[jaguar]

Hm, it's not bad but a tad too macro for my liking. The collapse of the bi-polar soviet era setup led to a bit of a vacuum, a period oddities as everyone sort of shuffled around and worked out what was going on.

As far as I'm concered the article makes far too many assumptions, particularly about Europe acting as one whole. Particularly in light of the mess that is the new consitution and the increasing problems faced due to the expansion I don't think you can talk quite so blithely about what 'Europe' is doing, particularly outside the relm of trade. While the idea of the collapse of the EU may sound far fetched I don't think, in the medium term, some serious re-organisation is out of the question, in particular to better represent the relative power of larger states. A security council of the EU if you like. Such a scenario could either strengthen or weaken the political willpower of the EU and it's cohesiveness. The article does make the point that trade, military power and 'soft power' are seperate but this isn't exactly new, the military and diplomatic closeness of two nations has never made trade deals any less cuthroat and recipricoal deals across two of those sectors are as a rule, the exceptions. Even the recent Australian fair trade agreement which was seen in some circles as a thankyou for support in Iraq predates that conflict and the final deal can hardly be called generous. What we are seeing is far more single-issue alliances of convenience over such boring old issues as resource access. While certain traditional alliances are fairly strong in the EU for example, France and Germany, they are in reality more strained that they appear and increasingly, alliances are based on the politics of the leaders of the day rather than traditional bonds.

The other factor is the relevance of military force, plenty of people were a tad shocked when NZ disbanded it's military but really - did it lose much? Like many 1st world countries it's ability to defend itself in the event of full scale invasion was questionable at best, it's need to was even more so. Who the hell is going to invade NZ? Indonesia? China? Tad far fetched. Same applies for Australia and most of Europe. Thanks to globalisation, economic interdependence means the chances of first world nations going to full scale war is about the same as every atom in your body deciding to spontaneously move one foot to the left. The only real exception of course is China. While sabres might be rattled and strongly worded statements exchanged after military exercises, the real impact on China going to war, potentially with the US could cause the entire government to colapse. Scratch one up for globalisation. Military power now seems as much about the ability to project power to troubled areas when needed and as a bargaining chip than about defence of sovereignty. The fundamental role of military forces is changing and that is and will continue to impact on foreign policy globally.

The article is correct in pointing out the strategy of using multilateral policy to maintain supremacy, the effectiveness of this is this day and age is questionable and the ambitions of (once again) China in particular and India to a lesser degree are clear. We are, as the Chinese appropriately say, doomed to live in interesting times.