In the Eyes of Truth host Stanislav Krapivnik talks with 21st Century Wire’s Patrick Henningsen about all this and much more. Watch: 

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

On 1 September 2026, the INS Drakon left the TKMS shipyard in Kiel under police escort and entered the canal on its way to Haifa. The submarine had reportedly been transferred to the Israeli navy behind closed doors on 22 July. German taxpayers contributed €135 million towards the vessel, even as the wider naval procurement programme remained at the centre of an unfinished Israeli criminal trial and a state inquiry into decisions that investigators say bypassed the country’s security establishment.

VIDEO: The Israeli submarine INS Drakon passes through the Kiel Canal under heavy police protection on 1 September 2026, beginning its journey from Germany to Haifa, Israel.

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By 2017, the allegations had become serious enough for Berlin to postpone a separate agreement to finance three more submarines. The delay lasted only until October, when Germany committed another €540 million, but this time attached an unpublished condition requiring the corruption investigations to end and the resulting suspicions to be cleared before the vessels could be delivered. A later Bundestag answer confirmed that the memorandum addressed the allegations without revealing how Berlin eventually decided that its condition had been met.

The Israeli attorney general was expected to confirm that the investigations had ended, while Berlin kept the power to decide whether the corruption suspicions had been cleared and to stop delivery if new evidence emerged. The decision was to be recorded through an exchange of notes between the two governments. Neither the exchange nor Germany’s assessment has been published. Although the agreement did not cover the Drakon, which had been ordered years earlier, Berlin had made the corruption case a condition of its next €540 million commitment. It later allowed the programme to continue while the Israeli proceedings remained unfinished, without revealing who cleared the condition or what evidence justified it.

At the centre of the case stood an intermediary whose appointment ThyssenKrupp says it can no longer explain.

IMAGE: Armed Israeli security personnel escort the INS Drakon during its passage through the Kiel Canal in Germany. (Source: Israël, My Beloved via Facebook)

The Man in the Middle

Michael Ganor had represented ThyssenKrupp in Israel since 2009 and received €10.4 million in commissions from the naval contracts. Israeli prosecutors allege that he channelled part of that money to officials who could help steer purchases towards the German shipbuilder.

But Ganor’s potential earnings did not stop when ThyssenKrupp secured a contract. Internal company documents reported by Globes put his commission at 2% and show that he could also earn from procurement used to meet ThyssenKrupp’s offset obligations in Israel. He was therefore positioned to benefit when Israel bought the vessels and again when work generated by those purchases flowed back to Israeli companies. The offset contracts and their beneficiaries remain undisclosed, concealing how far Ganor’s influence and financial interests may have extended through the deal.

IMAGE: Michael (Mickey) Ganor. (Source: Reuven Castro, Walla | Project logo: OCCRP)

The representative Ganor replaced later described the appointment under oath. During a visit to Israel, he said, a senior ThyssenKrupp executive was warned that no further orders would be placed unless Ganor got the job. The outgoing representative waited in the executive’s hotel room while the conversation took place. Less than ten minutes later, the executive returned and told him that Ganor would be appointed.

ThyssenKrupp says Ganor passed its compliance procedures and that an external law firm reviewed his contract. Yet the company can no longer reconstruct how an ultimatum delivered in Israel became an appointment approved in Germany. Its internal inquiry did not interview Ganor and was described by the company’s own spokesman as limited. According to ThyssenKrupp, Israeli investigators declined its offer of documents and interviews, while its Israeli lawyers warned that questioning Ganor during the criminal investigation might be treated as obstruction of justice. The inquiry ended without speaking to the man at the centre of the allegations. Its report was sent to the German government and remains confidential.

Israel continued to follow the money. The trail led to Avriel Bar-Yosef, the former deputy head of the National Security Council, which advises the prime minister from inside the Prime Minister’s Office. Prosecutors accuse him of accepting money from Ganor in return for advancing his interests. He was charged with bribery and breach of trust.

IMAGE: Composite image of Benjamin Netanyahu and David Shimron, his personal lawyer and relative, who also represented Michael Ganor.(Source: Palestine Chronicle)

From Ganor, the investigation that became known as Case 3000 moved closer to Netanyahu. David Shimron, the prime minister’s personal lawyer and relative, had represented Ganor. During a separate tender for naval vessels, Shimron contacted the Israeli Defence Ministry and questioned why the tender had been issued, allegedly seeking to have the contract awarded directly to ThyssenKrupp. The tender was later cancelled, and the contract went to the German company after Berlin agreed to subsidise part of the purchase.

Israeli police recommended charges against Shimron, but prosecutors ultimately closed the case against him. Netanyahu was questioned as a witness rather than a suspect and was never charged. His office has said the allegations were thoroughly investigated and found to be baseless.

An archive of 50 sworn statements submitted to Israel’s High Court revealed a broader breakdown in the way the vessels had been chosen. Former defence ministers, military commanders, intelligence chiefs and senior security officials described strategic acquisitions advanced without normal planning, officials bypassed and decisions concealed from the institutions responsible for determining Israel’s military needs.

Former Defence Ministry director-general Dan Harel described the pressure reaching his own office. He said he was urged to cancel an international tender and structure the acquisition in Germany, or in a way that favoured ThyssenKrupp. Harel refused to act without a written instruction bearing Netanyahu’s signature. None came. He also recalled Netanyahu demanding another submarine despite professional opposition, leaving him with the impression that an interest he could not identify was driving the expansion of the relationship with the German shipbuilder. Harel’s sworn evidence formed part of the High Court filing, and its central allegations were later reported.

The Israeli investigation, which became known as Case 3000, followed the commissions paid to Ganor and the money he allegedly passed to Israeli officials, while the sworn statements revealed the procurement system pushed aside to make those purchases possible. Yet the investigation stopped short of the other end of the transaction: Germany, where ThyssenKrupp had installed Ganor at the centre of its Israeli business, authorised the commissions he received and secured contracts underwritten by German taxpayers.

Ultimately, the investigation had followed the money into Israel, while the unanswered questions led back to what ThyssenKrupp and the German government knew before the payments were made.

What Germany Did Not Establish

By the summer of 2017, the arrests and allegations in Israel had become serious enough for Germany to put the agreement for three future submarines on hold. But the pause did not lead to a criminal investigation. As the Israeli inquiry widened and ThyssenKrupp’s limited internal findings reached the German government, prosecutors continued only to monitor the affair.

Nearly two years passed before prosecutors in Bochum opened a formal investigation in March 2019. The publicly identified trigger was not a referral from another German authority or company records supplied by a whistleblower, but allegations reported in the international press.

IMAGE: The Bochum Justice Centre, where German prosecutors opened an investigation into the naval contracts in March 2019. (Source: Boga)

The Bochum investigators examined whether anyone in Germany had committed bribery or related offences in connection with the naval contracts. They closed the file at the end of 2020 and announced the decision the following January, saying they had found no sufficient suspicion of criminal conduct by any identifiable person in Germany.

The inquiry ended without a public account of how Ganor obtained his position, who approved his commission arrangements, what ThyssenKrupp knew about his alleged payments to Israeli officials, or whether warning signs had surfaced inside the company. Nor did the Israeli indictment or the creation of a state commission of inquiry bring German investigators back to the case, according to NDR’s later investigation. The file remained closed, the questions remained unanswered, and German taxpayers continued to subsidise contracts whose path through Israel had become the subject of one of the country’s largest corruption investigations.

Two Investigations, No Resolution

Four months after Bochum closed its investigation, Israeli prosecutors indicted Ganor, Bar-Yosef and several other defendants. Allegations of bribery, money laundering, fraud and breach of trust surrounding the naval contracts would now be tested in an Israeli courtroom while the German file remained shut. The defendants deny wrongdoing and are presumed innocent.

The trial could determine whether individuals had committed crimes, but not why Israel bought the vessels, how military and government procedures had been pushed aside, or who was responsible for those decisions. In 2022, the government created a state commission led by former Supreme Court president Asher Grunis to pursue the questions the criminal case could not answer.

IMAGE: Asher Grunis, the former Israeli Supreme Court president appointed to lead the state commission examining the submarine affair. (Source: Alex Kolomoisky/Flash90 via Times of Israel)

The commission examined how Netanyahu’s government, the military and the security establishment decided to buy submarines and warships between 2009 and 2016. Its mandate excluded alleged crimes already before the courts, leaving it to investigate how the purchases were advanced rather than whether the Case 3000 defendants had committed criminal offences.

In its January 2026 report, the commission found that the normal safeguards around acquisitions worth billions had repeatedly failed. Professional bodies were bypassed, contacts and understandings with foreign parties went undocumented, and purchases proceeded without a coherent assessment of Israel’s wider security needs. The resulting systemic failures endangered national security and damaged Israel’s foreign relations and economic interests.

The same absence of scrutiny shaped Israel’s response to Germany’s sale of submarines and warships to Egypt. The commission described the handling of weapons sales by allies to third countries as chaotic and found that it had endangered national security. Evidence before the inquiry alleged that Netanyahu approved the German sale without consulting or notifying the Defence Ministry. He denies approving it, and the commission has yet to reach a final finding on his role.

The commission had already sent warning letters to Netanyahu and four former security officials in June 2024. Its provisional findings said Netanyahu had bypassed his government in reaching understandings with Germany and advanced purchases without orderly staff work. High Court proceedings had delayed access to evidence and temporarily frozen the commission’s work. The commission is now due to begin closed hearings in November, when those warned can challenge the evidence before its final report. The public now knows that decisions made beyond the usual safeguards put national security at risk, but the evidence that may reveal who authorised them, and why, will be heard behind closed doors.

Approved Behind Closed Doors

While Israel’s commission was reconstructing how safeguards had been bypassed, Germany was moving towards another approval. According to NDR’s reconstruction, the Federal Security Council authorised the Drakon for export in December 2023, while the commission was still gathering evidence. The operative export authorisation reportedly followed in May 2026, after the commission had found systemic failures in the procurement process that endangered national security.

IMAGE: The Federal Chancellery in Berlin, where the Federal Security Council meets behind closed doors to decide sensitive arms exports. (Source: The Official Website of Berlin)

Those findings did not stop the export, and Germany’s approval process leaves no public record showing what weight, if any, ministers gave them. The Federal Security Council brings together the chancellor and senior ministers, but its deliberations are secret. Berlin has disclosed neither whether the Israeli evidence was considered nor how another submarine was approved while responsibility for the earlier decisions remained unresolved. Secrecy did more than conceal the discussion; in this case, it prevented the public from testing whether the government had confronted the risks at all.

In 2020, more than a year after Bochum prosecutors opened their case, the federal government told the Bundestag that it knew of no investigations connected to the sixth submarine. It neither identified the Bochum inquiry nor explained why an investigation into the wider naval-contract affair did not count. By the time the Drakon was approved, Germany had been confronted with arrests, indictments and findings that the procurement process had endangered Israeli security, yet the public was still given no account of how any of this bore on the export.

Germany did not have to wait for Israel to assign personal guilt before deciding whether the failures already established demanded greater scrutiny. Instead, it approved the submarine without providing the information needed to judge that decision, while committing public funds to the result. What remained hidden in the approval process became tangible in the federal budget, where taxpayers continued to underwrite the contracts without knowing how the risks surrounding them had been assessed.

The Public Money Continued

By the time Germany authorised the Drakon, its taxpayers had supported Israel’s submarine fleet for more than three decades. The policy began during the Gulf War, after German companies helped Saddam Hussein’s Iraq develop missile and chemical-weapons capabilities that threatened Israel. Helmut Kohl’s government responded by financing two Dolphin-class submarines in full and half the cost of a third. Together, the first three boats cost Germany about 1.1 billion Deutschmarks, roughly €560 million.

What began as a response to that crisis outlasted it. Berlin later paid slightly more than one third of the fourth and fifth submarines, committed up to €135 million towards the Drakon and financed roughly one quarter of Israel’s four warships. An exceptional act of historical responsibility had become a standing channel through which German public money supported Israeli naval power. Once corruption allegations surrounded the contracts, that history could explain the spending, but it could not excuse the failure to account for it.

Angela Merkel’s government continued the policy even as the strategic implications became harder to ignore. In 2012, Spiegel reported that Israel was equipping the German-built submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Former senior German defence officials said they had always assumed the vessels would carry nuclear weapons. Merkel’s government maintained that Germany delivered the submarines unarmed and declined to address their subsequent armament. Berlin was therefore subsidising vessels that former officials understood could serve as platforms for Israel’s nuclear deterrent.

IMAGE: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem in early 2011. SPIEGEL has learned that Israel is equipping German-made submarines with nuclear-tipped missiles. (Source: Moshe Milner/ dpa via Der Spiegel)

The Drakon was initially priced at about €450 million, including Germany’s €135 million contribution, although later published estimates placed its value between €500 million and €700 million. The federal government has confirmed that appropriations for the procurement of Israeli defence systems do not have to be repaid. Germany’s contribution was not a loan, but a permanent transfer from the federal budget.

Yet Berlin could not tell Parliament where all the publicly supported work had gone. When Bundestag members asked in 2025 which Israeli companies had participated as subcontractors on German-built submarines and what share of the contracts they had received, the government replied that it did not know. It could account for the subsidy, but not identify every company that benefited from it or how much value each had received.

Despite that gap, the next agreement expanded the industrial relationship. Israel’s €3 billion order for three Dakar-class submarines included more than €850 million in reciprocal procurement and industrial cooperation with Israeli companies, including defence businesses. Germany committed a further €540 million, carrying its support from the contracts under investigation into a larger generation of purchases involving Israeli companies, even though the government had said it did not know which Israeli subcontractors had worked on the earlier publicly financed submarines or what share of their value they had received.

Berlin had promised that the next agreement would not proceed until the corruption investigations had ended and the resulting suspicions had been cleared. The condition remains unpublished, the Israeli criminal proceedings continue, and Germany has not disclosed the assessment that allowed the programme to proceed. Yet the Drakon departed, three more submarines were ordered and German taxpayers were committed to another €540 million.

By treating an unpublished anti-corruption condition as satisfied, German officials allowed the submarine programme to expand beyond the corruption affair, converting a decision the public could not examine into billions of euros in contracts and hundreds of millions in public support. Germany has yet to say who made that decision, what evidence they examined or how they concluded that Berlin’s promise had been kept.

Part II of The Drakon Files, “The Clearance Berlin Cannot Explain”, will trace that unpublished condition through the ministries and approval bodies responsible for the contracts. It will examine the commission and offset arrangements attached to the programme, and determine whether Germany’s promised safeguard was formally satisfied or disappeared inside the secrecy surrounding the deal.

READ MORE GERMANY NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Germany Files

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

For six months, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have insisted that the United States won its war against Iran. They spoke of destroyed capabilities, decisive success and overwhelming military victory. Their language grew more triumphant as the evidence moved in the opposite direction. Yet, Iran did not surrender, and did not abandon its nuclear programme or accept Washington’s terms. It continued to strike American positions, threaten regional energy infrastructure and contest control of the Strait of Hormuz.

American soldiers have died in a war they did not choose, and Congress did not authorise. Eighteen American service members have been killed and more than 750 wounded. By July, Hegseth acknowledged that direct American military expenditure had reached $37.5 billion. Washington was already seeking tens of billions more to continue operations and replace depleted weapons. These were not the costs of the clean and conclusive victory advertised by the White House. They were the consequences of an imperial war launched without a credible endgame.

This was an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state. It was launched without authorisation from the United Nations Security Council and without a demonstrated Iranian armed attack that could justify it as an act of self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Washington and Tel Aviv presented the assault as a limited response to an imminent nuclear danger. The scale and selection of their targets told a different story.

That admission has now come from an unexpected quarter. Writing in The Atlantic, Robert Kagan reaches a conclusion that the Trump administration has lacked the courage and intellectual honesty to acknowledge. Iran faced the combined military power of the United States and Israel and survived. Its cities and strategic infrastructure were bombed, much of its senior leadership was assassinated and enormous damage was inflicted, yet Tehran made none of the concessions demanded of it. In failing to force Iran into submission, Washington exposed both the limits of American power and the fragility of the regional order built to contain the Islamic Republic.

WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES OF U.S FOREIGN POLICY?

Curious about the real story behind U.S foreign policy shifts? Dive into this eye-opening clip where Robert Kagan’s bold Atlantic article unpacks Iran’s surprising resilience, growing influence and the… pic.twitter.com/QTqNt2JqEx

— Patrick Henningsen (@21WIRE) September 3, 2026

Kagan is no supporter of Iran and is a longstanding defender of American primacy who regards the erosion of United States power as a global danger. That is what makes his assessment so important. He is not celebrating an Iranian victory. He is mourning an American defeat.

The war was sold through the familiar spectre of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Iran’s nuclear programme was the pretext. The campaign reached far beyond nuclear facilities. Hegseth publicly declared that the mission included the destruction of Iran’s missiles, navy, military industries and ability to project power beyond its borders. The wider ambition was to break the Islamic Republic as a sovereign regional power, remove the principal obstacle to Israeli military supremacy and protect the expansionist Greater Israel project.

This was also a war against the movement towards a multipolar world. Iran sits at the intersection of the Global South, BRICS and the economic ambitions of China and Russia. Its territory connects the International North-South Transport Corridor with routes between Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, India and China. Reducing Iran to a weakened and dependent state would have struck at Eurasian integration while preserving Washington’s authority over the region’s energy and trade routes.

It would also have protected the geopolitical logic behind the India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor. IMEC was conceived around an India, Gulf, Israel and Europe axis that bypassed Iran and positioned Israel as its Mediterranean gateway. Its viability depended on the Abraham Accords, the submission of the Gulf monarchies to American protection and the claim that Israel could become the region’s indispensable security provider.

By failing to protect the Gulf from the consequences of its own attack, the U.S.-Israeli alliance demolished Israel’s claim to be the region’s indispensable security provider. Washington and Tel Aviv proved they could inflict enormous damage on Iran, but not that they could force it to submit or shield their regional partners from retaliation. Iranian strikes against military installations, shipping and energy infrastructure turned the American security umbrella into a source of danger for the governments beneath it. The bases built to protect them had become the very reason they were exposed.

Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Jordan must now answer for the degree to which their bases, airspace, intelligence systems and military coordination enabled an illegal attack on a neighbouring state. Iran has formally accused these governments of providing varying levels of operational, logistical and intelligence assistance. Those allegations remain disputed, and the responsibility of each government must be established separately. What cannot be disputed is the extensive American military infrastructure on their territory and the integration of their defence systems into Washington’s regional war machine. By allowing that presence to become the operational foundation of a war against Iran, these governments compromised their neutrality, exposed their populations and infrastructure to retaliation, and inherited responsibilities that American declarations of victory cannot erase.

Oman’s record is more ambiguous. Muscat’s early facilitation of the confrontation and its continuing ties to the American military structure and reported British intelligence installations place it within the architecture that enabled the campaign against Iran. GCHQ is reported to operate three surveillance sites in Oman, including facilities capable of intercepting communications passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Yet as the war expanded, Oman maintained relations with Tehran, resisted deeper involvement and tried to recover its traditional role as mediator. That later independence distinguishes it from governments more fully integrated into the U.S.-Israeli war system, but it does not erase its earlier contribution to the conditions that made the assault possible.

Washington’s promise of protection left its partners with damaged infrastructure, exposed economies, strained relations with Iran and foreign bases that now function as targeting coordinates. The governments that placed their security in American hands must decide whether continuing to host Washington’s machinery of war can be reconciled with the security of their populations or the sovereignty of their states.

Iran has not replaced the United States as an uncontested hegemon, nor should American domination be exchanged for another system of domination. Tehran has nevertheless gained the initiative and may now lead the effort to construct a regional security architecture based on sovereign equality, non-aggression and guarantees that no country will allow its territory to be used for attacks against another.

Kagan views this possibility with alarm, but it can also be read as a new political opening created by the failure of an imperial war and the survival of a sovereign state against the combined military force deployed to defeat it. His article does not reach that conclusion, but it provides a remarkable account of how Iran reversed the balance of coercion and broke an order organised around American power, Israeli supremacy and the Greater Israel project. What follows is an establishment autopsy of a defeat Washington still refuses to acknowledge.

Read Robert Kagan’s article featured in The Atlantic

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CNN reported that the video passed four million views before it disappeared. The removal followed widespread condemnation of its dehumanising imagery, although Ben-Gvir’s office has not explained the decision.

Posted weeks before Israel’s election on 27 October, the video turns the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners into a campaign promise. It will be Israel’s first national vote since 7 October 2023, giving voters their first opportunity to judge the government’s conduct through the wars that followed. With final candidate lists due on 8 September, Ben-Gvir and his rivals on the right are competing for the alliances and votes that could determine their political survival. Watch an archived repost on X.

VIDEO: An AI-generated campaign video posted by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir depicts numbered Palestinian prisoners moving along an industrial conveyor belt into a fortified detention complex and emerging visibly emaciated. Ben-Gvir later deleted the post.

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has deleted his video depicting kidnapped Palestinians being sent into an industrialized slaughterhouse. pic.twitter.com/4xUCnyqqae

— gato fumante (@KweenInYellow) August 31, 2026

A Kan poll published on 30 August projected 21 seats for Netanyahu’s Likud, down three since the beginning of the month. Netanyahu has since pressed the parties to his right to run together to prevent their votes from being wasted. Ben-Gvir has refused, accusing Netanyahu of planning to double-cross the smaller parties.

Ben-Gvir’s authority over Israel’s police and prison system gives his campaign message a material edge. On 30 August, he published footage from the women’s section of Damon Prison. Speaking through an interpreter, detainees told him they had gone three days without washing and were being denied medical care and clean clothing.

“The good conditions in the prisons are over,” Ben-Gvir replied. “I am directly responsible for everything. I am pleased with these conditions.”

VIDEO: An English-language report incorporating footage of Ben-Gvir’s visit to the women’s wing of Damon Prison. (Source: Hindustan Times)

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Since then, Ben-Gvir has not withdrawn his remarks. In the Hebrew post accompanying the footage, he dismissed the prisoners’ complaints and said Israeli hostages in Gaza had received “no conditions at all.” He promised to maintain what he called “the minimum of the minimum.”

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club described the filming and publication of the women as a direct attack on their dignity. Two weeks earlier, the organisation had documented inadequate hygiene, clothing shortages and denial of medical care among women held at Damon Prison. In a March report to the UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese wrote that torture had become state doctrine in Israel and described its prison system as “a laboratory” sustained by decades of impunity. Israel rejects her mandate and findings.

On 16 August, comments surfaced from a podcast recorded with former hostage Rom Braslavski. Ben-Gvir said Israel should carry out targeted killings of “30 to 40” people in Gaza each night. There were people there, he added, who “do not deserve to live.” Germany, France and the United Nations condemned the remarks.

Two days later he toured a gallows under construction. He described planned observation booths for victims’ families and cited the United States as a precedent for capital punishment. “We are making history,” he said.

Ben-Gvir had already tested the boundary between government authority and election campaigning. In June, he circulated a 38-second video filmed at an Ashdod Port detention facility. It showed him waving an Israeli flag among bound activists intercepted aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla. Central Elections Committee chairman and Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg ruled that the video was unlawful election propaganda produced with public resources.

Sohlberg ordered its removal and imposed NIS 23,000 in costs. Ben-Gvir was required to pay NIS 8,000, while his ministry and the Israel Prison Service were ordered to pay the remaining NIS 15,000 jointly. The decision followed a petition by the Movement for Quality Government. Ben-Gvir removed the video within hours and made no public statement. In August, his party was also ordered to obscure the faces of police officers appearing in another campaign video.

The scrutiny has followed him abroad, although its consequences remain limited. France barred Ben-Gvir from entering the country in May over the flotilla footage. Ireland imposed a travel ban the following month, and Italy opened an investigation. Ben-Gvir later cancelled a private trip to the United States after the US embassy required him to appear in person for fingerprinting. He also withdrew from a UN police chiefs’ summit in New York in July as rights groups sought criminal proceedings against him.

In addition, three Democratic senators asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to declare Ben-Gvir ineligible for a US visa. However, the administration did not act against him; instead, in August, it sanctioned the president of the International Criminal Court and a prosecutor examining alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The Kan News poll projected seven seats for Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, down from nine in the previous survey. Retired brigadier general Ofer Winter is competing for the same voters through his new party, Amcha Yisrael. At its launch, Winter ruled out a Palestinian state and called emigration the only solution for Gaza.

Bezalel Smotrich is competing for the same electorate. His “Yes. Let’s Judaize!” plan proposes moving another million Jewish residents into the Negev and Galilee and establishing about 40 new communities. His Religious Zionism party remains close to the 3.25 percent electoral threshold.

Parties that fall below the threshold are excluded from the Knesset, leaving every faction on the right fighting for visibility and every available vote. Ben-Gvir has chosen to wage that fight by turning the deliberate humiliation and deprivation of Palestinian prisoners into campaign material, presenting their suffering not as an incidental consequence of his policies, but as evidence to voters that those policies are working.

READ MORE ISRAEL NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Israel Files

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

How a sixteen-year-old Israeli doctrine of network disruption ended up removing an Italian server collective from the internet.

For twenty-five years, a few dozen volunteers in Italy have run free email accounts, virtual private networks and Noblogs, a platform for activists who would rather not entrust their politics to Google or Meta. On 26 August 2026, the United States Treasury designated their collective, Autistici/Inventati, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, placing a volunteer-run mail service in the legal company of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

IMAGE: Autistici/Inventati kept thousands of activists online. Washington treated that infrastructure as terrorism. (Source: AI-generated illustration)

Nobody was charged, and no court was asked to examine the evidence, yet under Executive Order 13224, Washington was able to freeze the collective’s assets after deciding that it had provided “material or technological support” to an act of terrorism. By the State Department’s own count, Autistici/Inventati, also known as A/I, supported 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites and 10,000 blogs. Within forty-eight hours, autistici.org went dark, PayPal cut it off, and its Italian bank moved to close the account, placing that entire network at risk. Everyone else has until 25 September to sever ties or risk the reach of American sanctions, even though the government, as Reason noted, “hasn’t accused Autistici/Inventati of committing any crimes.”

Treasury based the designation on services A/I allegedly provided to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish armed group that has fought the Turkish state since 1984 and is proscribed by the United States, Britain and the European Union. It is a useful name for Washington because no ally will defend it, yet it explains neither why A/I was sanctioned alongside two Palestinian organisations nor why the State Department’s case reaches far beyond the PKK into the politics of antifa, Israel and Palestine. The legal basis is in the filing, but the political logic is somewhere else.

That logic can be traced to a framework drawn up in Tel Aviv in 2010 to defend Israel against international criticism, then carried into American counterterrorism policy through doctrine, vocabulary and personnel. No cable places Israel inside the A/I decision because, by the time Washington chose its target, no instruction was required. The blueprint had already crossed the Atlantic.

The blueprint

In early 2010, the Reut Institute, founded by former Israeli government adviser Gidi Grinstein, published The Delegitimization Challenge, Creating a Political Firewall a report placing Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in what it called a “Resistance Network,” while casting Western activists “catalysed by the radical left” as a parallel “Delegitimization Network.” Islamists and left-wing critics of Israel now belonged to the same threat picture, sixteen years before that idea entered American counterterrorism policy.

After The Electronic Intifada reported on the document in February 2010, Reut revised the version on its website and removed the words “sabotage” and “attack”. The original survives in the Internet Archive and in the PDF preserved by the publication. Reut softened the language without abandoning the strategy, which still treated political criticism as a networked threat and sought the people and institutions that allowed it to spread.

In a June 2010 inquiry into the Gaza flotilla, Reut explained what it meant by a “catalyst.” It was not necessarily someone who committed violence, but an organisation that helped a political network communicate and grow. Catalysts collected and distributed information, connected existing groups, recruited new ones and protected the wider network. Reut described them as “collecting information, turning it into relevant knowledge, and disseminating it” while “mapping existing nodes,” “strengthening and connecting them” and “protecting, branding and publicising the network.”

That definition points directly towards a provider such as A/I. Its email accounts, blogs and privacy tools allow political groups to publish, organise, connect and protect their communications, which are the same functions Reut assigned to a catalyst. A/I therefore does not sit at the edge of the doctrine because somebody may have misused its services. Its role as communications infrastructure places it at the centre of what the doctrine was designed to disrupt. Reut had already treated “the use of human rights discourse” against alleged Israeli war crimes and Holocaust denial as parts of the same delegitimization campaign. The firewall was aimed not only at political arguments, but at the systems that allowed them to travel.

DOCUMENT: The Reut Institute’s 2010 executive summary before it was revised. Clause 16 instructs Israel to “sabotage network catalysts” in “global hubs of delegitimization,” including London, Toronto, Madrid and the Bay Area. Reut later removed the words “sabotage” and “attack” from the version on its website. (Source: Reut Institute, The Delegitimization Challenge, Creating a Political Firewall, 31 March 2010)reut-institute Original Document

The migration

In 2021, Reut published The Red-Green Alliance is Coming to America, a report on what it called the “Islamo-Leftist Coalition” and its impact on US foreign policy, American Jews and Israel’s national security. A revised framework the following year urged pro-Israel organisations to mobilise against an alliance of radical progressives and Islamists. This time, Reut was no longer describing a threat to Israel from abroad, but proposing a political response inside the United States.

IMAGE:  Reut Institute image for “The Red-Green Alliance Is Coming to America”, the 2021 report that recast pro-Palestinian activism as an “Islamo-Leftist” threat to the United States. (Source: Reut Group)

By May 2026, the “Red-Green alliance” had moved from Reut’s reports into official US counterterrorism policy. The White House National Counterterrorism Strategy listed “New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists” among five defining features of the threat environment. The Charity & Security Network, which monitors the impact of counterterrorism law on non-profits, traced the phrase to Israeli think tanks, where it described a partnership seeking “the destruction of the Jewish state.” A framework developed to protect Israel from political criticism was now shaping what Washington recognised as a terrorist threat.

Eight months earlier, NSPM-7 had already given Washington the powers to investigate and disrupt political networks. It identified “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” along with views on migration, race and gender, as signs of political extremism, but said nothing about Israel, Palestine or Islamism. The addition of the Red-Green alliance widened both the threat Washington claimed to face and the range of people and organisations it could investigate, sanction and cut off from financial and digital services. It also gave the officials and analysts promoting the doctrine a new field of targets to map

Who Carried the Doctrine

In September 2025, Kyle Shideler, the Center for Security Policy’s director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism, urged the government to “recognize a category of far-left violent extremism” broad enough to hold “all of your anarchists, autonomous Marxists, your Marxist Leninists, your Maoists.” It should then “conduct a number of designations against Antifa-linked groups primarily in Europe”, trace their connections back across the Atlantic and move on American organisations—a sequence he considered “faster and more effective” than starting at home. Europe was the way in.

A month later, Shideler told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Abolition Media was “just one of hundreds of such websites hosted on Noblogs, a blogging suite provided by the Italy-based Autistici/Inventati (A/I) Collective.” So far as the public record shows, this was A/I’s entry into the American security conversation. The following month, the State Department designated four European groups in Germany, Italy and Greece. Nine months later, State and Treasury sanctioned the very infrastructure Shideler had named.

IMAGE: Kyle Shideler testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2025, when he identified Autistici/Inventati as the host of Abolition Media.(Source: CombatAntisemitism.org)

Shideler described the “Red-Green alliance” as “the far Left and Islamists, who power the anti-Israel movement.” On 5 August 2026, three weeks before A/I was sanctioned, he appeared before another Senate hearing, this time on the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network, beside counsel from the National Jewish Advocacy Center. The framework collapsed antifa, the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine solidarity into a single threat, with opposition to Israel serving as the connective tissue. It also turned political solidarity with Palestine into evidence for a terrorism case and the infrastructure supporting it into a target.

The bureau that presented the case against A/I was led by an official whose career had centred on Israel and the Middle East. Ambassador Gregory LoGerfo took charge of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau on 20 May 2026 after serving as Principal Deputy Coordinator in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. His earlier positions included the department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs and the National Security Council directorship for Israel, Palestinian and Jordanian Affairs. The Senate confirmed him 46–43. Three months later, the bureau he led presented an Italian privacy collective as part of a transnational far-left terrorist network. Shideler had supplied the route, the name and the doctrine.

Shideler supplied the sequence, identified A/I and furnished the framework that placed it within a wider threat. The connection between far-left terrorism and opposition to Israel would not remain implicit for long, as an Israeli minister was about to make it explicit.

The template, stated aloud

Representatives of 66 countries gathered in Washington on 16 July 2026 for a ministerial meeting on what the State Department called the “resurgence of political terrorism.” Marco Rubio called the radical left an “enemy of civilization.” Stephen Miller promised to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” its networks. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pledged to follow their money into the nonprofits and charities accused of sustaining them. Several European diplomats remained unconvinced. “We don’t have antifa,” one told reporters. Yet, it was Israel, the only Middle Eastern country in the room, who told Washington where to look.

IMAGE: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio opens the July 2026 ministerial on the “resurgence of political terrorism” in Washington. (Source: by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via The Journal Record)

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described “an operational alliance” between terrorist groups and “radical leftist elements in Western democracies,” with Israel “on the front line of this fight.” The alliance was not confined to those who planned attacks or committed violence. “Networks of activists supply the logistical envelope,” Sa’ar said. “Hamas provides the strategy. The activists provide legitimacy.” Governments should “expose these networks,” “follow the money” and hold those providing operational support accountable. Under his formulation, legitimacy itself became a form of assistance, and the infrastructure carrying it became part of the network.

Six weeks later, Treasury’s language echoed Sa’ar’s and A/I was sanctioned for having “provided financial, material, or technological support for … an act of terrorism.” The collective was not accused of planning the act, committing it or even endorsing it. Its offence was to provide digital services used by others. That was enough. Sa’ar’s “logistical envelope” had become Treasury’s “technological support,” collapsing the distance between providing infrastructure and participating in terrorism in August.

Israeli military documents seized in Gaza were said to show that Hamas controlled aid-flotilla vessels through a Spanish company and identified London activist Zaher Birawi as the head of its European wing. Treasury had sanctioned Birawi six months before the ministerial. The documents drew a line from Hamas to a European activist, from the activist to an organisation, and from the organisation to the infrastructure that sustained it. Applied to A/I, the same method required no allegation that the collective had committed terrorism. Hosting those placed inside the network was enough.

What the Package Contained

Palestine Action, Masar Badil, two of its officials and A/I appeared together in the sanctions package issued on 26 August. Palestine Action was sanctioned over attacks on Elbit Systems sites, placing it inside the conflict over Israel’s arms industry. Masar Badil was accused of acting for Samidoun, which Treasury had designated as a fundraising front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The government’s public case linked neither organisation to antifa, yet both were announced as “violent far-left terrorist groups”. Israel’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the sanctions that same day. Washington had presented the package as an action against “violent far-left terrorism,” but four of its five targets were drawn from Israel’s political struggle over Palestine.

IMAGE: Palestine Action supporters protest in London before Washington included the group in an August 2026 sanctions package targeting “violent far-left terrorism.” (Source: Reuters)

The fifth was an Italian provider of email, blogs and privacy tools. The State Department’s fact sheet said a “far-left extremist media group” used A/I’s services to publish “official communiqués and calls to action” from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the PFLP and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Jerusalem Post identified the outlet as Abolition Media, which it said published PFLP communiqués “almost daily.” Statements written by armed groups were republished by one outlet through services maintained by another, yet Washington followed the chain back to the provider and treated the distance between them as evidence of a network.

The violence cited against A/I came from Casey Goonan, a California activist sentenced to more than nineteen years in federal prison for arsons and firebombings at UC Berkeley and the attempted firebombing of the Oakland federal building. A communiqué claiming responsibility for one of the attacks appeared on Abolition Media and declared “solidarity with the resistance axis for Palestinian life.” The State Department placed Goonan’s prosecution in the same passage as the armed-group communiqués, although it did not accuse A/I of knowing him, approving his attacks or selecting the statement for publication. What is well established is that Goonan committed the violence, Abolition Media published the claim, and A/I maintained the servers. Nevertheless, Washington has no issue assembling those separate acts into one chain and imposing the consequences on the infrastructure beneath them.

Punishment Without Prosecution

German media regulators ordered internet providers to block access to samidoun.net in January 2026. By then, the Palestinian prisoner-solidarity network had been banned in Germany, listed by Canada as a terrorist entity and sanctioned by Washington as a fundraising front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The block made a criminal prosecution unnecessary by placing the burden on the companies that carried the website. Reut had described the same route sixteen years earlier when it instructed that network catalysts be “identified, studied, and to the extent possible, undermined by legal, media, political, and diplomatic means.”

After Washington designated Zaher Birawi that same month, UK Lawyers for Israel wrote to LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, invoked American sanctions law and secured the removal of his accounts from all three platforms. Birawi has never been charged and says he was given no opportunity to answer the allegations. He sought removal from the sanctions list after the designation had already travelled through a pro-Israel campaign group to three American companies and excluded him from the platforms where his public life took place.

The United States sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, after she published a report on the “genocide economy,” identifying corporations she said were profiting from Israel’s occupation and war in Gaza. The restrictions left her unable to use a credit card, obtain health insurance or open a bank account. Banca Etica in Italy refused her application because it feared secondary sanctions. Washington had acted, and an Italian bank imposed the consequence without waiting for an Italian order.

IMAGE: UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, whose US sanctions left her unable to access basic banking and financial services. (Source: Reuters)

Within forty-eight hours of A/I’s designation, autistici.org went dark, PayPal cut off the collective and its Italian bank moved to close the account. A/I could no longer be found at its principal address, receive payments or rely on its bank, although none of those institutions had tested Washington’s evidence. Faced with secondary sanctions, each provider acted on the risk before any court examined the evidence.

Palestine Action challenged its British proscription through judicial review, winning in the High Court in February 2026 before the Court of Appeal reversed the decision in June. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a further appeal. A/I received no comparable hearing before its services disappeared, and by the time A/I could challenge the designation in court, the penalty had already been imposed.

Rome said the American designation was unilateral and had no automatic legal effect in Italy. Brando Benifei, an Italian Democratic Party MEP and member of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States, warned that the action “hits a service intermediary indiscriminately, associating it without evidence with possible unlawful uses by third parties.” A/I rejected the allegations and began exploring legal action, but its bank had already moved to close the account. Italy did not recognise the designation as law; its institutions nonetheless enforced it as risk.

What absence means

Israel did not need to direct A/I’s designation because it had already done its work upstream, shaping the doctrine through years of engagement with Washington and teaching the US administration where to look and whom to treat as a threat.

Washington’s case against A/I moves from rail sabotage in four European countries and an attack on the Transalpine Pipeline to the fatal disruption of Berlin’s power grid, the doxing of immigration officers in Portland and arson attributed to Jane’s Revenge. A/I is accused of none of those acts. Its alleged crime was keeping the servers running.

The distinction between perpetrator and provider had collapsed. Reut’s call to identify and undermine “network catalysts” now allowed American officials to treat the infrastructure of political movements as part of the threat. NSPM-7 extended that logic beyond those accused of violence to the people and organisations that helped dissident movements speak, organise and survive.

In June, federal prosecutors in Michigan indicted eight current and former University of Michigan students following a campaign for divestment from Israel. Civil-liberties groups say prosecutors turned protected speech and association into the connective tissue of a conspiracy case. The FBI’s 2027 budget request places the implementation of NSPM-7 inside a Joint Mission Center staffed by ten federal agencies.

IMAGE: Mariam Ode speaks in support of eight pro-Palestinian activists indicted following the University of Michigan divestment campaign. (Source: Michigan Advance)

A doctrine developed to defend Israel from political isolation had become part of American counterterrorism. It followed opposition from alleged acts of violence to the movements around them, then from those movements to the platforms and volunteers that kept them connected. The punishment crossed borders just as easily. A/I’s own account records how the designation was followed by the loss of PayPal, the disappearance of its domain and its Italian bank’s move to close its account.

Israel’s campaign against its critics had supplied the doctrine, Washington had supplied the power and private institutions had supplied the enforcement. Together they created a system capable of silencing dissent without prosecuting a crime, proving an allegation or granting the accused a hearing. By the time due process could begin, the speaker had disappeared, the money had stopped, and the server had gone dark.

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This week on the SUNDAY WIRE, host Patrick Henningsen returns for a shorter than usual episode – including the collapse of the US bond market and Bessent and Trump syndicate’s plans to profit off crashing the dollar. This coincides with Trump’s introduction of stolen Venezuelan oil on the world market. Meanwhile, Trump also claims ownership of the Strait of Hormuz as a “new US territory”. All this and more. All this and more…

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This episode examines how years of occupation, blockades, and ongoing conflicts have fostered an environment of confinement, dependency, and dehumanization long before the conflict that erupted on October 7, 2023. It delves into how displacement orders, siege strategies, the destruction of infrastructure, and AI-driven targeting have influenced the extent and nature of the violence and devastation. Utilizing testimonies, military assessments, and legal discussions, the episode tracks how Palestinian victims, Israel, and other nations interpret the intent and character of the violence, and why the International Court of Justice has cautioned about a “plausible risk” of genocide without yet making a determination on its occurrence. It questions what this ongoing legal struggle signifies for accountability, future deterrence, and the residents of Gaza themselves. Watch:

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Run time: 25 mins
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Broadcast on Al Jazeera English

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Syriana Analysis host Kevork Almassian talks with 21st Century Wire editor Patrick Henningsen about these and other important geopolitical revelations. Watch: 

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

When Javier Milei announced on December 20, 2024, that new modular reactors would anchor Argentina’s nuclear revival, he was laying the energy foundation for a much larger plan built around artificial intelligence, uranium exports and private investment. Yet construction on the country’s existing reactor had already been halted for three months. The Central Argentina de Elementos Modulares, or CAREM, was roughly 85 per cent complete, and hundreds of contractors had been dismissed from a project that had taken Argentina more than a decade to design and build. Rather than complete it, Milei’s government proposed privately financed 300-megawatt modular reactors at Atucha in Buenos Aires Province as the first stage of a wider plan linking nuclear power to artificial-intelligence data centres proposed separately for Patagonia, while the smaller public reactor Argentina had nearly finished was being dismantled.

This investigation traces who shaped that shift, how Argentina’s public nuclear expertise and strategic resources were redirected towards privately controlled projects, and who stood to benefit.

IMAGE: The unfinished CAREM reactor at the Atucha nuclear complex in Buenos Aires Province. Construction was halted in September 2024 after the project was reported to be roughly 85 per cent complete. (Source: Buenos Aires Herald)

As the Buenos Aires Herald reported, Milei’s proposal went beyond the new reactors. The government also wanted to expand uranium production and build a “Nuclear City” in Patagonia, where nuclear power would supply data centres used for artificial intelligence. Milei did not mention CAREM, even though the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Nuclear Energy Agency, or OECD-NEA, ranked it among only seven small modular reactor designs worldwide to have entered construction. It was also one of only four licensed for construction before 2025, and up to 70 per cent of its components were to be made in Argentina.

The government’s decision to halt CAREM in September 2024 had immediate consequences. Around 470 contractor jobs disappeared, according to the Buenos Aires Herald. Another round in June 2026 removed 61 workers from the National Atomic Energy Commission, or CNEA, including specialised technicians associated with CAREM, the outlet later reported. The cuts extended across CNEA. APF Digital reported that 571 scientists and technicians had left as the institution’s budget fell 42% in real terms between 2023 and 2025.

The contradiction did not end with CAREM. As the public reactor lost workers and funding, Milei’s government began building a different nuclear programme financed by private capital. As Rest of World reported, the new programme would support uranium exports and provide power for artificial-intelligence projects, including the proposed $25 billion Stargate Argentina data centre. It would later converge with Pax Silica, a US-led alliance organised around the energy, minerals and infrastructure needed for AI.

Demian Reidel, one of President Milei’s closest advisers on nuclear energy and artificial intelligence, helped shape the policies behind both tracks. Following Reidel’s path through government shows how the same circle of officials and business figures came to influence Argentina’s reactors, AI infrastructure and strategic minerals, and how private interests around that circle positioned themselves to profit as public assets and expertise moved into private hands.

IMAGE: From left, Demian Reidel, then chairman of President Milei’s Council of Advisors, President Javier Milei, and Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, present the Argentine Nuclear Plan at the Casa Rosada on December 20, 2024. Photo: Argentine Presidency. (Source: Buenos Aires Herald)

The plan before Stargate

Reidel was a former JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs executive who held several influential government roles. He chaired the Argentine Nuclear Council, became president of Nucleoeléctrica Argentina, the state company that operates Argentina’s three nuclear power plants, Atucha I, Atucha II and Embalse, and advised Milei on artificial intelligence and technology. He had also chaired the president’s Council of Advisors. These responsibilities overlapped as the government was designing its nuclear and AI policies. Reidel therefore had major influence over both the proposed energy supply and the industry expected to use it

IMAGE: Demian Reidel, then chairman of President Milei’s Council of Advisors and later president of Nucleoeléctrica Argentina, helped shape the government’s nuclear and artificial-intelligence policies. (Source: Infobae)

“This is my baby,” he told Rest of World in May 2025. “We have the planets aligned.” The Nuclear Plan described by the outlet had three phases. The first involved four 300-megawatt modular reactors based on the ACR-300 design developed by INVAP, the technology company owned by Río Negro Province, and financed with private capital. The second phase involved developing uranium production for export. The final phase was a Nuclear City in Patagonia, where nuclear power would supply artificial-intelligence data centres.

This programme connected reactors, uranium and computing before Stargate Argentina had a name. Milei’s government unveiled Stargate in October 2025, less than three weeks before the midterm elections. It presented OpenAI and a little-known Argentine company called Sur Energy as partners in a Patagonian data centre requiring as much as $25 billion in investment. Reuters reported that the data centre could consume 500 megawatts of electricity at full scale.

IMAGE: President Javier Milei with representatives of OpenAI and Sur Energy at the announcement of the proposed $25 billion Stargate Argentina data centre on October 10, 2025. (Source: Buenos Aires Herald)

The size of the announcement obscured how little had been settled because OpenAI had signed only a letter of intent, not a final investment agreement. It was expected mainly to buy computing capacity rather than provide the money needed to build the data centre, according to New Energy Events. Sur Energy would have to assemble the companies, infrastructure and financing required to deliver it. The $25 billion figure therefore described the possible scale of a project that still lacked identified investors, rather than money OpenAI had committed to Argentina. By presenting that figure as an investment before the financing existed, Milei’s government turned an unfinanced proposal into a major economic announcement days before the midterm elections.

Milei’s government had already created a programme to attract investments of this size. The Large Investment Incentive Regime, known by its Spanish acronym RIGI, offers qualifying investors reduced corporate income tax, exemptions from duties on imported equipment and greater freedom to retain export earnings abroad. It also promises that the main tax, customs and foreign-exchange terms will remain stable for 30 years. The existing RIGI sets a fixed corporate income-tax rate of 25 per cent for qualifying projects, while the proposed Super RIGI would reduce the rate to 15 per cent for eligible investments of at least $1 billion.

RIGI was already drawing foreign capital towards the strategic resources needed for Milei’s nuclear and artificial-intelligence plans. El Inversor Energético reported that US and Canadian capital was pursuing uranium projects through RIGI, while a bill later introduced in Congress sought to extend the same benefits to rare-earth development. While the projects themselves remained uncertain, the investment regime revealed itself as the financial mechanism beneath both the nuclear and mineral tracks.

Seven months after the Stargate announcement, the project still had no confirmed final site, disclosed financing structure or publicly identified company to build and operate the data centre. It had not even been presented to RIGI, the Buenos Aires Times reported. Sur Energy also had no visible record of delivering infrastructure on anything approaching this scale. The government had announced a $25 billion project before its basic details existed in public, but the investment programme capable of protecting it for three decades was already in place. The sequence suggested that securing favourable conditions for future investors had moved faster than establishing whether the project itself could be built.

VIDEO: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, announces the company’s letter of intent with Sur Energy to explore the development of Stargate Argentina. (Source: Sur Energy)

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The limits of Stargate’s promised economic benefits extended to employment, as Emiliano Kargieman, a Sur Energy co-founder and the founder and chief executive of satellite company Satellogic, acknowledged in an interview with La Nación. Data centres could employ thousands of people during construction but only “about a hundred people” once they began operating. They were “not a direct source of employment,” he said, arguing that their contribution would come instead through exports of computing services and the dollars those exports generated.

The same interview identified two possible sources of electricity. Sur Energy had signed non-exclusive memoranda of understanding with Central Puerto and Genneia, but neither agreement made the company Stargate’s final energy supplier. Genneia’s chief financial officer, Carlos Palazón, later told investors, as reported by BNamericas, “We are working to be the energy supplier of this project,” while adding that the company still had no exact timetable.

Argentina would provide the energy, land, water, infrastructure and regulatory privileges, while only a fraction of the construction workforce would remain once the servers began running. Stargate had not created the connection between nuclear power and artificial intelligence but had become the largest proposed project within the programme Reidel was already building around privately financed reactors, uranium exports and Patagonian computing infrastructure. What still appeared to be a domestic programme was about to become part of a wider struggle over the energy, minerals and infrastructure needed to control artificial intelligence.

Pax Silica and the network

Launched in December 2025, Pax Silica marked Washington’s attempt to organise the resources and infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence into a US-led strategic alliance. According to a State Department fact sheet, it covers critical minerals, energy, semiconductors, telecommunications, data centres and computing capacity. Argentina could supply much of that foundation through its uranium, lithium, copper, rare earths, nuclear expertise, energy and territory. Stargate was not formally identified as a Pax Silica project, but its dependence on the same combination of resources placed it squarely within the strategic landscape the alliance was created to shape.

IMAGE: Argentina’s ambassador to the United States, Alec Oxenford, with US Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg after signing Argentina into Pax Silica in Washington. (Source: Embassy of Argentina in the United States / X)

Argentina had begun aligning its mineral policy with Washington before formally joining Pax Silica, signing a Framework Instrument with the United States on February 4, 2026, covering the mining and processing of critical minerals. The agreement sought to strengthen supply chains, attract long-term investment and expand secure mineral supplies, according to Panorama Minero. The following month, the State Department created a $250 million fund for projects across Pax Silica’s technology and resource chains.

IMAGE: Argentina’s Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau sign the February 2026 critical-minerals framework in Washington. (Source: Pablo Quirno / X via Latin America Reports)

Washington’s effort to secure critical minerals also extended to Project Vault, a public-private initiative creating a strategic reserve for US manufacturers. The US Export-Import Bank (EXIM) approved a loan of up to $10 billion, alongside nearly $2 billion in private capital, to acquire and store critical minerals in the United States. The programme did not allocate $12 billion to Argentina, but it created a large US-backed market for minerals supplied through the wider network Washington was assembling.

Argentina formally entered that network when Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno announced on June 24 that the country would join Pax Silica. Two days later, Argentina’s embassy in Washington confirmed that Ambassador Alec Oxenford had signed the declaration. Argentina joined with extensive uranium, lithium, copper and rare-earth deposits, an advanced nuclear sector and Patagonian territory already being promoted for large-scale AI infrastructure.

Argentina entered Pax Silica without publicly disclosing what it had agreed to or how the arrangement would affect provincial control over the resources the alliance sought to secure. A formal request filed in the Chamber of Deputies said the full text had neither been published nor submitted for congressional approval. That secrecy carried particular weight because Article 124 of Argentina’s Constitution grants the provinces original ownership of the natural resources within their territories. The provinces supplying Argentina’s minerals and energy to the alliance therefore had no public account of what obligations had been assumed, whether their authority had been recognised or who would control the terms under which those resources were developed.

Argentina’s accession to Pax Silica did not place its mineral and technology sectors exclusively within Washington’s orbit. El Estratégico reported that the government had made no public commitment to exclude Chinese investment, leaving Milei free to align with the US-led alliance while continuing to seek capital from both sides of the strategic rivalry.

US interest in Argentina’s uranium emerged before Project Vault and the country’s accession to Pax Silica. In October 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Economy Minister Luis Caputo had discussed expanding US access to Argentine uranium while limiting China’s access to the country’s critical minerals. Project Vault later provided a US-backed mechanism to finance and stockpile strategic minerals, while Pax Silica brought Argentina into a broader US-led effort to secure critical-resource supply chains and reduce dependence on China.

Argentina’s largest industrial groups also recognised the wider importance of the alliance. In remarks covered by Radio Gráfica, Techint chief executive Paolo Rocca described Pax Silica as part of an economic “reset” for Argentina, placing the framework within the country’s broader industrial debate rather than only opposition or government rhetoric.

No public document identifies Stargate Argentina as a Pax Silica project, and there is no evidence of a secret contract linking them. Instead, the connection emerges from a series of overlapping policies. Reidel’s Nuclear Plan tied reactors and uranium exports to the development of data centres in Patagonia, while RIGI offered long-term protections to attract the investors required to build that infrastructure. Pax Silica then placed the same strategic assets, including energy, minerals and digital infrastructure, within Washington’s broader AI strategy.

Oxenford’s overlapping roles linked Milei’s government to Argentina’s technology and investment networks. He served with Reidel on the president’s Council of Advisors before he was appointed ambassador to the United States in November 2024, as documented by Bloomberg Línea. His position on Endeavor Argentina’s board, listed in his official Foreign Ministry biography, extended that connection into the private sector. His appointment therefore placed a member of Milei’s inner circle with established technology and investment ties in Washington as Argentina sought US support for its nuclear, data-centre and AI ambitions.

The nuclear transfer

In February 2025, Milei’s government transferred its 84.9 per cent stake in IMPSA to Industrial Acquisitions Fund, a US-led consortium whose principal partner was ARC Energy, an oil-and-gas equipment supplier. For a $27 million capital commitment and the restructuring of roughly $576 million in debt, the consortium gained control of a company with four decades of Argentine nuclear manufacturing experience.

IMAGE: IMPSA’s industrial plant in Mendoza. Milei’s government transferred its controlling stake in the nuclear manufacturer to a US-led consortium in February 2025. (Source: IMPSA)

Among the assets changing hands was IMPSA’s work on CAREM, Argentina’s first domestically designed small modular reactor. The company had manufactured auxiliary components and was building its 200-tonne pressure vessel, commissioned as the first reactor vessel of its kind to be produced in Argentina. CAREM gave IMPSA commercially valuable experience inside the country’s public nuclear programme, even as CNEA Resolution 236/2009 kept information about the reactor’s design, construction, operation, maintenance and commissioning confidential. The government had not merely sold a factory. It had transferred a private company carrying capabilities developed inside one of Argentina’s most strategic state projects.

IMPSA’s new owners were also connected to the political network returning to power in Washington. Forbes Argentina identified ARC founder Jason Arceneaux as a Trump donor. Agenda Malvinas reported that several company directors had also donated to Trump and that company figures met members of his circle at Mar-a-Lago.

A year after the sale, the commercial value of IMPSA’s CAREM experience began to surface. The company sought CNEA’s permission to identify private financing for the unfinished pressure vessel. On March 6, project manager María Magdalena Villaverde authorised preliminary approaches to potential funders, while reminding IMPSA that CAREM information remained confidential. The state reactor was stalled, its manufacturer was under foreign-led ownership, and capabilities developed through the public project now had an international market.

IMPSA president Jorge Salcedo soon made that ambition explicit. The pressure vessel would be completed with private capital and used to sell expertise developed through CAREM to reactor companies abroad. “From there, we will work with CNEA to sell this expertise to the rest of the world,” IMPSA reported him as saying.

The announcement forced a question the sale had left unanswered: where did IMPSA’s industrial experience end and CAREM’s protected knowledge begin? In a formal request for information, lawmakers asked whether IMPSA had access to confidential CAREM information, what compensation the state would receive for any such access, and whether the proposed exports would breach restrictions imposed in 2009. They also sought details of an agreement between Salcedo and CNEA president Martín Porro concerning the export of vessels originally developed for CAREM. No public response appears to have resolved whether knowledge financed and protected by the Argentine state could now underpin commercial work abroad.

The losses were already reaching beyond designs and machinery. Adriana Serquis, a physicist and former CNEA president, said that 40 per cent of the personnel assigned to CAREM had resigned or been displaced. Many, she said, were recruited by Meitner Energy, the private company preparing another modular reactor at Atucha. CAREM was not simply frozen. Its accumulated capacity was beginning to reappear outside the public project.

IMAGE: IMPSA workers beside a CAREM 25 reactor component. The company’s state-funded nuclear manufacturing experience passed into US-led ownership in 2025. (Source: IMPSA)

While the state reactor shed personnel, the government opened another part of the nuclear system to investors. In September 2025, with Reidel serving as president of Nucleoeléctrica, it announced plans to sell 44 per cent of the company operating Argentina’s three nuclear power plants through an international tender. Decree 695/2025 authorised the process, leaving 51 per cent with the state and reserving up to 5 per cent for employees. By May 2026, Espacio Tech reported that no specifications, bidding deadline or award had been published. There was no evidence that ARC Energy had submitted a bid.

But another private nuclear project was already taking shape at Atucha. Infobae reported that Meitner proposed investing $1.2 billion in the ACR-300, a 300-megawatt modular reactor based on Argentine technology. The company was owned 60 per cent by Ansari Group and 40 per cent by Black River Technology, the US subsidiary of Río Negro’s state-owned technology company INVAP. The private venture had absorbed specialists from the public reactor and connected foreign capital to an Argentine state technology company. It was also presented as eligible for the enhanced Super RIGI regime then under consideration in Congress.

CAREM remained unfinished while the capabilities assembled around it moved towards new employers, investors and foreign markets. Its manufacturer sought to commercialise expertise acquired through the public project. Its specialists moved into a privately controlled reactor venture. That venture, unlike CAREM, was being positioned for exceptional tax and regulatory protection.

Meitner executive Omar Adra described the resulting division of labour with unusual clarity. Argentina would enter the market, he told Desafío Energético, “not as an equal. As a supplier.”

The formulation echoed Kargieman’s vision for the data centre, in which Argentina would provide land, energy, technology and expertise, while control of the commercial system rested elsewhere. Reidel had helped shape that transition from inside government, and would soon emerge on the private side of it.

Reidel crosses the line

The trail began with Sur Energy’s announcement of a vast data centre in Patagonia, whose intended builder and source of financing remained undisclosed, and led into Argentina’s atomic laboratories and beneath the ground in Chubut and Mendoza, where uranium and rare earths were being prepared for the new energy and computing economy.

Generations of public investment had already given Argentina a domestic reactor design, research facilities, uranium deposits, specialist manufacturers and a workforce capable of operating one of the most advanced nuclear programmes in the Global South. Milei inherited an integrated system that could turn scientific knowledge and natural resources into national industrial power, then froze CAREM, cut its institutions, sold IMPSA, prepared Nucleoeléctrica for private investment and offered the pieces back to investors under RIGI.

Milei called it an opening, but access ran through a closed circle. Reidel moved from the presidential advisory council and the state nuclear operator into Siderian, a company selling nuclear decision systems. Oxenford moved from Endeavor into the embassy and signed Pax Silica. Kargieman, another Endeavor figure, fronted Stargate while the identity of the company expected to build it and the source of its financing remained hidden. RIGI gave foreign investors 30 years of tax, customs and regulatory stability through a process ordinary Argentines could neither inspect nor easily reverse.

Far beyond that circle, scientists and engineers watched CAREM stop while expertise developed through public investment moved into private ventures. Workers saw an industrial champion pass into US-led ownership. Communities were expected to provide the land, water and electricity for projects offering limited permanent employment, while the Treasury relinquished future tax and customs revenue and the state remained responsible for the infrastructure and institutional capacity those ventures required.

IMAGE: CNEA workers protest layoffs at Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission.(Source: Adriana Serquis / X

Argentina had the uranium, reactor technology, laboratories, manufacturers and trained personnel needed to build a nuclear industry under national control. Milei’s programme broke those capabilities apart and reassigned their value. Uranium became an export opportunity, public expertise a private asset and the national reactor a suspended project, while electricity and territory became inputs for a data centre whose builder and financing the government would not disclose.

Argentina retained the costs that could not be transferred, including pressure on its water and power systems, the maintenance of public infrastructure, the loss of scientists and technicians and the consequences borne by communities living above the resources. Protected revenue, commercial control and the authority to decide how those assets were used moved into private hands.

Milei sold this programme to Argentines as freedom from a predatory state. Instead, the state has been stripped of its capacity to act for the public and mobilised to protect private capital, open strategic assets and bind future governments to decisions negotiated beyond public scrutiny. Argentina’s uranium, energy and nuclear expertise are being drawn into foreign-controlled projects as the country loses the power to determine its own development, all under the promise that surrender will bring prosperity. Assets built over generations are being broken apart, their value redirected and their future placed beyond the reach of the people who paid for them. Milei calls it freedom. For Argentina, it is the heist of the century.

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