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cuban missile crisis
Trump 'Choosing From the War Crimes Menu' With 'Quarantine' on Venezuela Oil Exports
"Economic strangulation is warfare and civilians always pay the price," lamented CodePink.
Dec 25, 2025
President Donald Trump has ordered US military forces to further escalate their aggression against Venezuela by enforcing a "quarantine" on the South American nation's oil—by far its main export—in what one peace group called an attempted act of "economic strangulation."
"While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking [for]," a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
The move follows the deployment of an armada of US warships and thousands of troops to the region, threats to invade Venezuela, oil tanker seizures off the Venezuelan coast, Trump's authorization of covert CIA action against the socialist government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and airstrikes against boats allegedly running drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 100 people in what critics say are murders and likely war crimes.
This, atop existing economic sanctions that experts say have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans since they were first imposed during the first Trump administration in 2017.
"The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on Maduro, and the belief is that by late January, Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the US," the official told Reuters.
The official's use of the word "quarantine" evoked the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential standoff that occurred after the John F. Kennedy administration imposed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent Soviet nuclear missiles from being deployed on the island, even as the US was surrounding the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.
"This is an illegal blockade," the women-led peace group CodePink said in response to the Reuters report. "Calling it a 'quarantine' doesn’t change the reality. The US regime is using hunger as a weapon of war to force regime change in Venezuela. Economic strangulation is warfare and civilians always pay the price. The US is a regime of terror."
Critics have also compared Trump's aggression to the George W. Bush administration's buildup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, initially referred to as Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). But unlike Bush, Trump—who derided Bush for not seizing Iraq's petroleum resources as spoils of war—has openly acknowledged his desire to take Venezuela's oil.
"Maybe we will sell it, maybe we will keep it,” he Trump said on Monday. “Maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves. We’re keeping the ships also.”
On Wednesday, a panel of United Nations experts said that the US blockade and boat strikes constitute "illegal armed aggression" against Venezuela.
Multiple efforts by US lawmakers—mostly Democrats, but also a handful of anti-war Republicans—to pass a war powers resolution blocking the Trump administration from bombing boats or attacking Venezuela have failed.
The blockade and vessel seizures have paralyzed Venezuela's oil exports. Ports are clogged with full tankers whose operators are fearful of entering international waters. Venezuela-bound tankers have also turned back for fear of seizure. Although Venezuelan military vessels are accompanying tankers, the escorts stop once the ships reach international waters.
According to the New York Times, Venezuela is considering putting armed troops aboard tankers bound for China, which, along with Russia, has pledged its support—but little more—for Caracas.
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The US Advances Its Dystopian Plan to Destroy China
Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on Earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war.
Aug 01, 2025
Imagine: It’s the summer of 2025, and the United States has been surrounded by foreign military bases. The bases have been built by some antagonistic country on the other side of the world that drones on about the inevitability of war. Leaders of the nation pump billions into their military, drumming up advanced AI weaponry, building long-range ballistic missile systems targeting the most populated U.S. cities, and sending thousands of troops to the Caribbean in preparation. Large-scale war games are held throughout the region, including drills that simulate nuclear war on the U.S. In the next two years, they say. War is coming, and we need to be ready. Meanwhile, back on domestic soil, the nation’s top thinkers gather to plan the collapse of the U.S. government, releasing a 120-page document outlining the steps to take after the war leaves nothing but dust and instability behind.
But wait. You don’t need to imagine. That is happening, just not to the United States. No, the U.S. is not the victim at all—the U.S. is the antagonistic country on the other side of the world, bloating its military, prepping for war, and outlining the collapse of another nation’s government.
The U.S. has built over 300 military bases in the Asia Pacific alone, installed long-range missile systems pointed at China’s largest cities, and held joint war exercises with regional allies simulating nuclear war with China. And just last week, the federally funded Hudson Institute released its 128-page plan for the collapse of China’s government.
Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on Earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war. If the opposite were true—if China had surrounded the U.S. with missiles, troops, and bases—the U.S. would have already considered that an act of war. Just think back to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba almost led to the U.S. declaring full-scale nuclear war.
We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism.
Luckily, the facts speak louder than U.S. war propaganda, and these are the facts: The U.S. has over 700 foreign military bases, while China has just one. The U.S. has surrounded China with over 300 military bases, while China has zero in the entire Western Hemisphere. The U.S. has launched 251 military interventions since just 1991, while China hasn’t intervened in any country for 50 years.
And on July 10, 2025, the U.S. and its allies began conducting the largest military exercises in the Pacific since World War II. Nicknamed Resolute Force Pacific, or REFORPAC 2025, the exercise will involve over 350 aircraft, more than 12,000 service members, and will take place at more than 50 locations across 3,000 miles in the Pacific, including Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and international airspace. The U.S. Air Force says these exercises will “prove how we’ll fight and win” a war against China.
China’s “acts of aggression,” as labeled by mainstream Western media, are often just its own defensive military exercises that it conducts in response to the constant war games off its shores. But please, let’s be honest with ourselves—what country wouldn’t respond that way? If anything, it’s an act of restraint to clear preparation for war.
Just last week, the Hudson Institute (which has received millions from the U.S. Department of Defense) held a conference to discuss the collapse of China’s government and released a 128-page document outlining the plan. The document is heinous and dystopian, outlining a gradual invasion of China through clandestine information campaigns, cultural and psychological restructuring, military intervention, and an overall manipulation of the soul of China from the shadows.
Phase 0 will begin before the collapse. U.S. Special Operations Forces will use psychological and political warfare to sow division between the government, the military, and the people—the government has already funded billions of U.S. tax dollars to do just that. They plan to twist narratives to undermine China’s history, exploit trauma, and mock the Communist Party of China (CPC) through information campaigns. Phase 1 will go into play after China’s collapse, which is U.S. occupation in everything but name. U.S. forces will be deployed to China’s cities and embedded into China’s military. A new puppet government will adhere to the whims of U.S. leaders. Anyone sympathetic to the CPC will be “controlled” while U.S. forces conduct action raids to secure nuclear weapons. And finally, Phase 2 will attempt to rewrite national consciousness by installing a U.S.-approved version of history. They will create a “Voice of China” modeled after the “Voice of America,” the people will be reeducated about the evils of communism, and a “sad but transparent” period of national mourning will pave the way to a new China shaped entirely by the United States.
The rest of the document outlines how to precisely target China’s facilities, restructure China’s financial system to suit U.S. interests, secure assets, restructure the military, and conduct a “reconciliation” campaign. At the end, the document mentions an imaginary, arbitrarily drawn line across China separating East from West, and discusses potentially splitting or partitioning territories. It also considers name changes for China, such as Taiwan or the Chinese Federal Republic.
The document is as Orwellian as it sounds, written by “experts” such as Miles Yu, Ryan Clarke, and Gordon G. Chang. Chang is one of the most frequently cited “China experts” in the U.S., but he’s not an expert so much as a propaganda mouthpiece. He has built an entire career out of making bold, spectacularly wrong predictions about China’s collapse, all while reinforcing U.S. imperial talking points.
His most infamous claim came in his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, in which he confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party would fall by 2011 at the latest. When that didn’t happen, he extended the deadline... and extended it again. He even made Foreign Policy’s “10 Worst Predictions of the Year” twice. Over two decades later, not only has China not collapsed, but grown into one of the world’s most powerful economies and a leading force in global diplomacy and development.
Despite his long track record of failure, Chang remains a regular on Fox News, a speaker at military think tanks like the Hudson Institute, and a go-to figure for anti-China hardliners in Washington. Why? Because he tells them exactly what they want to hear. His role is simply to justify aggression, stir up fear, and promote regime change narratives under the cover of “expertise.” In truth, Gordon C. Chang is no more than a state-aligned propagandist, useful only because he reinforces the U.S. imperial worldview so Congress can use more of your tax dollars to go to war on China.
People like Chang will keep returning to live congressional hearings and federally funded organizations like the Hudson Institute to justify U.S. war and domination abroad. It’s time to demand that lying imperial mouthpieces like Chang no longer get uplifted to be used as a means for global death and destruction—not in Congress, in academia, or anywhere. We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism. But that future requires us to stop imagining that we are always the victims and start recognizing when we are the aggressors.
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Maybe Doom Isn’t Scary Enough
I interviewed three anti-nuke activists to understand the Doomsday Clock and how our society thinks about the very real threat of nuclear war.
Jan 27, 2025
“Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’”—Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies, they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen, and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”
“That’s a wonderful new weapon, and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.
Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.
The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God.
Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS, and one day he didn’t come home—he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washinton and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba. Alice, even with close proximity to someone who worked in the news, had no idea what was happening. Americans didn’t know the U.S. had nukes near the Russian border in Turkey, too. All they knew was that the communists were threatening them with nuclear bombs. We are far removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis now, but Alice said it was probably the most afraid she’s ever been. People really thought we were about to enter another war and send the entire world into a nuclear winter. Later people found out former U.S. President John F. Kennedy had negotiated to move U.S. nukes out of Turkey. But now they’re back, and scattered all over Europe.
Carol Gilbert, around the same week Alice’s husband didn’t come home from CBS, was at her aunt’s house in Michigan. She was around 15 years old at the time, and she remembered that it must have been during the school year—it was special that she got to go stay there that day, she loved spending time with her cousin. “I remember my mom calling my aunt and saying she was going to come pick us up because they were worried about the bomb,” Carole continued, “At some point I think we knew something bad was happening, but I don’t think I fully understood what was going on.”
On the other side of Lake Michigan from Carol, Kathy Kelly was in her home in Garfield Ridge, Chicago when her mother started putting stuff down in the basement on the day the news broke. Kathy’s parents lived in London during World War II, and tried every way they could to keep her sheltered from the trauma of war, but in the face of nuclear war—what are parents to do?
All three women recall the Cuban Missile Crisis as a time of uncertainty. Where people were freaked out and didn’t know what to do. Alice was afraid for her kids, and Carol’s and Kathy’s moms were clearly afraid for their children too. Then the missiles were taken out of Cuba, and the panic disappeared.
I chose Alice, Kathy, and Carol to interview on this topic because they are anti-war activists I deeply admire. I figured the concern over nuclear weapons amongst my peers may be less than that of older generations because of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even becoming conscious in the years right after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the more elders I talked to, the more I realized how little it may have impacted their trajectory as activists. Alice didn’t become an anti-nuke activist after the missile crisis, and neither Carol nor Kathy mentioned it as a moment they remembered in the awakening of their conscience. Kathy was radicalized on the issue of nukes by the women who worked at the bookshop in downtown Chicago that she would stop into on her way to work as a teenager. Alice was pulled into the movement by the war in Vietnam.
On January 28, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947, will reveal how close we are to midnight, or “doom.” Since the clock was made, nukes have proliferated all over the world. First it was the U.S., and then U.S. and Russia—now nine countries have a nuclear weapons stockpile. It would only take a fraction of that firepower to send us into a nuclear winter, wiping out all life as we know it. The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God. It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest; because of a handful of people, one political misstep or accident and our whole planet is destroyed along with every precious life on it. Governments continue to pour trillions of dollars into developing these weapons while people they are supposed to care about sleep out on the street.
With tensions between the U.S., Russia, China, and Iran at a high, we should all be putting things in the basement, picking our kids up from their playdates, and preparing for disaster. Instead, we walk around like a bomb was never dropped. Like hundreds of thousands of Japanese people didn’t have their lives taken or destroyed. With no reason to believe so, we act like our government would never do it again. While our leaders have bombed a dozen countries to oblivion since World War II ended, we still act like we are the civilians the world ought to care about, like we are untouchable. We aren’t. Mutually assured destruction might be useful if the people with their fingers on the buttons cared for the people they governed, but oftentimes they don’t.
On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.
I asked Carol why she thinks no one is really freaked out about nuclear weapons like they ought to be, whether they be my age or hers. She said, “We have too much.” She was talking specifically about Americans, whose lives are inherently made more comfortable because of the conquest and wars of our past and present. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the United States and the entire modern life it provides is built on war. When I asked Alice, specifically in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis, if people were scared into becoming anti-nuke activists she said, “You’re asking me if I was scared… I just kept hoping that democracy would prevail in some way, I guess.”
Carol, a Roman Catholic sister, and two other Dominican nuns were convicted of sabotage after pouring their blood into a Minuteman III missile loaded with a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb in Colorado. She spent two and a half years in federal prison for drawing attention to the real weapons of mass destruction while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made up fake ones in Iraq. In the 1980s, Kathy was greeted by four armed soldiers riding in a large military vehicle after she planted corn on top of a nuclear missile silo in Missouri. A soldier was left behind with Kathy while she was handcuffed, kneeling on the ground. “Do you think the corn will grow?” she asked him. “I don’t know ma’am,” he responded, “but I sure hope so.” Following a trial, Kathy spent nine months in maximum security prison.
Whether or not the Doomsday Clock reveals we are inching closer to midnight or staying where we are, the fear around nuclear Armageddon seems to freeze most of us in our tracks. If the whole world is going to be annihilated and suffering is imminent anyway, why think about it at all? We can cross that bridge to hell when we get there. If there weren’t a nuclear stockpile that could end life at any moment, maybe people would feel more inspired. Afterall, preventing doom isn’t a particularly motivating notion. On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.
Alice, Carol, and Kathy are all inspired activists. When you talk to them you don’t really ever get the sense that they will stop pushing ahead for what they believe in. I met Carol in the halls of Congress last February, despite being over 50 years older than me she was leaving me in the dust. After 12,000 steps on Capitol Hill, she walked with me to a vigil for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty airman who self-immolated over the genocide in Gaza. Never once in any of my conversations with them did I ever get the sense they did what they did out of fear—whether it be fear of war, nuclear winter, or overall doom. They all talk about a world that gives people what they need to survive and thrive. Kathy talked to me about international cooperation and laughed at the idea of borders: “When there’s a nuclear energy accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the poison that floats around in the air doesn’t care about your borders.” And she made note of the brilliant atomic scientists, and how quickly they’d figure out how to address the climate catastrophe if only we were to change our priorities. They talk at length about how the world ought to be, and their vision for a better future is what propels them ahead, not doom. Doom isn’t good enough to get us to where we need to go.
Planting corn over a nuclear silo, disrupting a weapons manufacturer, and creating a community of war resisters are steps we can take toward something much more impactful. A world that is mindful about nuclear weapons can push toward their elimination, and we absolutely must. If you’re not moved away from doom, be moved toward peace. At CODEPINK, we’ve created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see. It’s something that’s been within our sight a thousand times. We have to sprint toward it.
“Dear young people who have never experienced the horrors of war—I fear that some of you may be taking this hard-earned peace for granted.”—Takato Michishita
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