Anarchy ended our imperial dream
It’s 1994 and Robert D. Kaplan is in China’s Xinjiang Province, home to 11 million Turkic Uyghur Muslims whom the world now knows as the Uyghurs. He soon learns they are “trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression by the Chinese authorities”. To the Uyghurs, as well as to “geographers and ethnographers, this western outpost of China was historically East Turkestan”, he writes.
The Loom of Time is Robert’s Kaplan latest, characteristically magisterial book, and this opening anecdote holds the key to his enduring importance. He goes on to describe how back in the mid-Nineties an editor had described his interest in the Uyghurs as “testing the limits of obscurantism”. But Kaplan knew different — especially since he understood, when he went again in 2015, that the backdrop for this repression was China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative: “a postmodern transportation network of highways, railways, and energy pipelines linking China by land and sea with Europe across the Greater Middle East”.
Kaplan’s thinking is grounded in geography. Whether it is how the state of Iraq is so geographically incoherent that its descent into chaos was almost inevitable or the conservative influence of mountains on society, the truth is always to be found not in textbooks or the corridors of government, but out in the field, traversing the veins and capillaries that comprise our world: the alleyways and the slums and the bogs — the terrain.
His trip to Xinjiang illustrates his process in miniature. One, understand the map; two, get to the places that others won’t go; and three, from there, better understand the human activities (such as the Belt and Road) that act upon it. This is the beginning of political knowledge…
