PRESS ROOM

In particular, US policy on land-based missiles is outdated and should be changed. This policy creates the risk that the United States could launch these missiles by mistake in response to a false alarm—and start a nuclear war. The reasons that led the United States to accept this risk in the 1960s are no longer valid.

The COVID-19 crisis and the movement for racial justice have transformed the debate on what makes Americans safe, from calls to shift Pentagon spending to public health infrastructure to demands for defunding of the police. But Congress and the presidential candidates have lagged behind public sentiment on many of these issues, most notably the need for a radical rethinking of U.S. foreign and military policies.

“It’s troubling that a registered foreign agent being paid by Saudi Arabia is working to defeat a candidate that is critical of Saudi Arabia,” said Ben Freeman, a researcher at the Center for International Policy.

It is customary for the political rhetoric to get heated during a presidential campaign, which will find Donald Trump and Joe Biden vying for honors in the field of national security and militancy, but there should be some balance and context from the mainstream media.

The summer before her junior year, Bello interned for Rep. Jim McGovern. The experience gave her a solid foundation in politics and allowed her to engage with a number of issues she’s passionate about, including immigration. The following year, she interned at the International Institute of New England in Boston, where she helped resettle refugees to the United States and worked with people who had been granted asylum, helping them to locate resources, enroll in ESL classes, and job train. This summer, she is interning at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for International Policy, where she works in the Africa Program, researching U.S. foreign policy toward Africa.

The US military doesn’t have to face such a barrage of criticism even though failures like those above, which occurred in real life weapons systems, are common in military contracting. Defense analyst William Hartung argues at Tomdispatch.org: “Washington’s reflexive prioritizing of the interests of defense contractors has meant paying remarkably little attention to, and significantly underfunding, public health. Now, Americans are paying the price.”

Saudi Arabia, currently the largest importer of global arms, buys precision-guided bombs, aircraft, maintenance and missiles from the US. “Pretty much every part of the Saudi military gets some sort of weapon from the United States,” said William Hartung, director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy.

“Science denialism” is the worst aspect of the current political climate because it is costing lives. Donald Trump and Mike Pence are leading the movement, even supporting the notion that vaccines cause autism. Pence denies evolution as a concept. Trump’s hostility to science led to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Further, there was a two-year delay in the appointment of a director to the White House Office of Science and Technology, the science adviser to the President.

William Barr, Trump’s Cat’s Paw, was appointed as Attorney General of the United States in 2019. According to such political texts as How Democracy Dies by Harvard Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the first authoritarian step in compromising the rule of law and the rule of democracy is to compromise law enforcement. Barr’s loyalty over the past two years has been to the President of the United States and not to the American people.

Trump has mishandled every foreign policy and national security issue for the past three and a half years; why would anyone expect him to get this one right. The fact that he was making a series of calls to President Vladimir Putin regarding a return to the G-7 even as his National Security Council was discussing the bounty issue and the intelligence community was providing threat warnings to NATO members with troops in Afghanistan is simply too bizarre for words.

Think of it as a war system that’s been coming home for years. The murder of George Floyd has finally shone a spotlight on the need to defund local police departments and find alternatives that provide more genuine safety and security. The same sort of spotlight needs soon to be shone on the American military machine and the wildly well-funded damage it’s been doing for almost 19 years across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Nevertheless, Dubai and the UAE are widely viewed internationally as upstanding entities. Leading companies place their regional offices there: 138 out of 500 of the world’s largest companies (by revenue) have a regional headquarters in Dubai. Over the last decade, the United States sold $27 billion in military equipment to the UAE, a country former U.S. secretary of state James Mattis affectionately called “Little Sparta.”