Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Ferguson: "The Axis of Upheaval"

In case you missed it, here's Niall Ferguson recently in Foreign Policy: The Axis of Upheaval

He's writing about the new, uncertain world of failed/failing nation states and the scary possibilities these states represent. He summarizes things thusly;

Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts now.

Ferguson's 'axis of upheaval' is, of course, a play on Bush's 'axis of evil'. And what's scarier about this axis is that 1. it's larger and 2. it's growing. As Ferguson puts it:

The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis—an axis of upheaval. This axis has at least nine members, and quite possibly more. What unites them is not so much their wicked intentions as their instability, which the global financial crisis only makes worse every day. Unfortunately, that same crisis is making it far from easy for the United States to respond to this new “grave and growing danger.”

Those nine members?
  • Russia
  • Mexico
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Somalia
  • Sudan
  • Afghanistan
  • Iraq
  • Israel/Gaza/Lebanon

Other candidates for this growing axis include: Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Egypt, Congo, Zimbabwe.....

Fun

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