A NATO-Russia confrontation has been deemed a top risk by a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) survey, conducted by foreign policy experts. This placed it alongside the risk of a nuclear crisis with North Korea and a severe terrorist attack on the US. The likelihoods for all major American fears coming true were split into…
The news that Israel had attacked targets in Syria was a yawner. The Israeli Air Force has been regularly paying visits to Syria for years, attacking convoys transporting Iranian weapons to Hezbollah, or destroying a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. But this time, Syrian media reported that Israel fired several surface-to-surface missiles at a military…
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of…
The threat of the US military intervention in Iraq and Syria erupting into a far wider war has increased sharply in the wake of a series of Turkish air strikes against Syrian Kurdish militia forces that are aligned with Washington. The Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reported that Turkish war planes carried…
The question “why war?” has long inspired scholars to seek answers in human nature. Their findings invariably have been ambiguous and judgments inconclusive. While it is easy to make the case that humans do engage in violent behavior as part of their nature, there is no basis for arguing that they are “killers.” There is…
During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies. US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. More recently Washington has escalated…
