|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Anne-Marie Cusac
$20.08
By Aram Sinnreich
$22.45
$20
|
|
|
|
Photo by ctj71081 (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — Is the United States in decline? It’s clear to anyone who has been to Europe or the major Asian states recently, where everything works beautifully, even if Europe’s debts are not paid off.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By William Pfaff — European missile defense against the threat of hypothetical Iranian nuclear missile attack is a make-work project for the American aerospace industry and always has been.
|
U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman David Carbajal
|
By William Pfaff — Terminating the Afghanistan War and ending the global projection of American military power of which it is a part are indispensable steps to saving the nation.
|
U.S. Navy / MC1 Chad J. McNeeley
|
By William Pfaff — The two most recent American wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have failed or are disastrously failing. The United States is being pressed to launch two new wars. There is little public support for any of the four.
|
Richard Newton (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — The Socialist Francois Hollande is running ahead of President Nicolas Sarkozy in a contest that has more to do with personal character than issues.
|
DoD
|
By William Pfaff — No one yet in Washington seems fully to appreciate or acknowledge the failure, but failure it is.
|
AP / Kostas Tsironis
|
By William Pfaff — Denied a referendum on crippling austerity measures, Greeks demonstrated Sunday night that if they couldn’t express their opinions one way, then they would do it in another.
|
U.S. Navy / MC2 Brooks B. Patton Jr.
|
By William Pfaff — Stephen Hadley, a former official in ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, said in Munich that Europe must spend more if it wants to be a global player. The Europeans regard the George W. Bush administration record, and now the Obama administration’s, and see the disastrous results of “global playing.”
|
DoD / MC1 Chad J. McNeeley
|
By William Pfaff — Americans might do better to give up their China obsession and go back to their traditional vision of a European threat.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The obsession of the American foreign policy community, as well as most American (and a good many international) politicians, by the myth of Iran’s “existential” threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in the Middle East.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By William Pfaff — The Afghan government’s order a week ago to the United States to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington.
|
Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
|
By William Pfaff — The clear crossover vote-getter issue on which Ron Paul has differed from the rest of the candidate crowd is war: his hostility to the commitment of both Democratic and Republican administrations to prosecuting undeclared war in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.
|
Clay Junell (CC-BY-SA)
|
By William Pfaff — There are only three valid reasons why the Middle East, the focus of international attention as 2012 begins, is important to the United States and the European nations.
|
Wikimedia Commons
|
By William Pfaff — A week ago, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine wrote that President Barack Obama, through expedient political compromises, has lost the moral authority that an American president must command, and therefore has lost his right to a second presidential term.
|
Dennis Skley (CC-BY-ND)
|
By William Pfaff — The extent to which the economic policy of nations is made on the basis of misinformation or wishful thinking is not generally recognized.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The most dramatic contemporary event from which one can attempt to extrapolate future world change is the political and social uprising of the Arab peoples of the Mediterranean basin.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By William Pfaff — One might think that a bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan and an ambiguous commitment to Iraq would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with.
|
DonkeyHotey (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — The program to oust the Occupy Wall Street movement from its sites of occupation is now under way. The Occupied, who own the police, have grown tired of the Occupation.
|
NATO
|
By William Pfaff — The enthusiasm that has been inspired in NATO circles by the organization’s success in overturning the Gadhafi regime in Libya provides a demonstration of how badly NATO still feels the need for a justification of its continued existence.
|
Bob Jagendorf (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — The theme of most political and social commentary is that things are more complicated than you think. For once, I wish to write that things are simpler than you think.
|
U.S. State Department
|
By William Pfaff — The United States simply does not know how to disentangle itself from this menacing situation.
|
© Jeff Pappas
|
By William Pfaff — Both movements are essentially populist protests. The OWS people want to break the power of finance and the rich in America. So do tea party voters.
|
|
By William Pfaff — If political news doesn’t have to do with the presidential race and Barack Obama’s war with Congress, it’s not important.
|
U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Angelita Lawrence
|
By William Pfaff — The Gordian knot by which this American project is bound is the simultaneous conflict and collaboration of the United States and nuclear Pakistan.
|
AP / Tara Todras-Whitehill
|
By William Pfaff — Most Americans would likely agree that the main shock delivered to Americans and the American government by the 9/11 attacks was that of vulnerability. Another such shock is impending.
|
Surian Soosay (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — Ten years on, Osama bin Laden, were he not at the bottom of the sea, could be reasonably satisfied with what he has accomplished.
|
hobvias sudoneighm (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — It now seems a necessary qualification for the Republican nomination, at least at the present primaries stage, to be a born-again fundamentalist Protestant. Yet in the United States the majority of the electorate is not fundamentalist, evangelical or Protestant.
|
AP / Alexandre Meneghini
|
By William Pfaff — If the U.S. had gone seriously into the war, and behaved characteristically, Libya’s revolution would not have succeeded this week.
|
U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Isaac A. Graham
|
By William Pfaff — Global domination is a political policy that cannot possibly succeed. The world is not open to domination by a single state. The effort to establish it will destroy the United States itself.
|
Adam Campbell (CC-BY-ND)
|
By William Pfaff — Barack Obama seems unwilling to be president. What a contrast he makes to George W. Bush, in his boots and with his swagger—the Decider.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By William Pfaff — Few Americans know, or much care, about the opinions foreigners hold of the United States. This was displayed during the ignorant and solipsistic debate over when or whether the United States will pay its debts.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The events in Norway were in a twisted way the product of Western ideas about the rivalry and clashes of civilizations, which persist.
|
Andrew Stawarz (CC-BY-ND)
|
By William Pfaff — We seem to be expected to believe that the prime minister, the Murdochs, Mrs. Brooks and two of the most senior policemen in Britain, all were born yesterday.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The internal American debate may be said to center around how much to rob the poor, and how much to enrich the rich.
|
|
By William Pfaff — I heard a brilliant young Harvard scholar, influential in the Obama administration, explain that the future of successful American action in Central Asia lies in a “surge” of civilian political and developmental action to rescue the people of the region from their present backwardness.
|
|
By William Pfaff — Athens in recent days has experienced continuing popular protest, sporadically violent, against the economic austerity program demanded of Greece by the IMF.
|
|
By William Pfaff — Looking backward, there is a great deal to be said for leaving well enough alone, which is more difficult than one might think.
|
|
By William Pfaff — U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Kabul at the start of June talking about withdrawal—or non-withdrawal—from Afghanistan, but before he went home he stopped in Singapore to talk about an enlarged American military engagement in Asia.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The European intervention in Libya has provided a needed practical demonstration of the European states’ ability to influence world affairs, while at the same time discrediting the expectation that the European Union itself can or will conduct a united foreign and security policy.
|
|
By William Pfaff — What can only seem the irresistible self-destruction of Dominique Strauss-Kahn has already produced fundamental and irreversible consequences in France and Europe.
|
U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Efren Lopez
|
By William Pfaff — Killing Osama bin Laden leaves the United States facing two doors that open two ways into the future.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The struggle is under way to re-establish American control over the successors to those despots whom popular uprisings have ousted from Tunisia and Egypt, threatening the careers of still other abusive absolute monarchs and presidents-for-life (and their offspring).
|
|
By William Pfaff — The always-implausible notion that the European Union could have a common foreign policy has been exploded.
|
|
By William Pfaff — Neither Europe nor Washington has a United Nations mandate to depose and arrest Gadhafi and seek his indictment by international courts. Nor do they have a mandate to overturn the existing government in Libya, install a new one, build democracy, etc.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The United States, without really realizing, is now back to where it was, an isolated nation. But unlike in the past, this isolation is not deliberate.
|
|
By William Pfaff — Although it may seem heartless to say this, the Arab uprising is not our affair, and we should stay away from it.
|
View older articles:
< 1 2 3 4 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Letter From Birmingham Jail
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
