All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to understand world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture. To understand Putin's actions, for example, it is essential to consider that, to be a world power, Russia must have a navy. And if its ports freeze for six months each year then it must have...

"Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next--a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform--borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe. What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans...

Kissinger offers his analysis of the twenty-first century's ultimate challenge: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historic perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.

"The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny's bemused eyes, we watch global interests flock to her temporary backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age--from Baku to...

Our national and global affairs are in perilous disarray, to the point where extremely sober observers are saying that we have brought imminent catastrophe upon ourselves and that it is just too late to escape. While candidly admitting the difficulty and the danger, Of Thee I Sing nonetheless insists that something enormously significant and wonderful is actually coming to pass on this planetthat like a chick (out of food and space) pecking its way...

La implosión de la URSS volvió a poner la historia en movimiento. Sumió a Rusia en una violenta crisis, pero, sobre todo, creó un vacío mundial que absorbió a Estados Unidos, también en crisis desde 1980. Se desencadenó entonces un movimiento paradójico: la expansión conquistadora de un Occidente que se marchitaba en su corazón. La desaparición del protestantismo condujo a Estados Unidos, por etapas, del neoliberalismo al nihilismo, y...

1947 was a watershed year for the Dokdo issue. Many think that the differences between Korea and Japan over the historical title to the island are what caused the Dokdo issue. From my studies, however, I came to learn that the Dokdo issue is a ramification, or one of the shadows, of the sway and decision power the U.S. exerted on the post-war policies for Northeast Asia. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that the dispute over the sovereignty...

Europe is in transition between independent nation states and a unified Europe. The EU's crises-financial, migrant, Brexit-are threatening the European idea. In addition to the idea of Europe as a peace project, we need more meaningful narratives to create a Europe-wide feeling of togetherness that is emotionally underpinned. The question is this: how can we create European unity out of national diversity? European unity seems to be more important...

The fall of the Berlin Wall, symbol of the bipolar order that emerged after World War II, seemed to inaugurate an age of ever fewer borders. The liberalization and integration of markets, the creation of vast free-trade zones, the birth of a new political and monetary union in Europe-all seemed to point in that direction. Only thirty years later, the tendency appears to be quite the opposite. Talk of a wall with Mexico is only one sign among many...

Se trata de la expresión propia, muy afortunada y precisa, sobre la geopolítica actual, proveniente de la experiencia y el estudio. Es el resultado del trabajo adelantado por años, en materia de seguridad, mediante la pluma de alguien que conoce a fondo las relaciones existentes entre las ideologías y creencias, por una parte y, por otra, la actividad proselitista de movimientos políticos y religiosos de distintos orígenes y en diferentes latitudes. El...