"This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three.
Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating.
What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.
The planetary stakes of the new global game.
What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?
Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia.
The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest & the E.U. is already the world’s largest aid donor.
Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros.
Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream.
Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.
A Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged.
Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.
China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit.
The Big Three are the ultimate “Frenemies.” Globalization is the weapon of choice.
Second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics.
All this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of them at the same time.
Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it’s just a matter of time.
Turkey, too, is a totemic second-world prize advancing through crucial moments of geopolitical truth.
Roads are the pathways to power.
Kazakhstan considers itself a “strategic partner” of just about everyone, but tell that to the Big Three, who bribe government officials to cancel the others’ contracts and spy on one another through contract workers — all in the name of preventing the others from gaining mastery over the fabled heartland of Eurasian power.
Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.
“Creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown but not the white.”
With or without America, Asia is shaping the world’s destiny — and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process.
Despite the “mirage of immortality” that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.
The Anti-Imperial Belt: The new multicolor map of influence — a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence — is a very fuzzy read. No more “They’re with us”
The web of globalization now has three spiders.
Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind.
Europe and China all but personify business-government collusion."
“The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order” by Parag Khanna
BBC - The Interview: Parag Khanna talks to Carrie Gracie
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