“We have nothing to do with that.” An American Medical Association staff member said this to me with a look of disdain on her face. I was at the AMA’s annual conference in Chicago, urging the doctors in attendance to speak up for their imprisoned Palestinian colleague, pediatrician and neonatologist Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. My group posted up outside conference rooms and handed out informational flyers uplifting his story. Dr. Abu Safiya has been held in brutal Israeli detention for over 500 days without charge; you would think these details would trigger some sympathy or at least curiosity in his American counterparts, but the opposite happened. We were flocked by security guards, verbally harassed, and treated as if we were doing something much more nefarious than handing out harmless pieces of paper.

A male security guard was threatening to get physical with me when the AMA staffer walked past — but instead of intervening, she joined in with him, egging him on. I asked her, “Do you know why we’re here, though? You guys need to speak up for your colleagues in a genocide.” She shook her head snidely, showcasing an apathy that was almost laughable considering the irony of the situation: A staff member for the country’s leading medical institution — one that prides itself on its ethics — couldn’t even pretend to care about a Palestinian doctor being tortured by Israel.

It’s quite maddening when you think of how much support the AMA gave Ukraine when the Russian invasion began. They quickly put out statements of condemnation that the healthcare sector was being impacted, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid were given almost instantly. It has been three years since Gaza’s healthcare sector was completely reduced to rubble, and the AMA has yet to say a single word about it. A year and a half has passed since Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was abducted from the hospital that Israel besieged.

Coincidentally, the same week the AMA was meeting in Chicago, new photos of Dr. Abu Safiya emerged, the first in many months. He’s shown handcuffed and alone in a sterile white room, apparently on a video call with the Israeli courts.

Dr. Abu Safiya before Israeli prison

Dr. Abu Safiya after 1.5 years in Israeli prison

The new image of Dr. Abu Safiya breaks my heart. He’s lost so much weight, and there’s scarring and scabbing on his arms that weren’t there before, obvious signs of torture. Israeli prisons are vile and dangerous; they are places where military personnel can go rogue with no fear of punishment and enact their most atrocious desires. After all, these prisons are run by the likes of Ben Gvir, a racist, sadist, and war criminal. I just don’t understand how physicians in the AMA can consciously look at this photo of Dr. Abu Safiya and have nothing to say.

When Israelis are permitted to commit war crime after war crime, including holding medical professionals hostage, it sets a precedent. They’re not only killing and kidnapping healthcare workers in Gaza, but in Lebanon and Iran, too. Is it just because these are brown Muslim people that the AMA refuses to speak out? For an organization that claims a commitment to human rights and dignity, its racism is loud, and its participation in the white supremacist attitudes of Western imperialism is staggering.

This conference was a place for the AMA to discuss policy, especially around advocacy. CODEPINK staff, volunteers, and coalition partners were outside and inside the conference every single day. Our presence sparked awareness and conversation among the members, and we learned that there were debates inside on an issue the organization could no longer ignore: Palestinian healthcare workers.

Although they didn’t mention Dr. Abu Safiya by name, it’s clear that the AMA heard our collective message and that the friends of the movement inside the AMA were emboldened by our consistent energy. During the conference’s scheduled time to amend, remove, and propose new policies, a handful of resolutions were introduced about Palestine and the blatant attacks on its healthcare workers and infrastructure. There was one resolution in particular that was proof that our work was changing hearts and minds. It reads as follows:

“RESOLVED, that our AMA supports efforts to protect, release, and provide restitution to detained noncombatant healthcare workers in all areas of conflict, including Gaza.”

Ultimately, this specific resolution was not passed. But the mere inclusion and debate of the topic means that our persistence illuminated the issue of Palestine to every single person at the conference. And, because of that, the AMA delegates managed to pass 2 resolutions about the general “protection of healthcare workers and facilities in conflict areas.”

The AMA staff member and security guards knew what we were talking about; they knew the story of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. Whether they feel a moral obligation to do anything about it is beyond me, but we got confirmation that they knew exactly what we are organizing for. And even if the people in positions of power at the AMA don’t feel inclined to do anything about genocide, it is very clear that the general body does care.

The AMA was founded, in part, to lay out a strict code of ethics for medical professionals in the United States. These principles explicitly highlight the responsibility of physicians to advocate for human dignity, human rights, public health, and medical access for all. What has happened in Gaza over the past three years has been nothing short of an abomination of human dignity and rights. Israel and the U.S. have bombed Gaza’s public health system to the ground, and now the one million Palestinians in Gaza have been left without access to proper medical care for three years. If the AMA were run by individuals who actually practiced their own code, they would have been the first to advocate against medicide in Gaza. Unfortunately, the organization seems to favor quiet comfort over the actual embodiment of its values.

I am reminded of the photo that came out of Gaza just a few weeks after the genocide began. At a press conference outside an exhausted hospital, dead bodies of children in bags surrounded the podium, traumatized men stared at the camera, and some of the most courageous healthcare workers I have ever seen spoke out, pleading for the world to do something.

Press conference outside of Al-Ahli Hospital on October 18th, 2023.

I see the photo above, and the photo of Dr. Abu Safiya — these are just a handful of Palestinian healthcare workers making tremendous sacrifices to protect human life and dignity. They physically put themselves in the line of fire; meanwhile, the AMA doctors can’t even put out a statement. It is well past time that they break their silence. If the AMA chooses to advocate for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, they very well might save his life.

AMA: Demand the Release of Dr. Abu Safiya!

Jenin is CODEPINK’s Palestine Campaigner

Jenin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in December of 2023. For over five years, Jenin has been a community organizer and dedicated individual focused on the Palestinian movement through advocacy, digital storytelling, and grassroots mobilization. She is a firm believer in intertwined struggle and liberation for all.

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Episode 357: Challenging Zionism: In this episode, CODEPINK host Marcy Winograd interviews Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute on the war budget that fuses the US and Israeli militaries. In the second half of the program, we bring you highlights of CODEPINK'S summer series: Challenging Zionism in Schools. Guests include Adam Sanchez, an editor at "Rethinking Schools" magazine, and Rick Chertoff, co-author with Marcy Winograd of "What's Missing in Holocaust Education?"

The 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may lead to lasting peace or it may be over within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the US and Israel. If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades.

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Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21st. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the US-Iran memorandum, and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the US fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.

If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war between Iran, Israel and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.

This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries - all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.

Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the US and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the US from the war on Iran that he and Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.

But to understand the roots of this crisis in US foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive US foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that US military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”

Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.

The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the US defeat in Vietnam. After Bush II and Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama, Trump and Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.

This US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s. From the Suez crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.

In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.

They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia, the occupation of Beirut, the invasion of Grenada, the airstrikes on Libya in 1986, as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities,” and “unconventional warfare.”

They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact “a strategic reorientation of the US military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”

Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the US and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.

But the US involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East. It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; US and western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.

Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying US special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concentrating such a large share of US war casualties in such a small force - about 70,000 men and women at any one time - helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.

The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.

Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked US and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.

Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.

But the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of US imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of US and Western politicians and establishment media.

US political, military and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.

In the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power and uphold international law.

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in U.S. aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.

As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the US empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting US imperial violence for generations.

It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the essential transition from empire to democracy.

That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.

Ready to challenge the war marchine? Get involed with CODEPINK TODAY!

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Episode 356: From Media Madness to Cuban Solidarity: On Empire on the Rocks, Marcy Winograd & Medea Benjamin discuss CODEPINK’s media complicity in the war machine and CODEPINK’s demands to meet the press. On the second half of our program, Marcy interviews activists with Hands off Cuba on their recent trip to the island nation to support international worker solidarity.

Episode 355: Disrupting the War Machine: On this episode of CODEPINK Radio, host Marcy Winograd highlights CODEPINK disruptions of Capitol Hill hearings with architects of foreign and domestic wars: SOS Rubio and Sec. DHS Mullen. On the second half of the program, Marcy interviews Nuvpreet, coordinator of CODEPINK’s Bases Off Cyprus campaign, on protests over the UK’s role in transporting weapons to Israel.

Last week, the Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) announced a major health breakthrough with VAXIRA, a vaccine treatment for lung cancer. This is a remarkable achievement, made only more impressive by the fact this is Cuba’s second lung cancer vaccine.

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The vaccine stops the progression of cancer by developing the patient’s immune system to fight off cancer cells. This has proven to significantly prolong people’s survival. Since 2013, the vaccine has been monitored, trialled, and tested on more than 1,300 patients. Over a ten-year period, patients survived a median of 76.6 months with 20% of all patients who were given VAXIRA experienced unexpected long-term survival. Last year, VAXIRA was awarded the Technological Innovation Prize in Cuba for its contribution to healthcare in Cuba. This is an incredible feat for humanity and the battle against cancer - and it is being done by a country facing the longest and most severe blockade in history.

In 2011, Cuba developed CIMAvax, which remains the world’s only approved lung cancer vaccine. This vaccine works to induce the immune system to stop the growth of cancer cells to slow the progression of a tumors. This vaccine has already treated more than 5,000 people across the world and many more thousands in Cuba itself. Given the immense significance of the vaccine, the United States agreed to a special arrangement to trial the vaccine in the US. The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York has been running clinical trials with CIM since 2018. They have run the first clinical trials of CIMAvax in the United States. The very same nation that is imposing a genocidal blockade on Cuba is also benefiting from the historic breakthroughs in healthcare.

These major developments in medicine to treat cancer are not Cuba’s only awe-inspiring health achievements.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba produced five vaccines: Ablada, Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa. Cuba had one of the lowest COVID deaths in the Western Hemisphere - and by 2021, Cuba’s fatality rate was just 0.59% compared to the 2.2% worldwide average. The vaccines were produced without need for specialist refrigeration which meant they could be easily transported and also distributed across the world to places where accessing such infrastructure would be impossible. Quickly, Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico all picked up the vaccine to protect their population.

By 2023, Cuba had the third highest rate of vaccinations per 100,000 people. Despite the fact the U.S. banned the country from importing the syringes necessary to immunize their own population. In this context, Cuba was the first country in the world to vaccinate toddlers and children, as part of their push to re-open schools safely.

Cuba, like the United States, offered its COVID vaccines to the world. While Cuba donated vaccines to St Vincent and the Grenadines and sold them as cheap as they could, the U.S. bullied countries into putting up their assets, like embassy buildings and military bases, in order access vaccines. This was to “protect” against future legal challenges that vaccine recipients might file against the manufacturer of the vaccine. This profit-motive was a major cause for the vaccine apartheid in the distribution of COVID protection across the world. As of August 2024 in high-income countries, more than 222 doses had been distributed per 100 people. While in low-income countries, this was less than 46. In 2021, US pharmaceutical companies that produced COVID vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) collected an eye-watering revenue of $31 billion. The concept that companies and shareholders should make money from a pandemic should be utterly outrageous.

Biotechnology

Cuba leads the world in its vaccine breakthroughs. But, how is this all possible? It is not by accident that Cuba is able to develop world-leading health breakthroughs in medicine. Cuba has developed a world-class biotechnological sector that is state-owned and operates in the interests of the people, not profit. There are no profit motives to producing vaccines, research and development is for collective benefit, and resources are shared to better the process of scientific development. This is quite the opposite situation in capitalist countries where biotechnology is a major competition dominated by pharmaceutical companies motivated entirely by profits, which often means that when there are major developments in health - they are not accessible for people.

In 1981, Cuba opened the Biological Research Center, despite the blockade stopping entry of equipment, materials, access to research journals, and medicines. In the first 9 years, the Center produced three products. Between 1990-2000, it produced 18, and 2001-2010 it produced more than 40. Today, that figure continues to grow. The Center flourished into a world-class biotechnological sector that has made major health breakthroughs. Cuba produced the world’s first human vaccine to contain a synthetic antigen, for Haemophilus influenzae type B.

In 1989, Cuba produced the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine during a severe breakout of the disease in the country. This was the first ever vaccine produced to protect against Meningitis B and was exported to protect people in countries across Latin America. The U.S. approved its first vaccine for Meningitis B in 2014.

The following year, Cuba produced a vaccine for Hepatitis B. They joined just five other countries as a manufacturer of Hep B vaccines: France, South Korea, United States, Indonesia, and Britain. As the US blockade made it virtually impossible and far too expensive to import the vaccine, Cuba produced their own and eliminated Hepatitis B under 15.

In 2006, Cuba developed Heberprot-P, the only medicine in the world to reduce the amputation rate of patients with diabetic foot ulcers by 75%. Within 10 years, it was used in 23 countries. It has treated more than 400,000 people with foot ulcers. In 2024, the United States even broke their own blockade and approved it for trials and use. The very thought that Americans who suffer from diabetes might be treated by Cuban medicine while being fed propaganda against Cuba and funding a war against the very Cuban researchers and scientists helping them reveals how inhumane this blockade is.

By 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. Cuba managed this because of its socialist model, which is the same reason why it is not celebrated in mainstream media and looked to as a center for health advances in the U.S. This world historical achievement came as a result of Cuba’s universal health system that integrated maternal and child health programs with HIV and STI treatment. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of AIDS in the world and the lowest in the Americas, thanks to the free provision of antiretroviral treatment it has been distributing since 2001. Its vaccination programs have eradicated diseases that continue to cause death and suffering around the world including diphtheria in 1979, measles in 1993, whooping cough in 1994, and rubella in 1995. Cuba has also developed the highest control on blood pressure in the world.

The same principles that lead Cuba to produce world-leading medical breakthroughs is similar to its success in eliminating diseases. Cuba’s vaccination model is motivated by protecting its people. The National Immunization Program, which began in 1962, has saved the lives of at least 560,000 children who would have otherwise contracted diseases if it weren’t for the program. This is motivated by four directives: equity of vaccine distribution; integration of vaccination in primary healthcare; the inclusion of active community participation; and to provide vaccines free of charge. These guiding principles indicate how central the health of all society is, not corporate interests or greed.

Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world. Before the revolution in 1959, 300 children were paralyzed by polio each year. One of the first measured by the revolutionary government was immunization for Cuban society. In 1962, the polio campaign launched through mobilizing 100,000 members of newly founded revolutionary committees to conduct a population census and vaccinate all children. Within months, polio was eradicated in Cuba making it one of the first countries in the world to do so. Polio is still a leading cause of paralysis and death across the world.

These health achievements have massively benefited people across the world through access to new treatments and cures, affordable and accessible vaccines and medicines, and models for healthcare. But, another awe-inspiring element of Cuba’s healthcare is its international solidarity.

Cuba has restored the eyesight for more than four million people with its joint program with Venezuela, Operation Miracle. They have sent more than 600,000 health workers on medical missions to 160 countries in response to pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other crises where no other country would act. They have and continue to train doctors from the Global South for free so they go back to their home countries to practice medicine.

Cuba makes these miraculous achievements for humanity while facing a blockade that causes shortages of medicines in pharmacies across Cuba, blocks researchers from accessing health journals, and prevents the entry of equipment, spare parts, and laboratory materials that could make it easier and faster to conduct research. The U.S. blockade should be seen as an attack on humanity itself. This is a genocidal act of war against a population that exports doctors across the world by an empire that exports bombs, fighter jets, and invading soldiers.

Cuba once had amongst the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%. It is estimated this has cost 1,800 lives of infants. This is the material result of a blockade that intends to kill, punish, and destroy a country for asserting its own sovereignty. Yet, even still, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than that in the United States. The U.S. enforces its blockade on Cuba so that it can try to claim Cuba is a “failed state”, which also means its universal, free healthcare system “fails”; all so it can maintain its abysmal healthcare system that operates purely for profit, despite the level of death, bankruptcy, and suffering it causes to poor Americans.

The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.

Like Fidel Castro said in 2003: “Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country does not possess nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons. Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated in the idea of saving lives. It would absolutely contradict this concept to put a scientist or a doctor to work to produce substances, bacteria or viruses to kill other human beings.”

Join our next Cuba Community Call on June 16!

Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s Digital Content Producer and co-ordinator for the international Bases off Cyprus campaign.

Last week, the world watched as Donald Trump wrangled up his bro-squad of capitalist billionaires and chartered them across the world to China. We watched in disbelief as the China-hating Trump administration paraded around Beijing gawking at beautiful ceilings and giant rose bushes. “China is beautiful,” Trump said.

All the while, the top U.S. oligarchs met with Chinese officials, hoping to find openings they could slither into China’s large, booming markets and siphon off even more wealth that they most definitely don’t need. Fortunately, China just wasn’t that interested.

Even though nothing much came of the meetings, all the China hawks in Washington were on the edge of their seats, anxious that better relations with China would risk their favorite justification for raising the military budget to an unprecedented 1.5 trillion dollars. But we need to prepare for war with China by 2025… no 2027… wait maybe 2030? Forever?

Mainstream media had a lot to say about the meeting. The Guardian was especially deceptive, with one article titled:

This is the kind of headline we’ve come to expect from outlets like the New York Post, whose credibility is on par with a spam email. In fact, they did have a similar article:

It’s not a huge surprise that western media is trying to make it sound like war was China’s idea, when it’s the U.S. who has been actively preparing for it the last decade. It’s part of their strategy to use misleading headlines to stoke fear about China so nobody pays attention to the war-antagonizing behavior of the United States.

When President Xi Jinping speaks about the “Thucydides Trap,” he is warning the U.S. against treating war with China as inevitable, and to instead pursue diplomacy and cooperation. Many U.S. policymakers, however, continue to frame China’s rise primarily as a military threat, expanding military posturing across the Asia-Pacific in an effort to preserve U.S. dominance even at the risk of escalation.

It’s reported that Trump and Xi also talked at length about the U.S. war on Iran. This conflict — as well as U.S. military actions in Venezuela — are also tied to the broader U.S. confrontation with China. Both countries possess major oil, gas, and critical mineral reserves and have become important economic partners to China. By targeting two of China’s key energy suppliers, the U.S. is attempting to limit China’s access to the resources, while hoarding them for itself (and Israel).

The U.S. war on Iran has been a disaster, which is one of the reasons Trump is in China, hoping for concessions. It’s not just energy dominance the U.S. is worried about. While oil and gas prices are skyrocketing around the world, Iran has made an exception for Chinese oil tankers, which trade with Iran using the Chinese yuan, For decades, U.S. global power has depended on the petrodollar system, which keeps global energy trade tied to the U.S. dollar and gives the U.S. enormous economic warfare abilities. But China’s continued purchase of Iranian oil using the yuan, along with growing efforts by countries across the Global South to trade outside the dollar system, threatens to weaken that dominance.

The global order is clearly shifting toward a more multipolar world. The question is whether the U.S. will respond with diplomacy or attempt to preserve unipolar dominance through military confrontation with China. To prevent escalation, we must reject the idea that war between great powers is inevitable. And we must also demand media coverage that accurately and credibly covers the role the United States is playing in escalating tensions. That includes news outlets like The Guardian, who clearly prioritize painting China as the villain over credible and in-depth reporting.

Write to The Guardian: Stop Inciting War with Deceptive Articles and Learn From CODEPINK!

Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China Campaign Coordinator.

Megan graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.

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Episode 353: Flights to Cuba-Flotillas to Gaza-Resistance: On this episode, host Marcy Winograd features CODEPINK’s response to reports the Trump administration wants to investigate CODEPINK for bringing baby food to Cuba during Trump’s blockade of the island. Then we turn to special guest Ann Wright, CODEPINK Board member, who reports from Istanbul where she organizes flotillas to break the Israeli siege on Gaza. This episode also features CODEPINK-San Pedro’s Peace Week resistance to the military’s Fleet Week parade of warships. Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

The second-largest school district in the country has brought down the hammer on social justice educators following last year’s passage of AB 715, an “antisemitism” bill sponsored by the California Israel lobby and rubber-stamped by its minions in the state legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has ordered Ethnic Studies and social studies teachers at the Downtown Business Magnet (DBM) to remove Palestinian and Black Lives Matter flags and require them to undergo training on the use of “neutral terms” to describe sensitive topics, including Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Gaza.

The order from the District’s Office of Student Civil Rights came after Emet Legal Services, contacted by another teacher at DBM, filed a complaint of antisemitism last February objecting to social studies and health teacher Tiffany Do’s display of a Palestinian flag and anti-genocide poster, as well as the wearing of a keffiyeh in class. In its 19-page “Report of Findings,” which Do said was not shared with DBM teachers, the District said the keffiyeh could stay, but advocacy posters had to go.

Community rallies in solidarity with Do

At a lively after-school protest in front of the Downtown Business Magnet on May 16, teacher and Union del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said the District’s silencing of teachers in the face of a U.S.-subsidized genocide was like telling teachers in Nazi Germany to take a neutral stance on the Holocaust.

School psychologist Clemen Avalos also spoke at the rally sponsored by LA Educators for Justice in Palestine, Association of Raza Educators, Union del Barrio, Community Self-Defense Coalition and others. Avalos said, “Palestinian students, Mexican students, students born north or south of the border, Black students, Indigenous students–all of our students deserve the right to learn about the truth about their history, their identity and their culture.”

Ethnic Studies under attack

Avalos’ comments speak to AB 715’s threat to Ethnic Studies as an interdisciplinary study of decolonization that centers stories and struggles of people of color. The California Department of Education’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) underscores solidarity with the oppressed as a foundational value of Ethnic Studies, a course originally required for high school graduation under 2021 legislation, but now stalled due to zero funding in the state budget. From the start, the Israel lobby – JPAC/Jewish California and the California Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) — has objected to the mere mention of Palestine in Ethnic Studies, introducing one bill after another to either restrict Ethnic Studies to domestic issues or otherwise police the discipline’s teachers with AB 715, authored by Assemblymember Rick Chavez-Zbur (D-Santa Monica).

DBM Ethnic Studies and health teacher Do (Tido) told teachers, students, parents and community members gathered in the blistering sunlight in front of the school, “AB 715 is an erasure of marginalized people. The order to remove a Palestinian flag during an active genocide is actually Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian.”

The Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR) is a non-profit of scholars and researchers that encourages victims of anti-Palestinian racism to report incidents to the organization for “education” and “advocacy.” IUAPR defines anti-Palestinian racism as a form of racism that “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” Its list of examples of such racism includes “failing to acknowledge Palestinians with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine”… “pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives” … and “defaming Palestinians and their [non-Palestinian] allies with slander such as being inherently anti-semitic.”

Back at the rally

Against a backdrop of teachers holding signs that read “Protect Ethnic Studies” and “Defend Palestinian Voices,” Do animatedly addressed an estimated 40 people — including Colin Hernandez, Zbur’s challenger in the June 2nd primary.

“AB 715 weaponizes civil rights advocacy against the people it was meant to protect, so that just the mere existence of a Palestinian flag is now considered antisemitic, but the overreach of AB 715 does not stop with Palestinians,” said Do. The crowd shouted, “That’s right! That’s right!” Do continued. “Under AB 715, the statement ‘Black Lives Matter’ is painted as discriminatory bias. Under AB 715, historical injustices like the theft of Native American land cannot be righted under the banner of ‘Land Back.’”

Since the District began its investigation, Do says she has removed the Palestinian flag, along with the BLM flag, Landback flag, and Puerto Rico flag.

Daniel, a member of Roybal Learning Center’s Social Justice Club, said students in the club stand behind Do in their outrage over AB 715’s straitjacket on speech and attack on Ethnic Studies. “From the Nakba to the current genocide, AB 715 is a violation of the First Amendment,” said Daniel, who noted Israel had infiltrated the US government, from the federal to the state level.

Following its investigation, the District determined that Do’s conduct “subjected students to discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry or ethnic characteristic in violation of the Civil Rights Act.” The report also noted, however, that “Students generally described her classroom environment as open, nonjudgmental, comfortable.”

The charge of discrimination based on “shared ancestry” assumes that all Jews and Israelis identify and support the State of Israel and perceive solidarity with Palestine or a Palestinian flag as antisemitic.

Not everyone agrees.

Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that features keffiyehs and watermelon caps on its website, argues that both Jewish and Arab peoples have ancient, ancestral, and spiritual ties to the land in West Asia. According to JVP, asserting exclusive Jewish rights to Palestine inevitably leads to the displacement of Palestinians and the erasure of their connection to the same ancestral land. Thousands of JVP members and supporters – some carrying Palestinian flags — have occupied state capitols, subway stations, and lawmakers’ offices to demand the US stop funding what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry have all termed Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Daniel, the DBM student, also challenged the notion that expressing solidarity with Palestine was antisemitic or discriminatory. “A Semite is someone who speaks a Semitic language, of which includes Arabic,” said Daniel, adding that a Semite is not just limited to Jewish people. Being a Semite extends to the same people being murdered every day by Israeli bombs. To want Palestinians to live a peaceful life and talking ill of the Israeli government–that is not antisemitic; it is the opposite.”

“Israeli genocide bill”

Educator unions, administrator associations, Jewish Voice for Peace chapters and the ACLU all opposed AB 715 due to concerns over the chilling of instruction and conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism — yet the state legislature approved AB 715 after midnight on 9/13/25, prompting a protester to shout from the Senate balcony, “This is an Israeli genocide censorship bill and you all know it … this bill is aiding and abetting a genocide that is ongoing. You all have blood on your hands.”

AB 715 establishes a politically-appointed antisemitism coordinator to monitor teacher training and in-class instruction beginning with four-year-olds in transitional kindergarten, and to follow up on complaints which can be filed anonymously by those not directly harmed by alleged discrimination. So in theory, an IDF soldier in occupied Palestine could file a complaint against California teachers based on hearsay, and demand LAUSD administrators drop what they’re doing to pursue investigations of educators.

The District’s corrective actions, with a June 10th deadline for compliance, include administrative review of all DBM history, social science and Ethnic Studies displays and content; department-wide professional development on addressing sensitive topics; and implementation of a site-based review process for supplemental instructional materials. According to Do, DBM’s principal has already delivered the mandated professional development, reviewing the corrective actions, including follow-up monitoring to, in the District’s words, “verify continued compliance with nondiscrimination neutrality.”

Such mandates raise the question: What is neutral language for Israeli slaughter, starvation, and torture of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, for Israel’s obliteration of every school in Gaza and killing of over 200 journalists? The District’s condemnation of classroom bias also raises the question of whether the District’s repeated description of the genocide as a“conflict” reflects a pro-Israel bias. A conflict suggests two equal sides. Israel is a nuclear-armed state controlling over four million Palestinians living under military occupation. The “two sides” are not equal.

The avalanche

The controversy at DBM is not an isolated example of the Israel lobby’s attempt to chill debate over Israel’s colonization of Palestine. The District’s mandates come amid an avalanche of Public Record Requests from Israel supporters seeking copies of hundreds of LAUSD teacher lesson plans, according to one LAUSD high school teacher contacted by the District. In addition, the lobby is asking the Governor to approve $10 million more for the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education to deliver Anti-Defamation League curriculum that includes a definition of contemporary antisemitism as demonization of Israel of Israel and that excludes the Gaza genocide from lesson plans.

As the State and District seek to silence teacher opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, annexation of the West Bank, and bombardment of Lebanon and Iran, Gochez suggests that instead of removing Palestinian flags from classrooms, teachers might all post Palestinian flags in a collective act of resistance. Similarly, the four teachers at DBM who, according to the District, removed their “Stop Genocide” posters might display them once again, with other teachers at the high school and across the District displaying the same message.

Or imagine faculties and students all wearing keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestine.

Dr. Lupe Carrasco Cardona, an Ethnic Studies adjunct professor and chair of the Association of Raza Educators, seconded the call for solidarity with all educators who “courageously, honorably and respectfully teach young people the truth about what is happening in our world.” Said Cardona, “Education should never be about fear, censorship, or intimidation. We cannot accept the banning of books, posters or flags, nor can we accept attacks on academic freedom and the professional integrity of educators.”

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Marcy Winograd is a retired public high school teacher and coordinates CODEPINK’s Drop the ADL campaign.

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On May 23^rd, in Poulsbo, WA, hundreds of people joined several dozen pacifist Buddhist monks from the Japanese based Nipponzan Myohoji religious order to install a Peace Pagoda immediately adjacent to the Kitsap Bangor U.S. naval base. An estimated 1,700 Trident nuclear weapons housed at the base have an annihilatory capacity unimaginably more terrible than the destruction and suffering the U.S. inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.

The foundational mission of the Nipponzan Myohoji monks calls on them to engage in worldwide pilgrimages urging abolition of nuclear weapons. They have been acutely conscious of the need to reach U.S. people.

Forty years ago, construction of this peace pagoda began on property owned by the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a community devoted to abolishing nuclear weapons and war. Tragically, arsonists burned the initial pagoda structure to the ground. This weekend, celebrants signaled their gratitude and relief following four decades of effort to overcome hurdles which delayed completion of the peace pagoda.

During an outdoor celebration, the monks chanted, drummed, and prayed as they sat before the gleaming white stupa, colorfully festooned with prayer flags.

The peace pagoda represents readiness to fulfill Buddha’s call to love others, even enemies. By seeking release from attachments to anger or fear, followers of the Buddha aim to alleviate suffering in the world.

Since 1917, members of the Nipponzan Myohoji order, following the Buddha’s example, have left comforts of home and family, often entering war zones, always urging total disarmament.

Asked to speak briefly during the ceremony, I recalled being with international activists in 1991, shortly before the U.S. went to war against Iraq. As members of the Gulf Peace Team, seventy-seven of us encamped at a site used by pilgrims traveling through the Iraqi desert en route to Mecca.

We were determined to interpose ourselves between the warring parties. Included in our group were a Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist monk and a lay member of the order.

When an air war broke out, we seemed unlikely to be in the way. Truthfully, we spent much of our time reading books and playing ping-pong in the desert. Yet the constant overflight of warplanes left us wondering if Baghdad and other cities might be completely destroyed.

Midway through the aerial war, anticipating a possible land invasion, the Iraqi dictatorship ordered evacuation of our Gulf Peace Team. Those tasked with the order had little choice. By sunrise, the following morning, buses were parked outside our camp, and four Iraqis asked us to take down the tents, pack our bags, and board the buses. Twelve of our members, people for whom I had utmost respect, decided to remain seated, in a circle, holding signs in Arabic and English that said, “We Choose to Stay.” I felt conflicted. I didn’t want the world to see images of Iraqi soldiers dragging peace activists through the sand. Reluctantly, I stood to the side.

One of the Iraqi men, Tarak, had previously visited our camp. Seeing the circle of twelve, he walked up to me. “Excuse me, Madame Kathy,” he asked, “but what am I to do?” I assured him the twelve meant no harm, but they couldn’t willingly board the buses. It was a matter of conscience.

Tarak nodded. Then he approached Jeremy Hartigan, the tallest man in the circle. Jeremy, a practicing Buddhist, softly chanted “Ohm,” as he sat, holding his sign.

Tarak bent over Jeremy, kissed him on the forehead, and pointed toward Iraq’s capitol city, saying “Baghdad!” Next, he and another Iraqi civilian, along with two soldiers lifted Jeremy Hartigan up, carried him to the top step of the bus, carefully situated him there and then asked, “Mister, you okay?”

I remember feeling astonished, thinking these folks could give workshops on nonviolence and start with the Chicago police. Now, I sadly wish those Iraqi officials could teach Israeli military and government people to abandon the brutal, taunting tactics they wield against Palestinians. Israeli forces have savagely tortured, maimed, displaced, starved, and assassinated civilians in the Occupied Palestine Territory and in surrounding countries. Last week, Israeli militarists and their cohorts brutalized humanitarian flotilla activists who attempted to break the genocidal siege of Gaza by opening a corridor to Gaza’s shores.

What a stark contrast between the Iraqi evacuation of peace activists in 1991, during a war waged by the countries many of us came from, and the U.S- provisioned Israeli violations of international law which normalize appalling crimes against humanity.

In 1991, the U.S. government and media goaded people to fear Iraqis. Then and still, U.S. billionaires have profited stupendously from such fears, gaining opportunities to develop, store, sell, and use huge weapon stockpiles.

U.S. mainstream media seldom mentions the Shimon Peres Nuclear Research Center, an Israeli nuclear installation located in the Negev desert. The CIA estimates that Israel possesses at least ninety-one thermonuclear weapons, yet Israel continually flaunts international law by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear armaments.

Today, in our war-ravaged world, the witness of those who revere the peace pagoda reminds me of Tarak kissing Jeremy Hartigan’s forehead. I hope the Buddhist monks’ message will be installed in the hearts and minds of innumerable people, stretching across borders and reaching future generations.

Want to build peace locally? Find local CODEPINKers near you today!

Kathy Kelly, (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com), an author and peace activist, is board president of World BEYOND War.

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In mid-January, a young Venezuelan mother named Oriana invited me into her home in Ciudad Tiuna, a government-built housing project with thousands of apartments and roughly 20,000 residents. With her five- and twelve- year-old sons in the other room, she pointed through the window at the charred earth where the United States military had abducted President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores two weeks earlier. A few buildings down, Oriana’s neighbor showed me the path where a bullet had entered through the bedroom window, ricocheted off the wall, and pierced a dresser, a pair of shoes, and a towel next to her bed. The exterior and interior walls of the building, too, were pierced with bullets. So was the nearby primary school that Oriana’s sons and younger siblings attend.

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Since the January 3 assault, rumors and accusations have spread like wildfire across the globe. On the evening of January 3, one of my neighbors in Queens, New York – who knew I was in Venezuela at the time – sent me a screenshot of a Tweet that had been seen by 4.3 million people alleging that “the so called ‘capture’ of Maduro was a negotiated deal between Maduro and US for an agreed exit strategy. … Maduro likely already has purchased property in Dubai to retire to.” Last month, an attendee of an event in Brooklyn, New York – not far from where Maduro and Flores sit in prison – quipped, like many, that the Bolivarian Revolution has sold out since January 3 and asked somewhat rhetorically, why Venezuelans weren’t “fighting back”.

When I was invited to Venezuela for an assembly for peace in December, a friend of mine – a photographer – asked if I might have room in my suitcase to bring him a pair of combat pants. He, like many Venezuelans, had begun civic-military training exercises in the build-up to the bombing, in which Trump’s administration killed 150 fisherpeople, seized Venezuelan oil tankers, and repeatedly threatened and carried out acts aggression of against Venezuela. When I arrived in Caracas and caught up with a member of a commune in the neighborhood 23 de Enero (an economist by trade), he had a pistol tucked into his waistband: he was headed straight to his volunteer patrol shift after our conversation, preparing for the possibility of an invasion at any moment.

The idea that Venezuelans have given up or are not “real” revolutionaries is easy to profess from an armchair in the imperial core (as Vijay Prashad, Roxanne Dunbar Ortíz, and others reminded us in “A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in the name of purity,” published in the aftermath of the 2019 coup in Bolivia). There is a deep irony that this assertion is made – and made often – in a country that has not only intentionally and strategically “increase[ed] pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from,” to use the boastful words of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but that continues to brutally repress the right to democratic expression within its own borders (as is evident from the mass arrests of anti-police brutality and anti-ICE protestors through the years, the murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minneapolis earlier this year, and the decades’-long political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and Josh Williams). Yet for this group of people, the focal point, seemingly exclusively, is whether or not Venezuela (or Cuba, for that matter) is “doing it right.” Have they sold out? Has enough blood been shed to win the approval of these studied observers? (What happens within the US seems to be of no interest here).

In Venezuela, a country that has lived through terrorism in many forms – from the degradation imposed by the poverty in which 70% of the population lived before the revolution to the bipartisan economic warfare wrought by the US which caused 40,000 people to die in the first year of Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” and attempts to assassinate Maduro – many would prefer to die on their feet rather than to live on their knees. Over the years, the United States has spent millions of tax-payer dollars on “pro-democracy” initiatives in Venezuela that seek to enact regime change and has imposed over 1,000 unilateral coercive measures, including one of the harshest sanctions regimes in the world (in fact, the very idea of economic warfare is for the population to overthrow its own leader by, as US President Richard Nixon put it 1970, ‘mak[ing] the economy scream”).

The Trump administration has taken no pains to hide its agenda, declaring, repeatedly, some variation of phrases like “America will not… allow a hostile regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets” (President Donald Trump) and the US is “deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us” (Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, “our” meaning Venezuela’s oil). Furthermore, Trump has been clear that a decision from the Venezuelan government to refuse to make concessions would undoubtedly lead to mass destruction, stating at his January 3 press conference, for instance, that “we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so… a much bigger wave, actually” and that “[a]ll political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro can happen to them”. (Interestingly, in the press conference there is not a single mention of international law, which the US has violated repeatedly – only of “American justice,” “American property,” “American foreign policy,” “American dominance,” and “American sovereignty.” As Trump said in a telling slip of tongue, “I watched last night one of the most precise, uh, attacks on sovereignty. I mean, it was, uh, an attack f- -- for justice.”)

Trump and his predecessor showed how far they are willing to go, and what they are capable of, to further the American agenda and consolidate US hegemony. The livestreamed genocide in Gaza has been one warning to the world; January 3 was another, when the US military shut off power in Caracas, disabled detection and air defense systems, flew over 150 aircraft into the city, bombed at least seven locations, and made off with the president and first lady (herself an important leader in the country since the early years of the revolution) after rehearsing the attack on a full-scale replica of Maduro’s compound built in Kentucky.

As US President Donald Trump boasted later the same day, “[t]his extremely successful operation should serve as warning” and “if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence... it’s just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.” Caracas became an example for the US government to show off its military might; as many survivors of the bombing told me, “we experienced, briefly, what it is like to be Palestinian.”

The discussion of where Venezuela “should” – or can – draw the line is an extremely complex one, and not something that should be taken lightly. January 3, and the escalated genocide in Palestine before it, ushered in a heightened era of hyper-imperialism, an increasingly unrestrained, and illegal, use of US military power as the country’s economic and technological edge lose their edge. Faced with the threat of continued bombings and bloodshed, the Venezuelan people are left with a difficult, if not impossible, set of choices and their own internal contradictions to struggle through.

To fixate on these calculations while ignoring the context that informs them – implying that we, in the West, in fact know what is best and what decisions should be made – is an adaptation of imperialist thinking disguised as left intellect. Or, as Fidel Castro said, “You strangle us for… years and then criticize us for the way we breathe.”

The decision of where to draw the line, what setbacks to accept and at what cost, and how much blood is to be shed, is one that belongs to the Venezuelan people – the ones who would pay the price for a hard stance with their lives. To imply that the Venezuelan people do not have agency in this choice is not only ahistorical but pedantic, colonial, and quite frankly racist. To point to one segment of the population – especially the diaspora in the US – as if they represent the voice of an entire people, is lazy, inaccurate, and unscientific.

Those in the West who insist that Venezuelans must take a hard stance to be “real revolutionaries” in so doing imply that Venezuelans are not acutely aware of the complex reality in which they find themselves and that they cannot think for themselves or sort through the contradictions and challenges they face, whether external or internal. This assumption is particularly ironic when imposed on a country where the revolution has from the onset used its wealth to fund programs that have not only vastly improved the quality of life of its people but have also bolstered their training, consciousness, and confidence to lead their own revolution, fromMission Robinson (which eradicated illiteracy by 2005 and taught 1.5 million people to read and write) to a variety of programs that have built dozens of universities and developed cadre training and political education.

The task for the left in the West is not to determine the “right” thing for Venezuela to do, nor is to make ahistorical comparisons that equate the reality in Venezuela with countries like Iran. The task, rather, is to build a struggle for liberation at home that furthers social advances for and builds the dignity and confidence of their own people. Beyond lifting our own population out of poverty and defeatism, such a struggle in the United States would widen the space for sovereign processes across the world in the very places under scrutiny from sections of the self-proclaimed left today, from Venezuela and Cuba to Iran and the countries of the Sahel. This cannot be done in a vacuum – or “on an island surrounded by a sea of capitalism,” as Chávez warned. In a country rife with poverty and inequality whose president recently professed that the only obligation of the government is to fund the military, we would do well to learn from the extraordinary skill, accomplishments, and fierce dedication of peoples who have withstood decades, if not centuries, of foreign interference rather than challenge their ability to determine their own future.

Join our Venezuela Rapid Response Team NOW!

Celina is the director of publications and an editor at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. She has also been a leader in internationalist, anti-imperialist, and working-class struggles in the United States for over a decade and has lived and studied in Latin America. She also participated in CodePink’s 2026 to Venezuela.

This article was originally published in CounterPunch on May 26.

Editor's Note: Since this article was submitted, the US military has conducted military strikes in Southern Iran, once again breaking the ceasefire.

On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets.

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Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided “ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,” in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Since no agreement with the United States or Israel is worth the paper it’s written on, it’s hard to imagine an agreement that would really protect Iran from future attacks. Without a more radical change in US policy, the United States and Israel will keep attacking Iran, in open violation of the UN Charter, no matter what they all agree to.

The only effective ways Iran has found to protect its land and its people are to build strong military defenses, including the capacity for devastating retaliation, and to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of the impact on the world’s oil and gas supply and the global economy. By attacking Iran, the United States and Israel forced it to defend itself and triggered a war that is reshaping the Middle East and possibly the world.

Losing this war is forcing the United States to finally start reevaluating the neoconservative tactics it has blindly substituted for a rational US foreign and military policy since the 1990s: sanction; threaten; bomb; kill; destroy; occupy; escalate; leave countries mired in violence and chaos - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon – never admit defeat; never question American exceptionalism or superiority.

The systematic US disdain for the rule of international law that undergirds this policy appears to make peace impossible in today’s world. But the final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has effectively exempted itself from the entire system of treaties, international laws and agreements that are supposed to govern international affairs, starting with the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force between countries, and the Geneva Conventions, which protect civilians, prisoners-of-war and wounded soldiers and sailors from the impacts of war.

These treaties were drawn up and universally adopted in the wake of the Second World War, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” as the UN Charter says in its preamble. President Roosevelt returned from his Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in 1945 to tell a joint session of Congress that they were designing the United Nations as a “permanent structure of peace.”

“It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed,” FDR told Congress. “We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”

The UN Charter codified and strengthened the age-old common law prohibition against international aggression, and the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy in the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact, which German leaders tried at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for violating.

However, amid overblown Western triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, a new generation of US leaders, likeMadeleine Albright and Dick Cheney, came to see the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions as obstacles to their ambitions to further expand US global power by more widespread and unrestricted use of military force.

Believing that the new imbalance in military power freed them from compliance with post-1945 treaties and conventions based on the hard-earned wisdom of past leaders in two world wars, the US and its allies unleashed their armed forces to attack and invade other countries, torture, rape and kill prisoners, and massacre civilians.

US officials assumed that the new military imbalance so greatly favored the United States that neither the UN, international courts, other powerful countries, nor even the entire people of the world could enforce the rules of international law and the laws of armed conflict on the United States if it chose to ignore them.

It is ironic, and deeply frustrating and confusing to US officials, to find out that what they hailed as a position of overwhelming power and impunity has led them to squander America’s day in the sun and waste the chance that its great good fortune provided to improve the quality of life for Americans and their neighbors.

The supposedly unlimited freedom of action attained by disdaining and trampling international law and institutions has proved to be a double-edged sword. There is no such thing as unlimited military power, short of the mass suicide of nuclear war. The idea that America’s virtually unlimited investment in weapons and war would give it the final word in every dispute was a mirage, as even Trump is now finding out.

As Americans reexamine the state of the world and the conflicts by which warmongering US leaders have tried to define it, it is obvious that war and military power do not lead to peace or prosperity, for Americans or anyone else. The more countries the Pentagon and the CIA take aim at, the more people they kill, and the more resources our leaders throw at them, the more other people all over the world rightly come to see the United States as a threat to their own lives and futures.

Governments around the world face difficult choices between meeting the needs and aspirations of their own people or complying with the hegemonic and undemocratic demands of the United States.

After holding itself up as the champion of democracy and freedom for 250 years, the United States is only accelerating its own decline by wasting trillions of dollars, and what little is left of the world’s good will, on this failed, ill-fated bid for global imperial power.

When the United States rose to great power in the first half of the 20th century, its leaders were wise enough to recognize that exercising naked imperial power would not succeed in a world still fighting to free itself from the ravages of European colonialism. So FDR and his colleagues based the UN system on sovereign equality between nations, and created a framework for international relations that the whole world could agree to.

Like all legal and political systems, the success or failure of the UN system rests on whether the most powerful countries will agree to live by the same rules as the others. The veto is a poison pill that corrupts the system, as Albert Camus predicted when it was unveiled in 1945.

“If this report is accurate, … it would effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy,” Camus wrote in Combat, the underground French Resistance newspaper he edited. “The world would be ruled by a directorate of five powers… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”

However, the UN has developed the “Uniting For Peace” process, which allows the General Assembly to hold Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) on international problems when a veto prevents the Security Council from acting to resolve them. The General Assembly used that process to resolve the Suez Crisis in 1956, and it has been using it, albeit intermittently and inadequately, to address the crisis in Palestine since 1997.

In response to a request from the General Assembly in its Emergency Special Session on Palestine, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end without delay. And so, the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding that Israel must bring “to an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories… and do so no later than” September 2025.

Israel did not comply, so the General Assembly must take further steps, such as an arms embargo and an economic boycott. But it does have the means to do so and just needs to muster the political will.

While the United States and Israel commit systematic and barbaric war crimes, presuming themselves immune from accountability, the world is slowly - too slowly - coming to grips with the international cooperation needed to enforce the “permanent structure of peace” that all countries have agreed to live by, and on which the lives of millions of vulnerable people and the future of humanity depend.

While US leaders are finally realizing that they do not have the power to intimidate and conquer the whole world, the American people are gradually understanding that we have an even greater power, the power to refuse to fight their criminal wars, and to insist on making peace and cooperating with all our neighbors on this small planet that we all share.

Take action now! Stop the War on Iran!

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is also the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a new revised, updated 2nd edition.

Episode 352: US Empire in Free Fall & China on the Rise: On this episode of CODEPINK Radio, co-hosts Marcy Winograd and Medea Benjamin discuss the US empire’s last gasps and the push-back at home as residents rise up against data surveillance centers. During the second half, Marcy talks to Megan Russell, CODEPINK’s China campaigner, on Trump & the oligarchs’ visit to China to scout new markets and rescue the US dollar from Trump’s disastrous war on Iran.

It has been only 72 hours since our colleagues on the Gaza flotilla arrived in Istanbul, Turkiye to tell of the rape, assaults and abuse they endured from the Israeli military on their sailboats, security personnel on the prison ship, civilian police at the Ashdod processing center and guards at the notoriously abusive Ktzi’ot prison.

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Criminal Abuse Orchestrated and Ordered at the Highest Level of the Israeli Government

The 72 hours feel like weeks as we heard the stories from each of the 428 unarmed civilians from 45 countries who were on 50 small sailboats, kidnapped in international waters and taken against their will to a place they did not want to go-Israel-and then subjected to criminal abuse from personnel from a multitude of Israeli security institutions.

This criminal abuse was orchestrated and ordered at the highest level of the Israeli government as evidenced by the statement and actions of Minister of National Security Ben Gvir. Gvir himself posted footage on a social media platform showing himself gloating as activists from the flotilla were forced to kneel on the floor, blindfolded, roughed up with the hands bound tightly in zipties at the port of Ashdod.

The videos include a clip of Gvir waving an Israeli flag over the detainees who are hunched over on the ground with their hands bound and a clip of him smiling and chanting “Am Yisrael Chai”—Hebrew for “The nation of Israel lives”—at a detainee. Other clips showed detainees being pushed down to the ground, and detainees with their foreheads pressed against the floor, surrounded by armed guards as the Israeli national anthem plays.

Countries Ban Ben Gvir for Actions Against International Activists, But Not for Actions Against Palestinians

For his actions, France has banned Ben-Gvir from entering French territory stating that his “unspeakable behavior of taunting Gaza flotilla activists who had been arrested and abused by Israeli police forces. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot wrote on X on May 23: “As of today, Itamar Ben-Gvir is banned from entering French territory. This decision follows his unspeakable actions towards French and European citizens who were passengers on the Global Sumud Flotilla. We cannot tolerate that French nationals can be threatened, intimidated or brutalized in this way—all the more so by a public officials.” Barrot also called for the European Union to sanction Ben Gvir.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the treatment seen in the footage in a post on X, calling the images “unacceptable” and saying it was “inadmissible” that demonstrators, including Italian citizens, were subjected to treatment that “violates human dignity”.

“Italy further demands an apology for the treatment of these demonstrators and for the utter contempt shown toward the explicit requests of the Italian government,” she said, adding that Israel’s ambassador in Rome would also be summoned.

President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea on May 20 called Israel’s actions “way out of line.”

Spain and Ireland also issued statements, calling out Ben Gvir’s “monstrous” and “appalling” behavior.

Even US President Donald Trump’s administration issued a rare criticism of an Israeli official, branding Ben Gvir’s actions “despicable. “Flotilla was stupid stunt, but Ben Gvir betrayed the dignity of his nation,” wrote US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on X.

Israeli Government Values-Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Theft of Lands

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s disclaimer that Ben Givr’s incitement of violence against flotilla participants does not reflect the “values” of the state of Israel has been ridiculed around the world as the values of the state of Israel are clearly stated by their actions of recent genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank and 80 years of Israeli abuse of Palestinians beginning in 1948 with the Israeli militias massacres of Palestinians and theft of land and homes of over 800,000 in the Nakba, “Catastrophe.”

No one has to look far for the “values” of the state of Israel. The values of the state of Israel are the criminal actions documented in excruciating detail by cases brought to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Gaza Flotilla Participants Suffered Gunshots, Beatings, Sexual Assaults, Concussions, Broken Bones…and They Still Are Willing to Challenge Israeli Brutality Toward Palestinians

Gaza flotilla participants, both men and women, young and old, endured an endless succession of criminal actions by Israeli state security officials. Three were shot by Israeli officials. Beatings, kicked in all parts of the body, dragged on the floor by the hair, forced to remain kneeling and bent over for hours at a time, beaten when one moved slightly, stripped naked numerous times, sexually assaulted, intimidation and humiliation were suffered in various degrees by virtually all of the 428 persons who were kidnapped from their flotilla boats.

Within hours of their arrival in Istanbul, flotilla participants were describing one by one, boat by boat, to Turkish police investigators and civilian lawyers what the Israeli security personnel did to them. These are official statements from participants that will be used in judicial proceedings against the State of Israel.

The first of many reports describing the treatment of many participants was issued on May 24, 2026. Titled “Global Sumud Flotilla Released Horrific, Newly Emerging Testimonies as Survivors Return Home,” it contains descriptions by members of several delegations of Israeli brutality toward flotilla participants:

New Testimonies: Terror Inside the Shipping Containers

As survivors begin speaking to the press upon arrival in their home nations, a shared experience of calculated barbarism—and profound solidarity—is emerging:

The French Delegation: In a chilling personal testimony, French delegate Meriem Hadjal described being dragged toward a dark shipping container by soldiers multiple times her size. “I take the first blow. Slaps that knock you out… Everything happens at the level of the head.” Terrified of being raped, she resisted as a soldier repeatedly touched her, while a second soldier pulled at her chest and pants. Inside the container, she witnessed a third soldier torturing another volunteer on the ground with a taser. Another soldier grabbed her by the hair, beating her head while demanding she show her face. When the container door briefly opened, she recounted, “what I mainly see on the ground, because I don’t look up, are bloodstains.” Meriem noted she, along with other detainees, were stripped naked, removing any warm clothes and crammed into splintered containers where they could hear their “comrades, one by one, screaming, because they were being beaten to a pulp.”

The Polish Delegation: Karim Awad, a medic holding dual Polish and UK citizenship, recounted being choked with a torn Palestinian flag by an iOF soldier. Awad was subsequently subjected to continuous stompings to the head by six soldiers. Because he had written “Free Palestine” on his body, he was singled out for multiple strip searches, severe beatings with a hand-held metal detector, and having his hair ripped out. He further revealed that the iOF systematically flooded the floors of the dark shipping containers with cold water every few hours to prevent detainees from sleeping.

The Greek Delegation: Delegates recounted the boarding of the Kiriakos X, where soldiers used electric shocks and brutal beatings on the crew to force them to identify their captain. To halt the torture of her crew, the female captain courageously stepped forward to claim responsibility for the boat and volunteers; the iOF responded by shooting her directly in the leg with a rubber bullet. She was wounded and denied proper medical care for days.

The South African Delegation: Two South African delegates, Ebrahim Peters and Qutb Hendricks, provided powerful testimony detailing how iOF soldiers explicitly used geopolitical retaliation as a pretext for torture. Upon discovering the participants’ nationality, soldiers dragged them into an isolated room and launched a targeted physical assault. While beating the volunteers, soldiers explicitly referenced international accountability mechanisms, stating, “You guys want to take us to court? We’ll show you,” referencing South Africa’s genocide case against israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The Belgian & Australian Delegations: 77-year-old Belgian delegate Olimpia Dìez Perlines expressed total shock at the sadism of the forces. Julien Cabral, another Belgian participant noted that soldiers could be heard explicitly saying, “let’s have fun,” as they initiated the violent attacks. And Australian delegate Juliet Lamont provided further harrowing details, confirming she was sexually assaulted “in this kind of torture chamber as five men were bashing me and smashing my face.”

The Canadian Delegation: Ehab Lotayef, sailing aboard the Canadian Boat to Gaza, was directly asked by iOF personnel to assist them with translation, only to be stabbed in the hand by soldiers the moment he attempted to provide that help.

The Brazilian Delegation: A delegate returning to Brazil, Ariadne Telles, detailed suffering physical and psychological torture. The delegate was subjected to severe sleep deprivation and targeted physical assaults: “They kicked me on the face, they kicked me on the legs, they zip-tied my hands; I don’t feel my fingers until now.” Detainees were forced to sit on their knees with their heads pressed to the floor for hours, while captors laughed.

Ann Wright was in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a Colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years, but resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.” She is on the steering committee of U.S. Boats to Gaza and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

Articles Cited:

Shezaf, Hagar (August 5, 2024). “Torture, Sexual Abuse and Humiliation | Dozens of Testimonies From Palestinian Prisoners Describe Conditions in Israeli Jails During Gaza war”. Haaretz.

The recent deportation of Alex Saab from Caracas to the U.S. on May 18, 2026, has generated shock, confusion, anger and intense debate across sectors of the international solidarity movement and many Venezuelans themselves.

Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who became closely associated with the Venezuelan government during the years of heavy U.S. sanctions is seen by many Venezuelans as someone who helped the country bypass sanctions, obtain fuel and food, open financial channels, and resist economic collapse under blockade conditions.

The U.S. accuses Saab of corruption and money laundering connected to Venezuelan state contracts but for many people in Venezuela and across the international left, Saab came to represent something larger than an individual businessman: the broader struggle over sanctions, sovereignty, and Venezuela’s ability to survive under extraordinary economic and geopolitical pressure.

The Venezuelan revolution did not survive the last decade of US economic warfare without contradictions. It survived through improvisation, exhaustion, loyalty, fear, sanctions, migration, stubbornness, and an almost unbearable national fatigue that few outside the country truly understand.

The United States did not merely sanction Venezuela. It attempted to break it. It froze national assets, it openly pursued regime change, backed parallel governments, economically strangled the country, and ultimately launched a military operation to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores from Venezuelan soil.

To understand why Saab became such a powerful figure, one must first understand what Venezuela became under sanctions: a country forced into survival mode.

And now, after the deportation of Saab to the United States and the growing accusations against Delcy Rodríguez, I watch many people speak with the confidence of hindsight. As if everything had always been obvious. As if Venezuelans navigating one of the most aggressive campaigns of economic warfare, destabilization, and military coercion in modern Latin American history had the luxury of moral purity.

As a Venezuelan American, I am struggling too to understand and process this moment. I stood there too. I called for Alex Saab’s freedom when he was detained in Cape Verde during the height of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela. At the time, the reality that existed for many of us was that Saab was a Venezuelan diplomat helping the country navigate sanctions.

Recently, Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez publicly stated that Alex Saab has maintained relationships with U.S. agencies since 2019. These revelations, combined with Saab’s deportation, have generated painful questions for many people who spent years defending him publicly.

What did we actually know?
What kinds of compromises were going on inside a country trying to survive under siege?

These are painful questions. And at this moment, there are still far more questions than answers.

Maybe painful compromises were made.
Maybe Saab was never what many believed him to be.
Maybe serious betrayals occurred.
Maybe the deportation was justified.
Maybe realities existed behind closed doors that ordinary Venezuelans never had access to. Or maybe decisions were made inside an impossible reality where preventing wider war, deeper collapse, and even greater harm for ordinary Venezuelans became more urgent.

Because since the kidnapping of Maduro, Venezuela has not been operating in an atmosphere of freedom. It is operating under threat.

And it is easy to demand uncompromising heroism from a country under attack when you are not the one responsible for preventing millions of people from falling into even greater catastrophe.

People who defended Saab for years are now confronting the possibility that parts of the story may have been hidden from them. Others are immediately translating uncertainty into accusations of betrayal against Delcy Rodríguez and the entire Bolivarian process.

But I think there is something dangerous about how quickly so many people are rushing toward absolute conclusions while fragments of information, accusations, leaks, and political narratives are still colliding in real time.

Maybe there will come a moment for deeper criticism of Delcy Rodríguez and others within the Bolivarian process. Maybe new information will eventually clarify realities that today remain obscured by contradiction, secrecy, pressure, and war.

But I think there is a certain political myopia in discussing Venezuela’s internal contradictions while removing the broader reality of U.S. pressure and coercion from the story entirely.

Because regardless of what may eventually be revealed about Alex Saab, the larger reality remains unchanged: Venezuela was subjected to years of sanctions, destabilization, economic strangulation, coup attempts, international isolation, and eventually direct military intervention.

The aggressor has not disappeared from the story.

And reducing every painful decision to betrayal while ignoring the enormous machinery of coercion surrounding Venezuela risks reproducing the very fragmentation that external aggression was designed to create in the first place.

It’s difficult not to see the renewed imprisonment of Alex Saab as a disappointing capitulation to U.S. coercion after so many of us fought for his freedom, but we cannot forget the task at hand. If we are serious about ending U.S. aggression towards Venezuela, we cannot allow our solidarity with the Venezuelan people to be deterred. They have shown us how to sustain a revolution amidst contradictions, and that is what we must do.

Join us Venezuela Rapid Response Team!

Michelle Ellner is the Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.

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The U.S. Boats to Gaza, one of the 18 national campaigns of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla coalition (FFC) urgently requests solidarity and action to help safeguard the current flotilla mission en route Gaza. There are 25 U.S. citizens among the over 500 participants from 45 countries on the 2026 flotilla to Gaza.

As the almost 60 vessels from the FFC, Global Sumud Flotilla, and the Mavi Marmara Freedom and Solidarity Association move closer to Gaza, hostile rhetoric from Israeli media and political circles has intensified significantly.

False accusations and inflammatory narratives are already being circulated in what appears to be an effort to delegitimize the mission and lay the groundwork for not only unlawful aggression against unarmed civilians, but potentially lethal violence against our boats. In this moment, broad public visibility and political pressure are essential.

This mission is a lawful, civilian-led initiative challenging the ongoing blockade imposed on Gaza. It is critical that organizations, elected officials, community leaders, and individuals publicly affirm the legitimacy of the flotilla and demand the protection of everyone on board.

Recent media coverage connected to the Israeli establishment has insinuated that the flotilla could be treated as a security or “terror” threat. These allegations are entirely unfounded. They follow a familiar pattern in which humanitarian and solidarity efforts are deliberately misrepresented to rationalize state violence before it occurs.

We have seen this language used before in relation to attacks on civilian missions, including the deadly assault on the Mavi Marmara, in which 10 of our colleagues were murdered, including one U.S. citizen, 19-year-old Furkan Dǒgan.

These threats must be taken seriously. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to attack civilians, humanitarian workers, journalists, and solidarity activists while facing no meaningful accountability from powerful governments. Silence at this stage only increases the danger.

We therefore ask supporters to take the following actions immediately:

1. This flotilla is made up of almost 60 vessels carrying hundreds of people from over 45 countries. LEARN about the participants on the five FFC Boats here.

2. FOLLOW the flotilla on our tracker.

3. AMPLIFY updates from the flotilla across social media and public platforms, including Instagram content FFC and GSF.You can also follow us on: Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, Bluesky, and LinkedIn and help amplify our content.

4. ORGANIZE: Organize a local vigil or protest to demand safe passage for the flotilla.

5. CONTACT members of Congress — especially representatives connected to participants aboard the flotilla — and demand that they publicly oppose any attack, interception, detention, or use of force against the mission. Calls should also demand an end to U.S. weapons transfers supporting Israeli military actions.
The U.S. Capitol switchboard is: (202) 224-3121.

6. CALL ON local and state officials to publicly support the mission and speak against any violence targeting civilian delegates.

At its core, this flotilla consists of unarmed civilians attempting to challenge an illegal and deadly blockade that has devastated Gaza for nearly two decades and has been used as a tool of starvation and genocide. Efforts to portray such a mission as “terrorism” reveal the extent to which Palestinian humanity — and even solidarity with Palestinians — is routinely criminalized and dehumanized. On the anniversary of the Nakba, these realities remain impossible to separate from the broader structures of dispossession and violence Palestinians continue to endure.

Join our Palestine Working Group & Take action NOW!

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years, but resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She has been on many flotilla missions including with the Mavi Marmara mission in 2010 and the Women’s Boat in 2016.

Huwaida Arraf is a human rights lawyer and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) for Palestine. She was on the small boats that succeeded in getting into Gaza in 2008. She was on the Mavi Marmara mission in 2010 and was the boat leader for the Handala and Conscience missions in 2025.

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Historical vertigo. That is what I felt when the official White House account posted an image of Venezuela covered by the U.S. flag and labeled it the “51st State.” Not because I believed annexation was literally imminent, but because of what the image symbolized: a strange sensation of watching two centuries collapse into a meme.

In one crude graphic, the deeper logic that has shaped Washington’s relationship with Latin America for over two centuries was revealed: the idea that the hemisphere ultimately exists within the orbit of U.S. power.

And perhaps nowhere does that contradiction become more historically charged than in Venezuela.

Venezuela was born out of one of the foundational anti-colonial struggles of the modern world. Independence leader Simón Bolívar did not simply lead a war of independence against Spain. He envisioned the liberation of Latin America as a civilizational project: a sovereign bloc capable of resisting domination from any empire, European or otherwise. Bolívar led campaigns that liberated what are now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia.

Bolívar understood very early on that the newly rising power in the north could become as dangerous to Latin America as the old European empires. In 1829, he warned that the United States seemed “destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”

Bolívar was identifying an underlying contradiction: that a powerful republic–the United States–could use the language of freedom while pursuing domination. Two centuries later, that contradiction remains central to hemispheric politics.

Historically, mature great powers have often preferred informal empire to formal annexation. After achieving domination, they often prefer indirect control: favorable trade arrangements, military alliances, debt structures, sanctions regimes, intelligence partnerships, elite cooptation, and cultural influence. Formal annexation is expensive, politically risky, and often unnecessary.

Trump’s “51st state” discourse is less a realistic policy proposal than a symptom of anxiety inside a declining unipolar order.

To understand why, one must first understand how U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere historically functioned.

The Monroe Doctrine, announced in 1823, was initially framed as a warning to European powers against further colonization in the Americas. Latin American independence leaders had just defeated the Spanish Empire across much of the continent. On paper, the doctrine appeared anti-colonial.

In practice, however, the doctrine gradually transformed into something else entirely: a declaration that Latin America belonged inside an exclusive U.S. sphere of influence.

Throughout the twentieth century, Washington rarely needed formal territorial annexation to achieve regional dominance. It developed far more efficient instruments.

In Central America and the Caribbean, the United States deployed military occupations and direct interventions, but left U.S. puppets to govern. In South America, especially after World War II, the preferred mechanisms evolved into financial leverage, intelligence operations, elite alliances, and NGOs at the service of Washington.

The goal was not necessarily to govern countries directly - and even less to promote democracy - but rather to ensure that governments remained compatible with U.S. strategic and economic interests.

When governments moved too far outside those boundaries, intervention followed. Guatemala in 1954 after land reforms threatened United Fruit interests. Brazil in 1964. Chile in 1973. Nicaragua throughout the Contra war. Panama in 1989. The methods differed, but the logic remained remarkably consistent: political sovereignty was tolerated only insofar as it did not disrupt hemispheric order under U.S. leadership.

For decades, this system functioned because the United States occupied an overwhelmingly dominant position within global capitalism. But that world is changing.

The emergence of China as a major economic actor transformed Latin America’s geopolitical environment. For the first time in generations, countries historically dependent on Washington acquired alternative partnerships. China finances infrastructure, transportation systems, energy projects, telecommunications networks, and commodity integration across the Global South. Russia provides military and energy cooperation. Iran creates alternative trade channels under sanctions. BRICS institutions increasingly position themselves as mechanisms outside traditional Western financial control.

None of these actors are altruistic. But together they create something historically significant: options.

And hegemons become anxious when monopolies disappear.

That matters enormously for Venezuela because Venezuela is not only an ideological problem for Washington. It is a geoeconomic one. Venezuela possesses the largest proven oil reserves in the world. For most of the twentieth century, Venezuelan oil flowed comfortably inside a U.S.-dominated hemispheric order. When Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, he disrupted the assumption that strategic resources in the hemisphere would remain aligned with Washington indefinitely.

The Chávez project attempted to transform oil sovereignty into geopolitical autonomy. That was the real threat.

Sanctions became Washington’s primary instrument after regime change efforts failed. But sanctions reveal an important contradiction of modern U.S. power: they function best when no viable alternatives exist. The more fragmented the global economy becomes, the harder it is to permanently isolate states through economic coercion alone.

The recent annexation rhetoric reveals a symptom of anxiety inside a declining unipolar order. The fear that coercive measures may no longer guarantee long-term geopolitical alignment in a multipolar world.

Under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela became one of the clearest examples of a state subjected to relentless external pressure aimed at forcing political and economic realignment: sanctions, asset seizures, recognition of a parallel government and repeated regime change operations. Yet, despite years of maximum pressure, Washington still failed to reassert uncontested control over Venezuela, revealing the limits of U.S. dominance in an increasingly multipolar world.

That contradiction helps explain the escalation that followed: the 2026 kidnapping of President Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, growing pressure on Interim President Delcy Rodriguez and renewed efforts to restructure Venezuela’s political and economic order more directly around U.S. strategic interests.

For many Latin Americans, the “51st state” image activated a painful historical memory: occupations, coups, sanctions, protectorates, debt dependency, military interventions, and repeated attempts to subordinate regional sovereignty to external power.

The discomfort many Venezuelans felt was not merely ideological. It was historical. Because regardless of one’s position on the Venezuelan government, there is something profoundly unsettling about watching the homeland of Bolívar, a nation born from an anti-colonial war for sovereignty and self-determination, casually imagined by the White House as territory to absorb under another empire’s flag.

Add your name to the international solidarity letter to let Maduro, Cilia Flores and the Venezuelan people know they are not alone. Send a message of solidarity to Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores

Michelle Ellner is the Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.

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Episode 351: 78 Years of Nakba, 78 Years of Resistance: For 78 years, Palestinians have carried the memory of the Nakba as an ongoing reality of displacement, occupation, imprisonment, and genocide. In this episode of CODEPINK Radio, Jenin speaks with Chicago-based activist and political educator Soha Khatib about growing up Palestinian in diaspora, Black-Palestinian solidarity, the collapse of political Zionism, and how revolutionary love, community, and imagination keep the struggle alive. The Nakba did not end in 1948. Neither has Palestinian resistance.

As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it. As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find, all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.

Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14th, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents’ childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15th, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents’ childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.

After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn’t have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother’s parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only 2 hours away from their families, but they didn’t know if they’d ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.

My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It’s hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I will never forget when my grandfather, who was a bus driver back in the day, told me that he was once able to drive to Beirut or Baghdad, and then return home on the same day. Now, such an idea is unfathomable.

Ever since I was old enough to comprehend things, I knew Palestine was my homeland and that it was being hurt by something called Israel. Israel was the reason my mom was born in Jordan instead of Palestine, the driving force that led my parents to move to the U.S. for better education and work. It is the thing that separates me from the rest of my extended family, preventing me from knowing them wholly and truly. Israel is why I only see my grandparents every few years, why I have to watch my younger cousins grow up through a phone screen. As a Palestinian who grew up in the States, I was immersed in Western culture and disconnected from my own, and Israel is the reason.

This was my norm, the reality I was born into. After a while, the daily reminders of being disenfranchised, the cruelty of it all, become something you just get used to. You begin to get settled with the unsettling feeling that this may be the fortune of a Palestinian in this world: a life of displacement and diaspora, with the occasional travesty, like the previous bombing campaigns of Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014. This process of desensitization is imprinted in my generational DNA; I was practically born already accustomed to the injustice of being Palestinian.

The brutal truth was that the Nakba never ended. We all instinctively knew this, but especially after the Oslo Accords’ normalization efforts, a sense of false comfort plagued the Palestinian community for the two decades following its signing. The reality before October 2023 was the occasional protest and the occasional outrage, only to be quelled by half-hearted statements of sympathetic apathy by politicians. I became involved in student organizing for Palestine in 2021, and although we were constantly working, the landscape back then was much quieter and smaller.

Then, two and a half years ago, the current stage of genocide in Gaza began. I don’t think I will ever experience life the way it happened that fall. I had gone to sleep on October 6th, where everything was relatively “normal”, then I woke up for my morning shift at 4:30 AM to my phone practically blowing up with notifications. I remember going to my barista job with headphones in the whole time, watching Al-Jazeera while I made coffee for people who had no idea what had just shifted in the world.

In the wake of October 7th, the protests became consistent, the outrage became something so eternal that you felt like it could consume you and burn you to ash. What was once a few hundred people in the streets became thousands, and in some places, millions would turn out.

It was the beginning of a period of exhaustion, having something so important to organize for every single day, to the point that my studies didn’t even matter anymore. It was tough, but what was happening to those in Gaza was far worse, and it became a matter of expending everything you have for those who have nothing. Millions felt the same all over the world, and this sparked the mass-education and mobilization of the Palestine solidarity movement we see today.

Since October 2023, the images out of Gaza resembling the Nakba have flooded our timelines. After nearly three years of the most inhumane, dehumanizing, genocidal campaign by the U.S. and Israel, one might assume that a sense of hopelessness would take hold, as it did after the 1948 Nakba. But I see this moment as the catalyst for the exact opposite to happen.

Israel believes it can continue what it has always done. It can embark on an outright genocide with the intent of wiping Palestinians off the map, then agree to multiple ceasefires only to break every single one of them. After all, you cannot cease a genocide while the genocidal entity still operates with impunity. The difference this time around is that people around the world actually know what’s going on. Israel, along with its benefactor, the U.S., has backed itself into a corner I doubt it will ever escape from.

And that’s the fuel to my revolutionary optimism. Sometimes, it’s hard to think liberation is near when faced with so much death and destruction. But it’s even harder to ignore the cracks in the facade of the U.S. and Israeli machine. They were both built on false foundations that were already rotten and cracked, and nothing built on the crushed livelihoods of millions will ever persevere. People are seeing the rot come up to the surface, and they are utterly disgusted with the state of our world that has perpetuated genocide, all held together by an ultra-wealthy ruling class, agonizing capitalism, and white supremacy.

When Israel was once known as the democracy of the Middle East, it’s now the stain, the villain that has reigned chaos, death, and destruction all over the region. When getting AIPAC money once meant you were a strong candidate, now it’s a sure death sentence in local American elections. When American institutions like the American Medical Association once deemed it acceptable to stay silent on Palestine, they are now condemned for it. When our media and news outlets operated as tools of Israeli propaganda, they are now seen as tools of war and oppression. It is our work and dedication as activists that have changed the perception of all these things that were once deemed normal.

In 1948, a time when news travelled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that “forever” territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide. That’s the difference: the struggle for Palestine was built on the sacrifice of our martyrs and revolutionaries, on principle, and on love for our land and people. It is a beautiful, rich foundation that can withstand whatever force attempts to tear it down.

Most of my family remains on the land, or near it in Jordan. I see this as a consistent win against the oppressor every day. As long as we keep our homes, livelihoods, and stories, the Palestinian identity will never die, and my family is fighting that battle every day. If desensitization has an imprint on my DNA, so does resilience and the steadfast faith that Palestine will be liberated soon.

Take action for a Free Palestine, join our Palestine Working Group!

Jenin is CODEPINK’s Palestine Campaigner.

Jenin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in December of 2023. For over five years, Jenin has been a community organizer and dedicated individual focused on the Palestinian movement through advocacy, digital storytelling, and grassroots mobilization. She is a firm believer in intertwined struggle and liberation for all.

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In late April, as the world’s official climate process continued to stall, a different kind of gathering took shape on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

In Santa Marta, representatives from 59 countries convened for what organizers called the first-ever international conference dedicated not to debating whether fossil fuels should be phased out—but how to actually do it.

The “Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels” conference, co-hosted by Colombia and The Netherlands, marked a decisive break from the decades-long gridlock of the United Nations’ annual climate summits, known as COP (Conference of the Parties). For many in attendance, it wasn’t just another meeting. It was a response to failure.

And a warning.

The Breaking Point

For more than 30 years, COP summits have been the central arena for global climate negotiations. But critics argue the process has become structurally incapable of delivering meaningful change.

“There’s been dissatisfaction for years,” said climate organizer Aaron Kirshenbaum of CODEPINK’s War Is Not Green campaign. “The conference itself has struggled to rid itself of the extraction and capitalism undergirding the major countries present there.”

At the most recent summit in Brazil, contradictions reached a peak. Hosted in the Amazon rainforest, the conference required infrastructure that contributed to deforestation. Indigenous communities struggled for representation. And most strikingly, the final agreement failed to even mention fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel lobbyists maintained a strong presence—reportedly making up roughly one in every 25 attendees.

The problem, Kirshenbaun explains, is not just influence—but structure. COP operates by consensus, allowing a handful of powerful states to stall progress indefinitely. Those same states, primarily in the Global North, are also the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels.

A “Coalition of the Willing”

Frustrated by the impasse, Colombia proposed something different: a “coalition of the willing” that would move forward without waiting for universal agreement.

The Santa Marta conference was the result.

Unlike COP, it was not designed as a negotiating body. Instead, it aimed to lay out a roadmap—a practical and political framework for phasing out fossil fuels in real terms.

Participants included governments of nations who signed onto the Belém Declaration on the transition away from Fossil Fuels, as well as countries that are members of international alliances such as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance and the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative. Equally important, the gathering brought together around 1,000 civil society organizations, social movements, and grassroots groups.

This parallel gathering—the People’s Summit for a Fossil Fuel-Free Future—would prove just as significant as the official conference itself.

The Missing Piece: Power

At the heart of discussions in Santa Marta was a reality often sidelined in mainstream climate discourse: the global energy system is not just economic—it is political, military, and deeply unequal.

“The Global North consumes the majority of fossil fuels,” Kirshenbaum said. “But extraction happens in the Global South.”

This imbalance is not accidental. It is rooted in centuries of colonialism and maintained through modern systems of debt, trade, and military power.

Countries in the Global South, burdened by external debt, are often forced to expand extractive industries—oil, gas, mining—to generate export revenue. Those resources are then shipped abroad, refined, and sold back as imports at higher value.

“It’s a cycle,” Kirshenbaum explained. “Extraction to pay debt, which locks countries further into extraction.”

Efforts to transition away from fossil fuels, then, are constrained not just by technology or policy—but by sovereignty.

“You can’t start transitioning,” he said, “if you don’t have control over your energy infrastructure and finances.”

The Elephant in the Room

One issue loomed particularly large in Santa Marta—though it remains largely absent from official climate negotiations: the role of the U.S. military.

“The U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world,” Kirshenbaum said.

Its global footprint—hundreds of bases across dozens of countries—relies on vast quantities of fossil fuels. But its environmental impact goes far beyond fuel consumption.

Military emissions accounting excludes not only combat operations, but also supply chains, weapons production, post-war reconstruction, and environmental devastation caused by conflict.

This exemption dates back to the Kyoto Protocol, where U.S. lobbying successfully removed military emissions from reporting requirements.

The result is a major blind spot in global climate policy.

“You can’t have a transition away from fossil fuels,” Kirshenbaum argued, “when the U.S. military exists as an enforcement mechanism for the fossil fuel economy.”

From securing oil supply routes to intervening in resource-rich regions, military power has long been intertwined with energy interests. For many at the conference, addressing climate change without confronting militarism is not just incomplete—it is impossible.

The People’s Summit: Naming the System

While official delegates debated pathways and policies, the People’s Summit went further—directly naming the systems driving the crisis.

Its final declaration, developed by hundreds of organizations, placed climate change within a broader framework of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

It also explicitly linked the climate crisis to ongoing U.S.-Israeli-led global conflicts and imperial violence, including wars and sanctions that shape energy production and access.

“The declaration reflects what people on the front lines are actually experiencing,” Kirshenbaum said.

Among its core demands:

• A complete and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels

• A just transition to 100% renewable energy

• An end to structural barriers, including militarism and economic coercion

• A transformation of global systems toward justice and sovereignty

Additionally, the document outlines 15 principles, including one on “sovereignty, peace, and self-determination.” It also emphasizes People(s)-Centered Human Rights and collaboration for Indigenous peoples, Afro-Descendants, workers, women, and other marginalized and impacted communities. Territorial sovereignty, a rejection of false solutions like carbon markets and capture, and the need to move beyond extractive systems entirely—even in the context of renewable energy—are also centered in the declaration.

Beyond Fossil Fuels—Or Just New Extraction?

One of the most urgent debates at the conference centered on the risks of a “green transition” that replicates existing patterns of exploitation.

As demand for renewable technologies grows, so too does demand for critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt—often extracted from regions already subjected to environmental degradation and political instability.

From Latin America’s “lithium triangle” to mining operations in Central Africa, these resources are increasingly tied to geopolitical competition.

“We need to avoid extraction in any form,” Kirshenbaum said. “That was a consistent point throughout the conference.”

For Indigenous communities, this is not an abstract concern. Their lands are frequently targeted for both fossil fuel and renewable resource extraction.

“They protect extraordinary amounts of biodiversity,” he said. “But their sovereignty is consistently disregarded.”

A Fracture in the Global Order

The Santa Marta conference also revealed a growing divide between countries willing to move forward on fossil fuel phase-out and those still invested in maintaining the status quo.

Notably absent were many major Global North powers.

France, however, did participate, proposing measures to phase out coal and fossil gas. While some viewed this as a positive step, others pointed out the contradictions.

“France is still part of NATO,” Kirshenbaum noted. “If military emissions and neocolonial extraction aren’t addressed, there’s a long way to go.”

The same applies to The Netherlands, a co-host of the conference. NATO’s 2025 3.5% spending increase was projected to create an extra 2,330 MtCO2e (Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent) of total carbon emissions by 2030—almost the total annual emissions of Brazil and Japan combined.

These tensions underscore a broader question: can countries lead on climate policy while remaining embedded in systems that drive environmental destruction?

What Comes Next

The Santa Marta gathering was never intended to produce binding agreements. Its goal was to shift the conversation and begin building an alternative path.

That process will continue next year, when the conference reconvenes in Tuvalu, co-hosted with Ireland.

For frontline nations, particularly small island states threatened by rising sea levels, the stakes could not be higher.

Meanwhile, organizers and activists are working to expand the coalition, strengthen the People’s Declaration, and push for a global Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Whether this effort can succeed where COP has struggled remains to be seen.

But one thing is clear: a growing number of countries and movements are no longer willing to wait.

A Different Kind of Climate Politics

If COP represents the official face of global climate governance, Santa Marta offered a glimpse of something else: a politics that does not separate climate from war, or energy from empire. A politics that asks not only how to reduce emissions, but who controls resources, who bears the costs, and who gets to decide.

For activists, that shift may be the most important outcome of all.

As Kirshenbaum put it:

“We shouldn’t be having separate movements—environmental, anti-war, economic justice. The same systems are driving all of it. And we have the same targets.”

Learn more about transitioning away from fossil fuels with our War is Not Green Campaign!

Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK’s War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based in, and originally from, Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also hold a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark. During their time in school, Aaron worked on internationalist climate justice organizing and educational program development, as well as Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing.

Teri Mattson currently works with the Venezuela Solidarity Network. She is an activist with the SanctionsKill coalition and CODEPINK’s Latin America team. Her writing can be found at Anti-War.com, CommonDreams, Jacobin, and LAProgressive. Additionally, Teri hosts and produces the YouTube program and podcast WTF is Going on in Latin America & the Caribbean.

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