Much has already been written about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's damage-control mission to the Munich Security Conference, sent to cool transatlantic tensions mere weeks after President Donald Trump hinted multiple times at annexing Greenland by force. But beneath the conciliatory tone was Rubio's explicit defense of the fight against “godless communist revolutions” and “anti-colonial uprisings” throughout the world, a horrific sanitization of the US-backed dictatorships that terrorized Latin America and beyond in the last century.

Rubio painted a sweeping narrative of Western civilization under threat. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline,” he declared, “accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map.”

That line is a direct homage to the doctrines of Cold Warriors Henry Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both of whom infamously argued that right-wing dictators were acceptable allies in the fight against communism—regardless of their brutality—because they were “authoritarian” rather than "totalitarian.” Yes, even if those “communists” were democratically elected, popular, and nonviolent.

The implication, delivered with straight-faced solemnity in Munich, is that the US-backed campaign against leftist movements in the Cold War was a noble defense of freedom, democracy, and Christian civilization.

The United States can continue down the path outlined by Rubio’s speech, but it will only accelerate its decline, alienate its allies, and create the very chaos it claims to fight.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the US helped set up Operation Condor, a network that far-right dictatorships operated throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a coordinated system of state terror across South America. The Chilean intelligence service chillingly described it as “something similar to what Interpol has in Paris, but devoted to subversion.” It was, also important to mention, explicitly framed by the US government to defend Christian civilization (also called the Banzer Plan).

Rubio's Christian civilization trope is an ode to a very specific, pro-corporate, pro-authoritarian, and white-supremacist Christianity, the same ideology championed by Donald Trump's MAGA movement. This is the same ideology that colonized, enslaved, and subjugated Latin America and the Global South, through the European institutions he lifted up in his speech. Centuries later, the United States resurrected this crusade through the CIA, which funded and even armed the rise of far-right, pro-capitalist Evangelical movements, to actively oppose and dismantle the more redistributive, popular Catholic churches rooted in liberation theology.

Many of the right-wing paramilitaries and dictatorships backed by the US were explicitly Christian. They, however, killed priests who did not adhere to rigid far-right fundamentalism—Catholic groups were central to the resistance. That Evangelical fundamentalism now fuels the region's new wave of right-wing leaders, including Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Maria Corina Machado, and José Antonio Kast, who are also fanatical supporters of Israel.

The Condor system maintained a centralized database tracking guerrilla movements, left-wing parties, trade unionists, religious groups, liberal politicians, and anyone deemed an enemy of the authoritarian regimes. These designated “terrorists” were hunted across borders, tracked down, and eliminated throughout the Americas and even in Europe, including France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal.

The United States actively designed, funded, and supported this architecture of repression, and then helped cover it up. The infamous, still-open School of the Americas trained torturers, while CIA stations shared intelligence with Condor operatives. US Embassies smoothed relations with allies and propagandized local populations.

In Bolivia, the US backed Hugo Banzer after his predecessor convened a People's Assembly of proletarian sectors to usher in populist reforms. That president was later kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated by the Condor system.

In Brazil, Washington supported the neo-Nazi-backed military coup that deposed social democrat João Goulart after he attempted mild economic reforms, ushering in two decades of brutal military rule.

In Chile, the US organized against socialist president Salvador Allende, who was instituting democratic, redistributive reforms. The Nixon administration famously declared it would “make the economy scream” in Chile, and went on to support Augusto Pinochet's coup, which brought torture, disappearances, and a dictatorship that murdered thousands. Rubio and the US currently back its Pinochet-supporting, grandson-of-an-SS-lieutenant President, Jose Antonio Kast.

On the topic of the SS, the US used Nazis as part of their anti-leftist subversion campaign in the Cold War. After World War II, the US set up “ratlines,” or escape routes, for Nazis and Nazi sympathizers throughout Latin America and Europe, to escape prosecution. They ended up being key architects of the US-backed right-wing dictatorships throughout the world including in Latin America, while many even joined anti-communist death squads.

Final Solution architects Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, and countless others all left for South America with help from the US State Department, which Rubio now commands.

The US also deposed socialist governments and installed brutal right-wing regimes in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti (multiple times), Mexico, Nicaragua (multiple times through the Somoza family), Costa Rica, Honduras (multiple times), El Salvador, and Panama.

In Guatemala, the CIA overthrew socialist president Jacobo Arbenz after he dared to enact land reform that threatened the American United Fruit Company, whose political connections apparently mattered more than Guatemalan democracy. Guatemala was ruled by brutal military dictators for decades afterward, also regimes the US supported.

Mind you, this is only in Latin America—the US did plenty more of this in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was all less than 50 years ago, and continues to this day.

Such is the legacy that Rubio defends when he mourns the setbacks to “Western civilization” made by “anti-colonial uprisings.” We must ask, why did those uprisings occur? Is Rubio implying that opposing colonialism is bad? Most of them occurred after centuries of slavery and subjugation, some of which was inflicted by the US.

This historical whitewashing serves Rubio's contemporary objectives. The United States is currently engaged in a multi-front campaign to reshape Latin America into a bastion of pro-American right-wing populism.

The administration has waged economic war on Venezuela, and Cuba, now on the verge of total humanitarian collapse. It swayed the last election in Honduras through disinformation and threats—continuing a pattern of US intervention that began with the Obama administration's 2009 backing of a coup against socialist Manuel Zelaya. Trump's first term engineered a coup in Bolivia against socialist Evo Morales, that Rubio enthusiastically supported.

Trump’s second administration has threatened strikes on Mexico and Colombia, imposed sanctions and tariffs on Brazil, and openly and covertly supported authoritarian parties throughout the hemisphere, including the Bolsonaros in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Tuto Quiroga in Bolivia, and opposition figures across the region.

There is something profoundly ignorant in Rubio's performance. He and his boss have championed authoritarian tactics, openly supported neo-Nazi politics, praised dictators abroad, and destroyed democracy and the Constitution at home. To then stand before the world to declare that America defends freedom, democracy, and Judeo-Christian principles against godless revolutionaries is a ridiculous diminution of those very principles.

As Salvador Allende put it mere hours before his death at the hands of US forces at the Palacio de la Moneda, “While they have strength and will be able to dominate us, social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force.”

In Haiti, more than a century of US interventions, coups, and support for corrupt and violent figures has produced a humanitarian catastrophe that now generates waves of migration, while the American right has the gall to turn around and fearmonger about Haitian migrants invading the country.

As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva says, “Foreign intervention can cause more damage than it seeks to prevent.” They create the migration crises that then become fodder for right-wing demagogues. They alienate Latin American populations, who increasingly view China more favorably than the United States, because while Washington offers only militarism and domination, Beijing offers infrastructure investment and trade (however problematic its own debt traps may be).

Many Latin American states would rather navigate imbalanced partnerships with China than submit to foreign invasions and coups from Washington.

The United States can continue down the path outlined by Rubio’s speech, but it will only accelerate its decline, alienate its allies, and create the very chaos it claims to fight. Or it could finally reckon honestly with its history and chart a different, humane course.

Eduardo Galeano once said, “Latin America is part of the world, which was for many years condemned to the system of power where intimidation had more strength than the vote.” By sanitizing these atrocities, Rubio is condemning Latin America and the world to that fate once again.

When President Donald Trump convened his so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Switzerland, a key item on the agenda was to endorse his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s extravagant (and, I might add, detached from reality) plan for a “New Gaza.” The rendering of Kushner’s scheme shows it to be more of a luxury resort for wealthy tourists than the foundation of a just future for the Palestinian victims of Israel’s genocide. But since the raison d’être of the Board of Peace was supposed to be dealing with the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, the conversation, by necessity, had to address the needs of hundreds of thousands of now-homeless Palestinians.

Thus, Kushner presented a proposal for a model Palestinian community—the “New Rafah”—he intends to build to house Palestinians in Gaza. The plans for this New Rafah have been circulated since the meeting. Everything is covered: how Gaza’s economy will run; how its educational and health systems will create a new generation of hale and non-ideological Palestinians; and how the “new cities” will be laid out, function, and be governed. And everything has been calculated down to how many teachers, doctors, judges, religious leaders, and laborers will be needed per capita in each community.

If Kushner were preparing an owner’s manual for a complex piece of machinery or the instructions for installing and operating new software, this plan might seem flawless. But Palestine isn’t a video game, and Palestinians are human beings, not Lego pieces to be assembled, as per the instructions. Like every other people on Earth, Palestinians have emotional ties to their homes and families, and memories of the personal and collective injustices they have endured. This failure to consider the fullness of Palestinian humanity is the fatal flaw that will either stop the New Rafah before it begins or cause it to unravel soon afterward.

The refusal of those who have held power over Palestine to acknowledge the grievances and aspirations of its Indigenous Arab people isn’t new. In fact, it has defined their history.

Instead of acting to support Palestinians as their rights were systematically trampled, the US and other Western states have historically blamed Palestinians, while exonerating themselves and Israel.

For example, in 1919, when the British Lord Balfour was presented with the findings of the US-commissioned survey of Arab attitudes, which demonstrated their overwhelming rejection of his intent to grant the Zionist movement a homeland in Palestine, he famously responded, “In Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting its inhabitants as to their wishes... Zionism… [is] of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who inhabit that ancient land.”

And Palestinians were not consulted when the United Nations drew up grossly unfair maps to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Those maps gave the Jewish community over one-half of the land (despite its being less than a third of the population). The maps were rejected by Palestinians because more than half a million of them were disenfranchised without any say in the matter. Nor did Palestinians receive support when 650,000 of their brethren were expelled from the newly created Israel in 1948, or when, after the Oslo Accords, neither the UN nor the US would hold Israel accountable for sabotaging the peace plan through settlement expansion, land seizures, the erection of a wall, and the deliberate obstruction of the development of a Palestinian economy.

Instead of acting to support Palestinians as their rights were systematically trampled, the US and other Western states have historically blamed Palestinians, while exonerating themselves and Israel. The result of this century of systematic abuse and denial of rights has been to create a Palestinian community that is justifiably embittered and losing hope. And when they express these feelings, their grievances are dismissed and they are told to just “deal with it”—something that would never be said to, for example, Israelis or the Jewish people. This is because US policymakers understand the full humanity of the Jewish community. They understand their history of the losses they have experienced and their need to be respected and heard.

What we are seeing in the wake of the genocide in Gaza and in the midst of the state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing and erasure of Palestinian communities in the West Bank is just the same story playing out one more time. Every effort is made to make Israelis feel secure, while Palestinians are expected to lose their homes, families, and memories, and be resigned to being moved about like pawns on a chessboard and be grateful to have the opportunity to live in a model city once they have been properly vetted, biometrically identified, and de-radicalized. The bottom line is that Palestinians have never been permitted the human right to make their own decisions. The results have been devastating both for them and for the region. The reason behind the wars that have been fought and the aberrant behavior of some elements of Palestinian society can be found in one simple fact: the refusal to allow Palestinians the freedom to determine their future in a manner that recognizes the fullness of their humanity.

We’ve polled throughout Palestine a number of times in the past few years, and what we’ve found is that Palestinians don’t want to live under the control of Israel or any other external powers. They want the Israeli occupation to end, national unity of all factions in all parts of their country, and to hold a national referendum to elect new leaders and develop a plan for governance that can move them toward freedom and independence. They deserve nothing less.

The world is witnessing yet another manufactured humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in plain sight in Cuba. This crisis is not the result of any internal collapse or mismanagement. It is the deliberate outcome of United States policy, a policy of collective punishment designed to impose economic suffocation on an entire population to extract political change. President Donald Trump has openly declared his intention to overthrow the Cuban government by year’s end, meaning Washington is transforming its decades-old blockade into a full-scale siege. The Trump administration has absurdly designated the small, peaceful Caribbean nation as “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, weaponizing tariffs and economic coercion against any country that dares to sell oil to Cuba.

The consequences are immediate and impossible to ignore. Cuban authorities have announced that jet fuel will be unavailable at airports across the country starting this week, disrupting airport operations and grounding both domestic and international carriers. Canadian airlines have already announced contingency plans for flights to and from Cuba, assessing reroutes, suspensions, and assistance for stranded travelers. But aviation is only the most visible edge of a far deeper collapse. If Cuba’s energy infrastructure fails, people will die. This is not a metaphor. It is inevitable. Without electricity, food cannot be grown, preserved, or transported. Medicines cannot be produced, refrigerated, or administered. Hospitals cannot operate. Ambulances, incubators, and ventilators will stop.

This deprivation is not at all incidental. It is intentional. Administration officials and the extreme right Cuban American political establishment have been explicit: The goal is to inflict suffering, to manufacture hunger, medicine shortages, and nationwide blackouts as instruments of regime change. Washington’s intentions could not be clearer. The United States is attempting to strangle an entire nation into submission.

While the US pursues this deliberate campaign of suffering, Ottawa has once again chosen the path of procedural dithering, offering words instead of action. Canada’s response, to no one’s surprise, has been another Kafkaesque exercise in bureaucratic evasion. When Senator Yuen Pau Woo asked officials from the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade what Canada is doing to prevent this potentially catastrophic humanitarian disaster in Cuba, the exchange exposed more absence than action. Pressed for specifics, the response was: “There are no specifics.” The officials further conceded that “there is no humanitarian response plan for Cuba that I’m aware of,” explaining that Canada’s engagement has been framed as “more looking at the development context and not the humanitarian context.”

Canada is not responsible for US actions. But it is responsible for its response to them.

In practice, this distinction functions as a delay mechanism. The government is “looking into the matter,” as it so often does, deferring urgency behind the process while conditions deteriorate. The latency appears less accidental than structural. And, as usual, no timeline has been offered, no indication of when this period of observation will end, or when statements will give way to action.

This pattern is not all new, nor is it confined to Cuba. It is, in fact, a continuation of a long record of calibrated restraint and strategic silence. Canada’s response over the past few years has been consistent, predictable, and deeply inadequate. By now, Canada has perfected the art of tactful bystanding, present in language, absent in consequence. Ottawa has expressed concern, called for deescalation, and urged all parties to respect international law, but it has avoided naming responsibility and evaded confronting its closest ally. Canada criticizes outcomes while refusing to challenge the very system that produces them. This is simply appeasement dressed up as diplomacy. While statements are issued, the systems that produce these horrors remain untouched, leaving ordinary people, Palestinians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and now Cubans, to bear the consequences.

For the past two years, the United States has funded and enabled genocide in Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed with US weapons, under US protection, with full knowledge that no meaningful consequences will follow. A recent Al Jazeera investigation revealed that US-supplied thermal and thermobaric munitions, burning at 3,500°CC, effectively evaporated nearly 3,000 Palestinians, leaving no trace of their bodies, a stark illustration of unchecked barbarism. And as we speak, Israeli authorities are reportedly preparing to execute Palestinian prisoners under mandatory death penalties in military courts for vaguely defined “terrorism” offenses, laws applied only to Palestinians. And yet Canada, despite claiming to have imposed an arms embargo, continues to supply ammunition and weapons parts that fuel this violence. Canadian factories produce fighter jet components, explosives, and munitions that flow through US channels directly into the assault, sustaining the machinery of death while Ottawa issues carefully worded statements of concern.

This silence is not confined to Gaza. After the United States launched strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Ottawa responded with bland calls for calm and diplomacy. Still, it deliberately refrained from directly condemning Washington’s military action, instead echoing cautious G7 language about negotiation without even naming the US role in the escalation.

And when the US carried out large‑scale strikes in Venezuela and captured its president, Canada’s official statement did not even bother to mention the United States. And, instead offered abstract calls for all parties to “uphold international law” while leaving Washington’s unilateral intervention unchallenged.

In each case, Ottawa paid lip service to restraint while leaving raw power untouched, exposing how Ottawa’s posture has consistently privileged diplomatic caution over moral accountability.

Although recently, it did seem that Canada’s posture might be shifting, tellingly, not because of mass civilian deaths abroad. The change came only when US military adventurism edged closer to home. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s warnings about a collapsing rules-based international order only came after the US threatened Greenland, a territory tied to NATO allies and Arctic stability. Only then did Canada speak clearly about sovereignty, coercion, and the dangers of unchecked power. The timing is telling. It suggests Canada perceives the risks of impunity only when they threaten Western interests or its own proximity, while the devastation inflicted on others remains effectively invisible.

Even then, the response has remained largely rhetorical.

When Canada’s response to ICE’s documented brutalities of its own citizens is so plainly inadequate, it comes as no surprise that its response to US aggression abroad is equally hollow and insufficient.

And now, as the humanitarian catastrophe looms in Cuba, Canada appears to be relying on verbal gymnastics to maintain political correctness while avoiding meaningful action. Even though, on paper, Ottawa opposes US sanctions and the blockade, in practice, it offers no condemnation, no advocacy, and no protection for ordinary Cubans facing hunger, blackouts, and collapsing hospitals. Suffice it to say, Canada has by now perfected the role of silent bystander to nearly an art form.

Today, the mechanisms that enable atrocity, impunity, exceptionalism, and allied silence are on full display and fully operational, and Cuba is simply the latest victim. To call the United States’ behavior “outside the spirit of international law” would be a grotesque understatement. Washington treats international law as optional, shielding mass civilian slaughter through diplomatic vetoes, launching unilateral strikes with impunity, and sustaining devastation through overwhelming military support.

Canada is not responsible for US actions. But it is responsible for its response to them. Ottawa has deliberately hidden behind bureaucratic loopholes while allowing Canadian-made weapons components and ammunition to move through US supply chains and into Israel, insulating itself from accountability while profiting from the machinery of war. Carney’s government has offered no clear or urgent plan on Bill C-233, legislation intended to curb Canadian arms exports where there is a risk of war crimes. The bill continues to hang in limbo, while Canada remains embedded in US military supply chains. Canadian-made F-35 components and ammunition continue to flow to the United States, where end-use accountability effectively disappears. Simultaneously, Canada continues to export armoured vehicles and security equipment to US agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an institution that has detained Canadian citizens without explanation, due process, or urgency.

When Canada’s response to ICE’s documented brutalities of its own citizens is so plainly inadequate, it comes as no surprise that its response to US aggression abroad is equally hollow and insufficient. None of the people affected by the US aggression—Palestinians, Iranians, Venezuelans, Cubans, or others subjected to unilateral force—believe that Canada is in their corner in any meaningful way. None. Canada’s response serves no protective function at all. It is a calculated performance of concern, engineered to evade moral obligation without disrupting US power.

If Canada genuinely wants to make a difference, it can start with something simple and immediate: Sell essential goods to Cuba, food, fuel, and medicine. Not statements. Not carefully worded press releases. Tangible relief that keeps lights on, shelves stocked, and patients alive. Yet, as so often before, Ottawa may retreat behind another polished, empty statement while taking no meaningful action.

Ottawa’s approach is built on a reckless assumption that Trump’s chaos is governed by strategy, that US volatility is calculable, and that Canada will somehow remain exempt. That illusion has already collapsed. The same contempt for international law has now extended to Greenland, with explicit annexation threats aimed at allies. If Canada continues to hedge, appease, and delay rather than act on principle, it should not expect any support when its own sovereignty is challenged. Silence does not buy safety. It only invites escalation. If Canada does not adjust its course, it may find that when threats strike closer to home, there will be no one left willing to stand alongside it.

The government of the state of South Australia announced recently that its wholesale electricity price fell in Q4 ’25 to $37 AU per megawatt hour ( / MWh) (that would be $26.22 US). That’s the lowest wholesale electricity price in all of the continent of Australia. The reason the price is so low is because South Australia has a lot of wind, solar and battery power, and output was high late last year. Remember, October – December in Australia is spring into summer.

That’s 2.6 US cents per kilowatt hour. The average cost of electricity in the United States is roughly 17 cents per kilowatt hour, because it is mostly generated by expensive, dirty, planet-wrecking fossil fuels.

So here’s the thing: in Q3 of last year, the price of wholesale electricity was $104 AU / MWh.

That’s right. In one three-month period, the price fell by a third.

Since South Australia is demonstrating that wind, solar and battery can cause the wholesale price of electricity to plummet, it is also pulling the curtain from the Trump administration’s con game in the US.

It was not a matter of usage falling off. The government says, “underlying demand in South Australia ticked up by 1.2 per cent to a fourth quarter record high of 1,624 MW.”

Of course, how the fall in the price of wholesale electricity gets translated into consumers’ home electricity bills is politics, not engineering.

Some 74% of South Australia’s electricity consumption is provided by renewables, and the state plans to make that 100% by 2027, in only two years. Wind, solar and battery generated 100% of the state’s electricity for 99 days (27% of the time) in 2024, the last year for which full data are available as yet.

50% of homes in the state have rooftop solar. South Australia has been a pioneer in mega-batteries combined with its solar generation. The country as a whole has 3 gigawatts of battery storage capacity. South Australian needs more battery build-out, so as to smooth out the excess generation from rooftop solar at noon and during early afternoon, which has been producing negative energy pricing, forcing utilities to pay people to take their electricity.

South Australia, despite its small population of about 2 million, is widely seen as a demonstration project for what the renewables revolution can mean for the lives of people in the industrialized democracies. Its Labor government has been committed to the project. Only a decade ago, most of its electricity was coal-generated. Alas, its Liberals (i.e. conservatives) are now campaigning on more fossil fuels. Since so much of the progress was grassroots, with people just installing solar panels, the transformation seems difficult to halt or even slow substantially.

What the state is showing us is that wind, solar and battery power, when combined, are extremely inexpensive. Moreover, there is every prospect of solar panels becoming cheaper, more efficient, and less bulky over the next decade as scientific research burgeons. Renewables are already much less expensive than fossil fuels.

What the state is showing us is that wind, solar and battery power, when combined, are extremely inexpensive.

It is true that because they are a new source of energy, they are attended by construction costs, whereas old coal and gas plants built years ago have already sunk that cost. But wind and solar are now so cheep that in many localities it is less expensive to build a new solar farm and operate it than just to keep an old gas or coal plant in operation.

Since South Australia is demonstrating that wind, solar and battery can cause the wholesale price of electricity to plummet, it is also pulling the curtain from the Trump administration’s con game in the US. By using the might of the federal government to bolster coal and gas, Trump and his minions can keep expensive and dangerous sources of power in place, making you pay more for your electricity and arranging for your money to line the pockets of his Big Carbon campaign donors. If fossil fuels were competitive, Trump wouldn’t have to try so hard to stall permitting for new wind and solar projects.

Here’s how Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded on Sunday, during ABC’s “This Week,” to a question about the Trump regime’s handling of the Epstein files:

“This is about the Epstein class …. They’re billionaires who were friends with these people, and that’s what I’m up against in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump told us that even though he had dinner with these kinds of people, in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He's still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration. And they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”

The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.

Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class.

Trump appears 1,433 times in the Epstein files so far. His billionaire backers are also members. Elon Musk appears 1,122 times. Howard Lutnick is a member. So is Trump-backer Peter Thiel (2,710 times), and Leslie Wexner (565 times). As is Steven Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere (1,855 times).

The Epstein Class isn’t limited to Trump donors. Bill Clinton is a member (1,192 times), as is Larry Summers (5,621 times). So are LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (3,769 times), Prince Andrew (1,821 times), Bill Gates (6,385 times), and Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants (429 times).

If not politics, what connects the members of the Epstein Class? It’s not just riches. Some members are not particularly wealthy, but they’re richly connected. They trade on their prominence, on whom they know and who will return their phone calls.

They exchange inside tips on stocks, on the movements of currencies, on IPOs, on new tax-avoidance mechanisms. On getting into exclusive clubs, reservations at chic restaurants, lush hotels, exotic travel.

They entertain one another, stay at each other’s guest houses and villas. Some exchange tips on how to procure certain drugs or kinky sex or valuable works of art. And, of course, how to accumulate more wealth.

Most members of the Epstein Class have seceded into their own small, self-contained, squalid world. They are disconnected from the rest of society. Most don’t particularly believe in democracy; Peter Thiel (recall, he appears 2,710 times in the Epstein files) has said he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Many are putting their fortunes into electing people who will do their bidding. Hence, they are politically dangerous.

The Epstein Class is the by-product of an economy that emerged over the last two decades, from which this new elite has siphoned off vast amounts of wealth.

It’s an economy that bears almost no resemblance to that of mid-20th-century America. The most valuable companies in this new economy have few workers because they don’t make stuff. They design it. They create ideas. They sell concepts. They move money.

The value of businesses in this new economy isn’t in factories, buildings, or machines. It’s in algorithms, operating systems, standards, brands, and vast, self-reinforcing user networks.

I remember when IBM was the nation’s most valuable company and among its largest employers, with a payroll in the 1980s of nearly 400,000. Today, Nvidia is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was then and five times as profitable (adjusted for inflation), but it employs just over 40,000. Nvidia, unlike the old IBM, designs but doesn’t make its products.

Over the past three years, Google parent Alphabet’s revenue has grown 43 percent while its payroll has remained flat. Amazon’s revenue has soared, but it’s eliminating jobs.

Members of the Epstein Class are paid in shares of stock. As corporate profits have soared, the stock market has roared. As the stock market has roared, the compensation of the Epstein Class has reached the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, most Americans are trapped in an old economy where they depend on shrinking paychecks and a diminishing number of jobs. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York just reported that mortgage delinquency rates for lower-income households are surging.

Affordable housing isn’t a problem that occurs to the Epstein Class. Nor is income inequality. Nor the loss of our democracy. Nor the deleterious effects of social media on young people and children.

When Silicon Valley’s biggest tech proponent in Congress — Rep. Ro Khanna — recently announced his support for a tax on California billionaires, to help fill the void created by Trump’s cuts in Medicare (which, in turn, made way for Trump’s second huge tax cut for the rich), the Epstein Class had a fit.

Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, with a net worth estimated at more than $13 billion (and who’s mentioned a mere 182 times in the Epstein files but is no friend of Trump), called Khanna a “commie comrade.”

Khosla, by the way, is best known by the public for having purchased 89 acres of California beachfront property in in 2008 for $32.5 million, then trying to block public access to the ocean with a locked gate and signs. Despite losing multiple court rulings, including a 2018 Supreme Court appeal, he carries on with the dispute.

Not classy, but, shall we say, a typical Epstein Class move.

Distinguished Members of the Security Council,

The President of the United States is issuing grave threats of force against the Islamic Republic of Iran if it does not accede to US demands. His actions risk a major regional war that would be devastating. Asked if he wanted regime change, he responded that it "seems like that would be the best thing that could happen." When asked why a second US aircraft carrier has been sent to the region, President Trump answered "in case we don't make a deal, we'll need it ... if we need it, we'll have it ready."

These threats are in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which declares that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

These threats come in the context of Iran’s repeated calls for negotiations. Moreover, on February 7, Iran’s Foreign Minister delivered a speech in Doha proposing comprehensive negotiations for regional peace, following a round of talks in Oman supported by the diplomacy of the Arab states and Türkiye. Even as a second round of negotiations has been announced, the US is resorting to escalating threats of force.

Today, the world is in urgent need of a renewed commitment to diplomacy.

The issue facing the UN Security Council in these perilous days is whether any member state, by force or threat of force, may place itself above the United Nations Charter that governs us all. At stake is the integrity of the UN-based international system.

One of the crucial roles of the Security Council is to call on member states to settle disputes by peaceful means such as negotiation, mediation, arbitration, or judicial settlement, without the threat of force or resort to force. Today, the world is in urgent need of a renewed commitment to diplomacy.

The current threat of an attack by the US did not begin with any failure by Iran to negotiate. On the contrary, it began with the United States’ repudiation of negotiations that had already succeeded.

On July 14, 2015, after years of extensive diplomacy, Iran and the P5 countries plus Germany concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program would remain exclusively peaceful. In return, economic sanctions on Iran were to be lifted. The JCPOA placed Iran’s nuclear activities under strict and continuous scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency and thereby ended the risk of a nuclear-arms breakout by Iran, a risk that Iran had consistently denied.

On July 20, 2015, the UNSC unanimously adopted Resolution 2231. That resolution “endorses the JCPOA” and calls upon all states to take the steps “necessary to support the implementation.” It terminated previous sanctions resolutions and incorporated the JCPOA into international law. The Security Council explicitly recognized Iran’s “right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes” under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and established a robust verification regime.

Yet on May 8, 2018, three years after the successful UNSC Resolution, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA. This withdrawal was actively lobbied for by the Israeli government. Since the late 1990s, Israel’s leadership has repeatedly, falsely, and hypocritically claimed that Iran was on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, even as Israel itself had secretly acquired nuclear weapons outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and has until today refused to join the treaty and subject itself to its controls.

When President Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, the US reimposed wide-ranging sanctions in direct contradiction of Resolution 2231 and launched a campaign of economic warfare designed to cripple Iran’s economy that continues to this day.

The current threats by the US are therefore part of a long-standing pattern of feigning interest in negotiations while in fact pursuing economic warfare and military force. In June 2025, following the renewal of negotiations earlier that year, the United States and Iran entered a sixth round of talks. The US had characterized the negotiations as constructive and positive. The sixth round was set for June 15, 2025. Yet on June 13, 2025, the US supported Israel’s bombing of Iran. A week after that, the US attacked Iran under Operation Midnight Hammer.

The US assault on the UN Charter has now escalated once again to the brink of war, with US threats of force and acts of economic warfare proceeding daily. The US has been escalating its military presence near Iran and has repeatedly threatened to launch an imminent attack.

The administration has also been candid about its strategy of economic warfare. On January 20, in an interview in Davos, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described how the US had deliberately engineered the collapse of the Iranian currency, a dollar shortage, and a collapse of imports, all with the goal of fomenting economic suffering and mass unrest. Bessent described the resulting unrest as “moving in a very positive way here.”

The current threats by the US are therefore part of a long-standing pattern of feigning interest in negotiations while in fact pursuing economic warfare and military force.

The most striking aspect of the US campaign for regime change in Iran is the repeated US insistence that Iran must negotiate. Iran has negotiated, repeatedly. The JCPOA was negotiated and ratified by the UN Security Council. Even after Iran engaged in renewed negotiations last summer, it faced large‑scale air strikes on its territory. Now, the US openly avows the policy of economic collapse and regime change.

No country is safe if the United States can make brazen threats against Iran and indeed several other states in recent weeks, including Cuba, Denmark, and others.

It is both sad and poignant to recall that the United Nations was the brainchild of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He envisioned an era of great-power cooperation and multilateralism under international law as the basis of international peace and security. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, oversaw the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The US at that time envisioned an era in which diplomacy would prosper, and a time in which law and justice rather than brute force would prevail, a time when we would honor the words of the Prophet Isaiah inscribed on the wall on First Avenue facing the United Nations: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more.”

To allow the UN Charter to be ruthlessly violated, no less by its host country, is to invite the return to global war, this time in the nuclear age. In other words, it is to invite humanity’s self-destruction. On behalf of We the Peoples, the UN Security Council carries the authority and heavy responsibility to keep the peace.

Sincerely yours,

Jeffrey D. Sachs
University Professor at Columbia University

Appendix. I humbly offer below an illustrative Draft Resolution by which the UNSC could fulfill its duty in the current context.

The Security Council,

Recalling the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, in particular the obligation of all Member States to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, as set forth in Article 2(4) of the Charter,

Reaffirming that the maintenance of international peace and security rests upon respect for international law, the authority of the Security Council, and the peaceful settlement of disputes,

Recalling its resolution 2231 (2015), adopted unanimously on 20 July 2015, by which the Security Council endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and called upon all Member States to take actions necessary to support its implementation,

Reaffirming its commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the need for all States Party to that Treaty to comply fully with their obligations, and recalling the right of States Party, in conformity with Articles I and II of that Treaty, to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination

Acting under the Charter of the United Nations,

1. Calls upon all Member States to immediately and unconditionally cease all threats or uses of force and to comply fully with their obligations under Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations;
2. Acknowledges that the JCPOA constituted a valid multilateral negotiation endorsed by the Security Council, and recognizes that the abandonment of the JCPOA resulted from the unilateral withdrawal of the United States;
3. Decides that, under its authority, the UNSC mandates all States concerned to immediately engage in negotiations to conclude a renewed comprehensive arrangement on the Iranian nuclear issue, building upon the principles of the JCPOA and fully consistent with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons;
4. Calls upon all Member States to refrain from actions that undermine diplomatic efforts, escalate tensions, or weaken the authority of the United Nations;

Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

After ICE shot peaceful protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti to death in Minneapolis, right-wing supporters of the ICE surge terrorizing Americans in their cities argued that those who interfere with law enforcement and/or attend protests inherently risk their lives. If you want to stay alive, stay home.

The post Stay Safe, Stay Home appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Insecurity is spreading. The world is experiencing unprecedented armed conflict. Sixty-one state-based armed conflicts have been recorded across 36 countries. Eleven of these escalated into full-scale wars. Instead of “never again,” genocide is ongoing—again and again—without a response to prevent more.

Unfortunately, those leading have little understanding of the problem as they are part of the problem. A solution will have to come from elsewhere.

Rather than encourage peace or progress, US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, recently advised his generals that the Pentagon will be guided by the 4th century Roman dictum, "Sis vis pacem, para bellum"—"If you want peace, prepare for war." Despite mutual vulnerability in an interconnected world, Hegseth stressed that“the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting… We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We're training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend.”

Military spending is skyrocketing—tripling for some NATO allies—like Canada, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania.

So, what might be done? Is there a way to encourage cooperative, win-win approaches for people and the planet? Possibly.

The US Department of War already has a trillion-dollar budget and it’s projected to be 50% larger—$1.5 trillion—by 2027. Such a surge is only required when a government plans to fight multiple wars abroad and stifle dissent at home. Stephen Miller, (President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff), already claims that “we are back to a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Overall, the cost of preparing for more war is almost $3 trillion annually. Worse, if current trends persist, the United Nations warns that “global military spending could reach $4.7 to $6.6 trillion by 2035.”

Yet even that huge cost is dwarfed by the damage caused, with the Global Peace Index reporting, “the economic impact of violence on the global economy in 2024 was $19.97 trillion in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms.” As they note: “This figure is equivalent to 11.6% of the world’s economic activity (gross world product), or $2,446 per person. Military and internal security expenditure accounts for over 74% of the figure, with the impact of military spending alone accounting for $9 trillion in PPP terms the past year.”

Of course, most governments understand that no amount of military spending can guarantee a reliable defense or provide security in the nuclear era. Wars have seldom been winnable over the past 80 years, even for the most powerful. President Trump was correct to note the US has not won a major war since 1947. But that stops neither the current wars nor the extravagant investment to get ready for more.

Clearly, higher military spending leaves less for social security, climate action, healthcare, education, and poverty reduction. Precarious conditions spread, giving rise to extremes that generate further insecurity, with new risks of race, class, and civil conflict. Trust in government erodes when funds are available for weapons but not for human needs. Militarism follows, deepening a culture of violence, poverty, and extremes.

As President and General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed... Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

With ever-higher costs, there are ever-higher risks. All the great powers are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals. They still rely on nuclear deterrence, with a threat of total destruction held in check by rational leaders who are supposed to maintain a system of mutually-assured destruction (MAD) in a "balance of terror." Oh, oh! Even a limited use of nuclear weapons is understood to risk "nuclear winter," with starvation for those who remain. Just last month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the hands of their Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to catastrophe.

"Caveat emptor"—countries, like people, eventually get what they plan, invest in, and prepare for. Many are already suffering from the violence and militarism they fund, support, and share with others (e.g. foreigners that someone, somewhere labelled as progressives, terrorists, protesters, or activists).

Among the recent targets were Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Portland. Does anyone really think this violence is for peace and security?

Who knows who is next? Will it be Cuba, Columbia, Canada, China, Iceland, Mexico, New York, Maine, or Iran again?

People heard of the deeper, "complex" problem when President Dwight Eisenhower warned:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

With globalization and generous funding, this complex expanded worldwide into finance, banking, and insurance sectors; big oil and gas; telecommunications; logistics; media; surveillance; big data; robotics; and AI.

Eisenhower’s warning wasn’t enough to stem the appeal of profits, power, and control. The unwarranted influence is now everywhere, diminishing political autonomy to the point where government leaders believe they can’t say, “No.” And, this complex depends on violent conflict to "keep the old game alive."

In short, endless war continues in a dysfunctional, war-prone system. And, this system is the primary impediment to progress on a shared climate emergency and sustainable development.

"Endless war" is the risk in following the dubious Roman claim from the 4th century: "If you want peace, prepare for war." Notably, the Roman Empire didn’t survive with its massive military spending and constant civil wars. Instead, let’s remember, "Peace is possible, if we prepare for it."

For now, it is crucial to redirect the current trajectory away from more war and a climate crisis—a lose-lose outcome for all.

So, what might be done? Is there a way to encourage cooperative, win-win approaches for people and the planet? Possibly.

UN-Prepared

Over 80 years ago—in the aftermath of two World Wars—the universal challenge was how to confine the institution of war, preferably before it kills more, possibly everyone.

The United Nations was founded in response, primarily as a state-centric, international peace system. "Saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war" is at the forefront of the UN Charter. To its credit, the UN works daily on all the shared global challenges—sustainable development, human rights, climate change, international law, encouraging multilateral cooperation for peace, nuclear disarmament, culture and education, food and water, even more.

Yet the UN remains a work in progress—underfunded, unprepared, and poorly equipped—constrained by its 193 member states, and hamstrung by the Security Council’s veto power. As it stands, the UN cannot prevent violent conflict, enforce international law, or protect people and the planet effectively. These limits reflect the interests and political priorities of the UN’s member states. Global military spending ($3 trillion) is approximately 780 times higher than the UN’s regular budget ($3.45 billion), which is considerably less than the budget of the New York City Police Department.

Yet these priorities and limits are not fixed in stone. The UN still has the advantage of an exceptional charter, universal membership, 80 years of experience, with established programs, operations, and offices worldwide. Notably, people have not experienced another world war in 80 years. It is also widely acknowledged that UN peace operations—in deadly, remote conflicts—have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars.

In short, the UN foundation is sufficiently solid to expand upon. And, this isn’t a radical or original idea either.

Shortly after President Eisenhower’s warning, President John F. Kennedy’s State Department outlined several of the key steps required in "Freedom From War, The United States Program For General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World." As officials noted:

There is an inseparable relationship between the scaling down of national armaments on the one hand and the building up of international peace-keeping machinery and institutions on the other. Nations are unlikely to shed their means of self-protection in the absence of alternative ways to safeguard their legitimate interests. This can only be achieved through the progressive strengthening of international institutions under the United Nations and by creating a United Nations Peace Force to enforce the peace as the disarmament process proceeds.The Alternative

A new Guide to a UN-Centred Global Peace System outlines 20 steps to strengthen the UN’s capacity to prevent war, uphold human rights, enforce international law, protect the environment, and promote disarmament. Included is a UN Charter review conference (to agree on an option to the P-5 veto), a financial transaction tax, another decade focused on a global culture of peace, a UN Parliamentary Assembly, defense transformation, development of a UN Emergency Peace Service (a more sophisticated option than a UN Peace Force), economic conversion, and a boost for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Thankfully, work on most of these steps is already underway, supported by committed individuals and organizations. And, those who struggle to make the UN more effective understand that our scattered, siloed, and specialized approaches seldom combine to make a big difference.

What’s been missing is a compelling vision—"Peace on Earth is possible”—along with a coherent plan outlining a sequence of viable policy options. A shared vision should help to encourage the unity of effort and purpose required to mobilize diverse social movements and governments. And, once these steps for a more effective UN are implemented and combined, the result would be a UN-centered global peace system.

Paradigm shifts happen when prevailing systems are deemed inadequate or failing and when another option is widely viewed as better.

This guide is primarily a call to aim higher, pull together, and prepare now for that moment when new possibilities emerge. Cooperation is crucial to building the bridge between diverse sectors of civil society. With modest coordination and support, an inter-sectoral movement becomes possible.

Of course, this idea will be promptly dismissed as naive, wishful thinking, as "mission-impossible" for now. But as the political pendulum swings toward worse, the corrective swing back is likely to open the space and generate support for substantive shifts, even a safer system.

Just consider what’s distinctly different in 2026? Numerous governments are deeply worried and desperate to both avoid and constrain the new predatory hegemon. They know of safety in numbers and most realize that the one promising alternative is in an established multilateral counterweight, a more effective UN.

Within five years, peace on Earth—"mission impossible"—could become not just desirable, but widely supported, then possible. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars saved.

Paradigm shifts happen when prevailing systems are deemed inadequate or failing and when another option is widely viewed as better.

With the peace system proposed, there would be no further need for offensive weapon systems. National armed forces would shrink. Threats and tensions would fade. And, this new global system might cost $15-20 billion, freeing up trillions to help with climate adaptation and sustainable development. Imagine: We prepare for war no more!

Most of us understand that children are vulnerable, innocent, and must be protected and nourished. But too often in our country, and the world, that doesn’t happen—and now the US government is waging a global war on children.

It started with the closing of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), thus removing US humanitarian and development aid to people in the worst situations in the world. The cruel closure of USAID denied and continues to deny more than 95 million people access to basic healthcare and nutrition, leading to an estimated 1.6 million additional deaths in 2025, many of which were children.

The current administration also significantly weakened the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). These cuts, plus the closing of USAID, severely limit the international efforts of humanitarian organizations which work to control mother-to-child transmission of HIV. If funding for HIV prevention and treatment continues to fall, by 2040, an estimated 3 million children will contract HIV and nearly 1.8 million will die of AIDS-related causes.

As if that were not enough, the administration pulled out of the vaccine alliance Gavi, an international organization that has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated worldwide. This allows vaccine-preventable diseases to flourish among unvaccinated and vulnerable children. Many will be permanently disabled or die.

The administration turning its back on the “sh** hole” countries will come back and bite America in the ass, with innocents suffering the most.

The administration has directed these closings of international programs overwhelmingly against Black and brown people who, according to the president, live in “sh** hole” countries. This is his program of “America First,” where “those” people don’t matter—where their children don’t matter.

Moral judgement aside, helping those suffering in other countries is actually in our best interest. Not only would this show some badly needed humanity and compassion, it is also the best public health approach to protect all of us from contagious diseases.

But too many in the United States live in a right-wing news bubble where they aren’t aware of the suffering in the “sh** hole” countries or simply don’t care. And so many don’t realize that the diseases that foreign aid was working to control (AIDS, tuberculosis, polio, Ebola, and vaccine-preventable diseases) endanger us all. They are not just “their problem,” they are also “our problem.” As these diseases spread and multiply in other countries, the nature of the US economy and international trade will bring them here. The administration turning its back on the “sh** hole” countries will come back and bite America in the ass, with innocents suffering the most. Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are not “the cost of doing business,” as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Deputy Director, Ralph Abraham, MD, callously stated. The US has managed to “do business” while controlling vaccine-preventable disease for decades.

But the administration’s war on children does not stop with the “sh** hole” countries. Here in the US, the “Big Beautiful Bill” made draconian funding cuts to safety-net programs. This intentionally endangers children in millions of US families because it ends access to healthcare and adequate nutrition.

Even that was not enough. Robert F Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, has promoted an anti-science, anti-vaccine agenda by weaponizing the CDC to reduce the availability of vaccines in the US and to keep up a constant drumbeat of anti-vaccine disinformation. The CDC is no longer a trusted source of science-based public health information; it is now a clearinghouse for Kennedy’s anti-science, anti-vaccine misinformation, conspiracies, and lies. Many parents are rightfully confused by the barrage of anti-vaccine propaganda coming from Kennedy; vaccine hesitance is rising, resulting in soaring cases of measles, whooping cough, influenza and tetanus among children. And more will come as Kennedy’s flood of misinformation and fear-mongering about vaccines continues, supported by the highest levels of the administration.

Among this group dangerous beliefs are developing, exemplified by the comments of the Kennedy-appointed Chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Kirk Milhoan. He recently voiced the belief that the individual freedom to refuse vaccines is greater than the freedom to choose not to be infected by contagious diseases. He questions requirements for childhood vaccines, and believes that declining vaccination rates are an opportunity to see what happens when vaccine-preventable diseases run rampant, rather than the tragedy that it is. This is not a sane or ethical experiment; history tells us the answer: The viruses and bacteria will win, and children will suffer.

Kennedy and the administration recently began this unethical experiment when they cut the number of vaccines in the childhood vaccine schedule, guaranteed to reduce vaccine use. Kennedy removed recommendations for rotavirus, Covid-19, influenza, RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal vaccines. These are serious diseases that cause children to suffer and die.

They claim that the new recommendations allow parents the “freedom of choice” about these vaccines, after “shared decision-making,” but this has always been the case for childhood vaccines. What they say is freedom has a tragic cost, and this version of freedom effectively declares that the death of children by vaccine-preventable diseases is an acceptable cost, the cost of doing business, with that cost paid in kids’ lives.

Some may call this freedom. We call it a war on children.

They told you.

Not once. Not quietly. Not in some obscure corner of the internet where plausible deniability can hide. They told you in court filings and local hearings, in affidavits and field reports, in newsroom investigations and academic papers. They told you in the patient language of law and the blunt language of organizing. And for years, the country found ways to argue with the messengers, or litigate the metaphors, or change the subject.

Now the evidence is arriving from so many directions at once that warning has become record, and record demands a response. The question is no longer whether someone warned you. The question is what you do when the warnings stop coming as claims and start coming as records.

In two weeks, the machinery of American immigration detention has been more thoroughly exposed than at any point in this country's history, not because the government opened the door, but because enough people forced it. Analysts at Syracuse have tracked the population shifts, reporters at Bloomberg and the Washington Post have mapped the warehouses, the American Immigration Council has documented the deadliest year in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention on record, Austin Kocher has shown that 92% of detention growth this fiscal year comes from people with no criminal convictions. Ninety-two percent. The Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law has shown that release within 60 days of arrest fell from 16% to 3%. Hundreds of journalists, researchers, lawyers, and organizers have built a shared factual floor while the ground itself is being shaken. They deserve recognition, not rivalry. Amplification, not a race for credit.

The historical record offers no example of a detention system with these structural features that reversed course without public rupture, legal compulsion, or political defeat.

And still, the rest of the story has not been told.

Everything published so far answers the first-phase questions. How big is the system. How fast is it growing. Who is inside it. History asks a harder one. Not how big the system is, but where it is going. Not how fast it is growing, but when growth changes what the system is. Not who is inside it today, but what happens to the people inside it when intake keeps running, court capacity keeps shrinking, and the exits keep narrowing until the word "exit" becomes an administrative fiction. Answering that question requires a lens most of the current analysis does not use. The missing lens is not moral outrage. It is structural diagnosis, how systems change character when inputs outrun exits.

That is the lens I study. I study irregular warfare and state detention systems. That is not the career I started with. I am a West Point graduate, trained in the ethics of command and the obligations of the oath I took. I came to this work because the patterns I had studied from a distance were no longer distant, and because the oath does not expire. I have published that work in peer-reviewed journals. And I am telling you plainly: I have seen this structure before. Not in identical form, and not with identical ends, but with the same mechanics.

It appeared in the early Nazi concentration camp system before administrative pressure transformed improvised holding into something durable and escalating. It appeared in US counterinsurgency detention abroad, from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Camp Bucca in Iraq, where intake outpaced processing and produced the same result every time. Populations accumulated. Confinement lengthened. Exits never caught up. The vocabulary lagged behind the math. It always does.

Until the math catches up to you. That is why the spreadsheet matters. ICE publishes a detention statistics spreadsheet on its own website not out of transparency, but because a previous Congress wrote a disclosure mandate into law. ICE has complied reluctantly, delayed updates, and published selectively. Kocher has warned that the window is closing. But while it remains cracked, what you can see through it is damning. The crossing from processing to warehousing has already begun.

Start with scale, because scale amplifies every friction point downstream. More than 70,000 people are in ICE detention right now, across 225 facilities. The population has grown 75% in 12 months. That is not a surge passing through. It is a system swelling in place.

Then look at who is being held, because composition tells you what kind of force the system is applying. Nearly half, 48.4%, have no criminal conviction and no pending charges. They are held for the civil offense of being present without authorization. That is the government's own classification for the people in its own custody. Now look at the direction, because direction tells you what tomorrow will resemble. This year's detention growth comes almost entirely from people with no criminal convictions. The system is not detaining more criminals. It is detaining more people who have committed no crime, faster than at any point in its history. When that is the composition and that is the trajectory, the word "enforcement" stops describing what the system does. The word that fits is control.

Now follow the arithmetic, because the arithmetic tells you whether the system is clearing cases or accumulating bodies. Every month of this fiscal year, more people have entered that system than have left it. Every month. Net growth averages 3,000 per month. There is no month in which the system shrank.

Net growth matters because it proves the system is accumulating, not cycling. And once a system accumulates, the only question becomes which exits still function. Bond-posted releases account for 3-6% of all exits. For every 1 person released pending a hearing, 14.3 are deported. The system removes. It does not release. Read that ratio again. The system was built to take people in. It was never built to let them out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

That ratio points to the choke point. The court is what seals the system closed. Seven in ten detainees are tethered to a court system with 3.38 million pending cases and a bench that has lost more than 100 judges in the past year. Intake feeds backlog. Backlog extends detention. Extended detention drives growth. One loop. Self-reinforcing. Average bond wait times climbed 32% in four months. The door is not just narrow. It is closing while you watch.

Now here is the number that should end the argument. There are 7,252 people detained for more than six months. Among them are asylum-seekers who passed the government's own credible-fear screening. The government itself determined they have a legitimate claim to protection. Their average detention stands at 183 days and climbed 25% in three months. When the people with the strongest legal claims are held longer and longer, the paperwork may still say "processing." The calendar says captivity.

The calendar also tells you what captivity does when it becomes a baseline. Captivity at that scale does not hold still. It builds. If current conditions hold, the detained population will approach or exceed 100,000 by the end of 2026. The $45 billion appropriated through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds 135,000 beds through fiscal year 2029. Enacted law. Signed contracts. Revenue streams with lobbyists already defending them. Concrete does not dissolve because a press office changes its language. When a system starts building for those numbers, it is not preparing for a temporary spike. It is constructing a new baseline. The only question is what the system becomes once it reaches that capacity, and for that you have to look past the spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet was built to make sure you never see what comes next.

And when a system builds for long-term capacity, its failures stop being episodic. They become routine, and routine produces a record.

What remains is whether the rest of us decide that what is happening behind those walls is our problem. Not someone else's. Ours.

Here is what comes next.

Victor Manuel Diaz was arrested in Minneapolis. Eight days later he was found dead in ICE detention, hanging from a bed sheet. ICE sent his body not to the county medical examiner but to a military facility that does not release autopsy reports. When a government routes its dead to institutions it controls, the aim is not truth. It is the containment of the story.

Geraldo Lunas Campos died at Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss, asphyxiated while being restrained by five guards. He had asked for his medication. He was 55, Cuban, legally admitted to this country in 1996. The El Paso County medical examiner classified his death as a homicide. Two detainees who told the Washington Post what they witnessed received deportation notices days later. And it was not only the adults.

At Dilley, the South Texas Family Residential Center, the detained population tripled in three months. An estimated 800 children are inside. A measles outbreak was confirmed February 1. Members of Congress who visited described a 5-year-old as lethargic and depressed. A 5-year-old. In a facility the spreadsheet records as a line of numbers.

In the spreadsheet's categories, every one of these people occupies the same column. A man restrained until he stopped breathing is recorded the same way as a man who posted bail. A lethargic child is a digit in a headcount. An exit is an exit. A death is a departure. The system was not built to distinguish. It was built to count, and counting is not seeing.

What you see when you look past the count is containment masquerading as adjudication. A slow lengthening of stays. A piling up of people the system cannot move and will not release. A conversion of law into force so gradual that each day looks like the day before it, until you look back and realize the thing you are living inside has no name you are willing to say out loud.

Say it. The historical record offers no example of a detention system with these structural features that reversed course without public rupture, legal compulsion, or political defeat. None. Not one. The comparison is structural, not identical, and that is what makes it diagnostic. Structure determines what becomes possible and what becomes routine, long before anyone names the destination.

That is why the convergence matters. Every credible voice that has examined this system is arriving at the same conclusion from different directions. The analysts, the historians, the reporters, and the lawyers are standing in the same light for the first time. We were right. It is here.

One of those voices was not a professor or a journalist or a lawyer. He was a resident of Surprise, Arizona, and he stood at a city council microphone and invoked Ohrdruf. He was not performing history. He was reading the structure being built in his community and recognizing it in his bones. A windowless warehouse. A population detained for administrative reasons. A legal system too slow to process them. A government that builds faster than accountability can follow. He spoke because he understood the timing. You establish the record while the building is still going up, not after the concrete has set and the system has learned to call itself normal.

The record is being built. The full analysis is published as "The War Brought Home: The Recalibration" on my Substack. Kocher's biweekly analyses are at austinkocher.substack.com. The facility-level tool built by Kocher and Sawyer is at detentionreports.com. The AIC report is at americanimmigrationcouncil.org. Read them. Share them. They are what you hand to the person at your table who still thinks this is temporary.

But proof without witness is just a filing cabinet, and the witness is already underway. Lawyers have filed more than 18,000 habeas petitions and won nearly every case that reached a decision. Members of Congress have sued to inspect facilities their own government sealed from view. Communities in Surprise, Kansas City, and Shakopee have stood at microphones and said, "No." These people are not waiting for permission. They are building the record in real time.

They are also still the few. The system does not survive on the cruelty of its architects alone. It survives on three kinds of silence. Those who see it and approve. Those who see enough to be uncomfortable but have decided that discomfort is not obligation. And the rest of us, reading this right now, feeling the weight of it, not yet decided what that weight requires.

That middle is where every mass detention system in history found its operating room. Not in the enthusiasm of supporters, but in the silence of people who could see the wall going up from their kitchen window and chose to close the blinds. Every historical account includes the same figure. Never the architect or the guard. Always the neighbor who knew, who had every means to see, and who later claimed they did not.

The math is done. The facilities are mapped. The petitions are filed. The communities have shown what resistance looks like. What remains is whether the rest of us decide that what is happening behind those walls is our problem. Not someone else's. Ours.

No one else is coming. There is no cavalry over the hill. There is only the public, and the public is us. We are standing here, today, right now, in whatever light we have, with whatever we know, and it is enough to begin. Because when this is over, the record will not be in doubt. Only the witness will be.

Today, during my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins. I was reminded of a decades-old song by the Venezuelan singer Soledad Bravo, “Punto y Raya”—“The Dot and the Dash”:

Entre tu pueblo y mi pueblo hay un punto y una raya,
la raya dice no hay paso el punto vía cerrada

“Between your people and mine,” says the song, “there’s a dot and a dash. The dash says, ‘No entrance,’ and the dot, ‘The road is closed.'” Bravo goes on to say that, with all those dots and dashes outlining the borders of nations, a map looks like a telegram. If you walk through the actual world, though, what you see are mountains and rivers, forests and deserts, but no dots or dashes at all.

Porque esas cosas no existen, sino que fueron creadas
para que mi hambre y la tuya estén siempre separadas.

And she adds, “Because those things aren’t real, they were created so your hunger and mine would remain separated.”

Two Immigration Stories

Two morning news stories brought that song back into my mind, along with the human reality it expresses. Both appeared in the New York Times (and no doubt elsewhere). The first reported that the “United States population grew last year [between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025] at one of the slowest rates in its history.” Such a reduction in growth was in large part due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. In 2025, immigration rates to the United States dropped by 50% compared to the previous year. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump’s vicious and deadly deportation efforts accounted for only about 235,000 of the 1.5 million-person net decline in immigration.

Much more significant were the barriers to entry created under Trump, largely through the influence of Stephen Miller, the man Steve Bannon has labelled the president’s “prime minister.” Those include the effective closing of our southern border to undocumented arrivals. The administration has also made legal entry to the US much more difficult in a variety of ways, including:

• Instituting a $100,000 fee to be paid by employers seeking to hire professional workers under an H1-B visa;
• Erecting barriers to foreign students, leading to a 17% drop in new ones enrolling in American universities;
• Fully or partially restricting entry by the citizens (including refugees) of 19 nations: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen (full restrictions) and Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela (partial restrictions);
• Pausing all asylum applications by citizens of any nation in the world, leaving a backlog of 1.4 million cases;
• Capping all refugee admissions at 7,500 per year, a reduction of 94% from previous limits (with the exception, of course, of white South African farmers).

Why does it matter that the US population is growing more slowly while also aging? As the Times points out, this country “needs a large enough population of young workers and taxpayers to finance care for the nation’s older residents, whose numbers are swelling as the Baby Boom generation retires.” As any good Marxist will tell you, labor creates all wealth. In other words, a nation’s wealth (including that of its millionaires and billionaires) represents the accumulated value of work done by actual human beings. And that means an economy lacking enough workers will not be able to satisfy the grow-or-die logic of capitalism. Nor, if a reduction of the workforce is concentrated in jobs traditionally performed by immigrants, will that economy be able to feed its people. In other words, the stubbornly high price of groceries is not unconnected to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror campaign around the country.

Immigration reductions are part of the story of slowing population growth, but there’s another piece of the puzzle. During the Great Recession that began with a mortgage meltdown in 2008, Americans began having fewer children. In my world of higher education, we’ve known about this precipitous drop for a while. It’s been described as a “demographic cliff” that would become a (predictable) emergency for college enrollment 18-20 years later—that is, now. The entire higher education sector, which has grown steadily since the institution of the GI Bill at the end of World War II, now faces layoffs, retrenchment, and the closing of institutions.

What of the second story I read this morning? It concerned Spain, a country taking an entirely different approach to immigration. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in Spain, meeting there, in addition, of course, to Spaniards, farmworkers from Mali and other parts of francophone Africa, and Central American waiters and taxi drivers, who could use their native language in a new land. (I wonder if they sound to the Spanish much the way I do—like a hick from the faraway sticks.)

Like that of the United States, Spain’s population is aging, but its response is the opposite of the Trump administration’s. Our president and his minions have made it clear in word and deed not just that they want almost no new immigrants, but also which few they would consider accepting. “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?” the president asked last December. “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark,” he added. (Of course, that was before his spat with that country over his urge to take possession of Greenland.)

Unlike Trump’s crew, the Spanish government has issued a decree permitting undocumented migrants already in the country to apply for temporary residency, with permission to work legally there. Recognizing their contributions to fueling the major engines of the Spanish economy—agriculture, tourism, and construction—Spain has bucked a European and American tide of anti-migrant sentiment, the very one Trump sought to stoke with his remarks at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. Because of mass migration, he opined, “certain places in Europe are not even recognizable.” Critics of Spain’s new policy on the left argue that the country has been less welcoming to African migrants, but the socialist government of President Pedro Sánchez denies this (at least publicly).

Homesickness

All of this has left me thinking about the sacrifices people make when they choose, or are forced, to find a new home nation. Those of us in the US, even many who support immigrants, documented and otherwise, can fall into a trap of believing that, given the choice, everyone would rather live here. But it’s not that simple.

I spent some time in the Nicaraguan war zone in the mid-1980s. In spite of everything I loved about the early days of that country’s revolution, and how angry I became at the campaign of sabotage and torture my country unleashed to support the anti-government “contras,” there were days when I ached for the familiarity of home. The Greek roots of the word nostalgia refer to the literal pain of not being in one’s home, which describes just what I felt. I missed the everyday ease of knowing how to act without giving offense. I missed automatically understanding what was happening around me as well as, in a war zone, being able to distinguish the difference between people’s ordinary behavior and preparing for a possible attack. Most of all, I missed the feel of my native tongue in my mouth and its sound in my ears.

I knew that I would be going home in a few months, which set a limit to my homesickness. But I remember wondering then what it would be like to be a refugee, to know I’d never truly be home again. I thought about my friend Tiana, a Brazilian emigre with many years in the US, who used to talk about how she ached to hear Brazilian Portuguese. “Everything we say sounds so much more affectionate in Portuguese,” she told me. “We don’t just ask someone to pass ‘the butter’; we call it ‘the little butter,’ like a pet name.”

My grandfather must have felt that same nostalgic ache. The story my father told me was this: In 1910, after the Cossacks came to my grandfather’s village in what is now Ukraine and killed his youngest brother, the family hid him under the hay in a horse-drawn wooden wagon and had him driven out of town. He then made his way across Europe to Antwerp in Belgium, where he boarded a ship for New York City with nothing more than the name and address of a distant cousin in Norfolk, Virginia, who’d paid for his passage. He was just 18. He would then work for that cousin, almost like an indentured servant, until he eventually saved up enough money to bring the rest of his family to this country. I found evidence to support this tale when I visited the Ellis Island website and found his name and the cousin’s address in Norfolk listed in the manifest of the ship he took from Antwerp.

Cruelty Is the Point (of the Spear)

All of this is on my mind a lot these days, because most weeks I spend some time accompanying people to immigration court hearings or to their appointments with ICE. Each time I do so, I’m struck by the courage it takes to leave your familiar home, however dangerous it may have become, carrying that ache of nostalgia with you, maybe for the rest of your life. Last week, I waited outside an imposing building in downtown San Francisco, while a woman I’ll call Celia entered for an ICE check-in. The last time she’d done that, in October 2025, she hadn’t come out. Instead, she was sent to one of California’s privately-run ICE centers, the California City Detention Facility (CCDF), where she was imprisoned for the next two months.

California Sen. Alex Padilla visited that detention center recently. Having been to many jails and prisons over the years, he reported that, among other things, he expected complaints about issues like the quality of the food. “But I was shocked,” he said, “at the amount and intensity of the complaints about lack of medical care. Like, even in prisons, even under conditions of war, there [are] basic standards that we are supposed to hold and maintain. That is not happening.”

A New Yorker story by Oren Peleg about the CCDF supports Padilla’s claims. Detainees with gastric ulcers, prostate cancer, bloody urine, heart failure, and other serious medical problems told Peleg that they couldn’t get the medications or treatment they needed. It seems that CoreCivic, the company that runs CCDF, may be withholding medical treatment to encourage people to leave the country “voluntarily.” That may help explain why eight medical positions, including those of a physician and a psychiatrist, have gone unfilled for months. As Peleg writes:

But staffing issues do not fully explain the lack of basic medical care at California City. "They do it so you give up," Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was a detainee at California City from September to November, told me. When he arrived at CCDF, Santos Avalos recalls a consistent push by staff for detainees to sign away their rights and self-deport. Instructions for how to self-deport are displayed prominently near phones where detainees communicate with their lawyers. Santos Avalos and many of the detainees and attorneys I spoke to believe the lack of medical care is part of that push.

Peleg concludes that the “detention center is aiming to make conditions so terrible that detainees stop fighting and decide to leave.” The case of Santos Avalos is particularly searing. He lives with “chronic pain owing to a foot deformity caused by childhood cases of polio and Guillain-Barré syndrome,” but he was denied pain medication and forced to sleep in a top bunk at the detention center. He eventually chose to return to El Salvador, a country he’d left at the age of seven. As is true for many immigrants who came here as children, the home he now aches for is one in the United States.

Imagine the courage it took for Celia to smile, give herself a shake, and walk through those doors, knowing that she could very well end up back at CCDF. That day, however, we were lucky. After about 30 minutes, she emerged through the large bronze doors free—at least until her next appointment in a few months (and assuming there’s no Bay Area ICE surge in the meantime). I say “we” were lucky, because, while my fears are minor compared to hers and those of other immigrants like her, I’m always afraid that someone I’m accompanying will be taken away, leaving me angry and helpless.

Seeking Refuge

Like nostalgia, the word asylum has Greek roots. It suggests being free from someone else’s right of seizure, and so, by extension, “refuge.” When people come to this country seeking asylum, they are looking for refuge from horrors of all kinds: political oppression, familial or institutional violence, war, torture, you name it. An asylum is, by definition, a refuge, a safe place. That’s why institutions for people with mental illness used to be called “insane asylums.” (It’s been suggested that Donald Trump confuses the legal concept of seeking asylum with the term insane asylum, which is why he thinks that other countries are sending their mental patients here.)

An asylum should be a safe place, even if it may never feel like home. But in the first year of Trump’s second term as president, it’s become clear that, for those seeking, or even granted, asylum, the United States is no longer a safe place. Increasingly, as those two recent ICE murders in Minneapolis have shown, it’s not even a safe place for the rest of us.

In his poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost wrote:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

That’s what asylum is supposed to be in international law: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

In these dark and frightening days, I often find a short sentence bubbling to the top of my mind: “I just want to go home.” I’m not quite sure what it means, but I think that, like so many people in Donald Trump’s America, I’m looking for a place that doesn’t yet exist, a refuge we will have to build with our own hands.

The pattern for a bright red melt the ICE hat popped up in my news feed the other day, and I immediately knew I had to knit one. That the pattern for the freshly renamed hat reproduces the pointed, tasseled hats Norwegians wore in the 1940s as a symbol of protest against Nazi occupation; that it comes from a small woman-owned yarn store in Minnesota at a time when it feels we are not far away from the catastrophe of Fascism and Nazism; that the proceeds from buying the pattern go to organizations that protect immigrant rights. All of this made it even more urgent that I get hold of some red yarn and start casting my stitches without delay.

I learned to knit as a young child from a woman who had herself learned from a woman who had herself learned from a woman. In Italy, where I was born and grew up, this was the norm for girls, though boys were never taught the craft.

As a teen, I enjoyed the meditative quality of the repetitive work of making something grow, one knot at a time. I marveled at the magic of my hands transforming linear yarn into a multidimensional artifact. I learned the patience needed to make and unmake and remake something until I could get it not perfect but good enough. I absorbed the anti-consumerist message of frogging, or unraveling, an old sweater that no longer fits and reusing the yarn to make a new one. I grasped the necessity to create plans before jumping into action.

Then life got in the way, and I let it all fall to the side while I concentrated on becoming a scientist and relocating to the United States to work in biomedical research. My hands turned to handling pipettes and tubes rather than yarn and needles.

But symbols are important. They speak through history, they tell us we are not alone, they let us say things that words often cannot express.

But without my consciously knowing it, it became clear that the same skills were needed in the lab as in putting together a knitting project. There it was, the need to slow down and plan ahead, to repeat the same gesture over and over again, to reuse old concepts for new discoveries, to build step by step until a complex theory emerges from the simplicity of a single experiment. During those years, my brain might have forgotten the practicalities of knitting, but the underlying lessons were all there.

In early 2016, after more than 20 years in the US, I applied for citizenship, hoping to contribute my vote against what would become President Donald Trump’s first term. Bureaucracy was too slow to allow me the privilege to cast my vote that year, but it did not stifle my willingness to protest what I saw as a dangerous development.

The pussyhat, which became a symbol of the protest movement against President Trump, brought me back to knitting. I got hold of some bright pink yarn and needles at my local women-owned yarn store and discovered that my hands still had the muscle memory of what I had learned decades earlier on the other side of the world. I knit a bunch of pussyhats for myself and my friends, which we sported at the Chicago’s women’s march on the gorgeous, hopeful day that was January 21, 2017.

It’s now almost 10 years later, and here we are again, knitting hats against the dangers to our democracy. The hat’s color has changed, from the pink that represented women’s rights to the red now pointing to the defense of immigrants’ rights. As a woman immigrant, I need both and I am sure I will need more in the future.

The color of the hats might have changed over these years, but what has not changed is the core message: the symbolism of knitting as the slow work required to build activism and resistance, and the need to take the time to plan before acting. Knitting as the symbol of the patience it takes to build something meaningful and complex, one knot at a time. As the symbol of the need to constantly make and remake, to reuse what we built in the past to create something that fits the moment. And of knitting, just like quilting, embroidery, and other textile crafts, as reclaiming the role of women in history.

Yes, I know, a handmade hat will not determine the success of our resistance. Just like the pussyhats did not prevent a second Trump term, the melt the ICE hats by themselves will not stop the violence perpetrated against immigrants and those who try to protect them. But symbols are important. They speak through history, they tell us we are not alone, they let us say things that words often cannot express.

When I went to get my skein of yarn the other day, a young man wearing the same bright red hat I was planning to make was at the store, chatting with the owner, who had set aside a basket of skeins of red yarn. The young man told me, matter-of-factly, that he had just finished knitting the hat he was wearing and was there to buy some yarn to make a few more hats for his friends.

And there it was, the symbolism personified. A male knitter, unthinkable when I was a young girl, who let me know, without needing to explain it, that women’s history should not only be reclaimed but also shared with those who can treasure it. A red hat and a basket of red yarn that signaled, “You have nothing to fear here.” That told me that the accent that inflects my English was welcome, not despised. That I did not need the copy of the US passport I have started to take with me wherever I go. That we can do this, together, one knot at a time.

The most remarkable realization about Donald J. Trump’s rise to becoming America’s elected dictator is that it all came out of his MOUTH. Understanding that politics has become a performative exercise, Trump discovered that he could win the battle of words without having a record of achievement or any trusted experience in the business, government, or civic arena.

His lies sugarcoated his failed businesses. He wildly exaggerated his wealth (asserting that the Trump brand was worth $11 billion). He tried to explain away his numerous corporate bankruptcies as a business strategy, and blamed everyone for his commercial collapses—the banks, the workers, the students (Trump University, anyone?)—the government. This failed gambling casino czar never admitted he was ever wrong, ever sorry, and boasted he knew more than anyone because he was “right about everything.”

His MOUTH went into high gear during his introductory presidential debates with 16 Republican challengers during the 2016 GOP primaries. In retrospect, it is astonishing to see how, using his snarling mouth, he wrested control from those on the stage from the outset, targeting immigrants as invaders, criminals, rapists, and destroyers of America. Without rebuttals, he would repeat over and over again his sweeping bigotry.

Then Trump would move on to repeat how foreign countries have taken advantage of the US in trade, ignoring our Empire’s bleeding poorer nations, brain-draining their skilled people, and allowing giant US corporations to export millions of jobs to take advantage of serf labor and corruptible dictatorial regimes. He ignored the way the US-facilitated, corporate-driven trade deals pulled down worker and environmental protections in the US and devastated American workers and communities.

So many of Trump’s epithets fit him perfectly. So, throwing them back on him repeatedly rings the truth bell.

No matter, the MOUTH opened wider, slandering specific people, including selected politicians, judges, authors, reporters and editors, professors, and anyone who dared criticize his daily fabrications.

The MOUTH got major coverage in the mainstream media, including publishing his CAPITAL LETTERS OF CONDEMNATION, and because his targets were not given the right of reply, many people were inclined to believe him. This accelerated and entrenched his violent politics of intimidation. Again and again, he had the media field to himself, which deterred many of his critics from giving him a taste of his own medicine.

Trump—by far the most impeachable of presidents and the least negatively branded by his opponents—must wonder about his luck. Consider, he is a convicted felon; a chronic liar; a serial law violator; a repeated sexual abuser of women; a crooked extortionist; a hugely corrupt user of the White House to enrich the Trumpsters; a shatterer of the social safety net for tens of millions of Americans; a slasher of safeguards and scientific research against catastrophic climate violence and pandemics, leaving America rapidly defenseless; and a crazed suppressor of solar energy and wind power while boosting the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. Moreover, he pathologically breaks his promises and pledges, presiding over record waste, shutdowns, and censorship, ushering in the DARK AGES for America.

His dictatorial rule—“Nothing can stop me”—dishonors the American Revolution and violates the Constitution’s defenses against one-man rule. He epitomizes “big government” against the people, suppressing free speech; piling up huge deficits; advocating mass arbitrary arrests; and shutting down the enforcement of laws to protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of Americans, endangering them in both red and blue states.

A deficit-funded tax cutter for the already under-taxed rich, the powerful, and big corporations, he illegally takes tax revenue from necessities of the people and loads deficits on the backs of the next generation while starving the IRS budget and undermining the collection of taxes due. He spends or refuses to spend at his whim, flouting the exclusive appropriations authority of Congress. He is “a fascist to his core,” said his former chief of staff, retired general John Kelly, and a full-blown RACIST in what he says, does, and portends.

It should be easy to label Trump “America’s Number One Outlaw,” given all these dangerous, deranged delusions. He is openly and visibly wrecking and weakening our country rapidly with his entrenched dictatorship and his masked storm troopers who are on the rampage in large US cities.

He has hollowed out the federal government’s critical civil service except for the omnivorous military-industrial complex with its bloated budget that is devouring our best lifesaving programs abroad and at home, and fueling his Empire’s illegal military raids abroad.

Now he is starting to plan the subversion of our elections come November with fake ads and the attempted seizure of voter rolls and people’s personal identification data. Conducting elections is reserved exclusively to the states under our Constitution. Trump’s present obsession is rigging the midterm elections through selective voter suppression, especially as his poll numbers drop.

So, what can be done about Trump’s hyperactive MOUTH and his assault on our democracy? Fact-checking, as was done by a leading fact-checker for the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler. He now concedes that fact-checking did not deter Trump. In Trump’s first term, Kessler documented more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. He gave up this reporting last year and left the Post, concluding that Trump’s fabrications over reality—lies about serious matters such as claiming the unemployment rate was 42% when it was 4.9%, or asserting that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020—were not slowing down the FAKER IN CHIEF and his ditto-head network. However, setting the record straight has its own value in reasserting a truthful society.

There is another part of the MOUTH—the tsunami of invectives hurled at named public figures and his private victims. He calls prosecutors and judges “deranged” and “traitors.” Other opponents are described as “lunatics,” “communists,” “crooked,” “crazy,” “lying,” “corrupt,” “murderers,” and “low IQ.” The latter is mainly reserved for African Americans. Lately, he has gone berserk, instantly libeling the two innocent American citizens shot and killed in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents as “domestic terrorists.”

Then there are his disparaging nicknames of critics—that are too numerous to mention. Trump’s bullying expletives are relayed by the mainstream media to the broad public, which helped make Trump the Supreme Foul-Mouth Soliloquist. For years, to their detriment, the Democrats and other critics did not respond in kind and with frequency, with the truth on their side.

They could have defined him with memorable depictions such as Tyrant Trump, Dictator Donald, Crooked Donald, Deranged Donald, Lying Donald, Crazy Donald, Dangerous Donald, Corrupt Donald, Lunatic Donald, Cruel Trump, and Terrorist Trump. These on-point adjectives would have unsettled the thin-skinned Prevaricator-In-Chief, making him rethink what his daily false salvos are provoking in return. No more free rides would sober up his MOUTH. Hearing his own unsettling, repeated false salvos may make Trump decide to stop the daily froth from his MOUTH.

So many of Trump’s epithets fit him perfectly. So, throwing them back on him repeatedly rings the truth bell. It so happens that bullies, including Trump, stop their smears when they realize what they have provoked in return. Attending a Washington Nationals baseball game in his first term, the crowd started chanting “Lock Him Up,” a phrase he goaded his base to use for months against his political opponents. Trump and his followers lost their enthusiasm for this chant when he started getting a taste of his own medicine from anti-Trump crowds.

Since Minneapolis, some Democrats in Congress are describing Trump as “deranged,” and after the animal caricature of the Obamas, more Democrats are ending a much-delayed labeling of Trump as a many-sided RACIST. Because the Democrats have had a low expectation level for Trump and hitherto have satisfied themselves with derision, he has gotten away with the lies about his alleged successful economic policies, with enough voters—seeing no strong responders—to have him squeak through the 2024 election.

The one word Trump cannot stand to hear is a power neither he nor his toady six Injustices on the Supreme Court can control—IMPEACHMENT. We’re starting to hear it more these days from the Democrats, despite the political foolish leaders Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who are willing to remain silent on this one last resort against monarchy put exclusively in the hands of Congress by our far-seeing Founders. A majority of voters now appreciate the insights of our Founders. With Trump, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. In the coming weeks, the polls should show over 60% of Americans want Trump Impeached.

Leave it to Trump to dictate ever more crazed, distracting actions to save himself.

As with the GOP revolt in 1974 against former President Richard Nixon for transgressions far, far less than Trump’s daily crimes and constitutional usurpation, so too today’s congressional GOP may well move to protect their own sinking fortunes this November by unloading the baggage of the Trump Dump.

A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new United Nations doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” or R2P. The president hoped to avert a massacre by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rather than, as usual, coming in afterwards to count the dead and try to bring the malefactors to justice.

Obama intervened like a global police officer, following the letter of the (international) law. Eager to be seen as a “good cop,” the president even promised to “lead from behind.” It’s impossible to know if the US-led action did indeed prevent massive war crimes. However, the disastrous aftermath of that Libyan campaign—the summary execution of Qaddafi and a civil war that would kill tens of thousands—was yet more evidence that Washington’s attempts to police the world are quixotic at best.

Public support for the Libyan action was decidedly mixed, with criticism of the president coming from all sides of the political spectrum. On the left, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered that “we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.” Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation complained that Obama was too scrupulous in his adherence to the principles of R2P, which might only raise the bar for future US interventions.

Ah, the good old days, when the left and the right both took international law seriously enough to argue over how a US president should engage with it!

That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

Donald J. Trump has shown no such scruples. He considers international law nothing more than a trifling impediment by which the weak try to drag down the strong. He boasts that he didn’t even bother to consult the UN when pursuing his trumped-up peace plans and creating his laughably ill-named “Board of Peace.” He certainly didn’t consider international law recently when he bombed Nigeria, seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and threatened to annex Greenland. He may be the first American president to treat international law as if it were as fictional as intergalactic law.

By contrast, the only principle that Trump now invokes in his foreign policy is the infamous law of the jungle. He believes that power—its threat and its exercise—is all that matters for apex predators like the United States (and himself). The rest is just the chittering of potential prey.

“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” the amoral Trump told the New York Times in a recent (and terrifying) interview. “I don’t need international law.”

Global cop, then, would not seem to be a suitable aspiration for the likes of Donald Trump. Unlike Obama, he’s not interested in making sure that laws are observed and miscreants punished. Instead, Trump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. The duties of policing the planet—both the adherence to law and the expenditure of resources—simply don’t appeal to him.

“We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” Trump said back in 2018. “We want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country.”

That was the old Trump. The new Trump looks at things quite differently.

How Real Cops Operate

Maybe when you hear the expression “world’s policeman,” you think of Officer Clemmons on the once-popular children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: a genial upholder of community morals, but on a global scale.

Or maybe you’re like former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen who, in 2023, pined for an upright world policeman with superpowers and lofty principles. “We desperately need a US president who is able and willing to lead the free world and counter autocrats like President Putin,” he wrote. “The world needs such a policeman if freedom and prosperity are to prevail against the forces of oppression, and the only capable, reliable, and desirable candidate for the position is the United States.”

Donald Trump doesn’t want either of those jobs.

But let’s face it, that’s not how a large number of police officers actually operate. In 2025, police across the United States killed 98 unarmed people, the majority people of color. The misconduct of more than 1,000 dirty cops in Chicago—ranging from false arrests to the use of excessive force—cost that city nearly $300 million in court judgments between 2019 and 2022 alone, a pattern repeated at different magnitudes across the country and still ongoing, given the recent killings by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Elsewhere in the world, the police suppress dissent and fill prisons at the behest of dictators from Russia and North Korea to Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

In democracies, the police break laws, often with impunity; in autocracies, they follow unjust laws while systemically violating human rights.

A globocop embracing that kind of outlaw justice would disregard international law, make a mockery of institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and attempt to establish alternative bodies that privilege the powerful. That’s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.

The United States has long been tempted to play good cop-bad cop with the world. President Trump is simply taking things to the next distinctly psychopathic level.

Upholding the Law?

The first American president to dream of raising his country to the status of world policeman was Teddy Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner of New York City, he ardently believed that the federal government needed to use its constabulary power to intervene in society to maintain order, including suppressing labor unrest.

At the international level, like Trump, Roosevelt articulated his vision as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a 1904 address to Congress, he laid out his vision this way:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, 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.

Roosevelt believed that the United States—and other major powers—had to step in to right wrongs in the absence of robust international institutions. He proposed a global “League of Peace” to prevent wars and end conflicts. In the meantime, according to his problematic take on “civilized” behavior, Roosevelt justified US interventions not only in the Western Hemisphere but also farther afield. In fact, Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War where, in a secret agreement, he gave Japan control of Korea in exchange for US control over the Philippines.

Trump has borrowed much from Roosevelt in his approach to global affairs, now aptly known as the Donroe Doctrine. The “League of Peace” has become Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Roosevelt’s interventions in the Western Hemisphere to keep out European powers have become selective moves to push out the Chinese and (less so) the Russians in Venezuela and elsewhere. Roosevelt’s “civilizing mission” has become an equally abhorrent commitment by the Trump administration to advancing the interests of white people, as in the preferential treatment of white South Africans when it comes to immigration to this country. Like Roosevelt, Trump considered a “spheres of influence” swap with Russia, exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela, before ultimately rejecting the deal.

By now, all of America’s historical justifications for acting as the world’s policeman have fallen away, including the assertion of self-determination (Woodrow Wilson), the mobilization against fascism (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the crusade against communism (Harry Truman et al), and all talk of global democracy and human rights (the post-Cold War-era presidents). Trump has instead quite openly embraced Teddy Roosevelt, big stick and all, along with Roosevelt’s tendency to link the suppression of conflict at home and abroad. In Donald Trump’s world, federal immigration agents killing protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and Special Forces kidnapping Nicolás Maduro are two sides of the same impulse: the use of constabulary force to extinguish dissent and maintain a pyramidic order nationally and hemispherically, with Donald Trump on top of it all.

Like Roosevelt, Trump showed no regard for the principles of sovereignty in his intervention in Venezuela. Roosevelt didn’t think Filipinos were civilized enough for self-government and Trump, by insisting that Greenlanders must submit to US control, repeats the colonialist pattern. Trump’s major innovation: Speak loudly and carry that big stick.

The trajectory of the world order over the last 75 years has been in the direction of safeguards for weaker nations and controls on the exercise of power by stronger nations. An elaborate system of international agreements governing human rights has been designed to protect individuals and groups from the predations of states and corporations.

Trump wants to reverse that trajectory, just as he wants to roll back all the gains social movements have made within the United States, from civil rights and feminism to the victories of the LGBTQ community.

In TrumpWorld, those with the guns make the rules. They take Crimea, Gaza, and Greenland—at gunpoint, if necessary.

Profiting Off Policing

Corrupt cops have long been involved in protection rackets, shaking down gambling establishments, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Trump, a shady businessman at heart, thrills to that side of the globocop business. All of his “peace deals” cut him or his cronies in on a piece of the action.

Take, for instance, last year’s deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It includes a “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” that connects Azerbaijan with its enclave of Nakhichevan. In addition to naming rights, Trump negotiated as part of the agreement a TRIPP Development Company to construct the corridor, with the United States owning 74% of its shares for the first 49 years.

There’s no word yet on who the members of the US-Armenian steering committee will be for that project. If Gaza is any indication, however, it will be yet one more goodie to be distributed to friends and CEOs through Trump’s patronage system. The Gaza peace deal established a Board of Peace whose executive committee is dominated by Trump cronies, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, diplomatic emissaries Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, and Trump security advisor Robert Gabriel.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya—and there was much fault to be found—it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.”

An even more audacious profit-seeking deal was his recent multipoint proposal to end the war in Ukraine. In it, Witkoff and his Russian counterpart imagined a scenario in which US businesses would profit by gaining access to frozen Russian funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine, while also making billions from restarting business relations with Russia. Again, it’s not difficult to imagine who would profit from such arrangements. After all, Jared Kushner, architect of the Abrahamic Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, became a billionaire thanks to contacts in and investments from the Gulf States.

Trump is all about extraction. If he has his way, the Venezuelan operation will net billions of dollars in oil revenues for major US companies. Similarly, his obsession with Greenland is driven, at least in part, by his lust for the reputed mineral wealth that lies beneath that giant island’s snow and ice. The United States is dependent on imports of critical minerals, many now controlled by China. Like a cop who eyes the riches generated by someone else’s protection racket, Trump is desperate to muscle in to grab some of the profits.

Perhaps the most vulgar expression of his desire to run a global protection racket is that Board of Peace of his. Countries that want to have permanent seats on it have to pony up a billion dollars apiece. Warmongers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are welcome as members as long as they’re willing to fork over the money. On the other hand, Canada has been banned from it because, in a speech at Davos, its prime minister, Mark Carney, tried to rally the globe’s middle powers against the United States and other rule-breaking great powers.

Originally established to administer the Gaza peace deal, the board seems to have much greater ambitions. As its “president for life,” Trump has promised to cooperate with the United Nations. But the board’s membership, with the United States first among unequals, suggests a rival body with no interest in abiding by international law. Think of it as the UN’s evil twin and its creation as a signal that the United States has officially gone rogue cop.

The Future of US Foreign Policy

Not everyone in the MAGAverse is happy with America as a globocop.

Some isolationist remnants of the Republican Party have criticized the operations in Venezuela, though not enough to make a difference in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump’s greatest congressional advocate, parted ways with the president on a number of issues, including the Venezuela intervention, and decided to step down early from her position rather than face his political vengefulness.

Trump has insisted that, the attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty notwithstanding, the United States is not at war with that country. He ruled out any alternative interpretations of MAGA doctrine. “MAGA is me,” he said. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Trump has made some noises about a spheres-of-influence approach with his Donroe Doctrine, prioritizing US control over the Western Hemisphere. He has been happy to reward Russia for its “policing” of neighboring Ukraine, and he’s been ambiguous at best about coming to the defense of Taiwan, should China threaten it. Indeed, he has been more than happy to delegate such responsibilities to others, whether it’s Israel in the Middle East or acting president Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. In a complex world as full of nukes and conventional missiles as the United States is of handguns, globocops need their deputies.

However, neither isolationism nor the idea of global spheres of influence has truly captured Trump’s imagination. In the first year of his second term, he has instead driven a stake through the very idea of isolationism by launching military operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. Nor has he shown any deep interest in confining his ambitions to the Western Hemisphere. Instead, he has continued to build the Pentagon budget to counter China, while fancying himself a peacemaker across the Global South. Wherever his critics continue to dance beyond his grasp, as in Cuba and Iran, and wherever valuable resources can be extracted for personal and political gain, as in Greenland and the Congo, Trump will try to press any military advantage he might have.

For all of us who found fault with the “good cop” approach of Obama in Libya—and there was much fault to be found—it’s once again time to get a taste of America as the “bad cop.” So far, Trump’s targets have been weak (Venezuela) or easy to attack (Iran, after Israel destroyed its air defenses). The grave danger is that, encouraged by such “successes,” Trump may move on to larger targets like China or the 60% of American citizens who oppose his policies.

Cops, protected by their badges and their guns, think they’re invincible. Taken to court over their crimes and corruption, they suddenly discover that they’re not in fact above the law. Trump is now turning the United States into a “bad cop.” Let’s hope that he learns a lesson about the limits of his power before he goes apocalyptically rogue.

The Trump administration’s total blockade on oil imports to Cuba is jeopardizing the lives of millions across the island. It is resulting in severe blackouts that are disrupting food production, hospitals, schools, public transport, and tourism.

Despite this, the people of Cuba remain defiant. As Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel remarks: “The collapse lies in the imperial mindset, but not in the mindset of the Cubans. I know we are going to live through difficult times, but we will overcome them together with creative resilience.”

Cuba Is Not A Threat—Trump Is

President Donald Trump alleges that Cuba poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” for two reasons. First, its relationship with “hostile countries” and “transnational terrorist groups,” including Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas. Second, Trump alleges that Cuba’s “communist ideas, policies, and practices” are a threat to the region and endanger the lives of its citizens.

Neither of these is the real reason, however. In January 2026, Trump praised Canada’s trade deal with China as “a good thing.” He told reporters, “If you can get a deal with China, you should do that.” While Trump did threaten retaliatory tariffs against Canada a few days later, his own administration has boasted about the “historic agreement” it reached with China on trade. Trump himself raves about his “extremely good” relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He even invited Xi to join his Board of Peace.

For Trump, colonialism is not solely about exploitation and systematic theft—it is a means of reshaping the world in his self-obsessed image.

Likewise, Trump purports to have a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has described Putin as a “genius” and a “strong leader,” and their relationship as “very, very good.” He even praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. During a radio interview, Trump said: “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.” Despite his war crimes, Trump also invited Putin to be part of the Board of Peace.

Clearly, Trump has no issue forming close relationships with “hostile countries.”

Concerns about destabilizing the region or harms to the Cuban people are also false flags. The Trump administration has issued illegal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed at least 130 people; violated international law by invading Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro; threatened several nations in the region including Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Greenland, Canada, as well as Cuba and Venezuela. Compared to Cuba, the Trump administration is, in orders of magnitude, a significantly greater threat to regional stability.

Moreover, Trump does not care whatsoever about the well-being of Cubans. If he did, he would not have undone President Barack Obama’s attempts at normalizing US-Cuba relations. If he cared, then his administration would not have paused a humanitarian program that allowed Cubans to enter the US and remain here legally for two years. Rather than protecting a group that has overwhelmingly supported him, the Trump administration is mass deporting Cubans back to the very country it is now economically asphyxiating.

This vile disregard, however, is not surprising—Trump does not care about global stability. He does not care about American citizens. And he especially does not care about the peoples of Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American countries.

No, Trump’s blatant act of global terrorism against Cuba is not about national security, communism, or saving lives. This act of deprived cruelty masquerading as foreign policy is about narcissism, private interest, and personal grievances.

Donald Trump: Where Narcissism Meets Colonialism

According to a US official, Trump believes that successfully ending the Castro era would cement his legacy by accomplishing what presidents since John F. Kennedy have failed to do. This is among his chief motivations.

Whether it’s adding his name to the Kennedy Center, building the “Arch de Trump,” or whining about the Nobel Peace Prize he thinks he deserves, Trump is obsessed with himself and his legacy. At Turning Point USA’s 2025 AmericaFest Conference, conservative commentator Jesse Watters recounts asking Trump about why his “big, beautiful ballroom” is so extravagant—“four times the size of the White House.” Watters told the audience, “[Trump] said, ‘Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself—because no one else will.’”

For Trump, colonialism is not solely about exploitation and systematic theft—it is a means of reshaping the world in his self-obsessed image. In his mind, colonized lands are monuments to his greatness and ego; another property upon which he can stamp his name and expand his golden empire; further proof that only he can bring peace and order to the world.

Trump’s narcissism is why he labelled himself the “Acting President of Venezuela” after his administration kidnapped Maduro—a blatant violation of international law reduced to self-aggrandizement.

This is why he posted a video of an ethnically cleansed “Trump Gaza” filled with palm trees, luxury buildings, and, of course, a towering golden statue of himself. Mass displacement and genocide are simply steppingstones in his pursuit of more self-praise.

Cuba will be no different. He will torture Cuba in the hopes of forcing them to submit to his will and cement his legacy. To force them to “make a deal, before it is too late.” For Trump, all this cruelty is business as usual. As he puts it, “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

Marco Rubio’s Childhood Fantasy

That said, Trump’s is not the only ego at play here. Reportedly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is deliberately blocking negotiations between high-level officials from Havana and Washington. This, despite both Trump and Díaz-Canel insisting that they are open to talks.

Rubio has long since advocated for total regime change in Cuba. In his memoir American Son, Rubio writes about the profound impact his Castro-hating grandfather and President Ronald Reagan’s militant anti-communism had on his political beliefs. He writes that, as a child, “I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba.” When applying to law school, his personal essay expressed his “intention to use [his] law degree one day to help construct a new legal and political system for a free Cuba.”

We were too late to stop Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela; but we can still save Cuba. From Argentina to Canada, we must unite.

Throughout his life, Rubio has expressed the same sentiment: For Cuba to be free, the Castro regime must end and be replaced with a new political system. For Rubio, Díaz-Canel is no different than Castro. As he sees it, “The dictatorship of Díaz-Canel follows the same tactics as the Castro regime, censoring and repressing members of the opposition.” As such, there can be no negotiations: “Every concession made to the [Díaz-Canel] regime is a betrayal of those who are fighting for freedom on the island.” Thus, Rubio opposed Obama’s attempts at normalizing relations with Cuba, warned against President Joe Biden recommitting to the “failed Obama Administration policy of rewarding Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel,” and is now actively blocking negotiations between the two nations. For Rubio, there is only one way forward. The current regime must end, and the era of President Rubio must begin—an illicit inauguration that Trump has already endorsed.

Beyond his own twisted personal desires, many of Rubio’s constituents and backers are also anti-Castro and anti-communist. As journalists Ryan Grim, Noah Kulwin, and José Luis Granados Ceja with Drop Site News write, “If Trump successfully lands a deal with the Cuban government that Rubio would have to sign off on, Rubio would be left to either betray his life’s cause and that of his backers in Miami, or resign in protest.”

The stakes are much higher and far more personal for Rubio than Trump. But in the end, neither care about Cuba nor its people. For Trump, regime change in Cuba will cement his legacy. For Rubio, it will mark the culmination of his childhood dream. In their equation, they win and Cuba—like Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, Guam, and so many nations before it—loses its independence and freedom.

America vs. Trump

Now is the time for nations across the Americas and the Caribbean to band together against Trump’s vile Donroe Doctrine. President Claudia Sheinbaum should be praised for her efforts to aid Cuba, but this is not a fight Mexico can win alone. Nor should it have to; this impacts all of us.

Let’s be clear: Regardless of current US relationships, no country is safe from Trump’s colonial aggression and narcissistic whims. Whether it’s betraying the Kurds in Syria or threatening NATO allies, Trump will do whatever it takes to satisfy his own ambitions. Trump’s allies in the region, like Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader and Argentine President Javier Milei, would do well to remember this.

We were too late to stop Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela; but we can still save Cuba. From Argentina to Canada, we must unite. We cannot allow ourselves to be at the mercy of Trump’s delusions of grandeur. We must act now to save Cuba.

“While there is broad support across the political spectrum for removing criminal aliens...”

Screech! My connection to the words I’m reading grinds to a sudden halt, an inner alarm goes off, I look away from my computer screen and briefly clutch my soul. Oh God...

The words are from a Forbes article highly critical of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deporter-in-chief. I was mostly in sync with it as I read. Indeed, the above sentence continues, pointing out that “the vast majority of individuals in the country without legal status have not committed serious crimes.”

Yeah, absolutely. So what’s my problem here? It amounts to this: A false, unchallenged assumption quietly emerged, manifested in the word “aliens.” Do we support the rights of aliens or do we just want them (and their children) dragged out of the United States, especially if they’re non-white? Apparently, this is the context of the major debate of the moment. Who belongs here? What remains unquestioned in the article is the significance of an imaginary line, known as the border, without which there would be no such thing as aliens. The line separates “us” from the rest of the world and severely trivializes the scope of the debate.

My call in this moment is for humanity, especially those who define themselves as Americans, to stand up not just to Trump and Miller and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but to the false reality of nationalism itself.

But a planet divided into nations is just the way things are, right? This is certainly not questioned politically. But my scream in this moment is for the media, mainstream or otherwise, to look beyond the assumed certainty of nationalism, however discomforting that may seem, and acknowledge that the human race has no “aliens.”

The larger reality here—understood by anyone with a brain—is that this is one planet. One planet! We are a collective whole. All of us are connected. I do not write these words with naïveté. Knowing this is simply the starting point, as we continue to evolve. I’m not downplaying the need we all feel for security, just eliminating the word “national” from the phrase.

As Karabi Acharya writes: “In fact, over half of all national borders were created in the 20th century. The creation of borders is for the most part a sad history marked by conflict, colonialism, and war. Borders create unnecessary and harmful barriers not just between people and resources but also ideas.”

Yeah, war—in the nuclear age. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its metaphorical Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, as close to the zero hour as it’s ever been. The possibility of nuclear war plus the continuing reality of climate change ought to push all of us beyond the borders of our minds. These matters will only be solved collectively: trans-nationally. And we must solve them.

Acharya goes on:

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is a moral imperative to be open to new ideas from around the world and to question the origins of old ideas we take for granted. Global learning provides an important inflection point to question the morality of how and who decides what knowledge others see and share.

Not only have borders been historical constructs of wealth and power; they unfairly reflect whose ideas have mattered, what languages have been preferred. As places throughout history have been colonized, people were told that their own traditions don't matter and what’s important, what is to be prioritized, are the norms and concepts of the colonizers. Part of the process of setting up borders includes erasing not only people but other knowledge traditions.

I understand that national governments need borders to continue to exist, at least as they understand themselves. The world’s governments—in particular, the American government—need the help of we the people. My call in this moment is for humanity, especially those who define themselves as Americans, to stand up not just to Trump and Miller and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but to the false reality of nationalism itself. How do we open the borders of this planet? How do we start acknowledging, and healing, the consequences of two-plus millennia of colonial land theft? How do we start valuing—and learning from—those who are different from us?

What if we began opening our borders? What if we began governing nonviolently... with respect and awe for our world and its occupants? Perhaps we’d start freeing ourselves from the suicidal hell we’re caught in today. We’d definitely start pushing the hands of the Doomsday Clock backwards.

President Donald Trump hailed "historic" the agreement signed in Washington on December 4, 2025, between President Félix Tshisekedi of Congo and Rwanda's President Paul Kagame. Brokered by the US administration, this Washington Accord was supposed to end the devastating conflict in Congo that has taken millions of lives over the past three decades.

Alongside this deal, a Strategic Partnership Agreement was signed between the US and Congo. The agreement gives the US preferential access to Congolese mineral reserves, requires Congo to amend its laws and potentially its Constitution, and gives Washington a level of control over the management of mining resources through the establishment of a joint mechanism involving the two governments.

In October 2025, analyzing the pre-accord signed in June 2025 and a Regional Economic Integration Framework between Rwanda and Congo negotiated in the following months, the Oakland Institute released Shafted: The Scramble for Critical Minerals in the DRC. The report raised serious concerns about US maneuvers to control Congolese critical minerals under the guise of bringing peace to the region.

The Partnership Agreement signed in December makes these concerns legitimate. The Congolese people have been sidelined, with an agreement focused on extraction and exploitation of critical minerals and a peace deal that shockingly overlooks the need for justice and for holding perpetrators accountable. Soon after the signing of the deal, the US mining firms were already striking deals, while promises of peace and security remain wishful thinking with Rwanda and its proxy M23 continuing to occupy large swaths of land in mineral-rich eastern Congo. As a matter of fact, fighting has continued to rage with a fresh offensive launched by Rwanda and M23 in the days that followed the agreement, resulting in thousands of people killed and the capture of the strategic city of Uvira.

The lawyers and human rights defenders who have filed the case are urging the mobilization of Congolese people to preserve the sovereignty of their nation and calling on the international community to support their action and defend international law at a time it is under unprecedented threat.

While the prospect of peace remains uncertain, the government of Congo has not waited to take significant steps in the implementation of the agreement. Mid-January, it provided Washington with a shortlist of state-owned assets—including manganese, copper-cobalt, gold, and lithium projects—available to US investors. A major deal was announced soon after with US government-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium acquiring 40% of Glencore’s DRC copper and cobalt.

Congolese may legitimately wonder whether they are being fooled by the deal, seeing their mineral resources offered to the “peacemaker” whereas Rwanda, undeterred, continues its aggression and the extraction of Congolese minerals in Eastern Congo. This has led some to act.

On January 21, 2026, a collective of Congolese lawyers and human rights defenders filed a petition at the Constitutional Court of the Congo to challenge the constitutionality of the agreement. The lawyers argue that the partnership violates the Constitution since amendment of laws or the Constitution requires a democratic review and approval by the Congolese parliament or citizens through referendum. Specifically, it contravenes Article 214 of the Congo's Constitution, which sets out the ratification process for international agreements that involve amending national laws. The petition also contends that the agreement violates Articles 9 and 217, which uphold the principle of Congo’s sovereignty over natural resources, and Article 12, which upholds the principle of equality before the law.

According to Attorney Jean-Marie Kalonji, one of the plaintiffs: "By filing this case with the Constitutional Court, we are assuming our responsibility as Congolese citizens to protect the sovereignty of our country and safeguard our patrimony for future generations." The lawyers and human rights defenders who have filed the case are urging the mobilization of Congolese people to preserve the sovereignty of their nation and calling on the international community to support their action and defend international law at a time it is under unprecedented threat.

This legal challenge has major significance for Congo, a country that has large reserves of several critical minerals, such as copper and cobalt, and a long history of mineral extraction plagued by corruption, embezzlement, and predatory wars. The country’s mineral wealth has hardly benefited its people—still lagging behind most countries in terms of human development indicators such as access to health, education, and other standards of living. It is therefore totally legitimate for citizens to stand up for their basic rights and ensure that mining operations actually benefit the population.

Beyond Congo, this legal action has implications for other mineral-rich countries as global competition for the control of critical minerals intensifies and projections indicate steep increases in demand as well as shortfalls to be expected for some key minerals such as copper and lithium as early as the 2030s. Whereas China dominates both extraction and refinery activites, the US and other industrialized countries have set the supply of critical minerals as a vital priority for so-called green technologies as well as defense.

The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that mining has “severe environmental impacts” with “often […] few if any redistributive benefits for communities in regions where extraction takes place,” and instead of local development, the extraction of strategic minerals is often linked to violence, human rights abuses, and conflict. This legal challenge in the Congo highlights the stakes for millions of people around the world, including many Indigenous communities, who find their lands targeted by big powers for mineral extraction. It is essential that their rights are recognized and that they have a say in the future of their land—which is intertwined with their own future.

Ted Gioia has a popular Substack called “The Honest Broker.” Although, as an author, his books tend to focus on music and popular culture, he writes eloquently about a wide range of topics and offers insightful commentary about the global forced march toward technocratic lifestyle and governance that we’re now immersed in. In one posting, “25 Propositions about the New Romanticism,” Gioia posits that there is a new movement afoot mimicking (or, better, reflecting) the Romantic Period of the 18th century. This movement coincided with the first industrial revolution and, as a counterweight to that trend, saw a great shift toward impulses to re-enchant the world via poetry, art, and music, and reconnecting to nature. Gioia writes:

More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society. Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress. Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone. Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment? As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180° shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse. Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

He goes on to posit that we’re poised for a return to that modality and points out that the notion of a New Romanticism has spread “like a wildfire,” citing influencers such as Ross Barkan, Santiago Ramos, and Kate Alexandra. Gioia sees what he describes as cultural trends at the leading edge of this transformation citing popular TV series such as Pluribus and Yellowstone. But is this really happening or has Gioia just stumbled on a pocket of cultural resistance and pushback against technocracy that’s primarily a pocket of unified self-expression rather than something representing deep and substantive cultural and societal change?

The Technocratic Takeover: Alive and Well

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics, our way of life, and our relationships to each other as social beings. They’re becoming the advance guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of governance—the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected Big Tech overlords operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view.

The tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life—and indeed our own biological substrate—that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go this time around.

I certainly hope that Gioia is right about a major cultural rejection of technocracy. There are indeed hopeful signs. The fundamental human values that make societies work and cohere have gotten steadily shunted aside by the technocracy takeover of culture and education—essentially becoming a new value system. This behind-the-scenes power shift has been amplified and compounded by an over-emphasis in education on STEM, corporate modalities, neo-Darwinian utilitarianism, and the continuing erosion of the humanities that began decades ago. So yes, without a doubt, we need to get “back to the garden” and return to a wider and deeper set of the kind of core values that ultimately hold societies together. Without positive shared values, societies become rudderless and fall into a kind of benighted chaos. All we need to do is look around.

All of that said, in his Substack post, Gioia missed an important component of this transition—if indeed it is coming to pass (and we can only hope). Throwing off technocracy and emerging from our involuntary digital cages also means reconnecting with the natural world, a fundamental human relationship that’s now increasingly mediated by digital devices. The need for this reconnection, this existential about-face, was a key aspect of the romanticism of the 18th century. In literature, for example, the Romantic poets were rather obsessed with it as poet Robert Bly points out in his stellar book News of the Universe (I highly recommend it.) In allowing our daily life to be shifted into an increasingly claustrophobic and self-reinforcing digital cage, we have abandoned not only our connection to the natural world but also to each other. Connecting to nature also lets us tap into the mystery of the universe, which despite human folly remains nonetheless fully intact even if absurdly rationalized by scientific reductionism. Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein were both scientists who could appreciate this. We need more like them.

The Robot Wars: No Longer Sci-Fi

In the 80s and 90s, science fiction movies and literature commonly offered themes of “robot wars” where humans were pitted against the dominance of an ugly dystopian society. Will this be our future courtesy of Elon Musk and his cohorts? Or, alternatively, will there be a mass uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information? We humans are known for our adaptability and stoicism in difficult situations such as world wars and major disasters. That stoicism and sense of “accepting what can’t be changed” seems to be part of our psychological and perhaps even biological makeup. But the tech takeover is such a massive appropriation of our social, political, and cultural life—and indeed our own biological substrate—that stoic acceptance might not be the way to go this time around.

In the next few years, it most certainly will have finally dawned on the mass of humanity, especially in advanced Western nations, that something is badly amiss. Many will realize at a visceral level that their everyday lives are trapped in a claustrophobia-inducing closed-circuit technocratic system and control grid that robs them of autonomy and freedom while purporting to do the opposite.

I totally agree that a new romanticism is a very necessary sea change at this strange time in human history but am perhaps a bit less optimistic that it will happen—at least over the next few years. The forces of technocracy seem too powerful at the moment to be countered because so many of the necessities of everyday life depend on our attachment to this digital realm. This includes paying bills, financial maintenance, government-related necessities such as getting a license renewed, and so much more. Further, technological dependency keeps getting ratcheted up by the self-appointed masters of the universe represented by Big Tech’s unchallenged and ever-growing power. That said, I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this and Gioia is right. Time will tell.

By Ralph Nader February 13, 2026 The most remarkable realization about Donald J. Trump’s rise to becoming America’s elected dictator is that it all came out of his MOUTH. Understanding that politics has become a performative exercise, Trump discovered that he could win the battle of words without having a record of achievement or any…

Laura Dogu, newly appointed US envoy to Venezuela, is described by the Los Angeles Times as an appropriate choice because she “navigated crises” in Nicaragua and Honduras during periods of “social and political volatility.” What the LA Times fails to add is that it was precisely Dogu’s job to create crisis and volatility in both countries.

In Latin America she is widely regarded, for good reason, as the “US ambassador of interventions and coups.”

The LA Times appears entirely relaxed about a US diplomat’s job being to meddle in the internal politics of a country whose president the US has just kidnapped in an operation resulting in the murder over 100 people and involving the bombing of key public buildings and health facilities.

Dogu enters the fray “leveraging her experience with authoritarian regimes” and her “deep Latin American expertise.” The LA Times implies that her job is likely to be proactive, looking for ways to ease out the Chavista government and replace it with one more to Washington’s liking, even if that takes a while.

Nicaragua

Signaling that this is the case, the LA Times reporter asked right-wing opposition figures from Nicaragua for their opinions of Dogu, presumably on the basis that she is charged with working with similar quislings in her new role. Predictably, they praised her, admitting to having had clandestine meetings with her when she was based in the country and noting her public support for opposition groups.

Dogu was US ambassador in Managua from 2015 until October 2018, a period coinciding with the preparations and then the coup attempt that began in April 2018 and was defeated in July. At the start of her term, she had relatively cordial relations with the government. That changed after President Daniel Ortega was reelected in 2016 with an increased popular mandate. It became clear to Washington that electoral means to oust the Sandinistas lacked sufficient public support.

Instead, as the State Department admitted, the US concentrated their efforts on “civil society” groups led by opposition figures, “limiting their contact” with the elected government. It later emerged that, in the run-up to the April 2018 insurrection, millions of dollars were spent promoting such groups.

When the coup attempt fizzled, President Ortega explicitly identified Laura Dogu, as Washington’s representative, of being “the leader and financier of this conspiracy, the destruction, the fires, the torture, the disrespect for human dignity, the desecration of corpses, and other acts carried out with cruelty against all Nicaraguans marked by the great sin of being Sandinistas.” Within three months, Washington replaced her.

Honduras

In Honduras, Xiomara Castro of the progressive Libre Party became president in January 2022. Laura Dogu arrived in Tegucigalpa as US ambassador just three months later.

The Center for Political and Economic Research (CEPR) catalogued some of her egregious interferences including with energy and tax reforms, creation of a Constitutional Tribunal, replacement of the attorney general, and the building of a prison.

By 2023, Dogu was already drawing criticism from the Honduran foreign minister, who asked her to “stop commenting on internal Honduran matters.” He criticized her again for similar reasons, in December 2024, after she held a series of meetings with NGOs critical of the government.

In August 2024, President Castro complained about Dogu, after the US diplomat criticized Honduran officials for meeting with their counterparts in Caracas. The ambassador characterized this meeting as “sitting next to a drug trafficker."

Then after a conflict with Dogu over Honduras’s extradition treaty with the US in September 2024 and a spate of rumors about the president’s family, Castro warned that a coup attempt was underway. Dogu concluded her term in Honduras before the presidential elections at the end of 2025, where the US did, in fact, decisively interfere.

Venezuela

The LA Times ingenuously commented that Dogu was “an unusual pick signaling a strategic shift in US policy.” It was neither. US policy remains regime change, but the tactics have shifted in response to the successful and unified resistance of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Venezuelan analyst Francisco Rodriguez noted: “Laura Dogu presented credentials as diplomatic representative of the US to the government of [acting President] Delcy Rodríguez today, that would count as an act of formal recognition.”

As for Dogu being “an unusual pick,” her record, as shown above, suggests a continuation of business as usual. CEPR put it bluntly: “Dogu’s appointment suggests that the administration sought someone with experience in aggressively interfering in a host country’s domestic affairs.”

There is nothing unusual about that. Between 1898 and 1994, the US perpetrated coups and government changes in Latin America at least 41 times. Dogu now presides over just another such attempt. The only reasons Washington itself hasn’t suffered a coup, Latin Americans quip, is because there is no US embassy there.

Far from breaking with the past, Dogu actually invokes it: “We never left the Cold War in Latin America,” she said.

Dogu recently tweeted: “Today I met with Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez to reiterate the three phases that @SecRubio has outlined regarding Venezuela: stabilization, economic recovery and reconciliation, and transition.”

The comment drew an immediate repudiation from the aforementioned Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly. The failure by Dogu to refer to him and acting President Delcy Rodríguez by their formal titles is a disrespectful snub. He characterized her remarks as “diplomatic blackmail” and a “colonial roadmap.” The Venezuelan leadership may have a gun held to their heads, but they continue to respond militantly.

For now, Dogu is concentrating on the “stabilization and economic recovery” phases of the Rubio dictate. The more contentious third phase will be “transition.”

In a telling pivot from its previous myth-making that the “opposition [is] more unified than ever,” the LA Times now admits that Dogu is just the right official to be foisted on Venezuela because of her experience navigating “fragmented opposition movements.” The opposition to the Chavista government has long been fractious despite hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into “democracy promotion” by the US.

Contrary to the myths in the corporate press, María Corina Machado and her hand-picked surrogate Edmundo González Urrutia may not be the people’s choice in Venezuela. No lesser authority than Donald Trump himself commented that Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

If the claims that the opposition won the July 2024 presidential by a 70% landslide were credible, why didn’t González present his evidence when summoned by Venezuela’s supreme court? Failing to do so left no constitutional basis for him to be declared the winner.

But that was the whole point of the Washington’s interference in backing an astroturf opposition with more traction inside the Beltway than in Caracas. The US objective was not to win the contest but to delegitimize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The deadly sanctions—illegal unilateral coercive measures—were explicitly designed as collective punishment to erode Maduro’s authority with his compatriots.

And when that failed and the Bolivarian Revolution prevailed, Washington escalated further, culminating in the January 3 kidnapping of a constitutional head of state. That military action formed part of its hybrid war, accompanied by sustained demonization of Maduro before the US public.

Conclusion

Laura Dogu’s appointment ultimately signals not innovation but continuity: a recalibration of tactics in pursuit of the same objective that has defined US policy toward the Bolivarian Revolution for decades—regime change through pressure, attrition, and delegitimization. Whether branded as “stabilization,” “economic recovery,” or “transition,” the underlying premise remains that Venezuela’s political future should be shaped in Washington, not Caracas.

Yet the record in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Venezuela itself suggests that external coercion has limits. Dogu’s mission will test not only Venezuela’s resilience but also the durability of the unremitting US strategy of Latin American interventions.