Brazilian truckers have gone on strike, and though the protests appear to be winding down, the effects have been felt in the transportation, food and fuel sectors.
It has made geopolitical sense since their establishment in 1948 for North and South Korea to find a way to get along and tap into their joint potential, and yet they haven’t, because peaceful reunification is exceedingly difficult to achieve.
Located on the Pacific coast and 120 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of Mexico City, Guerrero state had the most homicides of any state in Mexico last year. Though this can partly be attributed to geography – the state is mountainous and therefore hard to secure from the outside – it’s also due to the fact that the state was not seen as a priority during various points in Mexico’s history.
For the first several centuries of Britain’s existence, much of the world used London as a bridgehead for invasion. But after the Industrial Revolution, when the British Empire reached the height of its power, London instead became a bridgehead for England to invade much of the world.
The European Union is struggling to find its way, Russia is in a state of flux, and Turkey is getting dragged deeper into the Syrian conflict. These are developments that indirectly shape the global order because of the size and power of the countries involved. But there is one part of the world that does not have the luxury of being shaped indirectly: the Balkans. This mountainous region’s unique geography has consigned it to a troubled place in history, as much because of the ambitions and machinations of outside powers as because of its own fractiousness.
Since 2015, tensions between two important Eastern European countries, Poland and Ukraine, appear to have been rising. The rift stems from the countries’ different interpretations of their shared history.
Chancellor Angela Merkel did not emerge from German federal elections unscathed, but she emerged nonetheless. Now that she has, she must throw the full weight of her limited powers into halting the EU’s slow decline into irrelevance.
Mexico City, the seat of Mexico’s government, has a very basic problem: It has a lot of territory to govern and many physical obstacles between itself and much of that territory.