A much more interesting (and less political) article than I expected from the headline. I grew up in and am best traveled in precisely the region that is featured in the article, the "Greater Mississippi Basin." My home town straddles the border between the original Treaty of Paris territory of the United States and the Louisiana Purchase territory. So the article's argument that where rivers flow and which rivers connect to which other rivers has much to do with the prosperity and the strategic aims of the United States is very interesting. Those of you joining in this discussion may find it particularly interesting to read the special section on London in the June 30th-July 6th issue of The Economist, with its discussion of the rise and fall and rise again of London as a prosperous, world-leading city. The article submitted here mentions mostly geographical factors as an influence on national strength and prosperity, while the section in this week's The Economist focuses on the legal and cultural framework of a country making a huge difference in the country's development, even when geography stays the same.

The discussion of United States history since the founding of the United States in the article brings to mind often forgotten facts. The territorial expansion of the United States as a unified political grouping had to take advantage of the Mississippi River basin as a matter of first importance. The article mentions building paved roads (the Cumberland Road) and neglects the history of canal projects in the United States while mentioning canals in other places. Of course the cost advantage of water transport via natural watercourses continues to this day, and has been very influential in world history. Thomas Sowell points out that Africa has exceptionally few rivers that are navigable all the way to a harbor on a seacoast compared to other continents, and very few rivers that are navigable at all. That constrained the development of trade networks in Africa and the development of many other learned cultural attributes of what countries with navigable rivers call "civilization." China developed early along navigable rivers that lead to the sea, and when the United States was settled by seafaring Europeans from trading cultures, its course of development was largely set.

The legal and cultural factors shaping national development should not be underestimated. In the 1770s, as the United States was breaking away from Britain, the world's greatest political scientists mostly wrote in English and lived in Britain or America. At the same time, the world's greatest mathematician (Leonhard Euler) was living in Russia, teaching the first of many generations of great Russian mathematicians. The United States, messy as its system is, has long benefited from the draw that freedom and democracy give the country to bring in talented people from around the world. More than half of all Americans are descended from ancestors who arrived in North America not speaking English (as is true of more than half of my ancestors), but day by day freedom with opportunity for voting and public expression of opinions on issues and an economy based largely on Adam Smith's principle of free trade joined together disparate groups of immigrants into a unified national population.

For the future, I don't think that the United States has any need to encourage fission or strife among countries on the Eurasian land mass, contrary to what the submitted article suggests. Rather, the United States can go on promoting what really has done the most to contribute to its national strength: democracy, civil liberties, free trade, and the rule of law. Those disruptive ideas do much to bring peace and stability to other countries and to remove the threat of war. "American identity" is an identity based on shared ideas, and as Abraham Lincoln noted in the Gettysburg address, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is an idea that can spread around the world far beyond the borders of the United States. Whatever the geographic conditions, everyone lives better where they can express dissent without fear of a government death squad and vote in new leaders from time to time.