How Geography Becomes Power · Day 1 of 30

Switzerland's Bill, Poland's Bill

In 1940, the Swiss army began drilling tunnels into the Alps. The plan was called the R cduit cnational cc the National Redoubt. If Germany invaded, the Swiss would abandon the flat northern part of the country, where most of the people and factories were, and pull back into the mountains. From fortresses dug into rock at places like Sargans, Saint-Maurice and the Gotthard, they would hold out and, crucially, blow up the rail tunnels that let German and Italian freight cross the Alps. The message to Berlin was simple. You can have the country, but you will not have the tunnels, and you will pay for every kilometre of valley.

That threat only worked because of the ground. A ridge is a fact. You can go over it or around it, and both cost money and time. General Henri Guisan, the Swiss commander, did not invent Swiss safety. He priced it.

Now look at Poland in the same decade. Poland had a larger army than Switzerland, conscription, a serious officer corps and a government that was not naive about Germany. In September 1939 it lasted about five weeks, attacked from the west on the 1st and from the east by the Soviet Union on the 17th. The problem was not courage or planning. The problem was that Poland’s western border ran across open farmland with no ridge, no gorge and no real river line to hold, and the country was over 600 kilometres wide with Germany on one flank and the Soviet Union on the other. To defend it properly you would need to defend all of it. That bill was beyond any Polish budget.

This is the idea the whole course is built on, so it is worth stating flatly. Geography does not decide what a country does. It decides what things cost. Mountains, coastlines, rivers, deserts and distance are not orders. They are a price list. Every state can read the list and then choose to pay or not pay. Some choose badly. Some pay enormous sums for things their geography makes expensive, and occasionally they get what they wanted anyway. But the list is real and it changes slowly, which is why it is useful for thinking about the next thirty years rather than the next thirty days.

You can see the price list working by taking one ambition and asking what it costs in each place. Take neutrality cc staying out of other people’s wars. Switzerland has held to it since 1815, when the Congress of Vienna recognised Swiss neutrality as permanent. It stayed out of both world wars. Poland declared neutrality too, in the 1930s, under a policy its foreign minister J cszef Beck called balance between Berlin and Moscow cc non-aggression pacts with both, alliance with neither. It collapsed in 1939.

Why did the same policy work in one place and fail in the other? Partly because neutrality is only credible if invading you is a bad deal. For Germany in 1940, taking Switzerland meant fighting uphill for the one asset it actually wanted, the Alpine rail links, which the Swiss had rigged to destroy. Better to leave the Swiss alone and use those tunnels commercially, which is roughly what happened: Swiss railways carried German and Italian freight through the war while Swiss banks did business Germany could not easily do elsewhere. Neutrality was worth more to Berlin than conquest. For Germany in 1939, by contrast, Poland was not an obstacle to be bought off. It was the flat corridor between Germany and everything east of it. Whoever holds that ground controls the route. You cannot be usefully neutral when your territory itself is the thing being fought over.

Notice what this does not say. It does not say Switzerland was fated to be safe. The Swiss spent heavily to make the mountains mean something cc by 1940 they had mobilised somewhere around 400,000 men out of a population of roughly four million, which is an extraordinary share of a small country, and they kept building the Redoubt fortifications for decades afterwards. Mountains without an army are just scenery. Plenty of highland places have been overrun. The terrain lowered the price of defence; it did not hand out defence for free.

And it does not say Poland was doomed. Polish choices mattered enormously. The decision to fight in 1939 rather than accept German demands over Danzig was a choice, and so was the 1934 pact with Germany, and so was the country’s post-1989 rush into NATO, joining in 1999. That last one is the best illustration of the whole argument. Poland could not buy defensible terrain. Terrain is the one thing you cannot import. So it bought the next best substitute: other people’s armies, contractually committed. An alliance is what you purchase when your geography will not sell you safety at any price you can afford. Switzerland has never needed to join NATO. It is not that the Swiss are more independent-minded than the Poles. It is that independence is cheaper in Bern.

The same logic runs in the other direction, and this is the part people miss. Switzerland’s mountains, which make it hard to invade, also make it hard to farm, hard to move goods through and hard to build in. The country imports about half its food. It has no coast, no oil, no coal worth speaking of. Its wealth came from choosing industries where the mountains do not tax you much cc precision instruments, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, banking, things with high value and low weight. Poland’s flat, fertile plain, so terrible to defend, is excellent to plough and cheap to build roads and railways across. Poland is one of Europe’s largest agricultural producers and a manufacturing hub precisely because nothing gets in the way. The ground that invites armies also invites trucks.

So each country got a bill and a discount in the same envelope. Switzerland pays high transport and food costs and gets cheap security. Poland gets cheap transport and fertile land and pays ruinously for security cc in 1939 in blood, and today in the roughly 4 per cent of national income it spends on defence, among the highest in NATO.

Hold on to that framing, because everything ahead depends on it. When we get to straits, pipelines, rivers and alliances, the question will never be what does this geography force a country to do. It will always be what does this geography make cheap, what does it make expensive, and who is paying.

The interesting thing about a price list is that states sometimes pay anyway.