I thought this part of the paper's conclusion was pretty interesting:

>Yet today’s geopolitical divide does not depend upon historical ties or cultural affinity. Rather, it finds its basis within politics and political ideology: namely, whether regimes are democratic or authoritarian, and whether societies are liberal or illiberal in their fundamental view of life. In the first category are maritime societies based on trade, the free flow of peoples and ideas, and the protection of individual rights: in this grouping we find the countries of western Europe, the settler societies of both North and South America and Australasia, as well as high-income insular democracies in North Pacific Asia. By contrast, the second cate- gory is comprised of historically land-based, continental empires: Iran, Russia, Central Asia, China, and the Arab Middle East. In that sense, comparisons with the Cold War are not entirely mistaken. For even though this latter grouping spans the full range of political in- stitutions and ideologies – from Islamism to secular communism, and from traditionalist monarchism to mass movement populism – they are united in their rejection of western modernity, and its associated political and social alternative.