This is a guest post written by Matthew M. Reed, a research intern with the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. The United States has for decades prioritized the Persian Gulf.

This is a guest post by Anya Landau French, who directs the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note.

For those interested in the work and contributions of Chalmers Johnson, I’ll be chatting this morning with National Public Radio’s Worldview Host Jerome McDonnell of WBEZ Chicago. Best to check the schedule at McDonnell’s website.

My powder is dry on the interesting subject that Zbigniew Brzezinski raised on PBS NewsHour. He suggested that in this enormous Wikileaks data dump of largely trivial cables, there are selections of highly pointed and embarrassing material. Brzezinski asks if someone with designs has planted this or selectively leaked to the operation.

For those of you who can never get enough leaked U.S. government documents but are tired of Wikileaks, The Atlantic’s Max Fisher had a must-read scoop from this weekend about a once-secret deal to remove highly enriched uranium that very nearly went sour. He details the never-before-released news that the U.S.

Foreign Policy just released its roster of the Top 100 Global Thinkers (and Doers): Warren Buffett and Bill Gates * Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Robert Zoellick * Barack Obama * Zhou Xiaochuan * Ben Bernanke * Celso Amorim * Ahmet Davutoglu * David Petraeus * Robert Gates * Angela Merkel * Michael Bloomberg and Feisal Abdul…

The pups send their best for the weekend. No more cats for a while. Promise.

One friend of mine told me that this was the best film he had seen all year.

This morning I received this Department of Defense announcement about a young man, William J. Donnelly IV, killed on active duty on Thanksgiving Day in Helmand Province. Politics and views on this war aside, condolences to his family and friends.

On a more serious front, read Dana Milbank’s logic knock on the heads of a few leading allegedly fiscally conservative Republicans who have been pining for the level of security that Israel applies at its airports.