Last week we noted that the ascension to NATO of the Balkan Five (Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania) and the Baltic Three (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) amounts to some kind of bad joke. Their combined active military forces total just…

Until recently, the West has pledged in the name of a two-state model in the partitioned Israel/Palestine. But it has been replaced by a unitary state that is decreasingly secular and democratic. In retrospect, the two-state solution died in Jerusalem on…

A significant amount of US military power has been on the move over this past week, including several B-2 strategic bombers which have landed at the US military base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean just over 2,000 miles southeast of Iran. According to…

In a genocidal war that has spiraled into a struggle for political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and the global powers supporting him continue to sacrifice Palestinian lives for political gain. The sordid career of Israel's…

Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. Adam Entous’ “blockbuster” New York Times report confirmed what only a few of us reported only weeks into the war, that Washington has been a co-belligerent in the war in Ukraine in all but name. In a widely…

Reprinted from Yves Engler’s website. If you believe Donald Trump might invade you should be calling for Canada to withdraw from NATO. The alliance won’t defend Canada, has enabled US interference and gobbles up resources. During a recent meeting with NATO…

Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. At last week’s Paris meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron congratulated themselves on reinserting Europe into the peace process opened up by President Trump. In practice…

A March 29 article on America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine in The New York Times by Adam Entous “reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” “Understood” is a euphemism. It means the American…

OK, the title is a bit crude and is deliberately mocking in tone. But it has to be because there is a deeply-entrenched, almost sacred presumption embedded in the nation’s foreign policy catechism that “allies”, “alliances” and “coalitions of the willing”…

The BBC’s news verification service, Verify, digitally reconstructed a residential tower block in Mandalay earlier this week to show how it had collapsed in a huge earthquake on March 28 in Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia largely cut off from the outside…

Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. They say that “History is written by the victors.” Fortunately, we know that that is not always true. History is written by those who can assert the most appealing narrative. Those who offer the most charismatic…

President Trump was elected in part because he promised to reduce prices and not drag the country into foreign wars. Sadly, President Trump has adopted a tariff policy that will raise prices and abandoned his “America First” foreign policy in favor of a return…

There is still reason for optimism that the Trump administration can bring the war in Ukraine to a diplomatic end. But insubstantial promises of a fast, smooth sailing solution have splintered against the solidity of reality. Campaign promises of a day became…

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading articles at TomDispatch, the website I set up soon after the 9/11 attacks to deal with this…

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened…

The phrase "civil war" is one of the most dominant terms used by Israeli politicians today. What began as a mere warning from Israeli President Isaac Herzog is now an accepted possibility for much of Israel's mainstream political society. “(Israeli Prime…

Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review. Asked about the state of the war in Ukraine during a press gaggle last night on Air Force One, President Trump responded that the war is “a horrible thing that never should have started.” That war is horrible…

Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.” A minimum 10 per…

In March, U.S. President Donald Trump sent a letter directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, informing him that Iran has two months to negotiate a nuclear deal with the U.S. and that, if he refuses to do so, the risk of military action against…

The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Gaza in late January 2025 was paraded by Western media as a diplomatic breakthrough that might finally curb the bloodshed – a potential turning point for peace in the region. But within weeks, the grim reality became…