Shaping a 21st-century world order amounts to a patchwork

By James M. Dorsey To watch a video version of this story on YouTube please click here. A podcast version is available on Soundcloud, Itunes , Spotify , Spreaker , and Podbean. What do Moroccan arms sales to Ukraine, a transnational Russian Iranian transit corridor, and US assistance in developing a Saudi national strategy have in common? Together with this week’s Russian-Iranian financial messaging agreement and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s December visit to Saudi Arabia , they are smaller and bigger fragments of a 21 st -century world order in the making that is likely to be bi-polar and populated by multiple middle powers with significant agency and enhanced hedging capabilities. So is the competition between rival US and Chinese technologies for which the jury is still out. For the two likely dominant powers, the United States and China, the building blocks are efforts to line up their ducks in a bipolar world. For Russia, they involve hanging on to its