Crooked Bough News Round-up

— How Citizens United supercharged 'Israel's lobby'

 

at 8/25/26 10:05pm

In March 2006, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," as a "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." In their essay, which was the basis of the book of the same name that appeared the next year, Mearsheimer and Walt had been careful to distinguish the Israel lobby from a lobby by and for Jews, but it was to no avail in the furor that the essay and book provoked.Two decades later, as the United States and Israel wage a senseless war against Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt's case for the inordinate influence of Israel and the Israel lobby over American foreign policy looks pretty good. So does their contention that the policies promoted by Israel and its lobby are not in America's interest. Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist who has documented the lobby's influence, and Ian Lustick, a retired political scientist and expert on the Middle East, have written a worthy sequel, "Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power", to Mearsheimer and Walt's book. Like Mearsheimer and Walt, they use the term "lobby" to refer to a "loose network" of groups, media outlets, and wealthy individuals. They do an excellent job of explaining how this lobby has grown and altered its approach over the last two decades.As Clifton and Lustick show, the lobby has changed the way it tries to influence election outcomes. Before the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which opened the door to super-PACs and unlimited contributions, AIPAC and affiliated groups tried to influence elections and elected officials through campaign contributions. But AIPAC itself did not contribute to candidates or officials. Instead, its leadership urged its members, which included the very wealthy, to back certain politicians and to oppose others based on whether they had backed or opposed measures that were in Israel's interest. Members of the House and Senate committees that oversaw foreign aid could expect generous contributions if they backed aid to Israel. Donors gave these contributions directly to candidates and to sympathetic local PACs like Badger PAC or Gold Coast PAC, which in turn doled them out to candidates.In the last decade, national groups that support Israel's government have established their own super PACs that wage independent expenditure campaigns either for or against candidates. In 2019, Mark Mellman founded Democratic Majority for Israel. In 2021, AIPAC founded the United Democracy Project. These committees have spent huge sums. According to Federal Election Commission records, the United Democracy Project has doled out $104 million between January 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. In August, the UDP alone spent $2.5 million to oppose an Afghan-American candidate, Aisha Wahab, in a runoff for the northern California congressional seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.In the past, wealthy American supporters of Israel's government also exercised influence as individuals. Businessman Abraham Feinberg was a major funder of Harry Truman's 1948 campaign, which gained him access to Truman and allowed him to influence Truman's policy toward the new state of Israel. Feinberg was, however, small potatoes by current standards. During the last decade, what Clifton and Lustick describe as a "small set of megadonors" have backed unconditional support for Israel. Clifton and Lustick highlight nine donors, including Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Yass, Larry Ellison, Haim Saban, the late Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer, who have contributed over $1.7 billion in disclosed contributions since 2012. These contributions, they note, do not include undisclosed "dark money." Some of these contributions, like those from the Adelsons, directly affected policy. The Adelsons’ contributions to Donald Trump in 2016 were reportedly based on an understanding that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which he did upon taking office. While AIPAC and the formal lobbies have influenced Congress, the megadonors have specialized in winning over the executive branch.The groups supportive of Israel's government have also changed how they have made their case for supporting Israel. When Mearsheimer and Walt were writing their book, the groups could still rely on widespread public support for Israel. If anything, the pro-Israel set in American politics had grown to include Republican evangelicals as well as Democratic liberals. Labeling politicians as "anti-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian" could discredit them. In AIPAC's successful 1984 campaign to unseat Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.), for instance, one of the groups sent around a mailer describing Percy as "Israel's worst adversary in Congress." But as Israel's popularity has plummeted in the wake of its disproportionate response to Hamas's October 7, 2023, massacre and to Israel's continuing expansion in the Palestinian West Bank, the groups have had to resort to deception and diversion against Israel's critics.Instead of engaging the arguments of Israel's critics, groups like the ADL, American Jewish Committee, the Adelson-backed Brandeis Center for Human Rights and Law, and watchdog groups like CAMERA and the Canary Mission began charging Israel's critics with antisemitism. "Their goal was not to win debates about Israel," Clifton and Lustick write, "but to prevent discussion about it." They successfully lobbied the Biden and Trump administrations to endorse an official definition of antisemitism that included criticisms of Israel. The Trump administration used charges of antisemitism to bludgeon liberal universities and law firms they disliked. It would be surprising if Clifton and Lustick escape being charged with antisemitism for exposing the machinations of the Israel lobby.The groups have also altered their campaign strategy. In their advertising, the UDP and allied PACs have eschewed mention of American policy toward Israel. Instead, they have attacked candidates they opposed by citing their stands on whatever issues might resonate with the relevant electorate. In their ads this year against Wahab, the groups advanced a spurious claim that she had made "teenage girls more vulnerable to predators" by opposing a sex trafficking bill in the state legislature.In Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, AIPAC ran ads claiming that Abdul El-Sayed "disrespected women." None of the ads mentioned Israel. This tactic seemed to work in 2024 campaigns AIPAC and the groups waged against then-Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), but as the Iran War has deepened discontent with the U.S.-Israel alliance, it failed against Wahab and El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed's Republican opponent in the general election, even requested that AIPAC drop its plans to support him with ads against El-Sayed.As Clifton and Lustick show, the groups composing the Lobby have seen a sharp growth in their staffs and revenues over the quarter century. AIPAC and its educational foundation enjoyed a "fivefold increase in revenue between 2000 and 2022.” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (an AIPAC spinoff) increased its revenues from $5.2 million in 2001 to $21.9 million in 2023. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which led the charge in 2015 against the Iran nuclear pact, increased its annual haul from $1.12 million in 2001 to $17.8 million in 2022. Along with the megadonors, the Israel groups enjoy the support of wealthy foundations, including the $256 million Koret Foundation and the $220 million Swartz Foundation. But the growth of revenue has not been matched by a growth in influence. If anything, the lobby's influence has declined, forcing it to resort to deceptive advertising and incendiary accusations.There are two parts of Clifton's and Lustick's argument about which I wanted to read more. The first has to do with situating the lobby in American politics. Clifton and Lustick accept Mearsheimer and Walt's definition of the Israel lobby as "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." That might have been OK in 2007, but in 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami founded J Street, which billed itself as "pro-Israel," and which has attempted to move American foreign policy in a completely different direction from AIPAC and the other "pro-Israel" groups that Mearsheimer and Walt had assigned to the lobby. The lobby Clifton and Lustick describe represents one interpretation of what it means to be "pro-Israel." As Clifton and Lustick note, the lobby has gradually shifted rightward in American politics and in its view of Israel. AIPAC, which was initially run by liberal Democrats and had its base in the Democratic Congress, began moving toward the Republicans in 1982, when it made Robert Asher its president. In 1993, it replaced its executive director Thomas Dine, a former aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), with Howard Kohr, a Republican operative. In its early days, AIPAC was aligned with Israel's social-democratic Labor Party, but it has moved closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its aim for a Greater Israel. It harried Barack Obama's attempts to achieve a two-state solution. Its PAC has not merely targeted harsh critics of Israel like El-Sayed, but liberal Zionists like former Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Tom Malinowksi (D-N.J.). And it's not just AIPAC. The constellation of groups is now weighted toward Republican proponents of a greater Israel. It includes Christians United for Israel, which boasts a larger membership than AIPAC; a revived, Adelson-funded Zionist Organization of America; and the Republican Jewish Coalition, which dwarfs its Democratic counterpart. The funders have also tilted rightward. In the 1970s, AIPAC's president and major donor was real estate developer Larry Weinberg, a liberal Democrat close to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Clifton and Lustick's lobby still includes major Democratic donors including Saban, but more of the money is coming from Trump supporters like Miriam Adelson, Yass, Singer, and Ellison. In short, the lobby is increasingly part of a conservative, pro-Trump Republican faction that backs the right wing of Israel's politics. It is opposed not only by the Democrats who support J Street — or beyond that, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — but also by a growing group of Republican conservatives who believe that in his support for Israel, Trump has betrayed his commitment to "America First." I would have liked to know more about the political debates that took place inside AIPAC in the 1990s when it shifted most decisively rightward and in AIPAC and other groups during the Trump years.What I would have also liked to read more about is the precise relationship between the lobby and the Israeli government. AIPAC, the main group in question, grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was founded in 1949 and was funded by the Israeli government. In 1963, in response to demands that it register as a foreign agent, AZC changed its name to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and rewrote its charter to exclude foreign contributions. Since then, as far as is known, AIPAC has no financial or other legal ties to Israel's government or institutions. But Clifton and Lustick suggest that the lobby is "the agent of a foreign power." The title of their book is similarly provocative. They called it "Israel's Lobby" rather than "The Israel Lobby," and they subtitle the book, "America in the Grip of a Foreign Power." That implies that the lobby is subordinate to the Israeli government, even if it is not financed or staffed by it. They give one example of how that relationship has worked, citing a quote in a book about U.S.-Israel relations from an unnamed Israeli diplomat who served when George Shultz was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State. They wrote that the Israeli diplomat:came up with the idea of "turning Israel into a Major Non-NATO Ally. We told AIPAC, which started rolling the idea up and down Capitol Hill corridors until it was accepted."They also cite what an Israel official, unaware that he was being recorded, said in 2015 to an American audience about the government's efforts to get the Senate to oppose the Iran nuclear arms deal. "We have the FDD. We have others working on ...data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail."They summarize the relationship in this way: "Israeli government operatives do not control the organizations ... Israeli officials send signals that guide the behavior and the rhetoric of Lobby leaders and thousands of activists." But these two examples don't go far enough in making that case. The first is from a single source decades ago, and the second is ambiguous. What does "having FDD" mean? One wants to know whether the staff or the leadership in these groups have relationships with people in Israeli government ministries who send them signals. Are there examples of Israel's government persuading one of the groups to do something it had not thought of doing or was wary of undertaking? Answering these questions about the group's political evolution or its precise relationship to the Israeli government would have required trying to get people who have worked in these groups to talk candidly about what went on. That kind of journalism is, perhaps, beyond the call of duty for this book.What Clifton and Lustick have provided is a comprehensive and much-needed account of how the groups and individuals that make up the lobby have attempted to influence American politics and policy. That's quite an achievement, and anyone interested in America's relationship with Israel should pick up Clifton and Lustick's book.

[Category: Israel, Foreign-influence, Aipac, Book-review]

— Trump wants to stabilize Libya. Militants have other plans.

 

at 8/25/26 10:05pm

A series of crises have roiled Libya over the last month, undermining a U.S.-led initiative to resolve the country’s profound political predicament and open its markets to American investment.Violent protests over deteriorating living conditions have surged in western cities under the control of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, just as a series of drone strikes have hit energy and oil facilities in the city of Zawia, west of Tripoli. In the east near Benghazi, which is under the authority of strongman Khalifa Haftar, unknown assailants assassinated Major General Fawzi al-Mansouri, Haftar’s head of military intelligence. This chaotic stretch of events prompted the U.S. to belatedly recognize that the deteriorating security situation could undermine its peace initiative.In a tone reflecting concern over the spiraling situation, Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s adviser for Arab and African affairs, said the attacks “underscore the need for unified, professional military and security institutions capable of providing security for the Libyan people.”So far, Boulos has succeeded in bringing together military commanders from eastern and western Libya in joint exercises as well as bilateral meetings. But these nascent efforts are a far cry from an actual unification of military institutions. Without progress on that front, there is little hope of achieving a lasting political solution.The security dilemmaIn a recent briefing to the U.N. Security Council, Hanna Tetteh, the U.N. envoy to Libya, said widespread power outages and public discontent revealed the consequences of “institutional fragmentation," resource mismanagement, weak investment, and non-existent coordination in decision-making. Tetteh's warning regarding the fragility of the security situation along the western coast — where armed groups linked to drug, human, and fuel smuggling compete — raises anew the unspoken questions regarding the armed militias that have become part of the current Libyan scene. An important aspect of this warning is Dbeibah’s attempt to rearrange his forces ahead of a possible military operation to wrest control of Zawia from local militias, which has become a strategic priority due to the oil refinery located there. However, Mohammed al-Haneesh, a member of the Libyan House of Representatives for Zawia, warns that storming the city is no easy task — one that could have exorbitant security and political costs. Al-Haneesh says the success of any political settlement will rely on the U.S. administration’s ability to exert strong and balanced pressure on all parties. Failure on this front, he noted, could open the door to a new armed escalation, leading to yet worse division than that of today.Zawia: A test balloonThe future of the security situation in Zawia is important for Boulos. It’s also important for the American company General Electric, which announced that it was evacuating its technical teams from a power plant in Zawia until the security situation improves. Zawia, located about 25 miles west of Tripoli and housing the largest operating Libyan refinery, is not just a troubled city; in my estimation, it is a key test for Boulos’ initiative. Any escalation there would weaken Dbeibah's position and increase the fragility of the security environment in the west. This directly threatens the U.S. initiative, which relies on maintaining the country’s fragile stability. The goal, from the U.S. perspective, is to impose a power-sharing settlement between east and west that unifies institutions and creates conditions for investments in the energy sector. Zawia proved that the security dimension of Boulos’ initiative is somewhat underdeveloped, as vividly demonstrated by GE’s rapid exit from the plant there. That departure should be a wake-up call for Boulos as he seeks to persuade other American companies to return to Libya. And, despite Boulos’ success in unifying the budget for the first time in 13 years, the conflict between Benghazi and Tripoli over oil revenues and the management of the central bank is ongoing. If Dbeibeh attempts to storm Zawia and impose his control, the initiative will find itself under extreme strain, as his expected failure will necessarily mean he is not the trusted party to bring stability. From the perspective of oil expert Ahmed al-Shehati, Boulos’ initiative is not designed to solve the roots of the Libyan conflict, but rather pragmatically aims to temporarily freeze the conflict and protect oil flows. This arrangement may succeed, according to al-Shehati, in preventing military clashes between elites and stabilizing the flow of funds, but it remains fragile in the long run.Haftar's family of multiple voicesIn the east, specifically Haftar’s stronghold in Benghazi (Libya’s third-largest city), the situation is no less complex.He suffered a blow with the assassination of al-Mansouri, one of his top aides and the head of military intelligence. But Haftar has managed to keep most attention on his relentless efforts to endear himself and his son, Saddam, to both American and Russian parties, in part by helping secure the release of an American pilot and two fighters of the Russian Africa Corps from Mali.By cozying up to foreign powers, Khalifa Haftar is hoping to guarantee his family’s influence in any future agreement. Boulos’ compromise agreement has not been made public, but reports suggest it would place Saddam at the head of the Presidential Council, which would rule alongside Dbeibeh as prime minister. Tetteh’s recent briefing highlights the divergence of priorities between the dueling initiatives: while the United Nations works to unify security and executive institutions in preparation for long-delayed elections, Boulos merely seeks a political and economic consensus among current centers of power. In an implicit critique of Boulos’ path, Tetteh considered that "establishing parallel tracks and initiatives may open the door to wasting time and searching for alternative platforms, which should be avoided." Abdul Jalil Mayouf, energy affairs adviser in the former Libyan government, warned that the balance of power on the ground has completely changed compared to 2015, when the Skhirat agreement opened the path for ongoing U.N.-led negotiations. Militias today have become much stronger and taken control of the economy in western Libya, to the extent that Mayouf pessimistically wonders whether Boulos’ initiative even aims to "officially install these militias" as leaders in the region.What comes next?Here lies the rub: Is it possible to protect the U.S. initiative? Will everyone accept it? And what are the limits of American capability to impose it and ensure it remains alive without suffering a sudden death? Answering these questions would reveal the danger of Boulos making efforts to unify institutions and forge a political agreement without first providing the necessary security environment. The events of Zawia represented a heavy price for an American company, shedding light on the magnitude of security threats. Likewise, the assassination of Haftar’s aide in the east reopened counterterrorism wounds that many observers thought had healed. Boulos will certainly find partners for his initiative and will perhaps reach an agreement later, but the dilemma of ensuring its implementation remains. Although the U.N. initiative is not entirely effective and faces difficulties in persuading local partners, it is at least more attentive to the danger of the security situation. However, it has so far failed to dismantle militias and expel mercenaries and foreign forces from Libya. Some Libyans look with suspicion upon Boulos’ initiative as a means to recycle the ruling elites responsible for institutional failure in the country and preserve the dinosaurs that refuse to go extinct. Therefore, Boulos must give the security and military situation greater importance. It is, after all, the most important dimension in his ambitious drive to secure a political solution to the war, which will certainly not succeed in the absence of a force to protect it.

[Category: Trump, Boulos, Haftar, North-africa, U-s-foreign-policy, Libya]

— Lindsey Graham's sister wins. The War Party wins. We lose, again.

 

at 8/25/26 8:48pm

Darline Graham won the Republican primary Tuesday and will likely win a full-term to fill her late brother Lindsey Graham’s U.S. Senate seat in the ruby red state of South Carolina in the upcoming November election. According to the latest tallies Tuesday night, Graham, who was appointed to her brother’s seat after his death in July, beat her opponent Rep. Ralph Norman, 53% to 46%.It’s a curious turn of events in a modern era where there are very few displays of hereditary power, but she had the full backing of the Republican establishment and the fulsome endorsement of President Donald Trump days before today’s primary runoff.To be sure, her self-confessed lack of foreign policy experience or even knowledge won’t be a bad thing for Trump. Graham has all but said she will follow her brother’s career-long support of a militarized U.S. foreign policy, which means she is likely to be no critic of Trump’s failing war in the Middle East. A win for the War Party, but a loss for the rest of us.Graham was given a chance to display her merits last Thursday when she was asked in a debate with Norman if Taiwan and the South China Sea were national security issues for the United States.“I’m just going to be honest here. I’m … not that informed on national security,” Graham replied. “But I do support the military."Many thought this gaffe would sink her. Not a chance.This just wasn’t Norman’s time. He has a mixed foreign policy record, yet campaigned on “peace through strength” and now-dated MAGA “no more forever wars” sloganeering. In the same debate Graham flubbed, he said of the Iran War, that “(Trump’s) going to have to tell the American people what it’s going to take if the Straits of Hormuz are still dominated by a country that’s supposed to be decimated.”Despite having voted more with Trump’s agenda than any other South Carolina Republican, Norman could not compete with the idea that Lindsey Graham’s sister somehow deserved the president’s endorsement more. Don’t think her potential rubber stamp for the military didn’t have a lot to do with that.Trump told reporters at the Graham rally four days ago that “she’s going to do what the military wants, and really what the president wants.”What the “military wants”? What the “president wants”? Is that the role of a U.S. Senator representing South Carolina?(Graham’s) candidacy has been bolstered by support from at least three political action committees, coordination with a national Republican Party group and donations from “large business executives”, while Norman has done more self-fundraising, The State newspaper in Columbia reported on August 19. Some of Graham’s big backers include the PAC raising campaign funds for major aerospace manufacturer Boeing, the CEO of private equity firm Blackstone, the head of public policy for TikTok, and an executive at Palantir, one of the most influential defense and surveillance technology contractors in the world today.Super PAC "Security is Strength", which was created for her brother a decade ago, pledged $900,000 for Graham in July. Palmetto Action spent $1.26 million targeting Norman, according to Federal Election Commission records.There was something ironic in the Security is Strength support of Graham after she admitted national security wasn’t her strength. Still this Columbia--based “neocon PAC”, which says it “is dedicated to promoting a strong national defense, conservative judicial philosophy, and the protection of traditional values,” was created in 2015 to support Lindsey Graham's 2016 Republican presidential primary run — the primary purpose of which was to kill any potential momentum for fellow candidate and restraint advocate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).The late Graham was clear a decade ago about who was bankrolling this PAC. “If I were a defense contractor, I’d be big time for Lindsey Graham, because I’ve been forward-leaning on rebuilding our military," he said at the time. “It’s not surprising, then, that the same warmongers who subsidized Graham are now subsidizing his sister — fully aware of her unwavering allegiance to Trump’s escalating war in Iran,” wrote Will Folks of South Carolina-based FITS News in July.Having an unquestioning Iran war supporter in Lindsey Graham’s seat certainly seems important to Sean Hannity, who promptly had Darline Graham on his Fox News program the night after her disastrous debate gaffe.“I bet based on all your time with your brother, that you know probably everything about the Middle East,” Hannity said to her, as if she received this knowledge through osmosis.“Absolutely,” she replied. “I know national security is important. We have a wonderful commander in chief.”“I know that we need to stand with the Israel,” Graham also exclaimed (emphasis added).Next to Graham on screen was a "Darline's Graham's Policy Positions" scroll letting Fox News viewers know the totality of her ostensibly conservative positions.Graham attempted to clarify and divert, “I tripped up on one question last night, regarding Taiwan. I don't speak politician. I was just honest. Of course, Taiwan is our friend.” “But I think people in South Carolina are more worried about boys in girls sports,” she went on.On Monday, Hannity made clear that he was supporting Graham and also interviewed South Carolina’s other senator, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) to explain why he, too, was supporting her.The reliably hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and neocon pundit Mark Levin had already endorsed Graham. “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” Donald Trump told South Carolina voters at the Darline Graham rally on Friday. “Just come and vote. It’s so important,” Trump pleaded.No doubt for the president and others invested in America’s current and future wars, it was important to vote for the sister of Lindsey Graham.South Carolina did.

[Category: South-carolina, Darline-graham, Lindsey-graham, Donald-trump, Republicans]

— After 6 months of war, why aren't oil prices even higher?

 

at 8/24/26 10:05pm

For decades, the potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz has been considered the ultimate doomsday scenario for global oil markets. So, when Iran effectively closed the Strait earlier this year in response to the joint U.S.-Israeli assault, many analysts warned that oil prices could skyrocket to record highs. The logic was straightforward. Prior to the war, about 20% of the global oil supply transited the Strait. A loss of supply on this scale could easily have pushed oil prices to $150 or even $200 per barrel — but it didn’t. Instead, prices peaked around $120 per barrel in April and have largely stayed below $100 since June.To understand the dynamics that have so far prevented an even higher price spike, and to get a sense of where oil supply and prices may be headed as the conflict drags on, I spoke with Rory Johnston, a leading oil markets analyst and the author of the Commodity Context blog. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Sam Fraser: Let’s talk about why we haven’t seen the $150-200 per barrel oil prices that you warned about early in the war. You’ve pointed to a few reasons, including China's massive import cuts. As we understand it, what has China done with their oil imports and how have they managed it?Rory Johnston: It’s a bit of a mystery. At this stage, what we know for sure is that China reduced its crude oil imports by over five million barrels a day, roughly 45% of their total pre-war import appetite. For China, there's two endpoints of that crude oil balance: into a refinery or into storage. We know that China had been building up a massive volume of strategic reserves prior to the war. Essentially half of the 5 million barrels a day reduction can be explained roughly by reductions in refining runs in China. The remainder is a question of balancing in and out of stockpiles. Some of it would've been likely a drawdown of less visible or underground stockpiles. And the other portion of it is the halting of that prior pace of stockpile building. The main debate is how much each of these factors is contributing. If, let's say, 80% of that remainder is a halt to prior purchases that were building strategic stocks, that is a bearish outcome for oil prices because it means that Beijing doesn't need to replace those volumes anytime soon. But if they are aggressively drawing down less visible strategic stocks right now, that's a much more bullish interpretation because it means they can't keep going on forever and they're going to need to replace those stockpiles. On the refined product side, they cut refining runs by about 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day. What are they doing with that prior flow of diesel, jet fuel, et cetera? And that's where we start to get even more speculative. Above-ground storage tanks for refined products don't have floating roofs. We can't independently verify their fill. It comes down to the apparent consumption and the apparent available supply of these fuels within China. For gasoline and diesel, each of those supplies have apparently fallen by about 20%, which is a stark reduction. There’s no evidence that people in China are just driving a fifth less. If they aren’t actually cutting back that much on consumption, where is the fuel coming from? Prior to the war, we suspected that China was also building strategic reserves of refined fuels. Again, we can’t verify that, but if they had built that up, they could be drawing it down. We’re then faced with that same question as in crude oil, how much of this is a cessation of prior stock building and how much of this is the drawdown of existing stock? For reference, the last moment we saw anything like this in terms of apparent consumption collapse was COVID zero in 2022 when the country was entirely locked down. Fraser: So we can say that stockpiles of refined products must exist, but we have no insight into their size or how much is being drawn down or how sustainable those drawdowns would be?Johnston: Correct. There are mixed estimates, but I think they are at best estimates. It's funny, I think in some ways the lack of verifiable data allows people to speak very confidently about what's happening in China, because there's no data to rebut virtually any argument. That's just allowing people to run with it without any kind of real pushback.Fraser: How have we seen the Chinese buying patterns change since the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding and since it collapsed? Johnston: What we saw following the MOU was a surge of exiting cargoes from Hormuz. The vast majority of that seems to have routed towards China. What we saw was that, at the very bottom, Chinese crude oil imports fell to around 6 million barrels a day in June. And then those spiked back up to more than 10 million barrels a day in July, or at least that was the high point in July. Roughly a month later, those imports are back down around six. You've seen a rollover back to where we stood pre-MOU.Fraser: Do we know how long this import suppression can continue?Johnston:. Let’s say this has been entirely a drawdown of stocks, which seems implausible. Even then, they have more than a billion barrels of crude oil stocks that we know about for sure. If they want to support the market to their maximum ability, they can do that for months further. But in doing so, they would deplete the entirety of the energy security blanket they've spent almost two decades constructing. Fraser: Let’s move on to the strategic petroleum reserve releases by the U.S. and other partners. To what degree have those been instrumental in keeping prices from going a lot higher?Johnston: It’s part of the suite that the world has kind of engaged in to blunt those effects. This is the largest release of strategic stocks on record. Depending on the exact month you're talking about, it has potentially been over 3 million barrels a day of incremental supply coming from OECD SPRs. Without that, the market would've been much tighter and we likely wouldn't have experienced the same relief even with China's import cut at the same time.Fraser: Last week the U.S. SPR dipped under 300 million barrels. There's a lot of discussion of what the physical limits on those stockpiles are given that they're stored in salt caverns. They need a certain amount of fill to maintain structural integrity. Are we anywhere close to pushing up against the U.S. ability to continue drawing down from those stockpiles?Johnston: I do not believe we are. I think that you have probably at least another 200 million barrels that can be readily drawn down. With the required fill level, absolutely it would be a massive issue if you just drew it down and left a vacuum in there. It would implode on itself. But they don't do that. They one-to-one replace a barrel of crude oil extracted with a barrel of saturated brine. So theoretically it should maintain the same fill. The issue for SPRs is not necessarily fill level, but number of refill and empty cycles. It's the actual up-and-down motion that disturbs and further erodes the walls and structural integrity.I think that the SPR caverns can get below 100 million barrels of fill before we run into any issues.Fraser: So if we continued the current rate of drawdown, that would take us well into next year.Johnston: Correct. Fraser: Over the course of the war, Trump or someone in his administration will make a statement about how diplomacy is progressing or about how much oil is coming out of the strait. And even if those are quickly disproven, there is a downward impact on prices. So why do these traders keep listening to Trump? Has there been a change in the reaction of markets over the course of this war? Johnston: You definitely get smaller drawdowns to these kinds of jawboning attempts today than you would have, say, in March and April, where there are multiple days that you saw $15 to $20 per barrel reductions in the span of a day. When you look at the history of oil, there’s a tendency on these geopolitical events to overdo it. That's a natural kind of fear-driven phenomenon. In some ways Trump has short-circuited that normal behavior in oil markets. Because while you're right that it's never coming true, the price action is coming true. At the end of the day, for prices to go higher, you need traders to bid higher. And if they bid higher and they get blown out of the water and they lose their jobs, they're going to be replaced by someone that doesn't bid higher on geopolitical risk. It has successfully arrested the upside volatility. But if we keep getting tighter, markets will continue to respond higher; we just won't get those runaway phenomena that we would've seen historically.Fraser: Since the start of the war, we’ve seen Saudi Arabia and the UAE successfully use pipelines as an alternative route to get oil out of the Gulf. How much oil are those getting out at this point? And has the Houthi blockade of Saudi shipping in the Red Sea had a meaningful effect on this?Johnston: The total volume coming out of Emirates at Fujairah and then the west coast of Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea rose to about 6-7 million barrels. It was about 2-3 million before, so that was an incremental change of 4-5 million barrels. To your question with the Houthis, it has absolutely been having an effect. As soon as they started attacking Saudi ships, the entire Red Sea fleet went dark. Everyone turned off their transponders, making it much harder to verify flows out of Saudi Arabia. Verifiable transits of Saudi tankers through the Bab al-Mandab have gone functionally to zero. They still are probably getting some out, but we're also seeing evidence of flows north into the Mediterranean. Pre-war flows here were around a million barrels a day, give or take. That's jumped over the past week or two to around 2.5 million barrels a day, presumed Saudi flow.Over the past two weeks, we've also seen Saudi Arabia begin loading tankers in the Gulf again, which they hadn't done since the collapse of the MOU. And the question is, does Riyadh know something? Is something big going to break in the Hormuz negotiations? Or are they being forced back into the Gulf? You're seeing reports now that they are participating in the Emirati-led shuttle trade, ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman. It seems likely that some of that is displaced barrels coming back from the Red Sea. So Saudi Arabia is needing to diversify away from its diversification. There's a poetic side to it.Fraser: Pulling all these factors together, where are we left in terms of a kind of global supply shortage? And what kinds of price impacts can we expect if that persists over the next few months? Johnston: It's very hard to estimate global balance right now. My bet would be 2-4 million barrels a day undersupplied on a global basis. The rub on top of that is that we now have a parallel crisis that's emerging on the refining side of the slate. So even if we've sorted out what was happening on the crude oil side, we have the Ukrainian hammering of Russian refineries, the attacks in the Black Sea, the reduction in U.S. exports now that stocks have drawn down, and China is not exporting refined products either. All together this further tightens global refined product markets.If this persists and we keep drawing down crude oil stocks, the crude oil price is going to keep rising. On top of that, we could see refined product prices independently going higher. So that's just an amplification. For consumers, it's refined product prices and not crude oil that are going to drive those economic issues.Fraser: So even though these factors we’ve discussed have kept oil prices down so far, and the biggest of these can persist for a while, we could still be looking at those extremely elevated prices by a few months from now.Johnston: Easily. We're already feeling it. Refined prices are already at demand-destructive levels. It's just a question of whether they are at sufficiently demand-destructive levels. It’s the same fundamental concern I would've had back in April, playing out on a much longer timeline and now more on the product side than the entire oil complex.

[Category: Iran-war, China, Israel, Persian-gulf, Oil-markets, Q-a]

— Turns out having nukes provided the US very little leverage

 

at 8/24/26 10:05pm

For decades, the United States treated the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon as an intolerable threat. Yet when Washington and Tehran went to war twice in roughly a year, America’s own nuclear arsenal provided remarkably little leverage. In June 2025, the United States joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran retaliated against Israeli territory and a U.S. air base in Qatar. The following year, a far larger U.S.-Israeli campaign killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of Iran’s senior military leadership while striking the country’s nuclear, military, energy, and transportation infrastructure. Tehran responded by attacking Israel, U.S. bases across the Persian Gulf, and regional energy infrastructure.In neither war did America’s overwhelming nuclear superiority prevent Iranian retaliation or compel Tehran to capitulate. The paradox is striking: the weapon the U.S. had long insisted Iran must never possess proved largely incapable of shaping Tehran’s calculations, or determining the course of a war of choice that has consumed Trump’s presidency.Indeed, nothing in Iran’s observable behavior during the conflict suggests that the prospect of American or Israeli nuclear use materially shaped its wartime decisions. Aside from President Donald Trump’s occasional angry outbursts on social media, Washington issued no explicit nuclear threats, and there is no public evidence that Iranian leaders regarded nuclear escalation as a plausible wartime contingency. It was only after hostilities ended that Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, publicly warned that any U.S. use of nuclear weapons would be a “mistake.”Tehran’s wartime choices — including the decision to close the Strait of Hormuz — were responses to conventional military and economic pressure, not to America’s nuclear arsenal. Iran fought what its leaders regarded as a war of survival against two nuclear-armed states without visibly adjusting its strategy to account for possible nuclear use. Instead, Tehran relied on pre-existing capabilities. As Alireza Salimi, a lawmaker and member of the Iranian parliament’s presiding board, put it, “Under the current circumstances, the Strait of Hormuz is more valuable to us than a nuclear bomb.” The Iran war is the latest example of a pattern stretching from the Falklands War in 1982 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When a nuclear-armed state’s survival is not at stake, its nuclear arsenal provides remarkably little leverage to compel an adversary’s submission. Three wars involving nuclear powers across more than four decades point to the same conclusion: nuclear weapons may constrain escalation, but they rarely determine political outcomes.The Falklands WarIn 1982, the United Kingdom — a nuclear weapon state — sent a naval task force 8,000 miles to retake the Falkland Islands from non-nuclear Argentina. Several Royal Navy vessels initially carried nuclear depth bombs as part of their standard armament, but the weapons were removed from the task force and eventually returned to Britain as political and operational concerns mounted. The war itself was fought entirely with warships, aircraft, and infantry.Historical records further indicate that British officials never seriously contemplated the threat of nuclear use, while Argentine officials calculated that the U.K. would be restrained by its own nuclear policies. This was a war over control of disputed territory, British national prestige, and potentially Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s political survival. Yet Britain’s nuclear arsenal provided no discernible coercive advantage and did not shape the conduct or outcome of the war.If possession of nuclear weapons reliably generated coercive leverage whenever a state’s political stakes were high, the Falklands should have been a favorable case for exploiting it. Instead, the conflict illustrates the opposite: when nuclear use would be grossly disproportionate —and the threat of such use therefore non-credible — even an advanced nuclear arsenal may have little bearing on an adversary’s behavior or on the conduct and outcome of a conventional war.Ukraine: The exception that isn'tUkraine presents the harder case. Unlike Iran or Argentina, nuclear-armed Russia has repeatedly brandished its arsenal as an instrument of coercion since its 2022 invasion. Within days of the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin placed Russia’s deterrent forces on a “special regime of combat duty.” Former President Dmitry Medvedev and other senior officials subsequently issued repeated threats to use “all available means”; the Kremlin expanded the circumstances under which its nuclear doctrine permits use; and Moscow conducted additional strategic-force exercises in May 2026 amid battlefield setbacks.This campaign had some effects, including generating a fear of escalation that contributed to some hesitation in Western capitals over providing Ukraine with long-range missiles and loosening restrictions on their use. But those threats neither compelled Ukraine to surrender nor reversed Russia’s battlefield and strategic failures, or ultimately prevented NATO states from supplying advanced military capabilities.U.S. intelligence assessments have further concluded that Moscow would be most likely to cross the nuclear threshold only if the Russian state or regime faced an existential threat. Russia’s nuclear threats therefore exerted psychological pressure and bought time at the margins, but they neither delivered victory nor transformed the basic character of a war still being fought with tanks, artillery, missiles, and drones.Even Moscow, then, operated within limits that were never seriously tested. The pattern is not unique to Russia: nuclear threats are most credible only when the state issuing them believes its own survival is at stake. None of these conflicts — Britain's war to reclaim the Falkland Islands, America's war with Iran, or Russia's invasion of Ukraine — placed the survival of the nuclear-armed state in jeopardy. Iran’s response was especially revealing: Tehran dismissed Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender” and escalated instead, demonstrating how little coercive leverage America’s nuclear superiority provided.These cases of nuclear restraint reflect a structural cost that applies to any nuclear power weighing escalation against a weaker adversary. Using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear or substantially weaker adversary would carry reputational costs far exceeding any plausible battlefield gain. Such an attack would likely invite international condemnation, alienate allies, and even potentially fracture the domestic and international coalitions sustaining the war.Argentina, Iran, and Ukraine could therefore fight nuclear-armed powers without treating nuclear use as a credible response to every escalation. Nuclear weapons may cast a shadow over such conflicts, but when their use would be plainly disproportionate, threats to employ them carry little credibility and provide limited leverage.Deterrence not compellence  These three cases do not show that nuclear weapons are irrelevant. They reveal a narrower limitation: nuclear weapons are better at deterring actions than compelling them.Nuclear weapons can raise the risks of intervention and place a ceiling on escalation. But because using them to achieve limited objectives would be disproportionate, they offer little leverage over a determined adversary, especially if the adversary is fighting for its survival. While they may shape the boundaries of a war, they rarely decide its outcome.To be sure, some Iranian leaders may draw the opposite lesson: that only an operational nuclear arsenal could have prevented attacks on the country’s leadership and critical infrastructure. But the war could also reinforce Tehran’s preference for remaining a nuclear-threshold state. Iran’s most effective leverage came from capabilities it could actually employ to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Remaining at the threshold would preserve nuclear latency while avoiding many of the diplomatic, economic, and military costs of openly building a weapon. Tehran may therefore focus on making its conventional forces more survivable, expanding its missile and drone capabilities, and strengthening its capacity for maritime denial. The lesson for Iran may be that usable conventional power offers more practical wartime leverage than a nuclear weapon whose principal value would lie in never being used.

[Category: Enewsletter, Iran-war, Iran, Donald-trump, Israel, Russia, Nuclear-weapons]

— Forest fires just the beginning of Israel's destruction of Lebanon

 

at 8/24/26 10:05pm

For two years, Israel's war in Lebanon has been measured largely in a human toll: the dead, the wounded, the displaced. What has drawn far less attention is the destruction of the land itself.Across southern Lebanon, a combination of incendiary munitions, systematic demolitions, and now aerial herbicide spraying has degraded large stretches of Lebanese territory to the point where it is difficult to farm, unsafe to inhabit, and in many places, unrecognizable. American money and American weapons are behind nearly all of it.Since the attacks on Lebanon escalated in late 2024, Israeli forces have made extensive use of white phosphorus munitions across the south of Lebanon. The Israeli military's stated rationale is that phosphorus shells serve as smoke screens to mask troop movements and deny Hezbollah fighters cover; officials have denied using them intentionally to start fires. But that rationale does not hold up well against the pattern of use. Investigations by outlets including Al Jazeera have documented phosphorus shelling that torched oak and pine forests, destroyed decades- and centuries-old olive groves, and left soil contaminated with lead and other heavy metals. These effects persist long after any potential tactical need for concealment has passed. Lebanon's National Council for Scientific Research has estimated $25 billion in environmental damages from strikes between 2023 and 2024 alone, including thousands of hectares of destroyed forest and orchard. Reporting from the border village of Ayta ash-Shaab documented the destruction of the Monk Forest, one of the last intact woodland refuges in the border zone, through phosphorus shelling and bulldozing that left what satellite imagery shows as white craters scattered across what had been continuous forest cover.Where munitions have not flattened border villages outright, Israeli forces have often finished the job with remote-detonated explosives that level entire neighborhoods in seconds. Israel's official justification is narrower than the phosphorus rationale: that Hezbollah has embedded military infrastructure – tunnels, weapons caches, command posts – inside civilian buildings over decades. But the scale, method, and permanence of what has followed makes that justification fall flat. The Guardian reviewed footage of mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura, and Deir Seryan, in each case razing entire villages to the ground in a single blast rather than targeting individual structures; further mass detonations have been filmed and published by the Israeli military itself in Mhaibib and Majdal Zoun, in one case showing soldiers celebrating a village's destruction on camera. In Adaisseh and Kfar Kila, Lebanese state media reported explosions large enough that a single underground detonation was strong enough to trigger earthquake-warning systems in Israel.Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has stated plainly that all homes in Lebanese border villages will be destroyed, comparing the plan to the demolition of Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza, where the Israeli military leveled roughly 90% of homes. Journalist Lylla Younes, reporting from her own family's region near Bint Jbeil, described entire villages reduced to “moonscapes,” terrain so thoroughly cratered and flattened that residents have resorted to purchasing satellite imagery just to determine whether their homes still exist, since they cannot physically reach the villages to check.The detonations are also setting the land on fire, independent of the phosphorus shelling described above. “What our documentation increasingly shows, particularly over the past two months, is a sharp rise in fires coinciding with or following large-scale Israeli detonations and the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, particularly in occupied border areas and their immediate surroundings,” said Dr. Hisham Younes, president of Green Southerners, a Lebanese environmental organization working to protect South Lebanon's natural heritage. “But the destruction is not confined to these areas; it extends further into different parts of South Lebanon.”Israeli military maps released this spring marked a red line running through 21 villages and barred residents from returning to more than 50 others. A CNN review of satellite imagery identified newly built Israeli forward operating bases positioned inside Lebanese territory. NPR's reporting from the village of Mansouri described a town center reduced to rubble – shops blown open, homes crumpled, a mosque burned with its minaret split in two – six miles from the border but now sitting inside the militarized "yellow line." U.N. human rights experts have described the pattern of blanket evacuation orders and systematic housing destruction as consistent with what has happened in Gaza, and rights groups have said the mass remote detonations, as distinct from targeted demolitions, could amount to wanton destruction under the laws of war. In early 2026, Israel added a third tactic: aerial spraying of glyphosate, a controversial herbicide, across roughly 11 miles of the southern border. Israeli officials described this to Lebanon’s U.N. peacekeeping mission as routine vegetation management using “approved substances,” intended to clear dense brush that could conceal infiltration. Lebanon's agriculture ministry found levels 20 to 50 times higher than normal agricultural use, which could sterilize soil and prevent regrowth for years. Independent Dutch research organization PAX estimated between 1,000 and 1,600 acres of land affected on the Syrian side of the border alone, with additional spraying on the Lebanese side that satellite imagery did not fully capture.Israel initially told U.N. peacekeepers the sprayed substance was “non-toxic.” Laboratory testing subsequently confirmed Israel’s use of glyphosate, a chemical the World Health Organization's cancer research arm classifies as probably carcinogenic to humans, which helps explain why it is banned outright in both Lebanon and the European Union.The herbicide is blanketing land already stressed by years of phosphorus and heavy-metal contamination, compounding damage to soil, pollinators, and an agricultural economy that roughly 80% of southern Lebanon depends on. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called the spraying “a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty and an environmental and health crime.” Each of these three tactics has an official Israeli justification that sounds reasonable in isolation: smoke screens, tunnel denial, brush clearing. What is harder to explain is why, in each case, the actual scale and persistence of the harm so far exceeds what the stated rationale requires.“Heavy bombardment, incendiary attacks including white phosphorus, demolitions and chemical spraying have destroyed, contaminated and degraded these landscapes, while the extensive use of explosives has physically reshaped the terrain itself,” Younes said. “Taken together, we see this as a systematic process of destruction and place erasure, progressively dismantling the ecological and physical foundations that make return, recovery and continued life possible”The practical result is a southern Lebanon that an estimated 600,000 residents, per Israel's own defense minister, will not be permitted to return to, in villages that in some cases no longer exist in a form their own residents can identify from satellite imagery.This is not the conduct of a few rogue units. It is what the entire U.S.-armed Israeli military has done, systematically, for two years, and it calls for a systemic response. Most of what's being destroyed won't recover in any of our lifetimes, if it recovers at all. The response has to match the scale of the destruction: cut off the military aid sustaining it, before it's too late.

[Category: Israel, Lebanon, Environment, Israel-hezbollah, Israel-lebanon-war, Enewsletter]

— A trillion budget but military can't 'afford' to attack mold on bases?

 

at 8/24/26 10:05pm

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the maintenance backlog for military installations has ballooned to more than $285 billion — leaving many facilities in disrepair, while risking readiness and service members’ quality of life.This figure is a jump up from 2022, when the maintenance backlog was about $137 billion. But the backlog continues to grow, because the services only request about 80% of the funds they need for installation repairs and maintenance. “By requesting less funding for installation maintenance and improvement projects than its models and experts recommend, DOD has chosen to accept some degree of risk that mission or quality of life will be negatively affected,” the report, released Friday, found. Indeed, service members face a range of issues at the facilities where they work and live. Barracks at Naval Station Norfolk, for example, have had suspected mold since 2023. But the installation office declined requests to test the growth observed there “due to the cost of testing and potential remediation.” Another highly used facility at that Naval station had evidence of asbestos and significant water damage, GAO found. While all the station’s piers require renovation, the Navy was “actively improving” only one — leaving the rest to operate in a “degraded condition.”At one Naval Base Guam facility, GAO observed, rust build-up and algae on an emergency door’s lock could “affect the door’s functionality during an emergency.” The base’s facilities have also been prone to HVAC failures and roof leaks, GAO found, leading to suspected mold. Beyond physical hazards and operational risks, other issues undercut service members’ overall quality of life.About 3,000 soldiers live at Fort Wainwright, for example, yet the army installation’s dining facility was only built to serve 800.“The dining facility is not able to serve soldiers in a timely manner, so many opt to eat less-healthy food in their living spaces at their own expense, especially in the winter when it is too cold to wait in line outside,” GAO found. Officials have repeatedly advocated for expanding the dining facility, but the installation has not yet received the funding needed to do so. The maintenance backlog continues to swell despite the Pentagon’s rapidly expanding budget. The White House requested a record $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY 2027.

[Category: Military-bases, Gao, Defense-budget, Pentagon, Military, Military-readiness, Military-families]

— Israel's Lobby: More powerful and more unpopular than ever

 

at 8/24/26 11:17am

The pro-Israel lobby is dominating American headlines during the current election because of its outsized role in competitive House and Senate races — a role that's drawn scrutiny as Israel's popularity among American voters declines.Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s new book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of Foreign Power” unpacks how this network of lobbying groups works to influence American politics, foreign policy, civil liberties and more.Clifton, a Quincy Institute co-founder, and Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently joined Alex Jordan and Courtney Rawlings on Always at War to discuss the impetus for the book. They also talk about how the Israel lobby has changed in the years since John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” and how the lobby will try to to adjust to changing political realities in the United States.Clifton and Lustick say that beyond advocating for a foreign policy that does not serve the American national interest, the lobby has in recent years worked to curb free speech, particularly on college campuses.“We [now] have the problem of the lobby’s' attack on American freedoms domestically,” Lustick said on the podcast. “This is a result of the lobby not being to defend Israeli policies because they’ve become so extreme. So it attacks American freedoms to try to suppress debate, intimidate dissidents and break the institutions that produce those dissidents.” Candidates supported by AIPAC, the United Democracy Project, its affiliated Super PAC, and other pro-Israel donors and groups, have had notable successes and failures so far in the 2026 primary elections. A challenger, backed by this pro-Israel network, managed to unseat sharp Israel critic Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in the country’s most expensive ever House primary; while a similar effort in the second most expensive Senate primary in history was unsuccessful when Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) earlier this month. The authors found nine billionaires who, in Clifton's words, indicate that “Israel is the driving motivation for their engagement in American politics.” These individuals have given over $1.7 billion in campaign contributions. In the Michigan Democratic Senate primary specifically, Clifton has noted, an outsized proportion of funds came from out-of-state donors who have previously given primarily to Republican candidates. As Israel’s popularity suffers in both major political parties, the authors warn that the lobby will look for ways to influence American policy in ways that are more difficult to overturn, turning their preferences into reality without clear oversight from elected officials and the public. “They want to keep the United States as close as it has been historically,” said Clifton. “And they understand that what that might look like might change over time because public opinion is swinging in a different direction. So they’re trying to figure out how you lock in the United States.”

[Category: Video, Aipac, 2026-midterms, Israel, Israel-lobby]

— US can huff & puff, but without a political fix Iran won't come down

 

at 8/23/26 10:05pm

The latest U.S. strategy in the Middle East is defined as one of “maximum pressure,” combining military containment and economic sanctions in an attempt to compel Iran to accept a deal. But it lacks clearly defined, civilian-led outcomes, illustrating the persistent misalignment between military means and political ends.Military pressure can set conditions, signal resolve, and buy time for civilian action. It cannot determine political outcomes. When a civilian-led strategy rooted in clear end states is not determined ahead of sending military forces, those deployments turn into continuous rotations; it is how ‘forever wars’ get started. This essay is not an argument against the use of force. It is at times necessary, and even realist restraint doctrine says so. Instead, this essay is an argument that force is but one of many instruments of national security; when the other instruments of national security, like diplomacy, aren’t employed equally or greater than the military, it is service members who pay the greatest price. An earlier article laid the framework for this argument; this article shows what the habit of overreliance on the military looks like in practice. It is about what happens when whole-of-government strategic planning doesn’t take place before the first bullet is fired – leading to strategic failure even if the military objective is achieved. On March 4, 2026, U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff General LaNeve testified that more than 108,000 U.S. Army soldiers only (not counting military forces from the other services) were deployed or forwardly postured across 160 countries. Many, more than 50,000 personnel from all the services, are deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of interest in the Middle East. They include sailors still at sea aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. These forces have frequently been deployed to display U.S. resolve or apply “pressure” but have remained overseas longer than they or others anticipated.Legendary deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling described a difference between using force to physically destroy an adversary's capability and using force as a threat to change an adversary's behavior. The former is a military task; the latter is a political strategy, effective only if a settlement is feasible. According to Schelling, "the power to hurt is bargaining power." But when pressure is applied without the possibility of a political settlement, force is all that remains. In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. military stopped after liberating Kuwait and declined to advance to Baghdad. The political and military leadership (of President George H.W. Bush and Gens. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr.) agreed that continuing to Baghdad would trade a decisive military victory for an open-ended occupation for which the country wasn’t prepared. That was a wise political decision made before forces were committed. Twelve years later, the U.S. political leadership ordered an invasion of Iraq without first answering the question of who would pick up the pieces after the military had done its job. While postwar civilian authorities were established, they were deployed too late, and post-conflict planning failed to assign civilian responsibilities and resources for security beyond military control. What was missing was the whole-of-government strategy on the who, what, where, when, and how the desired political outcome was to be achieved. "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,” then-Secretary of State Powell warned President George W. Bush before the invasion. “You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all.” His warning, later dubbed the Pottery Barn rule — “if you break it, you own it” — underlined the importance of allocating responsibility for planning for the “day after” the use of force. The answer must always be America’s elected civilian leadership, not the uniformed members of the military; answers to the “who, what, where” questions must be known before forces are committed, not afterwards. In Afghanistan, the military removed the regime and won on the battlefield. But multiple U.S. administrations failed to answer what specific, achievable, and time-bound political outcomes the fighting was designed to achieve. Instead, drawdown plans were based on optimistic assumptions and insufficient preparation for a full withdrawal. So when the political decision was finally made to bring the troops home and abandon Kabul in 2021, it was done in a hurried and improvisational manner, turning the operation into an evacuation, on the fly and under fire.The 2026 Iran war has followed a similar pattern. On February 28, U.S. and Israeli aircraft struck Iran, opening the current phase of the conflict. While the military achieved its tactical objectives, there was no clearly defined civilian-led strategy to achieve the publicly stated political goal of overthrowing the Iranian regime, or at least forcing it to make significant concessions. An interim agreement established a 60-day negotiating period for a final agreement and temporarily paused military operations, but, without a clear political strategy, this had little hope of succeeding. The result has been a return to violence as both sides claim to control, or even own, the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces are once again deployed to the Middle East with no end in sight. What started as a military pressure campaign to first destroy nuclear-related infrastructure and then remove the regime — something pressure alone (particularly air pressure only) can never achieve — has turned into the longest ever deployment of a U.S. aircraft carrier at sea without a port call and another “forever” conflict. Ordering the deployment of forces is easy, but disengagement and redeployment are hard work. Powell used eight questions, and former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger set down six criteria, including requirements that combat be a last resort and objectives be clearly defined before commitment. Which model used doesn’t matter so much as adhering to a model. It’s the discipline to not get into a fight without an exit strategy. This touches on one reason the military is repeatedly asked to accomplish strategic outcomes beyond its mandate. Unlike other government institutions, the military teaches strategy and planning, and at scale. It has dedicated masters degree-granting institutions and dedicated career fields, such as the U.S. Army’s Functional Area 59 (Strategist). In contrast, the Department of State has genuine expertise, and its foreign service officers execute complex diplomatic missions every day, but it lacks a year-long, in-residence, career-gated strategist program; so does every other major agency that make up the other elements of national security.The fix is for the president and Congress to build civilian capacity, tied to career advancement, to the same degrees the military currently possesses. Then, when national leadership convenes the government’s national security experts to consider the use of force, it is the civilian strategist who must be heard in at least equal measure as the military planner. Unfortunately, when the government equates military pressure to strategy, it asks military forces to do the work that would be far more appropriately assigned to their political, diplomatic, or development counterparts. Military forces are designed to close with and destroy the enemy, not negotiate or oversee political settlements. Deploying teams into high-risk environments and getting them home safely is common operational preparation. Every unit that deploys does it. Every combatant command does it. What is missing is the same preparation at the level above the uniform, from the civilian political leadership appointed over the military. Before you send them, know how, and when, you bring them back. Anything less is not strategy. It is the beginning of another long deployment.

[Category: Military-strategy, Forever-wars, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Military]

— Dozens of ex-lawmakers, staff landed at military firms since 2015

 

at 8/23/26 10:05pm

In the last decade, 31 former members of Congress and top staff have left Capitol Hill and joined the military-industrial complex as lobbyists or contractors, according to a new report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.The 21 lawmakers named in the report served on either the House or Senate Armed Services Committee, the legislative bodies that set the Pentagon’s annual policies through the annual National Defense Authorization Act. In addition, the report names 10 former senior committee staffers who transitioned to working as weapons industry government liaisons or lobbyists. These 31 former officials represent a snapshot of the military-industrial complex’s “revolving door,” through which ex-policymakers transition from setting the Pentagon’s agenda in Congress to cashing in on those same policies in the private sector. “That report we published is the most direct explanation we’ve ever seen of why the defense budget always goes up,” said John Mecklin, the author of the report and former editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.The report highlighted a variety of potential ethics conflicts, focusing in particular on the growing path between Congress and Silicon Valley defense tech startups.Chris Vieson, the former staff director of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), was appointed earlier this year to the National Commission on the Future of the Navy, established to advise Congress on everything “from shipbuilding and acquisition to maintenance and repair, workforce, training, and modernization.” Vieson is also an active registered lobbyist for two defense startups: Saronic Inc., a manufacturer of unmanned maritime vehicles; and watercraft builder Whiskey Project Group. Previously, Vieson worked as a lobbyist for Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm gaining influence in the Pentagon and pushing AI integration.According to its executive director, the National Commission on the Future of the Navy aims to modernize the Navy to prepare for conflict with China and Iran. As part of this goal, the Commission will “test emerging ideas such as a hybrid fleet and expanded use of unmanned systems.” Vieson’s lobbying client, Saronic Inc., is one manufacturer of such unmanned systems.While the revolving-door phenomenon is not new, the report captures the increasing influence of a new generation of Silicon Valley military firms. Former HASC members Mike Gallagher and Jeff Miller have taken up jobs as an executive and a lobbyist, respectively, for Palantir. Former Republican staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Christian D. Brose is now the Chief Strategy Officer for Anduril, an autonomous weapons startup valued at $61 billion in its latest round of fundraising. According to Mecklin, Congress is eager to let Silicon Valley officials into their bureaucracy. “It takes the Pentagon many, many years to acquire a new defense system like a fighter plane. With a high-tech system, you just can’t wait that long,” he said. “So they found a way around the complicated acquisition processes of the Defense Department.”Likewise, Silicon Valley weapons startups that wish to challenge prime contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin are desperate to hire former politicians. “If you’re a company that wants to get into defense contracting, it’s highly beneficial to hire people that understand the process of federal appropriations in the defense sector,” Mecklin explained.The Bulletin’s revolving-door report also details a who’s-who of top congressional stock traders. Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), who has served on HASC since 2015, has been trading GE Aerospace stock via his spouse since 2023. Scott’s trades this year violated the STOCK Act, a bill passed in 2012 to curb insider trading. That makes Scott one of seven Armed Services Committee members to violate the STOCK Act this year, generally for failing to disclose trades within 45 days, as the law mandates.Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) is another HASC member who has benefited from military contractor stocks. In December 2025, she disclosed her husband’s $100,000-$250,000 purchase of stock in Elon Musk’s xAI, which merged with SpaceX soon after in February. McClain’s husband’s xAI shares were converted into SpaceX shares months before the company's historic IPO in June. McClain previously violated the STOCK Act for her delayed disclosure of a trade worth up to $450,000 in Palantir stock.The report also makes note of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) trading stock for prime defense contractor Lockheed Martin and aerospace manufacturer Honeywell. Tuberville, one of the most active stock traders in Congress, has served on SASC since 2021. When President Donald Trump faced criticism this spring for his own portfolio of weapons stocks, Tuberville told a reporter for MeidasTouch, “I do the same thing.”Mecklin believes that laws like the STOCK Act are insufficient to curb members of Congress cashing in on defense spending. “The way you really stem this kind of behavior is to have inspectors general and law enforcement agencies that are on the lookout for them. Occasionally, take up one of these egregious cases and just prosecute it,” said Mecklin.“Unless you have a system that actually scares these people so they cut it out, it’s going to continue.”

[Category: Congress, Silicon-valley, Defense-tech, Revolving-door]

— Pitch for defense treaty and moving US military to Israel is insane

 

at 8/23/26 10:05pm

On August 18, Israel bombed a non-operational Syrian air base, reportedly to derail Turkish plans to deploy military forces to the installation. The move drew swift condemnation from the United States, which did not receive prior notification despite its growing support for Syria, its alliance with Turkey, and the presence of thousands of U.S. military personnel based nearby, in Jordan and other parts of the region.Is this the behavior of a “model ally”? The Jewish Institute for National Security of America seems to think so. The group, which promotes "strategic cooperation" between the United States and Israel, tries to defend this position in its new report, “Shifting the Center of Gravity: Transforming the U.S.-Israel Security Partnership.” It also lays out an ambitious set of proposals JINSA hopes will be part of a renewed 10-year U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding (the current one expires in 2028). JINSA wants this "final" direct aid package to include $38 billion total and be "paired with new, mostly non-monetary initiatives that deepen and expand the U.S.-Israel partnership."The recommendations in this report — which also include signing a mutual defense pact, basing U.S. military forces in Israel, and integrating Israeli technology into U.S. homeland defense — should be rejected as threats to U.S. national security. Not only would they cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, but the prescriptions would make the United States less safe than it is today, by institutionalizing U.S. military entanglement with (and even dependence on) Israel and increasing the risk of future wars. Instead the Trump administration should instead let the current MoU expire in 2028 with no replacement. With a strong military and nuclear arsenal, Israel can defend itself.The JINSA report opens by heralding Israel as “America’s most important ally,” praising its military prowess, technological capability, and willingness to project military power in pursuit of supposedly shared goals. Missing from its account of Israel’s support during Operation Epic Fury, however, is any mention of Israel’s role in starting, escalating, or widening the war. These are certainly relevant details if we are judging whether the bilateral relationship is an asset or a liability to the United States.The report sidesteps these realities and instead moves quickly to a set of 10 proposals that it argues will take the bilateral partnership to the “next level.” From the perspective of protecting U.S. national interests, these ideas range from bad to insane. Among the more worrying recommendations are those that suggest the United States should form a mutual defense treaty with Israel and begin shifting U.S. assets away from current positions in the Persian Gulf to a wider and permanent force posture in Israel — including a new CENTCOM headquarters and a "regional U.S. prepositioned arsenal hub." These would break long-established firewalls in the U.S.-Israel relationship and undermine U.S. interests.Since 1975, the United States has had a security commitment to Israel, formalized in a memorandum of agreement, that promises “remedial action” should Israel face external threat. In recent years, this commitment has functioned as a de facto security guarantee on par with Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Still, the United States has intentionally refrained from signing a more explicit mutual defense agreement with Israel or basing U.S. personnel inside Israel’s borders for two reasons.First, it was Israel’s preference. Jerusalem has long prided itself on the fact that only its soldiers directly defend the country and that it could fight its own battles as long as the United States offered military support. Second, Washington feared a more formal defense obligation or forward bases in Israel would increase the risk that the United States would eventually become entangled in Israel’s ongoing border skirmishes or complicate relationships with U.S. Gulf state partners, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, on whom the United States relied to keep oil prices low.The recommendations by JINSA, which count 43 retired U.S. officers — including 24 generals and nine admirals — on its roster discard these redlines. The mutual defense agreement they describe is framed as a narrow one that would be triggered “by the high bar of existential threat to Israel or Iranian use of weapons of mass destruction against U.S. bases in the region.” But history tells us that, for Israel, the “existential threat” threshold is met easily and often. In recent years, Israel has argued that Iran posed an existential threat while also claiming Hezbollah and Hamas as existential challenges to Israel’s security. In other words, signing onto this agreement would all but guarantee U.S. involvement in future Middle East wars against Iran or possibly even Turkey, which some in Israel have already identified as the next target despite the fact that it is a NATO ally.Of course, this is the goal of the recommendation: to ensure that no matter how far Israel falls in U.S. public opinion, the United States will be obligated to come to its defense, or risk undermining the credibility of its other commitments. Basing U.S military forces inside Israel would only worsen the moral hazard engendered by U.S. support to the country. With U.S. personnel as a tripwire, Israel’s leaders would feel assured that any attack would almost certainly drag in the United States, giving them little incentive to act with restraint. The risk that the United States might be ensnared in Israel’s future military adventures would be high.The second major focus of JINSA’s recommendations covers the sharing of military technology and joint industrial projects between Israel and the United States. Most of these proposals demand that Israel gain the same level of access to U.S. technology as is enjoyed by the closest NATO allies who have spent years working to meet U.S. security standards. That Israeli officials are suspected of spying on the United States should be warning enough that giving Israel this type of access to sensitive U.S. technology would be a mistake. The most dangerous of these tech sharing ideas, however, is one suggesting that Israeli technologies should be directly integrated into U.S. air and missile defense, specifically the Golden Dome project. This provision would mean that, if the Golden Dome project or something like it eventually covers the United States, Israeli technology would be part of its foundation, making the U.S. dependent on Israel for its own defense.The United States tried something similar once before with Israel and the project had to be cancelled. The reason? Israel refused to allow the United States access to the source code needed to integrate the Iron Dome systems it planned to purchase into the U.S. air defense network. Experimenting with this type of cooperation a second time would be an act of self-harm on the part of the U.S. government.Taken together, then, the JINSA proposals do not advance U.S. interests in the Middle East or elsewhere. In fact, they do just the opposite. They will increase the U.S. security burden and tie the United States down in the Middle East in ways that may quickly become irreversible while also undermining the physical security of the homeland. And they will do so at a cost of $38 billion from U.S. taxpayers in the form of annual military aid.This outcome should be entirely unacceptable to any American president, regardless of the specific ally or partner in question and especially for a president who ran on promises to put U.S. interests first. Elsewhere, President Donald Trump is pushing allies to defend themselves without so much (or any) U.S. support. He should do the same with Israel. The endless cycle of MoUs has run its course. The current one should be the last.

[Category: Enewsletter, Israel, Us-military, Jinsa, Iran-war, Israel-aid, Us-israel]

— Israel is sponsoring ads on Ted Cruz's podcast. Is that legal?

 

at 8/21/26 10:05pm

The Israeli government is running advertisements on a popular podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), raising questions about whether the staunchly pro-Israel lawmaker is indirectly receiving campaign funding from a foreign country. Radio and podcast giant iHeartMedia has syndicated Cruz’s show, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” since 2022. Because of lobbying-related restrictions, the company cannot legally pay the senator for ad revenue. But, it turns out, that’s not the only way to ensure the money benefits Cruz.Under an unusual licensing deal, iHeartMedia agreed to donate revenue “associated with (the show’s) advertising sales” to the Truth and Courage PAC, a super PAC dedicated to “ensuring that Ted Cruz is re-elected to the United States Senate.” The company has given at least $1,738,000 of “digital revenue” to the Truth and Courage PAC since 2023, according to Federal Election Commission filings.The agreement has drawn significant scrutiny from watchdog groups, some of which filed a complaint against Cruz with the FEC alleging he “brazenly violated” laws that bar candidates from receiving corporate donations. Though the senator admitted to having met with representatives from the company to discuss the acquisition of the show, the agency ruled in his favor, finding that there was “no available information to indicate that Cruz solicited, directed, received, transferred, or spent the funds iHeart paid to the PAC.”“Cruz’s role was limited to hosting the Podcast and he does not appear to have been involved with the decision for iHeart to pay the PAC, meaning that he did not direct or solicit any funds,” the commission found.The Israeli government-funded ad revenue appears to operate in a similar gray area. The advertisements, which are part of the $7 million “I am Israel” campaign launched in June, are geared toward encouraging Christians to visit the country and see biblical sites for themselves. “Israel isn’t a destination; it’s a revelation, where every site you’ve studied, every scripture you’ve memorized, every sermon that ever moved you suddenly has an address, a landscape, a heartbeat,” Ben Ferguson, Cruz’s co-host, says in one ad. “This is the trip that changes not just how you see the Holy Land, but how you see everything.”Ferguson then urges listeners to “start planning your trip today” and tells them to follow “Visit Israel” accounts on social media. The ads do not disclose that Visit Israel is a public-facing entity of the Israeli ministry of tourism.The campaign appears to exploit a loophole in election financing laws. Candidates and PACs are banned from receiving any funding “directly or indirectly” from foreign nationals, according to the FEC. But Cruz would only run afoul of campaign finance laws if Israel explicitly earmarked its contribution to go to the PAC, said Craig Holman, a leading expert on campaign finance laws and an ethics lobbyist at Public Citizen.“Assuming there is no formal agreement, then the money is considered iHeartRadio funds, with which it can do as it pleases,” Holman said.Holman blamed court decisions like Citizens United for opening the path to Cruz’s “surreptitious financial arrangement” with iHeartMedia.“The courts have fabricated a myth that outside groups are ‘independent’ of candidates and therefore fall outside the campaign finance limits and disclosure laws,” Holman told RS. “So, wealthy interests and even foreign governments launder money to outside groups with the explicit intent of the outside group spending that money to support a specific candidate. Israel is exploiting this court-created loophole.”Neither Cruz nor iHeartMedia responded to requests for comment about whether the Truth and Courage PAC has received or will receive money from the “I am Israel” campaign. RS also reached out to a representative of the PAC, who did not respond.iHeartRadio’s last publicly disclosed donation to the PAC was in May. The PAC does not share detailed information about the ad revenue it receives from iHeartMedia, and it does not have to reveal any further donations until the end of the third fiscal quarter in September.The “I am Israel” campaign is part of the Israeli government’s efforts to reinvigorate the country’s tourism industry after years of war. In May 2019, 105,700 American tourists visited Israel. In May of this year, that number was only 22,600. At the campaign’s June launch event in New York, which was hosted by the Jerusalem Post, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon encouraged attendees to help boost these numbers. “We have accomplished so much in the last 3 years. We have defeated our enemies,” said Danon. “Now it’s your turn…Now you have to start again, bring the groups to Israel.”The ads on Verdict target Christians in particular. The Israeli government has invested significantly in efforts to bolster support for Israel among Christians, including greenlighting a proposal to target churchgoers with pro-Israel ads during services and funding a Bible study program taught by IDF soldiers and West Bank settlers, as RS has previously reported. The Israeli government also secretly funneled $245,000 to Eagles’ Wings, a Christian Zionist organization based in New York, to lobby over 100 congressional offices for more military aid to Israel. These initiatives reflect Israel’s concerns that it is losing influence among American evangelicals. While they have long been one of the most influential pro-Israel constituencies in the U.S., that support is now slipping; a 2025 poll found that only 24% of evangelicals under 35 years old support the Israelis over the Palestinians. The Israeli ministry of tourism hinted at this dwindling support in a procurement document for the campaign. The goal of the June launch event was to broadcast “a message of ‘business as usual,’” according to the document, signed by Michael Yitzhakov, chief of staff of the Israeli ministry of tourism. The Israeli government agreed to pay the Jerusalem Post around $195,000 for the event.Cruz is among Israel’s most zealous allies in Congress. “There is no military on the face of the planet, including the U.S. military, that goes to the lengths that the Israeli military goes to avoid civilian casualties,” he said in November 2023. Just last week, Cruz lauded Israeli companies for “betting big on Texas, investing $3.2 billion and creating more than 4,200 jobs across our state.”Cruz is an adherent to Christian Zionism, a theological belief that Christians have a religious obligation to support the modern state of Israel. “I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed,” he told podcast host Tucker Carlson last year, referencing a controversial interpretation of God's covenant to Abraham in Genesis. “And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side.”Over the years, Cruz has received significant financial support from pro-Israel donors, including Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, who gave $1 million to the Truth and Courage PAC in 2024. And, as he told Carlson last year, the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC “raises a lot of money for me.”

[Category: Israel, Israel-lobby, Ted-cruz, Foreign-influence]

— Stepan Bandera is haunting the Ukraine War and Polish elections

 

at 8/20/26 10:05pm

For the last several months, relations between Ukraine and Poland — one of Ukraine’s main supporters in its war with Russia — have been unusually strained. The trigger for renewed mutual recriminations was the decision in June by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to name a Ukrainian military unit after the “Heroes of the UPA,” which was the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during WWII. Polish President Karol Nawrocki immediately reacted to this honoring of the OUN-UPA by revoking the Order of the White Eagle award — recognizing Polish-Ukrainian friendship — given to Zelensky by former President Andrej Duda in 2023. Also this spring, Zelensky doubled down on Ukraine’s determination to honor WWII era nationalists by re-interring with military honors the repatriated remains of prominent OUN leader Andriy Melnyk. Zelensky announced plans to set up a pantheon in tribute to Ukraine’s national heroes. He said, “No one can tell us which heroes [Ukrainians] will honor.” This controversy has implications for Polish support for Ukraine’s war effort. The populist-nationalist right opposition has, for example, challenged the decision by the centrist government to transfer a small number of Patriot interceptor missiles to Kyiv earlier this year, arguing that Poland’s own territorial defense should have priority. The strain in Polish-Ukrainian relations will also feature in the effort of the Polish right as it seeks to defeat the centrist-left coalition in parliamentary elections to be held no later than October 2027 (they are not scheduled yet). No doubt, Poland’s populist-nationalist right shares the widespread popular enmity toward Russia, but it prioritizes the country’s territorial defense over arming and sustaining Ukraine. From the standpoint of the right’s opposition to Prime Minister Tusk, the pursuit of historical justice for the Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres is necessary to reverse the alleged neglect of this tragedy by successive centrist governments. Those pragmatists stand accused of tactically forgetting the martyrdom of fellow Poles for the sake of a strategic alignment of Poland’s interests with those of Ukraine.Wars over history: VolhyniaDuring WWII, the UPA fought the Soviet Army in the Galicia area of western Ukraine (then eastern Poland). Factions of the OUN-UPA also made early tactical accommodations with Nazi forces but the collaboration did not last. In 1943-45, UPA forces killed an estimated 100,000 Poles and members of other minorities in the Volhynia region, seeking to rid the area of Poles. In 2016, the Polish parliament designated the Volhynia massacre a genocide, declaring July 11 as an annual national observance of the events.Ukraine contends that the OUN-UPA fought for the formation of an independent Ukraine, principally against the territorial ambitions of the USSR, but also of Poland and ultimately of Germany as well. They frame the Volhynia anti-Polish violence as “decolonization.”UPA commander Stepan Bandera is anathemized in Israel, as well as in Poland and Russia, for mass killings of Jews in Kyiv and in eastern Poland/western Ukraine. Nevertheless, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared him a national hero in 2010. A Ukrainian court annulled this designation in 2011, stating that hero status was reserved to citizens of the modern Ukrainian state. Bandera is still lionized by many Ukrainian right-wing nationalists.In both Poland and Ukraine, state-supported Institutes of National Memory (IPNs) play a significant role in shaping public attitudes and have been led by nationalist populists. These institutes foster the uncritical assertion of national pride (“rising from one’s knees”) and refuse any acknowledgement of any blame under any circumstances. Nawrocki was president of the Polish Institute of National Memory from 2021 to 2025. A historian by training, he also led a revamping of the Gdansk WWII museum to emphasize exclusively Polish innocence and suffering.Polish elections affectedThe salience of the Volnynia massacre is greatest in Poland among supporters of the formerly governing PiS (Law and Justice) party and the two other populist nationalist parties (Konfederacja and Konfederacja of the Polish Crown). Despite the recent breakaway of the more moderate wing of PiS, on current trends, the right still has reasonable chances of being able to form a governing coalition.The voters on the Polish right are also reflecting an impatience with the estimated 1.6 million Ukrainians who have taken refuge in Poland, a view that will serve the parties who represent these voters.Meanwhile, the OUN-UPA controversy has practical implications for Ukraine’s accession into the EU, including from Tusk’s pro-EU centrist government. Recently, deputy prime minister and defense minister Kosiniak-Kamysz reiterated Poland’s insistence that Ukraine can not enter the EU “under the banner of Bandera.”The politics of history will continue to roil relations between Poland and Ukraine, even if a cool assessment of national interest in both countries suggests this should not be the case.

[Category: Poland, Stepan-bandera, Wwii, Ukraine-war, Russia, Volodymyr-zelensky, Ukraine]

— 'Orcas' with likely inside info win big on Trump Jr.-funded Polymarket

 

at 8/20/26 10:05pm

The Trump-connected Polymarket is likely helping gamblers with inside military information cash in on wars the president wages. According to Reuters, a report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective found that 152 “exceptionally successful” Polymarket wallets otherwise known as “Orcas” may have traded on inside military information to place high-stakes bets on critical U.S. defense operations, including the June 2025 attacks on Iran. According to the non-profit research group, these wallets had a 97.2% success rate and won $8 million collectively.President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is an adviser for Polymarket. 1789 Capital, his venture capital firm, invested in the platform soon after it was founded.Moreover, Trump Jr. and his brother, Eric Trump, continue to profit from defense industry investments as the war with Iran continues. Powerus, a firm funded by both brothers, has received two Air Force contracts for interceptor drones this year.Eric Trump has also invested in Xtend, an Israeli drone firm that is also a DoD contractor. Xtend’s drones have been used during the Iran war, via a multi-million dollar contract with an unnamed Middle Eastern government. Eric Trump became an adviser to Space-Eyes, which makes software that detects and counters drones, in late July. Donald Trump Jr. is also on the board of Unusual Machines, a drone parts startup.According to Reuters, this latest report comes amid growing concerns about Polymarket betting on the outcomes of geopolitical events. In at least one case an insider was caught betting on U.S. military operations before they happened.Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who reportedly helped plan and carry out the secret U.S. invasion that removed Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power on January 3, allegedly made more than $400,000 on Polymarket by betting on the operation and outcome. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty to these allegations.Polymarket users have also repeatedly wagered that crude oil prices would drop just before Trump would announce supposed breakthroughs in talks with Iran or a cessation in U.S. airstrikes — declarations that would prompt oil prices to fall, suggesting such bets were based on insider knowledge. But these bets can pose broader national security risks for the U.S."Most people vastly underestimate how observable unusual betting activity actually is on Polymarket. It's all right there on the internet, and we can see clear signs that big traders and bots are copying potential insider trades," Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) co-founder David Szakonyi told Reuters. "It would be ⁠naive to think foreign-intelligence agencies aren't monitoring these markets."The White House warned administration officials back in March that they cannot use “nonpublic government information to place wagers.” U.S. Senators have since barred themselves from insider trading on prediction markets; a House of Representatives ban on the practice is also being considered. “The status quo is indefensible," Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who has introduced a ban in the House, told NPR. "There's no justification for allowing members of a campaign or members of the government to bet on their own decision making."

[Category: Polymarket, Trump, Trump-sons, National-security, Iran-war, Drones, Prediction-markets]

— Houthis may meet their match as Yemen slips back into civil war

 

at 8/19/26 10:05pm

Yemen’s front lines have barely moved since the 2022 truce, but the war around them is changing.Ballistic missiles and drones are striking far beyond established positions, and forces associated with the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government are responding more aggressively to infiltrations and military buildups. As commanders review readiness across key fronts, Yemen’s political leadership is signaling that attacks will no longer be absorbed without a response.Together, the developments suggest that the country’s long period of “no war, no peace” may be coming to an end. There has been no ground offensive large enough to redraw the map so far. But war can return gradually as long-range strikes increase, forces reinforce positions and the rules of retaliation begin to change.Mokha: War without taking territoryThe Port of Mokha stopped operating two weeks ago amid repeated Houthi ballistic missile and drone attacks.Dr. Abdulmalik al-Sharabi, director of the port, said the facility had been hit by more than 35 missile and drone strikes, concentrated on its economic zone, quay, logistics facilities, dredger, central workshop, administrative buildings and employee housing.According to al-Sharabi, 16 people have been killed and 22 wounded, and the port is now closed to maritime traffic. Military information from the western coast puts the number of ballistic missiles and drones launched toward Mokha during the latest escalation at close to 90.The attacks show how the conflict can inflict strategic damage without changing control of territory.The Houthis do not need to seize the port by land to disrupt it. Striking the quay, logistics facilities and equipment can interrupt shipping and trade while imposing economic costs from a distance. A missile explodes in seconds; its economic impact can last far longer.The influence of regional powers has contributed to this shifting picture within Yemen. Saudi Arabia remains the key supporter of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, providing political, financial, development and military backing. Saudi assistance has included support to the Central Bank and government finances to help cover public-sector salaries, while the Saudi Development and Reconstruction Program for Yemen has funded infrastructure, public services and reconstruction projects. Riyadh also continues to provide military support to forces aligned with the government, including the National Resistance Forces in Mokha and the Nation’s Shield Forces in Hadramout and Marib.The wider confrontation involving Iran has added another layer to the conflict. The Houthis’ close alignment with Tehran means that pressure on Iran and changes in the regional balance of power can reverberate inside Yemen. The recent increase in Houthi missile and drone attacks may therefore reflect both the wider regional escalation and concern that stronger government-aligned forces could launch a broader offensive, prompting the Houthis to intensify attacks in an effort to deter or pre-empt such a move.When the missile missesThese deep strikes are extending the geography of danger far beyond the front line. A Houthi ballistic missile recently crashed into a civilian home in al-Akamah village in Maqbanah district, west of Taiz. The home of Abdullah Ahmed al-Jabari was heavily damaged and livestock were killed, although initial information indicated no human casualties.The missile was believed to have come from the direction of Ibb province or Sharab district and may have been heading toward Mokha, according to local residents who spoke on condition of anonymity. The house was in a Houthi-controlled area, underscoring how long-range weapons can endanger civilians even on the launch side when a missile malfunctions or falls short.Taiz: The government's testIf Mokha shows the reach of Houthi firepower, Taiz tests whether government forces have become better prepared to contain pressure on the ground.The commander of Yemen’s Fourth Military Region, Maj. Gen. Hamdi Hassan Shukri, recently met Taiz Axis commander Maj. Gen. Khaled Fadhel and unit commanders to review troop deployment, battlefield developments, frontline needs, coordination and permanent readiness.After years of largely fixed front lines, the emphasis is increasingly on unifying efforts, integrating units and responding quickly to battlefield changes, according to Abdulrahman al-Yousifi, official spokesperson for the Taiz Military Axis.Government forces have also been striking Houthi concentrations and buildups on the northern front while confronting infiltration attempts along contact lines.Al-Yousifi said troops have repeatedly prevented Houthi fighters from penetrating their positions and have captured some infiltrators. The military significance of his account lies in the nature of the fight. For now, Taiz is less about gaining territory than preventing the enemy from changing the map. Government forces have improved their ability to detect Houthi reinforcements before they reach an assault position and strike concentrations of enemy troops early, before a local attack becomes a breakthrough. Years of stalemate have also given troops familiarity with roads, mountain approaches and likely infiltration routes.That does not amount to strategic superiority. But it can make government defensive lines harder to break."The era of aggression without costs is over"The most important change may be political rather than purely military.Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, has said the government did not initiate the escalation but would no longer accept a situation in which the Houthis choose when and where to attack while expecting restraint once government forces respond. “The era of aggression without cost is over,” al-Alimi said.If translated into military policy, that statement could mark a significant change in the rules of engagement. For years, limited attacks were often met with limited responses, allowing both sides to maintain an unstable but contained confrontation.A policy of imposing a cost seeks to deter the other side by convincing it that every attack will carry consequences. But attempts to establish deterrence can backfire.If the government believes stronger retaliation will force the Houthis to step back, while the Houthis believe greater missile pressure will force the government into restraint, both sides could escalate based on incorrect assumptions.The danger may not be that either side has already decided on nationwide war, but that each believes it can escalate without triggering one.The next war may look differentA renewed Yemeni war may not resemble the early years of the conflict. Ground offensives will still matter, particularly in strategic areas such as Marib, but fighting may increasingly be shaped by drones, ballistic missiles, artillery and attacks on logistics and economic infrastructure.The critical questions may no longer be only who gains territory, but who can keep ports operating, protect supply routes, replace losses, bring in reinforcements and maintain coordination while several fronts come under pressure.That is why readiness in Taiz, Marib, Hadramout and the western coast matters. The anti-Houthi camp’s central challenge is whether different forces can respond as parts of one military system if several fronts intensify simultaneously.For now, Mokha is the warning and Taiz is the test. Mokha demonstrates how Houthi missiles and drones can impose military, economic and civilian costs without capturing territory. Preparations at Taiz will show whether government forces can turn years of static warfare into stronger defenses and prevent local attacks from becoming strategic breakthroughs.Yemen’s front lines have not moved dramatically yet. But the rules that kept them frozen are beginning to change.

[Category: Yemen-war, Houthis, Iran-war, Saudi-arabia, Yemen]

— As Baghdad tries to please Trump, Iran tells Iraqi militias not to disarm

 

at 8/19/26 10:05pm

Esmail Qaani has a habit of not announcing his visits to Baghdad. He simply appears, meets whoever needs meeting, and leaves before most Iraqis know he was there.His trip on August 10 was no different. The commander of Iran’s Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for backing armed allies abroad, met with Iraqi militia commanders and officials from the Coordination Framework, the alliance of Iran-aligned Shia parties that dominate Iraq’s parliament and effectively chose the current prime minister.Qaani reportedly pressed the militants to keep their weapons rather than hand them to the government. The Iraqi government, laboring under intense American pressure, has set a September 30 deadline for all militias operating outside state authority to disarm. On that same day, U.S. forces are scheduled to withdraw from their last bases in Iraq.Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who has publicly aligned more closely with the U.S. than Iran, did not receive Qaani. According to one source close to the premier who spoke to MBN, al-Zaidi “wants a political relationship, not a military one.”Two days after Qaani arrived, another story broke about Washington. Asharq al-Awsat reported that al-Zaidi’s cabinet, sworn in three months ago, still had nine ministries unfilled, including defense and interior. The reason? Tom Barrack, America’s ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Iraq and Syria, has been vetoing candidates for the posts, according to the report.Barrack’s redlines are not limited to groups that command fighters directly. They reportedly extend to the political coalition of Nouri al-Maliki, the former prime minister whose bloc fields no militia of its own but has long governed in a coalition with the factions Washington wants disarmed. Notably, President Donald Trump had warned in January that the “United States will no longer help Iraq” if al-Maliki was reinstalled, blaming him for “total chaos” — a reference to the political purges and sectarian policies of the Maliki era that helped ISIS seize a third of the country in 2014.Barrack’s veto, then, is reinforcing a line Trump already drew publicly, sending the message that proximity to the militias also disqualifies candidates.While Washington and Tehran engage in a tug of war over Iraq’s weapons, al-Zaidi has asked parliament’s defense and security committee to draft legislation that would formally place all weapons under exclusive government control. Failure to disarm by the September 30 deadline could be met with terrorism charges.The bill would remove a legal grey zone that has let the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella of mostly Shia militias that Iraq formally absorbed into its security apparatus in 2016, operate for decades as simultaneously part of the state, but answerable to no one in it. Whether the bill can pass a parliament stocked with the very factions it targets is another matter entirely.All of this is unfolding amid the ongoing war between the U.S. and Iran. On February 28, Israel and the U.S. struck Iran, opening a war whose aftershocks continue to reverberate. Iran’s supreme leader was killed in the opening strikes; his body was carried through the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala last month in processions that drew crowds shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” a stark reminder of how thoroughly Iraq remains bound to Iran, even as its new premier tries to distance his country from the Islamic Republic.The Strait of Hormuz, through which Iraq once shipped the vast majority of its oil, remains largely closed. Oil revenue (accounting for roughly 90% of the state budget) has collapsed by roughly two-thirds since the war began, and Baghdad has struggled to pay public-sector salaries.To keep crude moving, Iraq has reportedly been selling oil at a steep discount (as much as $30 a barrel below benchmark) to Abu Dhabi’s state oil firm, ADNOC, which ferries the crude out of the strait by going “dark” — turning off transponders to evade detection by Iran’s navy.It was against that backdrop of economic and geopolitical tension that al-Zaidi flew on July 14 to Washington, where he secured a warm Oval Office reception. Trump called him “young and handsome” and touted their “tremendous chemistry.” Al-Zaidi also secured a raft of energy deals and pledged that all weapons would come under state control, an unrealistic claim that was nevertheless music to Trump’s ears.So far, progress on this front has been halting. Two factions, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali, announced they would sever ties to the Popular Mobilization Forces and place their weapons under state authority. However, Mohammed A. Salih, writing for The New Region, notes that Iraqi media reporting has found the handover ceremonies involved mostly scrap weapons, and that no independent mechanism exists to verify that heavier weapons — drones, missiles and the like — have actually changed hands.Tehran appears intent on formalizing that loophole: sources that spoke to Asharq al-Awsat relayed that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — one of Iran’s chief negotiators with the U.S. — visited Baghdad Wednesday and pitched a plan to conceal the factions’ heavier weapons or relocate them to Iran.Three other, more powerful factions have not bothered with the theater at all. Kataib Hezbollah’s leader, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, has said flatly his group will not disarm, calling the recent U.S.-Saudi strikes on Iraq “a serious precedent that may establish a new phase in the region.” Washington, by the way, has a $10 million bounty on his head.Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada have taken similar hardlines, the former arguing that weapons are needed to “defend the holy sites of Iraq and its people.”Indeed, since February 28, Iran-aligned factions have been blamed for repeated drone and missile strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan, which has long been a magnet for targets because of its close ties to the U.S. More consequentially, Saudi Arabia accused militias operating from Iraqi soil of launching drones at its oil infrastructure in late July, prompting joint Saudi-American strikes on Popular Mobilization Forces sites that killed roughly 20 fighters, including Iranian advisers.Al-Zaidi cancelled a planned trip to Riyadh in protest. Then, in a smaller and more telling gesture, he received Riyadh’s intelligence chief in Baghdad instead and pledged that Iraqi territory would not be used to launch attacks on anyone.Meanwhile, U.S. policy in Iraq, steered and articulated most clearly by Tom Barrack, does not view Iraq as a discrete problem so much as one node in an American project spanning Barrack’s three portfolios. He is ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria and Iraq, and he treats the Gulf states as an extension of the same brief, using them as a financing arm for reconstruction projects and loans for Damascus and Baghdad.Iraq, as Barrack said after al-Zaidi’s visit to Washington, is “uniquely positioned to connect the region through deeper integration with the GCC, Türkiye, Syria, Jordan, Central Asia, the Balkans, and the Caucuses.” Iran is pointedly excluded from that list.Barrack has spoken of wanting to make the Strait of Hormuz “an afterthought” within two years. He is betting on overland pipelines, such as the revived pipeline from Northern Iraq’s Kirkuk to Syria’s Baniyas port, and new capacity feeding Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal, which binds Iraqi crude to Ankara and Damascus and distances it from the Gulf.While this vision is coherent, it requires Iraq’s own house to be in order first. But neither Tehran nor Baghdad’s most powerful political coalition seem prepared to allow that just yet.The reality is that Iraq’s September 30 deadline is not really Iraq’s to keep. Whether Iran-backed militias disarm, freeze, or fight depends less on al-Zaidi’s pledges and legislative proposals than on decisions being made in Washington and Tehran regarding the ongoing war.A war that drags on keeps Baghdad in financial distress and the militias’ argument for “resistance” alive. A deal that returns the U.S. and Iran to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding they signed in June, which suspended hostilities between them, could give al-Zaidi some room, but easing the pressure is not the same as solving the underlying problem.Complete disarmament of the hardline factions requires two things not currently on offer: Iran deciding the militias are no longer worth protecting, and the Iraqi state actually using force against members of its own governing coalition. The former is unlikely, and the latter could be disastrous, risking precisely the civil war scenario analysts and even armed faction leaders have warned about.

[Category: Popular-mobilization-forces, Iran, Thomas-barrack, Iraq]

— Why would the Pentagon want to hide weapons testing results?

 

at 8/19/26 10:05pm

The Pentagon says it removed 25 years worth of annual weapons testing reports from public view late last month, a move that critics fear could hide potentially dangerous flaws in weapons systems. Justifying the move, the Defense Department said adversaries could use AI and other tools to “compile disparate, unclassified data points [from the reports] into highly detailed vulnerability profiles targeting [U.S.] critical infrastructure and defense capabilities.” In 1983, Congress created the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) to provide independent guidance and oversight to the services to test weapons. The move followed concerns that compromised testing practices repeatedly allowed for underperforming weapons systems to be deployed in the field. “The office was created in response to stories of a whole bunch of soldiers and Marines dying with M16s in their hands,” Greg Williams, the director of the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information, tells RS. The rifles had been used in Vietnam despite known ammunition and jamming issues — left unresolved during testing, in the rush to get the guns to the troops.The DOT&E office’s annual reports have also been a critical source of information for the public about the status of key weapons programs. The Pentagon apparently wants to end this public access, however. A defense official told RS on condition of anonymity that the office has moved the reports “to a secure DOT&E Extranet” to “ensure they are accessed exclusively by authorized personnel supporting the defense mission.” The Pentagon says the documents can only be accessed with a military standard “Common Access Card,” which requires an FBI background check to obtain. That’s not entirely true. In fact, Williams tells RS the Pentagon only removed the annual weapons reports’ landing pages from its website, rather than deleting them entirely. Thus, many reports can still be accessed with the correct weblink. The Pentagon official did not deny the report URLs still work, nor did they clarify whether future annual reports would only be available on the DOT&E Extranet.The military industrial complex's war on the DOT&E office“Pentagon careerists and corporate go-fers have been attempting to either get rid of or defang DOT&E” since its inception, says Winslow Wheeler, who was previously a budget process analyst for the Government Accountability Office and for both the Republican and Democratic parties in the Senate.“Because of many poor designs, some [weapons] systems do poorly in operational testing and incur the wrath of bureaucratic and corporate advocates when flaws are revealed to the public, and the money flow is interrupted,” Wheeler told RS.In particular, the office’s work has been scapegoated as costly and disruptive to fielding weapons. But independent assessments have found the testing does not create undue delays or expenses for these efforts.Weapons industry allies in Congress launched an unsuccessful bid to eliminate the office in defense authorization legislation for FY 1996. Later, an FY 2015 NDAA draft provision would have required the office to ensure its “activities do not unnecessarily impede [weapons] program schedules or increase program costs” — which advocates warned would “undermine” its effectiveness. That measure failed, too.A lack of independence has also undermined the office’s work. The military personnel who are doing the weapons testing “ultimately answer to the service,” Dan Grazier, the director of the Stimson Center’s National Security Reform program, pointed out. And the service leaders have incentives to ensure weapons are fielded quickly and without scrutiny, “because that's how the deputy commandant for aviation is going to get his sinecure upon retirement with Lockheed Martin.” In part because of these pressures, the contents of the annual reports have “already been defanged for the most part,” Wheeler said. “In past years when these reports were highly informative, such as under DOT&Es Mike Gilmore and Tom Christie during the Bush and Obama administrations, Congress and the public were allowed a sense of which were the winners, and which were the losers in our weapons,” Wheeler said. “That ability has now been mostly eliminated.” Christie and Gilmore are renowned for challenging problems with major weapons systems during their respective tenures directing the office.The Biden era “move to stamp DOT&E's reports CUI [Controlled Unclassified Information] was another tactic used” to weaken the office, Grazier told RS. The effort would have similarly removed the reports from public view, but was abandoned after public backlash. The Trump administration has accelerated the office’s decline. It has made extensive cuts to the DOT&E office itself, reducing its total authorized civilian headcount from 126 to 30 last May. It has proposed slashing the office’s budget by two-thirds for fiscal year 2027. Last August, it decreased the number of programs the office oversees from 251 last year down to 152.Swiping at another watchdog, the DoD also blocked the release of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the status of the F-35 fighter jet program last month, deeming it to have “Controlled Unclassified Information.” The F-35 program is widely criticized for its cost overruns, delays, and questionable combat readiness. 'The weapons that we're producing are garbage'These efforts have real impacts on oversight, which could adversely affect the weapons systems military personnel rely on. “The decision to purge the office of DOT&E has created significant and unnecessary risk that jeopardizes readiness, service member safety, acquisition reform, and taxpayer dollars,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Aug. 12. They urged Hegseth “to reverse the cuts made to this office to restore trust that DoD weapon systems are effective for combat use and safe for our warfighters.”Last year’s DOT&E office personnel cuts are already taking a toll. “Remaining staff absorbed more work than they could handle and didn't have the expertise to oversee some programs,” a June GAO report found. “If these staff limitations continue, it will be challenging for this office to effectively oversee testing to determine whether weapon systems work as they should.”The concern is particularly acute as the Pentagon pursues a number of controversial weapons programs. These include prospective Trump administration initiatives such as the Golden Dome missile defense system and the Trump-class battleship, whose high cost estimates and unproven weapons designs could undermine their viability. “The fact that…the national security establishment [has] to hide this information is proof positive that the weapons that we're producing are garbage,” Grazier said.

[Category: Dote, Pentagon, Pentagon-wars, Trump, Hegseth, Weapons-procurement, Weapons-testing]

— Rolling Stone hits hysterical note suggesting Putin NATO attack nigh

 

at 8/19/26 7:42am

The Ukraine war has become fertile ground for a dangerously misguided way of thinking about the dynamics between Russia and the West — one that, if left unchecked, will set the stage for a larger and more destructive confrontation in the coming years. The increasingly popular narrative goes something like this: President Donald Trump, by undermining the transatlantic alliance, has provided Putin with a window for achieving his long-held aim of waging war on NATO. Journalist Mac William Bishop offers a thorough articulation of this view in a recent report for Rolling Stone. Putin “may be emboldened by the increasingly strained relationship between NATO and its most important member nation,” Bishop writes, as a result of the Trump administration’s “contempt for allies and unwillingness to defend Europe.” Putin, according to Bishop’s sources, is driven by a kind of megalomania, a fixation on himself as a great historical leader that may be enough to push him into the reckless decision to wage war on a military bloc orders of magnitude more powerful than Russia. Putin would take such a risky step, Bishop avers, because the Russian leader wants to “remove NATO from the geopolitical chessboard, and place Eastern and Central Europe firmly back in Russia’s sphere of influence.” In an attempt to advance the dubious narrative that Trump has somehow painted a bullseye on Europe’s back, Bishop pores over a cavalcade of criticisms of NATO made by Trump going back to 1987, when “he famously purchased a full-page newspaper ad accusing U.S. allies of free-riding, saying it was time to make ‘others pay for the protection we extend.’” The body of evidence presented here amounts to little more than an anodyne preoccupation with burden-shifting and concerns over regional stability. Yet it is apparently enough for the Atlanticist cognoscenti to cast Trump as handing Eastern Europe to Putin on a silver platter. But the author’s biggest challenge in building up his case is that, try as he might, he can’t quite get his own sources to agree with him. As the lone “NATO official” quoted in this story told Bishop, “I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing anything remarkably different than we’ve seen before.” Military expert Michael Kofman correctly stressed to Bishop at the outset that scenarios involving direct Russian assaults on NATO states are “low likelihood possibilities.” Of these possibilities, the one that’s most commonly cited and treated in depth by Bishop is the “limited incursion” model. This concept centers on the threat of a Russian lighting advance to chop off part of a NATO state’s territory, with Estonia commonly presented as the easiest target. Moscow would be gambling that the U.S. and potentially other NATO members will conclude that it’s not worth entering a full-scale war with Russia over a small chunk of an eastern flank state, and that this would set off a political crisis that may lead to the neutering or dissolution of NATO. My colleagues and I have explained in depth why this scenario is unlikely, but casting that aside, it should warrant some degree of reflection that Estonian officials themselves do not see such a threat on the horizon. “Every now and then, someone claims that Russia is about to attack NATO, particularly the Baltic states. At this moment, neither Estonia nor NATO sees any indication that Russia is preparing a large-scale military attack against the Alliance. Estonia’s threat assessment has not changed,” said Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsakhna last week. “There are two reasons for this: Russia is struggling in Ukraine and currently lacks the capability for such an attack. And Russia is deterred by NATO.” It was true long before Trump’s second presidency that there is no ironclad guarantee in NATO’s Article V collective defense provision that the U.S. will go to war with Russia over Europe. The fact remains that European NATO is more than capable of assuming the responsibility for deterring Russia without the U.S. acting as the region’s primary security provider. As with previous entries in this genre, the Rolling Stone report comes off as a rather cynical attempt to hinder a much-needed recalibration of the U.S. role in NATO by inflating the threat to Europe almost to the point of caricature. Worse still, it conjures a shibboleth that distracts from the real challenge of how to effectively manage transatlantic relations and advance regional stability in light of the most destructive war in Europe since 1945. The threat of escalation between Russia and Europe is real, but it is not being shaped, let alone accelerated, by the changing nature of U.S.-Europe relations.

[Category: Vladimir-putin, Donald-trump, Rolling-stone, Nato]

— An independent Europe means no more US rooster in the henhouse

 

at 8/18/26 10:05pm

NATO continues to prepare for life without the United States, at least as the dominant alliance member. “Europeans are already backfilling what the U.S. cannot any longer promise,” explained Secretary-General Mark Rutte.America's foreign policy establishmentarians have long worried about losing influence as a result. Indeed, by driving Europe away from America, Donald Trump may be inadvertently spurring creation of a serious counterweight to Washington. As CNN Fareed Zakaria warned: “As Europe’s spending increases, the continent will become less dependent on the U.S., and less deferential to it.” American policymakers, he added, might therefore regret the disappearance of the continent as a military backwater governed by obsequious nonentities, which served as a convenient base for U.S. troops to operate around the globe.The rise of Europe as an independent power will almost certainly transform international politics. And the process could be painful. One issue will be the difficulty of coordinating the militaries of more than a score of often dissonant perspectives within the European Union. Another is the return of Germany as a significant military power. Moreover, as European states increasingly talk about the possibility and, worse, likelihood, of war with Russia, Moscow may perceive a growing threat from the West and increase its military preparations accordingly.However, the benefits for America will still far outweigh the problems. Europeans’ reliance on Washington has long reduced their mutual cooperation. For instance, in 2020, years after Moscow wrested Crimea from Ukraine and backed separatists in the Donbas, the Pew Research Center asked Europeans if they favored defending their neighbors. Overall, sentiment was 50% to 38% against. Only in three of 13 countries polled did more people favor fighting for their supposed allies rather than standing by in case of war. In two, pluralities opposed doing so. A majority said no in eight, reaching 66% in Greece. Yet most Europeans still believed that America would intervene on their behalf.This fecklessness encourages irresponsibility elsewhere. Last year the European Union surrendered economically, agreeing to President Donald Trump’s trade shakedown. EU policymakers and commentators claimed they had no choice, lest they be left to their own defense devices. For instance, European Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič observed: “It’s not only about … trade: It’s about security, it is about Ukraine, it is about current geopolitical volatility.” And it’s about saving money; as Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh asked: “How, if not through a smaller welfare state, is a better-armed continent to be funded?” Concern for such tradeoffs, until recently at least, trumped quaint concepts like sovereignty and self-respect. In this way, European subservience not only encouraged the administration’s irresponsible foreign policy, but also its modern, and destructive, mercantilist economic policy.If the Europeans, and especially the EU, can no longer rely on Washington’s military umbrella, they will have to do more for their own security. This will place greater pressure on them to limit sclerotic rulemaking and liberalize existing controls. They will also have good reason to reject dubious and costly U.S. demands. And they will be more likely to confront American administrations directly when the next George W. Bush or Donald Trump decides to create another international disaster.An equally important benefit would be to reduce America’s ability to meddle around the world, especially if a full U.S. military withdrawal from the continent ultimately results. Russia would no longer be viewed as a likely existential threat, at least in Washington, allowing the U.S. to follow by eliminating both its commitment to war and the force structure necessary to fulfill that obligation. Americans could then put these unlocked resources to better use elsewhere.Thus, what some see as a likely problem would actually be an enormous advantage. True, Washington risks losing a subservient Europe willing to back its political interferences and serve as a launching pad for Washington’s military interventions. However, these policies have, more often than not, turned out disastrously. Even the globe’s nominally benign hegemon requires restraint.The problem, as recognized by the historian John Dalberg-Acton, commonly known as Lord Acton, is that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That maxim applies even to the well-intentioned who wield overwhelming and largely unrestrained power. This includes the United States — especially when that nation is governed by a narcissist with spectacularly poor policy judgment.Washington’s Cold War misjudgments were legendary. Vietnam was the worst but not alone. Seventy-three years on, supporting the coup that delivered absolute power to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran looks disastrous. Decisions like backing Pakistan’s Islamist government, headed by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and funneling aid to Afghanistan’s Mujahedeen through later Pakistani regimes, which empowered the most radical insurgents, look terrible in light of 9/11 and succeeding developments.However, such errors must be understood, if not excused, by the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union. The latter was an Evil Empire like Ronald Reagan said, even if perhaps not as militarily aggressive as feared at the time. The same cannot be said for Washington’s missteps after the USSR’s collapse. “What we say goes,” announced President George H.W. Bush, when American policymakers really believed that the U.S. was the unipower and essential nation that could do no wrong. Alas, hubris overwhelmed judgment, yielding the Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan debacles. After a quarter century of the “Global War on Terrorism,” nearly 5 million people have perished, most as an indirect result of the many conflicts. Few in Washington appeared to understand that wandering the globe bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, as well as backing other nations that did the same, would create enemies prepared to strike back with often terrible consequences. Contra George W. Bush’s comfortable triumphalism, Americans were not attacked on 9/11 because they were so free and generous. Rather, a succession of administrations operating in their name spent years making other nations’ conflicts their own. Unfortunately, if you swat the hornet’s nest, you are likely to get stung.The usual suspects in Washington tend to share Zakaria’s error in conflating their power to intervene internationally and Americans’ national interest. The former is often negative. Blob members typically enjoy running the world, or at least attempting to do so. Unfortunately, the rest of us pay the price.If the president inadvertently strengthens Europe, so much the better for Americans as well as Europeans. U.S. policymakers have proved that their power, like that of adversary governments, require limits. A more powerful and dynamic Europe could help provide some.

[Category: European-security, Ukraine-war, Russia, Donald-trump, Eu, Nato]

— The Mecca Pact could be an opportunity for Iran

 

at 8/18/26 10:05pm

The Mecca Pact ranks among the most momentous developments to have reshaped the Middle East since the upheavals that followed the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. Though defensive in nature, the agreement — which creates a mutual defense commitment between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey — could have major repercussions for the regional balance of power. Much hinges on how its signatories define the threats they must face and, more critically, on how other regional players, especially Iran and Israel, react to its creation. Although the pact has come into being amid the ongoing U.S.‑Iran confrontation, it need not be construed as an expressly anti‑Iran coalition. On the contrary, Tehran has good reason to view it favorably. The Turkish foreign minister indicated that preparations for the agreement had been underway for over two years. The Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) between Riyadh and Islamabad was finalized within weeks of Israel’s attack on Qatar last year and may have been partially precipitated by it. Meanwhile, Egypt reportedly floated a proposal to establish a NATO‑style defense architecture in the region. Taken together, these developments suggest that Iran is not the target of the Mecca Pact. This distinction matters in deciphering Iran’s position. One of the objectives underpinning Tehran’s war strategy was to demonstrate to regional states that an American military footprint could itself become a source of insecurity. Should Iran succeed in that aim, those governments are likely to pursue alternative security arrangements. Hence, the emergence of alternative regional defense frameworks would not necessarily signify a failure of Iranian strategy. So far, Iran has expressed cautious optimism toward the pact. “Any plan that is based on the ⁠geopolitical and historical realities of the region, is comprehensive and inclusive, and correctly identifies the enemy ⁠and the threat, has a chance of helping to strengthen security ⁠and prevent instability and abuses by the Zionist enemy ⁠and its allies,” an Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson said last week.Tehran has strong incentives to continue viewing the Mecca Pact with an open mind. The Mecca alliance has opened its doors to “all brotherly countries” seeking “lasting peace and stability,” meaning there is a possibility that Tehran could one day join the alliance. This isn’t as much of a long shot as it might seem. After all, Iran has previously expressed openness to participating in the SMDA. If Tehran were prepared to enter into an alliance with Saudi Arabia, it would be all the less reluctant to do so when Turkey is also involved, given Ankara’s role in forestalling an Israel-backed Kurdish incursion into Iran this year. Moreover, Turkey and Pakistan share deep historical, cultural, and religious ties with Iran. Iran’s broader regional narrative continues to resonate, to some degree, within their societies. These bonds do not erase differences but they suggest that neither country is likely to morph overnight into an implacable foe of Iran. This leaves Iranian strategists with a clear choice. As it has done so far, Tehran should refrain from treating the pact as an anti‑Iran coalition. A pragmatic approach would keep alive the prospect of Iranian engagement with the emerging regional security architecture. Should U.S.‑Iranian diplomacy eventually yield a comprehensive nuclear agreement, many of the impediments to Iran’s participation in regional arrangements could also diminish. The alternative would be to respond to the pact as an inherently anti‑Iran project, a reaction that risks turning into a self‑fulfilling prophecy. The alliance would then be compelled to organize its collective defense explicitly around the Iranian threat. Iran would also risk losing popular goodwill in the broader Muslim world. In this respect, strategic restraint may be Tehran’s best option. The Israel factorIn practice, Iran may simply need to wait and see until time casts its spells.After Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, Tel Aviv’s security doctrine acquired a somewhat peculiar pre‑emptive bent toward Ankara, with threats being tackled even before they had fully materialized. Since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, for example, former Israeli officials have repeatedly labeled Turkey a “New Iran.” This narrative raises the prospect that regional strategic competition could gradually shift from an Israel‑Iran confrontation toward a more complex rivalry involving Israel and Turkey. Furthermore, Turkey’s stake in Syria’s stability and Israel’s incursions into Syrian territory could eventually place them on a collision course. Israel’s insistence on maintaining “security zones” in various neighboring countries, including Lebanon, likewise betrays Tel Aviv’s reluctance to accommodate others. Over time, Israeli policies intended to forestall future threats could produce the opposite effect, spurring greater coordination among states constrained by Israeli power. Iran stands to gain from this dynamic. Its existing regional network can no longer effectively counter Israeli influence. If a new regional arrangement gradually curbs Israel’s freedom of action, Tehran could secure additional strategic breathing room without having to confront Israel directly. It would thus appear to have a strong interest in allowing regional alignments to evolve. The possible expansion of the Mecca Pact could reinforce this tendency. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has indicated that Egypt could join the agreement. Egypt’s history with Israel, combined with Turkey’s competing interests with Israel in the eastern Mediterranean, could eventually lead Israel to perceive an enlarged Mecca Pact as a mechanism of strategic containment. Such a perception would carry its own perils. If Israel opts to counterbalance — as it is likely to do — both Israel and the bloc could fall victim to the security dilemma. Israel would seek more robust regional security partnerships, for instance with Somaliland and even with India, while members of the Mecca Pact might respond by further institutionalizing and expanding their collective defense arrangements. From Tehran’s vantage point, such a development could offer opportunities. If Israel were forced to manage a broader array of regional rivalries, Iran would enjoy greater strategic space. The logic is not simply that the enemy of Iran’s enemy becomes its friend. Rather, a more complex regional equilibrium could reduce Israel’s capacity to concentrate its strategic resources on Iran and render accommodation with Tehran more appealing over time. Nonetheless, the moment of truth may arrive much sooner. Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia could eventually place Iran in direct tension with members of the Mecca Pact. Yet even here, neither side has an obvious incentive to put the alliance’s mutual‑defense commitment to the test. If Iran deliberately tested the pact by encouraging Houthi strikes, it could hasten the emergence of an explicitly anti‑Iran security posture. If Saudi Arabia invoked the pact in response to an attack, it could expose the alliance’s political limitations and reveal the thresholds for collective military action. In fact, Pakistan and Turkey may encourage Saudi Arabia to exercise restraint. Both countries have demonstrated a preference for diplomatic management of regional crises. Their diplomacy played an important part in preventing Saudi Arabia from becoming a direct participant in the U.S.‑Iran conflict following Iranian attacks on Saudi facilities. Even under the SMDA framework, Pakistan did not automatically enter the war; instead, it emphasized de‑escalation. Their participation in the Mecca Pact could consequently introduce a diplomatic buffer rather than escalation. This combination of deterrence and restraint could open up space for mutually acceptable arrangements on the Houthi question. Even if Iran is bent on regional primacy, confrontation does not serve Iran’s interests. Iran may, therefore, have more reason to welcome the Mecca Pact than to fear it. What its strategists decide will shape the contours of the region’s future strategic environment.

[Category: Turkey, Saudi-arabia, Pakistan, Iran-war, Israel, Iran]

— Officials say 'America-hating' media to blame for USS Lincoln outrage

 

at 8/18/26 10:05pm

Over the past week, Pentagon officials launched a broadside against reports of dire conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which has been deployed in the Middle East for more than eight months. Less than 24 hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first criticized reporting about the Lincoln as “completely misrepresented,” a seemingly coordinated messaging campaign spread across the Pentagon’s social media apparatus. At least six senior Pentagon and Navy officials and spokespeople, along with official department accounts, published or amplified substantially similar attacks on the reporting across X and Facebook.Recent reporting by Military Times and Stars and Stripes has drawn significant national attention to alarming conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the flagship of Carrier Strike Group 3 operating under the U.S. 5th Fleet. Reporting by Natalie Oliverio, a Navy veteran and award-winning journalist, documented concerns from servicemembers and their families about suicide attempts, inadequate food, shortages of basic hygiene products, and deteriorating sanitation conditions aboard the carrier.The concerns have since drawn coverage from CNN, NPR and other national news organizations.U.S. Central Command subsequently placed Oliverio's reporting prominently in an infographic declaring that “multiple media outlets have reported several false claims” about the Lincoln. While five other reports displayed in the graphic were labeled “FALSE,” Oliverio's reporting was labeled “MISINFORMED.”On Aug. 14, Hegseth accused the “reckless & shameless ‘American’ media” of “completely & intentionally” misrepresenting the situation on the Lincoln, later referring to “fake, America-hating news.”Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao released a prepared statement and graphic declaring that servicemembers and their families “are not victims,” while calling the reporting “dishonest” and saying it “takes away the focus on the enemy and the threat it poses against our nation, people, and way of life.”The message continued through the Pentagon’s press operation. Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson accused the “Fake News media” of ignoring the facts and called the coverage “disgraceful.” Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said legitimate hardships were being “twisted into a false narrative” and called the coverage “shameful.”Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez accused the media of peddling “doom-and-gloom stories,” while deputy press secretary Jacob Bliss accused journalists of “exploiting military families” to create “crisis theater, not inform the public.”U.S. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper offered a more measured response in a post on CENTCOM’s X account after visiting the Lincoln. While not addressing the specific allegations about conditions aboard the carrier, Cooper said the Lincoln has “among the lowest numbers of cases related to mental health” among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers. He also acknowledged that prolonged service at sea is “uniquely challenging and tough” and said mental health “requires our attention,” while praising the crew’s resilience and leadership. Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer and State Department official who reviewed the posts collected for this story, said the pattern was unmistakable.“This is obviously a coordinated effort,” Hoh said. “As expected, those speaking on behalf of the sailors and Marines are being demeaned and denigrated.”Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the statements by senior defense officials were “attacking the loyalty and honesty of news outlets” and called them “the latest salvos in the Trump Administration's sustained war on the press.”“These attacks are designed to undermine the public’s faith in any press reports that criticize the government, a troubling anti-democratic trend,” Fallow said.RS asked the Pentagon to identify the specific reporting it contends was false or intentionally misleading and provide evidence contradicting those claims. Officials were also asked how many Lincoln sailors had reported suicidal ideation and how many suicide attempts or suspected attempts had occurred.Pentagon Press Operations did not answer the questions. Instead, a duty officer directed this reporter to Hegseth’s earlier remarks calling the reporting “completely misrepresented” and to a social media post about the Lincoln.The Pentagon also did not acknowledge a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records related to the public statements and potential communications guidance. The Navy separately confirmed receipt of the request and said it was working with its FOIA office and applicable offices to process it.Hoh said dismissing the accounts of service members and their families could have consequences beyond the Lincoln.“It does not just have an impact on the sailors and Marines of the affected ships but also throughout the Navy and Marine Corps, and can have a real effect on retention and recruitment,” Hoh said.Fallow also pointed to recent Pentagon restrictions on press access, saying the statements should be viewed as part of “a campaign by the government to limit what the public knows about the military.”“Especially in times of war, the public deserves to know about the conditions of its [servicemembers], and to hold public officials accountable,” Fallow said.

[Category: Pete-hegseth, Pentagon, Iran-war]

As of 8/26/26 10:36am. Last new 8/25/26 11:02pm.