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in these two exercises in practical geopolitical reasoning, liesthe logic of the global war on terror and the imperial aspirations of the Bushadministration to effectively extend the remit of Empire by forc

the events of 11 September have set in motiona rethinking of the military priorities in Washington. While it is too soon toknow how this reorganisation of the American military will play out, andwhether any of it will change the fortunes of the occupations in Iraq orAfghanistan, what is key to Barnett’s whole discussion is the reinterpretationof the geopolitical map, a redrawing of the spatial categories and the inven-tion of a whole new region of potential dangers where a third of the world’spopulation lives outside the reach of globalisation

the assertion that America is a nation at war and there-fore military actions are an integral part of foreign policy initiatives. The worldis divided into commands which cover the whole globe and increasingly pro-vide the infrastructural capacity to move combat forces rapidly from one partof the globe to another.

The bifurcation of the world into wild and tame, civilised and barbar-ian, integrated and non-integrated underlies all three of the geopoliticalvisions discussed here

his imperial vision, and in Kaplan’s writing, at least, it isunapologetically an imperial vision, with all the moral codes of missionaryzeal that come with patrolling the uncivilised landscapes of the periphery,comes with the premise of civilisation’s moral and technological superiority

strategies of regional economic integration are understood as an importantkey to providing economic prosperity that should in turn undercut theappeal of terrorist violence

The Westphalian political imaginary of separate competing territorial states is a spatial arrangement singularly unsuited to the collective tasks ahead, but it is the institutional context within which we have to act.

Israel’s two gas export deals — with Egypt and Jordan — were signed with the two Arab countries with which the Jewish state already had peace treaties, and even then relations are still fraught at times. Meanwhile, hopes that natural gas pipelines and projects could soothe years of tensions between Israel and Turkey have apparently evaporated.

“Politics drives energy relations, not vice versa,”

Lebanon’s decision this month to award an exploration concession to three international firms — France’s Total, Italy’s Eni, and Russia’s Novatek — to drill in a promising block off the Lebanese coast has ignited fresh tensions between Beirut and Jerusalem.

Mediation was at the top of the agenda during Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent visit to Lebanon, as it has been for U.S. officials since 2012, but with little success. A senior U.S. diplomat tried again Wednesday but found little Lebanese appetite for U.S. proposals. While Israel wants continued U.S. mediation in the spat, Lebanon and especially Hezbollah see Washington as too pro-Israel to play that role, especially after the Donald Trump administration’s controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the United States is “not an honest broker.”

This month — as it did in 2014 — a Turkish ship intercepted a drilling vessel in Cypriot waters; Ankara, which recognizes the Turkish north of the divided island, refuses to cede those waters to Greek Cyprus and angrily warned it could take further action if development continues. The Turkish Foreign Ministry said it is “determined to take the necessary steps” to support the northern half of the island in its dispute with Greek Cypriots, who Ankara said are “irresponsibly jeopardizing the security and stability of the Eastern Mediterranean region.”

“Shared interest in [energy resources] might provide an incentive for cooperation among countries of the region that already enjoy more or less good relations,” Sukkarieh says. “But it is equally conceivable that they could fuel rivalries as well, like we are seeing lately with Turkey.”

Exacerbating this danger is the deliberate and accelerating breakdown of the arms control architecture that for decades provided restraint, transparency, and predictability for each side’s conventional and nuclear forces. In their absence, Russia and the West are assuming and planning for worst-case scenarios. The first crack appeared in 2002, when the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed three decades earlier to prevent Washington and Moscow from deploying nationwide defenses against long-range ballistic missiles. Five years later, Russia effectively suspended another landmark agreement, the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, and NATO followed suit. The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty—which banned an entire class of destabilizing nuclear-capable missiles on European territory—has been dealt a likely fatal blow with this year’s decisions by Washington to withdraw from the treaty and by Moscow to suspend implementation of it.

The fate of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is also in doubt, with four Republican U.S. Senators writing to President Donald Trump this past spring asking if he would consider “unsigning” the treaty. The future of the 2010 New START treaty is also unclear

At the same time as checks on existing weapons are falling away, new technologies threaten to further destabilize the military balance. Sophisticated cyberattacks could compromise early warning systems or nuclear command-and-control structures, increasing the risk of false alarms. Prompt-strike forces, including delivery systems that pair conventional or nuclear warheads with a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle or cruise missile, can travel at very high speeds, fly at low altitudes, and maneuver to elude defenses. If deployed, they would decrease a defender’s warning and decision time when under attack, increasing the fear of military planners on both sides that a potential first strike could deliver a decisive advantage to the attacker. Then there is the militarization of outer space, a domain that remains virtually unregulated by agreements or understandings: China, Russia, and, most recently, India have built up their antisatellite capabilities, and Washington is mulling a dedicated space force. 

the absence of dialogue between Russia and the West—in particular, between civilian and military professionals in the defense and foreign ministries. The current disconnect is unprecedented even when compared with the height of the Cold War

The United States and its NATO allies are now stuck in a retaliatory spiral of confrontation with Russia.

transatlantic discord has damaged the perception of NATO as a strong alliance

By virtue of its vast geography, permanent membership in the UN Security Council, rebuilt military, and immense nuclear forces, Russia can disrupt geopolitical currents in areas vital to the interests of the United States, including Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Arctic. Further clashes and crises are not just possible but probable

The fact that Trump and Putin reportedly agreed to a new dialogue on strategic stability and nuclear dangers at a meeting in Helsinki in July 2018 was a step in the right direction. But their inability to follow through—including at the level of civilian and military professionals, who need the green light from their leaders—underlines how dysfunctional relations have become

the United States and Russia could take more specific steps to reduce the likelihood of a new nuclear arms race—of vital importance for international security, particularly in light of the probable demise of the INF treaty. All nations have an interest in seeing the New START treaty fully implemented and extended through 2026, the maximum five-year extension permitted by the treaty.

Today, decision-makers in Washington and Moscow have only a precious few minutes to decide whether a warning of a possible nuclear attack is real and thus whether to retaliate with a nuclear attack of their own. New technologies, especially hypersonic weapons and cyberattacks, threaten to make that decision time even shorter. The fact that Russian troops are deployed, and routinely conduct military exercises, in Russia’s western regions close to NATO’s boundaries, and NATO troops are deployed, and have recently conducted military exercises, close to Russia’s borders further raises fears of a short-warning attack. Such shrinking decision time and heightened anxieties make the risk of a mistake all too real. Leaders in both Washington and Moscow should clearly direct their military leaders to work together on ways to minimize such fears and increase their decision time

leaders in Moscow, London, and Paris could once again become consumed with fears of a short-warning nuclear attack that could decapitate a nation’s leaders and its command and control, which would greatly increase the risk of false warnings.

Exchanging more information about each side’s operations and capabilities could help ensure that prompt-strike systems, such as modern hypersonic missiles, do not further erode strategic stability. This is primarily a U.S.-Russian issue, but with China’s reported development of hypersonic missile capabilities, addressing it will ultimately require broader engagement. It would also help to offer more transparency on nonnuclear prompt-strike systems and commit to segregating these conventional capabilities from nuclear-weapons-related activities or deployments.

Cyberattacks on nuclear facilities, nuclear command-and-control structures, or early warning systems could cause miscalculations or blunders, such as a false warning of a missile attack or a failure to prevent the theft of nuclear materials. As states continue to develop and refine their ability to attack satellites, the United States and Russia could be blinded in the early stages of a conflict.

the understanding, first articulated in 1985 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Affirming this principle was an important building block to ending the Cold War.

some have suggested abandoning U.S.-Russian talks and waiting for new leadership in both countries. That would be a mistake. Dialogue between the two presidents remains essential: only that can create the political space for civilian and military officials in both nations to engage with one another in discussions that could prevent catastrophe

Washington and Moscow are acting as if time is on their side. It is not.

increase intracontinental trade—an area in which Africa lags far behind the other continents.

a new era in which the AU can finally leverage its collective economic clout in its political relationships with the rest of the world. Now is the time for African leaders to take stock of their existing relationships and examine whether they are helping the AU achieve its Agenda 2063 vision, a 50-year strategic plan with goals closely linked to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 that were adopted in 2015.

The 2019 Africa SDG Index finds that “Across the board, African countries perform comparatively well in terms of sustainable production and consumption as well as in climate action … but perform poorly in goals related to human welfare” such as poverty, hunger, and affordable and clean energy.

evidence that EU priorities for African development do not correspond to the continent’s areas of greatest need. The joint institution between the EU and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries for agricultural development ostensibly strives to “advance food security, resilience and inclusive economic growth in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific through innovations in sustainable agriculture,” yet the solutions it envisions would be marginal improvements, not transformational changes

Strengthening the value chains of small and medium-sized agribusinesses is desirable but not optimal, as it reinforces the existing trade dynamic of exporting raw materials to Europe. In sum, EU agricultural development policy is largely a neocolonial enterprise committed to protecting its own agricultural market and producing value-added goods for export; it is a greater vehicle for European soft power and merchant interests than for African capacity-building.

The current architecture through which EU institutions have in recent years provided about $6 billion in annual aid to Africa—its second-largest source of multilateral donations—also stunts African economic integration and divides the continent politically

the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which diverts 73 percent of the European Development Fund toward combating the European migration crisis at its external points of origin

participating in the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group prevents Africa from working with Europe toward African-oriented solutions. Involvement in this top-down, donor-recipient framework deprives Africa of agency and leaves it vulnerable to its patron’s priorities

New European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a symbolically significant trip to AU Headquarters in Addis Ababa a week after taking office in December 2019. She came bearing a $188 million aid package for health programs, electoral systems, environmental policies, and economic development initiatives to buoy her message that the EU is going to be more than just a source of handouts from now on: “The African Union is a partner I count on and I look forward working within the spirit of a true partnership of equals.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because the EU has been deploying this flattering talking point of a “true partnership of equals” for more than a decade.

despite not wanting to talk about migration in Addis Ababa, von der Leyen is continuing the post-Cotonou negotiations that began in 2018—which inject aid conditioned on migration control as a central plank of the relationship between the EU and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific states

The AU and its members have other options. Both China and the United States offer models of development assistance that meet Africa’s development needs better than the European Union’s. The European Development Fund won’t vanish, and slow-growing Europe is ill-positioned to compete with China’s largesse on infrastructure projects.

these two maps capture the paradox of America’s post­-Cold War liberal internationalism. Americans might have seen their ambitions as benign, but many others around the world found them threatening. The result is a strange contradiction whereby organizations like Freedom House and the Open Society Foundations appear to represent a kind of earnest if slightly quixotic idealism in Washington while becoming the subject of countless conspiracy theories abroad. For those who imagined color revolutions as a series of CIA-sponsored plots to spread U.S. influence under the guise of democracy, the Freedom House map was also the Pentagon map; seeing the world painted all one shade was tantamount to the United States conquering it.

Maps have proved particularly popular with people looking for the so-called real fault lines—be they religious, ethnic, or geopolitical—along which the post-Cold War world would inevitably fracture

an equally essentialist view of human society inspired a series of completely contradictory maps imagining what the Middle East’s so-called real borders would look like. Amid the chaos of Iraq’s civil war, some observers began to focus on the fault lines within Huntington’s category of Islamic civilization and concluded that it was, say, the tensions between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds that would ultimately prove insurmountable. In 2013, for example, one widely circulated map from the New York Times showed how Syria and Iraq might end up reconfigured on ethno-sectarian terms as four smaller, seemingly more homogeneous, states.

while the post-Cold War world has indeed remained conflict-prone, the conflicts themselves have not followed the predictions of any one particular pessimist

Risk geopolitics are certainly more fun to read about than the alternative, and they make for sharper and more compelling maps. But they also come at a cost

Not only is China offering aid to virus-hit countries, but it is also touting its success in bringing its own epidemic under control. It has, in effect, rolled extreme public health crackdowns into the broader “Beijing Consensus” or  “China Model” of totalitarian state capitalism that it has been promoting since the advent of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

If the United States and European Union are now in crisis, it is because they failed to act decisively to break the wave when they first knew it knew was coming. But these were failures of policy, not failures of democracy.

Western democracies may ultimately lose the coronavirus propaganda war, but China certainly won’t win it

This helps us to understand why western analysts keep misreading the motivation behind Putin’s actions. His reality is very different from the reality in which these analysts live. His goal is primarily to “recollect Russia’s historical territories” (which specific version of historical Russia he has in mind is for us to rediscover in the next episodes)

another Putin’s favorite that was rumored to be very popular in his close circles a few years ago: “The Third Empire: Russia that Ought to Be” by Michael Yuriev. It’s a utopian fantasy written as a history book from a perspective of a 2054 Latin American narrator. The book describes how 2054 world order was established, and the process has a striking resemblance with contemporary Ukrainian events. It begins with a Recovery period of 2000-12, when the Great Russia starts its resurgence under the rule of Vladimir II the Restorer. Importantly the First Expansion that leads to reunification of significant territory occurs when Eastern and Southern Ukrainian regions rebel against west-organized Orange revolution (supported by western Ukraine). To help the revolting Ukrainians (that want to rejoin Russia) Vladimir II offers to include their Eastern territories into Russia. He then passes a referendum on those territories, and replaces the Russian Federation with the Russian Union (refer to the Custom Union) that also includes Belarus, Prednestrovie, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia

Surveys show that 88 percent of Kiev’s Euromaidan participants came from outside of the capital. Of those only half originated from the country’s western regions, while the other half came from the central and eastern Ukraine. Specifically as many as one fifth (20 percent) of protesters came from the eastern regions alone

country-level data is also against the Ukrainian cultural divide concept. A survey from the Razumkov Center, shows that as of late December 2013 an absolute majority of the population in both the Center (two thirds) and West (80 percent) of Ukraine supported the Euromaidan; this is in contrast to about 20-30 percent in the East and South. However, the share of population that did not express support for the Euromaidan protests remained undecided regarding the alternative option: not supporting the Maidan did not automatically equal supporting the Russian vector or Yanukovych

the preponderance of pro-Russia oriented media in the Russian-speaking East

these media actively emphasized the cultural divide. If anything, the notorious divide exists primarily within Eastern Ukraine alone

“Human beings can never get rid of the interference of hormones or glucose.”

“It would not even consider the moral factors that conflict with strategic goals,”

“If one side of the strategic game has artificial intelligence technology, and the other side does not, then this kind of strategic game is almost a one-way, transparent confrontation,” he said. “The actors lacking the assistance of AI will be at an absolute disadvantage in many aspects such as risk judgment, strategy selection, decision making and execution efficiency, and decision-making reliability,” he said.

“The entire strategic game structure will be completely out of balance.”

“AI can think many steps ahead of a human. It can think deeply in many possible scenarios and come up with the best strategy,”

A US Department of State spokesman said the agency had “many technological tools” to help it make decisions. There was, however, no specific information on AI that could be shared with the public,

The system, also known as geopolitical environment simulation and prediction platform, was used to vet “nearly all foreign investment projects” in recent years

One challenge to the development of AI policymaker is data sharing among Chinese government agencies. The foreign ministry, for instance, had been unable to get some data sets it needed because of administrative barriers

China is aggressively pushing AI into many sectors. The government is building a nationwide surveillance system capable of identifying any citizen by face within seconds. Research is also under way to introduce AI in nuclear submarines to help commanders making faster, more accurate decision in battle.

“AI can help us get more prepared for unexpected events. It can help find a scientific, rigorous solution within a short time.

By directly acquiring mines, accumulating equity stakes in natural-resource companies, making long-term agreements to buy mines’ current or future production (known as “off-take agreements”), and investing in new projects under development, Chinese firms traded much-needed capital for outright control or influence over large shares of the global production of these resources. Despite China’s slowing growth and a major pullback in its foreign direct investment in other sectors, the government has maintained robust financial support for resource acquisition; mergers and acquisitions in metals and chemicals hit a record high in 2018.

China lacks significant reserves of three resources vital to its tech ambitions: cobalt, platinum-group metals, and lithium. It has successfully employed two strategies to secure control of them. One is driven by China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which use development finance and infrastructure investment to embed themselves in higher-risk countries, establishing close ties with government leaders. The second is investment by state-linked private firms in market-based economies. Both strategies have shown agility and an ability to effectively adapt to local circumstances to achieve the same end.

Chile is home to 57 percent of the world’s known lithium reserves, the world’s largest known concentration, and SQM controls roughly half the country’s production

DRC is home to nearly two-thirds of the world’s cobalt production and half of its known reserves. Those resources are the prime target of investors for the booming battery industry. Over a decade of steady engagement, China has staked out a dominant position by developing strong political ties and investing in production assets and related infrastructure

China’s SOEs and private firms have made at least eight major equity and off-take plays in platinum-group metals in the Bushveld Complex. Such investments in South Africa’s highly concentrated and strategic resource deposits have helped make metals the country’s leading source of export growth, with nearly 50 percent of its metal exports going to China—tying South Africa’s economic welfare directly to Chinese investment.

the three countries where nearly 90 percent of global lithium production and more than three-quarters of the world’s known lithium reserves are located: Chile, Argentina, and Australia. In just six years, China has come to dominate the global market: More than 59 percent of the world’s lithium resources are now under its control or influence

China now owns or has influence over half of the DRC’s cobalt production, and has a massive stake in its mining industry. Six months ahead of the presidential elections, the event also sent a strong message to candidates about China’s deep investment in copper and cobalt mining—which constitutes 80 percent of the DRC’s export revenue and thousands of jobs—and its capacity to influence the future of the DRC’s economy

Natural resources are abundant in China; it is the No. 1 producer and processor of at least ten critical minerals and metals that are essential to high-tech industries and upon which China’s commercial and strategic competitors depend. To reinforce its strength, Chinese firms are acquiring mines and output from the next-largest producers and reserves, giving China both an economic edge in the next high-tech industrial revolution and increasing geopolitical power.

In a cash-strapped industry, Chinese firms are financing mine expansion and new development in exchange for a guaranteed supply of lithium in both mature and emerging markets. In Argentina, where President Mauricio Macri is eliminating mineral export taxes, reducing corporate tax rates, and allowing profit repatriation, China is establishing a dominant position in the nascent sector with “streaming deals,” which provide development capital in exchange for future lithium yields to help projects get off the ground. Chinese firms, led by Ganfeng, have stakes in 41 percent of the country’s major planned projects that account for 37 percent of Argentina’s reserves. This raw-material strategy is already coming to fruition: Lithium export volumes from Argentina to China rose nearly fourfold from 2015 to 2017, and China has secured access to the country's lithium for the longer term.

This same strategy, combined with asset acquisition, has also been successful in Australia, whose proximity to China, significant lithium reserves, and broad political support for mining investment have attracted Chinese investment. Tianqi and Ganfeng have established stakes in 91 percent of the lithium mining projects underway and 75 percent of the country’s reserves, including some of the world’s largest.

Though the final agreement included restrictions on Tianqi’s board and committee participation and its access to SQM’s sensitive data, Tianqi’s equity position still confers considerable influence over SQM.

Perhaps the best-known example both of China’s natural-resource dominance and its willingness to exploit it is rare-earth elements, a group of 17 elements that (despite their name) are commonly found, but rarely in concentrations that can be economically extracted. They are important materials for the defense, aerospace, electronics, and renewable energy industries. Over the past two decades China has produced more than 80 percent of the world’s production of rare-earth elements and processed chemicals. In 2010 it cut off exports to Japan amid rising tensions over the East China Sea, and the following year it imposed export quotas that threw governments and manufacturers into a panic. But with the exception of Japan, the attention to this critical vulnerability was short-lived, and little action was taken by other countries reliant on imports to diversify their resources or develop minerals action plans of their own.

China declared rare-earth elements a strategic resource in 1990 and prohibited foreign investment in the sector. Six state-owned enterprises control the industry, and the government cut production quotas in 2018 by 36 percent. With global demand for rare-earth elements projected at a compound average growth rate of more than 17 percent to 2025, a supply crunch is likely approaching—and China is already securing other nations’ supplies

While Russia strictly limits foreign participation in rare-earth element development, Chinese firms have accumulated off-take agreements and stakes in rare-earth element mines in Australia and Brazil

in 2017, China’s Shenghe Resources and two U.S. private equity firms acquired the sole U.S. and North American rare-earth element producer and processor, Molycorp, and its idled mining operations at Mountain Pass, California.

In 2016, China’s Yellow Dragon Holdings Ltd. co-invested with Bushveld Minerals, the primary vanadium developer in South Africa’s massive Bushveld Complex, to acquire Strategic Minerals, which owned the Vametco vanadium mine and plant. Yellow Dragon subsequently increased its investment in Bushveld Minerals and has become the fifth-largest shareholder. The holdings deepen China’s influence over South Africa’s vanadium resources and its role in the country’s emerging high-tech sector

China’s position is even stronger in graphite, a crystalline form of the element carbon whose high conductivity makes it a major component in electrodes, batteries, and solar panels, as well as industrial products such as steel and composites. For the last 20 years, China has been the leading global supplier of graphite, representing nearly 70 percent of the world’s production in 2018 and 24 percent of its reserves. While synthetic graphite, which is produced from petroleum coke, is an alternative, unfavorable economics constrain its use

New projects are concentrated in Mozambique, where the world’s largest graphite mine and fourth-largest known reserves are located. Already, Chinese firms have secured off-take agreements with the three major developers in Mozambique for the majority of their graphite production, and they are financing new development.

Japan is 90 percent reliant on China for its graphite

This resource consolidation could determine whether China is able to overcome the last major hurdle to achieving its ambitions: a competitive semiconductor industry.

Semiconductors can be pure elements or compounds and altered with impurities to improve their conductivity. Several materials are now being used to improve speed and performance, including rare-earth elements, graphite, indium, gallium, tantalum, and cadmium. China is the dominant producer of five out of the six, controls more than 75 percent of the world’s supply of three, and is consolidating control over them all

Should China succeed technologically, its capacity to scale production and flood markets (as it has already done with solar panels and wind turbines) has serious implications not only for leading semiconductor producers, but also for national security, if Chinese-manufactured chips are embedded in the devices upon which our data-driven lives, our economies, and our defense systems increasingly depend. While government and industry officials have started to restrict semiconductor sales and scrutinize Chinese acquisition of technology firms—e.g., the United States’ temporary ban on selling semiconductors to ZTE, or the recent flare-up over Huawei —such moves are strengthening China’s resolve to develop its domestic industry. More attention should be paid to its efforts to consolidate critical raw materials and the computing power they confer.

In April, U.S. government officials announced plans to meet with lithium industry leaders and automakers with the intention of developing a national electric-vehicle supply chain strategy. It is a start.