Prisoners Of Geography Quotes

Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.

Sometimes you will hear leaders say, “I’m the only person who can hold this nation together.” If that’s true then that leader has truly failed to build their nation.’ That

What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other.

Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?

Agad bowed to the Fairy Queen. 'You are most wise, your majesty. Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.

All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

One man's imagined community is another man's political prison.

There are fifty American states, but they add up to one nation in a way the twenty-eight sovereign states of the European Union never can. Most of the EU states have a national identity far stronger, more defined, than any American state. It is easy to find a French person who is French first, European second, or one who pays little allegiance to the idea of Europe, but an American identifies with their Union in a way few Europeans do theirs. This is explained by the geography, and the history of the unification of the United States.

Equally important, anyone stupid enough to contemplate invading America would soon reflect on the fact that it contains hundreds of millions of guns, which are available to a population that takes its life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness very seriously.

The countries of northern Europe have been richer than those of the south for several centuries. The north industrialised earlier than the south and so has been more economically successful.

Analysts often write about the need for certain cultures not to lose face, or ever be seen to back down, but this is not just a problem in the Arab or East Asian cultures—it is a human problem expressed in different ways.

THE MIDDLE OF WHAT? EAST OF WHERE? THE REGION’S VERY name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.

India and Pakistan can agree on one thing: neither wants the other one around.

It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends “but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media.

Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.

When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his private study kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

In Russia we see the influence of the Arctic, and how its freezing climate limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power. In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy, and now the speed at which China is seeking to change this is becoming apparent.

Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the seven billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas that constrain us all – as they always have.

When we are reaching for the stars, the challenges ahead are such that we will perhaps have to come together to meet them: to travel the universe not as Russians, Americans, or Chinese but as representatives of humanity. But so far, although we have broken free from the shackles of gravity, we are still improsoned in our own minds, confined by our suspicion of the "other," and thus our primal competition for resources. There is a long way to go.

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be “bound hand and foot” and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners “went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy,” in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes “infamous and embarrassing.

The word ‘arctic’ comes from the Greek artikos, which means ‘near the bear’, and is a reference to the Ursa Major constellation whose last two stars point towards the North Star. The Arctic Ocean is 5.4 million square miles; this might make it the world’s smallest ocean but it is still almost as big as Russia, and one and a half times the size of the USA.

In 1867 Alaska was bought from Russia. At the time it was known as ‘Seward’s folly’ after the Secretary of State, William Seward, who agreed the deal. He paid $7.2 million, or 2 cents an acre. The press accused him of purchasing snow, but minds were changed with the discovery of major gold deposits in 1896. Decades later huge reserves of oil were also found.

Sykes-Picot is breaking; putting it back together, even in a different shape, will be a long and bloody affair.

North Korea is a stain on the world’s conscience, and yet few people know the full scale of the horrors taking place there.

As we’ve seen, the Chinese are everywhere, they mean business and they are now every bit as involved across the continent as the Europeans and Americans. About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which – along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries – means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up.

Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living

All the sovereignty issues [in the Arctic region] stem from the same desires and fears -- the desire to safeguard routes for military and comercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose.

For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped to develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on more huge projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.

China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers which – if the Han could reach them and establish control – would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, only fully realised with the annexation of Tibet in 1951.

Why would the Russians want Moldova? Because as the Carpathian Mountains curve round south-west to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the south-east is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also be thought of as a flat corridor into Russia; and, just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea – also known as Moldova – in the region formerly known as Bessarabia.

In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the Strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus only takes you into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Straits to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.

Nevertheless the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt – the cradle of its civilisation, where its people learnt to farm, to make paper and gunpowder.

The Chinese look at society very differently from the West.

The Americans don’t really want to fight for the South Koreans, but nor can they afford to be seen to be giving up on a friend.

There were now only three places from which a challenge to American hegemony could come: a united Europe, Russia and China. All would grow stronger, but two would reach their limits.

History tells us how much things can change in just a few decades, and geography tells us that if humans do not constantly strive to overcome its ‘rules’, its ‘rules’ will overcome us.

Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut off China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen.

Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into high land, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much further and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity which grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.

President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the break-up of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as ‘a major geopolitical disaster of the century’.

The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else are there so many rivers whose source is not in highland and whose waters run smoothly all the way to the ocean across vast distances.

Of all the different kinds of art, you see, poetry is the one most attuned to man's condition, and therefore the most noble and the most demanding of them all. Just as men struggle to transcend the inherent limits of geography, history, and biology to find the meaning of life, so poets strive to transcend the inherent limits of language, meter, and structure to find beauty and truth. And just as life wouldn't have meaning without death, so poetry wouldn't have its sublime power outside the prison of its form.

We have even broken the shackles of the Earth’s gravity. In our newly globalised world we can use that technology to give us all an opportunity in the Arctic. We can overcome the rapacious side of our nature, and get the great game right for the benefit of all.

To this day most people still live close to the coastal areas, despite the dramatic decision made in the late 1950s to move the capital (previously Rio de Janeiro) several hundred miles inland to the purpose-built city of Brasilia in an attempt to develop the heart of Brazil.

The Turks have never been truly recognised as part of Europe by their neighbours to the north and north-west. If Turkey is European, then Europe’s borders are on the far side of the vast Anatolian Plain, meaning they stop at Syria, Iraq and Iran. This is a concept few people accept.

When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends, ‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’ Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, ‘I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.

The GIUK is one of many reasons why London flew into a panic in 2014 when, briefly, the vote on Scottish independence looked as if might result in a Yes. The loss of power in the North Sea and North Atlantic would have been a strategic blow and a massive dent to the prestige of whatever was left of the UK.

This lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder, in his will of 1725, that Peter the Great advised his descendants to ‘approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia . . . Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India.

Cuba in particular kept American presidents awake at night, as it would again in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The island sits just off Florida, giving it access to and potential control of the Florida Straits and the Yucatan Channel in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exit and entry route for the port of New Orleans.

Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

What about this, then?” The metal surface rippled at his touch, stretching and splitting into a million thin wires that made it look like a giant version of one of those pin art toys Sophie used to play with as a kid. He tapped his fingers in a quick rhythm, and the pins shifted and sank, forming highs and lows and smooth, flat stretches. Sophie couldn’t figure out what she was seeing until he tapped a few additional beats and tiny pricks of light flared at the ends of each wire, bathing the scene in vibrant colors and marking everything with glowing labels. “It’s a map,” she murmured, making a slow circle around the table. And not just any map. A 3-D map of the Lost Cities. She’d never seen her world like that before, with everything spread out across the planet in relation to everything else. Eternalia, the elvin capital that had likely inspired the human myths of Shangri-la, was much closer to the Sanctuary than she’d realized, nestled into one of the valleys of the Himalayas—while the special animal preserve was hidden inside the hollowed-out mountains. Atlantis was deep under the Mediterranean Sea, just like the human legends described, and it looked like Mysterium was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. The Gateway to Exile was in the middle of the Sahara desert—though the prison itself was buried in the center of the earth. And Lumenaria… “Wait. Is Lumenaria one of the Channel Islands?” she asked, trying to compare what she was seeing against the maps she’d memorized in her human geography classes. “Yes and no. It’s technically part of the same archipelago. But we’ve kept that particular island hidden, so humans have no idea it exists—well, beyond the convoluted stories we’ve occasionally leaked to cause confusion.

A quick quiz. What do the following events have in common? The war in Iraq. The Exxon Valdez oil spill. The rise in America’s prison population. The answer: They all contribute to our nation’s gross national product, or what’s now referred to as gross domestic product, or GDP, and therefore all are considered “good,” at least in the dismal eyes of economists.

However, with the imposing plains of Kandahar and mountains of the Hindu Kush, no invading power has ever succeeded in Afghanistan, earning it the label of ‘the Graveyard of Empires’. The Afghan experience is sometimes called ‘Russia’s Vietnam’; Moscow’s dream of warm water open sea lanes has seeped away ever since, and is perhaps further now than it has been for 200 years.

The actor Richard Gere and the Free Tibet movement will continue to speak out against the injustices of the occupation, and now settlement, of Tibet by Han Chinese; but in a battle between the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan independence movement, Hollywood stars and the Chinese Communist Party – which rules the world’s second-largest economy – there is only going to be one winner.

Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular which London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately both were promised the same thing – control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saud and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted down the maps, drew some lines and said the head of the Saud family could rule over one region, and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would ‘need’ a British diplomat to keep an eye on things. The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia – the rough equivalent would be calling the UK ‘Windsorland’.

This creates a pernicious feedback loop. The policing itself spawns new data, which justifies more policing. And our prisons fill up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes. Most of them come from impoverished neighborhoods, and most are black or Hispanic. So even if a model is color blind, the result of it is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.

once took a Chinese ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope they would repeat Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s much-quoted answer to Richard Nixon’s question ‘What is the impact of the French Revolution?’, to which the prime minister replied ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ Sadly this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of ‘what you call human rights’ in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, ‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?

They can be divided three ways: those that are neutral, the pro-Western group and the pro-Russian camp. The neutral countries – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West. This is because all three produce their own energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade. In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is (another reason for the rebellion there).

IN OCTOBER 2006, A US NAVAL SUPERCARRIER GROUP LED by the 1,000-foot USS Kitty Hawk was confidently sailing through the East China Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group. An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

The Americans are keen to scale down their political and military investment in the region due to a reduction in their energy import requirements; if they do withdraw then China, and to a lesser extent India, may have to get involved in equal proportion to the US loss of interest. The Chinese are already major players in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. That scenario is on a global level and will be determined in the chancelleries of the capitals of the great powers. On the ground the game will be played with people’s imaginations, wants, hopes and needs, and with their lives. Sykes–Picot is breaking; putting it back together, even in a different shape, will be a long and bloody affair.

Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

Yes, you do hate Switzerland. And," doctor Messerli paused for effect, "you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy. You're not indifferent. You're ambivalent." Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon's sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She'd considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she's diagnosed herself with a disease that she'd also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I'm attached to the room in which I'm held captive. It's the prison I'm bound to, not the warden. Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. it was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon's Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snow-capped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn't simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich's old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn trains. She could take the train anywhere she wanted to go.

Back in the great capital cities of London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon, the Europeans then took maps of the contours of Africa’s geography and drew lines on them – or, to take a more aggressive approach, lies. In between these lines they wrote words such as Middle Congo or Upper Volta and called them countries. These lines were more about how far which power’s explorers, military forces and businessmen had advanced on the map than what the people living between the lines felt themselves to be, or how they wanted to organise themselves. Many Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made, and of the natural barriers to progression with which nature endowed them. From this they are making a modern home and, in some cases, vibrant, connected economies.

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to ‘wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian ocean’, in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. Some of the ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, water-borne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.

The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West. Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world. The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate this became Palestine.

Hoelscher and Alderman (2004: 350) argued that elites ‘often make or preserve … landscapes as a way to bolster a particular political order, and as a means to capital accumulation’, and Bruggeman’s (2012) analysis of the processes and circumstances behind the conservation of Eastern State Penitentiary suggests that the action of local elites in this case also (perhaps unwittingly) performed this function. Observing that ‘museums are branded by the moment in which they are born’, and that they ‘carry with them the politics of those who shape their public roles’ (ibid. 174), he noted that the committee of volunteers which formed to preserve the Penitentiary reflected the ‘young, highly educated and predominantly white culture activists’ (ibid. 177) who inhabited the newly gentrified local neighbourhood around the prison, and who had few connections either to prisoners who

Africa’s coastline? great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America. There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’ However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was only ever a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy – it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense – but it has never been a Blue Water navy. Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 97 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 per cent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the USA, with concurrent costs. Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile. Two of the continent’s oldest countries, with the largest armies, have at times edged towards conflict over the region’s major source of water.

Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west – the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (33 million Saudis as opposed to 81 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbour if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards itself as the champion of its respective version of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf. The American-led deal on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which was concluded in the summer of 2015, has in no way reassured the Gulf States that the threat to them from Iran has diminished, and the increasingly bitter war of words between Saudi Arabia and Iran continues, along with a war sometimes fought by proxy elsewhere most notably in Yemen.

Když se lidé ze Západu, jako Richard Gere nebo bývalý prezident Obama, vyjadřují k Tibetu, Číňanům to přijde hluboce iritující. Nikoli nebezpečné, nikoliv rozvratné - prostě iritující. Nedívají se na to prizmatem lidských práv, ale geopolitických jistot, a nevěří, že by lidem ze Západu mohlo jít o něco jiného než podrývání jejich bezpečnosti. Čínskou bezpečnost ovšem nic nepodrývá nesmí a taky nebude, i kdyby měli Chanové čelit novému povstání. Demografie a geopolitika hrají proti tibetské nezávislosti.

Dnes po celé Číně den co den proběhne okolo 500 protestů.

Evropa i NATO jsou pro Washington důležité, a bude-li to v americkém zájmu, mohou Američané tu a tam zakročit. Pokud jde o Rusko, třebaže je stále bedlivě sledují, vnímají je teď především jako problém Evropy.

Západní Evropa se po finanční krizi dostala do situace, kdy Řecko na jejím okraji působí jako napůl odpadlý apendix - a na východě mezitím znovu vzplály konflikty. Má-li anomálie v podobě sedmdesátiletého míru přetrvat i v tomto století, vyžádá si to lásku, péči a pozornost.

Tohle území (DR Kongo) nikdy nemělo být poskládáno v jeden celek. Je to rozpadlý kus země, jenž představuje mediálně nejopomíjenější válečnou zónu na světě, ačkoliv v tamních válkách zahynulo od konce devadesátých let už šest miliónů lidí.

Peking ani velké čínské společnosti nekladou problematické otázky ohledně lidských práv, nedožadují se hospodářských reforem, a na rozdíl od Mezinárodního měnového fondu či Světové banky u nich nehrozí, že by snad začali určitým africkým vůdcům naznačovat, ať přestanou rozkrádat majetek své země.

V porovnání s většinou arabských států je nicméně Turecko mnohem rozvinutější a nese zřetelnější rysy demokracie. Část Atatürkova díla se možná Erdoganovým přičiněním zbortí, pořád však platí, že vnuci Otce všech Turků se těší mnohem větší svobodě než kdokoliv na arabském Blízkém východě.

Severní Korea nepřestává hrát roli vyšinutého nebezpečného slabocha a jde jí to dobře.

Severní Korea je černou skvrnou na svědomí světa.

Někdejší japonská agresivita a militarismus se nicméně tak docela nevytratily; pouze je na čas překryly sutiny Hirošimy, Nagasaki a roztříštěné duše národa.

Kdyby k argentinské invazi došlo po roce 2010, Britové by nebyli s to zmocnit se ostrovů zpět, protože momentálně nedisponují žádnou letadlovou lodí schopnou operačního nasazení... zato však mají na ostrovech několik set speciálně vycvičených vojáků, moderní radarové systémy, střely země-vzduch, čtyři stíhačky Eurofighter a je pravděpodobné, že v blízkosti po většinu času číhá i bojová jaderná ponorka.

Kvůli zvýšenému napětí už Norové přesunuli ústředí vojenských operací z jihu na server země a momentálně zřizují arktický armádní prapor.

Postavit ledoborec je otázkou deseti let a jedné miliardy dolarů... Rusko má celkem dvaatřicet ledoborců... Flotila Spojených států naproti tomu sestává z jediného těžkého ledoborce: USS Polar Star.

Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years, and the concept of “ethnic Russians” will be used to justify whatever moves Russia makes.

Why does the path of institutional change differ across societies? The answer to this question lies in institutional drift. In the same way that the genes of two isolated populations of organisms will drift apart slowly because of random mutations in the so-called process of evolutionary or genetic drift, two otherwise similar societies will also drift apart institutionally—albeit, again, slowly. Conflict over income and power, and indirectly over institutions, is a constant in all societies. This conflict often has a contingent outcome, even if the playing field over which it transpires is not level. The outcome of this conflict leads to institutional drift.

The dream of some Europeans of an EU with ‘ever closer union’ and a common foreign and defence policy is dying slowly before our eyes, and even if it were not, the EU countries spend so little on defence that ultimately they remain reliant on the USA.

The USA is seeking to demonstrate to the whole region that it is in their best interests to side with Washington – China is doing the opposite. So when challenged, each side must react, because for each challenge it ducks, its allies’ confidence, and competitors’ fear, slowly drains away until eventually there is an event which persuades a state to switch sides.

Exhausted by war, and with safety ‘guaranteed’ by the American military, the Europeans embarked on an astonishing experiment. They were asked to trust each other. What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.

What the British have now is a collective memory of greatness. That memory is what persuades many people on the island that if something in the world needs to be done, then Britain should be among the countries which do it.

Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth as the IMF or World Bank might. All the Chinese want is the oil, the minerals, the precious metals and the markets. This is an equitable government-to-government relationship, but we will see increasing tension between local populations and the Chinese workforces often brought in to assist the big projects. This in turn may draw Beijing more into the local politics, and require it to have some sort of minor military presence in various countries.

The Middle East - the middle of what? East of where? The region’s very name is based on a European view of the world, and it is a European view of the region that shaped it. The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.

The battle for the future of the Arab Middle East has to an extent taken the spotlight off the Israeli–Arab struggle. The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West.

The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy, and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralised power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.

The Israelis feel threatened by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get theirs as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.

Until a few years ago Turkey was held up as an example of how a Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, could embrace democracy. That example has taken a few knocks recently. President Erdoğan’s remarks on Jews, race and gender equality, taken with the creeping Islamisation of Turkey, have set alarm bells ringing. However, compared with the majority of Arab states Turkey is far more developed and recognisable as a democracy. Erdoğan may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.

Because the Arab states have not experienced a similar opening-up and have suffered from colonialism, they were not ready to turn the Arab uprisings into a real Arab Spring. Instead they soured into perpetual rioting and civil war. The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the ‘Green Revolution’, describing the young students of north Tehran as the ‘Youth of Iran’, thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.

In 1989 in Eastern Europe there was one form of totalitarianism: Communism. In the majority of people’s minds there was only one direction in which to go: towards democracy, which was thriving on the other side of the Iron Curtain. East and West shared a historical memory of periods of democracy and civil society. The Arab world of 2011 enjoyed none of those things and faced in many different directions. There were, and are, the directions of democracy, liberal democracy, nationalism, the cult of the strong leader and the direction in which many people had been facing all along – Islam in its various guises, including Islamism. This is the complex internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links and guns are currently far more powerful forces than ‘Western’ ideals of equality, freedom of expression and universal suffrage.

The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds of which the average Westerner knows so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes. The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media. Anti-Semitic cartoons which echo the Nazi Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper are common. Week in, week out, shock-jock imams are given space on prime-time TV shows.

India and Pakistan can agree on one thing: neither wants the other one around.