Rajan Menon

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

How to Avoid Armageddon in Korea

Coming to terms with the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea and trusting in deterrence may not sound like a perfect ending, but under the circumstances it’s undoubtedly the best way to avert catastrophe.

Rajan Menon
By Rajan Menon
A man walks by a TV screen showing a local news program reporting about North Korea's missile launch with an images of U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 1, 2017. (AP/Lee Jin-man)

Most people intuitively get it. An American preventive strike to wipe out North Korea’s nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, or a commando raid launched with the same goal in mind, is likely to initiate a chain of events culminating in catastrophe.  That would be true above all for the roughly 76 million Koreans living on either side of

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Trump’s Twenty-First-Century American Populism

Rajan Menon takes a clear-eyed look at the populism of the Trumpian moment, the growing inequality that is increasingly the heart and soul of this society, and what is(n’t) being done about it.

Rajan Menon
By Rajan Menon
President Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up after speaking to Navy and shipyard personnel aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford at Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Va. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth -- he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage economies and

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