How Israel is expanding its cybersecurity footprint in Latin America

New security agreements with right-wing governments are opening doors for an industry whose technologies and expertise have been developed through Israel’s occupation of Palestine

Ana Maria Monjardino

Published date: 14 September 2026 

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-israel-expanding-cybersecurity-latin-america

As right-wing governments across Latin America embrace increasingly militarised and technology-driven approaches to organised crime, Israel is positioning its cybersecurity industry as a source of expertise, surveillance capabilities and national security solutions.

The growing cooperation is opening new markets for an industry closely connected to Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, where technologies have been developed and tested through the occupation of Palestine before being marketed abroad.

Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has identified Israel’s artificial intelligence and cybersecurity expertise as a potential weapon in his promised crackdown on organised crime.

“A collaboration with Israel would allow these resources to be applied directly to combating criminal structures within the national territory,” the hardline right-wing leader said.

In neighbouring Ecuador, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Roberto Kury, signed agreements during a state visit on 4 August to increase cooperation on counter-terrorism and cybersecurity.

Israel and Argentina have also agreed to deepen their cooperation on artificial intelligence, in addition to a concurrent agreement to fight "terrorist" cyber-threats.

The agreements point to a renewed opening for Israel’s cyber industry in Latin America as a succession of right-wing governments embraces technologically driven responses to organised crime.

However, digital-rights advocates warn that the distinction between defensive cybersecurity and surveillance can become blurred when technologies developed within Israel’s military and occupation apparatus are exported to governments with weak safeguards and records of abuse.

“One of the problems is that the main mindset from governments in Latin America is a risk-based approach, it is not about human-rights centred impact,” said Pepe Flores, director of programmes at R3D Mexico, an independent, non-profit digital-rights organisation. “There is an illusion of control with technology,” he told MEE.

The regional shift also coincides with Washington’s growing emphasis on using cyber capabilities against transnational criminal organisations.

On 12 August, US President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum empowering federal law-enforcement agencies to use cyber tools “to disrupt transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that operate in foreign jurisdictions to attack Americans”.

“President Trump is unleashing every available tool to stop foreign-based organized criminal organizations that exploit Americans in cyberspace,” the memorandum read.

The push for closer cooperation with Israel comes amid a broader political shift to the right in Latin America, where several governments have aligned themselves more closely with Washington and adopted hardline approaches to organised crime, migration and national security.

“New right-wing presidencies, like those of Daniel Noboa, Antonio Kast, and now Abelardo De La Espriella, have been built with an eye toward the United States. It’s like a pendulum swinging away from the likes of Hugo Chavez, Gustavo Petro, and Lula da Silva,” said Juan Diego Castaneda, co-director of Fundacion Karisma, a civil society and digital rights organisation based in Bogota.

In this context, “choosing Israel isn't simply a matter of picking the best supplier,” he told Middle East Eye, noting “nothing particularly special” about the Israeli tools themselves.

“The choice of Israel is ideological, meaning that when faced with two equal suppliers, they pick the one that aligns better with their values, or one that reinforces their own stance.”

The doctrine of defence

Israel has increasingly presented itself to Latin American governments as a source of expertise in defence, cybersecurity and counter-terrorism.

But “the concept of ‘defense’ has never been about simply defending oneself,” said Castaneda. “That is the official narrative but clearly it also involves defending against whatever is strategic. In other words, defending oneself can become a form of attack.”

The language of defence has long been used to justify expanding state power, from the US-led “war on terror” to the decades-long “war on drugs”.

In Latin America, the language and methods associated with those campaigns are increasingly converging in the fight against what governments call “narco-terrorism”. Rights groups warn that the result has been greater militarisation and serious human rights violations, including in Ecuador and El Salvador.

Israel has deployed similar rhetoric during its genocide in Gaza, repeatedly describing it as a war of defence against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people.

International criticism of Israel’s cyber industry has focused on offensive technologies such as Pegasus, the notorious Israeli spyware used by governments around the world to target journalists and activists.

But many companies closely connected to Israel’s military and security apparatus are marketing their products as defensive. 

“That is part of the selling point,” said Flores.

“The US has pushed a narrative about using cyber-technologies to fight organised crime and dismantle cartels” and “there is a pressure to provide results immediately,” he told MEE.

As a result, governments can be tempted to import Israeli tactics, but “the reality is a complex matrix where US interests, Israel’s interests and big-tech interests align”.

Tried and tested in Palestine

Israel’s cyber-technology industry is closely connected to its occupation of Palestine, where surveillance and other digital tools have been developed and deployed on a population that has little ability to refuse or challenge their use.

"The skill being monetised is not intelligence in the abstract - plenty of countries have that. It is knowing how to run population-scale surveillance on people who cannot refuse,” said Lama Nazeeh, advocacy manager at 7amleh, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement.

“That is the intellectual property, and every Palestinian is an unconsenting contributor.

“Since 2017 Israeli authorities have used predictive policing algorithms that scrape social media to generate recommendations on who to detain. Thousands have been arrested on that basis, and the systems are error-prone,” Nazeeh told MEE.

The use of surveillance technology is part of a wider system of digital repression, she said.

Furthermore, "our 2025 documentation recorded 3,452 digital rights violations against Palestinians, 538 censorship complaints and 2,910 cases of hate speech and incitement,” she said. “The absence of consent is not an unfortunate side effect; it is a design requirement.”

The increased use of facial-recognition technology in the occupied Palestinian territories is part of an official move towards what has been described as a “frictionless” occupation, supposedly reducing interactions between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers by leaving identification to machines.

Facial recognition systems, like Corsight AI in Gaza, Oosto in the occupied West Bank and Mabat 2000 in occupied East Jerusalem, have all been used as part of Israel’s extensive surveillance apparatus.

“Anywhere else deploying a biometric system at scale involves a procurement process, a data protection authority, legal basis, courts that enjoin you, journalists with access and a population that can refuse. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem there is none of that,” said Nazeeh.

Technologies and expertise associated with this system are subsequently marketed overseas, often as defensive or civilian security solutions.

Corsight AI’s facial-recognition software, for example, has been deployed in hospitals in Mexico and schools in Brazil. In Gaza, the Israeli military’s Unit 8200, an elite cyber-intelligence division, has used the company’s technology to identify and track Palestinians.

The commercial deployments are not necessarily used for the same purposes as Israel’s military surveillance. But rights advocates say their common technological and institutional origins raise questions about safeguards, oversight and how such systems could be used by governments seeking increasingly intrusive security powers.

The Israeli company Cellebrite, meanwhile, announced in 2023 that it was supplying a digital intelligence system to the federal forces of an unnamed Latin American country. Cellebrite, like many Israeli technology companies, has recruited personnel from Unit 8200.

Many prominent figures in Israel’s technology sector have backgrounds in the unit, which has been described as a crucial training ground for the country’s cybersecurity industry. Out of Israel’s 700 cyber-technology companies, an astounding 80 percent of founders served in Unit 8200, according to a study cited by Haaretz.  

They include Check Point founder Gil Shwed and its chief executive, Nadav Zafrir. Check Point says it is committed to “empowering Latin America businesses and governments with cutting-edge security solutions to combat rising cyber threats”.

The company recently met a delegation from Honduras’s National Telecommunications Commission to discuss the planned implementation of a national cybersecurity strategy.

Check Point has also partnered with Israel Aerospace Industries, one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers, through the Israeli Cyber Companies Consortium, or IC3.

The consortium was established in 2016 with the endorsement of the Israeli government to bring together cybersecurity companies and provide national-level cyber-defence systems to governments and international clients.

In 2017, the consortium announced that it had secured a contract worth tens of millions of dollars to establish a national cyber centre in an unnamed Latin American country.

The project included national-level threat monitoring, intelligence sharing, forensic tools, cyber training and systems designed to detect and investigate attacks.

A longstanding relationship

The expansion of Israel’s cyber industry in Latin America follows a much longer history of military and security cooperation.

During the latter half of the 20th century, Israel supplied weapons, training and security assistance to Latin American governments and armed forces implicated in campaigns against Indigenous communities and left-wing movements.

These tools and tactics were “conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians, then marketed as ‘battle-tested’,” Antony Loewenstein wrote in his book The Palestine Laboratory.

The significance of the Israeli arms industry did not lie merely in the number of weapons and pieces of equipment exported.

As Bishara Bahbah wrote in his seminal 1988 book, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection, “the significance lies in what has become Israel's absolute imperative to export arms.

“From this dependence on arms exports, all else is derivative,” he wrote, pointing to Israel’s close cooperation with authoritarian regimes and its involvement in the “global strategies” of the US.

“The history of relations [between Latin America, the US and Israel] forms the broader context in which we find ourselves today,” said Castaneda. “In other words, it shouldn't come as a surprise that these threads are converging again.”

The government of former Colombian president Gustavo Petro, which broke diplomatic relations with Israel over the war in Gaza, represented an exception to that history.

“What we’re seeing now is [a return to] the norm,” Castaneda told MEE.

From Mexico in the north to Argentina in the south, digital-rights advocates warn that the combination of militarised security policies and increasingly intrusive technologies could facilitate surveillance and abuse.

For Castaneda, Colombia’s new administration will provide an important test of how that combination operates in practice.

“We have to keep watching how the Abelardo de la Espriella administration evolves and how it reconnects with Colombia’s long history of asserting that national security requires exceptional solutions,” he said.

“That history justified secrecy. It justified the use of weapons, violence, killing of people and the notion that we should not complain.”

Tucker Carlson says Israel sought regional hegemony by weakening Gulf states through Iran war

The conservative commentator claims Israel’s strategic goal was to expand its influence while weakening Iran, the Gulf and the US military presence

MEE staff

Published date: 13 September 2026

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tucker-carlson-says-israel-sought-regional-hegemony-weakening-gulf-states-through-iran-war

US commentator Tucker Carlson has claimed that Israel launched the war on Iran to weaken Gulf states and get rid of US bases in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, "paving the way for Israeli hegemony".  

The conservative political commentator and journalist made the comments in an interview with Going Underground, arguing that the conflict was driven in part by a broader Israeli ambition to reshape the regional balance of power.

Carlson said he had advised US President Donald Trump on what he called Israel's strategic objective before the war began.

“I said the point here is Israeli regional hegemony. That’s why they’re pushing for this war on Iran. They want to control their region,” Carlson said.

Israel, he said, wanted to expand its borders while sabotaging Iran and its regional allies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

“What does Israel want? Israel wants to expand its borders and it doesn’t want Iran getting in the way or its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas,” Carlson said.

He said Israel also sees the GCC, which comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as an emerging challenge because of the economic development in the region.

“It doesn’t want the GCC because they’re building these kind of amazing societies,” Carlson said. 

“That’s a massive threat to Israel,” he added.

Weaken the Gulf

The broader goal of the war, Carlson said, was to weaken Iran as a regional power, diminish the influence of the Gulf states and eventually force the United States to withdraw from the Gulf.

“And this war, the point was to take Iran out as a regional power, take the, you know, scramble the eggs of the GCC, reduce their power and get the United States out of the Gulf,” he said. 

“I told Trump this. I said, that’s the point. This is actually aimed at us.” 

Carlson said he raised it with Trump in the Oval Office around 20 February, just as the war was starting.

“I told him that explicitly,” Carlson said, adding that the conversation took place after he had returned from the Gulf, where he had spent a lot of time over the past 25 years.

He also said Trump had personal close ties with leaders in the Gulf.

“Who doesn’t like the Gulf? Everyone who visits likes the Gulf. And Trump does,” Carlson said.

“Trump likes the GCC leaders, they’re incredible, they’re incredibly gracious people,” he added.

That, according to Carlson, made it hard for him to comprehend what happened next.

“Trump had no motive and no desire to hurt,” he said. “And yet he unleashed a sequence of events knowing that this could happen that badly damaged those countries. Why did he do that?”

“That is the question that the American media studiously ignore,” said Carlson. “And I would love to know the answer. And I hope at some point historians find an answer.” 

Carlson also questioned the conventional position that a sizable US military presence in the Gulf is inherently beneficial to Israeli interests.

“From an Israeli perspective, those are control mechanisms. Those are leashes that we use to constrain Israeli behaviour,” he said.

“And they don’t want to be constrained because they have a greater vision of their future,” he added.

Gulf pays for war

Carlson’s remarks come as the war has put increasing pressure on Gulf states and exposed the vulnerability of their infrastructure and US military bases.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies reported in March that Iran had fired thousands of missiles and drones at all six GCC states since the US-Israeli air campaign started. 

The attacks were aimed at putting pressure on the Gulf states, spreading the costs of the war, and exposing the limits of Israeli capabilities, according to the report. 

Iranian strikes have also inflicted heavy damage on US military facilities in the region. 

At least 228 buildings or pieces of equipment at US military sites have been damaged or destroyed since the war started, according to a May report by The Washington Post based on satellite imagery.

After months of Iranian attacks that damaged American bases, the Post reported in August that the Pentagon was also evaluating whether the US should reduce its military presence in the Persian Gulf.

Saudi Arabia recently closed its East-West oil pipeline after drone attacks, which Riyadh blamed on militants based in Iraq, and Houthi attacks have increased the pressure on Saudi energy and security infrastructure. 

The Iran war reveals the limits of BRICS

The bloc struggles to translate its economic weight into geopolitical sway. But there may be a silver lining to it.

By Ronny P Sasmita

Published On 13 Sep 2026

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/9/13/the-iran-war-reveals-the-limits-of

This year’s BRICS summit has wrapped up in New Delhi with the usual promises of deepened cooperation and expanding economic ties. But there was an important absence.

Although the US-Israel war on Iran has affected most of BRICS’ 11 members and 10 partner countries, the declaration issued by the bloc did not address it directly. Nor did it condemn the United States, which – objectively speaking – is the aggressor state in the conflict.

The wording allowed all members to remain inside the same diplomatic tent. It also revealed just how difficult it is for BRICS to turn shared dissatisfaction with the Western-led order into coordinated geopolitical action.

The Iran test

The problem was already visible months before the summit. In May, the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi failed to produce a common position on the war on Iran. The outcome document acknowledged differences among members and avoided naming either the US or Israel.

Iran wanted the group to condemn the US and Israeli military campaign, while the UAE opposed language that ignored Iranian attacks and its own security concerns. That failure was more than a diplomatic embarrassment. It was a clear sign of the political cost of BRICS expansion.

The group’s enlargement has increased its global reach, but it has also imported regional rivalries into the organisation itself. Iran and the UAE are a particularly clear example. Both belong to BRICS, yet their strategic calculations in the Middle East collide. Their participation in the same organisation therefore creates a built-in ceiling on how far the group can go in confronting a conflict that directly affects both.

The September summit produced a declaration, but the compromise was telling. Rather than taking a clear, strong position, BRICS became a platform for managing disagreement.

The episode therefore suggests that the central problem facing the bloc is not a lack of economic or diplomatic weight. It is the difficulty of converting that weight into a single geopolitical instrument.

Standing up to the US

While BRICS has emerged out of a desire to challenge the US-dominated world order, it has failed to reach a common position on Washington. That is because its members have divergent interests when it comes to dealing with the US.

India illustrates the dilemma most clearly. New Delhi sees BRICS as a vehicle for strategic autonomy, not as an alliance against the US. It is deepening its relationship with Washington, participating in the Quad and maintaining extensive defence and economic ties with Western partners. At the same time, it remains deeply engaged with Russia and China.

For India, the value of BRICS lies partly in preserving room for manoeuvre between competing centres of power. Turning BRICS into an anti-American bloc would undermine precisely that strategic flexibility.

China and Russia also have reasons to avoid transforming BRICS into a mechanism for direct confrontation with the US. For Russia, BRICS is unquestionably an important platform for reducing the political and economic impact of Western economic pressure.

Yet, pursuing more aggressive policies through military alliances could push Moscow into a conflict with the US and NATO – something it wants to avoid at all costs.

For China, the calculation is even more complex. Beijing wants a stronger multipolar order and greater influence for the Global South. It also wants to reduce the structural advantages enjoyed by the US in global finance, trade and international institutions.

But China has little reason to turn every BRICS dispute into a binary confrontation with Washington. The US remains an important market for its exports and an important factor in global trade.

Brazil and Indonesia add another layer of complexity. Brasilia wants a more representative international system, greater development finance and stronger bargaining power for developing countries, but has little incentive to turn BRICS into an instrument of Chinese or Russian geopolitical strategy. Similarly, Jakarta sees BRICS as a way to widen its strategic and economic options rather than as a vehicle for choosing sides.

The polycentric trap

BRICS is caught in what appears to be a polycentric trap. Its greatest strength is its diversity. That diversity gives the group legitimacy across regions that have historically had little influence over the architecture of global governance.

But the same diversity makes collective geopolitical action difficult. Every new member adds economic resources, diplomatic reach and political legitimacy. It also adds another set of national interests that must be accommodated. This explains why BRICS is more likely to become a powerful bargaining coalition than a coherent geopolitical bloc.

Its members can agree on reforming international institutions, increasing representation for developing countries, strengthening South-South trade, expanding development finance and reducing excessive dependence on Western financial infrastructure. They can also cooperate on local-currency payments, development lending, energy and food security.

But agreement becomes harder when cooperation requires members to choose sides in an actual geopolitical confrontation. The war on Iran makes that contradiction unusually visible.

That does not mean BRICS is irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Its influence may ultimately come from doing something less dramatic but more sustainable: changing the bargaining environment in which the existing international order operates.

BRICS does not need to destroy the current global system to challenge the US. It can push for greater representation in the IMF and the World Bank, strengthen alternative development institutions, expand non-dollar payment mechanisms and give developing countries more diplomatic options. That may prove to be its most consequential role.

Therefore, the limits of its geopolitical action could also be a blessing. Avoiding hard confrontation could allow for more space for gradual change and a shift in the balance of power.

Democratic voters are clear: they want an arms embargo on Israel, not more rhetoric

Progressive candidates won Democratic primaries by centering Palestine. Now, advocates warn that without a firm demand like an arms embargo, politicians can co-opt 'pro-Palestine' rhetoric without real accountability.

By Michael Arria September 11, 2026 

https://mondoweiss.net/2026/09/democratic-voters-are-clear-they-want-an-arms-embargo-on-israel-not-more-rhetoric/

Over the past few months, we’ve watched progressives notch victories in Democratic primaries across the country. Some wins were expected, while others were improbable.

In many of these contests, Israel emerged as a flashpoint issue. Candidates gained momentum by centering the human rights of Palestinians, highlighting the genocide in Gaza, decrying AIPAC spending, and calling for an end to arms sales.

This electoral momentum has inevitably been met with backlash, as many have downplayed the wins and launched broad attacks on left politics, with a specific focus on the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who backed a number of the victorious campaigns.

These attacks have come not only from the GOP but also from centrist members of the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, a number of Democratic lawmakers have spent their energy targeting left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

As Queens College professor Walter Lucken pointed out in Mondoweiss earlier this year, the debate around Piker has a lot to do with his firm anti-Zionist politics.

“The insistence that no Democrat associate with Hasan Piker on the part of the liberal political and media establishment is, in fact, a tacit acknowledgment of two basic facts: First, the debate about Palestine in progressive politics is over. Second, figures like Piker in fact derive their moral authority from their willingness to break the taboos imposed by a political elite that has lost its credibility in the face of genocide in Gaza,” wrote Lucken.

“Piker, in the end, is merely a symbol of the ascendant left populist consensus which places Palestine at the center of its politics as a global beacon for social justice and resistance to oppression,” he continued. “Indeed, these currents may very well reshape American democracy in the decades to come.”

He’s right, but we’ve also seen the ascendant left-populist consensus quashed and/or co-opted over the years. In fact, we’ve already seen some candidates (including El-Sayed) shift their rhetoric in response to pro-Israel backlash.

So, how can advocates for Palestine ensure that, if elected, progressive candidates will remain committed to the issue?

Organizer and writer James Ray told Mondoweiss that there’s a specific litmus test that can be applied to politicians.

“Over the next years, as Palestine continues to be a defining political issue, and as public opinion continues to erode for the Israeli project, we are likely to see more political actors attempting to stake out positions that seem ‘pro-Palestine’ without having to commit to real material changes that might undermine the Israeli project itself,” said Ray. “An arms embargo helps cut through a lot of the half measures and non-solution ‘solutions’ and instead directly holds the Israelis accountable in a way that degrades their ability to not just commit genocide in Gaza, but commit to violent military acts regionally.”

“An arms embargo therefore must be the standard, as it forces elected officials to clarify that they are willing to undermine the project materially for the sake of the millions being harmed by the occupation and it’s military forces,” he continued. “A state or colony committing genocide should not be able to purchase a single bomb or bullet from the U.S., and any political actor who is claiming to stand with Palestinians must be held to a standard the ensures that the weapons shipments stop.”

Iman Abid, the Political Director of USCPR Action, said organizations like his were specifically created to hold lawmakers accountable to the people they represent, and also cited an arms embargo as a central requirement.

“After the U.S. political establishment has ignored and dehumanized Palestinian lives for eons, Palestine is now one of the biggest voting issues of this midterm election,” explained Abid. “At a moment like this, we’re very aware that politicians can be tempted to capitulate on the promises they’ve made once they’re in power…If they want our support, they need to keep fighting for our movement’s demands like a full arms embargo now.”

These sentiments aren’t specific to a small number of activists. Polling shows they’re shared by the vast majority of Democrats and will be at the forefront of voters’ minds when they head to the polls to elect a 2028 presidential nominee.

A recent IMEU Policy Project survey of voters in the first states to hold primaries for the 2028 election found that a majority of respondents want the U.S. to stop sending Israel weapons and place sanctions on the country.

“These things, when they’re discussed, it’s often as ‘This is something that is out of the mainstream’, but they’re overwhelmingly supported by the voters who are probably going to be pretty decisive in deciding the next nominee for president in the Democratic Party,” IMEU spokesperson Hamid Bendaas told Al Jazeera.

“When that happens, when you have a new leader who takes a new position, that really does help parties shift more rapidly,” he added. “Unfortunately, the current leadership as it stands in the Democratic Party has been people who have a very status quo view about the US-Israel relationship. And so, what ultimately needs to happen is the party just needs a new leader who actually reflects its voters.”

America After 9/11: 25 Years of Fear, War, Surveillance, and Permanent Emergency

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead | Sep 11, 2026

https://original.antiwar.com/jwhitehead/2026/09/10/america-after-9-11-25-years-of-fear-war-surveillance-and-permanent-emergency/

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in  –  and the West in general  –  into an unbearable hell and a choking life.” – Osama bin Laden (October 2001)

“GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.” – President Donald Trump (September 2026)

Days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump flooded his Truth Social account with AI-generated fantasies of himself commanding armies of giant, red-eyed robots.

In one, Trump strides through a darkened Washington surrounded by robotic soldiers beneath the words, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another declares, “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.” A third depicts Trump seated on a mechanical throne, surrounded by an army of robots and the presidential seal, beneath the warning: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”

Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?

For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.

That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.

The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.

Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president – especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state – is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.

That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.

On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.

America began by rebelling against a king.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.

And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?

To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.

That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.

A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.

Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.

Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.

This is the bitter irony of America at 250.

We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.

Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.

What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?

Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.

Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.

And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.

That is the trap.

Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended – it became the government.

The USA Patriot Act, rushed through Congress just 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights. It dramatically expanded the government’s powers, weakened safeguards against government overreach, and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance of the American people.

What was sold to us as a temporary response to terrorism became the foundation for something much larger.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer.

Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.

George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention and preemptive war. Barack Obama expanded the drone wars, normalized targeted killings and presided over an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus. Successive administrations embraced secret watchlists, warrantless data collection and sweeping executive authority.

Donald Trump did not create this machinery.

He inherited it.

What makes this moment so dangerous is his willingness to use that machinery aggressively, openly and with little patience for the constitutional restraints that are supposed to prevent presidents from becoming kings.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.

Not content to wage war against Afghanistan after 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq under a preemptive war doctrine that embraced striking threats before they were fully formed.

The consequences were catastrophic: lives lost, trillions squandered, regions destabilized, terrorist movements radicalized, and the constitutional power to decide when the nation goes to war steadily transferred from Congress to the president.

Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.

The circle is complete.

9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: preemptive strikes do not make us safer. They create more enemies, more instability and more blowback.

War has become the permanent business of the American empire.

The military-industrial complex profits. Defense contractors prosper. Politicians posture. Presidents accumulate power.

The American people get the bill.

The post-9/11 wars have cost trillions, killed or displaced millions, and scarred generations of servicemen and women. Every new conflict creates the justification for still more military spending, secrecy, emergency powers and government control.

War abroad has a way of coming home.

After 9/11, the government embraced torture in the name of national security. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what happens when human beings are reduced to enemy combatants and government agents are told the normal rules no longer apply.

That battlefield mindset did not remain overseas.

Local police departments acquired armored vehicles, military weapons, tactical gear and battlefield training. SWAT teams became routine instruments of law enforcement. Military surveillance tools became tools for monitoring ordinary Americans.

Today, ICE increasingly operates like a domestic paramilitary force, carrying out raids, detentions and enforcement operations under a cloak of secrecy and impunity while being equipped with ever more aggressive technologies, from robot dogs to electric shock weapons.

National Guard troops are being normalized as a domestic law-enforcement presence, further eroding the barrier between military and civilian government that laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act were intended to preserve.

The language changed, too.

Citizens became “suspects.” Communities became “threat environments.” Protesters became potential extremists. The homeland became a battlefield.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: the tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home.

This is precisely what the Founders feared. James Madison warned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We ignored him.

The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.

The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.

The Patriot Act normalized mass surveillance. Technology has since made the machinery exponentially more powerful.

Today, government agencies no longer need someone following you in an unmarked car to create detailed records of where Americans travel, whom they visit and how they live. Your phone tells them. Your car tells them. FLOCK license plate readers tell them. Facial recognition cameras tell them. Your purchases, internet searches, social-media activity, location history and digital communications fill in the rest.

Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not eliminate terrorism. It will create a watched, tracked and increasingly submissive society.

Yet the deeper problem is that we stopped insisting that government obey the same laws it imposes on us. Once “national security” became an acceptable excuse for warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, secret courts and undeclared wars, the exception began swallowing the rule.

Congress surrendered authority. Presidents seized it. Courts deferred. The public became accustomed to government officials acting first and answering questions later.

Now we see the consequences everywhere.

The Supreme Court increasingly arrives too late to stop executive abuses before the damage is done, if it intervenes at all. The president bulldozes through legal and constitutional restraints, creates a crisis or a spectacle, and leaves Congress, the courts and the American people to deal with the wreckage.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: if we stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it will respect will be the ones it can use against us.

This failure transcends political parties.

Republicans cheered executive power under Republican presidents. Democrats cheered it under Democratic presidents. Then both sides expressed shock when those powers were turned against them.

Powers do not remain partisan.

Surveillance powers created to catch terrorists are used against Americans. Emergency powers become tools of ordinary government. Military powers migrate into domestic policing. Executive powers tolerated under one president become precedents for the next.

And once government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.

Trump is merely the latest president to demonstrate the danger of giving any one person such enormous power. He has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 state and shown how readily it can be turned to the purposes of an increasingly imperial presidency.

We are not merely repeating the mistakes of the past 25 years. We have institutionalized them.

A national-security apparatus powerful enough to track a terrorist can track a political opponent. A president empowered to wage war without Congress can invoke “national security” to bypass constitutional limits at home. A military normalized on American streets can be turned against Americans.

The police state does not care which party controls it.

And therein lies the madness of giving any president such enormous power.

The Founders did not assume that every president would be wise, rational, restrained or benevolent. They divided power precisely because human beings cannot be trusted with too much of it.

A free people cannot make their liberties dependent upon the judgment, temperament or sanity of a single ruler.

Yet for 25 years, under presidents of both parties, we have systematically weakened those restraints while strengthening the presidency.

Now the reckoning has arrived.

Trump’s fitness to exercise the immense powers of his office cannot be separated from the larger question of why any president should possess so much unilateral power in the first place.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: the more power we give the presidency, the more dangerous the presidency becomes when the person occupying it proves unwilling – or unable – to exercise that power with restraint.

That brings us back to the nightmare.

Fear has always been the fuel of the police state.

Keep people frightened enough, divided enough and distrustful enough of one another, and they will beg the government to protect them – even when the price of that protection is their freedom.

That bargain has defined post-9/11 America.

Benjamin Franklin famously warned against trading essential liberty for temporary safety.

We made the trade anyway.

The government seized our freedoms, but the assurance of safety never materialized. Instead, the emergencies multiplied: Terrorism. War. Pandemic. Immigration. Crime. Civil unrest. Political extremism.

Each crisis becomes another justification for government power. Each new power establishes another precedent. Each precedent becomes another weapon waiting for the next president to wield it.

That is what makes the convergence of these two anniversaries so important.

The Declaration of Independence was an indictment of a despot who obstructed the laws, manipulated institutions, maintained standing armies among the people, placed military power above civilian authority and repeatedly violated the rights of those he governed.

Two hundred and fifty years later, those grievances sound uncomfortably familiar.

The uniforms have changed. The technology has changed. The vocabulary has changed. The greed for money and power have not.

Nor have the duties of the citizenry to oppose such tyranny.

If constitutional government is to survive, Congress must reclaim the powers it has surrendered. The courts must stop treating “national security” as a magic phrase capable of making constitutional violations disappear. The machinery of mass surveillance must be dismantled. Domestic militarization must be rolled back. Emergency powers must be temporary, narrow and subject to meaningful oversight.

And the American people must stop allowing fear to dictate the boundaries of their freedom.

Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.

We are doing that ourselves.

Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.

Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.

America has spent 250 years proclaiming its freedom and the past 25 years building the machinery with which to extinguish it.

Two anniversaries. One reckoning.

America must decide what it intends to be: a republic governed by the rule of law or an empire governed by permanent war, permanent surveillance and permanent emergency.

We cannot be both.

The choice we make will determine nothing less than the survival of the American experiment in freedom.