How America’s Geography Shapes Our Role in the World

if I could have everybody's attention we'd like to begin my name is Alan Luxenberg I'm president of the foreign policy Research Institute and since I haven't seen many of you all year let me wish you all a Happy New Year judging by the last few days it ought to be a very wild ride this year I'd like to begin first by thanking the National Liberty Museum for hosting this series once again and thanking bny Mellon wealth management represented by our trustee Michael Barron for sponsoring this series as well before we begin tonight's program I did want to mention that tonight we kick off our geopolitics with grenery in the new format new venue new time frame then on February 23rd we launch our Princeton series with Robert litfock talking about the threat from North Korea on March 8th we launch our Mainline briefings which are no longer breakfast briefings but evening briefings at the Marion Cricket Club and that will feature our fellow Clint Watts on Russian information operations um it's a great talk he just gave it for us in Manhattan and um I can't say it's a happy talk but it's a good talk uh April 8th we launch our New York Historical Society lecture series with Jeremy black on World War One so tonight we welcome back our old friend Robert Kaplan we've been working with uh Bob since 1993 I think we've hosted 91. excuse me um we've hosted a book talk for each one of his last 15 of 17 books I think and the only problems I may have said before to you the only problem I have with Bob is that 20 years ago I looked a lot younger but he looks like he looks 20 years ago and that gives me grief um now I'll turn the proceedings over to my colleague Ron Granary the host of geopolitics with Granary so please welcome Ron and Bob thank you thanks very much thanks very much Alan thanks very much everybody for joining us uh here tonight uh as I as I like to say the beginning of all these programs it's Tuesday in Philadelphia and the world is as complicated as ever so let's talk about it uh welcome to the January 2017 edition of geopolitics with Granary fpri's monthly discussion of international Affairs this is the first program in our fifth season here at uh geopolitics with Granary we were talking about the beginning it's uh who knew it would last this long and we'll see how much longer it lasts after tonight but it's a pleasure to have you all with us I am indeed Ron Granary the director of fbri center for the study of America in the west I'll be the host and moderator of our discussion all of us at fpri thank you for joining us live and archived on the internet and for the first time live on our YouTube web stream uh and live this evening here at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia on January 24 2017. it's a real pleasure to have you all with us and as Alan said this is a uh the beginning of a new experiment with geopolitics with grenery a evening event rather than a daytime event we're already very gratified by the size of the audience which I of course attribute to the importance of Our Guest which is always nice we're going to have the format will stay similar to the other times we've done this right I will I have an introduction we're going to talk about Bob's book we're going to talk about his work I have questions for him he has responses and then we hope that you will have questions as well there will be time for questions from the audience and time for the questions from the online audience as well we're looking forward to seeing how that all goes tonight's discussion centers around a term that is near and dear to the hearts of all of us at fpri and especially to the host of this program that term of course being the magic word geopolitics although the term can have different specific meanings depending on the speaker in the audience geopolitics highlights the interplay between the natural world and Human Action between the Apparently Eternal and unavoidable realities of geography and the efforts of human beings over time not only to adapt to the natural world but to force the natural world to adapt to human ingenuity tonight's guest Robert Kaplan is one of the most prominent geopolitical analysts working today the author of best sellers with such dramatic and some could say dire names as Balkan ghosts Asia's cauldron the coming Anarchy and of course the Revenge of geography his most recent book which is released officially today is earning the Rockies how geography shapes America's role in the world a meditation on the relationship of geography to the American Destiny manifest or otherwise retracing a route across the United States traveled by his father Kaplan takes us from the Berkshires to San Diego inspired by a variety of writers from Bernard Devoto to Wallace stegner he contrasts the vertical landscape of the East with the horizontal landscape of the Great American desert all the while observing listening to the people inhabiting the towns along the way and pondering the significance of our geographical inheritance for the past present and future of the United States hovering over his work is the spirit of historian Frederick Jackson Turner whose 1893 essay on the significance of the frontier in American history first Advanced the notion that the frontier experience shaped American society in ways that made it profoundly different from the European societies that initially nurtured it idealized Concepts have rarely taken firm route in America Kaplan tells us at one point and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration people here are too busy making money an extension of course he writes of the frontier ethos with its emphasis on practical initiative particularly important for Kaplan if I can say that in the author's presence is the idea that the people in the vast American Heartland are more grounded contrasting their connection to their terrain with the quote fatal weakness of global culture the challenges of Western geography encouraged a degree of risk-taking what Kaplan calls a fundamental aspect of the American personality for Kaplan as for Turner Conquering the frontier didn't just make the United States it made Americans even if it is hard to say where the outside world's influence ends and human choices begin geography does not determine individual character he can seize at one point but it does matter the tempered climate of North America provides vast Bounty the river system makes possible the transport of goods and connections across regions that encouraged nation-building and thus he concludes geography remains an overwhelming advantage and source of American power indeed because of that geography America is quote fated to lead and there's the rub for Kaplan is much too internationally minded to allow his Continental Reflections to lapse in to Splendid isolation history and geography linked the United States to the larger World they do not separate them history and geography are a source of responsibility for the present and responsibility to Future Generations Kaplan is a patriot but not blind to the crimes that accompany the development of the United States From Slavery to the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans even as he encourages readers to confront those dark stains however he also tries to draw positive conclusions declaring at one point as he reflected on a visit to South Dakota's Black Hills quote the only answer to the crime committed here is for the United States to use the resulting power that has come with the conquest of a continent in order to continue to do good in the world or as he concludes elsewhere no place in the world can be ignored that is the legacy of America's geography and yet we are left wrestling with the uncomfortable Paradox how can the same Continental vastness that has insulated America and Americans from world affairs also encourage let alone require continued engagement with the wider world how can we celebrate the Hardy insular Children of the soil of the great interior while also expecting those Americans to send their children to defend the great intermarium in Central Europe or to set sail from San Diego in one of the aircraft carriers Kaplan describes so well in order to preserve freedom of navigation in the South China Sea Kaplan concludes that we must quote sustain ourselves internationally even as we remember that the lessons of successful empires have been restraint caution and strategic patience and that the future depends upon remembering all and not just some of the lessons of the frontier so what are those lessons how is geography shaped the American historical experience how does it continue to shape American politics and culture how have technological developments changed or failed to change the way Americans relate to their geographical inheritance and what implications do all these questions have for America's future Global role these questions and yours will guide us in conversation with our guest Robert D Kaplan Robert Kaplan is the best-selling author of 17 books of Foreign Affairs and travel including earning the Rockies in Europe's Shadow Asia's cauldron Monsoon the Balkan ghosts the coming Anarchy he is a senior fellow at the center for New American Security and a senior advisor at Eurasia group for three decades his work has appeared in the Atlantic he was Chief geopolitical analysis Analyst at stratfor a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy and a member of the pentagon's defense policy board appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates foreign policy magazine twice named him one of the world's top 100 Global thinkers Mr Kaplan has reported from over 100 countries and his essays have appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Times The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal as well as in major Foreign Affairs journals he has briefed presidents secretaries of state and defense secretaries including delivering the Secretary of State's open Forum lecture at the U.S state Department for all of these reasons we are delighted to have this world-renowned scholar and long-term friend of fpri with us tonight welcome Robert Kaplan thank you Ron thank you [Applause] I wanted to start by asking you a a basic question and that is this book is a slight departure for you it's it's a little more personal and it's focused on the United States at home right uh what led you to write this particular book well first of all thank you for hosting me again and thank you for the 20 you know the 27 year long relationship with fpri that I've had terms of this this book had an odd origin I originally wanted to write something long about Bernard Devoto Bernard Devoto in the 1940s and 50s might have been the most famous American intellectual for many years and yet now his name is completely forgotten and it's completely forgotten because although a liberal throughout his life who was always right on every issue he was right on on on the Menace of Nazism and Stalin long before the other intellectuals he was he was right on on conservation on many things because the academy moved so far to the left after the Vietnam war that it wasn't that they rebuked him they just cast him aside so I decided I wanted to write about Devoto then I realized I need to write something about my father not something long just something so I said a chapter on my father on Devoto that's not a book I said well where does that lead when you put the two together it leads to a journey across the United States and and then I said well where does that lead no it leads to a reflection on world affairs and America's role in the world so what I cobbled together was a book that in a sense is a series of essays you know though I wouldn't call it that um and I was very nervous about it because I didn't I wasn't sure if it worked as a book so I sent uh after I finished it I sent the draft to uh one of my literary agents Henry Thayer a very young brilliant young man and I waited anxiously for his response and he responded he says this is perfect and it's better because it's short you know we don't have to do much with it because the marketing department because it's because it's there you know it works so then I knew I had something but usually you have an idea for a book and you write the book this started from particulars That Grew into something larger so was it easier or more difficult to do parts of it were easy parts of it but required lots of rewriting parts of it were more difficult I I would say that each part was a different writing experience so to speak you know I'm so glad that you specifically mentioned Devoto to start because I uh something struck me when I was reading the book for those of you who don't haven't read a lot of Robert Devoto is 1846 the year of decision as a famous description of 19th century American politics and about the discovery of the West and as it happens it it which is this compendium of criticisms of historians David Hackett Fisher specifically singles out Devoto as an example of the aesthetic fallacy books without concluding that he is torn between two inconsistent objects to tell what actually happened and to tell a beautiful story in pursuit of the two purposes he operates at Cross purposes and diminishes the degree to which either is fulfilled now I'm sure you want to defend Devoto and I want you to do that but I want to ask this as a question for somebody who writes books and also magazine articles that have to grab the audience how do you see the tension between the uh to tell the beauty to tell a beautiful story or an interesting story versus trying to be scrupulously accurate I don't see a contradiction I think this comment by David Hackett Fisher is a perfect example of academic deconstructionism in the sense that Devoto did most of his research in the Harvard Library he went out on foot and horseback and would not write about a place until he saw it with his own eyes he grew up in Utah at the turn of the 20th century so how had an innate organic knowledge of the American West that later that later historians did not have and he was able to connect with both academics at the time intellectuals and the average person and he did tell a great story he writes so much better than people than most people today could ever hope to write sure and finally he was someone who had great fundamental arresting truths uh he was an inductive thinker much like Sam Huntington who also angered many of his academic colleagues I mean you know devoto's comment that America was an Empire estate and a civilization all at once was one of his things another was that America's Geographic Bounty made it natural for it to be engaged in the world which went against the grain of of so many isolationist thinkers who thought him a traitor before World War II uh remember Devoto never left the soil of the United States he never visited Europe or even Canada and yet he was not an isolationist he was an internationalist a choice and an intellectual perspective right so where you're from this goes back to your question about the role of geography a role of connection to terrain and where you're from shapes a lot of you but it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't Mark you forever in a sense you can choose to be different Devoto was had had fundamental ideas that grew out of what he experienced on the ground there was nothing abstract about his reasoning well related to this uh you know the traveling and the being there right you obviously you've traveled a lot of places and you've written lots of books about your travels uh how is it different when you're traveling in your own country uh and you know if you're do you do you find yourself uh applying the same or trying to look at say Nebraska the same way that you looked at the uh it's more challenging and here's why it's more challenging because when you're oh when you're in the Gobi desert or someplace you pick a place you know that only a very small number of people have seen what you've seen therefore even if the writing is mediocre it's going to seem fresh because nobody else because nobody else has seen it Mount Rushmore is right and the few people who have seen it tend to be you know you know tend to be very scrupulous area experts who will find out any mistake you made but there are very few of them so you can you can slip into cliche and not be caught for it all the time when you're looking at your own country you know every reader every body large numbers of people have seen what you've seen therefore the only way you can make it into a into a reasonable piece of writing is to have a perception an idea an Insight that others don't have generally so it makes you know you you have to operate on a higher level in a sense it's you're not traveling through uh you know a place in West Africa or a place in Northern Japan or someplace you're describing Nebraska or the New Jersey Turnpike you better have something original to say or else it's it's a failure what about the experience of of interviewing and listening to people when when you travel because this is related to the idea uh these are you know your fellow Americans but they are people that perhaps before you went to Nebraska you didn't know any anybody from Nebraska or anybody well in 1998 I published a fairly long book an Empire Wilderness which was which was I crossed the country back and forth several times and I was a reporter and I interviewed people I did profiles of people I went out of my way to meet people uh to listen to them to quote them to check back did I hear them right and all this and I didn't want to do the same book again I wanted to do something different so I decided what I wanted to do in this book was to be an analyst not a reporter and what an analyst does is he an analyst looks for what people say not what people say but what they omit but which is true nevertheless an analyst Works inside the silences inside the things that are not said or spoken and an analyst doesn't interrogate people which is what reporters do and when you interrogate people you'll catch them at their worst maybe at their best they it won't come out of their mouths the way they really wanted to say it because they're a bit nervous or whatever so um I I felt that something more honest and different from my previous America book was just to overhear and listen to people and just to not talk to anyone first six weeks straight and just keep a diary of you know what comes into my mind and what I overhear in conversations so it's not a perfect way of doing things it has flaws but I didn't want to do the same book twice I wanted to try something different did you ever have a moment where you were unobtrusively or thought you were unobtrusively listening and overhearing when people where you noticed that people noticed you were listening and overhearing uh well only once and I was in uh I was in a restaurant in Wyoming and I got a phone call from an editor and we were talking back and forth and somebody listened to me and came over and started talking to him because they figured out who you were or the fear not least that you were you were somebody who was I was somebody not from there yeah and and did that change did did the atmosphere around you change not that much no did you did you encounter you know we talk about the difference between Coastal Elites and the the people of the Interior did um did you ever feel like once you open your mouth once people heard your accent that they did were you ever made to feel a stranger no no I I didn't I felt that this was a very cohesive country but one where and this is what I saw visually but that the thing we love to refer to and talk about the middle class quote-unquote was disappearing before my eyes what I saw was beyond the coasts beyond the university towns and Beyond uh you know a dynamic city here and there the middle class didn't exist anymore what I saw was a larger you know a substantial amount drifting upward into the global Elite uh even in and it wasn't by state it was even in western Nebraska there was one restaurant that served Health Foods where people were sipping Chardonnay and where they were on their smartphones sitting alone but to that one restaurant every other eating place within 20 or 30 miles was worse than fast food it was something below fast food because the majority that were that didn't slip upward into the global Elite had slipped downward out of the middle class into a precarious working class existence where there were just maybe one or two misfortunes away from poverty and so the I think that um I though I traveled nine months before the presidential campaign even began I saw a country where the middle class was disappearing and I think that explains a lot did you uh since since this is a good test case because it was before the campaign began so people weren't talking specifically about politics but what did you get from what did you get from did you overhear political discussion no that was the thing America nobody talked about politics not nobody but almost never for instance I was traveling at a time when everyone was condemning Jeb Bush for having a bad answer to why his brother got involved in the Iraq War and remember all those news stories I traveled at a time when we initialed the Iran nuclear cord zero nobody knew about it cared about it um the feeling I got was for most of the country that was that don't give us more 9 elevens and don't give us more Iraq Wars anything between those extremes you work out the details you people in Washington but you get near those extremes suddenly there's a popular reaction wherever that and yet it's hard to know where that moment is and also people react according to their own what happens to them between when they get up in the morning and go to bed at night so people cannot nobody knows what TPP is the trans-pacific trading pact is yeah yeah they don't know what this they're not following the debate um but they do know that the middle class is disappearing that there are many much fewer manufacturing jobs than there should be in the interior reaches of the continent and they see this you know economic Global power Rising China and all they so their reactions to it are crude and ill-informed but yet it's based on a truth it's be you know it's based on an experiential truth what happened what how their own lives and communities have changed I wanted to uh to broaden the frame just slightly here right since you talk about geography and you've obviously written a lot about geopolitics uh as a as a broad explanatory or analytical term what does it mean to you when you talk about the geopolitics of the United States or the uh how do you use that term uh what it means to me is where essentially the last resource-rich part of the temperate zone to be settled uh during and slightly after the European enlightenment where uh in the temperate zone where you know to the north is essentially the Canadian Arctic because Canada demographically is Chile laid on its side all Canadians live within a hundred miles of the U.S border so and it's all middle class so there's no threat there it's you know um and the only um the only geopolitical challenge and I consider this a modest one that's been blown out of proportion is the is the is the relatively poor country to the South and with a higher birth rate low you know younger population not just of Mexico but of Central America protected by two oceans but and this is one thing while a stegner pointed out is the river systems I mean Wallace stegner was writing about the river systems in the 1940s and 1950s how we have an arable cradle of rivers laid not over the the not laid over the demographically poor Great American desert in Rocky Mountain but over the fertile soil of the middle west so that even a city like Pittsburgh is connected to World Trade because it's on the Ohio River which flows into the Mississippi which flows into the Caribbean to the great sea lines of communication and the river system is you know there's more miles of navigable inland waterways than much of the rest of the world combined and it's a river system that's diagonal it's not perpendicular like in Russia which separates the country so it unites the country with stegner has this wonderful phrase how all the rivers flow together you know you wrote this about 70 years ago uh basically and uh so on the one hand we're protected or have been protected from the convulsions of afro-eurasia on the other hand we're connected to the world due to our waterways and sea lines of communication so we have the ability to lead while at the same instance being somewhat protected uh 911 may have happened and all of that but nevertheless we're protected from Muslim migrations from the Middle East unlike Europe you know Europe is really the fight club you know it's going to get all the immigration from the Middle East for decades to come from Africa and not kiss Africa is failing but because it's in the early stages of starting a middle class which leads to more demographic upheaval not less because many people now in Africa have the ability to leave and go to Europe for the ambition and the ambition right so you know the idea that that certain African countries are a success story because the economic growth rate is growing is is increasing is it's it's not even a one-dimensional way of looking at things it's more superficial than that it gets really complex so we're both protected and involved so as I said we're fated to lead right well that and that's we get to that the question of Fate right when everybody talks about geography you talk about geopolitics you know in in the your the subtitle to the Revenge of geography is coming conflicts and the battle against fate which it's a great uh a great phrase but what exactly is fate right all geopolitical analysts have to wrestle with the charge that emphasizing geography leads to a kind of determinism uh especially when it's combined with a retrospective bias that assumes everything that happened had to happen so we constantly trip over the question of inevitability uh which appears to defeat the very purpose of historical analysis if it's inevitable then there's nothing to debate how do you respond to the the problem of inevitability well the Greeks invented the concept of fate and it's in Escalades it's in Sophocles euripides it's in Shakespeare basically and to an extent we're all semi-fatalists because we all you know base whatever we do based on probabilities that stem from the past uh if your child is accepted to Harvard and four other state universities you may say he should go to Harvard his the chances are according to Faith that he'll go further there he'll meet people who will further him more uh you know it's why we try to send our children to good schools to live in good neighborhoods on a minute-by-minute basis we're all semi-fatalists so for someone to say I don't believe in faith Aid you couldn't operate you couldn't operate in your life or in the world uh it's a balance it really is a balance uh geography is fate in a way I mean Taiwan is 98 miles from China if it were 20 miles the width of the English Channel the Chinese would have conquered Taiwan in the late 40s or early 1950s I mean that's Fate on the other hand as I always say if all you believe in is geography and geopolitics you're missing 50 percent of reality and what's likely to happen because 50 percent of Everything Is Shakespeare in other words it's human passion it's it's assessing personalities uh you can't look at the last decade not this decade the decade previously without George W bush to make having made the Fatal decision to appoint Donald Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense rather than Dan coats of Indiana and he was this close to appointing coach now had he appointed coats coats would have brought in Armitage as his deputy secretary and the whole history of the decade would have been different so you know that's Shakespeare so that's the you know the Battle of personalities that nobody could predict in advance that that the President George W Bush couldn't have predicted an hour before he made the decision right well and then of course then we even get into the idea of 539 votes in Florida would have made that uh situation very different as well right well this I'm glad you brought in the the um this question of of individual choice and human choice and the role of leaders because um in your book you make reference to Walter Russell Mead's um uh different American foreign policy Traditions uh and emphasis on the Jacksonian tradition which is this uh tradition especially in the interior of the country people who who feel as though sort of interaction with the outside world is optional you can stay away from it you can ignore it but then when struck you strike back hard with violence right in some ways right this is the most irresponsible of the Traditions uh but it is but it is profoundly American and it's the most basic it's the most basic because as as is pointed out in the book originally by Walter Russell Mead the elites are hamiltonians or their jeffersonians uh or the wilsonians the average American has no idea of this and even if it's explained to them they don't follow it but the Jacksonian tradition of we're not out to save the rest of the world but if you cause this harm we're going to hunt you down and kill you is it the basis of the American Soul well and what's the role of what's the role of American leaders to uh I guess to encourage an awareness of the outside world enough so that so that the United States doesn't vacillate between extremes of disengagement and well that's been our tragedy in re especially in recent presidential Cycles is we tend to vacillate between extremes uh we get a National Security Council under President Obama which is one extreme now you get one uh under another extreme and one of the themes of the book is that our geography because it's ambiguous because we're both connected to the to the outside world but we're also protected from it argues for what I call you know a realistic you know a a re realist internationalism and realist internationalism you know who embodies that James Baker George Schultz uh Henry Kissinger Brent scope you name it and I guess realism realism is a uh it's a very comforting term right because people suggest you if only we could be more realistic because we want to believe that reality is such that if people understood it they that we could predict their behaviors but the reality of the world today is according to another according to a brilliant author I've read before is we have to deal with the coming Anarchy right the reality isn't all reality is not all that good right reality is actually kind of frightening and so how can we have uh how can we be both realistic and calm how can we be both realistic and internationalist how do we not succumb to the temptation to want to shut it all out and hide behind the oceans we do it by assessing each crisis based on what are our security interests and consistent with those interests how can we improve the situation we try to project we try to widen the scope of Civil Society worldwide but not get too legalistic about it in other words Don't lecture enlightened authoritarianisms like an Oman Morocco Jordan you know places like that or previously Singapore and tell or and tell them they should you know have full-bodied cold turkey democracy that wouldn't lead to more liberal systems it would lead to chaos in in those places so don't be insisting on your historical experience everywhere it's the knowledge that our particular historical experience is ours it's not theirs and so is that then that's an argument for for encouraging education and area area expertise right I've always been a big believer in area expertise the scholars I respect the most are area Specialists because look here here's an argument if you want to say Egypt should be Democratic it should hold elections because that's the moral thing to do that argument Works in a 30-second sound bite because you don't need to know anything about Egypt you never need to go there or anything but if you say Egypt works better under an enlightened dictator who's much more moral and less bloodthirsty than the assads or Saddam Hussein but also runs a military dictatorship that's you know working to improve the economy well if you say that that doesn't work as well in a sound bite and you better know something about the country to back up your argument so realism is not as um is not as attractive in a short sound bite and requires knowledge of the places you're talking about and area expertise is built on local knowledge and local histories and local culture and and an awareness of it so I find that area experts tend to be moderate in foreign policy whereas people who don't who've never traveled abroad except to go on um uh you know on on on Washington fact-finding trips where they meet with the embassy and meet with some high people for a week and fly home and say that they know all about the country those people tend to be extreme now the foreign correspondents tend to be very moderate for instance people forget this debate but in the 1990s there were a whole group of people in Washington who were demanding that China be Democratic and all the China experts and the foreign correspondents who had actually lived in China and and it knew the country said that's a horrible idea you know you know if you had that you would have ethnic Warfare between the turkic wigor Muslims in the Han Chinese etc etc etc I I want to pick up on this but also I know that we've got some questions coming from the audience is any uh questions oh hands are hands are going up that's great this young man right here in the front but microphone's going to come to you 've been talking about the um the declining middle class uh in a in a time when most of us have always understood that it's the middle class produces our strength um it sounds pretty depressing and I just wonder how you can you reconcile that with the article that was written by your colleague James Fallows and the Atlantic you know he crossed he talked about crossing the country back and forth in a small Plank and saw these wonderful all this wonderful development and all these out of the way small towns across the country is that consistent with what you're saying is that America has always been a country of extraordinary individuals and individualism so if you're looking for positive stories you'll find it everywhere I was not looking for positive or negative stories I was just describing what I saw in front of me I avoided inner cities I dealt with inner cities in my previous book on the United States so I was not looking for bad things but what I found was very disturbing as I said it's to be an analyst is not to talk to people but to listen to the silences the things that people don't say and talk about and often the people who talk to reporters are the most articulate people they're very articulate I was interested in the people who weren't articulate if people who were in The you know in the next booth in the restaurant with me talking about their knee in back problems about their belief in God gossiping about their neighbors which we all do and and about all their financial problems and I heard this over and over and over and over again yet there was no discussion of politics uh remember this is the spring of 2015. and I think if you compare what I wrote at the time and what's happening now in the country you see this is very consistent because what Donald Trump represents is a sort of anti-politics a sort of a primal scream from people whose lives were just getting worse and worse and they had no outlet they didn't know who to complain about or what to say and uh and then somebody comes along and they say that's it he's a wrecking ball fine let's try a wrecking ball see that and of course that gets back to your you're talking about area expertise and needing to understand the world right it is very tempting just to say I don't need to understand the world I'm just going to bring in the wrecking ball and that's a normal attitude if if you're like an you know like most people who doesn't follow the op-ed page of the New York Times or all the other things that we all read doesn't really read world affairs all they know is that their lives have gotten worse right here I would like to ask you to comment on the relationship on the one hand between geography and whatever it means in terms of fate and technology and especially in the two areas that you were talking about were protected on one hand and we are connected and can be leaders on the other so in Manifest Destiny we're protected and we can fill out the continent perhaps Theodore Roosevelt sends the ships around the world and we're now moving out and as things speed up where do you see both the protective nature of our geographical situation and our ability to reach out and lead in terms of the electronic and travel geography technology rather has not defeated geography but it has shrunk geography It's Made It smaller more we're we're living in a more crowded congested interactive Earth where every crisis interacts with every other the Baltic Sea the Black Sea the South China Sea each ricochets off the other in a way that it never did before attrition of the same adds up the big change and so while we've always had this interconnectivity it's much more extreme now than it's ever been and the fact that America is less protected from Global cataclysms because of Technology financial markets terrorism Etc means that the only way we've found to deal with it is to try to export democracy abroad if we're not as protected as we were before we'll make the world exactly the way we are you know and you know this was wilsonianism um and and what it was was deep down another form of isolationism because it failed to take into account the different historical experiences of others and you know I don't want to be critical of Wilson because his actual views became more and more subjective and nuanced as he had failures in the Phil as he saw failures in Haiti the Philippines Mexico other places by the time he left the White House he was a very cautious thinker but people have taken his name in vain to make you know very extreme arguments about what's possible in the world and so think of it as this way technology brings the world closer and our response has been will make all the world Democratic you know so they're like us I would say this is one of the one of the challenges with traveling right is that people travel and often the first thing they'll say is they want to believe that everybody every place they go is just like them when in a way the idea of going to different places is to meet people who are not just like you right and one of the mistakes that's made is people go abroad academics others and they meet with people just like themselves in the capital city who are who are who are other members of the global Elite it could be in a poor country but it has members of the global Elite who they meet with who explain things to them and they say oh these this person is so cautious and moderate and Brilliant you know of course this country has a bright future you know you know because he's running a movement and we're going to support the movement and yet they have no idea what's going on at the border posts you know at the edges of the country um so so just traveling alone you know doesn't necessarily make you open-minded good question um I want to ask you a question on micro Geographics the South China Sea I don't know what China's goals are obviously I'd like to dominate the region and intimidate the countries um the president's cancellation of the trade pact is just a zap to drive some of that trade over to China rather than to us but with the size of container ships now carrying 18 000 containers do sea Lanes or sea Lanes restrictive very much it doesn't make much of a difference you can ship tremendous loads over great distances at low cost with the container ships and if you have to go further it's not a big deal so yeah so well uh that's a technical but an interesting question yeah let me answer it through geography sure a lot has changed in the world in the last Millennium but the Strait of Malacca is still of just a few miles wide and because it's only a few miles wide and only half of that mileage is navigable China has known for a long time it's getting too much of its oil and natural gas through a very vulnerable Waterway and has therefore needed to diversify so China has been building roads and Railways and pipelines into hydrocarbon-rich Central Asia it's been building ports across the Indian Ocean and even a military facility in Djibouti on the Straits of Babel mondeb and it's been doing this all to get oil natural gas you know into China from Central Asia or to the Indian Ocean then up by pipeline through the Burmese jungles into China all because the Strait of Malacca is only a few miles wide and yes there are other Straits the Sunder lombok Straits in the Indonesian archipelago but nevertheless you know geographical features still matter and yes shipping rates may go down but it's still better to be in the shortest Place between two distances because when you look at a globe there looks like there's a lot of ways to get from one place to another but there are better and worse ways right right here please the declining middle class that you were seeing or The Disappearance of the middle class you were seeing is that geographical in or in other words is it just in the in the middle parts of the country that that's occurring or is that happening everywhere it's partly geographical partly as I said you can find very globally connected well-off people in in in in in an unsuspecting places in what you know in the most rural parts of Wyoming western Nebraska but generally speaking uh well I'll give you an example I drove for days along the Ohio Ohio River Valley uh Wheeling West Virginia Portsmouth Ohio one town after another 20 30 000 where the downtown was totally deserted shelled out disasters uh uh but then you come to a college town Marietta Ohio which is just beautiful because it has a lovely wonderful hard to get into small liberal arts college which is that it goes back to the late 19th century and then you travel for more days nothing but shelled out towns then you get to Bloomington Indiana home of Indiana University and you might as well be in Singapore you're back with the global Elite so outside of the outside of what I call the coasts the college towns and successful cities uh uh in the in the inner rural reaches of the country uh the middle class is you know disappearing or has substantially disappeared look at the vote in Missouri we all hear oh Missouri went to Trump well no it didn't exactly Kansas City and St Louis voted for Hillary but the whole rest of the state voted strongly for Trump because once you get out of the pulsing that you know you know relatively well-off parts of Kansas City with sophisticated upper middle class people you're suddenly in places that have been badly hit right question here and then and then to the back following up on the prior question as you went through different parts of the United States having different greater affluence as you've indicated and lesser deteriorated affluence as you've indicated what are the commonalities that you've seen among different sectors of the United States that had similar circumstances the depressed areas of Upstate New York versus the depressed areas of the remote Midwest the more the more Dynamic cities of the Midwest the Rocky Mountain States versus the East and stuff like that what would you take away about it the commonalities that I saw Coast to Coast were a deep reverence for the military wherever you go roads parts of highways are named after the military uh there are historical markers about the Cavalry settling the West I've never seen a country with such reverence for the military as the United States we're a settler Frontier Society still and and the and being in the military grants you raises you in Social Prestige rather than lowers you uh in Europe what I found is a foreign correspondent there is the military is seen as civil servants in funny uniforms you're not raised in Social Prestige by being in the military in Germany or France it's a little different and that's because they have a still existing Imperial tradition so it's a bit different there um on the on the continent but reverence for the military reverence for local history in other words in Lancaster Pennsylvania James Buchanan may have been the worst president in American history so far um uh yeah yeah all right yeah yeah right yeah yeah um but you know his home Wheatland is in excellent repair with a little Museum Visitor Center uh all of Finance by the local wealthy people of the community because they're proud of it because it's their history and it happened there and they will subsidize it and hope people learn from it and wherever I went there was this reverence for local history reverence for the military uh and and to me that says that still at Bedrock we're a country still interesting back in the back the the area that you described as the hollowed middle class I'm imagining are the red States is there an answer that is geographical for that or is there an answer that is political for that um it's actually a bit split because the red states have big blue Parts like Missouri as I said a few minutes ago is a red state but St Louis in Kansas City or big blue Parts um it looked at Pennsylvania you have um Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and then you have lower Alabama in the middle which is the way that political Consultants look at the state of Pennsylvania actually so States themselves are split in except in a few categories even Alabama itself is like that you know it's split up um so Most states have split personalities most do and and because one side tends to show up more to vote than the other or you know this was a very close election in places like Michigan Wisconsin what we came technically red states were determined by tens of thousands of votes not millions of votes it's interesting that we could have a whole discussion about the way that the the electoral map of the Electoral College how it shapes our our sense of red and blue when actually it's much more nuanced well the Electoral College is crude in the sense that except in a few instances the state what you win one state even by two votes you get the all the states numbers we have time for I think one more question from the audience in the back thank you very much you you mentioned in your presentation right here yeah yes you mentioned in your presentation the importance of the um geography and in particular the effect of uh the difference between the formosan Straits and the channel the English Channel you indicated that um should the the the The Divide between mainland China and Formosa have been as large as the English Channel the fate of Formosa might have been different yet the Germans never invaded Britain during the second world war although they were separated only by the channel do you care to elaborate on that concept and on that analogies well Germany sure came close um and if it wasn't for the Royal Air Force it might have conquered Britain and the Very fact that it was close then Germany was obliged to try China never tried a sea land invasion of Formosa of Taiwan and if it had only been 20 miles wide they very well may have tried like the Germans did against the the British in 1940 right of to to wrap all this up uh it might not be fair to talk about a book other than the one that you just wrote but in the in your epilogue to the paperback edition of the Revenge of geography you have this line the smaller the world becomes because of Technology the more that every place in it becomes important uh and technology is double-edged right it provides us the apparent comfort of niches and Echo Chambers but it also deepens our connection so how should we both as individuals and as responsible citizens how should we separate our individual experience of Technology as isolating or go beyond that to also emphasize the reality of connection to the broader world all right first of all as I said geography technology has made geography more claustrophobic it's made geopolitics more interactive and claustrophobic there are no places in the world or very few that don't matter anymore because you could have a crisis anywhere that could start a crisis in other places I think the only way to sit you know to bring your personal experience to that in the world is counter-intuitive it's getting away from technology I don't tweet I'm not on Facebook I don't blog and that gives me more time to read you know oh I think we have to quit on that one thank you very much Robert Kaplan for this discussion thank you so so ladies and gentlemen I want to thank you very much for being part of this discussion tonight of course this discussion has to end but the conversation continues on geopolitics with Granary monthly we are experimenting with this new format and we'll be here again next month we're also going to be developing new online uh online uh audio offerings for conversations about International Affairs please note that copies of the are running the Rockies are available for a purchase but you can't have mine um if you liked what you heard today and you liked what you saw please tell a friend please bring a friend next time we would like very much to thank uh the National Liberty Museum bny Mellon wealth management and the Bradley foundation for their generous support for this program and to keep up with future episodes of geopolitical canary I will say this to you but I can't say it to Bob Kaplan because he doesn't tweet and isn't on Facebook but please friend us on Facebook follow us on Twitter um visit our website at fpri.org and you can follow the host of this program as well I'm on Twitter at Ronald brunneri but until next time for all of us at fpri especially my colleagues in producing this broadcast Eli Gilman Peyton Windell and Rachel Himmler I'm Ron Granary thanks for joining us thank you thank you

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 11,156

Keywords: America, Geography, Foreign Policy Research Institute, FPRI, Robert Kaplan, Earning the Rockies

Id: AS573eHch6k

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2017