As a result, Myanmar s generals have been able to play one side off against another.

But destroying poppy crops has been turning Afghan farmers against NATO.

They played China against the Soviet Union, while securing the protection of both.

The Iranian government fears that electricity shortages, slow economic growth, and high unemployment will turn the populace against it.

Today, a deepening global divide sets the slow growing US against many emerging market economies and commodity producing countries.

Korean rulers only managed to survive by playing one foreign power off against the other, and by offering subservience, mainly to Chinese emperors, in exchange for protection.

Both the Ukrainian revolution and high economic growth have been caused by President Leonid Kuchma s patent habit of playing everybody against everybody, while abstaining from fair play.

This proposal illustrates how the reform gap, and the unbalanced growth that results from it, can debilitate the European fabric by setting one partner against the other.

The Iranian government fears that electricity shortages, slow economic growth, and high unemployment will turn the populace against it. As social tensions increase, political turmoil will follow.

This would deprive Russia of its ability to play one country off against another, because a concession granted to one national distributor would immediately become available to customers in all the other countries.

Thailand s color coated crisis pits largely urban, conservative, and royalist yellow shirts against the predominantly rural red columns of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. For much of Thailand s long economic boom of the past two decades, wealth resided mostly in the Bangkok metropolitan area, a boon to the burgeoning urban middle class, but deeply resented by the rural majority.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster for North Korea, as it was for Cuba not only did Soviet economic support evaporate, but the Kims could no longer play off one power against another.

It pits the innocent, always hard working people against both a corrupt elite (who do not really work, other than to further their own interests) and those on the very bottom of society (who also do not work and live off others).

In this surreal world, the United Kingdom takes on disproportionate influence, because London is still a top financial center and because the biggest banks in the United States and Europe have proved very effective at playing off American and British regulators against one another.