TomDispatch.com

After America

Andy Kroll — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:28:49 +0000

While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it’s becoming increasingly clear that U.S. military might is no longer capable of subduing even a mid-sized power like Iran, much less holding the rest of the world in its thrall. Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes, and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events in the Persian Gulf — dynamics best seen by comparing two newspaper editorials with revealing similarities despite the 80 years separating... Read more

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About That Arc of the Moral Universe

Andy Kroll — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:32:44 +0000

This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my — I’ll admit it, easily attracted — attention. It’s been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I’ve ever worked with. A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between “their” and “they’re.” Unlike the New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask... Read more

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Donald (Disaster) Trump

Andy Kroll — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:27:54 +0000

Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in White Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky. Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can... Read more

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A Short History of Sportswriting (from Bat Masterson to Shams Charania)

Andy Kroll — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:23:03 +0000

When Chinese leaders claim that the American empire is in decline, I immediately assume their analysts are decoding dispatches from ESPN, The Athletic, and columnist Shams Charania. After all, it’s in sportswriting, I’ve come to think, that the songs of the canary in the all-American coal mine couldn’t be clearer. If the games we play and watch reflect our past and present lives, then the coverage and commentary about them may help predict our future. American sportswriters have been cheerleaders for empire since the early twentieth century, when Bat Masterson decided that shooting people in Dodge City wasn’t fulfilling enough for a man of his talent and ambition. Yes, that Bat Masterson. He came East and, as a boxing columnist... Read more

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Pete Hegseth’s Desperate Crusade for Masculine Validation

Andy Kroll — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:35:31 +0000

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” jumped at the prospect of such a conflict. “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump recently recalled at a press event. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’” Americans join the military for any number of reasons: to serve their country, gain economic stability, or simply join a community. For... Read more

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World War Trump

Andy Kroll — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:38:28 +0000

“It’s got no anything,” President Donald Trump said of Somalia in a recent xenophobic rant. “All they do is run around shooting each other.” As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession. U.S. troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, U.S. and U.N. troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. The next month, in a major escalation, U.S. helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a... Read more

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Is the U.S. Heading Toward a Hard Landing?

Andy Kroll — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:34:12 +0000

Ever since North Korea suffered through the death of its first leader in 1994, a loss magnified by an economic collapse and a devastating famine, outside observers have likened the country to an airplane experiencing a serious malfunction. The major question they posed: in the end, would North Korea experience a soft landing or a catastrophic crash? Perhaps a reformer would come along — say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea. More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but... Read more

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The President of Peace Makes War on the Planet

Andy Kroll — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:30:43 +0000

Hey, I always suspected that Donald Trump and I, having both grown up in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, had something in common. Now, I know just what it is — his boyhood love for the 1950s TV program Victory at Sea. (“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he asked reporters in January while talking about the new “Trump class” battleships he wants to build. “What a great thing that is to watch!”) I was similarly fascinated by that prime-time documentary series on World War II when I was a youngster, and I imagine that the two of us were watching it at the very same time in the very same city, both of... Read more

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Butter (and Schools), Not Guns (and Warfare)

Andy Kroll — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:51:53 +0000

Guns or butter. Butter or guns. Can we have both? If not, which should come first? Consider it one of those chicken-and-egg conundrums of modern society. “Guns” is the stand-in for a well-funded military and “butter” for all the human goods, comforts, and needs of a society. Economists, politicians, and generals have long considered the balance of guns and butter. Wage too many wars, produce too many arms, and there won’t be enough money to keep a nation decently fed and comfortable. Produce too many consumer goods, meet everyone’s needs, and a nation might find itself ill-prepared and vulnerable in the face of a possible attack or even invasion. Everyone from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to British Prime Minister Margaret... Read more

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The Electric Car Is the Only Winner in the Latest Iran War

Andy Kroll — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:30:02 +0000

After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind. The Iranians, of... Read more

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