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In 1945, the sheer size of the American economy and its armies allowed the country’s leaders to act in any way they chose on the world scene. Wisely, they chose to build a series of international institutions. Now, Trump is kicking that fundamental egalitarianism of the global system away with little heed for consequences. The consequences will be felt around the world as Trump and Pompeo’s rogue-state behavior continues to erode the foundations of the global order.
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Education from grade school to college must emphasize the value of the truth and the need to examine different hypotheses using a multiplicity of sources and methods of inquiry. Educators should endeavor to create a culture among their students of checking sources to verify whatever claims they read on the Internet and any other social media platform.
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If settlement growth continues with even less restraint than there is now, the consequences for existing Palestinian towns, villages, and cities will be devastating, as the settlements will choke off travel, commerce, and water and other resources even more than they already do. It won’t lead to a single state, or any other stable future, even an oppressive one. It cannot lead to anything but violence.
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Biden, Warren, and Sanders represent a sharpening debate within the Democratic Party not only about healthcare, the economy and immigration, but also how the United States should relate to the world. It might be plausible to argue that the ideologies and the political forces shaping their competing domestic policy narratives are also reflected in the foreign policy outlook of these candidates.
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Despite all the alarm expressed in American rhetoric about Iranian influence in places such as Iraq, that influence—beyond securing Tehran’s basic security objective of not having another Iraqi dictator launch an invasion of Iran, as Saddam did in 1980—has not bought Iran much beyond a lot of unfriendly slogans chanted by unhappy Iraqis.
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Double standards are rightly decried, and Israel should not benefit, nor face penalties from them. The claim that EU laws demanding proper labeling of settlement products is an example of the latter is demonstrably false and cannot be excused as a mistake. It is a blatant lie, and when that happens, it means you’re trying to enact a double standard to your benefit. That’s what Israel is doing.
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More than a month after protestors first took to the streets across Iraq, Adil Abdul Mahdi surprisingly remains the country’s prime minister. In a movement against high unemployment, poor basic services, and state corruption, demonstrators insist on the removal of factions and political elites. Protestors see these Iraqis as corrupt and subservient to other powers, namely the United States and Iran. But media coverage has thus far focused on the anti-Iran sentiment.
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Perhaps the greatest over-arching, Trump-inflicted damage, spanning both the domestic and foreign sides, is that the nation seems to have become inured to wrongdoing because of the sheer volume of it. What will the next president do to restore a sense of national outrage over wrongdoing whenever it occurs, be it blatant self-dealing, corruption of U.S. foreign relations, or something else?
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“Nothing will come of nothing…”, Shakespeare’s King Lear exclaims to his daughter Cordelia at the play’s beginning. And Lear is right, but only to a point. Anyone familiar with that drama knows full well what fate awaits both Lear and Cordelia, and it is far worse than “nothing.” Such darkness might be America’s fate if nothing is done about how the country manages its military.
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Lebanon’s confessional system has traditionally been justified as a means to prevent any one sectarian group gaining a majority in parliament and enforcing its preferences on others: this, it has been argued, underlies Lebanon’s social liberalism, and its press and religious freedoms. Do most Lebanese prefer to ditch this system? And if they do, might they agree on what might replace it?
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To get some perspective on what has been a rapidly developing situation, as the U.S. deploys new forces to “secure” eastern Syrian oil fields, to unknown aims, LobeLog spoke with Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and expert on Syria.
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