With the disastrous foreign and defense policies followed by the last two administrations in Washington, power vacuums have emerged throughout the world, and as we all know, nature (and politics) abhors a vacuum. Europe can no longer even be considered a significant player in the global geopolitical context.
Which leaves only three great powers in the contemporary world: a weakened United States, The Russian Federation and the Peoples’ Republic of China. Last month I wrote about Russia, which is in the process not only of forming a Eurasian empire from Siberia to Eastern Europe, but which in a few years and in the face of a fragile economy and a declining and unhealthy population, has detached pieces of Georgia and Ukraine, turned the Black Sea into a Russian lake, implanted defensive and offensive missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave which effectively turns the Baltic Sea into another Russian lake, established a major presence in the Eastern Mediterranean with naval and air bases on the Syrian coast and which regularly violates the air and sea spaces of its neighbors with impunity. It has done all this using almost exclusively naval and air power and the Western response has been feeble at best.