Political Discourse 2020

  One of the foremost issues facing the U.S. and planet earth is the need to work out a viable policy formation on the relationship between current energy resources and those that will be needed to establish a sustainable world. This must take place within the foreseeable future. The pressing matter is based on overwhelming scientific evidence. Earth's temperature is rising to unhealthy levels due to human-caused factors which have increased the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Addressing this pressing matter will require intelligent, timely, and concerted action among the nations of the world to keep the global temperature rise at a manageable level for the remainder of the century. I will bypass precise diagnoses on whether there will be a tipping point in the next 10 years with the proviso that addressing this problem sooner rather than later is the operative challenge. Regardless, I am in sync with Jeff Nesbit, author of This is the Way the World Ends , and the broad scienti...

  It is a common argument that NATO overreached when they brought the former Soviet states into its fold in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. The claim is that in so doing it encroached upon Russia’s sphere of influence, in which that nation, as a great power has every right to enact, just as the U.S. and China exert sovereign power in their geographical area. A version of this argument was recently made by Tom Friedman, esteemed New York Times column writer. This is far from a uniform view.   Others have argued that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of these states, formerly in a stranglehold by Soviet oppression, sought to enact some version of democracy and become increasingly allied to Europe where they have belonged both historically and geographically. The result was the expansion of NATO and the EU, which accommodated these Eastern European nations. The counterargument is based on the premise that without an embrace of a strong European identity,...