Democratic Party

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – ( Matthew Daly at the Associated Press reports that President Biden will announce at Thursday’s virtual international Climate Summit that the US will commit to reducing its annual carbon dioxide emissions by half of the 2005 peak by 2030. Joe Biden famously used an expletive to describe the passage of […]

Iran

Israeli Intelligence Chiefs Assess that Biden, Iran will Rejoin Nuclear Deal; Netanyahu wants to Stop it

Middle East Monitor

By Motasem A Dalloul | – After two weeks of deliberations in Vienna about reactivating the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell told reporters on Monday that, “There is a real goodwill on both parts to reach an agreement.” He pointed out that the […]

China

Washington is Spoiling for a new Cold War with China, but this Ambition needs a Reality Check

Dilip Hiro

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Like his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden is committed to a distinctly anti-China global strategy and has sworn that China will not “become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world… on my watch.” In the topsy-turvy universe created by […]

Featured

Why the Founding Fathers would have approved of Biden banning phrase “Illegal Alien”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Biden administration has announced that it will no longer use the phrase “illegal alien” and will replace it with “undocumented noncitizen.” Biden will also drop “assimilation” in favor of “integration.” These changes are long overdue and necessary for human dignity. For one thing, human beings cannot be “illegal.” They […]

China

Despite Hawks Seeking new Cold War, the US and China can only Confront Climate Emergency by Cooperating

Juan Cole

( China Dialogue ) – They say don’t mess with Texas, but Mother Nature didn’t get the memo. A surprise winter storm killed at least 111 people in March, when rolling blackouts left several million Texans without power for several freezing days. Their misery came just a few years after Hurricane Harvey put a US$125 […]

Afghanistan

US spent $2.261 Trillion on Afghanistan War, in which ~240,000 Have Died; We could have Greened Half the Grid Instead

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Costs of War Project at Brown University has just brought out a new report on Afghanistan. The September 11, 2001 attacks were launched from Khost and Qandahar in Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, though it is not clear that this organization of Arab expatriates informed their Taliban hosts of what they […]

Immigration

The Real Trauma at the Border: Hundreds of Trump’s Separated Children Still can’t Find their Families

Michael Slager

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – Media outlets consistently describe flight from Central America and Mexico as a “crisis,” suggesting that migrants’ proximity to our national space is a problem for us, not for them. Fleeing from violence back home and enduring possible assault on their journey here are often construed as threats to the […]

Displaced and Refugees

Biden to reverse Trump’s White Supremacist, Sadistic near-ban on Refugees, but US still Lags, Sweden, Germany other OECD Countries

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – About one quarter of one percent (0.25 percent) of the US population consists of refugees — some 838,000. This minuscule number was too much for the white supremacist Trump administration, which drastically cut back refugee admissions from an average of 70,000 to 80,000 per year earlier in this century to […]

Afghanistan

As the US plans its Afghan troop withdrawal, what was it all for?

The Conversation

By Jared Mondschein | – Unlike most US presidents, Joe Biden did not come to the White House with many fixed ideological positions. He did, however, come with fixed values. Chief among them is understanding how US policies impact working American families. In his nearly half century of experience in and around Washington, Biden was […]