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...
“Iranian regime may be too fragmented to come to a consensus” “Anytime you see a statement coming out of the government, just remember there’s a rat’s nest of people fighting underneath the surface,” Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Princeton who has studied Iran...
Saudi Arabia recently rejected a coveted seat on the U.N. Security Council it had campaigned for over two years to get. The sense of surprise in the policy analysis world has been palpable, with analysts scratching their heads trying to understand why the oil-rich...
Hardliners in Tehran are not happy with the recent rapprochement between the United States and Iran and the related progress in negotiations to address Western concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. But the bigger threat may come from hardliners in the...
To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, undisclosed location Re: Memo XP1476 Greetings from the tropics! I apologize for not writing to you earlier. As you probably know, if you have my file in front of you, I wrote to your predecessors with various modest...
As the U.S. and its allies prepare for another round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, powerful and wealthy opponents—from the halls of Congress to Middle East capitols—are maneuvering to torpedo them. At stake is the real possibility of a war with...
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...
The Middle East is normally a depressing topic of conversation with talk of ongoing wars, repressive governments, ethnic violence, and terrorist attacks. Yet two of the region’s most troublesome challenges (Syria and Iran) are on diplomatic tracks toward peaceful...
Last weekend, Kenya’s preeminent newspaper The Nation, reported that CCTV footage showed Kenyan soldiers looting during the terrorist attack in Westgate Mall. The “Shame of Soldiers Looting Westgate,” as The Nation dubbed the footage, may be allegorical for increased...