By Jorge Elbaum on July 27, 2025
foto: AFP
In the last fifty years, after the Cold War, the United States led the international coalition known as the Gulf War between 1991 and 1992. It then led the invasion of Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021 and, almost simultaneously, the military occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2011. In its two and a half centuries of history—since its founding as a country in 1776—it has been at war for 228 years.
This consistent warmongering does not include sporadic bombings, such as the one recently carried out in Iran, or interventionist coup operations aimed at imposing puppet governments through association with domestic oligarchies. Without counting these latest forms of warmongering, which include the criminal blockade of Cuba for more than six decades, ninety percent of US history is associated with arrogant militarism and geopolitical blackmail.
The latest chapter in the imperial saga, after three decades of “wars on terror,” is the current battle against the People’s Republic of China, combined with the ethnic cleansing of migrant workers within the United States. In the first case, to prevent Beijing from becoming the world’s leading power. In the second, to purify American society of the dark pigmentation of Chicanos, cornered by poverty, armed conflict, and military coups driven by Washington. To legitimize both conflagrations, Donald Trump is resorting to an old toolbox used in the 1990s: the fight against drug trafficking. This time, the substance used to justify war is fentanyl.
Washington has constructed a new fallacy, analogous to the invention of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent chemical weapons. The White House’s lack of communicative creativity calls this toxic scourge a “weapon of mass destruction”: this time, the culprits are not Arabs, but Latin American immigrants and Chinese laboratories. The first victims will be accused of drug trafficking and hunted down in the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The second group—business and political figures from the rising Middle East—will be blamed for supplying the chemical precursors.
What the fentanyl regulations do not specify is the role of US pharmaceutical companies: they are the primary customers of Chinese laboratories, whose 5,000 firms (many of them private, with shareholdings from Western investment funds) produce 70 percent of all chemical precursors available globally.
In 2024, one-third of the new compounds authorized by US pharmaceutical companies were produced by Chinese biotechnology companies. In the last two decades, imports from US laboratories have grown by an average of nine percent per year. In the last year alone, they increased by 40 percent, reaching $315 billion, becoming the fifth largest import sector in the United States in 2024.
Trump’s rant also fails to mention the role of US laboratories, which invest around $120 million a year in lobbying Congress to prevent the passage of measures to restrict the supply of a huge business that has 40 percent of US society captive with legal psychiatric prescriptions. Around 10 percent of global GDP fuels the neoliberal brutality promoted by the West.
A fifth of all money laundering, from various crimes, becomes the engine of the US economy. Almost two centuries ago, the United Kingdom invaded China—in the name of free trade—because the Qing dynasty banned the sale of opium that the British brought from India to the Chinese coast. That period of history was engraved in the tradition of the Middle Kingdom as a time of shame and humiliation. “It will never happen again,” they say.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English