The American energy miracle continues to make waves as more and more people realize just how big it is. The FT reports: The US will overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest global oil producer by 2017, according to the International Energy Agency, in one of the clearest signs yet of how […]

Obama’s first term had some notable foreign policy successes, but his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was decidedly not one of them. Indeed, his mishandling of the issue early in his first term has rendered his subsequent peace initiatives ineffective and left a legacy of strained relations with both the Israelis and the Palestinians.Now the […]

Is Japan flirting with a triple dip? Japan’s economy contracted sharply at 3.5 percent on an annual basis last quarter, leading many to believe that the world’s third largest (and second most sophisticated) economy is headed for its third recession since 2008. A recession is conventionally defined as back to back quarters of decline in […]

Tunisia is the poster child for the Arab Spring in many ways. Not only is it the country where the revolts against authoritarianism began; it has also long been considered among the most Westernized and secularized of the Arab countries. When Islamists were defeated in the country’s first free elections, Tunisia looked like a place where something […]

After some false starts last week, the various Syrian opposition factions agreed to form a tentative umbrella organization to present a unified front against Assad. The New York Times reports: After three days of haggling at a luxury hotel here, opposition negotiators agreed to the new coalition and then elected as its president Sheikh Ahmad Moaz […]

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month came word that guns of World War One had stopped firing; the war that ripped Europe to pieces had come to an end.The consequences of that war were only beginning. In Russia, the Civil War was picking up steam as the Bolsheviks crucified […]

The presidential election was, naturally, the biggest story of the week. Predictions of a major change at the top were proven wrong as America held its first status-quo election in nearly a decade, returning to Washington a Democratic President, Democratic Senate and Republican House. But that doesn’t mean that the election was meaningless; a number of […]

The heated speculation over the who knew what and when about the Benghazi debacle seems to overshadow a much bigger problem for U.S. policy: post-Qaddafi Libya is and continues to be lawless and anarchic.Shortly before Benghazi happened, the Obama administration set aside $8 million to build up a counterterrorism force in the country. The challenge […]

With its island disputes with China getting serious, Japan is beginning to play a more active role in the Game of Thrones. Already this week, we’ve seen signs that Japan is moving closer to India and Taiwan, and now it appears to be moving closer to America as well. The US and Japan haven’t seen […]

Nobody in human history has ever been entirely sensible and rational about the Big Five subjects, at least not for long: sex, power, children, money and God have been agitating and confusing human beings since time began.Note which comes first on the list: sex is both inescapable and inescapably confusing.America’s own peculiar forms of sex […]