When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***The archives are littered with far too many maps showing just how wrong sweeping predictions about the future can be. But then, read differently, they also show that the impulse is irresistible. So why fight it?After Tuesday’s election, speculation has intensified over what Donald Trump’s victory will mean for American foreign policy and the world. The New York Times declared that “Trump’s Win Ends a Post-World War II Era of U.S. Leadership” — which, as sweeping predictions go, seems both true and still somehow vague. Trump has certainly rejected the liberal internationalist tradition that, in different incarnations and circumstances, has guided U.S. policymakers from both parties since 1945. But, in his previous four years as president, he never quite answered the question of what will replace it.At the heart of Washington’s postwar leadership was the idea that America was strongest and most secure when it exercised power through allies and institutions. This still left plenty to argue about. The left could be skeptical of American power even as exercised multilaterally. The right sometimes resented the constraints multilateralism placed on the exercise of American power.The uncertainty of Trump’s foreign policy stems, in part, from the fact that he has taken on the liberal internationalist consensus from both of these angles at the same time. He lapped the socialist left with discussions about leaving NATO and alarmed even dedicated warmongers by discussing a nuclear strike on North Korea.In this two-part illustration of collective security from a 1950s NATO pamphlet, Europeans in their traditional costumes