by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just issued its 2023 Doomsday Clock statement, calling this “a time of unprecedented danger.” It has advanced the hands of the clock to 90 seconds to midnight, meaning that the world is closer to global catastrophe than ever before, mainly because the conflict in Ukraine has gravely increased the risk of nuclear war. This scientific assessment should [...]
The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic “Security Dilemma” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Photo: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meets in Lodz, Poland, on December 1, 2022. Photo credit: OSCE On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a [...]
by Nicholas Davies On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretaries Blinken and Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion. The top priority of Russian [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the street. But the United States and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities, towns and villages on a far greater scale than has so far disfigured Ukraine. As [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies https://www.codepink.org/the_high_stakes_of_the_us_russia_confrontation_over_ukraine A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords. The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies People have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country - and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops. Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury [...]
by Nicolas J. S. Davies Photo credit: UNICEF Teachers and students were able to return to school in Lao Cai, Viet Nam, in May 2020 A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the COVID pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very [...]
The Emperor’s New Rules by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies The world is reeling in horror at the latest Israeli massacre of hundreds of men, women and children in Gaza. Much of the world is also shocked by the role of the United States in this crisis, as it keeps providing Israel with weapons to kill Palestinian civilians, in violation of U.S. and international law, and has repeatedly blocked action [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies In 2004, journalist Ron Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” He dismissed Susskind’s assumption that public policy must be rooted in “the reality-based community.” “We’re history’s actors,” the advisor told him, “…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [...]
Eisenhower's Ghost Haunts Biden's Foreign Policy Team By Nicolas J. S. Davies In his first words as President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken said, “we have to proceed with equal measures of humility and confidence.” Many around the world will welcome this promise of humility from the new administration, and Americans should too. Biden's foreign policy team will also need a special kind of confidence to confront the most serious challenge they face. [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as the next president of the US! People all over this pandemic-infested, war-torn and poverty-stricken world were shocked by the brutality and racism of the Trump administration, and are anxiously wondering whether Biden’s presidency will open the door to the kind of international cooperation that we need to confront the serious problems facing humanity in this century. [...]
