Only when you truly appreciate the worst excesses of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) can you fully understand the danger ahead of us. Recent attempts to ban The 1619 Project and efforts to prevent any fulsome acknowledgment of the role of slavery and segregation in our history are merely the tip of the iceberg. MAGA calls it a war against “Woke,” but it is really a multi-faceted campaign to scrub our memory of its most unpleasant realities. So too is the impulse to ignore the long history of our embrace of Manifest Destiny—forged in the displacement and continuing defeat of the Native Americans—and our ability to always imagine that our expropriations and interventions are for the best.
Some of us have lived long enough to witness the disastrous attempts of our intelligence agencies and military to intervene in the internal affairs of countries as varied as Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Haiti, Panama, Cuba, El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, Argentina, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name a few. Thankfully, a coalition of independent journalists, whistleblowers, and members of both political parties have joined together over the years to investigate and reveal those efforts—and to provoke reform. This is an attempt to tell some of that unpleasant history.
The reality is that these clandestine ventures, involving illegal activities like bribery, manipulation, even assassination, so very often backfired. And, in truth, “the enemies” we acted against were often patriots who enjoyed significant popular support, who were committed to opposing corrupt and authoritarian behavior. Many were democratically elected. But the CIA, acting under orders from a succession of U.S. presidents, sided with those who, in coordination with multi-national corporations, exploited their nation’s natural resources, prohibited union organizing, and imprisoned their political enemies, as they amassed and maintained great wealth at the expense of the overwhelming majority of the people in their nations who were impoverished.
A 2017 Foreign Policy magazine article suggests a plausible explanation for the roots of our continuing crisis with Iran:
Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century …
Mossadegh, after nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence. And Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah, was re-installed. Many were killed in Tehran during massive protests in support of Mossadegh.
Foreign Policy continues:
Mossadegh is widely considered to be the closest thing Iran has ever had to a democratic leader. He openly championed democratic values and hoped to establish a democracy in Iran … The U.S government long denied involvement in the coup. The State Department first released coup-related documents in 1989, but edited out any reference to CIA involvement. Public outrage coaxed a government promise to release a more complete edition, and some material came out in 2013. Two years later, the full installment of declassified material was scheduled — but might have interfered with Iran nuclear talks and were delayed again, Byrne said. They were finally released last week, though numerous original CIA telegrams from that period are known to have disappeared or been destroyed long ago.
A State Department analysis explains:
This Foreign Relations retrospective volume focuses on the use of covert operations by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as an adjunct to their respective policies toward Iran, culminating in the overthrow of the Mosadeq government in August 1953. Moreover, the volume documents the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community in the policy formulation process and places it within the broader Cold War context.
This “Cold War context” refers to yet another instance where the United States and the Soviet Union battled to strategically influence and control important resources—in this case, the important Baku oil fields. And, so often, U.S. support for the authoritarians and their big-business confederates who exploited their workers was justified by the need to counter supposed Soviet influence.
The State Department Analysis explains:
It continues to be in the security interest of the United States that Iran not fall under communist domination, either as a result of invasion nor internal subversion … Iran is located in a key strategic position, the occupation of which would enable an enemy to threaten the nearby oil producing areas, Turkey, the countries on the Eastern Mediterranean, Pakistan, and India. Iranian oil resources are of great importance to the economies of the United Kingdom and Western European countries. Loss of these resources would affect adversely those economies in peacetime … Nationalization of the oil industry possibly combined with further assassinations of top Iran officials, including even the Shah, could easily lead to a complete breakdown of the Iran government and social order, from which a pro-Soviet regime might well emerge leaving Iran as a satellite state …
Clearly, Washington regarded the movement for democracy and for workers’ rights in Iran as a greater threat than supporting a tyrannical monarch. And, as The Washington Post reported, the alternative to Mossadegh was the corrupt and dictatorial Shah, who maintained power with the help of his brutal secret service, Savak:
During the 53 years of the Pahlavi dynasty, the imperial family has amassed a great fortune estimated to run into billions of dollars. One Iranian economist estimates the assets of the entire royal family at more than $20 billion, a staggering sum that would probably exceed or at least equal the wealth of any of the other royal families of Middle East Oil-producing states.
Here are just a few other examples of our tendency to intervene: In 1954, in support of United Fruit, the CIA helped engineer a coup to oust Guatemala’s democratically-elected President Jacobo Árbenz. As Wikipedia explains:
Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. president in 1952, promising to take a harder line against communism, and his staff members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had significant links to the United Fruit Company. The U.S. federal government drew exaggerated conclusions about the extent of communist influence among Árbenz’s advisers, and Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out Operation PBSuccess in August 1953. The CIA armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas. After U.S. efforts to criticize and isolate Guatemala internationally, Armas’ force invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954, backed by a heavy campaign of psychological warfare, as well as air bombings of Guatemala City and a naval blockade … Castillo Armas quickly assumed dictatorial powers, banning opposition parties, executing, imprisoning and torturing political opponents, and reversing the social reforms of the revolution. In the first few months of his government, Castillo Armas rounded up and executed between three thousand and five thousand supporters of Árbenz. Nearly four decades of civil war followed, as leftist guerrillas fought the series of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes whose brutalities include a genocide of the Maya peoples.
Then, there s the 1961 assassination by firing squad of Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic prime minister of Congo. When Congo, a former colony of Belgium, won its independence, the army immediately rebelled and the province of Katanga, led by Moise Tshombe, seceded. Katanga was rich in exceedingly valuable raw minerals, including nearly 50 percent of the world’s cobalt, with deposits of cadmium, coal, copper, gold, iron, manganese, silver, tin, uranium, and zinc. To protect their remaining financial interests, Belgium immediately sent troops in support of Tshombe.
In his review of Stuart Reid’s “The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination,” Isaac Chotiner sets the scene as King Baudouin condescendingly presided over Belgium’s handover ceremony:
It was Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s Prime Minister, who left an impression when he rose to speak next. A slim, enigmatic man, Lumumba was the most important politician in the country, and the one whom the Belgians were most concerned about. Lumumba’s remarks were clearly a direct reply to Baudouin’s. He ticked through the daily humiliations of life for Black Africans in the Belgian Congo, and recalled the violence visited upon his people. And then, his voice rising, he told his countrymen, ‘We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over.’
Chotiner notes:
[T]he American Ambassador to Congo was known to make jokes about Lumumba being a cannibal, while the C.I.A. on the ground was raising concerns about ‘Commie influence’ … Seven months later, Lumumba was murdered, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians and Belgian ‘advisers,’ with the tacit support of the United States and the malign neglect of the United Nations. The crisis that then engulfed Congo — impossibly complex, increasingly brutal — ended with the three-decade rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a onetime Lumumba ally who went on to govern as a ruthless Western client.
The same miscalculations that led to our disastrous interventions in Iran and Congo, marked U.S. policy and CIA strategy in Cuba. It is important to stress that our government was more than forgiving of the excesses of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes, “Fulgencio … was a soldier and political leader who twice ruled Cuba—first in 1933–44 with an efficient government and again in 1952–59 as a dictator, jailing his opponents, using terrorist methods, and making fortunes for himself and his associates …”
So despised was Batista, that Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara, and the 20 rebels who survived Batista’s ambush in 1956 managed to wage an improbable but successful guerilla war from their base in the Sierra Maestra mountains. And when they ultimately marched into Havana, they were greeted as heroes.
We are talking about a familiar set of failures here: America’s willingness to look the other way and ignore the utter greed and repression of the Batista dictatorship combined with an unrelenting suspicion that Castro was unduly influenced by the Soviet Union. In effect, this policy of continual opposition to the initially highly popular Cuban Revolution, including a punishing economic blockade, ironically forced Castro into an almost complete dependency on the Russians.
Our Cuban strategy began in the Republican Eisenhower administration and was carried over into the Democratic Kennedy administration. As the “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume III, Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1959 – January 1961” notes:
Sadly, the U.S. policy of “plausible deniability” allowed the architects of these doomed strategies to steadfastly pretend that their efforts were successful even as their failures provoked avoidable chaos and unnecessary death.
Wikipedia reveals the multi-faceted U.S. government’s campaign, code named Operation Mongoose, to displace Fidel Castro:
The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. It was officially authorized on November 30, 1961, by U.S. President John F. Kennedy … [and] aimed to remove the Cuban government from power, and to force the Cuban government to introduce intrusive civil measures and divert precious resources to protect its citizens from the attacks. The removal of the Castro government was a prime focus of the Kennedy administration.
[Emphasis added.]
Most notable, as Wikipedia explains, was the Bay of Pigs Invasion:
The Bay of Pigs Invasion … was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in April 1961 by the United States of America and the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF), consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution …
Cuban exiles who had moved to the U.S. following Castro’s takeover had formed the counter-revolutionary military unit Brigade 2506, which was the armed wing of the DRF. The CIA funded the brigade, which also included approximately 60 members of the Alabama Air National Guard, and trained the unit in Guatemala. Over 1,400 paramilitaries, divided into five infantry battalions and one paratrooper battalion, assembled and launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua by boat on 17 April 1961. Two days earlier, eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers had attacked Cuban airfields and then returned to the U.S. On the night of 17 April, the main invasion force landed on the beach at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs, where it overwhelmed a local revolutionary militia …
As the invasion force lost the strategic initiative, the international community found out about the invasion, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy decided to withhold further air support. The plan, devised during Eisenhower’s presidency, had required the involvement of U.S. air and naval forces. Without further air support, the invasion was being conducted with fewer forces than the CIA had deemed necessary. The invading force was defeated within three days by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.
Our government expected the invasion to provoke joy and support that never emerged. The plan failed to appreciate that Fidel Castro was still regarded as the man who had freed the Cuban people from the poverty they had endured and the brutality with which Batista relentlessly ruled. And our efforts only convinced Castro that he needed Russian support to protect Cuba from additional attacks. Ironically, the constant threat from America encouraged Castro to increase his vigilance against internal dissent and resulted in greater suffering and repression of the Cuban people.
An investigation was conducted into the CIA’s involvement in assassinating foreign leaders:
The report states:
On the basis of the investigation, the evidence shows that agents of the CIA were involved in planning in this country with certain citizens and others to seek to assassinate Premier Castro … 1960-61 and the Phase I Plans. The Phase I plans involved the preparation of poison botulism pills by the CIA; the delivery of those pills to organized crime figures who in turn were to get the pills delivered to contacts they had in Cuba for placement in a beverage to be drunk by Premier Castro. The two people in the CIA who were the most intimately involved were Richard Bissell, Deputy Director of Plans, who was the person in the CIA who had direct responsibility for the Bay of Pigs operation (April 17-19, 1961), and Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the Director of the Office of Security of the CIA … This documentation includes a May 14, 1962 ‘Memorandum for the Record’ … prepared at the request of the Attorney General of the United States following a complete oral briefing of him relevant to a sensitive CIA operation conducted during the period approximately August 1960 to May 1961. The oral briefing actually occurred in the offices of the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, on May 7, 1962 …
According to the memorandum: It was thought that certain gambling interests, which had formerly been active in Cuba, might be willing and able to assist … A figure of one hundred fifty thousand dollars was set by the Agency as a payment to be made on completion of the operation … Supposedly, the reason pills were used was that the syndicate personnel could not recruit personnel to undertake the assassination through gunfire because the chance of survival and escape was small … Colonel Edwards said that he, himself, checked out the pills on some guinea pigs ‘because I wanted to be sure they worked.’
According to the interview of Sheffield Edwards with the Executive Director, the Cuban asset got scared and did not try to pass the pill. Pills were subsequently delivered to another ‘asset’ who was in a position to slip the pills to Castro at a restaurant where the asset worked. This took place in the March-April 1961 period. Fidel Castro ceased visiting that particular restaurant at approximately the same time the pills purportedly arrived … After the second attempt failed, the case officer said the pills were returned to the CIA.
If this wasn’t so terribly tragic, the almost unbelievable combination of the CIA, the poison pills, the dead guinea pigs, and the incompetent Mafia assets might make a terrific Marx Brothers movie. But it was a combination of these continuing CIA failures that led to the Church Committee investigation and their report:
Let’s take a closer look at some of the operations mentioned by the Church Committee. In the February 14, 1967 issue of The New York Times, Neil Sheehan reported on the revelation—extensively documented by Ramparts Magazine—that the National Students Association (NSA), the leading student organization in the United States, had been secretly receiving funds from and had been influenced by the CIA.
Sheehan wrote:
Eugene Groves, president of the association, said the C.I.A. funds had been used to help finance the association’s international activities, including sending representatives to student congresses abroad and funding student exchange programs. The intelligence agency refused tonight to comment on the matter. The association has chapters on more than 300 American college and university campuses, where about 1.5 million students are studying … Mr. Groves’s statement was in response to inquiries about a forthcoming article in the March issue of Ramparts magazine. According to a Ramparts spokesman, the article discusses in detail the relationship between the student association and the C.I.A. Mr. Groves said the money was received through foundations that acted as go-betweens for the agency. He declined to name the foundations.
According to Marcus Raskin, who wrote for Ramparts:
It is widely known that the CIA has a number of foundations which serve as direct fronts or as secret ‘conduits’ that channel money from the CIA to preferred organizations … Ramparts was provided with an unusual insight into the manner in which the CIA uses legitimate foundations with liberal interests, such as the Kaplan Fund, in a recent conversation with the president of a prominent New England foundation who asked to remain anonymous: ‘I didn’t want my foundation dragged through the CIA mud.’ In 1965 he was approached by what he described as ‘two nice middle-aged Irish cop types who flashed CIA cards at me.’ The men asked the foundation president if they could look over the list of organizations that his foundation supports. He volunteered the list to them and after looking it over, the agents said that there were organizations on the list that they would also be willing to support. The CIA men explained, ‘We are trying to pose an alternative to communism and want to back third-force programs, which we could not do if it was known that this support comes from a government source.’
Ramparts main source of information was “23-year-old Michael Wood, NSA’s director of development, or fund raising chief.” Wood was having trouble raising funds for the organization and subsequently shared with Ramparts his version of a series of conversations he had with Phil Sherburne, NSA president from 1965 to 1966:
Sherburne began by telling Wood that NSA had ‘certain relationships with certain government agencies engaged in international relations’ which Wood didn’t know about. This, explained Sherburne, was why Wood couldn’t have full responsibility for NSA’s fund raising. Wood was astonished. ‘You mean the CIA?’ he asked. Sherburne nodded yes. Sherburne then told Wood that he was supposed to have been informed of the CIA relationship after he was appointed director of development, but that other NSA staff members and CIA contacts had decided he was politically unreliable. As well as having been a civil rights worker, Wood had gained a reputation as something of a radical. Because he couldn’t be told of the CIA relationship, it was necessary to keep him in the dark about certain aspects of NSA funding … The CIA, said Sherburne, had managed to inject itself into the Association’s international operations in the early 1950s. Since that time, virtually every president and international affairs vice president of the organization had been aware of the CIA relationship and had cooperated …
And they had each signed an oath of secrecy which subjected them to legal penalties if they revealed the CIA’s role. But then a significant benefit of this special relationship is that participating NSA officers were granted a draft exemption that would keep them from having to serve in Vietnam.
The CIA was most interested in the NSA’s relationships with student organizations around the world:
so intimately was the CIA involved in NSA’s international program, that it treated NSA as an arm of U.S. foreign policy … And NSA, with the CIA’s aid, was able to play a major role in cooperating with favored national unions of students all over the world. No other union of students in the Western world has the kind of financial backing as NSA. The Canadian Union of Students, for example, operates on a budget of about $14,000 a year for its international programs, all of which comes from the dues of member schools. NSA, with its almost unlimited funds, was able to conduct a full program of foreign diplomacy.
Of course, the CIA was also interested in intelligence. Cooperative NSA international staff members “would pass along reports on foreign student leaders directly to the Agency. This information helped the CIA in evaluating the political tendencies of prospective political leaders in critical areas of the world.”
It turns out the CIA’s funding of the National Students Association was the tip of the iceberg when it came to the agency’s involvement in domestic politics. On December 22, 1974, highly accomplished journalist Seymour Hersh broke this extraordinary story in The New York Times:
Hersh wrote:
The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well‐placed Government sources. An extensive investigation by The New York Times has established that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the C.I.A. that was reporting directly to Richard Helms, then the Director of Central Intelligence and now the Ambassador to Iran.
In addition, the sources said, a check of the C.I.A.’s domestic files ordered last year by Mr. Helms’s successor, James R. Schlesinger, produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities by members of the C.I.A. inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen‐fifties, including break‐ins, wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail … The Time’s sources said, the C.I.A. authorized agents, to follow and photograph participants in antiwar and other demonstrations. The C.I.A. also set up a network of informants who were ordered to penetrate antiwar groups, the sources said. At least one avowedly antiwar member of Congress was among those placed under surveillance by the C.I.A., the sources said. Other members of Congress were said to be included in the C.I.A.’s dossier on dissident Americans.
Hersh continued:
When confronted with the Times’s information about the C.I.A.’s domestic operations earlier this week, high‐ranking American intelligence officials confirmed its basic accuracy, but cautioned against drawing ‘unwarranted conclusions.’ Those officials, who insisted on not being quoted by name, contended that all of the C.I.A.’s domestic activities against American citizens were initiated in the belief that foreign governments and foreign espionage may have been involved.
‘Anything that we did was in the context of foreign counterintelligence and it was focused at foreign intelligence and foreign intelligence problems,’ one official said. The official also said that the requirement to maintain files on American citizens emanated, in part, from the so‐called Huston plan. That plan, named for its author, Tom Charles Huston, a Presidential aide, was a White House project in 1970 calling for the use of such, illegal activities as burglaries and wiretapping to combat antiwar activities, and student turmoil that the White House believed was being ‘fomented; —as the Huston plan stated—by black extremists. Former President Richard M. Nixon and his top aides have repeatedly said that the proposal, which had been adamantly opposed by J. Edgar Hoover, then the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was never implemented.
You might imagine that all this happened in the distant past and that the seemingly never-ending investigations by congressional committees and presidential commissions had had the desired effect of transforming the agency.
So how about we jump ahead to more recent days and look at the role the CIA played in Iraq. Propelled by the fear that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was therefore liable to use them against us, we invaded Iraq. We quickly displaced Saddam Hussein but could never locate those WMDs. But our decision to invade lead to our many-years-long struggle to deal with the extraordinary chaos and incessant political and sectarian violence that ensued.
On December 8, 2014, Jason Leopold reported for Vice about one terrible consequence of our occupation. The Vice headline read: “Senate Torture Report Finds the CIA Was Less Effective and More Brutal Than Anyone Knew.” Leopold wrote:
Today the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the long-awaited 500-page executive summary from its $40 million report on the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ program, which senators have said documents the brutal techniques used against 119 high-level al Qaeda suspects.
As the Senate’s Report on Enhanced Interrogation notes:
The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards. It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and external review. Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values. This Committee Study documents the abuses and countless mistakes made between late 2001 and early 2009 …
[Emphasis added.]
The report concluded the following:
- The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
- The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
- The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
The report states:
Interrogation techniques such as slaps and ‘wallings’ (slamming detainees against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity … The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting … Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation … At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration’ or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity. The CIA placed detainees in ice water ‘baths.’ The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin shaped box.’ One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because ‘we can never let the world know what I have done to you.’
Enhanced interrogation was but one aspect of the larger disastrous consequences of the CIA miscalculations about WMDs. On March 20, 2023, NBC News offered this estimate of the costs of the Iraq War. According to the Defense Department, we spent $728 billion from 2003 until our official withdrawal at the end of 2011. There were 4,492 U.S. service members killed and 32,292 wounded in Iraq.
This is but a short summary of just some of the mistakes our government and the CIA have made as we have tried to enforce our will on others. We excuse these efforts as necessary to oppose the spread of communism, or the need to protect our national interest. And too many times we have allied ourselves with the tyrannical and power-hungry and greedy.
If ever there was a president prone to abusing the significant powers of the CIA, it is Donald Trump. If ever there was a potential head of the CIA exceptionally willing to yield its powers on behalf of a president without reservation, it is John Ratcliffe, his nominee.
On Tuesday, January 7, 2025, Donald Trump told the world he shares the very same kind of American delusions that have so often backfired around the world and have brought such unnecessary violence and sorrow to so many. The Washington Post put it this way:
The New York Times reported it this way:
Trump raises the possibility of using military or economic force to take Greenland and the Panama Canal … President-elect Donald J. Trump said Tuesday that he would not rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal America built more than a century ago and to force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States. He refused to rule out using military force to retake the Panama Canal, which was given back to Panama by treaty in the late 1990s, and acquire Greenland, which Mr. Trump said was necessary for the national security of the United States. ‘It might be that you’ll have to do something,’ he said …
He also criticized Canada, saying that the country should be a state in the United States because of the economic support that the United States provides to the country. He said he would not use military power to achieve that but said that he would use economic power to pressure the American neighbor. ‘Why are we supporting a country, 200 million plus a year?’ he told reporters. ‘Our military is at their disposal all of these other things. They should be a state. That’s what I told Trudeau when he came down.’ Mr. Trump threatened to use ‘economic force’ to join Canada and the United States together, implying that the United States would pare back its purchases of Canadian products.
In his recent Truth Social posts, Trump made it crystal clear that, in Truskmumpia, Manifest Destiny is alive and well—and Greenland ought to be ours:
And then he posted this to remind the Canadians that they will soon be singing “The Star Spangled Banner”:
While these threats might amuse MAGA Americans, the rest of the world is well aware of the price so many others have paid at the hands of American arrogance.
On January 8, 2025, UK Guardian reported that the French were particularly concerned by Donald Trump’s threats against Denmark and Greenland:
France has warned Donald Trump against threatening the ‘sovereign borders’ of the European Union after the US president-elect refused to rule out military action to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of the EU member Denmark.
The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, told France Inter radio: ‘There is no question of the EU letting other nations in the world, whoever they may be, attack its sovereign borders.’
He added that, while he did not believe the US ‘would invade’ Greenland, ‘we have entered an era that is seeing the return of the law of the strongest’.
And as The New York Times reported:
Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, made his country’s position clear at a news conference hours after the American president-elect mused aloud about retaking the canal, which the United States built but turned over to Panama in the late 1990s. ‘The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,’ Mr. Martínez-Acha said. ‘Let it be clear: The canal belongs to the Panamanians and it will continue to be that way.’
As for the Canadians, the Times reports, “Canada’s leadership on Tuesday reacted angrily to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to use ‘economic force’ against the country to acquire it …” The recent interchange between former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Elon Musk points to the increased danger that American arrogance might lead to yet more illegal action:
It is both revealing and frightening that the leaders of other nations need no warning about the clear and present danger posed by Truskmumpia’s CIA.
