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

by Tim Marshall

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, at the least, that the extended family comes before the individual.

All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else are there so many rivers whose source is not in highland and whose waters run smoothly all the way to the ocean across vast distances.

On the plus side, the Chinese are not politically ideological, they do not seek to spread Communism, nor do they covet (much) more territory in the way the Russians did during the Cold War, and neither side is looking for conflict.

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.

Prejudice against immigrants always rises during times of economic recession

Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century,

arbitrarily creating “nation states” out of people unused to living together in one region is not a recipe for justice, equality, and stability.

There has been only one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.

The Lebanese army exists on paper, but in the event of another civil war, such as that of 1975–90, it would fall apart, as soldiers in most units would simply go back to their hometowns and join the local militias.

The battle for the future of the Arab Middle East has, to an extent, taken the spotlight off the Israeli-Arab struggle. The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region do not come down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West.

For millennia the Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel, but the ravages of history had dispersed them across the globe. Israel remained for them the “promised land,” and Jerusalem, in particular, was sacred ground. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.

To this day Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are suspicious of Palestinian independence, and if Israel vanished and were replaced by Palestine, all three might make claims to parts of the territory.

During the Six-Day War of 1967, the Israelis won control of all of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. In 2005, they left Gaza, but hundreds of thousands of settlers remain in the West Bank.

Militarily, the city is of only moderate strategic geographical importance—it has no real industry to speak of, no river, and no airport—but it is of overwhelming significance in cultural and religious terms: the ideological need for the place is of more importance than its location. Control of, and access to, Jerusalem is not an issue upon which a compromise solution can be easily achieved.

Because of its urban density, Gaza makes good fighting ground for its defenders but it is a nightmare for its civilians, who have little or no shelter from war and no link to the West Bank, although the distance between the two is only twenty-five miles at its narrowest point. Until a peace deal is agreed upon, there is nowhere for the Gazans to go, and little for them to do inside the Strip.

The relationship between India and Pakistan will never be friendly, but were it not for the thorn of Kashmir in both sides it could potentially be cordial.

As for the first person to reach the North Pole, well, that’s a tricky one, given that even though there is a fixed point on the globe denoting its position, below it, the ice you are standing on is moving, and without GPS equipment it is hard to tell exactly where you are.

after all, wars are started by fear of the other as well as by greed;

the geographical factors that have helped determine our history will mostly continue to determine our future: