This morning’s discussions seemed like a glass that was half empty; and focused mainly on internal issues to Israel. The existential question to Israel and Israel’s place in the world is assured and is not in doubt in any way, and I think you can have confidence that you can work through these issues. Looking to the picture of the world: Let’s draw away from where we are today and see where we fit in the global sphere in the Earth. I am going to try to illuminate on whether we have less or more political ideology; the radical Muslim against moderate Muslims and the West; East versus West; and our environment.

                The first statistic is the population of the world. An obvious statistic, but we need to state the basics. We have the population of China, India, EU and Americas as the largest in the world. It seems though that countries with around 20 million people is where a lot of the world’s attention is being focused today. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria and so on; their populations are still going to grow and their influence and world focus will grow as well. It isn’t the issue of the population of China or India, but the 150,000 of them that are affluent or will soon be affluent and will have a buying power comparable to the United States. These people are coming online for the first time in history, creating another US sized population within China that can compete economically with the US. India is following this trend with its strong economic growth and development of a large affluent population. The growth of the affluent peoples in these countries has many implications.

                India’s economy is growing and China’s economy is growing at a rate three times that of the United States. China’s economy has a long way to go, but that does not mean that in a few years time it won’t be a large player in global politics and influence.

                The power of Japan as the world’s second largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity plays a significant role in how global politics is run. The reunification of the Korea’s is inevitable and they will emerge as a world player, and a very influential one at that. Talking about the major Geostrategic trends, I run into businessmen from Israel and Korea wherever I am, these people are working to promote their industry very hard so that their influence in the world is strengthened.

                Defense budgets: The US is overwhelmingly large compared to that of any other nation. If you added up all of the worlds spending on defense it may barely equal that to the United State’s investment into defense spending.

                Technology half-life point. We talk about the rise of the middle class, as technology advances, the time it takes to improve technology the half-life to improve that technology gets less and less. We say we are ten years ahead of China in military and technological advances, but in five years from now we might be behind because of the great and fast advances in technology. We are not fighting a war of power, we are fighting a war on terror and we have focused a lot of our attention on the war on terror. Yet in the United States we are also fighting a war of dominance of who will be the world leader in fifty years, who will influence world politics in fifty years. It is not clear who will lead in influence with countries whose numbers are much larger than the United States and are developing a bloc of citizenry who can compete economically with the United States.