My Comment: Today must be Wednesday since the principal blog post is about politics. But I’m tired of the clowns involved in the Republican primaries and so am going a different direction. George Friedman is clearly a strategic thinker and describer of stuff that will ultimately influence how our lives will play out over time. He’s started a series of articles, of which this is the first.

BTW, I’m glad Romney won in Ohio. If he is the Republican party nominee, his candidacy will result in a better race for us to evaluate and make Obama a better candidate, and by extension, a better president in his second term should he win. Moving on…

After 1991 the only global power left was the United States, which produced about 25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) each year and dominated the oceans. Never before had the United States been the dominant global power. Prior to World War II, American power had been growing from its place at the margins of the international system, but it was emerging on a multipolar stage. After World War II, it found itself in a bipolar world, facing off with the Soviet Union in a struggle in which American victory was hardly a foregone conclusion.

The United States has been the unchallenged global power for 20 years, but its ascendancy has left it off-balance for most of this time, and imbalance has been the fundamental characteristic of the global system in the past generation. Unprepared institutionally or psychologically for its position, the United States has swung from an excessive optimism in the 1990s that held that significant conflict was at an end to the wars against militant Islam after 9/11, wars that the United States could not avoid but also could not integrate into a multilayered global strategy. When the only global power becomes obsessed with a single region, the entire world is unbalanced. Imbalance remains the defining characteristic of the global system today.

Read the rest of it here…