50 Fun Facts About Geopolitics

Which country became independent on 9 August 1965 when Malaysia's parliament voted unanimously to expel it?

Singapore was voted out of Malaysia 126 to 0, making it one of the few states to gain independence against its own wishes. Lee Kuan Yew became its first prime minister and Yusof bin Ishak its first president.

Which neutral country, the first state ever to join the United Nations by referendum, became a full member only in 2002?

Switzerland joined the Council of Europe in 1964 but waited until 2002 to become a full UN member, despite hosting the organisation's European headquarters in Geneva. Neutrality had kept it on the sidelines for decades.

Under a 1903 lease, the US pays which country about $4,000 a year for Guantánamo Bay, in cheques it refuses to cash?

Cuba has accepted only one payment since the 1959 revolution, and Fidel Castro said even that cheque was deposited by mistake. The rent was fixed at $4,085 in 1974, pegged to the 1934 gold value of the dollar.

Which country lost its whole coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific yet still maintains a 5,000-strong navy?

Bolivia has been landlocked since the war and the 1904 peace treaty, but it patrols Lake Titicaca and thousands of miles of rivers to keep a maritime consciousness alive. The current force dates from 1963.

Which country dismantled all six of its own nuclear bombs in the early 1990s, then signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

South Africa scrapped its arsenal, with a seventh bomb still under construction, before the handover to a majority-elected government. It acceded to the treaty in 1991 as a non-nuclear state.

Canada and Denmark ended their decades-long 'whisky war' in 2022 by dividing which barren Arctic islet down the middle?

Hans Island earned its nickname because each side left a bottle, Danish schnapps or Canadian Club, whenever it planted its flag, in what was called the friendliest war in history. The 2022 deal split it along a natural fault line.

Which container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal in March 2021 and blocked it in both directions for six days?

Ever Given was sailing from Malaysia to Rotterdam when she wedged across the canal, and more than 200 vessels were left queuing at either end. She reached Rotterdam in July, months late, after Egypt held her over a compensation claim.

Which country won three 'Cod Wars' against Britain between 1958 and 1976, partly by threatening to quit NATO?

Iceland held a trump card: leaving NATO would have cost the alliance access to the GIUK gap, a vital Cold War anti-submarine chokepoint. The 1976 settlement gave it a vast exclusive fishery zone.

Which country is the only state ever to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, announcing its exit in 2003?

North Korea had acceded to the treaty in 1985 but never came into compliance, and it carried out its first nuclear test three years after leaving, in 2006. India, Pakistan and Israel simply never signed.

Which country became the world's most populous landlocked state when Eritrea voted for independence in 1993?

Ethiopia lost its entire coastline when the 30-year Eritrean war of independence ended with the 1993 referendum, yet it still lists a navy among its three service branches. Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country by area.

The 1947 Truman Doctrine was announced to Congress as a plan to fund which two countries against communist pressure?

Greece and Turkey were both judged likely to slip into the communist bloc without American help, and Truman hoped the aid would also cool their long rivalry. Historians often date the start of the Cold War to his 12 March 1947 speech.

Which country handed Macau to China in 1999, ending both the first and the last European holding on Chinese soil?

Portugal had run Macau since its first official settlement there in 1557, and the transfer ceremony took place in the early hours of 20 December 1999, two and a half years after Hong Kong changed hands.

Which country became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century on 20 May 2002, as its constitution took effect?

East Timor, officially Timor-Leste, had been run by a UN transitional administration since October 1999 after an Indonesian invasion and annexation that followed its own declaration of independence. It shares its island with Indonesia.

Which strait, the only sea passage out of the Persian Gulf, carries about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade?

Hormuz also carried a fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas between 2023 and 2025, and its two coastlines are only about 50 km apart at the narrowest points. Iran lies on the north shore and Oman's Musandam Peninsula on the south.

Baarle-Hertog, a Belgian municipality made up of 22 separate exclaves, lies inside which neighbouring country?

The Netherlands' municipality of Baarle-Nassau surrounds the Belgian pockets so closely that some houses in the shared town are split between the two countries. The pockets stem from medieval deals between a duke and a lord.

The 1997 Ottawa Treaty, whose campaigners won that year's Nobel Peace Prize, bans which category of weapon?

Anti-personnel landmines remain legal for the United States, China and Russia, three permanent Security Council members that never signed. Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines shared the 1997 prize.

The 1944 conference that created the IMF and the World Bank met at a mountain resort in which US state?

New Hampshire's Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods hosted 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations in July 1944, while the war was still being fought. John Maynard Keynes's rival plan for an International Clearing Union lost out.

Which 1823 US policy warned Europe off new colonisation in the Americas, yet went unnamed after its author until 1850?

The Monroe Doctrine was stretched in 1904 by the Roosevelt Corollary, which claimed a US right to intervene in Latin America to pre-empt European creditors. James Monroe had set it out in a State of the Union address on 2 December 1823.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo, which nearly quadrupled prices, punished countries that had backed Israel in which war?

The Yom Kippur War prompted OAPEC to declare a total embargo in October 1973, and by the time it was lifted in March 1974 oil had gone from about $3 to nearly $12 a barrel. The Suez Canal, closed since 1967, reopened in 1975.

Nord Stream 1 carried Russian gas from Vyborg straight to Germany along the bed of which sea?

The Baltic Sea route ran from the Vyborg compressor station at Portovaya Bay to Greifswald, and the project began in 1997 as a Gazprom venture with Finland's Neste. Both pipelines now lie disused.

Which country dropped French firm Naval Group in 2021 to get nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK instead?

Australia paid Naval Group a €555 million settlement for walking away from a deal first struck to replace its conventionally powered Collins-class boats. The AUKUS pact also lets US and UK submarines rotate through Australian bases.

The secret 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement carved up the Ottoman Middle East between Britain and which other power?

France was to take Syria, Lebanon, the Kurdistan region and south-eastern Anatolia, while Palestine was to fall under an international administration. Russia and Italy gave their assent to the deal.

Which country mines over 60% of the world's cobalt, the metal at the heart of the battery supply chain?

DR Congo produces 63% of the world's cobalt, most of it from the Copperbelt that straddles its border with Zambia. The two neighbours together account for the bulk of global output.

Under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, a coastal state's exclusive economic zone extends how many nautical miles?

200 nautical miles was first claimed by Chile and Peru in 1947, decades before the convention made it the global standard. The zone begins where the 12-mile territorial sea ends.

Which term for Britain and Russia's 19th-century rivalry over Central Asia was popularised by Kipling's novel Kim?

The Great Game was coined in 1840 by Captain Arthur Conolly, an East India Company intelligence officer who had been travelling through the region since 1829. Kim, published in 1901, carried the phrase into the mainstream.

Which strait, whose name means 'Gate of Grief', links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden beside the Horn of Africa?

Bab-el-Mandeb joins 'bab', meaning gate or door, to 'mandeb', lamentation or grief, and every ship between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean must pass through it. Britain claimed an island there in 1857 and lit a lighthouse in 1861.

Which country owns the Wakhan Corridor, a panhandle drawn in the 1890s to keep the Russian and British empires apart?

Afghanistan's strip runs east from its north-eastern corner to the Wakhjir Pass on the Chinese border, about 300 km from Ishkashim at the corridor's mouth. It was fixed by the 1893 Durand Line deal and the 1895 Pamir Boundary Commission.

Which Vienna-based UN agency shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize with its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei?

The IAEA was set up in 1957 as an autonomous body inside the UN system, reporting to both the General Assembly and the Security Council. The prize cited its work keeping nuclear energy out of military hands.

Which name for Cyprus's UN buffer zone comes from the pencil a British general used to mark the 1963 ceasefire?

The Green Line was drawn with a green chinagraph pencil by General Young after a twelve-hour meeting on 30 December 1963, and it now runs 180 km from Paralimni to Kato Pyrgos. It was extended after the August 1974 ceasefire.

Japan and the Soviet Union never signed a Second World War peace treaty because of a dispute over which island chain?

The Kurils' four southernmost islands were annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, and a 1956 joint declaration ended the formal state of war without settling them. The dispute still stands between Japan and Russia.

The December 1991 accords that dissolved the Soviet Union were signed at a state dacha in a forest in which republic?

Belarus's Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest, once home to Brezhnev's hunting lodge, hosted the leaders of three founding republics at Viskuli on 8 December 1991, where they created the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Which 1987 US–Soviet agreement banned all ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km?

The INF Treaty was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev on 8 December 1987, and by its June 1991 deadline 2,692 missiles had been destroyed, 846 American and 1,846 Soviet. Ten years of on-site inspections followed.

Which African country's civil war from 1975 drew in Cuban troops on one side and apartheid-era forces on the other?

Angola's Cuban intervention, codenamed Operation Carlota, began on 5 November 1975 and cost Havana roughly 10,000 dead, wounded or missing by 1991. Pretoria and Washington backed the rival UNITA and FNLA movements.

Which Horn of Africa state hosts US, French and Japanese bases and, since 2017, China's first overseas military base?

Djibouti's Chinese base cost about US$590 million and opened officially on 11 July 2017 with ships from the South Sea Fleet, a short drive from America's Camp Lemonnier. It was the PLA Navy's first official base abroad.

The acronym BRIC, for Brazil, Russia, India and China, was coined in 2001 by economist Jim O'Neill of which bank?

Goldman Sachs's economics chief introduced the term in a paper called 'Building Better Global Economic BRICs', and the bank then championed it as shorthand for emerging markets. O'Neill later chaired its asset management arm.

Which choke point named after a Polish town is NATO's only land route to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?

The Suwałki Gap also marks the shortest path between Kaliningrad and Russia's closest ally, so any troops NATO supplies by land to the three must squeeze through it. Its border dates from the Suwałki Agreement of 1920.

Which 1936 pact gives Turkey control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles and limits the warships of non-Black Sea states?

The Montreux Convention was signed at the Montreux Palace on 20 July 1936, and in wartime it bars the warships of belligerent nations from the straits unless they are returning to base, provided Turkey itself stays out of the fight.

The 1967 declaration that founded ASEAN was signed by five foreign ministers in which capital city?

Bangkok's declaration was signed on 8 August 1967 by five founding states after two days in which their foreign ministers played golf and shared meals in a deliberately relaxed setting. Thailand had sent the invitations on 21 July.

How many states are members of the Arctic Council, the forum set up by the 1996 Ottawa Declaration?

Eight countries hold sovereignty over land inside the Arctic Circle, and only they can vote, though Indigenous groups sit as permanent participants who must be fully consulted. The same eight had signed an environmental strategy in 1991.

The 1969 Sino-Soviet clashes that brought the two powers to the brink of war centred on Zhenbao Island in which river?

The Ussuri, called the Wusuli in Chinese, flows through Manchuria, and the island is known to Russians as Damansky. PLA troops opened the fighting with a surprise attack on Soviet border guards in March 1969.

Which November 1983 NATO exercise did some Soviet leaders fear was cover for a real nuclear first strike?

Able Archer 83 simulated a nuclear crisis with the Warsaw Pact so realistically, with Pershing II missiles due in Europe, that some Politburo members believed a real attack was coming. Some count it among the Cold War's closest calls.

Which Soviet-built oil pipeline, among the world's longest, takes its name from the Russian word for 'friendship'?

Druzhba has run since October 1964 from Almetyevsk in Tatarstan, gathering oil from western Siberia, the Urals and the Caspian for delivery to Eastern Europe. It is also known as the Comecon Pipeline.

Rudolf Kjellén, the political scientist and politician who coined the term 'geopolitics', came from which country?

Sweden's Kjellén taught at Gothenburg from 1891 and took the Skyttean chair at Uppsala in 1916, and he also coined 'folkhemmet', the 'people's home' idea behind the Swedish welfare state. He died in 1922.

Neutral Moresnet, a tiny condominium that lasted from 1816 to 1920 near Aachen, was created to share which resource?

Zinc ore from the Vieille Montagne mine was so prized that Dutch and Prussian negotiators could not agree who should own it, so they ran the district jointly. In 1908 locals proposed making it the first Esperanto-speaking state, Amikejo.

Which Adriatic port became a UN-backed free territory in 1947, only to be divided between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1954?

Trieste's Zone A, the city and a coastal strip, went to Italy, while Zone B in north-west Istria went to Yugoslavia; the Tito–Stalin split had frozen the question for years. The territory was meant to cool rival claims to a strategic port.

Which 1933 treaty lists the four tests of statehood, beginning with a permanent population and a defined territory?

The Montevideo Convention says a state's political existence is independent of recognition by other states, the declarative theory of statehood. It was signed on 26 December 1933 at the Seventh International Conference of American States.

Which 1950 General Assembly resolution lets it act when a Security Council veto causes deadlock, first used over Suez?

Uniting for Peace passed 52 to 5 on 3 November 1950 as an American device to get round Soviet vetoes during the Korean War, and it created the emergency special session. The first such session came over Suez in 1956.

Which geographer set out the 'Heartland' theory in a 1904 paper titled 'The Geographical Pivot of History'?

Halford Mackinder read the paper to the Royal Geographical Society, and he is credited with bringing both 'heartland' and 'manpower' into the English language. His 1919 book pressed the case for geopolitics at the Paris Peace Conference.

Which desert patch between Egypt and Sudan is claimed by neither country, because each prefers a different border line?

Bir Tawil covers about 2,060 square kilometres between the straight 1899 boundary and the irregular 1902 administrative line, and claiming it would mean giving up the larger Hala'ib Triangle on the coast. Its name means 'tall water well'.

China's Belt and Road Initiative began as the 'Silk Road Economic Belt', announced in a 2013 speech in which country?

Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev University in Astana heard Xi Jinping unveil the concept on 7 September 2013, and a month later in Indonesia he set out the maritime half of the plan. The two strands together became the Belt and Road.