Tim Marshall. Prisoners of geography.

Despite the domination of neoconservatism in academic and political circles, neocon-lit rarely enjoys popularity. This is because neocons themselves are heavily infused with Straussianism and Strauss-speak--including Greek quotations--contains too many words to be understood by an average racist rube, be he a rolexed, ferraried currency trader from New York or a truck-driving red neck from Peoria. Only on the pages of "Foreign Affairs" their stupidities appear in all their ornate vacuity. Tim Marshall succeeded if one considers New York Times bestseller list a success--but only a few current books containing elaborate racist vituperation against Russia can avoid this fate.

To bridge the gap between the "core" audiences and the high priests of the Neocon, Tim Marshall, a retired Sky News hack, wrote his opus. In it, he upholds the idea of upcoming (or continuing) American five hundred years Reich but not to the victorious tune of the Kagans--who mercifully cut it in half with respect to the original Reich--but using platitudes and jokes as the last refuge of the "patriot." Namely, he proclaims that the eternity of American domination on this Earth is predicated by the famous Bismarck's maxim about "fools, drunks, babies and Americans."

Into this mess, he adds crap statistics how many US universities and banks are in the top ten (twenty, etc.). The first list is heavily skewed in favor of Anglo-Saxon educational systems. But, undoubtedly the US is a current leader in higher education. Yet, if one were to compile this list 100 years ago, probably, most universities in the list would be German, with a small tinge of French, British and Austro-Hungarian. In early 90s, the list of the largest world banks was heavily overpopulated by the Japanese banks. Have you heard about Second Japanese Economic Miracle? In the early XX century, the largest world exchanges were New York, London but also St. Petersburg and Buenos Aires. But autarkic economic experiments of the two last reduced them to insignificance. As they say in asset management, "past performance does not guarantee future results."