Some autocratic governments are challenging U.S. policies and silencing domestic dissent. But their increased spending raises the risk of inflation, which could erode popular support.
But some of the most obvious effects are in countries whose leaders are most hostile to the United States: Venezuela’s populist President Hugo Chavez, Iran’s stringent Islamic rulers and Russia’s growing [...]

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An inside look at the Russian leader’s autocratic regime and his turn away from the West
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity [...]

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According to Gen. Michael Moseley, who was recently dismissed from his position as U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, “there is almost zero chance we will fight a nation state” in the 21st century.
While senior American flag officers acknowledge the increasing unlikelihood of great power war in the 21st century, a handful of U.S. think [...]

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The word “petrostate” typically conjures up images of Middle Eastern sheiks with fantastically wealthy lifestyles ruling politically repressive, oil-rich desert regions. Few realize that Russia actually leads the world in the production and export of natural gas and trails only Saudi Arabia in the production and export of oil. Even fewer know that Russia has [...]

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Chavez, 53, the country’s first dark-skinned leader, has used Venezuela’s immense oil wealth, says Jones, to improve life for millions of impoverished shantytown residents through health and education programmes such as no other leader ever attempted. For Washington, though, the “Bolivarian revolution” (named after Simon Bolivar, the leader of the independence struggle against Spain) is [...]

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Since the late 1990s, there has been a flood of research on natural resources and civil war. This article reviews 14 recent cross-national econometric studies, and many qualitative studies, that cast light on the relationship between natural resources and civil war. It suggests that collectively they imply four underlying regularities: first, oil increases the likelihood [...]

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The number of oil-producer-based conflicts is likely to grow in the future as stratospheric prices of crude oil push more countries in the developing world to produce oil and gas. In 2001, the Bush administration’s energy task force hailed the emergence of new producers as a chance for the United States to diversify the sources [...]

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And the correlation between oil and violence is likely to grow stronger, since as Ross points out, countries in Africa, the Caspian basin, and Southeast Asia will soon become “significant oil and gas exporters. Some of these countries, including Chad, East Timor, and Myanmar, have already suffered internal strife. Most of the rest are poor, [...]

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