One way geopolitics experts (and pundits) try to help the general audience size up a challenge posed by a less familiar country is to compare it to a better known country (or, in the case of an American audience, a U.S. state). That cognitive trick has been recently applied by Andrew A. Michta, an American political scientist at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. In an Aug. 7 commentary in the Wall Street Journal, Michta chose Germany to help readers size up the challenges posed by Russia to the West. “Russia and even China have nowhere near the West's resources, when measured in terms of gross domestic product, compared with the overall collective wealth the West commands. Russia's economy is only about two-fifths the size of Germany's,” he wrote.
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