Know the Mount Athos monks and the other geopolitical players

Anyone who has visited tiny Bard College in the Hudson River Valley can attest it’s the last place you would expect to find a wise down-to-earth professor of foreign affairs such as Walter Russell Mead.  (The school still has an Alger Hiss Chair of History!)

Take a look at Mead’s superb summing up of the new alignment between Greece, Russia, Israel, and the island of Cyprus.

[Here is a map of the area. In NE Greece, there are three "fingers" coming down; Mount Athos (twenty monasteries with 2,000 monks) is on the easternmost one].