Trump’s Peace With NATO Reinforces Its Purpose: US-Led Global Hegemony


Trump’s hardball tactics have extorted greater allied cooperation and reasserted US domination over the organization.

By Jonathan Ng ,

Truthout

PublishedNovember 29, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio attend a press conference during the 76th NATO Summit in the World Forum in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 25, 2025.

Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty Images

This October, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth dominated the NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels, while pressuring Europeans to assume an even heavier share of the defense burden. Referring to his peers as “ministers of war,” Hegseth demanded that member states purchase additional U.S. arms for Ukraine. “All countries need to translate goals into guns,” he hammered home. “That’s all that matters: hard power.”

Following Hegseth’s lead, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is now directing a campaign to secure arms purchase commitments. Rutte emphasizes that he is “proud” of the alliance’s ongoing assistance to Ukraine, noting that Russia has “lost 1 million people — dead or seriously wounded.”

Hegseth’s strongarm tactics and fundraising drive showcase the power dynamics that underlie NATO policymaking. In recent years, the organization has portrayed itself as an alliance of democracies confronting unprovoked aggression in Ukraine and China’s meteoric rise. Yet fundamentally, NATO is a U.S.-dominated forum, rather than a symposium of equals — a reality that Rutte’s relentlessly patient handling of the Trump administration makes clear.

Since 1949, members have exploited the alliance to solidify American global leadership, coordinate interventionism, and contain rivals that challenge Western influence. Rather than promote peace, NATO continues to pose one of the greatest threats to international stability by fueling armed conflicts in Ukraine and across the world.
NATO’s Fascists

NATO often portrays itself as a principled alliance of democracies confronting authoritarian rivals. But historically, the organization has collaborated with far-right intellectuals and statesmen, in order to maintain its military-industrial edge and geopolitical power. Following World War II, U.S. officials protected Wernher von Braun and around 1,500 other Nazi scientists from prosecution, while integrating them into the alliance’s scientific establishment. Eventually, the German General Adolf Heusinger, whose men butchered Jews and tossed children into wells, became a senior NATO commander.

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For decades, Spain’s fascist strongman, Francisco Franco, was also an essential alliance partner. Between 1951 and 1953, the United States negotiated the Pact of Madrid, securing access to Spanish military bases and turning the country into a staging ground for NATO operations.

During negotiations, Washington appeared outwardly critical of Franco, while assuring his blood-soaked regime that it prioritized cooperation — a balancing act that insiders labeled a “comedy.” Privately, the U.S. embassy dismissed moral reservations, suggesting that officials approach relations “from a practical, even selfish, point of view,” since collaboration “could pay dividends in our own interest.” After concluding the pact, U.S. authorities praised Spain, a country studded with mass graves, for its “defense of the free world.” And Spanish bases became NATO launchpads in the escalating Cold War.

That came at a cost. In 1966, one of the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s B-52 bombers crashed above Palomares, releasing four hydrogen bombs over the seaside town. Residents remember a scalding wind and enormous fireball bursting over the horizon. “We thought that it was the end of the world,” one explained. The U.S. government promised to clean up the radioactive waste, but instead left the region riddled with plutonium particles. For the Spanish left, Palomares was the victim of NATO, an organization increasingly inseparable from the Franco dictatorship.

Ultimately, the alliance’s most visible fascist partner was the Portuguese Estado Novo regime. Between 1961 and 1974, NATO’s institutional heft and arms allowed Portugal to wage a merciless war against anti-colonial forces in Africa. The legendary African revolutionary, Amílcar Cabral, was scathing: “Portugal would never be able to launch three colonial wars in Africa without the help of NATO, the weapons of NATO, the planes of NATO, [and] the bombs of NATO.” In turn, Portugal’s military base in the Azores islands was an essential instrument of U.S. power projection, allowing American forces to airship arms to Israel and manipulate the geopolitical balance in the Middle East.

But in April 1974, disaffected officers toppled the Estado Novo regime, in order to initiate a democratic transition and halt the colonial wars. From Washington, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger feared that the unfolding Carnation Revolution would elect a communist government. The Pentagon reviewed “a contingency plan to take over the Azores,” as officials plotted “covert action” and prepared “our assets … for a coup.” NATO members slipped aid to the Socialist Party to offset communist influence, issued a communiqué isolating the Portuguese left, and conducted military exercises off the coastline.

By 1976, these maneuvers helped Prime Minister Mário Soares push the revolution rightward, while steamrolling over popular demands. Throughout the process, U.S. Ambassador Frank Carlucci frequently met with Soares and other politicos, holding court in the “Crow’s Nest” — a glass-enclosed observation deck overlooking Lisbon.

If anything, NATO’s Cold War history is not a record of democratic accomplishment but moral compromise. Repeatedly, alliance leaders protected Nazis, backed dictators, and subverted revolutions to preserve hard interests. Fascist regimes cooperated precisely because NATO allowed them to escape international isolation, while maintaining their colonial reach and authoritarian control.
Razing Yugoslavia

Founded to contain the Soviet Union, NATO’s purpose disappeared with the end of the Cold War in 1991. Yet President George H.W. Bush refused to dismantle the nuclear-armed alliance. Russian leaders hoped to shape its future, while demilitarizing Europe. But Bush was blunt: “to hell with that.”

Instead, he and President Bill Clinton strived to maintain the institutional architecture of the Cold War — now to preserve U.S. hegemony in a “unipolar” world. In 1992, the Pentagon’s vision statement explained that its “first objective” was to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” as well as “European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.” The alliance remained an indispensable instrument of imperialism. It allowed the United States to steer Europe’s defense policy, preserve U.S. supremacy, and prevent the EU from becoming a rival voice in the international system.

To rebrand itself, NATO intervened in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s, while claiming to defend oppressed ethnic minorities. Yet the historian David Gibbs concludes that its involvement “helped create the [Balkan] conflict in the first place.” For years, the United States and other alliance members backed ethnic separatists and allowed foreign states to funnel arms to local allies.

For the first time in history, NATO engaged in direct combat in 1994 by downing four fighter jets over Bosnia-Herzegovina. The peace mediator David Owen believed that Washington’s policies “prolong[ed] the war of the Bosnian Serbs,” while his partner, Cyrus Vance, named it “Genscher’s war” because of the German foreign minister’s ruinous involvement.

In 1999, NATO intervention climaxed as the Yugoslav government clashed with Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spearheaded the NATO drive for intervention, prompting policymakers to call it “Madeleine’s war.” During peace talks, the Yugoslav delegation agreed to accept Kosovo’s autonomy. But Albright also insisted that NATO — rather than neutral peacekeepers — occupy the contested territory. Rejecting compromise, she confided that the “whole point is for the [Yugoslav] Serbs to accept a NATO force.” After all, humanitarian interventionism offered a new justification for the alliance’s post-Cold War existence.

Albright’s demand scuttled the negotiations. “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply,” a senior U.S. official admitted afterward. “They need some bombing.”

Brandishing NATO’s firepower, members conducted over 38,000 combat sorties, pummeling Yugoslavia with depleted uranium shells, cluster bombs, and other munitions. Spokesperson Jamie Shea claimed that “more discipline and care [was] taken” to protect civilians than in any other conflict “in the history of modern warfare.” By contrast, Amnesty International concluded that NATO committed “serious violations of the laws of war.” Carefully curated media coverage suggested that planes solely used precision-guided munitions and struck military targets with unfailing accuracy. Yet most explosives were conventional bombs, pilots flew too high to be precise, and air strikes killed around 500 noncombatants.

At one point, NATO bombed a passenger train, then released sped up footage of the incident to make it look like an accident. The alliance even targeted Yugoslavia’s state television station. Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, implicitly acknowledged that NATO bombed the TV studio to prevent footage of its war crimes from generating “sympathy for the victims.”

Alliance members asserted that intervention was necessary to halt ethnic violence between Albanians and Serbians. Yet the air strikes accelerated the bloodshed, an outcome that NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark called “entirely predictable.” Years later, Albright’s investment firm attempted to buy up Kosovo’s public telecom company — certifying the victory of Western capitalism and NATO expansion, while puncturing the myth of humanitarian intervention.

In short, American officials reinvented the alliance through war after the Soviet Union dissolved. From their perspective, the post-Cold War peace posed an existential challenge: undermining support for NATO and, thus, the institutional architecture of U.S. global leadership. For Washington, the Balkan crisis was not a tragedy but an opportunity. By lunging into the region, officials rebranded NATO as a selfless vehicle for humanitarian interventionism, even as they accelerated the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Article-Five Aggression

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 prompted NATO to activate its Article 5 defense clause for the first time in history. Member states vigorously backed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, while contributing troops to the occupation. But the military campaign was hardly an act of self-defense: Later, the 9/11 Commission, which closely studied the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, concluded that the country’s Taliban leadership had opposed strikes against the United States, and, afterward, its initial response to U.S. demands for cooperation was “not negative.”

Once again, NATO involvement lent American military operations a multilateral facade, while the “Global War on Terror” offered the organization a new sense of purpose in a world without communism. U.S. officers spearheaded the International Security Assistance Force, integrating European partners into their war machine and dictating strategy.

Western leaders claimed that they were building a vibrant democracy in Afghanistan to safeguard human rights. In reality, NATO operations often culminated in massacres and fostered a spike in the sexual abuse of young boys — a discredited custom known as bacha bazi. The Taliban outlawed the practice when they came to power in 1996. Yet the NATO occupation, in effect, restored bacha bazi by empowering the Northern Alliance, a U.S.-backed coalition of Afghan militias. A U.S. Army War College study concluded that practically “all of the 370 local and national checkpoints in the Uruzgan Province had boy slaves.”

NATO commanders knowingly protected local child sex abusers and prohibited subordinates from stopping rape crimes, explaining that “boys are for fun and women are for babies” in Afghanistan. A British soldier recalled watching Afghan soldiers gang rape a screaming child. His officer stood by and refused to let him intervene, telling him to “forget about it.” Other soldiers described the sickening realization that some Afghan colleagues kept sex slaves on shared military bases, after entering rooms to find children lying between adult men or chained to beds.

But such crimes failed to move senior officials. Instead, the Pentagon persecuted whistleblowers and suppressed studies denouncing the pervasive abuse of Afghan children.

Beyond protecting brutal partners, NATO itself perpetrated numerous war crimes. British veterans claimed that killing civilians became “addictive,” and “lots of psychotic murderers” served in Afghanistan. One recalled that his comrades handcuffed and shot “a child, not even close to fighting age.” Indeed, soldiers reported that killing civilians and detainees “became routine.” During operations, NATO combatants would target residential buildings, “go in and shoot everyone sleeping there.” After securing the area, they again swept the premises to finish off survivors. “It was expected,” one veteran explained. “Everyone knew.”

U.S. General Douglas Lute stated that Afghanistan’s president was “so consistent with his complaints” that no senior diplomat could deny NATO war crimes were “a major irritant for him.” Yet top alliance leaders buried the information to protect their forces from accountability.

In August 2021, Western forces finally left Afghanistan after a two-decade standoff with the Taliban. Then, in a vengeful twist, President Joe Biden imposed punishing economic sanctions, threatening millions of Afghan civilians with starvation. NATO Assistant Secretary General for Operations John Manza later admitted that U.S. officials had cared more about “protecting the sitting president’s chances of reelection than … telling the truth about the lack of progress.” Yet official statements remained upbeat. During a postwar review, NATO praised the occupation as proof that members could undertake complex operations. “Crisis management should therefore remain a core Alliance task,” authorities concluded. By then, the occupation had claimed 241,000 lives.
The Devil’s Garden

Months after NATO exited Afghanistan, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. For years, experts had asserted that alliance policies in Eastern Europe were escalating tensions. In 1997, Brussels and Kyiv drafted the “Charter on a Distinctive Partnership,” stirring Russian anxieties by pursuing “NATO-Ukraine military cooperation and interoperability.” As Atlanticists redivided Europe, the political scientist Peter Gowan predicted the “onset of intense American-Russian rivalry in Ukraine,” even anticipating that the country could become the epicenter of a global war.

At the Bucharest Summit in 2008, NATO announced support for future Ukrainian membership. In response, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Burns, warned that alliance expansion threatened to trigger a regional catastrophe. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite,” he cautioned. “Today’s Russia will respond.” Nonetheless, U.S. officials continued to steer Ukraine into NATO’s sphere of influence, helping provoke Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion.

As Russian jets scraped the skies, the very officials who previously occupied Afghanistan united to denounce President Vladimir Putin’s aggression. Since then, NATO has affirmed that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to admission, while again branding itself as a democratic bastion against autocracy. Invoking racist and orientalist stereotypes, leading Atlanticists such as Josep Borrell claim that Europe is a “garden,” and the outside world is a “jungle” threatening to “invade” it.

Yet in practice, NATO remains an instrument for imposing imperial discipline, rather than safeguarding democracy. Since his first term, President Donald Trump has griped about the U.S. share of the financial burden and threatened to leave members defenseless. But rather than undermine NATO, his hardball tactics have extorted greater allied cooperation and reasserted U.S. dominance within the organization.

In particular, Trump has exploited the war to seize control of Ukrainian minerals, while coercing European states into buying U.S. arms and boosting defense spending. Openly groveling, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte assured him that Europe will “pay in a BIG way,” and “it will be your win.”

But those defense programs are destabilizing the globe, including the Middle East, where Israel is a major partner. One week before the Gaza genocide began, NATO Admiral Rob Bauer visited Israeli bases to continue “tackling common threats and security challenges together.” Tellingly, Bauer toured the military’s Gaza Division, while reviewing the “underground counterterrorism” initiatives that have turned the strip into a suffocating prison camp.

Since October 2023, NATO members have accelerated weapons shipments to Israel, sponsoring its rampage in Palestine. U.S. agencies alone have shipped over $21.7 billion in military aid. The Delàs Center concludes that military commerce between Madrid and Tel Aviv is “more lively, abundant and lucrative” than ever, as Israeli and EU leaders kickstart joint drone development programs. One UN report calls such partnerships “the fuel and profits of genocide.”

The destruction of Gaza would be impossible without the involvement of NATO states. European leaders criticize Trump’s slanted peace plan for Ukraine and reckless pressure tactics against Kyiv. Yet they have lavishly praised his Gaza “ceasefire,” which Israeli forces have violated nearly 500 times: killing hundreds of Palestinians. And while condemning Russian aggression, alliance members are systematically persecuting peace activists and allowing Israel to arrest, torture, and murder their own citizens with impunity.

Ultimately, the organization’s global footprint reflects a terrible irony. During the Cold War, NATO never initiated formal combat operations. But since the Berlin Wall fell, its interventions have been unceasing, while continuing a tradition of embracing brutal partners. Rather than an anchor of stability, NATO has repeatedly contributed to the conditions for the very wars that make its existence necessary. As the Russo-Ukrainian conflict unfolds, the arms race accelerates, and Israel continues to violate the ceasefire and starve Gaza, demilitarization remains both an urgent demand — and existential threat — for the U.S.-led imperial alliance.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Jonathan Ng is a postdoctoral fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.

POSTMODERN GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY

US announces ‘Southern Spear’ mission amid naval buildup in Latin America


US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday announced “Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR” to target “narco-terrorists", as regional tensions rose over a US naval buildup in Latin American waters. Hegseth gave no details on the mission or how it differs from existing military operations.


Issued on: 14/11/2025
By: FRANCE 24

The US strikes have now destroyed at least 20 vessels so far – 19 boats and a semi-submersible. © Handout/US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth's X Account/AFP

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday a military operation to "remove narco-terrorists", amid growing concerns that a US naval build-up in Latin American waters could presage land strikes and a wider conflict.

"Today, I'm announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR," Hegseth posted on X. "This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people."

The post gave no details of what the operation would entail or how it might differ from military actions already being undertaken.

President Donald Trump's administration is conducting a military campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, deploying naval and air forces for what it calls an anti-drugs offensive.

Venezuela: Tensions rise as US sends world's largest aircraft carrier © France 24
01:09

US forces have carried out strikes on about 20 vessels in international waters in the region since early September, killing at least 76 people, according to US figures.

Asked for clarification on the precise nature of Operation Southern Spear, a Pentagon spokesperson simply referred inquiries back to Hegseth's post on X.

CBS News on Wednesday cited multiple sources as saying senior military officials had presented Trump with updated options for potential operations in Venezuela, including strikes on land.

Venezuela announced Tuesday what it called a major, nationwide military deployment to counter the growing US naval presence off its coast – including a newly arrived US aircraft carrier strike group in the region.

Caracas fears the deployment, which also includes F-35 stealth warplanes sent to Puerto Rico and six US Navy ships in the Caribbean, is a regime change plot in disguise.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Report: U.S. Military Destroys 20th Suspected Drug Boat

File image: the Pentagon's 15th boat strike (Pete Hegseth / X)

Published Nov 13, 2025 11:37 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

The U.S. military has killed another four suspects in its new airstrike campaign against suspected smuggling boats off Latin America, according to CBS and the New York Times. The strike is the 20th in the series, and brings the total number of deceased to 80 people. 

Pentagon officials confirmed the attack to both outlets, but a formal announcement of the action is still pending, reportedly because top officials are awaiting video footage.

The attacks are controversial in legal circles, both for its compliance with American law and for compliance with international human rights law, and have attracted scrutiny. "The US must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them," said UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Volker Turk last week. 

Colombia has ceased sharing intelligence with U.S. forces over its concerns about the strikes, and the United Kingdom has decided to stop reporting the movements of suspicious boats in the Caribbean to the U.S.-led counternarcotics consortium, Joint Interagency Task Force West. The family of one of the deceased, Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza, has promised to sue the administration in U.S. courts for wrongful death; they have already retained an American attorney.

Out of 20 strikes, only two survivors have been rescued, one Colombian and one Ecuadorian national. Both have been repatriated, and the Ecuadorian national has been released without charges because of lack of evidence. 

The Pentagon has pledged that the attacks will continue. In addition, it is building up a substantial task force near Venezuela's coast, consistent with a large-scale military action. Sources within the department have told CBS that while no decision has been made to move ahead, the president has been briefed on possible strike options, to include attacks on land targets. The carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is now approaching the staging area, bringing four squadrons of F/A-18 Super Hornet strike fighters and three additional destroyers - enough capacity to consider a sustained air campaign. 

Secret DOJ memo justifying Trump's lethal

boat strikes hinges on his own words: report

Robert Davis
November 13, 2025 

RAW STORY

U.S. President Donald Trump salutes during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., November 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The Justice Department authored a secret memo saying it is relying on President Donald Trump's own words to justify the lethal boat strikes that have been carried out in international waters, according to a new report.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the memo was written by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, and is about 40 pages long. The report indicates that it "contradicts" experts in several ways, like suggesting the strikes are in response to an armed conflict.

About 80 people have been killed in the strikes, although the Trump administration has provided little evidence justifying the attacks.

"The memo, which was completed in late summer, is said to open with a lengthy recitation of claims submitted by the White House, including that drug cartels are intentionally trying to kill Americans and destabilize the Western Hemisphere," the report reads in part. "The groups are presented not as unscrupulous businesses trying to profit from drug trafficking, but as terrorists who sell narcotics as a means of financing violence."

"Based on such claims, the memo states that Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to determine that the United States and its allies are legally in a formal state of armed conflict with 'narco-terrorist' drug cartels, according to the people who have read the document," it adds. "The rest of the memo’s reasoning is based on that premise."

Read the entire report by clicking here.

‘No More Endless Wars,’ Maduro Says to American People, Calling for ‘Peace’ in Face of Trump Threats

“No more unjust wars. No more Libya. No more Afghanistan. Long live peace,” said the president of Venezuela.


Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro waves to supporters during a demonstration on Youth Day in Caracas, Venezuela on November 13, 2025.

(Photo by Pedro Mattey/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jon Queally
Nov 14, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Just as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced new branding for the US military campaign in Latin America, now known as “Operation Souther Spear,” the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, on Thursday offered a message of peace directly to the people of the United States as he warned against further conflict.

In an exchange with a CNN correspondent during a rally for the nation’s youth in Caracas, Maduro urged President Donald Trump not to prolong the region’s military engagement. Asked if he had a message for the people of the United States, Maduro said in Spanish: “To unite for the peace of the continent. No more endless wars. No more unjust wars. No more Libya. No more Afghanistan.”

‘They’re Going to Be, Like, Dead’: Trump Says Land Strikes on Venezuela Are Next



UN Experts Decry Trump Warmongering Against Venezuela as ‘Extremely Dangerous Escalation’

Asked if he had anything to say directly to Trump, Maduro replied in English: “Yes peace, yes peace.”

Hegseth’s rebranding of operations in Latin America, which has included a series of extrajudicial murders against alleged drug runners both in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, also arrived on Thursday.

He said that attacks on boats, which have now claimed the lives of at least 80 people, are part of President Donald Trump’s targeting of “narco-terrorists.” However, the administration has produced no evidence proving the allegations against these individuals nor shared with the American people the legal basis for the extrajudicial killings that deprive victims of due process.

With a significant military buildup that includes the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R.Ford, fears have grown that Trump is considering a wider military attack on targets inside Venezuelan territory, despite having no congressional authorization for such use of force against a nation with which the US is not at war.

CBS News reports that Trump has been briefed on possible military “options” for an assault on Venezuela, while anti-war voices continue to warn against any such moves.

“Regime Change” in Venezuela Is a Euphemism for U.S.-Inflicted Carnage and Chaos

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 11th, 2025

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005, an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush–Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The UN reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered—and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main U.S. ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

In 2006, the U.S. militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. U.S. AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the U.S. supported an election to replace him. The U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the U.S. and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries and a 45% reduction in oil exports.

Also in 2011, the U.S. and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the U.S.-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, Al Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

The U.S.-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a U.S.-backed transitional government, the U.S. joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by U.S. senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of  Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

Brazilian President Lula made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over U.S. investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as Secretary of State it renders him incapable of responsibly managing U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.

If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.

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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022.  Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran:  The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J.S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands:  The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Trump just sent an ominous warning with his latest manufactured crisis

Medea Benjamin And Nicholas J.S. Davis, 

Common Dreams
November 12, 2025 


Donald and Melania Trump observe a vessel during U.S. Navy sea power demonstrations. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that US bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth — it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other US interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a US armada gathers off Venezuela, a US special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in US-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005, an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad, detaining civilians. On Nov. 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other US-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly 1 million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered — and the US never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected US-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey — not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal” — or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: Who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, US-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking — while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main US ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban — the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

In Haiti, the CIA and US Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

In 2006, the US militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government — an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. US AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the US supported an election to replace him. The US-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration — until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the US and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries, and a 45 percent reduction in oil exports.

Also in 2011, the US and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the US-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, al-Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the US still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

The US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a US-backed transitional government, the US joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis — yet did not defeat the Houthis.

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the US has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. US presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots — attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean — have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by US senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it — and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of US military bases and deployments, and supercharged the US war machine with a trillion-dollar war chest — draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state and national security adviser was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.”

At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over US investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

Cuba bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as secretary of state it renders him incapable of responsibly managing US relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.


If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial US violence once and for all.