Portside

While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

The time and place was vastly different, but the men who designed the war against Native Americans would embrace the rationale that currently impels U.S. foreign policy. U.S. exceptionalism, the dangerous delusion that its institutions and its organization of capital are superior, has its roots in the campaigns against Native Americans. While it has fostered many crusades and stupendous violence, it is increasingly unacceptable and unenforceable in a multi-polar world.

It’s possible that the EU cannot be reformed, but popular resistance could provide an alternative to disintegration

The single most dangerous spot on the globe, the current situation in Kashmir cannot continue. The Kashmiris should have their referendum — and both India and Pakistan will have to accept the results. The world cannot afford the current tensions to spiral down into a military confrontation that could easily get out of hand. Neither country would survive a nuclear war, and neither country should be spending its money on an arms race.

Donald Trump is inheriting the scariest tools of aggression imaginable. A new book explores their dark legacy.

The problems facing the Spanish left mirror the crisis engulfing Europe.

While the mainstream media focuses on losers and winners in the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a largely unreported debate is going on over the future course of U.S. diplomacy. Its outcome will have a profound effect on how Washington projects power—both diplomatic and military—in the coming decade.

President Recip Tayyip Erdoğan has effectively used Turkey’s failed coup to isolate his internal opposition and consolidate his personal power. In the wake of the coup, the Kurds have suffered setbacks in Turkey and throughout the region. But there is also evidence of some shifts in regional alliances that may impact the deadly civil wars in Syria and Yemen, if the outside powers fueling the two conflicts can agree on negotiated solutions to these unwinnable wars.

Astounding increases in the danger of nuclear weapons have paralleled provocative foreign policy decisions that needlessly incite tensions between Washington and Moscow. It's been 71 years since atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and humanity's memory of those events has dimmed. The bombs that obliterated those cities were tiny by today's standards.

A new progressive coalition seeks to end Spain's punishing austerity regime and confront the country's staggering unemployment. The new kid on the block has raised the pressure on the center-left Socialists to make a choice: follow the lead of Portugal, where the Socialist Party formed a united front with the Left Bloc and the Communist/Green alliance, or imitate the Social Democrats in Germany and join a "grand coalition" and make common cause with the right?