Geopolitical Overhaul: What Will A Post-Obama World Look Like?

US President-elect Donald J. Trump in many ways faces the most circumscribed strategic options of any modern U. S. President entering office. Not only has the global context changed – and will change rapidly even further – so also has the United States’ abilities, tools, and resources to assert itself on the world stage.
The options, opportunities, and threats, then, are substantially new, not only to the US, but to the rest of the world, and therefore require clean-sheet analysis for every society. Similarly, the scale of urban-regional political divides in the United States and in most other countries is now unprecedented, and this makes the immediate future less predictable than in the past, especially when coupled with global popula-tion movement and growth and decline trends.
The two significant structural changes of 2016 – the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union and the U. S. election of Donald Trump – were the confirmation that the globalism era was being forcibly rejected by electorates in modern societies, even though the structures and tools of globalization (com-munications, access) will continue to flourish in a changing environment.
Strategic re-thinking may be most difficult for the U. S. itself, given that the U. S. was the pre-eminent glob-al power and perhaps the sole superpower just a decade or two prior. The context in which that condition prevailed has now changed, and faces significant variables in the coming decades. As a result, attempts to posture U. S. strategic policy and actions as a mere linear extrapolation of the past era of unquestioned dominance will result merely in delaying the US’ ability to respond appropriately to the new global archi-tecture.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Nov 28, 2016.