PRESS ROOM

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy, agrees. “Once on the job, he made noises about reforming Pentagon purchasing practices and decisions, but nothing major changed,” he told RS.

“The U.S. is still embroiled in multiple wars, the Pentagon is still planning to spend $1.7 trillion on a new generation of nuclear weapons, we are still buying unworkable weapons like the F-35, and the size of the military has not been reduced to reflect what should be our new priorities — dealing with pandemics, climate change, a severe economic recession and racial injustice,” Hartung added.

The four-year circus will soon leave town, and the clean-up effort will take at least a decade. The three rings of Trump’s circus—his White House, his do-nothing Senate, and his politicized judiciary—have contaminated governance, and given the Biden administration the worst political inheritance in U.S. history both at home and abroad.

The UAE’s perception of political dissent as a threat to the regime strongly influences its national security agenda. The United States’ emphasis on the “war on terror” enabled a convenient justification for Abu Dhabi to pursue domestic political repression. The UAE also aligns its interventionist campaigns with U.S. counterterrorism initiatives in the region, which has enabled it to pursue its authoritarian policies on a regional scale. U.S. lawmakers and officials should reflect on the monarchy’s political repression in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, to ensure that the U.S. does not also misconduct counterterrorism and execute terror instead

The divisions between leadership, rank and file, and politicized law enforcement would be exposed by a contested election, says veteran Danny Sjursen, and the military institution may not survive in the form it has today.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), and director of the soon-to-launch Eisenhower Media Network (EMN). His work has appeared in the NY Times, LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, The American Conservative, Mother Jones, Scheer Post and Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War. Along with fellow vet Chris "Henri" Henriksen, he co-hosts the podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet and on his website for media requests and past publications.

Danny Sjursen, an antiwar activist who served Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, believes that while prominent military leaders may have abandoned Trump, the president’s pledge to end wars gave him enduring support among the rank and file.

“Veterans are generally tired of the wars,” Sjursen said. “But some them are the same guys who are very anti-PC, very anti-identity politics, and maybe have a sense of Trump as being the last line of defense to that.

“They see Trump as a protector,” he added. "So if someone who was, say, softer or more liberal would have talked about this, it wouldn’t necessarily have had the same impact.”

“The United States is running an arms race with itself in the Middle East at the moment,” according to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy in Washington, a left-leaning think tank founded by peace activists after the Vietnam War, told the BBC.

Chris Lombardi, editor at Democratic Left Online, stops by the podcast to discuss her new book “I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars." It’s an amazing history of military dissenters, conscientious objectors, and their hard, but determined path of dissent.

The [Heshmat] Alavi tweet that [Richard] Grenell promoted showed Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) standing near two women, Iranian-American journalist Negar Mortazavi and Yasmine Taeb, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a think tank. It asserts they are former members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which it falsely calls “Iran’s lobby arm in DC.” In fact, the event pictured was a January 29, 2017, protest in Washington of Trump’s Muslim ban—an event that Mortazavi and Taeb helped organize.

"The United States is running an arms race with itself in the Middle East at the moment, says William Hartung of the Center for International Policy in Washington, a left-leaning think tank founded by peace activists after the Vietnam War.

He dubs the officially-titled Abraham Accords an ""arms sale accord"", believing that if other countries like Saudi Arabia join the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan in normalising relations with Israel they could expect even more access to the US arms industry."

It all comes down to this. After around 18 months of speculation and primaries, the election is Tuesday. The country is at a crossroads of immense proportions. And to add to the leftist/progressive discussion and atmosphere of the 2020 presidential election, here is an analysis of the critical points of Joe Biden’s record concerning foreign policy and a brief examination of his domestic record relating to racial justice, to include a half dozen sound clips from the man himself. This was a difficult episode to create, given the polarizing nature of Biden’s record and American politics today more generally, and it will be difficult to hear as well. Please email us with your comments, let us know where you fall, whether you agree or disagree, and be sure to vote on Tuesday!

On the one hand, donating to institutions such as think tanks may be about establishing a potential toehold over policy decisions in Washington. Indeed, such considerations have helped spark recent calls for greater transparency within American think tank funding, with many failing to disclose details about their substantial donations received. This month, the State Department specifically called on think tanks to “disclose prominently on their websites funding they receive from foreign governments, including state-owned or state-operated subsidiary entities.”