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

by Tim Marshall

The neutral countries—Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan—are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West.

In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia.

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.

The last of the original thirteen colonies to be established was Georgia in 1732. The thirteen became increasingly independent minded all the way up to the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). At the beginning of this period, the colonies, which gradually began to connect to one another, stretched one thousand miles from Massachusetts in the north, down to Georgia, and had an estimated combined population of approximately 2.5 million people.

The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together.

In the autumn of 1940, the British desperately needed more warships. The Americans had fifty to spare and so, with what was called the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, the British swapped their ability to be a global power for help in remaining in the war. Almost every British naval base in the Western Hemisphere was handed over.

While all the other countries in the region matter, in what is a complicated diplomatic jigsaw puzzle, the key states look to be Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. These three sit astride the narrow Strait of Malacca. Every day through that strait come 12 million barrels of oil heading for an increasingly thirsty China and elsewhere in the region. As long as these three countries are pro-American, the Americans have a key advantage.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, in a double-edged remark, said more than a century ago that “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”

you look at a world map and mentally glue Alaska onto California, then turn the United States on its head, it appears as if it would roughly fit into Africa with a few gaps here and there. In fact, Africa is three times larger than the United States.

The name Pakistan gives us clues about these divisions; pak means “pure” and stan means “land” in Urdu, so it is the land of the pure, but it is also an acronym. P is for Punjab, A is for Afghania (the Pashtun area by the Afghan border), K for Kashmir, S for Sindh, and T stands for “tan,” as in Baluchistan.