Geopolitical Goals (Superpowers)

Geopolitical goals are the restrictive personality traits that dominate the geopolitical policies of any large nation, from OTL Uganda up to the ATL Japanese Empire. Though still a debatable subject, it is believed that national entities have certain traits that are practically built into their "DNA", and these affect the way that they react to situations that present themselves to the government. Based on this theory, though a weak or strong leader can affect the proficiency by which the nation's goals are taken care of, they will always make certain major decisions that tend to affect world events.

To take a real world example, regardless of who was in power in the United States following the September 11 attacks, the reaction would have always been to invade Afghanistan and to enact some kind of law resembling the USA PATRIOT Act. Though a different administration may not have "declared a war on terror" or invaded in the same way or at precisely the same time as the Bush administration did, the major action would have always been the same. The strategic goals of the US would be the same.

While this may make it appear that history is set in stone from the beginning, this is clearly not the case. Small events, that are affected by human or natural intervention, can over time lead to large changes, completely changing the expected line of events. Furthermore, major reforms can not only break free of the geopolitical goals of a nation, but they can also change the current ones or add new ones.

This is still a useful tool for short term, centurial, predictions, and can to an extent help in the making of long term global forecasts. A mainstream example of their use in this way is the book "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman.

This page outlines the geopolitical goals that dominate the world powers of the Superpowers timeline, as well as the way they were formed and their effect on several vital world events. It is worth noting that many nations have similar initial goals, only differing in their specificity. This is because the primary, central goal of nearly all nations starts out the same and almost always remains an integral part of their existence.