When US Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III declared that Washington wanted to see Russia so “weakened" that it would no longer be able to invade a neighboring state, he lifted the veil on US goals in Ukraine. He also held out the prospect of a long-term US-Russian contest for power and...
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama hailed “the end of history” and the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy in an article published in the National Interest at the very moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama naively prophesized the rise of the unipolar...
Over the last two years, headlines about Lebanon have been negative. Nearly 80% of the Lebanese population is living below the poverty line. The World Bank has deemed Lebanon’s economic crisis the worst to hit the country since the mid-19th century. Much attention has focused on the...
Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the street. But the US and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities,...
Unlike most societies, political alignment in Afghanistan is not divided along the right and the left axis. Most of the policy debates in the last two decades of the so-called republic were shaped by the right — either Afghan/Pashtun ethnonationalism or political Islam. At times, both these...
Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of that of a rural Tennessee school board this January. In another life, I played a role in what could be thought of as the...
The recent rise of social media sites, the instant spread of news via the internet and the availability of satellite imagery to the public created a plethora of open source information that is not guarded by governments or the military. This type of information is increasingly used to generate...
As a consequence of climate change, extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms have increased in frequency and severity. As Domingo Sugranyes of the Pablo VI Foundation says, “global losses from natural disasters in 2020 came to $210 billion, of which $82 billion was...
On January 3, the United States announced the elimination of Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State (IS) during a counterterrorism raid in Atmeh, a town in Syria’s Idlib province close to the Turkish border. In an address to the nation, US President Joe...
In recent years, and even more in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become evident that finance must contribute to the development of a more sustainable economy. However, the current sustainable finance landscape is characterized by heterogeneous concepts, definitions, and industry and...
“Democracy” is the currency of hypocrisy in today’s America. No politician or pundit seems able to get enough of it. Most of the babble is about “our precious democracy” and the threats to its institutional survival. But amid all the talk, there is so little critical analysis of that...
Over the last two years, the United States witnessed a steep increase in alcohol use among adults. According to research from the Journal of the American Medical Association, those aged 30 and over experienced a 14% increase, with women seeing the steepest rise in heavy drinking — a whopping 41%...
This is Fair Observer’s new running feature offering a regularly updated review of the way language is used, sometimes for devious purposes, in the news. February 22: Practice For the past month or so, the Biden administration has been demonstrating a unique innovation in diplomacy. It...
