Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the United States has, over the past year, consistently violated international norms and laws. The rollercoaster of tariff barriers, the sham negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and the declaration of a false “ceasefire” with Israel, all while openly musing about turning Gaza into “oceanfront property”, would have been bad enough on their own.
But in just the past couple of months, the US has bombed Nigeria to “defend” Christians, invaded Venezuela and arrested its president, Nicolás Maduro, after months of blowing up Venezuelan boats in international waters, and openly threatened Iran, Greenland, and Mexico with military intervention. Within the US, Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has continued to carry out extralegal harm in the process of fulfilling his promise of mass deportations. Since the start of 2026, federal immigration officers have shot and killed at least three US citizens: 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. in California, and 37-year-olds Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Both Good and Pretti were killed on camera, in incidents recorded from multiple angles, intensifying public outrage over the expanding use of lethal force by federal immigration agencies.
If this were almost any other country, like Iran, with its repressive and indiscriminate killing of thousands of protesters over the past month, the Western-led international community would already be calling for sanctions and embargoes against the US. But in light of US threats and actions at home and abroad, the world now needs to take a page from the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. The world needs to boycott and divest from US corporations, US-made products, and US-led events. Short of civil strife, civil war, or military action, there is no other way for the world to disrupt US aggression except through massive economic pressure. While on a considerably smaller scale, King and so many other Black people in the 1950s understood that hitting the wallets of those who had long benefited from Black labour and pain could be effective in the US. It was one of the few tools available in their struggle against the daily onslaught of violent racist segregation.
The 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama was a response to decades of segregated public transport, not simply to Rosa Parks refusing to give up a “whites-only” seat at the front of a bus on December 1, 1955. During the year-long protest, some 40,000 Black Montgomery residents either carpooled or walked to school, work, church, and elsewhere. Defending the boycott, King said, “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honourable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation.”
White Montgomery residents responded with mass arrests, threats, and other acts of intimidation, including the bombing of King’s home on January 30, 1956. A month after the US Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle, the decision outlawing segregation on public transportation, with the now-deceased activist Claudette Colvin among the plaintiffs, Montgomery formally ended its bus segregation policies on December 17, 1956, though white residents continued to harass, attack, and even lynch Black bus riders and civil rights activists for years afterwards. “Our aim has never been to put the bus company out of business, but rather to put justice in business,” King said.
Putting “justice in business” in the case of the US will require a global effort. The world should build on the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel and apply those lessons to the US. BDS was launched in July 2005 with the support of 170 Palestinian organisations as a nonviolent effort to apply economic and cultural pressure on Israel to end its apartheid rule over Gaza and the West Bank. BDS founders Omar Barghouti and the late Ingrid Jaradat Gassner drew inspiration from the global anti-apartheid boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
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