Amit's Blog

The Grand European Tour from the Desk   For centuries the Grand Tour was a rite of passage for the privileged few: young British aristocrats hauling trunks of Shakespeare and Byron across the Alps to be dazzled by Rome, ruined by Venice, and quietly improved by Paris. It ended with the steamship, the package holiday, and the €29.99 Ryanair flight. Or so we thought. Between 1990 and 2024 something far more dramatic happened. Europe’s eight great tourism nations (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal, and the Netherlands) turned the entire continent into the world’s most fiercely contested stage. This was no longer a leisurely education for the elite; it became a sophisticated, multibillion-euro competition for every passport holder on earth. In 1990 these eight countries welcomed roughly 160 million international arrivals combined. By 2023 the figure had exploded to nearly 423 million, and the total economic impact now exceeds €2 trillion annually...

The Containment of China: Adapting Gaddis’s Framework to a New Era of Strategic Rivalry John Lewis Gaddis’s framework of containment—centered on preventing a rival power’s expansion beyond its existing sphere while exploiting its internal weaknesses—provides a comprehensive lens for analyzing contemporary U.S. strategy toward China. The ongoing trade war, characterized by tariffs on over $360 billion in Chinese imports with rates ranging from 10% to 100% in critical sectors such as semiconductors, electric vehicles, and steel, exemplifies asymmetrical strongpoint containment. Rather than pursuing comprehensive economic isolation, the United States employs selective measures—bolstered by tariff exclusions for over 350 product categories—to protect vital supply chains while maintaining interdependence. Taiwan functions as the central strategic linchpin, producing 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, making its defense essential to containing Chinese dominance over the first...

The Octopus Entwined: United States Complicity in the Dominion of the United Fruit Company The United Fruit Company’s dominance over Central America was fundamentally enabled by the active and sustained complicity of the United States government, which transformed the corporation into an instrument of American foreign policy. Through repeated military interventions, diplomatic pressure, and covert operations, successive U.S. administrations protected and expanded United Fruit’s monopolistic control over vast tracts of arable land, railroads, ports, and export infrastructure in countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Nicaragua. This partnership, rooted in the Roosevelt Corollary and exemplified by the Banana Wars, allowed the company to maintain economic hegemony, owning up to half of the arable land in some nations while deliberately leaving millions of acres fallow to suppress competition. The most notorious instance of this complicity was the 1954 CIA-orche...