Geography and Politics Among Nations

Geography and Politics Among Nations is intended to assist the general reader to grasp the significance of geopolitical awareness in the conduct of foreign relations. Toward this end, the book begins with a cursory review of selected examples of geopolitical thought from antiquity to the present, which illustrates some of the main tendencies in geopolitical thinking throughout history. This survey of both past and recent geopolitical thinking is followed by a discussion of the intimate relationship between geographical and geostrategic considerations and realistic foreign policy, and then continues with consideration of basic factors affecting geopolitical decision-making such as the size of a state, its configuration, climate, and often most critically its global and regional location. This is followed by a discussion of the frontiers, boundaries, and borderlands that separate and define the territories of states and the impact on them of technological advancements, which is then followed by an examination of the variety of territorial disputes among nations, past and present, many of which remain unresolved. The book concludes with a brief discussion of some of the continuing and prospective geopolitical challenges that are likely to be confronted in the course of the present century.