A country lookup includes its land neighbors
The borders field lists neighboring country codes, ready to use in another country lookup.
A country lookup is often the start of a larger question. If you're showing information about the United States and want to let someone explore neighboring countries, you shouldn't have to maintain another list just to connect those pages.
GET /country/US?deep=true includes these fields on a paid plan:
{
"country": "US",
"name": "United States",
"deep": { "borders": ["CA", "MX"] }
}
Each entry in deep.borders is a country code you can use directly: /country/CA for Canada, /country/MX for Mexico. Those lookups return the same country response; add ?deep=true for their own neighbor lists.
The field describes land borders. It doesn't include a country just because it's a short flight away or across the water. Japan, for example, returns deep.borders: null.
For a UI, handle that null as "no neighbor list" and skip the links. Don't turn it into an is_island calculation. That would make the field answer a geographical question it wasn't designed to answer.
The country endpoint accepts both two-letter and three-letter country codes. deep.borders consistently gives you the two-letter form.