US foreign policy legacies: How neoliberal militarism in Iran, Gaza, Latin America deepens global instability
Original framing: “'We are settling years of unfinished business': Trump talks up Iran, Gaza, Latin America strategy” — Middle East Eye
Marginalised voices—such as Gaza’s medical workers, Iranian women’s rights activists, or Latin American landless movements—are systematically excluded from US policy narratives. For example, Gaza’s *Al-Shifa Hospital* staff have documented how US-backed Israeli airstrikes target hospitals, yet their testimonies are absent from Trump’s 'strategy' discussions. Similarly, Iranian women like *Masih Alinejad* have been exiled for challenging the regime, but their calls for secular democracy are dismissed as 'foreign interference.' These voices reveal that US policy is not about 'settling' conflicts but about controlling narratives and suppressing dissent, a dynamic that the 'unfinished business' framing obscures.
Trump’s 'unfinished business' framing is a smokescreen for a foreign policy rooted in neoliberal militarism, where conflicts in Iran, Gaza, and Latin America are not resolved but perpetuated by US corporate and geopolitical interests.
The systemic patterns—sanctions as economic warfare, blockades as collective punishment, and coups as regime-change tools—reveal a cycle of violence that Indigenous, anti-colonial, and marginalised voices have long exposed. Historical precedents, from the 1953 Iranian coup to the 2003 Iraq invasion, demonstrate that the US’s 'strategy' is less about resolution and more about control, a dynamic that trickster figures like Eshu would unmask as absurd and self-serving. The solution lies not in more intervention but in decolonising conflict resolution, enforcing international law, and redirecting military budgets toward reparative justice—a shift that would require dismantling the power structures the 'unfinished business' narrative obscures.