The Threat from America

America is not our enemy, but it's a danger to itself and the world

A note on who I am and what I’m doing: I’m an investigative journalist who exposed the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and New York Times and I believe that we are in the grip of a new form of power: Broligarchy. The alliance of Silicon Valley, the US state and a global axis of autocracy is a threat that I’m committed to exposing.

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I woke up this morning with a clear idea of something I wanted to write before ‘back to school’ Monday. But then I opened my phone and saw that the USA has gone full rogue state.

And since I started writing this, President Trump has claimed responsibility for a series of explosions on military bases across Venezuela. Even more extraordinarily, he announced via his social media platform, Truth Social, that he’s captured President Maduro and his wife and exfiltrated them to the US.

All while America slept.

What happens next is critical. Not in the US, your news cycle today is going to be a roiling thunderdome of noise. The US army uses the language of “theaters of war” but this is military theater. A son-et-lumière spectacular crossed with an action movie. Regime change meets the Bourne Identity. I have zero doubt that there will be POV real-time helmet footage from the stormtroopers who lifted him, and that it will be crack cocaine to cable news bulletins and social media algorithms. God knows what is waiting for Maduro in the US but your news cycle is going to be flooded by this for weeks; held in a chokehold that will block all other sources of heat and light.

The east coast is waking up and Trump has scheduled a press conference for 11am ET and I wish my poor American friends the very best of luck as they try to process what is happening in the face of a wall of jingoistic propaganda and false narratives.

(And this isn’t even to mention what lies in wait for the poor people of Venezuela.)

But in America, the next 24 hours and the days and weeks to follow will be a national gaslighting event. It will be claimed a criminal narco regime has been busted by the US and the people must celebrate. Notice the language in Trump’s tweet. This isn’t an illegal invasion or even a military action. It’s “law enforcement”.

Update: after writing that paragraph, AG Pam Bondi released a criminal indictment for Nicolas Maduro on “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and other Byzantine charges. He will “soon face the full wrath of American justice”, another not-exactly-legal term.

(If you want to understand the real background to this attack, there’s a gift link here to a pretty comprehensive Dec 27 NY Times article on why Trump is attacking Venezuela and how this has been mapped out over the past year. TLDR: political expediency fomented by two of his closest consiglieri, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a Venezuela hawk, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration overlord who’s embraced the chance to go after an entire demographic.)

But it’s the rest of the world that should concern us.

America cannot constrain its president right now. It’s been almost impossible to pick Trump’s ‘worst’ acts, but the strikes on “narco boats”, aka murdering people without any form of due process in extrajudicial executions have to be up there.

The fact is there are no real checks on Trump’s power right now. Some of the courts are still holding on some of the executive orders but he’s invaded a foreign state on the bogus pretext of “law enforcement” presumably to bypass Congress’s approval and if this doesn’t ram home what it means to be governed by a rogue, out of control president, then what will?

And if it doesn’t, if that isn’t the narrative that wins through, what will that tell us about the state of the US news and information ecosystem? The next days and weeks are a test. What, if anything, will survive the blast zone of what is not just a military campaign but a targeted disinformation strike?

What the US needs to understand is that hybrid warfare isn’t simply a weapon used between and against states. It’s a strategy being deployed by your very own government. This is both kinetic warfare - bombs and missiles - and information warfare - false constructs, false narratives, false justifications.

A mass propaganda event is about to engulf the US and what, if anything survives it, will be a lesson for our times.

But it’s what the rest of the world does now that’s key.

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The Rest of the World

This should precipitate a whole new global crisis. It’s an unprovoked military assault on a sovereign nation in breach of international law. What should worry us more is if it doesn’t. The US bombed Nigeria at some point over the Christmas break and it barely broke the sound-news barrier.

How Europe and “the west” responds to Trump now and the actions that governments take downstream from that is going to set the path for 2026. Because Trump isn’t just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in.

Key to all of this is understanding that US companies are explicitly going to be used to enforce US national security interests. And that includes the US technology companies that are at the heart of our national infrastructure and embedded into our everyday lives.

The attack on Venezuela couldn’t be a clearer example of “when someone tells you who they are, believe them”. Trump has set out America’s new place in the world, in the startling new US National Security Strategy document. It’s only the third day of January, but Trump has made it absolutely clear that this new world order is already under way.

I was in Colombia a couple of weeks before Christmas and was with Jaime Abello Banfi, the director of the Gabo Foundation, a brilliant nonprofit set up by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, when the National Security Strategy was published.

He pointed out all the language in the document that clearly set out the US’s intention to treat Latin America not even as its sphere of interest; more like its property. Its stated number one priority is “the Western hemisphere”. It’s a manifesto that sets out US dominance of the Americas, including its governments, through military, commercial and other means with the unquestioned support of all US private companies.

“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity - a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

This isn’t just about Venezuela or even its near neighbours, and not even about just Canada and Greenland, the ramifications of this document and this strategy are of consequence for us all.

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When someone tells you who they are

When someone tells you who they are believe them. Donald Trump has told us what is coming for Europe. It’s the same language of regime change that he’s using for the Americas.

Here, it’s not even just about America’s national security or economic interests. The USA has a self-defined responsibility to prevent “civilizational erasure”. The continent is under threat from migration, the EU, and “free speech censorship”.

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

What we can see in Venezuela is how the US prepared over months for this moment: from deporting Venezuelan nationals to inhumane incarceration in El Salvador to the strikes on fishing vessels to blockading Venezuelan ports. And, what we need to see clearly is that a process has already begun in support of US foreign policy goals in Europe.

Those policy goals include the election of “patriotic European parties”.

And as he points out in the National Security Strategy document, Trump has so many tools at his disposal.

I woke up this morning, before I’d seen any of this, thinking about just one of them. And that’s where I want to end this. The UK government has been embarking on a disastrous and suicidal set of deals with US tech companies. I’ve written about that and will continue to write about that because it’s a five-alarm fire that almost no-one in parliament seems to understand.

But what we’ve also learned is that Trump has a new weapon to use against anyone who stands in his way. On the night before Christmas Eve, Trump sanctioned five European citizens involved in disinformation policy and research. I wrote about that here but what I hadn’t realised when that news dropped is what “sanctions” mean in an age when so much of our lives are dependent on US technology platforms.

Trump has already sanctioned six judges from the International Criminal Court and one of them, Nicholas Guillou, gave an interview to Le Monde in which he set out what that meant to his life.

This is the power that the US government can bring to bear on any individual anywhere in the world engaged in any activity it considers contrary to its national interest.

In my last newsletter, I wrote pretty personally about my efforts to overcome the attempts to silence my voice and prevent my work because I think they’re directly relevant to what lies ahead. (And thank you so much to very many kind and supportive comments: thank you thank you.)

I did so because what happens to me will happen to you.

And I’ve been thinking about this latest, newest weapon because the targeted individuals come from a small community that tracks and investigates and attempts to regulate tech platforms; a community I’m part of.

And because my journalistic activity could be defined as contrary to the US national interest, certainly to the economic interests of its biggest companies.

And currently my income comes from this newsletter hosted on a US technology platform whose revenues come via a US payment provider. I feel the chill winds of that precarity. Just as I’ve felt the chill winds of reporting on Russian disinformation and sabotage. There is no difference.

On Christmas Eve, I said that America is not our enemy. It’s not. We need a transatlantic alliance more than ever, but it needs to be between peoples not states. Your state is out of control. Our state is frozen in craven ignorance. And we’re all, governments and people too, in a state of dangerous denial.

PS I know there are alternatives to Substack. I went into this with eyes wide open and this certainly brings that into focus. But it’s the larger point I’m trying to make here. Note too that even some of the “alternative” technology platforms such as Bluesky are American.