Foreign Policy & War

Drone Trust the Government

by Sheldon Richman February 12, 2013

“Covert” drone warfare requires a level of confidence in politicians that they will never deserve. In the Kentucky Resolutions, the 1798 protest against the Alien and Sedition Acts, Thomas Jefferson wrote, It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of ...

Hagel’s Retreat

by Sheldon Richman February 6, 2013

Some observers are mystified by Chuck Hagel’s pathetic showing at his Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, but there should be no mystery about it. He performed as he did for one simple reason: He wants to be the next secretary of defense, and he (along with the White House) must have calculated that standing up for his past positions ...

The New Scramble for Africa

by Tim Kelly February 6, 2013

The deployment of French troops to Mali has put that large and impoverished African nation in the media’s spotlight. We are being told France’s intervention, which the US military is supporting, is necessary to prevent the country from being overrun by Muslim fanatics and terrorists. However, the intervention by a former colonial power into the affairs of yet another African ...

The Ominous U.S. Presence in Northwest Africa

by Sheldon Richman January 31, 2013

Ominously but unsurprisingly, the U.S. military’s Africa Command wants to increase its footprint in northwest Africa. What began as low-profile assistance to France’s campaign to wrest control of northern Mali (a former colony) from unwelcome jihadists could end up becoming something more. The Washington Post reports that Africom “is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest ...

Mali: Here We Go Again

by Sheldon Richman January 28, 2013

In testimony before Senate and House committees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically endorsed increased U.S. intervention in Africa. When government officials seem incapable of learning obvious lessons from the recent past, maybe their incentive is not to learn but to keep doing the same destructive things. President Obama’s inaugural speech contained this line, which has gone quite ...

The Tension within American Exceptionalism

by Wendy McElroy January 21, 2013

The concept of American exceptionalism is a key foundation of American freedom and militarism, individualism and imperialism. The meaning of the term seems to be elastic, changing through time and depending upon the purpose of each speaker. It has suffered a fate similar to the word “liberalism” in drifting far from its historical roots. What is American exceptionalism? One of the ...

The Hagel Brouhaha

by Sheldon Richman January 14, 2013

Washington is going through one of its regular melodramas with President Obama’s nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. (In light of America’s foreign policy, this is a title worthy of George Orwell; the position should be renamed the “secretary of war.”) To Hagel’s credit, he has the proper enemies on the right. Neoconservative advocates of perpetual ...

Private Murders versus Government Murders

by Michael Tennant December 24, 2012

The December 14 murder of 20 children and 6 women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has garnered vast media attention and caused countless people with no connection to the victims to grieve for them. This is not a new phenomenon: nearly all mass murders carried out by civilians generate the same type of coverage and response. But ...

Why Is Foreign Policy Neglected?

by David S. D'Amato November 30, 2012

Throughout the (thankfully concluded) election year, everyone — including the electorate and the blindly shilling punditry — was so very zeroed in on the domestic economy, as they perceived it, that foreign-policy issues were virtually completely neglected. No one in the mainstream debate, which was hardly one at all, cared to remark on or decry the fact that the ...

Petraeus Fell for the Wrong Reason

by Sheldon Richman November 20, 2012

David Petraeus has fallen — but not as he should have. Before being disgraced by an extramarital affair, the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director should have been shamed out of public life for his horrendous military record in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we talking about the same David Petraeus who is said to have heroically saved Iraq with the ...

The Japan Problem

by Laurence M. Vance November 14, 2012

There were no issues of any real substance debated by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the presidential campaign leading up to the recent election. With foreign wars raging, the USA PATRIOT Act and the NDAA threatening Americans’ civil liberties, the police state and surveillance state increasing, drone attacks killing foreign civilians, the drug war destroying Americans’ freedoms, the ...

Supersized Fries, Downsized Jobs

by Wendy McElroy November 12, 2012

On November 2 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that America added 171,000 jobs in October. President Barack Obama lost no time in proclaiming to crowds, “Today we learned that our companies have created more jobs in October than in any of the last five months.” Meanwhile his unsuccessful presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, called the jobs report ...