Axios

Five years from now, Germany's Angela Merkel and the U.K.'s Theresa May will have faded from the political scene, while Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China's Xi Jinping will continue to dominate domestically and shape geopolitics.

The big picture: That's according to Bloomberg's World Leaders’ Political Health Check, which shows France's Emmanuel Macron and potentially Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) slipping over the past six months. Other prominent world leaders have held steady, with President Trump projected to carry on through 2024.

The Department of Justice announced indictments of 10 Chinese agents and conspirators for stealing intellectual property and business secrets in aerospace and other high tech industries.

Why it matters: The Chinese government has been believed to commit economic espionage for years — an allegation it denies. If what U.S. lawmakers, law enforcement officials, intelligence agents and private security firms believe is true, this is a multibillion dollar scheme illicitly converting U.S. firms' research and development into Chinese companies' profits.

There are two competing ways to look at the Kremlin's social media activities during the 2016 U.S. election campaign: Either the Russian propaganda campaign aimed to elect Donald Trump or it intended to manipulate both left and right into country-crippling division. A new study suggests both views may be right.

Why it matters: Experts tend to believe that Russia's social media propaganda campaign is a year-in, year-out assault to sow division. That's been tough for more casual observers to square with other Russian efforts in 2016, like hacking the Democratic National Campaign or propaganda on its TV station RT.

We were escorted to the "occupation line" by a convoy of trucks. When we arrived, 10 heavily armed members of the Georgian security services fanned out along the barrier that divides Georgia from Georgia — or, if you ask Moscow, from the Republic of South Ossetia.

Why it matters: No issue is more critical to the Georgian people and the future of the country than the Russian occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But while everyone we met with in Tbilisi raised the issue, they all acknowledged they lacked a solution.

On Nov. 30, 2001, Jim O'Neill, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, released a 16-page white paper declaring a new geo-economic bloc that he said would supplant the current world order. If you were an investor, "BRIC" — Brazil, Russia, India and China — was the way to go.

Why it matters: Almost exactly 17 years later, the BRICs are emblematic of a very different world, but not the one O'Neill foresaw — one that is autocratic, nationalist and turbulent.