‘With Friends Like These…’

After World War II, the United States – newly equipped with the ultimate deterrent against attack, nuclear weapons – discarded the model of the nations’ founders, who cautioned against permanent or entangling alliances. The United States created many questionable...

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The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism

Originally posted at TomDispatch. War, what is it good for? In America, the answer is that, much of the time, you’ll probably never know what it's good for – or, in some cases, even notice that we’re at war. Right now, the U.S. is ever more deeply involved...

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‘McCarthyism,’ Then and Now

I’m often taken to task by some of my readers for characterizing the current anti-Russian hysteria as “McCarthyism.” After all, they say, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was right – there were, indeed, high-ranking individuals in the US government covertly sympathetic to the...

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Dump Duterte – for Starters

Alliances are transmission belts of war. So our Founding Fathers taught and the 20th century proved. When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany in 1914, America sat out, until our own ships were being sunk in 1917. When Britain, allied to France, declared...

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Why Progressives Love the New Cold War

The Clinton campaign’s full-scale effort to turn this election into a referendum on Vladimir Putin is causing liberals like Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and Glenn Greenwald, the energizing force behind The Intercept, much heartburn. Here is Ms. van den...

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