JB Shreve

The US has moved more than 3,000 troops to the Red Sea, escalating tensions with Iran. The move comes after Iran seized several civilian vessels in the same waters in recent years. According to the US, Iran has seized or attempted to take control of at least 20 internationally...

Nine months ago, Ethiopia concluded its two-year civil war in the Tigrayan region. The country may be on the verge of yet another internal conflict, this time in the northern Amhara region. For several months, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has pushed his plan to disband regional forces in the country's...

Rising frustration and hopelessness have come to define the political realities of Ecuador in recent years. The pandemic's destabilizing effects and subsequent lockdowns compounded layers of corruption and rising lawlessness. The violent trends within the South African nation were capped last week with the assassination of Presidential candidate Fernando...

The shift in weather patterns toward the extreme is being noted worldwide and occurring at an alarming rate. A recent article in the Washington Post pointed out that just as the world recorded its hottest month of June on record, we then recorded earth’s hottest day on record in...

The civil war in Sudan has now surpassed 100 days in duration. If you missed this milestone, it is no surprise. The violence occurring in Ukraine is abominable, but the disproportionate attention given to that war in Eastern Europe compared to the atrocities in Sudan suggests the Western world...

Months-long protests and heated divisions will come to a head in an Israeli Knesset vote that has triggered a domestic threat emergency in Israel. The nation has already seen the largest protests in its history. Today, 150 major firms, including banks, are striking ahead of the vote. On Sunday, tens...

After the unique economic factors (see yesterday's post), the second solution to the crisis of these debtor nations in the early 1980s is known to history as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution actually began earlier in the 1960s, but its transfer to the underdeveloped world was often hand in...

In our last post in this series, we looked at how benevolent aid became dysfunctional politics and began reshaping the global food system in the 1960s and 70s.  Two significant factors contributed solutions to the crisis as well the perpetuation of the dysfunctional global food system. The first was...

By 1956, food aid accounted for half of all US economic aid throughout the world.  From the 1950s onward, food became a central piece of American aid throughout the world and a foundational element in the evolving US-dominated global economy. By 1960, one-third of the world’s trade in wheat...

The end of World War II resulted in the near total destruction of Europe’s powerful nations and the global complex of colonialism they erected over the course of the prior century. It was only a few years into the postwar period when Great Britain withdrew from almost all of...