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nationalism
Jews as Prey and Conquerers
With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a worldwide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability—as all other groups—to vice.
Jun 27, 2026
Separating the meaning of Jewish identity and learning, distinct from the Israeli state and its underlying doctrine, is worthwhile work.
It's also urgent work, overdue. This is a maniacal, genocidal post from Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir:
For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!
Repulsion from Israel's actions naturally affects how Jews are seen in the world, how we walk among others in the world—and ironically, for Zionists, validates their conception of the gentile world as forever hostile to Jews.
The existence of the State of Israel, the merger of Judaism with Jewish nationalism, has unavoidably changed what being a Jew is.
Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.
Zionist theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 of the way that the Jewish state would have to be constructed, that “it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”
Colonization would have to continue “only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
When Jabotinsky wrote this, Jews were immigrating to Palestine under British protection to fulfill the League of Nations Mandate promise of a yet-to-be defined “Jewish homeland” there.
Population "transfer" to create a Jewish majority state was envisioned by Zionist leadership, from founder Theodor Herzl onwards.
The United Nations Palestine partition plan of 1947 and resulting civil conflict provided the opportunity for Jewish militias and then the Israeli army to target and empty communities—to become sites for Jewish settlements with Hebrew names.
Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 was accomplished by dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine—the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs from what would become Israel. This is called the Nakba (catastrophe) in Arabic.
Those Palestinians remain exiled despite a pledge from Israel to the United Nations in 1949 to accept returning refugees, as part of their admission as a member state.
The “restoration” of our sovereignty inflicted a catastrophe on Palestinians which will be part of Jewish history forever.
The creation of the State of Israel is presented as necessary Jewish self-assertion.
In September 1948, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban wrote that in a “just world” consultation and agreement would have been preferred. “But the world is more realistic than just. The doctrine of ‘accomplished fact’ has been entirely vindicated against that of ‘prior consent.’”
That doctrine forces for Jews a necessity of either identifying with Israel, or maintaining the identity of “Jewish-not Zionist,” an awkward thing to maintain while well-provisioned Jewish organizations present Zionism as Judaism.
That doctrine also destroyed Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, and as far as India. Exercising naked power to force Arabs from their homes to privilege Jews in Palestine poisoned the place of Jews who lived for many centuries as citizens in neighboring societies.
Thinking of the vulnerability and degradation of Jews in the past, I struggle to reconcile those moments with this moment of Jews as a menace—and Jewish nationalism as a personal imprisonment.
The Zionist movement which descended on Palestine to “ingather the exiles” is now a state dedicated to a philosophy of Jewish redemption by violence, “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority,” as described by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others in a 1948 letter to The New York Times, of the faction that is now in control of Israel’s psyche.
Israel operates with a logic in which opponents to the Jewish state intend a Holocaust—mindless, causeless enemies as in the Passover or Purim or Hanukkah stories.
While most Jews in the diaspora live in accommodation and cooperation with gentile co-nationals, Israel has sacralized and militarized the “they always turn on us” belief.
We live in two models of Jewishness—the Jew living in civil cooperation with gentiles, and the militant Jewish supremacist in Palestine.
The contradiction of those two models of Jewishness makes us a problem to ourselves and others, with no clarity.
Complicating this is our belief in the grandeur of our own culture and learning.
As a child, I was buoyed by stories of Jewish learning and achievement—unlikely persistence through the ages—uniqueness.
I felt I was one of a fine, special group.
I also absorbed the other, paired, narrative of Jewish history. In the ritual reading of the Haggadah text each Pesach, I was reminded that we were enslaved in Egypt, and that in every generation They rise up to destroy us. And we survive, achieve, and show our high quality.
The theme of Jewish life is that we were chosen for a great mission, and have been persecuted since.
In these narratives, living a Jewish life is fulfilling the endowment of Torah and generations of scholarship, earnest and humane— targeted by malice, by jealousy from peoples less… fortunate? Not Jewish.
It may be that feelings Jews have about gentiles are as problematic as prejudices gentiles have against Jews. We suffer from not only how gentiles may see us, but limitations on how we see non-Jews.
Mitch Abidor, in the magazine Jewish Currents, describes a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint about a non-Jewish girl who tosses a flaming baton and catches it, and and its significance to the “nice Jewish boys in the stands." Portnoy observes that:
there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.
Legendary Forverts newspaper editor Abraham Cahan wrote in his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, of Talmudic education (an experience Cahan had shared with his character during his youth in Lithuania). The process of extended reasoning and disputation in religious study seemed the acme of human ratiocination:
"Can you fathom the sea? Neither can you fathom the depths of the Talmud," as we would put it. We were sure that the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child's play as compared to the Talmud.
This feeling of higher thought as a specifically Jewish achievement is useful to surface in discussion of how we see our not-Jewish fellows.
Torah study may be mostly a treasure of the observant now, but the habits and outlook of study and productive disputation persist. Might the assumption of superlative Jewish quality also?
To accept the World-Against-the-Jew construct, one must accept the idea that there is a unique quality to Jews.
Our religion revolves around identity, descent from tribes in a substantive relationship with the true God. When we pray, we are praying to a god that particularly cares that we are Jews doing the praying.
The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
The Yiddish phrase "pintele yid," Jewish spark or kernel, expresses the belief that there is an irreducible, distinct core of Jewishness that is in a born Jew, observant or secular or ignorant.
The story told about converts is that their nefesh (soul, spirit) was there at Sinai to hear Moses tell God’s covenant with his people..
This resolves Judaism as an embrace of Torah—fudges the membership story, in truth.
Is “Jew” a coherent national category, as we include Indians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Poles, and Romanians?
When devotion to Torah is the center of this identity, it does not require ruling from imagined supremacy.
The poison brewed when mixed with a colonial enterprise designed at a time Britain could design a plan “natives” had to accept.
The Israeli government recognizes Israeli citizenship for Jews, Arabs, and others, but then records the “nationality” of the citizen separately, so that I, an American citizen, in their system share the same “nationality”—“Jewish”—as an Israeli Jew.
Ultimately the identity is based on magic, superstition, folkways, and spiritual truth. Am I required to believe in the existence of "The Jewish Nation" as the term is meant in the Zionist state?
The Zionist proposition for the world’s relationship with Jews is, “Love us, love our land.” This is articulated in their claim, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
In 1906, Jewish educator Solomon Schechter said that he feared assimilation of Jews, loss of identity, “even more than pogroms.” He wrote that in the Jewish “exile,” the Zionist project could form “the great bulwark against assimilation… an opposing force.”
As we Jews "fight for our existence," is it because diminishment of our self-held special place in the world feels like death?
American Jewish organizations promote connection with the State of Israel to nurture Jewish identity of the young.
Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.
A popular 1970s Israeli song had the refrain, "The Whole World is Against Us.” It concluded,
The whole world is against us...
This song was taught to us
By our old fathers,
And we too shall sing it,
And after us—the sons.
And great-grandchildren of great-grandchildren will sing
Here in the Land of Israel,
And anyone who is against us
Can go to hell!
The whole world is against us…
It’s not clear how we wish to be regarded.
At the Enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation of Jews, converting from toleration to equal citizenship, there was a loss of community autonomy, statutory difference—the loss of definition as members of a nation within the nation.
Even stigmatized, community autonomy had its advantages. Jewish communities had their own recognized governance, internal taxation, regulation of their own personal affairs, and laws, courts.
That concept of modern citizenship as individual equality conflicts with Jews residing as their own self-governing polity with representatives to the larger society, as was often the practice. This is sacrificed with equal citizenship, where all live under the same law.
Max Nordau, speaking to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, made interesting comments that when Jews lived isolated in ghettos, they had society of their own. He says that while Emancipation had its intoxication, it left Jews in Western Europe in “misery” because they could not thrive as Jews among Jews.
We are people; people do evil.
Acceptance becomes a stressor; the more we become like our fellow nationals, the more desperate to maintain a difference.
By the logic of Nordau, the most salutary circumstance for Jewish happiness is isolation from the larger society—or living as the majority the Jewish state achieved in 1948.
UK Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in a 2016 address on antisemitism, presents the existence of Israel as a Jewish human right. “Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.” (Emphasis added.)
Now, we've acquired the belief we're only meant to be happy if we rule our own “Jewish” land? Or only be safe if we do? The rationale toggles between the two, that Israel represents Jewish safety or Jewish fulfillment.
Jewish history treasures—curates—narratives of persecution. The meaning of that must be considered. If we have grievance, contempt, or pity for those outside our circle, are we healthy?
For me, there has been not just a feeling of kinship but a higher expectation of Jews, expecting less of gentiles as a rule. Prejudice absorbed growing up is painful to examine.
The origin story of our people—chosen by God to a special mission of glorifying Him and his laws—may instill confidence, a sense of identity, but I think is “worth another think” as a problem when, as Peter Beinart points out, it is empowered as a state.
He writes, “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”
Beinart's comment suggests that many Jews now have Zionism as their faith—and faiths are based on taking certain premises as fact. It may be a creator of a particular sort, or in this case a belief in the Jewish people as a reconstituted modern nation-state. In any case, faiths can't be debated.
Beinart, religiously observant and well-grounded in Jewish study, called his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and gave it the subtitle, A Reckoning. The necessary reckoning he forecasts for Jews I think will be ugly and with false starts and detours, and will necessitate re-evaluations of how we prejudge gentiles.
We number perhaps 16 million worldwide, and we Jews are at the pivot point of the USA’s wars on Iran, Iraq, and all sorts of involvement in bolstering Israel’s impunity in its neighborhood. Things at pivot points can get caught and mangled.
Dr. Michael A. Meyer wrote of American Jews: “For them the state is the flagship of the people to which they belong. Their Jewish identity is as much ethnic as religious, and their religious expression of that identity as much as affirmation of their peoplehood and the importance they attribute to preserving it…”
Polling shows this identification with Israel is less true than when written in 1994.
The American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded in 1943, is reviving the struggle within the Jewish community for Jewish life "free from the Zionist idea of Judaism as a nationality or the elevation of one nation above others…grounded in justice, solidarity, and humility."
We maybe are preserving ourselves without attention to what we become. An organized project to dispossess Arabs from their homes leaves us as what sort of people, declaring populations "human animals," and promising a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”?
Israel is now again attempting a land grab of south Lebanon, methodically blowing up evacuated villages so that Lebanese have no homes to return to.
Israel has no declared borders, only armistice lines after various wars since 1948. It has claimed and settled part of Syria, and in a de facto manner acquired all of mandate Palestine, settled it with Jews, but without recognizing citizenship of non-Jews living there. Gaza, populated in majority by refugees from the 1948 Nakba, it tried to settle, and strangled it at the best of times.
Israel has, since 1948, and especially since the 1967 occupation, arbitrarily detained 1 million Palestinians, and subjected them to routine beatings, humiliation, and abuse, reaching new depths since October 7, 2023.
This abuse is enabled by indifference to the humanity of a classification of people—in this case non-Jews.
Having known abuse from both pogromists and cruel soldiers, we—we?—unleash them on Arab civilians.
Israel is a significant producer in the international arms trade, especially in mechanisms of surveillance and control of civilian populations.
One thing is taboo: anything other than seeing innocence in the actions of Jews in the world.
Cruelty, persecution, crimes against humanity are in a blind spot when it's “our own people” as perpetrators. Exceptions to a virtuous rule.
There is anger at Israel's blockade, bombing, and occupation of Gaza, and West Bank state terrorism, and the reaction of Israel defenders is often that the charged offenses match historic antisemitic canards—thus are invalid.
The problem with enumerating the package of common antisemitic slurs is that they always seem to create a kind of immunity: If something has been falsely charged of Jews, one needn't avoid the crime charged?
Is it a matter of seeing ourselves as others see us? Is it a matter of the struggle for some objectivity? Is every ethnic or tribal identity a devaluing of those outside it?
For me to see the Jewish story with objectivity is as impractical as performing a non-trivial surgical operation on myself.
Do I touch on something unmentionable, “feed antisemitism,” by separating our human value from our outsize mythologizing?
I defend myself: It cannot be betrayal to think of Hillel's teaching, the universal "What is hateful to you, do not do to another," with an eye to truths we thought established in the Nuremberg trials, not to mention learned from the object lesson of the Nuremberg rallies.
Zionist Israel is Chelm. The legendary town of Chelm (not the real Polish city) in Yiddish stories is inhabited by remarkably foolish people who begin from foolish premises and build on them to ridiculous solutions.
The first stupid premise—that “Israel” can be taken from “Palestine”—is compounded by more and more technological excellence in killing and surveillance.
For believers that the Jewish story must include a modern nation-state in Palestine, it’s a certainty that I am “betraying my people” by writing out these thoughts. Or, naive to the innate antisemitism of the world.
In the Passover ritual meal, the “wicked son” asks, “What does this mean to you?” By not asking what the Exodus story means to “us,” he separates himself from The Jewish People, showing his wickedness.
I think the only irredeemable sin, among Jews, is faithlessness to “Our People”—aligning with gentiles. As a comment posted on a Zionist website stated, “True Jewish morality begins with loyalty to our own people.”
If all Jews compose a Jewish nation in a literal rather than spiritual, figurative sense, the weight of treason comes into play for faithlessness.
Danish expatriate Israeli Jonathan Ofir wrote in an online essay titled “I Am Freed from Zionism”:
It's hard to define the line where people sense you're not loyal. But it is a kind of social control with cult characteristics. It’s like people have the understanding that you’ve gone too far and now you’re not with "us" but against "us."
Ofir's provocative suggestion that Zionism is cultish makes me ask if there is some vulnerability that Zionism exploits in Jewish hyper-fixation on identity. Are we prone to the cultish division of the world into members and outsider "enemies" that installs an inner policeman to monitor for betrayal?
Certainly there is the cult characteristic of devaluing views from outside of the cult as worthless, ill-intentioned.
Intrinsic to Zionist belief is that Jews are historically vulnerable and non-Jews are unreliable, and that Israeli security is achieved by "realism”—relying on military superiority, "teaching" non-Jews lessons by massive retaliation and iron control.
Zionism began as a secular movement. The secular seamlessly slid to the sanctified, as the words of the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah,” with no mention of the deity, evoke the “Jewish soul,” necessarily implicating a God that made Jewish souls.
Considered with a step back, it has impressive gravity, being a selected people of God. Add the patina of antiquity and who can match the distinction?
The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.
When arms and sovereignty are grafted to this identity, we have Jewish identity transmogrified to something new—Jewish religious-nationalist power.
With Jews’ role of noble victim is the gentiles’ role of ignoble victimizers. In practice, we may view non-Jews as defective, lacking, having morally-vacant animality.
There is a witticism of uncertain origin, “Jews are like everyone else, only moreso.” I’d leave off the last part, and just say we’re human, with all the human prides and failings.
We are people; people do evil.
Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov has concluded that Zionism “became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent, and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective.”
Bartov continues that in Israel there was “a radical transformation of Judaism itself into a political religion, intertwined with a certain translation of Zionism... In Israel the specific version has, in effect, produced divine or rabbinic legitimation for genocide.”
Zionism becomes revenge, for correction of every humbled moment of Jews in history, and glorification of the god that selected us—to wreak on Palestinians reversal of centuries of obstruction of God’s promise of Jews being mighty and numerous in our land.
Fatally, omitted in the fury is remembering the promise of the land is conditioned on faithful following of God's mitzvot.
The “eternal Jewish vulnerability” narrative is available in Jewish learning to be turned to Zionist purposes. In February, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu laid out concisely the mental landscape of Zionism grafted to Judaism—eternal world antisemitism:
If you look at the course of Jewish history, then what you see is this was a fairly constant phenomenon:
I mean, once we lost our land, once we were scattered among the Nations, we were ready prey. We were ready prey. And eventually, when there was societal change the Jews always were blamed… And these attacks on the Jews were always preceded by vilification. Horrible vilifications that even so-called civilized and educated people adhered to: “The Jews poisoned the wells. The Jews spread vermin. The Jews slaughtered Christian children to use their blood for baking matzos.”
And this goes into modern times. The Nazis basically said the same thing. And all these vituperations, all these slanders were always accompanied, eventually, by exile or pogroms or mass murder.
That's what happened to the Jews one country after another into modern times.
PM Netanyahu then defines the rationale for whatever violence is necessary to preserve the Jewish state in Palestine:
The great change in Jewish history which [Theodor] Herzl saw very clearly is that when the Jews have their own independent state they will have the independent power to roll back the physical attacks against us.
Functionally, it is the strategy of a paranoid person holed up with weapons. As in any religion’s foundational literature, justifications can be found. In the Talmud is the imperative, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
In territories under Israeli control, it has fostered land stealing and ongoing terrorizing of Arab residents by Jewish “settlers” drunk on ethnic self-assertion, protected by the army of the Israeli state.
When we live among others, the paradox of this outlook on Jewish history, and its "solution" by territorial Zionism, is the abandonment of Jews' right to be French, American, Indian, Syrian, Irani. In harmony with the Nazi legislation that German Jews were not German.
Zionist founding father, secular Theodor Herzl, in Der Judenstaat, summarized the basis of Zionism—that Jews carry antisemitism with them. He said we go where there is no antisemitism and there generate antisemitism:
The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.
Herzl describes an irredeemable gentile world: “In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the [French] Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace... But I think we shall not be left in peace.”
Herzl's and Netanyahu's formulation is degrading of gentiles—that Jews cannot live among others. That there is something profoundly wrong with everyone but Jews.
This approach disregards the success story of a tribal cult from Judea maintaining and building culture over millennia, integrating converts wherever they’ve settled, up to our present.
Jewish pride can be consciousness of heritage, or be a sort of implicit contempt of gentiles.
The Zionist outlook, expressed by Maurice Samuel in 1924—talking of Jews' "wretched fate"—has Jews living in a trap which alienates us from humanity. One may be proud or lament the identity, but with no escaping it:
A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish radicals are beginning to understand it dimly...
The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome rôle upon us.
Do we demand safety, protection, because we share common humanity with rights to be respected, or because of our rare qualities—making us a special case?
Whether we think of ourselves as “ready prey” (Netanyahu) or precious unicorns of advanced civilization—or both—the point is we may think of ourselves as a different ilk than run-of-the-mill-humanity.
In America, the claim of being an extraordinary case makes a sisterly blend with Christians Zionist eschatology and “American exceptionalism” in Israel advocacy.
We are whatever we think we are. It isn’t a lament but a boast, that we are “a people that dwells apart.”
The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.
In 1938, a Polish leader of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund forecast:
Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history and on this law has based its perspective on Jewish life…
If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…
With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a worldwide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability— as all other groups—to vice. Trauma has not ennobled us.
The whole of Torah revolves around the proposition of singular essential Jewish peoplehood.
Herzl’s proposition that we have “our right to exist as a separate people, according us our rightful place among the nations of the world” is built on it.
The inner policeman tries to stop critical examination of the identity—Disloyalty to faithful ancestors! Betrayal of my people!—to question Zionist corollaries of the statement, “I am a Jew.”
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We Need to Break Free From the Cage of Nationalism
The possibility of nuclear war plus the continuing reality of climate change ought to push all of us beyond the borders of our minds. These matters will only be solved collectively: trans-nationally. And we must solve them.
Feb 14, 2026
“While there is broad support across the political spectrum for removing criminal aliens...”
Screech! My connection to the words I’m reading grinds to a sudden halt, an inner alarm goes off, I look away from my computer screen and briefly clutch my soul. Oh God...
The words are from a Forbes article highly critical of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deporter-in-chief. I was mostly in sync with it as I read. Indeed, the above sentence continues, pointing out that “the vast majority of individuals in the country without legal status have not committed serious crimes.”
Yeah, absolutely. So what’s my problem here? It amounts to this: A false, unchallenged assumption quietly emerged, manifested in the word “aliens.” Do we support the rights of aliens or do we just want them (and their children) dragged out of the United States, especially if they’re non-white? Apparently, this is the context of the major debate of the moment. Who belongs here? What remains unquestioned in the article is the significance of an imaginary line, known as the border, without which there would be no such thing as aliens. The line separates “us” from the rest of the world and severely trivializes the scope of the debate.
My call in this moment is for humanity, especially those who define themselves as Americans, to stand up not just to Trump and Miller and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but to the false reality of nationalism itself.
But a planet divided into nations is just the way things are, right? This is certainly not questioned politically. But my scream in this moment is for the media, mainstream or otherwise, to look beyond the assumed certainty of nationalism, however discomforting that may seem, and acknowledge that the human race has no “aliens.”
The larger reality here—understood by anyone with a brain—is that this is one planet. One planet! We are a collective whole. All of us are connected. I do not write these words with naïveté. Knowing this is simply the starting point, as we continue to evolve. I’m not downplaying the need we all feel for security, just eliminating the word “national” from the phrase.
As Karabi Acharya writes: “In fact, over half of all national borders were created in the 20th century. The creation of borders is for the most part a sad history marked by conflict, colonialism, and war. Borders create unnecessary and harmful barriers not just between people and resources but also ideas.”
Yeah, war—in the nuclear age. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its metaphorical Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, as close to the zero hour as it’s ever been. The possibility of nuclear war plus the continuing reality of climate change ought to push all of us beyond the borders of our minds. These matters will only be solved collectively: trans-nationally. And we must solve them.
Acharya goes on:
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is a moral imperative to be open to new ideas from around the world and to question the origins of old ideas we take for granted. Global learning provides an important inflection point to question the morality of how and who decides what knowledge others see and share.
Not only have borders been historical constructs of wealth and power; they unfairly reflect whose ideas have mattered, what languages have been preferred. As places throughout history have been colonized, people were told that their own traditions don't matter and what’s important, what is to be prioritized, are the norms and concepts of the colonizers. Part of the process of setting up borders includes erasing not only people but other knowledge traditions.
I understand that national governments need borders to continue to exist, at least as they understand themselves. The world’s governments—in particular, the American government—need the help of we the people. My call in this moment is for humanity, especially those who define themselves as Americans, to stand up not just to Trump and Miller and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but to the false reality of nationalism itself. How do we open the borders of this planet? How do we start acknowledging, and healing, the consequences of two-plus millennia of colonial land theft? How do we start valuing—and learning from—those who are different from us?
What if we began opening our borders? What if we began governing nonviolently... with respect and awe for our world and its occupants? Perhaps we’d start freeing ourselves from the suicidal hell we’re caught in today. We’d definitely start pushing the hands of the Doomsday Clock backwards.
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Who’s to Blame? Political Action, Personal Accountability, and Human Nature
We are more likely to advance human dignity and ecological sustainability if we focus less on “Why are those people so bad?” and more on “What forces shaped this outcome?”
Oct 26, 2025
A version of this essay was presented at the Taos Community of Love service on October 19, 2025.
I know this isn’t a conventional church service, but I would like to start with scripture:
“The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.”
That’s not really scripture but rather a sentence from An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, the 2022 book I wrote with Wes Jackson, cofounder of The Land Institute and an early innovator in regenerative agriculture. Even though we weren’t divinely inspired, I think it’s worth repeating:
The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
That’s not a nihilistic rejection of morality. Wes and I agree that human actions can and should strive to reflect moral principles and that we need a deeper conversation about those principles and actions, now more than ever. We simply suggest that when talking politics, especially about the multiple cascading ecological crises that we face, more humility all around would be helpful.
If we are to create just and sustainable societies, we must contend with geographic and biological determinism, which is a way of saying we must be clear about how we got here and face harsh realities about what lies ahead.
Let me illustrate this another way, with a story I heard from Wes, which he heard from his friend Wendell Berry. In a small town, a guy who was not known for his sophistication or intellectual ability—what some might call “the village idiot”—came upon two men digging a large hole. “What you doing?” he asked. “Obviously, we’re digging a hole,” they replied. “Why you digging that hole?” The answer: “It’s where we’re going to bury all the sons-of-bitches in this town.” The man’s response: “Who’s going to cover them up?”
That story hints at my approach to the question in the title of this talk: Who’s to blame? We should be careful, remembering that many traditions advise humility, such as “Let they who are without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). “There but for the grace of God go I”—or, for those of us who aren’t believers, “There but for luck or fate go I”—is a good touchstone when we are tempted to claim we are certain that we know better or act more ethically than others.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before going further with “who,” let’s be clear about “what.” Blame for what?
Today, I mean “blame for everything that is going wrong these days,” and there’s a lot going really wrong. Our species is doing a lousy job of designing and maintaining large-scale societies that are consistent with basic human dignity and a sustainable long-term human presence on the planet.
The immediate objection might be the use of “our species,” given that not every member of the species has contributed to those problems or has the same power to influence outcomes. Some small-scale societies in human history have been consistent with dignity and sustainability. Some people in today’s large-scale societies work to further those goals. More on this later, but for now, please remember our scripture: The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
Today I would like to work my way through three different levels of analysis about blame, rooted in my radical feminist, left politics and ecological understanding.
One place to lay blame would be the individuals who make decisions that predictably lead to human suffering and ecological degradation. That would include politicians who pursue policies that maintain wealth inequality and reject funding basic services necessary for a minimally decent life. That would include corporate CEOs who put profit before the health of ecosystems on which our lives depend. This approach assumes that our troubles are the product either of especially bad people making decisions or of generally good people making bad decisions, whether out of ignorance, greed, or both.
But as a good leftist, I know we should go beyond individuals and blame systems that reward those kinds of policies, such as capitalism and nationalism, tainted by racism and sexism. If we were to throw out the bums—that is, the politicians and executives we believe are making bad decisions—without changing the systems of illegitimate authority and the ideologies of dominance, the new bums running things would respond to the same incentives to produce the same problems.
That’s where most good leftists stop, with a conviction that changing economic, political, and cultural systems is the ticket. That’s where I once stopped, when I was a good leftist. Perhaps because as I have grown older I have become less dependent on unfounded hope, I have tried to face the intractable nature of our problems and try to understand the larger forces that shape our world: geography and biology. We have to grapple with determinism to understand the past and the present, and to give us a shot at a future.
Determinism is a dirty word in many circles, in part out of fear that it undermines a sense of responsibility and autonomy. If people think our collective fate is locked in by forces beyond their control, why bother trying to change things? I take up this question in a new book coming out next year, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, but for now I’ll offer a quick response. I think that if we ignore those larger forces, we’re doomed to fail. The reason to move beyond blaming individuals and systems is not to avoid our political and moral obligations but to come to grips with the world we live in and the kind of animal we are. Ignoring aspects of reality that are inconvenient for our ideology is not a winning strategy.
We all have ideas about how to contribute to a better world, but no one knows which ideas will prove most important.
First, geographic or environmental determinism, the idea that a society’s cultural, political, and economic development is determined by its geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Starting with a 2020 article, I have been asking a simple question: If we accept—as we should—the anti-racist principle that there are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations, then why are human cultures in different places so different? Unless one argues that the differences are the product of supernatural forces, such as a God or gods, the only plausible explanation is geography, climate, and environmental conditions. We are one species, and there are no significant genetic differences beyond superficial physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture (and, in some cases, susceptibility to disease based on ancestors’ region of origin). Therefore, there’s no reason that humans would have created such different cultures around the world except for differences in landscapes that shaped their evolutionary history. No one doubts that about food and clothing—people in tropical rainforests don’t eat or dress like people in the Arctic because of different geographies. Is there any reason that the forces that shape food and clothing choices would not shape other aspects of culture, such as moral and political systems?
Second, biological determinism. Wes Jackson has long suggested that it’s important to understand life on Earth as “the scramble for energy-rich carbon,” reminding us that every organism, including Homo sapiens, evolves to maximize its ability to acquire and use energy. We need to accept that we are animals, not Animals+. By that, I mean that as animals we are of course different from other creatures (as all creatures are different from one another) but that we are not ontologically special, even though our cognitive and linguistic capacities are unique. The claim of specialness leads people to think of our species as Animals with a capital A, with an extra special plus, whether that status comes from God or evolution. But we are ordinary animals, engaging in the scramble for energy-rich carbon like all others. We have the capacity to curb the drive to maximize energy extraction, of course, especially once we understand the negative effects on us and the ecosystems on which we depend. But the evidence indicates that it’s not easy to stop scrambling. What Wes and I called “the temptations of dense energy” are powerful.
My point is simple: If we care about humans and nature, we should try to understand human nature. Some say that true human nature is compassionate and collaborative. Others say that human nature is greedy and self-interested. Obviously, human nature includes all these traits. Throughout time and across societies, humans have acted on all these aspects of our nature. Asserting that some traits are our “real” nature and other traits are somehow secondary is dangerous—all are part of human nature, of the way we really are. We can try to devise social institutions and practices to foster behaviors we think are positive and inhibit those we think are negative, but that requires understanding human nature, not ignoring it.
A side note: Today I’m not going to weigh in on free will, one of the oldest and most contentious debates in philosophy. Whatever one’s position on that question, we can acknowledge the role of geographic and biological determinism in setting the parameters that we operate within.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting we give up on judgment. “Judge not lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1) reminds us to avoid hypocrisy. But living in community requires us to make judgments about all kinds of things, including the ethical principles that animate our actions. As we make and enforce rules for decent behavior, however, it is important not to be judgmental, to claim that we have captured the moral high ground. Perhaps it’s best if we stop asking, "Who’s to blame?” We are more likely to advance human dignity and ecological sustainability if we focus less on “Why are those people so bad?” and more on “What forces shaped this outcome?” We can make that shift and still demand of each other accountability and answerability—accepting the consequences of our actions and doing our best to explain why we took those actions. But we can do it without arrogance.
One more thing that I’m more aware of as I have aged: Explaining in detail why things happen is really hard. That’s obvious, but easy to forget. We can work to identify forces at work in the world and, when possible, change social structures to deal with those forces. But our attempts at understanding human affairs will always be incomplete and inadequate. We will never come up with laws of human behavior as we have laws of physics. Theories in the social sciences will never have the explanatory power of theories in the core sciences. Our explanations of history are, at best, educated guesses. Complexity—in the world around us and inside our own heads, complexity beyond our comprehension—means that the certainty we seek is unattainable, another reminder of the need for humility.
But in the absence of certainty, we still must act. In the struggle for human dignity and ecological sustainability, we make our best guesses at the strategies and tactics likely to be most effective. I’m not suggesting that we stop taking those choices seriously, only that when we think we are right, we should remember that the moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
Let me speak more personally. When I was younger, I was quick to tell others what strategies they should embrace and what tactics they should use. Today, I’m less sure I have the right answers, or sometimes any viable answers at all. Even if I had answers that I was convinced are correct, I would be careful about lecturing others.
None of this means that individuals should not be accountable for their decisions, or that social systems are irrelevant to outcomes. I think I’d make a better president than the current occupant of the White House. I think there is no decent human future if we can’t transcend capitalism. But I don’t think I could solve most of our problems, nor do I think democratic socialism could. I think we are up against human nature. Geographic determinism helps us explain how we got here, and biological determinism helps us understand why it will be hard to escape the traps we built for ourselves.
Throughout history there have been, of course, many societies with ways of living that were consistent with a long-term human presence. For 95% of Homo sapiens history, and 99% of the genus Homo history, we were gathers and hunters who lived in relatively egalitarian societies and did comparatively little permanent damage to ecosystems. But after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the steady increase in the human population and hierarchical systems forever changed that.
Today 8 billion humans live in high-energy and high-technology societies. No society in human history has ever had a blueprint for how 8 billion people can live in such a world. No society has developed lifeways that can sustain 8 billion people at the current aggregate level of consumption. The best of human social arrangements—those that have produced some measure of dignity and sustainability—never had to scale up to 8 billion, and there’s no reason to think that’s possible.
I’ll close with one assessment I feel confident about: The only human future I can imagine is “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and stuff. To deal with the temptations of dense energy, we need to agree to limits. I don’t know any politician or political activist in the mainstream saying that. I have never heard anyone on the right say that. And most of my comrades on the left either avoid the question or explicitly reject that answer. Across the political spectrum, most people are betting that miracle technologies, beyond anything we can imagine, will make it possible for humanity to continue its present course, what Wes has long called “technological fundamentalism.” But relying on miracles doesn’t have a great track record, and fundamentalism is always a dead end.
Summing up, what I’m not arguing: Nothing I’ve said here should be taken as rejecting the need for political organizing today. Resisting the current regime in the United States is essential, because people are suffering and ecological damage is being magnified. The threats to democracy are real, and action to defend political freedom is important. Whatever disagreements I have with my comrades or more moderate folks are relatively unimportant in the face of deepening government repression and emboldened reactionary movements.
Summing up, what I am arguing: In the short term, we can ask who’s to blame for policy decisions that make things worse and apply pressure that leads to what we hope will be better decisions. In the longer term, we can identify the weaknesses in social systems and advocate for what we hope will be better systems. But if we are to create just and sustainable societies, we must contend with geographic and biological determinism, which is a way of saying we must be clear about how we got here and face harsh realities about what lies ahead.
Along with the immediate emergency there is an ongoing emergency. We should face the short-term threats to justice and democracy today that come from a specific political formation and the long-term crises that threaten democracy permanently. Nothing I’ve said requires us to ignore the fact that a Trump-defined MAGA Republican Party is dangerous on many levels.
But to emphasize, one more time: The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted, because collectively we face hard choices that have no easy solutions and may not have solutions at all. We all have ideas about how to contribute to a better world, but no one knows which ideas will prove most important. Our best bet is to support each other in any efforts based on a commitment to dignity and sustainability.
As we do that, we should remember the 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, in which Walt Kelly’s Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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How Immigrant Fiction Can Reshape American Realities
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Aug 20, 2025
Immigrants have been reshaping America since the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or perhaps earlier than that fateful day in 1620, if you count Viking excursions dating back to 1021 and Spaniards landing in Florida in 1513. After the subjugation and genocide of the continent’s Indigenous people, and the establishment of the United States, wave after wave of newcomers from all over the globe, forced and unforced, have helped build what so many call “a nation of immigrants.”
Despite those facts, immigration has always been a topic of debate and a lightning rod for racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, a tool of political manipulation that appeals to people’s worst instincts and fears. Since the political rise of Donald Trump and his descent down that golden escalator in 2015, the debate on immigration and the US-Mexico border has shifted considerably to the right, after decades of centering on moderate concepts calling for comprehensive immigration reform and enhanced border security.
In the 2024 election cycle, both parties have skewed further in the same direction, narrowing the debate and placing immigrants and their advocates in an ever-tightening corner, with Republicans calling for mass deportations and Democrats supporting limits to asylum for refugees and backing away from providing public services (such as health and education) to undocumented immigrants and their children.
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Humanity, New Visions, and Hope
We are all human beings. To me, that’s what any good book reminds us of at its core. Authentic immigrant stories chronicle the desperation, urgency, and desire for safety and progress that drive immigrants to America’s shores in the first place. Immigrant and multicultural literature explore the process of becoming American, the rifts between immigrant generations and those born and raised here, and the sacrifices and rewards experienced by families and communities through acculturation, assimilation, and simply the act of living in a country full of promise yet also torn apart by a legacy of racism and discrimination. But, no matter where the readers and the writers come from, when one walks in the shoes of another, one gains empathy. In this way, immigrant literature builds bridges that foster unity in our shared humanity and multigenerational American experience.
Before embarking on my own journey as a writer of literary fiction steeped in the immigrant experience, some of the books that most deeply touched me were likewise immigrant or multicultural narratives. Even though they may not have been specifically about the Latino perspective, I saw myself and my family reflected in their characters’ struggles and dreams. At an early age, that experience as a reader opened my mind to cultures other than my own.
I did not get to New York City until I was a college student in New England, but I felt like I’d been there as a child making Jewish friends in the tenements of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I never spent a night in Harlem, but I could feel the dust on the floorboards and the tension between father and son in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. I’d never seen a ghost, but I saw myself and began to recognize my own voice as a writer in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
When we see each other as more the same than “other” and “different,” we see that artificial constructs—such as borders and citizenship and legal documents providing permission for human beings to live in peace on various patches of the Earth’s soil drawn on maps by men who waged and won wars decades or centuries past—are just that: artificial, man-made, and by their very nature should be malleable. To connect and lift each other up, we must work toward more togetherness and less division.
Immigrant fiction is a laboratory for the creation of new visions for where we could go as a nation, as a continent, as a people united rather than divided. Just like science fiction has laid out blueprints for many of the high-tech devices and inventions that are now either fixtures in our daily lives or soon to revolutionize the way we live, immigrant fiction can help us imagine, envision, and thus create a new reality.
In my novel, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez, I imagine a world where a multigenerational utopia is built on a city that straddles both sides of the Rio Grande, a place where not just the borders between nations fade away but also those between life and death. In a manuscript I’m currently working on, I envision an America where someday there will be no borders at all. The walls and fences will be pulled down. The coils of razor wire will be retired. The militarized forces will be deployed elsewhere, far from the fertile farmlands of the Rio Grande Valley, far from the vast and perilous Chihuahuan Desert. The river will gleam with promise and flow in tranquility as it snakes its way like a shimmering serpent toward the Gulf of Mexico. Bridges will be built. And people will move safely back and forth, north and south, along with trade and commerce. When this happens, cultural harmony will rise, economies will boom, and illegal narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking will become ancient history.
Imagine that. Instead of masses huddled along fences and politicians saber rattling and fearmongering, countries will work together to solve the hemispheric problems that they cannot solve alone. Stronger than ever, fueled by access to opportunity and more affordable labor, the combined Americas will be able to compete with the surging global powerhouses of China and India.
For that to happen, we must stop seeing the border as a problem and seize it as an opportunity. We need stories that inspire hope in us, faith that we can see past each other’s differences and find the common ground that binds us together: a love of family and freedom; a desire for each generation to do better than the one that came before; a respect for our fellow human beings regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin, or the language their mother whispered into their ears as newborn babies cradled in their arms.
We all have hearts that ache for love, minds that crave understanding, souls that yearn to be seen. This human connection—cognizant of the pain we all bear as living, bleeding beings but fiercely determined to cling to an optimistic view of the future we can share—drives the narrative arc of my new novel, The Border Between Us. It is the story of an immigrant family, of a young American raised on the border and kept afloat by the love of family and irrepressible buoyancy of the American dream. And many people who have read it have told me how they were touched by it in varied ways.
People didn’t focus so much on the border or the immigrant aspects when they shared their reactions. They mention seeing their own lives reflected in the novel: the strains of complex parent-child relationships, the balancing act between pursuing one’s own aspirations while living up to family responsibilities and obligations, the grief and hardship of losing loved ones before their time. When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
Listen to me, America. I’m from the border, born and raised. I love the border. And, I believe the borders should be erased. Anyone supporting the proposed mass deportations (as well as the racial and ethnic profiling and vast detentions these would entail) should read Farewell to Manzanar, chronicling the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. They should also do some research on the inhumane Operation Wetback, through which over 1 million Mexican migrant workers were deported in the 1950s. These are cautionary tales from our not-so-distant past.
We can be more than we are today as a nation and as a people. For that to happen, we must avoid the errors of the past, stop limiting ourselves, and expand our horizons. Until then, pick up some immigrant or multicultural fiction, learn from history, and imagine the possibilities. Someday, we can turn honest memories and empathetic visions into a new and more welcoming reality.
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Consensus Finally Reached: Israel Is Committing Genocide
Palestinians have been screaming for the world to stop this for nearly two years; we should listen to them and heed the call to act.
Jul 30, 2025
For nearly two years, the Israeli military has been relentlessly obliterating everything in Gaza. That destruction has not been hidden. The Palestinians who live in Gaza, the majority of whom are refugees forced to flee what became Israel in 1948, have been documenting every moment of the carnage. And in fact, Israeli soldiers have gleefully shared photos and videos of themselves destroying everything they see. The Israeli government has openly and repeatedly declared its intent to annihilate Palestinians.
For decades, Israel has denied it planned and carried out ethnic cleansing in 1948. It has insisted that the Nakba—the permanent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians by Zionist militias—was actually the fault of everyone but Israel. Now, nearly 80 years later, Israeli politicians at the highest level openly plot to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza. It has been clear since October 7, 2023 that the current Israeli assault is the culmination of more than 140 years of colonization, dispossession, expulsion, and repeated massacres. This is genocide.
Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel’s actions have nothing to do with “self-defense” nor is the ongoing slaughter “just a war,” many continue to deny the reality of the situation. However, there is now a public consensus among the major human rights organizations in the world. Palestinians and Palestinian organizations have been at the forefront of imploring the world to recognize what is happening and to act. Al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights have been documenting Israel’s crimes for years. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and many other organizations have now carefully assessed the best available evidence and determined that Israel is committing genocide.
And finally, B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization, along with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have joined the international consensus in recognizing Israel is committing genocide. All of that sits alongside the United Nations bodies and many scholars of international law, human rights, and genocide and Holocaust studies that have also recognized the genocide. The International Criminal Court has charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel is ongoing. Those are positive developments even as they are too late and insufficient. However, we do not need to wait for consensus among experts to make clear moral and ethical determinations. Palestinians have been screaming for the world to stop this for nearly two years; we should listen to them and heed the call to act.
Like the American genocide of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians, literally and figuratively, is intrinsic to Israel’s existence.
Even if Israel is found guilty at the ICJ, genocide denial will continue. Many of those who support Israel’s actions will not be convinced by facts. In that case, we need to build the power necessary to confront and challenge those who defend genocidal violence. The ideological and propaganda apparatuses dedicated to obfuscating and denying reality are finally beginning to show cracks. We need to exploit and further break open those fissures. “Stand with Israel” dead-enders will be judged the same as any other genocide supporters and enablers throughout history.
The State of Israel, like many countries, was founded on crimes against humanity. Its project of exclusionary ethno-religious nationalism is a 19th-century anachronism that has brought untold death and destruction. It will fail. Israel’s live-streamed genocide is its undoing. Every pretense has been stripped away. Israel as its supporters imagine it never existed, and even that fantasy is gone.
Like the American genocide of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians, literally and figuratively, is intrinsic to Israel’s existence. But there is no going back. Palestinians will be free, and what the ICJ calls Israel’s “institutionalized régime of systematic oppression and domination of one racial group over another” will be dismantled in favor of equality and democracy. It is only a matter of time.
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Why Does Trump Really Hate Internationalism? It’s Bad for Billionaires
As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s.
Jul 12, 2025
If you take U.S. President Donald Trump’s word, his foreign policy will finally make American workers great again. Where weak-willed attempts to work with other countries hollowed out the American economy, his belligerent nationalism will push the U.S. up and the rest of the world down. The globalists are for them; Donald Trump is for you!
But taking Donald Trump at his word is never a good idea. As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s. He has fought Japan’s car safety standards and India’s price cap on coronary stents. He has gotten Canada and India to drop taxes on tech giants. And in perhaps his biggest victory, six major countries recently caved to his escalating threats and hollowed out a global plan to enforce a minimum tax on big corporations.
That Trump has fixed his ire on this international agreement reveals a broader truth: Internationalism is bad for billionaires. The misguided approach of neoliberal globalization opened up a lane for nationalists to claim that they defend the working class. But in reality, Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies would like nothing more than to play governments against each other. Billionaires can take fragmented countries to the bank—only international cooperation can build a united front strong enough to beat them.
Trump’s Revenge on the Global Corporate Minimum Tax
The global corporate minimum tax is a good example of this. (The details are a little complicated, but the super-rich would like to keep it that way, so bear with me as I explain.) In recent decades, major corporations have gotten spectacularly effective at avoiding taxes. Last year, Tesla made a profit of $2.3 billion in the U.S. but paid zero federal income tax. Neither did Merck, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson, despite making $45 billion around the world.
Two global dynamics help them achieve this. First, corporations use sophisticated accounting tricks to make their profits show up in countries where they do little actual business, like Ireland and the Cayman Islands—which just so happen to have very low taxes. Second, when countries attempt to raise taxes, corporations threaten to move elsewhere, creating fears of job losses and economic slowdowns that can convince governments to keep taxes low.
Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
In 2021, most of the world’s countries agreed to a tax deal that aimed to counter these dynamics. It was highly imperfect, with too many exceptions and rules skewed against developing countries, but it was still an important step forward. One of its key rules was a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. Suppose a Brazilian company paid just 10% in tax for income earned through its Swiss subsidiary. The deal would allow Brazil to apply a top-up tax and collect the remaining 5% itself. This 15% floor meant corporations could no longer drive a race to the bottom in tax rates, as any tax haven with a rate below 15% would just be leaving money on the table—someone else would tax it anyways.
And because congressional Republicans blocked the U.S. from implementing the deal—instead relying on a weaker U.S. version of the minimum tax—that’s what could have happened to American companies. This was how the agreement was supposed to work: If a country like the U.S. was too silly to make sure its companies paid at least 15% in tax, other countries would.
But Donald Trump hated the idea that countries could work together to make sure the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Eli Lilly would pay a fair share of taxes toward schools, hospitals, and roads. In an attempt to spook other countries out of making the corporate minimum tax work, Trump’s tax bill included a “revenge tax” provision that would have hiked taxes on companies from countries that applied it.
In a moment of deep cowardice, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom folded: they agreed to exempt American companies from the minimum tax in exchange for Congress removing the revenge tax provision. While the exact details are not yet clear, it is certain to give a leg up to American corporations avoiding taxes at home and abroad. It will also create a perverse incentive for foreign companies to relocate their headquarters to the U.S. in order to avoid taxes—or at least to hang that fear over countries that consider raising taxes on them. Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
Building the International “We” That Can Beat the Super-Rich
The way big corporations have played countries off each other to avoid taxes echoes a tried-and-tested strategy of advancing the interests of the rich. Corporations threaten to move investment out of countries that raise minimum wages or strengthen environmental standards. When countries reject austerity, financial markets often sell off their currency or demand higher interest rates on government bonds.
Rather than falling into this trap, some countries are demonstrating the unity needed to advance a more equitable economy. Last week, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa launched an alliance for wealth taxes on high-net-worth individuals, while eight countries took steps toward taxing first-class plane tickets and private jets. A major United Nations conference led to an initiative that could coordinate developing countries as they borrow funds, rather than leaving them isolated against their lenders.
These efforts model an internationalism different from the form of globalization that dominated the past few decades. Neoliberal globalization advanced a web of agreements that coordinated countries to place a ceiling on taxes and labor standards, not to raise the floor. Developing countries were markets to be opened, not publics to work alongside.
Corporate globalization needed to end—but the problem was that it was corporate, not that it was global. Nationalists promised to reverse this globalization and take back the spoils unjustly taken by others. But Trump has been far more successful int expanding American corporations’ ability to pillage than enabling everyday Americans to prosper. A balkanized world ensures no one is ever powerful or coordinated enough to subordinate the interest of the super-rich to the interests of the public. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can beat the super-rich, but only if that “we” is big enough to include those beyond our borders.
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Finding Hope for the Future in a Gaza Mother and Doctor
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up.
May 30, 2025
The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians—dead children—are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all.
How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We’ve declared one another “the enemy,” which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.
And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media... genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN:
Dr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.
Hours later, the bodies of seven children—most of them badly burned—arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar’s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family’s home... The bodies of two more of her children—a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead—remain missing.
Only one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar’s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.
This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity’s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves—in all their vulnerable humanity—with the organization’s founding purpose.
A letter the fasters wrote to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres concludes: “Uppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the U.N. founding goal to save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”
I quote these words not with a sense of “yeah, yeah” abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war—beginning with an Israeli cease-fire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.
To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.
One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you’re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace or Friends of Sabeel North America.
The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.
Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old; Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.
Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country’s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.
So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost 9 of her 10 children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that
Dr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.
She told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.
Dr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.
And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has “continued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.”
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity’s role model.
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It Is Time to Build a World Based on Solidarity
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us.
Apr 22, 2025
In Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, a city responsible for producing the images of style and happiness that are propagated around the globe, there are 40,000 people living on the street. Even its wealthy neighborhoods were not safe from the disastrous wildfires of 2025. These problems are the result of an economic system that puts profits over human and environmental needs; a political system that allows money to impact outcomes; and a cultural system dominated by unregulated tech monopolies and other forms of corporate-controlled media.
While the technology is available to replace dirty energy with clean in the time we have left to stabilize the world at 1.5°C, many governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels at higher rates than they subsidize renewable energy. Levels of inequality are increasing both between the Global South and Global North and within countries all around the world. Living standards in the Global North are going down. One of the reasons for this is the corrosive nature of inequality. As long as a society tolerates high levels of inequality, it will contain high levels of social conflict. As people come to resent the existing social order, some turn to reactionary forms of ethno-nationalism.
All around the world voters feeling a sense of precarity have chosen to elect leaders such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. People’s faith in the future and sense of security are so under threat that in many places around the world, there are epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. California, one of the richest places on the planet with a two-thirds Democratic majority, has not figured out how to build a livable state. The global rise of right-wing nationalism is the symptom of a disease, rather than its cause.
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us. At this crucial moment we need to choose between a world based on reactionary nationalist sentiments and political power plays by the fossil fuel industry and other reactionary forms of capital, or we can figure out how to fairly share the resources we have and learn to live together in healthy relationships with nature. It is time to build a world based on relations of solidarity.
The Deep Roots of the Current Crisis
The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function.
Since its beginning capitalism has been challenged by those it has harmed: from slave revolts and anticolonial rebellions all around the world, to the Levelers and Diggers in capitalism’s original home of England, who opposed the privatization of land. And from capitalism’s beginning there have also been those who fought to get a greater share of the spoils of the system for working people. Unions have fought for better working conditions and wages from employers. Reformers have fought for the state to operate in ways that shifted the balance of power toward the interests of people and the environment.
In many European nations, accords between capital and labor were reached early in the 20th century as the result of strong labor movements. Those accords led to social democratic forms of capitalism, where living standards were kept high, and social safety nets were created, as states managed to regulate businesses while also allowing them to flourish and remain politically powerful. As inequality has increased and governments have been decreasingly able to deliver satisfying lives under these accords, many European nations have seen support for mainstream parties decline and support for right-wing nationalist parties rise.
If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
In the U.S., after the immiseration and social turmoil of the Great Depression, a similar accord was reached between capital and labor, where businesses were regulated by the state, living standards were somewhat protected, and wages rose. This accord lasted until it was challenged by former President Ronald Reagan, whose began his administration in 1980 by firing striking air traffic controllers. Since that time, the U.S. has seen a steady erosion of protections for workers, regulations to protect the environment, and living standards. The Depression-era accord was broken, and the U.S. has seen a steady decline in living standards ever since.
One could imagine a situation in which a new accord was established, and a detente could be reached again between the working class and capital. As the world falls further into chaos and people’s lives become more precarious, the old accords that were established between capital and labor are no longer holding. While it is possible that rational capitalists who want a stabilized system will come to the rescue and create a new accord, that outcome is highly unlikely, for several reasons.
One reason it is unlikely is the climate crisis. Clean energy is being installed at a rapid rate, and it is transforming lives in much of the Global South. Speeding the transition in ways necessary for our survival will require more regulations on polluting industries, and more government investments in infrastructure. And yet, the fossil fuel oligarchs continue to fight those changes tooth and nail, as seen in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The fossil fuel oligarchy holds dominant power is the U.S., Russia, the Gulf States, and many powerful transnational institutions. It is not going to peacefully wander into the sunset as the transition away from fossil fuels undermines its power and profits. The fact that the survival interests of a livable planet are in direct conflict with the interests of that politically powerful sector make it difficult for other sectors of capital to come to a new accord to stabilize the system.
Another factor making a new accord unlikely is the political power of the technology oligarchs whose social media products are responsible for much of the current chaos in the world’s information ecosystems. Those oligarchs and their firms are fighting globally to maintain their ability to operate as monopolies, and are preventing more benign forms of social media from developing. They continue to refuse to limit the spread of forms of misinformation that led to massacres in many places including Myanmar. They allow Russian bots and other malign entities to spread disinformation in ways that help us get outcomes like the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Those tech oligarchs are increasingly flexing their political power. A new accord between capital and human society would require strong action to reign in those destructive forces.
A third factor making a new accord difficult is that in earlier periods, businesses functioned largely by making things that met people’s needs. Consumers got the products they desired, and in many parts of the world, living standards rose. In the past decades, capitalism has entered a vampiric phase, where finance capital extracts profits while doing less to create things that meet people’s needs and desires. This has led to the rich getting richer without creating rising living standards as a by-product, as in happened in earlier phases of capitalism.
As inequality increases all around the world, a variety of social ills follow in its wake, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. These range from obvious ones such as increased crime rates, to less obvious ones such as teen pregnancy, and a tendency for social cohesion to fall apart. Lack of social cohesion can then lead voters to put authoritarian leaders into power who promise to give them a sense of stability as their worlds fall apart.
Solidarity
Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
The term solidarity is a call to unite across differences to advocate for a common set of interests. It often means standing up for the needs of others, not in the form of charity, but in the form of building social relations that work for others, or stopping destructive forces such as wars, or social practices that lead to poverty, in the name of building a world based on healthy forms of interdependency.
The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world.
In every part of the world there are examples of people managing resources in ways that build solidarity. They are creating community gardens, community land trusts, time banks, and credit unions. They are finding ways to support and promote sharing, gift giving, and caring for one another. They are building networks of socially oriented enterprises. They are developing models to spread. They are working to transform the context in which these enterprises take place to foster their growth and increase their impacts.
Moving to a world based on principles of solidarity involves building that new world from within the belly of the old. We need to challenge the dominant structures that uphold the old order, while simultaneously building and living in viable alternatives, and rethinking how we understand the nature of our shared social world. We need to fight, build, and rethink.
The accords established to stabilize many countries early in the 20th century were the results of tremendous work by people organizing in trade unions and broad-based social movements. Unfortunately, the current crisis comes at a time when trade unions are not as strong as they have been in some periods in the past. And yet union power is developing as are a wide range of oppositional social movements. The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world. As we do all we can to stop the current onslaught against a livable world, we should also keep in mind our broader vision of a world that works for all of us, including the natural systems on which our lives depend.
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Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Mar 18, 2025
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.
- Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control.
Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. - Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege.
Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. - Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity.
Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. - Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right.
Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
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Trump’s Sovereigntist Imperialism Will Trigger Self-Defeating US Decline
As Trump transforms the United States into pariah nation, he will be accelerating the nation’s fall from power, generating increasingly dangerous domestic and international turmoil and insecurity.
Feb 15, 2025
Days after November’s Trump-MAGA election victory, a senior Russian diplomat asked his American interlocutors how great a historical transformation it signaled. Was it the equivalent of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the South deserting the Democratic Party in response to the 1965 Civil Rights Act?
Within days of his inauguration it was clear, Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times, that U.S. President Donald Trump and his cronies were “waging war on the American system of government.” Billionaire plutocrats captured Washington to increase their immense fortunes, to eviscerate our limited social safety net, to eliminate corporate regulations, and to turn the clock back on 70 years of civil and human rights gains. A month on we find ourselves in the midst of what is politely described as a “constitutional crisis,” as Trump and his co-conspirators signal they will refuse to respect court orders that overrule their illegal and unconstitutional actions.
The chaos and calamity the Trump regime is wreaking within the United States extends beyond our borders, near and far. Counter-productively Trump and company are swinging their recking ball at the foundations of the United States’ liberal and sometimes democratic empire which has subsidized the U.S. economy for more than a century. The murder of as many as 3 million Vietnamese; NATO’s generation-long Afghanistan War; and continuing supply of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weapons, as well as diplomatic support, for Israel’s genocidal second Palestinian Nakba, give lie to a benign U.S. led “international rules-based order.” Reinforcing the image of the Ugly American, the Trump-Musk assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development is killing innocent aid recipients around the world by denying them food and medicines. Trump’s 25% tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, targeted primarily against China, provide an unexpected opening to the Middle Kingdom. They violate the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement and a trade agreement with Australia, signaling to the world that, like Hitler before him, Trump operates as if treaties are not worth the paper they are written on, and that the U.S.’ word is not to be trusted. This spells international chaos and economic pain for many U.S. Americans.
Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation.
That era of liberal imperialism is over. It has been coming since the end of the Cold War, as China’s rise and that of the most influential nations of the Global South have created the still uncertain and fluid multipolar disorder. Trump and company’s “peace through strength” is a response to the United States’ relative decline and is being pursued in a nationally self-defeating sovereigntist imperial tradition.
A New York Times article explained that the early sovereigntist movement sought “not only America’s formal sovereignty… but also the traditional forms of rule to which its white, native-born leaders were accustomed… they understood international cooperation as a threat to their personal sovereignty as well that of their nations.” Sovereigntists played leading roles in the 1930s’ fascist “America First” movement and opposed creation of the United Nations, the International Court, NATO, and the World Trade Organization as infringements on U.S. sovereignty. Sovereigntists supported racist Rhodesia as a “brave little country” and defended apartheid South Africa against U.N. sanctions. The Trumpist Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proclaimed that “international organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed. They should be abandoned.”
The conservative Trump critic Bret Stephens describes the sovereigntist ideology serving as a means for “a country doing what it wants to do… an indifference to the behavior of other states, however cruel or dangerous, so long as it doesn’t impinge on us.” It means that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In Trump’s case, we know that he despised the “rules-based order.” His former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien reported that he ”adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” That is to say his personal narcissistic sovereignty.
Thus, we have threats to seize Greenland and to annex Canada for minerals in order to outpace China in the technological and economic races for dominance. Panama is threatened in order to restore U.S. control over the strategically vital canal. And while the U.S. spends 3.4% of its GDP, nearly a trillion dollars, Trump has raised his demand that NATO nations increase their military spending to a staggering 5% of their GDP so that the Pentagon can concentrate its military and economic power on containing and dominating China. A fool’s errand.
Some governments, for example Poland, Japan, and Colombia, are kowtowing to Trump’s crude demands. Others—including Denmark, France, and even Germany, at least in the face of Trump’s Greenland demands—are insisting on respect for their national sovereignty. We can expect linkages as Trump goes beyond his threat to encourage Russia to invade nations that don’t meet his exorbitant military spending demands with tariff threats and other demands for those who fail to kowtow to the new lord’s orders.
Trump has yet to fully reveal his military and diplomatic approaches to Europe and Russia. In his return to power, Trump seems less smitten by Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the Russian autocrat is “destroying Russia.” Trump has threatened further and useless sanctions against Moscow and increases in military support for Kyiv if Moscow refuses to come to the negotiating table on Trump’s terms. He has also offered continued military support for Ukraine in exchange for significant quantities of rare earth minerals needed for the industrial and the technological arms race with China. The Ukraine War, of course, is not only for control of that long-tormented borderland. On all sides, it is being fought to shape and define the Post-Post-Cold War’s European order and strategic architecture.
At the same time, Trump, who believe it or not is driven in part by his Nobel Peace Prize ambitions, as well as his transactional way of being, could attempt to negotiate a comprehensive grand bargain with Putin over the heads Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukraine, and European leaders. It could include everything from the future of Ukraine to conventional and nuclear weapons in Europe, and to whatever follows the expiration of the New START nuclear treaty in February 2026.
On the other hand, if Putin is not willing to accommodate Trump’s demands we could see renewed commitments to the Biden administration’s goal of dealing Moscow a “strategic defeat,” and to the new Cold War.
On the international economic front, Trump’s tariff threats are more than temper tantrums. Rejection of the 70-year-old liberal imperial disorder includes the ambition of replacing the Bretton Woods-WTO systems with what Trump’s former Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer terms a “new American trade system.”
Lighthizer, who ignited the economic warfare with China during Trump’s first term, recently wrote that “countries with democratic governments [as of this now applies to the U.S. -jg!] and mostly free economies should come together to create a new trade regime. This system could enforce balance by having two tiers of tariffs.” Punitive tariffs would target “nondemocratic countries as well as those that insist on beggar-thy-neighbor aggressive industrial policies to run large surpluses.” Those within his new regime “would pay lower tariffs and they could be adjusted over time to ensure balance.”
The imperial naivety and ambition of this strategy brings to mind the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Abrams belief that with “shock and awe” that they could simultaneously export democracy to Iraq and seize control of the “sea of oil” on which that nation floats.
By definition, the narcissism of admiring one’s reflection in the mirror and insisting on personal or national sovereignty at the expense of others means ignoring the needs and agency of others. Trump’s needs and insistence on dominating anyone or any nation that refuses to kowtow to his demands will inevitably result in the alienation of valued and essential partners and painful isolation. Just as no man is an island, neither is a nation. As Trump transforms the United States into pariah nation, he will be accelerating the nation’s decline, generating increasingly dangerous domestic and international turmoil and insecurity.
We saw that with the end of the Cold War, based on common security and win-win diplomacy, there are alternatives that will enhance our personal and national security. In the words of the Jewish sage Hillel, “If not now, when? If not me [us] who?” We and the world’s nations are not powerless. U.S. and international strategies that target Trump’s stock market Achilles heel or ultimately a general strike could discipline this most undisciplined and dangerous despot.
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