Francis P. Sempa — Is China Bidding for the Heartland?

Beijing doesn’t have to choose between land and sea predominance. It could have both.

The Diplomat
Is China Bidding for the Heartland?
Francis P. Sempa | Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy

F. William Engdahl — Russia Turns East at Shocking Speed with China Mega Energy Deals

While Western mainstream media concentrates attention on the emissions agreement signed by US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi at the recent APEC Beijing Summit, Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi quietly signed major new energy agreements that will have enormous geopolitical significance in bringing about the very nightmare that US strategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski warned about way back in 1997 when America seemed indomitable as sole Superpower.…

They reportedly discussed “the current international and regional security situations, regional issues as well as the relationship between the two militaries”, said Xinhua. One can wonder just what those “situations” might be, perhaps the brazen US and EU intervention into Ukraine to give the excuse for financial warfare and a proxy war against Russia, and perhaps the US National Endowment for Democracy’s “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong, designed to rattle Beijing as well as the Obama “Asia Pivot” military focus on China? The Washington neo-conservative hawks and their backers in the CIA, State Department and NSC are managing to accelerate the very Eurasian alliance that is they are trying to destroy.…First appeared:

New Eastern Outlook
Russia Turns East at Shocking Speed with China Mega Energy Deals

F. William Engdahl

See also Hungary’s Viktor Orban: Washington’s New Enemy ImageFirst appeared

Richard Mills — Gold Dragons Grand Strategy

Good summary of where China is headed with respect to geopolicy and geostrategy. While this site emphasizes gold, it's both true and important that China has a traditionally strong relationship with gold, as does India. China has started to make its move and the geopolitical, geostrategy, and economic implications are going to be huge.

Market Oracle
Gold Dragons Grand Strategy
Richard Mills

Things ot be aware of: Noopolitik

In political science Noopolitik from the Greek Noos (knowledge) and German Politik (politics) is the network-based geopolitics of knowledge. The term was invented by defense experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in a seminal RAND corporation study of 1999 and often appears in connection with that of smart power.

Noopolitics is an informational strategy of manipulating international processes through the forming in general public by means of mass media of positive or negative attitude to external or internal policy of a state of block of states to create a positive or negative image of ideas and promulgated moral values...

While the term initially appeared in association with the concept of the US Revolution in Military Affairs, Noopolitik has also come to describe an interest in theKnowledge Economy and in particular innovation and R&D to leverage growth and political reach in international relations. Thus Noopolitik may be defined as the use of innovation and knowledge to leverage political intercourses by other means at the international level. Such "knowledge race" may be either a means of asserting political independence or of generating a sudden gap in the geopolitical balance of power.... 

Professor Li Xiguang of Tsinghua University described the stakes of Smart power for the People's Republic of China in a 2010 article on Noopolitik in the Global Times 

Soft power is the power of making people love you. Hard power is the ability to making people fear you. Over the last 500 years, all the world powers gained their hegemony through hard power, but the US has gained its hegemony through combining hard power and soft power, both striking at and assimilating its opponents.

The US has built its soft power by making its values and political system, such as the US interpretation and definition of democracy, freedom and human rights, into supposedly universal values.

Innovation war.

Emphasizing China’s deeply-rooted desire for technological independence, Segal refers to the PRC’s efforts as an “Innovation Wall,” which is the willingness to innovate as independently as possible from the rest of the world to simply and systematically leap ahead of any other country. Needless to say, the scope of the rising fog of war in world economic and R&D competition is particularly daunting for the Euro-Atlantic community. The Chinese phrase for national innovation zizhu chuangxin was notably coined in a 2006 state report titled “Guidelines on National Medium- and Long-Term Program for Science and Technology Development.” If China decides to foster an innovation of its own, and the ideas were published in Mandarin language journals it would provide a barrier against other linguistic communities, and a thicker fog of war might rise in knowledge-based economic warfare.

Noopolitik
Wikipedia

Francis P. Sempa on Mackinder and Spykman

Mackinder's heartland theory and Spykman's rimland theory of political geography provided the basis for Zbigniew Brzezinski' The Grand Chessboard as a basic document shaping US geopolicy and global strategy. Sempa provides useful summaries. This background is key in understanding US foreign policy, US military policy, US economic policy, and US trade policy. It's about power.

American Diplomacy
Mackinder's World

Spykman's World
Francis P. Sempa

Don Quijones — Is This One of the Men Pushing Obama Toward War With Russia?

Better known now as Mika's dad.

Raging Bull-shit
Is This One of the Men Pushing Obama Toward War With Russia?
Don Quijones

Shlomo Ben-Ami — History Strikes Back

Preparing for WWIII. 

The first half of the article is correct, but instead of drawing the conclusion that the West blew a historic opportunity for peaceful cooperation asserts that Western leaders were blissfully unaware of Russian and Chinese intentions. Nothing about Western moves toward encirclement. History is striking back largely because the West continued to pursue the Great Game.

Project Syndicate
History Strikes Back
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace

Patrick Doherty — A New U.S. Grand Strategy

The strategic landscape of the 21st century has finally come into focus. The great global project is no longer to stop communism, counter terrorists, or promote a superficial notion of freedom. Rather, the world must accommodate 3 billion additional middle-class aspirants in two short decades -- without provoking resource wars, insurgencies, and the devastation of our planet's ecosystem. For this we need a strategy.

The status quo is untenable. In the United States, the country's economic engine is misaligned to the threats and opportunities of the 21st century. Designed explicitly to exploit postwar demand for suburban housing, consumer goods, and reconstruction materials for Europe and Japan, the conditions that allowed it to succeed expired by the early 1970s. Its shelf life has since been extended by accommodative monetary policy and the accumulation of household, corporate, and federal debt. But with Federal Reserve interest rates effectively zero, Americans' debt exceeding their income, and storms lashing U.S. cities, the country is at the end of the road....

Foreign Policy
A New U.S. Grand Strategy
Patrick Doherty | Director of the Smart Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Watershed moment in history.

Analysis and plan worth reading.