As part of the western response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, several regimes acted on February 26 to exclude certain Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network. As of March 1, Reuters reports,...
At this point in my life, I’ve been consistently opposed to war for about twice as long as I spent as a Marine infantryman (with precisely the attitude toward war you would expect). The change was incremental and took a few years, but I consider my decision to...
After weeks of unsuccessfully attempting to either bully Russia’s Vladimir Putin into submission or bait him into war, US president Joe Biden may finally be looking for a face-saving exit from of the Ukraine “crisis” of his own making. Reuters...
“I think one lesson in recent history,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on January 7, referring to the entry of Russian troops into Kazakhstan to save that country’s allied regime from an uprising of dissatisfied serfs, “is that once...
When Joe Biden took office as the 46th President of the United States, those of us who desired a more peaceful foreign policy had reasons for both hope and doubt. The biggest issue for both was the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, for which Biden’s predecessor,...
On November 15, US president Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a “virtual summit” covering a number of subjects and resulting, for the most part, in banal public pledges of “cooperation” to “ease tensions.” Biden,...
In 1954, Congress passed, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed, a bill transforming Armistice Day – November 11, a post-World-War One celebration of peace – into Veterans Day, a celebration of warriors. Personally, I stick to the original name and the...
On October 19, 96-year-old Irmgard Furchner appeared in a German court to answer charges of aiding and abetting 11,412 murders. The murders took place between 1943 and 1945 at the Stutthof concentration camp, where a much younger Furchner worked as secretary to the...
“Debate on ‘no first use’ of nukes mushrooms in Washington,” Joe Gould reports at Defense News. “Five years after President Barack Obama turned back from declaring a ‘no first use’ as US policy for nuclear weapons,”...
Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the US government is finally – well, probably, kinda sorta – ending its lost war with Afghanistan, drawing down its presence in Iraq, and reducing the heat of its “global war on terror” from a rolling boil...
