Will Brown looks at the foreign policy agenda facing the Obama administration.
The vitriolic healthcare debate in the US and ongoing economic problems may dominate President Obama’s current agenda but the first nine months of this administration have also put into sharp focus an exceptionally difficult range of US foreign policy problems.
The inauguration of Barack Obama [...]

PHIL DORÉ recounts his personal and painful journey from the Stop the War Coalition to Labour Friends of Iraq
In March 2003, as the war began in Iraq, I found myself sitting in the middle of a road in Cardiff alongside hundreds of anti-war protestors. I was one of what the media had dubbed ‘protest virgins’: [...]

SARAH BRACKING unpicks the liberal agenda behind Live8 and the G8 summit.
The majority of the people attending Live8, and the demonstrations surrounding the G8, wanted no more nor less than to reduce poverty. But helping poor people in other countries raises problems, particularly when the language of benevolence doesn’t explain the structural issues involved.
What emerged [...]

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS explains why the latest pronouncements from Francis Fukuyama miss the mark
I have a feeling that it must have been a disappointing week for Francis Fukuyama, whose essay ‘After Neoconservatism’ (adapted from his upcoming book America at the Crossroads) was awarded seven pages in the 19 February 2006 New York Times Magazine. The anti-Danish mayhem [...]

IVAN BRISCOE listens to the voices of Venezuela’s unemployed, its mobilised, its empowered and its disillusioned to portray the hopes and paradoxes of Hugo Chávez’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’
He has lived on his homestead for only a year since staging a ‘sort of invasion’, but Jovito González is already enjoying the fruits of the Caribbean. Beside a [...]

GARY KENT reports on a nine day fact-finding trip to meet trade unionists in Iraq
It rarely makes the news here but a million trade unionists are on the march in Iraq. A new network of non-sectarian union federations, professional associations and civil society groups has emerged in Iraq, having been brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein’s [...]

Anti-Americanism must not become a pillar of left-wing thinking, says ALEX MILES
Of all the clichés attached to the United States of America, one of those repeated most often is that it is a land of contrasts. Clichéd it may be, but the statement is also accurate.
The ‘land of the free’ is also the spiritual home [...]

We must look beyond the two issues that dominate discussions of Iraq, and unite in support of Iraq’s trade unions, says former MP HARRY BARNES
In Britain, our minds are often focussed on two big issues concerning Iraq. First, should we have been involved in its invasion? Secondly, should our troops now be withdrawn?
I will outline [...]

GARY KENT reports on the diversity of opinions he found on a recent State Department-sponsored trip to USA.
The United States is not a uniform entity. Anyone who says, “America thinks this, that or the other” is just plain wrong. There is possibly more diversity of opinion in America than in Europe.
Bush made major electoral gains [...]

WILLIAM BROWN unpicks the rhetoric and looks beyond the headlines to examine the origins and assess the likely outcomes of the recent unrest in Zimbabwe.
Not since independence was granted in 1980 has Zimbabwe accounted for so many minutes of TV news and so many column inches in the broadsheets in Britain. However, the coverage of [...]