Portside

Before the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it conducted tests that have caused serious health issues to generations of New Mexico residents—who remain uncompensated.

The contradictory character of Trump foreign policy has left the peace movement befuddled. Perhaps the task is to include in the project of building a progressive majority ideas about challenging the US as an imperial power.

Protests against government corruption and austerity programs in Haiti and Iraq, are directed at corrupt neoliberal governments imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force.

With Pentagon budgets reaching record levels -- some $717 billion for 2019 -- Washington has stayed the course, while beginning to plan for more expansive future conflicts across the globe. Today, not a single square inch of this ever-warming planet.

The change in direction of Ecuador's policies under President Moreno is signaled by the return of a U.S. military presence. This is part of a larger push from Washington to reassert its historical role across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The United States military has a staggering 883 military bases in 183 countries, Russia has 8, China 1. There is no country with a military footprint that replicates that of the United States. The bases create instability rather than peace.

Trump will gradually disappear from the stage. But other names will remain intact: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon...

The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington's present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort.

It looks as if a 21st century version of the Cold War (with dangerous new twists) has begun and hardly anyone has noticed. Even while the disastrous U.S. wars against terror still rage, the Pentagon has committed itself and the nation to a new three-front “long war” against China and Russia.

“You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not less,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham after the briefing. “You’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you’re going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field.”