One problem in understanding geopolitics is the tendency to get lost in the “trees” of nations states and therefore to miss the forest. This is easy to do because we do not have a world state from which to make an analysis. This article attempts to pull the major countries, their organizations and their conflicts into a single whole. What struck us most is that Chinese and Indian trade is overtaking Chinese and US trade. An additional problem for the empire is that China and India are trading in local currencies, leaving the dollar behind.
