What is “great powers competition” in a time of global confinement? As we write this article, half of the human species is or has been confined in homes or apartments, in cities and slums. In China, for example, confinement is a massive political and social undertaking. All around the world hundreds of millions of people …
Continue reading “The COVID-19 and the U.S.-China competition (1)”
(Credit Image: Pierre Markuse, CC BY 2.0) The global wildfire is engulfing the world. Throughout 2019, immense swaths of Australia, California, Alaska, Russia, central Africa, and the Amazon basin, were part of this immense bonfire. This conflagration took place after the historic fire seasons of 2018, 2017, 2016… (David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, Life …
AI, AI Everywhere The Artificial Intelligence field (AI) is creating a continuity that encompasses climate change science and the preparedness of the U.S. military to climate risks. This continuity appears through the central role of AI in two apparently disconnected foresight civilian and military uses. AI and climate science Climate Central published in Nature a …
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The strange case of the disappearing report In August 2019, the Centre for Climate and Security published an article about a recent publication by the U.S Army War College. The document, entitled “Implications of Climate change for the U.S Army”, however, cannot be found anymore on the “publications” page of the U.S Army War College. …
A pandemic of African swine fever is devastating the pig stocks of China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Korea, South Korea, Laos, the Philippines, and Timor Leste. Furthermore, some wild boars carrying the disease have just been detected at the frontier between Mongolia and Russia (African Swine fever update, Food and Agriculture Organization, 03 October 2019). From …
Continue reading “China, the African Swine Fever Pandemics and Geopolitics”
From 1 to 28 September 2019, 3000 men and women of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps are participating in the “Arctic Expeditionary Capabilities Exercise”. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command leads this exercise. The exercise takes place in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska and Southern California (“Navy, Marine Corps conduct Arctic expeditionary capabilities exercise in Alaska”, …
Continue reading “Towards a U.S.-China War?(2): Military Tensions in the Warming Arctic”
In May 2019, for the second time in three months, Central U.S. is hammered by record-breaking floods. Those floods are impacting Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska and Iowa (Susannah Cullinane, Hollie Silvermane, Sheena Jones, “Central US reels from week of deadly weather”, CNN, May 26, 2019). In Van Buren, Arkansas, the Arkansas River level reached …
This article explores the way the warming of the Arctic transforms this region into the new frontier of a new driver of the confrontation between the US and China… Read More
Between 14 and 20 March 2019, a historically powerful “bomb cyclone”, combined with snowmelt devastated Colorado and the Central United States, especially the Midwest “farmbelt” of Iowa and Nebraska, South Dakota and Kansas. Consequently, it triggered immense floods, which wrecked more than a million of acres (405000 hectares). These floods have immediate direct consequences, because …
In February 2019, during the Saudi Arabia-China economic forum, the two countries signed for more than 28 billion dollars deals (“Saudi-Chinese Investment Forum Signs 35 Deals During Crown Prince’s Beijing Visit”, Ashark Al Awsat, 22 February, 2019). These gigantic deals are part of the growing Saudi-China relationship. They are the economic and political continuation of …
Continue reading “Saudi Arabia and the Chinese Belt and Road: the Great Convergence”
