Antiwar.com Blog

The Pentagon has just released its 2018 National Defense Strategy for the United States. After at least 18 years of being told that international terrorism is the number one threat to the United States and that we must spend enormous amounts of money ($11 trillion since 2001) fighting it, we are now told that terrorism is no longer a big threat. The new biggest threat that we must spend more mountains of money defeating? Russia and China! Who benefits from this official return to the Cold War? The military-industrial complex. Who loses? The rest of us. More on the Pentagon’s “Orwell moment” in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

US Vice President Mike Pence has announced that he would be attending the Olympic games in South Korea next month with an eye on preventing North Korea from reaping any PR advantage from numerous North and South Korean joint activities. Why is Washington so afraid of peace breaking out on the Korean peninsula? On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Are we supposed to believe that a critical five months of text messages between two plotting (and illicitly connected) anti-Trump FBI agents have disappeared due to technical errors? Much more likely — and more commonly, as Jim Bovard points out in a recent Hill article — it is the FBI manipulating evidence and destroying evidence to keep the public from knowing what they really are up to. In this case, it appears FBI agents were colluding with others in the US intelligence community to: 1) prevent Donald Trump from being elected president; and then 2) when that didn’t work, to undermine him with baseless charges of foreign collusion in the hopes he would be removed from office. The story continues to unfold, but as it does the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory seems to be melting into a “FBI-gate” reality. More in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

With Ankara’s recent military incursion into Syria to fight Afrin-based Kurdish forces, the US finds itself in a bizarre proxy war with its longtime NATO ally, Turkey. Turkish airplanes are literally taking off from the same airbase to bomb the Kurds as American planes are taking off from to arm the Kurds. US policy in Syria to create an autonomous Kurdish region to facilitate the continued (illegal) US military presence in the country is reckless and unsustainable. It is also absurd. For more on this strange state of affairs, tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Why do empires fall? Sometimes, it’s easy to identify a cause. Whether led by the Kaiser or by Hitler, Germany’s Second and Third Empires were destroyed by world wars. Germany’s ambition was simply too great, its militarism too dominant, its policies too harsh to win long-term converts, its leaders too blinded by the pursuit of power, its enemies too many to conquer or otherwise neutralize.

Other imperial falls are more complex. What caused Rome’s fall? (Leaving aside the eastern part of the empire, which persisted far longer as the Byzantine Empire.) Barbarians and their invasions, say some. The enervating message and spirit of Christianity, said the historian Edward Gibbon. Rome’s own corruption and tyranny, say others. Even lead in Roman water pipes has been suggested as a contributing cause to Rome’s decline and fall. Taking a longer view, some point to the rise of Islam in the 7th century and its rapid expansion into previously Roman territories as the event that administered the final coup de grâce to a dying empire.

Continue reading “The Fall of the American Empire”

In recent months Donald Trump has shown no hesitation to comment critically on political developments in Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, and North Korea. He supported protests in Iran against "the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime." He deplored the many years of US military aid to Pakistan, for which "they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. . . . No more!" His criticisms of the Maduro government in Venezuela were accompanied by the threat to use the "military option," reminiscent of what Trump had once said when talking about Mexico. And of course his personal insults directed at North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are now legendary.

Such interference is now taken for granted, for in Trump’s world, relying on diplomacy and abiding by the principle of noninterference in others’ affairs have no currency in Washington. Of course trying to destabilize other countries, even to the point of seeking regime change, has been part and parcel of US foreign policy for a long time. The difference now may be the constancy of Trump’s interference, and the undiplomatic language he uses.

Continue reading “Dubious Partnership: The US and Saudi Arabia”