Isegoria

Great Britain was better suited to leverage deepwater navigation than Iberia, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), but it was not the ultimate European geography for industrialization:

By 1850, it was Germany’s time to rise.

Berlin is perhaps the best-located city on the planet from a purely economic point of view. It sits at the junction of the Spree and Havel Rivers, both navigable tributaries of the Elbe. Berlin is only sixty miles from the Oder, and the Havel reaches so far to the east as to almost connect the two river basins. This grants Berlin access to one of the world’s very few maritime systems that taps into more than one river.

And those are just the rivers immediately proximate to Berlin. Close to the west is the Rhine, Northern Europe’s financial-industrial powerhouse, navigable all the way south to the Swiss city of Basel, and possessing tributaries and distributaries that spiderweb through German, French, and Dutch lands. Close to the east is the Vistula—the last major navigable river before the Eurasian Hordelands. Close to the south is the Danube—the longest river in Europe as a whole, one of the very few that flows southward, and the only one mighty enough to punch through the Alps and Carpathians. Any economic hub centered at Berlin is uniquely situated to reach almost anywhere in Europe where wealth can be created. Berlin’s waterways dictate that Germany emerge as the heart of a massive empire with economic links to the North, Baltic, and Black Seas, so long as Berlin is left to develop.

But Germany has almost never been left to develop.

Germany’s location saddles it with three critical weaknesses that make it an insecure — and often poor — country, despite what ostensibly seems like the geography that most peoples could only dream of.

First, Germans don’t live at the western end of the continent like the Spanish or on an island like the English; they are in the very middle of the North European Plain. While Germany’s wealth potential is massive, German lands are inherently vulnerable. To the east is a nigh indefensible border with Poland, whose own eastern border is even less defensible. Germany’s western border is similarly difficult: Opposite it is France, typically the most consolidated European power. Balkan upstarts often seethe on the other side of the Vienna Gap, while maritime powers can easily harass — and at times even hold portions of — the region’s lengthy coastline.

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Second, this man-in-the-middle position means that Germany has almost never been united. German rivers lead in different directions to different seas, making different cities look to different horizons for their economic well-being. The middle of Germany — the Harz Mountains region — is akin to having Appalachia between Boston and New York. The presence of not one but six major powers in immediate proximity long denied Berlin easy control not just of its borderlands, but large tracts of its interior as well, including most of the Rhine and Oder river systems. Unlike the English, who established a centralized government in the Thames valley as early as the tenth century, the initial German proto-state of Brandenburg didn’t start stabilizing as a country in its own right until the fifteenth century.

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The Germans lacked independent access to the ocean. Germany didn’t control even one of its major rivers’ delta cities until 1720, when it finally seized Stettin on the Oder from the Swedish Empire. Even then German ocean access was sharply circumscribed. The Danish island of Zealand is positioned perfectly to regulate traffic between the Baltic and North Seas. Germans only got their first full access to the ocean in 1871, when Berlin finally proved able to fold Hamburg, on the Elbe delta, into the German Empire.

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For the Germans industrialization changed everything.

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The endless quantities of cheap, high-quality goods decimated the Germans’ painstakingly fostered cottage and guild industries. Economic depression triggered the revolutions of 1848. Prussia only held together because of its national planning mechanisms and the strength of its military class, which derailed the revolutions and ejected vast droves of dissatisfied citizens.

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First, industrialization happened everywhere. Elsewhere in Europe, the various industrial revolutions launched from the respective capital cities. Money accrued in the capital and was spent from the capital, so road and rail networks radiated from it too, metabolizing whatever resources lay beyond in a system of diminishing returns. But the Germans, down to the most remote provincial city, were uniquely skilled in economic management and had already constructed the base road infrastructure that industrialization required to take root. Each and every one of the German cities was fertile ground for the seeds of industrialization.

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Second, industrialization happened much faster. Fractured fifteenth-century Brandenburg with no coastline or major port city was a very capital-poor country. Money had to be husbanded with ruthless efficiency. Imperial Germany of the 1870s, by contrast, controlled the bulk of Central Europe’s river networks and was awash in war booty from its recent string of military victories against Denmark, Austria, and France. Germany’s hypercompetent governments included industrialists on their cabinets, and the public-private pairing ensured that adequate funding reached each and every project that needed investment.

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The industrialization of England took nearly 150 years. The industrialization of Germany was carried out in less than forty.

Third, German industrialization had massive military applications. Most European countries’ military application of industrial technologies focused on quantity: more guns, more uniforms, more transports. Only Germany truly embraced the fundamental newness of industrial technologies to remake how it waged war. This would have been impossible had Germany not entered the industrial age with the highest level of literacy in the world, largely due to its ongoing need to maintain a qualitative edge over its quantitatively superior competitors. The most important manifestation of this superior education system was the innovation of the General Staff, a sort of military middle management designed to disseminate information up and down the chain of command. A military commission required a college degree. Fusing the expertise of local governments with academia, industry, and finance, the General Staff achieved two things: It encouraged the development of ever larger cannons that the military thinkers redesigned their strategies around, and it pioneered new logistical methods to take advantage of the German rail system.

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After three generations of fine-tuning, the world came to know the gentle German mix of technology, logistics, and force as blitzkrieg.

Finally, industrialization unified the Germans as a country and as a people to a degree unheard of elsewhere, before or since. All governments got a boost from industrialization. Industrialization brought per capita increases in wealth, health, and living standards so unprecedented that you have to go back to the domestication of animals to find a point in human history where the general populace experienced so rapid and sustained a period of improvement. With rising wealth came rising government legitimacy. For the birthplace of industrialization, England, this was merely garnish; the English were already rich from the benefits of deepwater navigation and a globe-spanning empire. In Germany, however, the legitimacy gain wasn’t so much radically different, but exponentially faster and larger.

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In a single generation, industrialization took them from being some of the North European Plain’s poorest people to some of its richest, and enabled them to impose decisive defeats in four significant conflicts with powers that had preyed upon them for centuries (Poland, Denmark, Austria, and France).

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Germanic cities that had been unassociated since the death of Charlemagne connected their rail networks together to discover a peer relationship, far different from when a sleepy country town became connected to mighty London. The effect, economically and culturally, was electric, and considering the era, that term is used both figuratively and literally. This was not simply a culture that had finally unified, this was a culture that was ecstatic with its identity and its government in a way that few other cultures have ever approached.

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It was the first country in the world to have the majority of its population urbanized — a critical development to both foster and take advantage of skilled labor in the industrial era — and by 1900 its many regional centers had grown to the point that Germany had more major industrialized cities than the rest of Europe combined. It was the first country to develop mass universities and research labs, and then to link the two directly into local governments and corporations, giving German industry the ability to source everything from loans to staff to scientific research, and giving rise to the national economic champions model of corporate organization that pervades Europe even today. And the Germans methodically and assiduously applied every new breakthrough, whether scientific or industrial, to every aspect of their national strategy, culminating in everything from engines so efficient and small that they could propel individual vehicles (via Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, and Emil Jellinek, whose daughter was the original Mercedes) and modern pharmaceuticals (Gregor Mendel, Robert Koch, Friedrich Bayer, and Paul Ehrlich), to cannons (Alfred Krupp) and blitzkrieg.

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Simply put, neither deepwater navigation nor industrialization was done diffusing. England could make better use of deepwater navigation than Iberia, and Germany could make better use of industrialization than England, but there was another geography that could make better use of both.

The Nile provided two things nearly unique on earth, Peter Zeihan explains in The Accidental Superpower:

The first was perfect agricultural inputs like reliable water and high-fertility soil. It wasn’t scant desert rainfall that gave rise to the mighty Nile, but instead the seasonal torrents from the Ethiopian highlands and overflow from the African Great Lakes. The seasonal floods washed down soil of fertility far higher than what could be obtained outside the river valley. The Nile was flush with water supplies every year in a cycle so reliable that true droughts were quite literally biblical events.

Perhaps more important was the second factor: The lower Nile was safe. One could stand on the ridges above the Nile floodplain at any point within a thousand miles of the sea, look east or west, and be met with the exact same view: an endless desert waste. With the technology of transport largely limited to what you could carry yourself, it was simply impossible for any hostile force to cross the desert.

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Copper sounds like a small thing, but once humans figured out how to smelt and cast it, they replaced their wood and stone implements with metal, generating staggering improvements in the productivity of each worker — and each farmer.

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By 3150 BC, a single government dominated all of the useful Nile territories between the Mediterranean coast and what is today the city of Aswan.

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Local deserts insulated both Mesopotamia and the Indus from multiple directions, but not all directions. Their geographies were secure enough to spawn civilizations, but outside forces were still able to reach them, and so they never had the time to consolidate as Egypt did.

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To the west, it is six hundred miles from the western edge of the Nile delta to where rain falls regularly enough to support a non-nomadic population (contemporary Benghazi, Libya).

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The Sinai Peninsula is just as inhospitable as the Bible suggests, and the three hundred miles between the delta and the Jordan River valley have proven to be a formidable barrier right up to (and even into) contemporary times.

A southerly approach seems better, and indeed following the Nile is certainly a less painful affair than trudging through desert. But as one moves upriver south, the Nile valley narrows — to a steep canyon in places, complete with the occasional rapids (locally known as cataracts) — and it is a long, winding nine-hundred-mile route before you reach a geography and climate that can support a meaningful population (contemporary Khartoum, Sudan). Establishing multiple defensive positions along this route is quite easy.

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Every patch of land within sight of the river is under cultivation, generating the most consistent food surpluses of any land throughout the history of not just the ancient world, but also the classical, medieval, and even early industrial worlds. This food surplus created the world’s densest population footprint for most of human history (the only exception being contemporary Bangladesh).

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Second, by ancient standards the interior of Egypt was remarkably easy to get around in. From Aswan downriver, the valley is flat, in the dry season turning the river into a very slow-moving lake. The lack of elevation change results in a hazy, lazy downriver ride, while Egypt’s prevailing north-to-south winds allow for fairly reliable upriver sailing. The Nile could support riverine traffic in a way that the Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus — cursed with faster currents, less reliable seasonal flows and winds, and omnipresent sandbars — never could.

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For the first millennia and a half of Egyptian history, outsiders simply could not penetrate into the Egyptian core. Yet within the Nile valley, the Egyptian government had very little trouble moving manpower, resources, the tools of governance, and even giant blocks of stone around within its riverine-based system.

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The pharaoh could — and often did — take a boat cruise down the river and visually inspect nearly all of his kingdom without setting foot on land. The current and accurate assessments enabled by such easy travel helped governmental policy to match and respond to reality — a concept that might not seem a major deal in a world of smart phones, but was revolutionary in the world before paper. Tax collection could reach every part of the valley, and such activity ensured that the government maintained a firm grip on every aspect of society. Food stores could be distributed quickly and easily to mitigate local famine; the population crashes and rebellions that plagued cultures well into the modern era were far less common in Egypt. Revolts could be quelled quickly because troops could be summoned with speed; fast military transport enabled the government to nip problems in the bud.

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A grand canal dug from a western braid of the Nile allowed for the regulated flooding of the Faiyum Depression, bringing another five hundred square miles into Egypt’s green zone, but that is the only significant expansion of Egypt’s agricultural lands until the twentieth century, and even that expansion was only about twenty miles west of the riverbed itself.

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As the Nile flows through the desert, Egypt — ancient or otherwise — lacks trees. What few were available for boat construction were largely reserved for ego projects ranging from royal barges to monument construction.

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The sheer isolation limited Egyptian knowledge of the world. It was so thin its leaders were shocked when confronted with the fact that some rivers flowed south.

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Every place that was within sight of the Nile was also a food-producing region, so there was never a pressing need to develop a nationwide food distribution system — that made the maritime transport system specifically, and transport in general, the province of the state. The military and the bureaucracy could move about (and did), but the common man could not (and did not), firmly entrenching the concept of central control.

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Theirs was a geography destined not just to generate slavery, but slavery of the masses.

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Developments in agriculture, transport, and education ended with unification. Instead of generating higher and higher food surpluses, or attempting either to advance their civilization or to expand it past the confines of the Nile, the Egyptians dedicated all spare labor to monument construction.

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New technologies developed to deal with problems that Egypt was blissfully unaffected by. Writing led to literacy. Copper led to bronze. Spears led to swords. Domesticated animals led to chariots. All of these technologies that most people associate with ancient Egypt were not actually developed there, because in Egypt there was no pressure for development past their original technologies of irrigated agriculture, basic engineering, small boats, and hieroglyphics. Even the word “pharaoh” was an import.

In time two of these “new” technologies — the domesticated camel and a sailing ship that could transport meaningful volumes of cargo — proved Egypt’s undoing. Outsiders could use these techs to breach Egypt’s desert buffers, and when they did they discovered the civilization that all had assumed was mighty and impregnable was in reality languid and backward. They also discovered that Egypt’s slave-heavy population lacked motivation to fight for their country.

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Instead of being the greatest of the civilizations, Egypt became an easily conquerable breadbasket for anyone seeking to rule the Mediterranean basin. Once the Nile was secured, the conquering power could redirect the population from pyramid building to food production. The excess food output could be diverted out of the Nile region to fuel the conquering power’s bid for Mediterranean control.

The Egyptians first lost their independence in 1620 BC to the Hyksos (commonly known in the West as natives of Canaan), and then were independent only intermittently until the Roman conquest in the first century BC.

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And after the Roman conquest, they were not independent for a single day until the collapse of the European colonial era after World War II.

In The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan explains how place matters:

The first I call the balance of transport. Successful countries find it easy to move people and goods within their territories: Egypt has the Nile, France has the Seine and Loire, the Roman and Inca Empires had their roads. Such easy movement promotes internal trade and development. Trade encourages specialization and moves an economy up the value-added scale, increasing local incomes and generating capital that can be used for everything from building schools and institutions to operating a navy. Such constant interconnections are the most important factors for knitting a people into a nation. Such commonality of interests forms the bedrock of political and cultural unity. With a very, very few exceptions, every successful culture in human history has been based on a culture of robust internal economic interactions, and that almost invariably comes from easy transport.

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Countries also have to be able to protect themselves. Just as internal trade requires more than a little help from geography — well-rivered plains preferably — so too does defense. Successful countries also have borders that are easy to protect.

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It is this balance — easy transport within, difficult transport beyond — that is the magic ingredient for success.

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In all three cases — the balance of transport, deepwater navigation, and industrialization — the United States enjoys the physical geography most favorable to their application. Two facts stand out. First, since the root of American power is geographic and not the result of any particular plan or ideology, American power is incidental. Even accidental.

Second, the United States wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.

In The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan traces a lot back to Bretton Woods:

On July 1, 1944, 730 delegates from the forty-four Allied nations and their respective colonial outposts convened at the Mount Washington Hotel in the skiing village of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, with a mission to do nothing less than decide the fate of the postwar world.

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Many of the rooms lacked running, potable water; there wasn’t enough ice or Coca-Cola to go around; staffing was so thin that some nearby Boy Scouts had to be drafted; and the establishment’s manager locked himself in his office with a case of whiskey and refused to come out.

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But despite this inauspicious beginning, the delegates set to work on the agenda White and Keynes had laid out and over the next three weeks engaged in multilateral negotiations that were responsible for creating the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development: the institutions that helped knit devastated Europe back together and that hammered out the foundations of the free-trade-dominated global economic system that endures to this day.

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The attendees had arrived in Bretton Woods knowing that they had no real leverage to negotiate or bargain with the United States; they had mainly come to hear what White and the other Americans had to say. And what the Americans had to say shocked them all.

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Everything from Sicily to Saipan was in essence an American effort fought with American equipment and American fuel. Even in terms of manpower the fronts were largely American affairs, with American troops tending to outnumber all other combatants, Allied and Axis combined, by a two-to-one margin. Only grand affairs such as the Normandy landings featured the sort of multinational resolve the propaganda lauded.

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Until that point there really hadn’t been a “global system” in an economic sense. Instead, various European nations maintained separate trade networks stemming from their earlier imperial ventures, in which their colonies served as resource providers and captive markets while mother countries produced finished goods. What interempire trading that occurred was largely limited to goods, whether raw materials or specific manufactures, that could not be sourced within the respective “closed” systems. Most of this cross-empire trade flowed through enterprising peoples like the Dutch who excelled at brokering deals among imperial leaders. Protecting each empire’s trade were its national naval forces, and the use of navies to guard national commerce and raid the commerce of competitors was as old an industry as the use of sail and oar.

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Building a navy is one of the most expensive and time-consuming projects a nation can undertake in the best of times, and it wasn’t something that a country emerging from rubble and occupation could even consider.

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There was about to be only one navy.

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White and the American team didn’t let the others sweat it out for long, and they presented their two-part plan with all the kindness and amused patience that comes from a position of unassailable strength. The first part alone likely stunned the conference into baffled silence: The Americans had no intention of imposing a Pax. They didn’t plan to occupy key transshipment or distribution nodes. There would be no imperial tariff on incomes or trade or property. There would be no governors-general stationed in each of the Americans’ new imperial outposts. No clearinghouses. No customs restrictions. No quotas.

Instead, the Americans said that they would open their markets. Anyone who wanted to export goods into the United States could do so. The Americans acknowledged that devastated Europe was in no condition to compete with American industry, which hadn’t been touched by the scourge of war, so this market openness would be largely one-way. The Americans suggested ideas about a new global system to reduce tariffs, but that was to be negotiated separately and later.

As startling and unexpected as part one of the plan was, part two must have rolled the Europeans in particular back on their heels. The Americans offered to use their navy to protect all maritime trade, regardless of who was buying or selling the cargoes. Even trade that had nothing to do with the United States would be guaranteed by the overwhelming strength of the American navy. Far from proposing a Pax that would fill their coffers to overflowing with trade duties, levies, and tariffs, the Americans were instituting the opposite: a global trading system in which they would provide full security for all maritime trade at their own cost, full access to the largest consumer market in human history, and at most a limited and hedged expectation that participants might open their markets to American goods. They were promising to do nothing less than indirectly subsidize the economy of every country represented at the conference.

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While American aid helped get Western Europe back on its feet, it was American markets’ absorption of every bolt, table, and car that the Western Europeans could produce that proved to be the determining factor in resuscitating their fortunes. The American economy, never touched by the bombs that devastated Europe, was larger than any that the Europeans had ever had entry to, and the ability to access that market allowed the Europeans to export their way back to affluence.

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As the Cold War ended and entire swaths of the globe changed economic and political orientations, the price grew, and as years turned to decades, the system expanded ever outward, until nearly the entire world had acceded to this American-guaranteed network. In fact, the Bretton Woods agreements are the single most important factor behind the Japanese and Korean miracles, the European Economic Community and its successor the European Union, the rise of China… and the statistical monster that is the U.S. trade deficit.

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At Bretton Woods the United States produced about one-quarter of global GDP, about the same proportion as it does in 2014. At Bretton Woods the United States was responsible for nearly half of global defense outlays, about the same proportion as in 2014. At Bretton Woods the American military controlled half of global naval tonnage, about the same proportion as it does in 2014. At Bretton Woods the United States was the only country that for the past eighty years had exited every decade with an economy larger than when it had entered, a record of the modern age that the Americans have since extended to 150 years.

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In 2014, we’re not witnessing the beginning of the end of American power, but the end of its beginning.

The version of Peter Zeihan’s Accidental Superpower that I (metaphorically) picked up was subtitled Ten Years On:

The trends of de­globalization, de­population, and American disinterest that were once on the horizon are now embedded firmly in the here and now.

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There’s no way you kick out a 350-page book that is three-quarters forecast and you get it all dead-on. The biggest bitch is always timing. Inevitable is not a synonym for imminent.

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It is undeniable that China has not cracked (yet) and the European Union is still with us (for now).

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Two years after Accidental I published The Absent Superpower, a book that brought America’s shale revolution into focus both in terms of its transformation of the American industrial experience and its impact upon the broader global geopolitic. As part of Absent I predicted that the 2020s would serve as the backdrop of three major international wars. The first of these, the Ukraine War, is now in full swing. Two to go.

Peter Zeihan opens The Accidental Superpower with a story about his destiny:

I’ve always loved maps. My mom tells a story of how when I was five I unfolded a map of my home state of Iowa and started tracing roads away from my hometown, building up to the thickest, brightest line I could find and then connecting it to the next thickest, brightest line I could find until I had traced myself off the map’s edge. When I inquired what was on the other side of the Missouri River, my mom realized that I’d be leaving Iowa someday.

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Geopolitics is the study of how place impacts… everything: the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the size and serviceability of your mortgage, how long you live, how many children you have, the stability of your job, the shape and feel of your country’s political system, what sorts of war your country wages or defends itself against, and ultimately whether your culture will withstand the test of time. The balance of rivers, mountains, oceans, plains, deserts, and jungles massively influences everything about both the human condition and national success.

Of course, you shouldn’t treat geography as deterministic. The Nazis loved geopolitics, but instead of using the study of geography to shape their policies, they used it to justify their ideology. They were hardly alone. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europeans of all stripes used the subdiscipline of geographic determinism to assert their cultural and intellectual superiority over the rest of humanity. At one point, geographers as a whole realized that such concepts were, well, hugely racist and the study of political geography in most forms — particularly in the United States — was largely abandoned.

There is definitely a baby/bathwater issue here. There are good solid reasons as to why nearly every major expansionary power of the past has been based in a temperate climate zone, and why all those that have lasted have been riverine-based. This doesn’t make the people of these zones better or smarter. It simply means they have more and more sustainable resources, fewer barriers to economic development, and economic and military systems that allow for greater reach. The trick is to begin with geography and see where it takes you; don’t start with a theory and use geography to justify it.

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My personal ideology is green and internationalist and libertarian, which means I’m an idealistic pragmatist who falls asleep during long meetings. Aside from a few snarky footnotes that bravely survived the editorial gauntlet, my ideology is not represented in this book. I have solar panels on my house, but I see a global future in which coal reigns supreme. I’m an unflinching supporter of free trade and the Western alliance network, seeing the pair as ushering in the greatest peace and prosperity this world has ever known. Yet geography tells me both will be abandoned. I prefer small government, believing that an unobtrusive system generates the broadest and fastest spread of wealth and liberty. But demography tells me an ever larger slice of my income will be taken to fund a system that is ever less dynamic and accountable.

At Yale, Rob Henderson explains (in Troubled), he had some friends in the ROTC program who weren’t from the upper class, either:

When we were kids, chain restaurants like Applebee’s and Olive Garden were considered “fine dining.” That was where people with money went out to eat. Upon meeting real rich people, we realized none of them went to such restaurants, except as a novelty. I later suggested to Nick, Esteban, and some other students that we go to the Cheesecake Factory. One guy asked, “Are we going there ironically?” I flatly said no and ordered some Buffalo Blasts.

I realized that even dietary choices reflected class differences. Yale dining halls had soda fountains that nobody used, save for the one nozzle that dispensed water. The halls also offered “spa water,” which was water flavored with cucumbers or strawberries. I’d always associated that with rich people on TV. I mentally contrasted this with my high school, where I couldn’t go more than ten minutes without seeing someone carrying a Powerade or a Pepsi. There was a striking absence of obesity among the students — many of them seemed to be preoccupied with their weight and image. I learned a term I’d never heard before: fat shaming. It was remarkable that students who seldom consumed sugary drinks and often closely adhered to nutrition and fitness regimens were also attempting to create a taboo around discussions of obesity. The unspoken oath seemed to be, “I will carefully monitor my health and fitness, but will not broadcast the importance of what I am doing, because that is fat shaming.” The people who were most vocal about what they called “body positivity,” which seemed to be a tool to inhibit discussions about the health consequences of obesity, were often very physically fit.

The luxury belief class claims that the unhappiness associated with certain behaviors and choices primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviors and choices themselves. But, in fact, negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. In order to avoid misery, we have to admit that certain actions and choices are actually in and of themselves undesirable — single parenthood, obesity, substance abuse, crime, and so on — and not simply in need of normalization.

Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm, especially on those who had no hand in the decision — like young children.