I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia
Well, in practical terms "setting up" a thalassocracy in such places would have to start with landing a pretty sizeable army on the shore and fighting it out with the locals. Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan (and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...).
"Nation-building" in the Middle East and environs has been a pretty miserable failure so far.
To be clear, I am definitely not advocating large scale military invasion and occupation. The external power would take over a tiny bit of land - say 1000 km2 - to set up a city.
Let's do a quick comparison between Yemen and Singapore:
The point is that Singaporean institutions are vastly more efficient at turning land area (an intrinsically scarce commodity) int...
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