On Building Armies and Watching Them Fail: Why Washington Can’t Prop Up Foreign Militaries

By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch Oct 14, 2015 Prudence might counsel Washington to assume that when it comes to organizing, training, equipping and motivating foreign armies, the United States is essentially clueless. Dig deeper ( 9 Min. Read )

What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire

By Howard Zinn, TomDispatch Oct 5, 2015 The idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War and came home. Dig deeper ( 8 Min. Read )

U.S. Special Ops Forces Deployed in 135 Nations

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch Sep 24, 2015 They belong to the special operations forces, America’s most elite troops. And odds are, if you throw a dart at a world map or stop a spinning globe with your index finger and don’t hit water, they’ve been there sometime in 2015. Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )

VIDEO: Robert Scheer: Foreign Entanglements Derailed the American Experiment (Part 8 of 10)

Alexander Reed Kelly / Truthdig Jul 6, 2015 In the eighth installment of an interview series on The Real News Network’s “Reality Asserts Itself,” Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer tells TRNN Senior Editor Paul Jay that American leaders “lost sight of the essential wisdom of the American experiment,” which was that if you enable prosperity “for your own people, and if it’s good, others will follow it.” Dig deeper ( 18 Min. Read )

The Superpower Conundrum: The Rise and Fall of Just About Everything

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch Jul 2, 2015 The greatest power in history can’t build a single mile of high-speed rail? And its Congress is mired in an argument about whether funds can even be raised to keep its highways more or less pothole-free? Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )

The Geopolitics of American Global Decline

By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch Jun 8, 2015 America’s political, national security and foreign policy elites have missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia that are undermining the grand strategy for world dominion that Washington has pursued these past seven decades. Dig deeper ( 21 Min. Read )

Writing History Before It Happens

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch May 20, 2015 With an emphasis on the U.S. national security state and its follies, here are my top nine American repeat headlines, each a surefire news story guaranteed to appear sometime, possibly many times, between June 2015 and the unknown future. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )

From Vietnam to Iraq: Turning a Nightmare Into a Fairy Tale

By Christian Appy, TomDispatch Apr 27, 2015 Our most popular Vietnam end-stories bury the long, ghastly history that preceded the “fall” while providing silver-lining tributes to good intentions and last-ditch heroism that may come in handy in the years ahead. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )

The Real American Exceptionalism

By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch Feb 26, 2015 While Presidents Eisenhower and Bush decided on exceptions that violated national boundaries and international treaties, President Obama is exercising his exceptional prerogatives in the unbounded domains of aerospace and cyberspace. Dig deeper ( 13 Min. Read )

The Future Is Not Ours (and Neither Is the Past)

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch Jul 21, 2014 The famed fog of war is nothing compared to the fog of the future or, as I’ve often said, I’d be regularly riding my jetpack in traffic through the spired city of New York, as I was promised in my childhood. Our urge to predict the future is unsurpassed. Our ability to see it as it will be: next to nil. Dig deeper ( 13 Min. Read )

The Pacific Pivot

By John Feffer, TomDispatch Jan 30, 2014 The administration's much-vaunted pivot looks ever more like a divot -- a swing, a miss, and a hole in the ground rather than anything approaching a hole-in-one. Dig deeper ( 13 Min. Read )

Why Washington Can’t Stop

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch Oct 24, 2013 In terms of advanced and unchallenged military power, there has been nothing like the U.S. armed forces since the Mongols swept across Eurasia. No wonder American presidents now regularly use phrases like “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” to describe it. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )