The basic rule of thumb is that the areas in the world that are more vulnerable to collapse are those with the highest amount of net oil imports.  Of course, it is true that the Middle Eastern or African countries with significant oil exports can suffer a collapse due to geopolitics and civil wars (example, Iraq, and Libya), but this was not a result of domestic oil supply and demand forces.  Rather the collapse of Iraq and Libya can be blamed on certain superpowers’ desire to control the oil market as they are strategic net oil importers.

The areas with the largest net oil imports, Asia-Pacific and Europe, have designed complex economies that are highly dependent on significant oil supplies to function.  Thus, the areas and countries with the largest net oil imports will experience a higher degree of collapse. Yes, there’s more to it than the amount of net oil imports, but that is an easy gauge to use.  If we look at the Asia-Pacific countries with the largest net oil imports, China, India, and Japan lead the pack.

In an unprecedented challenge to Mrs Merkel's authority, the CSU will give Chancellor Angela Merkel a two-week deadline to meet its demands for overhauling asylum policy, according to German paper Bild. The German leader will then face a choice between a humiliating climbdown on migration policy, or firing her interior minister, which would likely trigger a government collapse.

Mason explained: "I think the big danger in all of our nightmares whether you are pro- or anti-European Union, the nightmare is that it breaks up in an uncontrollable way. The way it does that is if the Merkel government falls and switches to the right, as the Austrian government did. Alexander Dobrindt, the leader of the CSU, the sister party of Merkel's, has come out really strongly with this Austrian and Italian line and that is undermining Merkel’s authority."

"We cannot spend more on our military than the next 10 nations combined while millions of Americans do not have food and housing and healthcare… That is why I voted against spending $716 billion on the military today." Had the Pentagon's budget simply remained the same as it was in 2017, Congress "could have funded public college for every student in the US and had $12 billion left over," noted media analyst Adam Johnson.

But Democrats and Republicans decided to join hands once more late Monday — in an overwhelming 85-10 vote — to affirm that militarism and massive handouts to defense contractors top education, healthcare, and anti-hunger programs on the list of congressional priorities.

The NFI website calls it a “father absence crisis in America” and states the “father factor” is in nearly all social ills facing the country today.

— Children in female-headed households without a spouse are at a 47.6% or four times higher poverty level than children who live with a married mother and father. (US Health and Human Services)

— Girls who grow up without a father are seven times more likely to become pregnant as a teen.

— Children who grow up with a non-biological man (social father) are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect that those who live with their biological father.

— Children without their father are two times more likely than their peers with fathers to drop out of school.

— Children without their father are more likely to go to prison at some point in their lives, and 92 percent of men who are incarcerated are fathers.

— Children in a fatherless family are 279% more likely to carry guns or use and deal drugs than those who grow up with a father.

The first of these meetings was the G7 (or G6+1 as some of the participants described it) in Québec City Canada. Attending were political leaders of the six largest (as measured by GDP) western industrial nations and Japan.

The American President Donald Trump did not bother to conceal his fundamental scorn for his alleged friends and allies. He arrived late, made little or nothing by way of a significant contribution, and left early. On his plane en route to a meeting in Singapore with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un he resiled from the joint memorandum supposedly agreed to in Québec, and added some personal and bitter insults about the meeting’s host, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau.

The second key group central to Russia’s ‘other formats’ is the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) whose most important member economically and politically is Russia. Even more importantly, the EAEU has signed major cooperation agreements with the China instigated Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It has also signed a free trade agreement with Iran, to come into effect in 2020. Iran is a pivotal nation in all of the Eurasian and beyond multilateral agreements that are not only already in place, but are having a steadily mounting economic, financial and geopolitical impact.

The third grouping and one having its annual meeting in Qingdao, China, is the Shanghai Cooperation organisation (SCO). It was not by coincidence that the SCO meeting took place in Shandong Province, which is the birthplace of Confucius.

The SCO meeting was the first to be held since Pakistan and India were admitted as full members in 2017. These two nations have a difficult history, but contrary to the expectations of many western commentators, they have nonetheless agreed to seek a resolution of their differences within the SCO framework.

Of even greater consequence, China and Russia, through a combination of factors including complementary economies and resources, and the certain knowledge that they are more secure together than apart, have forged an increasingly close relationship. So much so in fact, that in Qingdao President Xi presented President Putin with a unique Medal of Friendship. Xi not only described Russia as China’s “best ally”, he also used the phrase “strategic partnership” for the first time in a public forum.

First, the G7 fell apart. The gathering of the West’s seven major industrial powers collapsed on the issue it was originally set up to address: a reliable world trade order, based on agreed rules. The West is no longer united by common values; it is divided by economic interests. Donald Trump was only being consistent when he called for Russia to be re-invited to the group.

A second event took place at the same time as the G7. No coincidence: at the meeting of the Shanghai Group, the West’s authoritarian rivals showed a common will and a common desire to shape the globe’s post-Western architecture. These days, China, Russia and the other Shanghai Group members represent 40 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of world trade. Little unites this disparate group of nations except a belief that this century will be post-Western.

The third event was the Singapore summit between the North Korean dictator and Donald Trump, a democratically elected president. This proved, yet again, that we are facing a new era of nuclear proliferation. The Non-Proliferation Treaty has burst apart. Iran’s leaders will have watched the Singapore meeting with a watchful eye. They may well conclude that it was a mistake to get mixed up with a deal to abandon their nuclear weapons. In the end, those nice Europeans could provide no security.

Clearly, only those with nuclear weapons will be taken seriously in this world, and invited to sit at the negotiating table. The end of “regime change” is what Donald Trump offered to Kim Jong Un, but not to President Rouhani of Iran, who gave up his nuclear ambitions. The world’s dictators will learn a lesson from this — get hold of nuclear weapons if you can. On the Korean peninsula, even the mighty America was forced to give up its ideas of regime change.

“Europe: Whatever it takes.” This should be Germany’s motto... No one has profited more from Europe; we are the continent’s political, economic and financial winners. And no one stands to lose as much as we do. Our neighbors once invited us to join them in founding the European Union, even though just a few years earlier we had brought murder and pillage to their countries.

That step was taken by courageous statesmen from France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. They had to face down plenty of skeptics and critics in their own countries. But those politicians knew that Europe really was a question of life or death.