JONATHAN KIRSHNER – Five Looming Geopolitical Crises of the Trump Administration

Foreign policy crises are inevitable, and no American president can prevent them from arising. But it is possible to provoke, mismanage, and even exacerbate them, making a fraught situation catastrophically worse. We are only here today in part because John F. Kennedy overruled the hotheads among his advisors—they were in the majority—during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the anxious heat …

New Operation Condor Files Show Terror, Torture in Argentina

According to the National Security Archive more files will be released as they are declassified even after Obama leaves office. The administration of Barack Obama released Monday a declassified intelligence reports on Operation Condor, the 1970s covert efforts to rid U.S.-backed dictatorships of progressive opponents or to topple progressive governments outright in South America. Read more

Michael T. Bucci – Learning from the History of Presidential Elections: Barry Goldwater versus Donald Trump

Those old enough to have lived through the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis; attended the movies Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach and Seven Days In May; and experienced November 22-25, 1963 “as it happened”, might remember Senator Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency on the GOP ticket in 1964. They might also remember the most famous ad in …

Tom Engelhardt – Three Exceptional Facts About America

Given the cluttered landscape of the last 14 years, can you even faintly remember the moment when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended in a stunned silence of shock and triumph in Washington, Eastern Europe was freed, Germany unified, and the Soviet Union vanished from the face of the Earth? At that epochal moment, six centuries of …