Geopolitical Risks in the Post-Cold War Era: Make America Great Again Can Be Make the World Great Again

ABSTRACT

This study explores the post-Cold War era by investigating geopolitical risks (GPRs) from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula. Geopolitics is a fleeting reality and is a matter of a few top decision makers while ordinary people catch a glimpse of it by the press. Due to the relative inaccessibility of key information, geopolitics is hard to study even if it is a crucial element to shape our era. To fill the gap, we adopt a copula approach to surmise a joint probability distribution between the GPR in the world and several countries. This method could capture tail dependence. The highest upper tail dependence with the world’s GPR has been that of Israel; as one moves from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period, the increasing cases of upper tail dependence are China, Korea, Russia, and Ukraine while decreasing cases are Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. It implies that the world’s flashpoints might have been shifting from the Middle East to Asia as our eras have gone through the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods. Seemingly self-centered Make America Great Again could be Make the World Great Again. The best is yet to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitical risk
• post-Cold War
• copula
• upper-tail dependence

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C46
• F51
• F52

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the trade measures, see https://shenglufashion.com/timeline-of-trade-policy-in-the-trump-administration.