[Oilguy]

Rarely in the past six decades has global context counted for as much in strategic forecasting — trend analysis — as it does at the dawn of 2012. Reliance on stove-piped analysis of “strategic sectors” — such as economic and financial issues, security issues, politics, geopolitics, resources and energy, sociology and religion, and so on — will produce skewed and unreliable estimates, and will tend to favor linear extrapolations of recent experience. A study of broad contextual factors, including an expanded view of history, will show how cycles and confluences of trends potentially play a greater disruptive role than at any time since the end of World War II....
Full article at: http://oilprice.com/Geo-Politics/Intern ... -2012.html

Just snips please.

[Revi]

I like that article. All of those factors are in play right now, in 2012. Forget the Mayan prophecy, there are lots of things that will be affecting things for real in 2012. This might be the last year of anything like normalcy with all those factors coming into the mix. The last 50 years have been remarkably stable for those of us in the US. This may be the end of all that.

[Keith_McClary]

But memories of the Ottoman domination of the region are not merely reposited in Turkish minds; they are also, with negative connotations, embedded in the minds of their former subject peoples.

???
I think memories of more recent Brit/French/US domination would be more embedded and negative.