Free The Revenge of Geography by Robert D. Kaplan Page A

clear is that as the Cold War fades from memory, both Turkey and Iran will have their geographies further unleashed in order to play intensified roles in the Arab Middle East. Turkey is no longer yoked so strongly to NATO, even as NATO is a weak reed of its former self. And with the end of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq—itself a vestige of Cold War, Soviet-style police states—Iran is enmeshed in the politics of the Arab world as never before. It is all quite subtle: Turkey works in concert with Iran even as it balances against it. At the same time, Iraq emerges as a predominantly Shiite alternative to Iran, however weak Iraq may be at the moment. Assisting Turkey and Iran has been the revolution in global communications that, at least in their cases, allows people to rise above ethnicity and truly embrace religion as an identity group. Thus, Turks, Iranians, and Arabs are all Muslims, and all are united against Israel and to some extent against the West. And so with the enhanced geographical factors of Turkey and Iran affecting the Arab world, the vast quadrilateral of the Middle East is more organically interconnected than ever before.
    Unlike the cases of Turkey and Iran, the Arab countries that lie between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau had little meaning before the twentieth century. Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq were but geographical expressions. Jordan wasn’t thought of. When we remove the official lines on the map, we find a crude finger painting of Sunni and Shiite population clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the central governing authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely operate. The one in Syria is tyrannical but under intense siege from its own masses (and may not last to the time this book is published); the one in Jordan is an absolute monarchy but probably only has a future as a constitutional one. (Jordan’s main reason for existing always goes unstated: it acts as a buffer state for other Arab regimes who fear having a land border with Israel.) When U.S. president George W. Bush toppled the Iraqi dictatorship, it was thought at the time that he had set history in motion in the Arabworld, roiling it to a greater degree than any Western figure since Napoleon. But then came the democratic rebellions of the Arab Spring, which had their own internal causes unrelated to what Bush had done. In any case, the post-Ottoman state system that came about in the aftermath of World War I is under greater stress than ever before. Western-style democracy may not exactly follow, but some form of liberalization eventually must, helped by the revolution in Egypt, and by the transition away from Cold War–era Arab police states, which will make the transition in Central Europe and the Balkans away from communism seem effortless by comparison. Indeed, the Levant is currently characterized by collapsing authoritarian regimes and democracies here and there that are unable to get anything done. The aggressive energy that characterizes the leaderships of Turkey and Iran, partly a product of their geographies, has for decades been almost nowhere apparent in the Arab world—another reason why the Arab world has now entered a period of epochal political transition.
    Truly, the 2011 Arab uprisings that swept away several regimes were about the power of communications technology and the defeat of geography. But as time passes, the geographies of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and other countries will reassert themselves. Tunisia and Egypt are age-old clusters of civilizations, whose statehoods originate in antiquity, whereas Libya and Yemen, for example, are but vague geographies, whose statehoods were not established until the twentieth century. Western Libya around Tripoli (Tripolitania) was always oriented toward the rich and urbane civilizations of Carthage in Tunisia, whereas eastern Libya around Benghazi (Cyrenaica) was always oriented toward those of Alexandria in