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Russia warns US against sending more troops to its borders

RT | May 28, 2026

Russia has warned that deploying additional US troops near its borders would be “unacceptable,” after Washington pledged to send more soldiers to Poland.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a press briefing on Thursday that reducing the number of US personnel stationed in Europe would be a “rational, justified, and long-overdue” step toward stabilizing what she described as an “imbalanced” security situation created by NATO policies.

Deploying more American troops in the region, on the other hand, would place them within striking distance, Zakharova added.

She said such a move would only increase tensions in Europe and compel Russia to respond with “military-technical measures.” Zakharova accused NATO of pushing the continent toward a “suicidal” conflict.

Around 10,000 American service members are currently stationed in Poland, most of them on a rotational basis, while roughly 80,000 are deployed across Europe overall. Poland shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad Region, an exclave on the Baltic Sea.

Last week, US President Donald Trump unveiled plans to send 5,000 additional troops to Poland, one of the most vocal supporters of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. The announcement came after the Pentagon said it would delay the rotation of 4,000 troops, which Vice President J.D. Vance later downplayed as a “standard delay.”

Trump has frequently accused NATO members of failing to spend enough on defense and recently announced the withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany amid a dispute with Berlin over the war with Iran.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow has no intention of attacking NATO members unless Russia itself is attacked first. Russian officials have accused the West of “reckless militarization” and cited NATO’s eastward expansion as one of the causes of the Ukraine conflict.

On Thursday, Sergey Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said NATO was “de facto preparing for a large-scale military conflict in the east.”

May 28, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Comments Off on Russia warns US against sending more troops to its borders

Strategic rebound: How Iran turned military aggression and economic siege into lasting leverage

By Mohammad Molaei | Press TV | May 27, 2026

The US military aggression and economic strangulation ended in a ceasefire, not because of American goodwill, but because the war objectives failed and the aggression backfired.

This outcome reflects a new strategic reality that emerged during the war itself.

Facing the biggest military assault in its history, with Western and Arab countries complicit in arming and supporting the enemy across multiple fronts, Iran not only avoided strategic collapse but imposed a new balance of power on the battlefield.

Against overwhelming odds and coordinated pressure, Iranian resistance transformed what was meant to be a war of submission into a demonstration of enduring national strength.

What has emerged now is far more than the end of a military aggression against the Islamic Republic. It is the failure of a campaign designed to weaken Iran, isolate it from other nations, drain its economic strength, and ultimately force it into strategic retreat.

Military lessons of the war

In terms of the military, the most telling and self-evident lesson from the war is that the idea of “shaping Iran to crumble quickly” was misguided from the outset. Even after multiple claims by the enemy that Iran’s missile infrastructure, command centers, and launch capabilities had been destroyed, Iran continued its regular military activity, hitting the enemy at will.

Missile and drone operations were carried out multiple times every day during the war. The continuity of launch waves will one day become one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that the backbone of Iran’s strategic missile program has remained completely intact.

This revealed a critical wrong assumption made by both Americans and Zionists: the true extent of Iran’s underground military infrastructure, its depth, dispersion, and survivability.

Much of Iran’s arsenal of rockets, along with the necessary underground launching, storage, and escape facilities, is located in hardened bunker networks built over decades to resist common aerial attacks. Some of the most effective US bunker-penetration munitions are thought to be severely restricted by these heavily fortified facilities.

Operational philosophy: Restraint as strength

Also significant was the implementation of Iran’s operational philosophy during the war. Data has shown that Iran was not as aggressive in its use of its most advanced missiles as is often believed. Several systems discussed for years in military circles were either underutilized or not used at all. This has reinforced assessments that Iran deliberately relied more heavily on older missile stockpiles while carefully managing the timing and intensity of launches.

This has led to reports that Iran deliberately kept some of its strategic missiles in reserve while using older arms with calibrated firing patterns. This approach enabled Tehran to maintain its escalation edge while simultaneously proving sustainability.

Moreover, recent reports and analyses of military forces in the region suggest that systems for launching newer solid-fuel ballistic missiles with dual-stage capsules were not widely deployed, though they could greatly boost launch density in future operations.

Iran mounted extended attacks without fully testing its more sophisticated launch architecture. The size and intensity of future attacks could be far greater than anything seen so far.

The naval dimension: Anti-access and area denial

The naval dimension of the war also revealed a major shift in regional deterrence equations. US carrier groups operated well off Iranian waters on opposite shores, a remarkable caution given the overwhelming power of the American navy.

It has become clear that as Iran has matured its anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) doctrine, derived from the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles, long-range cruise weapons, drones, and multi-tiered coastal defense systems, the country has imposed a new caution on American operational decisions.

The Khalij Fars and Hormuz missiles, along with newer generations of anti-ship missiles, pose a serious threat to large naval assets in the confined waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Notably, these systems were not used during the recent war, indicating that Iran kept its deterrent capacity largely unused – yet visible enough to alter enemy behavior. This restraint sends its own message: what remains in the arsenal is far more capable than what was shown.

Strategic failure: The unraveling of the pressure campaign

Strategically, the most significant event of the third imposed war has been the complete failure of the original political goal behind the military pressure campaign. What its planners envisioned was a war that would trigger internal instability within Iran’s borders, fracture its command structure, undermine its regional cooperation, and ultimately isolate Tehran as a matter of strategy. Prolonged military pressure, they believed, would achieve what decades of illegal and crippling sanctions could not.

Not a single one of these goals was realized. The Iranian state machinery was not fractured. Continuity of command was maintained. Regional ally networks remained not only intact but operationally effective. In fact, the war produced the opposite effect on multiple fronts.

The war reinforced Iran’s broader strategic narrative across the region that military pressure alone cannot force Tehran into capitulation.

Diplomatic implications: A unified front that never formed

The results carry significant implications for diplomacy as well. Perhaps the most obvious fact to emerge from the war is that Iran successfully thwarted the establishment of any unified international body arrayed against it.

Despite a heavy Western political and military campaign coordinated with Israeli objectives, large portions of the Global South refused to align with the escalation drive against Tehran.

Several regional governments actively worked to defuse the crisis rather than escalate it. Major powers like China and Russia remained opposed to wider international isolation measures. Even among Western allies, growing concerns emerged regarding the risks of uncontrolled regional escalation, energy disruption, and maritime insecurity.

This deep division inhibited Washington from fashioning the kind of new global pressure architecture against Iran that it has typically pursued during past crises – from nuclear non-proliferation to regional security frameworks. The coalition that was meant to isolate Iran found itself isolated instead.

Economic dimension: Sanctions undermined, energy leverage preserved

The economic goal of the unprovoked war was another expected outcome that was not met. During the war, the economic disruption that many external observers had anticipated became totally muted. Iran continued exporting energy and maintaining its internal markets and logistics throughout the war, despite pressure on infrastructure and the weight of sanctions.

Remarkably, the US-Israeli aggression and Iranian retaliation revealed the fragile nature of the global energy system when it comes to instability involving Iran. The mere threat of escalation at the Strait of Hormuz triggered an immediate reaction from the international community, precisely because of the waterway’s critical importance to global oil supply.

Tehran’s inability to be isolated without sparking international ramifications was reaffirmed by the facts, not least of which are Iran’s deep ties to the region’s energy landscape and its central role in maritime security.

Industrial adaptation: War as a catalyst for expansion

The swift pace of the industrial adaptation process was another crucial factor in the recent war. Based on domestic sources and analyses from military-affiliated institutions, the rate of missile production had already dramatically increased after the 12-day war in June last year, and the recent war only accelerated and extended it even further.

Iran possesses a widespread defense industry, and even if aggressors succeed in targeting its production facilities, these are interdependent in such a way that they can localize supply chains and establish underground production lines.

Far from halting production and launch capabilities, the latest war has spurred strategic investments in survivability, redundancy, and high-volume output.

Political triumph: The narrative that collapsed

Among the more significant political considerations, this war represents a significant triumph for Iran, given the failure of the central narrative that Tel Aviv and Washington had been aggressively pushing for decades.

Their premise was that continued military, economic, and diplomatic pressure would eventually bring Tehran to the end of its rope, forcing it to “sit at the table” to negotiate strategic concessions.

Instead, the war proved to be another confirmation of the reverse: Iran under pressure continues to function, possesses the capacity to retaliate, and maintains domestic and governmental strength and unity. Most importantly, it has survived the encounter with its ability to influence regional affairs completely intact.

This is not to suggest that Iran was unaffected or bore no costs. Wars come with severe costs. But strategic results are not determined solely by the scale of damage. They are determined by the ultimate success or failure of political and military objectives.

The new regional reality

In this respect, there is growing evidence that Iran’s opponents found themselves baffled by the outcome. A campaign designed to diminish Iranian deterrence ended up confirming much of it.

A policy aimed at isolating Iran was met by a pressure strategy that ultimately promoted de-escalation with Tehran and prevented tensions from proliferating across the region.

What emerged instead were increased challenges and the risk of direct confrontation with a long-established regional power armed with deep missile stockpiles, rugged supply chains, and a mature asymmetric warfare doctrine.

The lessons that have become clear on the battlefield, in regional negotiations, and in energy calculations leave Iran poised to enter the post-war era with strategic gains and enhanced leverage.

May 28, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Strategic rebound: How Iran turned military aggression and economic siege into lasting leverage

Empire with a Humanitarian Face: Democrats Rebrand

By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | May 27, 2026

American political successions in recent years happen counterintuitively: implicit hand-offs between two nominally opposing sides. This strange reality is where we derive our notion of “the uniparty” and the media its notion of “partisanship.” Through the “partisan” lens favored by media, our politics appears divided between a party, the Republicans, in hock to Israel, the “big five” weapons contractors, real estate, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley; and a party, the Democrats, in hock to powerful “progressive” or “Left” nonprofits like ActBlue, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for American Progress, and the Open Society Foundations.

But the “uniparty” theory of the case shared by many politically disenfranchised Americans is a more accurate read of our political reality. Indeed, Democrats are as in hock to corporate and military interests as Republicans, and the newer “New Democratic” Party they are promising as a replacement to Donald Trump is his mirror image—there to serve the same interests under a different and deceptive cultural guise. Tracing the development of the modern Democrats from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and how that development shapes them today, shows that every sector of the party—from “neoliberals” to “progressives” to the Left—is de facto arbitered by military corporate interests which determine its policies and propaganda.

The initial cooption of Democrats by the military-corporate complex forty years ago is a familiar story, but largely one told by the political Left which is loyal to those economic groups left behind by this cooption, and largely unfamiliar to Americans at large. The story, which I have traced in part in past reports for the Libertarian Institute and elsewhere, goes something like this. In the 1970s and the 1980s, financiers used their influence to underwrite philanthropic ventures in New York City that gave them access to institutional and then political power at the expense of unions and activists—a top-down model of consolidating authority that they then transferred to the Democratic Party at large. During these years, what the scholar Dylan Gottlieb calls “a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein,” took over the mantle of Democratic politics. In 1992, Michael Steinhardt and Al From at the Democratic Leadership Council and Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic along with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg in Hollywood created the platform for Bill Clinton. In 2008, Penny Pritzker, George Soros, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with help from sympathetic media like S.I. Newhouse’s and David Remnick’s New Yorker, created the platform for Barack Obama.

These financial and political and journalistic and policy operators quietly refocused the Democratic Party to depend on corporations, so that “Goldman Sachs employees and their families donated more to Bill Clinton’s…campaign than any other firm” and “Barack Obama…raise[d] more money from Wall Street lawyers and law firms than any presidential candidate in history.” During both administrations, government largesse flowed accordingly. Under Clinton, the fifty major weapons contractors were condensed, based on Pentagon pressure, into the “big five,” with a lock on government contracts, and under Clinton and Obama these companies made their bones off of a spate of interventions or proxy fights abroad: in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Under Clinton, Wall Street investment banks and Silicon Valley technology companies also consolidated based on government backing and thrived off alleged “deregulation.” And under Obama these corporations further concentrated, so that 2015, the penultimate year of Obama’s presidency, was “the biggest year ever…in worldwide dealmaking…not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion.” The structural legacy of the Democratic Party since the end of the Cold War, then, is political dependency on those very military corporate networks which Democratic rhetoric would seem to belie.

A surprising and instructive place to begin tracing these networks and their priorities as well as their distance from Democratic rhetoric is the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which has recently become a favorite gathering space for neoliberal or “business-friendly” Democrats. This is surprising because it was not thirty years ago that the Journal’s op-ed pages were leading the crusade for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It is instructive because today some of Clinton’s most prominent allies are appearing in them. Indeed, on three days at the end of April (20th, 22nd, and 23rd), the pages ran op-eds by Clinton’s defender during his impeachment as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, Alan Dershowitz (“Why I’m Becoming a Republican); by Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo (“Trump is on the Right Track in Renewing Penn Station”); and by Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a possible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Rahm Emanuel (“Trump’s research cuts play into China’s Hands”). These op-eds nicely encapsulate the three political pillars of Democrats’ military corporatism as they have practiced it since the 1990s: reshaping their key voting constituency; funding monopolist development projects; and hinging America’s future on conglomerates’ relationship to China.

Dershowitz assigns his move to Republicans to what he calls Democrats’ abandonment of both Israel and of “moderation,” both of which he hopes the party re-finds:

“… perhaps they’ll wise up and move back to the center, where I (and others) could rejoin [them].”

This “center” was a concept first successfully articulated via the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign platform the “New Covenant” or the “New Choice” or the “Third Way.” Whatever its name, it was a platform which, thanks to the ministrations of the political strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, “redrew our political map” by “help[ing] to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals.” The political economic focus of this “New Democratic” Party adjusted accordingly, based off the urban development ethos of Michael Steinhardt, now embraced by Cuomo in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. It was Steinhardt along with a roster of other financiers and Steinhardt’s protégé Michael Bloomberg who, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in October, used government largesse towards financiers and philanthropy to change the landscape of New York City with real estate development and “public spaces” funded by private money. It was this development which made this city and imitators like Miami and San Francisco playgrounds for tech operators and tourists, while driving out productive industry and the middle class.

This was the most tangible expression of a broader pattern: power percolated to the top of society while alienating the middle and working class and the people at the bottom. And the underwriting engine for these elite operators’ growing power—what kept politically dissatisfied Americans politically inactive in the 1990s and early 2000s even as power slowly concentrated behind the scenes—was a seemingly prosperous economy of low consumer costs based on America’s relationship with China, which Rahm Emanuel in The Wall Street Journal makes the linchpin of our development today. The difference is that, where Clinton did this in the 1990s in the name of importing consumer products and exporting American media, Emanuel does it in the 2020s in the name of government investment in Silicon Valley to compete with China. In the end, these different forms of Chinese-centric policy enrich the same groups via lowering production costs or incentivizing government investment: financiers, technologists, and “the metropolitan professionals” who work for them.

The clearest articulation of the Democratic project of the 1990s as repackaged for 2026 is the “Abundance Agenda”: the brainchild of Ezra Klein, the columnist and podcaster at The New York Times; and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. The “Abundance Agenda,” as I have reported in the past, is monopolist corporatism dressed up as small government practicality. It is a series of proposals to weaken public and regulatory oversight of tech and urban development projects, from Google’s Waymo cars to Michael Bloomberg’s public parks to various real estate schemes helmed by a small rotating band of connected developers. This is not deregulation for the small business owner; it is deregulation for corporate welfare at the expense of local government, and it is being embraced most energetically by Democratic politicians backed by corporate interests.

These include Daniel Lurie, the Mayor of San Francisco, who is relying on philanthropy from Silicon Valley to “fix” the city; and Ritchie Torres, the self-identified “progressive” congressman from New York. Congresspeople Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), and Jared Golden (D-ME) are also Abundance supporters. Rising Democratic politicians linked to Abundance or its supporters include U.S. Representatives from New York and California Pat Ryan and Jimmy Panetta; Governors of Virginia and New Jersey Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill; and former Deputy Secretary of the Air Force and current San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones. Ryan, Panetta, Spanberger, Sherrill, Ortiz Jones, and Slotkin are former intelligence officers; and Spanberger, Sherrill, and Slotkin are eager adapters of Rahm Emanuel’s defense-tech-friendly policies towards China.

Almost all of these players, along with nationally “electable” Democrats in “red” or “purple” states like Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, and Texas senatorial nominee James Talarico, are members of Majority Democrats. According to The New York Times, Majority Democrats is “a new group of elected officials from all levels of government [with] outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the party” whose “structure resembles that of the Democratic Leadership Council, the once-influential group that successfully pushed the party to the middle in the Clinton era.” One of its strategists is Seth London, who, in a post-2024 election memo, recommended that the Democratic Party should imitate the Democratic Leadership Council and referenced as crucial to the party’s coming success the Abundance Agenda. London’s CV, not surprisingly, is peppered with financial connections, and so is Abundance: among them Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, James and Kathryn Murdoch, and the Walton Family, along with the lesser-known but influential operators Rob Granieri, Edward Fishman, Mark Heising, and David Nierenberg.

But why is a political economic agenda of billionaires outlined in The Wall Street Journal the most powerful agenda-setter for purportedly “progressive” Democrats? The reason is straightforward. The most powerful constituency of the new Democratic Party as shaped by funders like Michael Steinhardt, George Soros, Penny Pritzker, and Michael Bloomberg is the one constituted of “metropolitan professionals,” or, in the scholar Dylan Gottlieb’s words, “Yuppies,” who staff the corporate conglomerates these operators own. Though the Yuppie constituency does not share the Journal’s cultural values, it does share the Journal’s economic interests; and, at the hands of strategists like Stanley Greenberg and David Axelrod and David Plouffe, this fact has functioned to create a new progressive Democratic definition of “dispossessed.” At their hands, protecting the dispossessed has come to mean expanding “equal opportunity” to various minority groups or ideological interests that might appeal to Democrats’ Yuppie constituents: in other words, combating injustice in ways that do not affect the political economic structures on which Yuppies or their underwriters rely.

Early moves in this direction came with Martin Peretz’s and David Geffen’s push for gay rights before and during the Clinton administration, but the decisive shift came at the hands of David Axelrod and David Plouffe in the run-up to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. As the scholars K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor explain, “the Democratic defeat in the 2010 midterm elections focused Obama’s attention on how identity politics could rally his base,” and so “the administration took high-profile positions in favor of marriage for same-sex couples, permitting ‘dreamers’ to remain in the United States and mandating contraceptive coverage in Obamacare.” After Obama’s victory in the 2012 election, an overtly identitarian strategy emerged from Obama’s success. In the words of Bill Clinton’s strategist Stanley Greenberg, in his 2018 book RIP GOP: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans, an America that is “secular, racially diverse, and fueled by immigration,” and filled with “non-traditional family structures,” independent women, and “dynamic cities” means the “[Republican] party’s imminent demise.”

Rhetoric on this register reinforced the perception of moral and political stakes at play, even as the reality was politics-as-usual. Indeed, the groups’ progressivism courted were disproportionally upper-middle class (white collar beneficiaries of affirmative action; college-educated women; gay rights campaigners) or they were groups which benefited the upper-middle class (illegal immigration provided cheap labor). And initiatives to help these groups were undertaken predominantly through regulations and lawsuits, empowering administrative agencies, courts, and single-issue nonprofits. Progressivism’s overall effect, then, was to add regulations to the military corporate complex (more bureaucrats at the Pentagon; racial sensitivity training and eco-friendly policies in administrative agencies; formal or informal partnerships between those agencies and the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Open Society Foundations) without diminishing its power. Its unintended effect was to provide Donald Trump fuel against Democrats and Democrats fuel against Donald Trump, since much of Donald Trump’s second term has been devoted to sweeping away these regulations, particularly when it comes to Trump’s ostentatiously deregulated approach to ICE, Israel and AI.

The senior members of the group of Democratic politicians who use progressivism as their spear against Trump are lawyers like Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD). Their “rising stars” include Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), who is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s choice as Schumer’s successor as party leader. Their newer members include Alex Bores, a candidate running on a platform of AI regulation in New York’s 12th Congressional District. And their presidential contenders are Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. Schiff, Raskin, Schatz, Pritzker, and Newsom have heavy ties to defense technology and financial industries and (in Newsom’s and Schatz’s cases) to the Abundance Agenda, while Bores is running for U.S. Congress in a district which encompasses much of Manhattan and is home to Michael Steinhardt, Michael Bloomberg, and a number of their allies. All of them oppose the current policies of ICE and Israel, but none of them target the consolidated structures of corporate-government power on which ICE and Israel depend.

It might be supposed that an effective counterbalance to the neoliberal and progressive sectors of the Democratic Party comes from the Left since they seem to focus on questions of political economy like redistribution and antitrust. Indeed, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put the Left’s program best in 2025 when he said that aggressive promotion of identity politics was “what the liberal elite [tries to do].” In Sanders’s summing up of his own view, “Is every gay person brilliant or wonderful or great? No, of course not, everyone’s a human being. The issue is: what do you stand for? And that gets you back to the issue we discussed earlier: class politics.“ This class-over-lifestyle approach seems like a fairly defined brief for mobilizing poor, working, and middle class voters demonstrably shortchanged by a system run on corporate finance underwritten by government. But the exercise of often decisive military corporatist influence extends even to the most viable standard-bearer of Sanders’s revived Left, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and candidates running in the 2026 congressional elections on Mamdani’s platform.

Mamdani’s chief political strategist, and the chief political strategist of senatorial candidates Graham Platner in Maine and Dan Osborne in Nebraska, is Morris Katz, whose early political contact, thanks to an introduction from his father, a well-known movie director in Tribeca, was Melissa DeRosa, Andrew Cuomo’s closest aide. Since this initial introduction, Katz has moved away from pure establishmentarianism to combativeness with that establishment over issues like welfare and antitrust, but he and his candidates have not changed their rhetoric, which is reliably universalist. Namely, an appeal to concepts like “politics of humanity” or “dreaming and hope” that vacuum out the political economic context of any situation in the name of “pious uplift.” In the words of Susan Sontag, this perspective “systematically denies the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts” by “purporting to show that human beings are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way” to suggest “a world in which everybody is…immobilized in mechanical…identities and relationships” that make politics “irrelevant.”

Nowhere is the language of universalism more visible than at the Open Society Foundations, the project of George Soros which, as I have also reported for the Libertarian Institute, spent the 1990s and 2000s reliably “piggybacking” on military interventions executed by Democratic presidential administrations in the name of “universal ideals.” The Foundation’s former Director, Patrick Gaspard, is a close adviser to Zohran Mamdani and the former director of the Center for American Progress or CAP. CAP is funded in part by the Soroses, and it is the brainchild of John Podesta, the influential adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is famously the mentor of Huma Abedin, who is now married to Alex Soros: George Soros’s son who now directs the Open Society Foundations.

Based on these connections alone, much of what is said in public by progressive players like Mamdani and Katz begins to seem less relevant: plays in a game to parlay with those Zionists who have a lock on Democratic institutions rather than to meaningfully combat them. And, along these lines, it is not necessarily a coincidence that Zohran Mamdani seems to be embracing aspects of the Abundance Agenda. This may alienate portions of his base (labor unions, environmental groups, anti-gentrification activists) but it appeals to New York’s institutional arbiters. Namely, Governor Kathy Hochul; Congressman Ritchie Torres; The New York Times editorial board; as well as New York City’s police commissioner Jessica Tisch; Tisch’s close friends Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a real estate developer; and President Donald Trump, whose control over federal largesse is necessary for Mamdani’s welfare agenda. Despite differences over welfare policy and rhetoric, the distance from The Wall Street Journal to the pages of the democratic socialist magazine Jacobin, a key supporter of Mamdani’s, is not always so far as it may seem. This criticism is shared by some Leftists themselves: people like the Seattle activist Kshama Sawant, who sees Mamdani courting the universalist and globalist establishment to the detriment of his base in the working class.

There is a particular intellectual style shared across the sectors of this newer New Democratic Party; and its function if not its intent is to distract from questions of who has power and how they are using it. Its guiding concept, a cousin of universalism, is “reason”: in the definition of a recent article in David Remnick’s New Yorker, “to accept that one’s deepest convictions may fail to command assent from others who are no less sincere or thoughtful, and then to propose terms of political coöperation that others can appreciate.” Interestingly, The New Yorker locates its model for public reason in the place most Democrats seem to be locating their new politics:

“Bill Clinton’s… ‘triangulation,’ Tony Blair’s Third Way, and Barack Obama’s insistence on being the most reasonable person in the room.”

These leaders were, indeed, known for their rhetoric, which relied on concepts like “complexity” and “pragmatism.” In practice this meant all-night “grapplings” with “tough issues” of morality or peace; or else detail-heavy and sometimes hyperkinetically minute proposals for “reforming” government, a tactic Rahm Emanuel, an acknowledged master of it in the Clinton White House, has reanimated today. All of this complexity and pragmatism existed under a universalist philosophical veil: the notion that “reasonable people” who all believe in the same undefined abstractions (“human rights” and “democracy,” “hope and change”) can “set aside their differences” and “find common ground” through discussion and debate.

There is a lot of this talk occurring in Democratic circles today. In Morris Katz’s words, politics means “an increased fluency and understanding that we can disagree while being agreeable.” For Rep. Ritchie Torres, it means that “everyone should have a seat at the table, everyone’s voice should be heard, but no one’s gonna have veto power.” For Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic, “the essence of democracy” is “rational discourse” and “thoughtful back-and-forth argument.” For Ezra Klein in The New Yorker, democracy means “building political coalitions around disagreement.” What “reason” or “pragmatism” stands for in this variant is not the formation of public opinion, which as conceived by James Madison would play itself out at the local level on various issues then form a rough consensus throughout the republic based on the free flow of information and debate. What reason or pragmatism stands for in this variant, instead, is elites speaking to elites: a kind of senior debate society of the powerful which functions to elide questions of what actual interests they functionally serve.

Indeed, very few people attuned to Bill Clinton’s or Tony Blair’s or Barack Obama’s administrations would describe them as committed to public reason. Clinton and his political strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg were recognized experts at covering electoral bases using stealth emotional triggers, playing to white voters with one hand and black voters with another and splitting the baby on gay rights, while quietly reallocating power to corporate conglomerates and administrative agencies under the aegis of “pragmatism.”

Obama, aided by David Axelrod and David Plouffe, was instrumental in upping the emotional ante of government via identity politics. Gavin Newsom has taken this essentially manipulative approach to an even higher register. He has begun to traffic in criticisms of Republicans using slang like “gay” which is deeply offensive to progressive LGBTQ+ voters but which attracts white men who support Trump, even as he claims to be using this language to “bait” Republican opponents. All the while he is strongly supporting LGBTQ+ rights but making an exception for men’s participation in women’s sports. This is textbook triangulation of a Clintonian kind.

Another Clintonian practitioner is U.S. Senator from Georgia Jon Ossoff, who manages to triangulate between neoliberal center, progressive, and Left. He “supported the Laken Riley Act, an immigration bill written by congressional Republicans that calls for the detention of undocumented immigrants if they are arrested for minor crimes”; he “condemns Trump’s antidemocratic and racist tendencies in a way that excites party activists”; and he “uses Bernie Sanders–like rhetoric to…slam corporations and the super-wealthy. “

What will be the result of a “newer” Democratic Party run along these tried-and-true models? What the last thirty years suggest is an endless bait-and-switch. There has been domestic militarization at home (on black crime and white nationalism) in the name of national security. There have been military interventions abroad (Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Ukraine) in the name of human rights. There has been government investment in corporations (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act; “free trade” and outsourcing to China; monopolist real estate projects that displace the working and middle class) in the name of “growth.” And there has been “redistribution” (Obamacare, multiple stimulus packages) in the name of human rights and minority advancement. What there has not been is any redistribution of power to legislatures or small business associations or private sector unions or local politics; or an investment in working and middle class independence and productivity. This is a system for institutional “winners,” run by institutional “winners” that operates with the stick of monopolist development and the carrot of government welfare.

An instructively stark lens through which to consider what this system might look like going forward in America comes from “Liberal” Israelis’ Democratic-underwritten policy toward Palestine—not by coincidence, since many of the operators behind America’s modern Democratic Party are Jewish Zionists who, as I have investigated for the Libertarian Institute and elsewhere, succeeded WASPs as arbiters of American institutions forty years ago. In 1993, a year after Clinton’s “triangulation” had won him the White House, he presided over the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine. This was arguably the Democrats’ first massive military corporate development project, begun by Clinton and continued by Obama, under the guise of reasoned attention to detail and a commitment to “universal” human rights.

According to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, after the Oslo Accords and despite widespread “euphoria” about them among Palestinians, “conditions grew much worse for all but a very small number of individuals whose economic or personal interests were intertwined with the Palestinian Authority”: what the anti-Zionist Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein calls “collaboration-building to facilitate a burden-free Israeli occupation.” Under this system, “there were consistent denials of permission to travel and move goods from one place to another as a labyrinthine system of permits, checkpoints, walls, and fences was created.” This was part of a larger process of severing Gaza from the West Bank, which was itself severed from Jerusalem, effectively cleaving the Palestinian territory in thirds. But this was a process partially concealed by a raft of Israeli nonprofits and Israeli corporations that made a presence in the Palestinian territories in the name of “development” and “peace.” Indeed, it was in these years that progressive outlets funded by Soros and Pritzker and other Israeli-linked financiers expanded their commitment to amalgamating Palestinian rights with human rights and LGBTQ+ and women’s rights. This was a version of Yuppie progressivism for the Levant that was put in place even as Palestinians’ sovereignty was being effectively dismantled underneath them.

The overall aim of this process was articulated by Israel’s Liberal Zionist Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who “express[ed] a vision for transforming the Gaza Strip” into a version of the techno-authoritarian city-state of Singapore based on “trade, tourism, and technology.” And now, with the Netanyahu government having spent fourteen years of blockade and three years of genocide strangling Palestinians’ effort at sovereignty via Hamas, Peres’s are exactly the “values” being expressed by Jared Kushner for “remaking” Gaza today. Essentially, Peres’s and Kushner’s plan for Gaza is the Abundance Agenda applied abroad. Its endpoint is the current population being either displaced or forced to turn to low-level service work for corporations underwritten by government in the name of “progress,” “aspiration,” and “enlightenment.” And where America will end up under Democrats is not too different, in broad strokes, than where Gaza will end up under “liberal” Israelis: a techno-corporate “utopia” underwritten by government where uplifting progressive rhetoric and an occasional welfare program disguises the power imbalances underneath. This is not, in any sense, a real alternative to the overt military corporatism of Republicans under Donald Trump. It is military corporatism with a universalist, humanitarian, progressive face.

May 28, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Comments Off on Empire with a Humanitarian Face: Democrats Rebrand

How Can the Small Island of Cuba Threaten a Nuclear Superpower? – Cuban FM

Sputnik – 27.05.2026

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla slammed US propaganda portraying Cuba as a threat to the United States, exposing the absurdity of Washington’s narrative.

“Well, just imagine Cuba is a small island, 100,000 square kilometers and 10 million inhabitants. Based on what logic, what would be the common sense behind the idea that Cuba could threaten a nuclear superpower?” Rodríguez Parrilla said.

He also blasted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for “lying on and on regarding this issue.”

For months, Washington has pressured Cuba’s fuel lifelines — targeting shipments, threatening supply routes, and using economic collapse as a regime-change tool.

Rubio earlier claimed there is “no oil blockade on Cuba,” even though US President Donald Trump bragged that Cuba had “no oil,” “no money,” and “no anything” under the US embargo.

May 27, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , | Comments Off on How Can the Small Island of Cuba Threaten a Nuclear Superpower? – Cuban FM

India-Israel-UAE: An Alliance of Many Anxieties

By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – May 27, 2026

The I2U2 — that much-heralded “West Asian Quad” of India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States — is gathering dust. Launched with fanfare in July 2022 and billed as a transformative framework for regional integration, it has produced little of consequence since its inaugural summit.

Progress stalled through 2024, and its April 2025 revival dialogue in New Delhi was notably described as the first convening of the group in almost two years. Without sustained American engagement, the scaffolding has simply collapsed. What remains, however, is something more durable and more troubling: an informal troika of Israel, the UAE, and India, joined not by shared ambition but by a shared phobia.

Three States, One Obsession

Strip away the diplomatic pleasantries, and the organic glue binding Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, and New Delhi is strikingly similar: each government perceives political Islam — in its domestic and regional expressions — as a foundational threat to its survival. For the UAE, the enemy has a name: the Muslim Brotherhood. Abu Dhabi under Mohammed bin Zayed has treated Brotherhood-affiliated movements as an existential menace to dynastic stability. The Emirati government’s sweeping crackdown on al-Islah, the Brotherhood’s local affiliate, was driven by the calculation that political Islam of any kind is fundamentally threatening to government security. The UAE formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation in 2014, backed the military coup in Egypt, led the 2017 blockade of Qatar, and as recently as January 2025, blacklisted eleven individuals and eight UK-based organisations linked to Brotherhood networks. This is not counterterrorism policy in any conventional sense; it is a preemptive war on political pluralism dressed in security language.

India’s version of the same anxiety plays out along the Hindu-Muslim fault line. Anti-Muslim sentiment has intensified systematically since 2014. India’s 200 million Muslims — the world’s third-largest Muslim population — have faced demolitions of homes, discriminatory citizenship legislation, and a political atmosphere. The BJP government has systematically reframed domestic Muslim political life as a security threat, deploying counterterrorism law against peaceful dissent. If the UAE fears a Brotherhood-style capture of the state, India fears the democratic agency of its own largest minority.

Israel’s specter is Palestine. More precisely, it is the impossibility of indefinitely suppressing Palestinian political self-determination without a cost to legitimacy. For all three governments, the language of “counterterrorism” functions as a tranquilizer: it sedates domestic dissent, silences international criticism, and transforms political opponents into security threats. This shared grammar of repression is the true foundation of the troika.

While tackling these internal and regional threats remains a key imperative, the most recent push to revive the alliance, even without Washington being a formal member, is Iran and the still ongoing Iran war.

From Phobia to Alliance: Iran as the Accelerant

If political Islam is the ideological glue, Iran is what has now hardened this informal troika into something resembling a war coalition. Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28, 2026, the theoretical alignments of the Abraham Accords era became operational reality. Iran retaliated by targeting Gulf infrastructure, firing some 550 ballistic and cruise missiles and more than 2,200 drones at the UAE, making it the most targeted country in the region, including Israel. In response, Israel did something unprecedented: it deployed an Iron Dome battery, Israeli troops to operate it, and reportedly also its cutting-edge Iron Beam laser defence system and Spectro surveillance technology to Emirati soil. The Financial Times reported that Israeli military personnel on the ground in Gulf states were “a not insignificant number”. Emirati officials, reflecting on who came to their defence, reportedly said: “It was a real eye-opening moment. To see who our real friends are.”

The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, were partly motivated by a shared perception of the Iranian threat. What the 2026 conflict has done is strip away all residual ambiguity about what that means in practice. The UAE allowed its territory and airspace to be used by Israeli and American forces for strikes on Iran, according to Iranian officials. The Israeli Air Force carried out strikes in southern Iran during the war to neutralize short-range missiles threatening Gulf states. Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem are no longer strategic partners in aspiration; they are military partners in fact. The dream project of dismantling Iran as a regional power, long whispered in the corridors of both capitals, is now an open agenda.

It is in this context that Prime Minister Modi’s May 15, 2026 visit to Abu Dhabi — his eighth trip to the UAE in twelve years — must be read. The visit produced a raft of agreements: $5 billion in Emirati investment pledges, a long-term LPG supply deal, ADNOC access to India’s strategic petroleum reserves, and — most significantly — a formal Framework for the Strategic Defence Partnership covering defence industrial collaboration, cybersecurity, intelligence sharing, maritime security, and joint military exercises. Modi also chose to publicly condemn the Iranian attacks on the UAE and pledged India’s support in maintaining regional peace — a significant departure from the studied neutrality New Delhi had maintained for years. The visit came one day after India had hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who had openly accused the UAE of being “directly involved” in the US-Israeli war on Iran. The juxtaposition was not accidental; it was a signal about the direction of India’s foreign policy.

Silence Is No Longer a Strategy

For years, India’s position in this triangular relationship was one of studied ambiguity. New Delhi deepened ties with Israel and the UAE while maintaining functional relations with Iran and nominally adhering to the principle of strategic autonomy. That posture is now collapsing under the weight of events.

The contradiction at its heart is Chabahar. In May 2024, India signed a ten-year agreement to operate the Shahid Beheshti terminal, committing $120 million with a further $250 million credit line. This was to be New Delhi’s only viable overland and maritime gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi has called it a “golden gate” for India’s connectivity ambitions. Yet the US ended its special sanctions waiver for Chabahar in September 2025, and India has been reduced to exploring a temporary transfer of its stake back to Iran to avoid American penalties. Strategic autonomy, it turns out, survives only on American sufferance. Meanwhile, any Indian military technology that reaches the UAE now enters a security ecosystem that includes Israel — meaning India’s new defence partnership with Abu Dhabi is, in practice, an indirect alignment with Tel Aviv.

India now faces a reckoning that its political class has been deferring for years. As the region moves from cold confrontation to hot war, the space for equidistance evaporates. Every arms deal, every investment pact, every public statement condemning Iranian strikes while maintaining silence on Gaza and the West Bank narrows the gap between partnership and complicity. The troika that fear built has a peculiar logic: states drawn together by what they dread at home — Muslim political power in its various forms — will inevitably be pulled toward a shared agenda abroad. For India, the path ahead is less a clear choice than a delicate negotiation — with its own pluralistic traditions, with its new partners in the Gulf and Israel, and with a neighbourhood that offers no easy answers. What happens next will depend not on grand declarations, but on the quiet, unglamorous work of balancing interests without losing sight of the human cost at home.

Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.

May 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Comments Off on India-Israel-UAE: An Alliance of Many Anxieties

Trump advances his Arctic strategy

Washington will have many difficulties implementing its plans for the Arctic

By Lucas Leiroz | May 26, 2026

US interests in the Arctic continue to pose a significant threat to the European security architecture. Washington continues to advance its plans to expand its military and economic presence in the Arctic, despite the proven inability of the current American naval apparatus to conduct operations in the region efficiently. In practice, the irresponsibility with which the US conducts its Arctic policy could lead to a serious escalation of tensions in the near future.

According to recent reports, the US and Denmark are finally reaching an understanding on the Greenland issue. The Danish government has allegedly given permission for the US to proceed with a plan to build two military bases on Greenlandic territory. This will allow Washington to control specific territorial zones in the region, expanding its influence in the Arctic without having the burden of a formal annexation of Greenland.

The measure, if confirmed by Danish authorities, will certainly face strong opposition from the local population. The current situation of Greenland is unpopular among native Greenlanders, who do not want their homeland administered by a European country – nor by the US. Without the political power necessary to fight for independence, the locals end up having their future defined in negotiations between Europeans and Americans, in which they do not participate.

However, despite the disapproval of the local people, it is likely that the US will be able to impose its presence in the region in a reasonably peaceful manner. Local citizens do not have sufficient political power to prevent these moves, leaving them only with formal disapproval. Furthermore, regardless of how this process unfolds in practice, the final result will be the expansion of the American military presence in the Arctic zones, which will bring an atmosphere of tension and insecurity to the Greenlandic people.

Still, Greenland is just one of the regions where the US plans to enter in order to increase its Arctic presence. Washington is also reportedly planning to occupy the Norwegian island of Svalbard, which would have even more significant impacts on regional security. Despite Norwegian sovereignty, the island is regulated by an international treaty that guarantees Russia the right to economic exploration of the region, which is why, even today – despite sanctions – Moscow maintains activities in Svalbard.

Militarizing Svalbard would be a terrible move, as well as a violation of international law. The treaty regulating the island prohibits its militarization, and there is a historical Russian presence that cannot be ignored. Furthermore, even if the US does not use the island for public military purposes, the mere expansion of the American presence in a European Arctic region – so close to Russia – would be enough to substantially escalate regional tensions.

However, in both Greenland and Svalbard, the US will face the same problem: its logistical weakness in Arctic environment. Washington has historically ignored the Arctic, focusing on other regions of the world for its military and economic expansion. The result has been a significant lag in US Arctic technologies. The country does not have a significant icebreaker fleet, which severely diminishes its ability to operate in the Arctic. For decades, the Arctic has been seen by American experts as an inhospitable region of low strategic value, leading the country to not give due attention to its military and economic potential.

In recent military exercises in the Arctic, the US has proven incapable of conducting complex operations due to the low quantity and quality of its icebreakers. While the country is attempting to rehabilitate its Arctic strategy and produce high-quality equipment for the region, it is practically impossible for the US to achieve any status as an “Arctic superpower” in the near future. In practice, Washington is only beginning to take an interest in the region, but its possibilities for action are extremely limited.

In fact, instead of seeking to expand its Arctic presence aggressively and unilaterally, the US should simply engage in joint peaceful cooperation projects in the Arctic – especially with Russia, which is the country that currently possesses the most advanced Arctic technology in the world. Unfortunately, warmongering and pro-hegemonic sectors have gained considerable influence in the Trump administration in recent months, which explains his irresponsible decisions on several recent issues.

If Trump manages to regain control of his own government and contain the pressure from pro-war sectors, the US may in the future engage in fruitful international cooperation in the Arctic. Without this, however, the Americans will remain unable to explore the economic and strategic potential of the region for a long time.

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , , | Comments Off on Trump advances his Arctic strategy

Senior MP reveals Russia’s strategy for strikes on Kiev

RT | May 26, 2026

The Russian military will begin targeting bunkers used by Ukrainian military commanders and leadership in response to Kiev’s continued terrorist attacks on civilians, senior MP Andrey Kartapolov says. Ukraine’s parliament – the Verkhovnaya Rada – and Vladimir Zelensky’s office are not on the target list, he told Parliamentskaya Gazeta on Tuesday.

In the wake of the deadly Ukrainian drone attack on a college in the Lugansk People’s Republic, Moscow announced a new strategy, pledging to systematically hit assorted targets across the Ukrainian capital in retaliation. The strike killed at least 21 people, mostly teenage girls sleeping in a dormitory, in what the Russian Foreign Ministry characterized as the manifestation of “the Nazi and terrorist nature of the Kiev regime.”

Russia’s “patience has run out,” Kartapolov said, commenting on the tragedy. Kiev’s tactics have spiraled into “blatant terrorism against our civilians,” the head of the State Duma Defense Committee stated, adding that Moscow would now abandon its self-imposed commitment not to target Ukraine’s capital.

When asked about potential targets, the lawmaker stated that neither the Verkhovnaya Rada building nor Zelensky’s office counts as a “decision-making center.” Ukrainian MPs do not control the troops, and Zelensky himself does not even visit his office any longer, the MP stated.

“Decision-making centers [are] underground fortified [military] command and control centers,” as well as bunkers used by the Ukrainian security services and leadership, said Kartapolov, himself a retired colonel general and former deputy defense minister.

Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry urged foreigners to leave the Ukrainian capital and warned locals to stay away from military, industrial, and government sites. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed the issue with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well.

The EU has openly dismissed the warnings, accusing Moscow of “unacceptable escalation.” The bloc’s foreign policy spokeswoman, Anitta Hipper, said on X on Tuesday that Brussels summoned the Russian Charge d’Affairs over the ministry’s call and stated that “the EU delegation stays in Kiev.”

The Russian military maintains that it never targets purely civilian sites in Ukraine and focuses on military or dual-use installations.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Comments Off on Senior MP reveals Russia’s strategy for strikes on Kiev

Germany Embarked on Unprecedented Military Buildup – Expert

Sputnik – 26.05.2026

Germany is carrying out total militarization at all levels and on a scale unprecedented in the country’s history, Reiner Braun, an expert and former co-chair of the International Peace Bureau (IPB), told RIA Novosti.

“We are witnessing the total militarization of the country. This isn’t just a crazy arms buildup in terms of spending money. We are seeing the militarization of absolutely every aspect of society: from healthcare and civil defense to schools and environmental programs. We have reached a completely new level of war preparation. What is happening now is on a scale never before seen in the history of Germany,” Braun stated.

According to Braun, part of German society opposes militarization. Polls show that approximately 35% of the population is critical of the current military policy.

“Nevertheless, we must objectively assess reality and acknowledge that the concept of ‘war preparedness’ and the associated construction of an enemy image in Russia have taken root in German society and enjoy a certain level of support,” he added.

The expert noted that fear of Russia was a powerful tool in contemporary German politics that should not be underestimated.

“This fear clouds reason, creates mental chaos, distracts people from many other pressing issues, and, what’s more, it is built entirely on lies,” Braun added.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius earlier presented Germany’s first-ever independent military strategy and armed forces development plan, under which Germany plans to deploy the most powerful conventional army in Europe by 2039. The new strategy officially identifies Russia as the main threat to Germany’s security and the entire Euro-Atlantic area.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | | Comments Off on Germany Embarked on Unprecedented Military Buildup – Expert

When Our Word is No Longer Good

By Ron Paul | May 25, 2026

The pattern of media reports – based on White House leaks – that an agreement with Iran is almost completed has become predictable. Where once the markets fluctuated wildly (and some insiders made huge profits with the information), each time we hear that the deal is almost complete only to see it fall through, the markets barely move.

It is dangerous to have a US Administration that no one in the US or the rest of the world believes. When White House “sources” claim a deal is in sight only to have President Trump post another AI graphic of the US military – or himself – firing missiles at Iran, the futility of engaging with the United States becomes reinforced to the rest of the world.

This is not projecting strength. It is signaling moral and ethical bankruptcy. And it is dangerous. In a world where no other country sees value in negotiating to end disputes with the US government, the only solution is to prepare to use force against it.

A US government whose word is no good will soon find a world that refuses to speak with it.

That is what we have seen with the Iranian response to the US surprise attacks of last June and this February 28th. Two times the US used lies and deception that we were negotiating as an honest partner as cover for a pre-planned attack. How can any country negotiate in such circumstances?

There is a word for this: nihilism. It is the belief that there is no truth. Only the convenient lies and deceptions to force one’s will. Governmental nihilism leads to bankruptcies both financial and moral. Nearly $40 trillion in debt demonstrates the former bankruptcy, while our foreign policy of war and aggression demonstrates the latter.

A world that sees force as the only way to negotiate with the United States may not attack us immediately. But it will prepare to do so. That is what Iran has done for the past four decades. That is what our “rivals” China and Russia have done. Others are following suit.

The government and its neocon mouthpieces continue to propagandize the American people that we have the strongest military in the history of the world. And while it is true that we have a powerful military, more expensive than most others combined and capable of projecting force worldwide, it is also irrelevant.

Despite the relentless propaganda of “War Secretary” Hegseth, we are slowly learning the truth about the US war of aggression against Iran. Just a few weeks of fighting has nearly depleted our arsenal while barely denting that of Iran. Despite the US Administration’s initial claims that 90 percent or more of Iran’s military was destroyed, we now know that the opposite is the case: nearly 90 percent of Iran’s military remains intact.

What we should have learned from 20 years wasted in Afghanistan – that a nation fighting for its homeland has an immense advantage – has still not been learned.

Having the “most powerful military in the world” is irrelevant if the US continues to pursue a global military empire. There will never be a military strong enough for that. It is a lesson we have just learned in Iran.

If the American people are not willing to demand that their elected officials uphold the Constitution and restore our good name as honest brokers, I am afraid the future consequences of our current nihilism will be grave.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | | Comments Off on When Our Word is No Longer Good

The Disasters of War. Trump’s “Peace Through Strength” Doctrine Conducive to Worldwide Famines…

By Manlio Dinucci | Global Research | May 26, 2026

The White House announced:

“The Trump Administration’s doctrine of peace through strength has strengthened alliances and established America as an indispensable force for global stability.

As these achievements mount up, we have unequivocally entered a Golden Age of American Greatness, which promises even greater opportunities and security for the future”.

Adhering to the “peace through strength” doctrine, the Trump Administration increased US military spending from $860 billion in the 2025 financial year to $1.45 trillion in the 2027 financial year. This figure is further increased by $488 billion allocated to the Department of Veterans Affairs and other military appropriations, bringing the US’s annual military spending to over $2 trillion — more than a quarter of the Federal Government’s total public expenditure. Official budgets vastly underestimate the true cost of wars: the Pentagon claims that the war against Iran has so far cost $29 billion, but Forbes magazine estimates the cost at nearly $200 billion.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which the United States continues to enforce by using its warships to block the entrance to the Gulf of Oman, prevents Asian countries in particular from receiving the oil and gas they need from Iran and other countries in the Persian Gulf. These resources are increasingly being supplied to Asian countries by the United States at much higher prices. The rise in energy prices has led to a rise in the prices of agricultural products, with disastrous consequences.

The World Food Programme predicts that rising food prices will reduce access to food for poor households that were already barely able to afford a minimum diet before the conflict. For the 53 countries for which data is available, the number of people suffering from acute hunger is expected to rise by 45 million – compared with a pre-conflict baseline of 318 million – if the conflict continues into the second quarter of this year.

Overall, more than 360 million people could face severe food insecurity by 2026. This means that millions of people could go hungry. In this way, the war is causing far more casualties than those caused by the bombings. Others will die from the effects of pollution caused by US and Israeli bombing of Iranian oil refineries. An oil slick has reached Shidvar, an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf, surrounded by crystal-clear turquoise waters that provide a refuge for endangered sea turtles and dolphins. It is one of Iran’s most important protected nature reserves. Large dark streaks of oil now snake along the white sandy beaches. Birds, turtles and crabs can be seen trapped in piles of tar.

At the same time, the risk of nuclear war is increasing, both in the Middle East – where Israel, the only country in the region to possess nuclear weapons, could use them in a war against Iran – and in Europe, where the United States has deployed nuclear weapons aimed at Russia. Finland has stated its intention to lift the restrictions prohibiting the presence of nuclear weapons on its territory, in order to align the country with NATO’s ‘deterrence’ policy following its accession to the Alliance in 2023.  This means that US nuclear weapons – such as the new B61-12 nuclear bombs already deployed in Italy and other European countries – could be deployed in Finland, close to St Petersburg and other major urban centres. The Kremlin has warned that nuclear weapons in Finland would pose a very serious threat to Russia. It therefore conducted nuclear exercises from 19 to 21 May, involving 64,000 military personnel and 7,800 nuclear-capable missile launchers.

May 26, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | | Comments Off on The Disasters of War. Trump’s “Peace Through Strength” Doctrine Conducive to Worldwide Famines…

Iran shoots down Israeli spy drone over Hormozgan province

Press TV – May 24, 2026

Iranian air defense forces have shot down an Israeli “Orbiter” reconnaissance drone over the southern province of Hormozgan, according to military sources from the country’s southeastern air defense command.

The drone, described as being used for espionage and surveillance, was intercepted and destroyed after entering the operational airspace under the protection of Iran’s southern air defense network on Sunday.

Officials said the UAV was targeted by a specialized defense system whose technical specifications have not yet been disclosed.

Military authorities based in Bandar Abbas stated that the system used in the operation is capable of detecting and engaging radar-evading drones and that no stealth UAV would be able to penetrate the airspace stretching from the Persian Gulf and its islands to southern and southeastern Iran.

The wreckage of the destroyed drone was later recovered with the assistance of maritime border police units operating in Hormozgan Province.

The interception comes at a time of increasing scrutiny over the vulnerability of advanced Western and American unmanned aerial systems in regional conflicts.

A recent Bloomberg report detailing the loss of multiple advanced US drones during the war against Iran has drawn attention to the growing challenges facing technology-driven aerial warfare.

Among the systems highlighted was the MQ-9 Reaper, long regarded as one of the symbols of American military and technological superiority due to its surveillance, tracking, and precision-strike capabilities in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan and Iraq to Syria.

Analysts say the significance of such incidents extends beyond financial losses. The downing of advanced drones increasingly carries political and strategic implications, raising broader questions about the effectiveness of modern airpower and the sustainability of prolonged military engagements.

In the United States, criticism has gradually intensified over the objectives and outcomes of US aggression against Iran.

Analysts say that if Washington, despite possessing some of the world’s most advanced military technologies, is unable to achieve its strategic goals, the justification for continuing this war becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

May 24, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Comments Off on Iran shoots down Israeli spy drone over Hormozgan province

Oreshnik strike a retaliation for Kiev’s ‘terrorist attacks’ – Moscow

RT | May 24, 2026

Russian forces launched a “massive strike” overnight against military targets in Ukraine, using intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik system and Iskander ballistic missiles, Kinzhal and Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles, air-, sea- and ground-launched cruise missiles, as well as attack drones.

The strike came after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Defense Ministry to “submit proposals” for a response to a Ukrainian drone attack on a teacher training college dormitory in the Lugansk People’s Republic, which left 21 people dead and 42 injured, mostly teenage girls.

The bombardment targeted the Ukrainian military’s command and control facilities, air bases, and the country’s defense industry enterprises, the ministry said. No strikes had been planned or carried out against civilian infrastructure, it added.

“The objectives of the strike have been achieved. All designated targets were hit,” it stressed.

Earlier on Sunday, Ukrainian media and Telegram channels circulated videos showing clusters of bright objects rapidly descending from the sky, claiming that Russia had deployed an Oreshnik against an unspecified target in the town of Belaya Tserkov near Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.

The dormitory of Starobelsk College, a facility of Lugansk Pedagogical University located in the town of Starobelsk, was struck by multiple waves of Ukrainian drones on Friday while students were asleep inside, in what Putin described as a deliberate “terrorist act.”

Governor Leonid Pasechnik declared May 24-25 days of mourning, describing the attack as “pure evil” and saying those responsible would face “deserved and inevitable punishment.”

Earlier, the US Embassy in Kiev warned American citizens of a “potentially significant air attack” that could take place within 24 hours and urged them to be ready to seek shelter immediately if an air alert was issued.

Moscow first publicly confirmed firing an Oreshnik in November 2024 when the missile was used in a strike on the Yuzhmash military-industrial facility in Dnepropetrovsk. It was deployed for the second time this January, obliterating an aircraft repair plant in Lviv, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

May 24, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , | Comments Off on Oreshnik strike a retaliation for Kiev’s ‘terrorist attacks’ – Moscow

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