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Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost 40 percent percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world’s top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS?  Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept.  ("N-11" stands for the next 11 emerging economies.)

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

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A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr. M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M’s home state condemns foreign interference in his country’s internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the United States decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for U.S. and NATO forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

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What was once taboo has now got presidents talking in public and writing charged commentaries. They’re trying to frame the new drugs debate in terms that Washington — which firmly stands by the drug war solution — will understand: supply and demand.

The U.S. government says it will listen, but will not bend.

Some Latin leaders are discussing the need to experiment further with decriminalizing possession of drugs. Lawmakers are also proposing to scrap jail terms for growing coca and cannabis.

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Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing” it.  Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause.” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their core.

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Until that moment, the Afghan National Army was the crown jewel of the Obama administration’s strategy for drawing down forces in Afghanistan (without really leaving). Trained in their hundreds of thousands over the past 11 years by a horde of dodgy private security contractors, as well as U.S. and NATO troops, the Afghan National Army is supposed to replace coalition forces any day now and defend its own country.

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The matter was at the root of wry commentary accompanying a flurry of visits not seen in years.

In the past few weeks, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon have all held high level meetings in Jerusalem. Barak is scheduled to meet with Panetta and with Vice President Joe Biden. Peres will meet with President Barack Obama, as will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will fly to Washington for a much anticipated meeting on March 5.

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Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries -- Middle East/North Africa -- which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.

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How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat.  Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

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The Obama administration’s sweeping initiative —which will potentially steer billions of dollars in U.S. aid toward countries and programs that protect rights while expanding efforts to protect LGBT refugees — was announced ahead of Human Rights Day. The timing reinforced a now-common refrain that has been spoken, chanted and shouted by rights activists around the world for decades: Gay rights equal human rights.

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The new policy was signaled by President Obama himself on November 17th in an address to the Australian Parliament in which he laid out an audacious -- and extremely dangerous -- geopolitical vision.  Instead of focusing on the Greater Middle East, as has been the case for the last decade, the United States will now concentrate its power in Asia and the Pacific.  “My guidance is clear,” he declared in Canberra.  “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” While administration officials insist that this new policy is not aimed specifically at China, the implication is clear enough: From now on, the primary focus of American military strategy will not be counterterrorism, but the containment of that economically booming land -- at whatever risk or cost.

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A much more useful approach was laid out by the journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann in "U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic," which he published in 1943 during World War II. Lippmann spoke of “the order of power,” that is, the relationships among the handful of great military and economic powers that matter the most. In his view of history, American foreign policy has always been defined by America’s relations with other great powers: first Britain and France, and later Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.

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Did 9/11 “change everything”?  For a brief period after September 2001, the answer to that question seemed self-evident: of course it did, with massive and irrevocable implications.  A mere decade later, the verdict appears less clear.  Today, the vast majority of Americans live their lives as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred.  When it comes to leaving a mark on the American way of life, the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have long since eclipsed Osama bin Laden.  (Whether the legacies of Jobs and Zuckerberg will prove other than transitory also remains to be seen.)

Anyone claiming to divine the existence of genuinely Big Change Happening Now should, therefore, do so with a sense of modesty and circumspection, recognizing the possibility that unfolding events may reveal a different story.

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The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait...

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

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If ever there were a complete foreign policy disaster, it has been the Iraq war. Most foreign policy failures are imperfect idiocy. At least elements of the failed policy made sense at the time. By invading Iraq, the U.S. carried idiocy to perfection. The Iraq war was a catastrophe for the United States in every way—strategic, economic, political and moral.

Strategic. From the end of the Gulf War in February 1991 to the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, the U.S. pursued a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq. Though far less costly than the invasion of Iraq would prove to be, this dual containment policy was expensive, in part because of the cost of U.S. occupation of part of Iraq and frequent bombing of the territory that Saddam still held.

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Here's the excerpted exchange that kicked it off; I introduced the subject and then P.J. Crowley, my former colleague at the Center for American Progress, fired back (there was a break in between, so I've put the two statements together for brevity's sake):

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Sleek and deadly, operated at a remove of thousands of miles by faceless technicians, drones are the harbingers of a new type of warfare: technologically sophisticated, surgically precise and able to take out the enemy with little or no risk to American troops.

But there is also a darker side to the drone image. The glossy new war toys are often portrayed as killer robots that, in a Doomsday scenario straight out of Space Odyssey 2001, may one day go rogue.

In reality, as numerous experts have pointed out, a drone is just a modern-day tool of war. It can be used as a weapons-delivery system, it can provide sustained and minutely targeted surveillance, and it can take out bad guys with astonishing accuracy.

But the convenience of the drones has prompted an explosion in their use. Drones are no longer deployed solely in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States military is party to a declared armed conflict. Drones are now being used in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and, perhaps most controversially, in Pakistan, a nominal U.S. ally in the war on terror.

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