Hello and welcome to a new episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Firas Madad. This is a pre-recorded

episode. On Monday, when you're actually going to be seeing this, I will be somewhere far, far away,

getting one of my very close friends baptized, along with their entire family. And so we're doing a pre-recorded episode talking about

the geopolitics of Europe. In the past, I've done some work on the geopolitics of Turkey and Russia and

some other places. And I thought, well, we haven't done anything on Europe. So maybe let's start.

I think the beginning point is to understand the maritime picture, because everything really

flows from either land power or sea power.

And if you look at the Mediterranean, what it exposes is really Europe's

vulnerability to the global south to the Middle East and North Africa primarily

mainly Muslim states that are hostile to Europe and I thought that this might

be a good place to start.

And I think, you know, it's worth doing a bit of a dive into the geopolitics of the Mediterranean

and trying to understand what is going on there.

And then we'll look at the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea.

We'll look at the rivers, primarily the Danube and the Rhine.

We'll look at the mountains and then we'll get an idea of how Europe works geopolitically.

And then we'll talk about some economic questions, immigration, and what this means for Europe's

future.

I think this is how we're going to play this out in this episode.

So starting with the seas, the most important one is obviously the Mediterranean,

because this is where Europe's biggest vulnerability is.

And if you look at the position of Turkey,

...