More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Marshall
Started reading
June 14, 2023
The Chinese look at society very differently from the West. Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual. What the West thinks of as the rights of man, the Chinese leadership thinks of as dangerous theories endangering the majority, and much of the population accepts that, at the least, the extended family comes before the individual.
‘What is the impact of the French Revolution?’, to which the prime minister replied ‘It’s too soon to tell.’
‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?’
The Bering Strait is the quickest way for Chinese vessels to reach the Arctic Ocean, and we will see more of them off the Alaskan coast in the coming years.
All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.
Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC) to differentiate it from the People’s Republic of China, although both sides believe they should have jurisdiction over both territories.
Americans are committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.
if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the USA is not bound to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.
The geopolitical writer Robert Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century.
China also intends to become a two-ocean power (Pacific and Indian).
Chinese companies and workers are spread out across the world; slowly China’s military will follow.
China is not weighed down or motivated diplomatically or economically by human rights in its dealings with the world.
A great depression like that of the 1930s could set it back decades. China has locked itself into the global economy.
If we don’t buy, they don’t make.
And if they don’t make there will be mass unemployment. If there is mass and long-term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be – like eve...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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.
that anyone stupid enough to contemplate invading America would soon be forced to reflect on the fact that it contains hundreds of millions of guns, readily available to a population that takes its life, liberty and pursuit of happiness very seriously.
American Revolutionary War (1775–83).
Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the USA and gave it mastery over the greatest inland water transport route in the world.
The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable inland waterways than the rest of the world put together.
1819 the Spanish ceded Florida to the USA and with it a massive amount of territory.
Transcontinental Treaty of 1819
1867 Alaska was bought from Russia.
The civilian head of NATO might well be a Belgian one year, a Brit the next, but the military commander is always an American, and by far the greatest firepower within NATO is American.
The Americans have a treaty with Taiwan which states that if the Chinese invade the latter, the USA will provide arms,
The USA under Trump has gone in hard against Iran,
‘America has presidents and it has interests; the presidents come and go – the interests remain’.
Trump has followed all these policies but gone about them in a different way, using language that many people see as undiplomatic.
The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, in a double-edged remark, said more than a century ago that ‘God takes special care of drunks, children and the United States of America.’ It appears still to be true.
It has been among the countries hit worst by the 2008 economic crisis.
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.
GIUK (Greenland, Iceland and the UK)
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.
The majority voted Leave, but the result could well threaten the unity of the UK as it revealed divides across the union. In particular, the majority in Scotland voted to Remain, and so the Leave victory has once again raised the question of Scotland’s independence;
Brussels has already made it clear to Catalonia, in response to the crisis that started in 2017, that if it were to leave Spain, it might take more than a decade to become an EU member.
‘For those who didn’t live through this themselves and who especially now in the crisis are asking what benefits Europe’s unity brings, the answer despite the unprecedented European period of peace lasting more than 65 years and despite the problems and difficulties we must still overcome is: peace.’
Congo rainforests were a massive barrier to trade routes.
most of us use the standard Mercator world map. This, as do other maps, depicts a sphere on a flat surface and thus distorts shapes.
Given that Africa is where humans originated, we are all African.
Most of the continent’s rivers also pose a problem, as they begin in high land and descend in abrupt drops which thwart navigation.
in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size.
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.
prime example of how the imposition of artificial borders can lead to a weak and divided state, ravaged by internal conflict, and whose mineral wealth condemns it to being exploited by outsiders.
The DRC is neither democratic, nor a republic.
The people are divided into more than 200 ethnic groups, of which the biggest are the Bantu.
DRC’s years as a Belgian colony (1908–60)
In 2014 the United Nations Human Development Index placed the DRC 186th out of 187 countries it measured.
Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day.
As things stand Egypt has a more powerful military, but that is slowly changing, and Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people, is a growing power.
Given that the UN predicts the country will begin to suffer water shortages by 2025
