Geography is destiny

When I was in school, I read an interview book called [Giant and the Silly] by a journalist named Oriana Palaci published in 1979. After reading Palaci's interview with Khomeini, who had just taken power at the time, I thought Khomeini's conversation was very self-righteous and immersed in his world even in my childhood. Similarly, by inferring the scene, I thought that Christianity would have some of that side, but to some extent, it was also like that.

 

However, in LA RABBIA EL'ORGOGLIO, which was published as soon as 2000, there was a statement from an Islamic representative who attended a religious conference organized by the Vatican.

 

"By means of your democracy we will invade you, by means of our religion we will rule you."

 

The Islamic representative made an insult to the Vatican that was almost a defeat from a third party's point of view. I tried to understand why Islam is belligerent and its belligerence will not end, and why Israel must be belligerent to survive in the meantime. Later, I understood how climate and geography affect people's character, the geographic location of Islamic countries or North Korea, and how crude the climate was, and wrote several times that a harsh environment poses a risk of enhancing belligerence. And once again, with the help of artificial intelligence, we have time to organize.

 

 

 

Geography Is Destiny

The Geopolitical Roots of Middle East Conflict and North Korean Belligerence

Lee Hyeong-chun · A View from the Third-Party Perspective

Preface: Wars Fought in the Name of God

Israel and Iran both trace their roots to the same monotheistic tradition. In 539 BCE, the Persian King Cyrus the Great freed the Jews captive in Babylon and sent them back to Jerusalem. The Bible honored him as a king appointed by God. For millennia, Jewish communities lived peacefully within the borders of Iran. Yet today, the two nations define each other as targets for elimination.

 

Why? It is not God who is at war. It is human power, borrowed in God’s name, that wages the fighting.

 

Religion is the flag, ideology is the language — but land, water, and resources are the substance.

 

Chapter 1. The Same Root, Different Fates — Israel and Iran

The Illusion of Religion and Ethnicity

The Israel-Iran conflict is commonly read as a religious war between Judaism and Islam. But this is a surface-level interpretation. Persians (Iranians) are Indo-European Aryans while Jews are Semitic — ethnically, they are from different lineages. Religiously, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all Abrahamic faiths that worship the same God.

 

Category	Israel	Iran
Ethnic Origin	Semitic	Indo-European Aryan
Religion	Judaism	Shia Islam
Historical Relationship	Protected	Protector (Cyrus Liberation)
After 1979	Adversarial	Islamic Revolutionary State

 

The Real Structure of Conflict

The 1979 Islamic Revolution under Khomeini was not merely a change of government. It was the installation of 7th-century militant Islam onto 20th-century state power. Iran’s adoption of ‘anti-Israel’ as a national identity was not a theological inevitability — it was a political choice to sustain the legitimacy of a revolutionary regime.

 

Israel’s belligerence has a different character. Two thousand years of diaspora, Russian pogroms, the Holocaust with six million dead — the conviction that ‘weakness means death’ is etched into the national DNA. The problem is when this survival instinct is repurposed as justification for bombing Palestinian civilians. The memory of victimhood is not a moral exemption.

 

Chapter 2. Why Is Islam Structurally Aggressive?

As Oriana Fallaci witnessed firsthand, the language of Khomeini and the clerical class dripped with blood. This was not a matter of individual temperament — it was a structural product.

 

Factor	Content
The Founder’s Role	Jesus (martyr), Buddha (contemplative), Muhammad (conqueror and military leader) — the very role model differs
Binary World View	Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) vs. Dar al-Harb (House of War) — non-Islamic lands are inherently subject to conquest
The Dual Nature of Jihad	The inner struggle (Greater Jihad) converts instantly to external war logic once politicized
Theocracy	Sharia is law — compromise and secularism are defined as apostasy

 

Yet blaming Islam’s aggression alone is only half the analysis. The soil for this aggression is the nomadic culture of survival in the extreme harshness of the Arabian Peninsula, absorbed into religious form. Geography comes first.

 

Chapter 3. Barren Geography Breeds Belligerence

The Fertile Crescent — The Stage of Five Thousand Years of War

The Fertile Crescent — the arc connecting the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile river valleys — was the cradle of humanity’s first agricultural civilizations. With desert on all sides, this was the only land with water and fertile soil. As a result, every empire for five thousand years sought to seize it.

 

Sumer → Akkad → Babylon → Assyria → Persia → Alexander → Rome → Arab → Mongol → Ottoman → Britain and France → United States. The lineage of conquerors is world history itself.

 

The people born in this land have lived for millennia in a structure of taking and being taken from. Distrust and aggression are not the products of ideology or religion — they are learned survival behaviors. Even today, Middle East conflicts are ultimately about who controls the land’s resources and corridors. Religion is the flag; ideology is the language.

 

North Korea — Geography Shapes Disposition

Geographic Condition	Result
80% mountainous terrain	Fundamental limits on agricultural productivity
Subarctic climate	Short growing seasons → chronic food shortages
Encircled by major powers	China, Russia, US-garrisoned South Korea → siege mentality embedded in national character
External investment impossible	War structure → deeper poverty → greater belligerence (a vicious cycle)

 

North Korea’s nuclear development is not madness. For a country structurally unable to feed its people through economic means, constantly inflating external threats to maintain internal cohesion, and with military power as its only bargaining chip — it is a rational survival strategy. Geography made destiny.

 

Chapter 4. The Structure of Religious and Ideological Conflict

Religious and ideological conflicts appear to arise because ‘the people are ignorant.’ But history is full of counterexamples. Nazi Germany had one of the highest education levels in the world at the time, and the Holocaust was designed by doctors, lawyers, and professors. The core of Iran’s revolution also consisted of highly educated theologians and jurists.

 

Knowledge confined within an in-group only produces more refined hatred. This is knowledge turned into a weapon.

 

The true structure of conflict combines three variables:

 

Variable	Content
Fear and Deprivation	Hungry and insecure people are drawn to leaders who name simple enemies — regardless of education level
Elite Design	The masses are fuel; the leadership is the ignition. Every conflict has an architect.
Absence of Institutions	Without press freedom, judicial independence, and critical education, even the educated follow demagogues

 

Chapter 5. The Third-Party Perspective — Why Geography and History Free the Mind

Having experienced Korea’s major religions firsthand, and after deep study of geography and history, finding that attachment to religion fades — this is a significant epistemological shift.

 

The shock of geography: which land you were born in determines which god you believe in. Born in the Gyeongsang region of Korea and you’re in a Buddhist-Confucian culture; born in the Middle East and you’re Muslim; born in India and you’re Hindu. It is not God who chose — it is latitude and longitude that assigned the god.

 

The shock of history: every religion has passed through phases of birth, growth, corruption, and institutionalization, and throughout that process, power, politics, and war have shaped and reshaped doctrine. The Bible, the Quran, the Buddhist sutras — before they are the words of God, they are the edited products of specific groups in specific eras.

 

To see the language of any group — including religion — as truth from the inside and structure from the outside. That is the third-party perspective.

 

Conclusion: The Eye That Sees Structure

The Israel-Iran conflict, Islamic aggression, North Korean belligerence, the chronic disorders of the Middle East — all of these operate not on the basis of God or ideology, but on the material foundation built by geographic conditions. Barren land, scarce resources, and encircled geopolitical positions produce belligerence as a survival strategy, which is then packaged in the language of religion and ideology.

 

The leadership class benefits from maintaining this structure. That is why they are uncomfortable with a well-informed citizenry. Those who know ask ‘Why?’; those who do not know say ‘Yes.’