Richard E. Rubenstein October 23, 2023 Everyone knows that the United States is the world’s leading military power, with an annual “defense” budget approaching one trillion dollars, considerably more than the arms budgets of the next 144 nations combined. The U.S. employs more than 3.5 million active military and civilian personnel and maintains more than […]
Todd Hayen October 23, 2023 We have finally reached a point in the advancement of our technology where we no longer can believe anything we see or hear. I mean, we can if we want to, but we can also choose not to, because the presentation of anything in a photograph, a video, or an […]
Maria Popova October 19, 2023 “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum concluded in considering how to live with our human fragility. And yet in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, when the world seems […]
US lawmakers say the alliance’s movement into Asia is “inevitable.” It’s actually a completely avoidable, completely bad idea. Branko Marcetic September 15, 2023 A little over a century ago, rising inter-imperial tensions coupled with a complicated, evidence board–like set of alliances pulled Europe into the most disastrous, pointless war the world had ever seen up […]
Peter Ross From invading Afghanistan to dismantling Confederate monuments, George Orwell has been pressed into the service of all sorts of causes. But the real Orwell remains unknown. August 31, 2023 “It was a bright cold day in April,” said Richard Blair, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Blair is seventy-three and the son of […]
Joint demonstration of the trade unions on May Day in Berlin under the slogan Unbroken Solidarity. Photography K.M.Krause via Reuters Anatol Lieven & George Beebe August 23, 2023 Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin’s propaganda A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in […]
Khalid Malik* August 8, 2023 In the 17th century, Ming China represented roughly one-third of global output, and Mughal India a little less. Together the two countries accounted for more than half of the world’s output, with a corresponding size of populations (as a proportion of the total global population). By the 1950s, Mao China […]
Ger van Elk, Symmetry of Diplomacy, 1975, Groninger Museum Alfred de Zayas July 31, 2023 The blaming game has always been counter-productive. In the UN Human Rights Council, the practice is known as “naming and shaming”, as if the States engaging in “naming” would possess a higher moral authority over those “named”, […]
Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash Maria Popova August 3, 2023 “This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.” “There is no love of life without despair of life,” wrote Albert Camus — a man who […]
By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it […]