Caucausus Geopolitics
.While the US is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia is asserting itself, disrupting American plans for energy transport and control around the Caspian Sea . Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bush Administration isn’t all that good at effective strategy, as Michael Klare discusses in TomDispatch.
It seems that Klare’s analysis bears out the obvious: that a blind belief in your own supreme power doesn’t do you a lot of good when you have to contend with real adversaries. The American establishment don’t seem to have grasped that fully yet, although it must be said that this is in part because they’ve managed to serve their own domestic/local interests rather well despite this lack of understanding—a pattern that might be the real key to future American decline. (Which decline isn’t necessarily to be lamented, although I find it dubious that it’ll actually be good for many people due to the powers likely to step into any gaps that open up—in other words, major historical and geopolitical trends aren’t going to bring about a better world, only committed activism and grassroots democracy have much of a shot at that.)