Section: Institute for Policy Studies (USA)
United We Dream and Allies Demand Permanent Ceasefire and Immigrant Protections
“From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go!” Last week, I joined an action hosted by United We Dream in DC’s Capitol Hill. We demanded a ceasefire now in Gaza and permanent protections for immigrants who have made the United States our home. This action was a response to Senate leaders proposing a bill earlier this month that...
The Senate’s Failed War and Border Deal is Not Security
The $118 billion bill that Senate leaders put forward this week is a deal that never should have been made. The proposal puts the U.S. and world at greater risk for wider war, props up the inexcusable actions of the far-right Netanyahu government, and adopts a Trump-like approach to immigration. Bad for Americans. The deal puts forward $118...
Are North Korea’s Latest Threats Rhetorical or Real?
The Korean War ended more than 70 years ago, and a tense peace has reigned ever since on the Korean peninsula. The two Koreas have exchanged artillery fire, battled in the economic and diplomatic arenas, and even covertly dispatched spies to each other’s territory. But the threats of a resumption of conflict, disproportionately coming from...
The End of Europe
It would be funny if it weren’t so potentially tragic — and consequential. No, I’m not thinking about Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign but a related development: the latest decisions from the European Union (EU) about Ukraine. As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for...
What’s Going to Happen to Taiwan?
Much of international relations is pretense. The leaders of countries pretend to like each other, shaking hands with smiles and manufactured bonhomie. International treaties, which countries solemnly ratify, are often honored only in the breach. Then there are borders, the cement that holds together the international order. Nation-states are the...
Pentagon Pollution Is a Global Embarrasment
World leaders just wrapped up 2023’s international climate forum, COP28, held in Dubai. The forum opened on November 30 with an embarrassment for the host country, the United Arab Emirates, when the president of the gathering—who also leads the UAE’s state oil company—was caught using the platform to secretly push fossil fuel deals....
Rescuing Realpolitik from Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger wrote his doctoral dissertation about Europe’s “long peace” after the defeat of Napoleon, focusing on how conservative statesmen negotiated the Concert of Europe through a mixture of diplomacy and military power. Kissinger was enamored of this approach to achieving an “equilibrium of forces.” The lesson he absorbed, and...
The Return of the Far Right
Panic does not produce prudent politics. Panic produces provocative populists. And it reduces pundits to Seussian spluttering. How can voters choose such…panic-peddling panderers?! The defeats of Donald Trump in the U.S. elections in 2020 and Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian elections in 2022 were supposed to prove that the wave of right-wing...
Pentagon Fails Its Sixth Audit
The Pentagon has failed its audit, again. For the sixth time in a row. The agency that accounts for half of the federal discretionary budget does not know what it did with the money. For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed an audit. Since then, the Pentagon has completed an audit every...
How Long Can America Maintain a War Economy
The U.S. economy is in reasonably good shape, according to conventional measurements. The official unemployment rate is below 4 percent, and the productivity of U.S. workers is surging. In the last quarter, economic growth was nearly 5 percent, and Inflation has been levelling off. Americans are buying things, throwing parties, and going on...
