Resource wars, identity conflicts, disinformation, geostrategic rivalries, global power shifts, and an increasing number of non-state actors, make it difficult to analyse contemporary international relations. At the same time, contemporary power rivalries are increasingly affected by currency wars, economic diplomacy, competitive intelligence, economic warfare, indirect strategies, and state capitalism. The events in Ukraine in Spring 2014 reconfirm that Thomas Friedman's flattening of the world (based on the coincidence of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of Netscape and the.