If you know a country's geography, you can understand and predict its foreign policy. — Napoleon Bonaparte
Geopolitical power without military power is like a tiger without teeth. — Tim Marshall
No amount of ideology can change geographical realities. — Tim Marshall
The physical realities that underpin national and international politics are too often disregarded in both history and contemporary world affairs. — Tim Marshall
Geography is the art of the mappable. — Peter Haggett
Geography is destiny, and history is its interpreter. — Tim Marshall
The richest, most powerful countries on earth do not have to worry about geography. The poorest, weakest countries on earth are prisoners of geography. — Tim Marshall
In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. — Pearl S. Buck
It is impossible to understand history, international politics, the world economy, religions, philosophy, or ‘patterns of culture’ without taking geography into account. — Kenneth C. Davis
It is a fact that many of the wars and conflicts happening all over the world are aggravated or fought strictly for geopolitical fossil fuel energy interests, and many of the world's most dangerous regimes are funded by fossil fuel dollars. — Mark Ruffalo
The Soviets pulled their troops out of the north and the Americans out of the south. But a year later, an emboldened North Korean military fatally underestimated America’s Cold War geopolitical strategy and crossed the 38th parallel, intent on reuniting the peninsula. The Americans knew that if they didn’t stand up for South Korea, their other allies around the world would lose confidence in them. If America’s allies began to hedge their bets or go over to the Communist side, then its entire global strategy would be in trouble. Similarly, today, countries such as Poland, the Baltic States, Japan, and the Philippines need to be confident that America has their back when it comes to Russia and China. The U.S., leading a UN force, surged into Korea and pushed Northern troops to the border with China. Chinese troops — not wanting the U.S. within striking distance — fought back and after 36 months both sides agreed to a truce back on the 38th parallel. — Tim Marshall
[Globalization] has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well. — Amartya Sen
Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbors. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the chain; geopolitics dictates that it has to. — Tim Marshall
There are flash points between China and the U.S.. America’s treaty with Taiwan states that if the Chinese invade what they regard as their 23rd province, America will go to war. A red line for China, which could spark an invasion, is formal recognition of Taiwan by the U.S., or a declaration of independence by Taiwan. However, there’s no sign of either on the horizon. — Tim Marshall
Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process – moving from “traditional” to “modern” society – but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them. — Stephen Kotkin
The problem with fiat is that simply maintaining the wealth you already own requires significant active management and expert decision-making. You need to develop expertise in portfolio allocation, risk management, stock and bond valuation, real estate markets, credit markets, global macro trends, national and international monetary policy, commodity markets, geopolitics, and many other arcane and highly specialized fields in order to make informed investment decisions that allow you to maintain the wealth you already earned. You effectively need to earn your money twice with fiat, once when you work for it, and once when you invest it to beat inflation. The simple gold coin saved you from all of this before fiat. — Saifedean Ammous
World's major powers, including China and Russia, don't want to 'finance' American military adventures anymore. — Max Keiser
The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let's be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can't fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, exhaust? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we've sacrificed 300,000 of them. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Indeed, Russia and the U.S. were allies during the two tragic conflicts of the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there's something objectively bringing us together in difficult times, and I think - I believe - it has to do with geopolitical interests and also has a moral component. — Vladimir Putin
For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. — Zbigniew Brzezinski
Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. — Zbigniew Brzezinski
It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it. — Zbigniew Brzezinski
The national interest is predetermined by geopolitics or the history of a country. Important political leaders never just followed their interests - they were concerned about the interests of their people. — Joseph Nye
Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works. — Kurt Bills
The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role. — Zbigniew Brzezinski
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. [...] For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. — Charles Krauthammer
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. — Vladimir Putin
If you belong to a small country that is geopolitically not that important, or strategically not that important, you have no place among nations. Those countries are neglected and left to fend for themselves. — Pankaj Mishra
When the United States was in control of counternarcotics, the US governments used drug trafficking for purely geopolitical purposes .... The US uses drug trafficking and terrorism for political control .... We have nationalised the fight against drug trafficking. — Evo Morales
President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons. — Henry A. Kissinger
In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications. That’s both because of the physicality of computing–where the speed of light still matters–and because of geopolitics. — Satya Nadella
The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones. — Nouriel Roubini
For future geopolitical stability and global prosperity, we need to build a culture of greater trust and understanding between China, America and the rest of the world. — Stephen A. Schwarzman
Although our eyes can not penetrate the darkness of the future, scientific geopolitical analysis enables us to make certain predictions. — Karl Haushofer
If NATO troops walk in Crimea, they will immediately deploy their forces there. Such a move would be geopolitically sensitive for us because, in this case, Russia would be practically ousted from the Black Sea area. We'd be left with just a small coastline of 450 or 600km, and that's it! — Vladimir Putin
Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. — Zbigniew Brzezinski
On the one side, I welcome prosecutions of individuals such as Pinochet, and would welcome the indictment, prosecution, and punishment of Kissinger. On the other side is the geopolitical reality that only those in the global South are likely to experience the impact of Universal Jurisdiction. — Richard A. Falk
We must break out of this mindset in Australia that we are a small nation on the other side of the world from the main, great Western nations. Australia is the twelfth largest economy in the world. We are a not insignificant player in commerce, in geopolitics and we must be in culture as well and we are. — George Brandis
First, we have to find a common vocabulary for energy security. This notion has a radically different meaning for different people. For Americans it is a geopolitical question. For the Europeans right now it is very much focused on the dependence on imported natural gas. — Daniel Yergin
I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history. — Steven Johnson
In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor. — Steven Spielberg
I believe it is still true that conflicts among major powers usually stem from geopolitical rivalries but rarely from economic competition. — Robert Kagan
We are living in a world where major states and large geopolitical projects have to prove their competitive edge. It is clear, as well, that with regard to the intensifying American-Chinese confrontation and the inert power of a united Europe, Russia has to make up its mind - because it is losing ground as an independent center of power. — Garry Kasparov
I think the next 50 years are going to present the human race with challenges that so far exceed the limitations of geopolitical boundaries or nationalist identity. We're going to be up against challenges that we can barely fathom at this point. So how we embrace them and deal with them will define a great many things about where we go, but, you know, it's hard to say. We're teetering on the edge, I would say. — Zachary Quinto
The Kremlin said Yeltsin was committed to the deal, however. President Yeltsin states clearly and unequivocally that he is an initiator of the unification of the two fraternal states and their peoples, a consistent and firm supporter of it, ... It is a geopolitical necessity and an economic reality. — Sergey Yastrzhembsky
The geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world, from the ease with which [it] swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged. — Bono
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