Category: General

Kenneth Cole nails it.  h/t to Bob Witeck. — Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared.

In August 2005, because of growing US political resistance on national security grounds, the China National Oil Company (CNOC) withdrew its bid to purchase the US oil company, UNOCAL.

A number of correspondents checked in with America’s biggest financier, the People’s Republic of China, after President Obama signed the debt ceiling deal passed by the Senate and House of Representatives.

The Afghanistan Study Group has issued an interactive chart on key opinion leaders and their views on how far America’s limbs should be plunged into the Afghanistan quagmire.  The US is currently on target to spend $119 billion in Afghanistan, which itself only has a GDP of $14 billion.

Anne-Marie Slaughter has put out some interesting tidbits from a recent Singapore-based conference foray focused on China’s future. Slaughter, who just left her perch as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, and is now back teaching at Princeton University, has joined The Atlantic as a correspondent.

Senator Jim DeMint was not one of the major political players whose every move we watched this weekend, but he was the animator of much of the high stakes drama over raising the debt ceiling and cutting the national debt.

The standoff over the debt ceiling continues.  Back and forth.  Tit for tat.  No progress.  Paralysis.  Stuff is happening in the world — but there is absolutely no bandwidth for anything other than the debt ceiling debate.

Friends who have been battling a series of really bad fires that forced evacuations from homes in central Colorado — near Westcliffe, Colorado — have been sending me pictures of what has been going on as I have some land in the Rockies near them.

Twice at the helm California Governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown has called for Californians to get 12,000 MW of their energy from local power distribution grids by 2020.

The best places to meet the world’s most interesting national security and foreign policy personalities are no longer Washington or London or Paris.  Rather, highest on the list are Beijing, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha. Many years ago, I met Lt. General Asad Durrani in Beijing thanks to a conference organized by Australia’s Monash University.