British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin once quipped that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Apparently, so are disease outbreaks.
The Washington Post ran a great article by Kim Yi Dionne and Laura Seay lamenting that most American’s lack of knowledge about the geography of Africa (exacerbated by a distorted Mercator projection that makes the continent look much smaller on maps that it really is) results in a lumping together of all of Africa, when the Ebola outbreak is actually quite localized. The distance from South Africa to the outbreak area — more than 3,000 miles — is a thousand miles further than the distance from Los Angeles to New York City. Perhaps a bit more finesse is needed. I wonder: how much of the public discourse about foreign policy is based on our fuzzy knowledge of geography? Time to break the maps out . . .
