To hear the Obama administration tell it, the framework nuclear accord agreed to between the P5+1 powers and Iran last month in Lausanne, Switzerland is a good deal. The White House has pledged that the final agreement to be concluded in coming weeks, backed up by a robust monitoring and verification regime, will block Iran's pathways to a bomb for at least a decade - and perhaps considerably longer.
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.