← History Uncensored
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- [00:01]
Bianca
They call it the conflict trap. Which factors make an outbreak of conflict or violence? Most likely geography, history and power have collided again and again.
- [00:11]
Tim Marshall
If you're going to draw these stupid lines on a map, these artificial lines which. That is a design which will more likely fail than succeed.
- [00:22]
Bianca
The map, though, is being redrawn. Not with pen, with concrete.
- [00:28]
Tim Marshall
I always try to get people to factor in geography when they're looking at current affairs. Without it, you're missing a big part of the picture.
- [00:36]
Bianca
There's also a third possibility which I find very intriguing. What's your take on that?
- [00:40]
Tim Marshall
I put it to you, members of the jury,
- [00:48]
Bianca
Are some wars inevitable? That question has haunted philosophers, generals and strategists for. For centuries. It haunts me too often when I'm on a jog or on one of my dark nights of the soul. But if you look at a map of the world's conflict zones, you'll see that violence often recurs along some of the same strategic fault lines. So is this a messy collision of politics and circumstance? Or is something older at work, something written into the landscape itself? Before any nation state existed, before any ideology was invented or any leader made a decision, some thinkers believed that war is not a breakdown in politics, but a permanent feature of politics. An enduring pattern, not an aberration. Thucydides, the ancient Greek father of political realism, showed how fear, ambition and self interest can drive states into conflict. His point was bleak, but it endures. That as long as power and insecurity shape relations between states, war will keep returning. Early Enlightenment thinker Thomas Hobbes pushed the logic even further in Leviathan. He argued that without a strong common power to keep order, human life tends towards violence. What he called a war of every man against every man. And Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general who joined the military at 12 and became one of the most influential theorists of war ever to live, famously argued that that war is just policy by other means. So it's not separate from politics at all. It's simply one of the ways that politics is carried out. But there have always been optimists who believe that the road to war could be interrupted. Immanuel Kant argued how republican government, trade and international law could make peace more durable. And later, liberals extended that hope that democracies would be less likely to fight one another, that economic interdependence would raise the cost of war for everyone, and that institutions could could restrain power before violence begins. Both views have evidence. Both also have failures. Written all over the last century, there is a third possibility. One which I find very intriguing, that some places are not doomed to war, but are vulnerable because of where they are, what surrounds them and what passes through them. Geography. That is what I'm going to be looking at today. And because the stakes are so high, hefty brains have been trying to discover which factors make an outbreak of conflict or violence most likely, and ideally, predict when that might happen. In fact, economists Paul Collier and Anke Heffler even made an equation to predict an outbreak of civil war. And it goes like this. Basically, this is the odds that war will begin in a country in a given time period. This is the baseline probability of it occurring. This means variables that change over time, like GDP per capita, population size, exports and economy. This is what's already happened, like growth in the past five years or prior conflict. This is slow changes, which might be ethnic fractures, geography, colonial history, natural resources. And this is everything outside of the model, like leadership crises, random shocks, human behaviour that scientists can't really predict. And they call it the conflict trap, because the single biggest predictor they determined of a new conflict in any country is whether that country had recently had one. So all the more important that we investigate places where geography, history and power have collided again and again. For this episode, I've chosen five flashpoints. There are many more, of course, and I will cover them as well in time to help investigate them. I'm going to be joined by British journalist and mapman supreme author of Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall. And to any podcast listeners you might want to bring up a map for this one. Our first danger point is Eastern Europe. Spot the mountain ranges, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians to the south far east, the Urals, at the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia. Now, if you look at Eastern Europe, they disappear from the western edge of Ukraine all the way to Moscow, around 2,000 kilometers. There's almost nothing. No mountain range, no significant natural barrier. Just the European plain. Flat, open and often historically indefensible. This is the corridor that has swallowed armies for centuries. Napoleon marched east across it in 1812 with around 600,000 men. Hitler sent 3 million soldiers across it in 1941. Both reached deep into Russian territory and both were eventually destroyed by the same landscape. The vastness of the winter, the supply lines that stretched until they didn't. Ukraine sits at the western end of that corridor. It's also critically the largest country entirely within Europe. Russia is Transcontinental, so that's 600,000 square kilometers of largely flat agricultural land now severely damaged by war. Its geography is Shaped by the Dnieper, one of Europe's great rivers, alongside other river routes and lowland corridors. But its natural defensive barriers are limited. For Russia, it's either a buffer or a threat. The sovereign nation has never, in Russian strategic thinking, been simply a neighbour. The Russian invasion that began in 2022 is the latest movement across this historic battlefield over to Tim. So the North European plain is essentially a flatland. There's almost no mountains or natural defenses there and for centuries there's been Russian forces marching across it to try and secure its borders. So looking at the history in that way, do you think that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is very predictable? When you look at the geography and the long history, yes.
- [06:59]
Tim Marshall
It's not just that particular bit of geography, but it plays a major role. I mean, you talk about the North European claiming flat. Yes, it is. Starts pretty much in France, then goes through into Eastern Europe. And the key bit of this is that it narrows then. So you've got the Baltic Sea at the top and the Carpathian Mountains, and in that gap is Poland. Once you're through Poland, it opens out again and it's flat again in front of St Petersburg and Moscow, and it's flat all the way to the Urals. Now, you said the Russians marched through it. They certainly did. But coming the other way, over the past 500 years, there's been army after army after army, and therefore, I mean, Napoleon most famously perhaps in 1812, and then the Germans twice in the last century. And consequently, even though, to my mind, it is blindingly obvious that NATO was no threat to Russia, had no intention of going through that gap, you can understand the psyche, the. The psyche of the Russians and the leadership in the Kremlin, looking back that way, because of the geography, because of the history that they say we must have a buffer zone and if we've lost it in Poland, we'll have it in Ukraine and Belarus, and if they're in danger of losing it in Ukraine, they will act. The other bit of the geography, though, is, is. Is the warm water port they had in. Well, they have in Crimea. They only had it on loan from Ukraine. They have to go through the ice pack, up through the Arctic to get to the ocean lanes. This is the only warm water port they have. And so you put those two things together. When Ukraine looks like they're going to do what every single other Eastern Europe country did more or less, and say thanks not for very much goodbye to the Russians, they acted in that sense. It was predictable.
- [08:53]
Bianca
Now, when Your territory is 6.6 million square miles. People who don't follow this really closely might be forgiven for thinking, well, why, why are you pushing westward? If you could answer that question. And obviously part of that is why are the key Russian cities predominantly concentrated in the west of the territory?
- [09:15]
Tim Marshall
When you get to the Urals, and I've actually been up there, there's a spot at the top of the Urals mountains where you can stand with one foot in Europe and one foot in Asia. You know, get a photograph taken. Once you're the, the other side, it's tundra, it's cold, it's not conducive for comfortable living, which is why the majority of the Russians live west of the, of the Urals. And the two great centers of, of of power are St. Petersburg and Moscow. And in front of them is this flat. So if you have again been invaded so many times from that direction, you want to put space between your two centers of gravity and anybody that might be a threat to you once you've crossed the border from Russia into Ukraine, that, that's pretty flat as well. And it's interesting and I think it's absolutely connected to the, well, peace negotiations, such as they are, is the little bit of land in the Donbass that the Russians haven't taken. They've taken most of the Donbass, but the bits they have not taken is the only bits of the Donbas with this some high ground. And these are the fortified cities. So if, as the Russians demand, the Ukrainians have to give up the land that they haven't yet lost and fall back, and then under those circumstances, the Russians say they will sign a ceasefire. The problem for the Ukrainians is once they've lost that high ground and the 45 cities, it's flat and open all the way to Kyiv. So it's a bit of a non starter for them. You know, this is why I always try to get people to factor in geography when they're looking at current affairs. You know, I'm not arguing it's the determining factor, but I think, as you know, without it, you're missing a big part of the picture.
- [11:11]
Bianca
And from a purely coldly logical and pragmatic perspective, if Russia was to secure that area of the Donbas that you just mentioned, do you think that there would be the impulse for them to continue going further westward? So it's precisely secure that.
- [11:30]
Tim Marshall
Sorry, Bianca, for precisely the reasons that we've discussed, I do. You know, I think it would be naive to think that they'll just say, oh, well, you know, we've got that we'll just stop now. I mean, if you just look at the sweep of Russian history, there is nothing in it that would suggest that they will stop at that. They will not stop until they either conquer the whole of Ukraine and occupy it, which is difficult and probably won't happen, or they would prefer to at least dominate it and have it pliable like it used to be before the, for the halfway through the 2000 and tens, I would say. So that's why the Ukrainians can't give in, because they believe if they do, it's a long suicide note, you know, that within two, three, five years, whatever it is, they'll just come back for the rest. So that's why that major part of the negotiations is a non starter.
- [12:30]
Bianca
You mentioned just now that you're not saying geography is the only factor or even necessarily the primary factor. And you've done a really important thing in injecting geography back into more of the front line of these political discussions. But when we talk about Russia and the west and Europe, it often centers around ideology, whether we're going back to the time of Peter the Great. And there's the tension between does Russia Westernize, does it hold fast to its Slavophile nature, to its Russian nature, and of course the Cold War ideological fault lines. From your perspective, do you think that it was more ideologically or geographically inevitable that we would be in this tension with Russia in the West?
- [13:18]
Tim Marshall
I don't think you can really separate them out. I mean, that's a really good question, but it's also an exceptionally difficult one because then, you know, you're into the realms of psychology and, and sort of the mass society thinking. But I, I would argue strongly that it, it is to an extent the geography which has shaped the history that has happened. And of course the history that has happened shapes how you think. And, and for the geography of what used to be called Kiev Rus, the proto Russia going Back to the 11th, 12th centuries, the area they were in was consistently invaded mostly by the Mongols and people coming down through that direction from the caucuses. And so what does that do to your psyche? It says, right, I'm going to do something about this. And so Russia began to expand, to create strategic depth around the center, to allow it then to grow. So I just don't think you can divorce one from the other. It's the same with the, you know, the gap, the narrow gap of the North European plain. That is what has shaped Russia's view of what it is required to do now. Yes, I, there is nationalism in it as well. There is this idea of Slavic superiority which Putin is on record as saying. He even thinks that Slavic souls are somehow superior to other human souls. So yeah, you know, there absolutely is that nationalism and that feeling that Russia must be great because it is a great power, because it's the third Rome after Roman and Constantinople, Byzantium fell. You know, they are the, in the inheritance inheritors of Christianity. But I just think that all of that is connected to the geography.
- [15:20]
Bianca
Before we move on to our next area, I've got to ask because you said something so interesting when you mentioned psychology and I remember when I read your book on the Balkans, my family's from the Balkans. This really came across to me. What are the ways that you think geography shapes the psychology of people in groups?
- [15:37]
Tim Marshall
We're an island nation. British. Again, you cannot prove this, but I would venture that being an island nation was a part of the Brexit vote because I think it, that there's this, this sense of difference and it is that water, that thin stretch of water that between you and the mass of the continent that in some people's minds creates that feeling of difference. And anyone who knows our history knows that that small stretch of water did help us not being invaded by the Spanish and the French and the Germans. It also protected us from the, some of the more extreme ideologies of the 20th century. And so I think when that, that, that is an example, though you can't prove it, of how geography makes you think that you're a. We're a seafaring nation. We always have been Japanese. I think there's quite a lot of similarities between the Japanese and the British also if you're Greek. I think this is actually a really good example if you're Greek and forgive me, I haven't got the exact stats, but it's, it's only something like 12% of the, of Greece you can actually grow crops in because there's so little flatland, it is so mountainous. And so that makes you live in areas close to the food growing areas. You've got very little place to go. You will look outwards to the sea. And the Greeks have always been this seafaring nation and they have one of the biggest navies in Europe because of that, the 6,000 islands, you know, so, you know, there's always this connection between the land and how you behave on the land. One more. I'll give you one more.
- [17:43]
Bianca
Sorry, please do.
- [17:45]
Tim Marshall
I'm just writing at the moment. A piece for a Sunday newspaper. And I'm making. It's actually to do with the Kurds. I'm making the case that mountainous peoples cling onto their identity and their culture and their language more deeply and longer than people who are not mountainous peoples. And that's because in mountains throughout history, it's been very difficult to connect. You know, if there's a town there and a town there, but there's no pass between them for them to trade, they're not going to start linking up. And I think it's the mountains that are why the Kurds have always clung onto this fierce sense of identity in the four countries that they live.
- [18:29]
Bianca
I. For what it's worth, Tim, I completely concur with all of this. And I recently did an episode on the history of the samurai. And their emergence is also attributed in large part to the mountainous nature of Japanese territory and the clan based structures. And having to look after yourself and what you mentioned, also about Britain, it makes me think of human myth that's so deeply embedded in our socialization, because like the. The waterway, it's a threshold, it is a crossing. And the notion of change once you move over that waterway is something that you see in human storytelling. So it makes sense that it would permeate our psychology as well. The Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian. A mountain fortress and land bridge where there are mountains running across its spine. With peaks of over 5000 meters cut by narrow valleys and only a handful of strategic passes. To the south, the Lesser Caucasus forms a second mountain barrier. Between them sits Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, compressed between larger powers. Russia to the north, Turkey to the west and Iran to the south. That geography has made the region notoriously hard to master. Mountains can protect, but they can also divide. Power here has rarely meant controlling everything. It's meant controlling the passes, the corridors, the routes through. For centuries, empires pushed into the Caucasus not because it was easy to rule, but because they couldn't ignore it. Modern conflict has followed a similar logic. Borders were drawn in a landscape where terrain, empire and population did not align neatly. In 1921, Soviet authorities placed Nagorno Karabakh, a majority Armenian region, inside Soviet Azerbaijan, embedding one of the most consequential fault lines in the region. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and later recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent, though most of the world still regards them as Georgian territory. And in September 2023, Azerbaijan reasserted control over Nagorno Karabakh. By October, more than 100,000 of its roughly 120,000 ethnic Armenians had fled. So the Caucasus is not just a place of difficult history. It's currently a place where mountain geography, imperial rivalry and inherited borders have repeatedly collided. Naturally, mountains do fragment communities and can entrench difference. And I think the Caucasus has around 50 different ethnicities. It does the size of territory that's around Spain. I think Spain's just a little bit bigger. How have the mountains specifically led to that ethnic and cultural patchwork? That.
- [21:27]
Tim Marshall
It's a really good comparison, isn't it? Because in Spain, you've got it bounded on one side by the Mediterranean, then you go across and there's a river that separates it from Portugal. You've got the mountains at the top, Pyrenees, and at the bottom you've got more water. And so it frames that area where there's only three languages, Castilian, Catalan and Basque, but in the same size of land, the Caucuses, as you said, I agree with you. I think it's about 50 different ethnicities and 28 different languages. 28 different languages, just in that one area. And it's because of the mountains. You know, the South Ossetians didn't really have that much to do with the people of the interior in Georgia. The Ingushetians never really got on with those funny people up there in Moscow and all the rest of it. They. They've hung on to their languages, their religions. And I think a lot of it is, is to do with. With the. The terrain. I mean, it's. The thing about geography is that it's. It can be a bit like the law, it's a bit flexible. So it depends on what your definition of the Caucuses is. Mine is pretty much Caspian Sea to Black Sea and all the stuff in between it. And, you know, history is just littered with them wanting just to get on with things and leave us alone. So you go all the way through the centuries and you get to the Russian Revolution in 1917, and then the Red army decides, well, this is all Russian land. And within a few years, most of those countries in that, in that area, most of those peoples, those nations are just caught up and told, right, you're all part of our empire now. And they've always said, actually no. And the moment they get a chance not to be, they go away. Same with the Baltic States. You know, they were told, right, you're part of the Russian Empire. First chance they had after 1989, no, we're not.
- [23:32]
Bianca
And how does that firmly bounded sense of identity interact with the likelihood of conflict because you're talking about imperial ambitions there, and that's obviously a key factor. Are there other factors where geography is important in determining the recurrence of conflict? Conflict that we might see in Nagorno Karabakh or Georgia?
- [23:53]
Tim Marshall
Yeah, Nagorno Karabakh's a good example. Abkhazia is a great one. I mean, the Abkhazians regard themselves as Circassians. I mean, that's like, you know, this word from antiquity, the Circassians, but they're still around. But this is where it's not just geography. You know, there are these other things, ideas, politics, ideology, communication, modern communication trends which allow people to see the rest of the world. We are the first generation where pretty much everybody in the world can see how pretty much everyone else in the world lives. That's another subject about the movement of peoples. But, but, but I'm glad you brought this up, because I long believe that even if there's fierce nationalism amongst a nation, I don't mean a state, but a nation, the Scots is a good example. In our own country, if smaller parts of a federal country are given serious amounts of autonomy and are not oppressed, they can speak their language, they can perform their religion in the manner in which they choose, then most of the times things I've looked at, those minorities will just get on with it. You know, they speak their own language as and when they want, they pray as and when they want, and they just are part of a mix. The Azeris in Iran are actually a reasonably good example of that. About what, 16, 17% of Iranians are Azeris, whose first language for many of them is Azeri. And they are quite well integrated. The Kurds who speak Kurdish are not well integrated and they are mostly Sunni, and they're not exactly encouraged to have the freedom of worship and language. You know, there's other examples all over the world where the central power says to the minority, you can't name your children certain names, and that's what then sparks violence. Sorry, it's a very long answer. Basically, I should have just said, if you're given a large degree of autonomy, you're usually fine.
- [26:16]
Bianca
When it comes to mountains, do you think that there are ways in which they make populations more vulnerable? Because I'm thinking about the conflicts in that area, and the Caucasus are often described as frozen conflicts. So does it also trap the them in a sense?
- [26:34]
Tim Marshall
I don't think it makes. Well, it makes vulnerable in that it's very difficult to have a thriving, successful, large population and economy in mountainous Areas. I mean, you see in Iran, again, if you look where they live, they ain't going to live in the middle because it's salt deserts. So they cluster at the foothills of the mountains, like, you know, just below Tehran. It's a massive, very good skiing above Tehran. They cluster in those areas, but in the smaller communities, I mean, again, going back to Greece, let's say, I mean, one of the reasons why the Germans had such a hard time subduing the Greeks is that, you know, all the fighters just took off into the mountains, which is a terrible place to fight if you're trying to attack and a very good place if you're trying to defend. So I don't think they're vulnerable in that respect. I think they're vulnerable in that it's hard for them to develop.
- [27:30]
Bianca
Back to the map. The Levant is the eastern Mediterranean corridor, broadly the lands of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. To its east lies Mesopotamia, the Tigris, Euphrates Basin, where some of the world's earliest cities emerge. Together they form one of history's most important connective zones, a narrow bridge between Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean world. That helps explain why this region has been contested for millennia. Not because it was uniformly rich, much of it is dry or semi arid, but because it linked empires, trade routes and strategic corridors. Armies, merchants and imperial powers moving between Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean repeatedly pass through and around it. Its geography creates recurring pressure. Scarce water, limited fertile land, and a landscape that offers strategic depth in some places and extreme exposure in others. And across centuries, larger powers, Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab and Ottoman among them, treated this corridor as vital. In the modern era, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire turned this geography into a border problem. During World War I, Britain and France began planning how to carve up Ottoman Arab lands between them. The best known blueprint was the 1916 Sykes Picot Agreement. It wasn't the final map, but it was key to colonial cartography, where imperial bargaining and war divide much older realities.
- [29:09]
Tim Marshall
Levant, from the French Levon, as in rising, meaning the sun. That's where the sun rises. That's. We borrowed it and it's become popular parlance. It's because it's the other side of the Med, and the Med was the sort of richest part of the world for many, many centuries, you know, through the Hellenistic and Roman times. And they went over there and it's been this great crossroads of cultures and religions and ethnicities. Strategically, it's not vital in the way that, say, the Danube river valleys are in Europe. Or indeed Turkey as a crossroads, it's not as vital as that, but there are vital parts of it. If you want to expand like the Greeks did and the Romans did, you need ports? Right, well, which part of this land down here on this east, the eastern coast of the Med, has got ports? Right, well, we'll go and land there and we will build, build there. There are strategic things. For example, the Golan Heights. Both the Syrians and the Israelis would absolutely feel they must control it, because whoever controls that high ground of the Golan Heights looks down into the other's country and, and has the superior position. For a long time, of course, it was Syrian, and then the Israelis took it, and that's why they took it. It's also because anybody that wants to march from that direction down onto the plain that then leads to the great ports of Haifa and then the cities of Tel Aviv and then down through Gaza into Egypt, you've got to come over that. So, you know, it has its strategic place which has played its role in history, but, you know, it's not, it's not a Panama Canal in its, in its strategic advantage. In port of Tartus in Syria, it's not particularly important port. The Russians wanted to hang on to it simply because they haven't got any other ports in that part of the world. You know, I really think religion is sadly a big part of it, going back to the Crusaders and the Holy Land. And it's still, you know, after, well, after 2,000 years, the different religious entities are still tangling with each other.
- [31:42]
Bianca
How have you noticed geography entrenching religious division? Are there common features that you see in areas that have particularly firm sectarian divides?
- [31:56]
Tim Marshall
I'll be honest with you, I'm on shakier ground there. I mean, in a very, very broad brush sense, on one side of the Himalayas, the majority of the population is Hindu, and on the other, they're not in China. And that's the spread of ideas. But I mean, that's a pretty broad brush example, because in a lot of examples, yeah, people are very, very mixed up. And that's, that's to do with the great sweep of history. I mean, you know, in the, in India and Pakistan, in what is now India and Pakistan, in the Indian subcontinent, prior to the 600s, they were all various religions, but none of them were Islamic. Once you get the Islamic conquests which sweep out of Arabia and conquer large parts of the Indian subcontinent, then you inject the religion into it. But geography. Sorry, it's a terrible answer. I have not, no focus on that.
- [33:01]
Bianca
Because what fascinates me, I suppose, about what we're discussing right now is clearly geography is so powerful. And when we talk about the Levant, we're looking at one of the most conflict ridden areas. And it sounds like from what you're saying, okay, so many other places are really obvious in how geography is contributing. But do you think this is one of the cases where it's less obvious?
- [33:25]
Tim Marshall
Sorry, yeah, I'm now a little bit more focused. And that's to do with human geography and, and religion and absolutely plays a major role under Saddam Hussein. I mean, that's not in the Levant, but in Iraq. Under his decades in charge, the Shia were constrained in the manner in which they could practice their religion. You know, there were certain rituals they weren't allowed to do. And of course that breeds real mistrust of the powers. If you look at the Levant, I mean, the best example obviously, I think is Lebanon, where as you probably know, they haven't had a census for about 50 years. And that's because the political structures in Lebanon are based on what it was like in the 1950s. And so the president is always from one community, the Prime Minister is always from another community, the speaker of Parliament is from another community. And it's based on the population figures of the 1950s. But if they held a census now, and let's say one of those groups was found to be 65% of the population, that people from amongst that group will rise and say this structure doesn't reflect reality. We want more power. That's why they're frightened to have a census in Lebanon. So that's human geography and it plays a major role in what goes on there. Ditto Israel. You know, the minority, 20% of Israelis, I think are Muslims. They are actually free to worship as they wish within Israeli society. I think Lebanon's the better example. One more, one more. Even though we don't have time, Syria, which is all of them.
- [35:19]
Bianca
Tim, I've got all the time in
- [35:20]
Tim Marshall
the world for you. So Syria is considered part of the Levant. And I remember when I first started going there, it was before the, the war and then I went many times during the civil war. The, the, the penny dropped about what was going to happen and how things might play out. The moment the human geographers explained to me that, that the Alawites, which is a distant offshoot of Shia Islam, held all the top positions. And the Assad and his whole family were all Alawites. And the Assad's dad, along with Several other officers had basically taken over the country in the 60s. He'd then shot his rivals, come to power, and put all his people in positions of power. So what you had was a family that represented about 10% of the country, absolutely dominating it. Politics, military, intelligence, police, commerce, industry, you name it, they were in it. And the rest of the 90% of the population is thinking, hang on a minute, you know, it's just. It's not going to last. And the moment I got my head around that human geography, things became a lot easier to understand.
- [36:41]
Bianca
And when you're telling me that, I'm thinking about what you said probably 10 minutes ago, where you made a point about us living in a time when we immediately know the facts on the ground and what's happening elsewhere. So once that demography, once those statistics and that awareness is there, which may have been there vaguely in a nebulous sense, you're then confronted with the fact that a minority has all the political power.
- [37:06]
Tim Marshall
Yeah, that changes things.
- [37:07]
Bianca
Right.
- [37:08]
Tim Marshall
And the spirit of the times, because you remember 2011 and what was very stupidly called the Arab Spring. I never fell for that one. That was European intellectuals looking at the Prague Spring of 68 and thinking that somehow this template would apply to the Middle East Arab uprising. That I can live with. You know, they'd seen on the Internet, on the television, whereas in previous decades they would not have seen what was going on in these other countries. And they saw people rising up in Egypt and overthrowing their leaders. And then I think it was sparked down in Dara in the south, where they just said, we, we've had enough. And it kicked off. And then in places like Homs, they remembered that 30 years previously, Assad's dad had massacred thousands of them. And up it goes. Because all cultures live their history, but some can put it behind them more easily than others.
- [38:16]
Bianca
The South China Sea. From above, it's a scattering of reefs, sand banks and tiny islands spread across a body of water spanning roughly 3.5 million square kilometers, roughly 45% bigger than the Mediterranean. Most of the land features are uninhabitable. Some are submerged at high tide. But look at what surrounds it. China to the north, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines along its edges. Taiwan at the top. And running through these waters are shipping lanes that carry an estimated 3 to 5 trillion dollars of trade every year, a third of global maritime trade. So it's a critical economic lifeline in the Indo Pacific region that makes it one of the pressure points of the global economy. It's Also strategically vital for China. The sea is central to China's maritime access, while the first island chain to the east, including Taiwan and the Philippine archipelago, helps constrain direct movement into the wider Pacific to the southwest. The Strait of Malacca links the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and remains one of the world's key maritime chokepoints. The map, though, is being redrawn. Not with pen, with concrete. This is a fascinating case because, of course, geography is literally being manufactured. When we look at the Spratly Islands and the Paracels, what's your take on that and what that means for stability when that's happening?
- [39:50]
Tim Marshall
We all know eez, I'm sure our exclusive economic zone theory, that which is in unclossed United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which says that I have 12 nautical miles of my sovereign territory. Sovereign. So where my coastline ends, unless I've got a bit of an island, 12 mile, which is everyone recognizes as mine. 12 miles. But then 200 miles is my exclusive economic zone. I could trawl the seabed there, see if there's any oil, fish, whatever. So what if I pour a bloody great load of concrete on top of an atoll and create a little artificial island? Is that now a sovereign part of China, which is what they're doing. They have built many of these islands and they've then built runways on them so they can land planes on them, and they've put troops on them and they've put buildings on them, but they're just bits of concrete they've poured into the sea. So does that make them sovereign territory? Because if it does, it changes the map. That's what they're doing. They have something called the nine line dash. Ten lines sometimes depends which. And basically they woke up one morning and presented to the world a new map. And the map had these nine dashes written in red on it in the shape of a cow's tongue. It's called the cow's tongue. And they said everything within this, these lines is R, E, E, Z, not yours. And basically it's the whole of the South China Sea. So of course the Philippines, Filipinos say, hang on a minute, our Scarborough shoal is inside your red lines. No, no, no, no, that, that's Filipino territory. And Vietnam says, hang on a minute, that's our sea area. So you have these overlapping claims with the Chinese trying to create not facts, the of the ground, but facts in the sea. And I believe it's one of the major flashpoints of the 21st century, that whole area going all the way up through the South China Sea, Philippines, Taiwan and then to Japan, one of the major flashpoints. And that's to do with, yeah, maps, geography, where the fish are, where you think the gas and oil might be, which bit of the seabed you might want to trawl and if you want to get military about it, where I'm going to put my sonar, listening devices, etc, etc, it's a bit of a mess. The South China Sea, always well worth watching.
- [42:14]
Bianca
And we see that geography once again interacting with the power politics. Because it reminds me of how throughout history, as powers rise, if they can, or if they have access to seas and they begin to dominate the waters around them and sometimes the waters globally, like in the age of Empire. Is that the pattern that you also see being repeated here?
- [42:34]
Tim Marshall
Yes. I mean you'll be familiar with what has become a cliche now about Thucydides trap where Athens and Sparta, one's rising, the other's the major power, looks across at it and thinks maybe we need to strike now. But I don't think that is going to happen. I don't think America is going to look at the rise of China and think, oh, we'll have a prediction, preemptive strike. I mean I, I think they're going to try to come to a way to manage their relationship through this 21st century. But I understand the idea. You know, they're both eyeing each other warily and it is about the Pacific because if you look at the, what is essentially the American empire, either militarily sovereign or, or, and economic, you know, they went coast to Shining Coast Sea to sign it Shining Sea Sea. They got all the way to the Pacific, built lots of bases there. Next step, they're out into Hawaii. Next step, they're out building friends and allies right up to the Chinese border with the Philippines where they have a treaty ally and basing rights. Japan, where the 7th Fleet is anchored in the Bay of Tokyo, Taiwan, which they arm, even Vietnam they're quite friendly with. So they're all the way across the Pacific and the Chinese, who've now recovered from their hundred years of humiliation, colonialism as they call it, see in front of them this wall of friends of America and think we, we can't have that. This is our backyard. Just as America looks at Latin America as its back, this is our backyard. We intend to push out past Taiwan. And if Taiwan did fall to the People's Republic, at that point countries like the Philippines would no longer be able to say to China, no, no, these areas that you say are yours, they're not, they're ours. And they're saying that because their big brother, America is backing them up. If they don't do that anymore, if they don't back them up anymore, if Taiwan has gone, then the Philippines goes, Vietnam goes. Even South Korea could, would start to hedge and lean towards the Chinese. At which point the way is open for China to come out and dominate the whole eastern part of the Pacific, all the way up to Hawaii. So the Americans have this choice. Do they push back in this difficult and dangerous relationship, or do they just say, actually, it's not worth pushing, we'll just, this is our half of the Pacific, this is your half of the Pacific, and try and get on with it? I don't think they will. They're not going to be pushed back. You know, I mentioned listening devices. Americans have got listening devices all the way across the Pacific, deep underwater, which track the movement of Chinese vessels and submarines. And it's really useful to have them or in Taiwan, listening both ways. The Chinese can only listen from the Chinese coast. They can only listen for a couple hundred miles. The moment they have Taiwan and other places, they're just pushing out. So, I mean, that's really, really big, big picture stuff.
- [45:49]
Bianca
Thinking about what you just said of likely U.S. reluctance to push back on Chinese domination in the South China Sea, it makes sense when you think about President Trump's emphasis on Western hemispheric dominance, because that's a way to not look like you're contracting or capitulating.
- [46:09]
Tim Marshall
Have you got two minutes?
- [46:11]
Bianca
Yes. Good.
- [46:11]
Tim Marshall
Well, this is how to explain Venezuela. Everyone goes, it's about the oil. It's about the oil. It's about the oil. It's about the oil. And it's about what you just said. Venezuela makes bauxite from bauxite. There's a byproduct that goes into making some of the thinnest metals that go into the super semiconductor chips. You need that. They've got it now, as well as the oil, which is no longer going to Cuba. But you've also said by doing that to the Chinese, to a lesser extent, the Russians were pushing back now, because we know you're right all over Latin America, deep inside it, economically, why shouldn't they be? So this is the Monroe Doctrine back in fashion, and it is about that, but even wider than that, yeah, it is about the American administration, rightly or wrongly, and however it's behaving, positioning itself to have access to both territory and minerals that will allow it to, at the very least, match China so that they can still play their role in the Pacific in the area that they care much more about now than they do about Europe.
- [47:24]
Bianca
Draw a line across Africa, just south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic coast through Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and on into Sudan. That band of semi arid land is the Sahel, a transitional zone between desert to the north and savannah to the south. And it stretches for roughly 5,500 kilometers, covering an area of about 3 million square kilometers. Its geography doesn't make government impossible, but it does make stability difficult. Rainfall is low and erratic. Long stretches are open, dry, difficult to police with thin state presence and a few natural barriers that has made borders harder to control, communities harder to protect. And armed groups have had an easier time moving than government sometimes. This is not a riverless world, though. The Niger river, the Senegal river and Lake Chad, the basin of Lake Chad, have sustained life across parts of the Sahel for centuries. Beyond those corridors, livelihoods are exposed to drought, land degradation and the constant pressure of climate that can shift faster than politics adjusts. In the late 19th century, European powers turned the scramble for Africa into a system of imperial partition. The borders that later emerged across the Sahel were produced over time through conquest, bargaining, colonial administration, often cutting across those older trade routes, movements and political communities. Today, several of the world's most fragile states lie in or around the Sahel. French military influence has sharply receded. Russia has expanded its presence in parts of the region. And the deeper pressure remains geographic. With these vast distances, weakly governed frontiers, ecological stress, and borders that were never designed for the landscape that they cut across, this is one of the fastest growing areas of instability on the planet. How much of that is due to geography?
- [49:31]
Tim Marshall
Again, it's a major factor tied in with the other factors such as colonialism, ethnic differences, climate change, the desertification, the sand is coming down again from the Sahara. So yeah, it plays a major role. Sahel is also one of the reasons why I don't always use the term developing countries or the developing world, because there's no development going on there. You know, Nur and Chad are not developing, neither is Mali. So the geography, the densification, pushes the nomads and there are quite still some nomadic tribes living there to push their cattle, sheep, whatever they are, into the more fertile areas where the farmers are, were sedentary, of course, and that causes conflict and that causes violence and that causes people to move. So it feeds into it. The geography of the Sahel, dry scrubland, very little water, very few proper Resources, very hard to actually build something there. And so, you know, geography has dealt them a pretty tough hand. Then you go, and this is what the connection with politics there is, the legacy of colonialism where they were not built up. And then when the colonialists went home, they didn't leave much behind to help them. They just, you know, these are the lines that we drew. You lot get on with them. Mal is a good example. The French said, the Tuareg, who live pretty much from Timbuktu north upwards towards Algeria, you're Marlian now. They said, what? How do you pronounce that? Oh yeah, Marley. Oh yeah. There used to be an empire called the ma. They used to fight us, the Malian Empire, hundreds of years ago. And then they said to the darker skinned people below Timbuktu, you're all Marlians now as well. Get on with it. And that's not a good recipe for stability. So, you know, if you're going to draw these stupid lines on a map, these artificial lines which have nothing to do with where the rivers are, the mountains are, and how the language and the religions have grown up, if you're just going to draw those lines in a relatively arbitrary manner, that is a design which will more likely fail than succeed.
- [52:07]
Bianca
I think I know the answer to this, but would you say that that was one of the most predictable determinants of conflict? Having these arbitrary colonial divisions placed in areas that doesn't really reflect the history and culture.
- [52:22]
Tim Marshall
I think if you poured money and resources and trained up a cadre and had a long term plan when you left, they would have had a chance, a better chance. I mean, you know, look, some, some countries have done, I mean, Zambia, Zambia's, you know, there's quite a few success stories. Parts of Lagos look like downtown Manhattan at night, but not so much Mali or Chad or Niger or even Sudan. I think those lines that were drawn have, have got a lot to do with it. I mean, we're jumping around the whole globe. But another example would be India and Pakistan. Now that was drawn and partially agreed between the two entities and the departing colonial power, us. And it did have to do with rivers and mountains and languages and religions. But the problem there was is that we said, oh, it's five to, it's five to midnight, we're off at midnight. By, you know, there was no plan to progress a peaceful separation. So yeah, you know, there is that legacy. I would add. I don't want to be too much of a cuddly, tree hugging, knitting your own yogurt type person. There is a statute of limitations on this.
- [53:43]
Bianca
Exactly how I pictured you, Tim.
- [53:45]
Tim Marshall
There is a statute of limitations and there is a responsibility on the people that govern these areas is now, of course, you know, and they, they have not always played their positive role in what has happened in the last 50, 60 years.
- [54:01]
Bianca
One last question on the Sahar in that region, and it's a question about the geography of space, I suppose. So when you have regions that are just enormous and sparse and I guess less governable, what does that usually imply about the likelihood of conflict?
- [54:22]
Tim Marshall
Oh, I thought you meant geography of space.
- [54:26]
Bianca
Oh, that. I'm definitely one for that.
- [54:28]
Tim Marshall
There is a geography of space. I wrote a book about it. It's pretty hard, isn't it, to hold the center. For the center to hold rather the periphery. I mean, the Americans have made a pretty good job of it, again through federalism. You know, I mean, each federal state does have quite a significant amount of power to govern itself as it chooses. You know, age of drinking alcohol is a. Perhaps an asinine example, but an example. But also I think again, we're talking geography and history in the America. Let me try and juxtapose perhaps America and Russia or maybe America and Latin America. America in America, you had pretty much one culture and one language. Now, I know it was Germans and the Scandinavians and all the rest of the Italians and the Irish and the Brits. They all went over there, but very quickly across. And they accelerated by taking the land. Accelerated right across the continent, but with, with, with one, in broad brush terms, one culture and one language. And when you do that, it's a lot and to an extent, one religion with different denominations, like thousands of them in America. And so it's a lot easier for the center to govern that when you've got a relatively homogeneous society, relatively relative to many other countries. But if you look at somewhere like Russia, there are more different languages, different cultures. I mean, it's obviously a lot bigger than, than the United States. And also the division of wealth. Texas is quite wealthy because of its oil, but Siberia isn't, because Siberia has to send a lot more of the wealth it creates to Moscow. And there are. There is a Siberian independence movement. It, you know, it's tiny, but it expands, expresses a. Something that keeps Moscow awake at night. You don't want to see Russia break apart. And I think, all right, perhaps a better example is comparing the United States with Latin America, because in America, after they'd stolen the land, they then parceled it out. And so they said to farmers and people, you can have this land. It's yours to do what you want. And there you have an incentive to do stuff and to grow stuff. In Latin America, all the colonialists did was rob everything they could build a highway back to the port to get it out and send it back to the Old World. And they persisted with the system of basically serfs and massive landowners. And what's. What's your incentive to work in that? So, you know, there's politics, which you put on top of geography.
- [57:24]
Bianca
One thing that this journey should cure us of is the fantasy that war is ever caused by one factor. Geography matters enormously. Some places are clearly, persistently more vulnerable to conflict. But geography is not fate. Mountains don't start civil wars. What geography does is shape the field on which politics happens. Where states feel exposed, where trade concentrates, where borders are hard to defend, where power can move, or where it gets trapped. So are some wars inevitable? To return to my opening question, no. But they're not random either. Across scholarship and military history, a pattern does begin to emerge. That war becomes more likely when several pressures converge at once. First, ambition, A rising power that believes the current order no longer reflects its strength, or an established power that still has the capacity to dominate, but senses the balance is beginning to shift. That's what Abramo Organsky, a professor who fled to the US Escaping Mussolini, was trying to capture with his power transition theory, that the danger zone is often not stable dominance, but the moment when parity comes into view, when a challenger rises and a hegemon starts asking itself whether tomorrow will be worse for it than today. Second is strategic insecurity, the fear of encirclement, of decline, of losing access, influence, resources, prestige, or survival itself. States, like people, are most dangerous not when they're strongest, but when they feel cornered. Third, weakness. This is one of the clearest lessons of civil war research, in particular, that violence is not only about grievance, it's about opportunity. Conflict becomes more likely when states are thin, institutions brittle, borders get porous, and governments are unable to project force or legitimacy across their own territory. Basically, a window of opportunity. Fourth, history. Or more precisely, stories about history. The past is a weapon of conflict. Political actors inherit maps, but they also inherit memories, humiliations, and claims of rightful ownership. They tell populations what they are owed, who took it from them. That always happens once a war machine is in motion, and usually well before. Fifth, miscalculation. And this is where every grand theory begins to fray. Because war still depends on human beings, leaders who overestimate their strength, misread an adversary, gamble on a quick victory, or assume that the other side is going to blink first. Risk is easy to factor in, but vanity, panic, hubris, actions under pressure, much harder, because maps are easy to read, minds less so. So what do we know? That conflict is not evenly distributed. It clusters, weak institutions, contested borders, prior violence, shifting balances of power all raise the risk. Trade can restrain conflict, but not reliably. Democracies might be less likely to fight one another, but they are perfectly capable of violence, especially beyond their own sphere. And we know that once conflict starts, it often makes future conflict a lot more likely. And none of this makes war any less tragic. If anything, I think it makes it more so because it means that the destruction is rarely sudden or strategically senseless. It's often the result of pressures building for years, decades, centuries in plain sight, until towns are shattered, families uprooted, and a generation inherits the consequences of decisions made by very few people. That's, I suppose, the real warning if we want to understand where conflict may come from next. We can't treat war as a headline or a sudden eruption because usually it has a build up, usually it has a cold logic to it. Usually it has a geography. Thank you for watching History Uncensored. Leave me a comment. Tell me where in the world you are watching from and I will see you next time.