Departments

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foreign policy

  • SOURCE: Foreign Exchanges
    4/26/2021

    Necessary but Not Sufficient

    by Daniel Bessner

    The 2001 AUMF in effect has become yet another tool to enable the United States to prosecute a series of endless wars in the Global South.

  • SOURCE: Foreign Policy
    4/16/2021

    Biden Just Made a Historic Break With the Logic of Forever War

    by Stephen Wertheim

    A historian of American interventionism says that Joe Biden's apparent determination to withdraw from Afghanistan is a significant break from recent precedents, and possibly signals a shift away from perpetual war. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/20/2021

    The Long History of Members of Congress Talking Directly with U.S. Adversaries

    by Richard A. Moss and Sergey Radchenko

    New documents demonstrate that Senator Ted Kennedy had back-channel contact with the Brezhnev regime in the 1970s, which aimed both at resolving sticky diplomatic issues and at elevating Kennedy above Democratic party rivals. It's unclear if Kennedy was acting with or undercutting American intelligence agencies. 

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    4/19/2021

    Is America’s Longest Forever War Really Coming To An End?

    by Adam Weinstein and Stephen Wertheim

    The authors argue that Joe Biden has recognized that the US faces the choice of absolute withdrawal from Afghanistan or permanent entanglement. His resolve will be tested by inevitable bad news, but the time is now to move on from the policy of perpetual war. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    4/1/2021

    Biden’s Plan for Central America Is a Smokescreen

    by Aviva Chomsky

    The Biden plan for Central America revives the Cold War formula of business-friendly economic development and militarized security in the name of stopping migration toward the US. This, the author argues, amounts to doubling down on failed policies that have driven migration for decades.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/22/2021

    Does Biden Really Want to End the Forever Wars?

    by Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn

    Recent presidents, including Joe Biden, have relied on an expansive view of presidential powers under Article II of the Constitution to conduct military action outside of the framework of declared war. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    3/11/2021

    On Shedding an Obsolete Past

    by Andrew Bacevich

    "Sadly, Joe Biden and his associates appear demonstrably incapable of exchanging the history that they know for a history on which our future may well depend. As a result, they will cling to an increasingly irrelevant past."

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    2/18/2021

    The American Century Ends Early

    by Tom Engelhardt

    The American empire is now visibly in a state of rapid decay, the product of three decades of wasting the "peace dividend" of the end of the Cold War. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    1/29/2021

    What Should Drive Biden’s Foreign Policy?

    Columnist and Humphrey biographer James Traub says the former Senator and VP's interventionist liberalism in foreign policy is a model for Joe Biden's administration to reestablish American preeminence in world affairs. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    1/26/2021

    While America Was Sleeping

    by Alfred McCoy

    As journalist H.L. Mencken predicted back in 1920, America had finally come to the point where “the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    1/15/2021

    Legacies of Cold War Liberalism

    by Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

    Two historians interrogate the origins of liberal intervention after World War II. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    1/7/2020

    What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America

    by Anne Applebaum

    "The images from Washington that are going out around the world are far more damaging to America’s reputation as a stable democracy than the images of young people protesting the Vietnam War several decades ago, and they are far more disturbing to outsiders than the riots and protests of last summer."

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    12/22/2020

    Biden Wants to Convene an International 'Summit for Democracy'. He Shouldn't

    by David Adler and Stephen Wertheim

    Joe Biden has proposed a summit of democratic nations; this would be an unfortunate exercise in dividing the world into camps of nations following the US and those opposed, without strict regard for whether those nations actually practice democracy. Instead, the authors argue, the US must lead by example: close tax shelters, put the wealthy under the rule of law, and help other nations to control their oligarchs. 

  • 12/13/2020

    Will Biden Shake Up a Century of US-Ireland Relations?

    by Mark Holan

    As the second Irish-American Catholic president, Joe Biden may be expected to sprinkle his speeches with lines from Seamus Heaney, but he's likely to tread a moderate path as issues like Brexit test the Irish-American relationship.