Just how bad of a mess is President Obama in over Syria? So bad that the New York Times is visibly pained by the messy and humiliating situation the Democratic Reagan, the Second Coming of Lincoln and the New FDR finds himself in this week. A sampling of today’s headlines: “A Rare Public View of Obama’s […]

There are a whole host of reasons why China is finding it so devilishly difficult to replicate American shale success. China lacks the water resources, the geology, the roads, the pipelines, the technical know-how, and the wildcatting ecosystem, all of which helped foster the US shale boom. In a round-up of what’s gone wrong with […]

The popular understanding among the chattering classes is that the Fed’s quantitative easing policies—specifically the looming end of loose monetary policy—are at the root of emerging markets’ recent troubles. Daniel Gros has a great contrarian essay up at Project-Syndicate taking issue with this oversimplified view: Quantitative easing in the US cannot have been behind these […]

Compared to the G8 meeting in June in Northern Ireland, when he seemed isolated on the issue of Syria, Vladimir Putin seemed to have lots of company in opposing any possible U.S. military action at last week’s G20 meeting in St. Petersburg. Reasonable people can have legitimate differences over what should be done in Syria […]

The Circus Is Over (For Now) by Lilia Shevtsova The Real Test for Obama on Russia by David J. Kramer Russia and the West: No Special Treatment by Andrew Wood

The dispute over Edward Snowden—if anyone still remembers him—gave us the chance to slough off the mindset constraining Western policy towards Russia. How Western nations proceed over Syria will show how far that chance is developed. The US “reset” was a reset to factory mode, not a fresh beginning, and the factory was built to […]

In the course of history, there have been many problems that could not be solved given the tools available at the time. Such insoluble problems are generally related to a civilizational impasse of some kind. Relations between Russia and the West—and to an even greater degree between Russia and the United States—exemplify one of these […]

It has been barely more than a week since I wrote on Syria and U.S. policy, so-called, toward that issue. I started back on September 3 with an expression of surprise that things could possibly have gotten crazier since having written on August 30. So what am I to say now by way of introduction, […]

On the anniversary of the day the government of Japan bought the Senkaku islands—a handful of small rocks in the East China Sea—from a private owner, relations between China and Japan still haven’t recovered. As the anniversary approached, a number of Chinese coast guard ships and an unidentified drone thought to belong to China lurked near the islands. […]

When your debt is trading cheaper than Detroit’s, it may be time to panic. Puerto Rico is approaching a debt crisis that makes Illinois look hale and hearty. The WSJ reports: “It’s getting concerning,” said Dan Toboja, senior vice president of fixed-income trading at investment bank Ziegler. Puerto Rico yields “never got near a 10% […]