“Putin is the only major leader to utter a few simple truths about the role of the United States in the world today”
Perry Anderson on foreign policy: America’s problem is it’s a global hegemon without global ideology legitimacy Part two of our conversation with Perry Anderson. Find part one here. Fifteen years ago, in the distant universe we now know as pre-September 11,…
Thomas Friedman, read your Chomsky: The New York Times gets Putin/Obama all wrong, again
“Do you realize now what you’ve done?” The best question about our Middle East disasters actually comes from Putin A lot of good people are asking a lot of good questions these days, and this is an excellent thing. On…
How America built its empire: The real history of American foreign policy that the media won’t tell you
Perry Anderson sits down with Salon to discuss the Cold War, Hiroshima, American exceptionalism, Iran and more The other day I wrote Perry Anderson, the subject of the following interview, to ask what he thought of the foreign policy debates,…
We do what we damn well please: The demented American exceptionalism behind the neo-con foreign policy con
The right wants to substitute religious belief and ideology for reality and smarts. The Iran deal won’t derail them A few blocks south of where I sit, the 70th General Assembly just opened in the U.N.’s glass slab on Manhattan’s East…
America owns this nightmare: Everything Thomas Friedman and the media gets wrong about the migrant crisis
The refugee disaster unfolding across Europe is the result of decades — even centuries — of Western policies It is not that the West, or America in particular, is responsible for everything that befalls our awful world. Readers sometimes make…
Outright lies from the New York Times: What you need to know about the dangerous new phase in the Ukraine crisis
While establishment media toe Washington’s line, violence and instability have shaken the Ukraine this week The slightly fetid “phony war” in Ukraine—the unsettling stagnation noted in this space a month ago—is emphatically over. Suddenly there is movement on several fronts,…
The government’s authoritarian war on journalism: How a flaccid press enabled this Orwellian disgrace
Officials launch an all-out assault on free press — with nary an objection from the Fourth Estate’s guardians. Many readers will know, or know of, the Committee to Protect Journalists. It has been around since the early 1980s and does…
Donald Trump’s biggest crime is his honesty: How he exposes the sickening rot at the core of the GOP
Republicans have spent decades dressing up fear as courage, pretending at seriousness while advancing hysteria. Many of us cast last week’s Republican debate in Cleveland as entertainment—I have heard the thought repeated many times—but this seems to me a cheap…
The U.S.-Russia “phony war”: How Washington warmongers could bring us from stalemate to catastrophe
One of two outcomes is likely: Another long Cold War, or a great power conflict. The Ukraine crisis and the attendant confrontation with Russia assume a “phony war” feel these days. As in the perversely calm months between the German…
Our monumental Turkey blunder: Who put the American exceptionalists back in charge?
Take a hard, careful look at what the hawks in the Obama administration—and it is crawling with them—have just done by bringing Turkey into the fight against the Islamic State. Given the blur the campaign against ISIS has become, with…
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