Israel’s 2026 election is occurring in a highly polarized and incendiary political atmosphere that recalls 1995. Then, the Oslo process had split Israeli society between an increasingly radicalized right and a peace-oriented government. As the incendiary political climate was condoned by the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Labor’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was publicly branded a […]

The fight between Saudi Arabia and Yemen is escalating at a rapid pace. On October 11, the Houthis carried out a major attack on the airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. The strikes killed 12 and injured over 300, in what was the deadliest Houthi attack Saudi Arabia had experienced in more than a […]

Reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi‘s Substack:  On March 9 of this year, roughly ten days into the Iran war, I made the following points on Twitter: Trump is desperately seeking to end the war, but Iran has a vote to, and it won’t allow the war to end quite yet for a few reasons: […]

JD Vance drew anger this week after a CBS News town hall in which he appeared to brush off the Iran War’s operational failures in front of the grieving husband of a soldier killed in March. “Though the Iranian drone was the weapon that killed my wife, there were a lot of mistakes and a […]

Of all of the things that Donald Trump has said publicly since returning to the White House, his threats to annihilate Iran are arguably the worst. This is not only because the repeated statements are deeply immoral and illegal – deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime – but because they represent the kind […]

Republic of Korea (ROK) leaders are having to navigate an increasingly challenging policy course to avoid having their country become entangled in an array of dangerous security problems, both in East Asia and elsewhere in the international system. The most recent example involved Seoul’s actions in Ukraine.  In late September 2026, the Kiev regime transferred […]

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire (1694-1778) A government that claims the authority to kill persons after they have been subdued, disarmed, tried, convicted and confined in prison has made a startling claim about the nature of […]

On 1 October 2026, Jeffrey Isaac Jarquin, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan man, was deported from the United States by ICE and, on arrival in Managua, was immediately sent to prison by Nicaraguan authorities. Reports described him as a “torture victim,” a “political prisoner,” and a “prominent figure in the anti-government protests” that occurred in Nicaragua in […]

This past week, a flock of Israel supporters jetted to Jerusalem to attend this year’s “National Conservative” conference, the project led by Israeli political thinker Yoram Hazony. Days later, the offspring of neoconservatism’s godfather Norm Podhoretz, John, revealed the conceit and deception behind the “National Conservatism” project: “[Yoram Hazony] wants to secure intellectual support in […]

President Donald Trump reignited a fierce debate within the American right on October 10, when he made some aggressive remarks about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Zelensky could’ve settled this war many times,” Trump said. “He chooses not to. Very difficult.” Trump went on, “We said you can do whatever you want to Russia, don’t hit […]

Just after midnight on New Year’s Day 2024, a man and his two children stood near the harbor in the Danish town of Gråsten, watching fireworks over the water a short walk from the house where the children had been living. A witness later told a court in Hamburg that several gray cars had drawn […]

On October 9th, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize Was awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African international lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid political prisoners on Robben Island, and went on to serve as a judge on the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC), then as UN […]

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know; Those past, her nature and name is chang’d; to be Then humble to her is idolatry. ~ John Donne, Satire III Seven activists smashed their way into an engineering plant at Sandwich, Kent, before dawn on 17 June 2024. Instro Precision, the firm there, manufactures targeting gear […]

Reprinted from Andy Worthington’s website. Israel is lost. Every day for the last three years, the decent people of the world — in our untold millions — have been sunk in a pit of moral despair, weeping, having breakdowns or being permanently enraged by the most extraordinarily depraved example of full-spectrum, live-streamed barbarism in our […]

In February 2003, the intelligence that August Hanning’s service had handed to Washington turned up in Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council, in the case for invading Iraq. On the morning of 6 October 2026, masked officers walked Hanning, now eighty, out of his house near Münster in handcuffs, on suspicion of […]

Benjamin Netanyahu likes to translate Israel’s grief into American. At the United Nations last month, he took the dead of October 7 and multiplied them by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s. The 1,200 Israelis killed that day, he said, were “equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 […]

As the midterm election draws near, a number of Republicans in tough races are distancing themselves from President Trump’s war. The war is unpopular because it has inflicted economic pain on the already-suffering American people. No, I am not talking about the Iran War. I am talking about President Trump’s tariff war. The Tax Foundation […]

Treasury Secy Scott Bessent clearly endeavors to be the second Pete Hegseth of Trump World, albeit via packing heat in the form of economic missiles rather than the kinetic kind. In fact, however, his ballyhooed Operation Economic Outcast actually amounts to the greatest windmill tilting operations since Don Quixote himself. So let’s cut to the […]

Reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi‘s Substack:  Michelle Brohard, head of policy and geopolitical risk at Kpler, speculated in a recent interview with energy analyst Rory Johnston (@commoditycontext) that the reason why more crude is getting through the Strait of Hormuz may be because some countries are paying Iran a toll, possibly up to 20% […]

Reprinted from John’s Substack:  The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even […]