The Democracy Versus Autocracy Narrative Has a Ukraine Problem
"The war in Ukraine is a war in general for values: life, democracy, freedom. So this is a war all over the world,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said. "Today the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine, we are fighting for the values of Europe...
History, Olive Trees, and Football: What Keeps Palestinians Strong
Despite the horrific war in Gaza and the unprecedented number of casualties, millions of Palestinians in the Middle East and around the world took a brief respite from their collective pain to watch their national football team make history in Doha. The Palestinian...
Israel, the United States, and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror
I was uptown in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I still remember the distant smoke that you could see over the Hudson River. If you had told me then that, thanks to those four hijacked planes and a tiny group of al-Qaeda operatives, my country would launch a...
Terrible Tragedies Continue in Unjust War
The CBS national newscast on Jan. 20 showed the terrible anguish of a father holding a photograph of a little girl who had been killed a few days short of her first birthday by an Israeli bomb in Gaza. This father and another little daughter had just been pulled out...
Iraq Monthly Roundup: 106 Killed in January
What the First Week of War With Iran Could Look Like
I was asked for my thoughts on what most concerned me about the expected US attacks on Iran following the death of three American soldiers over the weekend in Jordan. Some of those thoughts made it into Newsweek. Below, I’ve provided an extended set of thoughts on...
Richard Sakwa Explains How We Ended Up In a New Cold War
The war in Ukraine is a complicated tangle of three wars in one. It is a civil war between Ukraine’s European leaning west and its Russian leaning east. It is a war between Ukraine and Russia. And it is a war between Russia and NATO. Ben Abelow’s book, How the West...
Who Lost the Peace Dividend After the End of the Cold War?
The end of the first Cold War in the late 80s gave Americans a unique historical chance to stop worrying about nuclear war and get a well-deserved Peace Dividend. Instead, not only they lost it, but the talk about the inevitable nuclear WW3 became a routine discussion...
Remote Warfare and Expendable People
In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place — Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine — at the wrong time. They die due to happenstance, choosing to shelter...
