The Iranian Army says it has targeted key facilities at US-run Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, as newly analyzed satellite imagery also points to fresh damage at another US-operated base in the Persian Gulf state.
The Army’s Public Relations Office said the strike marked the 27th phase of Operation Sa’eqeh and was carried out in response to recent US military attacks on Iran, including an airstrike on a residential home on Qeshm Island.
According to the statement, loitering drones targeted aircraft shelters, satellite communications systems and equipment storage facilities at Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base. It described the installation as a major hub for US air and surveillance operations and a vital center for the logistical support of American forces.
The retaliation comes as the US has been targeting southern Iranian provinces since earlier in July after violating the terms of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding.
Tehran has responded with repeated missile and drone attacks targeting US-operated military facilities across the region under Operation Nasr 2 and Operation Sa’eqeh (Lightning).
The Army condemned the US strike on civilian homes in Qeshm, calling it “a clear violation of humanitarian principles and another example of the enemy’s war crimes.”
It added that “crimes, sanctions and threats will only make Iran more united and cohesive in its sacred defense.”
The statement further said the “decisive, extensive and heavy” attacks carried out by the Army and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps have made it “very costly and difficult” for the United States to intercept Iranian drones and missiles despite deploying advanced air defense systems and reinforcing them.
It also noted that Washington has imposed strict censorship to prevent information about damage, casualties and injuries from becoming public.
The operation followed a deadly US strike on a residential building on Iran’s southern Qeshm Island on Thursday. A local official said three members of a family—a mother, a father and their two-year-old son—were killed in the attack. Two other children were pulled alive from the rubble and taken to hospital after receiving emergency treatment at the scene. The father was identified as a taxi driver, and the neighborhood was a working-class residential area.
Satellite imagery shows damage to US-run base in Kuwait
Meanwhile, satellite imagery has indicated new damage at another US-operated military installation in Kuwait.
Soar Atlas, specializing in maps and satellite imagery, said its assessment of newly released satellite images suggested fresh damage at Ali Al Salem Air Base.
According to the analysis, part of a storage area used by US forces appeared blackened in the latest imagery, indicating that the facility may have sustained damage.
The developments come as The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Washington is reassessing the scale of its military presence in Kuwait.
Citing US officials familiar with the deliberations, the newspaper said the Pentagon had already been considering reducing its troop presence before the war on Iran began and has since scaled back personnel in Kuwait to minimize the risk posed by Iranian attacks on US military bases.
Analysts quoted by the newspaper said US officials increasingly believe that maintaining a large permanent force in Kuwait is no longer militarily necessary.
The latest discussions between Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on expanding natural gas production in the Nile Delta represent more than another investment agreement in the energy sector. They illustrate a broader transformation underway across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where energy security, technological capability and regional capital are increasingly being mobilised from within the Global South rather than relying exclusively on Western financing and expertise.
For decades, energy partnerships in the MENA region largely followed a familiar pattern. Resource-rich states exported hydrocarbons while multinational energy companies from Europe and North America supplied technology, finance and operational expertise. That model is gradually evolving. Today’s agreements increasingly reflect cooperation between emerging economies that possess complementary strengths and shared strategic interests.
Egypt occupies a unique position in this transition. It is simultaneously an African, Arab and Mediterranean nation, giving it significant geopolitical value. While its domestic gas production has fluctuated in recent years because of declining output from mature fields and rising domestic consumption, Cairo remains determined to restore its status as a regional energy hub. The country’s existing liquefied natural gas (LNG) export infrastructure, strategic location along the Suez Canal and established pipeline connections position it as a gateway linking African producers with European and Asian markets.
The UAE, meanwhile, has become one of the Global South’s most influential sources of investment capital. Emirati sovereign wealth funds and state-backed energy companies are increasingly deploying finance across Africa and the wider Middle East, extending beyond traditional oil investments into renewable energy, logistics, ports and advanced extraction technologies. This reflects Abu Dhabi’s long-term strategy of securing energy assets while diversifying its international investment portfolio.
The proposed expansion of geological exploration in Egypt’s Nile Delta therefore serves multiple strategic purposes. It seeks to increase Egypt’s domestic gas output, reduce reliance on costly imports and strengthen export capacity. Equally important, it demonstrates how regional investors are assuming greater responsibility for financing critical energy infrastructure within their own neighbourhood.
For the MENA region, such cooperation strengthens economic resilience during a period of heightened geopolitical uncertainty. Conflicts across the Middle East, disruptions to shipping routes and volatile commodity prices have reinforced the importance of reliable regional supply chains. Expanding domestic production reduces vulnerability to external shocks while allowing countries greater flexibility in balancing domestic demand with export commitments.
The initiative also reflects the growing importance of technological modernisation in hydrocarbon production. Advanced drilling techniques, digital reservoir management and improved recovery methods are enabling countries to maximise output from existing fields without relying solely on new discoveries. Technology transfer has become as strategically valuable as financial investment, particularly for countries seeking to optimise mature energy assets.
The implications extend well beyond North Africa. Across the Global South, governments are increasingly pursuing development strategies centred on South-South cooperation. Rather than depending exclusively on traditional development partners, countries are building networks of investment, expertise and infrastructure with fellow emerging economies. This approach aligns with a broader effort to reshape international economic governance around more diversified partnerships.
For BRICS, the Egypt-UAE partnership reinforces several long-standing objectives. Egypt’s accession to BRICS expanded the grouping’s presence in Africa and the Arab world, strengthening its representation across key energy-producing regions. Although the UAE is not geographically located within North Africa, its growing investment footprint across the continent complements BRICS’ broader emphasis on infrastructure financing, industrial development and economic integration among developing economies.
The partnership also supports BRICS’ vision of enhancing energy security through diversified production and investment channels. As global energy markets become increasingly fragmented by geopolitical tensions, emerging economies are seeking to reduce exposure to concentrated supply chains and external political risks. Regional cooperation between BRICS members and partner economies helps create a more distributed and resilient energy architecture.
However, challenges remain. Expanding natural gas production requires sustained investment, regulatory certainty and environmental stewardship. Natural gas is frequently presented as a transition fuel capable of supporting economic development while renewable energy capacity expands, yet long-term climate commitments will continue to shape investment decisions. Egypt and the UAE will therefore need to balance immediate energy security objectives with growing international pressure to accelerate decarbonisation. [emphasis added]
Ultimately, the significance of the Egypt-UAE energy discussions lies not simply in additional gas wells or increased reserves. They reflect a deeper shift in how emerging economies are organising capital, technology and political partnerships. As the Global South assumes a more active role in financing its own development, regional cooperation is becoming an increasingly important pillar of economic resilience. In that sense, the Nile Delta may represent not only a source of natural gas, but also a symbol of a changing global economic order in which the future of energy is being shaped as much by cooperation within the Global South as by traditional centres of power.
Dr Iqbal Survé is a past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN.
Chloe Maluleke is an Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group, Russia & Middle East Specialist.
Prof. John Mearsheimer discusses how the dramatic developments in the Ukraine War conflict with NATO’s “Ukraine is winning” narrative. Prof. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago
Israel dragged America into another war, then sat back on the spectator bench and watched U.S. taxpayers foot the bill. Borrowed money burned into bombs. Billions more bled out at gas stations and in inflation, all to reopen a strait that was open before Donald was duped into fighting Benjamin’s war. Now Benjamin Netanyahu watches from a safe distance, gloating as missiles fly between the U.S. forces and Iran in a war he spent years pushing Washington to fight.
At home, flag-draped caskets of American soldiers arriving home from a war Israel instigated and American soldiers carried out. In Congress, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stood before the Senate requesting more money to keep the war running.
Lawmakers asked to sign the check for a war they never voted to authorize, fought for aims Washington did not set, with no accounting of when — or how— it ends.
In occupied Palestine, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich tells a settler conference that “Israel has no interest in joining the campaign . . . a confined campaign between Iran and the United States, is the correct [situation] and best for us [Israel].” In layman language, let’s sit and watch Americans die and pay for our war.
Exhibit A: the U.S. military is depleting its own missile-defense stockpiles defending its bases across the region, while Israel hoards its interceptors in reserve. Israel isn’t spending down its stockpile. It’s waiting for the moment American stocks run dry and the Gulf states are left exposed. When that moment comes, Israeli interceptors will become prized leverage, offered to the UAE and the rest of the Gulf at a price.
Last Sunday on Fox News, Netanyahu outlined to America his goals for the war against Iran. A foreign prime minister, on American airwaves, essentially setting the terms and the finish line for an American war, fought by American pilots, funded by American taxpayers, and now apparently concluded at Israel’s discretion. Whatever Trump negotiates, whatever Washington decides, Netanyahu has already told America it doesn’t matter. He isn’t waiting to end the war on Israel’s terms. He’s informing it.
But it is not only America’s war policy that runs through Tel Aviv. It is diplomacy and commerce too. When Washington signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, and the deal was announced, ink dry, both governments on record. Within a day, President Trump reversed course, declaring the agreement was contingent on Saudi normalization with Israel.
Israeli officials do not even try to be diplomatic on how they run Washington policy. Before Trump added the new condition, Israel’s Culture and Sports Minister, Miki Zohar, told Army Radio that “Israel has been clear with the United States about its red lines.” Those are the words of a government that understands it holds a veto pen, set red lines, and where America listens.
Think about it, an Israeli minister speaks openly of red lines over an American commercial and strategic agreement with one of the world’s largest oil exporters, a country central to Gulf security architecture Washington has spent decades building. It did not matter that the Saudi deal serves American energy and strategic interests. It mattered only that Tel Aviv had not yet signed off.
The issue isn’t whether Israel tries to shape American war strategy, or whether its leaders draw red lines Washington isn’t allowed to cross. The real question is why American leaders, across the political spectrum, permit a strategically insignificant country to wield such extraordinary influence over the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower.
Israeli red lines prompted America’s Israel-first loyalists to abruptly discover the agreement was a nuclear proliferation threat. For decades, they have defended, excused, or ignored Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. Yet the prospect of a Saudi civilian nuclear program suddenly provokes moral outrage. The issue was never stopping nuclear proliferation. It was about sequencing. They would be willing to kosher a Saudi civilian nuclear program the day after, not before, it recognizes Israel.
If Arab capitals want an American relationship that serves their own security and economic interests, they need to stop mistaking proximity for leverage. For years the strategy has been to buy access, funneling billions to powerful intermediaries like Jared Kushner, treating him as the private door into the Oval Office.
But Kushner is no neutral broker. He is an Israel-first advocate who built his post-White House fortune partly on Arab capital while shaping Middle East policy on Israel’s behalf and now uses his wealth to finance Jewish-only colonies built on stolen Palestinian land.
The United Arab Emirates lived this irony in hard numbers. Kushner sold Abu Dhabi on the Abraham Accords with a promise attached: normalize with Israel, and the most advanced American fighter jet in the world would follow, a $23 billion sale of fifty F-35s. The UAE delivered its half instantly, recognition, embassies, open skies. Washington delivered Israel every benefit of that deal. The jets never came. Years of “technical requirements,” stalled reviews, and quiet reversals later.
Trump wants to sell Saudi Arabia the promise of a commercial agreement, but deliver Israel an immediate recognition. The Arab cow gets milked for capital, investment, and diplomatic goodwill, and when the moment comes to deliver, the payoff is led instead to the Israeli altar. Every dollar spent courting Kushner, every concession made in good faith, has purchased not access but the illusion of it, never enough to collect on.
Arab regimes must understand that neither buying access to the president through Israel-first loyalists like Kushner, nor hosting the American bases that fight wars designed in and for Tel Aviv, will change U.S. policy — not while Israel holds the lobby power to dictate red lines American leaders dare not cross.
United States Representative Thomas Massie said the United States has been “significantly weakened by the war with Iran,” arguing in an X post that the campaign depleted missile-defense systems, drained oil reserves, sacrificed US troops, pushed up consumer prices, increased debt, and sidelined domestic needs “all for Israel.”
The Kentucky Republican’s remarks added fresh political pressure to an already widening debate in Washington over the price of the war on Iran, the scope of US involvement, and the degree to which the White House has tied American military power to “Israel’s” regional agenda. That debate has sharpened as more lawmakers question the administration’s war powers and the long-term cost of the campaign.
CENTCOM urged a pause near the Strait of Hormuz
Massie’s remarks came as Axios reported that Admiral Brad Cooper, the top US military commander in West Asia and head of CENTCOM, advised the Trump administration to halt bombing around the Strait of Hormuz after concluding the two-week assault had reached diminishing returns. Axios said Cooper briefed the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House earlier in the week, and that his assessment helped shape Trump’s decision to pause strikes along Iran’s southern coastline and around the strategic waterway.
The report said Cooper warned that most of the assigned targets had already been struck, leaving few objectives whose destruction would materially change the battlefield. In other words, the campaign had begun to run out of useful military targets unless Trump was prepared to escalate the war further.
Air-defense stocks under strain
Meanwhile, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth that shortages of air-defense interceptors could reduce Washington’s ability to shield its bases and regional allies if the confrontation escalated again. The warning echoed broader concerns inside the Pentagon about the strain that the war on Iran has placed on US missile-defense inventories.
The New York Times said senior advisers including Caine and Vice President JD Vance raised similar concerns about the shrinking stockpile of Patriot interceptors and other air-defence systems needed to protect US forces across the region. That assessment reportedly played a major role in Trump’s decision to hold back from a larger escalation.
Kuwait has officially ratified a broad defense cooperation pact with Pakistan that was signed in June 2023. The ratification follows high-level military contacts between the two countries.
“This agreement reintroduces Pakistan as a direct security stakeholder in the Gulf, beyond its traditional role of providing manpower and training,” said Sultan M. Hali, writer and retired Group Captain of the Pakistan Air Force.
Key points from his commentary:
1️. New role. Pakistan ceases to be merely a supplier of troops. The pact positions Islamabad as a direct security stakeholder in the Gulf.
2️. Hedging strategy. Kuwait is reducing excessive dependence on the US and NATO by relying on a nuclear-armed Muslim-majority ally.
3️. Multipolarity. Arab monarchies are turning to China, Turkiye, and South Asia in response to a fragmented world order.
4️. Basing. Permanent bases are unlikely, but joint exercises, rotational deployments, and maritime patrols are realistic scenarios.
5️. Defense industry. Kuwait may consider the Pakistani-Chinese JF-17 Thunder — cheaper than Western analogs and less vulnerable to embargoes.
6️. Forward presence. Expands Pakistan’s capability to monitor Gulf maritime traffic, including energy chokepoints.
7️. Defense diplomacy. Strengthens Pakistan’s leverage in Gulf councils and its position vis-à-vis India.
8️. Economic dividends. Military cooperation often accompanies labor, trade, and energy agreements, boosting Pakistan’s regional integration.
“Kuwait’s move signals recognition that multipolarity in defining relations is now essential for resilience in an increasingly fragmented regional order,” Hali said.
Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi is a former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. Prof. Marandi discusses Saudi Arabia’s miscalculation in terms of attacking Yemen. Trump has trapped himself in the Iran War, and his options keep getting worse.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Hussein Mohebbi outlined US military losses during fifteen days of retaliatory Iranian strikes on US bases across the region, in response to US aggression on the country launched from these bases.
In remarks to Tasnim, Mohebbi detailed that Iranian strikes destroyed a range of fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
US aircraft losses:
11 stationed fighter jets and helicopters
17 reconnaissance and operational UAVs
Eight intact units
Eight aerial refueling tankers
Four heavy military helicopters
One F-15 fighter jet struck inside a hardened shelter
One P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft
One C-17 Globemaster heavy transport aircraft
US radar, command infrastructure
The IRGC spokesperson said Iranian forces also inflicted significant damage on US military surveillance, air defense, and command infrastructure during the fighting, destroying multiple command-and-control centers, radar installations, air defense systems, and satellite communications assets.
Seven command-and-control centers
Six Patriot air defense radar units
Eight early warning and detection radar systems
Seven air defense missile radars, five long-range radar systems
Five specialized FPS and FPS-117 radar systems
Three air and maritime surveillance radars
Three satellite communications systems
US defense and logistics assets
Mohebbi also claimed that Iranian strikes caused extensive damage to military infrastructure at US bases, targeting aircraft shelters, drone facilities, hangars, and operational infrastructure used to support air operations.
Six MQ-9 Reaper drone hangars
Five fighter aircraft hangars and four hardened shelters
One F-15 fighter preparation hangar, one UAV hangar housing eight new drones
One P-8 aircraft hangar
Six flight and parking ramps
Four HIMARS mobile artillery rocket launchers
Four Patriots
Supply and intelligence facilities:
17 depots containing weaponry
Naval vessel components
Aircraft spare parts were destroyed
12 fuel storage tanks
One fuel dock
One aircraft carrier refueling platform
The losses also included, as per the spokesperson, six underground missile bunkers, six fighter and helicopter maintenance centers, two signals intelligence communication centers, one data intelligence hub, one artificial intelligence processing center, one Amazon data node, and one unmanned surface vehicle (USV) storage facility.
Over 200 American soldiers killed in strikes on US bases
Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebi revealed that the US casualty figures from recent Iranian strikes were inaccurate, stressing that more than 200 American personnel were killed during Operation Nasr 2.
He described US reports on its military casualties as “an outright lie.” The IRGC spokesperson added that Iranian forces struck eight US military bases during the operation, including one facility containing 20 hangars that were destroyed.
According to Mohebi, more than 200 US personnel were killed in Operation Nasr 2, while the number of wounded was “far higher” than the reported death toll.
The spokesperson also urged the American public not to allow what he called their “dishonest military commanders” to mislead them about the extent of the losses.
He further called on the US government to allow journalists access to the strike locations so they could independently assess the damage and determine how many personnel had been killed.
It is worth noting that Iran has repeatedly said that US military bases and economic assets in the Gulf region have been used to launch acts of aggression against Iran, including strikes that have resulted in civilian casualties. In this context, Iran frames any action against such facilities as retaliation against hostile military activity originating from or enabled by those bases.
Iran’s decisive retaliatory strikes in the face of the United States’ violations have forced Washington to halt and revisit its regional strategy, Army spokesman says.
Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia made the remarks during a televised interview on Saturday, stating that coordinated operations by the Army and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), including airstrikes, missile strikes, and drone operations against US positions in Kuwait, Qatar, and Erbil, Iraq, have brought Washington’s regional strategy to a halt and forced it to alter its strategic approach.
Turning to Iran’s recent retaliatory military operations, Akraminia said the Islamic Republic launched the strikes after the United States violated its commitments under a memorandum of understanding reached last month, and attempted to establish an illegal shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz in violation of the MoU.
Over the past 15 days, he said, the operations focused on US military bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, describing them as among Washington’s most important military installations in the region.
According to the spokesperson, decades of US investment in regional military infrastructure, particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, had made those facilities strategically significant.
However, as a result of Iran’s reprisal, many US facilities across the region have suffered damage severe enough to prevent them from carrying out their previous missions, he stated.
Akraminia cited the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain as a case in point. “There is now virtually nothing left of this base,” he said, hailing the Iranian operations for rendering the outpost effectively unusable.
The spokesman referred to US President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement that Washington had supplied weapons to counterrevolutionary elements based in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, but noted that Iranian strikes have robbed those elements of their operational capability and virtually destroyed the American military infrastructure in Erbil.
The official credited the success of the drone strikes among the operations to Iran’s employing a new generation of loitering munitions, citing deployment of the country’s Arash-2 drones.
‘Retaliatory deterrence’
The Army spokesperson described Iran’s military strategy in the face of the American violations as one of “retaliatory deterrence.”
He said the Islamic Republic’s objective was to raise the cost of aggression sufficiently to deter future attacks.
In the face of the retaliation, the United States has reached a strategic impasse, lacking a coherent strategy either to continue the war or bring it to an end, Akraminia said. The official cited contradictory statements by the US president as evidence of strategic confusion.
Akraminia, meanwhile, said the United States would also bear the greatest long-term strategic costs of the cycle arising out of its violations in light of the significant economic, geopolitical, and security consequences that have resulted from the Islamic Republic’s reprisal.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the spokesperson noted how the United States and the Israeli regime also failed to achieve either their declared or broader objectives during their unprovoked aggression against the Islamic Republic that took place from February 28 to April 7.
He noted that Washington’s publicly stated goals included destroying Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities and eliminating the regional Resistance Front, besides reminding how the US president had also demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender” during the early stages of the aggression.
According to the official, the adversaries also pursued broader objectives, including overthrowing Iran’s Islamic establishment, partitioning the country, and advancing the so-called “Greater Israel” project that features Tel Aviv’s expansionist ambitions.
None of those objectives was, however, achieved, he stated, attributing the outcome to public support, the Islamic Republic’s sagacious leadership, and the performance of the country’s Armed Forces.
“Tonight marks the 147th consecutive night of the people’s presence and support for the Islamic establishment, and this steadfastness demonstrates that the enemy has failed to accomplish its objectives,” the spokesman said, referring to unfailing presence across the country’s streets in support of the Islamic Republic and its defensive and retaliatory operations.
At least one sailor was killed and another injured in a Ukrainian strike on a cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has said, denouncing the attack as an act of aggression and warning of potential retaliation.
The drone attack was publicized on Saturday by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, who bragged on X about achieving “very strong results with long‑range strikes in the Caspian Sea.” The strikes affected “vessels used in military cargo shipments involving Iran, as well as a warship,” Zelensky claimed on X.
Tehran responded to the incident later in the day, confirming its commercial vessel came under the “Ukrainian regime’s attack” in the landlocked waterway. The strike killed one sailor aboard the vessel and wounded another one, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement without providing any details on the extent of the damage sustained by the ship.
The ministry condemned the attack as an act of aggression that “risks further fueling and expanding the flames of war.” It urged other nations to take a “responsible stance toward this reckless action by the Ukrainian regime” and hold its leadership accountable.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will not hesitate to protect its national interests and security. It is clear that the responsibility for the consequences of the Ukrainian regime leader’s adventurism will lie entirely with that regime, as well as its backers and instigators,” the ministry warned.
The ministry reiterated that “Iran has never intervened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” while arguing that Kiev’s actions show it has been “dangerously seeking to spread war and instability.” Ukraine has repeatedly accused Tehran of supporting Moscow in the hostilities, namely by supplying it with assorted drones and missiles.
While Moscow and Tehran have never attempted to hide their close cooperation, which is governed by bilateral agreements, both have dismissed the Ukrainian claims regarding large-scale arms shipments. While the Russian Geran-2 and the Iranian Shahed-136 UAVs do bear distinctive similarities, both, as well as analogous drones fielded by multiple countries, including the US in recent years, are inspired by the Dornier DAR drone developed in West Germany in the mid-1980s.
Kiev has actively tried to become involved in the Middle East conflict triggered by the US-Israeli attack on Iran earlier this year. The Ukrainian leadership has claimed to have secured deals with Gulf states to provide them with specialists and technology to counter Iranian drones and is hoping to secure additional anti-aircraft systems and munitions in exchange.
More than 200 Ukrainian military experts have been deployed to the Middle East under the deals, according to Zelensky. Ultimately, the group reportedly sustained personnel casualties and equipment damage in an Iranian strike on a depot in Dubai during the first wave of active hostilities in the region. Kiev has denied the incident took place.
The United States has presented its new nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia as a gift: reactors, technology, investment, prestige, and the radiant promise of a peaceful atomic future. Washington is forever giving gifts of this kind. Curiously, they tend to arrive fitted with surveillance equipment, political conditions, and a discreetly concealed choke chain.
This is not merely a civil nuclear agreement. It is a disciplinary instrument aimed at Mohammed bin Salman — a strategic summons issued to a crown prince who has recently behaved less like an obedient client and more like the ruler of an indispensable state.
Its message is simple: Saudi Arabia may diversify its economy, its diplomatic partners, and even its wardrobe of alliances, but it may not diversify the source of its ultimate protection. That franchise still belongs to Washington.
The agreement therefore concerns nuclear energy only in the same sense that a prison contract concerns architecture. Its deeper purpose is to reconstruct American authority over a kingdom that has begun imagining life beyond the imperial security nursery.
Riyadh has committed three increasingly intolerable offenses.
First, it has moved too close to Pakistan. The Saudi–Pakistani relationship is hardly new: money, soldiers, intelligence cooperation, religious patronage, and strategic ambiguity have bound the two states for decades.
What has changed is the context. As confidence in American protection has weakened, Pakistan has ceased to look merely like a useful military subcontractor and begun to resemble a possible component of an alternative security architecture.
That possibility is especially sensitive because Pakistan is nuclear-armed. No formal Saudi–Pakistani nuclear arrangement has been acknowledged, and neither capital needs one publicly declared. Strategic ambiguity is useful precisely because it performs deterrence without submitting an invoice to the International Atomic Energy Agency. A defense pact, carefully suggestive official language, and decades of intimate military cooperation can generate considerable anxiety without anyone having to unveil a warhead in Riyadh.
Washington’s nuclear offer is designed to interrupt that imagination. It tells the Saudis: there will be no Pakistani shortcut to strategic autonomy. If the kingdom wants reactors, fuel-cycle expertise, advanced technology, and the political symbolism of nuclear modernity, those ambitions must pass through American gates. The atomic future may be Saudi, but the key to the laboratory must remain in Washington.
Second, Mohammed bin Salman has shown insufficient enthusiasm for the campaign against Iran. Riyadh has no sentimental attachment to Tehran; states do not exchange friendship bracelets. But it has learned, after years of expensive confrontation, that permanent hostility to Iran is a ruinous American luxury financed by Gulf vulnerability. Saudi–Iranian accommodation is not ideological reconciliation. It is an insurance policy against being drafted into someone else’s war.
This is precisely what makes it objectionable to Washington and Israel. An autonomous Saudi Arabia might decline to become the logistics platform, financier, diplomatic choir, and eventual target of a regional war against Iran. It might decide that oil facilities, desalination plants, investment plans, and glittering megaprojects are poorly served by turning the Gulf into a missile exchange. Such ingratitude cannot be encouraged.
The nuclear deal places Washington back at the center of Saudi strategic planning. Technology creates dependency; dependency creates leverage; leverage restores obedience.
The reactor is not merely an energy source. It is a thirty-year listening device embedded in the kingdom’s national-security imagination.
Third, Riyadh has refused to normalize relations with Israel on Washington’s preferred terms. Saudi leaders continue to tie normalization to a credible pathway toward Palestinian statehood — an inconvenient demand in an imperial order that prefers Palestinians as humanitarian statistics rather than political subjects. Trump’s subsequent insistence that the nuclear arrangement depends on Saudi entry into the Abraham Accords merely stripped the agreement of its ceremonial clothing.
The bargain is now indecently clear: Washington will help construct Saudi Arabia’s nuclear future if Riyadh helps rehabilitate Israel’s regional standing. Nuclear cooperation becomes diplomatic blackmail. The kingdom is invited to purchase strategic reassurance with Palestine. This is less a treaty than a geopolitical obedience course: sit beside Israel, distrust Iran, step away from Pakistan, and receive your reactor.
China and Russia are the other uninvited guests at the signing ceremony. Saudi Arabia is not merely another energy producer; it is the central Arab power in OPEC, a financial heavyweight, and a pivotal actor in the emerging multipolar order. Its relations with Beijing and Moscow challenge Washington not because Riyadh has become anti-American, but because it has become insufficiently exclusive.
Empire does not require affection. It requires the absence of alternatives.
A Saudi nuclear program built with Chinese or Russian assistance would deepen technological, financial, and strategic relationships that Washington can no longer confidently control. American companies want the contracts, certainly, but the larger concern is architectural: whoever builds the reactors helps shape the dependencies surrounding them.
Nuclear cooperation produces decades of training, maintenance, fuel arrangements, regulatory influence, security coordination, and elite access. Washington is not selling machinery. It is purchasing strategic occupancy.
The irony is exquisite. The United States portrays the agreement as evidence of restored strength, yet its generosity reveals its weakness. A hegemon secure in its position does not need to offer extraordinary concessions to retain an old client. It does so when the client has discovered competing suppliers, alternative protectors, and the invigorating sensation of being courted.
Nor does the agreement simplify nuclear diplomacy with Iran. Washington has spent years treating Iranian enrichment as uniquely sinister while now constructing a far more permissive vocabulary for Saudi ambitions. The distinction will be explained through the usual theological machinery of empire: allies possess peaceful atoms; adversaries enrich malicious ones. Centrifuges, apparently, acquire moral character from the flag hanging above them.
The result is a nonproliferation doctrine so intellectually elastic that it can be folded into a campaign brochure.
Mohammed bin Salman may believe Saudi Arabia has accumulated enough leverage to escape the old hierarchy. Washington’s answer is this agreement: not quite a reward, not quite a threat, but an elegant combination of both. America will protect the kingdom — from Iran, from uncertainty, and above all from the dangerous temptation to protect itself through arrangements Washington cannot supervise.
The reactor, then, is the bait. Israel is the condition. Pakistan is the warning. China and Russia are the targets.
And the leash, freshly polished and marketed as partnership, remains unmistakably American.
While the US president continues to lie to his people about imagined victories over Iran in West Asia, the arguments fall flat amongst the vast majority of Americans who see through his tired rhetoric. Unlike past military blunders, Washington has not and will not be able to pull the wool over its people’s eyes.
Some analysts have attempted to compare Donald Trump’s failure to effectively combat Iran with defeats and strategic mistakes that ruined the reputations of past presidents; this one is very different.
To go through all US wars of aggression is simply too steep a task to take on in a single article, but there are a few different comparisons that are going around which deserve to be analyzed: they are the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, and even Operation Eagle Claw.
All the above-noted comparisons are very much different in their nature from the large-scale air campaign, turned stop-start battles that the Trump administration has engaged in. If we first look at the Vietnam War comparison, this is often said as a figure of speech – “it is so and so’s Vietnam” – which is the way in which some analysts have chosen to apply Vietnam to what we see today.
Although there is something to be said about how the US is being bogged down in the Iran War, it is a totally different ball game to what occurred in Vietnam. At the beginning stages of the escalation, in October of 1965, a Gallup poll recorded a 64% public approval rating of US intervention in Vietnam, which by 1970 had shifted to around 55% of the US public stating that they sought a return of the troops.
At the time, the US had sold its population the need to fight Communism and that the Vietnam War was necessary, as the fall of South Vietnam to a Communist government would lead to a slippery slope whereby governments across Asia would fall to the ideology. The Communist boogeyman captured the imaginations of those living in the West, who opposed the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao’s China.
In Trump’s case, the approval rating for the Iran war was never there. Ipsos polling data from the beginning of the war suggested that 58% of Americans opposed a war with Iran, with only 38% expressing approval. Two weeks into the conflict, Pew Research polling data then revealed that 61% of the country disapproved of the war. Now, even Trump’s own cult-like fan base is turning on the war, with Politico polling data suggesting that little more than a third of MAGA supporters believe the economic costs of the Iran war have been worth it.
In the Vietnam War case, public opinion at its worst was more favourable than it was at the beginning of the war on Iran. When it came to the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion, a Gallup News poll recorded a 72% approval rating for the war, with only 25% of Americans opposing it.
Then there is the comparison with Operation Eagle Claw, which refers to the disastrous mission that was ordered by former US President Jimmy Carter – aimed at seizing back American citizens held by the Islamic Republic at the time. The reference is now being made to Jimmy Carter and his failed operation, resulting in the deaths of 8 US service members, because of President Trump’s own comments about the Carter administration.
In the event of a ground invasion that seeks to seize Iranian territory – Kharg Island being the most publicly discussed target to occupy – the US president will almost inevitably be in a position where a number of American soldiers could be captured.
All of the above-noted cases have a shared difference that separates them from what the Trump administration is doing today, that being that they were not operations launched solely for a foreign country’s interests.
Although the Israelis certainly played a role in pushing the US toward launching the Iraq War, it was a conflict that did assert Washington’s dominance over the region, further bringing the Arab Gulf States under their control, and was evidently winnable. The consequences of the invasion were not immediate; the American public believed in the new “Islamic enemy” that had replaced the Red Scare narrative sold to populations across the collective West during the Cold War.
The Vietnam War also had the Gulf of Tonkin incident false flag that helped justify the war, while Iraq had the September 11 attacks. The Iran War didn’t even bother to use any incident as an excuse; it was rushed and sloppy.
This time, Iran has managed to use the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as leverage against the US, while Yemen’s Ansar Allah is now tightening the noose by imposing a counter-blockade on Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea. If the Yemeni Armed Forces choose to do so, they can totally block the Bab al-Mandab Strait also, choking off two of the world’s most important trade routes. Iran has demonstrated its ability to continuously pound US military bases and embarrass the US Navy’s attempts to coordinate the passage of ships out of the Gulf.
The US’ military industrial complex is also getting slapped around, as Iran has managed to shoot down at least one F-15 fighter jet, even locking on and striking an F-35 that was forced to do an emergency landing.
US allies in the Gulf, which have pledged to invest trillions in the American economy, are taking an economic beating, with the possibility that some could even be rendered uninhabitable if the war escalates. From power projection to the sale of weapons, seizure of resources, and an image of victory, there is nothing to gain.
Only the Israelis are set to gain anything from this deeply unpopular war. They seek to use the United States military to do their dirty work of degrading Iranian infrastructure and dealing an economic blow to the Islamic Republic. This is because Tel Aviv understands that the job cannot be performed by them alone and that as long as they can take the punishment dished out against them, they are willing to continue using the Trump administration to do their bidding.
Never before has a war of this nature been fought by the United States, where it loses in every category, with the conflict being fought solely for the purpose of fulfilling the expansionist desires of a foreign rogue regime. Donald Trump is not Jimmy Carter or George Bush Jr.; he will be remembered as the president who launched an offensive war of aggression on behalf of a genocidal regime that couldn’t care less how the US and the rest of the world are impacted, as long as they continue to get propped up to forward their goals of creating a regional empire premised on a supremacist ideology.
The Holocaust: Myth and Reality, Overview of the book by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom
BY ANTONY C. BLACK • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 17, 2022
Heresy In the 21st Century
Never in my long journalistic career have I ever hesitated to put pen to paper – until now. Indeed, I have delayed writing this overview of Dr. Kollerstrom’s remarkable book for going on six years.[1] Up until now no subject had been too controversial, too sensitive, too beyond the pale as to warrant more than a passing moment’s consideration of consequences. But this is different. In some sixteen countries in Europe one can be put in prison for doing what I am doing now, or even for expressing ‘holocaust denialism’ on social media. In Germany some fifteen thousand people are tried each year for Thought Crime, i.e., for so-called ‘right-wing extremism’. Here in North America it is somewhat better; one merely risks losing one’s job, friends and family – and possibly being blacklisted as a writer from virtually every venue one might have formerly been associated with. No small potatoes.
Dr. Kollerstrom, himself, stumbled rather more naively into this punitive quagmire in 2008 when, after merely reviewing a scientific paper analyzing samples taken from the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, – a paper authored by one Germar Rudolf, a young scientist working at the time at the Max Planck Institute – he found himself summarily dismissed from his erstwhile position as historian and philosopher of science at University College, London (UCL), “the sole member of staff…ever to have been expelled for ideological reasons”. As he recounts,
“I became ethically damned, thrown out of polite, decent groups, banned from forums and denounced in newspapers…..I felt as if some Mark of Cain had been branded onto my forehead. I had done something so awful that we could not even discuss the matter. The Medieval crime of Heresy was back alive and well…”
Heresy, of course, implicates the notion of taboo, and what a society makes taboo is what it feels to be sacred, and what is sacred is beyond question. When dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, then, we are, Kollerstrom assures us, dealing not with historical science, but, essentially, with a religion; the Holo-religion. And as the author repeatedly points out, “There can be no science where doubt is prohibited.” … continue
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