Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and the governor of Okinawa Takeshi Onaga agreed in early March to take a dispute over the future of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma out of the courts and back offline to the negotiating table. Abe “accepted” a freeze on...
The apparently sudden Russian military withdrawal from Syria, starting on 15 March, left political commentators puzzled, but few of the analyses offered should be taken seriously. There is little solid information about why the Russian leader decided to end his...
A crucial problem in news media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been how to characterize the relationship between the so-called “moderate” opposition forces armed by the CIA, on one hand, and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front (and its close ally...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In recent times, one of the strangest aspects of war, American-style, has been the inability of the most powerful military on the planet to extricate itself from any of the conflicts it's initiated or somehow gotten itself involved in...
President Obama’s historic opening to Cuba has come under fire from Republican and even some Democratic hawks because Cuban President Raul Castro did not greet him at the airport and because the Cuban government arrested members of a dissident group while Obama’s...
“Es un nuevo dia” and “Nowruz Mubarak.” The literal meaning of both phrases welcome the “new day” (nuevo dia, nowruz) in Spanish and Persian respectively (the latter is a holiday greeting for the Persian New Year). And President Barack Obama recently delivered these...
The biggest story in Jeffrey Goldberg’s 20,000-word report on “The Obama Doctrine” is President Barack Obama’s open break with the foreign policy establishment. The critique of orthodox national security policy thinking that Obama outlined in interviews with Goldberg...
