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"I'm particularly concerned about the large Facebook stock buy given that we already know the Saudis had agents at Twitter to spy on Saudi dissidents," Ben Freeman, a director at the Washington-based Center for International Policy, told AFP.

Nobody in his right mind would have made such remarks in the wake of the brutal and sadistic murder of George Floyd. Actually, no one in his right mind made these remarks. Only Donald Trump would declare that new unemployment numbers made it a “great day” for George Floyd. The statement was so shocking that it drew little comment.

Current U.S. strategic doctrine is dangerously misguided, so much so that it actually makes nuclear war more likely. That’s the conclusion of an essential new book by former Secretary of Defense William Perry and Tom Collina, the Director of Policy at the Ploughshares Fund. The book – entitled The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump – offers a primer on how to make the world a safer place and stave off the threat of nuclear catastrophe.

There is an “ICBM lobby” in the U.S., and the Center for International Policy’s William Hartung has a new two-page explainer on it all that just went live today. “The ICBM lobby is a major reason the United States continues to invest in ICBMs despite the obvious dangers of continuing to deploy them,” Hartung writes. And now America’s newest “ICBM — known formally as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) — is slated to cost between $85 billion and $150 billion, money that could be better spent on other priorities,” Hartung writes.

“It makes sense because Egypt has tried to block both U.S. officials and the press from what’s going on in the Sinai,” said William Hartung, the director of the arms and security project at the Center for International Policy and a co-author of the recent report analyzing U.S. security assistance to Egypt. “The fact that they’re acknowledging it is worth something, but the question is, are they going to do something about it?”

William Hartung, the director of the arms and security project at the Center for International Policy, worries about the lack of public awareness of dramatic policy shifts or scrutiny of emerging technologies, such as hypersonic weapons, that reduce an already short response time to missile launches, as well as the further weaponization of space.

It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.

William Hartung and Miriam Pemberton discuss the need to transition from militarized economies to industrialized economies, and the details of how that transition should be carried out.

“With a shift in strategy, we can be safer while spending less,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Program at Center for International Policy. “I think we could cut the budget by at least 10% to 15% from current levels, for savings of over $1.2 trillion over the next decade that could be shifted to more urgent priorities like dealing with and preventing pandemics and addressing the greatest risk of all — climate change.”

Donald Trump has been at war for the past three and a half years as president of the United States. But he is waging his war against U.S. institutions and norms.

Sales to Saudi Arabia are not the only questionable deals being pursued by the Trump administration. According to a new report by the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, the administration made over $85 billion in arms offers last year, the most since President Trump took office.

Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy has documented the dangerously unaccountable and covert expansion of the influence of foreign governments and military-industrial interests over U.S. foreign policy in recent years, in which registered lobbyists are only the "tip of the iceberg" when it comes to foreign influence.