Tag: regime change

US Withdrawing All Forces From Syria, Over A Year After Regime Change By Proxy War

Last week we and others reported that American forces finally after many years withdrew from the remote Al-Tanf Garrison, a base in southern Syria near the borders of Iraq and Jordan. US troops had long operated out of Tanf to pressure the Assad government as part of the long-running US-backed regime change project. The US primarily trained the Syrian Free Army (FSA) in that remote desert area – which was an umbrella group of various factions, among them jihadists, armed and funded by Washington.

But the majority of US forces had long occupied the northeast of the country, where the oil and gas fields are concentrated, specifically Hasakah and Deir Ezzor provinces. But over several weeks, the Pentagon has been handing over its constellation of small bases to the Syrian government of Ahmed al-Sharaa (al-Qaeda and ISIS name: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani). At times throughout the Syrian proxy war, the US had anywhere from 800 to 2000 troops on the ground, but likely also more contractors and intelligence operatives.

Under Trump, Washington has been weighing a complete withdrawal since the year’s start, having fully backed the Jolani regime in the wake of the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. This has been awkward to put it mildly, given Jolani had long been on the US terror list, after being dropped once he took control of Damascus.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reports, “The U.S. is in the process of withdrawing all of its roughly 1,000 troops from Syria, according to three American officials, ending a decadelong military operation in the country.”

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Iran Protesters Include Mossad and MEK

Donald Trump has promoted the idea – amplified by much of the international media – that protesters inside Iran are calling for U.S. military intervention and the overthrow of their government.

At the same time, Trump is threatening Iran with major military action, demanding not only changes in how protesters are treated, but that Iran abandon what he claims is a pursuit of nuclear weapons and relinquish its long-range missile capabilities and other defensive systems.

It’s true that many Iranians are protesting in response to severe economic hardship, which has reached unprecedented levels. But a major driver of Iran’s inflation and currency collapse has been the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, which have sharply constrained Iran’s economy and access to global markets.

What is largely absent from Trump’s rhetoric – and from much of the dominant media narrative – is that these protests are not purely organic. External actors are also involved, including Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian group that has committed acts of terror for decades.

Mossad involvement has been openly acknowledged

On social media, Mossad posted a message directed at Iranians stating: “Go out together into the streets. The time has come. We are with you – not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu reinforced this openly, stating: “When we attacked in Iran during ‘Rising Lion,’ we were on its soil and knew how to lay the groundwork for a strike. I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo compounded this message of encouragement by tweeting: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

And last year, Mossad Director David Barnea confirmed Israel’s ongoing activities in Iran, declaring: “We will continue to be there, as we have been.”

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How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia

On August 25th 2025, this journalist documented how the 1975 Helsinki Accords transformed “human rights” into a highly destructive weapon in the West’s imperial arsenal. At the forefront of this shift were organisations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch – the forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organisations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. A palpable example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

In December 2017, HRW published a self-laudatory essay boasting how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organisation’s independent lobbying for a legal mechanism “to punish military and political leaders responsible for atrocities” committed in the conflict, contributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s establishment. Documents held by Columbia University “reveal the fundamental role of HRW” in the ICTY’s May 1993 founding.

These files moreover detail HRW’s “cooperation in various criminal investigations” against former Yugoslav officials by the ICTY, “through mutual exchange of information.” The organisation is keen to promote its intimate, historic ties with the Tribunal, and how the ICTY’s work spurred the International Criminal Court’s creation. Yet, absent from these hagiographic accounts is any reference to HRW’s pivotal contribution to manufacturing public and political consent for Yugoslavia’s breakup, which produced the very atrocities the organisation helped document and prosecute.

In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.

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Engineering Iran’s Unrest

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919): 

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

The United States mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic sanctions and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On Jan. 19, we published “The US–Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,” describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on Venezuela and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. 

This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.

On Jan. 20, just one day after our article, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official U.S. policy.

“It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior… This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives.”

In an interview at Davos, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how U.S. Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign to deny Iran access to international finance, trade, and payment systems.

Bessent explained:

“President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.”

This is the explicit causal chain whereby U.S. sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail.

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Iran Is Not Libya: Why Destabilization Risks Global Chaos

The drumbeat of escalation against Iran has grown louder in Western capitals, from fresh sanctions rhetoric to renewed strike speculation. Beyond the headlines, a dangerous shift is occurring in the strategic thinking of policymakers. The old Neoconservative framework of “regime change”, which assumed one could swap a government while keeping the nation intact, is being shadowed by a far more perilous drift toward policies that risk state collapse.

Whether driven by the momentum of broad sanctions or a lack of viable alternatives, the current trajectory suggests that Western powers are risking a repetition of the “Libya Model” in Iran. A sober analysis of data, geography, and demographics indicates that this path would not lead to democracy, but to a geopolitical catastrophe that creates a security vacuum from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.

The Libya Mirage vs. The Iranian Reality

The allure of this strategy rests on a kind of amnesia about the outcome of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Sold as a humanitarian necessity, the removal of central authority did not produce a liberal democracy. Instead, it shattered the state’s monopoly on violence. Over a decade later, Libya remains a fractured territory where rival militias compete for control and human trafficking networks operate with relative impunity.

Attempting to replicate this outcome in Iran involves a profound misreading of scale. Iran is not Libya. It is a nation of nearly 90 million people, roughly thirteen times the population of Libya in 2011. Geographically, it sits atop the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery through which a major share of globally traded oil passes each day.

In contrast to the isolated Gaddafi regime, a destabilized Iran would not implode neatly. It would likely erupt across borders. The collapse of central authority in Tehran could plausibly trigger large refugee flows toward Europe and create conditions conducive to extremism and narcotics trafficking. From a purely Realist perspective, the cost of coexisting with a difficult Iranian state is significantly lower than the cost of managing a major zone of ungoverned instability in the heart of Eurasia.

Sanctions and the Fragility Trap

Some advocates of “maximum pressure” argue that economic strangulation creates leverage for democratization. The economic data suggests a different outcome. While sanctions have undeniably devastated the Iranian economy, driving high and persistent inflation and eroding the national currency, they have failed to produce political liberalization.

In practice, these policies create what economists call a “fragility trap”. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that geoeconomic fragmentation and the weaponization of trade are fracturing the global economy. In Iran, this dynamic systematically hollows out the middle class. By destroying the economic foundation of independent civil society, Western policy eliminates the very social stratum historically required for stable democratic transitions.

As citizens are pushed into a struggle for biological survival, facing documented obstacles to accessing some critical medicines and shrinking purchasing power, their capacity for organized political activism diminishes. They rarely become builders of stable institutions; survival takes over. Thus, the current policy does not weaken the grip of the state; it weakens the resilience of the society.

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EU official plotted to ‘organise resistance’ against Hungary’s Orban, files show

As the EU has sought to prolong the Ukraine proxy war, expropriate frozen Russian assets, and enlarge the bloc at any cost, Viktor Orban’s Hungary opposed it at every turn. Now, with his support teetering, leaked documents reveal a major EU official plotted a long-term covert campaign to oust him.

A senior European Union official has been secretly seeking to remove Hungarian President Viktor Orban since at least 2019, according to leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone. The files show in January 2019, the EU’s International Coordinator for the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, Marton Benedek, authored a “project proposal” aimed at “developing a permanent coordination forum to organise resistance against the Orban regime.” In addition to his role at the European border control agency, Benedek currently heads Brussels’ “cooperation” with Libya.

Read Benedek’s anti-Orban project proposal here.

The impetus for Benedek’s plot was “an unprecedented set of anti-regime demonstrations in Hungary and among expat Hungarians” over controversial proposed legislation allowing businesses to compel employees to work overtime, and delay payment of their wages for an extended period. Thousands took to the streets before and after its implementation.

According to Benedek, outrage over what he referred to as “the slave law” had “compelled a small group of some 30 political, trade union and civic leaders to coordinate their activities, agree on a set of minimum objectives and funding principles, and jointly plan future action.” This had given birth to “an ad hoc coordination forum… which could develop, over time, into an incipient political coordinating body that could credibly challenge” Orban’s rule.

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From Noriega to Maduro: The Long US History of Kidnapping Foreign Leaders

While it has undoubtedly shocked the world, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro fits into a long history of United States kidnapping of foreign leaders.

On January 3, U.S. Special Forces entered Venezuela by air, captured Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, killing around 80 people in the process. They were flown to the United States, where Maduro was put on trial on spurious drug trafficking and possession of firearms charges.

Despite President Trump himself declaring that “kidnapping” was an appropriate term for what happened, corporate media around the world have refrained from using the obvious word for what transpired, preferring to use “capturing” or “seizing.” These terms reframe the incident and cast doubt on its illegality, helping to manufacture public consent for a grave breach of international law. Indeed, managers at the BBC sent out a memo to its staff, instructing them in no uncertain terms to “avoid using ‘kidnapped’” when reporting on the news.

Targeting Venezuela

Maduro is not the first Venezuelan official Washington has helped kidnap. In 2002, the Bush administration planned and executed a coup d’état that briefly ousted Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, from power.

The U.S. government had been organizing and financing the ringleaders of the coup for months, flying the key players back and forth to Washington, D.C. for meetings with top officials. On the day of the coup, American Ambassador Charles Shapiro was at the mansion of local media magnate, Gustavo Cisneros, the headquarters of the coup.

Two U.S. warships entered Venezuelan waters, moving towards the remote island of La Orchila, where Chavez was helicoptered to. Chavez himself stated that senior American personnel were present with him during his abduction. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration immediately endorsed the proceedings, describing them as a return to democracy.

Chavez was only saved the same fate as Maduro after millions of Venezuelans flocked into the streets, demanding a return of their president. Their actions spurred loyal military units who retook the presidential palace, and the project fell apart. After the coup, the United States quadrupled its funding to the coup leaders (including Maria Corina Machado) through vehicles such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

A further kidnapping of a Venezuelan official occurred in June 2020, when the United States downed the plane of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Saab was in Cabo Verde at the time, traveling back from a diplomatic mission to Iran, where he has been helping break American sanctions. He was only released in 2023, after Venezuela negotiated a prisoner swap which included a number of CIA agents captured in Venezuela in the act of carrying out terror attacks against the country’s infrastructure.

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The Rubicon crossed – Team Trump’s nihilistic anti-values paradigm

So, finally an act of unvarnished predatory action by Trump and his team – the abduction of President Maduro in a lightning night-time military strike – has launched 2026 into a pivotal moment. A pivotal moment not just for Latin America, but for global politics.

The “Venezuela method” is aligned with Trump’s “business first” approach which is rooted in constructing a “financial reward system,” whereby diverse stakeholders to a conflict are offered financial benefits that permit the US to (ostensibly) achieve its own objectives, whilst locals continue to extract rewards from the exploitation of (in this case) Venezuelan resources – under US close supervision.

In this template, the US does not need to create a new governing régime from scratch, nor put “boots on the ground” – for Venezuela, the plan is that the existing government of the newly-sworn in President, Delcy Rodriguez, will remain in control of the country – so long as she follows Trump’s wishes. Should she or any of her ministers fail to follow that blueprint, they will receive the “Maduro treatment,” or worse. Reportedly, the US has already threatened Venezuela’s Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, that he will be targeted by Washington unless he helps President Rodriguez meet US demands.

Put another way, the plan comes down to a single underpinning premise that the only thing that matters is the money.

In this context, the US approach to Venezuela resembles that of a Vulture Hedge Fund “buy-out”: Remove the CEO and co-opt the existing management team with money to run the company to new dictates. In Venezuela’s case, Trump likely hopes that Rodriguez (who has been “talking” with Secretary Rubio via the Qatari royal family, and who is also the Minister responsible for the oil industry) has squared off all the factions that compose the Venezuelan power structure to accept the relinquishment of state sovereign resources to Trump.

What is so pivotal here is the shedding of all pretence: The US is in a debt crisis and wishes to seize – for exclusive US use – Venezuelan oil. Submission to Trump’s demand is the only variable that matters. All masks are off. A Rubicon has been crossed.

“Venezuela will be turning over 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil to the United States of America, sold at market price with the money controlled by me,” Trump has written on Truth Social.

The erasure of the American “project” – the substituting of self-interested hard power for the American narrative of it being “a light to all nations” – constitutes a revolutionary change. Myths and their supporting moral stories provide the meaning to any nation. Without a moral framework, what will hold America together? Ayn Rand’s celebrated belief that rational selfishness was the ultimate expression of human nature cannot reconstitute social order.

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Mike Pompeo Says the Quiet Part Out Loud About ‘Popular’ Regime Change in Iran

Former Secretary of State and Director of the CIA Mike Pompeo is one of the most bloodthirsty and prominent neocons in the United States today. He is militantly pro-Israel and has openly and consistently pushed for regime change in Iran. In the first Trump administration, he was one of Trump’s most hawkish advisors. As one of the main advocates for the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Pompeo clearly is not bothered by military action which is illegal under international law. However, one factor which differentiates Pompeo from his neocon cronies is his blunt, nigh-idiotic honesty.

While Washington has orchestrated numerous coups around the globe, few prominent officials have been so bold or careless as to acknowledge that the United States or Israel is helping foment a revolution in real time. However, Pompeo did just that when he tweeted, “The Iranian regime is in trouble… Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege – Mashed, Tehran, Zahedan.  Next stop:  Baluchistan… Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets.  Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…”

Pompeo’s remarks are important because of what it casually assumes: Israel is intimately involved in the current protests in Iran. This undermines the US and Israeli governments’ narrative that the protests are an organic development. Contrary to neoconservative narratives, the fact that every protester is not literally on a State Department payroll does not make the protests organic. While some, if not most, of the protesters might genuinely oppose the government, the fact remains that funding, intel, media amplification, training, and sanctions have all been used as tools to influence political outcomes inside Iran to the benefit of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The biggest historical example of this is the 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. After Mohammad Reza Shah was installed by the Iranian military on behalf of the US and UK, the CIA hired mobsters to stage riots in favor of the Shah. On top of this, the CIA also paid for buses and trucks full of demonstrators to protest in Tehran. Following the Iranian Revolution, the US trained members of the leftist Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) who previously killed American soldiers. With the rise of the internet, the US government provided funding for online activism targeting the Iranian government, asked Twitter to delay site-maintenance to help 2009 Green Movement protesters communicate, and carried out cyberattacks in collaboration with Israel. In short, for decades the US has tried to destabilize Iran to foster regime change. Pompeo’s remark suggests that this long-standing policy has not changed under the nominally “anti-war” second Trump administration.

Like the Obama administration, the second Trump administration is following the “Arab Spring playbook.” The Arab Spring was a series of protests, insurrections, and rebellions across the Arab world which sought to “promote democracy.” In reality, many of the figures and groups involved in the Arab Spring received not only training, but also funding from American NGOs like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House. These organizations all receive money from the US government via Congress or the State Department. Most of the aims of the Arab Spring failed. Instead of democracy, the protests led to an authoritarian backlash from Arab governments. This “counter-revolution” was beneficial for Israel as the failure of the Arab Spring made normalizing relations with destabilized, divided Arab regimes easier.

Ultimately, the main beneficiaries of regime change are not the United States or its people, but instead Israel. Unfortunately, so many figures in the American government, like Mike Pompeo, have a theology which places support for the secular State of Israel in high regard. In fact, Pompeo once suggested that God sent President Donald Trump to save Israel.

To put it frankly, there is nothing godly about Israel, especially with regard to its conduct in its proxy war against Iran. A godly nation would not have its intelligence agency pose as the CIA in an attempt to recruit terrorists for a false flag operation against Iran. The terrorist group in question, Jundallah, has been responsible for murdering both Iranian government officials and civilians.

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President Trump Posts Picture of Himself as ‘Acting President of Venezuela’

President Trump on Sunday shared a picture of a fake Wikipedia page that described him as the “Acting President of Venezuela” as he continues to push the idea that the US is “running” the country following the attack to abduct President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump has insisted that the real acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president, is willing to go along with his plan, which has received a cool reception from US oil companies.

While Rodriguez has said she’s willing to cooperate with the US, her government has maintained a message of unity and defiance in the face of US aggression and continues to call for the release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

“In these difficult times our country is experiencing, Venezuelans have once again demonstrated that our greatest strength is national unity and historical awareness,” Rodríguez said in a post on Telegram on Monday.

“The collective response has been one of firmness, serenity, and determination to preserve peace, raise our voices for the release of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, and defend the constitutional order, which guarantees protection and social justice for our people,” she added.

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