Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the United States has, over the past year, consistently violated international norms and laws. The rollercoaster of tariff barriers, the sham negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and the declaration of a false “ceasefire” with Israel, all while openly musing about turning Gaza into “oceanfront property”, would have been bad enough on their own.

But in just the past couple of months, the US has bombed Nigeria to “defend” Christians, invaded Venezuela and arrested its president, Nicolás Maduro, after months of blowing up Venezuelan boats in international waters, and openly threatened Iran, Greenland, and Mexico with military intervention.

Within the US, Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has continued to carry out extralegal harm in the process of fulfilling his promise of mass deportations. Since the start of 2026, federal immigration officers have shot and killed at least three US citizens: 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. in California, and 37-year-olds Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Both Good and Pretti were killed on camera, in incidents recorded from multiple angles, intensifying public outrage over the expanding use of lethal force by federal immigration agencies.

If this were almost any other country, like Iran, with its repressive and indiscriminate killing of thousands of protesters over the past month, the Western-led international community would already be calling for sanctions and embargoes against the US. But in light of US threats and actions at home and abroad, the world now needs to take a page from the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. The world needs to boycott and divest from US corporations, US-made products, and US-led events.

Short of civil strife, civil war, or military action, there is no other way for the world to disrupt US aggression except through massive economic pressure. While on a considerably smaller scale, King and so many other Black people in the 1950s understood that........

© Al Jazeera