Originally posted at TomDispatch. Back in 2011, thinking about the implosion of the Soviet Union two decades earlier and what followed, I wrote: “In 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States found itself the last superpower standing,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a reasonable question to ask in our unreasonable world: Does Donald Trump even know where North Korea is? The answer matters and if you wonder why I ask, just remember his comment upon landing in Israel after his visit to Saudi...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. “The wandering scribe of war crimes” is how TomDispatch regular Ann Jones once described me. Indeed, for more than a decade, across three continents, I’ve been intermittently interviewing witnesses and victims,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. War, American-style, in the twenty-first century hasn’t exactly been a sterling success story. (How did the Brits ever manage to run that empire of theirs for so many years with such modest numbers of troops?) Take Afghanistan,...
The closest I ever got to Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was 1,720.7 miles away – or so the Internet assures me. Although I’ve had a lifelong interest in history, I know next to nothing about Mosul’s, nor do I have more than a glancing sense of what it looks...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s a footnote to America’s present wars that’s worth pondering for a few moments. The U.S. Air Force is running out of ordinary bombs, smart bombs, and in some cases missiles. No kidding. The air war over Syria...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Wilbur Ross put the matter... well, mouth-wateringly. At a Milken Institute Global Conference in California, the commerce secretary recalled how President Trump was hosting a dinner for China’s president, Xi Jinping, at his...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Since the late eighteenth century, the United States has been involved in an almost ceaseless string of wars, interventions, punitive expeditions, and other types of military ventures abroad – from fighting the British and Mexicans to...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Our lives are, of course, our histories, which makes us all, however inadvertently, historians. Part of my own history, my other life – not the TomDispatch one that’s consumed me for the last 14 years – has been editing books. I...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If you’re a reader of TomDispatch, then you know something of real importance about this country that most Americans don’t. As an imperial power, there’s never been anything like the United States when it comes to...
