term paper on geopolitics

Buy Print Magazine

Rethinking Geopolitics: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft

Jaehan Park PDF Download -->

Geopolitics has become marginalized in modern international relations scholarship despite its foundational role. This essay seeks to bring geopolitics back to the mainstream of international relations through conceptual, historical, and theoretical analyses. I make three arguments. First, definitional confusion about geopolitics comes from an overly broad understanding of geography. Notwithstanding various uses, however, geography itself should be re-centered as the analytical core of geopolitics. Second, classical geopolitics sought to inform grand strategy using geography as an explanatory variable and was thus institutionalized in U.S. strategic education. To wit, geography was used as “an aid to statecraft.” Finally, although largely ignored in mainstream international relations, the basic premise of geopolitics still undergirds much of its research. But the asymmetry, relativity, and comprehensiveness of geography have not been well explored. Drawing from classical geopolitical works, I offer some suggestions for future research on how to use geography in international relations scholarship.

Geopolitics has become an increasingly trendy subject over the past decade. A number of popular books on the subject have been published; 1 savvy investors and businessmen are looking for “geopolitical” consultants; 2 and research centers and programs committed to “geopolitical” analysis are emerging. 3 However, the precise definition of “geopolitics” remains vague. One observer lamented some time ago that geopolitics means “everything from geographic determinism … to merely an analytical way of thinking.” 4 This criticism remains valid today. Academic works embracing the term “geopolitics” offer ingenious, yet somewhat deflective, interpretations, from realism to post-modernism. While this definitional plasticity likely contributed to the widespread use of the term, such a sweeping conceptualization makes productive discussions of the topic difficult. 5

Since the term “geopolitics” is often used almost synonymously with “international affairs,” and given the topic’s recent prominence, one would surmise that international relations scholars are familiar with the subject — especially since the “classical geopolitics” of the late 19th century effectively “inaugurated” modern international relations scholarship, according to one prominent scholar. 6 But this is not the case. As intellectual historian Lucian Ashworth observed, geopolitics is “largely ignored” in the field. 7 The discussion of early geopolitical writing is confined to a small group of defense experts, geographers, and historians. 8 Yet, their fixation with specific concepts, such as the “heartland” and the “rimland,” discouraged engagement with the field. 9 This is unfortunate, because classical geopolitics has much to offer. Understanding classical geopolitics and its relationship with international relations will help scholars to be more conscious of their own disciplinary history, to examine geographical assumptions underlying their scholarship, and ultimately to better incorporate geographic features into their research. This last point is especially important, since policymakers and strategists in Washington are debating where to draw defensive parameters against strategic competitors. Their answers, by and large, will depend on the value they assign to different geographic locations. 10

This essay, therefore, seeks to re-establish the lost connection between geopolitics and international relations. It proceeds in three parts. The first order of business is to clarify the definition of “geopolitics,” given the habitual conceptual over-stretching of the term. After examining various uses of geopolitics in contemporary discourses, the first section will show that commentators generally equate it with international affairs in general or power politics in particular. This is understandable given the fundamentally territorial nature of states and their interactions — especially competition over geographic objects. In contrast, scholars tend to have more focused definitions of the term, but these are no less confusing. This section shows that this definitional confusion in scholarly works comes from different conceptualizations of the term’s analytical core, geography.

Even if we adopt a literal definition of geography, however, a question remains on the relationship between “geo” and “politics.” Thus, the second section briefly examines the history of geopolitics. Since the general story is well told elsewhere, 11 it will focus on two particular aspects of the history of geopolitics. The first is the ideas of three key thinkers in what is often called the Anglo-American “geostrategic” school — Halford Mackinder, Alfred Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman — both their substance and context. 12 This will not only clarify distinctions between geopolitics and political geography, conceptually if not substantively, but also show why classical geopolitics was essentially a precursor to modern international relations. In turn, the second aspect is the historical relationship between the two. While recent scholarship has started re-establishing the connection between geopolitics and international relations, how exactly the former influenced the latter remains somewhat unclear. 13 By tracing the institutionalization of geopolitics in U.S. strategic education, we can gain a better understanding of how it actually contributed to the birth of international relations.

Not only did geopolitics help form the bedrock of modern international relations, but its intellectual premise — that geography affects state behavior — although under-appreciated, still undergirds much of contemporary research. Thus, the third and final section will illustrate this point by surveying geopolitical propositions in international relations scholarship, broadly defined. It will examine how leading works on foreign policy and grand strategy have used geography as a key explanatory variable. The list presented there is by no means exhaustive. Rather, the purpose is to identify the broad tendencies in the field. As will be shown, the use of geography as an explanatory variable in these works falls under one of the three pillars of strategy: the ends, means, and ways. 14 Despite modern scholarship’s contribution, this essay finds that these works have fallen short of capturing the asymmetry, relativity, and comprehensiveness of geography. A more serious engagement with classical geopolitics, especially with how the three founding figures of the field conceptualized geography, would help scholars improve on these points. The paper closes with a brief remark on future research.

Together, these findings form three arguments about the concept, history, and theory of geopolitics. First, the meaning of the term “geography” itself should be reclaimed as the analytical core of geopolitics, as a concept , to avoid definitional confusion and to develop a constructive research program. Second, historically , geopolitics was conceived of as a group of grand strategic theories, akin to contemporary international relations scholarship, with geography serving as a key explanatory variable — in other words, geography was used as “an aid to statecraft.” 15 Finally, international relations scholars can benefit from engaging classical geopolitics, especially its theoretical components, by paying attention to how geography interacts with human factors, such as technology and institutions, to dynamically shape the strategic environment, as opposed to fixating on particular geographies or geopolitical maxims.

The broad scope of this essay by default makes it interpretative and synthesizing in its approach. However, it relies on diverse sources, from published monographs to heretofore neglected unpublished works and recently released documents. It also draws from various disciplines across time, from the writings of classical geopoliticians of the late 19th century to contemporary scholarship in social sciences and intellectual history. Its purpose is less about breaking new theoretical or empirical ground than about bringing together compartmentalized knowledge in a holistic manner, thereby bridging the gap between the disconnected fields of geopolitics and international relations.

Geopolitics as a Concept

The term “geopolitics” has been rather loosely defined and used somewhat haphazardly. Commentators often use “geopolitics” as a substitute for international affairs in general. A corollary is that anything involving political and strategic rationale is deemed “geopolitical.” 16 As Colin Gray argued, “all politics is geopolitics.” 17 Although such an expansive definition of geopolitics omits “geo” altogether, it is not entirely wrong. Because states — the main actors in the international arena — are territorial entities by nature, their political relations are inherently geopolitical. 18 But this excessively broad definition is unhelpful for analytical purposes. If everything is geopolitical, nothing really is. One intuitively knows that it would be absurd to describe a congenial meeting of heads of state discussing mundane issues as “geopolitical,” even though it involves interstate exchanges.

A related, yet more focused, definition of geopolitics is great-power competition. 19 This is arguably the most common use of the term. Its progenitor, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, used “geopolitics” to denote “an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium,” understood as the balance of power. 20 He popularized this conception during the 1970s, when the term itself had largely been forgotten in the United States. 21 There is some truth to this way of conceptualizing geopolitics because great-power competition is often a competition over territory, resources, or other geographic objects. Kissinger himself is generally attentive to the importance of location throughout his works. 22 Still, Kissinger as a theorist, much like his contemporary Hans Morgenthau, was an ontological “idealist” concerned with moral — not material — forces, and his equation of geopolitics with high politics led later generations of commentators to omit “geo” from their analyses. 23

Conceptually, however, realism and geopolitics are different: The former is defined as a philosophical position that assumes the primacy of power and security in the struggle among self-interested political groups, whereas the latter does not necessarily have to make these assumptions and focuses instead on spatial dimensions.

If pundits have neglected the prefix, academics have either creatively overstretched the definition of “geopolitics” or reversed the order of “geo” and “politics.” Broadly speaking, in academia “geopolitics” means either “politics of geography” or “geography of politics.” 24 The former is used in the “critical geopolitics” literature where assumptions underlying cartographic concepts and discourses are examined. 25 While offering fresh perspectives, critical geopolitics has effectively gotten rid of the “geo” part — i.e., physical geography — and thus is more appropriately called the etymology or sociology of cartography. 26

The latter approach, “geography of politics,” is more common. It is uncontroversial to state that geography constitutes the basic context, or milieu, of politics. But even those who take the “geo” component more seriously conceptualize geography differently. To Robert Kaplan, for instance, geography is synonymous with the realities of international politics, and geopolitics with political realism. As Kaplan wrote, “realism is about the recognition of the most blunt, uncomfortable, and deterministic truths: those of geography.” 27 In fact, classical geopolitical thinkers, such as Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman, regarded international conflicts largely as a reality to reckon with, and earlier realists did take geography seriously. 28 One could also blame Mackinder for Kaplan’s conceptual overstretch, because he essentially contrasted geographic reality with democratic ideals . 29

Conceptually, however, realism and geopolitics are different: The former is defined as a philosophical position that assumes the primacy of power and security in the struggle among self-interested political groups, 30 whereas the latter does not necessarily have to make these assumptions and focuses instead on spatial dimensions. Moreover, both realism and geopolitics have different analytical focal points: power and space, respectively. This point is best illustrated in their different conceptions of the balance of power. As Jeremy Black wrote, “For realism, the relative physical strengths … are measured in terms of physical-balance relationships. In contrast, for geopolitics, balance-of-power relationships come, in part, in terms of spatial positions or patterns.” 31 More intuitively, as Or Rosenboim analogized, if realism weighs the balance on a mental “scale,” geopolitics expresses it spatially on a map. 32 In short, realism and geopolitics are two different schools of thought, albeit with some areas of overlap.

Another related conceptual cousin is historical materialism. Daniel Deudney defined “geopolitics” as a “historical security materialist theory,” equating geography with the material environment. Specifically, he argued that geopolitics explains the creation of the world order in terms of “violence interdependence,” which is determined by geography and technology. 33 Geography does constitute the basic feature of the material world. At one level, geopolitics and materialism seem similar. Not surprisingly, E. H. Carr mentioned Geopolitik , albeit in passing, alongside other prominent historical materialists such as Georg Hegel and Karl Marx. 34 In fact, communists were some of its earliest critics, because, according to them, the German “portmanteau science” essentially “stole” Marx’s materialism. As one scholar wrote, “For the economic materialism … the Geopolitikers had merely substituted the geographic materialism … . What the class struggle is to the Marxist the struggle for space is to the Geopolitiker.” 35

On a closer examination, however, their difference is stark. While historical materialism, as manifested in classical Marxism, generally takes the “inside-out” approach, privileging domestic factors, 36 geopolitics focuses primarily on international issues. Relatedly, Marxism presupposes the primacy of economics, or the “mode of production,” as opposed to geopolitics which does not make this assumption. Also, Deudney’s specific claim that geopolitics is a form of historical security materialism should be qualified. Classical geopoliticians did not periodize history according to the development of destructive capabilities. Mackinder’s “Columbian Epoch” and Mahan’s periodization had little, if anything, to do with weapons technology. 37 Finally, geopoliticians do not share historical materialists’ determinism. They treat geography as a condition, albeit a major one, under which states operate. A wise statesperson can exploit geography to his or her advantage. 38 Thus, geopolitics and historical materialism are profoundly different, despite some similarities. 39

In short, geography itself, not its abstractions, should be returned as the conceptual core of geopolitics. This leads us back to a more traditional definition. Geographer Saul Cohen defined geopolitics as “the relation of international political power to the geographical setting.” 40 While a useful definition, a question remains. How is geopolitics different from political geography? Is the distinction, as Franklin Roosevelt’s geographer Isaiah Bowman argued, one of purpose, where geopolitics is a pseudo-science that advances a particular agenda and political geography is a legitimate science that advances human knowledge? 41 In contrast, political scientist Harold Sprout considered political geography as a subset of geopolitics, containing the latter’s best insights. 42 Still others believed that the difference is one of methodology and ontology. 43 Although unclear at the outset, they have different intellectual points of focus. Urban planning, for instance, is considered in political geography, but not necessarily in geopolitical analysis. To illustrate this point, some intellectual archaeology is in order.

The Rise and Fall of Geopolitics: A Short History

Background of Geopolitics

Historians and philosophers sought to explain human affairs with geographic referents long before the terms “political geography” and “geopolitics” entered the lexicon. Thucydides’ history, for instance, begins with “political archaeology,” describing how geography affected the domestic structure of Athens. 44 Similarly, Montesquieu argued that the physical environment of the land affected not only its inhabitants’ physiology but also their political system. 45 These early “physio-politicians,” who examined the interaction between humans and nature, were generally more interested in how the natural environment affected political organizations. 46 During the Age of Discovery, geography served raison d’état by providing knowledge that was necessary to explore and, as new places and things were discovered, begat scientific disciplines. 47

With the industrial revolution, the focus of physio-politicians shifted from domestic to international politics, influenced by technological developments that were shrinking the globe. Meanwhile, geography became an established discipline. 48 This gave birth to political geography and geopolitics, both the terms and the substance of each. In the mid-18th century, French philosopher Anne Robert Jacques Turgot used “political geography” to refer to “the relationship between the facts of geography … and the organization of politics.” 49 About a century and a half later in 1899, Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen coined the term Geopolitik , which denotes “the harnessing of geographical knowledge to further the aims of specific nation states.” 50 Kjellen, who had been influenced by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, saw the state as a living organism. This line of thinking, often called the “organic state theory,” would in turn become prominent in Germany after World War I. 51

Founding Figures: Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman

Unlike in continental Europe, geopoliticians in the Anglophone world had a different set of concerns and analytical points of focus. 52 Three key theorists in the “geostrategic” school are Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman. In The Influence of Sea Power Upon History , Mahan argued that sea powers, 53 defined as those that exert control over key waterways, played a decisive role in the military history of Europe, which he saw as marked by clashes of interests among nations. Because waterborne shipping is cheaper and easier than overland transportation, maritime powers have an advantage over land powers in trade and commerce. In addition, the strength of continental states is sapped by the requirements of territorial defense. Thus, sea powers have had an overbearing influence on strategic questions throughout history. This “essential” principle of statecraft was still applicable at the strategic level, Mahan argued, regardless of technological changes that might affect tactics. 54

According to Mahan, sea power has three components: commerce, shipping, and colonies. While maritime trade is dependent on commercial shipping, the wealth generated should be protected by a capable navy. Also, the government should secure overseas stations and markets — what Mahan referred to as “colonies” — to fuel and maintain commercial and naval vessels, and to sell industrial products. Mahan argued that whether a country could become a sea power depended on six elements: “geographical position” (insular vs. continental), “physical conformation” (access to the sea and harbors), “extent of territory” (populated coastlines), “number of population” (seaworthy population), “national character” (commercial aptitude), and “character of the government” (regime type and policy). The first three are “natural conditions,” whereas the latter three pertain to human conditions. Their successful combination is subject to human agency, as illustrated in Mahan’s lengthy discussion on how Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s naval policy affected French sea power. 55

Writing at a time when the U.S. Navy was smaller than that of most European great powers, Mahan’s initial concern was with the near seas, especially the Caribbean. 56 However, he certainly believed that the Pacific Ocean would become a strategic focus in the future. For instance, Mahan noted that the Pacific frontier is the weakest, although at the time it was “far removed from the most dangerous possible enemies.” 57 Having in mind the likely construction of an isthmian canal connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, Mahan wrote: “The military needs of the Pacific States, as well as their supreme importance to the whole country, are … so near that provision should immediately begin.” 58 After the annexation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, Mahan thought that the most pressing problem was the fate of the Chinese empire, which was increasingly threatened by the land power of Russia. To protect America’s interests there, Mahan recommended the construction of a powerful navy and an isthmus canal in either Nicaragua or Panama, a quasi-alliance with other maritime powers that shared common interests — Britain, Germany, and Japan — and, finally, retrenchment from the area south of the Amazon valley to focus on the Caribbean and the “problem of Asia.” 59

The most fundamental geographic fact of Europe, Mackinder argued, lay in the divide between Western and Eastern Europe with Germany positioned at the center.

If Mahan believed that America’s future lay in the world’s oceans, Mackinder thought that the era of Europe’s maritime dominance — the “Columbian Epoch” — might be over due to technological changes and geographic discovery. 60 In his lecture delivered at the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, Mackinder observed that the wealth and power of nations historically depended as much on natural resources and mobility, which were in turn determined primarily by topography, terrain, and animal power, as it did on national characteristics, such as socio-economic organizations. For Mackinder, that there was no more new territory to occupy meant the “closure” of the international political system, which would intensify competition among states. With the development of transportation and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Mackinder speculated that the “pivot” state, Russia, would now pose a threat to Britain that was analogous to the Mongol threat to Europe several centuries prior. Because Russia’s large swath of land is inaccessible from the sea, it could tap continental resources with which to build an unmatchable navy. The post-Columbian period, therefore, would see a return to the status quo ante with the “pivot” of Eurasia once again overshadowing world affairs. 61

While he did not make any specific recommendations then, Mackinder developed his geopolitical outlook further for a post-World War I world in Democratic Ideals and Reality . The most fundamental geographic fact of Europe, Mackinder argued, lay in the divide between Western and Eastern Europe with Germany positioned at the center. Eastern Europe could be used as a springboard for the “Heartland,” a wider region outside Europe extending from Siberia to Persia. While a maritime power’s fleet could not penetrate into the “Heartland,” a continental power could launch a navy from it, thereby potentially dominating the entire “World Island,” a joint continent of Europe, Africa, and Asia. 62 In his view, World War I was essentially an attempt by Germany, organized by the “Going Concern” — the statist political-economic organizations — to subdue the Slavic people who would “grow food for her and … buy her wares” for “the occupation of the Heartland.” 63 In a Thucydidean sense, Mackinder argued that great-power war was caused fundamentally by the “unequal growth” of nations, which resulted largely from different resource endowments and strategic opportunities. 64 To construct a durable peace, the fundamental reality of political and economic geography should be factored in. A zone of viable buffer states, Mackinder advised, should be established in Eastern Europe to separate Germany from Russia. 65

Mackinder’s outlook was not static, however. He was agnostic about which nation would occupy the “pivot” or the “heartland,” thereby commanding Eurasia. Mackinder’s nightmare as described in his “pivot” lecture was a Russo-German alliance. That talk closed with an interesting speculation about the possibility of Chinese domination of Russia under Japan’s tutelage, which would be equally menacing. 66 Likewise, Mackinder distinguished the purely geographic from the strategic heartland. Because land powers could close the Black Sea and the Baltic with the development of transportation and weapons, the strategic heartland should include their basins. 67 His last work, published in Foreign Affairs in 1943, equated the heartland with the area occupied by Moscow excluding “Lenaland,” the surrounding area of “the transcontinental railroad from Irkutsk to Vladivostok.” 68 Therefore, his infamous aphorism evoking the Elizabethan statesman Walter Raleigh —“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.” — should be seen as a rhetorical devise, not a deterministic vision. 69

Eschewing grand theorizing about the fate of nations, Spykman focused his attention more narrowly on strategic problems at a time when international relations in the United States was predominantly idealistic. Spykman laid out his geopolitical outlook in a series of articles written in the interwar years and in his magnum opus, America’s Strategy in World Politics . Presaging modern structural realists, Spykman argued that the absence of “governmental organization … preserving order and enforcing law” necessitates the formulation of geographically informed foreign policy. This was because “[g]eography is the most fundamental factor … it is the most permanent. Ministers come and ministers go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges stand unperturbed.” 70 A nation’s size and location are two of the most important factors informing its foreign policy. The former approximates “potential strength” — a large territory gives a country advantages in defense and national power only if it is well endowed and effectively controlled by a centralized government. The latter is again divided into its location in the world, in relation to “the land masses and oceans of the world,” and its regional location, in relation to other regional competitors. The location itself does not change, but its significance — or relative value — does: with changes in the center of world power, routes of communication, and military and transportation technologies. 71

Spykman outlined what is perhaps his most well-known contribution, the “rimland” theory, in his posthumously published work, The Geography of the Peace . It is essentially an extension of America’s Strategy , in which he argued that the security of the United States depends neither on insularity nor on a “world federation,” but on the country’s active participation in Eurasian power politics. The “rimland” is the intermediate region along the littorals of Mackinder’s Heartland, which serves as “a vast buffer … between [sea power] and land power.” 72 Should this area be occupied by the Axis powers, the western hemisphere would effectively be encircled. This may not be an immediate and insurmountable military problem, given logistical difficulties. But further developments of airpower might change the situation. Moreover, the Old World’s combined resources would overwhelm the New World’s: The United States could face a significant challenge supplying essential raw materials from outside the western hemisphere. To forestall such a possibility, Spykman argued that America should maintain the balance of power in the rimland. Seen in this light, World War II was fought over “the rimland littoral of Europe and Asia.” Looking ahead, Spykman argued that who controls the rimlands would continue to be America’s most important strategic question. 73

Although misunderstood at times, Spykman was not a determinist. He knew well the changing value of geography depending on such factors as technology, demography, and the distribution of power. Spykman argued that “special ‘geopolitical’ regions are not geographic regions defined by a fixed and permanent topography but areas determined … by geography and … dynamic shifts in the centers of power.” 74 Moreover, Spykman explicitly distinguished his geopolitics from the “organic state” theory, which rejects individual freedom. 75

This brief examination of classical geopolitics reveals distinctive characteristics of geopolitics in three interrelated areas: the subject of analysis, its causal mechanism, and its ontology. First, these theorists were concerned, above all, with the most pressing politico-strategic question of their time, namely, how to safeguard their nations’ security in the face of international conflict. Specifically, they tried to identify where to direct foreign policy: for Mahan it was the Caribbean and later Asia, for Mackinder the heartland, and for Spykman the rimland. In other words, the three geopoliticians were essentially developing theories of foreign policy with a particular focus on the spatial dimension. This makes them “grand strategists” in modern parlance. Seen as such, classical geopolitics in its original form, whose interest lay with politics, was certainly different from political geography, which concerns itself primarily with geography.

Relatedly, classical geopolitical theories contained unique causal mechanisms. Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman argued that their respective nations should focus on particular areas as “natural seats of power,” 76 due to natural resources, terrain, population, and the like — that is, geography. To wit, geopolitics posits geography, especially physical geography, as an independent variable in order to understand the strategic environment. This distinguishes geopolitics from not only political geography, where geography is the dependent variable, but also those theories often described as “geopolitical.” For instance, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis is only half- geo political, because “civilizations” predict the locus of international conflict. 77 In contrast, Immanuel Wallerstein’s “World-System” theory is perhaps more geopolitical, given that the international division of labor between the “core” and the “periphery” is at least partially explained in spatial terms. 78

However, classical geopoliticians were not geographic determinists whose focus was only on physical features of the earth. As illustrated above, geographic features were always combined with other variables, including technology, political structure, and the distribution of power. The same geographic features, combined with human factors, are manifested differently across time: Large territories, long coastlines and inland waterways, and a central location can be good or bad, depending on the historical circumstances. In other words, Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman considered human factors to account for how the meaning of the Earth’s physical features changed over the long term.

These three characteristics — the subject of analysis, the causal mechanism, and the ontology — flow from the fact that the classical geopoliticians used geography as “an aid to statecraft.”

This emphasis on the material environment constitutes the final characteristic of geopolitical theory: a structural-materialist ontology. It has already been suggested that geography, an ontologically material factor, is the independent variable from which to deduce foreign policy. Geography is structural, that is, it exists independently from, and at times shapes, the agents — in this case, states. All three thinkers acknowledged the possibility of the agent altering the environment, most significantly with the aid of technology. But there is more to it. They all attributed the cause of conflict, for which nations need foreign policy, to structural factors: Mahan to the clash of commercial interests, Mackinder to the “unequal growth” of nations, and Spykman to “anarchy.” From the theoretical standpoint, classical geopolitics was a structural-materialist approach that derived the explanation for foreign policy from the geographic structure of the world. These three men eschewed, by and large, analysis of individual statesmen and their psyches. For this reason, as some scholars have pointed out, geopolitics represented the first attempt to move away from the agent to the structure. 79

In sum, classical geopolitics, as conceived by Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman, was essentially a group of theories on the geographic/spatial orientation of foreign policy. To locate their strategic points of focus, these geopoliticians used geography as a key explanatory variable. But since the value of geographic features depended on context, they examined human factors together with physical geography. Their emphasis on geographic factors as given makes geopolitics ontologically structural-materialist. These three characteristics — the subject of analysis, the causal mechanism, and the ontology — flow from the fact that the classical geopoliticians used geography as “an aid to statecraft.” Also, they make geopolitics a sort of applied social science compatible with modern international relations. Not surprisingly, geopolitics quickly became institutionalized in U.S. strategic education, especially during and after World War II.

Institutionalization of Geopolitics

The second half of the 20th century is often described as a period in which geopolitics declined. To be sure, the use of the term “geopolitics” went down significantly in public discourse after World War II. 80 Scholars have identified various personal, domestic, and international causes for this decline, from Spykman’s early death and the closure of geography departments to the development of strategic nuclear weapons systems and superpower bipolarity during the Cold War, which seemingly diminished the importance of geographic knowledge. 81 Above all, German Geopolitik ’s somewhat unfair guilt-by-association with the Nazis is often credited as the major contributing factor. 82 Edward Mead Earle, one of the major proponents of the geopolitical approach in the 1940s, cautioned U.S. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to “stay away from any word like geopolitics.” 83 Although the term disappeared from public discourse, geopolitical analysis, informing national strategy with reference to geographic features, was still relevant and therefore on the minds of American strategists and educators for some time after World War II. Several elite institutions — in particular, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and Yale’s Institute of International Studies — made geopolitics the foundation of their approaches to international affairs. In the late 1930s, for instance, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service started offering two courses on geopolitics at the behest of the school’s founder, Reverend Edmund Walsh. Walsh himself was a geopolitician in his own right. His book Total Power was based on his interviews with Karl Haushofer. After returning from Nuremberg, Walsh hired experts on geopolitics at Georgetown. In fact, his vision for the school was to be like Haushofer’s geopolitical institute, producing geographically informed assessments of world politics. Seminars on geopolitics lasted at Georgetown until the 1950s. 84

At Princeton, several individuals advocated geopolitical analysis. Earle was one of them. According to one historian, he “whipped [eclectic ingredients] to create … security studies,” a subset of the broader field of international relations. 85 For our purposes, he incorporated the geopolitical approach into the study of strategy. Notwithstanding his reluctance to use the term “geopolitics,” Earle occasionally invited geographers such as Derwent Whittlesey to his seminar on military strategy. He also suggested to Henry Holt & Company that the publisher reprint Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals , for which he wrote the introduction. 86 Moreover, the first edition of Makers of Modern Strategy was based upon Earle’s seminar and included chapters on Haushofer and Mahan. 87

Generally considered pioneers of foreign policy analysis, Harold and Margaret Sprout also showed keen interest in geopolitical analysis throughout their long careers. 88 The Sprouts had already written an important book in the 1930s on the U.S. Navy that displayed Mahan’s influence. 89 Their lectures for the Navy’s V-12 program resulted in the publication of Foundations of National Power , a textbook on international politics that included excerpts from geopolitical writings. 90 After World War II, the Sprouts, both together and individually, kept publishing on the influence of geography on international politics. 91 Margaret wrote the Mahan chapter in Earle’s edited volume. 92 Harold, who had taught political geography at Stanford, ended up managing the relocation of the Institute of International Studies, arguably the most important institute for geopolitical studies in America, from Yale to Princeton in 1951. 93

Created in 1935 under Spykman’s leadership, the Institute of International Studies promoted policy-relevant and interdisciplinary research, advocating for an interventionist approach based on power-political analysis. This went against the idealistic and isolationist intellectual currents in U.S. universities, which relied on international law and America’s insular position to safeguard national security. The Institute of International Studies brought together an impressive group of scholars — in George Kennan’s view, “the best and soundest” in the field. 94 Since geography affected national power, geopolitics naturally became a major research theme at the institute. 95 In addition to Spykman’s work, Brooks Emeny wrote The Strategy of Raw Materials , which caught the War Department’s attention. 96 Arnold Wolfers emphasized the importance of geography as it relates to national power. His co-edited volume on Anglo-American foreign policy tradition is essentially predicated upon the dichotomous nature of land and sea powers, a classic theme in geopolitics. 97

Later, Institute of International Studies members went on to lead similar power-focused and policy-oriented research initiatives across the nation, essentially laying the foundation for modern international relations. Wolfers was recruited by the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies to run the Foreign Policy Institute in a similar manner to the Institute of International Studies. William T. R. Fox, who had brought in University of Chicago scholars such as Gabriel Almond and Bernard Brodie, moved to Columbia University, where he founded the Institute of War and Peace Studies. This institute would later feature many prominent international relations scholars, including Huntington, Robert Jervis, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard is considered a modern classic of geopolitics and American foreign policy. 98 Brodie, one of the most influential nuclear theorists of the 20th century, went to RAND, only to be joined by other Institute of International Studies alumni such as William Kaufmann. At Princeton, the Institute of International Studies became the Center for International Studies and continuously hosted the who’s who of the field: Gordon Craig, Peter Paret, and George Modelski, among others. 99 In short, it served as an academy of American international relations during the early Cold War years.

The marginalization of geopolitical analysis in mainstream international relations scholarship is not surprising given their important differences.

An equally important development was the inclusion of geopolitics in professional military education, which indirectly affected strategic planning. U.S. military organizations had already been collecting geographic data to inform military strategy and foreign policy since the end of the 19th century, beginning with the creation of the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882 and the Military Information Division in 1885. 100 During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson created “The Inquiry,” headquartered at the American Geographical Society, to collect geographical data and prepare maps for peace negotiations. Wilson’s brain trust took part in the preparation for “The Fourteen Points” speech. Later, many of its members, including Bowman, joined forces with Elihu Root’s dinner club to form the Council on Foreign Relations. Bowman would later ask Mackinder to write a reflection on his “Heartland theory” in its publication, Foreign Affairs . 101

But it was geopolitical theories that connected geographic data with national policy. 102 During and after World War II, therefore, Walsh, Earle, the Sprouts, Spykman, and Wolfers, as well as Robert Strausz-Hupé, another prominent scholar of geopolitics, either served in military organizations, such as the Office of Strategic Services, or lectured at various professional education institutions. 103 At West Point, Col. Herman Beukema, who led the Department of Economics, Government, and History from 1930 to 1947, promoted what can be essentially described as geopolitical analysis. Civilian scholars started developing a program on international affairs for naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps students, resulting in Harold Sprout’s course at Princeton in March 1944, which began with a quote from Mackinder’s “Pivot” article. By the mid-1950s, U.S. military schools had essentially “institutionalized geopolitics.” 104

Paradoxically, the rise of Morgenthau’s classical realism, made possible partially by the institutionalization of geopolitics, resulted in the decline of geopolitics in U.S. academia. By the mid-1950s, the discipline of international relations was going through an identity crisis. At issue was how the field could distinguish itself from more established, traditional disciplines, such as diplomatic history and international law. To many, the answer was grounding the field on a firmer theoretical footing. 105 As late as 1954, geopolitics was still a venerable tradition in academia, as witnessed by a Council of Foreign Relations meeting where Spykman’s geopolitics was considered as a major theoretical approach to the study of international relations. 106 By then, however, no scholar had come after Spykman to produce another major theoretical work on geopolitics. 107 In this context, the Rockefeller Foundation’s “gambit” to promote Morgenthau’s realism marginalized other approaches, including geopolitics. 108

The marginalization of geopolitical analysis in mainstream international relations scholarship is not surprising given their important differences. First, classical realism and geopolitics had fundamentally different ontological focal points. For Morgenthau, key variables were ideational, as exemplified by his emphasis on the timeless concepts of “interest” and “power.” 109 Later, academic realism became even more abstract when it took a systematic turn, further neglecting geography and geopolitics. 110 Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism privileges the distribution of material capabilities, but reduces the complex strategic environment under which states operate into a simple diagram. Thus, what becomes important is “polarity,” or the sheer number of great powers, in an imaginary and aspatial “international system.” 111 In contrast, geopolitical analysis differentiates strategic spaces depending on their geographic features. 112

Geography in International Relations

Geopolitical Hypotheses

If geopolitics as an intellectual paradigm has declined, its basic premise still undergirds much of international relations scholarship. At the deepest level, the fact remains that states, arguably still the most important units in international politics, are fundamentally territorial entities and that their most important activities — maintaining internal security and order, defending borders and territories, and protecting citizens abroad — take place on land and at sea. The key components of their power — military hardware, economic resources, and population — are distributed unevenly and transported across various geographies. As the geographer Jean Gottmann observed long ago, “The political divisions are the raison d’etre of international relations.” 113 Technological developments have not changed this fundamental reality. Not surprisingly, geography, the core of geopolitics, still occupies an important, if unsatisfactory, position in the study of international relations.

Accordingly, it is worth examining the ways in which international relations scholars have used geography to explain foreign policy and grand strategy. Below, I identify the concepts or theories in international relations scholarship that imply some causal mechanism involving geographic features. Broadly speaking, there are three lines of inquiry. Geography is understood in international relations as an independent variable that conditions a state’s objectives, capabilities, or strategic orientation. To wit, these three elements can be conceptualized, respectively, as the ends, means, and ways of statecraft (Table 1).

Table 1. Geography in International Relations

First, if a state’s ultimate goals ( ends ) are security and power, 114 they are manifested in the real world more concretely as “buffers” and “resources,” respectively. 115 Perhaps this line of scholarship constitutes the most well-developed body of literature making use of geography as an explanatory variable. 116 The strategic value of a place may primarily lie in its ability to deny an opponent access to major lines of communication, territory, and resources. Historically, Britain sought to preserve the independence of the Low Countries so that they could act as buffers against territorial threats from continental powers of Europe. 117 In addition, as Morgenthau notes, the sheer size of its territory allows a state to absorb damage from strategic bombing in wartime. 118 Alternatively, occupying a piece of fertile or resource-rich land can add material power to the state controlling it. Throughout much of human history, the possession of, or easy access to, forests — which supplied timber with which to build weapons and buildings — was a major factor that determined the fates of empires. 119 In the early 20th century, the transition from coal to oil, ushered in by the development of the internal combustion engine, fundamentally altered resource requirements for the British Royal Navy, thereby increasing the importance of Persia. 120 Other resources, such as food and water, are also crucial for national survival. 121

In addition to affecting national power, geography also shapes the strategic domains in which states operate, conditioning their overall capabilities ( means ). Political scientists have been keen to use distance as an explanatory variable for force projection. As Kenneth Boulding wrote, a state’s “military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.” 122 During the Russo-Japanese War, for instance, Russia’s massive manpower and fleets could not reach the distant theater in the Far East on time, thereby contributing to its eventual defeat. 123 Another geographic factor that explains the power-projection capabilities of states is terrain. Geographic factors can even modify the effects of distance at times. China and India, although close to one another, did not have much interaction until relatively recently due to the mountain ranges that separate the two. 124 Similarly, John Mearsheimer argues that oceans hinder the movement and power-projection of armed forces — hence the “stopping power of water.” According to Mearsheimer, the late 19th-century power transition between Britain and the United States did not lead to conflict due to the buffering effects of the sea. 125

Lastly, international relations scholars have not completely forgotten the contrast between sea and land powers, a major theme in classical geopolitics.

Some recent works have combined both physical geography with human factors to assess power-projection capabilities. Patrick Porter has developed a more sophisticated concept — “strategic distance” — which contrasts with physical distance. Combining geography with technology, Porter demonstrates how strategic distance, a state’s ability to project power affordably , still constrains the “Global Village” theory that the United States can project power and fix problems anywhere on earth. In addition to the logistical limits posed by geography, Porter considered two factors: technology and human agency. The development of defensive technology partially cancels an opponent’s offensive capabilities. Meanwhile, states resist outside intervention to maintain their sovereignty, thus limiting the power of weapons technology. Porter thus concludes that “the offensive shrinking power of technology-driven globalization is grossly overstated.” 126 Similarly, Øystein Tunsjø has built on the “stopping power of water” to account for the interplay between geography and the distribution of power. In brief, he posits that Asia’s maritime geography would make an emerging bipolarity between the United States and China different from the U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War which took place primarily in continental Europe. Specifically, Tunsjø predicts that the “stopping power” would delay the balancing behavior of China’s neighbors, increase the likelihood of a limited conflict between the United States and China, and stabilize peripheral areas. 127

Finally, geography, especially the location and the lay of the land, affects a state’s overall strategic orientation, or its preferred ways to achieve ends with available means. 128 A large body of work on the “offense-defense” balance, pioneered by Jervis, takes into account geography and technology in determining a state’s overall military posture, or the “relative ease of attack and defense.” 129 While some analysts have argued for its exclusion, geography still looms large in the “offense-defense” literature. 130 But there is a flip side to this equation: Ease of attack for one state translates to an opponent’s vulnerability. Building on this insight, Stephen Walt argues that proximity, along with other variables (aggregate power, offensive capabilities, and intent), shapes a state’s threat perception and therefore affects its strategic behavior, e.g., balancing or bandwagoning. 131 Barry Posen found that geographically encircled countries may develop offensive military doctrines, but ultimately he argued that geography’s overall influence is not as pronounced as that of the balance of power. 132 Lastly, international relations scholars have not completely forgotten the contrast between sea and land powers, a major theme in classical geopolitics. This land-sea dichotomy is often used to explain the differential balancing behavior between continental and maritime states. 133 By the same token, the argument for “offshore balancing” is predicated on the fact that Britain and America are both maritime powers insulated from the Eurasian continent. 134

Assessments

These scholars’ collective efforts have contributed to advancing our understanding of international politics in general and the role of geography in it in particular. Still, there are three broad shortcomings. First, scholars often use easily quantifiable or codable variables, such as physical distance or the allocation of resource and personnel. One flaw with this approach is that distance and terrain manifest themselves asymmetrically . Before the age of steam power, a ship bound for South America had to sail from New York all the way to the Azores to catch winds for a westward voyage. 135 Likewise, the English Channel might have prevented the invasion of the British Isles by a continental power, but it did not stop Britain’s expansion throughout the world. 136 After all, the superiority of waterborne transportation was the predicate for Mahan’s argument for sea power. “It is,” Mahan wrote, “facility of transmission, that has made sea power so multifold in manifestation and in efficacy.” 137

A closely related issue is the question of determinism. While geography remains constant, its meaning changes, as classical geopoliticians knew so well. This aspect — the relativity of space — is underexplored in international relations scholarship. 138 Location A may be three kilometers away from location B in absolute terms, but the time, cost, and possibility of traversing this same space varies. For instance, the development of the steam engine reduced the total distance of a voyage by a significant margin. 139 But its effects were not merely one of “time-space compression.” 140 In fact, steam-powered vessels required an extensive network of coaling stations and maintenance facilities, without which their movement would be restricted. 141 Another factor is the socio-political context. During the Spanish-American War, Britain denied fuel to the Spanish fleet at Port Said pursuant to international law, complicating Madrid’s already cumbersome logistics. 142 Similarly, as Strausz-Hupé observed, Asiatic empires were able to maintain a high degree of efficiency in communication even without modern technology, due in part to their organizational finesse. 143 In short, the meaning of geography is relative , depending on various human factors.

Finally, these disparate studies deal with the ends, means, and ways separately. Geography, however, underlies all three elements of statecraft, as long as states remain territorial entities — in other words, geography is comprehensive . For instance, the Habsburg Empire’s rivers, vast territory, and precarious location at the center of eastern Europe circumscribed available resources, security requirements, and, therefore, grand strategy. 144 Likewise, the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, complicated by the problem of moving fleets between the two oceans, shaped War Plan Orange, America’s strategy to protect its Pacific holdings from Japan. 145 Spykman explained this best when he wrote,

Security must … be understood in terms of the integrity of control over the land … . [T]he physical characteristics of the territory will influence directly the manner in which that security is maintained because power is determined to a great extent by geography and natural resources … . [T]he nation has to act on the basis of the strength it can mobilize, either within its own territory or through its allies and protectors. 146

Scholars, therefore, should consider geography in a comprehensive manner.

Future Research

Accordingly, future research in international relations should address the comprehensiveness, relativity, and asymmetry of geography to complement the existing research. Here, some suggestions are offered. First, scholars need to pay attention to the broader environment in which states and state systems are embedded. For instance, the offense-defense theory has been mostly applied to land battles. How this dynamic works out at sea merits further exploration. 147 More broadly, the concept of the “international system” in the neorealist tradition is based on continental Europe’s experience. Thus, various theories deriving from this paradigm may not apply to different geographic conditions. 148 William Wohlforth and others found that the balance-of-power theory, a key pillar of realism, has not held in past state systems outside of Europe, especially when these systems stopped expanding their geographic scope. 149 Historian Ludwig Dehio argued that, even in Europe, the balance of power was maintained not within itself, but with the introduction of new powers from the periphery. 150 Looking into the future, geopolitical analysis may provide useful insights into how to think about new frontiers, such as outer space. 151

A second area in which more research needs to be done concerns the relativity of geography. Critics of geopolitics are not entirely wrong: The field does tend to pay too much attention to fixed geographic features, such as distance or terrain, and debate whether specific geopolitical ideas — for instance, the “heartland” theory — still hold today. 152 Yet, how classical geopoliticians thought about geography, especially how its interactions with human factors change the value of a place, is worth considering. One welcome development has been the incorporation of technology into the geopolitical analysis of “means,” as in the case of Porter’s “strategic distance.” While his goal was mostly to deconstruct the “Global Village” myth, the concept of “strategic distance” can be further developed and more fruitfully used to compare the power projection capabilities of different actors in a given theater. As for the “ends” of statecraft, it is becoming increasingly important to identify and manage chokepoints in the supply of foodstuff and high-tech products, such as electric vehicle batteries and semiconductors. 153 These changes will re-order the hierarchy of importance of different regions, thereby having broader strategic implications.

Moving forward, there is much room for scholars to explore the asymmetry, relativity, and comprehensiveness of geography.

There are two other avenues of future research relating to relativity. First is the inclusion of political institutions. While classical geopoliticians’ concern was mostly with how domestic institutions affected national capabilities, international institutions are also an important subject in geopolitical analysis. For instance, Harvey Starr’s observation that alliances enable states to “leapfrog” natural obstacles can be combined with Porter’s strategic distance. 154 A second line of possible research is man-made changes to the environment itself. 155 The melting of Arctic ice due to climate change is a case in point: It means the opening of a new trade route for East Asian countries. For Russia, however, it will create a long and open coastline to defend, spelling an end to its impregnable “heartland” status. 156

Finally, states tend to focus their diplomatic and military activities on specific frontiers due to limited resources. In other words, the spatial distribution of foreign policy is uneven, partly because of the asymmetric nature of geography. However, there are few, if any, analytical frameworks to explain and predict geopolitical orientation, the object of inquiry in classical geopolitical writing. 157 The standard realist literature yields only rudimentary predictions that states will prioritize the home front. Yet, great powers always have complicated interests across multiple frontiers. 158 Not surprisingly, realists’ predictions about the next strategic “hot spots” have not aged well. 159 In our time, arguably one of the most important strategic questions is whether China will become a sea power or remain a land power. 160 Geography alone is insufficient to anticipate the future. 161 The analysis on states’ strategic orientation can be done only when researchers properly consider geographic factors, along with human elements, in the way that Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman did.

This article sought to bring geopolitics back to the mainstream of international relations scholarship. It did so in three different ways. An examination of various uses of the term “geopolitics” has shown that stretching the concept of geography has resulted in definitional confusion. Therefore, geography itself should be re-centered as the analytical core of geopolitics. Historically, classical geopolitics sought to inform grand strategy using geography as an explanatory variable and was thus institutionalized in U.S. strategic education. That is, geography was used as “an aid to statecraft.” Finally, although largely ignored in mainstream international relations, the basic premise of geopolitics still undergirds much of its concepts and theories. Moving forward, there is much room for scholars to explore the asymmetry, relativity, and comprehensiveness of geography.

As long as human beings reside on earth and states remain territorial entities, their various challenges will have geographic referents, from strategic competition over resources and buffers to climate change and space exploration. As Gottmann observed, “The differentiation arising between compartments of space is the very foundation of any study in international relations.” 162 Wholly “social” intellectual paradigms are ill equipped to deal with such challenges. Classical geopolitics, a long-forgotten yet important tradition in the annals of international relations, dynamically incorporates geographic features into political analysis and thus can provide useful perspectives and insights. Scholars and policymakers, therefore, would do well to dust off old tomes and learn some new ideas from geopoliticians from the past. 163

Jaehan Park is a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct lecturer at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is completing his book manuscript, The Geographical Pivot of Grand Strategy: Rising Powers in the Far East, 1895-1905 .

Acknowledgments : The author wishes to thank the following individuals for providing helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript: Jeb Benkowski, Hal Brands, Kent Calder, Frank Gavin, Andrew Gibson, John Karaagac, Thomas Mahnken, Sally Paine, John Schuessler, the editors of Texas National Security Review , the two anonymous reviewers, and participants of workshops hosted by the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs in 2018 and the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies in 2022. This article benefited from the generous support from the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at Texas A&M University and the Smith Richardson Foundation. All shortcomings are the author’s own.

1 Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012); Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Twelve, 2014); and Tim Marshall, The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World (New York: Scribner, 2021).

2 Miriam Rozen, “Appetite for Geopolitical Risk Management Is Growing,” Financial Times , May 15, 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/3989290b-c4d1-48dc-88f1-ca80e61c186f .

3 In recent years, various think tanks (e.g., Stimson’s Geopolitics and Economic Statecraft Project) and universities (Belfer Center’s Geopolitics of Energy Project) in the United States have launched research initiatives with “geopolitics” in their name. Outside the United States, the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies (South Korea), the Council on Geostrategy (United Kingdom), and the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (Belgium) and the Spykman Center (France) were founded in 2015, 2018, 2021, and 2022, respectively. Also, see various essays featured in the “Mapping China’s Strategic Space” website, launched by the National Bureau of Asian Research, https://strategicspace.nbr.org .

4 Mackubin Thomas Owens, “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics,” Naval War College Review 52, no. 4 (1999): 62, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44643038 .

5 John Gerring, “What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences,” Polity 31, no. 3 (1999): 357–93, https://doi.org/10.2307/3235246 .

6 William R. Thompson, “Dehio, Long Cycles, and the Geohistorical Context of Structural Transition,” World Politics 45, no. 1 (1992): 127 (fn 1), https://doi.org/10.2307/2010521 .

7 Lucian M. Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919: Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics, and the Reality of the League of Nations,” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (2011): 281, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066110363501 . Exceptions are Harvey Starr, On Geopolitics: Space, Place, and International Relations (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2013); Phil Kelly, Classical Geopolitics: A New Analytical Model (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); and Andrew Rhodes, “Thinking in Space: The Role of Geography in National Security Decision-Making,” Texas National Security Review 2, no. 4 (2019): 90–108, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/6664 .

8 Klaus Dodds, Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jeremy Black, Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Colin S. Gray, “Nicholas John Spykman, the Balance of Power, and International Order,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 6 (2015): 873–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2015.1018412 ; Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Zhengyu Wu, “Classical Geopolitics, Realism and the Balance of Power Theory,” Journal of Strategic Studies 41, no. 6 (2018): 786–823, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2017.1379398 ; Antero Holmila, “Re-thinking Nicholas J. Spykman: From Historical Sociology to Balance of Power,” International History Review 42, no. 5 (2020): 951–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1655469 ; and Kevin D. McCranie, Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021).

9 For instance, Geoffrey Sloan, “Sir Halford J. Mackinder: The Heartland Theory Then and Now,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 15–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437752 .

10 For diverging assessments and prescriptions, see Jakub J. Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Evan R. Sankey, “Reconsidering Spheres of Influence,” Survival 62, no. 2 (2020): 37–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2020.1739947 ; and Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

11 For instance, Ladis K.D. Kristof, “The Origins and Evolution of Geopolitics,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 4, no. 1 (1960): 15–51, https://doi.org/10.1177/002200276000400103 ; Geoffrey Parker, Geopolitics: Past, Present and Future (London: Pinter, 1997); and Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson, eds., Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge, 2000).

12 Owens, “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics.” It should be noted at the outset that the term “geopolitics” is not synonymous with the German Geopolitik . The latter is one form of the former. Nicholas J. Spykman, “Geography and Foreign Policy, I,” American Political Science Review 32, no. 1 (1938): 30 (fn 3), https://doi.org/10.2307/1949029 .  See also, Owens, “Classical Geopolitics,” 65–66; Herman Van der Wusten and Gertjan Dijkink, “German, British and French Geopolitics: The Enduring Differences,” Geopolitics 7, no. 3 (2002): 19–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/714000970 ; Michael Lind, “A Neglected American Tradition of Geopolitics?” Geopolitics 13, no. 1 (2008): 181–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040701783441 ; and Wu, “Classical Geopolitics.”

13 For instance, David Criekemans describes geopolitics as having gone “underground,” without substantiating his claim. David Criekemans, “Geopolitical Schools of Thought: A Concise Overview from 1890 till 2020, and Beyond,” in Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew , ed. David Criekemans (Boston: Brill, 2021), 119–20. See also, Lucian M. Ashworth, “Mapping a New World: Geography and the Interwar Study of International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2013): 138–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12060 ; and Matthew Specter, The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022).

14 The “ends, ways, and means” model was first suggested in Arthur F. Lykke, Jr., “Defining Military Strategy,” Military Review 69, no. 5 (1989): 3–8, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/MR-75th-Anniversary/75th-Lykke/ . See also, Colin S. Gray, Theory of Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a critique of this model, see Jeffrey W. Meiser, “Ends + Ways + Means = (Bad) Strategy,” Parameters 46, no. 4 (2016): 81–91, https://doi.org/10.55540/0031-1723.3000 .

15 This expression is from Frederick J. Teggart, “Geography as an Aid to Statecraft: An Appreciation of Mackinder’s ‘Democratic Ideals and Reality,’” Geographical Review 8, no. 4/5 (1919): 227–42, https://doi.org/10.2307/207838 .

16 Jacky Wong, “Samsung Orders U.S. Chips, with a Side of Geopolitics,” Wall Street Journal , Nov. 23, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsung-orders-u-s-chips-with-a-side-of-geopolitics-11637666262 .

17 Colin S. Gray, “Inescapable Geography,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 163, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437759 .

18 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power , Volume 2 : The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 56.

19 Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (2014): 69–79, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483407 .

20 Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 914.

21 Geoffrey Sloan and Colin S. Gray, “Why Geopolitics?” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437751 .

22 Kissinger, White House Years , 58; and Henry A. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). See also, Leslie W. Hepple, “The Revival of Geopolitics,” Political Geography Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1986): 26, https://doi.org/10.1016/0260-9827(86)90055-8 .

23 Niall Ferguson, Kissinger , vol. 1, 1923–1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin Press, 2015).

24 Jeremy Black, “Towards a Marxist Geopolitics,” Geopolitics 16, no. 1 (2011): 234–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2010.493997 .

25 Gearóid Ó. Tuathail, “Understanding Critical Geopolitics: Geopolitics and Risk Society,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 107–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437756 .

26 Highly critical assessments are offered in Terrence W. Haverluk, Kevin M. Beauchemin, and Brandon A. Mueller, “The Three Critical Flaws of Critical Geopolitics: Towards a Neo-Classical Geopolitics,” Geopolitics 19, no. 1 (2014): 19–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2013.803192 ; and Black, Geopolitics , 229–39. For a more positive assessment, see Phil Kelly, “A Critique of Critical Geopolitics,” Geopolitics 11, no. 1 (2006): 24–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040500524053 .

27 Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography , 27–28. In fairness, Kaplan includes historical geography and geographically conscious historical studies in his analysis.

28 Jakub J. Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 8–11.

29 Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1919) . Scholarly works treating geopolitics essentially as a variant of realism include: Wu, “Classical Geopolitics”; Van Jackson, “Understanding Spheres of Influence in International Politics,” European Journal of International Security 5, no. 3 (2020): 255–73, https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2019.21 ; and Specter, Atlantic Realists .

30 Robert G. Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,” International Organization 38, no. 2 (1984): 287–304, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300026710 .

31 Black, Geopolitics , 9; and Kelly, Classical Geopolitics , 2–3, 29–30.

32 Or Rosenboim, “The Value of Space: Geopolitics, Geography and the American Search for International Theory in the 1950s,” International History Review 42, no. 3 (2020): 373, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1596966 .

33 The term is from Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). On his view on geopolitics in general, see Daniel Deudney, “Geopolitics as Theory: Historical Security Materialism,” European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 1 (2000): 77–107, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066100006001004 .

34 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations , reprint of 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 66. For distinctions between geopolitics and Geopolitik , see footnote 12.

35 Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), 137–38.

36 On this assessment, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, with a New Prologue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xix–xxi. The term “inside-out” is from Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 881–912, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081830003201X .

37 Mackinder’s was about the geographic scope determined by the dominant mode of transportation. In contrast, Mahan’s book stops in 1783 because he needed a break at the time of his writing. Halford J. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (1904): 421–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/1775498 ; and McCranie, Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations , 14.

38 Walter A. McDougall, “Why Geography Matters … But Is So Little Learned,” Orbis 47, no. 2 (2003): 224–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0030-4387(03)00006-1 .

39 Mahan parted with the “material” school and had become an adherent of the historical approach by the time he wrote his first book. McCranie, Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations , 55–57.

40 Quoted in Owens, “Classical Geopolitics,” 60.

41 Isaiah Bowman, “Geography vs. Geopolitics,” Geographical Review 32, no. 4 (1942): 646–58, https://doi.org/10.2307/210002 .

42 Daniel H. Deudney, “Geopolitics and Change,” in New Thinking in International Relations Theory , ed. Michael W. Doyle and G. John Ikenberry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 97, 120 (fn 4).

43 This is political scientist George A. Lipsky’s view, cited in “Fifth Meeting: Political Geography vs. Geopolitics, April 8, 1954,” in American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953–54 , ed. David M. McCourt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 169–73.

44 Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War , ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Free Press, 1996).

45 For a summary of Montesquieu’s view, see Karl Marcus Kriesel, “Montesquieu: Possibilistic Political Geographer,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58, no. 3 (1968): 557–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1968.tb01652.x .

46 Deudney, Bounding Power , 17–18.

47 McDougall, “Why Geography Matters,” 220.

48 W.H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (New York: Clarendon Press, 1982), 57–58; Deudney, “Geopolitics as Theory,” 81–84; and Lucian M. Ashworth, A History of International Thought: Fromm the Origins of the Modern State to Academic International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014), 1–92.

49 John A. Agnew and Luca Muscarà, Making Political Geography , 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 59–60.

50 Agnew and Muscarà, Making Political Geography , 21–22. See also, Owens, “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics,” 65.

51 David T. Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990); Holger H. Herwig, “ Geopolitik : Haushofer, Hitler and Lebensraum,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 218–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437762 ; Ola Tunander, “Swedish-German Geopolitics for a New Century: Rudolf Kjellén's ‘The State as a Living Organism,’” Review of International Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 451–63, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021050100451X ; Friedrich Ratzel, “Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study” (1901; translated into English by Tul’si [Tuesday] Bhambry), Journal of Historical Geography 61 (2018): 59–80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2018.03.001 .

52 Historian Jonathan Haslam noted that the concern of fin de siècle German intellectuals was to harness nationalism after long years of division and impoverishment following the Thirty Years’ War, unlike in France and Britain where the “contractual” notion of the state had become established, hinting at the source of different intellectual orientations in Britain and the United States. Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 167–69, and footnote 12.

53 The original term was “seapower,” deriving from the Greek term thalassokratia . Mahan split this term and, in doing so, narrowed the meaning to denote naval power. This article will use Mahan’s term (“sea power”) interchangeably with “maritime power.” Andrew D. Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 2–4.

54 Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (London: S. Low, Marston, 1890), 1, 14.

55 Mahan, Sea Power , 29, 70–74. Jon Sumida wrote that this chapter was added in a rather ad hoc manner and does not represent Mahan’s view in full. For the purpose of our discussion, however, the present work draws from this section. Jon Sumida, “Alfred Thayer Mahan, Geopolitician,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 46–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437753 .

56 Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age , ed. Peter Paret, Gordon Alexander Craig, and Felix Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 463–65.

57 Mahan, Sea Power , 42.

58 Alfred T. Mahan. “The United States Looking Outward,” Atlantic Monthly 66, no. 398 (1890): 823, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1890/12/the-united-states-looking-outward/306348/ .

59 Alfred T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effect Upon International Policies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1900).

60 This expression is from Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot,” 421. His basic geopolitical outlook, expressed in his “pivot” lecture and the 1919 treatise, were laid out earlier in a series of lectures at the Institute of Bankers in 1899. Halford J. Mackinder, “The Great Trade Routes: Their Connection with the Organization of Industry, Commerce, and Finance,” Lectures 1–4, Journal of the Institute of Bankers XXI (1900): 1–6, 137–46, 147–55, 266–73, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015031657045 .

61 Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot.”

62 Mackinder, Democratic Ideals , 79 (“world island”), 93 (“heartland”).

63 Mackinder, Democratic Ideals , 177.

64 Mackinder, Democratic Ideals , 4.

65 Mackinder, Democratic Ideals , 191.

66 Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot,” 436–37.

67 Mackinder, Democratic Ideals , 134–36.

68 Mackinder distinguished this railroad belt for the purpose of dividing geographic regions according to their resource endowment and population. Halford J. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs 21, no. 4 (1943): 598–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/20029780 .

69 Mackinder, Democratic Ideals , 186. Raleigh’s original statement was: “He who commands the sea controls trade and commerce, he who controls trade and commerce commands the wealth and riches of the world, and he who controls wealth controls the world.” Quoted in Archibald S. Hurd, “Coal, Trade, and the Empire,” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 44, no. 261 (1898): 722. https://www.proquest.com/historical-periodicals/coal-trade-empire/docview/2656708/se-2 .

70 Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 16–17, 41.

71 Spykman, “Geography and Foreign Policy, I,” 40; Nicholas J. Spykman, “Geography and Foreign Policy, II,” American Political Science Review 32, no. 2 (1938): 213–36, https://doi.org/10.2307/1948667 ; Nicholas J. Spykman and Abbie A. Rollins, “Geographic Objectives in Foreign Policy, I,” American Political Science Review 33, no. 3 (1939): 391–410, https://doi.org/10.2307/1948794 ; Nicholas J. Spykman and Abbie A. Rollins, “Geographic Objectives in Foreign Policy, II,” American Political Science Review 33, no. 4 (1939): 591–614, https://doi.org/10.2307/1949493 .

72 Nicholas J. Spykman and Helen R. Nicholl, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944), 40–41.

73 Spykman and Nicholl, The Geography of the Peace , x.

74 Spykman and Nicholl, The Geography of the Peace , 6.

75 Spykman, America’s Strategy , 207–09; and Spykman and Nicholl, The Geography of the Peace , 5–6.

76 The term is from Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot,” 435.

77 In fairness, Huntington mentioned proximity, albeit in passing. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49, https://doi.org/10.2307/20045621 .

78 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I .

79 The other such approach was Marxist theories of imperialism. A.J.R. Groom, André Barrinha, and William C. Olson, International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2019), 29–30. For similar interpretations, Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity , 181; Joseph M. Parent and Joshua M. Baron, “Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism,” International Studies Review 13, no. 2 (2011): 193–213, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2486.2011.01021.x ; and John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 5 and 7.

80 For instance, “Geopolitics,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed Dec. 15, 2022, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=geopolitics&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 .

81 On Spykman’s death, see Gray, “Spykman,” 874; and Or Rosenboim, “Geopolitics and Empire: Visions of Regional World Order in the 1940s,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 2 (2015): 380, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000547 . On the closure of geography departments, see Neil Smith, “‘Academic War Over the Field of Geography’: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947–1951,” Annals of the Association of American Geographer s 77, no. 2 (1987): 155–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1987.tb00151.x ; and McDougall, “Why Geography Matters,” 227–28. On the notion that periphery no longer existed under bipolarity, see Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus 93, no. 3 (Summer 1964): 881–909, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20026863 .

82 Agnew and Muscarà, Political Geography , 115. On fundamental differences between Nazism and Geopolitik , see Mark Bassin, “Race Contra Space: The Conflict Between German Geopolitik and National Socialism,” Political Geography Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1987): 115–34, https://doi.org/10.1016/0260-9827(87)90002-4 .

83 Quoted in Peter Francis Coogan, Geopolitics and the Intellectual Origins of Containment (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991), 227, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/geopolitics-intellectual-origins-containment/docview/303924442/se-2?accountid=11752 . The same view is expressed in Earle’s review of America’s Strategy : Edward Mead Earle, “Power Politics and American World Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 1943): 94–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/2144430 .

84 Edmund A. Walsh, Total Power: A Footnote to History (New York: Doubleday, 1948); Coogan, “Geopolitics,” 65–66, 332–37; and Specter, Atlantic Realists , 128.

85 David Ekbladh, “Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression-Era Origins of Security Studies,” International Security 36, no. 3 (Winter 2011/12): 140, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00067 .

86 William Fox, “Geopolitics and International Relations,” in On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear , ed. Ciro E. Zoppo and Charles Zorgbibe (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1985), 27; and Coogen, “Geopolitics,” 140, 145. Perhaps Earle’s interest in Mackinder is not surprising given his earlier work on the Bagdad Railway. Edward Mead Earle, Turkey, the Great Powers, and the Bagdad Railway: A Study in Imperialism (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

87 Edward Mead Earle, Gordon Alexander Craig, and Felix Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952).

88 As their students wrote, they had “lifelong interest in the interplay between geographic factors and new developments in science and technology.” James N. Rosenau, Vincent Davis, and Maurice A. East, eds., The Analysis of International Politics: Essays in Honor of Harold and Margaret Sprout (New York: Free Press, 1972), 3.

89 Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939).

90 Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, Foundations of National Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945).

91 For instance, see Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, “Geography and International Politics in an Era of Revolutionary Change,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 4, no. 1 (1960): 145–61, https://doi.org/10.1177/002200276000400111 .

92 Margaret Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power” in Makers of Modern Strategy , ed. Earle, Craig, and Gilbert, 415–45.

93 Paulo Jorge Batista Ramos, Role of the Yale Institute of International Studies in the Construction of the United States National Security Ideology, 1935–1951 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Manchester, 2003), 139, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/role-yale-institute-international-studies/docview/1774213325/se-2?accountid=11752 .

94 Ramos, “Yale Institute,” 16.

95 Inderjeet Parmar, “‘To Relate Knowledge and Action’: The Impact of the Rockefeller Foundation on Foreign Policy Thinking During America’s Rise to Globalism 1939–1945,” Minerva 40, no. 3 (2002): 247–48, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019572526066 ; Ramos, “Yale Institute,” 96–67, 123–25; and Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 37, 39–40.

96 Ramos, “Yale Institute,” 164–65.

97 Arnold Wolfers and Laurence W. Martin, The Anglo-American Tradition in Foreign Affairs: Readings from Thomas More to Woodrow Wilson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956); and Coogan, “Geopolitics,” 337–39.

98 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997).

99 Fox, “Geopolitics and International Relations,” 22; Ramos, “Yale Institute,” 141–43, 167–68; and Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 84.

100 Robert G. Angevine, “The Rise and Fall of the Office of Naval Intelligence, 1882–1892: A Technological Perspective,” Journal of Military History 62, no. 2 (April 1998): 291–312, https://doi.org/10.2307/120718 ; Robert G. Angevine, “Mapping the Northern Frontier: Canada and the Origins of the U.S. Army’s Military Information Division, 1885–1898,” Intelligence and National Security 16, no. 3 (2001): 121–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/02684520412331306240 .

101 Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 25, 118–35, 181–82, 192; and David M. McCourt, “The Inquiry and the Birth of International Relations, 1917–19,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 63, no. 3 (2017): 399–400, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12376 .

102 Fox, “Geopolitics and International Relations,” 30.

103 Their involvement in military organizations are described in Coogan, “Geopolitics,” esp. 196–238 (chap. 6); and Ramos, “Yale Institute,” 152–91 (chap. 5). On Strausz-Hupé, Andrew Crampton and Gearóid Ó. Tuathail, “Intellectuals, Institutions and Ideology: The Case of Robert Strausz-Hupé and ‘American Geopolitics,’” Political Geography 15, no. 6–7 (1996): 533–55, https://doi.org/10.1016/0962-6298(96)83606-7 .

104 Coogan, “Geopolitics,” 102–05, 217–29, 401, 423 (quote).

105 Brian C. Schmidt, “The Need for Theory: International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on the Theory of International Relations, 1953–1954,” International History Review 42, no. 3 (2020): 589–606, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1646780 .

106 These included Carr’s historical theorizing, Harold Lasswell’s scientific approach, Marxist theories of imperialism, Wilson’s idealism, and, of course, Morgenthau’s realism. See various minutes of meetings in McCourt, American Power .

107 On the lack of theoretical canon, see Ramos, “Yale Institute,” 183.

108 Nicholas Guilhot, “The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory,” International Political Sociology 2, no. 4 (2008): 281–304, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00052.x . For the broader institutional context in which realism rose in U.S. academia, Kuklick, Blind Oracles , 78–87.

109 Lucian M. Ashworth, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold? The 1953–4 CFR Study Group Meeting and the Decline of International Thought,” The International History Review 42, no. 3 (2020): 660–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1655780 . Compare with Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace , 7th ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

110 Daniel H. Deudney, “Regrounding Realism: Anarchy, Security, and Changing Material Contexts,” Security Studies 10, no. 1 (2000): 1–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636410008429419 ; Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot, “How Realism Waltzed Off: Liberalism and Decisionmaking in Kenneth Waltz’s Neorealism,” International Security 40, no. 2 (2015): 87–118, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00217 . For a contemporary critique, see Stanley H. Hoffmann, “International Relations: The Long Road to Theory,” World Politics 11, no. 3 (1959): 34–77, https://doi.org/10.2307/2009198 .

111 To see how Waltz did this, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1979), 100 (especially figure 5.2).

112 While Deudney pointed out that the main distinction between realism and geopolitics is their unit of analysis, both in fact focus primarily on the state and its external behavior. Deudney, “Geopolitics and Change,” 98.

113 Jean Gottmann, “Geography and International Relations,” World Politics 3, no. 2 (1951): 153, https://doi.org/10.2307/2008950 .

114 Both security and power are considered to be a state’s ends by defensive and offensive realists, respectively. Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, “Security Seeking Under Anarchy: Defensive Realism Revisited,” International Security 25, no. 3 (2001): 128–61, https://doi.org/10.1162/016228800560543 .

115 Peter Hugill, “Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology,” in William Thompson, ed., Systemic Transitions: Past, Present, and Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 35.

116 Good summaries of the literature on the influence of territory upon conflicts can be found in Paul R. Hensel, “Territory: Geography, Contentious Issues, and World Politics,” in What Do We Know About War? ed. John A. Vazquez, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 3–26; and Monica Duffy Toft, “Territory and War,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2 (2014): 185–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343313515695 . A more recent work positing geography as an object of statecraft is Dan Altman, “By Fait Accompli, Not Coercion: How States Wrest Territory from Their Adversaries,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2017): 881–91, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx049 .

117 On “buffers” and similar concepts, see Michael Greenfield Partem, “The Buffer System in International Relations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 27, no. 1 (1983): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002783027001001 ; Tanisha M. Fazal, “State Death in the International System,” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 311–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818304582048 ; Rajan Menon and Jack L. Snyder, “Buffer Zones: Anachronism, Power Vacuum, or Confidence Builder?” Review of International Studies 43, no. 5 (2017): 962–86, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210517000122 ; Evan N. Resnick, “Interests, Ideologies, and Great Power Spheres of Influence,” European Journal of International Relations 28, no. 3 (2022): 563–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221098217 ; and Boaz Atzili and Min Jung Kim, “Buffer Zones and International Rivalry: Internal and External Geographic Separation Mechanisms,” International Affairs 99, no. 2 (2023): 645–65, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad028 .

118 Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations , 127–35. For the continued relevance of territory in the nuclear age, see Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), especially 22–24.

119 John R. McNeill, “Woods and Warfare in World History,” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (2004): 388–410, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985766 .

120 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 138–48.

121 Eric J. Hamilton and Brian C. Rathbun, “Scarce Differences: Toward a Material and Systemic Foundation for Offensive and Defensive Realism,” Security Studies 22, no. 3 (2013): 436–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2013.816125 .

122 Quoted in Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 56.

123 Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 172–73, 202; and Constantine Pleshakov, The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Journey to the Battle of Tsushima (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 91–111.

124 Spykman and Nicholl, The Geography of the Peace , 40–41.

125 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics , updated edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 44.

126 Patrick Porter, The Global Village Myth: Distance, War and the Limits of Power (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), 9.

127 Øystein Tunsjø, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics: China, the United States, and Geostructural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

128 There are other recent works making use of geography as an explanatory variable, but they do not establish how certain geographic features affect foreign policy specifically. For instance, see Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Partnership or Predation? How Rising States Contend with Declining Great Powers,” International Security 45, no. 1 (2020): 90–126, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00384 ; and Norrin M. Ripsman and Igor Kovac, “Material Sources of Grand Strategy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy , ed. Thierry Balzacq and Ronald R. Krebs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 205–20.

129 Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978): 167–214, https://doi.org/10.2307/2009958 . The expression is from David Blagden, “When Does Competition Become Conflict? Technology, Geography, and the Offense-Defense Balance,” Journal of Global Security Studies 6, no. 4 (2021): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogab007 .

130 For instance, Keir Lieber argued for its exclusion in War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics Over Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 30–33. Some important works and reviews on the “offense-defense” balance include: Charles L. Glaser and Chaim Kaufmann, “What Is the Offense-Defense Balance and How Can We Measure It?” International Security 22, no. 4 (1998): 44–82, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.22.4.44 ; Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics,” Security Studies 4, no. 4 (1995): 660–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636419509347600 ; and Stephen Van Evera, “Offense, Defense, and the Causes of War,” International Security 22, no. 4 (1998): 5–43, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.22.4.5 .

131 Stephen M. Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” International Security 9, no. 4 (1985): 3–43, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538540 ; and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

132 Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

133 Some recent works using this dichotomy are Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, “Balancing on Land and at Sea: Do States Ally Against the Leading Global Power?” International Security 35, no. 1 (2010): 7–43, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00001 ; Evan B. Montgomery, “Competitive Strategies Against Continental Powers: The Geopolitics of Sino-Indian-American Relations,” Journal of Strategic Studies 36, no. 1 (2013): 76–100, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.736383 ; and Joseph M. Parent and Sebastian Rosato, “Balancing in Neorealism,” International Security 40, no. 2 (2015): 51–86, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00216 .

134 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy .

135 Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age , 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943), 105–6.

136 John M. Schuessler, Joshua Shifrinson, and David Blagden, “Revisiting Insularity and Expansion: A Theory Note,” Perspectives on Politics (2021): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272100222X .

137 Mahan, Problem of Asia , 20.

138 Starr, On Geopolitics , 22–29.

139 According to one estimate, the overall sail distance was 50 percent greater than steam for trans-Atlantic voyages. N.A.M. Rodger, “Weather, Geography and Naval Power in the Age of Sail,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 191, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437760 .

140 On the concept of “time-space compression,” see David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 418–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1990.tb00305.x .

141 Steven Gray, “Fuelling Mobility: Coal and Britain’s Naval Power, c. 1870–1914,” Journal of Historical Geography , no. 58 (October 2017): 92–103, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.06.013 .

142 David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 142–44, 270, 275–77.

143 Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics , 182.

144 A. Wess Mitchell, The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

145 Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991).

146 Spykman and Nicholl, The Geography of the Peace , 4.

147 On this point, see David W. Blagden, Jack S. Levy, and William R. Thompson, “Sea Powers, Continental Powers, and Balancing Theory [with Reply],” International Security 36, no. 2 (2011), 201–2, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_c_00060 . Blagden briefly discusses this point in “When Does Competition Become Conflict?” 14–15.

148 On Eurocentrism in the realist tradition and its limits, see William C. Wohlforth, “Gilpinian Realism and International Relations,” International Relations 25, no. 4 (2011): 499–511, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117811411742 .

149 William C. Wohlforth et al., “Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History,” European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 2 (2007): 155–85, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066107076951 .

150 Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle (New York: Knopf, 1962). Similarly, Paul Schroeder noted that it was the preponderance of two “flanking” powers, Britain and Russia, that maintained stability in Europe after the Congress of Vienna. Also, by virtue of geography, they could expand outside of Europe. Paul W. Schroeder, “Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power?” The American Historical Review 97, no. 3 (1992): 683–706, https://doi.org/10.2307/2164774 .

151 Everett C. Dolman, “Geostrategy in the Space Age: An Astropolitical Analysis,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 2–3 (1999): 83–106, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399908437755 ; Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

152 For a trenchant critique, see Christopher J. Fettweis, “On Heartlands and Chessboards: Classical Geopolitics, Then and Now,” Orbis 59, no. 2 (2015): 233–48, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2015.02.005 .

153 Rob Bailey and Laura Wellesley, Chokepoints and Vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade (London: Chatham House, 2017), https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publications/research/2017-06-27-chokepoints-vulnerabilities-global-food-trade-bailey-wellesley-final.pdf ; Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (New York: Penguin Press, 2020); Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth , The White House, June 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/100-day-supply-chain-review-report.pdf ; and Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022).

154 Harvey Starr, “On Geopolitics: Spaces and Places,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2013): 435, https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12090 .

155 Simon Dalby, “The Geopolitics of Climate Change,” Political Geography 37 (2013): 38–47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.09.004 .

156 Rodger Baker, “Revisiting Arctic Geopolitics: Climate, Competition, and Governance,” Presentation at Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 2022.

157 There are a few exceptions. See, for instance, Michael C. Desch, “The Keys that Lock up the World: Identifying American Interests in the Periphery,” International Security 14, no. 1 (1989): 86–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538766 ; Robert J. Art, “Geopolitics Updated: The Strategy of Selective Engagement,” International Security 23, no. 3 (1999): 79–113, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.23.3.79 ; and Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change .

158 Paul M. Kennedy, “The Operations Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914,” Militaergeschichtliche Zeitschrift 19, no. 1 (1976): 194, https://doi.org/10.1524/mgzs.1976.19.1.188 .

159 For instance, John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War,” International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 5–56, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538981 . An exception is Aaron L. Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia,” International Security 18, no. 3 (1993): 5–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2539204 .

160 Toshi Yoshihara, “China as a Composite Land-Sea Power: A Geostrategic Concept Revisited,” Center for International Maritime Security, Jan. 6, 2021, https://cimsec.org/china-as-a-composite-land-sea-power-a-geostrategic-concept-revisited/ .

161 Robert S. Ross, “The Geography of the Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-First Century,” International Security 23, no. 4 (1999): 81–118, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.23.4.81 .

162 Gottmann, “Geography and International Relations,” 165.

163 The original expression is from Todd G. Buchholz, New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought (New York: Plume, 2007).

Jaehan Park

Related articles, stabilizing haiti: a guide for policymakers.

Ian Murray , Chris Bernotavicius

Proposals for a security-focused intervention in Haiti are logical given the rampant instability and endless escalation of gang violence. Many argue that Haiti’s foundational problems of economic underdevelopment, violence, and weak institutions cannot be…

From Panic to Policy: The Limits of Foreign Propaganda and the Foundations of an Effective Response

Gavin Wilde

American leaders and scholars have long feared the prospect that hostile foreign powers could subvert democracy by spreading false, misleading, and inflammatory information by using various media. Drawing on both historical experience and empirical literature,…

Climate Change and Military Power: Hunting for Submarines in the Warming Ocean

Andrea Gilli , Mauro Gilli , Antonio Ricchi , Aniello Russo , Sandro Carniel

Climate change will have significant effects on military power, capabilities, effectiveness, and employment. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to this topic. We address this gap by investigating the effects of changing ocean conditions on anti-submarine…

Sign up to the TNSR newsletter:

A nation must think before it acts.

• America and the West
• Middle East
• National Security
• Central Asia
• China & Taiwan
• Expert Commentary
• Directory of Scholars
• Press Contact
• Upcoming Events
• People, Politics, and Prose
• Briefings, Booktalks, and Conversations
• The Benjamin Franklin Award
• Event and Lecture Archive
• Intern Corner
• Simulations
• Our Mission
• Board of Trustees
• Board of Advisors
• Research Programs
• Audited Financials
• PA Certificate of Charitable Registration
• Become a Partner
• Corporate Partnership Program

Why Geopolitics Matters

• Jeremy Black
• January 17, 2020

Geopolitics has been one of the great strengths of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from the outset, and this strength has been strongly developed by Alan Luxenberg. As such, FPRI is a key organization that not only teaches America about the world, but also the world about the world. Indeed, of all the many prestigious American think tanks, FPRI is possibly the one that is most relevant for those outside America. This is both praise for FPRI and also a criticism of its counterparts. Their concern with partisan audience and ideological clarity can lead, in a global perspective, to a degree of introversion or even irrelevance.

Geopolitics is not inherently global. Indeed, one of its greatest American manifestations was as gerrymandering, which was very much the geographical politics of the locality. Yet, rather like the putative Amazonian butterfly, the locality has of course a wider impact. Most obviously, the unitisation of America in the form of its political configuration had a crucial consequence for its politics, as with the spread of slavery, and continues to have such an impact.

The global dimension, however, is not always ably handled by commentators for whom the detailed impact of local circumstances is subordinated to the alleged exigencies of a model, indeed classically their model. With many commentators, this approach is frequently linked to a tendency to depoliticize the politics of their own country, so that their prospectus also becomes the necessary one. With his characteristically intelligent wry skepticism, Alan Luxenberg is apt to understand this problem, and FPRI has been open, in a most welcome fashion, to different accounts of global developments and American needs.

That openness flies in the face of geopolitics as rhetoric, for the latter, the consciously or unconsciously subjective use of the approach, sits alongside, and as part of a continuum, with the objective use. The key instance is the concept of strategic culture, which is useful, in an objective sense, as an account of the long-term climate of opinion and assumptions that frames policy. As such, it is also inherently political.

This situation does not make geopolitics less significant, not least because it is readily apparent that the full range of the social sciences are inherently political, whether in content, analysis, or exposition. So also with the use of history. Indeed, geopolitics, which is where geography, history, and international relations come together, is affected by the inherently political character of each. To suppose some abstract or pure geopolitics that is not thereby affected is to offer a misleading neo-Platonic approach. For example, we might think we all know strategic over-reach when we see it, but the idea of such over-reach faces the serious conceptual difficulty of assuming a clear-cut measure of strategic reach and geopolitical concern, whether in military or in other terms. From a different dimension, current debates over the value, context, and future of geopolitics can be fitted into the model of geopolitics as a form of response to problems. In short, it is, like most forms of analysis, a way to shape the complexities of existence.

The subject has been made more contentious by the development of an explicitly critical geopolitics from the 1970s. While this offered a homage to post-modernism, it drew in practice more clearly on a Marxisante tradition because such a rival geopolitics had been offered by the Soviet Union from the outset, and notably so with the Comintern. Marxist commentators in the West, such as J.F. (James Francis) Horrabin, provided a wider stage for these ideas, as in his The Plebs Atlas (1926).

The heavily politicized nature of geopolitics under the Third Reich led to the subject falling into disfavor for a while, but to do so was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In practice, indeed, the idea of “containment” was inherently geopolitical, as was the Cold War as a whole. As an interlinked struggle in many localities between global ideologies and powers, this was axiomatic—even if the relationship in question varied greatly.

What was less so was the situation after the end of the Cold War. The idea of a unipower that had “ended history”—providing a form of isotropic geopolitics, the concept advanced in the 1990s—could not last in the face of the reality and volatility of world affairs. This, indeed, has led to a competition to define the international politics of the world that developed from the beginning of the 2000s. Different accounts of geopolitics were an aspect of this competition, and these differences can be seen between, and within, individual countries.

Obvious contrasts are “national” ones at the level of particular states, but there are also broader conceptual contrasts. A classic instance is provided by that between classical realist geopoliticians and critical geopoliticians who are particularly influential in Western academe, notably that of the United States. The latter tend to reflect an almost axiomatic anti-Western approach and, in particular, to press for change in the world. As such, these critical thinkers differ from the classical school, which sought, and seeks, to appreciate the world as it is, or, in a more hostile light, not only to do so, but also to defend it accordingly. This is presented, by both supporters and opponents, as Realpolitik , but that is a construction as well as an objective description.

In practice, there is political commitment on all sides of the discussion, but Realpolitik approaches tend to seek an understanding of all players in order better to ground their analyses and proposals. In contrast, critical geopolitics frequently rests on a weak and naïve understanding of what it does not like. Adopting an inherently critical approach toward such overlapping categories as American public culture, consumerism, the West (an abstraction that somehow tends not to include the critic in question), neoconservatism, imperialist geopolitics, and claims to objectivity is not only repetitive, discursive, and somewhat exhausting, but also tends to rely on problematic theory, scant use of evidence, and argument by assertion. Alongside Manichaeism in the case of self-styled critical geopoliticians comes the problems posed by projecting their own frame of reference onto others.

More positively comes the value of assessing contrasting realist perspectives. These can relate to particular countries, specific issues, individual time sequences, and so on. These perspectives are most valuable when they engage with the dynamic and contested character of strategic culture, while also reflecting an evidence-based approach. For example, there has recently been much academic discussion of support for Brexit as reflecting a form of regret for British imperialism and great-power status. This has extended to a critique of Brexit alongside that of the interventionism of the “New Imperialism that was concealed behind the War on Terror.” [1] In practice, this analysis is deeply flawed. These policies were associated with the Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron governments, none of them noted for their Brexit sympathies. Moreover, House of Commons’ speakers against interventionism include some prominent Brexiteers such as Julian Lewis. Brexit is/was a matter more of Little Englanders than global interventionists. In short, an engagement with geopolitics can reflect what is by any standard intellectual confusion.

China is of much greater significance than Britain and the state that appears to be pursuing geopolitical ideas most aggressively. Resting on the Maoist perception that foreign pressure had held China’s development back, there was a determination to project power, both in order to prevent that situation and so as to be able to impose it on others. The traditional land-based focus on the development of expanding rings of security around a state’s territory has been applied to the maritime domain in a major expansion of geopolitical concern. “Near China” has been refocused to include the East and South China Seas. Xinjiang and Tibet similarly reflect the ambition to extend power.

Yet, the former leads to a clash with the United States as the land-based policy does not. Moreover, while the sea can seem a buffer in the way that frontiers do not, the Chinese use of the situation is not operating in this fashion. Indeed, in part as a consequence of significant domestic interest, naval strength has become symbolic, ideological, and cultural, as much as based on “realist” criteria of military, political, and economic parity and power. Again, the strategic culture dimension of geopolitics has been ever thus, but it is all-too-easy to forget the point.

This is also the case with the extension of Chinese ambition to more distant locations. However conceptualized, this is a development of Cold War policies, notably in the 1960s and early 1970s, but with more edge and with the support of a strong navy, an element absent until relatively recently. There is also a greater degree of geopolitical coherence than that offered by competition with the Soviet Union as a result of the Sino-Soviet rift. Indeed, the very different context then and now of Chinese-Soviet/Russian geopolitics is a reminder of the inherent volatility of the issue as well as its relationship with a wide range of what can be seen as total politics/history.

So also with the analysis of geopolitics. That also is inherently a product and aspect of this totality, rather than an element that can be readily separated out. This is apparent, for example, whether the frame of reference is the United States, China, or a lesser power. As a consequence, analysis has to consider the porous nature of government processes and the extent to which politics leads to a tendency to draw on a wide range of influences and to entail the perception of these influences.

FPRI offers a bridge to consider these and other different accounts of geopolitics. It will work best if it can maintain a humane skepticism toward any supposedly universal account of the subject.

[1] R. Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (2019); and S. Ward (ed.), Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (London, 2019).

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

4 (page 71) p. 71 Popular geopolitics

• Published: July 2019
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

‘Popular geopolitics’ considers the interconnection between popular culture and geopolitics. It focuses on the sensorial nature of popular geopolitics—the power and politics of images and sound. Social media in particular reminds us that images and stories can amplify and exaggerate the controversial and emotive qualities of geopolitics. Film and television have been judged to be significant interventions in the making of geopolitical cultures. While established media forms such as newspapers, television, and radio remain highly significant in producing and circulating news worldwide, it is new media forms such as the internet and social media practices, such as blogging and podcasting, which will command increasing attention from those interested in popular geopolitics.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• Google Scholar Indexing
• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Geopolitics — the key to understanding Russia foreign policy

• January 19, 2022

Gabriel Gorodetsky

• Themes: Russia

From Tsar Alexander II to Putin, Russia's leading ideology and relationship to Europe has swung between extremes. One constant, however, has remained throughout history: an overriding concern for the geopolitical.

This essay originally appeared under the title  ‘Geopolitical factors in Russian foreign policy and strategy’  in  ‘ The Return of Geopolitics ’,  Bokförlaget Stolpe , in collaboration with the  Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation , 2019.

It is most telling that less than ten years ago, with Vladimir  Putin  already well settled in the saddle, prominent Russian liberals dismissed the legend of ‘the Phoenix rising out of the ashes’ as a possible trajectory of the future. It was misleading, as  Dimitri Trenin  argued, because of the ‘discontinuities in Russia’s structure and behaviour that militate against the repetition of the familiar cycle, i.e passing from imperial break-up to  imperial restoration .’ In other words, there was no longer ‘a fundamental value gap between Russia and much of the rest of the world…  borders  as barriers are being replaced by borders as frontiers, interfaces, lines of communication.’

The perennial issue concerns the definition of the nature of Russian foreign policy and revolves around the relationship between ideology, realism and national interests. My contention is that the l egacy of the past still weighs heavily on the execution of contemporary Russian foreign policy . Any attempt in the  West  to make projections for the future, therefore, requires an ability to recognise the past and the enduring geopolitical factors of Russian foreign policy.

The concept of geopolitics often relates to the physical realm, and yet it is also inherently mental. Perceptions, preconceived ideas, emotions and individuals remain major factors in the conduct of international relations, though naturally this is rarely conceded by politicians and, strangely enough, tends to be ignored, if not dismissed, by both historians and political scientists. In the 1930s, for instance, vindictiveness and resentment rekindled preconceptions and mutual suspicion, which in turn shaped policies, and were the single most important contributor to the calamitous events leading to the  Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact  that precipitated the outbreak of the  Second World War.

The following subtle minor episode illustrates the  power  of such convictions. In May 1940, when Britain embarked on crucial negotiations with the Soviet Union in an attempt to sway it away from Nazi Germany,  General Hastings Ismay , head of the Cabinet Secretariat and later  Winston Churchill’s  military adviser, sent his friend,  Orme Sargent,  the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, ‘ The Truce of the Bear ’, which was inspired by the 19th-century Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry in Central Asia – the so called ‘Great Game’. In the poem, from which the following verses are selected, an old blind beggar who had been mauled by a bear removes his bandages to reveal his wounds and speaks:

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless – toothless, broken of speech, Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each Over and over the story, ending as he began: ‘Make ye no truce with Adam-zad – the Bear that walks like a man.

‘Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer, Making his supplication rose Adam-zad the Bear! I looked at the swaying shoulders, at the paunch’s swag and swing, And my heart was touched with pity for the monstrous, pleading thing.

Touched with pity and wonder, I did not fire then… I have looked no more on women – I have walked no more with men. Nearer he tottered and nearer, with paws like hands that pray – From brow to jaw that steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away!

‘When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer, That is the time of peril – the time of the Truce of the Bear!’ Over and over the story, ending as he began: ‘There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man.’

Ever since Russia’s emergence as a major power in the 18th century,  the Western world has been reluctant to accept it as an integral part of Europe . This rebuff, embedded in a deep-rooted Russophobic tradition, was heightened by the  Bolshevik Revolution . In 1839, the  Marquis de Custine , whose entire family had been sent to the guillotine, sought refuge in Russia, the bastion of monarchical rule in Europe. He came back appalled, warning his readers that the Russians were ‘Chinese masquerading as Europeans’. Almost a century later we find the famous British diplomat, author and politician,  Harold Nicolson , describing in his diary a lunch at the grand London residency of Ambassador  Ivan Maisky , a ‘grim Victorian mansion’ in Nicolson’s words. ‘I was ushered into a room of unexampled horror… we were given corked sherry, during which time the man with a yellow moustache and a  moujik’s  unappetising daughter carried tableware and bananas into the room beyond,’ he wrote. ‘We then went into luncheon, which was held in a winter-garden, more wintry than gardeny… We began with caviar which was all to the good. We then had a little wet dead trout. We then had what in nursing homes is called “fruit jelly”…During the whole meal, I felt that there was something terribly familiar about it all… And then suddenly I realised it was the East. They were playing at being Europeans…They have gone oriental.’

Earlier, during the civil war in the wake of the Russian Revolution,  Churchill  applied far more unflattering metaphors, comparing the Russians to ‘crocodiles’ and a ‘bubonic plague’. Continuity in the Western perception of Russia was likewise conspicuous in its choice of the ‘Iron Curtain’ metaphor as an opening salvo in the  Cold War , a mere para- phrase of the ‘ cordon sanitaire ’, with which  Lord Curzon  had hoped to isolate Western civilisation from the Bolshevik ‘epidemic’ following the Russian Revolution.

Nor have the Russians been immune to xenophobia, or clear about their own  identity and destiny.  From the early 1830s the Russian intelligentsia pursued a fierce debate between the  Westerners and the Slavophiles  over the road which Russia should follow to surmount its political, social and economic backwardness. It may well be argued that the search by the  double-headed eagle  for physical and national identity had been the gist of Russian history all along. The debate, in various shapes and forms, has since followed each swivel in the Russian story, culminating in the demonising of the Western bourgeoisie following the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin’s chronic misreading of British intentions and behaviour, for instance, was undoubtedly a major factor in the formulation of Soviet foreign policy.

This diehard tradition accounts very much for Western attempts to impose values as the indispensable common denominator and precondition for any community of interests with Russia – a criterion which is hardly observed by the West in its relations with allies such as  Turkey , Saudi Arabia or Egypt. This adherence to ‘moral’ criteria in forging foreign policy stands in contrast to lessons learnt from the past. There is no way of overcoming lingering mutual suspicion and preconceived ideas without a resort to history and dialogue, if a bridge is to be established. The idea that values are the indispensable common denominator and precondition for any community of interests is not borne out by historical experience. After all, paradoxically, the West forged the most sound alliances with Russia on solidly geopolitical grounds when its regime was much at odds with Western values: be that during the Napoleonic Wars, the  First World War , or the Grand Alliance with Stalin.

Notions of space and geopolitics, applied to conflicts concerning overlapping interests or regional ethnic issues and manipulated through the instruments of balance of power, were and remain central to the formulation and execution of Russian foreign policy. My extended research into Stalin’s foreign policy, for instance, has shown that he was little affected by ideological predilections or sentiments in that regard. His statesmanship was to a large extent entrenched in the legacy of  Tsarist Russia , and responded to challenges which had deep historical roots. This is in no way to question the view that Stalin’s system of government (or for that matter Putin’s as well) was also characterised by idiosyncratic and despotic methods in the pursuit of state goals. Who would dispute the disastrous impact of  Stalin’s savage purges of the military , his disastrous meddling in the workings of the high command and the highly professional Soviet foreign ministry?

And yet, on the whole, Stalin’s foreign policy appears to have followed an unscrupulous realpolitik, serving well-defined traditional Russian geopolitical interests. Ironically, Marx’s battle cry for the international proletariat in 1848 – that they had ‘ little to lose but their chains ’ – evoked far less resonance in Stalin than the famous dictum of the then British Foreign Secretary,  Lord Palmerston , in the same year: ‘We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’

I have devoted the core of my academic career to exploring the interrelations between ideology, realpolitik and geopolitics.  My earlier books  focused on the formulation of Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s. They revealed how the first decade of the Russian Revolution was characterised by a dynamic process of re-evaluation of foreign policy. The Bolsheviks faced a formidable trial in their futile attempts to reconcile two contradictory factors: the axiomatic need to spread the revolution beyond Russia’s borders and the prosaic need to guarantee survival within recognised borders. From its inception, Soviet foreign policy was characterised by a gradual but consistent retreat from unyielding hostility to capitalist regimes, preferring peaceful coexistence based on mutual expediency. Crude, cold calculations had always been and remained the backbone of Stalin’s policies, and they echoed forcefully in the corridors of the Kremlin until the  appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev  and the sub-sequent demise of the Soviet Union.

When it comes to the Second World War,  neither the fanciful idea that throughout 1939–41 Stalin had been meticulously preparing a revolutionary war against Germany  but was pre-empted by Hitler’s own invasion of Russia, nor the notion that he expected Germany and Britain to bleed white, paving the way for the communist revolution to be carried into the heart of Europe on the bayonets of the Red Army, is borne out by the archival sources. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Stalin personally warned  Georgi Dimitrov,  the Bulgarian leader of the Comintern, not to cherish revolutionary dreams. ‘In the First Imperialist War’, Dimitrov was warned, ‘the Bolsheviks overestimated the situation. We all rushed ahead and made mistakes! This can be explained, but not excused, by the conditions prevailing then. Today we must not repeat the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks then.’

Surprisingly, Stalin’s mind was not set on war, but rather on the agenda for a peace conference which he expected to convene by 1942. He hoped the conference, attended by a debilitated British Empire, would topple the Treaty of Versailles, and acknowledge the new Soviet security arrangements in Central and Northern Europe. However, far more striking is that, embracing the traditional Russian geopolitical outlook, Stalin saw in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact an opportunity to redress the grievances which he felt had been inflicted on Russia throughout the 19th century, during the struggle for mastery in Europe – and specifically in the  Paris  and Berlin Peace conferences following the Crimean War of 1856 and the  Russo-Turkish wars in 1877–78 . The forgotten story of the scramble for the Balkans in 1939–41, and indeed the reopening of the 19th-century ‘Eastern Question’, best illustrate the geopolitical continuum in Stalin’s approach to foreign policy. The  annexation of Bessarabia in June 1940  has been commonly perceived by historians as yet another example of pure Bolshevik expansionism. But the move was motivated by the need to improve the strategic position of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis both Britain and Germany by securing the littoral of the  Black Sea  and control of the mouth of the Danube. His conduct is almost a replica of Alexander II’s conduct during the 1877–78 war with Turkey, which ended with the  Treaty of San Stefano , establishing a Russian presence at the opening of the Bosphorus strait.

The common vivid presentation of  Molotov’s negotiations with Hitler  in Berlin in November 1940 as proof that Stalin had conspired with Hitler to divide the world, is contested by the directive for the talks, dictated to Molotov in Stalin’s dacha and in his long hand, which I unearthed, and which is confined to the intrinsic Soviet interests in the Balkans and the Turkish Straits, determined by considerations of security. Stalin later explained to Dimitrov, who became the first communist leader of Bulgaria, that the approach to Hitler was induced by the threats posed to Russia in the Black Sea. ‘Historically the danger has always come from there,’ Stalin noted, revealing his frame of mind, ‘The Crimean War – the capture of Sebastopol – the  intervention of Wrangel  [the commanding general of the anti-Bolshevik White Army in southern Russia] in 1919 etc.’

Stalin’s stance over the Balkans reflected similar arrangements obtained by force from Finland after the conclusion of the  Winter War in March 1940,  and which protected the maritime approaches to Leningrad. The triangular ‘urge to the Sea’ (at the Pacific, the Baltic and the North Seas, and the Black Sea) had been, and remains, as brilliantly suggested a long time ago by Max Kerner, a cardinal principle in Russian geopolitically-oriented foreign policy. It was Stalin’s a priori premise, when war broke out, that Russia was ‘content being confined to its own small  lebensraum ’. Accused at one point by the Western press of conducting in southeast Europe a ‘platonic relationship with the Slavonic people’, Stalin responded: ‘I have read Plato carefully but I do not really see the relevance. We simply pursue a realistic policy rather than sentimental. We save our sentiments for small children and little animals, but in practice we do not conduct a sentimental policy in relation to any country, be that Slav or not, be that small or big.’ In a tête-à-tête conversation with  Anthony Eden , Britain’s Foreign Secretary for most of the Second World War, Maisky, the veteran Soviet ambassador to London, complained that British statesmen and politicians had always been divided into two groups. One embodied primarily the state interests of Great Britain and the second embodied primarily the ‘class feelings and prejudices of the ruling top circles’. When Eden suggested that the same could be said of Russia, Maisky interjected: ‘But the difference is that the S[oviet] G[overnment] has never pursued and does not pursue  Gefülspolitik.  The S[oviet] G[overnment] is utterly realistic in its foreign policy. When state interests and ideas collide, state interests always emerge with the upper hand.’

It may come as a surprise to learn that Churchill, the cross-bearer in the crusade against communism in the Russian civil war and the 1920s, and the architect of the Iron Curtain, held similar views. Churchill’s witty quip, describing Russia as  ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ , has often been evoked by historians and politicians alike to demonstrate the sinister nature of Stalin’s foreign policy. However, few historians have actually bothered to study the radio speech delivered by Churchill in October 1939 (merely three months after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact), seeking reconciliation and rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Churchill actually went on to solve the mystery: ‘ But perhaps, there is a key. The key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant herself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that she should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south-eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia. ’

In conclusion, my argument is that to attribute Russian imperial policy, Stalin’s conduct of foreign affairs or indeed Putin’s actions in contemporary world affairs to the whims of tyranny, or to an ideological drive towards relentless expansionism, is entirely misleading and ahistorical. It overlooks Russia’s tenacious adherence to imperatives deeply rooted within its history and national mentality.

Geopolitics, in the Russian/Soviet process of nation building, has been a major factor in the interrelationship of Soviet domestic and foreign policy. It leaves one wondering whether, in the sphere of foreign policy, universal ideologies have not been at best instrumental in manipulating and moulding public opinion, or in sustaining legitimacy in the age of democracy and the masses.

In order to understand the 20th century, as well as today’s Russia, it might be necessary to resort to the icons of  Halford Mackinder ,  Machiavelli ,  Richelieu  and  Bismarck , rather than  Woodrow Wilson ,  Marx ,  Lenin  or  Milton Friedman.

More from Russia

Putin’s russia is a nuclear outlaw, fearing russia’s futures, russia, america and the roads not taken, grey zones and dark tourism in europe’s hinterlands, the invention of catherine the great, latest essays, inside sudan’s forever war, the salvation of spinoza, erdogan prepares to leave the stage, ai’s attention deficit.

Emerging contours of geopolitics and state in the digital era

• Book Review
• Published: 02 April 2024

Cite this article

• Arun Teja Polcumpally   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7137-6596 1 ,
• Megha Shrivastava 2 &
• Shashank S. Patel 3  

This review essay provides a critical analysis of the book ‘The Great Tech Game,’ authored by Anirudh Suri. For the analysis, other literature published in a similar area is considered and pitched the arguments against the ones made in the book. During the year this book was released, there were numerous debates on accountability and trust in frontier digital technologies like AI. These debates have reached a systemic level where the entire global community is divided into two camps headed by the US and China in drafting rules and regulations for the internet and allied technologies. A critical comment on a well-circulated book would add clarity to the debates on the impacts of frontier digital technologies. This review contributes to the critical voices of the emerging scholarship on the confluence of digital technology and global politics. This review essay is intended to serve as an academic comment on the published work.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Bindra J (2019) The Tech Wishper: on digital transformation and the technologies that enable it. Penguin Random House, New Delhi

Google Scholar  

Bostrom N (2014) Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Chandrasekaran N, Roopa P (2019) Bridgital nation: solving technology’s people problem. Penguin, New Delhi

Culpan T (2019) Tech cold war will force world to choose. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-26/u-s-china-tech-cold-war-will-force-nations-to-choose-sides

Feldstein S (2022) The global struggle over AI surveillance. National Endowment for Democracy . https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Global-Struggle-Over-AI-Surveillance-Feldstein.pdf

Gray CS (1996) The changing nature of warfare? Navel War Coll Rev 49(2):7–22

Harari TN (2016) Homo Deus. Vintage, London

Hofmann J (2016) Multistakeholderism in INternet governance: putting a fiction into practice. J Cyber Policy 1(1):29–49

Article   Google Scholar  

Jensen B (2017) The cyber character of political warfare. Brown J World Aff 24(1):159–172

Kenyon M (2020) Citizen Lab and Amnesty International uncover spyware operation against Indian human rights defenders. Citizen Lab, Toronto

Kostopoulos L (2021) Defacto shared sovereignity and the rise of non-state statecraft: imperatives for nation states. ORF . https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/de-facto-shared-sovereignty-and-the-rise-of-non-state-statecraft/

Lawton TC, Moura TG, Tobin D, Silva-Rego B (2023) Geopolitics of the digital economy: implications for states and firms. AIB Insights

Lee KF (2018) AI superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the new world order. Harper Business.

Luo Y (2022) Illusions of techno-nationalism. J Int Bus Stud 53(3):550–567

Miller G, Al-Jizawi N, Ermoshina K, Michaelsen M, Panday Z, Plumptre G, Senft A, Deibert R (2022) You move, they follow: uncovering Iran’s mobile legal intercept system. Citizen Lab, Toronto

Perritt HH Jr (1998) The internet as a threat to sovereignty? Thoughts on the internet’s role in strengthening national and global governance. Ind J Global Legal Stud 5(2):423–442

Polcumpally AT, Rahar A (2022) Impact of emerging digital technologies and artificial intelligence on the state: an overview. IUP J Int Relat 16(3):47–61

Radu R (2020) Global internet governance: is fragmentation avoidable? Global Challenges . https://globalchallenges.ch/issue/7/global-internet-governance-is-fragmentation-avoidable/

Scott-Railton J, Campo E, Marczak B, Razzak BA, Anstis S, Gözde B, Solimano S, Diebert R (2022a) CatalanGate extensive mercenary spyware operation against catalans using Pegasus and Candiru . Citizen Lab, Toronto. https://joan.domenechmilan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/citizenlab.ca-CatalanGate-Extensive-Mercenary-Spyware-Operation-against-Catalans-Using-Pegasus-and-Candiru.pdf

Scott-Railton J, Bill M, Abdul RB, Siena A, Nigro HP, Ron D (2022b) New Pegasus spyware abuses identified in Mexico. Citizen Lab, Toronto

Scott-Railton J, Bill M, Irene P, Abdul RB, Sutawan C, Ron D (2022c) GeckoSpy: Pegasus spyware used against Thailand’s pro-democracy movement. Citizen Lab, Toronto

Scott-Railton J, Bill M, Irene P, Abdul RB, Sutawan C, Ron D (2022d) Project Torogoz: extensive hacking of media and civil society in El Salvador with Pegasus spyware. Citizen Lab, Toronto

Srnicek N (2017) Platform capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge

Suri A (2022) The great tech game. Harper Collins

Susskind J (2018) Future politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Toffler A (1991) The power shift. Batnam Books, New York

Download references

The authors declare that we have not received any funding for this project.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Wadhwani Institute of Technology Policy, New Delhi, India

Arun Teja Polcumpally

Department of Geopolitics and International Relations, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka, India

Megha Shrivastava

Department of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Shashank S. Patel

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Arun Teja Polcumpally .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of views.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Polcumpally, A.T., Shrivastava, M. & Patel, S.S. Emerging contours of geopolitics and state in the digital era. AI & Soc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01923-1

Download citation

Received : 09 December 2023

Accepted : 06 March 2024

Published : 02 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01923-1

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Artificial intelligence
• Global governance
• Geopolitics
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

A queen Solenopsis invicta , an invasive fire ant. Photo by Alex Wild

Ant geopolitics

Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own.

by John Whitfield   + BIO

It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive .

In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.

This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.

It is tempting to look for parallels with human empires. Perhaps it is impossible not to see rhymes between the natural and human worlds, and as a science journalist I’ve contributed more than my share. But just because words rhyme, it doesn’t mean their definitions align. Global ant societies are not simply echoes of human struggles for power. They are something new in the world, existing at a scale we can measure but struggle to grasp: there are roughly 200,000 times more ants on our planet than the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.

In late 2022, colonies of the most notorious South American export, the red fire ant ( Solenopsis invicta ) were unexpectedly found in Europe for the first time, alongside a river estuary close to the Sicilian city of Syracuse. People were shocked when a total of 88 colonies were eventually located, but the appearance of the red fire ant in Europe shouldn’t be a surprise. It was entirely predictable: another ant species from S invicta ’s native habitats in South America had already found its way to Europe.

What is surprising is how poorly we still understand global ant societies: there is a science-fiction epic going on under our feet, an alien geopolitics being negotiated by the 20 quadrillion ants living on Earth today. It might seem like a familiar story, but the more time I spend with it, the less familiar it seems, and the more I want to resist relying on human analogies. Its characters are strange; its scales hard to conceive. Can we tell the story of global ant societies without simply retelling our own story?

S ome animal societies hold together because their members recognise and remember one another when they interact. Relying on memory and experience in this way – in effect, trusting only friends – limits the size of groups to their members’ capacity to sustain personal relationships with one another. Ants, however, operate differently by forming what the ecologist Mark Moffett calls ‘anonymous societies’ in which individuals from the same species or group can be expected to accept and cooperate with each other even when they have never met before. What these societies depend on, Moffett writes, are ‘shared cues recognised by all its members’.

Recognition looks very different for humans and insects. Human society relies on networks of reciprocity and reputation, underpinned by language and culture. Social insects – ants, wasps, bees and termites – rely on chemical badges of identity. In ants, this badge is a blend of waxy compounds that coat the body, keeping the exoskeleton watertight and clean. The chemicals in this waxy blend, and their relative strengths, are genetically determined and variable. This means that a newborn ant can quickly learn to distinguish between nest mates and outsiders as it becomes sensitive to its colony’s unique scent. Insects carrying the right scent are fed, groomed and defended; those with the wrong one are rejected or fought.

Colonies spread without ever drawing boundaries because workers treat all of their own kind as allies

The most successful invasive ants, including the tropical fire ant ( Solenopsis geminata ) and red fire ant ( S invicta ), share this quality. They also share social and reproductive traits. Individual nests can contain many queens (in contrast to species with one queen per nest) who mate inside their home burrows. In single-queen species, newborn queens leave the nest before mating, but in unicolonial species, mated queens will sometimes leave their nest on foot with a group of workers to set up a new nest nearby. Through this budding, a network of allied and interconnected colonies begins to grow.

In their native ranges, these multi-nest colonies can grow to a few hundred metres across, limited by physical barriers or other ant colonies. This turns the landscape to a patchwork of separate groups, with each chemically distinct society fighting or avoiding others at their borders. Species and colonies coexist, without any prevailing over the others. However, for the ‘anonymous societies’ of unicolonial ants, as they’re known, transporting a small number of queens and workers to a new place can cause the relatively stable arrangement of groups to break down. As new nests are created, colonies bud and spread without ever drawing boundaries because workers treat all others of their own kind as allies. What was once a patchwork of complex relationships becomes a simplified, and unified, social system. The relative genetic homogeneity of the small founder population, replicated across a growing network of nests, ensures that members of unicolonial species tolerate each other. Spared the cost of fighting one another, these ants can live in denser populations, spreading across the land as a plant might, and turning their energies to capturing food and competing with other species. Chemical badges keep unicolonial ant societies together, but also allow those societies to rapidly expand.

A ll five of the ants included in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) list of 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species are unicolonial. Three of these species – the aforementioned red fire ant ( S invicta ), the Argentine ant ( Linepithema humile ) and the little fire ant ( Wasmannia auropunctata ) – are originally from Central and/or South America, where they are found sharing the same landscapes. It is likely that the first two species, at least, began their global expansion centuries ago on ships out of Buenos Aires. Some of these ocean journeys might have lasted longer than a single worker ant’s lifetime.

Unicolonial ants are superb and unfussy scavengers that can hunt animal prey, eat fruit or nectar, and tend insects such as aphids for the sugary honeydew they excrete. They are also adapted to living in regularly disrupted environments, such as river deltas prone to flooding (the ants either get above the waterline, by climbing a tree, for example, or gather into living rafts and float until it subsides). For these ants, disturbance is a kind of environmental reset during which territories have to be reclaimed. Nests – simple, shallow burrows – are abandoned and remade at short notice. If you were looking to design a species to invade cities, suburbs, farmland and any wild environment affected by humans, it would probably look like a unicolonial ant: a social generalist from an unpredictable, intensely competitive environment.

When these ants show up in other places, they can make their presence felt in spectacular fashion. An early example comes from the 1850s, when the big-headed ant ( Pheidole megacephala ), another species now listed on the IUCN’s top 100, found its way from Africa to the Madeiran capital of Funchal. ‘You eat it in your puddings, vegetables and soups, and wash your hands in a decoction of it,’ complained one British visitor in 1851. When the red fire ant ( S invicta ), probably the best-known unicolonial species, spread through the US farming communities surrounding the port of Mobile, Alabama in the 1930s, it wreaked havoc in different ways. ‘Some farmers who have heavily infested land are unable to hire sufficient help, and are forced to abandon land to the ants,’ was how E O Wilson in 1958 described the outcome of their arrival. Today, the red fire ant does billions of dollars of damage each year and inflicts its agonising bite on millions of people. But the largest colonies, and most dramatic moments in the global spread of ant societies, belong to the Argentine ant ( L humile ).

New Zealand is the only country to have prevented the spread of the red fire ant

Looking at the history of this species’ expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it can seem as if the spread of global trade was an Argentine ant plot for world domination. One outbreak appeared in Porto, following the 1894 Exhibition of the Islands and Colonies of Portugal. The insects had likely travelled on produce and wares displayed at the exhibition from Madeira – ornamental plants, which tend to travel with a clump of their home soil, are particularly good for transporting invasive species. In 1900, a Belfast resident, Mrs Corry, found a ‘dark army’ of the same species crossing her kitchen floor and entering the larder, where they covered a leg of mutton so completely that ‘one could scarcely find room for a pin-point’. In 1904, the US Bureau of Entomology dispatched a field agent, Edward Titus, to investigate a plague of Argentine ants in New Orleans. He heard reports of the ants crawling into babies’ mouths and nostrils in such numbers that they could be dislodged only by repeatedly dunking the infant in water. Other reports described the ants entering hospitals and ‘busily carrying away the sputum’ from a tuberculosis patient. When the species arrived on the French Riviera a few years later, holiday villas were abandoned and a children’s hospital was evacuated.

In December 1927, Italy’s king Vittorio Emmanuel III and its prime minister Benito Mussolini signed a law setting out the measures to be taken against the Argentine ant, splitting the cost equally with invaded provinces. The state’s effectiveness, or lack of it, is shown in the novella The Argentine Ant (1952) by Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s great postwar writers. Calvino, whose parents were plant biologists, sets his tale in an unnamed seaside town much like the one where he grew up, in the northwestern province of Liguria. The ant has outlasted both Mussolini and the monarchy, and saturates the unnamed town, burrowing underground (and into people’s heads). Some residents drench their houses and gardens with pesticides or build elaborate traps involving hammers covered in honey; others try to ignore or deny the problem. And then there is Signor Baudino, an employee of the Argentine Ant Control Corporation, who has spent 20 years putting out bowls of molasses laced with a weak dose of poison. The locals suspect him of feeding the ants to keep himself in a job.

In reality, people who found themselves living in the path of such ant plagues learned to stand the feet of their cupboards, beds and cots in dishes of kerosene. However, this was not a long-term solution: killing workers away from the nest achieves little when most, along with their queens, remain safe at home. Slower-acting insecticides (like Baudino’s poison), which workers take back to the nest and feed to queens, can be more effective. But because unicolonial workers can enter any number of nests in their network, each containing many queens, the chances of delivering a fatal dose gets much slimmer.

In the early 20th century, an intensive period in the human war against ants, pest-control researchers advocated using broad-spectrum poisons, most of which are now banned for use as pesticides, to set up barriers or fumigate nests. Nowadays, targeted insecticides can be effective for clearing relatively small areas. This has proved useful in orchards and vineyards (where the ants’ protection of sap-sucking insects makes them a hazard to crops) and in places such as the Galápagos or Hawaii where the ants threaten rare species. Large-scale eradications are a different matter, and few places have tried. New Zealand, the world leader in controlling invasive species, is the only country to have prevented the spread of the red fire ant, mostly by eradicating nests on goods arriving at airports and ports. The country is also home to a spaniel trained to sniff out Argentine ants nests and prevent the insects from reaching small islands important for seabirds.

H uman inconvenience pales in comparison with the ants’ effects on other species. Exploring the countryside around New Orleans in 1904, Titus found the Argentine ant overwhelming the indigenous ant species, bearing away the corpses, eggs and larvae of the defeated to be eaten: ‘column after column of them arriving on the scene of battle’. Other entomologists at the time learned to recognise the disappearance of native ants as a sign of an invader’s arrival. Unicolonial species are aggressive, quick to find food sources and tenacious in defending and exploiting them. Unlike many ant species, in which a worker who finds a new food source returns to the nest to recruit other foragers, the Argentine ant enlists other workers already outside the nest, thus recruiting foragers more quickly. However, the decisive advantage of unicolonial ant species lies in their sheer force of numbers, which is usually what decides ant conflicts. They often become the only ant species in invaded areas.

The effects of these invasions cascade through ecosystems. Sometimes, the damage is direct: on the Galápagos, fire ants prey on tortoise hatchlings and bird chicks, threatening their survival. In other cases, the damage falls on species that once relied on native ants. In California, the tiny Argentine ant (typically under 3 mm long) has replaced the larger native species that once formed the diet of horned lizards, leaving the reptiles starving – it seems they do not recognise the much smaller invader as food. In the scrublands of the South African fynbos heathland, which has some of the most distinctive flora on Earth, many plants produce seeds bearing a fatty blob. Native ants ‘plant’ the seeds by carrying them into their nests, where they eat the fat and discard the rest. Argentine ants – almost certainly imported to South Africa around 1900 along with horses shipped from Buenos Aires by the British Empire to fight the Boer War – either ignore the seeds, leaving them to be eaten by mice, or strip the fat where it lies, leaving the seed on the ground. This makes it harder for endemic flora such as proteas to reproduce, tipping the balance towards invasive plants such as acacias and eucalypts.

In the past 150 years, the Argentine ant has spread to pretty much everywhere that has hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. A single supercolony, possibly descended from as few as half a dozen queens, now stretches along 6,000 kilometres of coastline in southern Europe. Another runs most of the length of California. The species has arrived in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and even reached Easter Island in the Pacific and St Helena in the Atlantic. Its allegiances span oceans: workers from different continents, across millions of nests containing trillions of individuals, will accept each other as readily as if they had been born in the same nest. Workers of the world united, indeed. But not completely united.

As with inbred species everywhere, this may make them prone to disease

Expanding in parallel with the world-spanning supercolony are separate groups of the Argentine ant that bear different chemical badges – the legacy of other journeys from the homeland. Same species, different ‘smells’. In places where these distinct colonies come into contact, hostilities resume.

In Spain, one such colony holds a stretch of the coast of Catalonia. In Japan, four mutually hostile groups fight it out around the port city of Kobe. The best-studied conflict zone is in southern California, a little north of San Diego, where the Very Large Colony, as the state-spanning group is known, shares a border with a separate group called the Lake Hodges colony, with a territory measuring just 30 kilometres around. Monitoring this border for a six-month period between April and September 2004, a team of researchers estimated that 15 million ants died on a frontline a few centimetres wide and several kilometres long. There were times when each group seemed to gain ground, but over longer periods stalemate was the rule. Those seeking to control ant populations believe provoking similar conflicts might be a way to weaken invasive ants’ dominance. There are also hopes, for example, that artificial pheromones – chemical misinformation, in other words – might cause colony mates to turn on one another, although no products have yet come to market.

In the very long term, the fate of unicolonial societies is unclear. A survey of Madeira’s ants between 2014 and 2021 found , contrary to fears that invasive ants would wipe the island clean of other insects, very few big-headed ants and, remarkably, no Argentine ants. Invasive ants are prone to population crashes for reasons that aren’t understood but may be related to genetic homogeneity: a single colony of Argentine ants in their homeland contains as much genetic diversity as the whole of California’s state-spanning supercolony. As with inbred species everywhere, this may make them prone to disease. Another potential issue is that the ants’ lack of discrimination about whom they help may also favour the evolution of free-riding ‘lazy workers’ in colonies, who selfishly prosper by exploiting their nest mates’ efforts. Though it’s assumed this uneven distribution of work may eventually lead to social breakdown, no examples have been found.

Unless natural selection turns against them, one of the most effective curbs on unicolonial ants is other unicolonial ants. In the southeastern United States, red fire ants seem to have prevented the Argentine ant forming a single vast supercolony as it has in California, instead returning the landscape to a patchwork of species. In southern Europe, however, the Argentine ant has had a century longer to establish itself, so, even if the fire ant does gain a European foothold, there’s no guarantee that the same dynamic will play out. In the southern US, red fire ants are themselves now being displaced by the tawny crazy ant ( Nylanderia fulva ), another South American species, which has immunity to fire ant venom.

I t is remarkable how irresistible the language of human warfare and empire can be when trying to describe the global history of ant expansion. Most observers – scientists, journalists, others – seem not to have tried. Human efforts to control ants are regularly described as a war, as is competition between invaders and native ants, and it is easy to see why comparisons are made between the spread of unicolonial ant societies and human colonialism. People have been drawing links between insect and human societies for millennia. But what people see says more about them than about insects.

A beehive is organised along similar lines to an ant nest, but human views of bee society tend to be benign and utopian. When it comes to ants, the metaphors often polarise, either towards something like communism or something like fascism – one mid-20th-century US eugenicist even used the impact of the Argentine ant as an argument for immigration control. For the entomologist Neil Tsutsui, who studies unicolonial ants at the University of California, Berkeley, insects are like Rorschach tests. Some people see his research as evidence that we should all get along, while others see the case for racial purity.

In addition to conflating a natural ‘is’ with a political ‘ought’, the temptations of ant anthropomorphism can also lead to a limited, and limiting, view of natural history. Surely the habit of worker ants in Argentine nests to kill nine-tenths of their queens every spring – seemingly clearing out the old to make way for the new – is enough to deter parallels between ant societies and human politics?

Unicolonial species can overwhelmingly alter ecological diversity when they arrive somewhere new

The more I learn, the more I am struck by the ants’ strangeness rather than their similarities with human society. There is another way to be a globalised society – one that is utterly unlike our own. I am not even sure we have the language to convey, for example, a colony’s ability to take bits of information from thousands of tiny brains and turn it into a distributed, constantly updated picture of their world. Even ‘smell’ seems a feeble word to describe the ability of ants’ antennae to read chemicals on the air and on each other. How can we imagine a life where sight goes almost unused and scent forms the primary channel of information, where chemical signals show the way to food, or mobilise a response to threats, or distinguish queens from workers and the living from the dead ?

As our world turns alien, trying to think like an alien will be a better route to finding the imagination and humility needed to keep up with the changes than looking for ways in which other species are like us. But trying to think like an ant, rather than thinking about how ants are like us, is not to say that I welcome our unicolonial insect underlords. Calamities follow in the wake of globalised ant societies. Most troubling among these is the way that unicolonial species can overwhelmingly alter ecological diversity when they arrive somewhere new. Unicolonial ants can turn a patchwork of colonies created by different ant species into a landscape dominated by a single group. As a result, textured and complex ecological communities become simpler, less diverse and, crucially, less different to each other. This is not just a process; it is an era. The current period in which a relatively small number of super-spreading animals and plants expands across Earth is sometimes called the Homogecene. It’s not a cheering word, presaging an environment that favours the most pestilential animals, plants and microbes. Unicolonial ants contribute to a more homogenous future, but they also speak to life’s ability to escape our grasp, regardless of how we might try to order and exploit the world. And there’s something hopeful about that, for the planet, if not for us.

The scale and spread of ant societies is a reminder that humans should not confuse impact with control. We may be able to change our environment, but we’re almost powerless when it comes to manipulating our world exactly how we want. The global society of ants reminds us that we cannot know how other species will respond to our reshaping of the world, only that they will.

If you want a parable of ants’ ability to mock human hubris, it’s hard to improve on the story of Biosphere 2. This giant terrarium in the Arizona desert, funded by a billionaire financier in the late 1980s, was intended as a grand experiment and model for long-distance space travel and colonisation. It was designed to be a self-sustaining living system, inhabited by eight people, with no links to the world’s atmosphere, water, soil. Except that, soon after it began operations in 1991, the black crazy ant ( Paratrechina longicornis ), a unicolonial species originally from southeast Asia, found a way in, reshaped the carefully engineered invertebrate community inside, and turned the place into a honeydew farm.

It is possible to be both a scourge and a marvel.

Economic history

The southern gap

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy

Keri Leigh Merritt

Thinkers and theories

Our tools shape our selves

For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience

Bryan Norton

Family life

A patchwork family

After my marriage failed, I strove to create a new family – one made beautiful by the loving way it’s stitched together

The cell is not a factory

Scientific narratives project social hierarchies onto nature. That’s why we need better metaphors to describe cellular life

Charudatta Navare

The dangers of AI farming

AI could lead to new ways for people to abuse animals for financial gain. That’s why we need strong ethical guidelines

Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert & Jonathan Birch

War and peace

Legacy of the Scythians

How the ancient warrior people of the steppes have found themselves on the cultural frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine

Peter Mumford

World Brief: U.S. ‘Outraged’ Over Deadly Israeli Strike on World Central Kitchen Convoy in Gaza

Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

World Brief

• Editors’ Picks
• Africa Brief

China Brief

• Latin America Brief

South Asia Brief

Situation report.

• Flash Points
• War in Ukraine
• Israel and Hamas
• U.S.-China competition
• Biden's foreign policy
• Trade and economics
• Artificial intelligence
• Asia & the Pacific
• Middle East & Africa

Ones and Tooze

Foreign policy live.

Winter 2024 Issue

Print Archive

FP Analytics

• In-depth Special Reports
• Issue Briefs
• Power Maps and Interactive Microsites
• FP Simulations & PeaceGames
• Graphics Database

Her Power 2024

The atlantic & pacific forum, principles of humanity under pressure, fp global health forum 2024, fp @ unga79.

By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.

Your guide to the most important world stories of the day

Essential analysis of the stories shaping geopolitics on the continent

The latest news, analysis, and data from the country each week

Weekly update on what’s driving U.S. national security policy

Evening roundup with our editors’ favorite stories of the day

One-stop digest of politics, economics, and culture

Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors

A curated selection of our very best long reads

U.S. ‘Outraged’ Over Deadly Israeli Strike on World Central Kitchen Convoy in Gaza

Nearly 200 aid workers have been killed in gaza since the israel-hamas war began..

• Human Rights

Israel-Hamas War

News, analysis, and background on the ongoing conflict .

More on this topic

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a deadly Israeli strike on humanitarian workers in Gaza , Ukraine targeting Russian oil infrastructure, and a school shooting in Finland .

Sign up to receive World Brief in your inbox every weekday.

Aid volunteers killed in gaza.

World Central Kitchen (WCK), an aid organization founded by celebrity chef José Andrés that provides meals to communities struck by humanitarian disasters, temporarily suspended food deliveries to Gaza on Tuesday after an Israeli strike killed seven of the group’s volunteers in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah late Monday. Three of the victims were British citizens, and the others were Australian, Polish, and dual U.S.-Canadian.

“This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war,” WCK CEO Erin Gore said , calling Israel’s actions “unforgivable.”

Israeli forces reportedly launched a strike on WCK’s three-car convoy over suspicions that a terrorist was traveling with the volunteers, defense sources told Haaretz . They said the convoy was escorting an aid truck allegedly transporting an armed man to a food warehouse in Deir al-Balah, where WCK said the team unloaded “more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid.” When WCK left the warehouse, the suspect was believed to still be inside. Israeli drones then fired three consecutive missiles at the convoy, killing all seven volunteers.

World Central Kitchen said it had coordinated its movements with Israel’s military and that the convoy included two armored cars branded with WCK’s logo. “The attack on the seven WCK aid workers constitutes a clear violation of the International Court of Justice’s provisions,” said Washington-based aid organization American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera), referring to a court ruling last month saying Israel must take “all necessary and effective measures” to ensure the unhindered provision of aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Anera is a nonprofit that collaborates with WCK to deliver 150,000 meals to Gaza daily alongside medical treatments and other emergency aid items.

Israel took responsibility for the strike. “Unfortunately, in the last 24 hours, there was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “This happens in war, and we will investigate it to the end.”

Foreign leaders condemned Israel’s actions. U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the White House was “ outraged ,” and British Foreign Secretary David Cameron called the attack “ completely unacceptable ,” summoning the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. to London.

At least 196 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the U.S.-funded Aid Worker Security Database, including 173 employees with the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (known as UNRWA). Not all of these staffers were killed while carrying out their duties. Israel barred  UNRWA last week from delivering aid to northern Gaza despite the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warning last month that 70 percent of Palestinians in parts of northern Gaza face famine-scale food shortages .

Today’s Most Read

• Power Is the Answer in U.S. Competition With China by Michael Mazza
• America Must Act to Prevent a Rwanda-Congo War by Evan W. Nachtrieb
• NATO Is Unprepared for Russia’s Arctic Threats by Liselotte Odgaard

What We’re Following

Oil refinery attack. A Ukrainian drone strike hit Taneco, Russia’s third-largest oil refinery, in the Russian city of Nizhnekamsk on Tuesday, roughly 800 miles from the war’s front lines. Local authorities said the facility suffered no critical damage to its output despite a fire breaking out onsite. The refinery produces more than 17 million tons of crude per year—6.2 percent of Russia’s refining capacity—and the unit hit on Tuesday is responsible for roughly half of the facility’s total production.

Kyiv’s assault was in response to Russian strikes late Monday against energy facilities in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Kirovohrad oblasts, the Ukrainian military said. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted Russian oil refineries in recent weeks as a way “to strike at both the economic and logistic sinews of Russia’s war effort,” FP’s Keith Johnson wrote . As of the end of March, Ukrainian drone strikes had shut down around 14 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity, Reuters reported .

Finland’s school shooting. Finnish authorities apprehended a 12-year-old who opened fire at a secondary school north of Helsinki on Tuesday. One student was killed, and two others were seriously injured during the shooting. It is unclear what the student’s motive was, but Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said there will be an investigation.

The suspect was accused of murder and attempted murder “due to some degree of planning,” police said. However, Finland’s minimum age of criminal liability is 15 years, meaning the suspect cannot be formally arrested. The shooter will instead be handed to child welfare authorities after police finish their questioning.

The student was in possession of a licensed handgun registered to a close relative when they were arrested. Finland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in Europe, with around 430,000 license-holders and more than 1.5 million licensed firearms in the nation, according to the Finnish Interior Ministry. In response to school shootings in 2007 and 2008, Helsinki passed a law in 2011 raising the age to purchase firearms from 18 to 20, introducing an aptitude test, and requiring doctors to report anyone deemed unfit to own a gun.

New leadership across Africa. Senegal inaugurated Bassirou Diomaye Faye on Tuesday, making him the West African country’s youngest president. “I am aware that the results of the ballot box express a profound desire for systemic change,” Faye said . “Under my leadership, Senegal will be a country of hope, a peaceful country with an independent judiciary and a strengthened democracy.”

Just 10 days before Senegal’s March 24 presidential election, Faye was released from prison, where he had been held without trial on charges that included inciting insurrection. Experts and observers saw his incarceration as part of a broader undemocratic effort by then-outgoing President Macky Sall to cling to power. Analysts writing for the BBC say Faye’s swearing-in has “reinvigorated popular confidence in democracy.”

Also on Tuesday, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi was sworn in for a third six-year term. The ceremony took place in the nation’s new capital, called the New Administrative Capital (NAC), which is located around 28 miles southeast of Cairo. The NAC is the largest in a series of mega-projects that Sisi has touted as vital to the country’s economic development and growing population. Critics, however, have argued that the NAC and other multibillion-dollar mega-projects increase Cairo’s debt burden.

In more leadership changes, the Democratic Republic of the Congo appointed its first female prime minister on Monday. President Félix Tshisekedi chose former Planning Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka in a significant step for gender equality . Tuluka vowed to prioritize peace and development amid ongoing regional violence.

Odds and Ends

The world’s oldest continual monarchy has dipped its toe into social media. Japan’s imperial family joined Instagram on Monday to better connect with today’s young people. In just a few hours, the account had already published 60 pictures and five videos of Emperor Naruhito, Empress Masako, and their 22-year-old daughter, Princess Aiko, attending diplomatic meetings, awards ceremonies, and a bonsai exhibition. The family will also consider joining Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) in the future. Too bad they missed out on the MySpace era.

Alexandra Sharp is the World Brief writer at Foreign Policy. Twitter:  @AlexandraSSharp

Join the Conversation

Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription.

Already a subscriber? Log In .

Subscribe Subscribe

View Comments

Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now.

Not your account? Log out

Please follow our comment guidelines , stay on topic, and be civil, courteous, and respectful of others’ beliefs.

Change your username:

I agree to abide by FP’s comment guidelines . (Required)

Confirm your username to get started.

The default username below has been generated using the first name and last initial on your FP subscriber account. Usernames may be updated at any time and must not contain inappropriate or offensive language.

Sign up for Editors' Picks

A curated selection of fp’s must-read stories..

You’re on the list! More ways to stay updated on global news:

How Will Senegal’s New President Govern?

China-philippines tensions heat up, the problem isn’t just netanyahu, it’s israeli society, the moscow attack showed terrorism is asia’s problem now, how the united states lost niger, editors’ picks.

• 1 The U.N. Security Council’s Default Is Deadlock
• 2 Ukraine Is Winning the War’s Other Front
• 3 How the United States Lost Niger
• 4 Nobody Actually Knows What Russia Does Next
• 5 The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society
• 6 China-Philippines Tensions Heat Up

How Will Diomaye Faye Impact Senegal's Economy?

World central kitchen: israeli strike on gaza aid convoy prompts u.s., international condemnation, netanyahu is a scapegoat. a callous israel is the problem., moscow terrorist attack shows islamic state is asia's problem now, more from foreign policy, is this a revolution or are people just very ticked off.

In a new book, Fareed Zakaria explores how much the times are a-changin’. At risk, he says, is the entire global system.

Egypt Is What Happens When the U.S. Gives Up on Democratization

Civil society loses—and China and Russia fill the vacuum.

Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

Why Biden Can’t Force a Truce on Israel—or Won’t

The United States has intervened in past Mideast wars, but this one is different.

Ukraine Is Winning the War’s Other Front

Nobody actually knows what russia does next, the u.n. security council’s default is deadlock.

Sign up for World Brief

FP’s flagship evening newsletter guiding you through the most important world stories of the day, written by Alexandra Sharp . Delivered weekdays.

Schneier on Security

Friday squid blogging: the geopolitics of eating squid.

New York Times op-ed on the Chinese dominance of the squid industry:

China’s domination in seafood has raised deep concerns among American fishermen, policymakers and human rights activists. They warn that China is expanding its maritime reach in ways that are putting domestic fishermen around the world at a competitive disadvantage, eroding international law governing sea borders and undermining food security, especially in poorer countries that rely heavily on fish for protein. In some parts of the world, frequent illegal incursions by Chinese ships into other nations’ waters are heightening military tensions. American lawmakers are concerned because the United States, locked in a trade war with China, is the world’s largest importer of seafood.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here .

Tags: squid

Posted on March 29, 2024 at 5:02 PM • 92 Comments

keiner • March 29, 2024 5:11 PM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810

vas pup • March 29, 2024 5:37 PM

DocFilm – Cryptocurrencies – The Future of Money? h ttps://www.dw.com/en/docfilm-cryptocurrencies-the-future-of-money/video-68182783

inothernews • March 29, 2024 5:52 PM

Ross Anderson died yesterday.

I expect Bruce will eulogise him at some point. It’s very sad and shocking news.

Z.Lozinski • March 29, 2024 5:56 PM

Fran Stajano has written a brief announcement of Ross Anderson’s death at Light blue Touchpaper.

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2024/03/29/rip-ross-anderson/

We’re going to miss Ross.

Sound the pibroch, loud and high.

Steve • March 29, 2024 7:41 PM

@vas pup: I made it through about five minutes of that DW documentary before falling into an “Art Shot” coma.

nealT • March 29, 2024 7:53 PM

I haven’t found much useful information on that ssh backdoor yet. One page claims “the RSA_public_decrypt function will be redirected”; does this mean that servers with no RSA host key configured are safe from this backdoor? Or that only accounts with an ssh-rsa line in authorized_keys are affected?

I hope we’ll see something done about the mess that is autoconf. The initial report claims “an obfuscated script” will be executed after the configure script, which makes me wonder… how would anyone even know it’s obfuscated? If you’ve ever looked at a configure script, you’ll know what I mean. I opened up GnuPG’s as an example, and my editor shows 18,000 lines—apparently written in a style meant to be executable by 35-year-old shells, often testing for stuff that’s been in the C standard for just as long (literally “checking for ANSI C header files”, “checking for working volatile”, etc.). My general preference is to throw away the shipped configure scripts and re-generate them from configure.ac; but those seem very sensitive to autotools versions, often leading me down a rabbit hole of incomprehensible errors… and it’s still 2,000 lines of a macro-language most people don’t know, referencing macros they don’t know, for reasons obscured by the mists of time. I think we’re all just assuming someone knows how that stuff works.

When it comes to my own projects, a script that runs something like “gcc -DFOO -o PROGRAM *.c” is usually enough. These days, a project has to get pretty large before the performance benefit of partial-recompilation has much value. I can’t imagine xz is large enough; they were probably only using autotools because it’s “expected” (cargo-cult reasoning, and probably implementation too; I expect most people are just copying from a tutorial or an existing project).

MarkH • March 29, 2024 8:24 PM

Ross Anderson did so much for awareness and understanding of practical security challenges, and ways to respond to them.

One of the Best.

xz: upstream repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored • March 29, 2024 8:38 PM

xz: upstream repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored

xz-utils are compromised and inject malicious code

https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2024/msg00057.html https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-3094

Debian Security Advisory DSA-5649-1 [SECURITY] [DSA 5649-1] xz-utils security update

Package : xz-utils CVE ID : CVE-2024-3094

Andres Freund discovered that the upstream source tarballs for xz-utils, the XZ-format compression utilities, are compromised and inject malicious code, at build time, into the resulting liblzma5 library.

Right now no Debian stable versions are known to be affected. Compromised packages were part of the Debian testing, unstable and experimental distributions, with versions ranging from 5.5.1alpha-0.1 (uploaded on 2024-02-01), up to and including 5.6.1-1. The package has been reverted to use the upstream 5.4.5 code, which we have versioned 5.6.1+really5.4.5-1.

Users running Debian testing and unstable are urged to update the xz-utils packages.

For the detailed security status of xz-utils please refer to its security tracker page at: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/xz-utils

Further information about Debian Security Advisories, how to apply these updates to your system and frequently asked questions can be found at: https://www.debian.org/security/

Mailing list: [email protected]

######################

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/urgent-security-alert-fedora-41-and-rawhide-users

“What distributions are affected by this malicious code?

Current investigation indicates that the packages are only present in Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide within the Red Hat community ecosystem.

No versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are affected.

We have reports and evidence of the injections successfully building in xz 5.6.x versions built for Debian unstable (Sid). Other distributions may also be affected. Users of other distributions should consult with their distributors for guidance.”

= OpenWall: (With more details at the openwall link)

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

“After observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors) I figured out the answer:

The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.

At first I thought this was a compromise of debian’s package, but it turns out to be upstream.”

44 52 4D CO+ • March 29, 2024 9:34 PM

Clive Robinson • March 29, 2024 10:25 PM

It would appear that, it’s brewing up to be another log4j / logshell ffor the MSM and Politicians to chew on…

I guess this little reminder might be timely,

https://xkcd.com/2347/

It appears the previous maintainer had to drop out back in 2022 due to what sounds like stress, the person who took over apparently slid themselves in back then and became the defacto sole maintainer.

The “supposition currently” is that the current person is employed by a Government Entity as they took two years to slip in the backdoor…

If it is more than knee jerk supposition of the,

“It was the Butler Wot dunit!”

type thinking. It begs the question as to if the previous maintainers decline was “spotted” by a Government Entity or not and if so used.

That is, are certain Governments watching sole developers of “key projects” to spot a way to push them out and replace them with someone more compliant?

If certain politicians pick up on that and do their usual,

“If there’s a wrong way to go, then lets run that way”

Then FOSS etc might find it’s self a thing of the past as it’s developer model gets legislated/regulated out…

Anonymous • March 30, 2024 12:33 AM

RIP Ross, his articles used to be like strong coffee in the morning for me, a good while ago :).

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 2:10 AM

“It’s the weirdest thing.” – Because in a quirk of geography and history, Hawaii is not technically covered by the NATO pact.

‘https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/29/us/nato-treaty-hawaii-intl-hnk-ml-dst/index.html

Very early on, NATO leaders realized that the benefits of the alliance extended beyond military security and included economic stability as well. Virtually all Eastern and Central European countries that joined NATO experienced major gains in GDP per capita as a result of their membership.

NATO also provided its member nations with a status as safe havens in which to invest and with which to trade. This brought broad and deep benefits to member nations, including the US. US exports to new NATO member countries rose from $900 million in 1989 to $9.4 billion in 2016.

Paring back US security arrangements could portend, say the report’s authors, a serious hit to the US economy — “a 50% reduction in security agreements would cause US GDP to fall by as much as $490 billion, about 2% of the U.S. GDP in 2021.”

‘https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/criticism-nato-ignores-its-economic-benefit-us

Clive Robinson • March 30, 2024 2:20 AM

Re : Death of Ross j. Anderson

Our paths occasionally crossed, mostly by “electronic means” as has been the way society has turned these past three decades.

Ross had a passion for the well being of people against those that would seek to do them harm. Thus had a very real interest in their privacy and security in the changing face of society and economics the technology brought.

From memory our first direct contact was back in the early 1990’s over the use of RF to force free running logic circuits to become synchronised (injection locking). Thus opening a doorway to other attacks on the likes of Smart Cards.

As part of it I pointed out that the use of RF was a two way street, not only injecting signals in but also for pulling them out (which I’d demo’d on pocket gambling machines and electronic wallets). Back then the general assumption was “TEMPEST” was sufficient and if it did not radiate then it was secure. As PC’s were mainly steel boxes with few cables entering or leaving thus approximated faraday shields many thought they were secure.

This was not true as I’d found by independent research that by “illuminating a current carrying conductor” you could get it’s waveform to be carried away by an RF carrier a considerable distance.

As I mentioned to Ross back then the keyboard cable was the easiest cable to attack with RF. It also had the advantage of being at “the users fingertips” input interface. Thus was an especially useful attack vector as it would reveal passwords and other secrets (a fact not lost on later developers of hardware “key-loggers”).

Ross was kind enough to put me in contact with another researcher in Belgium who was investigating injecting pulses of energy into chips via “pico-probe” coils.

Ross had a reputation amongst some of possessing “a sharp tongue” and both a wry and dry sense of humour. The latter I saw pop out from time to time but the sharpness of tongue only on those really deserving of rather more due to the injustices they inflicted on others.

Like many others I always found Ross to be approachable and gentlemanly in a way seldom seen these days, and he would often go out of his way to not just help but inspire people a rare quality the world could do with a lot more of.

Less well known is Ross had an interest in music and actively researched it.

So for Ross,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LMsdssVwwSc

Highland Cathedral played by “The Phantom Piper”[1]

In memoriam Ross, rest in peace.

[1] Is Jane Espie, former “Rock Musician” with amongst others “Celtica” turned to NHS Nurse who I once very much to my surprise bumped into in the recovery room of a hospital where I’d just had people making holes in me for my own good 😉 Like all the other Dr’s, Nurses and NHS staff who have managed to keep me ticking along, I wish them all well.

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 2:33 AM

analysis so far of impact on sshd

It appears to wait for “RSA_public_decrypt () got plt” to be resolved. When called for that symbol, the backdoor changes the value of RSA_public_decrypt () got plt to point to its own code.

…during a pubkey login the exploit code is invoked

Still being analyzed.

‘https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q1/268

The “enemy”, “hypocrite” and a “global arrogant and colonial power”

The capacity of authoritarian states to manipulate narratives and undermine the authority of western democracies is increasingly emphasized in International Relations research. Far less scrutiny has been paid to the ways in which the media environment creates communication vulnerabilities for these same repressive states.

Trump’s escalatory attack played into the Iranian state narrative that Iran is resisting western ‘imperialism’ and standing up for the oppressed in the world. Iran’s former ambassador to the UN, Majid Takht Ravanchi, described it as ‘an obvious example of state terrorism’. Given that the US has designated Iran as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, this was a chance to turn the tables in terms of rhetoric. …When other actors buy into the narratives promoted by a state, the latter’s legitimacy and power are heightened.

We question this idea that authoritarian states are winning the communication battle, demonstrating that they have important vulnerabilities as well.

For commentators such as Lajevardi, Soleimani was no soldier defending the Iranian nation from outside threats; he was a defender of the regime and had been the second most important person involved in internal repression. These commentators denied that the Islamic Republic was acting in the national interest. In their eyes, the regime was only fighting for itself. Lajevardi attacked the idea of ‘national unity’ in the Islamic Republic, instead describing a deep divide between state and society.

‘https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/99/6/2465/7280011

“One can always be sorry for the killing of an individual, but I refer to Khamenei who said that ‘we have never seen anything but good from him’. In reality, the only good he did was for the promotion of the regime and ideology of the Islamic Republic. To Sajjadi who says that millions of people participated in his ceremonies, I ask: were the families of the 1,500 or so people killed in the November protests part of the people you saw [in the funeral], or the 60 million who live in poverty in Iran. Those whom the regime say were ‘led by outside forces’, were they not part of the Iranian nation?” – Hossein Lajevardi, (sociologist) ‘https://t.me/bbcpersian/56261

“This crowd has no political value in my opinion. Hitler also took his crowd to the streets. Mussolini the same. Stalin took his crowds to the streets … We must look for democratic institutions such as elections, political parties and free media to evaluate the freedom of the people.” – Hassan Hashemian, (journalist, Czech Republic) ‘https://t.me/bbcpersian/56280

Authoritarian regimes in the 21st century have increasingly turned to using information control rather than kinetic force to respond to threats to their rule. This paper studies an often overlooked type of information control: strategic labeling and public statements by regime sources in response to protests .

Labeling protesters as violent criminals may increase support for repression by signaling that protests are illegitimate and deviant. Regime sources, compared to more independent sources, could increase support for repression even more when paired with such an accusatory label. Accommodative labels should have opposing effects—decreasing support for repression. The findings suggest that negative labels de-legitimize protesters and legitimize repression while the sources matter less in this contentious authoritarian context.

‘https://ash.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/democracy_and_authoritarianism_in_the_21st_century-_a_sketch.pdf

Defending Democracy will be harder than most assume, as political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal, to the exclusion of everyone else.

“We have seen for example, what it looks like in Hungary to have a prime minister who, once he took power, began to subtly and unsubtly alter the political system, to make it very difficult for him to lose another election. And we saw the same thing in Poland. But these things are not always immediately obvious.”

https://news.asu.edu/20201218-global-engagement-democracy-under-siege-author-warns-about-appeal-authoritarianism

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 2:44 AM

Top brass admitted that they failed to listen during inquiry. Continue not to listen…

“Consecutive governments have failed for years. They’ve learned nothing — we are going over the same stuff.”

Senator Lambie said a database was needed to track complaints and the ADF and Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) needed to be more accountable. She said rather than try to deal with complaints, most other politicians send people to her office.

‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-12/jacqui-lambie-attacks-defence-top-brass-at-suicide-inquiry/103577070

“They’re not hearing. We’re losing our children because no one is listening.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-13/defence-veterans-suicide-royal-commission-nick-kaldas-fears/102851264

[sound of a gunshot rings out] or [perhaps no sound at all – just silence]

When Jordan appeared in court last month, the judge was unable to hand down a sentence because despite those 94 days in detention and her 12 years in the care of the state, no-one at court produced an up-to-date psychological assessment of her. Nor could the defence, the prosecution or the representative of the Youth Justice Department — all publicly funded — produce any reports or assessments conducted by any medical or allied health professional.

Asked how it was possible that a child in state care was homeless, how it is that a child in state care has apparently not been assessed, treated or medicated for her disabilities, the Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs said, “Under the Child Protection Act 1999, we are legally prevented from discussing individual cases”.

‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-01/qld-youth-detention-analysis-crime-justice/102161036

“I argue again and again it is an all-out punitive culture, an entrenched toxicity. It used to be even worse.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-19/officer-allegedly-made-ghost-noises-in-cleveland-dodd-cell/103591776

A 25% increase of suicides in the Northern Territory in 2023. And a 200% rise in suicides since the beginning of the century.

The youth suicide rate in the NT is three and a half times the national average.

‘https://parliament.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/366551/Final_Report_on_Youth_Suicides.pdf

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 3:34 AM

Unlike the setuid bit, the setgid bit has effect on both files and directories. Wall messages are often disabled by admins for a very good reason. Old bugs…

‘https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/313549/why-cant-i-send-messages-with-the-wall-command

“The util-linux wall command does not filter escape sequences from command line arguments. This allows unprivileged users to put arbitrary text on other users’ terminals, if mesg is set to “y” and wall is setgid.” On systems that allow wall messages to be sent, an attacker could potentially alter a user’s clipboard through escape sequences on select terminals like Windows Terminal. It does not work on GNOME Terminal. CVE-2024-28085 impacts Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian Bookworm as these two criteria are met.

(you could escalate privileges with a crafted message for example – and do nasty stuff)

Disable ‘setgid’ for wall, or disable wall messages for the user account (mesg n -v).

‘https://github.com/skyler-ferrante/CVE-2024-28085

Clive Robinson • March 30, 2024 4:08 AM

@ ResearcherZero,

“Because in a quirk of geography and history, Hawaii is not technically covered by the NATO pact.”

Have you seen the Hawaiian flag?

It was part of “Great Britain” when it was a monarchy. A bunch of American business men did not like that so tried to cease the nation. And eventually to stop the Americans Hawaii became a republic, but the American business interests finally got their way and the Native Hawaiian’s have suffered under the US since and many want out of it and are fighting for their freedom…

With regards the Unix “Write All” wall() command it’s been a bit of a problem since DEC RS232 terminals of the late 1970’s early 80’s which had programmable function keys…

That is you could run a script that would reprogram the function keys on Dec Terminals to fire up a script that was used for the “SuSh attack”… Thus giving an an attacker later access to a users account and files.

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 4:55 AM

A popular routine here is the old ‘dismissal on medical grounds’.

“The inquiry into alleged Special Forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan set out to give “blanket exemption” of accountability for the highest levels of the ADF and Defence.”

‘https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/new-report-blows-up-brereton-inquiry-into-alleged-special-forces-war-crimes/news-story/8b89f22cdc680c81fe5caa1e48ca6e13

“The government is no doubt hoping this will all just go away. …There is a culture of cover-up at the highest levels of the Australian Defence Force. It is the ultimate boys’ club.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/the-politics/martin-mckenzie-murray/2023/06/20/sending-out-sas

It found “credible” evidence of allegations that 25 Australian soldiers had murdered 39 Afghan civilians, and pointed to a disturbing “warrior culture” that had developed within elements of the elite Special Air Service Regiment. Prosecutors allege that Schulz, 41, murdered an Afghan man while deployed to Afghanistan with the ADF in an incident unrelated to Roberts-Smith.

The inquiry has found “credible information” that junior soldiers were required by their patrol commanders to shoot a prisoner, in order to achieve the soldier’s first kill, in a practice known as “blooding”. “Throwdowns” — other weapons or radios — would be planted with the body, and a “cover story” was created.

‘https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-reckoning-over-afghanistan-war-crimes-is-only-just-beginning-20230530-p5dciz.html

“some guys went up the Congo, and … yes, [that] could have applied to Mr Roberts-Smith”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/110-days-41-witnesses-and-15-key-questions-to-answer-what-the-ben-roberts-smith-case-was-about-20230209-p5cjdp.html

Mercer painted a picture of a combination of offhand arrogance from senior officers and a lack of interest and accountability on the part of ministers.

‘https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/12/britain-war-afghanistan-special-forces-sas-johnny-mercer

Johnny Mercer has until 5 April to provide a witness statement with the names to an independent inquiry. Failure to comply could result in a jail sentence or fine, the MP was told.

The chair of the inquiry, Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, previously told the minister: “You need to decide which side you are really on, Mr Mercer.”

Mr Mercer repeatedly refused to reveal the identities of whistle-blowers who he said had warned him there might be truth to the allegations of extrajudicial killings by special forces. Mr Mercer told the inquiry last month: “The one thing you can hold on to is your integrity and I will be doing that with these individuals.”

The inquiry is investigating whether British special forces killed civilians and unarmed people on night raids in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013.

‘https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68662384

‘https://iiaweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/240313_JM_amended_s.21_Notice-For-publication_Redacted-Annex-A.pdf

&ers • March 30, 2024 11:51 AM

Nice writeup

hxxps://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

JonKnowsNothing • March 30, 2024 12:39 PM

@ResearcherZero, @Clive, All

re: Grab n Take: American business interests finally got their way

A large portion of the USA, west of the Mississippi River, came into US possession the same way. Includes some of the barely known US Territories, Puerto Rico and Cuba (pre-C/post-Gitmo).

We are experts at taking what is not ours, but we get to keep it all the same. We got bigger guns and we know Guns Make Might Is My Right Not Yours .

JonKnowsNothing • March 30, 2024 12:59 PM

A number of MSM reports indicate a fair few number of cities in California are deploying AI License Plate Readers along highways and streets.

The capabilities enabled vary, as do the terms of use

• Capture LPN
• Storage 30+ days [a rolling 30 day heat map of individual vehicles]
• AI recognition of Model, Type, Color, Stickers, Car Marks
• Tracking transit times, number of trips
• May include echo based gunshot location-direction systems

Some indicate that these are not directly tied to the existing Traffic Violation Auto-Infraction systems used for red lights, seat belts, speed infractions often mounted at intersections.

Drone Surveillance is coming to San Francisco.

HAIL Warning

ht tps://w ww.t heguardian.com/world/2024/mar/29/oakland-surveillance-cameras-freeways-highways

• California deploys hundreds of freeway surveillance cameras in Oakland

California highway patrol (CHP) has contracted with Fl[xxx] Safety, a surveillance technology company, to install 480 cameras that can identify and track vehicles by license plate, type, color and even decals and bumper stickers. The cameras will provide authorities with real-time alerts of suspect vehicles.

CEOs of four major employers in downtown Oakland announced plans for a joint $10m security program to improve public safety and protect employees. The companies are Blue Shield of California, Clorox, Kaiser Permanente and Pacific Gas & Electric. [no specifics]

ht tps://www .latimes. com/california/story/2024-03-29/license-plate-readers-and-video-cameras-are-coming-to-orange-to-fight-crime-officials-say

• License plate readers and video cameras are coming to Orange [City]
• information on vehicles entering and exiting Orange, which can then be shared with other law enforcement agencies in neighboring cities to catch suspects on the move.
• 43 license plate readers and 13 video cameras
• The license plate readers will record the make and color of a vehicle and how many times it has driven past. The information is stored for 30 days.

Clive Robinson • March 30, 2024 1:00 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Re : Red Crocus in the wind.

I’ve been mulling over my disquiet with the ISIS-K MSM story on the Moscow “Crocus Expo” center attack as it does not sit well with me.

In fact I’m getting to the point of thinking based on the evidence available that it is in fact a “Red Flag” event, probably faked up by almost state level resources.

First of consider ISIS-K was effectively a “dead organisation” they were taken out to the point of extinction by Afghanistan forces after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Their sources of finances, arms, and much else had been blocked or stopped and their “safe areas” effectively eliminated.

Without going into too many details the MO of the Moscow Attack was so different to known ISIS-K modalities it was in effect more like a staged theatrical event.

As one example ISIS-K was fundamentalist and as such did not do “strike and run” their MO was “strike and self-immolate”.

That is part of the ISID-K core doctrine was not “live to fight another day” but “Die and rise as a martyr” anything less being unacceptable and what we might view as “consorting with the devil” thus eternal damnation.

When you notice this and examine what little alleged evidence there is you come to realise that there are way to many little things wrong, and that means the most likely thing is,

“It is not supportive evidence of what is claimed”

Which leads on to the question of,

“If it is evidence, what is it evidence of?”

It’s clear that Putin / Russia care not a jot for finding the truth, the event has given them a major “home propaganda” opportunity and they have leapt on it like a rabid dog, thus now will be “stage managing” just about every aspect of it they can to “bolster it up” as it’s an article of faith that “Strong men can not be wrong”. Thus it’s unlikely anything further from Official Russian sources will be of use in an evidentiary way to the actual truth. However unofficial picking at the loose threads usually uncovers the truth hidden beneath which is why we can expect propaganda if not repression to come into play.

We’ve seen this before with stuxnet it was clear at the time North Korea knew enough that they went “public” and aimed a finger at the US. This caused rather more disquiet in the security community than the obviously false original statements and thus started even more people pulling at threads and digging. The US in the face of mounting evidence they could not repress, coming from those AV and other organisations that did not “toe the line” or “act as forty pieces of silver mouth pieces” then tried to stage manage their admission rather than be hit with a tsunami of evidence of what they had been upto.

On balance they “got away with it” as the repercussions have been minimal. In fact the only real harm for the USG was that AV and Similar organisations stopped trotting out the blatant “USG insider” nonsense. Which on balance has been of real benefit for the rest of us, as people are waking up to the implications including that of faux-and stage-managed news from all governments, not just those considered tyrannical, despotic, fascist, etc but even those who claim to be bastions of democracy, truth, morality, etc.

In the past I’ve pointed out how “malware” via APT tactics can turn a single person into an “army of one” and why, and that became more obvious with subsequent events. Well malware is just one very small front on the “information-space battlefield”, and due to the stupidity of “grab it and run” neo-con “short term thinking” we are now in an almost indefensible position without the necessary tools to build defences. The days of wearing red uniforms and marching up the hill with pikes in the face of thousands of archers and the like are long over in military doctrine. It’s well over due to apply the same logic to the information-space battlefield.

Thus the questions,

“Will we?” and “When?”

Clive Robinson • March 30, 2024 1:06 PM

@ JonknowsNothing, SoaceLifeForm, ALL,

Note from your and mine post times above we made “coincidental posts”

I got the “too many posts” error message, paused and hit the post button again.

I’m more and more convinced this is caused by a race condition within the blog software stack.

JonKnowsNothing • March 30, 2024 1:19 PM

@ResearcherZero, All

re: when is a child in State Care

In the USA, our obsession with our southern border, and to some extents our northern border, has some interesting OHs??

People crossing our borders fall into a huge bucket of potential definitions, each of which has it’s own list of legal definitions and legal requirements.

A new(to me) version of this dance goes something like this:

1, A person crosses the border

2, The person is picked up by any number of US Border Control Agencies

3, The person is allocated to a defined bucket

4, Once a defined bucket as been assigned, they wait in camps for processing

2, The person is not picked up for 6-24hrs after Agencies have been notified. The person often waits at a known Agency collection point, but the Agencies delay pickup. This delays the Tolling Clock (1)

4a, The person is permitted to go “anywhere except further into the USA”; their presence in these holding camps is “voluntary”.

4b, Since the person is under no restraints and their presence in the camps is voluntary, neither the State nor the Federal Governments are responsible for any support, food, shelter, health or medical care.

• “the child in [not] State Care” and there is no obligation to feed them.

1) ht tps:/ /en.w ikipedia.org/wiki/Tolling_(law)

• Tolling is a legal doctrine that allows for the pausing or delaying of the running of the period of time set forth by a statute of limitations

JonKnowsNothing • March 30, 2024 1:43 PM

@Clive, SpaceLifeForm, ALL

re: “too many posts” error message / caused by a race condition within the blog software stack

I have also recently gotten several “security error” messages on post. I did not capture the messages because I figured they were also a race condition and a resubmit worked.

There is likely at least 2 validations with race conditions:

• The top of the input form security check
• The creation of a post timestamp and allocation of storage for the message

Hopefully, there isn’t an MITM diversion happening

JonKnowsNothing • March 30, 2024 2:27 PM

@Clive, All

re: “grab it and run” neo-con “short term thinking” we are now in an almost indefensible position

We know the Hayek/Austerity economic model is collapsing. The known points of failure of the model are in evidence. (1) Global economists are not unaware of this pending catastrophe, it’s seen in the bankruptcies of not just cities but entire countries. The collapse is evident in the global panfamine, where commodity traders and hedge funds are buying up vast quantities of food and withholding these from the open markets to force an artificial shortage with increased prices. (cocoa chocolate)

We also know that the uber-oligarchs have been prepping their bugout locations for years. These folks have access to economic advice that ordinary people do not. They also have the funds to create private enclaves with the ability to be self-sustaining for years.

I’ve been considering what happens when the full collapse of the Austerity model hits in a wide swath. We can see parts of it regionally:

• hunger, lack of paid work, lack of housing, lack of options or opportunities.

Gordon Brown, former PM of UK, who must be on of the last of the old Keynesian model thinkers (rising tides lift all boats) has referred to what is coming as

• ‘the hungry decade’

As in 10 years … or perhaps more. Economies even in collapse take decades to rebuild; they take moments to collapse directly or indirectly but recovery is a long term effort.

So the question is:

• What are the oligarchs going to actually do to avoid the collapse themselves while dumping the effects on the world population?

It seems that their direct answer is: global wars

Not nuclear ones, but wide spread enough to affect millions of people who will be affected by wrapping the situation in a bunting of patriotism.

Wars are quite handy for a collapse. Everything does into the fire. There is nothing left from the previous pre-war state. The population willingly signs up for it, and willingly sacrifices all they have for it.

I am reminded of the many post-WW2 years in UK where food shortages remained a common factor. Other countries did away with their artificial food shortages years before the UK relinquished theirs. The deprivations allowed government actions, that today are deplored, but were effective at controlling the population into accepting even more severe limitations.

In a Hollywood movie about GIs in UK during WW2, the GIs send a kid to the fish and chips shop for them. The dialog runs something like this:

PersonA Fish n Chips 1 way (1 order) PersonB Fish n Chips 2 ways (2 orders) Kid Fish n Chips 50 ways (order for the platoon)

All the villagers leave as there’s nothing left for them.

1) Both the Hayek/Austerity and Keynesian models have collapse or failure points, however they fail at different points.

• Keynesian fails under hyper inflation (demand without production)
• Austerity fails when there is nothing left to sell so there is nothing left to take (zero assets)

2) ht tps://e n.wi kipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_brown

• James Gordon Brown HonFRSE is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010.

ht tps:/ /ww w.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/27/gordon-brown-calls-for-creation-of-poverty-fund-to-halt-slide-into-hungry-decade

• emergency plan to halt Britain’s slide into a “hungry decade” of destitution and hardship.

Winter • March 30, 2024 2:59 PM

@JonKnowsNothing

We know the Hayek/Austerity economic model is collapsing.

If there is one thing that the recent pandemic showed it is that nation states can do the “impossible” if they feel like it.

Nations that organized their stuff were able to withstand lockdowns, health emergencies, and supply chain collapse for two years emerging relatively well.

Those that didn’t, saw real hardship and lots of unnecessary deaths.

Winter • March 30, 2024 3:17 PM

Continued (hit submit too soon)

Note that Global Free Markets were non-functional during the pandemic.

Clive Robinson • March 30, 2024 4:33 PM

@ Winter, JonKnowsKnothing,

Re : Free Markets and the taking hand.

“Note that Global Free Markets were non-functional during the pandemic.

Actually they have never been functional, they have like a puppet only given the illusion of life as long as the strings were being pulled.

We once used to call it,

“The hidden hand of the Market.”

The reality is the only thing “hidden” was what it was doing. So more correctly from the normal perspective it would be,

“The stealing or rapacious hand of the Market.”

But also because the “Free Market” is an entire fiction created to make naked theft by the “self entitled” legal and turn ordinary people back into possession less serfs renting everything to their last penny and beyond, thus we get,

“The lordling hand of the Market”

And it’s authoritarian following guard labour, that knows first hand having “dished it out already” what awaits if,

“They do not do what the Lord Commands.”

At various times in history those that are serfs can take no more and they rise up in civil disobedience, and take the guard labour out of the lordlings control in some way. The result is never pretty, however if luck prevails then the lordlings just get sanctuary in some other place to waste the rest of their lives. But unfortunately as many are aware that this might be their fate they take with them as much of the stolen wealth as they can. Usually by doing it in advance.

For instance it is reputed that “Comrade Putin” has salted away more wealth than all of his crony oligarchs,

https://www.businessinsider.com/richest-russian-oligarchs-putin-list-2018-1?op=1#19-mikhail-gutseryev-64-billion-7

Was worth over a quarter of a trillion USD by “confirmed sources” so it probably grew to twice that at least in the years, but in more recent times,

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/04/07/the-forbes-ultimate-guide-to-russian-oligarchs/

Some have lost a fraction to those outside Russia and Putin is calling in markers to pay for his moronic idealism to have his name go down in history, and be more remembered than Stalin, Hitler, Genghis Khan and others. Hopefully he will be laughed at as “Vlad the failer”.

But remember that list is incomplete and they are just a small number of the reputed 6000 cronies.

vas pup • March 30, 2024 4:37 PM

@Steve: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/03/68676.html/#comment-434486

Sorry to hear this. I have to reload it several times before move to the end. Recently DW even short videos are not working properly because DW somehow start cooperating with Google to collect statistics or even put their videos on Google servers (the latter is like BBC used to say ‘highly likely’).

Moreover, recently DW introduced privacy choice for users but there is actually zero choice. DW set ‘agree’ as default on all cookies even you reject such selection and want set ‘reject all’.

DW videos are really good and I like them on different subjects, but DW IT folks handling their video access totally screw up.

&ers • March 30, 2024 5:48 PM

Paged Out #3

hxxps://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_003_beta1.pdf

vas pup • March 30, 2024 6:17 PM

Unbreakable Codes 43m | 2023 | TV-PG V | CC

https://play.history.com/shows/the-unxplained/season-6/episode-8

“There’s nothing more fascinating than a code that can’t be cracked. For centuries, mankind has devised ingenious ways to hide valuable information–using everything from enigmatic puzzles, to complex ciphers and secret symbols. If history’s unbreakable codes can be deciphered…could we unlock answers to some of the greatest mysteries of both the past and present?”

Last rerun yesterday – interesting!

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 6:25 PM

@JohnKnowsNothing

We are not troubled by a Bill of Rights, or for the responsibilities or care of anyone, including one’s own citizens, and especially not children. The specifics differ from state to state, but basically the government can pick and chose on it’s own whim whom to help.

This can be challenged via the High Court, if you are one of the 3% of applications which is approved to be heard, after making it through all the other legal hurdles. This could take years, perhaps even decades. That is if you manage to survive that long. Some do.

You need to travel to the other side of the country to attend the High Court. The others shut. Probably why we have such high suicide rates. Few services exist outside of cities.

It keeps Undertakers in business and makes time for more frivolous cases like defamation.

‘https://time.com/6962075/donald-trump-video-president-biden-tied-up-truck/

“He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”

‘https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/24/the-snake-how-trump-appropriated-a-radical-black-singers-lyrics-for-refugee-fearmongering/

“Mike was seriously misleading our members. …Not one of them had seen the brief.”

‘https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/29/speaker-mike-johnson-dishonest-january-6-brief-liz-cheney-book

Johnson “organized more than 100 House Republicans to sign onto an amicus brief filed in support of a lawsuit from Texas’ Republican Attorney General, Ken Paxton, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s wins in four states that gave him his winning margin in the Electoral College — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”

https://apnews.com/article/congress-house-speaker-2024-election-certification-8cd7c5a9e6ae69635bbb4624cc78e5c5

His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case .

‘https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/politics/republican-election-objectors.html

“Well I’m surprised that she’s given that criticism because during that process, Liz and I were in constant dialogue about that. And, at one point, she even considered signing on to that bill. I’ll tell you that that is a fact, to that amicus brief,” Johnson said.

(Cheney’s memoir strongly suggests otherwise.)

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4394047-cheney-rejects-johnsons-claim-she-considered-signing-amicus-brief-on-overturning-2020-election/

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 6:33 PM

DW are driving traffic away from their site, which is a pity as the videos are good.

I’ve pretty much avoided DW since they changed the website.

‘https://blog.fox-it.com/2024/03/28/android-malware-vultur-expands-its-wingspan/

vas pup • March 30, 2024 6:50 PM

@ResearcherZero – what a sh#t!

@ALL on China

European flying car technology sold to China h ttps://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68669296

“The tech behind a flying car, originally developed and successfully test-flown in Europe, has been bought by a Chinese firm.

Powered by a BMW engine and normal fuel, the AirCar flew for 35 minutes between two Slovakian airports in 2021, using runways for take-off and landing.

It took just over two minutes to transform from a car into an aircraft.

The tech behind a flying car, originally developed and successfully test-flown in Europe, has been bought by a Chinese firm.

Now vehicles made based on its design will be used within a “specific geographical region” of China.

Hebei Jianxin Flying Car Technology Company, headquartered in Cangzhou, has purchased exclusive rights to manufacture and use AirCar aircraft inside an undisclosed area.

The firm has built its own airport and flight school after a previous acquisition from another Slovak aircraft manufacturer, said Anton Zajac, cofounder of KleinVision, the company which created AirCar.

Having led the way in the development of the EV revolution, China is now actively developing flying transport solutions.

Last month a firm called Autoflight carried out a test flight of a passenger- carrying drone between the cities of Shenzhen and Zhuhai. The journey, which takes three hours by car, was completed in 20 minutes, it said – although the aircraft contained no passengers.

And in 2023 the Chinese firm eHang was awarded a safety certificate by Chinese officials for its electric flying taxi. Here, the UK government has said flying taxis could become a regular feature of the skies by 2028.

But unlike these drone-like passenger aircrafts, AirCar does not take off and land vertically, and requires a runway.

KleinVision declined to say how much it had sold the technology for. AirCar was issued with a certificate of airworthiness by the Slovak Transport Authority in 2022 and featured in a video published by YouTuber Mr Beast earlier this year.”

Xiaomi: Chinese smartphone giant takes on Tesla https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68672192

“Mr Lei also said the SU7, which has drawn comparisons with Porsche’s Taycan and Panamera models, would have a minimum range of 700km (435 miles), beating the Tesla Model 3’s 567km.

The firm is hoping that the SU7’s shared operating system with its phones, laptops and other devices will appeal to existing customers.

Xiaomi is the third-largest seller of smartphones worldwide with a market share of about 12%, according to research firm Counterpoint. Xiaomi has said it will invest $10bn in its vehicles business over the next 10 years.

“The Chinese EV market is very mature and creates a very stable ecosystem for the EV manufacturers,” said Abhishek Murali from research firm Rystad Energy.

“For example, the battery supply chain is very strong, and the charging network in the country is also growing to meet the growing EV feed.”

Tesla, which is headed by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, has cut the cost of its cars in China by thousands of dollars in recent months as local rivals like the world’s top-selling EV maker BYD have slashed prices.

The world’s biggest car market is already crowded so Xiaomi is one of the few new prospective entrants to gain approval from authorities as officials try to curb a flood of new players.

Earlier this week, BYD posted record annual profits but said growth had slowed towards the end of last year.”

lurker • March 30, 2024 7:55 PM

@vas pup, @ALL

a passenger-carrying drone between the cities of Shenzhen and Zhuhai. The journey, which takes three hours by car, was completed in 20 minutes,

datapoint: The Shenzhen – Zhuhai journey is a hot topic in China, and especially in the “Greater Bay Area.” The bay is 50km across Hongkong – Macao, and 100km deep from ocean to tidal limit at Guangzhou. Three hours refers to the journey time staying within PRC. The new Hongkong-Macao bridge reduces that to less than 90 minutes, most taken up negotiating the streetscape around the China-Hongkong border. There are “fast” ferries that run Shenzhen-Zhuhai in 60 minutes jetty to jetty. The drone flightpath would be mostly across seawater, and would have to rely on the port authority tracking for SAR purposes.

lurker • March 30, 2024 8:08 PM

@ALL “too many posts …”

I submit “contact bounce” on touchscreens as a probable cause. @Clive could probably define and describe this better than me, but I have seen error behaviour in other offline apps that would follow from contact bounce. This can vary with finger condition too, wet – dry, hot – cold, …

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 8:14 PM

Australia is waking up to the fact it needs to look at it’s supply chain…

More than 3.7 million Australian homes have installed rooftop solar – the highest uptake rate in the world. But only about 1% of those panels are locally manufactured, with Adelaide-based Tindo Solar being the only homegrown solar panel manufacturer.

“ARENA will look at the entire supply chain from ingots and wafers to cells, module assembly and related components, including solar glass, inverters, advanced deployment technology and solar innovation.”

‘https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/28/australia-announces-pit-to-panel-solar-manufacturing-program/

State government clearing the way to fast-track production. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2024/03/25/state-smooths-way-for-quinbrook-polysilicon-plant-plans/

New steel pellets could be processed in furnaces that use hydrogen.

‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/gfg-alliance-says-green-steel-production-a-step-closer/101368634

160-tonne electric arc furnace would lift steel making capacity at the Whyalla plant from 1 million tonnes annually to about 1.5 million tonnes.

https://www.afr.com/companies/manufacturing/sanjeev-gupta-in-500m-push-to-make-whyalla-steelworks-greener-20230403-p5cxm8

“Artificial intelligence helps us in two ways. One is mapping, and the other is genetic studies focusing on kelps’ tolerance to warm water.”

It is estimated that 95% of Australian kelp forests have died due to ocean warming. The loss of the dense canopy-forming giant kelp forests along Tasmania’s coastline has devastated the dense, sheltered habitat they created for a wide range of fish and invertebrates, including commercially valuable species such as abalone and lobster.

‘https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2024/February/National-collaboration-to-save-Australias-invisible-endangered-forest-of-giant-kelp-using-AI

Kelp also act as the trophic foundation of coastal food-webs by providing food for a suite of grazers, detritivores, and microbes – the effects of which can reach to adjacent reef, seagrass, and sediment communities, as well as to deep waters and beyond the continental shelf.

This plant community serves as an underwater forest, providing habitat for thousands of marine creatures ranging from small penguins to leafy sea dragons.

‘https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.00074/full

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 8:24 PM

I’m much more fond of the old keyboard. Touch technology has a few issues to be resolved.

They are turning off the old network so I have to get a new phone. But first I have to hack it, modify it, and install proper things like a firewall and other such necessities.

Then it will sit there, get dusty and I’ll probably never use it except to update it.

ResearcherZero • March 30, 2024 9:44 PM

Re: backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh

This is pretty gnarly…

analysis of the bash obfuscation part of the backdoor

‘https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?lang=en&id=782

The hooked RSA_public_decrypt verifies a signature on the server’s host key by a fixed Ed448 key, and then passes a payload to system(). It’s RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable.

The payload is extracted from the N value (the public key) passed to RSA_public_decrypt, checked against a simple fingerprint, and decrypted with a fixed ChaCha20 key before the Ed448 signature verification.

‘https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/30/36

Clive Robinson • March 31, 2024 1:12 AM

Re : Backdoor in xz/liblzma

This is pretty gnarly…

To gnarly for my tired brain, it’s past 6AM here and for entirely unrelated reasons I’ve been “boiling my mind” on other things since before the first post on .xz popped up[1], and as the old say has it “I ain’t as young as I used to be, when old dragons were named “mad maggie”.

Thus when I glanced at the bash script and saw “tr” my brain just said to me “it’s just under twenty years since you last used it!”…

Which gave me the feeling that the choice of the way things have been done and the commands being used was deliberate to rule out most keyboard jocks under the age of ~forty years.

Even the encipher stuff is long in the tooth after all when did “Ron’s Cipher 4″(RC4) get chucked on the scrap heap?

So my brain has done a “Zebedee” and said “Boing time for bed”[2]

[1] Remember folks it’s the Easter Weekend and not everyone is “at their keyboard” some actually have families they have to interact with…

[2] It’s the catch phrase for a stop motion puppet made of a toilet roll center mounted on a spring… From the children’s TV Show “Magic Roundabout” that was so full of rude innuendo it’s amazing that they got away with it…

SpaceLifeForm • March 31, 2024 3:09 AM

Re: XZ backdoor

Here is a good collection of links currently

‘https://shellsharks.com/xz-compromise-link-roundup

ResearcherZero • March 31, 2024 3:51 AM

@SpaceLifeForm

There are plenty of false flags and other suspicious contact details to try and throw people off the trail or mislead. A lot of work went into setting up and planning.

I got up at 3AM. I try to avoid my family for the holiday breaks. Not always possible.

List of platforms affected (including VMs)

‘https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/threat-brief-xz-utils-cve-2024-3094/

Winter • March 31, 2024 6:40 AM

The obfuscation looks very effective. There is no code stored in plaintext. The decoding is done using innocent looking simple bash commands that cut, paste, and substitute bytes and do XOR in awk, which does not have bitwise operators. The convoluted command chains take some time to disentangle which hides their true purpose.

I think a large number of maintainers and distributers are combing through projects to see whether they can find other instances of this type of backdoor.

I would start with a grep on tr-commands, just to get the low hanging fruit.

Clive Robinson • March 31, 2024 8:41 AM

@ ResearcherZero, SpaceLifeForm, Winter, ALL,

The body has creaked it’s way back into the world of the living, but the brain is still feeling like it’s still eight time zones behind…

However I’ve been thinking some more on the use of old *nix commands like ‘tr’ for doing crypto. The likes of ‘sed’ obviously spring to mind and the command line invocations can look very similar.

The trick in the long run though will be making the “encrypted file” look like it’s not just “printable” but “sensible” plaintext as well as not holding the whole attack.

The use of XOR or ADD on bytes just does not do that but a semi randomised substitution code of words can do it.

In effect the simple substitution “the code alphabet” becomes words so “apple = banana”, “cat = dog” and so on. To step it up you can use more than one substitution thus “cat = {dog, rat, pig, pug}” thus an RNG produces two random bits for encryption to make the selection and decryption works by the simple fact that any occurrence of dog / rat / pig / pug becomes cat. The only real requirement is that all the encode words are unique in the substitution dictionary.

The thing is that you don’t have to use an RNG but some other generator based on statistics of the plaintext as the algorithm walks it. That way “plaintext statistics” can be preserved thus passing simple automated statistical checks, or other checks.

Now consider @nix command line commands are of the form,

name -flags fields

name -flag field -flag field

Many will ignore “excess fields” a trick I used to use with “checksums” that is you add a final field that “sums to zero” when you add up the whole line. You can thus check a file has not got corrupted on a line by line basis etc.

So you can just “substitute the name” and in some cases “substitute a flag” and the valid shell plaintext becomes valid shell ciphertext even though it would produce garbage results if executed.

Intersperse just one or two such substitutions in a shell file in areas it would apparently make little difference and whilst not impossible to find and work out would obfuscate beyond the abilities of most to spot with the resources they have at the time.

Because as humans we “implicitly trust” unless we have very firm reason to “distrust”. Distrusting everything is seen as,

1, Paranoid behaviour 2, Very resource wasting behaviour

(Both of which I’ve been suspected or actually accused of in the past).

On this occasion we got lucky because “odd behaviour” was seen by someone who “thinks hinky”.

As the old saying has it,

“As an attacker you have to get lucky once, as a defender you have to get lucky every time.”

Which is the reason we also have the stupid saying of,

“Fortune favours the brave”

It does not, the reality is that the odds are alway very very much against a defender.

Subtle obfuscation moves the odds even further away from the defender.

And worse there are oh so many tricks that an attacker can use.

Think about spreading the bits of an attack across time as a chained attack… That is stage one goes into “update 1”, stage two in “update 2” and so on pick the bits of the attack so they do no harm if an update is missed. One simple way to do such a thing is to look for files or information in files left by a previous update. Hiding the stages in what looks like “clean-up code” gives oh so many excuses…

Winter • March 31, 2024 9:26 AM

Re: obfuscating

The trick in the long run though will be making the “encrypted file” look like it’s not just “printable” but “sensible” plaintext as well as not holding the whole attack.

I like the Obfuscated C contests.

My favorite is heathbar.c from 1995 ‘https://www.ioccc.org/years-spoiler.html#1995

The C code: ‘https://www.ioccc.org/1995/heathbar.c

The hint(not really necessary) ‘https://www.ioccc.org/1995/heathbar.hint

The main reason we liked this entry was mainly because the main effect of the source was self documenting! 🙂

lurker • March 31, 2024 1:46 PM

@Moderator The post from Manuel343 • March 31, 2024 1:04 PM looks like unsolicited advertising.

@ALL One reason Chinese squid boats roam the world’s oceans is that no commercially viable method has yet been found to farm squid. Chinese are successful farmers of crabs, prawns, salmon, catfish, tilapia and many other fresh and salt water species. Tuna is also a variety that is difficult to farm, but the Japanese pay exorbitantly for large bluefin tuna, and the Americans created a worldwide market for canned “chicken of the sea.”

JonKnowsNothing • March 31, 2024 2:18 PM

@Clive, @ fbi, lurker, ALL

re: solar flare problem for electronics

So this is maybe a few days past its sell-by date, but my game servers have been off-line in New Jersey USA since ~late Friday night (tz).

There is lots of speculation and little detail other than Data Center Issue. No one has thought of a solar flare fault or by product of the solar eclipse in the region.

It’s likely just a blown circuit, but more fun to think that the sun is finally getting some revenge for being restricted to ~50% of our 24hr cycle and for releasing a horde of game players into other entertainment areas.

I’m missing hitting the other side with Sticky Feet and a Plague Gourd. Others are missing hunting for the Egg Laying Rabbit.

The latest edition of the 3 Body Problem is pretty good. A bit less complex than the book but still contains all the main points. Good acting and very watchable. Caveat Season 2 is not anytime soon.

echo • March 31, 2024 3:54 PM

I’m rather busy at the moment so only just have time to make a short comment as a marker to hang further comments off. As tools I’m inclined to use feminist security theory and the European style multi-domain security model. Following on from International Women’s Day we have lived through Women’s History Month and the last day of this month is also the Transgender Day of Visibility.

This is a fairly old video. I selected it not because it was the clearest or best presentation Helena gives on the subject matters but because it captured her positive energy and vibrant passion. I have long admired Helena and view her as a role model. Her words are prescient and remain relevant as governance and techno feudalism and global security concerns capture our minds today.

Baroness Helena Kennedy is one of Britain’s foremost human rights lawyers. As well as her work on women’s rights, Helena has been leading work on international war crimes in Ukraine and is the Founder of the Helena Kennedy Foundation for social mobility. She’s played a key role in many prominent inquiries including the Brighton Bombing trial, the Michael Bettany espionage trial, the Guildford Four appeal, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy and fought the world’s first case about transgender rights at the European Court of Justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zJaehBbvw4 Helena Kennedy on Human Rights “You can’t create good law if it isn’t infused with human rights. It’s about how we deal with our neighbours, colleagues, friends. It’s about a treatise for respect” – Baroness Helena Kennedy QC argues we need Human Rights at the centre of all laws in her lecture at Hay Festival 2017, part of our 30 Reformations series. Our 30th anniversary coincided with the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his Theses to the door at Wittenberg. So we invited international thinkers at our festivals around the world to propose their reformations of institutions and authorities, re-imagining the world.

To keep the men happy I’m balancing this with an Owen Jones discussion with Gary Stevenson. Gary is an ex City trader and was previously Citibanks highest earning trader. He doesn’t say anything nobody hasn’t known for a long time but had given up his job to advocate for reform of economics and economics education to include equality. As Gary notes (like Helena) inequality is the root cause of the system breaking and the rise of technofeudalism and global instability.

echo • March 31, 2024 3:55 PM

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2qH4kJU4xzPsXV7i5Zh6E4 The Mummafesto Episode One Baroness Beeban Kidron Beeban is a leading voice of children’s rights in the digital environment and has been instrumental in establishing global standards and legislation for online safety and privacy. Beeban is the founder of digital rights foundation 5Rights and educational charity Into Film. Prior to being appointed to the House of Lords in 2012, Beeban was an award-winning film director. Directing and producing films such as Bafta winning Oranges are not the only fruit, Victoria & Abdul, Swept Away and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

I’ve really been enjoying this series. Stella Creasy MP (who also has a PhD in sociology) is a really good interviewer and conversationalist who lets her guests shine. I didn’t expect much from this interview but it’s obvious very fast that Beeban is on top of her brief and still very much current with topics such as AI and social media and how it might best be approached and regulated. Her latest work also ties in with the advocacy of Esther Ghey mother Brianna Ghey.

echo • March 31, 2024 3:58 PM

Drat. Just posted the ID string I use as an identifier in the wrong field. Changing it to a new one now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHrFBQ0u0CE Lella Lombardi: Remembering F1’s Female Trailblazer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ8npn0Ogyw Trans Racing Driver Charlie Martin’s Incredible Journey

I don’t have the time to create a comment which I wanted to on military special forces selection and mental health which might also be relevant to human rights and governance so will end on this more James Bond/James Hunt style of topic.

Lella Lombardi was an amazing woman and like many women endured atrocious sexism during the 1970’s to get to the top of her profession. Today Charlie Martin, a transgender woman who is also a racing driver, is living in a world where transmisogyny is ever present. This hasn’t stopped her. Charlie Marin is the world’s first transgender woman who is due to be racing in Le Mann.

lurker • March 31, 2024 4:09 PM

@JonKnowsNothing, All re: obliquity of the ecliptic

Maybe your server has joined the shortwave broadcasters and gone to Northern Summer schedules. BBC handily has a web page showing no useful frequencies for my morning listening. The Chinese inscrutably provide only material for RPGs: if you desire something, you must embark on a quest for it.

re: 三体 The original wove Chinese cosmology and legend into the narrative. Reports I have seen suggest these will be lost in translation, but the loss may not be noticed by an unsophisticated audience.

echo • March 31, 2024 5:18 PM

https://www.thenational.scot/politics/24218430.sam-fowles-hate-crime-act-likely-enhance-not-limit-freedom/ Sam Fowles: ‘Hate Crime Act likely to enhance, not limit freedom’ IN February I wrote a column advocating for trans rights. As a barrister, I’m fairly used to death threats, so I didn’t take the ensuing deluge of abuse particularly seriously. Until, that is, I was advised that I should no longer post my location or members of my family on social media. https://consult.gov.scot/hate-crime/independent-review-of-hate-crime-legislation/supporting_documents/495517_APPENDIX%20%20ACADEMIC%20REPORT.pdf A Comparative Analysis of Hate Crime Legislation A Report to the Hate Crime Legislation Review James Chalmers and Fiona Leverick University of Glasgow, July 2017 https://www.thenational.scot/news/24194857.jk-rowling-elon-musk-criticise-new-scottish-hate-crime-laws/ JK Rowling and Elon Musk criticise new Scottish hate crime laws https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/03/28/meta-anti-trans-hate-glaad-report/ Meta failing to moderate ‘extreme anti-trans hate’ on its platforms, claims report https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/lister-v-new-college-swindon/ Lister -v- New College Swindon Case Number: 1404223/2022

New hate crime legislation is coming into to force in Scotland. It is notable that the people screaming the loudest about Orwellian government and being silenced happen to be the loudest voices known for hate speech, or the biggest enablers of hate speech.

echo • March 31, 2024 5:20 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2EKTCngiM Some More News. Are Rich People Okay? In today’s episode, we look at what being rich does to your perception of yourself and others, the eccentricities of the super wealthy, how they use their money to hold influence over our political systems, and the dystopian future they envision for all of us. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/65415/the-marshall-plan-paul-marshall-gb-news The Marshall Plan Hedge fund manager Paul Marshall is on a God-driven mission to transform the religious fabric of the nation–and he has the money to do it

Power, influence, and money…

JonKnowsNothing • March 31, 2024 5:30 PM

@lurker, All

re: 三体 The original wove Chinese cosmology and legend into the narrative. Reports I have seen suggest these will be lost in translation

Quite likely but I cannot say for sure because my Chinese is limited, very limited. I did not read it in the original.

While the current western version is quite good, the 3BP TV series does drop a lot of the nuance from the English translation version. It sort of skips quickly over “how do you figure this out” part and morphs quickly into the standard offense-defense motif narrative. It also white-casts some of the characters and white-casts the location. These aspects I find less attractive.

In 3BP TV series there are a limited number of episodes, that cost a packet each to make. So perhaps they just didn’t were not able to fund a more detailed version.

The comedy “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, was wonderful because it did not white-cast the story. It would not have mattered too much to the plot line, however, some of the exchange dialog would have flopped over cultural nuances that were so well delivered by the actors involved.

A British TV adaptation of Agatha Christ books was well done, but the star of the entire series was Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Some of the other acting is stilted and route but she was absolutely fantastic. She had nearly zero dialog but her presence and manner centered every story and the dialog delivery was beyond understatement to the sublime.

iirc(badly) In an episode, one of the villagers is describing a young man from a family of medium means who’s point of view is left of center.

Oh, … a communist? In Chipping Cleghorn ? Must be very loney….

Nuance is often the best driver of a plot. Rosalind Chao as Ye Wenjie delivers nuance by the heap full.

• Do not play with God

h ttps://en.wi kipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Hickson

• Joan Bogle Hickson, OBE (5 August 1906 – 17 October 1998) was an English actress of theatre, film and television. She was known for her role as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in the television series Miss Marple.
• h ttps:/ / en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Marple_(TV_series)
• a British television series based on the Miss Marple murder mystery novels by Agatha Christie, starring Joan Hickson in the title role. It aired from 26 December 1984 to 27 December 1992 on BBC1. All twelve original Miss Marple novels by Christie were dramatised.

echo • March 31, 2024 6:57 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVFf5xy7lXE Helena Kennedy QC on changing the justice system, her working class roots and debating what’s right.

This is an old video but Helena explains very clearly a number of points I’ve previously made such as comments on authority, creating a supportive environment as well as allowing younger people to develop and access opportunity and grow professionally, and the issue often overlooked of needing to think things through. It’s tough to edit down and Helena interleaves so many points but an observant listener should pick up on what’s important.

Why is this five year old interview relevant to current news? In security implementation terms a crude understanding of equality is neither equality nor is it necessarily an improvement in the system and important lessons can be lost. For example: the recent paper claiming sociopathy was present equally in both men and women. This paper was deeply flawed as it lacked understanding and context. It makes no comment on systems or society, and how the issues I previously mentioned which concern women can be better understood and used as a model to change the system not just for the benefit of women but equally for men. So like I said anyone who seized on this paper and waved it around like they were God Oh Mighty didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about. Helena explains succinctly why.

nealT • March 31, 2024 7:01 PM

Winter, the obfuscated C contests are fun, but “The Underhanded C Contest” is more relevant to the backdoor story. The point is to write a program that looks innocent and non-obfuscated but acts against the user’s interests in some way. (Whereas this backdoor, with its various “tr” commands and such, does look obfuscated, and we’ve just gotten used to our configure scripts looking like that.)

Clive Robinson • March 31, 2024 8:59 PM

@ nealT, Winter, ALL,

Re : Out of sight, out of mind…

“The point is to write a program that looks innocent and non-obfuscated but acts against the user’s interests in some way.”

That is but stage 2…

You can view the stages of mal-behaviour as,

0, Overt. 1, Obfuscated. 2, Covert. 3, Undecidable.

For years malware has been like a “battering ram” or other “siege engine” it’s presence and purpose quite “overt” and in effect uses the “Might is right” style moronic tactics of “Let your fists do the thinking”.

The main downsides of overt is it makes the attacker obvious to defenders, especially in the strengths and weaknesses department and it needs considerable resources to “over come opposition” by defenders. Hence you find “crush”, “trample”, “stamp down”, “steam roller”, and similar being used descriptively. As such it works against small defenders but not against large well prepared defenders. Due to the nature of these things small defenders are numerous and ill resourced and as such are seen as “low hanging fruit” in “target rich environments”.

But two obvious things happen,

1, Individuals and small groups come together out of self interest in the face of a common threat. 2, As defensive groups grow the gain more resources and use them more efficiently as well as thinking up new defensive ideas.

Also they can more quickly “out grow” the attackers, but that can and usually does have downsides (standing armies all to often form coups against the civilian population).

Thus the more intelligent way to attack is to make it appear not as an attack or not as an attack from a recognisable source.

As I mentioned in an earlier post the old saw of,

Is a nonsense. It’s based on incorrect observation of,

“An attacker needs to only succeed once, a defender every time”

Hence although the odds are very much against defenders over all, defenders chances of success increase on any given attack the earlier they respond to attackers intent.

Thus from an attackers point of view delaying a defenders responses to gain advantage requires denying the defender knowledge. That is by hiding it from the defenders observation.

There are two basic ways to hide activity,

1, Hide it in plain sight. 2, Hide it in secret.

The first was is simple obfuscation, you make something not look like what it is. That is you know the defenders will see an activity, the trick is to get them think it is something other than what it is, hence “hide in plain sight”. Hence,

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The second way is the more difficult covert way, you make an activity unseen by the defenders. Hence,

“Use the lie of the land and approach from behind existing cover.”

However there is another form of “hiding in plain sight” where by the method is such that no matter how suspicious a defender is, no matter how they investigate they can not prove or even show there is an activity hidden or that there is a method to do so in place.

It gives the attacker,

“Full deniability even in the face of betrayal.”

Such systems have been around in communications for something like a century, we call them “Duress Codes” that are a hidden communications channel within a message plaintext.

In essence you use redundancy in a way it can not be determined from random.

I’ve discussed this on this blog in fairly recent times as it shows that there are uses for Shannon’s “Perfect Secrecy” code/cipher systems that deterministic block or stream ciphers can not do (due to unicity distance).

I’m not going to go into details for obvious reasons, but you can see early work by Shannon and Simmon’s on the idea, and extended in the writings of Adam Young, and Moti Yung in,

“Cryptovirology : Extortion-Based Security Threats and Countermeasures”

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2020/tot-papers/young-1996.pdf

And later writings.

echo • March 31, 2024 10:46 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izJNEzJxngk Leeja Miller. AI is Bad for Democracy.

Pop video on AI and many of the problems with its use and implementation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M Philosophy Tube. Abigail Thorne. Here’s What Ethical AI Really Means.

Another pop video on AI. This explains the difference between general intelligence and the clunky problem specific AI we currently have, a lot of problems we need to solve, and the difficulties of implementing an ethical AI.

Abigail Thorn is currently scheduled to appear in Star Wars: The Acolyte.

Moonwalker • March 31, 2024 11:10 PM

== FBI Agent Says He Hassles People ‘Every Day, All Day Long’ Over Facebook Posts

https://reason.com/2024/03/29/fbi-agent-says-he-hassles-people-every-day-all-day-long-over-facebook-posts/

“It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will,” he claimed.

lurker • March 31, 2024 11:18 PM

@nealT “we’ve just gotten used to our configure scripts looking like that”

Familiarity, contempt, harrumph… Sometimes I think configure scripts are written like that to discourage amateurs like me from masssaging them to fit platforms the original dev didn’t want to support.

Muppet Spotter • March 31, 2024 11:23 PM

A claim is made in echo’s post above,

“So like I said anyone who seized on this paper and waved it around like they were God Oh Mighty didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about.”

But you should ask,

What paper would that be?

Those who look back will find only,

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/26/more-women-may-be-psychopaths-than-previously-thought-says-expert

No mention of a paper just a talk, the basics of which are,

hxxps://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/cambridge-festival-spotlights/clive-boddy-2024

As for Dr Clive R., you can find more on him at,

hxxps://www.aru.ac.uk/people/clive-boddy

That has a list of books and papers with nothing mentioned there.

But lets have a look at the other echo claim,

“Helena explains succinctly why.”

No, not really, in fact not at all.

If you watch the video you will discover it’s not even really about women as such.

What it’s actually about is given at about 17:25 and amplified there on in. You can reduce it to a discussion of

“People at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, politicians selling out due to their waning power, and the influence of money via international corporations”

Yes women and crime are mentioned but it’s a “porthole view” into the discussion on much of the majority of society, as they tend to be on the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder.

In short echo is hand waving nonsense around to support a very misguided misandric outlook on life.

As others have noted echo has an agenda against this blog, it’s host, and individual posters.

One poster succinctly resorted to,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/03/friday-squid-blogging-operation-squid.html/#comment-433827

Call it “Essential Reading”🤣

ResearcherZero • March 31, 2024 11:24 PM

An old member of the CCP gave me a copy of 3BP a long time ago. Uncensored too. He was about to retire and it was his last trip abroad as part of a trade delegation. I read it to my friends at the time. I did get a few paranoid comments form people at the time. The usual Dungeons & Dragons, comic book, and ideas spreading by telephone wires type stuff.

It was an interesting book that raised questions about covert behaviour, loss of agreed definitions, breakdowns in communication, the sharing of ideas, human adversary and trust.

“Take the most famous human nature argument: are people by nature good or evil? In recent years, experimentalists have conducted tragedy of the commons games and observed how people solve the tragedy (if they do). A common finding is that roughly a third of participants act as selfless leaders, using whatever tools the experimenters make available to solve the dilemma of cooperation, roughly a tenth are selfish exploiters of any cooperation that arises, and the balance are guarded cooperators with flexible morals.”

“…some people are routinely honest and generous, a few are downright psychopathic, and many people fall somewhere in between. Human society would be entirely different if this were not so.”

‘https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25404

“I have to tell you this: this whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

~Dr. Bernard Rieux (from Albert Camus The Plague )

ResearcherZero • March 31, 2024 11:43 PM

The competition of ideas is beneficial, whereas the thuggery of violence is most often counterproductive. Excellence withers without an adversary, it has been said.

nealT • March 31, 2024 11:44 PM

Clive Robinson wrote:

For years malware has been like a “battering ram” or other “siege engine” it’s presence and purpose quite “overt”

If one defines backdoored software as “malware” (as opposed to only counting harmful payloads installed via the backdoor), we may already be in “stage 3”. We’ve gotten used to having thousands of software vulnerabilities revealed annually, with perhaps 0.1% being explicitly called out as “backdoors”—but the rest can rarely be proven to be accidental. In other words, it’s already undecidable whether any vulnerability is an accident or backdoor (unless the author tips their hand by submitting it to an “underhanded C” contest).

The best way to disguise a backdoor, then, is to make it look like a common vulnerability. Grab one of those lists of “top 100 vulnerabilities”, and skip down a bit so it’s not too obvious. The downside is that it’s not a “nobody but us” backdoor. And at nation-state scale, it may be hard to keep the backdoor out of a country’s own infrastructure, though a paranoid person might note that requiring something like FIPS certification could be a way to do that. A more paranoid person might note the possibility of meta-vulnerabilities—for example, encouraging the use of memory-unsafe programming languages, and raising concerns like performance if someone tries to retrofit safety. (One unproven conspiracy theory about IPsec is that the NSA sabotaged it by just making it too complicated—lots of supported algorithms, modes, etc., “for security”.)

ResearcherZero • April 1, 2024 3:16 AM

Telstra had stored the wrong alternative number for eight emergency services which prevented manual transfer of calls.

Secondary database failure “triggered an existing but previously undetected software fault”.

‘https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telstra-explains-why-triple-zero-transfers-failed-606461

A rundown of CVE-2024-1086 bug in kernel versions v5.14 to v6.6.14 -including hardened versions. (drop a root shell)

‘https://pwning.tech/nftables/

Checklist for the xz backdoor.

‘https://xeiaso.net/notes/2024/xz-vuln/

Flowchart (as presently understood)

‘https://infosec.exchange/@fr0gger/112189232773640259

And the list of packages if you need to check.

‘https://repology.org/project/xz/versions

ResearcherZero • April 1, 2024 5:31 AM

There would be a prize, a ribbon and a certificate for participating in the experiments.

Anyone who wants to volunteer would be included. I’m sure bigots, racists, and chauvinists would have magical brains, as they are so darn special. Along with some others.

‘https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-part-of-the-brain-that-controls-movement-also-guides-feelings-20240123/

What if fake images or videos enter the collective consciousness — spread and amplified via social media and video apps, causing large numbers of people to fall for it?

‘https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/29/hillary_clinton_election_ai/

Twelve cables run through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

‘https://www.wired.com/story/houthi-internet-cables-ship-anchor-path/

While the Rubymar was drifting, three cables were damaged: the Seacom/Tata cable, a 15,000-kilometer-long wire running the length of East Africa and also connecting it to India; the Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1), which snakes 25,000 kilometers and links Europe to East Asia; and the Europe India Gateway (EIG), made of 15,000 kilometers of cable and joining India with the United Kingdom.

‘https://www.kentik.com/blog/what-caused-the-red-sea-submarine-cable-cuts/

Winter • April 1, 2024 5:46 AM

@ResearcherZero

What if fake images or videos enter the collective consciousness — spread and amplified via social media and video apps, causing large numbers of people to fall for it?..

Posting this just after Eastern is timely. You find your answer on your doorstep.

Look around and try to find some stories about miracles. Ask yourself when and where they started.

Winter • April 1, 2024 7:24 AM

If more people settled for being happy the world might be a better place.

I am afraid there will be too many people fighting to be more happy than the others.

“Holier than thou” has been a very potent driving force for as long as we know.

Clive Robinson • April 1, 2024 8:22 AM

@ Winter, ALL,

Re : What you are out of context mostly does not matter.

I know you were asking in a rhetorical manner about those who due to their own mental limitations and fixations actually believe “you can not” to,

“How can you take someone seriously when you don’t know if this person is a “real” man or woman?”

The answer I have is in two parts.

The first part was aptly answered many years ago with a cartoon that said,

“On the internet nobody knows you are a dog”

Meaning you can only judge people by what they profess by word or behaviour through the non physical medium that information is.

It unfortunately showed that as with all technology it could be used for good or bad and as I oft point out,

“That is decided by the observer of the directing mind within their point of view.”

Whilst it has enabled a torrent of abusive behaviour, it has in the main detached the message and the messenger, which is mostly desirable.

That is, is a “truth” any less true, because “a dog says it” rather than an “aged human with title says it”?

Judge the message not the messenger.

Which brings us to my second point and something I’ve spent most of my professional life fighting against.

Most people are biased in one way or another, you can find a very long but very incomplete list of “isms”, for which there is a lot of argument about why they exist. But if you dig down through them you come to an apparent foundation of “evolutionary behaviours” that give advantages by “social behaviours”.

In essence to protect our young who have no defenses we have family, extended family, tribe, etc through to nationalism and above.

That is there are “In-groups we stand with” and “Out-groups we distrust”. Moving a person from an “out-group” to an “in-group” has advantages and disadvantages. They are to do with resources, risk, advantage, etc in both the short term and the long term.

The arguments are a form of triage based on personal view and group-think rather than logic and reason.

For some people all they have or are is due to “group-think” it gives them faux-stability for others they can gain advantage of such people. Hence the Authoritarians and Authoritarian followers so readily seen in strong-man / cult / fascist type groups.

It does not take much thinking to realise that this is an “evolutionary dead end” and has at best only very short term advantage for the very few.

Whilst in an environment where the most valuable resource is “the mind” we can not discriminate because of the physical packaging around it, as a society it makes no sense.

The only reason to do so is for the very short term personal gain of the few and this is detrimental to all others in the short term, and every one in the long term. It’s why you see me say,

“Individual Rights v Social Responsibilities.”

Which is also,

“Short Term Greed v Long Term Benefit”

I’m all about the “Benefit” thus the “Responsibilities” thus “The promotion of mind” and “the search for truth” via what we currently call STEM. And we are at the point in our evolution where Benefit really only lies in the scarce output of the mind.

So if we can get the foundations of society right we can build solidly upon them.

And by foundations, I do not mean “solid rock” but “stable platform”. As the old saying has it,

“A rising tide lifts all well found vessels equally.”

fib • April 1, 2024 11:54 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, lurker, Clive

t’s likely just a blown circuit, but more fun to think that the sun is finally getting some revenge for being restricted to ~50% of our 24hr cycle and for releasing a horde of game players into other entertainment areas.

Hehe, but see, there was indeed one last flare from the bustling 3615, which now fades from view. But of course it wouldn’t be so selective.

3615 continues to be a risk for class x flares.

Clive Robinson • April 1, 2024 12:30 PM

@ fib, JonKnowsNothing, lurker, ALL,

Re : Wrath of deity

“But of course it wouldn’t be so selective.”

That’s the trouble with the old gods they lack focus…

If it were me there would be a three hundred meter deep, near vertical walled crater some where near Redmond as you would expect from a deity sized plasma cutter 😉

Mind you there are a few bunkers near “the last bus stop to the South Pole” that could do with a little of that near century old, Dali “melted watch” look.

Winter • April 1, 2024 1:13 PM

“On the internet nobody knows you are a dog”

Or a woman. Which is why many women on the internet hide behind a man’s name just to be taken seriously.

I also know female scientists hide behind a non-gendered pen name, or initials, to prevent being ignored in citations:

The gender citation gap: Approaches, explanations, and implications ‘https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soc4.13189

vas pup • April 1, 2024 6:24 PM

@ResearcherZero and @ALL – there is spot to watch normally DW videos – see below but not all good videos are there:

AI reveals huge amounts of fraud in medical research | DW News h ttps:/@A/www.youtube.com/watch?v=X85ZNjlHrPk

“New detection tools powered by AI have lifted the lid on what some are calling an epidemic of fraud in medical research and publishing. Last year, the number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time.

One case involved the chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University’s medical center. An investigation found that dozens of his cancer treatment studies contained dubious data and recycled images. Other scandals have hit Harvard on the East Coast and on the West Coast it is Stanford University. A scandal there resulted in the resignation of the president last year.”

vas pup • April 1, 2024 6:26 PM

Sh#T – that is proper link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X85ZNjlHrPk

ResearcherZero • April 2, 2024 2:25 AM

That is the annoying thing. They don’t put all their videos on youtube, to force users to their site. Youtube also deliberately breaks alternate services by changing aspects of it’s implementation. A petty and anti-competitive strategy employed by large tech companies who regularly steal, crush and absorb others, then lie about it. And gank everyone’s data.

Google agrees to partially delete some data collected in ‘Igocnito Mode’ to avoid $5b fine.

‘https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24527732-brown-v-google-llc-settlement-agreement

I’m a cruel and precision targeting god, not one of the old ones. But I do dilly-dally and take my time to re-check and re-confirm the targeting to avoid civilian casualties. On occasion, I spend so much time, everyone dies because I forgot to eliminate the threat.

At other times, I’m so unimpressed with the majority of behaviour, I refrain purposely.

PROXYLIB – A cluster of VPN apps is secretly turning phones into proxy nodes.

“The LumiApps platform promotes itself and its SDK as an alternative app monetization method to rendering ads to users. According to their FAQ and available information, the platform rewards developers with cash payment based on the amount of traffic that gets routed through user devices.”

‘https://www.humansecurity.com/learn/blog/satori-threat-intelligence-alert-proxylib-and-lumiapps-transform-mobile-devices-into-proxy-nodes

The deliberate use of starvation is a blatant violation of international law.

Criminal intent does not require the attacker’s admission but can also be inferred from the totality of the circumstances of the military campaign.

‘https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/australia-icj-judge-hilary-charlesworth-israel-suspend-gaza-idf-military-operation

Intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies” is also a war crime.

Geneva Convention IV, aimed at the protection of non-combatants in IACs, provides that states must allow the free passage of medical consignments, food, and other relief supplies for the benefit of the civilian population. The Security Council issued several forceful resolutions against the Syrian government’s use of starvation in 2014–15.

https://www.justsecurity.org/29157/siege-warfare-starvation-civilians-war-crime/

In 1998 the International Criminal Court Statute codified starvation methods as a war crime in international armed conflicts.

‘https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf

A 2019 amendment expanded this doctrine to cover noninternational armed conflicts – conflicts between states and organized armed groups, or between organized armed groups. In addition to food, the legal definition of starvation also includes deprivation of water, shelter and medical care. https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-10-g&chapter=18&clang=_en

On 4 and 5 November, seven water facilities across the Gaza Strip were directly hit and sustained major damage, including three sewage pipelines in Gaza city, two water reservoirs (in Gaza City, Rafah and Jabalia refugee camp) and two water wells in Rafah. The Gaza municipality warned about the imminent risk of sewage flooding.

‘https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-30

lurker • April 2, 2024 2:32 AM

‘https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDWJ213d2Ucr-3q9LDF9P1_j3Rr3GMJeS

三体 30 eps, has YT ads at start of each ep, and embedded chinese ads, dialog appears accurate to book both Zh & En CC subs, but events may be shuffled to suit TV program flow, some events omitted for political sensitivity, some padding to make up.

ResearcherZero • April 2, 2024 2:35 AM

Ukraine is using AI technology to negate GPS jamming effects and strike targets that need a lot of Western technology. Ukraine claims 12% of Russian refining capacity is now offline, while Reuters calculates it’s up to 14%.

‘https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/01/energy/ukrainian-drones-disrupting-russian-energy-industry-intl-cmd/index.html

Volodin’s letter to President Putin proposed to implement the concept of “de-Westernization” in the Russian Federation after the elections.

‘https://informnapalm.org/en/russia-after-the-elections/

lurker • April 2, 2024 2:50 AM

How many blue helmets would it take now to enforce the provisions of UNGA Resolution 181? How many British are now ashamed of their government’s abdication of responsibility in 1948?

ResearcherZero • April 2, 2024 4:06 AM

More British are ashamed of their government’s abdication of responsibility in 1948 than Australian’s are of their government’s abdication of responsibility for the continued atrocities committed against Australia’s traditional owners and their children. And certainly more than the number of GOP members who fail to condemn the language of violence.

When is enough’s enough?

The Republican Party excuses Trump’s conduct, despite no former nominee acting in such a disgusting manner.

‘https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/31/politics/trump-dangerous-rhetoric-analysis/index.html

What Trump is doing—encouraging this violence—is a time bomb. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-incitements-to-violence-have-crossed-an-alarming-threshold

“First, they change the view of violence. And Mr. Trump, since 2015, he started saying at his rallies, using his rallies and campaign events for radicalizing people. And he started saying, oh, in the old days, you used to hurt people. The problem is, Americans don’t hurt each other anymore.”

“So now he’s going into a new phase of openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future.”

‘https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trumps-ramped-up-rhetoric-raises-new-concerns-about-violence-and-authoritarianism

More annoying than Clippy (and crashing explorer executable)

‘https://sherwoodmedia.com/news/microsoft-copilot-ai-search-chatgpt-is-making-up-fake-vladimir-putin-quotes/

In 1999, an equation used to calculate eGFR was modified to adjust Black people’s results compared to everyone else’s, based on some studies with small numbers of Black patients and a long-ago false theory about differences in creatinine levels. Until recently that meant many lab reports would list two results… Numerous formulas or “algorithms” used in medical decisions — treatment guidelines, diagnostic tests, risk calculators — adjust the answers according to race or ethnicity in a way that puts people of color at disadvantage.

‘https://apnews.com/article/kidney-transplant-race-black-inequity-bias-d4fabf2f3a47aab2fe8e18b2a5432135

ResearcherZero • April 2, 2024 4:49 AM

Putin’s assertive nuclear rhetoric is strategically unhelpful and politically dangerous.

‘https://thebulletin.org/2024/03/putins-nuclear-warnings-heightened-risk-or-revolving-door/

The scientists made calls on the public to exert pressure on its leaders to pull back on the dangerous rhetoric … They also called Trump’s comments about expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal “ill-considered” and lamented Trump’s “troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security.”

https://bigthink.com/the-present/thanks-trump-the-doomsday-clock-moves-closest-to-midnight-since-the-1950s/

Mr. Asif appeared to be reacting to a fake news article published on awdnews[.]com.

“The proliferation of fake news stories — spread on social networks and produced by a variety of sources including pranksters, foreign governments and enterprising individuals who hope to receive advertising revenue by driving traffic to their websites — has become an increasingly serious problem.”

‘https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/world/asia/pakistan-israel-khawaja-asif-fake-news-nuclear.html

Grozev has a long track record of uncovering Russian documents and reveals he found one that may link the 29155 unit to a directed energy weapon. Members of the Kremlin’s infamous military intelligence sabotage squad have been placed at the scene of suspected attacks on overseas US government personnel and their family members, leading victims to question what Washington knows.

“this particular unit had been engaged with — somewhere, somehow — empirical tests of a directed energy unit.”

—try adding a couple more decades to any FOI requests.

‘https://www.cbsnews.com/news/havana-syndrome-russia-evidence-60-minutes/

The approaching future • April 2, 2024 5:18 AM

@ResearcherZero @lurker

“More British are ashamed of their government’s abdication of responsibility in 1948”

“The Republican Party excuses Trump’s conduct, despite no former nominee acting in such a disgusting manner.”

The two are not unconnected

Then the question of fascists hiding behind accusing others of fascism is not just a tactic of Russian politics, and can be put in the admixture.

Some British people are realising that the UK Labour Party has been

“taken over by Blair-rights”

especially the current leadership with the expression “Purple Politics” being said in increasing frequency.

The fact is Tony Blair via his religious convictions strongly supports Zionism likewise the Blair-rights are more orthodox leaning than the current Pope. Which means in English Politics of today there is no non Zionist supporting party to vote for.

Remember, in every lie there is a truth…

You might find this from an Israeli University of interest,

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/britains-continuing-abdication-of-responsibility-f

So the violence will likely continue and build more visibly toward a global war yet again.

echo • April 2, 2024 6:36 AM

Presently the rightoids are kicking off about Scotland’s new hate crime law and the American historian and expert on fascism Timothy Snyder is wondering why Europeans have a handle on Kremlin backed spy networks and the US doesn’t. I woke up this morning with a frazzled brain so…! Time for an interlude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-sJtUpftFU Yoann et Marie Bourgeois – Celui qui tombe https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/452403/misunderstanding-in-moscow-by-beauvoir-simone-de/9781784878252 Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir.

I quite like the concepts of viewing time vertically or horizontally, or viewing it as a circle or a spiral not just the imagination free lazy assumption of a straight line. Linear progress like rationality can be somewhat of a myth. It’s something which events are teaching us today. The art performance speaks for itself. A decent review or long essay on Misunderstanding in Moscow is good enough to illustrate the point. The book may one day be a bit too on the nose and I have enough mental images of Cold War Moscow not to mention Russia behaving like a bad ex who won’t go away. European intellectuals romance with Russian culture was always a one way street which Russia exploited to the hilt. But that’s neither here nor there.

I find this performance interesting in the sense history and culture and possibly mathematics (for the kinds of people who like it) and relationships and gender and contrasts of gender and expression and sense of play and tragedy and subjective experiences and the gaze of society looking on and texture, and angsty mental health contrasting with the haunting meanings layered in the music playing all roll together. There’s really quite a lot going on.

As for Misunderstanding in Moscow I’m looking for other feminist literature which appeals to a more lighter mood.

echo • April 2, 2024 6:38 AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXmcBZ1Yhlw Silicon Curtain Valeria Kovtun – Unpacking Techniques Russia used to Implant its Lies and Narratives into your Head

A lot of this discussion resonates. A key theme of this post running from the issues at the top to the bottom is values alongside things like cognitive resilience and communication and all the other useful tools, as well as being alert to active measures to protect democracy.

In closing Valeria discusses the need for Russia and its people to take responsibility and the need to build civic institutions which protect against an evil regime arising and she sounds very angry when she’s saying this. Surprise, women can be angry and justifiably so.

fib • April 2, 2024 8:15 AM

I’m looking for other feminist literature which appeals to a more lighter mood.

Because living in an ideological silo does wonders for the Final Truth…

Clive Robinson • April 2, 2024 9:14 AM

Re : ICTsec supply chain fail side effects.

This is funny in one way but not in others. It’s also an instructive lesson to teach kids chemistry in the kitchen[1].

A little while back a well known industrial chemical shifter that disgueses it’s products as “processed food” got hit by a cyber attack…

The result caused a chain of events,

1, Industrial processed product flow stopped. 2, The price of such products went up extraordinarily. 3, One seasonal product became unavailable.

This was about as far as supply chain analysis normally goes, but the reality is it does not stop there… “The ball keeps rolling” or “The dominoes jeep falling” depending on your chosen metaphor.

4, The “if they can, the I can” mentality kicks in and so a process starts. 5, Recipes are sort and found. 6, Recipes are tried and compared. 7, Blog posts and YouTube vids appear.

Such is sort of predictable but…

8, Vids a quarter hour long get “In 5 Minutes …” Titles…

So let me present,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EIf7XtSRwGg

“4-Ingredient Homemade CREAM CHEESE In 5 Minutes — Does It Taste Like the Real Thing?”

Whilst the actual answer is

“No it tastes a lot better”

Importantly at least the presenter explains who got hit by the cyber-attack and hence why the video.

Actually it would taste better with three times the amount of “unsalted butter, added or plain greek yogurt was added. But as a basic recipe that’s easy to remember (actually it’s a basic “cottage” or “farmers” cheese recipe before you add butter and blend so two for the price of one). Oh and instead of lemon juice, you can use apple vinegar that you can make with just a sliced apple and glass jar with water in it it takes one to three weeks depending on the weather)…

[1] Cheese in all it’s forms is a “natural plastic” so remember that next time you pull a slice of yellow rubber out of what looks like a cellaphane wrap 😋 Basically milk protein unravels in the presence of acid which vinegar or most citrus fruit juices are, warmth just speeds it up. The result is casin which is like nitro cellulose one of the first industrial use plastics… So recipe number 3 😇

echo • April 2, 2024 11:21 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War During the Russo-Ukrainian War,[5] Russia has forcibly transferred almost 20 thousand Ukrainian children to areas under its control, assigned them Russian citizenship, forcibly adopted them into Russian families, and created obstacles for their reunification with their parents and homeland.[6][7] The United Nations has stated that these deportations constitute war crimes.[7][8] The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for President of Russia Vladimir Putin[9] (who has explicitly supported the forced adoptions, including by enacting legislation to facilitate them)[10] and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their alleged involvement.[9] According to international law, including the 1948 Genocide Convention, such acts constitute genocide if done with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a nation or ethnic group.[11][a]

This is genocide.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/tennessee-passes-bill-allowing-non Under this bill, Tennessee would be prohibited from deeming parents unfit for adoption if they reject transgender youth, believing such identities to be sinful. Similarly, the state would be required to allow parents who are religiously or morally opposed to homosexuality to adopt gay children. If a parent believes that conversion therapy through their church can “cure” LGBTQ+ identification, this belief cannot be considered contrary to the best interest of an LGBTQ+ child. The bill risks exposing every LGBTQ+ child in the state to potential religious abuse, conversion therapy, and family rejection.

Clive Robinson • April 2, 2024 2:01 PM

Re : More than CTE.

As some here know I have an interest in head trauma both from single serious insult to repeated minor insult.

There is a causal link now sufficiently justified between repeated minor insult and “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy”(CTE).

Which in effect destroys the persons personality bit by bit and often leads to significant changes not just in personality but behaviour as well. Leading to quit visible antisocial if not criminal behaviour followed by dementia.

But importantly it causes significant depression, memory loss and cognitive impairment. Leading to the equivalent loss of IQ and “Emotional Intelligence”(EI) and even physical control.

As some are aware the US NFL has been hit rather badly by CTE. With many early deaths with early dementia followed by autopsy results showing CTE. As far as I’m aware it can not currently be tested clinically for directly on living brains,

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28975240/

Also some here are aware here that I’ve noted similar issues to CTE with those who have the mysterious “Havana Syndrome”. And I have suggested that if a directed energy weapon is involved it’s not the continuous power that needs to be considered but the energy in pulse edges and the pulse repetition rate. Also the use of two overlapping beams that provide a small “cocked hat area” where the harm happens.

As far as I’m aware this has not been “officially considered” in the enquiries so far held.

But what of brain insults that are not repetitive but near fatal single events?

As longterm readers know I was attacked in early autumn 2000 and received a head injury that should by all that’s been written have more than probably been fatal.

I’ve suffered from it since as I’ve mentioned. One skill I lost was the ability to read, and had to learn again and I’ve not even got to a 1/10th of where I was. Longterm depression chases me like a wolf hunting and the “experts” on both sides gave up on me as being effectively incurable…

But there are other issues.

Well it appears that near a quarter of a century later the medical profession are taking things more seriously,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68557769

I know and have experienced much of what those two people interviewed have suffered and still do suffer.

Such research is apparently to late for me, but if this post saves just one other person what I’ve suffered, well, it will be a blessing.

ResearcherZero • April 2, 2024 11:17 PM

@The approaching future

Why would everything have to be connected? Discussion does not have to be a competition.

Failing to condemn violence is a popular pastime of all of humanity. Like drinking booze. The Easter Sermon keeps suggesting that humanity stop shooting one another. Yet we don’t.

Each few generations we all want to start killing again because we forgot the lessons. Bacteria cannot climb into a wound without it being open in the first place.

Often there is little difference between parties, but the packaging of their rhetoric. Each feeds stories to the media to distract the public from their similar policy. Both major parties are willing to do cruel things to hang onto power. Occasionally one will abandon all it’s principles to try and gain power – each of it’s members hang onto their seat. Most of the public is so far removed that they do not know, or care who is lying.

Every party has it’s factions. No one party is any one thing. It is a collection of people with different ideas. Even the Nazi party had members who tried to blow up Hitler. Stalin’s group of thugs all tried to one-up each other, and later happily had each other shot.

The GRU’s members often try and get dirt on each other, and the SVR have been known to shoot them in the head for breaking into their buildings and cracking their safes.

But you don’t need a gun to slip a knife in a back. A dirty wound will do the trick.

In 1992, an international consensus panel defined sepsis as: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMra1208623

“The incidence of severe sepsis depends on how acute organ dysfunction is defined and on whether that dysfunction is attributed to an underlying infection.”

And you are all free to debate how long the wound has been open, exposed or infected.

DinodasRAT (V10) Linux implant targeting Red Hat-based distributions and Ubuntu Linux.

‘https://securelist.com/dinodasrat-linux-implant/112284/

Earth Krahang, which has a strong focus on Southeast Asia, also exhibits some level of overlap with another China-nexus threat actor tracked as Earth Lusca (aka RedHotel). Both the intrusion sets are likely managed by the same threat actor and connected to a Chinese government contractor called I-Soon.

Earth Krahang heavily employs open-source scanning tools that perform recursive searches of folders such as .git or .idea . The threat actor also resorts to simply brute-forcing directories to help identify files that may contain sensitive information such as file paths or passwords on the victim’s servers. They also tend to examine the subdomains of their targets to find interesting and possible unmaintained servers.

To check for vulnerabilities it can leverage, it uses one of any number of open source, off-the-shelf tools, including sqlmap, nuclei, xray, vscan, pocsuite, and wordpressscan.

‘https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/19/china_cyberspies_earth_krahang/

UNAPIMON is a C++ malware delivered in DLL form (_{random}.dll), which uses Microsoft Detours for hooking the CreateProcessW API function, allowing it to unhook critical API functions in child processes. UNAPIMON employs defense evasion techniques to prevent child processes from being monitored…

‘https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/24/d/earth-freybug.html

Of the 20 APTs operated by China, there are 5 in particular who have targeted Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Red Hat and CentOS.

‘https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/forms/enterprise/decade-of-the-rats

Bronze Union (aka Emissary Panda, APT27), PassCV, Casper (aka Lead), WLNXSPLINTER and the WINNTI APT group used compromised Linux servers as operational beachheads.

“This report detailed how this quintet of threat actor groups have managed to successfully infiltrate and maintain persistence on servers that comprise the backbone of the majority of large data centers using a newly identified Linux malware toolset obfuscated by a kernel-level module rootkit, all of which allows them to remain nearly undetectable on the infected systems. The fact that this new Linux malware toolset has been in the wild for the better part of the last decade without having been detected and publicly documented prior to this report makes it highly probable that the number of impacted organizations is significant and the duration of the infections lengthy.”

“The rootkits were installed by way of an interactive bash script, which in some cases reached out to an online build server to determine particulars about the target system (distro, kernel version, etc) before delivering a bespoke rootkit and backdoor.”

“This ensemble, who have spent the better part of the last decade successfully targeting organizations in stealthy cross-platform attacks, continue to operate relatively undetected while undertaking multiple strategic and economic espionage operations.”

The group also leveraged Linux for the development of backdoors, kernel rootkits, and online-build environments.

‘https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/blackberry-com/asset/enterprise/pdf/direct/report-bb-decade-of-the-rats.pdf

ResearcherZero • April 2, 2024 11:31 PM

“understanding sepsis requires reframing the research focus to identify immunometabolic and neurophysiological mechanisms of cellular and organ dysfunction.”

“Sepsis” is an imprecise clinical diagnostic term used to describe patients that have a continuum of abnormalities in organ function.

Sepsis: Current Dogma and New Perspectives

‘https://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613(14)00115-0

Device Bound Session Credentials

‘https://blog.chromium.org/2024/04/fighting-cookie-theft-using-device.html

Cryptographic keys that cannot be exported from the user’s device under normal circumstances. There is a seperate [sic] key for each session, and it should not be possible to detect two different session keys are from one device.

(DBSC will not prevent temporary access to the browser session while the attacker is resident on the user’s device.)

‘https://github.com/WICG/dbsc

(separate is often misspelled as seperate)

ResearcherZero • April 3, 2024 1:20 AM

I could point out one specific difference between ideologies of party members. Conservative members long believed that they were somehow immune from foreign influence. Blackmail and being fed false information for example. Some were warned repeatedly they were a target.

Foreign intelligence ops that specifically targeted themselves as individuals. Some were worse than others. The odd clown believed the very dangerous situation they were in, was in fact an opportunity. Occasionally, perhaps for political point scoring, certain politicians say the opposite of what they are advised. Even after they are advised not to politicise it.

“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” tweeted Trump.

“I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of ……..discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”

‘https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a35020930/trump-secretary-of-state-mike-pompeo-china-solarwinds-cyberattack/

The U.S. Government attributes this activity to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa20-352a

Mike Pompeo identified Russia around the same time that Trump made the announcement.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”

‘https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/secretary-state-pompeo-says-hack-was-pretty-clearly-russian-n1251798

A person familiar with internal U.S. government deliberations on the matter echoed Warner’s accusation, saying that the White House had weakened the language attributing the campaign to Russia and that the word “likely” was a surprise inclusion in the final statement.

‘https://cyberscoop.com/trump-russia-solarwinds-hack-warner/

“Both Kazuar and Sunburst used a very similar cryptographic technique throughout their code: specifically, a 64-bit hashing algorithm called FNV-1a, with an added extra step known as XOR to alter the data.”

The two pieces of malware also used the same cryptographic process to generate unique identifiers to keep track of different victims, in this case an MD5 hashing function followed by an XOR. Both samples used the same mathematical function to determine a random “sleeping time” before the malware communicates back to the the C2 server.

https://securelist.com/sunburst-backdoor-kazuar/99981/

Kazuar has been attributed to Turla.

Kazuar was discovered in 2017 by Unit 42, Palo Alto’s threat intelligence team.

Attributed to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB):

‘https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/pensive-ursa-uses-upgraded-kazuar-backdoor/

Turla (Snake, Uroburos)

Uroburos is the same group that performed a cyberattack against the United States of America in 2008 with a malware called Agent.BTZ.

Uroburos checks for the presence of Agent.BTZ and remains inactive if it is installed. It appears that the authors of Uroburos speak Russian (the language appears in a sample), which corroborates the relation to Agent.BTZ. Furthermore, according to public newspaper articles, this fact, the usage of Russian, also applied for the authors of Agent.BTZ.

A list of analysis by security researchers on Turla activity cab be found here.

‘https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0010/

ResearcherZero • April 3, 2024 2:38 AM

There have been a number of wars to end war, and the “free” speech earned was earned in blood. Given how many fell in both World Wars and other conflicts, we owe a responsibility.

I’d prefer that people did not encourage violence and resolved animosity respectfully.

There are a lot of innocent people who have already died. Many you won’t read about, and in a number of those cases it was done in an attempt to try and prevent intelligence coming to light regarding planned activities by The Kremlin, it’s intelligence services and military.

What is particularly disturbing is that they did not know anything. Yet they were killed. In some cases it was done as a psychological operation aimed at relatives or friends. Just on the off chance that one of these distantly related persons might have seen something. Wiping out family members of people who themselves posed no risk. Preemptive cruelty.

Illegal annexations and invasions also lead to what may be “accidental” cases of murder.

Flight MH17 was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, when it was shot out of the sky over territory held by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board were killed, including 15 crew members and 283 passengers from 17 countries.

‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-18/dutch-court-gives-verdict-on-mh17-plane-crash/101668556

There were a number of deliberate killings by Russian Intelligence Services well before, and after 2014. Those operations were carried out to silence people or prevent intelligence being passed on. There were other killings carried out against individuals or their family, friends and colleagues – for passing on intelligence. Some victims were misidentified and then killed. Other innocent victims were killed in an attempt to frame individuals.

In some cases there appears to be no clear reason why they were murdered. Fishing perhaps? Such cases did not take place in a conflict zone. They occurred in peaceful urban settings.

A lot of the intelligence came at a very high cost. But feel free to dance in the blood of my friends and colleagues. They laid down their lives so that you can have that privilege.

“Assassination attempts against foes of Putin have been common during his nearly quarter century in power. Over the years, Kremlin political critics, turncoat spies and investigative journalists have been killed or assaulted in a variety of ways.”

There also have been reports of prominent Russian executives dying under mysterious circumstances, including falling from windows, although whether they were deliberate killings or suicides is sometimes difficult to determine.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-kremlin-enemy-navalny-prigozhin-litvinenko-skripal-958c2ed6b8d60ecc4f64092fc1f9ceb5

“Mr. Litvinenko moved in a circle of exiled dissidents clustered around Boris A. Berezovsky, a fugitive oligarch who tilted against Mr. Putin from London and who was found hanged in 2013 under circumstances that were never categorically explained.”

That was in stark contrast to Mr. Skripal, a former military intelligence officer in Russia, who arrived in Britain in 2010 as part of a spy swap and lived quietly in an English cathedral town.

“This guy is not a big critic,” Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the whistle-blower, said of Mr. Skripal, speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location outside London. “Everyone says he kept a low profile.”

‘https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/world/europe/alexander-litvinenko-sergei-skripal.html

161st Special Purpose Specialist Training Center in eastern Moscow

Russian military intelligence officer of Unit 29155, Denis V. Sergeev charged…

Its operations are so secret, according to assessments by Western intelligence services, that the unit’s existence is most likely unknown even to other G.R.U. operatives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/world/europe/skripal-arrest.html

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Remember personal info?

Fill in the blank: the name of this blog is Schneier on ___________ (required):

Allowed HTML <a href="URL"> • <em> <cite> <i> • <strong> <b> • <sub> <sup> • <ul> <ol> <li> • <blockquote> <pre> Markdown Extra syntax via https://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

Powered by WordPress Hosted by Pressable

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Esther Coopersmith, Washington Hostess and Diplomat, Dies at 94

A place at her dinner tables, which sat 75, provided access to networks of money, influence and power across cultural and political divides.

By Katharine Q. Seelye

At a private fund-raising reception last year, the president of the United States introduced himself this way: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a friend of Esther Coopersmith’s.”

Mrs. Coopersmith’s name has been a calling card in Washington for seven decades. As one of the longest-reigning hostesses, best-connected diplomats and top fund-raisers in the nation’s capital, she greased the machinery that helped keep political, diplomatic and journalistic circles spinning; a place at her dinner tables, which sat 75, (with room for many more elsewhere and outside) provided access to networks of money, influence and power across cultural and political divides.

Among her many matches, she introduced Bill Clinton, who was then the governor of Arkansas, to Boris Yeltsin on a trip to Moscow. She introduced Jehan Sadat, the wife of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, to Aliza Begin, the wife of Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, before the Camp David peace accords. Anatoly F. Dobrynin , the longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, had his first Thanksgiving at her table.

“People need a place out of the public spotlight to meet and talk,” she told The New York Times in 1987.

Mrs. Coopersmith, who had multiple affiliations with the United Nations but who also reveled in her role as a freelancing citizen diplomat, died on Tuesday at her home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington. She was 94.

The cause was cancer, said Janet Pitt, her longtime chief of staff. Rather than seek treatment that might have only postponed the inevitable and made her miserable, Ms. Pitt said, Mrs. Coopersmith “wanted to live her life.”

The last public event Mrs. Coopersmith attended was the Gridiron dinner in mid-March. That annual political roast was one of her favorite outings, Ms. Pitt said, because she could bring dignitaries from other countries and show them “how we could poke fun at our politicians and our government and live to tell about it the next day.”

President Biden said in a statement after Mrs. Coopersmith’s death that she was one of his “early boosters” when he was 29 and ran for the Senate in 1972. “Her belief in me,” he said, “meant the world.”

Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, said in a statement, “For all my years in politics, I have been in awe of her.” In an obituary published on Legacy.com, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called her “the indomitable doyenne of Washington.”

Mrs. Coopersmith grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and caught the politics bug while listening to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats on the radio. She moved to Washington in the early 1950s, landed a lobbying job and quickly parlayed her skills — personal warmth, self-confidence, smarts about people — into fund-raising.

Mrs. Coopersmith was fascinated by power and the alchemy that it produced. As she told The Times in 1987:

“I do it because I love the activity, the excitement, I love to mix people up, I love sharing my home. In New York if you have a lot of money you can buy your way into anything. Here it is power that counts — what your position is or could be. It is wonderful to watch power and how power affects people, how they run with it, how they adjust to it.”

While bipartisan in her pursuits, she was a Democrat at heart and over the years raised millions of dollars for the party’s candidates. By 1958, she was rubbing shoulders with the likes of former President Harry S. Truman, who scribbled on a photo of the two of them, “Kindest regards to an able and efficient Democrat from one who knows!”

Such mementos accumulated and in time occupied nearly every square inch of space in Mrs. Coopersmith’s four-story brick mansion. They included signed photos of decades of Washington players and international personages and a telegram from Mr. Carter thanking her for introducing Mrs. Sadat and Mrs. Begin and helping to get the peace accords off the ground. She later introduced Mrs. Sadat to Richard Berendzen, president of American University, who then hired Mrs. Sadat to teach.

Mrs. Coopersmith donated some of her treasure trove to the newly minted National Museum of American Diplomacy in Washington. To help promote the museum, she held a discussion at her home last year featuring Debora Cahn, the creator and showrunner of the popular Netflix series “The Diplomat,” starring Keri Russell , and Elizabeth Jones, a longtime foreign service officer and one of the figures on whom Ms. Russell’s character was based.

During the discussion, Ms. Cahn paid homage to the importance of personal relationships in geopolitics: “In a crisis, you can pick up the phone and call somebody who you sat next to at Esther Coopersmith’s and didn’t think it was a good seating choice in the beginning, but by dessert it seemed like you had a lot in common.”

Mrs. Coopersmith was proud of the sometimes unconventional pairings at her dinner table. In 1990, she seated an Israeli diplomat next to an emissary of Saddam Hussein , the president of Iraq; shortly thereafter, Iraq invaded Kuwait and started the Persian Gulf war.

“It’s my home, and I can do whatever I want,” she told The Jerusalem Post in 1993. “They didn’t talk much, but as far as I was concerned, it was a start.”

She was born Esther Lipsen on Jan. 18, 1930, in Des Moines. Her family soon moved to the small town of Mazomanie, Wis., which is just northwest of Madison in the southern part of the state and at the time had a population of 891. Esther’s father, Morris, who came from Belarus, was a cattle rancher. Her mother, Pauline, who was born in Romania, managed the household of five children. They were the only Jewish family there.

By the age of 8, Esther was hooked on politics, thanks to F.D.R. By 12, she was raising money for the Red Cross.

She attended the University of Denver and later the University of Wisconsin. In 1952, she went to a rally for Senator Estes Kefauver , a Democrat from Tennessee who was running for president. Leaving college behind without graduating, she helped Mr. Kefauver win the Wisconsin primary; after he lost the nomination to Adlai Stevenson, she helped organize for Mr. Stevenson.

She decided that the real power was in Washington and moved there at Mr. Kefauver’s suggestion. She refused to learn to type, to avoid being stereotyped as a secretary, and she eventually got a job as a lobbyist for the Federation for Railway Progress.

She married Jack Coopersmith, a real estate developer, in 1954, and they settled in Potomac, Md., where she began hosting dinners, buffets and book signings and organizing events. A decade later, she was staging Texas-style fund-raising barbecues for President Lyndon B. Johnson all over the country.

She soon branched out to philanthropy, raising money for service organizations and helping to save Washington’s Union Station from the wrecking ball. She threw an intimate dinner for Barbra Streisand in 2015 the night before Ms. Streisand lobbied on Capitol Hill for the Women’s Heart Alliance .

Mr. Coopersmith died at 80 in 1991. Soon thereafter, Mrs. Coopersmith moved to Washington, where she overhauled the Kalorama house, not far from Embassy Row, with the help of a White House decorator.

She is survived by three sons, Jonathan, Jeffrey and Ronald; a daughter, Connie Coopersmith; a sister, Rita Rabinowitz; and eight grandchildren.

Over the years, Mrs. Coopersmith was given several quasi-official roles, most of them involving the United Nations. She served as a public member of the United States delegation to the U.N. under President Carter from 1979 to 1980; the position, also once held by Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Newman, entails representing the United States on committees, attending debates in the General Assembly and showing up at receptions given by member nations.

President Ronald Reagan sent Mrs. Coopersmith to important U.N. conferences. She received the U.N. Peace Prize in 1984. President Clinton named her as a U.S. observer at UNESCO. In 2009, UNESCO named her a goodwill ambassador.

The posts gave her diplomatic cachet, but she especially enjoyed practicing her own brand of soft diplomacy, defined by her own protocol, in the political kaleidoscope that is Washington.

“I don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t play cards and don’t belong to a country club,” she told The Times in 1978. “Politics is my vice.”

Katharine Q. Seelye , an obituary writer, was a reporter for The Times for 28 years. She previously covered national politics and New England. More about Katharine Q. Seelye