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Containing the National Security State represents more than 100 editorials that assess the militarization of U.S. governance and U.S. foreign policy.
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Ukraine and the Dangerous Munich Analogy
The crisis over Ukraine, which may be facing an imminent Russian invasion, is an excellent example of the need for greater and more careful analysis of the history, issues, individuals,…
Israel, an Apartheid Nation? Of Course!
First of all, let’s deal with the issue of Israel as an apartheid nation, which Israeli information policy strongly denies. When serious human rights violations are committed by one racial group to maintain a system of prolonged oppression of another racial group, as in South Africa from the 1940s to the 1990s, international law refers to this as a crime against humanity or a policy of apartheid. South Africa’s apartheid sparked intense international and domestic opposition to that country. This hasn’t been the case with regard to Israel. Nevertheless, the fifty-years of apartheid in South Africa is echoed by the fifty-year period in Israel, starting with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967.
The United States of Hypocrisy: Revisiting the Monroe Doctrine
There is no doctrinal statement in American diplomatic history that is more fundamental than the Monroe Doctrine. It was designed to draw a strategic line between the New World and the Old, and to alert the European powers that their political influence and presence was no longer welcome in the Western Hemisphere. No doctrinal statement has been enforced as often as the Monroe Doctrine, which has been used to justify U.S. intervention throughout Central America and the Caribbean. The Monroe Doctrine was cited in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a perfect failure, as well as the Cuban missile crisis, a diplomatic triumph.
Goodness Gracious, David Ignatius: Why Do You Want More War?
Photograph Source: Ittmust – CC BY 2.0 No one in the mainstream media takes better dictation than David Ignatius, the leading columnist at the Washington Post on international security. Ignatius gets briefings…
Bill Clinton’s Role in the Crisis Over Ukraine
Originally posed on CounterPunch The militarization of American foreign policy has evolved over the past thirty years. Ironically, this took place in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet…
KILL FILibuster
A Poem By Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl
In two thousand and six, many Repubs had a soul
A unanimous vote to extend was the goal.
And they did it. The Senators, both left and right,
Extended the Act giving voters their rights.
Antony Blinken and a Gun at Your Head
by Ted Snider When Joe Biden selected Antony Blinken to be his Secretary of State, Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, worried that the selection represented,…
Kazakhstan: Militarist’s Newest Case For Confronting Putin’s Russia
The mainstream media, particularly the Washington Post and the New York Times, promote a simplistic view of Russian history as a pursuit of an aggressive and expansionist national security policy to counter the West, particularly the United States.
Biden and the Tragedy of US Foreign Policy
Not since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower has the United States elected a chief executive with formidable experience in international security policy. President Biden has decades of foreign policy experience in the White House and the Senate, which is extremely unusual in American presidential politics. Therefore, he should be held to a high standard; thus far, his performance has been flawed.
J. Edgar Hoover’s Legacy: Spying On Democracy
The FBI has been conducting domestic surveillance operations since its inception in the 1920s, marking nearly a hundred years of violating the First Amendment of the Constitution. Very few of these operations involved the investigation and gathering of evidence of a serious crime, the only justification for FBI surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover, appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in1924, amassed illegal powers of surveillance that enabled him to conduct extra-legal tracking of activists, collect compromising information, and even to threaten and intimidate sitting presidents.
