Afrasianet - Mazen Al Najjar - The list of disastrous U.S. regime-change attempts is far too long, and includes Kosovo, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. They are all examples of the folly of excessive imperialist expansion, and all foreshadow America's fate.
The American ruling class, detached from reality and blinded by stupidity, greed and arrogance, has eliminated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against an outlaw world, the world of colonialism and battleship diplomacy.
Thus, American writer and thinker Chris Hedges concludes that undermining the rule of law at home and abroad consolidates America's standing in the world as a rogue state.
Democratic institutions are dying. It is powerless or unwilling to rein in the ruling gangster formation. The lobbyist Congress has become a useless tail. It has long ceased its constitutional powers, including the right to declare war and enact legislation. In 2025, only 38 meager bills were sent to Donald Trump for his signature. Most of them are "veto" resolutions that repeal regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump rules by imperial decree through executive orders.
The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is just an echo of state crimes, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, and the looting of the billionaire class.
The money-saturated elections became a farce. The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing wars and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by brave judges, including banning the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, are tools in the hands of corporations, overseen by the Justice Department, whose primary job is to silence Trump's political opponents.
Thuggery as an alternative to politics
For Hedges, the Democratic Party, which is supposed to be the opposition, while de facto subservient to corporations, obstructs the only bailout—mass movements and strikes—knowing that its corrupt and hateful leadership will be removed from its position. Its leaders treat New York City's mayor, Zahran Mamdani—a glimmer of hope in the dark—like a leper. They would rather let the ship sink than give up their status and privileges.
Dictatorships are one-dimensional, they reduce politics to its simplest: either do what I say or I will destroy you.
The nuances, complexity, compromise and, of course, empathy and understanding are beyond the limited emotional range of a gang society, including its supreme leader.
Dictatorial regimes are a haven for thugs. Gangs, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the White House, prey on their own countries and plunder other countries' resources.
Dictatorships turn the social order upside down. Honesty, hard work, compassion, solidarity, and self-sacrifice are all negative qualities that they have. Those who hold to these qualities are marginalized and oppressed, while the ruthless, the corrupt, the liar, the petty and the cruel thrive.
Dictatorial regimes give thugs the ability to keep their victims — at home and abroad — immobile. There are Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs, Delta troops, the Special Navy and CIA Special Operations Teams, which, as any Iraqi or Afghan knows, are the most dangerous death squads in the world. And the thugs of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration — who have been seen accompanying President Nicolás Maduro in handcuffs in New York — and thugs from the Department of Homeland Security and police departments.
Nihilistic paths
Is there any oversight of state power, where legitimate residents are abducted from our streets by masked thugs, where the ghost of the fictitious "radical left" is used as a pretext to criminalize dissent, and where the nation's highest court grants Trump royalty-like power and immunity?
Can anyone claim, with the demolition of environmental agencies and laws – which are supposed to help us confront the impending environmental annihilation, the most serious threat to human existence – that there is any concern for the common good? Can anyone argue that the United States is the protector of human rights, democracy, the law-based order, and the "virtues" of Western civilization?
The ruling gangs will accelerate the deterioration. They will plunder as much as they can, as quickly as they can, on the way to the abyss. The Trump family has raised more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since his re-election in 2024. They do so by mocking the rule of law, tightening their stranglehold and strangling people.
Freedom of expression is suppressed on universities and through the media. Those who denounce the genocide lose their jobs or are deported. Journalists are discredited and censored. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with technical support from Palantir and with a budget of $170 billion over four years, is laying the foundations for a police state. Its personnel have increased by 120 percent. It is building a huge complex of detention centers across the country, not just for illegal immigrants, but for all Americans. People outside the walls of this empire will not be better off with a trillion-dollar budget for this war machine.
Absolute power outside the law
This leads to Venezuela, where the head of state and his wife, Celia Flores, were kidnapped and secretly transferred to New York in flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter. War was not declared on Venezuela, nor was war declared when Iran and Yemen were bombed. Congress did not approve the hijacking and bombing of military installations in Caracas for not informing him.
The Trump administration has justified the crime, which killed 80 people, as a drug raid and a violation of U.S. firearms laws, the most bizarre: "possession of machine guns and destructive devices; conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices."
These accusations are as absurd as trying to justify the genocide in Gaza as an "Israeli right of self-defense."
If it were about drugs, Trump would not have pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez last month after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute more than 400 tons of cocaine in America, a conviction that was based on much stronger evidence than the charges against Maduro.
But drugs are just a pretext. Thanks to this success, Trump and his subordinates are already talking about Iran, Cuba, Greenland, and possibly Colombia, Mexico, and Canada.
Absolute power expands at home and abroad, feeds on every act of lawlessness, and rolls like a snowball into totalitarianism and disastrous military adventures. When people realize what happened, it is too late.
Who will rule Venezuela? Who will rule Gaza? Does it matter?
If countries and peoples do not bow to the authority of Molokh, the god of tyranny in Washington, they will be bombed. It is not about establishing legitimate government, it is not about holding fair elections. It is about using the threat of death and destruction to enforce total submission.
Trump made this clear when he warned Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, that "if you don't do the right thing, you will pay a heavy price, perhaps even greater than what happened to Maduro."
Maduro's kidnapping was not about drug trafficking or machine gun possession, it was about oil. As Trump said, so that the United States could "manage" Venezuela.
"We're going to send the giant U.S. oil companies, the largest in the world, to invest billions of dollars in repairing crumbling infrastructure, especially oil infrastructure, and start reaping profits for the country," Trump said at a news conference on the morning of the kidnapping.
Iraqis, a million of whom were killed during the U.S. invasion and occupation, are aware of what will happen next. Modern, efficient infrastructure was destroyed under Saddam Hussein — Hedges has seen Iraq under Saddam, so he can attest to this fact. America's Iraqi agents appointed as rulers had no interest in governing, and are said to have stolen some $150 billion in oil revenues.
The United States was eventually expelled from Iraq, although it continued to control Iraq's oil revenues and routinely turned to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The Baghdad government is allied with Iran, and its army includes the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). Iraq's largest trading partners are China, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Turkey.
The defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost the American people between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, were the most costly in U.S. history. None of the masterminds of these disasters have been held accountable.
Coup d'état and regime change
Countries targeted for regime change collapse, as in Haiti, where the United States, Canada, and France overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004. The coup led to the collapse of society and government, guerrilla wars, and worsening poverty.
Hernandez, who was recently pardoned by Trump, took over the presidency in 2014 and turned Honduras into a drug state, as did Hamid Karzai, the U.S. puppet in Afghanistan, who oversaw the production of 90 percent of the world's heroin. Then there is Libya, another country with vast oil reserves. When NATO toppled Muammar Gaddafi during the Obama administration in 2011, Libya was divided into pockets controlled by rival warlords and militias.
The list of disastrous U.S. regime-change attempts is far from long, and includes Kosovo, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. They are all examples of the folly of excessive imperialist expansion, and they all foreshadow the fate that awaits America.
The United States has targeted Venezuela since the election of Ugo Chavez in 1998. It was behind a failed coup attempt in 2002. It tried to install opposition politician Juan Guaidó as "interim president" even though he was never elected president. When that attempt failed, Guaido was brutally ousted as Trump did to opposition figure and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado. In 2020, the United States orchestrated a failed attempt by mercenaries to ignite a popular uprising.
Maduro's kidnapping marks the beginning of another catastrophe. Trump and his henchmen are no more competent, perhaps even less efficient, than officials of previous administrations who have tried to subjugate the world to their will.
Hedges sees the crumbling empire faltering like a wounded beast, unable to learn from its disasters, paralyzed by arrogance and incompetence, burning the rule of law and fanciing that indiscriminate industrial violence will restore its lost dominance. Despite its ability to wield destructive military influence, its initial success inevitably leads it to costly quagmires and self-defeats.
But the irony is that the tragedy is not the death of the American empire, but the loss of the lives of so many innocent people with it.
