Originally posted at TomDispatch. Strange, isn’t it? Our secretary of state emphatically claims that China has been acting “more aggressively abroad” and behaving “increasingly in adversarial ways.” No, he insists, we’re not exactly...

Here’s the strange thing: almost 20 years into a series of chaotic, staggeringly expensive, failing wars across significant parts of the planet, the U.S. military – "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known" (George W. Bush), aka...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. It seemed obvious enough to me in 2006. When you included the CIA’s “black sites” around the globe (where prisoners from the war on terror were being kept and regularly tortured), American military prisons like the...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. On May 1st, the date Donald Trump signed onto for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan, the war there, already 19 years old, was still officially a teenager. Think of September 11, 2021 – the 20th...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Some things just never seem to end. What came to mind was the way in which, during administration after administration, the Saudis and other foreign powers have poured money into Washington to ensure that their governments and their...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. When it comes to future conflicts or present-day war games, they have all the advantages and we have none! Or as Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, told CNN recently, “Russia and China are playing a...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Think of it as Cold War II or, as President Biden put it in his first news conference, “a battle between the utility of democracies in the twenty-first century and autocracies.” In other words, it’s us versus...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Assassination has not exactly been a foreign concept to American presidents. After all, there were those CIA-backed plots during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (who was himself assassinated) aimed at killing foreign leaders ranging...

Perhaps the strangest thing about America’s "forever wars" is how little obvious impact they’ve had here. A country – an imperial power, in fact, that liked to think of itself as the planet’s last or "lone" superpower – goes to war for so long (and...