Tema: The Mexican American war

Another excerpt from Robert D Kaplan on Mexico and the US (from an interview):

RFE/RL: What about America’s geographic position – you say it has benefited immensely from its two oceans.

Kaplan: Americans like to think they’re a great people because of who they are, because they’re a great democracy. But I would argue that Americans are a great people also because of where they happen to live: in the last, large, resource-rich part of the temperate zone. Not only that, but it’s a large swath of the temperate zone, with great inland waterways that, rather than the rivers in Russia -- which divide Russia because they flow north to south, [or] north, rather than east to west.

The waterways in the United States unite the continent from east to west. To the north, the U.S. is protected by the Canadian Arctic. There’s of course, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which make the U.S. a virtual island, give it protection, but also clear pathways to trade with Europe and East Asia.

The only problem the U.S. has with its geography is the threat of Mexican demography to the south. The border with Mexico is fairly artificial. You’re dealing with a border between a First World country and a Third World country. You have Latinos on both sides of the border – many of the cities on the U.S. side of the border have large Hispanic populations -- so it’s the future of Mexico, which on the one hand is one of the largest economies in the world, [and] on the other hand, is undermined by drug violence and drug cartels -- it’s the future of Mexico that will help determine the future of the United States. The future of the United States may have a north-south orientation rather than the east-west, sea-to-shining-sea of patriotic myth orientation.

http://www.rferl.org/content/robert-kaplan-geography-fate-nations/24704951.html