Chuck Spinney

MARINA DE CAMPO, Italy — As Esam Al-Amin explains here, Mohamad Morsi made some colossal blunders during his one year rule of Egypt as its democratically elected president.

He was elected in what most observers regard as a …

Neoliberal economics has been an ideological mantra of Republicans and Democrats alike since President Jimmy Carter began the wave of privatization that exploded during the succession of Republican and Democratic presidencies …

MARINA DI RAGUSA, Sicily — Almost 23 years ago, I wrote a short pamphlet, Defense Power Games.

My aim then (as it is now) was to explain why the end of the Cold War would not produce a peace dividend in the form of reduced …

Bina Shah has written an excellent review of Akbar Ahmed’s important new book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Brookings, March 2013). I urge you to read it …

Just received an interesting email from a Pentagon greybeard, who until recently had spent three decades toiling directly for a string of defense secretaries (which is why he needs to remain nameless).

The dead-on-arrival …

In the summer of 2002, during the lead-up to the Iraq war, a White House official expressed displeasure with an article written by journalist Ron Suskind in Esquire. He asserted that people like Suskind were trapped “in what we …

Most Americans do not realize the extent to which the U.S. is becoming involved militarily in the welter of conflicts throughout Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa (check out the chaos here).

Although recent reports have tended to …

President Obama will submit a new five-year spending plan for the entire federal government in his annual budget message to Congress later this month.

Included in his message will be the Pentagon’s five-year spending plan. …

The U.S. is pursuing a self-destructive grand strategy in the Middle East. It’s based on a pair of conflicting objectives, each bathed with high-toned rhetoric about promoting human rights and democracy:

I have an Afghan friend, Hashim, who lives in Europe. We correspond frequently on the situation in Afghanistan. He comes from an old distinguished Pashtun family; he has multiple degrees from the UK’s finest universities, …

One of the most pressing problems facing the incoming secretary of defense, no matter who it ends up being, is posed by our denouement in Afghanistan.

For reasons explained by Paul Sperry in an excellent 30 December op-ed in …

Winslow Wheeler’s three-part series on the Navy that wrapped up on Battleland Wednesday shows that the sea service is up to its old tricks.

To wit, it is impregnating President Obama’s five-year defense program by …