Kazakhstan is Mackinder’s Heartland!
The sum of virtue, Hobbes writes, is to be sociable with them that will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not.1
The two world wars were about whether or not Germany would dominate the Heartland of Eurasia that lay to its east, while the Cold War centered on the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe
Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.
With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius’s army marching into nowhere on an in...
While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that...
We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back m...
The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the...
Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.
Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline—for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still.
James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan (New York: Routledge, 2008); Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, Command of the Sea with Chinese Charac...
I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.
Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past...
Any act of intolerance, of ideological intransigence, or of proselytism exposes the beastly core of all enthusiasm….One can never stay far enough from the clutches of a prophet.
Idea of Central Europe has a fatal geographical flaw. Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the crush zone that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its oceanic interests,
Another case of America becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands
There were just so many cafés now—bearing conceited names such as Charme, Rembrandt, La Muse—with their chairs and tables made of wicker, zinc, velvet, blond wood, and black metal, each establishment...
The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those wh...
The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, H...
Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks to...