In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West now has no choice but to impose the toughest possible economic sanctions on Russia and to seek to unite as much of the world as possible in pressing Russia to end the attack. All scholars and analysts of Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union must add their voices to the unqualified condemnation of Russia’s action, and their support for massive economic retaliation.
Whatever may be the legitimacy of at least some Russian grievances about Western and Ukrainian policy, nothing can justify this flagrant violation by Russia of international laws and norms to which Russia itself has repeatedly appealed. And while Russia has had legitimate grounds to protest against Ukrainian discrimination against the linguistic and cultural rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, nothing remotely justifies President Putin’s grotesque lies about Ukrainian “genocide” and “Nazism.” Putin’s speech justifying the invasion brings to mind Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s response to the Japanese statement that accompanied the attack on Pearl Harbor:
“In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions — on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them."
Especially sinister was Putin’s reference to the “denazification” of Ukraine and the punishment of Ukrainians guilty of “atrocities” against Russian citizens in Ukraine. This would seem to hint at potentially ferocious repression in areas of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces, or even at an attempt to destroy Ukrainian nationalism as such.
Once the immediate crisis has passed, there will be a time to consider the lessons of this disaster for the formulation of U.S. global strategy, and the errors of that strategy over the past generation. For the moment, we must all support the Biden administration in its effort to punish and isolate Russia for this flagrant breach of international law.
Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
A resident stands in an apartment that received a shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine February 24, 2022. REUTERS/Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy
There is good news and bad news for critics of the United States’ bloated 21st century war machine. The good news: the “war on terror” is dead.
The bad news? It seems to have become a part of the walking dead — a kind of zombie war on terror that is continuing and radically expanding, even as the fears and threats that originally motivated all its excesses are seemingly vanishing from the American psyche.
Consider the following facts: despite the public release only a few years ago of evidence showing the Saudi government’s direct complicity in the crime of September 11, 2001 — the central, instigating act of terrorism that drove and justified every aspect of the “war on terror” that followed — associating with or even taking money from that same government appears to carry no stigma. The Biden administration’s efforts to pledge American lives and treasure to defend that same government elicited relatively little controversy. And this year, dozens of top U.S. comedians, from the left-leaning Bill Burr to the right-leaning Andrew Schulz, happily took its money to help whitewash its image. The Saudi government’s expanding encroachment into U.S. sports and entertainment in general continues only to receive an eager welcome.
Meanwhile, after spending more than a decade fighting the shadowy threat of al-Qaida, the U.S. government has now seemingly come to terms with the terror group’s ongoing influence in the region. It has enthusiastically gone along with the installation of an al-Qaida-linked militant, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the leader of Syria, whose former president Washington spent years trying to remove from power expresslybecause of his alleged support for terrorism — including the very al-Qaida its new president hails from.
Sharaa swiftly had the $10 million U.S. bounty on his head removed, the terrorist designation of the al-Qaida offshoot he led has been revoked, and just a few weeks ago, he was given a warm welcome during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where on one stage, former CIA Director David Petraeus acknowledged the two had been on opposite sides of the civil war in Iraq 20 years ago, in between lavishing him with praise and declaring himself a “fan.”
It’s not just al-Qaida. The Biden administration had explored teaming up with the Taliban to fight ISIS’s branch in Afghanistan, while the Trump administration is now inchingtoward normalizing relations with the group, which George W. Bush once said was “threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists.”
The Taliban’s link to al-Qaida was once upon a time the rationale for regime change and 20 years of U.S. war in Afghanistan — which, of course, ended with the Taliban coming back into power, which Washington appears to be coming to peace with now.
Together, these stories suggest that both the American public and the Washington national security establishment have moved on from the core motivations that drove the “war on terror” for the better part of two decades. Al-Qaida, the Taliban, the government forces behind September 11 — none of it matters anymore, apparently.
And yet the “war on terror” is not just still with us, it’s expanding in radical new ways. The Trump administration has now explicitlyrepurposed the tactics and powers used against terrorism against a new, unrelated target: drug traffickers — launching airstrikes on private Venezuelan boats in international waters on the basis that drug smugglers are terrorists, and that their transportation of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.” This is despite widespread doubts about the legality of such strikes and concerns about the risks of this terrorist designation.
Meanwhile, Trump has also continued and escalated the trend started under the Biden administration of turning the “war on terror” inward. The president is now threatening to deploy the military against what he calls the “enemy from within,” as his administration pushes to treat a variety of domestic critics, dissidents, and opposition groups as terrorist threats over their First Amendment-protected activity, and draws up secret watchlists of supposed domestic terrorists.
This is all a vindication of the many civil libertarians who warned over the past 24 years that the expansive powers claimed by President Bush and then Obama would somewhere down the line be used in new, alarming ways they were never originally intended for, including to intimidate and punish political dissent. What’s absurd is that this is happening at the exact time that the threats that originally justified all of this are simply being forgotten.
What we are witnessing is the war on terror in zombie form: devoid of its original life force and human drive, but more dangerous than ever, as it shuffles mindlessly forward in a search for human flesh to no end.
Trump may be the first president to use this zombie “war” for ends that it was never meant for, but history suggests he will not be the last, unless we make the collective political choice to put a lid on and roll back the radical growth of executive war-making power that has accumulated year after year since 9/11. Until then, this zombie will stagger on.
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Top photo credit: Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Wikimedia/Gabe Skidmore); Sen. Lindsey Graham (Michael Vadon/wikimedia)
When it was reported this week that former President Joe Biden’s FBI may have targeted the cellphones of eight Republican senators in the "Arctic Frost” investigation related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot, the Republicans that were supposedly surveilled were not happy about it.
One was Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who posted on X Wednesday, “We need to know why (ATT) and (Verizon) did not challenge the subpoena for the phone records of eight United States senators when the Biden FBI spied on us during an anti-Trump probe.”
“There needs to be a reckoning for this,” she declared.
On Thursday, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) explained to Blackburn why this might have happened, “It’s called the Patriot Act, FISA, and CISA.”
“Please vote no next time,” he insisted.
During her tenure in the House, Blackburn voted for the Patriot Act each time it came up for renewal since it was passed in 2001 and numerous other federal surveillance measures since that time too.
The Patriot Act was first hastily signed into law in the politically charged days and weeks after 9/11, significantly expanding the federal government’s spying and law enforcement powers. Section 215 allows the F.B.I. to obtain secret court orders and to collect any business records the agency deems vital to national security.
This Act supposedly designed to target potential terrorists has since been used to go after drug dealers, track website users, parents at school board meetings, and more.
Perhaps even spying on Republican senators.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has long been a vocal champion of the Patriot Act. He was also one of the Republicans reportedly surveilled — and he’s very mad about it.
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Graham roared to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “Can you tell me why my phone records were sought by the Jack Smith agents?” — Smith being the J6 investigation special counsel.
“Why did they ask to know who I called and what I was doing from January 4th to the 7th?” Graham wondered loudly and aggressively.
In May 2015, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) attempted to block an extension of the Patriot Act with a ten-plus hour filibuster, Sen. Graham famously rolled his eyes over Paul’s efforts.
Paul warned that the Patriot Act undermined civil liberties. Then and now, Graham has always appeared to have full faith in the government handling power responsibly.
Now Sen. Graham seems shocked — shocked — that the FBI might have intruded so easily into his own privacy.
There is little doubt that Sens. Blackburn or Graham are genuinely outraged that they may have been spied on, and it probably feels personal.
But there is something to be said about these Republicans’ privacy possibly being breached through government tools they championed.
Because they can’t say they weren’t told.
Sen. Paul, like Rep. Massie, and Congressman Ron Paul before them, and a handful of other libertarian-leaning Washington lawmakers have long warned that giving intelligence officials unconstitutional or at least extra-constitutional powers was a threat to Americans’ basic privacy.
A handful of progressives, like Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Democratic members of Congress like Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney in the past have consistently opposed the Patriot Act on similar grounds.
In fact, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act at its inception in October 2001 was Democrat Russ Feingold.
When Republican Ron Johnson ran against Feingold in 2010 and defeated him to win that Wisconsin senate seat, Feingold touted his lone opposition to the Patriot Act in ads throughout his campaign, while Johnson dismissed his opponent on that front.
Sen. Johnson has been a supporter of the Patriot Act. He was also one of the GOP senators allegedly spied on.
Johnson posted on X on Tuesday, “By now, it should be obvious that partisan leftists are the danger to our democracy. The latest example: Biden’s FBI went on a fishing expedition and subpoenaed the phone records of 9 members of Congress.”
“This should shock and outrage every American,” he contended. It should. For some, it long has. For at least these three Republican senators, this never shocked them until this week.
When a then-still unknown Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the NSA had been collecting the phone data of millions of Americans, Sen. Graham said he was “glad.” “I’m glad the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country,” Graham responded.
Perhaps the Biden administration was glad to see what Lindsey Graham and his Republican friends might have been up to too.
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Top image credit: Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks with President Donald Trump during an event in the State Dining Room at the White House Oct. 8, 2025. Photo by Francis Chung/Pool/ABACAPRESS.COM VIA REUTERSCONNECT
It appears that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is emerging victorious in the internal Trump administration battle over the direction of U.S. policy toward Venezuela.
The New York Times reported on Oct. 6 that White House special envoy Richard Grenell — who, after meeting President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas this January inked deportation agreements, won the release of American prisoners, and secured energy licenses for U.S. and European oil majors — was told by President Donald Trump to stop all diplomatic outreach toward the resource-rich South American nation.
The news comes as some Trump officials, particularly Rubio, have pushed the president to escalate tensions, which he has done by dispatching a major naval deployment to the Southern Caribbean in an alleged counternarcotics operation, killing over 20 alleged drug traffickers in at least four strikes against go-fast boats since early September.
Rubio, a Cuban-American former senator from Florida, has long been a leading voice in Washington for a combination of “maximum pressure” sanctions and related regime change efforts against Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
In January 2019, Rubio asked Trump to recognize little-known National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as interim president, which he did the next day, prompting Maduro to break off diplomatic ties with Washington. Amid a series of failed military uprisings spurred on by Guaidó that year, Rubio tweeted the Miami jail photo of deposed Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and images of a bloody Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan ruler, minutes before his death, in an apparent threat to Maduro. Before that, under President Barack Obama, Rubio spearheaded some of the first calls to sanction top Venezuelan officials over alleged rights abuses.
Despite catching then-candidate Trump’s ire on the 2016 campaign trail, Rubio, who also serves as the president’s national security adviser, has since become Trump’s most trusted voice on foreign policy, “amassing the kind of foreign policy power last seen by Henry Kissinger,” according to a recent Miami Herald profile.
His ideological flexibility on issues such as negotiations with Russia and cuts to democracy programs abroad has seemingly not extended to his almost obsessive agenda to oust the Maduro government. Yet while Rubio once invoked democracy and the rule of law to push for Maduro’s removal, he and leading figures in Venezuela’s opposition have since weaponized the 2020 indictment against Maduro in a New York federal court to convert Venezuela — which Trump administration officials allege is flooding the U.S. with drugs and criminals — into a purely law enforcement matter.
Rubio has found willing allies on both sides of the aisle in his maximum pressure approach. On Capitol Hill, GOP Florida lawmakers Sen. Rick Scott, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Rep. María Elvira Salazar and Rep. Carlos Giménez, along with Democratic Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Jared Moskowitz, have all backed Rubio’s hardline policy. Many of these legislators maintain close ties to prominent Venezuelan-American anti-Maduro donors and activists like Ernesto Ackerman, who has called Rubio “our general,” and Kennedy Bolívar, who regularly sharescontent with him alongside Rubio and Scott.
At the White House, longtime Rubio ally and former pro-Cuba embargo lobbyist Mauricio Claver-Carone, who also served initially as the State Department’s Special Envoy for Latin America in Trump’s current term, was an architect of sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil industry, which economists say fueled an unprecedented exodus of Venezuelans from the country. “Once Mauricio came in, the policy went on overdrive,” Rubio told the New York Times in 2019.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose disqualification from running in the July 2024 presidential elections resulted in the candidacy of diplomat Edmundo González, has arguably been the leading proponent of Rubio’s approach. Despite vote tallies from 83% of the country’s electoral precincts showing Gonzalez with an insurmountable lead of 67% of the ballots cast, the National Electoral Council declared that Maduro had won with 51% of the vote, a result denounced by international observer missions as lacking in transparency.
Amid a crackdown against the opposition, Gonzalez fled to Spain soon after the election, while Machado went into hiding. But she has been participating virtually in efforts by her supporters in exile to lobby for regime change, including in conferences with executives and financiers in New York and Houston at which she has depicted Venezuela as a trillion-dollar investment opportunity.
For over two decades, U.S. officials have lined up behind opposition figures working to install a government in Caracas friendlier to U.S. corporate interests. When the Chavez administration nationalized all privately owned oil fields in 2007, U.S. and European firms Chevron and Repsol played by the new rules of engagement, reconfiguring their joint ventures with state-run PDVSA. But ExxonMobil — whose CEO at the time, Rex Tillerson, would become Trump’s first secretary of state — rejected them, leading to years of litigation against Venezuela’s government.
Former Exxon counsel involved in the litigation, Carlos Vecchio, would in 2019 become interim president Guaido’s ambassador in Washington, working closely with fellow Popular Will party co-founder Leopoldo Lopez, special envoy on migration David Smolansky, OAS ambassador Gustavo Tarre, Lima Group ambassador Julio Borges and opposition negotiator Freddy Guevara, among others, to hasten Maduro’s departure.
These voices have featured prominently in the media and at U.S. think tanks like CSIS, AS/COA and the Manhattan Institute, while lobbyists at the Cormac Group and Continental Strategy have represented the anti-Maduro opposition and the neighboring government of Guyana — where Exxon discovered massive offshore deposits in territorially disputed waters after departing Venezuela — in their efforts to isolate Maduro regionally and levy harsher sanctions against the country’s economy.
U.S. government funding through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy and the seizure of Venezuelan assets abroad have also underwritten some of these efforts. Much of the assistance earmarked toward Venezuela has gone toward aid relief and civil society groups, but some has been used to influence the policy debate in Washington and bankroll opposition parties while yet another portion was allegedly siphoned off by Guaidó and his inner circle.
When other approaches appear to have failed, military adventurism has been pursued. In 2020, former Green Beret Jordan Boudreau, after claiming to sign a contract with Guaidó and his Miami-based associates JJ Rendon and Sergio Vergara, led a failed invasion intended to oust Maduro. The Trump administration and Guaidó denied any involvement. More recently Blackwater founder Erik Prince has claimed to have raised over $1 million for an operation designed to achieve Maduro’s downfall.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department recently raised the bounty for the arrest and/or conviction of Maduro to $50 million and designated the “Cartel de los Soles,” which he allegedly heads, as a foreign terrorist organization.
U.S. intelligence agencies have denied claims, including by Rubio himself, that another Venezuelan transnational criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, is led by Maduro.
Yet this hasn’t stopped the administration from using the allegation — which analysts say is being used to justify the military buildup near Venezuela — as a pretext to also strip Temporary Protected Status for 600,000 Venezuelans, many living in the South Florida congressional districts which overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Many of the overwhelmingly anti-Maduro voters in these districts, a majority of whom also reject U.S. military action to depose him, are now rethinking their decision, mostly over his deportations and termination of protected status for migrants, according to reports this spring.
For now, Rubio seems to be firmly in the driver’s seat of the administration’s muscular approach to Venezuela — even if his traditional base of supporters, and most Americans for that matter, aren’t going along for the ride.
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