In 1902—just a few short years after Queen Victoria’s momentous Diamond Jubilee celebration and at the height of British imperial power—London was fretting about its strategic position. British strategists, according to the late Oxford historian Michael Howard, were concerned that year about “Imperial weakness: of commitments all over the world to be defended, of well-armed
Canada doesn’t make sense from a geopolitical perspective. Think about it: geopolitics “provides the link between geography and strategy.” Geopolitics also seeks to “establish the links and causal relationships between geographical space and international political power, for the purpose of devising specific strategic prescriptions.” Canada is a huge country geographically—the world’s second-largest behind Russia—but it’s
From the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century, Russian leaders believed that rapid, mass industrialization would modernize Russia, and make their country competitive with the West. Yet, Russia (and, later, the Soviet Union) was never able to match the productive powers of the Western states. By 2000, as George Friedman assessed, “Russia
This year has been an historic first for American women in space. Not only has an American female astronaut committed the world’s first cybercrime from space (directed against her wife—so stunning and brave!) but the world was also treated to NASA’s first all-female spacewalk. Of course, the pesky patriarchy at NASA reared its ugly head,
Have you noticed an uptick in the appearance of a specific talking point from the political and military elite about President Trump’s recent drawdown in northern Syria? It goes something like this: Yes, the president was in a tight spot in Syria—caught between Turkey, a NATO ally, and the Kurds, who we were allied with
Going back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled from present-day Turkey and presided over a dominion which stretched across much of the Middle East and parts of North Africa, the Muslim world was divided between two sides of the Islamic coin: the first was that of the majority Sunnis and the second
Last week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) took center stage to become the withering face of the ongoing Democratic Party push to impeach their great bugaboo, President Donald J. Trump. As she closed her meandering remarks, Pelosi invoked America’s greatest moderate, Benjamin Franklin, when she reminded audiences that Franklin was asked by an
The Democrats now believe they have finally caught their White (or, possibly, orange?) Whale, Donald Trump. Congressional Democrats claim that President Trump violated election rules by asking Ukraine’s president for his assistance in investigating the Biden family’s potentially corrupt dealings in Ukraine during the time Joe Biden was vice president. Regardless of whether there is
Politics cannot be divorced from culture. Many people are wedded to the misperception that, in a democratic society, we elect leaders who are somehow better than the ordinary voter. In fact, democratic societies tend to elect leaders who are, in most ways, a reflection of the voters themselves. Since political leadership in a republic is
The September 11, 2001 attacks were the result of an unmitigated intelligence failure. No, 9/11 was not an “inside job,” as many conspiracy theorists believe. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network were responsible. But the 9/11 plot did not happen in a vacuum. In reality, America’s elephantine national security state had known of bin
