Thomas P.M. Barnett

Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force - as in tens of millions strong - of wifeless men who'll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.

You can't drag people from understanding to action. A customer isn't actually at the last mile if you're the one dragging her to the finish line.

Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United States fights somebody, we're going to be huge. They're going to be small.'

The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys.

So long as the global economy continues to recover, that remains Obama's No. 1 claim to successful leadership. Nothing else even comes close.

America has remained highly engaged in global affairs throughout decades of growing energy dependency, so it's hard to imagine it would disengage if its quest for energy self-sufficiency failed - especially amidst a world of heightened resource competition.

There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power?

Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.

An Obama administration truly looking to break with the molds of the past would stop treating Africa as an obligation and start treating it as globalization's next great opportunity, understanding that Chinese - along with Indians and Arab sovereign wealth funds - are natural partners in this process.

If America is addicted to foreign money and foreign oil, then China is addicted to foreign supplies of just about every commodity known to man - save highly polluting coal.

If you can get out in front of people with your ideas and your execution, you'll attract the people who need to be pulled in.