It often occurs to me that the fellow who wrote the book some years back about learning everything worthwhile at his mother’s knee had a very good point about foreign policy. We are trained and brainwashed to believe, of course, that foreign policy is too complicated...
This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books. On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he...
Because its members have managed not to mangle each other for a few decades, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize last year. But all is not pacific in peaceful Europe. If you look at Europe's borders, it’s hard to conclude that Europe much cares about the...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. The GMO wars escalated earlier this month when the 2013 World Food Prize was awarded to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive vice president and chief...
While some would argue that the United States and its allies routinely spy each other, it’s one thing to bug the Germany embassy in Washington, but another to tap into the phone of the leader of the country, as well as other officials. As we recently posted, spying by...
As you have no doubt heard by now, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was informed by German intelligence that her phone was subjected to American surveillance. Predictably she reacted badly and called President Obama himself to ream him out. At the New York Times,...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. When Communism collapsed in 1989 in East-Central Europe, many industries collapsed with it. Factories closed, workers were out of jobs, and economies shrank. But one sector of the economy grew: the media. Where there had once been a...
Cross-posted from the Colorado Progressive Jewish News. The news broke less than three weeks ago, on October 3, that Turkey, a longtime, staunch NATO member, just broke an unwritten rule of that global military alliance: it has announced it is considering a major $3.2...
In a Boston Review article titled The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike, Nasser Hussain attempts to … provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on...
The military museum in Bulgaria's sprawling capital city consists of a tiny building and a huge outdoor display of weapons that look as if they had been wheeled in fresh from the battlefields and parked, higgledy piggledy: mountain howitzers that shelled Turks in 1912...