John-Baptiste Oduor is an editor at Jacobin.
For decades, European leaders fostered a willing dependence on the United States that has made the continent acutely vulnerable to the superpower’s whims. Donald Trump has sensed this weakness and is using it to advance his own narrow interests.
America’s belief that it can be militarily dominant in every major region appears to be wavering. But without challengers, the Republicans’ loss of conviction in liberal internationalism will harden into a more dangerous global authoritarianism.
Last week, Trump signed executive orders targeting Biden-era green infrastructure spending. Republican politicians, whose states have benefitted from these policies, will now have to decide whether they care more about austerity or a manufacturing renewal.
After 15 months of bloodshed, news has emerged of a cease-fire deal in Gaza. The US always had the power to restrain Israel but refused to use it.
The argument of Ta-Nehisi’s Coates’s latest book, The Message, is that Israel is not and will never be a democracy. He describes the racist hierarchy on which Israel was founded in terms that are hard to dismiss.
Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah has been engaged in a limited war with Israel, which Netanyahu’s government escalated last month in a series of attacks on Lebanese society. Jacobin spoke to Lebanon scholar Joseph Daher about the dilemma the party faces.
In Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake, a world-weary spy infiltrates a leftist commune. Hoping to entrap its leaders, she ends up being consumed by the strain of living a double life.
As Keir Starmer’s Labour Party coasts toward power, its foreign policy discussion is all about being an outrider for Washington. As geopolitical conflict heats up, it wants to make Britain the US’s most implacable ally on the European continent.
As Britain lost the ability to maintain its empire, the US took on the role of managing the global order. In Someone Else’s Empire, Tom Stevenson shows how American dominance, aided and abetted by Britain, has caused untold suffering across the world.
Janet Malcolm had a talent for cynicism, which she marshaled readily in herself and took pleasure at uncovering in others. In her final book, Still Pictures, she asked whether the personal and emotional costs she paid for her success were worth it.
America’s prisons are grossly dehumanizing and unjust. The eminent political philosopher Tommie Shelby debates prison abolition and what kind of radical change justice demands.
A new president has a right-populist vision of transformation in East Africa’s largest economy.
The UK’s former prime minister Liz Truss came to power promising to restore growth to the British economy. During her 45 days at the helm, she crashed it. Calamity is pending, and the country’s political elite are out of ideas.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò responds to John-Baptiste Oduor’s recent review of Elite Capture.
In his new book, Elite Capture, Olúfémi Táíwò argues that elites have hijacked identity politics — but what if it belonged to them all along?
Many people’s social status and identity are intimately bound up with the jobs they do. That’s not just pernicious capitalist ideology, Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck argue: it can offer the basis for worker resistance to the power of employers.