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.
A surge in military spending;
Accentuating the positive in Crimea
China invests big in Pakistan;
Pakistan arrests 47 Indian fisherman;
Russia to build $2 billion pipeline in Pakistan;
Militants feel pressure in Pakistan;
$45 billion in Afghanistan aid unaccounted for;
Ghani visits Iran
China eyeing new infrastructure projects in Nepal;
Beijing to triple investments in Iranian oil fields