The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
BRATISLAVA, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - “What’s important is to make sure that you can immerse yourself in an environment that is positive for your mental health and wellbeing,” says Olena*.
Olena, from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, was just 12 when Russia’s full-scale invasion of her country began on February 24, 2022. Over the last four years she has seen all her close friends leave the small town she lives in, most to move abroad, and experienced deadly bombings by Russian forces on her home town.
Meanwhile, much of her schooling in that time has been online because the permanent threat of shelling makes it unsafe for authorities to keep her school open.
She admits all this has taken a toll on her mental health.
“I had the most devastating experience when my town was bombed and some people were killed. The sound of explosions and drones causes constant tension still,” she tells IPS.
“I miss having all my friends here. Before the war, we used to spend so much time together – walking around the city, celebrating each other’s birthdays, and simply sitting somewhere and talking for hours. Now many of them are abroad, building new lives. I’m happy they are safe, but I deeply miss the feeling of unity,” she says.
“And for almost four years we [kids in the town] have been studying online. We see our classmates much less, and simple things like chatting during breaks or working on group projects feel like something from another life. We grew up faster than we expected.”
Olena is just one of millions of children in the country whose lives have been upended by the conflict.
As the full-scale invasion goes into its fifth year, research shows the devastating effect it has had on Ukrainian children, displacing millions, plunging many into poverty, and exposing them to the loss of loved ones and other trauma. Meanwhile, 1.6 million have had their education disrupted due to displacement, facility damage, and insecurity. According to UNICEF, one in three children are unable to attend in-person school full-time and more than 1,700 schools have been damaged or destroyed. The Save the Children group has said that Ukrainian children missed 20 percent of lessons during the last academic year alone because of frequent air raid warnings.
Meanwhile, Save the Children has estimated that over a million children have spent hundreds of days with either no or limited face-to-face teaching as schools have moved to online learning for security reasons since the start of the war. This came not long after schools had finished lengthy periods of online learning implemented during the Covid pandemic, meaning some children have had little in-class learning since 2020.
All this has taken a huge toll on the mental health of children and adolescents, local and international groups working with kids in the country have said.
According to UNICEF, a third of households have reported children displaying signs of psychosocial distress.
“Children’s mental health is increasingly under strain. The constant fear of attacks, displacement, endless sheltering in basements, and isolation at home with limited social connections have left children and adolescents struggling,” Toby Fricker, UNICEF Ukraine Chief of Advocacy and Communication, told IPS.
This has been expressed in a variety of emotional and physical expressions of symptoms, mental health experts have said.
These include irritability and emotional instability, particularly among adolescents, and social withdrawal.
“It can be said with sad certainty that since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which is now in its fifth year, the most common issues observed among adolescents are increased anxiety, fear, and chronic stress related to a constant sense of danger and uncertainty. Many teenagers experience emotional exhaustion, sleep problems, difficulties with concentration and learning, as well as decreased motivation,” Daria Lavrenko, a psychologist in the Kyiv region who works with children aged 12 to 18 who have been displaced from regions near the frontlines, told IPS.
Children participate in UActive programmes which include rebuilding infrastructure damaged in the war. Credit: UActive
“Manifestations of social isolation and difficulties communicating with peers have also become quite common, largely due to prolonged distance learning, frequent air raid sirens, and the loss of a familiar school environment. In addition, adolescents often show deep grief reactions due to the loss of relatives on the frontline or as a result of Russian attacks on civilians. Increased irritability, emotional instability, and difficulties with emotional regulation are also frequently observed, which are natural psychological responses to the prolonged traumatic experience of war,” she said.
But severe somatisation of symptoms, including facial tics, involuntary head movements, and speech disorders, have also been frequently reported. Sleeping disorders are common, especially among young children.
“These are common reactions when the body is suffering the consequences of mental health strain,” Viktoria Kondratyuk, a psychologist who works with the humanitarian group War Child on projects in Ukraine, told IPS. “It affects the immune system, weakens it, and that’s why you see so many [children] getting sick, especially in the winter],” she added.
Since the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian government has moved to increase provision of mental health support through the approval of key legislation and the implementation of a nationwide mental healthcare programme.
At the same time, NGOs are working with regional administrations and local communities to improve public access to mental health services and psychosocial support, including providing informational and educational activities and integrating psychosocial support into existing social and educational services. It is hoped this will expand access to assistance for vulnerable groups and greater support for children and adolescents.
However, problems with access to such services, and recognition of mental health problems by those affected, mean many children are not getting the help they need, experts say.
“Many teenagers who experience psychological difficulties as a result of the war do not receive the help they need in time. This is partly due to limited access to specialists in certain regions where infrastructure has been damaged or where there is a shortage of mental health professionals. At the same time, attitudes toward mental wellbeing remain an important barrier,” said Lavrenko.
“Some teenagers avoid seeking help because they fear judgement, do not want to appear ‘weak’, or believe that their experiences are not serious enough. In addition, prolonged life under the conditions of war changes how young people perceive their own emotions. Many painful feelings—such as fear, anxiety, and helplessness—may be minimised or suppressed as the psyche attempts to adapt to constant danger and maintain the ability to function. This is a natural psychological defence mechanism; however, it can also lead to children and adolescents remaining without the support they need for long periods of time.
“Furthermore, adults do not always immediately notice or correctly interpret children’s emotional difficulties, as they themselves are often exhausted by the ongoing traumatic reality of war,” she said.
Lavrenko added that a different approach needed to be taken to mental health care given that Ukraine has been at war for so long.
“Under current conditions, improving adolescents’ mental health cannot be limited only to traditional approaches to psychological care. Ukraine is living through a full-scale war for a fifth year, and in this context, support for mental health often comes from things that are considered a normal part of life for teenagers in other countries: the ability to study consistently, communicate with peers, participate in extracurricular activities, think about the future, and make plans for their careers. This is why it is extremely important to create and expand programmes aimed at addressing educational losses and restoring opportunities for adolescents to socialise,” she said.
IPS spoke to a number of teenagers in different parts of Ukraine about mental health and access to services for them and their peers.
While not all have accessed specific mental health services, some said they had and that it had helped them. Some said they felt there was adequate access for them to psychosocial services, but others said it was woefully lacking, especially in schools where they felt it should be either discussed in classes more frequently or even taught formally as a subject.
“Teachers rarely discuss this in schools – it needs to be made part of the curriculum,” Andrej*, 16, from the Kyiv region, told IPS.
However, all of them pointed to the benefits of the kind of programmes referred to by Lavrenko.
The teenagers who spoke to IPS were involved in one such programme, UActive, in which children participate in initiatives helping rebuild towns and cities damaged by fighting.
They all said the project had given them a sense of purpose and hope for the future.
“Being part of UActive became a source of hope. It reminded me that even in dark times we can build something meaningful. Through our meetings and projects, I felt unity, support, and real motivation to act instead of just worrying,” said Olena.
“Some special sessions organised by UActive orientate toward working with different aspects of mental health… encouraged me to seriously analyse my mental health and seek support when I need to,” Nadezhda*, a teenager from Kyiv, told IPS.
Organisations involved in projects for children in the country told IPS that programmes focused on child mental health could have a profound effect on improving child wellbeing.
“For adolescents, civic engagement helps them connect with their peers and find a sense of purpose amid the uncertainty of war. UNICEF’s UPSHIFT programme is one example of this, where we train youth teams and equip them with the skills they need to lead and implement projects that support the needs of their communities. Such activities also provide a sense of purpose at a time when they feel like they have little control over their lives and the situation unfolding around them,” said Fricker.
However, while both the children and organisations which spoke to IPS said access to such programmes and other forms of psychosocial care are key to helping children at the moment, they also believed that ultimately the best way of improving child mental health would be for the war to end.
Even then, though, experts believe that even after an end to the fighting, people will be struggling with mental health problems related to the conflict for many years to come.
“When a child lives for years in an atmosphere of danger, loss, instability, and constant stress, it inevitably affects the development of their psyche, their sense of safety in the world, and their ability to trust in the future. In terms of long-term consequences, some teenagers may continue to experience heightened anxiety, difficulties with emotional regulation, challenges in relationships, or uncertainty about their future for many years even after the war ends,” said Lavrenko.
She added though that there was hope that with proper action now, some of the worst long-term effects among children might be mitigated.
“It is important to remember that the human psyche has significant potential for recovery, especially when adolescents receive support, a stable environment, access to education, and opportunities for socialisation. This is why it is extremely important to invest in programs that support children and adolescents now, helping them gradually regain a sense of safety and build a healthy future,” she said.
*Names of all children have been changed for security reasons.
IPS UN Bureau Report
SYDNEY, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - Bangladesh remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Its corruption perception index (CPI) score, 24, is 18 points below the global average score of 42, and 21 points lower than the Asia-Pacific region’s average of 45. One of the main sources of corruption is over-priced aid-funded projects as they lack competitive bidding. Projects funded through Government-to-Government deals drive up costs by more than 400% compared to more transparent alternatives, and around 35% of project costs are lost to corruption and inefficiency.
Anis Chowdhury
Complicity
Development partners – traditional and non-traditional – cannot deny their complicity. The most culpable is the World Bank, followed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The shares of Bangladesh’s external debt liabilities to them are around 29%, 23% and 18%, respectively, totalling 70% of total external debt. Russia and China are Bangladesh’s main non-traditional development partners, with their respective shares of total external debt at 11% and 7%. All donors offered loans rampantly to the fascist regime to achieve their strategic and business interest, ignoring its extensive corruption and wide-spread human rights violations.
The World Bank briefly demonstrated its adherence to responsible lending principles when it cancelled $1.2 billion IDA credit for the Padma Bridge project in 2012, citing high-level corruption allegations. But its lending subsequently increased as if to expiate itself for the cancellation of the Padma Bridge loan. Mr. Hasan, one of the most corrupt ministers in the deposed Hasina Government, boasted, “once the World Bank cancelled its credit to finance Padma Bridge but now [in 2023] it has proposed to provide $2.25 billion”. To embarrass (or absolve?) the Bank, Sheikh Hasina presented a picture of the Padma Multipurpose Bridge to World Bank President David Malpass at the loan signing ceremony.
While Dhaka boasted that the Padma Bridge project was “entirely funded” by the government, China Exim Bank in fact provided $2.67 billion preferential buyer’s credit. The project costed approximately $3.6-$3.9 billion, nearly 3 times the initial estimate of $1.2 billion (the amount sought from the World Bank), largely due to corruption. The cost over-run triggered crises in both the forex and local currency markets, leading to the erosion of the country’s foreign exchange reserves.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided the lifeline at the dying hours of Hasina’s kleptocratic regime when it approved $4.7 billion in January 2023 with some vague conditionality, such as raising revenues, implementing structural reforms to create a conducive environment to expand trade and foreign direct investment, deepening the financial sector, and developing human capital.
The IMF chose to turn a blind eye to widespread corruption, including the looting of banks by the regime’s cronies, gross violations of human rights and election engineering to hold on to power. Can the IMF absolve itself of responsibility for enabling the survival of the collapsing repressive and corrupt regime to commit human rights violations and abuses during the mass uprising against it a year and half later?
Old habits die hard
Corruption in Bangladesh has deep roots; corruption’s tentacles have reached almost the entire body polity of the country to become a ‘social culture’. Nevertheless, the Interim Government, led by Nobel Laureate Professor Yunus, took some bold reform initiatives to strengthen the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and the integrity of the financial sector.
Thus, it is deeply disappointing that the newly elected government replaced the highly professional central bank governor with a failed business person with no background in banking or international macroeconomics within the first week of assuming power. A loan defaulter himself, the new governor immediately relaxed the loan rules. The government also amended the Interim Government’s Bank Resolution Ordinance to allow the return of the restructured banks to previous owners who looted these banks.
These changes, together with the new government’s rejection of the Interim Government’s ordinances concerning the ACC, the independence of judiciary and the human rights commission, are clear signs of the old habits’ refusal to die and the persistence of corruption.
Another old habit, i.e., addiction to loans (so-called aid), denies to die. As of April 2026, the External Relations Division (ERD) of the Ministry of Finance has been instructed to look for up to $3 billion from development partners. Interestingly, the ERD’s main activity is foreign fund searching through its ‘fund searching committee’ which meets periodically to review (code name for naming and shaming section chiefs) its monthly loan signing targets. Instead, the ERD should have been focusing on fostering and strengthening economic relations – trade and investment – as its name implies.
One direct damage of aid addiction is the lethargy in mobilising domestic resources – Bangladesh’s tax-GDP ratio (around 7%) is not only low compared with the averages for low-income countries (13.5%) and middle-income countries (18.9%), but has also been declining from its peak of around 9% in 2012 since its borrowing from development partners accelerated.
Of course, the other collateral damage is the persistence of corruption. IMF research finds that countries with “voracious” and “fractious” politics divert large amounts of public resources to unproductive transfers to powerful interest groups.
Development partners’ responsible roles
All development partners – multilateral and OECD DAC members – ostensibly are in favour of “good governance”, meaning against corruption. The World Bank “considers corruption a major obstacle… to promoting shared prosperity”. The IMF views corruption as “a major obstacle to economic growth, stability, and development”. The ADB “maintains a zero-tolerance stance against corruption, viewing it as a major obstacle to development, poverty reduction, and economic growth”.
Unfortunately, the evidence of their complicity presented above tells a different story from their avowed anti-corruption posture. This casts doubt on their role as development partners. Global evidence shows that donors do not systematically allocate aid to less corrupt countries.
The citizens of the country expect that development partners remain true to their declared anti-corruption stance and advance concessional loans provided the government commits to strict monitorable anti-corruption measures and deep structural reforms. In particular, urgently needed funds should be considered if:
• Ordinances of the Interim Government designed to strengthen anti-corruption measures, protect human rights and ensure judicial independence are ratified by the Parliament;• amendments to the Bank Resolution Ordinance are repealed; and
• a professionally competent and experienced person with high integrity is appointed as central bank governor.
To achieve deep structural reform, the focus should be on strengthening domestic revenue mobilisation and reorientation away from the aid-dependent development model to a trade and investment led development model. Therefore, development partners should open up their markets, encourage investment in productive sectors and help develop Bangladesh’s productive capacity.
On the other hand, if they remain complicit and advance loans in a highly corruption-prone environment, any future pro-people government will have the right to declare such loans as “odious” and to refuse repayment obligation.
Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). He held senior UN positions in Bangkok and New York and served as Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor for Finance (with the status and rank of State Minister) in the Professor Yunus-led Interim Government. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com
IPS UN Bureau
NEW YORK, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - The veil has been lifted—but not the one you think.
Not the veil the West has spent decades weaponizing. The veil now exposed is the one that concealed Western feminism’s selective solidarity—its silence on the women it was never truly fighting for. The “othering” of women from the South West Asian and North African region. In other words: us.
In Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria offers a powerful critique of how mainstream feminism often reinforces white supremacist, colonial, and patriarchal logics. The suffering of women of color becomes useful—deployable.
The image of the veiled, victimized woman, waiting to be saved, has long justified wars, interventions, and foreign policies driven not by liberation, but by imperial ambition. When these women resist on their own terms, they are ignored or discredited.
This pattern is not new. It is structural. Discrimination is embedded in the system. Palestine has simply made it undeniable. The silence that followed stripped away any remaining illusion that “we are in this together.” Feminist solidarity, it turns out, has limits—and some of us were never included.
That is the veil we lift today.
We speak as Arab women aged 50–65, activists and feminists with over a century of combined experience across 90 countries. We now live in the United States, where these contradictions are stark. We have paid a price for insisting on integrity. So have many others.
Across conversations with colleagues and communities, the message is consistent: the system is not broken—it functions exactly as designed.
Early feminist movements everywhere have grappled with patriarchy, sometimes resisting it, sometimes accommodating it. In the West, this struggle has often aligned uncomfortably with white supremacy.
In formerly colonized regions, patriarchy cannot be separated from colonialism, racism, or imperialism. These systems are intertwined; dismantling one requires confronting them all. This is where Western feminism consistently falls short.
Today, little has changed. The language is more polished. The imagery more diverse. But the underlying structures—and the values sustaining them—remain intact. Nowhere is this clearer than in how women from the South West Asian and North African region are treated by movements that claim to champion them.
The same logic that invoked Afghan women to justify military intervention now watches Palestinian women document their own destruction while offering silence—or excuses.
The data reflects this reality.
In the United States, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination rose sharply in 2024. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,658 complaints—the highest since it began tracking in 1996. Employment discrimination alone accounted for 15.4% of cases. In 2025, these numbers climbed again. Rhetoric has consequences.
But numbers only tell part of the story. Women’s voices tell the rest.
One Arab aid worker described being sidelined after speaking publicly about Palestine following October 7:
“When I spoke about Ukrainian women, it was welcomed. When I spoke about Palestinian women, it was suppressed. I lost my work.”
Others describe being silenced on social media, accused of saying too much—or too little. Some were advised to remove their hijab for safety. Others were warned to avoid expressing views altogether to protect institutional reputations.
Yet another was denied the right to exercise leadership among her own staff, because as a Muslim from the Arab region, her ability to clearly articulate opinions, exercise judgement, and make decisions, was deemed ‘abusive’. One woman was denied employment because her call for “ceasefire and humanitarian aid” was deemed “too political.”
Western feminism often recoils at these truths. Yet Palestine is not only a political issue—it is a feminist one. All struggles against oppression are interconnected. Justice cannot be selective, even if its application often is.
Feminism demands confronting power, violence, and dehumanization wherever they occur. Palestinian women live at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression—patriarchy, occupation, militarization—and resist across all of them.
A feminism that ignores this reality is not feminism. It is complicity.
As Teju Cole describes, this is the logic of the “white savior industrial complex.” It operates through what can be called gendered orientalism: women from the South West Asian and North African region are portrayed as victims of culture, religion, or men—but rarely of bombs, sanctions, or occupation. This framing preserves the West as liberator while erasing its role in producing violence.
In the United States, the language differs but the outcome is the same. Conservatives fear Islam; liberals seek to save us from it. Both deny our agency. Both silence our voices.
We are rarely represented as we are: organizers, scholars, community leaders, mothers, activists, feminists.
This silence must be named clearly. It is not neutrality. It is complicity.
The credibility of any feminist movement rests on whether it stands with all women—especially when doing so is politically inconvenient.
We have paid the price for this failure: in erasure, in exclusion, in lost friends, in being told our grief is too complex and our politics too divisive.
What passes for solidarity is often conditional. It appears when it costs nothing and disappears when it demands accountability. Women from the South West Asia and North Africa were welcomed when our oppression reinforced dominant narratives. We became inconvenient when our liberation required confronting Western power itself.
Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality to describe how overlapping identities produce compounded forms of discrimination. What we are witnessing now is an intersectional crisis: women from those regions face discrimination based simultaneously on race, religion, gender, and geopolitics. The very movement best equipped to confront this has gone largely silent.
From decades of work in conflict settings, one truth is clear: women from South West Asia and North Africa do not need to be singled out for ‘saving’.
We need the violence to stop.
We need colleagues to speak our names when it is difficult. We need those marching for human rights to recognize that feminism that excludes Gaza, Beirut, or Tehran is neither feminism nor human rights. It is branding—a convenient narrative that avoids confronting deeper structures of power.
Palestine has revealed a deeper truth: these systems were never designed to serve everyone. They were built by—and for—those in power.
What is required now is not reform at the margins, but a reckoning.
Solidarity demands accountability. If women’s rights are human rights, then they must apply to all women—without exception.
Lina AbiRafeh – Better4Women – Azza Karam and Henia Dakkak– Lead Integrity: House of Wisdom.
IPS UN Bureau
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - As delegates from 191 countries, including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, gathered Monday at UN headquarters for a month of diplomacy at the Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the stakes could hardly be higher.
They meet in the shadow of a war of choice, waged by the United States and Israel against Iran—ostensibly to prevent nuclear proliferation. It is a war steeped in tragedy and laced with irony. The human toll and global economic costs speak for themselves.
The irony is starker.
The United States, a principal depositary of the NPT, unilaterally caused the collapse of a UN-authorised agreement it had itself initiated to verify Iran’s non-nuclear status—the JCPOA. Having done that, the US, alongside Israel—a state that rejects the NPT—now bombs a hitherto NPT-compliant Iran to achieve the same end: a non-nuclear Iran.
This oxymoronic irony lies at the heart of America’s war of choice. Waged in the name of non-proliferation, it may accelerate the very outcome it seeks to avoid. By demonstrating that even a state short of nuclear weapons can be subjected to unilateral unauthorised force, Washington risks sending a stark message: survival may depend not on restraint and diplomacy, but on possession of the bomb.
This paradox exposes a longstanding fragility in the global nuclear matrix. Built around the NPT and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards regime, it rests on a bargain: non-nuclear states forgo weapons in exchange for security assurances, access to peaceful nuclear technology and good-faith progress towards disarmament.
This system, discriminatory but functional, endures only so long as it is seen as credible. When a treaty-compliant non-nuclear state becomes the target of military action over suspected ambitions, that credibility erodes.
At the centre of this erosion is the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. Before the conflict, Iran’s posture was widely understood as “hedging”—developing technical capacity without crossing the weapons threshold.
This allowed Tehran to retain leverage while avoiding the full costs of weaponisation. But hedging depends on a shared understanding: that ambiguity will be tolerated—or at least not punished with illegal use of force.
War shatters that assumption. The lesson is stark: nuclear latency does not deter attack; nuclear possession might. The comparison with North Korea is instructive. Its overt arsenal has largely insulated it from large-scale intervention despite decades of hostility with Washington.
For policymakers in Tehran—and elsewhere—the implication is difficult to ignore. If ambiguity invites vulnerability, clarity in the form of a deterrent may appear rational. Nuclear weapons risk being recast from political liabilities into strategic necessities.
The damage extends beyond Iran. The non-proliferation regime has long depended on the belief that compliance will not be punished. Yet recent history has already weakened that assumption. Ukraine relinquished the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in the 1990s in exchange for security assurances, only to face Russian invasion decades later.
Libya abandoned its programme and soon after saw regime collapse following the US initiated external intervention. These precedents have chipped away at trust.
Against this backdrop, war with Iran reinforces a troubling pattern: states without nuclear weapons appear vulnerable, while those with them appear secure. This is the opposite of what the non-proliferation regime is meant to uphold.
Officials at the IAEA have warned such dynamics could trigger a “domino effect”, with multiple countries reconsidering their options. Across the Middle East and beyond, governments are quietly reassessing their assumptions.
Military aggression also reshapes domestic politics in ways that complicate non-proliferation. External pressure strengthens hardliners while marginalising advocates of engagement. This is not unintended but predictable. Hardliners are less inclined toward compromise and more likely to view nuclear weapons as essential to survival.
The space for diplomacy narrows as nuclearisation gains appeal. War, in other words, transforms not just capabilities but preferences.
There is also a practical limit to military solutions. Airstrikes can damage or even ‘obliterate’ facilities, but they cannot erase knowledge. Scientific expertise cannot be bombed out of existence. Indeed, intervention may accelerate the very processes it seeks to halt by pushing them underground. A programme once visible to inspectors may become more secretive and harder to monitor.
The regional implications are equally concerning. The Middle East is already marked by rivalry and fragile security arrangements. An Iranian move towards nuclear weapons—especially one accelerated by conflict—would likely prompt countervailing responses.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey have both signalled they would not remain passive. The result could be a cascading arms race, turning an already volatile region into a multipolar nuclear environment.
This is a classic security dilemma: one state’s attempt to enhance its security leaves others feeling less secure, prompting reciprocal measures that leave all worse off. By seeking to eliminate a potential threat through unauthorised force, the United States may multiply such threats. Instead of one threshold state, the region could face several.
These dynamics point to a deeper flaw: the belief that military force can resolve nuclear proliferation. Nuclear ambition is not merely technical; it is a political response to insecurity. Bombing addresses symptoms, not causes.
Without addressing the security concerns that drive states towards nuclear capabilities, coercion alone cannot produce lasting results. All successful non-proliferation goals-ranging from NPT to JCPOA- were reached through calculated diplomatic negotiations, not by military means.
Past experience underscores this. Diplomatic agreements, however imperfect, have constrained nuclear programmes. The collapse of the JCPOA removed mechanisms that had limited Iran’s activities. In the absence of a credible diplomatic alternative, military action amounts to little more than a delay—buying time at the cost of increasing long-term incentives to pursue nuclear weapons.
The war also risks reinforcing the perception that international law is subordinate to power politics. If rules can be bypassed by powerful states, weaker ones are unlikely to rely on them. Instead, they may turn to capabilities that cannot easily be neutralised. Nuclear weapons become not just tools of deterrence, but symbols of sovereignty and survival.
Perhaps the most enduring impact will be psychological. States learn from precedent. From Iraq to Libya to Ukraine—and now Iran—a pattern appears: vulnerability invites intervention, while nuclear capability deters it. This conclusion may be uncomfortable, but it reflects a cold logic of international politics. Once such a perception takes hold, it is difficult to reverse.
For this reason, the war may prove a watershed moment not only for Iran but for the global non-proliferation regime. It alters perceptions of risk and security in ways that favour proliferation over restraint. Even states with no immediate intention of pursuing nuclear weapons may begin hedging against a future in which international guarantees appear unreliable.
The tragedy is that a policy intended to prevent proliferation may instead accelerate it. By undermining trust, empowering hardliners and reinforcing deterrence logic, the United States risks achieving the opposite of its stated aim. Even if military action sets back Iran’s programme in the short term, the long-term consequences may be far more damaging.
A more secretive, more determined and more widely emulated pursuit of nuclear weapons would not represent a victory for non-proliferation. It would mark its gradual unravelling—an “own goal” in geopolitical terms.
If the aim of non-proliferation is to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, this conflict points in the opposite direction. It suggests that security cannot be reliably guaranteed by treaties or norms alone, and that in an uncertain world the ultimate insurance policy remains the bomb.
That message will resonate far beyond Iran. Its consequences may shape nuclear choices for decades.
The question the Iran war poses to the world is not polemical but stark: is it a new normal that a depositary state of the NPT and a covert nuclear power not party to the treaty can preclude diplomacy and bomb their way to non-proliferation?
If the current NPT Review Conference in New York, like its predecessor conferences, fails to reach consensus on the way forward for the Treaty’s three pillars—non-proliferation, peaceful nuclear cooperation based on sovereign equality, and disarmament—it will amount to an answer in the affirmative, to that question. This may then signal the onset of the treaty’s terminal decay.
HMGS Palihakkara is a former Sri Lankan Ambassador to United Nations; one time Chair /Member of UNSG Advisory Board on Disarmament; a member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel updating the ’Comprehensive Study on Nuclear Weapons’; Advisor to the President of the 1995 NPT Review & Extension Conference.
IPS UN Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - The race for the next UN Secretary-General has, so far, attracted only four candidates—perhaps with more to come in an unpredictable contest.
But most of the candidates have played it safe – avoiding controversial issues and circumventing the wrath of the US whose veto can demolish the chances of any candidate by a single stroke in the Security Council.
The Trump administration has taken a vociferous stand against some the longstanding basic principles and goals advocated by the UN, including combating climate change, promoting gender empowerment and supporting equity and diversity in the world body.
“This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion,” Trump was quoted as saying.
“All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Trump has also initiated a comprehensive, government-wide rollback of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, signing executive orders in January and March 2026 to eliminate DEI offices, initiatives, and training in federal agencies and among contractors.
The policy emphasizes “merit-based” opportunities over DEI and gender empowerment goals, restricting federal funding in the US for, and requiring contractors to stop, “racially discriminatory” DEI activities.
Who, amongst the candidates, will publicly stand on these issues, defying the US?
As of last week, the four candidates vying to succeed António Guterres as the next UN Secretary-General, starting January 1, 2027 were:—Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Rafael Grossi (Argentina), Rebeca Grynspan (Costa Rica), and Macky Sall (Senegal).
Mandeep S. Tiwana, Secretary General CIVICUS, an alliance of civil society organizations, told Inter Press Service (IPS) the United Nations was born out of the horrors of the Second World War, which witnessed cruelty and human rights violations on a monumental scale.
“It is telling that the candidates’ vision skirted addressing impunity for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the very violations that are weakening the promise of the United Nations today.”
Most candidates, he pointed out, come with years of experience within the system. But experience within a broken system is not the same as the capacity to repair it.
“What the world needs is not another politician or diplomat driven by pragmatism alone, but a leader with a moral vision grounded in a human rights framework, one willing to confront eye-watering inequality, the rise of misogyny, environmental degradation, and the normalization of might-is-right conduct in international affairs”, he said.
“Almost all presentations were made under the long shadow of a possible veto, a reality that shapes what candidates say and, more importantly, what they do not”.
Civil society has been actively calling for straw polls to be held at the General Assembly, giving member states beyond the Permanent P5 and the Elected E10 a formal opportunity to indicate their candidate preference.
That effort has not succeeded, he lamented, whether through a General Assembly resolution or any other mechanism, and that failure is its own indictment of how the selection process is structured.
People across the world need a leader who can drive change through their moral authority and serve as the conscience of the world. At this stage, each of the candidates could have done more to demonstrate that they possess the courage and conviction required to do that. said Tiwana.
Instead, they appeared to play to the gallery of powerful states when they could have been speaking to the people who need a functioning and relevant United Nations in the second quarter of the twenty-first century” declared Tiwana.
Ian G Williams, a longtime commentator covering the UN since 1989 and currently President of the Foreign Press Association (FPA), told IPS, so far, it’s a very uninspiring and, dare one say, “mature” field.
Maybe there should be as much pressure for “youth’s” turn, as there is for a woman, not least since both female candidates are of pensionable age. The “most difficult job in the world” is not one for Donald Trump’s contemporaries!
The hustings had four announced candidates, but as the Book of Proverbs says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”
“None of the candidates offered a vision: their presentations had all the breadth and depth of an application for deputy head of corporate Human Resources,” said Williams, who covered four previous SG elections– BBG, Kofi, Ban and Guterres.
Even the candidates who showed signs of integrity, keeping the law, seem to be missing the vision thing and, frankly, keeping the law is a stretch for candidates who want to avoid a veto from the P5, he pointed out.
“So, in a field of lame horses, the three-legged one might limp home, and that could be Mackie Sall, who is not a woman, not Latin American and does not have the support of his own country or region. His big benefit is that he passes the traditional UN promotion test of not being remembered for anything in particular.”
In an in-depth analysis, Williams said Bachelet has the credentials, but for obvious reasons camouflaged her vision while Rebecca Grynspan is an uninspiring apparatchik who has presided over the effectual dismantlement of UNCTAD, the development agency that had been in the sights of Washington for decades.
While one cannot hold family connections against her, many countries might also worry about the optics of an SG whose sister is an Israeli settler in the West Bank. However, she is backed by her government unlike some other candidates.
Indeed, it could be a plus for Bachelet that Chile’s new reactionary government pulled its endorsement, just as the Argentine Grossi’s backing by Millei, and thus simplicity by Trump, is not exactly a vote winner.
Looking at the heavily handicapped slate so far, said Williams, it’s good that there are nominations waiting in the wings.
Barbadian PM Mia Amor Mottley would be an ideal candidate – ticking both the vision and law boxes. A woman from the Latin American and Caribbean region, (whose ”turn” it is for the position) and whose otherwise disqualifying integrity might pass the Trump test by speaking English and being accoladed by no less that the American Enterprise Institute! However, she has just won re-election in her homeland.
Another candidate who is reportedly waiting to declare, said Williams, is Ecuador’s María Fernanda Espinosa, former GA President, who is missing support from her own government, but has other supporters, is young, a woman and a Latin American and who has shown both vision and integrity.
However, he pointed out, the odds are against anyone desirable surviving the vetting and vetoing from this US administration, and they would be unlikely to survive scrutiny by Moscow or Beijing, Russia and China, pay lip service to the international order, and might be prepared to sacrifice their immediate prejudices for the greater good.
Overall, the question is whether the UN is redeemable without finding a way to bypass the veto. At one time the US realized the advantages of maintaining the UN as thin blue fig leaf for its actual hegemony, but it no longer sees the need to cover its rampant MAGAhood, declared Williams.
A list of former UN Secretaries-Generals follows:
• Ban Ki-moon (Republic of Korea) who served from January 2007 to December 2016;• Kofi Annan (Ghana) who held office from January 1997 to December 2006;
• Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt), who held office from January 1992 to December 1996;
• Javier Pèrez de Cuèllar (Peru), who served from January 1982 to December 1991;
• Kurt Waldheim (Austria), who held office from January 1972 to December 1981;
• U Thant (Burma, now Myanmar), who served from November 1961, when he was appointed acting Secretary-General (he was formally appointed Secretary-General in November 1962) to December 1971;
• Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden), who served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in Africa in September 1961; and
• Trygve Lie (Norway), who held office from February 1946 to his resignation in November 1952.
IPS UN Bureau Report
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - The January 2026 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) departs significantly from those preceding it, including from Trump’s first term. Is it deliberately misleading? Or is actual policy, including war, being driven by other considerations?
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The 34-page NDS begins by asserting: “For too long, the US Government neglected – even rejected – putting Americans and their concrete interests first”.
Much like the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), released by Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio in December 2025, the NDS claims to be about putting ‘America First’.
Both documents promise ‘no more business as usual’. They claim to change decades of strategy, supposedly in the national interest. Unlike earlier US military blueprints, the NDS is filled with vague rhetoric and eschews interventions abroad.
But in Trump 2.0’s first year alone, the US bombed ten countries, threatening at least four more, all in the Americas. Despite scant mention in both documents, the US-Israel war on Iran resumed on 28 February!
Europe
The NDS claims the US is reducing its direct military role in Europe but still wants to be influential.
It pledges to remain central to NATO “even as we calibrate US force posture and activities in the European theater” to meet US priorities.
Nurina Malek
The NDS blows hot and cold on Europe’s aggressive support for Ukraine’s Zelensky, envisaging a reduced troop presence on NATO’s borders with Ukraine.
Many European allies complain the Trump administration has created a ‘security vacuum’ by leaving Europe to confront Russia with uncertain US support.
They also complain about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s insistence on “credible options to guarantee US military and commercial access to key terrain”. The NDS insists on more than access to Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Issued days after Trump claimed he had a “framework of a future deal” on Arctic security with NATO chief Mark Rutte, he insisted it ensured the US “total access” to Greenland, long a territory of NATO ally, Denmark.
However, Danish officials insisted formal negotiations had not yet begun. Trump also threatened European nations opposing his Greenland plan with tariffs.
Western Hemisphere
The NDS supports the NSS and Trump’s ‘Donroe doctrine’ focus on the Western Hemisphere, envisaging the Americas as the US backyard.
In his January Davos speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney noted that recent US actions are disrupting established international norms.
The NDS was issued three days later, after a week of tensions between the White House and its Western allies. Cooperation with the Americas, including Canada, is conditional, to “ensure that they respect and do their part to defend our shared interests”.
It warns the US will “actively and fearlessly defend America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere. And where they do not, we will stand ready to take focused, decisive action that concretely advances US interests.”
Trump had declared the US should retake Panama and its Canal, accusing the government of ceding control to China. Later, however, Trump was more ambiguous about ‘taking back’ both the country and the canal.
Many also doubt Trump’s intentions in kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, ostensibly for trial on drug charges in the US.
Asia-Pacific
The previous NDS, issued in 2022 under then-President Joe Biden, had deemed China the US’s principal threat. Biden also embraced Trump 1.0’s Indo-Pacific alliance to encircle China.
In contrast, the new NDS describes China as an established power in the Indo-Pacific region that only needs to be discouraged from dominating the US and its allies.
The goal “is not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them… This does not require regime change or some other existential struggle…President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China”.
The NDS even proposes “a wider range of military-to-military communications” with Chinese counterparts! The U-turn followed the administration’s retreat from its threatened tit-for-tat tariff escalation after China’s successful retaliation.
Biden’s 2022 NDS promised the US would “support Taiwan’s asymmetric self-defense”. The new NDS offers no such assurances to the self-governing island province of China, which Beijing warns it will take by force if necessary.
The NDS also calls for “a sharp shift – in approach, focus, and tone”, insisting US allies must take more responsibility for countering adversaries such as China, Russia and North Korea.
It insists, “South Korea is capable of taking primary responsibility for deterring North Korea with critical but more limited US support”.
Cutting costs of empire
Like Trump, the new NDS wants allies to pay much more for US ‘protection’.
It echoes his frequent criticisms of allies for taking advantage of previous administrations to subsidise their defence and being ungrateful for US protection.
But the terms of such subordination remain ambiguous and arbitrary, even extortionate and corrupt. Gulf monarchies may now regret their generous donations to the president, apparently to little avail so far.
Trump’s treatment of allies, the Netanyahu-led war on Iran, and continuing US-led efforts to ‘contain’ China suggest both documents offer poor guidance to knowing and understanding, let alone anticipating, US policies abroad.
Nurina Malek is an economics graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, currently working on policy research at the Khazanah Research Institute.
IPS UN Bureau
SEATTLE. USA, Apr 27 2026 (IPS) - This is the third part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 1: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 1 of 3, Part 2 of 3
Whose head?In foreign relations, as in immigration, King Don the Con appears to be channeling King John the Bad and often surpassing him.
However, our wannabe monarch should consider one more exemplar, this one fictitious: Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen could be another spiritual ancestor of the Golden Emperor. After all, his Bling Dynasty has been a creature of fiction more than fact.
Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“Let the jury consider their verdict.” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
As we’ve seen, King Don has demonstrated a similar disdain for legal niceties. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” could be the motto of much of his foreign policy as well as immigration enforcement. He often skips indictment, trial, and verdict, and jumps straight from accusation to carrying out the sentence.
There is one striking difference between the two monarchies, though: the Red Queen’s courtiers understood that she was not playing with a full deck, and so they ignored her ranting. The Golden Emperor’s toadies are too cowardly to tell him that he’s acting increasingly unhinged, and have become immune to shame about their North Korea-like sycophancy. A possible exception is “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who may be even more deranged than his boss. His speeches sound like they’re written by a B-grade action-movie screenwriter torqued on crank. Economist Paul Krugman said in an interview that some people in the Pentagon are calling him the Secretary of War Crimes.
In the summer and fall of 2025, Trump marshalled a massive armada of ships, air power and troops in the southern Caribbean. The official name was Operation Southern Spear, and they were clearly positioned to threaten Venezuela. But while they were waiting to carry out the eventual abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros, Trump reportedly ordered them to unleash military strikes against small boats that he said were smuggling drugs.
Instead of ignoring the President, as the Red Queen’s courtiers did, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio obediently began extrajudicial executions of civilians in small boats. The victims reportedly included sailors, fishermen, bus drivers, laborers, and possibly some small-time smugglers.
The Defense Department reportedly confirmed to Congress that as of March 17 the U.S. military had killed at least 157 people in military strikes on 47 alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. More strikes have allegedly occurred since, raising the death toll to at least 163 people.
As an Elizabethan connoisseur of royal mayhem might have put it: “As flies to wanton boys are we to King Don. He kills us for his sport.”
If Trump had wanted to make a serious case to the world that he was actually combatting drug smuggling, he could have ordered normal policing operations: intercept and impound the boat, display the packets of drugs and weapons captured, perp walk the smugglers and publicize their indictments and convictions. However, the his government has not publicly presented evidence that drugs were being smuggled or that the crews were connected with drug cartels or terrorists.
U.S. forces did not give the boats or crews a chance to surrender. They simply blew them (and any evidence of their alleged crimes) to smithereens. In one case, they reportedly slaughtered two survivors of an initial strike who were still clinging to the wreckage. Some boats were apparently carrying more people than would be needed for a crew, so perhaps some were just passengers. In another strike in which two survivors were rescued, they were not arrested by the U.S., but instead returned to their respective countries, Colombia and Ecuador. This was an improbable outcome if they were in fact smugglers or terrorists.
Here’s the lowdown: regardless of whether the crews or passengers were smuggling anything, they were civilians. Even if a war had been in progress, it would have been illegal under international and U.S. military law to kill non-combatants. But this was not a war with a foreign government, nor an attack on the U.S. by terrorists. Given that many of the strikes killed four or more people, the customary threshold for mass homicide, the operation should be investigated as serial mass murders.
Even before the strikes began, the senior Judge Advocate General (JAG, a military lawyer) at the U.S. Southern Command in Miami questioned the legality of the strikes and voiced concerns that they could amount to extrajudicial killings, NBC News reported. This JAG’s opinion was reportedly overruled by more senior officials.
Many other military lawyers and other officials also voiced concerns about the strikes’ legality up their chains of command. The “Former JAGs Working Group”, formed by victims of Hegseth’s earlier mass firings of JAGs, issued a statement that it “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.”
Questions about the operation’s legality also apparently troubled the head of the U.S. Southern Command. Admiral Alvin Holsey abruptly announced that he would step down from his post in December, without offering any explanation for his decision. But the New York Times reported that Holsey, too, had expressed concern about the legality of the killings. This brought him into conflict with Hegseth and the White House. Ultimately, Hegseth pushed out the Admiral.
Six Democratic members of Congress who are veterans made a video that simply told serving military members: “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders.” This is advice commonly given to soldiers. Trump responded hysterically on Truth Social: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”, and reposted another user: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” [Buchanan 11/20/2025]
Trump reserved his nastiest blast of vitriol for the only U.S. senator in the group, Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy combat pilot and astronaut. Defense Secretary Hegseth moved to demote and censure Kelly and reduce his retirement pay. In February, a federal judge temporarily blocked the demotion and criticized Hegseth for trying to punish a veteran and member of Congress for First Amendment-protected speech. Ironically, the attacks on Kelly seem to have supercharged his political fund-raising and helped establish him as a credible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028.
The rationales for killing civilians on small boats followed an opportunistic trajectory: first frame the strikes as tools to intimidate Maduro, then claim to be interdicting drug smuggling to save American lives. Next up the ante to fighting narco-terrorists. Finally, admit that the main goal of the whole operation was to take back oil from Venezuela that somehow belonged to the U.S.
After the abduction of Maduro, the usefulness of boat strikes to intimidate the now deposed president, if it ever existed, should have expired. But since then, Trump has continued to claim he is protecting U.S. citizens from “narco-terrorists” by destroying small boats.
The U.S. Southern Command claims with each strike that it is targeting boats along “known smuggling routes” that U.S. intelligence has identified. But it has yet to provide evidence that these boats were actually carrying drugs – perhaps because it is hard to collect it when the boat is blown to bits remotely from the air. And whether or not smuggling goes on along those routes, people living on the coasts of Latin America use small boats for public transportation, carrying legal goods, fishing, and many other purposes. Unsurprisingly, some may follow the same routes that smugglers use (as I have witnessed traveling in a small passenger panga on the Caribbean).
As the case of the Venezuelan deportees established, Venezuela is not a major drug producer; it serves primarily as a conduit for illicit substances produced elsewhere in South America and bound for European markets, not the U.S. Furthermore, in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the main drug being moved is cocaine, which is rarely fatal for users. The fentanyl that Trump flagged as responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. is produced almost exclusively in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S. from there.
As a congressional interrogator at a hearing on the strikes asserted, any amounts of drugs the strikes may have destroyed were insignificant, and are having no impact on the volume or price of drugs entering the U.S.
Furthermore, small boats are only one of numerous modes of drug transport from South to North America and Europe. Drug enforcement has been playing Whac-A-Mole for a half-century with submersibles, commercial shipping, air freight, small planes, drones, tunnels, parcel post, package express, U.S. citizen travelers, and the list goes on. Despite high-profile drug seizures, arrests of drug lords, and spasms of violence, drug markets keep calm and carry on. Meanwhile, fatal overdoses, almost exclusively from fentanyl, spiral upward.
And narco-terrorism? Sorry, but in the non-fiction world, organized crime and terrorism are fundamentally different beasts.
Big drug cartels resemble legal transnational corporations in many ways. Their main purpose is to make money – and then they have to launder it, which also requires business acumen. They have vast decentralized networks that include voluntary and involuntary sub-contractors and investors. They spin off subsidiaries in different countries. They can be very violent when competing over plazas, treating migrants as a profit center, or responding to attacks by governments, but usually they want to run their businesses without visibility or drama. The most successful organized crime executives have been the cagey facilitators and deal-makers.
Occasionally, when the gangs have become stronger than the police forces, governments have had to use the military to confront them. But only patient use of law enforcement tools like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and socio-economic programs to offer foot soldiers ways to get out of the life can ultimately disentangle their roots from society.
On the other hand, organizations that practice terrorism use violence or the threat of it for political, social, or ideological purposes. They want to visibly menace and destroy their enemies, and they are not primarily concerned with making money.
Many political movements from the American Revolution onward have practiced terrorism – in that case against Tory sympathizers with the British crown. And as in most wars, the British army also practiced terrorism against civilian colonists. Whether a given armed group is classified as terrorists or freedom-fighters generally depends on which side of the conflict the observer stands.
Organized crime may sometimes pursue socio-political objectives, and terrorists may sometimes use illicit activities to fund themselves. But defending against each phenomenon requires very different approaches. The Global War on Terror and the War on Drugs have both been long-running failures because neither terrorism nor organized crime can be eliminated militarily.
When King Don calls an organization “narco-terrorists”, he is simply slapping a label on it that gives him legal cover for using military force to blow things up and kill innocent bystanders. (“Oopsie!”, as his buddy Bukele might say with a smirk.) And as a bonus, the violence may distract his followers from his rich stew of corruption, juicy emoluments and tender pardons garnished with a soupçon of Epstein.
Despite the smoke screens, international efforts to hold Trump responsible for serious human rights violations have begun in a few venues.
A panel of experts convened by the United Nations Human Rights office in September 2025 concluded that the boat strikes violated the right to life under international law and the law of the sea. Their statement asserted: “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers. Criminal activities should be disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.”
The U.S. had accused the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua of mounting “an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion’ of the U.S., at the behest of the Venezuelan Government.” But the experts found that “There is no evidence that this group is committing an armed attack against the U.S. that would allow the U.S. to use military force against it in national self-defence.”
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an organ of the Organization of American States, also held a hearing on the boat strikes in March. It heard testimony from several human rights organizations and the U.S. government. “We are doing everything in our power to hold the Trump administration responsible for its egregious violations of both U.S. and international law”, Jamil Dakwar of the ACLU testified. “These extrajudicial killings,” said Angelo Guisado of the Center for Constitutional Rights, “were poorly veiled cover to justify the illegal overthrow of the Venezuelan government, as admitted by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.” A State Department spokesman responded: “The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue.” He also accused the Commission of interfering in domestic litigation.
The Trump administration has not released the names of the slain. But a few families have come forward to identify their loved ones. Human rights groups are representing two of them seeking redress from the government.
Although we have focused on the boat strikes as Trump’s most literal implementation of “Off with their heads!”, the operation that they were supposedly a warm-up for – the ousting of Venezuela’s president – also resulted in pointless and illegal bloodshed.
On January 3, 2026, Trump cried “Havoc!” and let slip the dawgs of Delta Force. The U.S. invaded Venezuela, abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro, and charged him in a U.S. court with heading a drug-smuggling cartel and illegally possessing firearms. During the operation, U.S. officials estimated that at least 75 people were killed by U.S. forces. The Venezuelan defense minister later said that 83 were killed and more than 112 injured by U.S. forces. He confirmed that the operation killed 47 of its personnel, and the Cuban government said that 32 of the dead were Cuban citizens. Some reports have suggested that additional civilians may have been killed.
As mentioned previously, an investigation by U.S. intelligence services had already found that the Venezuelan government did not direct or cooperate with Tren de Aragua, and was instead generally hostile towards the gang. So whatever his other faults, Maduro was evidently not a drug lord.
These charges also beg the question of how a president who is the commander-in-chief of an army and under protection of a presidential guard can be guilty of illegally possessing firearms. Stay tuned to Maduro’s trial in federal court in New York City for more details.
In any case, just for the record, it is generally illegal under international law for one country to invade another, kill its citizens, and capture or assassinate its leaders.
To understand Operation Southern Spear, it may help to compare the capture and abduction of Maduro with Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted in a U.S. court of large-scale drug trafficking and imprisoned. His brother Tony had already suffered the same fate.
Trump’s pardoning of JOH at the same time he was detaining Maduro on similar charges was widely seen as contradictory. But on the contrary, the message was eloquent: the law means nothing, and King Don the Con doesn’t care if friends break it. All that matters, even if you’re a convicted narco, is that you shamelessly genuflect to him and declare undying fealty.
Despite U.S. criticism of the Maduro government, the abduction of the Venezuelan president left his vice-president in charge as the temporary president, and did not remove any other high officials from the existing Venezuelan government. So much for régime change.
In an outburst of candor, Trump confirmed afterwards that his main motivation was to force Venezuela to give back “our oil” to the United States. This was apparently done under what he calls the “Donroe Doctrine”. The reality was that since long before Maduro, Venezuela had expropriated the assets of some foreign oil corporations, as many developing countries have done. But Trump conveniently omits the backstory that foreign oil companies had originally expropriated Venezuela’s oil from Venezuela. This was fueled by concessions from dictators in the first half of the 20th Century. [Wolfe 1/9/2026]
Treachery, lechery, mendacity and cruelty? Sorry, King John the Bad: in immigration, foreign policy and many other domains, King Don the Con has elevated those qualities far above your crude medieval badassery.
Kings and lawsWhen the New York Times asked Trump if there were any limits on his global powers, he replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. … I don’t need international law.”
It is true that Trump has a finely calibrated moral compass. The problem is that it always points to himself.
Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig laid out the challenge starkly: “Once more, we must ask, as Lincoln did, whether a nation so ‘conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’ can long endure. …We have been given the high charge of our forebears to ‘keep’ the republic they founded a quarter of a millennium ago. If we do not keep it now, we will surely lose it.”
The millions of partisans of No Kings and other resistance initiatives are working overtime to organize the massive and diversified political insurgency necessary to throw King Don the Con into the toxic waste dump of history and to re-establish something resembling the rule of law. Some of the political opposition seems to be slowly awakening from its torpor and showing signs of life. However, if the MAGA fever has not broken by 2028, I fear that our democracy and human rights will be languishing in hospice.
The last word goes to Tom Paine, the sharp-tongued English pamphleteer who lit a fire under colonial revolutionaries in 1776 with Common Sense: “[A]s in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
This is the third part of a three-part commentary. Read Part 1: No Kings? Meet King Don and King John – Part 1 of 3, Part 2 of 3
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