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Category: United States

  • Distinguishing Chinese Countermeasures from US Sanctions

    On 26 December, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced countermeasures against US military-related companies and senior executives.

    Most western mass media has been referring to China as imposing sanctions rather than countermeasures, but the distinction is important.

    The US uses sanctions offensively, as a punitive measure to achieve its desired aims.

    An early objective of the US was to prevent recognition of a Communist China, so the US embargoed the PRC at its inception in 1949. This aim lasted until 1972.

    It was the first of many sanctions to be imposed on the PRC. After the Mao era, came a propaganda blitz about a Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The US again imposed an embargo (a broader, severe form of sanction).

    Later, disinformation emerged about a genocide being persecuted against Uyghurs in China spread. US sanctions were once again applied.

    There are several instances of US sanctions being applied against China, including over Xizang (Tibet), Hong Kong, etc.

    However, the US does not apply the so-called rules-based order to itself. It arrogates the right to judge and sanction actions abroad that it considers inapplicable to itself (it rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and in 1986 it ignored the finding of the International Court of Justice that the US was guilty of “unlawful use of armed force” and ordered to pay “reparations for damages to person, property and the Nicaraguan economy…”) or its allies (it is nign impossible to imagine the Trump administration acknowledging a genocide in Palestine or even stopping its supply of weaponry for the prosecution of said genocide).

    China is rising, and the US economy is heading in a precarious direction. The US response to this has been to ditch its support for free trade. Faced with a stern competitor, the US has not sufficiently upped its game. It has resorted to erecting roadblocks to free trade and persuading its vassals to deny China access to technology; i.e., a win-lose relationship. China has, nonetheless, stepped up its game. It has continued to research and develop, innovate, develop supply chains, and establish domestic independence to evade unfair trade practices. Contrary to the West, China emphasizes win-win relationships with its trade partners.

    Taiwan as a Red Line

    However, China does have an inflexible red line, and this red line pertains to the One-China principle: “The one-China principle has a clear and unambiguous meaning，i.e. there is but one China in the world, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and the Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China.” One hundred and eighty-three countries adhere to the One-China principle, including the US. Although the US has agreed to the “clear and unambiguous” One-China policy (it does not agree with the wording of One-China principle), it holds to a position of “strategic ambiguity,” purportedly to deter a military clash between the PRC and its province of Taiwan.

    The US Department of State spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, stated on 12 August 2025: “The United States is committed to preserving peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”

    Supposedly then, the sale of a $10 billion arms package to Taiwan, announced by the US State Department on 17 December 2025, should serve the two purposes to which the US is pledged: (1) the One-China principle/policy and (2) preserving peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

    This is clearly problematic on both fronts. First, the One-China principle/policy is being violated by making a sale to a province without the approval of the capital Beijing. Second, what bona fides does a serial warring nation like the US have to command credulity to preserve peace? In just 2025, the administration of the US’s self-declared “peace president” has bombed Yemen, Iran, Somalia, Venezuela, Nigeria and is fully complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

    Conclusion

    The US’s sanctions are distinctively different from the countermeasures employed by China. The US’s sanctions are offensive, meant to punish any entity the US declares to be an enemy, to kill, act as sanctions of mass destruction,1 or carry out a genocide,2 even though that costs half-a-million children’s lives.

    On the other hand, China’s countermeasures are non-lethal, defensive, and designed to protect it from the sanctions imposed on it and also from US meddling in its domestic affairs.

    Finally, claiming peaceable US intentions toward the PRC and its province Taiwan are implausible given its historical record with the PRC and Taiwan, its historical record with the rest of the world, and the historical record of the establishment of the US through the genocide and dispossession of its Indigenous Peoples.3

    ENDNOTES:

    The post Distinguishing Chinese Countermeasures from US Sanctions first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, 78:3 (May-June 1999): 43-53. Available at JSTOR.
    2    See Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States (Clarity Press, 2012).
    3    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014).

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China Changes Everything: A Book Review

    A new book edited by Kyle Ferrana, China Changes Everything, bills itself as an anthology by “social justice activists, journalists, and commentators” and brings together chapters about the People’s Republic of China written by prominent left-wing analysts, including Arnold August, Roger Harris, Radhika Desai, Carlos Martinez, Gerald Horne, Lee Siu Hin, Margaret Kimberley, Danny Haiphong, KJ Noh, Sara Flounders, and many more.

    The publication covers a comprehensive range of subjects in the ongoing “China debate” and includes chapters on such hot topics as China’s relation to Palestine and China’s foreign affairs policies, its banking and healthcare system, its transportation infrastructure and the rail and air infrastructure that China has helped to build in developing nations, its achievements in green technology and poverty alleviation, China’s military expenditures and aims, its role in the “space race,” its alleged genocide of the Uyghurs, and the status of Taiwan and Tibet, among others.

    Public health: China vs. USA
    The first entry, written by Sara Flounders and titled “A Fundamental Difference: China—Socialist or Imperialist,” dispels the widespread myth prevalent among Western thinkers (and even among Western Marxists) that China’s economy is essentially capitalist. Flounders contrasts China’s economic system with that of the US and demonstrates how it is the essential differences in their respective economic structures that have propelled China’s economic growth since its liberation in 1949: “In the United States, nearly all resources are privately owned by a handful of billionaires. Even public forests, waters, and raw minerals are ripe for exploitation for private profit. In China, the overwhelming bulk of resources—oil, gas, coal, gold, gems, rare earth minerals, and water are socially owned and used for the development of the whole society.”

    This chapter sets the tone for the entire book. The collection of essays functions as a primer for an English-speaking, primarily US-based audience that will allow the reader to contrast the economics, culture, and politics that they are familiar with, on the one hand, with the economics, culture, and politics of the People’s Republic of China. As such, it does not provide a detailed look at what life is like in China for everyday Chinese people, from a Chinese perspective, but instead functions as a guide for Western observers who seek to compare the achievements of the People’s Republic of China with those of the “developed” nations of North America and Europe since World War 2.

    For example, Margaret Flowers’ essay on healthcare is titled “If China Can Provide Universal Healthcare, Why Can’t the United States?” The author compares the two healthcare systems and reflects how, in the US, “Hospitals are shuttering essential services such as obstetrics and pediatrics to open more lucrative specialty centers in orthopedics and cardiovascular interventions. Hospitals that don’t turn a profit, especially in rural communities and poor urban areas, are being closed down and either abandoned or converted into commercial spaces.” In contrast, a system that prioritizes public welfare instead of profit is able to provide superior, or at the very least, competitive services for only a fraction of the cost (China spends less than 3% of what the US spends per capita on healthcare).

    “The Commonwealth Fund’s 2024 health insurance survey highlights some major failures of healthcare in the United States,” notes Flowers. “They found that only 56% of working-age adults had adequate health insurance. Of those who had health insurance without adequate coverage, 57% ‘avoided getting needed health care because of its cost,’ and 41% of these experienced a worsening of their health condition as a result. 44% of underinsured adults held medical or dental debt. In fact, in the US, medical illness is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, and about three-fourths of those who go bankrupt had health insurance at the start of their illness.”

    Data like this will provide ample ammunition for our conversations with the China-haters who virtually all of us in the West can count among our coworkers, friends, and family. The book continues with this line of thinking, succinctly contrasting the facts of life in the US, Europe, or Canada with those in the People’s Republic, and confirms that the glaring differences exist precisely because China has not followed the capitalist path of prioritizing corporate profit over basic public needs.

    “Health outcomes have dramatically improved over the past 76 years” in China, Flowers recounts. “The average life expectancy in China was around 43.5 years in 1950, and rose to almost 78 years in 2024. Life expectancy rose by almost seven years between 2000 and 2021, while life expectancy in the United States fell during that same period.”

    China and the climate crisis
    In a case of projection that is typical of knowledge production in the imperial core, the ubiquitous anti-China smear campaign portrays the People’s Republic as a fortress of smokestacks belching fumes of melting coal and plastic into the air, polluting at levels never seen in human history and ruining the environment for everyone. However, it is fairly common knowledge that China ratified both the Kyoto and Paris accords of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the US has never committed itself to either agreement.

    In its section on green development, China Changes Everything provides ample details regarding China’s commitment to clean energy and sustainable development. China’s achievements in this realm are driven by the nation’s socialist principles and made possible through centralized planning.

    Lyn Neeley, in a chapter entitled “China Outpaces the World in Energy Production and Green Technology,” recalls that China has produced “70% of the world’s electric vehicles (EVs) and 98% of the world’s electric buses”—although we’ll never see them on the road in the West. Because of state aid for green technology, the country produces electric cars at a fraction of their cost in the US, Europe, or Canada (a theme that is repeated throughout comparisons of costs for healthcare, housing, education, infrastructure, the military, etc.).

    “Chinese EVs are cheaper and more advanced than EVs made anywhere else,” writes Neeley. “A Chinese EV now costs less than [USD] $10,000 because of the efficient manufacturing processes and an increase in the amount of government subsidies for EVs from [USD] $76.7 million in 2018 to [USD] $809 million in 2023.” Neeley notes that China produces over 80% of the world’s solar panels, is the world’s leading producer of hydroelectric power, accounts for up to 70% of the global wind turbine market, and in 2024 filed more than half of the world’s patents for clean energy.

    China and Palestine
    In an entry titled “Is China’s Foreign Policy ‘Good Enough’?” Danny Haiphong reflects on another criticism frequently leveled at China, particularly in the wake of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 which approved the US plan for the occupation of Palestine by a UN International Stabilization Force. China did not exercise its capacity to veto this resolution and abstained from the vote, giving rise to a common criticism of China heard in the West, even among purported leftists: that China has not done enough to aid the Palestinian cause.

    Haiphong helps to put things in perspective: while the US and its vassal states carry out a livestreamed genocide, providing arms and diplomatic cover to the Zionist regime, “China has used its influence at the United Nations to not only condemn Israel’s brutality and call for an immediate ceasefire, but also to uphold the right of the Palestinian people to armed resistance. In 2024, China hosted a historic summit in Beijing that convened all major Palestinian political organizations with the aim of forging unity toward the establishment of a future Palestinian state.”

    When the foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China is compared to that of the United States and its vassals in the imperial core, the differences are stark. “The horrors in Gaza are not of China’s making,” recalls Haiphong. “The US accounts for 70 percent of Israel’s arms imports, and wields a political and diplomatic shield over Israel that is arguably more powerful than that provided to any of its other so-called ‘allies’ around the world. The blame for Gaza’s plight rests at the feet of the US, the West, and of course, Israel. Moving attention away from this is as unhelpful as it is dangerous. Makers of US foreign policy have shown the world time and time again that they are willing to go to any length to protect what they see as their most important military asset in the region. Any unilateral action taken against Israel will be met with serious consequences. While the US empire is in marked decline and unable to arrest the development of a rising China and Global South, it has proven more than capable of spreading chaos and instability. The US and Israel would undoubtedly move to cut China off from the entire region if it were to carry out a boycott of Israel on its own, and the genocide would continue, but under even more hostile global conditions than currently exist. This isn’t to say that a boycott isn’t correct in principle, but to put the onus of responsibility for leading such a boycott on China, a developing country that is itself the target of US sanctions, moves the goalposts away from the US empire.” One only has to look at the economic blockade and recent US bombing of Iran to see how the US might treat China were it to go further in its support for Palestine.

    The book is highly recommended for those who seek facts about the economic, political, and cultural development of China since 1949, particularly in comparison to that of the United States and particularly regarding the most hotly debated issues. China Changes Everything provides a wealth of information and constitutes a useful manual for those who seek to dispel the myths about China that are propagated in the imperial core. Most of us are familiar with these often contradictory claims: “China is not socialist,” “China is capitalist,” “China is imperialist,” “China is the worst polluter,” “China is not a democracy,” “China is a Communist dictatorship,” “China only cares about its own development,” “China is a settler colonial Han supremacist nation,” “China is imprisoning dependent nations in debt traps,” “China is exploiting Africa and Latin America,” and finally, “the People’s Republic is not revolutionary.” In doing so, the book outlines a realistic vision for our future and provides hope for those in the West who are often disillusioned with all social and political projects.

    The post China Changes Everything: A Book Review first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Steve Lalla.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Whatever Happened to Trump’s “Golden Age” for American Workers?

    Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.

    Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25 percent.

    America’s farmworkers, too, many of them desperately poor, are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost U.S. farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year.

    As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30 percent of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official U.S. government poverty level.

    Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers.  Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by raising it to the federal minimum wage, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage.  In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.

    Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it, thanks to inflation.  And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving them of key labor rights, including minimum wage and overtime pay.

    Not surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025, that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8 percent.

    Trump’s policies have also fostered unemployment.

    Probably the best-known example of this is the Trump administration’s chaotic purge, led by billionaire Elon Musk, of 317,000 federal workers without any clear rationale or due process. On top of this, however, it has shut down massive construction projects, especially in the renewable energy industry. Trump’s recent order to halt the construction of the huge wind farms off the East Coast is expected to result in the firing of thousands of workers.

    Ironically, as two economic analysts reported in mid-December 2025, “key sectors of the economy that are central to Trump’s agenda have contracted, with payrolls in manufacturing, mining, logging and professional business services all falling over the last year.” Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be reviving U.S. manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.

    Consequently, U.S. unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4 percent, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6 percent. This is the highest unemployment level in four years, leaving 7.8 million workers unemployed―700,000 more than a year before.

    The Trump administration has also seriously undermined worker safety and health. According to the latest AFL-CIO study, workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year, with millions more injured or sickened. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to enforce health and safety standards, the Trump administration cut its workplace inspections by 30 percent, thereby reducing inspections of each site to one every 266 years.

    Similarly, Trump has nearly destroyed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides research on workplace safety standards, by reducing its staffing from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80 percent.

    Through executive action, the Trump administration eliminated specific measures taken to protect workers. This process included blocking a Biden rule to control heat conditions in workplaces, where 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 others are injured every year.  Moreover, in the spring of 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure and moved to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration district offices. Although a public uproar led to a reversal of the office closures, the administration then proposed weakening those offices’ ability to impose mine safety requirements and also weakening workplace safety penalties for businesses.

    In addition, Trump appointed corporate executives to head relevant federal agencies, gutted Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines, and, in March 2025, issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government workers. This last measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for one out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States.

    In a special AFL-CIO report, issued on December 22, 2025, the labor federation’s president, Liz Shuler, and secretary-treasurer, Fred Redmond, declared: “Since Inauguration Day . . . the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people,” and “every day has brought a new challenge and attack:  On federal workers.  On our unions and collective bargaining rights.  On the agencies that stand up for us and the essential services we rely on. . . .  On our democracy itself.”

    Although Trump’s second term in office might have provided a “Golden Age” for the President and his fellow billionaires, it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.

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  • To a 2026 of Not Fighting Over Crumbs

    Every single person in the United States, from those who’ve been most harmed to those who’ve been most privileged, would be better off if we had a normal government that put even a moderate effort into universally improving everyone’s lives. If we had a government that took trillions of dollars away from the war machine and the untaxed oligarchs and provided, as a matter of basic rights, for all

    economic welfare,
    education, preschool through college,
    healthcare,
    a clean and sustainable environment, and
    public transit,
    then nobody would ever be denied an education or a job for any reason of hateful idiocy. Why should they be when we’re absolutely rolling in wealth? We could obviously do a much better job of fighting over the crumbs we’ve got, with more context and nuance, but why should we, and how dare we? We need to be putting everything we’ve got into trying to preserve a habitable planet for our children, not fighting over crumbs.

    That perfectly true statement is almost meaningless to someone who’s been wrongly imprisoned or denied housing or traumatized by racist police or prevented by cost from providing healthcare for a loved one. Those fortunate enough to not find the preservation of the environment, or the abolition of war, or the taxing of billionaires meaningless need, I think, to work at understanding how badly we are divided and conquered. A huge segment of the U.S. population is being trained to support racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all varieties of bigotry, while another huge segment of the population seems to think it would be joining in the same hideous beliefs if it were to admit that white men have ever had anything unfair done to them or grown their bitterness in any sort of realworld soil.

    Young white U.S. males’ support for fascism is not excusable, sensible, or unpredictable. Discrimination against young white males that predictably leads to fascism is not a justification for, or the equivalent of, anything. Nor is it imaginary. In the United States, we have an enduring legacy of slavery and white supremacy, persistent racist police and vigilante killings, a rising tide of traditional bigotry, and also discrimination against white men. Millions of words would never suffice to detail the full complexity of the mess we’re in or to properly rank and compare the wide variety of injustices. No solution other than deeply addressing each injustice, and not even that, would satisfy all.

    But we would care less about the distribution of the crumbs if we were to take the whole loaf of bread away from sociopathic billionaires and weapons dealers.

    Dumping so much of our wealth into the war machine is key to generating the xenophobia and nationalism that allow us to think in terms of a struggle for crumbs internationally. But we don’t need to accept those terms either. The world has plenty of wealth for all. That indisputable fact is also very hard to grasp through the flood of nationalistic propaganda from all sides and in the face of extreme inequality nearby.

    We’re not helped by corporate media, with its normalization of war and corruption, and its solemn debates over how Democrats should rebrand themselves in order to better pretend to give a damn. I think Zohran Mamdani’s dad had a good point when he said that his son was elected mayor of New York because he promised to actually improve people’s lives and because he refused to support a genocide, which allowed people to know he was an honest person who really meant that he would work to improve people’s lives. That combination is almost unheard of in Washington D.C.; and almost unmentionable is the more direct connection between ending wars and improving lives. Unless we end the wars, we will not be able to improve the lives of the people being killed or of the people paying for the killing.

    Here’s to a strategic new year, moving the money from war to peace, Medicare for all, green energy, free college, fast rail, guaranteed basic income, and ending fascism by improving the lives of every single person.

    The post To a 2026 of Not Fighting Over Crumbs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Sanctioning Fever: The United States, European Union, and Free Speech

    At present, there is a pot-calling-the-kettle-black approach being taken by the European Union and the United States regarding the imposition of sanctions upon individuals deemed hostile to free speech. On December 23, the US State Department announced that it would bar five European citizens accused of spearheading efforts to pressure US tech giants to censor or suppress American opinions. This came after the European Union’s own tilt to sanctioning individuals accused of spreading Russian misinformation or disinformation, particularly about the Ukraine War.

    Those caught in the State Department vice are former EU Commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton, a key figure behind the Digital Services Act (DSA), Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of the German legal aid organisation HateAid, British head of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Imran Ahmed, and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

    Von Hodenberg and Ballon assisted Jewish college students sue the social network platform X over the dissemination of antisemitic content while Ahmed, in particular, has been praised for his work by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) on advancing social media hygiene. “He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and he will remain a valuable partner,” insisted the JFNA’s head of government relations, Dennis Bernard. Given that many a policy decision by the Trump administration to withdraw from international institutions – the UN Human Rights Council comes to mind – has been based on thinly justified accusations of antisemitism, this was side splittingly comic.

    US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was suitably bolshie in making the announcement, calling the barred individuals “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex”. “For too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”

    Sarah Rogers, the US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, had her share of stones to cast, lashing Breton for “ominously” reminding “[Elon] Musk of X’s legal obligations and ongoing ‘formal proceedings’ for alleged noncompliance with ‘illegal content’ and ‘disinformation’ requirements under the DSA.” Ahmed’s organisation was taken to task for its 2022 “Disinformation Dozen” report lacerating anti-vaccination advocates, among them the current US Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    A spokesperson for GDI called the sanctions an “authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.” The Trump administration had yet again used “the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with.” The actions were “immoral, unlawful and un-American.” French President Emmanuel Macron saw matters in terms of autonomy, calling the decision intimidatory and coercive “aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty”.

    The European Union can hardly claim to be saintly on the subject of protecting free speech either. When it comes to discussing Russian policies, tolerance for its exercise shrinks. (Consider, for instance, the imposition of EU sanctions on experts associated with the Russia-based international forum, the Valdai Club.) The recent, most troubling case of Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss colonel living in Brussels who finds himself the target of an executive sanctions listing, stands out. The listing was made as part of the Russia hybrid-threats framework adopted in October 2024 (Decision 2024/2643 and Regulation 2024/2642) covering such non-military actions as the dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, cyberattacks and interference in elections. Member States are directed to take measures against “natural persons” who are involved, for instance, in “planning, directing, engaging in, directly or indirectly, supporting or otherwise facilitating the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference” in favour of Russia.

    Baud, according to the EU sanctions tracker, is described as “a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst [and] a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example, accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.” An odd curriculum vitae to warrant an executive listing that is punitive and lacking curial assessment.

    For holding and promoting such views, an asset freeze has been placed upon him within the EU jurisdiction, along with an entry and transit ban across the EU. Stranger in this whole affair is the fact that Switzerland does not subscribe to this monochrome sanctions regime. A situation of the absurd has been created: a Swiss national residing in Brussels who is effectively incapable of returning to Switzerland for expressing views no good European should have.

    Attacking a viewpoint deemed unsavoury and out of step with accepted, if not dictated opinion, is the very essence of censorship. The mood of the moment is that of a bouncy militarism in Europe, a reverie of warmongering committing Member States to ever increasing defence budgets against imaginary jackboots awaiting to make their way to Paris and Brussels. Those wishing to question the Ukraine narrative in terms of history and origin, or the need for the prolongation of war, have become targets.

    These formulas deny debate, endorse a police version of history, and affirm fundamentalist scripts. Stick to the script, or else. It becomes chilling to then see various countries and political entities punish those with undesirable, even unsavoury opinions. This might be a good time for the EU to drop all pretence on the subject and admit that opinions are there to be policed by the stuffy mandarins of the day. And while there is much to be said that is problematic about such restrictive, babying instruments as the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s DSA, preventing activists and researchers from travelling to a country where free speech is protected seems similarly perverse.

    The post Sanctioning Fever: The United States, European Union, and Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Iran Rejects US Terms at UN Council

    DV coeditor Faramarz Farbod joined AnewZ.tv (Baku, Azerbaijan) this morning to discuss the escalating U.S.-Iran nuclear standoff and the sharp divisions at the UN Security Council over the status of UNSC Res. 2231, the snapback mechanism, the reimposition of sanctions against Iran, and uranium enrichment.

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  • Ending China’s Humiliation?

    European powers plan to cut up China for themselves; Germany, Italy, the British Empire, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France are represented by Wilhelm II, Umberto I, John Bull, Franz Joseph I (in rear), Nicholas II, and Émile Loubet. The United States, represented by Uncle Sam, opposed this, also wanting to retain power in China. Puck, 23 August 1899, by J.S. Pughe.

    Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
    — Mao Zedong, 7 August 1927

    The Century of Humiliation for China began with the First Opium War (1839-1842) and ended with the end of World War II. During this period several European countries carved out slices of China for themselves.

    Since then, the People’s Republic of China has surged economically from a destitute country to the top of the economic order, as measured by PPP. China even eliminated absolute poverty.

    But did the humiliation of China really end?

    Case in point: Late Wednesday, 17 December, the US State Department announced the sale of a $10 billion arms package to Taiwan that includes medium-range missiles, howitzers, and drones. It is not hard to deduce which actor Taiwan had in mind when it ordered such armaments.

    Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded to the “dangerous act of arming Taiwan” by urging the US to immediately cease its brazen plan.

    The People’s Daily quotes Guo as stating at a regular news briefing that the sale “seriously violates the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiqués.”

    “The U.S. move severely undermines China’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.”

    There are 183 countries that acknowledge the One-China Policy wherein the government of China is situated in Beijing, and Taiwan constitutes a province of China. The US is one of the countries that acknowledges the One-China Policy. Given that, then what does the sale of weapons by the US to Taiwan without the approval of Beijing signal?

    Historical Context

    During World War II, a civil war was underway in China between Communist and Nationalist (Guomindang, KMT) forces, while supposedly they were working together against imperialist Japanese invaders. Japan would suffer defeat as would the Nationalists led by Jiang Jieshi (known as Chiang Kai-shek in the western world). The Nationalists escaped from the mainland and managed to remain outside the control of the Communist government at the end of WWII because the frail Communist navy was effectively hindered by the US 7th fleet from pursuing the KMT across the Taiwan Strait.

    Virulent anti-Communism by the US led to its favoritism for the KMT and later to separatist forces in Taiwan. William Blum noted that even though the Chinese Communists were close allies of the US military during World War II, “Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek [of the KMT] would be Washington’s man.”1

    Current Context

    Given the historical fact that the US prevented the re-integration of Taiwan into the mainland, then the US arming a Taiwanese separatist government surely is a poke in the People’s Republic of China eye.

    Is it a meaningful poke in the Chinese eye?

    When asked if China might just place missiles in Havana, former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter saw that as futile.

    We are spending 11 billion dollars on giving Taiwan [The US is not “giving.” It is an arms sale to Taiwan — DV ed] a capability that simply turns it into a target because all the Chinese are going to do is locate where all this material goes and then target it with, you know, one of thousands of ballistic missiles they possess that Taiwan will never be able to reach. Taiwan will cease to exist as a civilization, as a nation state, as a place capable of sustaining life before a single Chinese soldier sets foot on their soil. It will happen instantaneously, so fast that the United States won’t be able to mobilize. You know, we don’t even have a war plan for Taiwan now because we’re not allowed to have a war plan for Taiwan because Taiwan doesn’t really exist. It’s not a sovereign state.

    Currently, the US is seizing oil tankers in waters off Venezuela, some of which are destined to bring oil to China. American officials say they are preventing sanctions evasion and narcotrafficking. China argues that the seizures represent an abuse of power and an extra-territorial application of US domestic law. Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that the US seizure of Chinese related vessels constitutes a serious violation of international law.

    Under international law, derived from the United Nations Charter, states are sovereign and equal. The US cannot legally obligate other states to uphold its sanctions, in this case, US sanctions against Venezuela.

    Despite American provocations, China sees no need to overly react to maneuvres by the US. The US maneuvres speak to US desperation.

    Modern China, true to its proclamations, is rising peacefully. Ancient Chinese military logic also argues against warring unless forced. Renown military strategist Sunzi (Sun Tzu) philosophized:

    1. In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

    2. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.2

    *****

    FOOTNOTES:

    The post Ending China’s Humiliation? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (pdf available online); 20, 23.
    2    Sunzi (Sun Tzu), “III: Attack by Stratagem” in The Art of War (available at Internet Classics).


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump’s Tanker Grab vs. the Houthis’ Anti-Genocide Blockade

    The United States has now intercepted multiple Venezuelan oil tankers as part of its escalating aggression against Venezuela, while also destroying dozens of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific under the banner of “drug enforcement,” killing over 100 people whose identities the U.S. has obscured. At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened a naval blockade of Venezuela—a sovereign country with which the United States is not at war.

    How can Washington claim the right to seize or blow up vessels, disrupt maritime trade, and kill civilian boaters—while bombing Yemen and condemning its de facto Houthi government for intercepting ships in the Red Sea to counter Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

    This contrast exposes a stark double standard in U.S. policy. The U.S. government labelled the Houthis’ actions as “terrorism”, piracy, and a threat to U.S. national security, even as the Houthi government presented plausible legal justifications for its actions based on the laws of war. But Washington has tried to normalize—or even glorify—its own attacks on tankers, pineros (ferries or water-taxis) and fishing boats, which violate the most basic principles of international law.

    Beginning in November 2023, Yemen’s Houthi movement launched a naval campaign in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Arabian Sea in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Houthis publicly announced their criteria, stating they would target only vessels linked to Israel, bound for Israeli ports, owned by Israeli companies, or connected to states materially supporting Israel’s war.

    The United States and its allies immediately denounced these actions as criminal. And there were legitimate grounds for scrutiny. Human rights groups raised concerns about attacks that struck vessels without obvious Israeli connections and about the safety and treatment of civilian crews. Over the course of the campaign, the Houthis targeted more than 100 commercial vessels, damaged dozens, sank several, and seized at least one ship outright—the Galaxy Leader—detaining its multinational crew for more than a year before releasing them in connection with Gaza ceasefire negotiations.

    But as a matter of law, the Houthis consistently framed their actions as blockade and interdiction during an armed conflict, justified by Israel’s grave breaches of international humanitarian law. That legal framework exists. Under the Geneva Conventions and customary international law, parties to an armed conflict have the right—and in cases of grave breaches, the obligation—to interdict shipping that materially supports a belligerent committing mass civilian harm. In the case of Israel’s genocide, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has affirmed, that all states are obliged to cut off all military and economic support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

    The United States’ response was not to pressure Israel to halt its genocidal assault—an outcome that would have also immediately ended the Houthi campaign—but to unleash overwhelming force against Yemen. Beginning in December 2023, Washington organized Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational naval deployment backed by extensive U.S. airpower. Over the following year, the United States and Britain carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Yemen, bombing radar sites, missile launchers, ports, the capital, Sanaa, and other infrastructure. Several hundred Houthi fighters were killed, along with scores of civilians. One U.S. strike on the Ras Isa oil terminal killed dozens of African migrants when U.S. bombs hit a detention facility.

    But how do the Houthi interdictions compare with the Trump administration’s actions toward Venezuela?

    On December 10, Donald Trump boasted to reporters, “We have just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” as his administration released video of U.S. Marines rappelling from helicopters onto a civilian oil tanker. This was not a conflict zone. Venezuela is not at war with the United States. There was no UN Security Council authorization, no armed conflict, and no claim of self-defense.

    Since then, additional Venezuelan-linked tankers have been intercepted or turned back, and the administration has openly threatened a naval blockade. Meanwhile, U.S. forces have destroyed dozens of small boats in the region under the pretext of counter-narcotics operations, killing over 100 people at sea without arrests, trials, or even public identification of the victims. These were not lawful acts of war or legitimate law enforcement. They were extralegal, summary uses of lethal force.

    Under international law, seizing civilian commercial vessels in international waters or imposing a naval blockade outside of a declared armed conflict are “acts of aggression” and can constitute acts of war. The Trump administration claims its actions are justified by U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. But those sanctions are themselves illegal under international law. Only the UN Security Council has the authority to impose and enforce sanctions. Unilateral coercive measures—especially when enforced through military force—violate the UN Charter.

    Legal experts have been unequivocal: the United States has no jurisdiction to seize foreign-flagged vessels to enforce its domestic laws or unilateral sanctions outside its territory, particularly in another country’s territorial waters.

    The distinction could not be clearer.

    The Houthis declared a blockade and attacked ships that violated it, based on a legal rationale rooted in the laws of armed conflict, to try to end mass civilian slaughter in Gaza, and their interceptions stopped when a ceasefire was declared in Gaza.

    On the other hand, the United States, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has seized tankers, destroyed boats, killed people at sea, and threatened a blockade against a country it is not at war with—not to try to end a war or save a civilian population from genocide, but simply in pursuit of extralegal regime change and U.S. control of that country’s most valuable resources.

    If the United States wants safety at sea, whether in the Caribbean or the Red Sea, it should stop enforcing illegal sanctions by the illegal use of military force, and stop enabling genocide in Palestine. U.S. murder and violence against other people and countries does not become lawful simply because officials in the White House wish that it was.

    The post Trump’s Tanker Grab vs. the Houthis’ Anti-Genocide Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • After Trump’s Pardons, Are Far-Right Militias Gearing-Up to Influence the 2026 Midterm Elections?

    On September 29, 2020, during the first 2020 presidential debate with the Democratic Party’s candidate Joe Biden, moderator Chris Wallace asked then-President Trump if he would condemn white supremacist and militia groups and tell them to “stand down” amid ongoing violent protests. Trump responded by asking which group to name, and when Joe Biden said the Proud Boys (a far-right paramilitary group), Trump replied: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” a remark widely interpreted as a refusal to disavow—and a possible signal of approval.

    In addition to Trump having the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol agents as his enforcers within the federal government, “he surely hasn’t forgotten that he has paramilitary forces outside of the government available to him if he decides he needs them,” Zeteo’s Thor Benson recently reported.

    “With ICE rapidly expanding its ranks, offering large signing bonuses and recruiting widely, the vetting process could be stretched beyond its capacity, making it harder to screen out individuals with extremist connections,” Brewminate’s Matthew A. McIntosh recently noted. Thereby opening ICE up to recruits from right-wing militia organizations.

    After Trump pardoned hundreds of people convicted in the January 6 Capitol attack, including top leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, there have been months of relative silence. Now, there are new rumblings on the far right.

    While Trump’s NSPM-7, a 2025 national security memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” directs federal agencies to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle politically violent groups — including domestic extremist groups — many observers believe the policy focuses more on left-wing activists than on right-wing militias.

    Zeteo’s Benson noted that “Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes – who was convicted of seditious conspiracy before Trump commuted his sentence – recently announced that he’s ‘rebuilding’ the white nationalist militia group, in what could be a sign of things to come.”

    “They tried to take us out after January 6 but what man means for evil, God will use for good,” Rhodes told the Gateway Pundit podcast. “I came out stronger after it, and so my goal is to rebuild the organization stronger than ever because it’s an essential mission. Absolutely.”

    In the interview, Rhodes said he wanted to let Trump know that “we’re ready to serve, encourage him to do that, call us up as a militia,” and “order us all to come together in our counties under his command.”

    As The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling reported, “This new chapter of the Oath Keepers will maintain the original organization’s mission—to ‘protect people against radical antifa and other leftist violence in the streets,’ according to Rhodes—but will be built to outlast its creator.”

    Rhodes added that he wants “to make sure its got resilience and redundancy built in that it can drive on strong. I mean, I have to make sure that if I’m ever taken out again or when I’m taken out again, that the organization can drive on without me. That’s not what happened last time.”

    Trump’s pardons and commutations certainly sent a strong signal to paramilitary groups that political violence would not necessarily be punished, and might even be rewarded. Clearly some extremist groups, like Stewart Rhodes’ Oath Keepers, are getting ready to get back into the fray, as pardoned leaders regain influence, up their recruiting efforts, and become more active publicly.

    The post After Trump’s Pardons, Are Far-Right Militias Gearing-Up to Influence the 2026 Midterm Elections? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • VP Delcy RodrÍguez: US Must Pay Reparations For Stealing CITGO

    At a massive rally in front of Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA headquarters in La Campiña, Caracas, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez condemned the ongoing US aggressions against the country.

    In her speech on Friday, December 19, Rodríguez, who is also the minister of hydrocarbons, emphasized that Venezuela has a firm stance of dignity and resistance. She underscored that the country has no outstanding debts with the Trump administration. Rather, Washington owes the Venezuelan people compensation for stealing Venezuelan state assets.

    The post VP Delcy RodrÍguez: US Must Pay Reparations For Stealing CITGO appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Left Parties In Asia Denounce US Military Threats Against Venezuela

    Left and communist parties across Asia issued a statement expressing solidarity with the people of Venezuela, who are facing unprecedented attacks from the United States with an aggressive military build up in the Caribbean, as well as open threats of invasion.

    The statement, dated December 16, notes the concerns over ongoing “military escalation in the Caribbean and the aggression against Venezuela by the imperialist US” and demands the immediate cessation of all such hostile activities.

    The statement was signed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM), the Party of the Laboring Masses of Philippines (PLM), and Indonesia’s Partai Pembebasan Rakyat.

    The post Left Parties In Asia Denounce US Military Threats Against Venezuela appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Model Campaign Platform

    Candidates for the U.S. Congress usually have websites, and often those websites include some minimal platform (what they would do if elected). Sometimes there’s none at all. Sometimes there’s a great deal of substance on numerous topics. But the vast majority of Congressional candidates have no foreign policy whatsoever. They want to be given a job to oversee a discretionary budget of which some 60 percent goes to militarism, yet they make zero mention of war, peace, diplomacy, weapons sales, bases, treaties, international law, budgetary priorities, or 96 percent of humanity. They clearly do not think that the military spending and wars they will be responsible for will help them get elected.

    Would a platform that was serious about peace help them get elected? It might. To the limited extent that it has been tried, it has tended to be a boost or at least not a burden.

    This is what I think a decent and humane foreign policy section of a Congressional campaign website would look like: 

    From the moment I am elected I will work to organize the public and my colleagues, regardless of their party or the party of the president, to move resources from military spending to urgent human and environmental needs at home and abroad. I will pull together a caucus publicly committed to voting no on any military spending that is not at least 10 percent lower than the previous year — and voting no on every related procedural vote and otherwise working to impede the current gargantuan levels of military spending or increases thereto.

    I will also introduce and work to pass legislation to

    • assist individuals, businesses, and localities in transitioning to peaceful industries,
    • require compliance with the Treaty on Nuclear Nonproliferation,
    • mandate both the elimination of U.S. nuclear weapons over the next 10 years and negotiations to effect the elimination of nuclear weapons by other nations,
    • mandate the closure over the next 5 years of all U.S. military bases outside of the United States,
    • end all military assistance to foreign governments,
    • end all weapons shipments to foreign governments, with severe criminal penalties for violations of a practice already often done in violation of laws,
    • establish a cabinet-level department of compliance with international law,
    • introduce a privileged resolution to compel a vote on preventing any threatened or ending any current war,
    • create a department of unarmed civilian defense to train the U.S. public in nonviolent noncooperation with foreign militaries,
    • abolish draft registration, military advertising, ROTC, and JROTC,
    • abolish joining the military as a path to citizenship,
    • establish a global Marshall Plan to provide humanitarian aid,
    • create, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a memorial to all the victims of all wars.
    The post Model Campaign Platform first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Swanson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US Blockades Venezuela in a War Still Searching for an Official Rationale

    In our Donald-in-Wonderland world, the US is at war with Venezuela while still grasping for a public rationale. The horrific human toll is real – over a 100,000 fatalities from illegal sanctions and over a hundred from more recent “kinetic strikes.” Yet the officially stated justification for the US empire’s escalating offensive remains elusive.

    The empire once spun its domination as “democracy promotion.” Accordingly, State Department stenographers such as The Washington Post framed the US-backed coup in Venezuela, which temporarily overthrew President Hugo Chávez, as an attempt to “restore a legitimate democracy.” The ink had barely dried on The New York Times editorial of April 13, 2002 – which legitimized that imperial “democratic” restoration – before the Venezuelan people spontaneously rose up and reinstated their elected president.

    When the America Firsters captured the White House, Washington’s worn-out excuse of the “responsibility to protect,” so beloved by the Democrats, was banished from the realm along with any pretense of altruism. Not that the hegemon’s actions were ever driven by anything other than self-interest. The differences between the two wings of the imperial bird have always been more rhetorical than substantive.

    Confronted by Venezuela’s continued resistance, the new Trump administration retained the policy of regime change but switched the pretext to narcotics interdiction. The Caribbean was cast as a battlefield in a renewed “war on drugs.” Yet with Trump’s pardon of convicted narco-trafficker and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – among many other contradictions – the alibi was wearing thin.

    Venezuelan oil tankers blockaded

    The ever-mercurial US president flipped the narrative on December 16, announcing on Truth Social that the US would blockade Venezuelan oil tankers. He justified this straight-up act of war with the striking claim that Venezuela had stolen “our oil, our land, and other assets.”

    For the record, Venezuela had nationalized its petroleum industry half a century ago. Foreign companies were compensated.

    This presidential social media post followed an earlier one, issued two weeks prior, ordering the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela “closed in its entirety.” The US had also seized an oil tanker departing Venezuela, struck several alleged drug boats, and continued to build up naval forces in the region.

    In response to the maritime threat, President Nicolás Maduro ordered the Venezuelan Navy to escort the tankers. The Pentagon was reportedly caught by surprise. China, Mexico, Brazil, BRICS, Turkey, along with international civil society, condemned the escalation. Russia warned the US not to make a “fatal mistake.”

    The New York Times reported a “backfire” of nationalist resistance to US aggression among the opposition in Venezuela. Popular demonstrations in support of Venezuela erupted throughout the Americas in Argentina, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, and the US.

    Trump’s phrasing about Venezuela’s resources is not incidental. It reveals an assumption that precedes and structures the policy itself: that Venezuelan sovereignty is conditional, subordinate to US claims, and revocable whenever it conflicts with Yankee economic or strategic interests. This marks a shift in emphasis, not in substance; drugs have receded from center stage, replaced by oil as the explicit casus belli.

    The change is revealing. When Trump speaks of “our” oil and land, he collapses the distinction between corporate access, geopolitical leverage, and national entitlement. Venezuelan resources are no longer considered merely mismanaged or criminally exploited; they are portrayed as property wrongfully withheld from its rightful owner.

    The day after his Truth Social post, Trump’s “most pointless prime-time presidential address ever delivered in American history” (in the words of rightwing blogger Matt Walsh) did not even mention the war on Venezuela. Earlier that same day, however, two House resolutions narrowly failed that would have restrained Trump from continuing strikes on small boats and from exercising war powers without congressional approval.

    Speaking against the restraining resolutions, Rep. María Elvira Salazar – the equivalent of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen and one of the far-right self-described “Crazy Cubans” in Congress – hailed the 1983 Grenada and 1989 Panama invasions as models. She approvingly noted that both were perpetrated without congressional authorization and suggested that Venezuela should be treated the same way.

    The votes showed that nearly half of Congress is critical – compared to 70% of the general public – but their failure also allows Trump to claim that Congress reviewed his warlike actions and effectively granted him a mandate to continue.

    Non-international armed conflict

    In this Trumpian Wonderland, a naval blockade with combat troops rappelling from helicopters to seize ships becomes merely a “non-international armed conflict” not involving an actual country. The enemy is not even an actual flesh-and-blood entity, but a tactic – narco-terrorism.

    Trump posted: “Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” Yet FTOs are non-state actors lacking sovereign immunities conferred by either treaties or UN membership. Such terrorist labels are not descriptive instruments but strategic ones, designed to foreclose alternatives short of war.

    In a feat of rhetorical alchemy, the White House designated fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” Trump accused Venezuela of flooding the US with the deadly synthetic narcotic, when his own Drug Enforcement Administration says the source is Mexico. This recalls a previous disastrous regime-change operation in Iraq, also predicated on lies about WMDs.

    Like the Cheshire Cat, presidential chief of staff Susie Wiles emerges as the closest to a reliable narrator in a “we’re all mad here” regime. She reportedly said Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” openly acknowledging that US policy has always been about imperial domination.

    The oil is a bonus for the hegemon. But even if Venezuela were resource-poor like Cuba and Nicaragua, it still would be targeted for exercising independent sovereignty.

    Seen in that light, Trump’s claim that Venezuela stole “our” oil and land is less an error than a confession. It articulates a worldview in which US power defines legitimacy and resources located elsewhere are treated as imperial property by default. The blockade is not an aberration; it is the logical extension of a twisted belief that sovereignty belongs to whoever is strong enough to seize it. Trump is, in effect, demanding reparations for imperialists for the hardship of living in a world where other countries insist their resources belong to them.

    The post US Blockades Venezuela in a War Still Searching for an Official Rationale first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Julian Assange: Sweden Broke Own Laws with Nobel Prize to Venezuela’s Machado

    By awarding its peace prize to Trump’s favorite Venezuelan opposition figure, pro-war coup plotter Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Committee contravened the principles enshrined in its founding documents, as well as Swedish law, Julian Assange alleged in an explosive brief reviewed by The Grayzone.

    The Swedish government violated its own laws by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado, according to an explosive legal brief filed by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder and former political prisoner who was hounded across the globe, confined in harsh conditions, and subjected to physical and psychological torment over the course of a decade by the US and its allies.

    The Nobel committee’s decision to award Machado the Peace Prize — and the 11 million Swedish Kroner ($1.18 million USD) reward which accompanies it — means that “there is a real risk that funds derived from Nobel’s endowment have been or will be… diverted from their charitable purpose to facilitate aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes,” Assange stated.

    The Wikileaks founder pointed to the “ample public statements… showing that the U.S. government and María Corina Machado have exploited the authority of the prize to provide them with a casus moralis for war,” adding that the explicitly stated purpose of the war sought by Machado and her wealthy Latin American backers would be “installing her by force in order to plunder $1.7 trillion in Venezuelan oil and other resources.”

    The Nobel Foundation stands accused of a number of violations of Swedish criminal law, including breach of trust, misappropriation and gross misappropriation, conspiracy, crimes against international law, as well as financing of aggression, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and breaching Sweden’s stated obligations under the Rome Statute, to which Stockholm says it is “deeply committed.”

    Under Swedish law, “Alfred Nobel’s endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war,” Assange noted. “Nor can it be used as a tool in foreign military intervention. Venezuela, whatever the status of its political system, is no exception.”

    By granting Nobel funds to Machado, Assange argues that the Committee is effectively financing “a conspiracy to murder civilians, to violate national sovereignty using military force…” By refusing to end payments, “they flagrantly violate Nobel’s will and clearly cross the threshold into criminality,” he alleged. The Wikileaks co-founder seeks the “immediate freezing of all remaining funds and a full criminal investigation” into Committee members who awarded the prize.

    The Nobel Prizes were established in 1901 according to Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament, which was later incorporated into the Swedish and Norwegian legal systems. The Peace Prize, which is meant to be bestowed on the figure who has contributed most to “fraternity between nations,” the “abolition or reduction of standing armies,” and “the holding and promotion of peace congresses,” has served as a cornerstone of Scandinavian soft power ever since.

    Since its inception, however, the prize was marred by controversy due to the violent legacy of its recipients, and the political ambitions of its Norwegian sponsors. In the case of one of the Prize’s first winners, US President Theodore Roosevelt, the Norwegian Nobel Committee was criticized at the time for overlooking the American statesman’s naked warmongering in Latin America in order to curry favor with the nascent US empire. The New York Times sardonically observed that “a broad smile illuminated the face of the globe when the prize was awarded … to the most warlike citizen of these United States.”

    The same dynamic is at play in the Caribbean once again, according to Assange, as the Nobel Committee crowns a Venezuelan politician best known for her unhinged appeals for foreign military intervention and her dedication of her Nobel victory to US President Donald Trump.

    As Assange explained, Trump’s massive buildup of US military forces off the coast of Venezuela “has already committed undeniable war crimes, including the lethal targeting of civilian boats and survivors at sea, which has killed at least 95 people.”

    “The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights labeled these U.S. coastal strikes against civilian boats “extrajudicial executions,” the Wikileaks co-founder wrote. And the “principal architect of this aggression” was none other than Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who “nominated María Corina Machado for the peace prize.”

    Norwegian Nobel judges tied to influential Venezuelan regime change lobbyist

    The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a figure as clearly unqualified as Machado – and in apparent violation of Swedish law – raised questions about whether the Committee had been influenced by powerful outside interests. Machado’s nomination for the prize by the US Secretary of State had an undeniable impact on the decision, as the Nobel ceremony serves as a central channel of Norwegian soft power. But inside Oslo, a political powerbroker determined to return to power in his family’s native Venezuela may have also played a role in swinging votes for Machado.

    He is Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of a CIA asset and wealthy Venezuelan aristocrat who held positions in neoliberal Venezuelan governments before the election of Hugo Chavez. Halvorssen is also the first cousin of Leopoldo Lopez, the author of several military coups against Chavez and Maduro, and the founder of the US government-sponsored Popular Will party which has traditionally led the way for the radical opposition.

    As the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, a self-proclaimed human rights group which openly advocates for toppling governments targeted by the West, Halvorssen presides over a network of Western-backed regime change activists. At the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, Halvorssen played host to Machado, who clamored for Maduro’s removal through a video link-up from Venezuela, where she was supposedly “in hiding.” This year’s Forum featured Machado’s top advisor, the Spain-based Pedro Uchuruttu, as well as her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa. When the Nobel Committee awarded Machado with its peace prize in October, the Oslo Freedom Forum issued a press release celebrating the decision for “chang[ing] the dynamics” in Venezuela.

    Thor Halvorssen Jr. hosts Maria Corina Machado at his 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum

    The Norway-based Fritt Ord Foundation is a key link between Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum and leaders of the Nobel Committee. The Oslo Freedom Forum declares on its website that Fritt Ord “was among the first to endorse” it. While providing funding to Halvorssen’s regime change outfit, Fritt Ord awarded Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair, with its 2021 Freedom of Expression Tribute. During his speech awarding the Nobel Prize to Machado, Frydnes likened the right-wing coup plotter to Nelson Mandela. With geriatric members of the Norwegian royal family seated just a few feet away, he went on to call for Maduro to step down and allow Machado to preside over a “democratic” transition.

    Frydnes also happens to be the former director of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a think tank focused on supporting the Ukraine proxy war, which is a formal partner and supporter of Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum.

    Among the five judges who awarded Machado her prize was Kristin Clemet, a Norwegian politician who was also awarded the Fritt Ord Freedom of Expression Tributein 2017. Clemet is the managing director of a liberal Norwegian think tank called Civita which officially partners with and supports Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum.

    Who’s behind Nobel insider gambling scheme?

    Even before she had officially received the award, Machado’s entourage drew accusations of corruption and illegal enrichment after a handful of insiders seemingly used advanced knowledge of her imminent win to rake in close to $100,000 on the Polymarket betting site.

    The odds of Machado winning surged from 3.75% to 72.8% just hours before the Nobel Committee officially informed Machado of her victory. One unusually prescient bettor won $65,000 gambling on the Venezuelan opposition figure. “It seems we have been prey to a criminal actor who wants to earn money on our information,” said Kristian Berg Harpviken, the head of the Nobel Institute.

    Months later, The Nobel committee still has yet to conclude its investigation into the corruption scandal. As of publication, the committee did not respond to a request for comment by The Grayzone.

    For what promotes itself as the world’s premiere peacemaking institution, it may be too late to undo the damage wrought by giving the Nobel Prize to an avowed champion of violent regime change.

    “Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have” already “tipped the balance in favor of war,” Assange concluded.

    • By Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed

    *****

    The post Julian Assange: Sweden Broke Own Laws with Nobel Prize to Venezuela’s Machado first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Prison Horror Show Plays On

    Hopes for a major restructuring of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) a year into President Donald Trump’s second term in office have come to naught. 

    Trump in June named former federal prisoner Josh Smith as the BOP’s deputy director. It was a bold and, in my view, progressive move. While greeted with hostility from the union representing federal corrections officers, it inspired hope among the tens of thousands of prisoners in federal custody. 

    Many of us thought that the next step would be something equally bold — perhaps to turn away from private prisons, which have cost the government millions of dollars in lawsuits because of wrongful deaths in custody, or perhaps to institute programming that would better prepare prisoners for release and for reintegration into society. 

    The post US Prison Horror Show Plays On appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Trump Cabal’s “Apocalypse Again”

    In Francis Ford’s Coppola’s brilliant 1979 film Apocalypse Now, we have the CIA ordering the assassination of a renegade colonel. Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, rambled “Off the reservation” and simply went too far, even for the genocide loving US government in Vietnam. When the assassin, played by Martin Sheen, gets too close to Kurtz at his deep jungle compound, Kurtz, dying, shouts out “Kill ’em. Kill ’em all” referring to his Cambodian army of followers.

    Fast forward to our horrific current era of outright (and I will say it) Fascist Amerika. The Trump Cabal obviously took the mantle in spades from the war mongering Bush 1 and Bush 2 administrations. Bush 1 used the lies about Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait (read the transcript of the meeting between US Ambassador April Glaspie and Iraq President Saddam Hussein about Kuwait and it’s illegal drilling of Iraqi oil); Bush 2 ( with Cheney pulling the strings) using WMD lies to illegally invade and occupy Iraq. The Trump Cabal, let’s give them credit here, are great students of their predecessors. They just take it on steroids with the disgraceful missile attacks blowing up Venezuelan speedboats. Trump’s handlers obviously viewed the massacre of the fleeing Iraqi Revolutionary Guards in Iraq War 1, blowing them into dust. They also obviously watched documentary footage of the Nazis grabbing up Jews, packing them into trucks and speeding off to the concentration camps. Not a bad preface to what occurs in places like Alligator Alley and a myriad of our current ICE detention centers.

    The hope all good and decent Americans are pining for is official resistance. We need our military personnel to say NO when ordered to do any such illegal or immoral action. We need our Congress to finally stand together and say NO to the sociopaths running this fascist enterprise. Yes, call it what it is folks.

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  • Murder on the High Seas?

    The boat, leaving its wake behind, just before it was struck by U.S. fire.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, announced in a post on X another deadly U.S. strike on a boat he said was trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean Sea. (Screengrab from a post on X)

    Since Sept. 2, following the orders of President Donald Trump, U.S. armed forces have launched at least 22 airstrikes that we know of on alleged “narco-terrorist” vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean killing 86 civilians. Thus far, there has been no congressional approval sought, nor thorough oversight provided.

    There has been no complete factual information presented publicly that could provide sufficient proof of anything about the status of the people killed, nor the contents of those vessels, all of which appear to have been vaporized by precise and powerful munitions delivered by U S. armed forces.

    The discussions concerning the airstrikes so far have been predominantly focused on the initial strike and a second strike on the same vessel 41 minutes later on Sept. 2. But, the paramount and transcendent questions to be answered with all due diligence and speed are: (1) whether any of the strikes were legal; and (2) whether the deaths of 86 people were justified?

    A person who engages in hostilities against the United States during an “armed conflict,” on behalf of an opposing government, is an “enemy combatant.” Killing an enemy combatant engaged in an armed conflict can be a lawful act of war, but not if the target is a civilian or an enemy combatant who no longer poses an immediate threat of engaging in hostilities.

    An “armed conflict” is defined as a “resort to armed force” between two or more countries or states. Whether there exists an armed conflict is determined by the facts, not by one country or state, and certainly not by a vigilante president and secretary of defense falsely and unilaterally declaring that their actions and orders are justified by the existence of an armed conflict.

    As far as a vast number of Americans and members of Congress know, not one of the aforementioned attacks has produced a shred of verifiable evidence sufficient to justify the wholesale extrajudicial killing of 86 civilians. Unquestionably, stopping the overseas flow of illegal drugs into the United States is a matter of extraordinary importance, but that mission must be initiated and executed in conformance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, international law and the Constitution — not by the president merely proclaiming the existence of an armed conflict where one does not legally or factually exist.

    Likewise, there is no evidence that has been revealed of any “armed conflict” between two or more countries or states. In fact, the only known evidence of the use of “armed force” is that initiated by the United States.

    In addition, there is no evidence proving that another state or country is involved in this debacle — much less that it has “resorted to armed force against the United States.” Likewise, there has also been no reported verification of hostilities against the United States initiated by enemy combatants on behalf of an opposing government. In fact, all the evidence reveals at this point is that only the United States has engaged in hostilities, and not against an opposing state or country, but instead against civilians, which, if true, raises issues of potential war crimes and charges under the UCMJ.

    The UCMJ requires members of the armed forces to determine the legality of an order and to obey only those orders that are lawful. To put it simply, it is the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to determine whether an order is manifestly illegal and, if it is, to refuse to obey it.

    Of grave concern for the members of U S. armed forces ordered to engage and carry out the orders of the president is the possibility that if, in fact, the orders of the president or secretary of defense are determined to be illegal, or unconstitutional, or in the alternative, there exists no evidence to prove the allegations upon which the orders to kill were based, then, in that case, there is the possibility of investigations for extrajudicial killings being initiated pursuant to Article 118 of the UCMJ involving those members of the armed forces in the chain of command who participated in executing civilians without justification or excuse.

    If, in this instance, no other state or country has resorted to armed force or engaged in hostilities with enemy combatants against the United States, by definition and legally, there can be no armed conflict. Without the provision of evidence establishing justification to the contrary, the president or the secretary of defense, directing the U.S. military to act as judge, jury and executioner, poses grave risks to those members of the armed forces in the chain of command whose responsibility it is to assure the execution of only lawful orders.

    Epilogue: The president has described six Democratic members of Congress — all former U.S. military officers or national security officials — as “traitors” for advising members of the armed forces that: “You can refuse illegal orders.” In actuality, there is no discretion — members of the armed forces must determine and refuse to follow a manifestly illegal order.

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  • Who’s the Dictator? Venezuela’s Maduro or Ukraine’s Zelenskyy

    Washington brands Nicolás Maduro a dictator, celebrates Volodymyr Zelenskyy as democratic, and sponsors María Corina Machado to achieve regime change in Venezuela rather than promote genuine democracy.

    Within the narrow spectrum of establishment punditry, “dictator” functions as a term of opprobrium reserved for governments Washington designates as enemies. By this measure, Maduro is cast as the dictator, while Zelenskyy is sanctified as democratic.

    Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wrote about a democracy “double standard” in 1979. A Democrat turned anti-communist neoconservative, she formulated a convenient rhetorical distinction. The so-called Kirkpatrick Doctrine supported “authoritarian” traditional dictatorships and opposed leftist “totalitarian regimes.”

    In its modern incarnation, the Brookings Institution argues that US geopolitical interests justify backing “friendly” autocrats while opposing “regimes” critical of Washington.

    Thus Ahmed al-Sharaa, former Al Qaeda “terrorist” and now head of Syria after a US-backed coup, was welcomed to the Trump White House. A week later, the “benevolent monarch” from a country that does not even bother to hold national elections – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – graced the Oval Office.

    Ukrainian exceptionalism

    What about the leader who banned opposition parties, shuttered critical media, arrested political opponents, closed trade unions, sent security forces into churches, and persecuted speakers of Ukraine’s main second language? When Zelenskyy’s term in office was set to end on May 20, 2024, he declared martial law to suspend elections.

    Yet Senate Democrats still deem Zelenskyy to be in “the front lines of democracy.” Forbes praises his “moral velocity.” NPR anoints him an “icon of democracy.”

    While Trump and company may have uttered unkind words about the Ukrainian president, follow the money. The US has showered Ukraine with $128–137 billion in aid since Trump took office.

    Ukraine is widely recognized as being caught in a war. Yet the deadly hybrid war against Venezuela is rendered invisible – reduced to merely “sanctions” against an errant regime or at most “pressure.” The latest escalation involves what are euphemistically called “kinetic strikes” on small boats, backed by the largest armada in the Caribbean since the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis. The most recent act of war, the seizure of an oil tanker, has been condemned by the Venezuelans as “international piracy.”

    Causalities in the Ukraine war are mourned, but the over 100,000 fatalities by US sanctions in Venezuela are ignored. Both are at war and should be judged by the same standards.

    Venezuela: the exception that proves the rule

     Since Hugo Chávez’s 1998 victory and the initiation of the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela has held over 20 national elections. Washington deemed only the two won by the opposition as legitimate, proving the operative rule that “democracy” is attained when outcomes please the hegemon.

    Maduro first ran for president in 2013 after Chávez’s death. The US was the only country not to recognize his win.

    In 2018, Washington’s regime-change offensive of sanctions, amounting to illegal collective punishment, and other coercive measures was taking its toll. The US called a boycott of the presidential election, hoping to achieve by extra-parliamentary means what it could not attain by the ballot. Declaring the contest illegitimate six months before the actual vote, Washington even threatened opposition politician Henri Falcón with sanctions for running.

    Venezuela did not fall in 2018. Falcón came in second with 21% of the vote after Maduro, who the US again refused to recognize.

    The following year, Washington tried a new “democracy promotion” gambit. Juan Guaído, after receiving a call from Trump’s VP Michael Pence, declared himself “interim president” of Venezuela on a Caracas street corner. The 35-year-old had never run for national office. This embarrassment lasted until 2022, when Guaidó’s own opposition found him so toxic that he was given the boot.

    The making of Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado

    Ahead of the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, Washington’s regime-change campaign had “failed.” Maduro’s resolute political leadership and the unbroken civilian-military unity had defeated Washington’s illegal measures.

    The Biden administration faced a choice: boycott again and hand Maduro an uncontested mandate, or back a candidate and thereby legitimize elections in a government it refused to recognize. Washington’s workaround was to promote a candidate who could not legally assume the presidency.

    The audition began with a US House Foreign Affairs Committee “bipartisan roundtable” in February 2024 featuring María Corina Machado as the sole opposition candidate. Machado had been disqualified in 2015 from running for public office due to treasonous activities. But the fanatical Zionist was photogenic, fluent in English, and came from one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families.

    Even so, Washington’s favorite was not a consensus candidate among those opposed to the ruling Chavista party. Widely resented, Machado belonged to the extreme insurrectionary wing in a fractious field of competing opposition groupings.

    She returned to Venezuela to stage a dubious “opposition primary,” not run by the electoral authority but by her own private NGO, Súmate, which had received NED funding. Machado claimed an implausibly lopsided victory and destroyed the ballots, eliminating any possibility of verification.

    Barred from running, Machado hand-picked Edmundo González Urrutia as her surrogate. A minor Foreign Ministry official in the 1980s, he was unknown even in right-wing circles. With Washington and the corporate press running interference, González did not even bother to leave the capital city during the campaign. Which was just a well since his platform of privatization at home and genocide in Palestine was far more popular inside the Beltway than in Venezuela.

    Predictably, both Maduro and González claimed victory. The contested election went to the Venezuelan supreme court, which required all candidates to submit their evidence proving they won. Largely underreported in the US press, González refused to submit anything, leaving no legal pathway for him to be declared president, even if he had won. Even Trump, disputing his 2020 defeat, fought it out in the courts.

    To this day, the US has not formally recognized González as president of Venezuela. Why bother when the objective of demonizing Maduro was accomplished with a help from the fourth estate.

    Propaganda gap

     As MAGA mavens might say, exporting democracy exhausted our strategic reserves at home. Masked ICE agents now have license to terrorize US cities.

    Trump rationalizes the mission against Venezuela as a war on narco-terrorism. The problem is that few buy the alibi from the world’s largest consumer of narcotics, leading drug money launderer, and top gun runner to the cartels.

    Proving the obvious, Trump sprung Juan Orlando Hernández from federal penitentiary, after the former Honduran president was convicted in US courts of aiding in the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine. Sentenced to 45 years for running a “narco-state.” Hernandez was freed in Trump’s undisguised interference in Honduras’s November 30 presidential election.

    As Trump’s hypocrisy on narco-trafficking and his weak justification for naked imperial aggression falter – and as US public opinion rejects further escalation – the corporate press has moved in to fill the propaganda gap, justifying “Maduro must go.”

    In the end, the “dictator” narrative reveals less about Venezuela or Ukraine than about Washington’s geopolitical imperatives. Media caricatures, selective indignation, and shifting standards of legitimacy validate intervention when convenient and dismiss democratic processes conflicting with US aims. Stripped of moral pretenses, the discourse reduces to a simple calculus: allies are democratic by definition, adversaries authoritarian by decree, The empire’s issue is not democracy, but domination.

    The post Who’s the Dictator? Venezuela’s Maduro or Ukraine’s Zelenskyy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Trump’s Empire of Hubris and Thuggery

    The president’s latest National Security Strategy memorandum treats the freedom to coerce others as the essence of US sovereignty. It is an ominous document that will—if allowed to stand—come back to haunt the United States.

    The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) recently released by President Donald Trump presents itself as a blueprint for renewed American strength. It is dangerously misconceived in four ways.

    First, the NSS is anchored in grandiosity: the belief that the United States enjoys unmatched supremacy in every key dimension of power. Second, it is based on a starkly Machiavellian view of the world, treating other nations as instruments to be manipulated for American advantage. Third, it rests on a naïve nationalism that dismisses international law and institutions as encumbrances on US sovereignty rather than as frameworks that enhance US and global security together.

    Fourth, it signals a thuggery in Trump’s use of the CIA and military. Within days of the NSS’s publication, the US brazenly seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil on the high seas—on the flimsy grounds that the vessel had previously violated US sanctions against Iran.

    The seizure was not a defensive measure to avert an imminent threat. Nor is it remotely legal to seize vessels on the high seas because of unilateral US sanctions. Only the UN Security Council has such authority. Instead, the seizure is an illegal act designed to force regime change in Venezuela. It follows Trump’s declaration that he has directed the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela to destabilize the regime.
    American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened—structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.

    The NSS, in other words, is not just an exercise in hubris on paper. It is rapidly being translated into brazen practice.

    A Glimmer of Realism, Then a Lurch into Hubris

    To be fair, the NSS contains moments of long-overdue realism. It implicitly concedes that the United States cannot and should not attempt to dominate the entire world, and it correctly recognizes that some allies have dragged Washington into costly wars of choice that were not in America’s true interests. It also steps back—at least rhetorically—from an all-consuming great-power crusade. The strategy rejects the fantasy that the United States can or should impose a universal political order.

    But the modesty is short-lived. The NSS quickly reasserts that America possesses the “world’s single largest and most innovative economy,” “the world’s leading financial system,” and “the world’s most advanced and most profitable technology sector,” all backed by “the world’s most powerful and capable military.” These claims serve not simply as patriotic affirmations, but as a justification for using American dominance to impose terms on others. Smaller countries, it seems, will bear the brunt of this hubris, since the US cannot defeat the other great powers, not least because they are nuclear-armed.

    Naked Machiavellianism in Doctrine

    The NSS’s grandiosity is welded to a naked Machiavellianism. The question it asks is not how the United States and other countries can cooperate for mutual benefit, but how American leverage—over markets, finance, technology, and security—can be applied to extract maximal concessions from other countries.

    This is most pronounced in the NSS discussion of the Western Hemisphere section, which declares a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States, the NSS declares, will ensure that Latin America “remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” and alliances and aid will be conditioned on “winding down adversarial outside influence.” That “influence” clearly refers to Chinese investment, infrastructure, and lending.

    The NSS is explicit: US agreements with countries “that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage” must result in sole-source contracts for American firms. US policy should “make every effort to push out foreign companies” that build infrastructure in the region, and the US should reshape multilateral development institutions, such as the World Bank, so that they “serve American interests.”

    Latin American governments, many of whom trade extensively with both the United States and China, are effectively being told: you must deal with us, not China—or face the consequences.

    Such a strategy is naive. China is the main trading partner for most of the world, including many countries in the Western hemisphere. The US will be unable to compel Latin American nations to expel Chinese firms, but will gravely damage US diplomacy in the attempt.

    Thuggery So Brazen Even Close Allies Are Alarmed

    The NSS proclaims a doctrine of “sovereignty and respect,” yet its behavior has already reduced that principle to sovereignty for the US, vulnerability for the rest. What makes the emerging doctrine even more extraordinary is that it is now frightening not only small states in Latin America, but even the United States’ closest allies in Europe.

    In a remarkable development, Denmark—one of America’s most loyal NATO partners—has openly declared the United States a potential threat to Danish national security. Danish defense planners have stated publicly that Washington under Trump cannot be assumed to respect the Kingdom of Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland, and that a coercive US attempt to seize the island is a contingency for which Denmark must now plan.

    This is astonishing on several levels. Greenland is already host to the US Thule Air Base and firmly within the Western security system. Denmark is not anti-American, nor is it seeking to provoke Washington. It is simply responding rationally to a world in which the United States has begun to behave unpredictably—even toward its supposed friends.

    That Copenhagen feels compelled to contemplate defensive measures against Washington speaks volumes. It suggests that the legitimacy of the US-led security architecture is eroding from within. If even Denmark believes it must hedge against the United States, the problem is no longer one of Latin America’s vulnerability. It is a systemic crisis of confidence among nations that once saw the US as the guarantor of stability but now view it as a possible or likely aggressor.

    In short, the NSS seems to channel the energy previously devoted to great-power confrontation into bullying of smaller states. If America seems to be a bit less inclined to launch trillion-dollar wars abroad, it is more inclined to weaponize sanctions, financial coercion, asset seizures, and theft on the high seas.

    The Missing Pillar: Law, Reciprocity, and Decency

    Perhaps the deepest flaw of the NSS is what it omits: a commitment to international law, reciprocity, and basic decency as foundations of American security.

    The NSS regards global governance structures as obstacles to US action. It dismisses climate cooperation as “ideology,” and indeed a “hoax” according to Trump’s recent speech at the UN. It downplays the UN Charter and envisions international institutions primarily as instruments to be bent toward American preferences. Yet it is precisely legal frameworks, treaties, and predictable rules that have historically protected American interests.

    The founders of the United States understood this clearly. Following the American War of Independence, thirteen newly sovereign states soon adopted a constitution to pool key powers—over taxation, defense, and diplomacy—not to weaken the states’ sovereignty, but to secure it by creating the US Federal Government. The post-WWII foreign policy of the United States government did the same through the UN, the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization, and arms-control agreements.

    The Trump NSS now reverses that logic. It treats the freedom to coerce others as the essence of sovereignty. From that perspective, the Venezuelan tanker seizure and Denmark’s anxieties are manifestations of the new policy.

    Athens, Melos, and Washington

    Such hubris will come back to haunt the United States. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides records that when imperial Athens confronted the small island of Melos in 416 BC, the Athenians declared that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Yet Athens’ hubris was also its undoing. Twelve years later, in 404 BC, Athens fell to Sparta. Athenian arrogance, overreach, and contempt for smaller states helped galvanize the alliance that ultimately brought it down.

    The 2025 NSS speaks in a similar arrogant register. It is a doctrine of power over law, coercion over consent, and dominance over diplomacy. American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened—structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.

    America’s national security strategy should be based on wholly different premises: acceptance of a plural world; recognition that sovereignty is strengthened, not diminished, through international law; acknowledgment that global cooperation on climate, health, and technology is indispensable; and understanding that America’s global influence depends more on persuasion than coercion.

    The post Trump’s Empire of Hubris and Thuggery first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Trump’s NSPM-7 Turns Dissent into Domestic Terrorism

    Donald Trump, Democrats, Enemies

    President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 is Operation TIPS on steroids. After 9/11, President George W. Bush proposed a program recruiting ordinary workers — truck drivers, postal workers, utility workers, cable installers — to report “suspicious behavior” to authorities. Critics quickly warned that TIPS resembled a domestic informant network, a kind of “neighbors spying on neighbors” setup reminiscent of East Germany’s Stasi or Soviet-style surveillance.

    Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) was launched with great fanfare: In March 2002, former Johnny Carson sidekick Ed McMahon introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to cheering representatives of more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups gathered in Washington, D.C. But TIPS never went into effect. By late 2002, Congress killed the program outright.

    Today, however, an anti-Trump lawn sign, a “No Kings” button, a T-shirt with an anti-fascist slogan, a donation to a progressive organization, a subscription to an anti-capitalist publication, a social media post, or even a peaceful gathering of pro-peace grandmothers might be enough to draw federal scrutiny. Under Trump’s new directive, such activity could be viewed as evidence of “anti-Americanism” — a label that may land you on an FBI monitoring list.

    As journalist Ken Klippenstein reported, “Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to ‘compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,’” according to a leaked Justice Department memo he published.

    In late September, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, addressed to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security, and to the Attorney General. Its subject: “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”

    The memorandum cites recent political violence — including the murder of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk — to argue that “a new law enforcement strategy” is required, one that “investigates all participants in “criminal and terroristic conspiracies,” including the “structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.”

    Klippenstein notes that NSPM-7 is fundamentally a law-enforcement directive. It avoids the legal complications of deploying the military or National Guard by directing the Department of Justice to mobilize the FBI’s roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). These task forces represent an enormous domestic intelligence apparatus: more than 4,000 members drawn from over 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies, including special agents, police officers, intelligence analysts, and surveillance technicians. Originally created in New York City in 1980 to formalize FBI-NYPD cooperation, JTTFs now operate out of all 55 FBI field offices.”

    Most alarming, Klippenstein reports that the Trump administration is not only “targeting organizations or groups” but also individuals and “entities” identified by ideological “indicia” of potential violence, including:

    *anti-Americanism,

    * anti-capitalism,

    * anti-Christianity,

    * support for the overthrow of the United States Government,

    * extremism on migration,

    * extremism on race,

    * extremism on gender

    * hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,

    * hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and

    * hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

    These categories are so broad they could sweep up activists, journalists, academics, nonprofits, donors, protest organizers — or anyone with dissenting political views.

    The Memorandum noted that in the wake of political violence, including the murder of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.”

    In practice, this opens the door to wide-scale surveillance and data-gathering targeting not just criminals but people whose associations, ideologies, or speech fall outside the administration’s definition of acceptable American political identity.

    Before it was put into play, Operation TIPS died in 2002. NSPM-7 revives its core idea — but turbocharges it with the full force of federal intelligence, law enforcement, financial regulators, and 4,000-plus terrorism-task-force personnel.

    The Stasi would be proud.

    The post Trump’s NSPM-7 Turns Dissent into Domestic Terrorism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Not in My Jewish Name: From Israel’s (perpetual) Crimes Against Humanity to Slandering Ms. Rachel

    A tragic canard of history — i.e., the assertion: “Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people; therefore, we Jews have the right to return and establish a Jewish ethno-supremacist state.”

    Only by a literal reading — i.e., cracked-brained — of Old Testament mythos can we Jews claim to be the people G-d choose to [ethnically cleanse] the Levant.

    DNA analysis proves the Jews of the Torah are, wait for it, the Palestinian people (and that would include a certain rabble-rousing, empire-agitating rabbi known as Jesus of Nazareth). In contrast, my Jewish DNA reveals, my ancestors origins are from Europe e.g., Germany, France, Spain, Greece, with 4% traced to northern Iran and Iraq.

    Thus we can conclude the “Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews” canard should be regarded as flat out, Flat Earth theory-level risible.

    Conceived in lie Zionist perpetual crimes against humanity continue unabated:

    A journalist and former detainee, identified as “Yahya” reports, during his year and ten month of incarceration in Sde Teiman prison, he was subjected to torture by electrocution, being beaten, starved, and was the victim of sexual assaults that were filmed by his jailers.

    Yahya went on to relate he was sexually assaulted by a dog trained to inflict the act.

    Yet Ms. Rachel is accused of all forms of depravity, including “blood libel,” by defenders of Israel — a crime against humanity disguised as a nation.

    May be an image of child and text that says ‘PET ES RECYCLE > Meeting Rahaf from Gaza’”

    These are the people, when I, as a Jewish person, object to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, hiss I am a self-loathing Jew and I am committing an act of treason against my tribe.

    Truth be told: if I acted as an apologist for Israel, doing so would amount to an act of treason against my soul and I would loathe myself as I made the utterance.

    Update from the annals of the “most moral army on earth.”

    A CNN investigation has revealed the IDF opened fire on starving Palestinians while they were desperately attempting to secure flour in Gaza. Then the IDF used bulldozers to bury their corpses in mass graves.

    Their deaths were not chronicled, nor was the location of their bodies disclosed to their families.

    According to the UN, since the US-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza, the Israelis have slaughtered an estimated 360 Palestinians (and counting).

    The above, since the establishment of Israel, has been the Zionist state’s conception of peace. Moreover, any act of retaliation or even resistance by Palestinians are termed as acts of terrorism.

    In the late 1930s, the Gestapo entered my family’s home, arrested my grandfather, and imprisoned him in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. If he and his fellow prisoners had escaped and fought their way through the streets of Berlin, the Nazi regime would have termed them terrorists — yet history would have lauded them as heroes.

    This is the context of the Palestinian struggle from 1948 to the Oct. 7 Gaza prison breakout. The response of the Zionist state: a rampage of collective punishment.

    By the standards of international law, a flagrant war crime; by Israeli standards — the modus operandi of Zionist tyranny.

    As brazen as SS (Schutzstaffel) officers who wore death-head skulls on their uniforms and US Jim Crow era Klansmen prone to brandishing lynching nooses, Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security, Culture Minister Amichai Eliyahu, and other devotees to the radical right-wing death cult, masquerading as the Israeli government, have taken to affixing golden noose-pins to their lapels expressing their call for Palestinian detainees from Gaza be executed.

    All as:

    “An elderly woman and her son were among at least seven Palestinians killed in the latest Israeli attacks in Gaza, as the military continues to operate across the “yellow line” ceasefire demarcation.

    “Health officials reported the killings on Saturday in Beit Lahiya, Jabalia, and Zeitoun, including a 70-year-old woman and her son, who were hunted down and killed by a drone in Gaza City.

    Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said the woman and her son were chased by a quadcopter drone about one kilometre [half a mile] from the yellow line and “left there to bleed to death” as the aircraft continued hovering overhead, preventing anyone from reaching them.”

    Yet Israel’s apologists bristle and insist on their perpetual victimhood because the world views their genocidal rampage through Gaza and observers posit the mindset of all too many Israelis is analogous to that evinced by racist sorehead denizens of the Jim Crow ruled US Deep South and the blood-drenched actions of the Israeli government are Third Reich adjacent.

    The conduct of the Zionist state is an affront to the memory of my relatives who perished in the flames of The Shoah. Israel defenders, to their shame, represent a whole new bloc of Holocaust denialists.

    Yet, through the horror of it all, the world has witnessed the true nature of the Zionist ethno-supremacist state: i.e., a perpetual crime against humanity disguised as a nation.

    All the Zionist hasbara lies, including social media trolling as a national enterprise, will not cause the world to forget what we have witnessed. And the Israeli citizenry senses the fact. A recent poll reports: 40 percent of Israelis are considering or making plans to leave the country.

    Personally, I will welcome them if they come in the spirit of repentance.

    More from The Department of Not In My Name

    Zionists are attempting to bulldoze the reality of their lawless actions, to bury the people of the world’s awareness of the massive crimes against humanity Israel perpetrates, from Gaza to the West Bank, and outward towards their neighbors in the region — rather than face the reality that Zionism, the dream of an ethno-supremacist state, has been manifested as the blood-drenched, waking-life nightmare that it is.

    Israel’s apologists, relentlessly, attempt to whitewash away the nation’s perpetual transgressions by means of the proliferation of propaganda and character assassination with the soul-defying agenda of imposing censorship and intimidate critics into silence.

    No photo description available.

    Withal, a comment/threat made by a Zionist troll on a recent post of mine on the subject:

    From Vincent ******* “We are noticing you. Never again. #noticing Jew-haters”

    I replied, “can you say that with a World Two era, Hollywood movie German accent to achieve its full effect?”

    Speaking of acting in a Third Reich-adjacent manner, from the fascist-minded homefront, Donald Trump is demanding stripping US citizenship from individuals who refuse to swear absolute fealty to the tenets of what he terms: “Western Civilization.”

    Quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi when asked what he thought of Western Civilization:

    “I think it would be a good idea [if they tried it].” [A disputed quotation. — DV ed]

    Withal, the US (a nation established in ethnic cleansing, slavery and genocide) has slaughtered over 4 million people of the Islamic faith since the early 1990s alone. Israel, a de facto Western nation, remains committed to ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the funds and weaponry to do so are supplied by the West.

    Masked ICE thugs patrol US streets. The economic elite serially exploit all their greedhead minds survey, from the resources of the cupidity tormented earth to the bodies of teenage girls and women from power-devoid economic groups. As, all the while, rents, medical care, utilities, and food prices rise and rise when life’s necessities, in a civilized society, would be a birthright not a privilege of the few.

    Yes, I agree with Mahatma Gandhi, we, in the West — where we have been brainwashed to believe our capitalist-imposed shackles are the very wings of liberty — should give civilization a go.

    What else is on the minds of the civilized men of Western civilization?

    Trump and his Heinrich Himmler toy soldier appointees to the US Department of War (Crimes) are careening towards an attempt at a military smash-and-grab of Venezuelan oil.

    I thought I had witnessed the nadir of jingoistic stupid and soul-shriveling political class arrogance in the run up to the Bush-Cheney administration’s war of aggression waged against the people of Iraq. How could I have suffered from such pathology-based-optimism?

    By any measure of sentience the history of imperial fuckery would serve to warn us off such a dance with catastrophe — in buying into such a dismal display of war mongering prevarication — such a psychopathic lust for mayhem and mass death.

    The guiding god of empire (including the US imperium’s client state, Israel, is: Moloch, a God to whom the innocent are sacrificed. In modern imperium, his blood-crazed devotees, knowing his thirst is insatiable, proffer him libations of blood and oil.

    Pete Hegseth insists his god is Jesus Christ but his guiding god is Moloch. This is the reason Hegseth does not, in any manner, regard the declarations of the Christian Messiah, The Prince Of Peace, blesser of the meek and peacemakers, Jesus Christ — who would demand of Tipplin’ Pete the question:

    Why did God, the all-knowing Father, place the United States’ god-given oil beneath Venezuela’s commie soil?

    Trump et al. are the emblems, in shambling human form, of the personality types i.e., one-dimensional, greed-crazed maniacs — human embodiments of the Second Law Of Thermodynamics — who cause the collapse of over-extended, corrupt-to-the-core empires.

    Tragically, the remedy for the pathology of End Stage Empire is: the doubling down of said End Stage Empire by the dim and dismal machinations of belligerently obtuse imbeciles.

    In this manner, Trump and his klavern of fools and tools have heard and are heeding the call of history.

    Further dispatches from the realm of government-squatting fools:

    The news has been “disclosed” by National Security State “whistleblower” insiders that “alien technology,” in the form of downed UAP/UFO craft and the remains of “nonhuman biologics” are in the (greed-rancid) hands of Military Industrial Complex (war) profiteers.

    Of course, like a hammer that sees the world as an endless series of nails, these militaristic minded characters, straight out of a combination of Dr. Strangelove and Plan 9 From Outer Space, are warning us to watch the skies, and “be afraid, be very afraid!”

    If we were not perpetually afraid, NSS and MIC types would be out of a job, wouldn’t they?

    Think it through: If aliens possessed the tech they are purported to have, they could have blasted our species of bipedal, grifting ne’er-do-wells and genocidal knuckleheads to cosmic shitdust long ago and in an instant.

    Same type of Big Lie storyline being deployed towards Venezuela — i.e., “narcotrafficking” Venezuelan fisherman, for the sake of US national security, must be bombed then survivors of the initial assault are to be “double-tapped” bombed.

    Will we next be subject to official narratives reporting that UFO-manning aliens are the actual party delivering fentanyl to the decaying precincts of the collapsing republic?

    If super intelligent aliens regard us at all, I suspect, it would be with the annoyance that we regard raccoons prone to upend garbage containers scattering the contents across the yard, albeit we humans, with our ecocidal, genocidal, and war making proclivities cannot be regarded as, in any manner, cute.

    Consider this, the beauty and terror of it, at times, must be regard from what the poet Wallace Stevens termed to “central mind” of poetic imagination:

    Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

    We make a dwelling in the evening air,

    In which being there together is enough. Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, Wallace Stevens

    As US empire, the global neoliberal order, and the Zionist state are falling apart — so are we.

    We have been in service to a dictatorship of money, to a gangster imperium, and we are held and buffeted by the caprice of a soul-defying despotism that will kill what it cannot dominate.

    Through it all, we are all storytellers conjuring tales of what isn’t and what has never existed. We are a fiction of possibilities, most of the latter being improbable.

    How real is the tangible world that is invisible to us given its hidden-from-us order? Real enough to prove to us that it is us that must be regarded as unreal.

    I am an ad hoc contrivance of myself. Only by surrendering to the implausible can I conjure a serviceable face to meet the day and to possess a modicum of plausibility I must allow myself to be transformed by the inchoate counsel of Impossible Angels.

    You might not know it but, I suspect, the same goes for you.

    Bear the above in mind as the world (we only believe) we know continues to fall apart.

    The post Not in My Jewish Name: From Israel’s (perpetual) Crimes Against Humanity to Slandering Ms. Rachel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Schemes of Bankruptcy: The United Nations, Funding Dues, and Human Rights

    The United Nations, in turning 80, has been berated, dismissed and libelled. In September, US President Donald Trump took a hearty swipe at the body’s alleged impotence. “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he posed to gathered world leaders. All it seemed to do was “write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words and empty words don’t solve war.” Never once did he consider that many of the wars he has allegedly ended have not so much reached their pacific terminus as having gone into simmering storage.

    While harsh geopolitics has become violently fashionable and sneery of international law, an organisation whose existence depends on solidarity, support and cooperation from its often uncooperative Member States, is seeing itself slide into what has been described as a “worsening liquidity crisis.” The crisis was given much stimulus by the organisation’s US$135 million deficit as it entered 2025. By September’s end, it had collected a mockingly inadequate 66.2 per cent of the year’s assessments.

    In October, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in speaking to the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly responsible for the entity’s budget, warned that the organisation was facing a “race to bankruptcy” unless Member States forked out their dues. Last year, arrears totalled US$760 million. With the need to return credits worth US$300 million to Member States at the start of 2026, some 10 per cent of the budget would be emptied. “Any delays in collections early in the year [2026] will force us to reduce spending even more … and then potentially face the prospect of returning US$600 million in 2027, or about 20 per cent of the budget.”

    While discussing finances can induce a coma, some preliminary discussion about the structure of contributions to the UN is necessary. Assessed or mandatory contributions for 2025, measured by the “capacity to pay” formula, comprised the regular budget of the organisation covering administrative and operational costs (approximately $US3.7 billion); funding for international tribunals ($US43 million); the Capital Master Plan covering the renovation of the UN headquarters in New York; and peacekeeping operations (US$5.4 billion). Voluntary contributions are self-explanatory enough, comprising optional donations from Member States and various other entities for humanitarian and development agencies, in addition to sustaining the broader UN system.

    States discharging their obligations in making contributions to the regular budget receive proud mention in the Honour Roll of the UN. Those not doing so risk losing their vote in the organisation if their financial lethargy continues for two years or more after the due date of contributions – not that this injunction has been well observed. The United States remains famously tardy, and under Trump, boisterously so. As the body’s primary contributor to the regular budget – assessed as 22 per cent in 2025 – and 26 per cent to the peacekeeping budget, this is particularly galling.

    Since January, the current administration has savaged funding to various UN bodies. On his first day of office, the President signed an executive order withdrawing his country from the World Health Organization due to its “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”

    The UN Human Rights Council was the next fashioned target, with February’s withdrawal from the body justified on the basis that it had “protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny”. In sympathy for Israel, funding was also frozen to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), citing the allegation that employees had been “involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.”

    Revealing its crass, impulsive philistinism, the Trump administration proceeded to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in July. “UNESCO,” declared State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, “works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.” Amidst all of this, the parochial agenda was made clear: UNESCO, in admitting Palestine as a Member State was “highly problematic, contrary to US policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.”

    Washington has been singular in this regard only in terms of scale. China and Russia are also conspicuous in being late with their contributions while other Member States have simply pared back their UN contributions for reasons of defence and domestic expenditure. War mongering is proving catching, while peacemaking, despite the boasts of the US President, is falling out of vogue. A most conspicuous area to suffer has been human rights.

    In October 2025, the International Service for Human Rights identified an ongoing campaign to defund the UN human rights agenda being waged in the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee. In a report using material gathered from 37 diplomats, UN officials and experts, along with data analysis of UN documents and the organisation’s budget from 2019 to 2024, the ISHR identified a campaign of “coordinated obstruction” by Member States steered by China and Russia. Coupled with Washington and Beijing’s “failure to pay their assessments in full and on time (respectively)”, the UN’s means of funding and implementing its human rights programs has been stymied.

    Most to suffer has been the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which finds itself $90 million short of what it needs for 2025. Some 300 jobs have already been shed by the organisation. “Our resources have been slashed, along with funding for human rights organisations, including at the grassroots level, around the world,” warns UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk. “We are in survival mode.”

    The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), responsible for humanitarian aid and crisis, has had to resort to the beggar bowl. Facing its own budgetary razor, the body is seeking US$23 billion as a matter of immediacy, with the hope that it will save 87 million lives. “Ultimately, in 2026,” the body announced on December 8, “the aim is to raise a total of US$33 billion to support 135 million people through 23 country operations and six plans for refugees and migrants.”

    While wobbly, scarred by imperfections and marked by contentiousness, an organisation built from the ashes of murderous global conflict in 1945 risks becoming the very model of impotence Trump claims and no doubt wishes it to be. In this, he can count on a number of countries, friendly or adversarial to the US. Increasingly shrivelled and shrunken, the UN’s far from negligible role in seeking to conserve peace, flawed as it can be, or distributing aid and protecting human rights, risks vanishing into history.

    The post Schemes of Bankruptcy: The United Nations, Funding Dues, and Human Rights first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Report Downgrades US Civic Rating To ‘Obstructed’

    A new report from an international organization dedicated to tracking civic freedoms throughout the world has downgraded its rating for the United States, due in large part to policies enacted by the Trump administration.

    The report, which was published on Monday, comes from a group called Civicus, which monitors “the state of civic freedoms — including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly — across 198 countries and territories.”

    The U.S. was previously rated as a “narrowed” society, in terms of civic freedoms. In its new report, Civicus now rates the U.S. as an “obstructed” society.

    The post Report Downgrades US Civic Rating To ‘Obstructed’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ragebait Governance

    Trollface

    Image information: “Trollface” by Me in ME is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

    Oxford University Press’ 2025 Word of the Year is “ragebait.” The term captures a defining feature of today’s information ecosystem: content engineered to provoke anger, boost engagement, and overwhelm our ability to think clearly. Fake news is a potent form of ragebait, and in this week’s Gaslight Gazette, the most troubling examples come not from fringe corners of the internet but from the people who now claim to be combating disinformation. This essay examines how the federal government under President Donald Trump has adopted, and expanded, the very practices it once criticized, turning itself into the nation’s most powerful arbiter of truth while sidelining the press, rewriting narratives, and generating its own brand of institutional ragebait.

    The announcement of an arrest in the D.C. pipe-bomb investigation, tied to the events surrounding January 6, saw a proliferation of ragebait. The suspect, Brian Cole, reportedly believed the 2020 election was stolen, a belief shared by many who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    Yet even the straightforward update about his arrest generated its own bout of rage and fake news. While discussing the case, CNN’s Jake Tapper described the suspect as “white” even though the images on screen clearly showed Cole was Black. No correction was issued in the segment. Conservatives had recently spread their own fake news about the case. The conservative outlet The Blaze, in a spectacular act of defamation, incorrectly named an unrelated woman as the suspect. If Cole is indeed guilty, The Blaze should prepare its legal team for a defamation case.

    In another example of the intersection of rage and fake news, there was the chaos at the CDC last week. The conflict emerged over CDC guidelines, when established scientists clashed with activists and appointees installed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After sidelining career experts, the agency reversed long-standing guidance and declined to recommend the Hepatitis B vaccine for young people. Multiple experts say the decision was driven by misinformation rather than evidence. Once again, public institutions tasked with promoting truth are becoming factories of confusion. Ragebait has always been a problem, but the real crisis emerges when the government itself becomes the most prolific producer of ragebait.

    Fake News About Fake News: The White House’s Disinformation Spiral

    “Misleading. Biased. Exposed. Media Offender of the Week.” This sounds like a tagline from a scrappy media-watchdog newsletter. In fact, it’s an official designation from The White House. The Trump administration has replicated the tactics it once condemned in the Biden era, launching a government-run website that identifies alleged fake news, names specific journalists and outlets, describes their supposed “offense,” and then offers “the truth.”

    The problem? Their standards for truth are as arbitrary as they are political. One recent example: Fox News was labeled too “woke,” after the White House misidentified the reporter they were criticizing for “bias.” The administration’s supposedly authoritative sources for debunking stories are equally suspect, relying almost entirely on government accounts, including posts from “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth” and a New York Times article that merely reported what unnamed officials said. In other words, the government cites itself as the final word on reality.

    This trend is spreading. Agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now publishing their own “debunkings” of media stories. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking not only to dismiss views opposing the Trump administration as baseless, but also to criminalize them. According to a memo obtained by Ken Klippenstein, the targets include those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme support for mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

    These actions are especially ironic because conservatives erupted in outrage when President Joe Biden attempted something similar with his short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, which was run by Nina Jankowicz, known for her cringe-worthy TikTok videos. The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent governments from monopolizing truth and delegitimizing the press. Yet that’s exactly what is happening under Trump’s administration.

    Pledging Silence: The Death of Accountability at the Pentagon


    Image Information: (Top)“Pete Hegseth” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; (Left) “Laura Loomer by Gage Skidmore (cropped)” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. (Right) “Matt Gaetz” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    In October 2025, we witnessed a dangerous escalation in government censorship of the press. That month, the Pentagon announced it was barring legacy journalists from its briefings after they refused to sign a pledge to report only information pre-approved by Pentagon leadership. The New York Times refused to sign the pledge and is now suing the Pentagon on the grounds that the pledge violates the Constitution’s free press protections.

    Those who signed, known as pledgers, can no longer credibly call themselves journalists; by agreeing in writing, they have committed to acting as stenographers for the Pentagon. The pledgers now populate the briefing room. They include Laura Loomer, who has a long record of spreading debunked claims, and Matt Gaetz, who left federal office under allegations of sexual misconduct, drug use, and bribery. The pledgers faced online backlash this week after three different pledgers reported that their outlets were occupying the desk formerly held by the Washington Post, whose journalists evacuated the Pentagon after refusing to sign the pledge.

    Meanwhile, one of the pledgers revealed they had interviewed Pete Hegseth, the head of the Pentagon and U.S. Secretary of War, describing it as a good interview but stressing that it was off the record, preventing them from sharing any details. Essentially, this means the pledgers mingle with Pentagon leadership yet offer nothing substantive to the public in terms of objective journalism. They act as mere props to give the illusion of a free press while failing to fulfill the true role of journalists.

    At the same time, the pledgers sided with the press secretary’s claim that, before the pledge, the press had been acting unethically by persistently knocking on the press secretary’s door. Apparently, reporting objective facts, getting figures like Hegseth on the record, and the press secretary engaging with the media are no longer considered part of journalism, at least according to those who signed the pledge.

    The entire situation feels profoundly Orwellian and dangerous. Hegseth is embroiled in a scandal, repeatedly changing his story amid accusations of overseeing war crimes in an unofficial conflict and leaking sensitive information that endangers U.S. military personnel. The stakes are real. This week, a damning government report on “Signalgate” revealed that Hegseth shared information that could have put service members’ lives at risk. He also faces allegations of overseeing war crimes connected to a double-tap strike on Venezuelan drug boats in an unofficial conflict. Recent reports claim the second strike occurred 45 minutes after the initial attack, long after survivors had shown they were no longer a threat, raising serious questions about the operation’s intent and legality.

    With the video documenting the alleged war crimes concealed from public view and genuine journalists supplanted by propagandists, both Republicans and Democrats have retreated into entrenched partisan positions, interpreting the unseen footage to advance their own narratives. Despite repeated promises of transparency, the video remains withheld. In the absence of a free and independent press, truth devolves into partisan property, and accountability effectively vanishes.

    🚫Censorship

    This section chronicles some of the most pressing examples of censorship from the previous two weeks. Project Censored defines censorship as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.”

    Image information: (Left) “Public Domain: JFK with RFK Outside Oval Office by Robert Knudsen, March 1963 (NARA)“ by pingnews.com is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.(Right) “MLK Photo and Quote“ by mattlemmon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

    The Long Shadow of Impunity: The Real Scandal Isn’t Trump, It’s Decades of Looking the Other Way

    “Did the Trump administration commit a war crime in its attack on a Venezuelan boat?” read a December 2025 headline from National Public Radio. The headline was one of many in which journalists asked, and pundits debated, whether President Donald Trump’s Department of War had crossed a legal line by bombing Venezuelan boats. Yet what is missing from most of these accounts is the historical context that gives such claims meaning. Trump’s actions, like those of any president, do not exist in isolation. They sit atop decades of presidential abuses that were ignored, minimized, or sanitized by the press and the public. As the anti-censorship organization Project Censored notes, censorship can be either intentional or accidental. Regardless of the cause, it seems that historical context has been erased from our press discourse on contemporary events, including the alleged war crimes committed by the U.S.

    The erasure of historical context deprives citizens of the framework needed to understand that many of the actions they oppose are not the result of a single administration or individual, but rather decades of the public failing to hold the powerful accountable. Instead, people divide into partisan camps, only concerned when “the other side does it,” which effectively means that neither side is held accountable. This allows those in power to continually expand their authority, even at the expense of constitutional guardrails.

    From Iran-Contra to Gaza: A History of Presidential Lawbreaking Without Consequences

    The historically astute surely noticed the connection between the discussion of the Trump administration’s alleged war crimes, and the death of Eugene Haines Hasenfus on December 2, 2025. Hasenfus, a former United States Marine, helped ferry weapons to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua on behalf of the U.S. government in the 1980s. On one of these missions, his plane crashed, and in the process revealed a secret and illegal operation by the Ronald Reagan Administration known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

    The scandal revealed how Reagan violated the separation of powers, supported terrorism, enabled drug trafficking, and armed Iran while it was at war with Iraq—which America was also arming. Before the story broke publicly, Reagan warned his cabinet, “If such a story gets out, we’ll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House.” Despite the gravity of these crimes, consequences were negligible. George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president and a knowing participant, succeeded him as president without ever facing accountability.

    This troubling pattern of impunity has persisted across administrations: Bill Clinton ordered a controversial strike that destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory under questionable justification; George W. Bush oversaw drone strikes and torture programs; Barack Obama expanded the drone campaign, which killed civilians including U.S. citizens; Donald Trump, in his first term, ordered the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in violation of international law; and Joe Biden faces global condemnation for aiding Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the United Nations has declared a genocide.

    It is against a long history of presidential misconduct without consequence that accusations of war crimes against the Trump administration must be understood. This pattern of impunity has been allowed to persist by the American public. For decades, presidential wrongdoing has rarely been punished. Had earlier leaders been held accountable, their successors might have hesitated before violating national and international law. Instead, the public’s default response remains partisan outrage—a reflex that will undoubtedly surface in the comments on this article—ultimately letting all perpetrators off the hook and normalizing abuses of power up to the present day.

    War Abroad, Violence at Home: Tracing the Fallout of U.S. Foreign Policy on American Soil

    The importance of historical context extends beyond war crimes to include domestic events as well. On November 26, 2025, Afghanistan refugee Rahmanullah Lakanwal reportedly shot and killed two National Guardsmen. Trump claimed that Biden was at fault because he ended the war in Afghanistan and allowed refugees, including Lakanwal into the country. However, this overlooks important historical context. First, before Biden suggested removing troops from Afghanistan, it was Trump who, during his first term, sought to withdraw U.S. forces after he left office in January 2021. Second, while Biden did oversee the troop withdrawal and allowed Lakanwal to enter the United States, it was the Trump administration that granted him asylum back in April.

    Furthermore, Lakanwal’s crimes should be understood within the broader context of the long history of U.S. involvement in weaponizing, collaborating with, and training individuals abroad, actions that have often led to those individuals committing violence on domestic soil. A similar tragedy unfolded in April 2025, when Jamal Wali, a former translator for U.S. forces while they fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, shot police officers in Fairfax, Virginia, before being killed by law enforcement. Moments before opening fire, he was stopped by police and was recorded bemoaning his experience in the U.S. noting “I should have served with f–king Taliban.” This suggests a broader pattern, as Lakanwal’s story is similar but even darker: he served in a CIA-backed Afghan ‘Zero Unit,’ an elite paramilitary force accused of human-rights abuses, including killing civilians and torturing detainees during the war. These histories complicate simple partisan narratives, especially about war, yet they are routinely excluded from mainstream coverage.

    When History is Forgotten: How Media Complicity Enables Power to Evade Accountability

    New revelations about past censorship reveal how historical erasure distorts the press’s ability to accurately inform the public’s understanding of power today. In November 2025, a whistleblower disclosed that the CIA had once celebrated misleading Congress during the post-1963 investigation into President Kennedy’s (JFK) assassination. Relatedly, that same month it was also revealed that during the 1960s the NYPD conducted far more extensive surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) than previously known. As with the JFK case, those who questioned the government’s version of King’s assassination were often dismissed as baseless conspiracy theorists. While not every counter-claim can be, or ever will be, proven, what is demonstrably true is that the government withheld information from the public in both cases.

    That fact alone should prompt greater skepticism from the press regarding government claims about contemporary events. This means abandoning the practice of routinely lumping together two very different groups: those raising informed, evidence-based questions and those drawing unfounded conclusions. For example, while there are many baseless, Alex Jones–style narratives, such as claims that the government is turning frogs gay or that school shootings involve crisis actors, there are also legitimate conspiracies supported by evidence, like Watergate or Iran-Contra. Dismissing all alternative narratives as lunacy only serves the interests of those in power. Reduced skepticism among journalists enables the government to conceal evidence with minimal pushback, while the fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” discourages legitimate inquiry and has contributed to decades of misunderstanding.

    This revelation should force journalists to rethink their role, not just getting the story right, but getting it right when it matters. The truth means little to those whose lives were shattered by lies that changed the nation’s course. Worse yet, modern journalism’s economic incentives often reward holding back information until it can be monetized. For example, reporters concealed President Biden’s cognitive decline until it could be released in book form, after the election, and after the period in which the public could have used that information to determine whether a primary challenge was necessary. Repeatedly, the recent scandal involving Journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) makes this structural failure unmistakable. Both journalists reported knowing that Kennedy, who reports to be a recovered heroin addict, allegedly used DMT in 2024 but waited nearly a year to disclose it. In fact, they only released this information when Nuzzi could include it in a book and Lizza on his Substack. By the time the reporting surfaced, RFK Jr. had already undergone his confirmation hearing for Secretary of HHS. Surely the public would have wanted to know that beforehand.

    Perhaps the starkest illustration of the costs of historical secrecy is the long-delayed release of the Epstein files. I have compiled a continuously updated guide for readers who want documented facts rather than speculation about the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Although some files from the Epstein estate and select government records have been released, more are expected on December 19, 2025. Additionally, last week a Florida judge approved a motion to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the Department of Justice’s Epstein investigation. Meanwhile, key materials, including documents held by Epstein’s lawyer and by figures like Michael Wolff and Steve Bannon, as well as unreleased government and banking records, remain hidden. After years of the news media dismissing those who questioned Epstein’s connections to power as conspiracy theorists, the release of emails has brought prominent and powerful individuals under scrutiny including the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew and Larry Summers to Noam Chomsky, Sarah Ferguson, Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, and Andrew Farkas.

    The revelations expand our understanding of Epstein’s function as a power broker connecting governments, corporations, intelligence agencies, and political operatives. He played a role in facilitating communication between India’s Modi government and Steve Bannon, pursued financing for Israeli cyberweapons, hosted Israeli operatives, promoted the export of Israeli surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire, and helped build diplomatic backchannels between Israel and Russia. He even collaborated with Dershowitz in 2006 to undermine early scholarship on the political influence of the Israel lobby. The recently released images and videos of Epstein’s Virgin Islands estate, including a medical-style chair surrounded by masks, a blackboard covered with redacted names, and records of his contacts, suggest how much more remains concealed. Given the historical record, journalists would be wise to avoid dismissing researchers’ claims as baseless conspiracies and instead follow the evidence.

    From Revolution to Repression: The Complicated History of Free Speech and Protest at UC Berkeley

    History is not only a catalog of abuses of power, but it is also a source of inspiration. The University of California, Berkeley is often remembered as a bastion of protest that ignited the Free Speech Movement and helped catalyze the social movements of the 1960s. But that history is more complicated than the popular myth suggests, and its omissions are worth recalling when considering the university’s current suppression of speech.

    Recently, UC Berkeley administrators threatened disciplinary action against student protesters advocating for Palestinian rights, a chilling echo of the very restrictions students once fought to dismantle. Some interpret this as evidence that Berkeley has lost its commitment to free speech, but history tells a different story. The university has long been resistant to student protests, even in the 1960s. It was students, drawing inspiration from movements like the Civil Rights Movement, not university officials who ignited the Free Speech Movement and expanded civil liberties on campus. Those gains were won through confrontation and collective courage, not institutional benevolence. We would all do well to remember that lasting change has never come from waiting for permission; it has always come from insisting on the society we hope to create.

    The post Ragebait Governance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump, Infantino, and the FIFA Peace Prize

    He craves it, and, to some extent, his desire was satisfied. President Donald Trump did get a peace prize. Not the peace prize picked out by self-important Norwegian non-entities, but the inaugural curiosity of FIFA, an organisation famed for opacity, corruption and graft. What the critics missed in all of this was its sheer appositeness.

    In a two-hour ceremony held on December 5 at Washington’s Kennedy Center, which included the World Cup draw for participants at next year’s games, Trump was presented with a prize few FIFA officials seem to know existed. Last month, FIFA president Gianni Infantino announced the award, expressing the view that Trump also deserved that other coveted gong, the Nobel Peace Prize. One senior FIFA official boldly told BBC Sport that the football organisation’s prize deserved serious attention: “Why can’t this be bigger than the Nobel Peace Prize? Football has huge global support, so it’s right that it recognises extraordinary efforts to bring about peace every year.”

    That football – grand sport of sublimated aggression, contest and rivalries – is an agent of peace, is one of those shibboleths sporting administrators feed. Go through the records of any famous club rivalry, and peace is found wanting. Violence and politics, however, can be found in abundance. But Infantino did not become FIFA President on his mastery of such details. His formula was simple if hypocritical: athletes should play and shut up about politics, leaving it to the administrative class to do the rest.

    With fawning relish, he heaped high praise on the winner. “This is what we want from a leader; a leader who cares about the people. We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. We want to unite – that’s what we do here today, that’s what we’ll do at the (FIFA) World Cup, Mr President.” Trump, in deserving the inaugural award, could count on Infantino’s support and that “of the entire football community – or ‘soccer’ community – to help you make peace and make sure the world prospers all over the world.”

    Infantino has never been a strict observer of the dusty ethics clause stating that the organisation maintains neutrality “in matters of politics and religion” and that “all persons bound by the code remain politically neutral … in dealings with government institutions.” He has hobnobbed with the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Russia, ostensibly pursuing the footballing cause. He was the only sports leader present at the Egyptian “Summit for Peace” held in October, when a clutch of significant figures, marshalled by Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, agreed to implement the first phase of the Gaza peace plan. (There was much personal gratitude for Trump, praised as “absolutely fundamental and crucial in the [peace] process.) He has gathered a swag of awards and accolades from governments, hardly an affirmation of neutrality in any strict sense.

    In keeping with the mood, Trump spoke about everything other than football. He was in the business of saving lives, and peace prizes did not matter much. (You need to get one in order to dismiss its merits.) For good measure, he had also “saved a lot [of lives], millions even.”

    In keeping with the absurd occasion was the furious criticism of the choice, when its absurdity was most apt. Infantino, derided over his stance on not suspending Israel over its military operations in Gaza, was now receiving rebukes for eschewing neutrality. “Not satisfied with two years of FIFA complicity in genocide in Palestine, Infantino and his cronies have now invented a ‘peace prize’ in order to curry favour with Donald Trump,” fumed former UN official Craig Mokhiber and campaigner against Israeli’s membership of FIFA.

    Andrea Florence, Executive Director of the Sports & Rights Alliance, acknowledged that the World Cup had been the political plaything of states in rinsing stained human rights records. “But FIFA is now doing the sportswashing itself. Giving this so-called FIFA ‘Peace Prize’ to US President Donald Trump with no clear criteria or process – and despite his administration’s violent detentions of immigrants, crackdowns on freedom of expression, and militarization of US cities – it’s sportswashing on steroids.”

    This grumbling was bound to take a more formal shape, and it came in the form of an eight-page letter of complaint from the non-profit advocacy organisation, FairSquare. Unfortunately for the organisation, it was sent to FIFA. In the letter, the organisation demands that the ethics committee (the joke keeps giving) “investigate the circumstances surrounding the decision to introduce and award a FIFA Peace Prize and their conformity with FIFA’s procedural rules.” It makes reference to various remarks of Infantino’s, including those in an Instagram post from Trump’s inauguration on January 20 declaring that, “Together we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world”.

    Studiously referencing FIFA statutes – not that this will get them far – the group goes on to state that awarding such a prize “to a sitting political leader is in and of itself a clear breach of Fifa’s duty of neutrality”. Infantino lacked the power to unilaterally determine “the organisation’s mission, strategic direction, policies and values”.

    As with most things relevant to that organisation, the complaint is unlikely to get far. Politics and sport do mix, as they have always done. Infantino, chief of the world’s foremost unchallenged sporting mafia, may claim otherwise, but his tenure shows that he knows that crude reality all too well.

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  • The Colby Review, AUKUS and Lopsided Commitments

    In one of his many cutting observations about the fallibility of politicians, H. L. Mencken had this to say about the practical sort: “It is his business to convince the mob (a) that it is confronted by some grave danger, some dreadful menace to its peace and security, and (b) that he can save it.” Regarding Australia’s often provincial politicians, that grave danger remains the Yellow Peril, albeit it one garbed in communist party colours, while the quackery they continue to practise involves the notion the United States will act as shield bearer and saviour in any future conflict.

    The AUKUS trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States has turned the first of these countries into an expectant vassal state, mindful of security guarantees it does not need from a power that can, and would at a moment’s notice, abandon it. But more dangerously, the expectation here is that Canberra, awaiting Virginia Class (SSN-774) nuclear-powered submarines from the US, will offer unconditional succour, resources and promises to the projection of Washington’s power in the Indo-Pacific. Without any guarantee of such submarines, Australian money is underwriting US submarine production, which remains consistently tardy. (Currently, 1.3 boats are being produced annually, when 2.3 are needed.)

    The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act makes it irrefutably clear that Congress shall be notified that any transfer of boats “will not degrade the United States underseas capabilities”. Pursuing AUKUS still entailed “sufficient submarine production and maintenance investments” on the part of the US to meet undersea capabilities, with Australia advancing “appropriate funds and support for the additional capacity required to meet the requirements” along with Canberra’s “capability to host and fully operate the vessels authorized to be transferred.”

    This true steal for US diplomacy, and sad tribute to Homo boobiens on the part of the Australians, has continued with the review of AUKUS conducted by Undersecretary of Defense Policy Eldridge Colby. The review is not available for public eyes, but Colby had previously released smoke signals that the AUKUS pact would only “lead to more submarines collectively in 10, 15, 20 years, which is way beyond the window of maximum danger, which is really this decade.”

    The Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles told reporters on December 4 that the review had been received. “We’re working through the AUKUS review, and we very much thank the United States for providing it to us.” (Surely that’s the least they could have done.) He had identified unwavering support for the pact. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell also released a statement to the media expressing enthusiasm. “Consistent with President Trump’s guidance that AUKUS should move ‘full steam ahead,’ the review identified opportunities to put AUKUS on the strongest possible footing.” No doubt opportunities have been identified, but these are likely to be consistent with the lopsided arrangements Australia has had with the US to date.

    Australia has so far provided A$1.6 billion in funding to the US submarine base, with the promise of more. What remains unclear is how much of this is also going into training Australian personnel to operate and maintain the vessels. “There’s a schedule of payments to be made,” explained Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in July. “We have an agreement with the United States as well as with the United Kingdom. It is about increasing their capacity, their industrial capacity.” As part of such arrangements, “we have Australians on the ground, learning those skills.”

    The joint fact sheet on the 2025 Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN), held between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and their Australian counterparts Penny Wong and Marles in Washington, makes one reference to AUKUS and nothing in terms of substance to Colby’s recommendations. There is, however, this bit of unpardonable gibberish: “In line with President Trump and Prime Minister Albanese’s direction to move ‘full steam ahead’ on AUKUS, the [ministers] recognised the work underway to deliver priority infrastructure works and workforce uplift plan in support of an enhanced trilateral submarine industrial base.”

    Given such statements, it is hard to see what opportunities identified in the Colby report could possibly be advantageous to Australia, a mere annexure of the US imperium. There is bound to be continued pressure on Australia to increase its defence spending. There are also unaddressed concerns about how sovereign the SSNs in Australian hands are going to be when and if they ever make it across the Pacific. In a conflict involving the United States, notably in the Indo-Pacific, Canberra will be expected to rush in with that mindless enthusiasm that has seen Australian soldiers die in theatres they would struggle to name for causes they could barely articulate.

    Even the confident opinion of Joe Courtney, a Democrat member of the House Armed Services Committee and representative of Groton, Connecticut (the “Submarine Capital of the World”), should be viewed warily. “The statutory authority enacted by Congress in 2023 will remain intact, including the sale of three Virginia-class submarines starting in 2032,” comes his beaming assessment. The Colby review “correctly determined that there are critical deadlines that all three countries have to meet. Therefore, maintaining disciplined adherence to schedule is paramount.” That degree of discipline and adherence to schedules is unlikely to be an equal one. It is bound to favour, first and foremost, Washington’s own single perspective.

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  • “The Days of the United States Propping Up the Entire World Order Like Atlas Are Over.”

    On Thursday, the White House released the new National Security Strategy for the United States. Others may well give it a different read, but here is my quick take:

    The document is ghoulish, abhorrent, repetitious, and sometimes incoherent, but I found its honesty refreshing. The mask is torn off sanctimonious bullshit, tall tales about spreading democracy and caring about human rights. The US is “not grounded in traditional political idealism,” but by “America First.” (P.8) A bit of the usual boilerplate is here, but for the most part, the ideological cover is gone.

    Dan Caldwell, onetime advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, applauded the new American military restraint, saying, “For too long, delusion undergirded our foreign policy, delusion about America’s role in the world, delusion about our interests, and delusion about what we can achieve through military force. This is a reality-based document in that regard.” (NY Times,12/7/2025)

    In place of pretense, the document spells out what US policy has always been about: undisguised economic nationalism — whatever benefits American grifter capitalism. All this unexpected candor required the New York Times to lamentably and hypocritically describe the new doctrine as “Security Strategy Focused on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy.” Going further, General Wesley Clark, former NATO Commander, joined in by saying that “The United States has sacrificed the magic of America. For 250 years, America lived the dream that we gave to all mankind. And we acted to protect that. The rules-based international order has served us so well.” Yes, he actually said that…

    Here are a few specifics from a document that, without explicitly saying so, recognizes that the US is a declining power and must accommodate that reality

    Ukraine: The US must press for an “expeditious cessation of hostilities.” This is as clear a public admission that we’re going to see from Trump that the US proxy war is lost. Ukraine will not be joining NATO; the organization must cease being a “perpetually expanding alliance.” The US should also “re-establish strategic stability with Russia.” This section states that “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” One detects Vance’s input here.

    The Middle East: The US will recede from the Middle East. There will be “No more” decades of nation-building wars, even as the area remains an area of “partnership, friendship, and investment.” The document also states that “We seek good and peaceful relations with other countries without imposing on them democratic or other changes that differ widely from their traditions and histories.” This falls under a section called “Flexible Realism.”

    Europe: The US evidences contempt for Europe. As recently as last Wednesday, Trump said, “The European Union was founded to screw the United States.” The document asserts that Europe faces “civilization erasure” in 20 years, in large measure because immigration will make it “non-European.” Further, Europe must learn to “stand on its own feet” and “We expect our allies to spend far more on their Gross National Product (GDP) on their own defense to start making up for the enormous imbalances over decades of much greater spending by the United States.” This refers to Washington’s demand that European allies spend 5% of their GDP on defense.

    Latin America: The United States will reassert its preeminence in the region, a development referred to as “The Trump Corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Hemispheric competitors will be prevented from owning and controlling energy facilities, ports, and telecommunication networks. The goal is to make the Western Hemisphere an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment. In accordance with this objective, US diplomats in the region are to seek out “major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts.” And they should be “sole-source contracts for our companies.” I sense that profits from the Western Hemisphere are expected to offset a shortfall elsewhere. There is an unmistakable message here that Latin American countries will no longer retain their sovereignty.

    China: As nearly as I can tell, the document cautions that war over Taiwan should be avoided because it would have “major implications for the US economy.” Further, “Our allies must step up and spend — and more importantly do — much more for collective defense.” The document refers to establishing a “mutually advantageous relationship with China.”

    Finally.

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  • If Trump Is Serious About Peace, Marco Rubio Has to Go

    Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America.

    The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities.

    The eight wars Trump claims he has ended include non-existent wars between Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo, and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended in 2023, after Azerbaijan invaded and ethnically cleansed the ancient Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh. Trump stole credit for peace between Thailand and Cambodia, which was actually mediated by Malaysia, while India insists that it ended its war with Pakistan without help from Trump.

    Trump recently invited the presidents of Rwanda and the DRC to Washington to sign a peace deal, but it’s only the latest of many agreements that have failed to end decades of war and proxy war that rage on in the eastern Congo.

    Trump even claims to have brought peace to Iran, which was not at war until he and Netanyahu plotted to attack it. Now diplomacy with Iran is dead—torpedoed by Trump’s treacherous use of negotiations as cover for the U.S.-Israeli surprise attack in June, an illegal war right out of Rubio’s neocon playbook.

    Rubio has undermined diplomacy with Iran for years. As a senator, he worked to kill the JCPOA nuclear agreement, framed negotiations as appeasement, and repeatedly demanded harsher sanctions or military action. He defended the U.S. and Israeli attacks in June, which confirmed the claims of Iranian hardliners that the United States cannot be trusted. He makes meaningful talks with Iran impossible by insisting that Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and long-range missile development.  By aligning U.S. policy with Israel’s, Rubio closed off the only path that has ever reduced tensions with Iran: sustained, good-faith diplomacy.

    Trump’s eighth claimed peace agreement was his Gaza “peace plan,” under which Israel still kills and maims Palestinians every day and allows only 200 truckloads per day of food, water, medicine, and relief supplies into Gaza. With Israeli forces still occupying most of Gaza, no country is sending troops to join Trump’s “stabilization force,” nor will Hamas disarm and leave its people defenseless. Israel still calls the shots, and will only allow rebuilding in Israeli-occupied areas.

    As secretary of state, it was Marco Rubio’s job to negotiate peace and an end to the occupation of Palestine. But Rubio’s entire political career has been defined by unwavering support for Israel and corrupted by over a million dollars from pro-Israel donor groups like AIPAC. He refuses to speak to Hamas, insisting on its total isolation and destruction.

    Rubio even refuses to negotiate with the weakest, most compromised, but still internationally recognized, Palestinian Authority. In the Senate, he worked to defund and delegitimize the PA, and now he insists it should play no role in Gaza’s future, but he offers no alternative. Contrast this with China, which recently convened fourteen Palestinian factions for dialogue. With a U.S. secretary of state who won’t talk to any Palestinian actors, the United States is only supporting endless war and occupation.

    Ukraine is not on Trump’s list of “eight wars,” but it is the conflict he most loudly promised to end on day one. Trump took his first steps to resolve the crisis in Ukraine with phone calls with Putin and Zelenskyy on February 12, 2025. War Secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting of America’s NATO allies in Brussels that the U.S. was taking Ukraine’s long-promised NATO membership off the table, and that “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

    Zelenskyy and his European backers are still trying to persuade Trump that, with his support, they can win back at the negotiating table what Ukraine and its western allies lost by their tragic decision to reject a negotiated peace in April 2022. Russia was ready to withdraw from all the land it had just occupied, but the U.S. and U.K. persuaded NATO and Ukraine to instead embark on this long war of attrition, in which their negotiating position only grows weaker as Ukraine’s losses mount.

    On November 21st, Trump unveiled a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine that was built around the policy Trump and Hegseth had announced in February: no NATO membership, and no return to pre-2014 borders. But once Rubio arrived to lead the U.S. negotiating team in talks in Geneva, he let Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and the Europeans put NATO membership and Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders back on the table.

    This was a poison pill to deliberately undermine the basic concept of Ukrainian neutrality that Russia insists is the only way to resolve the security dilemma facing both NATO and Russia and ensure a stable and lasting peace. As a European official crowed to Politico, “Things went in the right direction in Geneva. Still a work in progress, but looking much better now… Rubio is a pro who knows his stuff.”

    Andriy Yermak, who led Ukraine’s negotiating team in Geneva, has now been fired in a corruption scandal, reportedly at Trump’s behest, as has Trump’s envoy to Kyiv, Keith Kellogg, who apparently leaked Trump’s plan to the press.

    Trump is facing a schism in his foreign policy team that echoes his first term, when he appointed a revolving door of neocons, retired generals and arms industry insiders to top jobs. This time, he has already fired his first National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, several NSC staff, and now General Kellogg,

    Trump’s team on Ukraine now includes Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Deputy National Security Advisor Andy Baker and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who all seem to be on board with the basic policy that Trump and Hegseth announced in February.

      But Rubio is keeping alive European hopes of a ceasefire that postpones negotiations over NATO membership and Ukraine’s borders for a later date, to allow NATO to once again build, arm and train Ukrainian forces to retake its lost territories by force, as it did from 2015 to 2022 under cover of the MInsk Accords.

    This raises the questions: Does Rubio, like the Europeans and the neocons in Congress, still back the Biden-era strategy of fighting a long proxy war to the last Ukrainian? And if so, is he now in fact working to undermine Trump’s peace efforts?

    Ray McGovern, the founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, thinks so, writing “…we are at the threshold on Ukraine, at the beginning of a consequential battle between the neocons and Europeans on one side, and Donald Trump and the realists on the other. Will Trump show the fortitude to see this through and overcome his secretary of state?”

    But it’s perhaps in Latin America where Rubio is playing the most aggressive role. Rubio has always promoted regime-change policies, economic strangulation, and U.S. interference targeting left-leaning governments in Latin America. Coming from a conservative Cuban familiy, he has long been one of the most hard-line voices in Washington on Cuba, championing sanctions, opposing any easing of the embargo, and working to reverse Obama-era diplomatic openings.

    His position on Venezuela is similar. He was a leading architect of the Trump administration’s failed “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, promoting crippling sanctions that devastated civilians, while openly endorsing failed coups and military threats.

    Now Rubio is pushing Trump into a catastrophic, criminal war with Venezuela. In early 2025, Trump’s administration briefly pursued a diplomatic track with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, spearheaded by envoy Richard Grenell. But Marco Rubio’s hard-line, pressure-first approach gradually overtook the negotiation channel: Trump suspended talks in October 2025, and U.S. policy shifted toward intensified sanctions and military posturing.

    Rubio’s hostility extends across the region: he has attacked progressive leaders in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, and Brazil, while supporting authoritarians aligned with U.S. and Israeli interests. While Trump has warmed to Brazil’s president Lula and craves access to its reserves of rare earth elements, the second largest after China’s, Lula has no illusions about Rubio’s hostility and has refused to even meet with him.

    Rubio’s approach is the opposite of diplomacy. He refuses engagement with governments he dislikes, undermines regional institutions, and encourages Washington to isolate and punish rather than negotiate. Instead of supporting peace agreements—such as Colombia’s fragile accords or regional efforts to stabilize Haiti—he treats Latin America as a battleground for ideological crusades.

    Rubio’s influence has helped block humanitarian relief, deepen polarization, and shatter openings for regional dialogue. A Secretary of State committed to peace would work with Latin American partners to resolve conflicts, strengthen democracy, and reduce U.S. militarization in the hemisphere. Rubio does the reverse: he inflames tensions, sabotages diplomacy, and pushes U.S. policy back toward the dark era of coups, blockades, proxy wars and death squads.

    So why is Trump betraying his most loyal MAGA supporters, who take his promises to “end the era of endless wars” at face value? Why is his administration supporting the same out-of-control American war machine that has run rampant around the world since the rise of neocons like Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s?

    Is Trump simply unable to resist the lure of destructive military power that seduces every American president? Trump’s MAGA true believers would like to think that he and they represent a rejection of American imperialism and a new “America First” policy that prioritizes national sovereignty and shared domestic prosperity. But MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Green can see that is not what Trump is delivering.

    U.S. secretaries of state wield considerable power, and Trump is not the first president to be led astray by his secretary of state. President Eisenhower is remembered as a champion of peace, for quickly ending the Korean War – then slashing the military budget – and for two defining speeches at the beginning and end of his presidency: his “Chance for Peace” speech after the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin in 1953; and his Farewell Address in 1960, in which he warned Americans against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”

    For most of his presidency though, Eisenhower gave his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, free rein to manage U.S. foreign policy. By the time Eisenhower fully grasped the dangers of Dulles’ brinksmanship with the U.S.S.R. and China, the Cold War arms race was running wild. Then Eisenhower’s belated outreach to the Soviets was interrupted by his own ill-health and the U-2 crisis. Hillary Clinton had a similarly destructive and destabilizing impact on Obama’s first-term foreign policy, in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and Honduras.

    These should be cautionary tales for Trump. If he really wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, not a warmonger, he had better make the necessary personnel changes to his inner circle before it is too late. War with Venezuela is easily avoidable, since the whole world already knows the U.S. pretexts for war are fabricated and false. Rubio has stoked the underlying tensions and led this escalating campaign of lies, threats and murders, so Trump would be wise to replace him before his march to war crosses the point of no return.

    This would allow Trump and Rubio’s successor to start rebuilding relations with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to finally change longstanding U.S. policies that keep the Middle East, and now Ukraine, trapped in endless war.

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  • The Agony of Defeat

    A peaceful settlement of the Ukraine conflict is not in the cards. It is a logical impossibility given the following truths

    1.     America’s leaders could not tolerate terms minimally acceptable to Russia. For such terms would represent a) an unmistakable loss of status and self-regard; b) a reversion from the strategic foundations of the country’s foreign policy put firmly in place over the past 35 years; and c) a domestic political embarrassment carrying heavy costs for Trump and his movement. Furthermore, Trump’s narcissistic, warped personality is too vulnerable to endure a rebuke and a failure of that magnitude. He is terrified at the prospect of looking like a loser.

    2.     Currently, there is not a single official at the policy level who has direct knowledge of Russia or has dealt with it on a sustained basis. Similarly, there is not a single official at the policy level who has the experience of having conducted serious diplomacy with foreign powers. Ignorant amateurs wedded to a rigid conception of American national interest are at the helm. A crew made up of a New York real estate operator who draws heavy financing from the Qatari government, a FOX news loudmouth, a Castro-obsessed Miami pol and an opportunistic novice Veep is in so far over their heads that the bubbles don’t reach the surface – and their skipper is an erratic, mentally impaired narcissist whose hold on reality is tenuous.

    The fixed goal of everything that the United States does in the world is the securing of American dominance as institutionalized since 1991 – in every sphere of international life that counts and in every region where either the stakes are high or the prospect of a putative rival arising exists. To that end, they are prepared to use all the formidable means available to them. There is no group or intellectual current of weight whose worldview deviates markedly from this line in either political party, in Congress or among prominent members of the foreign policy community.

    3.     Therefore, the United States in Ukraine has stranded itself in a cul de sac that is strategic, political, intellectual and psychological. Trump’s so-called 28 Point peace proposal – a pastiche of the not-so-good, the very bad, and the very ugly – is an absurd non-starter. Dead on arrival in Moscow whoever the delivery man. When he finally realizes that he is cornered, Trump’s first instinct will be to bluster his way out; that failing, to forcibly fight his way out. Only the pervasive, unlimited capacity for self-delusion hides that unyielding fact. Self-delusion is the cardinal feature of the faux diplomatic initiatives that the White House is desperately trying to make real – over the strenuous objections of Kiev and the European allies who have succeeded in stiffening its provisions so they are yet more unpalatable to Moscow.

    4.     Vladimir Putin, and his associates, tacitly feed this delusion by taking a calculatingly temperate tack in reaction to this non-starter of a “peace” plan despite Washington’s quixotic and bumbling machinations. Whether they do so to satisfy partners (China, India, Turkey, Brazil) who for their own national reasons want to see an end to the war and whose cooperation is valued OR due to Putin’s long-standing and enduring hopes of engaging constructively with the United States, their non-confrontational approach carries the risk of entrenching the Americans’ fantastical view of the world. So that when crunch time comes, and humiliating defeat is at the door, they might revert to type and impulse by resorting to the violent, escalatory option.

    Far-fetched? For some time, the Kremlin may well have been emboldening Washington to consider escalation by passively accepting that hundreds of American military personnel are firing American HIMARS and ACATM missiles into Russia proper, that American AWACS and satellites guide Ukrainian attacks against strategic radar sites, that analogous technical assistance allows for assault on Russia’s “shadow” oil fleet, that the Pentagon draws up the battle plans for the Ukrainian army and orchestrated the ill-starred 2023 offensive, that the CIA implanted itself along the country’s border to provide Kiev Intelligence and to facilitate para-military operations. This passive behavior has led many within Washington policy circles to believe that Putin is lacking in ruthlessness – whatever his other strengths. That impression has been reinforced by Russian restraint on Syria, Iran, Palestine and Venezuela when the Kremlin was confronted by audacious, in-your-face American actions. The conclusion that Putin is not a ruthless leader is probably correct – although incorrect in the corollary assumption that he would allow himself to be bullied into major concessions when push comes to shove over Ukraine. Putin’s reading of the Trump presidency is that the man’s mercurial nature and unpredictability potentially opens the possibility for some kind of meeting of the minds which was foreclosed by more conventional American leaders like Biden. A stable Russo-American modus vivendi, in turn, is the sine qua non for a longer-term reconciliation of Russia within the wider European system.

    Another consideration. In all likelihood, there lurks in the back of Putin’s mind the dread fear that an unhinged Trump, roiling in the coils of his twisted psyche, could do something truly insane that endangers all. Keeping company with him – however tenuous – is seen as mitigating that risk by ensuring that Trump didn’t disconnect from reality totally.

    What he fails to perceive is that behind the showmanship and disconnects, Trump’s outlook on the world – especially the fixed belief in the country’s superiority and privileged exceptionalism – at its core closely resembles that of the Washington consensus. Scratch beneath the surface and we experience deja vu all over again – decked out in novel costume.

    Looking beyond Ukraine, bear in mind that this government, in less than a year, has established a stunning record for bellicosity: launching a massive air assault against Iran with no legal or security justification (an aggression concealed by a deceptive veil of fictitious peace talks); lending its military might and diplomatic muscle to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Syria followed by partial territorial seizures; participating in the Palestinian genocide; declaring war on Venezuela behind a smokescreen of transparent lies to hide the actual objective of taking control of the country’s petroleum resources; encouraging the newly minted Japanese government of ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to make the reckless declaration that Japan had a strategic national interest in Taiwan’s independence and, if necessary, defense; imposing or threatening coercive economic sanctions on an array of countries suspected of disobedience to  Washington.

    5.     Domestic criticism of Trump’s mishandling of the United States’ foreign relations is feeble. The Democratic Party leaders share the same worldview (re. the Biden administration – and are inhibited about crossing swords with Trunp on any issue. The MSM have been intimidated into subservience to the point where even the most egregious lies and illegal actions are not labelled as such. Examples: the global tariff wars that are in direct violation of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) that grants Congress the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” which includes the authority to set tariffs on imported goods – with statutory exemptions limited to national security emergencies; the promiscuous use of the armed forces without even prior notification of the Congress; the ridiculous tale about Venezuela’s fishing skiffs delivering drugs only 800 miles off the U.S. coast, , the condition of Russia’s economy, the Afghan who shot the two National Guardsman – a CIA commando trained to fight a dirty war against the Taliban – as reason to suspend all asylum petitions,  the destruction of the Nordstrom II gas pipeline, the denunciation as ‘traitor’ anyone who reminds serving military officers that they are bound by the Department of Defense’s manual stipulating codes of conduct as well as international law to refuse a manifestly illegal order. Hence, the public is instilled with the notion that there is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the Trump dangerous escapades and inanities.

    A conscientious follower of the MSM remains largely oblivious to the meaning and consequence of these matters. Superficial and fleeting mention of tactical differences or disagreements over the grammar of policy elbows out any serious critical commentary. Therefore, tolerance is high, electoral costs abnormally low and the President’s ability to act with feckless impunity unimpeded.

    The United States is being defeated in Ukraine – comprehensively. One could say that it is facing defeat – or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. We prefer to look at the world through the distorted lenses of our delusions. We plunge forward on whatever path we’ve chosen while averting our eyes from the topography that we are trying to traverse.

    It is not that America is a stranger to defeat. We are very well acquainted with it: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Mali – in strategic terms if not always military terms. To this broad category, we might add Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Georgia and Niger. Moreover, Washington’s failures are now crowned by its embarrassment at being forced to run up the white flag when China stared it down in the Trump initiated tariff war. That rich experience in frustrated ambition has failed to liberate us from the deeply rooted habit of eliding defeat. Indeed, we have acquired a large inventory of methods for doing so.

    Vietnam being the prime example. A society that so thoroughly can erase from the collective mind a Vietnam where 59,000 Americans died, surely can suppress Ukraine where no deaths are recorded.

    The post The Agony of Defeat first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Resistance Builds Within Against Trump’s Drive To War With Venezuela

    The US government has continued to accelerate its drive to war with Venezuela. While rumors circulate about phone calls and possible talks between US President Donald Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in tandem, the US head of state has continued to launch bizarre and illegal threats and accusations against the South American nation. On Saturday, November 29, Trump unilaterally declared that Venezuelan airspace was closed, despite international law stipulating that only Venezuela has authority over the airspace above its territory and reports that air traffic above Venezuela has since continued.

    The post Resistance Builds Within Against Trump’s Drive To War With Venezuela appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.