Under President Barack Obama, the United States has been fundamentally transformed. From the land of the free and the home of the brave, seven years into the Obama presidency, America acts like the land of the overregulated and the home of the risk averse.

In the Middle East, the new America is treacherous, and pathetic. It is despised by its allies and scorned by its enemies. America’s spurned allies are making their peace with its global self-destruction. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t praying that America will come to its senses.

Unfortunately, history cannot wait forever. Time is running out. Incremental change simply will not do. The world is changing too quickly and dangerously for a hesitant successor or one that fails to recognize that the entirety of Obama’s foreign policy must be rejected from the outset.

And so, before the first votes are cast in the 2016 presidential election, who among the candidates has the courage and the competence to enact a counterrevolution in American foreign policy?

Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him.

Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly.

 The album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes.

To play the old “what if” game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, and declared that the singer’s hit song was the president’s favorite in 2008, from an album whose grotesque cover had a crowd of NASCAR-looking, white redneck youth bunched up with an African-American official dead at their feet?

And what if the next day, Bush told the nation that he regretted not being able to bring the country together? Would there have been media calls for Bush’s impeachment?

Tearing the country apart is the unfortunate legacy of Obama—and it will continue in Pavlovian fashion until January 2017.

Hedge funds and private equity groups armed with $60 billion of ready cash are ready to snap up the assets of bankrupt US shale drillers, almost guaranteeing that America’s tight oil production will rebound once prices start to recover.

Daniel Yergin, founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says it is impossible for OPEC to knock out the US shale industry though a war of attrition even if it wants to, and even if large numbers of frackers fall by the wayside over coming months.

“The management may change and the companies may change but the resources will still be there,” he told me here at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The great unknown is how quickly the industry can revive once the global glut starts to clear - perhaps in the second half of the year - but it will clearly be much faster than for the conventional oil.

“It takes $10 billion and five to ten years to launch a deep-water project. It takes $10 million and just 20 days to drill for shale,” he notes. Do the math. OPEC cannot compete.

With great fanfare, former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Tuesday this week (1/19) endorsed Donald Trump for President of the United States.

Mr. Trump has spent much of his life endorsing (and living) socially liberal causes. Although he now says he is pro-life, he’s on the record multiple times as “very pro-choice.” He is in favor of government health care that is even more comprehensive than Obamacare. He’s had four bankruptcies that hurt countless people and businesses. In short, he’s no conservative.

Why then would the Queen of the Tea Party movement stand up for him? Because Mr. Trump is the show. The spotlight shines where ever he goes and Sarah Palin loves, indeed craves, the spotlight.

Former Gov. Palin has made a fortune in the seven years since she and Sen. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, and more power to her for it. But in the year 2016 the shine has worn off, the novelty is gone, while she is still hungry for the attention, the fame and the money.

She is so hungry in fact, that she prioritized Donald Trump, her springboard back into relevance, ahead of her own suicidal son.

Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on “the Caliphate Curve.” The Caliphate Curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate.

ISIS is at the extreme end of the scale, not because it tortures, kills and rapes, but because it implemented the Caliphate immediately. The atrocities for which ISIS has become known are typical of a functioning Caliphate. The execution of Moslems who do not submit to the Caliph, the ethnic cleansing and sexual slavery of non-Moslems are not aberrations. They are normal behavior for a Caliphate.

This behavior is not a temporary aberration, but dates back to Mohammed’s men raping and enslaving non-Moslem women and young girls as a reward for fighting to spread Islam.

The Moslem Brotherhood is on the moderate side of the Caliphate Curve not because it doesn’t want to bring back the Caliphate, it does, or because it doesn’t want to subjugate non-Moslems, it does, but because it wants to do so gradually over an extended period of time using modern political methods.

But whether you take the long road along the Caliphate Curve or the short one it still ends up in the same place. Everyone on the Caliphate Curve agrees that the world, including the United States, must be ruled by Moslems under Islamic law and that freedom and equal rights for all must come to an end.

This is why ISIS is in some ways our least dangerous enemy.

The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist is warning.

On the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, here’s what William White, the Swiss-based chairman of the OECD's review committee and former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), told me:

"The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up. Debts have continued to build up over the last eight years (which) will never be serviced or repaid, and this will be uncomfortable for a lot of people who think they own assets that are worth something.”

Mr. White says the Fed is now in a horrible quandary as it tries to extract itself from QE and right the ship again. "It is a debt trap. Things are so bad that there is no right answer. If they raise rates it'll be nasty. If they don't raise rates, it just makes matters worse," he says.