By Rich Lowry
Friday, January 10, 2025
In business, Donald Trump was a real-estate guy. In the
presidency, he might be one, too.
The prospective foreign policy of his second term has
taken an unexpected turn, with his recent talk of annexing Canada, buying
Greenland, and taking back the Panama Canal. Rather than the neo-isolationist
that he’s often accused of being, Trump is talking like a neo-imperialist, at
least in our own hemisphere.
Even if President Trump does none of these things — he’s
largely joking about the Great White North — his musings are a reminder of the
crucial importance of geography and the control of territory.
The first thing you need to do to understand the world
and, to a large extent, the behavior of nations is to look at a map.
“Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign
policy of states because it is the most permanent,” the 20th-century strategist
Nicholas Spykman observed. “Ministers come and go, even dictators die, but
mountain ranges stand unperturbed.”
The world was never “flat,” according to the formulation
of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, which became the
catchphrase of complacent globalism.
No, the world is full of mountains and steppes; rivers
and coastlines; temperate, tropical, and dry zones. Some nations, by virtue of
their location, are secure, others vulnerable; some naturally rich, others
resource-starved.
The first thing you need to know about Britain, for
instance, is that it is an island, “this precious stone set in the silver sea,”
as Shakespeare had it. This basic, ineluctable fact has crucially shaped
Britain’s strategic orientation and its national character. It is why it became
a naval power committed to global trade, and why it considered far-flung places
— courtesy of the waves — relatively nearby.
The English Channel has been an indispensable buffer
between it and continental Europe. There’s a reason Nazi Germany invaded
Poland, France, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands,
Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Italy — but not Britain.
As for Germany, Robert Kaplan writes in his illuminating
book, The Revenge of Geography, it “faces both east and west with no
mountain ranges to protect it, providing it with pathologies from militarism to
nascent pacifism, so as to cope with it its dangerous location.”
The United States is uniquely blessed by its geography.
It is of immeasurable importance that we are both a continental and island
nation, combining the massive resources that come with the former with the
protection from hostile European and Asian powers that comes with the latter.
We have abundant natural resources, ample coastlines, a massive river system,
and a disproportionate share of the world’s best soil, among other advantages.
That we ended up stretching from sea to shining sea
wasn’t an accident. Our forefathers supported continental expansion as a matter
of geopolitics, whether it was the Louisiana Purchase or the Mexican–American
War. They believed that it would make us stronger and more secure, and although
their methods weren’t always admirable, they were correct.
Control of territory matters, sometimes even relatively
small pieces of territory. Consider Hawaii. It is of enormous consequence that
the island archipelago sits in the middle of the Pacific athwart key sea lanes.
Other powers circled it in the 19th century, while the great naval strategist
Alfred Thayer Mahan urged us to acquire it. We all know the role of Pearl
Harbor in World War II, and as the “Crossroads of the Pacific,” Hawaii remains
a major economic and military asset.
As for Greenland, the idea of buying it from Denmark is
no more ridiculous than any other land purchase we’ve ever made, including of
the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1917 . . . from Denmark.
Greenland has attracted the interest of such estimable
American statesmen as Harry Truman and William H. Seward. Given its strategic
location in the Arctic Circle and its wealth of mineral deposits, it’s an
alluring proposition.
Geography isn’t everything, but often when it comes to
geopolitics, there’s no substitute for cold, hard real estate.
No comments:
Post a Comment