Geopolitics / North America

• America’s Military Tug of War

  Obama’s national security strategy lays out a vision of US global power based on a strong, modern economy at home and multilateralism abroad. But other forces in the US body politic are pushing in a different direction. The strategy, rolled out last week but overshadowed by the continuing ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, is the administration’s first effort to articulate its vision of American national defense and global power. “Our strategy starts by recognizing that our strength and influence abroad begins with the steps we take at home,” says the introduction, listing deficit reduction, education, green energy and…

• America and the Jungle of Serpants

  An official directive that grants the US army expanded counterinsurgency powers reveals Washington’s imprisonment in an exhausted vision of security. An early decision of Bill Clinton after he became president in January 1993 was the appointment of R James Woolsey as director of the CIA. At his Senate confirmation hearings, Woolsey was asked how he would to characterise the current era, following the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He replied that the United States had slain a "large dragon" (the Soviet threat) only to find itself living "in a jungle filled with a…

• Regulation Era – The ‘60s Return

  The decade of the 1960s stood orthodoxy on its head. It was a time when alternative everything got a hearing. Expertise came into doubt; the phrase “some decisions are too important to be left to the experts” was heard everywhere. The seer of the day was Ralph Nader. Government was only trusted as a regulator. So it regulated: the environment, the schools, the workplace, the airline industry, the communications industry, and new industries like nuclear power. Anything that had escaped regulation in the 1930s got swept up in new regulations. And those 1930s regulations for banks and utilities were applauded.…

• A New Look at National Security: Oil, Fertilizer and Energy Demand

  The BP oil spill has released more than four million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico to date, threatening the southern US coast. As congressional hearings begin, the disaster should cause the US to reassess what it means by 'national security.' A funny thing happened on the US President Barack Obama's trip to the Gulf Coast disaster zone earlier this month.  When he arrived, before discussing his administration’s response to the spill, which the visit was designed to highlight, he had to first address another issue. The night before, someone had left an SUV packed with poorly improvised…

• Gulf Oil Spill Highlights Flaws in Obama’s Government

  Ever since he became President, Barack Obama has displayed a disturbingly consistent pattern of behavior: Ignoring the desires of the base that elected him in favor of consistently failed attempts at bi-partisan “co-operation” with Republicans, and – here’s the kicker – OTHER actors who are most definitely not part of that base, above all big corporations and industries who have made no secret of their opposition to even his weakest efforts at “change.” The examples are too numerous to mention, but in passing we can at least reference the nonsensical “debate” about health “care” “reform” that was finally passed without…

• Obama's Energy Policy: A Labyrinth of Contradictions

  When it comes to energy, there is an incoherence to President Barack Obama’s policies. This incoherence is embedded in his administration in the person of Carol Browner. She is largely regarded as the agent of a kind of reactionary environmentalism that once haunted the Democratic Party. Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, is a special assistant to Obama for energy and environment. To a wide variety of industries, though, she is the agent of regressive, just-say-no environmentalism. Browner’s background–from environmental jobs in Florida to working with Al Gore–dooms her to suspicion of zealotry, which is…

• America: Export Nation?

  There’s some interesting data emerging on the world trade situation. One of the surprising things is the U.S. export market is actually fairing reasonably well. People often pan America for having no exports. It's a common complaint the U.S. doesn't produce anything the rest of the world wants. This is untrue. These critics latch onto the fact the U.S. produces almost no consumer goods. America doesn't make t-shirts and CD players. It's just not cost effective for these low-end products. American export value peaked in early 2007 at just under $340 billion quarterly. Of that, only $40 billion came from…

• The US Finds its Superpower Structure and Capital are Insufficient to Cope with a Transformed World

  The United States of America, in global strategic terms, is tumbling down a series of misadventures, declining in a “step of sighs” through frustrating economic and military endeavours as it discovers that its superpower structures and massive capital wealth are insufficient to cope with a transformed world. This transformed world was created by the very superpower capabilities and massive wealth of the West. Even the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is beginning to recognize that massive financial holdings are inadequate to address all challenges to national survival and wellbeing. The question is whether this current process through which the US…