The language of national insecurity: prediction, strategy, and geopolitics.

ABSTRACT

Credible predictions (in the sense of forecasting future events) are notoriously difficult to achieve in human affairs. Predictions, once made public, invite counter maneuvers by adversaries. But whether presented in public or not, predictions must take into account the human capacity

for strategic action: deception, surprise, and even changing the political or technological context of any conflict. One way to narrow the range of anticipated counter maneuvers in the arena of international politics is by incorporating geopolitical analysis into one's predictions; geopolitics being a field of inquiry that analyzes the relationship between contingent political events and persistent spatial structures. In order to show how strategy and geopolitics interact with prediction, this paper reconsiders a prophecy from the Book of Jonah, the strategy of appeasement at Munich, and a geopolitical prediction of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

INTRODUCTION

In an insecure world, diplomats and senior military officers often must act on incomplete knowledge, relying on hunches to thwart the designs of their adversaries; social scientists, on whose (dispassionate) observations the fate of nations rarely depends, loathe to predict the future. Why should this hesitancy be so? Imagine trying to forecast how high and for how long a child might fly his kite (Tocqueville, 1893/1987, p. 28). To attempt a credible forecast, it would be necessary--at the very least--to gauge the child's skill (a behavioral factor), the length and strength of the string and the quality of the kite (technological factors), the rules--if any--pertaining to kite flying (an institutional factor), and the location from whence the kite is launched in relationship to the prevailing winds (geographic factors.) Given such information, there is a reasonable chance of anticipating an outcome. But what if the dispassionate observer is trying to forecast the winning of a kite flying contest under conditions where slightly different locations provide marginal advantages in catching the wind, or the rules permit sabotage, or the design of the kite varies according to the skills of the child or his prior forecast of the likely wind conditions? Such circumstances only begin to approach the complexities--and hence the insecurities--encountered in the arena of international politics.

JONAH, PROPHECY, AND GEOPOLITICS

At least since the time of Jonah, discerning the future has been a risky business. What most people recall about the story of Jonah is that God commanded Jonah to do something--they usually forget what--but that when Jonah fled rather than do it, a great beast of the ocean swallowed him. So, Jonah is usually remembered because of his unfortunate association with a "whale." Nevertheless, what is crucial to remember is what God commanded Jonah to do, and what He commanded involved prediction, strategic thinking and even geopolitics.

God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh and prophesy that, because of the wickedness of its inhabitants, the capital city of the Assyrians would be "overthrown" in forty days (presumably by God, or one of His instruments.) At first, rather than deliver the prophecy in Ninevah, Jonah fled to the port city, Joppa, where he booked passage to Tarshish. Jonah undoubtedly recognized that he could deliver the prophecy anywhere; he didn't have to travel to Ninevah to do it. Jonah may have also understood that God hoped when the Ninevites heard that the city would be overthrown, they would repent, thereby saving themselves. In that eventuality, Jonah might be accused of being a false prophet!

But there is also another, even more Machiavellian explanation for Jonah's unwillingness to deliver God's message. Armed with this prophecy, Jonah decided to take geopolitical considerations into account. Jonah, according to later interpretations of his actions, also foresaw that the Assyrians would eventually destroy Israel, provided of course that God did not destroy the Assyrians first. Therefore, Jonah may well have reasoned strategically as follows: Israel would not be destroyed if the Assyrians were destroyed first; the Assyrians would be destroyed if they did not repent; they would continue in their wicked ways if God's prophecy was not delivered; and so Jonah decided not to deliver it (and risk being a false prophet to boot.) Thus, Israel's fate and Jonah's reputation were tied together.

It is not our purpose to recount in detail the story of Jonah, and how it came to pass that he repented his own decision to flee while confined to the belly of the "whale." For our purposes all that needs to be mentioned is that the Ninevites, both the commoners and the king, reportedly believed his prophecy, and then they fasted, donned sackcloth, and sat in ashes. In effect, they also thought strategically and took the following risk. By repenting and abandoning their wicked ways, they attempted to stay God's wrath. And, even if their repentance was merely for show, they reckoned that God might take pity on the city, if only for the sake of their children and cattle. Indeed, their gamble paid off, and the city was saved. Where did all of this leave Jonah? Sitting outside the city, furious that his prophecy did not come true, and praying to have his life taken from him. Note the elements of Jonah's prophecy:

* the outcome--a city will be destroyed;

* its location--the capital of the Assyrians;

* its timing--forty days after the delivery of the prophecy;

* the cause or occasion--because of the unrepentant wickedness of the inhabitants; and

* the prime mover--God.

Although God did not direct Jonah to specify the means by which Ninevah was to be overthrown, He could easily have hinted that a plague would befall the Ninevites or that brimstone would fall from heaven or that some neighboring city would conquer them. So, the method by which the prophecy was to have been fulfilled was left unspecified, no doubt contributing to the inhabitants' fears and anxiety, softening them up for repentance. But for the fact that the prime mover and the ultimate source of the prophecy are one and the same (i.e., God), this prophecy sounds a lot like a prediction.

What are the elements of a credible forecast? The sandwich man who walks around town with signs proclaiming that "The end of the world is upon us" should be asked at the very least what he means by the end of the world, how this catastrophic event will take place, and when and where this process will begin. If such assertions of a divinely instigated apocalypse no longer seem entirely credible, it is partially because the God of the Old Testament has perversely threatened to destroy the world, various nations and cities--the innocent along with the wicked--on a number of occasions; even though, after having saved Noah from the flood, He repented on having delivered on His threat. An omnipotent Being may be motivated by whimsy and need brook no opposition.

In human affairs, however, any forecast must indicate what will occur with a fairly high degree of specificity. Credibility and specificity are closely related. Such predictions (and when I use this word, I do so in the same way that meteorologists use "forecast") should state when, where, and how what will occur will take place--all taking into account human intentions, actions and, above all, opposition (Clausewitz, 1832/1984; Luttwak, 1987).

This is because nations (and other organizational manifestations of the human will toward power, certainty, and security) do everything they can to thwart the designs of adversaries (or, indeed, their enemies). They seek to anticipate the likely course of action their adversaries will take, and then surprise them with an unanticipated counter-maneuver. It is this capacity for surprise, which is closely associated with strategic thought and action, that makes it so hard to come up with credible scenarios (Luttwak, 1987, p. 9). After all, once a prediction is made public, those who have an interest in forestalling an outcome may, like the Ninevites of old, seek to do whatever is in their power to reverse their fortune. So, even the most sagacious of political observers can be surprised by the creativity of adversaries (Clausewitz, 1932/1984; Luttwak, 1987; Handel, 2001; Kagan, 1991, pp. 206-7).

PREDICTION AND CHANGING CONTEXTS

What is strategic thinking and why does it render prediction difficult to achieve? Predictions are strange statements. "Tomorrow morning, before going to work, I will shower and shave" is a prediction of personal behavior based on the force of habit, the social expectations of the work place, and perhaps even a vague sense that only people who meet such expectations are likely to get raises or promotions. Such a statement is a prediction, but it is relatively uninteresting and trivial. Why? Well, for one thing as a prediction this statement is based primarily on sheer repetition of daily events: one of the strongest indications of what will happen in the near term is what occurred just prior. And, for another, this prediction takes into account only my own behavior, over which I have considerable degree of control. Completing my daily ablution does not normally provoke opposition.

But suppose we consider the old Roman adage: "If you want peace, prepare for war." This odd comment highlights some of the assumptions and paradoxical qualities of strategic thought and its interplay with prediction (Luttwak, 1987, p. 8). The adage assumes that the world is one populated by potential enemies; that is a world in which it is critical to imagine what adversaries will do by "thinking like the opponent." Therefore, peace is fleeting, psychologically--as Thomas Hobbes would be quick to remind us--and in reality. So, thinking strategically about war requires that we anticipate that it may occur, but to secure peace, it is necessary to avert war by preparing for it. Expressing a willingness to fight through threats may signal preparation for war, and for threats to remain credible, they may even require initiating an occasional resort to arms--that is, it is necessary to establish a posture of deterrence by carefully calibrating and deploying military means to secure political ends (Clausewitz, 1832/1984).

But how much should a state prepare for war? At what point does preparation for war in order to secure peace produce the very outcome that the Romans claimed was being avoided? After all, too much preparation for war can so threaten neighboring states, that neutrals may feel threatened and quickly become potential adversaries, and adversaries may become enemies. These are among the unintended and potentially unanticipated consequences of over-preparation for war.

The costs associated with a strong posture of deterrence do not end with emergence of opposing alliances. Military preparedness may also come at an economic cost. Over a longer run, such costs may prove debilitating, thereby sapping the future strength of an economy to support military preparedness (Kennedy, 1987, pp. 444-46; but see Friedman and Friedman, 1996). In such situations, where adversaries or enemies are trying to undermine each other's designs, too much of a good thing may prove counterproductive. And, should war come despite every effort to calibrate an appropriate level of defense, a state often discovers that it can only fight effectively the one for which it has prepared--hence the all-too-well-known danger of preparing militarily for the previous war.

It would seem that, in human affairs, for predictions to be both significant and interesting, at least several elements must be present. First, the prediction must involve an event that is going to occur neither in the immediate nor in the distant future. If the event is going to occur fairly soon, then it probably is the result of previous similar events, ongoing habitual behavior or a fairly clear trend. Many people may predict events by observing near-term processes or repeated outcomes, but no particular discernment would seem to be required to do so. On the other hand, if the event is many generations off, then the "why" and "wherefore," become extremely indefinite, with many processes potentially producing the same or an indistinguishable result.

Second, predictions involving considerable uncertainty usually require forecasting events where the outcome depends upon the actions of adversaries or opponents. For instance, predictions about the major movements of the stock exchanges are extremely interesting precisely because of the uncertainty associated with the presence of "bulls" and "bears"--which are metaphors for behaviors by aggregations of actors (some of which are now computer programs). But beyond the presence of bulls and bears, what has made predictions about the market compelling is how such statements take into account outside forces, forces that require "bulls" and "bears" to constantly reevaluate their situation and their relation to each other.

Accounting for and forecasting extreme shifts in the context of conflict or competition--that is, "market conditions"--is a third element producing complexity. In 1984, for instance, a forecaster of market trends might have claimed that the Dow Jones would reach almost 12,000 points by 2000. Imagine what would have been required to get all the changes in context right, so that looking back we would now recognize the observer's extraordinary astuteness. He or she might have done so taking into account the interplay of fundamental and startling changes in the international, technological, fiscal, and demographic contexts of the U.S. stock market: First, the Cold War will end with the relatively peaceful, territorial implosion of the Soviet Union, and the United States will be acclaimed the victor. Second, political stability in the United States will continue into the post-Cold War era, and the U.S. will in turn become a magnet for offshore money seeking a safe investment opportunity. Third, the United States will experience a "return to normalcy" in financial and monetary policy (with cutbacks in military expenditures, welfare programs, the balancing of the U.S. budget, and an associated reduction in interest rates.) Fourth, the U.S. baby boom generation--confronting its near term retirement--will suddenly discover a need to invest its savings for retirement in instruments paying a high rate of return. Fifth, the application of computers to trading in stocks will result in a quantitative change in the market, permitting larger numbers of trades to occur. And, finally, investors, expecting that a new communications technology (i.e., the Internet) will fundamentally change the geographic shape of the market (even as railroads did during the mid-nineteenth century), will put huge sums of venture capital and investment into "dot com" companies. The "irrational exuberance" associated with these expectations will lead to a stock market bubble with investment flowing into I.P.O.s without regard to earnings and its relationship to stock prices (Kindleberger, 1996).

Had someone made such a set of predictions in 1984, his statements would have been met with extreme skepticism, if not outright derision. Why? For one thing, nobody of note predicted the shift in international affairs predicated on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without forecasting that event, no one could imagine a return to political--or fiscal--normalcy. Nor had demographers worked out the implications of the aging of the baby boomers for investment patterns. Although some technology gums might have already just begun to appreciate the impact of the computer on the volume of stocks traded, did anyone have the faintest suspicion of the potential--though still unrealized--impact of the Internet on communications, retailing, and wholesaling? Credible and ultimately valid forecasts, which take into account simultaneous and autonomous shifts in historical context, are extremely rare and significant (Braudel, 1980, p. 75).

Keep in mind that the decade long run up in the Dow was also highly contingent on any number of political decisions. Indeed, there were many who anticipated that once the Cold War ended, military expenditures would decline and, with that decline, the welfare state would finally come into its own. Remember the "Peace Dividend." Had policy makers opted for increased domestic expenditures and continued deficit spending, the Federal Reserve would have probably responded with significantly higher interest rates, thereby removing one of the underpinnings of the stock market run up.

Yet, to appreciate fully how difficult it is to make predictions about such changes, it is necessary to consider where such discontinuities in context are most likely to occur: international politics.

STRATEGY AND PREDICTION: APPEASEMENT, MUNICH, AND THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR TWO

Forecasting is most difficult for situations in which strategic thought is operative precisely because strategic thought often aims at changing the context of competition and conflict. As was hinted at above, adversaries most frequently seek a shift in the context of war, diplomacy and international relations. It is precisely in these situations where extremes in human action are quickly reached (Clausewitz, 1832/1984, p. 77). What is at stake is the survival of nations, and the means of achieving the defeat of an enemy demands that the destructive capability of the weapons be increased, technological countermeasures be quickly developed, and military and diplomatic surprises be deployed, etc. One example must suffice to illustrate the relationship of strategy to prediction.

Consider "appeasement" (Fox, 1964; Wheeler-Bennett, 1968). Now, after the Cold War, most Americans believe that dictators and tyrants cannot be appeased; rather, once dictators--whether Fascists or Communists--sense weakness, they will demand more concessions. This interpretation of "appeasement," the policy pursued by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the eve of World War II, rests on a simple fact. One year after having allegedly appeased Hitler with regard to his demands over Czechoslovakia, Hitler invaded Poland and, in response, Chamberlain led Britain to declare war on Germany. My goal in reassessing the policy of appeasement is not to rehabilitate Chamberlain, but to illustrate how appeasement served a strategic goal; albeit one that was profoundly risky, yet it had to have been met before the Western democracies would take up arms.

Ever since Chamberlain returned to Britain from his negotiations with Hitler in Munich and proclaimed that he had secured "peace for our time," political commentators have condemned him for his naivete in selling the Czechoslovak Republic--with its strong defensive bulwark--out. Chamberlain's repeated attempts to advance what is sometimes today called a "peace process" were designed to finally satisfy Hitler's constant and expanding demands for a redrawing of Germany's territorial borders, borders that had been established by international treaty at the end of World War I. When, after 1935, Germany revealed the extent of its rearmament, and in 1936, it reoccupied the Rhineland, Hitler--sensing the war weariness of the Western democracies--grew ever more bellicose. By 1938, most male Europeans thought that unless such a formula of territorial redistribution could be found through negotiations, war would result. Given that their formative experiences had been in the trenches, they had emerged from World War I both exhausted and cynical toward the goals espoused by the Allied powers. Many genuinely sympathized with German demands for a redress of the Versailles Treaty. Chamberlain, therefore, confronted a context in which

* the public in the Western democracies was unwilling to fight again to contain Germany;

* the political elite in Britain, France, and the United States were unwilling to appear too bellicose; and

* the sinews of modern war in Britain--the radar system and the Spitfires--were not fully deployed.

Under these circumstances, appeasement might be understood as merely an effort to buy enough time for these contextual factors--public opinion, elite sentiment, military technology, etc.--to change.

But surprisingly it was more than that. When he returned from Munich, Chamberlain explained his policy of appeasement in the following terms:

   ... armed conflict is a nightmare to me. But if I were convinced that any
   nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I
   should believe that it must be resisted. Under such a domination life for
   people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a
   fearful thing and we must be very clear before we embark on it that it is
   really the great issues that are at stake (Fox, 1964, p. 45).

In effect, Chamberlain's remarks emphasized that he had gone the extra mile to secure peace, even to the extent of granting Hitler the changes in the borders he demanded. However, Chamberlain also raised the ante with Hitler. His remarks implied that Hitler ought now to be satiated, and that any further demands for territorial redress, backed by the threat of force, must be regarded as a breach of the contract guaranteeing "peace for our time." Indeed, such threats of force will be a clear marker to anyone who erroneously believed that Germany was a harmless victim of the Peace Treaty ending World War I. "Appeasement" therefore had a secondary effect. It had the effect of unmasking and highlighting Hitler's intentions, thereby putting into play a triggering mechanism that would potentially reverse public opinion on the need for war should Germany attempt to overthrow the peace of Europe. Of course, no stratagem comes without a price (Luttwak, 1987, p. 9): appeasing Hitler by selling out the Czechs may well have heightened Stalin's suspicion that the Western democracies were unreliable allies at best, treacherous at worst.

However, appeasement may well have had an enduring and even more paradoxical effect, one that could not have been predicted when Chamberlain returned from Munich: namely, to stiffen the resolve of the Western democracies to resist the Soviet territorial aggrandizement during the Cold War. Indeed, Nixon and Kissinger's surprising opening to Communist China as a counter weight to the U.S.S.R. (Kaplan, 2000, p. 132) or even Reagan's apprehension of the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire" were actions and rhetoric taken and spoken in the shadow of Munich.

Credible and valid predictions are even more difficult to achieve whenever institutions neither contain conflict nor confine the actions of adversaries to accepted norms. Despite the efforts to develop robust institutions and strong, accepted norms for the international arena, sovereign states remain fixated on related issues of economic vitality and national insecurity (Emeny, 1938; Klare, 2001). That is as it should be. Given this situation, there are at best few timeless and universal guideposts to predicting the actions of sovereign states. We could, I suppose, turn to Clausewitz (1832/1984) and find his predictions that with a threatened invasion, a defender will find new allies, but that with the invasion, some allies are lost, others switch sides.

When it comes to making predictions about situations in which strategic thought and action are operative, paradoxes and contradictions abound. They stem from several factors: first, rapid changes in circumstances that result in what is sometimes called a "reassessment"; second, the presence of states which deploy specific countermeasures designed blunt the actions of their adversaries; third, the use of strategic thinking to reverse fortuna by changing the structural context in which conflict takes place. One advantage of geopolitical analysis is that it attempts to reduce the uncertainties associated with prediction by placing rapidly changing events in a long-term, geographic perspective (LeDonne, 1997, p. xiv).

HINDSIGHT AND PREDICTING THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION

It is now widely believed that no one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. The events that led to the territorial implosion of the Soviet Union, the repudiation of the Communist Party, and the disintegration of the Communist State apparatus were so surprising that no one, it is now thought, could have predicted it. After all, many Western intellectuals had taken it for granted that time was on the side of the socialist powers, capitalism was doomed as an archaic economic system, and "containment" of the Soviet threat could not succeed over the long run (Gaddis, 1982). Through 1970 or so the Soviet industrial base apparently expanded fairly dramatically; the capitalist economies remained in the grip of periodic economic downturns, each producing labor unrest which seemed to portend a socialist revolution; and, throughout Africa, the Middle East and even in the Caribbean Sea, the Soviets were attracting ideological adherents and even allies, thereby leapfrogging over the defensive bulwark laid down by NATO and the other maritime alliances established by the West. It looked as if the future belonged to communism and the Soviet Union.

Yes, there was an occasional prediction that the Soviet Union could not last. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publicized his belief that the Soviet Union would not survive, but his forecasts were designed by and large to weaken the regime, not necessarily to analyze the causes of its demise. And, there were, after World War II, some economists who believed that no central government could "plan" an entire economy--there were just too many contingencies, unintended consequences, and minute details for any regime, however well instructed by the "science" of socialism, to anticipate, monitor, divert, or overcome. But, by and large, claims that the Soviet Union was likely to collapse were regarded as wishful thinking, too vague to be credible, or belied by the facts.

Now, after the fact, no one argues with the inevitability of its collapse. In polite conversation, there is the sense that "History" caught up with the Soviets. "History" takes many forms in these conversations. Some say that the Soviet elite recognized that the computer was transforming the American economy, and that the Soviet Union could not adopt this new communication technology without relinquishing some of its control over society and the economy. Others claim that when Gorbachev initiated perestroika (economic "restructuring") and glasnost (political "openness"), all of the ideologically inspired lies promoted by the Communist elite were questioned and the regime quickly lost legitimacy. That is, once Gorbachev attempted to restructure the economy and open the political arena to reform, the failures of the Soviet Union became apparent, reform spun out of the Communist Party's control, with the unassimilated nationalities along the periphery of the Soviet Union taking advantage of the reforms by asserting their autonomy. However, the continuing presence of a communist regime in China--however attenuated its control over the economy might be--suggests a problem with such arguments--that History has yet to repudiate communism everywhere (Goldstone, 1995; Huang, 1995).

Among academics, over the past eight or nine years, there has grown up a cottage industry that attempts to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in one case, "predict" it after the fact. This might be called a "retroactive prediction." What is a retroactive prediction? It is nothing more than knowing the outcome of a political process, and then claiming that we should have known the outcome would occur for reasons that could have been specified had we known earlier what we know now. This retroactive prediction, published by Jack Goldstone in 1993 (that is, two to four years after the key events), suggested that the breakdown in the Soviet Union would have been accurately predicted provided someone had tracked key demographic, social, and political factors (i.e., variables) through the 1980s and early 1990s. Goldstone (1993; 1998), a noted expert on the causes of revolutions, has argued that the key factors required to make a credible prediction were:

* First, shifts in demographic trends, such as declines in the standard of living (e.g., increasing infant mortality or reduced life expectancy) along with increases in urbanization and the size of youth cohorts.

* Second, heightened competition and conflict among the elite of the society usually intensified by obstructed paths toward upward mobility (e.g., the production of too many degree-holding graduates from universities in comparison to what the economy can absorb), or by disagreement over public policy to rectify social and political difficulties.

* Third, a decline in state effectiveness as measured by the growth in the overall debt of the regime and its consequent failure to maintain its status in the international arena.

When these three factors are given quantitative expression and then statistically manipulated, a composite index--or an outcome expressing the interaction of these factors--emerges, which has been labeled as a "political stress indicator."

During the late 1970s and the 1980s, the "political stress indicator" began to register significant changes across the three factors. Infant mortality, for instance, rose between 1971 through 1976 by almost half to 31.1 per thousand. In addition, the Soviet universities increased the number of post secondary degree holders, with only 2 percent of the population receiving such degrees in 1959, but 9 percent attaining this status by 1989. However, the regime did little to shift from an industrial to an information economy, thereby creating circumstances in which these highly trained specialists were unlikely to find appropriate appointments. And, whenever a young, highly educated individual did find such a position, his or her influence was likely to be limited by the Communist Party officials who were charged with guaranteeing that the activities of the technicians were in line with the regime's ideology. Finally, during the 1970s, manufacturing and agricultural productivity became sluggish, and in the 1980s may have begun to decline--as the regime continued to concentrate on heavy industry, ignored the need for upgrading the transportation infrastructure, and failed to shift its focus to new products. Gorbachev, in a vain effort to secure economic reforms, directed the regime to print rubles. This policy, which was designed to secure enhanced worker productivity and increased investment in selected sectors of the economy, resulted in a fiscal crisis of the regime--that is, a particularly severe indicator of political stress.

Thus, by 1985, the year Gorbachev initiated his reform program, the graph of the "political stress indicator" would look like slope of a roller coaster as viewed from the point before the passenger cars begin their ascent. As 1989 approached the interaction of these variables produces a line on a graph, the slope of which is becoming steeper with each passing year, until at some point it begins to approach a nearly vertical line. And, with each advance in the "political stress indicator," the room for political maneuvering narrows such that each effort at reform produces more opponents, who have an incentive to deploy strategic thinking to gain their goals, and hence more unintended consequences.

Goldstone's is a powerful theory, relying as it does on declines in life chances of the population as a whole, in the circulation of elites, and in the capacity of the regime to gain compliance with its policies. Nevertheless, in relying on the interaction and acceleration of these key factors, it may be the case that by the time the trend line is noticeable for its near vertical quality (say within two or three years of the collapse), a revolutionary crisis may be upon the society. And, at that point, with people likely out in the streets demanding radical changes, the expectation that a state is about to breakdown is sufficiently widespread as to provide dissenters with a reasonable hope of success. The critical issue here is whether it is possible to base forecasts on long-term, persistent factors in the human condition, or must one rely--as this theory does--exclusively on rapidly accelerating trends (Goldstone, 1993 & 1998).

If forecasting can be based only on the near-term interactions of such trends, then it is probably the case that the actors--defenders and dissenters --are themselves already aware of the regime's vulnerability. At that moment, the regime's opponents anticipate a breakdown in the apparatus of the state, and their own calculation of risk-laden versus risk-averse actions are predicated on the likelihood that the regime will fail to crack down effectively. Under such circumstances, the forecast of a distant observer looses its force. However, if a prediction can be based on long-term, persistent factors, then the observer may be able to forecast significant change long before the relevant opponents appear on the political stage. In order see how this second form of prediction might work, it is necessary to turn to how persistent geopolitical factors enabled a second social scientist to forecast (well in advance!) the collapse of the Soviet Union.

GEOPOLITICS AND PREDICTION: THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION

In addition to the difficulty of coming up with a prediction of state breakdown well in advance, the "political stress indicator" theory does not directly account for one absolutely crucial event that took place during the Gorbachev years. Specifically, once Gorbachev decided to engage in demokratizatsiya ("democratization"), he decreed that new representative institutions should be established. In 1988, the Congress of the People's Deputies of the U.S.S.R., along with a Congress of People's Deputies in each republic, were established. In 1989 elections were held, and in the Baltic republics and in those of the Caucasus, the elected officials began to agitate for greater autonomy for their republics from the Soviet Union and then for independence. They quickly discovered that they could make common cause with the opponents of the communist regime in Russia who favored Boris Yeltsin's program of Russian autonomy from the multinational Soviet Union (Carrere d'Encausse, 1993). The details of this process of mass mobilization are less important than the fact that a sociologist predicted, well in advance of the event, that the Soviet Union would experience a territorial implosion due to the presence of unassimilated populations concentrated along the territorial periphery of the Soviet state.

Randall Collins (1986a; 1986b; 1999), a sociologist of wide ranging interests, advanced several geopolitical propositions about the territorial nature of states and empires in world history. These propositions are well understood by political geographers who are steeped in the classics of the field (Mahan, 1957; Mackinder 1981; Spykman, 1944, Lattimore, 1962; Parker, 1988), and no doubt appreciated to some extent by anyone who has played the board game "Risk." They are:

   A) States which are physically peripheral to others ("marchland states"
   ...) have an advantage [in war] over those which have potential enemies on
   more than one border. The marchland principle is especially important in
   that a series of other processes follow from it. These include (B) the
   tendency for interior states caught between several marchlands to fragment
   over long periods of time, and (C) the periodic simplification of
   geopolitics that occurs when rival marchland states have succeeded in fully
   assimilating the territories between them (Collins, 1986b, p. 168).

However, when states succeed in incorporating the territories along their frontiers, they may create the conditions for their own demise. This unintended consequence of geographic expansion is the result of--in the Collins' words--"geopolitical overextension." That condition "consists in fighting heavily on territories which are more than one ethnic/geographical heartland away from the political center (Collins,. 1986b, p. 168)."

During the 17th and 18th centuries the Russian empire expanded to the Baltic, south into the Caucuses, and east to the Pacific. Then in the 19th century, it incorporated the Islamic areas abutting on Iran and built the Trans-Siberian railroad. As a state incorporates distinctive nations along its border, it often strives to co-opt, integrate, subdue, or even disperse heterodox populations. Throughout its history, the Russian-dominated multi-national empire tried all these techniques, with varying degrees of success. Finally, in the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union conquered Eastern Europe and then dominated the region under the terms of the Warsaw Pact. (The settlement pattern of the Russian ethnic group as of 1979 was centered essentially on Moscow, the surrounding environs, and along the Trans-Siberian railroad route--as depicted in Figure 1). Collins suggests that Russian dominance was predicated on using communism and the Soviet Union as a cat's paw for continuing territorial aggrandizement. With the conquest and domination of Eastern Europe, the Russian heartland of the Soviet Union lost its strategic, marchland, advantage vis-a-vis the Western alliance, which in turn mobilized its resources along the maritime rim of Eurasia to contain further expansion.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In fact, when Collins (1986b, p. 194) added up the number of active duty troops the Soviet Union and its allies had as compared with its adversaries (including China) as of 1975-77, the Soviet Union's enemies totaled 9,320,000, whereas the Soviet Union and its allies had only 5,500,000. This gave the powers that were seeking to contain the Soviet Union and its allies a 1.7 to 1 advantage in active duty troops--and this was despite the fact that the Soviet Union and its allies were "3.5 times as heavily mobilized" as their adversaries. Thus, further expansion of the Russian empire would prove difficult to achieve given not only its geopolitical overextension, but also the military mobilization of China, NATO, and the rest.

It was this astute aligning of historical facts with classical geopolitical theories that allowed Collins to predict that the Soviet Union would encounter severe difficulties in Afghanistan. This military adventure required that it transport troops and supplies long distances overland. But this critical logistical factor was coupled with cultural factor, both of which resulted in friction. Supply lines had to pass through religiously and socially inhospitable terrain: that is, "across ... Kazakh, Uzbek, Tadzhik, and Turkmen ethnic areas" where Islamic populations, which potentially could develop sympathy with the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, reside (Collins, 1986b, p. 198). Figure 2 reinforces this point by showing the concentration of various national and ethnic minority groups along the territorial periphery of the Soviet Union. Collins foresaw that such military adventures along its far-flung frontiers contained the seeds for the future unraveling of the Russian empire.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

But his analysis did not stop there. Drawing on earlier work devoted to the extent of ethnic fragmentation of the population of various states, Collins compared the Soviet Union's with that of the United States. He found that in comparing these two multi-ethnic societies, the Soviet Union was more ethnically fragmented, and the ethnic groups were more territorially concentrated--that is, in the Soviet Union, they were positioned in both a political and geographic sense to mobilize--should the central regime collapse--on the basis of their ethno-territorial identities. Although Collins could not with any precision date the territorial implosion of the Soviet Union, he suggested that there was a high probability that it would occur sometime over the next generation (that is, over the twenty years from the early 1980s when he first presented these ideas.)

What he could not have foreseen was the precise course of events that led to the dissolution of this, the latest manifestation of the Russian empire.

For instance, Collins could not have foreseen how Gorbachev's calling of the Congress of People's Deputies in the various Soviet Republics into existence would accelerate the process of dissolution, though he did suggest that once this process began, it "would proceed at an accelerating rate." The predictive tether between one of the critical events of the actual revolution and the persistent geopolitical features of the multi-national Russian empire of the Soviet Union is very close. His prediction rested on the assumption that geopolitics creates long-term opportunities for and constraints on human action, and that under certain circumstances, political entrepreneurs will become fully aware of these geopolitical possibilities, and then act rationally to exploit them. In this instance, political entrepreneurs issued new nationalistic appeals to the ethnic populations of the Soviet Union, and in doing so mobilized new constituencies in favor of autonomy and independence.

Unfortunately, Collins (1986b) did not draw the Chinese population explicitly into his comparison of the Soviet Union with the United States. It would have been extremely interesting to learn the extent to which the Chinese population had fewer ethnic groups than either the Russians or the United States, and to what degree they were territorially concentrated. Such a comparison might have enabled him to predict the relative success of the Chinese attempt to contain temporarily political reform even as it enabled maritime districts to engage in private enterprise and international commerce--a factor that falls outside of Collin's elegant theory but which would need to be incorporated in order to assess the economic and political significance of the Chinese seaports and the relative absence of warm water ports in the Soviet Union (Sachs, Mellinger, Gallup, 2001; Hausmann, 2001). Despite this theoretical quibble, the implication of Collins' theory stands: to the extent the Han Chinese political reformers could not readily find many heterodox ethnic allies, seeking separate homelands located along the periphery of their empire, the Chinese Communists would remain in power.

Nor did Collins delineate how the Reagan administration's revision of the theory of containment affected the Russian empire. During the Reagan years, the United States deliberately sought to counter Soviet expansion through military means. By providing active support to the Afghan rebels, the Reagan administration contributed to a reverse domino effect--one that eventually led to discontent among the largely Islamic Soviet republics that abutted on Afghanistan. And, the Cuban effort to build an airstrip that accommodated MiG-23s--thereby threatening to cut U.S. maritime trade routes to and from the Panama Canal, the mouth of the Mississippi and the Venezuelan oil fields (as shown in Figure 3)--was effectively countered by a Marine-led invasion of Grenada in October 1983.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

These counter maneuvers directed at Soviet expansion destabilized the Russian empire in Eurasia by signaling that Soviet-inspired insurgency movements in the Third World would no longer be able to operate with complete impunity.

No doubt, other caveats, quibbles, and concerns might be raised with regard to Collins' prediction. But what is of particular interest here is the reception his ideas have had. It may be an apocryphal story, but it has been said that when Randall Collins first presented his predictions at various Ivy League universities in 1980, specialists found his conclusions preposterous --perhaps because they had an intellectual stake in their ongoing analyses of the Cold War. Unlike Jonah, whose prophecy convinced the King and the people of Ninevah to repent lest God destroy them, Collins was unable to persuade his university audiences to take heed. It is my impression that the mainstream media in the United States continues to ignore Collins' work, which presented a credible and valid prediction; one grounded in history and geopolitical theory, about the most important event of the latter half of the twentieth century. The refrain of that old rock and roll song (i.e., "don't know much about history ... don't know much about geography") may be all-too-true--but such ignorance among journalists and political elites is also extremely dangerous. At the end of the day, the Ninevites heeded Jonah and saved themselves; whereas those social scientists, like Collins, who use geopolitics to engage in serious prediction, are likely to be treated more like a Cassandra than a Jonah.

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Leonard Hochberg is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Louisiana State University. He is also the cofounder of www.stratfor.com.

The author acknowledges the generous support of Earhart Foundation and Scaife Foundation. The Peace Fellowship, awarded by the Hoover Institution several years ago, enabled me to discuss some of these ideas with military officers. Nancy Nicholson provided detailed commentary on the nature of scientific forecasting; Joseph Berger, Jack Goldstone, Robert Kaplan, Richard Nelson, and Mackubin Owens were encouraging at critical moments; Robert Paulsell rapidly produced the maps. All have my thanks. I suspect that Hari Seldon would recognize and appreciate the predictive skills of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Randall Collins, and George Friedman; I am extremely fortunate to know them all. Finally, I would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Michael Handel who, I trust, would have forgiven me for wandering on to his intellectual turf. Any errors remain mine alone.