Reader Interventions
Re The Nation’s July 16/23 special issue, “Needed: A New Foreign Policy”: Truer words were never written. But there’s a puzzling aspect here as well. The one issue that has mobilized Americans politically today—immigration reform—appears only as a minor point. The growing inequality among nations, which is the ultimate cause of the immigration problem, is presented as an aspect of economic growth, or as a blot on our humanitarian values, and it’s both. But shouldn’t it be front and center? Only international measures can deal with it; Trump is so strikingly oblivious to its causes.
Peter Marcuse
santa barbara, calif.
Thank you for the valuable insights in your special foreign-policy issue. As someone who has worked alongside a few of the authors to press community and labor organizations to oppose the war in Iraq and the bloated, counterproductive US military budget, I have long been worried by our movement’s relative lack of attention to global workers’ issues.
Your authors wisely talk about the rise in inequality and its relationship to militarism, both at home and abroad. The growing resistance movement needs to understand these issues or we’ll continue to lose big portions of our base, such as people in marginal economic situations, to tantalizing demagogic, xenophobic, and racist appeals. One hundred years ago, labor was key to the broad opposition to World War I. We need those connections again.
Jeff Blum
new york city
Even in The Nation’s special foreign-policy issue, there is no mention of Palestine. How disheartening! US tax dollars fund Israel’s destruction of lives, dreams, the economy, the environment, and beauty in Palestine. How can you justify such a glaring omission? Yes, Robert Borosage mentions Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, but he does not mention that this move is against international law. There needs to be context as well as urgency in supporting Palestine.
Elizabeth Smith
kansas city, mo.
Giant Steps
In “Wars Without End” [July 16/23], Andrew Bacevich concludes his fine critique of American militarism by asking where we can turn for guidance when it comes to transforming the war economy and producing a better life for all. By way of a partial answer, he reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech decrying “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Then Bacevich asks who will bring Trump voters into “the fold” to join the battle against these triplets.
Let me suggest the renewed Poor People’s Campaign as one possible candidate. The effort has begun with organizing in 40 states, with an emphasis on the poor and the working class, and has added the struggle against “ecological devastation” to King’s triplets in its “national call for moral revival.”
Maynard Seider
philadelphia
