There are growing signs that the United States may be on the verge of another major financial crisis, one that could start in the $3 trillion private credit market, which is already seeing significant turmoil, before spreading to other sectors.

Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson to discuss the serious problems on Wall Street. Hudson warned that the US economy is built on a Ponzi scheme that depends on continuing to pour money into a bloated, bubbly financial system based on unsustainable speculation, not industrial production.

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(Introduction)

BEN NORTON: There are more and more signs that we may be on the precipice of another major financial crisis.

The former CEO of the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs warned in an interview on Bloomberg that he can smell another financial crisis on the horizon.

Where exactly could this crisis come from? Well, some financial analysts are worried about the private credit industry in the US.

This has exploded in recent years, because after the 2008 crash, banks were more heavily regulated. So more and more firms on Wall Street began to lend to private companies, and the private credit industry ballooned.

It is now a $3 trillion industry, yet it is not regulated. And many of these private credit firms have given bad loans to bad companies that are now defaulting.

We published a short video explaining the issue with the private credit industry and the fears of a new financial crisis. However, that video is just a brief introduction to the problem.

I thought it would be important to go into further detail explaining the very real danger here. And I thought the perfect guest to interview to help us understand this would be the economist Michael Hudson.

Michael is the author of many books, including Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy.

So here we’re going to play some highlights of our interview, and then we’ll go straight to the discussion.

(Highlights)

MICHAEL HUDSON: You then begin to have private capital take over companies and make money by essentially looting them.

Thames Water in England is typical how you loot a company. Hospitals, for instance, were a target of these private equity companies.

Private equity proceeded to bankrupt whole swaths of the American economy. And, new word was added to the English language: enshittification — just cutting back the quality of what companies were doing, slashing expenses, working labor harder, making them work overtime.

…

So the financial system has been turned into a predatory system. And all of this enormous growth in financial wealth since 2009 has accrued to the financial and real-estate sector, dominated by the wealthiest 10% of the population.

40% of the American population doesn’t have any savings at all. They’re living on the brink.

And now the costs are going up. They’re having to fall further and further behind on their credit-card debt, their personal debt, their automobile debt, student loans especially.

…

But as long as the credit-card companies will lend the consumers the money, the credit, to remain current on their obligations, and not have to pay penalty fees, then you’re going to be able to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

A Ponzi scheme is you need more and more money paid into it to keep the exponential growth rate growing.

(Interview)

BEN NORTON: Michael, thanks for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure having you.

Let’s talk about the real possibility of a new financial crisis. If you read financial media outlets like Bloomberg and the Financial Times, they have been warning a lot recently of the possibility of a new financial crisis.

It could potentially start in the private credit industry, which is seeing all of these problems and rising default rates. And it could spread; this could be contagion that spreads through the banking sector and other industries.

Then you also have the AI bubble, and the war in Iran, and the energy shock. There is so much we’re going to talk about today.

But let’s just start by talking about this crisis. Do you think we could be on the verge of another major financial crash?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, the whole problem stems exactly from 2008 or more particularly, 2009, when President Obama took office.

His solution to the junk mortgage crisis, the bank fraud crisis, was to turn the economy into a Ponzi scheme.

He needed to bail out the banks. The banks had made so many fraudulent and bad loans, that exceeded the ability of these banks to collect on their high-interest, junk mortgages that had been given, that the major banking companies were in negative equity.

What was the solution? The solution was a zero interest-rate policy, ZIRP.

Then the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates from the high crisis levels in 2008 and 2009 way down to 0.1%, which is what banks could borrow for.

The Federal Reserve was able to create electronic money on its computers to lend to the banks at a very low interest rates and said, “Well, banks, you have as much money as you want, at 0.1%, that we are providing you to lend out to the economy, to support the price of real estate, stocks, and bonds, so that we will restore the negative equity that the reckless banking sector has created”.

Well, the result is that the banks did two things.

One, they could simply leave the 0. 1% money they borrowed with the Federal Reserve, and make a few percentage points for nothing, in their sleep, by just leaving it with the Federal Reserve, because the Federal Reserve said, “Our job is to transfer money from the private economy into the banking sector, to rescue the financial sector, because that’s what central banks do; we represent the commercial banks”.

“So we’re going to begin paying interest on the bank reserves”, which the Fed hadn’t done before. “But, all the rest of the money, we want you to lend out to the economy, to make as much interest rate margin, the increase in what you charge to borrowers over what you can borrow, the cost of your borrowing from us, which is almost nothing”.

Well, the banks weren’t set up to evaluate loans to particular companies, specifically. They the banks usually make money on collateral being pledged for their loans.

Bank credit isn’t extended, in the United States or Britain, to finance industrial capital investment. That’s the job of the stock market, if anything, or of companies to reinvest their earnings.

Banks lend money for assets, real estate, stocks, and bonds, already issued, already in existence.

So they lent money out to intermediaries, saying, “You do the job; you find the companies to take over”.

You then begin to have private capital take over companies and make money by essentially looting them.

Thames Water in England is typical of how you loot a company. Hospitals, for instance, were a target of these private equity companies.

They would go to a hospital saying, “We’ll sell off your real estate, to a separate entity. Then you agree to use the capital gain, the money that you make selling the real estate, to pay a special dividend. And now, instead of owning the real estate, you will now be paying rent on a long-term lease for the real estate. And we’ll lend you the money for this, and you’ll be paying us credit, management fees, late fee penalties”.

And the result is that a lot of hospitals went bankrupt. Private equity proceeded to bankrupt whole swaths of the American economy.

A new word was added to the English language: enshittification — just cutting back the quality of what companies were doing, slashing expenses, working labor harder, making them work overtime, cutting.

When there was an attrition of the labor force, when workers left, you let the remaining workers pick up all of the slack. Productivity went up.

So you had an extractive, predatory financial system in the United States.

Well, meanwhile, this predatory financial system was making so many gains for the companies that were financialized and using their profits not to invest in new capital formation and new factories and means of production; all of that was done abroad; it was sent to China and other Asian countries.

94%, 92-94%, of corporate cash flow profits and all the surplus they had was spent either on dividend payouts or buying their own stocks.

So you had companies creating the stock market boom by buying their own stocks back, to push up the price, so that the earnings they had would be spread over a shrinking and shrinking number of shares, making the illusion of increasing earnings per share. The earnings weren’t really earned.

When you make money in your sleep, it’s not earned; it’s economic rent, meaning unearned capital that you make in predatory ways.

So the financial system has been turned into a predatory system. And all of this enormous growth in financial wealth since 2009 has accrued to the financial and real estate sector, dominated by the wealthiest 10% of the population.

40% of the American population doesn’t have any savings at all. They’re living on the brink.

And now the costs are going up. They’re having to fall further and further behind on their credit card debt, their personal debt, their automobile debt, student loans especially. So they’re not able to pay.

And the bottom 60-80% finds itself hardly increased at all. What used to be the middle class isn’t really in the middle anymore.

It turns out the middle-class people are wage earners, just like the blue-collar earners.

They all have to pay rising costs for either for rent or for their mortgages to buy homes, whose price is inflated by the low interest rates that enable a larger and larger debt to be created on the basis of these low interest rates.

Well, now that interest rates are going up, you can imagine the cost squeeze.

There’s a huge wave of defaults happening all the way from consumers — that’s polite word for wage earners, in America — to corporations that are being squeezed.

So, this is all part of the backwash that — being a Ponzi scheme, essentially, the way that you enable the economy to keep paying its debts if you lend the debtor the money to pay the interest.

That’s what credit card holders do. They will send in the payment, a monthly payment due on their credit cards, and their credit card debt is going to go up and up and up, and with it their monthly payments.

But as long as the credit card companies will lend to the consumers the money, the credit, to remain current on their obligations and not have to pay penalty fees, then you’re going to be able to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

A Ponzi scheme is you need more and more money paid into it to keep the exponential growth rate growing.

The same thing happens for corporations. As corporate sales fall off, as labor squeezed — if, in the United States, wage earners have to spend more money on gasoline, on electricity prices that are going up, partly as a result of gas prices, on all of these monopolized expenses, then they’re going to have less and less money to spend on the goods that they produce.

And that means that companies that produce goods and services for sale in the United States are going to have lower sales, and lower profits out of which to pay the rising debt and the interest on their carrying charges that they are mounting up, and that are being increased as the economy is pushed into financial crisis, as a result of the move to a war economy.

It means that there are going to be layoffs, that companies are going to be closing down.

Farmers cannot afford to do farming anymore. Chemical companies cannot afford to produce what they were producing before.

Electric companies cannot afford to pay the higher prices for their gas, or oil, without regulatory agencies increasing their electric rates. And that means that firms using electricity are going to have to close down their offices.

We’re in for the equivalent of what was the Great Depression. And depressions are not inflationary. They’re deflationary. That’s what nobody seems to get.

They think, “Oh, if interest rates go up, then a wealthy people who have a bond are not going to be able to buy as many goods and services as they could. And we have to stabilize the purchasing power of their credit by lowering the purchasing power of labor”.

The economy is to be sacrificed to the financial sector. That’s what neoliberalism is all about. That’s what finance capitalism is all about, and what makes it so different from industrial capitalism.

We’re in a post-industrial society, and that’s a financial society run by the banks, through their control of the central banks, which are controlled by the government, [which is run by politicians] whose campaigns are financed by contributors from the finance and the real estate sector.

So it’s all sort of a self-feeding circular flow. And Ponzi schemes always end in a crash.

That’s what’s leading other investors to try to withdraw from the American and European economies. But where can they withdraw to? That’s the problem. What can they do?

BEN NORTON: Yeah, I’d like to talk about the US government’s response, or lack of response to all of this.

Because we’ve seen that the Trump administration has been completely in bed with the finance industry.

One of the biggest donors to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was the highest paid corporate executive on Wall Street, Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, which is the largest alternative asset manager in the world. And Blackstone has a massive private equity arm.

And Trump’s friends and donors on Wall Street pressured him to sign an executive order in August 2025 that is so cynical. It is titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(K) Investors”.

And it makes it seem like this is something that is helping average workers who are saving for their retirement and their 401(K) plan.

But in reality, what this was was an attempt by Wall Street to provide exit liquidity, and dump these horrible, toxic assets on average people.

Because it was very clear on Wall Street, you know, in the months leading up to this crisis, everyone could see that there was there were so many bad loans that had been made by these private credit and private equity funds, and they were looking for someone to hold the bag.

So Trump comes in and says, “Oh, we’re going to ‘democratize’ access”.

And there are reports that some of these financial firms are actually paying wealth managers, and they’re paying financial advisors, to pressure average people to invest in some private credit fund, saying, “Look, you can get 10% per year on this fund”. And supposedly it’s not risky.

I mean, there are so many similarities to what happened with the collateralized debt obligations, the CDOs, that just bundled together all of these mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Back then, credit rating agencies said these MBS and CDOs were great, they were risk free, they were AAA rated. And obviously it was all junk.

And what we see today with the widespread use of some of these apps, like for instance Robinhood, there are a lot of average people, especially young men, who are basically just gambling their savings away and trying to engage in risky derivatives. Some of them have been buying up ETFs of some of these private credit funds.

Basically, the more sophisticated financial analysts and firms on Wall Street are just trying to dump all of this stuff on average people.

And what’s so disgusting is that the white House was facilitating this in the lead-up to this crisis that a lot of people could see coming.

How do you how do you see it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s exactly what has been happening, Ben.

When an investment firm deals with an investor — primarily what you call average people are largely pension funds.

We’re having pension-fund capitalism being used to bail out the Ponzi scheme.

In other words, when a company sees an investor or a fund manager come in, what do they think? “How can I make money off these people?”

Well, right now, the wealthiest funds, like Blackstone, think, “It’s now how can we make money; we know that we’re entering a depression period where we can’t make money, really. There’s not going to be much more to be made. The market has gone as high as it can be”.

“But what we can do is minimize the losses. What we want to do is avoid making a loss. But there are going to be losses. What do we do? Let’s make labor pay for them. Let’s turn the economy of pension-fund managers and the average people into suckers — the suckers who bought Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency [coin] and the Melania [coin], you know, that went up to a huge amount, and then collapsed 95%.

Donald Trump had a company that made Donald Trump watches — and, you know, you talked about lowering the consumer prices, which he promised to do — the watches that were sold, at huge prices, like maybe $10,000, the price for Donald Trump watches has fallen 95%.

Talk about lowering prices for consumers!

All of these were con games. The financial system has been turned into a confidence game, of how do you get American consumers to have the confidence to be willing to risk their money in a Wall Street casino where the casino always wins, and the players lose on balance, because that’s why they created the casinos in the first place. That’s the game.

Well, Wall Street is that kind of a consumer game.

If you can convince people, “Look at the high interest you’re making”, you’ll ignore the fact that you’re going to lose your capital.

Yes, you’ll make 10% interest, and then lose all of the money that you’ve [invested].

When I was in Russia in 1994, you know, taking the subway, I’d say all of these advertisements along the subway, saying, “You can make 33% on your savings by putting the money in such and such a bank”. It was all a huge scam.

Albania had, I think, the leading type scam. The whole economy, the consumers, the largest single investment by consumers and savers were in basically a Ponzi scheme. That was all wiped out.

So what we’re seeing is the Albanian-ization of the American economy. It’ll sort of look like Russia under Yeltsin.

You’re guaranteed to lose your capital, but if you can only think, tunnel vision for the short term, then you’ll think, “Well, I made 10% for a while”. That’s the policy.

Pension-fund capitalism was always an attempt to withhold wages to provide to the financial sector, the financialized pension systems, instead of a pay-as-you-go system, or instead of a public pension system.

So the whole way in which the American pensions have been financialized, and American savings have been financialized, by predatory private capital firms is exploitative from the beginning.

That’s the model. Create a bubble, sell it the top, and then sell all of the assets, and stocks, and bonds, and other financial claims, that were your assets, sell them to labor, sell them to the pension funds.

Tell them that this is the way to save the economy, and to get rich themselves, to get rich in the short run, by losing all your money in the medium term. That’s what happens in a crisis.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, very well said, Michael.

I want to talk about the situation overall in the US economy, because, we’re seeing the energy crisis due to this US war of aggression in Iran causing oil prices to skyrocket. And now we’re seeing this crisis in private credit.

Well, we’ve also seen several other major problems with the US economy recently.

You may have seen this chart going around that shows that now the richest 10% of Americans make up half of the spending in the economy. And of course, the US economy is deindustrialized, and driven largely by consumption.

Bloomberg published an article back in October warning of charts that are “haunting Wall Street”.

One of these charts shows the famous “K-shaped economy” — where, in 2020, you have a recession, due to the pandemic; and since then, the S&P 500, the most important stock market index, has skyrocketed.

And 90% of stocks held in the US are owned by the richest 10% of the population. So the rich have gotten much, much richer.

Meanwhile, the expected financial situation of average people has gotten worse and worse.

So the rich have gotten much richer, and they’re driving economic growth and they think things are going well. But the vast majority of people are suffering.

There is another incredible chart, using data from the Federal Reserve, that looks at the share of the US population in economic expansion.

You can see that, as of the end of 2025, only about 20% of the US population is living in a local economy that actually is growing.

That is to say that, if we take out the small minority of places like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the US is in a recession — the vast majority of the population [is in a recession].

But of course, most of this growth — the so-called growth — is being driven by the AI bubble.

This economist at Harvard, [Jason Furman], found that, in the first half of 2025, 92% of GDP growth came from investment in information processing equipment and software, which is largely AI.

And we know that a lot of this is being driven by this crazy circular investment scheme where these AI companies like OpenAI, that are not making money, that have trillions of dollars in obligations they have to pay, despite the fact that they’re not making money, and yet they’re all investing in each other.

Nvidia is the only company that is really profiting, because Nvidia is selling the digital shovels in this digital gold rush, if you will.

Nvidia needs these AI companies to keep buying its chips. But many of these AI companies are not making money. And if they stop buying Nvidia chips, then Nvidia stops breaking records with its net income, which means that Nvidia’s stock will fall, which will pop the AI bubble.

And the AI bubble is the only thing that’s actually keeping the US economy “growing”, in scare quotes, because the vast majority of the population is in recession.

So then you can throw in the war in Iran, the energy crisis, the oil shock, the private credit crisis.

I mean, to me, it seems like this is the perfect storm. There are so many cascading crises, and I’m really worried about where this could all lead.

How do you see it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: There are two dynamics that you mentioned. The immediate dynamic is Nvidia, whose chips are made in Taiwan, using liquefied helium, to make them — you have to have liquefied helium at a very low temperature, to solidify the silicon, so that the ultraviolet ray doesn’t just sort of diffuse and spread out, because the chip is too warm.

So there’s going to be a problem in chip supply, now that Qatar is no longer able to supply Taiwan with the helium.

But on the larger basis, all of this projected increase in automatic intelligence — I prefer that term to artificial [intelligence]. It’s really an automatic, mechanized system, electronically mechanized.

All of this requires huge super-computing complexes run by electricity.

But the electricity is limited by the amount that can be generated by America’s electric utilities.

And there’s been hardly any increase in America’s capacity to produce electricity, so that, as new demand for electricity is added, the price of electricity has gone up for everybody.

Already, [US] states are trying to block new AI investments in systems in their territories, because they know that this would force all of the electric price, and gas price, and oil prices for their voters way up.

So almost all of the big,AI companies have been investing in the Arab OPEC countries, because that’s where the oil has been produced.

Well, Iran has been focusing on bombing, specifically, these American AI investments in the OPEC countries in the Middle East, saying, “In order to defend ourselves against the fact that the Sunni Arab countries are in a symbiotic relationship with the United States, and back the United States in wanting to attack us, we’re demanding that they end their economic linkages with the United States, specifically with America’s AI industry. But also they have to begin selling off their bonds and their dollar holdings in the United States”.

So you’re having that. You’re having the fact that — where on Earth is the electricity going to come from to enable these AI companies to expand their activities to make the profits that will justify their stock prices going up?

There’s no way that you can see that they can create enough of a supply to have the growing market that is projected.

So, if you have GDP falling and the stock market going up, something has to give at some point.

The stock market has been decoupled from industrial investment, from AI investment, from capital investment in general.

That’s the difference between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism.

The financial sector has a life and dynamics of its own. And these dynamics are purely mathematical, independent of productivity, with no linkage with the ability to produce and the ability of the population to buy the products that it produces. It’s decoupled.

The illusion is that somehow, with the stock market going up, that the interest — what is pushing GDP up in America recently?

Well, when home prices increase, that is counted as an increase. 5% of GDP is the rise of what homeowners believe their apartments would rent for [known as the imputed rent of owner-occupied housing].

Interest payments to the banks that are going way up are treated as GDP. When credit card companies impose penalty fees, raising the charge to 30%, 31%, per year. All of that is called “providing a financial service”, as part of GDP.

What counts as American GDP is largely a financial illusion, as if all of this financial sector is actually a product, and part of the productive economy, instead of predatory overhead that is reducing the economy’s productive capacity, and hence its consumption capacity, and hence the real economy.

So you have finance as a fictitious economy, a purely mathematical gamed economy, a casino, a Ponzi scheme; and you have the real, productive economy, that is shrinking.

That’s what the K-shaped economy is. It’s a good term for it. And that’s exactly what we’re in.

But there’s no economic theory, mainstream theory, that has acknowledged all of this.

Although, in a way, this is what classical economics warned against. It’s what David Ricardo warned against. It’s what other classical economists of the 19th century, right down through Marx, warned against.

All of what the 19th century saw, initially, saying the problem was land rent, is now the problem of money rent, you could say, of privatizing the monetary and financial system in a predatory way in the century since World War One ended.

BEN NORTON: Well, I think that’s a great note to end on, Michael.

Of course, as we see more developments on Wall Street, and potentially more crises, we definitely will have you back to help us understand everything that’s happening.

It’s always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, thanks. I think it’s going to be evolving rapidly, month by month, and almost week by week, from here on in.

More than a month has passed since the United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran on February 28.

It is now clear that Iran is winning this war.

The Donald Trump administration has failed to carry out regime change or state collapse. The Iranian government has proven to be resilient.

Tehran has used asymmetric tactics to defend itself, targeting the weak points of the US empire and exacting a heavy price on its military, economy, and allies.

In fact, Iran has successfully destroyed the US military bases in West Asia, forcing many American troops out of the region. The Pentagon is primarily waging this war from bases in Europe.

Western media admits Iran is winning the war

The fact that Iran is winning the war is even being admitted by major Western media outlets.

The British newspaper The Independent printed an article titled “Iran is the clear winner as Trump’s desperate bid for peace shows he wants out of the war”.

Politico published an op-ed arguing that the “war against Iran is a far bigger strategic error” than the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ironically, this article was written by the former US ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, who had previously supported the war on Iraq.

Most US media outlets helped to promote the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, which blatantly violated international law. In fact, the corporate press has supported every major US war for decades, including the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, the list goes on and on.

This is the first major US war in decades that the Western media is criticizing from the very beginning.

So the writing is on the wall. It is clear to everyone that this conflict is a disaster, and Iran is winning.

Foreign Affairs is the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose members are a veritable Who’s Who of the US ruling class. Yet even Foreign Affairs published an article acknowledging that Iran is winning this war.

The author of the essay, Narges Bajoghli, is a professor at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, which is a significant recruiting ground for the US State Department.

Bajoghli wrote the following in Foreign Affairs (all emphasis added):

Judging by the metrics of conventional conflict, Iran is not faring well against the United States and Israel. Its adversaries are destroying crucial targets in Iran, killing its commanders and degrading its military assets. But these are the wrong measures for assessing Iran’s position in the war. The right measure is not even an assessment of whether Iran is absorbing punishment well—which it is. The question that will matter when the fighting ends is whether Tehran is achieving its strategic objectives. And on that count, Iran is winning.

This outcome is not accidental. Tehran has been preparing for this war for nearly four decades, since the new revolutionary government faced its first major military test in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. And it is now executing a strategy that has managed to neutralize key U.S. and Israeli air defense batteries, severely damage U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, inflict substantial economic pain, and drive a wedge between the United States and its Gulf allies. The Iranian regime, in other words, is not just surviving the U.S. and Israeli bombardment. The serious economic and political problems it is creating for its adversaries are, on a strategic level, giving Iran the upper hand.

Iran’s strategic objectives in the war

To assess if Iran is winning the war, it is necessary to analyze Tehran’s goals.

The first and most obvious strategic objective of Iran has been to prevent regime change and state collapse.

The Trump administration initially thought it could overthrow the Iranian government by carrying out so-called decapitation strikes, assassinating its senior political and military leaders.

Nevertheless, Washington has failed to orchestrate regime change. In fact, the Iranian government has not only shown that it is resilient; it has probably become even stronger now, because it has more popular legitimacy.

Many Iranians who were critical of the Islamic Republic have rallied behind the flag and are supporting the state, to prevent the US from taking control of their country (and exploiting its oil, natural resources, and other lucrative natural resources).

More than 850 public demonstrations were held in Iran in support of the government in the first month of the US-Israeli war.

Iran destroyed US military bases

A longtime strategic goal of Iran has been to expel the US military from West Asia.

The US surrounded Iran with roughly two dozen military bases, which were developed over decades.

In response to the US-Israeli war of aggression, Iran has pummeled most of these bases in the Persian Gulf.

Iran launched at least 5,471 missile and drone attacks against the US and its allies in the first month of the war, according to official data compiled by Turkish state media outlet the Anadolu Agency.

These Iranian attacks have been remarkably successful.

In fact, the New York Times reported that the US military has essentially been pushed out of West Asia (a more accurate term for the Middle East).

“Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable”, the Times wrote in an article titled “Iran’s Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely”.

Among the US facilities that have been severely damaged is the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which is the biggest US base in West Asia; as well as the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

The major US newspaper reported the following:

Iran has bombed U.S. bases across the Middle East in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli war, forcing many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces throughout the region, according to military personnel and American officials.

So now much of the land-based military is, in essence, fighting the war while working remotely, with the exception of fighter pilots and crews operating and maintaining warplanes and conducting strikes.

Before Trump launched this war of aggression on February 28, the US had approximately 40,000 troops in the region. In the first month of the war, thousands of these US forces were sent to Europe.

The American troops that remain in West Asia have been relocated to “makeshift” and “alternative” sites, off base, the Times reported.

Critics have pointed out that, given that US soldiers are waging war on Iran from hotels and office spaces, this means the Pentagon is essentially using civilians in these areas as human shields.

US military is waging war on Iran from bases in Europe

In short, Iran has largely succeeded in expelling the US military occupiers from West Asia.

This fact was further confirmed by an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Europe Is Quietly Playing a Crucial Role in the Iran War”.

The newspaper reported:

While many European leaders have publicly decried the U.S. attacks on Iran, behind the scenes their military bases are facilitating one of the most logistically complex operations the U.S. military has been involved in for decades.

In recent weeks, U.S. bombers, drones and ships have been fueled, armed and launched via bases in the U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece, officials say.

Attack drones are being directed from a sprawling U.S. base at Ramstein in Germany, the nerve center of America’s operations against Iran, according to German and U.S. officials. Heavy B-1 bombers have been photographed loading munitions and fuel at RAF Fairford in the U.K. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is currently docked at a naval base in Crete to undergo repairs after suffering damage from a fire.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military commander, said in recent Senate testimony that most European allies “have been extremely supportive.”

The continent, which is home to around 40 U.S. military bases and 80,000 U.S. service personnel, is a launchpad for U.S. operations in both the Middle East and Africa. “The distances are shorter, it’s less expensive, and it’s much easier to project power with our network of bases and allies,” he said.

There are two major takeaways from this report.

Firstly, some European governments have publicly criticized the US war on Iran, acknowledging that it violated international law and constitutes an illegal war of aggression. However, behind the scenes, most EU states and the UK are helping Washington wage this war, allowing the Pentagon to use their territory to attack Tehran. Europe is therefore a party to the conflict.

Secondly, Iran has succeeded in destroying the major US military bases in West Asia and expelling most American troops from the region.

This is one of several reasons why it is clear that Tehran is winning this war.

You can find more information in the following video:

Topics
0:00 Iran is winning the war
2:32 Iran's strategic goals
2:47 Failure of regime change
3:34 US military bases
4:25 Iran destroyed US bases
7:32 USA wages war from Europe
8:53 Bases used by USA in Europe
9:30 Iran's objectives
10:05 Gulf monarchies (GCC)
13:46 Normalization with Israel
14:54 Threats to Gulf regimes
16:40 Lifting of US sanctions
19:10 Oil and Strait of Hormuz
22:34 Escalation dominance
23:33 Costs of the war
25:34 USA running out of missiles
26:59 Deterrence
29:17 US and Israel are losing
29:42 Multipolar world
31:34 Outro

The US-Israeli war on Iran is transforming the geopolitical order, and could even unleash a global economic crisis. The conflict has caused the largest oil shock in history, disrupting global markets and driving up fuel and food prices.

To better understand the implications for the world, Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson, who discussed how Iran is challenging US dollar dominance and undermining Washington’s control over the global oil market, which has been a key pillar of US foreign policy.

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Transcript

(Intro)

BEN NORTON: The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran is having a massive impact on the global economy.

Every country on Earth is being affected, because this US-Israeli war has caused the largest oil shock in history — larger than the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979.

The effects are especially pronounced in Asia, which gets the majority of its oil imports from the Persian Gulf.

The Philippines has declared a national emergency, and it is now rationing energy, because it does not have enough oil, due to this war.

Japan also imports much of its oil from the Middle East, or West Asia. And this is why Tokyo has carried out the largest ever release of oil from its reserves.

Moreover, the 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency, the IEA, unanimously agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves.

However, this is only a short term band-aid measure. It’s not a long-term solution.

This is why the global price of oil only went down a little bit in response to the news of countries releasing oil from their reserves. And since then, the oil price has continued rising, because as long as this US-Israeli war on Iran continues, there are going to be massive disruptions in the energy market.

Given that oil is the most important commodity on Earth — and it’s used in many other products, and it’s used in all aspects of society in order to transport food and other goods — world leaders are now warning this could cause a global recession.

The head of the International Energy Agency said it very clearly. He warned that the US Israeli war on Iran has been a “major, major threat” to the global economy.

This war is causing not just gasoline prices to go up, but also food prices to go up, because so many fertilizers and chemicals used in fertilizers come from the Persian Gulf region.

It is also likely going to lead to higher interest rates, which will lead to increases in mortgage rates, and other rates on loans that are taken by average people. So this is going to hurt the poorest people the most.

So to make sense of how this war is going to impact the global economy, today we will be speaking with the renowned economist Michael Hudson, who is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.

Michael Hudson has been writing articles and doing interviews explaining how this war is going to reshape the world economically and geopolitically.

In particular, Michael has argued that this war has meant that “multipolar oil markets are now a reality”.

This is because Iran is directly challenging the global dominance of the US dollar, and in particular the petrodollar system — the fact that, for decades, the vast majority of oil in the global market was priced and sold in dollars. Iran is now challenging that

In response to this US-Israeli war of aggression, Tehran close down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the single most important oil transit chokepoint on Earth.

Every day, about 20% of the globally traded oil passes through this narrow strait — or at least 20% of global oil did pass through, before the US and Israel started this war.

Now Iran is telling countries that, if they want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, they have to agree to sell oil not in US dollars, but rather in China’s currency, the yuan.

This is why some media outlets, such as the South China Morning Post, are now saying that this “Iran war could boost China’s ‘petroyuan’ and weaken US dollar dominance”.

Given the massive geopolitical and economic consequences of this war, I thought Michael Hudson would be the perfect guest.

So without further ado, we are going to play some highlights of what Michael said, and then we will go straight to the interview.

(Highlights)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Iran has said this is a phase change: we are now forever going to control the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and we are going to control the oil trade.

That means that, instead of the United States’ plans to use oil as a chokepoint on other countries to enforce their compliance with American foreign policy, it is now Iran that is in control of this chokepoint, and it can impose sanctions on the US and its allies, sanctions on Israel, sanctions on the Europeans, or any other allies of the United States.

So it has turned the tables on the whole US attempt to use oil as a means of control. Now what is at issue is Iran being able to achieve what the United States has based all of its foreign policy on: control of the international revenues from oil exports.

…

The American philosophy is, number one, you bomb civilians, you break all the rules of international law which are against that. You bomb civilians to demoralize them.

And if you concentrate, as Trump did, along with Israel, a few weeks ago, you bomb the schools, you bomb the hospitals. That’s American policy in foreign countries.

It’s most visible in the case of Israeli policy, in Gaza, and now the West Bank as well. And it is the same policy that the United States has followed in Iran.

Well, the idea was that this would demoralize the population, and the Iranian population would want to get rid of the ayatollahs and say, “We don’t want to be bombed anymore; we want to save the children; let’s make a deal and appoint a leader favorable to the United States so that it will stop bombing us”.

Well, this was nonsense from the beginning, but it was the guiding spirit of American foreign policy: bomb a country, and that will lead to a regime change, and a collapse.

…

This is a conflict, in Iran, to determine what will the shape of the international economy be? Is it going to restore American control of the oil trade and give it the chokepoint over the international economy that it is looking for? Or are we going to be independent of the United States?

That’s what this war is all about.

(Interview)

BEN NORTON: Michael, it’s always a real pleasure; thanks for joining us today.

Now, you have been talking about some of these issues that the world is now discussing due to the war in Iran — especially dollar dominance and the petrodollar system — you have been writing about this for decades, going back to the 1970s.

And in fact, the US government has also been planning a potential war on Iran for decades. This is not something new.

Now, Donald Trump is the first president who is actually crazy enough to try it. But I remember going back to the George W. Bush administration, after the US invaded Iraq, there was a lot of discussion of a potential invasion of Iran.

So, Michael, explain to us how you see this war. What is the bigger picture here, and how will this impact the world?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you mentioned that it’s for the last few years or decades; it has actually gone back half a century.

Already in the mid-1970s, when I was working for the Hudson Institute, on contracts with the Treasury, and the White House, and the Defense Department, I sat in on meetings, and they were discussing all along how ultimately the United States was going to have to take control of all of the Middle Eastern oil, and that entailed conquering Iran.

And in the mid-1970s, at one military meeting, for instance, Herman Kahn was explaining how probably Balochistan was the main opportunity to begin carving up Iran into subject ethnic constituencies. And Balochistan, in between Pakistan and Iran, was probably the best place to start a separatist movement. There were military plans.

My field, in the mid-1970s, was oil and the balance of payments. I had that position at Chase Manhattan Bank for many years. I actually was the only — I was so low on the totem pole, being a technician and in my mid-20s, that I was the only person who was allowed to see all of the operating details and statistics of the US oil companies, the major companies, so that I could make a calculation as to the role that oil played in the balance of payments, supporting the dollar.

This was right after the United States was forced off gold, in 1971, because of the Vietnam War.

So, the United States all along has realized that what you’re seeing today was going to be the endgame of consolidating, they hoped, American control over the Middle Eastern oil; and they wanted their because the central point, the strongest lever that American foreign policy has had for the last century, is control of the world’s oil trade.

Because it’s so immensely profitable for the American oil companies themselves — it has given the oil companies major control over US policy — and also the US economy’s potential control over other countries, by the ability to turn off the supply of oil to other countries, thereby stopping their electricity production, stopping their chemical production, their fertilizer production with natural gas.

The oil industry includes the gas industry, because they’re so closely interconnected. All of this has been thought out. And every year, the military has been upgrading the long-term plans for — well, if we really, have to use force to entail our control over the Near East, the Middle East; if, for any reason, the OPEC oil countries want to become independent of the United States, and begin investing their oil profits outside of the United States, instead of sending all of their oil earnings to the United States, to invest in Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, US bank deposits, and stock holdings; well, if any of them should want to exert their own sovereignty and go their own way, we’re going to have to take over; and no matter what, we’re going to have to take over Iran, because that is the most powerful, final locking point of US control.

And, as we have discussed before, in 2003, General Wesley Clark came right out and said, well, we’re going to conquer seven countries in five years, culminating with Iran.

So all of this has been completely open. This is not simply Donald Trump’s war. It’s a war which he decided at this time, because America has steadily been losing its position of economic strength, military strength, and arms supply, and missiles, and aircraft, and bombs, as a result of the war, first in Ukraine, and then supplying Israel.

So there will never be a less bad time to go to war than at the present. And of course, it is a bad time, but it’s not as bad as it’s going to be. And the military, the neocons behind the military and behind the Central Intelligence Agency, are not going to give up.

They say, “Well, what do we have to lose? If we don’t conquer the Middle Eastern oil now, then we’re going to be losing what has become the major lever of American foreign policy”.

Donald Trump believed that he could conquer Iran, within two to four weeks. He actually believe that.

And his hope was that, by that time he went on his scheduled trip to China, he could confront China, saying, “Well, we’ve just caused a regime change in Iran. We’ve appointed an Iranian client oligarch, client dictator to take over and become sort of Iran’s version of Boris Yeltsin, administering Iranian oil in the interests of the United States”.

“So, we now have the power to impose sanctions on you, China. We can cut off your oil. But, you know, we don’t want to do that. If you begin to export the raw materials, the gallium, the tungsten, and all the other things that we need for our military that you’ve put an export control on, then we will give you the oil”.

Trump had hoped to be able to present China with that victory. Well, obviously that’s gone. The military miscalculated, because they could not think of an alternative that would threaten this grand plan.

Remember all of the American military attacks, for the last 50 years, ever since Vietnam — all of the wars that the US had, from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela.

It has always been the United States and its allies, the coalition of the willing, against single countries. This is the first war that America has fought since World War Two where other countries that it’s fighting against are allied with each other.

It’s not just fighting against Iran now. It’s fighting against Iran, supported by Russia and China, because they all realize that this is a fight to the end, to decide: Is the United States going to be able to reassert its control over the world economy using monopolies? The oil monopoly, the information technology monopoly that it’s trying to do, the computer chip monopoly, the technology monopoly, also its ability to supply food to other countries, its exports and control of grain.

This is the last chance that it has. And there’s a feeling of desperation that has led the US planners to bet at all.

And that I think that it’s not going to work. All of the generals have told them that it’s not going to work. The generals who have been pessimistic have pretty much been forced out of the military, and the State Department, because, “If you’re pessimistic, well, why aren’t you on board? You know, why aren’t you on the team? Or are you Putin’s puppet? You know, you’ve just gotta have faith”.

America believed that it could not lose any war because its policy of bombing other countries was always going to work.

The American philosophy is, number one, you bomb civilians; you break all the rules of international law which are against that. You bomb civilians to demoralize them.

And if you concentrate, as Trump did along with Israel, a few weeks ago, you bomb the schools; you bomb the hospitals. That’s American policy in foreign countries.

It’s most visible in the case of Israeli policy, in Gaza, and now the West Bank as well. And it is the same policy that the United States has followed in Iran.

Well, the idea was that this would demoralize the population, and the Iranian population would want to get rid of the ayatollahs and say, “We don’t want to be bombed anymore; we want to save the children; let’s make a deal and appoint a leader favorable to the United States so that it will stop bombing us”.

Well, this was nonsense from the beginning, but it was the guiding spirit of American foreign policy: bomb a country, and that will lead to a regime change, and a collapse.

That was what America expected in Russia.

But Iran essentially has the same spirit that Patrick Henry had in America’s revolution against Britain in 1776. He said, “Give me liberty or give me death!”. And that’s exactly what Iran is saying.

For them, this is existential, because they know what the US plans are, since the United States has been so open about what its plans are.

Yes, they want a regime change; they want to break up Iran into parts; they want to take control of Iranian oil and use the oil export revenues to support the US dollar, and to support basically the US economy, and to give American foreign policy the option of turning off the oil to other countries, to say, “We can close down your industry, your chemical industry, all your industries that need electric power, oil, gas; we can do all that, if you take an independent policy, following your own sovereignty. And we in the United States reject the United Nations principle that every nation has its own sovereignty”.

This is the basic principle of Western civilization for the last half century, the basic principle of the United Nations Charter. All of that is being rejected by the United States.

And what it has done is galvanize other countries to recognize that, well, yes, this really is the final conflict.

This is a conflict, in Iran, to determine what will the shape of the international economy be? Is it going to restore American control of the oil trade, and give it the chokepoint over the international economy that it’s looking for? Or are we going to be independent of the United States?

That’s what this this war is all about.

BEN NORTON: Well said, Michael. You raised so many important points there. It’s hard to know where to start.

I wanted to just make a brief comment about this idea that the US has been preparing for war in Iran for decades and, as you said, was waiting for the least worst moment.

I think this is absolutely right, because there also were two major developments in the past two years that led to this war in Iran.

One was the overthrow of the Syrian government — which goes back to 2011, the beginning of the regime-change war that ultimately succeeded at the end of 2024, which was a major step toward war in Iran.

And then also Israel killed the leadership of the Lebanese resistance, which basically, they thought at least, would remove Lebanon from the equation.

So by removing Lebanon and Syria — at least they thought they removed Lebanon — then the US and Israel could attack Iran, by isolating Tehran from its allies.

Now we have seen that there has still been some resistance in Lebanon. Although Israel has invaded Lebanon and is trying to colonize the south.

Anyway, I want to talk about more about this issue of the dollar system. I think this is so critical to understand this war.

You talked about how the US wants to use control of the global oil market in order to undergird the dollar.

You know, the petrodollar system really goes back to 1974, when the Richard Nixon administration, after delinking the dollar from gold, made an agreement with Saudi Arabia, which at that time was the leading oil producer in the world, to make sure that oil was traded exclusively in the dollar, which ensures global demand for the dollar.

It seems that Iran clearly understands the importance of this for US hegemony, the importance of the dollar system and the petrodollar, because Iran has targeted it directly.

Iran closed down the Strait of Hormuz and is demanding that countries that pass through trade oil in Chinese yuan.

Also, there have been reports that the Iranian military is targeting not only US military bases in the region, but also the offices of major US corporations, including US financial institutions and Big Tech companies, which have been building big AI data centers in places like the UAE.

So I think Iran understands how critical the economic element is to this war. Do you want to talk more about that?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, the United States’ plans to militarily control the Middle East were based not on its own fighting, because the United States had been exhausted by the Vietnam War — remember, in the mid-1970s.

The US has had two client armies fighting in the Middle East.

First of all, Israel is a client army. Already in the early 1970s, a deal was made — and Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute played a big role in this. A deal was made with Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, one of the leading pro-military senators in America, that he would agree to use Israel as America’s proxy army.

BEN NORTON: This was famously spelled out by Joe Biden, when he was a senator. Biden gave a speech in which he said “Israel is the best investment we make”.

JOE BIDEN: (In 1986) Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.

(In 2022) I have often said, Mr. President, if this were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.

(In 2023) I have long said, if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, this was very open at that time.

Well, later, after 9/11, and after President Carter backed the [Mujahideen] in Afghanistan, as the alternative to secular rule in Afghanistan, you had Al-Qaeda emerge as a Wahhabi terrorist army.

And the Wahhabis are the second force that America has used.

You mentioned Syria. And of course Syria has the ISIS leadership there, the terrorists. And they’re busy murdering everyone who is not a Sunni. They’re killing the Alawites; they’re killing the Christians. They’re the head-choppers, basically.

So these are the two proxy armies of the United States [Israel and the Wahhabis].

Well, what has made all of this urgent right now? It was number one, you had the Wahhabis working, for the last 10 years, hand in hand with Israel. The one non-Sunni group that they have not attacked is Israel. They have been working hand in hand, together.

Well, what has forced the hand of the military in Israel is Israel’s attack on Gaza, and the fightback from Lebanon, the civil war of resistance that has spread throughout the Middle East; and the worldwide criticism of the [Gaza] genocide that you’ve seen from the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

So all of this has forced the hands of [the US and Israel], saying, “Well, are we going to have a take over?”

Israel now is trying to take over Lebanon. I guess the Israelis are going to need somewhere to move, if Iran is successful in sort of destroying the economic foundations of the Israeli state.

This is the military setting for all of this, and it’s the financial setting.

I want to mention again the control of the petrodollars that you mentioned.

It wasn’t just pricing oil in dollars. Everybody, all countries, were pricing the exports of copper, everything in dollars, because that was still the main currency.

Almost seamlessly, instead of countries, keeping their international reserves in the form of gold, and US dollars that were as good as gold, even when the dollar wasn’t as good as gold anymore, they continued to trade in the US dollar.

Well, the issue was, where were these dollars going to be invested?

Under the rules of Kissinger — and all this was explained to me by the Treasury and the State Department, in 1974 and 1975 — the US military told Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, “You can charge whatever you want for oil, but you have to use the surplus have to invest in the United States. We’re not going to let you buy control of any major American firms. You can’t buy American companies; only we can buy control of foreign economies. You’ll buy bonds. You can finance American industry and American companies. You can buy stocks in the companies. You can make money by just depositing your money in banks”.

These were the petrodollars. The petrodollars were the savings of OPEC countries invested in banks.

Well, this recycling of OPEC surpluses now is not as important as it was in the 1970s. In the 1970s, these petrodollars came into US banks. And what were they going to do with it? They lent it to Global South countries, to finance their trade deficits, their balance of payments deficits.

And this ended up in a collapse of the Latin American foreign dollar debts, and other debts. And later it led to the Asian crisis of 1998, which I think is going to be a paradigm model for what’s going to happen the rest of this year.

But now Saudi Arabia and the other countries have, for the last 10 or 20 years, they’ve used their export earnings to build up their own economies in sort of crazy ways, building huge luxury real estate in the desert, with huge desalinization plants to supply the water for all of this domestically.

But they still have enormous savings of bonds, stocks, and financial savings in the United States.

Now that the OPEC countries are blocked from having export earnings, they’ve announced, “Well, we’ve actually debt-leveraged our own economy. Rich as we are, our real estate projects and our investments are financed by debt, and we have to begin selling off our holdings of US securities, and gold, in order to keep our domestic budgets and the balance of payments in balance”.

So all of this now is leading to a sell-off of dollars. And this has reversed what was the whole petrodollar, the whole inflow of OPEC money, into the currency, of oil into dollars. Now, this is becoming a drain on dollars.

So that is another threat.

Iran has said, “This is a phase change. We are now forever going to control the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. That’s why it’s called the Persian Gulf, because it’s ours. And we are going to control the oil trade”.

And that means that, instead of the United States plans’ to use oil as a chokepoint on other countries to enforce their compliance with American foreign policy, it’s now Iran that is in control of this chokepoint, and it can impose sanctions on the US and its allies, sanctions on Israel, sanctions on the Europeans, or any other allies of the United States.

So it has turned the tables on the whole US attempt to use oil as a means of control.

Now what is at issue is Iran being able to achieve what the United States has based all of its foreign policy on, control of the international revenues from oil exports.

And the determination of who will be able to buy this oil, and natural gas, and helium — these three things — and also by controlling the Strait of Hormuz, it controls the inward shipping of food and other materials to the OPEC countries, so it has a chokepoint over OPEC countries, as well as over foreign oil users.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, I want to talk more about the energy element here.

The International Energy Agency referred to the energy crisis that we’re seeing now as the largest oil supply shock in world history.

It’s larger than the oil crisis that was caused by the 1973 OPEC embargo, which was also related to an Israeli war of aggression.

And then in 1979, with the Iranian revolution, there was another oil crisis.

But today we’re seeing the biggest oil crisis in history.

The price of crude has skyrocketed, and this is going to fuel inflation all around the world, because, of course, oil is a crucial input in many other products, and oil is needed to transport most goods, especially food.

Moreover, a lot of fertilizers and chemicals that go into fertilizers come from the Persian Gulf. So this could likely create a food crisis, which is especially going to hurt the Global South.

Of course oil-exporting countries could potentially benefit from higher revenue — although in the Gulf, a lot of the oil and gas infrastructure has been damaged by this war. So some of these Gulf regimes might not see some of the benefits from increased export revenue.

But the majority of Global South countries import oil, energy, and other commodities. And as the price of those commodities increases, it’s going to also be a significant drag on their economies.

It’s likely going to lead to current account deficits. And that means that, in the Global South, a lot of their currencies are going to start falling against the dollar, which will likely lead to capital outflows — you know, the so-called hot money, as foreign investors just sell all of their holdings in emerging markets.

So we could see currency crises, economic crises, energy crises, food crises.

This this war of choice, this war of aggression, that Trump and Netanyahu started, could cause a massive economic crisis that will especially hurt the Global South.

Do you see it the same way?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, and all of this was anticipated.

First of all, if you want to see a paradigm, a model of what will happen, look at what happened to German industry after the United States and Europe imposed sanctions on buying Russian gas and oil.

German industry collapsed, and Europe and Germany are now suffering a depression. They’re in for a great depression.

What happened in Germany destroyed its economy, and led its chemical industry to close.

Oil is not only for energy. Oil is for chemistry, as you pointed out. It’s the glass-making industry, and fertilizer.

Well, fertilizer especially right now is important, because it’s made out of natural gas. And when Iran bombed Qatar, Qatar was the major exporter of liquefied natural gas.

This natural gas is what was providing fertilizer to in other countries, especially to America’s allies: Japan, Korea, the Philippines. They’re all in crisis.

And helium, along with the natural gas — the fact that helium now is not available to, let’s say, Taiwan, and its semiconductor industry, and electricity. The oil is not available to Taiwan.

How is Taiwan going to make the semiconductors that are supposed to be the key to America’s information technology control, to all of the computer chips and monopolies that it had hoped to have? So this is far reaching.

Also, we’re about to be, in the northern hemisphere, entering the planting season. And the planting season requires fertilizer.

Well, already the price of fertilizer, made out of gas largely, is rising in the United States. That’s putting a squeeze on farms. And the farmers in America, are claiming, what I’m sure farmers all over Europe and the Global South countries are experiencing, “We cannot make a profit, selling our crops at today’s prices, if we have to pay so much for fertilizer, and farm equipment that Trump has imposed tariffs on, that we lose money by producing crops”.

So what are they going to do?

This is causing an agricultural crisis. And obviously the countries that are going to be left out most of all are the countries that can least afford to pay the higher prices for fertilizer, gas, and oil. These are the Global South countries.

Because, in addition to having to pay for oil and gas, and its byproducts, they have to pay their foreign dollar debts, which are falling due. Something has to give.

There are going to be financial defaults. Other countries are going to say, “What are we going to do? Are we going to do what Europe has done, saying, well, there’s a budget crisis, our prices are going up for oil. We’ve got to subsidize the homeowners, so they can heat their apartments with gas or with oil. Our labor is already living on the brink, running up, increasing debt. We will lose the elections in Europe, just like in America, if consumers have to spend so much more money on oil, gas, heating their apartments, their electricity rates, if they default. So we’re going to have to cut back all other social spending, while we increase our military spending”.

So this is going to lead to a political crisis, of pro-war vs anti-war, pro-US vs anti-US feelings, all the way from Europe to the Global South countries, and the Asian countries that are America’s allies.

How can Korea and Japan pay the $350 billion that the Korean parliament has said it has just passed, saying, “We’re going to pay Donald Trump $350 billion for him to use, at his discretion, so that we will not lose the US export market for our products”.

And Japan has promised $650 billion. How can they possibly do this if they don’t have the gas and oil that they need to make the exports to the United States?

Somebody there must be thinking, “Well, if we don’t have oil and gas, we’re not going to have exports to the United States. So we don’t have to give the United States the $350 billion from Korea and $650 billion from Japan”.

All these deals that Trump has made will be unwinding.

BEN NORTON: Well, Michael, I think that’s a perfect note to end on. Thank you for joining me.

Unfortunately it looks like this war is going to continue, but I’m sure I’ll bring you back soon to talk more about the global implications of this conflict. Thanks a lot.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I look forward to it. Thanks for having me.

The United Nations General Assembly held a vote on a resolution denouncing the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”.

The countries of the political West refused to formally condemn the mass enslavement and trafficking of Africans.

The vast majority of UN member states, which are in the Global South, supported the resolution, with 123 votes in favor.

All of Europe abstained, except for Serbia. There were 52 abstentions in total.

Just three countries voted against the resolution: the United States, Israel, and Argentina’s right-wing regime of Javier Milei.

Paraguay’s conservative, pro-US government abstained. The right-wing, Trump-allied regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador did not vote. (Venezuela lost its right to vote, because it is unable to pay UN membership fees, due to the illegal US sanctions against it.)

Even Ireland and Spain — which in the past have broken with the pro-Israel European Union and supported Palestine — abstained in the vote.

The resolution stated:

The trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans [was] the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital.

The capitalist nations of the West developed their economies through the enslavement and extreme exploitation of Africans.

The UN News agency wrote:

For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, put in shackles and shipped to the New World to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations under scorching heat and the crack of the whip.

Denied their basic humanity and even their own names, they were forced to endure generations of exploitation with repercussions that reverberate today including persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination.

The resolution was sponsored by Ghana, whose President John Mahama said Africa wanted “reparative justice”.

West opposes reparations for Africans, arguing slavery was supposedly not a crime when it was committed

What especially angered the West about the UN General Assembly resolution was its call for reparations for the African descendants of the victims of slavery.

Western governments argued that they do not owe reparations, because international law did not exist during the mass enslavement and trafficking of Africans, therefore it was supposedly not a crime.

The US representative, Dan Negrea, claimed that the resolution was “highly problematic in countless respects”, the UN News agency reported.

The US government stressed that it “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred”.

The representative of the European Union made the same argument on the floor of the UN.

The EU criticized the resolution for implying “suggestions of a retroactive application of international rules which was non-existent at the time and claims for reparations, which is incompatible with established principles of international law”.

“References to claims for reparations also lack a sound legal basis”, the EU argued, stressing that the “principle of non-retroactivity, a fundamental cornerstone of the international legal order, must be strictly upheld”.

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office said the same, in a statement explaining its decision to abstain.

The British representative argued that there is “no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law”.

The UK insisted “that the prohibitions on slavery, the slave trade, and what are now considered crimes against humanity had not yet been established in international law at the time of the transatlantic slave trade”.

Iran has responded to the war of aggression that the United States and Israel launched against it on February 28 by using unconventional tactics.

As the US and Israel systematically assassinate Iranian officials and bomb schools, hospitals, and residential areas, Tehran has defended its sovereignty by engaging in a campaign of asymmetric economic warfare, not only hitting US military bases in West Asia, but also targeting major US corporations, and even challenging dollar dominance.

After closing the Strait of Hormuz, the most important oil transit chokepoint on Earth, Iran has disrupted global energy markets and directly confronted the petrodollar system, demanding that ships that want to pass through the strait must sell their oil in China’s currency, the renminbi (also known as yuan), not dollars.

In this way, Iran has demonstrated that it is possible for a medium-sized country in the Global South to resist the US empire.

Iran’s asymmetric warfare

The United States has the most powerful military on Earth. It spends approximately $1 trillion on its armed forces every year, whereas Iran’s defense budget is less than $10 billion — that is, just 1% of that of the US.

Given the clear disparity in conventional military force, Iran recognized that it needed to engage in asymmetric warfare.

Iranian military strategists identified the weak points of the US empire, and they have cleverly targeted these vulnerabilities.

Immediately after the Donald Trump administration started this war of aggression, Iran retaliated, hitting the roughly two dozen US military bases hosted by the neighboring countries of West Asia.

Tehran also struck a major CIA station located inside the US embassy in Saudi Arabia, as well as crucial radar systems and several US Air Force refueling planes.

Iran is allowed to respond to the US-Israeli aggression, according to international law. Article 51 of the UN Charter guarantees the right of a state to self-defense.

Largest oil supply crisis in history

This was only the beginning of Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare, nevertheless.

In response to the US-Israeli war of aggression, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which the US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has described as “the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint”.

Before this war, roughly 20% of the oil traded in the global market passed through this narrow strait on a daily basis.

Since the Trump administration launched this war of choice, traffic has ground to a halt.

A spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said they will not allow “a liter of oil” to pass through the strait, until the US and Israel end their war of aggression.

“You will not be able to artificially lower the price of oil. Expect oil at $200 per barrel”, the spokesperson said, according to Al Jazeera.

“The price of oil depends on regional security, and you are the main source of insecurity in the region”, the IRGC added.

This US-Israeli war has created what the International Energy Agency (EIA) describes as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”.

The price of oil has skyrocketed from just around $60 per barrel in January 2026 to well over $100.

Iran challenges petrodollar system, demanding oil payments in Chinese yuan

However, while Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, it made an important exception.

Tehran has said that Chinese tankers are allowed to pass through the oil transit chokepoint, unimpeded.

This has led to some ships claiming to have commercial links to China, even if it is not always true.

Moreover, an Iranian government official told CNN that tankers can have permission to travel through the Strait of Hormuz if they agree to sell oil in China’s currency, the renminbi (or yuan), not US dollars.

This is what CNN reported on March 14 (emphasis added):

Iran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, provided that the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, a senior Iranian official tells CNN.

This is an extremely important geopolitical development. It is a direct challenge to the global dominance of the US dollar.

The dollar is the most powerful weapon that the US empire has — much more powerful than its military.

The fact that the dollar is the global reserve currency, and that the US is the only country with the ability to print it, gives it what is known as an “exorbitant privilege”.

The US can run gargantuan deficits with the rest of the world — chronic current account deficits of more than $1 trillion per year — sucking in the goods and services produced by foreign workers, and it does not face the currency depreciation and inflationary pressures that other countries would suffer from, because there is artificial demand for the dollar, given its reserve currency status.

This exorbitant privilege also helps the US keep borrowing costs relatively low, as the dollars it sends abroad to pay for imports are often recycled by foreign investors into US Treasury securities and corporate bonds, thereby reducing yields and interest rates for both the public and private sectors.

Foreign investors similarly use these excess dollars to help inflate enormous bubbles in the US stock market, further enriching wealthy shareholders. (Around 90% of the stocks held by US investors are owned by the richest 10% of the population.)

One of the pillars of dollar dominance is the petrodollar system. Since the US made a historic agreement with top oil producer Saudi Arabia in 1974, the vast majority of global crude has been sold in dollars.

In other words, soon after US President Richard Nixon de-linked the dollar from gold in 1971, the gold standard was replaced with a de facto oil standard.

Almost all countries on Earth have to import oil, and this means that they need access to dollars to do so. And because oil is the most important global commodity, most other commodity markets are also priced in dollars.

This ensures an artificial global demand that strengthens the dollar, granting the US its exorbitant privilege.

Dedollarization

The United States has taken advantage of this exorbitant privilege to weaponize the dollar system, through the use of illegal unilateral sanctions.

The US has imposed unilateral sanctions on one-third of all countries on Earth, including 60% of low-income nations.

This increasing weaponization of the global reserve currency has incentivized more and more countries to seek financial alternatives.

In response to Washington’s illegal sanctions, Tehran has pushed for dedollarization for years.

China purchases the vast majority of Iran’s oil exports, and the BBC reported back in 2012 that Beijing has been paying in yuan.

Iran was admitted into BRICS in 2024, and it has advocated for a new currency for international trade. (Although some other BRICS members, namely India and the UAE, lean pro-Western and have opposed such efforts.)

Western sanctions have also motivated Russia, which is consistently among the world’s top three oil producers, to push for dedollarization.

About 20% of the global oil trade was done in other currencies, as of 2023. This was a marked shift compared to recent years, but it meant that 80% was still conducted in dollars.

Iran is now forthrightly confronting this system, using its geopolitical leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and the global oil trade to challenge the petrodollar.

Fears of global economic crisis

The Western financial press has warned that this war that the US and Israel started in West Asia could unleash a “global economic crisis”.

This is because oil is the most important commodity on Earth. Every country relies heavily on petroleum, and practically everything in a modern economy depends on it. The trucks, ships, and planes that are used to transport food and other goods use a lot of oil.

Therefore, as the cost of crude goes up and up, the prices of other products will rise as well, fueling inflation.

The Persian Gulf region is likewise a significant producer of fertilizers and the chemicals used in fertilizers, meaning this US-Israeli war of aggression could cause a global food crisis as well.

All of this was totally avoidable and unnecessary. But Donald Trump has defended his decision to start this war of choice. The US president insisted on his website Truth Social that the oil price shock is “a very small price to pay”.

Rising gasoline prices and inflation just a few months before the November midterm election are really going to hurt Trump and the Republican Party.

This is why Trump is so worried, and so desperate to find a way to forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump sent 2,500 more Marines and three more warships to West Asia, the New York Times reported on March 13. This was in addition to the more than 50,000 US troops already in the region.

Trump has also threatened multiple countries and demanded that they send their own warships to the Persian Gulf, to try to force open the strait. They have quietly declined, however, as they are afraid of getting further involved in the war.

Asymmetric economic warfare: Iran targets major US corporations in West Asia

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare against Iran aimed to “collapse” the country’s economy by cutting off oil exports, denying it hard currency, and fueling inflation.

Bessent even took credit for the extremely violent protests and riots that destabilized Iran in the weeks leading up the US-Israeli war of aggression.

Tehran has sought revenge for all of this by engaging in its own kind of guerrilla economic warfare, thereby giving the US empire a taste of its own medicine.

After hitting US military bases in West Asia and closing down the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian military announced that it will target the offices of major US corporations in the region.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) published a warning with the addresses of these corporate offices, Drop Site News reported.

“We warn the American regime to evacuate all American industries in the region”, the IRGC said.

Among the corporations on the list were Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are top Pentagon contractors and key parts of the military-industrial complex.

Also named were Silicon Valley Big Tech monopolies, like Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon.

Furthermore, the IRGC mentioned US oil corporations like ExxonMobil, and financial firms such as Citigroup, KKR, and Bain & Company.

New Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei spells out Iran’s strategy to expel the US empire

The Iranian government has been quite clear about its goal: it wants to push the US empire out of West Asia.

This was spelled out by the new supreme leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed by the US and Israel on the first day that they launched this war of aggression, February 28.

In a speech on March 13, Mojtaba Khamenei said, “I advise the leaders of regional countries to shut down those [US] bases as soon as possible, for they must surely have realized by now that the US’s claims of ensuring security and peace have been nothing but lies”.

“Shutting down US bases in the region will enable those governments to strengthen their ties with their own people, who are generally dissatisfied with the humiliating behavior associated with those bases”, he added.

It is not just US military bases that Iran is targeting, but also what Khamenei called “financial bases”.

He noted that, “for years, the enemy has been establishing military & financial bases in some of these countries to secure its dominance over the region”.

This was apparently a reference to the offices of major US corporations, which were told to evacuate by the IRGC.

“In any case, we will obtain compensation from the enemy”, Khamenei said. “If they refuse, we will take it from their assets to the extent we deem appropriate. If that wasn’t possible, we will destroy an equivalent amount of their assets”.

The supreme leader likewise vowed that his country will take “revenge” for the more than 175 children and teachers who were killed in a US military double-tap strike on a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab in southern Iran on February 28.

Khamenei similarly promised to get revenge for his family members that died at the hands of Washington and Tel Aviv.

In his March 13 speech, Mojtaba Khamenei noted that, in addition to his father, the US and Israel killed his wife, his sister and her child, and the husband of another sister.

In order to seek revenge, Tehran will use all of the tools at its disposal, Khamenei insisted.

“The leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz must definitely continue to be employed”, he declared.

“Studies have been conducted regarding opening other fronts where the enemy has minimal experience and where it would be highly vulnerable”, he added. “Should the war continue, activation of such fronts will be carried out based on certain interests”.

Khamenei did not identify what those “other fronts” are specifically, because Iran does not want to lose the element of surprise.

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that one potential front would be Yemen.

The northern part of Yemen, where the majority of the population lives, is governed by Ansarallah, also known as the Houthi movement.

Ansarallah is an indigenous Yemeni resistance group that is allied with Iran and strongly supports the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide.

Drop Site News reported that Ansarallah is prepared to join a “coordinated campaign of military operations” with Iran, if Tehran deems it necessary.

The Ansrallah-led government in northern Yemen would likely seek to halt oil traffic in the Red Sea.

Given the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia has rerouted some of its oil exports via pipeline to its western Yanbu port on the Red Sea.

Yemen has the ability to shut down another important chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandab Strait, where close to 10% of global seaborne-traded oil transits every day.

This is not just hypothetical. Starting in late 2023, Ansarallah used its leverage to threaten to attack ships in the Red Sea, declaring that it would only stop when the US and Israel ended their genocide in Gaza.

In 2025, the Trump administration launched another war against Yemen, in an attempt to forcibly open the Red Sea.

In May 2025, the US was forced to sign a ceasefire with the Ansarallah-led government in nothern Yemen.

Yemen is the poorest country in West Asia. However, it was able to use unconventional tactics to fight the US empire, which boasts the most powerful military force on Earth and a $1 trillion annual budget.

What all of this demonstrates is that Iran and Yemen have mastered the art of asymmetric warfare, borrowing the tactics of Global South anti-colonial movements in the 20th century, to successfully resist the aggressive US empire.

Video

Topics:

0:00 Iran war causes energy crisis

0:29 Oil price skyrockets

0:56 Fears of economic crisis

2:07 Strait of Hormuz

3:21 Iran permits Chinese oil tankers

4:17 Iran: sell oil in RMB, not USD

4:43 Dollar dominance & petrodollar

6:28 Asymmetric warfare

6:59 US military bases in Middle East

7:47 Iran strikes CIA stations

8:46 Iran hits US refueling planes

9:10 US empire underestimated Iran

10:32 Iran targets US corporations

12:03 Economic warfare

13:07 CLIP Scott Bessent on Iran

14:05 New leader Mojtaba Khamenei

15:21 Iran strategy spelled out

17:08 Tehran wants revenge

18:51 Yemen, Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab

22:16 US war on Yemen in 2025

23:23 Anti-colonial wars

24:16 Trump sends more US troops

25:21 Iran’s Kharg Island

26:21 Global energy crisis

27:24 Trump wants military coalition

29:02 Iran allows Chinese ships

29:59 US dollar dominance

30:37 US current account deficit

31:20 Exorbitant privilege of dollar

32:19 Dedollarization

32:52 West seized Russia’s reserves

33:49 Central banks buy gold

34:16 US Treasury securities

34:47 Oil sales in dollars

36:26 Trump threatened BRICS

37:16 Iran promotes dedollarization

37:42 China & Russia de-dollarize

38:33 India

39:34 UAE

40:18 Saudi Arabia

41:04 Iran & Indonesia join BRICS

42:14 Iran proposes BRICS currency

42:31 Divisions within BRICS

43:12 Struggle against imperialism

45:12 Outro

The United States and Israel are intentionally devastating civilian areas in Iran, brutally bombing schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods, in an attempt not only to destroy the state but also to collapse Iranian society itself.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described the scorched-earth strategy in a Pentagon press briefing on March 4.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”, Hegseth boasted.

He added with pride that the US and Israel are raining upon Iran “death and destruction from the sky, all day long”.

Hegseth noted that, in the first four days of the war on Iran (named Operation Epic Fury), the US military employed “twice the air power” that it had used in the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In another press briefing on March 2, the US secretary of war condemned international organizations like the United Nations and proclaimed, “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history”.

Hegseth bragged that the US is fighting with “no stupid rules of engagement”. By his admission, the Pentagon is purposefully targeting civilian areas, and does not care about the rules of war.

US and Israel bomb 20 schools and 13 hospitals in Iran in one week

According to the World Health Organization, the US and Israel bombed at least 13 hospitals and health facilities in Iran in the first five days of the war, which Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched on February 28.

Washington and Tel Aviv bombed at least 20 Iranian schools in the first week of the war, according to UNICEF.

They also destroyed a desalination plant, depriving dozens of Iranian villages of water.

The US and Israel killed more than 1,300 Iranians in the first week. Children made up 30% of the victims.

CNN and the New York Times both independently confirmed that the US military bombed an elementary school in the city of Minab in southern Iran on the first day of the war.

The US bombed the school twice, 40 minutes apart, to make sure there were no survivors.

The US military killed at least 168 children and 14 teachers.

War Secretary Hegseth published a map of the areas in Iran that were bombed by the US, and the Minab primary school was clearly in the strike zone.

This is what Hegseth meant when he bragged that the US empire is “punching them while they’re down”, with “no stupid rules of engagement”.

The US-Israeli slaughter is so extreme that even some right-wing media outlets in the West, like the UK’s conservative newspaper The Telegraph, were forced to admit that “Tehran [is] an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble”, as the US and Israel intentionally bomb civilian areas.

US and Israel want a failed state and societal collapse in Iran

What Washington and Tel Aviv want to unleash in Iran is not just regime change; it is the destruction of the state and the collapse of Iranian society.

This was openly admitted by some Israeli officials, in a report in the Financial Times.

The FT cited Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who declared that “every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime . . . will be an unequivocal target for elimination”.

Tel Aviv’s plan is to kill all Iranian leaders, so the country cannot be governed and simply falls into chaos.

This was further confirmed by a former top Israeli intelligence official.

The Financial Times interviewed Danny Citrinowicz, who worked for 25 years in Israel Defense Intelligence (IDI) and was the chief of the Research and Analysis Division’s Iran branch.

Citrinowicz told the FT that what Israel wants is the “total destruction of this regime, of the pillars of this regime, of everything that holds it together”.

The former head of Israeli military intelligence’s Iran analysis said this is how Tel Aviv sees the war (emphasis added):

If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.

In other words, the US and Israel want to repeat in Iran the same kind of war of extermination that they carried out in Gaza, which a UN commission determined to be a campaign of genocide.

US-Israeli war on Iran blatantly violates international law

It goes without saying that the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran flagrantly violates international law.

The United Nations education agency, UNESCO, emphasized that the bombing of Iranian schools by the US and Israel “constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law”.

Legal experts have clearly stated that the US-Israeli war violates international law. They also noted that Washington was engaged in supposed “negotiations” with Tehran, and Iran was willing to make significant concessions for a deal, when Trump launched this surprise war of aggression, sabotaging the talks.

Stanford University’s elite law school published an interview with an expert on international law, Professor Allen Weiner, who stated, “From an international law perspective, my judgment is that the attack was quite clearly illegal”.

States do have a right to self-defense under international law, Weiner noted. Iran has exercised this right.

The US and Israeli regimes claimed they launched “preemptive” attacks on Iran, but Weiner stressed that this is not valid under international law.

In order to claim self-defense, states may only strike when they have evidence that “they face an imminent threat of attack”, he argued.

This does not apply in this situation, Weiner emphasized. The Stanford law professor explained:

The notion that Iran presents a general security threat to U.S. interests does not constitute a threat of imminent attack. Nor does the possibility that Iran might at some point in the future acquire either nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the U.S. homeland amount to a threat of an imminent attack.

US-Israeli war on Iran is based on lies

All of the talking points that the Trump administration has used to try to justify this illegal war have fallen apart.

The Pentagon admitted in a closed-door briefing to Congress that Iran was not going to attack the US and Israel first, and that it only had plans to retaliate in self-defense.

Similarly, the Trump administration claimed that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. This was false as well.

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said clearly in an interview on CNN that Iran was not on the verge of having nuclear weapons.

This was another lie promoted by the US government to justify an illegal war.

“Were the Iranians days or weeks away from building a [nuclear] bomb, from having a bomb?”, CNN host Becky Anderson asked Grossi.

“No”, he replied, bluntly.

The IAEA chief explained, “We never had information indicating that there was a structured, systematic [Iranian] program to build, to construct, a nuclear weapon”.

The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran is expanding. Washington and Tel Aviv are attacking more and more countries.

The CIA is arming Kurdish proxy forces in northern Iraq, with plans to launch an invasion of Iran.

Meanwhile, Israel has invaded Lebanon, and has reimposed its siege of Gaza.

Donald Trump is now even threatening Spain, because it refuses to support his illegal war of aggression against Iran.

Iran hits US military bases across West Asia

In response to the US-Israeli attacks, Iran has retaliated in self-defense, which it is allowed to do under international law.

Tehran has hit US military bases in the countries surrounding it in West Asia.

Oil prices skyrocket

This conflict has caused the global price of oil to skyrocket, as energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf has been damaged.

Tehran has vowed to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) described as “the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint”.

Every day, crude representing roughly 20% of global oil consumption travels through this very narrow strait, which is right off the coast of Iran.

Tehran has essentially closed the geostrategic chokepoint, by announcing that it will strike any vessels that travel through the strait.

US State Department recommends evacuation of West Asia

At the same time, the State Department has told US citizens to evacuate all of the countries of the region, issuing “serious safety risks” for Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, occupied Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

However, the State Department is not providing support for Americans who are trying to flee these countries.

CIA arms Kurdish proxies

Instead of trying to stabilize the situation, Trump is pouring fuel on the fire.

CNN reported that the CIA is arming Kurdish mercenaries in northeastern Iraq. Washington wants them to act as US proxies, invade Iran, and destabilize the Iranian government.

This policy is likely to worry Türkiye, a NATO member, and could lead Istanbul to militarily intervene as well. Türkiye has the second-largest military in NATO, after the US.

Multiple media outlets, including Axios and Rudaw, confirmed that Trump is calling leaders of Kurdish armed groups in Iraq and asking for them to help the US attack Iran.

All of this is deeply ironic, because Trump was elected on the promise that he would be a “peace president”, and that he would end wars, not wage them.

Trump said his war of aggression against Iran will likely continue for “four to five weeks”, although he added that it could “go far longer than that”.

Israel invades Lebanon and besieges Gaza

In the meantime, the regional war in West Asia is getting larger and larger.

Israel took advantage of the chaos to launch an invasion of Lebanon.

Tel Aviv hopes to reoccupy southern Lebanon. Israel occupied this region for nearly two decades, following another invasion in 1982, although indigenous resistance groups forced it out in 2000.

At the same time, Israel has reimposed its siege of Gaza.

The food supply in Gaza is very limited, and two million Palestinians may soon starve, The Guardian warned.

US military shoots protesters in Pakistan and launches operations in Ecuador

People in dozens of countries around the world have filled the streets, protesting the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

US soldiers have shot protesters in the Pakistani city of Karachi, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has launched more military operations in Latin America.

Southern Command announced that US military forces are fighting in Ecuador. It claimed they are combating “narco-terrorism”.

However, Ecuador’s US-backed government is very closely linked to drug trafficking.

Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa is a dual US citizen and a close ally of Trump.

Noboa is the son of Ecuador’s richest billionaire oligarch. His family is notorious, because numerous investigations have found that the Noboa company is deeply involved in drug trafficking, and it regularly smuggles cocaine in banana crates from its private ports.

Trump admin imposes suffocating oil blockade on Cuba

While the US government is waging multiple wars in West Asia and Ecuador, it is also essentially waging war on Cuba.

The New York Times admitted that the US military is carrying out a naval blockade of Cuba.

The Trump administration is strangling the small island nation, preventing it from importing oil, in an attempt to collapse Cuba’s economy and overthrow its revolutionary government.

This naval blockade of Cuba is continuing even as the US military is busy bombing Iran.

Bloomberg reported that Russia tried to send a tanker of oil to Cuba in late February, but the US forced the vessel to turn away, starving the country of fuel.

Trump has the record for bombing more countries (10) than any other US president

Trump, the self-declared “peace president”, has bombed 10 countries — more than any other US leader.

In his two terms as president, Trump has bombed Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

In 2025 alone, the first year of his second term, Trump bombed seven countries.

In fact, Trump initiated his war of aggression against Iran just a few weeks after he launched an organization he calls the “Board of Peace”, which amounts to an attempt to replace the United Nations with a privatized group controlled by the US and Trump himself.

Trump threatens trade embargo against Spain

While all this is happening, Trump is also threatening Spain.

Madrid has been a thorn in Washington’s side. Its left-wing government has supported Palestine and has deepened its ties with China.

Now Spain is the only state in the European Union that has openly opposed the US war on Iran.

Spain condemned the war as an “unjustified and dangerous military intervention” and a clear “violation of international law”. Madrid has forcefully called for peace.

Trump has demanded that countries in Europe let the US military use their bases in order to attack Iran.

The UK has obediently given the US access to British military bases.

Spain, on the other hand, has refused. US aircraft were forced to leave Spanish bases.

This has infuriated Trump. In a press briefing at the White House on 3 March, Trump excoriated Madrid.

The US president threatened to impose a trade embargo on Spain. He said he ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off trade with the European nation.

If Spain continues to deny Washington access to its bases, Trump vowed to use military force to take over the facilities.

“Spain said that we can’t use their base. And that’s all right. We don’t need to. We could use their base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it”, Trump said.

As he threatened Spain, Trump was sitting next to the right-wing chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, a multimillionaire who owns two private jets and previously led the German arm of Wall Street giant BlackRock.

A reporter at the White House press briefing asked Merz if he supports the US president’s proposal to punish Spain. Merz said he agreed. He openly sided with Washington against a fellow EU member.

The German government has strongly supported the US-Israeli war on Iran. In fact, Merz argued that Iran should not be protected by international law.

The West’s so-called “rules-based order” apparently only applies to certain countries.

(Leer en español aquí)

The United States and Israel are waging a war of aggression against Iran. This is not about nuclear weapons; it's about imperialism.

Trump published a video on social media early on the morning of February 28, announcing, “The United States military began major combat operations in Iran”.

As the US and Israel brutally bombed Tehran, Donald Trump admitted that they want regime change.

Trump ordered members of Iran’s military to “lay down your weapons”, or “face certain death”.

The US president then called on Iranian opposition supporters to “take over your government”, claiming, “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations”.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the war would overthrow the government in Tehran, to "cast off the yoke of tyranny and bring freedom and peace-loving values to Iran”. (Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces an ongoing arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, due to the genocidal crimes against humanity he committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza, with steadfast US support.)

Iran immediately retaliated, launching strikes in self-defense against multiple US military bases in Qatar, Bahran, Kuwait, and the UAE. The Pentagon’s largest base in the region, Al-Udeid in Qatar, was hit.

The absurd narrative that Washington and Tel Aviv are promoting is that they had to carry out “preemptive” attacks (which are illegal under international law), because Tehran supposedly seeks nuclear weapons.

This is nonsense. Iran signed the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in 2015, in which it agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons in return for the US and European countries lifting their illegal unilateral sanctions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) admitted that Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal. Nevertheless, Trump unilaterally tore it up in 2018, during his first term as US president, in flagrant violation of international law (given that the JCPOA had been endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which even the US had voted for, under Obama).

Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is ironically a reformist who sought to negotiate another deal with the same US aggressors who sabotaged the previous one just a few years before.

When Trump entered office for his second term, in 2025, he oversaw several rounds of bad-faith “negotiations” with Iran. Then, during those talks, the US and Israel suddenly bombed Iran in June 2025. The Wall Street Journal admitted: “In Twist, U.S. Diplomacy Served as Cover for Israeli Surprise Attack”.

The same thing happened in February 2026. The Trump administration participated in fake “negotiations” with Iran.

On February 27, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who moderated the talks, said they had made “substantial progress”, and a “peace deal is within our reach”.

Mere hours later, Trump and Netanyahu launched a massive bombing campaign in Iran.

The reality is that the US and Israel do not want peace.

The goal of this war of aggression is clear: Washington seeks to topple Iran’s independent government and finally overturn the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which removed one of the pillars of the US empire’s “twin pillars” strategy in West Asia.

The US empire, and more specifically the large US corporations that it represents, want to control the plentiful resources not only in Iran, but in the entire region, which is home to the world’s top producers of oil and natural gas, as well as critical minerals and other important commodities.

Washington also hopes to cut off China’s access to its top energy providers.

Wesley Clark, a former top US general and NATO commander, revealed more than two decades ago that, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, imperial strategists at the Pentagon made plans to overthrow the governments of seven countries in West Asia and North Africa.

On the US empire’s target list was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

Washington succeeded in destabilizing governments in six of those seven. Iran is the last one standing.

With its war, the United States hopes to install in Tehran a puppet, like the son of the former shah, the murderous monarch who came to power following a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

A Fox News correspondent reported that the CIA-linked US state media outlet VOA Persian is broadcasting propaganda in Iran in support of the so-called “exiled crown prince”, Reza Pahlavi, who has spent much of his life living in the US, and whose dictatorial father terrorized Iran, with staunch US backing, until the 1979 revolution.

Top US officials have been secretly meeting with the so-called “exiled crown prince”, the former Israeli intelligence officer Barak Ravid reported in January. On Twitter, Reza Pahlavi heaped praise on Trump, claimed “the Islamic Republic is collapsing”, and called for the Iranian people to help put him in power.

US imperial strategists believe the Iranian government is weak at this moment, and they are going for the jugular.

In doing so, the billionaire supposed “populist” Trump is fulfilling the dreams of the most ardent neoconservative hawks — even as he calls himself a “peace president”.

In the following video, Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton explains the real reasons behind the US-Israeli war of aggression, and debunks the lies being spread by Washington:

Timecodes:

0:00 USA & Israel bomb Iran

1:21 (CLIP) Trump threatens Iran’s military

1:49 (CLIP) Trump calls for regime change

2:33 Iran retaliates, hitting US bases

3:26 Iran is not Venezuela, or Iraq

4:18 (CLIP) Trump fears US casualties

4:52 Israel’s PM Netanyahu

6:08 US empire’s plans for West Asia

7:39 (CLIP) Wesley Clark: 7 countries targeted

8:14 Nuclear weapons

9:15 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA)

10:31 Fake US “negotiations”

12:21 Oil & gas in Middle East (West Asia)

12:45 USA wants to cut off China’s oil supplies

13:55 Trump’s oil blockade of Cuba

14:25 Israel: US empire’s aircraft carrier

15:26 CIA coup in Iran in 1953

16:04 US-backed dictator, the shah

16:54 Iranian Revolution

17:20 Iran-Iraq War

17:52 US puppet, “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi

19:56 US-backed regime change in Syria

21:01 Imperialism

21:24 Outro

(Leer en español aquí)

The United States is waging a new cold war against China. This has been openly admitted in Washington for several years.

The First and Second Cold Wars are different in some significant ways. The ideological split is not exactly the same.

The United States is capitalist and constitutes the heart of the capitalist world-system, whereas China is socialist. However, the People’s Republic of China is not the Soviet Union; it does not lead a socialist bloc of countries, and Beijing has been clear that it does not seek to “export” revolution.

“We will not import other countries’ models, and will not export the China model”, President Xi Jinping asserted in 2017 — although he added, “We will provide more opportunities for the world through our development”.

With that established, it should be stressed that just because China is very different from the USSR does not mean that there is no ideological aspect of Cold War Two.

There are unambiguous ideological differences between the US and China, and each promotes a very different vision of international relations.

The Second Cold War, therefore, will still have an enormous impact on the new global order that is being shaped.

In short, the political model that Washington seeks to impose on the world is the exact opposite of the political model being advocated by Beijing.

The Donald Trump administration wants to return to the politics of the colonial era of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Western empires carved up the world and treated other regions as their imperial “spheres of influence”, denying sovereignty to Global South countries.

In stark contrast, China — which was a victim of colonialism in the Century of Humiliation — opposes Western hegemony, and wants to lift up the Global South as the protagonist of a more equitable international order.

Beijing advocates for a multipolar system in which all countries, regardless of size, have a voice on the international stage and equal representation in multilateral institutions.

Beijing considers sovereignty to be a sacred principle that must be respected and guaranteed, in a firmly established system of international law that every country must abide by, whether or not it is a great power or a small nation.

Two speeches at one event illustrate the opposing visions of the US and China

These two opposing global visions were clearly articulated at the 2026 Munich Security Conference in February.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an overtly pro-colonialist speech in which he called to reverse the decolonization of the Global South, revive “the great Western empires”, and “build a new Western century”.

The top US foreign-policy official demonized Global South anti-colonial movements as a nefarious plot by “godless communists”. He also praised the colonization of the Americas by European conquistadores, while whitewashing and denying the genocidal crimes against humanity that they committed against indigenous peoples.

Rubio’s imperialist tirade could not have been any more different from the remarks delivered by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Wang denounced the “the law of the jungle and unilateralism” of the US, instead calling for a system of “international collaboration” based on “win-win cooperation”.

The top Chinese foreign-policy official declared (emphasis added):

The monopolization of global power by a small number of countries is unpopular. We live in a multipolar world and need to practice true multilateralism.

There needs to be greater democracy in international relations. Global affairs should be discussed by all and the future of the world should be decided by all.

We need to make sure that all countries abide by the same set of rules, i.e., the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. All countries should be equal in terms of rights, opportunities and rules, and all countries, in particular small and medium-sized ones, should be able to find their places and play their roles in international relations.

Compared back to back, these speeches succinctly demonstrate the ideological divisions of Cold War Two.

The multipolar model of international relations that China is promoting is the polar opposite of the unipolar one advocated by the United States.

Beijing defends decolonization and wants a global order based on multipolarity, multilateralism, and peace; while Washington uses military force and wages economic warfare in a desperate attempt to restore a unipolar system in which it can act unilaterally, anywhere on Earth, without consequences.

Washington wants an international system based on the law of the jungle

The extreme imperialist worldview of the US government was articulated by Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, the far-right white nationalist Stephen Miller.

In an interview on CNN in January, Miller defended the Trump administration’s illegal invasion of Venezuela, in which US troops killed more than 100 people and kidnapped internationally recognized President Nicolás Maduro.

Miller argued that the global political order is and should be based on the principle that might makes right. He stated the following in a segment with CNN host Jake Tapper:

STEPHEN MILLER: The United States — this is sort of foundational — the United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere.

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us; to hoard weapons from our adversaries; to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States, rather than on behalf of the United States.

JAKE TAPPER: Sovereign countries shouldn’t be able to do what they want to do?

STEPHEN MILLER: The Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Doctrine is all about securing the national interest of America.

…

The future of the free world depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology.

These are not just the fringe views of one individual. This is the imperialist ideology that is openly promoted by top officials of the US government, including Trump and Marco Rubio.

Rubio’s pro-colonialist speech at the 2026 Munich Security Conference made it clear beyond a doubt that the goal of the US empire is to reverse the decolonization of the latter half of the 20th century and to drag the world back to the colonial era of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

China’s vision of a multipolar world

The model of international relations that China is promoting is that of a multipolar world based on multilateralism, win-win cooperation, and respect for the sovereignty of all countries, including and especially small ones.

The People’s Republic of China is profoundly opposed to imperialism and hegemony, and not only for ideological reasons, but also due to its own history.

During the Century of Humiliation — from the start of the British Empire’s First Opium War in 1839 until the revolution of 1949 — China was partially colonized by numerous Western powers and Japan. The European empires, Japan, and the United States all invaded China, exploited its workers and resources, and even seized control of parts of its territory.

Since its foundation in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has done everything it can to defend its sovereignty and make sure the Century of Humiliation is never repeated.

This history very much informs the policies of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Beijing’s vision for the world was spelled out in the speech given by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the 2026 Munich Security Conference.

This was the antithesis of the remarks delivered by Rubio.

The following is an excerpt of Wang’s speech (all emphasis added):

Over the past year, the international landscape was marked by growing transformations and turbulence, and the law of the jungle and unilateralism went rampant. Humanity has come to a new crossroads for the cause of peace and development. At such a juncture, President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), and called for following the five principles of sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, the people-centered approach, and real actions, with a view to jointly building a more just and equitable global governance system. The GGI aligns with the progressive trend of the times, represents the biggest common ground of the world’s nations, and has thus received widespread response from the international community shortly after its announcement. It injects new impetus into the endeavor to build a community with a shared future for humanity, and offers a compass for the giant ship of history to navigate through storms toward a brighter future. Now that humanity has weathered wind and rain to come this far, pulling together should be the imperative choice. We should reform and improve global governance to set the ship of history on the right course.

In reforming and improving global governance, the priority is to revitalize the United Nations system.

The founding of the U.N. was an important outcome of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War, a historic choice made by previous generations after painful reflection on past agonies, and the peace endeavor that nations have invested their greatest efforts in thus far. This edifice was jointly built by the people of the world. We have every responsibility to reinforce and renovate it, and no right to destroy it or tear it down.

The U.N. is not perfect, but it remains the most universal and authoritative intergovernmental organization in the world. On the U.N. platform, each country, regardless of its size or wealth, has a voice and a sacred vote as well as its due obligations and equal rights. Without the U.N., the world would revert to the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak, and many small and medium-sized countries would lose the multilateral foundation critical to their survival and development.

Therefore, what is imperative for us today is to recommit to the founding mission of the U.N., revitalize the leading role of the U.N., abide by the purposes of the U.N. Charter, and enhance the efficiency and efficacy of the U.N. system, so that the organization will be able to better adapt to the needs of the 21st century and unleash renewed vitality.

In reforming and improving global governance, the key lies in the collaboration and cooperation of all countries.

The reason why the international system is not functioning well enough lies not with the U.N. itself, but rather with certain country seeking to magnify differences and disagreements, put itself above everyone else, stoke bloc confrontation and even revive the Cold War mentality. All these have eroded the foundation of trust, worsened the atmosphere for cooperation, and impeded the functioning of international institutions.

To safeguard international collaboration and cooperation, it is important to seek common ground while shelving differences and pursue win-win cooperation. The world is a diverse place. It is only natural that countries differ in social system, history, culture, interests and demand. And it is precisely the differences that necessitate dialogue and cooperation. There is no reason why countries cannot respect each other and contribute to each other’s success. Just like the way gentlemen engage with one another, there could be harmony without uniformity.

A review of history shows, from the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War, to overcoming the global financial crisis, from the climate response to fighting terrorism, none of such progress would have been possible without countries coming together for sincere cooperation despite their differences. Let us always bear in mind that unity brings strength, and only in unity can we find hope.

In reforming and improving global governance, multilateralism should be always upheld.

The monopolization of global power by a small number of countries is unpopular. We live in a multipolar world and need to practice true multilateralism. There needs to be greater democracy in international relations, global affairs should be discussed by all and the future of the world should be decided by all.

We need to make sure that all countries abide by the same set of rules, i.e., the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter. All countries should be equal in terms of rights, opportunities and rules, and all countries, in particular small and medium-sized ones, should be able to find their places and play their roles in international relations.

To practice multilateralism, major countries in particular should lead by example. They should take the lead in pursuing cooperation, instead of conflict or confrontation. They should take the lead in observing rules, instead of applying double standards. They should take the lead in promoting equality, instead of imposing their will onto others. They should take the lead in encouraging openness, instead of resorting to self-serving unilateralism.

The Global South is rising collectively. The global governance system should also stay up-to-date to give more prominence to their voices and representation. Time will prove that the more democratic international relations are, the more peaceful the world is; the stronger multilateralism gets, the more effective global governance becomes.

The West’s global dominance has been in serious decline for several decades. The US government wants to reverse this by undoing the progress made by decolonization and reimposing Western hegemony on the world — by force.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an overtly pro-colonialist speech to European leaders, in which he praised “the great Western empires” and said North America and Europe should unite to “build a new Western century”, based on the subjugation of the Global South.

Speaking on behalf of the Donald Trump administration, Rubio made it clear that what Washington has done to Gaza, Venezuela, and Cuba is what it now hopes to do to the rest of the Global South — which represents 86% of the world population, and therefore constitutes the Global Majority.

Marco Rubio’s pro-colonialist speech at the 2026 Munich Security Conference

Marco Rubio is the second-most-powerful person in the US government, after Donald Trump. He is serving as both secretary of state and national security advisor. (Rubio is just the second person in US history to simultaneously hold the two positions, following notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger.)

Rubio spoke at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 14.

He was surrounded by prominent EU officials, who gave a standing ovation and applauded Rubio’s explicitly pro-colonialist remarks.

The top US foreign-policy official revealed that the US empire wants to reverse the gains made by the anti-colonial struggles in the latter half of the 20th century, and he portrayed decolonization as a sinister plot by “godless communists”.

These were Rubio’s comments (all emphasis added):

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, 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 in the years to come.

Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.

And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.

And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance – the alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children.

It is worth noting that Marco Rubio’s reactionary red-baiting fails to get even basic facts right. The hammer and sickle on a communist flag are not red; they are yellow. It is the flag itself that is red. But this only further illustrates Rubio’s extreme ignorance of history.

The point is that Rubio used his global platform to regurgitate far-right disinformation, demonizing the anti-colonial struggles of the Global South as an evil communist conspiracy, and vowing to reverse them.

The US secretary of state asserted that Washington will not accept the fact that “the West’s age of dominance had come to an end”, and will use all the tools at its disposable — including and especially military force — to “build a new Western century” and “renew the greatest civilization in human history”.

Rubio tells the West to stop apologizing for its colonial crimes

Marco Rubio also told the European leaders who were sitting around him at the Munich Security Conference that they must stop apologizing for the colonialist crimes against humanity that their countries committed in the Global South.

“We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame”, Rubio declared. “We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it”.

In fact, the top US foreign-policy official disputed the undeniable historical fact that Western empires carried out monstrous atrocities.

Rubio insisted that the West must not “atone for the purported sins of past generations”. By using the term “purported”, Rubio was calling into question whether or not they actually were sins; he was whitewashing the horrific history of colonialism, in which the Western imperial powers colonized the vast majority of the world, killed hundreds of millions of people, and enslaved many millions more.

The US secretary of state declared that the West should be proud of these colonial crimes.

“Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history”, he proclaimed.

The European Union gives Rubio’s far-right, pro-colonialist speech a standing ovation

Meanwhile, Rubio’s far-right, pro-colonialist diatribe was being applauded by the same EU officials who often bloviate about so-called “democracy” and “human rights” and love to lecture Global South countries for supposedly not being enlightened enough.

The Western media’s coverage of Rubio's speech erased his pro-colonialist rhetoric and made it all about the US reaffirming Europe that they will stay together in a cozy transatlantic alliance, despite Trump's aggressive tariffs.

After Rubio concluded his remarks, the moderator of the Munich Security Conference, the German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, thanked him profusely.

“Mr. Secretary, I’m not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we were just listening to what I would interpret as a message of reassurance, of partnership”, Ischinger said.

“You spoke of intertwined relations between the United States and Europe”, the German diplomat effused. “Thank you for offering this message of reassurance about our partnership”.

Rubio identifies with European colonialists, not Latin Americans — and he denies the genocide of Native Americans

Throughout his speech, Marco Rubio emphasized that colonialism links the United States and Europe in a transatlantic imperial bond.

Rubio repeatedly stressed that United States is itself a European colonial creation. He stated:

For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

We are part of one civilization – Western civilization.

…

… for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.

Rubio similarly made it clear that he personally identifies with European colonialists.

Although Rubio’s family is technically of Cuban descent, he made no mention of this in his speech. Instead, Rubio stressed that his ancestors came from modern-day Italy and Spain.

Rubio sees himself, proudly, as a child of the European colonial elites of the Americas, rejecting his Cuban heritage. He admires the European colonizers, the conquistadores, who traveled to Latin America, declared themselves the ruling classes, and carried out horrific crimes against humanity against the indigenous populations.

This is what Rubio said:

… for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.

Our story began with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas – and became the legend that defined the imagination of a our pioneer nation.

Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system. Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.

Our great midwestern heartland was built by German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse – and by the way, dramatically upgraded the quality of American beer. (Laughter.)

Our expansion into the interior followed the footsteps of French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley. Our horses, our ranches, our rodeos – the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain. And our largest and most iconic city was named New Amsterdam before it was named New York.

And do you know that in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.

When Rubio claimed that European colonizers in the modern-day United States “transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse”, he was engaging in overt genocide genial.

The US secretary of state erased the objective historical fact that European colonizers killed tens of millions of Native Americans, ethnically cleansed them, and stole their land. According to Rubio, these inhabited lands were mere “empty plains”.

Anti-communism unites the West

While he denied and whitewashed the genocidal crimes of colonialism, Marco Rubio stressed that the basis of “Western civilization” is fundamentally predicated on capitalism.

The US secretary of state emphasized that anti-communism is a point of unity between Washington and Brussels. He proclaimed:

When this conference began in 1963, it was in a nation – actually, it was on a continent – that was divided against itself. The line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany. The first barbed fences of the Berlin Wall had gone up just two years prior.

And just months before that first conference, before our predecessors first met here, here in Munich, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Even as World War II still burned fresh in the memory of Americans and Europeans alike, we found ourselves staring down the barrel of a new global catastrophe – one with the potential for a new kind of destruction, more apocalyptic and final than anything before in the history of mankind.

At the time of that first gathering, Soviet communism was on the march. Thousands of years of Western civilization hung in the balance. At that time, victory was far from certain. But we were driven by a common purpose. We were unified not just by what we were fighting against; we were unified by what we were fighting for. And together, Europe and America prevailed and a continent was rebuilt. Our people prospered. In time, the East and West blocs were reunited. A civilization was once again made whole.

…

When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism.

It must be mentioned that, during the First Cold War, the US empire joined the European empires in violently opposing most of the anti-colonial movements and propping up racist colonial regimes.

On the other side, the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc supported the anti-colonial struggles in the Global South, providing national-liberation movements with weapons, technical assistance, diplomatic backing, and other forms of aid.

This does not mean that all of the anti-colonial movements were evil plots by “godless communists”, as Rubio argued in his speech.

But it is certainly true that the national-liberation struggles were supported by socialist countries, and opposed by capitalist ones.

Rubio calls for a new Western supply chain that cuts out China

In his speech, Rubio strongly insinuated that the West should ally together once again in Cold War Two, this time against the People’s Republic of China.

Although he did not directly name China, Rubio heavily implied that this is the shared adversary of “Western civilization”.

Rubio argued that China was supposedly trying to destroy the West by deindustrializing their economies. He did not mention that it was Western capitalists who voluntarily moved their factories to China and other countries in the Global South in order to exploit lower paid workers.

Instead, Rubio portrayed the deindustrialization of Western neoliberal capitalist economies as an evil Chinese plot, and he argued that the US and Europe should work together to reindustrialize, isolate China, and develop “a Western supply chain for critical minerals”.

These were his remarks:

… we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours – shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.

…

Deindustrialization was not inevitable. It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence. And the loss of our supply chain sovereignty was not a function of a prosperous and healthy system of global trade. It was foolish. It was a foolish but voluntary transformation of our economy that left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.

Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West. Together we can reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people. But the work of this new alliance should not be focused just on military cooperation and reclaiming the industries of the past. It should also be focused on, together, advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century. Commercial space travel and cutting-edge artificial intelligence; industrial automation and flex manufacturing; creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals not vulnerable to extortion from other powers; and a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South. Together we can not only take back control of our own industries and supply chains – we can prosper in the areas that will define the 21st century.

Rubio’s insistence that Western corporations must control the “market share in the economies of the Global South” illustrates how Washington considers the Global South to be little more than a market for US goods and a region that must be dominated by West, with no regard for its sovereignty.

Donald Trump has openly called for “regime change” in Iran. He has surrounded the country with what he calls a “massive armada”, and has suggested that he wants to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

While Trump threatens to bomb Iran again, after attacking it in 2025, the US government has been dropping devastating economic bombs on the nation.

Top US government officials boast that they are trying to “collapse” Iran’s economy.

The Trump administration is waging what it calls a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran, which the White House says is “aimed at driving Iran’s oil exports to zero”.

Washington’s strategy is to starve Iran of export revenue by sabotaging its oil industry. By denying Tehran access to hard currency, the US aims to cause high rates of inflation and destroy the value of Iran’s currency, the rial.

This US economic warfare does great harm not only the Iranian government, but to all of the 93 million Iranians who live in the country. Civilians are bearing the brunt of the pain.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on “making Iran broke again”

Washington’s strategy for scorched-earth economic warfare was clearly spelled out by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge-fund manager from Wall Street.

In an interview with Fox News in January, anchor Maria Bartiromo asked Bessent about the impact of the sanctions that the US government has imposed on Iran.

Bessent bragged that these unilateral coercive measures, which flagrantly violate international law, have caused Iran to run out of dollars, which means Iran cannot pay for imports or stabilize its currency, leading to significant inflation.

“Their economy collapsed”, Bessent gloated. The top US official then took credit for the violent protests and riots in Iran.

These were Bessent’s full remarks (all emphasis added):

MARIA BARTIROMO: What do you want to say about sanctions? Something else you’ve been working on, of course. What are you planning there in terms of Iran, and the impact there? Do sanctions actually work?

And the same question with regard to 500% secondary sanctions or tariffs on countries who purchase energy products from Russia.

SCOTT BESSENT: OK, so two things here. There are Treasury sanctions. And if you look at a speech that I gave at the Economic Club of New York last March [2025], I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranian citizen, I would take my money out.

President Trump ordered Treasury and OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put “maximum pressure” on Iran.

And it’s worked. Because, in December, their economy collapsed.

We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports.

And this is why the people took to the street.

So this is economic statecraft. No shots fired.

In the Fox News interview, Bessent cited a speech that he delivered at the Economic Club of New York in March 2025.

In those remarks, the US Treasury secretary admitted that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran was “designed to collapse its already buckling economy”.

This is what Bessent said:

Last month, the White House announced its “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, designed to collapse its already buckling the economy.

The Iranian economy is in disarray: 35% official inflation — official inflation — a currency that has depreciated 60% in the last 12 months, and an ongoing energy crisis.

I know a few things about currency devaluations. And if I were an Iranian, I would get all of my money out of the rial, now.

In the same address at the Economic Club of New York, Bessent vowed: “We will close off Iran’s access to the international financial system, by targeting regional parties that facilitate the transfer of its revenues”.

“Our maximum pressure campaign [is] designed to collapse Iranian oil exports”, he said.

“We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector”, he declared.

Bessent then quipped, “Making Iran broke again will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy”.

“If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither”, he added.

When Bessent gave this speech at the Economic Club of New York, he was surrounded by Wall Street executives. They applauded with glee as he vowed to “collapse” Iran’s economy.

Sitting directly behind Bessent on stage was the billionaire oligarch Stephen Schwarzman, who is CEO of Blackstone, the largest alternative asset manager on earth, which is known for its massive private-equity arm.

Blackstone is the largest landlord in the United States. The Wall Street firm owns more than 300,000 rental housing units in the US.

Schwarzman also happened to be one of the main funders of Trump’s presidential campaign.

After Trump won the 2024 election, Bloomberg noted that the billionaire oligarch’s “bet pays off”, and that the Wall Street executive would be “well-positioned to influence business, tax policies”.

Close correlation between US sanctions and inflation

The US Treasury secretary’s admission that Washington is intentionally trying to cause hyperinflation in Iran is extremely revealing.

Western media outlets and pundits often blame the high rates of inflation in sanctioned countries like Iran on corruption and mismanagement.

However, it is not a coincidence that many of the countries with the highest rates of inflation on Earth have been sanctioned by the United States and the West more broadly, including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Iran.

The US government has waged brutal economic warfare against these countries, seeking to deny them access to the dollar-dominated international financial system and collapse their local currencies.

Corruption and mismanagement are not irrelevant (and they exist in every country), but they distract from the most important factor: sanctions.

In the case of Iran, a look at World Bank data shows that there is a very close correlation between US sanctions and inflation.

It should be emphasized that the US economic war against Iran is bipartisan, and it did not start under Donald Trump.

When the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Iran, they also contributed to high levels of inflation.

In the 2000s, before the US massively escalated its sanctions on Iran, the country’s inflation rate was relatively low, bottoming at 10% in 2006.

That year, in October, the Bush administration imposed heavy sanctions on Iran and threatened to sanction non-US oil and gas companies that invested in the country.

This scared off foreign investors and trading partners, while significantly increasing transaction and insurance costs for Iranian firms. Inflation promptly shot up to 17.3% in 2007 and 25.4% in 2008.

Iran managed to get inflation under control by 2010, when it fell to 10.1%.

However, in July of that year, the Obama administration hit Iran with heavy sanctions, while also threatening sanctions on foreign financial institutions and companies that worked with the country.

Unsurprisingly, inflation skyrocketed over the next three years, rising to 26.3% in 2011 and 27.3% in 2012, before peaking at 36.6% in 2013.

In 2012, the Obama White House published a sadistic press release boasting of how its illegal sanctions were “grinding the Iranian economy to a halt” and “crippling” it.

Obama stated:

Because of our efforts, Iran is under greater pressure than ever before… Few thought that sanctions could have an immediate bite on the Iranian regime. They have, slowing the Iranian nuclear program and virtually grinding the Iranian economy to a halt in 2011. Many questioned whether we could hold our coalition together as we moved against Iran’s Central Bank and oil exports. But our friends in Europe and Asia and elsewhere are joining us. And in 2012, the Iranian government faces the prospect of even more crippling sanctions.

However, in 2014, inflation in Iran cooled off significantly. This was likely due in large part to the interim agreement that Iran signed with Western countries in November 2013, as part of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.

Then, in 2015, Iran and the P5+1 countries (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and the European Union) signed the final version of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The JCPOA was written into international law with UN Security Council resolution 2231.

This agreement lifted sanctions on Iran — and, immediately after, inflation fell, reaching the lowest point in decades in 2016, at just 7.2%.

However, Trump came into office for his first term as US president in 2017, and in May 2018, he unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, sabotaging the agreement, and reimposed sanctions on Iran, in clear violation of international law.

Inflation in Iran then shot up to 39.9% in 2019.

The Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, and Iran has struggled with high rates of inflation (around 40%) ever since, as US sanctions have ripped through the economy.

The correlation is very clear. And US officials have not even tried to hide the fact that their unlawful sanctions have caused inflation in Iran. Treasury Secretary Bessent is proud of it.

US Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg, a hardline neoconservative hawk, bragged on Twitter that “President Trump’s strategy of MAXIMUM PRESSURE has brought the regime to its knees [sic]”.

Helberg did not mention the tens of millions of Iranian civilians who are suffering from this brutal US economic warfare, which has intentionally wrecked their currency and has thus eliminated their purchasing power, while causing shortages of crucial goods.

UN experts: US sanctions are illegal and violate human rights

Independent experts on international law have said for many years that US sanctions on Iran are illegal, and violate human rights.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has published many reports denouncing US sanctions.

A 2019 press release stated that the “imposition of unilateral coercive measures on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran by the United States” and “the use of economic sanctions for political purposes violates human rights and the norms of international behaviour”.

“Such action may precipitate man-made humanitarian catastrophes of unprecedented proportions”, the OHCHR warned.

Prominent American economists calculated that illegal US sanctions on Venezuela caused at least 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018, in a conservative estimate.

The top UN expert on unilateral coercive measures, Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy, stressed, “Regime change through economic measures likely to lead to the denial of basic human rights and indeed possibly to starvation has never been an accepted practice of international relations”.

In another publication in 2022, a group of UN experts said that US sanctions were violating the human rights of all Iranians.

“It is time for sanctions that impede Iran’s ability to improve the environment and reduce the ill effects on health and life, to be eased or lifted completely so that Iranians can access their right to a clean environment, the right to health and to life, and other rights”, the UN experts wrote.

Western politicians, such as Andrew Yang, insist that “the US should help the people of Iran”.

If they truly wanted to help the Iranian people, the most effective — and easiest — thing they could do would be to lift the illegal sanctions that they have imposed on Iran, which have intentionally devastated the economy and caused extreme suffering to tens of millions of civilians.

Donald Trump claims to be a so-called “peace president”, but he has bombed more countries than any other US leader.

After proudly renaming the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Trump now plans to raise the US military budget from $1 trillion to a staggering $1.5 trillion.

This means that, if Trump succeeds, the United States will soon spend more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined, excluding China.

This is deeply hypocritical, because in his January 2025 inauguration speech, as he started his second term as US president, Trump declared that he would be a “peacemaker”.

Similarly, in the victory speech that Trump gave after he won the November 2024 presidential election, he claimed, falsely, that during his first term, “we had no wars”.

“I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars”, Trump promised.

He lied. In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

When his first and second terms are combined, Trump has bombed 10 nations (the aforementioned seven, plus Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan).

This means Trump has bombed more countries than all other presidents in US history.

Moreover, Trump is threatening to attack at least four more nations: Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland. He has vowed to colonize Greenland and forcibly turn it into US territory.

In a publication on his website Truth Social on January 20, 2026, Trump posted a photoshopped image of himself sitting in the White House next to a map showing Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela all annexed by the US empire.

Bipartisan US wars kill millions of people

Trump is certainly not unique when it comes to waging wars; every US president in modern history has intervened abroad and overseen war crimes.

George W. Bush bombed five countries, and invaded Iraq in an illegal war of aggression.

Barack Obama won the so-called Nobel “Peace” Prize, before his administration went on to bomb seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.

Trump bombed the same seven nations attacked by Obama, adding three more: Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela.

In fact, the wars waged by the US in the two decades after September 11, 2001 had a death toll of at least 4.5 million people, in a conservative estimate by researchers at the elite Brown University.

They also found that 38 million people were displaced due to these US-fueled wars. This was the largest refugee crisis since World War Two.

These imperial wars have been bipartisan. All modern US presidents have been complicit.

But what is especially hypocritical about Trump is that his administration constantly spreads propaganda claiming that the man who has bombed more countries than any other US leader is “the peace president”.

Trump launched more airstrikes in 6 months than Biden did in 4 years

Just in 2025, in the first 11 months of his second term, Trump carried out more than 500 bombings of countries around the world, according to data from the monitoring group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED).

“Trump launched more airstrikes on foreign nations in the first six months of his second term than Biden did in all four years he was in office”, CBC reported, citing ACLED figures.

Joe Biden himself also oversaw extreme war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Biden administration strongly supported the Israeli regime, giving it tens of billions of dollars of military aid and shielding it from any legal consequences by repeatedly vetoing resolutions at the UN Security Council, as US-backed Israeli forces committed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Trump has continued doing the same. In September, the Trump administration pressured Congress to approve the sale of $6.4 billion more in military equipment to help Israel further colonize Palestinian land.

Trump bombed civilian sites in Venezuela

Moreover, when Trump attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its internationally recognized President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, he also killed more than 100 people, including civilians.

In the illegal invasion of Venezuelan sovereign territory, the US military bombed civilian sites in addition to military targets.

Among the civilian areas hit by the US military was a medical warehouse that stored supplies for Venezuelan dialysis patients. Thousands of civilians could now die, because they lost access to this life-saving treatment.

The US military similarly destroyed an important scientific research center in Venezuela.

Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth proudly declared that the US attack on Venezuela was aimed at China and Russia.

“We’re re-establishing deterrence that’s so absolute and so unquestioned that our enemies will not dare to test us”, he stated.

Trump wants $1.5 trillion US military budget

Just a few days after Trump bombed Venezuela, he announced that he plans to increase the US military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion by 2027.

Fortune magazine reported that “a $1.5 trillion U.S. military budget would exceed the combined military expenditures of the next 35 highest-spending countries. And starting from the bottom up, a $1.5 trillion U.S. military budget would exceed the military expenditures of every other nation combined except for China”.

For context, in 2024, the entire world’s military expenditure was $2.7 trillion.

As of that year, the United States alone accounted for 37% of global military spending, according to data collected by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Nearly half, 47%, of US federal government discretionary spending was dedicated to the Pentagon — which was previously known as the Department of Defense, but which self-declared “peacemaker” Trump renamed the Department of War.

In 2024, the US spent more on its military than the next nine largest military spenders in the world combined.

The combined defense expenditure of China, Russia, Germany, India, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, France, and Japan was $984 billion, compared to $997 billion in the US (and most of these top military spenders are US allies).

China’s defense spending in 2024 was $314 billion, or less than one-third of that of the US, according to SIPRI.

China has not fought a war since 1979, while the United States bombed seven countries just in 2025.

Trump’s $1.5 trillion US military budget will increase federal debt by $5.8 trillion

When he announced his intention to raise the military budget to $1.5 trillion, Trump claimed he will, “at the same time, pay down Debt”.

This is false.

A report by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump boosting annual military expenditure to $1.5 trillion will add $5.8 trillion to US federal debt over the next decade.

Trump claimed that the tariff revenue that the US government makes will supposedly cover this increase in military spending. This is not true.

Tariff revenue is estimated to be around $300 billion per year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That is significantly smaller than the additional cost of increasing the military budget to $1.5 trillion.

This assumption that tariff revenue will stay high, at roughly $300 billion annually throughout the next decade, likewise suggests that Trump’s assertion that his tariffs will reindustrialize the US is false.

If Trump’s levies truly aimed to accomplish this, it would be expected that tariff revenue would fall over time, as they would reduce imports and instead encourage domestic consumption of goods.

Nevertheless, Trump’s insistence that his tariffs could help pay off US federal debt demonstrate that he knows they will not re-industrialize the US.

Trump cuts taxes on the rich while raising taxes on the poor

In reality, Trump’s tariffs are a regressive tax on Americans. They represent a shift of the tax burden off of rich Americans onto poorer ones.

Trump constantly claims that other countries will supposedly pay for his tariffs. This is not true. It is US importers and consumers that pay the tariffs.

This tax on consumption of imported goods is extremely regressive. The biggest burden by far is felt by lower-income Americans, who spend much more of their paycheck on basic imported goods.

At least 55% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs have been paid by US consumers, Goldman Sachs estimated in October 2025.

Meanwhile, Trump has been cutting taxes on the richest Americans. The policies included in his “One Big Beautiful Bill” will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest people in the country.

Trump’s policies will result in 69% of tax cuts going to the richest 20% of Americans.

While a mere 1% of tax cuts will benefit the poorest 20% of Americans, 94% of Trump’s tax cuts will go to the richest 60%.

In fact, due to Trump’s tariffs, the bottom 95% of Americans will actually see an effective tax increase.

The poorer a person is, the higher the percentage of their income will go to paying taxes to the Trump administration, while only the richest 5% of Americans will actually see their taxes fall.

This is because, as Trump reduced progressive income taxation in one area, he increased regressive taxation in another area, in the form of tariffs.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" and his tax cuts on the rich will cause US federal debt to balloon by $5.5 trillion by 2034. This is in addition to the $5.8 trillion federal debt increase that will result from his $1.5 trillion military budget.

This is all profoundly hypocritical, because Trump oversaw the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which he appointed the world’s richest billionaire oligarch, top US government contractor Elon Musk, to lead.

Trump and Musk claimed DOGE would root out government “waste, fraud, and abuse”.

In reality, the Trump administration gutted social spending and the parts of the state that actually help working families, while not reducing spending overall.

Trump’s plans to increase US federal debt by trillions — by cutting taxes on the rich and raising the military budget to $1.5 trillion to wage war around the world — come at the same time when he is eliminating $186 billion of funding for SNAP, the food program that helps poor and working-class Americans feed their families.

In other words, Trump is slashing government support for the poorest people in the country, while providing tax relief for the richest and massively increasing the Pentagon budget, which will further enrich corporate shareholders in the military-industrial complex.

Donald Trump, the billionaire self-declared “peacemaker” who now holds the record for bombing more countries that any other US president, is demonstrating to the world that all US wars are indeed a form of class war.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has garnered a lot of attention for a speech he delivered at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he condemned Donald Trump’s threats and announced that Canada will “fundamentally shift our strategic posture” and “diversify” away from the United States.

These remarks came just a few days after Carney took a high-profile trip to China, to try to mend relations. He was the first Canadian leader to visit since 2017.

At a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Carney said foreign relations must shift in a “new world order”.

Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton discussed these events in detail with independent journalist Daniel Dumbrill:

These two events were indeed significant, and historic.

But many observers have overlooked the most revealing admission that Carney made in his 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) speech, which exposed the blatant hypocrisy of Western imperialism.

The Canadian prime minister acknowledged that the so-called “rules-based international order” was always deeply hypocritical and biased, serving the interests of the imperialist West.

Carney said (emphasis added):

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

In other words, Carney was admitting that what he called Western “middle powers” (such as Canada or European countries) willingly went along with US hegemony and supported the US-led imperialist system — which is predicated on the systematic subjugation and exploitation of Global South countries in the periphery — because these Western middle powers also benefited from this pillage of the Global South.

It must be noted that Carney said they always knew that the so-called “rules-based international order” was hypocritical and exploitative.

But he emphasized, “This fiction was useful” for Western imperialist countries. They benefited from imperialism, as the US hegemon’s junior partners in crime.

Carney understands very well how this system operates. The neoliberal technocrat got his start working at Wall Street mega-bank Goldman Sachs, before going on to lead the central banks of both Canada and England.

However, “This bargain no longer works”, Carney stressed.

Now that the US empire has turned against these Western imperialist middle powers that it previously called its “allies”, and now that they are getting just a glimpse of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of what they have been doing to the Global South for centuries, they are (ostensibly) turning against the exploitative system that they had helped to sustain for so long.

Canada assisted the genocide in Gaza by sending weapons to Israel.

Canada helped NATO wage war on Libya in 2011, destroying its central government.

Canada has been a key part of colonial military occupations of Haiti, and has supported US-led coups across the Global South.

Carney was himself governor of the Bank of England in 2019, during the first Trump administration’s coup attempt in Venezuela, and he illegally froze (read: stole) billions of dollars worth of gold belonging to the Venezuelan government.

Canada and other Western “middle powers” supported the US-led imperialist system as long as it benefited them.

They were fine with the US-sponsored colonization of Palestinian land, but Trump’s flagrant attempt to colonize Greenland (an autonomous territory of NATO member Denmark) is a bridge too far for them.

Now that that imperialist system no longer benefits these middle powers, they suddenly pretend to be acting in a principled way, supposedly to uphold international law and defend sovereignty.

But Canada’s prime minister has publicly acknowledged that they never truly cared about that. It was just the public relations narrative.

It would be objectively good for the majority of the world population (which is in the Global South) if the Western imperial alliance broke apart, but it is hard to take Carney’s rhetoric about a “new world order” seriously, given Canada’s track record.

The United States has launched a full-frontal attack not only against Venezuela, but against all of Latin America -- and even against the basic concept of sovereignty.

Donald Trump ordered the US military on January 3 to bomb Venezuela, to kidnap its constitutional President Nicolás Maduro, and to send him to New York to be subjected to a show trial on politically motivated charges.

This brazen assault on Venezuela is part of a larger US imperialist offensive in Latin America as a whole. The Trump administration has openly invoked the 202-year-old colonial Monroe Doctrine, and has updated it for the 21st century, proudly dubbing it the “Donroe Doctrine”.

By attacking Venezuela, the US empire hopes to accomplish several goals:

• Impose US hegemony in Latin America (from the Monroe Doctrine to the Donroe Doctrine).

• Exploit Venezuela’s natural resources (oil, gas, critical minerals, and rare earth elements), as part of an attempt to build a new supply chain in the western hemisphere.

• Cut off Latin America’s ties with China (as well as with Russia and Iran).

• Threaten other left-wing governments in the region (primarily Cuba and Nicaragua, but also Brazil and Colombia).

• Destroy the project of regional integration in Latin America and the Caribbean (in organizations like the ALBA and CELAC).

• Sabotage Global South unity (given Venezuela’s support for Palestine, Iran, African liberation struggles, etc.).

Trump embraces the colonial Monroe Doctrine

The US empire’s broader plan was spelled out clearly in the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy.

The document showed how the US seeks to forcibly impose its hegemony in the entire western hemisphere. It openly invoked the Monroe Doctrine.

US officials have enthusiastically embraced the colonial doctrine, which dates back to 1823.

Mere hours after the US government attacked Venezuela, an official Trump account on Twitter posted propaganda depicting the US president standing over all of the Americas, from Alaska at the top of North America to Argentina at the bottom of South America, holding a big stick reading “Donroe Doctrine”.

The image was a reference to a Monroe Doctrine political cartoon from 1905. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reposted it on his official government account.

The US empire wants to control Latin America’s natural resources

The goal is for US corporations to control all of the western hemisphere’s strategic natural resources, including critical minerals and rare earth elements.

It is by no means a coincidence that Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of oil. Although today the US is the top oil producer on Earth and a net exporter of oil, it is still heavily reliant on importing heavy crude. Much of that comes from Canada, but Venezuela’s heavy crude is a potential alternative source.

Trump has been explicit about the fact that he wants US corporations to take over Venezuela’s oil industry, so the US can meet its heavy crude needs. (Replacing Canada’s heavy crude exports could also give Washington leverage over Ottawa, at a time when Trump talks about colonizing Canada and making it the “51st state”.)

In a press conference held after he bombed Venezuela, Trump claimed that the US government will “run the country”. He added, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money”.

“We’re in the oil business”, the US president stressed. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground”.

A new US-controlled supply chain for critical minerals, cutting out China

In addition to enormous reserves of oil and natural gas, Venezuela also has significant deposits of gold, critical minerals, and rare earth elements.

The US government has made it clear that it wants to create a new supply chain in the western hemisphere that cuts out China, to prepare for future conflict with Beijing. It hopes it can use Latin America’s critical minerals and rare earths to do so.

This is also a major reason why Trump wants to colonize and pillage Greenland, which has 25 of the 30 materials considered “critical” by the European Union.

In the 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump administration asserted that US corporations must control Latin America’s “energy infrastructure” and “critical mineral access”. The US government wrote that it is “strengthening critical supply chains in this Hemisphere”, in order to “reduce dependencies” and “detrimental outside influence” -- an obvious reference to China.

China dominates the global supply chain for critical minerals. It is not only the Trump administration but also the Joe Biden administration that sought to change that, by creating a new US-controlled supply chain.

More sober officials in the Trump administration officials have recognized that most manufacturing is not actually coming back to the US (where the number of manufacturing jobs has been steadily falling for decades, even under Trump), so they admitted in the National Security Strategy that they want to “near-shore manufacturing” to Latin America. US corporations would like to exploit low-paid Latin American workers to make their products, cutting out China.

This is also why a new US-dominated supply chain in the western hemisphere is wanted: not only because the US military-industrial complex needs to remove China from the supply chain for the weapons that it is making to prepare for a potential future war with China; but also because the US seeks to economically decouple from China, and thinks Latin America can help it do that.

Latin America’s strategic infrastructure

Moreover, the US empire wants to control all of the strategic infrastructure in Latin America.

The 2025 National Security Strategy said Washington will “identify strategic points and resources in the Western Hemisphere”, adding, “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region”.

The Trump administration is brazenly threatening Latin American countries to force China to sell any investments it has in regional infrastructure projects.

The US government already successfully ordered Panama to pressure the Hong Kong company that owned ports surrounding the Panama Canal, CK Hutchison Holdings, to sell them to Wall Street giant BlackRock.

It is likely that the US will also target Peru’s Port of Chancay, one of the most important ports in the region, which was built by China. Trump’s Latin America advisor, Mauricio Claver-Carone, suggested, “Any product passing through Chancay or any port owned or controlled by China in the region should be subject to a 60% tariff”.

There has even been discussion in Washington of potential measures to force Latin American governments to impose restrictions on Chinese investment in the region.

US intervention in Latin America in the Second Cold War

The 2025 National Security Strategy showed how the Trump administration is obsessed with trying to limit China’s ties with countries in Latin America. This is Cold War Two.

In his first trip abroad as secretary of state, Marco Rubio went to Panama, where he forced the Central American nation to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Trump administration is significantly increasing US pressure on other countries in the region to leave the BRI.

Likewise, Trump blatantly meddled in Honduras’ election in 2025 and backed an electoral coup d’etat. (Trump also pardoned and released from prison one of the world’s worst drug traffickers, the US-backed right-wing former dictator of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández -- which illustrated how the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about drug trafficking, but is merely using it as a cynical excuse to attack and destabilize the independent governments in the region.)

The right-wing Trump ally who will now run Honduras on behalf of the US, the oligarch Nasry “Tito” Asfura, has vowed to formally break diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China and recognize Taiwan separatists.

The US also wants to use Honduras as a base of operations for attacks on the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua.

After bombing and occupying Venezuela, Trump and Marco Rubio hope to wage similar imperialist regime-change wars on Cuba and Nicaragua. Rubio has dedicated his entire career to overthrowing their socialist revolutions. It is a political crusade for him.

In fact, in a press conference that Trump and Rubio gave after bombing Venezuela and kidnapping President Maduro, they openly threatened Cuba and Colombia’s left-wing President Gustavo Petro.

The Trump administration’s goal is simple: to impose right-wing US puppet regimes in every country in Latin America, which will obediently serve the interests of Washington and Wall Street, and sell off their assets to US investors.

Two important elections are coming up in 2026 in countries with left-wing governments: Brazil (in October) and Colombia (in May). It is guaranteed that the Trump administration is going to meddle in those elections to try to put in power subservient right-wing US allies (like Javier Milei in Argentina).

Trump has also threatened to bomb Mexico, which has an independent, non-aligned government led by left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum (who is one of the most popular leaders on Earth, with a consistent approval rating of around 74%).

Mexico has strongly opposed these US threats, saying they would be an attack on Mexico’s sovereignty. But, as Trump’s war on Venezuela demonstrated, the US empire doesn’t care a bit about sovereignty.

From the Monroe Doctrine to the Donroe Doctrine: the 2025 National Security Strategy

To further understand the US empire’s plan for Latin America, it is important to look at the details of the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS).

This document identified the western hemisphere as the most important region for US foreign policy. The Trump administration declared that it wants a region that “remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains”, in which the US has “continued access to key strategic locations”.

The NSS stated in no uncertain terms that the “United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”.

In a press conference that Trump gave a few hours after bombing Venezuela and abducting President Maduro, he echoed this rhetoric. Praising the Monroe Doctrine, Trump said, “We’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe Doctrine”. He added, “We are reasserting American power in a very powerful way in our home region”.

In the 2025 NSS, the Trump administration pledged to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere”. This was an obvious reference to China.

The document made it as clear as day that what Washington seeks is hegemony. It declared (emphasis added):

The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region. The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.

The Trump administration did not even try to hide the fact that it does not care about the sovereignty of countries in Latin America, and is more than willing to violate it.

“We want other nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others”, the NSS said.

The document articulated a cold war-style, Manichean division of the world, writing, “The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world”.

The ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine

The 2025 National Security Strategy stated that the US empire “will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”.

This was a reference to the “Roosevelt Corollary” proposed by arch-imperialist Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt in his 1904 State of the Union address, when he stated the following (emphasis added):

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.

...

Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them.

...

In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large.

What is striking is how the targets of Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist aggression in 1904 -- China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Panama -- are some of the same targets of Washington today.

Trump has brought back Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist “Big Stick” doctrine and gunboat diplomacy. With its “Trump Corollary”, the US government is stating that it believes it has the right to militarily intervene anywhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, whenever it wants. It is an explicitly imperialist policy that seeks to deny the nations of the region their rights to independence, sovereignty, and self-determination, which are enshrined in international law and the UN Charter.

The Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela is part of a larger imperialist assault on Latin America, and the Global South more generally.

The overt savagery and cruelty of the US empire likewise demonstrate how puerile and ridiculous the “democracy” rhetoric of Western officials and pundits is, when they accuse besieged Global South countries like Venezuela of supposedly being “authoritarian”.

It is impossible for the nations of Latin America (and the Global South as a whole) to practice democracy when the world’s most powerful and deadliest empire is constantly interfering in their elections, attacking them, imposing sanctions on them, and sponsoring coups.

True democracy is impossible while imperialism exists.

Leer en español aquí.

2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism in World War Two. Unfortunately, the history of this extremely important conflict is not very well understood today.

It was not the United States and its Western allies that defeated fascism in WWII. That is a myth that is promoted by Hollywood movies.

In reality, it was the Soviet Union and China that defeated fascism in WWII. However, their heroic contribution was later erased by the West, when the US waged the First Cold War against the global socialist movement.

The vast majority of Nazi casualties, approximately 80%, were on the Eastern Front, in the Third Reich’s savage, scorched-earth battles against the Soviet Red Army.

More than 26 million Soviets died in the Nazi empire’s genocidal war. Compare that to the just over 400,000 US Americans who died, and the roughly 450,000 Brits who lost their lives.

This means that 62 Soviets were killed for every US American who died in WWII. Yet, tragically, their sacrifice has been forgotten in the West – or, better said, erased from public consciousness for political reasons.

The fact that the USSR defeated Nazi Germany was even admitted by the inveterate anti-communist Winston Churchill, an explicit racist, colonialist, and erstwhile admirer of Hitler who oversaw the British empire’s extreme crimes, including a famine in Bengal in 1943.

In a speech in August 1944, Churchill acknowledged:

“I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies”.

Then, in October 1944, Churchill said, “I have always believed and I still believe that it is the Red Army that has torn the guts out of the filthy Nazis”.

In fact, the USSR wanted to crush fascism even earlier by proposing a surprise attack on Nazi Germany in 1939, weeks before Hitler invaded Poland. Soviet military officers made an official request to British and French officials to form an alliance against Nazi Germany in August 1939, but London and Paris were not interested. The USSR had a million troops ready to fight, but the Western European powers were not prepared.

What the capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America had hoped for was that Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union, which they considered their main enemy. This is why the Western imperial powers had long appeased Hitler, signing shameful deals like the 1938 Munich Agreement, which allowed the Nazi empire to expand in Europe.

What the Western capitalist “liberal democracies” and the fascist regimes shared in common was mutual hatred of communism. The rich oligarchs who controlled Western governments feared that they would lose their privileges if workers in their countries were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the 1930s, the US State Department spoke positively of fascism as an alternative to communism, and the US chargé d'affaires in Germany praised the supposedly “more moderate section of the [Nazi] party, headed by Hitler himself ... which appeal[s] to all civilized and reasonable people”.

It must be emphasized that, when the Japanese empire officially allied with Nazi Germany in 1936, the name of the deal they signed was the Agreement Against the Communist International, or the Anti-Comintern Pact. Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy subsequently signed the agreement in 1937, and the fascist regimes in Spain, Hungary, and other European countries joined in the following years. It was extreme, violent anti-communism that united all of these fascist powers.

While there is widespread ignorance about the Soviet Union’s leading role in crushing Nazi Germany in WWII, the heroic contribution that the people of China made to the defeat of the Japanese empire is even less well known.

For Europe, WWII began in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. For the people of China, the war started much earlier, in 1931, when the Japanese empire invaded the Manchuria region of northern China.

For 14 years, the people of China resisted Japan’s aggression, as the imperial regime sought to colonize more and more Chinese territory.

By the end of the war in 1945, roughly 20 million Chinese had lost their lives. This means that approximately 48 Chinese were killed for every US American who died in WWII.

In China, WWII is known as the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and it was part of a larger conflict called the World Anti-Fascist War.

China held an important event on 3 September 2025 commemorating the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism. It featured key leaders of countries that are today, once again, fighting against imperialism and fascism, including China’s President Xi Jinping, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the DPRK’s leader Kim Jong-un, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, and officials from other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, including Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Nicaragua’s representative Laureano Ortega Murillo.

The United States has long taken credit for the defeat of the fascist Japanese empire, but this erases the enormous, heroic, 14-year contribution made by the Chinese people.

Although it is true that the United States was briefly allied with the USSR and China during WWII, and it did provide significant military assistance through its 1941 Lend-Lease Act, Washington immediately terminated that partnership in 1945.

In fact, even before WWII officially ended, the United States had already started to recruit fascists to help them wage the First Cold War. US intelligence agencies saved many Nazi war criminals in the infamous Operation Paperclip. Instead of facing justice, these genocidaires assisted Washington in its subsequent attacks on the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe.

Later, the CIA and NATO created Operation Gladio, in which they used fascist war criminals as foot soldiers of their new global imperialist war on socialism. The former top Nazi military officer Adolf Heusinger was appointed the chair of NATO’s military committee, and the ex Nazi Hans Speidel became commander of NATO’s land forces in Central Europe.

The United States even rehabilitated Nazi war criminal Reinhard Gehlen, who had directed Hitler’s military intelligence on the Eastern Front in WWII, and who later led the CIA-backed Gehlen Organization to help Washington wage its cold war against communists.

The United States did not defeat fascism; it rehabilitated and absorbed fascism into the capitalist empire that Washington built after WWII, centered in Wall Street and based on the dollar.

The contemporary German government published the results of a study in 2016, called the Rosenberg project, which sifted through classified documents from 1950 to 1973. It found that, at the height of the Cold War, the government of capitalist West Germany, which was a member of NATO, was full of former Nazis.

In fact, 77% of senior officials in West Germany’s Justice Ministry had been Nazis. Ironically, there had been a lower percentage of Nazi Party members in the Justice Ministry in Berlin when the genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler himself was in charge of the Third Reich.

Similarly, in Japan after WWII, US occupation forces released Japanese war criminals from prison and used them to construct an imperial client regime. The CIA helped to create and fund the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has essentially governed Japan as a one-party state, with few exceptions, since 1955.

Notorious war criminal Nobusuke Kishi had overseen genocidal crimes against humanity against the Chinese people as an administrator of the Japanese empire’s puppet regime of Manchukuo, in Manchuria, during WWII. After the war ended, the United States strongly supported Kishi, who led the LDP, established the de facto one-party state, and became prime minister of the country.

Still today, the Kishi dynasty is one of the most powerful families in Japan. Kishi’s grandson Shinzo Abe also led the LDP and served as prime minister from 2012 and 2020, closely allying Japan with the United States, while antagonizing China and rewriting the history of WWII.

In short, after the Soviet Union and China led the fight to defeat fascism in WWII, the US empire recruited fascists to fight its global war against socialism.

Today, it is extremely important to learn these facts and correct the historical record, because 2025 is the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII, and it is clear that the proper lessons have not been learned in the West.

The planet is still plagued by extreme imperial violence, and closer than ever to another world war.

The United States and Israel have been carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, committing atrocities that are reminiscent of the fascists’ crimes against humanity in WWII.

Fascism has its roots in European colonialism. The genocidal tactics that the European empires used in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were later used by the fascists inside Europe.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was inspired by the genocidal crimes that the German empire had committed in southern Africa, and also by the genocide that the US colonialists had carried out against indigenous peoples in North America. The Nazis were similarly influenced by the US government’s racist laws against Black Americans, in its apartheid system known as Jim Crow.

Given the close links between fascism and Western imperialism, it is not surprising to see that, today, the US regime has become increasingly fascist. Politicians in Washington scapegoat immigrants and foreigners for the many domestic problems in their country, including the significant growth in inequality, poverty, and homelessness. They have no solutions other than more violence, racism, and war.

The increasing political desperation and instability in Washington is combining in a toxic mixture with the greed of US corporations in the military-industrial complex, which profit from war, and are thus incentivized to push for more conflict, not for peace.

The United States, as the leader of NATO, has already been waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukrainian territory, using the people of Ukraine as cannon fodder in an imperial war, tragically destroying an entire generation of Ukrainians in a vain attempt to maintain US global hegemony.

The US empire has also used its Israeli attack dog to wage war on the people of Iran, in an attempt to overthrow the revolutionary government in Tehran and impose a puppet regime, like the former king, the shah, who was propped up by Washington.

The number one target of the US empire today, however, is the People’s Republic of China. US imperialists fear that China is the only country powerful enough to not only challenge but to defeat Washington’s global hegemony.

The US empire is waging a Second Cold War against China, and it has weaponized everything in this hybrid war, imposing sanctions and tariffs to wage economic war, using its control over the dollar system in a financial war, and exploiting the media to spread disinformation and fake news as part of an information war.

Part of the US empire’s strategy in this information war is to erase the Chinese people’s major contribution to the defeat of fascism and imperialism in WWII.

This is why it is so crucial to defend the facts, and to teach the true history of WWII to people today. If we don’t correct the historical record, the fascists and imperialists of the 21st century will weaponize ignorance in order to carry out the same crimes that their ideological brethren committed in the 20th century.

Donald Trump has openly admitted that he wants to take Venezuela’s oil. Top US officials have made it clear that this is a key reason for their war on the South American nation.

Trump declared an illegal naval blockade of Venezuela on December 16. The US government aims to prevent Venezuela from selling oil to China, to starve Caracas of export revenue.

The Trump administration is also illegally blocking Venezuela from importing crucial goods — including the light crude and chemicals needed to process and refine its own heavy crude.

The US goal is to bring about an extreme crisis in Venezuela — to “make the economy scream” — hoping it leads to regime change.

Trump says US corporations should control Venezuela’s oil

On December 17, a journalist asked the US president, “Is the goal of the blockade of Venezuela regime change?”

Trump replied:

It’s just a blockade. We’re not going to let anybody going through that shouldn’t be going through.

You remember, they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil, from not that long ago. And we want it back.

Another reporter then asked Trump, “On Venezuela, sir, you mentioned getting land back from Venezuela. What land is that?”

The US president stated:

Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had. They took it away, because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching. But they’re not going to do that. We want it back.

They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.

Trump imposes a naval blockade on Venezuela

In these questions, the journalists were referencing a December 16 post on Trump’s website Truth Social, in which the US president announced “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela”.

These US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry are unilateral coercive measures and do not have the approval of the UN Security Council, and are therefore illegal under international law.

In his post, Trump demanded “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they [Venezuela] previously stole from us”.

He was referencing Venezuelan oil, Venezuelan land, and Venezuelan assets, which Trump believes are the property of the United States.

Hugo Chávez’s full nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.

US corporations have been desperate to get access to the country’s crude since 2007, when leftist former President Hugo Chávez fully nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry.

The Venezuelan government passed a policy mandating that the state oil company PDVSA must have majority ownership of all projects. Foreign firms were only allowed to have a minority stake, in joint ventures.

Major US corporations like ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and ExxonMobil refused to accept these terms, and thus left the country.

The Trump administration has portrayed this nationalization from 18 years ago as an attack on the United States.

Trump boasted of trying to take Venezuela’s oil

This is by no means the first time that Trump has targeted Venezuela’s natural resources.

During his first term as US president, in 2019, Trump launched another coup attempt in Venezuela. He appointed a little-known right-wing opposition politician, Juan Guaidó, as he supposed “interim president” of Venezuela.

Although that coup attempt failed, Trump later admitted that the goal was to “take over” Venezuela and pillage its oil — treating the sovereign, independent country like a US colony.

In a 2023 speech at a Republican Party rally, Trump declared:

Venezuela, how about we’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.

Trump’s first secretary of state was CEO of ExxonMobil

In his first administration, Trump’s initial secretary of state was Rex Tillerson, who served as the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil from 2006 to 2016.

ExxonMobil was one of the major US oil corporations that left Venezuela in 2007, following the full nationalization of the industry under Hugo Chávez.

Ever since, ExxonMobil has been desperate to get back into Venezuela.

In fact, ExxonMobil sued the Venezuelan government in the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a corporate tribunal run by the World Bank Group, which is dominated by the US government.

Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s CEO when the corporation sued Venezuela. Soon after, he was ushered through the revolving door to the head of the State Department, overseeing US foreign policy.

Top Trump aide Stephen Miller claims Venezuela’s oil belongs to the USA

It is not just Trump but also his top aides who insist that Venezuela’s oil belongs to the United States.

Trump’s notorious, far-right deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, is helping to supervise the US war on Venezuela.

In a Twitter post on December 17, Miller claimed that “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela”.

“Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property”, he wrote.

Miller’s extremely misleading claims earned a community note on Twitter, which pointed out that Venezuela’s oil infrastructure was actually built by Venezuelan workers on Venezuelan land.

The community note added that US investors had been compensated after Venezuela’s oil industry was initially nationalized in 1976.

Miller’s false accusation that Venezuela is responsible for drug production was likewise debunked by the Twitter community note, which pointed to the US government’s own reports, from the DEA, showing that it is actually longtime US ally Colombia, not Venezuela, that is responsible for cocaine that is trafficked into the US.

US naval blockade cuts of Venezuelan exports and imports

The Trump administration launched a war against Venezuela in September. As of December 19, the US military had killed more than 100 people in strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

Throughout this war, the Trump administration gradually escalated its aggressive tactics, seeking to destabilize and overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In December, the US government started to seize oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, in blatant violation of international law.

When Trump was asked what the US government would do with the Venezuelan oil in these tankers, his response was, “We keep it”. This is piracy.

Reuters reported that several supertankers that had planned to collect crude oil in Venezuela were forced to make U-turns and avoid the region, because the US military threatened to steal their cargo.

However, the Trump administration did make one exception: it allowed tankers from the US oil corporation Chevron to go through.

This US naval blockade immediately led to a significant fall in Venezuela’s oil exports.

The Trump administration also blocked Venezuela from importing goods like naphtha, which is used to refine Venezuela’s heavy crude.

The goal of the naval blockade is clear: the Trump administration wants to prevent Venezuela from exporting oil to starve the government of revenue. It also has the supplementary geopolitical effect of denying crude to Washington’s main adversary, given that around 80% of Venezuela’s oil exports are bought by China.

With his blockade, Trump wants to cut off Venezuela’s access to hard currency, cause hyper-inflation, and collapse the economy.

Washington is also trying to block Venezuela from importing crucial goods that would be needed to maintain economic stability. This not only includes the materials needed to refine Venezuela’s heavy crude, but also food.

Venezuela is dependent on importing much of its food. So, with its naval blockade, the US government aims to use hunger as a weapon, to cause mass chaos and social instability in the country, and to destabilize and overthrow the government of President Maduro.

Even the US business press, like Fortune magazine, warned that the US blockade could “devastate” the Venezuelan economy.

The US government’s imperial strategy: “make the economy scream”

In other words, Trump is bringing back the infamous US imperial strategy known as “make the economy scream”. This phrase originated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

In 1970, US President Nixon and his top advisor Kissinger met at the White House with Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms.

They convened to discuss the election of socialist Salvador Allende as the president of Chile (who went on to nationalize some of the world’s largest reserves of copper, angering US corporations and their representatives in Washington — just as Chávez would do with Venezuela’s oil a few decades later).

The CIA was given a clear mission to destabilize and ultimately overthrow Allende’s elected government.

“Make the economy scream”, CIA Director Helms was told.

The CIA was ordered to use the “best men we have”, in a “full-time job”. It was given a budget of $10 million, promising “more if necessary”. That was equivalent to nearly $83 million as of late 2025.

The US ultimately succeeded in sabotaging the Chilean economy, causing high rates of inflation and chaos. The CIA even worked with right-wing labor unions to carry out strikes that paralyzed the country.

Then, on September 11, 1973, the CIA backed a military coup that overthrew Chile’s elected President Allende, and put in power the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet.

US coup attempts, illegal sanctions, and economic war on Venezuela

This is precisely the imperial strategy that the US empire has used to try to topple Venezuela’s left-wing government, over more than two decades.

Washington has sponsored many coup attempts in Venezuela, including a briefly successful putsch in 2002, which was overturned by the Venezuelan people.

After these coup attempts failed, the US government resorted to economic war.

The Barack Obama administration started imposing sanctions on Venezuela in 2015. The White House even passed an executive order “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela”.

When Trump came into office in his first term in 2017, he levied heavy sanctions against the Venezuelan government and the state-owned oil company, PDVSA.

In 2019, Trump escalated this hybrid war into a full economic embargo on Venezuela.

UN experts made it clear that these unilateral US sanctions on Venezuela were illegal.

The UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, wrote that the US sanctions “constitute a violation of international law”.

“The announced purpose of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign – to change the Government of Venezuela – violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in the domestic affairs of Venezuela”, Douhan stressed.

As the US government steadily increased the number of illegal sanctions, Venezuela’s oil production crashed. The South American nation not only found it difficult to export its crude, but it was unable to import the technologies, parts, and products needed to repair and modernize its oil infrastructure.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) boasted in 2019, during the previous Trump administration’s coup attempt, that Venezuelan crude oil production had collapsed.

The EIA admitted that one of the main reasons for this was the “U.S. sanctions directed at Venezuela’s energy sector and PdVSA”.

The coup attempt that Trump initiated in 2019 failed. So in his second term, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump launched another putsch.

This time, they used the US military to try to directly force President Maduro from power.

Donald Trump has pardoned and freed from prison one of the world’s worst drug dealers, the former dictator of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine and machine guns into the United States.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been openly meddling in Honduras’ 2025 election.

Honduran electoral officials have revealed evidence of massive fraud, aimed at putting a right-wing US-backed candidate in power.

The US government sponsored a military coup against Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing president in 2009.

Washington then helped a corrupt right-wing regime, run by the drug-trafficking dictator Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), steal Honduras’ elections in 2013 and 2017.

Today, Honduran officials warn that this nightmare is repeating again.

Honduran officials allege fraud in the November 2025 election

Honduras held a disputed election on 30 November 2025. As of the morning of 5 December, there still was no official winner. Multiple candidates have alleged wrongdoing.

An electoral counselor at Honduras’ National Electoral Council (CNE), Marlon Ochoa, held a press conference on the night of 4 December in which he published evidence of what he called a “plan of monumental electoral fraud”.

Ochoa documented extreme irregularities in the result transmission system, known as the TREP.

Workers at the CNE published videos showing how the TREP was taking votes away from candidates and giving them to others.

Of the 15,297 vote tally sheets that had been processed as of 4 December, 13,246 of them (86.6%) had errors and inconsistencies, according to Ochoa.

Several weeks before the 30 November election, Honduran President Xiomara Castro published 26 leaked audio recordings in which right-wing, US-backed opposition politicians could be heard plotting an electoral coup. They discussed plans to hack the TREP system in order to change the votes.

It appears that these plans were fulfilled exactly as planned.

The candidate of Honduras’ left-wing Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, alleged that the election was being stolen.

Moncada pointed to many irregularities, such as the fact that the tally sheets representing roughly 25% of the total votes did not have biometric confirmation. Moreover, many tally sheets had more votes than were in the area they represented.

When the US government sponsored a military coup in 2009, it overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing President Manuel Zelaya, who is a leader of the Libre Party. His wife is Xiomara Castro, the current Honduran president, whose government has been demonized by Washington and targeted for destabilization.

The US government openly meddles in Honduras’ election

A few days before the 30 November election, Donald Trump openly meddled in Honduras’ internal affairs.

Trump published posts on his website Truth Social in which he endorsed Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a candidate in the 2025 election, from Honduras’ right-wing National Party.

Trump also attacked candidate Rixi Moncada, of the left-wing Libre Party, smearing her as a “narcocommunist”.

“Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections in the beautiful country of Honduras on November 30th”, Trump wrote on 26 November. “Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?”

“The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting against Maduro, is Tito Asfura, the Presidential Candidate of the National Party”, Trump claimed.

Honduras’ National Party is very closely connected to drug cartels, and is notoriously corrupt and authoritarian. It is the party of the former dictator Juan Orlando Hernández, who was imprisoned for trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine into the US.

Trump, however, ignored Asfura’s drug ties and stated, “The only real friend of Freedom in Honduras is Tito Asfura. Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras”.

“I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists”, the US president added.

“I hope the people of Honduras vote for Freedom and Democracy, and elect Tito Asfura, President!”, he wrote.

Trump then re-posted the same message on 28 November.

Trump also criticized Salvador Nasralla, another Honduran presidential candidate from the center-right Liberal Party.

Both Asfura and Nasralla are wealthy businessmen, and they are backed by competing factions of Honduran oligarchs.

Asfura and the National Party are closely allied with Trump, Marco Rubio, and the Republican Party.

Nasralla is more aligned with the centrists in the Democratic Party.

Trump repeatedly campaigned for Asfura.

In another post on 28 November, Trump threatened Honduras.

“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive”, Trump pledged.

“If he [Asfura] doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country”, Trump added.

This was a clear message to the Honduran people: if they didn’t vote for the US-backed candidate, it would “bring catastrophic results to” their country.

“Tito will be a Great President, and the United States will work closely with him in order to ensure the success, with all of its potential, of Honduras!” Trump declared, deciding on behalf of the Honduran people who their leader should be.

“MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!” the US president proclaimed.

Then, on 30 November, Trump again meddled in Honduras’ election.

“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election”, he wrote.

“If they do, there will be hell to pay!” he threatened.

US disinformation deceives Hondurans, interfering in elections

Rixi Moncada, the left-wing presidential candidate, also accused the United States of meddling in Honduras’ election in other ways.

In the lead-up to the election, people in Honduras were flooded with millions of messages on their phones warning them that, if they voted for the left-wing Libre Party, the US government would block remittances from being sent to Honduras.

Honduras is a poor country, and remissions, primarily from Hondurans living in the US, make up roughly 25% of the country’s GDP. If the Trump administration cut off remittances, it would cause an economic catastrophe.

This was another example of how the sovereignty of the Central American nation was being violated.

The vice foreign minister of Honduras, Gerardo Torres Zelaya, remarked that the 2025 “elections were an absolute fiasco. A scandalous theft and disrespect for the popular will”.

Trump released drug-trafficking Honduran dictator Juan Orlando Hernández

In the middle of the chaos of the alleged electoral coup in Honduras, Donald Trump further escalated the US government’s meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

On 1 December, Trump officially pardoned and freed from prison the drug-trafficking former dictator of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, known by the acronym JOH.

JOH had been convicted by a US court, in 2024, of trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine and machine guns into the United States.

This is what the US Department of Justice wrote at the time (emphasis added):

According to court documents, from at least in or about 2004, up to and including in or about 2022, Hernández, the former two-term president of Honduras and former president of the Honduran National Congress, was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world. During his political career, Hernández abused his powerful positions and authority in Honduras to facilitate the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Hernández’s co-conspirators were armed with machine guns and destructive devices, including AK-47s, AR-15s, and grenade launchers, which they used to protect their massive cocaine loads as they transited across Honduras on their way to the United States, protect the money they made from the eventual sale of this cocaine, and guard their drug-trafficking territory from rivals. Hernández received millions of dollars of drug money from some of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, and used those bribes to fuel his rise in Honduran politics. In turn, as Hernández rose to power in Honduras, he provided increased support and protection for his co-conspirators, allowing them to move mountains of cocaine, commit acts of violence and murder, and help turn Honduras into one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

During his time in office, Hernández publicly promoted legislation and the efforts he purported to undertake in support of anti-narcotics measures in Honduras. At the same time, he protected and enriched the drug traffickers in his inner circle and those who provided him with cocaine-fueled bribes that allowed him to obtain and stay in power in Honduras. For example, Hernández selectively upheld extraditions by supporting and taking credit for extraditions to the United States of certain drug traffickers who threatened his grip on power, while at the same time promising drug traffickers who bribed him and followed his instructions that they would remain safe in Honduras.

Trump freed this notorious drug trafficker at the same moment that he is waging a war against Venezuela, which the US government falsely claims is about stopping “drug trafficking”.

In reality, the Trump administration seeks to overthrow Venezuela’s left-wing President Nicolás Maduro. The US war on Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs.

On 2 December, the day after he pardoned one of the worst drug dealers on Earth, Trump threatened to bomb any country that sends illegal drugs to the US.

The hypocrisy is so blatant that even Western media outlets, such as the major British newspaper The Guardian, remarked, “Trump move to pardon Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’”.

US-backed coup and electoral fraud in Honduras

The only reason that JOH came to power in the first place is because, in 2009, the Barack Obama administration sponsored a military coup against Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing government, which had been allied with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

The US State Department, then led by Hillary Clinton, recognized Honduras’ unelected right-wing coup regime.

Following the US-backed coup, the homicide rate in Honduras skyrocketed, and the Central American nation became one of the most violent countries on Earth. This fueled a migration crisis; many immigrants and refugees fled Honduras and traveled northward to the US.

JOH subsequently stole Honduras’ 2013 election, by using drug money. US prosecutors admitted that JOH was given a $1 million bribe from notorious Mexican cartel leader El Chapo Guzmán, which was used to rig the 2013 election.

The Honduran constitution limits presidents to just one term, without eligibility for reelection.

Despite the constitutional restrictions, the dictator JOH stole the 2017 election as well, carrying out blatant fraud.

The US government, during Trump’s first term, happily recognized JOH in the stolen 2017 election. The European Union also legitimized JOH’s fraud.

Why was Washington so insistent on propping up JOH’s narco-regime? It compliantly served US interests.

Under JOH’s dictatorship, Honduras supported Trump’s coup attempt in Venezuela in 2019, recognizing the unelected right-wing opposition figure Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s supposed “interim president”.

JOH’s narco-regime also allowed the US military to operate several strategic bases in Honduras, including the Soto Cano air base, the largest US base in the region.

Both the Obama administration and the first Trump administration openly supported JOH’s dictatorship. This was despite the fact that US authorities knew that JOH was running one of the largest drug-trafficking operations on Earth.

To justify his pardoning of JOH, Trump falsely claimed that the Joe Biden administration had imprisoned the drug trafficker on fake, politically motivated charges. Trump called it a “witch hunt”.

This is quite ironic, because the US Department of Justice’s investigation into JOH’s drug trafficking actually started during Trump’s first term as president.

A report published by the Associated Press in 2019, when Trump was president, noted, “U.S. federal prosecutors have accused Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández of having used $1.5 million in drug trafficking proceeds to secure the presidency in 2013”.

What is the US government’s plan?

Gerardo Torres Zelaya, the vice foreign minister of Honduras, argued that the US government’s strategy is not just to put in power the right-wing candidate Tito Asfura (who is commonly referred to with the nickname “Papi”), but also to reimpose an obedient narco-regime that will serve US interests.

“It is this criminal [JOH] whom Trump wants to impose on us”, Torres said. “It is not Papi, he is just the cover. It is the narco-state that they want to reinstall”.

Torres published a video imploring fellow Hondurans: “we must unite to prevent the plan to return us to the narco-state from being successful. Today, the United States, which has already disrespectfully interfered in our elections, freed the worst criminal in our history. We must unite and defend our homeland”.

Honduran Foreign Minister Eduardo Enrique Reina, who stood in as the presidential designate for candidate Rixi Moncada, reflected on the blatant foreign interference in his country’s 2025 election (emphasis added):

What is happening today in Honduras is surreal, it reveals a contest of dark, enormous, and unknown interests. If the 2009 coup and the narco-dictatorship set us back decades, this is unthinkable and unprecedented. The corporate media portray it as something normal and even rejoice in it. It is unbelievable that so many remain paralyzed in the face of the largest form of interference and intervention. If with 2009 the coups and lawfare returned, with this use of blackmail and force, the dignity of a people is twisted; it is a new mechanism of terror and fear without precedent.

The reports from the Organization of American States (OAS) and EU electoral observation mission do not even refer in name to the principles of the UN Charter, or the OAS, to the worst disrespect for the sovereignty of the Honduran people, or of any people, to self-determination and to the free and independent choice of our political system.

What is occurring in Honduras, added to the fact that they are freeing the one who destroyed the country and its institutions like JOH, cannot pass without at least raising the voice of dignity, of patriotic responsibility. The planet is succumbing to the breaking of all norms, based on threats and violations of all norms and principles.

Those who remain silent or those who are complicit are part of the emergence of something that puts at risk more than just Honduras. The hell that they threaten if their electoral designs are not fulfilled, extorting a people with the use of world power, is senseless and irrational; the worst part is that it is not something they say will arrive. That hell is already occurring here.

If this happens in Honduras, it will happen anywhere. History is there to remind those in power who were allowed to advance by breaking all norms, and the world ended up paying for it dearly.

Honduras once again is becoming the laboratory for intervention in new forms. We must take dignified and historic positions.

Hondurans vow to resist US imperialism

Despite Washington’s flagrant meddling in their country, Hondurans have vowed to continue fighting against US imperialism, and to defend their country’s sovereignty.

Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected left-wing president of Honduras who was overthrown in the 2009 US-backed military coup, condemned Washington for meddling in his country yet again.

“With the interference of Donald Trump and his pardoning of JOH, the desperate bipartisanism is imposing an electoral coup against Rixi [Moncada]”, Zelaya wrote. (By “bipartisanism”, he was referencing the fact that both the right-wing National Party of Tito Asfura and center-right Liberal Party of Salvador Nasralla are pro-US groups, funded by Honduran oligarchs, which fought against the left-wing Libre Party.)

“Mr. Donald Trump, you don’t intimidate us. We have resisted coups d’etat, monumental frauds, political assassinations, and persecution”, Zelaya said.

“If we survived a narco-dictatorship, do you think your tweets are going to break us?”, he added.

“You can call us communists, socialists, insurgents, whatever you want. We are free Hondurans, and we fight for the self-determination of the peoples and for a dignified homeland, free and independent”, Zelaya declared.

He stressed, “Neither Washington nor the [Honduran] oligarchy can decide for us”.

The Donald Trump administration is trying to expand the presence of the US military across Latin America, in an attempt to forcibly impose Washington’s hegemony in the region.

The people of Ecuador just delivered a major blow to Trump’s aggressive Latin America strategy.

More than three-fifths of Ecuadorians voted to reject a change to their progressive constitution, which would have allowed the Pentagon to establish US military bases in their territory.

Ecuador’s Trump-backed right-wing oligarch President Daniel Noboa

Ecuador is currently governed by a right-wing president, Daniel Noboa, who is a key regional ally of Trump.

Noboa is the son of Ecuador’s richest billionaire oligarch, Álvaro Noboa — who ran as a presidential candidate in five different elections on a hard-line right-wing platform, but lost every time (in 1998, 2002, 2006, 2009, and 2013).

Daniel Noboa’s grandfather, Luis Noboa, was also the richest man in Ecuador in the 20th century. The family patriarch worked for the Standard Fruit Company, now known as Dole, and established a massive exporting dynasty, specializing in the export of bananas.

The Noboa family is notorious for its corruption and close links to drug trafficking and organized crime.

Daniel Noboa is the third member of the Noboa dynasty to serve as president of Ecuador.

Noboa is also a dual citizen of the United States — and his Ecuadorian critics say that is where his true loyalty lies.

Noboa was born in Miami, Florida, and he was educated in the US. In fact, just two months after he was inaugurated as president of Ecuador, Noboa returned to Miami so his wife, an Instagram influencer, could give birth to their child on US soil, guaranteeing him US citizenship.

As president, Noboa has been widely accused of dictatorial tendencies. He has publicly made fun of left-wing political prisoners, and threatened to imprison more political rivals.

Ecuadorians reject Daniel Noboa’s attempt to change the constitution

One of Noboa’s key goals has been to change Ecuador’s constitution, which is one of the most progressive in the world.

Ecuador’s constitution bans foreign countries from creating military bases in its territory.

Noboa held a referendum on 16 November to try to change the constitution to permit the US to open military bases in Ecuador.

The measure was rejected in a landslide, with 61% of Ecuadorians voting against it, according to the official results from the National Electoral Council (CNE).

In the referendum, Noboa proposed four measures. Voters rejected all of them.

The second measure sought to end public funding of political parties in Ecuador’s elections, which would have given wealthy right-wing forces like the oligarchic Noboa dynasty even more power. That measure was rejected with 58% of the votes against it.

Another measure proposed a constituent assembly to rewrite the entire constitution. That was rejected with 62% of the votes in opposition.

The war on Ecuador’s leftist former President Rafael Correa

Ecuador’s current, progressive constitution was drafted during the government of socialist former President Rafael Correa, who served from 2007 to 2017.

When Correa campaigned for president in the 2006 election, a key part of his left-wing platform was a call for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.

A new, progressive constitution was approved in a 2008 referendum, with 64% of the votes in support, and just 28% against it.

In 2009, Correa kicked US troops out of Ecuador, and closed US military bases in his country’s territory.

Washington supported a failed right-wing coup attempt against Correa in 2010.

One of Correa’s right-wing opponents in the 2006, 2009, and 2013 elections — all of which he won by a large margin — was Álvaro Noboa, Ecuador’s richest billionaire oligarch, and the father of current President Daniel Noboa.

Correa, who has a PhD in economics, opposed neoliberalism and rejected Ecuador’s history of taking on debt from the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Correa significantly reduced poverty, inequality, and violence. He declared a “Citizens’ Revolution”, based on what he called “21st-century socialism”.

During Correa’s three terms, Ecuador formed closed ties with China. It also promoted Latin American integration, hosting the headquarters of UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations.

Under Correa, Ecuador joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which promoted de-dollarization. The ALBA even created a new currency for regional trade, to challenge the dominance of the US dollar, called the Sucre.

Today, Correa is living in exile as a victim of political persecution, because right-wing, US-backed authorities in Ecuador formally charged him with the “crime” of so-called “psychic influence” over his left-wing followers.

The Trump administration revives the colonial Monroe Doctrine — and supports drug-trafficking oligarchs

While all US presidents have intervened in Latin America and violated the sovereignty of countries in the region, Donald Trump has made this a key priority of his aggressive foreign policy.

The Trump administration has proudly sought to revive the 202-year Monroe Doctrine, which treats Latin America as the colonial “backyard” of the US empire.

Trump has waged war on Venezuela, seeking to overthrow its President Nicolás Maduro. The Trump administration also imposed sanctions on Colombia’s left-wing President Gustavo Petro, and hit Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government with more unilateral sanctions.

Washington has pressured Latin American governments to allow the US military to open bases in their territory.

Argentina’s right-wing, self-declared “libertarian” President Javier Milei — one of Trump’s closest allies in the region — has pushed through executive orders that declare a constitutional exception to give the US military access to Argentine territory.

To justify its neocolonial attacks on Latin America and its meddling in the region’s internal affairs, the Trump administration has claimed that it is supposedly fighting drug trafficking.

However, the US government is allied with some of the worst drug traffickers in the region.

One of the most loyal US allies in Latin America is Colombia’s right-wing former President Álvaro Uribe. US intelligence has admitted that he is among the most “important Colombian narco-traffickers”, but he has never faced any consequences, because Washington has always supported him.

In fact, Trump’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio has publicly defended Uribe, amid widespread accusations of corruption.

Ecuador is an even clearer example of the US government’s extreme double standards on drug trafficking.

The Noboa dynasty owns private ports in Ecuador, and police documents show that Noboa family companies have used these to smuggle cocaine in banana crates.

A Chinese journalist interviewed Geopolitical Economy Report editor-in-chief Ben Norton about the situation in Venezuela, and his analysis was translated into Chinese. The following were his original remarks in English:

QUESTION: Ben, you have traveled around Latin America extensively, including in Venezuela. I would like to hear your comments on Maduro. Is his government well supported by the Venezuelan people, or may he face a similar fate like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad? As you know, Trump is planning attacks inside Venezuela. So do you think Maduro’s government will fall like Assad’s?

MY ANSWER: There are indeed some parallels between Venezuela and Syria, but there are more differences than similarities.

Venezuela is very divided politically, but in general, the Bolivarian Revolution initiated by previous President Hugo Chávez and continued by current President Nicolás Maduro still has a lot of support from poor and working-class Venezuelans. Most rich people and elites are pro-US and anti-government. Many of them have left the country, but there are still some in Venezuela (especially in wealthy areas like Chacao).

In Venezuela, most people are tired of political conflict and violence, and they simply want stability. The right-wing opposition does not have many active supporters inside the country. Whenever they try to hold a protest, only a few hundred people show up. However, while they are small in number, they still have a lot of power concentrated in private companies, media outlets, and Western government-funded “NGOs”.

Maduro will not be overthrown by people inside Venezuela. The only possible way I think the Venezuelan government will fall is if the US military invades Venezuela and/or wages a direct war inside Venezuelan territory, bombing Caracas — like what the US did to Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, etc. (although the tactics used were different in each of those wars).

Trump has already ordered the US military to kill dozens of Venezuelans in illegal, extrajudicial executions in international waters. Thus far, he has not launched direct attacks inside Venezuela, although he confirmed that he authorized the CIA to carry out destabilization operations inside the country.

There are reports that Trump plans to bomb targets inside Venezuela. This would be an extreme act of aggression, and is quite possible, even likely. I don’t think he will send US troops into Venezuela — it is certainly possible, but it would be very unpopular at home, especially among his so-called “MAGA” base.

If I were forced to make a prediction, I would say there is a 66% chance that the US military launches attacks inside Venezuelan territory, with missiles and/or airstrikes; and a 25% chance that US troops invade the country and try to take control of ports, airports, major roads, and/or oil fields.

Polls show that Trump’s war on Venezuela is very unpopular inside the US. A slight majority of Americans, 55%, would oppose a US invasion of Venezuela; whereas only 15% would support it. A clear plurality, 45%, oppose using the US military to overthrow President Maduro; while just 18% support this. However, public opposition has never stopped Washington before.

In fact, scientific studies show that public opinion has no impact on US government policy.

Economically, Venezuela has suffered extreme hardship under illegal US sanctions and an economic embargo, which has blocked Venezuela from accessing the US-dominated international financial system and prevented Venezuela from exporting its oil and fixing/updating its oil infrastructure, causing government revenue to shrink by a staggering 99% (according to the top UN expert on sanctions, the special rapporteur Alena Douhan).

However, Venezuela’s economy is in a better state today than it was during the previous US-led coup attempt in 2019-20, which caused hyperinflation. The inflation rate has fallen a lot. Real wages have risen. Food and everyday necessities are affordable. The economy has dollarized a lot, however, which erodes the monetary sovereignty of the Venezuelan government.

The latest US attacks will likely end up increasing support for the Venezuelan government, because it will make it clear that there are only two realistic options: either Maduro or a right-wing US puppet — like the US government-funded far-right coup leader María Corina Machado, whom Washington wants to put in power, and who has been open about the fact that she wants to privatize Venezuela’s massive oil reserves and sell off the country’s assets to US corporations.

One clear similarity between Venezuela and Syria was the economic warfare waged by the West.

The Syrian government fell in part because the US/EU “Caesar” sanctions had devastated the economy. Syria could not get access to hard currency, and thus had very high inflation. The Syrian military was unable to pay its officers and soldiers, so they were not willing to fight. There were also shortages of food and oil. Syria was blocked from accessing its oil and wheat fields, which were militarily occupied by the US.

One major difference is the Western-sponsored war on Syria, which started in 2011.

The Syrian state was significantly weakened by more than a decade of war. Moreover, Syria had been invaded by multiple foreign powers, including the US, Turkey, and Israel. Large parts of its territory were not under the control of the central government, but rather by extremist groups and mercenaries funded and armed by the US, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.

The situation is Venezuela is not like that. There were violent coup attempts by US-backed far-right extremists in 2014 and 2017, but nothing close to the levels of violence seen in the war in Syria.

QUESTION: In Maduro’s first and second term, the economy was in very bad shape. Why it is now getting better?

MY ANSWER: The US sanctions on Venezuela started in 2015, when Obama declared Venezuela to be a supposed “national security threat”. The global price of oil also crashed from 2014 to 2016. Both factors caused huge economic problems in Venezuela.

The illegal US sanctions then escalated significantly under Trump in 2017. And in 2019, Trump imposed an economic embargo on Venezuela (like the illegal US blockade of Cuba, which has gone on for more than six decades, in violation of international law).

This means that Venezuela was not able to export oil, which was the source of the vast majority of government revenue. The UN special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, reported that Venezuela lost 99% of government revenue due to the US sanctions. The UN expert also emphasized that these unilateral US sanctions are illegal, violate the human rights of Venezuelans, and devastated the economy.

The US sanctions caused a significant shortage of dollars and other hard currency in Venezuela, which meant that the central bank was not able to stabilize the national currency, the bolivar. Moreover, there were enormous attacks by currency speculators based in the US, with the help of Florida-based black market groups like DolarToday. The central bank also tried to maintain a fixed exchange rate throughout these speculative attacks, which meant it bled the little hard currency it had to try to defend the bolivar. Together, these factors caused hyperinflation in Venezuela.

Another very important factor to consider is that the vast majority of the technology and oil infrastructure that had been used in Venezuela for the past century had been designed by Western companies. The oil industry had been nationalized by Chávez, but the technology it relied on was still the intellectual property of US and European corporations.

So the sanctions prevented Venezuela from repairing its oil equipment and buying the new machinery needed to maintain and modernize its oil infrastructure. This caused a huge fall in Venezuela’s petroleum output.

In fact, the US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) boasted in 2019 — during a US-sponsored coup attempt — that Venezuelan crude oil production had fallen to its lowest level since 2003 (following another US-backed coup attempt). The EIA even admitted that US sanctions were a factor that contributed to this significant decline.

The situation in the past few years has gotten better because Venezuela was able to replace some of its oil machinery with technology from Iran, Russia, and China. Technicians from Iran, Russia, and China also helped Venezuela to repair and update its oil infrastructure.

This meant that Venezuela was able to export more crude, primarily to China. Oil output today is still much lower than it had been before the US sanctions began in 2015, but it is slowly rising, and is now more than 1 million barrels per day, which is the highest level since the last US-led coup attempt, during Trump’s first term.

This means that Venezuela is now earning more hard currency, which it can use to stabilize its own currency and reduce inflation.

The economic situation has significantly improved in the past few years. In fact, inflation has been higher in Argentina, under its US-backed libertarian President Javier Milei, than it was in Venezuela.

QUESTION: Are there other Latin American countries that are helping or aiding Venezuela?

ANSWER: Cuba and Nicaragua have helped Venezuela. But they are very small and don’t have many resources, and are both suffering from illegal US sanctions as well. They are mostly providing political and diplomatic support.

The right-wing governments in Latin America are all extremely pro-US and anti-Venezuela. Many of the left-wing governments are more independent in their foreign policy, but they are afraid of getting too close to Venezuela, because of the threats by the US government, particularly the threat of secondary sanctions; and also because of right-wing backlash at home.

Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia has historically been the most loyal US ally in the region, and its government was dominated by wealthy right-wing oligarchs for decades. Today, for the first time, Colombia has a left-wing government, led by President Gustavo Petro.

Petro has publicly criticized the US and vocally opposed its attacks on Venezuela. In response, Trump imposed sanctions on President Petro and his family. This was a blatant act of aggression against Colombia’s sovereignty, and a clear example of US meddling in the country’s internal affairs. It was also obviously meant as a threat against other leaders in the region, so they don’t speak out and challenge the US war.

That said, Petro is still afraid of getting too close to Venezuela, because of the attacks by the right-wing media outlets inside Colombia, and because elections are coming up in 2026, and he doesn’t want his left-wing allies to be hurt.

US-backed right-wing forces are gaining influence in many parts of Latin America. The war against Venezuela is part of a larger strategy by the US empire to weaken left-wing anti-imperialist resistance, strengthen right-wing oligarchic groups that will serve US corporate interests, and impose US hegemony across the region.

María Corina Machado is a far-right Venezuelan coup leader who has been funded by the US government since at least 2003.

The Donald Trump administration is waging war on Venezuela, and if it can succeed in overthrowing the leftist government of President Nicolás Maduro, Machado would help to lead the new pro-US regime in Caracas.

Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, despite the fact that she openly supports Trump’s war on her country. She has for years called for a US military intervention to violently topple President Maduro.

If Trump and his powerful Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio can manage to put Machado in power, she has pledged to sell off her country’s assets to US corporations.

Machado proudly told a group of US corporate executives in Miami, Florida that she is planning a “massive privatization program”, offering “a $1.7 trillion opportunity” to exploit Venezuela’s oil, natural gas, infrastructure, gold, and other minerals.

The far-right Venezuelan opposition leader made these remarks in a virtual speech at the America Business Forum on 5 November.

Machado spoke before Donald Trump appeared on stage at the same event. She was interviewed by the Republican mayor of Miami, Florida, Francis Suarez, a loyal right-wing ally of Trump and Rubio. (He is also the son of Xavier Suarez, who previously served as Miami’s mayor.)

The following is a partial transcript of Machado’s comments (all emphasis added):

And this is amazing, super exciting for me: We will open Venezuela for foreign investment.

I am talking about a $1.7 trillion opportunity, not only in oil and gas, which is huge, and you know that there are opportunities, because we will open all, upstream, midstream, downstream, to all companies; but also in mining, in gold, in infrastructure, power.

We have, our grid right now has a 17 gigawatt opportunity of energy potential that needs to be rehabbed, certainly for technology and AI.

And tourism, you know, Venezuela has 2800km of pristine Caribbean coastline ready to be developed.

So this is going to be huge. We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment, and a transparent, massive privatization program that is waiting for you.

This was not the first time that Machado had made this promise.

Machado also spoke virtually at the Fortune Global Forum in Saudi Arabia in October, where she offered a “business opportunity, of more than $1.7 trillion”.

“Venezuela will be the single biggest economic opportunity for decades to come in this region”, vowed the US government-funded Venezuelan coup leader.

Machado presented her ultra-right-wing economic program at an event in June hosted by AS/COA, a corporate lobby group funded by a Who’s Who of large US companies.

US companies “are going to make a lot of money”, promised Venezuelan coup leader María Corina Machado

In an interview with Donald Trump Jr. in February, Machado again promised to sell off her country’s assets to US corporations.

“We are going to privatize all our industry”, she said, stressing that US companies “are going to make a lot of money”.

These were her remarks:

Forget about Saudi Arabia; forget about the Saudis. I mean, we have more oil, I mean, infinite potential.

And we’re going to open markets. We’re going to kick [out] the government from the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all our industry.

Venezuela has huge resources: oil, gas, minerals, land, technology. And, as you said before, we have a strategic location, you know, hours from the United States.

So we’re going to do this right. We know what we have to do.

…

And American companies are in, you know, a super strategic position to invest.

…

This country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.

María Corina Machado boasts that she is being supported by Marco Rubio and other US government officials

Machado has boasted of the fact that she and her coup-plotting movement in Venezuela are receiving support from numerous US government officials, including Marco Rubio, the second-most powerful person in the administration after Trump himself.

In an interview with Bloomberg reporter Mishal Husain in October, Machado revealed, “I have been in contact not only with several officials in the US government, but also in other countries — in Canada, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and certainly Europe as well”.

Husain asked if Machado has specifically been in touch with Rubio. The Venezuelan coup leader confirmed that she has.

“I have been in touch with [Rubio], of course, and with his team”, Machado divulged. “And I have to say, even further in Congress, both aisles, you know, in both parties, we have really good friends and champions of our cause”.

In her virtual remarks at the America Business Forum on 5 November, Machado also thanked more US government officials for supporting the coup attempt in Venezuela.

This is what she said:

I’m so grateful to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that has been, you know, the champion of the cause of freedom and democracy in the Americas.

I want to thank Governor DeSantis.

I want to thank my friend, Senator Rick Scott, that has always trusted us.

And now Senator Ashley Moody.

And of course, I have to say, and I want to make a special mention to our three amigos, our three friends, [Congress members] María Elvira Salazar, Mario Díaz-Balart, and Carlos Giménez, who have been so, so, so close, and always supporting us.

Machado likewise expressed gratitude to the Miami mayor, Francis Suarez, who was interviewing her at the America Business Forum, just two hours before Trump spoke at the same event.

“You have been a great friend, Francis, of our cause. I am so grateful to you”, she said.

The Miami mayor noted that he and Machado had a friendly conversation before the interview.

“We spoke yesterday on the phone, and you invited me to a free Venezuela, and I look forward to that day, where I can go with my wife, who is in the audience, to visit you in the presidential palace, one day”, Suarez said.

This was a clear sign that US government officials hope to put Machado in power in Caracas. They are confident that the longtime US government-funded coup leader would obediently serve US interests in Latin America.

Machado stressed that, if Trump and Rubio can help her overthrow Maduro, she would cut Venezuela’s ties with China, Russia, and Iran, and their next plan would be to work with Washington to topple the leftist governments in Nicaragua and Cuba.