When Hidden Enemies Serve the Reaction and Reveal Themselves

“Either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case, they … serve the reaction.” — Friedrich Engels

24 August 2026

By Stephen Gowans

The question of whether the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the conduct of its government in the country’s internal affairs is acceptable is hardly germane at this moment, when a single question has been made immediately relevant by current circumstances: Is the war of the United States and Israel on Iran acceptable and is the resistance of Iran against the imperial marauding of Washington and its Zionist proxy-state, admirable, desirable, and worthy of support?

In an open letter that appeared in The Guardian on August 20, 2026, a group of mainly US intellectuals denounced Iran under cover of rejecting “the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.” It was a transparent effort to change the channel. The signatories—Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, and Walden Bello, among others—addressed themselves to Iran’s political prisoners, writing that “On one side, you face the domination of the Islamic Republic; on the other, the imperialist forces that republic claims to stand against.” The word “claims” insinuated that the republic doesn’t really stand against US-Israel imperial forces. Furthermore, the qualification slyly intimated that real anti-imperialists should stand against Iran and its “false” anti-imperialism.

 “We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.”

Why broach this subject now?

We can speculate about the motives of the signatories. A pusillanimous desire to be held in high esteem in polite society? The inability of the beautiful soul to navigate the dilemmas of the real world? Who really knows?

Is the open letter any different in its intended effects from denouncing the ideology of Hamas and the conduct of its internal affairs in Gaza in the middle of a stepped-up US-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians? However deplorable the attempt to change the channel might be, one should never lament occasions when those who would throw one to the wolves identify themselves in advance.

Yet to say the signatories are hidden enemies, is hyperbole. They’ve hardly concealed their political orientation as anti-authoritarians.  They described themselves as “former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism,” (though, given their suggestion that Iran’s fighting back against US-Israeli aggression is faux anti-imperialism, it’s not clear what their understanding of anti-imperialism really is.)

Anti-authoritarians are always opposed to the state as an instrument of repression, and will, therefore, only ever support revolutions and resistance movements that fail and never the ones that succeed, since those that do succeed must of necessity repress their enemies, including taking political prisoners. Anti-authoritarians are utopian luftmenschen (quixotic characters with their heads in the clouds) who should not, and generally aren’t, taken very seriously by anyone concerned with the way the world really works. The world of politics, especially when it involves war and revolution, is not a world of graduate seminars. The important questions of the day, observed Bismarck, are decided, not by words, but by blood and iron. And as Saint Just once cautioned, those who carry out revolutions by half measures do nothing but dig their own graves. The same can be said of wars. Kill or be killed. Imprison or be imprisoned.

Perhaps the signatories are not at all unlike those Friedrich Engels had in mind when he wrote of the socialists of his day who had “launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority,” and for whom it sufficed “to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned.”

“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

Replace “the movement of the proletariat” with “the movement against the muscular imperialism of the United States and its tool, Israel,” and Engels’ concluding paragraph to his reflection “On Authority” places the open letter of the US anti-authoritarian intellectuals in perspective. Either “one of two things must be true,” Engels wrote.

“[E]ither the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case, they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”

None of this is to endorse the repression of all of those the Iranian state counts as its enemies, or to draw an equals sign between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the proletarian movement; they are clearly two entirely different things. But it is to say that, which of Iran’s repressions are justifiable and which are not (a matter which will depend on one’s political goals) is a question for another time and hardly relevant when Iran is under attack and the priority of those who seek to fight, rather than serve, the reaction, is to do what one can to bring about an end to yet another eruption of US-Israeli imperial aggression. That means remaining focused on the immediate aim, not changing the channel to issue quixotic anti-authoritarian proclamations.

Post script

In March of this year a group of ‘left’ academics, including Gilbert Achcar, a man Lenin would surely have characterized as a “social parson and opportunist,” issued a petition which said “No to war and no to the Islamic Republic.”

The petitioners proclaimed that “We, the beautiful souls of humanity, courageously oppose all things foul and rotten and bravely support all things sweet and good.” Since the petition was aimed at no decision-maker, and was merely a statement, it was clear that its goal was to announce to the world how morally admirable its signatories are.

Among the the world’s foul things, the beautiful souls identified Iran’s “anti-Western rhetoric, slogans calling for the elimination of Israel,” and “support for proxy forces,” which is to say, allies, like Hezbollah, with which Iran shares a common enemy in US imperialism and its instrument, Israel. Slogans calling for the elimination of Israel are surely a terrible thing. It is inconceivable that anyone of a high moral standing could ever want to see the end of settler colonialism, ethnic supremacy, and apartheid in Palestine, much less an end to the genocide of the Palestinians.

At least two of the signatories–Angela Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley–later signed the Guardian open letter.

Kelley has since retracted his signature from the Guardian piece, saying the letter wasn’t what he thought it was. However, given his apparent penchant for endorsing communications that excoriate Iran at the moment it is under attack by the United States and Israel, his retraction has deservedly been met with a fair degree of skepticism.

The Real Reason Trump is Lashing Out at South Korea

It’s not widely known that South Korea is the world’s fifth ranked military power—more powerful than even Japan, Germany, France, or the UK. By contrast, its foe, North Korea, is ranked thirty-first. Trump is lashing out at South Korea, not because it free-rides on the Pentagon (it doesn’t), but because the Lee administration doesn’t want to become embroiled in Trump’s wars, either against Iran or China.

21 August 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Irritated that South Korea had declined to send warships to the Persian Gulf to help the United States open the Strait of Hormuz, US president Donald Trump lashed out at Seoul, accusing the US ally of free-riding on the United States.  The US “can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” complained Trump. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. We have 39,000 soldiers over there, guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?’” [1]  

The United States has 28,500 soldiers in South Korea, not 39,000. And opening the Strait of Hormuz is the antithesis of an easy military operation. But lay Trump’s arithmetical lapse and military ineptitude aside. Does the United States have to guard South Korea from Kim Jong Un because the country is incapable of defending itself, as Trump alleges? The answer turns out to be fairly obvious and non-controversial.  No, it does not. “South Korea could almost certainly defeat a North Korean invasion on its own.”  [2] That’s the view of Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary of defense for policy.  So, if Trump thinks the Pentagon has to guard South Korea from Kim Jong Un, he must have slept through meetings with Pentagon staff.

In his 2021 book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, Colby wrote that “South Korea can … defend itself from a North Korean invasion on its own or with modest US support.” He pointed out that in terms of military expenditures, South Korea spends “more than twenty-five times what North Korea spends” and that “the South Korean military also benefits from an advanced economy and access to US equipment and expertise.” In contrast, North Korea’s conventional military “is antiquated, even decrepit.” South Korea could, Colby concluded, “almost certainly defeat a North Korean invasion on its own.” [3]

This too is the view of South Korea’s defense minister Ahn Gyu-back. In May he said that “we wouldn’t have much trouble defending ourselves.” The country’s president Lee Jae Myung was more emphatic. “Actually, we wouldn’t have any trouble at all.” [4]

Colby’s, Ahn’s, and Lee’s assessments are backed by the numbers. South Korea’s population is twice as large as North Korea’s. Its GDP is 58 times larger. Seoul’s military budget alone is bigger than all of North Korea’s economy—40 percent larger. Its military expenditures are at least over five times as large as Pyongyang’s military outlays (25 times larger according to Colby). South Korea has 4.1 million soldiers (600,000 active-duty troops and 3.5 million reserves), more than twice as many as North Korea, which has 1.9 million soldiers (1.3 million active-duty troops and 600,000 reserves.)   

Of US allies, South Korea is the most powerful militarily—more so than even Japan, Germany, France, and the UK. South Korea’s military is ranked fifth in the world, behind only the United States, China, Russia, and India. North Korea, in contrast, ranks thirty-first, weaker even than tiny Greece. [5]

Currently, South Korean troops make up 99 percent of combined US-South Korean forces in South Korea, 95 percent of the naval forces, and 90 percent of the air forces. [6] In a war with North Korea, almost all of the fighting would be done by South Koreans. Americans would play a peripheral role.

Far from being a security burden, the world’s fifth ranked military power is a formidable US military asset, one Washington would like to use to check its top rival, China. The People’s Republic, according to the leading US military official in Korea, General Xavier Brunson, could “deny American access to vital global markets,” the rationale for dubbing Zhongguo America’s top security threat. [7] The “China problem” in the US view, is not that the country poses a military threat to the US homeland (it doesn’t) but that it could squeeze corporate America and wealthy US investors out of lucrative markets in East Asia.

Brunson heads three military commands.

  • US Forces Korea (USFK), the contingent of 28,500 US troops stationed on the Korean peninsula.
  • The United Nations Command, established by the UN Security Council in 1950 to evict North Korean forces from South Korea. While active hostilities ended on 27 July 1953 with an armistice, the belligerents have never signed a peace treaty and remain technically at war.  For this reason, the UN Command continues. Its current mission is to manage the armistice.
  • The Combined Forces Command. “Combined forces” refers to the South Korean military and USFK together. It is worth repeating that the combined forces are 95 percent South Korean. In peacetime, South Korea’s military is under the control of the the country’s top general. In wartime, it falls under Brunson’s command.

The mission of the UN Command is straightforward: to deter North Korean aggression and “uphold peace and security on the Korean peninsula.” But the missions of the two other commands are broader. Like the UN Command, both aim to defend and protect South Korea. But they are also pledged to “maintain stability in Northeast Asia,” according to the USFK website. As the Pentagon understands it, Brunson’s mission extends beyond the Korean peninsula to all of Northeast Asia. That means that US forces could use South Korea as a base of operations against both China and Russia. It also means that the world’s fifth ranked military power could be pressed into service under Brunson’s command to wage war against either or both of these US rivals. Needless to say, these interpretations raise serious concerns among some, though not all, South Koreans. Conservatives generally favor submitting to US leadership, even if it means becoming entangled in wars with China or Russia. Progressives, in contrast, worry about Washington embroiling them in a military contest with a great power.

Brunson has done little to allay South Koreans’ concerns about the United States enmeshing them in a war that would inevitably have devastating consequences for their lives. South Koreans are not unaware of the fate of the United States’s Persian Gulf allies in the Iran War, countries which, like South Korea, host US military bases in the neighborhood of a US enemy.  Brunson has referred to the Korean Peninsula as “a key strategic terrain vital to … advancing American interests in the region.” [8] When one considers that the key American interest in the region is checking China, and more specifically, preventing it from asserting sovereignty over Taiwan, then South Koreans can be understandably apprehensive about the role the Pentagon foresees them playing in pursuit of US objectives.

A year ago, Brunson told an audience, “If you were to draw a triangle from Tokyo to Seoul to Manila, about 52% of global trade comes through that area. And I think there’s a recognition that we all ought to have that if something happens in the region, there’s going to be a call for nations to react accordingly.” [9] The South Korean newspaper, The Hankyoreh, reported that Brunson was “advocating for building the capacity for the US and [South] Korea to respond to common enemies,” the most important of which, in the US view, is China. [10] Brunson has “repeatedly defined [South] Korea as a military hub for the US containment of China” and believes “that [South] Korea, the US and Japan should join forces to hem in China.” [11]

Washington is modernizing its alliance with South Korea, as part of the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy. The strategy seeks to prevent China, Russia, and Iran from becoming hegemons in their respective regions. If any of these powers become regionally dominant, they will, in the strategy’s assessment, be in a position to deny US investors and business-owners access to their regional markets. US strategy and war-planning documents almost invariably cite the need to safeguard US access to foreign markets as a key security aim. The Pentagon and US foreign policy establishment plan wars around the pursuit of business and investor interests.

The plan goes on to assess that the United States does not have the resources to fight more than one potential hegemon at any one time. It must therefore prioritize its efforts and focus on the largest region and most significant potential hegemon: China.

If China is not contained, the plan’s authors write, it will use force to dominate its neighbors, beginning with Taiwan, and achieve regional supremacy. If it achieves regional supremacy, it will be in a position to deny US businesses and investors access to Asian markets.

In order to prioritize China, the strategy calls on the United States to:

  • Offload responsibility for preventing Russia from seeking hegemonic status in Europe to its NATO allies;
  • Transfer resources for defending Ukraine to defending Taiwan;
  • Contain Iran by arming Israel;
  • Modernize its alliance with South Korea. [12]

Modernizing the US-South Korea alliance means shifting command of the officially ongoing war with North Korea from Washington to Seoul. This will free up US resources to concentrate on preventing China from seizing control of Taiwan, and ensure that if China and North Korea initiate concurrent military actions—China against Taiwan and North Korea on the peninsula—that US forces can remain focused on China, while South Korea holds down the Korean front.  As we have seen, Washington recognizes that the world’s fifth ranked military power can easily take on the thirty-first. But for South Korea to assume its new responsibility, authority to command its own forces in wartime must pass from Brunson and the Combined Force Command, where it currently sits, to a South Korean general. The process of carrying out this transition is called OPCON (operational control) transfer.

South Korea regained peacetime OPCON in 1994, and Washington has promised at various times to transfer wartime OPCON. Its promises, however, have always proved empty. South Korean progressives have been in favor of regaining sovereignty over the country’s armed forces and most conservatives, being strongly inclined to philodespotia (love of their imperial masters) have opposed it.  South Korea’s Ministry of Defense has been pushing for the transfer to take place next year but Brunson favors delaying until 2029. [13]

Along with OPCON transfer, Washington has also been pursuing the idea of strategic flexibility: the notion that US forces in Korea should be deployed to missions throughout Northeast Asia, rather than being limited to action on the Korean peninsula. “Colby thinks that USFK’s primary role shouldn’t concern North Korea but China, and has consistently referred to the possibility of either withdrawing or redeploying US troops in Korea.” [14] In Brunson’s words, having the USFK “moored in place is not militarily expedient.” [15] If strategic flexibility means the exit of US forces from South Korea, this would be a boon for all Koreans, even if the exit would be vigorously opposed by conservatives. US forces remaining on the peninsula is quite a different matter. If Washington intends to use South Korea as a platform from which to attack China or Russia, South Koreans will end up as pawns sacrificed in a great power game of international chess.  

The Lee Jae Myung administration “has drawn a line in the sand, holding to the position that the potential for USFK to intervene in the event of a conflict over Taiwan is not up for discussion.” [16] This may be one of the top reasons Trump has lashed out at Seoul. Recently, the Pentagon sent a questionnaire to NATO members, outlining what Trump expects from US subordinates: Support for US foreign policy; access to their military bases; and purchases of US weapons. [17] Lee’s clear opposition to the Pentagon using South Korea as a platform from which to attack US rivals has very likely agitated Trump. Chiding Seoul for failing to assist the United States in the Iran War debacle, and falsely accusing South Koreans of free-riding on the Pentagon, reflects his frustration over the refusal of Seoul to sacrifice South Koreans for US, and Trump’s own, self-serving interests. In short, Seoul is balking at the possibility of South Koreans being used as cannon fodder in a US war against China whose aim is to prevent wealthy US investors and business owners from possibly losing access to lucrative Asian markets.

Stephen Gowans is the author of Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Fight for Freedom.

1. “Korea latest casualty of Trump’s misplaced frustration over mess in Iran, says US media outlet,” The Hankyoreh, 2026-08-19.

2. Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, Yale University Press, 2021, p. 263.

3. Colby, p. 263. 

4. “Lee calls sovereign defense ‘fundamental’ amid rift with US over OPCON transfer timing,” The Hankyoreh, 2026-05-27.

5. 2026 Military Strength Rating, Global Firepower,https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php; “N. Korea ranks 34th in global firepower ranking; S. Korea 5th,” The Korea Times, Jan 14, 2025; “Kim Jong Un Wants a Military That’s More Than Just Nukes—and Russia Can Help,” The Wall Street Journal,  Sept. 23, 2025; “USFK commander sets early 2029 as target date for OPCON transfer,” The Hankyoreh, 2026-04-24; “Lee says Korea must be able to defend itself without foreign troops, states resolve to reclaim OPCON by 2028,” The Hankyoreh, 2026-04-29.

6. “Korea is more than ready to regain OPCON. Is the US ready to relinquish it?” The Hankyoreh, 2026-06-24.

7. Statement of General Xavier T. Brunson, before the 119th Congress Senate Armed Services Committee, April 22, 2026.

8. Ibid.

9. “USFK commander hints at changes to US troop presence in Korea,” The Hankyoreh, 2025-08-11.

10. Ibid.

11. “Why does the USFK commander keep butting heads with Seoul?” The Hankyoreh, 2026-06-29.

12. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

13. “Lee calls sovereign defense ‘fundamental’ amid rift with US over OPCON transfer timing,” The Hankyoreh, 2026-05-27.

14. “Korea mulls how to respond if US demands ‘strategic flexibility’ of USFK at summit,” The Hankyoreh, 2025-08-20.

15. “USFK commander stresses changing geopolitical environment in pitch to ‘modernize’ alliance,” The Hankyoreh, 2025-08-11.

16. “Korea mulls how to respond if US demands ‘strategic flexibility’ of USFK at summit,” The Hankyoreh, 2025-08-20.

17. “Korea latest casualty of Trump’s misplaced frustration over mess in Iran, says US media outlet,” The Hankyoreh, 2026-08-19.

Antisemitism on Canadian Campuses: Debunking a New Report by the Government of Canada

By Stephen Gowans

August 9, 2026

A Canadian-government-sponsored report has concluded that antisemitism is widespread on Canadian university campuses. Some media outlets have picked up on the report. According to the CBC, the new report shows that “Antisemitism on campus is ‘systemic’ and going unaddressed.” Israel’s Haaretz reports that the research found that “95 percent of Jewish Students on Canadian Universities Have Encountered Antisemitism.” Meanwhile, The Canadian Press let its readers know that the study reveals that “Jewish students on Canadian campuses report pervasive antisemitism.”

But what the report really shows is that there is a growing wave of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian activism on Canadian campuses—hardly a revelation. The authors, whose political biases and methodological lapses will become evident in a moment, have turned this commonplace into an alarming trend by a slight of hand: They have defined criticism of Israel as hatred of Jews.

It’s difficult not to conclude that the motivation behind the report is to discredit pro-Palestinian activists by smearing them as antisemites, with the clear intention of shutting down criticism of Israel at Canadian universities. Once you consider who sponsored the report (a pro-Israel, pro-Zionist Canadian government); who wrote it (the lead author is a Zionist who was once the executive director of pro-Israel organization); and who was surveyed (Jewish students who identify Israel and Zionism as important parts of their lives), it becomes clear that the report is not to an honest attempt to gauge antisemitism on campus but a politically motivated effort to discredit students who have organized against Israeli atrocities in Gaza as Jew-haters.

All of this starts to become clear when the report reveals that it “uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism,” a definition that has been widely discredited for falsely conflating antisemitism with antizionism.  The Government of Canada’s “Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism” (Ottawa adopted the definition in 2011) cites the following as examples, among others, of antisemitism:

  • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

All these examples refer to attitudes toward Israel, a state, and Zionism, a political movement, not Jews as an ethnoreligious group. The action depicted in the third example—using antisemitic images to denote Israel—may be crude, stupid, and intolerable, but the target is Israel, not Jews. This illustrates the problem with the IHRA definition, and why it’s considered invalid. If it were true that hatred of an ethnocratic movement (Zionism) or ethnocratic state (Israel) was the same as hatred of an ethnoreligious group (Jews), then it would be true that anti-fascism represented anti-Italian hatred, that anti-Nazism equaled anti-German animosity, and that opposition to South African Apartheid amounted to intolerance of white people.

The report’s pro-Zionist orientation is further evidenced by its definition of antizionism as “a movement that calls for the erasure of Israel and denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.” In defining antizionism this way, the report’s authors make the claim—which would hardly be accepted by pro-Palestinian students on campuses—that the Jewish people have a right to dispossess the Palestinians of their country, land, homes, and property.

The report’s authors argue further that antizionism relies “on libel and distortion to claim that the Jewish collective, Israel, rather than the individual Jew, is uniquely evil. It further asserts that Jews, who have thousands of years of history in this place, are fabricating a legitimate claim to their ancestral homeland. Antizionism claims that Israel, exceptionally, is the one state that must be eradicated.”

These claims are false. First, antizionism is not a doctrine concerned with definitions of evil, let alone unique evil. Second, it doesn’t deny that many, though not all, Jews claim Palestine as a homeland, only that Jews are not the only peoples who have lived in Palestine, and that prior residency or what the Pentateuch says Yahweh promised to Moses do not justify the colonization of Palestine and the dispossession of its inhabitants. Finally, antizionism is only anticolonialism specific to Palestine. Anticolonialism has opposed other settler colonial states, including Algeria, Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa, declaring that these states too needed to be eradicated as ethnocratic political orders. Much as Israel’s supporters like to think the Zionist state is being singled out, it is not.

The report’s lead author, Jack Jedwab, served as Executive Director of the Quebec branch of the Canadian Jewish Congress, from 1994-1998. The CJC became the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (note the priority of ‘Israel’ in the title), a pro-Israeli outfit that “educates Canadians about the central role Israel plays in Jewish life and identity” and which monitors “issues that affect the Canada-Israel friendship”—like the growing disapproval of Israel in Canadian society, owing to its connections to genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.

Citing the report, the CIJA is urging “university leaders and governments at every level to carefully consider this report and the recommendations by the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics.” NECA recommends that Canadian universities formally adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a gambit that would allow university administrators to suppress pro-Palestinian activism on campus by labelling it as antisemitic. The body also recommends that universities define Zionism as a part of a Jewish student’s identity. In this way, antizionist activism can be proscribed and punished as antisemitic speech and conduct.

Survey Results

If the authors’ overly broad definition of antisemitism leaves much to be desired, so too does their survey methodology and treatment and reporting of the results.

Below are the percentages of surveyed Jewish students who say they have experienced or witnessed various instances of what the authors call “antisemitic” incidents.

Over the past 12 months, how often have you experienced or witnessed the following on your campus?

(Scale: Often or Occasionally)

  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists. (81%)
  • Vandalism of school property motivated by antisemitism. (71%)
  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Israelis. (67%)
  • Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at others. (59%)
  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Jews. (56%)
  • Intimidation or threats directed at Jews. (54%)
  • Exclusion from an event or group (on campus). (36%)
  • Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at you. (34%)
  • Physical violence directed at Jews. (22%)

Notice that two of the incident types concern Jews as Zionists and Jews as Israelis, not Jews as Jews. Second, the most frequently reported incident of hate or discrimination concerns Zionists, followed by Israelis. Jews, as a group, come last. This says that more of what Jewish students report as antisemitism is anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli conduct than antisemitism.  

Who were the Jewish students the study surveyed? According to the report, they were recruited “through Jewish student organizations, community networks, and related channels.” Nine of every 10 said that attachment to Israel was important to them and nearly as many said the same about Zionism. Since pro-Israel, Zionist Jews have long been inclined to label criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitism, it comes as no surprise that these students would view the growing wave of pro-Palestinian activism and opposition to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, apartheid, and settler colonialism as a sign of rising Judeophobia.

A final remark on the results. The study used a four-point scale of often, occasionally, rarely, or never.  The percentages sum two points—often and occasionally. This invites the question or whether the answers leaned more to “occasionally” than “often”, or whether results based on the percentage saying “often” alone would tell a different story—one less likely to arouse media interest? Not that it would matter much. When a government that officially equates antizionism with antisemitism hires researchers who equate antizionism with antisemitism to survey students who equate antizionism with antisemitism about their experiences with antisemitism, it would be naive to think that the findings would claim anything other than campuses that are bursting with antizionist activism are hotbeds of antisemitism.

Conclusion

The report is a transparently dishonest attempt to shut down pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist activism on campuses by misrepresenting opposition to Israel as Jew hatred. It was sponsored by the Canadian government, which supports Israel and has adopted the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism. Its first author is a Zionist, who once held an executive position in a pro-Israel organization. The study surveyed overwhelmingly pro-Israel, pro-Zionist students—students inclined to see opposition to Israel as antisemitism. Likewise, the study’s authors accept a discredited definition of antisemitism, which conflates opposition to Jewish ethnocracy with hatred of Jews as an ethnoreligious group. Additionally, the results, for what they’re worth, show that incidents labelled as antisemitic tend most often to be directed at Jews as Zionists and Jews as Israelis than Jews as Jews.

Based on the study’s evident political bias, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the aim of the research was to paint pro-Palestinian activists as antisemites. It would appear the study pursued this goal in order to support the Zionist and pro-Israel project of pressuring governments and university administrations to prohibit and punish campus campaigns against Israeli apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.  This is a study with a clear pro-Israel agenda. It cannot be taken seriously as a measure of antisemitism on Canadian campuses.

The Meaning of the US-Iran MoU

18 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Below are my brief comments on some aspects of the 14-paragraph Memorandum of Understanding between Washington and Tehran.

Paragraph 1

In the first paragraph “The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran” indicate that they are making commitments on behalf of themselves and “their allies in the current war.”  

The language of the MoU is ambiguous throughout, and the ambiguity is evident here. Who are the signatories’ allies? It’s clear that “allies” covers Israel in the case of the United States and Hezbollah in the case of Iran, but it’s notable that this isn’t spelled out, and that no effort is made to define who the allies are.

A further ambiguity: The paragraph says that military operations will end “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The document, however, doesn’t define the fronts, other than Lebanon. Are the Persian Gulf countries fronts? Iraq? Jordan?

Implied in the definition of Lebanon as a front, is that Hezbollah’s current military operations are actions taken on behalf of Iran, rather than, or, in addition to, actions specifically related to Israel’s ongoing occupation of south Lebanon and its campaign to destroy the Shia organization. Are Hezbollah’s military operations a necessity of self-preservation in the face of Israeli efforts to annihilate the organization and empty south Lebanon of its Shia population, or are they aid to Iran, or both?

More significantly, the fact that both parties make pledges on behalf of their allies, indicates that Washington and Tehran consider themselves the senior partners and their allies subordinates.

This shouldn’t be controversial in the case of the United States and Israel, but has become so owing to a ridiculous popular fallacy that Israel, a country of 10 million people with a GDP of $720 billion, controls the foreign policy of the United States, a country with 34 times the population and 44 times the GDP, and which is a state, moreover, on which Israel depends for its survival.

No matter how ridiculous the idea is on the surface, legions of Americans have found some comfort in scapegoating Israel for their own government’s actions. It is much easier to blame Zionist Jews, working in the shadows, manipulating world events—a trope much beloved of reactionaries throughout history—than to recognize that murder, genocide, invasion, occupation, and conquest are the very hallmarks of US foreign policy. The US government was vicious and bloodthirsty long before there was an Israel and the Israel lobby.

It is instructive to recall that in 1895 US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge hailed the United States as unequalled in conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion in the nineteenth century.  Its record in the eighteenth century was no less unattractive, and the tens of millions slaughtered and burned to death in US colonial and neo-colonial wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries recall that sanguinary imperialism is embedded in the history and character of the United States.  

To believe that wars of aggression and support for colonial and apartheid regimes are somehow alien to the fundamental values of the US state – as John Mearsheimer and his votaries do – is to blind oneself to US history, even recent history, and to be ignorant of the fundamental nature of the US state.

Bernard DeVoto once remarked that US history “began in myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stories.” The notion, conjured by Mearsheimer and his followers, that the United States wouldn’t be involved in wars of aggression, wouldn’t be participating in genocide, and wouldn’t be supporting a repressive, racist, and anti-democratic regime, were it not for the influence of Israel and its lobby, is yet another fairy story, added to the mountain of comforting illusions that make up US historiography and Americans’ sense of who they are—or who they wish they were—as a people.

In any event, “the Jews made us betray our fundamental values” theory of US foreign policy has been decisively refuted by events, no less by the MoU. The agreement:

  • Was negotiated without the involvement of the fantasized Israeli motive force of US foreign policy;
  • Achieves none of Israel’s war aims;
  • Is universally opposed by Jewish Israeli leaders across the entire political spectrum;
  • Is reviled by the Israel lobby.

On top of implicitly defining Israel as a US vassal state that marches to the beat of a US drummer, the first paragraph commits both parties and their allies to “refrain from the threat or use of force against each other,” (my emphasis). No sooner had Trump signed the MoU, than he violated it, warning the Iranians that “if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.” He added: “It’s amazing what bombs can do.”

On two occasions, as US and Iranian negotiators were meeting to work out the terms of the MoU, US war secretary Pete Hegseth equated negotiation with bombing.

In March he said: “We negotiate with bombs.” He repeated himself this month. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs. And we’re very good at it. Nobody better in the world.”

Hegseth’s threats, however, didn’t rise to the barbarity of Trump’s 7 April vow to annihilate “a whole civilization” if Tehran didn’t submit to his demands.

For their part, the Iranians could reply (but haven’t) that “We negotiate by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and striking US Persian Gulf allies with ballistic missiles and drones.”

Paragraph 4

The fourth paragraph states that “The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.”

In keeping with the MoU’s ambiguity, no definition is offered of what “proximity” means or whether the United States will remove its forces permanently, or only temporarily. These questions are deferred to negotiations scheduled to take place over the next 60 days, or longer, if mutually agreed.

The United States will likely make withdrawal of its forces contingent on Iran meeting front-loaded commitments to scale back its nuclear program.  In this way, once Iran satisfies US demands, Washington can renege on the deal, a danger not to be taken lightly, given US conduct in the past, and Trump’s track record. Indeed, the reason Iran began enriching uranium to near military grade, was to pressure the United States to return to the JCPOA, after Trump disavowed the agreement, and after Biden declined to re-enter it, trying instead to coerce the Iranians into accepting new conditions.  

Paragraph 6

In the six paragraph Washington “undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least U.S.D. 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development.”  

Based on press reports, Washington sees this program as an investment opportunity, not reparations. We destroy your infrastructure and rebuild it at a profit for us, rather than repairing it at our expense.

Paragraph 7

In the seventh paragraph Washington pledges “to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran … in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal.”

This means that the United States agrees to lift sanctions contingent on Iran satisfying US demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program. It’s very unlikely that Washington will offer sanctions-relief before Iran eliminates its stockpile of highly enriched uranium or satisfies whatever other demands Washington makes regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

There is a very real danger that if Iran complies with US demands, Washington will fail to honor its commitment to lift sanctions. If the Trump administration follows standard US operating procedure, it will either claim that Iran is cheating, and that sanctions therefore won’t be lifted, or will invent new reasons to impose new sanctions on Tehran for some new Iranian trespass. Or Trump could change his mind and decide he’s not going to honor the deal. He has done it before.

Paragraph 11

In the eleventh paragraph, Washington “undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The assets will be unfrozen according to “procedures” to be “mutually agreed on” over the next 60 days. The fact that procedures to release the assets remain to be negotiated, means Washington could slow-roll negotiations of the procedure to hold up release of the assets in order to exert leverage on other issues.

In endlessly lambasting Obama for sending “pallets of cash” to Iran, Trump created the impression that Obama paid a ransom to get Tehran’s signature on the JCPOA. Of course, Obama was doing what Trump himself has pledged to do in the MoU: return to Iran what is rightfully Iran’s.

Having agreed to unfreeze Iran’s assets, Trump did a volte-face and came clean, explaining that: “We have taken a lot of their money, and we have their money. We have taken their money, it’s not our money, it’s their money, and we froze it. At a certain point in time I guess we’re going to have to give it back.”

The idea that in unfreezing Iran’s assets the United States is paying Iran a ransom is an inversion of reality. Meeting US demands to scale back its nuclear program will be the ransom Iran pays to Washington to recover its stolen assets.

Conclusion

Au fond, the MoU is an agreement to pause the war, open the Strait of Hormuz, and lift the US naval blockade, while Washington and Tehran negotiate a final agreement to scale back Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief, reconstruction, return of Iran’s stolen assets, and withdrawal of US forces from some undefined part of West Asia, either permanently or temporarily.  

Strictly speaking, the MoU does not commit the parties to only pause the war, but to end it. By signing the agreement, Washington and Tehran “declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” (my emphasis.) Trump voided the declaration immediately, when he pledged to return to war if the parties fail to arrive at a final agreement, calling to mind the words of Otto von Bismarck: “Great questions of the time are decided not by words but by blood and iron.”

The Via Crucis of John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer developed the theory of the Israel lobby because the facts contradicted his Realist theory of international relations. Now the facts are contradicting the very same Israel lobby theory he developed to plug the holes in his IR theory.

15 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

It’s difficult to argue that Israel and the Israel lobby control US foreign policy when Washington arrives at an agreement with Tehran:   

  • That Israel had no say in;
  • Achieves none of Israel’s war aims;
  • Is universally opposed by Jewish Israeli leaders across the political spectrum;
  • Is met with skepticism by pro-Israel hawks in the US.

Even if the agreement falls apart, it is still the case that Washington has acted in a manner that is hostile to what Israelis perceive as their interests.

“The Israel lobby” is a category of explanation invoked to account for the failure of certain theories to explain US actions (e.g., some Realist IR theories, or the theory that US foreign policy is fundamentally benign in its intentions if not always its actions.)

The problem lies with the theories. They don’t explain what they set out to explain.

John Mearsheimer is a Realist IR theorist, and the most vocal exponent of the theory that 1) Washington acts against US interests in West Asia and in favor of Israel’s and 2) it does so because its foreign policy has been hijacked by the Israel lobby. He readily acknowledges that his IR theory doesn’t explain US behavior in West Asia.

Steve Walt and I, who are both card-carrying Realists, wrote this book called the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. And lots of people over the years have delighted in pointing out, in a “got-ya!” moment, that the Israel Lobby book contradicts our Realist theory. Because the Israel Lobby book says that domestic politics causes the United States to act in non-strategic ways. This is what the Israel Lobby book says. It says that when it comes to Israel, the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave. It’s because of the Lobby; domestic politics. And people expect us, when they level that charge at us, to be defensive and say ‘Oh no, the Lobby book really fits in with our theory.’ But our response is, ‘You’re absolutely correct. The Israel Lobby contradicts my basic theory of international politics.’ [1]

You may notice that Mearsheimer engages in some question-begging here (question-begging in the sense of assuming the truth of what he’s trying to prove in his premise.)  He says “that when it comes to Israel, the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave,” and then adds “It’s because of the Lobby.” An alternative explanation is that the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave because the theory is wrong. Instead, he assumes the theory is correct, and that something else must be going on to obscure its validity. Presto, the Israel lobby theory is born.

The problem, however, is that the Israel lobby theory has as many holes in it as there are holes in the original theory it was designed to plug. That’s evident in the obvious rift that has developed between Washington and Tel Aviv over the question of how to proceed on Iran.

Apart from being an add-on to save Mearsheimer’s IR theory, the Israel lobby theory is also a political tool used by some activists to mobilize support for pro-Palestinian positions by deliberately fostering a misunderstanding that a foreign power has hijacked the US state and that US citizens are paying for wars fought in Israel’s interests and not US interests.

The truth is that US citizens are paying for US wars—and the wars are being fought in the overlapping interests of US billionaires and Israeli colonizers. They may not want to face up to the fact that their government’s conduct is vicious and tyrannical, and may prefer, instead, to see the United States as a fundamentally benign but helpless giant manipulated by an Israeli Svengali, but this is nothing more than a comforting illusion.

The reality is that the domestic billionaire class that shapes US foreign policy goals has set objectives that, for the most part, mesh with the settler colonial project of Israel. Broadly speaking, the overarching US objective is to prevent the emergence of an independent regional hegemon in energy-rich West Asia.

Owing to its cultural, ethnic, demographic, and economic connections with the West (Israel sees itself as part of the West, a Western outpost in the East), and its complete dependency on Western support to survive, Israel is uniquely placed to act as a US janissary—a protector of US interests in the Land of the Five Seas [2] and elite combat force equipped and motivated to assert US interests. Guardian of the interests of great powers in the Arab and Muslim worlds has, from day one, been the role sought by Zionists for a Jewish state. The quid-pro-quo has always been understood as: We look after your interests in the region against those of local forces of independence, and you guarantee our survival.

A troubling aspect of the Israel lobby theory is its resonance with a Nazi theory.  

Hitler did much the same as Mearsheimer in explaining why something didn’t happen that he thought should have happened.  

Mearsheimer says the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave because policy-making in Washington has been taken over by decision-makers who are committed to Israeli goals and Israeli goals are inimical to US interests.

Similarly, Hitler said Germany should have won the First World War and didn’t because Jews penetrated German policy-making circles and took over German decision-making and pursued Zionist goals that were hostile to German interests. How else could one explain, asked Hitler, that no enemy troops had ever set foot on German soil, and still Germany lost the war? In this, Hitler anticipated Mearsheimer’s wondering how Realist IR theory failed to account for US behavior in West Asia. For both, a Zionist take-over offered a ready explanation of failed expectation.

Overlapping interests, not Israeli colonization of foreign policy decision-making in Washington, account for why US and Israeli decision-makers are so often in sync. Occasionally, however, the goals of the two states depart, as they do, now, on Iran. Israel wants to finish off Iran, destroy Hezbollah, and continue its expansion into Lebanon. Washington wants to prevent the world economy from going off an oil- and fertilizer-scarcity cliff, and is prepared to make concessions to Iran that Israel doesn’t like in order to avoid a world-wide calamity.

When US and Israeli interests fail to align, the US asserts its greater strength, and Israel tries to maintain some degree of autonomy by negotiating the terms of its subordination. But it remains, as always, a subordinate state and instrument of US policy. For its part, the US remains, as always, the guarantor of its janissary Jewish state’s survival.

1. John Mearsheimer in Athens: Why Realism Explains Better than Alternative Theories, Address to the Council for International Relations and the Institute of International Relations, Athens, Greece, 2 June, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVuZbW4qKNY

2. The territory bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Arabian Sea, and Red Sea.

Whether the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Israel, It’s All Stolen Land

By Stephen Gowans

13 June 2026

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “left-wing UK leaders” are “slamming” an Israeli real-estate event, alleging that it seeks to sell properties to Jews on stolen West Bank land.

While efforts to impede the ongoing Judaization of Palestine are commendable, there is a fundamental problem that lurks in the campaign’s understanding of what is and isn’t stolen Palestinian land. The reality is that all the land in historic Israel that is claimed by Jewish settlers—both within the 1967 borders and outside—is stolen.

Failing to acknowledge this reality implicitly legitimizes Israeli colonialism and all earlier thefts of Palestinian land. While it identifies land stolen in 1967 as Palestinian, it tacitly accepts land stolen in 1948 as legitimately belonging to Zionist settlers.

Of course, it can’t be true that land taken from Palestinians by Zionist violence in 1967 is Palestinian land, while land taken from Palestinians by Jewish settler violence in 1948 is not.

All the same, the illogic is concealed behind the claim that the violent transfer of Palestinian land to the new Israeli state in 1948 was legitimized by the UN partition plan.

This view, however, is wrong for a number of reasons.

1.) The plan was legally invalid, since it was based on a General Assembly resolution, and

1a.) General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and

1b.) the General Assembly didn’t have the authority to partition Palestine. (Indeed, the UN Charter accords to neither the General Assembly or the Security Council the authority to create new states);

2.) The Palestinians rejected the plan;

3.) The Zionists also rejected it, as evidenced by the fact that:

3a.) They didn’t implement it; and

3b.) They conquered territory in excess of what the plan allocated to them.

The plan apportioned 56 percent of Palestine to one-third of the population that was Jewish (mainly settlers), and only 42 percent to the Palestinians, who comprised two-thirds of the population. (Two percent was allotted to what was to be an internationalized Jerusalem.)

By early 1949, the Zionists—keen to control as much of Palestine as they could—had conquered 78 percent of the territory (versus the 56 percent they were supposed to have under the plan.)

Still, even if the partition plan had been legally valid, it remained flagrantly colonial, since it endorsed the expropriation of the territory of the existing inhabitants by a group of settlers animated by the project of expelling as much of the Palestinian population as possible and them imposing a regime of Jewish ethnoreligious supremacy on those that remained.

The partition plan has become embedded in international law, but colonialism does not become just by virtue of its inclusion in international law. International law is the instrument of the colonial powers that formulated it. They formulated it to defend and promote their interests—not to protect weaker peoples and states.

The great powers make, and have made, international law, and when it doesn’t suit their purposes, they break it. So it is that they have read the partition plan into the global legal order, even though the plan was invalid under the very same order.

There exists today one Jewish supremacist state in all of historic Palestine. All the land, both within and beyond the 1967 borders, is stolen. The ineluctable conclusion is that home sales to Jewish settlers anywhere in historic Palestine, (not only in the West Bank), are auctions of stolen land.

The competing view that only settlements in the West Bank represent confiscated Palestinian land, endorses the colonial fiction that Jewish settlement within the 1967 borders is not colonial and has not taken place on the dispossessed land of the Palestinians. On the contrary, all the territory controlled by the US-backed colonial settler regime is colonized and stolen.

The solution to colonization is not colonization of all but 22 percent of a people’s territory—what’s proposed in the two-state “solution”—but decolonization, the creation of one democratic state, in which all people are equal, regardless of their ethnicity or religious identity.

That’s what Palestinians proposed from the very beginning. It is a multidimensional solution, one that remedies both the problems of settler colonialism (by creating its antithesis, the democratic state of all its citizens) and the problems of anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism (by depoliticizing ethnic and religious identity and thereby establishing the full equality of individuals, regardless of the religion they practice or the people they identify as.)

From the 22 percent of historic Palestine that the two-state proposal envisages for a Palestinian state; to Jawlan (called the Golan Heights by Israelis; conquered by the US-backed colonial settler regime in 1967; ethnically cleansed of its Syrian population; settled by Jews; and annexed by the Israeli state in 1981); to Israel itself: it is all stolen land. Failing to recognize this reality perpetuates an injustice and blocks implementation of the only fair and democratic solution to the multiple problems at the center of the Zionist colonization of historic Palestine and Jawlan.

The Billionaire Plan to Cut Social Services and Insert NATO Forces Directly into a War with Russia

By Stephen Gowans

12 June 2026

The United States and NATO are urging Europe to significantly increase its military spending to defend the continent from what we’re led to believe is an inevitable Russian invasion that will take place sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, has told Europeans that “we must be ready for the scale of war our parents and great-grandparents endured.” [1]

To prepare, he is urging Europeans to accept cuts in spending on health care, education, and other social services, in order to free up revenue for military expenditures (much of which will benefit wealthy people with investments in weapons makers.)

Rutte told Britons that if they didn’t agree to significant increases in military spending, they would be able to keep their National Health Service, but they had better start learning to speak Russian. [2]

Rutte is a shameless lickspittle (he called the megalomaniacal chairman of the billionaire-backed US imperialist state “daddy,” much to Trump’s delight) as well as a shameless fear-monger who is peddling a lie. The idea that Russia has any intention of invading a NATO state is implausible.

  • Moscow is four and half years into a war with a much smaller Ukraine that it just can’t seem to defeat.
  • NATO countries in Europe already outspend Russia militarily by more than a factor of three—and the gap is on track to grow larger.  Europe plans to significantly increase its military spending by 2035.

The Wall Street Journal [3] notes that:

  • “European countries’ spending on the military collectively dwarfs Russia’s and has overtaken China’s.”
  • “Military spending by European Union member states, the U.K. and Norway could reach up to about $890 billion to $1 trillion in 2030.” (Russia is currently spending $173 billion on its military.)
Military spending, 2025
 $ billions% of GDP
NATO states in Europe5592.3
Germany1142.3
Russia1736.3
Sources: Max Colchester and Alistair MacDonald, “U.K. Defense Secretary Quits Over Lack of Military Spending,” The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2026 Ivan Nechepurenko and Constant Méheut, “Why Russia Is Gaining Ground in Ukraine,” The New York Times, July 19, 2025.

What’s more, consider the following:

  • Europe enjoys “a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure,” according to the 2025 US National Security Strategy.
  • “A senior NATO official said Russia doesn’t have the troop numbers or military capability to defeat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe,” according to The Wall Street Journal [4].

Based on the above, it’s clear that the campaign to increase NATO military spending has less to do with deterring a Russian invasion (which appears to be a fear-monger’s fantasy) and more to do with building a NATO capability to overwhelm Russia while wrecking Europe’s social safety net.

To this end, the German government is making Kriegstüchtig, meaning “ready for war,” its rallying cry. It is trying to galvanize support for building Europe’s largest conventional army—one ready to lead Europe into a land war against Russia. [5]

The price Europeans will pay for Kriegstüchtig include:

  • The dangers and destruction of a major war;
  • Austerity to pay for the new militarism.

The campaign to boost NATO spending has “no basis in reality,” says former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder. Confirming the figures in the table above, he notes that European NATO members already spend three times as much on their militaries as Russia does on its armed forces. The campaign to boost NATO spending is aimed, he says, at outspending Russia 10 times. [6] 

Does NATO need to outspend Russia 10 times? Is this a goal that warrants further reductions to already strained and starved public services?

I said the plan to cut social services and start a war with Russia is a billionaires’ plan. Why?

Because the plan comes from the Trump administration, which issued an edict commanding NATO states to hike military spending to five percent of GDP. Virtually all NATO states say they will comply. Trump’s administration teems with billionaires and centi-millionaires. The plan was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank funded by billionaire families and major corporations. It’s impossible to say the plan isn’t billionaire-backed.

The rich have long been hostile to social services, both because they don’t want to pay taxes to fund them and because social services make people less vulnerable and therefore less desperate to submit to exploitation by wealthy business owners.

Billionaire investors and major corporations are also keen on military spending (especially if it’s paid for by others), because it involves investments in weapons-makers in which they have a financial interest, and because a strong military can be used to defend and expand trade and investment abroad. A military able to dominate Eastern Europe, and therefore to secure the region’s profit-making opportunities for North American and European investors at the expense of Russian ones, is attractive to the NATO-area business community.

For these reasons, the plan to wreck social services and go to war with Russia deserves the title “made by billionaires for billionaire interests.”

For these reasons, it also deserves to be rejected.

1. Laurence Norman and Daniel Michaels, “For Ukraine’s Allies in Europe, a Bad Deal With Russia Is Worse Than No Deal,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 2025.

2.  Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, Jun. 9, 2025.

3.  Alistair MacDonald, Cristina Gallardo, and Robbie Gramer, “The Phantom Stealth Fighter That Exposes Europe’s Deep Divisions Over Defense,” The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2026.

4.  Matthew Luxmoore and Robbie Gramer, “Marathon Russia-U.S. Meeting Yields No Ukraine Peace Deal,” The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2025.

5. Christopher F. Schuetze, “Lithuania, Once Occupied by Germany, Is Glad German Troops Are Back,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.

6. Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, June 9, 2025.

To Show Meaningful Solidarity with Cuba, Americans Need to Fundamentally Change Their Own Society

During an audience with Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, Tariq Ali asked what Western radicals and student activists could do to best support the Vietnamese resistance against U.S. forces. Ho replied: “Make your own revolution.”

7 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

When it comes to Cuba, the accustomed practice of the establishment press is to document in detail the measures Washington has taken to sabotage the country’s economy, and then to relegate these measures to third place, behind mismanagement and corruption, as the causes of the socialist state’s economic crisis. Here’s how The Wall Street Journal puts it:

While the press regularly documents in detail the numerous measures the US has taken to sabotage the Cuban economy, I have yet to see any reporting on mismanagement or corruption.

The most parsimonious explanation of why the Cuban economy is collapsing, and the only one with any empirical support, is:

1. The toll taken by over six decades of US economic warfare.

2. The fact that Cuba has no great power support to help it endure US pressure.

3. The US oil embargo.

4. The threat of new secondary sanctions that is precipitating a flight of foreign businesses from Cuba.

Over six decades of US economic warfare

Almost from the moment of the Cuban Revolution’s birth, Washington has acted “to weaken the economic life of Cuba” with the aim of bringing about “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the government.” From 1960 to today, not a moment has elapsed without Washington working in some way to pauperize Cubans. Unless we think Washington has been totally incompetent in engineering the unravelling of the Cuban economy, it is unreasonable to minimize the role played by US economic warfare in Cuba’s immiseration.

Cuba no longer has great power support

For three decades the Soviet Union provided Cuba with significant aid, both economic and military. This was sufficient to counteract some of the measures the United States introduced to undermine the Cuban economy.

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 plunged Cuba into crisis. Relying on its own limited resources, along with joint ventures with European, Canadian, and other non-US businesses, Cuba was able to keep the lights on, and more.

During this period, Washington’s foreign policy agenda was focused on efforts to maintain US unipolar dominance, and prevent the rise of hegemonic regional powers in West Asia, East Europe, and East Asia. Cuba flew under the radar. It was too small, too weak, too significant, and too caught up in its own desperate struggle to survive, to pose any threat to the United States.

Moreover, compared to the strategic significance of controlling Persian Gulf oil, the promise of profitable access to vast commodity, investment, and cheap labor markets in East Asia, and rivalry with Russia over East Europe, Cuba had little to offer the capitalist interests that shaped US foreign policy.  Why bother with Cuba when there were much bigger fish to fry?

Another factor that inclined Washington to leave Cuba alone to struggle under the mountain of sanctions it had imposed, was the fact that the existence of the island country as an example of socialism was an important part of US anti-socialist propaganda. The poverty of Cubans (relative to the capitalist metropolis but not its periphery) could be pointed to as evidence of the failure of socialism and its inability to offer anything like the good life Americans enjoyed at home.

There were two problems with this narrative.

First, the expected consequence of decades of US economic warfare was poverty. Indeed, US foreign policy officials said in private that their goal was to make Cubans hungry and desperate by weakening the country’s economic life. US predation, not socialism, caused Cubans to struggle economically.

Second, there were scores of capitalist countries in the world that were as poor or poorer than Cuba. If turning its back on capitalism was making Cuba poor, why were there so many poor capitalist countries in the world? Indeed, the number of poor capitalist countries vastly exceeds the number of rich ones. And why was Cuba faring better in human development terms than countries of comparable income? What’s more, for a time, Cuba had a lower infant mortality rate than did the United States itself.

Hence, it seemed like there were more reasonable explanations for Cuba’s relative poverty than socialism. In fact, the evidence that socialism made Cuba poor was exactly zero. All the same, the narrative that pointed to “mismanagement” of the economy, i.e., socialism, was, and continues to be, universally accepted by establishment figures and media in the United States as the gospel truth, despite the narrative’s glaring deficiencies and absence of evidence.

With the Soviet Union gone, and Russia returning to great power status, and China returning to the ranks after a centuries-long absence, the possibility arose that these powers could backstop Cuba.

But the conditions weren’t right. At least two of the following things would need to be true for China or Russia to offer Cuba sufficient economic aid to enable the island country to survive a determined effort by the United States to finally bring about its economic collapse:

  • An ideological commitment to aiding the workers and peoples of the world to liberate themselves;
  • A sufficient economic surplus to cover both the great power’s strategic needs and substantial aid to Cuba;
  • The existence of some meaningful benefit the great power could derive from helping Cuba.

Neither of these conditions was true. The reality is that the benefits Cuba can offer China and Russia are miniscule compared to the costs of giving the socialist island sufficient aid to keep its economy afloat in the face of a resolute US effort to sink it.

The US oil embargo

While previous US administrations have been content to largely ignore Cuba as an immediate target for regime collapse, and to focus on larger opportunities, the Trump administration has set its sights on Cuba as an easy target. This is a project that appeals to Marco Rubio’s domestic base and the secretary of state’s presidential ambitions, and presents a vainglorious and egomaniacal Donald Trump with the prospect of being able to boast that he has accomplished something no other president before him was able to achieve.  

Having eliminated Venezuela’s Maduro through abduction, and installed in his place a biddable Delcy Rodriquez as the country’s quisling acting-president, Washington has proceeded to halt Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba. It has also imposed an embargo on oil shipments from any country. With Cuba producing only 40 percent of its energy needs domestically, the consequences are devastating.

 US secondary sanctions

Having greatly weakened Cuba by denying it oil imports, Washington has introduced what it hopes will be the coup de grace: threats of sanctions on any foreign company that does business with GAESA, the body that controls a substantial part of the Cuban economy. Canadian and European hotel operators are pulling out, and the future in Cuba of the Canadian mining giant Sherritt is in question. On top of that, Mastercard and Visa transactions have been suspended.  

Socialism in One Country

The imminent collapse of the Cuban economy raises the question of whether socialism can survive in one country, especially a small one like Cuba.

Even Stalin thought that it couldn’t over the long term (not because there’s something inherently unworkable about socialism but because one socialist country in a world of many capitalist predators has little hope of survival.)

Here’s how Stalin put it. (I cite him only because he’s most strongly associated with the view that socialism can be built in one country.)

Leninism teaches that ‘the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations, is possible only on an international scale’.  This means that the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the final victory of Socialism in one country cannot be solved.

Building socialism and defending it in a country like the Soviet Union—with its large population and vast continental territory that contained within it every natural resource needed to build an industrial economy—was of an order of magnitude easier than building socialism and defending it in Cuba, a small island, with a small population, and few resources. And even the Soviet Union, with its advantages, failed to withstand the incessant threats, sabotage, and pressure of the United States and its capitalist allies.

Can Cuba survive as an independent socialist state in the face of the US onslaught? Perhaps. But only as one reduced to abject poverty.

To use Stalin’s terminology, the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the survival of an independent socialist Cuba cannot be solved.

Inasmuch as it is the United States that is bent on erasing both Cuba’s independence and its socialism, whatever hope it has for existing as a socialist country in other than an economically unviable state depends, not only on the resilience and resolution of the Cuban people, but on the energy and determination of the American people to fundamentally change the nature of their own society. For it is their society that stands in the way of any prospect of even mild Leftism in the Western Hemisphere, and any endurable socialism outside it.

Nazi Myth. Zionist Myth.

By Stephen Gowans

4 June 2026

A national Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published an editorial on 4 June 2026, lambasting Canadian prime minister Mark Carney for failing to condemn anti-Zionism. The editorial board pressed Carney to equate opposition to Israel’s existence with demonizing Canada’s Jews.

The editorial was titled “The Missing Words in Carney’s Speech”, a reference to a speech the prime minister had made to condemn what he described as a growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada. “It was good that Mr. Carney went to a synagogue and addressed antisemitism,” argued the editorial, but added that “He should have said: ‘If you oppose Israel’s existence, if you demonize Jewish-Canadians, you are wrong, you are hateful and I stand against you.’”

The growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada is a myth. As I explained in a previous post, B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia. The organization, along with other pro-Israel partisans, are pressing Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian, pro-democracy and anti-Zionist, anti-colonial political positions. Carney’s speech added grist to the mill of the anti-Palestinian argument, but the Globe and Mail felt he hadn’t gone far enough.

Let’s be clear

1/ Zionism is not Judaism and nor are “Zionist” and “Jew” the same. Indeed, there are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jewish Zionists.

Zionism is a settler colonial, ethno-supremacist, apartheid ideology, that is the foundation of laws and practices that maintain the dominance of one ethnic group (Jews) over all others in historic Palestine. Nazism, and the ideology of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, shared the same ethnic chauvinism and colonialist mentality.

2/ Conflating Jew and Judaism with Zionist and Zionism is reminiscent of the Nazis conflating, in one instance, Jew and Judaism with international banker and finance capitalism, and in another, with Bolshevik and Bolshevism. The Nazi’s “Judeobolsheviks” have become “Judeozionists” in the hands the Globe and Mail and other Israel supporters.

The conflation is a form of anti-Semitism, since it argues that ethno-supremacism and settler colonialism are inherent in Judaism (which they are not) and that all Jews, and only Jews, are ethno-supremacists who support settler colonialism (manifestly untrue.)

Neither were all Jews Bolsheviks or finance capitalists, though the Nazis would have had you believe they were. Likewise, The Globe and Mail would have you believe that all Jews in Canada are ardent Zionists and die-hard supporters of Israel. In point of fact, all Jews do not support an ideology and regime of ethnoreligious exclusion and rule over colonized natives and many of those who do support these abominations are not Jews. There is, therefore, no necessary connection between Jew and Zionist.

We can look at this another way.

Despite the Nazis’ self-appointment as representatives and champions of the German race, anti-Nazism was not hatred of Germans. Anti-Nazism=anti-German is an obvious logical fallacy, but one Nazis were happy to promote.

Likewise, despite Israel’s self-appointment as representative and champion of the world’s Jews, anti-Zionism is not hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism=anti-Jew is also an obvious fallacy, but it is one, all the same, that Israel and its supporters are indefatigably keen to propagandize.

Having no other argument to make—how can one argue that settler colonialism and its offspring, apartheid and genocide, are good things?—Zionists reliably fall back on the myth that Nazis relied on to defend their own settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide: Anyone who rejects the ethno-supremacist ideology I’ve adopted as self-appointed representative of my ethnic group, is obviously against my ethnic group.

Germans didn’t appoint the Nazis to represent their “race.” Nor did all Germans support the Nazis. Saying that all Germans were Nazis and that opposition to the Third Reich therefore amounted to demonizing Germans, is plainly absurd. It’s also a slur against Germans.

And yet this is precisely the argument Zionists, no less the Globe and Mail editorial board, make when they equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

The world’s Jews didn’t appoint Israel to represent them. Not all Jews support Zionism. (And most of the world’s Zionists are not Jews, but evangelical Christians. For example, CUFI, Christians United for Israel, has more members than all the Jews in the United States.) Saying that all Jews are Zionists and that criticism of Zionism is therefore demonization of Jews is no less absurd than saying all Germans were Nazis and anti-Nazism is demonization of Germans.

The truth of the matter is that Israel and its Zionist ideology are bleeding support, and the pro-settler colonial, apartheid, anti-Palestinian Israel lobby is trying to stop the hemorrhaging. Their answer: Invent a crisis of antisemitism, blame it on anti-Zionism, and press governments to implement laws and practices to silence activists calling for the decolonization and de-Zionization of historic Palestine.

Plus ca change. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, The Globe and Mail strongly supported apartheid South Africa and opposed the ANC, Nelson Mandela, and the liberation movement. Had it been able to, it might have argued that the prime ministers of the day should have dressed down ANC supporters, telling them that: ‘If you oppose the apartheid regime’s existence, you demonize white-Canadians.’” The newspaper, the organ of Bay Street, Canada’s financial center, will, it seems, forever be on the wrong side of history.

B’nai Brith Canada Invents a Crisis of Antisemitism to Pressure Governments to Criminalize Political Opposition to Israel

B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia in order to press Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist political positions.

30 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 27 B’nai Brith Canada issued its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, arguing that “Canada is in the throes of a national crisis of antisemitism.” The report documented 6,800 incidents of antisemitism” in 2025, the “highest volume recorded” since the group began its tracking in 1982.

What is B’nai Brith, how does it define antisemitic incidents, and what actions does it want governments to take to address the crisis it has identified?

B’nai Brith is a pro-Israel lobby group which “works tirelessly to support and defend Israel” and whose mission is to “stand unequivocally with the State of Israel,” according to its website. The group does not represent Canadian Jews as a whole. Not all Canadian Jews are Zionists or supporters of Israel. Instead, the outfit represents Israel and Jews in Canada who stand firmly with the Jewish state.

Significantly, B’nai Brith describes its support for Israel as “unequivocal.” It backs Israel, right or wrong. In 1988, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Then US president George H.W. Bush refused to apologize for the incident, saying that “I will never apologize for America.” B’nai Brith is the George W. Bush of Israel. It will never apologize for what it calls “the only Jewish state in the world.”

The group’s commitment to defending Israel is evidenced in its definition of antisemitism. The organization uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, prepared by an outfit that is as ardently pro-Israel as the B’nai Brith.  The IHRA definition has been widely criticized for 1) not being a definition at all, but a list of examples of what the group calls antisemitism, with no explanation of the principles than undergird the examples; and 2) for including anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel in three of its 11 examples.

The IHRA cites the following as an example of Jew hatred: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” While anti-Zionists do not deny Jews the right to establish a state per se, they do deny Jews (and anyone else for that matter) the right to establish a national state on the country of another people. Israel’s existence depends on the non-existence of Palestine. In practice, Jewish self-determination is equivalent to the denial of Palestinian self-determination.

A careful and precise interpretation of the IHRA example above would exclude anti-Zionism as an example of antisemitism were an anti-Zionist willing to accept the creation of a Jewish state on a genuine terra nullius (unoccupied, unclaimed land). Indeed, I would argue that virtually all anti-Zionists fall into this category, since their opposition to Jewish nationalism lies not in Jews creating a state, but in the cancelation of one people’s right of self-determination (the Palestinians’) to assert another’s (that of Jews).

However, it is clear from the B’nai Brith report that the organization has interpreted the IHRA example to mean that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The report describes criticism of Zionism, (e.g., that “Zionism is analogous to “settler colonialism”) as “demonization of Jews who believe in the right of the Jewish people to practice self-determination in their ancestral homeland,” and that this criticism, or “demonization”, creates “a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community.”

I would make a few points in reply:

  • Jews, to be sure, did have a state in Palestine in antiquity. But the Palestinians’ ancestral claim to the same land is equally strong. Indeed, it seems likely that today’s Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who lived in Palestine in antiquity, and were converted to Islam during the Muslim Expansion of the seventh century.
  • Palestine was the ancestral homeland of many peoples. That Jews once had a state there does not negate the rights of other peoples who have also had a presence in the same territory. The Palestinians, significantly, have an unbroken, multi-millennial presence in the land.
  • Criticism of Zionism does not create a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community. The categories Zionist and Jew are no more coterminous than are the categories Zionism and Judaism. There are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jews, let alone Jewish Zionists. And not all Jews are Zionists; some are ardently anti-Zionist. Zionist and Jew are not the same. Criticism of Zionists is not equal to criticism of Jews. Likewise, criticism of Zionism is different from criticism of Judaism; one is a nationalist ideology, the other a religion.

It is likely that a majority of Jews in Canada support Israel and hold Zionist views. Based on this reality, B’nai Brith advances the sophistical argument that criticism of Zionism and Israel amounts to criticism of Jews (again, illegitimately conflating Jew and Zionist), and that, therefore, this criticism amounts to antisemitism. The argument is tantamount to claiming that anti-Nazism, at the height of the Nazi’s popularity, was an expression of hatred of Germans as a people. Only if one conflates Nazism with German ethnicity can this sleight of hand be pulled off.

Other indications that B’nai Brith defines anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian positions as antisemitism:

  1. The pro-Zionist organization objects to pro-Palestinian student clubs at Canadian universities celebrating Palestinian resistance, decrying armed Palestinian resistance as “terrorism.” As an organization that stands unequivocally with Israel, we can be sure that the B’nai Brith regards the Irgun and Stern Gang—Jewish insurgent groups which, from 1931 to 1948, practiced terrorism in Palestine—as groups that resisted British colonialism.  Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and the British preferred to call them terrorists, even fascists. Of course, one can be a resistance fighter and use terrorist methods, as much as a state can be a state and practice terrorism, Israel being an emblematic case. The categories are not mutually exclusive.
  • The pro-Israel group objects to the use of the terms “massacre” and “genocide” by Canadian journalists reporting on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and deplores the Canadian media’s “focus on civilian casualties and humanitarian imagery” along with the “presentation of casualty figures.” Moreover, it defines the following headlines as examples of anti-Israel media bias linked to antisemitism:
  • “Israel killing journalists and getting away with it, say advocates.”
  • “More than 400 dead in Gaza as Israel makes ‘extensive’ strikes ending ceasefire, standoff.”
  • “Winnipeggers rally to condemn Israel’s attacks on Iran, humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The points above make clear that the B’nai Brith is little more than a pro-Israel public relations outfit that objects to any and all criticism of Israel, and seeks to neutralize opposition to the state it tirelessly defends and stands by unequivocally by smearing the state’s opponents as Jew haters.  In the organization’s view, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and Israel-critical positions are antisemitic by definition. Political positions are cast as expressions of irrational hatred. When it reports that there is a crisis of antisemitism in Canada, what the Israel lobby group really means is that there is a growing tide of opposition to Zionism, hostility to Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians, and intolerance of Israel’s character as an ethno-supremacist, apartheid, state.

Name-calling critics of Israel and anti-Zionists as anti-Semites is fairly harmless.  But B’nai Brith has no intention of stopping at traducing Israel’s opposition. Its real intention is to pressure Canadian governments at all levels to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist positions by portraying them as hate-speech.

The pro-Israel lobby group calls on the:

  • Federal government to designate the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations;
  • Provincial and territorial governments to prosecute antisemitic hate crimes, which, given the organization’s broad definition of antisemitic hate, includes any expression of opposition to Jewish nationalist ideology and ethno-supremacism and all support for pro-Palestinian positions;
  • Municipal authorities to ban “events that promote hatred”, by which it means pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist events, including Al Quds Day.

To understand how dishonest both the B’nai Brith and its report are, consider what a pro-Palestinian report would look like if it mimicked the pro-Israeli lobby group’s approach. It would define denial of a Palestinian right of self-determination on the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland as anti-Palestinian hatred. Denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization; denying the Nakba as a genocide; disputing the stamp of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal; dismissing as false or exaggerated reports of torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons; denouncing the October 7 attacks as acts of terrorism rather a campaign of national liberation; rejecting the reality of Israeli apartheid; all of these–in other words, adopting the B’nai Brith’s own political positions—would be defined as hate speech rather than political speech. The media would be censured for describing October 7 as a massacre and focusing on Jewish casualties, as well as for failing to place Palestinian atrocities within the appropriate context. Media “bias” would be blamed for an avalanche of anti-Palestinian hate incidents. Finally, the report would call on governments at all levels to criminalize political speech that is critical of the Palestinian cause.

Canadians might think of the B’nai Brith as a Jewish advocacy group that works to overcome antisemitism. In reality, it is a pro-Israel lobby group that uses antisemitism as a weapon to smear people and organizations that oppose its pro-Israel political positions. The outfit poses as a representative of all Jews in Canada, but is, on the contrary, only a champion of Israel and Zionists, not Jews and Judaism. Its self-avowed mission is to work “tirelessly to support and defend Israel”, which it does, in part, by attacking opponents of Israel as antisemites, using a definition of Jew-hatred that includes opposition to Israel and the nationalist ideology on which the state is founded.

There is no crisis of antisemitism in Canada. The “crisis” is a myth invented by the Zionist outfit to pressure Canadian governments, at all levels, to criminalize pro-Palestinian positions and anti-Zionist advocacy—that is political speech—as hate speech. B’nai Brith must be resisted, exposed for the pro-Israel lobby group it truly is, and contained as a menace to the right of political advocacy.