Quotes About Geopolitics

Poland is the natural bridge between East and West.

For Poland, the United States is the most important ally.

Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.

Afghanistan can't police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.

Belarus is not the Middle East. The policies of Belarussian and Middle Eastern leaders are cardinally different from one another.

Iran is central to our foreign policy in the Middle East, a major player in global energy markets, and a key country in terms of our interaction with the Muslim world.

Direct access to sea is an essential part of foreign policy.

Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states.

I don't think, post 9/11, we're going to wait for real obvious things like Country A attacking Country B - because Country A doesn't attack Country B any more.

Do not let ASEAN become a playing card for the competition among major countries.

The world may view India more benignly, but it does more business with China. It courts China; it needs China. Look at the genuflecting Europeans and the fork-tongued Americans!

As I've said many times and publicly, a war between China and Taiwan that involves the United States is a lose-lose-lose.

So, anything that avoids a conflict that could draw in, unhappily again, outside powers such as the United States or revisit, for example, Japan's interests in the Taiwan area would be the last thing that anyone would want.

We have to convince mainland China that a free and democratic Taiwan is more in China's interest than reunification.

The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.

Like Iran and Syria supplied Hezbollah with sophisticated anti-tank rockets - Matisse, Cornet, and other RPGs that caused great damage to Israeli tanks and Israeli infantry in 2006 - they did the same in Gaza with Hamas.

Above all, those with a strategic sense argued that the US had to challenge Russia over Ukraine as a warning to China over its possible ambitions in the South China Sea and Taiwan.

The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia's navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world's annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2

The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was "the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.

Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging, the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the Chinese in similar Mahanian terms.

Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.

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

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

Robert D. Kaplan