Basic Thesis

The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent
Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order.

How should countries and companies approach and navigate this challenge in order to get the
greatest benefit for their citizens, shareholders and employees?

The bigger you are, the more powerful you are.

Geopolitics - Definition
1. Geopolitics is based on the nature of politics and relations defined by the real spaces in
which we live.1
2. a study of the influence of such factors as geography, economics, and demography on
the politics and especially the foreign policy of a state2
3. The term geopolitics, which is now used in many different ways, refers to everything that
concerns the rivalries of power or influence over territories and the people who live
there: rivalries between political powers of all kinds - and not only between states, but
also between political movements or armed groups more or less clandestine - rivalries
for control or domination of large or small territories3
4. Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography (human and physical) on
politics and international relations... At the level of international relations, geopolitics is a
method of studying foreign policy to understand, explain and predict international political
behavior through geographical variables... Geopolitics focuses on political power linked to
geographic space.4

“The great powers have always competed globally for power, influence, markets and
resources.” - Jeff Goodson, Stratfor5

1
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/14/is-geopolitical-chessboard-now-digital/
2
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geopolitics
3
Yves Lacoste
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitics#cite_note-1
5
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/line-between-conflict-and-stability-great-power-
competition#/entry/jsconnect?client_id=633726972&target=%2Fdiscussion%2Fembed%3Fc%3D1566962
094711%26vanilla_category_id%3D1%26vanilla_identifier%3D299991%26vanilla_url%3Dhttps%253A%
252F%252Fworldview.stratfor.com%252Farticle%252Fline-between-conflict-and-stability-great-power-
competition
Variables for Analysing Geopolitics of a Country
Geography
● Where is the country located? - temperate zone, continent, etc
● What are the natural facets of the country? Rivers, Ocean, Desert, Forest, Mountain, etc
● Do they provide security? Or are they open?
● Do they provide connections to the rest of the word? Or do they isolate?
● Who are their neighbors?
● Climate change impacts

Demographics
● Size - How big is the country?
● Age - Is it a young country? Old Country?
● Ethnicity
● Language
● Religion
● Immigration rates
● Research - Population pyramid.com

History and Culture

● - what had happened before? National culture
● What has the country done in the past?
● What impact on the national culture does this mean?
● What are the country’s fear? And Desires? Power

Governance and Politics

● Political structure
● Political stability — not to be conflated with democracy
● Corruption - Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (CPI),
● Judiciary
● Government Credit Rating

Economy
● GDP growth, financial sectors, home ownership and debt levels
● What is the economy based on?
● How diverse is it?
● What are potential threats?
● What are the future projections?
● FDI - Who is investing? In what sectors - Research each country individually? How much
- $ and/or %
● Research - Capital Economics

Trade
● Who for they trade with? exports as a percentage of GDP,
● What industries, FTAs
 ● Trade through put - shipping containers amount world wide
● What trade routes does the country use?- Sea, Air, land and train

Agriculture
● Can they feed themselves
● What do they import and from where?
● What do they export?
● What are their future needs? Can they afford?
● Are they food secure?
● Research - Rabobank

Security
Security is the sine qua non. Without strong national and internal security, neither good
governance nor economic fundamentals can evolve sustainably.
● Military Power - Land vs naval, airforce, cyber
● Intelligence agencies
● Internal Security Agencies - Police, Secret Service, etc
● How experienced are they?
● Who are their allies, partners, enemies, none of the above, - Allies Treaties
● How do they measure vs their neighbors?
● The likeliest threat?
● Does the country have the ability to project power?

Energy
● What is their current energy needs?
● What is current energy mix? Ie - How do they meet this need?
● What do they import
● Where do they import energy from?
● What are their future needs? Can they afford?
● What impact can happen where they source from?

Transport links
● Port usage / shippage numbers
● Railroads and port
● Oil pipelines and refineries
● Data centers
● And who owns the above plus where are they located?

Foreign Policy
● What has their historic foreign policy been?
● Who are their allies?
● Who are their historical challenges or threats?

Environment
 ● What impact does climate change mean for the country? + good or bad
● Access to Water?

Technology
● - who creates it, who builds it? Who educates? Which technologies can change a
country
● - Data centers / Super Computers
● - Impact of two systems? Closed (China, Russia, etc) and Open (US, Europe, etc)
● What technologies can truly impact the country?

Questions to Answer
Where do we source information for each bullet point above? who has the best source of data
and information? What are key sources?
Where to find visuals of Major geographic barrier - ocean, mountains, rivers - for each country?
What are strategic intelligence methods of collecting and evaluating information

How to convert above assessment into projection?

How to connect projection to thesis?

Strategic Intelligence
Strategic intelligence is the way we collect information. Unlike other forms of intelligence, like
operational or tactical, strategic intelligence does not begin by building from the bottom.
Strategic intelligence deals not with secrets but with political, economic, military, and cultural
forces that are visible to the naked eye. The challenge of strategic intelligence is both to see
and understand the obvious. Learning to believe what you see – however preposterous it may
appear – is far more difficult than it sounds. We then use strategic intelligence methods of
collecting and evaluating information to track and challenge these forecasts and net
assessments.
Rules in Geopolitics

1. The bigger you are, the more powerful you are

2. Muddle-along rule - On and off for several decades, knowing analysts have forecast
state collapse for Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, and other nations. Kyrgyzstan and
Uzbekistan have been said to be destined for economic ruin, and North Korea for the
ash heap of history. Yet they have gone on—often with the help of the global community,
but gone on they have. The lesson is that countries tend to muddle along regardless of
the trouble, and not collapse.
3. Precipice rule - A corollary to Rule No. 2. Even the most violence-riven nations tend not
to plunge over the precipice, as it seems they might, but to pull back if only at the last
moment and not devolve into utter chaos and ruin. Often they need help—last year,
Kenya sent troops to Somalia to break up the radical militia al-Shabab, for example. But
absent the Precipice Rule, Kenya’s intervention would not have worked: Somalians in
fact did not wish to dive into the abyss. So al-Shabab could be uprooted.
4. Conspiracy rule - When you find a simple explanation for an event, the safest bet is to
embrace it. To be sure, conspiracies exist—what would war be without them, for
instance? But they are much rarer than many suppose. Generally speaking, groups of
people do not successfully conceive and execute dastardly schemes; even if they want
to, they are typically confounded by the compound physics of too many moving parts
and human fallibility. (You can think of this as the Occam’s Razor of geopolitics.)
5. Economic/health/injustice rule - A desire for these three things—economic success,
good health and justice—is the big driver in political revolt and revolution. The inflection
point is when a critical mass of individuals despairs for the future of its children, and
youths feel they can succeed only under a different circumstance. Governments
generally do not fall over questions of liberty and political expression, which are not
nearly as potent as a collective sense of injustice, helplessness or outrage over the
security or health of their children. To battle this rule, a regime will try to change the
subject (using the potent factors of Rule No. 14—nationalism, xenophobia, jingoism and
fear of instability) and, if that fails, to scare the wits out of its population.
6. Idea rule - The most over-rated of the drivers of change. Political ideas and theories,
even when they are brilliant, only very rarely gain the critical mass to move events. But
occasionally they do. A case in point is the Arab Spring. Originally triggered by Rule No.
4, the Spring has spread and been sustained by the idea of the right to rise up.
7. Caesar rule - When states are muddling along, staying away from the precipice and not
at the stage of revolt, as described in Rules No. 4 and 5, the only other way that
dictators are typically ousted is defection or assassination. Generally speaking, a key
ally or a few will either pull away from a ruler, causing an apparently strong edifice of
power to crumble, or kill him outright.
8. Staying in power rule - The ultimate objective of almost every leader in the world.
Governments including dictatorships may seem sclerotic, but can become among the
most nimble of things when under existential threat. Keep this in mind when you are
tempted to say, “He will never change. He has always been that way.”
9. Territory rule - Among the most powerfully visceral forces in politics. A threat to even
the slenderest sliver of land can arouse the primal and uncontrolled indignation of a
people. When territory is involved, common sense can vanish even among otherwise
worldly and balanced leaders and their people, leading to brittle diplomacy and, if Rule
No. 2 is not invoked, a drift toward war.
10. The rule of averages - As with most matters in life, events tend toward the average, the
local version of the moderate middle. There can be periods of wild, insane extremism.
But then people are prone to calm down, do business and seek strong, stable and bright
futures for their children.
11. Big personality rule - What would Venezuela have been during the 2000s without Hugo
Chavez? Libya during the last quarter of the 20th century without Moamar Gadhafi?
Russia for the last dozen years without Vladimir Putin? For that matter, Great Britain in
1939 without Winston Churchill, and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s without Ho Chi
Minh? In politics, personality matters, and big, idiosyncratic personalities move and
dominate events. No. 10 has symbiosis with the following two rules.
12. True-believer rule - While people and countries tend toward the middle, events can turn
on exceptions operating on the extremes. Hitler’s Germany is an example. Today,
Khamenei’s Iran, Afghanistan’s Taliban, Kim’s North Korea and Chávez’s Venezuela
punch above their weight in influencing the geopolitical landscape.
13. Mountain rule - Like Rule No. 10, this is a direct carryover from the energy indicators.
That is, certain countries are so large and their behavior so singular that their actions
can create and disrupt economic and geopolitical trends. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia
and the United States are among the Mountains. When one or more of them step into
the picture, they can and do create news. There are three corollaries to the Mountain
Rule:
a. The future superpower corollary: China is not yet a military or economic power of
the stature of the US, but since most assume it will be, it is more or less already
treated and behaves as one. As a Mountain, it can and does shape and shift
economic and political trends.
b. The former colonial/great power corollary: When you formerly were a great
power, it is hard to give up the mantle. Such is the lot of countries like France
and Great Britain. Though well past their great-power prime—and not Mountains
in either case—both from time to time play outsized roles in big events, such as
France’s 2011 intervention in Libya. A problem comes, however, when inflated
former great-power thinking conflicts with current powers, in which case it is
regarded as a nuisance. Such is the case of Russia, a Mountain whose often
countervailing policies seem to be Moscow’s strategy for staying in the great-
power game (see next corollary).
c. The perceived great power corollary: India, Iran and Turkey all perceive
themselves as great powers (and in the latter two cases actually were a long time
ago, and as such also fall under the previous corollary). So they can and do
behave in ways that impact events far beyond their shores. India projects its
weight around the Indian Ocean and the Subcontinent, Turkey around the
Mediterranean and into Central Asia, and Iran around the Persian Gulf and into
 the Levant. Russia, having lost its great-power status in 1991, interjects its
leverage wherever it sees a useful opening.
14. Getting-rich rule - Why do leaders act as they do? Often, look no further than personal
enrichment.
15. Local politics rule - Most geopolitics begin at home. Whether deliberate or inadvertent,
domestic politics are a crucial contextual determinant of future events. Among key local
influences are xenophobia, nationalism and jingoism.
16. Extreme Weather - it itself could potentially wipe existing nations off the map; invigorate
others; create unsurvivable swaths of the Earth, and new, thriving lands from currently
inhospitable ones. It could utterly undermine widely embraced GDP forecasts for China,
the US and Europe.

Indicators for the geopolitics of energy

1. Oil prices - The surge of oil prices in the 1970s pushed the Persian Gulf monarchies into the
uppermost sphere of global power. Similarly, high oil prices weakened the relative leverage of
big-consuming countries such as the United States by burdening their balance of payments.
The same circumstances play out today, making price perhaps the most important indicator of
potential geopolitical impact.

2. Transportation - invention of oil tankers signaled the role of transportation—the ability to

move and choke off energy—in big geopolitics. In 2006, this axiom was reinforced with the
launch of the U.S.-backed Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which eliminated Russia’s stranglehold on
energy and political independence for the Caucasus region.

3. Big personality - Without Vladimir Putin, would petro-charged Russia be a menacing specter
in Europe and elsewhere? Rockefeller, Churchill, Muammar Qaddafi, Hugo Chávez—big
personality has been a geopolitical indicator since the advent of the age of big energy.

4. Technological shift - Winston Churchill’s conversion of the Royal Navy from coal- to oil-
burning vessels fundamentally altered the course of World War I, and helped seal the Entente
victory. Henry Ford’s creation of the industrial-scale assembly line triggered the 20th-century
industrial boom. More recently, George Mitchell’s refinement of hydraulic fracturing has
disrupted the global oil and natural gas market, and threatens to shake up geopolitical power.

5. Supply - An examination of OPEC policies over the last four decades shows it: Tight oil and
gas supplies make producer nations more powerful. Surpluses reduce their influence, and
increase the leverage of consumer nations.

6. Public opinion - Public opinion has been a leading geopolitical indicator in the energy sector
ever since muckraker Ida Tarbell’s takedown of Rockefeller led to the 1911 breakup of Standard
Oil. More recently, Middle Eastern public opinion about economic opportunity has shaken
Persian Gulf oil regimes, and what ordinary Chinese think about pollution is driving worried
Chinese leaders to shift economic policy.
7. War - Wars often threaten energy supplies, and this in turn can affect the outcomes of the
wars. nd even when oil supplies have not been explicitly threatened, prices have surged on the
mere possibility that they could be. Nigeria’s civil war and general instability have roiled oil
prices for a half-decade; the Arab Spring has had the same impact.

8. Local politics - When the 1970s began, petroleum-producing Arab nations were seriously
riled up. For several decades, Big Oil and consuming nations such as the United States had
treated them as inferiors. So it was that, when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war broke out, they were
already conditioned to convert their local row into a geopolitical affair. The result: four decades
of accommodating OPEC as a global player. The lesson is not to dismiss “local” or “domestic”
politics as unimportant; they can be momentous.

9. Corruption - Corruption and natural resources tend to go together, and while many resource-
rich countries go to some lengths to dole out some of the benefits to the masses, the
enrichment of the few at the top can still breed resentment. Long-term, deep-seated corruption
underlie the fuming anger in the Arab Spring and this year’s protests in Russia. And when
protests spawned by corruption threaten to destabilize the country’s energy output, there can be
geopolitical consequences.

10. The Mountains—Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and ExxonMobil - Some countries and
enterprises are so large and their behavior so singular that their actions can create and disrupt
economic and geopolitical trends. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and ExxonMobil are four entities
that can affect supply, price, demand and more simply by stepping into the picture.

11. Extreme Weather - it itself could potentially wipe existing nations off the map; invigorate
others; create unsurvivable swaths of the Earth, and new, thriving lands from currently
inhospitable ones. It could utterly undermine widely embraced GDP forecasts for China, the US
and Europe.

Thesis6

The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent
Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order,
which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As
Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the
world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that
this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.” Everyone
knows about the rise of China. Few of us realize its magnitude. Never before in history has a
nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power

6
https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/thucydides-trap-are-us-and-china-headed-war
But if anyone’s forecasts are worth heeding, it’s those of Lee Kuan Yew, the world’s premier
China watcher and a mentor to Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in
March, the founder of Singapore put the odds of China continuing to grow at several times U.S.
rates for the next decade and beyond as “four chances in five.” On whether China’s leaders are
serious about displacing the United States as the top power in Asia in the foreseeable future,
Lee answered directly: “Of course. Why not … how could they not aspire to be number one in
Asia and in time the world?” And about accepting its place in an international order designed
and led by America, he said absolutely not: “China wants to be China and accepted as such—
not as an honorary member of the West.”
Geopolitical Futures Podcast - Building Out Our Model
- To the place a state or non-state actor with interest
- Intersection of politics, economics, military strength and capability and geography, what
do have access to , what constraints do they face domestically, geographically, or within
the international system - What options do they actually have? This reveals what
countries can actually do.
- States that can make big moves can shape the global syste
- Read 350 to 400 years of history of a country to get an understanding of where the
country comes from?
- Add in the in-depth of study of maps - Constraints and imperatives are revealed by
geography
- Geography defines what resources a state can access, how they can transport goods /
people, food growing.
- Start Stupid - Don't bring your biases / assumptions when analyzing a country
- If you have more money, you can buy more arms; if you have a bigger military, you can
project power; if you have a cohesive political system, you can control the military in
sensical way.
- The rational that national borders follow geographical barriers - Rivers, mountains,
swamps, etc,plains (which often are points of conflicts because geographically, there is
no buffer zone as a result of geography)