WATCH: A History of Expansion

Joining me now to discuss is Joe Lauria, an independent journalist and editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Joe, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.

JOE LAURIA: Thank you, Rachel, for inviting me on your show.

RACHEL BLEVINS: I’m glad I get to talk to you today. I know there’s a lot going on kind of on the international stage that I want to get to, but I actually want to start off with this latest update coming from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He came out this week and he said, we’re doing away with fact checkers.

We’re moving towards free speech. We’re moving towards a community notes type system similar to X. In fact, it kind of feels like he wants to be the new Elon Musk in a way, but given you’ve been around for a few years in the independent media, you’ve experienced censorship at the hands of outlets like Facebook. How do you view this sudden change? Is Mark Zuckerberg just trying to get more people to come back to Facebook, or is there more to it?

JOE LAURIA: I think that’s a big part of it. Clearly, Twitter has outdone Facebook. I mean, I know so many people, including myself, who never go on Facebook anymore and live on X. I also think that there were other things that Zuckerberg said over the years that were interesting in interviews. He admitted once, not too long ago, a year ago, that the F.B.I. put pressure on him and he didn’t like it. I don’t think he’s alone. I think most of these tech guys really have been uncomfortable for years now since the pressure was put on them by Congress in particular to basically censor people that don’t follow the official U.S. narrative, particularly if it hurt the Democratic Party, which I have to say has been more keen on censorship than the Republicans have been.

So I think Zuckerberg has never, like the others were not comfortable about it. I don’t know how he came to this decision, and I’m going to wait to see what happens. There was just one article that I wrote a couple of weeks ago called “A History of Humiliation,” in which I talked about John F. Kennedy’s 1963 American University speech, his very famous speech, in which he called for the end of the Cold War and said that Americans should put themselves in the place of Russians and we’re all humans.

It was a tremendous speech. He said one thing we cannot do is give a nuclear power, i.e. the Soviet Union, the choice between humiliation or nuclear retaliation. He said you just can’t do that. That’s exactly what my article says every president since him basically, particularly since the end of the Cold War, has done.

They have humiliated and pushed Russia to the brink. That piece, a lot of people tried to share it and Facebook would not allow it to be shared. I couldn’t share it. I appealed, never heard back from them. I won’t hold my breath about Facebook improving.

RACHEL BLEVINS: Yeah, and it’s always interesting, isn’t it, how it’s the pieces, the articles or the videos that are calling for peace, right, or saying, hey, let’s back away from World War III. Let’s stop what we’re doing in terms of this, you know, decades-old conflict with Russia that now has gotten to the brink, thanks so much in large part to the Biden administration, although the Trump administration did play its own role when he was in office the first time around.

And now we’re coming to this full circle moment where in less than two weeks, Donald Trump is coming back to the White House. And I’ve watched him, right?

He campaigns so heavily on ending the war in Ukraine, but he never really gave a roadmap to how he thinks that that’s going to look. It’s all very vague. It’s all, you know, we’re going to get Putin and Zelensky in the room together and they’re going to figure it out. That sort of thing.

Any reports that we’ve seen citing so-called Trump insiders, they have all been throwing out proposals that Russia has already said would be a non-starter from the very beginning. So what are you keeping an eye on when it comes to Donald Trump coming back to the White House and how his administration is likely to try to handle Russia, especially in the initial months.

Please Support CN’s Winter Fund Drive!

JOE LAURIA: Well, he may end the war in Ukraine, but he may start one in Panama or Greenland or in Canada. I mean, some of the things he’s saying are just so off the wall right now. Look, I think he has the right instincts about certain things, but that’s where it seems to end.

He doesn’t have the right instincts in terms of hiring people. Look at the people, again, that he’s surrounded himself with. War hawks, neocons, et cetera. Do you really think that he’s going to be able to rein them all in again? He’s going to wind up firing a lot of them.

So his personnel decisions are very, very troubling in terms of bringing about peace. And there’s no question that he got a lot of votes because of that. Clearly, the Democrats have smeared themselves with not only provoking and starting and continually funding this outrageous provocation of Russia and this war in Ukraine

that’s been a disaster for Ukraine and for the United States, but also Gaza, of course, genocide. So people are fed up with that. But don’t forget, Obama was elected because people were fed up with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. So it’s just a circle, a  cycle,  that keeps going on and on again.

You never come to a leadership that ends  a long, long history of U.S. foreign policy. It goes way back to the founding fathers that Americans like to put up on Mount Olympus. Like, you know, Americans like to say this is a country of laws, not men, but it’s nonsense. Of course, it’s a country of men. We deify our American past leaders, and it’s always been a country of expansion, of first, the American continent had to be conquered like the Romans had to take Italy first, and then, of course, the wars against the Native Americans and Mexico, the Spanish-American War.

Washington said stay out of Europe, and that was until they conquered the United States. Then, of course, the First World War, which there was an opposition to, the U.S. got involved. At the end of the Second World War, The United States was the only undamaged power in the whole world and it found itself with armies all over the world and destroyed countries without governments and enormous natural resources and the U.S. modus operandi, their whole foreign policy is to keep what they found, what fell into their lap at the end of the Second World War, which was dominance of the whole world.

And they need governments around the world that will allow them to exploit those countries’ resources, labor, etc. And American history since the Second World War has been one of an intelligence agency that defends the class interests of the top tier of the United States to overthrow governments that will stand in its way and that will try to end what they had at the end of the Second World War, which is global dominance.

Of course, what we see now with BRICS is a crisis of the United States that they’ve never seen before. The U.S. empire has never seen before, and this is where we’re at. Now you have Donald Trump coming in wanting to, again, this acquisitiveness, this expansion that is part of the U.S. from the very beginning. Those founding fathers referred to the U.S. as an empire. Look at what they wrote. Here’s Trump wanting to take these other countries.

Will he end the war in Ukraine? I think this nonsensical Kellogg plan, which is to allow some kind of peacekeepers, European peacekeepers in there, or to freeze the conflict like South Korea, North Korea, it’s not going to fly. Russia is winning the war. They will continue to prosecute it. But they are now also, and even Blinken said it in his interviews, if you could bear watching them, that Russia is going to keep the territory [that it has won]. So they’re starting to see the reality. I don’t trust Trump’s team to follow his instincts to end this war.

RACHEL BLEVINS: And I think you summed it up perfectly there. I mean, I’ve been watching the news cycle for the last couple of days going, OK, why is Donald Trump talking about Greenland and wanting to take over Canada? It’s like we have so many other issues that he should be focused on.

It feels like kind of the distraction of the moment. But you’re right. That’s what we should expect from a leader here in the United States is this expansionist mindset. And going back to what you were saying about his team, I mean, the fact that he picked Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State for the next four years, I still look at it and I go, Marco Rubio, have we learned nothing? This is the same Trump that he gave that interview where he said that one of the biggest mistakes that he made in his first term was surrounding himself with the wrong people, right? And he doesn’t really go into the details.

He still thinks that Mike Pompeo is a great guy, even though you know, thanks to Mike Pompeo, I mean, the Trump administration, they went after Julian Assange in a way that even the Obama administration was, you know, wary to do. At least there’s that. But the Trump administration did things that I look at their foreign policy. I look at their killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and just the actions that were taken under Trump that were really taken by his cabinet, by his team, the people he surrounds himself with, and they were able to get away with it because of who Donald Trump is, because he listens to the people who kind of whisper in his ear.

What are your concerns about where we could be headed, especially foreign policy-wise over the next four years, even if it’s not World War III against Russia? That’s not to say we couldn’t be looking at World War III against China or even a possible war with Iran.

JOE LAURIA: That would be a great achievement to avoid World War III because the Biden administration has brought us to the brink here, particularly in his decisions to allow these U.S. missiles to be fired into Russia when the Pentagon said no effing way because it’s going to start a war with Russia.

And so the Russians, I think, are waiting for Trump to come in, although I don’t believe that, as a lot of pundits are saying, that obviously Putin and Trump have this bromance and everything’s going to be fine. No, I don’t think Putin trusts Trump.

No one in Russia trusts Trump or should anyone in the United States or anywhere else in the world. It’s an insane thing to talk about Greenland. He just sent his son into Greenland. I apologize to your viewers that don’t like history for that detour into American history, but I wanted to put it in the context that this is what America does, American presidents do, and Trump is right in there. Marco Rubio, when he was appointed, I literally gasped. I said, oh, no, out loud. I’m sitting alone in my room here in my apartment, and I yelled out, oh, no, I couldn’t believe [it was] this guy, particularly foreign affairs. I mean, forget about Cuban relations being restored. I mean, what Trump undid … for Obama deserve a little bit of credit, you know, for restoring relations with Cuba. Trump undid that. With Rubio, forget that happening. And Biden, of course, kept it. He didn’t return back to his former president, Obama.

Please Support CN’s Winter Fund Drive!

Obama did the Iran nuclear deal, and that was undone by Trump, and Biden stuck with that. I expect the Trump administration to really ramp up the troubles with Iran. This is what I’m more worried about. I think that the Ukraine war will continue as it is. I think all these initiatives will be tried by Trump.

He’s going to make a big fanfare after that. He’ll speak clearly with Putin on the phone where Biden has refused to do that. They may even meet somewhere. But I don’t expect Ukraine to be resolved by Trump right now unless he goes against his advisers and does something. But he will be killed by the media for that.

But I do expect China is a long-term objective, and we’ve had military men in the U.S. saying that by 2027 war with China. I don’t trust Trump with China. He’s always been having trouble with China, although he says he loves Xi over the chocolate cake they had in Florida. I mean, you cannot predict this guy.

I think he wants to do business with China. I’m worried about Iran. That’s the answer to your question. I think Iran is where the real trouble spot is. Of course, if he’s told by one of these nonsensible advisors that if we go to war with Iran and they shut down the Straits of Hormuz, if they destroy the energy infrastructure around the Middle East, or if that just becomes a victim of this war, the world economy collapses. Donald Trump, you are not going to be able to say that this was the golden age of America.

RACHEL BLEVINS: Oh, absolutely. And I, you know, I look at the statements that he’s made about the Middle East. I mean, we have an ongoing genocide right now that is being carried out by Israel and is being fully enabled by the U.S. And when Trump was campaigning for office, I know that he has to be pro-Israel. He knows that much of his backing here in the U.S. is very pro-Israel, very staunchly Zionist. And so he really towed that line. And any complaints that he had were not that Israel’s killing all these Palestinians. It was that Israel looks bad because Palestinians are dying and that’s getting blamed on.

It was all about the kind of the PR aspect of it. And looking at someone like Netanyahu, who Biden has given him whatever he wants on a silver platter for the last four years. Now we have Trump coming in to give him even more of what he wants after Trump did it the first time around.

How do you view this situation and what are your concerns, especially for the Palestinians and so many in the region who have suffered at the hands of Israel and the U.S. for more than a year now? Much longer, but obviously the latest being this last year.

JOE LAURIA: I’m worried that Trump will give Netanyahu whatever he wants on a golden platter. He’s the guy who, for the first time, a president ever accepted Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moved the embassy there. Did Biden reverse that too? No. He also recognized the Golan Heights being annexed by Israel, which no American president had ever done.

All these are against U.N. resolutions, many of which the U.S. actually voted for, like 242. This and the resolution against the seizure of the Golan Heights. And now don’t forget the Golan Heights. This is like, I mean, they’ve gone way beyond the Golan Heights on what’s happened in Syria in the last few weeks. This is a major seismic shift in the Middle East, and it’s unfortunately a great victory for greater Israel and a disaster for the people of Syria, for Lebanon. Trump is going to be right there with Netanyahu. Don’t forget, he got all that money from Adelson, but also he’s a guy who knows if you want to become a successful politician in the U.S., you must love Israel. I’m going to tell you off the record, an official, I covered the United Nations for 25 years for big newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe. I have a mainstream media background, and thank God I’m away from that.

I’m running Consortium News now for seven years on our 30th anniversary coming up. But one U.S. official there admitted that in order to get the job as U.N. ambassador, that this diplomat had to lie, that this ambassador, I don’t want to say the gender because I give it away, said loved Israel, even though the official didn’t love Israel. So you got to love Israel in order to get anywhere in American politics. And that’s just a fact of life. And Trump is excellent at it.

He better stop short of a war against Iran because otherwise, like I said, it’s going to be a disaster. Somebody better tell him that. But in the meantime, he’s also threatening that if the hostages, the Israeli hostages are not released by the time he’s sworn in on January 20th, that all hell is going to break loose.

Let me ask you, Rachel and your audience, how could all hell break loose worse than what we are seeing going on in Gaza right now with this outrageous, historic criminality, this genocide that everybody now in the U.N. system is admitting this is a genocide, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, these very cautious, usually pro-Western human rights organizations calling it a genocide. And here you have the U.S.government now saying it’s a genocide … in Sudan. That’s what they announced just now. It’s a genocide in Sudan. And Blinken saying, no, it’s not a genocide in Israel. I mean, something has changed.

Everything has changed after Gaza in terms of the legitimacy of Israel, the legitimacy of U.S. government leaders. There is an anger there against the U.S. policy in the Middle East that is inside the American population. Unfortunately, there’s nobody to vote for. That’s the problem. You had to vote for one genocide supporter or another one who could be even worse than Biden.

RACHEL BLEVINS: Yeah, and it’s interesting, too, going back to the point that you were making about the fact that you have, you know, here in the U.S., we have this age-old tradition of one presidential candidate help complain about the guy in office, right? You have Obama complaining about Bush’s policies, and then he gets in and he continues the same policies when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan and and Gitmo and all of the things, especially foreign policy related. And you have Trump and Biden as well doing the same thing. I mean, you have Biden exactly as you were noting.

He condemned Trump for getting out of the Iran nuclear deal and putting an end to that. But has he gotten us back into it? No, he hasn’t. He has not pulled back on any of the sanctions that he criticized Trump for or anything like that. So when it comes to this kind of gradual walking off the cliff into World War III where we currently are. How do you see Trump in that position? I mean, I know that he’s the kind of guy where he wants to have this legacy, right? He talks about wanting peace while at the same time openly supporting genocide.

And I just wonder where that leaves us as a country here in the U.S., especially at a time when, as you were also noting, I mean, the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, I don’t think we’ve even seen the impact of that, right? I think it’s going to be years long the impact that that has had overall on the axis of resistance in the region. And there’s been so much hope for this growing multipolar world. But how do you view the U.S. and kind of its position there right now as the U.S. still is so destructive, but there has yet to really be a full body to kind of counter the U.S. even when it comes to the multipolar world?

JOE LAURIA: Well, it’s a crapshoot with Trump, clearly. The entire history of the country, as I went through briefly, is one president after the other doing the same policies. These policies are set down. Expansion on the continent, expansion across the world against the old Spanish empire that collapsed with the American empire coming and then expansion into Europe, ultimately after the Second World War, trying to control the whole world with the richest, most powerful empire ever. By the way, Americans never admit they have an empire. Why is that? I think because imperialism got to be a dirty word from the socialists and the communists and then the Soviets.

Now, of course, Reagan called the Soviet Union an empire, the evil empire. So they’re using that word against their enemies because they realized empire …  It used to be people who were imperialists were proud of it. The British were proud of their empire. And so were the Americans back in the early days when Mark Twain was in the Anti-Imperialist League. They were imperialists. That was what the Americans did. They’re still doing that. Trump’s in the middle of this. He is a bad face for empire. The establishment… The intelligence agencies, they are unhappy with this guy because he’s unpredictable. Will he stick with the program, the one that’s been around since I’m saying the beginning of this country, which is to continue to expand the U.S. and to fight against BRICS, as you say, in a multipolar world?

It’s just now dawning on them what this multipolar world is. And this is the public, forget it, the media, no. But the leaders…Even the unelected blob, you know, they’re beginning to understand this is a different world right now. America doesn’t have necessarily the preeminent position, the  primacy that it once had. How will they maintain that? One could starkly say it could be nuclear war or they’re going to give up and become a responsible member of the international community and give up on this idea of trying to dominate the whole world, to grow up and stop trying to teach, to rule everybody else in a country here that’s separated by huge oceans that is separate from the the center of world history, the Middle East, Europe, Africa…this is uh, the U.S is so protected and so cut off and yet a country that’s cut off, it seems to be like this is America, then there’s the rest of the world. You’re not in the world when you’re in the U.S. The world is out there somewhere. And these are the people trying to run the world.

I don’t think we’re going to see, I don’t think, in the Trump administration, a dawning of an understanding that America can no longer have the power it once did and doesn’t need that power. It has enormous domestic problems t needs power to fix. It doesn’t need to waste any more money on wars.

Since the end of the Second World War, this has run the economy in the sense that they were afraid the Depression would return when the war ended. Therefore, the ramping up of the Cold War, the exaggeration of the Soviet threat, the continuous growth of what Eisenhower warned, and now we absolutely have a military industrial, congressional complex, this is going to have to end at some point.

I don’t think Trump will end it, but I’m going to just say that I hope that a guy who was a real estate agent, a real estate mogul, rather, who wants to make deals, that ultimately that instinct might take over and say, oh, we’re not going to go that far. We’re not going to push this way, what could be a nuclear confrontation. We’re not going to push a war against Iran, which could destroy the world economy and destroy my reputation and legacy. So you have to hope, although it’s such a dangerous moment, that Trump is going to realize, well, we can’t do that, so let’s not do it.

RACHEL BLEVINS: Yeah, and it does go back to, you know, to what you were saying earlier about the fact that you have to also look at the people around him and what those people are trying to convince him of, right? Who is in his ear telling him this is an existential threat, we have to target Iran or target China or even target Russia, if that may be the case. And now when it comes to that multipolar world, I’m also curious how you view the countries like Russia and like China. And I think that there is a lot of promise there, right? Really as much promise as we’ve ever seen in terms of a group of countries that could actually take on the U.S empire.

I think my biggest concern has been watching genocide unfold in Gaza right, watching the horrific stories that we’ve seen about Israel targeting the palestinians and then looking at the international stage and going okay why is no one doing anything? And I’m not just talking about, you know, the U.N. resolutions that they attempt to pass every few months that they know that the U.S. is going to veto. I’m talking about why isn’t there more care for the fact that we do have an existential threat to a people, even if they’re, you know, no, they’re not in Russia, no, they’re not in China, but why isn’t more being done? How do you view the state of the current multipolar world and kind of where it stands in actually being able to confront the very real problems that we’re all facing right now?

JOE LAURIA: Obviously it’s a work in progress but it has gotten a jolt forward with the Ukraine war and this is because what the U.S. did against Russia, they thought they could overthrow the government in russia, overthrow the Putin government and they were going to do that three ways:  with an information war,

with an economic war, and the ground proxy war and they lost all three, except in the West in Europe and the U.S. there’s still lots of people who  believe the information war about russia’s invasion out of nowhere just because one day Putin woke up and spun the globe put his fingers on it: “Oh we’re going to invade Ukraine today,”  for no reason, no historical context for that. That is still believed by lots of people, intelligent educated people here in the U.S. and in Europe so that is not going to change.

But Russia and China, I think, are leading what is a long overdue movement to end colonialism because we’ve moved from colonialism where they’ve lowered one flag of Britain or France and then put up a national flag, but it was still economically and in every other way dependent on their former colonial masters, particularly in Africa.

We’re seeing now as part of this process where, as I said, the economic sanctions failed against Russia, backfired in Europe. Look at the economy in Germany, for example. This change is leading to the United States having to realize that they no longer could run the whole world.

We saw the French being kicked out of West Africa, for example. This is part of this decolonization that Russia and China are leading and the economic system that they created in a separate financial, economic, trading system grew up because of these sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.

So this has given an injection of life to this new world that’s being born. But unfortunately, when new worlds are born, the old one dies. It’s very, very painful. And this is what we’re seeing in the fields of Ukraine and what we’re seeing in Gaza. Gaza is something just unbelievable.

It’s beyond imagination the horrors that we’re witnessing there. And no one is stepping up to stop them because they all have this selfish, cowardly interest. Only Yemen is really doing a Responsibility to Protect, to try to stop it with their drones and their attacks on Israel. It’s a stand against what Israel is doing.

But to see Syria being overthrown and the Israelis moving in and the Turks moving in and the U.S. staying there and carving up Syria and they’re allowing terrorist people who are still on the terrorism list to rule that country, which first of all proves that the U.S. has been using terrorists, in the Middle East for a long time, aligned themselves with religious extremists against secular rulers that were not interested in American dominance of the region after taking over from the French and the British imperialism in the Middle East, the U.S., after the Suez Crisis in 1956, has run basically the Middle East through Israel, their proxy, and there have been always governments like the Assad regime in Syria and Saddam Hussein was an absolute brute and going back to, of course, Nasser in Egypt that the British tried to kill. The Americans do not want any governments there that will stand in their way anywhere in the world, and they will support religious extremists.

That’s what we’re seeing right now. This is a long, long process. Again, as I said before, will there be a U.S. leadership that finally gives up and says we can’t run the whole world anymore? We don’t need to run the whole world. We’ve got so many problems to fix in the U.S.? Let’s be a responsible citizen and have good relations with Russia, China, allow the developing countries, the South, the Global South, to actually have their freedom and to develop. And that’s what Russia and China are are championing right now and they’ve got the Global South on their side, they don’t want war, they want development, they want peace. It’s the U.S. that is the problem and I know that that makes people say that you’re some kind of Russian puppet but this is the fact, these are the facts right now.

RACHEL BLEVINS: If only someone would go to Trump and say, okay, you can dream about Greenland and Canada and Mexico and all you want, but why don’t you focus on the country that you were tasked with serving as the president and you’re getting back to the White House in just a couple of weeks? I don’t think anyone’s really saying that to him, but I sure wish they would be. I know that there is certainly a lot at stake here all around, and I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today to break down all of the latest here. Joe Lauria, an independent journalist and editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Thank you so much for your time and insight.

JOE LAURIA: Thank you, Rachel. It was a pleasure to be with you.

RACHEL BLEVINS: If anything in this video resonated with you, be sure to like it, share it with your friends, leave a comment. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. And if you want to keep up with all of my work, make sure that you’re subscribed to my page on Substack. That’s rachelblevins.substack.com.

That’s where you’ll find ad-free videos and new weekly episodes of my exclusive series for paid subscribers called Sanction. You can also catch Sanction over on my page on Patreon.com. That’s patreon.com slash Rachel Blevins. As always, thank you all so much for all of your support, and I’ll see you next time.