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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Yet, even though it has an economy comparable with America’s, it stands as a political dwarf in responding to the rapidly changing geopolitical environment. The combination of slavishly following the US lead (with the possible exception of the invasion of Iraq), its reluctance to contemplate badly needed strategic initiatives (as in the Middle East) or [...]

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Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, is stepping into the vortex of the superpowers’ race for global pre-eminence. Here are some of the challenges he faces.
NATO AND MISSILES
NATO’s readiness to give Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership has exacerbated Kremlin suspicions that the West’s goal is to surround and weaken Russia. Lately tensions have escalated along Russia’s [...]

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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 [...]

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