Labor Holds the Line in Argentina

This March, Argentina’s school year began with empty classrooms. The price of learning materials rose by 502 percent over the past year, leaving many children unprepared for the year to come. And the teachers? On strike after President Javier Milei announced deep cuts to their salaries. There’s something much larger happening here: Workers rights are More

A World Going in the Wrong Direction

The converging crises facing our world today shout out the fact that their roots are systemic. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve these problems, because they are embedded in the systems logic itself. The climate crisis is the signature of this. While definite progress has been made in deploying low-carbon energy technologies, overall carbon pollution has continued to increase because of the systemic economic and political assumptions under which dominant institutions operate. More

An Escalatory Game for Fools and Madmen

In the past 30 years, the number of nuclear-armed nations has grown. Arms treaties have been broken, including unilaterally and without merit by my own country. Modernization of nuclear forces by all parties has greatly increased the destructive capability of missile and bomber fleets, so even though numbers and yields of nuclear weapons have diminished, improved accuracy has increased the destructive power of those fleets. There are warheads designated as “usable” nuclear weapons. Disturbingly, we have generals, diplomats and politicians who believe such things exist. More

The United States and the Middle East: the Politics of Miscalculation

The U.S. experience in the Middle East is a classic study of political and military miscalculation leading to strategic failure.  President Joe Biden’s political support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which is being sorely tested, and his military support for Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which is making the United States complicit in Israel’s genocidal campaign, is the latest and worst example of U.S. miscalculation.  Overall, the exercise of U.S. military power in the Middle East, designed to gain strategic advantage, has backfired.  It has led to disarray in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and has opened diplomatic opportunities for Russia and China. More