To understand geopolitics we need to understand power, which in turn derives from the perception of national wealth. The way nation-states use their wealth to defend their interests helps to shape our perception of their place and their role in the world. Soil resources are among the most important elements of wealth. But it is the human being who evaluates those elements — as such, the human resource is superior to them.
Demographics may not be destiny, but for students of geopolitics, they come close. Although conventional measures of economic and military power often receive more attention, few factors influence the long-term competition between great powers as much as changes in the size, capabilities, and characteristics of national populations.
Right now, we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union, and maybe the end of the liberal world order as we know it, writes Anne Applebaum.
Critical events of early 2015—cheap oil and Middle East violence—will probably continue to take their toll as the year goes on, according to a new projection of geopolitical hot spots. Lower overall prices for commodities may hurt the economies of resource-rich nations.
Realpolitik made a comeback in 2014. In the immediate post-Cold War-era, during those years when America enjoyed its unipolar moment, international politics as it had been usually understood seemed to have been eclipsed. The world began to focus more on the liberalization and globalization of the world economy, the spread of democracy, and the threats posed by non-state actors.
In the 1930s travellers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence.
The United States’ new rivals and enemies all lack the element that made the Soviet-American struggle so consequential during the Cold War.
