The Revenge of Geography (48 page)

Alas, we are in frighteningly familiar territory. Just as Roman power stabilized the Mediterranean littoral, the American Navy and Air Force patrol the global commons to the benefit of all, even as this very service—as with Rome’s—is taken for granted, and what has lain exposed over the past decade was the overstretch of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, busy trying to tamp down rebellions in far corners of the earth. America must, therefore, contemplate a grand strategy that seeks to restore its position from something akin to Rome’s third system to its second; or to its first. While America does not have client states, it does have allies and like-minded others, whom it needs to impress in order to make them more effective on its behalf. America can do that best through an active diplomacy and the buildup of a reserve of troops, used sparingly, so as to restore its surge capacity, of the kind Rome enjoyed under the original Julio-Claudian system. Rome’s very longevity proved its grand strategy a success, and yet its ultimate decline and tumultuous fall in Western Europe was due to a failure to adapt to the formation of new national groupings to its north that would provide the outlines of modern European states. Because of these formations, the Roman Empire was headed for extinction in any case. But it need not have happened as soon as it did, and in the way that it did.

Rome’s real failure in its final phase of grand strategy was that it did not provide a mechanism for a graceful retreat, even as it rotted from within. But it is precisely—and counterintuitively—by planning for such a deft exit from a hegemony of sorts that a state or empire can actually prolong its position of strength. There is nothing healthier for America than to prepare the world for its own obsolescence. That way it labors for a purpose, and not merely to enjoy power for its own sake.

How does America prepare itself for a prolonged and graceful exit from history as a dominant power? Like Byzantium, it can avoid costly interventions, use diplomacy to sabotage enemies, employ intelligence assets to strategic use, and so on.
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It can also—and this leads back to Bacevich—make sure it is not undermined from the south the way Rome was from the north. America is bordered by oceans to the east and west, and to the north by the Canadian Arctic, which provides for only a thin band of middle-class population on America’s border. (The American-Canadian frontier is the most extraordinary of the world’s frontiers because it is long, artificial, and yet has ceased to matter.
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) But it is in the Southwest where America is vulnerable. Here is the one area where America’s national and imperial boundaries are in some tension: where the coherence of America as a geographically cohesive unit can be questioned.
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For the historical borderland between America and Mexico is broad and indistinct, much like that of the Indian Subcontinent in the northwest, even as it reveals civilizational stresses. Stanford historian David Kennedy notes, “The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world,” with American GDP nine times that of Mexico.
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America’s foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its society, and nothing will affect its society more than the dramatic movement of Latin history northward. Mexico and Central America constitute a growing demographic powerhouse with which the United States has an inextricable relationship. Mexico’s population
of 111 million plus Central America’s of 40 million constitute half the population of the United States. Because of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), 85 percent of all Mexico’s exports go to the United States, even as half of all Central America’s trade is with the U.S. While the median age of Americans is nearly thirty-seven, demonstrating the aging tendency of its population, the median age in Mexico is twenty-five and is much lower than that in Central America (twenty in Guatemala and Honduras, for example). The destiny of the United States will be north–south, rather than the east–west,
sea-to-shining-sea
of continental and patriotic myth. (This will be amplified by the scheduled 2014 widening of the Panama Canal, which will open the Caribbean Basin to megaships from East Asia, leading to the further development of Gulf of Mexico port cities in the United States, from Texas to Florida.)
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Half the length of America’s southern frontier is an artificial boundary line in the desert established by treaties following the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Crossing this border once, having traveled by bus north from Mexico City, was as much of a shock for me as crossing the Jordan-Israel border and the Berlin Wall. Surrounded by beggars on the broken sidewalk of Nogales, Sonora, I stared at the American flag indicating the border. The pedestrian crossing point to Nogales, Arizona, was in a small building. Merely by touching the door handle, I entered a new physical world. The solidly constructed handle with its high-quality metal, the clean glass, and the precise manner in which the room’s ceramic tiles were fitted seemed a revelation after weeks amid slipshod Mexican construction. There were only two people in the room: an immigration official and a customs official. Neither talked to the other. In government enclosures of that size in Mexico and other Third World countries there were always crowds of officials and hangers-on lost in animated conversation, sipping tea or coffee. Looking through the window at the car lanes, I saw how few people there were to garrison the border station, yet how efficiently it ran. Soon, as in Israel, I was inside a perfectly standardized yet cold and alienating environment, with empty streets and the store logos made of tony polymers rather than
of rusted metal and cheap plastic. Because of the turbulence and semi-anarchy I had experienced amid over 100 million Mexicans for weeks just to the south, these quiet streets appeared vulnerable, unnatural even. Arnold Toynbee writes, in reference to the barbarians and Rome, that when a frontier between a highly and less highly developed society “ceases to advance, the balance does not settle down to a stable equilibrium but inclines, with the passage of time, in the more backward society’s favor.”
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Since 1940, Mexico’s population has risen more than five-fold. Between 1970 and 1995 it nearly doubled. Between 1985 and 2000 it rose by over a third. Mexico’s population of 111 million is now more than a third that of the United States, and growing at a faster rate. Nevertheless, East Coast elites display relatively little interest in Mexico. The actual daily challenges, incidents, and business and cultural interactions between Mexico and the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are geographically distant from the concerns of East Coast elites: which, instead, focus on the wider world and on America’s place in it. Truly, Mexico registers far less in the elite imagination than does Israel or China, or India even. Yet Mexico could affect America’s destiny more than any of those countries. Mexico, together with the United States and Canada, comprises the most crucial of the continental satellites hovering around Mackinder’s World-Island.

In the Valley of Mexico once stood the great lake holding the two Aztec Venices of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco: here now stands Mexico City. This is the Nile valley of the New World, “the matrix of civilization” for both North and South America, in the words of historian Henry Bamford Parkes, from where the cultivation of maize spread over the two continents. Lying midway between the Atlantic and Pacific, and joining along with Central America the two continental landmasses of the Western Hemisphere, the Valley of Mexico and the country that has grown out of it form one of the earth’s great civilizational cores.
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Yet Mexico, unlike Egypt, exhibits no geographical unity. Two great mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental, lie on either side of a rugged central plateau. Then there are other, cross-cutting mountain ranges, mainly in the south: the Sierra Madre del Sur, the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, and so on. Mexico is so mountainous that if it were flattened it would be the size of Asia. The Yucatán Peninsula and Baja California are both essentially separate from the rest of Mexico, which is itself infernally divided. This is the context to understand northern Mexico’s ongoing, undeclared, substantially unreported, and undeniable unification with the Southwestern United States, and consequent separation from the rest of Mexico.

Northern Mexico’s population has more than doubled since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. The U.S. dollar is now a common unit of exchange as far south as Culiacán, halfway to Mexico City. Northern Mexico is responsible for 87 percent of all
maquiladora
(duty-free) manufacturing and 85 percent of all U.S.-Mexico trade. The northeastern Mexican city of Monterrey, one of the country’s largest, is intimately connected with the Texas banking, manufacturing, and energy industries. David Danelo, a former U.S. Marine now working for U.S. Customs, who has studied northern Mexico extensively, and has traveled throughout all six Mexican border states, told me he has yet to meet a person there with more than one degree of separation from the United States. As he told me, “Northern Mexico retains a sense of cultural polarity; frontier
norteños
see themselves as the antithesis of Mexico City’s [city slicker]
chilangos
.” Still, northern Mexico contains its own geographical divisions. The lowlands and desert in Sonora in the west are generally stable; the Rio Grande basin in the east is the most developed and interconnected with the United States—culturally, economically, and hydrologically—and has benefited the most from NAFTA.
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In the center are the mountains and steppes, which are virtually lawless: witness the border city of Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas, wracked by running gun battles and serial killers. Ciudad Juárez is the murder capital of Mexico, where 700 people were murdered in
the early months of 2010 alone. In 2009, more than 2,600 died violently in a city of 1.2 million; some 200,000 more may have fled.
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In Chihuahua, the state in which Ciudad Juárez is located, the homicide rate was 143 per 100,000—one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere. The northern mountains and steppe have always been the bastion of Mexico’s tribes: the drug cartels, Mennonites, Yaqui Indians, and so forth. This harsh frontier was difficult for the Spanish to tame. Later on, in the 1880s, it was a lair for Geronimo and his Apaches. Think of other remote highlands that provided refuge for insurgents: the Chinese communists in Shaanxi, the Cuban revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra, and al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan.
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The drug cartels come out of this geographical tradition.

The fact that most of the drug-related homicides have occurred in only six of Mexico’s thirty-two states, mostly in the north, is another indicator of how northern Mexico is separating out from the rest of the country (though the violence in Veracruz and the regions of Michoacán and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels launched in 2006 by conservative president Felipe Calderón completely falters, and Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense lose control of the north, with grave implications for the United States. Mexico’s very federalism—a direct product of its disjointed and mountainous geography—with 2 federal, 32 state, and over 1,500 municipal police agencies, makes reform that much harder. Robert C. Bonner, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, writes that if the gangs succeed, “the United States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South America.”
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The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who made a career out of clairvoyance, devoted his last book to the challenge that Mexico posed to the United States.
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In
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
, published in 2004, Huntington posited that Latin history was demographically moving north into the U.S., and would consequently change the American character.
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Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. For only by adopting Anglo-Protestant culture do immigrants become American. America is what it is, Huntington goes on, because it was settled by British Protestants, not by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics. Because America was born Protestant, it did not have to become so, and America’s classical liberalism emerges from this very fact. Dissent, individualism, republicanism ultimately all devolve from Protestantism. “While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ.” But this Creed, Huntington reasons, might be subtly undone by an advancing Hispanic, Catholic, pre-Enlightenment society.
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Huntington writes:

Boston College professor Peter Skerry writes that one of Huntington’s “more startlingly original and controversial insights” is that while Americans champion diversity, “today’s immigrant wave is actually the
least
diverse in our history. To be sure,” Skerry continues, paraphrasing Huntington, “non-Hispanic immigrants are more diverse than ever. But overall, the 50 percent of immigrants who are Hispanic make for a much less diverse cohort than ever. For Huntington, this diminished diversity makes assimilation less likely.”
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And as David Kennedy observes, “the variety and dispersal of the immigrant stream” smoothed the progress of assimilation. “Today, however, one large immigrant stream is flowing into a defined region from a single cultural, linguistic, religious, and national source: Mexico … the
sobering fact is that the United States has had no experience comparable to what is now taking place in the Southwest.”
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By 2050, one-third the population of the United States could be Spanish-speaking.
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