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This expansion left the Turks in a bit of a quandary. The size of their conquered territories was now larger than their home territories. The wealth of their conquered territories was potentially larger than that of their home territories. The population of their conquered territories was comprised of different nationalities and religions, and combined was larger than that of their home territories. The Turks very quickly came to the uncomfortable realization that they not only needed their conquered peoples to make their empire functional, but that they needed those conquered peoples to be willing participants in the empire. The Ottomans may have started out as Middle Eastern, but their early successes made them European.

And it was all held together by a governing concept the Turks called suzerainty: regional governments would pay taxes to the center and defer to Istanbul on all issues of foreign and military policy, but would control the bulk of their own local affairs.

After more than 90 years of being in a geopolitical coma, the Turks are on the move again, and are deciding what sort of power they hope to become. Within that debate are two choices.

The first would herald a “Great Turkey” rooted in the founding of the Turkish Republic that celebrates its Turkish-ness.

The second would herald a “Greater Turkey,” a multinational federation in which the Turks are the first-among-equals, but in which they are hardly alone.

Israel: The Tuesday meeting scheduled to take place in Washington between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will occur when American-Israeli relations are at one of the lowest points they have been in years, perhaps decades.

Russia: One country that has been delighted to read about the United States’ problems with China and Iran is Russia. It has seized the opportunity to operate in its near abroad and continue upon its mission of resurging into the former Soviet periphery.

Possibly seeking to exploit the growing rift between the United States and Israel are the Palestinians, Iranians and Hezbollah.

China: The recent tensions between the United States and China could possibly flare into a full-blown trade war in the coming months.

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.

In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.

If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.

The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.

Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.

Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.

Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.

Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.

So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.

Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.

Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.

It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.

Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.

A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.

Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.

He had mastered the politics of trust.

Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.

If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.

The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.

Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.

For all his talk of reform -- and so far it is just that, talk -- Medvedev still claims that Russia is a working democracy that protects the liberties of individual Russians despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The point is not that Poland and its neighbors expect to see the Wehrmacht on the horizon any time soon, but rather that they remember how a “normal” Germany repeatedly sold out Central and Eastern Europe’s security for its own national interests.

Russia has long dabbled in Latin America as a way to make the United States nervous — particularly during the Cold War.

the most important kind of help that Venezuela could receive from Russia at this point is something (anything) to assist with Venezuela’s dire electricity situation.

As PLAN steps up its expansion and modernization process to facilitate Beijing’s territory claim, new contests within both the East China Sea and South China Sea are expected.

Many countries that have nuclear power plants do not possess weapons. And almost every country that has nuclear weapons today acquired them before acquiring nuclear reactors.

Nuclear energy is cheaper as well as cleaner than fossil fuels.

The trajectory of this hypothesized rapprochement coincides with the trajectory of increasing American military bandwidth. Though American ground combat forces remain heavily committed at the moment, this will change in the years to come.

The United States is on this trajectory with or without Iran, but with an American-Persian rapprochement, it is possible on a more rapid timetable and to a greater degree.

Europeans, especially the French and the Germans, would welcome a Tehran-Washington reconciliation

Russia has no interest in seeing the United States and Iran come to terms with each other.

The more distracted the United States is, the more room Russia has to entrench itself in the former Soviet space and keep Europe under its thumb.

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.

First, they felt that the Russian threat had declined if not dissipated following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Second, they felt that their economic future was with the European Union.

Third, they believed that membership in NATO, with strong U.S. involvement, would protect their strategic interests.

First, Russia has changed dramatically since the Yeltsin years. It has increased its power in the former Soviet sphere of influence substantially

Second, the infatuation with Europe, while not gone, has frayed. The ongoing economic crisis, now focused again on Greece, has raised two questions: whether Europe as an entity is viable and whether the reforms proposed to stabilize Europe represent a solution for them or primarily for the Germans.

Finally, there are severe questions as to whether NATO provides a genuine umbrella of security to the region and its members. The NATO strategic concept, which was drawn up in November 2010, generated substantial concern on two scores. First, there was the question of the degree of American commitment to the region, considering that the document sought to expand the alliance’s role in non-European theaters of operation.

Second, the general weakness of European militaries meant that, willingness aside, the ability of the Europeans to participate in defending the region was questionable.

Germany’s commitment to both NATO and the EU has been fraying. The Germans and the French split on the Libya question, with Germany finally conceding politically but unwilling to send forces. Libya might well be remembered less for the fate of Moammar Gadhafi than for the fact that this was the first significant strategic break between Germany and France in decades.

There are strong political forces in Germany questioning the value of the EU to Germany, and with every new wave of financial crises requiring German money, that sentiment becomes stronger.

The Nordic countries share the same concerns as the Visegrad countries — the future course of Russian power, the cohesiveness of Europe and the commitment of the United States.

Some will say this is over-reading on my part or an overreaction on the part of the V4, but it is neither. For the V4, the battle group is a modest response to emerging patterns in the region, which STRATFOR had outlined in its 2011 Annual Forecast. As for my reading, I regard the new patterns not as a minor diversion from the main pattern but as a definitive break in the patterns of the post-Cold War world

For the countries on the periphery, there is a perpetual sense of insecurity, generated not only by Russian power compared to their own but also by uncertainty as to whether the rest of Europe would be prepared to defend them in the event of Russian actions. The V4 and the other countries south of them are not as sanguine about Russian intentions as others farther away are. Perhaps they should be, but geopolitical realities drive consciousness and insecurity and distrust defines this region.

Pilsudski proposed an alliance stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and encompassing the countries to the west of the Carpathians — Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

An alliance with Ukraine would provide significant strategic depth. It is unlikely to happen. That means that the alliance must stretch south, to include Romania and Bulgaria. The low-level tension between Hungary and Romania over the status of Hungarians in Romania makes that difficult, but if the Hungarians can live with the Slovaks, they can live with the Romanians. Ultimately, the interesting question is whether Turkey can be persuaded to participate in this, but that is a question far removed from Turkish thinking now. History will have to evolve quite a bit for this to take place. For now, the question is Romania and Bulgaria.

Even Trekkies (do they still call themselves that?) who go to conventions in costume and speak fucking Klingon know that it's make believe.

So I wrote the parody. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, yes. But somebody has to shoot them.

STRATFOR has said that one of the reasons China appears bent on expanding its naval capabilities relates to its shifting economic structure.

China’s economic supply lines now cross the globe.

China’s naval expansion, in that case, is not part of a strategy to engage in a naval arms race with the United States or challenge U.S. dominance of the seas. Rather, Beijing intends to build a defensive buffer around China’s maritime periphery.

the attention to China’s new aircraft carrier, deep-diving submarine, its space exploration, and similar activities also helps Beijing distract audiences domestic and global from real problems inside the country

Overseas, they somehow reinforce the perception of a rising China — and a rising China cannot be on the verge of a major economic and social crisis.

Like the Three Gorges Dam, this show of China’s capabilities is impressive for a moment, but it does not really address the country’s core needs.

What happens if China’s economic miracle faces what all economic miracles eventually face — the reality that there is no such thing as unlimited, linear, multidigit growth.