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Paul Krugman: The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

I spend some time every day reading the discussions on Twitter and BlueSky. Given the perilous state of America’s role in the world–our failed war on Iran, our abandonment of Ukraine, the absurd trade war with Canada, Trump’s insults to our European allies, his admiration for Russia and North Korea, the cost of fuel–I am curious about how his supporters defend him.

No matter what happens, his most loyal fans believe he is wise and all-knowing. When anyone complains about the cost of gasoline, which affects everyone, they have a new answer. Trump just made a deal to get billions of gallons of oil from Venezuela! In a matter of days or weeks, the price of oil will plummet, not only to $3 a gallon but maybe lower. Take that, libtards!

If only they would read what Paul Krugman wrote about that deal! But I know they won’t.

The deal that Trump made will take years, even decades, to have any effect on the price of oil. American firms have to invest billions to develop the infrastructure needed to pump oil from the ground. And in the meanwhile, the Venezuelan government must be willing to honor the deal, which is deeply unpopular in that country. There are many “ifs” in the deal, and it will have no impact on the price of oil in the near future.

Krugman wrote:

The United States has an ugly reputation in Latin America — a reputation that, I’m sorry to say, is mostly well deserved. Our government has a long track record of supporting dictators, assisting in the overthrow of democratic governments, and sometimes even sending in the Marines, often on behalf of American corporations trying to pillage other nations’ natural resources.

Excluding the Trump II presidency, we have, I think, behaved better in the recent past. And this was largely due to the role of enlightened self-interest.

The fact is that old-fashioned, extractive imperialism doesn’t pay. In fact, it hasn’t paid for well over a century. In the modern world nations grow rich through innovation and productivity, not conquest. In 1909 Norman Angell’s book The Great Illusion argued that even victorious wars cost far more than they can possibly yield in tribute, documenting his case with what was already extensive historical evidence. His argument has even more force now.

Let me give you a recent historical example. Portugal was the last European nation to maintain a large overseas empire. As late as 1973 Lisbon still ruled vast African territories — some of them rich in natural resources — with many times the home country’s population. It was also the poorest nation in Western Europe, its resources drained by the endless wars it fought in an attempt to keep its colonies subjugated.

Finally, in 1974, junior officers in the Portuguese military, fed up with the fighting and dying, rose up in the Carnation Revolution and overthrew the fascist government. A newly democratic Portugal quickly abandoned its empire, eventually joining the European Union — and while it’s still poorer than some of its peers, it is far closer than before to the standard of living in, say, France.

In short, at this point only someone deeply ignorant of both the realities of modern economies and of the lessons of history can believe that there are big payoffs to seizing other nations’ natural resources. In other words:

For those who need a refresher, in January U.S. forces raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the nation’s brutal, corrupt dictator. Maduro surely deserved his fate. But the Trump administration made no move to help Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Instead, it made a deal with former members of the Maduro cabal,effectively installing a new regime that may well be even more brutal and corrupt than its predecessor. (There’s widespread suspicion that the kidnapping of Maduro was in part an inside job, engineered by his fellow cabalistas.)

In return, Trump got an agreement — details are scarce — that apparently will allow U.S. oil companies to extract and sell large quantities of Venezuelan oil but only if they put tens of billions of dollars into investments in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure.

So the Venezuela venture had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It seems safe to say that it had nothing to do with crime or terrorism, which were the other excuses the administration offered. What happened in Venezuela was simply an old-fashioned, 19th-century-style resource grab, a sort of Caribbean version of the Belgian Congo.

In one stroke, Trump has just validated everything the Latin American left has ever said about U.S. imperialism. And we’ll be paying for that, diplomatically and strategically, for decades to come.

Now, it’s highly unlikely that this deal will hold. By all accounts, just about every faction in Venezuelan politics except the current ruling clique hates the deal. Since it will take years, maybe even decades, to realize the putative benefits of oil-company investments in Venezuela, how likely is it that whoever is running that country in the future will want to honor Trump’s terms? What are the odds that Venezuela will eventually expropriate U.S. oil-company investments? Or do we imagine a future in which the U.S. military maintains a permanent occupation of Venezuela, using force to prop up a puppet government the nation’s citizens hate?

Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela appears on paper to have huge oil reserves. But much of these reserves are what I called a “black, sticky fantasy,” created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, when he reclassified oil in the OrinocoBasin that will be difficult if not impossible to recover as “proved” reserves.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Trump really does manage to seize 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. That sounds like a big number. Is it?

Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets. But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expertput it, “it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.”

So the profit margin on Venezuelan oil will be at most a small fraction of its market price. Surely $20 a barrel would be a highly generous estimate. So let’s go with that, in which case Trump’s deal might be worth $20*65 billion barrels = $1.3 trillion, a sum extracted over many years.

How big a deal would that be for the United States? Since this would be a many-year process if it happens at all, you want to compare it with U.S. wealth, not GDP (which is only the value created in a single year.) And total U.S. wealth is about $167 trillion.

So the chart at the top of this post shows how Trump’s triumphant Venezuela deal stacks up for the U.S. economy. Even if we make the most favorable assumptions — above all the assumption that the Venezuelan regime, unlike the Trump administration, can be trusted to honor its promises — the value of this deal to the United States is, to a first approximation … nothing.

Oh, and what about Trump’s claim that this will “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans”? Since any significant rise in Venezuelan production would take a long time, even crude oil prices won’t show any effects from this deal for years at best. And in any case the prices of gasoline and diesel — which are what people actually burn — have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude.

So Trump’s Venezuela deal will do nothing for ordinary Americans, while solidifying our reputation for rapacious, short-sighted imperialism.

Thank you for wasting your attention on this matter.

Categories Economy, Ethics, History, International, Lies, Scandals, Trump

To Understand Putin’s Plan to Destroy NATO and the European Union, Read This

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2026 //
1

Today, The New York Times published an astonishing article about Putin’s attempt to destabilize NATO and the EU by driving tiny Moldova back into Russia’s orbit.

Moldova shares a border with Ukraine. Putin hopes to thwart the West by persuading Moldova to oust its pro-Western government.

Putin created an elaborate pro-Russian organization inside Moldova, spending millions of dollars to pay collaborators, agitators, and priests.

The Times‘ articleis a gift article with no pay wall. It begins:

It resembled in many ways a summer camp. Barbecues and beach volleyball games were on offer. A wellness spa was called “Relax and Have Fun.”

The men and women who attended the program at a resort complex in a remote part of Serbia also took part in more sinister activities, like learning to break through police cordons and set buildings on fire. They donned flak jackets and trained with assault rifles.

Their counselors, it turned out, were operatives with ties to Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the GRU. Their purpose, according to intelligence officials from three countries who described the activities, was to build a cadre of disciplined shock troops trained in election interference.

The target was tiny Moldova, a country of about three million people that carries outsize importance for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The Kremlin’s campaign included methods familiar elsewhere in the West, like hacking and disinformation. But in Moldova, its intervention went further than perhaps anywhere else outside Ukraine, and stands as one of the most extensive and audacious plots to date in Mr. Putin’s effort to destabilize the West, the three Western intelligence officials say.

Besides the camp in Serbia, Russian agents ran training programs in Bosnia and Moscow that were designed to turn pro-Russian Moldovans into foot soldiers. Moscow paid hundreds of Orthodox Moldovan priests to recruit voters and to push Russian narratives from the pulpit. And it spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a sophisticated vote-buying scheme financed by a Moldovan billionaire in exile and conceived and operated from Skolkovo, the Kremlin’s knockoff Silicon Valley outside Moscow.

Moscow’s campaign has not stopped. This spring, Russian missiles targeted energy infrastructure that provided service to Moldova, polluting waterways and disrupting electricity flows.

This article is based on interviews with activists who took part in the Russian effort; senior Moldovan law enforcement and security officials; and more than half a dozen European and American intelligence officials. The New York Times also reviewed thousands of documents related to Russia’s attempts to interfere in Moldova’s elections.

Many of those interviewed insisted on speaking anonymously, either to discuss sensitive security operations or because they feared retribution.

Details about Russian efforts in Moldova have emerged in court cases and local reporting, but the scope and extent of the campaign, including the vote-buying scheme and role of Russia’s intelligence services, has not been previously reported.

Publicly, Russian officials have denied interfering in Moldova’s affairs, and have dismissed accusations that Moscow is trying to undermine the West. Last December, Mr. Putin, in an address to military commanders, castigated European leaders for “stoking hysteria” over the threat from Russia.

Soon afterward, though, he gathered the leaders for a secret briefing to deliver the exact opposite message, according to officials from two countries with knowledge of the episode. Their goal for 2026, Mr. Putin told them, is “the collapse of NATO and the E.U. from within,” the people said.

Ms. Sandu, wearing a blue outfit, walks toward a lectern, with flags in the background.
The pro-Western government of President Maia Sandu has set European Union membership as a priority, making it a Kremlin target.Credit…Daniel Mihailescu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Categories Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, International

Afghanistan: The Corruption of Boys’ Education

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2026 //
12

The Guardian posted a fascinating and depressing article about the “education” of boys in Afghanistan.

It is a reminder that religious education is likely to be indoctrination.

It is a reminder of the importance of separation of church and state.

It is a reminder of why public funds should not pay for religious education.

It is a reminder of the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who guaranteed freedom of religion and prohibited the establishment of any state religion.

In the world of the Taliban, critical thinking and questioning are not permitted.

In the world of religious zealots, indoctrination is the goal of education.

In the U.S., critical thinking and questioning are necessary for our democracy to thrive.

Which path we will choose?

The Guardian reports:

Before he leaves for Kabul University each morning, Hashmat* checks his face for the beard he has been ordered to grow. Male students are required to grow their facial hair and wear traditional Afghan clothes and those who fall short are punished. Hashmat says he recently saw a classmate beaten for wearing trousers.

“They look at you before they listen to you. If your appearance is wrong, you are already in trouble before the class begins,” he says.

Five years after the ultra-conservative Islamists of the Taliban retook Afghanistan, students have described to the Guardian a collapsing education system, with women banned, lecturers leaving and teaching increasingly focused on religious subjects and discipline.

University has lost its purpose. It feels more like a … place where curiosity is banned and remaining silent ordered

Qader

Students are required to attend religious lectures and pray in public every day, sometimes for two hours at a time, says Hashmat. The lectures are about Islam, conduct and obedience. They are not optional. In some cases, he says, they are held during time that would otherwise be used for regular academic courses.

“I am missing my actual classes to sit in a lecture about obeying. That is what they [the Taliban] think education is for. Everyone talks about the girls who were banned, but nobody talks about what is happening to the boys who were allowed to stay.”

Another student studying in central Afghanistan said the problem is not only weak teaching, but also the disappearance of debate and questioning from the classroom. “We are expected to listen, not to question,” says Qader*. “Since the fall of Kabul, the university has lost its purpose. It feels more like a madrassa now — a place where curiosity is banned and remaining silent ordered.”

Hashmat studies journalism, a subject shaped by digital tools, online platforms, verification, ethics and technology, but as he listens in class, he says he wonders whether the person teaching the course understands the subject well enough to teach it.

“He is teaching us about the modern world while struggling to use PowerPoint in the class. How can you teach journalism technology if you do not understand what technology is?”

Hashmat’s account matches those of more than 20 students interviewed by phone at public and private universities in seven provinces across Afghanistan – Kabul, Kandahar, Helmand, Nangarhar, Bamiyan, Balkh and Wardak.

Teachers come to class and read from old notes they cannot explain … it feels like we are back in high school

Zalmay

Afghanistan’s higher-education sector contracted sharply between 2019 and 2024, according to Unesco, with female enrolment down to zero by 2024 and male enrolment falling from 310,369 in 2019 to 188,957 in 2024.

Kabul University still looks like a university from the outside. The buildings are open, male students still attend, exams are held and degrees are issued. But students say much of what makes it a university has been hollowed out.

Experienced professors have left the country, stopped teaching or been pushed aside. And ideologically aligned Taliban lecturers have been hired in their place. In some departments, recent graduates and even undergraduates are teaching.

*Names have been changed.

Categories History, International, Religion, Separation of church and state

Musk Insisted that No Child Died Because of His Cuts to USAID. Kristof Proves He Is Wrong.

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2026 //
8

When Elon Musk started his Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), one of his first targets was USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency that sent food, medicine and health workers to the world’s neediest nations.

Musk and his DOGE shut down USAID. On February 3, 2025, Musk boasted on Twitter:

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.

Clearly, Musk was very proud of what he did. American farmers complained that they lost $2 billion in sales that had previously been purchased by USAID to ship abroad to needy people.

Immediately, there were dire predictions that people would die without the food and medicine provided by the U.S.

Musk at first ignored the critics, but eventually insisted that no child had died as a result of closing down USAID.

Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times responded:

Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine.

“Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week.

I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said that Musk had “possibly sentenced to death” a large number of children, and Musk retorted that it was “time to sue this liar.”

“There is not even a single dead child!” Musk protested on social media. I noted that I had met many families of children who had died — and that’s when he concluded that I was lying.

Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd, yet he doubled down: “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”

On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate:

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.

These figures may not be accurate; we just don’t have solid mortality data, and the aid cuts have also reduced data collection. What I can say after visiting numerous impoverished villages is that aid cuts are unquestionably costing the lives of many children.

Some prominent conservatives leaped to the defense of Musk, saying in effect: Why is it our job to save the lives of children in South Sudan? Why don’t rich liberals write checks? Why don’t other countries do more?

Those are fair questions. But if any of us came across an ambulance that had run out of gas with a hemorrhaging woman inside, surely we would happily hand over a $10 bill to save her life.

Until Trump’s second term, American aid cost just 23 cents for every $100 of gross national income and saved a life approximately once every 10 seconds. Seems like a bargain to me. Certainly it appears wiser than spending billions of dollars on a war with Iran.

I say “wiser” because all this is not just about compassion but also about self-interest. Aid money serves national security and protects us from diseases. I’ve noted that the current Ebola outbreak in Africa may have gotten out of control precisely because we cut aid spending in the region.

Yes, other countries should do more, impoverished countries should be less corrupt, and our own aid can be allocated more wisely. But note that some countries in Europe are significantly more generous than America, spending up to 10 times as much on aid as a share of national income as we do.

Should liberals donate more to humanitarian causes? Sure. But compassion isn’t a liberal impulse — it’s a human one. It was evangelicals and Republicans who in 2003 started the single best aid program ever, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; it has saved more than 26 million lives so far. Some of the most heroic aid workers I’ve met in dangerous locations have been Christian missionaries, from nuns to doctors; they would dispute the idea that empathy is woke.

It’s reasonable to ask how much we should spend or how we should reform the system. But why would anyone begrudge $2 bed nets or $4 malaria vaccines to save children’s lives?

So let me offer a challenge to Musk: Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.

You’ll understand that these kids are just like ours, except that they didn’t do as well in the lottery of birth — and that just because we can’t save every child’s life doesn’t mean we should save none of them.

Back in the late 1960s, opponents of the war in Vietnam used to torment President Lyndon B. Johnson by shouting at him,

Hey, hey, LBJ,

How many kids did you kill today?

I can’t think of a word that rhymes with “Musk.” Can you?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, International, Poverty

If Iran and Oman Put Tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, They Will Strike It Rich

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2026 //
27

Blogger G.F. Brandenburg is upset about Trump’s disastrous deal with Iran. All the sanctions on this rogue state will be lifted, and Iran agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for only 60 days. After 60 days, Iran and Oman will decide about the management of that vital body of water, through which moves about 20% of the world’s oil.

Brandenburg calculates how much money these two nations will haul in if they require ships to pay a toll. Annually, we are talking of revenues worth billions.

Categories Accountability, Funding, International, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson on Trump’s Deal with Iran

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2026 //
5

This audio is a bit more than eleven minutes. It is worth listening to for Heather Cox Richardson’s view of Trump’s agreement with Iran. She points out that before the war, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and Iran was burdened by heavy sanctions.

The agreement opens the Strait for 60 days, after which Iran and Oman will decide how it is managed. Richardson suggests that Iran intends to control the Strait and impose tolls.

The U.S. agreed to help raise $300 billion to rebuild Iran and also unfreeze Iran’s bank accounts.

And, most significantly, all sanctions on Iran will be removed.

This is a very good deal for Iran.

Maybe Trump should have sent experienced diplomats to negotiate, instead of Jared Kushner and Howard Lutnick, both real estate developers.

Categories Failure, International, Trump

The Iran War: A Fiasco!

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2026 //
5

Richard Haas is a foreign policy expert. For years, he was president of the Counculmon Foreign Relations from 2003 to 2023. Before that, he was director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department.

He titled his post “Defeat.”

He wrote:

Welcome to Home & Away. The big news again is the Iran War, as we now have the memorandum of understanding (MOU) agreed to and signed by the United States and Iran. Here are the main provisions:

— The two governments have committed to an immediate and permanent ceasefire, including Lebanon.

— The two agree not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs.

— The two will seek to negotiate a final deal within 60 days, but this can be extended if need be, as is virtually certain to be the case.

— The Strait of Hormuz will reopen as the United States has pledged to end its blockade and Iran has agreed to allow the resumption of shipping.

— The Iranian government has (again) agreed not to procure or develop nuclear weapons. More significantly, it has agreed to maintain the nuclear status quo while all nuclear-related issues are being negotiated. Nothing in the MOU prejudices, one way or the other, the future status of the stock of enriched uranium in Iran, new enrichment-related activities, or inspections.

— Financial assets will flow to Iran as all economic sanctions are eased and frozen assets are released. A $300 billion reconstruction fund will be established for Iran.

— Nothing is mentioned about Iranian conventional military forces (including missiles and drones) or support for proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Obviously, much remains to be negotiated (particularly in the nuclear realm) and implemented when it comes to the Strait and just about everything else. We will see whether the end of the war is temporary or permanent, as declared.

What is clear, though, is that the emerging deal constitutes a massive victory for Iran, or, more precisely, for its government. The regime will receive a financial windfall that will strengthen its hold on the country and help it rearm itself and its proxies. In just two months, it can impose tolls and quite possibly other controls affecting the use of the Strait of Hormuz.

The same cannot be said about Iran’s people, who are among the war’s principal losers. The regime is not just more radical; it now has the prestige of having successfully stood up to the Great Satan. As already noted, it will be bailed out financially. Plus, the United States has pledged not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs, which is a 180-degree reversal of its initial stance of seeking regime change. There is no reason to expect repression to ease, although at some point Iran’s leaders will have to confront their questionable priorities and policies that have driven the country to economic ruin.

Israel is another big loser in the war, as its relationship with the United States, already strained by Gaza, has deteriorated sharply. (Prime Minister Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump has deteriorated as well.) Israel’s main concerns (Iran’s missiles and aid to proxies) are unaffected by the MOU. It remains to be seen whether Israel’s nuclear-related concerns are met (safe to say they will not be met in full, as at most there will be a JCPOA-like ceiling placed on Iran’s nuclear program, not its elimination). Iran’s pledge not to procure or develop nuclear weapons is simply a statement of intentions that has no effect on capabilities. Worse yet for Israel, it finds itself under increased pressure to pull back in Lebanon and may experience the same vis-à-vis Gaza – and it is far from clear that the Trump administration won’t add to the pressure.

The Arab countries of the region also come out worse off, as they will have to contend with an emboldened, strengthened, and more radical Iran, one with newfound power derived from its demonstrated willingness and ability to interfere with the Strait of Hormuz and attack its neighbors. The war also showed they will have to deal with Iran largely on their own, as neither the United States nor Israel can protect them. I expect several will decide the better part of valor is to reach an accommodation with Iran.

The result reinforces the view (which I have held since before the war was launched) that this war was a strategic error of the first magnitude. There was no imminent threat that justified the decision to initiate the war, and there were better options (above all, diplomacy and increased sanctions) available to pursue U.S. aims. The result was a misguided war of choice, predicated on flawed assumptions about Iran held by officials with little expertise or experience, a war that predictably turned out badly for the United States and its partners in the region and beyond.

The United States has paid a great deal to return the Strait of Hormuz to its previous status – and what will result will fall short of that. Nuclear arrangements remain up in the air, but it is certain Iran will remain active in that domain (especially given the leverage this war has given the regime). Inspections will be as critical as they are likely to be challenging. The war introduced new strains into U.S. ties with regional partners and allies, in the process isolating the United States more than Iran. Respect for the United States, both for its judgment and competence, is much diminished.

Bret Stephens is right to term the war a debacle. But he and others are wrong in suggesting that if only the president had used more military force (including ground troops) for longer the result would have been different. Actually, it would have been different, but not for the better. Odds are we would have found ourselves caught in a quagmire of our own making, losing many more troops and churning through far more equipment in the process.

The commitment might well have taken years to play out, and even then, there would have been no guarantee of success given the tens of millions of Iranians who still support this regime and the many more who might have rallied to the regime against the foreign occupier. It would have created a strategic distraction and a political and economic nightmare. The best and perhaps only good thing to say about the deal just reached with Iran is that the United States cut its losses.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Extremism, International, Trump

U.S. House Defies Republican Leaders, Votes for Sanctions on Russia, Aid for Ukraine

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2026 //
2

Half a dozen Republicans and one independent joined Democrats to authorize a start to aid to Ukraine and sanctions for Russia. They defied not only the Republican leadership, but Trump, who does not want to help Ukraine and has eased sanctions on Russia.

This has been a bad couple of days for Trump. He lost his $1.776 billion slush fund for his allies; Congress will not pay $1 billion for his ballroom; the House passed a War Powers Act to limit his war in Iran. It takes just a few Republican votes to block his authoritarian wishes.

Robert Jimison of The New York Times reported:

Defying Republican leaders, the House voted on Wednesday to take up a bill to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia and provide additional aid to Ukraine, after a bloc of G.O.P. defectors joined Democrats in an effort to ratchet up pressure on Moscow more than four years into the war.

The bill, which still must win passage in the House, faces a difficult path to enactment, given divisions in the Senate over a sanctions package and objections from the White House. President Trump has repeatedly signaled he does not want Congress constraining his flexibility to negotiate directly with Moscow, and could veto the legislation if it reaches his desk.

Still, the 218-to-204 vote to take it up, in which six Republicans and one independent who normally votes with them crossed party lines to side with Democrats, sent a clear signal of bipartisan pressure on the matter. It added to a growing list of issues on which the Republican-led Congress has in recent weeks shown a greater willingness to challenge Mr. Trump, including the war with Iran, his push to fund a new White House ballroom and a bid to create a federal fund to benefit his political allies.

The legislation’s centerpiece is a broad package of sanctions targeting Russia’s oil and gas sector that is aimed at striking at the Kremlin’s primary source of wartime revenue. Lawmakers in both parties have argued for more than a year that sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies have failed to fully sever the energy revenues that continue to bankroll Moscow’s war effort.

The bill would expand restrictions on financial institutions that conduct business with sanctioned Russian officials and state enterprises and seek to crack down on entities that help Moscow evade existing sanctions. It also would target international organizations, companies, banks and governments that continue doing business with sanctioned Russian entities, provisions primarily aimed at actors in China, Central Asia and other jurisdictions that have helped Russia circumvent Western restrictions.

And the legislation would eliminate a sanctions waiver President Trump approved earlier this year that provided limited relief.

It would authorize roughly $1.8 billion in direct spending and more than $8 billion in loans for Ukraine’s war effort as the country continues to face deadly bombardment in Kyiv and other areas.

The bill languished for more than a year as Republican leaders on the House Foreign Affairs Committee declined to take it up, preventing lawmakers from debating and amending it.

That prompted Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the committee’s top Democrat, to turn to a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition, which allows rank-and-file lawmakers to bypass the leadership and force a bill to the House floor if it gains the support of a majority of members.

The bill must pass the House and pass the Senate. Trump might veto it.

But it shows that Trump’s iron control of his party is slipping.

Categories Democrats, International, Republicans, Trump

Timothy Snyder on “Superpower Suicide”

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2026 //
2

Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history. He taught for many years at Yale University and held a prestigious chair in European history. In 2025, he accepted a chair at the University of Toronto. His Substack blog is titled “Thinking About…” This important essay appeared in May 9. Nothing Snyder says here has changed.

He wrote:

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.

On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.

2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.

3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function. In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.

4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency. Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution. The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.

5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world. This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.

6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration. Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower. Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.

7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming bookdemonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself. Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings. The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.

8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable. While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have. This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.

9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge. Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor. In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.

10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood. Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power. The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.

11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests. But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world. Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them — the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.

12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again, and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail. The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world. In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.

The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one. The US lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners. An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.

13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function. More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics — government as customer service to the very wealthy — that leads us from power to ethics.

The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide. Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.

But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.

Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery. After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

*****

PS. If you would like to help Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s criminal war of aggression, please consider contributing to the Sky Defense campaign. For worse but also for better, as the Ukrainians have shown us, this is a time when civil society campaigns can contribute to general security.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, International, Lies, Science, Stupid, Technology, Trump, Tyranny

Colorado: Governor Polis Bends to Trump Pressure, Frees Tina Peters

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2026 //
2

Trump has spent a lot of time rescuing, pardoning and trying to reward the people who joined him in attempting to overturn his election loss in 2020. He is a giant baby. He is a sore loser. He lost decisively, and he refuses to accept it. More than 60 federal and state courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, rejected his appeals because there was no evidence of election fraud.

Someday, with time, we will look back on Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat as a low point in our history. Of course, we will look at his two terms in office as the absolute nadir of our history, as a time he spent rolling back civil rights, environmental protections, international alliances, access to healthcare, defunding medical and scientific research, bullying universities, and censoring the mass media.

Trump bullied Governor Jard Polis of Colorado to free Tina Peters, and Polis succumbed:

Tina Peters, the former clerk convicted of participating in a scheme to chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by President Donald Trump, was released from prison Monday after the president successfully pressured Colorado’s Democratic governor into commuting her sentence.

Peters’ release was confirmed by the Colorado Department of Corrections. The state agency said it would have no more information about the 70-year-old inmate. Her sentence was shortened by Gov. Jared Polis last month after Trump waged a lengthy pressure campaign against the governor and his state.

Peters served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence.

Peters was the first local election official to be charged with breaching security after the 2020 election. She snuck in an outside computer expert affiliated with My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — who himself denied that Trump lost the White House in 2020 — and the person copied the county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server as it was updated in 2021.

Peters then joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof that the election was rigged. Video and photos of the computer system upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. The move stoked false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty and other crimes by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. An appeals court upheld her conviction in April, but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud.

Trump had championed Peters’ case, but because she was convicted under state law, he did not have the power to pardon her. Instead, the president pressured Polis to do so, lambasting him on social media and disinviting him to a White House meeting with other governors. The Trump administration also announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocated the U.S. Space Command to Alabama.

Polis commuted Peters’ sentence on May 15. In a letter, he wrote that although Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison, the sentence was “extremely unusual and lengthy” for a first-time non-violent offender.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the move a “dark day for democracy” and said it amounted to “selling out our state’s justice system for Trump.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Colorado, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, History, Injustice, International, Trump
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