Geography hasn’t gone away. The global elite—leading academics, intellectuals, foreign policy analysts, foundation heads and corporate power brokers, as well as many Western leaders—may largely have forgotten about it. But what we’re witnessing now is geography’s revenge: in the East-West struggle for control of the buffer state of Ukraine, in the post–Arab Spring fracturing of artificial Middle Eastern states into ethnic and sectarian fiefs and in the unprecedented arms race being undertaken by East Asian states as they dispute potentially resource-rich waters. Technology hasn’t negated geography; it has only made it more precious and claustrophobic.
This appears in the March 31, 2014 issue of TIME.