We could soon see another brutal Israeli war on Palestinians after this weekend’s shocking attacks on Ramadan worshippers by Israeli forces. Yet the Western solidarity that’s rightly been forthcoming for Ukraine is now nowhere to be seen.
Unlike most world leaders, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has boldly called for peace commission in Ukraine, foregrounding the need for open negotiations to end the war. At home, however, he has increased the power of the military.
Most new architecture, like Amazon’s proposed new HQ, is hideous. That’s because it is made for corporations. Despite all the mistakes and brutalities of the Soviet experiment, at least their architecture was designed to serve the people instead.
The International Olympic Committee has declined to curtail Israel’s involvement in the 2024 games and has placed half-hearted limits on Russia. The IOC claims it opposes the politicization of sport — but the Olympics are a historically political institution.
Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write one of the most important books about the making of Karl Marx’s Capital, paving the way for a revival of Marxist economic theory from the 1960s.
Many thought that, with the end of the Cold War, the world had seen the last of big-power nuclear brinksmanship. But the Ukraine crisis has revealed that leaders have forgotten the lessons of that era.
The antiwar movement was right to challenge the lies used to justify the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We should be equally willing to denounce Vladimir Putin’s fake pretexts for war against Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a proxy war between the Korean states as they supply arms for both sides. Now that Kim Jong-un has sent troops to take a direct role in the fighting, South Korea could respond by escalating its own involvement.
Vladimir Putin claims to be protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine. A Jacobin reporter at the Polish border found Russian-speaking refugees outraged at his claims — and at Russian media’s denial of horrors they saw with their own eyes.
The German government’s reluctance to join an anti-Russian bandwagon owes at least as much to commercial interests as to historical guilt. But calls for Berlin to play a stronger role in NATO should be emphatically resisted.
As a socialist and internationalist, I abhor war. But the basic premise of self-determination justifies the resistance of ordinary Ukrainians to Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of our country.
Ahead of today’s Hungarian election, Viktor Orbán has boasted of his solidarity with Ukrainian refugees. The anti-immigrant premier has folded to public sympathy for Ukrainians — but the welcome doesn’t extend to everyone fleeing war.
The images of genuine popular self-determination in the streets of Kiev are empty ones.
Georgian liberals hope Saturday’s election will see a shift toward pro-EU parties. Yet the Georgian state’s dependence on bigger powers is making the country’s politics part of a wider geopolitical contest, as tensions rise between the US, Russia, and China.
The Russian aggression in Ukraine has triggered a revival of Cold War liberalism. After decades of self-doubt and introspection, old ideas about “the free world” and the “empire of evil” have been resurrected. But to revive the Cold War would be a serious error.
Israel’s war in Gaza has been portrayed as a gift for Moscow, helping it rally the Global South against the West. But Kremlin policy in the region has long relied on a tacit deal with Israel — and its unraveling is causing splits within Russia’s elite.
The strikes in Belarus last week showed that the protests against Alexander Lukashenko aren’t just a “hipster rebellion.” But while citizens are joining the protests for all manner of different reasons, there are well-organized neoliberal forces well-placed to assert their own control.
Vladimir Putin claims to be defending populations in the Donbas. In fact, the Kremlin-controlled statelets there are dominated by military rule and repression of organized labor — a troubling indicator of the future Putin has in store for neighboring regions.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion was meant to last just a few days. But Ukrainian resistance turned it into yet another imperial quagmire — showing that the great powers aren’t as able to reshape the modern world as they think.
You might think everyone agrees the Iraq War was a complete humanitarian and strategic disaster. But a casual survey of today’s politicians and mainstream talking heads reveals that many in corridors of power think the invasion was fundamentally a good idea.