Who’s responsible for the border crisis? The United States
For decades since the US destabilized central American governments, thousands of people, including this woman and her children photographed in April, have fled for the US in search of work or to escape drug-related violence.
America’s Legacy of Regime Change
Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War by Lindsey A. O’Rourke (Cornell University Press, 2018); 330 pages. For most of history, seizing another country or territory was a straightforward proposition. You assembled an army and ordered it to invade. Combat determined the victor. The toll in death and suffering was usually horrific, but it was all […]
Invitation to an arms race
INTIMIDATING WEAKER COUNTRIES is normal behavior for great powers. For most of the 20th century, the United States was strong enough to keep allies in line and rivals at bay. Today, however, other countries are not so easily intimidated. Many have lost confidence in the US. At the same time, competing powers have emerged. This […]
Why are we so fixated on Iran?
DURING HIS PRESIDENTIAL campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly denounced America’s “forever war” in the greater Middle East. As his principal advisers on world affairs, however, he has chosen some of the most relentless militarists ever to sit at the hand of an American president. How fully he accepts their advice will determine whether the United States […]
40 years later, grappling with regime change in Nicaragua
NICARAGUANS ARE RELIVING a nightmare. Forty years ago, they deposed the brutal Somoza family dictatorship. But over the decade of Sandinista rule following the coup, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans were killed in a brutal civil war. Now the country is facing a strikingly similar situation: President Daniel Ortega is, by all measures, an autocrat, […]
