Determinism and Foreign Policy

Robert Kaplan has an article in the current Foreign Policy recommending geographic determinism as a basis for understanding geopolitics. He recommends that we reject the theories of the NeoCons as simplistic, and revisit the theories of earlier writers who better understood the area from the Mediterranean to Bangladesh and China. He focuses on geographic determinism.

Perhaps it is a quibble, but he describes a change in the determining factor when Europeans successfully develop sea routes around Africa to Asia. It seems to me that the development of ships able to make the journey reliably might be better seen as a technological determinant of the following history, and indeed the development of an understanding of the African coast and the sea routes might be seen as a scientific accomplishment which also helped determine the future course of history.

Kaplan give attention to urbanization, which suggests demographic deterministic factors. Moreover, it would not have been possible to develop a world in which more than half the inhabitants live in urban areas without developing the technologies by which a minority of the population could feed all,-- another technological determinant.

I lean toward a multifactoral theory of the determinants of history,