If you get your picture of the war in Ukraine from the Institute for the Study of War, you could be forgiven for thinking Russia has spent 2026 standing still. According to reporting on ISW’s latest assessments, Russia’s actual territorial gains this year come to roughly 100 square kilometers, about 40 square miles, or a...

Washington and Israel are talking again about “finishing the job” in Iran. Before they do, someone should take a hard look at the bill for the jobs already done. My friend Karl Miller, who has called this region correctly more often than most of the people paid to do it, sent me his latest assessment...

Saudi Arabia went looking for allies against Ansar Allah, and so far it has gotten statements of support. Egypt has declared its readiness to back the Kingdom, but its statement does not commit to any military involvement. Pakistan and Turkey have pledged troops under the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed in August, but both governments...

For most of the Saudi war in Yemen, Ansar Allah’s ballistic missiles were more political than military. They were noisy and frightening, but rarely decisive. In 2017 the press could fairly report that the group’s missiles were often lightened by reducing their payloads and seldom hit what they were aimed at. Saudi air defenses picked...

Karl Miller’s new report says the Gulf paid for protection it never got, and that it is time to walk away For years the Gulf monarchies have been told that the path to security runs through Washington and Tel Aviv. Sign the Abraham Accords, buy Israeli defense and surveillance technology, invest in the right American...

I’ve had this article sitting in storage waiting for the right moment to publish it. Tonight, Mario Nawfal hosted a debate on Iran that featured Robert Barnes and Matt Tardio. Matt put out so much disinformation and falsities that I believe now is the time to set the record straight about what happened to the...

I am back in NYC at the invitation of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Unlike my previous appearance before the full UN Security Council, this was an Arria session. An Arria-formula meeting is an informal meeting called by one or more Security Council members to hear from people who normally can’t address the...

When the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February, Saudi Arabia had what almost no other Gulf producer had: a way out at scale. The East-West pipeline, known in the industry as Petroline, carries crude 1,200 kilometers across the desert from the oil fields of the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red...

Karl Miller’s new assessment: a seven-to-ten-year rebuild, a trillion-dollar bill, and a diesel crisis that Saudi Arabia can no longer cushion For most of this war, Saudi Arabia has been the shock absorber of the world oil market. When Hormuz closed, Riyadh pushed crude west through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea...

For four years Republicans had a simple message on energy: prices were higher under Joe Biden. It worked. Voters remembered $5 gasoline in the summer of 2022, and Donald Trump promised to bring it down. The war with Iran has turned that argument on its head, and the evidence is in the government’s own price...

On Friday night Donald Trump announced that, after a call with Vladimir Putin, Russia would ship diesel to the United States and world markets. Treasury followed with a temporary general license lifting sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027. The President promised that diesel prices would fall “in record numbers” and “fast.” With the midterms...

Introduction This is a follow-up to my previous piece on the economic effects of the Persian Gulf sulfur and urea cutoff. In that piece I argued that the public conversation about the Strait of Hormuz has fixated on crude oil and ignored the other commodities the Gulf supplies: LNG, urea, sulfur and helium. Having covered...

On the morning of September 30, flydubai flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, left Dubai for Tel Aviv with 174 passengers aboard, 27 of them children. About two and a half hours into the flight, the first officer attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. The aircraft dropped roughly 17,000 feet in one...

For seven months, the coverage of the war with Iran has been about oil: tanker counts, the price of Brent, how much is left in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Hardly anyone outside the fertilizer trade has noticed that the Strait of Hormuz also carries close to half of the world’s seaborne sulfur. Sulfur is not...

The global economic damage caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is generally not understood by most policymakers. Public and policy discussion of the Strait of Hormuz closure has fixated on crude oil: tanker counts, Brent prices, strategic petroleum reserves. That focus is understandable, but it misses much of the damage. The Persian...

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...

Benjamin Netanyahu has a talent for round numbers, and for knowing which audience gets which one. On the night of October 17, 2024, after Israeli soldiers stumbled on Yahya Sinwar in Rafah and killed him, the prime minister recorded two statements. In Hebrew, he called Sinwar the mass murderer “who murdered thousands of Israelis.” In...

Benjamin Netanyahu has a talent for round numbers, and for knowing which audience gets which one. On the night of October 17, 2024, after Israeli soldiers stumbled on Yahya Sinwar in Rafah and killed him, the prime minister recorded two statements. In Hebrew, he called Sinwar the mass murderer “who murdered thousands of Israelis.” In...

Donald Trump would like you to know that the Strait of Hormuz is in tremendous shape. Possibly the best shape in its history. On September 27, he told reporters that “last night, we took a record amount of oil out of the Hormuz Strait, more than we took out before the war.” Three days later...

Con Coughlin’s September 30 column in the Telegraph tells readers that Vladimir Putin’s decision to raise defense spending is a “desperate gamble” that could end with Russia following the Soviet Union into economic collapse. It is a familiar story. Western commentators have been predicting Russia’s economic implosion since the first sanctions packages in 2022. What...