U.S. troops are losing a war with their deadliest enemy. The post Osama Bin Laden’s Enduring Triumph appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus ..read more

Approaching the consequential elections of 2024, the United States faces a stark debate over the role of the country in international affairs. The media has generally presented the two positions as the internationalism of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris versus the isolationism of Donald Trump. The current team in the White House touts the importance of international treaties like the Paris agreement on climate change while the former president spent much of his term in office trying to build a wall—and even a moat—along the southern border with Mexico to keep out undocumented immigrants. Both Bide ..read more

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress in 2015, the Congressional Black Caucus skipped the speech. Netanyahu had arrived — with the Republicans’ blessing — to rebuke then President Barack Obama for pursuing an agreement with Iran over the country’s nuclear program. In defense of Obama, the CBC refused to attend the speech. But will Black members of Congress do the same in defense of Palestinians? Israel is in its ninth month of a scorched earth assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli forces have killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians and wounded hundred ..read more

It is very rare that a leader from the southern Caucasus treks to a south Asian nation on business. But a blooming bromance between Azerbaijan and Pakistan has made this rarity routine. On July 11-12, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan landed in Islamabad on what Pakistan described a “state visit.” He received the protocol that Islamabad reserves for dignitaries from the United States and the People’s Republic of China. A pair of Pakistan’s sleek fighter jets escorted the presidential plane as soon as it entered the country’s airspace. While flanking him, the pilot of a Pakistani jet dived c ..read more

Over the past decade and more, nuclear war has grown increasingly likely. Most nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements of the past have been discarded by the nuclear powers or will expire soon. Moreover, there are no nuclear arms control negotiations underway. Instead, all nine nuclear nations (Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea) have begun a new nuclear arms race, qualitatively improving the 12,121 nuclear weapons in existence or building new, much faster, and deadlier ones. Furthermore, the cautious, diplomatic statements about ..read more

The conventional Artificial Intelligence doomsday scenario runs like this. A robot acquires sentience and decides for some reason that it wants to rule the world. It hacks into computer systems to shut down everything from banking and hospitals to nuclear power. Or it takes over a factory to produce a million copies of itself to staff an overlord army. Or it introduces a deadly pathogen that wipes out the human race. Why would a sentient robot want to rule the world when there are so many more interesting things for it to do? A computer program is only as good as its programmer. So, presumably ..read more

In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two ..read more

Whether we call it “polycrisis,” like Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze, or “the age of catastrophe,” like the distinguished Marxist Alex Callinicos, there is no doubt that we are living in a period where the very foundations of the contemporary world order are cracking. There is that enigmatic line Gramsci used to describe his era that is also appropriate for ours: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” This short essay will focus on a key dimension of the polycrisis: the unravelling of the global hegemony of the United States. Th ..read more

Last week’s immunity decision by the U.S. Supreme Court will strengthen presidential power in multiple domains, including foreign policy. Given the already robust state of institutional power and autonomy the office has come to possess in recent years, this ruling’s new departure from existing limits is troubling. By declaring that the president is immune from prosecution, the Court goes beyond existing safeguards in criminal law. As Justice Jackson explains in her dissent, immunity in criminal cases is distinct from the other protections provided by law to a criminal defendant, such as presum ..read more

The United Nations recently hosted a third round of talks on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, to weigh the prospects for the country’s return to the international system. The talks were attended by special envoys on Afghanistan from 30 world nations, including the United States. That the world’s 30 leading nations have appointed “special envoys” on Afghanistan shows how concerning Afghanistan is to the globe. The UN sponsored the earlier two rounds in May 2023 and February 2024. Doha I and Doha II were, however, focused on the international obligations of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers, i.e., the Ta ..read more