Donald Trump is a classic example of why you don’t let bullies prosper. “Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of ‘the rules-based international order’  — the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the US and its allies.

The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are objects, we are mere “things” to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”. 

I wrote that in January 2025 in this article that I reproduce today. It provides a useful backgrounder, including historical precendents, to help us navigate through the times we are living through right now.

What do Panama, Canada and Greenland have in common? Could Trump be getting the US back to brass tacks, to a core strategy of dominating the Western hemisphere? Possibly, and he may be blowing away the fraudulent rhetoric about rules-based international order, territorial integrity, international law and the crusade to expand democracies.

Trump said this week that the US is prepared to use military force to assert control over Panama and Greenland.

“We need Greenland for national security purposes.  People don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it but even if they do they should give it up because I’m talking about protecting the free world,” Trump said.

The world’s largest island is bigger than France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium combined. It’s literally bigger than Texas (300 percent bigger) — and the US wants it.

A greater risk
Think about that.  The US may pose a greater risk to the territorial integrity of the European Union than the Russians do. If they get antsy with the US, Trump will “tariff them”.

The Danes, like the rest of Europe, are frightened of the US. In response to Trump’s Greenland gambit, Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen timidly said this week that Denmark was “open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can cooperate, possibly even more closely than we already do, to ensure that American ambitions are fulfilled”.

To ensure American ambitions are fulfilled. And this was the country that gave us the Vikings. If Ragnar Lodbrok, Eric Bloodaxe or Bjorn Ironside had been around when Donald Trump Junior swooped into Nuuk for his photo op, his skull would have been used as a drinking tankard for a blót sumbl feast that same evening.

Top independent strategists have for years despaired of the strategic brainlessness of US foreign policy — the Midas Touch in reverse, as Professor Mearsheimer calls it.  Wherever they went — from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza — Americans embroiled themselves in conflicts of little strategic worth and left behind piles of bodies, millions of implacable enemies and a litany of failures.

Trump’s rough woo-ing of Canada to become the 51st state, and his threat to use military force to seize both Greenland and the Canal, speak to a back-to-basics focus for American imperialism — a shift in US policy that will bring it closer to its core strategic interests.

That’s quite appropriate for a man who counts President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) as a role model. There is a whiff of the Rough Rider (Roosevelt’s cavalry which kicked over the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898) about Trump’s recent utterances.

Outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York you could see a magnificent statue of Teddy Roosevelt, cowboy kerchief around his neck, six-shooter hanging off his hip, astride a proud steed with two bare-chested Noble Savages — an African and an American Indian — walking on either side of the Great White Man.

Punkish metal spikes
I particularly like the slightly punkish metal spikes sticking out of his hair to stop birds crapping on his head.  After 82 years, the City finally woke up to the fact that this was a racist, colonialist trope and took the statue down in 2021.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

The Western media went into overdrive this week to work the laconic Kiwis into a mild frenzy over three Chinese naval vessels conducting exercises in the Tasman Sea a few thousand kilometres off our shores.

What was really behind this orchestrated campaign?

The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean).

 “We cannot hide at this end of the world anymore,” Defence Minister Judith Collins said in light of three Chinese boats in the Tasman.

Warrior academics were next . “We need to go to the cutting edge, and we need to do that really, really fast,” the ever-reliable China hawk Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University said, telling 1 News the message of the live-firing exercises was that China wants to rule the waves.

The British Financial Times chimed in with a warning that “A confronting strategic future is arriving fast”.

Could this have anything to do with the fact we are fast approaching the New Zealand government’s 2025 budget and that they — and their Australian, US and UK allies — are intent on a major increase in Kiwi defence funding, moving from around 1.2 percent of GDP to possibly two percent? A long-anticipated Defence Capability Review is also around the corner and is likely to come with quite a shopping list of expensive gear.

What’s good for the goose . . .
It is worth pointing out that New Zealand and Australian warships sailed through the contested Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the South China Sea as recently as September 2024. What’s good for the goose is good for the Panda.

And, of course, at any one time about 20 US nuclear submarines are prowling in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Each can carry missiles the equivalent of over 1000 Hiroshima bombs — truly apocalyptic.

Veteran New Zealand peace campaigner Mike Smith (a friend) was not in total disagreement with the hawks when it came to the argy-bargy in the Tasman.

“The emergence apparently from nowhere of a Chinese naval expedition in our waters I think may be intended to demonstrate that they have a large and very capable blue water navy now and won’t be penned in by AUKUS submarines when and if they arrive off their coast.

“I think the main message is to the Australians: if you want to homebase nuclear-capable B-52s we have more than one way to come at you. That was also the message of the ICBM they sent into the Pacific: Australia is no longer an unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

According to the Asia Times, China fired the ICBM — the first such shot into the Pacific by China — just days after HMNZS Aotearoa sailed through the Taiwan Strait with Australian vessel HMAS Sydney.

Smith says our focus should be on building positive relationships in the Pacific on our terms. “Buying expensive popguns will not save us.”

China Scare a page out of Australia’s Red Scare playbook
For people good at pattern recognition this week’s China Scare was obviously a page or two out of the same playbook that duped a majority of Australians into believing China was going to invade Australia. They were lulled into a false sense of insecurity back in 2021 — the mediascape flooded with Red Alert, China panic stories about imminent war with the rising Asian power.

As a sign of how successful the mainstream media can be in generating fear that precedes major policy shifts: research by Australia’s Institute of International & Security Affairs showed that more Australians thought that China would soon attack Australia than Taiwanese believed China would attack Taiwan!

Once the population was conditioned, they woke one morning in September 2021 with the momentous news that Australia had ditched a $90 billion submarine defence deal with France and the country was now part of a new anti-Chinese military alliance called AUKUS. This was the playbook that came to mind last week.

There are strong, rational arguments that could be made to increase our spending at this time. But I loathe and decry this kind of manipulation, this manufacturing of consent.

I also fear what those billions of dollars will be used for. Defending our coastlines is one thing; joining an anti-Chinese military alliance to please the US is quite another.

Prime Minister Luxon has called China — our biggest trading partner — a strategic competitor. He has also suggested, somewhat ludicrously, that our military could be a “force multiplier” for Team AUKUS.

We are hitching ourselves to the US at the very time they have proven they treat allies as vassals, threatened to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, continue to commit genocide in Gaza, and are now imposing an unequal treaty on Ukraine.

Australia’s ABC News on Foreign Minister Winston Peter’s talks in China. Video: ABC

Whose side – or calmer independence?
Whose side should we be on? Or should we return to a calmer, more independent posture?

And then there’s the question of priorities. The hawks may convince the New Zealand population that the China threat is serious enough that we should forgo spending money on child poverty, fixing our ageing infrastructure, investing in health and education and instead, as per pressure from our AUKUS partners, spend some serious coin — billions of dollars more — on defence.

Climate change is one battle that is being fought and lost. Will climate funding get the bullet so we can spend on military hardware? That would certainly get a frosty reaction from Pacific nations at the front edge of sea rise.

The government in New Zealand is literally taking the food out of children’s mouths to fund weapons systems. The Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme provides nutritious lunches every day to a quarter of a million of New Zealand’s most needy children.

Its funding has recently been slashed by over $100 million by the government despite its own advisors telling it that such programmes have profound long-term wellbeing benefits and contribute significantly to equity. In the next breath we are told we need to boost funding for our military.

The US appears determined to set itself on a collision course with China but we don’t have to be crash test dummies sitting alongside them. Prudence, preparedness, vigilance and risk-management are all to be devoutly wished for; hitching our fate to a hostile US containment strategy is bad policy both in economic and defence terms.

In the absence of a functioning media — one that showcases diverse perspectives and challenges power rather than works hand-in-glove with it — populations have been enlisted in the most abhorrent and idiotic campaigns: the Red Peril, the Jewish Peril and the Black Peril (in South Africa and the southern states of the USA), to name three.

Our media-political-military complex is at it again with this one — a kind of Yellow Peril Redux.

New Zealand trails behind both Australia and China in development assistance to the Pacific. If we wish to “counter” China, supporting our neighbours would be a better investment than encouraging an unwinnable arms race.

In tandem, I would advocate for a far deeper diplomatic and cultural push to understand and engage with China; that would do more to keep the region peaceful and may arrest the slow move in China towards seeking other markets for the high-quality primary produce that an increasingly bellicose New Zealand still wishes to sell them.

Let’s be friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and he is a regular contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

The United States shares the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalising the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.

Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths.

Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.

They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing
from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organisation.

They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza.

They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal.

They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under US control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the US.

Uttering nonsensical remarks
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.

I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Read it while you still can. Seriously.

These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianised” state led by a divinely anointed leader.

They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt.

They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.

Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.

“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book.

“Labour unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytising mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”

Chris Hedges talks to Marc Lamont Hill on Up Front on why “democracy doesn’t exist in the United States” today.   Video: Al Jazeera

Comforting to most Americans
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.”

They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings.Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine.

Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration.

Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.

The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.

The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.

The dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponised to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the UN and other multilateral organisations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the US military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

Building infrastructure projects
When the US offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organisation of American States, which it did.

Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.

USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed
“as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organisations and initiatives, including training programmes so Bolivian youth could be taught the American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.

Kennard in his book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, documents
how US institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.

Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programmes, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.

The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programmes facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.

Our US tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialisation lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically”.

Legitimises theft at home
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”

Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.

“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the US, is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labour and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview.

“You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”

These same US institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the US empire, for prime minister in Britain.

The US disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.

Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by US corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the US military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child labourers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.

https://t.co/FLgNuVBwaT

— Chris Hedges (@ChrisLynnHedges) February 7, 2025

The demise of American power
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organisations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.

The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals
and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalise the leviathan they worship.

They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education
and the US Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.

Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the US will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates.

The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.

Relentless hunt for plunder, profit
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power:

Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just 27 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the US invaded Iraq],” he writes.

The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, including due process, torture, militarised police, the massive prison system, militarised drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.

The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. This article was first published on his Substack page. Republished from the Chris Hedges X page.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.