Re: Geopolitics/Geoeconomics Thread - June 2015
Posted: 11 May 2021 05:57
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles ... 76261.html
The book has come in for high praise from no less than leading American statesman Henry Kissinger and William Webster, a former director of both the CIA and FBI. Kissinger describes it a “sweeping exploration of the changing energy landscape looks far into the future and outlines issues that will occupy scholars and policymakers for decades to come.” Retired Marine Corps General James L. Jones, former President Barack Obama’s security advisor, penned the book’s foreword. Gen. Jones describes Mirtchev’s tome as "a timely and truly inspired perspective on 21st century global security challenges" – one that helps disaggregate “the complex relationship between economics, the alternative energy megatrend, security, and defense and the implications for the unfolding major power competition.” .
In this seminal work on the planetary scale of 21st century security challenges, Mirtchev makes brilliant use of a new conceptual prism that he calls the “alternative energy megatrend.” Using this construct as a guide, Mirtchev traces the geopolitical combinations likely to emerge in the coming decades. Much has been written about the multipolarity that is coming to characterize the international system. Until now, however, no one has been able to systematically explain the emergence of a multicentric world order catalyzed by the human quest for alternative energy.
Mirtchev unpacks the growing complexity of international relations in which states are joined by a broad range of non-state actors. The latter include intergovernmental institutions, NGOs, multinational corporations, organized crime syndicates and terrorist entities. These players expand the spaces in which power can be projected and the ways in which it is used. The quest to unlock and exploit the energy sources of the future connects with this growing complexity to upend global balances of power. In the geopolitics to come, foreign policy is no longer just about states trying to maintain territorial integrity. These non-state actors, unlimited by borders, are redefining what national and even international security means through the advancement of a "green creed" and the creation of new global norms about the need for alternative energy sources.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/ ... o-respond/Mirtchev explores how the development of renewable sources of energy are giving rise to this new Grand Energy Game.
Mirtchev then emphasizes their collective nature in the form of a megatrend, whose future security trajectory will be shaped by the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution and by exponential advances in artificial intelligence.