‘The United States is not just a superpower. It is a super-dooper power,” I was told shortly after the end of the Cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was considerable truth in this claim. Never since the Roman Empire, under the Emperor Augustus 2,000 years ago, had one state appeared so [...]

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The often repeated refrain “we don’t want to be in another cold war” is nonsense - we are in one. And Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is a much more dangerous opponent than dozy old former head of state Leonid Brezhnev. However, the latest demonstration of this truth in Georgia is only a week old, [...]

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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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Hamas and Israeli negotiators have agreed to a cease-fire that could ring in a new era. Instead of fighting, they want to lay down their weapons. By Pierre Heumann in Tel Aviv more…

‘Mission Doable’: Israeli Ministers Mull Plans for Military Strike against Iran
From the Archive: Hamas’ Triumph of Violence
SPIEGEL 360: Our Full Middle East Coverage

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PRISTINA, Kosovo | Days before the West begins one of the most ambitious nation-building experiments in modern history, profound questions remain about how the day-to-day governance of Kosovo will be handled.
Kosovo now has its own government. But the U.N. mission that effectively ruled the former province of Serbia since 1999 is still here.
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Video: Kosovo: [...]

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What does the collapse of communism have to do with the credit crunch? According to Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni, author of the best-selling book “Terror Inc: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism,” the fall of the Berlin wall set off a global economic transformation that led directly to the turmoil on Wall Street and will [...]

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Evidence of Venezuela’s support for terrorism could carry Hugo Chávez to the pariah status he deserves.
THE CONFIRMATION by an international forensics team that laptops and hard drives captured by Colombia originated in a camp of FARC terrorists ought to open a new era in relations between the democratic world and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government. Whether [...]

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If there was a the unipolar moment it has passed. The US will most likely remain the pre-eminent global power for some time yet, but it is already an insufficient one. The multilateral system designed in the middle of the last century no longer fits geopolitical realities. New powers might be accommodated in a reformed [...]

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