US Foreign Policy

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Biden administration is devoting what energy the State Department has aside from the effort to defend Ukraine to achieving diplomatic normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The premise for this entry of the Saudis into the Abraham Accords is that it would seek an alliance with Israel against Iran. […]

Afghanistan

Women’s secret war: the inside story of how the US military sent female soldiers on covert combat missions to Afghanistan

The Conversation

By Jennifer Greenburg, University of Sheffield | – A US Army handbook from 2011 opens one of its chapters with a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Young British Soldier. Written in 1890 upon Kipling’s return to England from India, an experienced imperial soldier gives advice to the incoming cohort: When you’re wounded and left […]

China

Goodbye to the American Century: China India and the Emerging New World Order

Michael T. Klare

( Tomdispatch.com) – Not so long ago, political analysts were speaking of the “G-2” — that is, of a potential working alliance between the United States and China aimed at managing global problems for their mutual benefit. Such a collaborative twosome was seen as potentially even more powerful than the G-7 group of leading Western […]

Featured

Is Israel Over-Hyping the Supposed Iran Threat?

Marc Martorell Junyent

Review of Jonathan G. Leslie, Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “Words have consequences,” writes Jonathan G. Leslie on the last page of his book “Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative.” He argues that the predominant Israeli […]

China

China and the Axis of the Sanctioned: How America’s Divide-and-Rule Strategy in the Middle East Backfired

Juan Cole

( Tomdispatch.com) – A photo Beijing released on March 6th of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s foreign minister Wang Yi* delivered a seismic shock in Washington. There he was, standing between Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, and Saudi National Security Adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban. They were awkwardly shaking hands on an […]

European Union

The European Union is Struggling to Respond to Biden’s Subsidies for Green Energy

China Dialogue

By Anna Gumbau ( China Dialogue ) – After the economic crisis caused by Covid-19 and the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European unity is being tested once again, this time by the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). When President Joe Biden signed the IRA into law in August 2022, European leaders […]

National Security State

The Privatization of War, American-Style

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers […]

National Security State

Are the Best Years of My Country Behind Me? Reflections on a Long-Ago Tour of Los Alamos and the Trinity Atomic Test Site

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me. But […]

Algeria

A Final Burial for the Arab Spring: Arab League Readmits Syria under al-Assad, as Tensions with Iran Subside

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The foreign ministers of the Arab League states, meeting in Cairo on Sunday, approved the end of Syria’s suspension from membership in that body. Syria was suspended in November 2011 as the Syrian Arab Army was deployed to massacre civilian protesters. The decision was a recognition that the Baath government […]