Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Consider it strange. The U.S. has been fighting in Somalia on and off (mostly on) since the early 1990s. (Who, of a certain age, doesn’t remember the “Black Hawk Down” fiasco?) Almost 30 years later, at a time when the U.N. secretary-general, supported by dozens of countries, has reasonably read more

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Let me quote a rare good guy and once-upon-a-time leader on this increasingly godforsaken planet of ours, former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev. He recently wrote: “What we urgently need read more

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We are in a strangely viral religious moment. Only recently, a White House in which little, including the deaths of Americans, counts for more than the support of evangelicals rejected initial guidelines prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “re-opening” America. A major reason: because those read more

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It’s old news by now that President Trump has compared the arrival of the coronavirus in America to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and al-Qaeda’s 9/11 assault on key symbols of this country — the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and possibly even the White House read more

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In March, as casualty figures were starting to pile up, he labeled himself a “wartime president.” Almost two months later, with the U.S. having long outstripped every other country on Earth in Covid-19 cases read more

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Someday, America’s Afghan Wars — the first was against the Soviet Union, 1979-1989; the second began with the post-9/11 invasion of that country and has never ended — may be seen as follies of an unprecedented sort. Certainly, the wars that invasion set off across read more

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Somehow, it seemed apt to do a different kind of introduction today to TomDispatch regular Belle Chesler’s piece. After all, she’s the daughter of my first childhood friend from the building in New York City where I grew up in another read more

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The greatest American stories have always been fictions. I mean this both literally and figuratively. I mean The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Invisible Man, and Little Women, but I also mean American exceptionalism, “good” wars, rags to riches, and liberty and justice for all. What, then, is the great American non-fiction story? I submit read more

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There was certainly a hint that the previous century was not going to unfold in a particularly propitious manner when World War I, “the war to end all wars” (a phrase famously attributed to American President Woodrow Wilson), proved but an introduction to a second world war that would make the first look more like a skirmish. Add in the fact that the pandemic to end all read more

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In this century, the war-fighting performance of the U.S. military has proven woeful indeed and both the Pentagon high command and key Trump administration officials have evidently been incapable of drawing obvious conclusions from that fact. Or think of it another way: even the president who can’t read more