The UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Cancun is turning out to be both anti-climactic and anti-climatic.
Cloistered Climate Talks
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Energy
Iran’s Adventures in Latin America
As the United States continues to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, the Islamic regime is engaging in a foreign policy counter-attack with profound strategic consequences. The theater of strategic warfare between the United States and Iran has expanded well beyond the Middle East.From sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, Iran is selling arms, offering aid and investments, and otherwise establishing a new pattern in south-to-south relations as it battles what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls “Western arrogance.”
Obama: Blowing It on India?
President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to India will come just after the mid-term elections in the United States. Whether this timing is coincidental or deliberate, it will decide where Obama stands on several contentious issues between the two countries.
One of these issues is the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to India.
Iran-Turkey-Syria: An Alliance of Convenience
The Israel-Palestine conflict has been at the heart of regional affairs since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This is the context wherein the “de facto” Iran-Turkey-Syria axis should be understood, although substantive normalization of relations in the last decade between Turkey and its neighbors Iran and Syria served as a pre-requisite for the supposed alliance.
U.S.-India Nuke Transactions Go From Bad to Worse
U.S.-India nuclear transactions are part of a broader set of agreements between the two countries that U.S.-based multinationals are hoping to use as a wedge to further open India to investment and sales.
Loose Oil Is a Way of Life in West Africa
Big oil spills are no longer news in Africa. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates
Extreme Energy
Noted author and Hampshire College professor Michael Klare, whose latest book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet describes the geopolitics of the energy crisis, will talk about the causes behind the Gulf oil spill.
Multinational Oil, The US and Nigeria: A Crude Contrast
In the wake of the environmental disaster caused by the 20 April explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the oil multinational was immediately pressured into providing adequate compensation by the US government. This is an experience palpably not shared by Nigerian people in the face of another multinational, Shell, in the country’s Niger Delta, writes Alex Free.
The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy
It took President Obama 24 days to finally get publicly angry and “rip” into BP and its partners for the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. What was he waiting for? The pattern has been obvious enough: however bad you thought it was, or anyone said it was at any given moment, it’s worse (and will get worse yet).
A Final Survey of Nuclear Posture Perspectives
Once and for all, is the Obama administration nuclear posture review slumped or standing up straight? Here’s a sample of commentators whose insights — from fresh to just plain strange — jumped out at us. (The new START treaty is remarked upon as well.)