Exposing the big con: The false promise of Artificial Intelligence

By Marty Hart-Landsberg

Published 6 March, 2025

First published at Reports from the Economic Front.

The leading big tech companies are working hard to sell Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the gateway to a future of plenty for all. And to this point they have been surprisingly successful in capturing investor money and government support, making their already wealthy owners even wealthier. However, that success doesn’t change the fact that their AI systems have already largely exhausted their potential. More concerning, the uncritical and rapidly increasing adoption of these systems by schools, businesses, the media, and the military represents a serious threat to our collective well-being. We need to push back, and push back hard, against this big tech offensive.

The big con

According to tech leaders like Elon Musk, we are only years away from building sentient computers that can think, feel, and behave like humans. For example, as reported by Business Insider,

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a [February 2025] interview with Dubai’s World Governments Summit that the economic returns of artificial intelligence investments will be seen in humanoid robots.

Speaking to the UAE’s AI minister ... Musk said that humanoid robots and deep intelligence will unlock the global economy’s potential by providing “quasi-infinite products and services.” ...

“You can produce any product, provide any service,” Musk said of humanoid robots. “There’s really no limit to the economy at that point. You can make anything.” ...

“Will money even be meaningful? I don’t know; it might not be,” he said, adding that robots could create a “universal high-income situation” because anyone will have the ability to make as many goods and services as they want.

Musk recently rebranded Tesla as an AI robotics company and, in a January earnings call, said that the company will soon be building thousands of Otimus robots which will likely earn it “north of $10 trillion in revenue.”

And Tesla is not the only company pursuing this strategy. According to a Bloomberg article, “Apple and Meta are set to go toe-to-toe” in competing to build “AI-powered humanoid robots.” The article continues:

It’s the stuff of science fiction — robots at home that can fold your laundry, bring you a glass of water, load up the dishwasher or even push the kids on the swing in the backyard. For years, that future seemed far off. But it’s getting closer, with help from some of the world’s largest technology companies.

If the stock market is to be taken seriously, a lot of investors are true believers. The so-called Magnificent Seven stocks–Apple, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon.com, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Tesla — have been responsible for almost all the market’s gains over the past several years. At the beginning of 2023, the seven accounted for 20 percent of the S&P 500. A year later it was 28 percent. It is now 33 percent.

Getting real

The 2022 release of ChatGPT by OpenAI marked the start of public engagement with AI. It was free, easy to access, and required no technical knowledge to use it. And while it remains the most widely used chatbot, other companies have launched their own competing products, including Tesla, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft. But, although these chatbots can perform a variety of tasks, there is nothing “intelligent” about them. And despite heavy spending to boost their speed and computing power, they do not represent a meaningful step towards the creation of artificial general intelligence systems with the ability to think, learn, and solve problems on their own.

Existing AI systems, like ChatGPT, rely on large-scale pattern recognition. They are trained on data, most of which has been scraped from the web, and use sophisticated algorithms to organize the material when needed in line with common patterns of use. When prompted with a question or request for information, chatbots identify related material in their database and then assemble a set of words or images, based on probabilities, that “best” satisfies the inquiry. In other words, chatbots do not “think” or “reason.” Since competing companies draw on different data sets and use different algorithms, their chatbots may well offer different responses to the same prompt.

At the same time, all chatbots do suffer from the same weaknesses. Their systems need extensive data and scraping the web means that they cannot help but draw on material that is highly discriminatory and biased. As a result, chatbot responses can be compromised by the worst of the web. One example: AI-powered resume screening programs have been found to disproportionately select resumes tied to White-associated names. And because of their complexity, no one has yet been able to precisely determine how a chatbot organizes its data and makes its words selection. Thus, no one has yet devised a way to stop chatbots from periodically “hallucinating” or seeing non existing patterns or relationships, which causes them to make nonsensical responses.

The BBC recently tested the ability of the leading chatbots to summarize news stories and found that the resulting answers contained significant inaccuracies and distortions. Here is what the BBC News and Current Affairs CEO Deborah Turness had to say:

The team found ‘significant issues’ with just over half of the answers generated by the assistants. The AI assistants introduced clear factual errors into around a fifth of answers they said had come from BBC material.

And where AI assistants included ‘quotations’ from BBC articles, more than one in ten had either been altered, or didn’t exist in the article.

Part of the problem appears to be that AI assistants do not discern between facts and opinion in news coverage; do not make a distinction between current and archive material; and tend to inject opinions into their answers.

The results they deliver can be a confused cocktail of all of these — a world away from the verified facts and clarity that we know consumers crave and deserve.

This is certainly not a record that inspires confidence. For its part, the BBC recommended a “pull back” on AI news summaries.

No light at the end of the tunnel

Aware of these shortcomings, tech companies argue that they can be overcome by increasing the amount of training data as well as the number of parameters chatbots use to process information. That is why they are racing to build new systems with ever more expensive chips that are powered by ever bigger data centers. However, recent studies suggest that this is not a winning strategy.

As Lexin Zhou, the co-author of a study published in the journal Nature, explains, “the newest LLMs [Large Language Models] might appear impressive and be able to solve some very sophisticated tasks, but they’re unreliable in various aspects.” Moreover, “the trend does not seem to show clear improvements, but the opposite.”

One reason for this outcome, says Zhou, is that the recent upgrades tend to reduce the likelihood that the new systems will acknowledge uncertainty or ignorance about a particular topic. In fact, it appears that the changes made were motivated by “the desire to make language models try to say something seemingly meaningful,” even when the models are in uncertain territory.

The resulting danger is obvious. In fact, according to Lucy Cheke, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge, “Individuals are putting increasing trust in systems that mostly produce correct information, but mix in just enough plausible-but-wrong information to cause real problems. This becomes particularly problematic as people more and more rely on these systems to answer complex questions to which they would not be in a position to spot an incorrect answer.” Using these systems to provide mental health counseling or medical advice, teach our students, or control weapons systems, is a disaster waiting to happen.

Some perspective

Tech leaders confidently assert that AI will lead to revolutionary changes in our economy, boosting productivity and majority well-being. And if we want to reap the expected rewards we need to get out of their way. But what can we really expect from the massive AI related investments projected for the coming years?

One way to ground our expectations is to consider the economic consequences of the late 1990s tech-boom, which included the growing popularity and mass use of computers, the internet, and email. This pivotal period was said, at the time, to mark the beginning of the Information Age and a future of endless economic expansion. As for the economic payoff, the data on post-adoption trends in US labor productivity is not encouraging. As the International Monetary Fund reports,

Labor productivity gains slowed from the range of 3–3.5 percent a year in the 1960s and 1970s to about 2 percent in the 1980s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the US economy experienced a sizable but temporary productivity boom as productivity growth rebounded to 3 percent. Since about 2003, productivity gains have been lackluster, with labor productivity slowing to an average growth rate of less than 1.5 percent in the decade after the Great Recession.

Yes, these technologies and the many companies and products they spawned have changed how we work and live, but the economic consequences have been far from “revolutionary,” if by that we mean significantly improving the lives of most people. Worker earnings and economic growth have followed labor productivity in a similar downward trajectory. And given the limitations of AI systems, it is hard to imagine that their use will prove more effective in producing strong productivity gains and higher earnings for workers. Of course, that isn’t really the main point of the effort. Tech companies have made a lot of money over the years and they stand to make a lot more if they succeed in getting their various AI systems widely adopted.

The fightback

In exchange for their promised future of “quasi-infinite products and services,” tech companies are demanding that we help finance— through tax credits, zoning changes, and investment subsidies — the massive buildout of energy and water hogging data centers they need to develop and run their AI systems. There is no win in this for us — in fact, Bloomberg News reports that Microsoft’s own research into AI use:

shows a disturbing trend: The more we trust AI, the less we think for ourselves. . . .

The researchers found a striking pattern: The more participants trusted AI for certain tasks, the less they practiced those skills themselves, such as writing, analysis and critical evaluations. As a result, they self-reported an atrophying of skills in those areas. Several respondents said they started to doubt their abilities to perform tasks such as verifying grammar in text or composing legal letters, which led them to automatically accept whatever generative AI gave them.

And who will get blamed when the quality of work deteriorates or hallucinations cause serious mistakes? You can bet it won’t be the AI systems that cost billions of dollars.

So, what is to be done? At the risk of stating the obvious: We need to challenge the overblown claims of the leading tech companies and demand that the media stop treating their press releases as hard news. We need to resist the building of ever bigger data centers and the energy systems required to run them. We need to fight to restrict the use of AI systems in our social institutions, especially to guard against the destructive consequences of discriminatory algorithms. We need to organize in workplaces to ensure that workers have a voice in the design and use of any proposed AI system. And we must always ensure that humans have the ability to review and, when necessary, override AI decisions.

 

B’Tselem in the Crosshairs

Netanyahu Cabinet’s War against Human Rights in Israel

by Dan Steinbock Posted onMarch 05, 2025

In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel.

In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?     

B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide.

In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?    

Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

Whose “foreign subversion”?              

B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state      

Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

The author of The Fall of Israel (2025), Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/ 

The original version was published by Informed Comment on March 2, 2025.

 

Normalizing the Abnormal

by Michael Brenner / March 3rd, 2025

From day one, we humans have reacted to the extraordinary with awe and dread. Unprecedented phenomena evoke acute anxiety – even when not immediately threatening – because they are inexplicable. They sow fear because their nature, and whatever mysterious realm they emerge from, are beyond our comprehension. Thus, the compulsion to fit them into some ordered frame of reference. That entailed populating the earth and the sky with spirits, demons, gods and a host of related forces. In the imagination of more literate societies, they were composed into entire families of the supernatural – endowed with human attributes so as to make their persona and machinations more accessible to our mortal minds. The previously unknown becomes not knowable in any overt sense but it can be referenced. Calamities and boons alike can be ascribed to them – either as divine whim or provocation by human actions: (failure to propitiate the divine powers or consorting with malign spirits) Or, we might be victimized by the plotting by the juju men deploy witchcraft in the service of enemies and blasphemers.

These days, we do the exact opposite: we reduce the extraordinary to the banal ordinary. We normalize it. We neutralize by confining it to the mundane categories we rely on in order to understand how the world works and to navigate it. In this way, we alleviate stress – emotional or mental.  That allows us to avoid the need to contend with the challenging, with what disturbs our comfort and convenience. This response is recognizable even when the phenomena encountered are of consequence, even among responsible leaders. At this moment, we are witnessing a remarkable example of this phenomenon.  America is experiencing an imminent threat to its very essence as a Constitutional Republic – to its foundational values, to its principles of collective life. Yet, the reaction is decidedly undramatic. There is no general sense of crisis or desperate efforts to counter it. No urgency. The numerous assaults on the body politic by Trump and his henchmen are judged as serious, but each is addressed as if it were self-contained rather than part of a comprehensive, revolutionary – if erratic – plan to remake the country in MAGA’s perverse vision.

The harsh reality is that the country is under the brutal rule of a mentally unhinged autocrat with strong Fascist instincts. He, and his Rasputin Elon Musk, share the mentality of juvenile delinquents driven by the impulse to destroy and to coercive use of power. They are dismantling the federal government and subverting our political system. In textbook coup fashion, they have decapitated the senior ranks of every federal administrative unit, supplanting incumbents with loyalists who will do the bidding of their master in the White House.¹ They command the blind loyalty of tens of millions of cultists. They control cyberspace. They have intimidated the formal opposition into passive acquiescence. Massive success in these twin projects has been achieved within just six weeks. In four years’ time, little will be left of the political system in place for the past 250 years; our society will be prey to pillage and oppression. The system’s reconstitution would be a Herculean project – even under the most favorable circumstances. At the moment, there is no evidence of such circumstances emerging.

The sine qua non for improving the odds, however slightly, on building some measure of countervailing force, is to cease-and-desist from the deleterious practice of normalizing Trump’s depredations. That includes casting him and his machinations in a positive light whenever a particular action of his conforms to our own views.  The outstanding case in point is the termination of the open-ended Ukraine project of exploiting that benighted country as a weapon for subordinating Russia. That catastrophic failure should be recognized as such, and reversion from it is called for. Let us bear in mind, though, that the campaign that was launched by Barack Obama in 2014 was deepened by Trump I and turbocharged by Joe Biden. It reflected an overwhelming consensus by the country’s political class that the plan served major national interests. Several of Trump’s appointees have been vocal promoters of the campaign. Trump is anything but a natural conciliator and humanitarian – as evinced by his plan for extirpating the Palestinians, but his bullying of every country fend or foe in sight, and by his full dedication to confrontation with China. The expediency of calming relations with Russia has much to do with the girding of loins for the priority given aggressive campaigns in the Middle East and East Asia rather than earnest concern for European peace.

At the more practical level, the White House notion as to what should be the basis for an agreement with Russia bears no relation to the realities on the ground or to the Kremlin’s oft-repeated statement of its unnegotiable core objectives. Trump will not be happy with terms, however dressed up, that constitute a clear humiliation of the U.S. Similar ignorance, and fantasy, attaches to the proposal of a ceasefire which makes zero sense from a Moscow perspective. Simply put, the White House has no viable plan to end the war in Ukraine.

Instead of a sober appreciation of these truths, we find many critics of the Ukraine venture tossing bouquets of praise at Trump for his takedown of Zelensky in the White House. This disgraceful display of arrogance backed by mendacity is now being justified and often praised. We are told that Trump “schooled” him, “took him to the woodshed,” “taught him a lesson.” Whatever one thinks of Zelensky, the entire episode was an acute embarrassment for the United States. Our President behaving like a mafia capo engaging in an extortionate shakedown of a fellow gangster registers worldwide in a manner damaging to America’s image and interests. There is widespread backing for the White House claim that Zelensky ‘insulted’ the President and, thereby, the United States – a sin for which he should publicly apologize. This from a man who called Zelensky a “dictator,’ accused him of stealing tens of billions of dollars, lies about his alleged failure to thank Americans for all the wonderful things they have done for Ukrainians, and blames him for starting a war which Washington forced on Kiev. The last is carried to the extreme of coercing Zelensky to back away from the agreement with Russia, initialed in Istanbul at the end of March 2022, which would have spared hundreds of thousands of lives – and America’s (the West’s) ignominious defeat. Who owes whom an apology?

Trump sees Ukraine as a financial investment that went sour. So, you blame your agents for the failure and grab whatever tangible assets are lying around. He never will admit that our aid in fact was spent to make possible the spilling of Ukrainian blood for American purposes. Mea Culpa is not in his vocabulary.  How will he react when his simple-minded ideas for ending the war prove to be fanciful? Find a scapegoat – Biden, Zelensky, the Europeans? Concoct another fictional narrative eagerly spread by credulous mass media? Create a noisy distraction? Or, fall on his face as occurred repeatedly in a career as real estate mogul featuring serial bankruptcies?

The blunt truth is that the United States no longer is capable of conducting normal diplomacy. Evident under Biden, it is even more alien to the Trump team. The man is a malignant narcissist, borderline psychotic whose only methods for dealing with the world are bullying, intimidation, and domination. We have seen that in living color for 9 years. He thinks in slogans and indulges any whim that passes through an addled mind. Still, there remain distinguished analysts who put forth the thesis that the displays such as we saw with Zelensky are just calculated showmanship, that in private Trump engages with colleagues in sober, disciplined, informed exercises in policy formation., and the careful weighing of tactical options. Picture Churchill’s war cabinet in May 1940 – substituting Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, Waltz and Musk for Churchill, Halifax, Attlee, Greenwood, Bevin and Chamberlain.

Even the best of us are not entirely free of the instinct to tint reality to match our wishes.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  In key departments, the purge is being carried out well into the organization chart. At State, a special unit led by a fresh MAGA appointee is tasked with reviewing all 13,000 treaties and agreements that the U.S. has internationally. The aim of the sifting is to abrogate some considerable number. That number as well as the criteria to be applied in identifying disposable agreements is a mystery to those working on the project. When one staff official inquired of the non-entity in charge what methodology would be employed, his foggy response was to ask what is meant by “methodology.”

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Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. Read other articles by Michael.

This article was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2025 at 7:41a

 

Europe’s Ukrainian Predicament

Righteous, Confused and Unwilling

by Binoy Kampmark / March 4th, 2025

There is something deeply moving about the ignorance and scatty nature of politicians.  At points, it can even be endearing.  In the apparently wide wake left by the mauling of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the press at the Oval Office on February 28, backers of Kyiv’s war effort were wondering: What next?  How do we prevent Ukrainian defeat at the hands of Russia?  Having irresponsibly cuddled, coddled and insisted that Ukraine was in with more than a sporting chance to bloody and beat the clumsy Russian Bear that shows no signs of stepping down and hibernating, they now find themselves without a war sponsor in the United States.

The previous US President Joe Biden had been more than willing to keep the war machine fed by proxy, furnishing Zelensky handsomely.  The Washington war establishment purred, happy that Ukrainians were doing the dying and bleeding Russia’s soldiery white.  Cant and righteousness were in abundant supply: the Ukrainians were foot soldiers wrapped in civilisation’s flag, democracy worn on their sleeves.  Accusations from the Russian side that Ukrainian nationalism was also adulterated by a history of fascist inclination were dismissed out of hand.  A country famously seized by kleptocrats, with a spotty, ill-nourished civil society, had been redrawn as a westward looking European state, besieged by the Oriental Barbarism of the East.

If words of support could be counted as weapons, then Zelensky would have had a fresh arsenal in the aftermath of his tongue lashing by President Donald Trump and his deputy J.D. Vance.  Much of these were provided by leaders gathered at Lancaster House on March 1 hosted by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  Starmer, for his part, promised that Europe would continue sustaining Ukraine’s efforts and, were a peace deal to arise, aid the country in improving its defences to ensure that “Ukraine can draw on munitions, finance and equipment to defend itself”.

French President Emmanuel Macron tried to clarify any doubt that had arisen in the Oval Office savaging.  “There is an aggressor: Russia.  There is a victim: Ukraine.  We were right to help Ukraine and sanction Russia three years ago – and to keep doing so.”  The “we” in this case, Macron went on to add, involved “Americans, the Europeans, the Canadians, the Japanese, and many others.”

Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz also declared that “we must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war”, affirming that “we stand with Ukraine”.  The country’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, thought it prudent to point out that the Oval Office brawl “underlined that a new age of infamy has begun”, adding that Russia would be withstood “even if the US withdraws support, so that it [Ukraine] can achieve a just peace and not a capitulation”.

Other leaders expressed supportive words of standing.  Donald Tusk of Poland: “Dear [Zelensky], dear Ukrainian friends, you are not standing alone.”  Spain’s Pedro Sánchez: “Ukraine, Spain stands with you.”  Canada’s Justin Trudeau: “[we] will continue to stand with Ukraine and Ukrainians in achieving a just and lasting peace.”

When they were not standing, many of these effusively supportive leaders were scrambling, teasingly suggesting a bloc of military support that may, somehow, be formed in the absence of US involvement.  This would comprise the sillily worded “coalition of the willing” (that expression, when used in 2003, saw the United States, UK and Australia, along with a motley collective, violate international law in invading Iraq).  Such a coalition, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen dreamily envisaged, would transform Ukraine into a “steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders”.

This imaginatively foolish and recklessly irresponsible undertaking does little to patch up the irreplaceable role the US plays in a number of areas, not least the budgetary coverage of NATO, coupled with the promise for military intervention in the event a member state is attacked.  Macron has, at stages, taken pot shots at NATO as cerebrally obsolete, a brain dead creature best be done away with.  But these articulations, beyond such reports as NATO 2030, have not resulted in anything significant that would cope with an absentee US.

European states, furthermore, are divided ahead of the March 6 summit, where the EU will supposedly approve some 20 billion euros for the purchase of missiles and air defence equipment for Ukraine.  Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a letter to European Council President António Costa, offered the view that the EU, “following the example of the United States – should enter into direct discussions with Russia on a ceasefire and sustainable peace in Ukraine”.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister, Robert Fico, was even harder in his response, suggesting that financial and military assistance to Kyiv could be refused were ceasefire efforts not pursued, rejecting such notions as “peace through strength” being advocated by various EU members.  It was also incumbent, Fico went on to insist, that any settlement “explicitly include a requirement to reopen the transit of gas through Ukraine to Slovakia and Western Europe.”

With this in mind, and the pressing, crushing implications of power, not as fantasy, but as coarsening reality, other options must be entertained.  Given their lack of punch and prowess, one arising from years fed by the devitalising US teat, European states are simply playing with toy soldiers.  Eventually, they will have to play along if peace in Ukraine, however much detested in its form, is to be reached.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Trump’s Détente with Venezuela

by Roger D. Harris / March 4th, 2025

Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – “speak loudly AND carry a big stick” – has not been applied full force on Venezuela… as of yet. Instead, the new administration appears to be testing a more nuanced approach. In his first administration, he succeeded in crashing the Venezuelan economy and creating misery among the populace but not in the goal of changing the “regime.”

Back in 2019, the Bolivarian Revolution, initiated by Hugo Chávez and carried forward by his successor, current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was teetering on collapse under Trump’s “maximum pressure” offensive. The economy had tanked, inflation was out of control, and the GDP was in freefall. Over 50 countries recognized Washington-anointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó’s parallel government.

In the interregnum between Trump administrations, Biden embraced his predecessor’s unilateral coercive economic measures, euphemistically called sanctions, but with minimal or temporary relief. He certified the incredulous charge that Venezuela posed an immediate and extraordinary threat to US national security, as Trump and Obama had before him. Biden also continued to recognize the inept and corrupt Guaidó as head-of-state, until Guaidó’s own opposition group booted him out.

Despite enormous challenges, Venezuela resisted and did so with some remarkable success, bringing us to the present.

Run-up to the second Trump administration

In the run-up to Trump’s inauguration, speculation on future US-Venezuela relations ran from cutting a peaceful-coexistence deal, to imposing even harsher sanctions, to even military intervention.

Reuters predicted that Trump’s choice of hardliner Marco Rubio at secretary of state augured an intensification of the regime-change campaign. Another right-wing Floridian of Cuban descent, Mauricio Claver-Carone was tapped as the special envoy for Latin America. He had been Trump’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs and credited with shaping Trump’s earlier aggressive stance toward Venezuela. Furthermore, on the campaign trail, Trump himself commented: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing on January 15, Rubio described Venezuela as a “narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself of a nation state.” He was unanimously confirmed the very first day of the new administration.

The supposedly opposition Democrats all stampeded in his support, although Rubio severely criticized the previous Biden administration for being too soft on Venezuela. Rubio’s criticism was largely unwarranted because, except for minor tweaks, Biden had seamlessly continued the hybrid war against Venezuela.

 Grenell Trumps Rubio

 The first visit abroad by a Trump administration official was made by Ric Grenell, presidential envoy for special missions. Grenell briefly served in Trump’s first administration as acting director of national intelligence, becoming the first openly gay person in a Cabinet-level position.

Grenell flew to Caracas and posed for a photo-op, shaking hands with President Maduro on January 31. This was a noteworthy step away from hostility and towards rapprochement between two countries that have not had formal diplomatic relations since 2019.

The day after the Grenell visit, Rubio embarked on an uninspiring tour of right-wing Latin American countries. That same day, General License 41 allowing Chevron to operate in Venezuela automatically renewed, which was a development that Rubio had advocated against.

Diplomacy of dignity

Maduro entered negotiations with Grenell with a blend of strategic engagement and assertive resistance, aiming to navigate Venezuela’s economic challenges while maintaining sovereignty. The approach had win-win outcomes, although the spin in the respective countries was quite different.

Grenell claimed a “win” from the meeting with the release of six “American hostages” without giving anything in return. Venezuela, for its part, got rid of a half dozen “mercenaries.” Neither country has released the names of all the former detainees.

Grenell took a victory lap for getting Venezuela to accept back migrants who had left the country, a key Trump priority. Maduro welcomed them as part of his Misión Vuelta a la Patria (Return to the Homeland Program), which has repatriated tens of thousands since its inception in 2018.

Trump’s special envoy boasted that Venezuela picked up the migrants and flew them back home for free. Maduro was pleased that the US-sanctioned national airline Conviasa was allowed to land in the US and transport the citizens back in dignity. Congratulating the pilots and other workers, Maduro said: “The US tried to finish off Conviasa, yet here it is, strong.”

Evolution of imperialist strategy

Trump’s special representative for Venezuela in his first administration, Elliot Abrams, believes his former boss sold out the shop. He criticized Grenell’s visit as functioning to help legitimize Maduro as Venezuela’s rightful president, which it did.

In contrast, Robert O’Brien believes, “Grenell scored a significant diplomatic victory.” What is noteworthy is that O’Brien replaced John Bolton as Trump’s national security advisor in 2019 and had worked with Abrams as co-architect of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, yet now acknowledges it is time for a shift.

Speaking from experience, O’Brien commented: “Maximum economic sanctions have not changed the regime in Venezuela.” He now advocates: “Keeping sanctions against Venezuela in place, while at the same time, granting American and partner nation companies licenses.”

 According to Grenell, Trump no longer seeks regime change in Venezuela, but wants to focus on advancing US interests, namely facilitating deportations of migrants, while halting irregular migration to the US and preventing inflation of gas prices.

Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis suggests that Trump’s strategy is to adroitly use sanctions. Rather than driving Venezuela into the arms of China and Russia, Trump wants to incrementally erode sovereignty, compel sweetheart deals with foreign corporations such as Chevron, and eventually capture control of its oil industry.

Venezuela’s successes force imperial accommodation

 Not only did “maximum pressure” fail to achieve imperial goals in the past, but the Bolivarian Revolution’s accomplishments today have necessitated a more “pragmatic” approach by the US.

Venezuela has resolutely developed resilience against sanctions, achieving an extraordinary economic turnaround with one of the highest GDP growth rates in the hemisphere. Venezuelan oil production is at its highest level since 2019. The oil export market has been diversified with China as the primary customer, although the US is still prominent in second place.

However, if Chevron operations in Venezuela get shuttered, that would take a bite out of the recovery. Trump threatened on February 26 to withdrawal the company’s license, departing from the initial engagement approach. This was seen as a short-term concession to foreign policy hardliners in exchange for domestic support. But even then, the license’s six-month wind-down period offered room for the two governments to negotiate their future oil relationship. On March 1, the Office of Foreign Assets Control automatically reissued the license for another six months. But then on March 4, the wind-down period was reduced to a short 30 days. This could mark a turn back in the direction of regime change.

The government is incrementally mitigating the economic dominance by the oil sector. It has also made major strides towards food self-sufficiency, which is an under-reported victory that no other petrostate has ever accomplished.

It has reformed the currency exchange system reducing rate volatility, although a recent devaluation is worrisome. Tax policy too has become more efficient.

Further, the collapse of the US-backed opposition leaves Washington with a less effective bench to carry its water. The opposition coalition is divided over whether to boycott or participate in the upcoming May 25 elections. The USAID debacle has now left the squabbling insurrectionists destitute. (Venezuela never received any humanitarian aid.).

Washington still officially recognizes the long defunct 2015 National Assembly as the “legitimate government” of Venezuela. At the same time, Trump inherited the baggage of González Urrutia as the “lawful president-elect” (but not as “the president”), leaving the US with two parallel faux governments to juggle along with the actual one. Lacking a popular base in Venezuela,  González Urrutia abjectly whimpered: “As I recently told Secretary of State Marco Rubio: We are counting on you to help us solve our problems.”

 Although US sanctions will undoubtedly continue, Venezuela’s adaptations blunt their effectiveness. Venezuela’s resistance, bolstered by its natural oil and other reserves, have allowed that Latin American country to force some accommodation from the US. In contrast, the imperialists are going for the jugular with resistance-strong but natural resource-poor Cuba.

 The future of détente

Shifting political forces can endanger the fragile détente. Indeed, on February 26, Trump announced that oil licenses would be revoked, supposedly because Venezuela was not accepting migrants back fast enough. The Florida Congressional delegation, it is rumored, threatened to withhold approval of his prized Reconciliation Bill, if Trump did not cancel.

Clearly there is opposition from his party, both at the official and grassroots levels, against détente with Venezuela. As for the Democrats, elements have distinguished themselves from Trump by outflanking him from the right. The empire’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, recently ran a piece calling for military intervention in Venezuela.

According to Carlos Ron, former Venezuelan deputy foreign minister, the issue of détente between Washington and Caracas goes beyond this particular historical moment and even beyond the specifics of Venezuela to a fundamental contradiction: the empire seeks domination while the majority of the world’s peoples and nations seek self-determination. Until that is resolved, the struggle continues.

UPDATED at 8:59 PST, 4 March 2025.

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Roger D. Harris was an international observer for Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. He is with the US Peace Council and the Task Force on the Americas. Read other articles by Roger.