Strategic Geography

Geography is at the heart of many disputes, and one can anticipate and understand much about why and where conflicts occur by understanding it in strategic terms. In the post-Civil War American West, towns competed to get the railroad, knowing that the ones that succeeded would grow and prosper.

If one maps the world’s major civilizations and the goods each imported, it is easy to identify vital land and ocean trade routes. Rome depended on grain from Egypt. The north Italian city-states became important when Central and Western Europe became wealthy enough to buy luxuries from Asia and the Near East. Portugal and Spain were perfectly placed for discovering the sea routes around Africa and to the New World. The Industrial Revolution favored countries with access to coal and iron. Oil gives the shipping routes from the unstable Middle East to the great industrial centers their current importance.

The world’s strategic centers are not fixed. Strategic geography provides a theoretical tool for understanding what is important when. If one mapped all the world’s battles on land and sea, it would quickly become apparent that battles are rare in some and common in other areas. Color-coding the battles chronologically would strengthen the impression. The chessboard provides an abstract explanation. Place three knights on a chessboard, one in a corner, one on an edge halfway along the board, and one on any of the four central squares. A knight is required to move two squares parallel to one edge of the board then turn one square to the right or left.

Applied to the real world, the advantage of position can be understood in terms of “options” and “chokepoints.” The more routes to or from a place, and the fewer the routes bypassing it, the greater the strategic value it has. There are three routes large enough to move armies between Germany and France. The Belfort Gap lies between the Alps and Vosges and connects Lyon and Munich. The Lorraine Gateway lies between the Vosges and Argonne (Rhine Graben to the Germans) and connects Metz and Strasbourg to the Saar. Belgium and Holland occupy the flat land between the Ardennes and the English Channel that runs all the way to Moscow. Almost all the battles between Germany and France have taken place along one of these routes. In World War II, Devers’ Sixth Army used the first, Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group used the second, and Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group used the third route to invade Germany. These routes converge at Paris. This gives Paris the strategic advantage known as “interior lines” that is at the heart of de Jomini’s (1971) conception of strategy. The French can keep their entire army around Paris and move it quickly to defend any one of the three invasion routes. The Germans must divide their army to defend three invasion routes.¹⁰ Turin lies at the point where five passes through the Alps converge, giving Italy a defensive advantage over the French similar to the one France holds over the Germans.

Vienna, the second most important city in Europe, lies on the Danube just south of the Moravian Gate between the Bohemian Knot and the Carpathian Mountains. When Bismarck said “Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe, he meant that control of that mountain bastion made it relatively easy to invade or defend the South German basin, the North German plain, Poland, and Austria.

East Asia divides north to south into five zones, beginning with the tundra, where winter temperatures can reach –100 °F. Just to the south lies the taiga, the endless forests of pine and larch. Next are the grasslands that stretch from the plains of Hungary across Central Asia to the great loop of the Yangtze River. This “Nomad Route” made possible the conquests of successive waves of cavalry armies from the Huns to the Mongols. The grasslands give way in the south to cold deserts. Finally, south of the deserts stand the mountain complex anchored by the Pamir and Armenian knots that stretch from the Himalayas to the Alps.

The world’s oceans have similar chokepoints (Figure 14.4). During the Reagan presidency, a new air base in Grenada added to two in Cuba and one in Nicaragua made it possible for communist governments to cut off the 40% of US oil imports that arrived through the Caribbean. One might suspect that this was a larger consideration in the US decision to invade Grenada than the hypothetical danger to a few American medical students used to justify it. Similarly, the importance of the South China Sea, which a third of global maritime traffic traverses, explains US intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s, the “Hinge of Asia” as the Japanese called it—and Chinese efforts today to turn it into Chinese territorial waters.

Americans seldom think strategically. One exception was Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote Influence of Sea Power upon World History 1660– 1783 just as Americans closed their land frontier and were looking for new outlets for their energies. Mahan argued persuasively that naval supremacy explained British emergence as a world power.

Under Mahan’s influence, America shifted from a “green water” navy focused on coastal defense and commerce raiding to a blue-water navy focused on command of the seas. The US acquired an overseas empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific and built the Panama Canal. The combination radically altered the world balance of power. British historian Charles Webster said that “Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War” because he supposedly sparked the British-German naval arms race. Despite that race, the German fleet remained weaker than the combined allied fleet, leading Germany to adapt the classic strategy of the weaker naval party, raiding enemy commerce. To this end, they used submarines, cruisers, and merchant ships converted into warships disguised to look like ships from various neutral nations.

Sir Halford Mackinder (1904) thought that the railroad made the Eurasian “heartland” the “greatest natural fortress on earth,” immune from Mahan’s navies so a base for control of the world. Mackinder also was influenced by the nineteenth century struggle for empire in Central Asia between Britain and Russia—the Great Game (Hopkirk 1990). Mackinder’s thinking led the negotiators at Versailles to create buffer states such as Czechoslovakia to prevent either Russia or Germany from dominating the heartland.

Mackinder also influenced Karl Haushofer, a multilingual German professor of geography who had been a major general in World War I and a diplomat in Japan before it. He hosted meetings leading to the German-Japanese alliance. Through Rudolph Hess,¹¹ one of his students, he gained access to and tried to influence the leaders of the Nazi Party. For this reason, he often is wrongly accused of being the theoretician behind the Soviet invasion.

During World War II, Nicholas Spykman (1944) argued that the key to controlling the world island was not Mackinder’s heartland but the “rimland” between it and Mahan’s oceans. Spykman’s ideas influenced the “Wise Men”¹² who developed American Cold War strategy and created NATO as the mechanism to implement containment. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US entered a brief period of naïve “happy talk” expecting the “end of history”—that is the end of competition for power. Unfortunately, as illustrated by the failure of the Russian “reset,”the failure of Islamic states to embrace liberalism, the expansion of global terrorism, and the economic problems of Europe and the United States, happy talk continues to run up against reality. The rise of China to world power status may prove the central drama of the next 50 to 100 years.

China shares the advantages of the US and Europe: a varied climate, an arable center, ample navigable rivers, and a long coastline with good harbors. China is courting the Turks of Central Asia to deny its Uighurs a base for resistance to Beijing. China is moving quietly into Amuria, increasingly vacated by a declining Russian population. To the south, it is developing Kunming as a market center for turning Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar Thailand, and Vietnam into a market for its manufactures and a source of low value agricultural products.

With an increasingly favorable situation along its land borders, China for the first time since the fifteenth century is building a navy aimed at controlling first the East and South China Seas then the Indian Ocean routes to Africa to ensure its access to Middle Eastern and African resources. It soon will have a submarine force larger than that of the US, its mine warfare capability is increasing rapidly, it is buying or building aircraft carriers, and it is buying fourth generation Russian jet fighters while developing its own fifth generation ones for deployment by 2020.

If the US continues reduction of its naval capabilities, or abandons Taiwan, then Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam are likely to doubt the value of US bilateral commitments with them. In that case, each, including a potentially reunified Korea, will chart its own course to survive Chinese hegemony. India, already reacting to the Chinese naval buildup and its basing arrangements in Myanmar and Pakistan, is building a navy of its own and has established a naval base in the Andaman Islands to counter the increasing Chinese naval presence. If the US is to remain engaged, it will have to resume rebuilding its own forces and consider possibilities such as an alliance with Russia to balance China.

Four strategic geographies have emerged to replace Spykman’s vision that guided the containment strategy of the Cold War. The first, the search for a “near peer” threat to the United States, sees China replacing the Soviet Union as the bête noire of the future. The immediate challenge is xenophobic Muslim (primarily Arab and Iranian) terrorism. The larger context now is the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Taken together, these problems suggest a replay of the Great Game in Central Asia. The region divides into two areas. Ethnic groups give the countries surrounding the Caspian Sea their names. East of them, the “stans” (from the common ending of their names meaning “people”) are largely Turkish or Iranian, setting up a competition within a competition between Turkey and Iran. All have substantial Russian minorities. They are strategically located to facilitate or to counter any alliance between China and Iran. Most important, they are oil-rich, a potential counterweight to Saudi Arabia. The second conception is an “arc of instability” formed by the Islamic states of the Near East. The third is a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996).

The fourth, proposed by Barnett (2004) begins with his observation that in the first fifteen years after the Cold War, the US engaged in roughly 150 military operations (contingency positioning, combat, evacuations, peacekeeping, relief, and show of force). About 80% involved Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, and Yugoslavia. The common denominator is their isolation from the global economy. Similarly isolated countries divide the world into a non-integrated “Gap” and a functioning “Core” in Barnett’s terminology. The Core includes Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, all of North America, Russia, India, China, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and all of Europe except the Balkans. The Gap includes western and northern South America, Central America, much of the Caribbean, all of Africa except South Africa, the Balkans, all of the Middle East, the “stans” of Central Asia, and all of Southeast Asia. Singapore is a Core country in the midst of the Gap, and North Korea is a Gap country in the Core.

According to Barnett, the countries in the Core live by agreed rules, are economically interdependent, and no longer resolve disputes by war. In an alternative formulation, they are “competent” (Friedman 1999). China, the “near peer” seen by many in the Pentagon as the major threat to the United States, is more likely to continue integrating into the functioning Core than to attempt anything more than regional hegemony.

Poor communications and transportation, lack of foreign investment, low life expectancy, lack of education, repression especially of women, lawlessness, and war characterize the countries in the Gap. Many depend on export of one or two raw materials for foreign exchange. Some are theocracies, others are kleptocracies, and some are both. Their rulers are for the most part above the law and removable only by coup or death. The Gap is a Hobbesian world in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Barnett’s formulation implies six main policy choices for the US. The radical fringe advocates a retreat from globalization into some sort of anarchic primitive utopia. The far left holds the Core—no more than evil former slavers and colonizers in their view—responsible for conditions in the Gap and advocates withdrawal of military forces, atonement through foreign aid and reparations, and treating Gap states as responsible international actors, which many are not. The mainstream left advocates joint action through the UN and defense of all possible targets at home, but no expansion of police powers to collect supporting intelligence. The mainstream right advocates short, sharp interventions to eliminate bad actors each time they crop up. The libertarian right blames the Gap for its own problems and advocates isolationism.

The sixth choice, advocated by Barnett (2004) is to “enlarge the Core by shrinking the Gap.” This strategy envisions ending conflict by creating a brighter future for the people of both the Core and the Gap. This task of decades, the equivalent of the Cold War’s containment strategy, can guide foreign policy decisions such as military basing, foreign aid, and encouragement of private sector investment. It requires that the US assume the role of Leviathan in the Gap. It must act, if necessary unilaterally and preemptively but ideally with allies—but only in the Gap. It need not do so in the Core, where there are established mechanisms to deal peacefully with almost every issue that arises. The US must lead—and hope that others will help. But, the US must do more than act. It also must explain, so that the countries of the Core know that they have nothing to fear. The US has often acted wisely but explained poorly.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the only state with global reach, but divided domestically and thus uncertain as to its strategy. Russia resurgent is seeking defensible borders and is drawing closer to Germany—the traditional European nightmare.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests recast China as a capitalist economy with a communist government that is focusing on securing its Pacific frontier by turning the East and South China Seas into territorial waters.

The 1991 Maastricht Treaty marked Europe’s next step in transcending nationalism to become a unified economic system that many hope will eventually be governed by a continental parliament, one whose fundamental instability became apparent with its inability to manage financial crisis.

The Middle East is undergoing a fundamental shift consequent on the “Arab Spring” but more importantly on the US withdrawal from its effort to stabilize the area, leaving Iran as the regional hegemon from the Mediterranean Sea to the western provinces of Afghanistan and influential from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. Given the record (Chapter 15), the idea that sanctions are sufficient for managing the threats it poses is a form of denial rather than strategy.

Strategic geography and Jones’s formulation for understanding strategy and tactics combine to provide a rational and parsimonious explanation of how wars are fought and where. Barnett’s approach to strategic geography is in the tradition of optimistic conservatism, realistic but giving hope for steadily converting management of conflicts to diplomatic rather than military resolution. The two concepts combine well with Expected Utility Theory (Chapter 12) to approach a complete theory of conventional interstate conflict.