@wretchard:
or whether the stars are veiled

If you are sounding an apocalyptic note, I hear it. An amazing thing about all these strange hints of alarm and chaos is how thoroughly they upset conceits of rational action and “Progress”. I’d much prefer Fukuyama to have been correct.

Take, for example, the phrase “geopolitically correct”, a neologism (new to me) for something desirable but conspicuously absence in our current global “reality”.

So, Admiral Mahan comes to grief on the steppes of Central Asia and the mountain passes of Afghanistan, no?

Professor “Heartland” Mackinder described Britain as ‘a lump of coal surrounded by fish’. Is our globe now “pockets of gas, surrounded by giant Octopi [or Cthuloi]“?

If “The End” tarries, will some bright young person synthesize Mahon and Mackinder with nods to General Tunner [of "The Hump" and "Raisin Bombers" fame] and Colonel Boyd [of "OODA Loop" fame]?

If those topics make it into the young bright one’s opus, a few topics as yet unknown will necessarily have been included as well. Higher topics, as in higher altitudes?