Craig Murray, Consortium News:

The genocide in Gaza demonstrated the end of hopes – which were extremely important to my own worldview – for the rule of international law to outweigh the brutal use of force in international relations. The kidnap of Maduro, the rush of Western powers to accept it, and the inability of the rest of the world to do anything about it, have underlined that international law is simply dead.

Bush set out the American demands. He pushed Gorbachev to halt assistance to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. This was top of the US list of priorities. The Soviet team was surprised. Gorbachev wanted to draw a „strategic and philosophical“ line under the Cold War.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 96.

Here Zubok is writing about Bush and Gorbachev meeting near Malta in December 1989. Topping the US list of priorities is Soviet support for Cuba and Nicaragua. I remember those years of incessant drumbeats insisting Americans fear impoverished Central Americans.

I find this headline very funny.