Departments

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militarism

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    9/7/2021

    The Decline and Fall of the Roman… Whoops!… American Empire

    by Tom Engelhardt

    A hubristic choice to refuse a negotiated surrender from the Afghan Taliban in favor of establishing American military supremacy now haunts both nations as the costs of war undo domestic "nation building" in the US. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    9/8/2021

    Review: The Case Against "Humane War"

    by Daniel Bessner

    Samuel Moyn's book "Humane" pushes for policymakers and intellectuals to focus less on the strategy of warfare and more on whether war should be fought, a crucial step to reestablishing peace as the goal of international relations and American foreign policy.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/30/2021

    America's Military is Too Big

    by Jeremy Suri

    The war in Afghanistan is much more than a failed intervention. It is stark evidence of how counterproductive global military dominance is to American interests.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    8/5/2021

    Answering the Armies of the Cheated (But No Questions about War Please!)

    by Andrew Bacevich

    Americans wondering why their nation is failing to meet their basic needs since supposedly winning the Cold War need to reckon with its successor ideology, the idea of America as the Indispensable Nation, and the costs of intervention it has inspired. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    7/20/2021

    Is the US Ready to Stop Being the World's Policeman?

    Historians Daniel Immerwahr and Stephen Wertheim are among the experts quoted on the rise of the idea of American interventionism and its reconsideration after twenty years of the War on Terror. 

  • SOURCE: Prospect Magazine
    7/14/2021

    The Legacy of 9/11

    by Stephen Wertheim

    "9/11 might well have 'changed everything' as momentously as was assumed—just not in the direction intended."

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    7/13/2021

    The Ethics of Coalition-Building

    by Samuel Moyn

    Can progressives justify alliances with the America-First right to push Biden to stop America's "forever wars"? 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    6/15/2021

    Social Security Versus National Security

    by Rebecca Gordon

    The military budget has quietly displaced Social Security as the "third rail" of American politics, and it's increasingly clear that the welfare of the defense industry will take priority over the welfare of Americans. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/2/2021

    What Kind of Fear Is Stopping Joe Biden?

    by Samuel Moyn

    The course of the Biden administration's policy agenda will be determined by what Democrats are afraid of. In particular, it will matter whether they are more afraid of foreign adversaries or of domestic poverty. 

  • 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: TomDispatch
    4/13/2021

    Slaughter Central: The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine

    by Tom Engelhardt

    The American armanents industry is profiting from the sales of weapons of potential planetary destruction, mass shootings, and all manner of violence in between. We should understand the gun industry as a global public-private partnership of death.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    4/4/2021

    “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World”

    by Liz Theoharis

    Martin Luther King's 1967 Riverside Church address pointed out that the cause nonviolent civil rights struggle required him to challenge the US government to end militarism. Today, the pandemic shows that an ethos of nonviolence must include an active approach to end suffering through global cooperation. 

  • 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.