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I have been accused of thinking like an old Cold warrior. I don’t think that’s true. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and U.S. influence in Europe has declined. Whatever will come next will not be the Cold War. What I do not expect this to be is a region of perpetual peace. It has never been that before. It will not be that in the future. I want to understand the pattern of conflict that will occur in the future. But for that we need to begin in the past, not with the Cold War, but with World War I.

he Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, the Russian empire was replaced by the Soviet Union, and the German empire was overthrown and replaced by a republic.

The Carpathian Mountains form a rough boundary between the Russians and the rest of Europe from Slovakia to the south.

The northern part of Europe is dominated by a vast plain stretching from France to Moscow.

Following World War I, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign nation.

Pilsudski is an interesting figure

The Russians defeated the Ukrainians and turned on Poland. Pilsudski defeated them.

His vision was something called the Intermarium — an alliance of the nations between the seas built around Poland and including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states.

Pilsudski’s Intermarium makes a kind of logical if not historical sense. It is not historical because this borderland has always been the battleground for others. It has never formed together to determine its fate.

As always, the Intermarium is caught between Russia and Europe.

the entire question of the price and value of the European Union became a central issue in Germany.

For Poland, the specter of a German-Russian entente is a historical nightmare. The last time this happened, in 1939, Poland was torn apart and lost its sovereignty for 50 years.

The question in Ukraine is whether their attempt to achieve complete independence is over, to be replaced by some informal but iron bond to Russia

The area east of the Dniester, Transdniestria, promptly seceded from Moldova

Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Its primary export is wine, sent mostly to Russia. The Russians have taken to blocking the export of wine for “health reasons.” I think the health issue is geopolitical and not biological.

Romania is oriented toward the European Union but is one of the many countries in the union that may not really belong there.

as its power increases in the Balkans, Turkey will be one of the forces that countries like Romania will have to face.

It is a theory that argues that the post-Cold War world is ending. Russia is re-emerging in a historically recognizable form. Germany is just beginning the process of redefining itself in Europe, and the EU’s weaknesses have become manifest. Turkey has already taken the first steps toward becoming a regional power. We are at the beginning of a period in which these forces play themselves out.

First, Turkey is deeply divided

Second, the Islamism of the Turkish government cannot possibly be compared to that of Saudi Arabia

This is not a time of clear strategic thinking in Washington. I find it irritating to go there, since they regard my views as alarmist and extreme while I find their views outmoded and simplistic.

I regard NATO as a bureaucracy overseeing an alliance whose mission was accomplished 20 years ago.

The Intermarium countries remain infatuated with the European Union and NATO, but the infatuation is declining. The year 2008 and Germany’s indifference to these countries was not pleasant, and they are learning that NATO is history.

Washington still thinks of Russia as the failed state of the 1990s. It simply doesn’t take it seriously. It thinks of the European Union as having gone over a speed bump from which it will recover. But mostly, Washington thinks about Afghanistan. For completely understandable reasons, Afghanistan sucks up the bandwidth of Washington, allowing the rest of the world to maneuver as it wishes.

Nature is the most predictable thing of all, since it lacks will and cannot make choices. Scientists who like to talk about the “hard sciences” actually have it easy.

First, human beings have choices as individuals. Second, and this is the most important thing, we are ourselves human. Our own wishes and prejudices inevitably color our view of how things will evolve.

By being stupid we mean that rather than leaping toward highly sophisticated concepts and principles, we should begin by noting the obvious.

they are born and then they die

Human beings are born incapable of caring for themselves

Humans protect themselves and care for their young by forming families

Who should you ally with and where would you find them?

The idea that romantic love should pre-empt the love of one’s own introduces a radical new dynamic to history, in which the individual and choice supersede community and obligation.

Which love is prior? Is it the love to which you are born — your family, your religion, your tradition — the love of one’s own? Or is it the acquired love, the one you have chosen because it pleases you as an individual?

one married out of love for one’s parents, and out of the sense of duty that grew out of that love.

Romantic love is acquired love.

This notion is embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, which elevates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over obligation.

Ideology is an acquired value. No child can be a Jeffersonian or a Stalinist. That can only be chosen after the age of reason, along with romantically acquired spouses.

Tradition is superseded by reason and the old regime superseded by artificially constructed regimes forged in revolution.

For modern regimes, birth is an accident that gives no one authority.

In post-revolutionary society, you may know who you were but that in no way determined who you would become.

This leads us to nationalism — or, more broadly, love and obligation to the community to which you were born, be it a small band of nomads or a vast nation-state.

Modern liberalism and socialism do not know what to do with nationalism.

For economists, self-interest is a natural impulse. But if it is a natural impulse, it is an odd one, for one can see widespread examples of human beings who do not practice it. Consider the tension between the idea that the United States was created for the purpose of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the decision of a soldier to go to war and even willingly give his life.

Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of one’s own makes a great deal of sense. But the modern understanding of man has difficulty dealing with this idea.

Europe had been ruled by dynasties that governed nations by right of birth. Breaking those regimes was the goal of Europe’s revolutionaries.

In the case of the American founders, having acted on behalf of national self-determination, they created a Bill of Rights and hoped that history would sort through the contradiction between the nation, the state and the individual.

Wherever one chooses to go, whatever identity one chooses to claim, in the end, you cannot escape from who you are.

Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.

Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.

Dinosaurs are one of the best groups for studying the potential effects of paleogeographic changes on evolution because dinosaurs were large animals that were capable of traversing continent scale-distances. For example, early in the Mesozoic Era, when the Earth's continental landmasses were connected, dinosaur faunas worldwide are generally similar. Carnivorous dinosaurs from North America, for example, bear striking resemblance to those from southern Africa, and herbivorous dinosaurs from China resemble those from South America. Later in the Mesozoic Era, however, this is not the case. Dinosaur faunas worldwide became more distinctive from one another due to evolutionary changes and extinction associated with increased isolation.

Snakes first appear in the fossil record 100 million years ago, but most Mesozoic snake fossils consist of isolated vertebrae—complete skeletons are extraordinarily rare and limited to a handful of specimens collected from Patagonia, the Levant, and southern Europe.

STRATFOR has always doubted the euro would last. Having the same currency and monetary policy for rich, technocratic, capital-intensive economies like Germany as for poor, agrarian/manufacturing economies like Spain always seemed like asking for problems.

The resulting government debt load in Greece — which now exceeds annual Greek gross domestic product — will probably result in either a default (triggered by efforts to maintain such programs) or a social revolution (triggered by an effort to cut such programs). It is entirely possible that both will happen.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble on March 13 in which he essentially said that if Greece, or any other eurozone member, could not right their finances, they should be ejected from the eurozone. This really got our attention.

Back-of-the-envelope math indicates that in the past decade, Germany has gained roughly a 25 percent cost advantage over Club Med.

The implications of this are difficult to overstate. If the euro is essentially gutting the European — and again to a greater extent the Club Med — economic base, then Germany is achieving by stealth what it failed to achieve in the past thousand years of intra-European struggles.

It is not so much that STRATFOR now sees the euro as workable in the long run — we still don’t — it’s more that our assessment of the euro is shifting from the belief that it was a straightjacket for Germany to the belief that it is Germany’s springboard.

But this was not the “union” the rest of Europe signed up for — it is the Mitteleuropa that the rest of Europe will remember well.

otherwise "foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions."

GURGAON, India

In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.

Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.

Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”

Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.

From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.

The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.

“We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”

Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.

Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.

Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.

“The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”

“Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.

Prague has always had a little more room to maneuver when it came to the BMD system. It is not positioned on the borders with a resurgent Russia nor would any of its buffer states such as Ukraine and Belarus.

Unlike Poland and Romania, which had missile components of the new BMD system, Prague was left with an early warning system, which really constituted nothing more than a room full of computers

Moscow will be able to use the SCO statement to show that it’s not just Russia that has problems with the U.S. plans for BMD in Europe but also for another very important security player in the world - China.

it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.

The idea of an AI singularity

if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.

at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down

My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.

We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.

engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems

Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.

without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.

if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.

we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology

We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.

another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.

Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide

Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it

. In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years

Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies

Finally, representative democracy scales up badly

Nor are governments as important as they used to be.

the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.

we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.

The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.

Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.

a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa

In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.

by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.

It’s a normative projection

I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.

And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.

a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar

Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted

Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions

He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.

But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves

Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings

But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks

Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.

The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.

For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.

to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house

The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.

We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.

the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication

funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.

These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.

This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian

the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?

Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.

wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.

One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.

the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.

Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.

Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.

The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.

whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.

at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.

In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.

full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.

Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.

Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.

we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.

In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.

With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.

the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.

Some of the countries on Russia's periphery do not want to be dominated by her. Russia, in spite of some strengths, is inherently weak and does not require U.S. exertion

Putin is now in a position where, in order to retain with confidence his domestic authority, he must act decisively to reverse the outcome. The problem is there is no single decisive action that would reverse events.

One is simply to accept the reversal, which I would argue that he cannot do. The second is to take action in places where he might achieve rapid diplomatic and political victories against the West -- the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus -- while encouraging Ukraine's government to collapse into gridlock and developing bilateral relations along the Estonia-Azerbaijan line.

The United States has been developing, almost by default, a strategy not of disengagement but of indirect engagement. Between 1989 and 2008, the U.S. strategy has been the use of U.S. troops as the default for dealing with foreign issues. From Panama to Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States followed a policy of direct and early involvement of U.S. military forces.

Because the current Russian Federation is much weaker than the Soviet Union was at its height and because the general geographic principle in the region remains the same, a somewhat analogous balance of power strategy is likely to emerge after the events in Ukraine.

The coalescence of this strategy is a development I forecast in two books, The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years, as a concept I called the Intermarium. The Intermarium was a plan pursued after World War I by Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski for a federation, under Poland's aegis, of Central and Eastern European countries. What is now emerging is not the Intermarium, but it is close. And it is now transforming from an abstract forecast to a concrete, if still emergent, reality.

First, Ukraine is a large country, and the force required to protect it would outstrip U.S. capabilities.

Second, supplying such a force would require a logistics system that does not exist and would take a long time to build.

Finally, such an intervention would be inconceivable without a strong alliance system extending to the West and around the Black Sea.

If the United States chooses to confront Russia with a military component, it must be on a stable perimeter and on as broad a front as possible to extend Russian resources and decrease the probability of Russian attack at any one point out of fear of retaliation elsewhere.

The problem is that NATO is not a functional alliance. It was designed to fight the Cold War on a line far to the west of the current line. More important, there was unity on the principle that the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to Western Europe. 

That consensus is no longer there. Different countries have different perceptions of Russia and different concerns. For many, a replay of the Cold War, even in the face of Russian actions in Ukraine, is worse than accommodation.

The countries that were at risk from 1945 to 1989 are not the same as those at risk today. Many of these countries were part of the Soviet Union then, and the rest were Soviet satellites.

The rest of Europe is not in jeopardy, and these countries are not prepared to commit financial and military efforts to a problem they believe can be managed with little risk to them.

the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus are areas where the Russians could seek to compensate for their defeat. Because of this, and also because of their intrinsic importance, Poland, Romania and Azerbaijan must be the posts around which this alliance is built.

. Poland is eager for a closer military relationship with the United States, as its national strategy has long been based on third-power guarantees against aggressors.

In Western hands, Moldova threatens Odessa, Ukraine's major port also used by Russia on the Black Sea. In Russian hands, Moldova threatens Bucharest.

Should Dagestan and Chechnya destabilize, Azerbaijan -- which is Islamic and majority Shiite but secular -- would become critical for limiting the regional spread of jihadists.

Azerbaijan also would support the alliance's position in the Black Sea by supporting Georgia

To the southwest, the very pro-Russian Armenia -- which has a Russian troop presence and a long-term treaty with Moscow -- could escalate tensions with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan serves a more strategic purpose. Most of the countries in the alliance are heavy importers of Russian energy

The key to the pipeline will be Turkey's willingness to permit transit. I have not included Turkey as a member of this alliance.

I view Turkey in this alliance structure as France in the Cold War. It was aligned yet independent, militarily self-sufficient yet dependent on the effective functioning of others.

This is not an offensive force but a force designed to deter Russian expansion.

In each case, the willingness of the United States to supply these weapons, for cash or credit as the situation requires, will strengthen pro-U.S. political forces in each country and create a wall behind which Western investment can take place.

There are those who would criticize this alliance for including members who do not share all the democratic values of the U.S. State Department. This may be true. It is also true that during the Cold War the United States was allied with the Shah's Iran, Turkey and Greece under dictatorship and Mao's China after 1971.

The balance of power strategy allows the United States to use the natural inclination of allies to bolster its own position and take various steps, of which military intervention is the last, not the first.

Weak and insecure states with temporary advantages are dangerous. The United States has an interest in acting early because early action is cheaper than acting in the last extremity. This is a case of anti-air missiles, attack helicopters, communications systems and training, among other things.

These are things the United States has in abundance. It is not a case of deploying divisions, of which it has few.