I hope no one has tired of the well-worn saying that if a person does not choose his parents, states do not choose their neighbors. To which one might add the region as well, since a region is made up of adjoining neighbors that have lived a shared history in which each country’s interests took shape according to what its people and its leadership settled upon.
The establishment of the state of Israel astride the line separating the eastern and western halves of the Arab world produced ongoing conflicts and wars. At that time Iraq's invasion of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein had not yet come to pass, nor had border disputes among the Arab states been settled; and certainly, it had not yet entered the maddest dreams of the ISIS terrorist organization to found a "caliphate" on the Syrian-Iraqi border.
In general, geography, as an expression of place, has taken up a great deal of human attention. In the human sciences it has given rise to important terms covering relations of power between neighbors, or between regions of neighbors - what has been called the geopolitical, where tendencies toward hegemony and control come into play. And when economics and mutual benefit enter into it, it becomes the geoeconomic.
Globalization, which was built on planetary relations across the earth, went beyond both of these into another kind of competition, one into which culture, identity, and religion entered. The world, having grown small, became a kind of neighborhood in which states and regions compete. When it became apparent that this was causing world wars in which the atomic bomb was used, it forced a global maturing of international law, which has itself now come under scrutiny. The modern world has tried to move past this, as is well known, through regional formations in which free trade was the starting point and which then extended into other fields of exchange and cooperation.
Europe was the pioneer, because of the Second World War, and so came the European Union. Asia followed in the wake of the Vietnam war and the wars of Southeast Asia, when ASEAN was born. In North America the grouping was born that brings together the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In South America a free trade area was born, Mercosur, comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
All these attempts were efforts to merge political geography with economic geography and to take both in cooperative directions that would prevent war and advance peace. Despite its military form, the NATO alliance straddled the European and North American regions.
With the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, this orientation took another turn, with the eruption of conflicts and wars. The Russian-Ukrainian case imposed a geographic and historical neighborhood between Russia and Ukraine, whether in the era of the Russian tsars or under the Bolsheviks, and it carried an important influence after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A glance at the maps shows that Ukraine was always situated in Russia's embrace, a condition compounded by Moscow's annexation in 2014 of the Crimean peninsula, which Nikita Khrushchev had attached to Ukraine in 1954, making it part of the Soviet system. Ukraine was one of three Soviet republics - with Russia and Belarus - that represented the Soviet Union in international organizations. Ukraine had its own virtues as a substantial part of the Soviet Union's agricultural and industrial base. It also had its ample share of Soviet military industry, particularly the nuclear part of it.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and Russia's declaration of independence from it gave 14 other republics the chance to become independent, Ukraine among them. But that was perhaps the beginning of processes of fragmentation affecting many federal unions, such as Yugoslavia and Ethiopia, and of the rise of sectarianism and ethnicity as foundations for states that found themselves worthy of taking part in globalization in their own person rather than through the persons of others.
The Middle Eastern condition that followed the "Arab Spring" rested politically and strategically on two concepts. The first was that the contradictions and conflicts inside the state were fiercer and bloodier than any other regional conflicts. Civil war spread through more than one country, and in others tensions were sharp enough to require either external intervention or the armed forces taking over the running of politics.
The second was that the state's effectiveness contracted as a principal actor in regional relations, and alongside it there appeared actors that were not states, such as the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood group and its subordinate militias, subjecting political and economic geography alike to absolute concepts. What is happening requires further thought and study.
