The saga of ousted Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan is a perfect case study in the way that US power functions in the world, and how the propaganda that’s used to conceal that power is shaped to mislead the general public.

Khan, a former cricket superstar who since his 2018 election win has butted heads with the US government over, among other things, using Pakistan as a launching pad for drone strikes, was removed from the presidency by a no-confidence vote in April 2022, partly fueled by Khan’s attempt to reappoint a friendly spy chief in advance of a coming election against the wishes of the country’s powerful military, partly by disillusionment among his coalition partners over his government’s failings. Those failings were legitimate and very real, including imposing International Monetary Fund–driven austerity after having vowed to avoid the organization.

In any case, Khan has said that the vote was part of a US plot to oust him even before it was held, an accusation he continued to repeat for the next year and a half. Khan claimed to have a document, a copy of a Pakistani diplomatic cable he couldn’t publicly show for fear of revealing government secrets, that showed assistant US secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu pressuring Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States over the no-confidence vote due to Khan’s entreaties to Russia, while warning that leaving him in power would isolate Pakistan from the Western world.