For the past forty years, the United States has been dependent on foreign oil. In the early 1970s, declining domestic production and America’s ever increasing thirst for oil made dependency on imports a necessity, whilst the OPEC Revolution and the 1973 Arab oil embargo seemed to also make dependency a serious threat to national security. Beginning with the formulation of Nixon’s “Project Independence”, the US has sought to reverse this worrisome position and restore what is usually imagined as a quasi-paradisiacal state of nature: energy independence. Yet, while president after president emphasised the importance of tackling the problem, US net oil imports kept rising, until they peaked in 2005 at about 12.5 million barrels of oil per day, 65% of …

A Conversation with Rakim Brooks Background: On February 26, 2012, 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed as he was walking home to his father’s house in a community in Sanford, Florida. Unarmed, Martin was seen carrying an iced tea and a bag of Skittles candy, when 28 year-old George Zimmerman opened fire on the boy, resulting in his death. Until yesterday, under the auspices of self defence and through the protection of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, Zimmerman had not been arrested for a crime that the civil rights community insists was motivated by racial prejudice.  Public outrage regarding the handling of the incident (no doubt including the decision not to arrest Zimmerman) resulted in the resignation of …

It continues to look like Mitt Romney will be the Republican candidate for President in the fall. While he is still fighting a war of attrition with Rick Santorum, it will take a major game changer for him to lose the primary. So it is no surprise that he is increasingly orienting himself towards the general election. What can the course of the campaign so far tell us about the challenges Romney will face and how he will try to tackle them? The drawn-out primary has been a mixed blessing, forcing Romney to cater to a conservative base out of touch with many Americans, forcing him to spend time and money battling right-wing rivals when he would have preferred to …

The web is rightly abuzz with analysis of the Supreme Court’s impending consideration of the US Affordable Care Act, usually known as Obama’s health care bill. Today is the second day of oral arguments. Of the many interesting aspects of the case, the role of precedent stands out. Implicit in much of the discussion on which precedents the Court will follow is that precedent actually matters.  I think it does; others think not.  We shall see. The broader discussion is over whether the Court will be willing to strike such a major law on a weak legal case. The legal issue is whether the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution — 16 words that grant Congress the authority to regulate ‘commerce …

From Project Syndicate in Collaboration with Martin Van Creveld:  Israel is daily ratcheting up its threats to attack Iran over its nuclear program. Unfortunately, these threats have come to overshadow more pressing events in Syria, which is the epicenter of a regional crisis that will determine the future of the Arab Spring, as well as Iran’s role in the Middle East. Throughout 2011, the Arab uprisings were driven by each country’s internal dynamics. Yet the disparate movements were united by the pursuit of freedom, dignity, and economic opportunity. Now this liberal narrative is breaking down. Chaos reigns in Egypt and Libya, where post-revolution authorities are proving too brittle either to consolidate their authority, or to incorporate more popular forces. In …

The American Public Broadcasting Corporation’s (PBS) new installment of The American Experience: the Presidents is a biography of the 42nd President, William Jefferson Clinton, that feels more like a drama than history. Clinton paints a picture of a highly improbable president, born famously into impoverished circumstances in Hope, Arkansas, with a father who died before his birth and an alcoholic stepfather who beat his mother in front of the children. Consequently, Clinton threw all of his efforts into his studies, laboring to redeem and rescue his family, and substituting a broken home life for his ersatz, carefully managed public persona at school. Such a stratagem recurs throughout Clinton’s life: when situations become tough, Clinton pretends as though they are not happening. Unfortunately …

Super Tuesday came and went, and I’m not sure people in the ten states involved felt it was all that “super”. Despite some Republican party activists asserting this is the most important presidential election since George Washington was elected (no, really), voter turnout in several cases was lower than in the 2008 Republican Primary. Many of those who did vote were not enthusiastic about any of the candidates running. According to the Washington Post, “Barely more than four out of 10 voters in Ohio said they were strongly behind their candidate, according to exit polls”. And people aren’t enjoying the spectacle of the campaign itself either—the New York Times quotes a couple from Ohio complaining about the “barrage of ads” …

When Rick Santorum claimed that JFK’s 1960 ‘separation of church and state’ Houston campaign speech made him want to throw up, he was rightly criticized for it. Kathleen Townsend for the Washington Post said ‘Either Santorum doesn’t know his American history or he is purposefully rewriting it.’ Working in the wonderful New York State Archives in Albany this week I found a great deal of material on Catholic religious school aid controversies, which shed light on the history of US anti-Catholicism and ‘Wall of Separation between Church and State’ rhetoric. Since Santorum is a Catholic and so was JFK, along with fully a quarter of all Americans, examining such materials may help us to understand why Santorum made such remarks, …