I’m playing around with this as a way to link to items I’ve read and have little to add to, but that don’t overlap with the Off the Radar turf.
– Investment banks (read: Goldman Sachs) have been making money coming and going on Greece’s debt. Jean Quatremer has been covering this for a few weeks, but delicately because few people are willing to go on record. The target, according to Quatremer, is not Greece, but the euro. Lots of Soros wannabe’s out there.
– If uranium is the new oil, Kazakhstan is the new Persian Gulf, complete with all the intrigue. Niger fits in this category, too, since the other sources of supply — Canada and Australia — are too stable to be manipulated like this. Fits in nicely with Saurav Jha’s WPR feature article on the New Nuclear Age.
– Cash flying out of Afghanistan, one of the predictable downsides of the announced expiration date of the Afghan Surge. Add this to the list of indicators of the surge’s success and track it over the next six to 12 months.
– The Obama administration is staying on the sidelines of the U.K.-Argentina dispute over offshore oil rights in the Falkland Islands. This is a no-win situation for an administration intent on preventing influence-freefall in Latin America. But it’s hard to see how it goes over well in Britain, given the U.K.’s past and current commitments to U.S. security priorities. Yet another example of poor alliance management from this administration.
– More on the EU’s foreign policy turf wars.