09/05/2025
Geopolitics and Global Political Sabotage: How Leaders Threatening Western Financial Dominance Became Targets of Coups, Sanctions, and Destabilization
History, when viewed through the lens of global political economy, reveals a troubling pattern: leaders and movements that dared to challenge the dominance of Western powers — particularly in relation to finance, resources, and geostrategy — were systematically sabotaged.
The methods varied: assassinations, coups, sanctions, propaganda campaigns, and “debt diplomacy.” Whether in the form of direct colonialism, Cold War realpolitik, or neoliberal globalization, the underlying logic remained the same — protecting Western economic supremacy.
From Abraham Lincoln’s struggle against international banking interests to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, from the crippling of Haiti to the ouster of Chile’s Salvador Allende, the record of interventions underscores how financial hegemony often trumped democratic will. Recent works such as John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman and declassified CIA files further reveal the systemic nature of these operations.
Drawing on a variety of sources, I will discuss how leaders and nations that sought financial sovereignty or challenged Western control were systematically undermined—through coups, assassinations, sanctions, propaganda, or debt diplomacy. From Lincoln’s Greenbacks to Gaddafi’s gold dinar, the pattern reveals that financial independence is often treated as a threat to global order.
I. Individual Leaders, Diplomats, and Activists as Targets
1. Abraham Lincoln and the Greenback Threat - United States
During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln bypassed European banking syndicates by issuing “Greenbacks” — government-backed currency that reduced dependence on private loans at high interest rates.
His vision of financial sovereignty was radical for the 19th century. European bankers, according to numerous accounts and correspondence, saw this as a dangerous precedent. Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 has been read by some revisionist historians as convenient for those financial powers. While not conclusive, the broader narrative illustrates the danger posed by leaders who sought to free states from debt-driven subjugation.
2. John F. Kennedy and the Federal Reserve Challenge - United States
A century later, John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110, intended to curtail the Federal Reserve’s monopoly by authorizing the issuance of silver-backed US currency. Though the significance of this measure is debated, combined with his resistance to military escalation in Vietnam and his tense relationship with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy represented a challenge to entrenched power structures. His assassination in 1963 remains clouded in controversy, with layers of obfuscation and suspicion surrounding intelligence agencies.
3. Patrice Lumumba and the Price of Congolese Sovereignty - Democratic Republic of Congo
Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese leader, sought to use Congo’s immense mineral wealth—especially cobalt and uranium—for his people rather than Western corporations. His calls for real independence from Belgium and openness to Soviet assistance sealed his fate. Declassified CIA cables reveal American involvement in his removal, while Belgian complicity in his brutal ex*****on is now publicly acknowledged. Lumumba’s assassination in 1961 stands as a tragic symbol of Africa’s thwarted postcolonial aspirations.
4. Thomas Sankara and the Anti-Neocolonial Revolution - Burkina Faso
In Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara rejected dependency on France and international financial institutions. He launched land reforms, opposed World Bank austerity, and denounced “the debt system” as a new form of slavery.
His assassination in 1987, orchestrated with French complicity and carried out by Blaise Compaoré, restored Burkina Faso to the Western orbit. Sankara’s fate demonstrates the lethal risks of defying neocolonial structures.
5. Hugo Chávez: Oil Nationalism and Regional Integration - Venezuela
In Latin America, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela sought to redirect oil wealth toward social programs and to create regional financial alternatives such as Banco del Sur and the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA). His opposition to US influence in the hemisphere, coupled with nationalization of key industries, drew fierce resistance from Washington.
The failed coup of 2002 had US fingerprints, and later sanctions severely crippled Venezuela’s economy. While Chávez officially died of cancer in 2013, his government’s relentless pressure from Western powers highlights another dimension of sabotage: not only assassination or coups, but also the use of economic warfare to discipline states that deviate from financial orthodoxy.
6. Muammar Gaddafi: The Gold Dinar and Pan-African Ambitions - Libya
For decades, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi positioned himself as a thorn in the side of Western financial dominance. He advocated for a gold-backed African dinar and the creation of a Pan-African Monetary Fund, institutions that could have undermined the US dollar and the French-controlled CFA franc.
Leaked US State Department emails from 2011 reveal that French officials were concerned about Gaddafi’s gold reserves and financial projects. NATO’s intervention, justified in humanitarian terms, coincided with efforts to preserve Western access to Libya’s oil and to prevent Gaddafi from destabilizing the financial order in Africa. His brutal death in October 2011 ended one of the most ambitious attempts to create financial independence for the continent.
7. Saddam Hussein: The Petrodollar Challenge - Iraq
Although Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was long entangled with Western powers, his decision in 2000 to price oil exports in euros rather than U.S. dollars challenged the foundations of the “petrodollar” system established after World War II. By linking oil—the world’s most traded commodity—to the dollar, the US secured both financial hegemony and demand for its currency.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, though framed as a mission to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, resulted in Western oil companies securing lucrative contracts. Saddam’s ex*****on underscored the dangers of tampering with the global financial order. Analysts and banking insiders have charted how Iraq's Euro move could destabilize the US dollar dominance.
According to Resilience.org, one London banker, who remains anonymous, reportedly said, "The Iraq move was a declaration of war against the dollar...now we don't have to worry about the damn Euro threat." Former General Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan remarked that while politically inconvenient to admit, the Iraq war was "largely about oil." General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, reportedly said: "of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that." Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel similarly acknowledged the US interests in oil via simpler terms.
8. Ken Saro-Wiwa: Shell’s Oil Operations in the Niger Delta - Nigeria
One of the most chilling illustrations of corporate complicity in repression is the ex*****on of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist who led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). The Ogoni resisted Shell’s oil operations in the Niger Delta, denouncing environmental devastation and the destruction of local livelihoods.
In 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow activists were executed by Nigeria’s military dictatorship under Sani Abacha. Despite international outcry, Shell was accused of tacitly supporting the regime and even of colluding in the arrests.
Declassified documents, court testimonies, and later civil lawsuits in U.S. and European courts revealed how Shell provided logistical support to Nigerian security forces, knowing that they carried out massacres against Ogoni communities. The case stands as a stark reminder that the defense of oil profits outweighed both human rights and democratic freedoms.
9. Dag Hammarskjöld: A Secretary-General Who Became an Obstacle to Western Corporate Interests - United Nations Operation in the Congo
The mysterious 1961 death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld remains one of the most striking examples. Hammarskjöld had pushed for the UN to play a genuinely independent role in Congo after Patrice Lumumba’s assassination.
He resisted efforts by Western powers and mining companies to carve up Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga region, where companies like Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (backed by Belgian and British interests) sought to maintain control and access to its copper, cobalt and uranium.
Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed under suspicious circumstances in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia), while en route to negotiate a ceasefire. Decades later, declassified US and British intelligence suggested the possibility of foul play, including sabotage or even a shootdown, with links to mining interests and Cold War strategy. His death effectively removed one of the last international figures willing to confront corporate and state collusion in Africa’s resource plunder.
In "Who Killed Hammarskjöld?" (2011), Susan Williams, a senior research fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, argues that the crash, officially ruled as pilot error, was a deliberate act orchestrated by Western powers and corporate interests to remove a leader who threatened their colonial and economic control in the newly independent Congo.
10. Carla Del Ponte and the Rwandan Taboo - United Nations International Tribunal for Rwanda
Another striking case is Carla Del Ponte, former Chief Prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). While she pursued accountability for the 1994 genocide, Del Ponte attempted to investigate alleged crimes committed not only by the defeated Hutu regime but also by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame—Washington’s key ally in the region.
Her efforts clashed with Western strategic interests. The RPF had become the linchpin of US and UK policy in Central Africa, facilitating resource access in Congo while acting as a bulwark against rivals. Del Ponte’s inquiries threatened to expose this imbalance.
This move placed her in direct conflict with Western backers of the RPF, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, who viewed Kagame as a crucial regional proxy. Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire was in decline, Rwanda's Habyarimana had fallen from grace due to his flirtations with alternative alliances (including outreach to North Korea, China, and remnants of the Soviet Union), and a younger, more pliable leader was required to stabilize Western influence in Central Africa.
Del Ponte’s attempt to prosecute both sides threatened to unravel the carefully constructed narrative of a “clean” liberation force ending a genocide, and thus jeopardized Western strategic investments in the Great Lakes region. Unsurprisingly, her mandate was curtailed, and she was eventually removed from her post. This episode illustrates how international justice itself can be subordinated to geopolitical agendas.
II. Nations as Laboratories of Sabotage: Case Studies
1. Haiti: The Price of Freedom
Haiti’s revolution (1791–1804) was the world’s first successful slave revolt, but France forced the new republic to pay “reparations” for its lost property—including enslaved people—under threat of military reinvasion. This indemnity, only fully repaid in the 20th century, crippled Haiti’s development. Later, US occupations, IMF-imposed austerity, and repeated interventions reinforced dependency. Haiti remains a case study in how financial shackles replaced chains of slavery, perpetuating underdevelopment to preserve Western dominance.
2. Chile and the Death of Democracy
Salvador Allende, elected in 1970, sought to nationalize copper mines (dominated by US firms like Anaconda and Kennecott) and implement socialist reforms. Declassified CIA documents now confirm Washington’s direct involvement in destabilizing Chile’s economy, funding strikes, and backing the military coup of 1973 that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. Allende’s overthrow is one of the clearest examples of Cold War-era sabotage to protect US corporate interests.
3. Cuba: Enduring Embargo and Resistance
Since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, Cuba has endured one of the longest economic blockades in history. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose assassination plots, and decades of sanctions all aimed to strangle Cuba’s socialist experiment. Yet the survival of Cuba despite these pressures highlights both the ruthlessness of US policy and the resilience of alternative models.
4. The Democratic Republic of Congo: The Perpetual Resource War
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) offers one of the most tragic illustrations of how Western powers, multinationals, and international organizations have undermined efforts at sovereignty and democracy in the pursuit of strategic minerals.
In the early 1990s, as the Cold War ended, Zaire (as it was then known under Mobutu Sese Seko) entered a fragile transition toward pluralistic democracy. Popular movements, church leaders, and civic groups pushed for reforms. But Western powers, long allied with Mobutu during the Cold War, shifted their strategies as he aged and became politically unstable. Instead of supporting democratic forces, they turned to new regional proxies—such as Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Paul Kagame in Rwanda—whose military interventions in the mid-1990s plunged the DRC into prolonged conflict.
The assassination of President Laurent-Désiré Kabila in 2001 and the subsequent rise of his son Joseph Kabila further entrenched external influence. What followed was not democratization, but a patchwork of international “peace agreements” and “transitions” that largely preserved Western access to Congo’s vast mineral wealth while sidelining genuine democratic aspirations.
For over three decades, the DRC has been the site of what is often called “Africa’s World War,” with millions killed or displaced. At the heart of this violence lies the exploitation of cobalt, coltan, uranium, diamonds, and copper—minerals essential for global industries ranging from nuclear energy to smartphones and electric vehicles. Multinationals such as AngloGold Ashanti, Glencore, and Freeport-McMoRan, often in partnership with local elites, have profited from the instability. Meanwhile, the presence of UN peacekeepers has not resolved the core issue: the structural sabotage of Congo’s sovereignty in favor of resource extraction.
The DRC case underscores how the language of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention can conceal a geopolitical economy of plunder. Just as in Haiti, Chile, and Cuba, Congo’s tragedy reveals that when nations attempt to assert independence or move toward pluralistic governance, they risk being dragged back into dependency through war, coups, or “managed” transitions that serve global capital.
III. Multinational Corporations: Profits, Power, and Proxy Violence
Multinational corporations often acted as extensions of Western geopolitical agendas. United Fruit Company’s lobbying helped justify coups in Central America (earning the term “banana republics”), while oil giants shaped Middle Eastern interventions. John Perkins describes in Confessions of an Economic Hitman how “economic hitmen” lured leaders into unsustainable debt traps; refusal often invited coups or assassination. From Iran’s Mossadegh (ousted in 1953 for nationalizing oil) to Ecuador’s Jaime Roldós, the nexus of corporations and intelligence agencies is unmistakable.
1. Shell and Blood in the Niger Delta
The Nigerian case stands as one of the clearest illustrations of how corporate interests collude with state repression to maintain control over resources. In the 1990s, writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa mobilized the Ogoni people against the environmental devastation caused by Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta. Gas flaring poisoned air, oil spills contaminated farmlands, and rivers turned black. Saro-Wiwa accused Shell of operating with impunity, enabled by the Nigerian military government.
In 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists—later known as the "Ogoni Nine"—were executed after a sham trial orchestrated by General Sani Abacha’s regime. Declassified documents, court testimony, and NGO investigations later suggested Shell had been complicit in the repression, providing material support to Nigerian forces and lobbying internationally to protect its operations. The message was unmistakable: when indigenous resistance threatens Western corporate access to vital energy resources, brutal measures will be sanctioned.
2. Total, Exxon, and the Cartography of Resource Control
While Shell’s collusion in Nigeria is infamous, it is far from unique. French oil giant Total has long operated as an extension of French foreign policy in Africa, often in Francophone states where Paris exerts disproportionate influence. From Gabon to Congo-Brazzaville, Total has been accused of supporting authoritarian leaders in exchange for secure oil concessions, sustaining a neocolonial dynamic where French strategic needs override local sovereignty.
ExxonMobil, meanwhile, has been closely tied to US geopolitical strategy. In Equatorial Guinea, Exxon’s investments transformed one of Africa’s smallest nations into a major oil producer—yet wealth distribution remained highly unequal, with revenues consolidating around the authoritarian regime of Teodoro Obiang. US silence on human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea can be understood through the Exxon connection: corporate and strategic imperatives outweigh democratic ideals.
3. The Mining Sector: AngloGold Ashanti and the Politics of Extraction
Mining has proven just as central as oil in the geopolitical sabotage of sovereign nations. South African-based AngloGold Ashanti, with operations across Africa and South America, has been repeatedly accused of collaborating with corrupt regimes and armed groups to secure access to gold deposits. Reports have documented payments made by AngloGold to warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where resource wealth has fueled endless conflict.
Similarly, multinationals in the mining sector have acted as conduits for Western interests: controlling strategic minerals like cobalt, uranium, and lithium ensures that local governments remain tethered to global supply chains dominated by Western or Western-aligned corporate actors. Leaders who attempt to nationalize mining or renegotiate contracts—as seen in Bolivia under Evo Morales—face immense pressure, often escalating to destabilization campaigns.
4. Corporate Sabotage as Statecraft
These cases illustrate a broader reality: multinationals are not neutral market players but deeply political actors. Their alignment with Western state power creates a system of enforced dependency. Resistance—whether in the Niger Delta, the Andes, or Central Africa—risks being crushed through a combination of military repression, sanctions, or outright regime change. The ex*****on of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the broader patterns of corporate collusion reveal the brutality underpinning Western financial dominance, where economic interests are safeguarded at the cost of sovereignty, democracy, and human life.
IV. International Organizations: The Illusion of Neutrality
If corporations act as profit-driven enforcers, international organizations often provide the veneer of legitimacy for interventions, sanctions, or selective silence. Whether the UN, IMF, or World Bank, these institutions frequently claim neutrality while operating within a geopolitical framework shaped by Western dominance and structural bias.
A key example is the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, formally endorsed by the UN in 2005. In theory, R2P was designed to prevent mass atrocities by authorizing international intervention when states failed to protect their own populations. In practice, however, R2P has often served as a Trojan horse for regime change cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric. The NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 remains a textbook case: what was authorized by the UN Security Council as a mission to protect civilians quickly mutated into an all-out campaign to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. The aftermath—state collapse, civil war, the spread of weapons across the Sahel, and the re-emergence of slavery markets—illustrates the catastrophic consequences of weaponizing humanitarian ideals in service of geostrategic and financial goals. Far from preventing atrocities, R2P in Libya entrenched instability and preserved Western access to oil while crushing Gaddafi’s gold-dinar project that threatened dollar and euro dominance.
Similarly, the Bretton Woods institutions—IMF and World Bank—have long framed their policies as neutral tools for stability and modernization. Yet, as Joseph Stiglitz has argued in Globalization and Its Discontents, these institutions imposed rigid neoliberal orthodoxy—privatization, austerity, and market liberalization—that deepened inequality and locked nations of the Global South into dependency. Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), championed as necessary reforms, in fact dismantled public sectors, undermined food security, and opened the door for foreign corporations to dominate local economies.
Together, R2P and IMF/World Bank “conditionality” illustrate a broader structural pattern: international institutions cloak coercion in the language of morality and technocracy. Humanitarianism becomes the pretext, economic efficiency the rationale, but the outcome is the same—Western powers secure financial supremacy while weaker states lose sovereignty under the illusion of multilateral consensus.
In "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis" (2002), David Reiff, an American nonfiction writer and policy analyst whose work focuses on issues such as international conflict, humanitarianism, and immigration, contends that humanitarian organizations have lost their founding principles of political neutrality and impartiality by advocating for military intervention and aligning with the foreign policy objectives of powerful states. He argues that this shift has made aid groups a "fig leaf" for political inaction and that they should return to their original, more limited mission of simply alleviating suffering.
1. The United Nations: Origins, Mandate, and Structural Contradictions.
The United Nations (UN) was established in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the express purpose of preventing another global conflict. Emerging from the ashes of the failed League of Nations, the UN’s founding charter was signed in San Francisco by 50 nations, under circumstances shaped by both genuine aspirations for peace and the stark realities of global power politics.
The official mandate of the UN was ambitious: to maintain international peace and security, to promote friendly relations among nations, to achieve international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems, and to serve as a center for harmonizing the actions of nations. In its architecture, the UN embodied the dream of a world governed by law, dialogue, and collective security rather than unilateral aggression.
Yet from the beginning, the UN was deeply structured by the balance of power of 1945. The Security Council, endowed with enforcement powers, institutionalized the wartime alliance of the victors—United States, Soviet Union (now Russia), United Kingdom, France, and China—by granting them permanent seats and veto power. This veto, conceived as a pragmatic guarantee to ensure the participation of great powers, has become one of the most criticized features of the organization. It entrenches a structural bias in favor of the strongest states, effectively allowing them to block resolutions regardless of global consensus.
For much of the postwar era, this bias mirrored and reinforced the bipolar logic of the Cold War. More recently, it has preserved the dominance of Western powers and their allies in shaping international agendas. Humanitarian interventions, peacekeeping missions, and sanctions regimes have often been filtered through the interests of these permanent members. Critics argue that the UN has too often served as the legitimizing arm of Western hegemony, particularly the United States, rather than as a neutral arbiter.
Examples abound: the 1991 Gulf War coalition was conducted under UN authorization, effectively masking US-led military action under the legitimacy of multilateralism. The NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, also covered by a UN resolution ostensibly meant to protect civilians, quickly evolved into regime change, leaving the country destabilized. Meanwhile, conflicts where permanent members have stakes—such as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 or Russia’s interventions in Chechnya and Ukraine—illustrate the paralysis or selective enforcement created by the veto system.
Beyond military affairs, the UN system’s economic arms—particularly the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank), though formally separate—have often worked in tandem with UN development agendas, reinforcing neoliberal reforms in the Global South. Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed in the 1980s and 1990s devastated public sectors in Africa and Latin America, deepening dependency while being presented as “reforms” for modernization and global integration.
Thus, while the UN has achieved successes—decolonization facilitation, international treaties on human rights, child welfare, and climate change—the critique remains that it too often provides a humanitarian vocabulary for policies that reproduce imperial hierarchies. In practice, sovereignty is defended selectively, human rights are invoked inconsistently, and interventions tend to align with the geostrategic calculations of the Security Council’s most powerful members.
Today, the UN faces a profound legitimacy crisis. Calls for reform—expanding the Security Council, curbing veto power, strengthening the General Assembly, and increasing the autonomy of humanitarian agencies—have gained momentum, but structural inertia remains strong. The paradox is clear: an institution founded to prevent domination by force has itself become a stage where domination is sanitized under the banners of legality, peacekeeping, and humanitarianism.
2. Bretton Woods Institutions: IMF and World Bank
Beyond the UN, financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank have operated as instruments of structural coercion. Through structural adjustment programs, they compelled debtor nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia to privatize industries, cut social spending, and open markets to foreign investment—policies that overwhelmingly benefited Western corporations. Leaders who resisted, from Thomas Sankara to Evo Morales, were vilified, destabilized, or sanctioned.
While presented as technocratic and “apolitical,” these measures in fact restructured entire economies in ways that perpetuated dependency and curtailed sovereignty. The effect was to institutionalize economic subordination under the guise of international cooperation.
Conclusion: Continuity of Financial Imperialism
From Haiti’s forced indemnity to Sankara’s assassination and Gaddafi’s downfall, the evidence suggests that when leaders pursue financial sovereignty, they often meet violent or destabilizing ends. While not every political assassination or coup can be reduced to economics, the pattern is unmistakable: challenges to Western financial and corporate power invite sabotage.
Today, as BRICS nations (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russian Federation, South Africa, United Arab Emirates) discuss alternatives to the US dollar and African leaders call for reforms of the global financial system, the same tensions persist. Haiti’s debt, Lumumba’s murder, Sankara’s silencing, and Gaddafi’s fall remain cautionary tales—reminders that the struggle for genuine independence is as much financial as it is political.
If the twentieth century taught us that financial sovereignty often invited sabotage, the twenty-first may test whether collective alternatives—BRICS, regional banks, or South-South cooperation—can finally create a multipolar financial order not held hostage to imperial designs.
© Tom MacPherson 2025
