The Iran war has killed thousands of Iranians and Lebanese and displaced hundreds of thousands more. People in poor countries around the world are facing fuel shortages, power outages and food insecurity, with much worse to come.

Here in the United States, the war has already cost more than $50 billion, and the cost is only going up — not just at the gas pump but in opportunity. For that $50 billion, we could have paid for healthcare for 3 million people in this country and gotten about 1.5 million kids into Head Start, according to the IPS National Priorities Project.

Which makes us safer?

President Trump would like us to believe that no price is too high to stop Iran’s “nuclear threat.” But Iran isn’t a nuclear threat. Year after year, including 2026, U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

In 2015, Iran agreed to cut its stockpile of enriched uranium, reduce its reactors, and submit to unprecedentedly intrusive U.N. inspections. The United States, in return, agreed to end many of the sanctions that were crippling Iran’s economy.

It worked. Intelligence agencies around the world, including in the United States, agreed that Iran was complying. U.N. inspectors kept a watchful eye on Iran’s reactors, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz flowed freely, and Iran was still not trying to build a nuclear weapon, maintaining that a bomb would violate Islamic law.

However, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. He didn’t pretend Iran was violating it; he just claimed he could “get a better deal.” He couldn’t.

Instead, Trump joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ratcheted up threats against Iran. Eventually, those threats turned into reality — first in a short-term bombing campaign in June 2025 and then a full-scale U.S.-Israeli war this year.

Despite repeated ceasefire declarations and claims from the White House that “we’ve won,” the war continues months later. Thousands are dead, gas prices are shockingly high, and the Strait of Hormuz (which was running fine before Trump trampled the nuclear deal) remains largely closed.

It’s easy to say that diplomacy works and war does not. That’s not just a statement of principle — it’s the truth.

Diplomacy is the only strategy that’s ever worked to change Iran’s behavior. It wasn’t because the U.S. asked nicely. It was because the U.S. negotiated seriously, changed its own aggressive behavior, and stopped using its economic, political and strategic power as acts of war against Iran.

Is this war worth the human, economic or environmental costs? Clearly not. You could say the same of Trump’s other second-term conflicts — including his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his attacks on Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela and Nigeria.

In fact, today most Americans would agree that none of the major wars in this country’s recent memory have been worthwhile — not in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iraq again.

For the $16 trillion the U.S. had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education and renewable energy. We could have erased student debt and virtually wiped out child poverty at home and globally.

Instead, our leaders continue to spend money on wars they think will make the United States the undisputed power in the world — wars that instead kill millions of people abroad, endanger U.S. troops and make life harder at home.

Veterans know this. “The U.S. has been at war in one form or another since my deployment in the Persian Gulf, 36 years ago,” said Michael McPhearson, executive director of Veterans for Peace.

“Trillions of tax dollars spent, thousands of U.S. military service members dead, and tens of thousands wounded. The toll on the rest of the world is even more staggering, while warmongers and those who send us to war get richer,” he added.

“It’s time to invest in people and life and stop spending money on death and destruction,” McPhearson said.

I agree — and so do most Americans.

The post Our Wars Haven’t Been Worth It, and Not Just in Iran appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Perhaps a reformer would come along — say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. U.S. analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing — and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029 — and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges — a sustained COVID quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy — the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew — and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below — has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

But another fear lurks in the background. Given the state of the airplane — a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear — it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: is it too late to avert catastrophe?

Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics, suppressed virtually all signs of civil society, and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.

So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites — an elected U.S. leader and the North Korean dictator — is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.

Different Beds, Same Dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage — through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption — that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult — by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on U.S. coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34% of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6% and the United States at under 4%). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun — military first — doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.

Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the U.S. economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated one million people.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The U.S. economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while U.S. food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?

A Soft vs. Hard Landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority — the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions — Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, U.S. allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.

Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the U.S. debt —  at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world — could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called — not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the U.S. electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks — such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the U.S. economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign — led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani — it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in U.S. actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upwards, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air — though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit — just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001 — and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.

The post What Can North Korea Tell Us About America’s Future? appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Among the first confirmed casualties were more than a hundred schoolchildren killed in a strike on their elementary school in southern Iran. Within a month, 850 U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles were used to strike Iran. President Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” with U.S. and Israeli missiles targeting bridges, pharmaceutical and steel plants, and civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals. The bombing campaign has struck civilian oil infrastructure in Tehran, engulfing a city of 10 million people in toxic black rain. Thousands of Iranians and Lebanese have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs as factories and basic infrastructure have been destroyed.

…

Read the full article on Truthout.

The post From Asia to the Middle East, U.S. Bombs Are a Failed Foreign Policy Choice appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Today, about 10,000 North Korean combat troops are stationed in Kursk—along with another 1,000 engineer troops—to protect this western-most city from another Ukrainian incursion and to free up Russian troops to participate in offensive operations inside Ukraine. Another 6,000 North Korean soldiers were killed or injured in previous fighting.

Earlier this year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un cut a ribbon on a new housing district dedicated to the families of those killed in the Russian war in Ukraine. Recently, at the inauguration of a memorial in Pyongyang to the fallen, Kim celebrated a “new history of friendship with Russia written in blood.” North Korea’s relationship with China was previously celebrated to be “as close as lips and teeth.” But blood goes deeper still.

North Korea also continues to supply Russia with millions of rounds of ammunition—artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, and short-range ballistic missiles. According to Ukrainian estimates, this has amounted to as much as half of what Russian is using in its war. North Korea is certainly supplying quantity, but it’s not necessarily quality. In 2024, one Ukrainian military official estimated that half of the shells North Korea was supplying were duds. No matter: as Russia’s use of its own soldiers as cannon fodder suggests, the Kremlin prefers quantity over quality.

It is telling that Russia, at its time of need, must rely on a country as poor and isolated as North Korea. But what other choices does Russia have?

Some Russian allies have disappeared, like the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, or have been coopted by the United States, like the government of Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. Other allies haven’t been able to count on Russia, so they haven’t been able to offer much in turn. Iran, for instance, has been receiving some intelligence from the Kremlin during its war with the United States and Israel. But aside from some drones, Russia hasn’t sent its ally significant hardware much less Russian warships full of soldiers.

Russia is at the center of the Collective Security Treaty Organization—a post-Soviet alliance that also includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—but the group has provided little in the way of assistance even though the CSTO has a mutual defense clause comparable to NATO’s Article Five. It’s no surprise that none of these countries has sent troops to assist in Russia’s war. After all, Russia didn’t come to Armenia’s aid when Azerbaijan took over Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. Armenia has boycotted meetings of the organization ever since.

It’s not as if Russia lacks ways of enticing potential allies. Russian fossil fuel exports have become especially attractive as the war with Iran has bottled up other supplies in the Strait of Hormuz. But these exports have been monopolized by China and India, which have been taking in about 80 percent of Russia’s oil. Also, drone attacks by Ukraine have reduced Russia’s capacity to export its fossil fuels.

Russia also supplies the world with military hardware. In 2024, it fell to third place in arms exports behind the United States and France, largely because of the requirements of the war in Ukraine. Recently, however, the Kremlin has claimed that it has bounced back by exporting $15 billion worth of weapons in 2025, mostly to Africa and the Middle East. This is still a far cry from U.S. military exports of over $330 billion. But it suggests that Russia is trying to profit in some way from its otherwise disastrous war in Ukraine.

India and Russia have a new military pact, which allows them to station troops, warships, and fighter jets in each other’s countries. This agreement provides Russia with important access to the Indian Ocean. But it doesn’t mean Indian troops are heading to Ukraine. In fact, the only Indians who have fought on behalf of Russia have been tricked into doing so by the Kremlin. And one of the reasons why Russian military exports experienced such a major drop even before the war in Ukraine began is that clients like India have diversified their imports away from dependency on the Kremlin.

China’s assistance to Russia has been more complicated. In addition to the energy purchases, China is helping Russia by providing up to 90 percent of the country’s high-tech needs. Shut out of U.S. and European markets, Russia relies on China for components for drones, machine tools, batteries, fiberoptic systems.

But China is not providing Russia with enough to tip the balance of the war in its favor. Russia, like North Korea, remains something of a liability for China. While Pyongyang is unreliable because of its nuclear program and cyberoperations, Russia is unreliable in its willingness to upend international law in the pursuit of its territorial ambitions.

China, above all, wants stability. And it wants to maintain good relations with the West. The unpredictable actions of Russia and North Korea threaten the global infrastructure that contributes to Chinese growth and prosperity.

This, then, is what unites Russia and North Korea. They are both disgusted with the West, with liberalism, and with any aspect of international law that constrains their freedom of movement, whether it’s human rights conventions or rules governing maritime commerce.

This is something relatively new for Russia. Under Putin, Russia initially flirted with the United States and established a solid energy relationship with Europe. Now, under Western sanctions, it has become a great deal more like North Korea: solidly military-first, increasingly authoritarian and repressive, economically autarkic, and suspicious of technologies, like Telegram, that might magnify civic discontent.

The current reign of Donald Trump, an American leader who favors autocrats over democrats, might indicate that this Russian-North Korean model of governance is on the upswing.

But even Trump’s apparent affection for both Putin and Kim can’t make up for the fact that the economies of North Korea and Russia are struggling, their respective personality cults are showing some cracks, and the war in Ukraine is not currently going in their favor, with Russia losing territory to Ukraine in April for the first time since 2024.

Russia and North Korea are moving ever closer to each other largely because they don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Even blood oaths can’t make up the fact that their alliance is one of desperation, not inspiration.

The post Russia and North Korea: An Alliance of Desperation appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves in the United States as well.

For speaking boldly, Ruth is now in prison. She’s been held without trial since May 18, 2025 — now a year ago — when she was torn from her bed by police and arrested without any investigation or judicial warrant. Ruth has since had minimal contact with her family and lawyers.

Ruth’s crime? She opposed corruption.

When Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele signed a secret agreement with the Trump administration to accept $4.7 million for the illegal transfer of more than 200 U.S. deportees to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, Ruth spoke up to defend their basic rights. She filed habeas corpus petitions for 76 families who wanted to know where their loved ones had been taken. Soon afterwards, she herself was arrested.

Ruth’s advocacy for democracy spans two decades. She worked for El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Court to ensure transparency in elections, then for the Social Security Institute, where she fought to expand benefits for Salvadorans living abroad. She has also defended the right of Salvadorans abroad to vote.

As a member of El Salvador’s Superintendency of Competition, she issued more than $8 million in fines to businesses for illegal mergers and anti-competitive practices. After El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as an official currency in 2021, she represented victims of fraud.

Since joining the staff of Cristosal, a regional human rights organization, she has documented the Bukele regime’s use of state resources to spy on critics, make backroom deals with violent gangs, and the misuse of pandemic relief funds. She has continued to investigate corporate corruption, filing criminal complaints with the Attorney General and motions with the Constitutional Court.

For her efforts, Ruth was named one of 100 most influential women in the world by the BBC, and has received numerous awards — including the American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award, the Magnitsky Human Rights Award, and the OCCRP Anti-Crime & Corruption Hero Award.

More than 500 organizations — including the American Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association, the Organization of American States, Human Rights Watch, Washington Office on Latin America, Human Rights First, the Robert F, and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the Due Process of Law Foundation, Alianza Americas, and the organization I lead, People’s Action — are calling for Ruth’s immediate release.

Amnesty International has named Ruth a prisoner of conscience, and The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has determined she now faces “cruel and inhuman treatment” and the risk of irreparable harm to her life and integrity.

For me, Ruth represents what every Salvadoran — and every American — should want our society to be: a place where we live without fear for ourselves and our loved ones, where our rights are respected, our votes are counted, and the vulnerable have the same protections as the rich and powerful.

Here in the United States, what happened to Ruth is a warning. The Trump administration now looks to El Salvador not only as a destination for those it illegally detains and deports, but also as a model for how any of us can be detained and held indefinitely without charges.

Already, the Trump administration has indefinitely detained thousands upon thousands of immigrants as well as U.S. citizens, often without a warrant. They’ve detained and tried to deport people for writing op-eds, joining demonstrations, reporting on ICE, or otherwise exercising First Amendment rights. And they’ve been relentlessly harassing critics of all kinds with lawsuits, investigations, and trumped-up charges.

That’s why we can’t allow what happened to Ruth to stand.

To help, you can sign the petition to Congress (online at ​​https://ppls.ac/freeruth) demanding Ruth’s immediate release and calling on the U.S. to condition any future support for El Salvador on respecting human rights. You can also post a statement of support on social media with the hashtag #FreeRuth.

It is essential that El Salvador #FreeRuth now.

The post She Spoke Up for Due Process. Now She’s Detained Without Charges. appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Phyllis addressed the mounting human and financial costs of U.S. military policy, calling the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran “a war of choice and a war of aggression” that is “immoral and illegal” under both U.S. and international law. 

She cited the more than $50 billion spent on that war so far, and noted that the same dollars could fund Medicaid coverage for 1.5 million people, 35,000 university scholarships, and living wages for 117,000 families. (Those figures came from our National Priorities Project’s Trade-offs Calculator. Other NPP trade-off data appeared on signs at the rally.)

On Gaza, Phyllis  pointed out that the United States has paid nearly $28 billion directly to the Israeli military since the start of the genocide, and that in 2024 alone, U.S. tax dollars covered 40 percent of the entire Israeli military budget.

She also warned that the deployment of National Guard troops on American streets is a form of policy violence, designed to normalize military presence and suppress the votes of people of color and immigrant communities.

“When we fight for justice here — when we fight for jobs and health care and education — we know that fight is not complete until we include the Palestinians, the Venezuelans, and the Iranians in our fight.”

Watch Phyllis’s full remarks below:

The rallies, organized by IPS ally Repairers of the Breach, brought together communities outside the White House and Congressional offices in cities across the country in a coordinated act of nonviolent moral resistance. Organizers say they gathered to challenge a nation that “continues to spend billions on war while people suffer at home and abroad” — standing against what they call policy violence, abandoned communities, and the normalization of destruction.

The post VIDEO: Phyllis Bennis Says “Stop the War” at the National Moral Monday Peace Rally appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

In late April, dozens of world governments — led by Colombia and the Netherlands — convened the first ever international diplomatic conference on phasing out fossil fuels, demonstrating the kind of leadership the world needs today. It’s a refreshing contrast from what we’ve seen from Washington.

Just two days before Earth Day, for example, President Trump issued an order invoking his authority under the Defense Production Act to expand domestic production and exports of fossil fuels, purportedly to boost national security.

…

Read the full article on In These Times.

The post While the U.S. Doubles Down on Fossil Fuels, Other Countries Are Charting a Path Away From Them appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

YUST was also remarkable because it was established by evangelical Christians from the United States, something the Chinese government tolerated in exchange for high-quality vocational training. The staff I talked with, who were all Korean-Americans, were happy enough to be working in China, where they were careful to conceal their religious sympathies except in one-on-one interactions with the students. But the hope of most of the faculty, I was told confidentially, was to work in North Korea. Although it was exciting to proselytize covertly in China, the teachers had their hopes pinned on doing God’s work among North Koreans.

Those teachers were oriented toward the mecca of North Korea in part because that region of the world had once witnessed one of the most extraordinary upsurges in conversion to Christianity in the modern era. That upsurge had been suppressed during the period of Japanese rule in the half of the twentieth century before being eliminated altogether in 1945 when communist North Korea began to actively suppress all official religions. The teachers were eager to restore Christianity to its former home in Korea.

At the time, I knew that Pyongyang had once been the “Jerusalem of the East,” that the country’s founder Kim Il Sung had a Christian background, and that some elements of Kim’s ideology drew on religious sources. This was common knowledge among North Korea watchers.

But it was only after reading Jonathan Cheng’s voluminous new account, Korean Messiah, that I can now connect all the dots between the rapid spread of Christianity in nineteenth-century Korea and the rapid consolidation of Kim Il Sung’s rule in the latter half of the twentieth-century.

Journalists rarely have the luxury of digging deep into a topic and then developing an argument across multiple articles. As a former Korea bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Cheng relishes this opportunity to dig very deep into the Christian history of Korea and then develop the connections between Kim and the religion that birthed him across nearly 550 pages (excluding footnotes). It’s not really until more than 200 pages in that young Kim Il Sung even enters the picture. At times, I would have preferred a more journalistic condensation of the subject. But overall, Cheng’s deep dive is an excellent addition to the literature on North Korea.

In that first pre-Kim part of the book, Cheng explores the way missionaries brought Christianity to Korea, braving inauspicious conditions and even, in some cases, courting martyrdom. It was a tumultuous time for Korea, which found itself caught up in the jockeying for geopolitical power among Russia, Japan, and China. Christianity spread quickly in part because it provided a hopeful vision of the meek inheriting the earth. Koreans weren’t exactly meek, but they were collectively weak in the face of their neighboring empires. Many Koreans also found a fighting spirit in Christianity—that of Jesus angrily sweeping the moneychangers out of the temple—which translated into a revolutionary determination in the early 1900s to expel the Japanese occupiers. Several assassins of Japanese officials, for instance, were Christian converts.

Christianity, as Cheng points out, also flourished because it offered a path to modernity, a way around the strict hierarchies of Korean culture that kept women locked away at home and certain castes locked away in poverty. Christian women began to leave their houses and, contrary to centuries of tradition, eat dinner with their families. The poor also found advocates among the ministers. “When, during one church service in 1895, the noblemen threatened to leave the church unless the butchers were expelled,” Cheng writes.  “Rev. Moore let them walk, leading the butchers and the other remaining congregants in a singing of ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I know.’”

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the missionaries transformed the face of northern Korea. Pyongyang had previously been notorious for its saloons and brothels. A door-to-door campaign in 1905 to convert the city’s residents discovered that 40 percent of the residents were already Christian. By that point, the houses of ill repute had largely vanished.

When the Japanese occupation authority tried to impose Shintoism on the population, many Christians fled to neighboring Manchuria in northeast China so that they could continue practicing their religion. Many decades later, some of the descendants of those fleeing Christians would send their children to study at YUST.

The young Kim Il Sung was part of that exodus, and it was in Manchuria where his Christian consciousness and revolutionary mindset developed in tandem. Later, when he’d returned to North Korea with the victorious Russian army in 1945, Kim would virtually erase his Christian upbringing and wildly exaggerate his revolutionary credentials. As the new Kim-led regime closed churches and expropriated religious properties, Christians fled in droves to the South. Between 1945 and 1950, Cheng reports, a million Christians moved south. In 1950 alone, they were responsible for 90 percent of the 2,000 new churches established in South Korea.

Despite Kim’s official anti-Christian doctrine, Cheng points out that revolution and religion continued to intermingle in Kim’s thinking. The particular version of communism that Kim Il Sung would impose on North Korea drew on Christian dogma. A holy trinity of Kim the father, his son Kim Jong Il, and the spirit of Kimilsungism became the anchor of a personality cult. The Ten Commandments became the “Ten Principles of the Monolithic Ideology.” Kim performed miracles, he offered narratives of redemption for the Korean people, and he even displaced Marxism-Leninism with his own Chuch’e ideology of self-reliance. Major edifices devoted to the new state replaced what had been church complexes, with the Kim Il Sung Library rising up where the main Methodist church had been and the huge statue of Kim Il Sung erected where the Central Presbyterian Church once stood.

Though Cheng doesn’t mention it, Kim’s approach was little different from how Christianity itself took root in Europe, with the cult of Mary replacing earlier sects devoted to female deities and with churches built on the same sites as pre-Christian sites of worship. The New Testament drew heavily on the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament can be glimpsed remnants of earlier religions (for instance, in all the names of Yahweh).

Perhaps the most interesting part of Cheng’s book, however, comes later in Kim Il Sung’s life, when he experiences an apparent change of heart about the Christianity that he ruthlessly suppressed on taking power. In the memoirs he wrote in his final decades, Kim was “not merely acknowledging his family’s ties with the Christian faith but describing, in anecdote after anecdote, for hundreds of pages, his deep immersion in the church and his gratitude to the Christians in his life—tales told with an unmistakable sense of wistfulness,” Cheng writes. At the same time, Kim was meeting with various representatives of the Christian community, authorizing the construction of churches to satisfy outside religious institutions, and even mending fences with previous religious adversaries like the deeply anti-communist Rev. Moon of the Unification Church.

Pyongyang engaged with religious figures even further on the fringes. In Guyana, for instance, cult leader Jim Jones established a compound where he “read aloud from North Korean publications extolling the Great Leader, screened propaganda films from Pyongyang for his followers and even invited North Korean agents to preach the virtues of Kimilsungism.”

Jonestown, of course, self-destructed. The Kim dynasty, meanwhile, lives on in North Korea, in part because the state continues to exercise tyrannical control over the population. But Kim Il Sung also managed, through his skillful and syncretic adaptation of Christianity, to instill a sense of belief in the population. “More than half of North Koreans in a 2011 survey of more than 100 North Koreans resettled in the South said they still feel pride in Chuch’e ideology and supported Kim family rule,” Cheng points out.

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that substantially fewer North Koreans—inside or outside the country—feel the same way about Kim’s grandson, Kim Jong Un, the endurance of the Kim dynasty across three generations cannot be attributed solely to brute force. Cheng’s book is an indispensable guide to understanding the methods by which the North Korean regime captured at least some of the hearts and minds of the residents of what had once been one of the most rapidly Christianized parts of the world.

The post Digging Up North Korea’s Christian Roots appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

By dismantling formal barriers to voting, the Voting Rights Act opened the door for Black political participation — and over time, representation. That progress was neither immediate nor inevitable, but it was real.

It was in this context that the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the organization I lead, was founded in 1970. Our mission is to support the growth of Black political leadership and ensure that increased representation translates into meaningful policy outcomes.

More than five decades later, that mission remains urgent.

Black representation in the House has grown from fewer than 10 members in 1965 to more than 60 today, reaching roughly 14 percent of members — finally approaching parity with the Black share of the U.S. population. But it took nearly 60 years to reach this point.

That underscores a critical truth: representation requires sustained protection and intentional policy.

Even now, the progress is incomplete. Even with a record high five Black senators — just 5 percent of the total — Black representation in the Senate remains far below the Black population share.

Today, even these gains are under threat. Recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened the Voting Rights Act, reducing federal oversight and making it more difficult to challenge discriminatory voting practices.

The Court’s most recent ruling gutted regulation designed to ensure Black representation, permitting what amounts to racial gerrymandering under the guise of partisan gerrymandering — a practice which itself badly undermines democracy for Americans of all races.

The result is a system increasingly driven by political advantage rather than fair representation. And Black representation is likely to suffer because of it.

Gerrymandering is often discussed as a partisan tactic, but it has broader structural consequences. When districts are drawn to maximize political control, they can dilute the voting power of communities of color — even without explicitly referencing race. For Black communities, whose political gains have often depended on fair districting, the erosion of these protections is particularly consequential.

This is not simply about who wins elections. It is about how policy is shaped and whose interests are represented in decisions that affect economic opportunity, education, healthcare, and wealth. Representation alone does not guarantee equity — but without it, inequity is almost certain.

The current moment demands clarity. The expansion of Black political representation over the past half-century was the result of deliberate policy choices, sustained advocacy, and legal enforcement. As those protections are weakened, the risk is not just stagnation — it is regression.

At the Joint Center, our goal is clear: to ensure that the gains of the past are protected and that the path toward equitable representation remains open.

Nearly 60 years after the Voting Rights Act, Black Americans have come closer than ever to achieving representation in Congress that reflects their share of the population. But progress at this level is not self-sustaining. Without strong protections and continued commitment, it can be reversed.

The work of building a representative democracy is ongoing. And at this moment, it is clear that the work must continue.

The post The Supreme Court’s War on the Voting Rights Act Sends America Backwards appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Donald Trump is no stranger to such visual manipulations, though he tends to add himself rather than subtract others. He has depicted himself as Jesus, as a U.S. Olympic hockey player scoring a goal and beating up Canadian opponents, as a sunbather with other Cabinet members in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. One of his ardent followers in the House, Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), proposed a bill last year to add Trump to Mt. Rushmore, though Trump beat her to the punch five year earlier with a tweet inserting himself next to the Founding Fathers.

Despite his preference to overpopulate the visual universe with his own image, Trump has also developed his own process of elimination. He has compiled an enemy list—former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Mark Kelly—that he’s been targeting with legal suits and character assassination campaigns. Not content to focus on the present, he has actively been trying to expunge from federal websites, publications, and parks all the non-white, non-male historical figures that previous campaigns saved from obscurity.

But perhaps the most dangerous effort at air-brushing involves climate change. Trump has gone out of his way to turn the United States from a lukewarm advocate of measures to reduce carbon emissions to a stone-cold denier that climate change is even happening. Trump is notoriously upset at not being at the top of every list—best president, smartest guy in the room, most creative hairstyle. Let’s throw in one more list: greatest threat to humanity. Perhaps in order to top that list, too, the president has downgraded the threat of climate change to the point of non-existence. Like Stalin, Trump now stands alone.

The administration’s campaign started with the scrubbing of all references to climate change from federal websites. It has encouraged more widespread self-censorship: anyone who wants to keep their federal job or apply for a federal grant has tactically removed anything Green-related from their descriptions and applications. This animus toward anything climate-related has also shaped many of the administration’s latest budget cuts: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget halved, $1.6 billion cut from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program eliminated, $449 million in renewable energy funding slashed.

It’s no surprise that the administration has gone after states that have retained strong climate policies. The Justice Department has targeted Vermont and New York for their polluter-pay approaches as well as California for its cap-and-trade system. Despite these attacks, a number of states have actually moved forward with their emissions-reduction and energy-transition strategies. The 24 states in the U.S. Climate Alliance have cut their emissions 24 percent below 2005 levels and promoted the development and adoption of clean-energy technologies.

The administration’s approach can also be seen in the carrot side of the equation. It has approved pipelines like the recent Bridger Pipeline Extension, green-lighted deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil companies, and tried to prop up the dying coal industry. The administration has paid out $2 billion to companies to cancel their wind power projects and invest instead in fossil fuels. Deregulation and lack of enforcement—of pollution standards, of safety and health requirements, of environmental permitting—have been huge gifts to companies spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

More ominously, the administration has altered the very DNA of regulatory governance by repealing the “endangerment finding.” According to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, the EPA is required to ascertain if climate change is a danger and, if so, to take steps to address it. Under subsequent administrations, the EPA did just that. But Lee Zeldin, the EPA head determined to destroy his own agency, recently stomped on nearly 20 years of legal precedence by repealing the “endangerment finding.”

At a press conference with Trump at the White House, he said that revoking the finding would save Americans $1.3 trillion, mostly in the form of lower car prices. He neglected to mention the costs of the move, which, by the EPA’s own estimates, could top $1.4 trillion, and this is not even counting the expenses associated with greater warming.

Roughly half the states of the union have joined together to challenge Zeldin and bring the case to the Supreme Court.

In the best of all possible worlds, the Trump assault on climate science, energy transition funding, and regulatory mechanisms is the last hurrah of the fossil fuel cult. After all, the price of renewable energy is dropping, the scientific community remains united in its dour assessments, and most of the rest of the world is committed to doing something about the gathering storm. Even Trump’s all-out bid to save the U.S. coal industry must reckon with the inexorable laws of the market. Because coal-fired power plants are old and just plain uneconomical, Trump has presided over the closure of more of these plants than any other U.S. president.

But this isn’t the best of all possible worlds. Trump’s rearguard actions come at a perilous time when even half-hearted attempts to address climate change are plainly insufficient. Only industrial-strength collective action against fossil fuels can mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. Instead, Trump is playing to the strengths of polluting industries in an attempt to destroy any last hope of restoring a measure of equilibrium to the planet.

The Climate Keeps a Changin’

Although almost every country in the world has pledged to cut its emissions of greenhouse gasses, the overall amount of carbon spewed into the atmosphere continues to grow. In 2025, spurred by a 4.1 percent increase in emissions associated with the oil and gas sector, emissions hit a new record. Methane emissions, considerably more dangerous than those of carbon-dioxide, also increased to a new high after a small decline in 2024.

The total increased in part because of a surge in U.S. emissions. In 2023 and 2024, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions actually declined. Equally important, U.S. policies managed to sever the link between economic growth and emissions, with the former increasing even as the latter declined. In 2025, however, emissions increased by 2.4 percent, once again faster than economic growth.

Just as the impact of Pentagon spending on global military expenditures will not be measured until the figures are released for this year, Trump’s policies on climate won’t begin to register in the statistics until the end of 2026. The increase in emissions last year was more a function of an unusually cold winter and the expansion of both data centers and crypto mining, not Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly policies.

It’s not all bad news. China, the world’s biggest emitter in total numbers by a long shot, is approaching peak carbon dioxide emissions while also boosting exports of solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines to record levels so that other countries can transition to these renewables. European emissions continue to drop. In 2025, solar became the first renewable energy source to lead the growth in electricity supply. Wind and solar now account for a larger share of electricity generation than coal.

The Iran War, meanwhile, is an unintended inflection point in the trajectory of energy politics. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has created a huge energy crisis, with many countries reporting major shortages in oil and gas. As Zoya Teirstein and Jake Bittle write in Grist,

As prices rise and supplies dwindle, countries around the globe are reevaluating their energy futures. While some have fallen back on dirty fuels to fill the gaps caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, others have announced significant investments in clean energy to chart a path away from the sources of energy they have relied on for more than a hundred years.

Trump and company dreamed of accessing Iranian fossil fuels and driving down prices at the pump. So far, they are getting the exact opposite of what they wanted. The same may well hold for their war against renewable energy.

Attempting to Kneecap the International Response

As part of his effort to destroy the “green new scam,” Trump hasn’t been content to dismantle the domestic infrastructure of emission reduction and energy transition. He has taken the United States out of every major international initiative to address climate change, beginning with the Paris Agreement and the UN agency that administers it, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

So far, however, there hasn’t been a rush to the exits in the wake of U.S. withdrawal. No other countries have exited the Paris Agreement, not Russia, not any of the Gulf Countries, not even Nicaragua and Syria (both of which initially didn’t sign the agreement). Three countries have signed but not ratified the agreement—Iran, Libya, Yemen—but internal turmoil plays a role in their foot-dragging. Meanwhile, all UN members remain part of the UNFCCC.

So, the United States stands alone in its refusal to acknowledge that the world is endangered by climate change.

In general, international responses have been inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Only a trickle of funding is going toward helping countries reduce emissions (mitigation), addressing the ongoing impact of climate change (adaptation), and making the transition away from fossil fuels. But the world minus the United States is at least inching up its commitments to fund these three efforts. Global action continues to address the preservation of biodiversity and the 23 targets identified in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The Trump administration has turned its back on climate science, slashing funding and even planning to disband the National Center for Atmospheric Research. But the rest of the world has no problem poaching U.S. scientists and surpassing the United States in Green patent filings. In this way, Trump is steering the United States into a high-tech cul-de-sac.

Trump took office with a plan to remake the world with his tariffs, his military interventions, his refocus on fossil fuels, and his preference for authoritarianism. The world has certainly taken note. Given the size of the U.S. economy and the U.S. military, it is impossible to ignore Trump. When it comes to the imperative of climate change, however, the world has shrugged. The international community is not accelerating at the speed necessary to save the world, but it also isn’t slowing down to defer to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is leading the United States in a great leap backward. The rest of the world, at least when it comes to climate science, is refusing to take that leap with him.

The post The Airbrushing of Climate Change appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.