"encirclement" is a correct and usable word in written English.
You can use it to refer to the act of enclosing or surrounding a place or thing with a barrier or force. Example: The encirclement of the city by the invading army was complete.
The Afghan government has never recognised the "Durand line", the Afghan-Pakistan border that the British drove through Pushtun tribal lands, and the idea of an independent "Pushtunistan" has never entirely vanished.Pakistan fears encirclement by India and its ally.
Strategists in Delhi wonder whether the new Chinese facilities on the Myanmar coast might lead to India's encirclement.
The capture on March 15th of Yabroud, a strategic town 80km (50 miles) to the north, in effect relieves Damascus of what had, as recently as November, seemed a real threat of encirclement by rebel forces.
It will also require America to allay the army's fear of encirclement by a pro-India regime in Afghanistan.
From the windows to the south the hills were lit with fires as the Israelis began their encirclement of the Old City.
The first is Mr Kissinger's insight that Chinese strategists think like players of wei qi or Go, which means that, in the long term, they wish to avoid encirclement.
Suddenly, it felt that its hard-earned seat on the UN Security Council had been turned into a joke, and NATO's enlargement looked like encirclement.
Brussels lies only a few kilometres inside Flanders, but jumpy francophones now mutter, only half-jokingly, about creating a "corridor" to link it to French-speaking Wallonia, as if preparing for Berlin-style encirclement.
Although it is America's ally, Pakistan maintains links with the predominantly ethnic-Pushtun Taliban in Afghanistan, as a hedge against the day America leaves and a way to thwart a perceived Indian plan of strategic encirclement.
Caixin quoted one popular online comment that tried to get its own back for some of the 2008 coverage by likening London 2012 to Berlin 1936, the Nazi games, and arguing that this year's event was about "the soft encirclement of China".
Watching President Barack Obama in action this week, it is easy to see what he means.Mr Obama's four-country tour of Asia might have been designed to play on Chinese fears of American encirclement.
