COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

If you were wondering why the US establishment was so much more chill about Trump becoming president this term than they were the first time around, you’re watching the reason now.

The powers that be were assured that he’d carry out longstanding imperial agendas like kidnapping Nicolás Maduro, bombing Iran and overseeing a final solution to the Palestinian problem, and they trusted him to carry out those plans.

The MAGA narrative that the establishment hates Trump because he’s fighting the Deep State has never been true; there were certain factions within the US imperial power structure which disliked Trump, but that was only because he was not a proven commodity like Hillary Clinton and they didn’t trust him to be a reliable steward of the empire.

Trump proved that he could be trusted with his advancement of longtime swamp monster agendas throughout his first term, and he plainly did enough during his time out of office to assure his fellow empire managers that he would do even more if re-elected.

The empire needs its skillful orators and apologists like Obama, but it also needs its iron-fisted overt tyrants like Trump.

It needs good cop presidents to manufacture global consensus and expand US soft power, and it also needs bad cop presidents to inflict the hard power abuses the good cops can’t get away with. Both are essential components to the operation of the imperial machine.

Marco Rubio:

If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned — at least a little bit. pic.twitter.com/6ZBmwykfH1

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 3, 2026

Cuba for example has been a socialist island nation off the coast of the United States for generations, because the US hasn’t been able topple its government by its usual means. All the standard CIA assassination ops, proxy warfare and economic blockades were unsuccessful, and there’s been no national or international support for sending US boots on the ground to regime change a small country that poses no military threat.

But a last-term bad cop president like Trump has options at his disposal that would be off the table for good cop presidents.

US empire managers are discussing this openly.

“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio after Maduro’s capture.

“Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump told the press on Sunday next to a delighted Lindsey Graham. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re going to hold out. But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from their Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it. And Cuba is literally ready to fall.”

This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened. pic.twitter.com/SXvI868d4Z

— Department of State (@StateDept) January 5, 2026

“You just wait for Cuba,” Graham added. “Cuba is a Communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns, they preyed on their own people. Their days are numbered. We’re gonna wake up one day, I hope in ’26, in our backyard we’re gonna have allies in these countries doing business with America, not narcoterrorist dictators killing Americans.

“Donald Trump will have done something that’s eluded America since the fifties: deal with the Communist dictatorship 90 miles off the coast of Florida,” Graham said on Fox News. “I can’t wait till that day comes. To our Cuban friends in Florida and throughout America, the liberation of your homeland is close.”

The Beltway swamp was saying this well before Trump’s Venezuela assault. In October, Senator Rick Scott told 60 Minutes that if Maduro was removed “it’ll be the end of Cuba,” saying “America is gonna take care of the Southern Hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy.”

Trump’s blatant smash-and-grab violation of international law in Venezuela wouldn’t have worked for a president who’s trying to put a nice guy face on the US empire, but for a wealthy reality TV star who’s comfortable playing the WWE heel, it’s opened up potential power grabs that have been eluding the imperialists for decades.

JUST IN – Lindsey Graham and Trump pose together with a “Make Iran Great Again” hat, signed by Trump. pic.twitter.com/656ctZp52M

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 5, 2026

When the news broke that Trump had attacked Caracas I was working on an article about his warmongering with Iran which I had to abandon to focus on the new development. The president had announced on Truth Social that if any of the people protesting in Iran are killed, “the United States of America will come to their rescue,” adding, “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Prior to that Trump had confirmed to the press that the US would attack Iran if it tried to rebuild its missile program, saying in a joint news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu that “I hope they’re not trying to build up again because if they are, we’re going have no choice but very quickly to eradicate that buildup.”

To be clear, the president is not talking about attacking Iran if it tries to rebuild its nuclear facilities or construct a nuclear weapon. He’s talking about Iran’s conventional ballistic missile programme. The United States is saying that Iran simply is not allowed to defend itself in any way, shape or form, and that if it tries to rebuild its ability to do so it will be attacked again.

So they’re clearly just making up excuses to bomb Iran and waiting for something to stick.

Senator Graham recently tweeted a photo of himself grinning with the president, who was holding a hat which said “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN”. You can pretty much determine how warlike the US empire is from day to day by looking at the expression on Lindsey Graham’s face, and lately he’s been looking positively ecstatic.

Trump used to slam warmongers like Graham, building a huge part of his presidential 2016 campaign around contrasting himself with their disastrous foreign policy platforms.

Now that he doesn’t have a re-election to posture for they’re best friends, with Graham proclaiming that “Trump is my favourite president” because “we’re killing all the right people and lowering your taxes”.

January 2029 is still a long way off, and we’re seeing every indication that Trump is going to be making Lindsey Graham smile for years to come.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Adrian Blackburn

Blatantly, boastfully, bullyingly, shamelessly, Trump overnight threw open to the world’s eyes the cruel reality of US foreign policy. He has brought out from the shadows the ugly reality of what for generations previous administrations have found politic to keep covert.

That foreign policy has been shown most especially arrogant in regard to its neighbours anywhere in the Americas.

It has been based on a lie, a lie to its own people first but no less potently to the nations, including New Zealand, which have subscribed to that fiction of a United States democracy representing all the best human qualities.

The nicely gift-wrapped package includes belief in equality, fairness, justice, the sanctity of human life, acceptance of difference, mutual respect, kindness and love: The American way, the ultimate Christian morality in practice.

Trump has done all of us who have bought that lie a favour. What he is saying out loud with the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro is the age-old message of a rogue state — might is right, all power comes from the barrel of a gun, bow down to us.

Any self-reflection by Trump, unlikely, would reveal to him the deeper historical truth that empires which once seemed invulnerable resort to such desperate measures as his Venezuelan adventure in an attempt to deny, to delay, to divert from the fact they are in their death throes. Decline and fall.

It will get worse for the United States, as a state. The lie will become increasingly acknowledged internationally as trust is shown to be a one-way street. The allied fiction of US Treasury bills as a long-term safe repository for the world’s savings may be undermined even faster.

Run on the US bank
Trust gone, it’s the work of moments for an international run on the bank of the US to begin. Even if its already hard-working monetary printing presses go into overtime, an economy and society propped up on trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt can quickly become bankrupt

Immediately, though, what can the international community do in protest? I believe there’s a special obligation on the “Western” nations to assuage a little of their guilt as willing US accomplices over many years, accomplices ready to abandon true independence and a fair bit of morality to self-interest, cowardice.

Just a gesture in protest, but a powerful one, would be to immediately and in unison demand the temporary closure of US embassies and the withdrawal of their staff as persona non grata.

Unrealistic? Of course. Real-politik will rule, OK!

Turning blind eyes to Venezuela
But we should all beware of turning blind eyes to Venezuela. Who next, after Maduro, incurs the Don’s displeasure? If Zelensky stubbornly won’t surrender to Don and Vlad’s territorial demands, will he be safe on his next State visit to the US from arbitrary arrest and incarceration as an alleged war criminal?

Does our own Christopher Luxon need to brush up his flattery skills even further? Losing every hole of a golf match with Trump would help.

Trump, though, has already lost, whether in his hyperbolically hypocritical state he knows it or not. But he has done the world a useful service in revealing how an empire on the way out is likely to act.

Big oil will be triumphal about a grab for Venezuela’s oil riches in the hypocritical guise of protecting the US from illicit drug imports.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is quietly gloating.

Adrian Blackburn is lifelong journalist and writer. Staff writer on many publications, including The NZ Herald, Sydney Morning Herald, BBC World Service, Beaverbrook Newspapers, NZ Listener and NZ Woman’s Weekly. Author of The Shoestring Pirates (Hodder and Stoughton, 1974) a history of pirate Radio Hauraki, and Gift: A Troubling Message from the Afterlife (2024). This commentary was originally a Facebook posting under the title “Trump grabs Venezuela by the pussy” and is republished here with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It’s bizarre how little mainstream attention is given to the fact that the President of the United States has repeatedly confessed to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, especially given how intensely fixated his political opposition was on the possibility that he was compromised by a foreign government during his first term.

During a speech before the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) on Monday, President Donald Trump once again publicly admitted that he has implemented Israel-friendly policies at the behest of Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, this time adding that he believes Adelson favours Israel over the United States.

Here’s a transcript of Trump’s remarks:

“As president, I terminated the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and ultimately, I terminated Iran’s nuclear program with things called B2 bombers. It was swift and it was accurate, and it was a military beauty. I authorized the spending of billions of dollars, which went to Israel’s defense, as you know. And after years of broken promises from many other American presidents — you know that they kept promising — I never understood it until I got there. There was a lot of pressure put on these presidents. It was put on me, too, but I didn’t yield to the pressure. But every president for decades said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The difference is I kept my promise and officially recognized the capital of Israel and moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

“Isn’t that right Miriam? Look at Miriam. She’s back there. Stand up. Miriam and Sheldon [Adelson] would come into the office and call me. They’d call me — I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else, I guess. Look at her sitting there so innocently — got $60 billion in the bank, $60 billion. And she loves, and she, I think she said, ‘No, more.’ And she loves Israel, but she loves it. And they would come in. And her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. It was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you? I’d say ‘Sheldon, I’m the president of the United States. It doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in. But they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about Golan Heights, which is probably one of the greatest things ever happened. Miriam, stand up, please. She really is, I mean, she loves this country. She loves this country. Her and her husband are so incredible. We miss him so dearly. But I actually asked her, I’m going to get her in trouble with this. But I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means — that might mean Israel, I must say, we love you. Thank you, darling, for being here. That’s a great honor. Great honor. She’s a wonderful woman. She is a great woman.”

Speaking in Israel, Trump suggests he moved the embassy to Jerusalem as a promise to the Adelsons, who he says have paid more visits to the White House than anyone he can think of.

He then says he asked Miriam if she loves Israel or America more and she refused to answer. Insane pic.twitter.com/jg9VXciRgg

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) October 13, 2025

Sheldon Adelson reportedly gave Trump and the Republicans more than US$424 million in campaign funding from 2016 up until his death in 2021. His widow Miriam continued her husband’s legacy and poured a further $100 million into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

On the 2024 campaign trail Trump also admitted to being controlled by Adelson cash.

Here’s a transcript of those remarks:

“Just as I promised, I recognize Israel’s eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem. Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something — always for Israel. As soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else. I’d say, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, will you, please?’ But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it.

“You know, for 72 years they’ve been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn’t have the nerve. But I said, ‘You know what?’ I said to David Friedman, ‘Give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less on the Golan Heights.’ And he did. And I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ We got it done in about 15 minutes, right?”

Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don’t. Trump said this week that he “gave” the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House “almost more than anybody.” Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2024

Legitimising Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem were two of the most controversial moves Trump made in Israel’s favour during his first term, which have now been eclipsed by his backing of the genocide in Gaza and his bombings of Iran and Yemen.

And here he is openly admitting that his billionaire Zionist megadonors have been using the access their donations bought them to push him to take drastic action in favour of Israel.

Just imagine for a second if someone had leaked documents to the press proving that Trump and received extensive financial backing from a Russian oligarch to whom he doled out favors of immense geopolitical consequence.

It would be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics, bar none. But because it’s an Israeli oligarch, he can admit to it openly and repeatedly without anyone batting an eye.

During Trump’s first term his political rivals spent years pushing a bogus conspiracy theory that he was controlled by Vladimir Putin, despite his having spent that entire term aggressively ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia. Entire political punditry careers were birthed trying to create a scandal out of a narrative that could be plainly seen as false just by looking at the movements of the US war machine and Washington’s actions against Moscow.

Trump: I am bought and owned by Miriam Adelson, the world’s richest Israeli.

Democrats: Trump is a Putin puppet.

Trump: I do whatever she says.

Democrats: A Russian secret agent.

Trump: I’m controlled by the Israelis.

Democrats: He’s suspiciously close with many dictators,…

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 13, 2025

But here’s Trump openly admitting to bending over backwards to give an Israeli oligarch whatever she wants because she gave his campaign huge sums of money, while pouring weapons into Israel to facilitate its mass atrocities and engaging in acts of war on Israel’s behalf. And it barely makes a blip in mainstream Western politics or media.

This is because mainstream Western politics and media understand that we are living in an unofficial oligarchic empire to which both the US and Israel belong. They never acknowledge it, they never talk about it, but all high-level politicians, pundits and operatives in the Western world understand that they serve a globe-spanning power structure run by a loose alliance of plutocrats and empire managers.

They understand that states like Israel are a part of said power structure, while states like Russia, China and Iran are not. So they spend their time normalising the corruption and abuses of imperial member states while facilitating the empire’s efforts to attack and undermine the states which have successfully resisted being absorbed into the imperial power umbrella.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only thing I like about Donald Trump is his infantile tendency to say the quiet part out loud. He advances the same kinds of abuses as his predecessors who were no less corrupt and controlled, but he exposes the underlying mechanics of those abuses in ways that more refined presidents never would.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has called on New Zealanders to condemn the US bombing of Iran.

PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said in a statement that he hoped the New Zealand government would be critical of the US for its war escalation.

“Israel has once again hoodwinked the United States into fighting Israel’s wars,” he said.

“Israel’s Prime Minister has [been declaring] Iran to be on the point of producing nuclear weapons since the 1990s.

“It’s all part of his big plan for expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine to create a Greater Israel, and regime change for the entire region.”

Israel knew that Arab and European countries would “fall in behind these plans” and in many cases actually help implement them.

“It is a dreadful day for the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s forces will be turned back onto them in Gaza and the West Bank.”

‘Dreadful day’ for Middle East
“It is just as dreadful day for the whole Middle East.

“Trump has tried to add Iran to the disasters of US foreign policy in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The US simply doesn’t care how many people will die.”

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters “acknowledged the development in the past 24 hours”, including President Trump’s announcement of the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

He described it as “extremely worrying” military action in the Middle East, and it was critical further escalation was avoided.

“New Zealand strongly supports efforts towards diplomacy. We urge all parties to return to talks,” he said.

“Diplomacy will deliver a more enduring resolution than further military action.”

The Australian government said in a statement that Canberra had been clear that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme had been a “threat to international peace and security”.

It also noted that the US President had declared that “now is the time for peace”.

“The security situation in the region is highly volatile,” said the statement. “We continue to call for de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy.”

Iran calls attack ‘outrageous’
However, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the “outrageous” US attacks on Iran’s “peaceful nuclear installations” would have “everlasting consequences”.

His comments come as an Iranian missile attack on central and northern Israel wounded at least 23 people.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Dr Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, said the people of Iran feared that Israel’s goals stretched far beyond its stated goal of destroying the country’s nuclear and missile programmes.

“Many in Iran believe that Israel’s end game, really, is to turn Iran into Libya, into Iraq, what it was after the US invasion in 2003, and/or Afghanistan.

“And so the dismemberment of Iran is what Netanyahu has in mind, at least as far as Tehran is concerned,” he said.

US attack ‘more or less guarantees’ Iran will be nuclear-armed within decade

‘No evidence’ of Iran ‘threat’
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said there had been “absolutely no evidence” that Iran posed a threat.

“Neither was it existential, nor imminent,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We have to keep in mind the reality of the situation, which is that two nuclear-equipped countries attacked a non-nuclear weapons state without having gotten attacked first.

“Israel was not attacked by Iran — it started that war; the United States was not attacked by Iran — it started this confrontation at this point.”

Dr Parsi added that the attacks on Iran would “send shockwaves” throughout the world.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

If there is one thing we can thank US President Donald Trump for, it is this: he has decisively stripped away the ridiculous notion, long cultivated by Western media, that the United States is a benign global policeman enforcing a “rules-based order”.

Washington is better understood as the head of a gangster empire, embracing 800 military bases around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been aggressively seeking “global full-spectrum domination”, as the Pentagon doctrine politely terms it.

You either pay fealty to the Don or you get dumped in the river. Last Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was presented with a pair of designer concrete boots at the White House.

The innovation was that it all happened in front of the Western press corps, in the Oval Office, rather than in a back room, out of sight. It made for great television, Trump crowed.

Pundits have been quick to reassure us that the shouting match was some kind of weird Trumpian thing. As though being inhospitable to state leaders, and disrespectful to the countries they head, is unique to this administration.

Take just the example of Iraq. The administration of Bill Clinton thought it “worth it” – as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously put it — to kill an estimated half a million Iraqi children by imposing draconian sanctions through the 1990s.

Under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, the US then waged an illegal war in 2003, on entirely phoney grounds, that killed around half a million Iraqis, according to post-war estimates, and made four million homeless.

Those worrying about the White House publicly humiliating Zelensky might be better advised to save their concern for the hundreds of thousands of mostly Ukrainian and Russian men killed or wounded fighting an entirely unnecessary war — one, as we shall see, Washington carefully engineered through Nato over the preceding two decades.

Henchman Zelensky
All those casualties served the same goal as they did in Iraq: to remind the world who is boss.

Uniquely, Western publics don’t understand this simple point because they live inside a disinformation bubble, created for them by the Western establishment media.

Henry Kissinger, the long-time steward of US foreign policy, famously said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Zelensky just found that out the hard way. Gangster empires are just as fickle as the gangsters we know from Hollywood movies. Under the previous Joe Biden administration, Zelensky had been recruited as a henchman to do Washington’s bidding on Moscow’s doorstep.

The background — the one Western media have kept largely out of view — is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US tore up treaties crucial to reassuring Russia of Nato’s good intent.

Viewed from Moscow, and given Washington’s track record, Nato’s European security umbrella must have looked more like preparation for an ambush.

Keen though Trump now is to rewrite history and cast himself as peacemaker, he was central to the escalating tensions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2019, he unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That opened the door to the US launching a potential first strike on Russia, using missiles stationed in nearby Nato members Romania and Poland.

He also sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, a move avoided by his predecessor, Barack Obama, for fear it would be seen as provocative.

Repeatedly, Nato vowed to bring Ukraine into its fold, despite Russia’s warnings that the step was viewed as an existential threat, that Moscow could not allow Washington to place missiles on its border, any more than the US accepted Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba back in the early 1960s.

Washington pressed ahead anyway, even assisting in a colour revolution-style coup in 2014 against the elected government in Kyiv, whose crime was being a little too sympathetic to Moscow.

With the country in crisis, Zelensky was himself elected by Ukrainians as a peace candidate, there to end a brutal civil war — sparked by that coup — between anti-Russian, “nationalistic” forces in the country’s west and ethnic Russian populations in the east. The Ukrainian President soon broke that promise.

Trump has accused Zelensky of being a “dictator”. But if he is, it is only because Washington wanted him that way, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians.

Reddest of red lines
Zelensky’s job was to play a game of chicken with Moscow. The assumption was that the US would win whatever the outcome.

Either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff would be called. Ukraine would be welcomed into Nato, becoming the most forward of the alliance’s forward bases against Russia, allowing nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to be stationed minutes from Moscow.

Or Putin would finally make good on his years of threats to invade his neighbour to stop Nato crossing the reddest of red lines he had set over Ukraine.

Washington could then cry “self-defence” on Ukraine’s behalf, and ludicrously fearmonger Western publics about Putin eyeing Poland, Germany, France and Britain next.

Those were the pretexts for arming Kyiv to the hilt, rather than seeking a rapid peace deal. And so began a proxy war of attrition against Russia, using Ukrainian men as cannon fodder.

The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow.

Zelensky did precisely what was demanded of him. When he appeared to waver early on, and considered signing a peace deal with Moscow, Britain’s prime minister of the time, Boris Johnson, was dispatched with a message from Washington: keep fighting.

That is the same Boris Johnson who now breezily admits that the West is fighting a “proxy war” against Russia.

Hmm, maybe someone can help me.

How was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine entirely ‘unprovoked’, when the British leader in charge at the time, Boris Johnson, now admits Nato viewed Ukraine as the battlefield for a ‘proxy war’ against Russia? 🤯 pic.twitter.com/VS6jRE03gH

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 24, 2025

His comments have generated precisely no controversy. That is particularly strange, given that critics who pointed this very obvious fact out three years ago were instantly denounced for spreading “Putin disinformation” and Kremlin “talking points”.

For his obedience, Zelensky was feted a hero, the defender of Europe against Russian imperialism. His every “demand” — demands that originated in Washington — was met.

Ukraine has received at least $250 billion worth of guns, tanks, fighter jets, training for his troops, Western intelligence on Russia, and other forms of aid.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have paid with their lives — as have the families they leave behind.

Mafia etiquette
Now the old Don in Washington is gone. The new Don has decided Zelensky has been an expensive failure. Russia isn’t lethally wounded. It’s stronger than ever. Time for a new strategy.

Zelensky, still imagining he was Washington’s favourite henchman, arrived at the Oval Office only to be taught a harsh lesson in mafia etiquette.

Trump is spinning his stab in the back as a “peace agreement”. And in some sense, it is. Rightly, Trump has concluded that Russia has won — unless the West is ready to fight World War III and risk a potential nuclear war.

Trump has faced up to the reality of the situation, even if Zelensky and Europe are still struggling to.

Trump’s overt ‘genocidal’ warning over Gaza.   Video: TRT World News

But his plan for Ukraine is actually just a variation of his other peace plan — the one for Gaza. There he wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, on the bodies of the enclave’s many thousands of dead children, build the “Riviera of the Middle East” — or “Trump Gaza” as it is being called in a surreal video he shared on social media.

In telling the “people of Gaza”, they will be “DEAD” if the hostages aren’t released – something they can’t decide – Trump is expressing clear genocidal intent. He’a also sending the arms to make that genocide possible.

He needs to be in the ICC dock alongside Netanyahu. pic.twitter.com/eomkGP6eWe

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 6, 2025

Similarly, Trump now sees Ukraine not as a military battlefield but as an economic one where, through clever deal-making, he can leverage riches for himself and his billionaire pals.

He has put a gun to Zelensky and Europe’s head. Make a deal with Russia to end the war, or you are on your own against a far superior military power. See if the Europeans can help you without a supply of Washington’s weapons.

Not surprisingly, Zelensky, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron huddled together at the weekend to find a deal that would appease Trump. All Starmer has revealed so far is that the plan will “stop the fighting”.

That is a good thing. But the fighting could have been stopped, and should have been stopped, three years ago.

Money, not peace
It is deeply unwise to be lulled into tribalism by all this — the very tribalism Western elites seek to cultivate among their publics to keep us treating international affairs no differently from a high-stakes football match.

No one here has behaved, or is behaving, honourably.

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately.

An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

Zelensky now understands this. He knows that he, and the people of Ukraine, have been scammed. That is what tends to happen when you cosy up to the mafia.

If anyone doubts Washington’s insincerity over Ukraine, look to Palestine for clarity.

In his earlier presidency, Trump tried to bring about what he termed the peace “deal of the century” whose centrepiece was the annexation of much of the Occupied West Bank.

The hope was that the Gulf states would ultimately fund an incentivisation programme — the carrot to Israel’s stick — to encourage Palestinians to make a new life in a giant, purpose-built industrial zone in Sinai, next to Gaza.

That plan is still simmering away in the background. At the weekend, Israel received a green light from Washington to revive its genocidal starvation of Gaza’s population, after Israel refused to negotiate the second phase of the original ceasefire agreement.

The Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now spinning their own bad faith as Hamas “rejectionism”.

They and the echo chamber that is the Western media are blaming the Palestinian group for refusing to be gulled into an “extension” of what was never more than a phoney ceasefire — Israel’s fire never ceased. Israel wants all the hostages back, without having to leave Gaza, so that Hamas has no leverage to stop Israel reviving the full genocide.

The people of Gaza are still being fed into the Washington mafia’s meatgrinder, just as the Ukrainian people have been.

Trump wants them out of the way so he can develop a Mediterranean playground for the rich, paid for with Gulf oil money and the so-far untapped natural gas reserves just off Gaza’s coast.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t pretend that Ukraine and Gaza are anything more than geostrategic real estate for Washington.

The big shakedown
Zelensky’s shakedown did not come out of the blue. Trump and his officials had been flagging it well in advance.

Two weeks ago, the industrial correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote an article headlined “Here’s why Trump wants to make Ukraine a US economic colony”.

Trump’s team believes that Ukraine may have rare-earth minerals under the ground worth some $15 trillion — a treasure trove that will be critical to the development of the next generation of technology.

In their view, controlling the exploration and extraction of those minerals will be as important as control over the Middle East’s oil reserves was more than a century ago.

And most important of all, the US wants China, its chief economic — if not military — rival excluded from the plunder. China currently has an effective monopoly on many of these critical minerals.

Or as the Telegraph puts it, Ukraine’s “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.

A draft of the plan seen by the Telegraph would, in its words, “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity”.

Washington wants first refusal on all deposits within the country.

At their Oval Office confrontation, Trump reiterated this goal: “So we’re going to be using that [Ukraine’s rare earth minerals], taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI, and including weapons, and the military. And it’s really going to very much satisfy our needs.”

All of this means that Trump has a keen incentive to get the war finished as quickly as possible, and Russia’s territorial advance halted. The more territory Moscow seizes, the less territory is left for the US to plunder.

Self-sabotage
The battle against China over rare-earth minerals isn’t a Trump innovation either — and adds an additional layer of context for why Washington and Nato have been so keen over the past two decades to prise Ukraine away from Russia.

Last summer, a Congressional select committee on competition with China announced the formation of a working group to counter Beijing’s “dominance of critical minerals”.

The chairman of the committee, John Moolenaar, noted that the current US dependence on China for these minerals “would quickly become an existential vulnerability in the event of a conflict”.

Another committee member, Rob Wittman, observed: “Dominance over global supply chains for critical mineral and rare earth elements is the next stage of great power competition.”

What Trump appears to appreciate is that Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has, by default, driven Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace. It has been self-sabotage on a grand scale.

Together, China and Russia are a formidable opponent, and one at the centre of the ever-growing Brics group — comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They have been seeking to expand their alliance by adding emerging powers to become a counterweight to Washington and Nato’s bullying global agenda.

But a deal with Putin over Ukraine would provide an opportunity for Washington to build a new security architecture in Europe — one more useful to the US — that places Russia inside the tent rather than outside it.

That would leave China isolated — a long-time Pentagon goal.

And it would also leave Europe less central to the projection of US power, which is why European leaders — led by Keir Starmer — have been looking and sounding so unnerved over the past few weeks.

The danger is that Trump’s “peacemaking” in Ukraine simply becomes a prelude to the fomenting of a war against China, using Taiwan as the pretext in the same way Ukraine was used against Russia.

As Moolenaar implied, US control over critical minerals — in Ukraine and elsewhere — would ensure the US was no longer vulnerable in the event of a war with China to losing access to the minerals it would need to continue the war. It would free Washington’s hand.

Trump may be behaving in a vulgar manner. But the gangster empire he now heads is conducting the same global shakedown as ever.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.