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London also believes that the United Kingdom has surrendered too much of its national sovereignty to supranational EU institutions.

Yet the United Kingdom is a strong defender of the single market. Roughly half of its exports end up in the European Union, and half of its imports come from the European Union.

Some critics suggest that the United Kingdom could leave the European Union but remain a part of the European Economic Area, the trade agreement that includes non-EU members, such as Iceland and Norway. However, the country would still be required to make financial contributions to continental Europe and adapt its legal order to EU standards, but it would not have a vote in EU decisions. According to Cameron, the United Kingdom must be part of the common market and have a say in policymaking.

However, this is the first time that London has openly demanded the return to a previous stage in the process of European integration. At no other time has a country tried to dissociate itself from the bloc in this way. The decision not only challenges the Franco-German view of the European Union but also makes a compromise extremely difficult and risky between France and Germany and the United Kingdom.

Cameron's rhetoric suggests that he is positioning the United Kingdom to be the leader of a counternarrative that opposes Germany's view of the crisis.

In recent years, the country's veto power in the European Union has been reduced substantially. With each reform of the European treaties, unanimous decisions were replaced by the use of qualified majority

London could try to become the leader of the non-eurozone countries, but these countries often have competing agendas, as evidenced by recent negotiations over the EU budget. In those negotiations, the United Kingdom was pushing for a smaller EU budget to ease its financial burden, but countries like Poland and Romania were interested in maintaining high agricultural subsidies and strong development aid.

As long as London is the main military ally and a major economic partner of the world's only superpower, continental Europe cannot afford to ignore the United Kingdom.

Britain also benefitted from the Napoleonic Wars' having crippled most European powers. Britain was not under military pressure for most of the century, and was not forced into a singularly exploitative relationship with its empire to support its wars. It thus avoided Hitler's trap.

The first was German unification in 1871

The second challenge came from the United States, which also was industrializing at a dramatic pace -- a process ironically underwritten by investors from Britain seeking higher returns than they could get at home.

The German challenge culminated in World War I, a catastrophe for Britain and for the rest of Europe. Apart from decimating a generation of men, the cost of the war undermined Britain's economic base, subtly shifting London's relationship with its empire. Moreover, British power no longer seemed inevitable

World War II, the second round of the German war, broke Britain's power.

British strategy at the end of the war was to remain aligned with the United States and try to find a foundation for the United States to underwrite the retention of the empire. But the United States had no interest in this. It saw its primary strategic interest as blocking the Soviet Union in what became known as the Cold War.

the British aligned themselves with the U.S.-dominated alliance system and the postwar financial arrangements lumped together under the Bretton Woods system.

The British, however, added a dimension to this. Unable to match the United States militarily, they outstripped other American allies both in the quantity of their military resources and in their willingness to use them at the behest of the Americans.

Britain could not be America's equal. However, it could in effect be America's lieutenant, wielding a military force that outstripped in number -- and technical sophistication -- the forces deployed by other European countries.

The United States was not motivated to go along merely out of sentiment based on shared history, although that played a part. Rather, like all great powers, the United States wanted to engage in coalition warfare and near warfare along with burden sharing.

A good example -- though not a very important one -- was London's ability to recruit U.S. support in Britain's war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands, also known as the Malvinas. The United States had no interests at stake, but given that Britain did have an interest, the U.S. default setting was to support the British. 

The first was the cost of maintaining the force relative to the benefits.

The second was the danger of being drawn so deeply into the U.S. orbit that Britain would lose its own freedom of action, effectively becoming, as some warned, the 51st state.

Britain has developed a strategy of being enmeshed in Europe without France's enthusiasm, at the same time positioning itself as the single most important ally of the only global power. There are costs on both sides of this, but Britain has been able to retain its options while limiting its dependency on either side.

While the United States remains Britain's largest customer for exports if Europe is viewed as individual countries, Europe as a whole is a bigger customer.

Britain has positioned itself superbly for a strategy of waiting, watching and retaining options regardless of what happens. If the European Union fails and the European nation-states re-emerge as primary institutions, Britain will be in a position to exploit the fragmentation of Europe to its own economic and political advantage and have the United States available to support its strategy.

Whatever the British thought of Iraq, a strategy of remaining the most reliable ally of the United States dictated participation.

The British strategy represents a classic case of a nation accepting reversal, retaining autonomy, and accommodating itself to its environment while manipulating it. All the while Britain waits, holding its options open, waiting to see how the game plays out and positioning itself to take maximum advantage of its shifts in the environment.

Western sanctions have dramatically increased the economic pressure on Iran and have affected a wide swath of the Iranian public.

The election of President Hassan Rouhani to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the latter's two terms was a sign of unhappiness.

The logic here suggests a process leading to the elimination of all sanctions in exchange for the supervision of Iran's nuclear activities to prevent it from developing a weapon. Unless this is an Iranian trick to somehow buy time to complete a weapon and test it, I would think that the deal could be done in six months.

An Iranian ploy to create cover for building a weapon would also demand a reliable missile and a launch pad invisible to surveillance satellites and the CIA, National Security Agency, Mossad, MI6 and other intelligence agencies. The Iranians would likely fail at this, triggering airstrikes however risky they might be and putting Iran back where it started economically. While this is a possibility, the scenario is not likely when analyzed closely.

There is a bit of irony in Israel and Saudi Arabia being allied on this issue, but only on the surface. Both have been intense enemies of Iran, and close allies of the United States; each sees this act as a betrayal of its relationship with Washington.

In a way, this marks a deeper shift in relations with Saudi Arabia than with Israel.

It was a massive producer of oil. It was also the protector of Mecca and Medina, two Muslim holy cities, giving the Saudis an added influence in the Islamic world on top of their extraordinary wealth. 

It was in British and American interests to protect Saudi Arabia from its enemies, most of which were part of the Muslim world.

Absent the United States in the Persian Gulf, Iran would have been the most powerful regional military power.

The United States did not want Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The Iranians didn't want the United States hindering Iran's economic development. The fact was that getting a nuclear weapon was not a fundamental Iranian interest, and crippling Iran's economy was not a fundamental interest to the United States absent an Iranian nuclear program.

The Iranians want investment in their oil sector and other parts of their economy. American oil companies would love to invest in Iran, as would other U.S. businesses.

There are other significant political issues that can't be publicly addressed. The United States wants Iran to temper its support for Hezbollah's militancy, and guarantee it will not support terrorism. The Iranians want guarantees that Iraq will not develop an anti-Iranian government, and that the United States will work to prevent this.

But in the end, this is not the problem that the Saudis and Israelis have. Their problem is that both depend on the United States for their national security. Neither country can permanently exist in a region filled with dangers without the United States as a guarantor.

The fact is that neither the Saudis nor the Israelis have a potential patron other than the United States.

The United States is not abandoning either Israel or Saudi Arabia. A regional policy based solely on the Iranians would be irrational. What the United States wants to do is retain its relationship with Israel and Saudi Arabia, but on modified terms.

The American strategy is built on experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington has learned that it has interests in the region, but that the direct use of American force cannot achieve those goals, partly because imposing solutions takes more force than the United States has and partly because the more force it uses, the more resistance it generates. Therefore, the United States needs a means of minimizing its interests, and pursuing those it has without direct force.

Saudi Arabia is not abandoned, but nor is it the sole interest of the United States.

In the same sense, the United States is committed to the survival of Israel.

If Iranian nuclear weapons are prevented, the United States has fulfilled that commitment, since there are no current threats that could conceivably threaten Israeli survival. Israel's other interests, such as building settlements in the West Bank, do not require American support.

With this opening to Iran, the United States will no longer be bound by its Israeli and Saudi relationships. They will not be abandoned, but the United States has broader interests than those relationships, and at the same time few interests that rise to the level of prompting it to directly involve U.S. troops.

Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world.

You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing.

So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives

Third, Geithner spoke about the reformation of the global financial architecture and evoked the framework agreement signed at the September 2009 G-20 summit.

The problem for China is that while Germany and Japan are U.S. allies, firmly lashed to the American-dominated international system, and have already been forced to change in response to American demands — such as the 1985 Plaza Accord in which Washington forced them to adopt market-oriented exchange rate policies — China is not.

If the United States is serious about enforcing such a policy, it will require changes to the next three biggest economies — China, Japan and Germany — as well as to those who have grown accustomed to the status quo, that is, in some way, almost everyone else in the world.

In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.

If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.

The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.

Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.

Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.

Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.

Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.

So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.

Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.

Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.

It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.

Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.

A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.

Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.

He had mastered the politics of trust.

Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.

If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.

The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.

Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.

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

Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.

The United States compensates with technology,

from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.

the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with.

The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited

The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines.

The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians.

As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender.

Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly.

The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.

In each case it is obvious: for political reasons.

In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable.

The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission.

Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory.

Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale.

By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end?

Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating.

An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message

Both are anti-system parties that have put the traditional parties against the ropes.

Grillo's remarkable performance reflects a growing fatigue among the Italian electorate with the German leadership during the European crisis.

When the total number of votes for these three parties are combined, it becomes clear that more than two-thirds of Italians said no to austerity measures. Monti's poor performance in the elections confirms this trend. No matter what happens with Italy's political future, the new Italian government will have this mandate in mind.

Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France.

Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes.

Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s' Russia.

The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East.

Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds.

Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk's warning that such a pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers.

Ozal died abruptly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002.

one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period.

Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia.

In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.

it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision.

Putin's Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position.

In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime.

Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.

The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey.

Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region.

Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism

The real political crisis will not come until the sacrifice of sovereignty moves from the realm of theory to application, but that will not occur in 2012.

In 2012, the Kremlin will face numerous challenges: social unrest, restructuring Russia's political makeup (both inside and outside of the Kremlin) and major economic shifts due to the crisis in Europe.

Russia will continue building its influence in its former Soviet periphery in 2012, particularly by institutionalizing its relationships with many former Soviet states. Russia will build upon its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as it evolves into the Common Economic Space (CES).

In the Baltic countries -- which, unlike other former Soviet states, are committed members of NATO and the European Union -- Russia's ultimate goal is to neutralize the countries' pro-Western and anti-Russian policies

Russia will continue managing various crises with the West -- mainly the United States and NATO -- while shaping its relationships in Europe.

Russia will attempt to push these crises with the United States to the brink without actually rupturing relations -- a difficult balance.

Numerous factors will undermine Central Asia's stability in 2012, but they will not lead to a major breaking point in the region this year.

Iran's efforts to expand its influence will be the primary issue for the Middle East in 2012.

In 2012, Saudi Arabia will lead efforts to shore up and consolidate the defenses of Gulf Cooperation Council members to try to ward off the threat posed by Iran, but such efforts will not be a sufficient replacement for the United States and the role it plays as a security guarantor.

Iran's goal is for Syria to maintain a regime -- regardless of who leads it -- that will remain favorable to Iranian interests, but Iran's ability to influence the situation is limited, and finding a replacement to hold the regime together will be difficult.

Despite its rhetoric, Turkey will not undertake significant overt military action in Syria unless the United States leads the intervention -- a scenario Stratfor regards as improbable -- though it will continue efforts to mold an opposition in Syria and counterbalance Iranian influence in Iraq.

Hamas will take advantage of the slowly growing political clout of Islamists throughout the region in hopes of presenting itself to neighboring Arab governments and the West as a pragmatic and reconcilable political alternative to Fatah.

Three things will shape events in East Asia: China's response to the economic crisis and possible social turmoil amid a leadership transition; the European Union's debt crisis and economic slowdown sapping demand for East Asia's exports; and regional interaction with the U.S. re-engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.

While Beijing knows that rolling out another massive fiscal stimulus and bank loans as it did in 2008-2009 is unsustainable and would put the economy at risk, it sees few other short-term options and thus will use government-led investment to sustain growth in 2012.

As it learned from the Tiananmen Square incident, CPC factional infighting exploited at a sensitive time is a serious risk, and we expect to see measures to ensure ideological and cultural control throughout the Party and down through the rest of society.

The United States will continue to consider a political accommodation with the Taliban, but such accommodation is unlikely to be reached this year.

Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west.

Brazil will spend 2012 focused on mitigating shocks to trade and capital flows from the crisis in Europe. However, with only 10 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product dependent on exports, Brazil is much less vulnerable than many other developing countries.

In many European countries, the state is at the center of many of the activities that shape private life, but that is less true in the United States.

The American public is often most active in public affairs when resisting the state's attempts to increase its presence, as we saw with health care reform. When such matters appear settled, Americans tend to focus their energy on their private lives, pleasures and pains. 

Of course, there are times when Americans are aroused not only to public affairs but also to foreign affairs. That is shaped by the degree to which these events are seen as affecting Americans' own lives.

People in European or Middle Eastern countries, where another country is just a two-hour drive away, are going to be more aware of foreign affairs. Still, they will be most concerned about the things that affect them.

The United States' geography, obviously, shapes American thinking about the world. The European Peninsula is crowded with peoples and nation-states. In a matter of hours you can find yourself in a country with a different language and religion and a history of recent war with your own. Americans can travel thousands of miles using their own language, experiencing the same culture and rarely a memory of war. Northwestern Europe is packed with countries. The northeastern United States is packed with states.

Passing from the Netherlands to Germany is a linguistic, cultural change with historical memories. Traveling from Connecticut to New York is not.

American interest is cyclical, heavily influenced by whether they are affected by what goes on. After 9/11, what happened in the Islamic world mattered a great deal. But even then, it went in cycles.

The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with. Americans may turn out to have been wrong about these things in the long run, but at the time, an issue must fit these criteria

Context is everything. During times of oil shortage, events in Venezuela might well have interested Americans much more than they did last week. During the Cold War, the left-wing government in Venezuela might have concerned Americans. But advancements in technology have increased oil and natural gas production in the United States. A left-wing government in Venezuela is simply another odd Latin government, and the events of last week are not worth worrying about. The context renders Venezuela a Venezuelan problem.

It is not that Americans are disengaged from the world, but rather that the world appears disengaged from them. At the heart of the matter is geography.

The American reality is that most important issues, aside from Canada and Mexico, take place across the ocean, and the ocean reasonably is seen as a barrier that renders these events part of a faraway realm.

During the Cold War, Americans had a different mindset. They saw themselves in an existential struggle for survival with the communists.

One thing that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent 20 years taught the United States was that the world mattered -- a mindset that was as habitual as it was reflective of new realities.

Starting in the late 1980s, the United States sent troops to Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Kuwait. The American public was engaged in all of these for a variety of reasons, some of them good, some bad. Whatever the reasoning, there was a sense of clarity that demanded that something be done.

After 9/11, the conviction that something be done turned into an obsession. But over the past 10 years, Americans' sense of clarity has become much more murky, and their appetite for involvement has declined accordingly.

More recently, the standards for justifying either type of intervention have become more exacting to policymakers. Syria was not a matter of indifference, but the situation lacked the clarity that justified intervention.

We see the same thing in Ukraine. The United States cannot abide a single power like Russia dominating Eurasia. That would create a power that could challenge the United States. There were times that the Ukrainian crisis would have immediately piqued American interest. While some elements of the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, did get deeply involved, the American public remained generally indifferent.

(Americans have heard of many things that could have become a major threat -- a few did, most didn't.)

This is disconcerting from the standpoint of those who live outside the United States. They experienced the United States through the Cold War, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 era. The United States was deeply involved in everything. The world got used to that.

I spoke to a foreign diplomat who insisted the United States was weakening. I tried to explain that it is not weakness that dictates disengagement but indifference. He couldn't accept the idea that the United States has entered a period in which it really doesn't care what happens to his country.

The diplomat had lived in a time when everything mattered and all problems required an American position. American indifference is the most startling thing in the world for him.

The current public indifference to foreign policy reflects that shift. But Washington's emerging foreign policy is not the systematic foreign policy of the pre-World War II period. It is an instrumental position, which can adapt to new circumstances and will likely be changed not over the course of decades but over the course of years or months.

The sense that private life matters more than public is intense, and that means that Americans are concerned with things that are deemed frivolous by foreigners, academics and others who make their living in public and foreign policy.

Americans might not be interested in the world, but the world is interested in Americans. Until this luxury comes to an end, the United States has ample assistant secretaries to give the impression that it cares.

It's not just their work; it's their way of life. As workers move to factories, the social fabric is torn apart. But that rending of life opens the door for a mobile workforce able to take advantage of new opportunities. Traditional life disappears; in its place stand the efficiencies of capitalism.

Low-wage countries seize the opportunity and climb upon the escalator of the international system, and with them come the political and business elite and the poor, for whom even the brutality of early industrialism is a relief.

In looking at this historically, two markers showed themselves. One is a historical first step: garment and footwear manufacturing, a highly competitive area that demands low wages but provides work opportunities that the population, particularly women, understand in principle. A second marker is mobile phone assembly, which requires a work force that can master relatively simple operations. Price matters greatly in this ruthlessly competitive market.

We were not looking for the kind of large-scale movements that would be noticed globally, but the first movements that appear to be successful. Where a handful of companies are successful, others will follow, so long as there is labor, some order and transportation.

The Cultural Revolution had ended a few years before. It was a national upheaval of violence with few precedents. Mao Zedong died in 1976, and there had been an intense power struggle, with Deng Xiaoping consolidating power in 1977. China was politically unstable, had no clear legal system, sporadic violence and everything else that would make it appear economically hopeless. In fact, Egbert F. Dernberger and David Fasenfest of the University of Michigan wrote a paper for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress titled "China's Post-Mao Economic Future." In this paper, the authors state: "In the next seven years as a whole, the rate of industrial investment and production, more than the total of the last 28 years, imply a level of imports and industrial labor force such that the exports, transportation facilities, social overhead capital, energy and middle-level technical personnel requirements would exceed any realistic assessment of Chinese capabilities."

I don't mean to criticize the authors. This was the reasonable, conventional wisdom at the time. It assumed that the creation of infrastructure and a managerial class was the foundation of economic growth. In fact in China, it was the result of economic growth. The same can be said for rule of law, civil society, transparency and the other social infrastructure that emerges out of the social, financial and managerial chaos that a low-wage economy almost always manifests.

When you look at map, much of this new activity is focused in the Indian Ocean Basin. The most interesting pattern is in the eastern edge of Sub-Saharan Africa: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh are directly on the Indian Ocean.

A special word needs to be included on Mexico. The area north of Mexico City and south of the U.S. borderlands has been developing intensely in recent years. We normally would not include Mexico but the area in central-southern Mexico is large, populous and still relatively underdeveloped.

All of this has to be placed in context. This is not the only growth process underway. It is most unlikely that all of these countries will succeed. They are not yet ready, with some exceptions, for advanced financial markets or quantitative modeling. They are entering into a process that has been underway in the world since the late 1700s: globalism and industrialism combined.

It can be an agonizing process and many have tried to stop it. They have failed not because of their respective ruling classes, which would have the most to lose. It doesn't take place because of multinational corporations. They come in later. It takes place because of profit-driven jobbers who know how to live with instability and corruption. It also takes place because of potential workers looking to escape their lives for what to them seems like a magnificent opportunity but for us seems unthinkable.

Most important to note was the division of Europe. Each country crafted its own response -- or lack of response -- to the Syrian crisis. The most interesting position was taken by Germany, which was unwilling to participate and until quite late unwilling to endorse participation.

Nothing has ruptured in Europe, but then Europe as a concept has always been fluid. The European Union is a free trade zone that excludes some European countries. It is a monetary union that excludes some members of the free trade zone. It has a parliament but leaves defense and foreign policy prerogatives to sovereign nation-states. It has not become more organized since 1945; in some fundamental ways, it has become less organized.

no individual European nation has the ability by itself to conduct an air attack on Syria. As Libya showed, France and Italy could not execute a sustained air campaign. They needed the United States.

Amid profound differences and distrust, U.S. and Soviet leaders managed to avoid the worst. Given their track record, Europe's leaders might have plunged the world further into disaster.

First, Europe was all over the place. Then the coalition that coaxed the Americans in fell apart, leaving the United States virtually alone. When Obama went back to his original position, they decided that he had been outfoxed by the Russians. Had he attacked, he would have been dismissed as another cowboy.

The American view of Europe is a combination of indifference and bafflement. Europe has not mattered all that much to the United States since the end of the Cold War.

all of Europe became Scandinavia. It was quite prosperous, a pleasure to visit, but not the place in which history was being made.

When Americans can be bothered to think of Europe, they think of it as a continent with strong opinions of what others should do but with little inclination to do something itself.

The American perception of Europe is that it is unhelpful and irritating but ultimately weak and therefore harmless.

For example, a friend pointed out that he spoke four languages but Americans seem unable to learn one. I pointed out that if he took a weekend trip he would need to speak four languages. Citizens of the United States don't need to learn four languages to drive 3,000 miles.

The United States is a unified country with unified economic, foreign and defense policies. Europe never fully came together; in fact, for the past five years it has been disintegrating.

Europe's past is magnificent, and its magnificence can be seen on the streets of any European capital. Its past haunts and frightens it. Its future is not defined, but its present is characterized by a denial and a distance from its past. U.S. history is much shallower. Americans build shopping malls on top of hallowed battlefields and tear down buildings after 20 years. The United States is a country of amnesia. It is obsessed with its future, and Europe is paralyzed by its past. 

Where once we made wars together, we now take vacations. It is hard to build a Syria policy on that framework, let alone a North Atlantic strategy.

The anti-Western government in Belarus is at risk, and were Minsk to change its loyalties, Russia's potential enemies will have penetrated almost as deeply toward the Russian core as the Nazis did. This is a comparison I heard Russians make several times.

The first is that the Russians will not invade Ukraine directly.

Equally clear is that no European power can defend the line running from Poland to Romania with the decisive force needed to repel a Russian attack -- or even support these countries against Russian pressure and potential subversion.

Berlin does not want another Cold War. Germany depends on Russian energy and ultimately is satisfied with the status quo. The rest of Europe cannot intervene decisively.

Finally, this means that any support to Europe's eastern flank must come from the United States.

Washington is not ready to outline the nature and extent of its support, and from the American point of view, so long as the Russians are focused on Ukraine, there is still time to do so.

It is important to note the extensive diplomacy ongoing between the United States and Turkey

What we are seeing is regional players toying with new alliance structures. The process is in its infancy, but it is already forcing the Russians to consider their future.

Natural gas is a powerful lever, but it is not particularly profitable.

Deployment of military force, while necessary, is therefore not the core element of the developing Western strategy.