Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

The United States of Betrayal

Turning on our allies has always been the American way.

Donald Trump — America’s self-proclaimed “peace president,” head of the world’s newly created Board of Peace, and the recipient of the first FIFA Peace Prize — has nonetheless been embroiled in more than 20 wars, interventions, and conflicts. And more loom on the horizon. Cuba remains on the chopping block. He began threatening Greenland, again. And Guatemala agreed to joint military operations with the U.S. against cartels.

People in these countries will have a choice to make: Throw in with the Trump administrationm or resist. In Venezuela, resident quisling Delcy Rodríguez acts as a puppet of Trump’s viceroy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and serves at his pleasure. A U.S. criminal indictment alleging corruption and money laundering charges hangs above her head, and Trump has threatened to attack again if she does not comply with his whims. If history is any guide, Rodríguez will be cashiered or worse once she outlives her usefulness.

For centuries, the United States has been double-crossing allies, selling out partners, and sacrificing innocent people without compunction. Recently, Iranian civilians avoided certain slaughter by ignoring Trump’s self-serving lies. Every potential ally, partner, and collaborator from Latin America to Greenland would be wise to follow their lead, assume the worst of America, and learn from the history of U.S. betrayals that has left a trail of suffering from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch.

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Trump Adds to America’s Lethal Legacy of Treachery

Who can even remember it now? That giddy moment less than five months ago when President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and take on the ruling regime. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. America is backing you with overwhelming strength,” Trump promised on February 28. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

Like a million Trump pledges before it, it was part bluster, part bullshit. Last week, Trump admitted as much, stating he knew the Iranian opposition had no chance against the ruling regime. “Nobody is gonna take over. They have no guns, and the other side has machine guns,” he said at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They can’t take over because they’re dead.” This was not, however, just a routine Trumpian lie; it was also part of a grand American tradition.

They say baseball is America’s national pastime, but you could make a solid case that it’s actually betrayal. Washington loves nothing more than to sell out its friends, betray its partners, leave its allies in a lurch, and call people into the streets and then abandon them to slaughter.

Ahmadinejad Is Still Bad for Iranians — and Still Great for Israel

In an interview with the Washington Post on the Iran war’s first day, Trump said that “freedom for the people” of Iran was the goal of the conflict. It never was. But what would be lost in luring Iranian activists into the streets — aside from Iranian lives?

This type of lethal double-cross has been America’s stock-in-trade since its infancy — and has continued across the globe no matter the conflict, era, or president.

During the American Revolution, most Native peoples viewed America’s colonial rebels with skepticism and attempted to remain neutral or sided with the British. But some placed a bet on the revolutionaries, assuming that they would be rewarded with fair, if not preferential, treatment in the event of a win by the colonies. They were, in the end, wrong to assume their allies would act honorably.

The Oneida, for example, split from most of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and others — who allied with the British. “There would have probably been a lot more death for the Continental Army,” according to Heather Bruegl, a public historian and citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin who noted that the Oneida altered the tide of the war by breaking the famine at Valley Forge.

Even the Pentagon lauds the Oneida Nation, noting its “support for American independence saw the Continental Army through its lowest point in the Revolutionary War” but admitted that while Congress offered thanks, “that gratitude did not always translate into equitable treatment.” This is nothing but a mealy-mouthed reference to the fact that at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Oneida Homelands were estimated at between five to six million acres of land but were reduced to just 32 acres by the early 1900s.

Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire 

The Lenape people also threw in with the American rebels, signing a treaty that pledged their backing to the nascent United States in exchange for protection and the creation of a 14th state, governed by Native Americans. The agreement fell apart within weeks. As the official State Department history puts it:

First, the Lenape leader White Eyes died. While American officials insisted White Eyes died from smallpox as the cause, evidence indicated members of the [colonial] militia murdered him, and the........

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