The 2023 Pentagon budget passed late last year was $858 billion and, if you’re talking about the full “national security” budget, including all US intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and others, that figure is closer to $1.5 trillion...
Joe Biden’s retreat from Afghanistan IN 2021 did not remove US interests and military presence from a region of the world no longer invested by Washington with the same sense of urgency that it had had two decades earlier under George Bush. Nor did it cancel a focus on war.
The US southern border is home to chaos-driven cruelty, and this must end.
The police have become ever better funded just like the military. As the police have become increasingly militarized, war has come home to roost in the US no less disastrously than it did abroad during the years of the infamous global war on terror.
The US has declared itself to be the global leader in democracy through its mass media, powerful economy and extensive military. However, the US needs many reforms before it can claim to be truly democratic. Disposing of the two-party system would be a good place to start.
Old empires once jostled for control of this part of the world. Today, Turkey, Iran, Russia and the US are doing the same and even Pakistan and India have jumped in. Politics, geopolitics, ethnicity and religion combine to make a toxic brew.
The Pentagon has spun decades-long stalemates into Beltway gold, while leveraging its inability to beat the Taliban, al-Shabaab, or even al-Qaeda into a justification to rearm for great-power competition. Its battlefield defeats have proven to be signature wins for the Pentagon’s civilian high command, the generals, their industry partners, and their many camp followers.
The authors argue that none of the stakeholders in this war — the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the USA and its NATO allies — has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes. But in this war of shameless spin, real people are being...
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