While we maintain a myoptic focus on the war against terrorism, we risk losing ground in the great game where we compete for access to resources and strategic alliances. This may put our country at serious disadvantage strategically in the very near future. This excellent article is just one of many examples of the U.S.'s waning influence around the globe, and some insights on how we may be able to regain our influence.

September 2008 Atlantic

Lifting the Bamboo Curtain, by Robert Kaplan

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/burma

As China and India vie for power and influence, Burma has become a strategic battleground. Four Americans with deep ties to this fractured, resource-rich country illuminate its current troubles, and what the U.S. should do to shape its future.
Burma is a prize to be contested, and China and India are not-so-subtly vying for it. But in a world shaped by ethnic struggles, higher fuel prices, new energy pathways, and climate-change-driven natural disasters like the recent cyclone, Burma also represents a microcosm of the strategic challenges that the United States will face.
Burma is also a potential North Korea, he says, as well as a perfect psychological operations target. He and others explained that the Russians are helping the Burmese government to mine uranium in the Kachin and Chin regions in the north and west, with the North Koreans waiting in the wings to supply nuclear technology. The Burmese junta craves some sort of weapons-of-mass-destruction capability to provide it with international leverage. “But the regime is paranoid,” Heine*mann points out. “It’s superstitious. They’re rolling chicken bones on the ground to see what to do next.