The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) retreat from Al-Aqtan prison, on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Raqqa, to Kobani, on January 23rd, 2026. AFP Photo
The offensive of the powerful against the people is growing in every corner of the planet. The United States and its regional allies are behind the numerous aggressions that have been occurring, which threaten to spread as long as there are no mechanisms capable of stopping them. Impunity is the rule in this period, in which the great powers are drawing a new global map tailored to their interests.
Since the Gaza genocide went completely unpunished, the floodgates of repression and violence against the people have been opened. The world’s ruling classes believe they can reverse the decline of their nation-states through military force. The long and terrible history of colonialism shows them the way.
In the few weeks of the new year, fierce offensives are being carried out against the Venezuelan, Iranian, and Kurdish peoples, in an escalation as rapid as it is devastating. Even within the United States, President Trump seems prepared to send 1,500 troops to quell the Minneapolis protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations, which resulted in the death of a woman days earlier. Regarding Venezuela, the strategy of strangulation continues, which, although aimed at ending the regime, primarily affects the population, condemning them to hunger in the hope that they will rise up against the government.
This is a strategy already being applied against other countries, with the Cuban people in the crosshairs of the Pentagon, which designs these methods of cornering entire populations. The situation in Iran is a tragedy that implicates the left due to its inexplicable silence. State repression appears to have claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people through an abominable crackdown that cannot be justified simply because the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom are instigating popular mobilization. This mobilization, though they deny it, is rooted in the deteriorating living conditions and persistent repression.
The Kurdish people are being brutally attacked by the jihadist regime governing Syria, with the collaboration of Turkey. In early January, they attacked Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo, forcing a retreat, and now they are targeting the autonomy of Rojava in the hope of eradicating the self-government process that the population has been developing for the past 14 years.
Apparently, there was an agreement between Turkey and Israel, with the approval of Washington and the European Union: Ankara accepts Tel Aviv’s control of southern Syria in exchange for free rein against Rojava, which is its strategic objective. The powers reject all agreements, put an end to a “peace process” that never got off the ground, and close down an imaginary Turkish crisis with the support of the collective West.
The Kurdish case illustrates how the powers and nation-states consider peoples as clay malleable by capitalist geopolitics. In reality, for oppressed peoples there has never been democracy or good governance, but rather the rigor of surveillance and control that now results in the blows with which the cavalry has always treated peoples who resisted. I believe this juncture compels us to reflect more broadly.
The great thinkers on war, although they acted in different eras and geographies and against diverse enemies, agree on some central aspects that have nothing to do with weapons and military technologies. For Sun Tzu, the first fundamental factor to consider is “moral influence,” by which he means that “the people are in harmony with their leaders.” Despite being a Prussian military officer, Carl von Clausewitz maintained that there is no force in the world more exceptional than the spirit of the people in arms, and that, alongside it, there are no superior technical or military means. He even went so far as to say that the people are the “god of war.”
Mao is more concrete and states, in his writings regarding the Japanese invasion of China, that “the mobilization of the entire people will form a vast sea to drown the enemy, create the conditions that will compensate for our inferiority, and other elements, and provide the prerequisites for overcoming all difficulties in war.”
In all cases, the people are the center, not a mere instrument or means to achieve ends. This centrality was later obscured by the left, both electoral and revolutionary, in an ethical drift that turns people into spectators or executors of decisions made by others. Once this principle is established, we can consider other aspects of war. Great military strategists agree that defense is superior to offense, a point of contention in the face of wars waged from above.
However, defense cannot be passive but must be “resistance and rebellion,” as the Zapatistas teach, since these are the conditions for changing the world when the winds blow against the people.
Original article by Raúl Zibechi, La Jornada, January 23rd, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.