John Carl Baker is a senior program officer at Ploughshares Fund. The views expressed here are his own. Baker's writing has appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the New Republic, Defense One, and elsewhere.
The risk of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine is low but rising. It’s deeply concerning. But we should also resist the kind of alarmism that is counterproductive to both principled internationalism and winning a world free of nuclear weapons.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed the new reality of great-power conflict, underwritten by nuclear weapons. Our task is to reject aligning with one of the great powers and to instead push for across-the-board nuclear disarmament.
South Korea’s 2016–17 Candlelight Revolution shows that to defend democratic rights, you have to be ready to step outside the bounds of liberal proceduralism. We should take the same lesson in the US: the best way to ensure that Donald Trump will respect the results of the November election is to mobilize in the streets and demand it.
According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.
We can’t avoid confronting the Pentagon and the massive (and lucrative) security state it oversees.
Samantha Power has staked her career on fighting for human rights. But her liberal interventionism undermines those very aims by propping up the world’s most powerful military.
The New York Times and other establishment outlets like to paint North Korea as an irrational actor hell-bent on destroying the United States. But you can’t understand North Korea’s nuclear program without talking about US militarism.
Donald Trump’s ignorance and hubris are undermining any possibility of a denuclearization deal with North Korea.
The Netflix series Wild Wild Country has been widely praised — and rightly so. It’s an incisive meditation on everything from the colonization of the Americas to present-day gentrification.
Trump might get all the attention, but South Korean president Moon Jae-in is the real key to securing peace on the peninsula.
Don’t credit Trump, but a new Korean War seems less likely today than it has in years.
It’s not just Trump — nuclear weapons are tools of genocidal power, no matter who controls them.
The United States cares more about keeping South Korea under its thumb than securing peace with North Korea.
The risk of war with North Korea remains real. And Trump and Abe are pushing us further in that calamitous direction.
To prevent nuclear catastrophe, we must stand in solidarity with ordinary people across the Korean peninsula.
The dozens who perished in an Oakland warehouse fire were victims of the affordable housing crisis.
In criticizing capitalism for mass consumption instead of exploitation, The Americans uses Soviet characters to valorize austerity.
Rick Scott and Obama’s figures may sound impressive, but “job creation” does not equal recovery.