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By Robert Hunziker

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry totaled 38.11 billion metric tons (GtCO₂) in 2025, hitting a record high, versus 25.51 GtCO2 in 2000. Moreover, the rate of global warming more than doubled for the first time in human history, in only one decade. Scientists are stunned: The Rate of Global Warming has Accelerated More in the Past Decade Than Ever Before, LiveScience, d/d March 7, 2026. According to NASA, 97% of publishing scientists in the world agree that excessive CO2 emissions cause excessive global warming as well as aberrant climate change.

Following a surge in permitting and construction, more than 50 large coal-fired power plants were commissioned in China last year. Source: CREA / Global Energy Monitor. Yale Environment 360 /

China loves coal, but it still should be awarded a gold medal for renewable installations in 2025. No other country came close to installation of 300 gigawatts of solar and 100 gigawatts of wind power in 2025. These installations set a record. Paradoxically, China also wins a tarnished medal for biggest emitter of greenhouse gases at roughly 32% of the world total. If this seems contradictory, yes, it is. But it takes a lot of energy for 1.4B people. After all, the scorecard shows China consumed 40% more coal in 2025 than the rest of the world combined.

China also installed more solar and wind power in 2025 than the rest of the world combined. It is the first country to exceed 1,000 GW of solar capacity. China’s investments in clean energy exceed the combined efforts of the U.S., EU, and UK. Another 300 GW of wind and solar is currently under construction. China’s total clean energy investment in 2025 was $630B.

Still, “Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 is severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years.” (Isabel Hilton, As It Boosts Renewables, China Still Can’t Break Its Coal Addiction, YaleEnvironment360, March 26, 2026)

US Emissions Turn Up

Meantime, United States greenhouse gas emissions increased for the first time in 24 months: The Rhodium Group’s preliminary 2025 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions analysis reports that after two years of declining emissions, the U.S. produced 2.4% more planet-warming CO2 pollution last year. More concerning was emissions growing faster than the economy, which expanded just 1.9%, reversing three years of successfully decoupling economic growth from carbon output.

Earth’s Tipsy Climate Losing Balance – Worst in History

Climate balance/imbalance is the key gauge of a healthy system. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO): “The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands of years.” (Earth’s Climate Swings Increasingly Out of Balance, World Meteorological Organization, March 23, 2026)

Within the past 12 months, Dr. James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia) publicly stated: The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated and the international “2C target is dead.” Buckle up.

US Loses $61 Billion In Clean Energy Projects in Only One Year

“A new report indicates that Trump administration policies led to billions of dollars in canceled investment and tens of thousands of lost jobs… industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs.” (Grist)

A more comprehensive report, according to Climate Power, nearly 173,000 clean energy jobs have been lost, put on the chopping block, or delayed since Trump took office. The job losses stem from 354 canceled or delayed projects, representing more than $61 billion in investments, which would have powered more than 14 million homes. Clean energy as a priority is gone for this administration, over cliff’s edge, in a tailspin.

Clearly, the United States is intentionally harming the world climate system by pushing fossil fuel use over renewable energy, but that’s only the most obvious of intentional abuses. The US has become public enemy number one of climate change with worldwide impact. For example, “The White House also terminated funding for the US Global Change Research Program, the federal body responsible for producing the nation’s most comprehensive climate reports on the impacts of rising global temperatures. It also shut down climate.gov, NOAA’s primary public-facing website for climate science, and axed NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster dataset, which has provided vital information for first responders, the insurance industry, and researchers to plan recovery efforts and assess weather-related risks… The cuts extended to international climate efforts as well. In February, the administration pulled the US out of global discussions regarding an upcoming global climate change assessment carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). President Trump also ordered federal scientists at NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program to cease all work related to IPCC climate assessments, effectively ending US involvement in one of the world’s most critical climate evaluation efforts.” (for a comprehensive list of cuts: Earth.org)

The United States is knee-deep in a massive strategy of global disengagement, ‘isolationism’ pure and simple, America First, regardless of decades of building global interrelationships that have molded the world order. That world order is gone, in crash mode. Along the way, climate change mitigation is low-hanging fruit, easily ignored because of a soft constituency, making it doubly vulnerable with very little ‘pocket money’ payback and crushed by fossil fuel moneyed interests.

At the heart of the problem climate change is an extremely complex global issue that requires worldwide cooperation, the antithesis of isolationism.

Nobody wants to accept it, but a worst-case climate scenario may be taking center stage, flooded coastal cities and bone-dry farmlands as two potential scenarios for failure to acknowledge and mitigate climate change. There is nothing positive about the current direction of seemingly endless fossil fuel energy production. According to scientists, the atmosphere is very close to ‘full-up’ of CO2 emissions based upon guesstimates of limits to keep global temperatures under the dreaded 2C. Then, the whole climate system spins out of control in chaotic fashion.

Isolationism by the world’s leading economy in a complex world with a flagging climate system leads to big trouble for life-supporting ecosystems. But nobody wants to deal with it seriously enough, soon enough to make a big difference; only a couple of countries, out of 195 signatories, are tracking Paris 2015 commitments to cut CO2 emissions by 2030. This is disgustingly outrageous as these same 195 countries were in full agreement that the ‘shit would hit the fan’ unless they cut fossil fuel emissions by 2030 to hold global mean temperature to 1.5°C pre-industrial, which they’ve subsequently moved up to 2°C as 1.5°C looks to ‘be in the bag.’ Clearly, the climate system is outpacing any and all commitments to tame it, but it goes without saying, it’s acting a lot like a wild stallion.

Alas, it is only too obvious that climate change is not a high priority, even as it turns chaotic and destructive enough to crush homeowners’ insurance in some regions of America. Only a few years ago, nobody suggested climate change would end up crushing the property insurance market: How Climate Risks Are Putting Home Insurance Out of Reach, YaleEnviroment360, d/d Sept. 15. 2025.

“After years underestimating the risks posed by climate-fueled disasters, the U.S. home insurance industry is in turmoil. In vulnerable areas, rising insurance costs are upending housing markets and communities, as homeowners scramble to try to find insurance they can afford,” Ibid.

OMG- What happens to property insurance at 2C?

Robert Hunziker is a journalist from Los Angeles

5 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Tom Engelhardt

Honestly, I can’t believe I’m in this world of ours (or do I mean His?). Yes, this very one and no other!

Almost a quarter of a century after, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. launched its war in Afghanistan that would last a mere 20 years until Donald Trump prepared for and Joe Biden carried out a humiliating withdrawal of the last American troops there, the U.S. is back big time, dumber and more wildly destructive than ever.

Whew! That’s a lot of (terrible) history to get into a single sentence!

And so, here’s a TomDispatch question for you: What four-letter country, the first three of which are IRA, has the U.S. now been bombing? No, not Iraq! That war began in 2003 and ended a mere eight years later in 2011. And remind me, how did that work out? It’s Iran, of course.

And what a nightmare that is! By now, everyone who didn’t vote for Donald Trump (and even some who did) knows that he’s an all-American maniac. In his own striking fashion, the former “president of PEACE” has undoubtedly, even proudly, taken possession of the label: the most dangerous man on Earth. And believe me, on this planet of ours right now, that’s no small accomplishment. (Think Vladimir Putin for a start!)

And given that he has almost three years (3 years!!) to go in his presidency (if all goes well and he doesn’t nationalize the American electoral system and run for a distinctly unconstitutional and unprecedented third term in office), everything we’ve seen so far is undoubtedly just a prologue to a future from hell! (And yes, sad to say, at this point we are indeed in the second exclamation-point presidency of Donald J. Trump on an exclamation-point of a planet, itself going downhill all too fast.)

Of course, anyone — and, for that matter, any people — can make a mistake. And electing Donald Trump president the first time around might once have qualified as exactly that.

But no longer — not when, having just missed in 2020 with 46.9% of the vote, he won again in 2024 with 49.8% of American voters backing him.

Of course, at some level, we shouldn’t be shocked. For so many years, the United States was simply the most powerful country on Planet Earth, an imperial #1 of a sort that arguably hadn’t been seen in history. But sooner or later, all great imperial powers do go down. If you don’t believe me, just check any history book. That’s beyond predictable.

What’s been unpredictable is that the United States would begin going down quite so wildly and, as a first in history, that “our” president would distinctly try to take the planet itself down with him. So, here we are blasting the hell out of Iran and, of course, in the process, as all wars do, putting wildly more fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Modern war and preparations for them may, in fact, be the most carbon intensive activity on this ever warming planet of ours.

Of course, century after century, great powers have experienced decline, but seldom have their leaders been quite such a personification of imperial decline as Donald Trump. Yes, the self-proclaimed “president of PEACE,” who campaigned in 2024 on the promise that he’d “break the cycle of regime change,” is now distinctly the president of WAR, leaving the rest of us not in a Dump-Trump, but all too sadly in an increasingly dump-truck of a world.

The “Con Job” Presidency

If, once upon a time, you had told me about a world in which Donald Trump would be president of the United States (twice!), I would have thought you a genuine nut case. And worse yet, he has proven to be anything but alone in his madness. I mean, how could there possibly be a war in its fifth year right at the edge of the European heartland, another in Lebanon, a third in Iran (and mind you I’m not even mentioning Gaza), and a major civil war underway for endless years in Sudan on a planet that already seems to be going down the tubes in a big-time fashion? (And, mind you, I’m not even counting the never-ending American bombing of Somalia!)

How could all of that be happening on a planet already (all too literally) heating to the boiling point thanks to what’s come to be known as climate change (itself far too mild a term for what’s going on)? How could all of that be happening when it’s no secret that wars and militaries (even in peacetime) release staggering amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere — and my own country’s military tops them all? (And honestly, in this world of ours right now, it’s hard to write anything without exclamation points!!) As Nina Lakhani of the Guardian has reported, that military is “the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter” and “the largest single fossil fuel consumer in the U.S.”

You might wonder how that could be possible, when it’s become all too apparent that making war on each other, while a nightmare in itself, is also the worst imaginable way of making war on this planet of ours.

Honestly, how could we Americans have elected — not once, but (yes again!) twice — a president who rejects the very idea that this planet is beginning to broil from the burning of staggering levels of fossil fuels and has openly called climate change a “con job“? And worse yet, he remains deeply indebted to the fossil-fuel industry, which poured at least $96 million into his 2024 reelection campaign and an estimated $445 million into influencing the total election. He might indeed not have won the presidency without their donations, and now, undoubtedly as his thank-you to the industry, he’s doing everything he can to take our future away from us by, among other devastating things, trying to halt projects that spread non-fossil-fuel-producing solar and wind power. Truly, how could 49.8% of Americans have reelected a president who ran for office the third time (with a bluntness almost beyond imagining) on the all-too-incendiary campaign slogan “drill, baby, drill“?

A president of the United States, really?

Honestly, don’t you think that everything I’ve written so far reads like the world’s most unbelievable science fiction novel? And once upon a time, I can assure you (as a former editor in mainstream publishing), no publisher would have ever agreed to put out a book with a plot so pathetically unrealistic and, had it by some miracle — or rather ill omen — appeared, every imaginable reviewer would have panned it mercilessly and few readers would have thought to buy it.

In truth, if, once upon a time, some sci-fi writer had come up with such a plot, he (or she) would have been laughed out of the profession and off this planet. Donald Trump, president of the United States (twice!)? Give me a humongous break! How distinctly unrealistic could any author be in creating such a bizarre character as The Donald, no less coming up with a plot in which he would win the presidency not once, but twice?

And how about, on a planet where there may be no greater broiler than military operations, that very president deciding to launch a new war almost randomly against — yes! — Iran, which has already spread across the region (with, of course, a helping hand, or rather a panoply of bombs and missiles, from Israel), while creating a global oil crisis linked to the largely blocked Strait of Hormuz? I mean, imagine that! Or rather, no need to imagine it, since it’s our reality and Donald Trump is distinctly trying to create a dump-truck (rather than dump-Trump) world.

Living on Borrowed Time and Possibly the Wrong Planet

And so, here we are, all of us, already living through the worst imaginable version of science fiction with a literal madman as president, who seems distinctly intent on nothing less than doing in this planet and so all the rest of us, or at least all too many future us-es.

And under the circumstances, no one should be faintly shocked that 2023, 2024, and 2025 were the three hottest years in recorded history, while the El Niño weather pattern expected to emerge later this year is essentially guaranteed to drive global temperatures to new records in 2026 and 2027. And as Jonathan Watts of the Guardian recently reported, “Climate breakdown is shrinking the amount of time that people can safely go about their lives, according to a study [by scientists from the Nature Conservancy] that shows a third of the world’s population now resides in areas where heat severely limits activity.”

And just to emphasize how strange things truly are these days, imagine this: the country doing the most on this planet when it comes to putting some limits on climate change is — yes, of course, China. As a start, it’s now producing and selling solar panels, wind turbines, and other green energy-producing materials globally in a distinctly record fashion. It has also captured the electric vehicle (EV) market, lock, stock, and barrel, selling millions of those vehicles in more than 150 countries and territories, which should, of course, be truly commendable. And yet, to put all of that in a little Trumpian perspective, China still produces more greenhouse gases (mainly from burning coal) at this very moment than anyplace — yes, anyplace! — else on Planet Earth and an estimated 35% of the total. How beyond strange, beyond science fiction, beyond fantasy, beyond anything someone might once have imagined.

Of course, give him credit. At almost 80 years old, Donald Trump’s own level of energy is somewhat remarkable. And it’s also true that, when it comes to destroying our lives, climate change is just one of the areas he’s taken up with such alacrity. After all, we’re talking about the president who appointed vaccine skeptic (and that’s putting it politely) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his secretary of health and he’s been hard at work trying to ensure that Americans will get vaccinated ever less frequently and sicker ever more often. (Fortunately, a Massachusetts district judge only recently “blocked the government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the last year” by Kennedy and crew.)

I have to admit that, at almost 82 years old myself, having covered so much of this at TomDispatch for almost 25 (increasingly strange) years, I do have the feeling that I’m living not just on borrowed time (because of my age) but increasingly on the wrong planet. And for that reason — if you’ll excuse my repeating myself — I find it no less hard to believe that a near majority of Americans voted in 2024 for You Know Who a third time around.

So much that Trump and crew have done should be considered the political, environmental, and cultural equivalent of putting a gun to all our heads and pulling the trigger. In truth, his name should undoubtedly be changed from Donald J. Trump to Donald D. Trump — “d” for decline, of course. So, give the whole crew of them credit. Thanks to Trump, Kennedy, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and all too many other strange characters, this country and this planet are both heading down in a remarkably distinctive fashion.

And it’s hard even to imagine that we still have almost three more years of Trumpiana ahead before — well, under the circumstances, who knows what? There can be no question that he and his crew are indeed hard at work trying to create a dump truck (rather than a dump Trump) version of this world of ours. Sigh…

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com.

30 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Friendship is a form of egalitarian relationship where mutual understanding, support, trust, interests, respect, equality, and dignity thrive to expand cooperation, minimise risks, and share both happiness and sorrow, thereby creating a society based on mutual dependency and solidarity. Share and care defines friendship. These values are crucial in friendships between people as well as between countries. However, these values are alien to Yankee imperialist US foreign policy and its parasitic approach to international relations and politics. American imperialist foreign policy uses friendship as a strategic tool to advance its so-called national interests—that is, to uphold the dominance of capitalism at all costs. There is no genuine friendship in American foreign policy; it is driven by corporate interests, which reign supreme in every partnership, undermining the very idea of friendship, solidarity, diplomacy and democratic dialogues. Strategic friendship is no friendship but an opportunist alliance that US pursues at costs.

American foreign policy has, at various times, betrayed Australians, Afghans, Africans, British, Egyptians, post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe, Chinese, French, Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Spaniards, Ukrainians, Russians, western Europeans, Iraqis, Iranians, Latin Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, Kurds, Vietnamese, Koreans, and countries in the Arab and Gulf regions. The list is so long when it comes to what is seen as American betrayal of friendly countries across the globe. The US has used these countries at different stages to serve its own strategic interests by backstabbing these countries in different stages of its imperialist history.

There is no country, other than Israel, that US foreign policy has not betrayed, at some point, disappointed or turned against in its interactions. Many countries have suffered due to their friendship or strategic partnership with the US. USA has not truly helped any single countries; rather, its assistance, aid and relief pakages have often been tied to advancing its own interests. For example, food aid to India was desinged to undermine Indian agriculture and food sovereignty, potentially creating food markets for American corporations. In this way, American aid packages are often carrying embedded strategies to uphold American interests.

American foreign policy often seeks to undermine democratic governments and constitutional states while supporting reactionary, authoritarian, and anti-democratic regimes to advance its strategic interests. Pakistan, for instance, is widely seen as having suffered politically and economically due to its unequal strategic partnership with the US, in which the Pakistani army is often acting in alignment with American interests at the cost of Pakistani people and their interests. Afghanistan was also deeply affected, as US policies during the Soviet period involved supporting militant groups to undermine progressive changes in the country with Soviet support.

American regime-change operations have occurred in many parts of the world. Washington has frequently been destabilising countries and governments that do not align with its strategic priorities. US actions have single handedly contributed to the devastation of countries such as Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as several nations in Africa and the Middle East, while at the same time supporting reactionary family-led regimes in Arab and Gulf regions. Similarly, in Latin America, the US has backed right-wing and authoritarian forces, often under the justification of combating drug cartels.

American foreign policy is often seen as using the language of terrorism, democracy, freedom, and human rights to destabilise and disrupt the prevailing order and stability in different regions of the world. Mr. Donald Trump’s recent unprovoked attack on Iran is not merely as an accident or a sudden decision by a megalomaniac president, but as part of a well-designed foreign policy. It is argued that such actions aim to divert public attention from issues such as the abandonment of Ukraine and the Epstein scandal, while also fuelling prolonged ethnic conflicts in Asia, Arab, and Middle Eastern countries. These strategies are intended to weaken existing structures of governance in order to gain greater control over natural resources in these regions, thereby strengthening the petrodollar led capitalist system, which is seen as facing challenges due to the increasing independence of the OPEC countries from Washington’s influence.

From Vietnam and Korea to Kosovo and Ukraine, American foreign policies have contributed in creating divisions within families, communities, and countries in order to preserve its own interests. British colonialism divided the Indian subcontinent, but American policy is keeping India and Pakistan apart by supporting terrorist strategies of the Pakistani military, thereby containing India while also contributing to Pakistan’s political and economic deficit and instabilities within democratic governance. US foreign policy has been using the Kurds as strategic allies but abandoning them, with little support for an independent Kurdistan. Similarly, American policies have emboldened Zionist regimes in Israel, which is carrying out large-scale genocidal violence against Palestinians in their own land.

American foreign policy is serving corporate interests in the name of national interests, while many working people in the US continue to face hunger, homelessness, unemployment, and poverty. The American state and its ideological apparatus are not aligned with the broader interests of people or the planet, but instead serve propertied classes and various forms of their capitalist interests. Therefore, opposition to American imperialism is framed not as opposition to the American people, but to the American state and its ideology, which is fundamentally at odds with peace and the well-being of people worldwide. Both ruling and non-ruling classes within the US are often operating within this framework, shaped by an entrenched political system that advances these interests across party lines. The American state is not only a rogue state but also a highly organised mafia system that primarily serves entrenched economic power, often at the expense of people, peace, and the planet.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator

30 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Guillermo R. Barreto

We are witnessing a turning point in history. We are experiencing a crisis that goes beyond an economic crisis. We are facing a true crisis of civilization. The U.S., as an imperial power, is increasingly showing its decline, and in that decline, it acts irrationally, endangering all of humanity. It is not merely the fact that they have an ‘incoherent’ and violent president, a racist and misogynistic sexual predator; Trump is not an anomaly. He is merely an extreme and bizarre manifestation of what the U.S. has been since its founding.

The United States was founded by white slave-owning landowners, convinced of their racial superiority and exceptionalism, coupled with a deep-seated belief that they were destined to dominate the world (Manifest Destiny). A look at the recent National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, directly reveals this claim to superiority, which, in Trump’s case, takes on pathological traits.

Between 1776, the year of its independence, and 2019, the U.S. carried out 392 military interventions, half of which took place after 1950 and 25 percent after the end of the Cold War. It is a fact that in the 250 years following its independence, the United States was not involved in a war for only 17 years. Since its inception, it has been a nation with imperial ambitions, which has made it a true power since the Anti-Fascist World War (the so-called Second World War according to Eurocentric historiography). Its imperial trajectory has evolved over time, and today we find ourselves at a moment when its power and society show clear signs of decline, and when new forces—capable of challenging that power—have emerged worldwide. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), its actions have become more dangerous and threatening.

One of those forces is, without a doubt, the People’s Republic of China, which was identified at the NATO Summit held in Madrid in 2022 as a threat to ‘the interests, security, and values’ of whatever NATO represents.

The Declaration has the audacity to claim that China seeks to undermine the ‘rules-based international order.’ A way of saying that China is challenging that international order based on NATO’s rules.

China was consolidated as a state in 221 BC under the reign of Emperor Qin, who succeeded in centralizing the state after two centuries of the so-called ‘Warring States period.’ During his rule, Qin developed professional armies, organized the collection of taxes, had legal codes written, invented instruments for long-distance trade, and stabilized the mandarin bureaucracy. We could say that, during that period—more than 1,500 years before Latin-Germanic Europe—China had moved beyond feudalism. By that time, China had already developed a political thought and philosophy (the ‘Period of the Hundred Schools’) that would underpin, with variations, normative and ethical action in China for the next 30 centuries.

In classical Chinese philosophy, political wisdom is grounded in knowing how to wait, so that the ‘situation’ may transform into an ‘opportunity.’ This waiting is not, however, passive. It involves observing the ‘potential of the situation’ and preparing for and accompanying the transformation (the path, the Tao) toward the opportunity. From the European perspective, Machiavelli said 20 centuries later that opportunity arises from fortune (chance), and it was the ruler’s skill to know how to take advantage of those opportunities. In Chinese philosophy, the opportunity arising from fortune is not lasting. It is fleeting. One must prepare for the opportunity. The ruler must therefore not fight opposing forces, but know how to use them to his advantage without denying them.

This brings us to the words spoken by President Xi Jinping during thecentennial of the Chinese Communist Party. In his words, the president takes us from the party’s founding, the struggle for liberation, the Long March, the defeat of the Nationalists, the triumph of the revolution, the Cultural Revolution, the 1978 reforms, and the present day. A historical journey that reveals a path (Tao), a journey during which the transformation of the ‘situation’ into an ‘opportunity’ has been prepared.

In concrete terms, this opportunity has meant the eradication of critical or extreme poverty, officially declared in 2021. China lifted 850 million people out of extreme poverty. This achievement has resulted in a 70 percent reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. China has achieved economic development unparalleled in human history. The rate at which GDP, life expectancy, total consumption, and per-household consumption have increased, among other metrics, is on a unique scale. In 1978, only 1 percent of the world’s population lived in countries with a GDP lower than China’s. By 2012, that figure stood at 51percent. These indicators can be reviewed in John Ross’s insightful book, China’s Great Road, published by 1804 Books. All of this translates not only into positive impacts for the Chinese people but also reinforces a vision centered on working to consolidate what President Xi has called a ‘community with a shared future.’ This implies positive impacts on a global scale.

We see that the challenge China poses to NATO—and especially to the United States—goes beyond macroeconomic indicators or trade advantages.

It is a civilizational challenge. It is a different worldview. While President Xi Jinping speaks of building a community with a shared future, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy emphasizes making the U.S. the strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful nation in the world. While China works to transform the situation into an opportunity, the United States acts impulsively, hoping that fortune will grant it the opportunity. That is why China invests in health, education, science, housing, and transportation, but the U.S. invests in weapons and in maintaining a deadly military force capable of destroying the entire world. This makes the U.S. a true threat to humanity. A nation of supremacists and superstitious people who promote a culture of death and possess a powerful army. An empire whose decline we are witnessing, whose end is beginning to loom, but an empire that dies fighting. Today, more than ever, anti-imperialism is a necessity and must be the common ground for all the struggles of the peoples of the world. The struggle today is anti-imperialist. For peace, for life, for humanity.

Guillermo R. Barreto is Venezuelan and holds a Ph.D. in Science (University of Oxford).

30 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

In an interview published Sunday in the Financial Times, US President Donald Trump announced his “preference” to “take the oil” from Iran—a massive expansion of the US war of aggression that would only be possible through a ground invasion of the country.

Trump’s statement of his intent to massively expand the war was announced one day after what organizers said were as many as 8 million people took to the streets across all 50 states in the third round of “No Kings” demonstrations—which would make them the largest single-day protests in American history. Despite efforts by the organizers to downplay opposition to the war in Iran, the demonstrations expressed the overwhelming popular opposition to it.

The Financial Times interview, conducted by Edward Luce, was published as the Pentagon ordered thousands of additional troops to the region. Trump compared the planned seizure of Iran’s oil to Venezuela, where the US intends to control the oil industry “indefinitely” following its capture of President Nicolás Maduro. “To be honest with you, my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran,” Trump said, “but some stupid people back in the US say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

Such a move would involve seizing Kharg Island, through which most of Iran’s oil is exported. Trump told the Financial Times: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” He added: “It would also mean we had to be there for a while.”

The Wall Street Journal reported separately Sunday that Trump is actively making plans for a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran—“a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.”

The Washington Post reported Sunday that the Pentagon is preparing for “weeks of ground operations in Iran.” The Post reported that any operation “would fall short of a full-scale invasion and could instead involve raids by a mixture of Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops.” One official told the Post the objectives would take “weeks, not months.” Another said “a couple of months.”

The Post cited a former senior defense official, who said: “We’ve looked at this. It’s been war-gamed. This is not last-minute planning.” On the seizure of Kharg Island, the official said: “Seizing it is not difficult. Protecting your guys once they are there is.”

Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a retired Army officer, told the Post: “I just wouldn’t want to be in that small place with Iran’s ability to rain down drones and maybe artillery.” A poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 62 percent of Americans strongly oppose the use of ground troops in Iran. Only 12 percent are in favor.

Trump claimed he could take Kharg Island “very easily,” saying Iran has “no defense” on the island. The military’s own assessments contradict this. CNN reported that Iran has fortified the island with an estimated 30,000-40,000 personnel, air defense systems, underground trenches, land mines along the coastline and swarms of first-person-view kamikaze drones. Harrison Mann, a former Army major and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, told Democracy Now that the operation would be “close to a suicide mission,” warning that US troops “could really end up being trapped there.” Joe Kent, Trump’s own former counter-terrorism chief, said: “I just think that would be a disaster. It would essentially be giving Iran a bunch of hostages on an island that they could barrage with drones and missiles.”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham compared the planned operation to Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, and said: “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this. My money’s always on the Marines.” Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Sunday that the US was “secretly planning a ground invasion” while publicly talking about negotiations, according to Reuters.

More than 50,000 US troops are now deployed across the Middle East, according to the New York Times. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU)—2,500 Marines and 2,500 sailors—arrived in the region on Friday. Another 2,200 Marines from the 11th MEU are en route aboard the USS Boxer. Roughly 2,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have been ordered to the region. The Wall Street Journal and Axios reported that the Pentagon is drawing up plans to send another 10,000 troops to the region.

In Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Sunday the expansion of what he called the “security zone” in southern Lebanon. More than 1,238 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since Israel launched its assault on March 2, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, including 124 children. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Israeli forces have reached a tributary of the Litani River. PBS NewsHour reported that three journalists were killed Saturday in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a marked press vehicle in Jezzine.

After 30 days of war, the civilian death toll in Iran continues to climb. The human rights group Hengaw, using field documentation, reported at least 6,530 killed through Day 25, including 640 confirmed civilians. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) documented at least 1,551 civilian deaths, including 236 children. Iran’s Red Crescent reported more than 81,000 civilian sites damaged, including 61,000 homes and nearly 500 schools. Between 3.2 and 4 million Iranians have been internally displaced. A near-total internet blackout has sealed off 90 million people from the outside world for 30 days.

Brent crude surged above $115 a barrel on Sunday, up 59 percent this month, according to Reuters, the steepest monthly jump on record, exceeding gains during the 1990 Gulf War. Gasoline in the United States has risen to $3.98 a gallon, up nearly $1 since the war began. Goldman Sachs estimated in a report cited by Fortune that the war is costing the US economy 10,000 jobs per month.

On the Sunday talk shows, no Democrat on any of the four major programs used the words “war crime” or “international law” in connection with the Iran war. Last weekend, former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Donna Brazile declared on ABC’s Sunday news program: “Democrats understand that Iran has posed a threat, not just to the region, the Gulf, but to the world itself.”

The entire Democratic leadership—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar—voted for the $839 billion military budget that funds the war.

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

30 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Laala Bechetoula

“Those in power must show reason and discernment and rise to the level of our people — and let Algerians express themselves freely.”

— Liamine Zeroual, April 2019 — declining for the third time in his life to return to power, aged 77

EDITOR’S NOTE FOR THE INTERNATIONAL READERS: Most of the world has never heard of Liamine Zeroual. That itself is part of his story. He was the sixth President of Algeria — a nation of 46 million, the largest country on the African continent, a former French colony that purchased its independence with over one million dead between 1954 and 1962. He governed from January 1994 to April 1999, during the most violent period in Algeria’s modern history: a civil war that claimed more than one hundred thousand lives. He did not seek power. He did not cling to it. He did not profit from it. He gave it back. That is who he was. The rest is detail — extraordinary, luminous detail.

❖ ❖ ❖

He Died Yesterday

Not like any death.

He died — this man who refused a salary for doing nothing, who said no to America and went home, who walked out of the presidential palace with exactly what he had walked in with: nothing but his honour.

Liamine Zeroual died on Saturday, March 28, 2026, at 84. And with him ended not merely a life, but an entire generation’s understanding of a single word: duty.

A Name That Was a Prophecy

Few obituaries begin with etymology. This one must.

Zeroual — in Tamazight, the ancient Berber language of the Aurès Mountains that colonialism could not kill — means the one with blue eyes. The one who carries the colour of the sky in his gaze, yet never flies away. He remains a man of the earth, of clay, of mountains.

Al-Yamin — in Arabic — is the oath. The right hand extended in covenant. The direction of blessing.

When his parents named him in 1941 — while Algeria still groaned under French colonial rule — they did not choose a name. They wrote a destiny.

He fulfilled it, word by word, until his last breath.

The Mountain That Never Bowed

He was born in Batna, in the heart of the Aurès — that ancient, unbroken massif that refused to kneel before Rome when Tacfarinas led his resistance, that refused to surrender when the Berber warrior-queen Kahina made her last stand, and that fired the first shots of Algeria’s war of independence on November 1, 1954.

The Aurès is not merely geography. It is the genetic code of Algerian defiance, written in stone.

Those who grow up with its soil under their fingernails carry something no academy can teach and no rank can confer: a pride that does not break, and a silence that speaks louder than any speech.

Sixteen Years Old, One Rifle

In 1957, at the age of sixteen, he joined the National Liberation Army — the armed wing of Algeria’s independence movement — to fight French colonial rule.

A boy. A rifle larger than his shoulders. A mountain ahead with no visible end.

He needed no one to explain why. It was enough to watch his mother walk with her head bowed in her own hometown. It was enough to read the words “French national” on his father’s identity papers and know it was the greatest lie ever stamped on an official document.

His comrades in the mountains called him the Lion of the Aurès. He neither accepted nor rejected the name. He simply kept walking forward.

Moscow, Cairo, Paris — Learning the Enemy’s Art Without Becoming Him

After independence in 1962, while many veterans rested on the laurels of revolution, Zeroual went back to school. Cairo. Then Moscow (1965–1966). Then the École de Guerre in Paris — yes, in Paris, the capital of yesterday’s coloniser — to learn the art of war from those who had waged it against his own people.

This is the difference between a genuine statesman and an imitator: the first takes the tool and leaves the soul; the second takes the soul and loses himself.

He returned to build, methodically, without haste: the Cherchell Military Academy (1981), command of Tamanrasset in the Sahara (1982), Béchar on the Moroccan border (1984), Constantine (1987). General in 1988. Commander of ground forces in 1989. A man who lays bricks one by one. Who does not skip steps. Who does not jostle for position. Who does not wait for applause.

“I Don’t Want to Be Paid for Doing Nothing”

In 1990, he disagreed with President Chadli Bendjedid over plans to restructure the army. He did not negotiate. He did not yield. He did not manoeuvre.

They moved him sideways — appointing him Ambassador to Bucharest, Romania. An old and refined technique for sidelining those who inconvenience you.

He accepted. He went. Then, within weeks, he did something almost no one in the history of power has ever done voluntarily: he came back and said the sentence that contains his entire soul:

“I don’t want to be paid a salary for doing nothing.”

Stop. Read it again.

In a world where people claw at positions, titles, offices, and salaries — he gave one back because he was not earning it. He went home to Batna. He closed the door. He thought the story was over.

It was not over.

January 1994: The Country Calls, and He Cannot Refuse

Algeria was burning. Not as metaphor. As fact.

The Black Decade — la Décennie Noire — had consumed the country since the military cancelled the elections of January 1992. What followed was one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and underreported conflicts: over one hundred thousand dead, entire villages massacred, intellectuals and journalists assassinated, children orphaned by the thousands. A nation bleeding from wounds it could not dress.

The army needed a president. They went first to Abdelaziz Bouteflika. He refused. So they went to the silent man in Batna.

General Khaled Nezzar — the army’s strongman who engineered the transition — wrote in his memoirs, one of the rare documented testimonies of Algeria’s opaque political history, that Zeroual was “the most visibly unsettled” in the room that night, and that he

“accepted, out of a sense of duty, to become Head of State.”
— General Khaled Nezzar, Memoirs

Not with joy. Not with ambition. But: out of a sense of duty.

Like a man lifting a boulder not because he wants to, but because no one else can.

On January 30, 1994, Liamine Zeroual sat in the presidential chair at El-Mouradia palace — without the hunger for power, and with its full weight pressed upon his chest.

The Woman Who Voted While Trembling

“Do not go out. We will slaughter you.”

That was the message from the armed groups before the presidential elections of November 1995.

And yet Fatima went — or Khadija, or Zohra, or whatever name you wish to give to that Algerian woman who had lost her son, or her husband, or her brother in the decade of blood. She dressed in black that morning. She stood before the mirror for a long moment. And she said to herself, in a language only those who have buried someone they loved can understand: “I will go.”

Her hands were trembling when she placed the ballot in the box. She was not voting for a man. She was voting against the slaughter. She was voting for her son’s right to rest in his grave in peace. For her own right to sleep one night without fear.

She was among the 74.24% of Algerians who came out that day despite the threats — the highest recorded voter participation in Algeria’s post-independence history. That number is not a statistic. It is the collective moan of a people who came out into the street to say: We want to live.

Zeroual won 61.34% of the vote, in Algeria’s first ever genuinely pluralist presidential election. But the real victory belonged to Fatima, and Khadija, and Zohra.

Mercy: The Word He Chose Deliberately

When he sought to bring armed fighters back from the mountains, Zeroual did not call his policy an amnesty — the cold legal term preferred by bureaucrats. He did not call it reintegration — the bloodless language of technocrats. He called it: rahma. Mercy.

In that single lexical choice lives an entire philosophy.

Mercy is not weakness. It is the courage of a man who knows that a people who have lost one hundred thousand sons do not need more blood. They need to breathe. Thousands of fighters surrendered their weapons and returned home.

Wars do not always end with a last bullet. Sometimes they end with a word.

America Comes Knocking

In December 1997, US Ambassador Cameron Hume sat across from Zeroual for forty minutes. He brought the full diplomatic weight of the world’s unipolar superpower to bear. He wanted to persuade Zeroual of something Zeroual had already decided against.

When the meeting ended, Zeroual was Zeroual. The only thing that had changed from the encounter with the ambassador of the most powerful nation on earth was a cup of coffee added to the tray.

In Algeria’s history, many have bowed before Washington. Many more have claimed they did not bow. Zeroual belonged to a rare third category: those who simply did not register the question.

The Night in Windhoek

September 1998. Windhoek, Namibia. Guest of President Sam Nujoma.

In the garden of the official residence, alone beneath the open African sky, he paced. One cigarette, then another. The night deepened. No one.

No one knows what passed through his mind in those hours. No one ever will. But we know what came out of them.

At dawn, on the presidential aircraft returning to Algiers, he gathered his aides in the small salon. He was calm. He was serious. And he spoke the words that those who heard them have carried verbatim to this day:

“You know that I wanted to leave a year ago. The time has come. We must leave room for others. I am leaving.”
— Liamine Zeroual, aboard the presidential aircraft, September 1998

In the entire recorded history of human political power, few leaders have said voluntarily: I am leaving. Washington said it when he refused a third term and founded the Republic. Mandela said it after one term and secured South Africa’s democracy. Zeroual said it over Africa in a plane, with no audience but his aides.

The first had a monument carved in gold. The second had a Nobel Prize. The third did not ask for even a photograph.

Twenty-Seven Years of Golden Silence

A year passed. Then five. Then ten. Then twenty-seven.

He wrote no memoirs. He gave no interviews. He commented on nothing. He founded no party. He appeared nowhere. He complained to no one. His house in Batna stood as he had left it. His window looked out on the mountain that had made him. It was enough.

In 2019, when the mass uprising known as the Hirak toppled President Bouteflika after twenty years in power, the most powerful figure in Algeria’s intelligence establishment personally asked Zeroual to lead a transitional government. His answer was what it had always been: “The new generation must take its place.”

This was not humility. It was the wisdom of a man who understood that genuine leadership means leaving room for those who come after you.

What Ibn Khaldun Would Have Written

The fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun — perhaps the greatest social theorist the Islamic world ever produced — argued in his Muqaddimah that civilisations rise and fall on the strength of asabiyya: the collective spirit that binds a community and places the common good above private interest.

Zeroual was asabiyya embodied in a single human being. He did not need to read the Muqaddimah to learn the lesson. He was born carrying it in his blood and in the red clay of the Aurès.

Had Ibn Khaldun lived to see this man say “I am leaving” over Africa in an aircraft, he would have added a final chapter to his masterwork. He might have called it: “When Virtue Takes Human Form.”

The Mountain Returns to the Mountain

Liamine Zeroual died on March 28, 2026, at the military hospital in Algiers, aged 84. The institution he had served his entire life received him at the end.

His life held everything a human life should hold: a childhood under occupation, a youth in revolution, a maturity spent building, an ordeal of governance in infernal years, and an old age of noble silence.

What his life never held, not once: hypocrisy, greed, self-dealing, or leaving the country worse than he found it.

❖ ❖ ❖

Algeria weeps today with tears that are real — because it understands, in the depths of its conscience, that it is not merely bidding farewell to a man. It is bidding farewell to a mirror in which it could once see what it aspired to be.

And in this moment of farewell, everyone who has ever loved this country asks the same question: why do we grieve a man who lived in silence and departed in silence?

Because noble silence — in a country like Algeria, in a time like this — is the highest form of eloquence. Because the man who does not want a salary for doing nothing — in a world where everyone scrambles for everything in exchange for nothing — that man cannot be replicated.

He was the last of a kind. Not a kind defined by ideology, party, or region. A kind defined by a single quality that history cannot manufacture on demand:

He meant it.

Farewell, O man whose name was an oath and whose life was the keeping of it.

Farewell, Liamine. Last of those who left power and took nothing with them but their honour.

May God have mercy on you, and grant you a rest as great as your service.

Laala Bechetoula is an Algerian historian, journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Laghouat, Algeria.

29 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor

The US and Israeli bombardment might be destroying the lives and livelihoods of the Iranian people. Still, from afar, it is bleeding every Kashmiri heart, regardless of sect, faith, or status.

The heart’s cry for Palestine seems to miss a beat for Tehran.

This is the first time since the end of internal autonomy in 2019 that thousands of Kashmiris took to the streets without regard for security forces and restrictions, participating in mourning the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a consequence of the US-Israeli war imposed on Iran. The mourners, under heavy police escort, highlighted various aspects of Khamenei’s life and his friendship with Kashmir.

It was observed with great pain that more Sunnis than Shiites participated in mourning processions in Kashmir and strongly criticised the US/Israeli aggression.

Approximately sixteen per cent of the population in Jammu and Kashmir are Shiites. The Shia sect was introduced into Kashmir in the fourteenth century by the Iraqi scholar Shamsuddin Iraqi, and it later flourished in the fifteenth century, when the Shia Chak dynasty ascended the throne of Kashmir.

The Mughal Emperor Jalaluddin Akbar abolished the Chak monarchy in 1586 and annexed Kashmir to India. That marked the start of invasions into the Kingdom of Kashmir.

The reason for condemning the American attacks on Iran in Kashmir is also clear from the fact that there have been close public relations between Kashmir and Iran. In addition to trade and religious ceremonies, Persian has long been the official language in the valley, later replaced by Urdu during the Dogra era. The strong influence of Iranian culture on local life and livelihood persists today, which is why Kashmir is often called ‘Minor Iran’.

After visiting Kashmir during the Maharaja’s era, Sir Mohamad Iqbal conveyed the place’s helplessness in this way,

Today, it is Kashmir — oppressed, forced, and impoverished.

Yesterday, what the wise called Minor Iran.

Most of the authentic histories and literary masterpieces of Kashmir are also written in Persian, which historians and authors consult in Iran to study, and this tradition continues to this day.

Compared to Arabs, Kashmiris have historically had a closer relationship with Iran, which has consistently spoken out against human rights violations during turbulent times and supported a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue in international forums. However, while Iran has previously maintained close relations with the Indian government, those relations are no longer as warm.

Iranian support during the two and a half years of Israeli genocide in Gaza has further strengthened the sense of closeness towards Iran among Kashmiris. Despite government’s tacit restrictions, they have vocally backed Iran in rallies condemning the recent Israeli-American aggression.

Although many elements tried to incite sectarian chaos in the valley, for which they sought the services of numerous religious clerics, Kashmiris strongly condemned it. They thwarted the intentions of these elements.

Perhaps one reason for the surging public sentiment is that, despite India’s Muslim population of 250 million, the government openly expressed support for Israel, prompting Muslims from Kashmir and other states to respond with enthusiasm in making donations.

This is why public support for Iran is so clear: in one village, donations amounting to Rs. 10 million were collected in a single day.

Apparently, Iran has always publicly supported the restoration of Kashmiris’ political rights; however, most observers believe that Iran has often favoured India’s stance in international organisations.

Six years ago, when Kashmiri people were deprived of their internal autonomy by losing their power, most of the Imams in Iranian mosques strongly condemned it. At the same time, Ayatollah Khamenei, citing his close ties with India, appealed to restore the rights of Kashmiris. Despite that Iran and India have had close relations, he made a statement on Kashmir at that time.

But it has often been said about some pro-India Kashmiri leaders affiliated with the Shia sect that they played a key role in shifting Iran’s stance in favour of India by strengthening their ties with Iran, and some of their descendants are still working on this today.

Although the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, fighting for the freedom of Kashmir, also included Shia leaders who were later regarded as a moderate faction within Hurriyat.

After the attacks on Iran, the central Lal Chowk and the suburbs of Srinagar were filled with crowds, just as they did during freedom processions in the nineties, which gradually transformed into mourning processions in every district. The following day, security forces sealed off Lal Chowk and most of Srinagar with tin sheets. When people refused to disperse, recognising the public’s anger, they were permitted to mourn elsewhere.

Whether it was the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto or the air crash that killed General Zia-ul-Haq, a large number of Kashmiris took to the streets. They began wailing, during which sometimes leftists and sometimes Jamaat-e-Islami workers were subjected to violence.

Iran’s firm stance against Israeli brutality in Gaza rekindled recent sympathy for Iran among Kashmiris, and they now admire the Iranian leadership for supporting the oppressed.

Another link between Kashmir and Ayatollah Khamenei was established when he visited Kashmir in 1980 at the request of Ruhollah Khomeini and emphasised the importance of sectarian unity. Before going to the Shia mosque, he visited the Jamia Mosque in Srinagar, where he attended Friday prayers with the late Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq and called on the people to unify as one nation rather than remaining divided by sectarian differences.

This is why there was intense anger and grief over Khamenei’s death in the city centre, and stone-pelting had also begun at many locations, which was immediately brought under control.

Observing the central government’s pro-Israel stance, Kashmiris chose to align with Iran, and by standing united against the ongoing violence, they conveyed to the government that they would never endorse Israeli aggression.

Many Muslims were surprised that Prime Minister Modi did not express condolences for the death of Ayatollah Khamenei or the murder of hundreds of schoolgirls earlier, which has led to criticism from leading opposition parties, including the Congress, claiming that Modi does not want to anger Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, with whom he was touring Tel Aviv a day before the Israeli-American attack on Iran.

Most public and political parties criticised Modi for changing India’s foreign policy without consulting anyone, while Iran has long been an old friend of India.

Although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under pressure from the public and opposition, has expressed sympathy for Iran and emphasised efforts to establish peace in the region, the BJP’s pro-Israel policy has not only caused significant anxiety among the public, especially Muslims, but has also led to grief over the tarnishing of India’s image on the global stage. Watching Pakistan take centre stage in international diplomacy and emerge as a peacemaker, many politicians and civil society members have strongly criticised Modi for sidelining India when it could have played a crucial role in peace-making.

Not only did crowds gather on roads, but they also set up centers to collect donations for Iran, which have now exceeded fifty crore rupees, according to initial estimates.

Chhattargam’s Sara Begum, with all her savings, walked for three hours to reach the Zadi Bal area of Srinagar, where people from different areas were gathering in large numbers to help Iran. Just on Eid, when an appeal was made to help Iran, crowds gathered at the Imam Baras.

Sara Begum’s bag did not hold paper money, but instead contained old one- or two-rupee coins, which she had been saving for a long time and had dreamed of buying a cow at the right moment. However, now, after the death of the Iranian leader, her dream is shattered.

‘When I saw the pictures of the damage caused by the American and Israeli bombing of Iran, my heart sank, and I worried about those mothers and sisters whose entire assets had been razed to the ground in just a few minutes. I decided that whatever savings I have, I will give to Iran; a cow is not needed as much as my sisters need help at this time.’

Like Sara, thousands of Kashmiri women line up in long queues at centers organised by Shia associations across various districts to receive donations for Iran.

Kashmiri children, old and young, rich and poor, Shias, Sunnis, Hindus, and Sikhs are all taking part in this effort and want to contribute to Iran’s aid fund. However, the other side of this is that the government’s change in Iran policy and the subsequent questioning of some donors have also created concerns and anxiety for many people. Why is the government interfering in our donation affairs, which have nothing to do with politics? asked many donors.

Ramiz Ali (name changed for security reasons) from Budgam says that when he deposited a large sum of money into Iran’s aid account, he received a call from the police and was asked to appear at the police station.

Ramiz says, “If we want to help Iran, it has become necessary to do so with the government’s consent, as would be the case in an authoritarian regime. We don’t care about the government’s policy; let it support Israel. We cannot support those who committed genocide in Palestine or destroyed a peaceful nation. The recent policy of the central government has hurt our feelings.”

Appreciating the spirit of the Kashmiris and their example of donation, the Iranian ambassador in Delhi expressed his gratitude and said he values this gesture. The Iranian embassy released the bank account details at public insistence to enable the transfer of aid money directly to Iran. It is estimated that millions of rupees have been received in this account.

The Tehran Times published an image of a drone in a news report, with the caption thanking the Kashmiris and seeking revenge for the death of Ayatollah Khamenei.

Agha Syed Muhammad Hadi Moosavi, associated with the Anjuman Sharia Shian in Jammu and Kashmir, states that those who did not have cash donated copper vessels, gold, silver, vehicles, and valuables. Agha Moosavi further said that it is a living example of our traditional and cultural ties with Iran, as today the people have united and paid tribute to the services of those seven hundred Iranian sages who have led in introducing and spreading the religion of Islam in the valley, whether it is Bulbul Shah or Syed Ali Hamadani.

‘Kashmir, known as Minor Iran, and Iran share a common cultural heritage, whether in fine arts, handicrafts, language, or cuisine. Every item bears the stamp of Iran,’ he said.

Agha Mujtaba, another associate of Anjuman Sharia Shian, states that “cash donations are being deposited directly into the account of the Iranian embassy in Delhi, while the proceeds from selling gold, silver or other items are deposited into the account.”

Although the government has quietly imposed a ban on pro-Iranian gatherings, it continues to monitor the collection of donations closely. Some reports suggest that a few donors have also been reprimanded. It could not be confirmed, however.

The economy of Jammu and Kashmir has been extremely weak due to the violent situation that has persisted for over three decades. Nevertheless, the people have not hesitated to support the Iranian people, have collected millions of rupees in aid, and voice opposition to US and Israeli aggression, much to the dismay of the BJP government.

Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor is an author and journalist

29 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

In recent days, Islamabad has been cast — by its own officials and attentive external actors — as a venue for backchannel contacts linked to the escalating U.S.–Israeli confrontation with Iran. The choreography is familiar: signals of readiness, hints of quiet facilitation, the projection of Pakistan as a responsible intermediary at a moment of regional strain. States host such efforts as a matter of routine diplomacy. Yet the dissonance here is hard to miss. As Pakistan presents itself as a bridge in a crisis it did little to avert, its most prominent political figure associated with a more independent vision of Iran’s regional role remains imprisoned within the same capital.

That juxtaposition is not incidental. It exposes the contradiction at the heart of the performance.

The Islamabad spectacle is therefore not merely about diplomacy. It is about political deflection. A regime with thinning legitimacy at home seeks borrowed significance abroad. It cannot generate authority through representation, so it pursues visibility through geopolitical performance. Host the talks. Carry the messages. Pose for the cameras. Let foreign relevance impersonate domestic credibility.

But this performance becomes especially obscene when set against Imran Khan’s imprisonment. Khan represented a distinctly different orientation toward Iran from that of Pakistan’s present custodians. He did not treat Iran as a subordinate issue to be handled within the constraints imposed by Saudi and American preferences. He understood that Iran’s isolation was not a natural condition of the region but a manufactured one, imposed by U.S. coercion, Israeli aggression, Gulf monarchic insecurity, and the political caution of dependent Muslim states.

This was visible geopolitically in Khan’s instinct for regional reconciliation. He sought to reduce antagonism between Iran and Saudi Arabia rather than merely rent Pakistan’s services to one camp against the other. More importantly, he was drawn to the possibility of a wider Muslim political formation not monopolized by Riyadh’s theology, money, and diplomatic disciplining. The aborted Kuala Lumpur summit was emblematic in this regard. It gestured toward a counter-hegemonic Muslim conversation involving Malaysia, Turkey, Qatar, Pakistan, and potentially Iran — a conversation not pre-cleared by the House of Saud. That Khan was effectively pressured into withdrawing from it was more than a diplomatic humiliation. It was a revelation of Pakistan’s dependency: a nuclear state told, in effect, that even its attendance at an alternative Muslim forum required monarchical permission.

Yet Khan’s affinity with Iran cannot be reduced to geopolitics alone. That is where most analyses remain superficial. His relation to Iran was also intellectual, even civilizational. Two Iranian thinkers matter here above all others: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Ali Shariati. Together, they illuminate a dimension of Khan that Pakistan’s establishment neither understands nor forgives.

From Nasr comes an expansive vision of Islam grounded in religious pluralism and a deep respect for multiple paths to the Divine. Nasr’s thought affirms that truth is not monopolized by a single historical or institutional expression, but refracted through diverse traditions, each carrying a measure of sacred insight. It is precisely this inclusive, civilizationally confident understanding of Islam — one that resists reduction to sectarian rigidity or state-managed orthodoxy — that resonated with Khan. It offered him a language of faith that was intellectually serious, spiritually generous, and resistant to politicized narrowing.

Khan’s encounter with Shariati, by contrast, came through a shared intellectual lineage with Muhammad Iqbal. Like Khan, Shariati was deeply influenced by Iqbal’s philosophical and poetic vision, and it was through this connection that Khan came to appreciate Shariati’s work. What Shariati offered, alongside this intellectual inheritance, was a dynamic conception of Islam as an emancipatory force — a language of resistance against hierarchy, stagnation, and imperial domination. He rejected the passivity of clerical quietism and reimagined Islam as a vehicle for social justice, moral awakening, and political transformation. That sensibility resonates deeply with Khan’s better impulses: his attraction to Iqbal, his suspicion of subservient elites, his recurring insistence that Muslim political life must recover moral purpose rather than serve as a local management class for foreign power.

This is precisely why Khan has always been such a dissonant figure within Pakistan’s dominant order. He is not opposed merely because he is popular. He is opposed because he disrupts the theological and geopolitical grammar on which the order depends. Saudi-aligned Islam prefers obedience over emancipation; the Pakistani security state prefers utility over sovereignty; Washington prefers reliable managers over unpredictable national figures. Khan, at his most politically lucid, unsettled all three.

That is what makes the current pageantry in Islamabad so revealing. The same establishment that has hollowed out domestic legitimacy now eagerly embraces the role of intermediary, not as an exercise in sovereign initiative but as participation in a script written elsewhere. These negotiations — if they materialize at all — risk serving as little more than a diplomatic façade, a managed performance of de-escalation even as the underlying machinery of U.S.-Israeli coercion continues to operate. Islamabad’s rulers do not resist this arrangement; they lean into it, presenting proximity to power as proof of relevance, even when that proximity underscores their dependence.

Iran, for its part, has little reason to enter into such a process. It has seen enough negotiations conducted under threat, enough diplomacy used as camouflage for coercion, enough “peace efforts” that preserve the aggressor’s freedom to strike again. In that setting, Pakistan’s current rulers do not appear as principled brokers. They appear as functionaries of managed optics.

And so the image that remains is devastatingly simple: in Islamabad, the regime hosts the language of peace while jailing the one leader who seriously imagined Iran not as a target of containment, but as a partner in a different regional future. That contrast tells us nearly everything.

The mediator worth thinking about is not the one in the conference hall.

It is the one in prison.

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

29 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ghassan Shahrour

Seventy years of crisis in Iran did not begin with ideology, nuclear ambitions, or regional rivalries. They began with a single, deliberate rupture that the world has spent decades minimizing or ignoring: the destruction of Iran’s democratic trajectory by the very powers that now speak most forcefully about “supporting the Iranian people.”

In 1953, the United States and the United Kingdom overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Declassified CIA and MI6 documents confirm that the operation was designed to reverse the nationalization of Iranian oil and restore Western control over Iran’s resources. What was dismantled was not simply a government, but a functioning democratic experiment that had emerged from decades of constitutional struggle.

This was not an episode. It was the first betrayal — and one the international community has never fully confronted.

The coup violated core principles later codified in the UN Charter, including the right of peoples to self‑determination and the sovereign equality of states. Its consequences were immediate and enduring. The reinstatement of authoritarian rule—backed, financed, and protected by external powers—produced decades of repression, corruption, and political fragmentation. For ordinary Iranians, this meant living under a system where civic freedoms were constrained, institutions were weakened, and decisions about their future were shaped by interests far beyond their borders.

The economic dimension of this rupture was equally damaging. By reversing the nationalization of Iranian oil, the coup entrenched a model in which Western oil companies profited while Iranian communities near extraction sites endured environmental degradation, economic inequality, and the long-term social impacts of resource exploitation. The promise of sovereignty over natural wealth was replaced by a structure that deepened dependency and fueled public resentment — a reality rarely acknowledged in contemporary debates.

Any serious analysis must acknowledge that Iran’s subsequent trajectory has also been shaped by internal political dynamics and governance choices. But external intervention remains a foundational element — one that continues to shape Iranian perceptions of international engagement and the credibility of foreign calls for “democracy.”

Yet today, governments that helped dismantle Iran’s democratic institutions present themselves as advocates of Iranian freedom. This is not simply a contradiction. It is a credibility gap rooted in lived history — a history the world often turns a blind eye to. It is difficult to take calls for “democracy in Iran” seriously when they come from governments that helped extinguish Iran’s last democratic experiment — and have spent decades turning a blind eye to the consequences.

And the pattern did not end in 1953; it adapted.

Targeted killings of Iranian scientists and officials over recent decades—widely attributed in international reporting to Israel—raise serious concerns under international law, including protections of the right to life under the ICCPR. Extensive U.S. sanctions, described by UN experts as having broad humanitarian consequences, have affected access to medicine, economic stability, and civilian well‑being. These pressures shape the daily lives of millions of Iranians, yet they are often framed as technical policy tools rather than measures with profound human impact.

Meanwhile, unresolved regional conflicts and the uneven application of international legal standards continue to influence Iran’s security posture. When violations of international humanitarian law by some actors are minimized or ignored, while others are scrutinized intensely, the result is a hierarchy of rights that undermines the universality of international norms.

This selective application of principles is not incidental. It is structural.

It reflects a global order in which the enforcement of international law is often contingent on political alignment rather than legal obligation. When policy debates prioritize market stability or geopolitical advantage over human impact, the normative framework that underpins international law begins to erode.

For international civil society, the implications are clear.

The UN’s sustaining peace framework (UNGA/SC Resolutions 70/262 and 2282) emphasizes that durable peace requires addressing root causes, including historical grievances and violations of self‑determination. Ignoring such foundations does not stabilize conflicts — it perpetuates them.

The 1953 coup, subsequent patterns of external pressure, and the broader regional context are not peripheral to understanding Iran. They are part of the architecture within which contemporary tensions unfold.

To omit them is not neutrality. It is distortion.
To ignore them is not oversight. It is complicity.

Any meaningful call for democracy, human rights, or de‑escalation must begin with consistency in the application of principles. Without it, the language of democracy risks becoming an instrument of policy rather than a standard of justice. And without confronting the first betrayal — the rupture of 1953 — efforts to support the Iranian people will remain constrained by a past that has never been fully acknowledged, and therefore never fully addressed.

Dr Ghassan Shahrour, Coordinator of Arab Human Security Network, is a medical doctor, prolific writer, and human rights advocate specializing in health, disability, disarmament, and human security.

29 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Azmat Ali

The Iran-US-Israel war enters its fourth week. The United States and Israel continue to attack Iran and Iran retaliates on Israel and the assets of the United States in Gulf countries. Iran’s key leaders, primarily its Supreme leader, are killed, yet the country remains steadfast in defending its land. Rather than collapsing, the Iranian people have now become stronger and more united than they were before the war, contrary to what the United States and Israel reportedly anticipated. Despite the United States and Israel’s sustained campaign against Islamic Republic of Iran and heavy bombardment that primarily killed 1,500 civilians, they stand in support of Islamic Republic of Iran and refuse US-Israel intervention. They remain committed to their principle: never surrender and always resist. This is the profound reality that the United States and Israel failed to understand.

There is a widely held assumption that the assassinations of a country’s key leaders can leave a nation paralysed. But Iran proved this assumption wrong by responding differently. They take to the street in solidarity to Iran, rally in support of their government, and chant anti-imperialist, anti-American and Anti-Israeli slogans. The destruction and losses of war do not weaken them; instead, they revive a sense of nationalism, strengthen unity, and narrow the gap between the people and the government. Iran is attacked but not broken; it lost leaders, not leadership, and it will endure.

On 28 February corresponding to 10th Ramadan, the first day of the war on Iran, the US-Israeli’s coordinated air strikes killed the Supreme Leader of Iran, while he was working at the office. The 86-year old leader did not seek refuge in a bunker but continued his service to the nation which he has been developing through revolutionary and visionary leadership for four decades.

As the enemy’s prime target, his service to the nation carries immense symbolic force, and in moments of war, symbols matter greatly. Khamenei’s decision not to seek safety in a bunker sends a stark image of resistance. Death, in this case, does not signify defeat but martyrdom—a continuation of life.

Following the killing of the Supreme Leader, Iran responded swiftly by striking the US bases in the countries where it was attacked from, targeting air bases and other American assets, contrary to Washington’s expectations. United States President Donald Trump admitted this when he said: “In the last two weeks, they [Iran] were not supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. Those missiles were set to go after them. So, they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. And the other one, you know, they fought back. They could have yielded.”

Trump’s admission that Iran “could have yielded” reveals a significant historical miscalculation. The United States attacked Iraq, killed Saddam Hussein, and the result was regime change. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was killed, and regime change followed there as well. Iran, however, did not yield. It is fighting back.

Iran presented something quite different, something unexpected. It cannot be re-engineered through the killing of leaders and the bombing of the country because of its ideology and complex political structure. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, without significant military power, it fought an imposed war for eight years. Iran does not merely rely upon its military power but also on its ideology of revolution, sacrifice, and resistance that generate the spirit of resistance.

For millions of Iranians, this historical tragedy of Karbala is a living moral framework for standing against aggression, a refusal to submit to the tyrannical ruler of one’s time, without fear of death or defeat. The life and sacrifice of Imam Hussain teach ‘live with dignity’ and “Death with dignity is better than a life of humiliation”. In this situation, martyrdom carries weight. It cannot be considered a loss but the highest testimony to truth and justice. The holy Quran testifies: “Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead—in fact, they are alive! But you do not perceive it.” (Al-Quran, 2:154). Thus, resistance in Iran is not purely military; it is also theological, ethical, and historical.

Similarly, Khamenei’s death is a martyrdom, refusing to submit to the imperial power of the United States and Israel, showing no fear of death and continuing the chain of sacrifice in defence of the land, the Islamic Republic of Iran. He continued his duties as usual, confronting the enemy rather than yielding or fleeing out of fear of death, despite media reports and rumours that he had fled to Russia.

This is not only about Ali Khamenei, but about the entire leadership structure of Iran. In this view, none of them fears death; rather, they confront it openly. The deaths of their leaders are seen not as a source of weakness, but as a force that makes Iran stronger and more resilient. They will continue fighting until they attain martyrdom.

In sum, Iran will never bow to its enemies. It will continue fighting until martyrdom is achieved. They rely not merely on weapons and military power but also on sacrifice, martyrdom, dignity, and memory. This is why, after leaders are killed, cities are struck, and defence facilities are targeted, they are not collapsed. They did not yield and continued to resist. In this sense, the message is clear: Iran will not bow down to any aggression.

Azmat Ali is a New Delhi–based writer in English and Urdu who focuses on literature, religion, and politics

29 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org