When Push Comes to Shove…

– by Nora Hoppe and first posted at – Al Mayadeen English

The dawn of this new year was pierced by brutal lucidity. The lid has been lifted from the Deep State of the Barbarian Empire, revealing not a fathomless conspiracy, but something far more dangerous: a shallow, patent reality no longer in need of concealment. Those hoodwinked into believing the rogue would “drain the swamp” now face the truth: he has merely claimed it as his own.

The Emperor stands naked; so too does the Empire and its agenda. The pretence has been shed – the “clothing” of constitution, diplomacy, propriety, and law. Even the veneer of humanity is discarded. This is the raw predatory urge for appropriation… the time to let it all hang out and grab it all. Western colonialism, in its terminal phase, accelerates toward its climax.

The Barbarians of the administration have dispensed with subtlety. The invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its legitimate president, Nicolás Maduro, is but the first instalment in a planned series of depredations. The roster is brazenly drafted: Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Mexico, even Greenland – and those are only the “starters”. It is a prospectus for plunder.

Though revealing nothing new, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck laid bare the imperial primal instinct when he hailed the Venezuelan operation as, “The most ‘America First‘ thing I have ever seen.” His admission is succinct and perfect. For this is the true agenda: not merely the takeover of a hemisphere, but the securing of total planetary primacy. The trajectory is clear: cripple Iran, contain China, fracture Russia, and destroy the BRICS as a rival constellation. Venezuela is not an anomaly; it is the prototype.

Western Imperialism and its sidekick Zionism – itself a colonial project birthed and armed by the West

Owning the Western Hemisphere is but an initial phase. Western Asia must also be seized, and Iran is envisioned as the grand, final prize. The Zionese Twin “non-entity”, implacable in its ambition to foment a “Bellum Judaica” has already scored significant victories: securing the hollow normalization of the Abraham Accords and fostering the geopolitical fantasy of Somaliland – a cloudcuckooland existing solely to fracture the Horn of Africa.

Barbaria operates not only beyond borders but within. As recent revelations have confirmed, the Emperor’s own domestic militia, ICE, functions as a Zionese-Twin undercover operation. Overseen by the ADL, its mandate extends beyond migration to specifically target anti-Israel activists within Barbaria itself, with hundreds of IDF soldiers embedded as its agents. The internal security apparatus has been conscripted into a foreign campaign.

The mask has fallen because it must. Barbaria chokes under a debt that grows like a cosmological calamity, a financial black hole threatening to consume its own foundations. Simultaneously, it gags on the undeniable, sovereign rise of China and Russia, and on the global spectacle of states breaking their colonial yokes. The year 2026 thus finds the Empire at its critical juncture, cornered by its own decay and the world’s awakening. The calculation, now naked and desperate, is binary: All or Nothing.

The Great Conundrum: Containing a Raging Psychopath

Confronted with this blueprint for imminent global capture, a terrible question hangs over the world: how to organise an effective geopolitical counteroffensive without triggering a nuclear Armageddon? This is the precise and paralysing predicament now ensnaring the principal oppositional powers, Russia and China. The cost of action and the cost of inaction are both potentially apocalyptic.

Within alternative forums, condemnation echoes against their perceived hesitation. Where is the immediate, decisive response to the brazenness in Venezuela? Yet this critique, however understandable, overlooks the abyss. Would a conventional retaliation – a naval blockade met with a blockade, a seized diplomat met in kind – not be the very spark the Empire, in its death-throes arrogance, seeks to justify a final escalation? Is the wiser, if more agonising, strategy to let the flailing, moribund Empire continue its frantic lunge, exhausting itself into implosion?

The statesmen in Moscow and Beijing are not mere observers; they are tightrope-walkers suspended over the void, where every movement must be calculated to millimetric precision against a foe that revels in shaking the wire. Their required balancing act has reached a historical extreme. They must project unwavering deterrence while offering avenues for de-escalation; they must strengthen the sinews of the multipolar world – BRICS, the SCO, strategic partnerships – without providing a pretext for preemptive war. It is a grand and dreadful game of chicken, played with civilisations as the stakes.

The “Axis of Resistance”: Global or Bust

In a June 2022 interview, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro articulated its foundational creed: “All of us who fight to decolonize our minds and our people, are part of the Axis of Resistance that stands against the methods of the imperialists for imposing hegemony on the world.” He declared the 21^st century as the century of liberated peoples, of justice and truth, insisting, “Empires are in decline, and people’s projects for well-being, development and greatness have just begun.”

This vision was affirmed in Tehran, where Ayatollah Khamenei identified resistance as the sole counter to American hybrid warfare. That was 2022. Since then, cooperation among targeted states has deepened, and more nations have cast off the colonial yoke. The world has witnessed staggering, soul-forging courage: in the rubble of Gaza, the trenches of Donbass, the mountains of Yemen, and the fields of the Special Military Operation. This resistance inspires, yet the decisive, systemic counterpunch against the Empire remains suspended, held in a terrible limbo.

Why this suspension? The United Nations stands exposed as a theatre of the impotent. A cohesive global alternative is not yet born. BRICS+, for all its promise, is riven by internal conflicts and members – like the UAE – whose allegiances lie with capital, not cause. In other nations, populations of fierce resolve are betrayed by comprador elites. And as established, the great power guardians of multipolarity, Russia and China, are trapped in a bind where the wrong move could mean the Apocalypse.

The institutional pathways are blocked. The diplomatic avenues are mined. So what is left?

The solution, it now appears, does not lie with statesmen or institutions. It lies with the only force the Empire cannot finally corral or corrupt: the People themselves. The global People. For the true, existential enemy of the Imperial elite is not a rival state, but the awakened multitude whose labour they exploit and whose sovereignty they deny. The leaderships are either tied or complicit. The People are not.

It was a People’s Resistance that expelled the empire from Vietnam. It is a People’s Resistance that remains unbowed in Gaza, unyielding in Yemen, and rising across the Sahel. Their power does not stem from stealth fighters or financial sanctions. Their weapons are more profound, more durable, and ultimately ineradicable. And what are these powerful weapons?

The revolutionary optimism of a Ho Chi Minh was neither naivety nor mere sentiment. It was a disciplined force, forged in a profound belief in the people, in national unity, and in the global anti-colonial struggle. It viewed hardship as temporary, victory as inevitable through perseverance, and drew its power from a deep moral dedication – a willingness to live simply and sacrifice personally for a collective ideal. This optimism also possessed a spiritual dimension: a unifying belief in something nobler than material supremacy and individual gratification, the very antithesis of the aggressor’s creed.

Today, the struggle has escalated to a planetary scale. The threat is no longer merely colonial subjugation, but potential annihilation. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro declared, the moment demands action over words, insisting that the genocidal logic unleashed on Gaza and the Caribbean targets “all of humanity that demands freedom”. The need is no longer for national liberation alone, but for a global uprising – a coordinated defence of the Global Majority.

This forces upon us the ultimate question: how is such an international front to be built? Leaders must arise organically from the People. Networks must be woven – between local activists, anti-imperialist movements, independent journalists, and alternative media – transcending borders to form a new digital and moral geography. The weapons are at hand: solidarity, non-cooperation, general strikes, and the relentless truth-telling that shatters imperial narratives.

Yet, the great unknown remains. How far can the world be pushed before fragmentation yields to fusion? How can Peoples, isolated by design, weave their separate strands of resistance into an unbreakable collective front? The Axis of Resistance must become global, or it will cease to be. The imperative is clear. The path to its realisation is written not here, but in the courage yet to be forged. The final question hangs in the air, awaiting its answer in history: When push comes to shove, who will finally – and together – shove back?