Strategic Environment - Strategic Intelligence

By Peter Zeihan. April 28, 2010 | 0857 GMT. In recent weeks, STRATFOR has explored how the U.S. government has been seeing its interests in the Middle East and South Asia shift. When it comes down to it, the United States is interested in stability at the highest level — a sort of cold equilibrium among the region’s major players that prevents any one of them, or a coalition of them — from overpowering the others and projecting power outward.

One of al Qaeda’s goals when it attacked the United States in 2001 was bringing about exactly what the United States most wants to avoid. The group hoped to provoke Washington into blundering into the region, enraging populations living under what al Qaeda saw as Western puppet regimes to the extent that they would rise up and unite into a single, continent-spanning Islamic power. The United States so blundered, but the people did not so rise. A transcontinental Islamic caliphate simply was never realistic, no matter how bad the U.S. provocation.

Strategic Environment - Strategic Intelligence

New British-Saudi Prescription for Permanent War in the Islamic World 

The much-vaunted success in Iraq, by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, has now become a violent failure, engulfing the Shi’as and Sunnis into lethal conflict. In Pakistan, the “Taliban movement,” funded from Saudi Arabia and aided by Britain, is fast turning into the slaughter-house of minority Shi’as by the “Islamic Sunni jihadis.” Unless

Baghdad and Islamabad recognize, and deal with, the enemy that unleashed this endless war to destroy Islam, and bring untold misery to hundreds of millions of Muslims in the region, a state of permanent war will prevail, subsuming much of Middle East, Central Asia, and a large part of the Indian Subcontinent. In other words, the Islamic world must identify the creators of this monster, and end the killing of Muslims by their fellow Muslims. 

Strategic Environment - Strategic Intelligence

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By  Ramtanu Maitra 

In the midst of the global financial collapse that began in 2007 and continues to throw hundreds of millions of families around the world into a state of despair, the strengthening of cooperative relations among Russia, India, and China has shone through like a beacon of hope. These three large nations, encompassing the Eurasian landmass that constitutes more than half of the world’s population, have forged a triangular alliance, developing stronger economic ties and a regional web of security relations. Russia is at the forefront of such efforts, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is credited for instituting trilateral dialogue among China, India, and Russia which is shaping a new reality in the Asia-Pacific region.