This is not regime change, but change of behaviour by a regime’
US: an old-new imperial doctrine
by Gilbert Achcar
The United States has grown wary of long term occupations. Abandoning the pretence of exporting democracy, the Trump administration has chosen to force existing powers to comply with its rule.
It would require a highly selective memory to regard the abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on 3 January as Washington’s return to an imperialist policy that it supposedly abandoned in 1945, or even 1918.
There’s something disingenuous about the sudden reappearance of the term ‘imperialist’ in Western media outlets which previously applied it only to Russia. For – to limit ourselves to the post-cold war era – it is in a very similar manner that Washington returned to largescale military operations in 1989 under President George HW Bush, after long years of ‘Vietnam syndrome’. Like the recent intervention in Venezuela, the invasion of Panama and the abduction of its dictator Manuel Noriega, in blatant violation of international law, were also presented as an anti-drug police operation.








As Israel ticks off its list of Nazi-like atrocities against the Palestinians, including mass starvation, it prepares for yet another – the demolition of
Most of the recent electoral rounds in Western countries (lately in Norway and Germany) have yielded worrying results that confirm the rise of racist far-right forces. This buttresses the characterization of the era we live in as one comparable to the fascistic era between the two world wars of the past century, but in a new guise claiming to respect the democratic form of government, among other new features. Hence the labelling of these forces as neofascist (see “The Age of Neofascism and Its Distinctive Features”, 4 February 2025).



What is driving neofascist movements to question, to varying degrees, the reality of climate change, or at least its connection to human behaviour?