Link to Amazon.Com
By George Friedman at Stratfor.Com
OVERTURE
An Introduction to the American Age
Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was [...]

go to permalink....

An inside look at the Russian leader’s autocratic regime and his turn away from the West
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity [...]

go to permalink....

Forget about all the cookie-cutter books that explain how to make money in China. Let’s take a look at how to lose money in China.
Mr. China: A Memoir
In the early 1990s, British businessman Clissold–with a passing knowledge of China and of Mandarin–found himself the point man between a group of Wall Street bankers with hundreds [...]

go to permalink....

For a decade, metallurgists studying the hulk of the Titanic have argued that the storied ocean liner went down quickly after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died.
Now a team of scientists has moved into [...]

go to permalink....

Now, a young, well-traveled, multilingual foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khanna, suggests in “The Second World” that we are on the cusp of a new new world order — “a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.” The three are the United States, the European Union and China. The [...]

go to permalink....

ON THE face of it, these two books are about the same thing: the great trends in geopolitics as the economic power of Asia grows and as the world grimaces at America in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Yet they could hardly be more different. Parag Khanna’s is a long, complicated book on the [...]

go to permalink....

It is hardly a coincidence, he suggests, that ancient Athens found itself doing battle with the Persian tyranny of Xerxes, while the modern Western world faces a stand-off with the mullahs’ Iran. In his view of history, these are simply related chapters in a single narrative: the contest between liberal and enlightened societies whose locus [...]

go to permalink....

Now, a few secrets are spilling through a crack in the wall of silence, revealing some of the science and spying that went into the doomsday preparations.
A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine, the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The [...]

go to permalink....

By the third week of January this year, we heard Russia announce that it would not hesitate to be the first to use nuclear weapons in battle, that it would resume this May parading tanks and missiles through Red Square in the Soviet fashion, that it would reestablish the application of double jeopardy in criminal [...]

go to permalink....

To commentators such as Thomas Friedman, today’s globalization is a largely technological phenomenon. Once learned, new technologies are typically not forgotten, which is why globalization can seem an irresistible force, destined to bind us ever more tightly together for the foreseeable future. History, however, suggests that globalization is as much a political as a technological [...]

go to permalink....