The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

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Robert D. Kaplan

The Revenge of Geography

What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

Robert D. Kaplan

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English

Random House Inc
02 December 2013

Military history; Politics & government; Geopolitics

The bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory paradigm through which to view the latest global upheavals, a timely and important response to The World is Flat.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . In this ""ambitious and challenging"" (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world.

In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe's pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland.

Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties- China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan's porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India's main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage.

A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century's looming cataclysms.

By: Robert D. Kaplan
Imprint: Random House Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 132mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 312g
ISBN: 9780812982220
ISBN 10: 0812982223
Pages: 448
Publication Date: 02 December 2013
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Robert D. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and the author of fourteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate; Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power; Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History; and Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century. In 2011 and 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan among the world's Top 100 Global Thinkers. From 2009 to 2011, he served under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a member of the Defense Policy Board. Since 2008, he has been a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis. From the Hardcover edition.

Reviews for The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

[An] ambitious and challenging new book . . . [The Revenge of Geography] displays a formidable grasp of contemporary world politics and serves as a powerful reminder that it has been the planet s geophysical configurations, as much as the flow of competing religions and ideologies, that have shaped human conflicts, past and present. Malise Ruthven, The New York Review of Books Robert D. Kaplan, the world-traveling reporter and intellectual whose fourteen books constitute a bedrock of penetrating exposition and analysis on the post-Cold War world . . . strips away much of the cant that suffuses public discourse these days on global developments and gets to a fundamental reality: that geography remains today, as it has been throughout history, one of the most powerful drivers of world events. The National Interest Kaplan plunges into a planetary review that is often thrilling in its sheer scale . . . encyclopedic. The New Yorker [The Revenge of Geography] serves the facts straight up. . . . Kaplan s realism and willingness to face hard facts make The Revenge of Geography a valuable antidote to the feel-good manifestoes that often masquerade as strategic thought. The Daily Beast [A] remarkable new book . . . With such books as Balkan Ghosts and Monsoon, Kaplan, an observer of world events who sees what others often do not, has already established himself as one of the most discerning geopolitical writers of our time. The Revenge of Geography cements his status. National Review From the Hardcover edition.