We were kids, but they weren’t kidding. It wasn’t called “Risk: The Game of Global Domination” for nothing. You remember it, I’m sure. You had a territory. You had armies. You could make alliances. You could cheat, stab in the back, and generally scheme to your heart’s content as long as you achieved your goal: the conquest of the world. And it’s never ended, not for Parker Brothers, nor for the great powers of this planet over the last many centuries. Look at a Risk board these days and note that whoever controls Europe starts off with Ukraine, while whoever has Asia (with China at its heart) has Russia as well. Pepe Escobar would find meaning in that line-up.TomDispatch’s peripatetic Eurasian correspondent, he’s the man who discovered Pipelinestan, which, by the way, would have made a thrilling kids’ game filled with skullduggery and historic profits in the service of devastating the planet until the price of oil recently began plunging toward the energy subbasement. As he points out today, the world is starting to look ever more eerily like a giant game of Risk, especially across the Eurasian subcontinent.

For a bare decade or so after the Soviet Union imploded, it seemed like the game of global domination, the one for the big kids in Washington (and, until 1990, Moscow), had come to its ultimate conclusion with a single victor till the end of time. (So the Bush administration came to believe anyway.) Jump another decade-plus ahead and Risk once again has a more contested look to it. As Escobar so brilliantly labels it — the title, by the way, of his newest book that includes his superb Pipelineistan work for TomDispatch — the U.S. has come to seem ever more like an “empire of chaos” rather than the dominating power on planet Earth. Wherever its military has gone these last 13 years, what’s followed has been some version of chaos, destabilization, radicalization (often, but not always, in a fundamentalist direction), and blowback (as well as torture, drones, black sites, the death of innocents, the uprooting of populations, and the manufacture of jihadist organizations). It’s a picture that couldn’t be uglier.

In the meantime, on the Eurasian continent, something seems to be shifting, potentially in a big way, and Escobar is, as ever, on the scene. Consider today’s essay part two (here’s part 1) of his wide-ranging look at a potentially tectonic set of commercial and power shifts, centering on China, that could change the way the world works (or, of course, simply descend into Cold War 2.0).