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Adam Garfinkle is editor of The National Interest.
As befits a word constructed from two parts, geopolitics is a locution with more than one meaning. To most contemporary observers of international politics, the term raises at least a whiff of Realpolitik. To those not inured to Realpolitik, geopolitics smacks of the overly simple and the primitive, as if someone were to seriously suggest that the complex dynamics of international relations could be reduced to the rules of the board game “Risk.” To those for whom Realpolitik is philosophically or temperamentally congenial, geopolitics can mean anything from the common-sense notion that geography and topography are factors among many to be taken into account when explaining international politics, to the extravagant claim that these are first-order causal factors in such politics.
As it happens, that extravagance was in evidence when the term “geopolitics” was coined in 1899 by a moody, Bergmanesque Swedish academic named Rudolf Kjellén. (As this issue of Orbis means to make widely known, geopolitics was introduced into the English-speaking world by Robert Strausz-Hupé in his 1942 book, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power, but, as we shall see, in a very different context.) But while the term dates from the cusp of the twentieth century, the idea is very old, as are differences of view as to its worthiness and application. The Greek geographer-philosopher Strabo (64 BCE–23 CE) believed that geography was destiny, even that particular geographical circumstances conduced to certain political orders. Aristotle famously remarked, in The Politics, on the impact of climate on men’s characters and, ultimately, their politics, and it requires no stretch of logic to see geography and topography as both antecedents to and resultants of climate.
The ancients were true ecologists, for they assumed a strong organic relationship between environment and society. Jean Bodin, writing in 1566, took exception; he argued that reason, as exercised by statesmen, could overcome the tyranny of geography. About a century later Montesquieu broadened Bodin’s observation and applied it to cases of his own day. Not long after, however, Napoleon Bonaparte returned to the original view, stating that “the politics of a state is its geography,” [1] and it was not so long after Waterloo that the idea of geography’s being destiny received its name from Professor Kjellén. It is instructive to recall the context. Under the general influence of the Age of Reason, and the specific ministrations of those from Vico to Bacon to Comte who believed that science could be applied to benefit human society, Kjellén sought a science of international politics grounded in an empirical bedrock—and what bedrock could better suit the purpose than geography? In short, the motivation for Kjellén’s neologism was bound up with the contemporary conviction that serious inquiry needed to be linked to science rather than to the traditional conception of the humanities, where literature, history qua chronicle, and even theology (in some ages and cases) held pride of place.
This conviction was, on balance, a bad thing, but then an even worse thing happened. The polymorphous project of applying science to human affairs had its evanescently bright and its dark sides in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The dark side proved the stronger, producing the two most murderous, genocidal political movements of the modern era. Fascism was one, especially its Nazi variant, which was the twisted application of science to the then-young fields of anthropology and cognitive science, leading to the general enthronement of social Darwinism and thence to the specific theories of Aryan racial superiority. The second was Marxism-Leninism, which was the twisted application of science to sociology and economics. In both instances, the irresistible promise of empirical truth, when wedded, however improbably, to meta-theoretical forms of idealism, overwhelmed common sense and ultimately allowed the willful, the vengeful and the egomaniacal to plunge the world into war, misery, and death to a degree that even the wars of religion had not known. [2] For such men to suppose God on their side was bad, but for them to suppose Science on their side was even worse. One could pray to and argue with God; Science was implacable, and deaf. This is what Strausz-Hupé was trying to explain to Americans in 1942: that the Nazi understanding of geopolitics, as elaborated by Karl Haushofer—the Nazi Machiavelli, Strausz-Hupé called him—was not a means of understanding the balance of power, but of overthrowing it. It was also what he tried to teach us after World War II about that other, still-surviving bastard offspring of distorted science, communism, which substituted the slightly more elegant notion of the “correlation of forces” for the old geopolitics. [3]
Between Kjellén’s time and that of Haushofer, of course, geopolitics had been much developed as a scholarly discipline, and not just in Germany. From London, Halford Mackinder made a living out of the idea with his famously evolving theory of the Heartland. [4] At base, the Heartland theory, in all its variations, was a simple idea: that relations among states could be reduced for most practical purposes to considerations of relative power—economic capacity, political cohesion, and military might—but that the actual use of that power depended on relative position. (This too was an old idea, or else Hannibal’s crossing the Alps with a bunch of elephants would never have been understood as such a legendary feat.) But now a scientific observation underlay this notion: just as the intensity of sunlight or sound waves or energy in a magnetic field varies according to the distance from their source (according to the Inverse Square Law, expressed as S/4πr2=I), so the power of a state can be brought to bear most effectively on other states that are closer rather than far away. It all boils down to a measure on the Y-axis—power—as it intersects with a measure on the X-axis—distance. What gave this idea the girth it soon acquired was the obvious fact that the earth’s geography is gloriously convoluted, and the almost equally obvious fact that technological innovation and its uneven diffusion affected how “close” or “far” other states were for practical purposes.
Of course, variable interpretations of new and prospective technology were possible, as were estimations of which resources and real estate (like oil and the Middle East) were truly strategic. Differences over how to measure power and how to assess the significance of various topographical barriers also arose, so geopolitics as a field of study gradually gained a sort of problem texture and a literature. As naval and air power waxed compared to land power, it was only a matter of time before the Heartland theory was joined, in 1944, by the Rimland theory of Nicholas John Spykman. The Rimland, which began life as Mackinder’s secondary “inner crescent,” was defined by Spykman as “an intermediate region, situated … between the heartland and the marginal seas. It functions as a vast buffer zone of conflict between sea power and land power.” It was comprised of swath of land in an arc from Finland through Western Europe, down through the Middle East and around to Central Asia. Mackinder’s famous 1919 aphorism, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island, Who rules the World-Island commands the world,” was amended to read “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” [5]
So aside from Nazi geopolitics, there came to be an Anglo-Saxon version in service to the Allies during World War II—and I do not say “in service” lightly. Just as Haushofer influenced Adolf Hitler, both Mackinder and Spykman influenced the Anglo world. Though Mackinder was unpopular with liberal British opinion, Lord Curzon was a great fan of his, even appointing him high commissioner to Southern Russia in 1919. This was, not least, because the general thrust of Mackinder’s analysis worked like a manual and a justification in national security terms for the British Empire. As for Spykman, a Dutchman transplanted to America, his formulation of the Rimland coincided with and justified the seeds of the Atlantic Alliance and advanced the focus on Russian power as a threat to global security. Spykman also acknowledged a fact that Mackinder, thirty years earlier, could not have seen: oil was a strategic commodity, and lots of it lay under the Rimland sands of the Middle East. Again, liberal intellectual opinion in the United States just after World War II was not much attracted to Spykman and his theories, but in the State Department and what would soon become the Department of Defense (in 1947), his views were universally known and widely appreciated.
For all the criticism that can be directed in retrospect at Mackinder and Spykman for their excessive determinism and general lack of analytic sophistication, one must remember what the academic/intellectual environment into which they forayed looked like: it was overrun with legalistic, starry-eyed idealists who at various points were sure that war was obsolete and that geopolitics was therefore an eccentric atavism. In Spykman’s case especially, when World War II effectively made realists out of all but the most wooly-headed American observers, geopolitics advanced as part of the larger realist tradition with which it was more or less consanguine; there but for the grace of Nicholas John Spykman during the war years, so to speak, went Hans Morganthau after them.
The realist tradition remains alive and well in America today; the geopolitics tradition is far weaker. Though a few prominent observers adopt the label to describe their own analyses—Zbigniew Brzezinski is a case in point—most do not. Elements of geopolitics remain, embedded in sometimes interesting hybrid concepts. Thus in 1990 Edward Luttwak invented the notion of geoeconomics, perhaps the first attempt to take both the world map and the sinews of economic globalization into a single vision. [6] And thus today topographical considerations live on even in the realm of grand strategic theory, as John J. Mearsheimer relies, however improbably, on the “stopping power of water” to explain the strategic vicissitudes of land powers and naval powers in their historical interactions. [7] But geopolitics is certainly no vanguard movement among the intelligentsia these days, or even among most realists. Its residual importance is pre-Kjellén in nature; it designates a matter-of-fact acknowledgement that geography and topography are necessary but hardly sufficient factors to be taken into account in explaining how the world works. It retains its scientific name, but no one thinks it a science.
It remains to be seen, however, just how necessary geography and topography really are to sound explanation and analysis. The Middle East is as good a place as any to look for evidence. A general case can be made that such considerations are increasingly less important: Technological innovations in communications and transportation are making geographical constraints less constraining. Goods and services are increasingly globe-spanning. National borders, we are told with some justification, are increasingly porous, giving enormous advantage to administratively flexible market-states, but harming and undermining those states that cannot or will not adapt to globalizing dynamics. Military technology of the first rank is also less constrained by geography, topography, and climate than ever. Bombers based in Missouri can hit targets 7,000 miles away and return without having to land once; the prospective use of space for more kinds of military activity seems to render even Hannibal-like propositions quaint. The next generation of scientific-technical advances will accelerate such processes, many believe, making vestigial constraints imposed by geography and topography completely obsolete.
But, it can rejoined, such scientific-technological capacities are very unevenly distributed. Societies that have mastered the “new economy”—the unprecedented institutional conjunction of science, technology, and the market—are few. It is not inevitable that the mass of humanity will soon, or ever, live in states with such abilities. Geography may not seriously constrain the United States and a few other advanced societies, but it will continue to constrain most states most of the time.
This suggests three ways to think about geopolitics in any given region. As applied to the Middle East, these ways can be expressed as three questions. First, what does geopolitics mean when applied to the ability of major powers outside the Middle East to operate in and on states and societies within the region? Second, what does geopolitics mean with respect to the interaction of regional states with each other? And third, based on the different capacities we should expect to find between extra- and intra-regional applications of geopolitics, what if any difference does it make what political leaders believe about the significance of geopolitics? The first two questions are about “the picture”—which is to say, about objective realities in these extra- and intra-dimensions. The third question is about “the camera”—which is to say, about consequential definitions of the situation imposed on reality by human actors. It concerns, as it were, the phenomenology of geopolitics.
Until about a dozen years ago, discussing interventions by outside powers in the Middle East was natural for Westerners. This had been the reality at least since 1789, when Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt, only to be rousted out by Admiral Nelson and his friends. It described an earlier reality in some parts of the region, as for example the seventeenth-century competition between Portugal and Britain in the Persian Gulf, or even between the then still-foreign Seljuks and Crusaders in Syria in the twelfth century. This no longer makes sense, however. For the first time since 1789, there is no significant competition among outsiders for influence and position in the Middle East. In the end, while there is challenge and clutter from other external powers, there is only the United States whenever push is to be calculated against shove.
This matters a great deal when it comes to how geopolitics affects the region in this first, extra-regional prism. The Soviet Union was much nearer to the Middle East than the United States during the Cold War, which obliged the United States to develop air and naval power and to maintain friends and bases in the region, to prevent Soviet Russia from improving its relative position. Here, of course, the consequences of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan stand as an obvious example of how geography matters. The 1973 U.S. military airlift to Israel, which made use of a critical transshipment point in Portugal’s Azores islands, provides another example. The U.S. alliance with Turkey, too, was of particular significance and complexity because of geography; Turkey’s European role as a NATO member cohabited with its role as a U.S. ally bordering on Soviet proxy states in Syria and Iraq. This mattered enormously in the twin crisis of 1958 (Iraqi revolution and Lebanese crisis), as it did in the Berlin-Cuban crises of 1961–62. It mattered after the Iranian revolution of 1979 because of Turkey’s border with Iran.
U.S. singularity in the region will not endure forever, of course. Russian power will return, inevitably, to an area so close to its southern frontiers—whatever they end up being. India and China may well have reason to compete with one another in the Middle East before long, not least over energy resources. For all anyone knows, pan-Turanism may have a future, even if it does not come to resemble another version of the Ottoman Empire. Who can say, too, what Middle Eastern machinations a mature European Union might contemplate, should such a Union ever come into existence? But for now, there is only the United States, and what is striking about American attitudes toward the region is how little geography and topography matter for any practical purpose—except one.
It does not much matter where the mountains and rivers and deserts are; not only do they not stop the United States militarily or much affect the terms of trade or transportation, they figure in planning only in the sense that someone about to go autumn camping goes to the garage and pulls out the clothing, tents, and other appurtenances needed for the trip. It’s a chore, not a challenge. The exception, of course, concerns oil—a strategic commodity if ever there was one.
The way the United States might free itself from the constraints imposed by the location of this strategic commodity has to do with energy policy as much or more than with foreign policy. The wiser way to deal with the problem is not to seize oil fields and depose troublesome governments, but rather to liberate ourselves and our friends from dependence on these resources and hence this real estate. But the United States does not have a serious energy policy, so it burdens foreign policy with problems it should not have to face; in a very real sense, then, it is an aspect of U.S. domestic policy, not geography, that constrains an aspect of U.S. foreign policy.
The solution to this problem may turn out, ultimately, to be a scientific-technical one. Conservation and finding new sources of fossil fuels may matter in an intermediate stage but, in the end, learning how to generate and use energy according to different principles, and using different fuel stocks altogether, will make the difference—not just for the United States, but also for countries even more dependent on fossil fuel imports. Yet not a single aspect of U.S. energy policy has changed in any significant way since 9/11/01, even though everyone who has taken a moment to reflect upon the matter recognizes an underlying energy-related source to what happened on that day. [8] This is a failure of national policy and leadership of the first order.
But except for the happenstantial location of the oil and the U.S. government’s failure to offset the significance of that happenstance by other means, it is hard to see how geopolitics much matters in the extra-regional prism. When other powers return to the region, geopolitics may begin to matter again, at least at the margins. But when that will be, and what form competition may take so as to have geopolitical relevance, is impossible to predict.
On the other hand, the effects of developments in the Middle East outward, on other lands, may matter in a way we have not witnessed since Ottoman armies knocked at the gates of Vienna. Two such developments stand out in what might be called the inverted geopolitics of the Middle East.
First, the physical propinquity of Middle Eastern lands to Europe places a special burden on the latter at a time when both legal and illegal immigration is looming ever larger as a major international issue. It already affects relations between the EU as a whole and its member states with several Middle Eastern countries. While Europe’s own demographic vitality is flagging, Europe is being invaded, not by Middle Eastern countries, but by Middle Easterners. All but a very tiny fraction of the invaders carry no weapons, and they are smiling. One result of this is that of French citizens under the age of 20 years, about a third are of Muslim Arab origin. Project this demographic momentum forward a generation or two, and one may begin to wonder what “France” will really mean by the second half of this century. This helps to explain why some Europeans are so dead set against allowing Turkey to join the EU, but aside from that, few Europeans I have met really know how to discuss this phenomenon. Most would rather not discuss it. A few are learning Arabic.
Second, the acquisition by several Middle Eastern countries of weapons of mass destruction that can be delivered to targets outside the region is, from a geostrategic point of view, a revolutionary development. At the very least, it makes the sending of conventionally-armed expeditionary forces to the Middle East from outside the region a far more problematic prospect and can be relied upon to affect the full gamut of existing alliance relationships, and hence the stability of dependent regimes in the region. [9] It raises the possibility that non-Middle Eastern states can be, and perhaps will be, attacked from the Middle East at levels of violence that raise literally existential issues. To say that most European statesmen have yet to truly face up to such prospects might be the understatement of the decade.
With the partial exception of Israel, no Middle Eastern country is “modern” in the contemporary sense of the word. No other Middle Eastern country has the educated human capital, degree of social trust, and institutional coherence to harness the cybernetic age to its state power. For every other state in the region (however one defines it), to one degree or another, the old influences and constraints of geography and topography still matter enormously. (They matter for Israel, too, despite its capacities, because it is so small.) There is not space here to go into detail about this. [10] We merely take some standard elements of geopolitical analysis, then, and give an example or two about each just to make the point plain.
Oil has already been mentioned. That its varied location within the region matters, for good and ill, cannot be denied. For one thing, oil has caused or exacerbated regional wars. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 owed partly to Iraqi contentions that the Kuwaitis were insufficiently grateful for Iraq’s protection from Iran during the 1980s, but mainly to Iraq’s belief that Kuwait was abusing its rights in the southern Rumaila oil field. The location of oil may yet cause other wars. The Asir region of Saudi Arabia, which was taken by force from Yemen in 1932–34, remains a potential point of future conflict, and the presence of oil nearby may be just enough one day to turn a pressure point into an explosion. Then there is Sudan, where the presence of oil in the southern, non-Arab part of the country has raised the stakes of communal disharmony and helped stoke a genocidal civil war.
Oil riches have also tended to make for lazy economic planning and desultory achievement. Iraq is the only Arab country that has used oil revenue to successfully diversify its economy and to build an infrastructure relying mainly on its own human talent. Algeria has failed at the task, while Saudi Arabia and the other sheikdoms have been abject slaves to their own good luck. With the partial exception of Bahrain, whose oil stocks are relatively small, none of these countries has figured out how to convert serendipitous riches into genuine wealth. Oil money has proven corrupting and socially divisive; nowhere is this plainer than in Algeria and Libya, but the Saudis may get a chance soon to surpass those countries and others. The sudden rush of oil revenue has also proven deeply destabilizing politically, and nowhere was this plainer or did it have larger implications than in Iran during the 1970s.
Additionally, oil has had a generically harmful influence on state-building in oil-rich states. As Lisa Anderson has shown, the flow of wealth from the state to the citizenry as an entitlement, rather than the flow of revenue from the citizenry to the state in taxes in return for services, has corrupted the very idea of citizenship. [11] Where citizenship has been infantilized by the modus operandi of rentier elites in oil rich countries, it has often reinforced the old social hierarchy wherein some command and give, others obey and receive. Oil riches, in other words, have made social and political modernization more difficult. While the diffusion of money usually works to advance social change, loosening traditional bonds and enhancing social mobility, in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East it has often had the opposite impact.
One can adduce proof for this phenomenon by looking at contrary cases. Where have states and societies best advanced and most cohered in the Middle East? In Turkey, for one, which has no oil, but in more recent times in the Arab world in Jordan, Tunisia, and to some extent in Morocco—all states with no oil resources of any significance.
Oil is not the only commodity in Middle Eastern history that has had profound political and social significance. In ancient times both salt and spices played hugely important roles. Salt mining in what is today southern Iraq, at a time when salt was the only reliable preservative for food, helped build empires and also created the most powerful early economic incentive for slavery. Spices, which were also important to food preservation and hygiene, as well as to aesthetic considerations, built fortunes and power and hewed out critically important trade routes. What this history suggests is that just as salt and spices had and then lost their day, so will oil. That day would come none too soon.
Rivers have always mattered in the Middle East, and they still do. The civilization of the entire area has depended on the way in which water was available to people. As any basic anthropology text will reveal, different cultures grew up in places where water fell from the sky in the form of rain, allowing sedentary agriculture or animal husbandry, and places where rivers and irrigation provided water. The most famous iteration of this difference is Karl Wittfogel’s notion of the hydraulic imperative within his argument on “oriental despotism.” Wittfogel reasoned that where rivers and irrigation provided social survival, organization and central government arose. Governments arising from that experience then became prone to expand and conquer. Hence the major powers of the ancient Near East were Egypt and Mesopotamia, because of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates. That there is something to this argument cannot be denied, even if Wittfogel oversimplified his analysis in service to his thesis.
As all students of the Middle East know, the variation of rainfall and of river uses also divides the region in two ways: between bedu and hadhari, nomads and sedentary dwellers; and in some parts of the region between horizontal and vertical nomads. These patterns have driven cultural patterns and even language. As to the latter, for example, consider the variable meaning of lhm (in the consonant-only root letter system of Semitic languages) as the main foodstuff: the word came to mean meat in Arabic, whose speakers were originally nomadic peoples who relied on animal husbandry, but bread in Hebrew, whose speakers lived in sedentary cultures that relied on agriculture. [12]
As these examples suggest, one could write at length on ways in which environmental realities have shaped the cultures of the region, and how these cultural patterns continue to resonate today—that, more or less, is what serious anthropologists do, and some do it very well. One could, however, read the easier prose of journalists and soon fall into the error of thinking that water scarcity in the modern Middle East is either a compelling cause for peace or, more likely in most of their accounts, for war. It may be, but not likely; water stress is better understood as one factor among many that drive such decisions. Certainly, the ability of Israel and Jordan to cooperate on water helped in a situation in which both leadership elites desired peace; in situations where peace is not desired so much, as between Israel and the Palestinians or Israel and Syria, water problems can make bad situations worse. Just as water takes the shape of whatever container it is poured into, so the politics of water tends to take the shape of whatever political circumstance into which it is poured. That goes for the Levant, for relations between Turkey, Syria and Iraq over the Euphrates, for Egyptian concerns about what upstream African states may do to the waters of the Nile, and for the contested use of aquifers between, say, Jordan and Saudi Arabia or between Libya and Egypt.
There are deserts in the Middle East; this everyone knows. What is not as well appreciated is the diversity of these deserts. Some are high, as in the Iranian plateau, and some are low. Some are sandy and others are rocky, which suggests that some are passable and some are not. Some deserts, like the Syrian desert, separate populations that would otherwise more easily communicate, trade, and live with one another; others, like those of Oman, separate virtually no one from anyplace. These topological facts matter in many ways. Let us mention just a few.
Deserts make it hard to draw borders, and largely because of that the Middle East has more still-existing border uncertainties and disputes than any other region in the world.
Deserts are filters, letting certain groups of people through but others not. The history of Syria, for example, is defined by rivers (mainly the Euphrates and the Orontes) and deserts. The rivers (and mountains ranges with their rains that feed them) have made for a south-north line of connection, from Damascus to Homs to Hama to Aleppo, and the deserts have made for an east-west filter, from the Syrian desert across to the Mediterranean, where every major Syrian city has had its corresponding port. No one who understands these factors is under any doubt that they have given the country and Syrian society its indelible character.
Deserts are also barriers to certain kinds of activity: Why have very hostile Baath governments in Baghdad and Damascus over the years not ever gone to war? One reason is that both armies are too logistically and technically inept to have crossed the desert to fight one another.
But deserts encourage other sorts of decisions: Why did the United Nations commission responsible for drawing the boundaries of a to-be-partitioned Palestine in 1947 award the barren expanse of the Negev Desert to Israel? Because a few experimental kibbutzim, notably kibbutz R’vivim, showed that Israel could make better productive use of the land than could the Arabs. This had obvious strategic consequences a few months later, and those consequences endure.
Deserts are usually (but not always) hot. Heat is a defining characteristic of nearly the whole region throughout its history. It is, then, almost impossible to exaggerate the impact that the relatively simple, and quite recent, innovation called air-conditioning has had on the Middle East. In those places where people have been otherwise primed to work, like the Levant, productivity has soared since the advent of air-conditioning. Social patterns have changed: no longer, for example, do so many people take the long midday rest. Working far from where one lives is now more common, and urban living is not nearly as unpleasant and unhealthy as a result, too. What effects these social changes will have on politics in and among societies we still do not really know.
Mountains, as a refuge for the persecuted, explain the political sociology of Lebanon, accounting in large part for the nature and setting of its sectarian heterogeneity. Because of mountains, rain falls in some places and not in others; for example, in the Hejaz, on the western side of what is today Saudi Arabia, there is far more rainfall than in the east. This simple fact helps explain why the separation of societies east and west of that mountainous divide is a natural thing, and thus why to this day the Saudi government has not been able to fully integrate the people on one side of that divide with the people, and the government, on the other. Mountains are also barriers to the application of military force, which is why Hannibal’s feat was such a surprise in its day, and why T. E. Lawrence’s leading the Arabs across a desert thought to be impassable (in July, no less!) against the Turks at Aqaba made for such extraordinary copy during the Arab Revolt.
Then there is the wind. The wind brings clouds and rain in certain patterns, and its course has since time immemorial made some valleys and creases in the land more livable than others. But it is the monsoon winds off the Arabian coast that have had the most profound effects on Middle Eastern, and African, history. Those winds, shifting from season to season, have made the history and people of Oman unique, linking it with Zanzibar and Arab ways and language with all of East Africa. It also enabled a slave trade for more than two thousand years. Just the wind.
Obviously, modern peoples in the Middle East are not affected as they used to be by the wind, mountains, rivers, and deserts. But these effects do still exist in part; impediments that have been barriers or buffers in ages past in large part remain barriers and buffers today. Distance is not dead, and nearness is not mere. If, for example, Iraq becomes a vibrant democracy, its resonations will probably have more power close by, in Iran or Syria, than in North Africa. As to the future, too, the salination of aquifers and the desertification of marginal areas will play critical roles in many of these societies, and in their relations with each other.
More important, the peoples of this region are who they are largely because of these features of geography and topography. Just as individuals do not jump out of their skins, cultures do not suddenly jump out of their histories and the effects of their physical circumstances. It is not too much to say, even if it sounds uncomfortably like poetry, that we become where we are. Human social patterns are not erased easily, even if the conditions present when those patterns were established have changed. Americans, a people with a short history and an even shorter attention span for its lessons, are hard to convince on this point. Some of us even think we can transform the political culture of an entire world, the Islamic world, in a single generation, into a glorious array of newly gestated liberal democracies, just by paying U.S. government functionaries to concern themselves with the “hearts and minds” of various and sundry Middle Easterners. Not only is this a mindless delusion, it is a heartless one, as well, for it evinces precious little respect for the ways of Arabs and other Middle Eastern peoples. It has a name, too: it is called imperialism.
When we call attention to the “camera” as opposed to the “picture,” we are drawing attention to the constitutive role of human beings in the social construction of our world. This sort of language can be off-putting to those who have never thought sociologically, but it need not. It is really very simple.
Suppose that upon looking over a field you mistake a paper bag for a rabbit. It probably won’t matter; neither the paper bag nor the rabbit would care. But suppose you mistake a wake for a party; that might matter (it might even land you in the hospital). The point is that humans define social situations in ways that are detachable from objective reality, and we care about and act upon those definitions. To make the point even more basic, when you read these words on this page, or when you hear sounds coming out of a human voice box, you are seeing inky scribbles and hearing phonemes. But you do not care about the ink or the noise; you care about the symbolic meanings attached to them.
What has this to do with the geopolitics of the Middle East? Just this: if decision-makers believe that geopolitical criteria are significant, then they will be significant, at least to a point. If they do not, they won’t be—again, to a certain point. Obviously, objectivity sets ultimate limits on the freedom with which we can shape political reality. But the limits are softer than many think. Politicians, and sometimes entire political classes, can carry illusions with them for a long time. We noted the course of U.S. energy policy above; that seems as poignant a case in point as any.
Most likely, U.S. decision-makers will proceed as if geographical and topographical considerations do not make a major difference when it comes to the Middle East, and they will be right to do so. Regional decision-makers will proceed as if geographical and topographical considerations do make a lot of difference when it comes to their relations with one another, and they will be right to do so, too. It is in the interstices, in the relations between the United States and other outsiders on the one hand and the locals on the other, that dissonance over geopolitics may matter.
The difference in generic perspective as concerns the factors of geopolitics may well lead Americans to misunderstand Middle Easterners, and for Middle Easterners to misinterpret or miscalculate when it comes to Americans and other Westerners. Osama bin Laden, for example, interpreted the American humanitarian mission to Somalia as part of a grand scheme to surround Mecca and Medina, and a tail-between-the-legs withdrawal from that mission as an indication of American irresolution and weakness. Many American analysts, for another example, still underplay the Shatt al-Arab border dispute as a reason for the Iran-Iraq War, and some also underplay the continued significance of even small pieces of ground, like the Golan Heights, in strategic relations between neighboring countries. I cannot predict how such dissonance may affect history to come, but come it will—and when it comes to errors born of self-absorption, and of the casual projection of one’s own frames of references onto others, the sky has always been the historical limit. If anyone can see reason why this may cease to be so in future, he or she should tell the rest of us.
[1] This history is nicely summarized in Alexander Rose, “Geopolitics as Art and Science,” The National Interest, Spring 2003.
[2] This was paradoxical. Empiricism took firmest root in the Anglo-American world, where it vanquished several forms of Hegelian idealism and romanticism in the early twentieth century—one thinks of G. E. Moore and Thomas Dewey, for example. On the continent, empiricism fought and lost the battle for hearts and minds before Nietzsche, Heidegger and, in time, Foucault. The evil genius of Nazism and Communism resides in the fact that both managed to attach the status of empirical science to idealist and, in the German case, highly romantic symbolic apparata. The combination proved equally attractive and disastrous.
[3] Strausz-Hupé’s insight may owe something to his having been born and raised in a German-speaking intellectual environment, for both Nazism and communism took root in a German philosophical/intellectual milieu. (This is true notwithstanding the fact that Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a Frenchman, pioneered scientific racism before the Germans, and that Russians rather than Germans took Marx and Engels to their most consequential application.)
[4] To a lesser degree, so did the American, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan; Mahan was luckier than Mackinder, however, because he had a real job.
[5] Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962 [1919]), p. 150; Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of Peace (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1944), p. 43.
[6] Edward Luttwak, “From Geopolitics to Geoeconomics,” The National Interest, Summer 1990.
[7] John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); and see a review by Barry Posen, “The Best Defense,” The National Interest, Spring 2002.
[8] See Gregg Easterbrook, “Oil Price: How to Fund a Terrorist,” New Republic, September 9 & 16, 2002.
[9] See, e.g., Adam Garfinkle, “Iraq: Anatomy of a Farce,” The National Interest, Summer 1998.
[10] But see Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East (Washington: Carnegie Endowment/Brookings, 1997).
[11] See for example Lisa Anderson, “Absolutism and the Resilience of Arab Monarchy,” Political Science quarterly, Spring 1991.
[12] See Bernard Lewis, “In the Finger Zone,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2002.
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