By The Chris Hedges Report
15 Apr 2026
The Trump Administration’s economic strangulation of Cuba has created unbearable hardships for the population. Medea Benjamin describes what she saw on a recent solidarity delegation and what people can do to break the blockade.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzWMouhvDeM]
27 April 2026
Source: transcend.org
By Joshua Carroll
Evidence of gruesome form of torture is ‘overwhelming’.
20 Apr 2026 – Guards at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman torture camp have admitted their colleagues use dogs to rape Palestinian captives there, according to a prominent Israeli analyst.
Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a geopolitical expert who opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza, said he spoke to two guards from the facility about the gruesome form of torture “on more than one occasion”.
“Some have said that claims that Israel uses dogs to sexually abuse prisoners are antisemitic blood libels,” Ben-Ephraim wrote on X on Friday. “Unfortunately, there is a good deal of evidence.”
Of the two guards he spoke to, “one had seen this happen and said it was too awful to talk about. The other said that he had heard about it from others and believed it was true. This happened. This is happening still. The evidence is too overwhelming.”
He highlighted several cases reported by human rights groups and media outlets.
They include a man who spoke to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). “We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me,” he said. “Then one of the dogs raped me… I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation.”
“They know once they rape someone with a dog or with a stick that these people won’t be able to carry out their jobs or live their lives normally,” Basel Alsourani, international advocacy officer at PCHR, told Novara Media last year. “It’s part of their genocidal intention to destroy [Palestinians].”
Sde Teiman gained global notoriety after footage was leaked of soldiers gang-raping a captive there in 2024.
Joshua Carroll is a writer and journalist.
27 April 2026
Source: transcend.org
By Emma Graham-Harrison
Experts say attacks, also carried out by settlers, are leading girls to quit school and enter early marriages.
21 Apr 2026 – Israeli soldiers and settlers are using gendered violence and sexual assault and harassment to force Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank, human rights and legal experts say.
Palestinian women, men and children have reported attacks, forced nudity, invasive and painful body cavity searches, Israelis exposing their genitals, including to minors, and threats of sexual violence.
Sixteen cases of conflict-related sexual violence were recorded by researchers for the West Bank Protection Consortium over the last three years, a figure that is likely an under-reporting because of the shame and stigma faced by survivors.
“Sexualised violence is used to pressure communities, shape decisions about remaining or leaving their homes and land, and alter patterns of daily life,” the group of international humanitarian organisations said in a report.
The study, “Sexual violence and forcible transfer in the West Bank”, details accounts of escalating sexualised attacks and humiliation of Palestinians in their communities and inside their homes since 2023.
Other forms of reported violence include urinating on Palestinians, taking and distributing humiliating photographs of bound and stripped individuals, stalking women who are using latrines, and threatening sexual violence against women. The case studies are anonymised because of the stigma surrounding sexual violence.
Sexualised attacks were hastening the displacement of Palestinians, according to the report. More than two-thirds of households surveyed identified rising violence against women and children, including sexual harassment targeting girls, as a tipping point in their decision to leave, the consortium said.
“Participants described sexualised harassment as the moment when fear shifted from chronic to unbearable. They spoke of watching women and girls endure humiliation and of calculating what might happen next,” the report said.
Israeli soldiers present during abuse had repeatedly failed to prevent it or prosecute those responsible. One woman was subjected to a painful internal search by two female soldiers who entered her home with settlers then ordered her to remove her clothes for a full body search.
“She described being instructed to open her legs in a way that caused pain, and she described derogatory comments and touching of intimate areas,” the report said.
Men and boys were also targets of sexual assault and harassment. Last month, Israeli settlers stripped 29-year old Qusai Abu al-Kebash, from the northern Jordan valley community of Khirbet Humsa, put a zip tie on his genitals and beat him in front of his community and international activists, witnesses said.
In October 2023 settlers and soldiers stripped, handcuffed and beat Palestinians from the village of Wadi as-Seeq, urinated on them, attempted to rape one with a broom handle, and took photographs of them naked which they then distributed publicly.
Sexual violence and harassment had severe impacts even when communities were not displaced, and women and girls were particularly badly affected. To limit the chance of coming into contact with Israelis who might assault or harass them, girls had quit school and women had stopped working.
It had also led to a rise in early marriage, as parents desperate to protect their daughters sought ways to move them away from the threats. At least six families interviewed for the report arranged weddings for girls aged between 15 and 17.
The Ramallah-based Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) has also documented the use of sexualised violence and harassment of Palestinian women and girls to fragment and displace communities.
The WCLAC said women in the occupied West Bank had reported sexual assault, including forced penetration during searches, and abuse, including Israeli soldiers exposing themselves to girls at checkpoints and molesting them during searches. Humiliation had included the mocking of girls who were menstruating, she said.
“Girls aren’t going to schools, and you see early, forced marriages. These are minors, but we know their mothers and fathers are trying to protect them by sending them out of the area,” said Kifaya Khraim, the advocacy unit manager at WCLAC.
“Women lose their jobs because they can’t get to work because of the sexual violence and then deciding to stay at home.”
Khraim said she believed her team knew about only a fraction of the cases of sexualised violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers. “This is maybe 1% of the cases, and we had to do a lot of research in local communities just to earn the trust for people to tell us about these cases.”
Milena Ansari, the head of the occupied Palestinian territory department at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, said the rise in sexualised violence and harassment in the occupied West Bank was happening amid a broader culture of impunity for attacks on Palestinians.
A recent decision to drop charges against soldiers for the filmed rape of an inmate at the Sde Teiman centre sent a particularly clear message.
“Israeli officials are effectively green-lighting the use of sexual violence, when they decide not to prosecute the most high-profile case, which is extremely well documented,” Ansari said. “There is a culture of accepting sexualised assault against Palestinians.
“There was a discussion in the Knesset about whether or not it is OK to rape a Palestinian. Even the prime minister didn’t say that Israel opposes raping detainees.”
Israel’s failure to prosecute settlers who attacked Palestinians in the West Bank led to the country’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, calling for the international criminal court to intervene to save Palestinians from “Jewish terrorists”, in an interview with the Guardian.
The report on sexualised violence as a tool of forced displacement drew on 83 interviews with Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank, including those facing settler violence and movement restrictions.
Participants included people at risk, those already forced to flee their homes, women, youth activists and community leaders. The findings are not meant to be a statistically representative sample of the West Bank.
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to questions about allegations of sexual abuse by soldiers.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
Emma Graham-Harrison is the Guardian‘s chief Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem.
27 April 2026
Source: transcend.org
By Vijay Mehta
25 Apr 2026 – The defining crisis of the twenty-first century is not climate change alone, not inequality alone, not the rise of the far right alone — though all of these are real, all of these are deadly. The defining crisis of our age is war. Endless, permanent, profitable war. War that has become not an aberration, not a last resort, but the very engine of a global economic system that cannot function without it.
We talk endlessly about the cost of living. We debate housing, healthcare, wages, migration. These are vital debates. But we cannot afford to keep ignoring the elephant in the room. We cannot keep building our politics around the edges while at the centre of everything lies the catastrophic reality of militarism — the single greatest destroyer of human life, human dignity, and human potential on the planet today.
A World on Fire
The catastrophic war on Iran — prosecuted with US firepower and Israeli strategy — has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilised an entire region. The genocide in Gaza, watched live on our screens by the entire planet, has exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western governments who speak of human rights while signing arms deals and vetoing ceasefire resolutions.
World War III is looming on the horizon. I say to you today: it is not looming. It is here. It has been here for some time. It simply is not being called by its name because the dying, so far, has been concentrated among people whose deaths the Western media does not count in the same way.
The Business of War
The United States of America — the self-proclaimed leader of the free world — is, above all else, an arms dealer. Weapons are the number one export of the United States economy. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a fact, documented in trade figures, confirmed by congressional records, visible in the share prices of defence contractors on any given day of conflict.
For the capitalist economy to continue functioning in the way it currently does, there must be markets for weapons. And for there to be markets for weapons, there must be wars. This is not paranoia. This is political economy. When you build an entire industrial complex around the manufacture and sale of instruments of death, you have a structural incentive to ensure those instruments are used. USA with 250 years of history had 16 years of peace and as a war monger is a global threat to the world.
History bears this out with terrible clarity. Hundreds of millions perished in the First and Second World Wars. The slaughter in Vietnam — which continued into the 1990s in its aftermath of landmines, Agent Orange, and destroyed generations. The bombing and occupation of Iraq in 2003, based on the deliberate lie of weapons of mass destruction, resulted in the deaths of approximately two million people. Two million. And what followed? Not justice. Not accountability. Not a single war crimes trial for those who ordered the invasion. Instead, the arms manufacturers who supplied that war posted record profits.
Now, as the Iran war grinds on, we are told once again that this is about security. About freedom. About democracy. It is nothing of the sort. President Trump has convened meetings of the wealthiest defence industry CEOs in the country — the heads of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, and others — and instructed them to quadruple their production capacity. He has handed out contracts worth billions of dollars. Billions. While nurses strike for a living wage. While children go to school hungry. While the homeless sleep on the streets of every major Western city.
This is not a coincidence. This is a choice. And we must name it as such.
The Human Cost
Statistics can numb us. Two million dead in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands in Iran. Tens of thousands in Gaza. The numbers become abstract. So let me ask you to think instead about one person. One family. Perhaps a mother in Tehran who has lost two sons. Perhaps a child in Gaza who no longer has a home, a school, a parent.
The human cost of these conflicts are staggering. Wars do not only kill on the battlefield. They kill in refugee camps. They kill in hospitals that have run out of medicine.
And wars displace people. The very migration crisis that right-wing governments exploit to whip up fear and division — that crisis has a cause. People do not leave their homes, their cultures, their languages, their families, unless they have no choice. When we bomb countries, when we sanction economies into collapse, when we arm one faction against another and then walk away from the rubble — we create refugees.
We will not get to peace through politics as mainstream political parties of centre or centre-left have no answers to conflicts. We will not get there by voting for the lesser evil and hoping for the best. We will only get there by building a politics of principle — a politics that starts from the lives of ordinary people, not from the demands of arms manufacturers, not from the interests of oil companies, not from the strategic calculations of imperial powers.
What We Stand For
We are against all imperialist wars. We are against the occupation of Palestine. We are against the bombing of Iran. We are against every instance of military aggression dressed up as liberation or democracy or security. We are against the arms trade. We are against the use of public money to fund private profit through the manufacture of death.
We stand for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank. We stand for a political settlement in Iran based on diplomacy, not military force. We stand for the right of all peoples to self-determination, free from external interference. We stand for the redirection of military budgets towards housing, healthcare, education, and the transition to a sustainable economy. We stand for a world in which disputes between nations are resolved through international law and genuine multilateral institutions — not through the military supremacy of the most heavily armed power.
Tens of millions of people across the world who have marched against these wars, who have organised in their communities, who have sat in front of arms factories, who have refused to be silent. The anti-war movement is not a footnote in political history. It is one of the most important moral forces of our time.
A Call to Act
Peace is the most radical and the most necessary demand of our time. The power to end these wars does not rest only with governments. It rests with workers who refuse to manufacture weapons. It rests with soldiers who refuse illegal orders. It rests with journalists who refuse to launder propaganda. It rests with voters who refuse to support parties that fund war. It rests with each one of us who refuses to be complicit in our own silence.
Conclusion: The World We Choose to Build is Possible
History is not inevitable. It is made by people — by choices, by courage, by collective action. The wars of the past century were not inevitable. They were the product of decisions made by leaders who chose empire over equality, profit over peace, power over people. And they can be unmade. A different set of decisions is possible.
The world we want is not a utopia. It is not a world without disagreement or without difficulty. It is a world in which disagreements are resolved without mass slaughter. A world in which the resources we have — and we have extraordinary resources — are directed towards meeting human need rather than feeding the military-industrial complex. A world in which no mother has to bury a child killed by a bomb manufactured in a factory in Sheffield or Seattle.
That world will not build itself. It will be built by us, or it will not be built at all. Organise. Agitate. Build coalitions. Support the strikes. Join the marches. Knock on doors. Write to your representatives. Refuse to give comfort to those who profit from war.
The time for words alone is over — here is what each of us must do:
A different world, a safer and peaceful world is possible. Let’s build it.
Vijay Mehta is an author and peace activist. He is chair of Uniting for Peace, founding trustee of Fortune Forum charity, and board member of GAMIP-Global Alliance for Ministries and Infrastructures for Peace.
27 April 2026
Source: transcend.org
By Vijay Prashad
The way Iran has been able to stand up to the West has become a source of admiration across the formerly colonised world. Where does that confidence come from?
23 Apr 2026 – During some of the worst days of the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, I was talking to friends who were in the civilian areas being bombed. Some of them are scholars, others poets and artists, some work in the government, others in institutions of different kinds. All of them, regardless of their views of the government, stood defiant. Not one person felt that their world was under threat. They remained steadfast, their courage emanating from an immense belief in the resilience of Iranian civilisation.
Marxist and national liberation thought have had a very complex history with the concept of ‘civilisation’. Classical Marxism rejected it, since it could flatten social division under a blanket of cultural homogeneity and therefore negate the necessity of class struggle. But as Marxism became a crucial framework in the great anticolonial struggles of the post-World Anti-Fascist War era, the idea of civilisation returned with a different meaning. Civilisation came to be understood as a valuable terrain in the cultural struggle against imperialism. It could become an instrument of national continuity and political legitimacy rather than simply an ideological mask for class domination. Yet this reclamation of civilisation had to be carried out from the standpoint of an emancipatory project willing to break with certain reactionary inheritances within that civilisation itself.
In the case of China, for instance, Chinese Marxism – best synthesised by Mao Zedong – insisted on a break from the worst inheritances of pre-revolutionary China, such as Confucian hierarchy and sexism, at the same time as it adopted, through class struggle and ideological transformation, the very idea of ‘Chinese civilisation’ as a bulwark against imperialism and for the development of national patriotism.
The Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) was made by a range of political forces, including Marxists, many of whom were subsequently persecuted and killed by the newly created Islamic Republic. Despite their subjugation, many Marxist ideas entered the ideological framework of the Islamic Republic, whether through the work of a range of thinkers with their own histories with Marxism such as Ehsan Tabari (1917–1989), Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969), Ali Shariati (1933–1977), Bijan Jazani (1938–1975), or Khosrow Golsorkhi (1944–1974). I wish I could write more about these thinkers, but that would take an entire book. The most compelling was Golsorkhi, who was killed in his prime. He told a rattled judge at his trial:
I begin my words with a saying of Mowla [Imam] Hossein, a great martyr for the peoples of the Middle East. I, who am a Marxist-Leninist, first sought social justice in the school of Islam, and from there arrived at socialism. I will not bargain for my life in this court, nor even for my lifespan. I am an insignificant drop from the struggles and deprivation of the fighting peoples of Iran… Yes, I will not bargain for my life, for I am the child of a fighting and courageous people. I began my words with Islam. True Islam in Iran has always repaid its debt to Iran’s liberation movements. The Seyyed Abdollah Behbahanis, the Sheikh Mohammad Khiyabanis, are true embodiments of these movements. And today too, true Islam repays its debt to Iran’s national liberation movements. When Marx says, ‘In a class society, wealth accumulates on one side and poverty, hunger, and misery on the other, while those who produce wealth are themselves deprived’, and Mowla [Imam] Ali says, ‘No palace is erected unless thousands are impoverished’, there is a profound similarity. Thus, one can name Mowla [Imam] Ali as the first socialist in history, and likewise the Salman Farsis and Abu Dharr Ghaffaris.
By the time of the revolution, the Iranian left – divided among the Fedayeen guerrillas, the communist Tudeh Party, and the Islamist-revolutionary Mujahideen – had come to understand that they could not overthrow the Shah without the religious forces. But they underestimated the power of the clerics over Iranian society, including over the working class. It was this miscalculation that transformed the Iranian Revolution into the Islamic Republic within a year. Yet rather than form an ordinary theocracy, post-revolutionary Iran drew on a much older civilisational inheritance, one that dates back to the rule of Cyrus the Great (559–530 BCE) and the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BCE) – roughly two thousand years before the arrival of Shi’ism as the state religion in Iran during the Safavid Empire (1501–1736). It is this older civilisational inheritance that plays a foundational role in Iranian society, enabling it to absorb internal differences and to summon a deeper historical legitimacy at times of terrible crisis as the basis for the defence of sovereignty. In 1971, the Shah held a massive event at Persepolis to celebrate 2,500 years of continuous civilisation since Cyrus the Great. Later, during Iraq’s war of aggression on Iran from 1980 to 1988, when Saddam Hussein tried to cast the conflict as a war of Arabs against Persians, the Islamic Republic rejected that framework and insisted that this was rather a ‘defence of the homeland’ (دفاع از وطن, defa’ az vatan), drawing on the idea of an unconquered and uncolonised land that must be defended at all costs by its people.
It is difficult for those who do not come from colonised societies to understand the power of such statements as ‘defence of the homeland’ and of the idea of civilisational inheritance. The damage caused to so many social formations by colonialism is vast. Colonialism steals wealth and reinvests it elsewhere for the development of other peoples; it denigrates the colonised peoples’ cultures and often denies them their own language and their own sense of a historical mission. That is why so many people in the Global South marvel that Iran has been able to stand up to the United States and win the current conflict in strategic terms.
For those who share that history of obliteration, to witness the kind of dignity displayed by societies such as China or Iran, where there is less need to fashion cultural pride out of hallucinations (through the creation of imagined pasts) or by vilifying others (whether minorities or foreigners), is nothing short of inspiring. The lack of total colonial destruction of culture in such places allows for their own history to be reclaimed and reconstructed without being totally caught up in false reversals of the West (often equal parts rejection and mimicry). It is the kind of confidence that faces the destructive power of the United States with dignity and has the courage to send back Lego memes of Trump and his associates that are not about empty mockery but about genuine disdain.
In December 1997, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) released the Tehran Declaration, which advanced the idea of a ‘Dialogue of Civilisations’. This was a direct response to Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay and 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. In that initial essay, published in Foreign Affairs, Huntington predicted that ‘Conflict between civilisations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world’. For Huntington, history had moved from the clash of ideologies (communism versus capitalism) to the clash of civilisations (which he defined in religious-cultural terms as ‘Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilisation’). Huntington warned that the new fault lines would be along these axes. The OIC cautioned that this way of seeing the world might produce the very conflict it claimed to describe rather than prevent it, and that it would be better to hold a dialogue of civilisations rather than await the conflict between them.
The Tehran Declaration found traction within the United Nations (UN) but not in the halls of Western capitals, where the rhetoric of the War on Terror – which predated 2001 – escalated out of control. Fear of Islam became routine, and it was quickly associated with fear of migrants, a dual fear that continues to paralyse Europe and the Americas. In 1998, the UN proclaimed 2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations, and at the 31st General Conference of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation, held in Paris from 15 October to 3 November 2001, it selected the Iranian philosopher and diplomat Ahmad Jalali as its president and invited Iran’s president, Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, to address the body. The conference took place little more than a month after the attacks on the US in September and during the US invasion of Afghanistan as part of its Global War on Terror. Khatami’s address remains powerful, asking the world not to yield to ‘false political polarisations and divisions’. Terrorism ‘is the result of the sinister union between blind intolerance and brute force, with the goal of serving an illusion which, despite all its propaganda, is nothing but the projection of the harmful contents of the unconscious’.
When a terrorist attack happens, the worst thing, Khatami said, is to respond with revenge. ‘Revenge is like salt water which, though it looks like water, increases the thirst rather than satisfying it, thus entangling the world in perpetual outbreaks of violence, hatred, and revenge’. Rather than revenge, Khatami insisted, dialogue ‘is the principal need of the international community’.
A call for dialogue is important and necessary because the alternative is driving us toward annihilation – both through the system of capitalism that deepens inequality and drives planetary destruction and through the system of imperialism that devours societies with war. But neither civilisation nor dialogue will by themselves drive history toward human emancipation. For that, in time, the class struggle will have to intensify, human needs will have to overcome material inequalities and power relations, and the global system will have to be transformed to meet our complex destinies rather than turn us against one another.
Carlos Gutiérrez Cruz (1897–1930) developed his poetic sensibility amid the literary currents of post-revolutionary Mexico, including the patriotic group Contemporáneos (Contemporaries), but later broke with them as he became more radical. In 1923, he published Cómo piensa la plebe, folleto de propaganda libertaria en haikais (How the Plebs Think: A Pamphlet of Liberation Propaganda in Haikais), which turned the haikai form associated in Mexico with José Juan Tablada (1871–1945) into a vehicle for communist poetry. Gutiérrez Cruz understood that there was no sense in defending the nation if the masses of workers got nothing from it. The point bears repeating here: a civilisation cannot be defended as an abstraction. If it is to mean anything, it must be defended as the living record of those who make history. As he put it in one of his haikais:
Labriego, la tierra da ciento por uno
y tú ganas uno por ciento.
Peasant, the land yields a hundred from one
and you earn one from a hundred.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.
27 April 2026
Source: transcend.org
By Maung Zarni
26 Apr 2026 – They Self-Destruct at Enormous Human Costs
Andrey: Nazi Fuck! (i.e., Settler). You terrorist!
Issa Amro: (soldier) shoot him ! Shoot him as you shoot Palestinian kids! …. They do everything to make our lives impossible – to force us to leave.
Watch the clip here.
Watch the interview our delegation filmed with Issa in Hebron in his community center in Jan. 2025, here:
Here are the educational pieces that I find most helpful to understand the cancerous phenomenon that has come to threaten humanity at large – namely the very existence of Israel and its foundationally Jewish Supremacist (“Greater Israel” vision”).
Israel did NOT go bad or genocidal as a result of its right-ward drift as the result of Likud’s coming to power after the disastrous Prime Ministership of Golda Meir.
Emphatically, Israel was conceived and established as a genocidal settler colony, from its very inception.
These are some of the important pieces which further inform my understanding of Israel as the irreformable settler colonial European project.
Listen to the two Palestinian resisters on the soil, a very prominent anti-Zionist Jewish American economist, an anti-Zionist ex-Israeli (ex-Jewish?) psychologist, a Hungarian Jewish survivor of the Nazi genocide.
“Jewish Israelis have a choice. Instead of complaining and feeling sorry for themselves they can stop their orgy of destruction. They can give up their cult idea of an ethnically pure state at the expense of the non-Jewish indigenous people of Palestine, and try to join the human race. They have no right to cry and pretend to be the victims, when they are the ones inflicting destruction and misery on millions.”
—- Avigail Abarbanel (Read her full text here).
27 April 2026
Source: transcend.org
By Richard Falk
Points of Departure
It seems an opportune time to scrutinize how it has come to pass that the U.S. has become a menace to others as well as to itself. Remembering its early vision of being a peaceful democracy that confined itself to the Western Hemisphere without entangling alliances and suspicious of a standing army that was institutionalized as part of governance and national security, other than in conditions of wartime.
This was not the whole truth, which blurs this mythified positive self-image of ‘greatness’ or ‘American exceptionalism’ by reminding dogmatic patriots of genocidal policies toward America’s native peoples and how imported slave labor sustained its agricultural productivity. In addition, geography helped sustain this peaceful image of a country welcoming to immigrants and skeptical of engagement in the European rivalries of its early experience as a sovereign state, a former colony until it broke away from the mighty British Empire in its War of Independence. Its earlier period as an exploited colony made the talented architects of the American public sensitive, above all, to the arbitrary rule and militarism of European rulers legitimized by the absolutist pretensions of royalism with special attention to the British instance as an influential negative model.
This early image of a guardian of hemispheric autonomy in relation to Europe was never an accurate portrayal of American foreign policy. The United States, once a sovereign state, flirted with the adoption of a foreign policy that included a colonial project of its own devising, focused on both the Caribbean and Pacific regions, seeking hegemonic controls, basing rights, and natural resources. Yet that did not challenge the core character of its foreign policy, which remained committed to isolationism with regard to European wars and general contentment with its successful emergence as an industrial giant.
The two world wars of the 20th Century began a transformative process that reached its climax at the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. emerged as a globally engaged superpower with no credible challengers possessing the requisite geopolitical muscle to back up strategic ambitions and fears. Yet its domestic identity remained rooted in the savior imagery of exceptionalism, which highlighted benign claims to be ‘a light unto the nations’ or, as all American politicians of right and left still affirm, ‘the greatest country ever,’ almost in the spirit of a loyalty oath. It is this transformation from a relatively peace-oriented republic to a globe-girdling militarist superpower that needs to be better understood if a demilitarized future identity is to become a realistic project of reform. Dwight Eisenhower recognized the domestic problems of this militarization in his 1961 Farewell Address as President, encapsulated in his memorable warnings to democracy of a peacetime ‘military-industrial-complex.’ This warning was a 20th-century echo of concerns about whether a free society could co-exist with what the Federalist Papers referred to as ‘a standing army.’ Such a sensitivity to the fragility of democratic governance has been lost in the long period of belligerency that stretched from World War II to the Cold War, and then was soon resuscitated as neoliberal globalization and increasing inter-civilizational tensions rationalized an expanding military budget and the global projection of American power, resulting in 750 foreign military bases in 85 countries.
From Engagement to Warmongering
The path leading from America’s reluctant engagement in the two world wars to becoming the leading practitioner of wars of choice can only be explained by several converging factors, including a reinvigoration of its mythic past. Each factor deserves a fuller treatment than can be given here, but the complexity of this toxic emergence of a warmongering foreign policy seems important to clarify, if only to appreciate the formidable challenges posed. A primary purpose is to confirm the intensifying and erratic relevance of Trump and the MAGA worldview, but to do so without neglecting the reality that the main elements of the current warmongering posture carried to new extremes systemic pre-Trump developments supported by both major political parties. This pre-Trump consensus is important to acknowledge as it tends to be minimized in public debate as the process evolved, with significant media complicity.
The Militarization of the State
The governing bureaucracy experienced an uninterrupted period of war and geopolitical rivalry dating from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a half-century of preoccupation with national security priorities. The advent of the nuclear age, the struggles against European colonialism, and the growing interdependence of the world economy produced important adjustments, and the pause in geopolitical rivalry created an opportunity to establish a more peace-oriented world order.
Among these opportunities was a global setting more amenable to a democratic organization of the United Nations that treated all sovereign states equally. A UN reform process along these lines would have needed to arrange the management of global security free of control by geopolitical actors. This would have required the winners of World War II to adopt a farsighted view of global security in the nuclear age. It would need to end of or greatly restrict the right of veto and eliminate permanent membership in the Security Council that paralyzed the UN in situations of serious threats to peace and security. It also froze the Organization in its 1945 mold, given the applicability of the veto to the Charter amending process. These design features of the UN architecture became more serious and perhaps unavoidable in the bipolar setting of the Cold War, where conflict pervaded international life and opposing ideological worldviews made conflicts on the peripheries of world power structures of crucial significance to whether Western liberal democracy was winning the war for ‘hearts and minds’ in Europe and the Global South. As Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe and the U.S. efforts to avoid a Vietnamese alignment with Moscow demonstrated, the Cold War was a more genuine global war than either of the so-called ‘world wars’ that are more accurately interpreted as regional wars for changing the hierarchies of power in Europe, with a side event involving the encounter with Japan. In this sense, the Soviet Union, despite its communist identity, was itself European as post-Cold War Russia with its underlying white Christian character. Mikhail Gorbachev and Putin both recognized this European regionalism in their official pronouncement. [See also Richard Sakwa, The Culture of the Second Cold War (2025]
Some of these design flaws represented good-faith efforts to avoid the mistakes of the past. In the case of the UN, its design was based on overcoming the failures of the League of Nations, particularly the exclusion of the Great Powers and the related assumptions that major states were ready to compromise their sovereign rights by subordinating national security to the will of international institutions. Some influential persons thought the League had failed because several major states of the day either failed to join, were expelled, or withdrew their membership. The U.S. role was somewhat typical. It was both the principal supporter of establishing the League, as championed by its wartime president, Woodrow Wilson, and its most notable defector due to the refusal of Congress to ratify the League Covenant. Franklin Roosevelt, as a wartime president, overtly sought to avoid what he believed to be Wilson’s mistake. Accordingly, the drafters of the UN Charter set as a primary goal a universal framework that would encourage all states, including geopolitical actors, to join and remain, no matter what. The goal of inclusivity was achieved and managed to weather many political storms over the more than 80 years since the UN was established. This is a remarkable achievement, but it came with a high price tag. The effectiveness of the UN was undercut where it was most needed. This hamstringing of the UN was evident throughout the Gaza genocide, and at least partly due to geopolitical alignment with the perpetrator government.
Another impediment to a peaceful future after 1945 was associated with the ideology of foreign policy elites in dominant countries. This ideology, known in academic circles as ‘political realism,’ stuck to the belief that it was military ascendancy that shaped world history, and that all alternatives associated with ideas of disarmament, respect for international law, and world government were a mixture of wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of the persistence of conflict and the priority accorded strategic national interests. This ideology was congenial with both the militarized bureaucracy and private sector interest in a large military establishment. This consensus was insulated from self-criticism that nurtured a political culture of ‘group think’ in which dissent and alternate views of national security were effectively excluded from internal policy debates.[Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972] In recent years this rigid version of political realism has stubbornly ignored the moderate voices of such prominent political realists as John Mearscheimer and Stephen Walt because they advocated a responsible statecraft, along the lines of the Quincy Institute, which conceived of national security interests more cautiously and were more sensitive to the record of military frustration in anti-colonial settings.
As if this ideological closure were not enough, it is strongly reinforced by numerous Washington ‘think tanks,’ funded by defense contractors and foreign governments that give backing to the prevailing narrow views of militarist geopolitics under the guise of objective research but in conformity with the slant of foreign policy elites. These assessments are made in convincing detail by William Hartung and Ben Freeman in their important book The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us At Home (2025). I would argue that spending is the outcome rather than the explanation of American warmongering, which I associate more with a twisted, insular notion of political realism as given enthusiastic endorsement by a militarized state bureaucracy in league with private sector interests driven by the quest for profitability. This bipartisan consensus is reinforced by a compliant media, by the leverage of pro-Israeli lobbying groups overlapping with strategic ambitions, and by the career incentives associated with revolving door relations between top armed forces officials, militarized bureaucrats, executive appointments to top defense contractors, and fancy consultancies in media or research venues.
To gain a seat at the table at the pinnacles of power, you must be willing to validate wars of choice and, in the process, discard the relevance of international law, the UN Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles except as a propaganda tool to wield against adversaries. There are some surprising implications of this warmongering. Of primary importance is profitability rather than political victory. Although regime-changing and state-building militarism as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, should be looked upon as defeats despite the overwhelming military they avoided any serious rethinking of U.S. foreign policy because they were great successes from the perspectives of profitability. Such a mixed outcome is a barrier to learning the lessons associated with political defeat despite total domination of the military battlefield. Losing wars without heavy American casualties results in little pushback. This was the major lesson learned in the wake of the American defeat in Vietnam. Minimize casualties by relying on weapons innovations that can cause widespread devastation, require heavy spending, and are okay if the results are politically disappointing.
For the United States and the West, the Vietnam War was an ambiguous turning point, at once illustrating the limits of military agency in the post-1945 setting and generating a series of adjustments that consolidated the militarization of the state and its symbiotic relationship with private sector interests in arms sales and a growing ‘peacetime’ military budget. The professionalization of the armed forces, a growing emphasis on weaponry and tactics that did not result in serious U.S. casualties, is orienting the mainstream media to the brand of political realism that prevailed in Washington among the private sector think tanks and political foreign policy elites in government.
Perhaps the least acknowledged and most instrumental explanation of US peacetime militarism is the combination of the collapse of European colonialism in Eurasia and the impacts of shifts from industrial to finance capitalism. This shift has contributed to adverse domestic effects of increasing inequalities between the very rich, the 1%, and everyone else with declines in the standard of living among workers and middle-class professionals. As a result, billionaires have emerged as an ultra-right political influence. Additionally, finance capital flowing to the global south via trade, investments, and markets tends to lend a justification for the vast network of foreign military bases and a global naval presence enabling military operations anywhere on the planet.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.
21 April 2026
Source: counterpunch.org
By Gerry Condon
A coalition of veterans groups gathered in the nation’s capitol on Monday to express their deep opposition to the U.S. war on Iran. One hundred and thirty (130) veterans and military family members held a solemn, disciplined protest in the Capitol rotunda demanding that the Trump administration end its illegal war on Iran and that Congress stop funding the war.
The veterans, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducted a flag folding ceremony and played Taps on a bugle in honor of the 13 service members who have already died in the US war on Iran. They unfurled banners reading “END THE WAR ON IRAN,” “WE CAN’T AFFORD ANOTHER WAR” and “COST OF WAR IS TOO HIGH” inside one of the most heavily trafficked public spaces in the U.S. Capitol. The action marks one of the largest veteran-led civil disobedience actions inside a Congressional building in recent years.
Sixty-two veterans were arrested after refusing police orders to vacate the Capitol Rotunda. Participating organizations included About Face – Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, 50501 Veterans, Military Families Speak Out and the Center on Conscience and War, which advises service members of their right to be discharged from the military as Conscientious Objectors to war.
Veterans For Peace executive director Michael McPhearson said:
”The veterans and military families here today represent three generations of U.S. wars from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, and the Global War on Terror, including the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. We are here because we are weary of war. We are sick and tired of war. Yet our political leaders have taken a fourth generation to war. We say no to this war. These forever wars must stop.”
On Tuesday, President Trump announced that the US ceasefire with Iran would be extended. This is certainly better than carrying out his threats to bomb all of Iran. At the same time, however, Trump doubled down on his economic warfare against Iran, attacking and seizing a second oil tanker, this time in the Indian Ocean, thus further jeopardizing the prospects for a peace agreement.
“This is a very dangerous moment,” said Michael McPhearson. “There are even rumors that Trump has considered using nuclear weapons. We call on Congress and President Trump to end this illegal, immoral, and unprovoked war on Iran immediately, and bring our troops home now. Not one more dollar, not one more life lost in these forever wars. Bring our troops home now.”
VFP Executive Director Michael McPhearson will speak this Thursday, April 23, 5 pm PT, at a webinar, RESISTING U.S./ISRAELI WARS, from Venezuela and Cuba to Gaza, Iran and Lebanon.
Gerry Condon was a GI resister to the US war on Vietnam, and he serves on the Board of Directors of Veterans For Peace.
22 April 2026
Source: countercurrents.org
By Malvika Nair
While the United States President Donald Trump continues his brazen threats against Iran, the latest being a naval blockade after several bombastic genocidal claims earlier this month of bombing the country to the stone ages and wiping its civilisation off, in another corner of the world, Cuba also finds itself at a particularly perilous geopolitical and economic juncture today. The Caribbean island nation, having endured imperialist aggression since the Fidel Castro-led revolution that overthrew the US-backed dictatorship in 1959, is currently facing a grave humanitarian crisis. Through an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in January, the US has effectively imposed a total fuel and financial blockade by threatening punitive tariffs on any country that supplies fuel to Cuba. This marks a significant escalation of the already debilitating decades-long economic embargo imposed by the US. Trump, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have been open about their intentions, stating several times that Cuba “will be failing pretty soon” while making thinly veiled threats that it might be too late for the country if a deal—implying, effectively speaking, capitulation—was not made very soon. Even in the midst of the ongoing war on Iran, Trump made his nefarious designs clear by claiming he would soon be able to “take Cuba” and do whatever he wished with it.
It is evident that the US intends to create the conditions for a total economic collapse in Cuba, which it hopes would lead to popular discontentment and eventually achieve its aims of toppling the communist regime. As an outcome of the illegal blockade being enforced by the financial and military might of the US, fuel supply had almost completely dried out on the island, with only one tanker being able to bring fuel to the country in over a hundred days’ time, causing long hours of blackout and affecting day-to-day life severely. The entire country was plunged in to darkness several times as the national grid collapsed in its entirety. Since the escalation in January, the Cuban government had already been forced to adopt emergency measures to ration its fuel consumption, including prioritising the supply of electricity to hospitals, primary schools and elderly care homes, shortening of the work week, scaling down public transportation significantly, heavily capping personal fuel purchases, amongst other such measures. Emergency services in most hospitals have also been hit hard. Shortages of food and medical supplies have become more widespread, while people are being forced to fall back on wood for cooking. Tourism, on which much of the country’s economy is dependent, is also heavily affected. Re-fueling for international carriers has been halted, while some of the key events that not only serve as symbols of national pride but also attract thousands of people from abroad each year, such as the Feria internacional del libro (International Book Fair) and the Festival del Habano (Cuban Cigar Festival), have had to be postponed, and a large number of resorts had to be closed during the peak of the tourist season, in order to conserve energy.
In the face of this impending humanitarian catastrophe, being engineered via what many call as a ‘genocidal blockade’ by those who have long sought the collapse of the communist government that has resisted Western imperialist designs, how would ordinary Cubans react to this latest attack on their country? If the events of January 2026, when this author spent nearly three weeks in the country, are anything to go by, despite the hardships, it is evident that the extraordinary resilience that the people of Cuba have shown for so long, still remains as strong as ever, and the US’ objectives of bringing them to their knees would not be easy to fulfill.
This January was not just tumultuous for Latin American politics, with the first-ever direct military intervention of the US on a South American country in its display of naked aggression while abducting Maduro, but also was hugely consequential for Cuba. The country has a special relationship with the Bolivarian regime in Venezuela, which is shaped by their shared political commitments and material needs. They signed an agreement in 2000, referred to as an “unprecedented solidarity compensation mechanism”, wherein Venezuela provides subsidised fuel in exchange for skilled Cuban manpower, in terms of healthcare, defense and scientific research. As part of this relationship, the Cuban government also provided security and intelligence personnel to Venezuela, thirty-two of whom were killed in the US raid to abduct Maduro in the Venezuelan capital this January. This is by far the highest number of Cuban casualties in a conflict with the US, since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, signifying the scale of the costs for Cuba itself, and that could have potentially led to a pushback amongst the Cuban people, already besieged economically, against the regime whose current leadership led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, from most accounts, lacks both the authority and the charisma wielded by the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raúl.
Yet, the popular response to these casualties clearly suggests rallying behind the ideals of the revolution, and in turn, behind the regime that is widely seen as the bearer of those ideals. On a rainy Thursday morning in mid-January, the island nation received the remains of the martyrs who lost their lives in Venezuela, and came together to pay their tributes. The remains were placed in the Ministry of Armed Forces building to allow the public to pay their final respects. It was an overcast day, with unrelenting rain, as if the skies too were joining in mourning with people braving the heavy downpour and turning up in tens of thousands, with the queue to enter the building over two kilometres long, and people waiting patiently for their turn, for long hours. Inside the building, the soldiers’ remains were placed with small placards with their names, next to which their photographs and medals were present. The mood was sombre, yet the conversations centred around belief in the cause of the revolution and how the struggle against US-imperialism in light of these latest events needs to be carried on.
The following day, the government organised hundreds of events, each referred to as the ‘Marcha del Pueblo Combatiente’, the March for the Fighting People, across the country, with many hundreds of thousands joining them. The march in Havana originated at the José Marti statue, one of the most powerful figures from the Cuban liberation struggle and a tall figure among Latin American intellectuals, on the historic Plaza de la Dignidad that oversees the US embassy in Havana, and which has served as a powerful venue for protests decrying American intervention in recent decades. That morning, the resolve to defend sovereignty at any cost was evident, with the air filled with slogans of ‘Glory and Honor’, in tribute to the martyrs. People carried the Cuban and Venezuelan flags, posters of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, placards decrying US imperialism, asserting Cuban sovereignty and celebrating the revolution, while calling for the release of Maduro, alongside expressing unflinching solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Young kids perched on their parents’ shoulders, waving the Cuban flag, marching together with those from the generation that participated in the revolution in the 1950s, including Raúl Castro himself, walking on, along the Malecón seafront, the waters that geographically separate Cuba from the US, with impassioned chants such as “Patria o Muerte, venceremos!” (Nation or Death, we will be victorious!), “Viva Fidel!”, “Viva Maduro!” (Long Live) and “Abajo al imperialismo yanqui!” (Down to Yankee imperialism) reverberating in the air, served as a powerful setting to symbolise the unity of the Cuban people against the Donroe doctrine’s machinations for achieving unchallenged hemispheric hegemony.
Even before this latest tightening of the blockade, Cuba was suffering from severe fuel and food shortages. Everyday life being upended by long blackouts, amounting to as high as 14 to 16 hours, even in the capital city of Havana, had been a common occurrence. Routine activities such as cooking and storing food, using mobile phones and laptops, accessing the internet, and other life-sustaining activities became severely affected – a thinly-veiled assault on the very dignity of the people. Private electricity generators remain out of reach for most Cuban families. With the fuel crisis, public transport was also completely disrupted. People were forced to walk long hours to their workplaces, and the working hours of offices, shops, and markets are irregular. Making an already volatile situation even worse, the Cuban currency has been rapidly getting devalued, making the purchase of everyday supplies much more difficult than it already was. For instance, while a pack of a dozen eggs cost upwards of 2 USD, the average monthly salary of Cubans is only a few times higher than that, equivalent to approximately 12-15 USD, much less than even a one-way cab fare from central Havana to the airport, suggesting how suffocating the all-encompassing sanctions to the ordinary Cubans.
Surely, everything is more difficult now – “Está complicado, no es fácil” (It is complicated, things are not easy), is amongst the most frequently resorted to responses, from many with whom this author interacted. But it is also palpable that there is an urgent need to defend what the Cubans had dared to dream, and they seek to do it with dignity, conviction, and a great deal of resilience. It is not very clear at the moment when the present political and economic siege of Cuba will end, but people understand that even in these unprecedented times, it is important to continue to lead their lives, carrying forward the spirit of the Cuban revolution.
Through many decades, under the harsh US sanctions, Cuba did not let the legacy of the Revolution and its internationalist spirit get extinguished. It sent its soldiers to fight in national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles in Angola, South Africa, Congo, and Vietnam, while also dispatching medical brigades all over the world, developing indigenous vaccines, including vaccines against Covid-19 and lung cancer. At this hour, as the US seeks to choke the island into submission, it is crucial that the rest of the world stands in solidarity with the Cuban people’s struggle against Western imperialism, and in defense of their sovereignty and undertake efforts to break this stifling siege of the island.
Malvika Nair is pursuing a PhD in Hispanic Studies, at the University of Warwick (UK), where her thesis looks at the representation of race and caste through Cuban and Indian poetry, respectively.
14 April 2026
Source: countercurrents.org
By Dr Marwan Asmar
In a display of showmanship, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited southern Lebanon, Sunday, according to the Israeli media. He was accompanied by his Defense Minister Israel Katz and Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir. They are trying to shore up their illegal presence there.
Netanyahu was on what the Jerusalem Post called a “situational assessment” tour of the Israeli troops who are seeking to set up an illegal “occupation security zone” in the southern part of the country and thus encroaching on its sovereignty.
Thousands of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon are meeting stiff resistance from Hezbollah fighters. The Israelis want to establish a security zone in that part of the country in an attempt to stop what they claim as tireless Hezbollah missiles and drones fired and puncturing Israeli northern towns and cities.
In their attempt, the Israeli army are demolishing entire villages and detonating homes in different stretches of the Lebanese countryside to permanently displace people and drive them up to the north of the country.
Netanyahu’s presence in the southern part of the bleeding country is indeed a testimony of a criminal mind for the previous Wednesday, when a two-week ceasefire was signed between the USA and Iran, his airforce unleashed their warplanes and missiles on Beirut and other parts of Lebanon killing at least 250 and injuring over 1100 people in a 10-minute killing debauchery spree and destruction.
The London Guardian has provided a graphic description of what the Israel army is doing in southern Lebanon. The UN estimates that between 1 and 1.2 million were forced to flee their homes to the northern parts of the country and are waiting their return despite the facts that are being created on the ground.
Meanwhile the Israeli army has been pushing forward into Lebanon. They want to establish a security zone from the southern border up to the Litani River which is about 30 kilometers away. However, they are entering Lebanon from different border areas and say they are between 8-10 kilometers deep into different parts of southern Lebanon, depending on the different areas they are entering from. They are already in Khiam, Taybeh, Dier Siryan and Dier Mimas among a host of other villages and towns across the southern divide.
However, their control is checkered. In this last invasion Israeli has lost at least 13 soldiers with around 411 injured and the destruction of at least 100 tanks and military machinery including bulldozers in just the last month.
Take the town of Bint Jbeil, emotionally known as the capital of the revolutionary south. Today it stands as a major flashpoint. Currently, Bint Jbeil which is between four or five kilometers inside the Lebanese border, stands as a fierce point of resistance with Hezbollah fighters in daily direct clashes with the Israeli army.
While the Israeli military controls different parts of the town, they are not able to subdue it. Here, the resistance fighters are in top form. The Israeli army has been trying to control the town for the past month, at least since 16 March 2026 but they are still unable to do so despite attempting to encircle the town from different areas of southern Lebanon.
The re-invasion of Lebanon had been part of the US-Israeli war on Iran which is winding down through Washington’s attempt to reach a ceasefire and an end of the deadly and globally-catastrophic war that is effecting the world economy with its soaring oil prices. However, here, Israel refuses to stop with war until Hezbollah is weakened and disarmed, either unilaterally, through negotiations and by force.
But Hezbollah refuses to disarm or take any measures that would leave it exposed to Israel’s military might. What is likely to happen is a continuation of a war of attrition between the two, despite the fact that the Lebanese government may open talks with Israel in Washington in the coming days.
Dr Marwan Asmar is a Jordanian writer who blogs for crossfirearabia.com
14 April 2026
Source: countercurrents.org