America news

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares129 Views

    Has the US Always Been at War?

    by

    Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.”

    I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day. But in a sense for me, my whole generation and the US, war never really ended.

    Western Sahara: Washington’s Accidental Red Line

    READ MORE

    The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was “cold” — which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight — but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.

    In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the “infrastructure” in which Americans increasingly invested their tax dollars via aircraft carriers, trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed with Hellfire missiles and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons around the globe, rather than roads, bridges or rail lines (no less the high-speed version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab an ever-larger percentage of federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2 trillion or more.

    In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars ended, when some version of peace might descend and America’s vast military contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War officially ended and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But of course, the promised “peace dividend” would never be paid out as the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the US military (and the CIA) never happened.

    Never-Ending War

    Consider it typical that, when President Joe Biden recently announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of the last US troops from that country by September 11, 2021, it would functionally be paired with the news that the Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Donald Trump years. “Only in America,” as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote recently, “do wars end and war budgets go up.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact, let’s consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this country’s war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in 1978 that, of the 42 years to follow, the US would be involved in war in a single country for 30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan wouldn’t have been your pick. And yet so it’s been. From 1979 to 1989, there was the CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure, as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after — that Afghanistan is indeed the “graveyard of empires” — clearly had no impact in Washington.

    Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001, themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, al-Qaeda, born as an American ally in that first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that America’s second Afghan War has cost this country almost $2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least 241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.

    And yet, three decades later, the US military high command still seems not faintly to have grasped the lesson that we “taught” the Russians and then experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly opposed  Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it’s not even clear that, by September 11, 2021, if the president’s proposal goes according to plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as the New York Times put it, are determined to “fight from afar” there. They are evidently even considering establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.

    America’s “forever wars” — once known as the global war on terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries — do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.

    War in Our Time

    In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary” activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

    In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as journalist Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the shadows” that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

    .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
    .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
    .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -ms-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
    order: 1;
    color: #ffffff;
    font-weight: normal;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
    right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
    .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

    Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.” But that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but — despite, for instance, the militarization of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came home to the Capitol on January 6 — it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

    One explanation: Though the US has, as I’ve said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly — on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1954-75) — and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well — that first Gulf War of 1991 and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that global war on terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the greater Middle East and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role (now failing) across much of that continent.

    And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 US troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore order”; or President Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive self-defense” by US Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

    And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the US military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places.

    There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few US soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly “wars,” as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum’s “A Brief History of Interventions” makes all too clear.

    Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for “peace,” American-style, if the US military under President George H.W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama (“Operation Just Cause”) as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

    Embed from Getty Images

    And then, of course, in January 1991 the first Gulf War began. It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “only” a few hundred deaths among the US-led coalition of forces. Airstrikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the US Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

    And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 200,000 US troops have regularly been stationed abroad and US Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked “terrorists” in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins-in-chief. To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American “empire of bases” — a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them — across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10) countries combined, including China and Russia.

    A Timeline of Carnage

    The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at war” at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke — well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

    As journalist William Arkin recently argued, the US has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.” As he writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries,” possibly more, and there’s nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

    The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the US were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped? What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in World Politics

      America’s Moment of National Reckoning

      by

      America has just concluded a cataclysmic Election Day and its immediate aftermath. What was supposed to be our quadrennial celebration of democratic institutions is instead a reflection of what happens when unprincipled and corrupt leaders are given access to the national stage to promote disorder, distrust and chaos. It seems likely that the outcome of the vote will be finalized in the days ahead and that Joe Biden will have won the election. But until Trump is chained in his White House bunker without public access, the peaceful transfer of power remains at risk.

      Add to the equation that there is a deep sense among progressive activists, people of color, the underprivileged and the under-represented that over 71.5 million votes for Trump was a direct repudiation of their demands for a dynamic push forward for social, economic and racial justice in America. And this doesn’t even get to the immediacy of confronting a rampaging pandemic at home and an abundance of global challenges.

      360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

      READ MORE

      Amid the chaos, let me be clear that I hope an armed confrontation can be avoided and that there will be enough leadership and institutional integrity to force an orderly transfer of power. However, the election results make clear that many more people voted for Trump this time than last time. Targeted right-wing messaging works, and there is no apparent antidote. Those 71.5 million votes for Trump are a terrible outcome for a nation at war with itself and in which only the right-wingers have the guns.

      As Biden’s victory sets in, there will be those who cheered on Trump and his toxic message who will not rest until they try to blow something up along with the country itself. As that unfolds, there is likely to be the first foundational test of America’s political and military institutions since the Civil War. I am not sure those institutions will hold. It is certainly not clear that those institutions can ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

      Healing the Nation

      At some point, something will have to give. At that point, a crippled America will harvest the rancid fruit of decades of delusion about how “exceptional” the nation was as it grew intellectually lazy, willed its future to greedy and corrupt capitalists, and utterly failed to invest in a sustainable system of governance that could meet the challenges of an evolving world. Picking up the pieces will not be easy.

      The 50-state solution so beloved by those wallowing in the 19th century simply must be discarded, and some new foundation for national governance must be designed and implemented. Unfortunately, with the coronavirus pandemic ripping its way through the populace and a court system packed with those 19th-century wannabes, the time for wishful thinking will have to wait. The 50-state solution will have to be urgently junked to address the pandemic with a national plan and national mandates. Maybe afterward, America can study the results of the coordinated national response and find the way to a new, vibrant, 21st-century federal system.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Meanwhile, there will be an enormous amount of focus on how America got to this point, but I want to get out front that years of “false equivalency” disguised as “balance” or “fairness” has poisoned the nation’s well of fact-based knowledge from which any democratic nation would hope that its citizens could draw. Much has been said about willful ignorance, but not enough about the fountains of falsehoods that feed those unwilling to learn much of anything that requires factual focus. Repetition of belief is no substitute for acquisition of knowledge.

      The impending national convulsion has just begun. A reckoning with collective ignorance and the arrogance of ignorance is essential as the starting point for a meaningful national dialog about how America so completely lost its way. The responsible mainstream media and social media outlets have to stop honoring falsehood with repetition and that most ludicrous of questions — “What’s your response?” And to try to rebuild lost credibility, real and transparent sourcing of news reporting has to again become the rule.

      Then, if government institutions are to be resurrected and strengthened, there must be some measure of accountability for those who worked so diligently to undermine governance, often to enhance their own wealth and power. Today’s list of the corrupt is really long. Trump is a sick symptom, a tool used by so many others to achieve corrupt ends. But he is also symbolic of so much of what is so wrong that his accountability is an essential component of any national reckoning.

      It is important that Trump be charged with the crimes he has committed both in office and in his corrupt life that led to his election in the first place in 2016. It is equally important that those in his inner circle, including his family, his enabling aides, his attorney general and his secretary of state, all find themselves under criminal investigative scrutiny.

      This will surely further divide the nation. But it will be impossible to begin the healing if there is no accountability for the intentional wrongdoing that has led to so much suffering and dysfunction. Those who corruptly profited from the past should have to pay in the present if there is to be a future with the rule of law restored to its proper place in the national pantheon of virtues.

      Joe Biden’s Inauguration

      However, the critical first task ahead is to ensure Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. Unfortunately, that date is over 10 weeks away. Ten weeks of an angry and “victimized” Trump still empowered to “govern” will bleed so much more blood from the nation. He will have to be thwarted at every turn each and every day, so the hard work of restoration can begin now.

      This must start with a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic that is raging across America and much of the globe. This cannot wait 10 more weeks. There is no need for a “balanced” discussion because we have no choice. We have seen how a venal leader can lead so many to their demise and so many more to a participatory march to more death and disease.

      Biden must try hard to convince those participatory marchers to turn around, look at those they care about and start protecting themselves and others. This will be a hard sell, and those of us who have already seen this light will have to step up our game as well. It is no longer fine for corporate sloths and all those endangered small businesses to wink at their “no mask, no entry” signs. It is time for local governments to publicly out those businesses that do not enforce mask mandates and social distancing in their community and publicly support those that do.

      I am hardly certain where any of this will end. But I am certain that the false narrative of a caring, giving and committed people has now finally been ripped from our delusional midst. America is not now, nor has it often been, much of anything to be proud of.

      *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      America Is a Nation in Darkness

      by

      As America’s 2020 Independence Day fades from memory, many things are clearer. Americans love to go to beaches and bars as their petri dishes of choice, masks are a better idea than they were before Independence Day, there will never be a national pandemic response as long as Trump is president, and it is beyond time for Trump to wear a ball gag in lieu of a mask. It is also clear that way too many Americans know way too little about the history of their nation and even less about the birth of the nation.

      Independence Day is celebrated on July 4, the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress ratified the text of the Declaration of Independence. However, it is a safe bet that most Americans know more about the contents of a margarita than they do the Declaration of Independence.

      America’s Problem With Racism Has Become Clearer

      READ MORE

      Some will note Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words near the beginning of the document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

      Practically no one will know that immediately following these words, the Declaration goes on to state: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  

      Much of the rest of the document is a list of grievances against the British king and his minions leading to the conclusion that the colonies should be free and independent states absolved of any allegiance to the British Crown and free of any political connection to Great Britain. So there you have it, a quick history lesson. But before moving on to the US Constitution, pause a moment and actually think about what should be the cornerstone of this document: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

      We know that the “self-evident” language was never actually self-evident, and that the notion that all men are created “equal” remains at the core of America’s living historical lie, birthed even before there was a Declaration of Independence. But the part that presents the solution, the path forward, is a declaration that government deriving its powers from the consent of the governed should be how a nation organizes itself to provide for and protect its sovereignty and its people, how it defines and enables life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

      Broken Government

      Now with America’s national government completely broken, the consent of the governed nowhere to be found, and the actual right of the people to alter or abolish their government at issue with every new and imaginative effort to suppress voting, the Declaration of Independence rings hollow. But if it means anything today, it is to be found in the concept that human beings living within some demarcated landmass should be free to institute a “new” government around a set of principles and organizational mandates required to protect public safety and provide some foundation for societal well-being.

      There have been times before, and surely now it is America’s time again — the time to wrest power from the corrupt and corrupted, the venal and the vengeful. There is Trump’s Independence Day performance, practically begging the nation to again take up arms against itself. There is significant social unrest because aged institutions have failed for centuries to include a huge swath of those supposedly equal folks. There is the daily inventory of undermined governance rendering the present government incapable of protecting public safety and promoting social well-being.

      And most of all, there is the sight of our government “leaders” standing by unmasked as the fools that they are, while death and disease permeate the land. I want to be clear about this: Trump has blood on his hands, McConnell and most Republican politicians at the national and state levels have blood on their hands. And, those around Trump who have enabled his vile ignorance to prevail have blood on their hands. America’s present government is literally draining the life from this land.

      Today’s catalog of legitimate grievances is even stronger than those of 1776, for they demonstrate just how far the nation has strayed from its lofty ambition. Today, when we well know that the words “all men are created equal” rang hollow then but seem even more devoid of meaning now, the failure to fight hard enough for that ideal in modern times dwarfs the earlier willingness to fight for words that meant so much less then.

      A New Revolution

      Without wishing for a renewed revolutionary war, I do wish for a new revolution. The time has come to stop America’s national retreat from an imperfect union to an even more imperfect union. In a nation that loves its Constitution, just reading the Preamble should be enough to know that the text to follow has failed us miserably: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

      Not one objective set out in that Preamble to the US Constitution is happening now. The institutions brought to life by that document in the text that follows are not working today to meet any of the lofty goals set forth in the Preamble. Think about it, read each one carefully, reflect on gaping societal divisions, reflect on today’s attorney general, reflect on marchers in the streets demanding racial and social justice, reflect on US allies discarded like vermin, reflect on poverty and lack of access to meaningful health care laying waste to many, and reflect on warriors in our streets supposedly “protecting” us from ourselves.   

      It is truly unfortunate that the world had to watch a black man die in the street before our eyes amid a raging tableau of disease and despair for many finally to see what America has become. When national institutions born centuries ago fail so completely to protect lives and save lives, they have failed in their original purpose.

      Now is the moment for we the people to argue loudly that the time has surely come to fundamentally alter what we have and replace it with something much better.

      *[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 63 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      What Really Makes America Great

      by

      This year’s US presidential election is likely to unleash the most polarizing discourse we’ve seen in decades. We’re likely to hear both sides use extreme labels like fascist, socialist and racist. We’ve already seen a clear schism between the parties and an equally deep-seated hostility within the parties. A Better Way to Connect in Lockdown […] More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Testing America’s National Character

      by

      I hope that Americans who want to believe in the promise of their nation have paid attention to the presidential impeachment trial. I hope that those in the international community still clinging to the hope that America will finally live up to its promise have paid attention to the presidential impeachment trial. We all know the […] More