Former Turkish Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s proposal to establish a joint maritime security force—composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Turkey—to secure and temporarily administer the waterway offers this alternative precisely. By leveraging the unique reservoir of political trust these specific nations enjoy across Washington, Tehran, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) capitals, this formula provides a pragmatic, honor-saving way out of the current quagmire.

The primary viability of this proposal rests on the unique diplomatic currency possessed by its core triadic pillars: Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Crucially, these three nations enjoy a rare commodity in modern foreign policy: the explicit trust of the Trump administration. Washington has consistently identified Ankara, Islamabad, and Jakarta as vital, reliable anchors for regional stabilization and international burden-sharing. For an American administration that operates heavily on personal diplomatic trust and high-impact deal-making, a security architecture spearheaded by these three trusted partners satisfies Washington’s strategic demands without requiring direct U.S. military entanglements. It appeals directly to the administration’s preference for bold, disruptive, yet reliable ally-led frameworks.

Equally critical is that this coalition has impeccable bilateral equity with the key regional antagonists. Unlike Western powers, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia maintain highly functional, respectful, and historic relationships with Iran. Tehran does not view these prominent Muslim-majority democracies through the adversarial lens of imperial encirclement. Concurrently, these four nations enjoy deep economic, security, and diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and the broader GCC block. This dual-acceptability is a rare geopolitical asset. Because both sides of the Persian Gulf trust these countries, their joint presence in the Strait of Hormuz cannot be misinterpreted as a hostile vanguard, transforming a volatile maritime choke point into a neutral, stabilized zone of shared stewardship.

File photo. Strait of Hormuz. Public Domain. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Indra Beaufort). Via Picryl.

Furthermore, the international standing of the proposal’s architect, Ahmet Davutoglu, lends immense intellectual and diplomatic weight to the initiative. As a highly respected scholar-statesman, Davutoglu commands a remarkably positive image in international politics, recognized for his deep conceptual understanding of regional equilibrium and institutional diplomacy. His involvement elevates the proposal from a reactionary tactical deployment to a sophisticated, legitimate blueprint for systemic peace. His reputation ensures that the plan arrives on the international stage with immediate intellectual credibility, making it an easier sell to the United Nations Security Council and the broader global community.

Ultimately, Davutoglu’s Hormuz plan succeeds because it builds a bridge over the region’s deep political divides using the mortar of established trust. By designating Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia as guarantors of transit through the Strait, the international community can secure a vital global economic artery within a framework built on mutual respect and operational excellence. It offers Iran a dignified exit from economic isolation, guarantees the GCC’s security, satisfies Washington’s mandate for reliable ally-led solutions, and establishes the foundational muscle memory for a permanent, inclusive Regional Security Forum. In an era defined by polarized deadlocks, this trust-broker formula provides the most viable path toward sustainable maritime and regional stability.

By Alexander Korolev, UNSW Sydney

(The Conversation) – It’s been quite a week for Beijing, with back-to-back visits by the leaders of the United States and Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping has had his hands full with hosting duties, gun salutes, photo opportunities and high-level talks.

Each visit was important in its own way. US President Donald Trump’s state visit was his first to Beijing since 2017. It came at a moment of strained China-US relations, with the US at war in the Middle East and its foreign policy undergoing a massive transformation under Trump.

For Putin, it was his 25th official visit to China. The trip was intended to further consolidate the China–Russia strategic alignment amid global uncertainty. Putin was also keen to secure China’s continued economic lifeline and diplomatic cover as its war with Ukraine grinds on.

And while the timing of the back-to-back visits should not be over-interpreted – Moscow says there was “no connection” between the two – they do reveal a deeper structural shift in global politics.

Beijing’s rising confidence

First, the United States is clearly no longer the most important country in China’s strategic worldview – and Beijing is increasingly willing to show it.

This was visible in Xi’s posturing and negotiating style with Trump. From his rather distant handshake to his dominant body language throughout their meeting, Xi
sent a message: Washington has a limited ability to influence Beijing anymore.

The modest outcomes of their summit reinforced this dynamic. Trump left China without a formal deal, a press conference or a joint communiqué. Nor was there a breakthrough on either Iran or Taiwan.

Putin, meanwhile, met his “good and old friend” Xi and took home some 20 agreements ranging from trade to technology.

The most striking, if not unsettling, moment was Xi’s invocation of the “Thucydides Trap” during his meeting with Trump. This is the idea that a rising power inevitably threatens an established one, risking war.

Xi asked a pointed question:

Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?

Xi has used this concept before, but his directness this time sent a warning: the US risks creating a major crisis if it continues to rely on a containment strategy to counter China’s rise.

In short, Beijing used the Trump visit to signal confidence, autonomy and the fact that Washington is not the only capital that matters to China.

Russia has new usefulness to Beijing

Second, the China–Russia alignment has become less equal, but it has gained greater strategic depth. And Beijing is now using it to put pressure on the US leadership.

During a private garden stroll through the highly secretive Zhongnanhai leadership compound last week, Trump asked whether Xi often brings other world leaders there. Xi replied that such visits are “extremely rare,” but added that “Putin has been here”.

The innocent reading of this exchange is that Xi was simply noting the depth of his personal rapport with Putin. But in the current geopolitical context, it also served as a subtle reminder to Trump that China’s “no limits” partnership with Russia is not rhetorical. Beijing was signalling Moscow remains a privileged strategic partner – and that China has options.

The deeper message is this: if Washington seeks to isolate China, Beijing can lean even more heavily on its relationship with Moscow.

China does not need to help Russia “win” in Ukraine to make this point. What matters is that Beijing has the ability – if it chooses – to bolster Russia’s war effort through economic, diplomatic and long-term technological and energy cooperation. Beijing’s influence now extends well beyond the Indo-Pacific and reaches into Europe in ways Washington cannot ignore.

Xi didn’t give Putin everything he sought during his meeting, though.

With the turmoil in the Middle East cutting off China’s access to Middle Eastern oil and gas, Moscow sensed an opportunity to push ahead on a new pipeline, called the Power of Siberia-2, to bring Russian gas to China.

While Putin and Xi came to a “general understanding on the parameters” of the project, however, no final deal was signed.

China is now in the driver’s seat

Third, China now sees itself as the central node of great-power politics.

For many decades, the United States sat at the apex of the “great triangle”, balancing between China and the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Today, the geometry has flipped. Both Trump and Putin felt compelled to come to Beijing – for stabilisation, reassurance and strategic signalling – even as they confront each other elsewhere.

China is not playing triangular diplomacy in the classic sense. It is not trying to pit Washington and Moscow against each other. Instead, it is positioning itself as the system’s centre: the place where major-power diplomacy must pass, even if the outcomes are uncertain.

China is not at the apex of this arrangement because it is the strongest militarily or economically, but because it has the confidence to engage the US and Russia on its own terms.

File Photo, detail. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin. Public Domain. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Via Picryl

In this new geometry, great-power politics does not revolve around Washington. Increasingly, it runs through Beijing.

Alexander Korolev, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was originally published by Truthout

Perhaps some things should never be spoken — for, when they are, they leave us aghast, in a state of horror. Think here of the ghostly figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” During the height of the war on Iran, Donald Trump threatened: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Those are words that elicit something frightening, terrifying. Let’s be frank. The words, which clearly constitute a genocidal threat, are atrocious and should make all of us want to scream. 

That threat came after Trump also threatened the Iranian government to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Not only is this not “presidential,” but it’s characteristic of someone who has a warped moral compass; it is indicative of someone who has failed to understand the dignity and preciousness of human life. 

Even if never carried out, the threats — and the ones he’s issued since then — speak to the fundamental and despicable depravity and horror of the threat. There are over 93 million people in Iran, which means that Trump is fantasizing about their total annihilation. This is inhuman and ruthless. It is evil. 

To address the issue of Trump’s inept moral compass, I conducted this exclusive interview with Norman Solomon, who is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. Solomon insightfully argues that there is a larger existential issue at stake that speaks to the history of U.S. militarism and its terror spread around the world. Within this context, Trump, who is himself unfit for office, is a symptom of a deeper and unchecked form of U.S. military power.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

George Yancy: What manner of man is Trump?

Norman Solomon: The beyond-huge problem is that he’s president of the United States, and that is what’s so mind-blowing and extremely dangerous about “what manner of man” he is. The fact that Trump can be president — for the second time yet — with control over two branches of the U.S. government and dominance of the Supreme Court, points us urgently to questions about how the fascistic political movement that he leads can be defeated. And a key question is, “What manner of country is the United States?”

Our current crises are in many ways the most extreme and dangerous to human survival in any lifetimes because Trump has shamelessly intensified and boosted the proclivities of all nuclear-age presidents while bottom-feeding and spewing the toxic layers of U.S. society with flagrant racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and contempt for those who are not white rich males. It doesn’t in the slightest lessen the enormity of Trump’s huge guilt in committing crimes against humanity to point out that many of his predecessors have also been guilty of terrible war crimes, including what the Nuremberg tribunal called the “supreme international crime” — a war of aggression. In this century, four presidents have given orders that qualify them to stand in the dock at The Hague to face war crimes charges.

Last summer and this year, Trump launched a completely unprovoked war of aggression against Iran.

President Joe Biden was a direct accomplice in the Gaza genocide as he insisted on sending billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel.

President Barack Obama, who expanded warfare with drones that were experienced by so many people under them as airborne instruments of terror, tripled up to 100,000 the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

President George W. Bush launched and continued a so-called “war on terror” that, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University, has directly resulted in close to 1 million deaths and, including indirect results, has killed at least 4.5 million people.

Yes, Trump is clearly unfit, and that in and of itself is a humungous 24/7 problem for the United States and the rest of the world as long as he’s president. At the same time, his regime would be impossible without its ability to gain and retain near-dictatorial power in many respects because of a dire shortage of democracy in the United States — a shortage that, while severely worsening in the past 15 months, has always been present, no matter what civics textbooks told us.

In your book, War Made Invisible, you open with two quotes by writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley. One quote reads, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” I know about the history of white supremacist propaganda, both in the U.S. and abroad, and how it worked to dehumanize Black people and how white folk internalized that propaganda. This is what made it so easy within the U.S. for many whites to participate in the lynching of Black bodies, treating the gruesome spectacle as a “picnic.” Or think here of the Berlin Conference in the 1880s, in which 14 European nations and the U.S. laid claim to the domination and control of Africa, dividing the continent up among themselves. I would argue that the conceptualization of such a violent colonial project was inextricably linked to the egregious belief that Black people could not govern themselves, that they were “inferior” and lacked true political agency. Talk about Trump’s use of propaganda vis-à-vis his war of choice in Iran, or even, if you like, the propaganda of the military war machine that is the U.S.

Racism and racialist views of humanity, along with pernicious “Western” ethnocentrism, were inherent and implicit in the “war on terror” from the outset. Nearly 25 years later, what Trump has been doing is in many ways an extension of that continuous warfare of aggression, resolutely repackaged as defensive operations.

The U.S. military didn’t bomb Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya or other countries because their residents were people of color. However, the fact that they were people of color made it easier for the U.S. to launch and sustain those wars; easier because of the racial, religious, cultural, and ethnic biases of U.S. news media, elected officials, institutions, and much of the public.

Amid all the differences in how Trump has behaved publicly compared to Biden or Obama or Bush, it’s too easy to forget that the results for huge numbers of people on the other end of Pentagon firepower have been essentially the same. What was done to Afghanistan and Iraq, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, can be forgotten or downplayed only with the aid of varieties of individual biases and structural forgetting that lets the essence of U.S. foreign policy — and much of U.S. society — off the hook. Likewise absolved is the actual overall U.S. role in the world.

I was well into writing War Made Invisible a few years ago before I realized a key reality that has been hidden in plain sight: Virtually everyone killed by the U.S. military during the “war on terror” has been a person of color. To point out that reality seems to be a tacit taboo in U.S. mainstream media and politics. And that implicit taboo goes some distance toward explaining how the dynamics described in that quote from Huxley are operative, rendering it all too easy “to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

That’s a core task of the warmakers who appear at news conferences and give ballyhooed speeches and get interviewed with inordinate deference by U.S. corporate media. Euphemisms and nationalistic blather mask the human realities of mass killing. This simple and momentous systematic distortion of language — twisting and strangling a human language until it’s bent into shape to serve inhuman purposes — goes a long way toward explaining how the dynamics described in that Huxley quote are operative.

While we’re suitably aghast at how Donald Trump or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy words from their propaganda arsenals, the much smoother — and for most people, much less disturbing — rhetoric that came from say Biden or his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin often served much the same desensitizing and euphemistic purposes. 

The U.S. war machinery has been in various settings of high gears for several decades. After the mass horrors of the U.S. wars on Southeast Asia, a kind of hiatus set in during the last half of the 1970s. But a gear-up took place during the 1980s, with warm-up sessions for aggression against Grenada and then Panama.

Whatever lessons had been learned or at least observed about the Vietnam War were cast aside in the jingoistic zealotry of 1991 with the U.S. triumph of the Gulf War against Iraq. At that point, immediately and memorably foreshadowing decades of a hyper-warfare state to come, President George H.W. Bush declared with evident great emotion: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” That was 35 years ago. 

Since then, the list of countries that the U.S. bombed with impunity has gotten longer and longer. Since early last year, Trump has ordered the bombing of seven countries, aside from boats in international waters. Along the way, he has blazed new demagogic trails with candor. His virulent, unapologetic racism, not even bothering to cloak his allegiance to white supremacy, has become normalized.

In my last question, I used the expression “war of choice.” Do you accept this as a legitimate interpretation of the current war in Iran? 

I’m not fond of the phrase “war of choice,” partly because what it’s supposed to mean seems so squirrely. Every U.S. war in the last 80 years has involved a choice from the top of the American government that shouldn’t have been made — that was aggressive and not defensive — routinely based on lies, as I documented with painful details in my book War Made Easy. That book was published in 2005, and the repetition compulsion has remained undisrupted since then.

Presidents have made choices to wage aggressive war, and in that historic context, the phrases “U.S. wars” and “wars of aggression” are redundant. The United States is the world’s preeminent warfare state, by dubious virtue of being not only the most militarily powerful by far, but also by being willing to wantonly use that military might to attack so many countries so often and with such unrelenting violence.

There is a great deal of disagreement regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence over Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. I really want to say: instigated the war with Iran. I say this because if attacking Iran was about Iranians soon acquiring a nuclear bomb, there are experts who have contested that claim, suggesting that “there was no evidence that Iran was close to a nuclear weapon.” 

Israel has at least several dozen nuclear weapons, a fact hardly ever mentioned in U.S. media, and it’s difficult to think of a country that has shown less restraint in the last years. Israel has been literally terrorizing people in Iran and Lebanon lately, and for years — decades really — it has terrorized Palestinian people in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank.

In all the talk about nuclear weapons, rarely do we hear clarity about the agreement that the U.S. and Iran entered into in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement was possible because Iran and the Obama administration made it possible. The deal was working quite well with rigorous and successful inspections, and if it had remained in place, there could have been no doubt about foreclosing Iran’s developing nuclear weapons. But Trump killed the JCPOA in his first term in 2018, and Biden failed to resuscitate it.

Netanyahu is in many ways a grotesque matched set with Trump — completely self-focused and all too eager to cause massive death and suffering. A lot of people who are pro-Israel want to believe that the main problem with Israel is that its prime minister is Netanyahu. I think that’s a convenient illusion. The main problem is the implemented ideology of “Israelism” and its commitment to Jewish supremacy within the country’s ever-expanding de facto borders. A horrific consequence is the ongoing genocidal treatment of Palestinian people.

As you know, on January 27 of this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which keeps track of the Doomsday Clock, said that the world is at 85 seconds to midnight, where midnight means that we are getting closer to a global event that will leave our planet uninhabitable. That is the stuff of nightmares. I know that you don’t possess a magical crystal ball, but where are we headed?

Photo by Farid Karimi on Unsplash

The nuclear arms race is out of control, while nine countries already have nuclear weapons. The United States has led the world toward Armageddon by dismantling arms-control agreements while plunging ahead with a massive nuclear-weapons “modernization” program. Unless we can put a stop to the swiftly escalating U.S. militarism, the Doomsday Clock will keep ticking toward a midnight so horrific that none of us can fully grasp what it would mean.

I was lucky enough to get to know the antiwar and human rights activist Fred Branfman before he died in 2014. More than anyone else, he effectively challenged the mass-murdering U.S. bombardment of the Plain of Jars in Laos during the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

When I asked about hope, he said: “When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around ‘hope.’ Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded — not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.”

This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.

Perhaps a reformer would come along — say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. U.S. analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing — and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029 — and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges — a sustained COVID quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy — the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew — and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below — has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

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But another fear lurks in the background.  Given the state of the airplane — a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear — it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: is it too late to avert catastrophe?

Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics, suppressed virtually all signs of civil society, and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.

So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites — an elected U.S. leader and the North Korean dictator — is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.

Different Beds, Same Dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage — through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption — that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult — by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on U.S. coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34% of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6% and the United States at under 4%). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun — military first — doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.

Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the U.S. economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated one million people.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The U.S. economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while U.S. food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?

A Soft vs. Hard Landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority — the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions — Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, U.S. allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.

Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the U.S. debt —  at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world — could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called — not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the U.S. electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks — such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the U.S. economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign — led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani — it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in U.S. actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upwards, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air — though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit — just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001 — and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.

Copyright 2026 John Feffer

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Several months ago, Paramount and the Ellisons — billionaire father Larry, founder of software company Oracle, and nepo son David, CEO of Skydance — did everything possible to kiss up to Trump. Their pandering started with Paramount’s shake-down settlement with Trump over his frivolous lawsuit against CBS, enriching him by $16 million.

Paying off this extortion demand wasn’t enough. Paramount canceled Stephen Colbert’s Emmy award-winning Late Show, which has been the highest-rated late-night talk show for nine consecutive seasons. As one of his most outspoken persistent critics, Colbert annoyed thin-skinned Trump. With humor, he called mocking attention to the president’s lies, stupidity, and cruelty. The aggrieved president called for Colbert’s cancellation on many occasions, even demanding he be “put to sleep.”

The cancellation came just two days after Colbert criticized Paramount‘s settlement with Trump, calling it a “big fat bribe” to buy approval of the merger with Skydance. Supporting Colbert’s claim, the merger was ratified one week later by the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Late Show ends this Thursday leaving over 200 people unemployed, including my son and nephew.

Colbert remains undiminished and will certainly rise again if he chooses, but Paramount and the Ellisons humiliated themselves by exhibiting an un-American willingness to sacrifice free speech as well as Colbert‘s network-enhancing classiness, empathy and intelligence for — pardon the cliché — money, influence, and power.

The cancellation was still not enough. Further groveling was revealed. The Paramount Skydance merger included a side deal to run $20 million in public service announcements promoting causes supported by Trump. Skydance also pledged that it will eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion practices and install a Trump-aligned “ombudsman” to root out “bias” at CBS News.

In yet a further capitulation, David Ellison installed anti-woke, anti-trans writer Bari Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic,” as editor-in-chief of CBS News. This occurred after the merger was approved but as one media executive said, “They just wanted to hire Bari as a symbolic gesture to Donald Trump to make sure they got that deal through.”  

With no experience directing television coverage, Weiss’ incompetence was on full display last week as her hand-picked news anchor was forced to cover Trump‘s trip to China while stranded one hundred miles away in Taiwan. Colbert was quick to ridicule the failure: “All the news teams are on the ground in China to cover this epic and historic summit,” he said. “All except one because our CBS News colleague Tony Dokoupil is being forced to broadcast from Taiwan after failing to get a Chinese visa in time. Well, that is disappointing, but it does fit in with their slogan: CBS News, when events happen, we’re at most one country away.”

Ideologically, Weiss pushed CBS News to the right. She chose MAGA-friendly Dokoupil as the nightly news anchor. He hosted a special on the illegal unjustified Iran war, cheering the administration and downplaying the military deaths. The network became a pro-war, “propaganda-palooza,” according to one CBS News staffer. Journalist Alicia Hastey left CBS and lamented that stories increasingly were “evaluated not just on their journalistic merits but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

CBS employees fear censorship and propaganda will replace independent journalism, especially considering Weiss’ history of downplaying Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the Ellison family’s deep ties to Israel. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got more than a softball interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes last week, he got to choose his interviewer. High profile anchor Anderson Cooper departed 60 Minutes as staffers fretted that Weiss’ control of CBS News amounted to “dropping a grenade” in the newsroom.

Just as he crushed the journalistic independence of CBS, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison will similarly suppress and dismantle CNN to further extend the Ellisons’ media domination. Regulatory approval of the merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of CNN, hinges on Trump’s approval. And Trump hates CNN, continuously calling it “fake news” and insulting its White House reporter Kaitlin Collins.

David Ellison promised Trump “sweeping changes” at CNN as part of his Warner Bros. takeover. This included consolidation of CNN with CBS, possibly run by Weiss. CNN will become more Trump-friendly. Larry Ellison even talked with the White House about “axing certain CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.”

Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth — the Islamophobic crusader — ranted against “unpatriotic” CNN at a recent news conference and ended by saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network the better.” Trump has repeatedly gushed over the Ellisons in recent months, telling people that he expects changes to CNN with their ownership.

If Trump succeeds in remaking or destroying CNN, the malicious president will have effectively dismantled one of the two cable-news networks that covers him even slightly skeptically. Enabled, he will turn to fresh targets, until everyone in the kingdom submits. Yet the Ellisons’ pathetic fawning props up a severely wounded president.

Trump‘s approval numbers are tanking while inflation is sky-rocketing; his corruption level is beyond stratospheric; his war with Iran is a strategic disaster. He falls asleep at national security meetings after posting paranoid rants all night. Despite his glaring weakness, he still controls — with lackeys in charge — once-independent regulatory and investigative agencies the FCC and the Department of Justice [DOJ].

Dependent on regulatory approval of their growing media empire, the Ellisons’ Trump-appeasement machine continued in high gear, operated by David’s coddler father Larry — a heavy Trump contributor, an Israeli army donor, and a 2020 election denier.

In turn, Trump played a major role in facilitating a deal that gave Larry Ellison’s Oracle a significant ownership stake and operational control over TikTok, the addictive social media platform. This acquisition marks another tightening of the right-wing grip on America’s media power centers by a small group of billionaire men.

Alarmingly, the Ellisons join a mere five of the richest Americans who have infiltrated and ensnared the most popular social media sites and a national newspaper: Elon Musk (X), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, Instagram and Threads), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google, YouTube) and Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post). Together these billionaires — along with Robert Murdoch (Fox News) — dominate worldwide communication channels. The news is not safe with these hyper-capitalists in charge.

Bezos has culled viewpoints at the Washington Post that might offend Trump while firing 30% of its employees and cutting back its international coverage. After Trump threatened the Meta owner with prison if he crossed him, Zuckerberg took steps to make Facebook friendlier to MAGA: he abandoned third-party fact-checking, dropped restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and appointed Trump supporters, like Dana White — Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO — to Meta’s executive board. Musk turned X into a vehicle for propagandizing far-right politics across the globe.

“It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption,” said Steven Buckley, lecturer in media at the University of London. If the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is corruptly finalized, the Ellisons would not only control CNN and CBS but also streaming services, including HBO and Paramount+, with a combined 200 million–plus subscribers.

Paramount Skydance would also become the biggest movie studio in the world with a formidable base of franchises that include Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Top Gun, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Mattel licenses like Barbie and much more. Their stranglehold would create a “Hollywood jobs apocalypse.” Adding TikTok’s 170 million–plus users, Paramount Skydance approaches a position of monopolistic media dominance. This would be dangerous for democracy and, given the Ellisons closeness to Trump authoritarianism, that is the point.

In David Ellison’s most egregious democracy-disrupting move, he compelled CBS News personnel, including its chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes and former “Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, to ”honor” Trump at a private dinner two nights before the Correspondents’ dinner. The thwarted attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner, itself an unconscionable journalistic pandering to Trump, moved attention away from the Ellisons’ corruption-inducing event.

Among the guests, in a flagrant conflict of interest, was Todd Blanche — acting Attorney General and Trump toady — whose DOJ antitrust division will review the power-hungry Ellisons’ acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons’ sycophantic party was intended to show Trump how much their journalists liked him. CBS News chief Bari Weiss sat alongside David Ellison at Trump’s table.

The unscrupulous Ellisons’ and their CBS News underlings’ supine prostration before the altar of Trump was a contradiction beyond parody:  billionaire media owners honoring the authoritarian political leader whose administration holds regulatory power over their merger ambitions. This fawning spectacle mocked the principles of a free press and grotesquely betrayed the First Amendment as journalists celebrated the president who works to silence them.

Trump demonizes reporters that scrutinize him. He sued multiple news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the BBC, for coverage he didn’t like; he defunded PBS, NPR, and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which shut down. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Media Matters over its critical coverage. At Trump’s directive, the FCC pushed for the Trump-critical comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Myers to be taken off the air. The DOJ prosecuted reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for the crime of reporting on an anti-ICE protest at Cities Church in St Paul. Countless regular Minnesotans have been harassed, pepper-sprayed, physically attacked, or taken into custody for protesting the ICE raids in their state as well. The examples of Trump’s attacks on free speech are endless. Trump has criminalized critical journalism.

Yet the Ellisons — owners of CBS and potentially CNN if the Warner Bros. Discovery merger is approved — continue to placate Trump. This merger is a catastrophe for unbiased journalism. “The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery,” warned Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.”

“Paramount Warner Bros. is not a done deal,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a press statement. “These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny — the California Department of Justice has an open investigation. There are red flags everywhere.” Bonta made clear that he’ll scrutinize the Paramount Warner Bros. cartel with attention to antitrust criteria that will likely be absent at Trump’s corrupt DOJ. AG Bonta and the group State Defenders of Democracy will hold a #BlocktheMerger Zoom town hall on Thursday May 21.

States can challenge the merger even after federal regulators cynically wave it through. Under the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, states retain the power to fight monopolistic mega-mergers with the nation’s primary antitrust weapon — a law specifically designed to prevent corporations from growing so massive that they crush competition, consolidate power, and dominate entire industries.

An open revolt in Hollywood backs the anti-merger fight. More than 5,000 marquee-name actors and other film industry players, including Bryan Cranston, Ben Stiller, Kristen Stewart, Joaquin Phoenix, JJ Abrams and the deals’ most vocal opponent Mark Ruffalo have signed an open letter opposing the corporate consolidation. The letter warned it would lead to “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer production jobs, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”

Opposition to this merger also erupted inside Paramount Skydance. Using their power as Paramount shareholders, a pair of press organizations — Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — are demanding, under a Delaware law, that David and Larry Ellison produce records related to both recent acquisitions.

The two investor groups charged that Larry Ellison promised “favors” to the Trump administration to win regulatory approval, which constituted “a breach of fiduciary duties.”  Those favors included “sweeping” staff changes at CNN — ousting anchors that Trump despises. The shareholders expressed “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange” that opens up the company to a “range of potential civil and criminal penalties.”

Photo by Viktor Hesse on Unsplash

“We are participating in corporate governance to protect the freedom of the press and protect our investment,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “When you’re overpaying dramatically for assets, promising the president of the United States you’re going to damage the product, these are not reasonable business judgements. This appears to be just blatant corruption.”

One final pressure point exists to stop the merger. Paramount has admitted that nearly 50 percent of the shares in its expanded company will be held by the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. FCC rules prohibit foreign investors from owning more than 25 percent of any company that holds broadcast licenses. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez has publicly demanded a rigorous review, specifically citing concerns about foreign-government influence over the news. It’s no stretch of the imagination, for example, to believe that the Ellisons won’t look kindly on CBS or CNN news coverage that’s critical of fossil fuels.

Urgent action is needed to stop the Ellisons’ media coup. Investigations must be completed, lawsuits filed, and court injunctions issued. The toxic cloud of corruption engulfing the Ellisons’ purchase of Paramount and their pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery is blatantly obvious. The silencing of Colbert, the Trumpification of CBS News, and their threatened dismantling of CNN are part of Trump’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and commandeer control over American media. A lifeline exists outside of Trump’s control to stop this looming disaster, but State Attorneys General must act fast.

( San Diego Union Tribune ) – On Monday, two assailants, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, the site of both a mosque and school, killing three adults. It was both a hate crime against a house of worship and a school shooting.

In 1992, I stepped foot in the Islamic Center of San Diego for the first time. As an undergraduate student at UC San Diego, I was there to announce the creation of the Muslim Student Association, numbering only five students then.

On April 24, I returned to the same center to give a lecture on modern Arab identity as a professor, alongside its imam, Taha Hassane. I began that lecture by stating how far as a community we had come. I could never have imagined the number of students at UCSD’s Muslim Student Association reaching the hundreds, or that an entire cafeteria at Revelle College would serve Halal food.

In 1991, we never had to worry about a shooter attacking our mosque. However, in April, I told the audience we were never more vulnerable to such an attack, particularly as rising Islamophobia during the war on Iran made our safety precarious. Not even a month later, my worst nightmare materialized with the recent shooting.

I anticipated an attack on the Islamic Center as a historian. Around the world, in the U.S., reaching to the San Diego area, Islamophobia erupted after 9/11, and there is no defining moment that will lead to its end.

For example, the investigators recovered anti-Islamic writing in the car of the attackers. The words “hate speech” reportedly were written on one of the firearms used in the attack. The writing on the firearms is not an isolated incident in the history of Islamophobia.

In a March 2019 article for Al Jazeera English, I wrote about an Australian-born man who attacked two mosques in New Zealand, killing 50 people. His guns were inscribed with Islamophobic racial slurs such as “kebab remover,” commonly invoked by the European far-right, where all foods coming from the Middle East are equated with Muslim immigration.

Then, in April 2019, I wrote an article for The Washington Post about a 19-year-old student who walked into a synagogue in Poway and opened fire on the congregation that was commemorating the last day of Passover, killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring three others. Now, two teenagers attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego prior to the Eid al-Adha celebration, marking the end of the Hajj pilgrimage.

The Poway attack was an antisemitic hate crime, but the White assailant appears to have also sought to attack both Jews and Muslims in order to protect White people. He also claimed responsibility for a March 24, 2019, arson attack on the Islamic Center in Escondido, inspired by the shooting rampage in New Zealand.

The Islamophobia that animated the 2019 attacker in Escondido is why, in April 2026, I warned the Islamic Center of San Diego congregation of a possible attack, which tragically materialized just three weeks later.

The attacker of the Poway synagogue was a student at Cal State University San Marcos, where I teach. He was studying nursing in a building that’s just across from mine. A person who was studying how to help people live ended up a killer. I invoke this student on my campus as a reminder that antisemitism and Islamophobia are a continuum of the specter of hate, not distinct forms of racism.

Photo by Dohyuk You on Unsplash

I concluded my speech at the Islamic Center of San Diego, lamenting that neither on my campus, nor in the entire San Diego area, is there a single class or program devoted to the history of both Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, a class I have been fighting for since 2012, when I moved to the area.

The point of such a class is to teach how German Americans and Japanese Americans were treated during World War II. However, in the case of Muslim Americans, there is no Berlin or Tokyo to surrender and declare that war is over, allowing for a “rehabilitation” of those Americans. During that conflict, their ancestral homes were nation-states.

In this 2026 article on Islamophobia that I wrote for the Union-Tribune, as in 2019, if I may presume to speak on behalf of our community, all we seek is a degree of banality in American society. However, any Muslim, from Morocco to Indonesia, is subject to discrimination in the U.S. as long as America wages wars in the Middle East, which appears never-ending.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from the San Diego Union Tribune

Warnings to Taiwan, Not Iran

Chinese state media emphasised progress in bilateral trade and economic talks during the summit, rather than releasing a statement from Beijing saying it would pressure Tehran over its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, China’s leader Xi warned that the question of Taiwan was the key issue in the two sides’ bilateral relationship, avoiding any public commitment to help the US reopen the Strait, and keeping the diplomatic focus on Chinese concerns in its own region.

Indeed, the US appeared to be the one making concessions to China. Shortly after leaving the US-China summit, President Trump warned Taiwan against declaring independence from the mainland, telling press: “I’m not looking to have somebody go independent, and you know, we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that. I want them to cool down, I want China to cool down.” Taipei responded by stating it was already “sovereign and independent,” but signalling that it would maintain the status quo between itself and China, likely to prevent further escalation.

On Iran, Trump stated that Xi informed him that China would not sell Iran any weapons and wanted to help end the conflict. Meanwhile, China’s foreign ministry issued a statement calling for peace in the Gulf but without making any similar kind of warning to its ally Iran that Trump delivered to Taiwan, a longstanding US partner in East Asia. Regarding Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman only said that: “It is important to reopen the shipping lanes as soon as possible to respond to the call of the international community and jointly keep the global supply chains stable and unimpeded.”

Iran, US Trade Blows as China Watches For Now

Following the summit, both Iran and the US appear to be gearing up for a continued blockade of one another in the Persian Gulf. Iran also retains a “very moderate if not small capability to continue strikes” in the Middle East, per US Central Command head Admiral Brad Cooper in testimony to the US Senate last week. On May 17, the UAE reported a drone strike hit its Barakah nuclear power plant without naming the party behind the attack. The strike caused a fire at an electricity generator. China appears pleased that it has avoided entangling itself in this dispute, while continuing to offer its vague Four Point Plan as the basis for peace talks and the re-opening of the Strait.

China appears to be negotiating separately from the US with Iran to allow some of its shipping to pass through the Strait unmolested, taking advantage of the fraying Iran-US ceasefire while this holds. As a goodwill gesture before the US-China leadership summit, Iran allowed a Chinese super-tanker to pass through the Strait without charging it a toll. China opposes Iran’s plan to set a toll on maritime traffic through the Strait, and Tehran may have to offer its largest oil customer’s shipping some form of exemption from this charge if it pushes ahead with it during the ongoing US-Iran peace talks. But for now, China continues a hands-off approach to the Iran war despite meeting with Trump.

Conclusion

Nevertheless, damage to China’s economy from the blockade is growing, meaning Beijing is likely to conduct some behind-the-scenes diplomatic negotiations ahead of President Xi’s September visit to the US. China is likely watching both sides for signs of war weariness before it steps in. It may calculate that the White House will be more amenable to a peace deal later this summer, as the November 3, 2026, US midterms start to loom ever closer, and the war’s inflationary toll on the US economy grows.

File photo. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Public Domain. Via Picryl.

Separately, China can choose to exert influence with Iran when it decides — as it conspicuously did not during the recent leadership summit — the costs of inaction are exceeding the limits of what it is willing to bear. Beijing can cut oil purchases from Iran as a non-public signal that it wants Tehran to grant the US concessions. Iran is not a Chinese satellite, but Tehran sends about 90% of the oil it exports there, giving Beijing significant economic leverage. US intelligence estimates even with Chinese oil purchases, Iran can only hold out against the US naval blockade for three to four months. Chinese pressure is therefore likely to be a decisive factor in bringing Iran to the table with the US later this year, when Beijing judges a deal will be most possible.

Volker Türk
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
ohchr-registry@un.org

Khaled El-Enany
Director-General, UNESCO
dg.office@unesco.org

Francesca Albanese
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the oPt
hrc-sr-opt@un.org . . .

Your Excellencies, High Representative, Special Rapporteurs, and Mr. Secretary:

I write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America to express grave concern about the widening pattern of attacks on higher education infrastructure and the targeting of scholars, academics, and students across the Middle East, and especially in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. These attacks appear to reflect an increasingly dangerous interpretation of universities, research facilities, and academic expertise as “dual use” and therefore targetable. We reject this logic in the strongest terms. Universities, laboratories, libraries, classrooms, faculty offices, student dormitories, and the scholars and students who inhabit them are quintessentially civilian. Treating them as “dual use” or presumptively suspect, especially on the grounds that knowledge itself may have military applications, gravely undermines international humanitarian law and the principle of distinction at its core.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,600 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

The principle of distinction requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish at all times between civilians and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives. Attacks must be directed only at military objectives. Under Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, civilian objects are all objects that are not military objectives, and military objectives are limited to objects that, by their nature, location, purpose, or use, make an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances at the time. This definition of civilian objects is widely accepted as a statement of customary international law and thus binding on all parties to a conflict. This rule articulates the legal barrier that protects civilian life, civilian institutions, and the social worlds that make survival possible in wartime.

That barrier is now being eroded by an expansive and legally dangerous use of “dual use” reasoning. International law does not recognize “dual use” as an independent category that automatically transforms civilian objects into military objectives. Yet in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, we see a disturbing pattern in which educational institutions are treated as targetable because they may include laboratories, technical training, engineering expertise, data infrastructure, or scholars whose knowledge could theoretically be put to military use. This reasoning has no limiting principle. If accepted, it would expose every research university, every science department, every engineering faculty, and every medically oriented research center in a conflict zone to attack. Academic knowledge is not, by definition, a weapon.

In Gaza, this logic has accompanied the near-total destruction of the higher education sector. MESA has previously documented the killing of thousands of students and hundreds of educational staff, the destruction of all major universities in Gaza within the first 100 days of the war, and the devastation of the physical infrastructure necessary for higher education, including laboratories, libraries, classrooms, and technological systems. The destruction has not been limited to buildings. It has included the killing of university presidents, deans, professors, lecturers, librarians, researchers, and students whose work sustained Palestinian intellectual life.

In Lebanon, two academics were killed in an Israeli drone strike at the Lebanese University while leaving a campus meeting convened to organize remote education for students displaced or endangered by the conflict. This illustrates the dangerous spread of the same lethal logic the Israeli military applied in Gaza to Lebanon. Israel reportedly claimed that one of the scholar’s scientific expertise had been used for military purposes. The consequence of normalizing such a claim would be chilling: physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists, physicians, and other academics could be stripped of civilian protection because their expertise is considered useful, or potentially useful, to a military actor.

In Iran, MESA has documented attacks on universities, research centers, medical science facilities, schools, and technical institutes. In a letter dated 22 April 2026 MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom documented that, between 28 February and 30 March, twenty-one universities in Iran were attacked by U.S.-Israeli strikes, damaging 154 buildings and sites across campuses, including major institutions in Tehran and provincial academic centers. The letter further describes damage to research facilities, medical science infrastructure, dormitories, libraries, laboratories, and data systems. MESA also notes that U.S.-Israeli claims that certain institutions were “dual use” not only undermines the principle of distinction but also stretches the concept of “dual use” in ways that disregards proportionality and fails to account for the direct, indirect, and cumulative harm to civilians.

We are particularly alarmed by the apparent embrace by the United States of an expansive Israeli interpretation of “dual use” for targeting purposes. When the United States adopts, supports, enables, or fails to repudiate a theory under which civilian universities and scholars become legitimate targets because of their fields of study, research capacity, or alleged contribution to a broader war effort, it helps normalize a doctrine that puts academic life across the region, and, if the same logic were to be applied elsewhere, the world, at risk. Such a doctrine is incompatible with the protective purpose of international humanitarian law. By collapsing the distinction between civilian intellectual infrastructure and military objectives, the U.S. is now extending the Israeli practices that have converted education itself into a field of war.

The effects are cumulative and long-lasting. The destruction of higher education infrastructure does not end when a strike ends. It deprives students of education, severs communities from professional training, destroys archives and laboratories, displaces faculty, interrupts medical and scientific research, and attacks the social capacity of a people to rebuild. The killing of scholars and students likewise destroys more than individual lives. The consequences of the widescale targeting of, and attacks on, scholars and higher education infrastructure disrupts the continuity of intellectual communities, the transmission of knowledge, and the civilian future of entire societies. Scholars have described such campaigns as scholasticide: the deliberate destruction of educational institutions and the intellectual life they sustain.

We therefore call upon international and regional organizations, including the United Nations, UNESCO, the European Union, and all states with influence over the parties to these conflicts, to condemn the targeting of universities, research facilities, schools, scholars, academics, and students in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. We urge them to reject any interpretation of “dual use” that treats academic expertise, technical knowledge, or civilian research capacity as sufficient grounds for targeting. We also call upon all scholarly associations globally to join us in condemning the dangerous precedent set by the rampant targeting of higher education infrastructure and personnel across the Middle East.

Sincerely,
Ussama Makdisi
MESA President
Professor, University of California, Berkeley

This article was originally published by Truthout

In 2025, the Trump administration successfully pushed Congress to enact nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts over the coming decade, which the Congressional Budget Office analysis estimated would result in 10 million people losing health coverage by 2034. More recently, it has blocked any and all efforts to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credit subsidies for people buying insurance on the state exchanges. In demanding that the GOP leadership in Congress prevent at all costs a continuation of the expanded ACA tax credits, Donald Trump intimated that his administration was on the verge of proposing a better and more affordable health care reform to replace the ACA system.

Nothing of that nature has materialized. Instead, the administration’s health reforms have been shockingly small-bore — a handful of measures to lower the costs of prescription drugs, more incentives for consumers to create health savings accounts, a rollback of regulations on catastrophic coverage plans — thus, making it easier for younger, healthier, patients to buy junk insurance, but doing nothing for those who are older or suffer from chronic conditions.

Over the past months, even these baby steps have stalled out, with the GOP seemingly and inexplicably resigned to the fact that it will be heading into the midterm elections as the party that is putting health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. Early in the Iran war, Trump was caught saying that the federal government could no longer afford its massive Medicare commitments now that the country was engaged in an expensive overseas conflict, and it would have to roll back responsibility for paying for this bedrock safety net program onto the states. 

This represents a stunning reversal of government efforts to bring health care access to millions who had previously lacked it. In 2020, when Congress expanded tax credits during the pandemic for Americans accessing health insurance plans through the ACA, millions of Americans were finally able to access health insurance at reasonable rates through the state exchanges.

Expanding the tax credits patched a hole through which large numbers of Americans had fallen. Under the original provisions of the ACA, anyone at or under 138 percent of the federal poverty level would qualify for Medicaid; and anyone between 138 and 400 percent of the poverty level would be able to access tax credits on a sliding scale to help them cover the cost of health insurance. None of these recipients would be expected to pay more than 10 percent of their income on insurance.

Expanding tax credits did two things: It ended what advocates had taken to calling the “affordability or eligibility cliff” — a situation in which, if your income went even one dollar over the 400 percent of the poverty line limit, you suddenly lost all tax credits and your insurance costs soared virtually overnight. It also lowered the maximum payment for credit recipients from 10 percent of their income to 8 percent if they bought a so-called “silver plan” with relatively low deductibles.

Taken together, these new terms were enough to bring millions of families under the health insurance umbrella, and it allowed millions of additional families, who previously had to opt for catastrophic insurance with huge deductibles, to access the silver plans.

“It’s an advanceable, refundable tax credit,” Anthony Wright, executive director of the health advocacy organization Families USA, explained to Truthout. “And it was tied to the point of sale.” In other words, people buying health insurance wouldn’t have to fork out thousands of dollars and then wait for a tax refund. Instead, the calculated refund would be applied to the cost of insurance from the beginning.

Congress initially passed these credits in 2021 and then, under the Inflation Reduction Act, extended the credits for another three years in 2022. Last year, despite a congressional majority in support of extending the credits, GOP leadership, at Donald Trump’s urging, stood firm against marshalling the votes needed to ensure their continuation. The affordability cliff was suddenly resurrected. As a result, from January of this year, millions of people renewing their insurance policies suddenly found themselves facing far higher bills. According to Wright, for a young person just above the Medicaid cut-off, that meant finding an extra $50 or $100 a month, itself an oftentimes insuperable obstacle for someone scrabbling just to cover their basic bills. For many older persons at the higher income side of the subsidy spectrum, it in many cases meant monthly insurance bills rising by more than $1,000, according to Wright. For some families, he says, it rose by upwards of $2,000, the equivalent of adding a second mortgage payment to families’ monthly bills.

“Congress made deliberate decisions to have premiums spike, to have more people uninsured or underinsured,” Wright argued. “People who are older, they are the ones who got socked in a big way.” 

Predictably, following Congress’s failure to renew the expanded tax credits, in the first months of 2026 state exchanges calculated that up to 2 million people dropped coverage, and millions more shifted to lower cost plans with far higher deductibles, some in the $10,000 a year range. “So it really is a different product; they’re paying more and getting less,” explained Wright.

More recently, as additional insurance plans come up for renewal, and as more and more people fall months behind on their premium payments and, in consequence, get dropped by insurers, the numbers predicted to end up uninsured have soared. The New York Times published data showing that over the next couple of years, those on ACA-backed insurance plans would likely decline from 24 million to 19 million, a drop of more than 20 percent. In some states, such as Georgia, the exchanges are already reporting falloffs far in excess of 35 percent.

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California has stepped in to at least partially replace the lost federal tax credits for hundreds of thousands of lower-income ACA customers who use the Covered California marketplace. But even there, according to Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, as of March 2026, there were 135,000 fewer marketplace users than a year earlier. That represents a 7 percent drop in coverage, and Altman believes the numbers will only grow over the coming months. She said there are “farmers, gig workers, small businessmen who need the marketplace because they don’t have access to employment-based coverage,” and yet these are precisely the individuals now being hit by the rollback of subsidies: people too affluent to qualify for California’s partial subsidies, but income-insecure enough to be pushed into financial hardship by increases in premiums. “This middle-income group is the only part of the health care system where we are asking the consumer to pay the full price,” Altman argued.

Add up the cuts to Medicaid, the cuts to federal ACA tax credits, and the escalating rhetoric about further paring back Medicare — despite growing popular support for Medicare for All — and “collectively we are looking at millions of people going uninsured across the country as a result of federal policy. It has ripple effects through the economy and for health care providers,” said Altman. More people, she fears, will skip vaccines, go without preventative care, including cancer screening, forgo wellness checks. Eventually, as was the case before the ACA expanded health care access, those people will present at hospital emergency rooms with untreated diseases that, had they had access to regular doctors’ visits, would have been managed far earlier.

“Our system,” said Altman, “will bear the cost of less healthy people.”

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