Across The World

                                                  On Friday, February 10th, a car-sized object was shot down in the space between the US-Canadian border, north of Alaska. The object was presumed to be shot down right inside the Radar Identification Zone. The following day, another object was shot down over the Canadian Yukon. Finally, on February 12, another object was shot down over Lake Huron. This series of events is unprecedented. Never before has there been such a violation of US and Canadian airspace without the government identifying who the culprit is. Obviously, as soon as the news broke that some “unidentified flying object” was shot down, people all across the internet ran to suspect it was an alien spacecraft! In fact, the first report people got from John Kirby was that the object was “cylindrical” and “silver.” It almost seem...

 A Dangerous Monopoly: Why We Should Reform the Two-Party System By: Marco Dorazio  A two-party system relies on the Downsian theory of convergence on the median . For readers who do not know,  Downsian theory is a political science theory created by American economist Anthony Downs. He presupposes three major concepts. One: that voters are rational and two: parties will act rationally. And three, that parties will offer policies similar to one another to try and maximize their appeal to the general public . But, as I will discuss and hopefully you’ve noticed , in our current government, parties do the exact opposite. Parties often attempt to differentiate themselves and create antithetical policies and agendas that categorically oppose the other party. We have lost the overlap of moderation between the parties and it doesn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon.  So how do we fix this? In order to address this issue and hopefully dissolve or significantly reform...

 PMC Wars: Countering Wagner Group in Africa By: James Schuldt, Guest Author and American University Student In recent years, Africa has been becoming increasingly important to Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin has been “aggressively” pursuing strategic objectives on the continent, successfully securing mining concessions, port access in the Red Sea, and a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. According to the Brookings Institute, rather than relying on conventional statecraft, Russia is using a series of asymmetric measures to expand influence. Perhaps the most well-known of these measures is the “Wagner Group” private military company (PMC). Wagner, founded by former Russian military intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin and close Kremlin ally Yevgeniy Prigozhin, is doing Putin’s bidding all over Africa, providing security assistance in exchange for concessions important to the Kremlin. Wagner’s presence is destabilizing and poses a threat to U.S. interests. In 2019, the head of U...