William Astore
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular. He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Astore discusses the difficulty of speaking one’s mind in the military, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, July 14, 2017 Preparing for Doomsday: A Shelter-in-Place Mentality Is the New American Normal Has there ever been a nation as dedicated to preparing for doomsday as the United States? If that’s a thought that hasn’t crossed your mind, maybe it’s because you didn’t spend part of your life inside Cheyenne Mountain. That's a tale I’ll get to soon, but first let me mention America’s “ doomsday... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 06, 2017 America’s Real Red Scare: The Slow-Motion Collapse of the American Empire Jump into your time machine and let me transport you back to another age. It’s May 2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the mail. I’m tantalized by the cover article. “Russia is finished,” the magazine announces. The subtitle minces no words: “The unstoppable descent into social... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 13, 2017 What Does an "America-First" Foreign Policy Actually Mean? What does an “America-first” foreign policy look like under President Donald Trump? As a start, forget the ancient label of “isolationism.” With the end of Trump’s first 100 days approaching, it looks more like a military-first policy aimed at achieving global hegemony, which means it’s a potential... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 28, 2017 In Afghanistan, America's Biggest Foe Is Self-Deception America’s war in Afghanistan is now in its 16th year, the longest foreign war in our history. The phrase “no end in sight” barely covers the situation. Prospects of victory -- if victory is defined as eliminating that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 26, 2017 A Violent Cesspool of Our Own Making: The Dark [K]night of Donald Trump I came of age during America's Cold War with the Soviet Union, witnessing its denouement while serving in the U.S. military. In those days, the USSR led the world's weapons trade, providing arms to the Warsaw Pact (the military alliance it dominated) as well as to client states like Cuba, Egypt,... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 20, 2016 All the President's Generals America has always had a love affair with its generals. It started at the founding of the republic with George Washington and continued with (among others) Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor , Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. These military men shared something in common: they were winning... Read more |
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Views Friday, August 12, 2016 Our Greatest National Security Threat? Perpetual War The United States is now engaged in perpetual war with victory nowhere in sight. Iraq is chaotic and scarred . So, too, is Libya . Syria barely exists. After 15 years, “progress” in Afghanistan has proven eminently reversible as efforts to rollback recent Taliban gains continue to falter. The... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 12, 2016 We Are The Empire Perhaps you’ve heard the expression : “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Cartoonist Walt Kelly ’s famed possum, Pogo , first uttered that cry. In light of alien disaster movies like the recent sequel Independence Day: Resurgence and America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, I’d like... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 21, 2016 Dominating the Skies – and Losing the Wars In the era of the long war on terror, Thursday, June 2nd, 2016, was a tough day for the U.S. military. Two modern jet fighters, a Navy F-18 Hornet and an Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon , flown by two of America’s most capable pilots, went down, with one pilot killed . In a war that has featured... Read more |
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Views Saturday, June 04, 2016 Hillary Clinton’s Flat and Misleading Foreign Policy Speech On Thursday, Hillary Clinton gave a foreign policy speech in San Diego that was notably flat and misleading. It’s been getting decent reviews in the mainstream media for the zingers she tossed at Donald Trump. But when you listen to the speech (you can watch it here ) and think about it, you... Read more |