Quotes About Geopolitics

Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland!

If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently defending ourselves against—religious movements that reverse the Enlightenment and affect today's geopolitics.

According to Mackinder, Europe and the Middle East are much more affected by the Heartland than India and China, whose hundreds of millions of people are self-contained and thus able to peacefully develop. This leads him to predict that the future lies to a large extent in the "Monsoon lands of India and China."38

This is to be a landscape meditation about America's place in the world.

Russia is not going to give up easily on Syria. They've had a relationship with that country since 1955. It's very close to them.

During the Cold War era, the issue was the containment of Soviet influence, and we tolerated many an authoritarian regime as long as they were useful to us in this respect.

some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map.

It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire [95].

Geopolitical pivots are the states whose importance is derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location and from the consequences of their potentially vulnerable condition for the behavior of geostrategic players.

France, Germany, Russia, China, and India are major and active players, whereas Great Britain, Japan, and Indonesia, while admittedly very important countries, do not so qualify. Ukraine, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey, and Iran play the role of critically important geopolitical pivots, though both Turkey and Iran are to some extent—within their more limited capabilities—also geostrategically active. More will be said about each in subsequent chapters.

a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.

In short, favoring the Jews would offend the Arabs and their millions of Muslim supporters and create dangerous risks and turmoil in a part of the world where the United States had a substantial stake.

Over the course of nearly a half-century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by U.S. strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire.

Information has always been important in geopolitics, but for most of history physical resources mattered more. Whoever had better farmland, healthier livestock, bigger armies, sturdier fortresses, better weapons, and faster ships prospered. Tangible assets generated trade, transformed societies, and won wars.

In geopolitics, the same information is not available to everyone, regardless of how much time they have. Intelligence is in the business of unlocking other people's secrets and protecting our own. Asymmetric information is the name of the game. And in a world of asymmetric information, prediction is much more difficult and miscalculation much more likely.

Suppose a part of Britain or a part of America was taken away and given to the Jews as Israel. Do you think the Americans are going to sit quietly and say 'Welcome,' and all that? They won't.

Iran is a major threat to the well-being of Europe and America just as much as it is for the state of Israel.

The West wanted to avoid an Islamic state in Europe.

Russia is a part of the West and at the same time is a part of the Asia-Pacific.

Israel is so tiny. It's, you know, a little less than the length of Manhattan, without the West Bank, without Judea and Samaria.

Western States keep playing with, and around, Russia.

Hours before the Georgian invasion, Russia had been working to secure a United Nations Security Council statement calling for a renunciation of force by both Georgia and South Ossetians. The statement that could have averted bloodshed was blocked by western countries.

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.

Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions: Western Europe and East Asia.