text: One of the unfortunate consequences of the globalization theology of the 1990s has been the withering away of geopolitical thinking in the West. This eclipse of geopolitics is not totally negative, to be sure, for as one pundit put it, "few modern ideologies are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of "geopolitics.'"21