The night of 17-18 September 2024 will mark the 63rd anniversary of the death in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) of the second United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, UN staff and the plane’s crew. They were on a crucial UN mission to the newly independent Congo, where More
Last month, in a tangible victory for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, San Francisco State University (SFSU) agreed to pull its investment from four companies tied to weapons manufacturing and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The four include Lockheed Martin, aerospace company Leonardo, military contractor Palantir, and construction equipment maker Caterpillar, whose bulldozers have More
Last month, I reported on the Biden administration’s new nuclear doctrine to prepare the United States for a coordinated nuclear challenge from Russia, China, and North Korea. The Biden doctrine revives the concept of “escalation dominance,” one of the main drivers of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. More
The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire—and that once did—now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. More
