Your source for foreign policy news. |
| |
|
On Monday, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Pentagon leaders believe the state of Ukraine will survive Russia's invasion and that the US is preparing to arm the country for years to come. "I think what we can assure ourselves today is that there will be a country called Ukraine. It will be a sovereign country and that country will have a military that will need to defend it," Hicks said at the Defense One Tech Summit. "And so as we look ahead, we're thinking through what are the kinds of capabilities that the Ukrainians need to protect themselves over the long term," she added. So far, the US has allocated about $54 billion to spend on Ukraine's war effort, the majority of which will go towards military assistance. The funds are meant to last through the 2022 fiscal year, which ends on September 30 for the federal government. |
|
|
Biden will travel to Israel and Saudi Arabia next month on a trip that confirms that the worst of US policies in the Middle East remain unchanged. The visit to Saudi Arabia has rightly been the focus of much of the criticism in recent weeks, but the stop in Israel is just as outrageous in its own way. The White House announcement of the trip comes only a month after Israeli forces gunned down prominent Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin. Just as Biden's expected meeting with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman shows that the US will do nothing to hold the Saudi government accountable for its many crimes, the visit to Israel underscores that the Israeli government can kill an American citizen with impunity. Multiple reports have since confirmed what eyewitnesses said when the murder took place: Abu Akleh was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier, and there was no fighting in the vicinity when she was shot. That was always the most likely explanation, and all the available facts support it. It is a measure of the Biden administration's cowardice that Secretary of State Blinken was still pretending last week not to know facts that had already been established. Given that she was wearing identification that she was with the press and she was with a group of her colleagues, it is more likely than not that she was targeted because she was a journalist. |
Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that some Biden administration officials are privately expressing concern that sanctions on Russia are worsening the global food crisis, exacerbating inflation, and hurting ordinary Russians more than President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. History has shown that US sanctions and other economic pressure do little to change the targeted government and always hurt civilian populations. For example, Cuba has been under a US economic embargo since 1962, but the same government remains in power decades later while the people have suffered. The US typically targets smaller countries with the harsh sanctions it has imposed on Russia, such as Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria. But the sanctions campaign against Russia, the world's 11th largest economy by Gross Domestic Product, has also had a significant impact on the economies of the US and Europe, a consequence President Biden warned Americans to be prepared for. |
| FBI emails made public in connection with the recent trial of Michael Sussmann show that President Barack Obama was actively encouraging his top security officials to do a number on the Queen of Hearts:"Sentence First; Verdict Afterwards" in order to help Mrs. Clinton win in 2016. For those, like me, who wondered how top U.S. law enforcement and security officials felt they had immunity to bend so many of the rules to help Mrs. Clinton, the FBI emails suggest they were given very poor example by the president himself (their conviction that Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in surely also helped). Like the manufactured-out-of-whole-cloth story about Trump ties with Russia's Alfa Bank, there was zero hard evidence to prove that Russia hacked the DNC emails showing that the deck had been stacked steeply against Bernie Sanders. |
The October 10 election in Iraq saw Moqtada al-Sadr's party win a plurality of 73 seats. All deadlines have passed, and Sadr failed to form a government. This weekend, all 73 MPs resigned, recognizing the stalemate. What happens next is the real question.
Iraq's parliamentary system lends itself to close finishes and long struggles to form coalitions. Sadr tried to align with the Kurdish Democrats and a Sunni Arab bloc, but never had enough to overcome boycotts of sessions by the rival Shi'ite State of Law to form a government. State of Law, led by former premier Nouri al-Maliki, tried to force a unity government including them as well, but Sadr resisted, saying that his party's anti-corruption platform would be undercut by governing alongside the old parties. |
On Thursday, Russia blamed the US and Ukraine for cyberattacks on its state institutions and critical infrastructure and warned the West that cyberattacks increase the risk of a "direct military clash." "The militarization of the information space by the West, and attempts to turn it into an arena of interstate confrontation, have greatly increased the threat of a direct military clash with unpredictable consequences," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, according to Reuters. The Russian warning came after the US military said it was conducting "offensive" cyber operations to support Ukraine. The head of US Cyber Command, Gen. Paul Nakasone, said last week that the US had "conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum; offensive, defensive, information operations." |
|
|
Keep your finger on the pulse of US foreign policy. Subscribe to our Daily Digest and each evening, the day's top news stories and editorials are delivered straight to your email. Please support our work by signing up. |
|
|
Antiwar.com, 1017 El Camino Real #306, Redwood City, CA 94063 | 323 512 7095 | www.antiwar.com |
|
|
|
