Steve LeVine

Two years ago, France led NATO into the war that toppled Libya’s Moamar Gadhafi, who invited militants from Mali to defend his rule but ultimately fled and was slain. Now, France has been flying four days of air strikes against those same, battle-hardened militants in Mali, where, it is feared, they are establishing a large new sanctuary for al Qaeda that could threaten both northwest Africa and Europe.

In a small, tight room in a US Coast Guard building in Washington’s southwest quarter, a dozen former federal officials, academics and journalists were squeezed in on Jan. 9 with Gen. James Mattis, commander of the US Central Command. Most prominent among the officials was former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, just off his failed quest for the US Republican presidential nomination. We were served coffee, sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies, and told that under Chatham House rules, we could talk later about what was said, but not who said it.

Earlier this week, we presented the 14 rules of global events, a Quartz algorithm for making sense of international news and creating your own scenario of what comes next. Now, we apply the rules to some of the biggest issues of 2013 and take a stab at predicting what lies ahead. (If you’re really keen, read this with the rules open in a separate window.)

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Google’s Eric Schmidt and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson are in Pyongyang this morning at the start of a three-day visit to North Korea. The pair, whose visit to North Korea was opposed to by the US State Department, is not currently expected to meet with leader Kim Jong Un, but don’t be surprised if they do.

Nations are eccentric. But they also have threads of repeated history through which we can discern what comes next. For five centuries, since Ivan the Terrible, for instance, Russia has been characterized by one-man rule, an exaggerated sense of identity, and an acceptance of often deadly cruelty toward individual citizens.  Therefore, it is not surprising that those traits are the bricks and mortar of Vladimir Putin’s rule today.

As Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez struggles to recover from surgery, Cuba may have the most say over who succeeds him.

This item has been updated.

Hugo Chávez’s condition after his latest cancer surgery in Cuba is throwing political uncertainty into a nation that, under the charismatic and populist leader, has used oil reserves to punch above its geopolitical weight in big foreign policy issues. It is not even clear who will be president of Venezuela next week.

Avis Budget Group, the car-rental company, has paid a 49% premium for Zipcar, a largely US urban rival that rents its cars by the hour. But it doesn’t signal Avis’s surrender to the idea that all-day rentals are a thing of the past. Rather, despite what looks like a high premium, Avis is taking advantage of a tough climate for Zipcar to buy the firm for a bargain and broaden its own offerings.

This item has been updated.

Former President George H.W. Bush, a.k.a. “Bush One”, has a far more important legacy than most people give him credit for, says a leading US presidential scholar.

Last year, a UK-based petroleum company called Tethys lost a hard-fought bid for oil fields in northern Afghanistan to China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). Tethys groused that CNPC had made an uncommercial offer. Over the subsequent months, one of Tethys’s strategic advisers, former senior US diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, launched a bitter fusillade over the deal. It was the fault of Washington, which was engaged in commercial abdication to China around the world, wrote Khalilzad and Alexander Benard, his son and managing director of their consultancy, Gryphon Partners, in numerous essays.

The upper house of Russia’s parliament this morning unanimously approved a bill that would ban Americans from adopting Russian children, threatening to nullify the pending adoptions of scores of Russian children. Russian politicians say they are reacting to the deaths and abuse of Russian adoptees in the US, but they also appear to be retaliating for a new US law penalizing Russian officials linked to the prison death of a Moscow anti-corruption lawyer.

Syrians, who are fighting a civil war in which 40,000 of them have died just this year, are still more optimistic about their own future than US Republicans, recent polls reveal. Republicans also are much less optimistic than Greeks, whose economy may still bring down the whole of Europe, and Afghans, who are hopeful despite three decades of on-and-off civil war.

Oil attracts a super-smart crowd—peak-oilers and oil bulls alike have both their vapid ideologues and ragingly insightful observers. So it is with those mulling the multitude of studies over the last year (such as this much-cited one) forecasting a renewed age of fossil fuel abundance. A global surge of oil and gas discoveries leads our list of the top geopolitical events of 2012. But not everyone is convinced. Among those pushing back is Steven Kopits, an analyst with Douglas Westwood. “I still don’t know where you get this ‘awash in oil’ stuff,” Kopits writes. In a followup, he says, “Our models see the world economy as oil-constrained.”

US political negotiations to avert triggering the fiscal cliff—a combination of government spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect Jan. 1—are in limbo as the Republicans Thursday night withdrew “Plan B” legislation amid division within their party.

Russian officials are threatening to ban Americans from adopting their orphans, a tit-for-tat political campaign after President Barack Obama signed a law blacklisting US travel for Russian officials linked to the prison torture and death of a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky.

For Saudi Arabia, 2012 marked a year of growing apprehension as a frightening trend emerged: that by the end of the decade, according to mid-range forecasts, two new hyper-producers—Iraq and the US—will be pumping some 14 million barrels of oil a day, a 58% jump from today’s production levels. And that’s not even counting Iran, which is also likely to have resumed full-tilt production, churning out 4 million barrels per day (bpd), an increase of 1.3 million bpd from current production. All in all, OPEC will have much less influence over a world awash in oil.

A stroke suffered by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani this morning could reignite tensions between Baghdad and an increasingly self-confident Kurdistan—a conflict that the president has been instrumental in mediating. The 79-year-old Talabani, who is himself a Kurd, is being treated in Baghdad, though doctors are in the process of determining whether to fly the ailing president to a hospital abroad, said a spokesman.

Are Maltans more armed than Pakistanis? Luxembourgers more than Mexicans? Are Danes armed to the teeth, and by comparison Afghans not?

Not a whiff of US shale gas has left the nation’s shores in the 3- or 4-year-old boom. Relatively little may ever be exported. Yet the disturbance that shale gas and oil have created can make them seem just as ubiquitous as the iPhone. In Europe, US shale has made the air dirtier, manufacturing less competitive, and Russia vulnerable. They have weakened OPEC’s influence on global oil and gas pricing (paywall), and undermined distant nations including Australia and Qatar.

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Last year, ExxonMobil, in its annual long-term forecast, delivered an unsentimental message to the nascent electric-car industry: For at least the next three decades, not only electric cars, but plug-in hybrids such as the GM Volt, were destined to be a decidedly niche play. Together with far-out vehicles burning liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and compressed natural gas (CNG), these cars would make up just 5% of the global fleet by 2040 (pdf, p. 20), although ordinary hybrids—gasoline-propelled vehicles like the Prius with a modest added battery drive—would be about 40% of it.