The Quadrant Framework

I want to share a model that I have observed in the last few years. It is a very coarse-grained model, like a first-order approximation, but nonetheless describes some dynamics and is occasionally useful.

This is one way the world is very approximately balanced.

Sure, it doesn't take into account that a big portion of India's population is Muslim nor that the Christian portion includes Russia.

But it does shed light on a few things:

• Why some Indian nationalists are very concerned with exacerbating competition in the West with China and the Muslim world.

• Why China has invested so much to expand into Africa and Latin America.

• Why some people at the State Department and NATO have made a generational decision to ally with the Muslim world. They see historical and cultural issues as something much smaller than the competition with China (and increasingly India).

And it does beg some questions:

• Why is Christianity so toothless despite the numeric edge?

I wish the world would be a bit more cooperative and less of a zero-sum game, but that is life in a reinvigorated age of empires.

I'll update this post in the future with more generalized ways to imagine the world.