#geopolitics

I have been watching videos lately from a young woman who travels around Russia.

She goes to places I would like to see myself someday: Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Ural Mountains. Her videos are quiet and beautiful. There are trains, snowy roads, apartments, forests, meals, conversations, long stretches of landscape.

What struck me most recently, though, was something almost completely unrelated to the scenery.

She cannot monetize the videos.

Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, and YouTube still says that creators with Russia-based AdSense accounts cannot monetize their channels. The restriction is one of a long series of measures connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

That makes sense at the level where we usually discuss international affairs.

Russia invaded Ukraine. Other countries and international companies responded. Sanctions and restrictions followed.

But then the abstraction travels downward.

Eventually it reaches somebody filming Lake Baikal.

That is where the situation starts to feel different.

A Country and the People Inside It

It is easy to talk about countries as though they were people.

Russia invaded.

America threatened.

China wants.

France objects.

Iran retaliates.

We do this because it is useful shorthand. Governments really do act on behalf of states, and those actions have consequences.

But nations contain millions of people who may have had almost nothing to do with those decisions.

If geography shapes national destiny, the United States began with an advantage few nations in history have ever enjoyed. A wide ocean buffering it from Europe’s old rivalries, a political experiment unburdened by monarchies or inherited wars, and a sense of mission rooted more in ideas than in borders—this combination placed America in a unique position. It could have become a neutral power on a continental scale: a republic that influenced the world not through force, but through example.

That wasn’t the path it took. The United States chose expansion, intervention, and global entanglement. The choice wasn’t inevitable, but it became self-reinforcing. And while the late 1990s briefly gave the illusion that the American-led order had produced a stable and conflict-free world—the so-called “end of history”—that stability was built atop decades of interventions and unresolved tensions that would resurface soon after.

This essay explores the neutrality that could have been, the path that was chosen instead, and the consequences of that divergence.

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I. Two Doors at the Beginning

In its early years, the United States stood before two plausible futures:

1. Geographic insulation as a shield: A distant republic refusing foreign entanglements, maintaining a limited military, and becoming a steady, predictable mediator in global affairs.

2. Geographic insulation as a springboard: A budding power expanding across the continent, projecting influence abroad, and eventually shaping world affairs through force, alliances, and economic reach.