Articles and analysis

The new era after the Cold war interregnum

By Peter Zeihan

As students of geopolitics, we at Stratfor tend not to get overexcited when this or that plan for regional peace is tabled. Many of the world's conflicts are geographic in nature, and changes in government or policy only rarely supersede the hard topography that we see as the dominant sculptor of the international system. Island states tend to exist in tension with their continental neighbors. Two countries linked by flat arable land will struggle until one emerges dominant. Land-based empires will clash with maritime cultures, and so on.

The UK-US partnership in a changing world

Excerpts from a speech delivered by Rt Hon Des Browne MP, Secretary of State for Defence at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, USA, 10 July 2008, on the 50th anniversary of the Mutual Defence Agreement.

The MDA is one of the central planks of US-UK defence co-operation.

It is a collaboration that enabled the UK to contribute to the West's defence against the Soviet threat for decades. A collaboration that reinforces our mutual security, enhances deterrence and helps to keep the peace.

Adam Smith on defence

Always worth reminding ourselves of what a prudent Scot had to say....

The art of war, however, as it is certainly the noblest of all arts, so in the progress of improvement it necessarily becomes one of the most complicated among them. The state of the mechanical, as well as of some other arts, with which it is necessarily connected, determines the degree of perfection to which it is capable of being carried at any particular time.

Articles and analysis

The new era after the Cold war interregnum

The UK-US partnership in a changing world

Adam Smith on defence

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