UNITED NATIONS, Jan 30 2026 (IPS) – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was dead on target when he told the Security Council last week that the rule of law worldwide is being replaced by the law of the jungle.
“We see flagrant violations of international law and brazen disregard for the UN Charter. From Gaza to Ukraine, and around the world, the rule of law is being treated as an à la carte menu,” he pointed out, as mass killings continue.
“The New York Times on January 28 quoted a recent study pointing out the four-year war between Russia and Ukraine has resulted in over “two million killed, wounded or missing”. The study published last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says nearly 1.2 million Russian troops and close to 600,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed, wounded or are missing.
In the war in Gaza, over 70,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including women and children, have been killed since October 7, 2023, with figures reaching over 73,600 by early January 2026, according to various reports from the Gaza Health Ministry and human rights organizations.
These killings have also triggered charges of war crimes, genocide and violations of the UN charter, as in the US invasion of Venezuela and the takeover threats against Greenland.
Guterres said in an era crowded with initiatives, the Security Council stands alone in its Charter-mandated authority to act on behalf of all 193 Member States on questions of peace and security. The Security Council alone adopts decisions binding on all.
No other body or ad hoc coalition can legally require all Member States to comply with decisions on peace and security. Only the Security Council can authorize the use of force under international law, as set out in the Charter. Its responsibility is singular. Its obligation is universal, declared Guterres.
Dr Ramzy Baroud, Editor of Palestine Chronicle and former Managing Editor of the London-based Middle East Eye, told IPS the statement by the Secretary-General is long overdue.
Too often, he said, UN officials resort to cautious, euphemistic language when describing egregious violations of international law—especially when those responsible are UN Security Council veto holders, states that have ostensibly sworn to uphold the UN Charter and the core mission of the international system.
Unfortunately, the UN itself has become a reflection of a rapidly shifting world order—one in which those with overwhelming military power sit at the top of the hierarchy, abusing their dominance while steadily hollowing out the very institutions meant to restrain them, he pointed out.
“We must be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that this crisis did not begin with the increasingly authoritarian misuse of law by the Trump administration, nor is it limited to Israel’s absolute disregard for the international community during its two-year-long genocide in Gaza.”
The problem is structural. It is rooted in the way Western powers have long identified—and exploited—loopholes within the international legal system, selectively weaponizing international law to discipline adversaries while shielding allies and advancing their own strategic agendas, he declared.
Responding to a question at the annual press briefing on January 29, Guterres told reporters it is obvious that members of the Security Council are themselves violators of international law –and it doesn’t make life easy for the UN in its efforts.
Unfortunately, he said, there is one thing that we miss. “It’s leverage. It’s the power that others eventually have, to force countries and to force leaders to abide by international law. But not having the power, we have the determination, and we’ll do everything possible with our persuasion, with our good offices, and building alliances to try to create conditions for some of these horrible tragedies we are witnessing. And from Ukraine to Sudan, not to mention what has happened in Gaza, we will be doing everything we can for these tragedies to stop”.
Dr Jim Jennings, President of Conscience International, told IPS the global humanitarian situation described by the Secretary-General is grim but very real. The climate crisis, natural disasters, numerous ongoing and expanding conflicts, and the impact of new technologies, all add to today’s global economic instability and affect every person on earth.
While President Trump continues bombing countries and strutting the world stage with his adolescent dream of US territorial expansion, a major readjustment of the global power balance among China, the US, Europe, and the BRICS nations is underway, he noted.
Stripping life-giving aid away from the poorest countries on earth to benefit those already rich, as his policies guarantee, is a recipe for even more global suffering and violence.
“Clearly one of the most blatant and harmful reasons for the present disastrous situation worldwide is the reduction of funding for UN agencies by the United States, which has traditionally paid a high percentage of their costs”.
With the further curtailment of The Department of State-USAID’s enormous support for people in critical need in almost every country in the world, the Trump administration’s one-two punch has already threatened to make a challenging set of problems unmanageable.
What is to be done? People and governments everywhere must stand up, speak out, and act against the colossal forces now arrayed against some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. How to do that has never been easy, Dr Jennings argued.
Put in the simplest terms, Secretary-General Guterres was merely pointing out the glaring fact of the true global situation and appealing for the critical need UN agencies have for support if their mission is not to fail. The answer is straightforward— more private funding.
Why not raise the level of our individual, corporate, and foundation donations to the UN Agencies and other aid organizations while continuing to advocate for responsible government backing for the irreplaceable United Nations agencies? he asked.
Dr Palitha Kohona, a former Chief of the UN Treaty Section, told IPS international relations, for a very long time, were dependent on the whims of powerful states and empires. Might was right and disputes were settled by using force. Land inhabited for centuries was annexed to empires and native populations were dispossessed or even exterminated.
From such fractured beginnings, an orderly world governed by agreed rules began to emerge gradually, although most of the rules were established by the powerful.
Thousands of treaties were concluded, customary rules were respected and a rudimentary judicial structure began to be established. The world rejoiced in the establishment of the United Nations.
Though lacking in proper enforcement mechanisms and largely dependent on voluntary mutually beneficial compliance, a rule based international order was beginning to emerge.
Dr Palitha Kohona, a former Chief of the UN Treaty Section, told IPS international relations, for a very long time, were dependent on the whims of powerful states and empires. Might was right and disputes were settled by using force. Land inhabited for centuries was annexed to empires and native populations were dispossessed or even exterminated.
From such fractured beginnings, an orderly world governed by agreed rules began to emerge gradually, although most of the rules were established by the powerful.
Thousands of treaties were concluded, customary rules were respected and a rudimentary judicial structure began to be established. The world rejoiced in the establishment of the United Nations.
Though lacking in proper enforcement mechanisms and largely dependent on voluntary mutually beneficial compliance, a rule based international order was beginning to emerge.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing atrocities in Sudan and elsewhere are not aberrations. They represent the culmination of decades of legal erosion, selective enforcement, and the systematic degradation of the international legal order.
While I agree—and even sympathize—with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he expressed criticism of the new power dynamics that have rendered the international political system increasingly defunct, one cannot help but ask why neither he nor other Western leaders are willing to confront their own governments’ historical role in creating this reality.
Without such reckoning, calls to defend international law risk sounding less like principled commitments and more like selective outrage in a system long stripped of credibility.
European powers that are critical of Trump have not raised their voice with the same intensity and vigor against Netanyahu for doing a lot worse than anything that Trump has done or threatened to do.
This also begets the same question about the latest comments by the UN Secretary-General. He should offer more specifics than generalized decrying the collapse of international morality.
“Moreover, we expect a roadmap that will guide us in the process of re-establishing some kind of a sane global system in the face of the growing authoritarianism, dictatorship, and criminality all around”, declared Dr Baroud
It’s official. This tormented, heated, traumatised planet is now home to over 3,000 billionaires. (That number was reached last year.) In October 2025, Elon Musk became the first man to have wealth exceeding half a trillion dollars. These developments could still take alongside the fact that one in four people across the globe face hunger.
Oxfam’s Resisting the Rule of the Rich has, as its subtitle, “defending freedom against billionaire power.” It’s an important link, as money, rather than knowledge, tends to be the indicator of raw power. In her foreword to the report, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, links the stirrings of authoritarianism with the pains of inequality. They were neither “separate problems” nor “distinct dilemmas.” They were “entwined, as governments across the world side with the powerful, not the people, and choose repression, not redistribution.” Reading such words commands an echo from US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who observed in 1941 that, “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” (The Oxfam authors also cite the same quote, though not its questionable provenance.)
The charity accepts that the rich influencing and moulding politics is hardly new. That scale of influence, however, has burgeoned. What took place in the US last year, with the victory of a billionaire president, supported and sponsored by billionaires, running a cabinet with billionaires, made this “viscerally clear: in country after country, the super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent, but have also used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern our nations.”
Considering data from 136 countries, the authors confirm the thesis that the unequal distribution of economic resources correlates with unequal political power. “This leads to policy outcomes that reflect the preferences of upper-income groups more than those in lower-income groups.” Those in the highest income bracket have, by means of this fact, secured influence in purchasing political representatives, seeking to legitimise elite power, and secure direct access to institutions.
News coverage and commentary have also been infiltrated by the billionaire class, with over half of the stable of global media companies owned by it. Of the 10 top social media companies, nine are in the hands of six billionaires. A chilling nexus with artificial intelligence has also developed, with its inexorable shaping of the information environment, given that 8 of the top 10 AI companies are steered by billionaires. These are individuals who are not only affecting the nature of wealth distribution but the nature of how knowledge and understanding is sought.
The authors do not throw their hands up in despair at these dire developments. They suggest measures of amelioration. One idea, and unlikely to take off, is the proposal of “limitarianism” advocated by philosopher Ingrid Robeyns. Just as societies define a poverty line, they should just as well define an “Extreme Wealth Line”. (Robeyns puts this limit at US$10 million, an amount bound to make the tech tyrants goggle.)
More feasible is the construction of a “strong firewall between wealth and politics.” Governments can tax the wealthiest – a thorny point given the threatening influence they exert both within and outside representative chambers. Lobbying and the revolving door phenomenon between public and private interest should be regulated. Modest measures include transparent budgetary processes, reforming regulations, establishing mandatory public lobby registries and enforcing rules on conflicts of interest.
Addressing the hoary old chestnut of concentrated media ownership is another suggestion, be it through rules limiting individuals and corporations to secure a lion’s share of the market, encouraging alternative public and independent media outlets, compelling media companies to be transparent about how they use algorithms and rein in the distribution of harmful content. “Oversight and enforcement should be led by a state-funded, governmental body independent of billionaire influence.” The authors fail to appreciate that such supposedly independent bodies can come with their own problems, becoming censors in chief and paternalistic killjoys, a point aptly illustrated by the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s guerilla campaign against the Internet.
The very nature of political campaigning is also targeted by the charity’s recommendations. Political financing by the wealthy should be subject to accountability and transparency guidelines. Those running for office would have to make commitments to reduce their reliance on private donations, have such donations capped, with political parties having to abide by transparency rules regarding funding and electoral campaign financing.
While all these measures point to the drafters, regulators and lawmakers, Oxfam insists on “political power of the many” as a noble, necessary agenda, with governments needing to “guarantee an enabling civic space, in line with international legal frameworks, standards and guidance.” This would involve promoting freedom of expression, lawful assembly and association and enforcing such standards “through regular reporting and scrutiny by both state and non-state actors.”
The Oxfam report will be dismissed by the aspirational and the moneyed as the rantings of the envious and the airings of the lazy. The obscenely wealthy often assume that a mixture of hard work, prudence and basic genetics will get you the loot. In the end, it remains loot, protected by the systems that encourage it, and officials who remain complicit in weakening any mechanism that seeks redistribution and levelling.
Refusal to join will be an act of national self-respect. The UN-based international order, however flawed, should be repaired through law and cooperation, not replaced by a gilded caricature.
The so-called “Board of Peace” being created by President Donald Trump is profoundly degrading to the pursuit of peace and to any nation that would lend it legitimacy. This is a trojan horse to dismantle the United Nations. It should be refused outright by every nation invited to join.
In its Charter, the Board of Peace (BoP) claims to be an “international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” If this sounds familiar, it should, because this is the mandate of the United Nations. Created in the aftermath of World War II, the UN has as its central mission the maintenance of international peace and security.
It is no secret that Trump holds open contempt for international law and the United Nations. He said so himself during his September 2025 speech at the General Assembly, and has recently withdrawn from 31 UN entities. Following a long tradition of US foreign policy, he has consistently violated international law, including the bombing of seven countries in the past year, none of which were authorized by the Security Council and none of which was undertaken in lawful self-defense under the Charter (Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela). He is now claiming Greenland, with brazen and open hostility towards the US allies in Europe.
So, what about this Board of Peace?
It is, to put it simply, a pledge of allegiance to Trump, who seeks the role of world chairman and the world’s ultimate arbiter. The BoP will have as its Executive Board none other than Trump’s political donors, family members, and courtiers. The leaders of nations that sign up will get to rub shoulders with, and take orders from, Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Tony Blair. Hedge Fund owner and Republican Party mega-donor Marc Rowan also gets to play. More to the point, any decisions taken by the BoP will be subject to Trump’s approval.
If the charade of representatives isn’t enough, nations will have to pay $1 billion for a “permanent seat” on the Board. Any nation that participates should know what it is “buying.” It is certainly not buying peace or a solution for the Palestinian people (as the money supposedly goes to Gaza’s reconstruction). It is buying ostensible access to Trump for as long as it serves his interests. It is buying an illusion of momentary influence in a system where Trump’s rules are enforced by personal whim.
The proposal is absurd not least because it purports to “solve” a problem that already has an 80-year-old global solution. The United Nations exists precisely to prevent the personalization of war and peace. It was designed after the wreckage of two world wars to global base peace on collective rules and international law. The UN’s authority, rightly, derives from the UN Charter ratified by 193 member states (including the US, as ratified by the US Senate in July 1945) and grounded in international law. If the US doesn’t want to abide by the Charter, the UN General Assembly should suspend the US credentials, as it once did with ApartheidSouth Africa.
Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a blatant repudiation of the United Nations. Trump has made that explicit, recently declaring that the Board of Peace “might” indeed replace the United Nations. This statement alone should end the conversation for any serious national leader. Participation after such a declaration is a conscious decision to subordinate one’s country to Trump’s personalized global authority. It is to accept, in advance, that peace is no longer governed by the UN Charter, but by Trump.
Still, some nations, desperate to get on the right side of the US, may take the bait. They should remember the wise words of President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address “ those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”
The record shows that loyalty to Trump is never enough to salve his ego. Just look at the long parade of Trump’s former allies, advisers, and appointees who were humiliated, discarded, and attacked by him the moment they ceased to be useful to him.
For any nation, participation on the Board of Peace would be strategically foolish. Joining this body will create long-lasting reputational damage. Long after Trump himself is no longer President, a past association with this travesty will be a mark of poor judgment. It will remain as sad evidence that, at a critical moment, a national political system mistook a vanity project for statesmanship, squandering $1 billion of funds in the process.
Ultimately, refusal to join the “Board of Peace” will be an act of national self-respect. Peace is a global public good. The UN-based international order, however flawed, should be repaired through law and cooperation, not replaced by a gilded caricature. Any nation that values international law, and the respect for the United Nations, should decline immediately to be associated with this travesty of international law.
You circumscribe everything demand that we prove We exist, that We use the land that was always ours, that We have a right to our ancestral lands.
And now it is We who ask: By what right are You here?
it is worth noting that Danish and other Nordic diplomats have disputed Trump’s claims of Russian and Chinese warships operating ‘around Greenland’, for which Trump has offered no public evidence.
China’s anticipated investment in Greenland does not pose a military threat, nor is it something that the United States, Canada, or indeed Denmark should be concerned with. This should be a discussion and debate within Greenland.
The US has set its sights on Greenland due to its mineral wealth and strategic location. But its people – the Kalaallit – are an afterthought in Washington’s machinations.
Every few years, the centre of the imperialist Global North – the United States – forgets its manners.
It is one thing to be rude to Iran or Venezuela, but it is another thing entirely to be rude to Denmark. The North Atlantic has not experienced internecine acrimony since – perhaps – Adolf Hitler turned on Poland in 1939. But to be fair to the United States, it has not coveted Denmark itself. Washington has licked its sticky fingers and placed them upon Greenland.
Denmark began its colonisation of Greenland 305 years ago, in 1721. Constitutional scholars will say that the formal colonial status ended in 1953 when Greenland was incorporated into the Kingdom of Denmark and that Greenland gained a further measure of autonomy in 2009 when the Act on Greenland Self-Government was passed – but let’s be frank, it remains a colony.
For context, Greenland (over 2 million square kilometres) is fifty times larger than Denmark. For comparison, if placed over the United States, it would almost stretch from Florida to California. If it were an independent country, it would be the twelfth largest in the world by area. Of course, the Arctic country has a very small population of around 57,700 (roughly equivalent to the population of Hoboken, New Jersey).
In Washington’s imagination, Greenland appears not as a homeland, but as a location – a place on a map or a signature on a radar screen. The words used to talk about it belong to the grammar of possession: purchase, control, seize. This is the language of domination – one imperialist power (United States) wanting to seize the land of a colonial power (Denmark).
But Greenland is not a prize.
The Inuit of Greenland call their country Kalaallit Nunaat: ‘Land of the Kalaallit’ (Greenlanders). When Trump and his allies speak of Greenland, they never speak of the people: the Kalaallit. Instead, Trump speaks of the strategic importance of the island and about what the US government sees as the perils of its Chinese and Russian capture (never mind that neither China nor Russia have made any claims over the territory). Greenland is always a place that someone else must hold, but not the Kalaallit. For people like Trump, or indeed for generations of Danish prime ministers (despite soft statements about the path to self-determination), the Kalaallit have no role as political subjects.
Greenland grew in strategic and economic importance to Denmark after the 1794 discovery of cryolite, a key mineral used in the production of aluminium. This extractive focus continued after the 1956 discovery of uranium and rare earth elements in Kuannersuit (Kvanefjeld) in southern Greenland. In 1941, Denmark’s envoy in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, signed an agreement that allowed the US to establish bases and stations in Greenland. In 1943, the US placed a weather station at Thule (Dundas) known as Bluie West 6, and in 1946 it added a small airstrip. After the Second World War, Denmark was an early entrant to the US effort to build a military bloc against the Soviet Union. In fact, it was a founder of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (1949) and then signed the Defence of Greenland Agreement (1951) that allowed the US to build the Thule Air Base under the codename Operation Blue Jay (now Pituffik Space Base).
The base became useful not only as a place to watch the USSR, but also for missile warning, missile defence, and space surveillance – a strategic foothold that has grown more consequential as Greenland’s uranium and rare earth deposits have become central to the global contest for critical minerals.
As Greenland’s ice sheets have melted in recent decades due to the climate catastrophe, the country’s deep geology has become easier to survey and to mine. Feasibility studies and drilling in the early to mid-2010s (especially 2011–2015) showed that the land was teeming with graphite, lithium, rare earth elements, and uranium. As the United States imposed its New Cold War on China, it had to seek new sources for rare earths given China’s dominance of rare-earth refining and downstream magnet production. The island became not only a source of minerals or a geographical location for power projection, but also a critical node in the US-led supply-chain security architecture.
In August 2010, long before Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trip to China in mid-January 2026, the Canadian government released a report with an interesting title: Statement on Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy: Exercising Sovereignty and Promoting Canada’s Northern Strategy Abroad. On the surface, the report is rather bland, making many pronouncements about how Canada respects the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and how its intentions are entirely liberal and noble. That posture is difficult to square with the reality that major mining projects across the Canadian Arctic have repeatedly sparked Inuit concerns about impacts on wildlife and Inuit harvesting and that regulators have at times recommended against expansions, as in the case of Baffinland’s Mary River iron mine.
In fact, Canada is home to the world’s largest hub for mining finance (TSX and TSX Venture Exchange list more than half of the world’s publicly traded mining companies), which has been sniffing around the Arctic for decades in search of energy and minerals. The 2010 report does mention Canada’s ‘Northern energy and natural resource potential’ and that the government is ‘investing significantly in mapping the energy and mineral potential of the North’. But there is no mention of the large Canadian private mining companies that would benefit not only from Greenland’s mineral potential (for instance, Amaroq Minerals, which already owns the Nalunaq gold mine in South Greenland) but also from Canada’s Arctic region (for instance, Agnico Eagle Mines, Barrick Mining Company, Canada Rare Earth Corporation, and Trilogy Metals). What is significant about the report is that if it is put into operation, it would sharpen the long-running Canada-US dispute over Arctic navigation, particularly in the Northwest Passage, which Canada treats as internal waters and the US approaches as an international strait.
Canada is an ‘Arctic power’, the report says. There are seven other countries that have an Arctic foothold: Denmark, Finland, Iceland (through Grimsey), Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (through Alaska). They are members of the Arctic Council, which was set up by Canada in 1996 to deal with environmental pollution in the Arctic and to create space for Indigenous organisations in the region to put forward their views. However, the Arctic Council has largely been paralysed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when member countries paused normal cooperation with Russia and later resumed only limited project-level work that does not involve Russian participation, even though Russia holds roughly half of the Arctic coastline.
With consensus required, this has narrowed the council’s role from a venue that could broker pan-Arctic coordination and even negotiate binding agreements to one largely confined to technical working-group projects and assessments. Canada’s claim to being an ‘Arctic power’ comes with bravado but lacks substance. Will it really prevent the US from using its sea lanes, and can it exercise a form of capitalist sovereignty for its mining companies in the Arctic region?
In 2020, before the council paused cooperation with Russia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) had already called upon its members to ‘set [their] sights on the high north’ (as NATO’s think tank, the Atlantic Council, noted in a report). After 2022, NATO developed a ‘high north’ strategy that can be best appreciated in its 2025 parliamentary reportRenavigating the Unfrozen Arctic. The report identifies what it sees as the primary threat to NATO countries: China and Russia. One of them (Russia) is a major Arctic power, and the other (China) has two scientific stations in the north (Yellow River Station in Svalbard, Norway, which has been there since 2003 studying atmospheric and environmental science, and the China-Iceland Arctic Science Observatory in Kárhóll, Iceland, which has been there since 2018 studying Earth-system and environmental science). China has also indicated that the Arctic waters would be ideal for a Polar Silk Road, a trade corridor that would link China to Europe. But there is no Chinese military footprint in the region as of now.
On 9 January 2026, Trump said that he does not want China or Russia to get a foothold in Greenland. It is true that representatives of Chinese companies have been to Greenland and signed non-binding memorandums of understanding (MOUs), but it is equally true that none of them have gone forward. Trump fears that some of these MOUs might eventually turn into projects that could see Chinese companies on Greenland’s soil. However, since EU investment is so low in Greenland (around $34.9 million per year), and since US (around $130.1 million per year) and Canadian investment ($549.3 million per year) is higher but still lower than an anticipated Chinese investment (at least $1.162 billion), it is credible to fear the Chinese businesses. At the same time, it is worth noting that Danish and other Nordic diplomats have disputed Trump’s claims of Russian and Chinese warships operating ‘around Greenland’, for which Trump has offered no public evidence.
China’s anticipated investment in Greenland does not pose a military threat, nor is it something that the United States, Canada, or indeed Denmark should be concerned with. This should be a discussion and debate within Greenland.
Greenland is not for sale. It is not a military platform or a mineral reserve waiting to be extracted. It is a society, alive with memory and aspiration. The Global South knows this story well – a story of plunder in the name of progress, of military bases in the name of security, of the suffering and starvation of the people who call this land their home.
Land does not dream of being owned. People dream of being free.
Ask Aqqaluk Lynge, a Kalaallit poet, politician, and defender of Inuit rights who wrote in his poem ‘A Life of Respect’:
On maps of the country We must draw points and lines to show we have been here – and are here today, here where the foxes run and birds nest and the fish spawn.
You circumscribe everything demand that we prove We exist, that We use the land that was always ours, that We have a right to our ancestral lands.
And now it is We who ask: By what right are You here?
NATO’s civilian head, Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and abject flunky, appeased Trump at Davos by offering more NATO defenses deployed to Greenland. Rutte, who previously referred to Trump as “daddy”, made the “deal” in private with Trump. No details have been made public nor even shared among other NATO members. How’s that for contempt of underlings?
Since the end of World War Two, the United States paid lip service to global law and order along with its European allies. Under Trump, there is no longer any pretense of lip service. It’s outright imperialist power for naked domination. At one point in his rambling Davos speech, Trump declared such might-is-right land grabbing as normal.
Russia and China, among others, have repeatedly declared the paramount need to abide by international law and the principles of the UN Charter. U.S. imperialist power has no such respect. Trump has openly said so.
Under Trump, the European appeasers are inviting disaster as they indulge his bogeyman games over Greenland.
The old saying that a week is a long time in politics is especially true under the U.S. Presidency of Donald Trump, given his propensity for unhinged bombast, zig-zags, U-turns, vendettas, and theatrics.
So, last week, he was threatening to take over the Danish Arctic territory of Greenland by military force, if needed. Trump was also gearing up to launch an unprecedented trade war against European states that, with pipsqueak temerity, dared to support Denmark, a move that would have cratered the eight-decade-old transatlantic Western alliance.
This week, in a 70-minute rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump, seemingly magnanimously, announced that he was not going to deploy military power to subordinate European NATO “allies”. But he insisted that Greenland must be annexed under U.S. control.
In a telling quip, he said: “I don’t have to use force.” Trump is right on that score. There is no need for military coercion because the European “allies” have been exposed as a bunch of dithering vassals who were pathetically clutching their pearls for the past week out of fear and angst that Uncle Sam was slapping them.
However, when vassals appease, they only end up being abused. The American Don may have softened his contemptuous rhetoric at Davos, but there is little doubt that the expansionist ambitions to grab Greenland will be pursued, and the Europeans will be, in time, further degraded in their submission to the American overlord.
Oddly enough, for a president who boasts about flexing military muscle for imperialist aims, Trump couched his takeover of Greenland as a matter of “national security.” He is claiming that the United States needs to take control of the “big, beautiful piece of ice” to defend it from Russia and China.
He lied that it wasn’t because of Greenland’s vast mineral resources, including oil and rare-earth metals. Trump was claiming that the U.S. is the only NATO member strong enough to keep Russia and China from gaining a foothold. Beijing slammed Trump’s claims as baseless.
In an insulting and absurd remark, he likened Russia and China to how Nazi Germany tried to take Greenland from Denmark during the Second World War, and it was the U.S. that prevented that.
Only a few days before, Trump contradicted himself (not hard for him) by posting a comment deriding how Russia and China are used as “bogeymen”, that is, as false enemies.
Another anomaly was seen with Trump inviting Russia and China to join his dubious Global Board of Peace initiative, which he unveiled with much corny fanfare in Davos. Enemies for peace?
In other words, on Greenland, Trump is cynically playing the Russia and China threat as a pretext for blatantly violating the sovereignty of an ally.
Not that Denmark deserves sympathy. It is questionable how it retains any territorial right to a distant Arctic island whose people have consistently demanded independence from Copenhagen’s colonialist control.
NATO’s civilian head, Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and abject flunky, appeased Trump at Davos by offering more NATO defenses deployed to Greenland. Rutte, who previously referred to Trump as “daddy”, made the “deal” in private with Trump. No details have been made public nor even shared among other NATO members. How’s that for contempt of underlings?
Trump hailed the so-called framework agreement as a “great deal” for the United States and Europe without sharing the details. It’s believed to permit the installation of Trump’s futuristic Golden Dome missile defense system. If that goes ahead, it will heighten strategic tensions with Russia by militarizing the Arctic, not bring peace or stability. Denmark is reportedly wary that its sovereignty is being sold out in a grubby behind-closed-doors private takeover.
Hence, the transatlantic storm may have subsided somewhat for now, but the damage and mistrust that have shattered the alliance are not going to be repaired. It will only get worse because of the thug-vassal relationship unravelling.
The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, in his speech at Davos, made a shocking admission when he said that the “fiction of rules-based order” between the U.S. and its Western allies is dead.
Trump may have been appeased and placated for a while. But it’s like keeping a predator at bay by throwing pieces of meat at it. Sooner or later, the minions will be on the menu.
Only last week, Denmark and the other European states were dismissing Trump’s outlandish claims about defending the free world from Russia and China by taking control of Greenland. They knew it was a brazen land grab. Now, however, Rutte, the European NATO chief, is saying that NATO must accede to Trump’s demands to protect Greenland from the alleged threat from Russia and China.
After saying there is no such threat, now the Europeans will indulge Trump’s fantasy about Greenland, just to restrain him from overtly abusing them.
The trouble for the European and other Western allies of the United States is that they have consorted with decades of American violations of international law. They have played along with the charade of using Russia and China as enemies of convenience. This has hollowed out any claim of upholding international order and norms.
The U.S. and Europe have played the bogeyman card with regard to Ukraine. The Europeans supported Trump’s aggression against Venezuela and Iran, and they have been complicit in the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza.
This week, while French President Emmanuel Macron was admonishing Trump to respect international order concerning Greenland, he ordered French troops to seize a Russian-linked oil tanker in neutral maritime waters. The latter act of piracy on the high seas was probably an effort by France to demonstrate its loyalty to Washington’s policy of hijacking Russian cargo ships.
Since the end of World War Two, the United States paid lip service to global law and order along with its European allies. Under Trump, there is no longer any pretense of lip service. It’s outright imperialist power for naked domination. At one point in his rambling Davos speech, Trump declared such might-is-right land grabbing as normal.
During the past eight decades of charade and lip service, the U.S. needed the Europeans as a facade of multilateralism for its stealth imperialism. Washington indulged the Europeans, Canadians, and others as “allies”. In reality, they were always vassals.
Now, in the latest historical phase of returning to flagrant imperialism and brazen power, the United States has no use for the pretense of allies. They can be slapped around for the lackeys they are. And we are seeing that with brutality.
Ironically, the European powers have a historic tendency for appeasement. The British and French appeased Nazi Germany in the 1930s with disastrous results. Today, the Europeans are appeasing the United States in its every criminal demand. That is only emboldening the U.S. to expand its outright abuse of international law, or, in other words, its descent into barbarism.
This is not merely about Trump as a maverick megalomaniac. He is but a symptom of the U.S. global empire in desperation mode to maintain its waning power as a new multipolar world potentially emerges. U.S. hegemonic ambitions are untenable, but in a desperate bid to assert itself, the world is being turned upside down and intimidated into submission.
Russia and China, among others, have repeatedly declared the paramount need to abide by international law and the principles of the UN Charter. U.S. imperialist power has no such respect. Trump has openly said so.
Total domination is the only acceptable end for U.S. imperialism. Russia and China should not have any illusion about it, even if, in the short term, Trump wants to make an expedient withdrawal deal in Ukraine, or if he invites them to join his “Bored of Peace” boondoggle.
History shows us that rampant imperialist violence ends in disaster. Under Trump, the European appeasers are inviting disaster as they indulge his bogeyman games over Greenland.
In a sweeping and unsparing conversation with Glenn Diesen, economist and longtime geopolitical analyst Jeffrey Sachs dissects the accelerating rupture between Europe and the United States — a crisis triggered not by Russia or China, but by Washington’s own imperial overreach. Speaking with Glenn, Sachs argues that Europe is finally confronting the consequences of “riding on the back of a predator,” a metaphor he borrows from President Kennedy’s 1961 warning that those who try to ride the tiger often end up inside it.
A Crisis Europe Helped Create
Sachs traces Europe’s current panic — triggered by Trump’s threats toward Greenland and open hostility toward NATO — to decades of European complicity in U.S. militarism. For years, he argues, European leaders “said not a word” as Washington toppled governments, invaded sovereign states, and shredded international law from Iraq to Libya to Syria.
One of Sachs’ most pointed observations captures the hypocrisy now on display:
“When the United States said, ‘We want Greenland,’ suddenly Europe rediscovered international law.”
The same governments that lectured Iran about “restraint” after being bombed, or applauded the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, now find themselves shocked that the empire they enabled is turning its gaze toward them.
The End of the ‘Rules‑Based Order’
One of the most striking developments Sachs highlights is Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s admission in Davos that the so‑called “rules‑based international order” was never neutral — it was a Western privilege system. With the world shifting toward multipolarity, even U.S. allies are reassessing their dependence on Washington.
Carney’s outreach to China, Sachs notes, signals a geopolitical realignment that Europe has been too timid — or too captured — to attempt.
NATO’s Identity Crisis
The interview exposes a NATO leadership class that continues to praise U.S. power even as Trump openly calls the alliance America’s “enemy from within.” European leaders like Mark Rutte, Sachs argues, have responded with “pathetic” deference, hoping to appease Washington rather than assert independent interests.
Meanwhile, the EU’s political imagination has shrunk to a single unifying principle: Russophobia. Sachs calls this a catastrophic strategic error:
“Europe has no diplomacy with Russia, no diplomacy with the United States — basically no diplomacy at all.”
Germany’s Pivotal Role — and Repeated Failures
Sachs lays particular responsibility at Germany’s feet. From violating its reunification assurances on NATO expansion, to abandoning the 2014 Yanukovych agreement, to failing to enforce the Minsk II settlement, Berlin repeatedly chose alignment with Washington over European stability.
Yet Sachs insists the path to peace still runs through Berlin — joined by France, Italy, and the Central European states already calling for diplomacy.
Economic Warfare as Regime Change
One of the most explosive moments in the interview comes when Sachs quotes U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant openly bragging about collapsing Iran’s economy:
“This is economic statecraft… their economy collapsed… and this is why the people took to the streets.”
For Sachs, this is not policy — it is gangsterism. And Europe’s silence in the face of such actions has only emboldened Washington.
Despite Sachs bleak assessment, in the end there is room for conditional optimism: Europe could still reclaim sovereignty, pursue diplomacy, and avoid becoming collateral damage in America’s imperial decline. But doing so requires courage — something in short supply among current European elites.
let’s just talk about who is on this, the executive committee of this board. It includes, of course, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now, the French President Emmanuel Macron refused to join, warning that it could undermine the United Nations. But Trump will not only serve as the board’s chair indefinitely, he will also have veto power over all the board’s decisions. I mean, what do you think that means, especially in light of critics, like yourself, saying that this might actually be an organization that supersedes the United Nations, or, in fact, makes the U.N. entirely redundant?
We speak to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis about the United States under Donald Trump and its attempts to reshape the post-World War II international consensus. “Trump has all his work done for him by placid European centrists who went along with the policy of trashing international law and creating the circumstances for him to create his private company and say, ‘Right, I’m taking over the world,’” laments Varoufakis as he draws a connection between Trump’s pay-to-play diplomacy and the mercantalist policies of European colonial powers. Varoufakis comments on plans for the reoccupation of Gaza by the U.S.-led “Board of Peace,” which signed its founding charter this week; Trump’s designs on the Danish territory of Greenland; and European leaders’ ineffectual, largely symbolic resistance to Trump’s assertion of U.S. supremacy on the world stage.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: President Trump hosted an elaborate signing ceremony today in Davos for his so-called Board of Peace. Over 20 countries have joined, but that number is expected to increase. Many critics fear the board could undermine the United Nations. Trump will serve as chairman indefinitely. Each permanent seat has a price tag of a billion dollars, which Trump will control. Trump initially proposed the board to oversee Gaza, but said he now envisions a much broader vision.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do. And we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations. You know, I’ve always said, the United Nations has got tremendous potential — has not used it, but there’s tremendous potential in the United Nations. You know, on the eight wars that I ended, I never spoke to the United Nations about any of them. And you would think that I should have. You would think they could have done those eight wars, but they couldn’t have. And they tried, I guess, in some of them, but they didn’t try hard enough.
This is for the world. As everyone can see today, the first steps toward a brighter day for the Middle East and a much safer future for the world are unfolding right before your very eyes, because I’m calling the world a region. The world is a region. We’re going to have peace in the world. And, boy, would that be a great legacy for all of us. Everybody in this room is a star, or you wouldn’t be here. There’s a reason that you’re here. And you’re all stars.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The charter makes no mention of Gaza.
Countries that have joined the board so far include many right-wing or authoritarian governments, including Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Hungary is the only European country to sign on. France, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have all said they will not join.
Trump has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin to join the Board of Peace. The Israeli press reports Netanyahu opted not to fly to Switzerland, out of fear that he would be arrested for war crimes. During the Board of Peace ceremony, Trump also suggested a settlement on the Ukraine war is, quote, “coming very soon.”
Also at today’s signing ceremony, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner unveiled the board’s new $25 billion “master plan” for a new Gaza.
JARED KUSHNER: So, we did a master plan. We brought in — I thank you — Yakir Gabay, who’s one of the most successful real estate developers and brilliant people I know. He’s volunteered to do this not for profit, really because of his heart. He wants to do this. And we’ve developed ways to redevelop Gaza.
Gaza, as President Trump’s been saying, has amazing potential. And this is for the people of Gaza. We’ve developed it into zones. In the beginning, we were toying with the idea of saying, “Let’s build a free zone, and then we have a Hamas zone.” And then we said, “You know what? Let’s just plan for plan for catastrophic success.” We — Hamas signed a deal to demilitarize. That is what we are going to enforce.
People ask us what our plan B is. We do not have a plan B. We have a plan. We signed an agreement. We are all committed to making that agreement work. There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this in — you know, 2-3 million people, they build this in three years. And so, stuff like this is very doable, if we make it happen.
Rafah, we’ll start with. This will show a lot of workforce housing. We think this could be done in two, three years. We’ve already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition. And then, New Gaza. It could be a hope. It could be a destination, have a lot of industry, and really be a place that the people there can thrive.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s former — that is former White House adviser, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Meanwhile, President Trump has backed down on his threats to take Greenland from Denmark and to impose tariffs on European allies who oppose his plans — at least for now. After a dramatic day at the World Economic Forum in Davos Wednesday, Trump announced the “framework of a future deal” had been reached for Greenland and the entire Arctic region. During his speech, Trump repeatedly referred to Iceland, instead of Greenland.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Iceland, that I can tell you, I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money. But that dip is peanuts compared to what it’s gone up.
AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s comment came after he met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Details of the framework have not been made public. Trump said the deal would involve the United States getting mineral rights and for Greenland to be used for Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system. …………………………………………………………………………………….
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: When I first heard about the board of Gaza, months ago, it made me think that, you know, this is something that Philip K. Dick would invent — part of science fiction — if he was on really bad drugs. The reason why it is a monstrous idea is because — think about it — what he initially proposed — and this is still going on — is that a private company, headed by him for life, will annex the occupied land of Gaza. And interestingly, the Europeans, they went along with that, because they thought it was only about Gaza. But it wasn’t. They were wrong. It was much bigger than that. It was all about, as we now see, replacing the international order that came out of 1945, the carnage of the Second World War, the Holocaust and so on.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Yanis, let’s just talk about who is on this, the executive committee of this board. It includes, of course, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now, the French President Emmanuel Macron refused to join, warning that it could undermine the United Nations. But Trump will not only serve as the board’s chair indefinitely, he will also have veto power over all the board’s decisions. I mean, what do you think that means, especially in light of critics, like yourself, saying that this might actually be an organization that supersedes the United Nations, or, in fact, makes the U.N. entirely redundant?
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, this is not a matter of interpretation. I mean, it’s what Trump wants. It’s what he says he wants to do. He says, “OK, well, maybe we can keep the United Nations as a rubber stamp.” You know, after all, he did push through his proposal of this Board of Peace for Gaza through the Security Council, with the complicity of the French and the British, who are now realizing that this is not just about, you know, Brown people in the developing world. It’s not just about the Palestinians, whom they themselves condemned to genocide. It’s about them, as well. So, they’re beginning to understand that they’re getting their comeuppance…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
AMY GOODMAN: Very interesting to see Jared Kushner giving, center stage, a PowerPoint presentation on what they would do with Gaza — you know, no Palestinians included here — and President Trump himself saying today, describing Gaza as a “beautiful piece of property,” said he is a “real estate person at heart.”
AMY GOODMAN: Very interesting to see Jared Kushner giving, center stage, a PowerPoint presentation on what they would do with Gaza — you know, no Palestinians included here — and President Trump himself saying today, describing Gaza as a “beautiful piece of property,” said he is a “real estate person at heart.”
YANIS VAROUFAKIS:……………………………what this Board of Peace plan for Gaza is is the completion of the genocide. This is the logical limit of what Israel has been doing, to treat Gaza as a piece of real estate. Palestinians don’t exist. They can only exist as servants……………………………………..
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”
The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”
The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.
White House Adviser Jared Kushner revealed a neocolonial plan to transform Gaza into a home for luxury tourist resorts and data centers at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.
The plan has been widely condemned by human rights advocates, who say it is an an attempt to erase Palestinians by building a capitalist dystopia on the ruins of Israel’s genocide.
At the signing ceremony for President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Kushner shared a set of slides depicting a colonialist fantasy of the Gaza Strip under a hypothetical “demilitarization” of Hamas — despite the group’s repeated refusal to disarm, saying it would leave them defenseless against further attacks by Israel or otherwise.
The slides show computer-generated photos of high rise buildings along the coast and rows of residential buildings elsewhere.
The presentation includes a blueprint of Gaza divided into sections, which Kushner says is the U.S.’s plan for “catastrophic success” in the event of demilitarization of Hamas. The blueprint, labelled as the “Master Plan,” shows the entirety of the coast — where Palestinians have long fished for sustenance — dedicated to “coastal tourism,” with a sea port and an airport. There are large swaths dedicated to “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities.”
Tellingly, numerous parts of the map located next to residential areas are dedicated to industry and “data centers.” Ruinous technology like AI, reports have said, are slated to be a major part of the White House’s plan for Gaza, with other slides in the pitch deck reported by The Wall Street Journal showing a transformation of the Strip into a “smart city” with “tech driven governance.”
Nowhere is there a designation for cultural sites, nor does the map seem to be built around keeping or restoring any parts of Gaza that retain Palestinian heritage or life. The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s razing of the territory, clear the rubble in which thousands of Palestinians’ bodies are thought to be trapped, and replace it with real estate opportunities for investors.
“Gaza, as President Trump has been saying, has amazing potential,” said Kushner.
At the signing ceremony, Trump said that Gaza, home to millions of Palestinians, is “a great location” that should be viewed as a “big real estate site,” and expressed his interest in the region as a “real estate person at heart.”
“I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property — what it could be for so many people, it’ll be so great, people that are living so poorly are gonna be living so well,” Trump said.
Kushner touted the White House’s goal of applying “free market economy principles” to the razing and redevelopment of Gaza. He also expressed a desire to replace the humanitarian aid system for Palestinians in the region using those principles.
Palestinians have strongly condemned the plan.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’” wrote Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa. “Palestinians will be pushed behind walls and gates, retrained in ‘technical schools’ to serve Israel’s supremacists ideology. The indigenous traditions and social fabric of this land will be obliterated utterly.”
“If the goal is truly peace, then the path is simple: end the occupation and help restore the rights that have been taken from Palestinians since 1948,” said Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer from Gaza. “We, the Palestinian people, are the ones who must determine our own future. Peace cannot be imposed while our land is occupied, our lives controlled, and our voices ignored.”
There are moments in politics when language becomes so detached from reality that it tips from cynicism into a farce. Appointing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” for Gaza is one such moment.
Netanyahu is not a neutral stakeholder. He is not a reluctant participant dragged into a tragic conflict. He is the leader who has overseen the systematic destruction of Gaza: tens of thousands of civilians killed, entire neighbourhoods erased, hospitals flattened, universities bombed, and a population deliberately deprived of food, water, shelter, and hope. He is also the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
That Israel has rejected those charges or dismissed them as political is beside the point. Courts exist precisely because perpetrators rarely accept responsibility for their own actions. The question is not whether Netanyahu agrees with the accusations – it is whether the facts on the ground support them.
They do.
International law defines genocide not by slogans or historical analogies, but by actions and intent. Killing members of a protected group. Causing serious bodily or mental harm. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s destruction, in whole or in part. Gaza today bears the unmistakable imprint of each of these elements.
Add to this the repeated, dehumanising rhetoric from senior Israeli officials – Palestinians described as “human animals”, Gaza spoken of as something to be “flattened”, “erased”, or emptied – and the claim that this is merely an unfortunate but lawful military campaign collapses under its own weight.
Legal processes move slowly. They always do. Genocide is almost never recognised as such while it is unfolding. Rwanda was denied until the machetes were put down. Srebrenica was minimised until the mass graves were opened. History shows that moral clarity arrives long before judicial finality.
Which is precisely why Netanyahu’s elevation to a “Board of Peace” is so grotesque. Peace is not brokered by those actively prosecuting a war of annihilation. Reconstruction is not overseen by those who created the ruins. And justice is not served by rehabilitating leaders while the bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.
Trump’s board is not a peace initiative. It is a branding exercise – one that launders responsibility, flattens moral distinctions, and asks the world to accept Orwellian doublespeak as diplomacy.
Calling this arrangement a farce is not rhetorical excess. It is an accurate description. When an alleged war criminal is recast as a peacemaker, language itself has been bombed into submission.
And Gaza, once again, is expected to pay the price.
William D. Hartung, Trump’s Doubling Down on Imperialism in Latin America Is a Formula for Dec
The Trump administration’s exercise in armed regime change in Venezuela should have come as no surprise. The U.S. naval buildup in the Caribbean and the attacks on defenseless boats off the Venezuelan coast — based on unproven allegations that they contained drug traffickers — had been underway for more than three months. By the end of December 2025, in fact, such strikes on boats near Venezuela (and in the Eastern Pacific) had already killed 115 people.
And those attacks were just the beginning. The U.S. has since intercepted oil tankers as far away as the North Atlantic Ocean, run a covert operation inside Venezuela, and earlier this month, launched multiple air strikes that killed at least 40 Venezuelans while capturing that country’s president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife.
Both of them are now imprisoned in New York City and poised to face a criminal trial for narco-terrorism and cocaine importing conspiracies, plus assorted weapons charges. Even more strikingly, President Donald Trump recently told the New York Times that the U.S. could run Venezuela “for years.” On how that would be done, he (of course!) didn’t offer a clue. Naturally, a Venezuelan government forged in the face of a possible U.S. occupation would comply with the whims of the Trump administration — assuming that such a government, capable of stabilizing the country and earning the loyalty of the majority of its people, can even be pulled together.
Trump’s rush to war in Latin America is a phenomenon that, until recently, seemed long over. Its revival should raise multiple red flags, given the history of Washington’s failed efforts to install allied governments through regime change. (Can you spell Iraq?) In fact, given this country’s lack of success with such attempts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it’s a good bet that regime change in Venezuela will not end well for any of the parties concerned, whether the Trump administration, the new leaders of Venezuela, or the people of our two countries.
In the meantime, Trump has already suggested that he might entertain the idea of launching military strikes on neighboring Colombia. After a White House phone call between that country’s president Gustavo Petro and him, however, Time Magazine speculated that, when it comes to “who’s next?,” it might not be Colombia but Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, or even Iran. What’s not yet clear is whether Trump and crew will use the U.S. military, CIA-style covert action, economic warfare, or some combination of all of them in pursuit of their goals (whatever they might prove to be).
The one thing that should be clear by now is that pursuing such global regime-change campaigns would be sheer madness. Going that route would sow chaos and instability, while harming untold numbers of innocent civilians, all in pursuit of a futile quest for renewed U.S. global supremacy.
When, long ago, President Trump first started using the term “Make America Great Again,” I assumed he was thinking of the 1950s, when a surge of post-World War II economic growth and government investment lifted the prospects of a select group of Americans (while pointedly excluding others). That period, of course, was when the efforts that produced the modern civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and trans rights movements were in their early stages. Prejudice was the norm then in most places where Americans lived, worked, or got an education, while McCarthyism cost untold numbers of people their jobs and livelihoods and had a chilling effect on the discussion or pursuit of progressive goals.
Such a return to the 1950s would have been bad enough. However, Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s. If so, count on one thing: we’ll pay a high price for any such exercise in imperial nostalgia.
Intervention as the Norm: The History of U.S. Aggression in Latin America
The Trump administration’s attempt to control Latin America and intimidate its leaders and citizens is, of course, nothing new. At the start of the twentieth century, President Teddy Roosevelt announced his own “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which went well beyond the original pronouncement’s warning to European powers to avoid challenging Washington’s dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt then stated that “chronic wrongdoing… may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
The Office of the Historian at the U.S. State Department points out that, “[o]ver the long term, the [Roosevelt] corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, but it did serve as justification for U.S. intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.”
In fact, there were dozens of U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean in the wake of Roosevelt’s statement of his doctrine. Later in the century, there were U.S.-aided coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973); invasions of Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1983), and Grenada (1983); armed regime change in Panama (1989); the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua (1981) and death squads in El Salvador (1980 to 1992); and support for dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in the 1970s and 1980s.
In all, according to historian John Coatsworth, the United States intervened in the Western Hemisphere to change governments 41 times from 1898 to 1994. Seventeen of those cases involved direct U.S. military intervention.
In short, the Trump administration is now reprising the worst of past U.S. policies towards Latin America, but as with all things Trumpian, he and his cohorts are moving at warp speed, and on several fronts simultaneously.
The Perils of Regime Change
Although Trump officials are no doubt celebrating their removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, the battle there is far from over. When the U.S. drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a six-week military campaign in 1991, there was a great deal of celebratory rhetoric about how “America is back” or even that the United States was the single most impressively dominant nation in the history of humanity. But as historian Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, the 1991 Gulf War was just the start of what became a long war in Iraq and the greater Middle East. In Iraq, the ejection of Hussein was followed by relentless bombing, devastating sanctions, and a 20-year war of occupation that ended disastrously………………………………….
Why Venezuela? Oil, Ego, and the Quest for Dominance
………………………………………………..Donald Trump has since stated repeatedly (as in a January 3rd press conference), that the intervention he ordered was, in fact, about seizing Venezuela’s oil resources and developing them to the benefit of the U.S. through the activities of American oil companies.
…………………………………The Venezuelan debacle — which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done — is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power. The question is, given the administration’s costly and dangerous military-first foreign policy, how much damage will this country do to people here and abroad on the way down?
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition, 21 Jan 26
A week ago President Trump was posturing about an imminent attack to overthrow the Iranian regime embroiled in massive protests. His declared motive was to save the Iranian protesters seeking internal regime change who were being slaughtered by the regime.
Then Trump pivoted, declaring since the regime was no longer planning to execute protesters, he wouldn’t attack.
But it wasn’t Iranian government benevolence that persuaded Trump to stand down. The two reasons Trump’s explanation was covering up were reality on the ground and a phone call.
The massive but failed protests were not solely a spontaneous internal revolt. They were fomented and supported by both the US and Israel to complete their long sought dream of regime change to destabilize Iran, Israel’s last hegemonic rival in the region. Israel’s Mossad was definitely on the ground and likely the CIA as well. Trump was cheering on the protests from the sidelines.
Trump was poised to attack to complete the regime change operation when protest success appeared imminent. But Iran’s government quickly and decisively snuffed out the protests, ending Trump’s dream of adding more thousands to his massive, murderous death toll bombing 7 countries in his first year of term two.
Trump also got a call from the real boss of US Middle East policy….Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. He told Trump that with the regime intact, Israel would be decimated by thousands of Iranian missiles once Trump attacked.
Iran’s government may be secure for now but Israeli, US dream of Iranian regime change will never cease.
Trump lied to the New York Times when he said the only thing that can stop him from foreign intervention is “my own mind, my own morality.” What stopped Trump from attacking Iran again, as he did in June, is what stopped him then… failure on the ground and a call from the guy giving Trump his orders on Middle East foreign policy.
The UN nuclear watchdog’s chief warned Tuesday that a standoff with Iran over inspections and its near-bomb-grade uranium stockpiles cannot continue indefinitely, raising the prospect that Tehran could be declared in non-compliance with its obligations.
“This cannot go on forever because at some point I will have to say, ‘I don’t have any idea where this material is,’” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said.
“This cannot go on like this for a long time without me having to declare them in non-compliance.”
Grossi said he was exercising diplomatic restraint but stressed that Iran, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, does not have the option to pick and choose which obligations to meet.
Iran said in December last year it will not yield to international pressure to allow renewed inspections of nuclear sites hit by the United States in June.
Grossi also acknowledged parallel diplomatic efforts aimed at easing tensions between Iran and the United States, saying he hoped they would avert renewed military confrontation.
The IAEA has long sought answers from Iran over past nuclear activities and the whereabouts of undeclared nuclear material, issues Grossi has said cannot be resolved without access to relevant sites.
The secretary general, who will step down at the end of 2026, will say: “Last year, global military spending reached $2.7tn – over 200 times the UK’s current aid budget, or equivalent to over 70% of Britain’s entire economy.”
The deepening investment in weaponry runs alongside his concerns that the drivers of climate breakdown are being wilfully ignored and online content is undermining democracy.
In historic speech to mark UN’s 80th anniversary, secretary general makes impassioned plea for multilateralism and international law amid drastic US funding cuts.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, will warn on Saturday of the peril posed by “powerful forces lining up to undermine global cooperation” in an address to mark the 80th anniversary of the UN’s first major meeting.
Speaking in London’s Methodist Central Hall – the site where eight decades earlier delegates from 51 countries came together for the inaugural session of the general assembly – the UN head will make an impassioned plea for the virtues of multilateralism and international law to prevail during a period of deepening global uncertainty.
In January 1946, the general assembly’s first resolution focused on disarmament and the elimination of atomic weapons as a global goal.
Now, Guterres warns of a planet facing myriad threats that were then unthinkable, citing the climate crisis and threat from “cyberspace” at a time many countries are locked into a new arms race, though he will hold off from naming offending states.
The secretary general, who will step down at the end of 2026, will say: “Last year, global military spending reached $2.7tn – over 200 times the UK’s current aid budget, or equivalent to over 70% of Britain’s entire economy.”
The deepening investment in weaponry runs alongside his concerns that the drivers of climate breakdown are being wilfully ignored and online content is undermining democracy.
“As the planet broke heat records, fossil fuel profits continued to surge. And in cyberspace, algorithms rewarded falsehoods, fuelled hatred, and provided authoritarians with powerful tools of control,” he will tell the London audience.
Comments from the 76-year-old come at a time of chronic funding difficulties for the UN, largely driven by the decisions of the US president, Donald Trump.
The US has announced it would be allocating just $2bn (£1.5bn) to UN humanitarian assistance, a fraction of its previous contributions as the leading funder. The announcement came with a warning from the US state department that the global body must “adapt, shrink or die”, and that demands would be imposed on countries receiving the money.
Just over a week later, Trump announced the US withdrawal from multiple UN agencies as well as its key climate treaty.
Experts say the funding cut will lead to a shrunken, less effective international aid system, with the UN already saying a funding shortfall threatens to cripple its global peacekeeping operations.
Guterres, however, says reforms will ensure the “United Nations is more agile, more coordinated and more responsive”.
Russia blasted the U.S. for running a “regime change” operation in Iran, while the Iranian envoy said “any act of aggression, direct or indirect, will be met with a decisive, proportionate, and lawful response.”
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, in an address to the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, accused the United States of taking part in a regime change operation in Iran.
He said:
“What is happening on the streets of Iranian cities in recent days has gone far beyond peaceful protests. There have been documented cases of the use of firearms, killings of law enforcement officers and civilians, arson attacks on medical facilities and public institutions, and attacks on emergency services facilities. These actions cannot be covered up by the pretext of freedom of expression or the protection of human rights.
What is happening in Iran is yet another example of the use of tried and tested methods of ‘color revolutions,’ in which specially trained armed provocateurs turn peaceful protests into senseless riots, pogroms, destruction of public property, and brutal murders of police officers, state security personnel, and peaceful protesters, including children.
As we have already seen time and again in a number of countries, all these actions are either orchestrated or supported by external forces that are interested in so-called ‘regime change.’”
He said:
“Today’s meeting, convened by our American colleagues, is nothing but yet another attempt to justify blatant aggression and interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. And if the Iranian authorities do not ‘come to their senses’ – as Washington put it – then the US will resolve the Iranian problem in their favorite way, namely through strikes geared towards overthrowing the undesirable regime.
In fact, in the current situation, these external forces are not not even bothering to hide their involvement in violent actions, especially given that the U.S. president has openly called on protesters to take over Iranian state institutions.
The U.S. and its ‘cheerleaders’ are actively exploiting the economic and social problems of ordinary Iranians, caused by the unlawful sanctions pressure imposed on Iran by Western countries. They are using sanctions to stir up public tensions and destabilize the domestic political situation.”……………………………………………………………………. https://consortiumnews.com/2026/01/16/russia-blasts-us-at-un-security-council-on-iran/
the strategy shifts from direct confrontation to destabilization from within, through sabotage, information warfare, and regime-change pressure. That is why unrest inside Iran is being treated as an opening to exploit. That has been the official US and Israeli strategy for decades. And Israeli officials are already framing this like a Syria scenario.
This is all built to shape diaspora perception — and then feed Western headlines. Israel and the United States aren’t operating separately; they operate as an ecosystem. Israel drives the information war: narrative shaping, psychological operations, and online influence. The U.S. provides the infrastructure layer: funding pipelines, Persian-language media influence, pro-democracy NGO networks, and diaspora-facing institutions that convert narrative momentum into political pressure.
Even if Iranians overthrew their government today, that does not mean Iran’s future would suddenly be decided freely. Because the moment a state collapses, a vacuum opens. Washington and Tel Aviv will fill that vacuum. They will intervene politically, economically, and through media and proxy networks to shape the outcome.
Make no mistake: the U.S. and Israel are ready to seize this moment in Iran’s mass protests to drive a regime change operation. And it’s not even subtle.
Trump has openly threatened airstrikes against Iran — and he’s told protesters to keep going, promising: “Help is on the way.”
And Israeli security analysts are already gaming out a collapse scenario — suggesting the Israeli military could hit Iran’s strategic infrastructure and government targets if the state begins to crumble — to weaken the Islamic government and shape the outcome towards regime change with a plan to install Reza Pahlavi, the son of the brutal dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
And the timing matters. Iran sits at the heart of the Axis of Resistance, and Israel has been hit with many political and regional losses from resistance in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. With its global reputation destroyed after the genocide in Gaza and stalled normalization plans with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Israel’s default issue is to attack Iran, as the Islamic Republic is the number one target of the apartheid state.
This is why Israel is seizing this moment now. Its own intelligence agency posted on its Farsi-language account urging Iranians to join the protests, even claiming that Mossad was with them “in the field.”
What began as legitimate protests over the collapsing rial, rising prices, economic hardship and calls for real political reforms is now bwwwwwweing hijacked by pro-monarchy rioters waving Shah-era flags, openly calling on Israel and the United States to help overthrow the government.
Reports indicate these rioters who are openly backed by Israel have burned down over 30 mosques, and committed attacks and killings against civilians and pro-government demonstrators, using military-style weapons, hunting rifles, knives, axes, and blades, while targeting police and state institutions.
MintPress has documented how Israeli intelligence covertly transfer weapons into Iran through its eastern border and often times through Israeli-tied Cargo Ships that travel past Yemen through the Red Sea. A MintPress investigation revealed that Zodiac Maritime, operator of the Mercer Street, has deep ties to the IDF and Mossad — using commercial ships to move arms and operatives for covert operations, including assassination missions inside Iran.
Phony Human Rights Groups
Despite these facts, Western corporate media are pushing out bogus casualty and mass arrest numbers that are being shared by diaspora Iranians in the push for regime change. But we at MintPress News traced these numbers back to one source: the Human Rights Activist News Agency – an arm of the Human Rights Agency in Iran (HRAI).
A new MintPress investigation found that this agency and its news arm are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout organization.
They’ve become the go-to source for some of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their numbers have been repeated across outlets like CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others.
Even mainstream liberal commentators repeat these claims as settled fact. One example of this is Owen Jones, who wrote in The Guardian that Human Rights Iran is a “respected” group, and that their death toll claims are “probably significant underestimates.”
But what these reports almost never disclose is the funding pipeline connecting it directly to the CIA. Human Rights Activists in Iran presents itself as independent, but it’s based in Fairfax, Virginia — right inside the Washington intelligence ecosystem of the CIA. On its website, it describes itself as “non-political,” and even claims it does not accept financial aid from political groups or governments. Yet in the same paragraph, it admits its major donor is from the National Endowment for Democracy, a group created by the CIA to covertly do what the CIA once did openly.
And Human Rights Iran isn’t the only “human rights” NGO being signal-boosted into Western headlines. Another organization widely cited in coverage of Iran is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, led by Roya Boroumand — cited by outlets including The Washington Post, PBS, and ABC News.
And again, the proximity to the U.S. foreign policy apparatus is rarely mentioned.
Although the Boroumand Center does not prominently advertise it in its funding disclaimer, it has been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. A 2024 NED press release described the center as a “partner” organization — and the NED awarded Boroumand its 2024 Goler T. Butcher medal for democracy promotion.
At that ceremony, NED officials openly praised the Boroumand Center’s work as an “indispensable resource” and said the NED was “proud to support” their advocacy toward what it called a “democratic future for Iran.”
And sitting on the center’s board is Francis Fukuyama — a former NED board member, and an editor of the NED’s own publication, the Journal of Democracy.
So when Western corporate media presents these organizations as neutral, independent referees while using them to justify escalations, sanctions narratives, and regime change pressure, understand what’s happening.
Propaganda Onslaught
These messages are being reinforced digitally on social media through coordinated media messaging, diaspora amplification, and bot-driven campaigns traced back to hubs including Tel Aviv, Virginia and LA, boosting hashtags calling for the downfall of the Islamic government.
Of course, Iranians have the right to self-determination But what is happening now is unfolding inside a long-standing U.S.-Israeli framework built around sanctions, information warfare, and “democracy promotion” pipelines, including CIA-linked front structures like the National Endowment for Democracy, designed to steer unrest and manipulate Iranian diaspora toward regime change.
We have to remember: Israel has spent decades pushing the nuclear red-herring — the claim Iran is always “months away” from an atom bomb — to justify sanctions, sabotage, and escalation.
This summer, Israel and its allies tried to pull the U.S. into direct strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. But instead of a clean victory, Israel took a major blow when Iran retaliated, hitting military targets and causing damage reportedly worth billions, including in and around Tel Aviv.
Israel can’t win a full-scale war with Iran on its own.
So the strategy shifts from direct confrontation to destabilization from within, through sabotage, information warfare, and regime-change pressure. That is why unrest inside Iran is being treated as an opening to exploit. That has been the official US and Israeli strategy for decades. And Israeli officials are already framing this like a Syria scenario.
In the last year alone, Israel has been deploying an AI enabled operation on X targeting Iranians in the diaspora — using fake bot accounts, AI-generated personas, fabricated crisis content, and synchronized posting to push regime change messaging — pushing the idea that Iran must be de-Islamicized, that the Islamic Republic must fall, and that the “solution” is a secular, Western-aligned order. Ironic, of course, considering it is being pushed by an ethnic-Jewish state.
And when they say “de-Islamicize Iran,” Israel means destroy its revolutionary spirit from its roots. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew a US and British backed Monarchy is rooted in Islamic history and stories of Imam Hussain and Karbala, standing against a tyrannical system of exploitation, class warfare and oppression no matter the cost even if it means to stand alone.
That story is the moral backbone of Iran’s resistance identity, including why it backs Palestinian liberation, working class movements, independence and rejects U.S. and Israeli imperialism in the region and is part of a resistance movement for liberation.
Therefore, weakening that Islamic identity weakens resistance, targeting not just Iran, but Hezbollah, Yemen, and Gaza. That is why secularization is being sold as “liberation,” even though Iran is a majority-Muslim country.
This AI signal boosting promoting secularism, the monarchy, and regime change to the diaspora is not new. During previous unrest, hashtags like #WomenLifeFreedom and #IraniansDetestSoleimani were aggressively signal-boosted by bot networks — with MintPress analyses showing major traffic patterns tied not to Iran, but to hubs in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, and even MAGA-linked account clusters pushing the messaging. In some cases, over 80% of the traffic tied to these hashtags was coming from outside of Iran, according to X activity patterns and Google Analytics.
This is all built to shape diaspora perception — and then feed Western headlines. Israel and the United States aren’t operating separately; they operate as an ecosystem. Israel drives the information war: narrative shaping, psychological operations, and online influence. The U.S. provides the infrastructure layer: funding pipelines, Persian-language media influence, pro-democracy NGO networks, and diaspora-facing institutions that convert narrative momentum into political pressure.
Modern regime change against Iran doesn’t start with tanks. It starts with civil society capture — shaping what people believe, what they protest for, and what outcome they’re pushed toward through “pro-democracy NGOs” that are CIA cutouts. The stated goal and policy is to covertly do what the CIA once did openly.
That pipeline runs through a network of “democracy promotion” groups tied into U.S. foreign policy that can be traced back to the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy, and organizations in its wider orbit like Foundation for Democracy in Iran, United for Iran, Tavaana, NUFDI, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and Farashgard. Different branding — same function: media narratives, activist training, diaspora pressure campaigns, and political steering toward one destination: regime change.
One of the pressure points repeatedly weaponized is culture, especially women and the hijab, framing Islamic governance as backward, while selling “freedom” as secularization and Western capitalism as the future of freedom.
Now here’s the part most people never hear: it’s an influence architecture, where Washington-linked NGOs generate the numbers, Western outlets repeat them as fact, and the funding networks behind them stay off-screen and are represented as “independent.”
In Washington, Iran policy runs through institutions that are funded by weapons manufactures like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and pro-Israel billionaires with board members that read like a war criminal roster.
The pressure campaign is sustained by think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Atlantic Council, pushing maximum pressure, sanctions escalation, and regime change year after year.
These institutions are fueled by donor networks tied to hardline pro-Israel politics — billionaire megadonors like Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and Haim Saban — who bankroll the ecosystem that keeps Iran framed as the permanent enemy and regime change as the permanent solution.
Imperial Games
And of course, Iran sits inside a broader U.S. Cold War framework targeting Russia, China, and Iran as the core adversarial bloc. Iran’s “crime” is refusing to submit — standing independent, backing resistance, and defying U.S. and Israeli power.
So the policy becomes familiar: isolate, sanction, destabilize. And if that fails, destroy.
Israel’s strategic doctrine has long treated the region’s strongest adversarial states – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran – as targets for destabilization, because these states and alliances block Israeli dominance.
Its plan to weaken these states is documented in its Yinon Plan — the argument that Israel’s long-term security is strengthened when major states are broken into smaller sectarian and ethnic entities.
In 1996, a strategy paper written for Netanyahu’s circle called “A Clean Break” argued for reshaping Israel’s environment by weakening hostile states and rolling back adversaries. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Brookings Institute published “Which Path to Persia?” treating regime change in Iran as a standing policy option, while outlining methods from pressure campaigns to covert destabilization.
If regime change doesn’t deliver a compliant Iran, partition becomes the fallback. The plan is to carve out a Sunni statelet across western Iraq and eastern Syria — specifically to cut the land corridor that connects Iran to its allies. That corridor runs Iran → Iraq → Syria → Lebanon — the route that links Tehran to the Mediterranean and to Hezbollah. And if you break that corridor, you isolate Iran, weaken the Axis of Resistance, and sever the regional link that makes Iran such a strategic problem for Israel.
The plan has already been partially executed with the U.S. and Israel’s proxy war in Syria, the new HTS leadership, the arming of Kurdish separatists, and breaking off Kurdistan into its own state in Iraq. This is called the Sunnistan plan inked by neocon war hawk John Bolton, and it is being put into action through policy by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, AEI, and the Washington Institute.
This has been the official plan for Iran and the region to target any resistance to U.S. and Israeli imperialism. So when bystanders call for regime change under the guise of humanitarianism, they do not realize they are falling into the trap of imperialist propaganda and war planning that is fueled by a very sophisticated messaging system.
Even if Iranians overthrew their government today, that does not mean Iran’s future would suddenly be decided freely. Because the moment a state collapses, a vacuum opens. Washington and Tel Aviv will fill that vacuum. They will intervene politically, economically, and through media and proxy networks to shape the outcome.
And that’s why the replacement is being preloaded right now. If the Islamic Republic falls, the preferred answer is ready: Reza Pahlavi, a secular figurehead. A pro-West, pro-normalization with Israel, reversing the Islamic Revolution’s economic independence, and reopening Iran’s strategic industries — oil, gas, infrastructure — to Western capital and privatization. That’s the sad truth.
Iran is not a chessboard. It is 90 million human beings, with a civilization, culture, and identity far deeper than any foreign policy narrative. This is a people shaped by deep history and resilience, not a caricature in a policy playbook. And if the world truly believes in self-determination, then Iran’s future cannot be decided by think tanks in Washington or intelligence agencies in Tel Aviv.
Yet Western governments — where police state repression is increasingly the norm at home — are acting like they have the moral authority to tell Iranians to overthrow their own government.
In the United States, Trump has unleashed ICE in ways that have involved grave abuses, all while that same government lectures the world about human rights and “freedom.”
And history shows us this clearly: when the empire intervenes, it’s ordinary people who bleed first. Iran’s future belongs only to Iranians.
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