The Revenge of Geography (47 page)

I offer up Braudel as prologue to a remarkable moment at a Washington conference in June 2009, where a question was raised that gives particular urgency to my inquiry on the relevance of geography for the United States in the twenty-first century. It was a question that Braudel would have liked, taking people away from the obsessions of the moment toward a grander and longer-term perspective. The event was sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, where I am a senior fellow. The circumstance was a panel discussion on what were the next steps that needed to be taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a special emphasis on the fine-tuning of counterinsurgency. Panelists proceeded to engage the inside baseball of “Af-Pak,” as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region has come to be addressed by the Washington cognoscenti. Then another panelist, Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, made an impolite observation, which I—sitting in the front row—will paraphrase:

A historian looking at this panel from the viewpoint of the distant future might conclude, Bacevich surmised, that while the United States was deeply focused on Afghanistan and other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state failure was developing right on America’s southern border, with far more profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and American
power than anything occurring half a world away. What have we achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the 1980s? Bacevich asked. Why not fix Mexico instead? How we might have prospered had we put all that money, expertise, and innovation that went into Iraq and Afghanistan into Mexico.

Therein, sheathed in a simple question, lies the most elemental critique of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War: a critique that, as we shall see, goes far beyond Mexico, encompasses Eurasia, and yet is rooted in North American geography. I start with Bacevich only because his frustration is stark and his bona fides particularly impressive—and poignant: a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, his son was killed in Iraq. But whereas Bacevich in his books can be a polemicist with overwhelming disregard for East Coast elites and all manner of entanglements in which they embroil America overseas, there are others whose views substantially dovetail with his. Their analysis, along with Bacevich’s, is above all rooted in a conscious attempt to get beyond
l’histoire événmentielle
to the longer term. When I think about what truly worries all of these analysts, Braudel’s
longue durée
comes to mind.

Bacevich along with Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Paul Pillar, Mark Helprin, Ted Galen Carpenter, and the late Samuel Huntington are not, in every case, the most well-known voices in foreign policy analysis, and putting them in the same category is itself a bit of a stretch. Yet in a composite sense they have questioned the fundamental direction of American foreign policy for the longer term. Walt is a professor at Harvard and Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, but with all the prestige which those appointments carry, their book
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
, published in 2007, came in for very rough treatment because of its allegation that Israel’s supporters in America were essentially the culprits behind the Iraq War, a war which everyone in this group of analysts was dead-set against; or against how it was fought. Helprin, a novelist and former Israeli soldier, takes no prisoners in his belief that China will be America’s primary military adversary, a belief that Mearsheimer also shares. They both, along with Pillar, a former CIA analyst, remain in high dudgeon about the diversion of American resources
to useless wars in the Middle East while China acquires the latest defense technology. Indeed, even if we do stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, China will be the main beneficiary, able to build roads and pipelines throughout the region as part of its quest for energy and strategic minerals and metals. Meanwhile, Carpenter warns severely about the danger that a violence-plagued Mexico represents; as did Huntington in his last years. To merge their thoughts, as well as those of others I could name, all of whom dwell more or less in the realist camp of foreign policy circles, is to reach the conclusion that America faces three primary geopolitical dilemmas: a chaotic Eurasian heartland in the Middle East, a rising and assertive Chinese superpower, and a state in deep trouble in Mexico. And the challenges we face with China and Mexico are most efficiently dealt with by wariness of further military involvement in the Middle East. This is the only way that American power can sustain itself for the decades to come, and survive part of the
longue durée
.

Of course, there is safety, a certain smugness for that matter, in such long-term thinking. None of these men has adequately addressed what, for instance, would actually happen if we were to withdraw precipitously, say, from Afghanistan. Would the intelligence that has led to successful drone attacks on al Qaeda in Waziristan dry up? Would Ayman al-Zawahiri and other surviving luminaries of al Qaeda make triumphal entries in front of al Jazeera television cameras into Jalalabad? Would Afghanistan become a radicalized Taliban state under the tutelage of Pakistani intelligence? Would India, the global pivot state of the twenty-first century, lose respect for the United States as a consequence? Would Iran informally annex western Afghanistan? And what would have happened to Iraq had we withdrawn completely in 2006, at the height of the violence there, as some of these analysts would have no doubt wished? Would the Balkan-level sectarian atrocities have soared to the level of Rwanda, with a million killed rather than a hundred or two hundred thousand? For one would have to be particularly cold-blooded not to realize the monumental effect on individual lives in such different outcomes. Moreover, what would have happened in the region, and to America’s reputation for power,
had we so withdrawn? How would such quick withdrawals be carried out? Don’t ever say that things cannot get much worse than they are, because they can.

Truly, withdrawing precipitously from Iraq or Afghanistan would be irresponsible because—like it or not—merely by invading these places and staying there so long, we have acquired substantial stakes in the outcomes. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to judge these analysts and others who agree with them solely on the minutiae of Iraq and Afghanistan. For the wellspring of emotion behind their beliefs is that we never should have gotten involved in these countries in the first place. No matter how Iraq eventually turns out, the body count, both American and Iraqi, will haunt American foreign policy debates for decades, just as Vietnam did. They constitute more than just
l’histoire événmentielle
.

To be sure, these analysts are not concerned about what to do next in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead—again, merging their thoughts—they are asking themselves, what has been the cost of our blunders already? Can we as a great power be salvaged? And where do we put our best efforts, in terms of highly selective military deployments and civilian aid, so that America can help preserve the balance of power in Eurasia and not be inundated over the decades by Mexicans fleeing a troubled state? As Jakub Grygiel puts it: “Geographic isolation is a strategic blessing and should not be squandered by an expansionary strategy.”
⁵

So how much have we squandered already? Michael Lind, a scholar at the New America Foundation in Washington, agrees with Bacevich about the foolishness of both the Iraq War and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. But he parts company with Bacevich on whether America can afford such conflicts. Lind argues that relatively little of the national debt is the result of military spending, let alone of two simultaneous wars, and that reducing health care costs is far more central to America’s fiscal solvency than recent imperial-like adventurism, as much as he opposes it.
⁶
In fact, a look at some of the blunders of empires past may put the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan in some perspective, both in terms of their effect on U.S.
foreign policy already, and their effect on our ability to deal with the future challenges in the Middle East, China, and Mexico throughout the course of the twenty-first century.

In 1449, returning from a failed campaign in Mongolia, the army of Ming China was surrounded by Mongol forces. Without water, the Chinese panicked. Trusting in Mongol mercy, Grygiel writes, “many shed their armor and ran toward the enemy lines.” As many as half a million Chinese soldiers were slaughtered and the Ming emperor became a prisoner of the Mongols. The Ming army adventure in Mongolia marked the start of the long decline of the Ming Dynasty. The Ming army never again attempted to confront the Mongols in the northern steppe, even as tension with the Mongols would sap the energy of the Ming leadership. This led to China’s retreat from maritime Asia, which would help encourage the entry of European powers into the Rimland.
⁷

Nothing so disastrous has occurred following the America adventure in Iraq—our military and economic position around the world, and especially in East Asia, is sturdy and shows no signs of retrenchment, let alone retreat. We lost under 5,000 troops and 32,000 seriously wounded, a terrible price, but not an entire invasion force of half a million. The U.S. Army, which bore the brunt of the Iraq fighting, stands at almost half a million active-duty personnel, and precisely because of its experience in irregular warfare in Iraq is now better trained, doctrinally more flexible, and intellectually more subtle than ever. The same goes for the Marine Corps.

Not in Iraq, nor in Afghanistan, did the United States make the kind of pivotal blunder that late medieval Venice did. It wasn’t only Venice’s privileged geographical position between western and eastern Mediterranean trade routes that allowed it to create a seaborne empire; rather, it was the fact that Venice was protected from the Italian mainland by a few miles of water, and protected by invasion from the sea by long sandbars. One cause of Venice’s decline starting in the fifteenth century was its decision to become a power on mainland
Italy. By going to war repeatedly against Verona, Padua, Florence, Milan, and the League of Cambrai, Venice was no longer detached from “deadly” balance-of-power politics on land, and this had an adverse effect on its ability to project sea power.
⁸
The Venetian example should cause alarm among American policymakers if—and only if—the United States were to make a habit of military interventions on land in the Greater Middle East. But if America can henceforth restrict itself to being an air and sea power, it can easily avoid Venice’s fate. It is the permanence of small wars that can undo us, not the odd, once every third of a century miscalculation, however much tragedy and consternation that causes.

In this light, Iraq during the worst fighting in 2006 and 2007 might be compared to the Indian Mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the orientalists and other pragmatists in the British power structure, who wanted to leave traditional India as it was, lost some sway to evangelical and utilitarian reformers who wanted to modernize and Christianize India—to make it more like England. But the attempt to bring the fruits of Western civilization to the Indian Subcontinent were met with a revolt against imperial authority. Delhi, Luknow, and other cities were besieged and captured before being retaken by colonial forces. Yet the debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded even for another century. Instead, it signaled the transition from an ad hoc imperium fired by an evangelical lust to impose its values to a calmer and more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.
⁹

Ancient history, too, offers up examples that cast doubt on whether Afghanistan and Iraq, in and of themselves, have doomed us. Famously, there is the Sicilian Expedition recounted by Thucydides in the Sixth Book of
The Peloponnesian War
. Fourteen years elapsed from Athens’s first foray into Sicily to its final disaster there in the naval battle of Syracuse in 413
B.C
., the same number of years between the early forays of the John F. Kennedy administration in Vietnam and President Gerald Ford’s final withdrawal after Saigon was overrun. The Sicilian War split the home front in Athens, as did the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Paralyzed by pessimism and recriminations,
it was some time before Athenians were willing to resume in earnest the bipolar conflict with Sparta. Sicily, as it turned out, had not been altogether crucial to the survival of Athens’s democracy and its maritime empire. For despite having lost and suffered so much, Athens still had the resources to lead an alliance, even as the adventure in Sicily would prove to be the turning point in the Peloponnesian War, which Athens lost.

There also is the larger example of the decline of Rome, detailed in 1976 by Edward N. Luttwak in his book
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third
. Luttwak’s method is, rather than to talk about decline in general, to discuss it in terms of Rome’s grand strategy. Luttwak identifies three chronological stages of Roman grand strategy. The first is the Julio-Claudian system, or that of the republican empire, in which the client states that surrounded the empire’s Italianate core were sufficiently impressed with the “totality” of Roman power to carry out the empire’s wishes, without the need of occupation armies. In this stage, diplomacy—not military force—was an active ingredient of Roman coercion, even as an overwhelming formation of Roman troops lay in a “vast circle” around Rome. Because these troops were not needed for the occupation of client states, or for territorial defense in any sense, they were, in Luttwak’s words, “inherently mobile and freely redeployable.” Here was power at its zenith, prudently exercised, run on an economy-of-force principle. A surge capacity was readily available for any military contingency, and all in the Mediterranean world knew it. Thus everyone feared Rome. One thinks of Ronald Reagan’s America, with a massive buildup of the military that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was, nevertheless, hell-bent not to use, so as to nurture the reputation of power without the need for risky adventures. The Antonine system, in place from the mid-first century to the mid-third, reflected what Luttwak calls the “territorialization” of the empire: for Rome now felt the need to deploy its military everywhere, in the client states themselves, in order to secure their fealty, and so the economy-of-force principle was lost. Nevertheless, the empire was prosperous, and there was widespread, voluntary Romanization
of the barbarian tribes, “eliminating the last vestiges of nativist disaffection” for the time being. Yet this very Romanization of the empire would over time create unity among different tribes, allowing them to band together in common cause against Rome, for they were now joined in a culture that was still not their own. Think of how globalization, which in a sense constitutes an Americanization of the world, nevertheless serves as a vehicle to defy American hegemony. Hence came the third system to constitute Rome’s grand strategy: Diocletian’s “defense-in-depth,” whereby the border peoples coalesced into formal confederations able to challenge Rome, and so the state was on the defensive everywhere, with emergency deployments constant. The surge capacity that even the second system retained was lost. With its legions at the breaking point, fewer and fewer feared Rome.
¹⁰