Section: Institute for Policy Studies (USA)
Cluster Bombs Are as Outdated as War
President Joe Biden’s administration has taken a cruel weapon—the cluster bomb—off the shelf and sent it to Ukraine to be used in the war against Russia. Prior to being transferred to Ukraine, cluster bombs made in the United States were used by Saudi Arabia as recently as last year to devastating effect in its war in Yemen. The weapons...
Korean Armistice, Ukrainian Ceasefire
In his famous essay about democracy, the British novelist E.M. Forster celebrated the political system’s encouragement of diversity and its tolerance of criticism. However, he only gave two cheers for democracy, rather than three, because democratic systems tend toward inefficiency and mediocrity. Forster believed that democracy, although...
Russia’s Agricultural Warfare
Saudi Arabia is pissed off at Russia. It’s not as if the Gulf state has released any angry statements to the press. Rather, Riyadh has made clear its displeasure in an indirect way. It has offered to host a “peace summit” next week that Ukraine will organize. Brazil, India, South Africa, and China are among the invitees. Here’s the...
Ukraine and the World Order
As the Cold War began to wane, multipolarism became a rallying cry for everyone sick and tired of superpower politics, nuclear standoffs, and the banal bipolarism of Soviet misinformation and American propaganda. This “rise of the rest” was prefigured in the Non-Aligned Movement that began in 1961, the New International Economic Order that the...
In Bid to Join NATO, Sweden and Finland Back Turkish Repression of Kurds
As Ukrainians face a brutal and ongoing Russian siege, NATO’s July summit has endangered and betrayed Kurdish people, cruelly trading the fate of one occupied and repressed group for another. The most celebrated news out of the summit was the fact that the last hurdles had been removed to Sweden joining the alliance, with Finland having...
America vs. the Supreme Court
After last year’s NATO summit, Joe Biden talked to reporters about the war in Ukraine, U.S. military assistance to the government in Kyiv, the invitations to Sweden and Finland to join NATO, and the global economy. The message that the U.S. president emphasized, on all of these issues, was that “America is back.” After the isolationist...
The Beginning of the End for Putin?
The former hotdog salesman rose about as high as he could. He became a caterer to the Russian elite and a confidante of the president. He led his country’s premier paramilitary force. He was one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs. And then he overreached. Yevgeny Prigozhin now says that he had no intention of overthrowing Russian...
A Tale of Two Missions
It was a peace mission that basically fell to pieces. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa tried to line up a number of African leaders to travel to Russia and Ukraine in an effort to persuade the two countries to stop fighting. He was joined on the trip by the leaders of Senegal, Comoros, and Zambia. Three other leaders pulled out, one...
For GOP, Debt Ceiling Deal Was Never About Debt — It Was About Conserving Power
Many mainstream accounts of the recent debt ceiling deal make it sound like the negotiations represented a give and take between spending and saving — with President Biden and Democrats aligned with spending, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republicans aligned with saving. The real interests of the Republican Party in these negotiations,...
Greening Transatlantic Relations
From a foreign policy perspective, transatlantic relations appear to have reached new heights. The United States and European Union both support Ukraine’s efforts to expel Russian troops from its territory. On the military front, NATO is enjoying boom times thanks to the reemergence of a ‘common enemy’ and the addition of new members...
