Pakistan just held an election; Venezuela is about to. Both incumbent governments have banned the leading opposition figure from competing. The United States sanctioned one and was silent on the other. What was the difference? Not international law or responsible...
Reprinted from CommonDreams. There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time,...
Reprinted from Consortium News. As U.S. House members grapple with whether to give $60 billion more to Ukraine, they must also grapple with the checkered nature of the intelligence they’ve been fed. On July 13, 2023, President Joe Biden announced Russian President...
On February 8, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Washington on an official visit, aimed at working jointly with the United States to make “sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself”. If such a statement was made soon after the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. So that classic late 1960s song claimed. Still, for Bill Astore and me (and, I have little doubt, Joe Biden, too), such a thought didn’t cross our minds as we played with toy soldiers on...
The Biden administration has seemingly adopted a foreign policy doctrine in which they nurture a war while attempting to manage it, preventing it from becoming a wider war. The doctrine has been applied in both Ukraine and Gaza. In Ukraine, war has been nurtured by...
Reprinted with permission from Responsible Statecraft. The Israeli government is preparing to launch a ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza as their devastating military campaign enters its fifth month. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was adamant...
An Internet search shows journalist Sidney Blumenthal and historian James Chace as the first to coin the term “indispensable nation," which is appropriate for describing the United States. This happened in 1996 during Bill Clinton’s presidency and Madeleine Albright's...
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution marks its 25th anniversary this month, despite continuous US-led hybrid warfare to overthrow the socialist project. The Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro has successfully forced the US to de facto engage with it,...
During Mr. Obama’s second term in office (2013-2017), it had become clear that the terms of the public policy debate were undergoing a radical and worrying transformation. In the space of a very short time, certain ideas and policy proposals were being ruled as out of...
