Author: Daniel Larison

Trump is sounding more and more like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney:

“I think the people want to be with us,” Trump said when asked about the island in the press room on board the presidential plane.

“I don’t really know what claim Denmark has to it, but it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for the protection of the free world [bold mine-DL],” he added.

“I think Greenland we’ll get because it has to do with freedom of the world,” Trump continued.

It goes without saying that trying to take over someone else’s country against the wishes of the inhabitants has nothing to do with freedom. The people of Greenland have no desire to be part of Trump’s Greater United States, as their own leaders have said many times. When an American leader declares that the people of another country will welcome our domination of their land (“we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators”), that is usually a prelude to an act of aggression. American nationalists can’t imagine that other nations don’t want to be Americans, and they assume that that the U.S. is doing the others a favor by annexing or attacking them.

Continue reading “‘For the Protection of the Free World’”

As expected, Trump has started the process for redesignating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), and he is also going after USAID support for U.N. and humanitarian aid groups working in Yemen:

It also directs the US Agency for International Development to end its relationship with United Nations agencies, nongovernmental organizations and contractors “that have made payments to the Houthis, or which have opposed international efforts to counter the Houthis while turning a blind eye towards the Houthis’ terrorism and abuses.”

The Biden administration removed the Houthis from the FTO list for a very good reason, and it is a terrible mistake to put them back on. The Houthis are the de facto government of the part of Yemen where most of its people live. Labeling them as terrorists will do tremendous harm to the population. The sanctions that come with this designation threaten to cripple the economy, block remittances, and prevent the delivery of humanitarian aid. That is why humanitarian aid groups condemned the designation the first time, and it is why they are condemning it again now.

Continue reading “Trump’s Malevolent Yemen Policy”

The Biden administration is getting something right on foreign policy at the very end:

Less than a week before leaving the White House, President Joe Biden is lifting the state sponsor of terrorism designation for Cuba, nearly four years to the day from when President Donald Trump, in one of his own last acts in office, put Havana back on the list.

Removing Cuba from the state sponsors list is the right decision, but it should have been made years ago. The Trump administration’s designation was wrong on the merits, and everyone could see that it was done at the last minute to box the next administration in. That move succeeded in large part because Biden and Blinken didn’t want to be attacked for being “weak,” and so they kept in place punishing sanctions that hurt the Cuban people out of political cowardice.

Continue reading “Cuba and the Ridiculous State Sponsors of Terrorism List”

Richard Nephew thinks that the case against attacking Iran isn’t as strong as it used to be:

But today, the case against military action is not so neat.

If anything, the case against attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is stronger than it has ever been. It is because Iran’s nuclear program has advanced so far that we have no reason to believe that military action would be successful. Because Iran is more vulnerable than it has been in the recent past, that makes it more likely that an attack would spur the Iranian government to pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent. When a government feels more threatened than before but has more advanced capabilities for developing these weapons, that is a terrible time to make their fears of attack a reality. Thanks in large part to the stupidity and malice of hawks in the U.S. and Israel, Tehran’s incentives to acquire nuclear weapons have increased. That is why we should reject a military option that gives Iran an even bigger incentive to cross that line.

Continue reading “Attacking Iran Would Be Wrong and Illegal”

Trump threatened to steal another country’s land again:

Trump reiterated his intentions to take back the Panama Canal, after threatening he would in a Truth Social post on Saturday. Trump said that the United States is being “ripped off” at the Panama Canal and has insinuated that China is gaining influence over the waterway. “We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we’re being ripped off everywhere else,” Trump said Sunday.

The fearmongering about China is a reminder of how pernicious defining U.S. foreign policy around great power rivalry can be. The threats against Panama show how Trump’s crude imperialism and the pursuit of rivalry with China reinforce each other. Trump assumes that the U.S. is always being “ripped off,” and he believes that the answer to this is to steal from other countries. If he thinks another country is getting too close to a rival, he wants the U.S. to “solve” that by threatening to steal some of their territory. Trump sees weaker countries in our hemisphere that he wants to dictate terms to, and rivalry with China provides him with the excuse for threatening them. He has probably been encouraged in this by his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has been inflating the Chinese “threat” in Panama for years.

Continue reading “Panama and Trump’s Throwback Imperialism”

Another State Department official quit in frustration over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy:

Casey resigned from the state department in July after four years at the job, discreetly leaving the post unlike other recent high-profile government departures. Now seated at his kitchen table in the quiet suburbs of northern Michigan, Casey reflected on how, as one of only two people in the entire US government explicitly focused on Gaza, he became an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian catastrophe.

“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”

Continue reading “The Ongoing Horrors in Gaza”