How Madeleine Albright Got the War the U.S. Wanted

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Twenty-five years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.

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Is a New Korean War in the Offing?

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In recent days, U.S. media have been proclaiming that North Korea plans to initiate military action against its neighbor to the south. An article by Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, neither previously prone to making wild assertions, created quite a splash and set off a chain reaction of media fear-mongering. In Carlin’s and Hecker’s assessment, “[W]e believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.” They add that if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is convinced that engagement with the United States is not possible, then “his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using [his nuclear] arsenal.”

Migration as Economic Imperialism

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Numbering an estimated 169 million, international migrant laborers are generally regarded in mainstream economic circles as playing a substantial role in poverty alleviation and economic development in their home countries. This is accomplished, it is asserted, through remittances sent home by migrants, reaching an estimated $647 billion arriving in low- and moderate-income countries in 2022, a total that surpasses foreign direct investment in those nations.  As one World Bank policy researcher explains, remittances “have a profound impact on the living standards of people in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” 

In his latest book, Migration as Economic Imperialism, political analyst Immanuel Ness challenges and complicates that simplified narrative, situating the global migrant labor system in the broader context of the long history of resource and labor extraction between the Global North and Global South.

The Struggle for Peace in Northeast Asia

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Text of talk delivered on May 16, 2023, at the International Strategy Center’s ‘International Conference for Peace in Northeast Asia: The South Korea-US-Japan Military Alliance is Stoking a New Cold War.’

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North Korean-Russian Talks Aimed at Expanding Cooperation

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Hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Gregory Elich to discuss the recent visit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, why the western media’s characterization of the meeting as focused on shipping artillery shells is misleading and what kinds of cooperation may have been agreed to, and how this partnership may help to alleviate the impact of sanctions on North Korea.

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The Impact of the Korean War

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Hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Gregory Elich to discuss the anniversary of the beginning of the Korean war and how the US divided the peninsula, how the war has had lasting effects on both sides of the Korean Peninsula and led to intense repression of progressive political elements in the south, and why the Korean Peninsula is so important to US imperialism.

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The Dynamics of Rural Capitalist Accumulation in Post-Land Reform Zimbabwe

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George T. Mudimu interviewed by Gregory Elich

Since the advent of British colonial occupation in the late nineteenth century, control of the land has been a contested issue in Zimbabwe. In what the British named Southern Rhodesia, they systematically stripped Indigenous peasants of land, cattle, and resources, crushing resistance with brutal violence.

Book Launch of the New Edition of I. F. Stone’s ‘The Hidden History of the Korean War’

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People’s Forum presentation co-sponsored by Monthly Review and the Korea Policy Institute.

The Korea Policy Institute’s Christine Hong and Martin Hart-Landsberg talk with the writers of the book’s new introduction, Tim Beal and Gregory Elich.

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Introduction to the New Edition of ‘The Hidden History of the Korean War’

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By Tim Beal and Gregory Elich

For a book on contemporary events to have a new edition seventy years after the first is a rare achievement. Izzy Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War has a continuing relevance for three major reasons: it is a tour de force of investigative journalism; the Korean War was a pivotal event in post-1945 history; and the combination of the two—the method of investigation and what it revealed of machinations behind the official curtain of obfuscation—can be brought to bear on a wider scale in order to understand what has happened since then and what is happening around us now, and into the future.

 

What is on the Agenda in South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s Visit to Washington?

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Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Gregory Elich to discuss South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s state visit to the US and what might be on the agenda with regard to South Korea’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, the potential for South Korea to be a bigger part of the US tech war against China as tensions between the US and China escalate, and how this visit may impact inter-Korean relations as the US prepares for a conflict in East Asia.

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