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THE ISLANDER

Jan 3

https://x.com/IslanderWORLD/status/2001460749277798408

So here we are watching the rules (for thee but not me) based order perform its favorite magic trick, of turning performative flexing of might into virtue by simply narrating it as law.

The United States has kidnapped Venezuela’s sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, via an operation carried out by Delta Force and removed them from the country.
The choreography matters. The message matters more: we can reach into your capital, take your head of state, and call it “justice.” But hey, we'll own that it's about oil and minerals in the next breath, so at least we are honest bandits

And the world is meant to accept it because the banner says narco-terror and the megaphone says freedom.

But strip the branding off and you’re left with something brutally simple, a doctrine of unilateral capture, the right claimed by one state to arrest another state’s leader by force, without a UN mandate, and without an authorization of war by any recognized international mechanism. This sets an extremely dangerous precedent and raises serious questions under the UN Charter.

And that’s the point isn’t it?

Because rules for thee but not for me, isn’t a slogan anymore. It's long established Imperial hypocrisy.

For weeks, Washington has been tightening the maritime noose, seizing tankers, escalating interdictions, floating the language of blockade (armada) while insisting it’s something softer, something cleaner, something that doesn’t smell like an act of war. Yet international law is not fooled by euphemisms. A blockade is a blockade and blockade is specifically listed as a paradigmatic use of force in the legal logic of warfare.

So when Washington behaves like a global coast guard with a private statute book, siezing ships, choking ports, “quarantining” a sovereign country’s commerce, the legal argument from much of the non-West is straightforward: this isn’t law enforcement; it’s coercion by force. An illegal act of aggression.

And now, with Maduro reportedly seized, the “quarantine” graduates into the purest expression of that gangsterism logic... if we can’t reshape your politics through ballots, and we can’t squeeze you through sanctions alone, we’ll reach in and remove the human hinge of the state.

and that is a doctrine of permissible abduction and every American adversary with means will use the precedent.

The Taiwan mirror

Now zoom out, because the Venezuela episode is not isolated. It’s part of the same imperial grammar used everywhere else:

When China conducts drills around Taiwan, like it's "Justice Mission 2025" drill, Washington frames it as “aggression.” But Washington’s own legal posture is far more hypocritical and laughable than its outrage suggests.

The U.S. position, spelled out in its by its acceptance of the One China policy, is that it recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China and “acknowledges” (but does not endorse) the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China. Even when U.S. messaging shifts on the margins, Washington continues to insist it remains committed to its One China policy.

Essentially Washington wants the ambiguity of a lawyer and the outrage of a revolutionary at the same time. It wants to “acknowledge” a claim when it’s convenient, then behave as if it never acknowledged it when it wants leverage.

And here’s the consequence: if you accept the U.S. legal posture as written, then Chinese drills in waters and skies surrounding territory it claims are not foreign adventurism, they are operations in its own strategic perimeter, which the US acknowledges in accepting the One China policy.

Part 2/2👇

https://x.com/IslanderWORLD/status/2001460749277798408

Part 2/2 Meanwhile, the same Washington that lectures Beijing about “stability” as it tightened a maritime blockade on Venezuela and now boasts of physically removing its leader.
So which is more destabilizing: drills around China's perimeter, or the normalization of leader-snatch operations? The US just handed China the precedent on a silver platter, though the difference is China will have a legal case. The US told China to stay out of its backyard with Venezuela (that's a big backyard) China will not for a second entertain lectures from a hypocritical US administration.

And then, right on cue, the Empire’s sacred props arrive... the anointed “democracy champion,” the foreign applause, the ready-made transitional script.

María Corina Machado, foreign agent, been elevated on the world stage, and handed (not awarded) the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, the imperial participation trophy. Her allies are now openly celebrating the capture of Maduro as an “hour of freedom.”

From the Global Majority's lens, this is the familiar script of international prizes and recognition as priming the audience for regime change, a moral lacquer applied to an illegal kidnapping operation. The halo always arrives after the target list is pre-written.

Now, you can dislike Maduro. You can detest Caracas’s governance. None of that settles the core point: external capture-by-force alongside externally curated leadership is not “self-determination.” It is the old imperial script with modern branding.

When you continue to normalize unilateral force as “justice,” then you have replaced international law with a hierarchy of impunity. But at least 3 can play that game.

That’s why Russia and China keep dragging the argument back to first principles: sovereignty, non-intervention, and the prohibition on the use of force except under tightly constrained conditions. They’re invoking the logic the post-1945 order is supposed to rest on.

For the US and its European gang of cowering vassals, you cannot claim the mantle of international law while behaving as if it is a menu. You cannot preach against spheres of influence while enforcing one with warships. If you want your Monroe doctrine get ready for Russia and China's version, and don't about the natural consequences of your own actions. You cannot lecture and sanction others for “provocations” while executing the most provocative act of all: turning soverign heads of state into exportable prisoners.

If leader-capture becomes normalized, the world becomes an arena of legitimized kidnapping. And once that door opens, it doesn’t stay “Western-only” for long, not when the global balance of power has shifted, not when combined Eurasian and Global South capacity dwarfs that of the West, let alone declining EU.

So yes... might makes right, until it doesn’t.

Because once leader-capture, maritime strangulation, and selective legality are normalized, the world does not slide gently into chaos, it hardens into and accepts it. Law becomes costume, sovereignty becomes conditional, and power stops pretending it needs permission. The lecture circuit ends not with applause or rebuttal, but with silence, the kind that follows when every capital understands the same thing at once, that the hunt has been legitimized. And in a world where abduction is policy and force writes precedent, the next knock will not be answered with arguments, but with fire.

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THE ISLANDER

@IslanderWORLD

Dec 15, 2025

A look back at RFK Jr. detonating the West’s biggest geopolitical lie

He said what no U.S. politician was allowed to say out loud, that the war in Ukraine didn’t begin in 2022. It didn’t even begin in 2014. It began in 1990, with a betrayal so foundational it fractured the architecture of European peace, and laid the groundwork for everything that followed: NATO’s Eastward march, Ukraine’s ruin, and the hybrid war now convulsing the world.

That year, the Soviet Union withdrew 450,000 troops from East Germany. Not a skirmish, not a bargain for territory, a full-scale strategic, agreed upon pullout. In exchange, U.S. officials gave their word: “Not one inch eastward.” That wasn’t propaganda, it was documented. In declassified U.S. memoranda, diplomatic cables, and NATO meeting records, Secretary of State James Baker, President George H.W. Bush, UK Prime Minister John Major, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and NATO’s own Secretary General all echoed the same line, no NATO expansion beyond Germany.

They didn’t write it into a treaty, not because the promise lacked weight, but because the plan was never to keep it. That was the brilliance of the deception, get Gorbachev to demobilize, to open space and fill it later with missiles, bases, and encircle Russia.

Gorbachev didn’t completely misread the West. He misread the moment. He naively believed the Cold War had ended, a handshake, not a handover. But Washington didn’t see peace. It saw a unipolar window, a brief chance to rewrite history (a la end of history), redraw borders, and neuter its only true civilizational rival before it could ever rise again. The promise wasn’t broken out of negligence. It was a calculated maneuver, a velvet deception, designed to coax the Soviet Union into disarming itself so the West could encircle what remained.

What followed wasn’t diplomacy. It was conquest through delay.

NATO crept east by over a thousand miles. Fourteen countries absorbed. Missiles moved in. Exercises in the Baltics. Airfields in Poland. Radar stations in Romania. The ring tightened, and every Russian protest was mocked as paranoia, even as the alliance that promised not to move was building an offensive perimeter around Moscow.

And then came Ukraine.

RFK Jr. is one of a few American figures with the clarity to connect what happened next. Because behind the flags, hashtags, and televised appeals for “democracy,” this war was never about defending sovereignty. It’s about laundering money, and laundering the collapse of the old world order through a fire that someone else has to die in.

Congress authorized a couple hundred billions in “aid.” That aid didn't go to Ukrainian schools, hospitals, or pensions. It flows directly into the balance sheets of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, which delivered weapons in exchange for state contracts, then return the profits to their shareholders. And who holds the shares? BlackRock. Vanguard. State Street.

That’s layer one,the war as stimulus. Layer two is much worse.

Ukraine was never meant to be rebuilt. It was meant to be collateral.

Because while the war raged, the West was already sketching the post-war carve-up. In 2022, Ukraine signed an agreement with BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory to manage its “recovery framework.” Translation: BlackRock would help structure the incoming capital, loans, and investments needed to rebuild the country, under the friendly guidance of those who also hold Ukraine’s war debt.

This was the endgame, Ukraine’s future mortgaged to pay for its destruction.

Part 2/2 In the fantasy sold to Western publics, Ukraine would win. Then rebuild. Then integrate with Europe. In reality, the loans are unpayable (it never was meant to be repaid by fiat, looting Ukraine's national assets was the game), the infrastructure is gone, the population is evicerated, and the vulture investors are circling, not to save the country, but to harvest it. With one hiccup, that of a Russian victory.

The recovery plan was never humanitarian. It was a boardroom playbook. BlackRock structures the loans. McKinsey fills in the spreadsheets. Monsanto patents the seeds. Bayer owns the soil. Cargill buys the silos. Halliburton draws the blueprints. Shell bids on the gas fields. This isn’t a Marshall Plan, but a leveraged buyout underwritten by the blood of a betrayed people.

And none of this could happen if Ukraine retained sovereignty. That’s why it had to be broken, politically, economically, militarily. And that’s exactly what happened.

In 2014, when Yanukovych refused to sign the EU Association Agreement, the deal that would’ve handed Ukraine’s trade, currency, and economic policy to Brussels, neocon Washington intervened. The color revolution on the Maidan was not a spontaneous cry for freedom. It was a regime change op, executed in the open. We have the receipts. In a now-infamous call, Victoria Nuland chose the new government in advance: “Yats is the guy.” The State Department picked the cabinet. Ukraine’s fate was decided from outside.

Then came Minsk, not a peace process, but a stall tactic. Merkel and Poroshenko both admitted Minsk was never designed to be enforced. It was meant to buy time. While Ukraine was pretending to negotiate, NATO was training troops, fortifying positions, preparing the battlefield.

But it backfired. Russia didn’t wait. And now the fantasy is in ruins.

Russia didn’t collapse. It fortified economic firewalls, building sovereign infrastructure like SPFS, its alternative to SWIFT, long before the West pulled the trigger. It turned over 19 rounds of EU sanctions into rocket fuel, catapulting itself to the rank of the world’s fourth-largest economy. Its economy realigned east. Its diplomacy expanded south. Its military might reestablished, and on the fronts that matter (missile and drone tech), surpassed Western parity. The plan, to use Ukraine as a spearhead to fracture Russia, then feed off the chaos, has failed. And for the Russophobes who sold it as strategy, the result is absolute humiliation.

Real decisions were made far from Kiev, in the embassy corridors of DC and London, where strategy is scripted by CIA and MI6 coordinators, and refined by Pentagon war planners and NATO’s forward command structures. The financial architecture is dictated by IMF technocrats, World Bank emissaries, and the ever-present calculus of BlackRock and global capital.

Narrative control outsourced to Atlantic Council affiliates, NGO apparatchiks, and the sprawling ecosystem of Western-funded “civil society” instruments whose real mandate is to simulate consent while neutralizing dissent. The language of democracy is retained, but only as a branding exercise.

And through it all, the Ukrainian people, courageous, exhausted, misled, continue to bleed, not for sovereignty, but for a geopolitical hallucination drafted in Western capitals.

Ukraine has already sold nearly 30% of its farmland to foreign conglomerates. It has traded its independence for a lie. It has outlawed opposition parties and extended martial law indefinitely. It is no longer a nation, it is a Western asset under hostile management.

This was never a war for democracy.

It was a war for markets, for access, for contracts, a war to secure the right of empire to loot without resistance.

But every empire dies the moment it forgets what its promises once meant.
And this one, bloated with nuclear debt, drowned in lies, choking on its own illusions, is already being buried under the betrayal it thought no one would remember.

Gorbachev didn’t walk away empty-handed. He was rewarded, not with security for Russians, but with standing ovations, glossy magazine covers, Pizza Hut, and... a Nobel Peace Prize granted not after peace had been secured, but while the West was still carving up the Soviet sphere. The prize was not for defending his nation’s future, but rather for facilitating its orderly liquidation. He was not deceived in silence. He gave away strategic depth, critical alliances, and economic sovereignty in exchange for personal gained. And when the consequences came – NATO expansion, national humiliation, and economic collapse, he offered no apology

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