10 Geopolitical Predictions for 2010 & Short Term Strategic Outlook

10 Geopolitical Predictions for 2010 & Short Term Strategic Outlook

A great - and still growing - divergence appeared in 2009 between public statements by leaders and their public performance. The politicized, romanticized theater of increasingly populist “democratic” leaders and media seemed to be of a different planet from activities taking place in the real world.

While a large part of the global population appears still transfixed by words, there is a growing perception that great fissures already rend the global strategic architecture.

This is a trend which will compound during 2010.

There is a widespread belief that the world has “ducked the strategic bullet” of global economic collapse, but this is merely the delusionary euphoria of the severely wounded patient. Severe structural damage has occurred to the key driver of global economic stability, the United States. Most major economies of Western Europe and Asia, although in plight, have been protected in their fall by a complex web of structures and the fact that they were not, in many respects, as leveraged as the US. Britain and Japan, however, remain leveraged in their debt-to-asset ratio, to a death-defying degree.

All of this has been long in coming, and brought to a speedy climax by the unprecedented recklessness of inflationary spending by US Pres. Barack Obama, and, in the UK by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The modern world (East and West, but prompted by the West) is at a junction point in a long process of constantly growing — but poorly-defined — obsession with “rights” (entitlements). This had its origins with the halting, but consistent, rise in global prosperity which began with the early stages of the Second Industrial Revolution (1700-1900).