Ever since the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the world has been living on borrowed time. The indications, then and since, that the development of nuclear weapons did not bode well for human survival, were clear enough. The two small atomic bombs...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. In July 2025, the Massachusetts legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill to make it the 38th state to follow the federal government, 45 other countries (almost all of them in the global North), and more than 50...
“An easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia — from a position of strength — is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end.” Candidate Donald Trump said that on April 27, 2016. At first glance that might sound rather irrelevant to...
Last week the nuclear rhetoric between the US and Russia made some of us feel like we were transported back to 1962. Back then, Soviet moves to place nuclear-capable missiles 90 miles off our coast in Cuba led to the greatest crisis of the Cold War. The United States...
Just days ago, the Israeli parliament Knesset passed a motion for the agenda to "apply sovereignty" to the West Bank. Though largely declarative, the motion is paving the way to a wider debate on West Bank annexation in the Knesset plenum or in committees. The motion...
When Donald Trump entered the White House for his second term as president, he had an excellent opportunity to extricate the United States from the quagmire war between Russia and Ukraine. His instincts--that continued involvement in that conflict was not in...
Paul Chamberlin’s masterful new book, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II, is a vitally important work that fundamentally reframes our understanding of the twentieth century’s most devastating conflict. It meticulously dismantles the comfortable and...
For the second successive year, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) has included an ill-considered and unworkable proposal by the Selective Service System (SSS) to try to automatically construct a database of potential draftees from other government records...
When, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the unwarranted influence wielded by a partnership between the military and a growing cohort of U.S. weapons contractors and came up with the ominous term “military-industrial...
The war with Russia is now going very badly for Ukraine. But Ukrainians must feel like the world, and not just Russia, is treating them badly. At the beginning of July, the Russian armed forces took full control of the Luhansk region for the first time. And, though it...
