Prisoners of Geography
An analysis of how geography shapes geopolitics, national interests, and global conflicts throughout history and in contemporary times.
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 that, at the least, the extended family comes before the individual.
The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable inland waterways than the rest of the world put together.
A human being first burst through the top layer of the stratosphere in 1961 when twenty-seven-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made it into space aboard Vostok 1. It is a sad reflection on humanity that the name of a fellow Russian called Kalashnikov is far better known.