Tucked between India and China is a tiny Buddhist kingdom best known for its monasteries, fortresses, and incredible Himalayan landscapes. Bhutan has only about 800000 people, but its critical position with India and China has made it disproportionately important in the realm of geopolitics. So why has such a small country managed to stay independent between two major powers, and what impact does Bhutan actually have on the world?
Read MoreThere’s a country in the middle of Africa whose sprawling, jungle-covered territory produces about 73% of the world’s cobalt, without which your phone, your laptop, and your car wouldn’t be able to exist. But the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, has also experienced the deadliest wars ever on African soil. So how are these two facts connected, and what impact does the DRC ultimately have on geopolitics?
Read MoreIn the pre-dawn hours of 3 January 2026, the US launched a military strike on Venezuela, bombing the country’s air defenses and ultimately capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife on narco-terrorism and drug charges. Shortly after, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was publicly sworn in as acting president, and US oil companies began moving in. But what exactly is going on in Venezuela today, and how has the country changed since Maduro was removed from office?
Read MoreMexico’s first woman president, a climate scientist named Claudia Sheinbaum, took office in 2024 after a landslide election, just months before a geopolitical development that radically changed its regional environment. That development, of course, was the most recent US presidential election, which resulted in unprecedented tariffs, migration issues, threats against Mexican territory, and instability that have driven much of Sheinbaum’s strategic rationale. So how and why did Sheinbaum become Mexico’s president, and how has she navigated such an uncertain geopolitical environment?
Read MoreWhen the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Armenia became an independent state. But a year later, Russia led the signing of an intergovernmental military treaty called the Collective Security Treaty, whose signatories today comprise Russia, Armenia, and four other post-Soviet states, with Russia as the primary guarantor of security. For almost thirty years, Russia and Armenia were incredibly close, but since 2020 things have shifted dramatically, with its own prime minister calling the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, a threat to the country’s national security. So what happened to change Armenia’s relationship with Russia?
Read MoreIn January 2026, the US conducted targeted strikes on Venezuela that ultimately decapitated the country’s government, placing President Nicolas Maduro in US custody and providing an avenue for US businesses to expand their operations into a country that has been a key US adversary for decades. Just weeks later, the US launched an even larger operation in Iran to kill the country’s Supreme Leader and degrade its military and nuclear infrastructure. And now reports indicate that the US may be preparing to conduct military operations against Cuba. These events have many similarities that can give us tremendous insight into the current administration’s priorities and strategy, but the question is, knowing what we know now, how and why would the US invade Cuba?
Read MoreIf you zoom in on a map of east Africa, you might notice two little countries tucked between Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda. Beyond being surrounded by far larger countries, Rwanda and Burundi also look like a single country that’s been split in half. So why are Rwanda and Burundi small, separate, and surrounded?
Read MoreThe regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad collapsed in December 2024. Since then, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, the man who led the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to victory against Assad, has led the country into uncharted territory. Without Assad, Syria is a fundamentally different place. But how exactly has Syria changed since his regime fell?
Read MoreFor almost as long as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has existed, Pakistan has been one of its closest allies. In fact, many consider this relationship to be one of the closest friendships between any two countries in the world. But in 2025, the two countries signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement to codify this relationship for the first time. This is an important geopolitical shift. Let’s talk about why.
Read MoreThe country of Timor-Leste is Asia’s youngest state, having restored its independence in 2002 after 24 years of Indonesian occupation. But Timor-Leste is increasingly being courted by Indonesia, China, Australia, Japan, and the US despite occupying only half of a single island. So what makes Timor-Leste so interesting to the region’s far more powerful stakeholders?
Read MoreIn June 2024, a Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine called the Kazan pulled into harbor at Havana, Cuba. It was joined by a guided missile frigate, a fuel tanker, and a rescue tug. US destroyers and unmanned surface vessels shadowed them the entire way in, and though the Pentagon publicly waved it off, that single port call was the loudest signal in a very quiet relationship between Russia and Cuba that has been rebuilding since the Cold War ended. We all know the stories about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet patronage, but how and why are the two countries collaborating today?
Read MoreThe Basque Country of Spain is best known for being incredibly distinct from the rest of the country. Its language is the only living language in its family, its culture is very different, and its people are genetically descended from those who lived on the Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age, despite having intermingled with other groups for thousands of years. The natural question is how does a region that’s so different from the rest of its own country play into Spain’s broader geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreVietnam is the only country on Earth that has top-tier strategic partnerships with China, Russia, the United States, Britain, and France. That’s all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus many more like India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. All of these countries view Vietnam as a strategic partner, even if they don’t get along very well with Vietnam’s other allies. So how did Vietnam become so universally attractive to other countries?
Read MoreDid you know that for over 500 years, Spain has technically been an African country? Obviously most of Spain is in Europe, but just like French Guiana makes France a South American country, the territories of Ceuta and Melilla in north Africa give Spain a very different geopolitical footprint than any other state in Europe, and they are a key player in Spain’s heated dynamic with Morocco. So how exactly do Ceuta and Melilla play into geopolitics?
Read MoreThere’s a family in Russia that has been credibly tied to political assassinations on European soil, and Vladimir Putin uses them as his preferred subcontractor for dangerous work. The Kadyrov family has ruled Chechnya since 2000, and though they haven’t always had a positive relationship with the rest of Russia, they have repeatedly done Putin’s dirty work in exchange for money and independence. In many ways, this one family is the case study for how Putin runs Russia.
Read MoreIf you’ve heard of Eritrea at all, you’ve probably heard it referred to as the North Korea of Africa. This is a country of a few million people governed for the last 33 years by one man, in a very literal sense. Eritrea has no constitution, no legislature, and no elections, but it is now being courted simultaneously by Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now the US. So what makes this tiny east African autocracy so attractive in the world of geopolitics?
Read MoreBelarus is more than just a Russian ally. As of 2026, it is effectively a Russian satellite state. In fact, Russia controls or routes roughly 90% of Belarusian exports, leverages Belarusian airspace and territory for military operations, dominates the Belarusian economy via fused regulatory and financial environments, and hosts tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil. If Vladimir Putin hadn’t intervened during Belarus’s mass protests in 2020, Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime likely would have collapsed. So how exactly did Belarus become subjugated by Russia?
Read MoreIn many ways, there are two Canadas, and they interact with the world in very different ways. There’s the Canada led out of Ottawa, the one most people are familiar with, and then there’s Quebec, which has 35 government offices in 20 countries, signs international treaties on its own, and has a population roughly the same size as Belarus or Switzerland. So just how different is Quebec from the rest of Canada, and what impact does this have on the country’s geopolitical dynamics?
Read MoreIn 1667, the Dutch and the English signed a treaty that traded one piece of land for another. The English kept a swampy little outpost we now call Manhattan. The Dutch kept a sliver of South American coast that they considered the better deal. It’s called Suriname, and 350 years later that piece of land hosts roughly 750m barrels of recoverable oil, a Chinese-owned gold mine, the highest proportion of Muslims of any country in the Americas, and the political afterlife of a criminal dictator. So with all that in mind, how does Suriname fit into geopolitics today?
Read MoreYou probably never heard that on Christmas Day 2025, US Tomahawk missiles hit Islamic extremist targets in the state of Sokoto in northwestern Nigeria. These were the first ever direct US missile strikes against Nigeria’s insurgencies, but the more interesting aspect of this is that it’s a symptom of the fact that the Nigerian government doesn’t have oversight of the country’s security. Today, Nigeria relies on many different security architectures that vary in effectiveness from region to region and often barely speak the same language, making coordination difficult at best. So why is Nigeria’s security architecture so scattered?
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