THE POWER OF GEOGRAPHY

The author of Prisoners of Geography(2015) follows up with an elucidating survey of 10 regions whose demographics, economics, and politics will affect the future of the planet.

Geography is not necessarily fate, but it is more important, insists Marshall, than individual politicians. Consider Australia, he writes in the first chapter: It sits 5,000 miles from Africa, more than 7,000 miles from South America, and more than 2,500 miles from its supposed neighbor, New Zealand. The isolation of the island continent once allowed it to maintain a small White settler population and conduct genocidal wars on Indigenes largely unseen. Today, connected by air and sea routes and communication lines, it is “a territorially huge, Western-oriented, advanced democracy” that sits next door to China, “the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship.” This makes Australia a bulwark. What of Iran? Will it ever become a world power, as it was in the days of Darius and Xerxes? Hemmed in by mountains, “Iran’s main centers of population are widely dispersed and, until recently, poorly connected. Even now, only half of the country’s roads are paved.” This dispersal favors ethnic and cultural diversity, and Iran’s overwhelmingly young population is beginning to resist a fundamentalist ideology “more in tune with the sixteenth century than the twenty-first.” Regional rival Saudi Arabia contains vast resources of oil, a commodity that is increasingly less important than before, so much so that much of the vast sandy peninsula remains unexplored. The U.K. is another region that, Marshall projects, will become less important in world affairs as the U.S. looks to the Pacific rather than Europe. The author also considers the secondary effects of the movement for Scottish independence and, of course, China, with designs everywhere around the world, especially in a developing Sahel—and, significantly, in space, where it is vying with Russia to be the first to build lunar bases.

Geopolitics wonks will find Marshall’s prognostications to be reasonable, believable, and capably rendered.