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Begin with the fact that the United States was not the first country calling for military intervention in Syria after pictures of what appeared to be the dead from a chemical attack surfaced. That honor went to France, Turkey and Britain, each of whom called for action. Much as with Libya, where France and Italy were the first and most eager to intervene, the United States came late to the feast.

The United States did not have any overriding national interest in Syria.

The United States is in the process of recovering from Iraq and Afghanistan, and is not eager to try its hand at nation building in Syria, especially given the players.

Typically the government antagonizes Washington when U.S.-Iranian tensions heat up, and indeed the Syria situation has aggravated tensions. Syria is a critical Iranian ally, and the survival of the al Assad regime is a national security interest for Tehran. Iran cannot afford to directly retaliate against the United States, but it is widely expected to retaliate indirectly through militant proxies.

Iran's strategy involves more than just activating these proxy groups. It entails the kind of skillful maneuvering it displayed as the United States sought regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is another bluff going on that has to be understood, this one from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is bluffing that Russia has emerged as a major world power. In reality, Russia is merely a regional power, but mainly because its periphery is in shambles.

Germany's economic performance is tied strongly to external developments because of the country's reliance on exports.

Europe is Germany's largest customer, so the German economy depends on the strength of the European consumer base.

However, Germany's economy has not escaped the crisis unscathed. Over the past few years, German economic growth has slowed. According to the International Monetary Fund, Germany's GDP grew by only 0.9 percent in 2012, down from 4 percent in 2010.

The armies fought to the limits of their empires and, after a series of wars culminating in the Treaty of Zuhab of 1639, the Zagros Mountains came to define the borderland between the Ottomans and Persians, with the Kurds stuck in the middle.

The Turkic-Persian competition is again being fought in Kurdistan, only this time, energy pipelines have taken the place of gilded cavalry.

Roughly 25 million Kurds occupy a region that stretches from the eastern Taurus Mountains in Turkey through the Jazira Plateau of northeastern Syria across the mountains and plateaus of southeastern Anatolia before dead-ending into the northern spine of the Zagros Mountains, which divide Iran and Iraq.

This dynamism is not limited to China. The Scottish referendum and waves of secession movements -- from Spain's Catalonia to Turkey and Iraq's ethnic Kurds -- are working in different directions.

in China, one of the most intractable issues in the struggle for unity -- the status of Tibet -- is poised for a possible reversal, or at least a major adjustment.

More important, a settlement between Beijing and the Dalai Lama could be a major step in lessening the physical and psychological estrangement between the Chinese heartland and the Tibetan Plateau.

Three developments from Europe brought a degree of optimism to the economically beleaguered Continent on Wednesday

Europe’s recent history does not point to an optimistic answer. The euro — itself a product of European integration — arose from the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War’s end. Unified Germany needed to be restrained and committed to the EU, so its fellow member states decided to hand it the keys to European monetary policy while giving up their ability to undercut Germany’s exports with currency depreciation.

The Taliban were quick to deny a June 27 Al Jazeera report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had met personally with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who with his father forms the leadership of the Haqqani network (Karzai’s government also denied the report). The Haqqani network, which straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border, is part of the Taliban under Mullah Omar, but it remains the most distinct individual entity within the diffuse and multifaceted Taliban movement.

The Taliban perceive themselves to be winning the war, leaving little motivation for meaningful negotiation on their part. Kabul also has long been dominated by elements skeptical of — if not downright hostile to — Pakistani intentions in Afghanistan, and these elements remain intent on keeping the Taliban from power.

The report of Karzai’s meeting with the younger Haqqani, however unlikely, does reflect the fact that movement and discussions are taking place at some significant level and that geopolitical shifts are starting to occur in the region. The outcome is far from certain, but the game is undoubtedly under way.

The way the media has reported on the issue falls into three groups: That the Cold War is back, That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable, And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort.

I do not doubt that some of the activists on the ship welcomed a confrontation with Israel, but the Israelis should not have obliged them. In any event, what took place on that deck looks to me like a tragic misunderstanding. Yet there was no reason to think that anything else would have transpired.

authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) suggest that throughout the 500-year span of Anglo-American history, a more or less predictable cycle has played out, a cycle in which generational types are in a certain stage of life at any given time.

According to Strauss and Howe’s model, we’re currently in an Unraveling, with the aging prophet Baby Boomers moving into elder mentorship roles, the middle-aged nomad Gen Xers assuming the highest leadership positions, and civic-oriented Millennials coming of age to become the doers and institution-builders of the next High.

While we may be a bit different than our forebears, history suggests that even they were not without their faults, and that we have more in common with them than we’ve given ourselves credit for. If they could dig themselves out of catastrophes like the Civil War and the Great Depression, why can’t we?

The art of the "big lie" is to repeat something often enough, and with a powerful enough megaphone, such that your distortions are not challenged.

By trying to rewrite the narrative of the economic cataclysm we have lived through, the deniers are attempting to challenge the common-sense conclusions that flow from an accurate understanding of history.

Greenberg was removed as CEO of AIG by his own board—of its own volition—after his refusal to answer questions about his involvement in fraudulent reinsurance contracts that his company had created. Five people were convicted by a jury in Connecticut in 2008 for their role in these frauds. The federal prosecutor, in his summation, called Greenberg an unindicted co-conspirator in the scheme. In New York, the judge who will hear the case based on these facts, brought by the state when I was attorney general, called the case "devastating" and referred to AIG as a "criminal enterprise." AIG as a corporate entity settled the case with my office in 2006 by restating its financial results and paying a fine of $1.6 billion. Shareholders are now awaiting judicial approval of an additional $750 million settlement to compensate them for damages they suffered from these accounting frauds.

Mountain ranges inhibit trade and armies alike while peninsulas and islands limit the ability of larger powers to intimidate or conquer smaller ones. Because of such features, it isn’t as much of a surprise that Europe has never united under a single government as it is that anyone has ever tried.

The first is the North European Plain

But while the military’s top generals and senior civilian leadership are responsible for providing the president with sound, clearheaded advice on all military matters including the highest levels of grand strategy, they are ultimately responsible for the pursuit of military objectives to which the commander-in-chief directs them.

The strategy of the guerrilla is to make the option to withdraw more attractive. In order to do this, his strategic goal is simply to survive and fight on whatever level he can. His patience is built into who he is and what he is fighting for. The occupier’s patience is calculated against the cost of the occupation and its opportunity costs, thus, while troops are committed in this country, what is happening elsewhere?

The occupation force will always win engagements, but that is never the measure of victory. If the guerrillas operate by doctrine, defeats in unplanned engagements will not undermine their basic goal of survival.

In his analysis, McChrystal made two key assertions: The strategy then being implemented would not succeed, even with more troops. A new counterinsurgency-focused strategy just proposed would not succeed without more troops.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Washington had originally intended to install a stable, pro-American government in Baghdad in order to fundamentally reshape the region. Instead, after the U.S. invasion destroyed the existing Iraqi-Iranian balance of power, Washington found itself on the defensive, struggling to prevent the opposite outcome — a pro-Iranian regime.

in Afghanistan, there is no real “victory” to be had, and the question is just how much needs to be accomplished before U.S. forces can withdraw.

The United States will be forced once again this quarter to balance the reality that Pakistan is both a necessary ally in the war in Afghanistan and a battlefield in its own right.

But it’s futile to insist on nuances of history and law when we’re speaking the language of “offense.” The mythical heartland Sarah Palin speaks from, or for, is full of these voiceless, downtrodden plain folk who are constantly being offended, for whom there is no end to the offenses, real or imagined, perpetrated against them: the Mexican immigrant speaking his native tongue, the Muslim at his prayers, the black man drinking from a public water fountain (oh wait, that one’s not offensive anymore . . .). One of the more charming stories in Budiansky’s history of Reconstruction concerns a Southern gentleman who wanted a freed slave whipped because he had the temerity to wish him “good morning” without being spoken to first. These offended people see with such dreadful clarity things that don’t exist, and so remake reality to suit their grievances.

In a late interview by turns confessional and triumphant, Lee Atwater, author of the strategy that turned the solidly Democratic, racist South into the solidly Republican, racist South, described the Southern Strategy’s metamorphosis over the years, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” Partly through Atwater, Republicans developed a kind of reverse means test, an economic version of the old “one-drop rule.” Policies that were likely to help blacks, even if they were also likely to help poor whites, because they were policies largely designed to help the poor, regardless of color, became issues to campaign against: welfare, health care, federal education funding, progressive taxation, clean air regulations, funding for public transportation, just about any “progressive policy” you can think of. Some whites would be hurt, but blacks would be hurt worse. This has proved true. African Americans as a group are still poorer than whites as a group, regardless of the achievements of this generation’s talented tenth and of the growing army of the unemployed of all colors.

At first glance, the Obama administration appears to have ruled out the "concert of powers" approach to managing multipolarity. The United States instead remains committed to a 21st-century version of the "Open Door" policy, rejecting anything that would recognize "spheres of influence" or "zones of privileged interests" in the geographic neighborhoods of the other great powers. As Vice President Joe Biden reiterated in Kyiv in July 2009, "We don't recognize, and I want to reiterate this, any spheres of influence." Nor is it likely the current administration would embrace an updated version of Nixon's "regional policemen" idea -- having a major power assume the lead for ensuring stability and security in a specific region of the world.

Multipolarity is the future, says the U.S. intelligence community, and many serious students of foreign policy tend to agree. But policymakers in Washington don't seem eager to embrace change, or to make the strategic choices that would be needed to guarantee continued U.S. global leadership.

U.S. policy seems predicated instead on expecting the rise of other powers to be interrupted, or even reversed. There is some rationale for this approach

While the United States and Israel attempt to sort out the thorny issues of East Jerusalem settlement building and how to prevent a nuclear-capable Iran, Hamas and Fatah back in the Palestinian Territories are trying to cobble together a unified — and possibly militant — response to Israel, with some likely nudging from Iran.

While Hamas would prefer an intifada to be waged from rival territory in the West Bank, Fatah would like Hamas to initiate conflict through rocket fire targeting southern Israel, thus inviting the bulk of Israeli retaliatory action to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and sparing Fatah most of the damage.

The overall goal is thus to exploit the breach in the U.S.-Israeli relationship to reunify the Palestinian leadership and encourage Israeli military action in the territories that would further undermine Israel’s diplomatic efforts in building a coalition against Iran. While this is by no means an intifada, or popular uprising in the traditional sense of the word, it does point to another potential crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations that would consequently complicate U.S. designs for the region.

Even though lack of subsequent military conflict shows that the incident has now become a political event, the maritime boundary of the Korean Peninsula should be watched closely in the coming days to see how the incident fits within Pyongyang’s attempts to hold its own as it approaches the resumption of international negotiations and an important leadership transition.