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Here Be Dragons: Robert Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography Will Quinn Kaplan, Robert D. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. New York, NY: Random House, 2013.
Between the Islamic State's efforts to erase the borders established by the World War I Sykes-Picot agreement, Russia's annexation and aggression in Crimea and Ukraine, and China's expansive claims in the South China Sea, it has been a poor year for both political cartographers and those who suffer what they must.
Such times were made for journalist Robert D. Kaplan, whose occasionally thought-provoking, but ultimately ponderous and equivocal The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House, 2012) serves as a summation of the cultural and resource-driven tensions he has explored throughout his peripatetic career in books such as Balkan Ghosts (St. Martin's, 1993), The Coming Anarchy (Random House, 2002), and Asia's Cauldron (Random House, 2014).
A self-proclaimed realist, Kaplan's book serves as a pointed rebuttal of what he sees as the tendency of global elites to casually dismiss the influence of physical boundaries and proclaim New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's "flat world" as they flit between the Four Seasons' Grill Room in New York City and the World Economic Forum at Davos. Kaplan argues that geography "could have served us well in anticipating the violence in both the Balkans, the Cold War, and in Iraq," a mea culpa from a man who was a prominent supporter of the invasion in 2003.1 We need, he avers, "a modest acceptance of fate, secured in the facts of geography, in order to curb excessive zeal in foreign policy."2
Kaplan, a proponent of the Grand Tour in intellectual...