Geography Returns
The globalization era convinced us that “where” didn’t matter. It always mattered — we just stopped paying attention.
For three decades, we were told that geography was dead. Capital flowed everywhere instantly. Information moved at the speed of light. Supply chains could stretch across oceans without friction. The “flat world” meant that where you made things, where resources sat, where production happened—none of it mattered anymore.
This was always a fantasy. But it was a profitable one, so we believed it.
Now the fantasy is over. Remember the old Corn Flakes slogan, “try them again for the first time”? That’s where we are with geography. We’re being asked to rediscover what every strategist before the internet age already knew: where matters. The physical location of production capacity, the geographic concentration of critical resources, the territory that controls chokepoints and supply routes—these determine power.
China understood this the entire time. While America convinced itself that geography was obsolete, Beijing was systematically securing control over the physical landscape of production.
What We Pretended Not to See
The globalization narrative went like this: in the modern economy, competitive advantage comes from innovation, not manufacturing. The United States would design products; others would make them. We’d stay ahead through superior ideas while production dispersed globally to wherever labor was cheapest.
This required believing that “where things are made” was a commodity decision, not a strategic one. If you could design the iPhone, it didn’t matter that Foxconn assembled it in Shenzhen. If you invented the semiconductor, it didn’t matter that TSMC fabricated it in Taiwan. Location was just an optimization problem for cost accountants.
Except location was never just about cost. It was always about control.
The Geography of Dependence
China spent the past thirty years securing geographic control over every physical bottleneck in global production:
Rare earth elements. Not because China has all the deposits, but because China controls the mining, processing, and refining infrastructure. Over 80% of rare earth processing happens in China. You can find neodymium in California, but good luck turning it into magnets for electric motors without Chinese facilities.
Semiconductor fabrication. The most advanced chips are made almost entirely in Taiwan and South Korea. China doesn’t dominate this—yet—but the geographic concentration creates massive vulnerability. When production of the world’s most critical technology depends on factories within range of Chinese missiles, geography matters.
Active pharmaceutical ingredients. China produces the base chemicals for roughly 80% of U.S. pharmaceuticals. During COVID, we discovered that masks, gowns, ventilators—basic medical supplies—came overwhelmingly from Chinese factories. The “global supply chain” meant Chinese geography.
Battery production. China controls 77% of global battery cell production capacity. Not because batteries require some unique Chinese innovation, but because China built the factories, secured the lithium and cobalt supply chains, and scaled production while we theorized about the “knowledge economy.”
Manufacturing equipment. The machines that make other machines increasingly come from China. This isn’t just about current production—it’s about the ability to rebuild industrial capacity even if we wanted to.
In every case, the pattern is the same: production concentrated in specific locations, controlled by specific actors, creating dependencies that can’t be wished away with better ideas or more innovation.
The Chokepoint Geography
It’s not just about where production happens. It’s about where things move.
The South China Sea. One-third of global shipping passes through these waters. China has been systematically militarizing artificial islands, creating facts on the ground—or water—that assert control over one of the world’s most critical trade routes. Not because they have a legal claim everyone accepts, but because they can physically dominate the space.
The Taiwan Strait. The narrowest point is 81 miles wide. That’s the distance between mainland China and the island that produces the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Geography makes Taiwan both invaluable and vulnerable. Any analysis of semiconductor security that ignores this physical reality is fantasy.
Arctic shipping routes. As ice melts, new paths open between Asia and Europe. China is already positioning itself as a “near-Arctic state”—a designation that makes no geographic sense but reflects Beijing’s understanding that future trade routes require physical presence and control.
Suez and Malacca. The classic maritime chokepoints haven’t become irrelevant in the digital age. They’ve become more important as supply chains stretched globally. China’s Belt and Road Initiative isn’t primarily about development—it’s about securing physical infrastructure along the routes that matter.
Geography creates chokepoints. Chokepoints create leverage. Leverage creates power.
The Delusion of Dematerialization
How did we convince ourselves that geography didn’t matter?
In part, because the digital economy seemed to prove it. Software doesn’t care where it’s written. Cloud computing works the same everywhere. Information wants to be free—and location-independent.
But even the digital economy has a physical substrate. Data centers sit in specific locations, consuming massive amounts of electricity. Fiber optic cables run along the ocean floor, vulnerable to interdiction. The semiconductor fabrication plants that make the chips powering AI are in Taiwan, not in some ethereal cloud.
We mistook the dematerialization of some services for the dematerialization of power itself. That was the error.
Every economy, no matter how “advanced” or “knowledge-based,” ultimately rests on physical stuff made in physical places. If we’re outsourcing the making of physical stuff, we’re offshoring the foundation of power, and we shouldn’t be surprised when the country that ends up making everything also ends up with leverage.
What “Reshoring” Actually Means
There’s been a lot of talk about reshoring, friend-shoring, and rebuilding American manufacturing. These are steps in the right direction. But they reveal how much ground we’ve lost.
Reshoring isn’t just about moving factories back to the United States. It’s about rebuilding entire ecosystems of production that take decades to develop:
The skilled workforce that knows how to operate advanced manufacturing equipment
The supplier networks that provide components and materials
The institutional knowledge of how to scale production efficiently
The infrastructure—power, water, transport—that advanced manufacturing requires
We can’t rebuild this overnight. And we can’t rebuild it everywhere. Geography matters here too: some locations have advantages in power costs, port access, proximity to suppliers, or workforce availability.
The question isn’t whether to bring production back. It’s whether we can, and whether we’re willing to accept that “where we make things” is a strategic imperative, not an economic optimization problem.
The New (Old) Geography of Power
In the emerging order, advantage flows to countries and blocs that control:
The physical locations where critical things are made. Not designed—made. Not “headquartered”—produced.
The territory containing resources required for production. Rare earths, lithium, cobalt, but also mundane things like the sand required for semiconductor fabrication.
The infrastructure connecting production to markets. Ports, shipping routes, rail networks, energy grids. The physical substrate of trade.
The chokepoints through which goods and materials must flow. Straits, canals, mountain passes. The places where geography creates bottlenecks.
This isn’t a new framework. It’s how power worked for most of human history. The British Empire didn’t dominate because it had better ideas about governance—it dominated because it controlled sea lanes, resources, and production. The United States didn’t win World War II through superior ideology—we won because we could out-produce everyone else, and our geography made us nearly impossible to attack.
The flat world was always an illusion. Geography never stopped mattering. We just stopped paying attention while China systematically secured control over the locations and routes that determine who can make what, and who can stop others from making anything at all.
What This Means Going Forward
The recognition that geography matters has profound implications:
Alliances are about geography now, not just values. We need allies who control critical locations and resources. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia—these aren’t just “like-minded democracies.” They’re geographic positions that matter in the contest with China.
Industrial policy must account for location. Where you build semiconductor fabs matters. Not just for cost, but for security. A fab in Arizona is defensible. A fab in Taiwan is hostage to Chinese forbearance.
Resource security is back. The United States has rare earth deposits. We’ve chosen not to process them because China did it cheaper. That was treating geography as an optimization problem when it’s actually a strategic one.
Infrastructure is the new arms race. Ports, power grids, manufacturing facilities—these are the equivalent of battleships and bombers in previous eras. The country that controls the physical infrastructure of production controls more than the country with the biggest military budget but no industrial base.
China’s Geographic Strategy
Beijing understood this from the beginning. While we were busy declaring that geography was dead and the knowledge economy would rule everything, China was:
Building ports globally (Belt and Road)
Securing resource supplies (mines in Africa, Latin America)
Concentrating production in Chinese territory
Militarizing strategic waterways
Creating dependencies by being the only place critical things are made
This wasn’t accidental. It was strategy based on an older understanding of power: control the physical landscape of production, control the chokepoints, make yourself indispensable to everyone else’s economy.
We called this “mercantilism” and dismissed it as backward thinking. Turns out that when mercantilism controls where things are made and how they move, the “advanced” knowledge economy is just an intellectual superstructure resting on someone else’s foundation.
The Test
The test of American seriousness about competition with China is whether we’re willing to accept that geography matters, even when acknowledging that means admitting how much ground we’ve lost.
It means accepting that:
We need manufacturing in America, even if it costs more
We need domestic resource processing, even if Chinese processing is cheaper
We need control over our supply chains, even if that means less efficiency
We need infrastructure investments at wartime scale, even if that requires sacrifice elsewhere
The alternative is continuing to pretend that because we’re good at innovation and have nice headquarters buildings in Silicon Valley, we can maintain primacy while outsourcing everything that matters to rivals.
That’s not strategy. That’s nostalgia for a world that never really existed, decorated with buzzwords about the knowledge economy.
Geography Never Left
The globalization era didn’t make geography irrelevant. It just made us irrelevant to the geographic arrangements being made.
While we convinced ourselves that where didn’t matter, China was making sure where mattered more than ever—and that China controlled the places that count.
Now we’re being told to care about geography again. Experience it for the first time, as if Mackinder and Mahan and every strategist before the Internet age hadn’t already understood what we’re breathlessly “discovering.”
Geography is back but it never really left — we just stopped looking at the map.