Historically, polities with access to the sea (in Europe, Japan, USA) have established overseas empires while essentially landlocked entities (Russia, Germany) opted to spread on land and at the expense of their neighbours. The USA started off as a land empire, but fast acquired holdings across various seas (Caribbean) and oceans (Pacific.) The disintegration of the British Empire and the rise of Germany and Russia forced the USA to abandon the Monroe doctrine and directly intervene in European affairs in the course of three globe-spanning wars (the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War.)

As empires crumbled in the wake of the two World Wars, agreements made by erstwhile colonial masters regarding “national” borders and newfangled “nation-states” were assiduously observed, defended, and preserved by ostensibly post-colonial rulers and regimes. The Cold War was about maintaining these colonialist fixations and about perpetuating imperialist-mercantilist confabulations which took little notice of ethnic, cultural, and social realities on the ground.

The unanticipated demise of the USSR wrecked this precarious equilibrium. Suddenly, it became both conceivable and doable to redraw colonial-era borders to better reflect ethnic and historical facts: in Europe (Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and perhaps soon in Spain and Scotland); in the Middle East (in Iraq, in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring, and as a consequence of any peace process in Palestine); in Central Asia and other parts of that continent (East Timor; the islands disputed by China, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines; Hong Kong and, soon, Taiwan); and in Africa (South Africa and South Sudan, for instance.)

As a “sole superpower” in a “unipolar world”, the self-appointed and exceptionalist “cop of the international community”, the USA spent two decades, rivers of blood spilled, and countless trillions of dollars in an attempt to stanch this imminent avalanche of geopolitical realignment. To no avail. Realising the unsustainable folly of trying to prop up a zombie world order, President Obama instituted an isolationist foreign policy and military stance, in all but name. He withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan, kept away from an imploding Syria and a besieged Ukraine, and largely left the Middle East to its own devices. The USA has reverted to form: acting as a Pacific power. Yet, even Obama’s Pivot to Asia was stillborn as was his alleged newfound interest in Africa and its prospects.

The future would witness the rise of trading nations, economic empires the likes of Venice and the Netherlands in the 13^th-17^th centuries: Germany (aka the EU), China, the USA, Australia, and, probably Africa. These would be multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, usually banded together within supranational arrangements. The areas excluded from such commercial-economics juggernaut clubs will be carved up according to ethnic, tribal, and religious affiliations to yield a patchwork quilt of obscure and obscurantist impassable and backward nether regions.