Ignoring its main content, it includes an aside that interests me. Stephens mentions "the notion that geography no longer matters, the high ground, the warm water ports and everything else that nations have fought over since time immemorial are superfluous in our 21st century world."
As I do with most problems in the world today, I think this notion is rooted in bad philosophy. Outside of talk about borders ("how can we really say where one country starts and the other country ends?"), this comes up in plenty of other contexts. Think extreme linguistic descriptivism: "Languages are defined by their users, how can we say that any particular grammatical usage is an error?" Think of the definition of personhood: "We can't pin down exactly when two gametes have reached 'conception,' so let's just say an embryo can't be a person."
It's positivism mutating into nominalism. It's the lazy idea that, since we can't absolutely define something with absolutely no grey area, there's no point in trying to define it at all.
It's despair, ultimately rooted in a lack of faith. If there's no God (even in the Aristotelian, if not the full Christian conception), there's no final arbiter of truth. There's no standard to conform to. We all make up our own definitions, or we decide that definitions don't matter anyway. And once there are no definitions, reason goes out the window, leaving will and power. You don't have to know a lot about history to know that doesn't end well.
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