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By Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The hugging, hobnobbing, and digital display of friendship on social media between Mr. Narendra Modi and Mr. Donald Trump appear to be designed mainly for public consumption, without any substantial achievement for Indians or the Indian economy. The much-talked-about, so-called non-existent free trade deal between the US and India reflects unfair and unequal trade relations between the two countries. Mr. Trump reportedly promised to reduce US tariffs on Indian exports to 18 percent in return for India’s promise to reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers on US goods and services to zero. Such a trade arrangement is likely to undermine India’s productive capacities in various sectors and drain Indian wealth and human resources in favor of the American economy. The US ruling elites and their corporations seem to view India merely as a market, without any genuine friendship or commitment to stand together during times of crisis or need.

History reveals that the American ruling elites and their imperialist system have never truly stood with anyone. When it comes to India’s national interests, US power elites have consistently acted against India and Indian interests, seeking to undermine those interests and exploit crises by accelerating instabilities and promoting military conflicts. They have attempted to checkmate India’s industrial and technological progress while simultaneously using the technologically advanced and skilled Indian workforce to establish, shape, and develop Silicon Valley and advance their own technological dominance.

During periods of economic and military crisis, the United States has sought to contain India’s growth and development and weaken Indian sovereignty. The US has never been a genuine friend of India; instead, it has repeatedly used its imperial power to restrain India’s rise. American power elites are no one’s friend. Therefore, India must remain clear-eyed and realistic while developing alliances with the US. It is a strategic illusion to expect significant gains from an Indo-US alliance.

The US is attempting to bully, pressure and trap India in various ways to join US-led alliances like QUAD (Asian NATO) as a junior partner, not only to contain China but also to limit India itself. American imperialism seeks to control Asia and its resources to maintain dominance in the global economy, often at the expense of Asian peoples and their sovereignty. By falling into this US trap, the Modi government is not only undermining India’s independent foreign policy but also creating conditions that could weaken the Indian economy and pave the way for American dominance over Asia. Racial capitalism driven by American economic power is fundamentally exploitative and hostile toward the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even parts of Europe.

The Indian government and the Indian people must remain vigilant against all American attempts in the form of trade deals and military alliances. The US has never stood with Indian or Asian peoples and their interests. One only needs to look at how American imperialism and its European allies have devastated Ukraine and then abandoned it in the midst of a military and humanitarian crisis, where Russians and Ukrainians are suffering directly and people across Europe are paying the price of the war on a daily basis. Similarly, American imperialism has destabiliSed Pakistan by using its military as a proxy to contain India, while also undermining the Pakistani people. The US is manufacturing conflicts and is currently involved in numerous wars and interventions around the world to sustain its imperialist system and maintain the dominance of American capitalism, which is increasingly weakening due to its own internal contradictions.

India and its current ruling regime must learn from history to understand the dangers of forming any kind of alliance with US imperialism and its capitalist system. This system is fundamentally designed to dominate, destroy, and create conditions of destitution for both people and the planet. There should be no illusions about this reality. India must revive and follow its time-tested non-aligned foreign policy strategies and its traditions to uphold its independence, while promoting internationalism based on solidarity with peoples and nations suffering under imperialist domination and exploitation.

The Modi government’s myopic attempt to engage with American imperialism is a strategic illusion. It will not protect and promote India’s economic, military, or global diplomatic interests. On the contrary, it is likely to prove disastrous for India and its people. American imperialism has often aligned itself with autocratic, reactionary, and undemocratic regimes while undermining liberal and secular democracies. The state-led, corporate-driven model of planned American capitalism and its market-centered democracy are not compatible with India’s aspirations for inclusive and democratic development. Therefore, it is essential to oppose unfair trade agreements and imperialist military alliances between India and the United States for the sake of India and Indians. India must not forget to celebrate—its historic struggles against imperialism, as well as its longstanding tradition of international solidarity with other anti-imperialist movements around the world.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator

4 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

Pakistan’s military has always preferred its wars orderly: enemies legible, proxies pliable, violence narratively obedient. For decades, the western frontier complied. Militants were assets, Pashtuns were terrain, and Afghanistan was treated not as a polity but as strategic negative space — a hinterland to be shaped, managed, and periodically disciplined. What the generals never planned for — because they never do — is autonomy. Not from civilians, not from provinces, and certainly not from former clients expected to remain grateful, dependent, and silent.

What Rawalpindi now brands a security crisis is something far less dignified. It is the shock of lost control, disguised as resolve. A tantrum, armored and aerial.

The Taliban in Kabul were supposed to vindicate Pakistan’s long romance with proxy power: deferential, aligned, permanently conscious of who midwifed their rise. They were expected to outsource strategic imagination to Islamabad. Instead, they committed the unforgivable sin of client regimes everywhere. They behaved like a sovereign authority. Brutal, reactionary, and incompetent — yes — but independent. They refused instruction, rejected hierarchy, and declined the role scripted for them in Pakistan’s strategic theatre.

Nothing enrages a patron more than a proxy that stops asking permission.

Pakistan’s hostility toward Kabul is therefore not about terrorism in the abstract. Terrorism has always been negotiable. Militancy, when useful, has always been tolerable. What is intolerable is insubordination. The Afghan Taliban’s real offense is not harboring the Pakistani Taliban; it is refusing to accept that their political horizon should terminate in Rawalpindi. That refusal punctures the mythology of omnipotence on which Pakistan’s security state depends.

And so the gaze turns inward. Enter the Pashtuns — again.

Every authoritarian system eventually exhausts explanation and reaches for scapegoats. Pakistan’s establishment has chosen the population it has always known how to manage with force. Pashtuns, long racialized as suspect and governed as exception, are recast as the connective tissue between Kabul’s defiance and domestic instability. A strategic failure is collapsed into an ethnic security problem, and the remedy remains reassuringly familiar: bombard, displace, sanitize the language, repeat.

Military operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former tribal districts are not counterterrorism in any meaningful sense. They are disciplinary performances. Villages are destroyed to restore hierarchy. Displacement is normalized as method. Civilian suffering is rendered administratively invisible through the antiseptic dialect of “kinetic actions” and “area clearance.” Violence is not merely inflicted; it is processed.

Pashtuns understand this grammar fluently. They have lived under it for generations.

What has changed is not their exposure to repression, but their tolerance for its alibis.

The Pakistani state prefers to pathologize Pashtun resistance as cultural reflex — atavistic militancy rather than political response. This fiction is convenient, because it absolves the center of responsibility. The reality is more corrosive. Pashtun regions have been subjected to a rolling experiment in securitized governance: collective punishment, economic abandonment, enforced disappearances, and episodic devastation marketed as stability. Loyalty is demanded as tribute, never cultivated as consent.

Yet political consciousness has evolved in ways the generals failed to anticipate. The appeal of Imran Khan in these regions is not sentimental; it is diagnostic. He opposed drone strikes when applauding them was elite consensus. He condemned military operations when silence was safer. He stated — without euphemism — that mass displacement is not counterterrorism, that bombing civilians manufactures militancy, and that dignity does not arrive by helicopter gunship.

This made him dangerous. Popularity among the governed is intolerable when it bypasses the governors.

The military’s resentment toward Pashtuns is therefore cumulative. It is anger at communities that refuse pacification through slogans. Anger at people who remember too much. Anger at a population that understands — perhaps more clearly than any other in Pakistan — that the language of security is often the vocabulary of domination. Pashtuns expose the limits of coercion. That exposure is intolerable.

The standoff with Afghanistan intensifies this fury. Cross-border strikes are framed as self-defense, but function politically as diversion. They convert internal legitimacy deficits into external threat narratives. Each missile becomes a press release; each funeral, a footnote.

Borders, however, are not abstractions in Pashtun life. They are colonial incisions cutting through kinship, commerce, and memory. The Durand Line has never been emotionally internalized by those who live across it, and successive Afghan regimes — monarchical, republican, Islamist — have treated it with studied ambiguity. The Taliban have not formally rejected the border, but they have refused to consecrate it. That ambiguity is deliberate, historical, and strategic.

Pakistan’s failure is not that Kabul questions the line. It is that Rawalpindi no longer has the leverage to enforce silence about it.

The Afghan Taliban no longer depend on Pakistani sanctuaries or sponsorship. They have alternatives: regional engagement, transactional diplomacy, calibrated flirtations with Pakistan’s rivals. This is not Taliban brilliance. It is Pakistani strategic exhaustion.

And exhaustion, when denied, curdles into aggression.

The Pakistani Taliban become the perfect instrument in this choreography. Their attacks justify operations; their persistence validates escalation. Cause and consequence collapse into ritual. Bomb, declare success, displace civilians, neglect reconstruction, wait for militants to return, repeat. This is not counterinsurgency. It is institutional inertia armed with airpower.

The human cost is vast and deliberately obscured. Families freezing in displacement camps are not policy failures; they are inconveniences. Children killed by errant fire are not moral ruptures; they are statistical residue. Accountability is deferred indefinitely because acknowledging it would require admitting that the strategy itself is the pathology.

What makes this moment volatile is that Pashtun grievance now intersects with national recognition. The repression unleashed after Imran Khan’s removal did not remain provincial. Punjab — long insulated from the full architecture of coercive governance — has begun to recognize familiar patterns: censorship, judicial farce, economic predation, intimidation dressed as order. What was once frontier experience is becoming national knowledge.

This convergence terrifies the establishment.

A Pashtun protest can be dismissed as peripheral. A national awakening cannot. The danger is not rebellion; it is translation. That Pashtun experience becomes legible to others. That the frontier is no longer treated as exception, but as forecast.

Hence the escalation. More operations. Harder rhetoric. Louder threats.

But each escalation reveals not strength, but panic. Each miscalculated strike exposes strategic hollowness. Each displaced family becomes evidence — not of necessity, but of collapse.

Strategic depth was meant to secure Pakistan’s future. Instead, it has produced strategic humiliation. The western frontier has become a mirror, reflecting decades of manipulation back at its authors.

And when a state begins to wage war on its own reflection, it is no longer defending sovereignty or order. It is staging a confession — armed, unrepentant, and increasingly desperate — that it has mistaken domination for durability, and force for foresight, and now lacks the imagination to do anything else.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.

31 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ranjan Solomon

The renewed push for an EU–India Free Trade Agreement is being presented as a partnership between equals — a coming together of the world’s largest democracy and one of the most powerful economic blocs. The language is reassuring and familiar: sustainability, shared values, rules-based trade, ethical supply chains, green transitions. Yet behind this polished diplomatic vocabulary lies a far older structure of power. Strip away the technocratic veneer and what emerges is a trade framework tilted decisively in favour of Europe, carrying the unmistakable imprint of a colonial economic mindset — not through territorial control, but through regulatory domination.

This is not an argument against trade. It is an argument against unequal trade dressed up as cooperation.

Europe no longer rules colonies with gunboats or administrators. Its power today lies in exporting rules. The modern European Union exercises influence not through direct political control but through standards — environmental norms, labour regulations, intellectual property regimes, data protection frameworks and carbon accounting mechanisms. These are presented as neutral, universal and progressive. In practice, they operate as non-tariff barriers that favour economies already industrialised, capital-rich and technologically dominant. What scholars describe as regulatory imperialism is, in effect, colonialism without colonies — discipline without occupation.

India, still grappling with agrarian distress, informal labour, fragile manufacturing and deep inequality, is being asked to comply with standards designed for post-industrial Europe, without corresponding access to finance, technology or transition support. The historical imbalance is simply erased from the negotiating table.

The asymmetry at the heart of the EU–India FTA is impossible to ignore. Europe negotiates as a consolidated bloc of twenty-seven states, representing advanced capital, multinational corporations and entrenched control over global value chains. India negotiates as a single country with vast internal disparities, where millions survive at the margins of the formal economy. Free trade agreements are never neutral instruments; they reward those who already dominate capital flows, intellectual property, finance, logistics and technology. In this equation, India is not viewed as an equal partner but as a vast market to be accessed, regulated and disciplined.

Nowhere is this imbalance clearer than in agriculture. The European Union continues to protect its farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy, insulating them from market volatility with heavy subsidies. At the same time, Europe presses India to open its agricultural markets in the name of free trade. For India, agriculture is not merely an economic sector; it is a livelihood system sustaining hundreds of millions. Any dilution of protection exposes Indian farmers to subsidised European competition, price volatility and corporate capture of supply chains. The result is not efficiency but dispossession, not reform but rural distress. India’s caution here is not protectionism; it is an assertion of survival and food sovereignty.

Equally troubling are the demands around intellectual property. The EU insists on stronger patent protections, longer data exclusivity and stricter enforcement mechanisms, particularly in pharmaceuticals. India’s generic drug industry, however, is not just a national asset — it is a global public good. It supplies affordable medicines to much of the Global South and plays a critical role in combating diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and cancer. Strengthening intellectual property regimes to suit European pharmaceutical giants would raise drug prices, weaken public health autonomy and undermine India’s ability to act in the public interest. This is not innovation; it is the enclosure of knowledge for profit — a familiar colonial logic of extraction rearticulated through legal instruments.

Labour mobility exposes another layer of contradiction. India’s comparative advantage lies in services — information technology, healthcare, education and engineering — and in the mobility of skilled labour. Yet the European Union remains resistant to meaningful concessions on movement of people, even as it demands liberalisation of Indian markets. Capital is allowed to move freely, goods are encouraged to circulate, but workers from the Global South are securitised and restricted. An agreement that liberalises markets without facilitating mobility entrenches hierarchy and reveals the real priorities of so-called free trade.

The EU also claims the moral high ground on sustainability and climate responsibility. Environmental clauses, labour standards and carbon accounting are framed as ethical imperatives. Yet this posture is marked by historical amnesia. Europe industrialised through centuries of colonial extraction, fossil fuel dependence and ecological destruction, externalising environmental costs onto colonised territories. India is now asked to decarbonise rapidly, without having benefited from that historical carbon space and without receiving adequate financial or technological support. Mechanisms such as the Carbon Border Adjustment threaten to penalise Indian exports while ignoring Europe’s historic emissions debt. Climate responsibility is thus transformed into climate discipline.

In the digital sphere, the pattern repeats itself. Europe seeks access to India’s growing digital markets while pushing regulatory frameworks that favour established European firms. India’s efforts — however imperfect — to assert data sovereignty and regulate Big Tech are treated as obstacles rather than legitimate expressions of policy autonomy. Locking India into restrictive digital trade regimes risks reproducing technological dependency rather than fostering innovation.

At its core, the EU–India FTA is not about tariff reduction. It is about shaping India’s development trajectory. Europe seeks integration without empowerment, access without parity. India is invited into the global economy, but only on terms that preserve European advantage. This is the essence of neo-colonialism: participation without sovereignty, inclusion without equality.

If India is to engage meaningfully, it must draw clear red lines. Public health safeguards cannot be diluted. Agriculture and food sovereignty must remain protected. Labour mobility must be treated as integral to trade, not peripheral. Technology transfer and climate finance must be real, not rhetorical. Above all, India must preserve policy space to support its farmers, workers and small enterprises. Without these safeguards, the agreement risks reducing India to a consumer market and a low-cost production base.

Trade can be mutually beneficial, but only when power asymmetries are acknowledged rather than concealed. The EU–India Free Trade Agreement, as currently envisioned, does the opposite. It reproduces historical hierarchies through the language of rules, ethics and sustainability. The colonial mindset has not disappeared; it has merely adapted to the age of contracts and compliance.

India’s choice is not between isolation and integration. It is between sovereign engagement and neo-colonial incorporation. History suggests that the cost of choosing wrongly is borne not by negotiators, but by people.

Dr. Ranjan Solomon has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age. After an accumulated period of 58 years working with oppressed and marginalized groups locally, nationally, and internationally, he has now turned a researcher-freelance writer focussed on questions of global and local/national justice.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Phil Pasquini

NOVATO, California (01-31) – On January 30, thousands of people across the Bay Area and in cities nationwide joined a major daylong Free America Walkout strike, by rallying, marching, and protesting to demand the abolition of ICE and in resistance to President Trump’s immigration crackdown calling for an end to all ICE operations that have led to the deaths of two peaceful protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.

In the small northern Marin County town of Novato, students walked out of their classrooms to join the nationwide strike, in solidarity with “No work, no school, no shopping” to protest the killings and kidnappings of immigrants by ICE. Participants demanded an end to ICE’s ongoing violent abuses and unlawful actions, condemning its defiance of the U.S. Constitution and the widespread turmoil it has caused across the country.

The Novato Unified School District and others countywide granted students permission to peacefully participate in the strike during a two-hour window in a show of support and solidarity with Minnesotans. The school district supported students wishing to participate allowing them to do so without penalty. Student participation also served as a live civic lesson in exercising First Amendment Rights.

Rallying outside of City Hall, the large number of student protesters from elementary to highschoolers chanted and held signs calling for ICE Out. One student held his handmade sign saying that “My dog is a better president.” Several others questioned the “humanity” of ICE regarding the kidnappings and killings while one noted “I Like My country Like I like my water, No ICE.”

Regarding the many controversies surrounding ICE, Indivisible Novato, along with other concerned citizens and human rights activists, have mounted a campaign of protests and direct actions calling on the County Board of Supervisors to “Stop the Sheriff from working with ICE.” The Marin County Sheriff’s Office, through its voluntary participation in the federal grant program, State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), has established a lucrative financial relationship by reaping a $1,000 payment for each “Captured Immigrant” who is turned over to ICE custody when released from jail.

SCAAP funding reimburses participating agencies in covering the costs incurred for salaries, training and incarceration of “undocumented criminal aliens.” To receive the funds, the personal information must be provided to the DOJ for each detainee. Many California cities have refused to cooperate in the program due to sanctuary policies that disallow such cooperation or on moral grounds.

According to activists, during the past three years the Marin County Sheriff’s Office has received $1.2 million for processing more than one thousand immigrants, while participating California law enforcement agencies statewide in 2024 collected $59.4 million according to a Congressional report released in 2025.

Report and photo by Phil Pasquini

31 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin

When Senator Tim Kaine told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a recent Senate hearing on Venezuela that the administration’s announcement of a new Monroe Doctrine “does not land well in the Americas,” he was putting it mildly.

I just returned from an emergency gathering in Bogotá on January 24-25 with about 90 delegates from 20 countries, where speaker after speaker denounced the open revival of this doctrine — and its companion, the so-called Trump Corollary or “Donroe Doctrine” based on raw coercion— as a blatant, illegal, and reprehensible interference in their internal affairs. The message from Latin America could not have been clearer: the future of the Americas must be decided by its peoples, not imposed by the U.S. empire.

The gathering, called Nuestra América and convened by Progressive International, brought together ministers, parliamentarians, diplomats, trade unionists, and grassroots movement leaders from across Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. After two days of intense closed-door deliberations and public assemblies, we adopted the San Carlos Declaration, launching a new continental project to defend sovereignty, democracy, and peace.

Delegates spoke with urgency about the most egregious U.S. interventions shaping hemispheric affairs. Delegates from Argentina described how Trump openly backed right-wing president Javier Milei, including the announcement of a $20 billion loan during the presidential campaign — a brazen attempt to tilt the vote by offering a financial lifeline in exchange for political alignment. They also condemned the lawfare-driven persecution and unjust imprisonment of Cristina Kirchner, emblematic of how courts are being weaponized to crush leaders who challenge U.S.-aligned economic and political power.

Hondurans condemned electoral interference in their country, including Trump’s efforts to shore up the National Party, and his hypocritical pardon of former president and convicted narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández. Updating the old adage about Nicaragua’s strongman Somoza — “he might be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” — he joked that Washington’s line on Juan Orlando Hernández is: “He might be a drug trafficker, but he’s our drug trafficker.”

The Venezuelan ambassador in Colombia denounced U.S. aggression against his country, including the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores and the bombings in Caracas that left more than 100 people dead. The Trump administration is offering sanctions waivers to U.S. oil companies amidst threats of further strikes should Venezuela defy its demands.

Colombians took aim at Trump’s arrogance, his reckless threats to bomb Colombia, and his offensive attacks on their democratically elected president, Gustavo Petro. Delegates spoke with a mix of hope and trepidation about Petro’s upcoming February 3 meeting with Trump, wondering whether it would mark a genuine attempt at reconciliation — or turn into a setup reminiscent of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s humiliating White House visit. They also voiced deep concern about U.S. interference in their upcoming May presidential elections, as Petro’s term comes to an end and left candidate Iván Cepeda faces an emboldened right. Many warned that the vote represents a pivotal moment not only for Colombia but for the entire region, which has already swung sharply to the right in recent elections.

A narcotics expert condemned strikes on civilian vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific carried out with absolutely no due process, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of more than 100 people, including fishermen. Delegates spoke of coastal communities paralyzed by fear, with many fishermen no longer daring to go out to sea, afraid their boats will be blown up. This sparked calls for a “Reclaim the Seas” campaign to defend the right to fish without fear — along with proposals to organize solidarity flotillas to Venezuela and Cuba.

The Cuban ambassador to Colombia denounced the unprecedented escalation of the economic blockade against Cuba, including efforts to cut off oil supplies, aimed at plunging the country into total economic crisis to force regime change. Delegates voiced strong solidarity with Cuba, and Progressive International announced that the next Nuestra América gathering will take place in Havana. Trump’s new order threatening tariffs on any country that “directly or indirectly” supplies oil to Cuba only heightens the urgency of building international solidarity — and finding concrete ways to break the siege.

Representatives from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena Party denounced Trump’s escalating attacks on Mexico — from branding the country a “narco state,” to threatening military action across the border, to using tariffs and migration enforcement as weapons — all aimed at destabilizing Mexico’s democratically elected government and undermining its project of social transformation.

Jana Silverman, one of three delegates representing Democrat Socialists of America, addressed the systematic violation of the rights of millions of migrants living in the United States — overwhelmingly from Latin America — who face detention, deportation, and repression by state authorities. She raised the powerful concept of the “right not to migrate”: the often overlooked human right to remain in one’s homeland with dignity, rather than being forced to flee due to poverty, violence or foreign intervention.

Taken together, delegates said, these attacks form a coherent U.S. strategy: a revived Monroe Doctrine asserting the hemisphere as an exclusive U.S. sphere of control, where sanctions replace diplomacy, coercion replaces cooperation, and military force lurks behind every negotiation.

The Trump administration thrives on division, betting that countries will confront Washington one by one. But the only way to withstand the world’s largest military and financial machine is through collective action — a task complicated by today’s political fractures across the region.While some governments align closely with Trump, others, like Venezuela and Cuba remain squarely in the crosshairs. Meanwhile, international institutions are largely paralyzed: the UN is constrained by U.S. vetoes, the Organization of American States functions as Washington’s echo chamber, and regional mechanisms (such as CELAC, ALBA and CARACOM) are fragile and must be revitalized.

Ultimately, the most decisive force against U.S. aggression is popular power–the power of social movements, trade unions, youth organizations, and community groups, backed by renewed solidarity in the Global North. Sovereignty, the delegates agreed, must be defended in the streets, workplaces, classrooms, and communities.

As Colombian Senator Gloria Florez told us, “The U.S. is on trial throughout the Americas, and people are answering with courage, solidarity, and dignity — from migrants to Afro-descendants, Indigenous peoples, and women. This is Our América, and it includes social movements in the United States. Together, we must bury the Monroe Doctrine, once and for all.”

Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Tom Engelhardt

Having reached a certain age and long been fascinated by obituaries, I sometimes think about both Donald Trump’s and my own. At 79, he’s just slightly less than two years younger than me, though of course I wasn’t the 45th president of the United States or the 47th one either. And eight chaotic years (or more?) as president (assuming he makes it that far) guarantee him a monster (and I do indeed use that word advisedly) set of obituaries when he dies, whereas almost a quarter-century at TomDispatch guarantees me nothing at all.

And I wouldn’t argue with that for a second. After all, Donald Trump has been (and continues to be) a truly one-of-a-kind president of the United States — though the word “kind” (as opposed to “king”) doesn’t actually apply to him, does it? Think of him, in fact, as the mad hatter of American presidents. If you remember, that Alice in Wonderland character was accused of “murdering the time.” And that, in its own strange fashion, seems like quite a reasonable description of at least one of the crimes of President Donald Trump.

The man who believes that climate change is a “green new scam” has tried, among other things, to shut down every major East Coast offshore wind power project in sight (though judges, including one he appointed to the bench, have so far denied him that right). Meanwhile, he’s been working to ensure that coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, remains a major source of American energy. He and his crew aren’t even letting major coal-burning power plants whose days are all too literally past close.

Phew, that paragraph left me out of breath — so much for my wind power! — and I didn’t even get everything in. After all, he’s also had the urge to pull every last barrel of oil out of Venezuela (even if, once upon a time, he did all too accurately call that country’s petroleum the “worst oil probably anywhere in the world” and “garbage”). And in the process, he is indeed engaged in murdering time — at least, the time we humans have left to live reasonably decent lives on this planet, which is, it seems, no longer truly ours but, at least for now, significantly his.

In some sense, you might say that Donald Trump is hard at work trying to ensure not only that he’ll get a major obituary on his death, but that humanity will, too. In that sense, give him credit. He’s trying to put us all in the paper and give us all the experience he’s had of being “the news.”

And I wonder if someday, if not your obituary and mine, perhaps those of our children or grandchildren will start out something like this: “He/she died in his/her home in the midst of a blinding heat wave/a devastating storm/a historically unprecedented flood [or you name it] on a planet still growing hotter and more uncomfortable by the decade, if not the year.”

The U.S. Is an Increasingly Violent Petro State

When it comes to obituaries, don’t think it’s just the climate that’s the problem. We are living in a distinctly mad world of the living (and the dead). And OMG, it’s increasingly apparent that, on a planet where wars are still proliferating from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan (and the burning of fossil fuels to fight them is already adding significantly to the devastation of the planet), things are unlikely to get better any time soon. As the Costs of War project reminds us: “The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil — and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.”

And just to take one grim example, “my” president wants to take our tax dollars and apply them even more strikingly — in fact, in a blindingly record fashion — to the Pentagon budget, the thing that, once upon a time, was called, however inaccurately, the “defense budget.” It’s already at somewhere close to a trillion dollars a year and, give him credit, he only wants to raise it by another half-trillion dollars to $1.5 trillion.

And no, that is not a typo! Believe me, there’s no misprint there! That’s what he thinks he needs to do to create a “dream military,” which (at least in his mind) would undoubtedly ensure that Greenland will become the 51st state, Canada the 52nd, Cuba the 53rd, and Colombia the 54th. The 55th, then, could well be China. (Or so he might dream anyway. Or perhaps the phrase should be: so he might nightmare anyway.) And don’t fret. That increase in the military budget is only likely to mean a $6 trillion increase in our taxes over the next decade (or roughly $45,000 per family).

Oh, wait, this is already the nation with by far the largest military budget on Earth that, over all the endless decades since it emerged globally victorious from World War II, couldn’t win a single significant war — not in Korea, nor in Vietnam, nor Afghanistan, nor Iraq, nor even, possibly, in the weeks to come on the streets of Minneapolis. Nowhere. And count on this, another half-trillion dollars a year will ensure only one thing: that the United States won’t win yet more wars ever more extravagantly, whether in Greenland or somewhere else entirely, while never learning even the most obvious lessons from such a grim reality.

And no, for some reason, Donald Trump has never actually used the word “nightmare” either in relation to himself or his presidency, though he certainly did accuse the Democrats of being the party of “the socialist nightmare.” Nor did he use it in his recent interview with the New York Times when he was asked about whether there were any limits whatsoever on his own global power. Instead, he responded this way: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

So now, you can breathe a giant sigh of relief, right? Who could possibly worry about his mind? If Donald Trump’s “morality” is the only thing that stands between us and him doing more or less anything he wants, however destructively, on this planet of ours, then what could possibly go wrong?

And speaking of nightmares (or even obituaries), oil is Donald Trump’s dream liquid — and oil is hell. In the long run on this already overheating planet of ours, oil means war, not on this country’s potential enemies, or even Donald Trump’s, but on all of us. (And the U.S. is indeed an increasingly violent petro state, as Mark Hertsgaard has recently reminded us at the Nation magazine.)

The very decision to elect Trump to the presidency, not once, but twice, should be considered the popular equivalent of preparing an obituary not just for him but for this country, this planet, all of us. And it might read something like this. Or rather, let me just start it for you, since I know that you won’t have the slightest problem filling in the rest:

“Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, died yesterday. Born in New York City on June 14, 1946, he would come to be known for many things from the TV show The Apprentice to pussy-grabbing. (“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”) And that admission, which came just before his first presidential election contest against Hillary Clinton, didn’t do the trick. He still won, which certainly tells you something about the United States (if, that is, we were writing an obituary not of a president but of a country).

But perhaps his presidency was most significant not for grabbing this country’s pussy, but for murdering time. He was America’s first green-new-scam president, the “drill, baby, drill” candidate who proved all too ready to devastate not just a few women, or a pile of American voters, but the planet itself. Hey, if you happen to want to close down wind farms, but keep coal plants open, you know just the man to vote for (yet again).”

The Anything-Goes President

We don’t know yet what our future holds. Donald Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow and kiss this planet and the rest of us goodbye. But if he lasts the next three years, having already figured out how to largely ignore Congress — really, who needs Congress to blow up ships in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, or invade Venezuela, or take Greenland? — and do whatever the hell he wants to do, the Constitution be damned, there’s always the distinct possibility that he’ll deal with the 22nd Amendment, which prevents any president from having a third term in office, in a similar fashion. When it comes to running for president yet again, he’s already said: “I would love to do it.” And perhaps the key line in any future obituary of Donald Trump could prove to be that he broke new ground by becoming the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win (or do I mean seize?) a third term in office and so become the first true American autocrat.

There’s no question, he’s the man, and if he can’t do it, nobody can. And believe me, if he succeeds, he won’t be forgotten, not on a planet he’s lent such a hand to sending down, down, down. In some fashion, you might say, he’s put a tariff on all of us when it comes to life on Earth and that’s no small… well, I hesitate to say it… accomplishment.

If only we could put a tariff on him — call it the autocrat tariff — and make him pay us for the suffering he’s caused and will undoubtedly continue to cause. I mean, when you think about his “accomplishments,” it’s no small thing the second time around to have left Congress largely in the lurch and done whatever pleased him most, with only his “own morality” to stop him.

At 79, he gives old age new meaning. He’s the anything-goes president on a planet going down, down, down. The only thing, it seems, that doesn’t go down (not yet, at least) is Donald J. Trump.

Having reached this point, I now wonder if my task in this piece shouldn’t have been writing obituaries for Donald Trump and me but writing one for humanity and Planet Earth (at least as we’ve known it all these millennia). In some sense, here’s the extraordinary thing: in November 2024, a near majority of American voters, 49.8% of us, to be exact, voted yet again for him as president. Anybody can understand and even excuse making a mistake once in this strange world of ours. But twice? Really? When it comes not just to a president of the United States but to the very fate of this planet?

I have a feeling that, if Trump makes it to a third term, he — not Congress — would have to change the preamble to the Constitution of these (dis)United States of America to read this way:

“I, the Only Person Who Matters in the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Autocracy, establish Injustice, ensure domestic and global Chaos, provide for a common offensiveness, promote the general Poorfare, and secure the Blessings of Autocrcacy to myself and my Posterity (if they even make it), do ordain and establish this Constitution for the (Dis)United States of America and a world going to hell in a handbasket.”

And having done that, I suspect that we would then have to start preparing an obituary (which might be headlined “Murdering Time in the Age of Donald Trump”) for this planet of ours, at least as we humans have known it all these endless centuries.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Laala Bechetoula

The contemporary international order no longer requires sophisticated theory to be understood. It exposes itself daily, mechanically, in the unequal distribution of outrage. Place two comparable tragedies side by side and observe the response. In one case, headlines erupt, sanctions are rushed through, leaders deliver grave speeches, and moral language saturates the public sphere. In the other, deaths are reduced to figures, filed away as unfortunate but acceptable losses. From this contrast emerges a truth that is no longer controversial but deeply unsettling: the modern world continues to operate according to a silent hierarchy in which skin color, civilizational proximity, and geopolitical alignment determine the value of human life.

Western power no longer needs to proclaim its superiority. It has perfected something far more efficient: the routine administration of superiority. Through selective indignation, conditional legality, and moral asymmetry, North America and Europe continue to position themselves as the measure of humanity, the arbiters of legitimacy, and the guardians of so-called universal values. These values are endlessly invoked, solemnly defended, and strategically suspended. Some lives are assumed sacred by default. Others must qualify, explain themselves, or simply disappear.

At the heart of this system lies a binary logic that is rarely acknowledged but constantly enforced: the Western, white, Judeo-Christian self on one side, and the rest of the world on the other. This is not a racial doctrine in the old biological sense; it is a political and cultural architecture inherited from colonial modernity and updated for the twenty-first century. Where nineteenth-century empires spoke openly of civilizing missions, today’s powers speak of democracy promotion, counterterrorism, humanitarian intervention, and a rules-based international order. The language has been sanitized. The hierarchy remains untouched.

Donald Trump did not invent this worldview. He exposed it. By referring to entire regions as “shithole countries,” by signing executive orders barring entry to people from predominantly Muslim nations, by ranking countries and peoples according to desirability, Trump did not depart from Western logic—he articulated it without shame. He stripped Western power of its diplomatic camouflage. Trump was not an aberration. He was a disclosure. He said aloud what had long been practiced quietly: that the world is a gated system, and equality was never part of the blueprint.

History offers abundant confirmation. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified through claims of weapons of mass destruction later dismantled by official investigations and intelligence reviews. A sovereign state was destroyed, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, and an entire region was plunged into long-term instability. Yet no sanctions regime targeted the architects of this war. No international tribunal summoned them. No collective punishment followed. The explanation is structural: when violence emanates from the center of power, it is reframed as error, miscalculation, or tragic necessity. When it emanates from the periphery, it is criminalized, moralized, and punished.

Nowhere is this asymmetry more glaring than in Palestine. For decades, occupation, settlement expansion, siege, and collective punishment have been documented, condemned, and declared illegal under international law. United Nations resolutions exist. Legal opinions exist. The facts are not disputed. And yet accountability never arrives. Law is invoked ceremonially, then suspended indefinitely. Alignment overrides legality. Identity eclipses justice. The violence of a “civilized ally” is contextualized and absorbed, while the suffering of the colonized is managed, not resolved.

This hierarchy does not end with bombs and borders; it extends to empathy itself. When war erupted in Ukraine, Europe responded with unprecedented speed and generosity. Borders opened. Temporary protection was activated. Refugees were welcomed with dignity, housing, and legal security. This response was humane and necessary. But it also exposed a disturbing contrast. Why is such urgency not universal? Why are refugees from the Middle East and Africa subjected to detention, suspicion, pushbacks, and bureaucratic humiliation? Why are some displaced people framed as neighbors, while others are framed as threats? The answer lies not in capacity, but in perception. Those who resemble the dominant self pass through the front door of empathy. Those who do not are redirected into the machinery of fear.

The Mediterranean Sea stands as a vast, silent indictment of this moral order. Thousands drown each year attempting to cross into Europe, their deaths catalogued under the antiseptic label of “irregular migration.” Language here becomes an accomplice. It kills first through policy, then through abstraction. If these bodies belonged to the correct demographic, emergency summits would follow, naval corridors would be activated, and solemn vows would be issued. Instead, the sea absorbs them, and the system moves on.

Climate injustice completes the picture. The industrialized West bears primary historical responsibility for global carbon emissions. The data is clear and uncontested. Yet the most severe consequences—droughts, floods, desertification, food insecurity—fall overwhelmingly on the Global South. Even when responsibility is acknowledged rhetorically, accountability is postponed indefinitely. Aid replaces reparations. Sympathy substitutes for justice. Those who engineered the crisis recast themselves as its moral managers, lecturing the victims on adaptation and resilience.

Across Europe, the political climate hardens further. Far-right and identitarian movements gain ground in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Their rhetoric is no longer marginal; it is normalized. Concepts like “replacement,” “civilizational threat,” and cultural purity re-enter mainstream discourse, carefully laundered for parliamentary respectability. This is not mere electoral turbulence. It is the defensive reflex of a civilization anxious about losing its symbolic monopoly on universality.

Let us be precise. This is not an indictment of the West as a culture, nor a denial of its intellectual, scientific, or philosophical contributions. It is a rejection of its self-mythology—specifically, the myth of moral innocence. A system that claims universality while practicing selectivity is not universal. It is imperial, albeit in moral form.

What distinguishes the present moment is that the illusion no longer holds. Comparisons are instantaneous. Archives are public. Contradictions are documented in real time. The Global South, long spoken for, now speaks back. It observes that international law carries a passport, that human rights have preferred beneficiaries, and that freedom often functions as an exclusive franchise rather than a shared principle.

The most dangerous illusion today is not Western power itself, but Western righteousness. Power can be contested, resisted, and eventually rebalanced. Righteousness that refuses self-examination becomes untouchable—and therefore unaccountable.

The question, then, is not whether the West will confess. Power rarely does. The real question is whether the rest of the world will continue to accept the role assigned to it: the perpetual “other,” required to prove its humanity, its moderation, its worth. Or whether it will assert a simpler, more radical truth—one that requires no civilizational endorsement at all.

That dignity is not granted by proximity to power.
That life does not require cultural resemblance to matter.
And that universality, if it is to mean anything, must finally apply to everyone.

Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian writer and analyst.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Richard Falk

[Prefatory Note: Initially framed as questions responding to Middle East journalist, Mohamed Abd Elaziz, raising question about Stage II of the Trump Plan for Gaza, inaugurating the Board of Peace at the Davos World Economic Forum this January. The questions raises some key issues. My assessment is that the Board of Peace deserves to fail. It insults the Palestinian people, is blind to flagrant violations of the Genocide Convention, and indirectly further undermines international law and UN authority with respect to global security.]

1- How do you view the legitimacy of establishing an independent peace council to intervene in international conflicts, compared to the traditional mechanisms of the United Nations?

The mechanism may work in certain situation, but not if as in the Trump Plan it is

slanted in favor of the wrongdoers and is prejudicial to the legal rights of the aggrieved and victimized party. The idea of an independent peace council could only achieve legitimacy if it is mindful of the imperative of equality with respect to the parties when addressing conflicts and its activities are professionally shaped by their joint participation, with an eye toward determining whether part of the peace council’s writ covers potential accountability of one or both parties in the form of reparation or recommendations of investigation and possible prosecution for individuals seemingly involved in wrongdoing in relation to law, morality, and human rights. Given the present structure of international relations, it seems highly unlikely that leading states would participate and fund such an independent peace council with a mission of conflict resolution as it would encroach upon the traditional sovereign prerogatives with respect to strategic national interests.

2– Do you believe that such initiatives could serve as leverage for UN reform?

It could in principle, but not in the setting of Israel/Palestine, where the partisan nature of the interactive process is one that by its composition, framework, and agenda rewards the perpetrators of genocide and further victimizes those who continue to suffer from severe and cruel wrongdoing by Israel, the U.S, and complicit enabling states. To the extent that UN affirms such an unjust initiative it brings shame to the Organization as it did by the unanimous endorsement of the Trump Plan in UNCR RES 2803 on January 17, 2026, and further stigmatized of the Organization by the show of support for the resolution expressed by the Secretary General, which included encouragement for the establishment of the misnamed Board of Peace that can be more accurately identified as the Settler Colonial Peace Council.

At this time, it is hard to say whether the Trump Plan, especially the Board of Peace by its apparent intention of marginalizing the UN, dramatized by situated its inauguration at the Davos World Economic Forum rather than within the UN System might generate a strong effort to engage in UN reform. This would require a considerable mobilization of pressure and is risky in that might lead to the US exit, which would actually play into Trump’s anti-internationalism approach that seeks to heighten US transactionalism as well as geopolitical outreach.

3- What are the potential risks if a peace council were to assume a larger role than the United Nations in managing global crises?

I have no confidence that such an independent peace council could work unless free from geopolitical manipulation by the US, Russia, China, and above all the US. It would need to be funded independently, and its executive members determined by some process that assured selection would take account of geographical, civilizational, ideological, gender diversities and maybe even strived to obtain an inter-generational balance. If, and this is a big if. such a peace council could become truly independent of the narcissistic geopolitics of Trump it might pose a constructive challenge to transform the UN as now constituted. The UN has performed disappointingly over the decades when it comes to conflict resolution, the enforcement of international law, the accountability of wrongdoers. This is not an accident. It should be remembered that the UN was set up in a manner that protected the strategic interests of the winners of World War II, as exemplified by conferring the right of veto and permanent membership in the SC as a way to ensure that the UN would act in a manner hostile to their perceived priorities. If a IPC could be based, staffed, and funded on the primacy of justice rather than currently as a reflection of the primacy of geopolitics it might displace the UN in the vital policy sphere of the management of global security. It is with respect to global security that the UN has most consistently failed the peoples of the world. This was illustrated dramatically, grotesquely, and fundamentally, by the recent pathetic efforts of the UN to oppose the Israel/US genocidal partnership that has produced the ongoing acute Palestinian ordeal.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

The history of American power is, in many ways, the history of reinventing rules—or designing new ones—to fit US strategic interests.

This may sound harsh, but it is a necessary realization, particularly in light of US President Donald Trump’s latest political invention: the so-called Board of Peace.

Some have hastily concluded that Trump’s newest political gambit—recently unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos—is a uniquely Trumpian endeavor, detached from earlier US foreign policy doctrines. They are mistaken, misled largely by Trump’s self-centered political style and his constant, though unfounded, claims that he has ended wars, resolved global conflicts, and made the world a safer place.

At the Davos launch, Trump reinforced this carefully crafted illusion, boasting of America’s supposed historic leadership in bringing peace, praising alleged unprecedented diplomatic breakthroughs, and presenting the Board of Peace as a neutral, benevolent mechanism capable of stabilizing the world’s most volatile regions.

Yet a less prejudiced reading of history allows us to see Trump’s political design—whether in Gaza or beyond—not as an aberration, but as part of a familiar pattern. US foreign policymakers repeatedly seek to reclaim ownership over global affairs, sideline international consensus, and impose political frameworks that they alone define, manage, and ultimately control.

The Board of Peace—a by-invitation-only political club controlled entirely by Trump himself—is increasingly taking shape as a new geopolitical reality in which the United States imposes itself as the self-appointed caretaker of global affairs, beginning with genocide-devastated Gaza, and explicitly positioning itself as an alternative to the United Nations. While Trump has not stated this outright, his open contempt for international law and his relentless drive to redesign the post-World War II world order are clear indicators of his true intentions.

The irony is staggering. A body ostensibly meant to guide Gaza through reconstruction after Israel’s devastating genocide does not include Palestinians—let alone Gazans themselves. Even more damning is the fact that the genocide it claims to address was politically backed, militarily financed, and diplomatically shielded by successive US administrations, first under Joe Biden and later under Trump.

It requires no particular insight to conclude that Trump’s Board of Peace is not concerned with peace, nor genuinely with Gaza. So what, then, is this initiative really about?

This initiative is not about reconstruction or justice, but about exploiting Gaza’s suffering to impose a new US-led world order, first in the Middle East and eventually beyond.

Gaza—a besieged territory of just 365 square kilometers—does not require a new political structure populated by dozens of world leaders, each reportedly paying a billion-dollar membership fee. Gaza needs reconstruction, its people must be granted their basic rights, and Israel’s crimes must be met with accountability. The mechanisms to achieve this already exist: the United Nations, international law, longstanding humanitarian institutions, and above all the Palestinians themselves, whose agency, resilience, and determination to survive Israel’s onslaught have become legendary.

The Board of Peace discards all of this in favor of a hollow, improvised structure tailored to satisfy Trump’s volatile ego and advance US-Israeli political and geopolitical interests. In effect, it drags Palestine back a century, to an era when Western powers unilaterally determined its fate—guided by racist assumptions about Palestinians and the Middle East, assumptions that laid the groundwork for the region’s enduring catastrophes.

Yet the central question remains: is this truly a uniquely Trumpian initiative?

No, it is not. While it is ingeniously tailored to feed Trump’s inflated sense of grandeur, it remains a familiar American tactic, particularly during moments of profound crisis. This strategy is persuasively outlined in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which argues that political and economic elites exploit collective trauma—wars, natural disasters, and social breakdown—to impose radical policies that would otherwise face public resistance.

Trump’s Board of Peace fits squarely within this framework, using the devastation of Gaza not as a call for justice or accountability, but as an opportunity to reshape political realities in ways that entrench US dominance and sideline international norms.

This is hardly unprecedented. The pattern can be traced back to the US-envisioned United Nations, established in 1945 as a replacement for the League of Nations. Its principal architect, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was determined that the new institution would secure the structural dominance of the United States, most notably through the Security Council and the veto system, ensuring Washington’s decisive influence over global affairs.

When the UN later failed to fully acquiesce to US interests—most notably when it refused to grant the George W. Bush administration legal authorization to invade Iraq—the organization was labeled “irrelevant”. Bush, then, led his own so-called “coalition of the willing,” a war of aggression that devastated Iraq and destabilized the entire region, consequences that persist to this day.

A similar maneuver unfolded in Palestine with the invention of the so-called Quartet on the Middle East in 2002, a US-dominated framework. From its inception, the Quartet systematically sidelined Palestinian agency, insulated Israel from accountability, and relegated international law to a secondary—and often expendable—consideration.

The method remains consistent: when existing international mechanisms fail to serve US political objectives, new structures are invented, old ones are bypassed, and power is reasserted under the guise of peace, reform, or stability.

Judging by this historical record, it is reasonable to conclude that the Board of Peace will eventually become yet another defunct body. Before reaching that predictable end, however, it risks further derailing the already fragile prospects for a just peace in Palestine and obstructing any meaningful effort to hold Israeli war criminals accountable.

What is truly extraordinary is that even in its phase of decline, the United States continues to be permitted to experiment with the futures of entire peoples and regions. Yet it is never too late for those committed to restoring the centrality of international law—not only in Palestine, but globally—to challenge such reckless and self-serving political engineering.

Palestine, the Middle East, and the world deserve better.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author, and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jessica Corbett

Venezuelan scholars and a US watchdog group were among those expressing concern on Thursday after Venezuela’s government caved to pressure from President Donald Trump and signed a bill opening up the South American country’s nationalized oil industry to privatization.

After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—the Trump administration installed the deposed leader’s former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president.

On Thursday, Venezuela’s National Assembly—which is led by the acting president’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez—approved and Delcy Rodríguez signed legislation that “promises to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil and allow for independent arbitration of disputes,” according to the Associated Press.

As AP reported:

Rodríguez’s government expects the changes to serve as assurances for major US oil companies that have so far hesitated about returning to the volatile country. Some of those companies lost investments when the ruling party enacted the existing law two decades ago to favor Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.

The revised law would modify extraction taxes, setting a royalty cap rate of 30% and allowing the executive branch to set percentages for every project based on capital investment needs, competitiveness, and other factors.

It also removes the mandate for disputes to be settled only in Venezuelan courts, which are controlled by the ruling party. Foreign investors have long viewed the involvement of independent courts as crucial to guard against future expropriation.

Malfred Gerig, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, said on social media that the Rodríguez siblings’ United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) “has just approved the most anti-nationalist and damaging oil law since, at least, 1943. The absolute surrender of the state as an oil producer and a sudden conversion of the property rights of the Venezuelan nation into private rights of foreign companies.”

Victor Lovera, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said that “it must be really fucking tough for the Rodríguez siblings to end up as the empire’s lapdogs and open up the oil sector, taking us back to the 1970s, before the nationalization of oil. All just to cling to power for a few more months.”

[https://twitter.com/venanalysis/status/2017001193982099721]

Trump—who returned to office a year ago with help from Big Oil’s campaign cash—has made clear that his aggressive policy toward Venezuela is focused on the country’s petroleum reserves, which critics have blasted as a clear effort to further enrich his donors and himself.

“Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the US watchdog group Public Citizen, in a Thursday statement.

“Imperfectly, Venezuela has for most of the last century sought to manage its oil and gas reserves to advance its national interest, rather than that of outside investors,” he noted. “Brutal sanctions and the threat of still more military action from the Trump regime are now forcing Venezuela to turn from that history and make its oil available to Big Oil at discount rates and to agree that investor disputes should be resolved at corporate-friendly international tribunals.”

“This is imperial policy to benefit Big Oil, not Americans—and certainly not Venezuelans,” Weissman stressed. “Even still, US oil companies are likely to be reluctant to invest heavily in Venezuela without US government guarantees—a likely next step in Trump’s oil imperialism, unless Congress moves proactively to block it.”

Both chambers of the US Congress are narrowly controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, and they have so far failed to pass war powers resolutions aimed at stopping more military action in Venezuela and the administration’s bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in international waters—all of which some American lawmakers and other experts have argued are illegal.

When Trump’s secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Marco Rubio, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—on Wednesday, he insisted that the president wasn’t planning for any more military action in Venezuela, but would take it, potentially without congressional authorization, in “self-defense.”

Rubio also laid out how the United States intends to continue controlling Venezuelan oil and related profits, telling senators that Venezuela’s government will submit periodic budgets, and as long as they comply with preset restrictions, the Trump administration will release funds from a US Treasury blocked account.

[https://twitter.com/venanalysis/status/2017003696953971194]

After the legislation passed Thursday, the Trump administration began easing sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry, with the Treasury issuing a general license authorizing certain activities involving Venezuelan-origin oil.

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

30 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org