3 Reasons Why Ukraine Crisis Is More Dangerous than You Think

Contrary to President Barack Obama’s promised reliance on career Foreign Service officers to fill U.S. ambassadorial positions, his administration is nominating a large number of political allies and fundraisers, and many are not qualified for the job. Filling senior overseas posts with men and women with no foreign policy experience is nothing new, but in his second term Obama is opening the floodgates to a group of appointees whose common thread appears to be a wholesale lack of knowledge of the countries where they will live and work.

As first-round talks to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program closed last week there was no evidence to suggest that the coming negotiations can succeed. Few observers expect a resolution within the allotted six months; even fewer expect Tehran to agree to the seven key concessions LIGNET has identified to assure that Iran’s nuclear effort is solely for civilian purposes.

Radical Islamists in the unruly Sinai Peninsula appear to be targeting Egypt’s tourism industry, which has suffered from the country’s instability since 2011. The downing last month of an Egyptian air force helicopter with a surface-to-air missile is a serious development, one which could derail peace efforts on the strategically important peninsula.

LIGNET Global Forecast

Thanks to a glut of oil and natural gas production from its unconventional shale resources, the United States is fast becoming one of the world’s primary oil and natural gas producers. However, recent setbacks to exploring the Arctic Ocean’s potentially vast hydrocarbon deposits have invigorated environmentalists to step up their efforts to block new drilling operations in 2014 and beyond.

The United States, China and Russia are in a growing arms race to produce the first “hypersonic” weapons, precision vehicles that can deliver a payload at 20 times the speed of sound. Boosted by an aircraft or ballistic missile, their amazing speed would evade even the best missile-defense systems.