In its latest statement, No Cold War takes stock of the long history of U.S. aggression across the world and the need to reject a future of wars without end.
Rokni Haerizadeh (Iran), Typical Iranian Funeral, 2008. (Via Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
As violence spreads from the Caribbean to Western Asia, the United States and Israel’s war of aggression against Iran is paralysing the global economy.
Its consequences were predictable: it was known that if the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the Strait of Hormuz – through which a quarter of global seaborne oil trade passes – would become a chokepoint.
With rising oil prices, geopolitical tensions deepen. It feels like little can be done to avert the avalanche of catastrophes that Washington and Tel Aviv have unleashed on the world.
Already demoralised by the inability to stop the genocide against the Palestinians, working people around the world are now spectators to yet another war not of our choosing. Faced with this reality, it is easy to plunge into emotions that range from anger to despondency.
Shadi Ghadirian (Iran), Untitled, 1998. (Via Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
There is a war against the planet – a war without end.
These words are not exaggerations. At a United Nations daily press briefing, the chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Máximo Torero, warned:
“This is not only an energy shock. It is a systematic shock affecting agrifood systems globally’. The Persian Gulf region accounts for nearly half of global sulphur trade, which is used to produce the sulphuric acid necessary to process phosphate rock into fertiliser.
Disruptions in this market have already caused fertiliser prices to rise dramatically. This has created problems for farmers who have planted crops or are planning to do so in the coming season.”
Torero added:
“Farmers are facing a dual cost shock: they have more expensive fertilisers alongside rising fuel costs affecting the entire agricultural value chain, including irrigation and transport’.”
Even if the war ends now, food prices are likely to remain high into next year. Given the debt burdens and austerity already imposed on so many countries in the Global South, hundreds of millions more people will be pushed deeper into poverty and hunger.
Newsha Tavakolian (Iran), Somayeh (from Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album), 2014–2015. (Via Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic and the anti-China rhetoric in the Global North, the No Cold War campaign issued a statement titled ‘A New Cold War Against China Is Against the Interests of Humanity’.
The 176-word statement, which was translated into twenty languages, called for cooperation rather than confrontation among the world’s countries. It was endorsed by over two thousand people and more than twenty peace organisations and platforms.
Over the past five years, the collective that runs the No Cold War campaign, of which I am a member, has grown to include almost twenty members drawn from numerous organisations.
Alongside our statements, we publish regular essays in our Perspectives series and hold regular conversations about war and peace. We invite you to visit our new website, where you can find a list of our collective’s members and learn how to get involved in our work.
In response to the growing danger of a wider conflict, No Cold War has produced a statement on this war without end.
NoColdWar.org Website
The capitalist United States has imposed war upon war on the planet for over 90 percent of its existence since 1776 – only pausing for a few years in its early period.
Almost all these wars have been wars of choice, often taking place very far from the U.S. mainland (the wars in the Philippines and Vietnam took place 13,000 km away).
These wars resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of civilians, with horrendous weaponry used (including nuclear bombs in Japan and chemical weapons in Vietnam and Iraq).
Forty-five men have been president of the United States. All of them have entangled their country in a foreign war or a war against people on the land being settled, particularly Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and immigrants.
This belligerent habit has discarded U.S. law (particularly [the Constitution saying only Congress can declare war and] the War Powers Resolution of 1973) and, by default, has permitted U.S. presidents to use their massive military power against the planet.
This pattern is evident in the current conjuncture.
In 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump deepened or initiated five major conflicts on the planet. Three of them are being conducted alongside the government of Israel, which operates in a twinned manner with the United States government, alongside European countries that provide diplomatic support and weaponry.
Each of these wars violates the United Nations Charter, making them illegal acts that should receive condemnation in the U.N. Security Council; all of them are wars of aggression, which means that the person who authorised them is a war criminal.
Mehrdad Afsari (Iran), Written Guidance, n.d. (Via Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
- Venezuela. On Jan. 3, 2026, United States violated Article 2 of the U.N. Charter when it invaded a member state of the U.N., kidnapped its sitting president, and forced the country to submit to demands devised by the United States government.
- Cuba. The United States has conducted an illegal economic blockade of Cuba since 1960, violating Article 41 of the U.N. Charter that only permits third-party sanctions to be imposed with a U.N. Security Council resolution (of which there has been none). This blockade was deepened on Jan. 29, 2026, when Trump forbade any third country from providing oil to Cuba, forcing the country to survive on about a third of its energy supply.
- Iran. On Feb. 28, 2026, the United States and Israel, in violation of Article 2 of the U.N. Charter, began a barrage of attacks on Iran, killing civilians with abandon and destroying infrastructure across the country, as well as assassinating the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. These attacks come less than a year after the United States and Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear energy facilities over twelve days in June 2025. The recent bombings provoked retaliation from Iran against U.S. military bases that are less shields for Iran’s neighbours and more targets. The war has led to the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has resulted in a major fuel and food catastrophe across the world.
- Lebanon. Taking advantage of the war on Iran, Israel has been ruthlessly bombing the south of Lebanon and its capital, Beirut, in violation of Article 2 of the U.N. Charter. A fifth of the population has been displaced, and thousands of civilians have been killed and wounded.
- Palestine. As part of the unending and brutal genocide against the Palestinians, despite the ceasefire, Israel has attacked the cities in Gaza repeatedly and has been confiscating land in the Occupied West Bank as well as removing Palestinians from the area in violation of several U.N. resolutions on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Meghdad Lorpour (Iran), Untitled, 2019. (Via Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
These five wars are related to each other, being part of the U.S.-driven imperialism that has begun to shape the planet (we are aware of other wars, in Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine, for example, but those will be for another statement).
Unable to drive an agenda to recover its declined economic power and the rise of the Global South (particularly China), the United States has shifted its focus to its military force.
But even here, the United States finds that it can destroy infrastructure and kill civilians, but it cannot seem to subdue nations politically. Each of these countries stands tall. None of them are willing to surrender.
Despair and demoralisation are not to be the mood of the world’s people. From Cuba to Palestine, those who are being fired upon fight back with everything they have at their disposal.
They require the world to stand with them and not to be despondent. They require condemnation of U.S. imperialism, and they require that we never treat such violence as normal.
These wars appear to be without end. But they will end. The human spirit is far too strong to be vanquished by tormentors. It uses every avenue to refuse a world in which this history of war without end determines our future.
Portrait, Saida Menebhi. (Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
We are in a period that demands strength. That strength comes from our own humanity but also from the example of those who struggled before us.
Saïda Menebhi (1952–1977), a schoolteacher and member of the Moroccan Marxist organisation Ila al-Amam (Forward), was one of them.
On Jan. 16, 1976, during Morocco’s Years of Lead (Les années de plomb), when the monarchy tolerated absolutely no word or deed in support of a republic, let alone socialism, comrade Saïda was arrested. She was detained at King Hassan II’s torture centre, Derb Moulay Cherif, where she wrote this poem that still gives me chills:
You know my child
I wrote a poem for you
but don’t chastise me
for writing is this language
that you don’t yet understand
it’s nothing my child
when you are older
you will seize this dream
that I dreamt in the middle of the day
when it’s your turn, you will tell the story of this woman
Arab prisoner
in her own country
Arab up to her white hair
her greenish eyes
the dream my child
begins
when I see a pigeon
the birds that build their nests
on the roofs of prisons
I dream of sending a message to the revolutionaries
of Palestine
in order to assure them support for victory
I dream of having wings
just like sparrows
to traverse the skies
as far as Erythrea
as far as Dhofar
arms heavy with guns
the head with poems
I want to be a passenger
on board clouds
with my war attire
combating Pinochet
in the back country of Chile
so that my blood runs
on Chilean soil
that Neruda praised
o my dream
red Africa
without hungry children
I dream
that the moon
up there is going to fall
to take out the enemy
and that the moon will leave me
in Palestine or in the Sahara
anywhere
I struggle for victory
For all people who are combatants.
In late 1977, comrade Saïda joined a hunger strike to protest the king’s policy of holding political prisoners such as Abdellatif Laabi, Abraham Serfaty, Fatima Oukacha, Piera di Maggio, Rabea Ftouh, and herself in isolation.
On Dec. 11 that year, Saïda was rushed to Ibn Rushd Hospital in Casablanca, where she died at the age of twenty-five. The memory of her bravery and the poem she left us strengthen us in the struggle against the war without end.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
First, let us recall that after 1789, France transitioned from a monarchy, where all intermediary bodies acted as checks and balances, to a financial oligarchy devoid of any such checks and balances, all under the deceptive guise of democracy. Democracy is merely the clothing worn by those in power under the pretext of popular representation, but this representation is, in reality, not popular but controlled by political parties under the influence of “moneyed interests”.
Marxism, for its part, appears to defend workers because it seems to want to return everything to the power of the State in order to ensure a better distribution of goods and wealth, whereas in reality its goal is, by winning over the working masses through cunning, to accumulate everything in the hands (again and again) of “moneyed interests”, hidden and camouflaged behind the political parties they control, whether socialist or communist. The doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle observed in nature and replaces it with the rule of numbers.
After the Age of Enlightenment and its “spontaneous” revolutions, subversion was to have the extraordinary “fortune” of finding a powerful “ally” who would continue to use the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries : in the name of a new principle of international solidarity, that of nationalist and democratic states helping each other to shake off the yoke of so-called traditional tyrannies.
In the past, people sacrificed themselves for what they loved. Today, made “free” by the grace of democracy, they are now forced to die, if necessary, for the devil himself or for the interests of Capitalism, which amounts to the same thing.
Never have there been more slaves on Earth than since the word “Liberty” was idolized, and liberties were trampled underfoot—unless, of course, this refers to a very particular kind of Liberty, one that permits wrongdoing or, rather, encourages evil.
Any elevation of the human type requires an aristocratic regime. Democracy debases by lowering the good ; it is a tyranny exercised through a moral pull, from bottom to top. It brings people down, prevents the best from rising, and cuts down those who stand above the mediocre, thus preventing the emergence of superior individuals. It suppresses respect and makes the lowly insolent. This is why democracy is intimately linked to the “egalitarian” conception so dear to the modern world, that is, to the negation of all hierarchy : the very essence of the democratic idea is that any individual is worth as much as any other, because they are numerically equal, even though they can never be equal except numerically. It is therefore not without reason that “democracy” is opposed to “aristocracy”, the latter word designating precisely, at least when taken in its etymological sense, the power of the elite. Thus, a true elite, which can only be intellectual, has nothing in common with the “numerical force” on which democracy rests ; this is why democracy can only be established where pure intellectuality no longer exists, which is indeed the case in the modern world.
Since the 18th century, the major bankers have been closely interconnected and have common and interrelated interests. The activities of these bankers are structurally international, their interests being what could be described as stateless, or more precisely, supranational, in that they have no connection whatsoever with any “national interest” in the cultural and geographical sense of the term “national”.
Thus, in most countries of the world, the current state is the “deep state”, that is to say, a true plutocracy, stateless and supranational, hidden behind a democracy, a veritable empty shell. This stage, which has often taken the indirect and insidious path of banking control, sometimes uses, when necessary, more forceful methods. The strategy of tension, “false flag” operations or attacks, and the recent creation and proliferation of proxy armies, composed of mercenaries, are some of the modern manifestations of force employed by the “money powers” to eliminate independent states.
It is worth recalling that, in the context of a power struggle, the presence of states in the political sense of the term—that is, sovereign states—is, by definition, the worst enemy of the “powers of money”. Thus, historically, the takeover of state control by oligarchy has never been achieved without a coup d’état, whether permanent or temporary.
Thus, since the 18th century, all revolutions—whether called color, flower, or any other such jovial term—are an emanation of this initial tactic : for oligarchies (local or coalitionized), seizing control of state institutions in various countries around the world. The second stage involves the collaboration of the economic elites of these countries.
It is interesting to note that during all these “spontaneous” revolutions, the “rebels” never attack bankers, their estates, or their banks.
War can only have one legitimate aim : to defend the Law, to establish Civilization.
Militarism was invented solely to perpetuate injustice, and it is the gradual spread of the rule of force that has led to widespread suffering among the masses.
Militarism took its modern form in 1558 ; this is the year the first regiment in France was created. It should be noted, however, that it was Charles VII who first assumed supreme command of the war companies and conceived the idea of ??creating a national army. The armies were initially composed of mercenary bands, or peasants. It was only under Louis XIV that men received regular pay and were called “soldiers”. They were also called “soudard”, because they were “bribed” ; it was a despised profession. And indeed, what could be more despicable than receiving money to kill men ?
Today, the monetary capture by the “Moneyed Powers” has allowed them to generate large economic conglomerates. These “corporate groups” are controlled by private individuals and, like the sovereigns of yesteryear, possess state-owned artillery, which is increasingly evolving, in step with the decline of the state, into private militias : one example is the PMC (Private Military Company) “Academi”, formerly known as “Blackwater”. It should be noted that “Academi” was renamed “Xe Services” in 2009, then reverted to “Academi” in 2011. In 2014, it merged with “Triple Canopy” to form the current private military company “Constellis Holdings Inc”.
The influence of PMCs and ESSDs (Security and Defense Services Companies), especially Anglo-Saxon ones, has been growing since the 1990s. It should be noted, however, that a paramilitary organization of the PMC type emerged in Russia in 2014 : the Wagner Group.
The military and currency are the twin “udders” of the globalist oligarchy’s domination.
It should be noted that one of the methods used for over a century by globalists to advance their agenda and turn “legitimate crime”, which we call war, into a “business,” is the “casus belli”. Examples include those of 1898 with the “USS Maine”, 1915 with the “RMS Lusitania”, 1941 with “Pearl Harbor”, 1964 with the “Gulf of Tonkin incidents”, 1967 with the “USS Liberty” (which was a failure), and 2001 with “9/11”.
(Blog french)
““US Aggression Across the World””
Floods across , spreads like wildfire .
The second coming or first going ?
The damned or dammed ?
Certainly not building a boat
But an Ark to the moon ?
Started with just a dinghy.
Around Alligator Alcatraz, in a remote moat .
The chinese went below
To dig a hole
Then found an island above the sea .
It is contested ?
But not in disbelief .
In Vijay Prashad, we have proof that Love and Compassion still exist in this very complex, very conflicted, human world.
As best you can, with all your heart and soul can muster: Extend kindness to your Self, and to those you come in contact with.
Thank you, Vijay!
Buckets of blood need to be dumped on Trump and Hegseth.
“and the need to reject a future of wars without end”
Yeah, no kidding. Sounds like a nice idea. Maybe we should try that? I wonder why no one has ever thought of that before?
“Let us stop talking falsely now, as the hour is getting late.” – Bob Dylan “All Along The Watchtower.”
If people want to reject this war, the way to do so is simple. March on Washington. In the millions. The war ends when there are so many people in DC that it reaches the traditional finale where the security chief tells the great leader that they really should get on that helicopter because there are more people here than the security forces can hold back, or even kill. That is the real way in which real change has happened in this real world.
But remember, hour is getting very late, and it was a long time ago that the wind began to howl.
In-line w/Pierre:
Local protests are good, yet now we need everyone to collectively gather in Wash. DC by the millions. Not by next year, but by the auspicious “Fall” of 2026! If not, plan to see mid-term elections canceled, The Chump void the constitution, and declare himself “Idiot for Life”. All in Hitler-fashion, as when the Weimar Republic fell in the Spring of 1933.
As for music being the antidote to trauma and pain, I offer lyrics from Eric Clapton’s (best!) album, ‘461 Ocean Blvd’, which came about after a 3 year hiatus while recovering from Heroin addiction:
“Standing at the crossroads, trying to read the signs, to tell me which way I should go to find the answers, and all the time I know:
“Plant your love and let it grow. Let it blossom, let it flow. In the sun, the rain, the snow: Love is lovely, so let it grow.”