Kaplan surprisingly neglicts what will allow a dynamic reinstructuring of US Foreign Policy: a new Energy Policy in the US and in Europe. With a radical unhinging of private corporate control of a national security resource [OIL!]...the Government cannot create a foreign policy that will handle the multiple challenges of Putin, China, OPEC and global warming not to mention Iran.

The key nation in the former so called 3rd World has become transformed via the massive influx of revenue from oil. They have bought massive new weaponary and can damage the US and its much more passive allies very seriously. The US error in Iraq was not the tactics of the war it was the adoption of fatally inept and corrupt Nation Building. If it would have been treated for what in fact it was [a critical Strategic War aimed at both Iraq and Iran regimes of authoritarianism] it could have been completed on over with OPEC picking up the Arab piles of debris. Instead the US is entrapped in a folly-filled, blood and cash sucking endless war with surge and re-surge over and over.

At home, the economy is in recession. The key is a Green Economic Transformation, creating new investment, new jobs and a new plantary understanding that only statesman like Al Gore understand in both breadth and depth. Obama in contrast offers moderate, slow policies that do not even match Hillary's.

Foreign Policy reshaping is directly connected with oil independency and a new 21st Century US economy that even Western Europe and some nations of NATO-allied Eastern Europe could join quickly.

And the US had better move fast because the whole ball game is resting on a very fragile and collapsing planetary ecosphere.