That’s a big shift from four years ago. Here’s what the Republican presidential candidate John McCain was saying about climate change.

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

You won’t hear talk like that from any of the Republican presidential candidates this go-round. There’s a reason for that, said David King at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“In a time of real economic distress, who is paying attention to global climate change? And especially if the costs of solving the reality of global climate change are so high they’re going to come directly in conflict with the economy, with jobs, and who wants to face that reality?”

But the Republican presidential candidates are more than just ignoring the issue, they’re running away from it. Take the case of Newt Gingrich. He appeared in a commercial in 2008 sitting on a couch next to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The two politicians introduce themselves, then Pelosi says, “We don’t always see eye to eye, do we Newt?”

Gingrich responds, “No, but we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.”

Gingrich has had to answer repeatedly for that commercial during this campaign season. Here’s what he told Fox News.

“It’s probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”

Gingrich also said he’s scrapping a chapter about climate change in his new book.

William Moomaw with the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the Republican candidates are distancing themselves from the issue for ideological reasons. “They believe that addressing climate change will require government action, or even worse, intergovernmental action.”

Moomaw said to understand just how far the Republican Party has shifted on environmental issues, consider the case of the incandescent light bulb. President George W. Bush signed a law in 2007 that requires new bulbs to be 30 percent more efficient. Moomaw said many Republicans now see that law as a source of government intrusion.

“Candidates like Michele Bachmann were jumping up and down and shouting how they were going to repeal this – to be denied their right to put any lightbulb in any socket in America is just too much control, a loss of freedom.”

But it’s not just the Republican Party that’s not addressing climate change. President Obama has fallen virtually silent on the issue. If you visit his 2012 presidential Web site, you’d be hard pressed to find any mention of climate change and global warming. That’s a political calculation, said David King at Harvard.

“If there’s no benefit politically to talking about global climate change, then you just keep your mouth shut.”

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

“As a general proposition, the question that was posed, I want to make sure the people understand, actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” the President said.

He went on to say that “for the most part they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied.”

Still on the topic of drone strikes, he said that “a lot of these strikes have been in the Fata” – that refers to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Marco Werman talks with Micah Zenko, Fellow for Conflict Prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations, about how surprising it is that President Obama publicly acknowledged the US use of drones in this way, and what it means for public discourse on this issue.

Zenko is the author of “Between Threats and War: U.S. Discrete Military Operations in the Post-Cold War World“.

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Marco Werman: Micah Zenko is a Fellow for Conflict Prevention at the Council at Foreign Relations. He’s an expert on U.S. national security policy and military operations. Micah Zenko, let’s be clear here. Were President Obama’s comments yesterday on the U.S. use of unmanned drones the first time anyone in the Obama administration had publicly acknowledged the first time use of drones?

Micah Zenko: It was the first explicit acknowledgement by a U.S. official that the United States is using these drones in Pakistan. That’s the key aspect. The U.S. has described their use in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, but under U.S. law these are quote “covert actions” and what that means is that the United States government cannot acknowledge that they occur. Never before had any administration official explicitly acknowledge that the United States is using drone strikes in what’s called the Fata area of Pakistan, so this is a completely new development.

Werman: So were you shocked by this and what exactly was this moment for President Obama, this public admission of covert action?

Zenko: I was shocked given the setting which he did, which was essentially an hour long event for Google at answering questions from the public, but I think the reason he made this announcement now is there are a lot of increasing criticisms about the transparency and oversight of drone strikes and particular about the killing of Anwar al-Alawki, who was a U.S. citizen in Yemen, by a drone a few months back and I believe that this statement by the President sets up what is supposed to be a forthcoming speech by Attorney General Holder that explains what is the legal justification for the United States government to kill a U.S. civilian, a citizen living abroad without access to their Fifth Amendment due process rights.

Werman: Well the drone program officially is secret and secrecy has its costs. What has been the cost of official secrecy on drones?

Zenko: Well some of the things that happens is that the United States, because it cannot acknowledge or defend them, is on a back foot within countries like Pakistan about what the effects of them are, so if you read the Pakistani press or in Pakistani television shows some of the worst myths and mus-perceptions about drone strikes are allowed to fester because nobody from the U.S. government can correct them. The other issue is that within the United States itself there is very limited transparency in oversight of these drone strikes, so these are properly reported to the intelligence committees within the House and the Senate, but within other committees dealing with the Senate Foreign Relations committee or the House Foreign Affairs committee, many staff members and officials on them have very little understanding of how these work.

Werman: I mean that raises the point that some critics have argued, that the use of drones has allowed the U.S. to go to war through a back door and that undermines the legal safeguards against going to war. Would you agree with that?

Zenko: I would. I mean there have been something like 285 drones strikes in Pakistan since the summer of 2004 when they first began, 85% of those occurred under President Obama. If there was 285 bombs dropped by manned aircraft in Pakistan, for example, there would have to be some formal declaration of war under the War Powers Resolution and there would have to be some acknowledgement to Congress, broadly, of what’s happened. As it is now, these are reported simply to a number of select senior members of Intelligence Committees in the House and the Senate. There’s no explicit Congressional authorization for these particular strikes and so the Administration has sort of let this go on and on and on and on for seven and a half years without ever acknowledging that these were occurring.

Werman: This is an election year, do you think the President came out publicly and spoke about drones for some political payback, and if so, do unmanned aircraft now become a campaign issue?

Zenko: Well drone strikes are incredibly popular especially in Capitol Hill and among members of the Democratic Party who want to have a smaller military, but I think the real reason that the President did this is, again, after seven and a half years the pressure had simply built to great with enough officials within the Administration and who have recently retired and enough people on Capitol Hill who finally said “You have to explain the scope and range of the targets which with unmanned drones are being used to kill, and in particularly, you have to explain why the U.S. believes that it can target U.S. citizens without Fifth Amendment due process rights.”

Werman: Micah Zenko is a Fellow for Conflict Prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of “Between Threats and War: U.S. Discrete Military Operations in the Post-Cold War World.” Micah, thank you very much.

Zenko: Thank you so much.

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Imran Khan made his name playing cricket, the most popular sport in Pakistan. In 1992 he became a legend after leading the Pakistani team to victory at the World Cup:

He formally entered politics in 1996, founding the PTI, or “Movement for Justice,” which promoted an anti-corruption platform.

The PTI attracted mostly urban educated professionals, but failed to get a mainstream following. In fact, in the 2002 parliamentary elections, Imran Khan was the only candidate from his party to win a seat.

But now Khan has managed to mobilize enough young urban professionals to become a rising political force. In the past, this demographic shunned politics as a dishonorable activity. But young people are coming out now out of frustration with the current leadership.

“This is the first rally that I’ve come to! I’ve never supported anyone before in Pakistan,” said Shazia Farooqui, who works at a shipping company. She came out to support Imran Khan at Sunday’s rally.

“The Pakistani want change. We believe that Imran Khan is probably the best person. He talks about respect. We’re getting tired of being pointed at.”

Uzair Dadabhoy also came out for the rally. He’s a recent university graduate, who works at an asset management company in Karachi.

“You can’t get justice, you can’t get safety. People’s businesses are getting affected. Our livelihoods get affected when the country gets in to such a terrible situation.”

Dadabhoy says he’s been a huge fan of Imran Khan since his cricket days, but only joined his political movement a few months ago.

“They might not have the best expertise to run the railways and Pakistan International Airlines, but at least they will be honest. They won’t loot,” Dadabhoy said, adding that anyone could do a better job of running the government than the people doing it now.

At the rally, you could see posters of Imran Khan with the slogans “hope” and “change,” a clear reference to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Some people wore t-shirts with the phrase, “Yes We Khan”.

Despite this new found enthusiasm for Imran Khan, not everyone’s so sure what he’s offering. Badar Alam, editor of Pakistan’s Herald magazine, said that Khan’s ideology is continuously evolving, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

“Whether it is right wing, centrist, or some kind of liberalism, we are never sure about his own ideology. Where is he coming from? The moment he gets his hands on to some wonderful idea, he wastes no time in adopting it,” Alam said. “If you go to his party’s website you will see articles which praise how Hugo Chavez has turned around the economy of Venezuela, and then you hear him speak very fondly of how China has eradicated corruption.”

Khan’s political rivals question whether his party, the PTI, with its untested upper-class leadership, can really tackle the country’s problems of poverty, violence and conflict. Nasreen Jalil, of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement or MQM, a dominant political party in Karachi, said there’s no comparison between Khan’s PTI and MQM.

“We’ve been there, delivered and proved,” she said.

Until recently MQM was at bitter odds with Imran Khan. The rhetoric is less heated now, but the differences remain.

“The problem has been that people who haven’t really faced the problems, they don’t realize how to tackle them,” Jalil said. “It’s like saying if they don’t have bread let them eat cake. Imran Khan doesn’t seem to have the organization and doesn’t have the people at present. He might be able to develop them, only time will tell.”

Western governments might also be wondering what they could expect if Khan and the PTI make it in to power, particularly when it comes to cooperating on counter-terrorism. They might look to his comments following a press conference last Saturday.

“If Western countries and the U.S. are looking for a friend, Pakistan will be friends,” Khan said. “But if they are looking for a hired gun as it has been today, or a government that is pliant, a puppet, I’m afraid Pakistan won’t be that.”

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Marco Werman: When the protestors in Tunisia triggered what’s become known as the Arab Spring, one of their first vocal supporters was President Barack Obama. But now many Tunisians are satirizing Obama on his Facebook page; more specifically, they’re posting criticisms and witticisms on his 2012 reelection page. Mona Kareem is a blogger in New York and she writes for Global Voices, an online community of bloggers, to report on citizen media around the world. What kinds of things are the Tunisians saying on Mr. Obama’s reelection page, Mona?

Mona Kareem: Well, at the beginning they were only sharing solidarity and giving support messages for the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’re saying we support you, we support your revolution, and you against police brutality and the arrests, and all these things. But by time it escalated and became one of cultural expressions of the Tunisian revolution because they started to be more critical of the Western journalists, US foreign policy and they expanded to other personas, not only Obama.

Werman: Well, it sounds like somebody you know, laying an insult at your feet and then saying don’t worry, it’s just a joke. I mean is it a joke or are they serious? Are they turning anti-American as we watch on Facebook?

Kareem: Oh, okay, actually I was trying to trace back this campaign. I thought maybe someone you know, was planning it ahead of time, there was an agenda for it because it was just crazy to have tens of thousands of people all over the internet from a small country like Tunisia.

Werman: So what did you find out?

Kareem: No, there is no tracing. There was just someone who started it and others joined him, and it got bigger and bigger. And I guess with the addiction of social networking in the Middle East right now such a thing was easy to you know, get bigger and bigger.

Werman: It’s interesting though when you have one person writing on Obama’s reelection Facebook page — Obama, coward, you are an agent of the Americans. I mean it’s hard to say that they’re just trying out these new-found internet freedoms.

Kareem: Yeah, no, but with this chance I mean it’s the most common chant in the Arab Spring, in every country…

Werman: Which chant is that?

Kareem: The chant that we will use one of leader’s names, like for example, Mubarak, Mubarak, you coward, you agent of Americans. You know, every president in the uprisings they use this chant against them because people think that their leaders are not loyal to them. People think that their leaders are just followers of the US foreign policy and they are not independent. So that’s where the chant came from.

Werman: I mean given how tricky it is to decipher some of these jokes as you say, has their been any response from President Obama or his people at the White House?

Kareem: No, I hear none of them. Actually, the only response I would say is that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, locked his wall just after that because he was afraid that he would be spammed as well.

Werman: And now it’s not just #trolling Obama, #trolling Sarkozy, # Berlusconi…

Kareem: Yes.

Werman: I guess there are equal opportunity insulters.

Kareem: Yes, exactly, but as I told you, I would say it’s more critical than insulters and that we not neglect the fact that they would like to show you know, the refusal for police brutality.

Werman: The police brutality that they’re referring to is the police brutality on Wall Street.

Kareem: Yes, and they’re rough because I mean, there are many pictures by the same people on Facebook in Tunisia you know, comparing what is happening now in America and what happened during the former regime. So they’re saying we are thinking of America as a democracy, so why is this happening?

Werman: Blogger Mona Kareem of Global Voices. Thanks very much for speaking with us.

Kareem: Thank you.

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Read tweets about the Tunisians and Obama

Clinton did concede that sanctions are a blunt instrument.

“I am aware that from time to time, certain sanctions can be difficult for totally innocent people going about their daily lives. But I would ask you to put yourself in the position of the international community and those who seek a better future inside Iran.”

One group of Iranians whose daily lives are being made more difficult by sanctions is Iranian students studying in the US.

When “Sarah” flew to San Francisco from Iran, she and her father were carrying $30,000 in cash.

“Handbags. I put it in my handbag, and my father put it in his carry on.”

I asked if that made her a bit, well, nervous?

“Yea, a little bit nervous, yea.”

Sarah was carrying stacks of hundred dollar bills because she needed the money to pay for her graduate studies. It’s not illegal to carry in large sums of cash. You just have to declare anything over $10,000.

Sarah had to do this because US sanctions imposed last year restrict Iranian banks from transferring more than $100 to American banks.

Sarah didn’t want to use her real name. Neither did her father. He lives in Tehran but was visiting Los Angeles when we spoke.

Speaking through a translator, he said he sent another $90,000 to Sarah through a third party. They wired money to his daughter from Turkey or Kuwait. Sarah’s father wasn’t sure which country the middle man used.

In the end, Sarah got the money to pay for her tuition, books and housing. But she and her father argue that the process was more than just an inconvenience. For instance, if something were to happen with the money transfer and Sarah was late with her tuition, she’d be in violation of her visa, and could be deported.

The US government wants Iranian students to come here. After all, they’re paying good money and serving as cultural ambassadors. Sarah’s father says the newest sanctions discriminate against average Iranians.

Banafsheh Akhlaghi

“The intention behind the sanction is to support democracy, eliminate the aiding and abetting of further national security issues. It’s not to have this young lady, Sarah, have difficulty in being able to be an international student here. I can’t imagine that the policymakers sat around the tables and thought that that’s the way in which they’re going to be able to get us to a safer nation, a safer global environment.”

“It’s very unfortunate that Iranian students, or Iranian citizens, should be hurt because of the actions of their own government,” said Nicholas Burns at the Harvard Kennedy School. “But I think the blame has got lie with their government”

Burns said sanctions are highly imprecise instruments. But they serve a purpose.

“They appear to be working well in Iran because they’re isolating the Iranian government, and that has been the purpose all along. Not just by the United States by the way. This is a policy agreed to by the European allies, and also by the other members of the (UN) Security Council.”

US officials have recently said that sanctions are slowing Iran’s nuclear program. Still, politicians and scholars have long argued over the effectiveness of sanctions.

Ibrahim Warde with the Fletcher School at Tufts University says the story of the Iranian students illustrates one point: It’s not that hard to get around the sanctions.

“An easy thing to do when you’re a tourist in Iran is to go to rug merchants and ask them, ‘OK, if I were to ship 20 of your carpets to the US, how would I do it?’ And then they would say, ‘Well, it’s very easy, because we have sister company in Turkey, or in Malaysia, or in Iraq. And what we’ll do is, we’ll do the billing thru these companies.’”

Those may just be carpets we’re talking about. But Warde says, in general, sanctions aren’t that effective if the rest of the world doesn’t cooperate.

“And there are always countries that are willing to help Iran and unwilling to go along with the sanctions.”

So what’s the answer? I asked attorney Banafsheh Akhlaghi what she proposed?

“So what do we want?” said Akhlagi. “An opportunity to also be part of those conversations as these policies are being written. We’re not there.”

Akhlaghi isn’t opposed to sanctions on the whole. But she says if policymakers see the broader impacts on average Iranians, they could write in exceptions.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for tighter sanctions yesterday, she also called for a “virtual embassy” for Iran. That could provide Iranians with online information about visas and student exchange programs.

He ordered a complete withdrawal from the country, nearly nine years after the invasion under President George W Bush.

About 39,000 US troops remain in Iraq, down from a peak of 165,000 in 2008.

The US and Iraq were in “full agreement” on how to move forward, Mr Obama said, adding: “The US will leave Iraq with its head held high.”

Before the speech the White House said: “This will allow us to say definitively that the Iraq war is over,” and said the US and Iraq would work as two sovereign nations.

Anchor Lisa Mullins discusses the announcement with former New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. President Barack Obama today announced that all US troops in Iraq will leave the country by the end of this year. The president made the announcement after speaking through video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. Mr. Obama left open the possibility of future US military help for Iraq, but he made clear that he’s set on plans to pull American troops out of Iraq completely by the end of December.

Barack Obama: After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over. Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.

Mullins: President Obama speaking earlier today. John Burns has spent over twenty years covering Iraq. He’s the former New York Times Bureau Chief in Bhagdad. He’s now in London. John, about President Obama’s announcement today, how do you look back on all that’s transpired since 2003 and how are you hearing this announcement?

John Burns: Well it’s a momentous occasion of course. An occasion which America has longed for, I think, in it’s great majority. It’s fought, of course, with danger and complications, not the least of which is getting the troops out.

Mullins: Maybe talk, John, as well about the enterprise itself. When we look at how many American troops alone, I think it’s about a million troops have passed through Iraq since 2003. A forty thousand remain. We’re talking about more than four thousand at least US troops that died in Iraq. What are we left with right now as President Obama makes this announcement of the final withdrawal?

Burns: Well, it struck me that the President did leave the door open in his remarks by talking, saying that they would be continuing discussions about the training program and that suggests that there might be some residual presence. Not, obviously, the three to five thousand troops that have been in discussion and not combat troops and it seems to me that Iraq will enter into a new phase of great danger when the last American troops go because, in effect, those diminishing number of US troops, and they have been out of major combat operations now for some time, were the tripwire. They were the guarantee against real political mayhem in Iraq. Nothing political has been resolved in Iraq. Let’s remember that. The fissures which bedeviled the American occupation from the beginning have never been resolved. Your listeners will be very familiar what the, with what those are. Sectarian, political, ideological, you name it. It’s a very fractured society. It hasn’t mended and there is a grave danger that Iraq could slide back into the sort of situation that we saw in 2005, in 2006 when Iraq, as you know, was plummeting towards an all-out civil war. We may hope that the Iraqis have learned that the lessons of that time and will not wish to return to it. The vast majority of them don’t, but there are some very sinister characters on the Iraqi political scene. Not the least of them is Muqtada al-Sadr, the very man who has made it impossible for the present Iraqi government to make an arrangement with Washington to keep a residual troop presence there. So I think that we have to be alert to the possibility, not perhaps immediate, but certainly within a matter of months of the political center in Iraq beginning to disintegrate.

Mullins: John Burns, former New York Times Bureau Chief in Baghdad. He’s now in London. Nice to speak with you.

Burns: It’s a pleasure.

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“It was a hard fit for Richard Holbrooke,” according to David Corn, the Washington Bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine. “He just never found his footing in the Obama administration on this very vexing question of Afghanistan.”

A transparently corrupt election in the summer of 2009 poisoned Holbrooke’s already rocky relationship with President Hamid Karzai. Well-publicized tensions inside the Obama administration and with military leaders contributed to an image of Holbrooke as powerless and sidelined. By 2010, the President was leaving Holbrooke out of important strategic meetings on Afghanistan.

“I think it was somewhat an unfortunate cap to his long diplomatic career.” Corn said. “We’re left not being able to judge him fully on this last mission.”

But history has already judged Holbrooke favorably for re-framing the war effort, and explicitly connecting Pakistan with Afghanistan in the US strategic vision. Today, with routine coalition attacks on targets in Pakistan, the Afghanistan-Pakistan link has become conventional wisdom. But the widely-used shorthand “Af-Pak” was coined by Holbrooke just a few years ago.

“Previously in the State Department or the White House, these two countries were even managed by different bureaus,” according to Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Holbrooke, and professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “Holbrooke understood that the most basic element of this diplomacy here was to understand that peace and security in Afghanistan is dependent on peace and security in Pakistan, and you have to get this right to find a way out.”

Journalist Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s wife for the last 15 years of his life, says he thought America’s “relationship with Pakistan was the most complicated, the most frustrating, the most fraught and the most dangerous. Richard and I never went for a walk in the park without him either getting a call from Pakistan or making a call to Pakistan. He established very close relationships with people where he was on first name basis with pretty much the entire power structure in Pakistan.”

There were some tensions with the Pakistani government and military; but Holbrooke deeply impressed many Pakistanis, wading out to distribute relief during the disastrous floods of 2010. Since his death, America’s image in Pakistan has been defined by drone strikes and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, which alienated many Pakistanis.

“The relationship with Pakistan has deteriorated rather dramatically,” noted Marton. “I cannot categorically say that that’s because Richard Holbrooke is no longer minding the store but he’s not — and things have gotten much worse.”

While his gains in Pakistan may have fallen apart, Holbrooke’s supporters point to a diplomatic accomplishment that could have lasting impact: strengthening diplomatic ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Relations between the two countries are deeply strained today. But before Holbrooke was involved, they were almost nonexistent.

“Since the creation of Pakistan in 1947 they had not really signed any treaty of substance,” according to Nasr. “Holbrooke said, ‘you have to begin to close this one treaty at the time.’ And he spent two years and an enormous amount of energy and time pushing these two closer and closer together.”

By October 2010, the two countries had signed their first border treaty in over 40 years.

Kati Marton says Holbrooke believed that dialogue between the Afghans and the Pakistanis was essential for any peace process. “His ultimate goal was to get some kind of a peace conference that would be a regional peace conference, and that was where he was heading, and that was where he didn’t get.”

It’s impossible to predict what will come next in Afghanistan, but the importance of Pakistan and a regional solution has come into even sharper relief. After the assassination of a key Afghan peace envoy, President Karzai announced this month that he was abandoning initiatives with the Taliban in favor of direct talks with Pakistan.

Arun Rath is a reporter for PBS FRONTLINE

Thursday, President Obama said the government should continue to support clean energy technologies. He rejected Republican claims that the US can’t compete with China when it comes to making solar panels.

“Part of what’s happening is China and Europe, other countries, are putting enormous subsidies into these companies and giving them incentives to move offshore,” said Mr. Obama.

“Even if the technology was developed here in the United States, they end up going to China because the Chinese government is saying, ‘We’re going to help you get started, we’ll help you scale up, we’ll give you low-interest loans or no-interest loans… We will do whatever it takes for you to get started here.”

It wasn’t so long ago that the US dominated solar manufacturing. In 1995, 43 percent of solar panels were built in the US, according to the Department of Energy. Today, that figure is around 5 percent.

To try and figure out what happened, I visited SolarWorld in Hillsboro, Oregon, the largest solar manufacturer in the United States.

The company is headquartered in Germany, but about a thousand people work in the Oregon facility. In its new factory, which opened last year, robotic arms glide across the factory, lifting, pushing, spinning and rolling solar panels from one station to the next. It’s kind of mesmerizing, and very impressive.

But the company is selling these panels for less than it costs to make them.

Gordon Brinser, the president of SolarWorld in America, said they can’t compete with Chinese manufacturers.

“It’s not an issue of them out innovating us. It is really, purely a subsidized manufacturing component.”

The Chinese government issued $30 billion in credit last year to its top solar companies. That’s more than 15 times what the US government provided to American solar manufacturers. And the Chinese also subsidize things like land, power, and water. And Brinser complains that Chinese companies aren’t held to the same environmental standards.

“We need to wake up as a nation because we’re on the verge of losing one of the core industries I believe for our future.

Right now, we’re dependent on Middle East for our fossil fuel oil. And very shortly, we’re going to be dependent upon on the Fareast for our solar.”

After my visit at SolarWorld, I asked a few solar industry watchers: Is China to blame for the precipitous downturn of solar manufacturing in America?

“It’s a very subjective thing. I think it’s really hard to make China totally out as the bad guy,” said Thomas Maslin with IHS Emerging Energy Research.

Joanna Lewis at Georgetown University said, “China’s entry into this market has really benefited the global solar industry, in that we’ve seen these very sharp cost reductions and is driving the technology down the learning curve.”

Lewis said solar manufacturing in China actually helps the overall solar industry in the US.

“When we look at the actual revenue that comes from solar projects, a lot of it comes not from manufacturing of the panels themselves, but installing the panels and preparing the sites.”

In other words, importing Chinese-made solar panels is putting a lot of people to work in the US putting panels on roofs and buildings.

As for the solar manufacturers, Thomas Maslin said, they’re struggling everywhere, in the US, Europe, even China. That’s because there’s been less demand for solar panels this year, especially in parts of Europe.

“The reality is it’s just a very difficult environment for these companies right now,” said Maslin. “There’s a high level of over-supply, there’s a lot of downward price pressure, and therefore there’s going to be a lot of consolidation, so somebody’s gotta fail somewhere.”

Still, Maslin said, yes, it’s legitimate for American manufacturers to gripe about China.

But if somebody’s gotta fail, somebody’s gotta succeed too. I asked Shayle Kann at GTM Research how a solar manufacturer in America can make it? He said it’ll be difficult to beat China at its own game, high-volume manufacturing of commoditized products.

But Kann said American manufacturers can succeed in two ways. First, have a new technology that can’t easily be replicated by the Chinese. Or, have a better business model.

“You can imagine, one manufacturer comes to you and says, ‘I’ll sell you these solar panels at this price.’ And another manufacturer comes to you and says, ‘I will sell you these solar panels at a slightly higher price, but I will also give you all of these additional services including helping you finance these systems for your customers and lead generation, so you don’t have to do that, I’ll do all these things for you.’ It’s not actually a straightforward decision to go with the lower-priced panel in that case.”

Kann said SolarWorld in Oregon is one of the companies that offers more than just the panel. And that answers a question: How does SolarWorld make money if it sells its panels for below cost? SolarWorld charges extra for things like installation, maintenance and engineering expertise. And they guarantee their work for 25 years.

Back at SolarWorld, Gordon Brinser said they still need government help. But he’s worried that some politicians in Washington will use the Solyndra case to scale back support for the entire industry.

“In the solar industry, everybody’s being lumped into one bucket. And the mudslinging that’s going on, we’re catching some of that mud directly.”

Brinser said his company has been around 35 years. The technology has been around longer. But he doesn’t like today’s business climate. Just last week, SolarWorld shut down its California factory and laid off 186 workers. The company says it had to do that largely because of competition from China.

Anwar al-Awlaki (Photo: Wiki Commons)

US-born radical Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a key al-Qaeda leader, has been killed in Yemen, the country’s defense ministry said.

US President Barack Obama said his death was a major blow to al-Qaeda.

Awlaki, of Yemeni descent, has been on the run in Yemen since December 2007.

The US named him a “global terrorist” and said he had played a “significant role” in plots to blow up US airliners and use poison to kill US citizens.

Obama is said to have personally ordered his killing last year.

Yemen’s defense ministry statement said only that Awlaki had died in Khashef in Jawf province, about 87 miles east of the capital, Sanaa, “along with some of his companions”.

US and Yemeni officials later named one of those as Samir Khan, also a US citizen but of Pakistani origin, who produced an online magazine promoting al-Qaeda’s ideology.

Douglas Feith was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for President George W. Bush until August 2005. He says he’s “one of the very few people who was actually an official in the administration who will admit to having been a neoconservative.”

The reason someone like Feith “admits” to being a neocon instead of proclaiming it can be boiled down to one word: Iraq. It wasn’t always that way. Immediately after 9/11, President Bush was looking for a new approach to fight what he saw as a new type of war.

“What the president saw was the necessity to do everything reasonable to prevent the next attack,” Feith said. “And I think that was really the radical departure from past practice regarding terrorism.”

Neoconservatism provided a framework for that radical departure. Preventing the next attack meant not just going after terrorists, but transforming those parts of the world that produce them – “draining the swamp,” as then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it.

In April 2002, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, told PBS’ FRONTLINE how, in this wider concept of the conflict, attacking the stateless al-Qaeda was only the first objective. “The second objective is state support for terrorism. And the third is this larger connection between states that support terrorism and states that develop weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

Overthrowing Saddam happened to mesh nicely with the neocon vision of using American power to spread American ideals of democracy and open society. It was a photo negative of the old “domino” theory of communism: in this era, liberal democracy would spread like a virus from country to country.

Of course, it didn’t turn out that way with Iraq: a chaotic, bloody occupation that lasted years instead of the promised months discredited the neocons.

“The neoconservative doctrine by 2004-2005 looked to be in shambles,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”

The fall of the neocons happened quickly and dramatically. Iraq turned into a bloody quagmire; the Republicans lost big in the 2006 elections; ultimately Bush fired Rumsfeld, and Heilbrunn says the President turned away from Vice President Cheney and the other hawks and neocons who wanted to attack Syria and Iran.

“Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates became the dominant foreign policy thinkers, so you briefly had a resurrection of the older realist tradition in the Republican Party and in the presidency.” He noted that tradition extended into the Obama administration, which kept Gates as defense secretary.

But it’s unlikely Heilbrunn’s next book is going to be titled “The Rise of the Realists.”
While almost all of the old neocon crew are back in the same think tanks where they spent the Clinton years, they remain influential. And they’re finding new support for their worldview in current events.

“In the past year – you’ve suddenly seen the flowering of the ‘Arab Spring,’ and a vindication of pretty much everything the neocons had been saying about how Arabs want democracy too, they want human rights too,” said Max Boot, who, at 41, might be considered a ‘next generation’ neocon.

Boot is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the author of “The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power,” and an advisor to the military.

“I think there was a taint associated with the idea of neoconservatism as a result of what happened in the case of Iraq, which I think was unfair and unwarranted, because in fact if neoconservatism means anything it is a devotion to our ideals, and promoting those ideals in all sorts of ways, most of which are not military,” Boot said.

When asked if the taint of the Iraq war has made it harder to argue for foreign intervention, Boot’s response is swift and unequivocal. “Oddly enough, it has not really made it that much harder to argue for intervention, all you have to do is look at what happened in Libya.”

In the case of Libya, President Obama overruled the realist objections of Defense Secretary Gates: that an intervention was not in America’s interests. The move prompted neocon pundit Bill Kristol to label Obama a “born again neocon.”

And Obama is hardly averse to acting unilaterally, launching more drone strikes in Pakistani territory in his first year than the Bush did in his entire term.

Given the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, who have all talked about the need to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and avoid nation-building — one could get the idea that Obama may be the neocon’s best hope.

Not so fast, says Heilbrunn. “Apart from Ron Paul, I don’t see a republican candidate who has really repudiated neoconservative doctrine.”

Ron Paul is in fact the only candidate who’s talked about a complete withdrawal. The others say they would ultimately defer to the wisdom of the generals on the ground — none of whom has ever asked for fewer troops.

In Monday night’s Tea Party debate, Rick Perry said we should bring our troops home, but we also needed to maintain a presence in the country. The Texas Governor is currently at the top of the pack and he’s been getting foreign policy tutorials from none other than Douglas Feith and Donald Rumsfeld.

US President Barack Obama and other world leaders from UK, France, Germany and the EU have all called for Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad to step down over his deadly crackdown on anti-government protesters.

The calls marks a significant increase in pressure on Syria for sending in his army against the protesters.

In a written statement, Obama said: “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people.”

We’ll have more on Syria and President Assad later in the broadcast.

Tweets about Syria

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  President Obama believes Syria would be better off without President Bashar al-Assad, that from the White House today.  The president’s spokesman also said that the US is watching with horror as the Syrian leader continues a brutal crackdown on protestors.  More than 1,700 people have reportedly been killed in the attacks. Also, today the US Treasury announced new sanctions on Syria aimed at the financial infrastructure that helps hold up Assad’s government.  Andrew Tabler is a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  He’s been anticipating today’s comments from the Obama White House.

Andrew Tabler: But the point here is a rhetorical one.  The Assad regime’s legitimacy does not come from the Obama administration.  It comes from the Syrian people.  So no matter what President Obama says, in the end it’s gonna be up to the Syrian people together with international friends and pressure to get the regime out of power.  And so the administration is going to be very, very careful about what it says and when.

Mullins: So you’re saying the Obama administration has to acknowledge that this is not all in its hands?  I mean what do you mean?

Tabler: Because of what’s happened in Libya, the military option does not appear to be on the table at least right now.  So, if President Obama says well, Assad has to go, the next question is what are you gonna do about it?  And then it gets into another realm with a military option off the table I think we’re looking at sanctions; and specifically sanctions on Syrian energy production.

Mullins: Before we get to the sanctions, can we say for sure that a military option is off the table?

Tabler: It’s not 100% off the table because we don’t know how this is all gonna play out.  The Assad regime continues to hold onto power and its collapse would take much longer than the Mubarak regime in Egypt or the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia.

Mullins: And it would have would it not, a much more unsettling effect than even the military force being used right now in Libya.

Tabler: It could.  There are lots of people who are afraid about chaos breaking out in the country, but to be honest with you you know, the Assad regime’s crackdown on its own people is not only bad, but its regional policies concerning support for Iran, Hezbollah, Jihadi fighters in Iraq, in order to judge the Assad regime as stable or conducive to international peace you’d have to set the bar on the floor.

Mullins: Okay, so when we look also then at what other options the president has, President Obama to backup his words, what about sanctions…which are already imposed?

Tabler: We have trade sanctions on Syria.  We have financial sanctions targeting individuals, and we have banking sanctions.  We don’t have sanctions targeting Syrian energy.  Oil exports account for about a third of government revenue, so hitting that would cripple the regime in Syria, but it would not hit the Syrian society as a whole, and that makes it very different than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  It’s an area of opportunity that the administration is exploring at the moment.

Mullins: Give us an idea of the back and forth in Washington over taking any steps regarding Syria.  I mean Hillary Clinton early on in the violence made some strong comments about Assad.  Why as it taken so long for the president to speak and what’s the discussion like?

Tabler: First of all, there was a perception that the Assad regime was going to hold on and I think that has eroded over time, so there was that.  Second, there has been unfortunately, a lack of creativity in Syria policy historically in the US which has always vacillated between engaging over the peace process or isolating President Assad.  There has never been a sort of in between. With the activities of Robert Ford, the American ambassador there recently traveling to Hama, it’s thrown diplomacy into a sort of new dimension, a more confrontational dimension and one that works well with increased international pressure on the regime.

Mullins: So what is the increased pressure from the United States matter if there’s increasing pressure throughout much of the world, including now, some pressure from Russia, a big ally of Syria?

Tabler: The United States along with its allies have to put concerted multilateral pressure on the Assad regime, that’s what it responds to best.  In April of 2005 when the international community converged on opinion concerning Syria’s presence in Lebanon, they forced Syria to withdraw from Lebanon.  So that works. And the United States plays a key role in marshaling diplomatic support towards this effort.

Mullins: Andrew Tabler is cofounder of Syria Today, Syria’s first private sector English magazine.  He is now with the Washington Institute.  He’s got a new book coming out in September called In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.  Thanks a lot, Andrew.

Tabler: Thanks very much, take care!

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World.  President Obama could’ve been forgiven for begging off an interview with a group of Russian journalists this week after all he’s been kind of busy.  But the Russian reporters found themselves welcomed at the White House.

Russian Male: Great pleasure…  [speaking Russian]

President Obama: It’s a busy time when I know that you uh, kind of a ringside, didn’t want to cancel.

Mullins: He didn’t cancel.  The interview touched on the US debt, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and US-Russian relations.  This probably wasn’t the moment the president would’ve chosen to talk to reporters, but former US ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering says the interview was valuable to Obama and to the audience.

Thomas Pickering: Valuable to him in particular because of US-Russian relations, where there is always a need for tending the garden, if I can put it that way.  And valuable for around the world to have some insight into how the president has reacted to the last couple of weeks or months in which he has been intimately involved in negotiations to resolve the debt ceiling crisis as well as to attack the debt crisis.

Mullins: Interesting that you, ambassador, mention tending the garden, which is what President Obama is doing because there seems to be pessimism in the garden, or at least to the prime minister Vladimir Putin, a parasite.  He as you well know, blast the US for being “a parasite on the world economy” meaning for living on credit.  Do you think that President Obama specifically was addressing his remarks even if it wasn’t directly at Putin’s remarks?

Pickering: I don’t think so.  I think studiously he attempted to avoid it in two ways — by addressing in the interview, President Medvedev, who is his opposite number, but at the same time by including in the interview a favorable mention of President Putin, I mean of Prime Minister Putin and his support for the reset.

Mullins: Former President Putin.

Pickering: Former President Putin, now Prime Minister Putin, maybe President to be again.

Mullins: That’s right, and so I mean, Vladimir Putin himself has been said to be out on the campaign trail looking for his old job back, the job that Medvedev has right now.  Do you think that Obama was on the defensive or was he playing there charm offensive?

Pickering: I think he was as he always is on the offensive.  He’s not a man who plays defense other than I think in a successful offense.  And he couches his speeches and his public presentations very much along those lines.

Mullins: And Obama himself though, when you talk about this much heralded reset in US-Russia relations, which is something that he called for, where does the relationship between Russia and US stand right now?

Pickering: Better than it was when he took over, and perhaps now waiting several more events to take place before we could gauge it as continuing to proceed rather than to be rather stuck at new start, if I can use that phrase.  Things we’re waiting to see that are very important are will there be a possible arrangement on missile defense, and will the final pieces fall into place on Russian membership in the World Trade Organization.  And will there be down the road the potential for another series of nuclear cuts, which looks several years off, even at the earliest, but nevertheless is very important to continue the relationship with Russia and to continue to build that relationship into a sense of international stability.

Mullins: Talk about the economic stability right now of Russia, and whether or not as Vladimir Putin said, there has been a fallout given what’s been transpiring in Washington over the past couple of days.  I mean Russia is very heavily invested in the US.

Pickering: Interestingly enough, Russia-US relationships in the economic area have gone through several cycles.  And I think that the US debt crisis must have set their teeth a little bit on edge — how could the world’s greatest economic power be ignored and not be part of the Russian interests, both economically and politically.  And I think that that has had a sobering influence.

Mullins: All right, thank you for speaking with us, Thomas Pickering, who served as US ambassador to Russia from 1993-1996.  Thank you.

Pickering: Thank you, Lisa.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.