US Foreign Policy

By Tom Engelhardt | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an “axis of […]

Featured

Sleight-of-Hand in Baghdad: The Biden Pull-Out from Iraq that Isn’t

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Mursi Abu Tawq at Al-Zaman (The Times“) in Baghdad reports that President Joe Biden on Monday announced that the US combat mission in Iraq would end by December 31 of this year, beginning a new stage of military cooperation between the US and Iraq. The remarks came after a White […]

Central America

Migration Is Not the Crisis: What Washington Could Really Do in Central America

Aviva Chomsky

By Aviva Chomsky | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands […]

Afghanistan

Who Authorized America’s Wars? And Why They Never End

Tomdispatch

By Andrea Mazzarino | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Sometimes, as I consider America’s never-ending wars of this century, I can’t help thinking of those lyrics from the Edwin Starr song, “(War, huh) Yeah! (What is it good for?) Absolutely nothing!” I mean, remind me, what good have those disastrous, failed, still largely ongoing conflicts done […]

Iran

America’s Afghan War Is Over, So What About Iraq – and Iran?

Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold

( Code Pink) – At Bagram air-base, Afghan scrap merchants are already picking through the graveyard of U.S. military equipment that was until recently the headquarters of America’s 20-year occupation of their country. Afghan officials say the last U.S. forces slipped away from Bagram in the dead of night, without notice or coordination. The Taliban […]

China

On the Brink in 2026: U.S.-China Near-War Status Report

Michael T. Klare

( Tomdispatch.com ) – It’s the summer of 2026, five years after the Biden administration identified the People’s Republic of China as the principal threat to U.S. security and Congress passed a raft of laws mandating a society-wide mobilization to ensure permanent U.S. domination of the Asia-Pacific region. Although major armed conflict between the United […]

Afghanistan

Afghanistan: two decades of Nato help leaves a failed and fractured state on the brink of civil war

The Conversation

By Natasha Lindstaedt | – ( The Conversation )- Afghanistan is falling apart. With US and Nato troops leaving the country earlier than planned, experts are warning that the Taliban could take control of the country within six months. Currently the insurgents control the strategically important province of Helmand, and control or contest territory nearly […]

Iraq

Waiting for US withdrawal, is Russia eyeing Iraq’s oil?

Nikola Mikovic

Belgrade (Special to Informed Comment) – When the George W. Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003, many believed the campaign’s main goal was to gain control of the country’s oil. Almost two decades later, most U.S. oil corporations have exited Iraq and the last major, ExxonMobil, appears to be on the way […]

China

Biden is a Transformative President Domestically, but from China to Iran he embraces the Same old Washington Militarism

John Feffer

America is back–to the same old, same old. ( Foreign Policy in Focus ) -On the domestic front, Joe Biden is flirting with transformational policies around energy, environment, and infrastructure. It’s not a revolution, but it’s considerably less timid than what Barack Obama offered in that pre-Trump, pre-pandemic era. When it comes to foreign policy, […]