"The answer to who is behind this probably is contained somewhere in case files," said Fred Burton, a former counterterrorism agent with the U.S. State Department who now serves as a security expert with Austin, Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence. At a minimum, Mr. Burton said, investigators need to "rule out or rule in" the various criminal organizations that are involved in the North Texas drug trade.
Michael Nayebi, a Middle East analyst at the Texas geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor, said the Chavez incident was just the "latest in a string of statements against Ahmadinejad that we've seen week after week, month after month over the past year."
Technical know-how, coal seam gas, shale gas and tight oil, as it's known, are reshaping world geopolitics. Having been so import-dependent, the United States is now the world's largest gas producer and expected to become the world's largest oil producer by 2017. Foreign Policy Magazine in 2011 named Robert Kaplan as one of the world's top 100 thinkers. Today he works for global intelligence company Stratfor in Austin, Texas.
Rodger Baker, VP of East Asia Analysis at Stratfor, identifies the top priorities for the Japanese Prime Minister as he attempts to strengthen ties with the United States in a visit to Washington.
In short, the next few decades will see the erosion of central authority in the former colonial world, which will be somewhat violent at first, before settling down into a reasonable harmony. Geography will be more crucial than ever, even as technology makes the earth smaller and more claustrophobic.
But as messy as Egypt's current situation seems to Western eyes, there’s a silver lining in the shaping of a new government that understands what needs to be done and who it can count on, according to Reva Bhalla, an analyst at Austin, Texas-based Stratfor, the geopolitical consultancy founded by George Friedman.
