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Speculation Surges That Pakistan Talks Are A Delay Tactic Ahead Of Expanded US Action On Iran

2026-04-10T14:27:09.775-04:00

By Tyler Durden - April 10, 2026 at 11:57AM

President Trump has made clear that American forces will still be “hanging around” the Persian Gulf area with an eye on Iran, while demanding that the Strait of Hormuz be opened to global energy transit once again.

Trump has vowed to keep troops positioned for a fight “until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with.” As direct US-Iran talks are set for Islamabad Saturday morning, there’s been an avalanche of speculation that the ceasefire could be ‘cover’ for a greater Pentagon force build-up and bigger impending operation.

Some pundits say that Washington needed more time to get large contingencies of Marines and Airborne units in place, possibly for some kind of risky island campaign towards reopening the strait.

This could be the case, as it’s also very evident to all that the demands of each side remain far apart, which means the chances for a breakthrough deal which finally ends the war are distant.

With a two week timeline in place to reach a deal, is this interim period merely for rearming and regrouping of forces on each side?

Clearly, the US wasn’t prepared for the fierce, sustained Iranian counter-attack on American regional bases and Gulf allies.

Open-source data of military logistics flights between the US, Europe, and the Mideast region suggests there is indeed an ongoing build-up and posturing of forces happening on the eve of the Pakistan summit.

Still, it’s clear that Trump needs an offramp, or else face the kind of endless military quagmire which would likely inevitably lead to the GOP getting decimated in next fall’s midterm Congressional elections.

Case in point: More than 70 transport planes landed in the Middle East within 24 hours of the ceasefire taking effect. That scale suggests possible preparation for a ground offensive, solidifying suspicion that Trump is using the truce to regroup: https://t.co/MHlFQjz1Tk pic.twitter.com/S3DzRMgOo2
— Bashkarma🇺🇸🌏🇷🇺 (@Karmabash) April 9, 2026

A bigger longer war, or ground conflict, would also damage the chances of a future Vance presidency.

As for Vance, the Associated Press writes, “But the arrival of Vance for negotiations marks a rare moment of high-level U.S. government engagement with the Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the most direct contact had been when President Barack Obama in September 2013 called newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to discuss Iran’s nuclear program.”

Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April?
Yes 19% · No 82%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

A Pentagon build-up in the region might also be Trump’s way of signaling powerful leverage for more potential major attacks on Iran to come, in order to gain more from negotiations. As yet, Iran holds the key economic leverage given its de fact Hormuz control.

Reprinted with permission from ZeroHedge.

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Killing and Indifference

2026-04-10T11:27:17.623-04:00

By Andrew P. Napolitano - April 10, 2026 at 09:56AM

Is personal freedom a reality or a myth? Does the government execute the will of the governed or the will of those who finance its officials? Does the Bill of Rights restrain the government? Are the levers of government power pulled by those the governed have elected or those we don’t see? Do elections change anything?

Can the president kill people whom he suspects might commit a crime? Aren’t even those who would cause great harm entitled to due process? Isn’t everyone entitled to a fair trial in front of a neutral judge and jury before any punishment can be administered?

Aren’t all persons legally innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty? Isn’t this presumption of innocence the linchpin of American jurisprudence? At trial and before punishment, isn’t it the government’s obligation to prove every element of the crimes charged? Isn’t there no such thing in American jurisprudence as a presumption of guilt?

Aren’t punishments prescribed by law? Can the president make up a punishment and direct the military to administer it to folks he thinks are probably guilty of criminal behavior? Can federal officials perform unlawful acts with impunity just because they are ordered to do so by the president? Is “probably guilty” a sufficient legal standard for punishment?

In war, can the combatants morally target civilians and their structures? Is war waged against the people of a given country, or against its government and military assets? What happens when there is killing without consequence?

Which is worse, a president who kills whomever he wishes or a Congress that funds the killing and is indifferent to the moral, constitutional and legal consequences?

Can the president morally bomb civilians “into the Stone Age” in a country where the civilian population has little control over the government? Why kill or ruin large numbers of civilians whose liberation you have urged?

What is the purpose of a Constitution if it is not followed? Why take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and then not do so? Why limit war making to the Congress but then ratify the president’s war making as if the Constitution authorized it? If the U.S. bombs other countries to temper their offensive military appetite, who or what will temper America’s offensive military appetite?

Can Congress fund a war it has declined to declare? Why are undeclared wars now commonplace? What to do about a Congress that escapes its constitutional duties? Which is worse, a president who fights an undeclared war or a Congress that does nothing about it?

What is Congress afraid of? Where in the Constitution is the president empowered to spend billions killing foreign persons in an undeclared war? From what source does the president derive power to destroy a foreign land? Why was there no great American debate about war before the president began his killings?

Can the president order killings because he is in the mood for it or because it is fun? Doesn’t the Constitution establish a system of checks and balances so that one of the three branches of the federal government cannot amass power at the expense of either of the other two? Don’t the Constitution and history lay out the functions and powers of the branches of government, and aren’t they supposed to check each other so as to assure personal freedom?

What good are treaties if they’re not followed? Why are treaties the supreme law of the land along with the Constitution itself and all federal statutes? Why does the government violate treaties like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter that U.S. officials wrote and U.S. presidents signed or acknowledged and the U.S. Senate ratified?

Can the president choose which laws he personally will obey and which he will personally violate? Can the government legally break its own laws? Can the president spend money from the U.S. Treasury that has not been authorized by Congress? Can the president impose a sales tax on all goods entering the U.S. from foreign countries? Can the president pick and choose which statutes to enforce and which to ignore? Why is computer hacking a crime, unless it’s done by federal agents?

Can the president put his own name on American cash? Can he put an image of his face on all your cash? Does Congress still write the laws and appropriate funds, or does the president now do these things on his own?

Is the president required to tell the truth? Is the government required to tell the truth? Why is it that the government can lie to the people but it is a crime to lie to the government? Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? Does the government know more about us than we do about it?

What happens when the government is untruthful and the people believe it? Isn’t truth the essential bond between the government and the governed in a free society? Doesn’t the government derive its just powers from the consent of the governed? What happens when the government does things to which the governed have never consented?

Are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness truly inalienable individual rights that every person has because they are integral to our humanity, or are these words just Thomas Jefferson’s musings written to arouse a reluctant public to challenge a king? Was the bloody revolution that was brewing on the east coast of North America 250 years ago a just war?

If the colonies could justly secede from London, why can’t the states justly secede from Washington? Is the right to leave the government without surrendering your property not a natural right integral to our humanity? What happens if you tell the government to take a hike?

Can the president terrify the whole country by threatening to wipe out an entire civilization across the globe? Why do presidents kill innocents?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
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America Last: War Abroad, Tyranny at Home—and the Theft of a Nation

2026-04-09T11:27:35.442-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - April 9, 2026 at 09:19AM

“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of … daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”—President Donald J. Trump

Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.

Every war waged in the name of “security” is paid for by Americans who go without—without affordable healthcare, without stable housing, without a government that prioritizes their well-being.

As the U.S. pours trillions into endless wars and military expansion, Americans are left paying the price—not just in dollars, but in lost freedoms and eroded constitutional protections.

This is not national defense.

This is organized theft.

While Americans struggle with rising gas prices, soaring grocery bills, and mounting debt—fueled in part by reckless tariffs and preemptive wars—the federal government is spending money it doesn’t have on military expansion, foreign conflicts, and presidential excess.

This is not America First.

If anything, it is becoming painfully clear that Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to governing puts America last every time.

Trump has not made it a priority to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. He has not made it a priority to invest in innovation or ensure that the nation remains competitive in a rapidly advancing technological world. Nor has he shown much concern for caring for veterans, the elderly, or the young.

Instead, the government is cutting back on programs that make Americans healthier, smarter, and more secure—while the president builds monuments to himself and indulges in a taxpayer-funded lifestyle of staggering excess.

Despite once claiming he would be too busy to play golf, Trump is on track to leave taxpayers with a bill exceeding $300 million in travel and security expenses—much of it tied to frequent trips to his Florida properties. Each visit to Mar-a-Lago costs an estimated $3.4 million.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are shelling out $273,063 per hour to keep Air Force One in the air.

And while millions of Americans struggle to afford basic necessities, Trump is demanding $377 million—an 866 percent increase—to renovate the White House residence.

But these excesses, outrageous as they are, pale in comparison to the true cost of this administration’s priorities: war.

The Trump administration has requested $1.5 trillion for its FY 2027 military budget—separate from an additional $200 billion in emergency funding for the war in Iran.

The sitting president of the United States is spending money that is not his to spend in order to fight endless wars unauthorized by Congress that do nothing to protect the American people or our interests, while insisting that the federal government’s only priority should be the military industrial complex.

In addition to increasing the budget for the military, prisons, nuclear weapons, and a weaponized Justice Department, the Trump administration has also proposed budget cuts of $73 billion to non-military programs—slashing funding for medical research, public schools, and low-income heating assistance, as well as cuts to affordable housing, job training, small-business lending, anti-poverty programs, agriculture, NASA, research in social sciences and economics, humanitarian assistance and global health programs, among others.

As Dominik Lett writes for Cato, “Shifting dollars from domestic programs to the Pentagon is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic given our mounting fiscal crisis.”

This is how empires fall.

The Constitution does not permit a president to wage war on a whim.

The founders were clear: the power to declare war rests with Congress, not the executive. The president, as Commander in Chief, was meant to oversee the military—not unleash it unchecked.

And yet, once again, we find ourselves embroiled in an unauthorized war—funded by taxpayers, justified with shifting narratives, and carried out without meaningful oversight.

With Congress unwilling to act as a check on executive overreach, and the courts increasingly sidelined, the constitutional safeguards meant to prevent this very scenario have all but collapsed.

War is no longer a last resort.

It has become a business model.

The man who campaigned on a pledge of “no new wars” has instead propelled the nation into endless military conflicts that promise to become endless wars that enrich defense contractors, reward political allies, and deepen the financial burden on the American people.

Reports of insider profiteering tied to shifting policy decisions only reinforce what many Americans already suspect: that war, in the Trump era, is as much about profit as it is about power.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively on authoritarian regimes, sees the administration’s expanded war budget through a darker and more troubling lens—by which military spending functions as a way to bribe the military into supporting a Trump-led government takeover.

Translation: the Trump administration could be laying the groundwork for a false flag terrorist attack that would allow Trump to declare martial law, cancel or nullify the midterm elections and shift the nation further towards a dictatorship.

The danger is not theoretical.

History has shown, time and again, that leaders who accumulate unchecked power, surround themselves with loyalists, and normalize perpetual war often turn those powers inward.

Which brings us back to the war in Iran—a costly, dangerous, and deeply suspect conflict that raises more questions than answers and provides a conveniently timed distraction from Trump’s presence within the Epstein files.

Despite President Trump and Pete Hegseath’s incessant claims of lethality and success, victory is not a foregone conclusion.

And the price we are paying is high indeed, in treasure and life.

Credible concerns point to the fact that key details about the true cost of this war—which “we the people” are entitled to know—are being withheld from the public.

Even the administration’s account of a dramatic rescue mission of a downed weapons system officer—one involving massive resources and the destruction of U.S. aircraft—is coming under scrutiny, with some suggesting it may have been more in the way of a failed ground invasion to seize Iran’s enriched uranium.

Which begs the question: can we trust the U.S. government to tell us the truth?

Can we trust a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and shields those in power from accountability?

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government was never meant to be trusted. It was meant to be restrained by the chains of the Constitution.

It turns out that the greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.

The greatest threat to freedom is a government that no longer fears, values or serves its people.

Don’t fall for the lie.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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Statement of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on the Two-Week Ceasefire and Negotiation Conditions

2026-04-08T11:27:11.740-04:00

By Larry C. Johnson - April 8, 2026 at 09:11AM

If you think the war is over, think again. Iran has not agreed to a ceasefire. They have agreed to stop retaliating as long as Israel and the US stop their attacks. So that ball is in the West’s corner. Despite the White House claim that the Strait of Hormuz is now open for business, it is not. Iran will continue to allow ships on a case-by-case basis to enter and leave the Persian Gulf after paying a cover charge. Iran will split this money with Oman. If Iran charges a million dollars — payable in Chinese Yuan — they will earn an estimated $96 billion a year. That will rebuild a school or two.

Please carefully read the statement released by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. It is a detailed, official explanation of Iran’s position:

The enemy, in its unjust, illegal, and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat. Thanks to the sacrifice of the martyred leader of the Islamic Revolution, Grand Ayatollah Imam Khamenei, the leadership of the Supreme Leader and Commander-in-Chief, Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, the courage of fighters on the frontlines, and the historic and heroic presence of the Iranian people from the very beginning of the war, Iran has achieved a great victory and forced the United States to accept its 10-point plan.

Under this plan, the United States has in principle committed to guaranteeing non-aggression, recognizing Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz, accepting uranium enrichment, lifting all primary and secondary sanctions, ending all UN Security Council and IAEA resolutions, compensating Iran for damages, withdrawing U.S. combat forces from the region, and halting war across all fronts, including against the resistance in Lebanon.

We congratulate the Iranian people on this victory and emphasize that finalizing its details still requires perseverance, prudent leadership, and unity.

Over the past 40 days, Iran and resistance forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories have dealt blows to the enemy that will never be forgotten. Iran and the resistance axis, as representatives of honor and humanity against the most brutal enemies, have delivered a historic lesson—crushing the enemy’s forces, infrastructure, and political, economic, technological, and military assets to the point of collapse, leaving them with no option but submission.

At the start of the war, the enemy believed it could quickly dominate Iran militarily and force surrender through instability. They assumed Iran’s missile and drone capabilities would be neutralized and did not expect such a powerful regional response.

They believed this war would end Iran, allowing them to act freely, divide the country, seize its resources, and plunge it into long-term chaos.

Despite the loss of their leader, Iran’s fighters and their allies, relying on faith and inspired by Imam Hussein, resolved to deliver a decisive lesson—avenging past actions and ensuring the enemy abandons any thought of future aggression and is forced into humiliation before the Iranian nation.

With this strategy, and relying on unprecedented political and social unity, Iran and the resistance launched one of the heaviest hybrid wars in history against the United States and Israel, achieving all their planned objectives.

Iran and the resistance claim to have largely destroyed the U.S. military infrastructure in the region, inflicted heavy losses, and delivered severe blows to enemy forces, infrastructure, and assets both regionally and inside Israeli-controlled territory. The pressure became so intense that none of the enemy’s primary objectives were achieved, and within about ten days, it realized it could not win. It then began seeking contact with Iran through various channels to request a ceasefire.

Iranian officials state that for over a month, the enemy has been requesting a halt to hostilities, but these requests were rejected as the war was intended to continue until key goals were met, including weakening the enemy and removing long-term threats. Iran also rejected multiple ultimatums from the U.S., emphasizing it does not recognize such deadlines.

Authorities now claim that most war objectives have been achieved and that the enemy has been pushed into a historic defeat. Iran’s stated position is to continue the conflict as long as necessary to consolidate these gains and establish new regional security and political realities based on its power and influence.

In this context, and following approval by the Supreme Leader and the Supreme National Security Council, it was decided—given Iran’s position on the battlefield and the enemy’s inability to enforce its threats—to proceed with negotiations in Islamabad to finalize details within a maximum of 15 days.

Iran rejected all opposing proposals and instead presented its own 10-point plan via Pakistan. Key demands include: controlled passage through the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian coordination; an end to military actions against allied groups; withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region; establishment of a security protocol in the Strait of Hormuz affirming Iran’s role; full compensation for damages; removal of all sanctions and international resolutions; release of frozen Iranian assets; and formal approval of these terms in a binding UN Security Council resolution.

According to Iranian officials, Pakistan has conveyed that the U.S. has accepted these principles as a basis for negotiations despite its public posture. Based on this, Iran agreed to a two-week negotiation period in Islamabad.

It is emphasized that this does not mean the war has ended, and Iran will only accept a full end to the conflict once all terms of its proposal are finalized.

It was the US, not Iran, that has pleaded for the last four weeks to restart negotiations. Unlike the previous two times, Iran harbors no illusions about the capacity of the US to engage in treachery and trickery. Iran is not going to soften its demands.

The Zionists are going crazy over this and Netanyahu and his government are in a state of panic. If JD Vance succeeds in securing a deal with Iran, it will likely mean no more support for Israel’s war machine. If Israel launches any new attacks on Iran in the coming two weeks, Iran will immediately retaliate.

The wild card in this is Hezbollah. If Israel continues to attack Lebanon and the Hezbollah positions in the south of Lebanon, Hezbollah will continue to wreak havoc on the Zionist forces.

Reprinted with permission from Sonar21.

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Claiming Victory, Whilst admitting Defeat: There is No Easy Way to Open Hormuz

2026-04-07T12:27:14.976-04:00

By Alastair Crooke - April 7, 2026 at 10:19AM

Bloomberg: “It is arguably Iran that has secured the most significant strategic victory … There is every sign that Tehran’s ability to control the Strait is increasing”

The defeats which the West keeps on having “[are] above all … intellectual.” And “not being able to understand what they are seeing – means that it’s impossible to respond effectively to it.” So Aurelien has argued. But “the problem goes beyond the fighting on the battlefield, to seeing and understanding the nature of asymmetric wars and their economic and political dimensions.”

This is particularly the case for Iran, where… Washington appears to be incapable of understanding that the ‘other side’ does have a strategy with economic and political components – and is implementing it.

[In line with the western obsession with trivia], all the media concentration recently has been on the movement of US troops to the region and their possible uses, as though that, in itself, was going to decide something. Yet in fact, the real issue is the development and deployment by the Iranians of a new concept of warfare, based on missiles, drones and defensive preparations, and the inability of the West, with its platform-centric mentality, to understand and process these developments [i.e., fully assimilate the strategy behind asymmetrical warfare].

Iran’s security concept and model was planned more than 20 years ago. The trigger for the move to an asymmetric paradigm came from the US’ utter destruction of Iraq’s centralised military command in 2003, as a result of a 3-week massive air assault on Baghdad.

The issue for Iran that arose in its wake was how the country might build a deterrent military structure when it did not have (and could not have) anything resembling peer air capability. And when too, the US could look down upon the extent of Iran’s military infrastructure from its high-resolution satellite cameras.

Well, the first answer simply was to have as little of its military structure out in the open to be observed from above. Its components had to be buried – and buried deeply (beyond the reach of most bombs). The second answer was that deeply buried missiles could indeed, in effect, become Iran’s “air force” – i.e. a substitute for a conventional air force. Iran thus has been constructing and stockpiling missiles for more than twenty years. The third response was to divide Iran’s military infrastructure into autonomous provincial commands – to decentralise command centres, with each having separate stockpiled munitions, separate missile silos, and where appropriate, their own naval forces and militia.

In short, Iran’s military machine – in the event of a decapitation strike – was designed to operate as an automated, decentralised retaliation machine that cannot be easily stopped or controlled.

When unable to understand what is before our very eyes, the easiest thing is to reach for that which one knows – a build-up of troops – and to continue doing what hasn’t worked in the past.

In an earlier incarnation, a younger Trump – desperate to be admired as a star in the world of Manhattan real estate – took New York Attorney Roy Cohen to be his personal mentor. “The latter notably was also the lawyer for the city’s five big crime families – who had, with connections such as these, earned for himself the reputation as someone not to be messed with,” Israeli military commentator, Alon Ben David relates:

In most cases, all Trump needed to do was to introduce Cohen to the other side of the deal, so that the latter would agree to his terms. Sometimes Trump was also forced … to drag the other side to court, where Cohen would bare his teeth to the judges and win. But that was always Trump’s bottom line: win. Not to make the pie bigger, not a win-win for both sides, but a victory for him alone – and preferably with the other side’s surrender.

Time moves on, and today, as Ben David writes, the US military juggernaut serves as Trump’s “Roy Cohen.” He presents the American military might for display to the Iranians in the expectation that they readily will capitulate; else he, Trump, will let go of the leash. Trump complained to Witkoff after the armada of US naval vessels had been assembled off the Persian coast that he was “puzzled and confused” as to why the Iranians had not already capitulated on sighting the collective naval power assembled.

“[The cause for Trump’s puzzlement is that] this time he faces an opponent different from any he has ever known. These are not Manhattan real estate moguls or Atlantic City mobsters, they are Persians, members of a 3,000-year-old culture, and they have different concepts of time and what victory is.”

Trump doesn’t now know what to do: he is confused and at a loss as to how to extricate himself from this predicament. He has threatened Iran, but they don’t capitulate. And as might be expected, Netanyahu, fearing that Washington might enter into negotiations with Iran before Iran’s military capabilities have been completely dismantled, “is pressuring the Trump administration to carry out a short, high-intensity operation that could include ground forces,” Israeli commentator Ben Caspit writes in Ma’ariv.

Whilst Trump is sending mixed messages about the prospects for talks with the Islamic Republic, Israeli officials believe he is considering three options: First to escalate the war by attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure on Kharg Island and at its South Pars gas field, with a second option being a ground operation to eliminate Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile.

A third option being considered would be to negotiate an agreement with Iran – but such a prospect would be seen by Israeli leadership circles as a “clear Iranian victory, opening the path for the Iranian Republic to survive,” Caspit writes. “Israel is focused on weakening the regime to the point where it cannot recover – thus it hopes, maybe encouraging future mass protests. This argument is also being used to convince Washington to continue the war,” Caspit emphasises.

A fourth option could be that Trump just declares victory and walks away.

What, realistically, might Trump hope to accomplish if he expands the war?

First, both Israeli and US military officials now consider that toppling the Iranian State is nigh impossible to achieve through airstrikes alone. It has never worked in the past.

Secondly, statements of faith by the US Administration in say the ultimate military seizure of the Strait of Hormuz should be seen more as battle-cries and descriptions of fantasies which reveal a deeper problem–that of strategic lacunae —

“They are not deduced from the facts of the situation, nor do there have to be actual processes capable of making them happen. The truth is what we want it to be; the truth is what makes us comfortable, we prefer the myth to the reality.”

The fact is that there is no easy way to reopen the Strait. Any negotiated reopening would, at a minimum, require substantive concessions to Iran, including explicit recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the waterway.

An attempt to agree a ceasefire to open Hormuz would require it to be applicable across all fronts: it would require Israel to cease operations in Lebanon, for AnsarAllah to similarly halt attacks on Israel, for Iraq to halt its attacks – and for Israel to halt its attacks in Occupied Palestine.

Thirdly, Trump claims that that “regime change” has already occurred because he had not heard the names of the new Iranian leaders before–“These are different people than anyone has ever heard of before, and frankly they’ve been more reasonable. So, we’ve had total regime change beyond what anyone thought possible.” Trump doesn’t know who the “new” third layer of Iran’s leadership are, but nonetheless presumes that they will be more flexible in negotiating with the US. (What is the basis for this “faith statement”? No facts needed?)

Fourth, any attempt to open Hormuz by direct military assault would be fraught with the risk of sustaining substantial US casualties: Hormuz is home ground to the Iranians and constitutes a prospective battle for which they have been preparing over many years. The geography of Hormuz alone–narrow waterways, proximity to Iran’s coastline, and dense Iranian defence systems – pose obvious and severe risks. From where would the troops stage? How would they be supplied? How would they be exfiltrated?

Even were US forces to seize Kharg, or one, or all of the three islands adjacent to the UAE coastline, Iran could still attack unauthorised tankers transiting the waterway using surface or submersible drones or missiles launched from mainland Iran.

And even if successful, US military positions on the islands would not solve the core problem – Iran would still have the ability to impose costs (missile strikes and casualties) from afar, and would use this leverage to impose further escalatory steps.

Fifth, as with the suggestion of controlling Iran’s enriched uranium, there is no way to ensure that the reported 430 kg of 60 percent enriched uranium that Iran has is out of Iranian hands other than seizing it; an agreement on Iran relinquishing it is unlikely, as is seizing it in an impossibly complex military operation –

According to the Washington Post , when Trump requested a plan to seize the enriched uranium from Iran, the US military briefed him on a complex operation involving airlifting excavation equipment, building a runway inside Iran for cargo planes to extract the material, all with the deployment of hundreds of troops.

A US Special Forces military operation to seize this uranium would require meticulous detailing of the site (or sites) where it is held, as well as requiring well-founded staging and ex-filtration plans. Does the US know if this uranium is still in one consignment, or has it been separated?

There is no indication that the US has done the “thinking through” for such an operation – suggesting that this aspect might be lined up as a deception exercise: Mount a small operation close to Isfahan, pretend to have seized the uranium, and skedaddle away quickly before Iranian forces kill American troops.

And finally, regarding the destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities, there is simply no way to achieve this. Iran’s magazines and production facilities are dispersed across the extent of the country and buried deeply. Maybe to lie would be Trump’s best option to produce a “win” on this issue.

Iran has launched the extensive machinery of its “Mosaic” system of long-term, pre-planned military actions. This is the point – Iran’s strategic counterattack was not conceived to lead to any negotiated compromise, but rather to create the circumstance by which it can escape the western-imposed “cage” of endless sanctions, blockades, isolation and siege.

The uncomfortable reality for the US and its allies is that every available counter-military or diplomatic response to Iran’s strategic counterattack carries significant downsides.

The war is Trump’s and the US’ to lose. Trump now realises the war is lost – it may be lost, but it is not over. It may last for some time.

After a month of war, “it is arguably Iran that has secured the most significant strategic victory,” notes Bloomberg – with its ever “tightening grip over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz”:

There is every sign that Tehran’s ability to control the Strait is increasing … The near-total closure of Hormuz since [early March] … has proved an exceptionally effective asymmetric weapon in Iran’s fight against two of the world’s most powerful military forces.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

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The Trillion-Dollar Illusion

2026-04-07T10:27:38.820-04:00

By George D. O’Neill, Jr. - April 7, 2026 at 09:18AM

The latest American-Israeli aggression against Iran has exposed the United States’ inability to defend our big bases in the Gulf Countries and smaller bases in Iraq. For decades, these countries have had to endure the ire of their populations who are unhappy with the presence of U.S. forces in their lands. Their citizens are painfully aware of the U.S. and Israeli mass destruction and murder of their Muslim brothers. This may become a source of instability as war escalates.

Our leaders bribed and coerced the Persian Gulf family monarchies into accepting U.S. military bases in their countries. The regimes justified the American presence because the “most powerful military in history” would protect them. How has that worked out? The Persian Gulf states are now experiencing devastating daily missile attacks from Iran because the Iranians are blaming them for supporting and participating in the Israel/U.S. aggression. How did they not consider that possibility when they encouraged this U.S. aggression? Iran warned them.

One of Osama Bin Laden’s chief complaints was the sacrilege of U.S. military bases in the Muslim Holy Land. The Gulf state leaders must have been watching too much Fox News or the other news outlets controlled by friends of Benjamin Netanyahu. Their foolish decisions now threaten the stability of their regimes. Also, if Iran is turned into a non-functioning country, there will be nothing to protect the Gulf states from predation by Israel.

As the war against Iran grinds on, the Gulf state leaders are becoming acutely aware of just how much the U.S. regime prioritizes Israel over them. It also galls other “allies” of the U.S. regime that Israel, the root cause of the war, is receiving resupply of Patriot missile interceptors at their expense.

In addition, we are now witnessing as they increasingly realize that the various U.S. and Israeli missile defense systems provide no serious defense against hyper-sonic missiles. This was a long-suppressed fact exposed during the Ukrainian War. The U.S. elite don’t want Americans to know, but Iran, Russia, China, Hezbollah, and even Ansar Allah (the Houthis) know full well how to successfully overwhelm and defeat U.S. missile defense systems. The Iranians are demonstrating this daily. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is too busy cheerleading to notice. President Donald Trump is clueless. Our mocking bird press maintains the pro-war narrative of phony U.S. successes.

Our military is still extremely powerful and able to cause wreckage all over the world. It is our leaders’ competence and judgment that is in serious question. Look what chaos they are wreaking on Iran and what Israel is doing in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria with the arms and money we have given them.

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What the Hell Happened with the Rescue of the F-15E WSO in Iran?

2026-04-06T11:27:40.053-04:00

By Larry C. Johnson - April 6, 2026 at 10:01AM

Iran’s air defense system succeeded on Friday, April 3, in downing a US F-15E over Iran. There is some dispute and confusion about the exact location (more about that later). The pilot and the WSO (i.e., Weapons System Officer) both successfully ejected but were separated. The pilot was quickly rescued by the Combat Search and Rescue (i.e., CSAR) and the two Pave Hawk helicopters ferrying him back to safety were hit, but managed to make it to Kuwait — despite trailing visible black smoke.

The WSO was not so lucky. He reportedly landed 5 miles northwest of where he was ultimately rescued. I do not deny that he was recovered by US Special Operations forces on a ridge on a mountain — The red circle on the left hand side of the photo is the reported location of the pilot, the red circle on the right hand side of the photo is the airfield where the US Special Forces landed.

There are some real oddities about this story. The WSO is normally a Lieutenant or a Captain… This WSO is a Colonel who is the Vice Wing Commander at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base (MSAB) in Jordan. This helps explain the large number of assets devoted to finding and rescuing him. A variety of press reports claim he suffered a broken leg or a broken ankle. This raises a legitimate question… How did a man with a broken leg walk five miles and then climb a mountain? I’m not suggesting it is an impossible task, but it does raise some questions about the accuracy of the US military’s account of events.

Now here is the kicker… The geolocated wreckage of the C-130s which were apparently using a local “agricultural airstrip” (see the photo above) just happens to be right over a mountain, about 35km (21 miles) away, from Isfahan’s nuclear facility, where Iran’s ‘near-weapons grade’ enriched uranium is alleged to be stored. Was this whole affair a botched raid by US Special Operations forces to seize Iranian uranium for the Isfahan facility?

Before giving you my opinion, I want you to consider some other accounts that are circulating. The first up is Simplicius’ Substack article: It’s Official: US Boots-On-Ground Deep Inside Iran Amidst Another Day of Humiliating Losses. Simplicius claims that a large-scale US rescue operation for the second crew member (weapons systems officer) of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle has effectively confirmed the first official U.S. “boots on the ground” inside Iran. What the US presented as a straightforward combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) mission involved significant special operations forces penetrating deep into Iranian territory, resulting in heavy US losses of aircraft according to Iranian reports and open-source evidence.

Simplicius argues the “rescue” narrative may have served as cover or coincided with a broader objective: the operation was centered precisely in the area where Iran stores significant enriched uranium and nuclear-related materials. He suggests this marks a dangerous escalation, with US special operations forces now operating deep inside Iran — the first acknowledged “boots on the ground” in the current conflict.

Anthony Aguilar, a retired Special Operations officer, has a slightly different take. He offers the following hypothesis:

The rescue operation expanded to become the desired Delta Force, JSOC, SOF, ST-6 high-risk operation to ALSO seize the uranium in Iran; hence the need for so many operators, support, aircraft, etc. This WAS intended to be that operation. It failed. So what happened to the aircraft. I do not believe that they were “stuck”. I have seen MC-130Js plow through dirt, mud, snow, gravel, etc. I doubt they were stuck. It is more likely that the aircraft took hits upon entry and also likely took hits and damage while on the ground at the hasty FARP at the old airfield in Isfahan, “conveniently” close to where the suspected uranium may have been stored.

The there is Greg Bagwell, who is currently President UK Air & Space Power Association, a Podcaster, a RUSI Distinguished Fellow and a former RAF Senior Commander. He wrote the following on X:

Some may be wondering why the US flew 2 x MC-130 into a landing zone in Iran rather than use other types available. The clue is in the use of the Night Stalker AH-6 Little Bird Helicopters, which were also destroyed at the forward landing site. The WSO was located a few hundred kms inside Iran and it was probably considered too risky to fly Helos all the way in and out after so much prior warning had been given, and after the hits sustained when extracting the pilot on Day 1. But, the location of the WSO high up in the mountains and with what sounds like an injury, still needed the sort of assistance that only a Helicopter could provide. Step up the Night Stalker AH-6 Little Bird.

It’s transportable by C-130 and can be readied for flight in minutes from off loading. So all that was needed was somewhere to land a C-130 far enough away from trouble, but close enough to the downed airman. Meanwhile the AH-6 Little Bird Helicopters would have picked up the downed airman and brought him back to the airstrip. Unfortunately, the surface of the runway appears to have been unable to support a C-130. As a result, some De Havilland Canada Dash 8s (yes the irony!) were sent in to extract personnel, but these could not have carried the AH-6 Little Birds. So the only option was to destroy both the MC-130 and the AH-6 helicopters, rather than risk flying the latter out. So that’s why we didn’t see a V-22 Osprey or a Sikorsky MH-60/HH-60 Pave Hawk be involved – it was a calculation based on risk and utility. Some will see parallels with the Desert One strip disaster on Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, but this was a calculated risk that worked.

Now let me tell you what I think happened. The shoot down of the F-15E was not a ruse to disguise a planned Special Ops raid on the nuclear site in Isfahan. It was an unlucky event for the pilot and the WSO. Given the rank of the WSO — and the highly classified knowledge he has about US operations in the Gulf and in Iran — recovering him became a top priority. The urgency of the situation resulted in the JSOC unit (I’m assuming they are based in Kuwait) being alerted to join the CSAR effort. The two C-130Js probably were already loaded with two AH-6 Little Birds. I think it was pure serendipity that the missing WSO was located northwest of the rudimentary air strip that the JSOC unit had been planning to use to stage its raid on Isfahan. Their familiarity with the area, based on their prior planning for the Isfahan raid, resulted in them being tasked to recover the WSO in lieu of the designated CSAR unit, which is manned by Pararescue Jumpers aka PJs (who, in my opinion, are the baddest asses in Special Ops).

We still do not know why the C-130s were not able to take off and that two planes from the 427th Special Operations Squadron flying C295s were summoned to carryout the extraction of the US forces, including the WSO.

This whole fiasco may be a blessing in disguise. The loss of a number of key air assets and the exposure of the remote airfield within shouting distance of Isfahan may compel the US commanders to cancel the planned raid to capture nuclear material from Iran. While the US forces, like chess pieces, had been assembled and were in place on Friday, April 3rd, to carry out the mission against Isfahan, the Commanding Admiral at CENTCOM may be having second thoughts and is communicating his concerns about the Op-Sec compromise to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I only know one thing for certain — we are not yet getting the truthful story about the rescue of the WSO on Saturday.

Reprinted with permission from Sonar21.

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Trump’s Easter Ultimatum: Open the (Expletive) Strait or Else

2026-04-06T11:27:39.071-04:00

By Kurt Nimmo - April 6, 2026 at 09:18AM

It was a few minutes past five in the morning on Easter Sunday, April 5 when President Trump, with all the élan of a drunken sailor suffering from coprolalia, mounted his social media and posted the following:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Trump’s outburst is more than a simple case of histrionic personality disorder. His frustration over the inability to have Iranians submit to the destruction of their country, culture, and religion (that Trump mocked in his post) is an affront, or more accurately afrunter, a verb which means “to defy.” For the most powerful malignant narcissist in the world, such noncompliance is a cardinal sin and rationale for murdering more grade school girls.

It was Albert Einstein who quipped that the “definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Trump keeps trying to intimidate the Iranians, but he is getting nowhere, and this prompts him to double-down with threats and insults.

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait” is his latest shibboleth, his battle cry.

Trump passed over a couple deadlines, but this time he means it. Once again, he announced a demand to open the strait within 48 hours, and if those “crazy bastards” in Iran refuse to get down on their hands and knees and obey, Trump will order Crusader Pete to drop a few GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs on grade schools and hospitals.

It should be obvious now empty threats and dubious timelines will not result in the Strait of Hormuz opening any time soon. On April 3, it was reported US intelligence warned “that Iran is unlikely to open the Strait of Hormuz any time soon because its grip on the world’s most vital oil artery provides the only real leverage it has over the United States.”

Previously, Trump attempted to pass off this responsibility to NATO and oil-starved nations:

Trump’s stance on potential U.S. involvement in reopening the strait has shifted. On one hand, he has made ending Iran’s chokehold a ceasefire precondition, but then he called on Gulf oil-dependent countries and NATO allies to take the lead in reopening it.

Nothing short of Trump admitting defeat will work, and that is a big problem. For a malignant narcissist, there is no such thing as surrender. Initially, Trump proposed military convoys to escort oil tankers through the strait, never mind Pentagon officials have stated they are not currently prepared to escort commercial vessels through the strait and the Persian Gulf, which is fraught with risks from Iranian missile and drone attacks.

Plan B is stepping up the air war despite the recent humiliation of several US aircraft taken down by Iran’s air defense. Minus accompanying ground operations, intelligence, and political considerations, this approach will undoubtedly also be a failure.

The deployment of boots on the ground will not work. Iran has said it is ready and waiting for the potential arrival of US ground troops. “We are waiting for them,” said a confident Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, while Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Iran’s parliament, said the Islamic Republic of Iran Army (Artesh), the IRGC, and the Police Command (610,000 active-duty personnel) will “set fire” to a paltry 50,000 invading US troops. A full-scale ground invasion of Iran would require between 500,000 and 1.6 million troops.

Trump and his Zionist controllers are drunk on hubris, hopeium, and stupidity. The only sane response to the situation is for the US to declare victory and exit, stage right. It will not be a victory, of course, and the strait will stay closed to all traffic from the United States, Israel, and countries in a shrinking corner.

The question is, then: will Trump’s outsized toxic ego allow him to admit defeat, or will he take another flight of fancy and insist the US has won what is obviously unwinnable short of carpeting Iran with nukes?

Reprinted with permission from Another Day in the Empire.

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Worse than John McCain?

2026-04-06T11:27:38.425-04:00

By Ron Paul - April 6, 2026 at 09:06AM

Following President Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday about the Iran War, stock markets suffered losses while oil prices rose. The decline in stocks and increase in oil prices reflected disappointment over President Trump’s failure to articulate a plan to end the Iran War and the related restraint of shipping through of the Strait of Hormuz.

The average gas price in America has risen to over four dollars per gallon since the US and Israel launched their war against Iran at the end of February. The increased cost of gas is raising prices at the pump and, by increasing shipping costs, resulting in higher prices at grocery stores and even on Amazon.

According to media reports, President Trump and his advisers dismissed the possibility that Iran would use its ability to limit or even cease oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz in order to drive up fuel prices. They dismissed the possibility even though disrupting oil shipments is the best way Iran can damage the US economy and make even America’s staunchest allies unwilling to take any action that could be seen as supporting the war. Fear of Iranian retribution may be why NATO countries rejected the president’s request that they send military support to the Strait of Hormuz to protect the free transport of oil.

President Trump’s contradictory statements regarding how close the US is to victory (and what victory will consist of) as well as whether he intends to establish a military presence at the Strait of Hormuz reflect the dilemma President Trump is facing when it comes to Iran. If the president sends troops to protect the Strait of Hormuz or sends troops into Iran, then he will lose more support from those who voted for him because he promised to be a peacemaker, not a warmonger.

Continuing to ignore the damage the increase in fuel costs is causing Americans will hurt Republicans in November’s midterm elections. This could result in President Trump facing a Democrat-controlled Congress in his final two years in office.

President Trump recently stated the federal government cannot afford to pay for daycare and other social programs because it has to spend so much money on the military and war. Of course, the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to run either a welfare state or a global empire.

The massive federal expenditure on militarism deprives the American people of the resources needed to create an effective private “safety net” for those in need. Yet, President Trump wants to increase the military budget to 1.5 trillion dollars — a 40 percent increase — even though the United States already spends more on “defense” than the combined defense budgets of the next nine biggest spending countries!

This spending will be paid for via the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax. This will further increase costs for Americans. The inflation tax hits middle and lower income Americans the hardest.

A saying among some antiwar libertarians and progresses, coined by Tom Woods, expresses the idea that whoever is elected president you end up with the militaristic foreign policy of the late Senator John McCain. President Trump’s commitment to continuing and expanding intervention in the Middle East and beyond, as well as to dramatically increasing spending to accomplish this task, suggests an exception to the rule: President Trump might be worse than John McCain.

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Trump Talks War for Easter Week

2026-04-04T16:27:45.626-04:00

By Philip Giraldi - April 4, 2026 at 03:22PM

This past week was what many Christians regard as Holy Week, starting with celebration of Jesus Christ’s Last Supper on Holy Thursday; mourning Christ’s crucifixion and death on Good Friday; continuing with prayer and church services on Holy Saturday; and concluding with the glory of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. Here in Washington things were predictably a bit different, starting with a President Donald Trump speech to the nation on Wednesday night which was a series of lies including how great the economy is doing. The intention was to address the American public concern over the ongoing war with Iran, in which he praised the valor of the US troops who are slaughtering Iranian schoolchildren before launching into a tirade demanding that Iran de facto surrender or he would bomb the country “back to the Stone Ages where it belongs” if it did not comply. On Holy Saturday Trump was at it again, threatening Iran. He warned on Truth Social that Iran’s “time is running out. Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!”

On Good Friday Trump followed up on this threats by requesting approval of a 2027 military budget proposed by the White House that would be $1.5 trillion, half a trillion more than this year, which does not even include the $200 billion recently requested by the Pentagon for the Iran war. Trump was following through on part of the Wednesday speech in which he had said that the United States cannot now spend money on the environment or “take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things.” Instead, the United States has to focus on its wars. “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.” Some in the audience subsequently speculated that it was an odd comment, totally devoid of anything like Christian charity, to be coming out with just before Easter.

Interestingly, that very week a projection of the US National Debt if the increased military spending is approve estimated that if the deficit spending continues the debt will increase by nearly $7 trillion over the next decade from its current $39 trillion level, which is itself unsustainable. To no one’s surprise, Trump had previously increased the debt by $7.8 trillion during his first four years in office.

A news story also revealed that Trump has wasted $100 million of taxpayer money on his fifty-six trips to Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where he spent 110 days, to play golf. If he keeps up the pace, he will have spent half a billion dollars on golf by the time his term of office has ended. Apparently, there may not be money available for improving the healthcare of Americans but paying huge amounts to be able to play a game, which he allegedly cheats at, is all right.

But there was more than that. Early in the week on Palm Sunday Pope Leo denounced the Iran war as “atrocious,” observing that the United States had “hands full of blood.” This ran contrary to what Trump and his cheerleaders were promoting, particularly Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has been evoking God and Jesus while calling for more war. The Pope’s response to that was “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”

Trump, who is affiliated with no known Christian denomination and may in fact be a convert to Judaism, has a so-called Christian spiritual adviser named Paula White-Cain. Early in the week she “advised” that American Christians should tithe their gross incomes and give the money (10%) to Israel. She stated that that would be compliant with what she claimed to be the right thing to do to avoid “disobeying God.” At a lunch at the White House later in the week she also compared Jesus Christ with Donald J Trump, an equation that shocked many in the actual Christian community. It might also be observed that the White House Faith Office, which White-Cain heads, was recently involved in the expulsion of its only Roman Catholic member Carrie Prejean Boller, who objected to the group’s inclusion of Zionism as a recognized and protected faith based on its political agenda and its war crimes in Palestine.

And speaking of Christianity and the Trump Administration, there was also celebration of Easter at the Pentagon, though some found one aspect of it rather odd. The event was on Good Friday and was billed as a religious gathering, though Pete Hegseth, who was the principal speaker, instructed the organizers to prohibit the attendance by Catholics. Signs were posted to that effect outside the gathering. Hegseth, who is an Evangelical Christian and ardent supporter of Israel and Zionism who has been promoting Christian religiosity in the armed services, may have been reacting to the Pope’s comments but his ban on Catholics, to put it mildly, provoked some controversy. An email sent out to Air Force personnel on Friday morning read “Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel.” One recipient responded anonymously with “I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome. It’s so ridiculous.”

A final story with religious overtones surfaced also last week. The defense attorneys for Tyler Robinson, who was possibly set up by the government as the killer of Charlie Kirk in Utah in September, have revealed that they have been able to demonstrate through technical examination that Robinson’s rifle was not used to fire the fatal shot, which could mean that the FBI, which showed up at the scene astonishingly quickly and proceeded to take charge, may have had prior knowledge of what was about to take place. They intervened to include denying a doctor access to a possibly still living Kirk after he had been taken to a nearby hospital. Kirk notably had decided to end his support of Israel crimes in the Middle East and was prepared to go public with his criticism. Interestingly, when he was shot, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on television almost immediately in Israel to declare that his country had had nothing to do with the killing! Hmmmm! I highly recommend today (Saturday’s) program featuring Larry Johnson with Judge Andrew Napolitano explaining in more detail how there has been a cover-up and at least some fingers are pointing at Israel colluding with the FBI!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Trump and the Phantom Dead of Iran

2026-04-03T11:27:46.572-04:00

By Kurt Nimmo - April 3, 2026 at 10:05AM

Not long ago, Trump and crew claimed the evil mullahs in Iran slaughtered 30,000 of their own citizens. Since that time, there has been a revision. Now Trump insists the number is 45,000. Larger numbers look better when it is the only fabrication that might be used as an excuse for dropping more bombs on Tehran and murdering more innocents in their sleep. Nukes and regime change are no longer applicable.

There are several problems with Trump’s preposterous claim. First and foremost, how does a government murder 45,000 people in a few days, or even a few weeks? How does the government dispose of 45,000 bodies without a single photograph or firsthand account? “Think about the logistics: morgues overflowing, mass graves that satellites or locals would spot, families demanding remains, and all under a blackout?” ponders DC Document Reports. “It smells like exaggeration from exile groups or media hype to amp up pressure on the regime.”

Exactly. But then this is hardly surprising, as most of what we get from Dear Leader, after he finishes talking about himself, is dissimulation, misrepresentation, distortion, and prevarication. I am not certain, however, Trump is telling lies. He may very well believe what his Zionist handlers and backroom neocon advisors tell him.

Remember when Trump said back in early March Iran was itching to attack America? On its face, that was obvious bullshit, as Iran does not have the desire or capability. On March 2, the Pentagon admitted there was no intelligence indicating Iran planned to attack America. On March 11, Trump took America to war on the advice of his Zionist son-in-law, not intelligence. On March 29, he admitted the whole thing is about Israel. “Israel was under threat so we had to attack,” he said.

Lately, though, things have become particularly delusional. Trump posted that Iran is begging for a ceasefire, which is untrue. Iran has refused any contact with Trump and his Zionist “negotiators” experienced in buying and selling New York real estate. Iran knows full well engaging in go-nowhere talks with the US results in murdered negotiators.

On April Fools’ Day, the Don insisted there is a new regime in Iran and it wants to turn over whatever uranium Iran might have, destroy its missiles, stop supporting its “proxies” (in the US, these are known as allies), endure endless sanctions, and basically go prostrate and allow Pete Hegseth’s patriotic hired killers to pull a Muammar Gaddafi on whatever leader arises.

Trump posted:

“Iran’s New Regime President, much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors, has just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE! We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!”

Iran’s FM Araghchi said his country is not looking for a ceasefire. “When we negotiated with them twice, and every time they attacked us in the middle of negotiations,” he told NBC News. “So there is no request for a ceasefire by us, and there is no request for the negotiation with the U.S. from us. We have never sent any messages to them.”

In response, Trump said the US will “hit them extremely hard over the next 2-3 weeks.” It should be obvious by now that any “hit” (for instance, murdering school girls) will result in retaliation by Iran. The Stone Age metaphor works both ways. If not for strict censorship, we would see the widespread destruction in Israel, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

The Department of State put up a post of Trump bloviating from a gold-plated Oval Office: “We have all the cards, Iran has none. We are in this military operation for 32 days and they have been eviscerated. They are no longer the bully of the Middle East.”

It’s true. Trump has “eviscerated” Iranian civilians, but not much of Iran’s military capability safely 800 meters underground. On April 1, for instance, the IRGC, in collaboration with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah, launched attacks against Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights with loitering munitions, cruise and ballistic missiles. Does that sound like evisceration?

“A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said Iran fired over 300 ballistic missiles, UAVs, suicide drones and cruise missiles” on March 28, according to the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post.

Occasionally, however, there is a ray of truth coming out of this cognitively impaired president. He said it is not “possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things” because “we’re fighting wars” for Israel.

I am reminded of Leo Strauss and his neocons. They were quite influential during Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Shadia Drury, a Canadian academic and political commentator, had something to say about the Straussian view of humanity.

For the neocons, politics is “conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death,” not for himself or his negligible humanity, but for Israel. Drury said she never imagined “the unscrupulous elite” elevated by Strauss would “come close to political power.”

Strauss “believed that society needs an elite of philosophers or intellectuals to manufacture ‘noble lies’ for the consumption of the masses,” she writes. The lies told about Iraq and Afghanistan, for neocons in the White House and Pentagon, may have been “noble,” but that depraved nobility of deception is not part of the Trump repertoire.

For a malignant narcissist of Trump’s caliber, it does not matter if the lies are threadbare and easily refuted. For Trump, everything that escapes from his “mind” is truth, and if you doubt that, if you question him, you’re a loser and maybe a domestic terrorist.

Reprinted with permission from Another Day in the Empire.

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Are There, or Will There Be, US Negotiations with Iran?

2026-04-02T12:27:21.089-04:00

By Alastair Crooke - April 2, 2026 at 10:25AM

The short answer is “no.” Trump was confabulating when he said that he was already in negotiations with “important” Iranians.

There is a back history to the US’ “negotiations narrative.” In earlier rounds of “negotiations” centred on the Ukraine conflict, Trump regularly would suggest that political negotiations with Russia were ongoing, when in practice, Witkoff and Kushner were simply engaging in a series of endless talks with the Europeans about establishing a ceasefire and the putative European-led “peacekeeping” role that the Europeans were demanding. In fact, these “peace plans” were never shared, or shown to Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.

A prolonged “ceasefire” then was seen by the White House as the bypass strategy to trying to resolve the entrenched security architecture issues between NATO and Russia’s sphere of security interests. Russia simply said “no” to Trump’s attempt to “kick the security architecture can down the road.”

The same pattern of dissimulation was evident in the Gaza ceasefire talks: Ceasefires were proposed without specifying any details of what might follow in Phase Two of the ceasefire.

Last weekend, Witkoff and Kushner drew up their wish-list for yet another ceasefire — in Iran this time — with more “cans” to be kicked along for later discussion. Same story. Same confabulation. A fifteen-point peace plan, drawn up by Witkoff and Kushner, was put to the client mediators — with its demands being hailed by Trump as “very good, and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of hostilities” — and with Iran “desperately wanting a deal.”

Iran, to Trump’s chagrin, said “no way” to the proposal: Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesperson for the Iranian military said, “Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way.”

Iran has no interest in a compromise at this point as it has not achieved its (audacious) strategic ambition to overturn the long-standing US-Israeli military and financial dominance of the Gulf region — and to remake it as a wide Iranian economic and military sphere of interest (“hemisphere,” if you will).

In any event, Iran possesses the escalatory dominance in this conflict – through dint of decades-long preparation and planning. Iran has already demonstrated that it controls the twenty percent of global oil exported via the Hormuz Strait. It has therefore the tools (regulation of passage of vessels through the waterway) to manage the volume of oil exported, and, as significant, if not more so, the ability to influence its globally sensitive pricing (once the sole prerequisite of the US).

More than just having one major component of the global economy under its thumb (oil), Iran effectively has much of the world’s supply lines and commodity production under its thumb too: Helium; fertiliser; food and Sulphuric acid all are to one extent or another dependent on Hormuz, and its closure for more than three weeks would create crippling shortages that would be unlikely quickly to disappear.

Manipulation of the oil economic lever, plus Iran’s insistence that vessels transiting the Straits both pay a fat fee and prove that their cargoes were purchased in Yuan, strikes also at the heart of Trump’s political vulnerability – the US economy, in the run up to the US Midterm Elections.

One regional report cautions:

Iran has a permanent plan for checkpoints in the Strait of Hormuz to offset losses. Should the attacks that Trump threatens materialize, Iran will choke the Strait of Hormuz, close the Red Sea routes, and the Yemeni front will act to seal Bab al-Mandeb. Iran is also prepared to reclaim Bahraini ports if the situation demands.

Trump once said that to lose dollar hegemony would be worse for America than losing a major war. Yet this is precisely what is in play in this “game of chicken” which Trump started with Iran, but where he is now at a loss for how to exit, without damaging humiliation.

“Washington is in shock,” Anna Barsky, chief political correspondent of (Hebrew language) Ma’ariv wrote in response to the Wall Street Journal outlining the list of counter demands that Iranian representatives have conveyed through mediators to the Trump team as Iran’s pre-conditions to a settlement:

“White House officials described the demands as ‘a wish list un-connected to reality on the ground’.”

With these economic cards already in Iran’s hands, and with its readiness to match Israeli-US bombardment escalation with its own retaliatory missile strikes on Gulf States’ infrastructure, pari passu, it seems inherently unlikely that Trump will get any plausible exit from war — not least because “Israel has a vote” in this matter, and Israel has now shifted from the hope of “regime change” to insistence that the US seize Kharg Island in the Hormuz.

Israel has acknowledged that its hoped-for regime change objective in Iran has failed, write leading Israeli commentators (Ronen Bergman and Anna Barsky). So it is recalibrating its objectives – “Jerusalem [now] believes that the path to [an Israeli] victory runs through control of Kharg Island,” writes Barsky.

According to this line of thought, if the [US-Israeli] campaign does not lead to the overthrow of the regime, a much more tangible move is required – one that will deprive Iran of both the ability to export oil on a normal scale and its ability effectively to threaten maritime traffic.

This discussion leads to another conclusion: Without a physical presence at a key point, it is very difficult to prevent Iran from repeatedly returning to the same pattern … To change reality, actual control must be created. In this context, Kharg is presented as a target whose takeover could simultaneously deprive Iran of both strategic income and room for action.

But, notes Barsky, “It is estimated however, that the real difficulty is not on the operational side … It is in Washington”:

“The question is not whether the US can reach Kharg and take control of the island. The question is whether Trump is willing to maintain a force there for a long time, with the possibility of casualties among American forces.”

Ex-CIA officer, Larry Johnson, writes that US intervention in Hormuz likely is imminent and would be disastrous (i.e. lead to many American casualties):

[U]nless Donald Trump reconsiders, we are likely to see the US attempt to seize both Kharg and Qeshm islands. If you read my previous piece (here), it appears that Trump will use both Delta Force and Seal Team 6, along with two Ranger battalions and the 82nd Airborne’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, to seize the islands.

The 31st Military Expeditionary Unit, MEU, will be in place in the Arabian Sea, on Friday … I [have now] learned that … Trump cancelled his appearance at CPAC this weekend and that he will not attend a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night ….

“Looks like [Trump] will be otherwise occupied starting Friday,” Larry Johnson speculates.

But then what? Those troops will be sitting targets and will face a serious risk of being cut off from resupply. If Iran releases a tsunami of mines, then the only option will be aerial resupply, which likely means those aircraft will face withering fire from Iranian shore batteries and air defence systems. Instead of opening the Strait of Hormuz, the anticipated US military action will make it virtually impossible for any ship to enter or exit the Persian Gulf. The complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz will further worsen the economic damage to the world economy.

Iranian Admiral Ali Akbar Ahmadian reacted to the threat of American “boots on the ground” in Hormuz:

“For years, we’ve been awaiting [an American invasion]. Now, we have just one message for the American soldiers: Come closer.”

Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

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Privatize the Private Airport Security Screeners

2026-04-02T11:27:23.765-04:00

By Laurence M. Vance - April 2, 2026 at 09:55AM

I am old enough to remember when your family members could accompany you to the airport and share a meal with you before your flight or wait at the gate with you until you boarded your flight. There is one thing preventing a return to those idyllic times: the TSA.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was created in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001. It was designed to consolidate all airline security under federal control and better prevent airplane hijacking. The agency’s mission is to “Protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.”

The TSA was initially placed under the control of the Department of Transportation but was transferred to the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003. The TSA employs about 60,000 people and has an annual budget of about $12 billion.

The legislation (S.1447) creating the TSA was overwhelmingly supported by both Democrats and Republicans and signed into law by President George W. Bush. Only nine Republicans in the House voted against the formation of the TSA. The legislation (H.R.5005) creating the DHS had bipartisan, but predominately Republican, support. Only ten Republicans in the House joined with a majority of the Democrats to vote against the formation of the DHS. Both pieces of legislation had unanimous Republican support in the Senate.

Before the creation of the TSA, airlines and airports used private security companies to perform security screening at airports. After a surge in airline hijackings, metal detectors were first introduced in airports in 1972. In 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated that all passengers and luggage be screened before a flight, and private airport security companies handled the job well.

Most Americans don’t realize that airports are allowed to opt-out of TSA security via the Screening Partnership Program (SPP) and contract with private companies to provide airport security. However, private companies must be approved by the TSA, follow TSA standards and procedures, and submit to TSA oversight. As a result, only about 20 of the nation’s 500 or so commercial airports use private security. Most are small airports, but some are not, like airports in San Francisco, Key West, Rochester, and Kansas City.

Private security has been in the news like never before because of the shortage of TSA Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) that has resulted in long security wait lines at airports across the country. Many TSOs have quit or refused to come to work because the Democrats and Republicans in Congress can’t come to an agreement on funding for the DHS, which shut down on February 12. Private security screeners are paid regardless of the DHS shutdown because their pay comes from a federal contract that is already funded.

There is certainly no reason why airports can’t use private security screeners—like they do in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Spain. Airports already rely on private contractors, local law enforcement, and their own police departments for every aspect of security other than passenger and luggage screening.

Airports and airlines have a tremendous incentive to keep undesirable people and dangerous objects and substances off their flights: the $100 million to $200 million price tag of new airplanes.

There are, of course, other reasons to return airport security to the private sector. It is bad enough that the TSA engages in security theater, but it is even worse when the TSA regularly fails to detect real and mock weapons and explosives at an alarming rate. The TSA hasn’t caught a single terrorist, but over 400 TSA agents have been arrested for theft, drug smuggling, or assault.

Yet, switching to private airport security screeners, although a step in the right direction, is not enough. Even the private airport security screeners need to be privatized.

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 should never have been passed. The federal government has been granted no authority by the Constitution to provide, fund, regulate, or control airport and airline security. This includes the SPP. No private security company should have to be approved by the TSA, follow TSA standards and procedures, or submit to TSA oversight.

But that’s not all. It is not the job of government to provide security for any business in any industry. The federal government has no more authority to provide airport security than it has to provide security at hotels, amusement parks, and convenience stores. It’s time to end all federal government oversight of airport security.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Hope For the Dead

2026-04-02T11:27:23.146-04:00

By Andrew P. Napolitano - April 2, 2026 at 09:34AM

“That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

When American colonists were oppressed by British monarchs, the word most frequently uttered in pamphlets, editorials and sermons was not “safety” or “taxes”; it was “freedom.” Yet, two intolerable acts of Parliament so assaulted personal freedom that they broke the bonds with the mother country.

The first was the Stamp Act of 1765, which required colonists to have government stamps on all documents in every household. It was enforced by British agents who used general warrants, issued by a secret court in London, to rummage through colonists’ possessions, ostensibly looking for stamps.

General warrants — like those issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington, D.C. — authorized government agents to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found.

The second intolerable act was the Revenue Act of 1767, the proceeds from which the king used to pay the salaries of colonial officials and the king’s clergy, thereby securing their loyalty.

The Stamp Act assaulted the right to be left alone, and the Revenue Act forced colonists to pay for a religious establishment. These two British laws caused many colonists to realize they needed to secede from Britain and form a new country, in which the government would protect freedom, not assault it. Ten years later, they did so and won the American Revolutionary War.

Today, the loss of freedom comes in many forms.

Sometimes it is direct, as when the government arrests people it hates or fears without a warrant and incarcerates them in prisons without due process.

Sometimes it is subtle, as when the president unilaterally imposes a sales tax on imported goods and, as a result, instability erodes the value of our investments.

Sometimes it is secret, as when the government reads emails and text messages and follows the movements of cellphones, all without search warrants; or when it uses drones and missiles to kill people the government hates or fears, without a declaration of war or any due process.

Freedom is the ability of every person to make personal choices without a government permission slip — to exercise free will. Free will is the natural characteristic we share in common with God. It is His unconditional gift to us. He created us in His image and likeness. As God is perfectly free, so are we.

When the government takes away freedom — whether by executive order or legislation — it steals a gift we received from God, it violates the natural law and the Constitution, and it prevents us from seeking the truth.

Freedom is the essence of humanity. No one can achieve happiness or truth without it. Government is essentially the negation of freedom.

We know from events 2,000 years ago this week — in the Roman Empire police state of Judea — that freedom is also the essential means to unite with the truth. To Catholics, the incarnation and the perfect manifestation of truth is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

To believe that Jesus is God and man is to take Easter seriously.

Taking Easter seriously also means that on the first Holy Thursday, Jesus attended a traditional Jewish Passover Seder. Catholics believe that at this Last Supper, Jesus performed two miracles so that we could stay united to Him. He transformed ordinary bread and wine into His own body, blood, soul and divinity, and He empowered His disciples and their recognized successors to do the same.

That Jewish Seder was the first Catholic Mass.

The next day — the first Good Friday — the Roman government crucified Jesus because it feared that by claiming to be the Son of God, He might foment a political revolution. He did foment a revolution, but it was in the hearts and minds and souls of men and women.

Taking Easter seriously recognizes that Jesus had the freedom to reject His horrific death, but He exercised His free will to accept it so that we might know the truth. The truth is that He — and we who have faith and hope and perform good works — would rise from the dead.

On Easter, that “far-off divine event,” as Tennyson wrote, Jesus rose from the dead. By doing that, He demonstrated to us that while living, we can liberate our souls from the slavery of sin because, after death, we of faith, hope and selfless good works can rise to be with Him.

Taking Easter seriously recognizes that the Resurrection of Jesus is the linchpin of human existence “to which the whole creation moves.” With it, life is worth living, no matter its painful costs or losses. Without it, life is meaningless, no matter its fleeting joys or triumphs.

Easter has a meaning that is both incomprehensible and simple. It is incomprehensible that a human being rose from the dead. It is simple because that human being was and is God.

Taking Easter seriously means that there is hope for the dead, and thus there is hope for the living.

But like the colonists who fought the oppression of the king, we the living can achieve our hopes only if we have freedom. And that requires more than faith and hope and selfless good works. It requires a government that protects freedom, not one that assaults it.

America today is divided and fearful. The government is broke, overbearing, lawless, fights an immoral war, and is unworthy of belief. It threatens World War III, has produced wild inflation, destroyed happiness, and refuses to obey its own laws.

But, faith in Jesus’ Resurrection — which is also hope for our own — infuses the souls of the faithful with a freedom and a joy that only God can give.

Happy Easter!

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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The War as the Trade

2026-04-01T12:27:34.374-04:00

By Gerry Nolan - April 1, 2026 at 10:12AM

WSJ: UAE preparing to formally enter the war, the first Gulf state to become a combatant lobbying for a UN Security Council resolution authorising force to open the Strait of Hormuz. Emirati diplomats racing across Washington, Brussels and Tokyo. Abu Dhabi wants US troops to seize Abu Musa island. Dubai wants to mine-sweep for America. The once wannabe neutral hub of the new multipolar order volunteering to be the tip of Netanyahu’s spear.

The WSJ piece then pivots to Trump telling aides he’s willing to end the war without reopening Hormuz and leave it to other countries. The morning that story dropped, the S&P ripped 1.5% and Nasdaq climbed 2%. Oil dropped, vassals panicked and the UAE volunteered to be cannon fodder. And that’s what we call the trade.

And it has a precise anatomy by now. Fifteen minutes before Trump posted “productive conversations” with Iran on Truth Social Marfy 23, $580 million worth of oil futures changed hands in a single minute. Paul Krugman called it what it is… treason.

“We have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is treason.” Iran’s own parliament speaker called it first: “Pre-market so-called news or Truth is often just a setup for profit-taking. Do the opposite: if they pump it, short it. If they dump it, go long.” His post got 8 million views. And he was right.

Meanwhile Hegseth’s broker had already been sniffing around BlackRock’s Defence ETF weeks before the first bomb dropped. The SEC’s top enforcement official resigned rather than pursue it. Nobody is minding the store.

Markets are now so numb to Trump’s Sunday evening habit of walking back threats that they barely react anymore. The manipulation has a diminishing half-life — which means the next move has to be bigger. A suicidal ground offensive. A Kharg Island high water mark seizure… A new escalation to reset the trade.

While the exit story circulated, the Pentagon was quietly preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran. Two Marine Expeditionary Units in theatre. 82nd Airborne deploying. Iran having already mined Kharg’s beaches, moving MANPADs to the shoreline, laying anti-personnel and anti-armour traps. Tehran read the playbook years earlier and are waiting.

Here’s what the Epstein class cheerleaders won’t say. Kharg sits 20 miles off the Iranian coast. Every artillery battery, drone battalion and rocket system on the mainland has it pre-registered. Russian military analyst Igor Korotchenko assessed Iranian forces could destroy a US landing force on Kharg within two hours. The ranking member of the Armed Services Committee (Adam Smith) said bluntly, “I don’t think we can do it. All Iran needs is one drone, one mine, one suicide boat.” Even Erik Prince — Trump’s own man said publicly: “You will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks.”

Russia and China will veto the UN resolution with NATO already declining to go. France wants to wait until the war ends. And the UAE which has absorbed almost 2,500 Iranian projectiles, more than any country including Israel, whose airport terminals burned and property market cratered has decided the suicidal play is to formally join the war that’s already destroying it. Because Trump begged. The same Trump who is simultaneously telling aides he’ll walk away and leave them facing Iran alone.

The WSJ buried the most important line in its own story. Trump is willing to declare victory and leave. The UAE just volunteered to hold the bag. Lindsey Graham compared it to Iwo Jima — where 7,000 Marines died on Fox News. “My money’s always on the Marines.”

This is what passes for Art of the Dead strategy. The Apprentice meets the Shock Doctrine with the war as a market instrument, the Gulf as collateral, and American boys as the price of the next trade.

Some final thoughts…

Here are all three paragraphs together as a unified block to drop into the piece:

There is a dimension to this that the Western client media has avoided… Every THAAD, Patriot and Tomahawk missile diverted to Iran is a missile kept from the frontlines of Ukraine and from the Pacific theatre where China’s real competition with America will ultimately be decided. The Pentagon is already considering diverting weapons contracted for Ukraine to the Middle East, with future packages likely to be missing air defence capabilities entirely as the US races to replenish its stocks. By spring 2026, US interceptors contracted for Ukraine are being redirected to Israel and the Persian Gulf. By July–August, Ukraine will experience a critical shortage of American air defence missiles. Russia needs to fire not a single additional shell to exploit this. It simply waits while America burns through its magazine in someone else’s war. From Beijing’s perspective, American military action against Iran serves Chinese interests by creating dependency relationships Beijing can exploit while diverting American resources from competition in the Pacific. Beijing doesn’t need to defeat America militarily when American strategic incoherence does China’s job for it. The Global Times called it weeks ago. Washington is not playing chess. It is playing draughts on multiple boards simultaneously and losing pieces on all of them.

The second-order effect is more structurally damaging and that is food. Urea, the world’s most widely traded fertiliser, has risen 50% since the war began. Middle East granular urea prices surged from $435 per ton to $710 per ton within weeks. Russia, the world’s largest fertiliser exporter, wins here too — a secondary windfall on top of oil (projected oil and gas profits at circa 387 billion per KSE institute in 6 months if this war continues), flowing directly from the same disruption. Nations already stressed by the purchasing power, already squeezed by post-pandemic debt loads, now facing a food inflation shock layered on top of an energy shock. This is how imperial wars generate blowback not on battlefields but in food queues and the streets. The Global South is watching which side closed the strait and which side built the yuan toll booth. The multipolar world is not an ideology but a natural conclusion being drawn in real time by the countries paying the price for Israel’s war.

Which brings us to the verdict that history will eventually deliver. February 28, 2026 will not be remembered as the day America struck Iran on orders from Israel. It will be remembered as the day the American imperial system completed its suicide pact and it never had to end this way. A country spending 1% of the US war department budget closed 20% of the world’s oil supply, collected tolls in yuan, survived the assassination of its supreme leader, forced Washington to humiliating capitulation. The petrodollar architecture Nixon and Kissinger enacted in 1974 to replace Bretton Woods, the system that has underwritten every US Treasury bond, every aircraft carrier, every sanctions regime for fifty years is now visibly, audibly breaking. All because The Apprentice handed the key to the toll booth to the one country that had spent forty years quietly preparing for this day.. The controlled demolition of the American century was authorised on February 28, 2026 and the permit was signed in Tel Aviv.

Reprinted with permission from The Islander.

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The Weight on Delcy Rodriguez

2026-04-01T12:27:33.547-04:00

By Craig Murray - April 1, 2026 at 10:05AM

As I was leaving the University of the Communes in Tocuyito, after a joyful and uplifting visit, an earnest young Professor came up to me and pulled me aside. Very quietly, he asked me what was going to happen. A number of the students were terrified there would be regime change and they, picked as young socialist leaders in the commune movement, would be imprisoned, tortured and executed.

It was a sharp reality check after a great day at this fledgling university. But it is very real. I had met sober and professional diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who knew exactly which part of the mountains they would flee to with assault rifles in the event of the right coming to power, and were resigned to a life of guerilla warfare, including partners and children. I have met nobody who doubts that a change of regime in Caracas would lead to immediate mass killings of leftists, and a lengthy civil war.

Almost everything you are told in the West about Venezuela is untrue, and the biggest lie is that Machado, Guaidó and the groupings around them are in any sense democrats or liberal. They are not, and have direct family and political links to the murderous CIA-sponsored regimes of the pre-Chávez years. They also have many scores to settle – Machado’s family, to give just one example, dominated the electricity supply before it was nationalised.

A very large number of the “political prisoners” the West is so concerned about, were involved in efforts at military coup or violent insurrection, of which Guaidó’s comic opera attempt in 2019 was only the most publicised. After the disputed 2024 elections many of those imprisoned were actually brandishing weapons – I met the families of three young men who told me their sons were misled into taking to the streets with guns, and hoped they would get out in the current amnesty.

Sanctions caused great economic hardship which affected government popularity. But it is a huge error to conflate discontent at the Maduro government with support for Machado – there is almost no evidence of the latter, no matter how hard you look. That Machado does not have the internal support to run the country is one of the few things Trump has stated truthfully. The alternative to the socialist government is chaos.

So Delcy Rodríguez has to maintain the Socialist Party in government, or see supporters butchered and the start of a civil war. At the same time she has to contend with the blatant colonialist assertion of control over Venezuela’s assets and finances by the USA, while placating the irascible and irrational Trump.

Let us get one thing straight. I have spoken personally to those closest to President Nicolás Maduro. I have spoken with Francisco Torrealba, who followed Maduro as President of the Transport Workers Union and also took over Maduro’s seat in the National Assembly. I have spoken to Maduro’s son, also Nicolás. None of these people believe for one second that Delcy Rodríguez was in any way implicated in the kidnap of Nicolás and Cilia Maduro.

Why does almost everybody in the West believe a narrative that nobody in Venezuela believes, and which I am quite certain is untrue?

That narrative has been force-fed to you. Trump undermined Delcy Rodríguez by open praise of her and assertion that she is his choice. The truth of course is different: as Maduro’s Vice-President, she naturally assumes the duties of President, as confirmed by the Venezuelan Supreme Court. A co-ordinated effort of briefings to journalists by the Trump administration, by the security services, and by Machado-aligned Venezuelans in Miami, gave to the media in a coordinated fashion a detailed story of negotiations between Delcy and her brother Jorge and the Americans, for a strategy of economic reform that included Maduro’s removal.

I have looked again through many articles that forward this narrative, and all of them very obviously come primarily from Washington sources, and it is a narrative that the United States has been very, very assiduous in feeding you.

It begs the question, if Delcy really is a Western puppet, why is the Western Establishment so keen to tell you that? In every other circumstance, like the Gulf monarchies or al-Jolani, they are always anxious to promote the myth that their puppets are not puppets.

My maxim, that if the government really wants you to know something, it probably means it isn’t true, holds in this case. Trump wants it known that Delcy Rodríguez is his puppet because it is part of his victory narrative, the fake story of Trump greatness. It is also intended to divide and weaken the socialist movement in Venezuela.

We have to look at the night of 3 January when Maduro was kidnapped. There is one key fact which again is simply not part of the Western narrative. It was Nicolás Maduro who instructed the military to stand down and not to fight, in the event of an attempt to take him. In fact he was aware that such an event was imminent, though he did not know the exact date.

Maduro’s primary concern was to avoid war between Venezuela and the United States, war which would devastate this peaceful country.

Read the rest of the article here.

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War On Iran: It Is Cheaper To Pay For Hormuz Passage Than To Wage War

2026-04-01T12:27:32.912-04:00

By Moon of Alabama - April 1, 2026 at 09:55AM

US President Donald Trump is reportedly ready to give up on the Persian Gulf passage:

Trump Tells Aides He’s Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz (archived) – WSJ

In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the US should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said.

There are also military options the president could decide on, but they are not his immediate priority, they said.

Trump is considering to give up because he has no ability to reopen the Gulf by military or other means. The US Navy is lacking the basic equipment to reopen sea passages – de-mining vessels – and it is lacking the arsenal depth needed to defend against the onslaught of missile, drones and torpedoes that would slaughter its ships should they try to pass through the Strait.

Iran controls 270 degrees of the bent of the passage. Its coast is mountainous with many hide outs from where weapons can be released. To reopen the passage by force, a 100,000+ strong army would need to invade, take and hold the Iranian coastline. There is no such forces as no country is willing to commit its soldiers to such a suicide mission.

Trump is now searching for other he can push into opening the closure he himself with war on Iran has caused:

All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the US, we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT

(TS: 31 Mar 07:11 ET)‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍‌‍

After 32 days of Trump’s “My war, your Hormuz problem …” has gone through many phases:

1. We need NATO help.
2. Not surprised NATO not helping.
3. We no longer need NATO help!
4. Actually we never needed NATO help.
5. We need Japan, Aus, Korea help.
6. They’re not helping either.
7. We are the most powerful country.
8. WE DON’T NEED ANYONE’S HELP!
9. NATO is a Paper Tiger without USA
10. The USA needs nothing from NATO, We will never forget.
11. Build up some delayed courage and go to The Straight of Hormuz.

There will be no takers.

For those who want and need their goods to pass through the Straits there are other ways to provide for it.

The National Security Affair Committee of the Iranian Parliament, the Majlis, has approved legislation that regulates future passages through the Strait:

– Iran will impose tolls on vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz (it will be in national currency, Rial)
– America & Zionist regimes will be banned from passing through the Strait
– Iran armed forces will guarantee safe passage for vessels
– countries that imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran will be bared from passing through the Strait of Hormuz (now tell Canada, Australia and EU to impose more sanctions!)
– Iran will invite and ask Oman to be part of this new legal regime

The scheme solves several problems:

The toll for future passages will help to repair the damage the USraeli war on Iran has caused to the country. (I had suggested this on March 19).
The payment in Rial will lift the extraordinary diminished currency of Iran. This will allow for more imports, will lower inflation and rise the income of the average people.
The effect of unilateral US/EU sanctions will evaporate if other countries decide to no longer follow them.

It is cheaper for Asia and Europe to pay a toll of let’s say 10% on plenty of oil passing through the Strait than to pay 100% on top of the previous price because of supply limits.

It will be more profitable for the Arab Gulf states to see oil flowing, even when the additional toll may cause demand to be slightly lower, than to suffer from no oil sales due to a continued blockade.

Persia had largely been in control of the Strait, including its western coast, until 1763, when the British East-India company established itself in Basra by force. It has now the chance to be back in control.

If it does so in a fair manner that will not unreasonably effect normal trade there is no reason for any neutral country to object to the change.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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Hijacking Religion: How the Pentagon Turned the Sermon on the Mount into a War Manual

2026-04-01T12:27:32.274-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - April 1, 2026 at 09:48AM

“We negotiate with bombs.”— Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary for the Trump Administration

The language of modern government is the language of empire.

It is the language of domination, retaliation, conquest and control—of enemies to be crushed, nations to be subdued, and dissenters to be silenced.

Under the Trump Administration, the language of empire has also been imbued with a religious fervor that recasts Jesus Christ—not as a peacemaker—but as a mascot for power, conquest and control.

War has been dressed up in patriotism. Wrapped in Scripture. Called “righteous.” Marketed as “peace through strength.”

But this is not a holy war. It is a political war dressed up as holy.

Despite the pageantry—crosses held aloft, prayers offered from podiums, politicians invoking God while demanding loyalty—the values animating America’s wars and power plays bear no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Jesus said: Love your enemies. The government says: destroy them.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. The government says: blessed are the war-makers.

Jesus said: Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. The government cages the poor, criminalizes the homeless, bombs the foreigner, and calls it security.

This is not a misunderstanding of Christianity.

It is a deliberate rewriting of it.

Consider the prayer offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon worship service: “Let every round find its mark… Give … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

No mercy. Spoken in the name of the Prince of Peace.

This is not faith. This is blasphemy baptized in nationalism.

It is the hijacking of religion to sanctify violence—the turning of the Sermon on the Mount into a war manual.

It is also an attempt to recast modern warfare as a holy war—sanctioned by God, justified by faith, and beyond moral reproach.

That idea is as unconstitutional as it is un-Christian.

And it raises a constitutional question that should alarm every American, regardless of faith.

The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of fusion of church and state power. It protects the free exercise of religion—but it also forbids the government from establishing, endorsing or advancing religion.

There is a difference between religious freedom and religious indoctrination.

There is a difference between private belief and state-sponsored theology.

When government officials invoke God to justify violence, when military power is cloaked in religious language, when prayer becomes a tool of state policy—we are no longer dealing with freedom of religion.

We are staring at the early stages of religious establishment.

History has shown us where that road leads.

As Thomas Jefferson warned, the Constitution erects a “wall of separation between church and state” precisely to prevent this kind of fusion of political power and religious authority.

When government begins to speak in the language of divine mandate, that wall is already being breached.

And more to the point—it is the very abuse of religion that Jesus Himself stood against.

Jesus did not preach “overwhelming violence.” He did not bless empire. He did not anoint governments to kill in His name.

And yet today, we are told that violence brings peace, domination ensures security, and revenge is strength.

What we are witnessing is not Christianity.

It is Christian nationalism—a counterfeit religion that wraps political power in religious language and calls it holy.

It is idolatry of the nation masquerading as devotion to God.

Christians are not called to identify with power, but to speak truth to power—even at great cost.

Yet today, far too many churches have traded prophecy for proximity to power. They have exchanged the cross for the flag.

And in the process, the message of Jesus is hollowed out. Stripped of its challenge. Neutralized.

Because the real Jesus is dangerous to power. He doesn’t flatter kings. He confronts them.

Jesus was not crucified for being polite. He was executed as a threat.

To the authorities of his day—both religious and political—Jesus was a destabilizing force. He challenged the legitimacy of power built on coercion, greed and violence. He exposed hypocrisy. He disrupted systems of exploitation.

And for that, the empire killed Him.

Crucifixion was not just execution.

It was a warning.

This is what happens to those who refuse to submit.

Which raises a question modern Christians would rather avoid: If Jesus walked into today’s halls of power—into the Pentagon, the White House, the halls of Congress—would He be welcomed?

Or would He be surveilled, silenced, labeled a threat?

Would He bless drone strikes and military parades? Or overturn tables?

Or would he be told, as Americans increasingly are, to comply, submit, obey and defer to authority?

Because the version of Christianity now being sold to the public is not one of resistance to injustice, but one of obedience to power.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not aligned with empire. “I was hungry… I was a stranger… I was in prison…”

Not: I was powerful, and you defended me.

Yet today’s political religion flips that script.

It exalts power. It sanctifies wealth. It demands loyalty to the state. And it calls this inversion of the Gospel “faith.”

But Jesus was clear: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” There is no footnote that says—except in matters of national security.

This is the great moral crisis of our time.

Not just that the government wages endless war, but that it dares to do so in the name of God—and too many cheer it on.

The early Christians understood something we have forgotten. Their allegiance was not to Rome. It was not to Caesar. It was not to the machinery of empire.

Their allegiance was to a higher law. And for that, they were persecuted, imprisoned, executed.

They did not seek to control the empire.

They refused to conform to it.

Today, by contrast, much of the modern church has become indistinguishable from the power it once challenged.

But the teachings of Jesus have not changed.

They still confront us.

They still demand something costly.

They still refuse to be weaponized for political gain.

So we are left with a choice.

The Constitution was designed to guard against the union of political power and religious authority.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we are witnessing today is not just a theological failure—it is a constitutional one.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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The American (and Israeli) Role in Syria exposed

2026-03-31T11:27:49.347-04:00

By Lucas Leiroz - March 31, 2026 at 09:31AM

The official narrative constructed by the United States and its allies throughout the war in Syria has consistently sought to conceal a central element of the conflict: the deliberate use of extremist groups as a geopolitical tool. For years, independent analysts have argued that Washington not only tolerated but actively encouraged the actions of radical militias in order to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. Even so, Western media and US authorities have persistently denied any direct collaboration with such organizations.

This version of events begins to unravel in light of recent statements by Trump’s former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent, which directly contradict the official discourse. According to him, there was active cooperation between the US and jihadist groups, including factions linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The strategic objective was clear: to bring about Assad’s collapse, regardless of the means employed. In this context, any force opposing the Syrian government was treated as a tactical partner, even when this meant strengthening organizations publicly designated as terrorist.

Even more revealing is the role attributed to Israel in this process. Kent argues that US foreign policy in the Middle East has been heavily influenced by Israeli interests, often at the expense of the American people’s own priorities. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington has played a decisive role in pushing for interventions and wars that have destabilized the region. In this sense, the Syrian conflict – like the current war with Iran—cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as part of a broader strategy of regional reconfiguration aligned with Tel Aviv’s interests.

According to this perspective, the US and Israel worked together to mobilize segments of the Sunni population against the Syrian government, fostering an unprecedented level of sectarian radicalization. By promoting extremist ideologies and funding militias, they created the conditions for an uprising that quickly spiraled out of control. Religious minorities became direct targets of this escalation of violence. What was presented as a “popular rebellion” was, in practice, a geopolitical engineering project based on the exploitation of internal divisions.

This process started to took place under the direct supervision of the Barack Obama administration. However, as often happens when external powers manipulate extremist forces, the plan eventually escaped control. The Islamic State evolved from a tactical instrument into an autonomous threat, imposing its own agenda and forcing the US to intervene militarily (at least publicly) against a crisis it had helped to create.

Another emblematic example is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which emerged as a central actor in the late and post war landscape. Initially integrated into networks of indirect cooperation aligned with Western and Israeli interests, the group consolidated power and ultimately assumed political prominence following the 2024 insurgency. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, embodies this transformation: from jihadist militant to a political figure attempting to project an image of moderation, even as his origins and connections remain evident.

The growth of these organizations can hardly be explained without considering external support. Curiously, despite their geographic proximity, such groups avoided to direct their actions against Israel, raising questions about the true nature of their tacit alignments. Meanwhile, Syria was devastated by years of war, with deep and lasting humanitarian consequences.

In the end, what emerges is a recurring pattern of external intervention marked by strategic cynicism. By betting on chaos as a tool of power, the US and Israel contributed to deepening divisions and fueling conflicts whose consequences extend far beyond Syria’s national borders. Today, there are signs that a similar approach may be unfolding in Iran through the encouragement of Kurdish militias, which have been associated with acts of terrorism. The continued reliance on the instrumentalization of extremism may ultimately come at a high cost – even for American interests themselves.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

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A War No One Can Afford

2026-03-31T08:27:27.047-04:00

By Eric Margolis - March 31, 2026 at 08:00AM

Speaking as a former harbor master, operator of cargo ships, and a military specialist on the Mideast, the current war in Iran is a fool’s errand. The much-ballyhooed Strait of Hormuz is only 33 odd kilometers wide and averages only 220 meters deep. It’s a bottom-scraper for the huge oil tankers that use it. What will happen if the Iranians scuttle one or two large tankers in these narrow waters? The Egyptians did so in 1956 in Suez and jammed up world oil traffic for months.

Someone in the Trump administration forgot to explain these topographical facts to the war-focused president and the hard right neo-conservatives around him. `Obliterating Iran’ (the White House’s favorite new term) may not be as easy as the pro-Israel neocons believe.

A US armada filled with troops is nearing the Strait of Hormuz. Landings by US Marines are expected to seize control of Kharg Island which is Iran’s principal hub of oil exports. I was there in the 1970’s. It’s a barren, ugly place covered by oil production infrastructure and angry sea birds. The US would bomb it flat – except that Iran threatens to go after key oil and water installations in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait and Iraq if they do. All are more or less US colonies, except Oman which is run by Britain’s Special Air Service.

Meanwhile South Yemen’s warlike Houthis tribesmen, who are Shia and thus pro-Iranian, have resumed attacks on the Bab-el-Mandeb, the narrow southern outlet of the Red Sea throwing marine traffic into chaos and further driving up the price of oil.

I’ve been with the Houthis. They are a wild and crazy bunch of pot-chewing tribesmen who don’t like outsiders, particularly the “Franks,’ as they call westerners, a term that dates back to the Crusades. We are now in a new Crusade commanded by the reborn state, Israel.

The majority of Americans are against the US-Iranian-Israeli war, particularly after it was revealed the first week of war cost some $11 billion in direct costs. As things stand, it appears this bill will soar as the war intensifies. This as the US prepares a ground war in the Bab-el-Mandeb.

It’s often said that Americans really only care about three things: God, guns and gasoline. The war in Arabia is making the cost of gas soar to $4.00 per gallon. There is fast-growing voter discontent over this price surge. It clearly undermines Trump’s core constituency in the Midwest and South. The White House even bombed Muslim Nigeria in an effort to pander to fundamentalist Christians.

Critics claim the current Gulf War was a massive effort to distract the media from the festering Epstein scandal that threatens to burst anew into flames. Wars are always a good way to divert public opinion from scandals.

But how long will the American public sustain Trump’s wars? Especially as the economy is winding down and the US national debt has reached $39 trillion and rising. The same applies to heavily indebted Israel.

War in Southern Arabia and the Gulf threatens to scupper the world economy. A key factor few have noticed is insurance. The mayhem in the Gulf and Bab-el-Mandeb has made nautical insurance soar. This upsurge could end up as being almost as destructive as the soaring cost of oil.

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

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Bring The Troops Back. End This War Now!

2026-03-30T11:27:31.743-04:00

By Ron Paul - March 30, 2026 at 10:12AM

As we begin a new week, the media is filled with reports that President Trump is ready to approve a US ground operation against Iran, either to seize Iran’s uranium or to attack an island off the country’s coast. Thousands of US troops have sped to the conflict area to await President Trump’s decision.

The President is on the verge of making a serious mistake to add to a series of deadly mistakes that have characterized this terrible war of choice against Iran. A US ground operation against Iran would only achieve the death of thousands of US servicemembers.

Of course, if our Congress was doing its job, this debacle would never have started. Clear signals would have been sent to the President by Congressional leadership that in the absence of an imminent attack on the US, the US President must go to Congress to make the case for taking the country to war. Instead, what we got was a shrug of the shoulders from Capitol Hill that has already cost billions of dollars and too many lives.

As we stand on the verge of a major ground operation, the main stated goals of the war are that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and that the Strait of Hormuz is open for shipping. But both of these things were already true before the war started! Now we are expanding the war to try and reverse the negative consequences of starting the war in the first place!

What was supposed to be a quick “shock and awe” to frighten Iran into capitulation has expanded rapidly and is costing the US dearly. As the New York Times has reported, every US military base in the region has been either destroyed or is severely damaged. Billions of dollars in US military equipment has been destroyed in Iran’s response to the US attack. Just over the weekend, a half-billion dollar US radar aircraft was destroyed at a US base in Saudi Arabia, along with several air tankers.

Iran warned that if the US launched another surprise attack this is how they would respond. The arrogant US Administration was sure they were bluffing.

The American people may not be getting the full picture of this disaster because they are being lied to – again – by the pro-war mainstream media. The war is going wonderfully, they report. We are obliterating Iran, they say. But what is really being obliterated is a complex global supply chain not just in oil and gas, but in the multitude of products related to oil and gas. Products such as the fertilizer needed to feed the world.

Already we are seeing gas riots in some Asian countries. Fuel rationing and stay-at-home orders have been issued. Australia is set to completely run out of diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel in just weeks. That means no food gets delivered. Power generation plants are shut down. Life becomes unlivable for many.

This is like the foolish move to shut down the global economy during COVID. In fact it is worse. This disaster will not end when the bombs stop falling. It will only be getting started. A worldwide depression may be upon us all because of a war of choice that was illegally launched.

When you are in a hole, it’s best to stop digging. Expanding this war to include a ground operation would be a massive digging operation. It needs to stop. Now.

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Who Gets a Seat at the Multipolar Table?

2026-03-28T10:27:33.889-04:00

By Ashes of Pompeii - March 28, 2026 at 10:01AM

The unipolar club is closed. The United States no longer holds the only key. A new table is being set in global politics, and the question isn’t whether the world is becoming multipolar. It aleady is. The question is: who actually gets a seat? Not who is invited. Not who is hoped for. Who earns it.

For decades, there was no table. There was only a throne. The United States sat alone at the head of the global order. Everyone else stood below – either as vassals secured by American protection or as enemies targeted by American power. There were no peers, only subjects and adversaries. But that hierarchy is crumbling. Look at the Philippines. For decades, a treaty ally, a strategic outpost in the American empire. Now, in light of developments in the Persian Gulf, Manila is in direct talks with Beijing to co-develop gas fields in the South China Sea. This isn’t hedging. It’s a recognition that the throne is, if not vacant, certainly vacillating. When a vassal starts negotiating with the hegemon’s rival over disputed territory, it’s not because the protection is “insufficient.” It’s because the hegemon can no longer fully enforce the hierarchy.

The lesson is being written in fire as we speak in the Gulf. The Gulf monarchies, all hosts to American forces, are being pummeled, not despite the bases, but because of them. US air defenses could not stop it all. The message was brutal: alignment with Washington doesn’t always buy safety. It can buy a target. The security umbrella has holes. The guarantee is no longer valid. For now, the Gulf states are sticking with USA, but for how long?

So, who sits at the new table? The United States, China, and Russia are already seated. They have the nuclear arsenals, the economic mass, the global reach. They are poles by default, by history, by capability. But multipolarity demands more than three. It demands regional centers of gravity that can shape their neighborhoods without asking permission.

Enter Iran. Iran isn’t asking for a seat. It is taking one. Through active war, it is proving the criteria. A pole isn’t defined by GDP or population alone. It is also defined by will, resilience, and reach. Can you absorb a blow and strike back? Can you project power beyond your borders without a patron? Can you impose costs on a superpower that make escalation politically unsustainable? Iran, under direct attack, has done all three. It has kept its missile forces operational, activated proxy networks across the region, and triggered the largest global energy shock since the 1970s by closing the Strait of Hormuz. That is leverage. That is pole behavior. Iran looks likely to emerge from the chaos in the Gulf as the regional superpower. A compariuson can be made to Prussia in the 19^th century – smaller population and economy, but its punching power meant it was a full player in the concert of European nations of the time.

And speaking of them, what of Europe? The UK, France, Germany, Italy – the EU as a whole? Europe is an economic titan, a regulatory superpower, a cultural beacon. But is it a pole? France has nuclear weapons and expeditionary ambitions, but it is overextended and domestically constrained. Germany has industrial might but remains a military lightweight, dependent on American security. The UK talks of “Global Britain” but lacks the resources to back the rhetoric. The EU can set standards for smartphones, but it cannot agree on a unified response to a war on its doorstep. Europe has wealth, but not unity; capability, but not will. It remains within the American orbit, even as that orbit weakens. Can we say it is a stakeholder, but not entirely a sovereign actor? If the need is a new USB connector, Europe is the first to get the call. But resolve a geopolitcal issue? Until and unless the current crop of leaders are replaced, Europe might get invited to the dinner, but they will only be allowed into the building through the servant’s entrance.

Now consider who else doesn’t get a seat, despite their wealth or alliances. Japan is an economic giant, a technological powerhouse, a key US ally. But it remains a protectorate, not a pole. Its military is constitutionally constrained; its foreign policy echoes Washington’s. It has influence, but not autonomy. The Arab states, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, have petrodollars and ambition. They broker deals, invest globally, and posture as regional leaders. But when the missiles flew, their US-backed defenses faltered. Wealth without will, or weapons without independence, does not earn a seat. They are customers, not architects.

Then there is Turkey. Ankara desperately wants in. It plays all sides: NATO member, buyer of Russian systems, mediator in Ukraine, power broker in the Caucasus. But no one fully trusts it. Its ambitions outpace its reliability. In a world where poles must be predictable to their allies and formidable to their adversaries, Turkey’s volatility keeps it on the periphery. It is a swing state, not a center of gravity.

And Africa? For politeness, for the optics of inclusion, South Africa or Nigeria might be invited to the multipolar dinner. They have populations, resources, and regional voices. But at a global scale, they remain observers. Neither can project power beyond its subregion, nor shield its neighborhood from external intervention. They are important, but not yet indispensable. Their time may come. But the table being set today is not waiting.

Which brings us to the other contenders. Brazil and Indonesia have massive populations, growing economies, and regional influence. They speak loudly at BRICS and the G20. But influence is not the same as imposition. A pole can set the rules in its neighborhood; a regional power often negotiates them. Can Brazil prevent external powers from intervening in South America if they choose? Can Indonesia deter great-power coercion in Southeast Asia? Currently, they remain arenas where the big three compete, not independent centers of gravity that can dictate terms. They are waiting for an invitation. But at this table, invitations aren’t sent. Seats are taken.

Then there is India. The wildcard. It has the raw materials: a booming economy, a large military, strategic location. It practices autonomy, buying Russian oil while partnering with the US on technology. But true pole status requires more than balance. It requires the capacity to enforce regional stability without outside help. India is moving in that direction, but it remains cautious, hesitant to fully shoulder the burdens of leadership. It is watching, calculating. But in a world where power is proven in real time, hesitation can cost you a seat. For now India is at the table, but as the junior member, whose major leverage is as swing state, not center of power.

So, what actually makes a pole? Iran’s example clarifies the test. It is less about raw totals and more about three things: resilience (can you take a hit and keep fighting?), reach (can you project influence beyond your borders?), and will (are you willing to pay the price for autonomy?). Economy, population, and military strength are the entry fee. But the seat is earned by how you use them under pressure.

By that measure, Iran has earned its place. Japan and the Arab states have the wealth but not the will. Turkey has the ambition but not the trust. Africa has the potential but not the projection. Brazil and Indonesia are still preparing their applications. India is in, but not really a fully consolidated member. Europe assumes it will have a place of honor at the table, but that requires that the others respect it, even if grudgingly. Does Europe currently have that respect?

The old rules no longer apply. In this new order, autonomy is the ultimate currency – and it is earned, not given. The question isn’t who wants a seat. It’s who is willing to do what it takes to claim one. The table is being set. The chairs are limited. And the world is watching to see who stands, and who finally sits.

Reprinted with permission from Ashes of Pompeii.

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The Stealing of America: You’re Not a Citizen—You’re a Revenue Stream for the Power Elite

2026-03-27T14:27:10.916-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - March 27, 2026 at 10:41AM

You’re not imagining it.

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.

Everything feels like it’s designed to take—from your wallet, your time, your freedom.

That’s because it is.

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream—funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime.

You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.

This isn’t government. It’s a business model.

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.

This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to the taxpayer.

An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran to fund its war with the U.S.

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to which most taxpayers will never be invited.

$75 – $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course in the nation’s capital.

$100 million for a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” next to Arlington National Cemetery.

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn to commemorate Donald Trump’s 80^th birthday.

While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of beef instead buy and eat “cheap cuts” like liver.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is left to absorb a higher cost of living driven by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and economic policies that punish the many to benefit the few.

At every turn, the Trump administration’s claims of slashing government spending have translated into even greater expense for the taxpayer with little to nothing to show for it.

All of those DOGE layoffs may have reduced the size of the federal workforce on paper, but in reality they have resulted in taxpayers footing the bill for unemployment benefits instead of salaries.

Trump may have dropped oversight into police misconduct—effectively giving a green light to police violence—but taxpayers will still be forced to pay for every lawsuit and settlement that follows.

In the eyes of Trump and his cohorts, you are not a citizen—you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is this: theft.

We’re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where the government and its corporate allies aren’t stealing from the rich to feed the poor—they’re stealing from the poor, the middle class, and anyone not politically connected to further enrich the powerful.

The result is as predictable as it is devastating: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the American Dream has been replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.

What Americans still fail to grasp is this: if the government can take your property, your income, your privacy, and your freedom at will, you don’t have rights—you have privileges.

And privileges can be revoked.

The American police state, with its surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centers, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons, is not about keeping you safe.

It is about profit.

It is a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers through government agencies and into corporate hands, all under the ever-shifting justifications of “security,” “law and order,” and “national emergency.”

The rationalizations never change.

We are told it is about terrorism, drugs, immigration, public safety, or civil unrest. Today, those justifications have simply been expanded to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad.

But these are pretexts.

The real motive has remained the same for decades: control the population, monetize the system, and keep the money flowing upward.

Follow the money and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: The government isn’t serving you. It’s billing you.

The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education or housing somehow always finds unlimited funds for war.

And the bill always comes due to the American taxpayer.

In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen.

You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed.

Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance or forced labor, the system is designed to extract value from you at every stage of your life.

And when you add it all up, the cost is not merely financial—it is constitutional.

Every dollar poured into this machinery comes at the expense of your privacy, your property, your due process rights, your freedom of movement, and your freedom of speech.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the real bottom line: you are paying for the erosion of your own freedoms.

It is time to defund the police state, dismantle the profit incentives, restore constitutional limits, and return power—and resources—to the people.

Because until that happens, the theft will continue.

And the only question left will be how much is left to steal.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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War and Morality

2026-03-26T16:27:40.978-04:00

By Andrew P. Napolitano - March 26, 2026 at 02:17PM

War is the most horrific series of events upon which any government can engage. It is systematic, industrialized, indiscriminate killing. It kills innocent adults and little girls. It often ruins the post-war lives of the killers. It is young men violently fighting old men’s power games. It is the health of the state.

The war President Donald Trump is waging against the people and the government of Iran is immoral, unconstitutional and unlawful. Yet, because Congress is not doing its job, there appears to be no relief in sight until Trump finds a face-saving way to erase his grave mistake from the public’s long memory.

An act of a person or a government is moral when it conforms to a universal set of principles designed to induce good over evil and justice over injustice. These principles are discoverable by all unimpaired adults exercising reason. Adults should comply with them. Children often know them.

To address this, we start with the primacy of the individual over the state. The individual is morally superior to the state because all persons have natural rights, consciences and free wills; and because in the U.S., “We the people” created the state. We are, of course, free to obey our consciences or to violate them; free to respect the natural rights of others or to transgress them.

When we transgress the natural rights of others, our behavior — whether lawful or unlawful — is immoral. When laws enforce natural rights, laws are valid and moral. When laws themselves transgress natural rights — by, for example, punishing speech or seizing property or restraining free movement or invading personal privacy — the laws themselves are immoral.

The government — which is an artificial creation based on a monopoly of force in a defined geographical area — does not have a conscience or a free will. In a liberal democracy, the government can only morally do what the governed have affirmatively authorized it to do.

Thomas Jefferson, writing in the Declaration of Independence, recognized that the government derives its “just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” From this it follows that if the government exercises powers to which the governed have not consented, then its powers are unjust and their exercise is immoral.

Can the governed give immoral powers to the government? Yes, they can. Suppose the governed consented to a war against another country not based on self-defense but based on their collective hatred of the race or ethnicity or religious beliefs of the inhabitants of that country. Such a war would be immoral, not just because killing not in self-defense is always wrong but because killing based on hatred of immutable characteristics is immoral, even if consented to.

I offer this brief philosophical roadmap to address the morality of Trump’s war. When using deadly force, the government has a heavy burden to overcome. It can only overcome that burden by offering publicly scrutinizable facts to demonstrate its claim of the immediate necessity of killing others who are not engaged in violence against us.

The government has not done so.

In the case of war, the bad to be corrected must be clear and obvious and the good to be achieved must be morally superior to that which impelled the war and one that can reasonably be expected to come about from the war.

The war must be initiated by a lawful authority; its objective must be clearly stated and winnable. And the means — the damage produced — must be proportionate to the evil to be eradicated.

None of these is the case in Trump’s war on Iran. He has not stated a moral goal. Ridding the Iran government of nuclear weapons cannot be considered a moral goal as the mere possession and nonuse of these weapons — which last June Trump stated did not exist — is not immoral. Only their use is.

The mere possession alone of these weapons cannot be a moral basis for invasion as both invading nations — the U.S. and Israel — have nuclear weapons, which the U.S. has used and Israel has not.

At the start of the war, Trump told the Iranian people he would help them to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.” If that is Trump’s purpose, this is a war of aggression, not defense.

Was the war commenced by a legitimate authority to which consent was given by the governed in America? It was not. Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can define an enemy and decide to attack it by declaring war. This war was commenced by the president alone, with no definition or declaration by Congress.

Neither the president, nor his secretary of state, his secretary of defense or his director of national intelligence have articulated the existence of an imminent threat posed by Iran to the U.S.

What could it be? Iran does not have nuclear weapons. Its missiles cannot reach the United States. North Korea, on the other hand, does have nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach Hawaii and California, and its leader is an erratic megalomaniac. Is North Korea next?

Two weeks ago, Trump’s senior counterterrorism official, who saw the same classified data that Trump’s advisers saw, stated affirmatively in his resignation letter that Iran poses no imminent threat to America. His boss, the director of national intelligence, refused to state under oath if Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S.

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is what James Madison feared. He argued that it is vital for the war making and the war waging powers to be separated — as they are in the Constitution — because, if a president could both declare and wage war, he’d be a prince; like the one from whom the colonists seceded. Of what value is a Constitution that is directly dishonored by those sworn to uphold it?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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Boots on the Ground as Israel Sabotages Trump’s 15 Point Peace Plan

2026-03-26T12:27:21.416-04:00

By Kurt Nimmo - March 26, 2026 at 10:09AM

Former Army lieutenant general Keith Kellogg thinks all the US need do to turn the tide in Iran is take Kharg Island. “We don’t necessarily have to send troops into Iran, but we need to capture Kharg Island. We need to do it the way the Romans did. We need to put legions on the ground to secure the territory,” he said.

The Roman legions didn’t face Shahed-136 kamikaze drones. Iran will undoubtedly send a legion of drones, missiles, and rockets against any attempt to occupy Kharg, Qeshm, Kish, Hormuz, or the Greater and Lesser Tunb islands.

According to retired US army lieutenant colonel Earl Rasmussen, a ground invasion of Iran would be a months-long nightmare. If the US sends troops to Iran, including Kharg island, they will suffer heavy losses, potentially expanding the conflict for months or even years. “This implies sending troops there either through the Strait of Hormuz or landing on the other side of the Persian Gulf—from Saudi Arabia. Both would be extremely difficult,” he explained.

Chris Murphy, Deputy Secretary of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said recently a ground invasion of Iran will translate into “thousands of Americans dying.” Murphy and other Democrats pushed for a symbolic vote on a war powers resolution in the absence of Congress adhering to the Constitution and Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 (the exclusive power of Congress to declare war).

Joe Kent, a former United States Army warrant officer, former CIA paramilitary officer, and director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned his post over Trump’s war and the pervasive and corrosive influence of Israel and its lobby, warns a ground war against Iran would “be a disaster.” For his effort to avoid this disaster, Kent has been denounced as a traitor and, in de rigueur fashion, an antisemite. He is currently under investigation for “leaking classified information” and the crime of talking with the media. The FBI is building a case against him.

Trump, his delusional disorder growing worse with each passing day, has decided to send the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, a 2,200-troop force, to West Asia to confront Iran. “A Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) can deliver an initial surge of troops quickly, but seizing and holding key terrain, or sustaining a prolonged fight, would almost certainly require a far larger ground force,” reports ABC News.

If we follow Trump’s illogic, the US does not need to send a single soldier to die on Kharg Island because the US won the war. If you doubt this, as millions of Americans do, then you’re a sucker for fake news, according to the president. Despite this deranged chimera, Trump has proposed a 15 point plan to “end the war,” a plan Iran rejected out of hand. It calls for Iran to dismantle its nuclear program, stop supporting “proxy groups,” agree to put its missile program up for discussion, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

In turn, Iran presented a plan of its own, little different than the plan it initially offered. It demands the closure of all US bases in the Persian Gulf, a guarantee against attacks in the future, reparations for the damage inflicted on Iran, an end to strikes against Hezbollah, lifting all sanctions, and international recognition of Iran’s authority over the Strait of Hormuz.

“Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met,” an Iranian official told Press TV. The official promised continued “heavy blows” against Israel, GCC nations, and US bases in West Asia until a reasonable plan is presented. Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesperson for Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, quipped: “Has the level of your inner struggle reached ‌the ⁠stage of you negotiating with yourself?… People like us can never get along with people like you.”

Following Iran’s rejection of the 15 point plan, the Pentagon confirmed the deployment of troops to West Asia. In response, Iran announced that if US ground troops are sent, it will invade the coastline of the UAE and Bahrain. Additionally, Iran may open a new front on the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb Strait, according to the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim. “If the Americans intend to take action regarding the Strait of Hormuz, they should be careful not to add another strait to their challenges … Iran is fully prepared to escalate the situation.”

Israel and Netanyahu, however, have indicated they are not onboard with Trump’s plan. On March 24, Netanyahu gave an order for the Israeli military to accelerate attacks on Iran, fearing the US would find an off-ramp and stop short of destroying Iran.

Israel’s stated war aim is to severely degrade or eliminate Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and military capacity. However, there is a larger and long-standing objective: the destruction of not only Iran, but Israel’s Arab neighbors as well. This was spelled out in the “Clean Break” report presented to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Zionist neocons (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, and others) were responsible for the document. Rather than pursuing a “comprehensive peace,” the document calls for Israel to “contain, destabilize, and roll-back” Arab nations and Persian Iran.

In 2007, during an interview with Democracy Now, retired four-star general Wesley Clark revealed the ambitious imperial plans of the Bush-Cheney inner circle. “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran,” he said after a visit to the Pentagon.

“The paper identified Iran as the final obstacle to Israeli hegemony, advocating for its isolation and eventual collapse,” writes Ali Sanaullah. “Nearly 30 years later, the policy paper has reached a critical stage. The ongoing war between Iran and Israel, and now the possibility of a direct US invasion of Iran, suggest that we are witnessing and play in action of a long-term geopolitical design.”

Trump’s desperate effort to find an off-ramp is now being sabotaged by Netanyahu and Israel-first Zionists in America. “The Israel Defense Forces were ordered by Netanyahu to strike as many high-value Iranian targets as possible as the US submitted a 15-point peace plan on Tuesday,” reports the Daily Mail. “The directive came after the Israeli prime minister reviewed a copy of Trump’s 15-point plan to end the war. Iranian regime officials, however, rejected the proposal via state media on Wednesday.”

In addition to increasing pressure on Iran, Netanyahu has announced an expansion of his illegal “buffer zone” (cover for annexation) in Lebanon.

Reprinted with permission from Another Day in the Empire.

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