The UAE Prepares For Expansion But Faces Pullback
United Arab States – Map: en.wikipedia.org
02-27-2026 ~ As Iran’s influence shows signs of waning, the UAE seeks to grow its global influence with U.S. backing, even as regional rivalries threaten to check its ambitions.
Rising tensions between Washington and Iran are now threatening to reach the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a U.S. ally. Hamidreza Moghaddamfar, an adviser to the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), warned in February that assets in the UAE linked to U.S. President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner could be targeted in the event of an escalation.
In 2022, the Iranian-backed Houthis struck Emirati infrastructure after the UAE supported a successful offensive against them in the Yemen war, showing the real and immediate risks facing the country. Abu Dhabi entered the conflict in Yemen in 2015 to curb Iranian influence on the Arabian Peninsula and to secure critical maritime routes along the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, a decision that has carried several consequences.
Despite tensions with Tehran, the UAE has a history of cooperating with its neighbor, and was Iran’s second-largest trading partner in 2025. But sensing Iran’s strain, Abu Dhabi is moving to consolidate influence at its rival’s expense. The UAE enters this period of geopolitical uncertainty somewhat insulated. Over the past three decades, it has strategically embedded itself deeply within U.S. political, economic, and military systems and has become financially integral and politically familiar in Washington as the region confronts major change.
“The Emirati goal with each successive U.S. president, it seemed, was to be considered America’s favorite Arab state. That effort was largely a success. For many in Washington and across the United States, the UAE became a model for the Middle East,” stated a 2025 article in the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Part of the UAE’s success stems from operating one of the most active foreign lobbying networks in Washington, D.C. Major bipartisan firms have been hired to sustain regular contact with congressional offices and the executive branch, and senior American officials have taken on advisory roles and been paid speaking fees during and after their public service, including former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Together, these networks helped lay the groundwork for deeper institutional integration that accelerated under the Biden administration, including the “UAE’s designation as a major U.S. defense partner.”
Speaking engagements and investments involving Bill and Hillary Clinton further demonstrate Abu Dhabi’s efforts to maintain ties across the political spectrum. They have also replicated this strategy in Europe. Former British prime ministers, including Tony Blair and David Cameron, have also engaged in advisory and speaking roles tied to Abu Dhabi.
Nonetheless, the UAE’s lobbying money comes from the oil and gas wealth that underpins its power, which has now expanded into a powerful network of state-linked investment vehicles. Sovereign funds such as Mubadala, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and the Investment Corporation of Dubai hold substantial positions in Western global infrastructure, the tech industry, and defense-linked manufacturing that Western governments consider strategically sensitive.
Welcomed by policymakers, in March 2025, the UAE announced a $1.4 trillion 10-year investment framework in the United States, adding to the $1 trillion already invested in the country.
Across Europe, Emirati capital has similarly flowed into critical transport and digital infrastructure, from the expansion of the UK’s London Gateway port to investing billions of euros for an AI data center in France. These projects are part of the UAE’s €38 billion in committed investments across the continent, highlighted at a “high-level reception” held on the sidelines of the 2026 Munich Security Conference. Emirati funding has also flowed to Western universities, policy institutes, and research centers that help influence political approaches to the Middle East.
But what sets the Emirati presence in the U.S. and Europe apart from some of its neighbors is its political restraint. Abu Dhabi has not linked its investments to a transnational religious agenda like Saudi Arabia is doing abroad in other contexts, nor has it used media platforms to promote politically charged messaging the way Qatar is doing with Al Jazeera. By avoiding the export of ideology or political doctrine, the UAE is positioning itself as a quiet, reliable source of capital and a pragmatic partner for Western governments while trying to manage public perception and foreign meddling. Read more
Will Mamdani Abolish Police, Or Simply Make Them Obsolete?
Sonali Kolhatkar
02-25-2026 ~ What sets Mamdani apart from other progressive mayors who promised to be tough on police is a democratic socialist vision of a society that meets people’s needs.
As part of his proposed city budget for 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just canceled the NYPD’s plan to hire 5,000 more police officers, undoing a key component of his predecessor Eric Adams’s initiatives. The move aligns with Mamdani’s campaign promise to keep police budgets and hiring in check. The young mayor also promised to create a Department of Community Safety while campaigning, an agency that, in theory, would divert certain emergency calls away from police. Although he did not include a line item for this department in his proposed budget, there are strong indications that the mayor plans to deliver on his abolitionist agenda by creating nonpolice alternatives to manage emergencies.
In 2020, when millions of Americans marched to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, many, including Mamdani, called for a defunding of police. But, five years later, Mamdani announced he would not, in fact, be defunding the police if elected as mayor, disappointing racial justice activists and critics of the police. And soon after his election, the mayor-elect announced in January 2026 that he would ask NYPD Police Chief Jessica Tisch to stay on in her leadership position.
Alex S. Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, isn’t discouraged by these moves. Author of the bestselling 2017 book, The End of Policing—considered a “bible of the movement to defund the police”—Vitale was invited in December 2025 to join the mayor’s transition team to work on community safety issues. While he disagrees with Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch on, he speculates that the New York City mayor is protecting against “the risk of a real big political backlash” if he had started his term with an aggressive removal of Tisch and dismantling of the NYPD.
Vitale says, “We need to start by building credible alternatives in the communities to produce real public safety before we start talking to the community about somehow dialing down or dismantling policing.” In other words, ordinary people need institutional alternatives to the police that they can turn to when faced with an emergency.
Vitale, who spent a lot of his time on Mamdani’s transition team working out the details for the Department of Community Safety, says such an agency would create a “robust civilian mental health crisis response capacity that is independent of the police, independent of the hospital system, which is tied to community-based service delivery [and] peer-to-peer outreach.” Additionally, “There are plans to address hate crimes, subway safety, all through a lens of what I consider to be a crisis stabilization.” The mayor’s approach, at least in theory, is to understand the needs of the city’s most vulnerable and underserved residents and work to meet them. This stands in stark contrast to the standard approach of criminalizing low-income and unhoused people and those struggling with mental health challenges.
Across the country, there are thriving models of nonpolice alternatives. A Department of Community Safety in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been in place for more than four years and has diverted more than 85 percent of emergency calls away from police. The city hired a new type of emergency responder: “trauma-informed professionals with a background in social work, mental health, and community engagement.” Read more
Widening The ‘We’: Meeting The Crisis Of Common Sense
02-20-2026 ~ What do we mean, in a social and political sense, by “we”? Generally, we’re referring to our shared identity as a community: the collective understanding that enables us to discuss, deliberate, and arrive at decisions on matters that affect all of us.
But “we” does not automatically include everyone. It refers to those of us who feel confident that we have a voice, however limited, in how society is run, and that we can expect our interests, needs, and desires to be recognized and addressed by the people who govern us. How widespread this feeling of being part of the “we” or of being left out is, becomes one of the most important determinants of cohesion in any society or polity.
This feeling of belonging—or not—is deeply affected by two other, often more widespread factors:
Common sense is the general understanding of how the social, political, and economic order works and the directions it needs to avoid: who it benefits and who it leaves out and how its processes and institutions do or do not work. Whether one approves or disapproves of the existing order, common sense represents our practical knowledge of how it operates and what’s essential for the social order to be deemed to be working.
Aspirational consensus is the understanding of what we can expect and hope for from one another and from the government acting responsibly and effectively. Whether or not it is universally accepted as valid, our culture aims to instill a shared understanding of our aspirations as a society.
Common sense and aspirational consensus are achieved in one or more of three ways:
Rhetoric and value positioning: The language that the dominant social movement uses to instill a sense of what values ought to define society,
Participation and representation: The assumptions this rhetoric inculcates that outline who rightfully belongs to society and has a voice in how it is governed, and
Coercion: The assumptions flowing from this sense of belonging as to what measures society can rightfully take to exercise its power, and upon whom.
Neither common sense nor aspirational consensus is shaped by the extremes of public opinion. But the contest between those extremes can affect the assumptions that determine mainstream opinion—the generally held view of how social order and its professed ideals ought to serve us—and therefore determine mainstream values.
Together, common sense and aspirational consensus determine how wide the we is: whether it tends to be inclusionary or exclusionary. This changes over time, in response to pressures from competing social movements and the Third Force: propertied individuals who amass capital and control access to it, and those who defend and promote their interests.
The institutions that form the basis of the present-day American political and social order—its aspirational consensus—were mainstreamed during the Progressive and New Deal eras. While these institutions were always under attack to some degree, it wasn’t until the Reagan presidency that a powerful assault on inclusionary social policy emerged.
What followed has been a growing polarization that makes it nearly impossible at times for political parties, religious sects, cultural identities, and other groups to cooperate even on basic, essential matters. In the past decade, polarization has reached a new level of policy paralysis.
This is occurring at a time when the need to communicate and deliberate productively is especially urgent. Climate change has become an existential danger. Economic globalization and resulting mass migrations have created enormous new social pressures. Vast, entrenched disparities of wealth and the interests connected with the rich have shrunk the window for new or updated social policy commitments to prevail. All these pressures make it imperative that we better comprehend the dynamics that produce a widening or narrowing of the we.
Tearing Down the Common Sense of Inclusionary Change
Polarization is the term we use to describe a situation in which politics becomes engulfed in competition between inclusionary and exclusionary social movements. It manifests itself in anger over issues like health and insurance, hunger and lack of material support, and socioeconomic injustice on one side, and fear and resentment of social change, status anxiety, and loss of faith in government on the other. Read more
Greenland Is Not For Sale: An Indigenous Activist Speaks Out Against The US
Malu Rosing – Advisor on Arctic and MA in Cross-Cultural Studies – Photo LinkedIn
02-14-2026 ~ The people of Greenland have stated: “We don’t want to be American, we don’t want to be Danish, we are Greenlandic.”
Donald Trump’s second presidency has been defined by lawless, fascist actions at home and imperial ambitions and performative militarism abroad. He has threatened scores of countries while depicting Canada and Greenland as part of the U.S. His obsession with Greenland has caused severe strains between Europe and the United States and even prompted several European nations to send troops to one of the world’s largest islands, which has a population of less than 60,000. For an insight on how the people of Greenland feel about Trump’s takeover attempts, Truthout spoke to Malu Rosing, a Greenlandic activist and Arctic advisor.
C. J. Polychroniou: U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants Greenland to be part of the U.S. and said on numerous occasions that this was going to happen one way or another. However, in remarks at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Trump ruled out using military force after it became clear that major European powers were determined to stand up to Trump’s imperial ambitions for Greenland. Can you share with us how the people of Greenland have reacted to Trump’s takeover attempts and why, under the circumstances, they prefer Denmark over the United States?
Malu Rosing: The ongoing threats of taking over Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) from the U.S. president have long been a headache to Kalaallit — the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.
First, in 2019, where Kalaallit, like the rest of the world, thought it was a by-passing thought — an outrageous claim that was laughed off. Second, in December 2024, where the president-elect stated that he wanted Greenland. This time it was taken more seriously as President-elect Trump had just won the presidential election and the world was looking at four more years with him in one of the most powerful positions in the world. He then followed that up by saying that he could not rule out military or economic force.
Further, Trump’s team, which consisted of a group including his son Donald J. Trump Jr. and the now-deceased Charlie Kirk, attempted an unwelcome and insincere charm offensive, walking around the capital city, Nuuk, handing out MAGA red caps, claiming that the statue of the colonizer Hans Egede and the Colonial Harbor was “where it all started.” To be clear, Inuit have lived in Kalaallit Nunaat for thousands of years, centuries before Hans Egede officially colonized the land in 1721.
This blatant insincere approach to the country and its citizens did not go unnoticed by Kalaallit. So, part of the aim was to spread factually wrong statements and push for pro-Trump staged photos from Greenland to make it seem like Kalaallit Nunaat and its people were interested in becoming a part of the U.S.
This is categorically not the case. In fact, Naalakkersuisut, the government of Greenland, has stated time and time again: “We don’t want to be American, we don’t want to be Danish, we are Greenlandic.”
And the population pushed back with soft, yet effective power. Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha Vance planned a visit to Greenland shortly after Trump Jr.’s visit to experience the culture, only to be turned down by every tourist company that was approached to plan their trip. Furthermore, silent demonstrations were planned — the Kalaallit Nunaat population was planning on literally turning its back against the vice-presidential couple to show them and the world that they were not welcome. The Vances never made it so far into the communities; instead they had to deviate from the original plan and only visit the American military base, Pituffik Space Base. Read more
Can Europe Reassert Itself After Ukraine?
02-13-2026 ~ For decades, Europe’s foreign policies have been decided elsewhere. As the war in Ukraine drags on and the U.S. priorities change, voices such as Glenn Diesen argue that Europe must rediscover strategic autonomy, whether the liberal international order survives or not.
Washington’s 2025 strike on Iran, the raid to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early 2026, and its renewed interest in acquiring Greenland have clarified the country’s international priorities. Meanwhile, securing Ukraine’s independence, once a defining rallying cry of the liberal world order, has slipped to a second-tier concern, but remains central for Europe. Equally pressing for the continent is the U.S. exerting economic and military pressure alongside the separate tensions over Greenland’s sovereignty. Combined with Russian pressure from the east, Europe’s vulnerability has been plainly exposed.
This is despite the European Union’s 27 member states representing roughly 450 million people, forming the world’s second-largest economy, and possessing advanced military capabilities, including France’s nuclear deterrent. Yet policy missteps, coupled with decades of outsourcing its security and strategic planning to Washington, has prevented the EU from mobilizing its collective power effectively. It now finds itself adrift as the U.S. narrows its global attention, eroding the region’s hegemonic stability.
Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen has warned of this trajectory for years. In his book, The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order (2024), he argues that the conflict will shape not only Ukraine’s fate but also the structure of international relations. A Western victory would extend its unipolarity in international affairs, while a Russian one would accelerate multipolarity by showing that Western rules cannot be imposed. Without deviating from its current foreign policy, the EU’s permanent marginalization is all but assured.
From Unipolarity to Uncertainty
In his book, Diesen writes that the post-Cold War expansion of Western institutions rested on the assumption that Russia was permanently weakened. During an interview with me, he said that the West believed its role would be “to manage its decline,” with Russia expected to “orbit the West essentially at the periphery, and it would do as it was told without having a seat at the table.”
Support for Western expansion into Eastern Europe was strong among institutionalists, industrialists, Eastern European states, and foreign policy hawks. While Russia naturally rejected NATO expansion, warnings about pursuing such a policy emerged throughout the 1990s from U.S. officials such as George F. Kennan, architect of the Cold War containment policy; former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock; former Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates; and former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III. Diesen explains in his book that this caution continued after several rounds of expansion. In 2008, “William Burns, who… became the director of the CIA, warned in a memo that threatening NATO expansion could provoke a Russian military intervention.”
He further writes, “During the first Cold War, the dividing lines in Europe were clearly delineated and the status quo had been largely respected, thus the competition for influence and proxy wars occurred in the third world. In the emerging second Cold War, the West and Russia were competing over where the new dividing lines in Europe would be drawn.” Ukraine, however, was always destined to be the flashpoint. As Diesen told me, “If you look through the ’90s, a lot of the leading politicians and academics in the United States recognized really, that Ukraine was this red line.” In his book, he argues that Ukraine’s proximity to Russia, deep cultural ties, and military significance explain Moscow’s intense resistance to its westward alignment.
In a 2025 podcast interview with the Stimson Center, Diesen clarified that while he does not support Russia’s war, he views it as a predictable outcome from a realist perspective. He sharply criticizes European leaders for backing NATO expansion, arguing that “if you know that the Russians will invade and destroy Ukraine if you try to expand NATO, it’s hardly a moral thing to advocate for this.” Read more
Why Scientists Are Still Puzzled By Consciousness
Leslie Alan Horvitz
Photo: lesliehorvitz.com
02-11-2026 ~ Despite several theories proposed by scientists and philosophers, there are no conclusive answers.
Consciousness, at its basic level, is an individual’s self-awareness, comprising both external and internal phenomena; it may constitute any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. Awareness can be a continuously changing continuum, or it may shut down or be disrupted temporarily. During sleep, for instance, we are not aware of our environment, yet it can be argued that we remain conscious.
Altered levels of consciousness can also occur due to medical or mental conditions—such as coma, delirium, disorientation, and stupor—that impair, change, or obliterate awareness. But what about consciousness in other species? Are dogs, fish, shrimp, or bees conscious? They have senses and perceptions, but do they possess the same kind of awareness as humans?
The problem with discussing consciousness is that it means different things to different people. Some researchers focus on subjective experiences (what you feel), while others focus on functionality, or on how cognitive processes and behaviors are influenced by consciousness. “Until about 30 years ago, it was taboo to study consciousness, and for good reasons,” said Lenore Blum, a theoretical computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a 2024 Nature article. According to her, there was a lack of “good techniques to study consciousness in a non-invasive way” back then.
That changed around 1990, with the emergence of new technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, which allowed researchers to study the brain non-invasively.
The words “conscious” and “consciousness” are terms that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena. They are used to convey various meanings, and the adjective “conscious” is applied to both whole organisms—creature consciousness—and particular mental states and processes—state consciousness.
The self-awareness requirement can be interpreted in many ways. If we consider explicit conceptual self-awareness, many nonhuman animals and even young humans may fail to qualify. Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher, proposed a criterion for describing the subjective experience of consciousness, summarized in his famous dictum “what it is like…,” that is, how does a creature (animal, child, or adult human) experience the world? According to Nagel, bats are conscious because they experience their world through echolocation, although human consciousness is very different from that of a bat. Nagel said that “the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”
In the English language, the words “conscious” and “consciousness” date to the 17th century. The first use of consciousness as an adjective was figurative, applied to inanimate objects, such as the “conscious Groves” in 1643. The word is derived from the Latin conscius, which means “knowing with” or “having joint or common knowledge with another.” In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes wrote: “Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another.”
Not surprisingly, consciousness is a subject of considerable debate. Is it a phenomenon limited to and produced exclusively by the mind? Does it imply an inner life, a world of introspection, private thought, imagination, and volition? Is consciousness related to a sense of selfhood, a mental state, or a mental process?
Wakefulness is a prerequisite of consciousness, but does this mean that we are conscious only when we are awake and alert? Are we closer to consciousness when we are in a fugue state or when we are close to waking up? And where does hypnosis fit into the picture? The boundaries are blurry.
Some scientists argue that an explanation for consciousness is fairly straightforward. In a 2018 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, Boris Kotchoubey, professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, maintained that “[c]onsciousness is not a process in the brain but a kind of behavior that, of course, is controlled by the brain like any other behavior.”
He believed that the “[h]uman consciousness emerges on the interface between three components of animal behavior: communication, play, and the use of tools.” Although these three components are found in other mammals, birds, and even cephalopods, their interaction is unique to humans owing to their capacity for communication and language.
One of the problems with the study of consciousness is the lack of a universally accepted operational definition. Scientist René Descartes famously proposed the idea of cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), which effectively equates consciousness with the act of thinking.
The Features of Consciousness
Self-consciousness may be a characteristic common to conscious organisms, meaning that they are not only aware but also cognizant of the fact that they are aware. Read more