A Tale of Colliding World Views

by Greg Godels / December 31st, 2025


In December, documents were released asserting two radically different political perspectives.

They could not be more different.

On December 4, under the President of the United States’ Seal, the White House published the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, expressing the government’s current evaluation of the global challenges facing it.

The next day, December 5, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly announced its forthcoming 22nd Congress, followed by the publication of its Theses of the Central Committee — the product of long preparatory discussions by the KKE’s members– constituting an assessment of the state of the world and the Party’s approach to it.

A comparison of the two documents presents a violent clash of class outlooks.

The US National Security Strategy

The US ruling class — in its current incarnation — intends to maintain or re-establish US economic domination and grease the wheels for US corporations to succeed internationally. In this regard, the Trump administration is no different than earlier administrations, except — perhaps — being more transparent in this goal.

More specifically, extracting policy from the section on the Western Hemisphere, the strategy includes:

Militarizing the seas and the oceans. Previous administrations portrayed military force as an instrument of guaranteeing free “access” to trade. This administration, under the “America First” ideology explicitly uses military force to promote US economic success, foregoing the charade of promoting free trade for all.

Accessing strategic resources. In the document’s laundered language, the goal is “to identify strategic points and resources… with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners.” More candidly, US policy makers in this administration project power to privilege US corporations in resource-rich countries like Bolivia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Making it hard for other countries to compete. “The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.” The strategy endorsed by the document uses economic leverage to deny success to others.

Helping US corporations to dominate. “[W]e will reform our own system to expedite approvals and licensing—again, to make ourselves the partner of first choice. The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by [other] countries…” Specifically and adamantly, “[e]very U.S. Government official that interacts with… countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

Accepting that “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.” Of course, this policy only reiterates what every US administration for more than a hundred years has sought since the intervention in Cuba and the Philippines: a free hand for US economic exploitation.

While these goals are extracted from Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, they are barely disguised as policy for the rest of the world. However, they represent considerable continuity with the foreign policy of earlier administrations, though shorn of any pretense to global fairness.

Commentators have been surprised with the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere over the often-bitter hostility towards the People’s Republic of China. Surely, that simply acknowledges the formidable economic and military power of the PRC. US policy makers of Trump’s world have been forced to recognize that — no matter how much they would like otherwise — the US is in no position to bully the PRC. Therefore, they accept that they can only adjust or modify their economic relationship. Competing with the PRC — the US’s most formidable rival — consists, instead, in bullying those who do business with their rival.

The administration is explicit on how to “compete” for the allegiance of their Chinese rivals’ economic collaborators: “China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure, and China has recycled perhaps $1.3 trillion of its trade surpluses into loans to its trading partners. America and its allies have not yet formulated, much less executed, a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South,’ but together possess tremendous resources. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others hold net foreign assets of $7 trillion. International financial institutions, including the multilateral development banks, possess combined assets of $1.5 trillion. While mission creep has undermined some of these institutions’ effectiveness, this administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they serve American interests.” [my emphasis] Thus, the document reveals the carrot to the US stick.

Almost in passing, by merely observing the European Union’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the Trump administration demonstrates that it considers the EU to be another rival, albeit a rival retaining some important historical ties — neither a protectorate, nor currently a competitor of great concern.

The US National Security Strategy paper offers the latest insight into the thinking now directing the still-greatest power in the imperialist system. It is a blue print for the security of US business interests and not of the security and well-being of the people.

The KKE Theses of the Central Committee

How does the Greek Communist Party view the current state of the world?

The KKE is one of the few Marxist organizations relatively untarnished by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It conceded little to the mass retreat from Leninist principles. It refused to flirt with the widespread ideological marriage of markets and socialism. It held fast to the centrality of class in the analysis of the contemporary world. Where much of today’s left rails against an ever-changing, seemingly unrelated basket of grievances, the KKE defends the classical Marxist understanding that the central, determinative contradiction remains the contradiction between capital and labor, nationally and internationally.

Certainly, that should make Greek Communist thinking of interest to all those who question the strategic aims of the leaders of the most powerful state in the capitalist system.

KKE sees a class-divided world moving toward relative and absolute impoverishment of working people, long-term unemployment, and an unfavorable balance of power between capital and labor. Technological innovation is skewed dramatically in support of the interests of capital. Pursuit of profit continues to dangerously degrade the environment.

As a result of the weakness of labor in confronting capital, the capitalist system is suffering from an overaccumulation of capital. Hyper-exploitation has produced a mass of capital, seeking — with greater and greater difficulty — to find (safe) profitable investment opportunities (one might well view the orgy of investment in AI as an attempt to create such an opportunity).

KKE understands the recessionary pressures experienced in Europe, Japan, and Asia as the effects of this crisis of the return on investment. Efforts to manage this crisis — Keynesian or otherwise — have failed. Specifically, the liberal project of green technology (e.g., the Green New Deal) and the Central Bank project (e.g., interest-rate manipulation, qualitative easing) were unsuccessful in restoring a solid foundation for the rate of profit.

Further, the capitalist powers have invested in the war economy, both in response to inter-imperialist contradictions and to absorb capital.

Militarism serves to destroy and devalue capital through the never-ending conflicts arising from imperialist rivalries. They caution that this military buildup increases sharply the risk of even larger wars, possibly world wars.

The KKE stresses competition between existing nations — great powers, alliances, and emerging blocs — fueling the existing wars, flashpoints, and severe clashes endangering our world. They contend that:

The USA, which still holds the leading position, is trying to halt the shift in the balance of power in China’s favour. International financial institutions have already downgraded the US credit rating. This trend is reflected in the decline of the US share and the significant increase of China’s share in Gross World Product (global GDP) between 2000 and 2025, in the significant difference in growth rates between the USA and China, the large US trade deficit in bilateral trade with China and the EU, and the sharp rise in US public debt.

Within the global imperialist system, both the PRC and Russia present challenges to US hegemony, and US nationalist, protectionist policies are also “… sharpening contradictions within the Euro-Atlantic camp and causing a deterioration in relations between the USA and the EU, Canada and Australia. They are exacerbating intra-bourgeois contradictions within the USA, which are also reflected in developments within the bourgeois political system. They are increasing the likelihood of the decline of the dollar as an international currency. They have a negative impact on international trade and reinforce the downward trend in the international capitalist economy.”

Of the major powers, the KKE sees the European Union as losing ground “relative to the USA and China”, which is feeding the existing turn to the right in many Eurozone countries.

The war in Ukraine is the result of today’s Great Power rivalries — it is an imperialist war. The KKE asserts:

In the three-and-a-half years of this war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, mainly young people of the working class and the poor popular strata. Approximately twenty-five million people have fled their homes. Homes and public infrastructure have been destroyed on a massive scale. Amidst the ruins, capitalist states and monopolies are competing for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine, viewing it as an “investment opportunity.” This will cost hundreds of billions of euros, a burden that the people will be made to bear… The outbreak of contradictions and realignments within imperialist alliances as imperialist conflict and competition unfold is neither paradoxical nor unprecedented, but a typical feature of imperialist wars. It can lead to former adversaries becoming allies, and former allies becoming adversaries.

Similarly, the KKE views the war in the Middle East as an imperialist war:

The Israeli war machine supported by the USA and the EU, launched a massive operation in the Gaza Strip, using the Hamas attack as a pretext. This operation resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of innocent people, including unarmed civilians, young children, women and elderly people….The imperialist nature of the war in the Middle East and the bourgeois character of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not invalidate the just struggle of the Palestinian people and other peoples in the region, who resist and fight against foreign occupation and other imperialist plans. Through this struggle, they can create the conditions necessary to free themselves once and for all from the system of exploitation and war.

For those who may be interested, the current assessment bears remarkable consistency and continuity with the Theses for the 20th Congress developed nearly a decade ago.

Serious-minded people seeking an understanding of the perilous, contentious, and confusing world in which we are living should welcome the revealing contrast between the two perspectives outlined here. One outlook only recognizes the interests of a minority of advantage-seeking, privileged individuals and soulless corporations, while the other recognizes the common fate and pressing needs of the majority of the world’s people who are found within a well-defined social class.

One doesn’t have to agree with all of the conclusions shared by the Greek Communists, but one must acknowledge that they are drawn from an effort to create a world far distant from the one arrogantly defended in the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Moreover, the KKE unabashedly supports a class line — on the working peoples’ side of the barricades. It argues that exploitation is the crucial social relation that decides whether employment, equality, living standards, health care, education, security, or peace are won or lost. Moreover, KKE unequivocally sides with the exploited.

Finding our way free from the Trumpian world and those conditions that produced it will require a clear and deep analysis. The KKE Theses provide a solid foundation of both clarity and depth.

Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

Trump’s Hosting of Kennedy Center Honors Tanks

It's the Least-Watched Ever

by Bill Berkowitz / December 31st, 2025

While Donald Trump has long treated ratings as a personal scorecard, his turn as host of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors delivered a result he has conspicuously avoided addressing: the lowest viewership in the history of the broadcast. While its clear that the often-addled Trump should not keep his day job, he certainly shouldn’t consider hosting awards programs as an avocation!

CBS 19 News noted that Programming Insider reported that preliminary Nielsen data found that the show on CBS “drew its smallest audience ever … averaging an estimated 2.65 million viewers. To put that in perspective: the 2024 broadcast averaged 4.1 million viewers, which itself had already marked a historical low. Do the math, and this year’s telecast represents a 35% year-over-year decline — a staggering drop for one of broadcast TV’s most traditionally reliable specials.”

Even during past controversies, political boycotts, and years of steady erosion in television audiences, no previous Kennedy Center Honors broadcast had fallen to a viewership low this severe.

The ratings collapse followed Trump’s own effort to hype the event. In a Truth Social post earlier in the day, he wrote that he was hosting “at the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America,” inviting viewers to judge his “Master of Ceremony” abilities and joking that he might leave the presidency to host full time if the response was strong enough.

Trump’s name was added to the Kennedy Center building on December 19, 2025, just one day after the Trump-controlled board of trustees voted on December 18, 2025 to rename the institution to “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Workers affixed large lettering with Trump’s name to the exterior sign on the center that Friday following the controversial board vote.

The move has drawn legal and public backlash because the center was originally established by Congress in 1964 as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy, and federal law designates it solely under Kennedy’s name—which critics say means only an act of Congress could legitimately change it.

This year’s honorees were:

• George Strait (country music star)
• Gloria Gaynor (singer, known for “I Will Survive”)
• KISS (legendary rock band — Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, and Ace Frehley)
• Michael Crawford (stage and screen actor, including Phantom of the Opera)
• Sylvester Stallone (actor and filmmaker)

Since the broadcast, Trump has not acknowledged the historically low ratings or conceded that the event underperformed. Instead, his post-telecast comments have focused on attacking media critics and entertainment figures, continuing a familiar pattern in which unfavorable numbers are ignored while blame is redirected elsewhere.

For a president who routinely cites television audiences as proof of popularity, the silence is telling. On a night meant to celebrate American culture, the only number that mattered to Trump was the one he chose not to mention.

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Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.

The U.S. Airstrike in Nigeria Confirms why the U.S African Command (AFRICOM) Must be Shut Down

by Black Alliance for Peace / December 31st, 2025

If it was not clear before the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) Christmas Day bombing of its Sokoto state, that Nigeria is not a sovereign African nation but is instead a neo-colonial state with a Western puppet government, it should be crystal clear now. The longstanding fundamental crisis of the sovereignty of African nations lies in the continuity of its neo-colonial structures, with the unrestrained operation of AFRICOM as a graphic example of that dependency.

The Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) Africa Team and U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) unequivocally condemn this veiled act of aggression in the strongest terms. The U.S. administration claims the strike was “…against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians.” The Trump administration’s alleged concern for Christians is a transparent ruse for gaining a military foothold bordering the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The 2011 U.S. destruction of the Libyan state gave power to these “jihadist” groups, who continue to serve U.S. interests by keeping Africa destabilized. The caretakers of the US-EU-NATO axis of domination are incapable of any such humanitarian regard. Palestinian Christians can attest to this. The U.S. has no right to attack anyone in Nigeria. As far as BAP and the USOAN — a network that consists of individuals and organizations throughout the African continent — is concerned the comprador leadership who do not genuinely represent the people, cannot give them permission to do so.

The only two real motives for this attack are the influence of white supremacy inherent in the U.S. settler state, as expressed in the Trump administration’s ties to evangelicalism, as well as concern for the insistent anti-imperialism of the AES. It is actually unlikely that only one of these is a factor by itself. As BAP Africa Team member Tunde Osazua explains:

The threat of U.S. military action against Nigeria, justified by claims of a ‘Christian genocide,’ did not emerge in a vacuum. Trump’s remarks came after weeks of lobbying by US lawmakers and conservative Christian groups and reflect renewed domestic political pressure to appear tough on the marginalisation or persecution of Christians abroad…

It is important for African (Black) people to keep in mind that U.S. imperialism often uses a dual contradictory strategy: on the one hand engaging in so-called “counter-terrorism” operations while also on the other hand (covertly) supporting terrorism. Imperialist interests in Africa are dependent on a destabilized continent versus one where its people are free to exercise self-determination. Five days prior to the U.S. airstrike, the Alliance of Sahel States launched a unified military force to strengthen regional security. If the AES were to successfully repel and overcome the violent extremism plaguing that region, it would further delegitimize the paternalistic claim that Africa needs AFRICOM and other NATO forces.

BAP and the leadership of the USOAN call on all anti-imperialist forces inside the U.S. to denounce the Congressional Black Caucus’ spineless silence on this incident. Their silence is emblematic of their role as a settler neo-colonial and comprador class, a counterpart to the Nigerian government. It is further proof that their true concerns about Trump and his administration are as shameless career politicians beholden to U.S. capital and the Democratic party wing of the duopoly.

Today the U.S. is wary of carrying out a naked military attack in Africa if it cannot stand behind a veil of anti-terrorism supported by that continent’s comprador class. In contrast to the increasing lawlessness of the U.S. state that is allowed to act with impunity against Venezuela, if the U.S. were to directly strike an AES state, which are very popular across Africa and around the world, there could likely be a domestic mass Black led response. And not even U.S. lackey ruled African governments could support them in such an action. The Economic Community of West African states (ECOWAS) does not have the same luxury as the right wing white elites of Latin America who openly call for regime change in Venezuela. For it to be silent or complicit on U.S. adventurism on the continent would destabilize their already weak states. This is already happening with Nigeria with many not believing that the state signed off on the strike.

ECOWAS remembers having to abandon its initial threat of military force against the AES because of support within their own countries. BAP also remembers and appreciates the response of the world when the AFRICOM Commander, General Micheal Langley openly admitted to regime change policy against Captain Ibrahim Traore, leader of the AES member state Burkina Faso.

The AFRICOM operations in Nigeria must put all Africans on notice. We must respond with unity and purpose. The primary challenge to Africa’s self-determination today is neo-colonialism and its comprador layer that obscures the reality from the people. Kwame Nkrumah pointed it out as “the last stage of imperialism,” a stage in which the masses across the continent are standing up to today. BAP and the USOAN stand with them.

No war on Nigeria!

No war on Africans!

Shutdown AFRICOM!

Africans Unite! 

No Compromise, No Retreat!

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) seeks to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical black movement. Read other articles by Black Alliance for Peace, or visit Black Alliance for Peace's website.

Christmas Cruise Missiles: Nigeria’s Complex War and America’s Misguided Strike

by Alan Mosley | Dec 30, 2025 |  ANTIWAR.COM

A Decidedly Non‑Christmas Gift

On Christmas Day 2025, President Donald Trump declared that the United States had launched a salvo of Tomahawk missiles against the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) in northwest Nigeria. In a Truth Social message from his Mar‑a‑Lago club, he boasted that “ISIS terrorist scum” were being bombed for “slaughtering Christians” and that he had directed the “most lethal attack on radical Islamic terror” ever. Trump later told Politico that he had postponed the operation so that it would be executed on December 25 as a “Christmas present.” U.S. Africa Command announced that multiple militant targets were struck and Nigerian officials acknowledged working with Washington, but they also stressed that the operation was aimed at terrorists and “had nothing to do with religion.”

Mainstream coverage emphasized that the situation in Nigeria is far more complicated than the picture painted by Trump. A PBS NewsHour report noted that the attack targeted ISWAP camps in Sokoto state, a region plagued by a mix of jihadist insurgency, criminal banditry and communal violence. Nigerian officials said most victims of this insecurity are Muslims, not Christians. Analysts interviewed by PBS explained that the violence is driven by overlapping factors: jihadist ideology in the northeast, organized banditry in the northwest and farmer‑herder clashes in the Middle Belt. In short, Nigeria’s conflicts cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of Christians under siege.

Nigeria’s conflicts are not a holy war

Trump’s message played to a familiar trope in American politics that persecuted Christians abroad must be rescued by U.S. firepower. This narrative, however, ignores the realities of the Sahel. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) notes that although Boko Haram and its ISWAP offshoot are vicious toward Christians, most of their victims are Muslims because the insurgency takes place largely in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north. Attacks on mosques have become more common than attacks on churches since 2015. Violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt largely stems from overlapping land disputes, ethnic tensions and economic grievances, with both Christian and Muslim communities suffering. The European Union’s asylum agency has similarly reported that Boko Haram labels Muslims who oppose its harsh rule as “infidels” and has attacked mosques across the region.

Those dynamics matter because U.S. bombs do not change them. A Brookings Institution study on Boko Haram’s ideology observed that the group derives strength from exclusivism and victimhood; heavy‑handed security crackdowns often fuel that sense of persecution. The authors argued that policymakers tend to view the insurgency solely as a security problem and ignore political and religious dimensions, thereby undermining any chance of a durable solution. Rolling in with cruise missiles may satisfy a domestic audience, but it risks validating militants’ narrative that the West is waging war on Islam and encourages recruitment.

Northwestern Nigeria, where Trump’s strike took place, is plagued more by banditry than jihadism. Small‑arms‑bearing gangs kidnap villagers and raid farms, exploiting the state’s weak policing. The Small Wars Journal and other analysts note that some violence labelled “jihadist” actually stems from farmer‑herder conflicts and criminal networks. Simplistic religious framing not only misdiagnoses the problem but also risks inflaming sectarian tensions. Nigerian officials have repeatedly warned Washington that an overtly sectarian message could incite reprisals against local Christians and expose them to further danger.

Intervention that destabilizes

Many foreign‑policy realists have long argued that military intervention tends to compound rather than solve conflicts. The Cato Institute reviewed the U.S. War on Terror and concluded that fifteen years of intervention, nation‑building and “light footprint” campaigns have destabilized the Middle East while doing little to protect Americans from terrorism. The analysis lists two key sources of failure: an exaggerated assessment of the terrorist threat and a belief in the indispensability of American power. “Military intervention and nation‑building efforts cause more problems than they solve,” the report argues, spawning anti‑American sentiment and creating rather than diminishing the conditions that lead to terrorism. The authors recommend abandoning this strategy in favor of intelligence, law enforcement and empowering regional partners.

Those lessons apply acutely to Nigeria. Jihadist groups in West Africa have thrived partly because state forces have committed abuses while pursuing them. Extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate bombings and mass arrests create grievances that insurgents exploit. When the U.S. provides kinetic support without demanding better governance and accountability, it risks entrenching abusive security practices. Moreover, strikes based on partial intelligence can kill civilians and drive communities into the arms of extremists. Even if U.S. missiles kill some militants, there is little evidence that such decapitation strikes end insurgencies; in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone campaigns often led to leadership turnover and escalation rather than peace.

Trump’s Christmas theatrics

Why then did Trump insist on launching the strike on Christmas Day? According to PBS, he told reporters that he delayed the operation so it would coincide with the holiday and deliver a “message.” The move conjures the 1997 satire Wag the Dog, in which political consultants stage a war to distract from a presidential scandal. Announcing a cruise missile barrage while many Americans were attending church and opening gifts made for dramatic headlines and appealed to evangelical voters. But the theatrics raise questions about motivation.

On the very same day as his Nigeria announcement, he logged onto Truth Social to denounce the ongoing release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s network of abusers as a “Democrat inspired Hoax.” In his post he suggested that prosecutors should release names to embarrass Democrats, downplaying his own long‑recorded ties to Epstein. CBS News noted that Trump has repeatedly tried to portray the Epstein files as a hoax, despite the fact that thousands of documents are public and indictments have been issued. The juxtaposition of blasting ISIS in Nigeria while dismissing attention to sex trafficking as partisan begs the question: was the Christmas strike partly an attempt to redirect media focus from scandals at home?

History of distractions: Operation Infinite Reach

This is not the first time a U.S. president has unleashed cruise missiles amid domestic turmoil. In August 1998, Bill Clinton ordered strikes against suspected al‑Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and the al‑Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan. The British Parliament’s Hansard record recounts that later scientific investigations found no evidence that al‑Shifa was producing chemical weapons. The attack destroyed a facility that produced two‑thirds of Sudan’s medicines and killed an employee, with the Defence Intelligence Agency later admitting it was a serious error. Lord McNair told the House of Lords that the strike was a “disastrous misjudgment” and suggested that the Clinton administration sought to divert media attention from its domestic affairs – the Lewinsky scandal was dominating headlines as Monica Lewinsky testified to a grand jury the same day. The parallel between Clinton’s distraction and Trump’s Christmas strike is hard to miss. When presidents embroiled in scandal turn to foreign targets, critics rightly suspect political calculation.

The al‑Shifa episode also demonstrates the human cost of erroneous intelligence. Sudan’s factory produced vital medicines for malaria and livestock. Its destruction exacerbated health crises and deepened anti‑American sentiment across Africa. Similar mistakes occurred in the 1990s Balkans and the 2003 Iraq war, where interventions were justified with claims that later proved false. In each case, once the missiles landed, Washington paid little attention to the long‑term consequences for ordinary people.

Selective outrage: ignoring attacks on Christians by allies

If defending Christians is the rationale for bombing Nigeria, why has Washington not targeted U.S. allies when they kill Christians? During Israel’s offensive in Gaza in October 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit the compound of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, a sanctuary where hundreds of Palestinian Christians and Muslims were sheltering. PBS NewsHour reported that the Israel Defense Forces said the target was a nearby Hamas command center, but more than a dozen civilians – including women and children – taking refuge in the church compound were killed. A Christian resident told PBS that the church, nearly 1,700 years old, had survived previous wars but now faced what he called a genocide. The United States did not respond with Tomahawk missiles or condemn Israel for killing Christians; instead, it rushed arms and diplomatic cover to its ally. This inconsistency exposes the hollowness of claims that U.S. bombs are about protecting the faithful.

The plight of Palestinian Christians extends beyond Gaza. In July 2025, clerics accused Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank of attacking churches and Christian homes, forcing some families to flee. Christian leaders pleaded for protection but received little support from Western capitals. When outrages are perpetrated by U.S. partners, Washington’s moral clarity evaporates. Bombing Nigeria on Christmas, then, is less about universal principles than about domestic optics and geostrategic positioning.

Towards a principled non‑interventionism

An anti‑war, non‑interventionist perspective does not deny the suffering inflicted by ISWAP and Boko Haram. These groups commit atrocities and should be opposed. But opposition should prioritize diplomacy, development, and support for local governance rather than external bombing campaigns. Nigeria’s complex crises require addressing corruption, strengthening law enforcement, mediating land disputes and improving economic opportunities. U.S. officials could assist by investing in education, providing humanitarian aid and supporting conflict‑resolution programs. Instead, they reached for cruise missiles and a public relations blitz.

Interventionists often respond that doing nothing is immoral. Yet decades of experience show that U.S. military action frequently leaves targeted societies worse off. Afghanistan remains unstable after twenty years of war; Libya descended into chaos after NATO’s 2011 intervention; Yemen’s civil war was intensified by U.S. support for the Saudi‑led coalition. Each case demonstrates that kinetic force cannot fix underlying political problems. Nigerians themselves are better placed to solve Nigeria’s conflicts. External actors should help them build the institutions necessary for peace, not blow up more villages and claim victory.

Trump’s Nigeria strike fits a pattern of presidents using foreign conflicts as props for domestic politics. The operation’s timing, framed as a Christmas gift to Christians, trivialized the human lives at stake. It also distracted from a scandal involving a notorious sex trafficker, the very opposite of moral seriousness. Unlike the West Wing speechwriters who crafted soaring rhetoric about fighting evil, Nigerians will bear the consequences of these bombs. When we recall how Clinton’s 1998 strike decimated a medicine factory and when we see Israeli bombs falling on Christian sanctuaries without consequence, the message is clear: U.S. intervention is more about power and posturing than principle.

A truly moral approach would reject such hypocrisy. It would recognize the complexity of Nigeria’s conflicts and resist the temptation to impose a simplistic Christian‑versus‑Muslim frame. It would confront allies such as Israel when they kill Christians. It would address domestic scandals directly rather than manufacturing distractions abroad. Most of all, it would understand that peace cannot be delivered from the barrel of a gun. For Americans committed to liberty at home and humility abroad, the best Christmas gift would be to restrain our leaders from turning yet another foreign tragedy into a stage for domestic theatrics.

Alan Mosley is a historian, jazz musician, policy researcher for the Tenth Amendment Center, and host of It’s Too Late, “The #1 Late Night Show in America (NOT hosted by a Communist)!” New episodes debut every Wednesday night at 9ET across all major platforms; just search “AlanMosleyTV” or “It’s Too Late with Alan Mosley.”

Reflections on a Neoliberal Ne’er-do-well’s Road to Redemption

by Peter Blunt / December 31st, 2025


The unexamined life is not worth living.

— Socrates

‘In the bad old days when I was embroiled in the business of churning out MBAs from capitalist ‘sausage’ factories masquerading as places of ‘higher education’ (business schools that were “the engine rooms of neoliberal indoctrination and elite formation” – Blunt, 2023), among many other harmful ideas (e.g., Purser, 2025), I used to teach eager would-be managers about ‘sequential’, ‘pooled’ and ‘reciprocal’ interdependence – between organisations and their environments, between workers within organisations, between departments, and between ‘teams’, and so on. Needless to say, ‘harmful’ because it was done with a view to increasing management control, worker docility and productivity, the extraction of surplus value, and shareholder profits.

This is just one of many such examples that I could give, but it will suffice as a vehicle for illustrating how difficult it is once one is ensnared by the capitalist system and ideology to escape, to evade its all-encompassing embrace and to do some good here and there. Even privileged people like me who had the time, money, status, access (to the literature), critical inclination, and capability to break the spell, found it hard to do so.

This essay gives an inkling of the wide and long – and in my case inadvertent – path of destruction that such people can wreck on their road to redemption and to doing (limited) good, and some of the obstacles to be overcome on the way.

Paving the Way for Imperial Predation

As with the evangelists of other religions, it is the duty of capitalist proselytisers to extol its virtues and to convert unbelievers wherever they may be found, particularly in those places with the natural resources and other assets needed to fuel capitalism’s insatiable appetite for perpetual economic growth.

Although I have never considered myself to be an unreflective and committed capitalist ideologue or votary, my work within the prevailing system – and my initial polite attempts to test its boundaries, or be ‘reckless at slow speed’ (Roy in Kumar, 2011) – may have ultimately strengthened and refined that system.

As my books and other publications on management in Africa (some discussed briefly below) demonstrate, this influence manifested itself in three main ways. First, my writing sought to improve the ‘fit’ between Western management theory and the African contexts in which it was applied. Second, as a direct result of this, it helped to expand the geographical reach of such theories. And third, the cultural-fit arguments probably made the ideas more palatable to African audiences. These three contributions – improving the contextual fit, expanding the reach of management theory, and enhancing its palatability – not only advanced academic understanding but also inadvertently bolstered the capitalist framework. Rather than being threatened by these proposals, the underlying capitalist structure was reinforced.

In the words of a slogan used by rural workers in Brazil, I was ‘expanding the floor of the cage’, or making small improvements while leaving the overall structure or the ‘cage’ itself intact (Chomsky, 2011).

Africa. To my enduring embarrassment and regret, I was among the first to inflict aspects of managerialism like interdependence on unsuspecting African audiences, suggesting for example that:


[jobs should] Allow for interlocking tasks, job rotation or physical proximity where there is a necessary interdependence between the output of one group and the input of another. At the very least, this facilitates communication, and lessens friction, recriminations and scape-goating (Blunt, 1983).

[that managers should analyse] workflows through the section or unit in order to determine degrees of interdependence with other groups, and the length and magnitude of the complete cycle of work leading to the group’s output. This analysis should take account of special skill requirements and training needs, and natural breaks in the flow of work which might provide suitable bases for the formation of additional semi-autonomous groups should this prove necessary (Blunt & Popoola, 1985).

And – unrelentingly – ten years later that:


Africa must develop the capacity to turn its ethnic, religious and racial diversity from a source of conflict and misunderstanding to a source of creative strength, mutual interdependence, and synergy (Blunt & Jones, 1992).

I now wince and squirm more than a little when I read these statements and weasel words like ‘synergy’ and ‘teams’. Words which when they were written had the best of intentions attached to them – according to an AI search, because my books on the subject were:


… significant for pioneering a shift from the universal application of Western management theories to a context-driven approach that integrates African socio-cultural and economic realities..

Ironically, I had been drawn to write about Africa partly out of a sense of guilt at having been brought up there, in Kenya, where “even as a young boy, enchanted by the wonders and joys of living in what was surely the world’s Garden of Eden and seduced by the privileges and pleasures of a colonial upbringing, I could not help but notice the fundamental injustices of the imperialist enterprise” (Blunt, 2023, ibid).

But of course the effect of my good intentions – my desire to give back – was to pave the way for and sharpen the edge of neoliberal penetration (or ‘expand the floor of the cage’), and thereby to produce more ‘contented’ and ‘fulfilled’ workers. Workers who had been ‘culturally attuned’ to their enslavement and could be duped into producing more for less.

China. I was primed to do much the same in China where I was part of the neoliberal (storm-trooper) vanguard in the country, beginning in 1990, when for three months a year for three years I was a visiting professor on the pioneering EU-funded Cambridge/INSEAD MBA programme headed by Professor John Child of Cambridge, which was delivered in Beijing. The programme went with all of the usual guff about the good things it would do to help China ‘advance’ and bring it into the (capitalist-enlightened) modern age.

But even to unreflective capitalist dupes like me it was soon apparent that China was different. In many ways Chinese students were unlike those I had encountered in other developing countries I had worked in. One quality in particular stood out. They were clearly not willing to imbibe uncritically what Purser (ibid) refers to as the Kool-Aid of neoliberal managerialism that my colleagues and I were peddling. Unlike the mostly mercenary, mouths agape, keen-to-be-anointed MBA students I had encountered in the West and elsewhere, they seemed to be (politely) sceptical about what we had to say and highly selective about what they accepted.

I believe this quality stemmed largely from a deep-seated confidence and security among them, a palpable self-assuredness regarding the greatness of their ancient civilisation. Unlike the citizens of many other developing countries I had worked in, who seemed desperate to ‘catch up’ with the West and to partake in capitalism’s consumer feeding frenzy, in China there was no fawning subservience to the white devils from abroad to be detected in the conversation and body language of my students.

On the contrary, I can well imagine them thinking that only not-so-long-ago cave-dwelling and club-wielding, English-speaking cossetted white men (there were no female professors or so-called ‘people of colour’ on the programme) would have had the breathtaking gall to presume to tell a five thousand year old civilisation like China’s how to organise itself and how to engage in strategic management and leadership, and so on.

Since then, China’s remarkable progress, its approach to international affairs compared to the US, and the clear disparities in the calibre of leadership between the two countries have clearly vindicated my Chinese students’ circumspection and foresight.

The Beginnings of Redemption and Rehabilitation

It was experiences like these that led me to start questioning more pointedly the limits of Western leadership theories (Blunt & Jones, 1997) and of culturally-loaded Western notions of sustainable human development and good governance (Blunt, 1995).

However, as with my earlier writing about organisation and management in Africa, this too was done within the well-policed boundaries of the ruling (capitalist) paradigm and therefore still a bit ‘clerky and calculating’, as Arundhati Roy would say. Even so, the critiques were unusually outspoken for the mainstream literature of the time, to the extent that AI now classifies those (much-cited) studies as ‘seminal’ and ‘foundational’.

My lame excuse for taking this long (up until about the mid-1990s) to begin to understand the ideology’s disastrous flaws and the consequences of what I was doing was my fixation with ‘making it’ academically. Like my business school colleagues, tail up and blinkers on, my eyes were firmly fixed on scaling the academic greasy pole as quickly as possible.

Dutifully, naively, I had been doing my bit for internationalising the manufacture of consent and preparing the ground for imperial predation of one form or another. Taking a more adapted version of the gospel to places where there was cheap labour or markets or natural resources waiting to be had, and where (often with the connivance of co-opted local elites) there were ‘conducive investment climates’ to be concocted to ‘facilitate’ (another of those weasel words) extraction and ‘economic growth and job creation’.

In the process, I carved out a market niche where I could legitimately claim international recognition and standing, which earned me a tenured full professorship at a relatively early age.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the idea of reciprocal interdependence per se. Indeed, how we interact with all aspects of our environment is the essence of sustainability. Likewise, there is no intrinsic evil in many of the topics typically addressed in a business school by people in my field: leadership, worker involvement, training and development, and so on. It is the uses to which the ideas are put or the purposes they are designed to serve and what is unsaid or left out that is harmful.

Indeed, an irony of the typical business school discussion of the reciprocal interdependence between an organisation and its environment – which is preoccupied with the presence of competitors and their ‘hostility’, the state of physical and institutional infrastructure, the availability of skilled and compliant labour, the ‘investment climate’ and so on – is that it is conducted just an intellectual stone’s throw away from more enlightened discussion of the topic. Discussion that includes the dangers of the exploitation of the environment and the forms of life that inhabit it and the importance of their sustainability. Links that for obvious reasons are rarely drawn in business schools.

The False Promise of Development ‘Assistance’

At the early stages of my long overdue Chomsky-induced éclaircissement, I attempted to get away from all of this and the growing commercialisation of universities in Australia at the time. Hoping to find institutions that valued reciprocal interdependence for planetary sustainability over exploitation, I resigned my tenured full professorship in 2000 and went head-first into the ‘business’ of development assistance. I believed – wrongly, it turned out – that by leaving academia, I would be able to contribute more directly to creating governance conditions in poor countries that prioritized ecological balance and social justice over profit and exploitation.

But there too, as I have explained at greater length elsewhere, I soon found that it was tough going for ‘enlightened’ consultants who were interested in doing what donors claimed to be interested in doing. That is, consultants who genuinely wanted to provide so-called ‘technical assistance’ that was in the interests of the recipient country – as their terms of reference (misleadingly) required them to – rather than preparing the way for corporate smash and grab raids on natural resources and the like (e.g., Blunt & Turner, 2005; Blunt et al., 2012; Blunt, 2014; Blunt & Sainkhuu, 2015; Blunt & Khamoosh, 2016; Blunt et al., 2017; Blunt, 2021; Blunt et al., 2022; Blunt, 2023, ibid).

I quickly found out that consultants like that had their hands tied and were always on the cusp of being fired.

The unsurprising reason being that conventionally (from Blunt, 2021, ibid):


“…. ‘technical experts’ and ‘agents’ were (and continue to be) despatched to developing countries bearing notions of Weberian bureaucratic rationality and managerialism, good governance and leadership that had been imprinted in their professional DNA by the management ‘education’ dispensed by business schools and their ubiquitous Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes and by courses on development studies. Indigenous bureaucrats from developing countries graduated from the same institutions, or their carbon copies at home, providing for donor-government discourse that could be conducted in a common language, a consistent patina of good graces for public consumption or ‘a haze of development cliché—participation, empowerment, facilitation, capacity building, coordination, harmonisation, ownership and so forth—(that) helps all involved to mask real meanings and intentions while maintaining politically correct outward appearances’….”

The difficulties and repercussions for consultants who wanted to do otherwise – and for the governments they were trying to help – are illustrated by the two examples set out below, both of which involve the notion of reciprocal interdependence. A notion whose meaning has never been more crucial than it is now, as our planet teeters on the brink of catastrophe and we stand by and bear witness to its, and our own, calculated demise.

Mongolia. In the Mongolian case, I was fired by my employer, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), for two main reasons. First, for producing SDC-sponsored research results, and arguments and recommendations based on them, that proposed the tightening of legislation governing the requirement for foreign mining corporations in Mongolia to provide compensatory development funding to nomadic herder communities in their areas of operation. The delicate balance maintained by indigenous communities of nomadic herders between their livestock and the vast and vulnerable open steppes upon which they depended, which had been nurtured for thousands of years, in many parts of the country had been badly disrupted by mining activities. My research recommended that the legislative tightening that was needed to compensate for this be reflected in the community development agreements that governed the recompense provided by foreign mining corporations. Community development that my research had shown to be woefully inadequate and often poorly designed and misdirected.

My summary of the report on this work, which was published after my dismissal by SDC, states (from Blunt, 2014, ibid):


“This is a case study of ‘development assistance’ that demonstrates how the interests of the supposed beneficiary of such assistance – Mongolia – were discarded as soon as there appeared to be the slightest risk that, if served, those interests might have jeopardized the economic or political interests of the donor country (Switzerland) and/or those of its (Western) trading partners and their mining corporations. Donor interests were deemed to be put at risk by a government and donor sponsored research report that made a case for strengthening mining legislation pertaining to community development agreements in Mongolia. The offending research report also challenged the establishment view of the aetiology of the ‘resource curse’, emphasizing the predisposing conditions established by neoliberal design and international financial institutions and the roles of foreign mining corporations, which are rarely mentioned in conventional accounts. The case provides further evidence for the view that Western ‘development assistance’ rendered by state capitalist ‘democracies’ (and others) is first and foremost designed, directly or indirectly, to serve the interests of the countries providing such ‘assistance’ and that development rhetoric and practice is intended to create an impression of altruism where, in reality, little or none exists.”

The second – and precipitating – factor in my dismissal was that the research findings referred to above, which had been banned by SDC, nevertheless found their way to sympathetic sites in the Government of Mongolia. What ensued is summarised by Blunt and Sainkhuu (2016, ibid) as:


“… a policy development process [that was] designed to advance the sustainable development of mining-affected communities in Mongolia and, indirectly, to invigorate debate concerning resource nationalism and community resistance to corporate predation. The policy process arose from a research report on community development agreements whose findings reached interested parties in Mongolia despite the ban placed on them by the donor research sponsor. The findings highlight, first, the lengths to which development assistance will go in its defence of foreign mining interests and the corporate-led assault on the commons; second, the serendipitous and vigorously contested nature of policy development; and third, the swift, variegated, muddled, uncompromising, yet effective, reactions of power to perceived threat. It is argued that Mongolia’s interests will best be served by a strong form of resource nationalism and that its predominantly indigenous population will be crucial to achieving this and to the defence of the commons.”

An irony of the case is described by Blunt and Sainkhuu (2025, ibid) as follows:


“Were it not for their potentially serious negative effects on rural communities and the commons, such blatant hypocrisy, such muddled thinking and such clumsy and disproportionate retribution [on the part of the donor officials involved] could also be seen as faintly comical, as their effects clearly ran counter to the very self-interests that they strove so frantically to defend and conceal. The failure to recognize the simple logic that shows that CDAs can make significant and low-cost contributions to stable political and conducive investment climate conditions suggests that donor petty officialdom is quickly out of its depth, and founders, in anything other than the safe and shallow waters of its own neoliberal rhetoric and development platitude. The ensuing thrashing about in response to real or, as in this case, imagined threat enables it to accomplish the quite tricky feat of being unhelpful to all sides at the same time – to mining-affected communities, to government at all levels, to local business interests and to international corporate investors and their national progenitors.”

Pacific Island Countries (PICs). In the second case, in Samoa, I was forbidden by the (Australian) donor that funded my employment to research and report to government on the vital importance to society and economy of the reciprocal interdependencies or ‘fateful synergies’ between global warming and non-communicable diseases in the PICs.

The work was squarely within my terms of reference.

The donor gave no reason for its refusal to allow me to do the work or to publish the results, which were based entirely on secondary sources that were freely available in the literature. Neither did the donor question the validity of my arguments and conclusions.

Several years after the completion of my contract in Samoa, I published an up-dated version of the work and explained its significance as follows (from Blunt, 2025a):


“The two gravest and most immediate threats to equitable and sustainable development in the Pacific Island countries (PICs) are global warming and non-communicable diseases. Regional vulnerabilities to these threats are greater than anywhere else in the world. In some important respects, the threats are interdependent, feeding off each other in ways that are multiplicative rather than additive. This fateful synergy could shrink national economies by more than 20% per annum for decades and cause untold social harm. To date, the threats have been treated largely in isolation by governments, usually by line ministries. However, their magnitude, immediacy and interdependence demand that their effects and associated costs on economy and society be assessed at the same time, that such assessments be accorded the highest priority by PIC governments and that national responses be led from the centre of government, by offices of the prime minister, ministries of finance and national security bodies. The production by national governments of valid evidence on the fiscal risks associated with these threats and their interdependencies will make the profound public policy changes that are called for much harder to resist politically and provide solid grounds for much-needed international assistance.”

The only plausible reason for the donor’s refusal to allow this message to be conveyed to the Government of Samoa and more widely was that it would strengthen the PICs’ case for seeking financial support for mitigation and the development of refugia for affected populations. As a significant contributor to the problem of global warming and the principal bilateral donor in the region, Australia would have been among the first ports of call for such assistance.

These examples demonstrate the implacable intransigence of capital to even relatively minor threats to its interests and the great difficulty of doing genuine good if you are part of the system and subject to its control. The broader implications for preventing global warming, nuclear war, growing inequality, and authoritarian control are just as clear.

The examples also help to explain why it is unlikely that even the straightforward commonsensical reforms of development assistance suggested in the papers referred to above and proposed by Blunt (2023, ibid), some of which are mentioned below, will be implemented:


“… the best-case scenario for the reform of [latter day imperialist) LDI bilateral technical assistance would be that the proposals for change set out in this book would constitute a small but significant part of more fundamental and far-reaching reform of the main drivers of climate change and inequality by the major powers. Our gloomy assessment in this chapter makes that possibility seem highly unlikely. But the heavy dependence of our proposals on LDI donor willingness to ‘universalise issues’ and on empathy and fair dealing, that is, a willingness to treat others as we would have them treat us, also casts a dark shadow over even our worst-case scenario. This consolation prize, where the implementation of our proposals renders some kind of palliative care to the recipients of technical assistance in the hope that policies directed at the root causes will be developed and applied before it is too late, also seems unlikely. In the circumstances, perhaps the best that we can hope for is that some LDI donors in some places will do as we recommend for the reasons that we suggest, and that, forlorn as it may seem, sufficient pressure is put on them by recipient governments and by an ‘organised public’ to force policy makers to devise and implement measures that forestall the apocalypse (Chomsky, 2021b).”

Our latest discussion of these matters (Blunt et al., 2025) reaches a similarly sobering conclusion:


“… in keeping with the likes of Chomsky (e.g., Chapter 1; Chomsky, 2020; Chomsky and Pollin in Polychroniou, 2023), Roy (e.g., Roy, 2024a), Sachs (e.g., Sachs, 2024a, 2024b), and Varoufakis, perhaps the best we can do as humanity approaches the end of its long race to the precipice is to help prepare the ground for change as thoroughly and convincingly as possible and do the same with the crafting of policies that will bring about the conditions discussed briefly above. The construction or rehabilitation of the institutional means to do so – in what we have called that vital middle ground – will be messy and unpredictable and may or may not result in the global systemic change that is so urgently needed. The ascendancy and tenacity of capitalism, the adversarial character and structure of international relations that it has created, and the unrelenting quest of its self-professed chief executive – the US – for ‘full spectrum dominance’ surely suggest that it could not be otherwise.

Unlike others such as McCoy (2024), under President Trump, we cannot see why the US would allow its hegemony to be overthrown or undermined without a fight. More so than his predecessors, the idea that the new egomaniacal, narcissistic, and dictatorial president (and his gang of policy sycophants) would readily abdicate the position of global emperor and go gently into the night seems fanciful to say the least (e.g., Cirincione, 2024; Hedges, 2025c; Zhang, 2025).”

Black Marks as Badges of Honour

Like so many others (e.g., Robinson, 2018), I am heavily indebted to the towering and tireless Noam Chomsky – whose heretical work was of course verboten and virtually unknown in business schools – for my eventual redemption and rehabilitation.

The revelations were life-changing and marked the beginning of an intellectual journey, which I have described elsewhere as follows:


“My questioning of the historical structural violence of imperialism and of the ideological packaging in neoliberalism of its neo-imperialist successors began to feature more prominently in my writing following my belated discovery of Noam Chomsky’s work in the 1990s (e.g., Chomsky, 1987,1996, 1997; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Blunt, 1995a, 1995b; Blunt & Jones, 1997; Blunt & Rondinelli, 1997). More rein, and fuller expression, came from my reading of Arundhati Roy’s evocative and scathing essays on power and international relations published from the turn of the twenty first century (e.g., Roy, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Blunt & Lindroth, 2012). Soon thereafter, Yanis Varoufakis burst on to the scene with his laser-like gaze, his penetrating analyses of the global economy, and his damning account of Greece’s mistreatment at the hands of the European Union (e.g., Varoufakis, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020; Blunt, 2018; Blunt et al., 2022). What little was left of my ‘normal scientific herding instincts’ (Blunt & Khamoosh, 2016), of any lingering sense that there were no alternatives to the dominant ideology of neoliberalism, disintegrated under the red dot and was blown away.”

But as we have seen above and others will know defectors are not treated kindly by the system.

My first black mark (and badge of honour) for dissent was earned many years ago during my time as a university student in Durban when I was banned for my antiapartheid views by the Government of South Africa. The ban was lifted at my request in 1993 after the release of Nelson Mandela.

In the same way, I count as badges of honour and testaments to my (political economy) redemption and rehabilitation my dismissal by the Swiss (SDC) in Mongolia and my ‘close shaves’ with the Australian Government (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) in Samoa where I was constantly under threat of being fired.

The same is true of my brushes with USAID in Iraq, where I resigned in disgust after three months (see Blunt, 2012), stating in my letter of resignation that (from Blunt, 2023, ibid):


Perhaps the most telling and damaging aspect of the project was that it had been designed with little or no apparent consultation with the Government of Iraq. In a now sovereign country, the project therefore had no legitimacy, meaning that in the absence of formal authorisation from central government it should not commence operations. But it also meant that the project’s design was likely to be seriously deficient.

By the end of December 2011, more than three months after project commencement in Iraq, formal government approval of the project had not been obtained, and no invitation had been extended to government to comment on or to influence the project’s design.

And with the British Government (Department for International Development) in Afghanistan where, among others, my attempts to persuade the donor to address the question of the thousands of Afghan civilian deaths arising from friendly fire and other illegal acts carried out by the occupying forces were rejected peremptorily (see Blunt & Khamoosh, 2016, ibid; Blunt et al., 2017 ibid; Blunt, 2025b).

These days, I also find some consolation (and honour) in the fact that my recent publications (e.g., Blunt, 2023, ibid and Blunt et al., 2025, ibid), which include articles in this journal and others like it, almost certainly mean that I would fail the new visa eligibility rules that have been introduced recently under the Trump administration in the US, and that officially I would (quite happily) be declared persona non grata there.

Undoubtedly, the relevant authorities in the US, the UK, and Australia, and other places that pose as bastions of freedom and tolerance, have already drawn up blacklists of dissenting voices. These lists will have been produced by nets cast far more widely than ever before. As the crack-down on dissent accelerates and becomes fiercer and more widespread in the West (e.g., Kenny & Munro, 2025; Oberg, 2025), we have good cause to fear that not just the dissenters, but their vicariously tainted husbands and wives, and close friends and descendants could be blacklisted too.

‘The stench of fascism’ that Roy declared to be ‘on the breeze’ more than a quarter of a century ago (Roy, 1998) is now overwhelming.

Peter Blunt is Honorary Professor, School of Business, University of New South Wales (Canberra), Australia. He has held tenured full professorships of management in universities in Australia, Norway, and the UK, and has worked as a consultant in development assistance in 40 countries, including more than three years with the World Bank in Jakarta, Indonesia. His commissioned publications on governance and public sector management informed UNDP policy on these matters and his books include the standard works on organisation and management in Africa and, most recently, (with Cecilia Escobar and Vlassis Missos) The Political Economy of Bilateral Aid: Implications for Global Development (Routledge, 2023) and The Political Economy of Dissent: A Research Companion (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). Read other articles by Peter.

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Carbon monoxide problems more common in fuel-poor homes

DECEMBER 30, 2025

Householders living in cold and damp homes are far more likely to report experiencing dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, according to new research, raising fresh warnings about the hidden safety risks facing people in fuel poverty.

Figures from the End Fuel Poverty Coalition show that 18% of people who say they live in a cold, damp home have had issues with high levels of carbon monoxide in the past 12 months, compared with just 7% of UK adults overall.

Carbon monoxide, which is colourless, odourless and potentially fatal, is produced by faulty or poorly ventilated gas appliances. Campaigners say people struggling to heat their homes are more likely to be exposed to risk, as unaffordable repair costs, ageing boilers and attempts to retain heat by blocking ventilation combine to create dangerous conditions indoors.

The research also shows that certain groups were significantly more likely to report carbon monoxide problems, particularly those facing additional housing and financial pressures. Reports were especially prevalent among 18 to 34-year-olds (16%) and households with children under 18 (11%).

Safety concerns are further compounded by a lack of basic protection, with almost one in three members of the general public (31%) saying they do not have a working carbon monoxide detector in their home.

Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said the findings showed how unsafe housing conditions and poverty are putting lives at risk: “The fact that people living in cold and damp homes are significantly more likely to experience carbon monoxide problems exposes a deadly intersection between poverty, poor housing and our continued reliance on gas. People in fuel poverty are more likely to be trapped in older, badly maintained or poorly ventilated properties, dramatically increasing the risk of carbon monoxide exposure.

“In rented accommodation tenants may feel unable to report safety concerns for fear of eviction or rent rises. That creates a toxic situation where serious hazards go unreported, life-threatening faults remain unfixed and vulnerable households are left exposed to an invisible killer.

“Ending fuel poverty is not just about lowering bills. It means tackling unsafe housing, strengthening tenants’ rights and moving away from fossil fuel systems that put people’s health at risk every winter.”

Campaigners say the findings strengthen the case for targeted investment in warm, well-ventilated homes and affordable clean heating systems, warning that without action, fuel poverty will continue to expose millions to avoidable health dangers behind closed doors.

Jade Monroe, Senior Project Manager at Students Organising for Sustainability, commented: “Research shows that 59% of students say they feel uncomfortably cold and 54% say they have damp or mould in their rented student accommodation. We know that living in these conditions already puts undue pressure on students’ health and wellbeing and so it is worrying to hear that there is the additional risk of carbon monoxide exposure. We want to see fuel poverty reduced and vulnerable tenants protected, and that means making significant investment to improve accommodation in the private rented sector.”

All households should follow basic Government advice to ensure they remain safe from carbon monoxide. If carbon monoxide build up is suspected, follow advice from Energy UK and contact the Gas Emergency Service (24 hours) on 0800 111 999. If carbon monoxide poisoning is suspected follow NHS advice and contact 111 or 999.

Image: https://pix4free.org/photo/13801/carbon-monoxide.html Carbon monoxide by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed