Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s how Colonel Robert Heinl, Jr., began a June 1971 article in Armed Forces Journal bluntly headlined “The Collapse of the Armed Forces”:

“The morale, discipline, and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The rise and fall of empires has long been a story at the heart of history. Since the Europeans first burst out of their then-marginal region on wooden sailing ships mounted with cannons in the fifteenth century, the planet seldom has had a moment in which several imperial powers weren’t competing for supremacy. In 1945, that number was reduced to two and then, for what the read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

His appointment was a genuine Bolton from the blue (so to speak). After all, everyone knew that former U.N. Ambassador (and Fox News commentator) John Bolton couldn’t be chosen for a major post in the Trump administration. No, not because of his outlandish views on war-making, or his responsibility read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Someday, it may seem like history’s classic example of imperial overstretch. There was, after all, only one superpower left on this planet after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was challenged by… well, next to no one. Or rather by a single jihadist, his modest set of followers, and an investment of perhaps $400,000-$500,000. read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Few American exports are more successful globally than things that go boom in the night: Hollywood movies — especially, of course, superhero films, which regularly garner read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

There’s been a lot of free-floating fear and horror read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Big Brother Isn’t Watching You
You’re Watching Him!
By Tom Engelhardt

A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Fifteen years ago last week, the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. It was to be beyond glorious.  It was to signal the start of an unprecedented new era in which a single imperial superpower, left alone on the planet, would organize more or less everything read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Who could possibly keep up with the discordant version of musical chairs now being played out in Washington? When it comes to Donald Trump’s White House, the old sports phrase about needing a scorecard to keep track of the players pops to mind (though you would need a new one every day or maybe every few hours). The turnover rate of top White House staffers was already at read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

When Russia moved into the Ukraine and seized Crimea in 2014, it got more than its share of (bad) media coverage in the United States, as it did when it intervened in Syria the next year.  So just imagine what kind of coverage Vladimir Putin’s favorite nation would be getting if, almost 17 years after it had launched a “Global War on Terrorism,” Russian troops, special read more