David S. D’Amato

3 weeks ago | counterpunch.org | David S. D’Amato

On March 24, the country learned that a group of senior Trump administration officials (including the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, among others) accidentally sent classified details of military strikes against Yemen to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. Since Goldberg broke the story, there has been a steady stream of commentary about “Signalgate,” most adding little but sound and fury.

3 weeks ago | dsdamato.substack.com | David S. D’Amato

With almost a quarter century of the new millennium behind us, we have an opportune time to reflect upon the international system that has defined this new period. The decades between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the present day bore witness to several important and unprecedented military interventions that give shape and structure to this new world order. Perhaps the most pivotal of these episodes was the United States-led attack on Yugoslavia in the last months of the twentieth century.

3 weeks ago | dsdamato.substack.com | David S. D’Amato

It is almost axiomatic in political philosophy that a stable and enduring social order requires the state, a powerful ultimate authority, exclusive within a given territory, to which all other social institutions must be subordinated. Across the ideological landscape, it is largely taken for granted that the division of power within a single territory opens the way to social confusion, disorder, and violence.

3 weeks ago | dsdamato.substack.com | David S. D’Amato

Introduction: the Empire and the Thirty Years’ WarThe dimensions of the modern state are remarkably little well understood given its dominant role in social and economic life today.

4 weeks ago | abajournal.com | David S. D’Amato

I’ve spent much of my career in the legal industry as a lawyer and a law firm business administrator. I don’t have the demographic profile of a typical American lawyer or even a typical BigLaw business director. My parents, Italian Americans from Greater Boston (one of whom is a second-generation American) did not graduate from college, and no one in their families went to law school or became a lawyer.