Review of Lisa Bhungalia, “Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023). Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– The impact of US military aid on Palestine is there for everyone to see. For decades, Israel has been the largest recipient of US military aid. The list of military […]
Ten Conflicts to Understand the New Middle East
Review of : Christopher Phillips, Battleground: 10 Conflicts That Explain the New Middle East. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024. Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– The title of Christopher Phillips’ latest book, “Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East”, might scare off some potential readers. Here comes another […]
Europe: The Onslaught of the Far Right
Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – After the results of the elections to the European Union parliament were announced on the night of June 9, a common reflection in many political analyses was that the center had held. The far-right advanced but not as much as some polls had predicted. The resistance of the center […]
Pegasus: The Zero-Click Threat to Democracy and Human Rights from Israel
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– Pegasus, the main cyber-surveillance weapon developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, had been at the center of formidable reporting before July 2021. Still, the revelations presented by the Pegasus Project partners in a cascade of articles that began on July 18, 2021, represented a watershed moment. […]
German Far Right Leader on Trial for Nazi Slogan: “X” Marks the Spot
Halle an der Saale, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– On the morning of April 18, in front of the district court in Halle, it became evident that not many people had taken up Björn Höcke’s invitation to support him before a trial. Höcke, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the central-eastern state […]
The Origins of the West’s Iran Crisis: Oil, Autocracy and Coup
Review of David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides […]
Donald Trump and the German Far Right: Is it Democratic to Prosecute Fascism?
Chemnitz, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Germany and the United States have very different political cultures, but also some similarities. They are both federal states and have seen in recent times how their political future could be partly decided in courts of law. In the US, former President Donald Trump is currently facing […]
Tempest in a Teapot: British Illusions and American Hegemony from Iraq to Yemen
Review of Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony.. London: Verso, 2023. Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an […]
Why, Despite the Arab Spring and Mass Protests of the 2010s, People Got the Opposite of What they Wanted
Review of Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023). Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A […]
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