Robert B Kaplan and "The Revenge of Geography"

so good evening hey Graham good evening and welcome I'm mark rush them in the politics department here at Washington and the University and it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's guest speaker and it's always an honor and a pleasure to speak from this venue here at the heart of our campus and when it entails an opportunity to introduce a guests such as tonight's speaker the honor and the pleasure really are that much more profound robert kaplan is chief geopolitical strategists for Stratfor a private global intelligence firm he's authored 14 books on all aspects of global affairs most recently the Revenge of geography what the map tells us about common conflicts and a battle against fate which is the topic of tonight's discussion a bob has been a foreign correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly for over a quarter century his books have been translated into many languages and his writings have glossed the pages of the world's major newspapers and news magazines these include the New York Times The Washington Post the Financial Times The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times just to mention a few I'm Bob Seavey his biography I could spend the entire hour just going through all of this but as I asked him I truncate of that so just to provide a few highlights about what else he's done and what other honors and accolades he's received in 2011 and 2012 foreign policy magazine named Bob among the world's 100 top global thinkers in addition to his writings bob has served in numerous academic and policymaking capacities such as he's a non resident scholar since 2008 at the Center for a new American security in Washington from 2009 to 2011 he served on the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a member of the Pentagon's defense policy board from 2006 to 2008 he was class of 1960 distinguished visiting professor and national security at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls Bob among the four most widely read authors defining the post Cold War era along with the likes of Professor Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins the late professor Sam Huntington of Harvard and Yale professor Paul Kennedy impressive peers indeed again as I mentioned I could go on talking about Bob Zoellick accolades and writings but let me just conclude by adding one additional note Bob's a wonderful guest and has been a wonderful guest at Washington and Lee when he first came in 2004 Bob spent two days meeting numerous classes visiting with students and faculty at both VMI and Washington and Lee he conducted colloquia on his work both his authorship but also journalism in the field his address at leech Apple was as well attended back then as it is this evening and so his visit this time has been no less busy or generous as was his last so Bob welcome back to Washington and Lee thank you for a wonderful visit so far and what will most certainly be an intriguing address this evening ladies and gentlemen mr. Robert Kaplan thank you very much for this high honor of inviting me to speak tonight I was here nine and a half years ago and it was a very memorable experience at this university which is really special it has a lot of cachet and it's just so so beautiful to look at and to walk the grounds let me let me dive right into it I'm going to start in 1755 and Lisbon Portugal it's a time of a great earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people the French philosopher Voltaire who is about 60 years old at the time said the earthquake he he was opposed to the earthquake he did not accept it and you laugh people laughed at the time but Voltaire had something very serious in mind he said that he was against all natural and impersonal forces that circumscribed the work and the livelihoods of individuals and human beings and that humankind should never give in to natural forces like an earthquake but should continue to strive and and better things on earth and what Voltaire was really getting at with something very serious he was saying that individuals could overcome forces of fate and this is a very a very serious topic especially in the era in which we live in night in the mid-1950s the Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin wrote a very influential article against vast impersonal forces such as geography ethnic and cultural characteristics the environment demography economics which he said on you an individual should not knuckle under and should not accept but should struggle against them and should not accept any philosophies that that seemed to give in to these forces Berlin was Professor Berlin was writing only ten years after the Nazi Holocaust and the Nazi Holocaust is only one lifetime removed from our own which is a nanosecond in human history and so this whole issue of not giving in to vast impersonal imperial machine's forces geographies etc is a very very serious topic and if you were to read the editorial pages of liberal publications like the New York Times or Washington Post or conservative publications like the Wall Street Journal it makes no difference actually because in both publications in all publications the elites are saying that it's all up to the individual the you the individual can overcome forces of fate the end we can set things to rights in Syria in Iraq in Libya wherever if only we were determined and we were able to do so well when I'm here - not here tonight to do is to push back against all this it's true that 50% a lot of reality 50% of reality 60% take a percentage is determined by individual men and women and the decisions they make and they have moral responsibility for the decisions they make nevertheless there is such a thing as constraints and limits and things that one that one should respect rather than simply overcome and among all the constraints and limits the most obvious one and therefore the most ignored one I believe is that of geography and by geography I do not mean geography in the 21st century sense of the word where it's just a map I'm talking about geography in the nineteen century sense of the term where the map is merely a starting point to investigate trade routes natural resources the environment climate group characteristics culture because what is what is history what is what is the culture except the experience of a certain people in a certain landscape over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years that common experience and to just say that everyone is just individuals bouncing off each other in a global meeting place ignores a lot of things it's it ignores much of what I've experienced as a foreign correspondent over decades so when I'm here to talk to you about tonight is not to say that the emphasis on the individual and human agency is wrong rather the opposite it's profoundly right I'm just going to fill in the picture with constraints and limits uh we live in an age where the global elite flies at six thirty thousand feet from one continent to the other and says that everything is possible that they can engineer reality from above I'm just someone from traveling on the ground for decades saying we have to respect local realities um geography does not negate this but it just offers a more powerful way to look at the world to supplant everything we know about the forces of individuals and so let me go around the world a bit one a nice start with the Middle East and with Tunisia and especially the Arab Spring began in Tunisia in the last weeks of 2010 it was not wholly an accident that it started in Tunisia Tunisia is the closest place in the Arab world geographically to Europe for most of history Tunisia had an organic fluid relationship Sicily in Italy Morocco may technically be closer to Spain than Tunisia is to Italy but Italy was the heart of Europe Tunisia is closest to the heart of Europe the most Europeanized country Tunisia was founded by the ancient Carthaginians and the Romans if you travel along Tunisia's roads in the northern one-third of the country chances are it'll be a road that was originally Roman or Byzantine it's a real state it has a state mentality it has real institutions that function and institutions are the most crucial aspect of governance everything from Motor Vehicles bureaus to Agricultural Extension services the electricity water the very things we take for granted and don't even think about many countries in the world doing it cannot rely on ah Tunisia is fortunate in this respect so whether it has a real state mentality it's an age-old cluster of civilization it's it wasn't not just under the car that Ginny ins and the Romans but under the Vandals the Byzantines the Turks the Hoff seeds and others so we know it's a real place close to Europe and yet when the Roman general skip-bo Africanness destroyed carthage he in 202 BC he built the demarcation ditch a fossa Reggio which was a line that he dug from Tabaka on the Mediterranean in the north south a few hundred miles then directly east meeting up again with the Mediterranean around gaw bass and everything within that ditch was a portion for development and in fact if you look at a demographic and economic map of Tunisia today you will find that most of the country's development and and population cluster is within that and the Mediterranean outside that ditch there was much less development it was poor even today you go down to southern southwestern or southeastern Tunisia it's markedly poorer and you feel like you're really closer to Africa guess what the the fruit and vegetable vendor vendor who set himself on fire to protest the poverty' poverty-stricken conditions unemployment under development did so and lived in a town way outside that ditch so that the Arab Spring started in the most Europeanized country and you're in the Middle East closest the country closest to the heart of Europe yet in a part of that country that from millennia was underdeveloped compared to the other part this does not explain the Arab Spring all it does is add another layer of understanding to it which is all that I'm trying to do to add some background in context now as I said Tunisia is an age-old cluster of civilization it's greater Carthage so is Egypt with the Nile Valley and Tunisia and Egypt have had their political problems Tunisia is dithering from one temporary government to another Egypt is currently under autocratic military rule like it was in the Mubarak Age but one thing we don't we can take for granted more or less that Egypt and Tunisia are real States their governing they have institutions we make one maybe weakly governed in the moment in the case of Tunisia one may be badly governed at the moment in the case of Egypt but they are governed the very fact that the military can control Egypt is a sign of governance because the military itself is an institution this is not the situation that of say in Libya or Syria or Iraq or Yemen those places were not ancient were not state longtime States rather they were vague geographical expressions to have Western Libya the capital Tripoli was just an extension of Greater Carthage historically eastern Libya Benghazi was an extension of Alexandria and the Nile Valley Libya as a state wasn't thought of until modern history essentially and so therefore rather than just have problems of who governs and a feisty debate on who are the ones to lead the country in Libya the state itself is under question well the capital Tripoli is no longer the capital of a country it's merely the weak point of Imperial orbit Imperial like arbitration for governing sects and tribes in the deep south and elsewhere places like Libya and Syria and Iraq or so geographically artificial that they had to be governed by particularly austere authoritarian regimes the regimes in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia they were they were authoritarian but to a much lesser degree than in Syria Iraq and Libya and this again goes back to geography because in Egypt there's a natural state that the Nile Valley in in Tunisia there's a natural state not so according to geography Libya or Syria or certainly Iraq which was a cobble together a creation of the British putting the Kurdish mountains together with a Sunni Center and a tribe alized Chia South Yemen Yemen in fact is an age-old cluster of civilization but not one civil several about a half dozen Hydra moody himyarite Sabian etc because Yemen is infernally divided from within by mountains uh the Turks only nominally controlled Yemen they governed from the coast and did not disturb the tribes inland the British governed from the coast as well and arranged truces between the tribes inland Ali Abdullah Saleh who governed Yemen from the late night late 1970s to just a few years ago on a good day controlled maybe 60% of Yemen I traveled all through Yemen in 2002 and earlier in 1986 and one had to hire private security guards etc and go from one tribal region to another Yemen today is even more weakly governed than it was under Ali Abdullah Saleh and ultimately it goes back to a very very rugged mountainous geography where each mountain valley was under was under a rule of its own so what happened with the Arab Spring was not the birth of democracy but the but but the but the destruction of central authority the weakening of central authority and now we have in too many places on just the whirlwind of sects and tribes and and regionally based ethnic groups configure geographically with a very very weak or non-existent center again let me shift focus to let me switch focus to Europe and by the way I should say something about the United States on we said Americans like to believe that we're children of an idea the idea of democracy are the Protestant Creed where any one Muslim Jew Catholic is an honorary Protestant if they adopt the the Protestant Creed that's all true but there are other there's something else as well the United States has more or navigable inland waterways than the rest of the world combined the Mississippi Ohio Missouri River system is what United the continent before the interstate highway system the United States exists in the temperate zone protected by two too wide oceans to the north is only the Canadian Arctic because all ninety percent of all Canadians live within a hundred miles of the US border the only geographical challenge the u.s. faces is with Mexico to the south so the United States is very blessed by geography the 13 colonies started up very quickly because they had an inordinate number of natural well protected deepwater harbors Boston Philadelphia Baltimore etc in other words protected shielded from the wind which is unusual and also naturally deep right before the coast which is also unusual without those deepwater harbors American history would have been very different back to my little tour of the world to Europe um Europe in the last few years has been a financial story an economic story debt crises unemployment phirni lehigh unemployment rates etc it's more it's a geographical story as well the wealthiest parts of Europe that have been able to withstand the current crisis tend to be uh the northwestern part of Europe the Low Countries in Germany the Low Countries being Holland Belgium and Luxembourg a Germany Denmark Scandinavia open to the seas yet with rich natural lost sales forests to protect their settlements so that if you look at a map of the great cities of today's European Union Maastricht The Hague Brussels Strasburg this is essentially the same spinal column of Charlemagne's Carolinian Empire in the ninth century this was where medieval Europe began because it was geographically protected and geographically blessed an extension of that is Prussian Europe Germany what is today Western Poland then you had a less developed somewhat more unwieldy Danube in Europe which is which was essentially the Habsburg Austrian Empire stretching from the confines of Lake Constance and Switzerland all the way close to the Black Sea in Romanian Moldavia this was Lester less developed because this was open to pressure from the Turks from the poles from others and the weakest part of Europe in terms of in terms of institutions and development was the part of Europe that was not under the HAP's not under the Prussians not under Charlemagne not under the Catholic Habsburgs but was both Eastern Orthodox and Turkish in the you know in the long chasm of the middle medieval and early modern centuries those are the countries today that include half of Romania all of Bulgaria about two thirds of the former Yugoslavia and Greece the these were more less you know where institutions were weaker where standards were less where unemployment development was much weaker and where you did not have modern middle classes at all even Greece which was not part of the Communist Warsaw Pact did not really have a modern middle class till the middle part of the 20th century a one can argue about the decade and and therefore it's not unusual that this was the part of Europe that experienced the worst trouble since the fall of the Berlin Wall if I was to make a prediction an economic prediction in 1989 how the various countries of the Warsaw Pact would perform over the next 25 years and I did it totally on the basis of former empires which were in turn based on the map I would have gotten everything nearly perfect on Poland in the Baltic States in the north um we do the best hairs to the Prussia the Prussian and Hanseatic traditions hungry the Czech Republic Slovakia um you know the heartland of or at least part of the heartland of the Habsburg Empire would do second best but still credibly well meanwhile the eat the Orthodox and Turkish Muslim Balkans in the south eastern extremity would do the worst out Romania would experience bad government low growth rates and high levels of unemployment through most of that period Bulgaria and Albania would have brief periods of anarchy interspersed with periods of bad government uh Yugoslavia would fall into into warfare in the 1990s and Greece would experience the worst economic crisis in the EU with unemployment and inflation rate unemployment and growth rates as bad as the United States during the Great Depression and and and Greece is a country where as many as 50 percent of the population according to the latest statistics do not pay taxes or do not pay them at the requisite amount this is the fruit of bad institutions and bad government that that is that it is true the fault lies with bad individuals with finance ministers who made incorrect choices but it is also a product of history and a product of geography that cannot be that cannot be denied let's talk about Russia for a minute Russia is encompasses half the longitudes of the world 11 time zones it's all of it with the exception of the caucuses and parts of the Russian Far East are north of 50 degrees north latitude make and because most of Russians do not live in the deep south but they live in the cities of Moscow and say in Petersburg and other other places Russia is the coldest country on Earth in terms of climate Canada may technically be colder but as I said most Canadians live in the southern part of it this is engendered a certain amount of communalism of a you know of of the need for it it has engendered autocracy there's a wonderful book written about this by the late you Seton Watson about how autocracy is prevalent to Russia throughout history also if you're a Russian leader and you're Vladimir Putin who by the way thinks geopolitically in a way that many most leaders in the world do not you know that your country encompasses 11 time zones but has less people in it than Bangladesh that it has no natural barriers very few it has been invaded not only by the French under Napoleon and the Germans under Hitler but by the Swedes by the Swedes the Lithuanians and the poles as well and so you know you need a buffer zone in Central and Eastern Europe you know you need a buffer zone in the caucuses you're terrified of China because you have a thousand mile long border with China and the Chinese have while you have only about a hundred and sixty-five million people or whatever China has 1.3 billion people close up to your border and is refund the natural resources that you have therefore you can have a tactical relationship with China but not a strategic one you have to always meddle in the caucuses because that's the only way to keep Iran and Turkey honest and although you do not want to recreate the Warsaw Pact after all Putin knows that it was the expense of keeping up the Communist Empire that basically destroyed the Soviet Union in the first place you do want a traditional sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe in other words the Warsaw Pact may be dead but Russia is still big it's right next door and so the Russian factor still hover hovers greatly over the the rulers in Brussels and Berlin because they know that the EU crisis which is now a half decade old the EU the European Union has lost the significant degree of bandwidth of security geopolitical bandwidth in Central and Eastern Europe which the Russians are now trying to fill everything from buying up electricity grids to buying banks to running intelligence services etc in other words you don't want if you're from Moscow you don't want to rule these countries from Poland to Bulgaria but you want to frame their decisions to a certain extent on Ukraine was not of the Ukraine crisis was not about the Ukraine per se because Ukraine is so exposed to Russia that Ukraine is never going to be a full member of Europe there are too many levers of too many levers of coercion of coercion geographically determined that that the Russians can force on the Ukrainians what the what made the Ukrainian crisis significant was by Tate was by basically telling the Ukrainians that they were not just going to join the EU the Russians were able to signal to the book to the Bulgarians to the Romanians to the Hungarians to the poles to watch out that they had to pay as close of attention to Moscow as they did to Brussels even though they were members of the EU that the in the 1990 I say people when their skin did I say to people when they're skeptical about the importance of geography I say you can say that because you're an American if you were a Polish defence minister or a Romanian defence minister you would not be thinking that way because if Europe oh if you're a Polish official or a Romanian official the 1990s were wonderful you joined the EU when it was strong I mean you started you got into the EU in the early 2000s when it was strong you join NATO in the late 90s when it was strong before the Afghan war and Russia was conveniently chaotic under Boris Yeltsin's rule Russia is no longer chaotic the EU is much weaker than it was a few years ago and NATO is coming off a 10-year war in Afghanistan that it's basically lost on and is searching for direction so again like since ol history is back in places like Poland and Romania people are looking both ways not just to not just to Brussels then we have China China is all south of 50 degrees north latitude China occupies the temperate zone northern China Manchuria Harbin is it the same north latitude is Maine the southernmost part of China Hainan Island is it the same degree of latitude as the Florida Keys China has all the seasons it's blessed like the United States it has vast quantities of Nigro carbons of strategic minerals and metals and water resources in its Far West it has a nine thousand kilometer coastline in the tropics and semi-truck tropics along the along the Pacific it's perfectly apportion to be a great to be a great power in the 21st century China though if you're the leader of China in Beijing and you look out at the map of your country you see good things and bad things the good things you see is Russia is weak because it has only 7 million people in the Russian Far West and it's birth rate is declining it's negative it's a negative territory you have a hundred million people in Manchuria alone you're hungry for the mineral and timber wealth of the Russian Far East ah you're making all these investments in former Soviet Central Asia you're building roads and pipelines and rail networks in Toulouse beckus tan Kazakhstan Turkmenistan you're sent former Soviet Central Asia is flush with Chinese cash ah you're playing a divide and conquer strategy with the economies of Southeast Asia um you can see a greater China that is beyond the borders of China so China is bigger than it looks like on the map that's the plus side of the story the negative part of the story is that the leaders of China see the map and feel very claustrophobic because China albeit to a lesser extent in the former Soviet Union is a prison of nations of minority groups in in the northern part of the country you have the Mongolians this is separate from the Mongolians in Outer Mongolia proper in the West you have the Uighur Turkic Muslims in the southwest you have the Tibetans all these people occupy vast territories about 1/3 the pup about 1/3 to territory of all of China they all live in the high and dry table lands which is the sources of all the mineral and hydrocarbon wealth uh Tibet holds much of the water resources for for China and so your so that the the night the Han Chinese population which is the ethnic cons who are who dominate China live in the arable lowland cradle of the country are surrounded by these hostile minority groups minority groups that is that as I said can you know are where all the resources are and so what so China's dilemma is essentially a geographical one the Chinese economic miracle is over China's growth rates are down from eleven percent economic GDP growth rates to 7.5% the leaders of China know that those statistics are not true that the growth rate is really below six percent and even lower on the Pacific coast they know that check the Chinese economic miracle of low wages and high export value is grinding to a close and that even if they get the rebalancing of the country right which is a very difficult thing to do get the rebalancing of the economy right on the coming years and decades we'll see a significant amount of economic and therefore political and social turmoil in China so what they fear is the very opening of China that we advise them to do they fear that with more liberalization they will have more systemic um non-stop ethnic unrest in their Borderlands within the borders of China and so the question is can the Hans continue continue to dominate the minorities in the the can the inner core dominate the outer core of China during the next quarter century of economic and social unrest let's look just for a minute at the South China Sea on we and the East China Sea we look at Chinese aggression these adjacent seas and see it as Chinese aggression the Chinese respond this way they say we're doing nothing different in the East and South China Seas that you Americans didn't do in the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th century the Caribbean was a Bluewater extension of America's Continental landmass Europe was far away the United States was close by and the United States under successive presidential administrations was not going to let the Europeans dominate the Caribbean and gradually from like the first from like the 1830s to the 1910s came to dominate the Caribbean the building of the Panama Canal was the capstone of that China feels it is doing similar it feels that when it when it projects naval power into its adjacent seas it is merely being benign it is taking its rightful role as the leader of East Asia whereas when the American Navy comes from half a world away to protect its treaty allies it's being hegemonic because Asia is not natural to a man up to America it's basically on one of the one of the issues of Asia fact the issue Asia is not about ideas it's all about nationalism and who owns what in what stretch of the maritime domain it's a fight over territory over net and natural energy resources in the South and East China Seas the disputes between China and Japan Japan and South Korea China and Vietnam China and the Philippines Malaysia and Vietnam are all about geography they're all about territory on who controls what now that that Imperial systems have died and you have the and you have strongly institutionalized States Vietnam has recovered from its decades of warfare so is Malaysia China has recovered from the Great Leap Forward in the great Cultural Revolution Japan is finished with with a half or two-thirds of a century of quasi pacifism you have normal ethnic states with strong senses of nationalism that are projecting power outwards and coming into conflict in terms of who owns what in the region um let me uh I haven't said anything about Iran Iran even though I talked about the Middle East Iran is was the great superpower of antiquity it is one of the most natural states in the Middle East like Egypt like Tunisia uh her ancient Persian empires the if Amon is the Parthian the Parthian 's the Medes the sassanids all all had soft spheres of influence from the Mediterranean to central Afghanistan and the Iran of today is no different um the Iranian state configures with the Iranian Plateau to a much greater extent than the Saudi state configures with the Arabian Peninsula um if you go to Iran you will see a much more strongly institutionalized state with real institutions real centers of power that compete with each other and operate on a farm or on a model of far more precision than you will in places like Syria Iraq and other Arab states so in fact with the with the implosion of the Levant of the implosion of Lebanon Syria and Iraq for whatever reasons between the eastern edge of the Mediterranean and the Central Asian plateau you only have really two strongly institutionalized States Israel and Iran and therefore it's not accidental that the United States is seeking to finesse the nuclear issue in order to come to some sort of strategic understanding with Iran um finally let me talk about the United miss turkey there's not there's not really enough time I could discuss Turkey the Indian subcontinent but let me say a word about Mexico in the United States in the early part of the 20th century Mexico was one-fifth of population of the u.s. it's edging on to 1/2 the population of the u.s. its population growth rate is slowing down but that in the u.s. is slowed down even more so the average of Mexican is in his 20s the average American is in his 30s so that the Mexican and population increases at a faster rate than that of the US Mexico is planning deepwater por new deepwater state-of-the-art ports on both its Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with high-speed rail connecting them Mexico is now the 12th largest economy in the world at the same time that economies like Spain and Italy fall through the floor Mexico a lot liable it will is liable to break into the top ten world economies over the next 15 years or so Mexico just did something very very important that did not get enough coverage be in the media because it was largely a technical story um they liberalize their laws on ownership and investment in hydrocarbon firms what that means boil down to simple English is that Texas can now invest in the Mexican oil and natural yes industry and that the business in Texas and in Mexico will fuse closer and closer together ah Texas by the way is it you know is the heart of the shale gas boom most of the shale gas deposits are in Texas Oklahoma and Louisiana with smaller amounts in North Dakota western Pennsylvania western eastern Pennsylvania route of western New York State uh the way energy is developing in North America uh we for all of our lifetimes we've seen the United States as an east to west sea to shining sea of mythic patriotic proportions as the geographical reality but if you look at what's happening in Mexico with its population with its energy industry with investment from Texas with more and more energy configuration between the United States and Canada you see this east/west sea to shining sea continuum slowly organically being replaced by a north-south vision of North America from British Columbia to Mexico City in other words up in future generations that north when you look at a map of North America without the political boundaries you see a mountain range from Alaska all the way down to the Andes and beyond the idea that this mountain range is the West rather than just the north south is something you you only see when you put in those political boundaries but North America will geographically reassert itself because of developments in Mexico and by the middle of the 21st century as much as 40 to 50 percent of Americans will have a working knowledge of Spanish you know that's real change that doesn't always get into the news papers because it's a gradual change it's not something dramatic ah let me close up with this there's this notion that geography doesn't matter because it's been overtaken by technology especially communications technology whether it's jet planes or it's the internet or whatever that's not true geography is the the what's happened technology has made geography more claustrophobic but it hasn't negated geography it's like this watch which I'm holding it's small and and if you can have even smaller watches like the earth but the but in order to understand the workings of the watch you have to take it apart and see all the gears inside of it it's that way with the Earth's geography more and more people more and more interconnected but that means each place affects every other place like never before it used to be said that Africa doesn't matter Latin America doesn't matter they all matter now any country can be strategic and in order to get a deeper level of understanding of what what's going on in that country you have to study its history which originally is rooted in geography thank you very much thank you thank you questions yes no it's very difficult to generalize about something like this security policy in the nation like the United States but you know face of all of these challenges that we're talking about on an international scale there are those who suggest that the best course for the country is to withdraw from the world to a degree and kind of return to our isolationist roots under this you suggest that the solution is for us to further this sort of Asia idea first of all isolationism is a very 1920s word it signifies a world when it took five six days to cross to travel from New York to Europe by ocean liner it doesn't really apply in today's world we misuse the word just because someone is opposed to this Middle East intervention or that doesn't make them an isolationist and just because people you know there are people who want to take a more circumscribed attitude to what really or America's interest doesn't make them isolationist the serious debate is what level of internationalism and how far to go the United States is so engaged in the world our Air Force and Navy project power across the whole globe the piece of Asia is kept essentially by the u.s. seventh Fleet and you know and button by its air contingent uh the US may have had humiliating military experiences in in Iraq and in Afghanistan but the US has you know has an aircraft carrier or two off the shores of the Persian Gulf in the eastern Mediterranean that allows it you know to project power inland with air and missile power and it's so the u.s. is the Americans love to say we're not an empire but but our influences of Imperial like dimensions our frustrations and problems are those that previous empires tended to have in their history so that when we look for examples we tend to look back at what did the British do what did the Dutch do it for example the United States cannot afford to shrink its military so much that it would you know that the world would be in disarray you may see the world is very violent but the American diplomatic and military and economic forces keep a relative peace they allow countries is diverse and different as Taiwan and Poland and Georgia and the caucuses in Israel in the Middle East to basically not be overrun yet you know to basically continue to exist as without us power the independence of Poland or Taiwan is impossible to imagine almost to say nothing of Israel or Georgia or other places I can name so it's about not shrinking our forces too much but it's also about I would say projecting air and naval power but to be very very wary and shrewd of where we put land forces in the future is the defense budget too big I think it is I think you can shrink the defense budget considerably and make it more efficient you know it's a matter of shrunk sharply shrinking it but there's a limit to which you can't go in other words so it's a matter of maintaining a balance yes I see the status quo is changing gradually it let's look I told you about Romanian Poland in the mid 90s how great it looked and how much darker it looks now it's similar with the Caucasus in the mid 90s people assume that the Caucasus would all be pro-western on Georgia was pining to join join NATO Armenia was pro-russian but not a Russian satellite and Azerbaijan was just beginning to exploit its vast hydrocarbons resources and sort of play a game but between balancing Russia against turkey against Iran against the West you look now Armenia has become a full-fledged satellite of Russia with thousands of Russian troops on the ground Armenia has joined the customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan essentially rejoining Russia Georgia has no possibility to get into NATO at all anam and Georgia is increasingly coming under the sway of Russia Azerbaijan because it has considerable oil and natural gas wealth is somewhat in a more favorable position but still has to be more and more cognizant of what the Kremlin wants so if you remember after world war one the British occupied the trans caucuses for a period of a few years and it was assumed that two trans caucuses that's that's the southern side of the Caucasus Mountains Georgia Armenia Azerbaijan would all be pro-western because this was during the Russian Civil War where but then the car Ennis can reconsolidated control of you know and essentially ruled is the pose arist empire they the British left and the caucuses went back to being pro you know aligned with Moscow something similar but less extreme seems to be happening now a Putin is in a very strong position but I believe it's only for the shorter middle term that in 10-15 years from now Russia is going to be in a lot of trouble because it's not going to dominate the energy markets to the degree that it is now yes Western what about a great country civil and Brazil Russia India China but recently since people are talking about the main countries Mexico Indonesia Nigeria and Tempe and I was waiting to see if you know you project into the future how those countries alpha with you in part and with your love yes so many acronyms to remember and I think the brick started out as an acronym invented in a goldman sachs document what we try to do is group these countries but when you actually look at their situations they're incredibly diverse and they have great differences with each other um Brazil and you know Brazil is essentially um you know it's far from markets it you know it's not as geopolitically central as China it's not well institutionalized it has it has a lot of natural resources on but most of its population or much of it I should say is in South Paulo Rio which is more or less demographically and economically part of the greater southern cone so to speak and is you know is divided from other parts of the country by the Amazon Turkey has great possibilities it is economically reasserting turkey in Europe inside the Balkans it's uh trying to you know its tried to exert soft political sway throughout the Arab world it has enormous water resources on its having tremendous government governmental to political turmoil at the moment only because the ruling party has been in power for over a decade and in a democracy when you're in power over a decade the voters get tired of you but in Turkey is still essentially stable and Indonesia is an archipelago as wide as the continental United States has weak institutions it's really not well governed and nobody you know and people are hard pressed to predict the future after President Yudhoyono but and also you can include Vietnam in that list because it's got a puppy it's got one of the 12 highest populations in the world it fronts the South China Sea it's incredibly dynamic and it's becoming a real de-facto ally in the United States but I think what you're really describing is that we've gone from a bipolar world to a short unipolar world to a world where the United States is going to be a great power for decades to come because of its energy resources and what and what you will have is a series of middle-level powers that each will be different than the other each will some will fare better than others but we won't have a neatly divided world we will have a world with where I think American power in a relative sense will still be greater than that of any other country because when you America with all of its problems does not have the structural economic problems of China or Europe China in Europe face much more profound problems than the United States does so I don't see a single competitor to the United States what I see is a lot of emerging middle level powers and yeah in a post-it you know that includes the countries you named of Brazil Turkey Indonesia India for certain but each of these countries are going to are going to experience significant social unrest as they climb the economic food chain and they develop real you know upper-middle classes that demand more you know more and better governance from within and we've seen that in Brazil recently yeah George Friedman wrote about the possibility of Mexico demographically overtaking California and Texas and that leading to problems between the two countries would you comment on that situation not George and I worked together because we argue all the time no seriously we have very spirited arguments and we we disagree on many things even though we share a geographic focus is a geographic geopolitical starting point I don't think it matters if Mexico overtakes California in Texas in terms of population what matters is can Mexico modernize its institutions because if it can continue to modernize and make more effective its institutions that then it can combine with its demographic heft to become a real strong middle-level power at the moment there are two trends in Mexico a few minutes ago I spoke of the positive ones but there's also the negative one which we know about which is a third of the country more or less is not governed by the government their government by this criminal cartel or that criminal cartel I am and what is government he who monopolizes the use of force in a given geographical space and if a criminal cartel monopolizes the use of force then it's the government whatever the World Almanac may say and so the question is can Mexico more strongly institutionalize and become a stronger state then then the demographic forces that George Friedman mentions will come to the fore but if Mexico is unable to it is unable to you know you know to essentially reclaim these criminalized areas especially in the north then Mexico will still remain what week because California and Texas may have their political problems debt and all of that but they're in a far far far higher level of bureaucracy and Institute of modern bureaucracy and institutions than Mexico is would you say that No you know I'll tell you something whenever I come back to the u.s. from East Asia and I fly to Asia often is I feel like I'm entering the third world in the US because Asian infrastructure its airports its seaports its hotels increasingly its cities the Asians make tremendous investments in infrastructure especially in transport and I see our crumbling airports and our crumbling highways and bridges Asia's as I said China's problem is geographic and structural and economic Japan's problem is that it has essentially a negative birthrate and that's why it's investing so much in robotics don't laugh seriously the Japanese are leading the world in robots because they're going to have less and less people on the South Koreans have a similar aging graying population um so there's there are a lot of problems in Asia but I don't see Asia as 50 years behind or 20 years behind I see it as kind of advancing in post-industrial technology in a way the United States still hasn't quite done yeah one last question yes well it's interesting North Korea is it's not just the communist state it's a national fascist state it's very similar to Romania how Romania was in the nineteen 1980s that the North Koreans rant about the US but in fact they fear China more cuz china has real influence inside North Korea and they hate the Japanese very much uh it's hard to see a bright future for such a totally sealed hermetically she min an information age I think that one thing we all have to kind of you know it's a low probability but it's but it has you would have enormous consequences if there were to be a collapse of this of the North Korean regime because North Korea is a state where two-thirds of the country are semi starving where it has nuclear you know or it has a nuclear capability a sudden collapse of North Korea would entail an operation conducted by the US military that Chinese People's Liberation Army and the South Korean military would all have to work in harmony together this is hard to you know this is hard to figure out very much North Korea is really the big question mark in East Asia because a few of because the fast-moving crisis in North Korea could determine the power balance in Asia for years to come remember if you look at the 20th century all divided country scenarios whether East and West Germany North and South Yemen North and South Vietnam the experts predicted that they were never that they would never unite that they would stay separate in the part and yet all of them either collapsed or came together in fast-moving tumultuous crises that lasted only weeks not months which nobody had predicted so that we you know we have to be prepared for a sudden implosion or shift in North Korean finally um I don't see North Korea giving up its nuclear capability the North Koreans look at Libya they look at the fact that Qaddafi had given up his nuclear program his WMD program and yet the West deserted him at the moment of any unrest so that the North Koreans look at this and say look we're not like the Iranians we don't have a massive sphere of influence we're not an age-old empire we're not well institutionalized like Iran is we're much weaker more artificial all we have is our nuclear capability so as long as there's a North Korea I believe we're going to have to deal with a nuclear North Korea thank you

Channel: Washington and Lee University

Views: 96,117

Rating: 4.7842698 out of 5

Keywords: geopolitics

Id: 9mm4Q5il9DU

Length: 64min 3sec (3843 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2014