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Faulkner, why do you not address my other points? I noticed that you seem to focus solely on the economic dimension. Indeed, we must always consider it. However, the businessman who focuses solely on the economic dimension whilst ignoring the geopolitical dimension, while perhaps winning the gamble in the short term, is likely to experience untimely turn overs in the long term. We have seen it time and time again particularly during the 20th century. The most extreme examples were the businessmen dealing with Germany during the 1930s. Some of them not only lost big due to WWII, in some cases they were actually thrown in the slammer for treason.

That's the problem with most US businessmen these days (my / your peers). Most of them neither want to consider nor talk about the geopolitical dimension. They have become too $&@*$@ arrogant and confident in the West and in the particular form of capitalism that has come into vogue since the late 1980s (there are many forms after all, you know this to be true...). Indeed, it looked to many like this form defeated the East, but why then, is the East now ascendent? Perhaps the Sun Tzu way of looking at things? In point of fact, the "winning of the Cold War" was not nearly so clean a win as many think. Much of what happened 1988 - 1993 was very ambiguous and without a clear settlement or winner. Yet, many Westerners started to beat upon their chests and gloat - a bit too early I think.

Viewing what appears to be crystalizing as a very new world situation with the new century, any objective analyst would have to, at this point, admit that the sort of ubiquitous span of Western control via multinational corporations and Western based financial networks might have been just a bit oversold. Already we can see that the theories of Francis Fukuyama and Thomas L. Friedman have serious gaps and flaws. Once again, I suspect, we shall have to confront both geopolitical and economic conditions that are less than ideal for the free nations of the world. War? Perhaps. Pain? You bet. In any case, those few business people who bring themselves to consider other dimensions besides the economic one, and without wishful thinking, will be the overall winners as we proceed through the first real wave of serious global chaos since the 1940s.

I focus on economics because it's the most important influence in history and the underlying foundation of everything else that goes on, including geopolitics. The primary purpose of the whole Cold War geopolitical affair was, after all, to spread capitalism and the capitalist way of life across the globe. Democracy is merely the means by which Western capitalists "make the world safe for capitalism" (although global capitalists have come to realize only recently from the examples of democratic Brazil, Argentina, Russia, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere that Third World republics aren't the fertile ground of capitalism that their pro-democracy theories told them they would be). Democracy works well in countries that already have majority-middle class populations but is a joke in Third World countries with majority-poor populations and, thus, majority-socialist politicians who oppose any kind of pro-capitalist economic reforms in favor of big-government welfare states (like in India).

Geopolitics is a function largely of military strength, but what is the foundation of military strength? It's economics. After all, arms and troops don't grow on trees but cost money to support. The bigger a nation's economy is, the bigger its military can be because, simply, it can afford a bigger military. Taiwan is already having trouble maintaining its military budget and buying US arms because its hi-tech companies, the heart of its economy, are leaving the island in droves for the mainland and will never return. Empires (Roman, British, etc.) rise and fall on the health of their underlying economic systems.