venerdì 21 settembre 2012
La geopolitica contemporanea secondo Robert D. Kaplan
Robert D. Kaplan: The Revenge of
Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle
Against Fate, Random House
Risvolto
In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts,
offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals
and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around
the world.
In The Revenge of Geography, 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 23 percent of its people from land that is only
7 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.
Lodovico Festa - il Giornale Ven, 21/09/2012 -
Iscriviti a:
Commenti sul post (Atom)
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento