Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Desperate Republicans are jumping Trump's war ship of doom

 

at 9/23/26 10:05pm

“The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”These were the unexpected words spoken Monday by former congressman and current Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who The Nation’s Jeet Heer has described as “not just an ardent supporter of this particular war but, more generally, a mega-hawk who has pushed for war with Iran for more than 20 years.”Why the sudden change? Rogers said that if the war ends, “energy costs will plummet…but Michigan families can’t afford to wait for that to happen. We need to do something now.”Rogers’ sudden economic concern and antiwar stance might have something to do with the fact that he is currently trailing his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed by seven points in a new Suffolk University Poll. El-Sayed has called Rogers “the worst of the neocon version” of Republicans.“When inveterate war hawk Mike Rogers suddenly declares, ‘The war in Iran needs to end—and end quickly,’ you know he’s losing—and losing badly,” former Republican Michigan congressman Justin Amash wrote Monday on X. Rogers is not the only Republican now running from the war – and Trump — amid a tumultuous midterm season for the GOP. The generic ballot polling average at Real Clear Politics has Democrats ahead by 8.5 points. “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Republican congresswoman and Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) wrote Monday. “We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.”Hinson is behind her Democratic opponent Josh Turek by eight points in a recent Marist poll. Turek responded that “it's easy to send a tweet but when you had the chance to vote to end this war, you chose not to. You voted seven times to continue it, including just last week.”“It's time to actually end the forever wars and put Iowa and Iowans first,” Turek said.Community notes found that Hinson had at least four opportunities to vote to end the war but did not. “Ashley Hinson out with a statement whining and crying about the consequences of the war she supported,” observed Drop Site News’ Ryan Grim. “If you read far enough in, you find she’s calling for an end to it. But just last week the House voted on a war powers resolution to end the war and she voted against it.”“Polls have her losing her senate race in Iowa,” he added.According to The Hill on Thursday morning, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) "now says he will vote for the war powers resolution directing Trump to end the conflict." This is a stunning reversal. The Senate has passed War Powers resolutions this year but without Tillis and Senate leadership on board.“We’re reaching a point to where we just need answers. We got to know what success looks like,” Tillis said told the newspaper. “We don’t know how long it’s going to go. So we’re afraid it could be a forever war. It’s a war that’s obviously hurting people economically. Why are we doing this? What is the goal?”Republican Congressman and current Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) has been a loyal Trump supporter and said previously that the U.S. war on Iran means “fighting for America.”On Tuesday, the Miami Herald reported that Donalds’ campaign website has scrubbed several references to President Donald Trump, who had endorsed him. A button to “Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds” at the top of the Republican candidate’s homepage was removed, as was text reading, “TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter BYRON DONALDS” and some other Trump messaging. A photo of Donalds with Trump remains on the donation page as do donate boxes that reference the Trump endorsement.Recent polls have shown Donalds in a dead heat with Democratic opponent David Jolly.Another pro-Trump Republican gubernatorial candidate, Wisconsin’s Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), told reporters on Tuesday that he believes "we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on...time to come home, take care of business here in America."The latest poll showed Democratic rival David Crowley slightly ahead of Tiffany.“No matter how hard he tries to run from it, Tom Tiffany voted five times to continue Trump’s war in Iran,” Crowley said in a reply to his opponent’s call to end the war.A new CNN poll published Tuesday showed that almost two-thirds of Americans don’t believe the US is winning in Iran and also don’t believe the president is doing much to end it. The poll also revealed that much of this continuing decline is coming from Republicans. While Democrats and independents have been negative throughout the war, a 73% Republican approval rating of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict in March has now dropped to 60%. For Republicans under 45, 53% disapprove.An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday also showed that a majority of Americans favor impeaching Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “for starting a war with Iran without authorization by Congress.”Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink to record lows, particularly on the economy.This president, this war, and his economy could be a losing combination for Republicans facing tough races and many seem to know it. Trump said earlier this month that the midterm election results will not affect how he conducts the U.S. conflict in Iran, and insists that the results will not be an indictment of him or the war because he’s “not running.”Sure, Mr. President. But it appears that for many voters, and some of your own party’s candidates, you might be the only one running.

[Category: Iran-war, Enewsletter, Gas-prices, Republicans, Donald-trump, Elections, Midterm-elections]

— Desperate Republicans are jumping Trump's Iran war ship

 

at 9/23/26 10:05pm

“The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”These were the unexpected words spoken Monday by former congressman and current Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who The Nation’s Jeet Heer has described as “not just an ardent supporter of this particular war but, more generally, a mega-hawk who has pushed for war with Iran for more than 20 years.”Why the sudden change? Rogers said that if the war ends, “energy costs will plummet…but Michigan families can’t afford to wait for that to happen. We need to do something now.”Rogers’ sudden economic concern and antiwar stance might have something to do with the fact that he is currently trailing his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed by seven points in a new Suffolk University Poll. El-Sayed has called Rogers “the worst of the neocon version” of Republicans.“When inveterate war hawk Mike Rogers suddenly declares, ‘The war in Iran needs to end—and end quickly,’ you know he’s losing—and losing badly,” former Republican Michigan congressman Justin Amash wrote Monday on X. Rogers is not the only Republican now running from the war – and Trump — amid a tumultuous midterm season for the GOP. The generic ballot polling average at Real Clear Politics has Democrats ahead by 8.5 points. “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Republican congresswoman and Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) wrote Monday. “We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.”Hinson is behind her Democratic opponent Josh Turek by eight points in a recent Marist poll. Turek responded that “it's easy to send a tweet but when you had the chance to vote to end this war, you chose not to. You voted seven times to continue it, including just last week.”“It's time to actually end the forever wars and put Iowa and Iowans first,” Turek said.Community notes found that Hinson had at least four opportunities to vote to end the war but did not. “Ashley Hinson out with a statement whining and crying about the consequences of the war she supported,” observed Drop Site News’ Ryan Grim. “If you read far enough in, you find she’s calling for an end to it. But just last week the House voted on a war powers resolution to end the war and she voted against it.”“Polls have her losing her senate race in Iowa,” he added.Republican Congressman and current Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) has been a loyal Trump supporter and said previously that the U.S. war on Iran means “fighting for America.” On Tuesday, the Miami Herald reported that Donalds’ campaign website has scrubbed several references to President Donald Trump, who had endorsed him. A button to “Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds” at the top of the Republican candidate’s homepage was removed, as was text reading, “TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter BYRON DONALDS” and some other Trump messaging. A photo of Donalds with Trump remains on the donation page as do donate boxes that reference the Trump endorsement.Recent polls have shown Donalds in a dead heat with Democratic opponent David Jolly.Another pro-Trump Republican gubernatorial candidate, Wisconsin’s Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), told reporters on Tuesday that he believes "we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on...time to come home, take care of business here in America."The latest poll showed Democratic rival David Crowley slightly ahead of Tiffany.“No matter how hard he tries to run from it, Tom Tiffany voted five times to continue Trump’s war in Iran,” Crowley said in a reply to his opponent’s call to end the war.A new CNN poll published Tuesday showed that almost two-thirds of Americans don’t believe the US is winning in Iran and also don’t believe the president is doing much to end it. The poll also revealed that much of this continuing decline is coming from Republicans. While Democrats and independents have been negative throughout the war, a 73% Republican approval rating of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict in March has now dropped to 60%. For Republicans under 45, 53% disapprove.An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday also showed that a majority of Americans favor impeaching Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “for starting a war with Iran without authorization by Congress.”Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink to record lows, particularly on the economy.This president, this war, and his economy could be a losing combination for Republicans facing tough races and many seem to know it. Trump said earlier this month that the midterm election results will not affect how he conducts the U.S. conflict in Iran, and insists that the results will not be an indictment of him or the war because he’s “not running.”Sure, Mr. President. But it appears that for many voters, and some of your own party’s candidates, you might be the only one running.

[Category: Iran-war, Enewsletter, Gas-prices, Republicans, Donald-trump, Elections, Midterm-elections]

— Lifestyles of the rich & famous ‘Lords of War’

 

at 9/23/26 10:05pm

This article is co-published in partnership with The InterceptFor the first time, the Pentagon budget topped $1 trillion and private contractors now receive more than half of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon. Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors. While these companies often advertise their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many servicemembers live in appalling housing conditions, while military-industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute and The Intercept. The short film pulls no punches as it lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year. “Lords of War” connects exorbitant Pentagon spending to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72% of which came from the U.S. government. As Lords of War’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-plus-million-dollar compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military-industrial complex. As research by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown’s Costs of War Project showed, 54% of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41% in the 1990s. The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and stock prices also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to devour an ever-larger share of the military budget. They converted their revenue from the military into line-items on their own budgets that do nothing to improve U.S. national security. They hired armies of lobbyists that now outnumber all members of Congress by a nearly two-to-one margin; billions of dollars in stock buybacks; and, of-course, CEO compensation packages on par with those of NFL quarterbacks.The contrast of these CEOs’ rock-star lifestyles — Lords of War reveals that one chief executive bought pop star Lenny Kravitz’s Miami mansion — with those of the military servicemembers they purport to serve is striking. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin’s CEO, Marilyn Hewson, received $33.7 million in compensation in 2015, which is more than 150 times as much as the average compensation package for an enlisted servicemember. While Hewson and other Pentagon contractor CEOs have been buying-up mansions, the basic pay of servicemembers has been relatively stagnant for the past 20 years when controlling for inflation. Worse, the conditions servicemembers have been living in are deteriorating. A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of servicemembers think their housing is unaffordable. And servicemembers often face “long commutes, leave families behind in other states, and work 2 jobs to afford housing,” according to the GAO report. A July 2026 Senate investigation, meanwhile, revealed dangerous living conditions at military bases in Georgia, including “reports of lead exposure affecting newborn health, severe mold contamination leading to emergency room visits, flooding in living areas, and more.” Wartime environments have been no better, as evidenced by the deplorable conditions — including food shortages and inoperable plumbing — during the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s extended deployment near Iran, which ultimately led multiple sailors to attempt to jump overboard. Unfortunately, it’s your tax dollars that are paying for this gaping chasm between the lives of contractor CEOs and the troops. As one of the stars of Lords of War notes in a quick cut that seamlessly blends the rabid patriotism of a Top Gun montage with the horrors inflicted in Gaza, “It’s thanks to your generosity in the form of tax dollars that these illustrious executives are on the case.” “Lords of War” is one of the few films about the military-industrial complex that you find hilarious, but its subject is no laughing matter. The private firms we’re entrusting with U.S. national security are doing more to defend their own share prices than they are to defend the nation. If we keep trusting this broken system to keep us safe, then, ultimately, the joke is on us.

[Category: Lockheed-martin, Pentagon-budget, Film, Military-spending, Weapons-contractors]

— These desperate Republicans are jumping Trump's Iran war ship

 

at 9/23/26 10:05pm

“The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”These were the unexpected words spoken Monday by former congressman and current Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who The Nation’s Jeet Heer has described as “not just an ardent supporter of this particular war but, more generally, a mega-hawk who has pushed for war with Iran for more than 20 years.”Why the sudden change? Rogers said that if the war ends, “energy costs will plummet…but Michigan families can’t afford to wait for that to happen. We need to do something now.”Rogers’ sudden economic concern and antiwar stance might have something to do with the fact that he is currently trailing his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed by seven points in a new Suffolk University Poll. El-Sayed has called Rogers “the worst of the neocon version” of Republicans.“When inveterate war hawk Mike Rogers suddenly declares, ‘The war in Iran needs to end—and end quickly,’ you know he’s losing—and losing badly,” former Republican Michigan congressman Justin Amash wrote Monday on X. Rogers is not the only Republican now running from the war – and Trump — amid a tumultuous midterm season for the GOP. The generic ballot polling average at Real Clear Politics has Democrats ahead by 8.5 points. “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Republican congresswoman and Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) wrote Monday. “We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.”Hinson is behind her Democratic opponent Josh Turek by eight points in a recent Marist poll. Turek responded that “it's easy to send a tweet but when you had the chance to vote to end this war, you chose not to. You voted seven times to continue it, including just last week.”“It's time to actually end the forever wars and put Iowa and Iowans first,” Turek said.Community notes found that Hinson had at least four opportunities to vote to end the war but did not. “Ashley Hinson out with a statement whining and crying about the consequences of the war she supported,” observed Drop Site News’ Ryan Grim. “If you read far enough in, you find she’s calling for an end to it. But just last week the House voted on a war powers resolution to end the war and she voted against it.”“Polls have her losing her senate race in Iowa,” he added.Republican Congressman and current Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) has been a loyal Trump supporter and said previously that the U.S. war on Iran means “fighting for America.” On Tuesday, the Miami Herald reported that Donalds’ campaign website has scrubbed several references to President Donald Trump, who had endorsed him. A button to “Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds” at the top of the Republican candidate’s homepage was removed, as was text reading, “TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter BYRON DONALDS” and some other Trump messaging. A photo of Donalds with Trump remains on the donation page as do donate boxes that reference the Trump endorsement.Recent polls have shown Donalds in a dead heat with Democratic opponent David Jolly.Another pro-Trump Republican gubernatorial candidate, Wisconsin’s Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), told reporters on Tuesday that he believes "we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on...time to come home, take care of business here in America."The latest poll showed Democratic rival David Crowley slightly ahead of Tiffany.“No matter how hard he tries to run from it, Tom Tiffany voted five times to continue Trump’s war in Iran,” Crowley said in a reply to his opponent’s call to end the war.A new CNN poll published Tuesday showed that almost two-thirds of Americans don’t believe the US is winning in Iran and also don’t believe the president is doing much to end it. The poll also revealed that much of this continuing decline is coming from Republicans. While Democrats and independents have been negative throughout the war, a 73% Republican approval rating of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict in March has now dropped to 60%. For Republicans under 45, 53% disapprove.An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday also showed that a majority of Americans favor impeaching Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “for starting a war with Iran without authorization by Congress.”Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink to record lows, particularly on the economy.This president, this war, and his economy could be a losing combination for Republicans facing tough races and many seem to know it. Trump said earlier this month that the midterm election results will not affect how he conducts the U.S. conflict in Iran, and insists that the results will not be an indictment of him or the war because he’s “not running.”Sure, Mr. President. But it appears that for many voters, and some of your own party’s candidates, you might be the only one running.

[Category: Iran-war, Enewsletter, Gas-prices, Republicans, Donald-trump, Elections]

— ‘The Dragon’ defined: How three capitals reimagined China

 

at 9/23/26 10:05pm

Few things better illustrate how charged the American debate over China has become than the reaction to Jennifer Kavanagh’s recent proposal for a radically different U.S. military posture in Asia. Kavanagh, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, has argued that Washington should pull most of its forces back from the “first island chain,” which includes Taiwan and the Philippines, toward the more defensible “second island chain,” while narrowing its defense commitments to regional allies and eschewing any commitment to defend Taiwan. The proposal prompted a sharp backlash from analysts and commentators, with some flinging accusations that Kavanagh and her colleagues are “fifth columnists.”The episode raises a larger question: how did the American debate over China become so intensely focused on strategic competition – and so resistant to arguments for restraint?David M. McCourt’s "The Dragon Defined: How Washington, Canberra, and London Reimagined China" is an unusually illuminating account of how China came to be understood as a strategic competitor in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.A professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, McCourt draws on more than 250 interviews with diplomats, strategists, academics, and other participants in the foreign-policy communities of the three countries to provide a rich, transnational account of great help to those seeking to understand the debate surrounding the rise of China.As McCourt puts it in the preface, “There is no single, real China, only numerous aspects – some inviting, others threatening. What leaders and elites see is largely a reflection of themselves: their hopes and fears for their countries domestically and on the world stage.” It is an apt summary of a sociologist’s perspective – and an especially useful one given the book’s subject: the production and circulation of elite knowledge.China, in McCourt’s telling, is both an empirical object and a kind of mirror. Its actual behavior matters, but so too do the institutions, professional incentives, domestic political struggles, and national self-conceptions through which that behavior is interpreted. This helps explain the striking transformation McCourt documents. In the 1990s, Washington approached China with considerable confidence that American power and engagement could shape the direction of its rise. By the mid-2010s, that confidence had given way to what McCourt describes as “an insecure, anxious, even fearful US hegemon facing a risen China that has become a near-peer challenger.” The shift from engagement to strategic competition was consequently not simply a response to an objective change in China. It was also a change in the way American elites understood the United States and its place in the world. ⁠McCourt focuses on the institutions where foreign-policy knowledge is made – government agencies, think tanks, universities, journalism, and the business community – and, crucially, the individuals who inhabit them.American readers will recognize many of the names: AEI, CSIS, government agencies, prominent China scholars, journalists, and the revolving door connecting all of them. But McCourt’s comparative approach makes the equivalent institutions in Britain and Australia equally familiar and their relationships intelligible, including Chatham House, the Lowy Institute, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the SOAS China Institute, and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.For an American reader, the most revealing story is what happened inside Washington. The shift away from engagement did not begin with a single administration, nor did it happen because everyone suddenly reached the same conclusion about China. For decades, American policy had rested in part on an expectation that economic development, integration into international institutions, and the growth of a Chinese middle class would produce some degree of political liberalization and convergence.McCourt shows that this expectation was never universally shared. The U.S. military, in particular, had long maintained a more skeptical view of China. As one military analyst told McCourt, his organization had “stayed in the same place” while the rest of the China field had “recently ‘come to us.’” The rise of strategic competition was therefore not simply the triumph of a new idea; in important respects, it was the movement of one longstanding interpretation of China from the margins of the policy community toward its center.A look at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration illustrates the point nicely. Before September 11, 2001, Bush described China as a “strategic competitor.” Of course, the terrorist attacks and the wars that followed redirected American strategic attention elsewhere for years. China did not disappear as a concern, but the question of how to manage its rise drew less attention. When great-power competition returned to the center of U.S. strategy, some of this skepticism reemerged.The assumptions underpinning engagement became increasingly difficult to sustain. Economic growth had produced a much more powerful China, but not the political transformation many American policymakers had anticipated. President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power, Beijing’s more assertive foreign policy, concerns about technology and economic dependence, human-rights abuses, and fears about the balance of power in East Asia all contributed to a growing sense that the old approach had failed.McCourt is especially interested in what happened to the people whose professional identities had been built around the older paradigm. One former Engager describes the pressure bluntly: in Washington, “You’re here because you want to influence policy,” which means asking, “how do I stay credible?” The choice, as he put it, was whether to “adjust myself to the metanarrative” or become “a voice in the wilderness.” McCourt’s interviews suggest careerism was not incidental to the production of China knowledge. Scholars, analysts, journalists, and think-tank experts had to connect their work to the concerns of policymakers – and the definition of what counted as relevant policy expertise was itself changing.At the same time, institutions with reasons to oppose engagement were becoming more influential. The military was hardly alone: hawkish think tanks and national-security officials had long challenged the assumptions of engagement, while parts of the business community became disillusioned with the expectation of an endlessly expanding “China market.” Politicians and strategists from across the political spectrum increasingly emphasized different aspects of the same emerging problem: China’s challenge to American power, its political system, its economic practices, or the security of the U.S.-led order in Asia. Figures such as Kurt Campbell, Ely Ratner, Robert Blackwill, Robert Work, Matthew Pottinger, and Elbridge Colby occupied different positions in this evolving debate, but the larger shift was institutional.By the early 2020s, the proposition that engagement had failed had hardened into a premise of Washington discourse, even as scholars and former Engagers, such as Michael Swaine and J. Stapleton Roy, continued to dispute the historical record.This is where McCourt’s comparative cases become particularly instructive. Australia, for example, complicates the assumption that ideas about China simply flow from Washington outward. McCourt shows how Australian analysts and officials helped strengthen arguments that subsequently gained traction among American skeptics of engagement, while initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific concept and AUKUS demonstrate that allies can also shape American strategic thinking. The point is not that any one of these actors “caused” America to become hawkish on China. It is that the American understanding of China emerged from a field of institutions and individuals whose interests, experiences, and assumptions were changing at the same time.McCourt’s field theory provides a useful way of understanding these developments without requiring either conspiracy or simplistic material determinism. Individuals occupying similar institutional positions, exposed to similar incentives and professional networks, can come to remarkably similar conclusions. Conversely, individuals situated differently can interpret the same Chinese actions in radically different ways.That is perhaps the greatest contribution of "The Dragon Defined." It does not require the reader to accept any particular interpretation of China in order to appreciate the importance of understanding how interpretations of China are made.For anyone interested in the origins of the contemporary turn from engagement toward strategic competition, McCourt has produced an exceptionally rich account. Its many individual case studies and interviews resist easy summary, and the comparative perspective makes the book considerably more illuminating than a study focused exclusively on Washington.Whatever position one takes on China, American grand strategy, or the wisdom of strategic competition, "The Dragon Defined" offers an important reminder: before asking what China is, it is worth asking who is doing the defining – and why.

[Category: China-competition, Great-power-competition, Australia, United-kingdom, Book-review, China]

— In Red Sea crisis, Somaliland seizes leverage for US recognition

 

at 9/23/26 7:45am

The president of Somaliland took advantage of the geopolitical and global economic turmoil caused by the Iran War to visit Washington this week in an effort to advocate for American recognition of Somaliland and for the deepening of economic ties between the two. President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, known as Irro, made a public appearance at the Hudson Institute on September 14, where he argued that his country’s three-and-a-half decade run as a secure, self-governing actor warranted recognition from the United States. Irro also said that, although he’s “not a geologist,” experts tell him his country has “everything” the U.S. could want in terms of critical minerals, which he’d be happy to provide the U.S. in exchange for deeper relations.A self-proclaimed sovereign country widely considered to be part of Somalia by the international community, Somaliland has for decades struggled to gain recognition on the international stage. But Israel’s unexpected decision in December 2025 to be the first government in the world to recognize Somaliland as an independent state has raised questions about which other countries might follow suit. Somaliland denies that recognition came as part of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, but, shortly after the recognition, it was reported that Somaliland will be forming a security partnership with Israel, potentially including offering the Israelis military access to its territory.If there was ever a moment for Somaliland officials to make the case for recognition, now is indeed the time. Somaliland sits in one of the world’s most geostrategically significant locations. With roughly 530 miles of coastline along the Gulf of Aden — which connects to the Red Sea through the vitally important Bab el-Mandeb Strait — Somaliland is at the heart of a crucial shipping route and on the edge of the expansive battlefield of the Iran War.Somaliland’s major port city of Berbera is located just across the Gulf from the Yemeni coast, putting Somaliland’s major economic engine within striking distance of potential Houthi attacks.The Houthi rebels — an Iran-aligned militant group fighting the Yemeni government and its Saudi backers in Yemen’s devastating civil war — have played a major role in expanding the footprint of the ongoing Iran War. The Houthis have repeatedly targeted ships traversing the Red Sea as well as energy and logistics infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. Their stunning gains along Yemen’s southwest coast in recent weeks — including the capture of the major port city of Mocha, near Bab el-Mandeb — mean the Houthis are increasingly in control of the Yemeni coastline along the strait, which gives the group added leverage. Indeed, if a lasting peace deal remains elusive, Iran could aim to use the Houthis’ position to effectively shut down shipping through Bab el-Mandeb, which is only about 18 miles wide at its narrowest point. This would essentially mirror the Iranian strategy on the Strait of Hormuz, which sits on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula. By shutting down shipping through both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, the Iranians and their allies would essentially bring to a halt nearly all sea trade connecting the Middle East to the Indian Ocean, worsening the ongoing global supply shock, especially as it relates to energy. The greater the pain on the world’s pocketbook, the greater the likelihood, the Iranians believe, that pressure will mount to a point where the United States and Israel have no choice but to negotiate an honest end to the war. Irro’s argument for recognition is straightforward. Somaliland has been operating as a functional and relatively secure country since claiming independence from Somalia in 1991. It has its own military and police force, and has a coast guard that patrols its waters along the Gulf of Aden, defending against potential threats from pirates and other nefarious actors on the seas. In an appeal to traditional Western appreciation for democracy, Irro argues that Somaliland’s ability to hold consistent (though often delayed) elections is another indicator of its ability to govern well.But the Hudson Institute appearance was unsteady. Irro, aged 70, giggled seemingly uncontrollably throughout, and struggled to articulate a vision for the broader region. At one point, he compared neighboring Sudan to Venezuela, saying — like the Latin American country — Sudan is “too far away” from Somaliland for him to provide an opinion on its civil war, despite the fact that the two are only about 460 miles apart. Cameron Hudson, a former U.S. intelligence official specializing in Africa, said on X that Irro “did himself and his country a major disservice by being unprepared or incapable of being able to respond convincingly to serious topics that will determine his country’s future. It was like watching an African Biden.”Last Tuesday, Irro held a breakfast with a bipartisan group of members of Congress from both chambers as well as a group of ambassadors. The president also met individually with several members of Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn.) and Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), with whom he reportedly discussed a wide variety of issues pertaining to security, trade, and investment.In addition to meeting with American officials, Irro met with members of the Israeli embassy in Washington, including the country’s ambassador.Ever since Trump took office, Somaliland has seen an opportunity to push for American recognition. Last year, the breakaway state offered the United States the opportunity to open up a military base along its Gulf coast in exchange for recognition, which the Trump administration reportedly seriously considered. Ultimately, though, concern over how such recognition would complicate U.S. relations with nearby governments in the region ultimately dissuaded the American president from agreeing to the arrangement. Such recognition would also hurt American relations with Somalia, which remains a major counterterrorism partner in the fight against the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab.Nevertheless, American military presence in the region appears to be growing. Recent reporting suggests the U.S. has sent military personnel to Somaliland’s eastern neighbor Puntland, another region claiming independence from Somalia. Despite a fraying federal system and deep insecurity, Somalia is still a member of both the African Union and Arab League, allowing it to maintain close ties with its regional neighbors. U.S. recognition of Somaliland would risk hurting American relations with this broad base of countries across the Middle East and Africa.In terms of what Somaliland is willing to provide the U.S. for recognition (or at least for enhanced relations), Irro told Semafor he would consider offering greater military access — including potentially building a military base (as he has offered before) — as well as access to the country’s deep resources. In an appeal directed right at Trump, Irro also suggested the possibility of naming the airport in the major port city of Berbera, which has one of the longest runways on the continent, after the American president.Still, it’ll be a challenge for Somaliland’s leadership to persuade the United States to recognize it while Somalia remains an American partner in counterterrorism activity, and while the wider regional community opposes Somaliland’s independence. But if either of these factors change, and if the Gulf region remains a hotbed for conflict, global geopolitical and military positioning will, at the very least, keep the conversation going.

[Category: Somalia, Iran-war, Red-sea, Houthis, Strait-of-hormuz, Horn-of-africa, Somaliland]

— A Trump-Zelensky meeting and another exercise in futility

 

at 9/22/26 10:05pm

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met President Donald Trump for a brief 40 minutes on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York on Tuesday. According to reports, both looked optimistic and shared comments to that end.“I hope we will end this war, and President Trump will help us end this war,” Zelensky said during the meeting. “I think we need to do this as quick as possible — before winter.”According to the New York Times, “the U.S. president nodded and repeated his words with approval.”But a closer look reveals that there was no breakthrough, just more suggestions that a face-to-face meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin might be on the horizon. Although both expressed a desire to see the war end, there is little evidence that it will. Right now, all the big foreign policy tickets in town make Trump look like a failure. If he wants to roll into the midterms with a fighting chance of avoiding the loss of both chambers, then something has got to give. While I believe his intentions to be sincere, he has failed to bring peace to Ukraine, despite saying he would do so within 24 hours. His war of choice in Iran has made the U.S. military look weak and left the global economy staggering towards a depression. Moreover, the late Lindsey Graham bequeathed to him the hot potato of risking another tariff war against China and India just weeks before the midterms. In the face of resistance from Zelensky and his European sponsors,Trump has been flailing when it comes to muscling through a peace deal for Ukraine. Indeed, in the teeth of rising diesel prices, he has begged Zelensky not to bomb Russian oil refineries. His entreaties have fallen on deaf ears. At the presser after their meeting, Zelensky suggested that the issue wasn’t discussed. The Ukraine war is stuck in a retaliation loop in which Russia will always respond in kind to Ukraine’s attacks on its infrastructure.The only difference is that Russia has the strategic capabilities, specifically the economic weight, readily available energy, deep industrial base, and population size to continue slugging away for much longer than Ukraine.Because of this, Ukraine’s energy infrastructure will once more get battered by massive strikes over the winter months. Hot on the heels of the September Yalta Economic Security Conference in Kyiv, Zelensky wants one thing: continued Western support – weapons and money — to keep fighting at least through to April 2026. That is foolhardy in the extreme. Trump cannot will the U.S. defense industrial sector to produce more interceptors overnight. America has burned through 80% of its THAAD stock since the Iran war started, as well as two-thirds of its own Patriots. While Trump touched on the idea of an energy ceasefire in his meeting with Zelensky, it is unlikely that Russia will get on board. Disrupting Muscovites’ access to gasoline is far less damaging politically than starving people in Ukrainian cities of heat and light. Why would Russia agree to give Zelensky some winter respite only for Ukraine to come out swinging again in the spring? Pause and reload has become predictable.Moreover, Trump seems unable to extricate himself from the war against Iran. No matter the positive spin he puts on it, like in his remarks at the U.N. on Tuesday, the conflict in the Middle East is taking a new and more dangerous turn with the Houthis now occupying the east bank of the Bab al Mandeb. The U.S. Navy has a base on the opposing shore in Djibouti, but then so does China, its only foreign military outpost.With the new sanctions bill, Trump can choose to sign a national security or he can re-impose tariffs of up to 100% on China and India, which would no more likely to succeed than in 2025. Such tariffs would, however, de facto impose an additional tax on ordinary Americans who have seen gasoline prices shoot up. This, on the basis of analysis from 2025 that up to 90% of the cost of tariffs imposed on Chinese exporters was passed on to U.S. consumers.That leaves Trump with no good options, staring down the barrel of becoming a lame duck President in early November. The cold truth is that Trump is deeply tied up in all of the foreign policies which have failed and he can no longer distance himself from them. For as much as he talks peace in Ukraine, the U.S. is still selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Ukrainians with European money to keep the fight going.For his part, Zelensky has proven remarkably effective in shuttling around the world cajoling, brow beating, and occasionally shaming his interlocutors into providing the money and military materiel that Ukraine needs. Yet the truth is that no amount of support for Ukraine, four and a half years into this terrible war, will ever be enough.I align myself with John Mearsheimer’s assessment that the Ukraine war will be settled by Russia on the battlefield. Zelensky seems incapable of accepting that Ukraine will eventually lose Donetsk, come what may.For him, the end of the war likely means the end of his political career in Ukraine, at least for the foreseeable future. He is expected to lose a future Presidential election. The next Ukrainian president in peacetime will face different, though no less formidable challenges than Zelensky has faced in wartime. Their country will be bankrupt and European sponsors may feel more coy about providing the level of financial assistance that they provide now. The demographic picture looks terrible in a country where around half of the adult population still in the country is a pensioner. The Canadian move to explore Associate Membership of the EU in the future may offer a troubling harbinger of what may lay in store for Ukraine. Subsidy rich states like Poland and France will not be willing to share the European budget with new members, however much they suffered in war.But these are Ukraine’s problems, not America’s. Zelensky showing up again and insisting that Ukraine really can win, with a few more weapons and a bit more money, is the last thing that Trump needs right now. The U.S. president needs a diplomatic success if he holds any hope of avoiding a shredding in the midterms. The Greenland deal won’t be enough. And Zelensky isn’t budging, perhaps because he sees that Trump may have even less leverage over him from November.

[Category: Donald-trump, Volodymyr-zelensky, Vladimir-putin, United-nations, European-union, Ukraine-war]

— More money for Iran war? This rigmarole won't wash

 

at 9/22/26 10:05pm

The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.You shouldn’t go to war without the backing of the U.S. Congress. President Donald Trump is learning that the hard way, as his — not our — six-month-and-counting “little excursion” and “small potatoes” Iranian quagmire drags on. And you don’t build weapons for tomorrow’s wars — especially the ones you say are critical to future victories (remember them?) — using the parliamentary peek-a-boo prestidigitation known as reconciliation. In both instances, Trump is seeking big changes in U.S. national security as unilaterally as possible, with minimal congressional backing.Reconciliation is a controversial process to fund programs. It doesn’t have to follow the standard congressional appropriation rules. Most critically, reconciliation bills aren’t subject to a Senate filibuster. That means they can pass the so-called upper house with a simple majority vote, instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Predictably, that too often leads to rickety resourcing and reversed reckonings when the other political party takes over.“Unfortunately, reconciliation is becoming a hallmark of the slow but steady degradation of Congress,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, Director of Advocacy here at the Project On Government Oversight, says. “It has also become a tantalizing tool for the Pentagon in its never-ending quest to throw good money after bad, to the tune of hundreds of billions above and beyond what a complicit Congress already showers them with each year.”And while you can begin a war with a surprise attack, you can’t build weapons that way. Yet Trump is trying to employ this reconciliation rigmarole in his proposed 2027 defense budget for arguably his two top military priorities — his “Golden Dome” aerial shield, and his wholesale push to develop sky-darkening fleets of drones:— The Pentagon is seeking $17.9 billion for Golden Dome next year, but only $400 million (2.2%) is in its official budget request.— The Pentagon’s drone-centric Defense Autonomous Working Group (DAWG) is asking for $54.6 billion in 2027, but only $1 billion (1.8%) is in the Defense Department’s official base budget request.While it looks like Congress will eventually approve Trump’s bloatacious $1.1 trillion defense budget, the separate $350 billion reconciliation proposal appears to be going down in flames (the combined $1.45 trillion top line represents an incredible 44% boost over this year’s budget). Yet it’s that threat to the $350 billion that’s got the generals in charge of those two programs sounding the alarm. “If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome because there is no funding,” Space Force General Michael Guetlein, chief of the space-shield effort, said flatly last month.Army Lieutenant General Steven Marks (PDF) told a defense-industry confab September 9 that his DAWG drone programs will lose their “momentum” if they don’t get at least some of the $53.6 billion plus-up requested. Marks warned that potential U.S. foes “can take a $100,000 drone and conduct an attack against a $2 billion vessel,” but declined to elaborate on potential funding cuts. “Unfortunately, all of our systems are all classified,” he said, “and so I will not be talking in detail about those.”Well, here’s a safe bet that’s not secret. The Pentagon will not get much, if any, of its $350 billion reconciliation bonus. That will force it to cut key operations and maintenance accounts, assuming it wants to keep Golden Dome and its drone programs humming. And those cuts in O&M — training, fuel, parts, and all the other humdrum items that hone a force’s fighting edge — will dull the readiness of the U.S. military.Bottom line: U.S. national security needs to be built on solid bipartisan bedrock, and not the ever-shifting sands of fleeting political advantage.Playing defense is becoming a bigger businessIt’s kind of funny that the Department of Defense putatively changed its name to the Department of War just when it’s becoming more of a department of defense than ever. The exploding use of drones around the world has forced the U.S. military back on its heels. The offensive edge that the U.S. has arguably held since World War II is being eclipsed by swarms of flying autonomous AI-guided weapons that can cheaply elude the Pentagon’s costly defenses. All of a sudden, they have made defending what the U.S. military has just as vital as what the U.S. military attacks. Impressive U.S. military assets — aircraft carriers, bombers, armored divisions — that once ruled the seas, skies, and battlefields, are now targets. And the U.S. military is scrambling to protect them:— After Iranian drones and missiles battered U.S. bases in the Middle East, the Air Force announced September 3 that it wants to buy “a Ground-Based, Medium-Caliber Gun Weapon System that fires affordable munitions, enables defense against air and missile threats with an initial focus on subsonic cruise missiles and Unmanned Aircraft Systems to provide persistent defense in support of United States Air Force assets.”— The Air Force’s top general says the wide use of drones and missiles in Iran and Ukraine have convinced the service that “we have to create a new career field and have experts in the ability to defend your airfield from all of these threats.”— Early in the Iran war — 22 days after six U.S. troops were killed by an Iranian drone — the Air Force issued a call for “prefabricated, transportable, hardened shelter systems designed to protect personnel from blast and fragmentation threats” that could be shipped to Jordan.— Two days later, the Pentagon sought contractors to “plan and design a hardened, underground, secure, Combat Center Building and squadron operations buildings supporting a variety of airframe and missions to include, but not limited to, bombers, fighters, and unmanned aircraft systems for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” at the key U.S. base in Qatar. Iran knocked out that command post at Al Udeid, which had run U.S. air campaigns in the region for more than two decades, in the war’s opening weeks. The Pentagon has yet to detail the damage.— Iran also severely damaged the Navy’s key base in the Persian Gulf, home of its 5th Fleet, early in the conflict. “They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao recently said, adding that the service is “looking” at what to do with it, without elaboration. The service is “not getting back in [the base in Bahrain] anytime soon,” Admiral Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said August 31. The Pentagon has yet to detail the damage.— In August, the Pentagon’s Mobile Land-Based Sensors Projects Office said it is looking to develop “highly mobile, rapidly deployable” Forward-Based Mode Radar Next systems “capable of providing enhanced early warning, tracking, and discrimination of emerging missile threats” under its Nimble Options for Buying Layered Effects — NOBLE — contracting authority (thank God at least one of those terms was deemed acronym-worthy).— The Air Force wants to convert cargo planes into “adaptive, force-multiplying launch platforms” that provide “a rapidly deployable swarm [of drones] for base security.”— Last month, the Marines began buying counter-drone vehicles “capable of detecting, tracking, and defeating unmanned aerial threats while maintaining the flexibility to reposition as mission requirements evolve.” The $1.9 million buggies are outfitted with Hellfire missiles originally designed for the Army’s AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships.All this is fine and dandy. We need to defend our forces. The trouble is that offense is much cheaper than defense. Given that financial advantage, the attacker can overwhelm the defender. Basically, the attacker has to succeed only once, while the defender must succeed 24/7/365. That’s why building moats, the Great Wall of China, and the Maginot Line — not to mention Golden Dome (grandchild of Safeguard, and child of the Strategic Defense Initiative) — is ultimately a losing game.Retooling subs for a bigger, cheaper, punchLast month, the Navy changed the designation for 19 of its future Virginia-class submarines from SSN — naval shorthand for a fast-attack submarine — to SSGN, meaning a guided-missile submarine. But the new nomenclature goes far, ahem, deeper than a single letter.The service is stretching the original design of the 377-foot Virginia-class boats by 84 feet so the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles it can carry grows from “about 37 to about 65,” according to long-time Navy expert Ronald O’Rourke at the Congressional Research Service. The change shifts the new subs’ primary mission from attacking enemy subs to striking land targets up to 1,000 miles away from beneath the waves. The goal is to replace the firepower of the four bigger Tomahawk-carrying Ohio-class subs which are reaching the end of their service life.The new expanded subs will cost about $4 billion each. That’s a lot of money, but it’s cheaper than designing and building a new class of submarines. And that’s refreshing, given the Pentagon’s current gimme-more mindset. The hardware tweak is a timely reminder that it is possible to do more with less. “It illustrates that innovation in the military is not always about inventing a new technology,” Joshua VerGow and Abigail Rudolph wrote recently for the Atlantic Council. The U.S. military, they add, “should make building from scratch the exception rather than the default.”Here's what has caught The Bunker's Eye recentlyThe dogfight continuesSome in Congress are fighting to keep 126 Air Force A-10 Warthog attack planes flying until 2034 over the service’s objections, Military.com’s Haley Fuller reported September 7. Ground-pounders love the warplane and its gatling gun, dedicated to coming to their aid if they run into trouble on the battlefield; the Air Force has been saying for years that role can be filled by other aircraft. The lawmakers have dubbed their bill the BRRRRT Act, for Bolstering Recognition, Resurgence, Retention, and Remembrance of the Thunderbolt Act. “Thunderbolt” is the A-10s official name, but troops affectionately call it the Warthog…and “BRRRT” is the distinctively deadly sound — listen here — of its gun.Aurora bombsoverusThe Pentagon now has weapons orbiting the Earth, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said September 14, the first public acknowledgement that the U.S. is arming the heavens, the Air Force said in a press release.What 9/11 did to themA trio of unlikely U.S. military veterans who signed up to fight following the terror attacks 25 years ago reflect on the “pride, regret, frustration and gratitude” their service wrought, Dave Philipps reported in the September 10 New York Times.Speaking of gratitude, thanks for stopping by The Bunker this week. Once again, we’re taking a couple of weeks off, returning October 7. Meanwhile, consider forwarding this on to friends and foes so they can subscribe here.

[Category: Us-military, Pentagon-budget, Pentagon-spending, The-bunker, Pentagon]

— Trump and 14 Lat Am leaders ignite new drug-terror war at UN

 

at 9/22/26 4:19pm

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Tuesday, 14 Latin American and Caribbean countries followed the Trump administration’s lead by designating 24 cartels, prison gangs, and drug trafficking groups as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), laying the groundwork for potential U.S. military involvement in operations across the Western Hemisphere.The announcement came from the majority of the member-states of the Shield of the Americas, a loosely-formed coalition of 19 right-leaning regional governments — including Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru — which in March committed to use lethal military force against criminal groups alleged of drug trafficking to the United States.The Shield members that — for reasons not immediately clear — did not sign Tuesday’s statement include Guatemala, Jamaica, Belize and Bahamas. Other hemispheric governments led by nominally left-of-center leaders, such as Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Venezuela, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Cuba and several Caribbean nations — some of which are regional epicenters for organized crime — have not been invited to join the ad-hoc coalition.The joint declaration, which invoked the 1947 mutual defense pact known as the Rio Treaty, came just hours after President Trump told world leaders that “the cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere.” As such he was previewing what many believe may signal the acceleration of open-ended, ill-defined, and unauthorized U.S. military deployments across wide swaths of Latin America and Caribbean in a fusion of the war on drugs with the war on terror.“For years, the cartels have waged war against the people of this hemisphere. Now, we’re waging war on them,” Trump told several heads of state, including Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, Honduran President Nasry Asfura, and Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, at the gathering of the consortium being led by ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Tuesday’s announcement followed statements last month by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Panama gathering of the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition (AC3), the Shield's operational wing, that five countries — Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica and Guatemala — had authorized U.S. forces to conduct joint military operations against armed groups in their national territory. Since March, Ecuador has been hosting U.S. special forces in joint operations near the border with Colombia, which has agreed to host the organization’s regional headquarters in Medellín. Colombia also plans to borrow three U.S. MQ-9A reaper drones to carry-out precision strikes against high-value targets and is slated to receive $1 billion in fresh U.S. security assistance over an undefined period of time. While Tuesday’s joint declaration also highlighted plans to boost economic cooperation and multilateral coordination, the coalition’s principal objective is “to do bad things to bad people,” Hegseth told the senior military leaders assembled in Panama, warning them of the alleged threats also posed by irregular migration and extrahemispheric actors like China. Tuesday’s meeting came a week after U.S. officials announced that $52 million in foreign military financing would be redirected from African and European countries to Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Panama. More recently, defense officials speaking with CNN said that “most” of the Pentagon’s high-powered drones operating in Africa will likely be transferred to South America in anticipation of escalating, land-based counternarcotics and counter-terrorism operations.While most, if not all, of the region’s leaders understand the acute challenges to their societies posed by organized crime, experts and former officials say that coercive pressure must act in concert with law enforcement-led solutions and economic development, as well strengthening the rule of law, combatting public corruption, and disrupting illicit financial flows, if security strategies are to prove durable over time.“Criminal organizations are not terrorist organizations,” Todd Robinson, a top Biden administration official for international narcotics and law enforcement, told the New York Times. Weakening these groups requires bolstering a “civilian security apparatus that is trained to go after these organizations — to go after their money, to collect evidence, to indict and prosecute and to, under the rule of law, bring these people to justice.”

[Category: Un, Drug-war, Colombia, Donald-trump, Ecuador, Shield-of-the-americas, Narco-terrorism]

— Banning US diesel exports will likely backfire on Americans

 

at 9/22/26 2:30pm

With diesel prices hitting all-time highs above $6.50 a gallon, there is a growing demand from farm states that the White House ban diesel exports from the United States.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that the administration is considering whether such a step would be feasible. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has endorsed the idea.The persistent jump in diesel prices comes despite oil prices dropping to $90 per barrel from their highs above $105 per barrel last week amid signs of more oil transits through the Strait of Hormuz and hopes of renewed diplomacy in the region. But global diesel prices are being driven not just by conflicts in the Gulf but also by refinery attacks in the Russia-Ukraine war. And U.S. diesel prices are determined by global markets, not just national ones, which is one reason behind the calls for an export ban. U.S. diesel exports hit 1.9 million barrels daily last month, and the idea is a ban would force American refineries to make that fuel available to domestic consumers instead. However, the idea also has its detractors, including within the administration. Energy secretary Doug Burgum said last week that an export ban could lead to other countries retaliating with their own export bans, which could hurt states like California, which depend on diesel imports after local refinery closures. Meanwhile, energy industry experts like Institute for Energy Research President Tom Pyle, have pointed out that an export ban would be more likely to cause refineries on the Gulf Coast (where much of U.S. refining capacity is located) to pare back their activity than to redirect that diesel fuel within the United States, thus reducing the aggregate supply of all fuels including gasoline. Others like “Gas Buddy Guy” (a widely followed industry commentator on X) point out that an export ban motivated by domestic politics is not only unlikely to result in more available diesel in the U.S, but could also hit the credibility of the U.S. as a backstop diesel supplier to other countries, hurting the industry over the long term.Thus diesel prices look like yet another set of issues where the old adage might apply – it’s a lot easier to get the toothpaste out of the tube than to put it back in.

[Category: Energy-prices, Oil, Strait-of-hormuz, Red-sea, Houthis, Diesel, Gas-prices, Iran-war]

— In UN speech, Trump threatens to 'annihilate' Iran if no deal reached

 

at 9/22/26 11:18am

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran if diplomatic efforts to end his nearly seven-month-old war do not succeed. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, he also touted both his peacemaking record and an increasingly belligerent U.S. foreign policy stretching from the Middle East to Venezuela to Greenland.Trump presented the past year as proof that military force and economic pressure could resolve conflicts that diplomacy had failed to settle. “As president of the most extraordinary nation in history, I have no interest in leaving dangers to grow for another day,” he declared. “I do not believe in letting problems fester; they only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted.”The leading example of this approach, Trump said, was Iran, which, in his telling, has rejected Washington’s diplomatic overtures that had pushed Trump to take military action with Israel in June 2025 and then launch a much larger-scale war beginning at the end of February. “I have a big decision to make,” Trump said of the current status of the war. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before (...) Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly?” Trump has made several similarly dark threats against Iran during the conflict, but they have done little to alter Tehran’s negotiating position, and the two sides appear stuck in a standoff, with some fearing that the operation is doomed to become another American “forever war”.The president, however, predicted that the two sides will reach an agreement after November’s midterm elections, because “it doesn't make sense for” Iran not to.“They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election, what they don't realize is that I'm not running,” he added, saying that national security questions, not political considerations will drive his calculus. But the war does seem to be affecting the president’s popularity. A recent poll by CNN shows that opposition to Trump’s approach to the war continues to grow, with only 26% saying that they support the president’s approach, and nearly 80% saying he is not doing enough to bring the war to an end. Trump blasted the “cowards and traitors” who say that U.S. munitions stockpiles are dwindling to a dangerous extent. The Congressional Budget Office recently found that it could take five years to replenish them.Elsewhere, Trump said he would “continue to seek and end the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine,” while threatening to use the “enormous” new tariff authorities granted to him by the Russia sanctions package that passed Congress last week. He also said that he would sign the recently announced deal with Denmark and Greenland that would increase the U.S. military presence in Greenland later Tuesday. Trump closed his remarks by downplaying the growing worries over artificial intelligence’s threat to humanity, instead presenting the race to “superintelligence” as part of a competition with China. “Whoever wins superintelligent wins,” he said. “That's the group that wins, and we're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way.”

[Category: Iran-war, United-nations, Artificial-intelligence, Donald-trump]

— China is outfoxing the US in the battle for Mideast influence

 

at 9/21/26 10:05pm

Washington talks about “influence” as though it were a mystical vapor that leaks out of every military base closure. But Beijing’s rapidly growing clout in the Middle East shows that influence can come in many forms.While the Pentagon debates whether and where to rebuild U.S. bases battered by Iran during Operation Epic Fury, China has spent the last decade expanding its influence in the Middle East without stationing a single soldier there. China’s experience in the region makes clear that influence can be cultivated far more cheaply than Washington assumes, and without maintaining a sprawling network of vulnerable military installations.As Operation Epic Fury demonstrated, Washington’s constellation of fixed bases across the Middle East is vulnerable and expensive to defend. Before the war, the United States maintained at least 19 military facilities across the region, eight of them considered permanent. Iranian attacks left both the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and the Qatar command center, from which the United States had coordinated regional air operations for more than two decades, effectively inoperable.Defenders of the status quo claim this cost is worth it, arguing that permanent presence keeps Washington politically relevant. Winding it down, they contend, would create a power vacuum to be filled by Beijing, eroding American influence and leaving China as the region’s dominant outside power. China’s own experience in the region invalidates that fear, showing how thoroughly Washington has conflated military power with influence itself.The Middle East is less strategically important to the United States than it was during the Cold War, and America’s regional interests are correspondingly limited. Washington needs Gulf oil to continue reaching global markets and to prevent any single power from dominating the region and its resources. It also must disrupt terrorist groups capable of striking the homeland. China’s interests are actually quite similar to America’s. It depends even more heavily on Middle Eastern energy, benefits from a stable balance of power, and has its own concerns about terrorism. Despite these overlapping interests, the two countries have pursued them through starkly different means.Aside from a single overseas Chinese base in Djibouti, a country where the United States also maintains a base that is roughly six times larger, China has nothing resembling America’s military architecture in the Middle East. Yet Beijing has rapidly expanded its influence in a region where Washington has devoted trillions of dollars and decades of military commitment to the same end.China enjoys near-universal diplomatic acceptance across the region’s competing camps, while Washington’s history and military entanglements undermine its ability to serve as a neutral mediator. China is the Arab states’ largest trading partner, and the Middle East is one of the largest recipients of its Belt and Road investment. Beijing’s regional diplomatic role has only grown more institutionalized, with the first China-Arab States Summit launched in 2022. Amid the current conflict between the U.S. and Iran, Gulf governments have repeatedly turned to Beijing to pressure Tehran, first over the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian retaliation, and more recently to rein in the Houthis.Washington remains the region’s preponderant military power, but even that status has not afforded it the ability to dictate the region’s geopolitical alignment. The Gulf monarchies have consistently resisted American efforts to organize the region around great-power competition, instead maintaining close security ties with Washington while deepening relations with China.While military strength will never be irrelevant, portions of Washington have become so accustomed to exercising power through the military that they often mistake it for power itself. China’s influence has risen alongside its rapid economic growth, technological advances, and growing military capability — the same combination that has built great-power status for centuries. Gulf states sell China the energy its economy depends on while courting Chinese investment because Chinese firms have capital to deploy.The United States should be great at this game. The Gulf states do not need tens of thousands of American troops on their soil to understand the value of doing business with the world’s largest economy. Nor would America’s decades-old relationships simply evaporate when the last helicopter leaves Saudi Arabia. When Washington is not trying to remake the Middle East in its image, it still has more to offer than Beijing. Winding down America’s bases in the region would inevitably cost Washington some influence with the countries that host these installations. But influence alone does not make a military presence valuable, especially where the interests at stake are limited. The United States could preserve other forms of security leverage, such as arm sales, capacity building, and intelligence sharing.If anything, some Gulf governments may be more eager to cooperate with the United States knowing they will not be part of a future target set in a regional conflict.The China-mediated Saudi-Iranian normalization deal in 2023 makes the distinction between military and diplomatic influence clear. Beijing managed to place itself at the center of one of the region’s most bitter rivalries despite lacking anything remotely resembling America’s regional military footprint. It relied instead on diplomacy and the political weight accumulated through its broader relationship with both countries. Influence in the Middle East does not require a military presence, and certainly not one as large as America’s.There is an even stranger irony in invoking China to justify America’s existing military posture in the region. China depends more heavily than the United States on Middle Eastern energy, yet Washington has effectively appointed itself guardian of the regional order on which China’s economy relies. If Gulf oil flows were ever seriously threatened, Beijing would have every incentive to help restore them. Instead, Washington has saved it the trouble, absorbing all the costs and risks of regional security while China has enjoyed the remarkably convenient arrangement of having its chief geopolitical rival protect its energy lifeline.As the Pentagon considers what comes next, it should prioritize maintaining regional access rather than regional dominance. It does not need to rebuild every cratered runway or shattered command center simply because those facilities existed before the war.It should close the most exposed bases, reduce the overall American military footprint, and consolidate what remains around, at most, a few strategic outposts farther from Iran. Jordan, Western Saudi Arabia, the Horn of Africa, or even parts of Europe could still provide the access needed to protect America’s limited regional interests without replicating the sprawling prewar architecture.Military postures this large are almost impossible to unwind in ordinary times. Operation Epic Fury created a rare chance to break the inertia that keeps outdated deployments alive long after their strategic rationale. The Pentagon should seize it. China is supposed to be the reason America cannot leave; in reality, it provides a clear example of how the United States can protect its interests and preserve its influence at a far lower cost.

[Category: China, Persian-gulf, Iran-war, Overseas-bases, Enewsletter, Xi-jinping]

— Trump and Xi meet on a 'rotting' diplomatic foundation

 

at 9/21/26 10:05pm

As Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for his third meeting in less than a year with U.S. President Donald Trump, calm seems to prevail in the relationship. This is a dangerous illusion.The sense of stability is breeding complacency on both sides even as pressure builds up under the surface. We may be throwing away our last opening to put the world’s most important bilateral relationship on a solid foundation.In keeping with the slogan on which the two sides agreed at their May meeting in Beijing, the U.S. and China are supposedly building a relationship of “constructive strategic stability.” Indeed, compared to the confrontational posture of both sides during the first Trump and Biden administrations, we seem to have stepped back from the brink of conflict. Even the seemingly explosive issue of the ongoing U.S. assault against Iran and its damaging consequences for the global economy, or China’s continued dealings with Iran that are frustrating the U.S. strategy of economic strangulation, do not seem to be major grievances for either side.At first glance, there are strong reasons for rethinking a confrontational approach. In sharp contrast to Biden, Trump does not frame his dealings with Xi Jinping as an ideological crusade. He does not seek to organize the world’s richest and most powerful countries against China or to block its technological development. Trump’s erratic and uninhibited conduct must be deeply disturbing to Xi Jinping, whose dominant psychological trait is an obsession with control. But because Trump wants to strike deals with China rather than geopolitically subordinate it, he has opened a wider range of possibilities in the relationship.Even more significantly, the U.S. and China find themselves in a balance of economic terror. Last year the relationship nearly spiraled into uncontrollable economic warfare when Trump raised tariffs to 145% in a furious response to China’s retaliation against his “liberation day” tariffs. China then brought to bear its most formidable economic weapon, cutting off U.S. access to the rare earth elements crucial to high tech civilian and military production.Trump returned to the table in short order, and the two sides deescalated to where they had started. The trade ceasefire was tested five months later when the U.S. Commerce Department imposed a sweeping expansion of its existing blacklist of Chinese companies and China responded by hastily rolling out a much wider version of extraterritorial controls on rare earths. Again furious, Trump threatened to call off the upcoming face-to-face meeting between the two leaders. But when he found out what his administration had done to provoke the Chinese response, he reversed himself.The economic truce was formalized at the Trump–Xi meeting in Busan, South Korea. Modest progress then followed from Trump’s trip to Beijing in May, with China agreeing to US purchases and both sides promising to talk through ongoing tensions in implementing the truce.On the surface, then, the relationship seems sound. But underneath, the entire foundation is rotting.Since 2018, when the US foreign policy establishment abruptly redefined China as alien and hostile to the US-dominated “rules-based international order”, bipartisan hostility toward China has become the single unifying theme in the otherwise floridly dysfunctional US political system. That this unanimity within the political establishment has survived Trump’s second-term reorientation of China policy was on display last week, when multiple congressional hearings were held to denounce China ahead of Xi’s visit. The members of both parties took turns raising antagonistic measures before witnesses chosen to offer only antagonistic approaches to the full range of challenges posed by China.At a hearing of the House Select Committee on China, for example, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) asked: “Should we be viewing this as a hawkish relationship between us and China? … Or should we be doing more of a cooperative relationship with them—because we tried that for like 50 years ever since Nixon went to China, and that didn't turn out very well for us.”The Republican and Democratic witnesses alike agreed that the key task is to slow down China’s economic and technological development and speed up that of the United States. In the words of witness Oren Cass, “it should be extremely obvious to us that there is no path to partnership, collaboration, mutually beneficial arrangements with China.”To the limited extent that Trump’s administration is making China policy, it is guided by the same sort of hostility. Although Trump’s desire for friendly meetings with Xi Jinping has starkly limited public anti-China rhetoric and has hamstrung the Commerce Department after its actions nearly derailed the Busan summit, other U.S. agencies are continuing the Biden practice of steadily expanding restrictions on China:— The Federal Communications Commission has banned the import of humanoid robots and power inverters from China and expanded the ban on imports from Huawei and ZTE.— Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently sent a letter to Ford denouncing the automaker’s agreements with Chinese companies for creating “reliance on technologies of foreign adversaries”.— Under a proposed rule set to take effect in December, the Office of Management and Budget would prohibit federally funded US research collaboration with Chinese researchers.— The Pentagon keeps expanding its own blacklist of Chinese entities, and has now included most of China’s leading private technology companies.— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, commenting recently on the artificial intelligence “race” that US leaders imagine themselves to be running against China, said: “There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this.” Trump himself holds the same view. (After talks on Sunday with his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng, Bessent said the two sides had agreed to establish an AI dialogue mechanism. This is an encouraging sign, but the atmosphere of deep distrust over technology will make real progress on the issue difficult.)Washington may be split, then, on how to talk about China. But on the substance of the relationship, overwhelming agreement prevails: U.S. and Chinese interests are inalterably opposed, the U.S. must dominate China or lose itself, excluding China’s presence in American society is an urgent priority.Because China is expanding its own capacity to counter U.S. attacks, and because neither side seems to understand what the other has promised in their truce, the two countries are headed for turmoil if not outright conflict.U.S. policymakers could still step back from such a mutually destructive future. The American people are communicating quite clearly that they do not want the single-mindedly adversarial approach that Washington has embraced. A clear majority now favor cooperation with China rather than seeking to limit its power.Recognizing the many shared interests that do unite the U.S. and China could open possibilities for cooperation on urgently needed global reforms. Appreciating the deep economic changes on both sides over the last decade would allow the two countries to explore different possibilities for mutual gain in trade and investment and research collaboration. New thinking on AI would make both countries safer and more prosperous. Taking seriously the idea of “constructive strategic stability” could inspire a new approach to regional security.Policy ideas for repairing the relationship are available. What is in short supply are U.S. leaders with the political courage to stand against the latest ill-fated bipartisan demand for international conflict.

[Category: Xi-trump-summit, China, Xi-jinping, Enewsletter, Donald-trump, United-nations]

— Is all this AI doomsaying distracting us from the real threat?

 

at 9/21/26 10:05pm

News items heralding the AI apocalypse are ubiquitous. The panic started shortly after the ex-Anthropic, ex-OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower, Jacob Coxon sounded the alarm on X, writing that AI companies are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”Coxon’s diagnosis is startling. AI, he wrote, “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” In a shocking turn, Anthropic’s own Evan Hubinger confirmed growing fears when he wrote, “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is 10% within the next decade."It’s no surprise that dire remarks like this from AI experts have turned every news headline or cable news segment this week into a freak-out over the coming doomsday. But is all of this panic really warranted?In the latest episode of Always at War, we attempt to parse what’s actually dangerous about AI from cynical industry hype. We focus aspects of the story often overlooked by Washington’s op-ed class: namely, that in the same breath that AI CEOs predict their own technology will end humanity, they’re also working closely with the Pentagon to build deadly weapons, expanding the surveillance state, and asking lawmakers to remove guardrails — like antitrust laws — that would limit their companies’ power.And, in a linguistic minefield that would entrap the Bard himself, CEOs like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei claim that the only way to prevent AI Armageddon is to free AI companies from the rule of law so that they can – stick with me – use AI to help us win a war with China.If this sounds insane, you’re not alone. Join us as we try to understand why AI CEOs are so eager to push the "end of humanity” narrative. Are these guys defending working at the proverbial “boiling people alive factory?” Or is this just a convenient ploy to distract from AI’s immediate harms, like its use to target and kill civilians in Gaza and Iran and the massive build-up of AI surveillance technologies here at home? As we discuss in the episode, whatever its upsides, we also know this technology is already being used sloppily and at the expense of people's lives. The dangers of AI are not simply hypothetical. So why not focus on the real and present dangers that are already affecting us?

[Category: Technology, Pentagon, Surveillance, Video, Artificial-intelligence]

— When Saudi Arabia realizes it's backed the wrong horse

 

at 9/21/26 10:05pm

The United States went to war with Iran in the belief that American power could quickly overwhelm Tehran’s ability to threaten the Middle East. For Saudi Arabia, the war is producing nearly the opposite result. Iran has been badly hit, but it and its regional allies have demonstrated that they can still threaten Saudi cities, oil installations, pipelines and export routes. At the same time, Washington has shown that even overwhelming offensive power does not necessarily translate into effective protection for its Gulf partners. The consequence is likely to be a historic Saudi reassessment: less confidence in the United States, more reliance on regional partners and a much closer strategic relationship with China.Saudi Arabia’s geographical problem is not new. In an article published in LobeLog in September 2019, I described the “encirclement” of Saudi oil production by Iran and Iran-aligned forces. That year, the attack on the Abqaiq processing complex displayed the accuracy and reach of the weapons available to Tehran or its allies. An earlier Houthi strike on pumping stations serving the East-West Pipeline showed that the kingdom’s alternative export route to the Red Sea was also vulnerable. Attacks around Fujairah similarly cast doubt on the idea that tankers and pipelines outside the Strait of Hormuz would remain safe in a crisis.The strategic message was straightforward. Saudi Arabia could not protect its petroleum system simply by building routes that bypassed one chokepoint. Its fields and processing plants lie near the Gulf; the East-West Pipeline crosses a vast, exposed territory; and the Red Sea outlet can be threatened from Yemen. Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen gave it the ability to apply pressure around much of the kingdom’s perimeter.In 2019, Saudi leaders were deeply disappointed when the United States did not retaliate against Iran for the attack on Abqaiq. They had invested heavily in their relationship with the first Trump administration. Later, the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s $2 billion commitment to Jared Kushner’s private-equity firm reinforced the impression that Riyadh expected its close connections to the Trump family to bring privileged access and dependable support. Whatever the Saudis expected, Abqaiq had already demonstrated the limits of the American security guarantee.The present war makes that problem much greater. The United States can destroy targets across Iran, but it has not been able to prevent Tehran and its partners from striking back across the region. Saudi Arabia is now paying for a conflict it did not start and cannot control. Missile and drone defenses can intercept many threats, but no shield is perfect, particularly against repeated, low-cost attacks on sprawling infrastructure. Recent strikes on the East-West Pipeline underline the point made in 2019: the route intended to insure Saudi exports against the closure of Hormuz is itself a target. The kingdom is surrounded not by conventional Iranian armies but by a network of missiles, drones, militias and maritime threats.For Riyadh, therefore, the issue is not simply the strength of the U.S. military. It is the mismatch between American power and Saudi security. Washington may be able to punish Iran severely without being able to stop attacks on Abqaiq, Ras Tanura, Yanbu or the pipeline between them. Indeed, a prolonged war can increase those attacks by giving Iran an incentive to raise the cost to America’s partners. Saudi Arabia is likely to be even more angered by the ineffectiveness of American protection now than it was by American restraint in 2019.The deterioration extends beyond immediate defense. The U.S.–Saudi civil nuclear agreement once appeared to be the centerpiece of a broader strategic bargain. Yet after supporting the agreement, President Trump publicly made its political future dependent on Saudi participation in the Abraham Accords. That demand is extraordinarily difficult for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to meet while Israel continues its operations in Gaza, expands pressure in the West Bank and wages war in southern Lebanon. The agreement has been submitted to Congress and is not formally dead but tying it to normalization has placed it in severe political jeopardy. From Riyadh’s perspective, Washington has again turned a promised strategic benefit into a conditional instrument of American and Israeli policy.Saudi leaders must now ask whether they have been backing the wrong horse. Their answer is not likely to be a complete break with Washington. The United States will remain an important arms supplier, investor and military partner. But the kingdom is already building alternatives. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed in August by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey commits the three countries to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Its practical obligations remain to be tested, yet its political meaning is clear. Saudi Arabia no longer wants its survival to depend on a single outside protector. Pakistan offers nuclear prestige and a long military relationship; Turkey brings a capable defense industry, armed forces and NATO experience. Together, they provide Riyadh with an additional layer of deterrence and strategic autonomy.China is the more consequential alternative. It is the largest buyer of Gulf oil, an indispensable economic partner for Saudi development and one of the few powers with real leverage in Tehran. Beijing also brokered the 2023 restoration of Saudi-Iranian diplomatic relations. Unlike Washington, China does not ask Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel or align itself publicly with a divisive regional war. Saudi leaders may increasingly conclude that China, precisely because it maintains relations with both sides, is better placed to restrain Iran and protect the commercial stability on which the kingdom depends.That does not mean China will replace the United States as Saudi Arabia’s military protector. Beijing has neither America’s regional force structure nor an evident desire to inherit its security burdens. But influence does not require exact replacement. China can supply digital and nuclear technology, investment, diplomatic access and eventually more defense cooperation, while Saudi Arabia assembles a diversified security system involving Washington, Beijing, Islamabad and Ankara. Each disappointment with the United States accelerates that process.The great irony is that an American war intended to reassert U.S. power may instead reduce U.S. primacy in the Gulf. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq removed Iran’s principal Arab counterweight and handed Tehran enormous influence in Baghdad. President Trump’s war with Iran risks a comparable strategic reversal. By exposing Saudi Arabia to retaliation, demonstrating the limits of American protection and attaching unacceptable political conditions to cooperation, Washington is encouraging Riyadh to seek security elsewhere. Bush’s war helped hand Iraq to Iran. Trump’s war may help hand the Gulf—and above all Saudi Arabia—to China.

[Category: Iran-war, Persian-gulf, Houthis, Israel]

— Does Mecca Pact demand Pakistan enter Yemen conflict?

 

at 9/20/26 10:05pm

In August, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Alliance, heralding a new chapter in regional security cooperation between the three nations. In early September, the Houthis launched a new offensive aimed at expanding their control over Yemeni territory and tightening their grip around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Suez Canal and Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. They subsequently launched drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia’s military and energy infrastructure on multiple occasions. As the situation deteriorated, attention increasingly turned to the Mecca Pact and to the question of whether Pakistan would enter the conflict on Saudi Arabia’s side. Some questioned the pact’s credibility, while others argued it was not yet operational. Both interpretations, however, misconstrue the nature of the agreement. The Mecca Pact establishes the principle that an attack against one member constitutes an attack against all. Yet this does not mean that every drone or missile launched against Saudi Arabia would automatically prompt Pakistan or Turkey to enter the conflict. NATO offers an instructive parallel. Although Article 5 stipulates that an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all, it requires members to provide “assistance,” not necessarily engaging in an automatic direct military action. Repeated Russian drone incursions into NATO territory, for example, have not automatically triggered Article 5. Saudi Arabia has not, so far, publicly invoked the Mecca Pact. This reflects an understanding that the pact is intended to provide collective security without outsourcing their primary defense responsibilities to one another. A member that is unable or unwilling to respond to relatively limited attacks on its own could risk creating the free-riding scenario, in which one country relies excessively on allies for its defense. The member states have an interest in avoiding a situation in which limited attacks become a mechanism for automatically drawing the alliance into a wider conflict. The Middle East already contains multiple overlapping conflicts. If every limited attack produced immediate military intervention by all members, the alliance could rapidly become overstretched. The institutional logic of the Mecca Pact, therefore, favors graduated involvement, with the scale of assistance increasing alongside the severity of the threat.Pakistan has, nevertheless, made clear that it remains committed to the Mecca Pact. Referring specifically to the conflict in Yemen, Pakistan’s defense minister stated: “We are bound by the terms and conditions of this pact, and we will honor them in case there is a need.” What many observers overlook is that collective-defense arrangements contain thresholds that determine the form and degree of assistance required at different stages of escalation. Pakistan’s response should, therefore, not be understood in binary terms of intervention or no-intervention. The more pertinent question is what form of assistance a particular level of escalation would necessitate. The answer could encompass a broad spectrum of military, logistical, intelligence, and diplomatic support.Diplomacy remains the first instrument for thwarting escalation. Pakistan holds a unique position in this regard. While many states may conduct operations against the Houthis, Pakistan is among the few capable of pressuring Iran to “rein in” the Houthis. On the military operational side, Pakistan will keep its commitments deliberately ambiguous. There is a strategic rationale for such restraint. Publicly disclosing the circumstances under which members would respond, and the kinds of responses they would make, would allow potential adversaries to tailor their own strategy accordingly. Ambiguity, by contrast, preserves uncertainty over escalation thresholds and can strengthen deterrence. The less an adversary knows about how the alliance would respond, the more difficult it becomes to design a strategy around a predictable reaction map. Pakistan already has a multi-role military presence in Saudi Arabia, consisting of at least 8,000 troops and 16 aircraft, and “Pakistan will go ‘to any extent’ to defend Saudi Arabia,” as a Pakistani military spokesperson said recently. Operationally, Pakistan can assist and may already be assisting Saudi Arabia in logistics, intelligence sharing and operational management, air defense, and air combat support roles without directly piloting strikes against Houthi sites inside Yemen. Here, Pakistan’s role is, to a certain extent, complementary to Saudi Arabia’s other defense partnerships. There is a straightforward operational rationale for Pakistan’s current approach. The Mecca Defense Alliance is a defensive arrangement, not an expeditionary force designed to enable its members to expand their influence beyond their borders. Therefore, Pakistan has little reason to assume a direct strike role in Saudi Arabia’s aerial campaign to thwart Houthi advances inside Yemen, even though those advances are manifestly harmful to Saudi Arabia’s regional interests. Moreover, the Houthis have not so far generated sufficient operational momentum in their attacks on Saudi Arabia to create an obvious requirement for Pakistani counterforce operations inside Yemen. Saudi Arabia possesses a sizable air force equipped with advanced platforms, including F-15s, to conduct operations inside all of Yemen as it did in its last anti-Houthi campaign from 2015 to 2022. Riyadh, consequently, has the means to conduct precision strikes against the Houthi missile and drone launch positions without requiring a direct combat role for Pakistan. Pakistan believes this operational dynamic will persist for the foreseeable future. The situation would change considerably if the Houthis were to launch a large-scale ground offensive into Saudi territory. Such an operation would represent a qualitatively different level of escalation and could trigger a more substantial and direct Pakistani response. However, in Pakistan’s view, there is currently little military logic for the Houthis to take such an escalatory step. A major ground incursion into Saudi territory would expose Houthi forces to the considerably greater military capacity of Saudi Arabia and potentially of the Mecca Defense Alliance. Rather than improving their strategic position, such an operation could place the Houthis under severe military pressure. While the operational details and escalation thresholds remain shrouded in ambiguity, there is one thing on which Pakistan’s strategic community agrees: the Houthis should not test the Mecca Defense Alliance. The strategic importance of Bab el-Mandeb presents a more complicated question. The passage is critical to global trade and energy flows. Saudi Arabia has an especially strong interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, particularly amid the Hormuz disruption. Pakistan, too, has an interest in securing this critical artery. Nonetheless, interest in maritime security falls short of justifying an independent Pakistani freedom of navigation operation. Pakistan does not possess the naval capacity to undertake such a mission alone at the scale required to reliably secure Bab al-Mandeb. Any sustained effort to control the passage would also require operations around key coastal areas, including Mokha. Such an undertaking would move well beyond the defensive purpose of the Mecca Pact. Pakistan’s participation in securing freedom of navigation would, therefore, be more likely if undertaken as part of a broader international coalition. This would provide the operation with a wider legal and political framework, allowing Pakistan to contribute to the protection of a vital international waterway without transforming the Mecca Pact into an instrument for conducting an open-ended military campaign in Yemen. Of course, the possibility of escalation remains real. Saudi Arabia claims to have shot down a Houthi drone near the holy city of Mecca, a claim that the Houthis deny. Pakistan is deeply committed to countering any threat to the holy sites. As Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said Wednesday, any attack on Mecca or Medina is a “red line” that would draw a Pakistani response even without a mutual-defense agreement. Any Houthi threat in this regard would, therefore, push the conflict several rungs higher on the escalation ladder, giving Islamabad a stronger rationale to intervene directly.

[Category: Houthis, Yemen, Saudi-arabia, Mecca-pact, Red-sea, Pakistan]

— Police hugging AI so tight, soon we'll all be pre-crime suspects

 

at 9/20/26 10:05pm

Earlier this month, an announcement by an Anthropic researcher that so-called “Superintelligent AI” has a greater than 10% chance of destroying humanity over the next decade triggered widespread alarm. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” wrote Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead.Those risks are, of course, real and terrifying. But perhaps of more immediate concern are the ways in which humans are already using AI, not how AI will potentially escape human control. Though it has been mostly ignored by corporate media, the U.S. security state is now seeking out and collaborating with AI firms on “offensive cyber ops”; AI targeting systems; and efforts to sift through and interpret vast troves of data on American citizens and foreigners collected by the U.S. government. AI weapons systems and cyber opsA dispute between the San Francisco-based company Anthropic and the Department of Defense — followed by reporting that its AI model, Claude, plays a role in the targeting system used in the U.S. bombing of Iran — brought the relationship between AI firms and the U.S. security state into mass public consciousness. Anthropic’s refusal to sign an “all lawful uses” contract with the Pentagon and its subsequent designation as a “supply-chain risk” garnered the company widespread praise, producing what AP called “a surge of Claude downloads that made it the most popular iPhone app.” The company, which describes itself as committed to ethical limits on AI, saw its valuation skyrocket to $965 billion in its latest funding round. But Anthropic’s high-profile dispute obscured how AI firms, including Anthropic, are already deeply integrated into the U.S. military-industrial complex. A confidential working paper leaked to tech journalist Jack Poulson, titled “The Art of the Possible,” documents a closed-door workshop in November 2023 at which Anthropic representatives met with senior CIA officials alongside officials from Australia’s Office of National Intelligence. The event was devoted to how large language models could be integrated into Western security agencies. As Poulson reported, Anthropic has since hired the longtime Palantir employee Steve Sloss to lead its pitch to U.S. intelligence agencies, including for military targeting, and partnered with Palantir “to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS [Amazon Web Services].” Inside Palantir's Maven system, military planners have used Claude to analyze intelligence feeds and build prioritized target lists for strikes on Iran. Claude also played a role in the operation to kidnap Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro, according to the Wall Street Journal. Asked by Bloomberg about the possibility Claude was used in the strike on a girls’ school in Iran that killed at least 120 children, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that he did “not know exactly” if or how Claude had been used in the strike but that the girls school bombing was “a use case that doesn’t even violate our red lines.” And, according to Financial Times, despite its supply-chain risk designation, Anthropic helps the NSA “deploy its powerful Mythos AI model for offensive cyber operations, embedding engineers inside the agency.” One person close to Anthropic defended the cyber ops, telling FT that “if [Mythos] is not used to build attack agents, adversaries will find a way to do it.” OpenAI’s contracts with the U.S. military and security state are equally significant, yet the firm’s largest public payout from the federal government had until recently drawn little attention. On October 16, 2025, the company signed a one-year, $3.5 million Other Transaction Agreement with U.S. Cyber Command for “AI platform training,” as Poulson first reported. Cyber Command was among the first participants in the Iran War, conducting preparatory cyberattacks against Iranian communications infrastructure. Their contract was signed 16 months after OpenAI announced the appointment of Paul Nakasone — who had led Cyber Command and the NSA jointly until his retirement in February 2024 — to its board of directors.AI surveillanceHaving too much data — and not knowing how to interpret all of it — was one of the main problems for the NSA when they introduced their Trailblazer bulk collection program. Steven Cash, an architect of the Patriot Act, testified to Congress in June that “Artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems now permit forms of analysis [of bulk collected data] that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.” Procurement documents and independent media reports demonstrate that interpreting large sets of data on Americans and foreigners is exactly how the U.S. security state intends to use its new AI tools.In March, The New York Times revealed that the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, had requested Anthropic “allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data.” That data, known as commercially available information (CAI), has been increasingly purchased and hoarded by the security state, as the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged in a 2023 report. “CAI,” the report warned, “can reveal sensitive and intimate information” and “be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”Meanwhile, a publicly viewable request on the federal government’s procurement website SAM.gov seeks AI tools for what journalists like Dan Boguslaw describe as “pre-crime policing” to be deployed at the FBI’s Threat Screening Center (TSC), with “Predictive Modeling” as one of the six requirements for potential AI vendors.The TSC, which maintains the federal terrorist watchlist created after 9/11, was renamed in 2025 from the “Terrorist Screening Center” to the “Threat Screening Center,” according to the agency website, “to reflect an expanded mission” which goes “beyond terrorism watchlisting and screening to address other national security threats.” Reporting by Ken Klippenstein indicates TSC is expected to administer the new category of domestic threats created by NSPM-7, the controversial authority that calls for a “comprehensive” strategy to surveil, investigate, and prosecute what it labels “domestic terrorism and organized political violence,” identifying “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist” and “anti-fascist” views as indicators of radical-left violence. “The TSC,” writes Boguslaw, “seeks to prosecute crimes before they occur,” while a 2026 report by the Government Accountability Office indicates TSC “shares surveillance data with state and local law enforcement.”Those tools would join a growing series of AI integrations already operating across the U.S. security state. In September 2025, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit signed a $5.7 million contract through Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring platform. ICE has meanwhile paid Palantir $30 million to build ImmigrationOS, while 404 Media separately reported that Palantir is creating a tool for ICE that “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.”Other tools include Babel X, the AI-enabled Babel Street product used by the Department of Homeland Security to gather data on various groups, including U.S. citizens.The DHS’ AI surveillance apparatus is set to expand. Contract forecast documents reviewed by FedScoop show the agency planning to spend well over $100 million on various AI-powered surveillance systems.Tech researcher Jack Poulson has argued that commercial large language model usage on platforms like ChatGPT and Claude will become central to police and intelligence interception, citing the case of Nebraska-based wiretapping firm PenLink, which has trained its law enforcement customers on gaining access to the Google search histories of investigative targets.While the risks presented by superintelligent and uncontrollable AI are real, the current debate misses the ways in which AI is already being deployed by the security state and military industrial complex against foreign and domestic populations.

[Category: Pentagon, U-s-military, Technology, Weapons-systems, Surveillance, Artificial-intelligence]

— Why Trump won't 'blow the sh*t out of' Oman today

 

at 9/20/26 10:05pm

The Sultanate of Oman’s willingness to engage all actors in the Middle East and beyond has long been a pillar of Muscat’s foreign policy. Yet with the war raging in the region, Oman’s efforts to maintain a pragmatic and normal relationship with Iran has fueled friction with the White House.This was notably underscored by President Donald J. Trump’s earlier threats to “blow up” and “bomb the shit out of” Oman in response to Muscat’s talks with Tehran about the future status of the Strait of Hormuz.Despite these threats, it is clear that Washington recognizes Oman’s value as a bridge to Iran and other regional actors.With the struggle for control over Yemen’s Red Sea coast and the Bab el-Mandab becoming the “Western Front” in the wider U.S.-Iran crisis, the Trump administration has turned to Oman for help with de-escalation efforts and direct talks between Washington and the Ansar Allah movement, better known as the Houthis. On September 15, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke by phone with his Omani counterpart, Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi, and “expressed support for deepening ties between Oman and the United States,” according to a State Department press release.“The significance of the Rubio–al-Busaidi call is best understood here in Oman not as an isolated diplomatic courtesy, but as a strong indication that Washington still sees Oman as a necessary diplomatic and strategic interlocutor,” explained a former Omani diplomat who spoke to RS on the condition of anonymity.“It can be also read as a form of ‘strategic correction’. Whatever the political rhetoric, the U.S. administration needs a functioning relationship with Muscat,” he added.Several days before Rubio and al-Busaidi spoke by phone, U.S. officials and senior Ansar Allah representatives met at the U.S. embassy in Muscat with support from Omani mediators. During this meeting, which came several days after the Houthis carried out their successful offensive against the forces of the Saudi-backed internationally recognized Yemeni government on the country’s west coast, the Houthis reportedly relayed to U.S. officials that their group has no intention of targeting American vessels.Meanwhile on September 12, Trump stated that Ansar Allah phoned his administration and asked for Washington to refrain from entering the conflict in Yemen. Two days later, Vice President JD Vance confirmed that Washington was in direct contact with the Houthi movement.This U.S.-Houthi meeting illustrates how “Muscat is not simply a diplomatic partner in the abstract,” noted the former Omani diplomat. “It is functioning as one of the few places where multiple actors in the regional confrontation can potentially communicate.”As officials in Muscat see it, instability in Yemen will always threaten Oman’s vital security and economic interests. Conflict in or around the Bab el-Mandab will inevitably disrupt commerce and energy flows. This stands to harm the broader maritime environment, undermining Oman’s ambitions for its ports and logistics hubs, which are key to the country’s Vision 2040 economic development and diversification agenda.Therefore, preventing an arc of maritime insecurity stretching from Yemen to the Persian Gulf is very much in Oman’s own national interests.With a relatively neutral foreign policy, Omani officials like to remain somewhat distant from problems plaguing the wider region. “But they realize these problems affect them and when there is something really important in Washington, Oman is willing to help and play a role,” explained David Des Roches, a professor at the Thayer Marshall Institute, in an RS interview.Hawkish, neo-conservative organizations, such as Foundation for Defense of Democracies, like to portray Oman as an untrustworthy and problematic actor aligned with the Iran-led camp. But, a U.S. foreign policy that treats Muscat as a threat to Washington’s interests would make it more difficult for the U.S. to pursue its interests vis-à-vis Yemen, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz.Rubio’s call with his Omani counterpart “suggests that Washington does not want the U.S.-Oman relationship to become collateral damage in the Iran conflict,” said the former Omani diplomat, who believes that the Trump administration has “realized that a breakdown in U.S.–Oman relations would therefore damage an established American security relationship and potentially eliminate an important diplomatic channel at exactly the moment Washington needs one.”There is a paradoxical dynamic in play: The ongoing U.S.-Iran crisis makes Muscat’s diplomatic role more valuable at the same time it becomes more potentially dangerous.“The more Washington needs Oman as an intermediary, the greater Oman’s diplomatic relevance becomes,” said the former Omani diplomat. “But the more Oman becomes involved in U.S.-Iran or U.S.-Houthi diplomacy, the greater the risk that one side interprets Oman’s role as alignment with the other.”

[Category: Yemen, Houthis, Red-sea, Iran, Trump-administration, Oman]

— Trump's 'me' monument to serve as domestic military staging ground

 

at 9/20/26 10:48am

A "Triumphal Arch" to be built at the entrance of sacred ground — Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where generations of U.S. military servicemen, women and veterans are buried — is going to serve the dual purpose of staging snipers and drones for "national security," according to President Donald Trump.At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. The arch was already controversial. The renderings and name conjure the ill-fated “Arch of Triumph” in Hitler’s Welthauptstadt (“World Capital”) Germania, which was never built. Its construction would adversely affect the cemetery and historic preservation. Vietnam veterans who say it flouts the law have sued to stop it. When asked by a reporter who the arch is supposed to honor, Trump said “me.” The idea that a command center filled with snipers, drones and stored ammunition might be unleashed on Washington for domestic security purposes is already landing like a bunker buster bomb. Is he trolling? What is he signaling now? Is this a joke? He already tore down the East Wing of the White House to start construction on the ballroom. After removing a massive outdoor sculpture from the premises, he closed the Kennedy Center (and is fueling rumors he is set to demolish the entire landmark), so it is not entirely unreasonable to think he is not telling “Truth” about the Triumphal Arch.“The Arch itself, even before making it a weaponized military outpost in one of the most secure areas of the country, disrupts the initial intent of the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Lee Mansion, that being peace and reconciliation following America's bloodiest war,” Iraq War veteran and podcaster Jim Webb told RS, noting the planned location of the arch is literally a mile from the Pentagon.For a president who has already hinted he might seek a third term and declare the elections a national security emergency, his latest announcement about militarizing a national monument is sure to stir an already boiling pot. Add that to an increasingly desperate tone when it comes to Americans' support (or lack thereof) for Trump's war in the Middle East. (Seb Gorka, senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, claimed yesterday that it is un-American not to accept higher gas prices in exchange for defeating Iran).“(Trump's) placing his ego in the middle of the country's most important symbols, and shows me how he truly feels about Americans, generally,” Webb added. “At best it's a waste of money and resources for a project to promote the ego of one man, at worst, it's an attempt to visibly intimidate an American public whose opinion of his presidency has sunk to a historic low.”

[Category: Triumphal-arch, Domestic-militarism, Us-military, Donald-trump]

— This isn't sci-fi, AI is already killing people

 

at 9/18/26 9:00am

Palantir CEO Alex Karp proclaimed on a panel in 2024 that “technology should be able to reduce drastically the amount of collateral damage, civilian deaths.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Director of the CIA David Cohen agreed. Proponents of artificial intelligence use in the military have long made some version of this argument — that the military’s adoption of AI will lead to a reduction in civilian harm. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) summarized the pitch during a congressional hearing about AI use in the military on Wednesday. “Our government has argued that AI could improve assessments of the likely effects of military operations and reduce the risk of civilian casualties,” McGovern said. “That’s the pitch that we’re getting. I mean, does everybody agree with that?”The question is no longer theoretical, as the U.S. military is already deploying AI. The Pentagon struck 13,000 targets in just the first 38 days of war, aided by Palantir’s Maven Smart System to identify targets and choose weapons used for attacks. But experts at the hearing, hosted by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, said the argument that AI reduces civilian harm simply isn’t supported by the facts on the ground, pointing to Iran, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza as evidence. “I disagree with that,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. While some tout targeting accuracy within AI systems being up to 90%, Feldstein says the real number may be closer to 50%. Deborah Brown, deputy director of technology, rights & investigations at Human Rights Watch wasn’t convinced by the argument either. “Whether it's Israel in Gaza, whether it's Iran, the evidence doesn't suggest that this is limiting the harm because of the high level of civilians dead.”Lawmakers have raised questions over whether AI played a role in the February 28 attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, which killed over 170 people. Palantir’s Shyam Sankar made the compassionate case for the military using Maven when asked about his company’s alleged role in the attack. "It's a tragedy for those girls for sure,” Sankar said. “The thing I would say is that in the history of warfare, technology has always reduced collateral damage.” But Feldstein explained that “even if there is more accuracy, because the number of targets is so much vaster, the ultimate number of civilians harmed is likely far higher as well.” For instance, the Israel Defense Forces claims to have a 90% accuracy rate with Lavender, its AI-targeting system used in Gaza. But Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, pointed out that accuracy doesn’t matter when proportionality is “blown out of the water,” such as when a 2,000-pound bomb is dropped on a residential building.AI systems are also carrying out instructions based on rules of engagement determined by humans, which could be based on instructions that do not prioritize civilian harm reduction. If a military decides “that it’s acceptable to have five civilians die for every suspect who is targeted… you’re telling the machine what’s acceptable,” said Feldstein.Lavender has been used to identify 37,000 Palestinian men as targets. But an intelligence source told the Guardian that they were constantly being pressured to bring more targets. “The numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is,” they said. The IDF also approved these attacks on low-level targets, even if it meant killing 15 to 20 civilians as collateral damage. Even as proponents promise that AI will create a more humane approach to warfare, training for civilian harm reduction has been hollowed out. The Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, established in 2023 to train combatant commands on civilian harm reduction methods, is reducing its staff from 40 in January 2025 to just nine by the end of this year.Witnesses pointed out that part of the issue is that the Pentagon has not shared evidence that AI systems mitigate civilian harm. "If this is the case that it's actually limiting civilian harm and being more precise and effective, then let's see the evidence,” said Brown.

[Category: Congress, Ai, Us-military, Artificial-intelligence]

— After Macklemore sacking, Ed Sheeran enters his 'Sun City' moment

 

at 9/17/26 10:05pm

In recent years pro-Israel advocates have aggressively sought to censor and control speech surrounding the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly in the United States, and often with considerable success.This month, Zionist censors might have finally met their match — in the world of pop music.When British megastar Ed Sheeran kicked off a two-night New Jersey show on September 4 at MetLife Stadium before 80,000 plus fans, hip-hop star Macklemore opened the night with a message: "A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine."On night two, Macklemore made similar pro-Palestinian remarks but also clarified that his criticisms of Israel’s government were not criticisms of "my Jewish brothers and sisters.”This prompted the circulation of a petition from the Israeli-American Council demanding that Sheeran kick Macklemore off the tour. Pop singer Pink condemned Macklemore and said his comments made her feel “scared” as a Jewish person.NFL Patriots owner and billionaire AIPAC donor Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to ditch Macklemore, telling the singer that his upcoming sold-out show at Massachusetts' Gillette Stadium might be canceled if he refused, and that he had rallied other stadium owners to cancel Sheeran’s scheduled concerts if the singer did not comply.“We do not provide a platform for hate speech,” Kraft said.On Monday, Macklemore was removed from the rest of the tour. Sheeran blamed his US tour promoter.This seemed like a win for pro-Israel advocates — until it didn’t. Other supporting acts for upcoming Sheeran shows began dropping out immediately.American singer Finneas, the brother of pop star Billie Eilish, announced that he would not perform and instead showed solidarity with Macklemore. “I stand with Palestine and its people,” he declared. Irish singer Aaron Rowe did the same, saying, “I can’t allow billionaires to silence rightful voices.” Danish pop artist Lukas Graham abandoned the tour, explaining on Instagram, “It’s hard to watch families in other parts of the world burying the people they love. We should be able to speak about war, about civilians being killed, about children who deserve to grow up. Wherever they live. Whatever flag flies over them.”Then, Sheeran’s own touring band, Beoga, also announced they would not be performing for similar reasons.As of this writing, all of Sheeran’s openers have quit, many fans have demanded their money back, and Sheeran began losing a significant number of social media followers while his former support acts gained about 1.6 million new ones.There are now reports that the entire American tour, which was set to resume this weekend in Philadelphia, could now be in jeopardy. Sheeran’s overarching defense throughout this ordeal has been that he is not a political act (an understandable, if perhaps dubious, claim). On a business level, this could be considered practical and even an admirable stance for entertainers. It should also be noted that most of the acts now refusing to participate in the tour, and also Macklemore, each made a point to call Sheeran a friend and thanked him for the opportunities he allowed them.But even apolitical music acts can get caught up in politics.In 1984, English rock legends Queen made the decision to play at the "Sun City" casino in South Africa, which at the time was a global focus over that government’s controversial apartheid policies, becoming a protest cause taken up by many musical artists.Queen, and particularly its singer, the late Freddie Mercury, defended their choice by claiming they were not a political band. Perhaps not, but that decision ultimately hurt Queen, getting it blacklisted for breaking the cultural boycott of South Africa and turning off many fans (their historic performance at 1985’s Live Aid not long after would do wonders in washing away so much bad PR).In 2021, Queen drummer Roger Taylor admitted they had made a mistake. “Oh sh*t, did we get grief for that,” Taylor lamented.Today, few people, musicians or otherwise, would want to be remembered as being on the side that gave any kind of support to South African apartheid.Sheeran could now be caught in a similar situation. He might be trying to remain non-political on this issue, but it could also be an unavoidable one for him at this point, as it has become unavoidable in general.To be clear, the pro-Israel forces who attempted to pressure Ed Sheeran, his opening acts, and subsequently, their fans, were definitely being political in trying to force all of them to submit to their will.But maybe this week they finally found out that, for all the power of pro-Israel voices, not everyone is always going to be bullied into singing their tune.

[Category: Israel, Palestinians, Cancel-culture, Gaza, Israel-lobby, Free-speech, Macklemore, Enewsletter]

As of 9/24/26 7:45am. Last new 9/24/26 7:45am.