The Trump administration's May 2026 indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro represents the latest escalation in a six-decade campaign of economic warfare that has failed to achieve regime change while inflicting catastrophic harm on the Cuban people. The roots of the U.S. embargo lie in the aftermath of Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-backed government of Fulgencio Batista and set Cuba on a course of nationalization and Soviet alignment. The United States first launched an arms embargo in 1958, with the energy and agricultural sectors targeted beginning in...

Americans have been fed a comforting fairy tale about Islamic terrorism. Radical jihadists attack the West simply because they despise freedom, democracy, and the American way of life. This narrative flatters domestic audiences while conveniently obscuring a far more troubling reality. For decades, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have armed, financed, tolerated, and tapped into Sunni Islamist extremists as geopolitical tools to destabilize rivals. The evidence spans multiple theaters and rests on declassified documents, congressional investigations, and credible...

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) tweeted on May 4, 2026: For nearly six decades the U.S. has voluntarily remained in the dark on Israel's nuclear capabilities. The ambiguity ends now. There is too much at stake to accept ignorance. We are at war alongside Israel against Iran without knowing what their red lines are for using a… pic.twitter.com/oe0KF9MnKQ — Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) May 6, 2026 That tweet accompanied a letter signed by Castro and twenty-nine other House Democrats addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The lawmakers argued that Congress has a constitutional duty to...

The United States has long operated under a seductive strategic fantasy. Remove the leader of an adversary organization, whether a drug cartel, a terrorist group, or a sovereign state, and that organization will collapse, enabling American interests to fill the resulting vacuum. However, decades of academic literature, hard empirical data from Mexico's drug war, and the lived consequences of America's post 9/11 targeted killing campaigns all tell a damning story many in the DC ruling class refuse to acknowledge. Decapitation strategies are, at best, tactically satisfying and strategically...

Economic sanctions have become the defining coercive instrument of American foreign policy. Currently, roughly 27% of the world's countries are under sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, or the United Nations—up from just 4% in the early 1960s. A landmark 2025 study published in The Lancet Global Health by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot has put a number on the cumulative death toll of these measures. Unilateral sanctions kill approximately 564,000 people per year, a figure comparable to the total annual mortality burden of armed...

The recent ceasefire between Israel and Iran may have paused the most intense phase of direct military confrontation, but it has done nothing to resolve the deeper questions about Middle Eastern stability that have emerged since October 7, 2023. Behind the temporary calm lies a profound transformation in Israeli strategic thinking, one that has moved from containment to active regional reorganization. Israel is not a normal democracy that abides by the rule of law or legal restraint. It is very much an expansionist state with bold ambitions and a demonstrated willingness to break...

Iran is not some fragile backwater that will crumble under the weight of American bombs. It is a civilization state with thousands of years of continuous existence, a population of ninety million people, and a geography of mountains, deserts, and underground fortifications specifically designed to resist foreign subjugation. The notion that air power alone can decapitate its leadership, destroy its infrastructure, and produce regime change represents a fantasy that scholars have debunked repeatedly over the past century. Yet here we are, over a month into Operation Epic Fury, watching...