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us imperialism
Trump's Reckless War Drums in Nigeria Stink of Islamophobia and Imperial Arrogance
For the sake of Nigerian lives and the American soul, we must not allow Trump to drag America into a quagmire of his own making.
Nov 07, 2025
In yet another display of the same divisive rhetoric that defined his first term, US President Donald Trump has once again pulled the United States into the crosshairs of global instability, this time by saber rattling over Nigeria’s complex ethnic and religious conflict. Trump not only threatened to slash US aid, but he also said he might order “fast and vicious” military strikes against what he calls “Islamic terrorists” slaughtering Christians. Aside from the fact that Trump is wrong, he is ranting xenophobic ideas, platforming American exceptionalism, and demonstrating a blatant disregard for the lives of millions caught in the cross fire of what is simply a resource war with colonial-era grudges.
Let’s be clear: The violence taking place today in Nigeria is heartbreaking and must end. Boko Haram’s extremism, clashes between farmers and herders, and general hooliganism have claimed over 20,000 civilian lives since 2020. It is true that Christian communities in the north-central regions have suffered unimaginable horrors as raids have left villages in ashes, children murdered in their beds, and churches reduced to rubble. The April massacre in Zike and the June bloodbath in Yelwata are prime examples of the atrocities taking place in Nigeria. These incidents are grave reminders that the international community must pay more attention to this crisis.
But Trump’s response is crude and wrong. Painting all Muslims as genocidal monsters is not the answer. Calling Nigeria a failed state ripe for American liberation is not the solution, especially since the data shows otherwise. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, more Muslims than Christians have been targeted in recent years. Boko Haram has massacred worshipers in mosques, torched markets in Muslim-majority areas, and threatened their own co-religionists.
The crisis in Nigeria is not a holy war against Christianity. Instead, it’s a devastating cocktail of poverty, climate-driven land disputes, and radical ideologies that prey on everyone and not just any distinct group. By framing Nigeria’s conflict as an existential threat to Christians alone, Trump is not shining a spotlight on the victims. Instead, he is weaponizing right-wing conspiracy theories to stoke Islamophobia, the same toxic playbook he used to fuel his ban on Muslims, and which left refugee families shattered at America’s borders.
Americans must reject Trump’s imperial fantasy and instead demand congressional oversight on any military action.
Nigeria’s leaders are right to be astonished and furious. Presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said he was “shocked” over Trump's invasion musings, while President Bola Tinubu decried the religious intolerance label as a distortion of their "national reality." Even opposition voices, like Labour Party spokesperson Ken Eluma Asogwa, admit the government's security lapses but reject Trump's extermination narrative as baseless fearmongering.
Trump should indeed be viewed as a warmonger, seeking every opportunity to sow discord and destruction in his wake. He sees every crisis as a photo op for his machismo and self-promotion. His first term was a disaster and now, in his second term, he wants to unleash drones and troops on Africa’s most populous nation, destabilizing a key partner in counterterrorism and migration management.
Unilateral strikes will only inflame the conflict’s root causes like resource scarcity and ethnic tensions. If anything, Trump’s misguided ideas to resolve the crisis will only exacerbate it by creating new waves of refugees and sowing even more discord throughout Nigeria. The country needs real solutions, not Trump’s wrong-headed conspiracy theories. He should be saving those who are vulnerable, not bombing them into submission.
A real solution would involve surging humanitarian aid to displaced families, partnering with the United Nations and African Union for joint security training, and pressuring Nigeria’s government through incentives, not threats. Real strength is in building bridges. Trump shows his weakness by building bunkers.
The Nigerian crisis is a clarion call for the world, but especially for America. Trump’s rhetoric is not just wrong; it is a betrayal of American values. Americans must reject Trump’s imperial fantasy and instead demand congressional oversight on any military action. America must recommit to a foreign policy that heals rather than divides. The world is watching, and for the sake of Nigerian lives and the American soul, we must not allow Trump to drag America into a quagmire of his own making. Nigeria deserves better.
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Why the Left Should Not Join Trump or BRICS' Attack on Globalism
US hegemony and a neoliberal faith in unfettered markets are noxious to be sure, but don’t be fooled by autocrats championing sovereignty
Nov 05, 2025
President Donald Trump hates Antifa. He hates late-night TV hosts, Democratic-controlled cities, and anyone who has ever challenged him in court. As of October, he officially hates the Nobel committee for not giving him a peace prize, despite his efforts to strong-arm its members into voting for him.
The president has gone after everyone he thinks has ever done him wrong. But there is a Venn diagram to his vendettas, an overlap in his circle of obsessions.
Map out his attacks, subtracting the purely personal and the primarily partisan, and you’ll see that they converge on a profound disgust for the liberal international order. That Trump has personally profited from that very global order—his portfolio of international real estate, his business’s reliance on global supply chains, the unacknowledged benefits he’s accrued from the international rule of law—makes no difference.
“Globalists” like Barack Obama, George Soros, and Emmanuel Macron have made fun of him, not fully accepting him into their ranks and refusing to acknowledge his brilliance with medals and awards. In the president’s skewed accounting ledger, the gatekeepers at the global country club who don’t want him as a member must be made to pay.
The dalliance between left and right is taking place at the margins where a mutual disgust for liberalism fuels the romance.
Trump has attacked the liberal international order in seemingly every conceivable way. He’s initiated a global trade war. He’s dismantled US humanitarian assistance to impoverished lands and put pressure on allies to spend more money on war preparations, not welfare programs or foreign aid. He’s destroyed relationships with liberal allies like Canada and the non-Hungarian members of the European Union. He’s levied sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in an effort to shut it down. He’s gleefully ignored international law by embracing ICC scofflaws like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. And he’s committed his own crimes, like the extrajudicial murder of the crews of nine boats near the Venezuelan coast and five in the Pacific Ocean.
The United States had long been a pillar of the liberal international order. So, when Trump takes a sledgehammer to its base, he causes potentially irreparable damage to the reputation, power, and global position of the United States. Many Americans, particularly those in the political center, are aghast at the self-inflicted wounds this country is now suffering.
In other quarters, however, there’s celebration.
America’s right wing has long hated everything that shimmers in the distance beyond the territorial waters of this country. The United Nations gives it indigestion. Ditto the European Union, the Third World, and anything connected to universal human rights. The most reactionary elements of the Republican Party have blocked Washington’s ratification of international treaties, undermined global efforts to address threats like climate change, and claimed to spot communist (or Islamist or terrorist) conspiracies behind every international institution and many nationalist movements. Such right-wingers have pushed to eliminate all forms of soft power in favor of beefed-up hard power. The ascendancy of Trump has provided them with an opportunity to force conventional conservatives from their party, while consolidating an America First position.
Elements of the left, too, have rejoiced in Trump’s globalism bashing. The most predictable support has come from unions that believe the president’s tariffs will protect American jobs. But some leftists have also been hesitant to support the work of the now largely shuttered US Agency for International Development (USAID)—even its distribution of AIDS medicines and climate funds—because of its legacy as a “destructive arm of American imperialism.” Some have even joined hands with Trump to deride NATO and echo Kremlin talking points on Ukraine. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the odd progressive even mistook Trump for an anti-imperialist.
Once upon a time, adventurous theorists imagined that communism and capitalism might both end up adopting some version of democratic socialism, as a reformed Soviet Union and an increasingly welfare-state-oriented United States seemed to be converging on the Swedish model. In the early 1980s, however, the leaders of the two superpowers of that time, Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan, teamed up to drive a knife through that particular fantasy.
Today, a different convergence is in process and the two poles are not meeting in the middle. Rather, the dalliance between left and right is taking place at the margins where a mutual disgust for liberalism fuels the romance. This courtship has developed its own love language. Both sides love to hate “globalism”—and, of course, the globalists who globalized it.
Trump stands astride that consensus like an angry god, urging his followers to tear down the temples and wreak vengeance on those who worship foreign deities. Meanwhile, some Marxists mutter approvingly of “sharpening the contradictions”—the notion that Trump will make things so bad that the masses will rise up in reaction. Meanwhile, MAGA followers love the spectacle of destruction that clears the way for white people, rich people, or just plain mean people to take over.
The left and the right still maintain very different visions of the future: maximum justice versus maximum injustice. But their odd convergence against the international liberal elite helps to explain MAGA’s success in certain Democratic strongholds. “Throw the globalist bums out” is a tagline that can appeal to both ends of the political spectrum.
As the poet William Butler Yeats observed after the end of the First World War, the center is not holding, while the best lack all conviction. During this second coming of Donald Trump, however, you better believe that it won’t be mere anarchy that is loosed upon the world.
Globalism, No. Multipolarism, Yes?
Multipolarism has lately become all the rage. The notion that the world could have multiple centers of power in contrast to the bipolarism of the Cold War or the aspirational unipolarism of the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is anything but new. Still, with the “rise of the rest” and the ascent of China in particular, the world has begun to look ever less US-centric.
For many, however, multipolarism isn’t just a description, it’s a prescription, too.
On the right, philosophers like Alexander Dugin in Russia and Olavo de Carvalho in Brazil have used the concept as part of their ultra-nationalist projects. For Dugin, Russia must reassert its superpower status as part of a new Eurasian force to block the Anglo-Saxons and their NATO henchmen. For Carvalho, who died in 2022, multipolarism would enable Brazil to move closer to the Christian West, while shrugging off its subservience to global elites.
Some on the left, too, have identified multipolarism as a sign of a more equitable geopolitics—and a potential cudgel against American imperialism. As the Tricontinental editorialized in 2022:
The longed-for Western, globalised capitalist world has not lived up to the expectations of even its most enthusiastic advocates. Today we are witnessing a shift towards a multipolar world, despite the aspirations of neoliberal globalists, neoconservatives, and those who favour the US model of development (‘Americanists’).
Enter the BRICS
If multipolarism seems like a magic elixir to many, today’s vessel of choice for it is the BRICS. Over the years, many multipolar efforts have fallen by the wayside, including the Non-Aligned Movement, the New International Economic Order, the Group of 77, and the World Social Forum. But the institutions created by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) beginning in 2010 were seen by multipolarists as the inheritors of those earlier movements for non-alignment and so a potential counterforce to US and Western power. According to such a scenario, the BRICS would sooner or later replace the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), dethrone the dollar, and remake the entire global economy.
For some on the left, support for the transformative nature of BRICS recalls arguments used to defend Russia from charges of imperial designs on Ukraine. By supposedly holding the line against the enlargement of the European Union and the expansion of NATO, Russia was seen as standing up to the West. The globalists responded with the same kind of sanctions they’d applied to Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. Unlike the leaders of those three countries, however, Vladimir Putin has never pretended to be a man of the left. Instead, as a right-wing authoritarian leader, he’s killed opponents; thrown dissidents in jail; eliminated an independent media in Russia; and imposed a religious, anti-LGBT, misogynistic agenda on its society. He’s also revived Russian imperialism with his invasion of Ukraine, his political meddling in Moldova, and his cyber-interference in the Baltic countries.
The cognitive dissonance required for a progressive to defend Putin carries over to any enthusiasm for BRICS as a whole. After all, a majority of the countries in that 11-member group—Russia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—are presided over by autocrats. Only Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and India are democracies, and the last two come with asterisks, given the autocratic tendencies of their current leaders. Moreover, the anti-imperial credentials of the bloc are suspect, considering Russia’s interference in its “near abroad,” China’s position toward Taiwan, India’s efforts in Kashmir, and the Saudi war in Yemen. At best, many of the BRICS members are sub-imperial, as political economist Patrick Bond has long argued.
As a bloc of mostly authoritarian, eco-unfriendly, and socio-economically conservative countries masquerading as a geopolitical counterbalance, the BRICS represent the multipolarism of fools.
The BRICS also generally have a distinctly regressive position on climate change, which is hardly surprising given that the majority of them are significant fossil-fuel exporters. Brazil has been pushing its fellow members to focus on climate change as a threat to the planet, and a number of BRICS statements do acknowledge the importance of reducing carbon emissions. But China, despite its massive investments in the green energy revolution, remains stunningly dependent on the worst of the fossil fuels, coal, as do India and Indonesia, while carbon neutrality remains a distant goal for Russia (2070). In the latest BRICS statement, the members “acknowledge fossil fuels will still play an important role in the world’s energy mix, particularly for emerging markets and developing economies.”
But the conservative nature of the BRICS is perhaps most strikingly on display in its embrace of the global capitalist economy. Its July 2025 statement enthusiastically endorsed both the IMF and the World Bank, and put the World Trade Organization at the center of the global trading system. The principal BRICS institution, the New Development Bank, has been heralded as a building block for a new economic order, but its focus on financing the same old dirty extraction projects makes it a mirror image of the World Bank.
The BRICS mode of multipolarism has but a single progressive attribute: its potential as a counterbalance to US imperial power. Unfortunately, even a tepid challenge to Washington’s authority has produced a predictable backlash from Donald Trump, a leader committed not just to US unipolarism but to his own unileaderism. To the imaginary threat that the BRICS would actually create a currency to challenge the dollar, Trump has repeatedly warned that “any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff.”
Toward a True Internationalism
In its BRICS form, multipolarism boils down to, at best, an effort to get a better seat at the table with the big boys. At worst, it’s a repudiation of the progressive parts of internationalism, especially global efforts to rein in abuses of power through higher standards on human rights, the environment, and labor.
To support the regressive multipolarism of the BRICS countries, elements of the right and left trumpet the importance of sovereignty and the notion that a country’s leadership has uncontested control over the territory within its borders. Sovereignty is indeed under attack on all sides. At a territorial level, the most obvious violation is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the economic level, neoliberal globalists want to challenge sovereign economic power through corporate attacks on state regulations and the IMF’s imposition of budget austerity in its loan agreements. Internationalists, by contrast, focus on democratically agreed-upon norms around human rights, while challenging the state’s prerogative to deploy child soldiers, employ child workers, or kill off large parts of the population.
Progressive internationalists should, however, be wary of conservative notions of sovereignty. Sure, we loathe the IMF’s overreach and the way oil companies take countries to court to dismantle their environmental regulations. But we also don’t believe that kings, tyrants, or even democratically elected autocrats should have the freedom to invade other countries or engage in extrajudicial killings. Sovereignty is not a trump card (or a Trump card). Popular sovereignty, where power is in the hands of the people, is certainly indispensable in securing more democratic societies. But as Trump and his friends like Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Viktor Orbán of Hungary have demonstrated, autocrats often use the language of popular sovereignty to gain office before concentrating power in their own sovereign hands.
It’s a dispiriting irony that just when the world needs more internationalism to address climate change, economic inequality, and pandemics, among other devastating realities, it’s also experiencing an upsurge in nationalism propagated by the sovereignistas. Promoting internationalism these days feels a lot like embracing a Palestinian state when the material basis for such a state is disappearing beneath a rising tide of Israeli settlements and bombs. In both cases, there is a will but not, it seems, a way.
Progressives should not join hands with the right in a misguided attack on “globalists.” US hegemony and a neoliberal faith in unfettered markets are noxious to be sure, but don’t be fooled by autocrats championing sovereignty. As a bloc of mostly authoritarian, eco-unfriendly, and socio-economically conservative countries masquerading as a geopolitical counterbalance, the BRICS represent the multipolarism of fools. The ends do not justify the BRICS.
Call me a globalist, but someone has to stick up for this planet when so many extremists, whatever they may call themselves, have their knives out to carve Earth up into their own fiefdoms of bigotry.
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Venezuela’s Oil, US-led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Nov 04, 2025
The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.
The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of US regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.
In 2023, Trump openly stated: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we're buying oil from Venezuela, so we're making a dictator very rich.” His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country’s resources. .
What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed thousands of troops, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life.
On October 26, 2025, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent US military strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and Colombia are a “real possibility.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicolás Maduro he’d “head to Russia or China right now.” These senators aim to normalize the idea that Washington decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the US fighting Russia in Ukraine to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the US to grab.
Nor are Trump’s moves a new story vis-à-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive US administrations have tried to submit Venezuela’s internal politics to Washington’s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez. The CIA knew the details of the coup in advance, and the US immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Chávez retook power. Yet the US did not end its support for regime change.
In March 2015, Barack Obama codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela’s internal political situation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the US. The White House has maintained that claim of a US “national emergency” ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaidó, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela’s “interim president,” as if Trump could simply name a new Venezuelan president. This tragicomedy of the US eventually fell to pieces in 2023, when the US dropped this failed and ludicrous gambit.
The US is now starting a new chapter of resource grabbing. Trump has long been vocal about “keeping the oil.” In 2019, when discussing Syria, President Trump said “We are keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.” To those in doubt, US troops are still in the northeast of Syria today, occupying the oil fields. Earlier in 2016, on Iraq’s oil, Trump said, “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen, I said keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don’t let somebody else get it.”
Now, with fresh military strikes on Venezuela vessels and open talk of land attacks, the administration is invoking narcotics to justify regime change. Yet Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter expressly prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” No US theory of “cartel wars” remotely justifies coercive regime change.
Even before the military strikes, US coercive sanctions have functioned as a siege engine. Obama built the sanctions framework in 2015, and Trump further weaponized it to topple Maduro. The claim was that “maximum pressure” would empower Venezuelans. In practice, the sanctions have caused widespread suffering. As economist and renowned sanctions expert Francisco Rodríguez found in his study of the “Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions,” the result of the coercive US measures has been a catastrophic decline in Venezuelan living standards, starkly worsening health and nutrition, and dire harm to vulnerable populations.
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The US has repeatedly undertaken regime-change operations in pursuit of oil, uranium, banana plantations, pipeline routes, and other resources: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Chile (1973), Iraq (2003), Haiti (2004), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and Ukraine (2014), just to name a few such cases. Now Venezuela is on the block.
In her brilliant book Covert Regime Change (2017), Professor Lindsay O’Rourke details the machinations, blowbacks, and disasters of no fewer than 64 US covert regime-change operations during the years 1947-1989! She focused on this earlier period because many key documents for that era have by now been declassified. Tragically, the pattern of a US foreign policy based on covert (and not-so-covert) regime-change operations continues to this day.
The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life. A war against Venezuela would be a war that Americans do not want, against a country that has not threatened or attacked the US, and on legal grounds that would fail a first-year law student. Bombing vessels, ports, refineries, or soldiers is not a show of strength. It is the epitome of gangsterism.
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