Although the American labor movement is sometimes depicted as hawkish and xenophobic, this characterization ignores its repeated attempts to grapple with the global problem of war. For more than a century, prominent U.S. labor leaders have called for peace, as have many of their unions. In the past three months alone, the nation's major labor federation, the AFL-CIO, has rebuked the governments of the United States and Israel for initiating a war with Iran, demanded an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and championed reliance upon international law and the United Nations in the quest for peace.
Published Articles by Lawrence Wittner
Recent public opinion polls in numerous countries, including the United States, indicate that support for international solidarity and cooperation is very substantial, and growing. Consequently, political activists and politicians shouldn't be reluctant to speak out for them. Indeed, given the popularity of this internationalist approach to global affairs, it might even prove a winning political issue.
Although Donald Trump has never been modest about his abilities or reluctant to exercise personal power, during his second term in office he has shown clear signs of megalomania. These signs include his blatant demands for the territory of other nations, his massive military buildup, his dispatch of U.S. military forces into combat, his disdain for the United Nations, and his establishment of a Trump-controlled "Board of Peace." This descent into megalomania is deeply disturbing, for the dangers to the world, and even to human survival, are sharply enhanced by one-man rule.
In July 2015, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union -- concerned that Iran's uranium enrichment program, used for peaceful purposes, might be diverted to the development of the Bomb -- worked out an international agreement with Iran blocking that possibility. The agreement granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for significant, enforceable restrictions on its nuclear program. But, from the start, Republicans opposed it and, when Trump became President, he quickly sabotaged it.
Over the course of history, nations -- in the quest for their own security -- have fallen back back on their own military strength and alliance systems. But these ostensible solutions to the problem of national security failed to prevent World Wars I and II, as well as numerous other wars. This sobering experience led, in the 20th century, to the conclusion that another path toward national security should be explored: international organization. Although international organization has not, as yet, proved a panacea, it has been more promising than its alternatives. As a result, the strengthening of the United Nations -- or perhaps its reshaping into a democratic federation of nations -- might yet help create a new and better world.
For centuries, a battle has raged in the United States over the issue of which Americans should bear the brunt of paying taxes to maintain public services. Although the advent of the federal income tax shifted much of the burden to those with the greatest wealth (and therefore the greatest ability to pay), in recent decades wealthy Americans and their corporations have managed to subvert progressive taxation and, in a growing number of cases, to evade taxation entirely. As a result, campaigns to enact tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in numerous states and in Congress.
Donald Trump's war of choice in the Middle East is but the latest indication that the system of international law -- which provides guidelines for the behavior of nations in world affairs -- is crumbling and being replaced by a might-makes-right approach. But there are ways to bolster international law and, thereby, halt the return of nations to their traditional practices of war and imperialism.
In January 2026, as the World Economic Forum opened in Davos, a report by the charity Oxfam revealed that a fourth of the world's population was afflicted by hunger and nearly half lived in poverty. Meanwhile, billionaire wealth jumped by over 16 percent in 2025 to $18.4 trillion -- its highest level in history. The world's 12 richest billionaires had more wealth than the poorest half of humanity (or more than four billion people) and lived in fantastic luxury and extravagance. Can this massive economic inequality possibly be justified?
Given the termination of nuclear arms control agreements, the escalating nuclear arms race, and the increasing threats of nuclear war by leaders of the nuclear powers, the hands of the "Doomsday Clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were recently set at the most dangerous level in its 80-year history. Even so, as in the past, it remains possible to stop the drift toward annihilation.
Amid widespread revulsion at the behavior of the second Trump administration and its Republican loyalists, there is a curious tendency to claim that the Democrats have failed to resist the slide of the United States toward fascism. But, in fact, Democrats -- at the grassroots level and in Congress -- have repeatedly displayed overwhelming opposition to the rightwing Republican onslaught. By contrast, Republicans have almost uniformly backed Trump's priorities.