Earning The Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role In The World, by Robert Kaplan

I can imagine how the research for this book went down. The author summons his memories of a father who sacrificed a great deal of his free time for a bunch of children to be able to travel as liberal New Englanders to various anthropological sights like visiting Virginia racism. The author then decides to drive from his home through flyover country (avoiding the interstates because they are too fast and too monotonous) visiting small towns that both time and contemporary elites have forgotten, and wonders why they are so unwilling to talk politics to or around the obvious outsider. After having done this enough he adds a conclusion that reflects his own interests (including a look at Asia as well as North America) and reflects in a rather facile way on the importance of geography to the American experience. After writing up his thoughts and reflections on the subject he submits it to his editor and collects a relatively nice fee, if he hadn’t received a large enough advance to make it an easy trip to undertake from the beginning. It’s a beautiful way to make a living, I say with only a slight degree of envy, but it doesn’t make for great writing.

I must admit that contrary to many people who will likely dismiss this book because of its strange title (how does one “earn the Rockies anyway?) or because of its author (who dwells here, as he often does, on his misguided advice to urge the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, which he wears like a cross, it would seem, given how often I have read about this failure over and over again in his writings). My response to this book was not an immediate dismissal, but a more complicated response. I got the feeling when reading this book that the author had neglected one very important comparable to the current state of the United States, with its progressive cities seeking to integrate with the wider world and leave their country behind and a group of angry small town and rural conservatives behind, and that example is Afghanistan. We often talk about Balkanized politics and comparables to the American Civil War, but America right now looks a lot like Afghanistan of the 1970’s, with its cosmopolitan and urban-based elite trying to rule while ignoring the disagreement (and even hostility) of restive rural and small town inhabitants who feel left behind, ignored, and insulted at every turn. We all know what happened to Afghanistan, and the author seems strangely unperceptive about the risk of the phenomenon of the uncoupling of cities and suburbs from small towns and rural areas of seeming sameness frozen in time and not receiving the proper development and integration that they deserve. The author thinks that there is no chance that the country ends up destroying the urban culture that oppresses it. I think that the author is gravely mistaken.

This book is a short one at less than 200 pages, signifying a likely profitable minor work on the part of the author. The book begins with a map of the united states and an invocation (which seems awfully solemn for a road trip). The author begins this book with a personal reflection on his own travels with his father as well as his father’s travels as a young man, which are responsible for the title of the book as well as its organizing concept. The next chapter, a continental empire, reflects on the author’s fondness for an out-of-date historian who has been rejected (unsurprisingly) by historians on the right and left for being a believer in the bogus theory that it was climate that kept slavery out of the far west (when Indian slavery/peonage was very common there), as well as having some less than politically correct things to say about native peoples. Imagine how bad of a popular historian you have to be in this world to be cancelled on both the right and the left. This is followed by two chapters that explore the author’s own road trip, the first part of the road trip focusing on what would mostly be considered the Midwest–places like Wheeling, WV and Portsmouth, OH and the like (3) as well as the drier far west (4) where the author reflects on the need for government to provide both water and protection to isolated settlements and people in that region. The author then finishes the book with a discussion about China and America’s foreign destiny as a whole.