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I’ve been toiling on this Berlin Bulletin for weeks, altering it, agonizing, starting anew. Events are simply too complicated and bitter–in the world and in Germany, too. Most dreadfully in Ukraine.

The world is sensing the United States’s growing rapacious intent for war. Amid the development of the Ukraine crisis, the United States and NATO have been attempting to escalate their proxy war with Russia while continuing to intensify their siege and provocations against China.

The Chinese communist base area of Yan’an was a literal and metaphorical stage for envisioning, experimenting, and building a new society and a new human being.

New Jersey’s highest court on Tuesday, May 10th, ordered the parole of 85 year old political prisoner Sundiata Acoli, a Black Liberation Army activist, imprisoned for 49 years.

May Day is known throughout the world as International Workers’ Day. It is celebrated in over one hundred countries to highlight workers’ struggles and triumphs.

If you really want changes requiring the dismantling of capitalism–and this does include the changes necessary to the imagined “green economy,”–then you will join in these efforts rather than condemning the project that inspires them.

The IPCC scientist in Working Group III in charge of proposing a concrete mitigation plan, that is, to reduce emissions and seek viable solutions (technological, economic, and social) to the biggest crisis ever faced by humankind. The science has never been clearer: we must drastically reduce emissions to have a chance of maintaining the climate stability that allows us to live on this planet.

This article by John Ross (Luo Siyin) was also published in slightly edited form in Guancha as “It’s pointless to count on American ‘kindness’.” Introduction The international escalation of U.S. military aggression over a period of more than two decades is clear. However, even within that framework, the events leading to the Ukraine war represent […]

To get a firm grasp on the current situation in Ukraine, we must understand the central role that the United States and NATO have played in the conflict from the start, beginning in 2014 with the U.S.-engineered Maidan coup.

There are two prongs to U.S. imperial grand strategy, one as geopolitical expansion and positioning, including the enlargement of NATO, the other as the U.S. drive for nuclear primacy.

Ben Lewis, the translator and editor of “Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism” talks with Green Left’s Barry Healy.

The war in Ukraine has focused attention on the shifts taking place in the world order. Russia’s military intervention has been met with sanctions from the West as well as with the transport of arms and mercenaries to Ukraine.

Brazil is in danger of becoming a country whose political economy is rooted in militarism, diverting precious social wealth to the military and police as it imposes a military ethic onto public life.

Political scientist John Mearsheimer stated that there was only one solution to the Ukrainian crisis: the West should “abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia.”

As we write these notes at the beginning of March 2022, the eight-year limited civil war in Ukraine has turned into a full-scale war. This represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy. By threatening global nuclear holocaust, these events are also now endangering the entire world. To understand the origins of the New Cold War and the onset of the current Russian entry into the Ukrainian civil war, it is necessary to go back to decisions associated with the creation of the New World Order made in Washington when the previous Cold War ended in 1991.

The outbreak of full-fledged war with the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a deep turning point in the world order.  As such it cannot be ignored by the geographers assembled (alas by zoom) at our annual meeting, I therefore offer some non-expert comments as a basis for discussion.

It is impossible not to be moved by the outrageousness of warfare, the ugliness of aerial bombardment, the gruesome fears of civilians who are trapped between choices that are not their own.

The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides—the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.

In the strategic vision of the U.S., Russia should be disarmed to become part of Europe as a “sidekick” and a bridgehead to contain China, the “more dangerous enemy” as Kissinger described it.

Russia’s demand that NATO cease its expansion to Russia’s borders is viewed as such an obviously impossible demand that it can only be understood as a pretext to invade Ukraine.