In 1898, Hawaii was officially annexed to the US illegally under a joint resolution of Congress, with the US using the excuse of ‘military necessity’ in the advent of the Spanish-American War.
If the UN does not act to reject this precedent, it will contribute to an international erosion of faith in its own integrity and independence -precisely the kind of behaviour which the carefully crafted ‘headquarters agreement’ was designed to prevent.
The UN's IPCC report on climate change calls for immediate action to deal with a crisis which supersedes and includes all other questions. Meredith Tax says that international pressure on the US government to deal with the crisis is essential, for soon it will be too late.
The purpose of deterrence is to prevent a nuclear war from happening. It depends entirely on producing a psychological impression in the mind of the enemy that you are a very tough guy - so tough you’re ready to commit suicide and drag the enemy down with you.
The Saudi strategy of offering military support to the US while exporting Muslim militancy and portraying itself as the protector of the two holiest sites in the Islamic world has backfired for both Saudi Arabia and the US.
The current conflict has been brewing for a long time and is the result of two asymmetrical imperialisms: Russia's outdated, and rather formal, imperialism, on the one hand, and the west's smart, informal route to empire on the other. We must come to grips with these fault-lines in Eurasia's vast
New documents reveal the blinding pace of US military operations in Africa as the Pentagon prepares for future wars.
If the production of refugees was an industry, Myanmar would be among the world’s market leaders. And of all its products the Rohingya would be one of the most lucrative. A niche but growing market of global proportions, the culmination of decades of tireless endeavour to hone a specialist craft.
The writer who taught courses at Yale on non-violence and nuclear arms through 2012 and who died Tuesday night, at 70, of cancer, in his home in Brooklyn, was a luminous, noble bearer of an American civic-republican tradition inherently cosmopolitan and embracing.
How Big Data and the Internet of Things means the surveillance of everything. There’s simply no way to forecast how these immense powers - disproportionately accumulating in the hands of corporations seeking financial advantage and governments craving ever more control - will be used.
Participation has become a necessary basis for institutional authority in an era of declining social mobility and government retrenchment. It has become a tool for sustaining hierarchies as much as a tool for transcending them.
