North India and South India share a country, but they speak unrelated languages and grew up on very different land. Today the south holds a disproportionate share of India’s wealth while the north holds a growing share of its people, and India’s first census in sixteen years could shift the balance of power between them. So how did these two Indias form, and what does the tension between them mean for India’s place in the world?
Read MoreWe all know that wars cost money and damage economies. But you probably don’t know that insurance has a shocking amount of influence on conflicts. Imagine if your car insurance charged you extra every time you drove through a dangerous neighborhood, and could raise that charge overnight or refuse to cover you there at all. That’s roughly how ships are insured in war zones, and it can decide whether a shipping company sails through a conflict or goes around it. But how exactly does this influence geopolitics?
Read MoreParaguay is a landlocked country with no oil, no gas, and no coastline, so it has built its leverage another way, by selling electricity and through diplomatic strategy. But why does Paraguay exist to begin with, and what does it have to offer the rest of the world?
Read MoreThere is no capital of the planet Earth. But if there were, it would be New York City, the very city the diplomats who founded the United Nations originally tried to avoid. So how did New York become the world’s de facto capital, and what does this mean for geopolitics?
Read MoreThe Italian peninsula has some of the oldest geopolitical history on the planet. You might think that modern Italy should have grown powerful as a result, but though Italy is in the G7 and is Europe’s second-largest manufacturer, the country is more defined by its burdens than its abilities. So what’s keeping Italy from being geopolitically powerful?
Read MoreFor decades, Ghana faced serious political instability. But it has run an unbroken multiparty democracy since 1992, and since 2000 power has changed hands between its two main parties three times, even as many of its neighbors in West Africa face coups and domestic volatility, and despite major economic problems. So how has Ghana managed to stabilize politically, and what impact does this have on its geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreBotswana’s entire economy rests on a single commodity. Diamonds long provided about a third of the government's revenue, and they're still around 80% of its exports, but the collapse of demand for natural diamonds globally has triggered Botswana's worst financial crisis in decades, and perhaps a geopolitical overhaul. So why is Botswana so reliant on the diamond trade, and how is it trying to move on?
Read MoreYou might not realize it, but Iraq and Iran share a lot more than just similar names. They are so geopolitically intertwined that it is very difficult to talk about one without eventually needing to talk about the other. But other than being neighbors, why are Iraq and Iran so tethered together?
Read MoreMacao is like the Las Vegas of Asia, and China is very happy with it because while it’s a Special Administrative Region just like nearby Hong Kong, Macao has no mass democracy movement. So why is Macao so different from Hong Kong, and how did it become such a hub for gambling?
Read MoreThe average person’s only real connection with Denmark is a LEGO set, a medication they take, or a fish they bought from the supermarket. But while Denmark is small, it wields outsized geopolitical influence. So why is Denmark disproportionately important?
Read MoreDubai is just one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates. But why are the emirates united into a single country to begin with, and are they really united?
Read MoreThe US spends about a trillion dollars per year on defense, and more than half of that goes to contracting companies. The five biggest, like Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, take a third of all contract dollars on their own. But why does the US rely so much on the military-industrial complex, and what impact does this have on geopolitics?
Read MoreMore shipping tonnage sails under Liberia's flag than any other country's, but only a third of Liberians even have electricity. And when USAID was dismantled in 2025, no country on earth lost more as a share of its national income. For two centuries Liberia has rented itself out: its land, its labor, and even its flag. So why hasn’t this led to long-term prosperity?
Read MoreHow did Javier Milei go from a TV news pundit to the president of Argentina? And what impact has he had on his country’s geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreEven if you’ve heard of Luxembourg, you probably don’t know much about it. It may be a tiny landlocked country, but today it has the highest GDP per capita in the world thanks to a financial sector that is both its greatest asset and its most critical vulnerability. It’s also hugely important in European politics. So how did Luxembourg become so disproportionately wealthy and influential, and how does this affect the country’s geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreSouth Africa controls 83% of the world’s platinum, metals your phone and your car can’t work without. It sits on minerals valued at over 2.5 trillion USD, and yet it has the world’s worst inequality, unemployment over 30%, and until recently, it couldn’t even keep the lights on. None of this is bad luck. South Africa was built piece by piece over nearly 400 years. So how does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics today?
Read MoreThe European Union is something we kind of take for granted today, but it hasn’t always existed. Before 1993, there was no EU. European countries had spent decades stitching together trade deals and shared institutions, but every country still had its own currency, and a giant tangle of geopolitical dynamics made European affairs incredibly complicated. So why did the EU actually come into being, and how do those reasons still affect geopolitics today?
Read MoreYou’ve probably heard that the Cayman Islands are a tax haven for the rich, and there’s a strong chance you’ve never heard anything else about them. But the Cayman Islands are far more important to geopolitics than you’re probably aware because they are the tax-neutral legal plumbing for the global financial system, with funds reporting roughly 16 trillion USD in total assets under management. So what impact do the Cayman Islands really have on the world around us?
Read MoreWhen most of us think of Jamaica, we think of beach resorts and reggae, but Jamaica is actually a perfect example of how geopolitics works in practice. It’s a small island of just 2.8m whose modern politics were forged by a plantation-slavery economy, whose geography as a small Caribbean island influences everything about its dynamics, and whose government has to operate within those constraints. So how did Jamaica come to be, and what can it tell us about geopolitics?
Read MoreMalawi is one of the world’s poorest countries. It depends heavily on foreign aid and a colonial-era economy anchored on declining tobacco exports, and it’s wedged between Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique, making it completely dependent on ports in other countries for trade with the rest of the world to occur at all. This also means that it is extremely vulnerable to those countries’ political volatility. So why is Malawi a country at all, and how has it managed to survive?
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