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Have We Reached a Milestone in Ukraine?
Secretary of Marco Rubio said today (Friday) that “If it’s not possible to end the war in Ukraine , we need to move on.” Rubio told reporters that the Trump could decide this “in a matter of days…” (NYTimes, 4/18/2025) The context: Russia has made its conditions very clear. (1) Ukraine must not join NATO. […]
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Democracy or Plutocracy?
Despite much lofty rhetoric portraying the United States as a democracy (in which the people rule), this nation, in fact, has often resembled a plutocracy (in which the wealthy rule). The confusion owes a great deal to the fact that the United States, at its founding, was somewhat more democratic than its contemporaries. In the […]
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Flexible and Sly: Indonesian Defence Policy, Russia, and Australian Anxiety
Island states tend to be anxious political entities. Encircled by water, seemingly defended by natural obstacles, the fear of corrupting penetration is never far. Threats of such unwanted intrusion are embellished and magnified. In the case of Australia, these have varied from straying Indonesian fishermen who are seen as terrors of border security, to the […]
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What It Means to Weaponize the Government
President Trump’s declaration of war as a justification for using wartime powers to sidestep constitutional protections is indeed a war, but it is a war waged by the president against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic. This is what it means to weaponize the government. When the government […]
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Singh Embarrassingly Trails Carney on Questioning F-35 deal
The NDP’s belated call to scrap the F-35 contract is a damning comment on Jagmeet Singh’s leadership. This cautious response to a rapidly shifting political terrain also includes an outrageous sop to the military industrial complex. On February 25 I asked the NDP leader if he’d reconsider paying tens of billions of dollars to a US […]
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Dealing with Government Repression, 2025
The attempted deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, met with dramatic and widespread resistance, is one of the first, high profile, specifically targeted repressive acts by the Trump regime, but it won’t be the last. There is no question about their intention to create a permanently repressive and dictatorial government, a government of, by and […]
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Poland’s Nuclear Weapons Fascination
With the Ukraine War and the retreat of the United States from what has routinely been called Europe’s security architecture, states are galloping to whatever point of presumed sanctuary is on offer. The general presumption is that the galloping is done in the same step and rhythm. But Europe, for all the heavy layers of […]
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Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons) Special to Consortium News and published there on February 25, 2025 The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history. A […]
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European Leaders Plan Massive Increase in Defense Spending
European leaders meeting in an “Emergency War Summit” in Brussels have agreed on huge increases in arms spending. On entering the meeting, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, declared “Spend, spend, spend on defense and deterrence.” And in response to an interviewer’s question, French Prime Minster Francois Bayrou dismissed the idea that the French public should […]
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