The Revenge of Geography (6 page)

In other words, true realism is an art more than a science, in which the temperament of a statesman plays as much of a role as his intellect. While the roots of realism hark back 2,400 years to Thucydides’ illusion-free insights about human behavior in
The Peloponnesian War
, modern realism was perhaps most comprehensively summed up in 1948 by Hans J. Morgenthau in
Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace
. Let me pause awhile with this book, the effort of a German refugee who taught at the University of Chicago, in order to set the stage for my larger discussion about geography: for realism is crucial to a proper appreciation of the map, and in fact leads us directly to it.

Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world “is the result of forces inherent in human nature.” And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear (
phobos
), self-interest (
kerdos
), and honor (
doxa
). “To improve the world,” writes Morgenthau, “one must work with these forces, not against them.” Thus, realism accepts the human material at hand, however imperfect that material may be. “It appeals to historical precedent rather than to abstract principles and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good.” For example, a realist would look to Iraq’s own history, explained through its cartography and constellations of ethnic groups, rather than to moral precepts of Western democracy, to see what kind of future Iraq would be immediately capable of following the toppling of a totalitarian regime. After all, good intentions have little to do with positive outcomes, according to Morgenthau. Chamberlain, he explains, was less motivated by considerations of personal power than most other British politicians, and genuinely sought to assure peace and happiness to all concerned. But his policies brought untold sufferings to millions. Winston Churchill,
on the other hand, was, in fact, motivated by naked considerations of personal and national power, but his policies resulted in an unrivaled moral effect. (Paul Wolfowitz, the former American deputy secretary of defense, was motivated by the best of intentions in arguing for an invasion of Iraq, believing it would immeasurably improve the human rights situation there, but his actions led to the opposite of what he intended.) Enlarging on this point, simply because a nation is a democracy does not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened than that of a dictatorship. For “the need to marshal popular emotions,” says Morgenthau, “cannot fail to impair the rationality of foreign policy itself.” Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous. “All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law,” he goes on, “is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another.”

Furthermore, states must operate in a much more constrained moral universe than do individuals. “The individual,” Morgenthau writes, “may say to himself … ‘Let justice be done, even if the world perish,’ but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care.”
²
An individual has responsibility only for his loved ones, who will forgive him his mistakes so long as he means well. But a state must protect the well-being of millions of strangers within its borders, who in the event of a failed policy will not be so understanding. Thus, the state must be far wilier than the individual.

Human nature—the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor—makes for a world of incessant conflict and coercion. Because realists like Morgenthau expect conflict and realize it cannot be avoided, they are less likely than idealists to overreact to it. They understand that the tendency to dominate is a natural element of all human interaction, especially the interactions of states. Morgenthau quotes John Randolph of Roanoke as saying that “power alone can limit power.” Consequently, realists don’t believe that international institutions by themselves are crucial to peace, because such institutions
are merely a reflection of the balance of power of individual member states, which, in the final analysis, determines issues of peace and war. And yet the balance of power system is itself by definition unstable, according to Morgenthau: since every nation, because it worries about miscalculating the balance of power, must seek to compensate for its perceived errors by aiming constantly at a superiority of power. This is exactly what initiated World War I, when Habsburg Austria, Wilhelmine Germany, and czarist Russia all sought to adjust the balance of power in their favor, and gravely miscalculated. Morgenthau writes that it is, ultimately, only the existence of a universal moral conscience—which sees war as a “natural catastrophe” and not as a natural extension of one’s foreign policy—that limits war’s occurrence.
³

Following the violence in Iraq from 2003 to 2007 we all claimed for a time to have become realists, or so we told ourselves. But given how Morgenthau defines realism, is that really true? For example, do most of those who opposed the Iraq War on realist grounds also feel that there is not necessarily a connection between democracy and morality? And Morgenthau, remember, who opposed the Vietnam War on grounds of both ethics and national interest, is the realist with whom we can all feel most comfortable. An academic and intellectual his whole life, he never had the thirst for power and position that other realists such as Kissinger and Scowcroft have demonstrated. Moreover, his restrained, almost flat writing style lacks the edginess of a Kissinger or a Samuel Huntington. The fact is, and there’s no denying it, realism, even the Morgenthau variety, is supposed to make one uneasy. Realists understand that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than that governing domestic affairs. For while our domestic polity is defined by laws, because a legitimate government monopolizes the use of force, the world as a whole is still in a state of nature, in which there is no Hobbesian Leviathan to punish the unjust.
⁴
Indeed, just beneath the veneer of civilization lie the bleakest forces of human passion, and thus the central question in foreign affairs for realists is:
Who can do what to whom?
⁵

“Realism is alien to the American tradition,” Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, once told me. “It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the facade of their values-based rhetoric.”

Realists value order above freedom: for them the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. In Iraq, order, even of totalitarian dimensions, turned out to be more humane than the lack of order that followed. And because world government will forever remain elusive, since there will never be fundamental agreement on the ways of social betterment, the world is fated to be ruled by different kinds of regimes and in some places by tribal and ethnic orders. Realists from the ancient Greeks and Chinese right up through the mid-twentieth-century French philosopher Raymond Aron and his Spanish contemporary José Ortega y Gasset believed war is naturally inherent in the division of humanity into states and other groupings.
⁶
Indeed, sovereignty and alliances rarely occur in a void; they arise out of differences with others. Whereas devotees of globalization stress what unifies humankind, traditional realists stress what divides us.

And so we come to the map, which is the spatial representation of humanity’s divisions—the subject of realist writings in the first place. Maps don’t always tell the truth. They are often as subjective as any fragment of prose. European names for large swaths of Africa show, in the words of the late British geographer John Brian Harley, how cartography can be a “discourse of power,” in this case of latent imperialism. Mercator projections tend to show Europe larger than it really is. The very bold colorings of countries on the map implies uniform control over hinterlands, which isn’t always the case.
⁷
Maps are materialistic, and therefore morally neutral. They are historically much more a part of a Prussian education than of a British one.
⁸
Maps, in other words, can be dangerous tools. And yet they are crucial to any understanding of world politics. “On the relatively stable foundation of geography the pyramid of national power arises,” writes Morgenthau.
⁹
For at root, realism is about the recognition of
the most blunt, uncomfortable, and deterministic of truths: those of geography.

Geography is the backdrop to human history itself. In spite of cartographic distortions, it can be as revealing about a government’s long-range intentions as its secret councils.
¹⁰
A state’s position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even. A map, explains Halford Mackinder, conveys “at one glance a whole series of generalizations.” Geography, he goes on, bridges the gap between arts and sciences, connecting the study of history and culture with environmental factors, which specialists in the humanities sometimes neglect.
¹¹
While studying the map, any map, can be endlessly absorbing and fascinating in its own right, geography, like realism itself, is hard to accept. For maps are a rebuke to the very notions of the equality and unity of humankind, since they remind us of all the different environments of the earth that make men profoundly unequal and disunited in so many ways, leading to conflict, on which realism almost exclusively dwells.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. According to this materialistic logic, mountains and tribes matter more than the world of theoretical ideas. Or, rather, mountains and the men who grow out of them are the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting and fortifying, only the second.

It is my contention that in embracing realism in the midst of the Iraq War, however uneasily we did so—and for however short a time we did so—what we actually embraced without being aware of it was geography, if not in the overt, imperialistic Prussian sense of the word, then in the less harsh Victorian and Edwardian senses. It is the revenge of geography that marked the culmination of the second cycle in the Post Cold War era, to follow the defeat of geography through air power and the triumph of humanitarian interventionism that marked the end of the first cycle. We were thus brought back to the lowering basics of human existence, where, rather than the steady
improvement of the world that we had earlier envisioned, what we accepted was the next struggle for survival, and by association, the severe restraints with which geography burdened us in places such as Mesopotamia and Afghanistan.

And yet within this sad acceptance there is hope: for by becoming more expert at reading the map, we can, helped by technology as the Arab Spring has attested, stretch some of the limits the map inflicts. That is the aim of my study—to have an appreciation of the map so that, counterintuitively, we need not always be bounded by it. For it is not only narrow-mindedness that leads to isolationism, but the overstretching of resources that causes an isolationist backlash.

But first we need to recognize the very centrality of the geographical discipline. “Nature imposes; man disposes,” writes the English geographer W. Gordon East. Certainly, man’s actions are limited by the physical parameters imposed by geography.
¹²
But these contours are extremely broad, so that human agency has more than enough room to maneuver. For the Arabs, it turns out, are as capable of democratic practices as any group, even as the spatial arrangement of Libyan tribes and of the mountain ranges in Yemen will continue to play crucial roles in those countries’ political development. Geography informs, rather than determines. Geography, therefore, is not synonymous with fatalism. But it is, like the distribution of economic and military power themselves, a major constraint on—and instigator of—the actions of states.

Yale professor Nicholas J. Spykman, the great Dutch American strategist of the early–World War II era, wrote in 1942 that “geography does not argue. It simply is.” He goes on:

And one might add, that despite 9/11 even, the Atlantic Ocean still matters, and, in fact, it is the Atlantic that declares a different foreign and military policy for the United States compared to that of Europe. In the same vein, we can say that Russia, unto this day, is an insecure and sprawling land power, the victim of invasions since before those of the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, with only time, distance, and weather as its friends, craving more access to the sea. And because there is no serious geographical impediment between Europe and the Urals, Eastern Europe, despite the collapse of the artificial boundary of the Berlin Wall, is still under threat from Russia, as it has been for centuries. It is also true that anxiety over the German frontier plagued France—like in the time of Louis XIV—through the end of World War II, when the United States finally guaranteed the peace of Europe.