After half a century studying the issue, here’s lesson number one: Wars are bad and empire is folly.
Lessons from 50 Years Covering Foreign Policy
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empire
Did 9/11 Change Everything?
The 9/11 attacks were a surprise. The response wasn’t.
Post-Afghanistan, Nation (Un)Building Comes Home
Just imagine where America might really be today if Congress had spent close to $8 trillion rebuilding this country?
Is This Country Heading for the Exit?
Three decades after the Soviet empire headed for the exit, is it possible that the far more powerful American one is ever so chaotically heading in the same direction?
The Claudius Presidency
After four years of an American Caligula, will Joe Biden bring the United States back into the international community?
The View from 2050
“Back in my youth, we imagined that lumbering dinosaurs like Russia and China and the European Union would endure regardless of the global convulsions taking place around them.”
A New World Order?
Where exactly is power located on this planet of ours right now?
Empire, Capitalism, and Human Trafficking in Northeast Asia
The trafficking of North Korean women throughout Northeast Asia is a process whereby women are commoditized. They are sold to Chinese men as brides, or forced into prostitution to pay off debts accumulated while escaping North Korea. In many ways, North Korean women are inheritors of the suffering of Japan’s “comfort women.”
Visions: America after Hegemony
To get out of the echo chamber, we need to present a vision of a democratic foreign and security policy that would tie our many campaigns together into a coherent whole, from the local to the global. Such a platform would provide hope to the many who sense that something is wrong with corporate capitalism, with U.S. foreign policy, and with the military-industrial complex. It would set the basis for a principled alliance between the peace movement and the labor, immigrant rights, women’s, economic, social, and racial justice movements that are its natural allies.
The Cost of Occupying Planet Earth
How much does the United States spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1 billion a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170 billion–or maybe even more.