Geopolitics and the New World Order
Geography increasingly fuels endless chaos and old-school conflicts in the 21st Century.
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This isn’t what the 21st century was supposed to look like. The
visceral reaction of many pundits, academics and Obama Administration
officials to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s virtual annexation of
Crimea has been disbelief bordering on disorientation. As Secretary of
State John Kerry said, “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st
century.” Well, the “19th century,” as Kerry calls it, lives on and
always will. Forget about the world being flat. Forget technology as the
great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law. Territory
and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us
human.Geography hasn’t gone away. The global elite—leading academics, intellectuals, foreign policy analysts, foundation heads and corporate power brokers, as well as many Western leaders—may largely have forgotten about it. But what we’re witnessing now is geography’s revenge: in the East-West struggle for control of the buffer state of Ukraine, in the post–Arab Spring fracturing of artificial Middle Eastern states into ethnic and sectarian fiefs and in the unprecedented arms race being undertaken by East Asian states as they dispute potentially resource-rich waters. Technology hasn’t negated geography; it has only made it more precious and claustrophobic.
This appears in the March 31, 2014 issue of TIME.
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