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By Helena Glass

President Trump has stated that he has appointed Zionist Stephen Miller to run Venezuela. Major oil company executives who have remained mum over the course of Trump’s statements regarding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure are meeting with Trump the end of the week. At issue is the cost to rebuild the bombed infrastructure so that oil can be extracted. Given oil companies don’t seem too keen on Trump’s proposal/mandate, Trump has reversed his previous mandate and now states US taxpayers will foot the majority of the bill.

In the meantime, Trump and Miller have announced that Venezuela cannot sell ANY oil – its main source of revenue. Making the people suffer! A classic Zionist tactic. Torture and suffering.

Oddly, despite Trump’s massive deviance from his campaign promises, he feigns ignorance as to why his MAGA base is fleeing! Bubble Boy — Seinfeld. To further Trump’s complete lack of intellect, he has exercised the Monroe Doctrine to quell any interference in America’s governmental policies by “Europe”. Apparently, Trump is of the opinion that Venezuela is now a de facto colony of the US.

Trump has spent billions of taxpayer funds to bomb and kill 110 fishermen, bomb Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, confiscate oil ships and kidnap Maduro. So, what does he have to show for this money spent? Nothing. In fact, he has now managed to isolate every single ally America has ever had in favor of Israel. He has become the madman of James Bond lore — Dr. No. a maniacal villain.

Forever Twistee – Trump has demanded that the interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, sever ties with Russia, Iran, Cuba and China because all of South America ‘belongs’ to the Western Hemisphere of which Trump is now the overlord. Trump is acting out the role of Genghis Khan! Khan is remembered as a backwards, savage tyrant in Russia and the Arab world, while western nations have recently changed their view and embrace him as a complex individual – psycho-drama.

The reasoning stems from the drama tinged media parlay that if Trump doesn’t take Venezuela – China will. China has been trading with Venezuela for 25 years and never challenged their sovereignty. Never bombed their infrastructure. Never attacked fishing vessels. Once again, the ‘enemy’ platform is a dead argument.

Ancient philosophical statement,

“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.” – George Carlin

Or this one,

“War, of course, is a form of madness”. — Walter Cronkite.

Or this,

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein

Unfortunately, Trump claims he has never read a book in his life which might explain the absence of thought.

Today, Hegseth has captured a Russian flagged oil tanker in open seas, not territorial waters. Marinera 1 is a tanker owned by Turkey based Louis Marine Shipholding Enterprise operating at 10 ports, including Iraq, China, Oman, UAE, and Iran. Sparking massive violations of pirating, Hegseth could be held accountable. There has been no radio contact with the vessel and the WH remains mum claiming the tanker, Marinera, violated US Sanctions.

Insanity is ruling the White House. IF China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, the Middle East, and South America chose a war with America, would ANY country defend us? The US military’s weapon stockpiles are severely depleted and while efforts to increase production of critical systems is underway – it will take YEARS.

In a statement yesterday, Trump reiterated that America will be curbing sales to other countries given our inventory is critically low claiming a plane takes four years and a helicopter five years to manufacture. In addition, he has ordered all defense contractors to build more quickly! “No one can take us”. All the above mentioned adversaries are in weapon-building mode collectively. Pushing China over the edge means pushing Russia, North Korea, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Iran, Iraq and the UAE who are not too keen on Trump’s actions to date.

Despite Trump’s bravado – IF in fact he assassinated Rodriguez as he has threatened, the world would not come to his rescue.

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Helena Glass is Former CPA & Series 7, with emphasis in Real Estate and Financial Planning. Two brains in one: former Bronze Sculpter and Danseuse.

8 January 2026

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Andrew Korybko

The overarching trend is that the US is militarily reasserting its historical “sphere of influence” over the Americas, and enforcing the maritime component of “Fortress America” is so important for Trump 2.0 that it’s willing to risk an accidental war with Russia over it and even rubbish the “rules-based order”.

The Russian-flagged Marinera tanker was just seized by the US in the Atlantic. It was earlier named the Bella 1 and is under US sanctions due to connections to Hezbollah. It sailed under the Guyanese flag from Iran to Venezuela and attempted to break the US’ blockade. It failed, turned around, changed its name to the Marinera, and received a temporary permit to sail under the Russian flag before being seized. Russian then demanded that its citizens on board be treated humanely and returned home.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted that

“The blockade of sanctioned and illicit Venezuelan oil remains in FULL EFFECT — anywhere in the world.”

This preceded Attorney General Pam Bondi threatening that criminal charges might be pursued against the crew. Her tweet and Hegseth’s other one about how the US will only permit “legitimate and lawful” energy commerce with Venezuela shows that it’s once again assuming so-called “police” functions. Here are three takeaways from this incident:

1. The US is Surprisingly Nonchalant About an Accidental War with Russia

It was brazen even by the US’ standards to seize a Russian-flagged tanker, especially after Western media reported that Russia had dispatched ships and a submarine to escort it, which Russia didn’t confirm and none were nearby during the seizure. Nevertheless, Trump 2.0 calculated that there’d be no retaliation despite the deputy chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee warning that “any attack on our carriers can be regarded as an attack on our territory, even if the ship is under a foreign flag.”

This incident interestingly occurred in parallel with the US backing European ceasefire guarantees for Ukraine that include British and French commitments to deploy troops there during that time even though Russia has repeatedly warned that they’d be legitimate targets. Quite clearly, the US is now surprisingly nonchalant about an accidental war with Russia, whether over seizing one of its flagged ships at sea or over NATO allies getting killed in Ukraine. This observation won’t be lost on Russia.

2. “Fortress America” Also Includes an Important Maritime Component

The goal of restoring the US’ unipolar hegemony over the Americas, which is described as the highest regional priority in its new National Security Strategy, can be referred to as building “Fortress America”. This isn’t being pursued just for reasons of prestige but also pragmatism in the sense of enabling the US to survive and even thrive if it’s ever expelled from the Eastern Hemisphere or decides to retreat from there since control over the hemisphere’s resources and markets would all but ensure this outcome.

As can be seen by this incident as well as Hegseth’s and Bondi’s posts about it, there’s also an important maritime component related to controlling the export of oil from Venezuela, which has the world’s largest reserves. This can only be achieved by maintaining the unilateral blockade and seizing all ships that violate it, both on law enforcement pretexts that embody the concept of extraterritoriality. Without this maritime component, “Fortress America” could never truly be built, but it’s not without some costs.

3. The US is Dismantling the “Rules-Based Order” That It Built Over the Decades

The abovementioned point segues into the last one about how the US’ militarily enforced extraterritoriality vis-à-vis Venezuela dismantles the “rules-based order” that it built over the decades for maintaining its unipolar hegemony over the world after the end of the Old Cold War. This violates the international laws that the US used to selectively police across the world according to its arbitrary standards. Instead of international ones, the US is now policing its own, but also in pursuit of hegemony.

International law has increasingly become illusory due to the UN’s innate dysfunction, which is related to the deadlock among the UNSC’s five permanent members, with one usually vetoing significant proposals from the others. Even so, if the Great Powers abided by it in their ties with one another, then there’d be more predictability and less risk of war by miscalculation. The US is no longer interested in even that as proven by this incident, however, since building “Fortress America” now takes precedence over all else.

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The trend connecting the three aforementioned takeaways is that the US is militantly reasserting its historical “sphere of influence” over the Americas, and this is so important for Trump 2.0 that it’s willing to risk an accidental war with Russia over it and even rubbish the “rules-based order”. The maritime component off of Venezuela’s Caribbean coast that’s been built before all else is justified by the administration as a law enforcement operation that prioritizes domestic laws over international ones.

Since this is taking place on the other side of the world where neither half of the Sino-Russo Entente has any military bases, they can’t challenge this even through indirect means, unlike how the US challenged Russia’s reassertion of its own historical “sphere of influence” in Ukraine through the ongoing proxy war. This doesn’t mean that the US’ grand strategic goal of restoring its unipolar hegemony over the Americas will succeed, just that if it doesn’t, then it’ll be due to intra-hemispheric reasons and not external forces.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.

8 January 2026

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Miguel Santos García

China has recently condemned reported US pressure on Venezuela’s new government to sever its partnerships with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, calling it a “typical bullying act” and asserting that Beijing’s legitimate economic interests in the country must be protected. The US demand, which follows the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, is a sharp escalation against doing business with Latin America, whereas China is Venezuela’s largest crude buyer and creditor and uses geoeconomic means for competition while the US uses hybrid war and military force to gets its points across. Although the US has stated it does not seek to occupy Venezuela, President Trump has emphasized steering its future in a neocolonial way including directing its oil revenue, with plans to rapidly trade millions of barrels to the US.

For decades, the term “Washington Consensus” evoked a potent mix of orthodoxy and controversy across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with many believing it has largely failed. Coined in 1989, it became shorthand for a neoliberal policy package, that is fiscal austerity, privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization which significantly impacts resource control promoted by Washington-based institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Its implementation in the 1990s yielded uneven results, often deepening inequality and deindustrialization in the long run thus sabotaging the region’s competitiveness. Today, amid persistent low growth, high debt, and inflationary pressures, a revised and repackaged Trumpian Washington Consensus that would also seek to limit who the region can do business with raises profound questions about national sovereignty and the future model of Latin American capitalism.

The region’s capitalism has historically been characterized by a sharp divide between a large, informal, low-productivity sector and a globally integrated, often commodity-exporting, formal sector. Latin America’s persistent low productivity is intrinsically linked to US foreign policy and the structural reforms of the Washington Consensus. The methods that shaped the region’s economic architecture inhibited sustainable, diversified, and innovation-led growth. The primary link lies in how the Washington Consensus, actively promoted by US-led institutions, reconfigured Latin American economies to serve as complementary, not competitive, partners in the global system. The doctrine’s pillars of so-called liberalization, privatization, and fiscal austerity were implemented in a specific sequence and context that had profound consequences snuffing out competitiveness. By demanding rapid trade opening in the 1990s, it exposed nascent Latin American industries to immediate, brutal competition from established global powers and the US, effectively de-industrializing many countries before they could climb the value chain. This locked LAC nations into their historical role as exporters of raw materials and low-value commodities. A return to a Washington Consensus under Trump offers fewer tools to address the region’s endemic problems of informality, inequality, and weak industrial capacity.

Based on the proposed National Security Strategy document, the US effectively seeks to replace the multilateral, market-based dynamics of global capitalism and globalization in the Western Hemisphere with a system of American economic and strategic primacy based on a neo-feudal, technocratic and neocolonial strategy. Consequently, the invisible hand is replaced by a visible American fist, guiding economic outcomes to serve US strategic imperatives like near-shoring and securing supply chains, effectively canceling the autonomous capitalist agency of LAC nations by not developing sovereign technological and industrial capacity.

The implications for LACs sovereignty are direct, although these states would not be directly annexed like Greenland possibly will, they would lose economic policy sovereignty, the freedom to set independent fiscal, monetary, and industrial policies. The sovereignty trade-off as seen by the governments that play ball with Washington, like Argentina’s is presented as a pragmatic bargain that some autonomy is surrendered in exchange for temporary stability and some access to capital, a calculation that tends to resonate with certain governments. That being said despite being seen as a poster child for US-aligned neoliberal governance, Argentina under Javier Milei continues to engage in substantial trade and financial transactions with China. Which shows how pragmatic economic relationships are channeled in reality as even ideologically aligned governments in Latin America cannot fully decouple from the strategic and commercial alternatives provided by Beijing.

The economic, financial and political context is fundamentally different from the 1990s, which may alter the ultimate outcome of a Trumpian Washington Consensus. China’s massive role as a trade partner, investor, and lender provides an alternative pole of influence, diluting Washington’s monopoly on ideas and capital. The emerging global multipolarity, characterized by the rise of China, the strategic cohesion of BRICS+, and renewed engagement from powers like the European Union and the Global South, has for the first time in a generation created a viable strategic and economic pathway forward for LAC. By providing credible alternatives to Washington-led institutions and their conditionalities, this new landscape has empowered LAC nations with genuine room for maneuver. It has transformed the region from a passive recipient of a singular economic doctrine into an active negotiator in a buyers’ market for investment, development finance, and partnerships. This competitive pressure has forced traditional partners, including the United States and the IMF, to offer more flexible terms and softened the rigid edges of the neoliberal model. Consequently, multipolarity has become the essential catalyst for creating a measure of sovereign economic agency, allowing LAC states to craft mixed development strategies, mixing market access, infrastructure deals, and technology transfers from various poles, tailored to national interests rather than geopolitical alignment with a single hegemon.

The return of a Washington-led economic framework to LAC now explicitly fused with a revived and mutated Monroe Doctrine, articulated as the “Trump Corollary” declares the hemisphere a zone of vital US interest from which “non-hemispheric competitors” like China must be expelled leading to a winding down adversarial outside influence, particularly targeting Chinese stakes in ports, infrastructure, investment, trade and strategic assets. Sovereignty, in this model, is not just constrained by macroeconomic conditionalities, but is directly bargained away in exchange for security guarantees and only access to US markets.

Which is why the return of the Washington Consensus would mean a painful return towards policies and decisions that have brought failure to the region over the past two decades. Moreover, declaring the Western Hemisphere a zone of vital interest where influence from non-hemispheric competitors like China will be actively denied would reduce options for the region. Among the US goals are securing supply chains and using economic and security tools to make the US the partner of first choice in LAC. It mandates that the terms of US partnerships and aid be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence, specifically targeting control of ports, infrastructure, and strategic assets by competitors like China. This does not promote a free market where Latin American nations autonomously seek the best partnerships and investment deals but instead, it constructs a Fortress America model that limits their sovereign choice in economic partners, using US leverage in finance, technology, and security to induce them to reject alternative offers, regardless of market conditions. The question is can the US actually compete with China and BRICS in this regard offering better terms or will this be a mixture of Hybrid War and Neocolonialism?

Washington canceling LACs capitalist freedom of choice to impose a neofeudal technocracy would be primarily exercised through the conditionalities of the IMF, World Bank, and US trade policy, seeks not to abolish the part of capitalism where free actors choose who they transact and do business with seeking thus to reshape and discipline it according to a specific, market-centric orthodoxy.

This enforced primacy functionally cancels the core tenets of capitalism for these nations by rigging the market in favor of a single, dominant state. The document argues that American goods and services are better, yet the mechanisms to accomplish this are not competitive and seek to “push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region” and secure “sole-source contracts for our companies.” Market Capitalism requires the freedom to choose based on price, quality, and opportunity, but the strategy aims to present Latin American countries with a coercive binary choice of Us vs Them. By systematically using diplomatic and economic pressure, lawfare, color revolutions and unilateral force to eliminate competing options, making failed policies obligatory, the US would not be engaging in market competition but would be establishing a sphere of exclusive economic influence, where the invisible hand is guided by American national security directives.

The logical endpoint of this doctrine is a neo-feudal and neocolonial restructuring of hemispheric capitalism. LAC nations risk being reduced to the status of unincorporated territories within a US-dominated bloc, their economic policies aligned not by independent assessment of global opportunities, but by a mandate to bolster American resilience. The critical, unanswered question is whether the US can genuinely compete with China and BRICS by offering better financial and trade terms, technology, or if this project will rely predominantly on hybrid war, lawfare and imperialistic violence that deliver fewer profits and diminished competitiveness to the region.

All in all, this strategy constitutes a direct assault on the foundational principles of capitalism as understood in the region. True market capitalism requires the sovereign freedom to choose, to pick partners, craft deals, and select transactions based on price, quality, and developmental benefit. In this model, the region’s capacity for capitalist agency, to freely choose parameters of contracts, set terms of trade, and leverage global competition for their own development, is effectively subordinated to the imperative of maintaining American preeminence, transforming market-based solutions into instruments of unilateral strategy in the hemisphere.

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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution, the ongoing New Cold War and the transition towards multipolarity.

9 January 2026

Source: globalresearch.ca

A broad coalition of South African trade unions, political formations, civil-society organisations and solidarity movements are holding an emergency picket tomorrow, Thursday 8 January 2026, outside the USA Embassy in Pretoria, in condemnation of the United States’ military invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.

This emergency action marks the first coordinated public protest in South Africa against the current USA military assault on Venezuela and reflects the growing outrage among South Africans at Washington’s escalating lawlessness.

The actions of the USA are in clear violation of international law, the UN Charter, and the sovereignty of an independent nation. The United States is behaving like a gangster on the international stage, and as peace-loving peoples, we are appalled by its actions.

EMERGENCY PROTEST DETAILS
Thursday, 8 January 2026, From 12h00
USA Embassy, 877 Pretorius Street, Arcadia, Pretoria
⁠Media & Enquiries or to Endorse: +27 (0) 84 211 9988

The picket and protest is lawful and we would like to thank the relevant authorities for swiftly facilitating this urgent gathering and enabling tomorrow’s emergency protest for Venezuela.

The action is jointly convened by COSATU, NEHAWU, POPCRU, SACP, YCL, Africa4Palestine, South Africa Latin America Association (SALA), Anti-Fascist International (South Africa Chapter), and other allied formations. Members of the media are invited to cover the protest and members of the public are invited to attend. We call on South Africans — workers, students, faith communities, activists, and all peace-loving people — to join this emergency protest and make their voices heard.

This picket is not only about Venezuela. It is about defending international law, national sovereignty, and the right of peoples to determine their own future without bombs, sanctions, kidnappings, or foreign interference from the USA. We reject the USA’s ongoing policy of war, coercion, sanctions, and regime-change operations particularly against poorer countries or those of the Global South.

Venezuela — a country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world — is being targeted not because it has failed its people, but because it has refused to hand over and surrender its sovereignty, resources, and political independence to USA corporations and USA imperial interests.

Yesterday it was Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Today it is Venezuela. Tomorrow it could be any of us.

ISSUED ON 07 JANUARY 2026

By Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” —Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th President of the United States, 1861-1865.

“I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me: ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” —George W. Bush (1946- ), American President, 2001-2009, (in George Bush: God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’, The Guardian, Oct. 7. 2005).

“I really do believe we have ‘God on our side’,” —Donald Trump (1946- ), (in a speech to the ‘Evangelicals for Trump Coalition’, on January 3, 2020

“The 1929 Great Depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U.S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it by discharging five functions:

(1) Maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods [basic necessities];

(2) providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long-term lending;

(3) policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;

(4) ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies;

(5) acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.”

—Charles Kindleberger (1910-2003), American economic historian and author of The Great Depression 1929-1939, (1973)

The United States radical government of real estate mogul Donald Trump, in office since just a few weeks, is full of plutocratic oligarchs, and it is led by a deeply flawed president who is convinced that he has all the knowledge in the world all by himself. He seems to believe that his country should not import or export any product and live isolated in economic autarky.

An Unhinged President

The last two weeks of January will go down in history as presenting the most questionable and unhinged behavior of any newly elected American president.

Never before, indeed, has such a flurry of dictatorial presidential decrees come from the Oval Office, some in violation of existing laws adopted by the US Congress and of the US constitutional system of checks and balances, as if the US government had suddenly become the business of a single individual. Add to that Donald Trump’s bizarre and increasingly inflammatory statements and rhetoric on a variety of topics, most of which are rarely, if ever, based on evidence, studies or sound analyses.

As far as economic issues are concerned, one has the impression that the new Trump 2.0 administration seems to have abandoned all intention and responsibility for stabilizing the international economy; he is instead promoting improvised, irrational and destabilizing policies.

In addition, many countries and even some international institutions, created after World War II under American leadership, have been the target of insults, threats and demagogic attacks by President Donald Trump. This raises many important questions.

[https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-oligarchic-dysfunctional-disruptive-global-economy/5879132]

I. Many specialists have become concerned about the mental state of the American president and his disruptive influence on things to come

The paramount issue is Mr. Trump’s mental state. One of the first people to express fears about Donald Trump’s mental state and personality disorders is Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and his niece. On many occasions and even in a book, she has attempted to warn her fellow Americans about her uncle’s unstable mental condition.

Already on November 29, 2016, in an open letter to then President Barack Obama, three professors of psychiatry at Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford universities, had come to a similar conclusion regarding Donald Trump’s symptoms of psychosis. Their conclusion was that Donald Trump was exhibiting “widely reported symptoms of mental instability, including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality,” and this “lead them to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office of president.”

Other mental specialists have since raised alarms and documented here and here, and in books, about how Donald Trump’s unstable mental state and personality disorder, (i.e. his desire for domination, his grandiose sense of self-importance, his lack of conscience and empathy and his absence of guilt, shame or remorse, etc.), could be a danger for the United States and for the world.

[N.B.: Such character traits and behaviors are among the main symptoms of those individuals suffering from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, according to the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Only about 1% of a large population displays symptoms of the mental disease of psychopathy or of sociopathy.]

Moreover, according to former FBI director, James Comey, Donald Trump also seems to have the mentality of a gangster and of a con man, with a mind filled with malice and wickedness, ready to violate any law, treaty, practice or convention to advance his personal interests. It is important to remember that Donald Trump was criminally convicted on May 30, 2024, and will go down in history as the only individual with a criminal record before occupying the White House.

Trump is also known for having encouraged violence by his cult of extreme followers, especially by the raging mob of insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol building, on January 6, 2021, in order to overthrow the results of the November 2020 presidential election.

As a matter of fact, a more than 800-page report on the insurrection against the U.S. Capitol building just released by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, on Tuesday, January 14, concluded that

“Donald Trump engaged in an ‘unprecedented criminal effort’ to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election… and the evidence would have been enough to convict Trump at trial.”

One can also notice Trump’s cavalier betrayal of his oath of office to the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, one of his first acts once back in power was to grant a complete pardon, commuting the prison sentences, or vowing to dismiss the cases of more than 1,500 violent rioters, some of them convicted of seditious conspiracy, including individuals convicted of assaulting police officers. He did not consider the fact that the January 6 insurrection caused more than 100 injuries and several deaths of policemen.

II. Trump’s gratuitous insults, threats and attacks against several countries

A second source of concern is the increasing aggressiveness in Donald Trump’s remarks. Indeed, President Trump 2.0 has multiplied threats, insults and gratuitous attacks against a large number of countries, including Panama, Mexico, Cuba, Columbia, Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, etc. The list is getting longer on a daily basis.

This is most counter productive to world peace and prosperity. It would be much more useful to the world if he could better assume his great political responsibilities, instead of adopting the imperialist posture of another century.

III. Donald Trump’s tricks to profit financially from his office

A third issue is about President Trump’s seemingly lack of judgement with his recent launching of speculative meme crypto ‘currencies’ for his organization and for his immediate family. Not only have we seen the issuance of his own commemorative $TRUMP crypto token on the Solana blockchain, but also one for his wife, a $MELANIA token and even another one for his daughter Ivanka (who has publicly denounced the operation).

Such crypto memecoins have no real intrinsic value. Their owners can only make money if they sell them to someone else at a higher price than they bought them. That is tantamount to a Ponzi scheme.

Nevertheless, such instruments are financial speculative gimmicks that could, in theory, earn Trump millions of dollars by abusing the credulity of some of his followers. It is also possible that they are in violation of an article of the American Constitution, which prohibits a president from enriching himself personally as a consequence of his position or of his policies (Art. II, sec. 1, par. 7).

IV. The longtime economic and defense cooperation between Canada and the United States is at risk

Donald Trump seems to have developed a special animosity towards Canada and its government. Indeed, the neighboring country of Canada has recently been the target of insults, threats and attacks from President Trump.

This may come as a surprise because Canada is a member of the British Commonwealth, besides being a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in 1949. Moreover, since 1957, Canada and the United States are partners in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) agreement, whose function is to defend North American air sovereignty.

In addition, Canada is part of the 1989 Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, which was expanded to include Mexico in 1994, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This latest agreement was renegotiated in 2019-2020 at the request of President Trump 1.0, and is known as the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement of 2020 (USMCA). It came into force on July 1, 2020. A review of the agreement is scheduled every six years, with such a review on line for next year, in 2026.

Nevertheless and without any trilateral consultation, President Trump has threatened to unilaterally impose 25% tariffs on American imports of goods and services from Canada and from Mexico, claiming that the US borders with these countries are not well enough controlled against illegal immigrants and the drug trade (fentanyl) entering the US. (Trump has gone even further in proposing that Canada annex itself to the United States!)

If these ill-advised, self-destructive tariff policies were to be applied, they would destroy the mutually beneficial and longstanding industrial cooperation between Canada and the United States. For instance, there has been such a close cooperation in the automobile sector since 1965. The same applies to the energy sector (oil, gas, electricity) and resource sector (iron ore, steel, aluminum, etc.).

It is difficult not to agree with a Wall Street journal editorial, which said that a trade war against Canada and Mexico would be “the dumbest trade war in history”. Moreover, it would be brought about in total intellectual confusion.

Nevertheless, that is precisely what Donald Trump did on Saturday, February 1st, (while relying on an obscure 1977 statute about a state of national emergency), when he hit Mexico and Canada with a unilateral 25% import tax on most American imports from these two countries, to be applied as of Tuesday, February 4, 2025. —In so doing, the US government violated the renewed trade agreement between the three countries, an agreement that President Trump himself signed in 2020.

However, to show how improvised, arbitrary and chaotic things can be, President Trump announced on Monday February 3rd that tarifs on US imports from Mexico and Canada would be postponed for 30 days.

Such a delay, however, will have a cost, namely the one of maintaining uncertainty and vulnerability for Mexican and Canadian companies. This could have negative consequences for their investments and exports.

Conclusions

Something is definitively wrong and worrying about US President Donald Trump. His mental state is questionable considering his behavior and his erratic, reckless and delusional statements.

He has made gratuitous insults, threats and attacks against many countries, including close allies, and would seem to have no hesitation in provoking an international trade war. Moreover, his rhetoric seems to get more and more violent as time goes by.

Such pronouncements and threats could be very disruptive politically and economically to international relations. This could lead to a drop in international trade, throw many economies into a severe economic recession, and possibly be a repetition of the policy mistakes of 1929-1939, which led to an economic depression.

President Trump would be well advised to refrain from creating havoc in the world. He should tone down his insults, threats and attacks against other sovereign countries and against international institutions.

In this day and age, when the threat of a nuclear conflict still exists and is indeed very present, it is no time to yield to impulsive actions and to adopt improvised policies. It is a time for cooler heads and for rationality to prevail, with the aim of making the world more peaceful and more prosperous for all.

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Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

7 January 2026

Source: michelchossudovsky.substack.com

By Eman Abu Zayed

Mass deaths in Gaza continue and yet the world no longer pays attention, having been convinced that the genocide is over.

2 Jan 2026 – When rumours about a ceasefire started circulating in October, it felt like a distant dream. We clung to any thread of hope, even though deep inside we feared believing it. For two years, we had become accustomed to hearing about “ceasefires” that never lasted.

When the announcement was finally made, the streets erupted with ululations and cheers. Yet, fear crept into my heart that this calm might just be a pause before another round of attacks.

My fears were justified. Israel’s daily deadly attacks have continued; more than 400 people have been killed so far by its army. Many others have died in circumstances caused by Israel’s decimation of the Strip.

And yet the level of global attention began to decline. In November, I noticed that engagement with what I wrote about Gaza started to diminish, whether on social media or media outlets – something other Palestinian journalists and writers also observed. The world’s interest waned because the global public was easily convinced that the war had ended.

It became clear to me that the real goal of the ceasefire was not to stop the violence or death, nor to protect people or limit bloodshed and genocide. The real goal was to stop the world from talking about Gaza, about the crimes being committed there, and about the daily suffering of people.

Gaza has now become mostly invisible, as other news and other “hot spots” have taken the global media spotlight.

Meanwhile, mass death continues.

A little more than two weeks after the ceasefire was announced, on October 28, the Israeli army carried out a huge bombing campaign, killing 104 people. The overwhelming fear for the future and for my loved ones returned.

On November 20, Israel struck closer to my heart. The Israeli army attacked the home of the Abu Shawish family in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. My friend Batoul Abu Shawish lost her whole family – her sisters Habiba, 11, and Tima, 16; her brothers Youssef, 14, and Mohammed, 18; and her mum, Sahar, 43, and dad, Rami, 50. They were massacred despite the fact that the family had no political affiliation; they were all civilians. Batoul now has to face the genocide alone.

The Israeli attacks continue, and so does mass death by other means: Collapsed buildings, unexploded bombs, floods, hypothermia, starvation and illness – all creations of the Israeli genocidal strategy. We continue to struggle with no proper shelter or food, no heating, electricity or potable water.

The situation is so bad that winter itself is killing people.

We just had another storm. Tents were flooded and blown off again. Thirty-year-old Alaa Juha was killed by a wall that the rain collapsed onto her. Two-month-old baby Arkan Musleh died from hypothermia. In total, 15 have died from the cold weather this month. My family’s tent was flooded again; it is hard to describe the feeling of helplessness that overwhelms you when you can find no escape from the water and the freezing cold.

Israel continues to violate the ceasefire not only with its attacks but with its refusal to comply with its obligation to allow in the negotiated number of aid trucks, a full supply of necessary medicines and tents, shelter materials and mobile homes.

Israel is also curbing access to international organisations that try to provide some relief for the people of Gaza. New rules are making it hard for NGOs to register, including some as big as Save the Children. This, along with Israel’s continuous denial of requests to bring in aid by NGOs, is stifling international efforts to provide some relief to us.

Meanwhile, Palestinian organisations that try to ease our suffering are facing a collapse of donations. For example, the Samir Project, a donations-based initiative that provides material support for impoverished families and students, has lost a large number of individual donors and followers after the ceasefire was announced. Dr Ezzedine al-Lulu, the project’s director, confirmed to me that the decreased flow of donations has hindered their ability to provide essential assistance.

Israel is also keeping the Rafah border closed. There is no opportunity to travel outside unless you pay an exorbitant amount of money to Israeli-linked war profiteers and agree to never return. More than 16,000 people who urgently need medical evacuation are prevented by Israel from leaving; more than 1,000 have died waiting to be allowed to leave.

Gaza has entered a new stage of genocide – low-grade mass killing which does not make headlines because it is not as explosive as carpet-bombing campaigns. But the ultimate result is the same: The extermination of Palestinian life in Gaza. It is no wonder that Israeli politicians have not stopped talking about colonising our land. They still see Gaza free of Palestinians as a very real possibility that is within reach.

Eman Abu Zayed is a Palestinian writer and translation student from Gaza.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Dave DeCamp

Other groups that are being banned include the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Catholic charity Caritas, and Oxfam.

30 Dec 2025 – Starting on January 1, Israel will ban 37 international aid groups and charities from operating in Gaza in its latest effort to add to the misery for the Palestinian civilians living in flimsy tents and bombed-out buildings in the Strip.

The groups being banned include several prominent international aid organizations: Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Catholic charity Caritas, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Oxfam. The NGOs will also be barred from working in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel will stop the groups from operating in Gaza for failing to comply with its stringent new requirements, which include handing over information about their Palestinian employees. The new Israeli rules also include vague ideological requirements that can disqualify any NGO that “promotes delegitimization campaigns” against Israel, or if it, or any officeholder, has called for a boycott of Israel.

An Israeli official claimed, without providing evidence, that an investigation revealed “employees of certain organizations were involved in terrorist activity… in particular, Doctors Without Borders.” The action against MSF is seen in part as an Israeli reaction to the organization’s criticism of Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Strip.

In a statement warning of the consequences of banning it from Gaza, MSF said that it has served hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza this year.

“If Israeli authorities revoke MSF’s access to Gaza in 2026, a large portion of people in Gaza will lose access to critical medical care, water, and lifesaving support,” the group said. “MSF’s activities serve nearly half a million people in Gaza through our vital support to the destroyed health system. MSF continues to seek constructive engagement with Israeli authorities to continue its activities.”

Israel’s move to ban the NGOs comes as Israel continues to violate the US-backed ceasefire deal by continuing to launch attacks on Palestinians and maintaining restrictions on aid and shelter materials entering the Strip.

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of antiwar.com.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Sakai Tanaka 

30 Dec 2025 – The year 2025 marked the beginning of a turbulent period in which the United States, under the Trump administration, will bring about a major transformation in the world. This transformation will continue for many years to come, and the world will continue to be turbulent in 2026. The world will see the collapse of the British-led US sole hegemony that has existed since the end of World War II (the Cold War structure was also part of this sole hegemony, in that the UK and the US played the role of the “enemy” to China, the Soviet Union, and the anti-American left). It will shift to the multipolar hegemonic structure with the multiple “poles.” The essence of the transformation Trump is promoting is the “multipolarization of the world order” and the “collapse and self-destruction of the Anglo-American hegemony.”

• (Trump’s Multipolar Global Strategy/トランプの多極型世界戦略）
• [Trump 2.0 and the Churning Global Order]
• [The many ways Trump changed the federal government this year]
• [How Trump upended the federal government in 2025]
• [The Things That Trump Has Done in 2025]

The biggest shift Trump made in 2025 was his shift in the structure of the Ukraine War from “the US, UK, and Europe unite to prop up Ukraine and continue the War against Russia” to “the US colludes with Russia to try (act) to end the Ukraine War, but the UK and Europe are unwilling to give up their hostility to Russia, leading to conflict between the US, the UK, and Europe.” The strategy of uniting the US, the UK, and Europe by viewing Russia as their enemy and maintaining the Anglo-American hegemony was essentially a ploy by the former hegemonic power, the Britain, to turn the US’s upper echelons (i.e. the US Intelligence Community), which was supposed to have become a hegemonic power after the War, into puppets, allowing the Britain to continue to control the US hegemonic system (i.e. the world). The US upper echelons before Trump, including the Biden administration, were essentially the “British puppets” and the “British-affiliated,” and the hostility to Russia was used to maintain the British-affiliated control (the upper echelons of Germany, France, the EU, and Japan and Australia are also the British puppets).

• [Trump sides with Russia on claims Ukraine targeted Putin residence]
• [29 times Donald Trump did what Putin wanted]
• [As Trump detonates relationship with Ukraine, Europe has no answer]
• [Opinion | America and Russia Are on the Same Side Now]

The Ukraine War also began as a strategy by the British-affiliated parties to strengthen the US hegemony by viewing Russia as an enemy. However, in reality, that war was planned from the beginning as a plot to cause the British-affiliated parties to self-destruct. Weapons provided to Ukraine by the US, the UK, and Europe continued to be destroyed by the Russian forces on the battlefield, the US, the UK, and Europe wasted their military power, furthering their self-destruction, and the war front itself remained deadlocked, with Russia having taken the Donbas region, which it had wanted to recapture, and incorporating it into Russian territory. A scenario where Russia would largely win and the military might of the US, the UK, and Europe would be squandered was established early on. This situation will continue into the future. The Ukraine War will likely continue even at the end of 2026.
(The Perpetuation of the Ukraine War/ウクライナ戦争の永続 )

• [Trump has proven he ‘stands with Russia’ after Ukraine peace talks]
• [Trump and Putin both blame Europe as Ukraine peace effort languishes]
• [‘This is shattering’: Europe reels from Trump’s new world order]

Trump continues to publicly attempt a ceasefire, but in reality, there is no ceasefire, and the farce of ceasefire arbitration continues. This is because Trump is “anti-British,” and the Ukraine War is a plot to destroy Britain. After Trump returned to the presidency, the British in the upper echelons of the US were expelled, and the Democratic Party, a British puppet, will no longer be able to hold power. Trump has removed the US from its British puppet status. In Japan, the Takaichi administration is also beginning to destroy the dictatorial system of the British puppet bureaucracy. Japan will no longer be a British puppet. Australia and others will eventually change. The only remaining British-affiliated countries are the UK, Europe, and the EU. The longer the Ukraine War continues, the more the British-European EU will be trapped in the structure of the war against Russia that is already certain to be lost, wasting their national power and leading to self-destruction. Both Trump and Putin want the British-European EU to self-destruct. The US and Russia will continue to communicate behind the scenes, publicly pretending to be working toward a ceasefire, but in reality there is no ceasefire, and the structure of the Ukraine War will continue until the British-European EU completely self-destructs.

Another war that caused a big stir in 2025 (and is likely to continue indefinitely) was Israel’s Gaza War, or its plan to wipe out Palestine. The Gaza War is also related to the collapse of the British-European hegemony. Israel is intentionally committing heinous crimes against humanity to anger the world. At first glance, it is difficult to understand why they would do such a thing. However, considering that the Palestinian issue was a British plot to weaken Israel, that humanitarianism was a ploy at the core of the British hegemonic strategy, and that Israel, which controls the intelligence community under the Trump administration, has great international political power (hegemony), it is thought that Israel is trying to neutralize the British, along with their humanitarianism, by showing the world that they will not be crushed even if they commit serious crimes against humanity, but will instead rise to power.

(The ongoing Gaza war/ずっと続くガザ戦争）

Israel (the Jews) are the originators of espionage and hegemony. The British hegemony (i.e. the British Empire), the first world empire in human history, used the skills of Jewish intelligence networks such as the Rothschilds to secretly manipulate the world and establish and maintain its hegemony. After World War II, Israel separated from the British Empire, and the British tactics to weaken Israel to prevent it from using intelligence to expand its own hegemony or rise to rival the British included the “Partition of Palestine” to reduce Israel’s territory (and the establishment of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon), and the “Middle East War,” in which the British used their intelligence to manipulate the Arab countries into permanent war with Israel.

• [Rothschild & Co]
• [The Rothschilds — The First Global Intelligence Network]
• [British Empire | History, Countries, Map, Size, & Facts]

Since the transfer of global hegemony from Britain to the United States at the end of World War II, there has been a secret struggle among the upper echelons of the Britain and the United States between Americans (such as Rockefeller, the hidden multipolar faction) who wanted to break up global hegemony into a multipolar system, and the British forces who wanted to maintain the British sole hegemony. The British started the Cold War to contain the multipolar faction, while the multipolar faction deliberately waged the Vietnam War in a childish and extreme manner, causing defeat and causing the self-destruction of hegemony, leading to reconciliation between the United States and China and the United States and the Soviet Union.

[The Hegemon’s Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the International Economic Order]

With the Cold War coming to an end, the British, in order to restore the hegemonic structure of “Britain, America, Europe vs. enemy forces,” plotted a second Cold War-style “clash of civilizations” by portraying the Islamic world as the enemy. They also tried to deceive Israel, which was showing signs of rising power, and fit it into the divisive structure of the second Cold War (this part is a new theory in this article). This led to the Oslo Accords, a plan to end the Palestinian issue by creating a Palestinian state/Palestinian authority (PA) as a puppet of Israel. The Palestinian state under the Oslo Accords was a puppet state that did not border the Jordan River, was completely surrounded by Israel, and would be under the Israeli supervision in terms of finances, infrastructure, and security. Israel (the Labor Party government) decided that this would not pose a threat, so it welcomed Arafat and concluded the Oslo Accords.

However, the Oslo Accords were likely a trap set by the British to deceive Israel (my own new theory). Around the same time, the US began to talk about a “clash of civilizations,” which led to the Clinton administration’s hostile policies toward the Taliban (a shift from Afghanistan-approaching policies such as the Unocal Pipeline proposal to hostility toward the Taliban, including policies regarding “rogue states”), and increased hostility toward the Islamic world. If Israel had continued to move forward with the establishment of a Palestinian state, around the time the Palestinian state was completed and a lightly armed police force was formed around 2000, relations between the increasingly Islamist Palestinians and liberal Israel, which was far more humanitarian-oriented than it is today, would have deteriorated, and Israel would have been permanently plagued by internal instability on the verge of a civil war.

• [Taliban Oil | Taliban]
• [Unocal Archives – Page 2 of 2 – International Center for 9/11 Justice]
• [The Afghan Oil Pipeline and the US Negotiations with the Taliban]
• [Afghanistan Pipeline Politics & And The US Oil, Gas Interests]

In fact, before the Anglo-Japanese War started the Second Cold War and revived its sole hegemony, the anti-British American hidden multipolar factions colluded with Israel and right-wing Jewish Americans (Likud faction), and this led to Israel’s hostility toward Palestine, its rightward shift, and its anti-liberalization, which began with the assassination of Rabin and the rapid expansion of settlements. The Likud faction infiltrated and hijacked the US Intelligence Community, posing as a working force advancing the “Clash of Civilizations” plot originally conceived by the British faction. This transformed the anti-Islamic policy, which was meant to be expanded covertly, into the extravagant, radical, and naive war on terror, which saw the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War. My new hypothesis is that the Likud faction hijacked the war on terror, originally conceived by the British faction as a second Cold War against the Islamic world, midway through, and instigated the heinous 9/11 attacks and Iraq War, which the British faction had not intended, thereby radicalizing and naive the strategy and transforming it into a plan to destroy the US and British hegemony. The hidden multipolar faction invited the Likud faction to undermine the Oslo Accords, the 9/11 attacks, and the takeover of the US Intelligence Community, thereby destroying their rival, the British faction. Plot takeovers and impersonation (piggybacking) of intelligence agents are not uncommon in the intelligence community.

(The Gaza massacre as a strategy to crush British interests/英国系潰し策としてのガザ虐殺 )

Following the 9/11 attacks, the US Intelligence Community, which had been responsible for managing the US hegemony, was taken over by the Likud faction, and the original masterminds, the British, were driven out. The arrival of Trump marked the completion of the Likud takeover of the US Intelligence Community (the Intelligence Community deliberately corrupted the Democratic Party to cause Trump’s defeat in the election in order to start the Ukraine War, and then allowed him to return to power). The Gaza War began in the fall of 2024, shortly after Trump’s return to office was virtually certain (a plan to lure Hamas into an invasion). Immediately after the war began, the trend toward ethnic cleansing and the complete destruction of Gaza City became apparent. Gazans, who had previously refused to flee Gaza City to the south despite Israeli threats, began fleeing en masse to the south

• [Intelligence Community | Office of the Director of National Intelligence]
• [The Intelligence Community’s Politicization: Dueling to Discredit]
• [Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”: Predicting Future Global Conflicts]

Once Trump’s return to office was certain, the British faction was crushed globally, the US sole hegemony was eliminated, and a shift to a multipolar world was decided. Israel launched the Gaza War to eliminate Palestine upon the confirmation of Trump’s return to power, in order to prevent the multipolar world from pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian state. The Gaza War will not cease anytime soon. A ceasefire would mean demands to rebuild Gaza City (i.e. Palestine). Globally, it is the liberal left and Islamists who continue to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, both of whom are (inadvertently) puppets of the British. If the British continue to self-destruct and their power becomes irreversibly reduced to zero, the liberal left and Islamists calling for the creation of a Palestinian state will also change their thinking. This will significantly weaken the global push for humanitarianism. Until then, Israel will leave Gaza a pile of rubble while expanding its humanitarian crimes in the West Bank. The far-right around the world, friendly with Trump and Israel, disregards humanitarianism and is harsh on Muslims.

Israel (Likud faction), which took over the US Intelligence Community, has gained enormous international political power. The Likud faction took over the British sole hegemony without any change. While this sole hegemony is collapsing, it still retains some degree of power. Israel is using this remaining hegemony to strengthen its ties with countries around the world. Islamic countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Somaliland are deepening their diplomatic ties with Israel without criticizing the humanitarian crimes committed in the Gaza War. Trump, relying on the intelligence power he has taken over by Israel, has repeatedly implemented measures to support Israel. This also strengthens Israel. The more international political power (hegemony) Israel exerts, the more countries refrain from criticizing it.

Among the BRICS, China, South Africa, and Brazil previously supported Palestine, but China has recently stopped supporting Palestine. South Africa filed a lawsuit against Israel with the ICJ, but has faced retaliation, including sanctions from Trump. Israel is propping up the right-wing Milley government in neighboring Argentina in order to undermine Brazil’s left-wing government. Brazil’s left-wing government imprisoned Jair Bolsonaro, his right-wing predecessor, but thanks to Israeli and Trump intelligence, Bolsonaro will eventually be acquitted and either he or his son will return to the presidency.

The Ukraine and Gaza Wars are still ongoing, as they are related to the “suppression of the British colonies” and the “multipolarization of the world order”. These wars will not end by the end of 2026. There are also stories about Israel’s expansion of hegemony that I have not yet analyzed. For example, there is a story that the formation of the Takaichi administration in Japan could become one way of containing China’s expansion over Israel’s hegemony. [The author’s self-talk] → I always spend ages explaining basic (repetitive) things before writing about the main point, and end up not getting to write the main point.

[Colonialism and imperialism: Understanding the British Empire’s quest for global dominance]

[The Rise Of A Multipolar World Order: The West Just Watched The World Shift]

[Hegemony or Normalization: Israel’s Future in the Middle East]

• [Unraveling China’s Grand Strategy: Its Aim is to Erode U.S. Global Hegemony, Not Seek World Domination]
• [China adjusts to Middle East turbulence in 2025, faces challenges in Iran, Yemen]

__________________________

Notes:

1. The underlined hyperlinks with the parentheses ( ) under some paragraphs above were added by the original author.
2. Those hyperlinks in the paragraphs and those with underlined brackets [ ] with the italic letters under some paragraphs were added by the translator for the convenience of the reader.
3. The views and/or opinions in those hyperlinks added by the translator do not necessarily reflect those of his.
4. The verification of the genuineness of the information in these links is unavailable for the translator. He does not take any responsibility for the contents in those relevant links at all.
5. The views and/or opinions expressed in the above-mentioned article, written by Sakai Tanaka, the original author, do not necessarily reflect those of the translator. Therefore, the readers are kindly requested to interpret, understand or judge the contents in those hyperlinks at his or her own responsibility.

________________________

Translation:  Satoshi Ashikaga — Google Translate

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Ann Garrison and Jamal Abdulahi

2 Jan 2026 – Israel has declared its intent to expand into the geostrategic Red Sea Region by recognizing Northern Somalia’s secessionist state, but Somalia and much of the rest of the world are pushing back hard. No other nations followed suit and only the US was supportive.

There Is No “Somaliland”: Hargeisa Controls Only Half Its Former Territory

On December 26, 2025, in a move that sent shockwaves around the world, Israel announced that it was formally recognising “Somaliland,” a secessionist region in Northern Somalia that has been seeking independence since the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991.

However, “Somaliland” no longer exists within the boundaries it claims in Northern Somalia. The authorities in Hargeisa, the capital of “Somaliland,” control approximately 60 percent of its former territory consequent to a conflict it lost in a civil war in August 2023. Roughly 30 to 40 percent is now the North Eastern State, a Federal Member State of Somalia, one of its seven Federal Member States with their own security forces and administration, and some undetermined percentage more is held by Puntland and the Warsangali sub-clan.

Djibouti, a small one-city country which is north of “Somaliland” with a predominantly Somali population, has been startled by Hargeisa’s aggressive and reckless pursuit for recognition and thus started organizing some of the communities in Awdal to resist.

The people of Awdal, which makes up another ten percent of “Somaliland” territory, are also defying Hargeisa’s authority.

The World Awakens to “Somaliland”

Most of the world had given little if any thought to “Somaliland” before December 26, but suddenly they saw Israel expanding into the Red Sea region bordering both West Asia and North Africa, where maritime security is crucial to the global supply chains that the world depends on. Roughly one-third of the world’s trade passes through the Red Sea, and its choke points on the Suez Canal and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait make them the most contested waterways in the world.

Awareness of their geostrategic significance grew in March 2021, when the massive container ship Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days, causing huge global trade disruption, and then again in November 2023, when the Houthis began firing at ships associated with Israel in the Red Sea to support the Palestinian people.

Dr. Dan Diker, President of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, stated in an X social media discussion that the first component of Israel’s strategic thinking was “securing the Red Sea.” A base in Somaliland would be a perfect place to launch strikes against the Houthis, whose leader was quick to warn that they would target any Israeli presence in “Somaliland.”

Dr. Diker also stated that “Somaliland” had “generously” agreed to accept up to 1.5 million Palestinian exiles and that President Trump had been made aware of the offer. Diker is also longtime Director of the Jerusalem Center’s Counter-Political Warfare Project, and former Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress.

Regional capitals and organizations scrambled to respond. The African Union (AU), Arab League (AL), Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), East African Community (EAC), and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) all vehemently came out against Israel’s decision. The EU followed suit.

Eritrea, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Djibouti, and Algeria added their own condemnation to that of their respective political blocs, as did the Palestinian Authority. Ethiopia, Kenya, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all of which have ties to both “Somaliland” and Israel, chose not to respond.

China, which has viewed “Somaliland” as equivalent to Taiwan, adamantly reaffirmed its support for the territorial integrity of Somalia. The secessionist state has no hope of becoming a UN member state in the foreseeable future because China would without a doubt veto its acceptance at the UN Security Council.

Turkiye, which has a large economic and military footprint in Somalia and Ethiopia, objected to Israel’s entrance in the race to dominate the Red Sea. Israel recently entered an economic and military cooperation agreement with two of Turkiye’s neighbors and historical nemeses, Cyprus and Greece. Some analysts surmised that Israel and Turkey are taking their competition for global influence to the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.

Israel Is a Global Pariah–Somalis Passionately Support Palestinians

Markus Virgil Hoehne, a noted German anthropologist and expert on Northern Somalia, weighed in on X to say that Israel is a pariah, now isolated on the international stage, and that no other nation has yet indicated it will follow its reckless lead and recognise “Somaliland.”

Somalia is one of the 29 UN member states that do not recognise Israel. It has officially and unequivocally stood with the Palestinian people since its independence in 1960. Many Somalis took to the streets waving both Palestinian and Somali flags shortly after Netanyahu and “Somaliland” President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi announced their new alliance.

“Somaliland” itself was never an oasis of stability and mature democracy as portrayed by the secessionist movement. Although relatively stable for some years, it was never free of the troubles that plague the rest of the country, including religious extremism and the clan conflict that finally erupted into civil war and led to the loss of half its territory in 2023.Now the Isaaq clan, which controls Hargeisa, may be rent asunder or even descend into civil war over the alliance with Israel because Somalis in “Somaliland” are as passionately pro-Palestinian as Somalis in the rest of Somalia. A prominent “Somaliland” cleric, Sheikh Mohamed Kariye was arrested almost as soon as Israel made its announcement. He said: “It is an honor to be arrested for opposing Netanyahu.”

“Somaliland” in the US National Defense Authorization Act

On December 29, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on Israel’s recognition of Somalia at Somalia’s request. There the US alone stood with Israel. US Deputy Ambassador Tammy Bryce angrily and defiantly declared that “Israel has the same right as any other sovereign state to form bilateral relations,” and that several Council members had, earlier this year, “unilaterally recognised a non-existent Palestinian state” without triggering an emergency meeting.

Bryce also said that the US is not announcing any plan to recognise “Somaliland,” but in fact the US has for years maintained bilateral relations with Hargeisa, bypassing Mogadishu, most of all as a military partner. This has been a blatant but informal violation of Somalia’s sovereignty.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a massive document that annually delineates US defense expenditures, has been gradually laying groundwork for a larger American footprint in northern Somalia, most importantly for a military base in Berbera Port, which Hargeisa controls. Berbera sits on prime coastal property, along the northern edge of the Gulf of Aden, very close to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. It’s a perfect location for the US and Israel to launch strikes against the Houthis and further project power in the Red Sea.

The Fiscal Year 2023 NDAA required the Department of Defense (DoD) to study the issue and controversially referred to “Somaliland” at least 12 times, far more than to any actual African nation. Hargeisa crowed that recognition was on the way, but it didn’t come.

The signed version of the 2026 NDAA requires that the expansion work for a military base in Berbera Port be implemented, but again without recognising “Somaliland” as a sovereign nation. It nevertheless makes way for a clear platform for US and Israeli military collaboration

Why hasn’t the US gone ahead and recognised “Somaliland”? There’s a sizable lobby for it, including the Heritage Foundation and New Cold Warrior Senator Ted Cruz, who proposes that it would make way for a splendid US/Israel/Taiwan/Somaliland Pact. In 2025, Pennsylvania House Rep. Scott Perry introduced the Somaliland Independence Act, which has since been referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

However, the US doesn’t need to recognise “Somaliland” to gain the strategic advantages it seeks. Hargeisa is already as welcoming as it could be, never standing in the way of US military expansion. The global pushback against Israel may have given the Trump Administration pause about acquiescing to the lobby, especially since it’s already getting all it needs strategically.

Israel had more reason to recognise. It can now claim to be expelling Palestinians in accordance with a bilateral agreement between nations it considers sovereign. It gives them something to say that can at least be argued. Never mind that it’s ethnic cleansing, which falls within the scope of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the UN Genocide Convention.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni,

“We always pray for peace. But unfortunately, we have gotten into a rocky start for 2026,” Larry C. Johnson, former Central Intelligence Agency analyst told his Norwegian interviewer and International Relations Professor Glen Diesen in Oslo on 4 January.

Of course, Johnson was referring to Washington’s most recent brazen act of attacking Venezuela and kidnapping its sitting President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, former head of the National Assembly in the wee hours of January 3

To belabour the obvious, US President Donald J. Trump is proving to be yet another aggressor in the White House despite the schizophrenic claims that he has ended eight wars, for which he practically demanded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

For the coveted “peace” prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, however, opted for a more suitable candidate, whom the committee gift-wrapped as “a democrat”. Her qualification?

At “America Business Forum” recently, the Venezuelan democrat announced, via a giant monitor, to the audience of greedy-eyed global businessmen and -women, that she will, in effect, pimp Venezuela, “upstream, downstream, midstream,” for the grand commercial opening. “Privatization”, and guaranteed “safety for foreign investment, ”in her words. All this, to the tune of $1 .7 trillion (i.e., $ 1,700 billion), presumably largely in the oil and gas sector. To the interested corporate representatives while throwing in a huge bonus of “2,800 km of pristine Caribbean coastline” for hoteliers, developers, tourism industrialists and so on.

In the pundit-sphere, a lot of ink has been spilled and many an expertly words have been spoken, in the last 24 hours since the US Delta Force’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president and his wife. The operative word that keeps coming up is “imperialism” of the United States whose business has always been business, that is, accumulation of wealth – in land, resources, profits, cheap labour, consumer markets and banking.

Some analysts rightly connect the dots between Israel’s coming big war with Iran and Trump-Rubio-Hegseth’s crime of aggression–a charge senior Nazi officials faced at the Nuremberg in 1945-46–against Venezuela, with its world’s largest known, but untapped deposit of oil. [Hitler wanted land “in the East of Germany (Eastern Europe) for his chosen people of Aryan and Trump wanted oil in Washington’s “Latin backyard” for his chosen circle of US oligarchs.]

When – not if –in the coming weeks or months, Israel attacks Iran’s missile facilities and whatever else the genocidal Jewish supremacists in Tel Aviv feel like taking out in the coming months it is widely expected that Iran will shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which passes 20% of the global oil flow, as an act of retaliation, in addition to striking US bases across West Asia.

It appears that the US invasion of Venezuela for regime change for oil control in Caracas kills two birds with a single stone: as criminal as it is, the act enables Washington to pre-emptively acquire a massive mitigating alternative to the oil from the Middle East in the face of a likely economic fallout from the US-backed Israel’s war with Iran, while it is pregnant with massive oil bonanza for the Big Oil in USA, which had been shut out by the socialist-leaning policies that the late Hugo Chavez instituted. Chavez’s rationale was straightforward: Venezuela’s lucrative resources must be used for the welfare of the Venezuelan public the majority of whom were unemployed and poverty-stricken.

Obviously, the Big Oil drills on foreign soil not for the local people in any oil rich country, but for the shareholders at home in the USA – or for that matter, UK, Canada, France, Italy, etc. So, a foreign leader anchors his government on this oil-for-welfare, he or she is viewed unfavourably by the Free Marketeers of Global North (that is, formerly colonizing Europe and its settler colonial offshoots of which the United States is the most ruthless case of White Supremacist genocidal success).

As the cancerous mindset and politico-economic system aimed at sucking the planet and people dry by any means necessary, imperialism is antithesis of what is referred to as “humanity”. This is universally applicable to all strains of imperialism, dating back to the days of such darkly iconic fortune-diggers as Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes who led the plunder in the Caribbean, the New World.

Over the last 500 years, the list of lucrative resources which the White Men of “the Judeo-Christian Civilization” have sought after have changed. From spices, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, tea, copper, silver and gold to the Black Gold of gas and oil and rare earth minerals.

The tribal backgrounds of largely white men leading the packs of Europe’s (and subsequently West’s) royally patronized and God-blessed plunderers and looters have changed from Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, British, Italian or German to North Americans.

But the methodologies, the narratives and the vocabularies these Nuremberg-worthy “civilizational” criminals, and their “democratic” regimes, deploy remain more or less the same.

Enter “Propagation of the Gospel”, “bringing Light to the dark corners of Heathens, “Civilizing Mission”, “Progress and productive uses of the soil”, democracy, human rights, and freedom, “anti or counterterrorism”, women’s liberation and so on.

If one takes a close look what has been promoted as part of this Imperialist Design rooted in “Christian Europe” and, since the Palestinian revolt on 7 October 2023, “Judeo-Christian Civilization”, peace is never a value, a political vocabulary, a policy objective.

And yet peace is the essential pre-condition for life as we know it, for all humans, animals and their/our shared ecosystems.

For (Western) imperialism has aimed to conquer, control, dominate and decimate local populations for want of their land, labour and resources, above and underground, with some ruptures over the last five hundred years.

As such, it is the highest stage of organized tyranny marked by mass murder and loot. It has remained a quintessentially European/Western in form, essence and operation, aided by its technological superiority. Its foundation is the absence of universal humanity.

Europe as we know it lacks any potential or prospect for self-enlightenment, despite its claim to the contrary.

As the latter-day conquistadores like Donald Trump and his European sycophants heading the old genocidal European states cannot be reasoned with or appealed to their humanity. For they have displayed none that qualifies as human decency, empathy or conscience.

These 21st century conquistadors and their policies of plunder must be resisted worldwide.

No one knows this centuries-old White Supremacy Criminal Enterprise packaged as “Judeo-Christian Civilization” better than enslaved Africans. Over the last nearly four decades of my trans-national activism, I have always gone to the corpus of grounded wisdom that the freed men of African origin have gifted We the People, including Frantz Fanon and Frederick Douglas.

I will leave this editorial note with two short quotes by Frederick Douglas, a born slave on a plantation in Maryland, outside of American imperialists’ swamp known as Washington, DC. two hundred years ago.

Advocating for active resistance for one’s freedom, the self-freed man wrote:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

In the opening of this editorial, I quoted the former CIA agent Larry C. Johnson, now a vocal critic of his former employer, the United States, who talked of praying for peace. Douglass had a more practical piece of advice.

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

We must pray with our resistance. For imperialists are not peaceable.

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

5 January 2026

Source: transcend.org