I think of Yalta and a Soviet Naval base in Crimea. The significant GIS I remember, or can envision, from reading, places the bulk of Soviet grains producing lands on and northwest of the island. The steppes beyond the Urals are barren and cold. Clancy’s film famously quipped about sonic refraction north of Denmark. The real burden for the socialists was ice breaking off, what was it, Lithuania? Afghanistan was always for Pakistani access to a first warm weather port on the northern coast of the Indian Ocean. It all makes me wonder what broke ground on CPEC somewhere around the time of the imperial issuance of the pictogram “backwards”. That decree sent some kind of cooperative Imperial Peoples Army marching into the Tibetan plateau where the northern pincer aspect of what seems a Chinese artery through Pakistan began. A door was closed at Marmara. A door was closed in Afghanistan. Tibet has broken.