After nearly 25 years as a Foreign Affairs correspondent, a job which took him from Balkan hotspots to reporting on byzantine and complex Middle Eastern politics; saw him report on Mujahedeen fighters and have the last ever interview with Benazhir Bhutto before her assassination, you could forgive Tim Marshall for wanting to head for the quiet life and type up his memoirs. But as he himself acknowledges, is there really room for another series of anecdotes from yet another embedded, front line journalist? Many of his colleagues have already written that book, some of them more than once!
Thankfully for the reader at large he turned his attention to arguable a much more interesting subject. Many well-documented factors affect political decisions, the minds of the leaders, the will of the people, the affect of disease, the dictates of faith, but one area, which remains less examined is the affect of the physical layout and constraints of the world in which we live.
As Tim explains in a wonderfully meandering delivery, one which contained not only plenty of thought provoking ideas but some disarming asides (“I forgot to tell you about Flags” and “ There’s a bit more on Russia, we’ll come back to that,”) it isn’t just about the big, obvious stuff. Yes, the Himalayas have largely been the reason that India and China haven’t spent thousands of years knocking lumps out of each other and the flat North European Plain has always allowed large armies of howling barbarians to have their way, but less tangible ideas such as borders are equally important. It is why Russia and China has spent decades building up buffer zones of dependent countries around them.
Ten maps illustrate his talk, which in turn is based on last years book, Prisoners of Geography, and we travel with him across almost all continents (sorry Australia you just weren’t interesting enough) as he explain how the physical world has informed political decisions of past and present and what the future may hold.
But between the descriptions of global power-plays and stand offs, Tim manages to reassure the listener, China isn’t the ideological threat it is painted as, Russia probably don’t need that many troops on the ground when they have large populations in neighbouring countries and global level political changes (with the exception of The Middle East) will largely move at the usual glacial pace. Which is fairly reassuring to know.
