Glossary
Plain-language definitions for terms you'll encounter in geopolitics and international economics.
Chokepoint
A narrow maritime or land passage through which a high share of global trade or energy flows must transit. The Strait of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, Suez Canal, Malacca Strait, and Panama Canal are the primary maritime chokepoints; their disruption has outsized effects.
Comparable treatment principle
A core principle of the Paris Club's sovereign debt restructuring framework: a debtor government's restructuring offer to Paris Club creditors must be matched, in present-value terms, by the offers made to non-Paris-Club creditors (commercial bondholders, Chinese policy banks, bilateral lenders outside the club). The principle is designed to prevent free-riding — where one creditor group preserves its claim while others take haircuts. In practice, applying comparable treatment to Chinese policy-bank loans has been a structural friction in the G20 Common Framework restructurings of Zambia, Ghana, and other distressed African sovereigns. Chinese creditors prefer case-by-case bilateral negotiation; Paris Club creditors prefer collective application of the principle. The dispute is procedural in form, distributive in substance.
Containment doctrine
A strategy of constraining a rival power's expansion by sustained diplomatic, economic, and military pressure short of direct war. George Kennan, writing as 'X' in *Foreign Affairs* in July 1947, argued that Soviet power would expand wherever it met no firm resistance, and that a patient policy of 'long-term, vigilant containment' would eventually force the Soviet system to mellow or break under its own contradictions. The doctrine shaped four decades of US grand strategy through NATO, alliance networks in Asia, the Marshall Plan, and forward-deployed forces. Kennan himself spent much of the rest of his life arguing that containment had been militarised in ways he never intended. The framework returned in the 2010s applied to China — first as 'pivot' or 'rebalance' under Obama, then as overt strategic competition under Trump and Biden. The Quad, AUKUS, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework are best read as alliance architecture for a containment-adjacent posture, even when officials avoid the word. Indo-Pacific analyses on this site track that framing without endorsing it.
Correspondent banking
An arrangement where one bank (the respondent) holds an account at another bank (the correspondent) to access services in a market it doesn't directly operate in. Most cross-border payments rely on correspondent banking, which is why loss of correspondent access from major banks effectively excludes a country from global finance.
Current account
The broadest measure of a country's trade with the rest of the world — covering goods, services, primary income (e.g. investment returns), and secondary income (e.g. remittances). A current account surplus means a country exports more value than it imports.
Current account surplus
A positive balance on the broadest measure of a country's external transactions — exports of goods, services, and net investment income exceeding imports plus net transfers. China, Germany, Norway, and the Gulf petrostates have historically run large current account surpluses, accumulating foreign assets. The mirror image is the current account deficit, which the United States has run continuously since the late 1970s. Persistent surpluses imply persistent capital outflows; persistent deficits imply persistent capital inflows. The macroeconomic identity is mechanical — the savings-investment balance and the current account balance are two views of the same accounting.