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. But this is nonsense. Elite
molders of public opinion may be able to dash across oceans and
continents in hours, allowing them t