By James R. Holmes
Cartography helps set the parameters within which debates over policy and strategy unfold.
We mathematicians often stand accused of skullduggery, but we’ve got nothing on cartographers. Mark Twain jested that there were lies, damned lies, and statistics. An old book from the 1950s instructs readers How to Lie with Statistics. So fraught is the situation that University of Wisconsin math professor Jordan Ellenberg wrote an entire book — and a laugh-out-loud funny one at that — to debunk faulty mathematical thinking and the misadventures to which it gives rise. Such are the consequences of our dark art.
But if numbers inform — and sometimes misinform — think about maps. A map or nautical chart is a picture. It’s a visual medium that conveys lots of seemingly factual information at a glance. One vignette. Europeans, and Europeanists, fret constantly that the United States must turn its back on Europe to pivot to Asia. You have to blame the Mercator map of the world for such claims. If Washington, D.C. is America’s geopolitical pivot point, and if we assume U.S. leaders can only gaze in one direction, then pivoting to the Far East does indeed mean doing an about-face.
When I discuss the rebalance with various audiences, consequently, I’ve taken to showing the pivot on a Mercator map … and then showing it on a polar azimuthal equidistant projection a spaceman’s-eye view down on the North Pole. When you do so, behold! Forces based on the U.S. west coast and Hawaii surge across the Pacific Ocean, sweeping around one side of the Eurasian periphery. But forces based on the east coast reach Asia through the Mediterranean and Red seas, their closest route to the western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. That pathway takes them around Eurasia’s other side.
Read the full story at The Diplomat