Section: Institute for Policy Studies (USA)
Ukraine and the Lessons of the Iraq War
Leaving aside the manufactured justifications, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to reassert U.S. power in the Middle East and reduce the influence of Iran. It wasn’t terrorism or yellow cake or even Saddam Hussein’s appalling human rights abuses that motivated one of the most tragic of U.S. foreign policy blunders. It was...
Russian War Crimes in Ukraine 20 Years After US Criminal Invasion of Iraq
This week marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war left at least 800,000 to 1.1 million Iraqis dead, and certainly many more injured, maimed, and permanently displaced. The invasion and subsequent military occupation destroyed Iraq’s once-modern infrastructure and much of its environment while...
One of the Highest Military Budgets in History
Last week, the White House released President Biden’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2024, which begins October 1 of 2023. As usual, the biggest portion of the discretionary budget request – 52 percent – was for military spending. While that’s usual, what’s not usual is the sheer level of that military spending. The Biden...
Can the World Save the World?
The United Nations has convened 27 conferences on climate change. For nearly three decades, the international community has come together at a different location every year to pool its collective wisdom, resources, and resolve to address this global threat. These Conferences of Parties (COPs) have produced important agreements, such as the Paris...
We Need to Cut the Military Budget, But Don’t Trust the Far Right to Do It
This article was jointly produced by Foreign Policy In Focus and InTheseTimes.com. Since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives earlier this year, the so-called “Freedom Caucus” — the badly misnamed right-fringe of the congressional GOP — has been flexing its influence. Caucus members are deeply invested in an agenda that would...
Seven Things We Could Do If We Cut the Pentagon by $100 Billion
What would be possible if we had an extra $100 billion to spend on urgent human needs? Just weeks ago, Congress and President Biden agreed to a $858 billion Pentagon and war budget. That’s the highest the military budget has been since World War II. About half of the Pentagon budget every year goes to corporate contractors who pay their...
Maybe the World Isn’t Falling Apart
The international community is not in great shape. The war in Ukraine pits two entirely different conceptions of the global order: authoritarian Russia and its supporters versus the more-or-less democratic world. This war is currently mired in a stalemate that could, nevertheless, escalate into a nuclear conflict very rapidly. At the same time,...
From the Unsustainable Here to the Sustainable There
In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report called The Limits to Growth that laid out the damage to the planet and to human beings of unrestrained increases in economic production and population. It was a straightforward extrapolation from then-current trends that took into account limited resources like water, fertile soil, and fossil fuels....
The Rise of Self-Hating Politicians
Some politicians just hate politics. They get into the game in order to disrupt it. They have such a visceral hatred of governance that, like suicide bombers, they’ve smuggled themselves into government in order to blow it up from within. Much of the coverage of the multiple attempts to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker treated the...
Changing My Mind on Ukraine
In the early 1990s, as the war in Yugoslavia spread to Bosnia, I took what I considered to be a principled position. I backed the UN-imposed arms embargo to the region. I urged friends and colleagues not to support actions to escalate the war. I believed that I was in the pro-peace camp. I hoped for a ceasefire. I yearned for more resolute...
