Two key paragraphs from the latest comments from Tom Barnett as they appeared last Monday in the World Politics Review.

The United States is on the verge of an industrial renaissance, according to energy experts enthusiastic about technological advances surrounding the “fracking” of shale gas and the processing of “tight oil.” America is sitting on a century-worth of natural gas, and the Western hemisphere boasts five times the reserves in unconventional oil as the Middle East claims in the conventional category.

…but having created this magnificent world, it is time for us to admit that we no longer control it. America remains an indispensable part of global order, necessary for its functioning — but far from sufficient. Instead of fantasizing about how we can still pull out some semblance of primacy by detaching ourselves from globalization’s interdependencies, we need to recognize that our grand strategic achievement of making globalization truly global has now placed humanity on a path of stunning complexity. Dipping into U.S. history, we can say that the planet has reached Benjamin Franklin’s inflection point where, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Read the rest of his article HERE…