Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues

By Norman Solomon

March 2, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

‘The Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was candid: “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”’ Photograph: Bettmann Archive

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.

Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. “Truth and Consequence,” being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.

“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.

The book’s subtitle – offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” – could hardly be more timely.

Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.

At the center of “Truth and Consequence” are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.

“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.

“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”

“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.

“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”

Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing – sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence – and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”

The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power – those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”

And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”

1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”

Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.

“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”

1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”

By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”

And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence – from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”

1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”

1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”

1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”

1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”

Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”

Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.

The President from Hell on One Hell of a Planet

Tom Engelhardt

 March 2, 2026

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Image by Diego Casiano.

I grew up with a vision of a possible instant apocalypse, inspired (if, under the circumstances, such a word can even be used) by the nuclear obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. It could happen at any moment, even if you were “ducking and covering” under your school desk, as I did in those years. And I was hardly alone. That was a genuine generational nightmare of the 1950s and early 1960s — the possibility of a nuclear war between my country and the Soviet Union that might devastate my city, New York (or your city, FILL IN THE BLANK), and our world. But in those years what I never could have imagined was that, even without an atomic blast, I might already be living through the extremely slow-motion equivalent of just such an apocalypse, which should, of course, be the definition of climate change.

And with that in mind, let me start this piece with a distinctly slow-motion apocalyptic moment some seven decades later, one I’m living through not as a young kid under that desk at school but as an old man under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Recently, in a White House ceremony, the president was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” by the Washington Coal Club, an event attended by Environmental Protection Agency (or do I mean Environmental Destruction Agency?) administrator Lee Zeldin, as well as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, both, as the Guardian reported, “staunch coal advocates.” The ceremony was in honor of the “signing of an executive order directing the defense department to secure long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants for military installations and other ‘mission-critical facilities.’”

And honestly, you don’t need to know much more to grasp that this world — as the Guardian also reported recently — is heading for a potential “point of no return” on the way to becoming an all too literal (if still reasonably slow-motion) hell on Earth, a genuine “hothouse planet.” Imagine that! And imagine that, in the future, the Trump administration is working so energetically to make far hotter, far faster, there will be no desks to duck under. And imagine as well that the man “we” chose to elect to a second term in office in November 2024 is now working all too feverishly to ensure that he’ll be remembered as the president of no return and that, before he’s done, it won’t just be the East Wing of the White House that he will have turned into rubble.

In that context, let me tell you just whom I feel bad for: the reporters on the beat in Washington, D.C., covering… yes, that genuine nightmare, President Donald J. Trump, the second time around. I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I’d be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them would, from the perspective of their ancient American world, seem like the most ludicrous form of fiction imaginable, not even a good (or bad) joke. A president like Donald J. Trump? Dream on. (Or more pointedly, of course, nightmare on.)

And yet here we indeed are. No question about it. And imagine this: the American people, or at least 49.7% of us, elected for a second time a man whose most essential goal remains the literal fossil-fuelization of planet Earth. Though all too few of us say so, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States should distinctly be considered the nightmare of our age, or possibly of any age. Once upon a time, you couldn’t have made such a thing up and yet, unbelievably enough, he wasn’t just elected president once (after all, anyone can make a mistake, even a truly grim one) but — yes! — twice! How could that have been possible, especially for a candidate so intent on taking our world down with him? Indeed, in November 2024, the American public reelected a former president who seemed to be itching to turn the United States into his personal property, while working all too literally to incinerate this planet. Just try to imagine that!

Can Donald Trump Flip American Democracy on Its Butt?

And that should indeed be considered a nightmare and a half. In this piece, then, let me offer both my pity and compassion to the reporters who have to cover Donald J. Trump for at least the next three years. Yes, hard as it might be to believe, barring a health disaster, always possible for someone who is going to turn 80 in July, we indeed do have (almost) three more years of him — and I should undoubtedly add “at least” to that. After all, he’s already clearly thinking about how to flip the more than two-century-old American political system on its head (or do I mean its butt?) and turn it into something else entirely — transform it, in fact, into his personal property. (Exactly what he and his associates have recently been trying to do with this country’s elections, which the president would now like to “nationalize.”) And to hell with the Constitution or anything or anyone else who might try to stop him! (As he wrote at one point on Truth Social, “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE! SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”) And don’t forget that the Trump Organization is already selling “Trump 2028” hats for a mere $55.

So, make that possibly five, six, seven, or more flaming years of him working to shut down (or at least endlessly stall) wind and solar projects in this country while continuing to fossil-fuelize the United States (and, naturally, the planet) in a striking fashion.

Of course, I’m perfectly aware that all of that might indeed not happen. Despite this ever eerier present we’re now living through, it might only be my grim fantasy of our future. Even Donald J. Trump might not be able to literally flip the American system on its ass. But given what we’ve gone through so far, don’t count on it not happening either.

And, of course, we’re not just talking about the man who wants to flip the system on its butt, we’re talking about the guy who seems all too intent on doing the same thing to planet Earth. Someday, Donald Trump may be known as the end-times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren. At some level, it should be considered beyond remarkable that even 49.7% of Americans voted for a presidential candidate intent, perhaps above all else, on burning this planet to the ground.

Giving Imperial Decline a New Name

I mean, just imagine that, in Donald Trump’s world (as well as Vladimir Putin’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s, since there’s nothing like a good war to drive staggering amounts of planet-heating fossil-fuel gasses into the atmosphere), this planet is his birthday cake and he’s intent on lighting the candles (most recently, of course, with his war in Iran).

After all, 2023, 2024, and 2025 were, as a threesome, already record-setting when it came to the (over)heating of our world. They were the three warmest years on record, and undoubtedly 2026 won’t be an anomaly when it comes to heating the Earth to the boiling point. In short, to make a particularly depressing point, whether you’re talking about fires, floods, droughts, or heat waves, what once would have been considered extreme weather is becoming ever less so, year by grim year. In the United States in 2025, there were 23 — yes, 23! — extreme climate-related disasters, each of which cost us more than a billion dollars. In short, the extremity of climate change is slowly becoming the norm.

In other words, we’re already on a different planet — and one only becoming ever more so thanks to those wars and world leaders like Donald Trump who remain so committed to the use of fossil fuels. And sadly, by the time they’re done, the resulting slow-motion apocalypse will be one where children won’t even be able to imagine ducking under their desks for protection.

In short, President Donald J. Trump is bringing us ever closer to “a point of no return” when it comes to climate-tipping points. Even in his own terms, by emphasizing fossil fuels the way he does, and trying to put the — yes, torch! — to anything associated with green energy, including electric vehicles, he’s turning whatever future we still have on this planet over to the Chinese in a fashion that should give imperial decline a new meaning. After all, despite the fact that China is still using staggering amounts of fossil fuels, the leaders of that country are also putting no less staggering financial resources and effort into creating green-power systems of every sort, which they’re already selling around the world. Meanwhile, they’re producing and exporting Electric Vehicles, or EVs, in a dramatic fashion. In fact, for the first time last year, the Chinese deployed more clean power in their country than fossil-fuel generating capacity.

On this planet right now, if you want a sign of imperial rise and decline, just check out the opposite ways China and the U.S. are dealing with clean energy. In the end, Donald Trump and crew would rather blow up boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, militarily seize the president of Venezuela, plan for taking control (in whatever fashion) of Greenland, and… well, do I really need to keep going? But climate change? No change there, just more of the same.

In short, President Trump remains remarkably intent on fossil-fuelizing our climate (and us) to death. Just the other week, in fact, he announced that, as the New York Times reported, he was “erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet… a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather.” And count on this: for the next three years, that’s only the beginning when it comes to the president who has all too bluntly called the very idea that climate change might be a threat to public health “a scam.”

And count on something else as well: blowing up boats will prove to be nothing compared to setting fire to this planet.

Once upon a time in the previous century in this country, “red” was short for communist. In 2026, however, red should be short for fire, for the burning of this planet. Though Donald Trump is certainly no commie, he stands every chance of turning himself into the reddest president ever (and I’m not just thinking of those blazing red ties and hats he wears). Someday, his name will undoubtedly be synonymous with wildfire, drought, and unbearable heat, while “Trumping the planet” will mean heating it to the weather version of the boiling point.

In some fashion, give him credit. Donald Trump is all too literally intent on making himself into the president from hell, the president of no return, while ensuring that the rest of us will be living on one hell of a planet.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

World War III is About to Begin

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos

March 2, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

World War 3 - XII | Image credit: Zé Carrión, M. Tayeb48 & Rubicon1 in the "Tabacalera de Lavapiés: World War 3", Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic via r2hox/Flickr

Shortly before World War I, when the smell of war was in the air, one of the most eloquent advocates of peace, the writer Romain Rolland, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote that the urgency of the moment no longer allowed for analytical circumspection regarding the complexity of the factors driving the war. War could begin at any moment, even before we had finished our reflections. I may be completely wrong, but today I feel the same perplexity that haunted Rolland in the months leading up to the start of World War I. For this reason, this text will displease my usual readers. And, to complicate matters, I ardently wish to be wrong when I write, in what follows, about the imminence of war.

Unlike in previous wars, fewer people in the world can claim to be surprised when news of the next global war breaks. The signs are very clear and well known. As with previous empires, the decline of American imperialism will be slow and violent until a war precipitates its end. In 1914, there were four great empires: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman. None of them survived World War I. The empires based on colonies remained (British, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, and Spanish). None of them survived World War II, although they lingered for some time (the Portuguese until 1975).

What empires exist today? If we understand empire to mean any large-scale political unit with a central power that exercises control over distinct peoples treated differently as a result of military conquest, colonization, or economic pressure, we can say that the following empires exist today: the US, China, Russia, Israel, and the European Union. It may be surprising to include Israel in the list, because its scale is smaller. But on the other hand, it is the country that most directly assumes the oldest forms of imperial domination: military conquest and colonization. It may also be surprising that the European Union is considered an empire. It is a quasi-empire, an empire in the making. It was not originally, but it has been becoming one as the political asymmetry between the peoples that constitute it increases (imperial relations between countries that are supposedly equal in the sharing of sovereignty) and it prepares for military aggression (even if justified as military defense). The new imperial rivalry can be defined as follows: on one side, the US, the EU, and Israel; on the other, China and Russia. Each group has a leader who defines a collective strategy. Currently, the leaders are the US and China.

Each imperial group defends the idea of multipolarity as long as it suits its strengthening. It continues to suit China, but no longer suits the US. It is this asymmetry that will lead to the next war. But rivals avoid confronting each other directly for as long as possible. To this end, they use proxy wars with the aim of weakening their rival. The first proxy war is the Russia-Ukraine war, a war encouraged by the US to neutralize one of China’s main allies—Russia. As long as it needs the US to end the war with Ukraine, Russia will not interfere in any other US imperial intervention.

The second proxy war was the Israel-Palestine war, with the aim of consolidating the historic defeat of Islam dating back to the Crusades. Because of this defeat, Islamic countries have always been under suspicion because their loyalty to the Christian powers that historically defeated them is always seen as a matter of convenience. The way they have behaved in the face of the Israeli-Palestinian war shows the US-EU-Israel imperial group that Islam is well neutralized. With one exception, Iran, the only state that defines itself as a theocracy and, as such, sees the wound of historic defeat as permanently bleeding. Iran cannot be neutralized. It must be destroyed. The same can be said of Cuba, but Cuba is not as important to China or Russia as Iran is.

For this reason, I am convinced that war will begin and Iran will be at the center of that war. The problem is that Iran is much stronger than Ukraine or Palestine, and therefore a proxy war against Iran will have unpredictable consequences. Among these, the least unpredictable is the generalization of the war when China concludes that, with the defeat of Iran (which is very likely), it will no longer have access to the energy resources essential for its expansion. It should be borne in mind that China has just suffered a huge defeat in Venezuela and that Latin American countries are to China what Middle Eastern countries are to the US. Their loyalty stems from convenience and, moreover, they are under increasing US pressure to reduce their relations with China.

It is therefore very likely that World War III will begin. As I said, the signs are evident, but that does not mean it will not come as a surprise. Just as Cuba is the same as Gaza, but without bombs, World War III could begin with any weak link in US-EU-Israel imperialism. I suspect that this weak link is the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The war begins with the loss of economic power on a global scale and escalates with the collapse of dollar-based financial capital. Bombs can be used as causes or as consequences. The only way this will not happen is if the gold reserves that countries have been frantically accumulating prevent it. I highly doubt it.

Is there nothing we can do to prevent World War III?

Yes, there is.

1- An international petition asking UN Secretary-General António Guterres to resign immediately in view of the high probability of war and the UN’s inability to prevent it.

2- Take to the streets in defense of Cuba and Iran as we did in defense of Palestine.

3- Organize protests in front of the US and Israeli embassies and EU representations.

4- Considering that the most repugnant (though not the weakest) link in the US-EU-Israel triad is Israel, boycott Israel through the BDS movement.Email

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.