Global Outlook Articles by Ramesh Thakur

In the 2020 election, President Donald Trump’s supporters looked beyond manifest character flaws to domestic and foreign policy results but opponents couldn’t overlook his character to assess any policy achievements. Joe Biden became president as much because Americans voted against Trump as for Biden The buyers’ remorse evident in opinion polls suggests that perhaps voters should have been careful what they wished for.

While in Iranian territorial waters, USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles to bring down the Iranian plane with the loss of all 290 on board on 3 July 1988. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were later awarded medals. Vice President George H W Bush insisted he would ‘never apologise for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are’.

Resorting to what President Barack Obama called the Washington Playbook of militarised response to a foreign policy crisis, Arta Moeini writes, the ruling elites in the West collude with the mainstream media in a Manichean framing that ‘redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation’. This doesn’t just enable, it ennobles the American war machine. For this to work, though, one’s own culpability in creating the crisis in the first place must be forcefully rejected.