The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

Robert Kaplan’s intriguing and thought provoking book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, is a densely packed book filled with ideas about how geography shapes and molds human behavior on a meta-level, even while human beings shape geography through their own agency.

This thesis may seem paradoxical, but really it is just advanced common sense.  Nations are subject to both the limitations and benefits of a particular location.  The United States benefited from excellent harbors on its eastern seaboard, which provided the jumping off point for westward expansion.   The real lack of any other national group to stop American expansion led to a relatively stable, democratic form of government over a large swatch of territory.

Russia, on the other hand, has a large swatch of territory with no natural boundaries and is surrounded by nations and peoples who have, at various times, invaded them.  Russian forms of government and expansion has been more autocratic as a result, and we see the results of this as of this writing (in Ukraine).

Kaplan’s book is dense but well written.  If you want to change how you look at the world and how it shapes and its shaped by people, there is no better book.