"We who defeated the Israelis will also defeat the terrorists," a Hezbollah fighter in Syria told the New York Times the other day, referring to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in the early 1980s. "And we will take Jerusalem."
By every account Russia and its "insurgent army" are planning a new offensive in Ukraine. Shelling aroundShyrokyne has increased considerably. Russia, once again violating the Minsk II agreement that it first broke even before the ink was dry, has brought up reinforcements, including air defenses - a telltale sign of an impending offensive. It has also reorganized and trained separatist fighters in Ukraine to make them more proficient and professional under Russian command and control.
The growing concerns of Arab nations over an emerging Iran nuclear deal and their reported desire for U.S. weapons to protect themselves are the unfortunate outgrowths of President Barack Obama's foreign policy realism.
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.