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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

By Tunç Türel

The year 2026 marks the eighty-third anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. The battle was not merely a decisive military engagement in the Second World War, but a historical rupture that reshaped the trajectory of the 20th century. Fought between August 1942 and February 1943, it marked the first total strategic defeat of Nazi Germany and shattered the myth of fascist invincibility upon which Hitler’s war of conquest depended. Yet in much of today’s dominant historical memory, particularly in the Anglophone world, Stalingrad is reduced to a dramatic episode, abstracted from its political meaning and severed from its consequences. This minimization is not accidental. To acknowledge Stalingrad as the turning point of the war is to acknowledge the centrality of the Soviet Union in the defeat of fascism, and, by extension, to confront the uncomfortable fact that the greatest victory over Nazism was achieved not by liberal capitalism, but by a socialist state fighting for its very survival.

In Western historiography and popular culture, the narrative of the Second World War has been persistently reorganized to center the United States and its allies as the principal agents of fascism’s defeat, while the Soviet contribution is treated as secondary, incidental, or morally compromised. Hollywood’s fixation on the Normandy landings in June 1944, the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, and the Pacific theater stands in stark contrast to the relative silence surrounding the Eastern Front, where the war was decided. This imbalance is not a matter of oversight, but of ideology. From the early Cold War onward, the memory of the war was refashioned to reconcile two incompatible facts: that Nazism was the greatest crime of the 20th century, and that it was defeated primarily by a socialist state. The result has been a systematic downplaying of Soviet military, economic, and human sacrifice, replaced by a depoliticized narrative in which fascism collapses under the abstract weight of “Allied unity,” rather than being crushed through a protracted and devastating class war in the East.

Already in 1941, Operation Barbarossa was conceived not as a conventional military campaign, like those the Nazi war machine had conducted in the Low Countries or in France in 1940, but as a war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg), aimed at the physical destruction of the Soviet state and the biological, social, and political eradication of entire populations. Nazi strategy in the East fused military conquest with genocide: the planned starvation of tens of millions, the extermination of Jews, Roma, communists, and Soviet officials, and the reduction of Slavic peoples to a reservoir of slave labor.[1] As historian Stephen G. Fritz writes:

“Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), overwhelmingly young men and women, often just teenagers (their average age was twenty), were put to work, normally in deplorable conditions, in the Reich’s factories, mines, and fields. By the end of July, over 5 million foreign workers were employed in Germany, while, by the summer of 1943, the total foreign workforce had risen to 6.5 million, a figure that would increase by the end of 1944 to 7.9 million. By that time, foreign workers accounted for over 20 percent of the total German workforce, although, in the armaments sector, the figure topped 33 percent. In some specific factories and production lines, foreign workers routinely exceeded 40 percent of the total; indeed, by the summer of 1943, the Stuka dive bomber was, as Erhard Milch boasted, being “80% manufactured by Russians.” [2]

The Wehrmacht was not a neutral instrument dragged unwillingly into this project, but an active participant in it. Stalingrad must be situated within this context. It was not simply a battle for territory or supply routes, but a decisive moment in a war whose objectives were openly colonial and genocidal. To lose at Stalingrad was, for the Nazi leadership, to confront the first concrete limits of a project premised on unlimited violence.

The Eastern Front was not one theater of the war among others; it was the war. Between 1941 and 1944, the overwhelming majority of German military forces were deployed against the Soviet Union. “By October 1, 1943, some 2,565,000 soldiers—63 percent of the Wehrmacht’s total strength—were fighting in the East, as were the bulk of the 300,000 Waffen SS troops,” write historians David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House. “On June 1, 1944, a total of 239 German division equivalents, or 62 percent of the entire force, were on the Eastern front.”[3] And it was there that the Wehrmacht suffered the vast bulk of its casualties. Approximately three-quarters of all German military deaths occurred on the Eastern Front, as did the destruction of entire armies whose loss could never be replaced. By comparison, the Western Front—while militarily and politically significant—opened only after the Red Army had already broken the backbone of Nazi military power. Stalingrad stands as the clearest expression of this asymmetry. It was on the banks of the Volga, not the beaches of Normandy, that the strategic initiative of the war was irreversibly seized from Hitler’s Germany.

The scale of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad cannot be understood without confronting the scale of the disaster that preceded it. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army was caught profoundly unprepared for a war of such speed, coordination, and technological concentration. Entire formations were encircled and destroyed, millions of soldiers were killed or captured, and vast territories were overrun within months. This unpreparedness was not simply military, but structural: a rapidly industrializing socialist state faced an existential assault from the most advanced war machine capitalism had yet produced, backed by the resources of occupied Europe. Stalingrad therefore did not emerge from a position of strength, but from the edge of collapse. That the Soviet Union was able to absorb these blows, reorganize its economy, relocate its industry, and reconstruct its armed forces under conditions of total war is itself one of the most extraordinary, and least acknowledged, achievements of the twentieth century.

Stalingrad marked the moment when the Nazi war machine ceased to advance and began, irreversibly, to bleed. The German offensive toward the Volga in the summer of 1942 was intended to secure oil resources, sever Soviet transport routes, and deliver a symbolic blow to the heart of the Soviet state. Instead, it culminated in a protracted urban battle that nullified Germany’s operational advantages and drew its forces into a war of attrition it could not win. Street by street, factory by factory, the Red Army transformed Stalingrad into a killing ground that consumed entire German divisions. The encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army was not merely a tactical defeat; it was the first time a full German field army was annihilated, rather than forced to withdraw. From this point forward, the strategic initiative passed decisively to the Soviet Union, and with it the fate of the war.

The victory at Stalingrad was purchased at a human cost almost without precedent, borne overwhelmingly by Soviet soldiers and civilians whose lives were subordinated to the imperatives of collective survival. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble; hunger, exposure, and exhaustion were as lethal as artillery and bombs. Yet what distinguished Stalingrad was not simply endurance, but the social form that endurance took. The defense of the city relied on mass mobilization, political commitment, and a degree of collective discipline that cannot be explained through coercion alone. Workers fought in the ruins of the factories they had built; civilians sustained production and logistics under bombardment; soldiers held positions measured in meters, not kilometers. These were not abstract acts of patriotism, but expressions of a society fighting a war that threatened its very existence, and in which defeat meant not occupation, but annihilation.

The impact of Stalingrad extended far beyond the battlefield, reshaping the political and strategic landscape of the entire war. For the first time since 1939, fascist expansion was not merely slowed, but decisively reversed, sending shockwaves through Axis leaderships and occupied Europe alike. Just prior to the invasion Hitler had told to his generals, “We need only to kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” For Hitler, and it should be said, for many of his generals and for large sections of the German population, the Soviet military was assumed to be incapable of matching the Wehrmacht. It was dismissed as rotten and weak, supposedly reflecting the inferiority of the peoples who made up the Soviet Union. This assumption, however, proved catastrophically false. The Red Army did not simply absorb defeat, it learned from it. Through bitter experience, it mastered the modern art of war, refining and applying the tactical and operational concepts of Deep Battle and Deep Operation with increasing effectiveness.[4] But not only that, resistance movements across the continent drew renewed confidence from the defeat of the German Sixth Army, while Allied strategic calculations were fundamentally altered by the realization that the Red Army would carry the war westward. Stalingrad also punctured the ideological aura of inevitability that had surrounded Nazi conquest, demonstrating that fascism could be defeated through sustained mass resistance rather than diplomatic maneuvering or technological superiority alone. From this point onward, the question was no longer whether Germany would lose the war, but how quickly and at what further human cost. That cost was determined by the increasingly fanatical resistance of Hitler’s army and the continued political and social support it received from large sections of German society.[5]

By the war’s end, the scale of the Soviet Union’s sacrifice dwarfed that of all other Allied powers. Approximately twenty-seven million Soviet citizens, soldiers and civilians alike, were killed, entire regions were devastated, and much of the country’s industrial and agricultural base lay in ruins. These losses were not incidental to victory; they were its material foundation. Yet in the postwar order that emerged under U.S. hegemony, this reality was increasingly obscured. As Cold War antagonisms hardened, Soviet suffering was detached from Soviet achievement, acknowledged in numbers but stripped of political meaning. Stalingrad was recast as a tragic episode rather than a decisive triumph, its significance diluted to accommodate a narrative in which socialism could not be credited with saving Europe from fascism. The debt owed to the Red Army was thus transformed into an ideological inconvenience—one to be minimized, relativized, or forgotten altogether.

This distortion of Stalingrad’s meaning is not confined to the past; it is an active political process in the present as well. Across Europe and North America, with the help of bourgeois historians and researchers; movies or video games, which form key components of the superstructure; the historical record of the Second World War is increasingly rewritten through the lens of anticommunism, equating fascism and socialism while obscuring the genocidal character of Nazi war aims. In this revisionist framework, the Red Army appears not as a force of liberation, but as a symmetrical oppressor, and the annihilation war waged against the Soviet Union is displaced by narratives of abstract “totalitarianism.” Such distortions serve contemporary imperial interests, legitimizing the rehabilitation of far-right movements, the militarization of historical memory, and the normalization of endless war. To remember Stalingrad accurately is therefore not an act of nostalgia, but an act of resistance against the political uses of forgetting.

Stalingrad offers no comfortingly simple lessons, but it does offer clarity. It demonstrates that fascism is not defeated by moral appeals, institutional gradualism, or abstract commitments to “democracy,” but through organized, collective struggle capable of confronting imperial violence at its roots. It reveals the scale of sacrifice demanded when capitalist crisis turns toward exterminatory war, and the price paid when such a war is allowed to advance unchecked. Above all, Stalingrad affirms that history is not moved by inevitability, but by mass action under conditions of extreme constraint. The Soviet victory was neither accidental nor preordained, it was forged through political will, social mobilization, and a readiness to endure losses that liberal societies—then and now—prefer not to imagine.

As the anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad is marked, the question is not simply how the battle is remembered, but who controls its meaning. To treat Stalingrad as a distant tragedy or a neutral military episode is to evacuate it of the historical force it still carries. It was there that the Nazi project of annihilation was broken, and it was there that the fate of the war, and of millions beyond the battlefield, was decisively altered. At a moment when fascism is again normalized, imperial war once more presented as necessity, and socialism routinely dismissed as historical error, Stalingrad stands as an enduring counterpoint. It reminds us that the greatest defeat of fascism in history was achieved through collective resistance, social organization, and the uncompromising defense of a future that, at the time, could not yet be guaranteed.

Notes
[1] Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), xx; Hans Heer and Christian Streit, Vernichtungskrieg im Osten: Judenmord, Kriegsgefangene und Hungerpolitik, 2020.

[2] Fritz, Ostkrieg, 222. Milch was the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation from 1933 to 1944 and Inspector General of the Luftwaffe from 1939 to 1945.

[3] David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 357.

[4] David M. Glantz, Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle (New York: Frank Cass, 1991).

[5] Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 (New York: Basic, 2015).

Tunç Türel is an Ancient Historian and a member of the Workers’ Party of Türkiye.

29 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

The Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has become a widely recognized symbol of the threats to life and life-nurturing conditions of our planet. The closer this gets to midnight, the greater the threat of catastrophe. In 2025 this was placed at 89 seconds to midnight and in a very recently released statement in year 2026 this has been placed at 85 seconds to midnight. In other words, the world came closer to catastrophe in year 2025 by 4 seconds. In our opinion, this seriously underestimates the new dangers that were created in 2025 by the breakdown of whatever international rules based order existed earlier in poor health and in fragments, and by a series of highly aggressive and arbitrary actions taken by the Trump administration in the USA. This is far from fully captured with all its serious implications in the Doomsday Clock Statement (DCS) 2026. Despite this failure, the DMC nevertheless remains a very useful document drawing attention to several serious problems albeit with a western bias that generally exists in DCS.

The DCS says, “Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers.”

Further the DCS warns, “Competition among major powers has become a full-blown arms race, as evidenced by increasing numbers of nuclear warheads and platforms in China, and the modernization of nuclear delivery systems in the United States, Russia, and China. The United States plans to deploy a new, multi-layered missile defence system, Golden Dome, that will include space-based interceptors, increasing the probability of conflict in space and likely fuelling a new space-based arms race. As these worrying trends continued, countries with nuclear weapons failed to talk about strategic stability or arms control, much less nuclear disarmament, and questions about US extended deterrence commitments to traditional allies in Europe and Asia led some countries without nuclear weapons to consider acquiring them. As we publish this statement, the last major agreement limiting the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia, New START, is set to expire, ending nearly 60 years of efforts to constrain nuclear competition between the world’s two largest nuclear countries. In addition, the US administration may be considering the resumption of explosive nuclear testing, further accelerating a renewed nuclear arms race.”

Coming to climate change and disasters this report says, “An array of adverse trends also dominated the climate change outlook in the past year. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide—the greenhouse gas most responsible for human-caused climate change—reached a new high, rising to 150 percent of preindustrial levels. Global average temperature in 2024 was the warmest in the 175-year record, and temperatures in 2025 were similar. With the addition of freshwater from melting glaciers and thermal expansion, global average sea level reached a record high. Energized by warm temperatures, the hydrologic cycle became more erratic, with deluges and droughts hopscotching around the globe. Large swaths of Peru, the Amazon, southern Africa, and northwest Africa experienced droughts. For the third time in the last four years Europe experienced more than 60,000 heat-related deaths. Floods in the Congo River Basin displaced 350,000 people, and record rainfall in southeast Brazil displaced over half a million.”

Speaking about a new risk this report tells us, “In December 2024, scientists from nine countries announced the recognition of a potentially existential threat to all life on Earth: the laboratory synthesis of so-called “mirror life.” Those scientists urged that mirror bacteria and other mirror cells—composed of chemically-synthesized molecules that are mirror-images of those found on Earth, much as a left hand mirrors a right hand—not be created, because a self-replicating mirror cell could plausibly evade normal controls on growth, spread throughout all ecosystems, and eventually cause the widespread death of humans, other animals, and plants, potentially disrupting all life on Earth. So far, however, the international community has not arrived at a plan to address this risk.”

“At the same time, the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence poses a different sort of biological threat: the potential for the AI-aided design of new pathogens to which humans have no effective defences. Also, concerns about state-sponsored biological weapons programs have deepened due to the weakening during this past year of international norms and mechanisms for productive engagement.”

On other aspects of AI related threats the DCS states, “The United States, Russia and China are incorporating AI across their defence sectors, despite the potential dangers of such moves. In the United States, the Trump administration has revoked a previous executive order on AI safety, reflecting a dangerous prioritization of innovation over safety. And the AI revolution has the potential to accelerate the existing chaos and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem, supercharging mis- and disinformation campaigns and undermining the fact-based public discussions required to address urgent major threats like nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change.”

The DCS has made a number of important recommendations–

• The United States and Russia can resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals. All nuclear-armed states can avoid destabilizing investments in missile defence and observe the existing moratorium on explosive nuclear testing.
• Through both multilateral agreements and national regulations, the international community can take all feasible steps to prevent the creation of mirror life and cooperate on meaningful measures to reduce the prospect of AI being used to create biological threats.
• The United States Congress can repudiate President Trump’s war on renewable energy, instead providing incentives and investments that will enable rapid reduction in fossil fuel use.
• The United States, Russia, and China can engage in bilateral and multilateral dialogue on meaningful guidelines regarding the incorporation of artificial intelligence in their militaries, particularly in nuclear command and control systems.

There should be more such efforts to draw attention to the survival crisis as the most serious challenge facing humanity. In particular a specific campaign demand for which this writer has been working for several years is that the next decade should be declared by the UN as the Decade for Saving Earth and all its life-forms within a framework of justice and peace. More wide-ranging world governance system changes should be considered seriously to protect the life-nurturing conditions of our planet. Some of these possibilities are discussed by this writer in his book Earth without Borders. The youth in particular should get many more opportunities for creating a new protective world based on peace, justice and protection of environment, instead of merely carrying the burden of the mess that ruling elites of the present and the preceding generation have created.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. 

29  January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ranjan Solomon

Escalating geopolitical tensions in Asia, driven by the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, Taiwan disputes, and Japan’s remilitarization, are reshaping the regional order, creating a “new cold peace” defined by structural suspicion. This shift is marked by a “first island chain” defense strategy aimed at monitoring Chinese naval operations. While some view this as containment of a rising power, others interpret these developments as a potential, albeit gradual, shift in the regional balance of power.

Asia once again finds itself at the centre of a global power struggle not of its own making. The escalating tensions over Taiwan, Japan’s accelerating remilitarisation, and the United States’ strategic pivot toward the Indo-Pacific reveal less about regional insecurity and more about the anxieties of declining empires confronting an irreversible shift in global power. Beneath the language of “democracy,” “rules-based order,” and “freedom of navigation” lies a familiar imperial instinct: to control, contain, and discipline any force that refuses subordination.

At the heart of this manufactured crisis lies a deliberate distortion of history—particularly the one-China principle, which is routinely treated in Western discourse as a negotiable claim rather than what it actually is: a settled international consensus.

As of late 2025 and early 2026, the intersection of the “One China” principle, the revival of historical imperial narratives, and rapid military modernization defines a new era of Chinese assertiveness. Under President Xi Jinping, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is transforming into a world-class force designed to secure national rejuvenation, project power globally, and assert control over territorial claims, with a particular focus on the 2027 centennial goal. The primary driver of China’s military development is the goal of achieving capabilities to seize or coerce Taiwan by 2027. This involves increased PLA incursions, which surged by 200% between 2020 and 2024.

The narrative emphasizes the “integral” nature of territories such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and border regions, framing them as essential to national sovereignty and the end of the “century of humiliation”.

Meanwhile Japan is drifting away from its post-1945 exclusively defensive, pacifist posture (under Article 9 of its constitution) towards becoming a “normal” military power. Since the mid-2000s, and accelerating under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and later Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (as of late 2025/2026), Japan has revised national security documents to focus on “counterstrike capabilities” and a significantly expanded defense budget.

Japan now officially frames China as an “unprecedented strategic challenge” and a “pressing security concern”. This surge in military activity is seen as a return to regional rivalry between China and Japan, echoing the competition for regional dominance during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., the First Sino-Japanese War).

The One-China Principle: An International Settlement, not a Chinese Claim

The question of China’s international representation was conclusively resolved in 1971, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, recognising the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate representative of China. This decision was not procedural housekeeping; it was a decisive geopolitical settlement that reflected historical reality and ended decades of diplomatic fiction. Taiwan was not recognised as a separate sovereign entity, nor was the question left open for reinterpretation at a later date.

Since then, over 180 countries – across continents, ideologies, and political systems—have established diplomatic relations with the PRC on the basis of the one-China principle. This sustained and uniform state practice has elevated the principle to a basic norm of international relations, rooted in both legality and custom. To challenge it today is not to uphold international law but to subvert it in service of strategic objectives.

Yet this is precisely what is happening. Strategic ambiguity is weaponised, diplomatic language is hollowed out, and militarisation is presented as prudence. The burden of instability is shifted onto China, even as external powers inject arms, alliances, and war rhetoric into a region that has no interest in becoming the next global battlefield.

Imperial Memory and the Taiwan Question

The Taiwan question cannot be divorced from the long history of imperial intrusion into China. Taiwan’s separation from the mainland was not the product of self-determination but the outcome of Japanese colonialism and the unresolved legacy of China’s civil war, compounded by Cold War interventions. From the Opium Wars to the Japanese occupation, China’s modern history is marked by humiliation imposed through foreign coercion. Sovereignty, for China, is therefore not an abstract concept—it is existential.

Western powers that once carved China into concessions now present themselves as guardians of its peripheries. The irony is stark. The same forces that denied China sovereignty for over a century now lecture it on restraint, while refusing to apply similar standards to themselves. No Western state would tolerate foreign militarisation along its core territorial claims; yet China is expected to accept precisely that.

Japan’s Dangerous Amnesia

Japan’s re-entry into military assertiveness is particularly troubling. Asia has not forgotten Japan’s imperial past—its invasions, atrocities, and colonial rule across China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. That history is not ancient; it lives in memory, trauma, and unresolved accountability. Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution was not a burden imposed upon it, but a safeguard for the region.

Today, however, Japan seeks strategic relevance through rearmament and alignment with US containment strategies against China. Advanced technology is being repurposed for military expansion, while historical responsibility is quietly sidelined. This is not leadership; it is regression. An Asia that needs trust-building and cooperation is instead being offered missiles and manoeuvres.

The United States and the Fear of Decline

The intensification of the Taiwan issue must also be understood as a symptom of American imperial decline. For the first time since the end of World War II, the United States confronts a power it cannot easily dominate, sanction into submission, or overthrow. China’s rise is not merely economic—it is civilisational.

China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, built the world’s largest industrial base, achieved technological breakthroughs in infrastructure, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and space exploration, and emerged as the primary trading partner for most of the world. Its economic scale now dwarfs all other powers, reshaping supply chains, development models, and global institutions.

This rise did not occur through colonial plunder or military conquest. It emerged through long-term planning, state capacity, and integration with the global economy—often under conditions set by Western institutions. That China succeeded despite these constraints is what unsettles the old order.

Unable to reverse this transformation economically, the United States resorts to militarisation and alliance-building, dragging regional actors into a confrontational posture that benefits none of them. Taiwan becomes a pawn, Japan a forward base, and Asia a theatre of escalation.

Militarisation Is Not Stability

The portrayal of military build-ups as deterrence ignores history’s most basic lesson: arms races create insecurity, not peace. Asia’s future lies not in NATO-style blocs or Cold War revivalism, but in regional autonomy, economic cooperation, and diplomatic maturity. The people of Asia—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Southeast Asian—do not benefit from becoming collateral in great-power rivalries.

To challenge the one-China principle today is therefore not an act of principle but of provocation. It destabilises an established international settlement, erodes global norms, and risks igniting a conflict whose consequences would be catastrophic.

Asia’s Future Lies Beyond Militarisation

Asia stands at a crossroads. It can either allow old empires to redraw its future through force and fear, or it can insist on peace, legality, and sovereignty. The choice should not be difficult.

Asia’s future cannot be built on aircraft carriers, missile shields, or revived military blocs that replicate Europe’s twentieth-century disasters on a far larger scale. It must instead rest on demilitarisation, regional sovereignty, and civilisational dialogue—a conscious rejection of the logic that security is achieved through dominance. Asia is home to the world’s oldest cultures, the majority of its population, and the engines of global growth; its destiny lies in cooperation, trade, cultural exchange, and shared development, not in becoming a permanent theatre for foreign power projection. The militarisation of the Taiwan question, the rearmament of Japan, and the strategic encirclement of China threaten to drag the region into conflicts that serve imperial anxieties rather than Asian interests. To insist on peace in Asia is not naïveté; it is historical wisdom. The one-China principle, upheld through international consensus, offers a framework for stability precisely because it rejects coercion. The real challenge before Asia is not choosing sides in a great-power rivalry, but refusing to inherit the ruins of an empire in decline – and instead asserting a future rooted in dignity, restraint, and peace.

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.

29 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Mohmad Maqbool Waggy

The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2803 on 17th of November 2025 to give effect to what was termed a “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict.” In the heart of this plan is the establishment of a Board of Peace. This Board of Peace is entrusted with the responsibility to reconstruct Gaza and its economic recovery programs, and the coordination and supporting of and delivery of public services and humanitarian assistance in Gaza. This resolution also authorizes the members of the Board of Peace to deploy International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza. Many governments hailed the resolution as a long-awaited breakthrough, an instance of decisive international action after years of devastation in Gaza. Yet implicitly in its humanitarian language lies the undercurrents of deeper and more troubling dilemma. This has been long recognized by scholars of international relations: the tension between sovereignty and trusteeship, relief and justice, external management and self-determination.

The Gaza is effectively placed under a form of international trusteeship by the Resolution 2803. It assigned Palestinians technocratic, and apolitical roles responsible for delivering the day –to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza. While meaningful authority remains with the external actors, the Board of Peace headed by Donald J Trump. This arrangement closely mirrors what Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, in Rules for the World, identify as the bureaucratic authority of international organizations. Such institutions claim legitimacy by presenting governance as technical, neutral, and humanitarian, yet in practice they reproduce existing power hierarchies. The Board of Peace is framed as a humanitarian necessity, but its structure consolidates U.S. and Israeli influence, ensuring that reconstruction aligns with their geopolitical priorities rather than Palestinian political aspirations. This is not peacebuilding rooted in self-governance; it is trusteeship without consent.

The dilemma posed by Resolution 2803 is not new. Roland Paris, in At War’s End, tests the hypothesis that liberalisation promotes peace in conflict-torn states by reviewing the success or failure of every major peacebuilding mission launched between 1989 and 1999: Namibia (1989), Nicaragua (1989), Angola (1991), Cambodia (1991), El Salvador (1991), Mozambique (1992), Liberia (1993), Rwanda (1993), Bosnia (1995), Croatia (1995), Guatemala (1997), East Timor (1999), Kosovo (1999) and Sierra Leone (1999). He famously argued that post-conflict interventions often prioritize “institutionalization before liberalization,” placing societies under external management in the name of stability before allowing meaningful sovereignty or democratic agency. While this model is intended to prevent chaos, it frequently produces a condition of suspended sovereignty. Kosovo remains the clearest illustration. Following NATO’s intervention in 1999, the UN’s interim administration (UNMIK) delivered stability and humanitarian relief, yet left the question of sovereignty unresolved for nearly a decade. Even after Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, its international status remains contested. Humanitarian governance thus produced what might be called a frozen sovereignty, order without resolution.

East Timor offers a contrasting lesson. The UN Transitional Administration (UNTAET) initially marginalized local voices, but crucially, international oversight gave way to full independence in 2002. That transition succeeded not because of prolonged trusteeship, but because trusteeship was explicitly temporary and ultimately relinquished. Gaza now stands at a similar crossroads. Resolution 2803 may deliver immediate relief, but unless Palestinians are recognized and empowered as sovereign political actors, it risks replicating Kosovo’s failures rather than East Timor’s conditional success.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is undeniable. Entire neighbourhoods lie in ruins, healthcare systems operate on the brink of collapse, and generations of children are growing up amid trauma and displacement. Relief is urgent and morally necessary. Yet relief without rights sets a dangerous precedent. Humanitarian aid can alleviate suffering, but when detached from political agency it risks institutionalizing dependency. Palestinians may receive food, medicine, and reconstruction funds, but without sovereignty they remain subjects of external administration rather than citizens shaping their own future. This is precisely the danger identified by David Chandler in his critique of liberal peacebuilding. Chandler argues that such interventions often produce a “post-liberal peace”: stability without sovereignty, governance without accountability, and order without justice. Resolution 2803 risks reproducing this model in Gaza, a managed calm that defers, rather than resolves, the underlying political question.

The legitimacy of Resolution 2803 is therefore deeply contested. Although it passed with 13 votes in favour and none against, the abstentions of Russia and Algeria signalled unease within the Security Council itself. More critically, Palestinians were side-lined during negotiations. This raises a fundamental question: can international governance ever be legitimate when it excludes the very population it claims to protect? As Barnett and Finnemore remind us, international organizations exercise authority through bureaucratic rationality, masking political choices as technical imperatives. The Board of Peace embodies this logic. Reconstruction is framed as an administrative necessity, obscuring the reality of external control. Yet legitimacy cannot be manufactured through humanitarian language alone; it requires consent. Palestinians have not consented to governance by a body dominated by actors widely viewed as complicit in their dispossession.

The regional politics surrounding Resolution 2803 further expose its contradictions. Pakistan’s decision to join the Board of Peace in January 2026 triggered significant domestic backlash. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly formally rejected the move, while opposition parties accused the government of subordinating the Palestinian cause to U.S. strategic interests. India’s position is more ambivalent. Historically, India was among the earliest and most vocal supporters of Palestinian self-determination. Jawaharlal Nehru opposed the 1947 partition plan, and India voted against Israel’s admission to the UN in 1949. For decades, Palestinian sovereignty formed a core pillar of India’s non-aligned foreign policy. Since the 1990s, however, India has deepened strategic ties with Israel, particularly in defence and technology. Today, New Delhi attempts to balance its historical commitments with contemporary geopolitical partnerships, often resulting in cautious or muted responses. Resolution 2803 places India in a delicate position: endorsing the Board risks complicity in side-lining Palestinian sovereignty, while opposing it risks diplomatic costs. For a state aspiring to global leadership, silence is not neutrality, it is abdication.

From an international relations perspective, Resolution 2803 invites multiple readings. Realists see power politics cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric, with the Board of Peace consolidating U.S. and Israeli influence. Liberals emphasize multilateral cooperation, but one distorted by asymmetrical power. Constructivists highlight the normative contradiction between self-determination and trusteeship, while critical theorists see global governance reproducing hierarchies that marginalize voices from the Global South. Despite their differences, these perspectives converge on a common conclusion: Resolution 2803 may stabilize Gaza materially, but it undermines its political future. It manages conflict without resolving it.

The implications extend far beyond Gaza. Resolution 2803 speaks to the future of global governance itself. Can international institutions provide humanitarian relief without eroding sovereignty? Can peace be constructed without justice? Can those most affected by intervention meaningfully shape the structures imposed upon them? The Board of Peace is a test case. If it evolves into a mechanism that genuinely empowers Palestinians, it could signal a new model of intervention that reconciles relief with self-determination. If it does not, it will reinforce long-standing critiques of international governance as paternalism cloaked in humanitarian language.

Resolution 2803 may ultimately be remembered as a turning point in Gaza’s history. Whether it becomes a pathway to justice or a mechanism of dispossession depends on one central question: are Palestinians treated as sovereign political actors, or as subjects of international trusteeship? As Barnett and Finnemore remind us, international organizations are never neutral. As Roland Paris warns, stabilization without sovereignty freezes conflict rather than resolving it. And as David Chandler argues, peace without justice is merely managed order. Resolution 2803 is therefore a stark reminder that humanitarianism without self-determination is not peace. True peace begins with sovereignty.

Dr. Mohmad Maqbool Waggy is PhD Scholar from Central University of Kashmir in Political Science with his research focus on Climate Change, Migration, Conflict, and Gender.

29  January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org