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It seems that Tom’s move to join Wikistrat  has freed him to focus on what he does best – serious geopolitical strategic analysis. While I have always concurred with Dr. Barnett’s emphasis on geoeconomics as an analytical cornerstone, ever since Great Powers his thinking has steadily incorporated greater and deeper historical context. Economics gives the connections and universals, history the particulars and the exceptions. A snippet of Tom on Russian political schizophrenia:

It used to be that these tilts, one way or the other, went on for decades–centuries!  But since Cold War’s end, it seems, like everything else in this networked world, to come and go so much faster.

Yeltsin’s time was an age of aping the West, then Putin led the return back to Russian-ness.  Now Medvedev and others sound the age-old alarm about “falling behind the West/world” and needing to modernize once again.  It’s the same old Westernizers versus Slavophiles debate:  Russia is a failure in its isolation and backwardness and must adopt the ways of the West versus Russia is not a failure but unique and wonderful and the champion of Slavs everywhere and we must stand up to the West and protect our brothers . . . by sucking them into our empire and putting a big wall around them!

If the last bit sounds like some modern-day Islamic radical fundamentalist impulse, it’s because it is very similar.  It’s just an earlier version of rejecting the capitalist west.

That’s it.

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