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That means it is entirely possible that a slew of miscalculations are being made today. One of the most widespread misconceptions about the U.S. political system is that a president who is weak at home is by default weak abroad. This is a belief primarily promulgated by Americans themselves. After all, if one cannot get behind one’s leader, what business does that leader have engaging in global affairs? But in reality, a president who is weak at home often wields remarkable power abroad. The U.S. Constitution forces the American president to share domestic power with Congress, so a split government leads to domestic policy gridlock. However, the Constitution also expressly reserves all foreign policy — particularly military policy — for the presidency. In fact, a weak president often has no options before him except foreign policy. This is something that the rest of the world repeatedly has failed to grasp. Domestically weakened American presidents have often done more than engage in foreign policy: They have overturned entire international orders. Former U.S. President George W. Bush defied expectations after his 2006 midterm electoral defeat and launched the surge in Iraq, utterly changing the calculus of that war. Clinton launched the Kosovo War, which undid what remained of the Cold War security architecture. Most famously, John Kennedy, whom the Soviets had written off as a weak and naive dilettante who had surrounded himself with incompetent advisers (sound familiar?), gave the Russians their biggest Cold War diplomatic defeat in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States might be distracted and its president domestically weakened, and undoubtedly most of the world will assume that they know what this means. But history tells a very different story, and this president — like his predecessors — is not done just yet.

First, I’m far less interesting than my writings are.

Second, the world is also far more interesting than my writings and me, and pretending otherwise is narcissism.

U.S. President Barack Obama hopes that the Republicans prove rigidly ideological.

John Boehner, already has indicated that he does not intend to play Gingrich but rather is prepared to find compromises. Since Tea Party members are not close to forming a majority of the Republican Party in the House, Boehner is likely to get his way.

I’d like to consider the opposite side of the coin, namely, how foreign governments view Obama after this defeat.

This economic downturn structurally resembles the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s rather than the cyclical recessions that have recurred since World War II. The American people, mired in debt, with one in six lacking full-time employment, are not spending; and businesses, uncertain of demand for their products, are not investing no matter how low interest rates fall. With the Fed virtually powerless, the only way to stimulate private demand and investment is through public spending. Obama tried to do this with his initial stimulus program, but it was watered down by tax cuts, and undermined by decreases in state spending. By this summer, its effect had dissipated.

Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program.

as the Obama administration recognized, much of the new demand will focus on the development of renewable energy and green technology. As the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans understand, these kinds of industries require government coordination and subsidies. But the new generation of Republicans rejects this kind of industrial policy. They even oppose Obama’s obviously successful auto bailout.

The recent WikiLeaks release, for example, shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand. And they did it in writing! That Clinton now decries Julian Assange's truth-telling an "attack" on America but excuses her cavalier approach to treaty violation tells you all you need to know about U.S. diplomacy.

Is it because our schooling has left us hopelessly naïve about how the world works? Or do we just fail to pay attention?

We shouldn't be surprised by the recurrence of scandals, but, of course, we always are. Why is that?

In other words, the White House blamed Democrats' 2010 defeat on the loss of independents, and to win them back, it will try to slow the growth of government, encourage a bipartisan spirit in Washington, and reform the government process by eliminating things like earmarks.

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of 'Western Civilization' - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

The United States has allocated nearly half a billion dollars worth of counternarcotics aid for Mexico under the Merida Initiative, but the situation south of the border continues to deteriorate. While there has been an increase in cooperation between the two countries, there is still much room for improvement, and corruption and political issues (mostly on the Mexican side) still stand in the way.

Two of the people killed in Juarez were U.S. citizens employed at the consulate, some of the latest victims in the increasingly violent Mexican drug wars, which have killed more than 18,000 people since Calderon took office in 2006.

There is one way that the United States could avoid relying on Mexican communication networks — actually helping to conduct countercartel operations.

Putin's treatment of Clinton raises doubts about the Barack Obama administration's strategy toward Russia, which has focused on building up the supposedly moderate President Dmitri Medvedev, reportedly one of the few foreign leaders Obama has bonded with, as a counterweight to Putin.

And now, we're hearing that Obama believes he has a different and promising relationship with Medvedev -- one independent of Putin.

The happy consensus did not last long. It was already breaking down by the nineteen-seventies, and by the late eighties it was gone, obliterated by the accidents at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 (where no one was killed), and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 (which caused thousands of deaths). But the giant anti-nuclear demonstrations of the time, in Europe and America, were fuelled at least as much by fear of nuclear war as by fear of nuclear reactors.

Such founding fathers of the environmental movement as Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Patrick Moore, an early stalwart of Greenpeace, now support nukes. James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a climate-change prophet, favors the so-called fourth-generation nuclear systems, which would substantially reduce the amount of nuclear waste. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is another supporter. So, within limits, are liberal senators like John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. And so is President Obama.

IT APPEARS TO STRATFOR THAT THE RELATIONSHIP between Moscow and Washington is — despite public successes of the START negotiations — becoming increasingly complex.

That the American president is choosing to meet with the Central and Eastern European leadership en masse in the same venue that is supposed to be dedicated to the pomp and circumstance of the signing of the new START treaty will not please Moscow. This is particularly true since Russia had originally planned for the signing of the treaty to be a minor stop on Medvedev’s own tour of the region, and because the event was designed to highlight Russia’s status as a superpower worthy of the United States’ undivided attention.

And if modern post-Nixon Republicanism has always had a thread of class resentment sustaining it, Palin concentrates it into a heady brew. If Nixon was cocaine for the resentful psyche, Palin is meth. 

I would wager to say that, back in the 1960s and 1970s, nothing infuriated Boomers more about how the American economy was run than the idea that powerful greasy old men, dressed in oversize pin-striped suits and hidden away in smoke-filled rooms, essentially made all the strategic decisions about where capital would flow and (therefore) what would be produced and consumed.  These anonymous titans, from their “commanding heights,” claimed they exercised prudent and responsible judgment, but their very paternalism just infuriated us more.  We wanted to blow it all up.

And guess, what?  We succeeded.  The ascendancy of Boomers as voters and leaders since the late 1970s has coincided with a radical deregulation of our economy, especially in those areas, like investment and finance, where trusted “fiduciaries” were supposed to take care of others.  In the new Boomer world, the market was the great leveler and everyone was liberated to take care of themselves.

Look: what we have seen this past year is the collapse of the RNC as it once was and the emergence of a highly lucrative media-ideological-industrial complex. This complex has no interest in traditional journalistic vetting, skepticism, scrutiny of those in power, or asking the tough questions. It has no interest in governing a country. It has an interest in promoting personalities and ideologies and false images of a past America that both flatter and engage its audience. For most in this business, this is about money.

Demographically, there is no doubt Latinos and other immigrant minorities are America’s future, and on this, Arizona stands on the front lines. Over the past two decades the state has seen its Latino population grow by 180 percent as its racial composition shifted from 72 to 58 percent white. 

It is the fact that the state’s swift Hispanic growth has been concentrated in young adults and children, creating a “cultural generation gap” with largely white baby boomers and older populations, the same demographic that predominates in the recent Tea Party protests.

boomers grew up in a more insular America than did their parents or their children. Between 1946 and 1964, the years of the boom, the immigrant share of the nation’s population shrunk to an all-time low (under 5 percent) and those who did arrive were largely whites from Europe. Most boomers grew up and lived much of their lives in predominantly white suburbs, residentially isolated from minorities. 

In the case of Israel, it's been obvious for decades that unconditional American support for Tel Aviv complicates U.S. policy in the rest of the Middle East, and that some kind of deal on Palestinian statehood is a practical means of dulling the contradiction inherent in America's approach to the situation.

It's clear that Israeli and American preferences just don't align, and hoping for that to suddenly change is not a coherent policy.

Likewise with Pakistan. America would like Pakistan to stop caring about the threat posed by India, be less concerned with gaining "strategic depth" in Afghanistan, abandon its quixotic fits over the status of Kashmir, and thus be less inclined to openly and tacitly support Islamic militant groups that complicate American policy.

Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I'd had in the US. "It's more real," they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

"Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart," a young woman named Bridget told me.