The Revenge of Geography (53 page)

  1.
H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,”
The Geographical Journal
, London, April 1904.

  2.
Halford J. Mackinder,
Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction
(Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1919, 1942), pp. 46–48, 203.

  3.
China, located in the temperate zone, has a population of 1.32 billion and its GDP totaled $4,326 billion in 2008, whereas Russia, located between the Arctic and the temperate zone, has a population of 141 million and its GDP totaled $1,601 billion in 2008. Simon Saradzhyan, “Russia’s Red Herring,” ISN Security Watch, Zurich, May 25, 2010.

  4.
John Keay,
China: A History
(London: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 13.

  5.
Ibid., p. 231.

  6.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey,
China: The Cambridge Illustrated History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 108.

  7.
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman,
China: A New History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 2006), p. 23.

  8.
M. Taylor Fravel,
Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 41–42.

  9.
Jakub J. Grygiel,
Great Powers and Geopolitical Change
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 133. Additionally, Owen Lattimore writes: “Obviously a line of cleavage existed somewhere between the territories and peoples that could advantageously be included in the Chinese Empire and those that could not. This was the line that the Great Wall was intended to define.” Owen Lattimore, “Origins of the Great Wall,”
Geographical Review
, vol. 27, 1937.

10.
Fairbank and Goldman,
China: A New History
, pp. 23, 25, 45.

11.
Ebrey,
China
, p. 57.

12.
Saul B. Cohen,
Geography and Politics in a World Divided
(New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 238–39.

13.
Keay,
China
, maps pp. 8–9, 53.

14.
Ebrey,
China
, p. 164.

15.
Fairbank and Goldman,
China: A New History
, pp. 41–42.

16.
Beijing’s position, writes geographer T. R. Tregear, served the needs of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties into the modern era by its sufficiently central location enabling it to govern China, even as it was close enough to guard the steppe-lands to the north and west. T. R. Tregear,
A Geography of China
(London: Transaction, 1965, 2008), pp. 94–95.

17.
The threat of “barbarian” invasions is a theme in the work of the late China hand Owen Lattimore. Owen Lattimore, “China and the Barbarians,” in
Empire in the East
, edited by Joseph Barnes (New York: Doubleday, 1934).

18.
Keay,
China
, p. 259.

19.
Fairbank and Goldman,
China: A New History
, p. 109.

20.
Ebrey,
China
, p. 227.

21.
“Map of Nineteenth Century China and Conflicts,”
www.fordham.edu/halsall
, reprinted in
Reshaping Economic Geography
(Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2009), p. 195.

22.
G. Patrick March,
Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 234–35.

23.
The theory of hydraulic societies was promulgated by twentieth-century German American historian and Sinologist Karl Wittfogel,
who explained that they originally developed in ancient river valley civilizations, where vast pools of corviable labor existed to build great irrigation works.

24.
Fairbank and Goldman,
China: A New History
, p. 5.

25.
Yale professor Jonathan D. Spence writes of Galdan, the Zunghar warrior loyal to the Dalai Lama in Tibet, whose forces were finally defeated in northern Outer Mongolia by a Qing (Manchu) invading army numbering some eighty thousand in 1696. Jonathan D. Spence,
The Search for Modern China
(New York: Norton, 1990), p. 67.

26.
David Blair, “Why the Restless Chinese Are Warming to Russia’s Frozen East,”
Daily Telegraph
, London, July 16, 2009.

27.
Spence,
The Search for Modern China
, p. 97.

28.
Fitzroy Maclean,
Eastern Approaches
(New York: Little, Brown, 1949), p. 120.

29.
Spence,
The Search for Modern China
, p. 13.

30.
Owen Lattimore, “Inner Asian Frontiers: Chinese and Russian Margins of Expansion,”
The Journal of Economic History
, Cambridge, England, May 1947.

31.
Uttam Kumar Sinha, “Tibet’s Watershed Challenge,”
Washington Post
, June 14, 2010.

32.
Edward Wong, “China Quietly Extends Footprints into Central Asia,”
New York Times
, January 2, 2011.

33.
S. Frederick Starr and Andrew C. Kuchins, with Stephen Benson, Elie Krakowski, Johannes Linn, and Thomas Sanderson, “The Key to Success in Afghanistan: A Modern Silk Road Strategy,” Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, 2010.

34.
Zbigniew Brzezinski,
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 167.

35.
Dan Twining, “Could China and India Go to War over Tibet?,”
ForeignPolicy.com
, Washington, DC, March 10, 2009.

36.
Owen Lattimore, “Chinese Colonization in Manchuria,”
Geographical Review
, London, 1932; Tregear,
A Geography of China
, p. 270.

37.
Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,”
Foreign Policy
, Washington, DC, November 2011.

38.
Dana Dillon and John J. Tkacik Jr., “China’s Quest for Asia,”
Policy Review
, Washington, DC, December 2005–January 2006.

39. Robert S. Ross, “The Rise of Chinese Power and the Implications for the Regional Security Order,”
Orbis
, Philadelphia, Fall 2010.

40.
John J. Mearsheimer,
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 135.

41.
M. Taylor Fravel, “Regime Insecurity and International Co-operation: Explaining China’s Compromises in Territorial Disputes,”
International Security
, Fall 2005.

42.
Grygiel,
Great Powers and Geopolitical Change
, p. 170.

43.
Spence,
The Search for Modern China
, p. 136.

44.
James Fairgrieve,
Geography and World Power
, pp. 242–43.

45.
James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “Command of the Sea with Chinese Characteristics,”
Orbis
, Philadelphia, Fall 2005.

46.
Ross, “The Rise of Chinese Power and the Implications for the Regional Security Order” (see Ross’s footnotes which accompany his quote); Andrew F. Krepinevich, “China’s ‘Finlandization’ Strategy in the Pacific,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 11, 2010.

47.
Seth Cropsey, “Alternative Maritime Strategies,” grant proposal; Robert S. Ross, “China’s Naval Nationalism: Sources, Prospects, and the U.S. Response,”
International Security
, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fall 2009; Robert D. Kaplan, “How We Would Fight China,”
Atlantic Monthly
, Boston, June 2005; Mark Helprin, “Why the Air Force Needs the F-22,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 22, 2010.

48.
Holmes and Yoshihara, “Command of the Sea with Chinese Characteristics.”

49.
Ross, “The Rise of Chinese Power and the Implications for the Regional Security Order.”

50.
Andrew Erickson and Lyle Goldstein, “Gunboats for China’s New ‘Grand Canals’? Probing the Intersection of Beijing’s Naval and Oil Security Policies,”
Naval War College Review
, Newport, Rhode Island, Spring 2009.

51.
Nicholas J. Spykman,
America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), p. xvi. The phrase first appeared in Nicholas J. Spykman and Abbie A. Rollins, “Geographic Objectives in Foreign Policy II,”
The American Political Science Review
, August 1939.

52.
This will be especially true if the canal and land bridge proposed for linking the Indian and Pacific oceans come to fruition.

53. Spykman,
America’s Strategy in World Politics
, p. 60.

54.
Andrew S. Erickson and David D. Yang, “On the Verge of a Game-Changer: A Chinese Antiship Ballistic Missile Could Alter the Rules in the Pacific and Place U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Groups in Jeopardy,”
Proceedings
, Annapolis, Maryland, May 2009.

55.
Jacqueline Newmyer, “Oil, Arms, and Influence: The Indirect Strategy Behind Chinese Military Modernization,”
Orbis
, Philadelphia, Spring 2009.

56.
Howard W. French, “The Next Empire,”
The Atlantic
, May 2010.

57.
Pat Garrett, “Indian Ocean 21,” November 2009.

58.
Julian S. Corbett,
Principles of Maritime Strategy
(London: Longmans, Green, 1911), pp. 213–214, 2004 Dover edition.

59.
Robert S. Ross, “The Geography of the Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-First Century,”
International Security
, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Spring 1999.

60.
Mearsheimer,
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
, pp. 386, 401–2.

  1.
James Fairgrieve,
Geography and World Power
, p. 253.

  2.
K. M. Panikkar,
Geographical Factors in Indian History
(Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1954), p. 41. A limiting factor in the importance of these rivers is that, as Panikkar writes, they “flow through uplands and not valleys, and do not therefore spread their fertilizing waters on the countryside” (p. 37).

  3.
Fairgrieve,
Geography and World Power
, pp. 253–54.

  4.
H. J. Mackinder,
Eight Lectures on India
(London: Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office, 1910), p. 114.

  5.
Burton Stein,
A History of India
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 6–7.

  6.
Persian traveled to India as a literary language in the twelfth century, with its formal role consolidated in the sixteenth.

  7.
Panikkar,
Geographical Factors in Indian History
, p. 21.

  8.
Nicholas Ostler,
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 223.

  9.
André Wink,
Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World
,
vol. 1:
Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7th–11th Centuries
(Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1996), Chapter 4.

10.
Stein,
A History of India
, pp. 75–76.

11.
Adam Watson,
The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 78–82.

12.
Stein,
A History of India
, p. 121.

13.
Fairgrieve,
Geography and World Power
, p. 261.

14.
Panikkar,
Geographical Factors in Indian History
, p. 43.

15.
Fairgrieve,
Geography and World Power
, p. 262.

16.
Robert D. Kaplan,
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
(New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 119, 121.

17.
Panikkar,
Geographical Factors in Indian History
, pp. 40, 44.

18.
Kaplan,
Monsoon
, pp. 122–23; John F. Richards,
The New Cambridge History of India: The Mughal Empire
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 239, 242.

19.
Richard M. Eaton,
The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. xxii–xxiii, 313.

20.
George Friedman, “The Geopolitics of India: A Shifting, Self-Contained World,” Stratfor, December 16, 2008.

21.
The geographical and cultural relationship between India and Iran is almost equally close.

22.
The Punjab means “five rivers,” all tributaries of the Indus: the Beas, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, and Sutlej.

23.
André Wink,
Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World
, vol. 2:
The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th–13th Centuries
(Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 1, 162; Muzaffar Alam,
The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 11, 141, 143.

24.
Aitzaz Ahsan,
The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan
(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 18.

25.
S. Frederick Starr and Andrew C. Kuchins, with Stephen Benson, Elie Krakowski, Johannes Linn, and Thomas Sanderson, “The Key to Success in Afghanistan: A Modern Silk Road Strategy,” Central Asia–Caucasus Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, 2010.

26.
Friedman, “The Geopolitics of India.”

27.
Fairgrieve,
Geography and World Power
, p. 253.

  1.
William H. McNeill,
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 167.

  2.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization
, vol. 1:
The Classical Age of Islam
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 50, 60, 109.

  3.
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman,
China: A New History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 2006), pp. 40–41.

  4.
Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy,
Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), pp. 15–17.

  5.
Ibid., p. xiii. Recent discoveries and developments concerning tar sands and shale deposits, particularly in North America, call these statistics into question.

  6.
Charles M. Doughty,
Travels in Arabia Deserta
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888), vol. 1, p. 336, 1979 Dover edition.

  7.
Bruce Riedel, “Brezhnev in the Hejaz,”
The National Interest
, Washington, DC, September–October 2011.

  8.
Alexei Vassiliev,
The History of Saudi Arabia
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 29, 79–80, 88, 136, 174, 177, 182; Robert Lacey,
The Kingdom
(London: Hutchinson, 1981), p. 221.

  9.
Peter Mansfield,
The Arabs
(New York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 371–72.

10.
Kemp and Harkavy,
Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East
, map, p. 113.

11.
Freya Stark,
The Valleys of the Assassins: And Other Persian Travels
(London: John Murray, 1934).

12.
Peter Brown,
The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 160.

13.
Ibid., p. 163.

14.
W. Barthold,
An Historical Geography of Iran
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1903, 1971, 1984), pp. x–xi, 4.

15.
Nicholas Ostler,
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 31.

16.
Michael Axworthy,
A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind
(New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 3.

17.
Hodgson,
The Classical Age of Islam
, p. 125.

18.
Axworthy,
A History of Iran
, p. 34.

19. Ibid., p. 78.

20.
Philip K. Hitti,
The Arabs: A Short History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), p. 109.

21.
Brown,
The World of Lat Antiquity
, pp. 202–3.

22.
Axworthy,
A History of Iran
, p. 120.

23.
Arnold J. Toynbee,
A Study of History
, abridgement of vols. 1–6 by D. C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 346.

24.
Dilip Hiro,
Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran
(New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2009), p. 359.

25.
Olivier Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, translated by Carol Volk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 1994), pp. 168–70.

26.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization
, vol. 3:
The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 22–23.

27.
Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, p. 168.

28.
James J. Morier,
The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan
(London: John Murray, 1824), p. 5, 1949 Cresset Press edition.

29.
Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, p. 172.

30.
Ibid., 174–75.

31.
Vali Nasr,
Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World
(New York: Free Press, 2009).

32.
Roy,
The Future of Political Islam
, p. 193.

33.
M. K. Bhadrakumar, “Russia, China, Iran Energy Map,”
Asia Times
, 2010.

34.
Axworthy,
A History of Iran
, p. 162.

35.
Robert Baer, “Iranian Resurrection,”
The National Interest
, Washington, DC, November–December 2008.

36.
Robert D. Kaplan,
The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century
(New York: Random House, 1996), p. 242.