Aug. 18, 2017 Before Islam, Arabs were confined largely to the Arabian Peninsula. They were nomads, warring and leaderless. To the north of the peninsula lay the Byzantine Empire. Across the Persian Gulf lay the Sassanid Empire, which stretched from Mesopotamia to the South Caucasus. The two empires had fought each other intermittently for more than three centuries. It was under these circumstances that their fortunes changed as Islam emerged and became the founding philosophy of a new government in Medina. Ten years later, when the Prophet Muhammad died and a new leader replaced him – ushering in the first Arab empire, known as the Rashidun Caliphate – Arab Muslims had assumed control of the entire Arabian Peninsula.
But the Arabs embraced Persian culture faster than the Persians converted to Islam. In fact, so great was the Persians’ influence that when Islam spread to Central Asia, the Turkic people who lived there converted to the Persianized version of Islam. Stunningly, the traditions of Persian subjects were adopted by Arab overlords – and not the other way around.
Aug. 11, 2017 Energy sales are an important source of revenue, of course, but for Russia they are more than that: They are an instrument of geopolitical power. They give Moscow considerable influence over the countries whose energy needs are met by Russian exports.
France and Germany – the de facto, if often irreconcilable, leaders of the European Union – illustrate how Russian energy can shape foreign policy. France may rely heavily on foreign energy, but most of its oil and natural gas comes from Algeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Libya – not Russia. France can therefore afford to be more aggressive and supportive of sanctions against Russia.
Not so with Germany, which receives 57 percent of its natural gas and 35 percent of its crude oil from Russia. Berlin must therefore tread lightly between its primary security benefactor, the U.S., and its primary source of energy, Russia.
This is one reason Germany has been such an outspoken critic of the recent U.S. sanctions, which penalize businesses in any country that collaborate or participate in joint ventures with Russian energy firms. Germany supports the construction of Nord Stream 2, a pipeline that would run through the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine – the transit state through which Germany currently receives much of its energy imports. The pipeline would help to safeguard German energy procurement, since it would allow Russia to punish Ukraine by withholding shipments of natural gas without punishing countries such as Germany further downstream.
Aug. 4, 2017 Russia and Canada are the most important countries in the Arctic. Russia holds the most Arctic territory by far. Accounting for the 200-nautical-mile limit that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea grants Russia the right to claim, Russia occupies approximately 40 percent of the Arctic’s territory.
More important, the two major sea routes that permit ships to traverse the Arctic run along the Russian and Canadian coasts: the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage. The Northern Sea Route is a more reliable maritime trade route than the Northwest Passage, which the Arctic Institute noted last year was impossible to traverse even at the peak of summer because of ice conditions.
July 28, 2017 The defining characteristic of South America is that its geography will not allow any nation to project power across the continent. Those that have come to power have been confined to either the Pacific Coast or the Atlantic Coast. Some were even able to hold power on both coasts, but none were able to form a seamless political entity.
Their separation is largely due to the Andes Mountains, which span the entire length of South America near the continent’s western edge. Other geographic features, however, accentuate the east-west divide. In the north, the vast Amazon rainforest prevents the movement of people from one population center to another and stunts urban development. The Amazon River and its tributaries, which flow from the west to the east, enable ventures farther inland, but upstream waters quickly become unnavigable to large ships.
July 21, 2017 Russia relies on wheat more than any other foodstuff as an important component of its food supply. In fact, roughly 70 percent of wheat produced in Russia annually is consumed domestically. From Siberia to the westernmost regions bordering Europe, wheat is a staple in most parts of the country.
In 2016, Russia became the world’s top grain exporter with a record production of 120 million tons of wheat, according to Russian statistics agency Rosstat. But poor weather conditions have affected this year’s production. Russia’s grain harvesting season normally starts in June, but this year, it started in July. Cold temperatures have delayed crop ripening and have slowed down field work. As a result, total output is expected to be 17 percent lower than was originally anticipated.
July 14, 2017 China’s ambitious One Belt, One Road initiative, unveiled in 2013, is really two plans combined to form a larger framework of new trade routes. The first of these is One Belt, which refers to the development of new infrastructure, particularly railroads and highways, to connect China’s interior provinces with Europe by way of Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East.
Of course, insufficient regional infrastructure has tempered expectations of increasing overland exports. But the bigger problem with One Belt is geopolitical: Eurasia is in a state of crisis, and several of the countries China borders will feel the crisis particularly acutely in the coming years.
Central Asia, a patchwork of states whose borders were drawn to make the countries more easily controlled from Moscow during the Soviet era, is hardly a promising market for Chinese goods. Furthermore, it is one of the most politically unstable regions in the world. One Belt is not a long march into prosperity – it’s a long march into disaster.
July 7, 2017 Transnational issues like religion and ethnicity have long bedeviled the countries of the modern Middle East. Major Arab states like Egypt, Syria and Iraq began to flirt with pan-Arabism – a secular, left-leaning ideology that sought political unity of the Arab world – not long after they were founded.
But Pan-Arab nationalism failed because it couldn’t replace traditional nationalism and because it advocated something that had never existed in history. But the countries that rejected it never really developed into viable political entities. Autocracies and artificial, state-sponsored secularism kept them fragile, held together mostly by the coercion of state security forces.
June 30, 2017 In late June, two influential German economic institutes published their midyear economic forecasts. They were released after the German central bank published its own forecast, saying that the German economy’s “solid upswing” will continue. The economic institutes found similar results, asserting that the German economy will continue its “steady growth.”
Both reports underlined that, unlike other periods of recent German history, the first-quarter economic results were based on domestic performance more than they were influenced by export growth. Our 2017 forecast, however, says German exports will fall in 2017, weakening Berlin’s trade position and, ultimately, slowing economic growth.
The latest reports coming from Germany challenge this forecast on two fronts. First, the German reports say that exports will continue to rise. Second, the German reports insist that while exports have grown, it is the domestic drivers that have made German growth stable.
June 23, 2017 Cooperation among Southeast Asian states has never come easy, but the surge of Islamist militancy in the region is encouraging Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines to give it another try.
Recently, the three countries formally launched trilateral patrols in the Sulu and Celebes seas — a vast expanse that has become a hub of piracy, militancy and smuggling. They have discussed the possibility since 2016, when the Abu Sayyaf, a jihadist group aligned with the Islamic State, conducted a string of kidnappings in the Sulu Archipelago. Whatever differences that may have impeded the patrols, however, were put aside during the siege of Marawi city, a provincial capital in the restive Philippine region of Mindanao.
But the slow start to the patrols shows just how elusive integration has been in Southeast Asia. Historically, mountains and island chains, not to mention starkly divided ethnic communities, have tended to produce inward-looking countries too preoccupied by instability and too suspicious of foreign meddling to bother to assimilate. (Singapore is a notable exception.)
June 16, 2017 The United States has benefited from the shale revolution more than any other country. Not only does it have extensive shale formations, but most of its wells are located entirely within its territory, so producers don’t have to compete for jurisdiction or share their profits.
Hydraulic fracturing, more commonly referred to as fracking, is a process by which oil deposits found in shale rock formations are extracted. Shale oil, also called tight oil, is enmeshed in shale rock, which is located thousands of feet beneath the Earth’s surface and is generally less permeable than other rock types, making deposits more difficult to access – difficult, but not impossible.
In the 1990s, producers began to combine fracking with a separate process known as horizontal drilling, which allows a well to be drilled vertically, then, when the drill hits the desired sedimentary layer, it is turned to drill parallel to the layer. In 1991, a well was successfully horizontally drilled and fractured for the first time, and in 1998 the first profitable horizontally fractured well was completed. The supply of U.S. shale gas, and later shale oil, has increased ever since.
June 9, 2017 The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces began an invasion of eastern Raqqa on June 6. They captured the neighborhood of al-Mashalab before IS stopped their advance. Meanwhile, Syrian army forces loyal to Bashar Assad crossed into Raqqa province and are now less than 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Raqqa city.
The Syrian army has also moved against IS in Aleppo province and outside of the city of Hama, and continues to push east from Palmyra toward the IS heartland. The Islamic State is reeling, no longer in a good position to defend its capital. That means its strategy must change, and along with it, our baseline assessment of its strategic imperatives in Syria.
June 2, 2017 As Pyongyang, Washington and other regional players prepare for the prospect of war, North Korea’s nuclear program and ballistic missile capabilities have received undue amounts of attention. Important though they may be, they have less bearing on how the war will be fought than does North Korea’s conventional military.
Eliminating Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities would be the first objective in a war, and indeed the justification for an attack. The second objective would be to protect South Korea from North Korean retaliation. No one really knows the true status of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, but a nuclear strike on a U.S. asset or ally is unlikely because it would force the U.S. to respond in kind, wiping out the North Korean regime.
The Geopolitics of the American President