A year ago, a group of superior US officers with Republican credentials were involved in a geopolitical brainstorming session at the National Defense University in Washington. The group was asked to provide answers regarding the US’ place in the world and to outline a ten-year national security plan. Edward Luce was invited to attend and [...]

In an intelligent and highly readable essay, Fareed Zakaria, a close Obama adviser, analyses the fundamental changes in the distribution of power in international affairs, away from US dominance. He claims that what we are witnessing today is one of geopolitics’ “tectonic power shifts”, the third in the last five hundred years in order of [...]

One of the key issues in IR & geopolitics is that of hegemonic transition. In the space of only thirty years, the world as we knew it has gone from bi-polar (international affairs dominated by the USA and the USSR) to unipolar (with the US as the only superpower left), to what is now a [...]

The 20th ASEAN summit took place last week in Cambodia. It ended after two days with a Phnom Penh Declaration, which basically reiterates the members’ commitment to establishing the ASEAN Economic Community by 2015. The summiteers were greeted in the capital’s Peace Palace by huge billboards depicting the smiling faces of the Chinese president Hu [...]

If we are to believe Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group and David Gordon, former director at the State Department, we have been living – for a number of years now – in a leaderless world, after decades with the US at the helm.. For the two specialists in geopolitics and geo-economics, as well as for [...]

The harsh austerity measures afflicting southern EU members like Greece, Spain, Portugal or Ireland are generating massive unemployment and negative economic growth, not to mention the type of social turmoil that can conceivably degenerate into civil war. As the European Union is far from a truly federal structure, fiscal transfers from economically viable member-states to [...]

Over the last two weeks, economic discussion among EU leaders has revolved around two main topics: austerity and increasing to 1 trillion euros the money available to the ESP. Few of the current leaders, if any, are concentrating on finding solutions to the real economic challenge facing the Union, that of kickstarting economic growth on [...]

The implosion of the Soviet Union has in many ways adversely affected the stability of the Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. Since 1991, a loose alliance of 11 former Soviet republics, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), was formed in order to preserve, at least in part, the Soviet-era heritage in [...]

International military analysts have recently pointed out that military spending in Asia has increased to 262 billion euros in 2012. The amount could overtake the EU’s own military spending in the near future, possibly as early as next year. Smaller military budgets, however, are consistent with the EU’s new focus on soft power and diplomacy, [...]

The introduction of an EU-wide financial transactions tax (FTT) has been delayed again in Brussels, as it has met with strong opposition from a group of countries led by Britain. Undaunted, the French and German finance ministers, seconded by the Italian premier, are pushing the Danish presidency to speed up talks on the issue. First [...]

The eurozone’s unemployment rate has reached 10.7 percent in January, meaning 16.9 million people out of work, of which 5.5 million young people under 25. If we add to these figures the 2.7 million people unemployed in the UK as well as another few million jobless in the other EU member-states, we can understand why the [...]

During a recent interview published in Le Monde, Artur Mas, the President of the Catalonian government in Barcelona, has revealed plans to conclude a new fiscal pact with the central government in Madrid. This is viewed in Barcelona as a means to diminish pressure to move forward on the province’s independence, an option shared by [...]

It is a well-known geopolitical fact that from 1914 to this day, Serbia has received military support or security guarantees from Russia. The latest such support was in evidence during NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, when Russian troops were present in the province in order to make sure Serbian interests were being respected by the Western [...]

Amid international media acclaim, the European Council on Foreign Relations has recently released the results of its innovative EU foreign policy research project, the 2012 European Foreign Policy Scorecard. The ECFR’s researchers have assessed the EU’s foreign policy performance in 2011 in six major areas: the relationship with China, Russia, the US, Wider Europe (Western [...]

We’re heading towards a Soviet-style union run by a Politburo made up of national political leaders uninterested in consulting the European Parliament on important decisions affecting our lives. Whilst in Brussels where the EU heads of government were busily hammering out  measures aimed at solving the euro-crisis, Martin Schulz held his first speech as President of the European Parliament. [...]