#Opinion
America has spent decades treating freedom as the absence of restraint. But when corporations can engineer our desires, monetize our weaknesses, and shift the costs of our choices onto everyone else, the right to choose can become a remarkably thin form of liberty.
#Opinion
Trump says the economy is doing just fine. But rising prices, weaker hiring, and falling real wages tell a less reassuring story: America may still be growing, but many Americans are not getting richer with it.
#Opinion
Gaza has revealed a most serious issue that goes beyond a war: When American leaders have the capacity to hold back an ally, they don't. When they don't, the people under fire suffer, and so does the credibility of the United States.
#Opinion
The hostility toward Indian Americans also suggests another paradox in the American dream: minorities are encouraged to move into the mainstream, but only if they don't threaten what the mainstream values and believes it is composed of.
#Opinion
Bernie Sanders was a politician who did what few in American history have managed: he brought the word socialism to millions of voters. The next big question, though, is whether the movement he helped build can harness the Democratic Party without morphing into another brand of it.
#Analysis
The Pentagon is not the whole American war machine. Its costs are scattered across Energy, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, intelligence agencies, and other parts of government, turning a multitrillion-dollar security apparatus into a collection of ordinary budget lines. The money is public. The total is not.
#Opinion
Washington’s withdrawal from Iraq marks the end of one military mission, not the end of the machinery that keeps American troops in the region. Bases create new security threats, allies organize their defense around Washington’s guarantees, and the Pentagon finds fresh reasons to remain long after a deployment's original purpose has faded.
#Opinion
America’s economic order rests on more than billionaires and Wall Street titans. In ordinary businesses across the nation, a new group of entrepreneurs has amassed wealth and the political clout to protect the rules that let them do it.
#Opinion
America rarely enters a war believing it will last forever. The problem is what happens after the original justification starts disappearing: the war acquires new purposes, new enemies, and eventually its own logic.
#Opinion
The United States can retain unmatched military reach, enormous economic weight, and the world’s dominant reserve currency while losing something harder to measure: the assumption that other countries must organize their choices around Washington.
The Washington Probe