By John Sitilides
Returning to Washington recently after consecutive keynote presentations at several major investor events, before hundreds of highly-educated and well-informed finance executives, I was struck by their focus on the turbulent shifts in geopolitical relations on a global scale of recent decades.
In 1988, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still locked in the Cold War, with most nations siding with liberty or totalitarianism. The 1990s were marked by America’s unipolar moment, with Russia rendered relatively meaningless in world affairs and China just beginning to rise from Mao’s domestic ruins. The first decade of the 21st century literally exploded into being, unleashing American military power in Afghanistan, Iraq, and globally against a vast radical Islamist terror network.
The last 10 years have witnessed the resurgence of a resurgent quasi-monarchy in Moscow undermining Western cohesion and American influence in Europe and the Middle East, joined by a revisionist authoritarian regime in Beijing determined to manage Asia’s commerce and overturn the international liberal economic order sustained by U.S.-led alliances for 70 years.
In 2018, the world is witnessing a tripartite landscape, marked by nuclear powers of varying influence within a framework unlike any of the past century. The question for political, corporate and finance leaders centers on how to engage these new power arrangements, sure to be in flux for the foreseeable future.
The perilous fusing of twin threats from nascent nuclear power North Korea and aspiring nuclear power Iran portend the broader destabilization of the Pacific Rim and Middle Eastern regions. Neighboring countries warn of plans to acquire independent nuclear arsenals or deploy American systems on their territories as desperate means of deterrence against aggression from Pyongyang and Tehran — a proliferation system that would gravely undermine stability.
Many of these flashpoints have emerged immediately adjacent to the world’s most important waterways, carrying the bulk of total global commerce and much of the world’s oil and natural gas supplies. Sovereignty disputes between China and almost every Pacific neighbor, from Japan to Indonesia, play out regularly in the South and East China Seas, through which a combined 35 percent of the world’s commerce traverses.
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