Medea Benjamin Books

Groundbreaking expose of the dramatic shift to robot warfare, by a leading antiwar activist

What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? What role is played by its members and partners? Does the largest military alliance ever to exist serve the cause of peace or the causes of weapons sales and war mongering? Published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the alliance, this sharp, concise account examines NATO's origins, structure, and its goals at a time of mounting global tension. NATO has remade itself repeatedly, as its past purposes have disappeared. In the last 35 years it has been part of wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It has played a major role in Ukraine, and supported warmaking by Israel. NATO is now expanding rapidly, both in geography and in scope, adding partners from Colombia to Mongolia to Australia, and claiming a role in policing, immigration, economics, public budgeting, scientific research, and environmental protection. With pointed investigations of how NATO's decisions are made, the widely misunderstood question of the way it is funded, its relationship to international law, and the available alternatives to it, NATO: What You Need to Know is an indispensable primer on an organization that not only confronts expanding military conflict but, the authors contend, plays an active part in its escalation.

Russia's brutal February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has attracted widespread condemnation across the West. Government and media circles present the conflict as a simple dichotomy between an evil empire and an innocent victim. In this concise, accessible and highly informative primer, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies insist the picture is more complicated. Yes, Russia's aggression was reckless and, ultimately, indefensible. But the West's reneging on promises to halt eastward expansion of NATO in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union played a major part in prompting Putin to act. So did the U.S. involvement in the 2014 Ukraine coup and Ukraine's failure to implement the Minsk peace agreements. The result is a conflict that is increasingly difficult to resolve, one that could conceivably escalate into all-out war between the United States and Russia--the world's two leading nuclear powers. Skillfully bringing together the historical record and current analysis, War In Ukraine looks at the events leading up to the conflict, surveys the different parties involved, and weighs the risks of escalation and opportunities for peace. For anyone who wants to get beneath the heavily propagandized media coverage to an understanding of a war with consequences that could prove cataclysmic, reading this timely book will be an urgent necessity.