The Strategic Environment

At present, the United States confronts the most complex and uncertain international environment in its history. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, an economic and political competitor, the People's Republic of China, appears to have the capacity to challenge America's dominance in the long term. The Middle East is in even greater turmoil than it has been at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, a turmoil that the youth bulge throughout the area can only serve to exacerbate. Moreover, adding to the difficulties that failing states have represented in the past is the possibility that a number of significant “national entities” – among others, Pakistan, Mexico, North Korea, and Nigeria – could collapse, bringing with their demise the kinds of troubles that Yugoslavia's disintegration in the early 1990s brought to the Balkans and Europe.

In the immediate future, the strategic and political results of American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq remain uncertain. The collapse of the Russian economy concurrently with a fall in energy prices several years ago led to a major crisis between Russia and Ukraine over the transshipment of gas supplies on which much of Europe depends. In 2008, the invasion of Georgia by the KGB mafia that runs Russia raises serious questions about the reliability of that nation. At present, the world's energy supplies are more uncertain than they have been at any time since the Second World War, while recent perturbations in the financial markets have shaken the global economy in a fashion that has not occurred since the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Adding to those uncertainties is the fact that a technological and information revolution is occurring at a pace never before seen in history, with consequences in the political, social, and military spheres that are difficult to predict.