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Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Volume 1) (Politics of Place, Band 1) - Softcover

Buch 1 von 5: Politics of Place

Marshall, Tim

 
9781501121470: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Volume 1) (Politics of Place, Band 1)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1501121472 ISBN 13: 9781501121470
Verlag: Scribner, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In this New York Times bestseller, an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powers—“fans of geography, history, and politics (and maps) will be enthralled” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

Maps have a mysterious hold over us. Whether ancient, crumbling parchments or generated by Google, maps tell us things we want to know, not only about our current location or where we are going but about the world in general. And yet, when it comes to geo-politics, much of what we are told is generated by analysts and other experts who have neglected to refer to a map of the place in question.

All leaders of nations are constrained by geography. In “one of the best books about geopolitics” (The Evening Standard), now updated to include 2016 geopolitical developments, journalist Tim Marshall examines Russia, China, the US, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Greenland and the Arctic—their weather, seas, mountains, rivers, deserts, and borders—to provide a context often missing from our political reportage: how the physical characteristics of these countries affect their strengths and vulnerabilities and the decisions made by their leaders.

Offering “a fresh way of looking at maps” (The New York Times Book Review), Marshall explains the complex geo-political strategies that shape the globe. Why is Putin so obsessed with Crimea? Why was the US destined to become a global superpower? Why does China’s power base continue to expand? Why is Tibet destined to lose its autonomy? Why will Europe never be united? The answers are geographical. “In an ever more complex, chaotic, and interlinked world, Prisoners of Geography is a concise and useful primer on geopolitics” (Newsweek) and a critical guide to one of the major determining factors in world affairs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than thirty years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News and before that worked for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World; The Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations Are Changing Our World; and A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols. He is founder and editor of the current affairs site TheWhatandtheWhy.com.

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Chapter 1: Russia 1 RUSSIA Vast (adjective; vaster, vastest):
of very great area or extent; immense.
Russia is vast. It is vastest. Immense. It is 6 million square miles vast, eleven time zones vast; it is the largest country in the world.

Its forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppes, and mountains are all vast. This size has long seeped into our collective consciousness. Wherever we are, there is Russia, perhaps to our east or west, to our north or south—but there is the Russian Bear.

It is no coincidence that the bear is the symbol of this immense nation. There it sits, sometimes hibernating, sometimes growling, majestic but ferocious. The Russians themselves are wary of calling this animal by its name, fearful of conjuring up its darker side. They call it medved, “the one who likes honey.”

At least 120,000 of these medveds live in a country that bestrides Europe and Asia. To the west of the Ural Mountains is European Russia. To their east is Siberia, stretching all the way to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Even in the twenty-first century, to cross it by train takes six days. Russia’s leaders must gaze across these distances, and differences, and formulate policy accordingly; for several centuries now they have looked in all directions, but concentrated mostly westward.
A map of Russia and surrounding regions, showing political boundaries, major cities, and geographical features. Description 1
When writers seek to get to the heart of the Bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends, “but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, “I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.”

He could have been talking about the current Russian leadership, which, despite being wrapped in a now-threadbare cloak of democracy, is authoritarian by nature, imperial in action, and has nationalism at its core. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to subjugate its people and wipe the country from the map, laid bare the depravity of what, under Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, has become a gangster state.

When Putin isn’t thinking about God or mountains, he’s thinking about pizza. In particular, the shape of a slice of pizza—a wedge.

The thin end of this wedge is Poland. Here, the North European Plain, stretching from France to the Urals (which extend a thousand miles south to north, forming a natural boundary between Europe and Asia) is at its narrowest—only three hundred miles wide from the Baltic Sea down to the Carpathian Mountains.

For Russia this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a corridor through which Russia can be attacked, but also one into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus block an enemy from advancing toward Moscow. Eastward from Poland the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia it is more than two thousand miles wide and flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction, partially due to its dominating countries to its west and partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoléon made in 1812 and Hitler repeated in 1941.

Likewise, in the Russian Far East it is geography that protects Russia. It is difficult to move an army from Asia up into Asian Russia; there’s not much to attack except snow, and you could only get as far as the Urals. You would then end up holding a massive piece of territory, in difficult conditions, with long supply lines and the ever-present risk of a counterattack.

You might think that no major power is intent on marching into Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past five hundred years it has been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoléon in 1812, and the Germans twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. If you count from Napoléon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–56, up to 1945 the Russians were fighting in or around the North European Plain on average once every thirty-three years. Ukraine’s counterattack into Russia’s Kursk region in 2024 took place on this flat ground, although in this case the aim was simply to have a bargaining chip for eventual ceasefire talks.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian Empire. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by European and North American states for the defense of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the communist states of Europe—under Russian domination—formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defense and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight, by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust.

President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. Putin blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”

Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has moved steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not join: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; Albania in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; North Macedonia in 2020; and now, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden. NATO says no such assurances were given. It also points out that it did not permanently deploy forces in all new member states and even created the NATO-Russia Council, which allowed Russia to open an office with a staff of twenty in the alliance’s Brussels HQ. That closed in 2022 after eight Russian officials were expelled for spying.

Russia, like all great powers, is thinking in terms of the next hundred years and understands that anything could happen. A century ago, who could have guessed that American armed forces would be stationed a few hundred miles from Moscow in Poland and in the Baltic States? By 2004, just fifteen years from 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia and Albania was in NATO or the European Union (EU).

The Moscow administration’s mind has been concentrated by that, and by Russia’s history.

As a concept Russia dates to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus, based in Kyiv and other towns along the River Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols continually...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1501121472
ISBN 13 
9781501121470
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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