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By George Friedman at Stratfor.Com.
Introduction
For the first half of 2008, Stratfor focused [...]

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Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if [...]

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Iran claimed to have launched a fresh battery of missiles in war games near the strategic Strait of Hormuz in a muscle-flexing exhibition meant to demonstrate its willingness and ability to defend itself against an invasion by Israel or the United States.
And Israel put its latest spy plane on display, which it claims can track [...]

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Russian military jets flew over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia this week in order to prevent imminent “bloodshed,” the Russian foreign ministry said Thursday.
“The need arose to take urgent and effective measures to prevent bloodshed and to keep the situation peaceful,” the ministry said in a statement.
“To determine the circumstances, Russian air [...]

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Wealth and innovation are bubbling up in the most unexpected places. The tallest buildings, the biggest dams, the highest grossing movies, some of the most advanced technologies: they’re all being created outside of the United States. It’s called “the rise of the rest”, and as global power shifts, Washington will face its greatest challenge: it’ll [...]

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America is losing its lead in the space race as other countries challenge its dominance on the “final frontier”, the head of Nasa has warned.
The more obvious rivals such as Russia and Europe have been joined by countries as diverse as Brazil, Israel and India, which are all launching their own space programmes.
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The Cold war pitted two superpowers with nuclear warheads trained on each other — from submarines, from silos, from mobile launchers. One false move and the world was a fireball.
Ah, those were the days.
In the 21st century, however, outer space and nukes are the domains of many nations, led by a variety [...]

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It’s a reminder that China’s pollution problems aren’t just taking a devastating toll on China–they’re also affecting the rest of the world. Acid rain partly caused by Chinese sulfur emissions pours down on Japan and South Korea. Eighty percent of the East China Sea, one of the world’s largest fisheries, has become toxic, due to [...]

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The Latvian National Security Council has included Russia in a list of major security threats to the Baltic state. As the RIA Novosti news agency reports, the agency places Russia’s threat alongside terrorism, drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
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Recently we have witnessed a flurry of high-profile and contradictory statements on the Russian state. In a role reversal, Russia’s leaders have been abnormally candid while several prominent western politicians and pundits have lavished undeserved praise.
Russian president Dmitri Medvedev was bold enough last week to state that democracy is irrelevant to the Group of Eight [...]

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By Peter Zeihan
As students of geopolitics, we at Stratfor tend not to get overexcited when this or that plan for regional peace is tabled. Many of the world’s conflicts are geographic in nature, and changes in government or policy only rarely supersede the hard topography that we see as the dominant sculptor of the international [...]

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