The problem with us progressives as this time of crisis is not that we lack an alternative paradigm to pit against the discredited neoliberal paradigm. No, the elements of the alternative based on the values of democracy, justice, equality, and environmental sustainability are there and have been there for sometime, the product of collective intellectual and activist work over the last few decades.
The new START looks less like a disarmament treaty than a front behind which the government can funnel funds to the nuclear-weapons industry in perpetuity.
The Internet expedites expression for activists, but ultimately it mutes their impact.
With a key Arab League meeting delayed until Friday, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is scrambling to keep one-month-old direct Israeli- Palestinian peace talks alive.
On Monday, The Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.
The Rally to Restore Sanity repeats liberals’ greatest error: when Republicans go on attack, hunker down somewhere in the middle and plead for civility.
Why did the Japan Coast Guard, on September 7th, arrest a Chinese fishing boat captain and detain his ship, setting off the most serious China-Japan conflict in decades? Investigative journalist Tanaka Sakai offers no definitive answer in the following historically-and geopolitically-informed analysis of the roots of the conflict. He does show, definitively, that the Japanese action marked a striking departure from policies that have been in effect since at least 1978 when China and Japan resumed diplomatic relations and Deng Xiaoping crafted an agreement to defer action on competing claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands.
Surprise, surprise: immigrants neither take Americans’ jobs, nor drive down their wages.
Afghanistan is a crossroads of civilizations and an almost bewilderingly complicated place.
Over the past few centuries, however, it has more often than not been treated as a pawn in the “great game”. The country has also developed a reputation as the “graveyard of empires”, not least because outsiders’ forces have never succeeded in pacifying the place. Internal stability, such as it has ever existed, has been predicated typically upon de-centralized, and frequently shifting political arrangements between a weak centre and roiling periphery.
Despite an unusual dip in global weapons sales in 2009, the United States retained its spot as the world’s top arms supplier of developing countries, according to an authoritative new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).