Ambrose Monahan

Cuba with the location of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base highlighted in red (Lindsay, 2017) The US Naval base of Guantánamo Bay was first established in 1903; Spain ceded Cuba to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War in the Treaty of Paris. Cuba never became a formal territory of the United States , unlike Puerto Rico, however there remained a strong military presence on the island after the war (Britannica). In the subsequent years, the US government passed several pieces of legislation such as the Platt Amendment which asserted the US’s right to intervene in Cuban politics and establish bases there (National Archives, 1903). This right of the US was incorporated into the constitution of the new Cuban Republic , thus leading to the construction of Guantánamo Bay. The establishment of Guantánamo Bay as a naval base, along with the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901, was indicative of the US’s increasing power internationally. The United States is not considered to h...

For this blog post, I examined recent reports by the US Department of Defense on the current administration's goal to further integrate women into the armed forces. These two articles largely focused on ways the DoD hopes to increase female participation in the military, in addition to reasons why women belong there; they contend that diversity is necessary for the future of the US military , saying: "She said supervisors — including males and females — should look to find the best talent available and they need to embrace diversity, including age, experience, race and gender as absolutely key to developing the workforce we need to face the challenges of tomorrow." (Vergun, 2022) These articles encapsulate the things that frustrates me the most about feminism: how vague and malleable the term is. The word "feminist" represents a myriad of different, and completely disparate schools of philosophy; for instance, materialist feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir pri...

Earlier this week, Houthi separatists in Yemen stuck several energy centers across three towns in Saudi Arabia, leading the Saudi Foreign Ministry to release a statement saying, “This will [affect] the kingdom’s production capacity and its ability to fulfill its commitments, which no doubt will threaten the safety and stability of energy supply to the global markets.”  (Dadouch, 2022). The civil war in Yemen and the conflict between Houthi separatists and the Saudi government is the perfect example of geopolitical notions of scale. In Yemen, 65% of citizens identify as Sunni muslim and 35% are Shiite , most of whom belong specifically to the Zaydi school of theology (CIA World Factbook). The Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, are an islamist group in northwestern Yemen who, since 2014, have been leading an armed rebellion against the secular post-unification government-in-exile led by the General People’s Congress (GPC) ( Council on Foreign Relations, 2022) . This conflict h...