But to be serious, the big picture is world peace and prosperity and the context is the decline of the West.
This decline is an own-goal, because we have built up a debt that is swallowing our tax revenues and making it difficult to sell our governments bonds, and we have put sanctions on our competitors to break their economies, and we have moved too close to their borders for their comfort & security to break their governments.
(Never mind that at home we are creating a society of extremes aggravated by economic inequality. But this is not the subject of this article, the subject of this article is IR, International Relations.)
America thinks that it can keep its place as world hegemon by threat.
But we in the West, our leadership, could play our cards differently. We could negotiate. This is not from weakness or about concessions. It is about win-win.
We are not in a unipolar world anymore - America is no longer the only great power. There are others, Russia, China - and more on the way - India and the BRICS. It's a multi-polar world.
Win-win means negotiation. It means listening to and understanding the different demands and positions of the other side; and agreeing to certain of their major points in exchange for concessions on some of our minor points: win-win, the subtle art of negotiation.
(This is a version of that Really Useful spreadsheet, right?)
So hard negotiation could move us along the path of peace and prosperity; rather than war and sanctions that is moving along the path of death, destruction, huge expense and even the possibility of nuclear annihilation in a third world war if things carry on as they are at the present.
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