Hello Locals members:

I wanted to make sure you are updated on what I regard as the exciting changes we announced on Friday night’s program, as well as the status of your current membership.

As most of you likely know, we announced on our Friday night show that that SYSTEM UPDATE episode would be the last one under the show’s current format (if you would like to watch it, you can do so here). As I explained when announcing these changes, producing and hosting a nightly video-based show has been exhilarating and fulfilling, but it also at times has been a bit draining and, most importantly, an impediment to doing other types of work that have always formed the core of my journalism: namely, longer-form written articles and deep investigations.

We have produced three full years of SYSTEM UPDATE episodes on Rumble (our premiere show was December 10, 2022). And while we will continue to produce video content similar to the kinds of segments that composed the show, they won’t be airing live every night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, but instead will be posted periodically throughout the week (as we have been doing over the last couple of months both on Rumble and on our YouTube channel here).

To enlarge the scope of my work, I am returning to Substack as the central hub for my journalism, which is where I was prior to launching SYSTEM UPDATE on Rumble. In addition to long-form articles, Substack enables a wide array of community-based features, including shorter-form written items that can be posted throughout the day to stimulate conversation among members, a page for guest writers, and new podcast and video features. You can find our redesigned Substack here; it is launching with new content on Monday.

For our current Locals subscribers, you can continue to stay at Locals or move to Substack, whichever you prefer. For any video content and long-form articles that we publish for paying Substack members, we will cross-post them here on Locals (for members only), meaning that your Locals subscription will continue to give you full access to our journalism. 

When I was last at Substack, we published some articles without a paywall in order to ensure the widest possible reach. My expectation is that we will do something similar, though there will be a substantial amount of exclusive content solely for our subscribers. 

We are working on other options to convert your Locals membership into a Substack membership, depending on your preference. But either way, your Locals membership will continue to provide full access to the articles and videos we will publish on both platforms.

Although I will miss producing SYSTEM UPDATE on a (more or less) nightly basis, I really believe that these changes will enable the expansion of my journalism, both in terms of quality and reach. We are very grateful to our Locals members who have played such a vital role over the last three years in supporting our work, and we hope to continue to provide you with true independent journalism into the future.

— Glenn Greenwald   

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has by far spent more time with President Trump than with any other world leader. Netanyahu, on Wednesday, will make his seventh visit to the U.S. since Trump’s second term began a little over a year ago, on top of the visit to Israel made by Trump in October. No other leader has visited the White House during Trump’s second term more than twice. The duo will once again meet at the White House.

The Israeli leader is traveling to Washington this time in order to impose as onerous conditions as possible on Trump’s desire to sign a deal with Iran that would avert a second U.S. attack on that country in the last eight months. “I will present to the President our positions regarding the principles of the negotiations,” Netanyahu saidbefore boarding his presidential plane this morning.

In June, Trump ordered the U.S. military to bomb several of Iran’s underground enrichment facilities in the midst of Israel’s 12-day bombing campaign. After those strikes, Trump pronounced Iran’s nuclear facilities “completely and totally obliterated.”

Yet over the past two months, Trump has ordered the deployment of what he called a “massive armada,” led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, headed to Iran. On Truth Social, Trump emphasized that the deployment of military assets to Iran is larger than what he sent to Venezuela prior to the removal of that country’s president by the U.S. military. Trump added: “Like with Venezuela, [the U.S. armada] is ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary.”

Indeed, Trump has explicitly and repeatedly threatened Tehran with “violence” and “very steep” consequences in the event that the two countries fail to reach a long-term agreement governing Iran’s nuclear program — the same one that Trump insisted had been “obliterated” last June.

All of that might be encouraging if not for the fact that this was the exact playbook run by Israel and the U.S. prior to their last joint bombing campaign on Iran. In the weeks leading up to Israel’s surprise attack, Trump had repeatedly assured the public, and Iran, that he believed negotiations were rapidly progressing to a deal that would render unnecessary military conflict with Iran.

And, just as now, coordinated leaks — typically laundered through Axios’ always-helpful Barak Ravid, the former IDF soldier who served in Israel’s notorious intelligence Unit 8200 — depicted a major rift between the two leaders as a result of Trump’s refusal to sanction a war with Iran. It seems clear that last year’s reports of a major “rift” were designed to lower Iran’s guard against what Trump ultimately acknowledged was a jointly planned U.S./Israel attack.

---

 

The supposed “dispute” between Washington and Tel Aviv this time rests on the scope of the deal with Iran. Israel’s fiercest loyalists in the U.S. have been demanding that Trump send the U.S. military to achieve Netanyahu’s longest and most supreme goal: having the U.S. military impose regime change on Israel’s most formidable regional enemy and replace it with a pliable puppet.

The sudden outbreak of deep concern over the human rights of Iranian protesters, from the same crowd that has cheered on every U.S. and Israeli war for decades, was quite obviously intended to provoke and even force a U.S. war to dislodge the Iranian government from power. This ritual is depressingly familiar to anyone paying even minimal attention to U.S. wars over the last several decades.

As I have long documented, feigned concern for oppressed peoples is always the tactic of choice for Washington’s neocons and warmongers. When they were trying in 2005 to force former President George W. Bush to go “from Baghdad to Tehran” on what was intended to be his regime-change crusade against Israel’s enemies, Americans were suddenly subjected to stories about the cruel and abusive treatment of Iranian gay men, as if that were a motivating factor in agitating for regime change there. (Similar concerns are rarely, if ever, expressed about the at least equally repressive behavior of friendly governments in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Uganda — all governments which the U.S. actively supports.)

What Israel and its American supporters most fear is a U.S. deal with Iran that will only resolve the question of Iran’s nuclear program, while leaving the current government in place. But the position of the U.S. government and of President Trump has long been that the threat posed to the U.S. by Iran comes from the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon. By Trump’s own repeatedly stated views, that is the only legitimate concern of the U.S. when it comes to Iran.

But Israel has a far more ambitious agenda when it comes to that country. For that reason, Israel — as it did last June — is demanding the imposition of pre-conditions on Iran to which Israel knows Iran would and could never agree.

As the Israeli journalist Guy Azriel reported this week: “Despite the apparent lack of tangible progress in the Iran talks over the weekend and the unresolved gaps between Washington and Tehran, concern is growing in Jerusalem over the trajectory of the U.S.-led negotiations[.] … In Israel, there is mounting fear that any emerging deal could fall short of addressing the country’s core demands, not only regarding Iran’s regional terror proxies, but above all its ballistic missile program.”

In other words, Israel is demanding that the U.S. go to war with Iran even if Tehran satisfies Trump’s demands on its nuclear program. Netanyahu is insisting that Trump also require Iran to give up its ballistic missiles before any deal can be signed: something no country would ever do.

It may be rational for Israel to wish that their main regional rivals were left completely defenseless against any possible Israeli attack. President Trump himself admitted that Iran’s ballistic missiles were used to great effect to retaliate against Israel for its attack last June: “Israel got hit very hard, especially the last couple of days. Israel was hit really hard,” the President said, adding, “Those ballistic missiles, boy, they took out a lot of buildings.”

But what does that desire have to do with the United States? And why would any country, let alone Iran — which was just heavily bombed for almost two weeks last June — agree to give up conventional weapons that serve as a deterrent for future Israeli attacks?

Despite the best propaganda efforts of the Ellison-owned, Bari Weiss-led CBS News to convince Americans that Iran’s ballistic missiles somehow pose a threat to the U.S. rather than just Israel, the reality is that Iran cannot and does not pose a threat to the U.S., particularly if there is an agreement in place to ensure Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons (such an agreement had been in place that, by all accounts, provided a comprehensive inspection regime at Iranian facilities before it was nullified in 2017 by the U.S.).

The very idea that the U.S. should even consider sending its own citizens to fight a war against Iran is the consummate example of Israel having Americans fight wars that serve Israel’s national interest but not Americans’ interests. In the days leading up to Netanyahu’s latest in a series of visits to the U.S., Israeli officials began publicly threatening that they would attack Iran on their own if Trump refused to do it for them.

---

---

If Israel actually wants war with Iran, Israel can go fight it itself. Invite their most impassioned, loudmouthed American advocates, such as Mark Levin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to join that fight. But leave the U.S. out of it.

The towering question, as always, is how much Trump is actually willing to defy not only Israel but his top Israel-centered donors and advisors, such as Miriam Adelson and Stephen Miller. The record on that front has been quite poor thus far. One once again watches to see whether the U.S. will make policy and war decisions not based on its own interests but on the interests of this one foreign country.

[Note: The article was originally published in Portuguese in Folha de. S.Paulo, on January 5, 2026]

The United States, over the past 50 years, has fought more wars than any other country by far. In order to sell that many wars to its population and the world, one must deploy potent war propaganda, and the U.S. undoubtedly possess that.

Large parts of both the American and Western media are now convinced that the latest U.S. bombings and regime-change operation is to “liberate” the Venezuelan people from a repressive dictator. The claim that liberation is the American motive – either in Venezuela or anywhere else – is laughable. 

The U.S. did not bomb and invade Venezuela in order to “liberate” the country. It did so to dominate the country and exploit its resources. If one can credit President Donald Trump for anything when it comes to Venezuela, it is his candor about the American goal.  

When asked about U.S. interests in Venezuela, Trump did not bother with the pretense of freedom or democracy. “We're going to have to have big investments by the oil companies,” Trump said. “And the oil companies are ready to go."

This is why Trump has no interest in empowering Venezuela’s opposition leaders, whether it be Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado (who Trump dismissed as a “nice woman” incapable of governing) or the declared winner of the country’s last election Edmundo Gonzalez, in whom Trump has no interest. Trump instead said he prefers that Maduro’s handpicked Vice President, the hard-line socialist Decly Rodriquez, remain in power. 

Note that Trump is not demanding that Rodriguez give Venezuelans more freedom and democracy. Instead, Trump said, the only thing he demands of her is “total access. We need access to the oil and other things.”

The U.S. government in general does not oppose dictatorships, nor does it seek to bring freedom and democracy to the world’s repressed peoples. The opposite is true.

Installing and supporting dictatorships around the world has been a staple of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. The U.S. has helped overthrow far more democratically elected governments than it has worked to remove dictatorships.

Indeed, American foreign policy leaders often prefer pro-American dictatorships. Especially in regions where anti-American sentiments prevail – and there are more and more regions where that is now the case – the U.S. far prefers autocrats that repress and crush the preferences of the population, rather than democratic governments that must placate and adhere to public sentiments.

The only requirement that the U.S. imposes on foreign leaders is deference to American dictators. Maduro’s sin was not autocracy; it was disobedience.

That is why many of America’s closest allies – and the regimes Trump most loves and supports – are the world’s most savage and repressive. Trump can barely contain his admiration and affection for Saudi despots, the Egyptian military junta, the royal oligarchical autocrats of the UAE and Qatar, the merciless dictators of Uganda and Rwanda.

The U.S. does not merely work with such dictatorships where they find them. The U.S. helps install them (as it did in Brazil in 1964 and dozens of other countries). Or, at the very least, the U.S. lavishes repressive regimes with multi-pronged support to maintain their grip on power in exchange for subservience.

Unlike Trump, President Barack Obama liked to pretend that his invasions and bombing campaigns were driven by a desire to bring freedom to people. Yet one need only look at the bloodbaths and repression that gripped Libya after Obama bombed its leader Muammar Gaddafi out of office, or the destruction in Syria that came from Obama’s CIA “regime change” war there, to see how fraudulent such claims are.

Despite decades of proof about U.S. intentions, many in the U.S. and throughout the democratic world are always eager to believe that the latest American bombing campaign is the good and noble one, that this one is the one that we can actually feel good about. 

Such a reaction is understandable: we want heroes and crave uplifting narratives about vanquishing tyrants and liberating people from repression. Hollywood films target such tribalistic and instinctive desires and so does western war propaganda. 

Believing that this is what is happening provides a sense of vicarious strength and purpose. One feels good believing in these happy endings. But that is not what Americans wars,  bombing campaigns and regime-change operations are designed to produce, and that it why they do not produce such outcomes.