Nature of state interests. Since countries with expanding interests also have strong incentives to acquire or increase their national power, discerning a state’s interests would also provide a way to assess the motivating effects of external pressures. The nature and extent of a country’s interest could be judged along the following lines: its geographic location and the extent of its defensive perimeter, with the location identifying its geopolitical value and its defensive perimeter indicating both the areas it must actively defend and those it has an interest in; the extent of its strategic natural resources (and possibly its composition of trade), these variables indicating whether it has resources that may be coveted by others as well as the extent of its external dependency; and the extent of and commitment to its natural diaspora or dispersion of its people, indicating the extent of the critical political commitments it may have to
service.