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Updated September 7, 2012, 11:28 p.m. ET

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Geography Strikes Back
To understand today's global conflicts, forget economics and technology and take a hard look at a map, writes Robert D. Kaplan
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By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don't read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government's aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources. With upheaval in the Middle East and a tumultuous political transition in China, look to geography to make sense of it all.
As a way of explaining world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics, globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of imagination.

Want to understand the political insecurity of China's leaders or Iran's resilience in the face of Western sanctions? The best place to start is with a map, says
Robert D. Kaplan, discussing his
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