By: Chris Martin, Martin Group International LLC, August 2, 2026
This article is written from the perspective of an operational practitioner with experience in foreign internal defense, security force assistance, and stability operations. It is not intended as an academic treatment of irregular warfare, but as an assessment of operational patterns observed across multiple conflict environments.
The Historical Incompetence Rationale
The modern security architecture currently deployed in Port-au-Prince operates under a deliberate, heavily funded illusion. The Western policy establishment, working alongside international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the self-appointed "Core Group" of foreign diplomats, routinely tells the global public that its heavy-handed intervention is a benign effort to build democratic capacity.
This narrative relies entirely on a century-old administrative deception. The core strategy has never changed: when local political movements threaten the financial or geopolitical interests of external managers, an international veto is deployed to strip the nation of its self-determination under the guise that the population is fundamentally incompetent to manage its own affairs.
As a professional practitioner who has managed security force assistance and stability operations across volatile international environments—including Afghanistan, Haiti, Nigeria, and Mali—examining this documented history is the only way to make sense of tactical situations that otherwise seem entirely contradictory on the surface. To understand why true democracy is systematically blocked in Haiti today, one must look at the direct, unbroken line connecting the U.S. occupation of 1915, the regime change of 2004, and the Core Group's modern administrative theater. This strategy is entirely by design to keep Haiti in perpetual turmoil and instability, preventing the emergence of a truly independent, self-governing state.
The 1915 Playbook: Engineering the Puppet State
The template for modern foreign intervention was finalized during the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Following the initial naval landing, American authorities didn't bring stability; they installed a compliant executive puppet, Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, and forced the signing of a treaty that handed total control of Haiti's customs houses and national treasury over to foreign bank managers.
The rationale used by policy planners at the time was raw and unvarnished. Secretary of State Robert Lansing openly advanced the view that the Black population of Haiti was entirely devoid of any capacity for political organization, claiming an innate incompetence to justify absolute foreign control.
More bluntly, the U.S. military command openly stated that the Haitian people were not competent enough to pick their own leaders—asserting that the United States military would choose them instead. Under direct American orders, when the Haitian National Assembly bravely refused to ratify a new, foreign-drafted constitution because it stripped away the historic ban on foreign land ownership, the occupation forces responded with raw kinetic power. The puppet administration forcibly dissolved the Haitian Parliament twice, shutting down legislative democracy until 1929.
Power was centralized under a foreign High Commissioner, Marine General John H. Russell Jr., who routinely treated the populace as backward children unfit for a ballot box. This strategy allowed Wall Street institutions, specifically the National City Bank of New York, to strip the country’s assets. It was a blueprint calculated by design to cultivate perpetual turmoil, ensuring a weakened, destabilized host nation remained permanently dependent on external overseers.
The 2004 Coup: Squeezing out the Sovereign Demand
In 2004, the exact same imperial playbook was deployed against Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The primary catalyst for Aristide's violent removal by external actors was an unpardonable structural threat to the global financial system: his formal, legal demand that France pay back the massive, illegal independence indemnity it extorted from Haiti under the threat of war in 1825.
Aristide launched an international campaign demanding the restitution of the 90 million gold francs Haiti was forced to pay to compensate French slaveholders for their lost "property" after the 1804 Revolution—a sum valued at over $21 billion in modern currency. The moment a sovereign Haitian leader began aggressively pushing for reparations for slavery and financial colonial extortion, the international architecture pivoted to eliminate him.
Utilizing deniable local cut-outs and localized paramilitary networks to sow chaos on the ground, external managers engineered a crisis to justify a "stability" intervention. U.S. forces physically removed the elected president from the country, and an international stabilization mandate was deployed to secure the capital. The resulting intervention model, which I analyzed directly during my tenure tracking the footprint from 2004 to 2017, proved that the mission was an operational shield designed to suppress the sovereign population, erase the demand for reparations, and re-install a safe, compliant technocratic elite. The resulting fractures were not accidental failures; they were part of a continuous architecture of instability engineered to prevent domestic consolidation.
The Modern Core Group and the Structural Exclusion of Viv Ansanm
Today, this identical engineering strategy is managed by the "Core Group"—an unelected committee of foreign ambassadors from the United States, France, Canada, and Brazil, alongside NGO elites—who effectively dictate policy to a Haitian Transitional Presidential Council that currently contains zero elected officials.
The mechanism has evolved from raw military dissolutions to sophisticated administrative law, but the objective is unchanged: pre-engineer the outcome of the scheduled general elections before a single ballot is cast.
The clearest proof of this ongoing information operation is the precise chronology of recent legal interventions. On January 2, 2025, the unified local coalition Viv Ansanm attempted a diplomatic pivot, explicitly offering a low-level conflict dispute resolution framework, a ceasefire, and the formation of a political party to seek a power-sharing transition. Local elements on the council recognized the ground reality and were ready to negotiate to save lives. External actors immediately panicked. Washington promptly dropped Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) labels on the coalition.
This was a pre-emptive administrative veto. By branding the de facto holders of territory as terrorists, the Core Group legally bound the hands of the local government, making it a financial crime to allow them onto a ballot. Just as the U.S. military dictated in 1915 that Haiti was incompetent to choose its own leaders, the establishment today uses administrative tools to outlaw the actual stakeholders of the terrain. This systematic political foreclosure ensures that only internationally vetted, pro-Washington technocrats can participate, locking the country into a manufactured state of permanent instability.
The Operational Equation of Failure
The fundamental flaw in the Core Group's strategy is that it completely ignores the baseline laws of irregular warfare. As Robert Taber famously outlined in The War of the Flea:
"When we speak of the guerrilla fighter, we are speaking of the political partisan, an armed civilian whose principal weapon is not his rifle or his machete, but his relationship to the community, the nation, in and for which he fights."
Taber further establishes that insurgency is the primary face and right arm of revolution. Irregular warfare is entirely population-centric warfare; the community controls all, and the populace is the absolute center of gravity.
Foreign security missions operate as isolated, foreign-backed entities confined to armored green zones. They have zero community trust, which means they have no human intelligence network. They are blind on the battlefield, completely untrained in fluid urban guerrilla warfare, and structurally set up to fail.
Conversely, the irregular coalition lives in these neighborhoods; the populace acts as their eyes and ears, tracking every troop movement and foreign cut-out. In an asymmetric theater, an intervention force that treats the local populace as a hostile population to be contained cannot win. The ongoing enforcement of this failed top-down model serves only to lock the country into a feedback loop of structural paralysis.
The Cold Bottom Line
The modern mechanism of this containment strategy is laid bare by the actions of the Core Group in directly picking and controlling the leadership of Haiti's Transitional Presidential Council (TPC). Rather than allowing an authentic domestic process, foreign diplomats orchestrated the appointment of council leaders—effectively installing vetted figures to act as managers for the establishment.
When elements within the council attempted to exercise independent authority by dismissing the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, the Core Group stepped in with severe administrative coercion. Leveraging threats of visa revocations, asset freezes, and explicit diplomatic pressure, the international apparatus forcefully reversed the council's actions. This swift suppression proves that the council functions merely as an administrative mask. The Core Group continues to enforce an imperial veto over Haitian decision-making through Haiti's Transitional Presidential Council (TPC), ensuring that the local state apparatus can never consolidate true independent authority.
From the U.S. military explicitly declaring in 1915 that Haiti could not pick its leaders, to the kidnapping of Aristide in 2004 for demanding slavery reparations, to the modern engineering of the presidential council, the global system has continuously labeled sovereign Haitian voices as incompetent or criminal to justify its own control. This baseline structural exclusion is entirely by design to keep Haiti in perpetual turmoil and instability.
By prioritizing outsourced security maneuvers over an authentic domestic settlement, foreign managers ensure that the tactical theater remains locked in continuous stasis. The historical data dictates an unyielding conclusion: until the external architecture lifts its vetoes and allows an uncompromised internal negotiation, the populace will continue to act as the primary shield for its own survival, while every foreign-vetted administrative blueprint collapses under the weight of real-world terrain math.
Posted Sept. 1, 2026