Quote (Skinned @ Apr 8 2014 04:53pm)

BRIC ain't shit.  Brazil's economy isn't booming like people predicted, they failed to enfranchise more people when they had the chance and now they're on their way back to chart topping inequality, high inflation, and slow growth.  Russia is in bad shape because the petrorubles are drying up and Putin is telling his oligarchs to stop stealing because of it by a few choice persecutions.  With internal political opposition gone, he has his own party to deal with, full of old oligarchs not going anywhere and young managers with MBAs from London with nowhere to advance.  They are going to chew his ass up.

China is the most relevant on the list, but they have every problem the US has only exponentially worse and without the massive force that is the American Middle Class.  Not to mention that militarily they have one aircraft carrier that is surplus and which they can fly nothing off of or land nothing onto.  The worse thing that can happen to China is that they could adopt a more individualistic outlook like the West and start competing within themselves instead of cooperating like they have been.  It would all be downhill for them from there.

I'm not going to say anything bad about India except that they have ways to go, but are well on their way.  They are developing a powerful Middle Class.  The Middle Class has to be able to overpower the upper class for them to ever truly rival the US (unless the Middle Class in the US doesn't cockslap the top 1% soon, then we're on our way to where India is).

Quote (killgoreisleet @ Apr 8 2014 10:15am)

China is a paper tiger, Thought BRIC is a very real (economic) threat to US supremacy, at least combined, China alone is more of a joke. Though, we should be concentrating our efforts in forming closer ties with Australia and Southeast Asian nations and containing China better.

I see Russia mobilizing as a clear way for Europe to stretch its might for once and maybe even get some battle experience at least once this century. Maybe that will wake them up from their fantasy of the US always being their guard dog because war is such 20th century for them, haha.

Quote (dothe @ Apr 8 2014 06:20pm)

"Interestingly, members of military households were no more likely to correctly locate Ukraine (16.1 percent  correct) than members of non-military households (16 percent  correct), but self-identified independents (29 percent  correct) outperformed both Democrats (14 percent  correct) and Republicans (15 percent  correct)"