The Revenge of Geography

What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

By: Robert D. Kaplan

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

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 twenty-three percent of its people from land that is only seven 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.

©2012 Robert D. Kaplan (P)2012 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A solid work of acuity and breadth." ( Kirkus)

Thought provoking

The book lays a good foundation to consider world events. It is refreshing not to have a partisan or political spin.

Flat reading

The reading of this book was so flat and dull that made a wonderful book sound boring.

Good book

Starts slow, builds on ideas midway through the end. The last chapter seems very relavent to today's issues.

Eye Opener

This audiobook does a good job of looking at regional issues and logically attempts to explain what to look out for and how it could impact the region and the rest of the world.

Amazingly current with a strong argument for geographical forces at work today.

This was a fascinating review of the geographical forces that juxtaposed against political forces, and the interplay between them.