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China’s first intelligence advocate was military theorist Sun Tzu who, in his sixth century B.C. classic The Art of War, emphasized the importance of gathering timely and accurate intelligence in order to win battles.

Since the time of Sun Tzu, perhaps the most successful Chinese spy has been the legendary Larry Wu-Tai Chin (Jin Wudai), an American national of Chinese descent who began his career as a U.S. Army translator and was later recruited by the MSS while working in a liaison office in Fuzhou, China, during the Korean War.

Chin had the same handler for 30 years, which means both agent and case officer had a high level of experience and the ability to keep all knowledge of the operation within narrow channels of the MSS. And the Chinese government never acted on Chin’s intelligence in a way that would reveal his existence.

(click here to enlarge image) Today, China’s intelligence bureaucracy is just that — a vast array of intelligence agencies, military departments, police bureaus, party organs, research institutions and media outlets.

Policymakers of the time realized that the prosecution of the war had suspended the depression, but few were confident that the war had actually ended the conditions that made the depression possible.

In fact, we are still using Bretton Woods, and while nothing that has been discussed to this point is wrong exactly, it is only part of the story.

Think back to July 1944. The Normandy invasion was in its first month. The United Kingdom served as the staging ground, but with London exhausted, its military commitment to the operation was modest.

The shape of the Cold War was already beginning to unfold. Between the United States and the Soviet Union, the rest of the modern world — namely, Europe — was going to either experience Soviet occupation or become a U.S. protectorate.

The Continental states — and even the United Kingdom — were not simply economically spent and indebted but were, to be perfectly blunt, destitute.

For the United States, the issue was one of seizing a historic opportunity.

The United States entered World War II late and the war did not occur on U.S. soil. So — uniquely among all the world’s major powers of the day — U.S. infrastructure and industrial capacity would emerge from the war larger (far, far larger) than when it entered.

The United States had to have not just the participation of the Western Europeans in holding back the Soviet tide, it needed the Europeans to defer to American political and military demands — and to do so willingly. Considering the desperation and destitution of the Europeans, and the unprecedented and unparalleled U.S. economic strength, economic carrots were the obvious way to go.

The United States would allow Europe near tariff-free access to its markets, and turn a blind eye to Europe’s own tariffs so long as they did not become too egregious — something that at least in part flew in the face of the Great Depression’s lessons.

The “free world” alliance would not consist of a series of equal states. Instead, it would consist of the United States and everyone else.

When loans to fund Western Europe’s redevelopment failed to stimulate growth, those loans became grants, aka the Marshall Plan.

And fast-forwarding to when the world went off of the gold standard and Bretton Woods supposedly died, gold was actually replaced by the U.S. dollar. Far from dying, the political/military understanding that underpinned Bretton Woods had only become more entrenched.

a crisis in the U.S. economy becomes global.

Relying on a currency that is not in the hands of a sovereign taxing power, but dependent on the political will of (so far) 15 countries with very different interests, does not make for a reliable reserve currency.

The French in particular look at the current crisis as the result of a failure in the U.S. regulatory system.

The Bretton Woods institutions — specifically the IMF, which is supposed to serve the role of financial lighthouse and crisis manager — proved irrelevant to the problems the world is currently passing through.

Fundamentally, the Europeans are not simply hoping to modernize Bretton Woods, but instead to Europeanize the American financial markets. This is ultimately not a financial question, but a political one.

the United States was not actively involved in supporting Israel prior to 1967, yet anti-Americanism in the Arab world was rampant. The Arabs might have blamed the United States for Israel, but there was little empirical basis for this claim.

Note that the United States is interested in maintaining the balance of power. This means that the U.S. interest is in a stable set of relations, with no one power becoming excessively powerful and therefore unmanageable by the United States.

The United States, given its overwhelming challenges, is neither interested in Israel’s desire to reshape its region, nor can it tolerate any more risk deriving from Israel’s actions. However small the risks might be, the United States is maxed out on risk.

It may not be the most persuasive threat, but the fact is that Israel cannot afford any threat from the United States, such as an end to the intense U.S.-Israeli bilateral relationship. While this relationship might not be essential to Israel at the moment, it is one of the foundations of Israeli grand strategy in the long run. Just as the United States cannot afford any more instability in the region at the moment, so Israel cannot afford any threat, however remote, to its relationship with the United States.

Second, it divided the Ottoman province of Syria on a line from the Mediterranean Sea east through Mount Hermon.

The British named the area to the west of the Jordan River after the Ottoman administrative district of Filistina, which turned into Palestine on the English tongue.

The British had promised postwar power to both. It gave the victorious Sauds the right to rule Arabia -- hence Saudi Arabia. The other tribe, the Hashemites, had already been given the newly invented Iraqi monarchy and, outside of Arabia

The most important interest, the oil in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, was protected from the upheaval in their periphery as Turkey and Persia were undergoing upheaval. This gave the Europeans what they wanted.

What it did not do was create a framework that made a great deal of sense of the Arabs living in this region.

The Europeans used the concept of the nation-state to express divisions between "us" and "them." To the Arabs, this was an alien framework, which to this day still competes with religious and tribal identities.

It was Lebanon that came apart first. Lebanon was a pure invention carved out of Syria. As long as the Christians for whom Paris created Lebanon remained the dominant group, it worked, although the Christians themselves were divided into warring clans.

Lebanon's issues were not confined to Lebanon. The line dividing Lebanon from Syria was an arbitrary boundary drawn by the French.

From the outside it appeared to be strictly a religious war, but that was an incomplete view. It was a competition among clans for money, security, revenge and power. And religion played a role, but alliances crossed religious lines frequently.

The complexity of Lebanon goes far beyond this description, and the external meddling from Israel, Syria, Iran and the United States is even more complicated.

But in the end, the state existed at the forbearance of the clans. The map may show a nation, but it is really a country of microscopic clans engaged in a microscopic geopolitical struggle for security and power.

A similar process has taken place in Syria. The arbitrary nation-state has become a region of competing clans.

Something very similar happened in Iraq. As the Americans departed, the government that was created was dominated by Shia, who were fragmented. To a great degree, the government excluded the Sunnis, who saw themselves in danger of marginalization. The Sunnis consisted of various tribes and clans (some containing Shiites) and politico-religious movements like the Islamic State. They rose up in alliance and have now left Baghdad floundering, the Iraqi army seeking balance and the Kurds scrambling to secure their territory.

the most likely outcome is what happened in Lebanon: the permanent power of the sub-national groups, with perhaps some agreement later on that creates a state in which power stays with the smaller groups, because that is where loyalty lies.

The boundary between Lebanon and Syria was always uncertain. The border between Syria and Iraq is now equally uncertain. But then these borders were never native to the region. The Europeans imposed them for European reasons.

The idea that Shia, Sunnis and Kurds can live together is not a fantasy. The fantasy is that the United States has the power or interest to re-create a Franco-British invention crafted out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire.

There are two issues here.

The Kremlin was forced to start an accelerated political restructuring in 2012 -- one entailing a countrywide effort to devise programs to plan for Russia's future.

The Kremlin launched a major domestic anti-corruption campaign that began targeting the government in an attempt to curb behavior that has had a long-term decaying effect on the country.

Russians believe good health to be an important aspect of one's ability to lead, and Putin's back trouble caused many in the Kremlin to panic. The Russian media and the Russian people had never seen Putin falter due to ill health. This was in stark contrast to his predecessor, former President Boris Yeltsin, who was plagued with health issues that negatively impacted his ability to run the country.

Though Russia has a formal electoral process to choose its leaders, in reality Putin makes the choices regarding leadership.

due to the intricate workings of the internal power circles -- and especially because Medvedev is a reformist, not a security hawk -- Medvedev was quickly deemed irrelevant, and Putin remained in power as premier.

Since the end of 2012, a new system – coined the Politburo 2.0 by widely followed Kremlin analyst Yevgeni Minchenko – has broken down much of the previous clan system and created an inner Kremlin circle of nine men, with Putin as its overall leader. This is not a formal system, like the Cabinet of Ministers, which implements Putin’s vision. It is rather a way to balance the most powerful decision-makers in the country, each with connections and power bases in politics, energy, finance and the military. Outside of the Politburo 2.0 are political circles from which Politburo members may draw support.

The concept of a vice presidency that would lead into a successor role is fraught with peril for Putin's new Politburo 2.0. There has never been a formalized second-in-command position under Putin for which various power groups could vie.

The first attempt took place in 1990, during the last years of the Soviet Union, when Gennady Yanayev held the office under former President Mikhail Gorbachev. Yanayev turned on Gorbachev in 1991, taking part in the coup that at first made Yanayev acting president of the Soviet Union. This was before he was arrested and replaced by Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin, Alexander Rustokoi held the role of vice president from 1991-1993. He eventually attempted to overthrow Yeltsin in 1993 during two weeks of mass violence across Moscow ending with Rustokoi’s arrest.

Later in the week, Ben Levisohn authored a column in Barron's called "Smoke Signals from China." He wrote, "In the classic disaster flick 'The Towering Inferno' partygoers ignored a fire in a storage room because they assumed it has been contained. Are investors making the same mistake with China?"

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs -- where in November 2001 Jim O'Neil coined the term BRICs and forecast that China might surpass the United States economically by 2028 -- cut its forecast of Chinese growth to 7.4 percent. 

Suddenly finding Stratfor amid the conventional wisdom regarding China does feel odd, I must admit. Having first noted the underlying contradictions in China's economic growth years ago, when most viewed China as the miracle Japan wasn't, and having been scorned for not understanding the shift in global power underway, it is gratifying to now have a lot of company.

One of the things masking China's weakening has been Chinese statistics, which Krugman referred to as "even more fictional than most."

China in fact has had an extraordinary period of growth. The last 30 years have been remarkable, marred only by the fact that the Chinese started at such a low point due to the policies of the Maoist period.

China's growth surge was built on a very unglamorous fact: Chinese wages were far below Western wages, and therefore the Chinese were able to produce a certain class of products at lower cost than possible in the West.

China had another essential policy: Beijing was terrified of unemployment and the social consequences that flow from it. This was a rational fear, but one that contradicted China's main strength, its wage advantage.

Growing the economy is possible, but not growing profitability. Eventually, the economy will be dragged down by its inefficiency. 

As businesses become inefficient, production costs rise. And that leads to inflation. As money is lent to keep inefficient businesses going, inflation increases even more markedly. The increase in inefficiency is compounded by the growth of the money supply prompted by aggressive lending to keep the economy going. As this persisted over many years, the inefficiencies built into the Chinese economy have become staggering. 

China's overall per capita GDP is around the same level as the Dominican Republic, Serbia, Thailand or Jamaica.

The Chinese have maintained a strategy of depending on exports without taking into account the operation of the business cycle in the West, which means that periodic and substantial contractions of demand will occur. China's industrial plant is geared to Western demand. When Western demand contracted, the result was the mess you see now.

The Chinese can prevent the kind of crash that struck East Asia in 1997. Their currency isn't convertible, so there can't be a run on it. They continue to have a command economy; they are still communist, after all. But they cannot avoid the consequences of their economic reality, and the longer they put off the day of reckoning, the harder it will become to recover from it.

The Chinese economic performance will degrade, but crisis will be avoided and political interests protected. Since much of China never benefited from the boom, there is a massive force that has felt marginalized and victimized by coastal elites. That is not a bad foundation for the Communist Party to rely on.

Rather than the feared repatriation of funds, the United States will continue to be the target of major Chinese cash inflows.

In a world where Europe is still reeling, only the United States is both secure and large enough to contain Chinese appetites for safety. Just as Japanese investment in the 1990s represented capital flight rather than a healthy investment appetite, so the behavior we have seen from Chinese investors in recent years is capital flight:

The major shift in the international order will be the decline of China's role in the region. China's ability to project military power in Asia has been substantially overestimated.

Its naval capacity is still limited compared with the United States. The idea that it will compensate for internal economic problems by genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) military action is therefore unlikely.

China will continue to be a major power, and it will continue to matter a great deal economically. Being troubled is not the same as ceasing to exist. China will always exist. It will, however, no longer be the low-wage, high-growth center of the world. Like Japan before it, it will play a different role.

the Turkish core is the same territory as the core of the Byzantine Empire that preceded it, namely, the lands surrounding the Sea of Marmara.

Such lowlands ease the penetration of peoples and ideas while allowing a central government to spread its writ with ease. One result is political unity; rivers radically reduce the cost of transport, encouraging trade and thus wealth.

In terms of political unity and agricultural production, the region’s maritime climate smoothes out its semiarid nature.

It may not be a large, unified, well-watered plain — split as it is by the sea — but the land is sufficiently useful that it is certainly the next best thing.

In terms of trade and the capital formation that comes from it, by some measures the Sea of Marmara is even better than a navigable river.

Establish a blocking position in Anatolia. Expand up the Danube to Vienna. Develop a political and economic system to integrate the conquered peoples. Seize and garrison Crimea. Establish naval facilities throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

if the Turks turned inward, that would restrict trade between Asia and Europe, virtually inviting a major power to dislodge the plug.

the Turks had little interest in grabbing all of Anatolia early in their development; the cost simply outweighs the benefits. But they do need to ensure that natives of Anatolia are not able to raid the core and that any empire farther afield cannot use the Anatolian land bridge to reach Marmara.

A secure block on Anatolia starkly limits the ability of Asian powers to bring war to Turkey, which can use the entire peninsula — even if not under Turkish control — as a buffer and be free to focus on richer pastures within Europe.

First, at only 350 kilometers (220 miles) away from the Marmara, it is the closest major river valley of note.

Second, there are no rival naval powers on the Black Sea.

Third, the Danube is a remarkable prize. It is the longest river in the region by far and is navigable all the way to southern Germany; ample tracts of arable land line its banks.

The first lies in modern-day Bulgaria.

The second point is where the Black Sea nearly meets the Carpathians

The third point lies in the Danube Valley itself, on the river where modern-day Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria meet.

The final — and most critical — defensive point is the city of Vienna, located at a similar gap between the Carpathians and the Alps.

Northern Europe is home to the densest concentration of wealth in the world

The second feature — the Mediterranean Sea — plays a similar role to the continent’s south

Mix the geographic features that inhibit unification with the features that facilitate trade and communication and Europe becomes a very rich, very violent place.

The first are the Seine and Loire river valleys

The second and third places where the fragmentation pattern does not hold are the Garonne and Rhone river valleys

Mountain chains, rivers and seas therefore enclose France at all points save for one: the North European Plain.

Internally, aside from the Massif Central in the southeast, France is a country of relatively low-lying terrain with occasional hills.

The Beauce region is therefore the French core.

Paris is also close enough to the Atlantic — connected by the Seine — to benefit from oceanic trade routes but far enough away to be insulated somewhat from a direct naval invasion.

In comparison with its continental neighbors, France has almost always been at an economic advantage because of its geography.

The Beauce region of France has always been the core of the French state because of its fertile land and strategic location on the North European Plain.

The first dealt with the plains.

The solution to this military reality was feudalism.

French, one of the Langue d’oil, did not become the official tongue until the 1500s, and linguistic unification was not completed until the 1800s.

England considered continental France their playpen for much of the Middle Ages. In fact, the Norman leaders of England did not distinguish much between their French and English possessions

As in the conflict with the Muslims, it was a technological innovation that forced France’s political system to evolve, and this time the shift was toward centralization rather than decentralization.

Europe’s Hapsburg era was a dangerous time for the French.

In three major wars — the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763, against Britain in North America) — France expended great financial resources in efforts to dominate one region or another, only to emerge at each war’s end with little to show for its efforts.

First, the depleted treasury led to a general breakdown in internal order, contributing to the French Revolution of 1789.

Second, Paris’ distraction with England and Spain led it to miss the emergence of Prussia as a serious European power that began to first rival and ultimately superseded Hapsburg Austria for leadership among the cacophony of German kingdoms.

Not only was France the only state to have embraced the concept of nationalism, but it also grafted the concept onto an already centralized system, allowing French power to pour forth across Europe and North Africa.

From 1803 to 1815, France nearly overwhelmed the rest of Europe before a coalition of nearly every major and minor power on the Continent combined forces to defeat her.

as France is concerned, however, STRATFOR views the entire post-World War II era as a single chapter in French history that has yet to come to a conclusion. In this phase, France is attempting to find a means to live with Germany, a task greatly complicated by recent shifts in the global political geography.

And far from being exposed and vulnerable, France found itself facing the most congenial constellation of forces in its history.

Eventually the Cold War ended, and the Soviet collapse was perceived very differently in France. While most of the free world celebrated, the French fretted.

Twenty years on, Germany cannot abandon the European Union without triggering massive internal economic dislocations because of the economic evolutions Maastricht has wrought.

First, the cage breaks, Germany goes its own way and attempts to remake Europe to suit its purposes.

Second, the cage holds, but it constrains France more than Germany.

France is the only country on the North European Plain that has an option for expansion into useful territories beyond its core without directly clashing with another major power.

Being situated at the western end of the North European Plain makes France the only country on the plain that has only one land approach to defend against.

Unlike the United Kingdom, whose expansion into empire was a natural step in its evolution as a naval power, France’s overseas empire was almost wholly artificial.

These colonial assets served one more critical role for Paris: They were disposable.

Louisiana was sold for loose change in order to fund the Napoleonic wars, while Algeria was ultimately abandoned — despite being home to some 1 million ethnic French — so that Charles de Gaulle could focus attention on more important matters at home and in the rest of Europe.

Geopolitics is not ideological or personal, although few countries have the discipline to understand that.

There has long been a myth about the unwillingness of Americans to absorb casualties for very long in guerrilla wars. In reality, the United States fought in Vietnam for at least seven years (depending on when you count the start and stop) and has now fought in Afghanistan for nine years. The idea that Americans can’t endure the long war has no empirical basis.

Washington’s primary goal at the initiation of the conflict was to destroy or disrupt al Qaeda in Afghanistan to protect the U.S. homeland from follow-on attacks to 9/11.

STRATFOR has long held that Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism does not represent a strategic, existential threat to the United States. While acts of transnational terrorism target civilians, they are not attacks — have not been and are not evolving into attacks — that endanger the territorial integrity of the United States or the way of life of the American people.

The strategic problem is that simply terminating the war after nine years would destabilize the Islamic world.

In the past, the United States has endeavored to keep the Taliban in Afghanistan and the regime in Pakistan separate.

The Pakistani relationship to the Taliban, which was a liability for the United States in the past, now becomes an advantage for Washington because it creates a trusted channel for meaningful communication with the Taliban.

The United States isn’t going to defeat the Taliban. The original goal of the war is irrelevant, and the current goal is rather difficult to take seriously. Even a victory, whatever that would look like, would make little difference in the fight against transnational jihad, but a defeat could harm U.S. interests.

Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration.

American policy became ready, fire, aim.

In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11.

Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.

an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy.

the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy.

The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush.

as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.

The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.

The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world.

There are two problems with Obama becoming a foreign policy president.

There are many actions that would satisfy Obama’s accomodationist inclinations, but those would not serve well in portraying him as decisive in foreign policy.

So far, Obama’s policy toward Iran has been to incrementally increase sanctions by building a weak coalition and allow the sanctions to create shifts in Iran’s domestic political situation. The idea is to weaken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and strengthen his enemies, who are assumed to be more moderate and less inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Obama has avoided overt military action against Iran, so a confrontation with Iran would require a deliberate shift in the U.S. stance, which would require a justification.

The most obvious justification would be to claim that Iran is about to construct a nuclear device. Whether or not this is true would be immaterial.

As STRATFOR has argued in the past, destroying Iran’s nuclear capability does not involve a one-day raid, nor is Iran without the ability to retaliate. Its nuclear facilities are in a number of places and Iran has had years to harden those facilities. Destroying the facilities might take an extended air campaign and might even require the use of special operations units to verify battle damage and complete the mission. In addition, military action against Iran’s naval forces would be needed to protect the oil routes through the Persian Gulf from small boat swarms and mines, anti-ship missile launchers would have to be attacked and Iranian air force and air defenses taken out. This would not solve the problem of the rest of Iran’s conventional forces, which would represent a threat to the region, so these forces would have to be attacked and reduced as well.

It would strengthen the Iranian regime (as aerial bombing usually does) by rallying the Iranian public to its side against the aggression. If the campaign were successful, the Iranian regime would be stronger politically, at least for a while, but eviscerated militarily.

Iran could launch a terrorist campaign and attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz

We have argued that a negotiation with Iran in the order of President Richard Nixon’s reversal on China would be a lower-risk solution to the nuclear problem than the military option. But for Obama, this is politically difficult to do. Had Bush done this, he would have had the ideological credentials to deal with Iran, as Nixon had the ideological credentials to deal with China. But Obama does not. Negotiating an agreement with Iran in the wake of an electoral rout would open the floodgates to condemnation of Obama as an appeaser. In losing power, he loses the option for negotiation unless he is content to be a one-term president.

First, Obama will be paralyzed on domestic policies by this election. He can craft a re-election campaign blaming the Republicans for gridlock.

The other option for Obama is to look for triumph in foreign policy where he has a weak hand.

Third, Geithner spoke about the reformation of the global financial architecture and evoked the framework agreement signed at the September 2009 G-20 summit.

The problem for China is that while Germany and Japan are U.S. allies, firmly lashed to the American-dominated international system, and have already been forced to change in response to American demands — such as the 1985 Plaza Accord in which Washington forced them to adopt market-oriented exchange rate policies — China is not.

If the United States is serious about enforcing such a policy, it will require changes to the next three biggest economies — China, Japan and Germany — as well as to those who have grown accustomed to the status quo, that is, in some way, almost everyone else in the world.

Finally, while I founded STRATFOR, I am today only part of it.

Geopolitics should be impersonal, yet the way we encounter the world is always personal. Andre Malraux once said that we all leave our countries in very national ways. A Korean visiting Paris sees it differently than an American. The personal is the eccentric core of geopolitics.

I travel to sample the political fault lines in the world, and I have done this all my life. This is an odd preference, but there might be some others who share it. Traveling geopolitically is not complex, but it does take some thought.

I begin my travels by always re-reading histories and novels from the region. I avoid anything produced by a think tank, preferring old poems and legends.

Reading literature can be the best preparation for a discussion of a county’s budget deficit.

It is inconceivable to me that Russia, alive and unrestrained, would not seek to return to what it once was. The frontiers of Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union had reasons for being where they were, and in my mind, Russia would inevitably seek to return to its borders. This has nothing to do with leaders or policies. There is no New World Order, only the old one replaying itself in infinitely varying detail, like a kaleidoscope.

Romania, Ukraine, Moldova and even southern Poland cannot be understood without understanding the role the Carpathians play in uniting them and dividing them.

I want to understand whether this time will be different and to find out whether the Poles realize that in order for things to be different the Poles themselves must be different, since the plain is not going to stop being flat.

Walking a mountain path in the Carpathians in November, where bandits move about today as they did centuries ago, teaches me why this region will never be completely tamed or easily captured.

Nothing taught me more about American power and history than taking that trip and watching the vast traffic in grain and steel move up and down the river. It taught me why Andrew Jackson fought at New Orleans and why he wanted Texas to rebel against Mexico. It explained to me why Mark Twain, in many ways, understood America more deeply than anyone.

Political leaders think in terms of policies and options. Geopolitics teaches us to think in terms of constraints and limits.

I am not looking for the pithy quote, but for the complex insight that never quite reduces itself to a sentence or two.

There is another part of geopolitical travel that is perhaps the most valuable: walking the streets of a city. Geopolitics affect every level of society, shaping life and culture. Walking the streets, if you know what to look for, can tell you a great deal.

He must go to places and force himself to see the geography that shapes everything. He must meet with what leaders he can find who will talk to him in all parts of society, listening and talking but reserving a part of his mind for the impersonal reality of the world. Finally, he must walk the streets. He won’t have time to meet the schoolteachers, bank tellers, government employees and auto repairmen who are the substance of a society. Nor will they be comfortable talking to a foreigner. But geopolitics teaches that you should ignore what people say and watch what they do.

Berlin and Paris are far less worried about a strong Moscow than are Warsaw, Bucharest and other Central European capitals.

the United States and its “Atlanticist” allies (such as the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom)

Core Europe wants to maintain its good relations with Russia and not provoke it with an alliance that is concentrating on rolling back Moscow’s control of its sphere of influence.

it is unclear what Russian participation in a NATO-wide BMD system — as was announced at the summit — really means

Core Europe (led by Germany and France)

the Central Europeans.

First, it shored up its bilateral alliances in Central Europe via military supplies, new military bases and proposed BMD installations

The United States also attempted to solidify support for Georgia

Shifting tactics, both countries brokered an understanding that each had larger issues to focus on at the time, so the growing hostilities would be put on hold — at least temporarily.

At a loss for options, some Central Europeans — like Poland — shifted their stances and attempted to reach an understanding with Russia. Other Central Europeans have maintained hope that the United States soon will be able to refocus on Eurasia and support them once again.

So in essence, the disintegration of U.S.-Russian relations will divide the already-fracturing NATO even further.

First, it adopted the 2010 Strategic Concept. Second, it decided to build a NATO-wide BMD network and invited Russia to participate.

Rogozin added that although the Strategic Concept leaves the possibility of further enlargement on the table via its Open Door policy, “this is furnished with the quite correct wording that these countries should meet the membership criteria.” One of the criteria, incidentally, is not having any territorial disputes — a requirement Moscow can certainly make sure Georgia can never fulfill.

First, sensing that Russia is no longer worried about NATO, the Central Europeans will start looking at bilateral agreements with the United States.

Second, other European countries will form agreements among themselves.

But in 1989, the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe and had disintegrated by 1991, returning Russia essentially to its 17th century borders (except for Siberia).

While Russia reconsolidated, the United States became preoccupied with the Islamic world. As the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed, they have absorbed Washington’s focus, presenting Russia with an opportunity to push back against the West’s increased influence in Eurasia.

Russia’s most crucial victory to date has been in Ukraine, where the top four candidates in the country’s January presidential election were all pro-Russian, thus ensuring the end of the pro-Western Orange movement.

Essentially, Russia has placed the countries of its former sphere of influence and other regional powers into four categories:

Russia’s geopolitical imperatives remain: The country must expand, hold together and defend the empire, even though expansion can create difficulties in the Russian core. This is already a difficult task; it will be made even harder when the United States is free to counter Russia.