"Despite being on different sides of the Syrian civil war, Putin has managed to bring Riyadh into its diplomatic orbit through cooperation on oil policy, given how both Saudi-led OPEC states and Russia need substantially higher prices for government budgets to break even."

"...Saudi Arabia's energetic and ambitious young deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, appears to see beyond the immediate threat of U.S. shale to the Saudi oil industry....He is focused on the broader need for major reform of the Saudi economy.  Climate change will plainly be a major problem of the 21st century, and the world is moving away from fossil fuels: game over for an unreformed Saudi Arabia."

"A negotiated solution would require a military stalemate on the ground, and this depends on NATO forces guaranteeing that Afghan forces in key positions will not be overrun. This is the political objective that should inform Western military support in Afghanistan from here on out: to make clear to the Taliban that they can achieve more through a peace deal than through fighting and to make clear to Western electorates that this isn't a forever war."

"...[W]e now know that the notion that regime change leads to a better democratic or a humanitarian outcome is decidedly false. From Iraq, where the West tried a heavy footprint strategy, to Libya, where it opted for a light one, the idea that Europe or the United States can actually execute democratic change by force has been exposed as a fallacy."

"President Barack Obama could use this moment to devise a real political strategy, rather than oscillating between moralizing tirades against Putin's support for what remains of the Syrian state and the apolitical, meaningless mission of degrading the Islamic State. U.S. strikes in Syria should only be tied to positively defined goals, such as counterterrorism to defend U.S. interests, stopping the Islamic State from resupplying operations to Iraq, or supporting Kurdish enclaves."

"Kunduz is potentially a game changer because it exposes the gap between the paper plan for the defense of Afghanistan and the reality on the ground, particularly in two key areas: first, the capability Afghan ground forces; and second, the credibility of their NATO back-up."

"The stakes are high, because if the United States gets it wrong, it could soon find itself increasingly marginalized in East Africa, having lost the geopolitical center ground to China. As in so many other parts of the post–Cold War world, China offers a fundamentally different kind of relationship, one based on maximal private-sector links and minimal public-sector reform, as opposed to the United States, which tends to want both maximally."

"In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, when the conventional phase was over and the mission became indistinguishable from enforcing the writ of a relatively corrupt government over disillusioned parts of its own population, the notion that a decisive outcome was even available is illusory: first, because that task is endless — as it's about changing people's political affiliations, which are liable to evolve (as we have seen quite spectacularly in Iraq since the surge); second, because there was not a single coherent enemy force to be rendered powerless in the first place."