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.***Windows in Washington, D.C. are like Twitter bios. You can find almost any combination of flags on display if you look hard enough. The city’s houses and apartments have an impressive array of political commitments draped on their facades, sometimes doubling as low-budget curtains.And with a car, you can be even more precise about your politics.I have no idea who owns this vehicle, for example, but now — with a little Googling — I know way too much about their politics: pro-West Papua, anti-Assad, pro-Ukraine, pro-Palestine, into an independent East Turkestan, free Tibet, and in solidarity with the Sahrawis.Over the past few years, commentators have struggled to map out the changing ideological contours of American foreign policy. Over the course of countless books, op-eds, think pieces, podcasts, and drunken arguments, they’ve proposed a growing number of new conceptual categories. For President Donald Trump alone, there’s “Jacksonian Realism” and “McKinleyite.” On the other side of the aisle, terms like “neoliberal” and “tankie” have gained new currency as epithets in intra-Democratic party debates. (The conclusion of which is usually that anyone using the term “neoliberal” is a “tankie” and anyone using the term “tankie” is a “neoliberal”).But rather than get caught up in ideological labels, there’s a simpler way to plot the political factions in U.S. foreign policy today. Call it the Ukraine-Palestine Matrix. The Bipartisan Consensus. Quadrant I, of course, is where most of the U.S. policy debate has traditionally taken place. Hawks vied to position themselves in the very upper left corner, while Democrats