NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this "ambitious and challenging" (The New York Review of Books)
work the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through
which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries
around the world. In The Revenge of Geography Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights
discoveries and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and
distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the
evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their
climates topographies and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe's pitiless
climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction for example while
Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely calculating that space on the globe used by
the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland.
Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe Russia China the
Indian subcontinent Turkey Iran and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic
interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably the future can be
understood in the context of temperature land allotment and other physical certainties: China
able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable has sought
energy minerals and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma Iran and Zimbabwe putting it
in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan's porous borders will keep it the
principal invasion route into India and a vital rear base for Pakistan India's main enemy.
Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing
areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally Kaplan posits that the United States
might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its
direct neighbor Mexico which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel
carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography
this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this
century's looming cataclysms.
