Reprinted from The Realist Review. President Trump has assembled the largest concentration of U.S. Air and Naval power in the Middle East since Iraq was attacked in 2003. Dan Grazier, a retired Marine officer and senior fellow at the Stimson Center notes that there...
After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft-carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran. This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew...
Reprinted from Andy Worthington’s website. In the long, dark farce of Guantánamo’s military commissions, the recently announced and almost entirely ignored decision by the Pentagon to turn down a plea deal for Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a prominent CIA torture victim...
As part of the US campaign to engineer a regime change in Iran, the US military and intelligence community are using Operational Preparation of the Environmnet aka OPE. OPE is defined in joint publications (e.g., JP 3-05 Special Operations) as non-intelligence...
On January 29, Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, signed a law that opens Venezuela’s oil industry to privatization. With the stroke of a pen, Rodríguez signed, not only the law, but the death certificate of a decades old Latin American dream. In 2007,...
Hawkish Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has never been a big fan of arms control agreements. His new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal confirms that his attitude has not softened in the slightest. The opening paragraph adopts a highly militant tone. “The New Strategic Arms...
The Munich Security Conference is underway, and both American and European politicians have taken the opportunity to lament the end of the old “rules-based” order. The problem is that the order to which they refer never truly existed. With a quarter century of the new...
Laura Dogu, newly appointed US envoy to Venezuela, is described by the Los Angeles Times as an appropriate choice because she “navigated crises” in Nicaragua and Honduras during periods of “social and political volatility.” What the LA Times fails to add is that it...
While many nations occasionally resort to a "state of exception" to deal with temporary crises, Israel exists in a permanent state of exception. This Israeli exceptionalism is the very essence of the instability that plagues the Middle East. The concept of the state...
On September 15, 1970, Richard Nixon infamously instructed the CIA to “make the economy [of Chile] scream” (CIA Director Richard Helms actual note of the conversation can be seen here). But “the economy” is an abstraction; the reality of economic warfare is a starving...
