Absent cats and busy, busy mice: an unfettered international system

stratfor's peter zeihan...

The question dominating the thoughts of national leaders who often find themselves at loggerheads with Washington is: How do I maximize my position before Washington stops staring at its own navel?

and what are we talking about exactly...? well, for starters, absent the "cats" (the u.s. on a global scale and france and germany within the eu), zeihan points out that the "mice" (the rest of the eu - british, irish, spanish, portuguese, estonians, latvians, lithuanians, poles, hungarians, czechs, slovaks, slovenes, romanians, bulgarians, greeks, italians, dutch, danes, swedes and finns), north korea, venezuela, israel, syria, saudi arabia, iran, pakistan, china, and russia), are going to be using the current global power vacuum to their best possible advantage... zeihan sees russia as having the most latitude to act and predicts where they will put their efforts...

[For Russia], the real issues are items closer to home: Uzbekistan, Ukraine, the Baltics. It is less about attempting to maintain the long-outdated international balance of the Cold War that Russia's nationalists crave, and more about more traditional Russian concerns of securing the borders by expanding them -- or at minimum expanding Russia's "zones of comfort."

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