What few of us realized at the time was that the neoliberal counterrevolution that took off in the late 1970s had an earlier manifestation in the early part of the twentieth century, and this had provided a theoretical and policy arsenal that the later movement drew upon.

Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way for Fascism is a masterful fusion of archival research, ideological deconstruction, and political economy that captures the post-World War I era, which was marked by acute class conflict. Although the revolution in Russia is quite familiar, less well-known is the situation in Western Europe, where there was a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, though of a less violent sort. Mattei is convincing when she documents how the role of the state in controlling all dimensions of the economy for the war effort led unwittingly to a “denaturalization” of the market economy, that is, to an unmasking of the “laws of the market” as really a political project benefiting a few that provided workers with a glimpse of a possible alternative order.

Reconstructionists and L’Ordine Nuovo

Focusing on the situation in Britain and Italy, Mattei details the two key responses to the revolutionary ferment. The “enlightened reconstructionist elite” sought to buy social peace by having the state take an active role in providing workers with better housing, social insurance against old age and disabilities, and greater educational opportunities, all of which entailed expansive budgets. The reconstructionists were not a homogenous grouping, nor did they seek to dismantle the hierarchical order. Yet they shared “a revulsion to competitive individualism and laissez-faire capitalism,” thus “profoundly disputing the economic doctrine that for centuries had stood as the cornerstone of capital accumulation.” In many ways, they were the ideological predecessors of the Keynesian economists of the post-World II era.

The reconstructionists triggered a process that saw a “mutually enhancing relation between reforms and working-class consciousness,” so that “ironically, the reformists, who had bent the iron laws of the market to avoid a revolution, had actually contributed to sparking another one.” The leading force in this radical offspring of the reformists was the Turin-based L’Ordine nuovo group whose key movers were the young Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, and Angelo Tasca.

Gramsci is often encountered only as a theorist, as the source of the many provocative insights of the Prison Notebooks. One of the many delights of Mattei’s book is its showing how these ideas were forged by Gramsci in action, as he, along with his comrades, sought to channel a spontaneous working-class rebellion into a revolutionary movement.  The “factory occupation” movement that radiated throughout Northern Italy from Turin was guided by four insights, developed in industrial combat. One was that there was no natural order of things, that market relations, especially the sale of labor power in return for wages, were really socially constructed assertions of the power of one class over another.

Second was that if the labor-capitalist relationship was not a functional one but one of exploitation, then it was the task of workers to create a new relationship to the means of production, which was to take over managing them, mainly through the agency of “factory councils.” Third, praxis was central in forging the new relationship between worker and machines, and among workers. As Mattei puts it, “L’Ordine nuovo was a full-blown experimental trial of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; now is the time to change it.” Thus, the practical experience of organizing within factory councils was understood as the people’s “new school.”  The factory councils, she observes, “were the living expression of praxis, their regulations guaranteed a melding of theory and practice that was in concept essential for self-government.”

The final principle that animated Gramsci and his comrades was the unity of politics and economics, as opposed to the separation between a formally democratic political sphere and an autonomous economic realm governed by immutable laws over which people had no control. As Gramsci put it, “[B]orn from labor, the [council] adheres to the process of industrial production…within it economics and politics merge, in it the exercise of sovereignty is all one with the act of production…in it the proletarian democracy is realized.”

Saving Capital

Massive strikes in Britain and the factory occupations in Italy in the years 1919-20 gave the establishment the sense that the European working class had capitalism by the throat. It is at this juncture that economic technocrats came to the rescue. These figures, like R.G. Hawtrey and Otto Niemeyer in Britain and Alberto De Steffani, Maffeo Pantaleoni, Umberto Ricci, and Luigi Einaudi in Italy, realized that the challenge was not simply to impose economic and political order; it was, fundamentally, to reestablish the ideological hegemony over workers that had been destroyed by the explosive conjuncture of the war economy, the reformist movement, and the factory insurgency. In short, the ideological context that would allow capital accumulation to take place had to be restored.

What they formulated, though working largely independently, was an economic paradigm whose centerpiece was savings. The economy could not function without savings, which were needed for investment in production. This meant savings had to be channeled to the figure who could invest rather than consume them, meaning the capitalist or entrepreneur, the person who personified the virtues of austerity. Workers in this model were seen as people that were unable to save but consumed resources that could otherwise be invested, or they were depicted as incapable of managing the process of turning savings into investment that would keep the industrial machine functioning, to the benefit of the whole society.

The technocrats sought to portray the austerity paradigm as constituting a set of universal economic laws, while being quite conscious it was designed to reassert the control of the capitalist class. Equally important, they sought not just to intellectually convince people; they were out to get them to morally internalize austerity. Thus, the emphasis on saving and thrift as virtuous.

Restoring Class Hierarchy

Austerity had interrelated dimensions: fiscal, meaning cutting or keeping down budgetary expenditures; monetary, meaning keeping interest rates high and tying the money supply to gold; and industrial, meaning depressing wages to ensure a high investment rate. It is amazing how the later incarnation of austerity in structural adjustment in the 1980s was so faithful to the original. And likewise striking is how the austerity formula failed to produce the promised economic growth in both instances owing to what its critics pointed to as its internal contradictions.

As I pointed out in my 1994 book, Dark Victory, there were hardly any successful cases of structural adjustment, the reason being that its key elements got the economy stuck in a “low level trap, in which…increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption , and low output interact to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline, rather than a virtuous circle of growth, rising employment, and rising investment, as originally envisaged by World Bank theory.”

Mattei’s answer to this seeming paradox is that austerity was never designed to restore growth. That was rhetoric designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the workers and the reconstructionists. The real aim was to repair the fraying class relations of capitalism, to reinvigorate the “capital order.”

Coercion Supplements Consensus

The technocrats’ ideological offensive was aimed at both ideologically disarming the working class and discrediting the reconstructionists. In Italy, however, with the ideological liberation spearheaded by Gramsci’s L’ordine nuovo, the technocrats realized that ideological disarmament had to be accompanied by violence, or as Mattei puts it, using Gramsci’s terminology, consensus and coercion were an inseparable pair. Fascist terror against rebellious workers and Mussolini’s authoritarian rule once the fascists seized state power were necessary to recreate the social context for capital accumulation to take place without hindrance.

Mussolini, Mattei points out, enjoyed the support of the international establishment, even of avowed adherents to parliamentary democracy in their countries, like the Governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman, who expressed dislike for Mussolini’s elimination of the political opposition even as he wrote to his friend John Pierpoint Morgan, Jr, the American banker, that “Fascism has surely brought order out of chaos over the last few years: something of the kind was no doubt needed if the pendulum was not to swing too far in the other direction. The Duce was the right man at a critical moment.”

This hypocritical deploring of fascist violence while approving the technocrats’ ideological cleansing would be repeated f50 years later, when the international establishment lamented General Augusto Pinochet’s killing and imprisonment of thousands of Chileans while lauding the Chicago Boys inspired by economist Milton Friedman, who were reproducing the conditions for the market economy to regain traction after Salvador Allende’s statist interventions. Chile in the early 1970s was the guinea pig for structural adjustment, which was then generalized to over 70 countries in the Global South over the next 20 years.

Mattei’s account makes clear that economists and technocrats are not mere accessories or instruments of the capitalist class. They are essential to the reproduction of capitalism, and their relative autonomy as agents of the system becomes particularly pronounced when the system is in crisis. The managerial capitalist elite may have been unhappy with the class compromise represented by the triad of Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor in late 1970s America, but they were willing to live with it. They were not the ones that took the lead in pushing the U.S. economy in a neoliberal or market fundamentalist direction, an enterprise that restored the hegemony of capital by disorganizing and disempowering labor. It was economists with profoundly ideological convictions, like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Arnold Harberger that led the charge.

Economists, to use Mattei and Gramsci’s terminology, are the organic intellectuals of the Capital Order.

The post Capital’s Organic Intellectuals appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided not to block access to the drug via telemedicine for now, while lower court cases play out. But those lower court decisions — and the broader policy debate around the medication —  have echoed misinformation and false narratives spread by anti-abortion activists.

For example, the previous Fifth Circuit Court ruling cited “irreparable harm” to the state of Louisiana, noting that the state spent public funds on care for two women “harmed by mifepristone,” and repeated debunked claims that up to 4.6 percent of women taking it require “emergency care.”

Days later, the Iowa State Senate passed a bill banning remote prescription of mifepristone. In the floor debate Sen. Jason Schultz repeatedly called it “poison.” And in March, as U.S. Senators launched a probe to crack down on mifepristone manufacturers and online sales, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith claimed, “More than 1 in 10 women who take mifepristone will experience a serious adverse event.”

The problem is, these things aren’t true.

Mifepristone’s alleged harms are junk science and false narrative propagated by an antiabortion group.  Over a hundred scientific studies overwhelmingly prove mifepristone’s safety and efficacy. When patients taking it visit the ER, it’s often for monitoring or to confirm they are no longer pregnant. Adverse effects are far below 1 percent. In fact it’s not mifepristone, but the campaign to restrict it putting patients at risk, a report by Congressional Democrats concluded.

Still, such false narratives are everywhere these days. In my fields — family planning, demography, gender-based violence — misinformation and disinformation flood the zone. Correcting the record can be an exhausting, Sisyphean task.

For example, claims that hormonal contraceptives cause health damage, from fertility loss to depression to heart trouble, are false. It’s actually the anti-birth control movement that harms women. That hasn’t stopped posts about hormonal birth control’s supposed harms from getting billions of hits on TikTok and other platforms.

Hormonal birth control is up to 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, while the “rhythm method” might be the choice of some couples but is among the least effective forms of birth control. That hasn’t stopped online influencers from touting it, or menstrual tracking apps like 28 (funded by billionaire Trump donor Peter Thiel) from marketing themselves as superior alternatives to hormonal birth control. Not incidentally, those apps glean data about users’ cycles that could potentially be weaponized against them if they seek an abortion.

How are health and rights advocates supposed to counteract false, gaslighting, toxic narratives like these? One way is to reframe them with truthful, forthright, nontoxic ones. When public discourse devolves into fictional storytelling, fictional storytelling can evolve into impactful forms of public discourse.

False narratives have harmful effects. Fact-based entertainment narratives can have beneficial ones.

For example TelevisaUnivision’s hit telenovela “Papás Por Conveniencia” (“Family of Convenience”) worked with researchers and field experts to tell honest, compelling stories about teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and gender-based violence. It attracted millions of viewers in Mexico and the United States, demonstrably shifting attitudes toward contraceptive use and talking openly about prevention.

“Toma Mi Mano” (“Take My Hand”) started out as a radio drama on community stations, caught on with audiences in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States, and recently became a TikTok series. Its characters grapple with teen pregnancy, sexual abuse, gender-based violence, and gang violence. Epilogues engage audiences in discussions of these issues, offering accurate information and resources to help deal with them.

Zambia has high rates of early marriage, teen pregnancy, gender-based violence, and HIV. When these issues were confronted honestly in a call-in radio talk show,  a radio drama miniseries, and a comic book roadshow, contraceptive awareness grew and social norms began to shift.

Such stories don’t just entertain — they change lives and improve public health, and amid disruption in foreign aid, they do it cost-effectively. “Papás Por Conveniencia” reached 6 million people a night in Mexico City alone and had measurable impacts. The price tag for addressing social issues directly in the drama? A little over $10,000 per episode. Compare that to the  $15 billion a year teen pregnancy costs governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Similar programming in the United States could make a world of difference when it comes to public attitudes about abortion care, birth control, mifepristone access, or related issues.

At a recent Social Impact Entertainment event my organization co-sponsored, Jane Fonda spoke about the primary importance of storytelling for positive change. “It’s the storytellers and educators…that are on the front lines,” she said. “Because we get into people’s heads and hearts. We change how people think.”

Storytelling, not reactive rebuttal, is where the true power of communication lies. Misinformation has grown so rampant that it’s no longer enough, and maybe no longer possible, to correct the record point-by-point. To be effective advocates, it’s now imperative to shift the narrative itself.

The post Storytelling, Not Rebuttal, May Be the Best Antidote to Misinformation About Reproductive Care appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Yet, the true crisis facing Western security architecture is not one of diplomatic resolve or moral courage. It is a crisis of raw arithmetic. From outside the transatlantic bubble, the arithmetic is even starker. The strategic ledger no longer balances. As Russia increasingly shifts toward sustained aerial bombardment amid stalled ground advances, and Ukraine expands its own long-range drone strike capability deep into Russian territory, the war is steadily mutating into an industrial contest of production endurance rather than territorial maneuver.

Concurrently, a quiet tremor has rippled through the defense establishments in Washington and Brussels following a devastating assessment published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Emerging data indicates that during the intense naval and aerial deployment in the recent Middle Eastern conflict, U.S. forces expended an unprecedented amount of their most advanced munitions, including hundreds of Tomahawk missiles, alongside hundreds of Patriot and THAAD interceptors. CSIS notes that some these interceptor lines produce only dozens of units per year, making this single campaign equivalent to multiple years of output. To put that figure in perspective: a campaign lasting just over a month absorbed multiple years of the entire production capacity of America’s premier precision munitions lines.

This convergence of events exposes a profound and deeply unsettling reality that the transatlantic alliance has spent decades avoiding. Since the end of the Cold War, the ultimate guarantor of global stability was not merely the moral authority of international law or the shared values of democratic states. It was the myth of the infinite warehouse, the deeply ingrained global belief that the American “arsenal of democracy” possessed a bottomless, rapidly deployable inventory of high-tech, precision deterrents capable of suppressing multiple global crises simultaneously. The West built its strategic posture on this myth, and its collapse marks a civic and geopolitical inflection point.

While Western political leaders continue to project an aura of total strategic dominance from podiums in Washington and Brussels, the physical lines of production tell a completely different story. According to the data, the Pentagon is staring at a timeline where replenishing these depleted missile stocks to pre-war levels will take until late 2030. The gap between Western rhetoric and Western capacity has never been wider. Adversaries can read the spreadsheet as clearly as anyone in NATO.

The Western defense apparatus was engineered for an era that no longer exists, a brief, historical parenthesis characterized by localized, asymmetric interventions against non-state actors where precision ammunition was used sparingly. It was never structured to sustain a protracted, high-intensity industrial conflict, let alone manage simultaneous flashpoints across the European, Middle Eastern, and Indo-Pacific theaters. Precision-guided missiles, advanced air-defense interceptors, and long-range strike capabilities are not digital commodities that can be scaled up with a software patch when a geopolitical crisis erupts. They are complex, slow-growing industrial crops requiring specialized supply chains, rare materials, and highly restricted manufacturing infrastructure that cannot be easily expanded. The West confused technological elegance with strategic resilience, a mistake that has now been exposed in real time.

The consumption rates witnessed over the past weeks demonstrate that deterrence is rapidly becoming a bluff. When Washington burns through years of accumulated missile stockpiles to contain a regional crisis in the Middle East, it inadvertently signals to adversaries in the Indo-Pacific that the Western shield is bounded by strict physical limitations. For planners in Beijing, the implication is stark: a United States that requires years to replenish critical missile inventories cannot credibly assume sustained deterrence simultaneously across Europe, the Middle East, and the Taiwan Strait. A deterrent that can be physically exhausted within months of intensive combat ceases to be an effective shield. It is instead a finite resource that can be deliberately out-produced, out-lasted, and overwhelmed by an adversary with a superior manufacturing base.

This reality places America’s allies, from the frontline states of Eastern Europe to the maritime borders of Southeast Asia, in an existential bind. As Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense has warned, intercepting ballistic threats remains an acute vulnerability when critical interceptors are lacking on the front lines. European capitals are beginning to recognize that the primary threat to their security is no longer an unpredictable shifting of political winds in Washington or the outcome of the next presidential election cycle but the hard reality of a depleted American inventory. The American shield is not lacking in political sympathy or strategic intent; it is simply running out of physical components.

For decades, the West substituted industrial capacity with high-tech sophistication, operating under the comfortable doctrine that superior precision could compensate for lower mass. Kyiv’s burning skyline and Washington’s strained logistical spreadsheets prove that in a peer-competitor conflict, mass still matters. The world is transitioning away from the era of diplomatic grandstanding and into a volatile new epoch where the global balance of power will not be determined by the elegance of treaties or the rhetoric of international summits but by the physical layout, workforce availability, and output velocity of precision assembly lines. The future of the international order will be decided not in conference halls but on factory floors.

By treating defense manufacturing as a transactional, just-in-time commercial endeavor rather than a core pillar of national strategy, the West has allowed its structural foundation to atrophy. This vulnerability cannot be quickly repaired with emergency funding or sudden political consensus; a Tomahawk missile cannot be printed into existence by a congressional appropriation. The choice before the West is stark: rebuild the arsenal or accept the twilight of the shield that protected it for generations.

The post The Dwindling Arsenal and the Twilight of the Western Shield appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Foot-draggers, in other words, can reap a lot of benefits, whether as a result of ignorance (not knowing about a new product), fear (of making a mistake), or strategic patience. But too many foot-draggers could doom innovation.

Public policy is often designed to reward early adopters and light a fire underneath the foot-draggers. During the Biden years, EV buyers could receive a tax rebate, and the administration invested money into the expansion of charging stations. As a result, consumers rejiggered their cost-benefit analyses, and for a short period demand exceeded supply. As more companies went into the EV business, the United States, at least briefly, began to move away from the combustion engine.

The Paris Agreement was supposed to create an overall environment to shape such Green public policies. Unfortunately, the Paris targets were voluntary, which meant that countries could make grand statements of commitment while dragging their feet in reality. The ubiquity of “Green-dragging”—the slow-walking of carbon-reduction strategies—has produced the inevitable results: steadily increasing global emissions, the spiraling costs of loss and damage, and a general skepticism that international cooperation can ever really tackle a problem of such magnitude.

Then along came Donald Trump, who has proudly proclaimed his climate denialism. To the delight of the fossil fuel companies that poured money into his reelection campaign, the president has pledged to extract every bit of oil, gas, and coal from beneath the United States. He hasn’t stopped there. To gain access to every last scrap of extractable value in the world—Venezuela’s oil, Greenland’s minerals—Trump has engaged in truly reckless behavior.

In his riskiest move yet, the American president joined Israel in attacking Iran at the end of February. His rationales were many: to “solve” a problem that had bedeviled presidents going back to the hostage crisis of 1979, to punish the ayatollahs that have taunted him, to upend the politics of the Middle East. But he also dreamed of controlling Iranian fossil fuel assets.

Yet this poorly planned, fitfully executed, and shamelessly promoted campaign has backfired in more than one sense. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which in turn prompted Trump to blockade the blockade, has boosted the price of oil at the pumps in the United States. And it has pushed countries all over the world to rethink their commitment to the fossil fuels that have been blockaded in the Persian Gulf. The fossil fuels that Trump wants to make more available have instead become more scarce.

Will the Iran war prove to be sufficient to shake the Green-draggers of the world out of their torpor? Much will depend on Asia.

What the War Has Done

Very few countries have insulated themselves from the energy shocks of the Iran War and the double blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. Poorer countries that rely on fossil fuel imports are the hardest hit: rolling blackouts in Bangladesh, fuel rationing in Myanmar, school closures in Pakistan. The rising cost of fertilizer—and the consequent reduction in global food supplies from such developments as the halving of this year’s Australian wheat harvest—will hit poor countries even harder.

You’d think that the countries that have pushed hard to transition to clean energy would be able to breathe easy despite the double blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But that’s not been the case. Uruguay gets 99 percent of its electricity from renewables, but it still relies on a good deal of imported fossil fuels to supply almost 40 percent of its overall energy needs. Several European countries—Denmark, Portugal, The Netherlands, Lithuania, and Luxemburg, with Spain, Ireland, Germany, and Greece not far beyond—are approaching the magic goal of sourcing their electricity entirely from renewable sources, but they too continue to import considerable amounts of oil and gas for heating and other purposes.

Even countries that produce oil and gas in large quantities have been adversely affected by the war. The Gulf States have faced enormous difficulties getting their products to market—and have also suffered damage to their energy infrastructure from Iranian attacks. The United States, despite an abundance of oil, has seen a substantial increase of prices at the pump. Although it can be considered a “winner” of the Iran war because of the increased demand for its oil and gas, Russia’s windfall profits have been compromised by sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes on key production and processing facilities.

Until recently, the countries that have dragged their feet in their exit from the fossil-fuel era were largely failing on the environmental front. They weren’t paying the upfront costs of preventing the planet from overheating, either because they didn’t sense the urgency of the situation or they wanted a free ride on an emissions-reduction bandwagon driven and paid for by others. It wasn’t because of outright denial of global warming. Other than the United States under Trump, it is hard to find a government that actively ignores the science of climate change. Still, such countries weren’t making the huge investments necessary—at home or as part of climate justice payments to the Global South—necessary to reduce emissions.

More recently, with the price of solar and wind power along with battery storage dropping precipitously, “Green-dragging” has been economically counterproductive as well. But inertia is a powerful force. An energy transition is more than just slapping a few panels on top of a parking lot or building a couple windmills on top of a mountain. Shifting away from fossil fuels requires a buildout of electricity infrastructure, the introduction of new fleets of electricity-powered public transportation, and the replacement of residential and business heating systems reliant on oil and gas. That not only costs money but requires strategic investments from motivated governments.

China showcases the push-pull dynamic of the energy transition. It has quickly transformed itself into a leader of the energy transition by pushing for adoption domestically—adding more solar capacity each year than the rest of the world combined—and grabbing 80 percent of the global market share for solar panels (as well as 60 percent of the wind turbines). It recently debuted an EV battery that can go for nearly 1,000 miles on a single charge that takes only about 6 seconds. This development alone will transform global transportation.

Yet China is also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses and remains heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports. In 2024, for example, China relied on fossil fuels for 86 percent of its energy supply. The country has one foot in the past and one in the future.

Japan is an equally stark example of a “Green-dragger.” To be sure, Japan was a pioneer in energy efficiency from the 1970s on. It was a leading innovator in the global environment movement for several decades. More recently, the government introduced a plan for Green industrialization. But the Iran War has revealed just how little progress the country has made in its energy transition and how domestic roadblocks continue to impede its progress.

The Price of Industrialization

Japan’s post-war economic miracle was fueled by imported fossil fuels. The country produces no natural gas and virtually no oil. Its coal production is negligible.

Not surprisingly, Japan is the second largest natural gas importer in the world (behind China), the third largest coal importer (behind China and India), and the fifth largest importer of oil. All of this imported dirty energy has pushed Japan into the number five position globally for its carbon emissions.

Environmentalism certainly exists in Japan. Thanks to the efforts of environmental movements, the air in Tokyo and other cities is no longer toxic. High-profile cases like the mercury poisoning in the coastal city of Minamata precipitated a campaign to clean up waterways. Japanese programs established some early environmental projects in China in the 1990s.

But change comes slowly to Japan, especially from the top down. Japanese governments have been willing to take risks on technology, but they have also been loath to embrace policies that could potentially disrupt the social fabric.

So, for instance, like the European Union and the United States under the Biden administration, Japan has committed to a government-led transition to clean energy. Its Green industrial plan—the GX Basic Policy—focuses on investments into batteries and semiconductors and is coordinating investments among nearly 750 companies. It recently launched an emissions trading system, Yet none of this will wean the country of its addiction to fossil fuels at anything close to the rate necessary to achieve rapid decarbonization.

Moreover, the country remains wildly optimistic about the ability of technology to compensate for its lack of resolve. For instance, it has invested heavily in “clean coal” technologies. But despite claims that carbon-capture methods or “coal-ammonia co-firing” will somehow make coal power more efficient or more palatable, the thinktank E3G concludes that “decades of ‘clean coal’ promotion have left coal technologies either high-emitting in the real world, or stuck in a perpetual planning phase.”

Ultimately, then, Japan is a serious Green-dragger. Its emissions are falling but not nearly enough to meet even the tepid targets of the Paris agreement. It is heavily committed to natural gas as a “transition fuel,” and that means building up fossil fuel infrastructure. One important development is indeed driving down energy use and emissions: the country’s declining population. But that’s not a development the government is going to promote.

The Costs of War

The Iran war could push the world in one of two directions: doubling down on clean energy or trying to exit the crisis the dirty way.

Much depends on Asia. The region is expected to account for much of the increase in oil and natural gas use in the coming years. It is also responsible for 84 percent of global coal-fired power. “If Asia turns around and says, ‘No, we’re not going to grow with fossil fuels, we are going to grow with electrotech,’ that means fossil fuels will peak, and will peak sooner than we think,” Daan Walter of the think tank Ember told Grist magazine.

Even if it continues to favor fossil fuels at home, China is ready to help the rest of the world move toward clean energy. Because of the Iran War, China finds itself in the enviable position of selling lemonade in a heatwave. As The New York Times reports, lots of countries are buying what China is selling: “Fifty countries, including Australia, India, Egypt and even the United States, have set monthly records for the highest Chinese solar imports.”

Japan, with its history of environmentalism, its embrace of industrial policy, and its track record of technological innovation, could lead the region down the clean-energy path. So far, that’s not happening. As a result of the Iran War, Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has pledged to make Japan completely energy self-sufficient—not through a Green transition but with a nuclear step backward. The government has a tailwind on this issue. Over 40 percent of the population supports the restart of nuclear plants—versus around 25 percent against—which is quite the reversal 15 years after the Fukushima catastrophe.

Japan is not alone. China and South Korea are looking to beef up their nuclear sectors. Vietnam and the Philippines are looking into developing the sector.

Nuclear is neutral when it comes to carbon emissions, but it has dirty byproducts of its own (not to mention the risks of future Fukushimas). A case can be made to maintain current nuclear plants to provide energy in the interim while renewable systems are built out. But spending huge sums on new nuclear plants is a recipe for stranded assets.

Perhaps it’s naïve to believe that Japan could again be a leader in the region, this time on clean energy. South Korea has been generally more willing to take risks, such as pledging to phase out coal by 2040, but it too is basically a Green-dragger. Vietnam and India are rapidly adding renewable energy infrastructure, but they too remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

The region hasn’t yet adjusted to the new realities created by the Iran War. Countries in Asia, which will determine the future of fossil fuel use, must be a lot bolder. And someone has to take the lead. If conservative, risk-averse Japan responds to the wake-up call of the Iran War to accelerate dramatically its exit from the fossil fuel era, that could indeed inspire the rest of the region to follow suit.

And if that happens, the planet has a real chance to avoid the worst-case scenarios of climate change.

The post Saving the Planet Depends on Asia appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Algorithms set their pay, assign their tasks, monitor their performance, and determine whether they can keep working at all. The issue is not just that technology may someday replace workers. It is that companies are already using it to control them while shirking the responsibilities that normally come with that kind of control. This leaves many workers with unstable pay, dangerous conditions, and little recourse when something goes wrong. But this could be about to change.

From June 1 to 12 in Geneva, governments will enter a final round of negotiations at the International Labour Organization, the UN agency dedicated to labor rights, over the first binding global standard for what is called platform work. This new treaty would regulate jobs managed through apps and websites, from taxis and delivery to home care, cleaning, and online piecework. Governments will decide whether companies that control this work should be required to treat workers as employees and comply with labor protections.

The stakes go well beyond the gig economy. Increasingly, workers report to an algorithmic boss in hospitals, care work, domestic labor, and beyond. The question is whether governments will set rules for how companies use these systems to manage work or let companies keep writing the terms themselves.

Gig work today offers a preview of what happens when they do. These companies promise flexibility and independence. For many workers, the reality is low and unstable pay, dangerous conditions, and no sick leave, unemployment insurance, or retirement benefits.

This isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system. Companies use software to manage workers closely, then contracts to deny responsibility for them. The result is familiar cost-shifting in a new technological form: workers absorb the risks while companies maintain control.

And it is scaling fast. DoorDash, which now operates in 30 countries, reported global revenue growth of 38 percent from the same period the previous year in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Uber, operational in about 70 countries, ranked ninth on Fortune’s 2025 list of the 100 fastest-growing public companies, with earnings per share growing 445 percent over three years. These companies create value by shifting costs off the company’s books and onto everyone else.

In recent months, Human Rights Watch spoke with workers in 10 countries. They described the same kinds of abuse everywhere.

In Beirut, we spoke with Apraham Orfalian, 74, who has worked for Uber since 2015. In October 2024, a passenger held a knife to his throat, forced him out of his car, and stole his vehicle and his phone. Without the car, he lost his income. Without sick leave, workers’ compensation, or support from Uber, he had to rely on his siblings to get by. “We are workers for Uber,” he said. “We generate income for them. At least they should show responsibility.”

In Gulf countries, delivery workers described cycling in extreme heat because they felt they could not afford to refuse orders, even when conditions were unsafe. In India, a worker injured on the job was left to cover his own medical costs. In the UK, another went months without income or injury compensation after being attacked while working.

Some governments have started to act. Mexico adopted legislation extending social security and labor protections to some full-time platform workers. In India, worker protests pushed the government to restrict 10-minute delivery promises that put dangerous pressure on delivery workers. Courts in the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have recognized rights that companies tried hard to avoid. But these gains are uneven and fragile. Without global standards, companies can keep exploiting gaps.

Strong ILO standards should start from a basic principle: if a company controls the worker, it should bear the responsibilities that come with that control. That means a presumption of employment in which companies exercise employer-like power; pay for all working time, which often includes waiting for assignments; safety protections; social security; protection from arbitrary deactivation; and a meaningful right to understand and challenge algorithmic decisions that shape pay, ratings, and access to work.

Some governments are trying to weaken those protections before they are written. They want standards that simply defer to weak national laws and define workers narrowly, and promise transparency without giving workers real power to challenge the decisions that shape their livelihoods.

Companies that depend on gig workers will say stronger rules would destroy flexibility. But that flexibility doesn’t really exist for many workers. Even if a worker can choose when to log on, they deserve protection from poverty wages, arbitrary dismissal, and uncompensated injury. If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.

This is about more than how companies that use gig workers operate. It is about whether labor law can keep pace with the way companies now organize labor. If workers cannot understand or challenge the systems that govern their work, software will become an efficient way to exercise control without accountability.

Governments meeting in Geneva can still set limits and protect workers’ rights. They should use that power before exploitation becomes the blueprint.

The post AI Runs the Global Gig Economy. Governments Must Respond. appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

The climate of aggressive nationalism is clear enough. In nations around the globe, demagogues (usually of a rightwing variety) whip up xenophobia, preach superpatriotism, demand vast military buildups, and―if holding public office―often launch invasions of other nations under the banner of restoring an allegedly glorious national past.

But what is often overlooked is that, across the planet, most people favor a very different way of engaging with the world. In late 2025, Focaldata, a major research company commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, conducted a landmark survey of 36,405 people across 34 countries. The resulting report, Demanding Results: Global Views on International Cooperation, revealed that 55 percent of people worldwide “believe their country should cooperate on global challenges even if it means compromising on national interests.” If international cooperation was proven to solve global problems, public support jumped to 75 percent. Respondents viewed such cooperation as essential for food and water security, jobs, health, trade, and climate.

Other opinion surveys confirm the widespread nature of internationalist sentiment. An Ipsos poll conducted between February and April 2026 found a substantial increase over the previous year in support for global solidarity and cooperation, with net disagreement shifting to net agreement. Among the more than 22,000 adults in the 31 countries surveyed, nearly two-thirds now supported the claim that, “for certain problems, like environmental pollution, international bodies should have the right to enforce solutions.” Some 42 percent (a plurality) agreed with the idea that “my taxes should go towards solving global problems.” And nearly four out of 10 respondents (a plurality) endorsed the statement:  “I consider myself more a world citizen than a citizen of the country I live in.”

Another measure of the worldwide support for international cooperation is provided by polling on public attitudes toward international organizations. The Rockefeller Foundation-Focaldata study reported that public trust was strong for the United Nations (58 percent) and the World Health Organization (60 percent), although weaker for international financial institutions. The global popularity of the United Nations was also attested to by a Pew Research Center survey that appeared in September 2025. Covering 31,938 adults in 25 countries, it found that a median of 61 percent of adults had a favorable view of the world organization, while only 32 percent had an unfavorable one.

Even proposals for new, avant-garde global institutions have attracted more public support than opposition. Commissioned by Democracy Without Borders, Nira Data conducted a global survey in September 2025 of public attitudes toward the election of a citizen-elected world parliament to handle global issues. The survey, released in January 2026, drew upon 117,000 people in 101 countries that held 90 percent of the world’s population. The finding was that 40 percent of respondents approved of the world parliament idea, while only 27 percent opposed it.

But what about the United States? Surely in this flag-waving nation, engulfed in the rabid “America First” rhetoric of the Trump administration and its MAGA acolytes, no more than a small minority would support the ideals of global solidarity and cooperation.

But that’s not the case at all.

One of the most striking findings of the Rockefeller Foundation-Focaldata survey is that 61 percent of U.S. respondents believed that the United States should cooperate on global challenges even it meant compromising on some national interests.

When it came to the United Nations, the Pew Research Center report revealed that 57 percent of Americans held a positive view of the world organization, as compared to 41 percent with a negative one. Moreover, it found that positive views of the United Nations had increased by 5 percent over the preceding year.

A study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, issued in September 2025, reported an even more favorable public attitude toward the United Nations. Two-thirds of the Americans surveyed, it noted, said that the United States should be more willing to make decisions within the framework of the United Nations, even if this meant that the country would sometimes have to go along with a policy that was not its first choice.

Admittedly, opinion surveys found that the level of support for international cooperation varied significantly from country to country. Thus, for example, the backing for international cooperation when that meant compromising on some national interests was greater in India (81 percent) and South Korea (73 percent), the countries highest on the scale, than in Argentina (41 percent) and Japan (34 percent), the countries at the bottom of the scale.

Furthermore, there was often a political dimension to worldwide public attitudes toward foreign affairs. According to the Pew Research Center, “people who place themselves on the left of the ideological spectrum are more likely than those on the right to have a positive view of the UN.”

This political division was particularly wide in the United States, where, as the Pew report maintained, “81 percent of liberals―versus 34 percent of conservatives―have a favorable opinion” of the United Nations. When it came to the issue of support for cooperation with other nations, the surveys by Rockefeller-Focaldata and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs both found substantial differences between the attitudes of Democrats (quite positive) and Republicans (far more negative).

Even so, in most countries, including the United States, support for international solidarity and cooperation is very substantial, and growing. Consequently, political activists and politicians shouldn’t be reluctant to speak out for them. Indeed, given the popularity of this internationalist approach to global affairs, it might even prove a winning political issue.

The post Around the World, Global Solidarity and Cooperation are Remarkably Popular appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in White Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.

Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they’re doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it’s also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.

The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls

As a start, we have the latter-day “Know Nothings,” a term borrowed from a nineteenth century political movement. It’s not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.

Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn’t that they can’t take in information; it’s that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.

The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don’t believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet — climate change — is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.

The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the U. S. government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled “Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health.”

On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture — the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39% of Americans believe “we are in the end times.” Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.

Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the “Know Nothing” movement of the nineteenth century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.

The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn’t the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country’s bedrock beliefs with a set of “politically correct” prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that “new class” is seen as sapping the country’s strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).

The use of that “new class” as a political epithet emerged from the neoconservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andrew Hartman has explained at his blog on American intellectual history:

“Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called ‘new class’ of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language — although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this ‘new class,’ so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status.”

However, the current Trumpian war on DEI should be considered an extension of a longstanding conservative effort to distract Americans from the real sources of their problems by promoting a politics of division and hatred. Mainstream accounts of the drive to eradicate concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion from public life rarely point out that fighting DEI can fairly be characterized as fighting to make racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination ever more acceptable in the sort of open, unapologetic fashion that prevailed before the modern-day civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements gained strength.

The crusade — and it’s nothing less than that — against DEI needs to be called out for what it is, not treated as some sort of skirmish over language. And rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality health care for all, regardless of race, gender, class status, or faith. Getting there will, however, require a flowering of faith of another kind — not religious faith, but faith that we can construct an accountable government that serves the public interest, rather than, as in the present age of Donald Trump, the interests of corporations and inhumane ideologues.

Silicon Valley Saviors

In contrast to the “know nothing” faction of the political right in America is the “know it all” faction — Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. They view themselves not just as business executives cashing in on the latest trend, but as superior beings who should be running the planet. They promise better living through technology and, as new age militarists, see robotic weapons as the future of warfare. But the idea that such new technologies will inevitably change our lives for the better or protect us from the worst has, at best, a mixed record. It depends, of course, on just who is using such technologies and for what purpose.

In addition to owning companies that create new systems grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the new age militarists are angling to shape our foreign policy, our federal budget, and the future of our democracy. They literally want to become masters of the universe by figuring out how to live forever and promote the colonization of space. They dream of video games in which, as Palmer Luckey put it, “if you die in the game, you die in real life.”

The political reach of the Silicon Valley crowd has grown dramatically in the age of Donald Trump. JD Vance, his vice president, was, of course, groomed and financed by Peter Thiel, the founder of the omnipresent firm Palantir, which provides technology to patrol the border, helps ICE identify suspects, and has provided software to Israel that its leaders have used to step up the pace of bombing in their genocidal war in Gaza. After a stint at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms, Vance won a Senate election in Ohio with major financial backing from him and his allies.

When Trump chose Vance as his running mate, champagne corks popped in Silicon Valley and the money started flowing to help Trump get elected, including up to a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money from Elon Musk. As a result, Silicon Valley now has its man in the executive branch.

Nor is Vance alone. Former employees of tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril are now embedded in key agencies of the federal government, and Secretary of — yes! — War Pete Hegseth has gone all in on integrating AI into U.S. military planning and practice to the delight of the billionaire tech moguls and their hangers-on.

To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves — and of the potential of the technology their companies produce — would distinctly be an understatement.

Kathryn Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, a self-appointed chief ideologist and cheerleader for the Silicon Valley tech takeover of America, gave a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in February 2025 that analyst Gil Duran described as an effort to “equate most government actions with communist dictatorships… while positioning tech bros as the ordained saviors of the traditional family.” Boyle’s bread and butter argument — call it a potentially fatal kind of narcissism — was that only the “founders” (yes, they call themselves that!) are serious enough, skilled enough, and endowed by their creator with enough persistence to solve and reverse America’s imperial decline. The rest of us should just get out of the way and let the new techno-gods do their work.

Will Trump’s Patchwork Quilt Come Apart at the Seams?

The Trump coalition is a strange kaleidoscope of confusing views and contradictory cover stories: the know-nothings; the know-it-alls; the false prophets of White Christian nationalism, the billionaires and millionaires, the people who (once upon a time) watched too many episodes of The Apprentice and think Trump is a good businessman; those who want yet another tax break; those men among us who want to control what women do with their bodies, and the (mostly) men who feel liberated because Trump openly and repeatedly makes racist, sexist, anti-gay, and anti-trans statements, legitimizing vocal expressions of prejudice in a way not seen in decades.

Yes, his is a motley crew, but so far they have rallied around the president, no matter the promises he breaks or the harmful policies he jams down all of our throats (policies that could ultimately hit many diehard Trump supporters who aren’t billionaires as hard or harder than they will hit his opponents). Fortunately, there are at least signs that his ability to thrive politically (even as his policies drive America into a ditch) may be fading. His brutal, illogical, illegal, ill-defined war on Iran — complete with genocidal rhetoric about ending an entire civilization — may be the beginning of the end of his grasp of our politics and our psyche.

Unfortunately, he may be as much a symptom of what’s wrong with America as he is a producer of deep damage to the future prospects of democratic governance and human cooperation in this country and on this planet.

Which Way Out?

Any resistance to such know-nothingism and incipient technofascism must start on a human scale. If we are ever going to build a tolerant, welcoming nation that meets the basic needs of its residents, while leaving ample room for scientific inquiry and creative endeavors of all sorts, we need to get off our machines and start talking to — and crucially, listening to — each other.

This is already happening more widely than you might imagine if you’re a prisoner of your news feed. And it’s happening not just in large gatherings like the No Kings rallies, but in local organizing around schools and housing, voter registration and education efforts, and attempts to help communities survive the double-injury of runaway capitalism and the shredding of the social safety net thanks, at least in part, to Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which is the ugliest, most inhumane piece of legislation in living memory).

We need to fight on at least three fronts — economically, politically, and culturally. Senator Bernie Sanders has shown just how a truly populist economic program could draw support even among diehard MAGA backers, and such a program is a necessity if we are ever to dig our way out of our current predicament.

But economics is hardly the only problem we have. There’s also the reality of racism to contend with, not to speak of a thriving anti-immigrant sensibility, and misogyny, as well as anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination — all deeply embedded in a nation that was founded as a colonial enterprise fueled by slavery and genocide. Such a history has to be transcended by embracing the values and elevating the leadership of the people most impacted by the legacy of America’s repressive past, while building a new culture based on tolerance, respect, and (yes!) love for our fellow human beings.

To be clear (as President Barack Obama would often say), by “transcend” I don’t mean ignore. We must fully acknowledge and seriously commit our society to repairing the crimes embedded in our development as a nation, not to speak of those being committed right now in Donald Trump’s America against so many of us and our planet as well.

And sadly, it’s all too obvious that coming together to save this planet and retain our basic humanity will not be easy. People are messy and, frankly, can be a pain to deal with (yours truly included). We are, however, all we have, and making the effort will matter.

I believe in the saying, attributed to leaders of the Wobblies (the radical union founded in 1905 and known formally as the Industrial Workers of the World), that we must sow the seeds of any new society in the shell of the old one. The way we treat each other in our homes, workplaces, schools, sites of worship, and other public and private spaces will determine whether we can build a better world or are fated to live in a never-endingly Trumpian one. In that context, it’s important not just to speak truth to power, but to begin trying to create alternative sources of power and good ideas aren’t enough for that. (If they were, we would already be living in a far better world.)

Building alternative power and charting a path to such a world will be a distinctly collective undertaking. A handful of charismatic leaders or courageous organizers can’t do it for us. We all need to be leaders since we are all experts (in the sense of knowing our communities and our bits of the world).

There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee, and if enough of us join that fight, we at least have a shot at building a society and a world worth sustaining for generations to come.

What are we waiting for?

The post Raging Against the Machine appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

This week alone, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Raul Castro, the former head of state, who’s now 94 years old and largely out of public life. In addition, the Supreme Court gave a green light to Cuban-American-owned companies with property claims in Cuba from 67 years ago to sue tourist industry actors who “profited” from that land. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to grow more and more publicly agitated with Cuba’s refusal to bow to his demands, and Trump’s consistent incoherence shows an absolute lack of any clear policy position towards Cuba, aside from one that may economically benefit him and/or his family.

The indictment of Castro is a page taken from Trump’s playbook on Venezuela from earlier this year. There, the administration indicted a sitting head of state, Nicolas Maduro, as a legal pretext for a military intervention, which was labelled an “emergency” and thus not an act of war that would require Congressional approval. The administration staged a geopolitical coup d’état involving international kidnapping, acts of war in plain violation of international law and the U.N. Charter, and then imprisoned that leader as a message to the world of what happens to those who defy U.S. interests. Such indictments serve as purportedly fixed legal fictions for shifting political pretexts. In Venezuela it was supposedly the state’s support for criminal enterprises and gangs, which was the justification for the Trump administration’s stated reason for the extrajudicial killing of nearly 200 civilians in piracy actions in the Caribbean.  Once Maduro was kidnapped and jailed, the administration has stopped talking gangs and narcotrafficking rings.

In Cuba, the Justice Department’s indictment of Raul Castro is a clear response to the political forces that commanded it. As the island nation is not complying rapidly enough to the changes demanded by Washington, the administration has escalated its threats, military preparations, and legal actions, albeit largely symbolic in nature.

Rubio’s Escalation of Threats as Campaign Messaging

For decades, Marco Rubio has pushed for privately what the Cuban-American community in south Florida has not achieved in nearly 70 years: to run Cuba’s political and economic system remotely from Miami and Washington. These remote “owners” of Cuba have driven and financed Rubio’s political career, leading to this moment where he is adamantly (though unsuccessfully) trying to sell the American public that Cuba is a national security threat while simultaneously telling Cubans that their government is too weak to protect them. That inherent contradiction and incoherence, long the basis of U.S. policy towards Cuba, have never been more dangerous than at this moment when Rubio’s rage and blind ambition to cause widespread destruction is bolstered by Trump’s monarchical goals.

The contradictory discourse is present in nearly every aspect of Cuba policy. Just this week, Rubio issued an Orwellian statement in response to the ICE arrest of Adys Lastres Morera, the sister of the head of GAESA, a Cuban entity that is connected to large swaths of the Cuban economy. Rubio was right to point out that “[f]or far too long, the family members of terrorist organizations, repressive anti-American regimes and other bad actors . . .  have been given a free pass to enjoy the privileges of living in the United States,” but the United States also has a long tradition of granting sanctuary to terrorists, dictators, and war criminals. In particular, Latin American leaders, generals, and intelligence operatives that have long done the U.S. bidding in propping up violent regimes have been granted refuge in south Florida, the home of Rubio and other elected officials who have promoted violence over diplomacy.

Yet what makes international cooperation, collaboration, and survival possible is not just insisting upon respect for international law and human rights by all governments, but strengthening their ability to do so through dialogue and diplomacy. The Trump-Rubio administration has clearly not been serious about using diplomacy to solve global conflicts, and that holds true in Cuba as well. The administration has tried to identify potential “opposition” I Cuba or political leaders it can “work with” like Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. Real U.S. diplomacy looks quite different. Twelve years ago, it brought to Cuba a boom of economic activity, a thriving private sector, better financed public institutions, and riveting cultural exchanges for over a million U.S. residents who found in Cuba a rich cultural, musical, artistic, and academic partner.

Trump and Rubio, though they might articulate the same goals, have different ulterior motives.  Their goal is not, and has never been, economic opportunity for Cubans. Instead, they want an economic boon for Cuban-Americans aching to exert political and economic control over a land many have never even visited. Although Florida no longer plays a significant electoral role in U.S.-Cuba policy, Rubio’s recent video talking to the Cuban people—and his messaging in general in escalating threats and aggression towards Cuba—is clearly intended to rally his base.  What has caused widespread anxiety and fear among millions in Cuba has nevertheless excited his political base in south Florida.

Inside Cuba

These days in Havana, Cubans are experiencing a duality that has existed for generations who have lived under the threat of U.S. military aggression and the daily reality of economic warfare. Cubans are exhausted. They are increasingly anxious and have reached the bottom of the well of hope. There is a saying that the last thing you lose is hope, meaning it is what you hold on to until the very end. Cubans are at the very end of their ability to see a hopeful future.

I get asked questions daily. Should I take my kids to a shelter? Will the United States bomb Havana? Where is it safe to go? Why don’t U.S. citizens stop their government?

Cubans are experts at survival, and that’s exactly what they continue to do.  As U.S. Southern Command sends the aircraft carrier Nimitz into Caribbean waters, Cubans continue to carry on with daily life like they have done decade after decade. Most days, those around me look for an electric tricycle to take them to work or their child to school or have added a child seat to their bicycles. Cars that run on gasoline have become what one of my friends calls “garage adornments.”

Given the daily threat of military intervention and the four-month long oil blockade, activities like sleep have become a luxury. Many families cook or wash clothes at 3:00 a.m. when they get 1-2 hours of electricity. My friend sleeps on the floor with her son near the front door where air drafts can keep them cool in the sweltering heat and humidity. Most of us go without water for days at a time because lack of electricity makes pumping and distributing water impossible. Another dear friend went 35 days with no water while she, her mother, and her toddler spent weeks traveling from house to house bathing and washing clothes. Cooking and cleaning become infinitely more difficult with no water, gas, or electricity. Some daycare centers use coal to cook lunch for undernourished children.

While we live under the perpetual threat of U.S. military aggression, children continue to play in the street with sticks and deflated balls, families continue to find ways to get to work and buy food, and the deep spiritual and religious traditions that sustain many Cubans are turned to over and over again. War has a name and a face. It’s not just a vague “government.” Here there are millions of people who owe the United States nothing and instead have only demanded to live in peace, in their homeland, however flawed it may be.

The post Manufacturing Consent for War against Cubans appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

“It’s got no anything,” President Donald Trump said of Somalia in a recent xenophobic rant. “All they do is run around shooting each other.”

As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.

U.S. troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, U.S. and U.N. troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The next month, in a major escalation, U.S. helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that 73 Somalis had died, including women and children, and more than 200 had been wounded. U.S. forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.

And it wasn’t long before — in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror — American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming an assassin-in-chief in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.

However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.

The second Bush administration conducted 11 airstrikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people — including possibly 55 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. Trump’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271% increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during Trump’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time — 51 strikes in four years — Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.

Trump’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the U.S. military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs, and full-scale wars — in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. His second term has, in fact been a furious blitz of global war-making, only half-noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents during just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the U.S. has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” said Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that tracks civilian harm globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

A War on Children

Since the U.S. began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as 170 civilians have been killed, according to Airwars. The U.S. military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries — and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.

In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term, a U.S. drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret U.S. military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child — 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse — survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”

More recently, President Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “U.S.-Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include more than 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation into that attack acknowledged that the United States was indeed responsible, contradicting assertions by President Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.

The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have insisted that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including dozens of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the U.S. military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the U.S. military has taken to address it.”

In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.

Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of Trump’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 U.S. attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, 10 of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women, and 13 children — were killed and seven others injured in the attacks. Among them was a raid by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the U.S. fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.

The Attack Was Horrible and Their Response Was Horrible

“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”

Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the family of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse in 2023.

The U.S. attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a partially redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia had skyrocketed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, recalled. During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple U.S. war zones spiked.

“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump — himself a convicted felon 34 times over — said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.

To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam – or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al Manthari. Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.

Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings — or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Donald Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.

“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.

And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.

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Reagan installed Korb as his Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, and Logistics. After the first term Korb stepped down, taking along with him the defense department’s medal for Distinguished Public Service. His next move sent him down a former Pentagon official’s most-traveled path: straight into the defense industry. He was hired to run the Washington office of the Raytheon Corporation (now RTX).

Then his relatively conventional story took a turn.

With Raytheon’s permission he had joined the board of the Committee for National Security (CNS), a nonprofit with a mission to generate public debate on national security issues and ways to prevent nuclear war. According to court documents, on a lunch hour in March 1986 Korb turned up at a Senate Office Building to speak at a CNS press conference. He argued against increasing military spending to cover the costs of the Navy Secretary’s plans for an expanded 600 ship-, 15 carrier- group Navy, among other things. The CNS report displayed at the press conference included a broader critique: “The threats cited most consistently by the Reagan administration to justify its buildup have either not materialized, or have proved far less menacing than advertised.”

By then, the Reagan military buildup was already heading back down, and Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had already begun their series of summits foreshadowing the end of the Cold War. Korb’s position was definitely more in step with the times than the Navy Secretary’s.

But not in step with his employer. Two Navy officials and a Senate Armed Services Committee staffer called Raytheon to complain. Korb was soon fired from his job, and offered a temporary face-saving position as a “special advisor” on the condition that he get prior approval for any speeches and not speak to the media. Or he could be reassigned as a commercial marketing consultant at a Raytheon subsidiary in Philadelphia, barred from any contact with the Pentagon. In other words: He could end his public life, in exchange for a Raytheon salary.

Instead, he sued. The ACLU of Massachusetts took his case (Raytheon was headquartered in the state), arguing he was wrongfully terminated in bad faith and in violation of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. They contended that this declaration “embodies a strong public policy supporting freedom of speech, and that Raytheon’s actions interfered with both [Korb’s] right to express himself and the public’s right to hear what he had to say.”

They lost. The thrust of Raytheon’s defense was that it hadn’t violated policy in firing Korb because he had “rendered himself ineffective” as the company’s spokesperson by “publicly expressing views in direct conflict with the economic interest” of the company.

Raytheon may have fired him, but it did not silence him. For the next 30-plus years he made his case for a smaller Pentagon budget from the upper echelons of civil society’s national security think tanks: as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, then as director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and finally at the Center for American Progress. He made the case in countless congressional hearings, books, op-eds in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, to name a few. He also appeared on widely watched programs such as Face the Nation, The News Hour, 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Larry King, and The O’Reilly Factor.

I met Korb at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting early in this century. I had read an essay of his arguing that national security could not be achieved by military force alone. It required a “full toolkit” of security tools he characterized as “offense” (the military) “defense” (homeland security), and “prevention” (including diplomacy, foreign aid, support for international institutions such as United Nations peacekeeping forces, and nuclear nonproliferation.) He argued that the country needed a Unified Security Budget to understand the relative balance in funding for these tools and to outline how it could be rebalanced.

With remarkable chutzpah I don’t usually possess, and not much in the way of credentials for the task, I asked if he’d like to collaborate with me in fleshing out this framework. He said sure.

What followed was an eight-year partnership producing the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.” Each year we calculated the balance and compiled a rebalanced budget incorporating the recommendations of experts in each field; Korb supplied the analysis of the Pentagon budget and rationales for what could be cut from it. No collaborative partner I’ve ever had has been easier to work with.

In representative testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on May 12, 2021, Korb promised to focus on three main subjects: the exceptionally high amount of money then President Joe Biden’s administration proposed to spend on defense for the coming fiscal year; the Pentagon’s unnecessary spending on costly yet flawed weapons systems; and the need for Pentagon leadership to vastly improve the department’s management.

Needless to say, this program of reform has languished. Korb retired in 2024, and had to watch since then, as we all have, astronomical sums being seriously entertained for the Pentagon, a disastrous war of choice, technological developments threatening to put control of dangerous weapons beyond the reach of humans, and the open embrace of new frontiers of corruption in weapons procurement.

Korb and I never talked about his history. I first learned about the court case from his son at his funeral after he passed away in late April. His odyssey from Pentagon official to Pentagon critic gave him unique and invaluable standing in the fight against Pentagon excess. The fight will miss him.

The post The Member of the Reagan Brass who Became a Pentagon Critic appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.