SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
us imperialism
US Revolutionaries Had 1 Huge Advantage: They Didn’t Have to Fight Off the US
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
Jul 05, 2026
More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.
Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?
The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.
In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.
After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.
In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."
By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.
In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.
In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:
In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own countrymen, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).
The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.
With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.
America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Iran Challenges the US Doctrine of Low-Intensity Warfare
In the US-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power, and uphold international law.
Jun 23, 2026
The 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may lead to lasting peace or it may be over within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the US and Israel. If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped US foreign policy for decades.
Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the US-Iran memorandum and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the US fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.
If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war between Iran, Israel, and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.
This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries—all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.
This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in US aggression and Israeli regional expansion.
President Donald Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the US and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the US from the war on Iran that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.
But to understand the roots of this crisis in US foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive US foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that US military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”
Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.
The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the US defeat in Vietnam. After President George Bush II and Vice President Dick Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Presidents Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.
This US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s. From the Suez crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.
In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.
They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia; the occupation of Beirut; the invasion of Grenada; the airstrikes on Libya in 1986; as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities,” and “unconventional warfare.”
They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact “a strategic reorientation of the US military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”
Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the US and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.
But the US involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East. It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; US and Western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.
Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying US special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Concentrating such a large share of US war casualties in such a small force—about 70,000 men and women at any one time—helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.
The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated, or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.
Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked US and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.
Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.
But the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of US imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of US and Western politicians and establishment media.
US political, military, and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.
In the US-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power, and uphold international law.
Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security, and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.
This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in US aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.
As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the US empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting US imperial violence for generations.
It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the essential transition from empire to democracy.
That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Democrats Offer No Real Alternative to Trump's 'Donroe Doctrine' for Latin America
In Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, both parties agree with the assumption that Washington has the right to shape the political future of other nations.
Jun 18, 2026
Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington's efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute—if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering—is less about ends than means.
Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it—with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.
The Central Role of Sanctions in Projecting Imperial Coercive Power
Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then—most drastically—against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.
Sanctions—a form of collective punishment—are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.
The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance.
Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention—as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026—the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.
Yet sanctions are very potent: Between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year—more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.
While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies—the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.
The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication—that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and—very frequently—intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.
Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel proclaimed, “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.
Transitioning to “Democracy” in Venezuela
In the case of Venezuela, the Democrats have criticized the Republicans from the right, complaining that the cudgel of imperial power against essentially defenseless small states has not been wielded with sufficient malice.
Washington has imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Venezuela since 2015 in efforts to asphyxiate its Bolivarian Revolution. The transparently false rationale for continuing sanctions is that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. Although the threat is obviously the other way around, mainstream Democrats have not exposed this lie. How could they, when it originated with President Barack Obama and was subsequently echoed by President Joe Biden and then Trump?
Despite the horrific toll of an estimated 100,000 excess deaths attributed to US-imposed sanctions, Venezuela has resisted and maintained an unbroken continuity of leadership from Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro and to now Delcy Rodríguez. And that’s the rub for the Democrats.
Ranking Democrat members of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY) and Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), issued a “request [for] a clear explanation” of Trump’s Venezuela policy. Their meek missive came a full five months after the abduction of the Venezuelan president, an operation that resulted in more than 100 collateral deaths. Meanwhile, more than 200 occupants of small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been subjected to extrajudicial murder by the Trump administration.
Yet these inconvenient facts are absent from the June 8 Democratic Party congressional foreign-policy leadership’s statement on Venezuela. Their complaint is that Trump’s White House has failed to sufficiently “exercise its leverage.” As they put it, “As of today, the [state] department has yet to provide any evidence the Trump administration is doing any of this hard work.”
The contradiction of kidnapping a lawful head of state in the name of restoring democracy does not trouble the Democrats. Rather, they “strongly support the Venezuelan people’s right to choose their leaders”… after the US abducts their president.
These Democrat leaders are also troubled that Venezuelan authorities were allowed to appoint a new attorney general and defense minister without apparent US interference. In addition, they express impatience with Trump’s lethargy in not yet overhauling Venezuela’s supreme court and electoral council.
To the extent that they make any concrete demand, the putative opposition party wants Trump to impose an “electoral timeline” on Venezuela. Yet, the same party has no problem with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine who suspended elections after his legal term in office expired two years ago, banned opposition parties, shuttered critical media, and arrested political opponents.
Restoring “Democracy” in Cuba
Democratic Party policy toward Cuba is perhaps best exemplified by Biden’s retention of the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, which he inherited from Trump. Then, just six days before leaving office, Biden rescinded the designation with full certainty that the incoming Republican would—and did—reverse his decision.
Former National Security Council officer Ricardo Zúñiga was Obama’s adviser for the Americas and Biden’s special envoy for the Northern Triangle. He writes in Foreign Affairs offering advice on, rather than criticism of, Trump’s Cuba policy.
Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults, and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion.
Zúñiga advocates achieving regime change in Cuba through “diplomacy” rather than “force.” Scare quotes are used because, for this Democrat, brute economic strangulation is regarded as diplomacy. Zúñiga would “forswear military action,” but only if Cuba submits to US dictates. And so long as “pro-market reforms” are adopted, “democracy” can wait.
Without a hint of opprobrium, Zúñiga casually references the US invasion of Iran and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president as policy options that would not be effective in Cuba. Given these examples, he then complains that Cubans remain resistant to “American views on democracy and human rights.”
He acknowledges that even if Trump wished to selectively roll back the murderous sanctions currently imposed on Cuba, he would face opposition not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Where this Democrat differs from Republicans is in his supremely hypocritical conclusion: “It is ultimately Cuban citizens who will determine their country’s future”… after the US overthrows their government.
Promoting “Democracy” in Nicaragua
Tiny Nicaragua is also labelled an “extraordinary threat” to the US. While the harshest and most successful sanctions against it were applied during the Reagan administrations, when an economic blockade and the US-financed Contra war eventually unseated the Sandinista government in 1990, economic pressure quickly resumed once the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007. Both the Bush and then Obama administrations made cuts in aid, and it was under Obama that Democrats joined with Republicans to launch the NICA Act, eventually implemented (under Trump) in 2018.
While Trump signed the NICA Act and sanctioned various Nicaraguan functionaries, Democrat senators took the lead in formulating stronger measures in the RENACER Act, signed by Biden in 2021. This led to an estimated loss of $500 million annually in development finance that would have been directed at Nicaragua’s poorest communities. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), with Marco Rubio, put forward new legislation in 2023 that was intended to strengthen the RENACER Act and ensure even greater damage.
Biden officials were consistently aggressive toward Nicaragua. In 2022, his nominee for ambassador to Managua, Hugo Rodríguez, promised the US Congress that he would “support using all economic and diplomatic tools to bring about a change in direction in Nicaragua.” As a result, Rodríguez was never accepted as ambassador and the post remains unfilled.
In 2024, Biden’s trade representative launched a hostile investigation clearly aimed at disrupting trade with Nicaragua and possibly at excluding it from the regional trade treaty, CAFTA. When it eventually reported in late 2025 it recommended punitive tariffs, but only relatively mild penalties were actually implemented by Trump.
Marco Rubio regularly imposes sanctions on individual Nicaraguans, including 100 more just this month. More than 2,300 have now been sanctioned by successive administrations. Nevertheless, hard-line Democrats, as well as Republicans, are pushing Rubio to do far more.
Two Parties, One Strategy
The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance. The two major parties differ mainly in messaging and, to a lesser extent, on tactics. Their theatrical contention is neither between intervention and nonintervention, nor between coercion and diplomacy. More often, it is between competing methods for achieving the same strategic objective.
Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults, and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion. But both approaches rest on the assumption that Washington has the right to shape the political future of other nations.
Despite differences in tone and tactics, the supposed opposition party offers not an articulated alternative to the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine but, at the very most, a variation of it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular