When we interpret geopolitics through personalities we can create false narratives. Sure there have been leaders through the ages who changed the course of history but most were co-opted by, or succumbed to, larger political forces.
Patrice Lumumba was dissolved in a barrel of acid; Walter Rodney blown up with a walkie talkie; Che Guevara murdered in a Bolivian schoolhouse; a besieged Allende took his own life; Cheddi Jagan removed “for being too forthright”. In the end they were simply on the wrong side of the Cold War. Only Fidel was smart enough not to accept trick cigars.
Additionally history does not really repeat itself, so it is not always instructive enough to rely on as a guide or forecaster of events. Stumbling into WW III is not the same as sleepwalking into World War I. Context is everything and our very human impulse to seek patterns, in order to explain our world, can lead us astray.
One way to understand international relations is to emphasise how countries behave and interact with each other depending on their relative geographical advantages and vulnerabilities. In this regard, “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)” by Tim Marshall is a fascinating and useful book whose opening chapter is highly prescient as part of concluding – but not excusing – why Russia has had few options in its course of action towards its neighbour, Ukraine.
But first America, a nation truly blessed by geography. Bounded to the north by the Canadian tundra and to the south by the Mexican desert, these buffer zones make it almost impenetrable from land invasion while enjoying some 95,000 miles of coast land including on both the Pacific and the Atlantic thereby facilitating trade and naval dominance. It is not by chance that America prevailed in both theatres in World War II. Its construction and continued de facto control of the Panama Canal remains as much about naval power as a benefit to trade.
Its 14,650 miles of well-connected internal waterways are more than the whole world’s combined allowing for abundant freshwater and cheap transportation of wheat and other crops from its vast arable heartland down to the Gulf of Mexico – made possible by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 for the bargain price of US$15M. All these geographical advantages have generated the wealth to make America the economic and military superpower it is today and why predictions of its impending demise are unrealistic.
It is also perhaps hard for people living on an island to appreciate the tensions and insecurities that often come with a hostile “land neighbour”. Great Britain has not been invaded since 1066 with the sea offering it a reliable and inexpensive form of defence. In contrast it has taken China centuries to secure its borders including the 2900 miles with Mongolia whose inhospitable and largely roadless Gobi Desert serves as a natural defence. On the other hand a porous border with Vietnam has meant centuries of Chinese dominance over its smaller neighbour and why it saw the Vietnam War as significant a threat as America might have done.
Thankfully China’s border with India is the militarily impenetrable Himalayas which have ensured mostly peaceful relations between the two largest countries in the world despite several disputes over territory. Control of Tibet is also seen as vital to China because it is the source of its three great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, and thus secures access to water. Similarly it would never abandon the northwest province of Xinjiang even with its restive population given it borders eight mostly Muslim countries. It was part of the old Silk Road and now trains laden with consumer goods leave the province for Europe cutting freight times by half compared to shipping.
As Marshall notes “all great powers spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks” and China’s current push to control the South China Sea is in response to the perceived threats to its access to the Pacific presented by Japan and other America-friendly nations. Further afield the construction of deep water harbours for trade can be seen as preparing for military conflict. Control the ports and you control the seas.
So we return to Russia, a country that is twice the size of the United States, and stretches from Europe to its neighbour Alaska. Geography has given it natural defences to the north with the icy Arctic Sea and to the east and south with the Urals, the inhospitable Siberian region and the Caucasus mountains.
However its centuries-old vulnerability has always been the North European Plain in the west. Marshall describes this as like a slice of pizza with the thin end of the wedge passing through Poland and expanding across Ukraine along a vast flatland all the way to Moscow making it impossible even for a large army to defend. Marshall points out that from Napoleon’s 1812 invasion up to Hitler’s disastrous Operation Barbarossa in 1945 (including Britain’s misadventure in the Crimean War), the Russians were fighting on this plain an average of once every 33 years. This is why, as we speak, for Ukraine to join even the European Union let alone NATO was always seen as a red line. Additionally the 2014 Maidan Revolution that toppled a Moscow-friendly regime in Kviv put in doubt the lease of Russia’s only warm water port at Sevastopol. Putin, says Marshall, would not be the man who lost Crimea or worse allowed it to host a NATO naval base.
Much newsprint has been spent on psychoanalysing Putin and in decrying the war in moral terms. Indeed it is a human tragedy, as all wars are, and a violation of international law. But as Marshall notes “when great powers are faced with an existential threat they will use force”. For Russia this is not about reviving the Tsarist or Soviet Empire but about fortifying what they call their “near abroad”. This is why Western sanctions and other non-military measures will have little effect. Russia will insist at the very minimum on Ukrainian neutrality and is prepared to spend considerable blood and treasure to achieve that goal.
And the West will make sure they pay the maximum price.
