Rania Khalek Dispatches

At the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio said the quiet part out loud.

No more “rules-based order.” No more liberal pretense. Just open coercion.

After Gaza — after a genocide livestreamed for the world — U.S. empire isn’t even pretending anymore.

In this episode of Dispatches, Rania Khalek is joined by Dylan Saba — attorney with Palestine Legal and co-host of Turbulence — to unpack what this moment represents:

• Gaza as the capstone of the War on Terror
• The return of gunboat diplomacy
• Why imperial “decline” means escalation, not collapse
• Fascist consolidation at home under Trump
• The Democratic Party’s containment of dissent
• Why the U.S. still lacks a real left foreign policy

This isn’t a deviation in American foreign policy.
It’s its logical endpoint.

🎥 The full episode is available to Breakthrough News members.
Become a member at: https://www.patreon.com/BreakthroughNews

The United States is mobilizing for a new war on Iran — repositioning military forces, floating assassination threats, and insisting on negotiations at the same time.
As this military buildup intensifies, Western media is reviving a familiar propaganda narrative: that Iran is collapsing, its government has lost control, and foreign intervention might actually help.
To cut through the noise, Rania Khalek is joined by Navid Zarrinnal, an Iranian-American academic and host of The Colony Archive, speaking from inside Tehran. Navid breaks down what’s actually happening on the ground — from internal debates over negotiations, to Iran’s potential military retaliation, to why the myth of Iran’s imminent collapse keeps getting recycled.
They also discuss the end of Iran’s so-called “strategic patience,” the reality of U.S. hybrid warfare, the role of foreign intervention in recent protests, and the dangerous push to fracture Iran along ethnic and sectarian lines — a policy openly floated by Western elites.
Finally, Navid explains why the nuclear deal failed, why sanctions and regime-change politics won’t bring justice, and what the Western Left should actually be focusing on.
Read Navid’s Breakthrough News article here; https://breakthroughnews.org/irans-protests-explained-a-diary-from-tehran/

Join Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra for a special live show as Minneapolis erupts after Border Patrol agents killed nurse and legal observer Alex Pretti, just hours after a historic general strike shook the state. Zoe will report from Minneapolis as protests surge nationwide and fury at ICE and federal occupation explodes. With special guests, Rania and Zoe will discuss the Democrats’ weak response, the connections between imperial violence from Gaza to Minnesota, and the rising calls to defund ICE and a national general strike against ICE terror. 

Special Guests:
-Craig Mokhiber, Human Rights Lawyer 
-Meghdad Bose, Independent journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Memphis
-Simon Elliott, Community Activist in Minnesota

Rania Khalek is joined by former UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber, whose recent Mondoweiss article, "Ushering in the age of impunity: Venezuela, Palestine, and the end of international law," unpacks how recent U.S. aggression from Venezuela to Gaza signals a dangerous unraveling of the post-World War II legal order. 
We’ll discuss:
• What the U.S. attack on Venezuela reveals about the limits of global legal restraints. 
• How the violence in Palestine fits into a broader pattern of unchecked power. 
• The crisis facing international law and global institutions like the UN, ICC, and ICJ. 
• What meaningful resistance and accountability might look like.

The U.S. military raid on Venezuela on January 3 shocked the world. On Dispatches, Rania Khalek is joined by Jorge Arreaza, Venezuela’s former foreign minister, to explain what actually happened and to respond directly to U.S. media narratives about “betrayal,” regime change, and control.