Future shocks in global politics
Had Tim Marshal’s publishers waited before publishing The Power of Geography, he may well have had to rewrite parts of this book. With the Taliban having conquered Afghanistan in a matter of months since US President Joe Biden unilaterally announced the withdrawal of US troops, events have decisively overtaken the predictions in this book.
The book, the cover blurb tells us, “explores ten regions that are set to shape global politics in a new age of great power rivalry”. They are: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Spain, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, and, most interestingly, space. Afghanistan is a glaring miss. Even before the withdrawal of US and Nato troops, anyone who read the foreign news with attention knew that large parts of its territory had become the locus of the sundry Salafist franchises that operate in west, central and south Asia and as far as the Balkans.
Mr Marshal, a journalist who has knocked about the world’s most volatile regions and knows his geography literally from the ground up, offers this explanation in the introduction. “The choices people make now and in the future are never separate from their physical context. The starting point of any country’s story is its location, its relation to neighbours, sea routes and natural resources.”
The book extends Mr Marshal’s proposition from his 2015 book Prisoners of Geography that “geography affects global politics and shapes the decisions that nations and their leaders are able to make” (a point Robert D Kaplan had made some years earlier). In The Power of Geography Mr Marshal uses the same technique of narrating the interplay of history and geography, this time to project the future.
He also offers a spirited riposte to critics who may claim that the “world is flat” because the internet has collapsed distances and landscapes have become meaningless. “That is a world inhabited only by a tiny fraction of people who may well speak via video-conference and then fly over mountains and seas to speak in person; but it is not the experience of most of the other 8 billion people on earth. Egyptian farmers still rely on Ethiopia for water. The mountains of Athens still hinder trade with Europe…,” he writes.
That’s a valid point, but the arguments in this admittedly absorbing geo-political predictive sweep hold only in some cases. Natural resource-rich but oil dependent Australia, for example, situated almost centrally in the Indo-pacific, undoubtedly plays a key role in this theatre of escalating contestation between the US and China. It is possible that the Basque and Catalan separatist movements in Spain located in mountainous barriers and a prosperous trading region respectively will spur dormant secessionist impulses elsewhere in the EU. The discovery of gas in the eastern Mediterranean could well set off new confrontations between Greece and Turkey. And the competition for space — easily the most interesting chapter — reminds us of a plausible dimension to global power rivalries.
Five of the 10 regions cover west Asia and Africa. These chapters are impressive for their range and depth of knowledge, but they tend to underplay the fell hand of colonialism and the Cold War. For instance, in the chapter on oil and gasrich Iran, he ascribes the mountainous barriers circling the country to its inwardlooking Shi’i extremism since 1979. But it is possible that without British and US organising a coup d’etat against the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and installing the venal and corrupt Reza Shah Pahlavi to protect their oil investments, Iran’s history may have taken a different course.
The same limitation informs his account of the Sahel, the belt of six subsaharan nations that stretches from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Mr Marshal has done well to select this region, one of the poorest and most environmentally degraded in the world. It is riven with fierce tribal rivalries for access to resources that cut across national borders, leaving the region vulnerable to Islamic extremism that threatens the relatively stable regimes in the south and east. What millions of years of climate change have done to the environment have been accelerated by human agency. But Mr Marshal mentions only in passing the egregious artificial division of the continent into “nations” by European powers at the infamous Berlin Conference of 18841885 that has left a depressing legacy of enduring instability.
The Sahel, Mr Marshal demonstrates, is very much Europe’s, especially France’s, Afghanistan. He does not explore in greater detail the fact that the region is likely to add to the refugee crisis that has thrown up new challenges for the European Union and the US that began with the Syrian war. Brexit has been one consequence and malevolent xenophobic regimes in Hungary and Poland present new centrifugal threats.
Books such as this run the risk of predictive failure because history is unpredictable. After the Soviet Union collapsed, for instance, who could have said the 1990s crisis in Europe would be less Eastern Europe but the Balkans? That had less to do with geography and more to do with two unprincipled politicians, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia.
Marginal Iceland signalled the start of the global financial crisis. The spark for tomorrow’s crisis may come from an overlooked Arctic island or from Mars, who knows. All the same, if you want an articulate and entertaining primer on contemporary affairs, this book is a useful addition to the bookshelf.