Writing for The Economist, Robert D. Kaplan argues that America’s geography provides it natural protection and creates the base for its tremendous command of resources and power
The problem is compounded by history. Ernest Renan, a 19th-century French political philosopher, wrote that, “To forget and…to get one’s history wrong are essential factors in the making of a nation; and thus the advance of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.” In fact, a mythic and triumphalist interpretation of the past was an essential element to America’s victories in two world wars and the cold war.
The country’s vast geography, which lends itself to heterogeneity, might actually help it assuage the polarisation that can arise out of a reinterpretation of national history. America’s 18th-century founders specifically designed a system on a sparsely populated and sprawling continent, where it took many days to travel from one part of the 13 original states to another.
This geography also featured the availability of affordable land, which constituted the original source of the American people’s optimism and unfriendliness to elites and aristocracies. The whole notion of the, as explained in 1893 by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was based on a vast continent with enough land for everybody. A rough equality among citizens was inherent in America’s plentiful and well-watered landscape.
Bear in mind that power is relative. America’s domestic tensions are out in the open, whereas China’s and Russia’s are more opaque. And their geographies are less fortunate. China has difficult borderlands and resorts to extreme oppression to manage its ethnic and religious minorities. Russia is an insecure land power with few natural borders, thus prone to invasion throughout history: this is the deep, unstated reason for Russian aggression.
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