Ordering a release of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a classic Obama administration move: temporary, mindless of market forces and politically motivated. It also creates uncertainty – the scythe that best mows down green shoots.

President Obama’s reelection prospects may well rise (and fall) on our country’s economic progress, which has drastically slowed of late. The recovery needs a boost, and since the White...

Social unrest is erupting in China—again. Simmering protests that began in two industrial cities several weeks ago have spread and intensified over the past few days, prompting yet more vigorous displays of force on the part of local governments and the security bureaucrats in Beijing. These are tremors, not an earthquake. But we all know what tremors here frequently foretell.

To put things in their proper context, we have long been counting demonstrations in China—“mass incidents” is the clean, official phrase—in the tens of thousands per year. But...

It’s not fun playing spoilsport, but someone needs to point out that President Obama is, as ever, over a barrel—in this case a barrel of crude. The United States has long backed stability in the Middle East – even embracing odious strongman regimes – simply because we need oil.  No amount of soaring rhetoric will loosen that noose.

Nothing could bring that reality home more clearly than news that the Iranian president Mahmoud...

“What the hell was anybody doing building six nuclear power plants in an earthquake-prone zone?” Senator John Kerry asked during a speech the other day at the Commonwealth Club of California. “I don’t get it. It’s hubris, if not stupidity.”

With Fukushima still generating fallout—and it is the real thing now—it is important that the Democrat from Massachusetts (and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) get fully in the...