If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west. So it is with all nations, big or small.
The landscape imprisons their leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to maneuver than you might think.
This was true of the Athenian Empire, the Persians, the Babylonians, and before; it was true of every leader seeking high ground from which to protect their tribe.#6155•
Broadly speaking, geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors: not just the physical landscape—the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example—but also climate, demographics, cultural regions, and access to natural resources.
Factors such as these can have an important impact on many different aspects of our civilization, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade, and religion.#6168•
The physical realities that underpin national and international politics are too often disregarded in both writing about history and in contemporary reporting of world affairs.#6167•
Geography is clearly a fundamental part of the "why" as well as the "what." Take, for example, China and India: two massive countries with huge populations that share a very long border but are not politically or culturally aligned. It wouldn't be surprising if these two giants had fought each other in several wars, but in fact, apart from one monthlong battle in 1962, they never have.
Why? Because between them is the highest mountain range in the world, and it is practically impossible to advance large military columns through or over the Himalayas.#6174•
The rules of geography, which Hannibal, Sun Tzu, and Alexander the Great all knew, still apply to today's leaders.#6181•
The conflict in Iraq and Syria is rooted in colonial powers ignoring the rules of geography, whereas the Chinese occupation of Tibet is rooted in obeying them. America's global foreign policy is dictated by them, and even the power projection of the last superpower standing can only mitigate the rules that nature, or God, handed down.#6162•
Chapter 1
Russia as a concept dates back to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus, which was based in Kiev and other towns along the Dnieper River, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols, expanding their empire, continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the thirteenth century.
The fledgling Russia then relocated northeast in and around the city of Moscow.
This early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Muscovy, was indefensible.
There were no mountains, no deserts, and few rivers.
In all directions lay flatland, and across the steppe to the south and east were the Mongols.
The invader could advance at a place of his choosing, and there were few natural defensive positions to occupy.#6173•
Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defense—i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outward. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history. Without his character, of both utter ruthlessness and vision, Russian history would be different.#6149•
Now the Russians had a partial buffer zone and a hinterland—strategic depth—somewhere to fall back to in the case of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor fight their way over the Urals to get to them. Their land was becoming what we now know as Russia, and to get to it from the south or southeast you had to have a huge army and a very long supply line and you had to fight your way past defensive positions.#6151•
How big is the biggest country in the world? Russia is twice the size of the United States or China, five times the size of India, seventy times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population (144 million), fewer people than Nigeria or Pakistan. Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones that Moscow governs.#6177•
Former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was mocked when she was reported as saying "You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska," a line which morphed in media coverage to "You can see Russia from my house." What she really said was "You can see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." She was right.
A Russian island in the Bering Strait is two and a half miles from an American island in the Strait, Little Diomede Island, and can be seen with the naked eye.
You can indeed see Russia from America.#6158•
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled that space in order to prevent anyone else from doing so.#6184•
If you take the long view of history—and most diplomats and military planners do—then there is still everything to play for in each of the states that formerly made up the USSR, plus some of those previously in the Warsaw Pact military alliance. They can be divided three ways: those that are neutral, the pro-Western group, and the pro-Russian camp.#6183•
The neutral countries—Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan—are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West. This is because all three produce their own energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade.#6163•
In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine's economy is (another reason for the rebellion there).#6185•
Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states that suffered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, who would all like to join both organizations but are being held at arm's length because of their geographic proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil.
NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war.#6152•
As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable.
That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating.
But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances and that threw into doubt Russia's access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host a NATO naval base? That could not stand.#6171•
President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides. He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow—thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw.#6178•
For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership in the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership in NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests that were eventually to overthrow him.#6161•
By mid-February 2014, L'viv, and other urban areas, were no longer controlled by the government. Then on February 22, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the president, fearing for his life, fled. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast.
President Putin did not have much of a choice—he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but most important the port of Sevastopol.
This geographic imperative and the whole eastward movement of NATO is exactly what Putin had in mind when, in a speech about the annexation, he said "Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from.
If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard.
You must always remember this."#6182•
No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbors knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, and Washington, DC, is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, but the West could.#6165•
It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring.
It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev's infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO.#6170•
The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its "near abroad." It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene and Crimea was "doable." It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula.#6153•
Why would the Russians want Moldova? Because as the Carpathian Mountains curve around southwest to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the southeast is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also be thought of as a flat corridor into Russia, and just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea—also known as Moldova—in the region formerly known as Bessarabia.#6157•
Moldova is reliant on Russia for its energy needs, its crops go eastward, and Russian imports of the excellent Moldovan wine tend to rise or fall according to the state of the relationship between the two countries.#6164•
Russia's most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the United States as the world's biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States.#6180•
On average, 25 percent of Europe's gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country's foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; and Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent.
About half of Germany's gas supply comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticize the Kremlin for aggressive behavior than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 percent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months' supply.#6160•
Enter the Americans, with a win-win strategy for the United States and Europe. Noting that Europe wants gas, and not wanting to be seen to be weak in the face of Russian foreign policy, the Americans believe they have the answer. The massive boom in shale gas production in the United States is not only enabling it to be self-sufficient in energy, but also to sell its surplus to one of the great energy consumers—Europe.#6156•
To do this, the gas needs to be liquefied and shipped across the Atlantic. This in turn requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and ports to be built along the European coastlines to receive the cargo and turn it back into gas. Washington is already approving licenses for export facilities, and Europe is beginning a long-term project to build more LNG terminals.
Poland and Lithuania are constructing LNG terminals; other countries such as the Czech Republic want to build pipelines connecting to those terminals, knowing they could then benefit not just from American liquefied gas, but also supplies from North Africa and the Middle East.
The Kremlin would no longer be able to turn the taps off.#6159•
This is an economic battle based on geography and one of the modern examples where technology is being utilized in an attempt to beat the geographic restraints of earlier eras.#6179•
Away from the heartland Russia does have a global political reach and uses its influence, notably in Latin America, where it buddies up to whichever South American country has the least friendly relationship with the United States, for example, Venezuela. It tries to check American moves in the Middle East, or at least ensure it has a say in matters, it is spending massively on its Arctic military forces, and it consistently takes an interest in Greenland to maintain its territorial claims.
Since the fall of Communism it has focused less on Africa, but maintains what influence it can there, albeit in a losing battle with China.#6166•
The days when Russia was considered a military threat to China have passed and the idea of Russian troops occupying Manchuria, as they did in 1945, is inconceivable, although they do keep a wary eye on each other in places in which each would like to be the dominant power, such as Kazakhstan. However, they are not in competition for the ideological leadership of global Communism and this has freed each side to cooperate at a military level where their interests coincide.
What seems like an odd example came in May 2015 when they conducted joint military live fire exercises in the Mediterranean.
Beijing's push into a sea 9,000 miles from home was part of its attempt to extend its naval reach around the globe.
Moscow has designs on the gas fields found in the Mediterranean, is courting Greece, and wants to protect its small naval port on the Syrian coast.
In addition, both sides are quite happy to annoy the NATO powers in the region, including the American 6th Fleet based in Naples.#6148•
From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn't matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist—the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.
Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day#6150•
Chapter 2
The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn't noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative, especially as the sub was within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk itself. They protested, perhaps too much, and the Chinese said: "Oh! What a coincidence, us surfacing in the middle of your battle group that is off our coast, we had no idea."#6175•
This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy; whereas the British used to heave a man-of-war off the coast of some minor power to signal intent, the Chinese heaved into view off their own coast with a clear message: "We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea." It has taken four thousand years, but the Chinese are coming to a port—and a shipping lane—near you.#6176•
The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and—crucially—the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions that surrounded them, especially Mongolia, with its nomadic bands of violent warriors.#6196•
China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that—if the Han could reach them and establish control—would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago.#6195•
By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilized China and the "barbarous" regions that surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people.#6193•
It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved—but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding.#6197•
The Han still warred with each other, but increasingly less so, and by the early eleventh century CE they were forced to concentrate their attention on the waves of Mongols pouring down from the north. The Mongols defeated whichever dynasty, north or south, they came up against, and by 1279 their leader, Kublai Khan, became the first foreigner to rule all of the country as emperor of the Mongol dynasty.
It was almost ninety years before the Han would take charge of their own affairs with the establishment of the Ming dynasty.#6191•
The imperial powers arrived, the British among them, and carved the country up into spheres of influence. It was, and is, the greatest humiliation the Chinese suffered since the Mongol invasions. This is a narrative the Communist Party uses frequently; it is in part true, but it is also useful in covering up the party's own failures and repressive policies.#6199•
A few outside observers thought the postwar years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent Arab Spring, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics, and geography of the region.#6194•
Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Chairman Mao battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year, Radio Beijing announced: "The People's Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan, and Taiwan."#6192•
Mao centralized power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing's influence into Mongolia. In 1951, China annexed Tibet (another vast non-Han territory) and by then Chinese school textbook maps began to depict China as stretching even into the central Asian republics.
The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life but turning away from much of the outside world.
The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified.#6190•
In the north we see the 2,906-mile-long border with Mongolia. Straddling this border is the Gobi Desert. Nomadic warriors from ancient times might have been able to attack south across it, but a modern army would be spotted amassing there weeks before it was ready to advance, and it would have incredibly long supply lines running across inhospitable terrain before it got into Inner Mongolia (part of China) and toward the heartland.
There are few roads fit to move heavy armor, and few habitable areas.
The Gobi Desert is a massive early warning system–cum–defensive line.
Any Chinese expansion northward will come not via the military but from trade deals as China attempts to sweep up Mongolia's natural resources, primarily minerals.
This will bring with it increased migration of the Han into Mongolia.#6228•
Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory and, unfortunately for both, this is the one area to the south that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979.
However, as China's military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cozy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing.#6214•
This brings us to Tibet and its importance to China. The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature's version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi's side—the Great Wall of India.
It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.#6212•
Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course, the border is really the Tibetan-Indian border—and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it.#6244•
This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China's great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as "China's Water Tower." China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.#6221•
When Westerners, be they Mr. Gere or President Obama, talk about Tibet, the Chinese find it deeply irritating. Not dangerous, not subversive—just irritating. They see it not through the prism of human rights, but that of geopolitical security, and can only believe that the Westerners are trying to undermine their security.
However, Chinese security has not been undermined and it will not be, even if there are further uprisings against the Han.
Demographics and geopolitics oppose Tibetan independence.#6229•
Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China's nuclear weapons testing sites.#6238•
There are similar reasons for the party's resistance to democracy and individual rights. If the population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into conflict. That in turn would embolden the people of the buffer zones, further weakening China.#6240•
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, at the least, that the extended family comes before the individual.#6243•
China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrializing as it modernizes and raises standards of living, but that very process threatens food production. If it cannot solve this problem there will be unrest.#6208•
America is committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. However, if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the United States is not to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.#6217•
The Chinese are determined to have Taiwan but are nowhere near being able to challenge for it militarily. Instead they are using soft power by increasing trade and tourism between the two states. China wants to woo Taiwan back into its arms. During the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong, one of the reasons the authorities did not quickly batter them off the streets—as they would have done in, for example, Ürümqi—was that the world's cameras were there and would have captured the violence.
In China much of this footage would be blocked, but in Taiwan people would see what the rest of the world saw and ask themselves how close a relationship they wanted with such a power.
Beijing hesitated; it is playing the long game.#6219•
The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Americans, having consolidated their landmass, had become a two-ocean power (Atlantic and Pacific), and then moved to control the seas around them, pushing the Spanish out of Cuba.#6215•
There are 1.4 billion reasons why China may succeed, and 1.4 billion reasons why it may not surpass America as the greatest power in the world. A great depression such as in the 1930s could set it back decades. China has locked itself into the global economy. If we don't buy, they don't make. And if they don't make, there will be mass unemployment.
If there is mass and long-term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be—like everything else in modern China—on a scale hitherto unseen.#6223•
Chapter 3
At the stroke of a pen, and the handing over of $15 million, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the United States and gave it mastery over the greatest inland water transport route in the world. As the American historian Henry Adams wrote, "Never did the United States get so much for so little."#6239•
Because the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, when Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 its border was just two hundred miles from the port of New Orleans. In the twenty-first century, Mexico poses no territorial threat to the United States, although its proximity causes America problems, as it feeds its northern neighbor's appetite for illegal labor and drugs.#6236•
Mexico is not blessed in the American way. It has poor-quality agricultural land, no river system to use for transport, and was wholly undemocratic, with new arrivals having little chance of ever being granted land.#6209•
As the country grew, and grew wealthy, it began to develop a blue-water navy. For most of the nineteenth century, foreign policy was dominated by expanding trade and avoiding entanglements outside the neighborhood, but it was time to push out and protect the approaches to the coastlines. The only real threat was from Spain—it may have been persuaded to leave the mainland, but it still controlled the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and part of what is now the Dominican Republic.#6245•
Cuba in particular kept American presidents awake at night, as it would again in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The island sits just off Florida, giving it access to and potential control of the Straits of Florida and the Yucatán Channel in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exit and entry route for the port of New Orleans.#6247•
Most subsequent presidents bore in mind George Washington's advice in his farewell address in 1796 not to get involved in "inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others," and to "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."#6211•
No matter what the treaty says, NATO's Supreme Commander ultimately answers to Washington. The UK and France would learn at their expense during the Suez Crisis of 1956—when they were compelled by American pressure to cease their occupation of the canal zone, losing most of their influence in the Middle East as a result—that a NATO country does not hold a strategic naval policy without first asking Washington.#6250•
In the 1960s, the United States's failure in Vietnam damaged its confidence and made it more cautious about foreign entanglements.#6230•
There were now only three places from which a challenge to American hegemony could come: a united Europe, Russia, and China. All would grow stronger, but two would reach their limits.#6235•
The dream of some Europeans of an EU with "ever closer union" and a common foreign and defense policy is dying slowly before our eyes, and even if it were not, the EU countries spend so little on defense that ultimately they remain reliant on the United States. The economic crash of 2008 has left the European powers reduced in capacity and with little appetite for foreign adventures.
The gradual splintering of the idea of unity was magnified by the UK's decision to hold a referendum on its membership in the EU in the summer of 2016.
The complicated aftermath of the Brexit vote has brought confusion to the continent.
It also disappointed Washington, DC, which always favored having the UK inside the EU as its eyes and ears#6210•
Americans care about Europe, they care about NATO, and they will sometimes act (if it is in the American interest), but Russia is now, for the Americans, mostly a European problem, albeit one they keep an eye on.#6237•
However, when it comes to Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and others, the Americans are pushing at a door already open due to those countries' anxiety about their giant neighbor and keenness to engage with Washington. They may all have issues with one another, but those issues are dwarfed by the knowledge that if they do not stand together they will be picked off one by one and eventually fall under Chinese hegemony.#6207•
The United States is still in the opening phase of what in 2011 then secretary of state Hillary Clinton called "the pivot to China." It was an interesting phrase, taken by some to mean the abandonment of Europe; but a pivot toward one place does not mean the abandonment of another. It is more a case of how much weight you put on which foot.#6232•
In the short term, most, but not all, are likely to be made by the Chinese—an early example is Beijing's declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone requiring foreign nations to inform them before entering what is disputed territory, and the Americans deliberately flying through it without telling them.
The Chinese gained something by declaring the zone and making it an issue; the United States gained something by being seen not to comply.
It is a long game.#6225•
Chapter 8
North Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River. The United States, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost thirty thousand troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.#6224•
In reality, it is the least democratic state in the world: it is not run for the people and it is not a republic. It is a dynasty shared by one family and one party. It also checks off every box in the dictatorship test: arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption, and a litany of horrors on a scale without parallel in the twenty-first century.
Satellite images and witness testimony suggest that at least 150,000 political prisoners are held in giant work and "reeducation" camps.
North Korea is a stain on the world's conscience, and yet few people know the full scale of the horrors taking place ther#6242•