The world is a couple of steps closer to a new Middle East war this morning. Even as the bloodshed in Syria gets worse and government gunships and artillery pound rebel controlled neighborhoods in the country’s largest city, Turkey is moving closer to striking Syria, and Iran is threatening to respond.Turkey has sent troops and […]

Leaving the wreckage of his London visit behind, Mitt Romney has gone to Jerusalem where he must hope better things await. London was a lost opportunity but ultimately unimportant; the Israel visit, however, matters much more to the ex-governor and to his campaign.The press almost always overlooks this, but the argument over Israel policy in […]

Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the energy revolution that is changing the look of the 21st centuries. Some countries are losers, but the US in particular stands to make big gains at home and in its foreign policy.On the whole, this news is about as good as it gets: trillions […]

With the presidential race essentially tied and the final 100 days of the world’s most grueling marathon almost here, Governor Romney gave what was widely billed his first big foreign policy speech at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nevada.It was not a speech that will change the election or […]

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok highlights a fascinating exchange between super-VC Peter Thiel (AI interview here) and Google’s Eric Schmidt on the future of technology. Do read Tabarrok’s excerpts, and don’t neglect to read the whole thing over at CNN. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably say here that I sit on the […]

Get ready for an American century: that appears to be the main consequence of the energy revolution that is now causing economic and political experts to tear up their old forecasts all over the world. The new American century won’t be a repeat of the last one, but in some very important ways the world […]

Forget peak oil; forget the Middle East. The energy revolution of the 21st century isn’t about solar energy or wind power and the “scramble for oil” isn’t going to drive global politics. The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 2oth centuries is back; if the energy […]

Over the past year, we’ve been watching a geopolitical revolution get underway. It’s much bigger and more consequential than the Arab Spring, though the legacy media are giving it much less play. It will rearrange the global chessboard, improving the position of some powers, weakening others. It is a powerful boost to American power, reducing […]

Anti-Semitism in America has, with some notable exceptions, been limited to the laughable fringe—witness the spectacle of “crazy anti-Semitic Elmo” being carted away from Central Park. In Iran, on the other hand, out-to-lunch, looney tunes Jew hatred is the basis for mainstream, respectable socio-political analysis, as revealed in the state-run Fars News Agency: Iranian First […]

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously lamented that Moses led the children of Israel for forty years of wandering in the desert until he found the only place in the Middle East where there wasn’t any oil.But could Moses have been smarter than believed? Apparently the Canadians and the Russians think so, as both countries […]