Because it’s the U.S. Army’s Energy Awareness Month, it may be a good time to remind President Obama of oil’s importance to economic security, and the role that wartime leadership and image play in getting your hands on it post-victory. He can’t just quietly outsource and downplay war because it’s icky, then call dibs on victory, as he has just done with Libya. Something has to give.When Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi was killed in the fog of war last week, Obama was quick to praise the “strength of Am

BOSTON ― The capture and killing of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, on-going demonstrations for an end to the oppressive reigns of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh and Syria’s Bashar Assad, and new elections in Tunisia show that one thing has not changed in the Arab Spring ― change itself. Even in Saudi Arabia, where requests for reform have not called for regime change, change is proving inevitable with the death of Crown Prince Sultan and questions about what direction the soon-to-be-named new crown prince

Economists were probably too busy watching markets gyrate to contemplate last month’s big news in science. Physicists detected particles travelling faster than light, which, if the reading was accurate, means time travel is possible. Now, let’s play a quick mind experiment that would surely captivate the deans of the dismal science: Pretend you have just been transported 10 years into the future to see how this incipient global crisis pans out. It would be hard to find anyone who isn’t desperate

Vice presidents are a vestigial limb of politics. The position persists even though a vice presidential candidate rarely carries a state, leads a constituency or even commands a portfolio beyond whatever he negotiates ad hoc with the principal. Research suggests that veep candidates don’t bring many votes to a presidential ticket, although an especially bad one can do damage at the margins (see Sarah Palin) or worse (Thomas Eagleton). Once in office, a few vice presidents have been notably troub

As real-life bad guys go, it doesn’t get much worse than Joseph Kony. He’s the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a cultish militia in central Africa that survives by plundering villages, massacring adults and forcing boys to become soldiers and girls to become sex slaves. President Barack Obama has ordered the deployment of 100 military advisers to Uganda to help regional militaries capture or kill Kony and his commanders. It’s a modest and reasonable plan, and a good idea. The LRA, which pr

What a glorious week for the world.Free and fair elections in Tunisia, Muammar el-Gadhafi’s demise. All the fomentation and death brought by the Arab Spring have produced two new states that stand as shining examples ― not just for the still-struggling people of Syria and Yemen, but also for China, Belarus, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and countless other unyielding authoritarian states.“You have won your revolution,” President Obama proclaimed with a big smile just after Gadhafi’s death. And on Sunday ne

The Obama administration says the Dodd-Frank financial reform law ends “too big to fail,” meaning that no financial institution will ever again need to be bailed out. The promise is alluring, but it’s already proving to be false. The argument rests on the premise that bank capital is now high enough to withstand serious shocks, so a calamity is less likely. It also assumes that Dodd-Frank’s new resolution authority allows global financial institutions to be wound down in an orderly fashion, and

The anti-Wall Street movement has confounded Republicans, Democrats and analysts alike. The take on the right is that Occupy Wall Street is the same old riff-raff of leftist anarchists, unlike the grassroots conservative Tea Party; seen from the left, it’s an authentic uprising against the huge income disparity in America and a call for redistributing the wealth. Actually, it is part of a combustible global protest that goes beyond the professional rabble rousers. There is a focus on income ineq

Being a geopolitical analyst and forecaster often means having to explain to people in America how and why a single event in Africa, Russia or China will directly impact them. One such event is the French presidential election set for May 2012, for which the opposition Socialists have just selected their candidate, Francois Hollande, in a final round of open primary voting.For most people, the knee-jerk reaction to an event on the other side of the world is, “Why should I give a toss what happen