Trump tells Norway's PM he has no obligation to 'think purely of peace' after Nobel snub

KOMMANDER IN CHIEF; BONESPURS

By Gavin Blackburn

Published on 19/01/2026 - EURONEWS

Trump has boasted about ending eight wars, styling himself as "the president of peace" and therefore deserving of the Nobel honour but those claims have been exaggerated.

US President Donald Trump told Norway's prime minister he no longer needed to think "purely of peace" after failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in a message published on Monday.

"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace," Trump said in a message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

It is unclear why Trump decided to send a message to Støre as the peace prize is decided by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and not the government.

In a written comment, Støre underlined that the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded by the Norwegian government.

"I have clearly explained, including to president Trump what is well known, the prize is awarded by an independent Nobel Committee," Store said.

US President Donald Trump speaks at a dedication ceremony in Florida, 16 January, 2026 AP Photo

Trump has long coveted the annual peace prize and last week Venezuela's opposition leader María Corina Machado gifted her Nobel Peace Prize medal to him at the White House.

Machado was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership of Venezuela's opposition movement amid a crackdown by President Nicolás Maduro, most notably in the much-maligned 2023 presidential election.

Machado's gesture to Trump followed a series of developments in Venezuela after a blitz US military raid captured Maduro and his wife and brought them to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges two weeks ago.

During the visit, Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal "as a recognition for his unique commitment to our freedom," she told reporters outside the US Capitol.

Trump confirmed on social media that Machado had left the medal for him to keep and said it was an honour to meet her.

The Prime Minister of Norway Jonas Gahr Støre speaks in London, 4 December, 2025 AP Photo

"She is a wonderful woman who has been through so much. María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done," Trump said in his post. "Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María."

Ahead of Machado's visit to Washington, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, organisers of the Nobel Prize, said in a statement that a Peace Prize cannot be withdrawn, transferred or shared once it has been announced.

The Nobel Foundation's statutes and Alfred Nobel's will — which dictate the merits awardees should have — state that the title of the winner belongs personally to the individual and cannot be legally shared or reassigned to another person.

The medal or the associated diploma can be physically given, sold or auctioned, but this does not confer the award's title on anyone else

Related

Ending eight wars?

Trump has often boasted about ending eight wars, styling himself as "the president of peace" and therefore deserving of the Nobel honour but those claims have been exaggerated.

The latest conflict he claims to have ended was two years of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The other seven are Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia and Serbia and Kosovo.

But some of those conflicts lasted just days and one, Egypt-Ethiopia, had no fighting to end but rather involved long-standing issues of water sharing from the Nile River.

A view of the rostrum where the Nobel Committee announce the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, 10 October, 2025 AP Photo

Ethiopia formally inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) last year. It sees the dam as a boon to its economy but Egypt opposed its construction, arguing that it would reduce the country's share of Nile River waters.

Trump recently told Fox News that one of the ongoing conflicts that has continued despite his claiming to have stopped it, a simmering border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, should actually count more than once.

"I did put out eight wars, eight and a quarter, because, you know, Thailand and Cambodia started going at it again," he told Sean Hannity last week.

Considerations on the Morality of Donald Trump

by Kim Petersen / January 19th, 2026

In an interview with the New York Times, when asked if there were any checks on his powers on the world stage, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

A voice jumps in to ask: “Not international law?”

“I don’t need international law,” said Trump. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

Trump’s own morality.

Morality is a set of principles that distinguishes between right and wrong that guide one’s behavior accordingly.

This inquiry into the morality of Trump will leave aside exploration of Trump’s alleged sexual peccadilloes, sexual abuse, adulterous flings, grabbing pussies, except for his questionable relationship with a known sex offender.

Thou shall not kill

Trump identifies as non-denominational Christian; therefore, the ten commandments should apply to Trump. In this case, the prohibition against taking human life is applicable and particularly worth examining because it is generally considered a universal principle that is also encoded in international law.

The list of lives erased at Trump’s behest is long. The recent US attack launched against Venezuela took 100 lives. That was on the heels of several snuff videos of small boats that Trump alleges were narco traffickers.¹ There were no interceptions, no presumption of innocence, just killing. As of 31 December 2025, CBC cited the number of crew members killed at 115.

On 22 June 2025, the US attacked three nuclear facilities in Iran. The number of casualties is unclear.

Clear is that the US sneak attack on Iran was an intrusion into the Iran-Israel war to aid the sneak-attacking Israel belligerent. Israel has been engaged in warring against its neighbors Lebanon, Syria, and was wreaking a genocide in Palestine, with devastating destruction in Gaza. This genocide has been abetted by Trump’s US (of course, with Democrats on side with Israel).

Sovereignty

The sneak attacks speak to the pusillanimity at the core of the Trump and Netanyahu governments.

As well, the US attacks demonstrate a disregard for US adherence to international law as per the UN Charter to which the US is a signatory, thus it is legally binding under the US Constitution. Article 2(1) of the UN Charter recognizes the sovereign equality of states, regardless of size or power. Further, Article 2(7) prohibits outside intervention in domestic matters, such as the protests recently in Iran where Trump threatened intervention, even though protests were also ongoing in the US for the killing of a critic of the Trump administration by ICE operatives.

By launching attacks abroad without Congressional approval, Trump is criticized for failing to abide by the US Constitution which he pledged to uphold in his oath of office.

Lying

Lying is considered an abnegation of morality. Ethics Officer Tim C. Mazur reasoned,

Lies are morally wrong, then, for two reasons. First, lying corrupts the most important quality of my being human: my ability to make free, rational choices. Each lie I tell contradicts the part of me that gives me moral worth. Second, my lies rob others of their freedom to choose rationally.

Trump has a history of documented lying including recently.

The big lies are insidious. For example, the Trump administration kidnapped Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on the accusation of running a cocaine narco-trafficking operation to the US. The Trump administration has focused on Tren de Aragua (TDA), a cartel that took root in prisons, and is allegedly linked to Maduro. US attorney general Pam Bondi called TDA “a highly structured terrorist organization” and “a foreign arm of the Venezuelan government.”

El País downplayed Bondi’s assertion, citing the opinion of experts that “Tren de Aragua in no way poses a national security issue for Washington, as Donald Trump claims.” Moreover, on 7 April 2025, the US National Intelligence Council issued a memo that stated,

While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.

More than two hundred people have died based on, at best, erroneous assessment of intelligence, or worse, outright disinformation.

After the attack on Venezuela, Trump said: “We’re going to take back the oil that frankly we should’ve taken back a long time ago.” And “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Not mentioned concerning the theft of Venezuelan oil is why the oil infrastructure is “badly broken.”

However, this is readily understandable when one considers the dire effect of economic sanctions that the US has imposed on Venezuela. One research report estimated that the sanctions had caused more than 40,000 estimated deaths in Venezuela from 2017 to 2018. A 2025 Lancet paper laid bare the perniciousness of economic sanctions for which 564,258 deaths worldwide per year were attributed for the period from 2012 to 2021.

Trump is a known braggart, and oftentimes his lies take the form of boasting. To wit his claim that he’d end the warring between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

It wasn’t just a one-off boast, presumably to attract votes. CNN notes that there were 53 times Trump said he’d end the Ukraine war within 24 hours or before taking office.

Even more unseemly is that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is only partially that. It is a NATO-Ukraine proxy war against Russia. So while Trump is bragging that he’ll bring a quick end to the Ukraine-Russia war, he is deeply involved in it — attested to by US secretary-of-state Marco Rubio: “And frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers – the United States, helping Ukraine, and Russia.”

Trump’s duplicity in the proxy war came to the forefront when a drone attack was launched from Ukraine targeting a residence used by president Vladimir Putin in the Novgorod region, this while Putin was in telephone discussions with Donald Trump (about which Trump lied) on ending the war in Ukraine. A downed Ukrainian drone provided decoded navigation data information, according to Russia, that proves it contained the precise coordinates of the intended target — Putin’s residence — including data on the flight path of the drone.

Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter was unambiguous as to the meaning:

American digital “fingerprints” were all over this guidance component, something the Russians knew when their head of military intelligence handed one of these intact components over to the US military attaches in Moscow.

Russia knows the truth.

And the truth is that the United States under Donald Trump still seeks the strategic defeat of Russia.

Rudenness

Are manners not necessarily attached to morality, facilitating social interaction and guiding us to live a virtuous life?²

Social etiquette befuddles Trump who addresses many people in a decidedly rude manner. In fact, he dehumanizes and humiliates people. The examples are myriad: he referred to DPRK president Kim Jong-un as “little rocket man”; he called Canada a 51st state, Canadians “mean and nasty,” and has driven his closest trading partner, Canada, to renewed  relations with China, a nation Trump calls a “threat to the world”; he considered his former appointee as US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, to be a “birdbrain”; former president Joe Biden is demeaned as either “Sleepy Joe,” Crooked Joe,” or even “sleepy son of a bi**h”;  of his director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard relaying the intelligence community’s assessment of Iran not pursuing nuclear weapons, Trump said, “I don’t care what she said” he called one female reporter “piggy”; and the list of people derided by Trump is much, much longer — indicating a penchant for crudely dealing with people he disagrees with.

What are Tariffs and Who Pays

Trump not only uses sanctions to inflict harm on other nations to achieve political aims, he also is imposing tariffs on other nations, friend and foe alike, as a cornerstone of his economic agenda and in support of his imperialist ambitions.

Trump envisions the US as a tariff nation. He frames a tariff as a tax on another country. He hopes to create a surfeit of cash to pay off the staggering US debt (now approximately $38.45 trillion) and create manufacturing jobs in the US.

But the question is who will pay the tariff. Trump maintains it is the exporting nation.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calls Trump’s claim erroneous and that American consumers will bear much of the cost through higher prices.

Indeed, Trump’s claim that tariffs are borne by exporters is widely held to be false.³

Noted Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs predicts the Trump tariff policy will fail.

What is in the Offing?

There is other sordid information that might have strong negative implications for Trump and his morality that is is still seeping out.

The release of the Epstein files may well speak to the morality of Donald Trump. The release of the files is staunchly opposed by Trump, but dribs and drabs have emerged. Epstein is notorious for having been charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. Children and adolescents who become entangled in sex trafficking sometimes come from backgrounds with traumatic experiences; young age and a history of trauma can be a recipe for exploitation of vulnerable youth.

Epstein operated frequent flights with high profile guests to his private island, Little Saint James, in the US Virgin Islands. There is much documented and video evidence of alleged sex trafficking of minors to the island and Epstein abodes elsewhere. Trump’s relationship with Epstein and his world puts him in an unwanted spotlight.

Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024, “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.” However, documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department –including flight logs and emails — indicate that Trump had been a passenger on Epstein’s private jet “far more often” than realized.

As of 16 January 2026, Will Gottsegen wrote, “Less than 1 percent of [the Epstein files] have been released. A CNN poll reveals that two-thirds of Americans believe the Trump government is holding back certain information.

How do Americans feel about the morality that guides Trump, and do they even care? Time will tell; the US November midterm elections are in the offing.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  “Trump says boat crews are narco-terrorists. The truth is more nuanced, AP finds.”
• 2
  See Sean Walsh, “On philosophy, morality and good manners,” The Article, 20 August 2024.
• 3
  See Forbes, a leading American business magazine; the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research says US consumers are bearing the brunt of the tariffs; the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics finds that so far US businesses are paying the tariffs; the Council on Foreign Relations, a establishment think tank says tariffs are paid by importers; the nonpartisan Brookings Institute states, “Tariffs are a tax on businesses and consumers”; Fox News matter-of-factly notes that a “Tariff is an import tax, a tax on consumption.”

Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Read other articles by Kim.

Syrian army deploys in former Kurdish-held areas under ceasefire deal

Deir Ezzor (Syria) (AFP) – Syria's army deployed in formerly Kurdish-led areas in the country's east and north on Monday after a ceasefire announced a day earlier, as Syria's president and the Kurds' leader were set to hold talks.


Issued on: 19/01/2026 - RFI

Syria's army deployed in formerly Kurdish-led areas in the country's east and north after a ceasefire announced a day earlier © OMAR HAJ KADOUR / AFP

The leader of the Syrian Kurdish forces said Sunday he agreed to the deal with Damascus to avoid broader war, integrating the Kurds' administration and his fighters into the state after months of stalled negotiations.

Despite the deal, the government and the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) traded blame on Monday for fresh attacks that the military said killed three soldiers.

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa announced the accord with SDF chief Mazloum Abdi following two days of rapid gains in Kurdish-controlled territory after the army pushed the SDF out of Aleppo city earlier this month.

Analysts said the deal marked a blow for the minority's long-held ambitions of preserving the de facto autonomy they had exercised in swathes of north and northeast Syria for over a decade.

In Deir Ezzor province in the country's east, an AFP correspondent saw dozens of military vehicles heading to the east of the Euphrates River, while trucks, cars and pedestrians lined up at a small bridge leading to the eastern bank.

Mohammed Khalil, a 50-year-old driver told AFP that he was overjoyed by the arrival of Syrian government forces.

"We hope things will be better than before. There was... no freedom" under the SDF, he said.

Teacher Safia Keddo, 49, said "we want children to return to school without fear, and for electricity, water, and bread to be re

'Protecting civilian lives'

The army said it "started the deployment" into Syria's north and east "to secure it under the agreement", adding that forces had reached the outskirts of Hasakeh city, whose province is the Kurds' stronghold.

The military did not say where its soldiers were killed but accused "terrorist groups" of seeking to disrupt the deal's implementation.

The SDF instead accused the government of launching attacks and reported "violent clashes" near a prison in Raqa that holds detainees from the Islamic State group.

The agreement includes the Kurdish administration's immediate handover of Arab-majority Deir Ezzor and Raqa provinces to the government, which will also take responsibility for IS prisoners and their families held in Kurdish-run jails and camps.

The SDF had seized swathes of the provinces as they expelled the jihadists during Syria's civil war with the support of an international coalition led by the United States.

An AFP correspondent in Raqa said security forces deployed in the main square, while a military convoy passed through the city as sporadic gunfire rang out.

Dozens of residents crossed the Euphrates in boats after two bridges were destroyed, while residents toppled a statue of a woman erected by Kurdish forces.

Raqa resident Khaled al-Afnan, 34, said "we support Kurdish civil rights... but we don't support them having a military role."

"This deal is important for protecting civilian lives," he told AFP.

'Serious doubts'

The SDF on Sunday withdrew from areas under its control in the eastern Deir Ezzor countryside, including the Al-Omar oil field, the country's largest, and the Tanak field.

Local fighters from tribes in the Arab-majority province sided with Damascus and seized the areas before the arrival of government forces.

Some Arab tribes were previously allied with the SDF, which included a significant Arab component.

An energy ministry official told state television on Monday that technical teams were heading to recently taken oil facilities to assess their condition.

The SDF's Abdi said Sunday he agreed to the deal to avoid civil war and end a conflict "imposed" on the Kurds.

Mutlu Civiroglu, a Washington-based analyst and expert on the Kurds, said the government's advance "raises serious doubts about the durability" of the ceasefire and a stalled March agreement between the government and the Kurds.

"Sharaa's confrontations with Kurdish forces, following earlier pressure on Alawite and Druze areas, reinforce doubts about the interim government's legitimacy and its ability to represent Syria's diverse population," he added.

Last year saw sectarian violence in the country's coastal Alawite heartland and in southern Syria's Druze-majority Sweida province.

Sharaa had on Friday issued a decree granting the Kurds official recognition, but the Kurds said it fell short of their expectations.

In Qamishli, the main Kurdish city in the country's northeast, activist Hevi Ahmed, 40, said Sunday's deal was "a disappointment after years of hope that the Syrian constitution might contain a better future for the Kurds."

© 2026 AFP

Is Russia imperialist? A response to Renfrey Clarke

By Chris Slee

Published date 18 January, 2026

In his article, “The sources of the Ukraine conflict: A reply to Chris Slee,” Renfrey Clarke disputes my contention that Russia is imperialist. Clarke says:

As analysed by Lenin early in the last century, imperialism is a characteristic of the richest and most developed capitalist countries.

However, he acknowledges that Vladimir Lenin regarded Russia as imperialist, despite the fact that the Russian empire of his day remained a “primitive and dependent state”. Clarke recognises that Russia was “a ranking military power, able to keep large non-Russian populations in subjection and to throw millions of soldiers into its wars.”

Clarke also notes that:

In his writings, Lenin never fully untangled this conundrum. But he left us a definite pointer to his views. In articles in 1915 and 1916 he described the Russian imperialism of his time as “feudal” and as “crude, medieval, economically backward”. Clearly, he did not include it in the same category with the modern imperialism of the advanced Western countries.

Instead, the Russian empire was a relic of an earlier, pre-industrial imperialism, based not on finance capital and advanced productive methods, but on peasant rents, handicraft production and merchants’ profits. For Lenin, it may be said, the Russian empire despite its military power belonged in a historical category with such empires as that of the Ottomans.

Military power and foreign interventions as indicators of imperialism

Certainly tsarist Russia was backward and semi-feudal. But some of Lenin’s writings indicate that he regarded military strength and interventions in foreign countries as indicators of imperialism, regardless of the economic system. For example, Lenin wrote:

The last third of the nineteenth century saw the transition to the new, imperialist era. Finance capital not of one, but of several, though very few, Great Powers enjoys a monopoly. (In Japan and Russia the monopoly of military power, vast territories, or special facilities for robbing minority nationalities, China, etc, partly supplements, partly takes the place of, the monopoly of modern, up-to-date finance capital)

Note the reference to Japan, which at that time was capitalist, though with feudal remnants, and where the development of finance capital was still limited. Despite this, Lenin highlighted its military power and interventions abroad (Lenin mentions China, but Japan had also invaded Korea). Clearly, Lenin regarded military power and foreign interventions as important factors in judging if a country is imperialist.

I am not aware of any writing by Lenin where he gives a full explanation of his views on this question. Lenin’s pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is often quoted as the definitive summary of his views. But Lenin himself noted its limitations. In his preface to the April 1917 edition, he said:

This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, particularly economic, analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language — in that accursed Aesopian language — to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up their pens to write a “legal” work.

Thus, Imperialism only deals with the economic aspects of imperialism. But Lenin’s other writings make clear that imperialism is not just an economic phenomenon. Political and military aspects are also important.

Clarke says:

Russia’s “feudal, medieval” imperialism perished in 1917. To characterise the country today using the tsarist regime as a historical reference is far-fetched.

Russia today is not semi-feudal, as it was in 1917. But its military strength makes it a great power. Lenin wrote: “The epoch of imperialism has turned all the 'great' powers into the oppressors of a number of nations…” This applies to Russia today.

Modern Russia

Clarke notes that:

The return of capitalism to Russia from 1991 saw the Russian Federation emerge as a typical “upper tier” country of the Global South; part of the “semi-periphery” of world capitalism along with countries such as Brazil, Mexico, or Türkiye.

Lenin never used the terms “Global South” or “semi-periphery”. Global South is an imprecise concept, while semi-periphery comes from World Systems Theory, which divides countries into the “core” and “periphery”, with semi-periphery as an intermediate category. This theory implies that the world capitalist system has a single “core” (or centre), ignoring the fact of inter-imperialist rivalry. 

In my view, Turkey, which intervenes militarily in Syria, Iraq and several African countries, is imperialist, even if on a much smaller scale than the United States.

Clarke says:

While Russia in 1991 inherited an industrial economy from the Soviet Union, the level of its technology in all but a few sectors was decidedly backward.

One sector, however, in which Russia was NOT backward was its military industry. This sector is crucial for Russia’s ability to intervene beyond its borders.

Clarke writes:

Entry to the “gated community” of the world’s rich states is effectively locked and barred; the list of genuinely wealthy countries, which apart from mini-states number about 20 in all, has barely altered since Lenin’s time.

Yet imperialism is not static. Japan, once a formerly poor country, is today an imperialist power.

Clarke says:

Imperialist states, if we read Lenin correctly, are marked by a surfeit of underused capital, seeking employment at the rates of profit its owners think they deserve. But the data cited above show that, compared to undoubted imperialist countries, Russia is strikingly capital-poor. Russian industry and infrastructure, the military sector aside, suffer from a severe lack of investment.

Meanwhile, the country is home to legendary natural resources that, in normal times, command high prices on world markets. To the extent that Russian entrepreneurs have capital to invest, they have the opportunity to draw very agreeable rates of profit at home, without the obloquy and vast expense of invading foreign countries.

This assumes that capitalists and their governments always act in a rational manner, avoiding unnecessary risks. In fact, they often act in a reckless and potentially self-destructive manner. Capitalists always want more wealth, and capitalist governments often seek to expand the territory under their control, even if it is unwise to do so. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example.

Clarke writes:

The charge that Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine from an imperialist drive to territorial expansion is therefore absurd. If we discard (as we should) the “crazed dictator” narratives current in the West, that leaves us compelled to accept that the reason for Moscow’s “special military operation” is exactly what the Russians say it is: a defensive response to determined, persistent Western menaces.

Andriy Movchan has convincingly refuted the idea that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was defensive. Movchan points out that Putin showed little concern when Finland and Sweden joined NATO, even though Finland is very close to St Petersburg.

He argues that Russian chauvinist ideology played a key role. I agree that ideology is important, but would add that this ideology is not simply the result of Putin being a “crazed dictator”. It has a purpose: to unite Russia’s population on a nationalist basis under Putin’s leadership, and thereby suppressing dissent.

Clarke writes:

The World Beyond War site puts the number of US military bases on foreign territory in 2025 at 877, in 95 countries. According to the same source, Russia has 29, the great majority of them inherited from and located in countries of the former Soviet Union. Several more Russian bases are in Syria. Moves by Russia to secure a naval station on Sudan’s Red Sea coast appear to have stalled.

This pattern does not suggest the pursuit by Russia of world hegemony, but rather, a focus on its own security. All of Russia’s military bases, actual or mooted, outside of the former Soviet Union are in the Middle East — a strategically sensitive area of Russia’s “near abroad”.

Many imperialist countries have few, if any, foreign military bases: for example, Japan, Germany and Sweden. Russia has more foreign bases than these countries.

Clarke explains the presence of Russian bases in the Middle East by saying it is “a strategically sensitive area of Russia’s ‘near abroad’.” But the US could say the same about Latin America.

Should the left just accept Russia’s peace terms?

Clarke says:

In any war, after victory has ceased to be a realistic prospect, there comes a point where the implications of continuing to fight approach national extermination. The killing in the Ukraine conflict has been monstrous. Now it must stop, on whatever terms might plausibly be enduring. For the international left that means, in practice, calling for acceptance of the peace terms, outlined above, put forward by the Russian side.

There is no guarantee that such an agreement would be “enduring”. Putin's ideology, which says that Ukraine is not a real nation but a part of Russia that was artificially separated from the rest by the Bolsheviks, implies that he may renew the war when he judges conditions for victory are favourable.

Peace is essential, but there need to be guarantees that Russia will not renew the war. Perhaps an international peace-keeping force sponsored by the United Nations should be considered. This could be combined with referendums in the disputed areas to ascertain which state the people want to join.

Putin would probably reject such a proposal, unless subject to strong pressure from within Russia. The best guarantee of peace would be a strong anti-war movement in Russia, combined with democratic rights enabling such a movement to organise and express its views.

 

My Dream for BRICS and its Critics

by Bruce Lerro / January 17th, 2026

Orientation

With the recent kidnapping of President Maduro by Yankee imperialists, I wonder about how BRICS nations and other countries sympathetic to them such as North Korea and Iran will respond. Venezuela has made an attempt to join BRICS and clearly they are in the socialist camp so I would expect it would be especially important to China. Were BRICS countries and their allies aware of the build-up for the kidnaping and what kind of help did they offer?

Some of my Facebook friends with an especially deep appreciation of geopolitics think I am naïve in my hopes that BRICS can be an operative to intervene politically in these events or other coups by a desperate United States. After all, BRICS is a formidable economic organization with infrastructural commitments like China’s Belt and Road Initiative to name just one economic commitment. Also, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to name another. However, they are not just international political organization. BRICS, after all has a wide variation of political orientation within its countries. There is a socialist country (China), Hindu fundamentalist (India) and capitalist nationalist (Russia) not to mention two Islamic allies, Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia). Can all these countries muster enough unity to stand up to the United States now and in the future? Time will tell. Let me provide a world historical perspective as to the uniqueness of BRICS in the overview of the history of capitalism.

A World-Systems Theory of the History of Capitalism
Capitalism gets around. In his great book The Long Twentieth Century Giovanni Arrighi claimed capitalism has gone through four stages, including:

• commercial capitalism of the Italians trading cities in the high Middle Ages;
• commercial seafaring Dutch in the 17th century;
• industrial manufacturing of the British in the 19th century and
• industrial manufacturing, financial and military capitalism US in the 20th century.

Another world systems theorists, Immanuel Wallerstein writes that each of these countries has gone through 5 phase of capitalism:

• commercial;
• slave;
• industrial;
• financial and
• military.

Arrighi points out that the speed through which the four hegemons go through the cycles speeds up so that their risk and decline accelerates. It ranges from 220 years for the Italians to 100 years for the United States (1870-1970). Why did they collapse? It was because of wars and financial ruin. What we have is the rise and fall of four hegemons having gone through the five phases of capitalism. This is all laid out in detail in my articles: “Beyond Socialist Purity” and “The Cycles  and Spirals of Capitalism.”

If the United States has been in decline for 55 years. Where will the world economy go? These days it is easy to say it is China. Both Andre Gunder Frank, in ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age and Giovanni Arrighi Adam Smith in Beijing put their money on China and did so over 25 years ago.

However, today there is something new that neither Arrighi nor Gunder Frank predicted. In the whole history of capitalism over the last 500 years it is only individual political entities that have risen and fallen. Today we have a regional configuration on the rise, BRICS and a regional confederation in decline, the United States and Western Europe. So, if economics was the only thing that matters, BRICS with China in the lead will be the new hegemon. But as most radicals know it is not economics on one hand and political science on the other. There is only political economy. The attack on Venezuela was an international political act in the service of economics (oil, gold and other natural resources). Can or will BRICS countries respond to this politically, either individually or as a collectively?

Can My Dream Come True?
How much do the Russian and Chinese leaders understand this world historical picture of the history of capitalism? My hope is that they do. My hope is they act not just as single nation-states within a region but rather as a regional consciousness within the national policies. Secondly, my wish is that they operate under the following political and economic values:

• nationalism as a political force that fights against the globalization of capitalism;
• nationalization that fights imperialism and colonialism;
• support of industrial capitalism as opposed to finance capitalism whether that system is socialist or capitalist;
• support of surplus value for technological innovation as opposed to investment in military aggression, and
• a new concept of the political spectrum which unites left and right against political centrism.

It seems to me that China, Russia and Iran have the most potential to come closest to this dream. India and Brazil seem to still want to imagine deals can be made with the West.

Skeptical Leftist Responds:
No Illusions about China and Russia
This is from my friend Raul:

“I am sorry, my left-leaning ideologue camaradas, but after many disappointments and fiascos from Syria, to Libya, to Palestine, to Venezuela and beyond, I no longer believe in the illusion of Russia and China representing a multipolar option to the empire. I used to believe in that illusion, but the well documented arguments presented by a couple of friends and easily verifiable historical facts broke the spell (and I am glad about it.)

While not exercising the same form of brutal gangster-like form of imperialism as the U.S. or Israel, Russia and China are certainly not going to put their hands on the fire for no one but themselves, and I hope Iran is taking notes of the Syria and Venezuela fiascos before they deposit their trust blindly in Russia and China as allies not willing to do a damn thing when they are attacked by the sick satanic Zionist forces.

Just look at Russia welcoming with open arms the illegitimate terrorist government of Ahmed al-Sharaa former leader of Al Qaeda/Daesh in Syria. Not making any unfounded accusations here, but literally the last meeting Maduro had before his abduction was with China’s Qiu Xiaoqi, special representative of the Chinese government on Latin American affairs, at the Miraflores Palace a day before the U.S. attacks. Again, I am not accusing them of participating in these crimes, but at the very least, they decided to remain passive and limit their response to issuing a few toothless platitudes condemning the war crimes in Venezuela and criminal abduction of the leader of a sovereign nation which was supposed to be their ally.

Now, let us discuss Russia and China’s backstabbing of  Palestine. On the 15th of November Putin initiated a phone call with Netanyahu to discuss Middle East affairs which included discussions on both Syria and Gaza. Just two days later a Russian military delegation showed up in Damascus and was filmed touring Southern Syria just before Russia’s abstention at the UN allowing Trump’s colonial plans to proceed while giving the green light to Israel to bomb a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.

Israeli military claimed that the attack targeted a Hamas training compound where militants were preparing to carry out terrorist operations. In fact it was a sports field within the refugee camp – 15 civilians were killed, many of them young teenagers who were playing football at the time

As we speak, Russian and China are enabling and endorsing war criminal Trump’s ethnic cleansing project in Gaza. So seriously, from now on pro-Russia/China ideologues should spare us any multipolar world rhetoric and stop at once with the foolish notion suggesting that Russia and China are moral models of reference, because evidently they are not. Blind ideology is wrong on the right side of the political spectrum and blind ideology also happens to be wrong on the left side of the political spectrum…”

In the Name of Marxist Leninism
Here is another comment by a friend that Ismael passed on.

Just quick thoughts: China does not practice romantic anti-imperialism. It practices historical materialism under conditions of uneven power. It just cannot come rescue you and trigger a full-fledged confrontation. All socialist states understand the need to avoid actions that collapse contradictions too early, especially when such actions can allow Washington the opportunity to reframe the conflict as “democracy vs authoritarianism”.

In fact, this is what distinguishes Chinese anti-imperialism based on dialectics from isolationist, “civilizational” or elite-led selective populist anti-imperialism  that avoid the real battlefield of global capitalism itself, its circuits of rent, debt, logistics and surplus. Venezuela (even as I understand real constraints it faced under severe sanctions) could be cited as one such example with some nuance.

I thought we knew this as Marxist Leninists. China will not die on someone else’s barricade… It expects states to manage their own internal contradictions. Solidarity means keeping the system open for future autonomy, not rushing in with gunboats to prove ideological virtue.

I know this is exactly what is frustrating inqilab types (not saying history doesn’t favor them when time is ripe and they did make sense in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria). And I can actually sympathize with them. But premature showdown with empire (from Hungary 1956 to Chile 1970s) tends to end in obliteration. China as a really existing socialism knows these lessons deeply and avoids fetishizing “the moment” that seduces the weak into fatal confrontations, taking away its weapon of time in asymmetric equations. It is this very strategic patience and peace that makes China more “violent” and revolutionary in the most radical sense.

So when China refuses dramatic confrontation over Venezuela, it’s protecting this hard-won positional advantage. Rescue is a liberal fantasy! Trump would LOVE China to break the Western Hemisphere taboo (the Monroe Doctrine). We don’t want that. If China were practicing “dirty realpolitik” we would be seeing it perform coercive “protector” politics, not otherwise. And this makes the BRICS alliance all the more important!

It would be a dirty realpolitik if China was trying to win imperialism’s game. Realpolitik has no concept of negation of the negation. It only knows adjustment. The ethical structure is “immanent”, not performative. This is the key historical point. China’s ethics are expressed through rules of engagement with history. Do we want China to win imperialism’s game or outlive the dirty game itself?

I’m not being a cynic. This is class calculus at the level of the world-system. We are communists, we drag down the heaven from clouds and nail it to the material history. Keep marching, it is always obvious only as an “after the fact”.

Lastly, I would like to show you a 17-minute video by a geopolitical analysis which claims that far from “deciding” to invade Venezuela, the CIA, the Neocons and Trump were trapped by a strategic plan laid out by Russia and China that was three years in the making. While the United States in a case of imperial overstretch will be preoccupied with Venezuela, the Chinese will consolidate their power in the Pacific region, including Taiwan and North Korea. Here is the video:

Conclusion

I began this article with the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro as a way to take stock of the power and limitations of BRICS as an alternative to Western imperialism. Then I placed Western imperialism in the world-historical context of the history of capitalism to show:

• the collapse of the United States as the latest capitalist hegemon and
• the rise of China.

Then I suggested that in today’s world the regional federation of BRICS expresses a transference of the world economy from the West to the East and that BRICS might be the future of the world economy. My dream for BRICS included the following:

• nationalism as a political force that fights against economic globalization;
• nationalization that fights political imperialism;
• support of industrial capitalism as opposed to finance capitalism whether that system is socialist or capitalist;
• support of surplus value invested in technological innovation as opposed investment in military aggression and
• a new concept of the political spectrum which unites left and right against political centrism.

I closed my article with three skeptical arguments about BRICS. One is the failure of Russia and China in the past and present to come to the aid of Syria, Palestine, Libya and Venezuela. The other defends Chinese anti-imperialism against a romantic kind of anti-imperialism and says China cannot jeopardize it gains and that other states, even socialist ones have to fight their own domestic battles. The last video presents the power of two countries within BRICS: China and Russia. They have developed a political and economic strategy to trap the United States and limit its capacity to undermine their BRICS projects.

I am sure there are many other international dynamics between the East and the West that are not covered in my three examples. So what else needs to be said? Are there more cynical arguments against the power and reach of BRICS? Are there even more optimistic outlooks based on facts that are about BRICS than my dream? Your comments are most welcome. Reply at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.