Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1)

by Tim Marshall

the growth of democracy has eased tensions.

Mexico has enough internal problems to cope with, without getting into any foreign adventures—perhaps none greater than its role in satisfying the Americans’ voracious appetite for drugs.

Panama and the United States are friends—in fact, such good friends that in 2014 Venezuela cut ties with Panama, calling it a “US lackey.” The effect of the rhetoric of the increasingly embattled country’s Bolivarian revolutionary era is

Relations are dominated by America’s starting position, laid out in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 (as we have seen in chapter three) during President Monroe’s State of the Union address. The doctrine warned off the European colonialists and said, in as many words, that Latin America was the United States’ backyard and sphere of influence.

Brazil, which makes up fully one-third of the land of South America, is the best example. It is almost as big as the United States, and its twenty-seven federal states equal an area bigger than the twenty-eight EU countries combined; but unlike them it lacks the infrastructure to be as rich.

Around 25 percent of Brazilians are thought to live in the infamous favela slums.

Mercosur, which loosely ties together Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

The country is by nature nonconfrontational, its foreign policy is against intervention in other countries, and war with any of its neighbors seems highly unlikely. It has managed to maintain good relations with all the other eleven South American nations despite having a border with nine of them.

BRICS—a group of major countries said to be on the rise both economically and politically, but, while each one may be rising individually, the concept is more fashion than reality.

if Argentina gets the economics right, its geography will enable it to become the power it has never been.

The Brazilians have a joke about their snobbish neighbors, as they see them: “Only people this sophisticated could make a mess this big.”

What Britain calls the Falkland Islands are known as Las Malvinas by Argentina,

The “Arctic Five,” those states with borders on the Arctic, are Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (due to its responsibility for Greenland). They are joined by Iceland, Finland, and Sweden, which are also full members. There are twelve other nations with Permanent Observer status, having recognized the “Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” in the region, among other criteria. For example, at the 2013 Arctic Council, Japan and India, which have sponsored Arctic scientific expeditions, and China, which has a science base on a Norwegian island as well as a modern icebreaker, were granted Observer status.

A Russian think tank followed this up by suggesting that the Arctic be renamed. After not much thought, they came up with an alternative: “the Russian Ocean.”

Norway, a NATO state, knows what is coming and has made the High North its foreign policy priority.

President Putin has said that, in relation to energy supply, “Offshore fields, especially in the Arctic, are without any exaggeration our strategic reserve for the twenty-first century.”

The hunger for energy suggests the race is inevitable in what some Arctic specialists have called the New Great Game. There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North, a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms—in fact, a lot more of everything.

The Arctic states know that theirs is a tough neighborhood, not so much because of warring factions but because of the challenges presented by its geography. There are five and a half million square miles of ocean up in the Arctic; they can be dark, dangerous, and deadly.

Geography has always been a prison of sorts—one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

It is a point the Scandinavian and English leader King Canute made to his sycophantic courtiers in the eleventh century, when ordering the waves to retreat: nature, or God, was greater than any man.

There are now about 1,100 functioning satellites in space, and at least 2,000 nonfunctioning ones.

R12308241815 Today the majority are owned by private companies.