As you all know, the world right now is really crazy.  It seems odd, though, that whenever there's global problems most places tend to side off or stay out of the picture--during the cold war, there was the democratic West and the communistic East and everywhere else either sided with one of those or didn't have a giant impact on everywhere.  Right now, it seems to me that the major players are the U.S., China, and, as a big group by itself, the Islamic world. Even though that last group is really quite diverse, I include it as one because separate countries, even across Shiite/Sunni borders, share common adversaries.  Where is everyone else?  Russia's still tanked after the revolution, Europe's either a battleground/breeding ground for Islam or just not terribly relevant, Africa's still so embroiled with infighting, South America doesn't have economic clout by itself to affect global power, and neither does Southeast Asia. Individual countries, sure, but I'm thinking on a billions-of-people scale.  There's always India, of course, but it looks like they're busy playing the economic/diplomatic role with all three, condemning things that Islam condemns, buying/selling with America, and not stepping on China's billions of toes.

In this age, information is the key, and it's not idealistically as if some information is a cure-all, and some is devious disinformation. China prevents its people from knowing certain things, in order (ostensably) to protect itself. The Islamic world churns chaotically when offensive information is shown. In the U.S., free speech is both lauded as one of the things that makes the country better than everywhere else and questioned as if it "really matters."

The craziest thing about all of this is that I have no idea what will happen in five years. China has a sizeable Sunni Muslim minority, and there's always the possibility that the government there might censor something that the rest of the Islamic world unites around. Iran's doing pretty good these days, with governments on either side of it in Iraq and Afghanistan not hostile to them for the first time in who knows how long. Who knows--China and the U.S. might unite to separate from OPEC, or possibly one or the other might produce energy independantly, but not the other, leading to an uneven state.

What is known is this: Things have changed, things are changing, and things will change.  It's what happens.