Good evening. Good evening and welcome. I'm Mark Rush. I'm in the politics department here at Washington and Lee 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 guest such as tonight's speaker, the honor and the pleasure really are that much more profound. Robert Kaplan is Chief Geopolitical Strategist 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 Coming Conflicts, and The Battle Against Fate, which is the topic of tonight's discussion. Bob's 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. Bob's CV, his biography, I could spend the entire hour just going through all of this but as I asked him I truncated 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 policy-making 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 under 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 in 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's 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 Lee Chapel 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 dive right into it. I'm going to start in 1755. in Lisbon, Portugal.
It was the time of a great earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people. The French philosopher Voltaire, who was about 60 years old at the time, said 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 it. against all natural and impersonal forces that circumscribe 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 was something very serious He was saying that individuals could overcome forces of fate.
And this is a very serious topic, especially in the era in which we live. 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 an individual should not knuckle under and should not accept, but should struggle against them and should not accept any philosophies that seem to give in to these forces.
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 machines, 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 individual can overcome forces of fate. 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, What I'm here tonight to do is to push back against all this. It's true that 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 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 19th 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 history? What is a 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 ignores much of what I've experienced as a foreign correspondent over decades. So what 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.
We live in an age where the global elite flies at 30,000 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. 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. Why don't I start with the Middle East and with Tunisia 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.
Most of history, Tunisia had an organic, fluid relationship with Sicily and 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 cannot rely on. Tunisia's fortunate in this respect. So it has a real state mentality. It's an age-old cluster of civilization. It wasn't just under the Carthaginians and the Romans, but under the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Hopsides, and others.
So we know it's a real place close to Europe. And yet, when the Roman general, Scipio Africanus, destroyed Carthage in 202 BC, he built a demarcation ditch, a fossa regia. which was a line that he dug from Tabarca on the Mediterranean in the north, south a few hundred miles, then directly east, meeting up again with the Mediterranean around Gabes.
And everything within that ditch was apportioned 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 is based on the Mediterranean. and population cluster is within that ditch and the Mediterranean. Outside that ditch, there was much less development. It was poorer.
Even today, you go down to southern, southwestern, or southeastern Tunisia, it's markably poorer, and you feel like you're really closer to Africa. Guess what? the fruit and vegetable vendor who set himself on fire to protest the poverty-stricken conditions, unemployment, underdevelopment, did so and lived in a town way outside that ditch. So that the Arab Spring started in the most Europeanized country in the Middle East, the country closest to the heart of Europe, yet in a part of that country, that... that for 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 and 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 can take for granted, more or less, that Egypt and Tunisia are real states.
They're governable. They have institutions. One may be 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 obtains, say, in Libya or Syria or Iraq or Yemen. Those places were not long-time states.
Rather, they were vague. geographical expressions. 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 the one that's going to be the leader. itself is under question. The capital, Tripoli, is no longer the capital of a country. It's merely the weak point of imperial-like arbitration for governing sects and tribes in the deep.
South and elsewhere. Places like Libya and Syria and Iraq are so geographically artificial that they had to be governed by particularly austere authoritarian regimes. The regimes in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia, 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, the Nile Valley. In Tunisia there's a natural state, not so according to geography, Libya or Syria or certainly Iraq, which was a cobbled together creation of the British, putting the Kurdish mountains together with a Sunni center and a tribalized Shia south. Yemen, Yemen, in fact, is an age-old cluster of civilization, but not one civilization, several, about a half dozen.
Hadramuti, Himyarite, Sabian, etc. Because Yemen is infernally divided from within by mountains. 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 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 a rule of its own.
So what happened with the Arab Spring was not the birth of democracy but the but the destruction of central authority, the weakening of central authority. And now we have in too many places just a whirlwind of sects and tribes and regionally based ethnic groups configured 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. We said Americans like to believe that we're children of an idea, the idea of democracy, the Protestant creed, where anyone Muslim, Jew, Catholic is an honorary Protestant if they adopt the Protestant creed. That's all true.
But there's something else as well. The United States has more... 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 wide oceans.
To the north is only the Canadian Arctic because 90% 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 deep water 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 deep water harbors, American history would have been very different.
Back to my little tour of the world, to Europe. Europe in the last few years has been a financial story, an economic story, debt crises. infernally high 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 the northwestern part of Europe, the low countries in Germany. The low countries being Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia, open to the seas yet with rich natural lost soils, 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, Strasbourg. This is essentially the same spinal column of Charlemagne's Carolinian Empire in the 9th 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 Danubian Europe, which was essentially the Habsburg Austrian Empire, stretching from the confines of Lake Constance in Switzerland all the way close to the Black Sea in Romanian Moldavia.
This was 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 institutions and development, was the part of Europe that was not under the Prussians, not under Charlemagne, not under the Catholic Habsburgs, but was both Eastern Orthodox and Turkish in the long chasm of the medieval and early modern centuries. Those are the countries today that include half of Romania, and half of the rest of the world.
All of Bulgaria, about two-thirds of the former Yugoslavia, and Greece. 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. One can argue about the decade. 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 Poland and the Baltic states in the north would do the best. Here's to the Prussian and Hanseatic traditions Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia you know the heartland or at least part of the heartland of the Habsburg Empire would do second best but still credibly well meanwhile The Orthodox and Turkish Muslim Balkans in the southeastern extremity would do the worst. 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. Yugoslavia would fall into warfare in the 1990s. Thank you.
And Greece would experience the worst economic crisis in the EU, with unemployment and growth rates as bad as the United States during the Great Depression. And Greece is a country where as many as 50% 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 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 denied. Let's talk about Russia for a minute. Russia 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 of the need for, it has engendered autocracy. There's a wonderful book written about this by the late U. Seaton 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 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, 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 Caucasus. You're terrified of China because you have a thousand-mile-long border with China.
Yeah. And the Chinese have, while you have only about 165 million people or whatever, China has 1.3 billion people close up to your border and is hungry for 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 hovers. ...hovers greatly over 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 a 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, 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.
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 geographically determined that the Russians can force on the Ukrainians.
What made the Ukrainian crisis significant was by basically telling the Ukrainians that they were not just going to join the EU. the Russians were able to signal 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.
In the 1990s, 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 defense minister or a Romanian defense minister, you would not be thinking that way. Because 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 got into the EU in the early 2000s when it was strong. You joined 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. NATO is coming off a 10-year war in Afghanistan that it's basically lost and is searching for direction. So again, history is back in places like Poland and Romania.
People are looking both ways, not just to Brussels. Then we have China. China is all south of 50 degrees north latitude. China occupies the temperate zone. Thank you.
Northern China, Manchuria, Harbin, is at the same north latitude as Maine. The southernmost part of China, Hainan Island, is at 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 hydrocarbons, of strategic minerals and metals, and water resources in its far west. It has a 9,000 kilometer coastline in the tropics and semi-tropics along the Pacific. It's perfectly apportioned 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 its birth rate is declining, it's in negative territory. You have 100 million people in Manchuria alone. You're hungry for the mineral and timber wealth of the Russian Far East. You're making all these investments in former Soviet Central Asia.
You're building roads and pipelines and rail networks into Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. Former Soviet Central Asia is flush with Chinese cash. You're playing a divide-and-conquer strategy with the economies of Southeast Asia.
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 than the former Soviet Union, is a prison of nations, of minority groups.
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 Uyghur Turkic Muslims. In the southwest you have the Tibetans.
All these people occupy vast territories, about a third the territory of all of China. They all live in the high and dry tablelands, which is the sources of all the mineral and hydrocarbon wealth. Tibet holds much of the water resources for China. And so Europe, so that the night, the Han Chinese population, which is the ethnic Khans 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 11% 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 6% and even lower on the Pacific coast. They know that 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, the coming years and decades will 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, non-stop ethnic unrest in their borderlands within the borders of China.
And so the question is can the Han's continue continue to dominate the minorities in 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 and the East China Sea. We look at Chinese aggression in these adjacencies 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 blue water 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 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 America.
It's basically one of the issues of Asia, in 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 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. Who controls what? Now that imperial systems have died and you have strongly institutionalized states, Vietnam has recovered from its decades of warfare, so has Malaysia.
China has recovered from the great leap forward in the great cultural revolution. Japan is finished 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. I haven't said anything about Iran. Iran, even though I talked about the Middle East, Iran was the great superpower of antiquity.
It is one of the most natural states in the Middle East, like Egypt, like Tunisia. Ancient Persian empires, the Achaemenids, the Parthians, the Medes, the Sassanids, all had soft spheres of influence from the Mediterranean to central Afghanistan. And the Iran of today is no different.
The Iranian state configures with the Iranian plateau to a much greater extent than the Saudi state configures with the Arabian Peninsula. 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 model of far more precision. than you will in places like Syria, Iraq, and other Arab states.
So, in fact, 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. Finally, let me talk about the United States.
I've missed Turkey. There's not really enough time. I could discuss Turkey, the Indian subcontinent, but let me say a word about Mexico and the United States.
In the early part Part of the 20th century, Mexico was one-fifth the population of the U.S. It's edging on to one-half the population of the U.S. Its population growth rate is slowing down, but that in the U.S. has slowed down even more. So the average Mexican is in his 20s, the average American is in his 30s. so that the Mexican population increases at a faster rate than that of the US.
Mexico is planning deep water port, new deep water 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 will liable to break into the top 10 world economies over the next 15 years or so. Mexico just did something very very important that did not get enough coverage in the media because it was largely a technical story.
They liberalized their laws on ownership and investment in hydrocarbon firms. What that means boiled down to simple English is that Texas can now invest in the Mexican oil and natural gas industry. And that the business in Texas and in Mexico will fuse closer and closer together.
Texas, by the way, 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, rather Western New York State.
The way energy is developing in North America, 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, in future generations. 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 only see when you put in those political boundaries. Thank you. But North America will geographically reassert itself because of developments in Mexico. 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 newspapers because it's a gradual change. It's not something dramatic. 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...
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 you can have even smaller watches like the Earth, 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'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. Question? Yes.
Now it's very difficult to generalize about something like the security policy of a nation like the United States. But in the face of all of these challenges that we're talking about on an international scale, are those that suggest that the best course for the... countries to withdraw from the world to a degree and kind of return to our isolationist roots and there are those who suggest that the solution is for us to further this sort of pivot to Asia idea and further alliances and so on.
What are your thoughts on that? First of all, isolationism is a very 1920s word. It signifies a world when it took five, six days 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 are America's interests doesn't make them isolationists. 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 peace of Asia is kept essentially by the U.S. 7th Fleet and by its air contingent. The U.S. may have had humiliating military experiences in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but the U.S. 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 so the U.S. is, the Americans love to say we're not an empire, but our influence is of imperial-like dimensions, and our frustrations and problems are those that previous empires tended to have in their history. So then when we look for examples, we tend to look back at what did the British do, what did the Dutch do. And so...
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 as very violent, but the American diplomatic and military and economic forces keep a relative peace. They allow countries as diverse and different as Taiwan and Poland. and Georgia in the Caucasus, and Israel in the Middle East, to basically not be overrun, you know, to basically continue to exist.
Without U.S. 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 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. I see the status quo is changing gradually. 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 assumed that the caucuses would all be pro-Western. Georgia was pining to 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 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.
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 I, the British occupied the Transcaucasus for a period of a few years. And it was assumed that the transcaucasus, 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. But then the communists reconsolidated control and essentially ruled as the post-Tsarist Empire.
The British left, and the Caucasus went back to being aligned with Moscow. Something similar but less extreme seems to be happening now. Putin is in a very strong position, but I believe it's only for the short or 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. Since when you talk about other geopolitical and security issues that you just described, we talk about the Western world, you know, the developed countries, and then we talk about the great countries, you know. Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
But recently since people are talking about the main countries, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Kenya, and I was waiting to see... if you project into the future, let's say a few years from now, how those countries are also going to impact the security of the world? Yes, so many acronyms to remember.
And I think the BRIC 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.
Brazil, you know, Brazil is essentially, you know, it's far from markets, you know, it's not as geopolitically central as China, it's not well institutionalized, it has it has a lot of natural resources. But most of its population, or much of it, I should say, is in Sao Paulo, Rio, which is more or less demographically and economically part of the greater southern cone, so to speak, and is divided from other parts of the country by the Amazon. Turkey has great possibilities. It is...
economically reasserting Turkey and Europe inside the Balkans. It's trying to exert soft political sway throughout the Arab world. It has enormous water resources.
It's having tremendous governmental, 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 it turkey is still essentially stable on and arm Indonesia is an archipelago is why does the continental United States has weak institutions it's really not well governed and nobody you know when people are hard pressed to predict the future after President you do I own oh but also you can include Vietnam in that list because it's got a pop, 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 you will have is a series of middle-level powers, that each will be different than the other.
Each will, some will... fair 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 its problems does not have the structural economic problems of China or Europe. China and 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. That includes the countries you named, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, India for certain.
But each of these countries are going to experience significant social unrest as they climb the economic food chain and they develop real upper middle classes that demand more and better governance from within. And we've seen that in Brazil recently. A few years back, your friend 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 now? George and I work together because we argue all the time. No, seriously, we have very spirited arguments.
We disagree on many things, even though we share a geographic focus as a geographic geopolitical starting point. I don't think it matters if Mexico overtakes California and 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 would 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. They're governed by this criminal cartel or that criminal cartel.
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 the demographic forces that George Friedman mentions will come to the fore. but if Mexico is unable to, is unable to, you know, to essentially reclaim these criminalized areas especially in the north, then Mexico will still remain somewhat weak because California and Texas may have their political problems, debt and all of that, but they're a far, far, higher level of bureaucracy and institute of modern bureaucracy and institutions than Mexico is I'll tell you something, whenever I come back to the US from East Asia and I fly to Asia often, I feel like I'm entering the third world in the US because Asian infrastructure, It's airports, it's seaports, it's hotels, increasingly it's cities.
The Asians make tremendous investments in infrastructure, especially in transport. And I see our crumbling airports. in 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 birth rate, 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. The South Koreans have a similar age. aging grain population.
So 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. Moving into the next decade, how do you see North Korea expanding social networking and its inability to keep its people in the dark?
Well, it's interesting. North Korea is not just a communist state, it's a national fascist state. It's very similar to Romania, how Romania was in the 1980s. that the North Koreans rant about the U.S., but in fact they fear China more because China has real influence inside North Korea, and they hate the Japanese very much.
It's hard to see a bright future for such a totally sealed, hermetic regime in an information age. I think that... One thing we all have to kind of, you know, it's a low probability, but it would have enormous consequences if there were to be a collapse of the North Korean regime.
Because North Korea is a state where two-thirds of the country are semi-starving, where it has a nuclear capability. A sudden collapse of North Korea. would entail an operation conducted by the US military, the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and the South Korean military, who would all have to work in harmony together.
This is hard to figure out very much. North Korea is really the big question mark in East Asia, because of 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 would never unite, that they would stay separate and apart, 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 have to be prepared for a sudden implosion or shift in North Korea and finally 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.
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.