Book review: The Revenge of Geography

I don't often read books on politics or geopolitics. So, Robert Kaplan's 2012 book The Revenge of Geography represented a nice change of pace. The subtitle is "What the map tells us about coming conflicts and the battle against fate". As he notes in the first chapter:

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... A state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.

However, this is not a book based on a geographically deterministic view of the world. Kaplan is careful to lay out that geography is but one of many influences on geopolitics, albeit a particularly important influence.

The first part of the book outlines a lot of the history of geopolitical thought. I found this difficult reading, since it is not an area of scholarship that I am particularly familiar with. For me, the book improved substantially in the second part, where Kaplan goes into detail in discussing particular regions: Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran, and Turkey. The mix of theory, history, and geography is quite compelling, but very difficult for me to excerpt. However, as one example, take this passage on Russia:

Russia's religious and communist totality, in other words, harked back to this feeling of defenselessness in the forest close to the steppe, which inculcated in Russians, in turn, the need for conquest. But because the land was flat, and integrally connected in its immensity to Asia and the Greater Middle East, Russia was itself conquered. While other empires rise, expand, and collapse - and are never heard from again, the Russian Empire has expanded, collapsed, and revived several times... Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia.

Or this bit on China:

Sea power suits those nations intolerant of heavy casualties in fighting on land. China, which in the twenty-first century will project hard power primarily through its navy, should, therefore, be benevolent in the way of other maritime nations and empires in history, such as Venice, Great Britain, and the United States: that is, it should be concerned mainly with the free movement of trade and the preservation of a peaceful maritime system. But China has not reached that stage of self-confidence yet. When it comes to the sea, it still thinks territorially, like an insecure land power, trying to expand in concentric circles...

I enjoyed this book, but the title is a bit of a mystery to me. It's hard to see how this book is about the revenge of geography. Kaplan argues in the introduction that air power defeated geography, but it is now getting its revenge. I'm not buying it, as geography matters even in the case of air power. Nevertheless, that is a minor gripe, and this was an interesting book to read.