PRESS ROOM

The arms makers and their allies in Congress and the executive branch won’t give up without a fight when it comes to the pandemic of Pentagon spending. You can count on that. A crucial question of this moment is: Will fear, exaggerated threats, and pork-barrel politics be enough to keep the Pentagon and its contractors fat and happy, even as the urgent priorities of so many of the rest of us are starved of much-needed funding?

For Biden and for the U.S., which has seen its global standing plummet under Trump, a change on Yemen could be the first step to showing Washington will approach the world differently. “The U.S. needs to prioritize human rights in our foreign policy,” said Yasmine Taeb of the Center for International Policy.

Danny Sjursen joins us today to discuss the history of the Irish Republican Army and how they compare to modern resistance movements.

William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, offered a partial solution to this problem in a recent interview with the Intercept, “Anyone with defense industry ties should be thoroughly questioned on those connections in confirmation hearings, and pledge to recuse themselves from issues relating to former employers or clients.”

Intellectual merriment loses luster when it amounts to dancing on thousands of fresh graves filled with family members of the tens of thousands more newly displaced. Only the implications of the ceasefire’s terms — under which Armenian troops withdraw from Nagorno-Karabakh after a 26 years occupation and replaced by Russian peacekeepers — are also disturbing. The outcome also set potentially long-lasting precedents.

Algeria has signed a contract to buy 14 Russian Sukhoi Su-57 bombers as the arms race with its neighbour Morocco intensifies, a Moroccan news site reported. Recent data published by the Center for International Policy (CIP) has shown that Morocco purchases 91% of its arms from the U.S., more than any other country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Twenty-nine arms control and human rights organizations have signed a letter opposing the sale of $23 billion worth of missiles, fighter jets and drones to the United Arab Emirates and asking the U.S. Congress to block the deal. The letter, which will be sent to lawmakers and the U.S. State Department, said, “The planned arms sales to the UAE, a party to the conflicts in Yemen and Libya, would fuel continued civilian harm and further exacerbate these humanitarian crises.”

Now that Joe Biden is slated to take office as the 46th president of the United States, advice on how he should address a wide range of daunting problems is flooding in. Nowhere is there more at stake than when it comes to how he handles this country’s highly militarized foreign policy in general and Pentagon spending in particular.

Senator Turner and Maj. Danny A. Sjursen (author, historian, anti-war progressive) break down the very real and very alarming state of how our government defines safety and how toxic masculinity fuels it. These two are both done being polite as they discuss the impending threat of current-day civil war, because as Major Sjursen says, "The veneer of civilization is very thin."

Donald Trump is making sure that President-elect Joe Biden has great difficulty getting out of the starting gate in January. The Trump administration’s economic warfare against China over the past several years will make it particularly difficult for Biden to pursue the necessary adjustments for one of the most important relationships in the world, the Sino-American relationship. For the past several years, Trump has pursued a trade and tariff war against China that has harmed U.S. farmers and consumers, and has restricted the profitable trade of technology with Chinese firms.

Critics in the United States have objected to arms sales to the Philippines, where thousands of extrajudicial killings have occurred during Duterte’s war on illegal drugs. The extrajudicial killings mean the U.S. shouldn’t provide arms to the Philippines, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, wrote in a 28 May opinion article for The Hill.

“People are being gunned down in the streets without benefit of a trial or formal charges,” he wrote.

In an Intercept profile from 2018, William Hartung, an arms control expert at the Center for International Policy, said, “The revolving door is a longstanding feature of the military-industrial complex, and it can lead to distorted policy decisions based on the financial interests of former government employees.”