Foreign Policy

The mainstream media’s “foreign affairs” coverage is obsessed with leaders and personality. That’s because those are easy stories to write.

“Crazy” Kim Jong-un killed his uncle. You don’t need to know much about East Asia to write that story. Donald Trump says mean things. Justin Trudeau says mean things about Donald Trump. Again, little perspective is needed to report on that.

In reality, those stories matter very little. That’s because leaders make decisions based on realities and interests created by geography, economics, military capability and demography.

Trudeau doesn’t like Trump. But when Trump used the leverage of Canada’s economic dependence on the U.S. to force Trudeau to re-negotiate NAFTA, Trudeau came to the negotiating table.

That’s because 20 percent of Canada's GDP comes from goods exports to the United States.

History tends to change leaders, not vice versa.

Freewill vs Determinism

Let’s be philosophical for a moment. How many of our choices are truly our own and how many are pre-determined for us? 

I think the balance is thus: free will exists within the framework and limits of the place you inhabit. A person living in the tropics is unlikely to be a great igloo maker.

This is not an absolute; individuals may somehow carve their way out of their matrix. But, they are the exceptions. The statistical long tail.

By definition, most people are average (between one standard deviation of mean). Half of people are below the mean.

That means most peoples’ lives are constrained by the place where they are born. The average German will have more and better life prospects than the average Nigerian.

Free will exists, but the menu from which we choose is determined, and, for most of us, there is no ordering outside of the menu.

Countries and leaders face the same constraints.

Geopolitical analysis takes into account a nation’s geography and the inescapable consequences of that geography. Leaders are usually trapped within those realities, and the leader’s decisions are shaped by those realities.

So how does geography define nations and what they seek?

Let’s consider:

• Terrain

• Resources

• Defensible borders

• Neighbors

• How geography shapes culture
  

Terrain

At its most basic level, terrain defines the parameters within which human life can exist. Communities need fresh water and arable land. At a more complex level terrain creates competitive advantage and disadvantage.

Consider the United States which has navigable rivers that flow north, south, east and west. As water transportation costs much less than overland transpiration, the US has a huge cost advantage compared with other major countries.

By contrast, Russia has vast resources and incredible mineral wealth. But look at the map.

Russia has rivers that primarily run north into the Arctic ocean, which makes them almost useless for navigation and means goods must be transported by expensive overland routes.

India and China may skirmish over their border in the Himalayas, but the high altitude, near impassable terrain and generally frosty conditions make a sustained war extremely difficult.

That’s because war would ultimately require ground troops to capture and hold territory. It takes nine to ten days to acclimatize to altitudes over 10,000 feet. Supply chain logistics and the ability to sustain troop levels are critical to sustain the fighting and maintain control over territory once the fighting ends.

Resources

Geography blesses or curses a country with resources. Resources determine economies.

For instance, if a nation has limited access to natural sources of energy, then a constant concern will be how the nation can get energy sources and what must be exchanged for that access. This is Japan’s constant conundrum.

No nation is truly totally self-sufficient. But the more resources you have, the less you consider conquest to get what you need.

Germany has few natural resources. Hitler’s Lebensraum — his plan to conquer the areas east of Germany — was primarily about securing Russian resources. It was also about ending German encirclement by the other great powers of Europe, which leads to …

Defensible Borders

Past conflict often determines what these are. Tribes or countries expand or fight until an impasse is reached because of some chokepoint like mountains or rivers or marshes.

For countries like Israel and Poland that have gone in and out of existence because they have easily penetrated borders, this must be their primary interest. For this reason, Israel is highly unlikely to ever give-up the Golan Heights in any peace deal.

Russia sits on the North European plain - the superhighway of invasion in Europe. From there, it has faced three major invasions from European powers (among other incursions) and was saved three times by strategic depth. That means Russia wants a large buffer zone between it and the major European powers. It greatly affects the kind of neighbor Russia will be for the countries like Poland and Hungary that are near its western borders.

Neighbors

Your neighbors greatly impact how you feel about the neighborhood and the kind of fence you build.

Canada and the United States have a sign at one of their borders that says, “Children of a Common Mother.”

They also have a trade relationship worth more than $700 billion a year. Even though Canada has just 0.5% of the world’s people, U.S. exports to Canada accounted for 18% of overall U.S. exports in 2018. This makes both countries richer.

If only India and Pakistan could find that “Children of a Common Mother.” spirit.

For their future, Japan and South Korea have every reason to work together; because of their past, they most likely won’t.

Geography Shapes Culture

A new study explains the big differences between cultures that grow wheat and culture that grow rice.

The reason? Cultivating rice is a lot harder. Rice seedlings require careful tending and many hours of labor—twice as much as wheat—as well as reliance on irrigation systems that require neighborly cooperation.

According to the authors, the influence of rice cultivation can help explain East Asia’s “strangely persistent interdependence.” A reason South Korea and Japan have remained less individualistic than Western countries, even as they’ve grown more wealthy. The author’s attribute that to being rice cultivators.

Canada’s cold climate and need to band together to survive harsh winters is part of what makes Canadians more amenable to socialism than their fair weather American neighbors.

Culture Not Based On Geography

In other words, history. History is a powerful constraint on leaders.

In 1215, the English lords challenging King John could have killed him. Instead they made him sign the Magna Carta, which from a monarch’s perspective, might have been worse than death.

Magna Carta constrained John and his successors. It created the rule of law. After Magna Carta the law was no longer only what the king said it was when he said it. Rule of law is now part of English DNA.

As that evolved, Britain became the best place in the world to do business. Contracts could be enforced in impartial courts and property rights were reasonably certain. This is a crucial part of how an island on the periphery of Europe with few resources was able to create a global empire.

One big problem with US foreign policy: many Americans don’t know their own history. Even the so-called “elite.”

They think it starts in 1776. They don’t know “taxation without representation” is as old as Magna Carta and was what the English Civil War fought one century before the American Revolution was about.

The British king was not the world’s most tyrannical monarch. In fact, he was the world’s most liberal. As a result, Americans often don’t understand that the foundations of democracy must be laid over time.

Too many American policy makers think there is a George Washington or Thomas Jefferson in every man waiting to get out. This is how the US gets into trouble in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where individual rights don’t trump communal rights, tribalism was crucial for survival in harsh climates, and voting is not an intuitive good to many locals.

History Creates National Expectations

Geopolitical analysis also relies on an understanding of a people’s basic needs as well as expectations about basic needs. Expectations about needs are largely created by a nation’s geography, its history, and the resulting culture.

China was the greatest country in the world for a millennia. Its people have been told they are the inventors of papermaking, gunpowder, printing and the compass — the foundation of the modern world. They believe China is rightfully a global leader. And other nations should bow to it.

This sense of entitlement is what China’s then Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi embodied when he said, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact.”

The point here is not to debate whether that’s a dumb way to say it. It’s to understand how national expectations can drive leaders.

Americans see their country as “the shining city upon a hill” or “a beacon of hope to the oppressed.”

As a result, American foreign policy sometimes takes on things that national interest might preclude.

Again, we don’t debate the wisdom of that here. We’ve touched on the consequences above. We simply point out that national expectations created by a nation’s geography, history, and the resulting culture matters to our analysis.

It also brings us full circle since national expectations seem like free will, but we see how they are rooted in determinism.

This are the factors that shape national realities and interests, and their product is what we will focus on here rather than the media’s cult of personality.