In fact, China’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 5% in January – March, and industry hummed along even more vigorously in April than it had in March. Ironically, some of the country’s increased economic vigor is from foreign demand for its solar panels and electric cars, spurred by the spike in crude and gas prices.

Still, as Trump heads off to Beijing next week, opening the Strait will be high on the agenda of Xi Jinping, since a global energy crisis is looming that could hurt the world economy and therefore China’s.

Two kinds of hydrocarbons are affected by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, fossil gas and crude oil. China produces the majority of the fossil gas it uses, and it imports some of its needs by pipeline from Russia and Central Asia. Another portion is brought in by tankers in the form of Liquefied Natural Gas, with Qatar and Australia being the two biggest suppliers. Qatar closed off its fossil gas spigots on March 2, soon after the Israelis and the United States launched their unprovoked war of aggression on Iran.

China imports about 24% of its LNG needs from Qatar, which comes to 16% of its total fossil gas imports if we include imports by pipeline.

The shortfall in gas imports cannot be made up. Australia and the US are already producing at capacity. This shortfall potentially affects three sectors: 1) power generation, 2) urban heating and cooking and industrial processes like smelting, and 3) fertilizer (fossil gas provides the feed stock for the latter). In India, restaurants are already closing because of lack of cooking gas. Things haven’t gotten that bad yet in China.

China can easily replace the gas power plants with renewables, since it has gigawatts of new solar and wind, some of which is still not even connected to the grid..

But until urban heating, cooking, and factory processes like kilns are electrified, the gas shortfall will eventually hurt. It hasn’t yet, since some LNG was still on the water and being delivered until recently. If the fossil gas shortage continues into the winter, it will pose a problem for urban residents, since gas heating in apartments and factories cannot quickly be converted to run on other forms of energy. I suppose you could run an electric space heater off of China’s renewables.

As for the gasoline and diesel produced from crude oil, they have risen in price, from the equivalent of $4.16 a gallon in April to about $5 a gallon today. The lower grade of gasoline was the equivalent of $3.69 per gallon in February.

Photo by Austin on Unsplash

Still, China has some cushions with regard to petroleum. It produces about a quarter of the oil it uses. It can increase imports from Russia. It has six months of oil reserves, and anyway 53% of new car purchases are electric, a percentage that is likely to rise substantially this year.

Although China’s government has set the country up to be resilient to energy shocks, in a way that South Korea, say, has not, there are limits to what it can endure before slowing down. For one thing, if the Strait of Hormuz impasse continues for several more weeks, it will result in absolute shortages of oil and gas globally, provoking a slowdown of the world economy. Since China is the workshop of the world, selling everything to everyone, if people cut back on their purchases, China will take a big hit.

Donald Trump is no stranger to such visual manipulations, though he tends to add himself rather than subtract others. He has depicted himself as Jesus, as a U.S. Olympic hockey player scoring a goal and beating up Canadian opponents, as a sunbather with other Cabinet members in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. One of his ardent followers in the House, Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), proposed a bill last year to add Trump to Mt. Rushmore, though Trump beat her to the punch five year earlier with a tweet inserting himself next to the Founding Fathers.

Despite his preference to overpopulate the visual universe with his own image, Trump has also developed his own process of elimination. He has compiled an enemy list—former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Mark Kelly—that he’s been targeting with legal suits and character assassination campaigns. Not content to focus on the present, he has actively been trying to expunge from federal websites, publications, and parks all the non-white, non-male historical figures that previous campaigns saved from obscurity.

But perhaps the most dangerous effort at air-brushing involves climate change. Trump has gone out of his way to turn the United States from a lukewarm advocate of measures to reduce carbon emissions to a stone-cold denier that climate change is even happening. Trump is notoriously upset at not being at the top of every list—best president, smartest guy in the room, most creative hairstyle. Let’s throw in one more list: greatest threat to humanity. Perhaps in order to top that list, too, the president has downgraded the threat of climate change to the point of non-existence. Like Stalin, Trump now stands alone.

The administration’s campaign started with the scrubbing of all references to climate change from federal websites. It has encouraged more widespread self-censorship: anyone who wants to keep their federal job or apply for a federal grant has tactically removed anything Green-related from their descriptions and applications. This animus toward anything climate-related has also shaped many of the administration’s latest budget cuts: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget halved, $1.6 billion cut from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program eliminated, $449 million in renewable energy funding slashed.

It’s no surprise that the administration has gone after states that have retained strong climate policies. The Justice Department has targeted Vermont and New York for their polluter-pay approaches as well as California for its cap-and-trade system. Despite these attacks, a number of states have actually moved forward with their emissions-reduction and energy-transition strategies. The 24 states in the U.S. Climate Alliance have cut their emissions 24 percent below 2005 levels and promoted the development and adoption of clean-energy technologies.

The administration’s approach can also be seen in the carrot side of the equation. It has approved pipelines like the recent Bridger Pipeline Extension, green-lighted deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil companies, and tried to prop up the dying coal industry. The administration has paid out $2 billion to companies to cancel their wind power projects and invest instead in fossil fuels. Deregulation and lack of enforcement—of pollution standards, of safety and health requirements, of environmental permitting—have been huge gifts to companies spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

More ominously, the administration has altered the very DNA of regulatory governance by repealing the “endangerment finding.” According to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, the EPA is required to ascertain if climate change is a danger and, if so, to take steps to address it. Under subsequent administrations, the EPA did just that. But Lee Zeldin, the EPA head determined to destroy his own agency, recently stomped on nearly 20 years of legal precedence by repealing the “endangerment finding.”

At a press conference with Trump at the White House, he said that revoking the finding would save Americans $1.3 trillion, mostly in the form of lower car prices. He neglected to mention the costs of the move, which, by the EPA’s own estimates, could top $1.4 trillion, and this is not even counting the expenses associated with greater warming.

Roughly half the states of the union have joined together to challenge Zeldin and bring the case to the Supreme Court.

In the best of all possible worlds, the Trump assault on climate science, energy transition funding, and regulatory mechanisms is the last hurrah of the fossil fuel cult. After all, the price of renewable energy is dropping, the scientific community remains united in its dour assessments, and most of the rest of the world is committed to doing something about the gathering storm. Even Trump’s all-out bid to save the U.S. coal industry must reckon with the inexorable laws of the market. Because coal-fired power plants are old and just plain uneconomical, Trump has presided over the closure of more of these plants than any other U.S. president.

But this isn’t the best of all possible worlds. Trump’s rearguard actions come at a perilous time when even half-hearted attempts to address climate change are plainly insufficient. Only industrial-strength collective action against fossil fuels can mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. Instead, Trump is playing to the strengths of polluting industries in an attempt to destroy any last hope of restoring a measure of equilibrium to the planet.

The Climate Keeps a Changin’

Although almost every country in the world has pledged to cut its emissions of greenhouse gasses, the overall amount of carbon spewed into the atmosphere continues to grow. In 2025, spurred by a 4.1 percent increase in emissions associated with the oil and gas sector, emissions hit a new record. Methane emissions, considerably more dangerous than those of carbon-dioxide, also increased to a new high after a small decline in 2024.

The total increased in part because of a surge in U.S. emissions. In 2023 and 2024, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions actually declined. Equally important, U.S. policies managed to sever the link between economic growth and emissions, with the former increasing even as the latter declined. In 2025, however, emissions increased by 2.4 percent, once again faster than economic growth.

Just as the impact of Pentagon spending on global military expenditures will not be measured until the figures are released for this year, Trump’s policies on climate won’t begin to register in the statistics until the end of 2026. The increase in emissions last year was more a function of an unusually cold winter and the expansion of both data centers and crypto mining, not Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly policies.

It’s not all bad news. China, the world’s biggest emitter in total numbers by a long shot, is approaching peak carbon dioxide emissions while also boosting exports of solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines to record levels so that other countries can transition to these renewables. European emissions continue to drop. In 2025, solar became the first renewable energy source to lead the growth in electricity supply. Wind and solar now account for a larger share of electricity generation than coal.

The Iran War, meanwhile, is an unintended inflection point in the trajectory of energy politics. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has created a huge energy crisis, with many countries reporting major shortages in oil and gas. As Zoya Teirstein and Jake Bittle write in Grist,

As prices rise and supplies dwindle, countries around the globe are reevaluating their energy futures. While some have fallen back on dirty fuels to fill the gaps caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, others have announced significant investments in clean energy to chart a path away from the sources of energy they have relied on for more than a hundred years. 

Trump and company dreamed of accessing Iranian fossil fuels and driving down prices at the pump. So far, they are getting the exact opposite of what they wanted. The same may well hold for their war against renewable energy.

Attempting to Kneecap the International Response

As part of his effort to destroy the “green new scam,” Trump hasn’t been content to dismantle the domestic infrastructure of emission reduction and energy transition. He has taken the United States out of every major international initiative to address climate change, beginning with the Paris Agreement and the UN agency that administers it, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

So far, however, there hasn’t been a rush to the exits in the wake of U.S. withdrawal. No other countries have exited the Paris Agreement, not Russia, not any of the Gulf Countries, not even Nicaragua and Syria (both of which initially didn’t sign the agreement). Three countries have signed but not ratified the agreement—Iran, Libya, Yemen—but internal turmoil plays a role in their foot-dragging. Meanwhile, all UN members remain part of the UNFCCC.

So, the United States stands alone in its refusal to acknowledge that the world is endangered by climate change.

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

In general, international responses have been inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Only a trickle of funding is going toward helping countries reduce emissions (mitigation), addressing the ongoing impact of climate change (adaptation), and making the transition away from fossil fuels. But the world minus the United States is at least inching up its commitments to fund these three efforts. Global action continues to address the preservation of biodiversity and the 23 targets identified in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The Trump administration has turned its back on climate science, slashing funding and even planning to disband the National Center for Atmospheric Research. But the rest of the world has no problem poaching U.S. scientists and surpassing the United States in Green patent filings. In this way, Trump is steering the United States into a high-tech cul-de-sac.

Trump took office with a plan to remake the world with his tariffs, his military interventions, his refocus on fossil fuels, and his preference for authoritarianism. The world has certainly taken note. Given the size of the U.S. economy and the U.S. military, it is impossible to ignore Trump. When it comes to the imperative of climate change, however, the world has shrugged. The international community is not accelerating at the speed necessary to save the world, but it also isn’t slowing down to defer to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is leading the United States in a great leap backward. The rest of the world, at least when it comes to climate science, is refusing to take that leap with him.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus )

( Truthdig ) – When Israel and the U.S. launched their war on Iran, a flurry of media reports suggested that CIA-armed Kurdish forces were preparing to enter Iran and help topple the Islamic Republic. That outcome was always unlikely. Just months earlier, the latest chapter in the Kurds’ long history of exploitation by the West was being written in neighboring Rojava, or Syrian Kurdistan.

Rojava’s Kurds spent years fighting Islamic State, or ISIS, in line with Western interests. But their long-term goal of meaningful political autonomy crumbled in January as Washington greenlit an offensive by the pro-Western, Islamist Syrian government against the Syrian Kurds. “After years of Kurdish collaboration with the West’s anti-ISIS coalition, they were abandoned overnight,” says Adnan Hassanpour, an exiled Iranian Kurdish journalist who spent 10 years on death row in Tehran. “These experiences are fresh in our memory.” 

Now the West has come knocking on Kurdish doors once again. Washington’s latest bout of interest is focused on the exiled Iranian Kurdish parties that have established a network of safe houses, military bases and refugee camps in the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). These groups cover the political spectrum from staunch Kurdish nationalists who welcome U.S. action against Iran, to leftists who say attempted U.S.-Israeli exploitation of Kurdish aspirations is “poisoning” their movement. 

But no matter their politics, the Kurds are generally united in a realistic assessment that the U.S.-Israeli intervention is bringing their long-suffering people grave risks and few rewards.

U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran began on Feb. 28, killing thousands to date. Since then, Iran has targeted the Iraqi Kurdish region with over 700 strikes — more than any other noncombatant country. During a two-month internet blackout, exiled Iranian Kurds in Iraq risked these bombings while driving up to the 1,000-kilometer Iraq-Iran border, desperately trying to contact relatives on the other side. Exiled Iranian Kurdish activist Keywan, whose family members in Iran have suffered torture and interrogation as a result of his activities, describes patching calls through multiple phones and limiting himself to 20-second conversations with each relative in a bid to evade detection by Iranian intelligence services. 

“We didn’t have any role in starting this war, and we don’t have any role in it continuing or stopping,” Hassan Sharifi, a member of the executive board of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, told me in his party headquarters, overlooked by martyr portraits. “But still they are bombing us every day.” 

An estimated 40 million ethnic Kurds are spread out across an ancestral homeland that remains divided between Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. In Iraq, 6 million Kurds won a precarious autonomy after partnering with the U.S. during two Persian Gulf wars. Across the border in Iran, 10 million Kurds continue to fight for their culture, language and political aspirations. In 2022, the murder of an Iranian Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, by the Islamic government’s morality police inspired Kurdish protesters to launch the nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom movement, but brought no lasting change. 

“I joined the ‘women’s revolution,’ and saw with my own eyes how they gunned protesters down in the street. A defenseless people went out to demand freedom, and they answered us with AK-47s,” says exiled Iranian Kurd Nazir, 27, holding his rifle as he gazes across the mountain ridges toward Iran. Those experiences drove him to join the armed groups known as the peshmerga in the Iraqi Kurdish mountains, where he looked on helplessly from afar as his compatriots once again took to the streets in January, when the Iranian regime blamed the Kurdish opposition for organizing nationwide protests. At least 6,000 people were killed, including hundreds of Kurds, as President Donald Trump’s social media promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” once again failed to materialize.

Whatever their view on the conflict, Kurds are realistic about the West’s intentions. 

As scattered Iranian strikes continued to hit the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups despite the supposed ceasefire, I drove up into the mountains separating Iraq from Iranian Kurdistan to meet a group of peshmerga fighters based around an hour from the border. As we drank tea out of old whiskey glasses around an open fire, their opinions ranged from the optimism of youth to decades-old, battle-hardened cynicism.

“I’m personally against this war and don’t want to see anyone killed. But if the U.S. and Israel want it, the [Iranian] regime will fall,” young fighter Nazir says. But an elderly fighter named Adib chimes in to urge caution, recalling his days battling the Western-allied shah as a teenage communist militant in the run-up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “The U.S. and Israel won’t give us anything we can’t take for ourselves,” he says. He recalls a notorious U.S.-brokered 1975 deal that exposed the Kurds to massacres, after Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state, abruptly terminated Washington’s clandestine support. “This isn’t our first experience with the West. They always try and use the Kurds as a card,” he says. 

These disagreements play out among the opposition groups. Figures such as Adib Khaladyan of the avowedly pro-interventionist Kurdistan Freedom Party are still hoping to benefit from Western backing. “We strongly believe the recent U.S. and Israeli conflict with Iran is the only way to put an end to the regime,” he tells me. But Ibrahim Alizade, a veteran communist politician, agrees with his peshmerga. “This war isn’t a chance to take down the regime,” he says. “It’s a chance for the regime to lengthen its existence.”

Whatever their differences of opinion, these groups are ultimately bound to respect the wishes of their hosts in the KRI. It’s the KRI’s political leadership who exchanged phone calls with Trump in the early days of the war and are now carefully trying to steer a course through the region’s complex conflicts.

“Although we are partners of the U.S., we would like to stay neutral, because this war is bigger than us. We don’t want to be part of it,” says Hoshyar Siwaily, a spokesperson for the governing Kurdistan Democratic Party. Though his pro-Western government hosts the exiled Iranian Kurdish opposition, it also enjoys friendly relations with Tehran, and so “we aren’t willing to let the opposition parties use Iraqi Kurdistan as a base for launching attacks against Iran.” Indeed, the KRI, Baghdad and Tehran have collaborated in recent years to disarm Iranian Kurdish groups and pull them back from the sensitive border regions.

Rather, Siweily repeats long-standing calls for the U.S. to provide his region with its own air defense systems, without which the Kurds will always be at the mercy of hostile neighbors. In Rojava, the Kurds’ long-term nemesis Turkey was able to conduct its own punishing campaign of drone strikes against humanitarian infrastructure and the Kurds’ Western-allied anti-ISIS force, paving the way for January’s Islamist offensive.

The Kurds remain highly exposed, especially the lightly armed Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, rendering cross-border action unlikely. Communist politician Alizede suggests that the U.S. was never serious about arming the Iranian Kurds, but rather wanted its better-trained, better-armed Iraqi partners to launch the offensive in the guise of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups. (Senior KRI officials dispute the claim). Material provision of air defense could have made the difference, and seen Kurdish boots hit the ground in Iran. But the West won’t provide these systems, for fear of angering its more powerful allies in Damascus, Baghdad and Ankara. 

Whatever discussions took place behind closed doors, Trump has since publicly stated he doesn’t want to see the Kurds involved in the conflict, and even suggested that unidentified Kurdish parties had intercepted U.S. arms intended for Iranian protesters — another accusation denied by all parties. “We don’t know which party has received this alleged support. If Trump knows, why doesn’t he say?” asks Iranian Kurdish politician Sharifi.

For now, the primary Kurdish role in U.S. and Israeli policy is as a rhetorical talking point. Genuine Kurdish suffering is used to justify the war, while Israel (in particular) uses the threat of Kurdish insurrection to pressure Iran. But as Washington and Tehran engage in fractious, off-again-on-again ceasefire talks, the Kurds have no seat at the diplomatic table. And their representatives are anxious about what comes next.

Iran has a long track record of exacting revenge on the Kurds. The day after a prior ceasefire was announced following the “12-day war” in June 2025, the government executed jailed Kurdish activists accused of having links to Mossad, Israel’s spy agency. Any surviving regime, weakened externally but all the more authoritarian at home, could win domestic legitimacy in part through violent retribution against the Kurds. Indeed, Iranian attacks on the KRI continue daily even throughout the fragile two-week ceasefire. Missiles soar sporadically overhead to strike Iranian Kurdish opposition camps and offices, killing and injuring dozens.

Even if the current war did result in regime change, it’s not clear the Kurds would benefit. The figure long groomed as the West’s point man to head a new Iranian government is the exiled son of hated, deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, known for cultivating ties with Israel as he lives a life of luxury in the United States. The shah’s son sees no place for Kurdish autonomy in a new Iran, and like Tehran’s Islamic rulers, his mainstream monarchist opposition condemns the Kurds as separatists. “We have experienced the rule of Pahlavi’s father and grandfather, and they were no better than the current regime,” says Sharifi, summing up the Kurds’ universal mood. “Pahlavi doesn’t recognize any of the other nationalities within Iran. He’s a fascist.”

The major Kurdish parties this year united in a coalition calling for a secular, democratic, federal Iran. Achieving this aim would mean coordinating with Iran’s Azerbaijanis, Arabs, Baloch and other minorities, who together with the Kurds make up nearly half of the country’s population. But whether the regime stands or falls, the Kurds are a long way from achieving this dream.

All the Iranian Kurdish parties have networks of supporters on the ground, and can mobilize street protests and strikes. But only one has active fighters deployed within Iran — the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (known as PJAK). This party is linked to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which was the guiding force behind the so-called Rojava revolution, meaning some of its cadres also have experience in governing and defending a population of millions.

Unlike other opposition groups, PJAK is listed as a terror organization due to its PKK links, and must operate clandestinely within Iraqi territory. “From the outside, the Kurds are seen as nothing but warriors,” says executive committee member Gulan Fehim, in an anonymous safe house in the foothills around Iraqi Kurdistan’s second city, Sulaymaniyah. “But opposition can’t be limited to the military level. We aim to establish an alternative system of democratic confederalism for all the different nations in Iran.”

Like their comrades in Rojava, the PJAK espouses a radical ideology based on women’s autonomy and decentralized, commune-level governance. This vision, which always appeared somewhat utopian amid the Middle Eastern chessboard of global powers mobilizing inter-ethnic conflicts to suit their own agendas, now seems more distant than ever. Rojava spent 14 years trying to implement federal, multi-ethnic governance amid the bloodshed of Syria’s civil war. But the project suffered from repeated military campaigns waged by key U.S. ally Turkey, manipulation by the U.S. in the course of Washington’s war on terror, and Syrian perceptions of the Rojava revolution as prioritizing Kurdish interests at the expense of the country’s conservative Sunni Arab majority.

Rojava’s Kurds had long been key U.S. partners in Syria. But when pro-Iranian dictator Bashar al-Assad was deposed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, an Islamist strongman and former al-Qaida affiliate, that reality changed. “The fall of the al-Assad regime marked a pivotal moment in shaping the new Middle East,” says senior Syrian Kurdish politician Abdulkarim Omar, speaking from Rojava’s de facto capital Qamishli. “The United States now supports [al-Sharaa’s] government and seeks to bolster its stability.”

The U.S. stood by as al-Sharaa’s Islamist forces seized swathes of territory formerly held by the Kurds, forcing them to accept a highly unpopular deal aimed at reintegrating their autonomous regions under Syrian government control. “The U.S. didn’t play a positive role in preventing attacks by the Syrian army,” Omar says. “This was the outcome of political arrangements between Damascus and Tel Aviv, with active Turkish involvement and American mediation.” Once again, at the crucial hour, U.S. and Israeli lip service to the Kurds did not translate into material support. 

On the ground during Rojava’s January offensive, frontline Kurdish fighters cursed the U.S. for this latest betrayal and swore to defend Rojava to the death. Today, these same fighters must register into battalions under the command of Damascus’ triumphant Islamist rulers — or face obliteration. The fate of the region’s famed all-female units remains unclear.

Exiled peshmerga guerrilla fighters in their mountain base. (Matt Broomfield)

Some PJAK fighters, battle hardened from fighting alongside Rojava’s Kurds, have since crossed back to rejoin old comrades on the Iranian border, hoping to continue their fight for a democratic, women-led Middle East in a new arena. But the Kurds’ enemies have also learned from the Rojava revolution, and Turkey has warned the U.S. that it won’t tolerate a repeat of Rojava’s 15-year effort at Kurdish-led autonomy on its eastern border. Meanwhile, Rojava’s bitter experience of ethnic warfare between Arabs and Kurds has dimmed many Kurds’ appetites for forging intercommunal partnerships in the name of “democratic confederalism.”

Kurdish representatives insist they’re ready to advance a radical alternative in Iran. “Our guerrillas are always ready to sacrifice themselves. We have no problem there. But if we enter this war, it will be in response to the demands of our people, not any [external] force,” Fehim says. But as those forces bomb their way toward a new Middle East designed to suit U.S. interests, it will be harder than ever for the Kurds to achieve their dream of a federal, feminist alternative — or even simply to stay out of the fight.

As evening falls over the peshmerga base, we drive back down the valley, past houses that once housed the families of exiled Kurdish fighters. Their doors have been marked with red crosses, in an effort to show that the buildings have been evacuated and pose no threat to Iran. But these tokens of neutrality are invisible from the perspective of the U.S. jets and Iranian drones soaring overhead.

We leave behind the peshmerga waiting in their bases, unable to answer airstrikes with their battered old rifles. Shino, 31, left behind a home, an abusive marriage and her young child to join the armed group, risking everything for a new life. “My heart is beating faster,” she says. “The moment is coming. I can feel it.” 

But the Kurds have lived through these moments often enough before, and though their hearts may beat for freedom, their heads remind them that liberation remains a distant dream.

Reprinted with permission from Truthdig

He also commented on PM Mark Carney’s initial support for the Iran War which Carney later retracted as it became more evident that this was a war of choice, rather than a war of necessity and would bring suffering upon many innocent people. 

When asked about Alberta’s separatist movement Snyder said it is “eerily similar to the Donbas region in Ukraine where Russia’s full-scale invasion took place in 2022.  He added: Alberta’s separatist movement needs to be taken seriously” even though no First Nations Indigenous are in support of it. 

American corporations own over 70% of the oil in the Tar Sands with an estimated $50 billion going to U.S. investors annually.  Alberta’s natural resources were recently valued at $860 billion, and such resources tend to provide enticements to American conservatives in the separatist movement. Similarly, in the  Donbas region, resources are valued at $7.5 trillion making their development a major motive in the invasion of Ukraine.

Canada has had a strained relationship with the U.S. due to President Trump’s Intemperate remarks about making it the 51^st state. As well as that, he has imposed onerous tariffs alienating many Canadians. His  lack of understanding concerning the long history of Canada-U.S. relationship, coupled with his inconsiderate remarks, indicate that even his most cautious  advisors are unable to curb his erratic behavior.

Trump is not unique. Humans can attain high levels of authority based on charisma rather than on competence. A century ago, the Harvard psychologist William James wrote about his admiration for octopuses and their “flexible intensity for life” and wished that humans too could learn such flexibility.  Octopuses have 8 arms and 9 brains, giving them an uncanny ability to escape from traps, whereas humans, especially those in positions of power, tend to get caught in risky decision-making, often doubling down on their mistakes, and unable to escape escalating traps during conflicts. Therapists have used the phrase: “doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results, is a sure sign of serious addiction.”

Elites like to believe they are a privileged class, convincing themselves of the right to subjugate others, even succumbing to the belief that they are “divinely chosen”. When this is coupled with the delusion that “might makes right” it normalizes the cruelty of wars, especially air wars where pilots are unable or unwilling to see the results of their actions. 

The genocide in Gaza has resulted in the death of 71,000 Palestinians, but “blowback” against perpetrators  is inevitable. Israeli soldiers suffer from their complicity so that, according to their own  sources, “Israel is experiencing a major mental health crisis among its soldiers, with  a sharp rise in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), moral injury, and suicidal breakdowns. The Israel Defense Ministry has recorded a 40% increase in PTSD and expect 180% increase by 2028”.

In America we are seeing a country trapped by its addiction to war. Domination of others has made it habituated to having 800 U.S. bases spread throughout the world. Recently 16 of these bases  have been rendered inoperable or unusable by Iran’s missiles in retaliation for the bombing of its hospitals, schools and bridges.

This current militancy is contrary to the U.N. model that the U.S., Canada and 48 other nations  committed themselves to in 1948, soon after WWII. These ideals were powerfully expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its 30 fundamental rights and freedoms. Though non-binding it inspired many international treaties such as rights against torture, and the protection of children, women and migrants.  

Image by Brigitte Werner from Pixabay

A sad commentary on current policies is that the U.S. has withdrawn from 31 of the most consequential UN organizations. This recent action has precipitated a decline in its influence over the developing world. Despite this, hundreds of peace groups express their humane concerns with on-going peaceful protests while also taking action against the punitive policies of deporting undocumented immigrants, many of whom are farm and health care workers innocent of any crime.

Perhaps new elections and a new government can halt the disastrous consequences that the Trump administration has initiated but more likely, later generations will see these decisions as a symptom of deeper maladies. For instance, the inequality gap has significantly widened, bringing to the fore an oligarchy leveraging its wealth by funding candidates for Congress whose views agree with their own.  

If leaders are able to take upon themselves a degree of “flexible intensity” it is possible that events will change for the better and that harbingers of the future will provide positive changes to provide for a more harmonious future.

(The Conversation) – When delegates gathered for COP30 in Belém, Brazil in November 2025, they scrutinized various sectors of the global economy for their contributions to rising greenhouse gases. Agriculture, aviation, steel, cement — all were on the table. One topic not discussed was war.

This isn’t a minor oversight. Militaries are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has generated an estimated 311 million tonnes of what’s known as CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined annual emissions of Belgium, New Zealand, Austria and Portugal. CO₂ equivalent is the metric used to compare the warming impact of various greenhouse gases to carbon dioxide.

Recently published research calculated that the first 15 months of Israel’s war in Gaza generated more than 33 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined 2023 annual emissions of Costa Rica and Slovenia.

In February 2026, Israel and the United States launched a war against Iran, joining a long list of other conflicts where emissions go uncounted in global inventories.

These are massive emissions, and they are generated with no formal mechanism to record, report or attribute them, and no accountability for the climate costs that affect people in conflict zones and far beyond.

A recent article by Neta Crawford, a researcher with the Cost of War project at Brown University, highlights how armed forces, militarization and war fuel climate change. She argues that military emissions and conflict-related emissions remain undercounted, even though they undermine efforts to mitigate climate change.

The military emissions gap

Estimates suggest militaries and their supply chains account for approximately 5.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is enough to make them the world’s fourth largest emitter if counted as a country. And that figure only covers peacetime.

This is what researchers call the military emissions gap: the difference in emissions between what governments report and what their armed forces actually emit.

The problem starts with the rules. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), countries have been exempt from fully reporting military emissions since the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in the 1990s. The United States successfully lobbied for the exclusion on national security grounds.

The 2015 Paris Agreement introduced voluntary reporting. However, as a 2025 briefing from the Conflict and Environment Observatory and Griffith University made clear, the result is a system that is “patchy, incomplete or missing altogether.”

The top three military spenders — the U.S., China and Russia — either submit no data or incomplete, non-disaggregated figures. This is a structural blind spot that excludes one of the most carbon-intensive sectors from meaningful accountability.

What wars cost the climate

A recent study on Gaza provides a comprehensive account of the war’s full carbon cycle. It found that direct combat emissions — jets, rockets, artillery, military vehicles — account for just 1.3 million of the 33.2 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent.

The vast majority, more than 31 million tonnes, are projected to come from the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure: nearly 450,000 apartments, over 3,000 kilometres of roads, schools, hospitals and water systems. Rebuilding what war destroys is, climatically speaking, the biggest act of war of all.

A report on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War found that direct combat emissions constitute 37 per cent out of total emissions between February 2022 and 2026. The war has ignited thousands of fires in forests and wetlands, accounting for 23 per cent of its total carbon footprint.

Russia’s attacks on electrical infrastructure have further released sulphur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas 24,000 times more potent than CO₂, from high-voltage switching gear. And the rerouting of civilian aircraft around Ukrainian and Russian airspace has added an estimated 20 million extra tonnes of CO₂ equivalent compared to pre-invasion flight paths.

In Iran, it is estimated that the U.S.-Israel war has unleashed over five million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent — largely from infrastructure destruction and energy-related impacts.

None of this appears in any country’s reports on emissions to the UNFCCC.

What needs to change

In July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion establishing that states have binding obligations to assess, report and mitigate harms to the climate system. In a separate declaration, ICJ judge Sarah Cleveland stated that those obligations extend to harms resulting from armed conflicts and other military activities.

The UN General Assembly has called for Russia to compensate Ukraine for all damages resulting from its invasion. When wars of aggression are launched, the emissions generated in fighting them, surviving them and rebuilding belong on the aggressor’s carbon ledger. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it generated a climate debt on behalf of the entire planet. The same can be said of other aggressors.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. The IPCC is currently in its seventh assessment cycle, with reports expected in late 2029.

This assessment cycle must include a dedicated report for conflict emissions covering infrastructure destruction, fighting and post-conflict reconstruction. The UNFCCC must make reporting military emissions mandatory and develop a framework for attributing conflict emissions under its Enhanced Transparency Framework.

Civil society and academia have already done the hard work of showing it can be done. Organizations like the Conflict and Environment Observatory have built methodologies from scratch, using open-source data. The science exists. What’s lacking is the political will to enshrine it in global climate governance.

Photo of Gaza – Palestine A huge explosion in a building as a result of a bombing by Israeli warplanes, 2025, by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

The richest countries spend roughly 30 times more on their armed forces than they contribute in climate finance to developing countries. Global military spending has reached a record $2.7 trillion. This is more than the total $2.2 trillion invested globally in clean energy in 2025.

As conflicts proliferate, the world is committing to an ever-larger unaccounted carbon liability. The climate finance gap is also likely to get worse as countries cut international development aid to direct funds to higher military spending.

Every degree of warming we are trying to avoid is undermined by wars. Accounting for conflict emissions is a vital way to make climate science whole.

Tamara Krawchenko, Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Middle East Monitor ) – In the intellectual circles of Washington and its allies, a growing certainty is evident: a combination of military and economic pressure can bring Iran to its knees or drive it towards collapse. Analysts present detailed three-step plans to “crush Tehran” and postulate that the West holds strategic superiority. However, a deeper look at the array of global and regional developments illustrates this certainty to be a dangerous “strategic illusion”. These roadmaps, by ignoring systemic consequences, geopolitical blind spots and their own internal vulnerabilities, chart a path towards an uncontrollable and attritional quagmire rather than a route to victory.

The fundamental weakness of these analyses is the oversimplification of the conflict’s nature. For example, the strategy of simultaneously intensifying economic and military pressure ignores the fact that modern warfare is a two-way street. While one side focuses on targeting the opponent’s economy, the other side takes the war to a new and dangerous level by targeting energy infrastructure.

The cycle of mutual retaliation against refineries and gas facilities, as the recent confrontation between Iran and Israel demonstrated, rapidly transforms from a tactical achievement into an existential threat for both sides.

This situation increases the risk of disruption to electricity networks, desalination plants and supply chains, and exposes the structural vulnerability of countries like Israel which rely heavily on these infrastructures. Therefore, the idea of one-sided pressure that only leads to the weakening of the opponent practically turns into an infrastructure war of attrition with no definitive loser.

Furthermore, proponents of maximum pressure routinely miscalculate the resilience of global energy markets. They assume that the US and its regional allies can seamlessly replace disrupted oil supplies to prevent price spikes. Yet, an escalated conflict involving the targeting of Iranian facilities guarantees a symmetric response against allied oil producers in the Gulf. Such an outcome would immediately trigger a severe shock to the global economy. That shock would not be an abstraction. It would show up in the price of bread, in fuel queues before dawn, in hospitals delaying shipments, and in families switching off air conditioning in unbearable heat. The first to pay would not be generals or strategists, but shopkeepers, nurses, drivers and migrant workers with no say in the confrontation.

European nations, already grappling with inflation and the economic fatigue of ongoing continental conflicts, cannot absorb another massive energy crisis. Consequently, attempting to strangle Tehran economically risks suffocating the fragile economies of the West in the process.

Beyond economic misjudgments, Western strategists fundamentally misread the architecture of regional resistance networks. They operate under the assumption that neutralising the central command in Tehran will automatically dismantle its allied factions across the Middle East. On the contrary, these non-state actors possess significant autonomy, local support bases and independent arsenals. If central authority in Iran were to weaken, the region would not suddenly embrace peace; rather, it would likely fracture into unpredictable, decentralised zones of conflict. Additionally, Tehran actively mitigates Western pressure by cementing strategic partnerships with Beijing and Moscow. This multipolar shield provides crucial diplomatic and financial lifelines, rendering unilateral US sanctions increasingly obsolete.

Another blind spot of these strategies is ignoring their impact on the global order and the lessons which other powers glean from them.

The Strait of Hormuz blockade and the effort to control this vital chokepoint do not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. This action, particularly for Beijing, is a practical masterclass in how to use maritime chokepoints to exert pressure on the global economy.

While the US tries to contain Iran by controlling Hormuz, China carefully watches and learns for a potential blockade scenario of the Taiwan Strait; a waterway which is the main artery for transferring advanced semiconductors and a massive portion of global trade. This means that the US strategy to solve a regional problem could inadvertently become a model for creating a much larger global crisis and hand its main rival the very tool it struggles to contain.

Photo by Nourieh Ferdosian on Unsplash

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

On May 2, the University did not merely censor this year’s commencement speech. It treated the mention of Palestinian humanity as a radioactive heresy that had to be scrubbed from the record as if a crime had been committed.  

The “outrageous” remarks were delivered by Professor Derek Peterson, a distinguished historian. During his address, Peterson suggested that the greatness of the University lies not so much in its scoreboard but rather in its pursuit of justice. He honored a list of pioneers: Sarah Burger, who paved the way for women to be admitted; Moritz Levi, the first Jewish professor, who opened doors for generations of Jewish students; and the Black Action Movement, which fought for the inclusion of Black people.

Then, he dared to praise a coalition of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students who protested the worst man-made humanitarian catastrophe of this century. Specifically, he commended the pro-Palestinian student activists for opening our hearts to the “injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

For this act of empathy, President Domenico Grasso issued a groveling apology on behalf of the administration for “hurtful and insensitive” remarks. It was a masterclass in institutional spinelessness. To honor Jewish professors is commendable. To honor Black students is noble. But to suggest that Palestinians, too, possess human rights worth defending—that, in this administration’s view, is heresy. 

It takes a profound level of moral bankruptcy to turn a blind eye to Israel’s campaign of mass killing and destruction that a global consensus of human rights organizations—including the Israeli groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, as well as the International Association of Genocide Scholars—has called the commission of genocide. The real scandal, apparently, is not the slaughter itself, but the possibility that a few donors might have had their commencement brunch disturbed by hearing those crimes named aloud.

The irony is staggering. University leaders oversee an institution supposedly devoted to truth. Yet they react to a call for empathy with the same reflexive suppression one might expect from a white Southern university in the Segregation era, terrified of the “subversive” idea that Black Americans should be granted equal rights. 

The administration’s official statement claimed that commencement was “neither the time nor the place” for such remarks. 

This rationale raises the obvious question: When, exactly, is the “correct” time to acknowledge the systematic destruction of every hospital in Gaza and the killing of nearly 1,000 doctors, nurses and medics? Is there a pre-approved window during which the University of Michigan permits its faculty to decry the murder of more than 21,000 children? Or is there a donor-vetted litmus test to determine which atrocities we are allowed to name?

As a Jewish lawyer and activist who knows this conflict intimately, I find the University’s “outrage” to be particularly ignorant and insulting. We are not protected by the silencing of truth. The administration does not honor our history or the Jewish idea of speaking truth to power by censoring those who acknowledge these horrors and appeal to conscience. Instead, it brings shame and embarrassment upon this world-renowned academic institution.

This censorship serves as a grim reminder that under the current leadership, academic freedom and the pursuit of truth end exactly where the protection of donor money begins. It must be a heavy burden for these administrators to carry all that “hurt” while tens of thousands of human beings are being extinguished.

Derek R. Peterson Michigan graduation remarks 2 May 2026

[This post contains video, click to play]

(The Conversation) – US President Donald Trump’s threats against Iran since the war began have targeted not just the country’s military capabilities, but its entire civilisation.

In recent days, he has threatened that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacks US ships trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

He’s previously pledged to send Iran back to the “Stone Age”, and warned that “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.

These statements show not only extreme belligerence, but Trump’s complete lack of understanding of Iran’s long, resilient culture and civilisation and the fortitude of its people.

Iran has been subjected to much internal strife and foreign power intervention, but it has never been colonised or subjugated. At every difficult moment in their history, Iranians have fought to preserve what is theirs.

Persian influence in ancient Greece and Rome

Since the Greco-Persian Wars (499 BCE), Persia has served as the West’s ultimate “other”: a dark and despotic oriental villain menacing an enlightened West.

This is despite Persia’s return of exiled Jews in Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple in 538 BCE, and its tolerance of diversity in the world’s first truly multicultural empire.

The victories of a coalition of Greek city-states over the Achaemenid Persian imperial forces at Salamis (480 BCE) and Marathon (490 BCE) are considered pivotal moments in the history of Western civilisation.

Yet this was just a minor setback for Persia. In fact, Persia continued to play a decisive role in Greek affairs. Persian gold helped Sparta defeat Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), and Persia was often the most important mediator in Greek affairs.

The Parthian and Sasanian Empires that followed the Achaemenids in Persia then challenged the Romans.

In 260 CE, Sasanian Emperor Shapur I captured Roman Emperor Valerian in battle – an unprecedented act. A century later, Shapur II’s army fought off an attempted invasion by Emperor Julian, killing him in the process.

Western triumphal narratives tend to forget that Persia repeatedly humbled the greatest Western empire in ancient times.

Surviving invasions from the east and west

Alexander the Great conquered Persia militarily. However, he embraced Persian culture, which outlasted Greek influence in the region.

The advent of Islam did not extinguish Persia’s civilisation or resilience, either. Islamic leaders preserved Persian language and culture, kept pre-Islamic festivals such as Nowruz (the 3,000-year-old Persian New Year), and adapted Zoroastrian concepts into Shiite Islam’s emphasis on resistance to tyranny.

The Mongols’ multiple invasions (between 1219 and 1258) devastated Iran, yet core elements of Persian civilisation survived. Persian power flourished again, especially under the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736).

During the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925), Persia was squeezed by the Anglo-Russian rivalry of Great Game era, but was not subdued.

During the second world war, Iran was occupied by the British in the oil-rich south and the Soviets in the north. However, both powers pledged, along with the United States, to respect Iran’s sovereignty and withdraw at the end of the war.

A turbulent 20th century

This episode rejuvenated Iranian nationalism and prompted a movement to free Iran from traditional major power rivalries and gain control over its own resources. This especially pertained to oil, since the British had controlled Iran’s oil reserves through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) from the early 19th century.

In 1951, a long-time nationalist-reformist, Mohammad Mossadegh, was elected prime minister and promptly nationalised the AIOC, sparking a major dispute with London.

Mossadegh also sought to limit the power of Iran’s monarchy in favour of democratic reforms, causing a conflict with the young, pro-Western Mohammad Reza Shah, who was still the country’s reigning monarch.

The shah was forced into exile in 1953, only to be returned to the throne days later when Mossadegh was overthrown in a covert operation by the US Central Intelligence Agency, with MI6’s help. (Fifty years later, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the CIA’s role in the coup.)

The US backed the shah as a pillar of American hegemony in the Middle East. In return, US oil companies received a 40% share of Iran’s oil industry.

Yet the shah was able to transform his dependent relationship with the US into one of interdependence. Iran became a pivotal player in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and in the region.

In the wake of the 1973–74 energy crisis, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned the United States would react with force if it was “strangled” by a cut in oil deliveries – a veiled message to the shah.

The Iranian revolution of 1978–79 then toppled the shah and enabled his chief religious and political opponent, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to assume power. Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic Republic with an anti-US and anti-Israel posture.

He essentially based his rule in the historic pride Iranians held as a people in charge of their destiny.

Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sought to entrench Shia political Islamism as the ideological guide and legitimate foundation of the state. But they sought to blend this with the Iranians’ sense of civilisational, cultural and nationalist identity, especially in the face of outside aggression.

‘Iran is my land’

The celebrated Persian-speaking poet Abul-Qasim Ferdowsi (940–1020 CE) once said:

Iran is my land, and the whole world is under my feet. The people of this land are the possessors of virtue, art and bravery. They have no fear of roaring lions.

As Iran’s standoff with the US continues, it appears the regime is prepared for the long haul against yet another military foe.

But there is no military solution to the conflict. Diplomacy within the framework of mutual respect and trust is the best way forward. Otherwise, the region and the world may remain captive to an energy and economic crisis that could have been resolved through negotiations, rather than war.

As for the future of the Islamic government, that needs to be determined by the Iranian people.

Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Australian National University; The University of Western Australia; Victoria University and Amitav Acharya, Distinguished Professor of International Relations, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.

Benign Neglect?

During the years when our main political work involved opposing U.S. aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they’re more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn’t treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.

Take Nicaragua, for example. U.S. Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, U.S. companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that U.S. commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.

When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country’s two biggest copper mines, their U.S. owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly-installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.

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Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its “Harvard boys” off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile’s economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar “benefits” to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.

Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the U.S. acquired a new, if amorphous, “enemy” and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington’s geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the U.S. began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon’s advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed “benign neglect.”

An Evil Harvest

As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico’s gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as U.S. imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or “Twenty-two-B” crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We’d watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.

As for climate change, we obviously can’t pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he’ll get one for the World’s Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the U.S. was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world’s largest user of fossil fuels.

One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the “Dry Corridor,” running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean’s surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the west coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.

Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.

It turns out that not only has the U.S. historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the combination of U.S. “exports” — murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought — had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.  

In El Salvador: Trump’s BFF Nayib Bukele

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”  He’s young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the “tejido social” — the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city’s youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D’Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.

Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city’s disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele’s agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don’t miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)

His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador’s congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the U.S.-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital’s murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal’s Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador’s citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.

In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT “terrorism confinement” prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.

When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: the United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a U.S. federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.

As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela’s quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in ICE roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS 60 Minutes report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.

In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The U.S. was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as the Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: some of those prisoners were U.S. informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post,

“To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.

“Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office.”

Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.

Eyes on El Salvador

These days, it’s all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:

• Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
• Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump’s case;
• Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, “enemies of the people” and “domestic terrorists”;
• Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he’d like to do.

Oh, and it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strong man, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator — and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.

Copyright 2026 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com