Geopolitics History

Eighteen years have passed since ten countries from Central & Eastern Europe joined the European Union and more than three decades since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989—but ignorance about what is popularly still called Eastern Europe is as widespread as ever. Slovenia still gets mixed up with Slovakia, the Slavs remain a mystery in a Europe apparently dominated by Romanic and Germanic nations and a country like the Czech Republic is labelled as Eastern European, although one needs to travel west to get from Vienna to Prague.

Jorge Dezcallar ha dedicado toda su vida profesional a la diplomacia y a la política exterior. Una experiencia que, en los últimos y turbulentos años, le ha permitido reflexionar sobre adónde va el mundo y plasmarlo en este ameno libro, en el que nos deja inquietudes, sugerencias y algunas ideas sobre cuál puede ser el rumbo de la geopolítica a partir de ahora.

Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet twenty-five years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs.

Chinas Aufstieg fasziniert die Welt - und lehrt sie das Fürchten. Unter Parteichef Xi Jinping erlebt das Land einen Rückfall in die Diktatur. Gleichzeitig dehnt es seinen globalen Einfluss immer weiter aus. Nicht nur in Amerika, auch in Europa wächst das Unbehagen an der neuen Weltmacht und an ihren Methoden. Droht ein neuer kalter Krieg oder sogar ein chinesischer Triumph über den Westen? ZEIT-Korrespondent Matthias Naß gibt einen spannenden Einblick in das Land, das sich anschickt, zur Führungsmacht des 21. Jahrhunderts zu werden.

War Donald Trump bloß ein Betriebsunfall? Ein hässlicher Fleck auf einer ansonsten weißen Weste? Und ist jetzt alles wieder in bester Ordnung? Michael Lüders warnt vor transatlantischen Illusionen und zeigt, warum wir aus dem Schatten der USA heraustreten müssen. Die USA gelten als Garant für Demokratie und Menschenrechte. Doch für "Werte" einzutreten, ist nur die eine Seite der Medaille. Auf der anderen steht eine brutale Machtpolitik. Seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg haben die Amerikaner weltweit zahlreiche Regierungen gestürzt.

Gefährlicher Drache statt gemütlicher Panda: Mit welchen Strategien China die Welt erobert. Chinas Aufstieg zur Weltmacht ist unaufhaltsam. Lange erwartete man, dass sich das Land mit zunehmendem Wohlstand demokratisieren würde. Doch das Gegenteil ist der Fall. Die Kommunistische Partei Chinas will sich mit allen Mitteln an der Macht halten. Dafür werden Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im eigenen Land auf Linie gebracht und ein weitreichendes Programm wurde entwickelt, mit dem China die westlichen Demokratien unterwandert und eine neue Weltordnung etablieren will.

La Cina è davvero "vicina" come recitava il titolo di un vecchio film d'autore? No, sostiene Giada Messetti nel suo "Nella testa del Dragone". È, anzi, molto lontana. Soprattutto, è diversa. Perché ― continua l'autrice, sinologa, che in Cina ha vissuto sei anni ― esistono dieci, cento, mille Cine. Esplorarle è come fare un viaggio su una macchina del tempo, passando da villaggi remoti rimasti all'epoca preindustriale a smart city avveniristiche dove, fermo al semaforo in motorino, può capitare che un drone ti intimi di indossare il casco se vuoi evitare una multa salata.

Pro Jahr mehr als 1.500 Kilometer neue Gleise für Hochgeschwindigkeitszüge, über ein Dutzend neue Wolkenkratzer allein in Shenzhen und mindestens 1,38 Millionen neue Patente: Chinas Diktatur treibt eine hocheffiziente Wirtschaft an. Sie baut einen digitalen Überwachungsapparat auf, wie ihn die Welt noch nicht gesehen hat, und dehnt im Stil einer neuen Kolonialmacht ihren Einfluss aus - ob in Afrika, bei der neuen Seidenstraße oder durch Investitionen in Griechenland oder Portugal, für die im Gegenzug Linientreue bei EU-Resolutionen gezeigt werden muss.

Howard Fineman, one of our most trusted political journalists, shows that every debate, from our nation’s founding to the present day, is rooted in one of thirteen arguments that–thankfully–defy resolution. It is the very process of never-ending argument, Fineman explains, that defines us, inspires us, and keeps us free. At a time when most public disagreement seems shrill and meaningless, Fineman makes a cogent case for nurturing the real American dialogue.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter pillories American liberals for their views on Republicans and conservative causes. Author of the best-selling anti-Clinton book High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Coulter summons pages of footnotes to support her highly original thesis that most of the media condemn even the most moderate of conservative views.

John Kampfner ist Brite und zeigt, wie sehr sich das Deutschland-Bild im Ausland in den letzten Jahren verändert hat. Die deutsche Krisenpolitik hält er für Weltklasse: Corona-Bekämpfung, Finanzkrise, Flüchtlingskrise - kein Land navigiere so erfolgreich und souverän durch schwierige Zeiten wie Deutschland. Während anderswo autoritäre Politiker und Populisten regieren, sei Deutschland ein Bollwerk aus Anstand und Stabilität.

Tensions between the world's superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. But between these hubs of high-level politics, an entirely new reality is emerging. Yet the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, and these interactions make California a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the 21st century. In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections.

In this adventurous, original book, NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt describes how he created a free taxi service - offering rides in exchange for illuminating conversation - to go beyond the headlines and get to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks like "Beer", a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life.

In We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, Laurie Calhoun examines the 21st-century practice of remote-control killing of suspects located in third-world countries and challenges listeners to reflect upon the long-range implications - moral, political, psychological, and cultural - of this new form of “warfare”. Through the use of provocative analogies and examples, We Kill Because We Can clarifies and criticizes targeted killing as incompatible with the values and principles of modern Western democratic societies.

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

Europe's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. Successive powers have redrawn the map of our continent, with varying degrees of success: the fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but the present shape of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945. In Borderlines, writer and political historian Lewis Baston journeys along and across key borders from west to east Europe, to explore their history.

Two of America's leading scholar-diplomats, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, have combed sources in several languages, interviewed leading figures, and drawn on their own firsthand experience to bring to life the choices that molded the contemporary world. Zeroing in on the key moments of decision, the might-have-beens, and the human beings working through them, they explore both what happened and what could have happened, to show how one world ended and another took form.

Using historical archives and primary documents, former Library of Congress historian Andrei Znamenski reveals the strange accounts of the Bolsheviks’ clandestine quest for ultimate power. Red Shambhala details the attempts of Marxist revolutionary and cryptographer Gleb Bokii and occult writer Alexander Barchenko to create a divine era of Communism by tapping into the power of Shambhala, a mythic land of pure bliss where inhabitants enjoyed god-like capabilities.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded.

China GDP has grown from $300 per capita to more than $10,000 in the past thirty years and lifted more people into the middle class than in any other country at any other point in human history. It is important for investors, US companies and anyone interested in the global economy to understand China. Author Jonathan A. Krane provides an inside look at China's transformation into a global superpower and explains why the relationship between the US and China is the most critical economic relationship in the world today.