Instruction: Write an article about: Venezuela’s economy will grow 20% in 2022, despite illegal US sanctions, predicts Western bank. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Credit Suisse, economics, oil, Rafael Correa, Venezuela

Output:
Major Switzerland-based bank Credit Suisse forecasts Venezuela’s real GDP growth to be 20% in 2022 and 8% in 2023. This is despite an illegal US blockade, which starved the government of 99% of its revenue, according to the top UN expert on sanctions.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
The major Switzerland-based bank Credit Suisse has predicted that Venezuela’s real GDP growth will be 20% in 2022.
The prominent Western financial institution also forecasted that Venezuela’s real GDP will increase by an additional 8% in 2023.
These predictions come despite an illegal US blockade imposed on Venezuela, which has starved the government of revenue, locked it out of the international financial system, and fueled an economic crisis.
The top United Nations expert on sanctions estimated that the Venezuelan government lost 99% of its revenue due to the Western unilateral coercive measures, which are illegal under international law.
“Unilateral sanctions increasingly imposed by the United States, the European Union and other countries have exacerbated the [economic crisis],” stated Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, after she took a two-week fact-finding trip to Venezuela in February 2021.
“The Government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income,” Douhan wrote, adding, “Remittances from abroad have decreased due to the blocking of state assets and the complexity of – and impediments to – bank transfers.”
“The hardening of sanctions faced by the country since 2015 undermines the potential positive impact of the current reforms as well as the state’s capacity to maintain infrastructure and implement social projects,” the UN expert warned.
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves and its economy is heavily dependent on production, but the US blockade has made it very difficult for Caracas to export its crude. Many countries, even US allies, fear being hit by Washington’s secondary sanctions if they trade with Venezuela.
Yet despite these suffocating and illegal Western sanctions, Venezuela’s economy is back on the path toward growth.
Ecuador’s leftist former president Rafael Correa tweeted a screenshot of an April 6, 2022 Credit Suisse report on Venezuela, which appears to be private, predicting 20% growth in 2022 and 8% growth in 2023.
“These are not typos!” the Swiss bank wrote. “If we are accurate, these might end up being among the strongest growth prints globally for these years.”
Credit Suisse sobre Venezuela?¡Gloria al bravo pueblo! pic.twitter.com/rGnbgcvTt5
— Rafael Correa (@MashiRafael) April 6, 2022

In addition to being an influential politician, Correa is a renowned economist, with a PhD in economics.
Correa and some of his former officials have provided economic advising to the Venezuelan government during this difficult period under blockade by the United States.
In 2015, President Barack Obama signed an executive order declaring Venezuela to be a supposed “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
This executive order opened the floodgate for the US government to impose grueling sanctions on Venezuela.
In 2019, President Donald Trump escalated the already existing US sanctions on Venezuela into a full-on embargo. Washington and several European capitals also illegally froze and/or seized all of Caracas’ foreign assets, worth billions of dollars.
This brutal economic warfare supplemented a coup attempt that the United States was leading in Venezuela, forcing allies to recognize unelected right-wing opposition politician Juan Guaidó as supposed “interim president” of the country.
Washington was ultimately unable to topple Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Nicolás Maduro, of the United Socialist Party (PSUV), which was founded by revolutionary former president Hugo Chávez.
But the relentless US economic war on Venezuela did stoke a crisis of runaway inflation.
The Chavista government has managed to rein in this hyperinflation. Venezuela’s inflation was just 1.7% in February 2022 – lower than other countries in Latin America.
Credit Suisse’s prediction of 20% Venezuelan growth in 2022 and 8% more in 2023 shows that the worst of this US-fueled economic crisis has passed.
Part of this recovery can be attributed to the massive rise in the price of oil.
Venezuela’s economy is very dependent on oil exports, and has been for a century, since well before leftist Hugo Chávez became president in 1999 and subsequently launched the Bolivarian Revolution.
Credit Suisse said its forecast “is largely based on the expectation that [Venezuela’s] oil GDP will rise more than 20%.”
In March and April 2021, the price of a barrel of crude oil was around $20. By March and April 2022, it had skyrocketed to more than $100.
But the Venezuelan government has put significant energy and resources into diversifying its economy beyond oil production.
China, Russia, and Iran have also helped Venezuela find economic alternatives and soften the destructive impact of illegal Western sanctions.


Instruction: Write an article about: CIA backed failed 2020 invasion of Venezuela, top coup-plotter says. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: CIA, Clíver Alcalá, Colombia, Juan Guaidó, Leopoldo López, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela

Output:
A Venezuelan army defector who helped plan a botched May 2020 invasion, Clíver Alcalá, said the coup-plotters were in touch with the CIA and other US government agencies, and had their approval to try to violently overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
A Venezuelan army defector who helped plan a failed May 2020 invasion of Venezuela, Cliver Alcalá, said the coup-plotters were in touch with the CIA and other US government agencies.
According to Alcalá, senior US officials approved of the operation, which sought to violently overthrow the leftist Chavista government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was democratically elected.
Alcalá’s lawyers made this revelation in a US court filing on January 28, the Associated Press reported.
Jordan Goudreau
On May 3 and 4, 2020, dozens of right-wing Venezuelan insurgents and two former US Army special operations comandos tried to invade Venezuela, with plans to kidnap President Maduro and take him to the United States.
The plot, known as Operation Gideon (Operación Gedeón in Spanish), was a disaster. It was quickly foiled by the Venezuelan government, with the help of local socialist fishermen, and the invaders were arrested.
The invasion had been organized by a Florida-based mercenary firm called Silvercorp USA, founded by a former US Army special forces comando named Jordan Goudreau.
In a breach-of-contract lawsuit, Goudreau said he had discussed the coup plot with two US government officials at a Miami golf resort owned by former President Donald Trump, where he was given a green light.
But when the operation was foiled by Venezuelan authorities, the US government immediately threw Goudreau and his team under the bus.

On March 26, 2020, a few weeks before the invasion, the US government put out a series of multimillion-dollar bounties on the heads of current and former top Venezuelan government officials. One of these was the former general Clíver Alcalá.
This surprised Alcalá, because by that point he had for several years been a bitter opponent of the Venezuelan government of President Maduro.
In fact, in 2018 Alcalá had moved to northern Colombia, to the city of Barranquilla, near the border of Venezuela, where he began to train Venezuelan military defectors and anti-Chavista paramilitaries, making plans to wage an armed insurgency against the Venezuelan government.
In northern Colombia, Alcalá worked alongside Goudreau, the US mercenary who said he had the Trump administration’s support, to create an anti-Venezuela guerrilla army.
The United States had been supporting Alcalá’s efforts to try to violently overthrow Maduro. So when Washington put out the bounty, Alcalá complied and willingly turned himself in to US authorities in Colombia, where he had been residing. He agreed to be an informant and to be extradited to the US.
Alcalá’s attorneys subsequently made it clear in their statements to US authorities that Alcalá’s operations had been approved by Washington.
“Efforts to overthrow the Maduro regime have been well known to the United States government,” Alcalá’s lawyers wrote in a November 2021 letter, cited by the Associated Press.
Alcalá’s “opposition to the regime and his alleged efforts to overthrow it were reported to the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, and the Department of the Treasury,” his attorneys added.
Yacsy Álvarez
This is not the first time that someone involved in the failed 2020 invasion of Venezuela said the US government was involved.
A right-wing Venezuelan who helped to organize Operation Gideon, Yacsy Álvarez, said she met with FBI and DEA officials in Florida, and that the agencies knew exactly what was being planned.
Álvarez had served as a translator and assistant for Goudreau, as he and Alcalá trained anti-Venezuela militants in Colombia.
According to Álvarez, the Colombian government supported the failed invasion plot as well. Colombia’s far-right President Iván Duque and former president Álvaro Uribe were involved in the operation, she said.
Colombia’s top intelligence agency “knew everything” about the plot, Álvarez confessed.
Yet just as Alcalá was detained by the US authorities with whom he had been collaborating, Álvarez was detained by the Colombian authorities with whom she had been collaborating.
Her lawyers accused Colombia’s spy agencies of setting a “trap” to blame her when the operation went awry.
Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López
The major right-wing Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López was also involved in the failed invasion.
López is seen in Venezuela to be the real power behind Juan Guaidó, who was a little-known figure when the United States appointed him “interim president” in January 2019.
In a June 2020 article titled “Venezuelan Opposition Guru Led Planning to Topple Maduro,” the Wall Street Journal reported that López “was behind a months-long effort to contract mercenaries to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro,” and had “considered at least six proposals from private security contractors to carry out military incursions to spur a rebellion in Venezuela’s armed forces and topple” the leftist government.
López, Guaidó, and fellow members of their far-right political party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will) contracted Silvercorp USA, and worked with Goudreau and Alcalá to plot the invasion.
Despite his clear involvement in an attempted invasion of his home country, and his leading role in several violent coup attempts, López lives comfortably today in Madrid. He enjoys the protection of the Spanish government, while he continues to organize the extremist Venezuelan opposition from abroad.
The Joe Biden administration, for its part, has continued Trump’s policy of recognizing unelected coup leader Guaidó as the supposed leader of Venezuela, although, as of January 2022, fewer than 15 countries refuse to acknowledge that Maduro is the real president.


Instruction: Write an article about: Nicaragua’s President Ortega: US/EU waging war to stop multipolar world. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Che Guevara, Daniel Ortega, FSLN, imperialism, Nicaragua, Sandinistas

Output:
At the Sandinista Revolution’s 43rd anniversary, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said the US and Europe are waging wars to prevent “multipolarity.” Quoting Che Guevara, he added “imperialism cannot be trusted”

(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
In his speech at the 43rd anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said the United States and European Union are waging wars to prevent “multipolarity on our planet.”
Ortega quoted Che Guevara, arguing “imperialism cannot be trusted even a little bit.” He added that dialogue with Washington is “impossible,” because it would be like negotiating with the devil.

A transcript of some of President Ortega’s remarks follows (emphasis added):
Why does the United States behave in that way? And when we say the United States, we are speaking of the North American rulers. Because when they dropped the atomic bomb above Hiroshima, they did not ask the North American people if the bomb should be dropped…
And they did a count of how many thousands the bomb could kill. And the higher the number was, that they calculated that the bomb could kill, the happier and more excited they were…
And they went ahead and dropped it, and killed, in one blow, hundreds of thousands of civilians, children, adults, because they dropped it on a city…
Right there, they killed, murdered many more civilians than all of those who could have died now in this war that the empires have started to try to destroy the struggle that humanity is carrying out to bring about the end of hegemony, and to create multipolarity on our planet.
That is the battle that is being fought over there in Ukraine, where Europe and the United States don’t want — they don’t want to see China growing economically…
It is from there, it is the evil that those powers have shown throughout history, the powers that colonized Africa, Asia, Latin America, the powers that brought slaves from Africa to these regions, to sell like them animals in slave markets…
When you asked me, and when it was asked, why not reach an understanding? They [the US] are not prepared to reach an understanding. They are prepared to do nothing more than impose — impose, occupy, bomb, kill, as they have done throughout history…
And they [the imperialists] waged war among themselves, to take over the world. It was war between the European powers, before there was a European Union.
You know it, dear brother. England, France, Spain, wanting to dominate all Europe, and dominating all of Europe, later taking over Africa, Asia, all of the Americas.
A hegemonic mentality. A selfish mentality. A mentality that has nothing to do with being Christian, nothing to do with being Christian. And all of that, they did it with the blessing of the different churches that existed in that time…
When they asked Roosevelt, who was a good friend of Somoza, why he was so gracious and friendly with Somoza, Somoza being a criminal, Roosevelt responded, in English, “He is a son of a…” How do you say it? “He’s a son of a bitch.” Yes, that is how he replied. “But he is OUR son (of a bitch).”
Yes, “He is a son (of a bitch), but he is OUR son (of a bitch).” That was the cynical response of the yankee…
I’m answering why there is no dialogue. Dialogue is impossible. Impossible. Dialogue is for one person to put a noose on your neck, and you to put your neck in the noose.
Look, dear brother, what dialogue can you have with the devil? As Che said, the yankees, imperialism, you can’t trust them even a little bit, not even a little bit. Because it will end you. It will end you.


Instruction: Write an article about: Mexico’s AMLO calls out US ‘oligarchy’ at Biden’s ‘democracy’ summit. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Joe Biden, Mexico, Summit for Democracy

Output:
Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador used the US government’s “Summit for Democracy” to indirectly call out Washington’s hypocrisy: “The oligarchy reigns with the façade of democracy”, he said, calling for “greater equality” and “separation of economic and political power”.

Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) used the US government’s so-called “Summit for Democracy” to indirectly call out Washington’s hypocrisy. (A full transcript of his speech follows below.)
AMLO strongly implied that the United States is an oligarchy, not a real democracy. He argued that the government needs to challenge the power of the economic elites if it truly wants to be democratic.
López Obrador opened his speech warning, “Many of the great crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of God or in the name of democracy”.
Mexico’s leftist President AMLO used the Biden admin’s so-called “Summit for Democracy” to indirectly call out US hypocrisy
“The oligarchy reigns with the façade of democracy”, he said, calling for “separation of economic and political power”
Full video: https://t.co/lR4kwPJZ4u pic.twitter.com/92XtabJHvl
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 31, 2023

“In some countries, the oligarchy reigns with the façade of democracy”, he said, not so subtly referencing his northern neighbor.
“How can we talk about democracy if there is no separation of economic power and political power?” AMLO asked.
He added that the system that exists in many countries today is “a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, or a simulated and mediated democracy”.
“We must search for greater equality to have more democracy”, the Mexican president insisted.

AMLO’s March 29 speech stood in stark contrast to the sycophantic remarks made by many US allies at Washington’s so-called “Summit for Democracy”.
The Joe Biden administration first organized this summit in 2021 to bring together US allies in an attempt to build a united bloc to wage a new cold war on China and Russia, which were not invited to either summit.
Despite its name, the 2023 “Summit for Democracy” featured numerous right-wing authoritarian regimes, from Israel, Poland, India, and beyond. (Pakistan’s unelected coup regime was invited, but decided not to attend, as it faces mass protests and instability at home.)
López Obrador’s critical comments also came at a time of growing tensions between the United States and Mexico.
Numerous Republican congressmembers have called for the US military to invade Mexico, proposing legislation to justify an intervention, in the name of supposedly combatting drug cartels.
AMLO denounced these threats in a massive rally in the heart of Mexico City on March 18.
“We remind those hypocritical and irresponsible politicians that Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or a protectorate of the United States!”, he declared.
“They can threaten us with committing some kind of abuse, but we will never, ever allow them to violate our sovereignty and trample on the dignity of our homeland!”, the Mexican president added.
‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium

Earlier, in a press briefing on February 28, AMLO blasted the US State Department’s “bad habit” of “meddling” in other country’s “internal affairs”.
“There is more democracy today in Mexico than in the United States”, he said, “because here the people govern, and there the oligarchy govern”.
AMLO says Mexico is more democratic than oligarch-run USA, condemns State Dep’t ‘meddling’ against electoral reform

The following is the text of López Obrador’s March 29 speech at the US “Summit for Democracy”:
Many of the great crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of God or in the name of democracy.
It is important, because of that, to return to the original and true meaning of the concept of democracy.
Aristotle said that there were three good and three bad forms of government. He came to the conclusion that democracy was the best, or the least bad, and he argued that democracy, like the Greek origin of the word, consisted of the power of the people.
In our time, there is still a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, or a simulated and mediated democracy.
That is to say, in some countries, the oligarchy reigns with the façade of democracy.
For example, how can we talk about democracy if the elites dominate, and not the majorities?
How can we talk about democracy if there is no separation of economic power and political power?
How can we talk about democracy if, in recent times, there has been the most offensive concentration of wealth in a few hands in the history of the world?
The fortune of a minority has increased without limits, without any moral concern, while there are a billion human beings who live on less than a dollar a day.
That is why we have to move further and further away from kratos [“power” in Greek] without demos [“people” in Greek], from power without the people, and make sure that the central purpose of the government is always to seek the happiness of the people, of a government of the people and for the people.
Today more than ever, it is necessary to return to our founding principles.
In 1776, the United States Declaration of Independence set out the pursuit of happiness as one of the fundamental rights of the people, and signaled that guaranteeing it was one of the functions of government.
The first article of the French Constitution of 1793 establishes that the aim of society is common happiness.
Article 24 of our Constitution of Apatzingán of 1814 states that the happiness of the people and of each and every citizen consists in the enjoyment of equality, security, property, and freedom.
The full preservation of these rights is the object of the institution of governments and the sole purpose of political associations.
Because of that, we maintain that we must search for greater equality to have more democracy.
May democracy be authentic, true, and may justice always triumph over power! Thank you very much.


Instruction: Write an article about: End of Juan Guaidó: US-appointed Venezuelan coup leader ousted by ex allies. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: coup, Jesús Rodríguez Espinoza, Juan Guaidó, Nicolás Maduro, Orinoco Tribune, Venezuela

Output:
The US claimed unelected coup leader Juan Guaidó was “interim president” of Venezuela from January 2019 to December 2022, when his former allies in the right-wing opposition removed him from the position. Washington however still refuses to recognize elected President Nicolás Maduro.

US President Donald Trump appointed Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s supposed “interim president” in January 2019, despite the fact that the little-known right-wing opposition politician had never won a single vote in a presidential election.
Under President Joe Biden, the US government continued formally recognizing Guaidó, until Venezuela’s opposition-controlled parallel “National Assembly” voted to oust him in December 2022.
This marked the end to a nearly four-year US-led coup attempt against Venezuela’s leftist Chavista government.
Yet Washington has still refused to formally recognize Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro – who always remained recognized by the United Nations, throughout the coup attempt.
Instead, State Department spokesman and CIA veteran Ned Price announced that the US only recognizes Venezuela’s opposition-controlled parallel “National Assembly” – which is competing with the Venezuelan government’s own National Assembly, which is part of the constitutional Venezuelan state recognized by the UN.
Geopolitical Economy Report editor-in-chief Ben Norton discussed the end of Guaidó with Venezuelan journalist Jesús Rodríguez Espinoza, who runs the independent news website Orinoco Tribune.
They analyzed the economic situation in the oil-rich South American country, which suffers under an illegal US embargo. The top UN expert on unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, reported that Western sanctions caused the Venezuelan government’s revenue “to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income”.


Instruction: Write an article about: Bolivia intercepts US weapons shipment to right-wing separatist region. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Bolivia, coup, Evo Morales, Luis Arce, Santa Cruz

Output:
Bolivia’s police intercepted a weapons shipment sent from the United States to the separatist region of Santa Cruz, the hub of violent far-right groups that led the coup in 2019.

Bolivia’s police intercepted a weapons shipment sent from the United States to the separatist region of Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz is the hub of fascist opposition gangs that led the violent coup in November 2019 that overthrew democratically elected President Evo Morales, of the leftist Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party.
Morales was the first-ever Indigenous president of Bolivia, a country where the majority of the population is of Native heritage.
Internal State Department cables published by WikiLeaks show how the US government has supported far-right separatists in Santa Cruz for years, as journalist Matt Kennard has documented.
A significant number of European fascists fled to the region after losing World War II to the Soviet Union. They then formed paramilitary groups, which regularly use Nazi-style salutes.
Santa Cruz Youth Union adopts Nazi salute after their leader questioned about burning down of MAS party headquarters. Oct 17 video from @diarioeldeber (FB) @markoacl @Pedro_Albornoz_ @OliviaArigho @bretgustafson pic.twitter.com/h1XFHQgtrJ
— AndeanInfoNet (@AndeanInfoNet) October 31, 2019

The extremist Comité pro Santa Cruz (Pro-Santa Cruz Committee) and its youth wing the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (Santa Cruz Youth Union) advance an explicitly neo-fascist Christian ideology.
The current governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, who was a main leader of the violent 2019 coup, comes from these far-right groups.
In addition to the violence of the putsch, these US-backed far-right separatists in Santa Cruz also routinely attack Indigenous Bolivians and supporters of the leftist MAS party.
These are the racist far-right separatists the US govt has supported for years in Bolivia (yes, under both Republican and Democratic admins)
State Department cables published by WikiLeaks show the US has long backed Santa Cruz separatism to try to weaken the leftist central govt https://t.co/u609FjPK4b
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) September 26, 2021


Instruction: Write an article about: Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, Michael Hudson, Middle East, oil, Saudi Arabia, West Asia

Output:
A geopolitical analysis of why the United States so strongly supports Israel: Economist Michael Hudson discusses with journalist Ben Norton.

Why does the United States so strongly support Israel? Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson to explore the reasons why Israel is such an important part of U.S. foreign policy and Washington’s attempt to dominate not only the region of the Middle East, but the entire world.

Israel is an extension of U.S. geopolitical power in one of the most critically important regions of the world.
In fact, it was current U.S. President Joe Biden, back in 1986, when he was a senator, who famously said that, if Israel didn’t exist, the United States would have to invent it:
If we look at the Middle East, I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel.
There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make.
Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region; the United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.
I am with my colleagues who are on the floor of the Foreign Relations Committee, and we worry at length about NATO; and we worry about the eastern flank of NATO, Greece and Turkey, and how important it is. They pale by comparison…
They pale by comparison in terms of the benefit that accrues to the United States of America.
It goes without saying that the so-called Middle East, or a better term is West Asia, has some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas, and the entire world’s economic infrastructure relies heavily on fossil fuels.
The planet is gradually moving toward new energy sources, which is needed to fight climate change, but fossil fuels are still absolutely critical to the global economy. And Washington’s goal has been to make sure that it can maintain steady prices in global oil and gas markets.
But this is about something much bigger than just oil and gas. The U.S. military’s stated policy since the 1990s, since the end of the Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union, is to try to maintain control over every region of the world.
This was stated clearly in 1992 in the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine. The U.S. National Security Council wrote:
[The United States’] goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies. These regions include Europe, East Asia, the Middle East/Persian Gulf, and Latin America. Consolidated, nondemocratic control of the resources of such a critical region could generate a significant threat to our security.
Then, in 2004, the U.S. government published its National Military Strategy, in which Washington stressed that its goal was “Full Spectrum Dominance – the ability to control any situation or defeat any adversary across the range of military operations”.
Historically, when it came to West Asia, the U.S. relied on a so-called “twin pillar” strategy. The west pillar was Saudi Arabia, and the east pillar was Iran.
Until the 1979 revolution, Iran was governed by a shah, a dictatorial monarch who was backed by the United States and served U.S. interests in the region.
However, following the 1979 revolution, the U.S. lost one of the pillars of its twin pillar strategy, and Israel became increasingly important for the United States to maintain control over this crucially strategic region.
Many of the world’s top oil and gas producers are located in West Asia.

Furthermore, some of the most important trading routes on Earth go through this region.
It would be difficult to overstate how important Egypt’s Suez Canal is. It connects trade transiting from West Asia going into Europe, from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.
Around 30% of all of the world’s shipping containers pass through the Suez Canal. That represents around 12% of the total global trade of all goods.
Then, directly south of the Suez Canal, where the Red Sea enters the Arabian Sea, there is a crucial geostrategic choke point known as the Bab al-Mandab Strait, off the coast of Yemen. There, more than 6 million barrels of oil pass through every single day.

Historically, the United States has tried to dominate this region in order to maintain control of energy supplies and ensure these global trade routes that the globalized capitalist system is built on.
As U.S. influence in the region has weakened in an increasingly multipolar world, Israel has become even more important for the United States to try to exercise hegemony in the region.
One can see this clearly in the discussions over oil prices in OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has essentially been expanded to OPEC+ to include Russia.
Today, Saudi Arabia and Washington’s archenemy, Russia, play a key role in determining global oil prices.
Historically, Saudi Arabia was a loyal U.S. proxy, but Riyadh has increasingly pursued a more non-aligned foreign policy. And a very big reason for that is that China is now the biggest trading partner of many of the countries in the region.
For a decade, China has been the largest importer of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, whereas U.S. oil imports peaked in 2005.
Due to massive expansion of production and the shale boom in the 2010s, the United States established itself as one of the top three oil producers on Earth, reducing its need for crude from Persian Gulf.
Meanwhile, through its global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is moving the center of world trade back to Asia. And the “road” in BRI is a reference to the New Silk Road.

Can you guess which region is crucial in the New Silk Road and the BRI? Of course, it’s the Middle East – or, again, a better name is West Asia, and that term actually much better explains the geostrategic importance of this region, because it connects Asia to Europe.
This explains why the United States has been so desperate to try to challenge the Belt and Road with its own attempts to build new trade routes. In particular, the U.S. seeks to make a trade route going from India into the Persian Gulf, and then up through Israel.
So in all of these projects, Israel plays an important role, as an extension of U.S. imperial power in one of the most important regions of the world. That is why Biden said back in 1986 that if Israel didn’t exist, the U.S. would have to invent it.
That is also why Biden repeated this in a White House meeting with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog on October 27, 2022:
We’re also going to discuss the ironclad commitment – and this is, I’ll say this 5000 times in my career – the ironclad commitment the United States has to Israel, based on our principles, our ideas, our values; they’re the same values.
And I have often said, Mr. President [Herzog], if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.
And even as recently as October 18, 2023, Biden again repeated the same thing in a speech he made in Israel: “I have long said, if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it”.
In that speech in 2023, Biden traveled to Israel in order to support the country as it was carrying out a brutal bombing campaign in Gaza, and ethnically cleansing Palestinians as part of what legal experts around the world have referred to as a “textbook case of genocide”.
Top United Nations experts have warned that the Palestinian people are in danger of genocide by Israel.
And the United States has steadfastly been supporting Israel, because, as Joe Biden said, Israel is an extension of U.S. imperial power in West Asia, and if it didn’t exist, Washington would have to invent it.

Below follows a transcript of the interview that Geopolitical Economy Report editor Ben Norton conducted with economist Michael Hudson, author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.
BEN NORTON: Michael, thanks for joining me today. We are speaking on November 9, and the latest death toll in the war in Gaza is that Israel has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians.
The United Nations has referred to Gaza as a “graveyard for children”. More than 4,000 children have been killed. About 40% of the casualties are children.
And the United States has continued to support Israel, not only diplomatically and politically, not only by, for instance, vetoing resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that call for a ceasefire, but furthermore, the U.S. has been sending billions of dollars to Israel.
Not only the $3.8 billion that the U.S. always gives to Israel every year in military aid, but additionally, tens of billions of dollars more.
So I am wondering if you could provide your analysis of why you think the U.S. is investing so many resources in supporting Israel while it is clearly committing war crimes.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, certainly it is supporting Israel, but it’s not supporting Israel because this is an altruistic act.
To the United States, Israel is its landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East.
And from the very time there was talk of creating an Israel, it was always that Israel was going to be an outpost, first of England, then of Russia, then of the United States in the Near East.
And I can give you an anecdote. Netanyahu’s main national security advisor for the last few years has been Uzi Arad. I worked at the Hudson Institute for about five years, 1972 to ‘76. And I worked very closely with Uzi there.
Uzi and I made two trips to Korea and Japan to talk about international finance. So we had a good chance to get to know each other. And on one trip, we stopped over from New York to San Francisco. And in San Francisco, there was a party or a gathering for people to meet us.
And one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said, you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you.
Well, I could see Uzi feeling, tightening up and getting very embarrassed and didn’t really have anything to say. But the United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base, not Israel.
So of course, it wants to secure this military base.
But when England first passed the act saying there should be in Israel the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies.
When Israel was formed in the United Nations, the first country to recognize it was Stalin and Russia, who thought that Russians were going to have a major influence over Israel.
And then after that, of course, when Truman came in, the military immediately saw that America was replacing England as the chief of the Near East. And that was even after the fight, the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953.
So from the United States, it’s not Israel’s wagging the American tail, just the opposite. You mentioned that America is supporting Israel. I don’t think America is supporting Israel at all, nor do most Israelis, nor do most Democrats.
America is supporting Netanyahu. It’s supporting Likud, not Israel. The majority of Israelis, certainly the non-religious Israelis, the core population of Israel since its founding, is opposing Likud and its policies.
And so what really is happening is that to the United States, Netanyahu is the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.
And the advantage of having such an unpleasant, opportunist, and corrupt person as Netanyahu, who is under indictment for his bribery and corruption, is precisely that all of the attention now of the whole world that is so appalled by the attacks going on in Gaza, they’re not blaming the United States.
They’re blaming Israel. They’re blaming Netanyahu and Israel for it, when it’s the United States that has been sending plane load after plane load of bombs, of guns. There are 22,000 machine guns, automatic guns, that are banned for sale in the United States that America is sending for the settlers to use on the West Bank.
So there’s a pretense of good cop, bad cop. You have Mr. Blinken telling Netanyahu, when you bomb hospitals, make sure you do it according to the rules of war. And when you kill 100,000 Gaza children, make sure it’s all legal and in the war. And when you talk about ethnic cleansing and driving a population out, make sure that it’s all done legal.
Well, of course, it’s not the rules of war, and there are war crimes being committed, but the United States is pretending to tell Netanyahu and the Israeli government, use smaller bombs. Be more gentle when you bomb the children in the hospital, when actually this is all for show.
The United States is trying to say, well, we’re only there to give help to an ally. The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic submarine near the Persian Gulf.
Why are they there? President Biden and Congress say we are not going to have American troops fighting Hamas in Gaza. We’re not going to get involved. Well, if the troops are not going to get involved, why are they there?
Well, we know what the American planes are doing. Yesterday, they bombed yet another airport and a fuel depot in Syria. They’re bombing Syria. And it’s very clear that they’re there not to protect Israel, but to fight Iran.
Again and again, every American newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of Iran. When it talks about Hezbollah, and is there going to be an intervention from Lebanon against northern Israel, they say Hezbollah are the Iranian puppets.
Any time they talk about any Near Eastern leader, it’s really that all these leaders are puppets of Iran, just like in Ukraine and Central Europe, they talk about Hungary and other countries as all being puppets of Putin in Russia.
Their focus, really – America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s military. Well, it hasn’t worked.
Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at a point is going to lead Nasrallah to finally say, okay, we can’t take it anymore. We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazians and especially rescue the West Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in.
And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran.
What we’re seeing in Gaza and the West Bank today is only the catalyst, the trigger for the fact that the neocons say we are never going to have a better chance than we have right now to conquer Iran.
So this is the point for the showdown, that if America is to control Near Eastern oil, and by controlling Near Eastern oil, by bringing it under the US control, it can control the energy imports of much of the world.
And therefore, this gives American diplomats the power to cut off oil and gas and to sanction any country that tries to go multipolar, any country that tries to resist US unipolar control.
BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, I think you’re really hitting such an important point, which is how this is one of the most geostrategic regions of the world, especially when it comes to hydrocarbons.
The entire global economy is still very heavily reliant on oil and gas, and especially considering the US is not part of OPEC, and especially now considering that OPEC has really expanded essentially to OPEC+ and now includes Russia.
That means that Saudi Arabia and Russia essentially can help control global oil prices. And we’ve seen this really, in fact, in the United States in the past few years with the rise of consumer price inflation.
We saw that the Biden administration was concerned about gas prices, in particular in the lead up to the midterm elections. And the Biden administration has been releasing a lot of oil from the strategic oil reserves of the United States.
And we can also see these kinds of statements in particular when we go back and look at the Bush administration. There are numerous people involved in the Bush administration and the so-called “War on Terror” who openly talked about how important it was for Washington to dominate this region.
And I’m really thinking of, in 2007, when the top US general and NATO commander Wesley Clark famously disclosed that the Bush administration had made plans to overthrow seven countries in five years. And those were countries in North Africa and West Asia.
Specifically, he revealed in an interview with journalist Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that Washington’s plans were to overthrow the governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran:
WESLEY CLARK: About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me.
And one of the generals called me and he said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second”.
I said, “Well, you’re too busy”. He said, “No, no”. He says, “We’ve made the decision; we’re going to war with Iraq”.
This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq, why?” He said, “I don’t know”. He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do”.
So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no”. He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They’ve just made the decision to go to war with Iraq”.
He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments”.
And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail”.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that”.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, “I just got this down from upstairs”, meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office today, and he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran”.
I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir”. I said, “Well, don’t show it to me”.
And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” And he said, “Sorry, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
AMY GOODMAN: I’m sorry, what did you say his name was? (laughs)
WESLEY CLARK: I’m not going to give you his name. (laughs)
AMY GOODMAN: So go through the countries again.
WESLEY CLARK: Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and then back to Iran.
BEN NORTON: And since then, we of course saw the U.S. war on Iraq. We of course saw the proxy war in Syria that still goes on in many ways. The U.S. is occupying one-third of Syrian territory, including the oil rich areas.
And Trump himself, President Donald Trump, boasted in a 2020 interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he was leaving U.S. troops in Syria to take the oil:
DONALD TRUMP: And then they say, “He left troops in Syria”. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil.
LAURA INGRAHAM: We’re not taking the oil. We’re not taking it.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, maybe we will, maybe we won’t.
LAURA INGRAHAM: They’re protecting the facilities.
DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know, maybe we should take it. But we have the oil. Right now, the United States has the oil.
So they say, “He left troops in Syria”. No, I got rid of all of them, other than we’re protecting the oil; we have the oil.
BEN NORTON: We also saw the U.S. impose sanctions on Lebanon, which contributed to hyperinflation and the destruction of the Lebanese economy. And that was largely because Hezbollah is part of the government, and the U.S. has been pressuring the Lebanese government to create a new government without Hezbollah.
We also saw, of course, that NATO destroyed the Libyan state in 2011. Somalia also has a failed state. And Sudan was divided in no small part thanks to the U.S. and Israel supporting South Sudan’s separatist movement on ethno-religious lines, using religious sectarianism.
So if you look at the list of countries that Wesley Clark named in 2006, the seven countries in five years, again, that was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran; the only country that really has been able to maintain state stability, that has not been completely devastated by the United States, is Iran.
Of course, it took longer than five years, but the U.S. was pretty successful. And of course Israel has played an important role in this U.S. goal to destabilize those governments in the region.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, let’s look and see how this was done. Remember after America was attacked on 9/11, there was a meeting at the White House, and everybody knew that the pilots were Saudi Arabians, and they knew that some of the pilots had been staying at the Saudi embassy in Los Angeles, I think, in the United States.
But after 9/11, there was a cabinet meeting, and Rumsfeld said to the people there, look and find any link you can get to Iraq, forget Saudi Arabia, no problem, Iraq is the key. And he directed them to find it, and 9/11 became the excuse for attacking not Saudi Arabia, but Iraq, and going right on with it.
Well, you needed a similar crisis in Libya. They said in Libya, there was some, I think, fundamentalists in the suburbs of one of the [cities], not the capital city, that were causing problems. And so you have to “protect” the innocent people from [Muammar Gadhafi], and you go in and grab all of their gold reserves, all of their money, and you take over the oil on behalf of France’s oil monopoly.
Well, this is the role of the fighting in Gaza today. Netanyahu’s fight against Gaza is being used as the excuse for America moving its warships there, its submarines, and bombing, along with Israel, the Syrian airport so that the Syrians are not able to move weapons or any kind of military support either to Lebanon, to the west, or Iran, to the east.
So it’s obvious that all of what we’re seeing is somehow to soften up public opinion for the fact that, well, just like we had to invade Iraq because of 9/11, we have to now finally fight and take out the oil refineries of Iran and their scientific institutes and any laboratories where they may be doing atomic research.
And Iran realizes this. Last week, the Iranian press TV said that their defense minister says that if there’s any attack on Iran, whether by Israel or by anyone else, the U.S. and its foreign bases are going to be hit hard.
Iran, Russia, China have all looked at the Gaza situation not as if it’s an Israeli action, but as if it’s the U.S. action. They all see exactly that it’s all about Iran, and the American press only says when it talks about Gaza or Hamas or Hezbollah or any other group, it’s always the Iranian tool so-and-so.
They’re demonizing Iran in the same way that the neocons have demonized Russia to prepare for America declaring an undeclared war against Iran. And they may even declare war.
Last night, on [November] 8, the Republicans had their presidential debate without Trump, and Nikki Haley said, you know, we’ve got to fight Iran, we’ve got to conquer it. And DeSantis of Florida said, yes, kill them all. He didn’t say who the them was. Was it Hamas? Was it everybody who lives in Gaza? Was it all of the Arabs in the Middle East?
And we’re really seeing something very much like the Crusades here. It’s a real fight for who is going to control energy, because, again, the key, if you can control the world’s flow of energy, you can do to the whole world what the United States did to Germany last year by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.
You can grind its industry to a halt, its chemical industry, its steelmaking industry, any of its energy-intensive industries, if countries do not agree to U.S. unipolar control. That’s why it wants to control these areas.
Well, the wildcard here is Saudi Arabia. Well, in two days, I think you’re going to have the Iranian president visit Saudi Arabia, and we’re going to see what’s going to happen.
But Saudi Arabia finds that while its role is key, Saudi Arabia could simply say we’re not going to export more oil until America pulls out of the Near East. But then all of Saudi Arabia’s monetary savings are invested in the U.S.
The United States is holding the world hostage, not only by controlling its oil and gas and energy, but by controlling its finance. It’s like you have your money in a mafia bank or in Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency mutual fund. They can do whatever they want with it.
So I think what would happen is it’s very unlikely that Saudi Arabia is ostensibly going to visibly break with the United States because the U.S. would hold it hostage.
But I think what it would do would be what has been talked about ever since the 1960s, when similar problems came with Iran. And Iran’s ace in the hole has always been the ability to sink a ship in the Hormuz Strait, where the oil goes through a very narrow little strait, where if you sink a tanker there or a warship, it’s going to block all of the sea trade with Saudi Arabia.
And that would certainly, number one, take Saudi Arabia off the hook for saying, we can’t help it. Of course, we’d love to export oil, but we can’t because the shipping lanes are all blocked because you, America, attacked Iran and they defended themselves by sinking the ship. So you can’t send your aircraft carriers and submarines to attack Iran. That’s very understandable.
But the United States is causing a world crisis.
Well, obviously, the United States knows that that’s going to happen because it’s been discussed literally for 50 years. Since I was at the Hudson Institute working on national security, it was being discussed what to do when Iran sinks the ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
Well, the United States figures, okay, oil prices are going to go up. And if Iran fights back in this way, we then will have the power to do to the world what we did to Germany in 2022 when we cut off its oil. But in this case, we don’t take the blame.
We’ll say, oh, we didn’t block the Saudi and Arab oil trade. It was that Iran that blocked it, and that’s why we’re going to bomb Iran, assuming that they can.
So that, I think, is the contingency plan. And just as America had a contingency plan just like that, waiting for an opportunity, like 9-11, they needed a trigger, and Netanyahu has provided the trigger. And that’s why the United States has been backing Netanyahu.
And of course, Iran says, well, we have the ability to really wipe out Israel. And in Congress, General Miley and the others have all said, well, we know that Iran could wipe out Israel. That’s why we have to attack Iran.
But in attacking Iran, you send its missiles off to Israel, and again, Israel will end up being the Near Eastern equivalent of Ukraine. And that sort of is the plan, and I think a lot of Israelis see this, and they’re the ones who are worried and are opposing Netanyahu and trying to prevent him from triggering a whole set of military exchanges that Israel won’t be able to resist.
And even though Iran, I’m sure they can bomb some places in Iran, but now that you have Russia, China, all supporting Iran through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, you’re having the lines being drawn very, very clearly.
So it seems that this scenario is inevitable because Mearsheimer pointed out that it’s impossible to have a negotiated solution or settlement between Israel and Palestine. He said you can’t have a two-state solution because the Palestinian state is going to be like an Indian reservation in America, all sort of cut apart and isolated, not really a state.
And you can’t have a single state because a single state is a theocratic state. It’s like, again, it’s like the United States in the Wild West in the 19th century.
And I think the way to put it in perspective is to realize that what we’re seeing today in the attempt to split the world is very much like, excuse me, very much like what happened in the 12th and 13th century with the Crusades.
BEN NORTON: Yeah, Michael, you raise a lot of very important points there. And I know you want to talk further about the Crusades and the historical analogy. And I think you made a really good point about the US empire standing in as the new Crusaders.
But before you move away from the more contemporary political discussion, I wanted to highlight two very important points that you stressed.
One is not only the hydrocarbon reserves in the Middle East, which are so important for the world economy and in the US attempt to maintain control over oil and gas supplies and in particular energy costs.
There’s also an election coming up in 2024, and the US is concerned about gas prices and inflation. And of course, energy inputs are a key factor in inflation.
But furthermore, this region is strategic because of trade routes. Of course, the Suez Canal, according to looking at data here from the World Economic Forum, 30% of the world’s shipping container volume transits through the Suez Canal and 12% of all global trade consists of goods that pass through the Suez Canal.
And we saw this in 2021 when there was this big media scandal when a US ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. And this, of course, also came at the time when the world was coming out of the pandemic and there were all these supply chain shocks.
So we can see how sensitive the global economy is to even small issues in the global supply chain. And when you talk about shipping routes, we’re not only talking about the Suez Canal, we’re also talking about in the Red Sea toward the south.
You also have the Bab al-Mandab. This is a very important strait off of the coast of Yemen. And in the war in Yemen, starting in 2014 and 2015, a lot of the fighting back by the U.S. in this war was in the south, off of the Bab al-Mandab, because this is such an important strait where every single day millions of barrels of oil flow through this strait.
And this also reminded me, Michael, you were talking about the historical context. And if you go back to 1956, Israel invaded Egypt. And why was that? Israel invaded Egypt because Egypt’s leftist president, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal.
And at that moment, what was very interesting is that the U.K. and France were strongly supporting Israel in this war against Egypt because they were concerned also about Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez. At that moment, the U.S. wasn’t as deeply pro-Israel as it later became.
Of course, in 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israel attacked the neighboring Arab states and occupied part of Egypt, the Sinai, and then also what became Gaza. Israel occupied the Golan Heights of Syria, which remain illegally occupied Syrian territory today. And Israel occupied the West Bank, what we call the West Bank today.
But another important detail about that is, after the 1967 war, Israel increasingly became much more of a U.S. ally.
Whereas the first generation of Israeli leaders were much more, many of them were European, whereas the later generations of Israelis have been really American.
I mean, someone like Netanyahu, he is an American. Netanyahu was raised in the United States. He went to high school in Philadelphia. He went to high school with Reggie Jackson, by the way. He spent his most formative years in the U.S. He went to college at MIT.
He then worked in Boston, and he worked with many Republicans that he became friends with, like Mitt Romney, like Donald Trump. And then when he went back to Israel, he was sent to the U.S. to be a diplomat in the United States.
So the new generation of Israeli leaders is much more American, essentially.
And another detail you mentioned about Iran is so important, because, up until the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Iran of the Shah, the U.S.-backed monarchy, was such an important ally in the region.
And in fact, Saudi Arabia and Iran were famously referred to as the twin pillars. Saudi Arabia was the west pillar and Iran was the east pillar. The U.S. used to try to dominate this region, of course, with the support of Israel as well.
Well, with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the U.S. lost that crucial east pillar, which meant that Israel became even more important from the perspective of the U.S. imperialism to maintain control over this region.
So I just wanted to mention those details of the strategic importance of the trade routes, like the Bab al-Mandab Strait, like the Suez Canal, and also the fact that the Iranian Revolution fundamentally shifted U.S. policy in the region and made Israel even more important from the perspective of U.S. imperialism.
And now we’re in a moment where, as you mentioned, the U.S. is even losing control over Saudi Arabia. So it’s losing both of its pillars, which is, again, why Washington is so desperate in propping up Israel, despite the fact that the entire region is completely against these settler-colonialist policies and these ethnic cleansing policies that Israel is carrying out right now, as the entire world is watching.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to U.S. diplomats, what you call the support of Israel is really the support of the U.S.’ ability to militarily control the rest of the Near East.
It’s all about oil. America is not giving all this money to Israel because it loves Israel, but because Israel is the military base from which the United States can attack Syria, Iraq, and Iran and Lebanon. So it’s a military base.
And of course, it can frame this in terms of pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish policy, but this is only for the public relations view of the State Department.
If American strategy is based on energy in the Near East, then Israel is only a means to this end. It’s not the end itself. And that’s why the United States needed to have an aggressive Israeli government.
You can look at Netanyahu as being, in a way, a U.S. puppet, very much like Zelensky. Their positions are identical in their reliance on the United States against the majority of their own people.
So you keep talking about America’s support of Israel. It’s not supporting Israel at all. It rejects the majority of Israelis. It supports the Israeli military, not the Israeli society or the culture, have nothing to do with Judaism at all. This is pure military politics, and that’s how I’ve always heard it discussed among the military and national security people.
So you want to be careful not to be taken in by the cover story.
There’s one other means of control, I think, that we should mention, and that is, you’ve had in the last month or so all sorts of statements by the United States that as soon as Russia conquers the Ukraine and solidifies its control, it’s going to bring up claims against war crimes, crimes against humanity, against Russia.
America is trying to use the crooked court system. The International Criminal Court is a branch of the Pentagon in the State Department, and it’s the kangaroo court. The idea is that somehow the kangaroo court can give America judgments against Putin as they’ve declared him to be arrested anywhere he goes of people who respect the kangaroo court, and they can have all sorts of sanctions against Russian property elsewhere.
Well, look at how on earth are they going to justify these claims of war crimes against Russia if in the view of what’s happening between Israel and Gaza right now, and in fact, the arms and the bombs that are being used against Gaza are U.S. bombs, U.S. arms. The U.S. is fueling it all.
How on earth can the United States not accuse itself of war crimes on the basis of what it’s trying to accuse Russia of? Part of the splitting of the world that you’re going to see, whether or not the United States can actually bomb Iran, is going to be a whole setup of parallel courts and an isolation, not only of the United States, but as Europe is coming in.
Basically, there’s a fight for who is going to control the world right now, and that’s why I mentioned the Crusades.
I want to say I’ve been writing a history of the evolution of financial policy. I’ve done two volumes already, one on the Bronze Age Near East, …and forgive them their debts, and the other on classical antiquity, The Collapse of Antiquity. I’m now working on the third volume, which covers the Crusades to World War I.
It’s really all about an attempt by Rome, that had hardly any economic power at all, to take over all of the five Christian bishoprics that were made. Constantinople was really the new Rome. That was the head of Orthodox Christianity.
The emperor of Constantinople was really the emperor over the whole Christian world. It was followed by Antioch, Alexandria, and finally Jerusalem.
The Crusades really began, before they attacked the Near East it began in the 11th century. And Rome was finally being attacked by the Norman armies that were coming in and grabbing parts of France and had moved into Italy.
So the papacy made a deal with the Norman warlords, and it said, “We will give you the divine right to rule, we will recognize you as the Christian king, and we will excommunicate all of your enemies, but you have to pledge feudal fealty, loyalty to us, and you have to let us appoint your bishops and control the churches, which control most of your land, and you have to pay us tribute”.
The papacy all during the 10th century was controlled by a small group of aristocratic families around Rome that treated the papacy just as they treat the local political mayor of a city or the local administrators.
The church was just sort of run by a family. It had nothing to do with Christian religion at all. It was just, this is the church property, and one of our relatives, we’re always going to have as the pope.
Well, the popes didn’t have any troops in the late 11th century, and so they got the troops by making a deal with the Normans, and they decided, okay, we’re going to have an ideal, we’re going to mount the Crusades, and we’re going to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”, the Muslims.
Well, the problem is that Jerusalem didn’t need a rescue, because all throughout the medieval world, throughout Islam, no matter what the religion of the governing classes was, there was a religious tolerance, and that continued for hundreds of years under the Ottoman Empire.
There was only one group that was intolerant, and that was the Romans, that said, “We have to control all of Christianity, in order to prevent these aristocratic Italian families from taking over again”.
And so they mounted the Crusades, nominally against Jerusalem, but they ended up sacking Constantinople, and two centuries later, by 1291, the Christians lost in Acre.
The whole Crusade against the Near East failed.
I think you can see the parallel that I’m going to be drawing.
So most of the Crusades were not fought against Islam, because Islam was too strong.
The Crusades were fought against other Christians. And the fight of Roman Christianity was against the original Christianity for itself, as it existed over the last 10 centuries.
Well, you’re having something like that today. Just as Rome appointed the Normans as feudal rulers, William the Conqueror in Sicily, the U.S. appoints Zelensky, supports Netanyahu, supports client oligarchs in Russia, supports Latin American dictators.
So you have a U.S. view of the world that is not only unipolar, but in order to have unipolar U.S. control of the world, the U.S. has to be in charge of treating any foreign state, any foreign president as a feudal serf, basically, that they owe feudal loyalty to the United States’ sponsors.
And just as you had the Inquisition formed in the 12th century, really, to enforce this obedience to Rome as opposed to independent southern France, and independent Italy, and Arab science in Spain, you have today the U.S. using the National Endowment for Democracy, and all of the organizations controlled by Victoria Nuland with her cookies, to support things.
Well, you’re having the whole strategy of the Roman takeover, how it was going to take over other countries, how it was going to prevent other countries from becoming independent of Rome, is almost sentence for sentence what you get in American national security reports, how to control other countries. And that’s really the fight that we’re seeing there.
And against that, you’re finding the fight of other countries, the global majority. But in this case, whereas Constantinople was looted in 1204 and sort of destroyed by the Fourth Crusade, Russia, and China, and Iran and the other countries have not been looted.
The only thing that the United States can do right now is it’s setting up this military plan to attack Iran. What is the role going to be of, for instance, India? The attack on Iran and on oil is at the same time an attack on the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative, the whole attempt to control transportation, not only oil, but transportation by the global majority for each other’s mutual growth, mutual gain, mutual trade.
And the United States is trying to have an alternative plan for all of this that would run from India, essentially largely through Israel, and making a cut right across Gaza, which is one of the big problems that are being discussed now, to the Israeli control of Gaza, which would control its offshore oil and gas.
So you’re having the wild cards in the U.S. plan, India, Saudi Arabia, what will it do, and Turkey, because Turkey also has an interest in this oil and gas. And if the Islamic countries decide that they’re really under attack, and this attack by the Christian West against Islam is really a fight to the death, then Turkey will join with Saudi Arabia and with all of the other countries, the Shiites, and the Sunnis, and the Alawites will join together and say, what we have in common is the Islamic religion.
That is really going to be essentially the extension of America’s fight against China and Russia.
So what we’re seeing, I’m going to try to summarize now, what we’re really seeing is having fought Russia to the last Ukrainian, and threatening to fight Iran to the last Israeli. The United States is trying to send arms to Taiwan to say, wouldn’t you like to fight to the last Taiwanese against China? And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world.
It’s trying to fuel other countries to fight wars for its own control. That’s how Rome used the Norman armies to conquer southern Italy, England, and Yugoslavia.
Israel, and what is in the news over the whole attacks in Gaza, is only the opening stage, the trigger for this war, just as the shooting in Sarajevo started World War I in Serbia started everything.
BEN NORTON: Well, you raised so many interesting points, Michael, and I think your analysis is very fresh and unique and very insightful. I wish we had more time to go into some of these topics, but we’ve already been speaking for about an hour.
So I think we’re going to wrap up here. But I do want to thank you, Michael, for joining us. And of course, we’ll be back very soon for more analysis.
For people who are interested, I actually have interviewed Michael. I did an interview recently on classical antiquity, and Rome and Greece. And he has also written about the history of debt up through the creation of Christianity in his book And Forgive Them Their Debts. And now he is working on this political, economic, materialist history of the Crusades.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I didn’t realize when I began the book in the 1980s, drafting it, I didn’t realize how critical the Roman papacy was, and how similar it was to the State Department, and CIA, and the blob today in its plans for world conquest.
BEN NORTON: Well, I’m sure in the future we will have many opportunities to discuss that research. Of course, for people who want to get more of Michael’s very important analysis, you should check out the show that he co-hosts here with friend of the show, Radhika Desai, and that is Geopolitical Economy Hour.
If you go to our website, geopoliticaleconomy.com, or if you go to our YouTube channel, you can find a playlist with all of the different episodes of Geopolitical Economy Hour. So thanks again, Michael, and we’ll definitely have you back very soon.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be here. Thank you.


Instruction: Write an article about: Trapped in IMF debt, Argentina turns to Russia and joins China’s Belt & Road. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alberto Fernández, Argentina, Belt and Road Initiative, China, Covid-19, IMF, International Monetary Fund, Mauricio Macri, Russia, Sinopharm, Sputnik V, vaccines, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping

Output:
Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of IMF odious debt taken on by corrupt right-wing regimes. Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt and Road Initiative.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
The United States constantly intervenes in the internal affairs of Latin America, organizing coups d’etat, destabilizing independent governments, trapping nations in debt, and imposing sanctions. Washington sees the region as its own property, with President Joe Biden referring to it this January as “America’s front yard.”
Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, progressive governments in Latin America have increasingly looked across the ocean to form alliances with China and Russia.
Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández did exactly that this February, taking historic trips to Beijing and Moscow to meet with his counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Fernández signed a series of strategic agreements, officially incorporating Argentina into Beijing’s international Belt and Road Initiative, while expanding economic partnerships with the Eurasian powers and telling Moscow that Argentina “should be the door to enter” Latin America.
China offered $23.7 billion in funding for infrastructure projects and investments in Argentina’s economy.
In the meetings, Fernández also asked for Argentina to join the BRICS framework, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Xi and Putin reportedly both agreed.
“I am consistently working to rid Argentina of this dependence on the IMF and the US,” Fernández explained. “I want Argentina to open up new opportunities.”
The Argentine president’s comments and meetings with Putin and Xi reportedly angered the US government.
Argentina is a Latin American powerhouse, with significant natural resources and the third-largest economy in the region (after Brazil and Mexico, both of which have significantly larger populations).
But Argentina’s development has often been weighed down by debt traps imposed from abroad, resulting in frequent economic crises, cycles of high inflation, and currency devaluations.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) – a de facto economic arm of the United States, over which Washington alone has veto power – has significant control over Argentina, having trapped the nation in huge sums of odious debt.
In 2018, Argentina’s right-wing President Mauricio Macri requested the largest loan in the history of the IMF: a staggering $57.1 billion bailout.
Macri was notorious for his corruption, and this was no secret at the time. By agreeing to give such an enormous sum of money to Macri’s scandal-plagued government, the IMF knew it was ensnaring Argentina in debt it would not be able to pay off. But this was far from the first time the US-dominated financial instrument had trapped Argentina in odious debt.
In December 2021, the IMF published an internal report admitting that the 2018 bailout completely failed to stabilize Argentina’s economy.
But when Argentina’s center-left President Alberto Fernández entered office in December 2019, his country was ensnared in $44.5 billion in debt from this bailout that the IMF itself admitted was a total failure. ($44.5 billion of the $57.1 billion loan had already been disbursed, and Fernández cancelled the rest.)
The Argentine government has tried to renegotiate the debt, but in order to do so the IMF has imposed conditions that severely restrict the nation’s sovereignty – such as appointing a British economist who “will virtually be the new economic minister,” acting as a kind of “co-government,” warned prominent diplomat Alicia Castro.
Seeking ways around these US debt traps, Fernández decided this February to turn to the two rising Eurasian superpowers.
On February 3, Argentine President Alberto Fernández travelled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin.
“I’m certain Argentina has to stop being so dependent on the [International Monetary] Fund and the United States, and has to open up to other places, and that is where it seems to me that Russia has a very important place,” Fernández said, explaining his motivation for the trip.
???? | "Estamos dando un paso importante para que la Argentina y Rusia profundicen sus lazos", expresó el presidente @alferdez en una declaración conjunta que brindó junto a su par Vladímir Putin. #GiraPresidencial
? @KremlinRussia_Ehttps://t.co/aHl8tOuPZy pic.twitter.com/APoQR6VHtU
— Casa Rosada (@CasaRosada) February 3, 2022

Fernández added that, for Russia, Argentina “should be the door to enter” the region, telling Putin, “We could be a venue for the development of your cooperation with Latin American nations.”
The two leaders discussed Russian investment in the Argentine economy, trade, railroad construction, and energy technology.
Fernández also thanked Moscow for collaborating with his country in the production of its Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine. Argentina was the first country in the western hemisphere to do so.
The Argentine president even pointed out in their meeting that he has received three doses of the Sputnik V vaccine. Putin added, “Me too.”
Putin said the two countries agree on many issues, calling Argentina “one of Russia’s key partners in Latin America.”
Es un honor haberme reunido con Vladímir Putin, presidente de Rusia.
Tuvimos la oportunidad de intercambiar ideas sobre cómo podemos complementar mucho más el vínculo entre nuestras naciones. pic.twitter.com/ntmDGn6jtD
— Alberto Fernández (@alferdez) February 3, 2022

Just three days after meeting with Putin, President Alberto Fernández travelled to China on February 6 to meet with President Xi Jinping.
In this historic trip, Argentina officially joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure program.
Fernández and other top Argentine officials signed agreements for $23.7 billion in Chinese financing, including investments and infrastructure projects.
The funding will be disbursed in two parts: one, which is already approved, will provide Argentina with $14 billion for 10 infrastructure projects; the second, for $9.7 billion, will finance the South American nation’s integration into the Belt and Road.
There are three joint Chinese-Argentine projects that were reportedly at the top of Fernández’s list: creating 5G networks, developing Argentina’s lithium industry, and building the Atucha III nuclear power plant.
Tuve una cordial, amistosa y fructífera reunión con Xi Jinping, presidente de China. Acordamos la incorporación de Argentina a la Franja y la Ruta de la Seda.
Es una excelente noticia. Nuestro país obtendrá más de US$ 23 mil millones de inversiones chinas para obras y proyectos. pic.twitter.com/LGyIJ6zWdG
— Alberto Fernández (@alferdez) February 6, 2022

Fernández also discussed plans for Argentina to produce China’s Sinopharm covid-19 vaccine, in addition to Russia’s Sputnik V.
Argentina and China signed a comprehensive memorandum of understanding, including 13 documents for cooperation in areas such as green energy, technology, education, agriculture, communication, and nuclear energy.
Fernández and Xi discussed ways to “strengthen relations of political, commercial, economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation between both countries,” according to an Argentine government readout of the meeting.
The two leaders apparently hit it off very well, with Fernández telling Xi, “If you were Argentine, you would be a Peronist.”
???? | El presidente @alferdez mantuvo reuniones sobre el proyecto de producir en Argentina la vacuna de Sinopharm, participó de la inauguración de los JJOO de Invierno #Beijing2022 y visitó el Museo de la Historia del Partido Comunista. #GiraPresidencialhttps://t.co/acSH9rvpM7 pic.twitter.com/Edz7hHRLE8
— Casa Rosada (@CasaRosada) February 4, 2022

Argentina’s incorporation into the Belt and Road comes mere weeks after Nicaragua joined the initiative in January, and Cuba in December.
Latin America’s growing links with China and Russia show how the increasingly multipolar international system offers countries in the Global South new potential allies who can serve as bulwarks against and alternatives to Washington’s hegemony.
While right-wing leaders in Latin America keep looking north to the United States as their political compass, progressive governments are reaching across the ocean to the Eurasian powers of China, Russia, and Iran, building new international alliances that weaken Washington’s geopolitical grip over a region that the US president still insists is its “front yard.”


Instruction: Write an article about: How Mexico’s progressive gov’t nationalized its lithium, the ‘white gold’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, lithium, Mexico, neoliberalism, oil, podcast, Renata, Turrent

Output:
Mexican professor Renata Turrent explains how the progressive government of President AMLO nationalized lithium and reversed privatization of oil by corrupt past neoliberal leaders.

Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton is joined by Mexican professor and activist Renata Turrent to discuss how the progressive government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) nationalized Mexico’s lithium, an important resource needed to create electronic technologies, while also reversing privatization of oil by corrupt past neoliberal governments.

This video is also available at Rokfin and Rumble.

You can download the podcast version of this interview at Substack.
You can follow Renata on Twitter at @RTurrent.


Instruction: Write an article about: ‘Free Julian Assange!’ say Latin America’s leftist leaders: Lula, AMLO, Petro, Maduro, Ortega, Kirchner, Evo, Zelaya. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Daniel Ortega, Ecuador, Evo Morales, Honduras, Julian Assange, Lula da Silva, Manuel Zelaya, Nicaragua, Nicolás Maduro, Nils Melzer, Rafael Correa, torture, Venezuela, WikiLeaks

Output:
Latin America’s leftist presidents are leading the campaign to free Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks journalist has the support of Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya.

A movement is growing in Latin America to demand the freedom of political prisoner Julian Assange, the Australian journalist persecuted by the United States for his work exposing its war crimes.
Most of the major leftist leaders in Latin America have called for Assange to be released from the maximum-security British prison where he has been held since 2019 and subjected to torture.
Current and former Latin American presidents who have expressed their support for the beleaguered journalist include Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya.

It was the socialist ex president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, who gave asylum to Assange in the first place.
Assange, the founder of whistle-blowing journalism publication WikiLeaks, was trapped in Ecuador’s embassy in London, England for seven years, starting 2012, in what United Nations experts determined to be an illegal form of arbitrary detention by the governments of the UK and Sweden.
In 2019, British authorities stormed the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested Assange. The UK’s judicial system subsequently rubber stamped Washington’s extradition request, and the WikiLeaks journalist faces up to 175 years in prison.
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, visited Assange in London’s brutal Belmarsh prison and reported that he suffers from “all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture.”
“While the US Government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity,” the UN expert noted.
The CIA, which has organized coups against many left-wing governments in Latin America, even made plans to kidnap and kill Assange. The infamous US spy agency is now being sued by journalists who were victims of its illegal spying operations.

Ecuador’s former President Correa has always been one of Assange’s most vocal supporters.
Correa’s successor, Andrés Arauz, has also praised Assange. A leftist economist and former central bank manager who served as a minister under Correa, Arauz came close to winning Ecuador’s 2021 elections.
“Real and also Ecuadorian journalism is that of Julian Assange,” Arauz tweeted with pride, referring to the fact that the WikiLeaks publisher was given Ecuadorian citizenship.
Verdadero periodismo y además ecuatoriano es el de Julian Assange.
— Andrés Arauz (@ecuarauz) July 6, 2021

Brazil’s left-wing President-elect Lula da Silva met with Assange’s colleagues from WikiLeaks on November 28, 2022.
Lula said he “sent my solidarity” and expressed hope that “Assange will be freed from his unjust imprisonment.”
Lula governed Latin America’s largest country from 2003 to 2010 and will return to power on January 1, 2023, after winning the October 30 elections and defeating current far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.
Estive com @khrafnsson, editor-chefe do WikiLeaks, e com o editor Joseph Farrell, que me informaram da situação de saúde e da luta por liberdade de Julian Assange. Pedi para que enviassem minha solidariedade. Que Assange seja solto de sua injusta prisão.
?: Cláudio Kbene pic.twitter.com/DuSvdEBQQY
— Lula (@LulaOficial) November 29, 2022

A week before they spoke with Lula in Brazil, the editors of WikiLeaks traveled to Colombia to meet with its new President Gustavo Petro.
Petro, the first-ever left-wing leader of Colombia, said he “supports the worldwide struggle for the freedom of the journalist Julian Assange.”
“I will ask President Biden with other Latin American presidents so they don’t put charges on a journalist only for saying the truth,” he added.
Me reuní con los voceros de Wikikeaks, para apoyar la lucha mundial por la libertad del periodista Julian Assange.
Le soliciaré al presidente Biden con otros presidentes latinoamericanos que no se pongan cargos a un periodista solo por decir la verdad pic.twitter.com/kWyoXrHhyV
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) November 22, 2022

Nicaragua’s socialist President Daniel Ortega said in 2021 that “Assange earned the recognition of the people, and for that he won the peace prize of the peoples of the world.” (He added, “Not the Nobel Prize, which is given to those who destroy, invade, kill, bomb.”)
Ortega noted that Assange’s supposed “crime” was “having denounced the violations of human rights, the crimes committed by the North American leaders in killings, in bombings.”
The revolutionary Sandinista leader condemned the hypocrisy and authoritarianism of Western governments, noting their roots in racism, monarchism, and fascism.
What do UN human rights bodies have to say on Julian Assange, whose only crime was to denounce the tortures, massacres and murders of the Yankee government? President Daniel Ortega: pic.twitter.com/tnTaEdi5l6
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) December 11, 2021

Venezuela’s elected President Nicolás Maduro has been one of the most outspoken world leaders in defending Assange.
When the journalist was imprisoned in 2019, Maduro harshly “condemned the atrocious decision” as “a shameful affront to international law and his human rights.”
The Venezuelan government stressed that Assange is a victim of “political persecution” by the US government, and his “crime is having revealed to the world the darkest and most criminal face of the ‘regime-change wars’ that the US empire executes, and in particular the massive killings of civilians and the shameful violation of human rights in Iraq.”
RT @jaarreaza: #COMUNICADO | The Government and People of Venezuela reject the atrocious decision to deprive Australian-Ecuadorian citizen Julian Assange of the right of diplomatic asylum, and his subsequent arrest in London, clumsily and shamefully […] https://t.co/1GkSGLqMRC
— Nicolás Maduro (@maduro_en) April 12, 2019

“The Australian-Ecuadorian journalist should not be delivered to the US, where his life is in danger of a rigged judicial process,” and “where there clearly exists the intention to end his life,” Maduro added.
“Out of the respect of the right to asylum, out of the respect of international law, Julian Assange must be freed immediately, his life and its integrity must be protected and respected,” the Venezuelan president stressed.
Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has praised Assange as the “best journalist of our time, in the world.”
Criticizing US government hypocrisy, AMLO called for the Australian “prisoner of conscience” to be freed, and he asked, “Are we going to take the Statue of Liberty out of New York? Are we going to keep talking about democracy? Are we going to keep talking about the protection of human rights, of the freedom of expression?”
In a press conference, the Mexican leader even played a clip of the “Collateral Murder” video published by WikiLeaks, which shows the US military killing journalists in Iraq.
At the press conference in which Mexican President AMLO called for Julian Assange to be freed, he showed a clip of the "collateral murder" video published by @WikiLeaks, which exposed US war crimes and killing of journalists in Iraq.
Read more here: https://t.co/qtR2SIOX1j pic.twitter.com/lEQw6F9rrS
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) June 22, 2022

Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was president from 2007 to 2015 currently serves as vice president, has repeatedly expressed support for Julian Assange.
On December 5, 2022, Kirchner met with the same WikiLeaks editors, Hrafnsson and Farrell, as part of their tour of Latin America.
Recibí hoy a Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor general y a Joseph Farrell, embajador de Wikileak. Están realizando una gira latinoamericana para reclamar la libertad de Julian Assange. pic.twitter.com/C1vKhIpV4n
— Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina) December 5, 2022

In 2019, Kirchner tweeted, “In the upside-down world, fake news circulates freely and those who reveal the truth are persecuted and imprisoned.” She emphasized the importance of “the citizens’ right to information,” and tagged Assange, thanking him for his journalistic work.
En el mundo al revés, las noticas falsas circulan libremente y aquellos que revelan la verdad son perseguidos y encarcelados. El derecho a la información de los ciudadanos y ciudadanas, bien gracias. #Assange
— Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina) April 11, 2019

Then in June 2022, while serving as Argentina’s vice president, Kirchner wrote, “The decision to facilitate the extradition of Julian Assange not only puts his life at risk but also marks an alarming precedent for all of the world’s journalists who investigate and look for the truth: journalistic disciplining for everyone.”
La decisión de habilitar la extradición de Julian Assange no solo pone en peligro su vida sino que además marca un precedente alarmante para todos los y las periodistas del mundo que investigan y buscan la verdad: disciplinamiento periodístico para todos y todas. pic.twitter.com/FHVhv7Ewen
— Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina) June 18, 2022

Bolivia’s socialist ex-President Evo Morales warned in June 2022 that the “decision of the United Kingdom to accept the request of the United States to extradite Julian Assange is a grave attack on journalism, on democracy, and on the search for truth.”
Morales added that Assange “exposed the unpunished crimes of the empire, that is his only ‘crime.'” The former Bolivian leader reassured “all our solidarity with him and his family.”
Assange expuso los crímenes impunes del imperio, ese es su único “delito”. Toda nuestra solidaridad con él y su familia.
— Evo Morales Ayma (@evoespueblo) June 17, 2022

Honduras’ former President Manuel Zelaya has been a very outspoken defender of Julian Assange.
Zelaya was overthrown in a US-backed right-wing military coup in 2009. Today, he officially serves as an advisor to Honduras’ current President, Xiomara Castro, who is his wife.
Zelaya created an organization called the Anti-Imperialist People’s International in Defense of Humanity and Nature (Internacional Antiimperialista de los Pueblos en Defensa de la Humanidad y la Naturaleza), which launched a campaign to free Assange.
“The world demands the immediate freedom of Julian Assange,” Zelaya declared. His campaign has been publicly supported by Paraguay’s left-wing former President Fernando Lugo, Ecuador’s ex foreign minister and defense minister Ricardo Patiño, Colombian lawmaker Piedad Córdoba, the lawmaker Nidia Díaz from El Salvador’s leftist FMLN party, and prominent socialist Argentine intellectual Atilio Borón.
El mundo exige la libertad inmediata de Julian Assange https://t.co/78an1Pd9E7 vía @tercerainfo3i
— Manuel Zelaya R. (@manuelzr) October 16, 2022

In September, Zelaya sent a letter to British Prime Minister Liz Truss, requesting a reversal of the extradition decision and freedom for Assange.
In 2020, Zelaya insisted, “Assange, for informing humanity about the hidden horrors of power, should be given an award.”


Instruction: Write an article about: Protesting farmer in Peru tells pro-coup media why she supports President Castillo: ‘He’s one of us’!. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Juliana Oxenford, media, Pedro Castillo, Peru

Output:
In a viral interview with a pro-coup media outlet, a protesting Peruvian farmer says she supports elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo because, “All my life, those foreigners who have governed have discriminated against us,” and “it pains them that we are governed by a teacher, a farmer,” who is “humble, like us.”

A farmer in Peru protesting the coup against democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo explained in a viral video why she supports the overthrown leader.
“All my life, those foreigners who have governed have discriminated against us,” the woman said.
“But today, it pains them that we are governed by a teacher, a farmer, who knows how to eat boiled potatoes, who knows how to eat humble things, like us, the farmers,” she said.
A protesting Peruvian farmer tells elite, pro-coup media she supports elected President Pedro Castillo because, “All my life, those foreigners who have governed have discriminated against us”
“It pains them that we are governed by a teacher, a farmer,” who is “humble, like us” pic.twitter.com/YFHRI7Zn8m
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 13, 2022

The video, which got thousands of shares on Twitter, showed a clip from Peru’s media network ATV noticias.
The presenter in the segment, Juliana Oxenford, was born in Argentina and is from a wealthy family of elite actors.
Oxenford has publicly defended the coup, attacking protesters as “vandals” and demonizing democratically elected President Castillo as a “dictator.”
A translated transcript of the conversation follows below:
PROTESTER: It is outrageous that you, as the Peruvian media, you do not support us.
We are supporting a President (Pedro Castillo) who was elected by the Peruvian people.
But no, excuse me, but you, you say that he has been these things that you are mentioning, so are you defaming him? Are you defaming our president?
PRESENTER: I would love to have the opportunity to have a conversation.
PROTESTER: I’m going to tell you something: All my life, all my life, those foreigners who have governed have discriminated against us. All of my life.
But today, it pains them that we are governed by a teacher, a farmer, who knows how to eat boiled potatoes, who knows how to eat humble things, like us, the farmers.
PRESENTER: I understand the request of those who suffer the most in this country, and maybe you are part of that group ma’am, I’m sorry.
PROTESTER: Who suffers? The ones who suffer, the ones who suffer, those who can’t bear the pain, are the right-wingers; it is the congress members. It is the congress members, but not us.
…
PRESENTER: I will never support a dictator.
PROTESTER: How much do they pay you? How much do they pay you to support the right wing?
PRESENTER: It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter how much they pay me! That is my own personal issue, not yours.