Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Major General Mohsen Rezaei, has dismissed the United States’ partial concessions regarding Tehran’s seven conditions for resolving the ongoing war as “inadequate.”
In a post on X, Rezaei acknowledged that Washington has agreed to some of the conditions outlined by the Islamic Republic, but stressed that the response falls far short of Tehran’s demands.
“Iranian diplomacy has changed, and there will be no return to the status quo ante,” he declared, signaling a fundamental and permanent shift in how Tehran engages with Washington, demanding full compliance rather than incremental or half-hearted concessions.
In a second post, Rezaei eviscerated the US administration’s strategic competence and the origins of the war.
He stated that US President Donald Trump, “deluded by the fantasy of conquering Iran, launched one of the most idiotic wars in human history after being duped by Netanyahu.”
Rezaei then highlighted the humiliating reality of the US military’s inability to achieve its objectives on the battlefield, referencing Washington’s recent attempts to bypass Iranian maritime controls.
“Now, after the US fleet failed to reopen the Hormuz, he has resorted to smuggling,” Rezaei wrote, adding that “the US military has never sunk to such a disgraceful low!”
This rebuke comes against the backdrop of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, which established the framework for halting the US-Israeli war of aggression.
Under the MoU, Washington committed to lifting its illegal naval blockade, releasing frozen Iranian assets, and ceasing all military operations in exchange for a phased normalization of maritime traffic.
Crucially, the agreement stipulated that any resumption of commercial transit through the strait must be coordinated with and approved by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
However, instead of adhering to the agreed-upon framework, US officials have reportedly attempted to force or sneak commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz without coordination with Iranian authorities.
The Iranian Armed Forces have responded decisively to these violations, intercepting unauthorized vessels and enforcing the defensive arrangements established during the war.
Tehran maintains that the Strait of Hormuz will remain under its firm control until the United States fully implements all seven of Iran’s conditions, proving that the era of US hegemonic dictates in the region is permanently over.
Sanaa’s government said it has kept all main roads leading into and out of Taiz open and secure, warning Saudi forces against blocking access to the city and imposing a siege on its residents.
Government spokesperson Omar al-Bukhaiti renewed the warning against continued road closures and attempts to besiege Taiz residents to deepen their suffering and exploit it for media purposes.
Al-Bukhaiti accused the Saudi forces of closing roads and obstructing the movement of civilians and the transport of food, medicine, and other essential supplies, noting that they openly announced, through their own media outlets, the closure of 19 key roads and crossings in Taiz Governorate, while targeting civilian vehicles on roads with airstrikes and artillery shelling.
“We call for keeping densely populated Taiz out of any military escalation, prioritizing the public interest, and preventing further bloodshed,” he asserted.
The statement follows the Sanaa government’s declaration that it is prepared to reach a reciprocal arrangement to spare humanitarian sites amid the ongoing conflict with Saudi Arabia. The government also reiterated its rejection of attempts to impose an occupation.
Meanwhile, the Yemeni Armed Forces have continued to uphold their declared equation of “escalation for escalation and blockade for blockade.”
Yemeni forces renew warning over Saudi airports
The Yemeni Armed Forces also renewed their warning to airlines, passengers, and workers against using Saudi airports and airspace, describing them as a theater of military operations and potential targets.
The warning excluded the airports and airspace of the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
An Iraqi anti-terror resistance group has urged the Saudi leadership to acknowledge the failure of the military option and completely lift the blockade on Yemen.
Kata’ib Hezbollah, in a statement released on Monday, said the operations carried out by Yemeni Armed Forces are in reprisal for Saudi Arabia’s brutal onslaught and siege against their homeland, and in defense of their dignity and fundamental rights.
It noted that Iraqi people from every walk of life and resistance factions stand by Yemen, describing the Yemeni cause as a just cause that requires solidarity and support as it confronts Riyadh’s US-Israeli-backed atrocious assaults.
Kata’ib Hezbollah went on to address the Saudi leadership, particularly Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, calling on them to acknowledge the failure of the military option and completely lift the blockade imposed on Yemeni people.
Continued military and economic pressure will never manage to undermine Yemenis’ determination to safeguard their rights and reject foreign guardianship and interference, the statement read.
Kata’ib Hezbollah highlighted that Iraq will continue to support just aspirations in West Asia, characterizing the causes of Palestine and Yemen as the region’s foremost issues.
On July 20, the Sana’a government announced a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia in response to “an unjust and oppressive siege” on Yemen for almost 12 years.
Subsequently, the Yemeni armed forces have reported a series of successful missions that have targeted vessels associated with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies imposed a blockade on Yemen, initiating a comprehensive military offensive that received support in terms of military, political, and logistical assistance from the United States and several Western countries.
Tens of thousands of Yemenis have lost their lives; however, Saudi Arabia has failed to achieve its primary goal of reestablishing a puppet government that served its interests.
On October 7, 2026, a front-page New York Times headline vaunted “Trump’s Retreat.” It wasn’t referring to Mar-a-Lago or Epstein Island.
The full headline, complete with subhead, reads:
“Trump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back. A war that was intended to demonstrate the reach of American power has now done the opposite. It is a lesson in unintended consequences.”
The “war that was intended to demonstration the reach of American power” was, of course, Trump’s ill-fated attack on Iran that began last February 28. But by publishing the story on October 7, the three-year anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the Times insinuated, intentionally or not, a causal link between Hamas’s heroic 2023 concentration-camp breakout and the collapse of the American empire following Trump’s losing war on Iran.
What the Times did not come right out and say, of course, is that the US has bled itself dry fighting losing wars for Israel, and that the October 7, 2023 provocation set off Israel’s long-planned US war on the last of the “seven countries in five years” that 9/11 was designed to “take out.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Thanks to resistance from the people of the region, and from realists in the US national security sector, Clark’s “seven countries in five years” turned out be be “seven countries in twenty-five years.” And the seventh, Iran, is not being “taken out.” Instead, it is Iran that is “taking out” the US empire.
But it was the Palestinian Resistance, specifically its Al-Aqsa Flood concentration camp breakout, that gave Iran the opportunity to show what it could do. Absent Al-Aqsa Flood, we would be living in a very different world:
* “Normalization” with the abnormal Zionist entity would have continued apace, and the Palestinian cause marginalized.
* US military bases would have continued to permeate and surround the Middle East.
* US naval forces would have continued to swarm unimpeded through the Strait of Hormuz and all over the Persian Gulf.
* The illusion that the US could protect and control Middle Eastern energy supplies would have been maintained.
* Propped up by its Middle Eastern footprint, the US empire’s military juggernaut would have continued to intimidate the world, leading to a gradual drawdown of US political and economic power over the next few decades, rather than the rapid collapse taking place right now.
Robert Kagan, dean of the neocons, has pointed out that without Trump-n’-Yahu’s idiotic attack on Iran last February 28, the US would have continued to successfully deter Iran from taking advantage of its geography and establishing control of the Persian Gulf. That deterrence did not depend on America’s power to defeat Iran and/or keep the Strait open. America had no such power, as we are seeing now. Instead, deterrence worked by creating uncertainty in the minds of Iran’s leaders about what might happen if they aggressively moved to seize control of the Strait. It worked by convincing them that seizing the Strait might cost them their lives. Most importantly, it worked by virtue of the fact that Iran’s leaders, unlike American and Israeli ones, are morally upright and unwilling to engage in acts of aggression.
By attacking Iran, Netanyahu and his blackmailed pedo-slave Trump removed all of Iran’s incentives to remain deterred. First and most importantly, it handed Iran its right of self-defense on the proverbial silver platter. Seizing Hormuz suddenly became a defensive act, not an aggressive one.
By martyring many of Iran’s top leaders, including Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Trump-n’-Yahu also removed the deterrent effect of Iran’s leaders fearing for their lives if they seized the Strait of Hormuz: “If they’re going to try to kill us even if we don’t take over the Strait, what have we got to lose?” Suddenly Iran’s perception of its best path to security radically shifted from “reason, moderation, and accommodation” to “hardline military moves aimed at transforming the regional security equation.”
Clearly, the February 28 attack on Iran was supremely irrational. Every serious analyst knew Iran would respond by seizing control of the Strait. That had been war-gamed thousands of times. And if the US lost hugely to Iran in 2003, according to the Millennium Challenge simulation, how was it going to win in 2026, after Iran had built up a powerful and impregnable drone and missile force?
Netanyahu’s irrationality, like Trump’s, stems from narcissistic hubris. Both leaders are monstrously egotistical. Both see the world through the distorting prism of their own self-serving vanity.
Netanyahu’s personal project, for more than four decades, has been inciting the US to destroy Israel’s regional enemies. Often that incitement has taken the form of reckless acts of false flag terror, as FFWN co-host Wyatt Peterson observed in his recent article “Blood and Terror Flow Wherever Bibi Goes.”
Clearly Netanyahu, and his co-ethnic agents like Paul Wolfowitz, have been frustrated by the slow pace of the US march on Tehran, which should have been taken out “five years” after 9/11. Pushback from American realists, and presidents like Bush and especially Obama who listened to them, has been driving Bibi up the wall ever since 9/11, which Bibi famously said was “very good…for Israel” and should have incited a quick clean sweep of Israel’s regional enemies, most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Decades of frustration at Israel’s inability to unleash a huge regional war—as a cover for accelerating the genocide of Palestine, grabbing territory from neighboring countries, and destroying Iran—led to Netanyahu’s hubristic incitements of October 7, 2023 and February 28, 2026.
In October 2023 Netanyahu got the Hamas attack he wanted, slaughtered his own civilians to raise the body count, and charged madly into his long-desired regional Armageddon. But instead of paving the road to Greater Israel, it has set the stage for a world without Israel:
* Israel has failed to achieve all of its military objectives, including defeating Hamas, freeing hostages militarily, emptying Gaza, emptying the West bank, putting an end to Hezbollah, seizing and settling territory in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies including not just Hezbollah, but also AnsurAllah in Yemen and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq.
* US withdrawal from the region leaves Israel naked, exposed to surrounding nations who view it as an illegitimate settler colony and recklessly expansionist threat, and who will seize every available opportunity to put an end to the genocidal Zionist experiment.
Netanyahu’s grotesquely irrational war, “a lesson in unintended consequences,” stems not just from Bibi’s individual psychopathy, but from the larger psychopathy of the hardline Zionist movement he leads. These people may or may not believe in Yahweh, their Bronze Age tribal god, but they certainly do believe that Yahweh gave them a real estate deed to everything between the Nile and Euphrates more than 2500 years ago, so they are going to try to steal all that land before somebody else does.
The drooling, demented Zionists aren’t thinking strategically. They’re emoting. They’re perpetually driven to hysterics by the thought that somebody somewhere might say something “antisemitic” (meaning critical of Jews or Zionism). They’re endlessly whining about real or imaginary ill-treatment from the goyim, who want them stuffed into gas chambers or driven into the sea, and who kicked them out of every country they’ve ever lived in for no reason at all.
So they feel they have a valid excuse to lie outrageously about Hamas supposedly roasting babies and raping Jewesses, and using such tall tales (along with all the other tall tales from the Torah to the Holocaust) as an excuse to hunt children for sport, train dogs to rape prisoners, and commit the world’s first-ever live streamed genocide.
It is that fundamental irrationality, the product of 2500 years of mental illness “from Yahweh to Zion,” that is driving the US empire to its destruction in West Asia. On the opposite side of the ledger, the sanity, decency, and heroism of the concentration camp prisoners who broke out of their death camp on October 7, 2023—and their brave backers in the Axis of Resistance—has brought down what used to be, just a few years ago, the world’s mightiest empire.
After 23 years, US-led occupation forces are formally leaving Iraq. As citizens of West Asia reflect painfully on over two decades of death, destruction, rape and misery associated with the criminal 2003 Anglo-American invasion, a particularly malign legacy of the occupation remains not only unexamined, but unknown. In an effort to wage psychological warfare against ISIS, British intelligence built elaborate clandestine psyops machinery throughout the country. Leaked documents reveal Baghdad’s youth-oriented “social activism” platform Yallais a flagship component of Britain’s covert Iraqi propaganda apparatus.
Ostensibly launched by young local journalists in 2015, Yalla is one of Baghdad’s largest news and social media platforms, boasting millions of followers within the country and wider region. Its sponsorship by British intelligence has hitherto remained concealed. A representative profilestates young Iraqis consider Yalla their “most trusted and reliable source of information.” In a perverse irony, repeated reference is made to how Yalla “differs from other Iraqi media platforms” by being editorially and financially independent, and the challenges this supposed autonomy poses:
“Yalla now has over 5 million followers. 92% of its followers are inside Iraq and 35% of the followers are women. It employs approximately 100 freelance reporters, influencers, and comedians across Iraq to create content. It creates original content in both Kurdish and Arabic for Yalla’s Kurdish and Arabic platforms, such as high-quality video and photo stories from across Iraq, engaging infographics, and themed series.”
In reality, leaked files reveal Britain’s secret outlay is massive, with £4,300,000 sunk into Yalla in 2019/20 alone, and a further £4 million allocated for the next year. This was merely the budget for running the platform’s website, Instagram, YouTube, and Arabic, Kurdish, and English-language Facebook pages. Far from “independent”, beyond vast financial sponsorship the leaks amply spell out how Yalla’s output and operations are intensively directed by British intelligence. Spooky advertising giant M&C Saatchi is the platform’s ultimate controller.
In submissions to the Foreign Office, M&C Saatchi boasted of its “significant experience…implementing sensitive unattributable programming for government clients.” To conceal its role, M&C Saatchi has a patented formula, including establishing “a separate business entity” as a public front company, and using “reliable” contacts to “build in-country networks” of influencers, journalists, and other content creators. “Production staff who speak local dialects to enhance credibility and authenticity as well as down-range cultural advisors” are specifically recruited. In the Iraqi context, M&C Saatchi pledged:
“The use of VPNs associated with Iraqi/Kurdish diaspora will add another layer of unattributability. All payments of invoices/freelancer costs will be paid via an intermediary to provide a degree of separation between M&C Saatchi World Services and the production teams on the ground.”
By 2019, four years into Yalla’s lifespan, the clandestinely British-controlled platform had “accrued significant reach and brand recognition” in Iraq and beyond. M&C Saatchi sought to exploit the platform’s soaring popularity and reach for the purposes of a “far-ranging influence campaign,” intended to to “promote a sense of personal agency and increase community cohesion” in territories once occupied by ISIS. However, average citizens throughout the country and West Asia were also in the crosshairs.
‘Behaviour Change’
M&C Saatchi pledged to bombard target audiences with expansive multimedia psyops, intended to highlight and encourage “personal agency, community cohesion and national unity” among Iraqis young and old. Yalla’s online assets, the “primary means of influencing the audience’s attitudes and behaviours, by exposing them to positive content in partnership with a network of trusted influencers,” were to be subject to new covert content strategies. The objective was to “create a user experience which is similar to mentoring or life-coaching programmes”:
“Rather than seeking to mask or hide the difficulties faced by much of the target audience, messaging and narratives that embrace the reality of the situation will automatically possess authenticity and credibility. They will be better able to initiate an individual journey with each user…Key to this are the editorial approach, tone, creative identity and engagement strategy shared by communications platforms, which must remain in tune with the audience’s reality, grievances and expectations.”
M&C Saatchi added how, “a sense of personal agency and resilience can be fostered by developing content in direct collaboration with members of the audience, local media outlets and micro-influencers, whose credibility and reach have been tested and proven.” The intelligence cutout pledged to work with “youth psychologists and training experts to develop a range of evergreen modules, each comprising a series of social videos and interactive graphics that live across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and that users can consume at their own pace.”
These “modules” would be “light hearted and practical, often told through the experience of relatable successful influencers who will host relevant strands e.g. ‘10 things I did to become a…’.” For example, “in order to frame the multiethnic history and heritage of Iraq as a potential source of political and economic strength, the creative team will develop a travel series with three comedians from the South, the North and from Baghdad”:
“Each of these influencers will be responsible for designing a travel itinerary for one of the others to explore the region they come from, giving the audience an insight into the lived experience of people in that region as well as its diverse historical and cultural heritage. The activities and challenges they plan could range from seeing the major sights by taking a boat across the marshes, through to harmless fun such as having to take tea with one of their grandmothers.”
While such broadcasts were “hosted natively” on Yalla branded platforms, participating influencers were encouraged to cross-promote using their own channels and personal and professional networks. Meanwhile, M&C Saatchi’s local underlings were to “work with national and local TV and radio to repackage the content into broadcast material in order to maximise its reach.” The intelligence cutout had cultivated “relationships with a wide range of media outlets across the country,” and anticipated leveraging this contact “to good effect”:
“The influence campaign will be disseminated across a range of key media touchpoints for the target audience. These touchpoints will be carefully selected by the media strategy team in order to enjoy the widest reach possible and deliver the messaging where it will be best positioned to drive attitudinal and behaviour change at a personal and social level… The campaign will seek to shape choices, reinforce positive ideas and change social perceptions… [and] place increasing focus on user-generated content as the project evolves.”
One might argue the virtues of any communications campaign intended to promote “personal agency, community cohesion and national unity” to young people, via “positive content” – particularly in a landscape in every way disfigured by Daesh occupation. However, on top of Yalla’s audiences being entirely unwitting about its output being effectively authored by the same elements thatboth mastermindedthe criminal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and actively helped create ISIS, the scope for the platform’s abuse was and remains self-evidently massive.
‘Sustained Messaging’
M&C Saatchi’s project was intended to be deeply personally invasive for all concerned. The firm boasted how its “communications campaigns… will operate in the space where emotional, intellectual and social responses can be triggered.” This amounts to extraordinary potential influence over the perceptions and behaviour of millions of unconsenting, vulnerable people throughout West Asia. Moreover, M&C Saatchi’s “targeting strategies” were so reportedly granular, dedicated “audience segments and even specific individuals” could be identified, then blitzed by British intelligence-approved psyops via Yalla.
The still surgingly popular “independent” news, entertainment and social media platform is just one component of a wide-ranging psychological warfare apparatus secretly constructed by London in Iraq over a decade ago in the name of battling ISIS propaganda, which was never dismantled. Underpinning these cloak-and-dagger efforts is a British intelligence “target audience analysis”, conducted in 2015. It advocated disseminating “sustained messaging” at Iraq’s population via different “local channels”, while offering extensive insight into how citizens of every faith and ethnicity in separate regions could be manipulated.
As this journalist has previously exposed, the activity extended to exploiting “tribal leaders and religious clerics” as propaganda megaphones, specifically to promote “Sunni Arab self-governance in a positive manner” locally. Strikingly, M&C Saatchi also managed the operation. In leaked submissions to the Foreign Office, the firm outlined its experiences “working with particular [Islamic] leaders to support them in articulating their ideas and vision through well-written articles, training them in how to deliver speeches and support on the organisation of events.”
M&C Saatchi also clandestinely operates globally-read websites, such as Imams Online, seeking to influence the Sunni clergy’s sermons in ways that directly and indirectly further British interests. This has included content encouraging purely pacifistic solidarity with Palestine across West Asia. Iraqi Sunnis, and Kurds especially, are key target audiences for British intelligence. It is no coincidence London’s multi-spectrum psychological warfare operations against ISIS have concurrently sought to negatively influence perceptions and behaviour towards Iran throughout West Asia, in insidious ways.
For example, this journalist has previously revealed how “within hours” of Iranian Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s January 2020 assassination, MI6 cutout Global Strategy Network activated its Aleppo-based network of citizen journalists and media production facilities to produce a video depicting residents of Atarib “handing out sweets in celebration.” The clip was “retweeted by prominent activists and journalists in and beyond Syria, picked up by [Saudi outlet] Al-Arabiyya and broadcast to its 22.5 million followers, and retweeted by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.”
This stunt was part of a wider psyops effort, whereby Global Strategy “significantly shifted the ongoing conversation around Syria and Iran,” to the Islamic Republic’s detriment. Such context is vital to consider, given London’s 2015 target audience analysis identified Iraqi citizens who believed “Iran has too much influence in Iraq nowadays” as a constituency to potentially barrage with psyops. Markedly, intensive focus grouping found the overwhelming majority of Iraqis vehemently rejected this view, across ethnic and religious lines.
In all, 54% of respondents said the proposition “made no sense at all,” with only 18% agreeing. However, 68% of Sunnis surveyed, many of them Iraqi Kurds, concurred. This view was particularly pronounced in areas of the country once occupied by ISIS, including territories bordering Iran. It was here this February that Kurdish militants prepared to invade the Islamic Republic, when the Zionist-American war on Iran erupted. Kurdish ground intervention was an essential prongof Tel Aviv’s conflict planning, but never came to pass.
It was possible to mobilise them because, as British intel’s 2015 Target Audience Analysis found, certain Iraqi Kurds believe their country’s borders “should be changed,” and support seizure of Iranian territory by force. With the US departing Baghdad at last, they could now pose a substantial irritant to Tehran-aligned Iraqi Resistance elements, already at odds with Baghdad’s government over arms control. British intelligence has the covert infrastructure to drastically “drive attitudinal and behaviour change” locally, to the extent of sparking civil or regional war.
Yemeni Armed Forces reiterated on Sunday a warning to airlines, aviation personnel, airport workers, and travelers against using Saudi airports and airspace, declaring them potential targets and a theater of military operations, with the exception of airports in Mecca and Medina.
In a statement, Spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree urged all concerned parties to take the warning seriously, holding Saudi Arabia responsible for any attempts to intercept Yemeni operations.
The Yemeni Armed Forces reaffirmed their commitment to pursuing the strategy previously announced as “an airport for an airport, a blockade for a blockade, and escalation for escalation,” vowing to continue until their objectives are achieved.
Earlier on Saturday, Member of Yemen’s Ansarullah Politburo Mohammad Al-Bakhiti warned that Saudi regime plots to target holy sites in Mecca and Medina and to blame Yemen for attacks.
In exclusive remarks to Al-Manar on Friday, Al-Bakhiti revealed that Riyadh had supplied Saudi-backed mercenaries in Yemen with missiles and drones to carry out attacks and blame them on Yemeni Armed Forces.
Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, says powers greater than the US have tried to conquer Iran but ultimately ended up in the “dustbin of history.”
During an exclusive interview with Press TV on Saturday, Rezaei said the “US suffered repeated defeats in its confrontation with Iran and has consequently turned to economic warfare out of desperation.”
Iran, rather than the US, would determine when the confrontation ends, he said, stressing that Tehran would continue its resistance until its rightful demands are met.
Addressing the presence of US forces in the region, Rezaei told Press TV that the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq reflected Washington’s failure to impose its military agenda on the region, describing it as a vindication of Iran’s resistance to American military presence in West Asia.
Rezaei further said that more than “30 million Iranians have registered in ‘Janfada’ (Sacrifice for Iran) Campaign to take up arms in the event of US aggression.”
On diplomacy, the official said “Tehran would not return to its previous diplomatic norms,” while stressing that “Iran would never abandon diplomacy altogether.”
The senior official warned that, if Washington launched another act of aggression against Iran, American assets could be targeted, including key data systems and artificial intelligence sensors.
Rezaei also identified Washington and its regional allies as the root of the problem surrounding the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to the latest round of US-Israeli aggression, preventing US and allied ships from navigating the strategic waterway.
The move resulted in a significant increase in oil and energy prices across the globe, especially in the US, forcing Washington and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to release their strategic resources several times.
Following the signing of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Iran and the US in June, Tehran opened the Strait of Hormuz, but after the US violated the MoU by blockading Iranian ports, Iran’s Armed Forces closed the maritime corridor once again.
In the classic martial arts film Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee’s character is instructing a young, aspiring fighter. Irritated at the lack of progress his student is making, he points to the sky. “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon,” he says as the student tries to focus on what his teacher is saying. “Don’t concentrate on the finger,” Lee says, slapping him on the head, “or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” The quote is derived from an old Buddhist text called the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, and the point is clear: Sometimes if you focus on what is immediately in front of you, you can miss the point entirely.
Something like this is happening in Washington, DC, right now. For almost two weeks, the debate around the progress or lack thereof in the Iran War has been focused on activity in the Strait of Hormuz. A whole host of maritime experts have emerged suddenly to inform us that the Trump administration has succeeded in reopening the crucial waterway to shipping. Maximalists are claiming that this means the United States has effectively won the war in the Middle East. Others are making the more modest claim that this reopening of the Strait will solve the looming energy crisis.
These were the two perspectives that most people who were not deeply involved in the debate heard. There was, however, a small but vocal minority who questioned whether the Strait had been opened at all. If Iran had effective fire control over the Strait in spring and summer, they asked, then why would they suddenly lose it now? Almost immediately after this question was raised, Iran settled the debate by striking an enormous number of ships: 12 and counting in less than a week.
To those of us who were paying attention, the whole exercise felt like looking at Lee’s finger as he points to the moon. As these debates unfolded, the market for U.S. Treasury debt continued an epic sell-off. Bloomberg quoted an investment banker who stated that Treasuries were “trading like a meme stock.” U.S. Treasury bonds have now experienced their worst long-run returns in history.
Treasury bonds are not just any old asset. For one, they are the debt of the U.S. government. If they become uninvestable, the capacity for Washington to live beyond its means through debt issuance is open to question. Treasuries are also the benchmark asset for the entire global dollar system that has allowed the U.S. to run enormous deficits for decades. If this asset starts “trading like a meme stock” and generating awful returns, foreigners will opt for something else. This week, the president of the German central bank stated that “the case for further diversification into gold remains significant.” People are talking.
In mid-September, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, posted an equation on X. Unusually for an obscure piece of algebra, the post garnered nearly 7 million views. The equation was a modified version of what economists call the “Taylor Rule,” a method that economists and central bankers use when setting central bank interest rates. In normal times, the equation factors in expected future inflation and how much slack is in the economy. But Ghalibaf’s equation—which he called the “Straits Taylor Rule” —included two new variables: the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, the two waterways currently under fire from Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, respectively.
The equation is a stripped-down representation of Iran’s strategy. By controlling these waterways, Iran and its allied groups have gained control over the global energy market. By squeezing these chokepoints, Iran can assert de facto control over America’s financial markets by pushing up expected inflation. Central banks like the Federal Reserve realize that this is no mere bluff and have already started raising interest rates. Ghalibaf’s equation explains, to a very large extent, why American government debt is currently trading like a meme stock.
Meanwhile, at the same time as these pressures are felt in American financial markets, the real economy is undergoing a squeeze too. Recent reports from the Energy Information Agency suggest that American heating-oil bills are expected to rise by 21 percent this winter. Diesel markets are entering into a genuine crisis, with President Donald Trump floating the prospect of banning diesel exports to ensure that there are no shortages. Diesel is the lifeblood of the American logistics chain. If there are shortages, trains and trucks will not run and goods will not be delivered to shelves. Trump has walked back the diesel export ban for now, after strong-arming the Europeans to dump their oil and diesel reserves, but there is every chance that this option appears back on the table as the crisis worsens. Food prices are rising too, with sugar prices looking particularly worrisome.
Once again, Ghalibaf outlined how this is part of Iran’s overall strategy. In an X post this week, the speaker published a rudimentary graph—coupled with a haunting image of a ghost—showing rising commodity prices and interest rates on one side, and falling consumer confidence, foreign interest in U.S. Treasuries, hyperscaler investment, and housing affordability on the other. The Iranians are not just trying to squeeze the American financial system—they are aiming to put extreme stress on the entire economy—and it looks increasingly like they intend on making this pressure felt before American voters go to the polls on November 3.
The Trump administration has become fixated on the Strait of Hormuz, seeing it as a decisive battlefield on which the U.S. can win the war. But the Strait is merely a means to an end. For Iran, that end is to slowly demolish the American economy and financial system until the pressure becomes too much and the U.S. backs off. The idea that you can “win” such a battle is delusional.
The Strait is merely the finger in Lee’s analogy. It is Iran’s overall economic strategy—the moon—that we should focus on. And when we do, we come to the worrying conclusion that by the time the Trump administration cries uncle, the damage done to the American economy and financial system will be so severe that it could take many, many years to recover.
In the early hours of October 5, Saudi-backed mercenaries launched an offensive along Yemen’s southwestern coastal road toward Dhubab, which overlooks the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
By evening, their affiliated media networks were proclaiming Dhubab’s fall. Hours later, they falsely claimed to have captured Al-Mokha as well.
Within a single day of operations, the Yemeni military forces had encircled the incursion, recaptured the ground, and released timestamped footage showing their troops standing undisturbed along the Bab al-Mandeb coastline.
Meanwhile, local residents openly ridiculed the reported advance of the Saudi mercenaries.
The attacking forces retreated to their original positions. The events along that coastal road – the assault, the media triumphalism, the rapid military reversal, and the collapse of the narrative – offer a revealing case study of how information warfare has become structurally embedded in Saudi Arabia’s disastrous military campaign in Yemen.
The Pressure Behind the Push
To understand the events of October 5, it is necessary to examine the developments that preceded them. Yemeni military had been consolidating significant territorial gains across southern and southwestern Taiz province – not marginal advances, but the seizure of areas spanning thousands of square kilometers.
The encirclement of Taiz city was tightening along its northern and eastern approaches, applying deliberate strategic pressure that could pave the way for a handover of the city from the Saudi-backed mercenary factions holding it.
More symbolically damaging still, the residence of Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Saudi-backed so-called Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), had fallen.
The Saudi-led coalition and its local allies were rapidly losing ground. An operation that could be portrayed as a decisive advance toward the Bab al-Mandeb Strait would offer PLC forces a much-needed military and propaganda victory.
The Bab al-Mandeb is precisely the kind of strategic objective whose association with a military operation can generate outsized media attention, regardless of what the operation actually achieves on the ground.
The attacking forces
The offensive was led by two formations: the Southern Giants Brigades (Al-Amaliqa al-Janubiyya) and the Dira’ al-Watan (Shield of the Nation) Brigades, supplemented by approximately 100 Saudi mercenary fighters, according to Saudi-affiliated media.
Both formations have histories that complicate their portrayal as straightforward Yemeni forces operating under the so-called Presidential Leadership Council (PLC). The Giants Brigades are a Salafi-oriented southern force whose origins are firmly rooted in Emirati patronage. Armed, trained, and financed by Abu Dhabi, they were institutionally shaped as part of the UAE’s parallel military architecture in Yemen – a network of forces, including separatist formations, that operated with considerable autonomy from the Saudi-led coalition’s command structure.
Their nominal realignment under the PLC framework following the UAE’s partial strategic withdrawal from the Yemeni theater has not necessarily erased the command relationships, patronage networks, or ideological orientation established during their formative years.
They remain among the coalition’s most combat-capable formations, but their relationship with the PLC is better understood through overlapping interests and patronage ties than through assumptions of unified institutional loyalty.
Dira’ al-Watan, by contrast, operates with a more direct orientation toward Riyadh, functioning closer to Saudi Arabia’s traditional mercenary structure in Yemen. The deployment of both formations along a single coastal axis, accompanied by a contingent of Saudi mercenaries, suggests a deliberately assembled force package rather than an improvised advance.
The media apparatus accompanying the operation, as we shall see, reinforces this interpretation.
The assault itself
The attacking forces advanced along the coastal road south of Al-Mokha toward Dhubab district. The coastal approach traverses relatively open terrain, and accounts of the local military disposition suggest that the Yemeni military’s forward garrison presence in the immediate coastal zone was limited. The defensive logic, under such conditions, favors concentrating forces at defensible chokepoints in the adjacent highlands rather than maintaining a thin, linear deployment across exposed ground.
Yet despite heavy Saudi supporting fire, the advancing forces failed to push beyond the outer perimeter of Dhubab along the coastal road. They reached the perimeter of Dhubab airport but did not enter Dhubab city.
At the airport perimeter, invading forces filmed themselves running over wounded members of the small Yemeni military garrison. The footage, subsequently circulated through pro-Saudi Telegram channels, appeared to have been published by the mercenaries themselves as evidence of momentum and fighting spirit.
Instead, it documented abuses against combatants in an isolated position, including the mutilation of dead bodies, turning apparent battlefield content into evidence of conduct that warrants independent human rights scrutiny.
The footage also carried a consequence beyond its grave humanitarian implications. Militarily, it documented a localized engagement against an isolated position—not a breakthrough along the coastal axis. The distinction would become critical within hours, as the broader operation stalled and the coalition’s claims of progress began to unravel. Material intended to project battlefield momentum would instead complicate the narrative surrounding an offensive whose advertised scale and strategic significance far exceeded its demonstrated territorial gains.
The encirclement and the reversal
Field sources report that within hours of the attacking force reaching the coastal road’s edge, Sana’a forces had encircled the limited area of the incursion and begun pressing to retake the ground. The timeline is critical. This was not a gradual reversal unfolding over several days. The encirclement and counterattack took place within the same operational day as the advance.
The reversal has a clear geographic dimension. Yemeni military, led by the Ansarullah movement, controls the Al-Omari mountain range and the Al-Omari base, situated east of Al-Mokha and west of Taiz. This elevated terrain offers observation over much of the coastal corridor and positions from which movement along the coastal road can be interdicted.
Any force advancing along the coast without first neutralizing Al-Omari risks operating under persistent observation, with its flanks and supply lines exposed to forces holding the dominant heights. The attacking force did not capture Al-Omari. Nor was it positioned to do so: securing the mountain range and its associated base would have required a substantially larger and more complex operation than the one assembled for the coastal advance.
At the same time as the encirclement was developing on the ground, Yemeni military forces launched missile and drone strikes against concentrations of Al-Amaliqa and Dira’ al-Watan personnel in the Ras al-Ara area. Field sources report casualties among the brigades’ ranks and the destruction of several military vehicles.
Crucially, Saudi-affiliated media correspondents were embedded with the attacking force when these strikes occurred. Some were recorded in real time on the scene. The media apparatus deployed to document a military triumph was thus capturing a very different story: an operation losing momentum under pressure, with its setbacks unfolding before the cameras intended to celebrate its success.
The media campaign
Saudi-affiliated news outlets began publishing accounts of Dhubab’s fall before any territorial gain had been consolidated on the ground. The claims escalated through the day: from entry into the airport perimeter, to control of Dhubab district, to the fall of Dhubab city, to the reported fall of Al-Mokha as well.
The maximum extent of the Saudi-backed advance against the Yemeni military was the perimeter of Dhubab airport. Located outside the district’s urban center, the airport lies on open, flat terrain adjacent to the coastal road.
Reaching its perimeter, as the attacking forces did, is materially different from establishing control over Dhubab district or the Bab al-Mandeb coastline – a distinction that Saudi-affiliated media systematically obscured in their October 5 coverage.
Sana’a’s counter-messaging response was swift. Its forces released footage showing their deployment along the Bab al-Mandeb coast and east of Al-Mokha, imagery that directly challenged claims of a lost coastline. By the time Saudi-affiliated sources began denying or walking back their claims about Al-Mokha, the damage to their credibility had already been done.
Escalation Deep Inside Saudi Arabia
Yemeni military response to the October 5 offensive extended beyond the immediate Yemeni battlefield. In a series of operations that Yemeni military officials had signaled in prior public announcements, strikes reportedly targeted military and economic facilities deep inside Saudi Arabia, including in Khamis Mushait, Riyadh, and Jeddah.
The East–West Pipeline was struck again, significantly disrupting operations. Air traffic at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah was suspended, marking another interruption to airport operations. Saudi refineries also came under separate attacks, with impacts on Aramco facilities raising the prospect of suspended refining operations and associated financial losses. The full extent of the damage, operational disruption, and economic costs are reported to be high.
Taken together, these operations widened the confrontation beyond the coastal front in Yemen, bringing Saudi military infrastructure, energy assets, and civil aviation into the broader picture.
Sana’a also formally announced the imposition of a no-fly zone over Saudi airspace. The Humanitarian Operations Coordination Center issued notices advising airlines to avoid the area, presenting the declaration as a reciprocal measure in response to intensified Saudi airstrikes against Yemeni population centers.
Regardless of its practical enforceability, the declaration carried political significance: it sought to portray Saudi airspace as a contested domain rather than an uncontested sanctuary.
It also introduced another variable into the risk calculations of third-party commercial operators, whose decisions on flight routing, insurance coverage, and overflight costs could create additional economic and political pressure on Riyadh.
The structural problem of Saudi Arabia’s military posture in Yemen
The October 5 operation failed to achieve its territorial objectives. The attacking force did not capture Dhubab, establish control over the Bab al-Mandeb coastline, or retain the ground it had temporarily entered. Within a single operational day, it had retreated to its starting positions.
The accompanying media campaign faltered alongside the military advance. The speed of the reversal was central to that failure. When a narrative collapses within the same news cycle in which it is constructed, and footage contradicting the initial claims circulates through the same information environment, the result is not simply a return to the status quo. It can produce a net loss of credibility.
In this case, the gap between the territory reportedly reached and the territory claimed exposed the central vulnerability of the messaging strategy – the declaration of victory preceded the establishment of durable control.
Once the advance stalled and the attacking forces withdrew, the initial claims became liabilities, leaving subsequent clarifications and retractions to compete with the very footage that had been intended to demonstrate success.
But the October 5 episode also illuminates a structural constraint extending well beyond a single failed operation. The Saudi-led coalition’s military options appear increasingly constrained as it struggles to reverse the Yemeni military’s territorial advances despite its substantial advantages in funding, equipment, and external support.
The pattern raises serious questions about the mercenary coalition’s ability to translate material superiority into sustained battlefield gains against a force whose strategic planning, local positioning, and combat motivation have repeatedly complicated its opponents’ campaigns. Meanwhile, reports of precision strikes against critical targets inside Saudi Arabia underscore the continuing challenge of protecting the Kingdom’s strategic infrastructure and deterring retaliatory attacks on its territory.
The Saudi-backed war on Yemen is far from resolved. Taiz remains a central point of military pressure, with the encirclement shaping the strategic calculations of the forces holding the city.
Ma’rib remains a key, and renewed fighting is a possibility in the weeks ahead. Saudi infrastructure continues to face the threat of further long-range attacks, while the operational and economic consequences of strikes require careful assessment.
The October 5 episode, meanwhile, demonstrated the limits of projecting territorial control through media messaging before that control has been secured on the ground.
For Saudi Arabia’s media apparatus, the consequences extend beyond one news cycle. Credibility cannot be restored through messaging alone; it depends on the consistency between public claims and verifiable battlefield developments.
Any subsequent operation will be judged not only by the territory it gains, but also by the gap, or alignment, between what its accompanying media campaign promises and what the evidence ultimately shows.
The battle for Yemen continues. The Bab al-Mandeb remains a strategic focal point, and the struggle to shape both the battlefield and the narrative surrounding it is far from over.
MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin conveyed to US President Donald Trump, in coordination with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s vision on a possible resolution of the conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday.
Putin, during communication on the sidelines of the summit in Turkmenistan, held two meetings with Pezeshkian, at one of which he informed the Iranian president about the upcoming telephone conversation with the US president, the Kremlin spokesman noted.
“And then, in coordination with the Iranian president, Putin conveyed to Trump Iran’s vision on a possible resolution of the conflict,” Peskov said.
During a conversation with Trump, Putin showed understanding regarding some proposals of the US leader aimed at de-escalating the conflict in Ukraine, Peskov said.
At the initiative of Trump, most of the time in the telephone conversation between the leaders, which took place the previous evening, was devoted specifically to the Ukrainian settlement, Peskov added.
It was another horrific week in Washington with President Donald Trump actually succeeding in coming out with an apparently improvised comment that equaled or maybe even exceeded his ghastly performance at the United Nations where he speculated over whether he should “annihilate” Iran and drive it back into the Stone Age. It would seem that ninety plus million dead Persians would satisfy Donald’s blood lust when it comes to killing innocent civilians, but the latest musing by our beloved leader had him addressing a campaign rally in Nebraska, where he appeared to be declaring that he might well consider wanting to continue the war against Iran even if the price to pay from the Iranians were to be retaliation consisting of eliminating some of our cities. He said “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe, and it’s going to be over with very soon. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego.”
Trump clearly saw the whole thing as some kind of quid pro quo expecting that even Californians would consider the price to pay worth it if it kept Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon but he failed to make any reasonable connection between the nonexistent weapon and the good to come out of annihilation of millions of Americans. The irony is, of course, that since Iran has no nukes and nor is it even developing that resource, a point generally made by US intelligence, it could not in any event destroy either or both of the West Coast cities. But then again, Trump is not given much to deep thinking and what he tends to say is what is roiling around among the three brain cells that might actually be functioning in his oversize head at any moment.
Interestingly, the video recording the gathering shows the Nebraska crowd of MAGA supporters cheering the exchange, seemingly unaware that the war never needed to be fought, that Iran was not and is not any military threat to the United States, and that the whole bloody thing could be ended by Trump repeating his frequent declaration of “victory” before ordering all the troops home and putting an end to it. That way no one “loses” and no more innocents have to die but somehow that does not appear to be an option circulating in the White House.
In the wake of the comment, both California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and San Diego Republican Mayor Todd Gloria called out President Trump for his willingness to see Americans die in large numbers due to bad policies coming out of Washington. Newsom wrote on social media how “After sending the National Guard to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Gloria added “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”
The White House inevitably pushed back in support of Trump’s comments, with communications director Steven Cheung writing on social media how “The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.” Interestingly, Trump’s communications director, who interpreted the comment backwards by claiming falsely that the president had “stopped” an Iranian nuke, was incapable of understanding what Trump actually said and instead invented what he might have been wanting to say. All of which explains why the White House is as dysfunctional as it is.
Beyond that, something at least veering towards a bit of constructive policy did take place on September 30th when the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Iraq, which it has been de facto occupying for the past 23 years. The withdrawal, which took place after multiple requests by the Iraqi government, appears to be due to the desire to move US troops out of the effective range of some of the Iranian short range-missiles and drones which could easily reach Iraq. The soldiers and airmen will be moving to next door Jordan which means they will still be near enough to intervene if the Iraqis become naughty and do anything that is not perceived as being in American “interests.”
Some will recall that back in January 2020, then President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qasim Soleimani who had just landed in Baghdad Airport to join in peace talks between his country and the Iraqis. Peace talks are not the sort of thing that Trumpists are good at, particularly if they involve actual or potential enemies of Israel, so Soleimani had to be stopped. The Iraqis are certainly aware that the departure of US soldiers does not mean an end to American intervention, which can indeed be at the point of a gun but which might also be through sanctions and other less kinetic means.
All of which is to suggest that the game is not over yet and Trump is quite capable of doing something very stupid in an attempt to salvage whatever remains from his reputation. What is behind a lot of this nonsense is the evil circle involving Trump himself and his good friends in Israel. Make no mistake that Israel is dedicated to becoming “Greater Israel” while also eliminating its potential enemies in Asia and Africa. And, unlike Iran, it is actually nuclear armed thanks to the material and technology that it stole from the United States before killing President John F Kennedy who tried to stop them. And the witless Donald will do everything in his power to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be reelected, be it because he is being blackmailed or because he loves the man so much. Be that as it may, Trump will cooperate fully with Netanyahu or whoever succeeds him, no matter what. So too will there be the usual consensus on doing everything to please the Jewish state coming from the usual crowd of Israel firsters in Congress, in the mainstream media and among the Foundations that have come to rely on the money and “respect” that comes from inhabiting the same space as those who are beloved by Zion.
For those who are not yet aware of just how deeply the Zionist activists have inserted themselves in the body politic, I would greatly recommend an article put out by the highly respectable Quincy Institute that just appeared this past week written by Kelley Vlahos, the Editor in Chief of Responsible Statecraft. It provides the sordid details of how the Israel Lobby backed up by Jewish billionaires has been able to create and then subvert a conservative movement that originally appeared to support American interests to make them instead do Israel’s bidding. She describes how “The annual confab, [NatCon 2026] ostensibly launched for American conservatives in 2019, is in Jerusalem this week, largely focused on shoring up US support for the Jewish state.” If Israel is successful, it will bring about a proposed US-Israeli integration at the Pentagon and take its place as a “partner” of the United States in defense matters as well as in foreign policy. Make no mistake, Israel will bleed us dry and then discard our carcass without even a backward glance. It will be the end of our country. President Donald J Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have done much to move this process along and it is to them and the cowards in Congress and the media that we the owe the deep hole that we as a once-upon-a-time proud and independent people will soon find ourselves in.
A US and Syrian official said Syria is considering sending troops to Saudi Arabia as the kingdom battles Ansar Allah in Yemen.
Reuters reported on Thursday that a US official and a Syrian defense official said that Damascus may send Syrian forces to Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has reached out to several allies for support in its war against Ansar Allah.
On Monday, Turkey and Pakistan agreed to provide military support to Saudi Arabia under the Mecca Accords, a mutual defense pact signed by the three countries earlier this year.
A joint statement released by the Mecca Accords members explained, “The Committee decided to move immediately to the practical implementation of the collective defense commitments and to take the necessary measures to provide the agreed military forces and capabilities and ensure their rapid deployment in the Kingdom, in accordance with the approved arrangements and the national legislation of the Parties, thereby enhancing readiness, military integration, and the collective capacity to confront and counter threats.”
Turkey indicated it would provide Saudi Arabia with military capabilities rather than ground troops, which would require parliamentary approval, while Pakistan did not provide details on the forces or capabilities it plans to deploy.
The statement was released following an emergency meeting of the alliance to discuss the situation in Saudi Arabia. The fighting between Ansar Allah and Saudi Arabia reignited in July after the kingdom attacked the Sanaa airport. In recent weeks, Ansar Allah has taken a significant amount of territory from the Saudi-backed forces in Yemen and attacked several energy sites in Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh has reached out to international partners for support. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman requested that President Donald Trump order direct attacks on Ansar Allah positions. So far, Trump has limited US involvement to intelligence sharing and battlefield planning, and refused to conduct direct strikes on Ansar Allah.
Saudi Arabia has also asked China and Pakistan to place pressure on Iran to rein in Ansar Allah. According to three Iranian sources speaking with Reuters, Beijing privately asked Tehran to rein in Ansar Allah after receiving a request from Riyadh. The sources told the outlet that Iran responded that stability in the region depended on US and Israeli aggression.
While Saudi Arabia’s ties to the US and Ansar Allah’s relationship with Tehran allow the war between the two to appear to be a part of a larger regional war, the conflict began over a decade ago. Additionally, Ansar Allah did not begin its offensive following the US and Israeli surprise attack on Iran, but rather after Saudi-backed forces attacked the Sanaa airport, prompting Ansar Allah to resume attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Western officials and media often label Ansar Allah as a proxy of Iran. However, while Iran has provided support to Ansar Allah, there is little public evidence that Tehran directs the group’s military operations.
While Syria was a long-time [resistance] ally under the rule of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Damascus fell to rebels, led by former al-Qaeda members, in 2024. Syria is now led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who previously led al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has dismissed claims by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Tehran has repeatedly squandered chances for an agreement, saying the inversion of historical facts cannot erase Washington’s pattern of treaty-breaking from public memory.
Baghaei, responding to an IRNA question on Rubio’s assertion that “Iran has missed opportunities for an agreement multiple times,” stated on Wednesday, “The inversion of historical truths cannot remove the reality of America’s repeated breaches of commitment from the mind of public opinion.”
He pointed to Washington’s successive acts of bad faith, including its unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, the sabotage of diplomatic tracks, military aggression against Iran while negotiations were underway, and the subsequent violation of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding Iran reached on June 18.
Baghaei held the United States responsible for the insecurity prevailing in the region and for the economic consequences felt in America and worldwide.
“Blame-shifting and contradictory statements cannot overshadow the demand of American and global public opinion that those responsible for the illegal war and the crimes committed be held to account,” he said.
On the latest developments in contacts with the United States, the spokesman said the Islamic Republic’s considerations and conditions for ending the imposed war on all fronts and restoring security to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz have been set out explicitly and decisively.
The necessary response to the other side’s proposals will be conveyed through intermediaries. “The exchange of messages between Iran and the US is being conducted through intermediaries,” he added.
On diplomatic efforts related to regional peace and security, including commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Baghaei stressed that the security of navigation in the waterway matters more to the Islamic Republic of Iran than to any other party. Iran, in consultation with Oman as the other littoral state, has spared no effort to restore security to the Strait.
“The consultation process between Iran and Oman has proceeded successfully. In addition to agreeing on the geographical coordinates of safe two-way routes in the Strait of Hormuz, the two sides have reached an understanding on how the matter will be presented to the relevant international body, a step that will, God willing, be taken soon,” he said.
Asked about the possibility of a joint meeting involving Iran, Oman, and other Persian Gulf states, Baghaei said Iran will continue its efforts to strengthen trust and engagement among the region’s countries.
“Defenders of the homeland, in both the diplomatic arena and the field, stand shoulder to shoulder, resolute and steadfast in defending Iran’s sovereignty and securing the nation’s interests and security,” he concluded.
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and Professor Mohammad Marandi said that Yemen holds the upper hand in its war with Saudi Arabia, and that neither Turkey nor Pakistan is likely to change that by sending forces to the kingdom’s aid.
Speaking on Al Mayadeen’s The Grand Standoff: Iran and the World on Tuesday, both guests also noted that Tehran is working on the assumption that the US will restart its war on Iran, while Johnson argued that Washington has less capacity to carry one out than its rhetoric suggests.
Yemen advances as Saudi-backed forces falter
Marandi said that the past weeks have shown a one-sided war. He stated that the Saudi camp’s claims that it could retake significant territory proved to be empty talk, as Yemeni forces, led by Ansar Allah and the Yemeni government, kept moving forward. “The liberation of Taiz is near,” he said.
Johnson stressed that Yemen “has every advantage in this war.” He put Saudi Arabia’s dependable fighting strength at about 75,000 soldiers, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) at another 100,000, and the Yemeni Armed Forces’ at 350,000. He described the Saudi army as “basically a group of mercenaries,” while Yemeni fighters have the motivation of defending their own land.
Johnson highlighted that the PLC’s latest offensive showed a lack of military competence. “Successful military attacks are usually not announced in advance, they usually prefer not to give the opposing side a heads up about what you’re going to do,” he said, noting that this one was announced beforehand. He added that the PLC launched it “even without what’s called close air support.”
Saudi aircraft carried out a number of bombing runs along the front lines, Johnson said, “but they were not coordinated.” He explained that “normally you want somebody on the front lines who can actually be in communication with the pilots or with the air controllers, the combat air controllers, to identify specifically along the front lines where bombs need to be dropped.”
“What we’ve seen is that [the Yemeni Armed Forces] operate at a more sophisticated level,” he said. He rejected the Western line that this is Iran’s doing. “Contrary to Western propaganda that this is all just the work of Iran, this is not the work of Iran,” he said. “Anybody that’s had any dealings at all with the Houthis knows that they are quite independent.” He said the movement sees Iran as a friend, but “they don’t let Iran dictate its choices or what it does.”
Johnson added that he believes Saudi Arabia attacked Sanaa after the funeral of Sayyed Ali Khamenei because the US encouraged it. He explained that Washington wrongly saw Yemen as a paper tiger, and described its approach to West Asia as “a combination of ignorance and arrogance.”
Turkey, Pakistan face a logistical nightmare
Both guests dismissed the idea of a Turkish or Pakistani deployment. Johnson said the announcement that Turkey and Pakistan would effectively declare war on Yemen “was laughable.”
He clarified that air power would not solve the problem either. “Dropping bombs without effective ground controllers is just, it’s a waste of bombs,” Johnson said. “It’s just punching holes in landscape without accomplishing anything.” He called the announcement “more Western hype” that “speaks to the desperation of the Saudis,” adding, “I don’t see Turkey or Pakistan intervening in any significant way.”
Marandi said he does not know whether Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad have even decided to send forces. “It’s possible,” he said. “But as Larry said, this would be a logistical nightmare, and the cost would be extraordinary. And even troop movements inside Saudi Arabia would not be easy.”
He stated that neither country has the capacity. “Pakistan, of course, its military is on the border with India, and they have very bad relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan,” Marandi said, adding that Turkey has difficult relations with almost all of its neighbors. “The armed forces of Pakistan and Turkey are not designed for such mass movements of troops.”
Marandi asserted that Turkey and Pakistan are also harming themselves by letting the narrative spread that they stand with Saudi Arabia. “Turkey and Pakistan are not doing themselves any favors by pushing or allowing this narrative to be pushed that they are on the side of Saudi Arabia,” he said. He pointed to their stance on Gaza, which he said made them popular across the region. “They’ve become heroes across the region,” he said, and “it’s clear that their sympathies lie with [Ansar Allah].”
Saudi Arabia exposed on oil, infrastructure
“The Saudis are in real trouble,” Johnson said. He said the East-West oil pipeline is down and that reports of oil getting through, including through the Strait of Hormuz, are false. “They have lots of infrastructure that can be targeted and is being targeted by Ansar Allah,” he noted, while “Ansar Allah doesn’t sit there with an abundance of infrastructure that can be targeted by the Saudis or the Western helpers.” His conclusion was that “Yemen holds the upper hand.”
Marandi pointed to the weight of the kingdom’s finances. “The Saudis have nothing but their oil exports and their oil industry to sustain themselves, and it is a country that has very high costs,” he stressed. “The government spends a lot of money, so the economy is doing very poorly.” He warned that “the longer this war lasts, the more Saudi infrastructure will be destroyed.”
Marandi argued that the way out is obvious. “The smart thing to do would be for Saudi Arabia to end this war, to do a deal with the people of Yemen, and to lift the siege, and to recognize the government, and stop interfering in Yemen’s internal affairs,” he said. “But Mohammed bin Salman is not the wisest of leaders, to say the least.” He compared the crown prince to Trump. “I think both are very arrogant, neither are wise, and the people around them are yes-men,” he asserted. “Otherwise the Saudis would have ended this by now.”
Johnson put the responsibility on Riyadh. “This is a fight that the Saudis chose to initiate,” he insisted, adding that Ansar Allah “was content to live side by side with the Saudis” and “abiding by the ceasefire” until the Saudis broke it. For Johnson, the kingdom now has a single option. “The choice is settle, make peace with Yemen, or risk the absolute destruction of the government and the country of Saudi Arabia.”
Tehran plans for a renewed US war on Iran
Marandi told the program that Tehran is planning around the assumption that Trump will restart the war. “I’m not saying that war is inevitable, but the working assumption is definitely that we’re going to have war,” he stated. Iran “has been preparing itself for a major confrontation, a very heavy war that would take perhaps weeks,” he noted, and it has warned US-aligned countries that helped Washington that “this time around the Iranian response will be much more devastating for them as well.”
He detailed upgrades to Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, improved air defenses, expanded underground bases and strengthened command and control meant to protect its leaders from targeted strikes. The remaining question, he argued, is timing. “Will there be conflict before Netanyahu’s election, or between the two elections, or after the US midterm elections? That is basically the real question.”
Marandi also pointed to deepening energy shortages. “Trump can pretend that the Strait of Hormuz is open and that more oil is getting through than ever before,” he said. “But the reality is that that’s not the case. The shortages are accumulating.”
Flows reached 11 to 12 million barrels a day for a couple of weeks, when Iran avoided escalation around President Masoud Pezeshkian’s planned US trip, but even then they fell short of demand. Shortages of diesel, gasoline, helium, sulfur and LNG are growing faster than the oil shortage, he explained.
He questioned why Trump keeps threatening to wipe out Iran if, as Trump has claimed for over seven months, the country is already defeated. “I don’t think anyone in Iran takes him seriously anymore,” Marandi added.
Johnson points to limits on US firepower
Johnson argued that Washington’s capacity is thinner than its threats suggest. “I wouldn’t characterize it as a wider escalation, because the United States is limited in what it can do to escalate,” he stated. He noted that the US lacks a robust supply of Tomahawk and JASSM cruise missiles and that its air defense stocks are depleted. “They’ve exhausted their air defense systems. Patriot missiles and THAAD missiles are, I mean, they’re out.”
He cited the evacuation of 12 B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford as evidence. Washington blamed a possible Iranian drone threat, but Johnson countered that “if they still had an adequate number of Patriot missiles, they wouldn’t have evacuated 12 B-1 bombers from the Fairford RAF airfield.” Even against drones, he added, the US does not have enough PAC-3 missiles.
Johnson dismissed press reports of 10,000 US troops being surged to the region, pointing out that 50 to 60 percent of them are the crews of aircraft carriers, escort destroyers and a Marine Expeditionary Unit. The USS Theodore Roosevelt is replacing the USS George H.W. Bush, which is docked in Phuket, Thailand, and due to depart on October 9. “So it doesn’t look like there’s a buildup on that front,” he observed, adding that it is unclear whether the Bush will return to waters off Iran.
Johnson believes the bomber withdrawal followed a secret meeting last Friday at Camp David involving J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth and John Ratcliffe. In his view, they recognized that “the United States really is in a limited position to carry out any kind of effective or sustained strikes against Iran that are risk-free.” He expects Iran to act preemptively if it judges strikes are imminent, for example against aircraft deployed to al-Udeid.
For Washington, he concluded, “the United States stands to lose much, much more than they’ve already lost if they decide to renew conflict and war with Iran.”
On October 5, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan activated the Makkah Pact, taking their new alliance to war for the first time, and potentially revealing the future of American power in the Middle East: Washington provides the security umbrella while regional partners increasingly do the fighting.
From treaty to military alliance
Only two months after Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, the new alliance has been activated. As representatives of the three countries met in Riyadh and Houthi missiles and drones targeted Saudi territory, Saudi-backed Yemeni forces launched a major counteroffensive around the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Despite hundreds of strikes, the Saudi offensive has not been enough to push the Houthis back to their original position. In this context, the alliance’s Strategic-Political and Defense Committee agreed to move “immediately” toward implementing its collective-defence commitments and to provide agreed military forces and capabilities for rapid deployment in Saudi Arabia. The meeting also appointed retired Pakistani Lieutenant General Nauman Mahmood as the alliance’s first secretary-general.
The significance goes beyond additional military assistance for Riyadh. The Yemen war is transforming – and that, too, very rapidly – a remarkably young agreement into an operational military alliance. Signed on August 7, the Makkah Pact contains a collective-defence commitment under which an armed attack against one member is regarded as an attack against all three. Pakistan describes the agreement as defensive and grounded in the right to collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
That inevitably invites comparisons with NATO. The analogy should not be exaggerated. NATO possesses 32 members, an integrated command structure and more than seven decades of institutional development. The Makkah Pact possesses none of that depth.
But its institutional development has been unusually rapid. On August 31, the three governments established mechanisms for political and military coordination, agreed to create a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia and committed themselves to joint activities, defence-industrial cooperation and joint technology development and production. Now comes the most important stage in the evolution of any military alliance: responding to an actual threat.
Pakistan and Türkiye were already assisting Saudi Arabia before formal activation. Reports show that Pakistan had supplied air-defence systems, drones, anti-drone equipment and light artillery, while Pakistani advisers were working with Saudi counterparts supporting Yemeni forces. Türkiye had supplied drones. The October 5 decision potentially integrates such capabilities into something larger: collective military action undertaken because one alliance member has come under attack.
The distinction between defensive and offensive action consequently becomes blurred. Defending Saudi airspace against Houthi missiles is clearly defensive. Destroying the launchers firing those missiles from Yemen would involve offensive operations undertaken for a defensive purpose. Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has deliberately avoided ruling out that possibility, saying Pakistan would make “whatever means are available” at its disposal available to defend Saudi Arabia.
America stays, but its role changes
It would be tempting to interpret this development as evidence that Saudi Arabia is preparing for a post-American Middle East. That conclusion would be premature. The more interesting possibility is almost the opposite: the Makkah Pact may fit remarkably well into the kind of Middle Eastern security order the Trump administration itself wants to create. Trump welcomed the agreement shortly after it was signed. He called it’s a “big, bold and important first step” and argued that it demonstrated how regional countries could “defend themselves in a more meaningful way.” That language closely matches the administration’s formal defence strategy.
The 2026 National Defense Strategy says Washington wants regional allies and partners to assume “primary responsibility” for deterring and defending against Iran and its proxies, while the United States supports them and deepens cooperation with Gulf partners. The administration’s arms-transfer strategy similarly argues that allies should assume more responsibility for regional security while Washington equips them with advanced American military capabilities. Yemen now offers an unusually clear illustration of what this division of labour can look like.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sought direct American military intervention against the Houthis in September. Trump declined to order US strikes. But Washington did not withdraw from the conflict. Instead, it offered intelligence and targeting assistance, while CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper travelled to Saudi Arabia for consultations. As the Saudi-backed offensive subsequently began, the same pattern continued. Saudi aircraft provided extensive air support to Yemeni government forces, while the United States supplied intelligence and targeting support. America therefore remains deeply involved. What has declined, at least for now, is direct participation in the fighting. This distinction matters.
The choice facing Washington is not simply between dominating Middle Eastern security and abandoning it. There is a third possibility: remaining the indispensable strategic enabler while shifting more of the immediate military burden onto regional states. That is precisely where the Makkah Pact becomes useful.
Saudi Arabia brings financial resources, geography and enormous investments in advanced weaponry. Türkiye contributes a large, NATO-trained military and a rapidly expanding defence industry. Pakistan brings substantial conventional forces, longstanding military relations with Saudi Arabia and extensive operational experience. Together, they can potentially perform missions that previously might have generated demands for more direct American intervention. The United States can remain above this architecture rather than outside it: supplying intelligence, weapons, logistical assistance, strategic deterrence and diplomatic backing while allies provide more of the personnel and firepower required to confront regional threats. Seen this way, the pact is not necessarily a rebellion against American primacy. It could become one mechanism through which that primacy is made less militarily expensive for the US.
A different kind of American order
This model also helps explain why describing the emerging Middle East as “post-American” can be misleading. American power has traditionally been measured partly through deployments, bases and direct military intervention. But primacy does not require Washington to fight every regional war itself. The Makkah Pact could push this transformation considerably further.
Its future significance will depend less on what its three members call the alliance than on what they build after Yemen, and whether their first experiment in collective defence proves sufficiently successful to encourage deeper cooperation. Regular military planning, interoperable forces, integrated air and missile defence, intelligence-sharing arrangements and joint weapons production would gradually give the agreement institutional substance.
Yet therein lies a paradox for Washington. The same burden-sharing that reduces America’s military responsibilities could eventually reduce its leverage. More capable allies are not necessarily more dependent allies. As regional powers acquire the institutions, experience and capabilities to conduct military operations with diminishing direct American involvement, they may also acquire greater freedom to pursue threats and strategic objectives that do not fully correspond with Washington’s preferences. An arrangement that initially reinforces the US security architecture could therefore gradually produce greater regional strategic autonomy.
The consequences could extend to military technology. Saudi Arabia’s armed forces remain heavily equipped with American weapons, but neither Pakistan nor Türkiye operates exclusively within a US defence ecosystem. Pakistan, for example, operates the JF-17 fighter aircraft jointly developed with China. In fact, Islamabad has deployed this jet in Saudi Arabia as part of the pact. While Türkiye has built an increasingly indigenous defence industry. A more deeply integrated Makkah alliance could therefore eventually combine American, Turkish, Pakistani and Chinese-origin military technologies rather than reproduce an exclusively US-centred weapons architecture.
That may prove more consequential for American primacy than the pact itself. If the Makkah alliance fades once the immediate Houthi threat recedes, it will remain another temporary regional alignment. But if Yemen produces permanent military integration, Washington could confront an unexpected consequence of its own burden-sharing strategy: the more successfully regional allies learn to defend the American-led order themselves, the less dependent that order may eventually become on America.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy said Tuesday that the Pentagon had denied him access to a US military base in Qatar and refused to arrange a briefing on the US-Israeli war on Iran during his regional tour.
Speaking to journalists in Riyadh, Murphy accused the department of deliberately obstructing congressional scrutiny of the war and concealing its consequences from the American public.
“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.
Murphy urges Republicans to challenge Pentagon secrecy
Murphy called on Republican senators to confront the deliberate obstruction by the Department of War.
“I’ve never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate and it’s part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to,” he said.
The senator said the Pentagon had denied him access to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military base in the region. The installation has come under repeated Iranian retaliatory strikes since the US-Israeli aggression against Iran began in February.
He also said the department had declined to organize a briefing on the war while he was visiting the region.
Diplomatic meetings proceed despite military restrictions
Murphy contrasted the Pentagon’s conduct with that of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom he credited with helping organize the trip and facilitating meetings with diplomats.
His regional discussions included talks with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, alongside other senior Gulf officials.
Riyadh was the second stop on the senator’s tour, following his visit to Qatar.
Iran’s economic adaptation over decades, marked by domestic production, regional trade and Asian partnerships, is on course to thwart Washington’s economic terrorism.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s prediction that Iran’s economy would soon collapse underscores the depth of delusion within the current American leadership.
“Iran is absolutely not sanctionable,” Deputy Economy Minister Mortaza Zamanian said this week as Tehran worked to keep trade flowing despite Washington’s latest sanctions campaign.
Zamanian cited Iran’s extensive borders, established commercial routes and longstanding trading relationships, saying that they make it impossible for external pressure simply to switch off the country’s economy.
His remarks came as Washington intensified its economic terrorism against Iranian oil, shipping, aviation, finance, technology and foreign companies supporting those sectors.
The new American campaign has been accompanied by extraordinary predictions from senior American officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s claim that Iran could have “nothing left to trade” within two weeks.
Speaking on September 27, Bessent claimed that Iran would probably make its final oil deliveries to China within two weeks, after which, he asserted, “they will have nothing.”
That prediction deserves comparison with history, because American administrations have imposed increasingly severe sanctions on Iran since 1979 while repeatedly expecting economic pressure eventually to produce collapse.
Yet the economy did not disappear, and Iran instead developed domestic industries, expanded regional commerce, strengthened trade with Asian powers and accumulated extensive experience operating outside Western financial channels.
The proposition that an economy which has absorbed American sanctions for almost half a century will suddenly disintegrate within two weeks therefore indicates the depth of delusion among the current US leadership.
Iran enters this confrontation possessing a large domestic market, extensive productive capacity, enormous energy resources and deeply established commercial relationships across Eurasia.
These are not temporary sanctions evasions assembled during the present crisis, but economic capabilities developed over decades through investment, industrial learning, regional integration and repeated adaptation to external restrictions.
The most important fact about Iran’s economic structure is its size, because a country with more than ninety million people possesses a domestic market capable of supporting extensive production independently of Western consumers.
The World Bank describes Iran as relatively diversified for an oil-exporting economy, with a substantial domestic market, a large workforce and significant activity across manufacturing, agriculture and services.
That domestic market sustains production across food, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, steel, petrochemicals, machinery, transportation, consumer goods and numerous intermediate industrial sectors serving Iranian households and companies.
Iran is therefore not an economy that must export continuously merely to keep its factories operating, because a substantial portion of its production already serves domestic consumption, investment and infrastructure.
That distinction becomes particularly important when external restrictions are designed around the assumption that cutting foreign trade will automatically paralyze domestic economic activity.
A country whose productive system is centered on domestic demand possesses an economic engine that continues operating even when international transactions become more complicated.
Iran has also spent decades building industrial capabilities specifically suited to its own resource base, population, infrastructure requirements and energy-intensive economy.
Steel production, petrochemicals, cement, refining, power generation, construction, food processing and pharmaceuticals represent substantial industrial ecosystems involving domestic engineering, manufacturing, logistics and skilled employment.
These capabilities have repeatedly expanded during periods when access to Western investment and technology was severely restricted, demonstrating that Iranian industrial development does not depend upon continuous Western participation.
Iran’s long exposure to sanctions has produced another asset that cannot be imposed or removed through a Treasury designation, namely a large body of accumulated technical and commercial experience.
When foreign manufacturers withdraw, Iranian companies have learned to redesign equipment, substitute components, develop domestic suppliers and work with companies from countries willing to maintain commercial relationships.
Academic research has documented this process in Iranian industries, including evidence that sanctions simultaneously restricted access to foreign technology while encouraging the development of domestic technological capabilities.
The resulting industrial knowledge extends beyond individual companies, because engineers, technicians, procurement specialists and managers have accumulated practical experience with restricted supply chains over successive decades.
A manufacturer that has operated under sanctions for years does not design its procurement system around the assumption that every international supplier will remain available indefinitely.
It develops alternatives as part of ordinary business planning, creating a commercial culture in which substitution, regional sourcing and domestic production are integrated into industrial decision-making.
This is one of the strongest reasons the prediction of sudden economic emptiness looks disconnected from Iran’s actual economic structure.
There is no single foreign supplier whose disappearance can remove Iran’s entire industrial capacity, because Iranian production is distributed across thousands of domestic enterprises and numerous regional supply relationships.
The system has been shaped by scarcity for so long that adaptation has become embedded within the operating methods of Iranian companies themselves.
Iran’s geographical position provides another form of economic strength that cannot be erased by financial sanctions, because the country physically connects several of the world’s most important commercial regions.
Iran borders Turkey, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while its southern coastline provides direct access to the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
Those borders connect Iranian commerce with the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, Turkey and Iraq, creating commercial possibilities extending in several directions simultaneously.
This geography gives Iran direct access to neighboring markets while also placing the country along important transportation corridors linking Russia, Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.
The significance of Zamanian’s argument is therefore practical rather than rhetorical, because no financial authority can relocate Iran away from its geographic position.
Goods can move through different borders, suppliers can be found in different countries and exporters can redirect shipments towards different markets when commercial conditions change.
Iran has consequently developed a regional trading system that does not depend upon one border, one port, one customer or one foreign economic relationship.
Its trade with Iraq, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia and China represents an extensive commercial geography developed through years of interaction.
The World Bank has documented precisely this shift, noting that Iranian trade has increasingly pivoted towards neighboring countries and China as sanctions have restricted conventional international economic relationships.
That transformation is now an established feature of Iran’s economy rather than an emergency measure invented after the latest American escalation.
China gives Iran’s economic system another dimension because it combines enormous industrial capacity with sustained demand for Iranian energy and other commodities.
In other words, Iran possesses access to a major global market even while facing comprehensive American restrictions on its oil industry.
China also supplies Iranian companies with machinery, manufactured products, electronics, industrial equipment and intermediate goods required across the domestic production system.
The relationship therefore operates in both directions, with Iran supplying commodities and China supplying industrial goods, creating a commercial relationship considerably broader than the simple sale of sanctioned oil.
Iran consequently does not need unrestricted access to every Western market when it possesses substantial trade relationships with China and numerous neighboring economies.
Iran’s energy resources provide perhaps the clearest demonstration of the country’s underlying economic strength.
It ranks second globally in proven natural-gas reserves and fourth in proven crude-oil reserves, giving the country extraordinary resource depth beneath its existing industrial economy.
These resources provide not merely potential export earnings but also abundant domestic energy and petrochemical feedstocks supporting Iran’s manufacturing, electricity generation, transportation and industrial production.
Iran has consequently developed an extensive downstream economy that converts hydrocarbons into refined products, petrochemicals and industrial inputs rather than relying exclusively upon crude-oil exports.
The World Bank has specifically noted that sanctions encouraged additional processing of crude oil and hydrocarbons into petrochemicals, illustrating how restrictions have contributed to changes within Iran’s economic structure.
The country’s resource base also gives it a durable position in Asian energy markets, where large industrial economies require reliable supplies of oil and petrochemical products.
That is why American attempts to eliminate Iranian oil revenue confront persistent commercial demand rather than an absence of buyers interested in Iranian resources.
The financial system represents another area where Iran has developed substantial independent capacity after decades of exclusion from conventional Western banking.
Iran’s economic ties span a broad network of foreign entities, reflecting its commercial reach across banking, shipping, logistics, commodities, and manufacturing.
Against this background, Bessent’s latest prediction appears less to be an independent economic forecast than an expectation based on what the American campaign is intended to achieve.
His claim that Iran will have nothing left to trade within two weeks assumes that removing one major source of oil revenue effectively removes the economic foundations supporting the entire Iranian system.
Iran’s actual economic structure is considerably broader, because oil exports represent one component of national economic activity alongside manufacturing, agriculture, services, domestic consumption and regional commerce.
The World Bank estimates that Iran’s economy contracted during the Iranian year ending March 2026, while simultaneously describing an economy that has adapted to sanctions through changing trade patterns and alternative payment mechanisms.
Those facts should not be confused with economic collapse, because contraction in a particular period is fundamentally different from the disappearance of productive capacity, markets and commercial institutions.
The historical record is even more significant, because American sanctions have been imposed repeatedly since 1979 and have been intensified dramatically during successive administrations.
The sanctions regime has targeted Iranian banking, oil exports, investment, technology, shipping and foreign companies, with especially severe measures introduced during the 2010s and after Washington abandoned the nuclear agreement.
Iran nevertheless retained its industrial base, rebuilt oil exports after earlier restrictions, expanded non-oil exports and redirected a growing share of trade towards neighboring countries and China.
The American expectation that economic pressure would eventually produce decisive Iranian economic capitulation has therefore been tested repeatedly against an economy that continued adapting.
Predicting that a strategy that failed to trigger economic collapse over half a century will suddenly achieve it within fourteen days merits no serious consideration, because it reveals the naivety of its proponents.
Washington now possesses powerful financial tools, but financial power does not eliminate Iran’s factories, oilfields, farms, engineers, consumers, borders, ports, regional markets or established commercial relationships.
Iran enters the current phase with an economic architecture extending from domestic manufacturing plants to Chinese refineries, from Persian Gulf shipping networks to northern Eurasian trade corridors.
Its domestic market provides magnitude and size, its industrial base provides production, its energy reserves provide commodities and its geography provides access to several major commercial regions.
In other words, Iran already possesses the domestic capabilities and international relationships required to keep its economy operating beyond the reach of any single American economic sabotage.
Once again Karl W. Miller has put numbers to a problem that most of the commentariat still treats as a temporary price spike. His latest forward outlook, “The Five-Year Global Energy Crisis,” dated October 3, makes an argument that should alarm every finance ministry from Berlin to Jakarta. The war’s damage to Gulf energy infrastructure is not a disruption that ends when the shooting stops. It is a reconstruction problem measured in years and trillions of dollars, and while it is solved, the world will be short of the fuels that run its economy.
A ceasefire is not a repair crew
Miller’s central insight is simple. A ceasefire can reopen a shipping lane overnight. It cannot manufacture a compressor, mobilize commissioning engineers, or pay a contractor. The next phase of this crisis, he writes, is a competition for cash, equipment, qualified contractors and finished fuel.
His cost model is sobering. In his aggressive case, rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy system requires $1.16 trillion in total program funding. Under prolonged stress, with scarce equipment, rising prices and delays, the bill reaches $2.53 trillion. Even his most favorable case runs to nearly half a trillion dollars. He is careful to say these are model outputs, not contractor quotes, and that the true extent of the damage is the largest unknown. An April assessment put energy-related repair costs at only $34-58 billion. But the direction of his argument doesn’t depend on the exact figure. Every month of delay makes the same repair more expensive, because the global market for specialized equipment and crews is already stretched by LNG expansions, refinery maintenance and power projects elsewhere.
The timeline is just as stark. Weighted by cost, the rebuild averages almost five years from today. Only 60% of the work finishes by 2031, and the longest-lead packages run to seven years.
The money problem comes first
The most original part of Miller’s analysis is about cash. A damaged refinery may be worth rebuilding and technically repairable, and still sit idle because the government that owns it has to pay for food imports, salaries, electricity and water first. Lost export revenue doesn’t stop those bills. When a state borrows to keep paying them, that money can’t also pay an engineering contractor.
Iraq shows the problem in practice. In July, it faced a monthly public salary obligation of about $5.96 billion with a funding shortfall of $2.52 billion. A government in that position rebuilds nothing. It pays its people, and the export capacity that would restore its revenue waits. Miller’s warning is that this trap can stop reconstruction before it starts: without engineering funds and vendor deposits, factory slots go to other customers and delivery dates slip.
The fuel gap is the global transmission belt
For the rest of the world, the damage arrives through diesel and jet fuel. The figures Miller cites are already severe. Gulf diesel net exports in August were just over a quarter of prewar levels. Combined Gulf and Russian diesel exports were 1.6 million barrels a day below February. Global oil stocks had fallen 507 million barrels since February, and global refinery throughput in August was 4.2 million barrels a day below a year earlier.
Looking forward, Miller’s severe case assumes a shortfall of at least 3 million barrels a day of diesel and jet fuel, every year for five years. That’s about 1.1 billion barrels a year and 5.5 billion barrels over the period. He is explicit that this is a deliberate stress test, not a forecast, and that a faster-recovery path closes the gap by the fourth year. But the stress case is a plausible one. Restored capacity can be absorbed by refinery outages, deferred maintenance, recovering demand and delivery bottlenecks. Damaged refineries don’t come back at full capacity on the first day.
Inventories cannot fill a gap of that size for that long. Five and a half billion barrels is far beyond any country’s emergency stocks, which is why drawing down Europe’s reserves now, under pressure from Washington, only buys weeks. Without enough new supply, the balance can close in only one way: by using less fuel.
How the shortage reprices everything
The economic damage extends well beyond the missing barrels. When supply falls short, buyers bid for the marginal cargo, and that bid sets the price for all the fuel still being bought. Miller’s illustration: a $40-a-barrel premium across 10 million barrels a day of purchases adds $146 billion a year to fuel bills. Applied only to the 3 million missing barrels, it would add $43.8 billion and badly understate the real cost.
Scarcity also reprices credit. At $150 a barrel, a buyer purchasing 1 million barrels a day needs $2.25 billion to hold 15 extra days of inventory, and $3 billion at $200. Longer voyages tie up more fuel and more money in transit. A supplier can have the barrels while its customer can’t get a letter of credit. And a cargo that wins a bidding war for one country leaves another short. Competition redistributes the shortage before it eliminates it.
Who absorbs the shock
Diesel carries the crisis into the real economy. It runs road freight, farm machinery, mines, construction fleets and backup generators, none of which can switch fuels quickly. Higher diesel costs pass straight into freight rates and food prices, and when diesel isn’t available at any price, activity simply stops. Jet fuel carries the shock into aviation: higher fares, fewer routes and higher air cargo surcharges. Kerosene hits the households with the least room to adjust, in countries where it is still used for heating, cooking and lighting.
Miller’s regional assessment follows the money:
Europe competes for replacement diesel and jet cargoes while running its refineries close to their limits.
South and Southeast Asia face higher import bills, currency pressure and greater need for trade credit.
Africa and smaller importers are the most vulnerable. Tenders fail, credit lines run out, and small cargoes become uneconomic long before global stocks are exhausted.
The United States and other Atlantic suppliers face export demand competing with their own diesel needs, with refineries running so hard they have little tolerance for outages.
The ultimate balancing mechanism is demand destruction: freight deferred, low-margin factories idled, flights cancelled, and poorer importers losing every bidding contest. Miller warns against mistaking that for recovery. Lower consumption caused by rationing through price or credit is not a repaired energy system.
Case study: Europe
Europe shows what Miller’s framework looks like in practice. The continent burns about 5 million barrels of diesel a day, fuel for the trucks that move its goods, the tractors that plant its crops and, as winter approaches, the boilers that heat millions of homes.
How much does Europe produce, and how much does it import? Running flat out, EU refineries can produce roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels a day of diesel and gasoil, and they are already operating close to their maximum. That leaves Europe roughly 85-90% self-sufficient at best. The remaining 10-15% comes from imports, and that margin sets the price for the entire market. Kepler puts the EU’s diesel imports from outside the bloc at about 580,000 barrels a day this year. Britain, which lost much of its refining capacity over the past two decades, is far more exposed: it imports more than half the diesel it uses.
The origin of those imports has changed dramatically. Russia was long Europe’s largest outside supplier until the EU embargoed Russian diesel in 2023. The Gulf filled much of the gap, until the war cut it off. Since March, the United States has supplied more than half of Europe’s diesel imports, and more than two-thirds in August and September. Europe has traded dependence on Moscow for dependence on Washington, and Washington has just shown it is willing to use that leverage, threatening an export ban unless Europe released its emergency stocks.
Europe’s diesel depends on imported crude as well. Its refineries run almost entirely on foreign oil: the EU imports about 97% of the crude it consumes. But the Gulf was never Europe’s main crude supplier. In 2025, Gulf Cooperation Council states supplied only about 7% of EU crude imports, Iraq another 5.8%. Europe’s crude now comes chiefly from the United States, Norway and Kazakhstan, which together supplied nearly half of EU petroleum imports in the second quarter of 2026. The volume has held steady; the bill rose 56%. But the crude isn’t the crude Europe’s refineries were built for. Much of Europe’s refining capacity was designed around medium sour crudes such as Russia’s Urals, with conversion units that turn the heavier part of the barrel into diesel. American shale crude is light and sweet. It refines readily into gasoline and naphtha, but it yields proportionally less diesel and jet fuel, the very products Europe is short of. As Miller notes, sour crude isn’t uniquely required to make diesel; the replacement barrels work, but not at the same yield or cost. The Gulf supply Europe really lost was finished diesel from Gulf refineries, and that is what the United States has replaced. The result is a double dependence: Washington is now Europe’s largest supplier of both the crude its refineries run and the diesel they can’t make. Even the non-American barrels carry risk. Most Kazakh crude reaches Europe through a Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk, on Russian soil, a route that has already been hit by Ukrainian drones.
How long can Europe store diesel? This is where Europe’s apparent cushion turns out to be thinner than it looks. Unlike crude oil, which can sit in salt caverns for decades, diesel degrades. Under ideal conditions, conventional ultra-low-sulfur diesel can typically be stored for six to twelve months. With stabilizers, biocides and well-managed tanks, that can be extended to 18 to 24 months. Oxidation forms gums and sediment, water collects, and microbes grow in the fuel.
European diesel has an added problem. The EU standard, EN 590, allows up to 7% biodiesel in road diesel, and biodiesel oxidizes faster than petroleum diesel. Concawe, the European refiners’ research association, recommends a maximum storage time of six months for biodiesel and current blends containing it. Strategic stockholders can extend that by holding biodiesel-free product, but even then the reserve has to be rotated, sold into the market and replaced with fresh fuel on a cycle of a year or two.
That changes what Europe’s reserve really is. EU countries and Britain held about 52 million tonnes of gasoil and diesel in June, including nearly 38 million tonnes of emergency reserves, roughly two months of consumption. But a diesel reserve is not a stockpile Europe can fill once and forget. It is a stock that must be continually turned over, which means continually bought, and bought in the same tight market Miller describes. Every barrel released now to satisfy Washington has to be replaced later, at a higher price, from suppliers who are already short. And because diesel degrades, Europe can’t solve the problem by buying extra while it’s cheap and holding it for years. A reserve with a shelf life of a year or two cannot cover a structural deficit that Miller’s severe case puts at five years.
The conclusion for Europe is stark. It produces most of its own diesel but has no spare refining capacity. It depends on imports for the margin that sets prices, and those imports now come mostly from a single supplier that has shown it will use them as leverage. And its emergency reserve is both perishable and finite. In Miller’s terms, Europe is one of the buyers most exposed to the marginal cargo, and the least able to wait out a five-year shortage.
The implications for the global economy
Put together, Miller’s analysis describes a world economy facing a prolonged supply shock, not a temporary one. Fuel costs feed into nearly everything, so central banks fighting the inflation this crisis has already produced will face pressure for longer than they expect. Emerging-market importers face a combination of high fuel bills, weak currencies and tighter credit that has historically produced debt crises and unrest. And the reconstruction itself will absorb capital, equipment and specialist labor that would otherwise build new energy supply elsewhere, so the shortage may delay the investment needed to end it.
Miller’s strategic conclusion is the one policymakers least want to hear. Ending the conflict removes one source of disruption. It does not repair the energy system, which requires a separate sequence of financing, engineering, manufacturing, construction and commissioning that will take years. Until that is done, reliable fuel and the cash to buy it will determine which economies absorb the burden. Neither will be distributed evenly.
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 “annihilated.” Indeed, Trump is preparing the option of bringing the military hammer down on Iran after the midterm elections if Tehran has not surrendered by then.
In effect, Trump and his supporters are waging a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in the mainstream media.
This campaign is sure to fail. If anything, it reflects the Trump administration’s desperation. The president started a war the United States was bound to lose, and there is little he can do now to change that basic fact.
Trump’s propaganda campaign has two dimensions – one economic and the other military.
First, the administration argues that Iran is being economically strangled by the US naval blockade coupled with Operation Economic Outcast, the strategy announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on 24 August 2026. At the same time, it maintains that oil is once again flowing out of the Gulf at rates not far below those that prevailed on 27 February 2026. The implications are obvious: the economic punishment being inflicted on Iran will force it to capitulate soon, while the US economy – and the international community more generally – is well on its way to recovery.
Second, the US is now building up its military forces for a massive military strike after the mid-term elections, when Trump will be free of electoral constraints. This growing threat of a devastating US attack, coupled with the economic pain being inflicted on Iran, is designed to get Tehran to quit now, before its situation becomes even worse.
There are huge problems with this strategy. It sounds persuasive when the mainstream media dutifully purveys it, but it falls apart when one looks closely at what is actually happening.
Consider the military dimension. The headlines say the US is sending 10,000 additional troops and a third aircraft carrier – the USS Theodore Roosevelt – to the Persian Gulf region, creating the impression that Iran will soon be confronting three American carriers. Moreover, the additional troops – on top of the roughly 50,000 US troops already in the region – are portrayed as evidence that Trump is seriously considering putting boots on the ground.
The aircraft carrier story, however, is quite different from what the headlines suggest. The Roosevelt is reportedly being sent to replace the USS George Washington, while the supposed third carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, has already left the Middle East and is now in Thailand. Thus, there is presently only one carrier in the region. Indeed, this is the first time during the war that the US has only one carrier in the Middle East, and it is difficult to imagine that there will be more than two – if even that many – after the midterm elections.
The larger problem is that the Iran war is severely straining the US Navy. Its senior leaders warn that the current operational tempo is not sustainable indefinitely. Carriers and other warships are being rotated through extremely long deployments, which cause significant maintenance and readiness problems that will have to be addressed at some point. This problem is compounded by the fact that US ships have lost access to nearby logistics facilities and increasingly depend on a supply chain that reaches back to Diego Garcia, which is about 2,500 miles from the Persian Gulf.
But even if three carriers are available to strike Iran, what could they accomplish in a renewed air campaign that the US and Israel could not accomplish together during the failed 40-day bombing campaign between 28 February and 8 April 2026? Some might argue that the US could finally destroy Iran’s oil infrastructure. The problem, however, is that Iran retains a second-strike capability and could retaliate by wreaking havoc on the oil infrastructure of the GCC states. One shudders to think what the consequences would be for the international economy.
On top of all this, the US faces a serious shortage of high-end weaponry, which is one of the main reasons it ended the 40-day bombing campaign and has shied away in recent weeks from engaging in tit-for-tat bombing exchanges with Iran. One would think that the shortage of critical munitions – both for striking Iran and defending against Iranian retaliation – would limit the scope and intensity of any renewed strategic bombing campaign, thereby reducing its chances of success.
Regarding ground forces, simply counting the number of U.S. military personnel in the Middle East is misleading when assessing the possibility of putting boots on the ground. What matters most in a ground war is the number of troops in actual ground-combat formations. I estimate that, of the roughly 50,000 U.S. military personnel already stationed in the region, about 5,000 belong to such formations: roughly 2,200 Marines and sailors in the 11th MEU, 2,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, and possibly another 800 Army personnel in Kuwait associated with Task Force Spartan. Of the roughly 10,000 additional personnel now being sent to the region, another 2,200 belong to the 13th MEU. Most of the remainder are sailors assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt carrier and its supporting warships. Thus, given present deployment plans, I estimate that by late November the United States will have just under 7,500 personnel in ground-combat formations in the Gulf region—roughly 4,400 in the two MEUs and 2,800 Army personnel.
There is no way a ground force that small provides a promising option against a country with Iran’s population and geography. Even tripling that number to roughly 23,000—which is highly unlikely—would not fundamentally alter the problem. Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey estimates that securing the Strait of Hormuz would require roughly 150,000 troops and three to six months of fighting. For comparison, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 with roughly 190,000 military personnel, and that force proved insufficient to hold much of the territory Russia initially captured. Iran has more than twice the population Ukraine had at the beginning of the Russian invasion, and its geography is considerably more forbidding for an invading army.
Simply put, the United States has not assembled anything remotely resembling the ground force required for a large-scale invasion of Iran. Indeed, from Tehran’s perspective, an American decision to launch such an offensive with anything resembling the forces presently available would present Iran with an opportunity to fight the United States under exceptionally favorable circumstances.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, two further points are in order. First, given how unpopular the Iran war is with the American public, there would almost certainly be a huge uproar if large numbers of US soldiers began coming home in body bags. Second, how are the Marines, who are aboard amphibious assault ships, supposed to land on Iranian territory if the missile and drone threat from Iran is forcing the US Navy to keep those large and vulnerable ships far from the Iranian coast?
Let’s turn to the economic dimension. There is no question that the US is doing great damage to Iran’s economy and inflicting enormous hardship on the Iranian people. But that has been true for a long time. The key question is whether that punishment can coerce Iran into surrendering to American demands.
There is no evidence that Iran is caving in to American pressure, and there are three reasons to doubt that it will. First, it is exceedingly difficult to find a case in the historical record in which an economic blockade by itself caused the target state to surrender. Second, Iran sees the US and Israel as existential threats to Iran – hardly surprising given the genocidal language Trump has used when talking about Iran – and states that believe their survival is at stake are exceptionally difficult to coerce. Third, Iran has a formidable escalation option if the economic pain becomes too great: it can attack the oil and gas infrastructure of the Gulf states and Israel, as well as their highly vulnerable desalination plants.
In short, it is difficult to see economic pressure alone forcing Iran to accept Trump’s terms. That is probably one reason the United States is once again talking about using military force. But, as I argued above, that option holds little promise of producing a favorable outcome.
Finally, there is no question that more oil is flowing out of the Gulf today than was the case in early September. But both Iran and the Houthis are working hard to reverse that trend. Iran is attacking US-escorted tankers on a daily basis, while the Houthis are targeting vital oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. Moreover, despite the increased flow of oil out of the Gulf, gasoline prices remain very high, and a host of other economic problems show no signs of easing anytime soon, including high diesel prices, persistent inflation, elevated mortgage rates, and dangerously high bond yields across much of the West.
All of this is to say that the Trump administration has powerful economic incentives to shut this war down as soon as possible. Indeed, it would hardly be surprising if there were a growing sense of desperation behind closed doors among Trump and his advisers.
This, of course, helps explain why the Trump administration and its allies are waging a media campaign designed to persuade Iran that its days are numbered and that it had better concede to American demands before it is too late. The facts, however, tell a different story. The success of this strategy therefore depends on Trump being able to bamboozle the Iranians into believing that Godzilla is closing in on them. There is little reason to think Tehran will be hoodwinked.
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