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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Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth urged Congress to pass a 2027 Pentagon budget of 1.5 trillion dollars. He justified the increase by saying we need a modernized, high-tech military to counter China.

U.S. lawmakers have been using China as a military budget increaser and ultimate policy-generator for years. Competition with Beijing is invoked to justify military expansion, new regional alliances, AI weapons development, semiconductor restrictions, and rising nuclear expenditures. In Washington, framing a policy as necessary to “counter China” has become one of the quickest ways to secure bipartisan support. As a result, the “China threat” rhetoric proliferates while the military budget skyrockets.

In truth, China is not the existential threat that Hegseth and others claim it to be. For one, China’s military posture remains far more regionally focused than that of the United States, whose global military footprint spans hundreds of bases worldwide. China has instead actively shaped its military around “active defense,” with a navy designed to stay close to its shores and defend the country should any invasion occur. Any increase in China’s defense spending should come as no surprise, considering the U.S. military buildup across the first island chain, just off China’s coast. China has also expressly stated, both through words and action, that it has no desire for war. It has been nearly fifty years since China was involved in a conflict. There are no signs of a policy shift when it comes to China’s pursuit of diplomatic solutions, and there is no use for any projection of “what-ifs” with zero historical background or evidence.

So no, China is not a military threat, but it is a threat to the political and economic balance of power. China’s growth over the past decade is unprecedented, and its economy is soon set to surpass that of the United States. Not only that, but China has become a global leader in research and technological advancement. While this poses no real threat to the American people, it does rattle the ruling class and business elite who rely on U.S. imperial behavior to maintain a monopoly on advanced tech revenue streams. That’s one reason U.S. tech giants like Palantir are currently paying content creators thousands of dollars to promote a looming “China AI threat” and advocate support for American AI companies.

The U.S. claims that the U.S.-China “tech race” is about national security, but it is really a struggle over resource control, economic power, and wealth accumulation. Instead of benefiting the American people, it drives militarization and undermines the very scientific progress the United States claims to seek.

The U.S. has historically responded to external threats, military or otherwise, through force. When socialist projects cropped up across the world, instead of establishing diplomatic arrangements with their leaders, the U.S. launched interventions and regime change operations. This crippled economies and forced governments to adhere to U.S. interests. In response to China’s economic growth over the last decade, the U.S. has responded by militarizing the entire Asia Pacific region. A simple regime change operation would not work, so a longer, more strategic operation was necessary. Over the past decade, a steady and well-funded campaign has convinced the general public that China is the greatest threat to the safety and security of the American people. It’s been largely successful, which is why using China as a policy generator works so well.

The truth is that the $1.5 trillion war budget isn’t meant to protect the American people but to pursue the agenda of the ruling class. The U.S. is not trying to “deter” a future China threat; it is preparing for a war it will attempt to bring to fruition should all else fail.

Advanced technology will define the future. And currently, the U.S. and China are building their own tech ecosystems, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The U.S. refers to this as a “strategic rivalry” with wider national security implications. This perspective only exists because China is considered a rival. China does not have to be considered a rival. China could just as easily be considered a development partner. And indeed it should, because cooperation on tech is the only potential avenue for ensuring the continued existence of the planet.

Instead, the tech race is exacerbating militarization and war while levying harsh costs on the environment. The U.S. still heavily depends on China for rare earth minerals and other resources critical for weapon systems and technological development. In order to compensate for this dependency, the U.S. has looked to other regions of the world — namely Venezuela and Iran — for access to oil and rare earth minerals.

Iran, in particular, holds significant untapped potential for rare earth elements. In 2023, Tehran reported the discovery of 8.5 million tons of lithium-rich hectorite clay. Its zinc, copper, and iron reserves are among the largest globally, just as Venezuela is home to the largest oil reserve in the world. These targets are no coincidence, and are not about “neutralizing a potential threat” as U.S. leaders often claim. They align with a larger strategic plan to obtain resource dependency, advance business interests, and prepare for a potential war against China.

If the U.S. really wants to win a tech race against China, it is shooting itself in the foot. Scientific progress in this country is funded in accordance with its military applicability. So instead of pursuing scientific advancements that could improve the daily lives and well-being of the people, it is pursued solely for military intentions. There are a lot of possibilities that go uninvestigated because the potential profit is not high enough.

Additionally, the U.S. has launched a war against Chinese scientists and scholars in the United States. Last year, Marco Rubio announced the administration would start intensively revoking visas for Chinese scholars in “critical fields” such as science and technology. Since then, numerous Chinese scholars studying at universities around the country have been questioned, detained, and deported. Just last month, semiconductor researcher Dr. Danhao Wang reportedly fell from the third floor of a University of Michigan building after being targeted by federal authorities. While the circumstances surrounding Dr. Wang’s death remain under investigation, the incident has intensified concerns among Chinese researchers who already feel increasingly scrutinized and unwelcome in the United States.

The persecution of Chinese scholars is ultimately hurting U.S. technological advancement. In its desperate bid to over-securitize the field, the U.S. is systematically destroying the avenues it has historically used to advance. Many Chinese scholars have since returned to China; others are now too afraid to come to the U.S. in the first place for fear of persecution.

Additionally, the U.S. continues to sanction Chinese technology to protect U.S. industries. This is especially absurd when it comes to critical technology such as electric vehicles and solar panels. Instead of enabling the transition to affordable and sustainable systems, the planet is continuously sacrificed for profit.

The greatest contradiction in the U.S.-China tech race is that the United States increasingly undermines its own strengths in the name of defending them. Scientific collaboration is plagued with suspicion, technological progress is subordinated to militarization, and urgently needed green technologies are restricted in the name of corporate greed. The result is a self-inflicted weakening of the very systems required to address the crises of the future.

Join Our China is Not Our Enemy Working Group!

Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. She 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, peace-building, and international development.

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Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.

In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.

Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal and controlled access to it for 70 years.

After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956, and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.

But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, France and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war of independence.

Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria and other countries in the region, and, after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.

Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States, Great Britain and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.

British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas”.

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal and try to overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President Eisenhower told a press conference, on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed that the US would ultimately support them once combat began.

Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and then Britain and France landed forces in Port Said at the north end of the Suez Canal, under the pretense of protecting the Canal from both Israel and Egypt.

But before Britain and France could fully seize control of the Canal, the US government intervened to stop them. The US began selling off its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to Britain, triggering a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons against Britain, France and Israel.

The UN Security Council used a procedural vote - which Britain and France could not veto - to convene an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” process. Resolution 997 called for a ceasefire, a withdrawal to armistice lines and the reopening of the Canal, and was approved by a vote of 64 to 5.

Four days later, Prime Minister Eden declared a ceasefire. British and French forces withdrew six weeks later, and the Canal was cleared and reopened within five months. Egypt subsequently managed the Canal effectively, and did not block British or French ships from using it.

The Suez Crisis was the pivotal moment when the British government finally learned that it could no longer use military force to impose its will on less powerful countries. Like Americans today on Iran, the British public was way ahead of its government: opinion polls found that 44% opposed the use of force against Egypt, while only 37% approved. As Prime Minister Eden dithered over the UN’s ceasefire order, 30,000 people gathered at an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square.

Eden was forced to resign, and was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who withdrew British forces from bases in Asia, expedited independence for British colonies around the world, and repositioned Britain as a junior partner to the United States. That new role included arming British submarines with U.S. nuclear missiles, which is now a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Macmillan’s successor, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, would later keep Britain out of Vietnam.

Britain charted a successful transition to a post-imperial future through its relationships with the United States and the British Commonwealth–an association of independent states that preserved British influence in its former colonies. On the domestic front, there was broad political support for a mixed capitalist-socialist economy that included free education and healthcare, publicly owned housing and utilities, nationalized industries, and strong trade unions.

Macmillan was reelected in 1959 with the slogan, “You’ve never had it so good.” When a cartoonist mockingly dubbed him “Supermac,” the nickname stuck.

Britain’s Tories were dyed-in-the-wool imperialists, much like Trump and his motley crew today. But they did not let their imperial world view blind them to the lessons of the Suez Crisis. They could see that the world was changing, and that Britain had to find a new role in a world it could no longer dominate by force.

Most Americans today have learned similar lessons from failed, disastrous US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But like the British people who opposed Eden’s invasion of Egypt, Americans have been repeatedly dragged into war by the secret scheming of leaders blinded by anachronistic, racist, imperial assumptions.

Trump is now encountering the same kind of international pressure that forced Britain and France to abandon the Suez invasion. Another Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly and a new “Uniting for Peace” resolution might also be helpful.

But ultimately, the resolution of this crisis, and the future of the United States in today’s emerging multipolar world, will depend on whether US politicians are capable of making the kind of historic policy shift that Macmillan and his colleagues made in 1956 and the years that followed.

Macmillan was not an opposition politician, but a senior member of Britain’s Conservative government, up to his neck in the Suez fiasco. The secret plot with the Israelis was his idea. President Eisenhower personally warned him at the White House that the US would not support a British invasion of Egypt. But unlike the British Ambassador who sat in on the same meeting, Macmillan assumed that, when the chips were down, Eisenhower would stand by his old World War II allies.

Maybe it was the shock of getting it all so wrong that persuaded Macmillan and his colleagues to take a fresh look at the world and radically rethink British foreign and colonial policy.

The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire. The question is whether anyone in Washington today is capable of grasping the gravity of the crisis and making the required policy shift.

To follow Britain’s Suez example would mean closing US military bases around the world; renouncing the illegal threat and use of military force as the main tool of US foreign policy; and relying instead on multilateral diplomacy and UN action to resolve international disputes.

But where is the Macmillan in the Trump administration or the Republican Party? Or the Harold Wilson in the Democratic Party, whose leaders have never even tried to formulate a progressive foreign policy since the end of the Cold War? Obama’s belated outreach to Cuba and Iran in his second term were their only flirtation with a new way forward.

The silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s and now cornered Trump into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice between an unwinnable war with Iran and a historic diplomatic defeat.

Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades. Trump’s dead end in the Persian Gulf must also be the final end of this ugly, criminal neoconservative era, and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful future for Americans and all our neighbors.

Send to Your U.S. Embassy: Stop the War on Iran!

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.

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In 1870, Julia Ward Howe penned her “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling for peace. Her words still ring with truth, calling us not to raise our children to kill another mother’s child but rather to gather together to “promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” She wrote this following the ravages and violence of the Civil War, a war like the wars today waged for the needs of the rich. Now the War Economy has consolidated in the hands of the rich to a level never seen in history.

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We live deep inside the War Economy — the extractive, destructive, oppressive economy founded upon greedy capitalism and imperialism. With the years-old genocide in Gaza ongoing, the continued dehumanizing blockade of Cuba, and the inhumane and strategically disastrous war on Iran all coinciding, we see how war serves the War Economy. Proof of this violence is served up, ubiquitous and relentless, via our phones, those devices we hold so near and dear to us. The War Economy has mesmerized us into participating in its cynical lullaby: we accept domination, dehumanization, demoralization, cynicism, and apathy as normal and natural, allowing War Economy thinking to pervade everyday interactions with our families, communities, and even our relationship to ourselves. The War Economy knows that, individually, we have little power to stop it. Convincing us that we are alone and powerless is its greatest trick.

These, however, are lies. We know this intuitively. We can understand that the War Economy is trying to lull us into a fugue of forgetfulness of our own nature. How do we remember what care and connection feel like? How can we begin to practice something other than the addictions the war economy forces on us? What experiences that we perceive as normal and natural are just internalized War Economy thinking and behaviors?

The Peace Economy is how humans have survived for millennia; it is how we have served each other and the world since humanity began tens of thousands of years ago. It is how people across the ages and the globe have learned to survive and thrive through the experience of community, collaboration, and connection. It is showing up for the needs of each other with generous and caring hearts. It is the giving, sharing, caring, thriving, relational, resilient economy that serves all life on this planet. Whether we know it or not, it is fundamental to serving life and cultivating peace. We can’t end war until we end the War Economy, so we who desire peace must create a future built on the habits of peace.

The Peace Economy is rooted in maternal care. When we are born, most of us experience love and connection effortlessly. We are provided for without the need for transactional thinking and relationships. The War Economy lies to us and says we can find love and connection through the purchase of things and transactional relationships. An insidious lie.

Think about it. How do you experience connection and care in your life? How do you experience joy and creativity? How do you play? How do you give of yourself to others and to things that matter to you? When you disconnect from phones and computers and walk out into the more-than-human world, how do you relate to what surrounds and sustains you? None of those things has a purchase price. They are freely given, like a mother’s love.

The War Economy forces addictions on us to survive its abusive thrall. We can break those addictions just by practicing habits of peace and walking through life with the care and connection of a mother’s love. Habits of peace, which we like to call “Pivots to Peace,” build muscles that will help us thrive and participate in the creation of a more beautiful future. It is a way to “mother” the world. A pivot is a commitment you can make on this Mother’s Day, a day hijacked by the War Economy to be one of consumption. Let us be as committed to peace as the war mongers are to war; they all do it for transaction and money — together let us build a future that serves life with love.

Here are some Pivots to Peace.

• Pivot from Transactional Relationships to Relational Connections: Our relationships are what keep us alive and thriving. One of the ways our War Economy has isolated us from each other is by turning our relationships into transactions. Transactions do not support life and relationships. Instead, transactional interaction steals what nourishes you and your community. Because our culture is based on transactions, this pivot can be especially challenging. It will require some self-honesty to witness what drives you. This will take a lifetime of practice, and the reward is life itself. How might you decrease transactionality in your everyday interactions with your family, friends, and neighbors?

• Pivot from Feelings of Scarcity to Abundance: The War Economy takes those things that were once free — food, water, land, entertainment, etc. — and monetizes them, forcing us to experience them as scarce. The War Economy also forces us to think we need an excess of things that are not essential to life; these things don’t really bring us true joy and pleasure, but rather distract us. How do you experience scarcity in your life? What feels out of reach to you? Which of your needs are unmet? What always feels out of your reach, and how does that make you feel? Ideas to pivot to abundance: Start with defining what is “enough.” What is it that you really need? What do you already have? What can you share with others who have less than you? Give something away every day this week — not as a transaction but as a way of relating.

• Pivot from Self-Oriented to Community-Engaged: It’s easy to see why we’re all alienated from each other when we live in a society that emphasizes individual achievement and self-directed actions over community care and engagement with those around us. What if our culture valued community care and engagement with those around you as the highest virtue? What are some ways you retreat into self-directed actions and individual achievement? Reflect on what nourishes you when you are community-engaged. Take some opportunities to see those who are caring for and creating your community — the teachers, healers, caretakers, nurses, essential workers, gardeners, etc., who enrich all of our lives. Thank them.

• Pivot from Reactionary to Investigative: In the War Economy, the corporate elites and warmongers control the media and the cultural narrative that is so pervasive in our lives. They capture your heart and mind to support their goals of domination and control. Often, they are weaponizing you to serve their goals, maneuvering you into a reactive stance. Mainstream media relies on us becoming reactive so that we will support the agenda of the War Economy. Instead of swallowing what the media is serving up, begin to practice investigating. What stories are seeking a reaction? What stories are investigative and nuanced? Begin to pay attention to who is benefiting. Where do you notice informed journalism that is not serving the War Economy? Notice what changes when you practice investigative and discerning media intake.

• Pivot from “Us vs. Them” to All of Us: Have you noticed that in most movies, the solution to the problem is to kill the villain? From an early age, we are fed the “good guy vs. bad guy” narrative. What are some ways this has permeated your own life and thinking? Where do you hold on to an “us vs. them” attitude? How does this serve your life? Can you transform your idea of separation from “them” into a more complex understanding of how relationships to the larger systems are affecting all of us — instead of placing blame on an individual or particular group of people? The War Economy thrives on divide and conquer, and people are the power if we stay connected.

• Pivot from Consumption to Creativity: The War Economy is fueled by consumption. Through the lifestyle the War Economy creates, we are forced into an addiction to consuming — be that the consumption of material goods, media, entertainment or something else. Most of the things we consume are not what we need but what we are taught to need. Often, they distance us from joy and pleasure, creating a cycle of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Creativity is usually the way to truly fill the void we are seeking to fill through consumption. We are fulfilled through connections. We are fulfilled when we create avenues for feeling, art, expression and for life to thrive. How can you create space for creativity in your life?

• Pivot from Limitation to Imagination: Limitation of ourselves is one of the great crimes of the War Economy; it gets us locked into transaction, productivity, and patterns of comfort that sever us from free thinking, creative action, and imagination. The War Economy convinces us that we need to stay narrow to survive, and often, we don’t even realize how narrow our bandwidth for creative thought, wild expression, and imagination has become. Where in your life does your imagination find expression and value? Take time each day to let your mind wander beyond what feels safe or familiar. Gather with your community and discuss what frustrates you. Then start a free flow of ideas that could address the frustrations. The more “out there” the idea, the better. Being in relationship with new pathways and new potential realities is a great way to expand creativity and birth the future.

• Pivot from Restraint to Pleasure: The War Economy shakes in its boots because the things that bring us joy and pleasure are free and abundant — a secret they don’t want us to realize. What would you be doing with your time and energy if you made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic yes? Often, the first thing we need to remove to find pleasure is transaction. Where do you experience restraint in your life? How is it imposed on you? By your habits? By self-limiting beliefs? By the culture? What scares you about pleasure? What excites you? Even when we do things we think will give us pleasure, we are sometimes so lost in transaction and productivity that instead we find emptiness and frustration. What were some times, have you sought pleasure and it has been beyond your reach? What were the circumstances? What one thing can you do today that will make you feel joy without having to purchase something?

These are a few of the 23 pivots you can find at peaceeconomy.org. They are offerings to serve you as you take your life away from serving the War Economy and cultivate a future on the foundation of a peace economy. It all starts small and local. Peace-making starts with our circle of influence right around us — in our families and communities — and that is where our personal actions and their impacts are felt and create effect. What can you choose to practice this week, right where you live? How might you care for others the way a mother might care for her child?

What would it look like if peace came alive in your community, connection by connection, family by family, and eroded the grip of the War Economy habits? What if we all remembered the connection and unconditional love given to us as our birthright by our mothers? Remember, we may be just one drop in an ocean of our culture, but oceans are made, drop by drop, little by little, to become the most powerful force in nature. Together, let us be an ocean of peace.

“No matter what you do it will never amount to anything but a single drop in a limitless ocean. What is an ocean but a multitude of drops.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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Jodie Evans is a co-founder of CODEPINK, creator of the PeaceEconomy.org project and editor of the upcoming book, China Is Not Your Enemy.

Marie Goodwin is CODEPINK’s Local Peace Economy Coordinator.

Episode 350: Golden Dome Boondoggle: People in the US live paycheck to paycheck while the Trump administration demands billions more to escalate the arms race in space with a missile defense (offense) shield modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome. Marcy Winograd interviews Bruce Gagnon, founder of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, on why the Dome is a disaster in waiting. Alice Slater, board member of World Beyond War, follows with a call to ban the bomb and sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

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Canada is set to host the headquarters of the proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), a new multinational institution designed to mobilize tens of billions in financing for military and security projects among allied nations. In short, what we are seeing is the quiet normalization of something far more consequential: the permanent financialization of war. The structure being envisioned for DSRB closely resembles other multilateral financial institutions. It would raise capital on global markets, issue bonds, and extend loans to governments and defense companies. That means funding for military supply chains, weapons systems, and defense infrastructure would increasingly flow through financial markets rather than direct public expenditure. In doing so, war itself risks being transformed from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product embedded in portfolios.

And so, with remarkable efficiency, we may be arriving at a point where, whether you like it or not, you are investing in war. Not because you consciously chose to, but because modern finance rarely asks for permission. It integrates. It diffuses. It embeds. Just as complex mortgage-backed securities seeped into pension funds and retirement portfolios before the 2008 Financial Crisis, instruments tied to defense financing could quietly become part of the same financial plumbing that underpins everyday savings. Deposits in major banks, such as Royal Bank of Canada or Toronto-Dominion Bank, feed into broader lending and investment pools. If those banks help underwrite DSRB bonds or finance defense projects, then ordinary savings are, at least indirectly, part of the system. You won’t need to opt in. The system will do it for you.

Once you are in that system, try opting out. Go ahead — divest. In theory, it sounds simple. In practice, it is anything but. Large pension funds, such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board or the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, operate within a web of financial relationships that makes complete divestment extraordinarily complex. If DSRB bonds are rated as safe, investment-grade assets, they could easily find their way into fixed-income portfolios. Even if funds choose to avoid them directly, indirect exposure remains: through banks that underwrite the bonds, through ETFs that bundle defense assets, and through lending syndicates that finance defense contractors. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men” of global finance, institutions like JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, are already lining up behind this model. When the entire financial stack aligns like this, divestment becomes less a matter of choice and more a question of how far you are willing, or even able, to disentangle yourself from the system.

What emerges is not just a new bank, but a new layer of abstraction between citizens and the consequences of war. Traditionally, military spending is debated, however imperfectly, through parliaments and public scrutiny. A financialized model shifts that process into capital markets, where decisions are driven less by voters and more by risk assessments, yield expectations, and institutional incentives. Over time, this risks normalizing war as an investable asset class, something to be priced, traded, and held in portfolios rather than questioned in public forums.

That transformation carries consequences. One of the most immediate concerns is that such a bank could normalize or even facilitate controversial military interventions. If borrowing costs for defense spending are lowered, the financial barriers to launching military operations also fall. History offers a sobering precedent. The Iraq War was widely condemned after the central justification, claims of weapons of mass destruction, collapsed under scrutiny. Yet the war had already been financed, executed, and justified through institutional momentum. A system like DSRB could make such momentum easier to sustain, not harder. When capital is readily available, restraint becomes less likely.

Over time, this could make war financing a permanent feature of the global system. What used to be occasional becomes routine, and what was once debated becomes taken for granted. In that sense, the DSRB starts to look like a ‘World Bank for Warfare.’

Equally concerning is the question of democratic oversight. Traditional military spending must pass through national parliaments, where budgets are debated by elected representatives. A multilateral financial institution operates differently. By raising funds on global capital markets and deploying them through loans and financial instruments, DSRB could create a layer of decision-making that sits at arm’s length from voters. The result is a subtle but significant shift from public accountability to financial abstraction. Decisions about long-term military financing could become less visible, less contested, and ultimately less democratic.

What makes this shift particularly jarring is where it is happening. Canada has long cultivated an image of a country that prioritizes diplomacy, multilateralism, and peacekeeping. Yet by stepping forward to host the DSRB, it is positioning itself not just as a participant in global security, but as a financial hub for its expansion. The very country that has emphasized de-escalation is now spearheading an ecosystem designed to sustain long-term militarization.

The implications extend beyond symbolism. By helping institutionalize a system capable of mobilizing upwards of $100–135 billion in defense financing, Canada is effectively tying part of its economic future to the expansion of military spending. That alignment carries risks. When financial systems are built around a particular sector, they begin to depend on its growth. We have seen this dynamic before, most notably in the housing market prior to the 2008 Financial Crisis, when an entire economic ecosystem became reliant on ever-expanding real estate values.

Apply that same logic to the realm of defense, and the parallels become difficult to ignore. A system that depends on continuous military spending creates subtle but powerful incentives: to maintain high levels of defense budgets, to expand procurement programs, and to sustain the geopolitical tensions that justify both. Over time, what begins as risk management can evolve into dependence. A system built to finance war risks becoming a system that depends on it.

Then comes the uncomfortable question: what happens if the wars actually stop?

In a world where defense financing is deeply embedded in financial markets, peace does not simply reduce risk; it disrupts revenue. If the assumptions underpinning defense-linked investments are built on sustained spending and ongoing tension, then de-escalation could trigger a recalibration across portfolios, institutions, and markets. The consequences would not remain confined to defense companies or financiers. They would ripple outward to pension funds, public investment vehicles, and the everyday savings of millions who never consciously chose to participate in this system.

This is where the analogy to the 2008 Financial Crisis becomes more than rhetorical. Before that collapse, housing was treated as a permanently expanding asset class. Financial innovation spread exposure across the system, embedding risk in places few fully understood. When the underlying assumptions failed, the fallout was systemic. Homes were lost. Savings evaporated. Institutions faltered.

Now imagine a similar architecture built around militarization. A world in which conflict is not just a geopolitical reality, but a financial dependency. Where instability is quietly priced into the system as a driver of returns. And where, if that instability recedes, the economic consequences are felt far beyond the battlefield.

At that point, the challenge will not just be moral or political, it will be structural. Governments may find themselves trying to stabilize a system that has grown dependent on the very thing it claims to minimize: war. And there may come a moment when the system simply breaks, and it becomes impossible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

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Umer Azad is a software engineer by profession and a volunteer with CODEPINK and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). He previously served as the Regional Social Media Expert for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), where he worked on digital outreach, exposing voter fraud, and documenting human rights violations.

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By: Teri Mattson

The modern border is no longer a line.

It does not begin at the Rio Grande, nor does it end at a wall. It is not confined to checkpoints, fences, or even national territory. Instead, it stretches—quietly but forcefully—across continents, embedding itself in foreign security forces, domestic policing, and global surveillance systems.

This is what journalist and author Todd Miller calls the age of “elastic borders.” First articulated in his book Empire of Borders, the concept describes how U.S. border enforcement has expanded both inward and outward, forming a multilayered system that increasingly resembles a global architecture of control.

Today, that architecture is becoming more explicit. Recent political rhetoric about a hemispheric security zone—defined on March 29, 2026 by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “Greater North America” stretching from the Arctic to the equator—has brought into the open what has long been under construction.

To understand what is unfolding, one must look beyond immigration policy. The story of elastic borders is also a story about militarization, economic inequality, climate crisis, and geopolitical competition. It is, in many ways, a story about how power is reorganizing itself in an era of instability.

And as Colombian President Gustavo Petro has warned, it may signal the rise of something even more systemic: “Fortress Capitalism.”

From Border Line to Border System

The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border did not emerge overnight. Its foundations were laid decades ago, shaped by Cold War strategies and foreign interventions.

In his book The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home, sociologist Timothy Dunn traced how U.S. military doctrine—particularly “low-intensity conflict” tactics used in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s—was gradually repurposed for domestic border enforcement. Equipment, training, and strategic thinking migrated from war zones abroad to the U.S. frontier.

By the 1990s, this transformation accelerated. Under President Bill Clinton, operations like Operation Gatekeeper reshaped enforcement strategy. Instead of attempting to stop migration everywhere, authorities concentrated infrastructure in urban crossing zones, erecting walls and deploying agents in cities such as San Diego and El Paso.

The goal was not simply interdiction—it was deterrence.

Migrants were funneled away from populated areas into harsh environments like the Sonoran Desert, where the journey itself became a barrier. The logic was stark: if crossing became dangerous enough, fewer people would try.

This doctrine—“prevention through deterrence”—remains central to U.S. border policy today.

The Post-9/11 Transformation

The attacks of September 11 marked a turning point. Border enforcement was rebranded as a matter of national security, and immigration became intertwined with counterterrorism.

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 consolidated this shift. Agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection were expanded and empowered, receiving massive increases in funding.

Although no terrorist threats materialized via the southern border, the narrative proved durable. It justified sweeping investments in physical barriers, surveillance systems, and personnel. Legislation like the Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized hundreds of miles of fencing, while new technologies promised a “virtual wall” of sensors and data.

Many of these technologies originated in foreign conflicts. Surveillance tools and drone systems tested in places such as the Gaza Strip were adapted for border enforcement, blurring the line between military operations and civilian policing.

At the same time, rhetoric evolved. Border agents were increasingly described as operating on the “front lines,” reinforcing a war-like mentality that continues to shape policy and practice.

The Layered Border Comes Home

If the border once existed at the edge of the nation, it now exists throughout it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection operates within a 100-mile zone extending from all external boundaries—a region that includes major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Approximately 200 million people live within this zone.

Within this space, enforcement increasingly resembles border operations. Joint actions between ICE and Border Patrol have introduced militarized tactics into urban environments, including helicopter deployments and coordinated raids.

The result is what Miller describes as a “layered border”—a system in which the boundary is not a single line, but a series of overlapping enforcement zones.

This internal expansion raises fundamental questions about civil liberties and the normalization of militarized policing. Practices once associated with remote borderlands are now part of everyday life in cities far removed from the frontier.

Exporting the Border

At the same time that the border has moved inward, it has also been pushed outward.

Through training programs, funding, and equipment transfers, the United States has effectively extended its border enforcement into other countries. Security forces across Latin America increasingly participate in migration control efforts aligned with U.S. priorities.

Former Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly once suggested that the U.S. border should begin thousands of miles from its physical boundary. In practice, this has translated into a focus on migration routes in Central America, particularly along the Mexico–Guatemala corridor.

Some officials have gone further. A former CBP commissioner stated explicitly that the functional southern border of the United States lies not at the Rio Grande, but at the boundary between southern Mexico and Guatemala.

This is the essence of border externalization: enforcement occurs long before migrants reach U.S. territory.

It also reflects a broader geopolitical strategy. By projecting enforcement outward, the United States shapes migration patterns, influences regional security policies, and extends its operational reach without formal territorial expansion.

Geopolitics: Resources, Rivalries, and Regional Control

The expansion of elastic borders cannot be separated from global power dynamics.

Latin America and the Caribbean occupy a strategic position in the 21st century. The region is rich in critical resources—lithium, rare earth minerals, freshwater, and biodiversity—while also serving as a key corridor for global trade.

At the same time, geopolitical competition is intensifying. The rise of China as a global economic power has deepened its engagement across the Americas through infrastructure projects, trade agreements, and investment.

For Washington, maintaining influence in the hemisphere has become a priority.

Border expansion and security integration offer one mechanism for doing so. By embedding U.S. priorities into regional security frameworks—through military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and migration control—the United States reinforces its presence without overtly framing it as geopolitical competition.

Migration, in this context, becomes both a justification and a tool.

At the same time, countries that resist alignment—such as Cuba or Nicaragua—often face increased political and economic pressure, further illustrating how border policy intersects with broader foreign policy goals.

Fortress Capitalism: A System Under Pressure

For Colombian President Gustavo Petro, these developments are part of a larger transformation.

He describes the emerging system as “Fortress Capitalism”—a model in which wealthy nations fortify themselves against the consequences of global inequality and environmental collapse, rather than addressing their root causes.

In this framework, borders are not just about controlling movement. They are about preserving a global order in which wealth remains concentrated and mobility is restricted.

As climate change accelerates, this dynamic becomes more pronounced. Rising sea levels, desertification, and extreme weather events are expected to displace millions of people in the coming decades. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) formally identifies climate change as a critical national security threat and a “threat multiplier,” as it exacerbates existing stresses like poverty, political instability, and resource scarcity. It endangers military readiness by damaging infrastructure, disrupting supply chains, and increasing demand for humanitarian missions

Yet instead of prioritizing adaptation, mitigation, or equitable development, governments increasingly invest in containment.

Walls rise. Surveillance expands. Military involvement deepens.

The result is a world in which mobility—once a fundamental aspect of human survival—is increasingly criminalized.

Climate Migration and the Security Paradigm

U.S. military doctrine has long identified climate change as a “threat multiplier.” But the focus is often less on environmental impacts themselves than on their social consequences.

Migration, in particular, is framed as a source of instability.

Policy documents frequently link population movement to security risks, reinforcing the idea that migrants are not just individuals seeking safety or opportunity, but potential threats to be managed.

This framing shapes responses.

Rather than addressing the underlying drivers of displacement—including economic policies, historical emissions, and geopolitical interventions—resources are directed toward enforcement.

In effect, the system treats symptoms while reinforcing the conditions that produce them.

An Invisible War

Unlike conventional conflicts, the expansion of elastic borders does not produce dramatic battlefields or clear front lines.

Instead, it operates in deserts, detention centers, transit routes, and data systems. It is often invisible to those not directly affected.

Yet its consequences are profound.

Migrants are pushed into increasingly dangerous journeys. Families are separated. Entire regions are reshaped by enforcement policies. And within the United States, the normalization of militarized policing raises enduring questions about democracy and rights.

Miller suggests that this system functions as a form of undeclared war—one that maintains global inequalities while minimizing visibility.

“It’s a war without end,” he argues, “and without a clear battlefield.”

Where Does the Border End?

As the concept of a hemispheric security zone gains traction, the implications of elastic borders become harder to ignore.

If the border can exist thousands of miles beyond national territory—and hundreds of miles within it—then what defines its limits?

Is it geography? Policy? Power?

Or is the border becoming something else entirely: a flexible instrument for managing a world marked by inequality, displacement, and ecological crisis?

The answer may determine not only the future of migration, but the future of global order itself.

In an era of rising instability, nations face a choice.

They can build walls—physical, digital, and geopolitical—or they can address the forces driving people to move.

For now, the trend is clear.

The border is expanding.

And the fortress is rising.

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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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They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm.

They come for the darkness.

A recent CBS segment on Cuba offered viewers a familiar script: a “failed” island, an aging revolution, refugees in Florida, and Washington once again contemplating what to do with the place ninety miles away. But the segment was also built on an omission so large it swallowed the truth: that while these cameras speak of shortages and collapse, babies are dying under a policy designed to create both.

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that the expansion of U.S. sanctions beginning in 2017 was likely the primary cause of a dramatic rise in infant mortality in Cuba. According to the report, Cuba’s infant mortality rate surged by 148 percent from 2018 to 2025. Had the rate remained stable, approximately 1,800 babies who died during those years would likely still be alive.

Read that again. Babies.

The report links the rise to the tightening of unilateral U.S. coercive measures under the first Donald Trump administration, the continuation of most of those measures under Joe Biden, and further escalation under the second Trump administration. Instead of telling that story, prime-time segments like CBS recycle Cold War clichés.

In this segment, people are invited to remember pre-revolutionary Cuba as a lost paradise. But beyond the casino lights were cane cutters, domestic workers, rural families without doctors, children without schools, Black Cubans denied the full rights, dignity, and opportunities the government claimed to promise, workers, surviving in an economy where much of the wealth flowed upward. For many Cubans, the revolution was a rupture with dependency.

It is common in U.S. media to shrink the Cuban Revolution into one beard, one speech, one man. As if millions of lives, shaped by inequality, dictatorship, and foreign domination, could be reduced to nothing more than a personality cult. Fidel Castro was central to Cuba’s history, but so were peasants who wanted land, teachers who crossed mountains to teach literacy, doctors who stayed in poor neighborhoods, workers who believed sovereignty meant something more than a flag.

Like any other country, Cuba has real internal problems. Bureaucracy exists. Economic errors exist. Frustration is real. Emigration is real. And yet, these realities are routinely seized upon by Washington as the ready-made justification for intervention, pressure, and policies that deepen the very conditions they claim to condemn.

For decades, the United States has built an external wall around the island brick by brick. Sanctions. Financial penalties. Shipping restrictions. Fuel pressure. Banking obstacles. Threats against companies that trade. Punishments for third countries. Obstacles to medicine, parts, credit, investment, and entrepreneurs. Policy papers described the logic openly generations ago: create hardship, provoke desperation, generate political unrest.

This is where media like CBS plays a critical role by showing the suffering while obscuring the system that produces it. By rendering U.S. policy as background noise rather than as an active force shaping the very reality being filmed. And this is not an isolated editorial choice. It is a pattern.

But when infant deaths rise sharply during a period of intensified external strangulation, honesty demands more than repeating those talking points. It requires naming cause and responsibility. And it requires asking a more uncomfortable question: If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?

You don’t spend decades trying to suffocate something that poses no alternative. Why isolate, sanction, and punish a model you believe is irrelevant? Unless the fear is not that it will fail. Unless the fear is that it might, even with all its contradictions, suggest a different way of organizing society. One where people are not reduced to clients, markets, or consumers to be captured, but honored as human beings to be nourished, protected, and allowed to flourish.

When I walked through Havana during a blackout, I saw neighbors calling across courtyards, playing dominoes by candlelight. Someone on the corner had a speaker with half a battery and enough music for three buildings. Two young people kissed along the Malecón. Someone cursed the government. Someone cursed the blockade. Someone cursed both. Someone laughed. I saw human beings remain stubbornly human.

Why does CBS not cover that? Because they film the darkness. But the real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel, the policy that constricted the hospital, the silence that normalized preventable deaths, and the infants whose names will never appear in the broadcast.

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Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants.

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By: Melissa Garriga

Across the country, resistance to data centers is rising even as plans are steadily being made to build new ones.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of new data centers — 67 percent — are being built in rural areas. And three-quarters of those are in Midwestern and Southern towns.

The negative effects do not go unnoticed in these communities. A new data center in Southaven, Mississippi, for example, is reportedly terrorizing the community with high levels of noise and air pollution, and residents are now regretting its existence.

But it’s not just the pollution, the depletion of water systems, and the increased energy costs to consumers that should lead communities to resist data centers. When you dig a little deeper, you begin to see how data centers are built on exploitation that goes far beyond small-town USA.

Data centers are both products and producers of wars that kill people and destroy the planet on a global scale. The rapid expansion of these data centers requires raw materials, especially fossil fuels — resources often obtained through violence — and they fuel a technology that is increasingly used to commit war crimes.

Fossil fuels provide almost 60 percent of the power for data centers, especially for “emergency generators.” AI data centers run almost 24/7, so these “emergency” generators are consistently operating.

Control over fossil fuels, of course, is a driving factor behind the U.S. regime change efforts in Iran, Venezuela, and other resource-rich regions. And the extraction of other needed minerals — like silicon, gallium, lithium, and cobalt — requires both the destabilization of the sovereign regions in which they are found and inhumane mining practices, including the use of child labor.

Then there is the question of the moral and ethical use of generative AI. The expansion of data centers comes at a time when AI and LLMs (large language models) are increasingly being used by the Pentagon for militarism domestically and internationally.

The Pentagon recently agreed to massive deals with both Palantir and OpenAI. The employment of AI in military operations has already resulted in war crimes. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude was used in the bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which killed around 170 students and teachers. Do towns that pride themselves on family values want to be the workforce behind a killing machine capable of murdering young girls?

It’s easy to understand why the announcement of these data centers can seem like good news for areas facing dire economic conditions. Existing low-wage jobs are difficult to survive on. But the evidence suggests data centers create very few local jobs in the towns where they’re built. Should this small number of jobs come at the expense of people and the future of our planet?

The state officials brokering these deals with tech companies could instead work on bringing jobs that design, install, and maintain renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuel reliance. They could sign contracts with companies that manage and protect the beautiful natural ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity that often surround rural towns.

We need jobs that sustain the heartbeat of the Midwest and the charm and hospitality of the South — not jobs in an industry that terrorizes communities and kills people.

Data centers are not just toxic installations in communities’ backyards — they are a driving force behind wars and instability, and they keep American workers tied to the endless cycle of wars for fossil fuels.

In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects — especially across the Midwest and the South, where they have so much beauty and love to protect.

Rural communities’ future is not AI. We should be investing in what makes us great: the people and the land.

Join CODEPINK’s campaign against data centers and the war economy that drives and supplies them.

Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She was born and raised in Mississippi, where she continues to live and work. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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By Colonel Ann Wright

In the evening of Wednesday, April 29, 2026, Israeli naval forces attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) en route to Gaza. An unknown number of Israeli military ships went over 700 miles to attack a 54-ship flotilla that was headed for Gaza to attempt to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and bring worldwide attention to the continuing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the destruction and occupation of southern Lebanon, and the attacks on Iran.

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21 boats were attacked by Israeli naval forces about 80 nautical miles west of the Greek island of Crete in international waters. 179 participants from 33 countries were taken against their will from boats that were damaged by Israeli naval forces and put onto a commercial cargo ship that may arrive at the Israeli port of Ashdod around Saturday, May 2.

We anticipate that they will be processed at a dock facility in Ashdod, then transported to an Israeli prison and in 3-5 days deported from the country with a 10-100 year ban on returning to Israel, which means that one cannot get to the West Bank for actions in solidarity with Palestinians who are under attack by Zionist Israeli settlers who steal Palestinian land, animals and burn Palestinian houses and cars.

15 U.S. citizens were among the 179 who were kidnapped by Israeli forces.

32 flotilla boats remain afloat, although Israeli naval forces damaged many and may be forced into ports on the large Greek island of Crete for repairs. No doubt the Israeli naval forces will be lurking like sharks in the waters off Crete, waiting for the small boats to come out.

4 More Boats Are in Siracusa, Sicily, Italy

I am in Siracusa, Sicily, Italy, with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) and its four boats, two of which came from the Thousand Madleens organization.

The FFC has been sailing boats to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza since 2010, with over 35 boats sailed in the years from 2008 to 2025.

2025 was a remarkable year for International citizen solidarity with Palestine

2025 was a remarkable year for international citizens in solidarity with Palestine. In July, the “Madleen” sailboat sailed to break the Siege of Gaza, followed by the 3,000+ person Global Sumud Land Convoy through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, followed by the FFC ship “Handala” sailing to break the blockade, followed by the large 42 boat Global Sumud Flotilla, followed by the FFC “Conscience” ship that sailed with 8 boats of the “Thousand Madleens.”

Actions Against U.S. Complicity in the Israeli Genocide of Gaza

As a U.S. citizen in opposition to the U.S. government complicity, no matter which political party is in power, in Israeli attacks on Gaza, I have been a part of the flotilla movement since 2010 as a participant on the flotilla that included the large ship Mavi Marmara, on which Israeli soldiers killed 10 and wounded 50. Israeli naval forces attacked all six ships in that flotilla, and participants were assaulted, taken to Israel, imprisoned in Israel, and ultimately deported.

We will continue to sail boats until the genocide of Gaza ends, and we break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Take action for Palestine NOW!

Ann Wright served in the US Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a Colonel. She was also a US diplomat for 16 years and served in US Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.” She has been with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition since 2010, has been put in Israeli prison two times for attempting to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and has been on segments of flotillas in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2024.

Episode 349: May Day, Media Complicity & the Demand to Arrest Hegseth: On this episode, CODEPINK feministas Marcy Winograd, Danaka Katovich and Olivia DiNucci discuss the importance of the May Day Strong General Strike demanding an end to US wars and occupations. Their conversation then turns to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, media complicity with Empire and CODEPINK’s “Arrest Hegseth” campaign.

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Episode 348: From Iran to South Africa: Hosts Marcy Winograd and Medea Benjamin bring us Empire on the Rocks with a look at growing opposition to the US-Israel war on Iran and weapons for Israel's bombardment of Gaza and bombing of Iran, Lebanon and Syria. On the second half of CODEPINK Radio, journalist Sam Husseini reports back on his trip to South Africa, where white supremacists are pressuring their country to drop its genocide case against Israel. Husseini advocates for South Africa to move for additional emergency orders at the International Court of Justice.

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