Tag Archives: geopolitics

With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid a whole lot of attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000 ships a year. With President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un exchanging threats and insults, why would the media bother with something innocuously labeled “Malabar 17”? They should have. Malabar 17...

In the context of the New Great Game in Eurasia, the New Silk Roads, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), integrates all of China’s instruments of national power – political, economic, diplomatic, financial, intellectual and cultural – to shape the 21stcentury geopolitical/geoeconomic order. BRI is the organizing concept of China’s foreign policy for the foreseeable future; the heart of what was conceptualized, even before President Xi Jinping, as China’s “peaceful rise.” The Trump...

Important backgrounder explaining what is really going on with Afghanistan. So, this new Great Game goes on, with wily Vladimir Putin, tweeting Donald Trump, smiling Xi Jinpeng and creepy Narendra Modi all trying to outwit each other, and rope in the other minor players to their side. Sic Semper Tyrannis Tillerson’s Trip & the new Great GameFB Ali At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism,...

As a number of participants (including myself) pointed out, compared with these existential threats to existing states, the issues currently dividing Russia and the West are likely to seem to the historians of the future (if there are any) so minor as to be almost insignificant. One hundred years from now, our descendants are likely to look back on disputes over Crimea, the Donbas and Syria with the same combination of incomprehension and contempt with which we regard the European elites...

How strategists think.Global GuerrillasDelaying Chinese Global Dominance John Robb

Backgrounder RussiaFeedRussia’s FASCINATING new oil geopolitics

In the first part of this essay, I gave my interpretation of the background of the current confrontation in Korea. I argued that, while the past is the mother of the present, it has several fathers. What I remember is not necessarily what you remember; so, in this sense, the present also shapes or reshapes the past.  In my experience as a policy planner, I found that only by taking note of the perception of events as they are differently held by the participants could one understand or...

Geopolitics and geostrategy.Russia InsiderWhy Jihadism Won’t Be Allowed to Die Pepe Escobar

Donald Trump has chided China for failing to take responsibility for its dangerous neighbor. But America's president should be careful what he tweets for: If China launched a military invasion of North Korea, it could work – and China would gain greater strategic parity with the US in East Asia. Project SyndicateA ‘China First’ Strategy for North Korea Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist

This is an interesting analysis from the POV of globalization, the global economy, geopolitics, geostrategy and political economy.  I am not endorsing the analysis itself, although it is plausible and makes many good points such as the geopolitical conflict between sea-power or thalassocracy, and land-power or tellurocracy.  While the specifics are interesting, the method of analysis is much more significant. The chief reason I am posting it is to show how developing an entire...