Short note on some developments worth watching across different sectors.

1. DRC’s Ebola Outbreak

It has been reported that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is currently facing the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in its history, with more than 5,000 confirmed cases and 2,500 deaths. This week, UN officials have warned that transmission of Ebola is accelerating rapidly across the country, in fact, the disease is now spreading across more than 50 health zones in six provinces.

Important to note that containing the outbreak has historically been complicated for DRC, especially given the ongoing armed conflict in eastern Congo, as the groups involved have restricted access to affected communities and disrupted the movement of medical supplies.

Outbreaks result from zoonotic spillover – animal to human transmission. Infected humans, which can include dead bodies, then pass on the disease to others through body fluids such as vomit, blood and semen. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle pain and headache followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash and internal and external bleeding. It has a 50% death rate.

There are four types or strains of Ebola that affect humans: Zaire, Sudan, Bundibugyo and Tai Forest. The latest outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo virus. There have only been two previous outbreaks involving this strain, in 2007 and 2012.

Source: The Guardian

The other problem DRC is facing is that while the government is trying to contain the outbreak, the Congo River and its tributaries are major transportation routes connecting remote communities with large urban areas, allowing suspected cases to infect others over considerable distances before being identified.

2. Somali Piracy Is Back?

The NYT reported that Somali piracy is experiencing its sharpest resurgence in years. At least 13 vessels have been attacked off Somalia or in the Gulf of Aden in 2026, compared with 5 in 2025. The latest target was the Eritrea-flagged Sibu 1, which was part of Iran’s shadow fleet of ships exporting oil around the world, was boarded off Yemen on 20 August and diverted toward Somalia.

This further complicates the security picture in the Red Sea. The Houthis have already shown, especially since October 7, that they can threaten and disrupt shipping through one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. Somalia’s instability adds another layer of risk while the U.S.- Israel conflict with Iran is still ongoing.

Somalia has also become a battleground between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, though for different reasons. On one hand, Ankara has aligned itself closely with the federal government in Mogadishu, where it operates a large military facility and trains Somali forces, on the other hand, the UAE has built deeper ties with Puntland, whose strategic position is only growing.

Puntland finds itself at a critical political crossroads, confronting a dilemma that is both unavoidable and increasingly urgent. On one side stands the United Arab Emirates, a key provider of security assistance and economic investment. Emirati support has strengthened the Puntland Defense Force and police, contributed to counter-terrorism operations against ISIS, and financed major infrastructure projects, notably the expansion of Bossaso Port and Bossaso International Airport—assets central to Puntland’s economy and to wider regional stability.

Source: wardheernews

3. Instability in Libya

Libya’s fragile political balance is being tested by a new wave of violence. A series of drone attacks around Zawiya in western Libya struck fuel storage tanks, an oil-blending facility and a power substation, causing fires and electricity outages. The National Oil Corporation warned that continued attacks could force it to declare force majeure and suspend operations at Zawiya, Libya’s largest operating refinery.

The attacks are significant because Libya remains heavily dependent on oil while much of its energy infrastructure sits within areas controlled by armed groups that are only loosely tied to the state. Zawiya alone has recorded more than 30 armed clashes this year. Direct drone attacks on infrastructure introduce another vulnerability, particularly as Libya is trying to increase oil production and attract foreign investment.

Political tensions have risen at the same time. Fawzi Al Mansouri, the head of military intelligence in eastern Libya, was killed in a car bombing in Benghazi, while Central Bank governor Naji Issa submitted his resignation to Libya’s rival legislative bodies. His attempted departure is especially important because his appointment in 2024 had itself been one of the few successful compromises between eastern and western Libyan authorities.

All of this comes just as there had been some movement toward reunifying Libya’s institutions. Eastern and western military leaders met in Sirte in July, the rival camps approved the country’s first unified national budget in more than a decade, and US and UN efforts continue to push toward a unified executive and eventual national elections. Dbeibah has also continued developing Libya’s relationship with Italy, particularly around economic, security, and Mediterranean cooperation. The latest violence is another reminder that political deals at the top remain vulnerable to armed groups and institutions that have never been fully brought back under state control, the crux of all issues.

UN Special Representative for Libya Hanna Serwaa Tetteh told the Security Council that the country faces a “striking paradox”: around $1 billion is spent each month on fuel imports, yet electricity systems remain vulnerable to fuel shortages.

Tetteh also raised concerns over the alleged large-scale diversion of subsidized fuel in the electricity and security sectors. She called for stronger oversight, accountability and coordination to ensure public resources are used to provide essential services.

The crisis has also triggered protests in the capital, Tripoli. Weeks earlier, more than 100 protesters dumped rubbish outside a Libyan oil company, chanting against the authorities and demanding an end to prolonged power outages.

The UN says those responsible for diverting subsidized fuel must be investigated and held accountable.

Source: AfricaNews

4. Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Politics of the Nile

Egypt has renewed its opposition to Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Irrigation Minister Hani Sewilam told Al Arabiya that Cairo continues to see the dam as “illegitimate,” arguing that Ethiopia constructed and operates it unilaterally, without a binding agreement with the two downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan.

The stakes are particularly high for Egypt, which depends on the Nile for the overwhelming majority of its freshwater. Cairo has also become more concerned about what comes after GERD. Reports that Ethiopia could build additional dams on the Nile prompted Sewilam to say that Egypt “will not allow” new projects that threaten its water interests.

The dispute also sits inside a wider geopolitical competition. Sudan has coordinated closely with Egypt in demanding an end to unilateral Ethiopian measures, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and the broader Arab camp have repeatedly backed Egyptian water security.

The United States has also moved closer to Cairo under President Trump, who offered to restart mediation and said in June that Egypt had been “very unfairly treated” over the dam. China is in a more complicated position. Chinese financing and companies helped build the transmission infrastructure connected to GERD, and Beijing has deep economic ties with Ethiopia, but China also has a major strategic relationship with Egypt and has generally preferred African Union-led negotiations rather than openly taking Ethiopia’s side. The disagreement now reaches beyond one dam to the balance of power in the Nile Basin and the Horn of Africa.

5. Iraq Tries to Reclaim the State

Iraq is making a renewed attempt to bring Iran-backed militias under state control.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has set a September 30 deadline for armed factions to surrender or integrate their weapons. Several groups have accepted the principle, but Kataib Hezbollah has refused and insists that it will retain its “resistance weapons.” The difficulty is that these groups are no longer simply militias operating outside the state. Many are embedded in Iraq’s political, security, and economic institutions, which makes disarmament a test of how much authority Baghdad can actually recover.

The stakes are particularly high for Saudi Arabia. Iran-backed groups operating from Iraq have been accused of launching drones against Saudi oil infrastructure, prompting joint US-Saudi strikes on militia positions in July. Riyadh wants a stronger Iraqi government capable of preventing its territory from being used against the Gulf, while also expanding economic ties with Baghdad. Zaidi has sent senior officials to Saudi Arabia to seek a larger OPEC production quota, giving the relationship an important economic dimension as well as a security one.

For Turkey, a stronger central government in Baghdad could open a different kind of opportunity. Iraq is trying to reduce its dependence on the Strait of Hormuz by expanding oil exports through Turkey’s Ceyhan port and developing additional routes toward the Mediterranean. Ankara has already been building influence through trade, infrastructure, and security cooperation. If Baghdad succeeds in weakening autonomous armed factions, Turkey would gain a more reliable state partner and greater leverage over the commercial corridors linking Iraq to Europe.

For Iran, the same process would amount to an immense strategic loss. Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf have both traveled to Baghdad as Tehran tries to preserve its position, with Ghalibaf calling for a “new regional order” with less U.S. influence. Historically, Iraq’s militias have given Iran immense political leverage and the ability to threaten US and Gulf interests without acting directly. Their disarmament would weaken one of Tehran’s most important regional networks.

Two recent statistics struck me as particularly alarming:

• 52% of Americans aged 18 to 29 were living with one or both parents during the pandemic,

• and, more recently, according to Bloomberg, 60% of Gen Zers and millennials reported moving back home in the past two years.

The economic explanation is straightforward: everything is expensive. But shifts of this scale have enormous political consequences, geopolitical even, as they fundamentally reshape the conditions in which people first experience two major elements of political life: authority and governance.

In fact, Anglo-American societies developed unusually strong traditions of individual freedom alongside an equally unusual family structure. The English historian Peter Laslett called this the “Western family pattern.” By examining parish registers, household listings, and population records from 16th- and 17th-century England, he showed that this pattern existed well before industrialization. Young people often left their parents years before marriage to work in another household. Marriage came relatively late, and married couples generally established their own households instead of remaining within a multigenerational family home.

A good example comes from a 16th-century English village. A farming household might include not only parents and their children, but several unrelated teenagers or young adults. They were called “servants,” who were the children of other farming families who had temporarily left their own homes to work for wages. A farmer’s 16-year-old son or daughter, for example, might leave their parents, move several villages away, and spend a few years working in another household. They each would later marry and establish households of their own. Historians such as Peter Laslett and Richard Wall refer to this period between leaving the parental household and marriage as “life-cycle service.”

This created a distinct period between childhood and marriage. By his early 20s, a young Englishman might already have spent years earning wages, living among strangers, going on adventures, changing employers, and moving between communities and villages. Independence (in the modern sense) was, therefore, experienced well before the formation of a family of one’s own.

Yet the deeper significance of life-cycle service, as historian Alan Macfarlane has argued, lay in teaching the young to prize freedom of thought and freedom of action. These values later formed the basis for liberalism as a political doctrine. Another important aspect of this is that once the extended family no longer structured most of adult life, other relationships became essential, such as the ones with the church or with various employers, which paves the way for an individualistic society that requires people to cooperate with those to whom they are neither related nor permanently bound. There are other important factors, naturally, such as rural and land reforms. Still, there is clearly something to the relationship between family structure and the political dispositions a society develops over time.

The Russian peasant household offers, for example, a revealing contrast to the English. Into the 19th century, a household could consist of an elderly father as well as several married sons, their wives, and their children, functioning as a single socio-economic unit. Marriage in that context didn’t necessarily end or start parental authority, since a man could become a husband and father while remaining subordinate to the head of the larger household.

French historian Emmanuel Todd argued that the Russian peasant family structure “habituated” generations to a particular combination: relative equality among brothers under strong vertical authority. Habituation here refers to how, long before political doctrines enter the picture, family life teaches people which forms of objects and subjects of authority are normal and which are not. Communism, in that sense, introduced a political order whose underlying structure was not entirely unfamiliar to Russians.

The Middle East presents another variation. In parts of Arabia, the family extended well beyond the household, linking several generations and branches of kin into networks that also shaped economic and political life. For instance, fathers, sons, and uncles provided one another not only with capital but also with political access. What is often called “tribalism” grew partly from these networks of “trust,” especially where formal institutions were weak, compromised, or absent.

In many ways, the lives of peasants in England and Russia, as well as traditional households in the Middle East, illustrate the same point: The family is an early school of authority. Repeated across generations, its patterns of dependence, autonomy, and obligation enter a long process of habituation, gradually forming social expectations and the cultural ground on which political doctrines can later take root. Across centuries, arrangements of family life can pass into a society’s political inheritance.

This is why the growing number of young Americans who remain in their parents’ home deserves more attention. A prolonged adolescence under family protection delays a more fundamental passage into adulthood: drawing a boundary between oneself and others, forming judgments apart from the household, bearing the consequences of one’s choices, and discovering the limits and extent of one’s own authority. For much of Anglo-American history, these were formative experiences of adult life.

Freedom, too, is partly a matter of habitus. As the social arrangements that once accustomed Americans to independence recede, the political culture they sustained will eventually follow.

Long Cycles is published on the 15th of every month and explores the structural changes transforming societies beyond the Western world. Demographic trends, migration, political realignments, AI adoption, urbanization, and generational change are examined not as isolated events but as part of longer historical trajectories.

1. Turkey's Population Crisis

For much of the 20th century, Turkey's strength rested on a young and rapidly growing population. That demographic advantage is now fading. According to new data from Turkey's statistical agency, the country's fertility rate fell to 1.42 children per woman in 2025, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 and the 9th consecutive year below that threshold. In 2001, the figure stood at 2.38.

Population mobility remains high as well. During 2025, 403,216 people emigrated from Turkey, a 5 percent decline from the previous year. Of those leaving, 248,097 were foreign nationals and 155,119 were Turkish citizens. Although emigration eased slightly, departures continued to exceed arrivals, highlighting that Turkey faces not only a fertility crisis but also sustained population outflows.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government increasingly treats today's demographic trends as a national security issue. Ankara has designated 2026–2035 the "Decade of Family and Population" and introduced policies intended to encourage marriage and larger families. Whether those measures can reverse a trend already visible across much of Europe and East Asia remains uncertain. Once fertility falls well below replacement level, few countries have managed to restore it for long.

“In Türkiye, while the child and youth population is decreasing, the share of those aged 65 and over is increasing. As of 2025, the elderly population share has risen to 11.1%.

According to all population projection scenarios, the 0–14 age group and the 65-and-over age group are projected to converge between 2030 and 2040. By 2100, the share of the elderly population is projected to reach 33.6% under the main scenario and 42.8% under the low scenario. Even the most optimistic (high) scenario foresees that by 2100 about one in three people (28.2%) will be elderly.”

Source: Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Services

Read More:

• Türkiye’s shrinking families set off demographic alarm bells

• Immigration to Türkiye rises by 25% in 2025: TurkStat data

• New official data show Turkey’s demographic crisis deepening as birth rate falls to 1.42 children per woman

• VISION DOCUMENT - The Decade of Family and Population

2. Kyrgyzstan's Return Migration Strategy

For decades, one of Kyrgyzstan's greatest economic challenges has been the steady outflow of workers. Hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz citizens have left to seek employment abroad, particularly in Russia, sending home remittances that account for a substantial share of the country's economy. While those transfers support many families, they also leave Kyrgyzstan dependent on foreign labor markets and vulnerable to demographic decline.

To address that challenge, the Kyrgyz government has continued encouraging members of the ethnic Kyrgyz diaspora to return. According to the Ministry of Labor, Social Security and Migration, 387 ethnic Kyrgyz received returnee (kairylman) status during the first seven months of 2026.

The kairylman (кайрылман) program, whose name literally means “returnee,” is designed for ethnic Kyrgyz whose families settled outside the country’s borders, often during the Soviet period or earlier. The status allows them to relocate to Kyrgyzstan while receiving healthcare, education, pensions, social benefits, and employment rights comparable to those of citizens for up to three years as they complete the process of obtaining full citizenship.

The policy has been part of Kyrgyzstan’s nation-building strategy since independence in 1991. More than 90,000 ethnic Kyrgyz have resettled in the country over that period, and roughly 70,000 have gone on to receive Kyrgyz citizenship. Beyond increasing the population, the government hopes returning families will strengthen the labor force, help offset outward migration, and reinforce cultural and linguistic ties with Kyrgyz communities that remained outside the country’s borders after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“Over the seven-month period, ethnic Kyrgyz who arrived from the following countries were granted kairylman status:

• Uzbekistan — 16 people;

• Tajikistan — 351 people;

• China — 10 people;

• Russia — 5 people;

• Afghanistan — 1 person;

• Other countries — 4 people.

Under Kyrgyz law, kairylmans are provided with social guarantees and benefits largely equivalent to those available to citizens of the republic. Status holders are entitled to social benefits, pensions, healthcare, education and employment in Kyrgyzstan.”

Source: 24.kg

Sources:

• В Кыргызстане 387 этнических кыргызов получили статус кайрылмана

• Ministry of Labor, Social Security and Migration (mlsp.gov.kg)

• Law of the KYRGYZ REPUBLIC of November 26, 2007 No. 175 - About the state guarantees to the ethnic Kyrgyz moving to the Kyrgyz Republic

3. Saudi Arabia Builds an AI Powerhouse

For decades, Saudi Arabia’s economy was defined by oil. Today, the kingdom is investing billions to ensure that artificial intelligence becomes another pillar of its future economy. Data centers, advanced computing infrastructure, and AI research have become central to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 strategy to diversify the country beyond hydrocarbons.

The scale of that effort is becoming increasingly visible. In its 2026 World Development Report, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, the World Bank ranked Saudi Arabia among the world’s top 10 countries for private investment in artificial intelligence. The report reflects several years of rapid expansion. Saudi Arabia’s data-center capacity grew from 68 megawatts in 2021 to 467 megawatts by the first quarter of 2026, nearly a sevenfold increase in just five years. Investments in the sector have exceeded 16 billion Saudi riyals (approximately $4.3 billion) since 2016.

The country’s technology workforce has expanded just as quickly. Nearly 426,000 people now work in the sector, an increase of 186 percent since 2018, while women account for 35 percent of information and communications technology jobs. Saudi Arabia also ranked first in the world for government AI strategy and first in the Arab world, 14th globally, in a United Nations-linked Global AI Index. Earlier this year, the government designated 2026 the “Year of AI,” underscoring the central role artificial intelligence now plays in national economic planning.

The latest step came on 13 August, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, and Google Cloud announced plans to establish an advanced AI center near the city of Dammam on the Persian Gulf coast. The project will deploy Google’s most advanced computing hardware, including Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and the company’s Vertex AI platform for developing generative AI applications. Subject to regulatory approval, Saudi officials estimate the partnership could contribute more than 265 billion Saudi riyals (roughly $70 billion) to the country’s economy over the next eight years.

Sources:

• World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence

• صندوق الاستثمارات العامة و”جوجل كلاود” يطلقان مركزًا متقدمًا للذكاء الاصطناعي في المملكة

• Saudi Arabia ranks among world’s top 10 for private AI investment as data center capacity rises nearly sevenfold

4. Madagascar’s Fragile transition

Nine months after mass protests led largely by Generation Z forced President Andry Rajoelina from power, Madagascar remains in a fragile political transition. A military-backed interim government led by Colonel Michael Randrianirina is attempting to restore stability while preparing the country for elections currently scheduled for 2027.

The unrest reflected more than dissatisfaction with a single government. Madagascar is one of the world's poorest countries, with roughly three-quarters of the population living in poverty despite possessing some of the world's most valuable deposits of critical minerals, including graphite, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths that are increasingly important for batteries, electric vehicles, and advanced technologies. A rapidly growing and youthful population, limited economic opportunities, and accelerating urbanization have intensified demands for political and economic change.

The transitional government is pursuing two parallel objectives. Politically, it has begun long-delayed national consultations on constitutional reform after repeated postponements. Economically, the government is reopening Madagascar's mining sector after a 16-year pause (except gold), hoping that renewed investment in critical minerals will generate jobs, attract foreign capital, and strengthen public finances.

Securing foreign partners has become central to that effort. In February 2026, Randrianirina made his first official trip outside Africa to Moscow, where he met President Vladimir Putin to discuss expanded cooperation in mining, energy, agriculture, defense, education, and healthcare. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later reaffirmed those discussions with his Malagasy counterpart, Alice N'Diaye, ahead of Madagascar's participation in the next Russia–Africa Summit.

Questions of sovereignty have also moved to the forefront.

On 1 July 2026, Madagascar's National Assembly adopted Law No. 2026-007, providing for the automatic transfer to the state of land titles that remained registered in the names of foreigners on 26 June 1960, the eve of independence, and had never subsequently been transferred to Malagasy ownership.

On 3 August, the High Constitutional Court upheld the legislation as constitutional, clearing the way for its implementation. Authorities have presented the measure as completing the unfinished process of decolonization by restoring national control over land and natural resources.

The law excludes diplomatic and consular properties, land that had already been transferred to Malagasy citizens before the cut-off, and properties owned by foreigners who later acquired Malagasy nationality and properly registered their ownership. Madagascar's approach reflects a broader debate across Africa over the legal legacy of colonial land ownership, although unlike the redistribution programs pursued in countries such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia, it focuses specifically on unresolved colonial-era land titles rather than contemporary foreign-owned property.

“That upheaval interrupted Madagascar's engagement with the IMF. An IMF staff mission led by Constant Lonkeng visited Antananarivo from March 26 to April 8, 2026 to hold discussions on the combined third and fourth reviews of the country's Extended Credit Facility (ECF) and Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF) arrangements — programs originally approved by the IMF's Executive Board in June 2024. Pending staff-level agreement and formal Board approval, Madagascar stands to receive a combined disbursement of roughly SDR 134.4 million, or about $183 million, under the two facilities. The resumption of talks after the political interruption is itself a signal that the transitional authorities are seeking continuity with the prior government's reform commitments rather than a wholesale reset of economic policy.”

“According to the African Development Bank's African Economic Outlook 2026, Madagascar's real GDP growth slowed to 3.2% in 2025, down from 4.3% in 2024, even as agriculture (5% growth), metallurgy (9.6%) and banking and insurance (14.5%) continued to expand.”

Source: Madagascar’s Uneasy Reset: Mining Reopens as Poverty and Political Transition Test the Economy

Sources:

• Madagascar strongman sacks government after just 5 months

• Madagascar: New World Bank Program Set to Provide Reliable and Affordable Energy to Over 2.5 Million People by 2030

• African island nation moves to reclaim colonial-era land still registered to foreigners

• Transcripts: Russian-Malagasy talks

• Лавров: глава МИД Мадагаскара подтвердила участие президента в саммите Россия—Африка

5. Brazil Becomes China's Space Anchor in Latin America

China and Brazil are taking another step in a space partnership that has lasted for more than three decades. The two countries have announced plans to jointly develop CBERS-5, a new geostationary satellite designed to provide continuous monitoring of weather, climate, and environmental conditions across South America. Scheduled for launch in 2030, the satellite will improve the region’s ability to track storms, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events in real time, strengthening disaster preparedness and early-warning systems.

The project builds on the China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program, which started in 1988 and has produced several Earth observation satellites since the first launch in 1999. Brazil was the first Latin American country to partner with China in the satellite sector and has the region’s largest aerospace industry, making it Beijing’s most important space partner in Latin America. Unlike earlier CBERS satellites, which orbit the Earth and pass over the same location periodically, CBERS-5 will operate in geostationary orbit, remaining fixed above the continent and providing continuous, 24-hour coverage. That capability will allow meteorological agencies to monitor rapidly changing weather systems with much greater precision.

The partnership, however, has expanded well beyond satellites. This year, China and Brazil began also constructing a joint laboratory for space technologies while continuing work on a major telescope project in South America, further deepening scientific cooperation. The expansion comes as China’s broader space ambitions in Latin America face growing geopolitical headwinds. The United States successfully pressed Argentina and Chile to freeze two high-profile Chinese-backed astronomical observatories in the Andes, citing concerns that their locations and technical capabilities could support satellite tracking, surveillance, or other dual-use military applications. Governments in both countries aligned with Washington’s security concerns amid broader strategic competition with China and wider trade and diplomatic tensions. Against that backdrop, Brazil has become an even more significant partner for Beijing’s long-term scientific and space ambitions in the region.

Sources:

• Wikipedia – China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite program

• China, Brazil to launch 24/7 disaster early warning satellite for South America

• Agência Espacial Brasileira (AEB) – Official announcement of joint development of CBERS-5

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Dear Readers,

Thank you sincerely for subscribing, commenting, and engaging with my work.

I started Beyond the Ideological because I enjoy developing and reworking concepts (most recently Third Worldism), connecting dots, and sharing things I find intriguing.

Unfortunately, my Substack has grown less organized and less fun than I would like, and I want a structure that is easier for me to sustain and, more importantly, easier for you to follow.

Starting August 15th, you can expect five formats:

• The Meridian — A weekly column or essay on geopolitics, a crisis, a war, a controversy, or idea consuming the political and intellectual debate of the moment.

• From Elsewhere — Every Friday, a short note on some developments worth watching across different sectors paired with selected links, books, and excerpts from sources that rarely enter the usual conversation, including Arab and Israeli media and publications from Latin America, Europe, Africa, and beyond.

• Long Cycles — On the 15th of every month, a closer look at some of the long-term forces reshaping societies beyond the Western world, from political causes, demographics, and migration to technology/A.I. adoption, urbanization, and generational shifts.

• The Palimpsest — On the 30th of every month, a translated short text from literature, history, or political thought that I believe deserves a wider audience.

• Beyond the Ideological Podcast — Periodically.

The purpose is to bring together developments too often examined separately and to share more of the background that informs my analysis and conclusions. Geopolitics cannot be separated from markets, energy from industrial capacity, or political movements from the intellectual traditions that animate them. Third Worldism, liberalism, Islamism, technological utopianism, and other ideological doctrines also shape how events are interpreted and which solutions appear desirable. In this sense, I consider Beyond the Ideological a very humble effort to look at both the forces moving the world and the battles over how to understand them.

I hope you will enjoy the next chapter of this project!

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Since the Arab Spring, Morocco's Islamists have struggled to offer a credible governing agenda. Instead, they have spent years convincing young Moroccans that their country has no future. Through alliances with NGOs, partnerships with European activist networks, and relentless claims that Morocco's ties to Israel and the United States make it a conspirator or aggressor, they have pursued a single political objective: to delegitimize the state, deepen public disillusionment, and convert that resentment into votes in September.

For a long time, Islamist rhetoric in Morocco has painted Europe as a kind of promised land, a place where welfare never runs out, chances are everywhere, and prosperity comes easily, with barely any effort required. The objective has always been to weaken trust in Morocco's own institutions and steer young people toward leaving.

But those very currents held power after the 2011 constitutional reforms tied to the Arab Spring. Their time in government produced a sluggish economy, unfulfilled promises, and a public that steadily lost faith. Since then, the pitch has barely changed. The same refrains keep coming back, while Morocco is framed as a failed state, not worth anyone’s loyalty, not worth building, not worth investing in.

In that narrative, Morocco is often branded a kafir state, and the King is attacked as not Islamic enough. Young Moroccans are urged toward jihad and a permanent stance of confrontation with the West. Amazigh (Berber) identity, too, is mocked or dismissed as backward, even primitive. Year after year, the effort has been to drain the spirit out of an entire generation, to sell them on one bleak claim above all: their country has no future.

And whatever Morocco’s problems, the country is not collapsing. There is no war, no state failure, no institutional breakdown. Development is still moving through some of the biggest infrastructure and industrial efforts in modern Moroccan history: the extension of Africa’s first high-speed rail network, the expansion of Tanger Med into the continent’s leading port, and large commitments in renewables and desalination. Morocco has also built one of Africa’s most advanced aerospace sectors, with over 150 companies employing about 25,000 skilled workers and bringing in close to $3 billion a year in exports. Safran, Boeing, Airbus, and other international manufacturers run sites producing aircraft engines. Compared with many developing states, Morocco has put its emphasis on infrastructure first, on pulling in investment, and on laying the groundwork for long-term growth, then, after that, widening social benefits.

The same ideological current also pushes a claim that Morocco is trying to “reclaim Muslim land” via Ceuta and Melilla. In reality, no Moroccan government has expressed such a demand to the United Nations or any similar international body. Official diplomacy has kept those enclaves separate from Western Sahara, where Rabat has made a formal, explicit sovereignty claim for decades. That difference says a lot about the distance between Morocco’s actual foreign policy and the Islamist storyline built for ideological mobilization.

It’s also worth noting where the loudest demand has come from. A Moroccan Islamist leader has publicly argued that the country “must eventually regain control of Ceuta and Melilla.” By projecting that position onto the state while brushing aside official statements and practice, Islamist activists manufacture a thin appearance of legitimacy for a campaign that aims to weaken state authority, and amplify the message online for global support. Morocco’s ties with Israel and the United States then get turned into a weapon as well, presented as proof that the government itself lacks legitimacy.

Since October 7, this has sharpened, in part because Islamists now face a possible political rival in Fouzi Lekjaa, the highly capable president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation. Lekjaa is widely credited with driving Morocco’s historic run to the semi-finals in the 2022 World Cup and with turning the national team into a global force. Now he is using his key role in winning and preparing for the 2030 World Cup, co-hosted with Spain and Portugal, to bolster his profile as a potential prime minister, and to deepen his standing as one of the country’s most influential public figures.

Morocco remains a developing country. Real social and economic difficulties persist, and legitimate frustrations deserve to be taken seriously. Still, describing the country as hopeless helps no one, not Moroccans and not anyone interested in meaningful reform. In practice, that narrative mainly benefits two groups: people looking to justify illegal migration, and those trying to strip the Moroccan state of legitimacy.

Contrary to the conspiracy talk that spreads online, Morocco gains nothing from uncontrolled crossings. Some critics point to Algeria’s relationships with European governments, but every major European state keeps channels open with Algiers, Giorgia Meloni’s Italy has a notably strong relationship, while Morocco’s day-to-day cooperation has stayed consistently solid across the board. That includes strong migration frameworks with France and Germany, including a bilateral partnership signed with Berlin in 2024 that has driven higher returns, deportation arrangements with Hungary and Poland, and, most recently, close operational coordination with the United States.

What actually happened looked far less like state orchestration and far more like online coordination and crowd movement. Facebook groups coordinated mass pushes toward the border cities, while a curated stream of clips showed traffic police, whose authority extends only within narrow legal limits, alongside videos of cars and buses heading north. All of it was then repackaged into the claim that “Morocco is behind it.” Missing from that online narrative were images of Moroccan security forces actively pushing back, deploying in Nador, Tangier, and surrounding areas, and the fact that Morocco itself suspended train service to slow the flow. Criminal networks sought to overwhelm the response by bribing people and urging the largest possible numbers to move simultaneously. In the end, Morocco mobilized the army across multiple cities.

The truth is that Morocco is itself under heavy migration pressure coming from the Sahel. In 2025 alone, authorities intercepted 73,640 attempted irregular crossings, and sub-Saharan nationals now account for nearly 60% of foreign residents.

Last year, several thousand Sudanese and other Sahel-origin migrants also crossed the eastern border, adding to the strain already felt in Moroccan cities, it’s a pressure ordinary Moroccans regularly complain about. The chaos of the past two days only worsens Morocco’s position rather than helping it: once the impression of an open or uncontrolled border spreads, it draws in even more refugees and irregular migrants, piling additional weight onto a burden that is already substantial.

Islamist voices now invert reality and accuse the Moroccan government of orchestrating the entire episode. Many NGOs, including those in Europe with ties to Islamist groups, have amplified the falsehood by branding Morocco a “Zionist proxy.” This ignores the fact that Morocco’s position on Gaza does not favor Netanyahu: Rabat has repeatedly and firmly condemned Israeli military operations and ceasefire violations, called for an immediate and lasting halt to the fighting, demanded unrestricted humanitarian access, and insisted on a two-state solution with East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

The timing is also interesting: general elections are set for 23 September, and Islamist operators understand that border chaos, magnified on social media, can destabilize the incumbent narrative before the vote.

Morocco is further constrained by Spanish policy choices under Pedro Sánchez. Effective migration management requires reciprocity. The security budget allocated to Ceuta has remained inadequate, particularly with a regional government led by the Partido Popular (whose president, Juan Jesús Vivas, belongs to a party long hostile to Sánchez).

Morocco shoulders the burden of physical presence, patrols, interceptions, and surveillance along the entire land and maritime perimeter. By contrast, Spain’s preventive spending is limited: Spain allocates roughly €60 million per year to measures aimed at preventing irregular arrivals (border technology, Frontex participation, and limited aid to North African partners), while spending more than €1.8 billion annually on reception and support for irregular migrants. A multi-year Spanish government plan of €711 million for Ceuta and Melilla through 2026, covered by El País in 2022, directed the bulk of funds to education, social services, and economic development not pure border security.

This structural imbalance renders Spanish policy unsustainable as it provides more incentives to illegal crossings, not less. Morocco has no legal prerogative to extract individuals once they are inside Spanish territory, including Ceuta. Spanish Supreme Court rulings that have extended asylum protections to certain “swimmers” which were published a few weeks ago only complicate the picture further.

This latest episode will primarily benefit Islamists who want Europe to fail and Morocco, denounced in their rhetoric as a "Zionist" state, to fail alongside it. Every crisis that deepens polarization, weakens European governments, and reinforces the narrative of a failing Morocco advances the ideological project they have pursued for years.

“If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.
If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics.”
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

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It’s official. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers agree with me that Third-Worldism is one of the biggest challenges that the United States is confronting, and I’m obviously very glad the notion is gaining traction.

For some reason, it has slipped out of the standard encyclopedia of ideologies even though intellectuals like Raymond Aron identified it early and explained precisely what it would become.

I have warned for a while about its rise in the United States, especially after October 7, and also about how China, Russia, and Iran use it to promote anti-Americanism and conduct information warfare campaigns. Naturally, naming the ideology is the first step toward countering it.

In a statement, Secretary Rubio explained: “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country. The American people deserve to know.”

What makes Third-Worldism uniquely dangerous is its ability to not only present itself as a moral creed, almost a secular religion, but also in how it helps advance every single interest but the United States’. Indeed, foreign propaganda usually arrives bearing the marks of an adversary and is discounted accordingly. Third-Worldism, by contrast, speaks in an American vocabulary through Americans in universities, newsrooms, philanthropic foundations, and legislatures, cultivating a domestic constituency that steadily narrows what elected officials consider politically defensible. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Havana understand the strategic value of cultivating these narratives. They benefit from activist movements already inclined to embrace them. After all, a citizen persuaded that his own country's power is fundamentally illegitimate does more to advance their interests than any intelligence agency could hope to accomplish.

Third-World and Third-Worldism

Understanding why requires distinguishing the ideology from the Third-World that named it.

Alfred Sauvy coined the term in 1952 by analogy to the third estate of the French Revolution, describing a bloc that was ignored, exploited, and scorned, and that wished to become something. The phrase later on designated a set of places belonging to neither the Western bloc nor the Soviet one, and the category has long since dissolved, since states once gathered under it now include some of the wealthiest societies on earth alongside powers projecting force well beyond their borders.

On the other hand, Third-Worldism is a symbolic conception of those places rather than a description of them, which is why it outlived the geography that produced it. The central claim of the Third-Worldist cosmos holds that the fundamental division in world politics runs between a dominating North and a dominated South, that this cleavage precedes and explains every other political fact, and that every conflict resolves into a single story of colonizer and colonized. What the ideology fundamentally demands but also delivers in a way that is hypnotic is a totalizing moral hierarchy in which victimhood confers legitimacy and power confers guilt, a formula that can be applied to any dispute anywhere, indefinitely.

As I mentioned in an earlier piece, François Furet gave the clearest account of what such a structure actually is. A French historian of the Revolution who broke with the Communist Party in 1956 and spent the remainder of his career dismantling the Marxist historiography he had once served, Furet argued in Penser la Révolution française and later in Le Passé d'une illusion that revolutionary politics operates as a mentalité rather than a body of doctrine, a way of inhabiting political reality in which history moves toward a redemptive rupture and the believer locates himself on the correct side of it.

His insight was that the mentalité survives the falsification of every proposition attached to it, because it was never held as a set of propositions in the first place, a finding he reached by tracing how Western intellectuals sustained their commitment to the Soviet project across every disclosure that should have ended it. And I believe that Third-Worldism operates on exactly that basis, which is why no accumulation of evidence, even when coming from the Third-World about the outcomes it produces, has any effect on the conviction of those who carry it.

The Ideology That Outlived Its Subject

In that sense, a mentalité that survives the falsification of its propositions will also survive the downfall of the state that housed it, which is why communism and its supporters did not vanish with the Soviet Union.

As a matter of fact, Western governments read the institutional victories of 1991 as the conclusion of a contest that had merely mutated, and the mutation followed a pattern familiar from certain pathogens, which shed the features that make them recognizable while conserving the mechanism that makes them transmissible. Class struggle and other forms of “Wokeism” proved dispensable and were discarded without difficulty, while the underlying partition of humanity into oppressor and oppressed survived every ideological battle by locating fresh categories to inhabit, so that class yielded to race, race yielded to colonizer and colonized, and the present arrangement arrays the West against everybody else.

Cuba demonstrates perfectly that the mutation worked and is working, having grasped before Moscow did that the Third-Worldist frame traveled further than doctrinal orthodoxy and having built the institutional machinery to prove it. The Tricontinental Conference of January 1966 assembled delegates across countries and produced two permanent bodies, the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Latin American Solidarity Organization.

From those bodies came a journal circulating in several languages and a poster output running to hundreds of designs distributed worldwide, which promoted this sort of “global resistance” to audiences that never opened a page of Marx.

The 6th Non-Aligned Movement summit followed in Havana in 1979, handing Fidel Castro the chairmanship for three years, and the Havana Conference on Third World debt came in 1985 with representatives of high caliber. The catch was that participation in any of it required no communist commitment, which was precisely the point, and Cuban intelligence built slowly but surely its relationships within American academic, activist, and policy circles around the frame instead of the party, so that those relationships outlived the Soviet collapse entirely.

Cubans themselves are the first casualties of what their government exports, since decades organized around “resistance to imperial domination” have yielded ration books, a medical system in ruin that the regime continues to advertise abroad as a great success, and an exodus so large that the diaspora now constitutes a substantial fraction of the nation. And every material failure receives the same explanation: colonialism, a category convenient enough to absorb responsibility for outcomes the leadership's own decisions produced.

Iran adapted the model as well to a different context and region and produced its most operationally successful version, namely “Khomeinism”, presenting itself as the vanguard of the mustazafin, the oppressed of the earth, a formulation that carries the North-South ideological framework intact under theological terms.

Why this Matters

First, the State Department, like much of the national security establishment, has struggled for years to identify conceptually the threat.

Communism is an inadequate label. The term has lost much of its explanatory power in the American political imagination, burdened by the legacy of the Cold War and associated with an economic doctrine that few contemporary activists openly embrace. More importantly, today’s progressive movements draw their energy from universities, media, and cultural production rather than from the industrial working class that Marxism once claimed as history’s revolutionary agent.

Islamism is equally insufficient, though for the opposite reason. Most of the college-educated Americans advancing the ideas of Hamas or Jihadism hold no commitment to divine sovereignty, Islamic law (Shariaa), or religious governance. Shared opposition to the United States and Israel, rather than shared theology, explains their alignment with Islamist movements. Common enemies frequently produce political cooperation without ideological agreement.

Also, Third-Worldism explains the coalition’s looseness better than either label because the doctrine furnishes the shared premise both alternatives miss: the revolutionary subject cannot err, and anti-imperial grievance is fuel. A movement organized around grievance rather than program can migrate from climate to Gaza to Cuba without contradiction, because the object of protest is interchangeable so long as the accused remains the same.

The irony is that many societies classified as “the Global South” increasingly reject the revolutionary governments claiming to speak for them. Cubans flee Cuba. Iranians risk their lives protesting the Islamic Republic. North Koreans defect whenever escape becomes possible. Developing states seek closer relations with the United States, Europe, and Japan rather than with self-proclaimed revolutionary regimes. The principal constituency for Third-Worldism sits not in the Third-World but in the West.

Second, accommodation with Third-Worldism appears in the conduct of American foreign policy itself.

Washington has almost always treated revolutionary hostility as a negotiating posture to be managed rather than a declared purpose to be believed, extending recognition, multilateral standing, remittance channels, and sanctions relief to governments whose legitimacy rests on the promise of defeating the United States. Havana and Tehran, for example, have never concealed that resistance to the West forms the foundation of both regimes and the justification they offer their populations for everything withheld from them.

Third, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism constitute one commitment expressed at two levels of a single hierarchy.

Anyone who accepts the case for decolonizing Israel has already accepted the case for decolonizing the United States, since the same premise governs both, and the Third-Worldist view has never permitted the exception that adherents assume they are drawing when they endorse the first and decline the second. Israel has always been the entry point in the longer argument against the United States.

Finally, and most importantly, the State Department for the first time explains to Americans why they should refuse the logic of decline that the Third-Worldist doctrine promotes.

The ideology asks a country to accept that its power is a historical accident awaiting either correction with a sort of new Red Terror or annihilation, that its founding contaminates everything built since, and that the proper posture toward the rest of the world is apology. One can entertain this only for so long, a country persuaded that its strength is illegitimate will not be able to keep it.

One year ago on a night like this one, a terrorist criminal shot my dear friend Yaron and his fiancée, Sarah.

The next morning, my phone lit with a message from my friend Ethan. He told me “It’s Yaron”. I searched the headlines and found a news report about two Israeli embassy staffers killed in a targeted attack. I got it. I will never forget that moment.

For a few seconds, part of me still believed I was hallucinating. Then I understood it was real. The gunman had walked into the Capital Jewish Museum and killed them both. I sat in the dark early in the morning, cried, dressed, and went to work, because Yaron and Sarah had planned to join me that day for the first conference I had ever organized, and I decided that keeping moving was the only form of honor I had left to offer.

His name was Elias Rodriguez, 31 years old, from Chicago. When event security apprehended him, he pulled out a keffiyeh, said “I did it. I did it for Gaza,” and began chanting “Free, free Palestine.”

Less than an hour after the shooting, a manifesto titled Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home appeared on X under his name, defending armed violence against Israel and situating it within an ideological framework of anti-imperialist resistance. The FBI examined the manifesto and found little ambiguity about what it said. Rodriguez was not some feral actor without a history. He had ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and arrived at that reception with a real purpose.

Growing up, I absorbed a great deal of propaganda and came away largely immune to ideological capture, though I cannot entirely explain why. That immunity prepared me for nothing when it came to confronting the actual logic of murder. What has become clear to me in the year since is that there are people who loved that Yaron died. They genuinely did.

They announced the murders online, reveled in them, and framed them as justice delivered to an enemy of the people. I had not been prepared for that.

I found comment sections full of ordinary people, many of them educated and professionally credentialed, expressing satisfaction that Yaron was dead. “This is what you get.” That he was a Christian who had dedicated his life to Israeli-Palestinian peace was irrelevant to that judgment. He was an Israeli who worked in America, and that was sufficient. The genocide charge and the Great Satan designation did the rest.

In fact, the newspaper of Ali Khamenei's regime praised the killer, calling him "our dear brother." "Our dear brother Elias Rodriguez, who killed two Israelis in the U.S., has founded the Washington Basij," the paper wrote. Khamenei himself joined the chorus, making clear that the approval was an official endorsement from the top of the Iranian state.

What changed in me was precisely this, the understanding that ideas and policies have logical conclusions, and that I spent too long assuming those conclusions were hypothetical.

When people chanted "globalize the intifada," when they declared “Americans evil” or “the West genocidal”, I processed those slogans from a comfortable analytical remove, as political theater. Yaron's death ended that for me. The slogans had always been instructions. I had simply chosen to read them otherwise.

In the year that followed, I have tried to honor that reckoning by writing more, explaining more, and staying close to what remains. I have met Yaron’s brothers and sister and his parents, and I have stayed in contact with the family. I bury that grief very deep, deeper than I know how to say. Looking at his brother’s face, I see Yaron’s exact smile, and that alone is painful.

I want to thank my family, and every one of you who reached out, who sent a note, an email, or simply checked in. I am deeply grateful, and I apologize to those whose messages I never answered.

I am writing this because I want people to remember that it happened, to remember who did it and under what ideological sanction, and to resist the drift toward forgetting that follows every act of political violence once the news cycle has moved on. I recognize how that sounds. But in the year since Yaron and Sarah were killed, I have watched enough reactions online, from enough people in enough countries, to understand that the forgetting is not always passive. Some people were never troubled by it to begin with.

That is what frightens me, more than the killer himself. The killer was one person. The people who smiled or rejoiced are beyond counting.

Yaron and Sarah deserve to be remembered and the circumstances of their deaths deserve to be named with precision.

His death taught me, among other things, the importance of friendship and what it means to nurture it. I am, by habit and by temperament, someone reserved who works too much and disappears into the work. The burn I carry from his killing has stayed with me, and I expect it will remain, but it has taught me that the people who matter require more than good intentions.

I have also made myself a promise. Whenever I am demoralized, whenever I am mocked or insulted, whenever the work feels useless and the cost of doing it feels too high, I will remember that I am fighting for Yaron and Sarah. That promise has held me, more than once, when nothing else could.

There is so much more I want to say, so much I want to explain, but this is the best I can do. Please don’t forget them.

Below is my tribute, special thanks to Tablet Magazine for publishing it.

Losing Yaron

MAY 26, 2025

Tablet Magazine - Piece

The memory of my last hug with Yaron Lischinsky stays with me. It was quick and familiar, as I crossed the street. He smiled, warm and full of life, and said goodbye with a steadiness that made it feel like we’d see each other again the next day. I didn’t know it would be the last time.

Now every detail stands out. The light in his eyes. The way he carried himself. How he made ordinary moments feel meaningful. Yaron was a rare person, thoughtful, kind, and generous. He had a way of making people feel valued.

He was also one of my closest friends.

Though we both held public roles in spaces that demanded constant engagement, we were more reserved by nature. We found comfort in the pauses that didn’t need filling, in the ease of simply being around each other. Where the world pushed for attention, we found meaning in presence, in the steady rhythm of thoughtful conversation.

We met two years ago, and since our first exchange, we never stopped talking. Long lunches between meetings, dinners stretched by ideas, I would find every excuse to invite him to events I was hosting. We spoke about books, belief, politics, and the future. After Oct. 7, when the world shifted in ways that were hard to name, I could see something change in Yaron. His expressions became more focused, his silences heavier. The work he had always taken seriously now carried an added urgency. He spoke less, but when he did, it was with clarity shaped by grief and resolve. The hostages weighed on him. He thought about them and their families constantly.

Yaron’s life was a testament to duty without fanfare: a man who served not for recognition, but because it was who he was. Working with him was a rare kind of partnership. His insights brought steadiness to discussions. I was often the fire in our conversations. I would vent about writings, ideas or opinions that bothered me. Yaron was always calm. He’d listen, lean back, a faint smile tugging at his lips, and say, “Ah, you know ...” Then, thoughtfully, he’d unravel the knot of my anger, helping me carry it without letting it consume me. I left every exchange with a clearer head, more certain of what mattered.

His memory was a gift that held your words long after they were spoken. Days after a conversation, a message would arrive, a quote, an article, a recommendation, always prefaced with, “You’ll find this interesting …” And it always was.

Years earlier, he had pursued an Asia studies minor in college and had studied Japanese, and those interests remained with him. They shaped how he saw global dynamics, how he thought about responsibility, and how seriously he took the inner lives of other nations. He also told me how much he wished there were more academic programs like this, ones that could help Israelis understand Americans more deeply, and Americans come to know Israelis beyond headlines and policy debates, through real conversation and mutual respect.

For Yaron, this kind of understanding required more than policy. It required taking belief seriously. His Christian faith and belief in grace were the pulse of his life. His interest in theology shaped the way he approached everything. He once told me, “People who don’t understand religion should never be in politics.” He believed that without understanding what others hold sacred, leaders fail to grasp what drives loyalty, fear, and hope. For Yaron, religion was part of what made people human.

I never met Sarah, but through Yaron’s words, she became intimately familiar to me. His voice softened when he spoke of her, his eyes glowing with admiration for her strength, her joy, her unwavering commitment to peace. Sarah dedicated her life to building bridges between Israelis and Palestinians, work that mirrored Yaron’s own mission to foster understanding in a region torn by conflict. Together, they carried a shared purpose: a Middle East where coexistence was not just possible but real. He told me she loved my native Morocco, that she and I should get together and think of what we can do for Morocco’s Jewish heritage, he believed we’d get along perfectly. He was ready to propose to her, to weave their lives into a shared future, and I teased him about cooking couscous for their ceremony.

Then came that shattering Thursday. I woke, the air thick with an unplaceable dread. My phone glowed with a friend’s message: “Hey, I don’t want to say this, but it’s Yaron.” My heart stopped. I scoured the news: “Two Israeli embassy staffers killed in targeted attack.” No names. No faces. But I knew.

I wept in the dark willing it to be untrue. It was 4 in the morning. I had to get ready, go to work, keep things moving, at least in his honor, because that day, I knew Yaron and Sarah were supposed to be with me at a conference at the Hudson Institute. I forced myself to smile to trick my brain.

The hatred Yaron confronted, with patience, clarity and grace, had found him. At the conference he helped me plan, his name tag waited: “Yaron Lischinsky,” printed, cut, expectant. He had registered. He had made time, as he always did.

But he was gone. And so was Sarah. Taken not by chance, but targeted. A man looked at them and saw something he could not tolerate, and he pulled the trigger. Yaron had spent his life naming that danger. Sarah had spent hers forging relationships. It was often painful. But they persevered, because they believed that understanding mattered. That the people around them still deserved to be reached.

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were thoughtful, kind, and full of promise. They should have been able to build a life and grow old together. Instead, their families are left with grief, their friends and colleagues with silence.

But the way they lived still matters. They moved through the world with care, with purpose, and with love that asked nothing in return.

It lives in memory, in absence, and in the responsibility of carrying them forward.

The situation is obviously dynamic, but from reading today’s statements, here is my takeaway.

When Iran sealed the Strait of Hormuz, its genius strategists believed they held a winning hand. They expected two things: a global energy shock to force Washington into negotiations and the Gulf states to blame the disruption on US belligerence. Today, as President Trump sat across from Xi Jinping in Beijing, the first statements emerging from that summit began to reveal how thoroughly Tehran had misjudged the situation.

Diplomatic readouts on both sides are written to obscure as much as they reveal, but the White House statement from the meeting is unusually legible. The two leaders agreed that the strait must remain open to support the free flow of energy, and agreed that Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons (or, from China’s side, that Iran should have peaceful nuclear energy). Read at face value, these are bland formulations. Read against the backdrop of the past several months, they represent a significant Chinese repositioning, one Tehran will have noticed immediately.

Reports that Iranian authorities had begun allowing Chinese vessels through the strait coincided almost to the hour with the statement’s release. That synchronicity was not accidental. Tehran's opening passage for Chinese ships is less a concession to Washington than a signal of how much ground it has lost with Beijing.

The deeper story here is what Iran’s gambit cost with its most important patron.

China had extended substantial support to the Islamic Republic through the sanctions years, sustaining Iranian oil exports through teapot refineries, enabling a shadow fleet to move Iranian crude, and providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations. That relationship carried an implicit logic whereby Beijing would absorb some international costs of the Iranian partnership because it served Chinese interests. Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz broke that arrangement entirely.

Roughly 40-50 percent of China’s crude oil imports pass through the strait, and by threatening the waterway indiscriminately, Tehran was undermining the energy security of the one government still willing to shield it.

When China subsequently blocked a Bahrain-sponsored UN resolution condemning Iran's weaponization of the strait, it exposed the contradiction at the center of its Gulf strategy: defending a partner whose conduct was actively alienating the regional relationships Beijing valued most. Which is why this morning’s statement reads as if Beijing had stopped absorbing that contradiction.

The nuclear language in the summit statement also deserves particular attention, especially given what Tehran was still saying just days earlier.

On May 10, Iran’s ambassador to China, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, said Beijing could serve as the guarantor of a future deal between Iran and major world powers, and that any agreement should ultimately be endorsed by the UN Security Council. The statement reflected Tehran’s long-standing preference for multilateral guarantees over bilateral commitments, but more immediately, Iran was still counting on China as its primary diplomatic anchor.

Beijing’s summit statement reaffirmed its longstanding support for Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities, as the IRGC expected, but by endorsing the anti-proliferation standard with Washington, Beijing withdrew diplomatic cover from the IRGC’s weapons ambitions at the precise moment the IRGC most needed that cover.

The context around Xi Jinping’s interest in purchasing greater quantities of US oil sharpens the picture.

Days before the summit, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical, one of China’s largest petrochemical refineries and a known processor of Iranian crude subject to sanctions. The interesting part is that Beijing had been enabling Iranian crude exports while simultaneously trying to shield its own companies from U.S. designation, a dual position that Xi’s pre-summit order prohibiting Chinese firms from complying with U.S. sanctions could not sustain once Washington refused to ease the pressure.

This is why Trump’s offer of US energy to China during the summit carries immense consequences.

China has always sought the cheapest available energy to fuel its industrial base, and Iranian crude, heavily discounted under sanctions, served that purpose for years. Cheap U.S. energy offers Beijing an alternative that does not come with Gulf relationships to manage or Chinese companies to protect from U.S. sanctions.

However, reading Beijing's repositioning as a strategic alignment with Washington against Tehran entirely misreads the relationship. What the past several months have demonstrated to China is that enabling the Islamic Republic generates compounding liabilities, and those liabilities now have a price tag attached to specific Chinese firms. A less entangled China is not a hostile China toward Tehran, but a China that can afford to watch Iranian decisions produce their own consequences without intervening to soften them.

More crucially, every future barrel China sources from the Western Hemisphere is a barrel that does not flow through the IRGC’s revenue stream, and that revenue is what sustains the weapons programs, the proxy networks, and the institutional ambitions that have kept the region in a state of managed instability.

Whether the energy arrangement materializes remains to be seen, but the offer is attractive to Beijing, which has watched the US Treasury designate Chinese-linked companies that sustain Iranian crude exports without hesitation. Operation Epic Fury is already compressing the IRGC’s economic base, and these signals, taken together, will not necessarily alter the IRGC’s strategic course. What they will do is amplify the perception of Iranian isolation, which, for a leadership that tracks X posts and meme cycles as proxies for regional sentiment, carries its own weight.

This piece was originally published in the New York Post

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In the past, the notion of “peace through strength” was read as a military proposition: Assemble enough force, and adversaries will stand down.

Operation Epic Fury has shown the error of that presumption.

We’ve seen in Iran how deterrence multiplies when military power, economic pressure and alliance consolidation strike together.

America’s response to the China challenge has suffered the same narrowness — until now.

Washington spent years treating competition with Beijing as a discrete series of problems — of the Indo-Pacific, or artificial intelligence, or trade balances — as though China were competing selectively, in specific theaters.

China, however, has been competing across every domain and every region simultaneously, building energy dependencies, embedding financial architecture and acquiring port access from the Atlantic to the South China Sea.

The Middle East was always a theater in that competition, and Iran was always a central CCP asset.

Beijing’s investment in Iran went well beyond oil.

Chinese companies supplied Tehran with sanctioned dual-use technology that kept Iran’s weapons programs advancing through years of international pressure.

In 2021, Beijing gave the regime access to BeiDou, its state-owned global positioning satellite system, directly enhancing Iran’s military targeting capacity.

In July 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi assured Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi that China would “continue to support Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty and dignity” and in “resisting hegemonic and bullying policies.”

China was sustaining Iran’s defiance at every level — financial, technological, diplomatic — and normalizing it in the process.

Operation Epic Fury plowed directly through that arrangement.

Its defining doctrine has been military force and economic statecraft applied simultaneously, leaving no window for adaptation or rerouting.

Washington degraded Iran’s military capacity and squeezed the financial architecture sustaining it at the same time.

The operation exposed a structural reality Beijing can’t escape: The United States has a deep alliance system in the Middle East, while China’s links are tenuous at best.

It also laid bare China’s vulnerability, as it relies on resources it does not control.

In the Persian Gulf itself, Beijing had sought to build real diplomatic capital.

By brokering the Iran-Saudi normalization deal in 2023 and the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement, it presented itself as the indispensable outside power.

Gulf states then watched America run a sustained military campaign against Beijing’s partner — and according to reports this week, at least one of them, the United Arab Emirates, participated in military strikes on Iran as well.

The campaign is shattering the myth of a Middle East arrayed against Washington, vindicating every government that joined the Abraham Accords and named Iran as its primary threat.

In the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran’s closure move aimed to change President Trump’s calculus and turn Gulf states against Washington.

It achieved the opposite, proving to Gulf capitals precisely why Tehran cannot be permitted a nuclear arsenal.

They watched, too, as China absorbed economic damage it had no instrument to stop.

Japan drew the operational conclusion from the regime’s closure action, committing over $6 billion to US liquefied natural gas supply chains.

But the economic track is where China is taking the worst damage.

The US Treasury hit Hengli Petrochemical, teapot refineries and 40 shadow fleet operators with sanctions.

The State Department then designated several Chinese entities for supplying Iran with satellite intelligence on US and allied military movements, placing Beijing’s complicity on the public record.

Xi Jinping responded by invoking China’s anti-extraterritoriality law, directing Chinese firms to ignore US sanctions — but in practice, Beijing has little leverage over companies whose survival depends on access to the dollar system.

Israel was central to all of it: The targeting precision and sustained strike capacity that degraded Iran’s military infrastructure required an ally of its caliber, and China has no equivalent partner in the region.

And as the military action proceeded, the United States made gains across the map aimed at limiting China’s reach.

The Pentagon locked in a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with Indonesia — the archipelago that sits astride Malacca, Sunda and Lombok, three straits through which most of China’s energy imports flow.

In the Philippines, a new 4,000-acre US-governed economic security zone on the Luzon Strait is anchoring an American presence at the doorstep of the South China Sea.

In the western Balkans, the US signed deals at Dubrovnik’s Three Seas Initiative Summit — a $1.5 billion Croatia-Bosnia gas interconnection, a $6 billion Albanian LNG framework and a $58 billion AI data center investment — foreclosing Chinese capital from the Adriatic in a single package.

Trump heads to Beijing this week carrying immense leverage over China.

To earn any sanctions relief for designated Chinese firms, Xi may well have to dismantle the Iranian military procurement network Beijing spent a decade building.

The summit is the test of whether the president can hold what his administration has built.

By Michael Doran and Zineb Riboua

This piece was originally published in the Wall Street Journal

The U.S. has launched a new phase in the competition with China over artificial intelligence. On April 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned U.S. embassies worldwide that Chinese companies, including AI firm DeepSeek, are waging a state-backed campaign to steal advanced American technology.

The warning is necessary, but defensive measures alone won’t secure American leadership. Success demands an offensive strategy: reshaping the competition through AI alliances hardened against Chinese espionage.

One promising area for such collaboration is in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to American and Israeli officials, the two countries are discussing a joint initiative there, which the Israelis call Project Spire. The plan is for an AI base that has the security of an American military installation and the creative output of a Silicon Valley hub.

The U.S. is evaluating three Israeli-proposed sites in the western Negev, where Israel is prepared to grant a long-term lease for American use. The base would be home to research and development, large-scale server infrastructure, and energy systems to meet the enormous demands of AI training and deployment. Engineers would design chips, build models and run them on site inside a secure perimeter. The base would also house advanced chip fabrication, thus reducing dependence on semiconductor production in exposed regions like Taiwan.

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What the War Inherited

Many forget that Iran entered the conflict carrying the most severe economic crisis in the history of the Islamic Republic.

President Pezeshkian had already warned that the country’s infrastructure was nearing the edge: “In Tehran, if we cannot manage and people don’t cooperate in controlling consumption, there won’t be any water in reservoirs by September or October.” The damage today runs well beyond water management and is visible across three dimensions: the currency, the labor market, and the industrial base.

The rial’s collapse to 1.45 million per dollar in January triggered massive unrest, and the currency has since deteriorated further, now trading at 1.87 million per dollar. Iran’s central bank issued a public warning, cautioning citizens against buying foreign currency, suggesting prices could reverse with intervention. “If expectations are adjusted, supply increases or the central bank makes targeted intervention, there is a possibility that prices will return and buyers at high rates will suffer losses,” the central bank said. A central bank warning its own population against holding dollars signals that the state has lost one of the most basic functions of monetary governance.

Moreover, the labor picture compounds the monetary one. The Iranian Deputy Minister of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare admitted last month that the war had directly destroyed over 1 million jobs, with 2 million additional losses due to different and indirect factors.

However, the government's own officials cannot agree on the scale of the damage. Or perhaps do not want to admit that U.S. and Israeli strikes have hit strategic assets. Indeed, some of them cited Social Security data suggesting that only 100,000 unemployment insurance cases may be added. Labor Minister Ahmad Meydari released another third figure that 150,000 Iranians have recently registered for unemployment benefits.

What is striking is that each figure comes from a different ministry, is measured through a different methodology, and serves a different political purpose. More than anything else, it reveals a government far more concerned with managing the perception of unemployment than with addressing the problem itself.

“In the past year, Iran’s working-age population expanded by roughly 825,000 people, yet only 57,000 new jobs were created.” Financial Tribune

Underlying both is the damage to Iran's industrial base.

Mobarakeh Steel, among Iran's most consequential industrial assets, took direct and heavy hits. More than 27,000 workers have since been left without a clear employment status. Skilled technical staff who previously took home over 100 million tomans — roughly $568 — a month now earn close to the statutory floor, a reduction to roughly a fifth of former wages, according to Iran International.

The problem that runs through everything else is that Iranian steel manufacturing depends on petrochemical feedstocks and energy inputs, while the petrochemical sector relies on domestic steel for plant construction and upkeep. These two industries function practically as a single interconnected system, and what made US attacks lethal is how they struck at two of its load-bearing points. This is also especially damaging for the IRGC, since that system carries substantial weight in the Iranian economy, with petrochemicals generating approximately $13 billion in export revenue annually, ranking as the country’s second-largest source of foreign currency after crude oil.

Notably, drug prices have surged by as much as 400 percent, pharmacies report shortages across the country, and the internet shutdown that has long served as the regime's preferred instrument for controlling the narrative may succeed in keeping Iranians from footage of IRGC battlefield failures, but it cannot keep them from a currency that has lost more than half its value.

In this sense, what Operation Epic Fury has achieved so far is forcing the Islamic Republic to manage two fronts simultaneously, one facing outward toward protecting a mosaic military enterprise built on proxy funding, missile threats, and an unrelenting nuclear program, and one facing inward toward managing a population that has shown repeatedly, at the cost of its own lives, that there is a threshold the regime keeps pushing past.

The Blockade and the Sanctions Architecture

Alongside the strikes on key industries, the U.S. naval blockade has been severing export revenue at the source, with Kharg Island approaching storage capacity, satellite imagery capturing a large oil slick west of the terminal, the IRGC has been losing roughly $170 million a day, and the Pentagon is placing total lost oil revenue at $4.8 billion to date.

Choking off oil exports, however, leaves untouched the financial network Iran built to process, move, and shelter that revenue through Chinese intermediaries, and that is precisely where Operation Economic Fury operates.

Understanding it requires recognizing that previous rounds of sanctions fell short precisely because China absorbed Iran’s crude through teapot refineries, moved its funds through shadow banking networks, and supplied the IRGC with the intelligence infrastructure that kept its regional operations functional. Economic Fury goes after all of it. As Secretary Bessent put it: “We will relentlessly target the regime’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds, and pursue anyone enabling Tehran’s attempts to evade sanctions.”

Trump’s economic campaign runs on two levels.

The first level is about targeting the financial network through which Iranian oil moved outside the reach of Western regulators.

U.S. Treasury designated Hengli Petrochemical, China’s second-largest teapot refinery, roughly 40 shipping firms tied to Iran’s shadow fleet, and independently operated teapot refineries serving as the primary processors of sanctioned Iranian crude. Beijing’s answer was a formal prohibition order directing Chinese citizens and companies not to comply, and the order itself was the tell: a government reduced to issuing emergency instructions to shield its firms from U.S. designations has run out of more discreet ways to do business with a designated terrorist organization.

The second level is about converting economic pressure on the IRGC into a political-exposure campaign directed at China.

The designations against Meentropy Technology, The Earth Eye, and Chang Guang Satellite Technology for supplying Iran with geospatial intelligence to monitor U.S. and allied military movements place Chinese complicity in Iranian military operations on public legal record, furnishing regulators with a documented predicate for broader action against Chinese commercial remote sensing.

Those watching the ceasefire negotiations and concluding that the conflict is winding down are misreading the situation in ways that carry real analytical consequence, because while the strikes have paused, Operation Economic Fury continues to function as both the accelerator and the anchor of what the military phase set in motion, converting battlefield destruction into institutional deterioration that compounds over time and denies the IRGC the fiscal and organizational capacity to reconstitute what Epic Fury dismantled.

The IRGC likes to boast about its immunity to external pressure, but the economic situation reveals an organization that is disoriented, operating a model so rigid and so dependent on conditions that no longer exist that it has no productive response to the pressure now bearing down on it.

IRGC’s Dilemma

The Islamic Republic was never held together by ideology alone, nor by coercion alone. What sustained it more than anything and what made it so sophisticated was this sort of layered and cohesive system in which ideological commitment, selective repression, and material patronage reinforced one another, with each element compensating for the others when one weakened.

Hezbollah received an estimated $700 million annually. The Houthis, the Popular Mobilization Forces, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a range of other proxies all drew from the same source. Ideology may explain why men join a revolutionary movement, but it rarely explains why they stay, and it never explains why they fight consistently for a long period and in different domains and areas. That requires payment, logistics, and a state capable of delivering on its end of the arrangement.

Across a region where state institutions had long proven predatory, inefficient, or simply absent, the IRGC offered what was genuinely scarce: an organization that paid on time, supplied its partners with functioning equipment, and followed through on its commitments. That operational reliability secured its regional influence as much as any ideological affinity, and the same principle sustained the regime’s domestic claim to institutional authority.

Authoritarian regimes can absorb significant popular pain, and the Islamic Republic has repeatedly demonstrated that capacity. Sustained endurance, however, rests on two conditions operating in concert. The first is a coercive apparatus possessing the organizational coherence and material resources to deploy force at scale. The second is a population that still calculates the cost of protest as exceeding the cost of compliance. Both conditions are now objectively in measurable decline.

The signs of erosion have already begun to surface at the institutional core. In March, members of the Special Units Command received notice that salary payments for certain units had encountered processing failures, the third such delay in wages for those forces within the year alone. The consequences were immediate, as some personnel refused to attend pro-government mobilization gatherings, causing visible disruptions to deployments in major cities. Retirees and segments of the regular army went unpaid for a second consecutive month.

Senior commanders have begun accusing the IRGC of exploiting the financial crisis at Bank Sepah to undermine the police force and consolidate resources toward bodies tied to the clerical establishment. What this pattern reveals is a military apparatus that, even with full awareness of a population pushed to its limits, has abandoned the collective management of scarcity and begun to redistribute it as a weapon among its constituent institutions.

The strategic environment has now narrowed the IRGC to two paths, each leading to a different form of institutional destruction.

The cruelty of the dilemma is that choosing either path only accelerates the collapse that the other path already threatens.

Path 1: A deal with Trump

Accommodation with Washington would force the IRGC to surrender its network of construction contracts, import monopolies, and financial institutions that turned political power into wealth, and to do so in front of a population that has endured decades of falling wages, collapsing savings, and decaying infrastructure while national resources were poured into foreign conflicts.

Path 2: Continue the war

Prolonged confrontation offers no escape either. It would push operational demands beyond the organization’s capacity, tighten sanctions that already cut off revenue streams, erode military credibility with each new engagement, and intensify internal rivalries among the clerical leadership, the IRGC, the bureaucracy, and the regular military as they fight over a shrinking pool of resources. A system built on patronage cannot survive once the patronage dries up.

The dilemma is structural and no short-term fix can resolve it.

Every available path undermines the very conditions the organization needs to survive. This exposes the central contradiction of what the Islamic Republic constructed over four decades: a parallel military state within the state, a regional empire of proxies, and a financial system shielded from accountability, all built for outward projection of power yet wholly unprepared for the mounting pressure now coming from both inside and outside.

My debut in The Washington Post

Vladimir Putin’s ambitions are dying in Africa. As jihadists swept through Mali late last month, they also swept aside the assurances that Moscow had dangled to governments in the Sahel for years. That collapse threatens the region but also offers Washington an opportunity to reassert the control it had foolishly relinquished.

The scale of the terror offensive came into sharp view in a single weekend as the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) — al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate — and nomadic Tuareg rebels seized towns and military installations across the country. On April 25 a JNIM suicide car bomber killed Defense Minister Gen. Sadio Camara at his residence in Kati. Abu Hudhayfa al-Bambari, a local jihadist commander, said that the “entire city” of Bamako, the capital, “is under lockdown.”

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This piece was originally published in Sky News Australia

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“The Strait of Hormuz,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News this week, “is an economic nuclear weapon.”

He was describing the IRGC’s core strategic intention, to hold the world’s most critical oil chokepoint as leverage over global markets and Washington itself, but Iran never got to pull that trigger.

The US Navy’s blockade of the Strait denied the IRGC that instrument before it could be used, and Operation Economic Fury now ensures the failure compounds, turning against Tehran the same economic pressure Iran spent decades positioning itself to inflict on the world.

What most ceasefire commentary has missed is that the military campaign's pause does not mean the conflict has paused, because the economic campaign is running at full force, its targets extending from Tehran’s financial network to the Chinese industrial architecture that keeps it alive.

That architecture took decades to build.

For years, the IRGC sustained itself through shell companies, rotating vessel identities, and shadow banking corridors that kept oil revenue flowing far from formal financial channels, turning every prior sanctions round into a temporary inconvenience absorbed and rerouted within months.

Washington kept targeting individual nodes while leaving the broader network intact, which gave Tehran reasonable confidence that Epic Fury’s ceasefire, like every pause before it, would open another window for recovery.

That calculation is wrong this time, because the cost of each passing week compounds rather than eases, with Treasury’s action targeting the evasion architecture itself rather than its individual components, ensuring that what Tehran reads as time purchased is in fact institutional capacity being permanently stripped away.

That architecture survived as long as it did for one reason: China built the infrastructure to sustain it, and Xi Jinping made that a deliberate strategic choice on three levels.

First, Beijing built the financial plumbing, developing methods for shadow banking, obscuring the origins of Iranian crude, rotating ship identities, and layering payments through third-country intermediaries.

Second, its teapot refinery sector absorbed most of Iran’s oil exports to China, conducting those transactions through the US financial system in dollar-denominated deals and providing the IRGC with the hard currency needed to fund missile, drone, and weapons transfers to regional proxies.

Third, and most critically, Xi used Iran as a rehearsal space, refining evasion techniques he intended to deploy on a far greater scale if Washington’s pressure ever turned directly toward China's core interests.

The volumes document exactly how deeply that relationship ran.

The IRGC operated a rotating fleet of tankers under falsified identities to conceal Iranian crude shipments to Chinese buyers, while Hengli Petrochemical, China’s second-largest independent refinery, received more than five million barrels of IRGC-affiliated crude through that same network.

The arrangement served Beijing on both ends: Chinese refiners purchased Iranian crude at steep discounts unavailable on open markets, while every successful evasion transaction simultaneously stress-tested the financial infrastructure Xi intended to activate over Taiwan.

However, the US Treasury’s latest action forecloses that confidence by sanctioning 35 entities and individuals operating Iran’s shadow banking architecture, simultaneously targeting 19 shadow fleet vessels, and putting every firm paying IRGC tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz on notice.

The Strait carries roughly 20 percent of global oil supply, giving Tokyo, Seoul, and every European capital with energy exposure to Gulf shipping a direct stake in whether the IRGC retains the capacity to weaponize that chokepoint, which means Washington is acting on behalf of the entire alliance system, not just its own strategic interests.

The stated objective of Operation Economic Fury is to coerce the IRGC into surrendering its nuclear program and abandoning its revolutionary ambitions across the region, an objective whose outcome remains uncertain.

What is already underway, as a direct consequence of pursuing it, is the dismantlement of the laboratory Xi spent two decades building, with Washington systematically mapping, documenting, and countering the instruments produced there.

What appears to be a pressure campaign against the IRGC and another against Beijing’s financial architecture is, in fact, a single operation.

On Saturday, April 25, explosions and sustained gunfire erupted near the Kati military base outside Bamako, where General Assimi Goïta, leader of Mali's military junta, has installed his residence. Simultaneous strikes followed near the Modibo Keïta International Airport, in Kidal and Gao to the north, and in the central Mopti region.

The assault belongs to a longer trajectory.

Since September 2025, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, JNIM, has imposed an economic blockade upon Bamako and the principal supply routes of the country, a slow strangulation that has produced fuel shortages, intermittent electricity, and the closure of schools.

Understanding Who is Who:

• AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb): The North African affiliate, formed in 2007 from the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and the parent organization from which the Sahelian jihadist constellation, including JNIM, was generated.

• JNIM: Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel, formed in 2017 through the merger of several Malian and regional jihadist factions such as Macina Liberation Front, Ansar Dine, and al-Mourabitoun.

  The group funds itself by ransoming captives, taxing locals, smuggling weapons, and extorting human and drug traffickers.

• The Tuaregs: A Berber people of the central Sahara whose ancestral territories straddle Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso, and whose history with Bamako has been marked by recurring rebellions over the autonomy of the north, most notable one was in the 1960s. Estimates place their total population at 2–3 million.

• Azawad: The name Tuareg separatists use for the northern half of Mali. It was declared an independent state in April 2012 by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and is being actively claimed by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA).

The instinctive response to this debacle is to reach for the counterterrorism file but that way of framing the problem conceals the deeper geopolitical implications: a major strategic setback for Russia in the Sahel and a direct threat to NATO’s southern flank.

The Origins of the Crisis

The Sahelian crisis traces its proximate origins to the collapse of the Qaddafi regime.

The 2011 NATO-backed fall of Tripoli unleashed consequences that Bamako and the West failed to anticipate, prevent, or counter — chief among them the return of Tuareg fighters previously integrated into Qaddafi’s security apparatus. These men arrived in northern Mali heavily armed and carrying deep-seated resentments over marginalization that had already fueled multiple earlier rebellions against the central Malian state.

By early 2012, Tuareg separatists of the MNLA had already formed tactical alliances with jihadist groups already active in the Sahara. They also declared the independent state of Azawad and rapidly overran the northern half of Mali. Which led to the disintegration of the Malian army and a military coup in Bamako in March 2012 that only deepened the chaos. By January 2013, the jihadist coalition — now dominant over the Tuareg separatists — was advancing southward toward the capital.

It was at this critical juncture that France intervened. Operation Serval (January 2013) shattered the jihadist offensive, retook the northern cities, and prevented the total collapse of the Malian state/government.

Due to the immense structural issues, Operation Serval was later replaced by the broader regional mission Operation Barkhane, which for nearly a decade maintained a fragile equilibrium across the Sahel. That stability rested on three institutional pillars: the sustained presence of French forces, empowering local partner governments, and a regional security architecture built around the G5 Sahel joint force (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) and the UN mission (MINUSMA).

The Russian Intervention

However, that French architecture was already under significant strain when Russia moved to dismantle it. Françafrique had been gradually eroding for years, facing growing domestic and regional criticism. Even when French operations delivered tangible security gains, they encountered increasing political contestation and accusations of overreach.

After the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023, Wagner later rebranded as Africa Corps, accelerated the expulsion of French forces from Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, delivering the final blows to France’s longstanding influence across its former colonies.

At the same time, they fueled tensions between the Sahelian juntas and Washington, which ultimately led to the U.S. withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger, a key strategic drone facility that had cost American taxpayers 110 million dollars.

The interesting part regarding Russia’s campaign is that it operated on two parallel tracks: the operational and the informational.

On the informational front, Wagner conducted sustained disinformation operations to delegitimize France as a credible counterterrorism partner. A notorious example took place in April 2022 at the Gossi base. After French forces departed, surveillance drones captured Russian mercenaries digging and staging a mass grave, then attributing the atrocity to the departing French troops. Such episodes exemplified their broader methodology across the region.

France was then forced to retreat. President Emmanuel Macron withdrew 400 special forces from Burkina Faso, 2,400 troops from Mali, and suspended military cooperation with the Central African Republic.

In February 2023, he announced a new security partnership focused on training and support rather than direct security guarantees, diplomatic language that masked a clear drawdown.

Moscow seized then the opportunity and consolidated further its operational gains with the active involvement of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who backed the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) which united Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as a direct counterweight to ECOWAS and the African Union, institutions long central to Western and NATO-linked regional cooperation against terrorism and other threats.

Mali: Russia's New Afghanistan

However, despite its early successes in the Sahel with a limited number of operators, Russia made costly strategic errors in Mali. The most visible case occurred on 25 July 2024 at Tinzaouaten, near the Algerian border, where Tuareg forces ambushed a joint column of Wagner mercenaries and Malian troops, delivering what remains Wagner’s most significant defeat in Africa to date.

The toll was heavy as roughly 20 Russian mercenaries were killed and around 10 Malian Armed Forces (FAMA) soldiers dead, several armored vehicles destroyed, and at least one helicopter lost.

More importantly, when viewed alongside the rapid expansion of jihadist groups and their growing cooperation with Tuareg factions, the Tinzaouaten defeat revealed early on that Russia is repeating in West Africa the classic doctrinal mistakes of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. One can argue that it made similar ones in Syria as well, but given the overwhelming historical evidence and archives, I chose to focus on Afghanistan as a template.

Four errors stand out.

The first error is the primacy of total regime preservation over meaningful territorial command, sustained by systematic disinformation campaigns. Much as Soviet strategy in Afghanistan centered on shoring up Kabul's communist leadership while effectively ceding the countryside, Africa Corps today channels its resources into protecting the Malian junta and securing gold extraction corridors — leaving vast interior territories open to JNIM expansion.

Indeed, Russian messaging operations paper over this de facto withdrawal by manufacturing the perception of Malian junta competence and military momentum. In the near term, this posture can appear functional, but it intensifies the vulnerabilities bearing down on the central government. Any perceptible sign of fragility risks triggering an escalatory cycle of jihadist attacks, hastening precisely the systemic breakdown the strategy was designed to forestall.

The second pattern is an institutional refusal to grapple with the genuine ethnic and political grievances that give the insurgency its sociological fuel. Moscow and the Bamako junta have met Tuareg claims with coercion rather than negotiation. The Tuareg are a historically subaltern, predominantly Berber-speaking pastoral-nomadic people whose territoriality and social organization are anchored in the northern Saharan and Sahelian ecozones, and who have long articulated demands for autonomy from a sedentary, south-dominated central state whose administrative logic sits in fundamental tension with their segmentary social structures.

The Soviet parallel is instructive: Moscow systematically bypassed the autochthonous institutional frameworks sustaining Afghan social order, among them the jirga, the deliberative council rooted in tribal and lineage structures, and the qawm, the primordial solidarity group defined by overlapping ties of kinship, locality, and patron-client reciprocity that constituted the foundational unit of political allegiance.

The junta and its Russian patrons have reproduced this failure at large scale in Mali, misrecognizing Tuareg ethno-political identity as a security variable to be neutralized rather than a deeply embedded sociocultural formation requiring genuine interlocution. The consequence has been the progressive and gradual reintegration of Tuareg factions into tactical convergence with JNIM, enlarging the insurgency's ethnic constituency and territorial reach.

The third pattern is the excision of Mali from any broader architecture of legitimacy or multilateral cooperation. Following the coups in Burkina Faso in 2022 and Niger in 2023, the Sahelian juntas made a calculated break with ECOWAS, the regional body that had formally condemned the seizures of power and signaled the possibility of sanctions and military intervention. The Soviet precedent is structurally illuminating. Moscow progressively confined itself to a narrow, deeply illegitimate client government in Kabul, hemorrhaging both domestic Afghan support and international standing in the process.

The Sahelian juntas have traced a comparable trajectory, opting for open confrontation with regional institutions and Western interlocutors rather than seeking multilateral accommodation. The consequences have been predictable. Diplomatic encirclement, economic sanctions from regional bodies, and near-total security dependence on Moscow as the sole patron willing to underwrite their survival have followed in sequence.

What makes this pattern particularly damaging for Mali, however, is that isolation is not symmetrical in its costs.

For Moscow, the severing of Mali’s Western and regional partnerships is strategically rational, as it deepens junta dependency, forecloses alternative patrons, and consolidates Russian leverage.

For Bamako, the calculus is far more punishing. The rupture with Western partners and regional bodies has effectively dismantled the intelligence-sharing architecture that previously provided actionable information on jihadist networks, financing flows, and cross-border movements. JNIM operates across porous Sahelian frontiers, and countering it requires precisely the type of multilateral intelligence cooperation that isolation has rendered unavailable.

Fourth, the chronic underestimation of the adaptive capacity and structural resilience of local insurgent networks. Soviet planners entered Afghanistan with the assumption that a conventionally superior military apparatus could rapidly dismantle a fragmented tribal resistance. The mujahideen confounded that assumption entirely, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for tactical improvisation, terrain exploitation, and the construction of durable decentralized organizational forms that proved highly resistant to attrition.

Russia and the Malian junta have reproduced the same foundational miscalculation. They have operated under the recurring assumption that concentrated firepower, mercenary deployment, and periodically visible operational successes such as the seizure of Kidal would progressively degrade JNIM and Tuareg resistance to the point of collapse.

The insurgents have instead demonstrated a sophisticated repertoire of adaptive strategies by integrating guerrilla tactics with economic strangulation and colonizing governance vacuums left by state absence.

Implications for Europe and NATO South

The unfolding crisis in Mali carries profound strategic consequences for Europe.

The first and most immediate risk is a renewed surge in migration.

Mali lies at the center of the main overland migration corridors from sub-Saharan Africa toward Libya and the Mediterranean. The loss of state control in Bamako and across its northern and central regions is already accelerating irregular migrant flows. These movements are larger in scale than previous waves and arrive in a Europe still politically scarred by the Libyan and Syrian crises.

The second risk is the weakening of NATO’s southern flank and the growing difficulty of effective intervention.

Jihadist groups, particularly JNIM, are actively seeking to replicate in Niger and Burkina Faso the same strategy of territorial expansion, economic blockades, and coordinated attacks that has succeeded in Mali. A contiguous zone of instability stretching across the three Alliance of Sahel States members would grant jihadists strategic depth, operational sanctuaries, and easier access toward coastal West Africa and the Maghreb. This dramatically raises the cost and complexity of any future European military engagement while leaving Europe’s southern frontier increasingly exposed and harder to defend.

In essence, the disintegration of authority in Mali should be seen as the leading edge of a wider process that threatens to destabilize the entire central Sahel and export its consequences directly into Europe.

This piece was originally published in The New York Post

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On Monday, China’s Xi Jinping let the mask slip.

After weeks remaining largely absent from the diplomatic picture as the US conducted Operation Epic Fury against Iran, Xi called Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman to publicly urge a peaceful reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The pressure on Beijing is showing.

At least five Iranian-linked tankers heading from the Gulf of Oman to Malaysia have changed course after the US Navy warned that ships carrying Iranian oil would be intercepted anywhere in the world.

And now, every concession the IRGC withholds costs it more than the one before.

Operation Epic Fury destroyed the military capacity Iran has used to threaten to close the strait, and dismantled the architecture the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps built to survive the decapitation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

What remains is a rump regime without the arsenal, command or finances that lent its threats weight.

President Trump should read this as the strongest card he holds against Beijing.

Xi spent a decade cultivating the Islamic Republic as the armed underwriter of Chinese influence in the Middle East.

Its erosion in this campaign hands Washington immense leverage.

Three fronts establish the stakes.

The first is military.

The US campaign dismantled the arsenal that Chinese industrial networks spent years building.

China had emerged as the principal external supplier of Iran’s ballistic missile program, providing chemical precursors for solid rocket fuel as well as satellite intel and navigation systems.

Indeed, the Treasury Department sanctioned several Chinese entities for supplying the Revolutionary Guard with chemicals used in missile fuel production, and US intelligence documented Iranian cargo ships unloading sodium perchlorate at Bandar Abbas in quantities sufficient to fuel approximately 800 new missiles.

Beijing was also negotiating the sale of CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers.

In December, US special forces raided a merchant vessel in the Indian Ocean carrying Chinese cargo bound for the Revolutionary Guard.

The second front is financial.

Iran served as China’s proving ground for sanctions evasion, the laboratory in which Beijing refined the techniques it expected to deploy at scale against US sanctions.

“Operation Economic Fury” has contested it.

The Trump administration sent letters to financial institutions in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and China, citing evidence that these institutions moved Iranian funds linked to illicit activity.

The letters are reportedly the first step toward secondary sanctions that would sever those institutions’ ties to the US financial system.

The third front is diplomatic.

Beijing brokered the Iran-Saudi normalization in March 2023 and presented it as evidence of a new Chinese diplomatic order.

The missiles and drones Iran fired at sites throughout the region during the recent conflict exposed the agreement as a paper arrangement that Beijing couldn’t enforce.

The damage deepened when the United Arab Emirates aligned with the US-led coalition and called for the reopening of the strait, while Beijing remained silent on the weaponization of the waterway that carries its own energy imports.

The Gulf monarchies now know what a Chinese security partnership amounts to when Iranian aggression reaches their territory.

The same pattern holds for the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela’s dictatorship has fallen, Nicolás Maduro is in US custody and Beijing’s position in Latin America has collapsed.

Within months, Washington has broken the two regimes through which Xi projects influence into the regions that matter most to the United States.

Washington is already collecting the gains in Asia.

Indonesia signed the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership on April 13, pulling Jakarta into the American security architecture through a framework for military modernization and professional military education.

The Philippines has joined that architecture and will host a 4,000-acre industrial hub anchoring supply chains that Washington intends to build outside Chinese reach.

The geography of those partnerships carries its own message.

Indonesia flanks the Strait of Malacca, through which the bulk of Chinese energy imports travel.

Washington has just demonstrated in the Strait of Hormuz the operational template for denying a chokepoint to a state that depends on it.

Beijing will draw the inference without being told.

Trump postponed his visit to China and refused the supplicant’s role Beijing had prepared.

He’ll travel on his own timetable, with those facts established before the first handshake.

Tehran saw the Strait of Hormuz as its ultimate coercive instrument, yet US power exposed it as a threat it can fairly easily overcome.

Xi Jinping will open the conversation knowing that Washington has broken his proxies, closed his laboratory and reduced to rubble an arsenal he spent a decade underwriting.

The card is in Trump’s hand. The administration has already begun to play it.

Asia is where the greatest returns are landing, and Beijing is where the reckoning comes next.

Always say what you see. Above all — and far harder — always see what you see.

Charles Péguy

Since last October, when I published my piece on Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution, I have received a wide range of reactions. Some have been thoughtful, others less so, and a number of interpretations have been attributed to my argument that bear little resemblance to what I actually wrote. I want to clarify a few points.

I wrote about Third-Worldism because my work focuses on foreign policy, and I am interested in the way foreign conflicts are mobilized for domestic purposes, as well as how domestic tensions shape the interpretation of those conflicts.

In the United States and elsewhere, one repeatedly encounters a fixation on external powers, accompanied by a vocabulary that relies on terms such as “surrogate power” or “settler colonialism.”

My premise is that this type of language doesn’t emerge spontaneously since it’s rooted in a specific intellectual tradition, what was originally called tiers-mondisme.

The term itself is often treated today as a polemical label, but has a precise origin. Alfred Sauvy coined the expression “Third World” in 1952 to describe a category of countries situated outside the dominant Cold War blocs, and from that point an entire body of political thought developed around it.

Islamism as a Third-Worldist Force

I also chose to address this question because the term “Islamism” is used loosely. In the United States and in most Western countries, Islamic movements rarely emerge1 as autonomous political actors. Their expression is mainly indirect, shaped by broader ideological currents that define how they are received and articulated.

First, Islamism in its doctrinal core demands a fully ordered society ruled by religious law — sharia. In Western Europe, especially France, secularism and laïcité set formal limits, but Islamists treat those limits as tools for adaptation and infiltration rather than genuine barriers.

They cleverly mask their ambitions in the language of human rights, minority protections, and anti-discrimination, allowing them to maneuver inside secular systems. They readily align with segments of the radical left around shared enemies, enabling tactical coordination without ever abandoning their ultimate goals. Most dangerously, they provide a ready-made playbook of “resistance” that fuels mobilization and justifies violence.

Second, modern political Islamism maintains a clear direction. It wages a total critique of modernity, liberalism, and the West, all branded as symptoms of Western civilizational decay. This contempt extends to the Westernized individual and to the West itself as a symbol of corruption.

The same judgment falls on Muslim societies that have succumbed to Western influence: they are branded complicit, degenerate, and therefore legitimate targets for destruction. This vision meshes perfectly with the daily practice of radical groups, who devote themselves to hunting down and punishing anyone labeled a collaborator with the United States. Their fury at the Gulf states, routinely denounced as capitalist pigs, gains extra venom from the Islamist verdict that brands them as corrupt, inauthentic, and traitors to true Islam.

Third, this Islamist direction converges perfectly with Third-Worldist thinking. The West is cast as the ultimate adversary and the supreme reference point for all evil, while every local grievance is absorbed into a grand vision of global resistance. Islamism slots neatly into a larger anti-imperialist framework obsessed with delivering absolute historical justice.

This is precisely why Green activists find so much common ground with Hezbollah and openly display affinity for these groups. The shared enemy and the shared narrative make the alliance feel natural.

Most people, unless they spend time engaging with foreign policy analysis, tend to view these ideas as abstract. I think they only become visible when they translate into political action, when movements portray themselves as part of a global decolonial project, when slogans such as “decolonizing a city” enter mainstream discourse, or when policy directions, including the push toward blocs like BRICS, begin to reflect this sort of grievance and resentment.

The mobilization for Gaza among certain segments of European youth also crashed into the June 2024 European elections.

In France, it deepened the fractures within a left already torn between Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) — fiercely anti-Israel and staunchly pro-Gaza — and the Socialist Party, home to many Jewish intellectuals who are radically hostile to Benjamin Netanyahu yet deeply attached to the Hebrew state.

This war between two lefts — the “decolonial” against the “colonial,” in the words of LFI’s lead candidate, MEP Manon Aubry — was further inflamed by the promotion of Franco-Palestinian jurist Rima Hassan, who is now set to take her seat in Strasbourg. Instead of focusing on social issues, the election became fixated on identity politics, with the Palestinian cause serving as the central theme for the Insoumis. This strategy allowed them to secure votes from both working-class Muslim immigrant communities and a segment of middle-class university students.

Le Bouleversement du monde: L'après-7 Octobre
Gilles Kepel

Third-Worldism in the U.S. Context

While trying to explain the attitude of intellectuals — merciless toward the failings of democracies, indulgent toward the greatest crimes, provided they are committed in the name of the right doctrines — I first encountered the sacred words: the Left, Revolution, Proletariat.

Raymond Aron, L'Opium des intellectuels, 1955

What’s striking today is that foreign conflicts now crash across borders in real time, carried by an unrelenting flood of images, commentary, and instant interpretation. They are devoured, processed, and forcibly reframed through a single ideological lens that imposes artificial order on events that would otherwise look chaotic and remote.

In this process, Third-Worldism supplies the crucial direction. It resurrects the old Marxist scaffolding of center versus periphery, recasting every distant war as part of an eternal global struggle between the exploiting core and the oppressed margins.

In the United States, several dynamics explain the reemergence of this:

The first is the institutionalization of Third-Worldist ideology within universities. The study of decolonization remains essential to understanding global history. Civilizations rise and fall, populations move, cultures intermingle, and every society carries traces of conquest and exchange. Within much of the contemporary academy, this inquiry has taken on a moral function. This is damaging to a genuine understanding of power dynamics and history.

The second is the exhaustion of domestic progressive politics. Political campaigns centered on identity have reached a point of fatigue in the United States. They continue to shape discourse, while their capacity to mobilize has weakened. This is where Third-Worldism introduces a different register. Political energy moves from the individual to the global, and a structural reading of power regains prominence.

The third is the expansion of anti-Israelism within a wider ideological field. Israel appears as the place where American power becomes nakedly visible, a concentrated symbol of global hierarchies and domination. It becomes a fixation. This reading rests on the conviction that every political conflict is merely a surface expression of deeper economic and political structures. The question of Israel thus becomes inseparable from the question of American empire itself, and the entire conflict is swallowed into a single, sweeping narrative of global struggle against oppression.

A fourth dynamic can be found in the weakening of national political reference points. Public debate shows a growing tendency to interpret domestic issues through external categories and conflicts. The language of international struggle is migrating inward, reshaping how political life in the United States is even understood. The old distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is collapsing. Only global narratives now supply the master frame through which every local issue is interpreted and judged. One can perhaps look at what podcasters are talking about today to gain a sense of it.

A World Read Through Global Struggle

It is far easier to condemn the world than to justify it.

Raymond Aron

I do not claim that Third-Worldism explains all the problems of the United States or of any other country. That would be an overreach. My aim is more limited. I am trying to understand the drivers behind certain patterns of thought, the belief systems that give them structure, and the energy that sustains them.

The United States, as a major power, inevitably becomes the object of competing interpretations, and some of these systems organize themselves primarily in opposition to it. Each country, in turn, develops its own variant of Third-Worldist thinking, shaped by its history and political traditions. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, France, Italy, Argentina... All have their Third-Worldists.

But what is even more striking is that, within this broader pattern, the rise of antisemitism in the West serves as a clear indicator of how far this mode of thinking has spread. As global conflicts are increasingly read through categories of domination and oppression, complex political realities are compressed into blunt hierarchies of power.

Within that ordering, Jews and Israel are placed on the side identified with dominance, stripped of historical specificity and recast as symbols. In its current forms, this depiction goes further, presenting Jews as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan American project, rootless, powerful, aligned with capital and empire, a convenient stand-in for everything associated with Western hegemony. And worse, they have Israel.

This translation gives hostility a political language and allows it to circulate within a thought process that appears legitimate, even established.

Most people will miss what is happening entirely. It is far too easy to dismiss this intellectual current as marginal noise and remain comfortably absorbed in small causes, campaigns, and personal projects. That comfortable habit belongs to a dead era. In the United States, the conditions have fundamentally changed. Public life will now unfold under an unrelenting stream of global exposure and interpretation.

In this new environment, Third-Worldism will not dominate as an official doctrine. Instead, it will function as a ruthless organizing machine for political mobilization.

It will weld disparate tensions together, force them into a single broader horizon, and discipline them through the familiar categories of class, domination, exploitation, and imperial hierarchy. Every local actor will be stripped of individuality and recast as a mere expression of larger historical forces, locked inside a sweeping narrative of capital and dependency.

Third-Worldism drew its raw power in the 1960s and 1970s from the Cold War’s rigid bipolar frame, which fused scattered conflicts into one grand narrative and transformed isolated events into a single intelligible global struggle.

It’s reemerging now in the United States under radically new conditions. The instant circulation of information, of hot takes, the visibility of distant wars, and the desperate hunger for a unifying political language are once again stitching separate events into one continuous, unforgiving fight against the West and its friends.

Something unprecedented is stirring in the Arab world. Beyond the expected discussion of the war and of Iran’s long record as an aggressor, one now hears a different register altogether, a growing conviction that the regime itself may actually fall because its revolutionary aim is being exhausted.

I believe this shift has no precedent in living memory.

Before turning to the two interviews, it is worth dwelling on the theological dimension in which the IRGC operates. Most American observers remain unfamiliar with how the Revolutionary Guard sees itself and the world, and that unfamiliarity matters, because it is the only lens through which Trump's threats, erratic and occasionally frightening to Western ears, can be properly understood from the inside.

The Eschatological Machine

Whatever clerics and Revolutionary Guards commanders remain standing in Iran are actually men who have spent their entire lives inside an edifice that explicitly defined this moment for them, and that has nevertheless failed to prepare them for Trump’s modus operandi.

To grasp how they read it, one must first understand what they believe the world fundamentally to be.

In 2006, Bernard Lewis, writing in a piece titled “August 22,” identified the roots of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons with considerable precision.

“There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers. This worldview and expectation, vividly expressed in speeches, articles, and even schoolbooks, clearly shape the perception and therefore the policies of Ahmadinejad and his disciples.”

Lewis wrote those words nearly two decades ago, and the worldview he described has never required updating. It remains what it has always been, the foundation upon which an entire revolutionary state gets built. In a certain sense, the Islamic Republic runs an eschatological project that happens to possess a government. What it actually builds toward, always, is Qiyamah, the Day of Judgment.

That project rests on a specific theological architecture, one that begins with Twelver Shia Islam’s singular orientation toward the end of history. The entire tradition converges on Akhir az-Zaman, when the hidden Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, emerges from his divine occultation. He remains in concealment, awaiting the appointed hour.

When that hour arrives, the Mahdi emerges to confront and defeat the Dajjal (The False Messiah) and the Sufyani, a tyrant from the Levant whose wars and massacres figure among the major signs of Qiyamah. The tradition holds something considerably more nuanced, for the Mahdi arrives at the lowest point of the human condition, summoned by the world’s complete exhaustion of its capacity for suffering.

Obviously, no eschatological matrix, however elaborate, suspends itself in abstraction. It requires an originary wound, a historical moment so charged with injustice that it ruptures the boundary between the temporal and the sacred, and becomes, permanently, both. For Shia Islam, that moment is the Battle of Karbala.

In 680 A.D., Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, was surrounded and killed on the plains of southern Iraq, abandoned by a passive world. The event underwent an immense metaphysical transfiguration, becoming the prism par excellence through which all subsequent suffering gets refracted.

There is an almost cyclical quality to this arrangement since every generation re-enacts Karbala. For Khomeini, Karbala and Qiyamah formed a single continuous arc, a battlefield that time never closed, still accumulating its martyrs, still moving toward its predetermined conclusion.

The evil genius of Khomeini lies precisely in this, in his grasp of this horizon’s governing potential. In his fatwas, he addressed Iranians during the revolution in the register of a man for whom the plain of Qiyamah had already begun to fill. “O nation, wake up! O government, wake up! Everybody wake up! You are all in the Presence of God. Tomorrow, you will be called to account. Do not ignore the blood of our martyrs, and do not quarrel over position or status.”

What the Arab World Sees

One must pause here and reckon with what this kind of certitude actually does inside a revolutionary and militaristic state, because its function rarely gets understood from the outside.

In ideologies centered on the end of the world, believers discover a profound certainty that removes all doubt about the future. This conviction serves as a divine promise. History does not remain truly open-ended, since God has already determined its final outcome.

A normal Western politician carefully weighs risks and adapts to changing circumstances. But the true committed IRGC revolutionary, driven by this unshakable faith, inhabits an entirely different relationship with time. For him, the final victory is already secured. The present does not create the future, and merely confirms what was always destined to occur.

Raymond Aron once observed that “foreknowledge of the future makes it possible to manipulate both enemies and supporters.” The IRGC not only believes in its eschatological vision, but it also uses it, and the difference matters enormously.

Indeed, eschatological certainty possesses the capacity to mobilize populations; it’s almost a hypnotic force and grants its believers an enormous power to erode political constraints and manufacture sacrificial commitment on a vast scale. Which is why what distinguishes the IRGC from the ordinary zealot is their simultaneous mastery of genuine belief and its calculated instrumentalization, a combination that renders them considerably more formidable.

But this orientation collides at every point with the mainstream Sunni worldview, which treats Judgment Day as a matter of divine concealment rather than political schedule. Sunni tradition forbids the forcing of providence and regards any state organized around accelerating the end of history as a deviation from Islam rather than its fulfillment. The Arab world reads the IRGC through this very lens, and what it sees is not a pious republic being tested, but a heterodox project masquerading as the fulfillment of faith, structurally incapable of assessing its strategic failures.

As a matter of fact, Arab media today surfaces an ideological skepticism toward the Islamic Republic that years of resistance mythology had long kept buried. That skepticism coalesces around two core claims:

First, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are executing generational modernization projects anchored in post-hydrocarbon economies oriented toward the future. Iran’s governing vision moves in the opposite direction entirely, organizing state power around an apocalyptic theology that treats modernity as a Dajjalic corruption and positions regional destabilization as a sacred instrument for hastening the end of history. For Arab capitals investing hundreds of billions into the next century, a neighbor whose ideological horizon terminates at the Mahdi's return represents a civilizational incompatibility, one that IRGC strikes on Gulf territory have now made impossible to manage through diplomacy alone.

Second, Iran's revolutionary theology teaches that adversity confirms the righteousness of believers and that enemies validate prophecy, which means eschatological conviction has entirely consumed the space where strategic analysis would otherwise operate. Arabs are watching a regime facing institutional collapse before the promised fulfillment arrives, one that has no doctrinal mechanism to absorb that failure and no capacity to assess it, because in Iranian doctrinal terms, the United States was never a potential negotiating partner but a Dajjalic force of deception and corruption. What Arab observers find most damning is precisely this, that a regime organizing an entire region around its prophetic vision cannot explain, even to itself, why the prophecy is unraveling.

The theological and revolutionary mindset described above may seem dense to the uninitiated, but it is precisely the background in which the Arab world is now processing Iran's institutional and religious disintegration.

The two interviews below, one with Iraqi researcher Ghaith al-Tamimi, a former Shia cleric, and one a panel debate between Arab intellectuals and analysts, speak directly to that moment.

Ghaith al-Tamimi: Iran Lost the War, and This Is What Awaits Iraq

Watch Interview

Host: You were criticizing then, and you still criticize Iran today. Khamenei was killed. How did you feel when Khamenei was killed by American and Israeli hands last February?

Tamimi: Oh my God, what a question, Your Eminence. Look, I faced this feeling when Saddam was executed. I faced this feeling on the ninth of April when the American army entered Baghdad as occupiers and liberators. I faced this question when Zarqawi was killed, when Bin Laden was killed, when Baghdadi, Sinwar, and Nasrallah were killed, all the way to Khamenei.

A complex ladder of personalities that I am influenced by, whose thought I engage with, whose ideology I engage with. This is the environment I breathe. Each one of these personalities is a deep narrative. I see before me a stage, and his death is the death of a scene in this play. We are facing a real and grand scene of ideology.

That is why I wrote about Khamenei’s death before his assassination. I wrote about the death of narratives, the death of a person.

Host: Why did you feel this way? You still have not described to me the exact state you were in.

Tamimi: The feeling is that this man chose this path, so he died an ideal death according to his methodology. As an opponent of Khamenei, it is not fitting for him to die less than al-Baghdadi, less than Saddam, less than Guevara, less than any of the great leaders who lead liberation revolutions, even if they are insane. They say that a person often resembles the way he dies.

I met Khamenei three times in my life. He is a charismatic man, an educated man, fluent in Arabic, a skilled translator of Sayyid Qutb’s In the Shade of the Qur’an. He is a man fluent in the language, deeply immersed in Arab and Islamic culture, the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb, literature, and a religious scholar.

You are facing a man who has been a judge for fifty years, a politician who has ruled Iran as president and as Supreme Leader. He is a man who is historically, physically, and in substance, the Shia religious scholar who wears a black turban and delivers his speech. His name is Ali, his tribe is Husseini, and his approach. You will notice all of this is rooted in the charisma of this person.

His death was precisely the kind of death that Sunnis who sympathized with the concept of the caliphate at the expense of the modern nation-state, or the way Baghdadi and Bin Laden were killed, this narrative needs. This is the ideal death for them. Sinwar is the same.

But on the other hand, in order for a state society to be established, in order to raise a generation whose culture is the culture of the state, when you tell them about the Islamic caliphate or the Islamic state with the rule of the jurist, they know that Islam is beliefs, behavior, and faith, not a system of states in life. The state needs a system built on laws, citizenship, investment, development, international relations, and interests.

This generation needs a great symbol to be raised, but Khamenei, whoever he is, is against everything you tell him about. Against citizenship, against the culture of coexistence and tolerance.

Host: He hates Arabs, right?

Tamimi: Look, to be clear, Khamenei does not hate Arabs. Yes, the Iranian regime is hostile to Arab regimes, but Khamenei, as an individual, is accused by Persians of being Arabized in Iranian culture and Persian in language. He is the most Arabized of them, unlike Khomeini.

Khomeini did not have a single instance of teaching in Arabic, not even in his classes in Najaf. Our teacher, Sayyid al-Sadr, may God have mercy on him, said, “I studied with Sayyid Khomeini in Najaf. He gave the lessons in Persian, and I wrote the report in Arabic.” Meanwhile Khamenei, in his Friday sermons in Tehran, addresses Arabs in Arabic, recites Iraqi and Arabic poetry, and is well-versed in Arabic.

He is like Erdogan, but he supports an expansionist ideological project. The proof is that as soon as he was killed, the Iranian war began against countries that have no connection to this war.

Host: For you, it has no connection to Khamenei’s project.

Tamimi: He says it many times, my dear lady. Khamenei clearly says, “We aspire to Islamic unity in this region that will expel the United States and its Western allies.” They slaughter the Jews, liberate Jerusalem, and overthrow the Arab regimes, which they consider infidel and tyrannical in terms of the religious doctrine of the Revolutionary Guard.

The political and military doctrine of the Revolutionary Guard and those associated with them considers these regimes pagan, infidel, and polytheistic. Therefore, they are like al-Qaeda and ISIS in this respect.

Host: Khamenei is gone for good. Where is his son?

Tamimi: He is under suspicion. In my opinion, I do not have tangible evidence, and if I did, I would have sent it to Trump. But my opinion is based on data and personal observation, considering that I am a religious man and that I have relationships with the Iranians, specifically the system of Sayyid Khamenei.

In my opinion, Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei was present at the incident when his father was killed. He and his mother were taken to the hospital. His condition was critical. He was admitted to the hospital, and there he disappeared. He disappeared, meaning he was in a severe coma, severely injured, and hidden for the benefit of the Revolutionary Guard.

Perhaps he died. I believe he died, or he is in a coma with his hands cut off, or disfigured to the point that he is unfit for anything and cannot write or give his opinion on anything. It is not even appropriate to photograph him or record his voice. The theory that he is still alive is completely out of the question.

Host: Why is there another jurist who is the Supreme Leader now in Iran?

Tamimi: Apart from who I believe is Ayatollah Arafi.

Host: Who is Ayatollah Arafi? Who is this person?

Tamimi: Ayatollah Arafi is close to Sayyid Khamenei, a Shia jurist, a religious authority within the system of the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, close to the Revolutionary Guard. I believe Ayatollah Arafi or someone like him is the real Supreme Leader. Because the Revolutionary Guard is at war, and deception in war is necessary, they have fabricated a story about a dead man to mislead the United States, Israel, and international public opinion, and to save the life of the real Supreme Leader.

All that is required of us is to give legitimacy to the Guard in the war. Nothing else is required.

Host: Do you think this information is widespread among American intelligence, Mossad, and others?

Tamimi: Honestly, I have not read a detailed analysis of this. Let me say that I am personally interested in this topic. As a researcher, I am interested in the marja’iyya, the religious authority. Khamenei, who comes after him, Sistani, who comes after him. This is my work, and I have been interested in it for years. I am involved in managing such matters.

I believe, according to the theory of the “righteous believers” and considering that they are in a state of war, they chose Ayatollah Arafi as the Supreme Leader and obtained his religious authorization to lead the war.

You might ask, “Is Sheikh Tamimi more extreme than Mojtaba Khamenei and Ali Khamenei?” The issue is not extremism. It is the ability to lead, influence, and shape events. These extremists can sometimes be useful because they are foolish. Arafi possesses this ability. I believe Ayatollah Arafi will only provide the religious cover.

You need to understand this. I am using a religious and jurisprudential term that those connected to this system understand. They need a virtuous figure. They need religious cover to lead. They are the “righteous believers” according to their jurisprudential system. They need a marja’ who says it is permissible to do so, that is all they need. Like Khamenei, he does not get into details.

Even with the killing of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s regime did not kill the Revolutionary Guard, which carries the Khomeini and Khamenei doctrine and the ideology of General Qassem Soleimani. They have been mobilized and trained for forty years, and they are still mobilized with everything you can and cannot imagine.

They cannot give it up so easily. The Iranians have a religious principle that says preserving order is the most important duty. What order? I am talking about the Revolutionary Guard’s system, not the state. They do not believe in the state.

Host: Okay, Sheikh Ghaith al-Tamimi, please excuse me. You said about two weeks ago that the Iranian regime had lost the war militarily and politically. What is your proof? Iran and the Revolutionary Guard are still capable of responding and influencing, still attacking Arab capitals and cities, still striking deep inside Israel. How can a regime that is finished and has lost the war politically and militarily continue to influence and respond?

Tamimi: It is very simple, Your Eminence, without complicating things. Any foolish teenage boy in any upscale neighborhood could break the windows of ten of the most beautiful houses. The fact that someone in the area might start a fire, might take a knife and kill children or commit an assault, does not mean they are strong, does not mean they are victorious, and does not even mean they exist.

The Iranians, the Revolutionary Guard, are committing suicide without any vision. Can you imagine them attacking Iraq? I cannot understand this. The Revolutionary Guard is attacking oil in Majnoon, meaning in Qurna, Basra. This is the strategic depth of the Shia who are linked to the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, who have been smuggling oil to Khamenei for twenty years and funding the Revolutionary Guard.

They go and attack Amarah, Basra, and Nasiriyah, attacking Iraqi army bases that Abu Fadak and the Popular Mobilization Forces use daily for movement and operations. Do you see such a thing? Imagine them attacking Camp Victoria in Baghdad, the one the Prime Minister, the Chiefs of Staff, the Popular Mobilization Forces, and the militia leaders use daily, and they call it an American base.

My friend, what is happening? And yet the Popular Mobilization Forces still support them, still take orders from them.

Host: Will the war end with the fall of this regime?

Tamimi: Yes, but they will continue to strike and weaken it until it disintegrates. It will not just fall in a normal way. It will disintegrate, meaning it will begin to fade away, fragment, and split internally over money, interests, and decision-making.

Host: What will happen after the cessation of operations, in your opinion, or during the coming weeks?

Tamimi: Before now, they are focusing on three types of targets. The Israelis are killing people, targeting individuals and command centers. The Americans have been striking strategic infrastructure and facilities. What they have in common is operations against camps, locations, and sites.

If we study this, they are dismantling command and control centers, and whenever they see them being reactivated somewhere or in some way, they eliminate them. Trump and Israel are working to rid Iran of weapons that affect the security of the region for a long period.

Host: You heard Trump, and even the Secretary of Defense, have always talked about a new regime. Do you really feel that there is a new regime in Iran, or is it a kind of counting of gains?

Tamimi: Trump is trying to say that this war ultimately produced a new regime. The problem is that we think ultimately. Who said that the American mind believes that there is an end, or that there should be an end? America is not going to disappear, and the region is not going to disappear.

Host: I am talking about military operations.

Tamimi: Military operations, my friend. What America and Israel are practically doing is destroying major strategic infrastructure that has had forty years spent on it. What good will the Revolutionary Guard do if it remains? It will remain, it will not matter. This is an illusion, an illusion of the left and the leftist media, who have been dreaming the same dream since October 7th. They do not want to wake up.

This war will not end except with a new Middle East. Let me tell you about Iran. Iran will enter a coma, just like Iraq entered a twenty-year coma. Iran will enter a coma like Libya is in a coma now, just like Yemen is in a coma.

Host: The difference, if you will allow me, is that when Iraq entered a coma, it was satisfied, meaning it withdrew into itself. Iran, with its missiles, you saw what it is doing.

Tamimi: My friend, give it two weeks, and everything will be finished. Missile farms, missile platforms, missile depots, missile production facilities, and missile carriers. All of this will be destroyed.

Panel on Iran Negotiations

Watch Here

Al-Ahmari on the Gulf’s Security Concerns and the Militia Question

Al-Ahmari: Thank you, and thank you to Al Arabiya again. Yes, I believe they are, and the proof is the question of the militias and the proxies, the abandonment of the proxies. This is the most important point, and it is the real security concern, not the targeting that has occurred during this war. The strikes have a separate legal discussion regarding compensation and regarding the conversation with the Chinese guarantor, who had been the guarantor of the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, among others.

The reality is that the Gulf states’ demands reflected in these negotiations concern the abandonment of the militias and the proxies.

The strange coincidence is that the militias and proxies had their real expansion in the region under former President Obama during the negotiations of 2013, 2014, and 2015. Those negotiations expanded Iran’s footprint, tied to their famous statements about controlling the four Arab capitals. You can trace this back to statements by American officials of that period, including former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who said that there were semi-direct or indirect instructions not to confront Qassem Soleimani and the IRGC, because of the fear.

Host: Look at the deception. There was a fear in Obama’s mind that the Iranians would withdraw from the nuclear negotiations.

Al-Ahmari: Let them expand however they wish, but let us finish this agreement. Today, the militias and the proxies are one of the essential conditions in the negotiations, not just uranium enrichment. President Trump says we will not give up on any condition. One of the American items is the abandonment of the proxies. I believe this is a very clear Gulf concern, whether it involves support for the Houthis in Yemen, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and we have seen the missiles and drones launched which prompted the Saudi Foreign Ministry over the past two days to summon the Iraqi ambassador and issue a strongly worded statement condemning the aggressions that were launched from Iraq.

Where did these drones and missiles come from? From Iran, to the proxies in Iraq and the armed factions. Of the four militia networks that existed across the Arab world, the one in Syria has fallen. The Houthis today are in a truce and a security agreement with the legitimate government in Yemen, and they are respecting previous agreements. Nothing has been launched at the Gulf states by the Houthis, and they have not entered this battle.

Host: We have also seen Hezbollah today, with Lebanon in Washington, Lebanese officials in Washington. The unity of the fronts that Iran clung to no longer exists. Syria is out of the fold. Today Lebanon is negotiating directly with Israel.

Al-Ahmari: Iran itself, they say, has abandoned this principle when it went to negotiate with the Americans, regardless of what is happening on the ground.

Host: Iran uses these militias as a card.

Al-Ahmari: And abandons them at the right moment.

Host: Dr. Sadeqian, according to the latest from the Americans, there may be a new round of negotiations in the coming two days. What will the Iranians offer in your view to move the negotiations forward and avoid the deadlock we saw in Islamabad a few days ago?

Sadeqian: Greetings to you, your guest, and your viewers. When the Islamabad negotiations ended and the two delegations, the Iranian and the American, returned to their countries, there was initial information from the Iranian side that they had reached about seventy percent of a resolution, or had managed to resolve seventy percent of the pending problems and files between the two sides.

It appears there was a phone call with JD Vance, and based on that call he left Islamabad, despite the fact that the Pakistani Prime Minister tried to salvage the failure of the negotiations and proposed extending them to Sunday. The negotiations were on Saturday, and the American side accepted, as did the Iranian side, to continue the discussions on Sunday. It appears there was a decision for a press conference by Vance, in which he said the negotiations had failed, and there was a document given to the Pakistani side on a “take it or leave it” basis.

He boarded the plane, and that was that. We heard notable statements, especially yesterday, from JD Vance, who said the negotiations had been good to a large extent and that there are issues that can be addressed. The American tone differs from what it was in Islamabad. The Iranian side now says it is ready to address the remaining problems, but it seems there is a very deteriorated trust, a lost trust, if I may use that expression, between Tehran and Washington, and that is casting a shadow over everything.

Host: Addressing files like what, Dr. Sadeqian? Which files will be addressed in your view, and from which angle?

Sadeqian: There are clearly pending issues. The files that have been addressed are, first, the nuclear file, second, the sanctions file, and third, the file of Iran’s relations with its friends or allies in the region. This covers the Iranian regional role.

It seems to me there were many initiatives and proposals from the Iranian side and the Pakistani side, but it appears JD Vance came to deliver a document. He said we will not negotiate on it. Either you accept this document or you do not. The Iranian side does not accept such things.

This document came against the backdrop of the ten points submitted by the Iranians, and there was great confusion about them, and the American side disavowed them, according to the information available.

Host: The American side disavowed them after having accepted the ten points?

Sadeqian: When Vance came to Islamabad, he said no, he was not negotiating on the ten points. He had these points that must be discussed. Either you accept them or leave them.

Al-Ahmari Pushes Back on the Ten Points Narrative

Host: Let me give space to Mr. Adwan al-Ahmari, because it seems he has things he wants to respond to. Mr. Adwan, it appears the Iranians want to say that what is being disputed and agreed upon are the ten points they originally presented.

Al-Ahmari: No, that is not correct. If you are facing the President of the United States who spoke clearly and frankly and said there are two essential points, the first being that they said, “Give us five years only for Iranian enrichment, not twenty.”

Host: He even said twenty years, not even twenty years, he would not accept.

Al-Ahmari: You are facing a president who sees himself as victorious, and the reality says that the losses and missiles fired by cars are on the Gulf states, not on Iran, not on Israel, and not on the United States. I also believe that President Donald Trump is coming from a position of strength. If we go back in time, the Iranians did not agree to go to Islamabad except after the famous statement, “We will wipe out an entire civilization tonight.”

They agreed immediately afterward. If Iran had negotiating solutions, it would not have agreed immediately after that threat, because there was genuine intent to target energy, water, and electricity facilities in Iran.

Let us move to the other point. When did Iran agree to go to Islamabad? Immediately after Trump announced the naval blockade. If you go back to the news timeline, you will find that four or five hours after the announcement of the naval blockade, Trump said he received calls that the Iranians were open to a second round of negotiations.

Each of these parties is making the other believe it has the posture of the victor, but the reality by the numbers on the ground says Iran today will suffocate economically. It will not be able to support what Dr. Sadeqian calls its allies and friends in the region. Iran does not have state alliances.

The truth is, if you asked Dr. Sadeqian who the allies are, is it the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam or Hezbollah, he would tell you Hezbollah. If you asked him who the real ally in Iraq is, is it the Iraqi government or the Popular Mobilization Forces, he would tell you the Popular Mobilization Forces. He is talking about proxies, not real regional allies. Syria is out of this equation. Yemen will be out of this equation.

This is what Iran must think about. How can it, let us say, win everyone over? We saw the contact between the Iranian foreign minister and the Saudi foreign minister. We also saw the welcome by the Gulf states and the states of the region for the negotiations in Islamabad, and the welcome of their outcome, the truce and the ceasefire. I believe that today after the naval blockade, things are not as they were before the naval blockade.

I believe the Arab viewer, and Dr. Sadeqian from Tehran among them, will see in the coming days that Iran’s tone will abandon much of the arrogance on the matter of the negotiations, which made everyone believe it was victorious.

Iran has suffered enormous destruction. The casualties are in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Today the losses are between 290 and 400 million dollars per day, not per month, in oil exports and the closure of the ports. You are talking about a state that planted mines along the Gulf of Oman and in the Omani maritime borders, which is an ally of Iran, to force ships to pass through its waters so that it could then impose fees and make a show of saying it will impose fees. This cannot be enforced.

The whole world sees such rhetorical theater, and it is Iran’s right, of course, to do all this to sell to the Iranian interior, which has not yet come out against the government, out of fear of repression, because there is activation of the emergency law. At any moment, Iran may be strangled economically, and it will surrender and meet all the demands, just give us at least 100 million dollars so we can breathe daily.

The exaggerations that deluded Iran into thinking it was able, I believe they thought that JD Vance was John Kerry. They thought Obama was Trump. They stalled in the negotiations. Vance gave them a clear request, left the plane, and said we gave them a “take it or leave it” offer. This is what will actually happen. Take it or leave it. After that, the naval blockade began, which Iran did not think would be implemented.

This is a smart move by the United States, the least costly for them. The ships are there, the warships are there. I simply inspect and prevent instead of firing missiles and shells daily and launching sorties. I am out at sea. If Iran were able to win and truly able to make the world and its regional allies believe, as Dr. Sadeqian says, that it is a strong state, it should launch missiles and drones at the American warships and the ships that are there.

This piece was originally published in The Free Press

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Iran Spent Its Last Card

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced a full U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to destroy “the little that is left of Iran.” In a pair of Truth Social posts, Trump declared that the U.S. military would begin blocking ships from entering or leaving the strait, intercept any vessel that had paid tolls to Iran to transit it safely, and warned that any Iranian who fires on U.S. or peaceful vessels would be “BLOWN TO HELL” while the Navy works to demine the strait. The announcement came as ceasefire negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, broke down and the U.S. delegation led by Vice President J.D. Vance returned home. In effect, Washington has moved to strip Tehran of the one coercive instrument it believed it held in reserve.

Wars usually shut doors for American foreign policy. But this episode has revealed that Operation Epic Fury has opened them with uncommon force. To understand why requires an honest reckoning with Iran’s biggest mistake in this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) decision to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most consequential miscalculations in the regime’s history.

Following the American and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guard pursued two anticipated outcomes from its Hormuz strategy.

The first was a global economic shock severe enough to force Washington to back down. Iran hoped it could cause a disruption so costly to oil markets and allied supply chains that the United States would be compelled to return to the negotiating table on Iranian terms. The strait carries roughly 20 percent of global oil trade and a similar amount of the world’s liquefied natural gas. A genuine closure would send energy prices soaring across Europe, Asia, and the gulf alike.

The second objective was political. Iran sought to use disruption in the Strait to fracture the alignment between Washington and its Gulf partners, demonstrating that American military operations imposed an unbearable cost on regional stability, pressuring Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha to demand a stand-down.

The Arab World Was Always Keeping Score

What the IRGC failed to account for was the weight of the political debt it had accumulated across the Arab world. For decades, Tehran positioned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the sacred center of Arab political life, consecrating every Iranian intervention and branding every Arab government that resisted as a traitor to Islam. The goal was to hijack Arab grievances and convert them into cover for the Islamic Republic’s conquest.

The Revolutionary Guard was the instrument of that conquest, deployed across the region to construct parallel states, capture financial systems, and install political figures whose survival depended entirely on Iranian patronage.

In Iraq, 67 armed factions tied to the Popular Mobilization Forces, collectively claiming some 230,000 personnel, consumed roughly $3.5 billion annually from the national treasury while Iraqi prime ministers governed with Tehran’s permission rather than a popular mandate.

In Syria, Iran poured billions into the Bashar al-Assad regime and transformed a once-sovereign Arab state into a forward operating base for revolutionary power projection. In 2013, Mehdi Taeb, the head of the Iranian regime’s Ammar Base think tank, called Syria “Iran’s 35th province.”

Farther south, Houthi commanders answering directly to the IRGC held the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which 10 percent of global seaborne trade passes, perpetually hostage.

Every theater followed the same logic: subordinate Arab sovereignty to the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ambition, then present the occupation as resistance.

Arab populations ground down under this revolutionary machinery had long recognized the enterprise for what it was. As far back as 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, as “the new Hitler of the Middle East.” During Operation Epic Fury, Faiq al-Sheikh Ali, a former member of the Iraqi parliament, stated that “I am Arab. I see humiliation from the Iranians. I do not see any humiliation from any Israeli.” The Arab world had been keeping score for years, and the IRGC had given it no shortage of reasons to reach that judgment.

This is why the second objective, fracturing Gulf alignment, failed. To make matters worse for Tehran, the regime had spent the weeks before the talks in Islamabad striking the very states on whose neutrality the strategy required, hitting desalination plants and oil facilities across the Gulf and curdling any residual sympathy in those countries into open hostility. Sultan Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) minister of industry and advanced technology, stated that the strait has never been under Iranian control in any manner that would permit Tehran to legally close or restrict international shipping. The Gulf States reinforced the American posture directly, and the political dividend Tehran had assumed would follow from economic disruption never materialized.

In other words, the IRGC shot itself in the foot. Iran’s available alternatives outside the strait can replace less than 10 percent of Gulf throughput. Before the war, inflation was running above 40 percent, the currency had lost more than 80 percent of its value over the preceding decade, and the shadow fleet Tehran had assembled to smuggle oil and fund IRGC operations was already straining under accumulated sanctions enforcement. Recruitment had collapsed so severely under the weight of unpaid salaries and economic asphyxiation that the IRGC was reportedly pulling 12-year-olds into its ranks. A sustained U.S. naval blockade renders continued resistance economically impossible.

By blockading the strait that Iran is trying to toll, America has called Tehran’s bluff, revealing that the Islamic Republic needs Hormuz commerce at least as much as the rest of the world.

The lesson for all has been that Iran cannot be worked with or relied upon. And Gulf States have since moved to make the lesson permanent. After Trump’s declarations, Saudi Arabia announced the full restoration of oil pumping capacity through its East-West pipeline to approximately seven million barrels per day, days after providing an assessment of damage to its energy sector from attacks during the conflict. By doing so, Riyadh has demonstrated that the region can route energy flows entirely around the strait. In trying to turn Hormuz into leverage, Iran accelerated the very investment the strategy was designed to prevent. The choke point Tehran sought to weaponize is being engineered out of strategic relevance by the states whose alignment Tehran had hoped to shatter.

Washington's Rare Door

But in the IRGC’s misery there is Washington’s opportunity, and opportunities of this magnitude do not repeat themselves. Properly leveraged, Trump’s blockade could unlock a broader regional consolidation.

The first opportunity lies in expanding the Abraham Accords into a robust regional architecture. The Accords signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco have already delivered measurable cooperation in trade, technology, and security. During Operation Epic Fury, Gulf States coordinated with U.S. Central Command at a level of intimacy unimaginable a decade ago, sharing intelligence, opening airspace, and integrating into a defense posture that functioned as a coherent whole. Bringing additional Gulf partners into a structured framework would convert that wartime alignment into a durable order, with the India-Middle East-Europe corridor providing the economic spine around which the broader architecture could take shape.

The second opportunity is more consequential over time. For two decades, the United States attempted to suppress Iranian-backed networks through direct military engagement in states too weak or too captured to act as genuine partners, a model that proved strategically exhausting and produced no durable result.

The degradation of Iran’s proxy architecture changes the underlying condition entirely. An Iraq reclaiming sovereignty over its own security sector, a Syria freed from Iranian entrenchment, and Gulf States that absorbed sustained attack without political fracture are better positioned to police their own territory. Strong sovereign states are the only counterterrorism infrastructure capable of producing lasting outcomes, and Washington now has a genuine opportunity to help build them through security cooperation and diplomatic engagement, freeing up American strategic bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific.

The Middle East is already reordering itself around Iran’s diminishment. Washington’s opportunity is to consolidate what the region has begun.

This piece was originally published in The New York Post

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Following President Trump’s announcement of a cease-fire, US Central Command (CENTCOM) commander Admiral Brad Cooper stated: “Iran has suffered a generational military defeat.”

Tehran’s response has been a single counterargument: the Islamic Republic still stands.

That argument mistakes the question. The survival of the Islamic Republic is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the surviving entity retains the capacity to direct the forces operating in its name.

Iran developed its mosaic military doctrine by drawing direct lessons from Saddam Hussein’s collapse in just twenty-six days. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari reorganized the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 2008 into thirty-one provincial commands, each with its own weapons stockpiles, logistics chains and pre-delegated authority.

Asymmetric warfare is the recourse of states that cannot prevail conventionally. Dispersion and concealment are the tools of a military that has already conceded the conventional battlefield.

Israel, operating alongside the United States in Operation Epic Fury, mastered asymmetric tactics and turned Iran’s own doctrine against it, employing intelligence penetration, targeted eliminations and network disruption with superior precision.

The clearest demonstration came before the operation began.

In July 2024, Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh inside a Revolutionary Guard guesthouse in Tehran. Iran’s security services must now operate under the assumption that they do not know the extent of the compromise — and that uncertainty is the most debilitating condition an intelligence service can face.

Operation Epic Fury then pushed that penetration to its extreme.

The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the elimination of hundreds of senior IRGC commanders and the degradation of the Quds Force’s extraterritorial capacity together constituted a decapitation campaign of unprecedented precision.

More importantly, fractures between Iran’s political leadership and its military have already surfaced publicly. On March 7, 2026, President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a televised apology to Arab Gulf states for missile and drone strikes conducted during the conflict, pledging that further attacks would cease.

That a sitting president apologized for his own military’s actions within minutes of their execution illustrates precisely what pre-delegated authority has produced: a military that the political leadership must answer for rather than control.

Three vulnerabilities now compound one another.

The first is the mosaic doctrine’s foundational limitation under sustained pressure.

The doctrine solved the problem that Saddam could not, preventing decapitation from producing immediate collapse. It never solved attrition. The mosaic delays the timeline of dissolution but leaves the dissolution itself intact.

The cease-fire arrived at a moment of Iranian weakness, and the pressure that produced that weakness remains available to Washington. The Islamic Republic knows that each day the cease-fire holds, it does so on terms that Washington can revise.

The second vulnerability is structural.

The mosaic doctrine distributed resilience horizontally across provincial land commands, but the IRGC’s functional branches — its navy, air force, missile corps and cyber and intelligence directorates — each represent a distinct accumulation of “tiles” with separate supply chains and command structures.

The United States has dismantled these branches sequentially rather than simultaneously, degrading each functional pillar while removing leadership at the center.

The result is a system weakening from two directions at once: horizontal provincial networks loses coherence as the vertical command spine collapses, and neither compensates for the deterioration of the other.

The third vulnerability is financial, and the most immediately exposing. The IRGC’s ability to sustain operations and evade sanctions has depended on Hezbollah and the broader proxy network to move money and provide the transactional infrastructure linking the center to the periphery. That system has been degraded.

Iran’s shadow fleet — the network of vessels moving sanctioned oil through falsified documentation and ship-to-ship transfers — has faced intensified US interdiction. China-linked front companies that provided financial cover to the IRGC have been sanctioned in successive rounds by the US Treasury.

On March 31, dozens of money changers linked to the IRGC were arrested across the United Arab Emirates following the escalation of Gulf tensions after Iranian strikes, severing one of the regime’s most critical cash arteries. A network that cannot pay its operators does not remain in a network for long.

Washington enters the cease-fire holding all the cards: military dominance, financial strangulation and a regional architecture that has isolated Tehran from the Arab world it once sought to mobilize.

Iran’s response has been to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the final lever a regime reaches for when it has exhausted all others. That threat is a measure of desperation, not strength.

The operation has not concluded, but the conditions for Iranian defeat are in place.

The entity that emerges from what comes next will bear little resemblance to the Islamic Republic that launched its doctrine of resistance four decades ago. What remains depends entirely on whether Tehran meets Trump’s terms.

Read in NY Post

Western coverage of Operation Epic Fury has unfolded almost entirely on Iran’s own terms.

The dominant frame across European and American commentary treats the Islamic Republic as the aggrieved party narrating its resistance, and the discussion in mainstream outlets and across social media platforms has largely been organized around what Iran claims, what Iran endures, and what Iran dares to threaten.

This frame leaves an enormous gap in the picture, and the gap is the Arab world — a civilization that has spent forty years watching the Islamic Republic erode its institutional, theological, and cultural foundations.

To grasp what is actually happening in the Middle East, a Western observer needs to hold three dimensions simultaneously, and the architecture of Western political debate makes this structurally difficult, if not in certain cases impossible.

Three Things the West Cannot See

The first is the Arab relationship with Iran. From the vantage point of Brussels or London, Iran presents itself as a resistance movement with a grievance against American hegemony and Israeli occupation, and this presentation maps comfortably onto familiar Western anticolonial frameworks.

What it does not map onto is the lived experience of Arab populations in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and across the Gulf. In those countries, Iran's presence meant Hezbollah holding the Lebanese state hostage to Tehran's decisions, thirty-five armed factions in Iraq drawing salaries from Iranian funds channeled through the Iraqi national treasury, and Houthi commanders answering to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while firing on Arab civilians from Yemeni soil. Freedom is not the word any serious Arab observer would use for what Iran brought.

Indeed, the Arab world's quarrel with Iran runs far deeper than American bases or Israeli airstrikes. What drives it is the systematic subversion of Arab sovereignty by a foreign power that uses the language of Islamic solidarity as cover for an imperial project conducted through proxies.

The second dimension is the proxy question itself, where Western analysis fails most comprehensively. Iran goes far beyond supporting armed groups. Parallel state structures get built inside Arab countries, financial systems get captured, and political figures get installed who owe their existence and survival entirely to Tehran.

The Iranians who have administered this project understand it as the export of a revolution, but what Arab populations have experienced is closer to a colonial occupation conducted through intermediaries, and as of now, they’re not mourning the Islamic Republic.

When Westerners treat these proxy networks as instruments of legitimate resistance rather than as mechanisms of subjugation, they endorse an imperial project while believing themselves to be opposing one, and as a matter of fact, make themselves the legitimizing force behind Iran’s war against the Arab world.

The third dimension is the most counterintuitive for a Western audience, and it is the one most consequential for how the current war is understood and misunderstood. For Arab nationalists, including secular nationalists and even those with deep reservations about Israeli policy, Iran represents a greater and more immediate threat than Israel does.

This is a position that Western media are structurally ill-equipped to render intelligible, because Western discourse on the Middle East has been organized for decades around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the primary axis of regional injustice.

The result is that when Western governments and Western publics take strong positions against Israel’s actions against Iran’s operations, they believe themselves to be standing with the Arab world. In reality, they are advancing a position that the Arab world does not share and has not asked for, while ignoring the threat that Arab governments and Arab populations actually live with.

The rhetorical use of Israel as a perpetual alibi for Iranian aggression has been one of the Islamic Republic’s most durable tools, and Western opinion has served as the unwitting amplifier of that tool across the entire duration of the Islamic Republic’s existence.

The War the Arab World Is Watching

What makes this moment significant is that Operation Epic Fury has accelerated a reckoning that was already underway. The Arab world is watching the proxy architecture Iran spent decades constructing get dismantled, and it is processing the implications for its own political future.

The first thing that has emerged from this is a demonstration of capability that no one predicted. Gulf states that absorbed thousands of rockets and drones while maintaining full civilian life and political composure have revealed a military steadiness that decades of condescension from Western and Arab nationalist commentators had written off as impossible.

The second is a region at a genuine inflection point, one where the destruction of Iran’s proxy architecture opens a real possibility of Arab states governing themselves without external interference for the first time in a generation.

Western observers who followed this war through the lens of Iranian social media accounts have been watching a carefully produced performance. The Arab world has been watching something else entirely, the first serious challenge to an ideology that was never democratically adopted, never welcomed, and imposed through violence and subversion from the moment of its founding.

The United States and Israel, long cast in Arab political culture as the twin engines of regional oppression, are being processed by a significant and growing portion of Arab opinion as something closer to liberators, not in the language of gratitude, which Arab dignity would resist, but in the language of relief.

Two interviews have proven especially illuminating in this regard. One features an Egyptian writer, the other a former Iraqi parliamentarian, both speaking on a Saudi-sponsored Arab channel with the kind of frankness that the Western media landscape rarely produces and rarely amplifies. Each, in his own way, says the same thing: Iran is the enemy.

I hope that reading them gives serious observers of international affairs a flavor of what the real debate looks like inside the Arab world, conducted in Arabic, on Arab terms, and almost entirely out of Western view.

Ibrahim Issa, Egyptian Writer, speaking from Cairo with host Nayef

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Host: When someone from Iran or from the pro-Iranians listens to you, they will say: in 38 days, the United States and Israel could not destroy the regime, could not change it, could not enter Iran by land, could not force Iran to surrender, and Trump went to a truce because he had no other option. What is your response?

Issa: Look, if these are the arguments that convince them, good — they satisfy themselves. You cannot convince a madman that he is mad. No matter how skilled a psychiatrist you are, there is no mentally disturbed person on earth who admits his disturbance. Let alone someone who is both mentally disturbed and ideologically driven at the same time.

But all of this raises the question about the war’s own objectives. This same argument was repeated to the point of tedium about Gaza — as Hamas’s presence was being crushed in Gaza, they said “Hamas hasn’t been defeated, Hamas exists, Hamas is negotiating, Hamas forced the enemy to the negotiating table” — the same nonsense repeated again.

The regime hasn’t fallen — and who said a regime can fall from the air alone? Saddam Hussein, in 1991, after the liberation of Kuwait and the massive defeat of Iraq and its army, remained in power from 1991 to 2003, twelve years. Does that mean he wasn’t defeated in 1991? The regime may have survived, but it is hollow, rotted, penetrated, decrepit, and now it will face its own people face to face after this truce — in a week, two weeks, a month, two months, a year, two years — with enormous challenges.

Let us assume the opposite, Professor Nayef: if the Iranian regime had managed to assassinate Netanyahu, the defense minister, the head of intelligence, the head of Mossad — what would they say then? That we were defeated? When the scene reaches this level of political decay and political delirium, we should not chase the arguments of madmen. We are not going to sit and talk about self-evident truths with them, to convince the pro-Iranians or the Mullah regime that it has been defeated. I am not going to convince him because he is like a man afflicted with color blindness — he sees green as red, and no matter how hard you try to convince him that what he sees as green is actually red, he will not believe you.

Host: Why did you describe everyone who supports Iran in its aggressive attacks against Gulf states, or even those who stay silent about it — as if they saw nothing — as legitimizing treason and collaboration? Convince the viewer that this description is deserved.

Issa: 1000%. Let me say first: the purpose of dialogue, debate, and presenting evidence is to enlighten people, to enlighten public opinion, to enlighten the Arab masses — not to convince the pro-Iranians, the Iranian regime, or the Mullah system that it has been defeated. That is outside my concerns, not on my list of priorities.

But when I say that everyone who has openly and clearly sympathized with, supported, or stayed silent about the savage, blatant, and despicable Iranian aggression against Arab countries in the Gulf, they are supporting and endorsing treason and collaboration. Why?

Because when Hezbollah exists in Lebanon, when you support Iran and its infiltration of Arab societies and Arab states — whether we take the example of Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, or the Houthis — what does it mean when you, an ordinary Arab citizen subjected to massive media and cultural coercion from political Islam and Arab nationalist movements, support Hezbollah? It means you are supporting a party that describes itself as the party of Velayat-e Faqih in the heart of an Arab state.

You are supporting a party whose loyalty to Iran is declared. You are supporting an armed organization inside a state — meaning you are supporting secession from the army, supporting rebellion against the army, supporting the proliferation of military forces inside any country.

Apply this to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Iraq, to Egypt, to Tunisia. When you tell me that an organization, merely because it raises the banner of fighting Israel and being “with the resistance,” and you accept it as an agent paid and funded by a foreign power, a traitor whose loyalty is to another state, a military rebel against his country and its sovereignty — fragmenting and splitting the state, as we saw in Yemen and as we see today with Hezbollah in Lebanon — hijacking the decision of the state, hijacking the decision of the people — is this not treason and collaboration? What else would you call it?

Treason and collaboration with a foreign organization with foreign loyalty inside this homeland, receiving money and support, acting on orders from outside, and receiving funds from abroad. If this is not collaboration, what is? If this is not treason to the homeland, what is?

When we say the organization “Bayt al-Maqdis” in Sinai — when it was from ISIS and al-Qaeda — if you fund an organization that raises its banners and rebels against its army, its country, its sovereignty, receiving external support — what is its name? I think Egyptian patriots, nationalists, and Nasserists would not tell us that those organizations are patriotic. They must be treasonous organizations. Every terrorist organization is necessarily treasonous and collaborationist. But if ISIS raises the banner of fighting Israel, should we be like ISIS?

Host: Professor Ibrahim, you mentioned important points we will return to. But you came a moment ago to the positions of some of these politicians, thinkers, and Arab elites — nationalists, leftists — who agreed with the Islamists, whether from Shia or Sunni militias or otherwise. They are all in the same trench. But can one say today that these elites and thought leaders in the Arab world — the leftists and nationalists — are the reason some Arabs, even citizens of the countries targeted by Iranian aggression, would celebrate and cheer their own targeting by Iran with rockets, drones, and spy cells? Do you hold them responsible?

Issa: I hold the Arab political culture responsible since the 1950s and ‘60s until now — the hegemony of the political Islam project and the Nasserist and leftist ideas that dominate Arab culture, control its keys, and reign over it. That is the real problem.

We are in an inheritance — the dung inheritance, the mental and intellectual dung that dominates and controls the Arab mind.

Many have escaped it; I cannot say at all that Arab society and Arab peoples have not stood with the Gulf states, or that they stand with Israel, or stand with Iran. I do not think that. The problem belongs to those affiliated with the Islamist and nationalist currents and those influenced by their ideas. And this is natural, because they see it in school curricula, in mosque sermons, in religious instruction, in the media, and in social media. These are large, not trivial forces — dominant over the Arab mind since the 1950s.

Then came the post-Islamic Awakening phase and Islamist dominance over the Arab scene. So you are facing a Nasserist-nationalist thought onto which Islamist thought was grafted, creating a terrifying rigidity and paralysis of Arab mentality, to the point of glorifying and magnifying Gamal Abdel Nasser the defeated, while attacking and accusing Anwar Sadat the victor.

I speak militarily, not about peace or anything else. The one who won the battle and the war — Anwar Sadat — is the object of hatred and attack from both Islamists, who also killed him, and Nasserists and nationalists who to this day say we did not win in ‘73.

So it is perfectly natural that someone who believes Egypt and the Arabs did not win in ‘73 would now consider himself victorious. He sees through a completely different lens: the one who crossed and liberated the land is the one who was defeated, and the one who was struck to the bone, whose military power was crushed, who has nothing left but remnants of rockets stockpiled for decades at the expense of the Iranian people’s wealth, capacities, and freedom — these nationalists, Nasserists, human rights advocates, and Islamists who speak about Arab regimes and attack them and consider them producers of human rights violations are conspiring and falsifying in a way that no sound mind can follow — about what Iran commits daily in human rights violations against its own people since the first moment of the accursed revolution, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which was an Iranian revolution and turned into an Islamic revolution through blood, killing, and executions.

This left that now supports Iran — Iran, by the way, kills your leftists inside Iran. The Mullah regime suppresses the left and suppresses all freedom. The left can have demonstrators beaten and killed by the thousands, while you, in your own country, want the right to demonstrate and accuse your state of suppressing demonstrators, yet you approve of the crushing of Iranian demonstrators.

These people have schizophrenic personalities. Their behavior can only be explained psychologically, not politically — it belongs to psychology, not political science.

Former Iraqi Member of Parliament Faiq al-Sheikh Ali, with host Rasha

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Host: Has the regime fallen or not, Professor Faiq?

Faiq: Rasha, before I answer whether the regime has fallen or not — you know, the peoples of the Gulf, like the Iraqi people and Gulf peoples, contain a proportion of Iranians — old Iranians, 200, 150, 120 years settled there, holding citizenship of these countries. These Iranians are now among the greatest haters of Iran and the turbans. You have lost a high proportion of your original citizens who used to live in the Gulf states and even Iraq — you have lost their loyalty and love. They now hate you, hate Iran, hate the regime and its conduct, because you attacked them. They did not know at what moment a rocket might fall on them. Because the rocket launched — the girl who fell in Kuwait — the rocket coming from Iran does not distinguish between an Iranian and a non-Iranian. I mean, all people now hate the regime.

Host: I will return to the question of people, but has the regime in Iran fallen, politically and practically?

Faiq: The regime is finished. Any regime in the world, especially a dictatorial one, consists of a head and those surrounding the head. Fine — where is the head? Ali Khamenei is gone. Those surrounding the head — would that the first, second, and third fundamental lines had all been eliminated. Everything at the level of the Revolutionary Guard and at the level of senior politicians we knew for 40 or more years — all gone, all killed.

Host: They say the Revolutionary Guard still exists, and as long as it withstood this war, Iran is still strong.

Faiq: True, the Revolutionary Guard still exists, but I am talking about the leadership, the senior figures. The current commanders of the Revolutionary Guard are low-level — fourth tier, not third, not second, not first. These have had standing orders from long ago: if something happens to Iran, you act on your own, you make your own decisions — no longer a supreme head controlling you or a specific commander telling you what to do. You act as you see fit.

Our enemies are the Gulf, our enemies are America and Israel. These people are fighting now, so you, Revolutionary Guard soldier holding the rank of first lieutenant, captain, or major, act as you please, make your own judgment; the important thing is enmity toward all these countries.

Host: Is the survival of these people in the interest of the region and its stability, or against it?

Faiq: Against. First, against the Iranian people, because this regime is built on repression. All Iranian revolutions were suppressed by the Revolutionary Guard. I hear that at the beginning, the number of martyrs of the latest revolution — just a day or two before the war — Iran announced 3,000, or the globally circulating figure is 32,000, and now Trump is talking about 45,000.

Those who speak of these numbers do not know Iran or the Iranian people. I can say with a clear conscience: more than 100,000. Because in 2009, during the Green Revolution, when 60% of the Iranian people rose up, the Revolutionary Guard alone killed a quarter of a million people. Not to mention the prisons, the arrests, and so on. These are criminals who use a policy of extermination — immediately and without discussion: you are an Israeli agent, a Zionist, an American agent, an infidel — they kill their own people, they slaughter them. They slaughtered a quarter of a million.

Host: So, after this war that lasted more than a month, what version of the Iranian regime did the Americans leave us in the region?

Faiq: The war has not ended, Rasha.

(…)

Faiq: This is a given. And now I address the Arab citizen: what do you have to say in sympathy with Iran? You know what my wish is? I should not say this — it is not politically appropriate. But my wish may be that two people govern you: my wish in this life and even in the next — one of them is named Saddam Hussein. Even if you sympathize with Iran, I wish he would slaughter you. I wish he would slaughter you right now because you sympathize with Iran — slaughter your family, your relatives, your neighbors, because you sympathize with Iran. Even if you tell him a million times, he would slaughter them all. That is one. My wish is that this would rule you until you come to understand what Iran is.

The second thing I wish — that Iran governs you as it governs me now, and you see the humiliation, hunger, degradation, abuse, contempt — and an Iranian comes to visit Karbala while the great Iraqi, who stood fighting Iran for eight years and brought it to its knees, kneels and washes the Iranian’s feet — and his feet are covered in mud and filth — and drinks the water used to wash those feet, on the pretext that this person is coming from Iran to walk to Imam Hussein, peace be upon him. I wish this kind of state ruled you, so you understand — how can you, an Arab, accept this? This is what Iran is doing to an Arab country. How can you be ruled like this? How can you sympathize with them?

Do you understand what kind of superstition and ignorance they spread among us in Iraq? I am coming to tell you — I am afraid you might say “what is this?” — or accuse me of being an extremist, maybe al-Qaeda, maybe ISIS.

I don’t know. You need to know I am a son of Najaf and of the religious establishment; my grandfather was a senior religious authority, and I am a son of the Hawza seminary. So, understand who I am and what I am telling you. How are you thinking? I am not like you — I differ from you in thinking. You are now taken over by sympathy, under the pretext that these are Muslims coming to fight Jews. What about the Jews? Let’s get to that point — that is the killer point.

I am Iraqi — the proportion of Jews in Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century in Baghdad — half of Baghdad’s population was Jewish, and the other half was Muslim. The finest, most beautiful, greatest, best, and most refined community in Iraq was the Jews, not others. They attacked no one — here are the court records and police station files.

Host: Yes, but you are talking about an image that differs from today’s reality. Look at what they are doing in Gaza. Look at what they are doing in the West Bank. Look at the settlements, look at the law to execute the original owner —

Faiq: Look at what they are doing in southern Lebanon.

Host: Yes, yes.

Faiq: Yes, correct. They are now committing all these crimes and doing the worst things — in order to secure themselves, to eliminate something called “resistance,” to secure their lives. But — and this is a very important point — those Jews who lived in our Arab countries, especially Iraq, we expelled them, we displaced them, we sent them to Israel, we uprooted them from their roots, we stole their movable and immovable property. This Jew whom we are now talking about — when he does what he does now, or rather the Zionist — yes, he wants to protect himself because at night you cross his border, you violate his land. Yes, I know — you violated his land while he was sleeping.

Host: And he killed and continues to kill and violate —

Faiq: And you shell him from southern Lebanon. He tells you: I want to make a treaty with you, let’s agree, we both live safely — you in southern Lebanon, I in Israel. You refuse — you want to fight him. Of course, he retaliates.

Host: That is not correct — Israel to this day has not withdrawn from the five points in Lebanon.

Faiq: I congratulate you, it has been ten days.

Host: Fine.

Faiq: What five points?

Host: If Israel does not want to leave — if there are those who see that the primary enemy around which all regional countries must unite is Israel, not Iran —

Faiq: Who are the Arabs who say that?

Host: Some say this view.

Faiq: No — the first, primary, and fundamental enemy is Iran, not Israel. Because, as an Iraqi, speaking for myself, what brought me to Israel? I have no border with Israel. I am not near Israel. Israel is not interfering in my affairs or my politics. Iran — 1,400 years — is the one inside Iraq.

Host: Yes, you are Iraqi, but you are also Arab, and you see what is being done —

Faiq: I am Arab. I see humiliation from the Iranians. I do not see any humiliation from any Israeli — not near me, not seeing him, not dealing with him, not occupying my country, not coming to Iraq.

Host: This judgment may result from what you, or Iraqis, suffered from Iran in the recent crisis. It is said that Iraq fell into the trap —

Faiq: Yes, of course. Now I will answer you: we suffered, but these Arabs who now sympathize with Iran have not suffered from Iran. Iran is not close to them on their borders. The Iranians are not entering and governing them. Qasem Soleimani was not controlling their politics, so they sympathize with and love the Iranians, love the turbans. And the strange thing is that they are Arab — what brought you to the turban, to love it and follow it?

Host: Because the turban is directing itself against Israel, from their point of view.

Faiq: Fine — now you are telling me that Iraq fell into a trap. What trap? Iran built militias. Just as it supported Hezbollah, just as it supported Hamas, just as it supported the Houthis, it supported 35 Iraqi factions loyal to Iran. The funding comes from Iran, but from Iraq — from the Iraqi treasury, from oil money. Iran takes it and gives it to these 35 factions. The weapons come from Iran. The political support comes from Iran. When elections happen, these 35 factions win — they have MPs in parliament. The entire state is controlled by Iran. These are slaves, Rasha.

And this is a very important point — let me tell you. The Iranians occupied Iraq and governed it through people they understood with — not through honorable Iraqis with history, struggle, and principle, with whom they said: “We are your neighbors and a big country, let us cooperate in governance.” That would have been fine — I can deal with Turkey, deal with Saudi Arabia, deal with Iran. I have no problem. But what did they do? They went and brought someone you do not know, never heard of, never seen — this man was starving, did not have a dinar — and they handed him a treasury of billions. What kind of person is that? What do I expect from such a person? What does he do? He is a slave of Iran until he dies, because the one who created and made him —

Host: But there were government and state institutions in Iraq that should have stood up to that.

Faiq: The government is brought by the militias, brought by Iran. If Iran does not approve, there is no government.

Host: So Iraq is in Iran’s grip.

Faiq: In Iran’s grip. And let me also criticize America and Israel at the same time. America and Israel were looking the other way — in fact, they agreed. When Iran agreed on a prime minister and a government, they also agreed. They supported all governments from 2003 onward — from Bremer to this day. All governments in Iraq — America and Israel approved of what Iran brought. So in a country governed like this — the Iranian, whom I fought for eight years, whom I defeated and destroyed — how is he now governing me, taking his revenge, stealing my country, killing my people, entering sectarian strife into my country through Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, bombing sacred shrines?

The sympathy you mentioned may exist because some Arab people have not seen this image of Iran. They see the image of Iran confronting Israel. No — they see and hear and know. At a high cultural level, what is wrong with them? The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and others — they see nothing, hear nothing, they don’t meet with politicians, they don’t know why they sympathize with Iran. Out of spite toward the Arabs and Gulf states.

There is absolutely no Arab person sympathizing with Iran who does not carry a hidden hatred inside him against the Gulf states, because he looks down on them and sees they have money, they have resources, they built their countries, and built their people. He does not want you to build the person because, if you do, he becomes aware and knows how. And if you build the country, afterward he does not need anything — he will not go to Iran, he will not go to any other country. He will live in his own country, living the best life. They do not want this.

These Arabs — I am astonished. At this time of calamity, destruction, and death, you sympathize with Iran? How do you sympathize with Iran? I ask God Almighty — those of you who sympathize with Iran — to truly set Iran upon you, so you feel its fire and see what Iran is. You who sympathize do not understand Iran. If you understood Iran, you would not sympathize with it.

Host: I can certainly appreciate your feelings. You are a seasoned politician who has lived through many years and eras, who has read history well in the region and in Iraq, and who has lived through the moments you speak of with great passion. Thank you, Professor Faiq al-Sheik Ali.