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The lack of experience governing with hung parliaments in the United Kingdom’s political culture — not to mention the non-existence of inter-party dialogue necessary for coalition-formation to take place — only heightens the sense of uncertainty around the outcome for the election.

The drawdown of American forces in Iraq is the first step. As U.S. power declines in Iraq, Iranian power increases.

If it continues its withdrawal of forces from Iraq, Iraq will be on its way to becoming an Iranian satellite.

If Iraq becomes an Iranian ally or satellite, the Iraqi-Saudi and Iraqi-Kuwaiti frontier becomes, effectively, the frontier with Iran.

Assuming that the United States is not prepared to increase forces in Iraq dramatically, the Iranians now face a historic opportunity.

The first is to retain the powerful negotiating hand it has by playing the nuclear card. The second is to avoid an air campaign by the United States against Iran’s conventional capabilities.

The Iranians would not have to invade militarily to be able to reshape the region. It would be sufficient for there to be the potential for Iran to invade. It would shift the regime survival question away from Iran to Saudi Arabia.

accepting the shift in the regional balance in favor of Iran, reversing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq or attempting to destroy Iran’s conventional forces while preventing the disruption of oil from the Persian Gulf.

There is, of course, the option of maintaining or intensifying sanctions.

The Europeans are hardly of one mind on any subject save one: They do not want to see a disruption of oil from the Persian Gulf.

Therefore, at the table next week will be the Americans, painfully aware that its campaigns look promising at the beginning but frequently fail; the Europeans and Chinese, wanting a low-risk solution to a long-term problem; and the Russians, wanting to appear helpful while hoping the United States steps in it again and ready to live with soaring energy prices. And there are the Iranians, wanting to avoid a conventional war but not wanting to forego the opportunity that it has looked for since before the Islamic Republic — domination of the Persian Gulf.

the United States was unprepared for the unilateral role Turkey and Brazil played at the time they played it.

The nuclear issue is easy simply because it is not time-sensitive right now. The future of Iraq is time-sensitive and uncertain.

The first is to facilitate the American withdrawal

The second is to limit the degree of control Iran has in Iraq

The third is to persuade Saudi Arabia that the degree of control ceded to Iranians will not threaten Saudi interests

the checkbook is not the ultimate power in the galaxy. The ultimate power comes from the law backed by a gun.

Americans fought the bloodiest war in their history from 1861 to 1865 over the issue of central power versus local power.

Northern Europe is composed of advanced technocratic economies, made possible by the capital-generating capacity of the well-watered North European Plain and its many navigable rivers

a people that identifies with its brethren throughout the river valleys and in other areas linked by what is typically omnipresent infrastructure. This crafts a firm identity at the national level rather than local level and assists with mass-mobilization strategies.

Southern Europe, in comparison, suffers from an arid, rugged topography and lack of navigable rivers.

identity is more localized; southern Europeans tend to be more concerned with family and town than nation, since they do not benefit from easy transport options or the regular contact that northern Europeans take for granted.

southern European economies are highly dependent upon a weak currency

While states of this grouping often plan together for EU summits, in reality the only thing they have in common is a half-century of lost ground to recover, and they need as much capital as can be made available.

European Union is now made up of 27 different nationalities

The ECB’s primary (and only partially stated) mission is to foster long-term stable growth in the eurozone’s largest economy — Germany — working from the theory that what is good for the continent’s economic engine is good for Europe.

Smaller, poorer economies are more volatile, since even tiny changes in the international environment can send them through either the floor or the roof.

The question is not “whither the euro” but how to provide a safety net for the euro’s less desirable, debt-related aftereffects.

The second is that the Dec. 16 agreement is only an agreement in principle.

First, when a bailout is required, it is clearly because something has gone terribly wrong.

The third complication is that the bailout mechanism is actually only half the plan. The other half is to allow states to at least partially default on their debt

tates that just squeaked by in 2010 must run a more difficult gauntlet in 2011 — particularly if they depend heavily on foreign investors for funding their budget deficits.

The key is that in each country where they took place, there were significant differences in the details — but they shared core principles at a time when other countries were open to those principles, at least to some extent.

The key principle that appears to be driving the risings is a feeling that the regimes, or a group of individuals within the regimes, has deprived the public of political and, more important, economic rights — in short, that they enriched themselves beyond what good taste permitted.

One reason is that there was a tremendous amount of regime change in the region from the 1950s through the early 1970s, as the Muslim countries created regimes to replace foreign imperial powers and were buffeted by the Cold War.

In this case, the question of greatest importance is not why these revolutions are taking place, but who will take advantage of them.

In this case, whatever the cause of the risings, there is no question that radical Islamists will attempt to take advantage and control of them. Why wouldn’t they? It is a rational and logical course for them.

The first is the establishment of democracy. The second is the election of governments.

The first is the reaction against corrupt regimes. The second is the election itself. And the third? The United States needs to remember, as it applauds the rise of democracy, that the elected government may not be what one expected.

pictures of peaceful demonstrators are not nearly as significant as the media will have you believe, but pictures of demonstrators continuing to hold their ground after being fired on is very significant.

This leads to the key event in the revolution. The revolutionaries cannot defeat armed men. But if those armed men, in whole or part, come over to the revolutionary side, victory is possible. And this is the key event.

If the split in the military is roughly equal and deep, this could lead to civil war.

Far more common is for the military to split. If the split creates an overwhelming anti-regime force, this leads to the revolution’s success.

Therefore, looking at the students on TV tells you little. Watching the soldiers tells you much more.

The danger is not radical Islam, but chaos, followed either by civil war, the military taking control simply to stabilize the situation or the emergence of a radical Islamic party to take control — simply because they are the only ones in the crowd with a plan and an organization. That’s how minorities take control of revolutions.

Only in the case of Eastern Europe do we see broad revolutionary success, but that was against an empire in collapse, so few lessons can be drawn from that for the Muslim world.

One is that this is like 1848, a broad rising that will fail for lack of organization and coherence, but that will resonate for decades.

The second is 1968, a revolution that overthrew no regime even temporarily and left some cultural remnants of minimal historical importance.

The third is 1989, a revolution that overthrew the political order in an entire region, and created a new order in its place.

Second, France has stood firm regarding plans to sell Mistral helicopter-carrier amphibious assault ships to Russia

Third, Germany has in the last few weeks boosted its military relationship with Russia

Europe should continue to engage Moscow, and the United States and Central Europe should not stand in its way, since aggression will only turn Russia inward.

Russia knows how to play the game with Western Europe. Specifically, it knows how to show hints of internal “reform” to satisfy the “soft power” complex of Europe. But at the same time, it is using its enhanced military relationship with France and Germany as a way to counter American influence in countries like Poland and Romania.

To be fair, I don't think that most students were as enamored of the book as he was, but still there was an air of fawning about the sessions. The professors helped guide the discussions but otherwise generally stayed out of the way. Interesting to note that the handful of times I criticized Objectivism or Atlas, they were sure to 'correct' me. Not brusquely or rudely, but nonetheless the message was that we were supposed to believe what Rand said (in the group think model, they would be the "mind guards").

Unfortunately, his topics were pretty standard fare for those well versed in libertarianism: communism is evil, the welfare state is pretty darn bad too, we need to go back to a commodity standard, and the Fed was the prime mover behind America's Great Recession.

So what is the net sum of this potpourri of ideas, quackery, and economics? Some good, I'm sure, but a dangerous potential for evil. I had been a libertarian and Objectivist fanatic for long enough to be familiar with most of the ideas presented in Clemson, but my roommate, who is new to the movement, said he learned a lot, so there's a good chance that many students picked up on a lot of radical right ideas. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Although these pro-Kremlin groups are not officially part of the government, they all receive a great deal of funding from the government. According to STRATFOR sources, the Russian government spent approximately $250 million on Nashi in the organization’s first year.

Nashi’s activities typically are nonviolent, but the group does have a government-trained paramilitary branch that has been used to ensure security and to incite riots. Nashi also took part in protests in Finland and riots in Estonia and is thought to have been responsible for the 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia.

Their view of what’s happening in Washington is that President Obama, who is heading into the beginnings of the next presidential election cycle, is mired in economic problems that the U.S. president really needs to have a foreign-policy action or a foreign-policy victory.

Most people view China as really the power that can, in many ways, turn on and turn off North Korea but ultimately, North Korea perceives China as more of a potential threat to its survival than the United States.

For the Chinese, Korean reunification is not always even a good thing, because if the Koreans reunify, or in particular if the U.S. and the North Koreans sign a peace accord and maybe even move towards diplomatic relations, China loses its leverage and it potentially has the United States able to ultimately push right up to the Yalu River, something that originally brought the Chinese into the Korean War.

I appreciate pquincy’s thoughtful comments. With regard to the reference to divorce, it’s also worth noting that – regardless of whether or not there are children involved – almost all divorce cases (along with almost all other civil cases) are resolved through a bargained solution (i.e., a settlement) rather than a trial. But in the vast majority of cases the bargained solution is not achieved until the parties arrive at a critical deadline such as the eve of trial. This is because, prior to the deadline and as suggested by Brams, “each player has an incentive to dissemble” in pursuit of a better outcome for itself. Since each player intuitively understands this, neither views the other player’s assertions about their “bottom line” to be credible, and neither can convince the other of the genuineness of its own position prior to the deadline.

Pquincy ‘s suggestion that this problem should eventually become less acute in a repeated game appears to be correct. But in the game of politics, it seems that (as in litigation), a player can be expected to pretend – in the pursuit of self-interest and for as long as it can – that it is less interested in arriving at a bargained solution than it is in pursuing some sort of abstract principle (such as what it would characterize as “justice” or “the public good”).

In contrast to some of the other people that have posted comments in response to this article, I don’t think the outcome that was ultimately arrived at in the debt ceiling negotiations can be fairly attributed to Obama’s having played the game poorly. Rather, I think the outcome was attributable to the fact that it was obvious from the outset that Obama’s objective (regardless of whether one wishes to characterize that objective as “preserving the health and safety of our most vulnerable citizens" or “holding on for a few more years to the remnants of a bloated welfare state”) would unquestionably be placed further out of reach if he were to walk away from whatever deal the other side was ultimately willing to grant as of the deadline. He could not credibly pretend otherwise.

Although this article muddles a few basic concepts, it serves to illustrate that game theory offers a relatively straightforward explanation for much of the conflict that exists in the world, certainly a much better explanation than is routinely put forth by partisans and commentators. Brams is spot-on. And it's a cop-out to claim that game theory assumes that people are hyper-rational, or that it does not apply when someone is seeking an unreasonable goal. Even if your adversary's goal is, at least in your view, unreasonable or irrational, game theory allows you to understand how you and your adversary can be expected to behave in the pursuit of your respective objectives.

In Washington, no politician is bound to reach a compromise to solve any long-term problem. Everyone, however, is playing a game called “election,” and the only possible goal in that game is to win the next one.

Anyone who promises to fix or change Washington is merely attempting to impose a cooperative game on a town that, by design, can’t play one.

A game theorist would say that the President is trying to play a cooperative game in a town that can’t play along with him. The trouble for the White House is that the Republicans aren’t playing a game called “fix the budget deficit.” They’re necessarily playing one called “defeat Barack Obama.” A reasonable offer seldom works in a divorce; there’s no reason to expect it would in Congress.

I would say we were marked by two traits: our dislike of nostalgia and our irritation whenever our barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at us.

Meanwhile MTV is exhuming “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Pop-Up Video,” while Nickelodeon is offering a 1990s-themed block of late-night programming with old shows like “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” presumably to help herbally sautéed 20-somethings regress in giggly reminiscence.

But of course we are not just the unwilling victims of the 20-year cycle of resuscitation. We are its architects, as a few of us have been able to wrest culturally influential posts away from baby boomers.

At that time, the sharpest articulation of generational pique was found in The Baffler

Now we’ll get to see how The Baffler dissects the rise of Gen-X-Squared

age can prompt even the most cynical to realize not only nostalgia’s sickly-sweet temptation but also its usefulness.

it runs search-and-rescue missions against the disposability of consumer capitalism

And it raises exception to the great leveling effect of the Internet

Today’s Birthers and Tea Partiers seem less apocalyptic if you remember that the last time a Democratic president battled Republicans over health care and federal budgets, he was being smeared as a conspiratorial murderer.

So how can an anti-nostalgic generation honor its past without becoming the thing it hated?

these internal issues have begun to affect Ukraine’s foreign relations

Any estrangement from the West would have a direct bearing on Ukraine’s relationship with Russia.

Ukraine had been using its growing relationship with the European Union as a bargaining chip with Russia in these negotiations, but given that the future health of this relationship is in question, Kiev could be deprived of much of its leverage with Russia.

Yanukovich is trying to avoid agreeing to a new natural gas deal on Moscow’s terms, which the Kremlin has said is conditional upon a merger of Russian energy giant Gazprom with Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz.

they’re both trying to get a sense of reassurance and a sense that at least there is an element of stability between what are now the world’s two biggest economies.

I think that the talk about pulling Chinese investment out of U.S. bonds out of U.S. treasuries is more rhetoric than anything, although certainly there are elements within China that are raising that up.

in the end, the Chinese really have two questions:

two other trends

There seems to be a significant drop in students from the provinces enlisting in the better universities. It also looks as if Beijing is planning a new crackdown on bloggers and social networks.

On the one hand, being able to allow their citizens to kind of display their frustration or express themselves through these social networks has been a way to reduce potentially some of the steam that would build up in China that could ultimately kind of explode out against the government.