Tom Graham’s wide-ranging “Response to the Critics” included a question for me, in his fourth paragraph. He saw an inconsistency between, on the one hand, my view that Putin’s crackdown over the first year of his latest Presidency has been internally generated and was not a response to U.S. pressure, and, on the other hand, […]

A few days ago rebels were defeated and thrown out of a strategically vital town near the Lebanese border. Brigades of Hezbollah fighters reinforced troops from the Assad regime in that fight. They are now massed outside Aleppo; an invasion appears close at hand. Not too long ago pundits were predicting the imminent demise of […]

Iran’s presidential election is only three days away, and the nuclear program remains foremost in the minds of outside observers and in the statements of the seven remaining candidates. But as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares to step down, it’s worth taking a closer look at Iran’s deteriorating economy. The FT‘s reporter spoke with Masoumeh, a 47-year old woman […]

After a week and a half of violent clashes between protesters and police throughout Turkey, things don’t seem to be cooling off. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced today that the government will not halt its controversial plans to develop a park. This morning riot police and demonstrators clashed again around the contested Taksim Square […]

An aggressive campaign seeks to lure the American workforce back to manufacturing, the WSJ reports: Manufacturers, government officials and nonprofits across the country are looking for ways to get the country’s brightest kids fired up about industry. They’re setting up engineering contests, backing classroom projects where kids design everything from audio speakers to artificial limbs, […]

Ding-dong, the wicked witch of farming subsidies might soon be dead. Last year a comprehensive farm bill reform stalled in the House of Representatives, forcing Congress to extend the 2008 bill for another year. But yesterday the Senate passed a new farm bill, and it looks like the House version has a fighting chance of […]

Nearly a third of the world’s technically recoverable natural gas and 10 percent of its oil can be found in shale formations, according to a new report by the Energy Information Administration.  Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, there’s a bounty of oil and gas available to countries around the world .This report, which has a […]

North Korea canceled high-level talks with South Korea scheduled for later this week, apparently because the South’s choice of negotiator was for some reason unacceptable. “We consider the North Korean decision very regrettable,” said a South Korean government spokesman. They were to have been the highest-level talks in six years.Yesterday we noted that North Korea’s […]

Today’s Telegraph has an excerpt from a recent speech given in London by David Petraeus, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and former director of the CIA. It is a sober and informative reflection on the Global War on Terror and what General Petraeus believes Britain and America’s duties are going forward. As […]

The euro crisis is so large, and its real world effects so tragic, that people often forget that the monetary mess is only one of many areas in which the EU isn’t working. Here’s a big one: Europe doesn’t have a security strategy and doesn’t want to talk about it. Judy Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe […]