Peril in a Tripolar World
When it comes to relations between Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, observers everywhere are starting to talk about a return to an all-too-familiar past. “Now we have a new Cold War,” Russia expert Peter Felgenhauer commented in Moscow after Trump announced plans to withdraw... Read more
Donald Trump Dreams of a Tri-Polar Planet
The pundits and politicians generally take it for granted that Donald Trump lacks a coherent foreign policy. They believe that he acts solely out of spite, caprice and political opportunism — lashing out at U.S. allies such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and England’s Theresa May only to embrace authoritarian... Read more
Girding for Confrontation
On May 30, 2018, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed, the U.S. Pacific Command. which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command. The name change, Mattis explained, reflects “the increasing... Read more
Mobilizing for the Third Gulf War
With Donald Trump’s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American experience in the Greater Middle East, is that it won’t be... Read more
The Pentagon Plans for a Perpetual Three-Front ‘Long War’ Against China and Russia
Think of it as the most momentous military planning on Earth right now. Who’s even paying attention, given the eternal changing of the guard at the White House, as well as the latest in tweets, sexual revelations and investigations of every sort? And yet it increasingly looks as if,... Read more
The Strategy of Maximal Extraction
The new U.S. energy policy of the Trump era is, in some ways, the oldest energy policy on Earth. Every great power has sought to mobilize the energy resources at its command, whether those be slaves, wind-power, coal or oil, to further its hegemonic ambitions. What makes the Trumpian... Read more
Making Nuclear Weapons Usable Again
Maybe you thought America’s nuclear arsenal, with its thousands of city-busting, potentially civilization-destroying thermonuclear warheads, was plenty big enough to deter any imaginable adversary from attacking the United States with nukes of their own. Well, it turns out you were wrong. The Pentagon has been fretting that the arsenal... Read more
Militarizing Homeland Security in the Climate-Change Era
Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Florida governor Rick... Read more
Oil Is Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy
Who says Pres. Donald Trump doesn’t have a coherent foreign policy? Pundits and critics across the political spectrum have chided him for failing to articulate and implement a clear international agenda. Look closely at his overseas endeavors, though, and one all-too-consistent pattern emerges — Trump will do whatever it... Read more
Donald Trump Is Building an Alliance of Oil States
That Donald Trump is a grand disruptor when it comes to international affairs is now a commonplace observation in the establishment media. By snubbing NATO and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, we’ve been told, Trump is dismantling the liberal world order created by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the... Read more

Michael Klare

Professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of 'The Race for What’s Left.'