The U.S. ended its almost 20-year war in Afghanistan in defeat last week. The speed with which the client government in Kabul disintegrated confirmed that the US military presence in the country was merely delaying the inevitable collapse of a rickety state that the...
Recognizing and Combating the Pernicious Effects of Propaganda
The U.S. is extraordinarily secure from physical threats, and the threat of international terrorism is small and manageable, but the government has nonetheless waged a "war on terror" for the last 20 years in which it assumed extensive new powers that...
Time Is Running Out on North Korea Diplomacy
The window for resuming productive negotiations with North Korea will be closing soon. The Biden administration has not treated diplomacy with North Korea as a priority in its first six months in office, and it has shown no sign of pursuing a more creative and...
What Nord Stream 2 Means for NATO Expansion
Following the conclusion of a U.S.-German agreement that cleared the way for the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Ukraine has been complaining about betrayal by the West. Ukraine views the pipeline as a threat to its own transit fees from Russia, and their...
Biden’s Foreign Policy Failures
Joe Biden’s foreign policy record as president in his first six months has been as bad as his non-interventionist and antiwar critics feared it would be. Biden has made one significant and correct decision that he appears to be following through on, and that is the...
Learning From the History of American Militarism
How does a country remain at war without end? Understanding the answer to that is a crucial part of bringing the forever war to an end and building a foreign policy that is not defined by domination and interference in other nations’ affairs. Marilyn Young (1937-2017)...
A Deranged Cult and Our Warped Foreign Policy
Every year the notorious cult and "former" terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) holds a political conference to promote its propaganda and call for regime change in Iran, and every year many current and former American, Canadian, and European officials...
Casting Off the Imperial Diadem
John Quincy Adams delivered his address celebrating American independence two hundred years ago this week, and in that speech he famously told his fellow Americans that their country does not go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." This was just one...
The US Military Presence in the Middle East Needs To End
The U.S. has no compelling reason to keep tens of thousands of troops in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Syria, and it should follow the withdrawal from Afghanistan with complete withdrawals of the forces currently located in these countries. There is a growing body of...
The Economic War on Iran Needs To End
The U.S. economic war on Iran hasn’t ended, and one of the costs of that war has been the increasing authoritarianism of the Iranian government. The "maximum pressure" campaign is not solely responsible for empowering Iranian hard-liners and contributing to...