After the Soviet Union’s fall, the West backed Boris Yeltsin as a paragon of democracy, even as his administration rigged elections and empowered a new capitalist class. Now, under Vladimir Putin, the crisis of Russia’s democracy is only intensifying.
There is no ambiguity about President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record: it was bloody, and it was disastrous.
The September 30 election in Slovakia was widely reported as a win for “pro-Moscow candidate” Robert Fico. But the Left should listen to the working-class voters who rallied behind Fico’s party — and understand that the vote wasn’t just about Ukraine.
The mainstream narrative is that Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine single-handedly caused an inflationary surge in commodity prices. But in fact, it was Wall Street speculators reacting to Putin’s war that forced up prices.
The latest Western sanctions mean “total economic and financial war on Russia,” according to a European finance minister. There’s little reason to hope this will stop Putin’s war — but it will bring a longer-term attrition that mainly hurts ordinary Russians.
Credit Suisse, the bank whose donors gave over $100,000 to Joe Biden’s campaign, has ties to Russian oligarchs and has been repeatedly found guilty of serious financial crimes. Yet Biden’s administration is considering waiving any punishment for the bank.
From the IMF to Goldman Sachs, concerns that US sanctions on Russia could undermine the dollar’s global dominance are growing.
French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.
Donald Trump speaks of an expanded Monroe Doctrine that asserts US domination across the Americas. Chilean ex-diplomat Jorge Heine told Jacobin about the need for a new nonaligned movement that can resist imperialist claims.
The recent leak of Ukraine war documents reveals much about how the US government has been misleading the public. But the corporate media is more concerned with catching and punishing the leaker, all in the name of defending democracy.
Across Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine has reinvigorated narratives that present life under Soviet rule as akin to Nazi genocide. It’s bad history — and it indulges the nationalist groups who collaborated with Adolf Hitler.
Claims that former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters deployed antisemitic imagery at recent concerts in Berlin are baseless. The charges are being elevated by media figures and politicians who detest his advocacy for Palestinian liberation.
Through Angela Merkel’s reign, neoliberal European integration provided the scaffolding for Germany’s export-led growth. But war on the continent and a series of crises have tested this model’s limits, producing splits within Olaf Scholz’s government.
Soviet symbols are widespread in today’s Russia, including in propaganda for the war in Ukraine. But in the classroom, the Soviet legacy is reduced to a nationalist cult of World War II, while burying even the notional idea of a more equal society.
Keir Starmer’s attacks on the Left show he's desperate to reassert Labour’s role as America’s closest ally. But with events from Afghanistan to Ukraine showing the limits of US interventionism, British centrists are longing for a now-past age of neocon power.
The gargantuan military aid bill that passed last week and the Democrats’ Build Back Better package relied on similar legislative strategies for passage. The party saw the strategy through to secure money for war while abandoning it to fund social programs.
Canada’s pretense of being a champion of peace and mediation conceals the aim of its foreign military training operations. These operations are not instances of bighearted largesse — they are strategic, geopolitical power projections.
Between 2010 and 2020, a wave of protests erupted around the world. In some cases, these movements strengthened socialist forces. In others, they opened the door to the Right. Vincent Bevins spoke to Jacobin to explain the causes of this divergence.
We are bumbling toward an AI-enabled, nuclear-curious World War III. A new book urges us to get over antiwar protest burnout and cynicism and to rebuild the long-dormant Cold War movement to ban the bomb.
European leaders’ muted response to the illegal attack on Venezuela showed how afraid they are of antagonizing Washington. Now they fear Donald Trump’s plans to seize Greenland, but they have no clear plan to stop him.