Drew Wood

Hindsight is 20/20, they say. We can all think of things in our lives that might have turned out much better if we had made different choices. The same is true of geopolitics. More than any other country, the United States has had opportunities to radically change the world we know. Would those changes have been better than what we have? You be the judge.

A little under 4 million Muslims live in the United States now. Some were immigrants from countries all over the world while others are from families that have been Americans for many generations. Many people have converted to Islam from other religions as well. Their numbers are reflected in education, business, and government. We even have four Muslims serving in the U.S. Congress today—a testament to the genuine religious freedom in our country. You can check out where your state’s Muslim population stands in this article.

Nobody likes taxes. Well, maybe the IRS. But we can safely say even their agents don’t like paying taxes. Everybody likes spending them. Even the most fiscally conservative advocate of small government still doesn’t enjoy having a highway bridge fall into the river or North Korean troops landing on the beach—with no one but their local town council to deal with it. Americans have a substantial tax burden, but it is neither the highest nor the lowest in the world. However,

Civil wars are some of the deadliest conflicts in history. They tend to create chaotic violence without an organized military strategy. Citizens are often caught in the crossfire, or deliberately targeted. They can become even more violent if foreign countries supply weapons or intervene with their own military forces. The American Civil War

Over 700 million people in the world today live on less than $2 a day, which is the threshold researchers use for extreme poverty. How can a person possibly survive on so little? The tragic truth is, in many cases they don’t. But for those who do, here are some of the survival strategies they use. While it can be easy to judge them from a position of abundance, none of us really knows the lengths we might go to if we or our families were on the edge of starvation.

Remember there was a time not so many years ago we thought the Cold War was over? Those days are long gone. The partnership between Russia and the United States that characterized the rule of Boris Yeltsin has been replaced with Cold War round two. Russia’s power is greatly diminished since its glory days of superpower status, but it is still a formidable regional power exerting influence on the countries on its borders and a few further afield.

On the surface, globalization promises to bring great improvements to the world, like economic growth, standardization, and better communication and transportation links to make us truly into a “global village.” But it also has its dark side in economic exploitation and the destruction of local businesses and indigenous cultures. We’re looking at some case studies of areas where globalization has hurt some countries more than it has helped.

The United States has the biggest debt in its history, an eye-watering $36 trillion. Much of that is owed to foreign countries, so understandably, some people wonder, what would happen if we just refused to pay it? We have the strongest military in the world. How are they going to collect on that debt if we just say “no?” This article will explore that path, and then you decide if we should keep on making those debt payments or tell the rest of the world to take a hike.

Although foreign aid is a comparatively small portion of the federal budget, it tends to receive outsized scrutiny by the public. Many people think of it as throwing money away. The fact of the matter is, foreign aid is a tool used by most wealthy countries, including our rivals, not only to relieve humanitarian needs, but as a tool of statecraft to promote one’s own national interests. This article will examine the role of foreign aid in U.S. geopolitics in the past and present. And we’ll let you know which countries currently receive the most American aid, and why.

The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and longest-lived empires in southeastern Europe and the Middle East. It can only really be compared to the Roman Empire, which it replaced when it conquered Constantinople in 1453. It ruled all or part of at least 37 countries and left a lasting cultural impact on each one.