The United States is beginning to realize the strategic benefits of the fracking revolution. And they just keep growing.
This week at the IHS CERAWeek energy summit in Texas, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said that the United States anticipated "becoming big players" in the global liquefied natural gas market and that "there's a good chance that we will be LNG exporters on the scale of Qatar," which he noted was the world's largest LNG exporter.
Less than a month after it was signed in Lausanne, Switzerland, the framework nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 powers is already beginning to pay dividends - for Iran, that is.
Even before the April 2 accord, the enforced isolation that brought Iran's ayatollahs to the nuclear negotiating table back in 2013 had begun to erode, progressively undermined by hungry investors eager to return to "business as usual" with the Islamic Republic. But since the framework deal was signed, the floodgates have opened in earnest.
As global talks over Iran's nuclear program resume in Vienna this week, one can't help wonder whether, in a larger sense, the die of an Iranian regional, military and economic victory has already been cast. From Washington to Berlin, Moscow to Beijing, and many places in between, Iran's isolation is disappearing as governments and businesses prepare to exploit its return to global respectability.
Both NATO and the United States have publicly acknowledged that Russia is violating the newest cease-fire over Ukraine, which was recently concluded in Minsk, Belarus. Despite the agreement, Moscow is still sending tanks, armored vehicles, rocket technology and artillery to separatist elements inside Ukraine, and has moved on to occupy the strategically located railroad terminal of Debaltseve. Moscow's continuing military buildup in the Donbass region, and the outbreak of renewed fighting, strongly suggests that Russia does not seek an off-ramp out of Ukraine but intends to conquer still more Ukrainian territory.
No sooner had the P5+1 powers and Iran announced on April 2 that they had agreed upon the framework of a nuclear deal than its supporters began to spin the results. To hear the boosters tell it, the preliminary agreement represents a victory for proponents of peace and a defeat for warmongers everywhere. That sort of simplistic rhetoric may play well on a political level, but there are real strategic reasons to be skeptical of the impending deal.
Of the new framework accord with Iran over its nuclear program, President Barack Obama said he hopes "that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement - and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations - and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors."
At first glance, Grozny seems like an odd place for a gathering of the world's best fighters. The capital of Russia's restive Chechen Republic, Grozny is in a better place today than it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was ground zero for two brutal wars between Islamist insurgents and the Russian state. But the city, like the region it inhabits, still ranks high on the misery index. Despite a major rebuilding effort on the part of the government, Chechnya's unemployment and poverty rates are among the highest in the Russian Federation, and the region has emerged as a significant source of angry young men who have traveled to the Middle East to join the ranks of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
If you go by President Barack Obama's rhetoric, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has single-handedly sunk the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The United States has been forced to "re-assess our options," the commander in chief has said, including supporting Israel at the United Nations, on the basis of Netanyahu's election-eve statement opposing a two-state solution.
President Barack Obama's vow to reassess U.S.-Israeli relations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign remarks about a Palestinian state showcases his badly skewed views of Israel, its conflict with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the true sources of regional instability.
The Israeli electorate has spoken. After a bitterly acrimonious political campaign, and an election on March 17th that saw the highest voter turnout (72.3 percent) in recent memory, Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has received a reinvigorated mandate to govern.
You wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, but President Obama has an Iran problem. His administration has wagered - and wagered big - on the idea of a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. But the effort is increasingly unpopular, and a hard sell among the American electorate.
The laws of war are intended to limit conflict and minimize casualties. But what happens when terrorists use these same laws to expand conflict and kill more people?
A firestorm erupted Tuesday over the letter by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. and 46 other Senators to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, laying out their view of the ongoing negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Critics of the letter started throwing around words like unprecedented, illegal, even treasonous.
The summit on countering violent extremism convened by the Obama administration last month was a lavish affair, full of pomp and circumstance and awash in foreign dignitaries. But substantive strategies for combatting radical ideologies, particularly those of Islamist groups, were far less in evidence.
From today's diary entry of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
Ah, the Americans. When it comes to our nuclear weapons program, they leave us with only good choices!
On the one hand, I can drag out the talks beyond this month's latest deadline because the desperate Americans certainly will agree to keep talking. That's how we went from the six-month interim deal in November 2013, through a deadline in July 2014, and then through another deadline in November 2014.
There is an old piece of folk wisdom which, in light of current events, must translate neatly into Russian: "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."
As an already shaky second cease-fire crumbles following the Russian capture of the Ukrainian town of Debaltsevo and with Moscow's intent to also seize Mariupol, it is becoming ever clearer that Russia has no intention of keeping the peace with Ukraine — and that the Kremlin is emboldened by what it perceives to be Western weakness.
With the likes of the Islamic State's self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the running, the competition is stiff indeed. But it would be fair to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin currently ranks as one of the world's most dangerous men.
Russia's political opposition has been put on notice. The Feb. 27 murder of prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov just steps from the Kremlin marks a dramatic escalation of the Russian regime's long-running war on its opponents. Nemtsov, after all, wasn't merely a dissenting politician. He was part of the old system, having served as a deputy prime minister in the government of President Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s. Beginning in the early 2000s, Nemtsov had moved into the political opposition, emerging as a critic of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, and his policies. Even so, his position as a member of Yeltsin's inner circle had given him a degree of immunity from official retribution.
On Tuesday in a much anticipated speech before joint session of Congress, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again sounded the warning against Iran's nuclear ambitions and called for "a better deal" than the nuclear agreement currently being negotiated.
Desperately pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran, scrapping old positions and offering new concessions at a mind-boggling pace, the Obama administration has lost sight of what this regime represents and why the United States and its allies have focused on its nuclear program to begin with.