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By Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-apartheid, and anti-racist foundations of the Indian freedom struggle laid the foundations of the foreign policy and international relations of post-colonial India. Only fifteen months after Indian independence, on 25 November 1948, Article 40 of the Draft Constitution of India (1948) adopted the principle that “the State shall promote international peace and security by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among governments, and by the maintenance of justice and respect for treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another.” This draft article was later incorporated and enacted on 26th of January 1950 as Article 51 in Part IV—Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution of India, which directs the Indian state to pursue foreign policy to achieve the ideals in which “the State shall endeavour to— (a) promote international peace and security; (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations; (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.”. These constitutional provisions provide the moral foundation of Indian foreign policy.

Unlike the Westphalian colonial, imperialist, and racialised capitalist nation-states of Europe and the United States, Indian foreign policy is not governed by self-centered and ficticiaous national interests sans the interests of people but by the principles of international peace, security, law, and justice. These principles provided direction to many post-colonial states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to incorporate similar ideals into the praxis of their foreign policies. The moral fabric of Indian foreign policy has thus influenced the principles governing international relations in many post-colonial countries. India provided moral leadership to the world when the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, articulated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, known as Panchsheel: (i) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; (ii) mutual non-aggression; (iii) mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; (iv) equality and mutual benefit; and (v) peaceful coexistence. These principles were first signed by India and China and were later adopted as core principles of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). They were further deepened in the Bandung Declaration adopted at the Afro-Asian Conference held in Indonesia in 1955. In this way, these values and principles not only guided the foreign policy of India but also influenced the foreign relations of more than 120 countries under India’s moral leadership.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was not merely about maintaining an independent foreign policy or refusing to take sides. It was about taking the side of justice, equality, and freedom at a time when a bipolar world order was imposed upon the world during the Cold War period. NAM emerged as a collective and internationaist force that sought to shape international politics in favour of world peace and actively opposed the war-mongering policies of colonial, racist, and imperialist powers in Western Europe and the United States.

India, under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, demonstrated this principled and moral position by condemning the USSR’s Operation Whirlwind, which led to the invasion of Hungary, without any hesitation, even while maintaining strong and friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Such clarity and independence in India’s position during 1956 gave the country an extraordinary stature as a moral leader of post-colonial states and an uncompromising advocate of world peace.

India stood with Africa during its struggle against European colonialism and racist apartheid regime. Indian stood with Latin America in its struggle against American imperialism. India also stood with the Jewish people during the Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe. It provided refuge to Jewish communities, including those known as the “Tehran Children,” in India during 1943. At the same time, India was among the first countries to recognise the State of Israel while opposing Zionist politics that led to the occupation of Palestinian land. India strongly supported the Palestinian struggle and their right to statehood, advocating a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. India also stood with Arab countries in their fight against colonialism and feudalism. Indian, African, and Arab nationalist movements and states worked together to build the Non-Aligned Movement as a moral force for world peace.

These historical legacies of Indian foreign policy were first diluted by the Congress Party and its successive governments when they adopted neoliberal economic policies to pursue a free-market economy and formed economic and political alliances with Western European countries and the United States. American foreign policy, particularly through its Global War on Terror, gradually incorporated India into its strategic framework. The Indo–US nuclear deal, led by the Congress Party government, further strengthened Indo–US relations and softened earlier tensions and anti-India positions within American foreign policy. This growing Indo–US relationship, along with the War on Terror framework, also reinforced the existing ties between India and Israel and diluted India’s earlier position in strong support of Palestinian struggles for independence.

The ideological foundations and historical legacies of Indian foreign policy were further diluted by the first BJP government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and later by the BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has been steadily dismantling the foundations of Indian foreign policy brick by brick. Hindutva, Zionist, colonial racist, and imperialist ideologies share significant similarities in their orientations, particularly in their grounding in supremacist ideas of puritan ethno-nationalism in the service of crony capitalism. These ideological convergences bring leaders such as Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu into close alignment. These three leaders are undermining the historical and ideological foundations of multicultural societies in Israel, India, and the United States. Rather than working for the interests of the American, Jewish, Israeli, and Indian peoples and their countries, their political orientations advance projects of imperial domination in pursuit of unfettered capitalism.

India, under Hindutva politics and the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has weakened India’s political and economic independence, as well as the moral ethos and constitutional foundations of its foreign policy. This has adversely affected India’s foreign relations and diminished its position in world affairs as a moral force for world peace. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown little moral or political resolve in opposing the Israeli war that has devastated the Palestinian people, undermining peace and stability in the Middle East, the Arab world, and West Asia. He has also failed to condemn American and Israeli attacks on Iranian targets, including schools and civilian areas, which have reportedly resulted in the deaths of schoolchildren, women, and unarmed civilians in the streets of Tehran. Such silence risks isolating India and weakening its long-standing historic and uncompromised reputation as a resilient moral force for world peace on the international stage.

Hindutva politics and its alliances with Zionist and imperialist forces are primarily about upholding the interests of crony capitalism in the name of national interests. This reactionary alliance has harmed lives and livelihoods, damaged the environment, and undermined world peace. The hollowness of Hindutva foreign policy, and its reactionary propaganda hidden behind the rhetoric of Indian nationalism, is now increasingly evident. The Hindutva government under Narendra Modi has failed to uphold the interests of the Indian people, the nation, and world peace. By forming such alliances and abandoning the internationalist ethos that historically guided Indian foreign policy, it has pursued a directionless strategy of so-called “multi-alignment.” This approach threatens India’s historic relationships and friendships with Russia and with countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Arab world, and Latin America.

Indians must defeat Hindutva in order to oppose Zionist imperialism and its system of racial capitalism, while resetting India’s foreign policy, foreign relations, and international friendships based on peace and solidarity. This would help re-establish the moral, internationalist and constitutional ethos of Indian foreign policy and its independence in the pursuit of world peace and opposition to all wars.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Michael Albert

We win almost any social demand only when some elite figure(s) succumb and implement the sought change. We demand a higher wage, a new stop sign at a dangerous intersection, abortion rights, affirmative action, a wealth tax, an end to a war—whatever. In each case. the demand is either met or unmet when some elite or elites accept or reject it.

What can cause the involved decision-makers, DMs, to make a decision we seek? It is almost never that we teach the DMs new morals. It is almost never that we get the DMs to substantially agree with us. It is almost always, instead, that the DMs conclude that to to do what we wish will cost the DMs less than to not do what we wish.

First, how can I be so sure of that? Second, what can we do that raises unbearable costs for a DM who doesn’t implement wharf we demand?

The DM’s mindset is typically “I am intellectually superior in this and all domains. My interests are paramount. My understanding is definitive. More, to maintain my dominance, I must always dominate. To accede to pressure would risk unleashing more demands, more pressure. To accede to pressure risks slipping all the way to no dominance or even to being dominated.”

This mindset, which takes various forms, rationalizes DM agendas. But where does this DM mindset come from? To become a DM instills it. A DM presides over decisions that constrain others. For self justification, DMs convince themselves others are fools. For self justification, DMs consider themselves eminently wise and competent. To navigate up a hierarchy of power, DMs dismiss and trample those below. Garbage deems itself god-like. Garbage rises.

Consider local bosses, owners of firms, government officials who determine societal laws, guys who preside over a family, or a dominant race that represses other races. We encounter associated DMs when we make significant demands. Such DMs have disproportionate and often near complete say over the lives and circumstances others endure. But when a person navigates to such a position, they have to answer: why do I have such authority? Did I steal it? Or do I deserve it? They typically decide they have innate brilliance and wisdom that merits it. Or sometimes they decide their having successfully climbed over others and amassed essential talents merits it. Trump and Co. are the archetype exemplars of garbage rising. Yes, there are less delusional exceptions to all this, but the higher you go the rarer non delusional DMs are. And, of course, in any event, the constraints of their domineering roles always channel them.

A question arises. What can we do to raise costs for a DM? Valid answers nearly always take a similar form. We join together collectively. We organize to reduce their revenues, comforts, or power. We convince the DM that to reject our demands will cause our efforts to grow and strengthen. To avoid threatened losses the DM must give in to our demands. The DM will always try to reduce the likelihood of more people learning the efficacy of resistance. Indeed, even giving in to pressure, the DM will claim to have implemented the change that movements sought despite movement efforts, not because of them.

We want to win higher wages. We undertake a strike or a boycott or a workplace occupation. We persist and the threatened losses for the owner mount up until to continue rejecting our demands is a worse DM option than to grant them. The DM then claims to have ignored us. We know better.

We want to win a new law or policy, or to block one, and the same dynamic applies. For example, to end a war, if the war was undertaken with real elite reasons and high stakes, or to end fossil fuel addiction if the profits of its continued use are high, resistance will have to raise very large costs for the national government or the fossil fuel industry to succumb. Other times, to get a new stoplight at a dangerous street corner, a higher wage in a workplace, or a new restraint on one firm’s polluting practices, we can raise middling costs to win. All the details of struggles are contextual. But the logic is universal.

So what now? And what of No Kings?

We are now in an existential fight to end current wars, to protect surrounding ecology, and to remove fascistic DMs. The stakes are enormous. So too, sadly, are the costs we must raise for the involved DMs to meet our demands.

To turn out over and over with unchanging support and unchanging militance will not win. In that case, the cost for the involved DMs is to clean up our demo areas after we leave them. If our threat to them doesn’t grow, we are at most a nuisance. We have to do better than that. So how can we act in ways that raise the costs to the DMs steadily higher?

We need to grow our numbers and commitment each time. We need to move from very sporadic to more frequent actions. We need for each new action to say to the DMs that their intransigence will keep increasing our numbers and our militance. We need for our resistance to impact tiny and then medium level and finally king-like DMs to fear that our growth is going to inspire their subordinated constituencies to challenge them on steadily more fronts. They have to fear that our actions, growing larger, more diverse, and more persistent are going to in time challenge the very structures that ensure their dominance. They have to fear that our growing actions will increasingly cost them, and if our sought change doesn’t come, our actions will eventually remove them as DMs. Our actions have to challenge, threaten, and if they don’t deliver our sought changes cut into and in time even take away their wealth and power.

All this is not rocket science. In our upside down society, it is self evident. So what does it say to us?

Consider No Kings.

If higher DMs—Trump and Co.—see No Kings every few months and each time it happens on one day. Each time it does the same things. Each time it has the same focus. Each time it doesn’t reach into new audiences. And each time it doesn’t escalate its non compliance. Then they won’t see a growing threat. Instead they will see that their ignoring our demands will only require cleaning up the venues on the scheduled day every few months. Likewise, somewhat lower DMs like Senators and corporate heads won’t get nervous that their constituencies are learning to resist. They won’t feel costs that force them to add their voices to our voices also demanding higher DMs succomb.

Viewed this way, No Kings, so far, has been a monumental achievement in creating a foundation to build on. Millions standing. But the building needs to grow. So what do we need? A broadening and diversification of demands. A growing base of support because the events themselves reach into new audiences with persistent face to face organizing and diversified demands. Plus a trajectory of growing non-compliance by way of associated marches, sit downs, strikes, and then occupations and encampments that display how new recruits become committed militants. We need all of it to say to DMs, look where this is going. You need to give in or you will endure still worse to come. Our threat is real. Our commitment is unequivocal.

In a couple of weeks No Kings returns with a hopefully larger and more militantly intense turnout even than last time. But then it needs to come back again in April. It needs to diversify its targets. It needs to march onto campuses to collect support and raise costs there. It needs to visit workplace entrances to collect support and raise costs there. It needs to go wherever there are potential allies. It needs to hear their concerns and add their demands.

It needs to challenge media at the doors of media monopolies. It needs to challenge ICE, complicit corporations, courts, churches, colleges, high schools and more, at their doors. It needs to threaten business as usual on every front. If we do that we can win and all continue on. If we do less, we may all lose.

The bottom line. Our words and actions need to convincingly convey what is ultimately a simple message. No more. We will not comply. We will not obey. We will raise costs for you DMs until you abide our demands. End military attacks. End Tariff attacks. End Police attacks. End sexist, racist, and classist attacks. End Trump and Co. It is all one big battle. Keep rejecting, and we will become one big movement of movements. Keep rejecting and we will move on to more fundamental change.

As we make our decisions about each new action of resistance, is that our mindset? Our agenda? It needs to be.

Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc.

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

For Paki Wieland (1944-2026), who fought the cruelty of US imperialism all her adult life.

The morning of my departure from José Martí Airport, named after the father of the nation, I hugged everybody: the woman who checked me in, the man who stamped my passport, the ground staff. I had hugged all my friends tightly the previous day, my tears fighting for the right to stream down my face. It felt as though, through these hugs, I wanted to somehow transmit my trepidation about what could possibly happen to Cuba, the Cubans, the Cuban Revolution – all of it – because of the madness of Donald Trump.

**

What has the world become? It is as if billions of people have become bystanders of the atrocities imposed by the United States and Israel: the genocide of the Palestinian people, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, the pummeling of Iran without cause, and of course, the attempt to asphyxiate Cuba. The decadent brutality of the US government, sharpened by the foolhardiness of Trump, is unpredictable and dangerous. No one can accurately say what comes next. Trump seems trapped in Iran, where he did not anticipate the political wisdom of the Iranians in refusing a ceasefire now, only for the US and Israel to rearm and destroy their cities with greater ferocity in a week. Trump cannot seem to bring the war in Ukraine or the genocide against the Palestinians to a halt. Trump’s ally, Israel, has once again widened its war to Lebanon and thus threatens to shake up the streets of the Arab world, where there is already disquiet at their utterly pliant governments. Will he strike Cuba next, thinking it will be a quick victory?

It is hard for me to describe the impact of Trump’s cruel Oil Embargo to Cuba. There has been no shipment of refined oil to Cuba since early December 2025. This means that every part of modern life has been utterly disrupted. The roads of Havana are quiet because there is simply not enough fuel for cars and buses to take people around. Schools and hospitals—the temples of revolutionary Cuba—struggle to maintain basic services. Farmers struggle to bring food into the cities, and medicines are expensive, if they are available. Imagine being a patient who needs to have neurosurgery, with doctors simply unwilling to risk putting a probe into your brain amid electricity fluctuations and rolling blackouts. This was the starkest example of the dangers of the Trump Oil Blockade that I heard during my time in Havana. As I walked around the Malecon, I saw a few horse-drawn carts go by. It is almost as if the yanqui wants to punish the Cuban Revolution and thrust ten million Cuban citizens into the Iron Age.

**

I came to Cuba as part of a delegation of solidarity from the International Peoples Assembly, a platform of hundreds of organizations from around the world that are trying to reestablish movement-to-movement internationalism. Our delegation was led by João Pedro Stedile (national direction of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement), and included Fred M’membe (President of the Socialist Party of Zambia and the opposition’s candidate for president this year), Brian Becker (one of the leaders of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the United States), Manolo De Los Santos (director of The People’s Forum), Giuliano Granato (one of the leaders of Potere al Popolo from Italy) as well as Manuel Bertoldi and Laura Capote (coordinators of the ALBA Movements). We visited many places, including the Latin American School of Medicine, the Institute of Neurology, the Martin Luther King Centre and Casa De Las Americas. We met with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and the President of Cuba, as well as countless ordinary Cubans. We went to the main cemetery in Havana to pay homage to the thirty-two Cubans who lost their life defending Venezuelan sovereignty, and we walked around the city of Havana to meet people who were going about their everyday lives.

During one of the conversations, a friend asked how I found Cuba, a place I have visited countless times over the past thirty years. I said that I found the situation difficult but that the people seemed irrepressible. My friend was clear: the prevailing sensibility in the country was that the Cubans would fight to the very end to defend their right to a future and their refusal to return to 1958, the year before the Revolution.

During the early years of the Revolution, Fidel Castro made it clear that the urgency was to solve the people’s immediate needs and problems. This meant that the Cuban Revolution placed its emphasis on ending hunger and poverty, illiteracy and ill health, as well as providing housing and cultural spaces. To see the deterioration of life because of the harsh, nearly seventy-year Embargo and the new Oil Blockade is heartbreaking. The priority remains to ensure that every Cuban can live a life of dignity. This was the message as well from the President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz Canel, a man of great humility: we will resist, he said, but we will not permit the Revolution to squander its gains and its emphasis on the well-being of our people.

Sitting on a rocking chair beside my friend Abel Prieto, a former Minister of Culture, in Casa De Las Americas, was a tonic. As usual, Abel, my fellow Marxist-Lennonist (!), made me laugh aloud and at the same time feel sorrow. His comments ranged from an assessment of Trump (with “madness” being the word most often used) to his sense of the vitality of Cuban reality (the remarkable crowds that stood in pouring rain to pay homage to the remains of the Cubans killed by the US forces in Venezuela on 3 January). I felt comforted by his balance between humor and clarity, Abel’s literary sensibility in control of the fast-moving situation.

I accepted Abel’s view that perhaps the United States in its current form is a gigantic mistake– the arrogance of Trump a reflection of something inherent in the extreme idealism that the United States and its administrations know better than anyone else. They believe they know better what should be done to the Palestinians, the Venezuelans, the Iranians, and the Cubans. In the name of “democracy,” the democratic rights and existential rights of the people in these darker nations are utterly absorbed by the US President—the holder of preponderant power. It is an ugly vision but a real one, a reality that rips sensitive people around the world away from their own desire to shape a reality that is not so hideous. A third of the people killed in Iran by the United States and Israel are children, and the children of Palestine, whose names we honor, will never become adults.

**

On my last day, I saw a group of Cuban schoolchildren playing in a park, dressed in their school uniforms, their revolutionary scarves around their necks. They were chirping with laughter and chatter. I watched them from across the road playing a game, supervised by two smiling teachers, with some cones on the ground– a game that required them to weave between them. These children must have been about five or six, boys and girls who played in a cocoon of great happiness. I sent them a virtual hug. Be safe children. Aways. Hug Cuba for me every day.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa.

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Habib Siddiqui

For decades, Western governments and media outlets have insisted that Iran is the gravest threat to global peace—a rogue nation, a sponsor of terrorism, a destabilizing force whose very existence endangers the “rules‑based international order.” This narrative has been repeated so relentlessly that it has hardened into conventional wisdom in Washington, Brussels, and most major newsrooms. But repetition does not make truth. And today, as the United States and Israel escalate their joint military aggression against Iran, the gap between reality and Western storytelling has become impossible to ignore.

The uncomfortable truth—one that Western officials work tirelessly to obscure—is that Iran has not invaded its neighbors, has not launched preemptive wars, and has not violated the sovereignty of other states on a scale remotely comparable to Israel. Iran signed the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and remains under the most intrusive inspection regime in the world. Its leaders, citing Islamic jurisprudence, have repeatedly declared nuclear weapons forbidden. Meanwhile, Israel—an undeclared nuclear power with an arsenal estimated in the dozens if not hundreds—has refused to sign the NPT, rejects inspections, and has a long record of preemptive strikes across the Middle East.

Yet it is Iran, not Israel, that Western governments portray as the existential menace. This inversion of reality is not accidental. It is the product of a century‑long political project rooted in colonial dispossession, military domination, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian rights.

The roots of today’s crisis lie in 1917, when Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration—an extraordinary document in which a colonial empire promised a national homeland in Palestine to the Zionist movement. As historian Arthur Koestler famously observed, it was “one nation solemnly promising to give to a second nation the country of a third nation.” The people of that third nation—the Palestinians—were never consulted.

Three decades later, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The plan allocated 56 percent of the land to the Jewish state, even though Jews constituted roughly one‑third of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land. Arab leaders, with the exception of King Abdullah of Transjordan, rejected the plan as unjust. Violence erupted, and armed Zionist militias—Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi—launched operations that resulted in the depopulation of hundreds of Palestinian villages.

The massacres at Deir Yasin, Qibya, and Kafr Qasim were not aberrations; they were part of a systematic campaign to empty Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants. By the time Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948, more than 770,000 Palestinians had been expelled or fled in terror. Many ended up in Gaza, where their descendants remain trapped to this day.

This foundational violence set the pattern for decades to come: territorial expansion, demographic engineering, and the use of overwhelming military force to maintain dominance.

A Record of Aggression, Not Defense

Since 1948, Israel has launched repeated preemptive wars and military operations across the region. In 1956, it joined Britain and France in invading Egypt. In 1967, it launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, seizing the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 1982, it invaded Lebanon, leading to the Sabra and Shatila massacres carried out by allied militias under Israeli supervision.

From Nablus to Jenin, from Tyre to Sidon, from the West Bank to southern Lebanon, the pattern has been consistent: overwhelming force, collective punishment, and the targeting of civilian infrastructure. The Oslo Accords, hailed in the West as a peace breakthrough, became a mechanism for deepening Israel’s control over Palestinian land through settlements, checkpoints, and a matrix of military restrictions.

Here I am reminded of Bertrand Russell’s final political statement, written in January 1970 and read aloud at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo shortly after his death: “For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to ‘reason’ and has suggested ‘negotiations’. This is the traditional role of the imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.”

Gaza, in particular, became the world’s largest open‑air prison. The blockade imposed in 2007 strangled its economy, restricted movement, and created a humanitarian catastrophe long before the events of October 7, 2024. That uprising—whatever one thinks of its tactics—did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the predictable result of decades of suffocation, the Israeli military metaphor of “Mowing of the Lawn”, dispossession, and despair.

Israel’s response was devastating: genocidal, the near‑total destruction of Gaza, mass civilian casualties, and the annexation of additional territory. Peter Maurer, the former President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who saw the aftermath of the Operation Protective Edge and said, “in all of my life I have never seen destruction like I saw in Gaza.” The campaign soon expanded into Lebanon and Syria, and now, with U.S. backing, into Iran.

The Manufactured Threat: Why Iran Became the Villain

To justify this escalation, Western officials have revived the familiar script: Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism; Iran seeks regional domination; Iran threatens global stability. But beyond its support for Palestinian resistance groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—Western governments offer little evidence that Iran poses a threat to Europe or the United States.

Iran has not invaded another country in over four centuries. It has repeatedly engaged in diplomacy, even when the United States violated agreements such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It has sought a negotiated resolution to disputes over its nuclear and ballistic programs, consistent with the guidance of Imam Ali (R) to his governor Malik al‑Ashtar: pursue justice, avoid oppression, and seek peaceful solutions whenever possible.

Contrast this with Israel’s posture. Israeli leaders routinely describe Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians in dehumanizing terms—“Amalekites,” “human animals,” “existential threats.” Several Israeli officials face international investigations for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet Western governments continue to embrace Israel as a moral beacon and strategic ally.

That hypocrisy is now in full display. In a stunning display of moral bankruptcy, after more than two years of arming and enabling Israel as it pulverizes the Gaza Strip—even after an October ceasefire deal—the United States last week formally intervened at the International Court of Justice to help Israel fend off genocide charges.

The double standard is glaring. When Israel bombs civilian neighborhoods, it is “self‑defense.” When Iran supports groups resisting occupation, it is “terrorism.” When Israel violates international law, it is “complex.” When Iran asserts its sovereignty, it is “aggression.”

None of this would be possible without the complicity of Western media. Major outlets routinely adopt Israeli and U.S. government framing, marginalize Palestinian voices, and portray Iran as irrational and fanatical. Context disappears. History is erased. The aggressor becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the threat.

This narrative discipline serves a purpose: it prepares Western publics for war. It transforms a nuclear‑armed state with a long record of regional aggression into a misunderstood democracy under siege. It transforms a non‑nuclear state that has abided by international treaties into an existential menace.

The result is a political environment in which Israel and the United States can launch preemptive strikes on Iran—twice in less than a year—while claiming the mantle of peace and stability.

Israel’s strategic doctrine has always been clear: maintain overwhelming military superiority, weaken neighboring states, and expand territorial control whenever possible. From the Nile to the Euphrates, the vision of a Greater Israel has animated political and religious extremists for generations.

This is not speculation. Israeli leaders have said so openly. They have threatened to use nuclear weapons—the so‑called “Samson Option”—if their dominance is challenged. They have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to strike first and justify later.

A state with such a doctrine, armed with nuclear weapons, and backed unconditionally by the world’s most powerful military is not a stabilizing force. It is a recipe for perpetual conflict.

Time to Call a Spade a Spade

The world can no longer afford the comforting illusions propagated by Western governments and media. Iran is not the primary threat to Middle Eastern stability. Israel is. Its history of dispossession, occupation, preemptive war, and nuclear opacity makes it the most destabilizing actor in the region.

The tragedy is that this was not inevitable. A just peace was possible—still is possible—if the international community confronts the reality it has long avoided: Israel’s policies, not Iran’s existence, are the root cause of the region’s instability.

Until the world acknowledges this truth, the cycle of violence will continue, and the Middle East will remain trapped in a nightmare of endless war.

The time has come for the global community—especially nations of the Global South—to speak plainly. The time has come to reject the distortions that have justified so much suffering. The time has come to say what Western leaders refuse to say:

It’s Israel, not Iran, that endangers the region. And unless the world confronts this fact, the path ahead leads only to deeper catastrophe.

Dr. Siddiqui is a peace activist.

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ismail Al Sharif

“We are in an advanced position, and we will decide when the war will end,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister.

President Donald Trump, in coordination with the Zionist entity, is igniting a regional war with Iran, an unprecedented event in the region. Analyses of the true motives behind this fateful decision vary. One school of thought believes the strategic objective lies in controlling Iranian oil wealth and containing growing Chinese influence. Another links it to the Epstein affair, based on claims of Zionist pressure threatening to expose him to sensitive information.

A third school argues that Trump is bound by political commitments made to Miriam Adelson, who generously funded his election campaign. Some go even further, alleging that Trump, known for his transactional negotiating style, received substantial financial compensation for engaging in this war. In a related context, however, recent reports indicate that Trump himself has blamed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and several close advisers for instigating this latest military adventure.

Whatever the true motives behind igniting this war, one path seems almost certain to end it: Trump will hold a press conference declaring a unilateral and absolute victory. The precise timing of this declaration remains uncertain.

But the decision to cease hostilities does not rest with Trump alone; it is contingent upon the agreement of two other key parties: Tehran and Israel.

Israel shows no desire to end this war, as it is the primary beneficiary of its continuation. It systematically seeks to dismantle the structure of the Islamic Republic and sees no harm in the regime’s collapse leading to widespread chaos engulfing Iran and the entire region.

If Trump fails to restrain Netanyahu, the latter will not hesitate to continue his military operations even after any official American declaration of a ceasefire. This may explain why Trump has declared that any settlement to end the conflict would only be possible with Netanyahu’s consent and explicit blessing.

However, the Zionist entity might feign acceptance of a ceasefire while its Mossad intelligence apparatus works behind the scenes to fuel separatist and rebellious sentiments among ethnic minorities within Iran, such as the Kurds and Baloch, potentially threatening the cohesion of the Iranian state from within. In response, Tehran would have no choice but to continue targeting the entity, which would then retaliate swiftly, potentially drawing Trump back into a cycle of military confrontation.

Adding to Trump’s predicament is the possibility that he might ultimately declare a ceasefire unilaterally, without any fundamental change to the structure of the Iranian regime and without extracting any genuine concessions from Tehran regarding halting uranium enrichment, dismantling its missile program, or severing its ties with regional allies—the very pretexts used to launch the war.

Even more dangerous is the possibility that the Islamic Republic’s resilience and emergence from this crisis with its system intact could make it a unique and exceptional model: the first country to challenge American hegemony and emerge unscathed. This could encourage other countries suffering under the weight of Trump’s policies or ambitions—such as Venezuela and Greenland—to adopt resistance as a path, even if they lack Iran’s military capabilities.

It seems that President Trump may be following in the footsteps of his predecessor, George W. Bush, when he famously declared victory in 2003 from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which was then—as it is today—at the center of the American military storm. It is worth recalling that Bush’s speech was a highly symbolic and premature declaration, one quickly contradicted by events, as the war on Iraqi soil continued for nearly a decade afterward.

The war has exhausted Iran and burdened it with immense hardships, making it seriously seek a cessation of hostilities. However, it simultaneously finds itself in direct confrontation with American will. Iranian officials have made it clear that any agreement on a ceasefire and the resumption of negotiations is contingent upon receiving firm guarantees from Washington and Tel Aviv that the aggression will not be repeated. Should Tehran manage to withstand and overcome this phase, it is likely to add to its list of demands the lifting of some of the sanctions imposed upon it.

Therefore, it appears that the Iranian strategy is essentially based on a policy of systematic attrition: simultaneously exhausting the United States and Israel by driving oil prices higher and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s vital energy artery. This would impose heavy economic burdens that might ultimately compel Washington to reconsider its calculations and agree to a ceasefire.

In short, Trump will not be in a position to deliver a victory speech in the next week or two, and any such declaration without genuine cooperation from Israel and Iran will amount to nothing more than empty rhetoric devoid of any real substance on the ground. There is little doubt that President Trump has placed himself, his country, and the entire region in a highly complex strategic predicament, from which the way out may not be as easy as those who made the decision to go to war imagine.

This analysis was originally written in Arabic and reprinted in crossfirearabia.com

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. The Middle East, where US President Donald Trump promised the “forever wars” would end, promises an end to his beginning.

The ledger of losses keeps rising with giddying pace. The US casualty list, for now, remains manageably low, but the military purse is being raided with manic relish. Operation Epic Fury cost US taxpayers $11.3 billion in munitions over the first six days, an estimate that excludes operating and maintenance costs of the engaged military force or the damage inflicted by Iran. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) claims that the first 100 hours of the war cost $3.7 billion, approximating to $891.4 million each day.

Strain is also being placed on inventories. The US prides itself on deluxe, high brand killing and extermination of targets, using chic weaponry and dull doctrine. Expensive homicidal measures do have to be eventually accounted for. According to reporting from Bloomberg, “as the conflict extends toward a third week, the US war effort is showing unexpected signs of strain against an adversary whose military budget is smaller than the GDP of Vermont – but which has an arsenal of missiles and drones unlike anything the US has ever faced.”

Critical munitions are being depleted. With the campaign barely 100 hours old, 168 Tomahawk cruise missiles had been fired. (Each unit costs a mighty $3.6 million.) This is a staggering figure when compared to the rate of procurement: the previous five years had seen the production of 322 Tomahawks. According to a source quoted in the Financial Times, “The navy will be feeling this expenditure for several years.”

While the Pentagon gloats at reducing Iranian strikes by 80% or more, Tehran has gotten more economical with its targeting, successfully striking military and energy infrastructure across the Middle East with telling effect. Ballistic missiles have hit the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, destroying two AN/GSC-52B SATCOM terminals. A costly AN/FPS-132 early warning radar in Qatar – a facility estimated to cost some $1.1 billion – was successfully struck by a ballistic missile.

The AN/TPY-2 radar facilities used by the lauded yet hideously expensive Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system have also been struck in Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base, Al Ruwais in the UAE, Al Dhafra Air Base in proximity to Abu Dhabi and Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. A sense of how important that facility is to the operation of the battery is provided by N.R. Jenzen, a munitions specialist of Armament Research: “The AN/TPY-2 radar is essentially the heart of the THAAD battery, enabling the launch of interceptor missiles and contributing to a networked air defence picture.” Knocking out the radar blinds the system.

The outstanding feature of many of the strikes is their relative cheapness to the interceptor missiles used to destroy them. “The round’s we’re firing – Patriot rounds, THAAD rounds … these weapon systems, each around is millions of dollars,” laments Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. “The math on this doesn’t work.” Shahed-136 one-way drones, each one costing $35,000, have played a starring role in upsetting “the math”. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper has also noted that the majority of wounded US personnel – some 140 troops – have been injured in “one-way strikes.”

This has compelled the Pentagon to pay greater attention to its own Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), which is now seeing service in some instances against Iranian attacks. But the department is also set to seek more cash, expecting to ask $50 billion in additional funding from Congress. Given the sheer unpopularity of the war, some lawmakers have reservations. “You’ve got to be able to provide us with more information as […] justification,” insists Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Don’t just take it for granted that the Congress’s role is basically to write the cheque.”

US military power is now being drawn from other theatres of interest to feed the Moloch of war. In a recent cabinet meeting, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung confirmed that Washington might relocate air defence material to the Middle East. Multiple launchers of the THAAD system have been or are in the process of being moved to Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, roughly 70km south of Seoul, with the interceptor missiles destined for the Middle East.

This shifting of pieces has not been without consequence. The THAAD batteries had been sent to South Korea in 2017 to assure it against threats from its nuclear-armed neighbour to the north. Depriving them of projectiles has gotten tongues wagging about increasing vulnerability. Besides, the ostensible security provided by US power for its allies and partners has been shown to be something of a dud, as Iran’s attacks on the Gulf states has so convincingly demonstrated.

Concern from Taiwan about such moves was registered in an interview by Chen Kuan-ting, a legislator and member of the country’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. As US military assets and resources could not “be deployed in two places at the same time”, it was a case of priorities. And those priorities, it was implied, should lie in Asia. “Deploying the main military assets in Asia and confronting the US’s primary competitor here is more in line with US interests.” That may well be what he hopes for, but it is clear that Washington is battling through the another malady Trump had once campaigned against: the debilitating entanglement of a foreign war with ill-defined objectives involving a resourceful, obstinate foe.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

The United States has carried out strikes on Kharg Island, a strategic Iranian oil hub in the northern Gulf, in what analysts describe as one of the most dangerous escalations in the expanding Israeli war between Washington and Tehran.

US President Donald Trump claimed on social media that American forces had “completely destroyed all military targets” on the island. He also warned that Washington could strike Iran’s oil infrastructure if Tehran continues to disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The island contains no military targets; it mainly hosts oil export terminals, storage tanks, and shipping infrastructure.

The attack has drawn intense attention because Kharg Island sits at the heart of Iran’s oil export system. The small coral island, located about 26 kilometers off Iran’s coast and roughly 483 kilometers northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, serves as the main terminal for Iranian crude exports.

The Heart of Iran’s Oil Exports

Iran has relied on Kharg Island since the 1960s as the central hub for shipping its crude oil to global markets. Around 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass through the island’s terminals, pipelines, and massive storage tanks.

The infrastructure on Kharg is almost entirely civilian. It consists mainly of oil loading facilities, storage tanks, and ports designed for large tankers that cannot dock in the shallow waters near Iran’s mainland.

Because of this role, Iranian officials have long considered the island a red line. Any attack on its infrastructure could severely damage the country’s economy.

Iran currently exports between 1.1 million and 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day, according to tanker tracking services. Data from shipping analytics firms shows that about 1.55 million barrels per day have moved through Kharg Island since the beginning of the year.

Before the war expanded, Iran had increased production and exports sharply. Shipments reached roughly 2.17 million barrels per day in February, and tanker tracking data recorded a weekly peak of nearly 3.79 million barrels per day in mid-February.

A Target Long Considered Too Dangerous to Hit

For months, military planners in Washington and Tel Aviv avoided striking Kharg Island despite their ongoing bombing campaign across Iran. Analysts warned that hitting the island would likely trigger a major regional escalation.

Richard Nephew, a former US deputy special envoy for Iran, told the Financial Times that attacking Kharg would represent a dangerous step.

He said such a strike could push Iran to retaliate against oil facilities across the Gulf, including infrastructure belonging to US partners.

Iran’s military has already issued similar warnings. Iranian officials said any attack on the country’s oil and energy infrastructure would lead to strikes on energy facilities owned by companies cooperating with the United States in the region.

Such retaliation could target oil installations in Gulf states that host US forces or cooperate with Washington.

Oil Markets on Edge

Energy markets are watching the situation closely because even limited damage to Kharg’s infrastructure could disrupt global supply.

Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners, warned that destroying the island’s export system could remove around two million barrels of oil per day from the market.

That loss would likely persist until shipping routes reopen or the situation in the Strait of Hormuz stabilizes.

Iran ranks as the third-largest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The country produces roughly 3.3 million barrels per day of crude oil and another 1.3 million barrels per day of condensates and other liquids.

Iranian crude plays a major role in Asian markets, especially in China, the world’s largest oil importer. Shipping data shows that Iranian crude accounted for about 11.6 percent of China’s seaborne oil imports this year.

Tehran may now feel compelled to escalate in response. Iran has already restricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that carries roughly 20 percent of global oil supply.

Any broader disruption in the strait could trigger severe price spikes and destabilize global energy markets.

15 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Juan Cole

Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of White nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as “White,” while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power. Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline” because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product] — down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.”

A Mayor Named Khan

As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is exemplified in Trump’s National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today’s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn’t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as “shithole countries,” has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe’s share of global GDP.

In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe’s supposed economic degradation doesn’t bother him nearly as much as another issue: “This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” thanks to Europe’s migration policies. In short, Trump’s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming “migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,” along with “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

Trump claims that he’s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington’s “reliable allies.” That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, “If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.” And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren’t just coming from the Middle East, “they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.” In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.

Of course, he’s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe’s future reliability, Trump has already said that he “can’t trust” Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won’t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.

Aryan Reliability

The underpinnings of Trump’s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he’s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recently asserted that “they’ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.” Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having restored British-U.S. diplomatic relations after years of strain.

In reality, studies show that socio-economic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian-Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish-Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term “immigrants” in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that nine of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as “major non-NATO allies” are Muslim-majority.

His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germany’s because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump’s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler’s thinking — that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler’s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump’s NSS.

“Mongols and Negroes”

Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrès wrote, “Today, new French have slipped in among us… who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.” He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. “The name of France might well survive,” he commented, but “the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.” Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrès denounced the famed French novelist Émile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as “not French” but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.

Fifty years later, the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957) coined the phrase “Great Replacement.” An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by “Mongols and Negroes” — that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn’t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized White Europeans.

Sadly enough, Binet’s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his twenty-first century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” (and President Trump called the assembled protestors, as well as those who opposed them, “very fine people”). Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump denounced the verdict and launched the slogan, “Free Marine Le Pen.” Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954-1962) that killed between half a million and a million Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was surrounded by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.

Forget 1776 and All That

The central concerns of that National Security Strategy now animate the Trump administration’s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once termed the White Man’s Burden, crowing that “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.” He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction, and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II alone, for instance, instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as 10 million people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist utters, “The horror! The horror!“

After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a Europe in ruins contracted. “Half of it,” he added, “lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.” He mourned that “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.”

He also displayed a striking mixture of White nationalism and colonial nostalgia — and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main Communist-led. After all, the United States launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early nineteenth century by Simón Bolívar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonialized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.

Marco Rubio’s mixing of White nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime’s most insistent demands in the late 1930s, and dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.

Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of mobilization. The first was “social mobilization,” which involved urbanization, industrialization, and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.

And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets demanding independence. And while the Netherlands did fight viciously to roll back Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out. The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by military force. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, twisted French President Charles De Gaulle’s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and Communism.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche

Given that history, the advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a White nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global South is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face Japan’s dilemma of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.” As for the White nationalist pronatalist dream of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it’s a chimera given the electoral power of women in today’s Europe (and the United States).

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s cruel, heavily ICED anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy and Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country’s disastrous twenty-first-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won’t be aided by the present assault on Iran either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.

In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump’s White nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty, and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.

And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase “the White man’s burden” a grim new meaning.

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan.

13 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

Careful and systematic analysis reveals Trump’s direct responsibility as US president for the deaths of 25.6 million people, many of them children, and a detailed and documented charge sheet has been drawn up here. However just as Nixon and Clinton evaded justice for huge war crimes but were brought down by victimless lying to Congress, so Trump goes unpunished for killing 25.6 million people in 5.25 years as president but may well be brought down by the Epstein Files and the alleged rape of a 13-year old girl.

Donald Trump was elected to office as a convicted felon, albeit convicted for a victimless technical crime. However while Trump is the first convicted felon elected as US president, 45 other war criminal US presidents remain un-convicted for their war crimes, variously from the 3-century American Indian Genocide (5 million Indigenous American deaths) to the 2001-2021 Afghan Genocide (7 million Afghan deaths from violence and imposed deprivation in gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention) (for a detailed and documented analyses of US war crimes see [1-6]).

Richard Nixon (US president 1969-1974) was not arraigned for direct involvement as US president in the following horrific war atrocities (deaths from violence and deprivation in brackets): the 1969-1998 Cambodian Genocide (6 million), 1955-1975 Laotian Genocide (1 million) and the 1945-1975 Vietnamese Genocide (15 million) [1-6]. However he was finally forced to resign in 1974 for deceiving Congress over the Watergate and cover-up crimes [7].

Similarly Bill Clinton (US president 1993- 2001) was not arraigned for direct involvement as US president in the following atrocities (deaths from violence and deprivation in brackets): 1992 onwards Somali Genocide (2 million), the 1990-2003 Sanctions and Gulf War part of the Iraqi Genocide (1.9 million), 1979 onwards Sanctions-related Iran Genocide (3 million), and non-intervention in the 1994 Rwanda Genocide (0.9 million) [1-6]. Clinton also bombed Serbia in 1995 and in 1999. However Clinton was impeached – but thence acquitted – over lying to Congress over his affair with an intern Monica Lewinsky [8].

It would seem extremely unlikely that Trump – nor indeed any other US president – will be prosecuted for killing 25.6 million non-Europeans in the Global South and particularly in the Muslim world [1-6]. Thus US Presidents George W. Bush (2001-2009), Barack Obama (2009-2017), Donald Trump (2017-2021), Joe Biden (2021-2025) and Donald Trump (2025 onwards) have not been arraigned for their direct responsibility for the 2001-2021 Afghan Genocide and Afghan Holocaust (7 million Afghan deaths from violence and from imposed deprivation in gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that state that an Occupier is obliged to provide its Conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” ) [1-6, 9-11]. Indeed no US presidents have been tried for their part in the century-long, 1916-2026 and ongoing Palestinian Genocide and Palestinian Holocaust (3.1 million Palestinians killed by violence, 0.3 million, and imposed deprivation, 2.8 million) [12-15], noting that the WW2 Jewish Holocaust was associated with 5-6 million Jewish deaths due to Nazi-imposed violence and deprivation [16-18].

(A). Unpunished for killing 25.6 million people (many of them children), Trump is threatened by alleged sexual crimes against females, and particularly the alleged rape of a 13-year old girl.

While Trump goes for unpunished for killing 25.6 million people (as detailed in (B) below), he is threatened by the huge volume of Epstein files and his close connections to Jeffrey Epstein, that are being examined by media and Congress. In particular the alleged rape by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein of a 13-year old girl is presently being reported by just a few Mainstream media, although most Western Mainstream media exhibit their extraordinary and entrenched mendacity by ignoring this hugely important story.

Thus the leading UK newspaper The Telegraph (6 March 2026): “US authorities have released new details of a sexual assault allegation against Donald Trump in the middle of their war on Iran. The trio of interviews were previously flagged as missing from the Epstein files and were released on Thursday night after pressure on the White House. The unidentified woman told FBI agents in 2019, shortly after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges, that she had been sexually assaulted by the paedophile and Mr Trump while she was a teenager in the 1980s” [19].

Further respected media have reported this matter. Thus Common Dreams (24 February 2026): “The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee announced Tuesday that an investigation will be opened into the US Department of Justice’s withholding of Epstein files related to an alleged sexual assault on a 13-year-old girl committed by President Donald Trump decades ago” [20].

Yahoo News (31 January 2026): “An allegation of rape against President Donald Trump involving a 13-year-old girl is part of an explosive new tranche of documents released by his own Justice Department into the crimes of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The bombshell claim, which the White House says was “unfounded and false,” was made in an FBI file dated from August last year” [21].

Yahoo News (9 March 2026): “The woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her when she was 13 provided several verifiable details about her life in interviews with the FBI, according to a new report. The woman detailed her alleged abuse by Trump and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein over four interviews in 2019, the Epstein files revealed. The interviews were initially kept secret by the DOJ” [22].

Wikipedia: “As of October, 2024, since the 1970s, at least 28 women have accused Donald Trump of various acts of sexual misconduct, including rape, assault, kissing and groping without consent, looking under women’s skirts, and walking in on naked pageant contestants… In April 2016, an anonymous woman using the pseudonym “Katie Johnson” filed a lawsuit in California accusing both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein of forcibly raping her when she was 13 years old at underage sex parties at Epstein’s Manhattan residence in 1994” [23].

As reported on YouTube members of Congress have demanded release of all the relevant FBI files and demanded Trump’s appearance before the Congressional Oversight Committee investigating the voluminous Epstein files [24].

Indeed astonishingly in highly censored Australia, presenter David Marr indignantly raised the subject of the alleged Trump rape of the 13-year old girl on the progressive Late Night Live radio program of the important but “conservative” ABC (the taxpayer-funded Australian equivalent of the UK BBC). David Marr’s US correspondent stated that this matter would become a “bombshell” for Trump if the woman decides to come forward again [25].

As outlined above, a Google Search for “13-year old girl” plus the word Trump presently brings up only a couple of reports by respected media and AI Overview says: “Newly released FBI interviews from the “Epstein files” (February/March 2026) contain allegations from an unidentified woman claiming Donald Trump assaulted her in the 1980s-90s when she was 13–15 years old. Trump has denied these allegations, which officials labeled unverified and “sensationalist”” . However nearly all Western Mainstream media are conspicuous by their absence (with presently just several exceptions) from reporting this extremely topical and important matter that could end the Trump presidency – an extraordinary example of pervasive “Mainstream media lying” to protect the US establishment [26].

(B). Trump is directly responsible for the deaths of 25.6 million people, many of them children, but has yet to face a court for these horrific mortal crimes.

In January 2016 Trump boasted that : “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible” [27]. Trump is responsible for the deaths of 25.6 million people, many of them children, but will only be held accountable to American voters if gas prices and the inflation rate go too high or if the Epstein child abuse scandal really explodes.

Documented below are estimates of the 25.6 million people who have died due to Trump’s actions as president of the US, actions for which he has not yet been held accountable under the US Constitution or under International Law.

(1). 57,000 US heroin-related deaths (2017-2021).

The Taliban banned Afghan opium production in 2000 for religious reasons. According to the UN Drug Control Program (UNDCP): “An estimated 185 metric tonnes (MT) of raw opium was produced in Afghanistan in 2001. This would suggest a large reduction in opium production of 94% from the 2000 total of 3,276 MT and a reduction of 96% from the record high of 4,582 MT reported by the 1999 survey”[28]. Thus the 2000 Taliban ban on Afghan opium production caused a 94% drop in output in 2000-2001. However the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and by 2002 US occupation had restored Afghan opium production to more than the 2000 level and to 76% of world market share in 2002 and to 92% of world market share by 2006 [29-31]. For the world and Afghan opium production statistics from 1980 to 2009 see [32].

US heroin-related deaths peaked under the first Trump Administration (20 January 2017- 20 January 2021), totalled about 57,000 [33], and coincided with the peak period of US-protected Afghan opium production before the US withdrew in 2021 and the Taliban imposed a ban in April 2022 on the cultivation, transportation, trade, and selling of all drugs. By 2023 and 2024 Afghan opium production was only about 5% of that in 2022 [34]. Global annual opium production (mainly in Myanmar, Mexico and elsewhere in 2023 and 2024) was only about 20% of the peak global production of 10,000 tons in 2017 (the first year of the first Trump presidency) [34].

War criminal Trump’s excuses for America’s illegal invasion of Venezuela were alleged Venezuelan involvement in drug smuggling to the US and alleged Venezuelan terrorism. However documented reality links Trump to 57,000 heroin-related deaths in his first presidency due to US backing of the Afghan opium industry. Trump was also complicit in 6.8 million Occupied Afghan deaths from violence and deprivation under US Occupation and US state terrorism [35].

(2). 1.36 million Afghan deaths from violence and deprivation (2017-2020).

Occupied Afghan “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase) totalled 6.8 million in the 20 year Occupation period of 2001-2021 [9-11]. Occupied Afghan deaths during Trump’s first 4 -year term (2017-2020) can be crudely estimated as (6.8 million deaths x 4 years)/20 years = 1.36 million. Under-5 year old children are about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished countries [2].

(3). 1.16 million global opiate-related deaths (2017-2020).

Global drug deaths totalled about 0.2 million in 2001 and about 0.6 million in 2019, and accordingly the average of annual drug deaths in this period was 0.4 million per year. Assuming that 90% of these drug deaths were opioid-related, that of these about 90% were due to opiates (such as opium and heroin, as opposed to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and tramadol), and that of these opiate-related deaths 90% were linked to Afghan opium production [36], then the average global death rate from Afghanistan-derived opium in the last 2 decades would have been about 290,000 million deaths per year – or a total of 5.8 million since 9-11 (11 September 2001)[37]. The first Trump Administration (2017-2020) ruled Occupied Afghanistan for 4 years and thus was responsible for (5.8 million deaths x 4 years)/20 years = 1.16 million global opiate-related deaths.

In stark contrast US Government-beholden Western Mainstream media continue to turn reality on its head by ignoring this US-imposed carnage of 290,000 per year x 20 years = 5.8 million opiate drug-related deaths world-wide linked to US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from about 6% of world market share in 2001 to 93% in 2007. Further, Western Mainstream media ignore the reality that Iran was the world leader in combating this deadly, 2-decade scourge of US-protected Afghan opiate drugs and instead beat the drums of war against Iran by the nuclear terrorist and serial invader countries of the US, Apartheid Israel, the UK and France – and all this against a country that does not have nuclear weapons, denies any intention of building them, repeatedly declares that it wants a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, and that has not invaded another country for 1,500 years (except for recent targeted retaliation against Gulf States supporting the unprovoked and illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran by hosting US military bases).

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in about 2018 Iran accounted for 74% of the world’s opium seizures and 25% of the world’s heroin and morphine seizures. However Iran’s role as a world leader in the War on Drugs and in combating opiate drugs from US-occupied Afghanistan came at a heavy price. Thus Iran has a 900 kilometer border with the formerly US-occupied Afghanistan that produced about 90% of the world’s opium under US Alliance protection. Iran has spent about $700 million policing its borders against drug movement. About 2.5 million Iranians are drug users with opium accounting for 67% of drug use. 4,000 Iranian police have been killed protecting Iran and the World from US-protected opiate smugglers. The US Alliance restored the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from about 6% of world market share in 2001 to 93% in 2007. Drought reduced the Afghan share of the world opium production in 2018 to 82% [36-39].

In my own country, fervently US-beholden, Zionist-perverted and resolutely “look-the-other-way” Australia, people are aware of 3,000 people being killed on 9-11 and possibly that about 40 Australian solders have died in the US War on Terror. However they are utterly unaware that since 9-11 there have been 5.8 million global opiate drug-related deaths linked to US-protected Afghan opium production in US-occupied Afghanistan, that in the 2 decades since 9/11 about 1.6 million Australians have died preventably from “lifestyle choice” or “political choices” reasons, that tens of thousands of Australians have died from drug-related causes (mostly opiate-related), or that that 1,400 Australian veterans of US Alliance wars have suicided [37]. Interestingly, in 2008 the Australian PM Kevin Rudd suggested to a NATO meeting on Afghanistan that the US Coalition should destroy the Afghan opium crop that presently kills about 290,000 people each year. His suggestion was, of course, rejected [40], notwithstanding the glaring reality that unlike Afghan combatants fighting the US and NATO Alliance, plants are sessile, cannot run away, and accordingly elaborate a huge array of chemical defences (including opiates) [41]. In June 2010 the popularly-elected PM Rudd was removed in a US- , Apartheid Israel- and Zionist-backed overnight coup [42, 43]. Despite dishonest denials, Australia vocally, materially and diplomatically backs the US-Israeli regime-change attack on Iran (Australia’s Pine Gap spying base targets US and Israeli strikes, 3 Royal Australian Navy sailors were aboard the US submarine that sank an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka, and Australia has dispatched key military forces to the UAE) . Indeed Australians have been involved in 8 US-backed coups, namely in Laos (1960), Indonesia (1965), Cambodia (1970), Chile (1973), Australia (1975), Fiji (1987), Fiji (2000) and Australia (2010), with the last 3 involving serial war criminal and genocidally racist Apartheid Israel [42, 43].

(4). 14 million people will die globally by 2030 from Trump’s abolition of USAID.

Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti et al in The Lancet (19 July 2025): “USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.…Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14, 051, 750 (uncertainty interval 8, 475, 990–19, 662, 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4, 537, 157 (3, 124, 796–5 ,910 ,791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030… USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths [14 million] could occur by 2030” [44]. Under-5 year old children are about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished countries [2].

(5). 875,000 Gaza deaths from violence and deprivation in 2 years of the US-backed Gaza Genocide, 325,000 of them children. .

In the first 2 years of the Trump-backed and Zionist Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide there were 875,000 Gaza “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase) including the deaths of 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men [12-15]. Trump provided the weapons, bombs, multiple UNSC vetoes [45], operational military cooperation and over $16 billion in military funding [46] for Apartheid Israel’s Gaza Genocide.

Expert epidemiologists published in the leading medical journal The Lancet estimated that 64,260 Gazans had died violently by 30 June 2024 (Day 269 of the killing) [47] and hence that 175,000 Gazans had died violently by 7 October 2025 (Day 731) i.e. after 2 years of killing. The wartime ratio of indirect deaths from imposed deprivation to direct, violent deaths ranges from 3 (the Iraq War, 1990-2011) to 16 (the Afghan War, 2001-2021) [2-6, 9]. Epidemiologists “conservatively” estimated 4 deaths from imposed deprivation in Gaza for every violent death [48-50], this indicating 700,000 non-violent deaths and 875,000 Gazans in total killed by violence and imposed deprivation by 7 October 2025 (i.e. in 2 years). Assuming (in the absence of other data) that the relative proportions of child, women and men deaths are the same for indirect (non-violent) deaths and for violent deaths reported by the Gaza health authorities, then the 875,000 Gazan deaths by 7 October 2025 are conservatively estimated to include the deaths of 325,000 children, 207,000 women and 342,000 men [13-15]. However this underestimates child deaths because it ignores the high vulnerability of under-5 year old infants who represent about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished countries (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” [2]).

(6). 8.1 million avoidable deaths: Trump’s “share” of 1950 onwards avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries variously occupied by the US since World War 2.

Whether a child dies from deprivation or is killed by bombs, bullets or bashing, the death is just as final and the perpetrators just as guilty. Indeed an Australian farmer who deliberately starves his livestock to death is prosecuted and goes to jail. Such avoidable deaths from deprivation can be determined as the difference between actual deaths in a country and deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with the same demographics (birth rate, children as a proportion of population). Using UN Population Division demographic data I determined avoidable mortality for every country in the world from 1950 onwards, with the results published in 2007 and 2021 editions of my huge book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” [2]. This book also includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country in the world from neolithic times. The results are utterly shocking. In particular, under-5 year old children are about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished countries [2].

Importantly, poor countries threatened by colonial or hegemonic powers need to divert precious resources from life-preserving social purposes to defence, with a consequent effect on avoidable mortality from deprivation. I determined that 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries variously occupied by the US in the post-WW2 era totalled 82.2 million. We could crudely estimate that the 1950-2025 figure would be (82.2 million x 76 years)/56 years = 111.6 million. Trump has been US president for 5.25 years. We can accordingly calculate Trump’s “share” of this carnage as (116.6 million deaths x 5.25 years)/76 years = 8.1 million deaths.

(7). Trump actions variously linked to increased avoidable mortality in the short-term and long-term but to a presently uncertain and unquantified extent.

(a). Trump bombed 7 countries in 14 months (Venezuela, Nigeria (government-invited bombing), Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran) as well as destroying “alleged drug boats” in international waters in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific [51]. In addition in the last circa 2.5 years US-backed Apartheid Israel has catastrophically bombed Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Further, the US and Apartheid Israel unilaterally declared the independence of Somaliland from Somalia. Over 78 years Germany- and US-armed and Germany- and US-backed Apartheid Israel has attacked 18 countries [52, 53]. Like the Zionist-perverted US, Apartheid Israel subverts all countries in the world, and exports high technology arms and surveillance systems to dictatorships and democracies alike, with Apartheid Israeli weapons supporting genocidal atrocities including the Myanmar Rohingya Genocide, the Sri Lanka Tamil Genocide, the Guatemala Mayan Indian Genocide, the Iraqi Genocide, the war- and sanctions-based Iran Genocide, and the ongoing Sudan Genocide [54-57]. Trump’s “share” of responsibility for the consequently increased avoidable mortality is not clear.

This horrendous ongoing global atrocity is enabled by Zionist subversion of the US and US Alliance countries [58] and of US-dominated Western Mainstream media in particular [58, 59]. While numerous anti-racist Jewish activists are resolutely critical of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, Western Mainstream Media variously censor or white-wash the nuclear terrorist, genocidally racist, and grossly human rights-abusing conduct of Apartheid Israel. A part explanation for this huge moral discrepancy is that the American 60% of the world’s 30 biggest media companies have a disproportionately high Jewish Zionist Board membership. Jews and females represent 2% and 51%, respectively, of the US population but average 33% and 19%, respectively, of Board members of the top 18 US media companies [59].

(b). There obviously have been deadly consequences from illegal US-Israeli bombing and devastation of 93 million Iranians, with consequent retaliatory bombing of Gulf States hosting US bases, closure of the Straits of Hormuz, and billions impacted globally through supply chain interruption, elevated oil prices, fertilizer prices, and inflation. However the killing and destruction continue and the magnitude of the consequent excess mortality is not clear.

(c). Who’s next? In addition to bombing 7 countries, destruction of boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, sanctioning and now blockading Cuba, and backing genocidal Apartheid Israel, Trump has threatened to invade and variously annex Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Canada, and Greenland (Denmark). Narcissist, racist and serial war criminal Trump could invade any non-nuclear-armed state at any time in this new might-is-right Trumpist world with huge consequent excess mortality.

(d). Trump and Trump-backed Apartheid Israeli violation of major International Conventions (most notably the Genocide Convention and the Fourth Geneva Convention) is predicted to encourage other countries to do likewise with huge consequent excess mortality.

(e). The world is existentially threatened by nuclear weapons and climate change. A nuclear exchange would generate a nuclear winter that would decimate Humanity and the Biosphere [60]. The Paris Agreement’s target of no more than plus 1.5C of warming was attained in the last 3 years in a row, and a catastrophic plus 2C of warming is only a decade or so away [61]. One of the world’s greatest minds, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking: “We see great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change” [62]. However anti-science idiot Trump resumes nuclear testing, allows fully autonomous AI weapons (despite the ethical stance of Anthropic and similar science-informed objections [63, 64]), and regards climate change as a “hoax”.

(f).1.7 million Americans die preventably each year from “life-style choice” and “political choice” reasons. The major killers are smoking, air pollution, obesity and adverse hospital events (for a breakdown see [65]). An average of 1.7 million Americans will die preventably each year under a 2-term Trump presidency or about 14 million in total [65]. However while Trump’s anti-science and anti-equity positions contribute to this American Holocaust of preventable deaths, it is ultimately smoking, drinking, polluting and overweight Americans who are committing slow suicide [65].

Final comments and conclusions.

Reported by just 4 major Western Mainstream media (MS) but ignored by the rest , Trump’s power is threatened by the Epstein Files and the alleged rape of a 13-year old girl. Similarly ignored by Western MSM is Trump’s direct responsibility as US president for the deaths of 25.6 million people, many of them children.

The world is acutely threatened by this out-of-control, ignorant, stupid, anti-science, racist, mendacious, warmongering, and child-killing narcissist. The only hope for the long-suffering Americans is release of all the Epstein Files relating to Trump and particularly those relating to the alleged rape of a 13-year old girl. Americans must use this to go all out to defend America from this dangerous psychopath via the justice system.

What can the world do? Decent folk around the world must (a) inform everyone they can (so far most Western Mainstream media are squibbing this) and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Trump-backed Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, companies and countries supporting this serial war criminal and child-killing rogue state, notably Trump America and its perverted Trumpist allies. Decent America must unite to demand impeachment of child-killing Trump. Thou shalt not kill children.

References.

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[65]. Gideon Polya, “Over 14 Million Americans Will Die Preventably Under A 2-Term Trump Administration”, Countercurrents, 22 March 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/03/over-14-million-americans-will-die-preventably-under-a-2-term-trump-administration/ .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

13 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By People’s Union For Civil Liberties

To

Shri Narendra Modi,

Hon’ble Prime Minister,

Government of India,

New Delhi.

Through:

Principal Secretary to Prime Minister @ connect@mygov.nic.in

Dear Sir,

We at the PUCL write this letter to you expressing our shock at the unprovoked and illegal bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel which commenced on 28th February, 2026. As of 12th March, 2026 the bombing has spread death and devastation across Iran, with over 1200 civilian deaths, including over 200 children, and the destruction of Iran’s infrastructure in about 200+ cities. The bombing also resulted in the targeted assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This unprovoked campaign of terror by Israel and the United States is a violation of international law and it is disturbing that the Government of India did not issue an immediate and unequivocal condemnation.

The Indian Government’s silence on violations of international law by the powerful nations seems to be a matter of policy. The Government of India did not condemn the kidnapping of the Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela on 3rd January, 2026 or the previous unprovoked aggression against Iran in June, 2025. The Government has also not condemned the continuing genocide in Gaza from 2023 till date.

It is even more concerning that the Indian government chose to remain silent on 4th March, 2026, when an unarmed Iranian warship, the IRIS Dena, was torpedoed by the United States when it was within Sri Lankan waters, close to the Indian coast. The ship was returning to Iran after the Milan multinational naval exercise hosted by India in Vishakhapatnam between 15th and 25th February, 2026. In fact India’s President, Droupadi Murmu, had participated in the event. Despite being our country’s honoured guests, the young Iranian naval officers were murdered. India till date has failed to condemn the attack. This speaks to India’s abdication of leadership of the global south, and India’s betrayal of both its constitutional vision as well as the abandonment of its oft declared sovereignty over the Indian Ocean.

The only way one can read this silence is as a decision to subordinate our interests to the actions of the United States. This has implications for the core constitutional principle of sovereignty. The cat was out of the bag when the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on 6th March that Washington issued a temporary 30-day waiver to allow Indian refiners to buy Russian oil already on vessels. The question rightly being raised across the country is, does India need US permission to import Russian oil? Is this not an infringement of India’s sovereignty?

Our position as a leader of the global south has been tarnished by your decision to visit Israel just 2 days before the bombing began on 28th February, and your declaration to the Israeli Parliament that ‘India stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, from this moment and beyond.’ Does this mean that the Government of India implicitly supports the bombing of Iran? Or does this mean that it doesn’t stand anymore in solidarity with the Palestinian people? Or does it mean that the arrest warrant issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who, incidentally, you have described as your ‘friend’ – by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, is of no significance? Any which way, it is a betrayal of India’s role as a leading voice of the global south countries against imperialism. This is a path the government seems to have consciously eschewed. It is very painful – but we are constrained to point out that the current India-US relationship seems to be one of a master and a vassal.

Foreign policy as conducted by the Indian government has shown itself to be purely transactional and bereft of values. The values which should underpin our foreign policy must derive from our Constitution. The Directive Principles of State Policy, under Article 51(c) oblige India to ‘foster respect for international law’ and under 51(a) require the State to ‘promote international peace and security’, under 51(b), ‘to maintain just and honourable relations between nations’ and under 51(d) ‘encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration’.

It is further the fundamental duty of every citizen and by extension, every high constitutional functionary, to ‘abide by the Constitution’ and ‘respect its ideal and institutions under Article 51-A (a), to ‘cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom’ under Article 51-A (b) and to ‘uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India’ under Article 51-A (c). Your own oath of office requires you to ‘do right to all manner of people in accordance with the Constitution and the law, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.’

As early as in 1946 itself, even before India formally and officially gained independence on 15th August, 1947, the drafters of the Indian Constitution very much envisioned a contribution of a future independent India to global peace. The `Objectives Resolution’ adopted by the Constitutional Assembly on 22nd January, 1947 – which later became the Preamble to the Constitution – very clearly emphasised in sub-point 8 that, ‘this ancient land attains its rightful and honoured place in the world and make its full and willing contribution to the promotion of world peace and the welfare of mankind.’

As Nehru said in the Constituent Assembly, in the famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, our ‘dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom; so is prosperity now; and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.’

The idea of India in the world was also articulated powerfully by Rabindranath Tagore who invoked the ideal of a people who were not ‘afraid’ and a context where ‘the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.’

India’s foreign policy in the past has derived from these constitutional values of promoting peace, upholding the UN-based international order and defending the sovereignty of nation states, in particular from the global south. In fact, India has had a proud history of opposing aggression by imperial powers drawing from the values of the Indian Constitution.

If these values give a constitutional compass to India’s foreign policy, then the bombing of Iran and the assassination of her Supreme Leader should be condemned as a violation of your oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

The defence of international law is not only a constitutional imperative but also in the self-interest of a middle power like India. As the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, ‘the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu. When middle powers only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact.’

In a rapidly changing world where re-colonisation by the most powerful countries has become the norm, India must act in its self-interest. Cosying up to the hegemon is not in India’s self-interest. India should aim, as Carney indicated, for something larger. It should aim to bring together the middle powers and to constrain the hegemony of the most powerful. It cannot stay silent when President Trump has bombed eight countries in one year laying waste to the principle that even the powerful are subject to international law.

The invasion of Iran has no legal, moral, or ethical justification and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. This is the mandate of both international law as also the Indian Constitution. If this armed aggression is not condemned by the world’s largest democracy, it becomes one more nail in the coffin of the international legal order. Each time such violations pass without condemnation, the principle of impunity of the powerful gets sanctified.

In this context of a willingness to tear down the rules based order by the powerful nations, India’s silence highlights a dangerous backsliding from our historically pre-eminent position as a non-aligned power. India had stood for an international rules based order based on resolving disputes through dialogue and discussion.

India should therefore have clearly and unequivocally condemned the unprovoked war against Iran, drawing her position both from India’s anti-colonial heritage as well as her Constitution.

We call upon the government of India, to unequivocally condemn the bombing of Iran by US and Israel and the attack on the Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, in the strongest terms and make a case that India stands in defence of the UN Charter and the right of all nations not to be subjected to wanton attacks.

The Indian government must also return to the constitutional imperative to promote peace and work towards building rapprochement between all parties and bring an end to this needless war. This is vital especially as there is the possibility of the war turning nuclear. This would be a devastating catastrophe which India must work towards preventing.

This is the heart of the idea of India sanctified in the Indian Constitution.

Yours sincerely,

Kavita Srivastava Dr. V. Suresh

President General Secretary

People’s Union for Civil Liberties

13 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org