The Houthis bombed Riyadh’s international airport on Saturday, killing 12 people and wounding 302. On Sunday, they struck King Khalid International Airport again, causing unspecified injuries.

Early on Monday, the Houthis hit King Fahd International Airport outside of Dammam. They also struck the Aramco Shedgum gas plant its oil installation at Tanajib in the Eastern Province.

The Saudis branded the airport attacks “war crimes,” since they targeted civilian objects. This is correct.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but it is maybe worth noting that the Saudis and their allies have bombed Sanaa International Airport in Yemen repeatedly, including this past summer.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called Saudi Foreign Minister Farhan Bin Sultan on Sunday to offer Iran’s efforts at mediating a settlement between the Saudis and the Houthis. It was the first such Iran-Saudi contact since this summer, before the current Houthi campaign to break the Saudi siege of north Yemen began.

The Houthis’ ability to get past Saudi missile defense shields is unexpected and points to heretofore unknown Saudi weaknesses. Likewise, the recent Houthi advances at Mocha on the Red Sea coast and at Taiz reveal hidden strengths of the movement.

The Helpers of God took over most of Yemen in 2014-2015. In spring 2015 then-Defense Minister Mohammed Bin Salman launched an all-out air war on the group in conjunction with the United Arab Emirates and several other countries, including Jordan. The UAE committed troops to pushing the Houthis back out of the southern port of Aden, coordinating with southern secessionists. The war lasted seven years and at the end of it, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had nothing to show for it. They sometimes fell to fighting each other in Yemen instead of the Helpers of God. In the meantime, they bombed military and civilian areas and infrastructure in Saadeh in the north, in Sanaa and at the port of Hodeidah intensively and frequently. At one point Riyadh tried to impose an oil embargo on Yemen, which would prevent civilians from driving to market to buy food.

In April 2022 the Saudis and the Houthis signed a truce agreement.

But Saudi Arabia continued to back the tiny internationally recognized government of Yemen, which deployed troops against the Houthis. The Helpers of God decided this summer that, with the weakening of the Saudis by the Iranian riposte to the Israeli-US war on Tehran, it was time to take Riyadh down a notch.

( Electronic Frontier Foundation ) – If the Arab Spring was defined by optimism about what the internet could do, the years since have been marked by a more sober understanding of what it takes to defend it. 

Back in 2011, the term “digital rights” was still fairly new. While in the decades prior, open source and hacker communities—as well as a handful of organizations including EFF—had advocated for digital freedoms, it was through the merging of disparate communities from around the world in the 2000s that digital rights came to be more clearly understood as an extension of fundamental human rights.

In 2011, we observed that there were only a few organizations focused on digital rights in the region. Groups like Nawaat, which emerged from the Tunisian diaspora under the Ben Ali regime; the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, formed to promote the creative use of technology; and SMEX, which was initially created to teach journalists and others about social media but has grown to become a powerful force in the region, led the way. Since that time, dozens of organizations have emerged throughout the region to promote freedom of expression, innovation, privacy, and digital security.

Understanding how the digital rights movement evolved in the Middle East and North Africa requires a closer look at the communities that shaped it, and the organizations that are carrying on the fight today. Perspectives from people and organizations that were key to these efforts offer critical insight into how the movement has grown and what challenges lie ahead.

Reem Almasri, a senior researcher and digital sovereignty consultant, says that:

‘Digital rights’ emerged as a term around the Arab Spring, when the internet was still a fairly unregulated space, we were still trying to figure out the tech companies’ policies, and force governments to look at the internet as a fundamental right like water and electricity.

But then the need to converge digital rights to everyday rights—economic, political, social rights—and to connect it to geopolitics has started to be thought about, and to be in discussion as well. And to not look at digital rights as a separate field from everything else that’s affecting it, from the geopolitical context.

Mohamad Najem, who co-founded SMEX in 2008 and has led it to become the largest organization in the region, told me that, at the time, “Nobody gave [social media] a lot of attention in our region.” Their work was “a positive approach to social media, how we can democratize sharing information, how we can share more from civil society, change people’s minds, et cetera.”

“After that phase,” he continues, “we can think about 2012-2013—after the Arab Spring, as an organization we started looking at the infrastructure of the internet, and how freedom of expression and privacy are affected. That’s when we started looking more at what we call digital rights.”

Towards Tech Accountability

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, social media companies moved from a largely hands-off approach to governance toward more formalized—and often opaque—content moderation systems. Platforms expanded their trust and safety teams and began working more closely with civil society through trusted partnerships in the region and globally. But, Mohamad Najem says:

After the expansion of tech accountability itself and the adaptation of tech companies, we’ve noticed that it’s not taking us anywhere. Gradually we’ve come to a new phase where it feels like tech accountability is an economy by itself that is not leading to real results. So the next phase for us at least and maybe for others in global majority communities is how we can focus on digital public good, how we can push more governments, private and public institutions to adopt more open source software, to look at the ecosystem and understand the US threats happening now, et cetera.

Another group that has played a key role in the fight for digital rights and tech accountability in the region is 7amleh, a Palestinian organization that was founded in 2013. At the time, says Jalal Abukhater:

[I]t was unique and interesting in Palestinian society to have a human rights organization dedicated fully to the topic of digital rights, you know, human rights in a digital format. However, with the years, we saw various milestones, we saw progress of policy decisions and movements through the Israeli government to influence content moderation in Big Tech companies. We saw problems there as an organization.

7amleh took a leading stance in fighting to preserve the digital rights of Palestinians during a period where there was a very strong influence through the Israeli government. There was actually quite important reporting coming through 7amleh on the situation of online content moderation at a time when it wasn’t really a topic being discussed but it was very clearly a situation where there was major influence by government and political suppression happening as a result.

An Ever-Expanding Ecosystem

While in the early days, the digital rights movement attracted specialists, today, people from other fields have recognized how digital rights intersect with their work, and the digital rights community has embraced them.

Almasri says:

Because the digital rights movement has been decentralizing and has stopped being a speciality, it stopped being an exclusive thing for digital rights specialists, since of course the internet not only in the Arab region but all over the world has become a fundamental infrastructure for running any kind of sensitive operations, or operations in general…all types of organizations, and companies, and initiatives are thinking about their digital security, about how internet laws are affecting the use of the internet, or putting them at risk, and how surveillance technologies are affecting their operations.

Abukhater credits the collaborative work that emerged within the region over the years in building the movement’s strength:

[Today], civil society and digital civil society have many forums, many coalitions and networks, but it’s always important to remember that this is work that builds over many years of experience, and relationships, and networks—that it’s different parties coming to support each other at different phases to ensure that this kind of work succeeds and that this ecosystem is sustained globally with support from partner organizations which were very crucial in ensuring that this ecosystem is sustained, especially in Palestine.

Growing Collaborations

Conferences like Bread and Net, first held in Beirut in 2018, and the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), first held in Ramallah in 2017, bring activists, academics, journalists, and other practitioners together to network and learn about each other’s work. The pandemic, conflict, and other barriers haven’t stopped either conference from carrying on: PDAF has become an annual virtual event that draws big-name speakers, while Bread & Net has spaced out its meetings but continues to draw bigger crowds each time. 

Almasri credits these meetings with expanding the movement beyond the traditional techies and activists who first got involved. “You see a wide spectrum of different fields. You see artists, archivists, journalists joining these conversations, which is definitely on the brighter side of things when it comes to this field, or this scene.”

She also credits the emergence of alliances such as the Middle East Alliance for Digital Rights (MADR, of which EFF is a member), founded in 2020 by individuals and organizations who had been working together for many years to formalize those collaborations.

“Other than the collaborations at the advocacy level, [MADR] creates a sort of pressure point on Big Tech, on content moderation policies, allows for certain coordination at the level of the UN, et cetera, which I see as really positive because it brings some of the redundant efforts together and helps decide on priorities.”

Looking Forward

In thinking about the future of the movement, Almasri and Najem agree that digital rights are no longer a niche. In Najem’s words, “It’s about everything else…it’s about everything.” 

Almasri adds:

[W]hen it comes to priorities, things that this scene has been working on, I feel that October 7 [2023] was a big turning point in the way that digital rights activists, researchers, and academics—this field—is looking at digital rights in general. Of course, there is the major question of the need to revise tactics to fight Israel’s tech-enabled genocide that is also empowered by the global economy, big tech, and governments of the world?  What alliances should we start building on a regional and global level?

She sees ‘digital sovereignty,’ the ability of people and communities to choose, control, and use technology that serves their needs and values, as one of the next big topics for the movement to tackle, as debates over who owns and hosts our data have sharpened amid revelations that U.S. companies have played a role in regional conflicts.

There have been pockets of debates on how to achieve digital sovereignty, especially from human rights organizations documenting war crimes … There’s an awareness of how the dependence on US-based providers, cloud storage, even hosting infrastructure is a risk, especially after how using these services has been weaponized against the digital existence of certain organizations in the region that have been deplatformed or had their content removed on platforms like Meta and YouTube because their content doesn’t align with the foreign policy of the United States…so it raises a big question about how we look at digital independence, what is the spectrum of independence that civil society in the region can achieve, and in relation to what’s available as well.

Almasri also points to the role of researchers in the region:

There has been a lot more research on the political economy of surveillance technologies, so not only looking at how governments are using them, but their supply chain, who’s investing in these technologies, and how geopolitical networks empowered their proliferation in the hands of governments.

This is where studies looking at the political economy of AI and the military become important, trying to understand how this field of weapons, the military, and AI grew together as part of this global capitalist system rather than looking at these technologies in silos, that is. Looking at the proliferation of these technologies from a geopolitical point of view, looking at the bigger ecosystem rather than zooming in to the specifics of it. I think this has been a big development in the way that we look at digital rights, and the way that digital rights have been converged and integrated into the geopolitical scene.

Tahrir Square, Cairo, July 27, 2011. © Juan Cole

As the global digital rights community continues to expand, it’s clear that the questions at its core are no longer just about access or expression, but about power—who holds it, how it is exercised, and who is left out of its protections. What began as a fight to keep the internet open has become a broader effort to reimagine it—an effort that is grappling with questions of infrastructure, ownership, and the global inequalities embedded in both.

And yet, despite the scale of these challenges, the movement’s strength lies in the solidarity, the ecosystems, and the networks it has spent more than a decade building. From the early days of the blogging and techie communities to the increasingly powerful digital rights community, advocates in the region have gone up against dictators, endured war and repression, yet remain determined to push forward.

Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

This is the fifth and final installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here.

And there are many of you. Even among those registered, ten percent do not cast ballots. In the 2024 national elections, fully ten percent of registered voters did not turn out. That is 18 million registered non-voters in a closely fought election decided by two million votes. 

When I was quite a bit younger and before I knew much history I had little understanding about the long struggle for the right to vote and the democracy of which it is a key part. Most of humanity for most of our history has been governed by narrow cliques of thieving oligarchs or autocratic royals, many of whom relied on violence and terror to retain power. 

At the start of the democratic era it took great courage to stand against the powers that be. But many thousands of people did so anyway, even realizing that they might well pay with their lives to resist. Great numbers of them had to know that they themselves would be unlikely to ever live to exercise the right to vote. They sacrificed their own lives and welfare so that the rest of us could live in a democratic society. Among those epic struggles were the American and French revolutions, but they were not the first. The people of ancient Athens also rose up against tyranny for democracy. Of course there were also many others.  

So I argue that we owe a debt to those who struggled on our behalf. We have a duty to them to vote, and to do so intelligently as best we are able. It is easy to forget that women and minorities were excluded from voting in the United States for long periods of time, and had to struggle mightily for the voting franchise. Some of them paid with their lives. By voting, we can show respect their sacrifices. 

Another argument against voting is that our votes do not count for much. Well, there is some truth to that in the United States, especially with an Electoral College winner-take-all presidential system in which our votes do not count at all if our candidate loses in our state. But on the other hand, there are many state and local offices, as well as school, park, health, safety and other local levies, for which our votes can matter a great deal. And in fact, local elections have a significant impact on the quality of our lives. 

We also hear it said that politicians in general are corrupt and “all the same”. There is a grain of truth to that point of view. Many politicians are indeed narcissistic sociopaths to whom the idea of the public good is close to meaningless. But they are not all like that. In fact, politicians and parties vary in their truthfulness and honesty – at least a third of them are reasonably honest and worth supporting. It is your job as a voter to do some research and support the best of them. If you do not vote, you enable the bad guys. Nowadays it is hard to argue that there are no differences in the two major US political parties.  

Image by Thor Deichmann from Pixabay

To be fair, there are real barriers to voting including onerous registration procedures, long lines at the polls, billionaire dark money in campaigns, and lazy “horse race” journalism that avoids issues. Negative ads and hate media increase public cynicism and increase polarization, of which we have too much already. The consultants who produce untruthful and fear-inducing media know exactly what they are doing.  

It is your job to meet these challenges and support those who are working hard to address them.

If your vote did not matter, they would not work to keep you away from the polls. With freedom comes responsibilities. Voting is one of them. 

Singapore (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Israel’s 2026 election is occurring in a highly polarized and incendiary political atmosphere that recalls 1995. Then, the Oslo process had split Israeli society between an increasingly radicalized right and a peace-oriented government. As the incendiary political climate was condoned by the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Labor’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was publicly branded a traitor and assassinated by a Messianic Jewish extremist.

The analogy has its limits. In 1995 the central political question was whether Israel should negotiate with the Palestinians. In 2026, the argument is taking place after October 7, three years of war, the obliteration of Gaza, intensified West Bank settlement and displacement, and Israeli military operations involving Lebanon and Iran.

In the past 10-15 years, the country’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power, documented in my The Fall of Israel (2024).

Recent polls have the Netanyahu and opposition blocs tied at 50+ seats. Neither side has a reliable governing coalition, while the Israeli Arab parties held the balance – until their representation was undermined.

International media muses about the “knife-edge Israeli elections” between the incumbent Netanyahu and his rivals, tacitly suggesting that the latter offer “hope” and “change.” In reality, the Israeli vote is not a conventional left-right election, but a referendum on who controls the Israeli state after years of permanent war—and what kind of state emerges from it.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Two major blocs and the unaligned       

In the 120-member Israeli parliament, the Knesset, no single party has a majority. Effectively, the rivalry is between two blocs of parties: the Netanyahu-led harsh-right and the rival bloc, led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, that is portrayed as centrist (though it, too, is slanted toward the right).

Current polling suggests that the election may produce no clear outcome. Each major bloc attracts about 50+ seats. Initially, Eisenkot’s bloc had a slight lead. Now Netanyahu’s group may be a few points ahead. As a result, the smaller unaligned groups are expected to have a critical role in the next government coalition. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud remains committed to military primacy, opposition to Palestinian statehood and a security-centered conception of Israeli sovereignty.

Once again, Likud’s campaign presents him as the indispensable protector of Israel in a hostile region, despite the catastrophic October 7 failure occurring under his watch. That depiction is fully misaligned with the war crimes he remains accused of.

In the absence of effective opposition alternatives, Netanyahu’s main rival, the centrist-populist Yashar (“honest”) bloc, has promoted itself as a more moderate option. Yet, its leader Gadi Eisenkot is a security hawk and the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine that was first tested in Dahiya, Beirut in 2006-7 and perfected in the Gaza genocide 2023-26. Eisenkot regards Palestinian statehood as effectively irrelevant.

Next come labor, far-right, religious and Arab parties, which each could attract about 7-11 seats.

Led by Yair Golan, the labor Democrats are the clearest major Jewish-Zionist force advocating a negotiated Palestinian settlement, while still maintaining a strongly security-oriented posture. For a year or two, the popular Golan has tried to consolidate and expand Israeli left. His dream is to restore the broad labor front that governed Israel until Likud’s election triumph in 1977. But that’s a tall order.

Since the mid-2010s, Israel has shifted toward the Messianic far-right, thanks to hardened domestic sentiments and billions of U.S. dollars in annual military aid and conservative American-Jewish funding. When the country is consistently rewarded for policies that international law considers crimes, this is hardly surprising.

The far-right, secular and religious not-so-centrists     

B’Yachad (“Together”) is an Israeli political alliance led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in partnership with the centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid. Bennett is a veteran far-right religious leader, a technology millionaire. They challenge Netanyahu’s leadership and differ over diplomacy, governance and relations with Washington, but opposition to Palestinian statehood remains widespread. Lapid’s party Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) is a centrist, secular-liberal political party founded in 2012, before the far-right tide.

Aligned with religious Zionists and far-right extremists, Bennett explicitly rejects Palestinian statehood on security grounds. During the Gaza conflict, he championed total blockade. When asked about civilian collateral damage, Bennett responded: “We’re fighting Nazis.” Lapid has historically supported a two-state framework. Yet, in crucial Israeli votes, he has been absent.

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”) is supported by the secular Russian immigrant population. The small party depicts itself as “a national movement with the clear vision to follow in the bold path of Ze’ev Jabotinsky”, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the hero of the Israeli harsh-right. In the interwar period, Jabotinsky built ties with Fascist Italy.

During the Gaza genocide, Lieberman reiterated there are “no innocents in Gaza.”

There are also two religious parties, the mainly Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism (UTJ) and the largely Sephardi Shas. These are the main ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) political parties, representing religiously observant communities. Despite holding a minority of seats, they have served as crucial power-brokers in coalition governments.

The Messianic far-right and Kahanite racists

Spearheading the new extreme-right is Itamar Ben-Gvir’s racist anti-Arab Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”). As Israel’s minister of national security, Ben-Gvir has advocated intensified killings in Gaza and policies combining siege, military force, Palestinian emigration and settlement. Recently, he said the entire West Bank “belongs to Israel,” while threatening to dismantle Palestinian Authority.

Outside Israel, Ben-Gvir is despised. He is a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent, Messianic and racist doctrines. In the 1980s, he might have been imprisoned. Today, he is a key player in the extreme-right.

Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party is annexationist, settlement-oriented and explicitly hostile to Palestinian statehood. Smotrich has advocated Israeli control and settlement of Gaza.

Outside Israel, Smotrich is widely scorned. In Israel, his party remains influential and his support is rising.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are popular among the squatter-settlers and their powerful political and financial supporters.

The striking fact is that the political spectrum’s mainstream has moved so far toward militarized security that opposition to Netanyahu does not necessarily mean opposition to the underlying territorial and military logic.

Except for the Democrats, Israel’s parties would more or less gladly condone a singular Jewish Israel with Gaza and the West Bank annexed permanently.

Excluding Israeli Arabs from election, democratically 

Israel’s 21% Arab/Palestinian population is constitutionally entitled to vote. Yet its political representation is being juridically suppressed.

Israel’s main Arab-majority parties feature

• Ra’am (United Arab List) stressing civic issues and pragmatism;
• the joint Arab-Jewish left-wing party Hadash;
• secular Ta’al focusing on civil rights and socio-economic issues;
• and the Palestinian nationalist Balad.

In Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian Arabs live in an apartheid state, but the openly segregationist practices are spilling over within Israel itself. In light of the effective goal of a single Jewish state, that’s logical.

Until recently, Israeli election season had a familiar routine. First, the Central Elections Committee, a political body, disqualifies Arab candidates and lists. Then, the Supreme Court restores them to the race. This year the ritual ended. Consequently, the Balad’s leader, Sami Abu Shehadeh, was compelled to withdraw from the October 27, 2026 election ballot following Supreme Court pressure regarding his past statements.

Effectively, the SC ruling set different rules for Arabs and Jews – which is consistent with an apartheid state, not with a democracy.

Recently, Israel’s Central Elections Committee (CEC) also voted to bar major Arab-majority lists (Ra’am and the Joint List) from the election. Party leaders and rights groups like Adalah denounce the bans as racist, political, and anti-democratic maneuvers designed to silence Palestinian citizens of Israel and stop them from influencing the vote.

Why this rush to deny Palestinian representation?

Polls have consistently demonstrated that Arab parties could act as kingmakers in a tight election race where neither major Jewish bloc is guaranteed a clear majority. Consequently, the major blocs, particularly the Netanyahu constituencies, have sought to marginalize Arab parties from the election, to ensure another harsh-right victory. Moreover, even Netanyahu’s rivals shun reliance on Arab parties, although that could ensure them a lead.

The exclusion has an obvious political consequence apart from its constitutional implications. It takes Israel a step closer to an exclusively Jewish state where other ethnic and religious groups are merely second-class citizens – exotic tokens to sustain the semblance of thriving democracy.

Toward apartheid democracy

Israel’s Arab citizens face a peculiar democratic paradox: they may vote, but the principal Jewish blocs increasingly insist that their representatives cannot govern.

In The Fall of Israel, I characterized this trend as “Herrenvolk democracy”; that is, a political system that functions as a democratic state for the dominant ethnic or racial group (the “master race”), but operates as a severe tyranny or apartheid system for disenfranchised minority groups. It used to typify the Antebellum and Jim Crow United States, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia, 1965–1979) and apartheid-era South Africa (1948–1994).

Tragically, as most nations struggle to move forward to the future, Israel is stumbling its way into the past. With the effective support of Washington, it is building a regime of state and local laws, rules and customs reminiscent of racial segregation in the pre-civil rights America.

Indeed, Israeli political discourse increasingly distinguishes between Jewish and Arab political legitimacy. One is prioritized; the other is suppressed.

That is more consequential than inflammatory campaign rhetoric. It concerns the institutional question of who is permitted to participate in determining sovereignty. Whether one calls this racism, ethnonationalism, exclusionary democracy or something else depends partly upon one’s analytical definition. But the underlying facts are difficult to evade.

The world may not be black and white. But the apartheid state always is.

The absent Gaza genocide    

In fall 2023, Israel began to engage in genocidal atrocities in Gaza. Yet, it is only today, several years later, that mainstream news organizations are ever so slowly beginning to use the term that they shunned for too long, thus contributing to these atrocities.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2025 that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and reiterated that conclusion in June 2026. Israel rejects the allegation.

Separately, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare.

The UN Human Rights Office has also reported concerns over ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, citing forcible transfer, destruction and policies apparently aimed at permanent demographic change. In September 2026, the UN reported continuing displacement, settlement expansion and unprecedented settler violence in the West Bank.

By contrast, the genocide of Gaza is systematically suppressed in Israel’s election campaigns. This creates an uncomfortable political reality: large sections of the political system either support these policies, defend them as necessary security measures, or treat them as politically marginal.

As a result, the electoral debate has largely been conducted within the boundaries established by a militarized conception of security. Gaza and ethnic cleansing are effectively absent in the campaigns.

Jewish supremacy via permanent emergency      

In September 2026, the UN Secretary-General again described a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines as the credible route to lasting peace, while warning that settlement expansion, evictions, land seizures and displacement are systematically eroding its territorial viability.

The international community still overwhelmingly treats the two-state solution as the principal diplomatic framework. Yet the Israeli electoral mainstream regards Palestinian statehood as unacceptable, premature or irrelevant.

That is strategically consequential. If there is no Palestinian state, the alternative becomes some enduring combination of occupation, annexation, fragmented Palestinian autonomy, unequal sovereignty—or forever conflict.

The election therefore concerns not merely Netanyahu. It concerns whether Israeli politics still regards territorial separation from the Palestinians as a strategic possibility. To ensure the latter response, Netanyahu’s most powerful electoral instrument is not just Likud, but the politics of emergency.

As long as Israel remains engaged in multiple conflicts, the prime minister can campaign as the man confronting Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and an increasingly hostile international environment. (The prime minister position is vital for Netanyahu to retain immunity against persistent corruption charges.)

The current election demonstrates how emergency politics can become self-reinforcing. A government fighting wars retains enormous security authority, as security crises elevate the incumbent’s preferred issue. The resulting fear makes effective political alternatives harder to articulate.

Escalation in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank could generate another national-emergency atmosphere during the election period. The conservative prime minister has a dark track-record in manufacturing or exploiting convenient crises – as evidenced by the “inconsistencies” surrounding the Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on September 30, 2026.

Washington—and the world—will feel the result  

The election will not simply determine Israel’s next cabinet. For Washington, the central question is whether the alliance remains strategically bipartisan. It is already becoming less so.

A September 2026 Senate vote on reporting requirements concerning West Bank abuses split almost entirely along party lines. Yet, growing Democratic opposition to Israeli policy and increasing concern that Netanyahu’s close alignment with Republicans is turning Israel into a partisan American issue.

File photo Naftali Bennett. State Department photo by Freddie Everett. Public Domain. Via Picryl

For Europe, settlement expansion and Gaza have already produced increasing diplomatic friction. Israel’s international isolation is no longer confined to traditional critics. Several long-standing Western allies have adopted sanctions relating to settlements. Nonetheless, this debate is subject to the far broader friction on European rearmament.

For the Middle East and internationally, the costs have already escalated dramatically. Worse, an Israeli government committed to permanent military presence, settlement expansion or annexation would make Palestinian statehood progressively harder to implement while keeping Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Jordan entangled in Israel’s security architecture.

And for Israel itself, the fundamental choice is deeper than Netanyahu versus his opponents. It is whether the country continues down a model of permanent mobilization, territorial consolidation and military deterrence.

In the absence of international pressure, it is hard to see why the Israeli political system would reopen the key question: How could security ultimately be achieved without a political settlement with the Palestinians?

Unlike 1995, the answer will now be judged not only by the Israelis, but by an international community increasingly prepared to judge Israel’s conduct through the language of international law, as it should.

There can no longer be any lasting political settlement without increasing international pressure – unless Jim Crow is deemed to be the worthy future of the world community in the 21st century.

( Yale Climate Connections ) – Hurricane Isaias made landfall around 9:30 p.m. EDT Friday, Oct. 9, near Destin, Florida, at Category 2 strength with top sustained winds of 105 mph (165 km/h) and a central pressure of 971 millibars (28.67 inches). In the final few hours before landfall, high wind shear of 40-60 knots was able to weaken Isaias from its 120-mph peak. Isaias was moving at a fast 18 mph (30 km/h) pace at landfall, and degenerated quickly into a post-tropical cyclone with 35 mph winds at 5 a.m. EDT Saturday, Oct. 10.

Most of Isaias’s intense showers and thunderstorms had been focused in the hurricane’s northern half, so conditions improved quickly along the coast after landfall. Ex-Isaias will bring flooding rains, damaging wind gusts, and a few tornadoes to the Southeast today.

Isaias had knocked out power to over 900,000 customers across Florida, Alabama, and Georgia as of 9 a.m. EDT Saturday, and is being blamed for one death — from a falling tree in Florida. The price tag for the hurricane will likely be several billion dollars, but it is questionable if Isaias’s impact will be notable enough to gets its name retired.

The largest storm surge observed at any NOAA tide gauge from Isaias occurred at Panama City Beach (Fig. 1), which reached 5.59 feet above Mean Higher High Water (MHHW). This is the second-highest water level sine 1995 at the gauge, behind the 6.84 feet observed in Hurricane Opal of 1995. Third through fifth place at the gauge are: 5.43 feet in Hurricane Dennis (2005), 5.08’ feet in Hurricane Ivan (2004), and 3.79 feet in Hurricane Michael (2018).

How climate change worsened Hurricane Isaias

In a press release on Oct. 9, Dr. Daniel Gilford, Meteorologist and Climate Scientist at Climate Central, said:

“The first hurricane of the season clearly shows the fingerprints of climate change. Climate-warmed Gulf waters mean that Isaias is forecast to be 7 mph stronger than it would have been in a world without heat-trapping carbon pollution, increasing the chances of expensive and life-threatening consequences for Gulf coast communities.”

A 7 mph increase in winds may not seem like much— that’s about a 6% increase in the Isaias’s winds. But as I explained in my 2026 post, Global warming is making the strongest hurricanes stronger, a 5% increase in hurricane winds yields about a 50% increase in damage: Hurricane damage increases exponentially with an increase in winds (see NOAA’s damage multiplier table).

Climate Central detailed multiple other ways that climate change made Isaias worse:

• Isaias underwent rapid intensification over waters that were 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.4°F) warmer on average than they would have been in a world without climate change. These unusually warm Gulf waters, exceeding 31°C (88°F), were made 4 to 600 times more likely due to human-caused climate change, depending upon the exact location in the Gulf being considered. Across the southwest Gulf, where Isaias first organized, the warmth was especially stark, estimated to have been 600-800 times more likely to occur by human-caused climate change, as shown in the Bluesky post embedded above.
• The Gulf’s warmer oceans supercharge tropical systems’ ability to carry moisture, adding to the ongoing flood concerns, especially across southern Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and Big Bend, and southwest Georgia through the weekend. 
• Human-caused climate change has raised sea levels in the region that experienced Isaias’s greatest storm surge by about 6.5 inches since 1900, allowing storm surges to reach higher levels and increase their potential for destruction. At the Pensacola, Fl, tide gauge, sea level has risen a little over 12 inches since the gauge was installed in 1923. Almost half of that rise can be attributed to human-caused climate change (Fig. 2).

Small increases in storm surge can cause huge impacts

A 6.5-inch rise in sea levels because of climate change may seem insignificant in comparison to the 6-9 feet of storm surge that Isaias was predicted to bring. But a small amount of sea level rise – even just a few inches – can lead to significant damage during a storm surge event. Why?

To use a sports analogy, it’s because the interaction of a storm surge with a city is a deadly game of inches and thresholds. Coastal cities are generally designed so that it takes a 1-in-100-year event (one that has a 1% chance of occurring in a given year) to cause substantial damaging flooding: A storm surge must rise to the base height of the city before it can flood large areas. But once the storm does cross that threshold, every inch of additional rise in water levels can flood large areas. And since just one inch of water in a 2,500-square-foot home can cause $27,000 in damage, and 12 inches can cause $72,000 in damage (according to FEMA), a few extra inches of storm surge can add up to a lot of damage in a hurry.

H/t NOAA

As much as $8.1 billion of the $62.5 billion in damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut resulted from the 3.8 inches (9.6 cm) increase in sea levels caused by human-caused climate change, according to a 2021 paper by scientists from Climate Central. (The total sea level rise that occurred from 1900 – 2012 in New York City is much higher, about 12.9 inches, since there are significant natural components caused by land subsidence and natural variations in ocean currents.)

Jeff Masters’ climate change/hurricane posts

• 10 ways climate-change-altered hurricanes may come to bite us (2026)
• The floods of the future won’t come one at a time (2026)
• Climate change is supercharging hurricane rainfall, contributing to deadly floods (2026)
• Climate fiction envisions the future of hurricanes and sea level rise (2026)
• This swirling gyre spawns storms. How will climate change affect it? (2026)
• Something startling is happening in the Gulf of Mexico (2026)
• How strong can a hurricane get in a warming world? (2026)
• Global warming is making the strongest hurricanes stronger (2026)
• Will climate change bring more major hurricane landfalls to the U.S.? (2026)
• The emerging danger of post-hurricane heat waves (2026)
• The future of Atlantic hurricane tracks (2026)
• Climate change strengthened Hurricane Melissa, making the storm’s winds stronger and the damage worse (2025)
• Climate change behind 36% of damage inflicted by Typhoon Ragasa in China (2025)
• Climate change brings more rapidly intensifying hurricanes; NOAA cuts makes forecasting them harder (2025)
• Human-caused ocean warming intensified recent hurricanes, including all 11 Atlantic hurricanes in 2024 (2024)
• Without climate change, Hurricane Milton would have hit as a Cat 2, not a Cat 3 (2024)
• Four ways climate change likely made Hurricane Helene worse (2024)
• Does the Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes need a Category 6? (2024)
• Hotter ocean temperatures from global warming likely increased Idalia’s destructive power by at least 40-50% (2023)
• How sea level rise contributes to billions in extra damage during hurricanes (2022)
• Warming climate makes extreme hurricane rains more likely for Puerto Rico (2022)
• Why are there so many Atlantic named storms? Five possible explanations. (2021)

Bob Henson contributed to this post.

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Besides omitting the historical context of colonialism, of Gaza’s particular history, as well as the genocide itself, the Board of Peace’s statement is openly revealing its allegiance: “Genuine and durable security for Israel is the foundation on which any peace must be built, and it is the surest guarantee that no October 7 will ever happen again.”

October 7 could have been avoided primarily if the international community did not make the two-state politics the only solution, thus allowing Israel to colonise Palestine. Furthermore, if one had to take only recent history into account, October 7 could have been avoided if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had heeded warnings coming his way. According to Haaretz reports, Netanyahu said Israel was prepared for any scenario in response to the warnings by the United Arab Emirates, and deflected attention to the occupied West Bank with the CIA’s warnings. 

Israel, therefore, was prepared to commit genocide. It was just waiting for the perfect timing. The only guarantee for October 7 not to happen again is to get a guarantee from Israel, which will not happen, of course. 

The Board of Peace has not explained what ‘genuine and durable security for Israel’ entails, except for vague consistent references to demilitarisation and deradicalisation  of Gaza.

So far, however, what lies behind demilitarisation and deradicalisation is Israel’s military occupation of Gaza, which the Israeli government has stated will be permanent. Again, the historical precedents are many, and Israel’s forced displacement of the Palestinians is by now a permanent strategy. Permanence, however, has been normalised by the international community. There is nothing safer than issuing a statement condemning forced displacement while doing nothing about it. The Board of Peace is not new to this politics. Its High Representative Nickolay Mladenov had, for years, contributed to UN diplomacy. 

Photo by Hosny salah: https://www.pexels.com/photo/young-boy-sitting-in-makeshift-shelter-in-gaza-36038665/

When the Board of Peace says it is committed to fulfilling its mandate, as the statement asserts, there is little to distinguish it from the UN in practice. The UN had decades of collaboration with Israel. The Board of Peace is just starting, having had much of its path already carved out by previous complicity. Without a change in international politics, the Board of Peace will fulfil its mandate, albeit not the one it is supposed to follow on paper. Like the UN, it will attempt to hide behind grand plans and safe rhetoric, while allowing Israel to proceed with its colonial expansion unhindered. 

If the Board of Peace fulfils its mandate, it will ensure that forced displacement remains permanent, that Gaza is emptied of Palestinians, and that colonial settlements will be built. Durable security for Israel is built on ethnic cleansing. 

Durable security for Palestinians is built on decolonisation.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

By Middle East Monitor )

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East M or infronitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A port called Harmozeia was known to the Greeks in the days of Alexander the Great. In the early Islamic centuries, from the conquests of the 600’s and with increasing mentions after 1000, the port city of Hormuz at or near modern Minab, the same place where on the first day of the current war, the United States struck a girls’ elementary school, killing 120 students and dozens of others.

During the 1200s, Hormuz was frequently threatened by Central Asian nomads who entered Iran as part of the Mongol conquests led by the successors of Genghis Khan. Because of this, around 1300, the ruler of Hormuz moved the city to the island which bears the name “Hormuz” today. This island location gave it a wide natural moat which protected it from political turmoil on the mainland.

Also during the 1200s, Hormuz began taking territory along the coast of what is now Oman. Today, negotiating passage through the Strait can involve passing through Omani rather than Iranian waters. Hormuz, however, came to control both sides, with a significant second city at Qalhat, today an archaeological site outside of the modern Omani port of Sur. This allowed it to monopolize passage between the Persian Gulf and the rest of the Indian Ocean world.

At its height, Hormuz had a population of 50,000, and was known as a wealthy trade emporium with merchants from throughout much of the Eastern Hemisphere and any product one might desire. It maintained its dominance with its navy, and sought to restrict ship-building materials to potential rivals.

Brian Ulrich. The Medieval Persian Gulf. Arc Humanities Press 2024. Click here to buy.

In 1498, the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean, and in 1515 seized control of Hormuz, though leaving its ruling dynasty in place. The Portuguese ambition was to control all Indian Ocean trade by controlling all the choke points, of which Hormuz was one. They ruled the island until 1622 until a Persian ruler named Shah Abbas both lured and pressured the British East India Company into being his navy in taking the island. Shah Abbas then developed a fishing village into the port of Bandar Abbas, literally “Port of Abbas,” on the main near Hormuz and west of Minab, as the emporium of the strait. Hormuz, however, continued to have an important fortress, and in 1718, Oman tried and failed to capture it as part of seeking to control Gulf trade. Today the island has only a few thousand inhabitants.

What can the history of the city of Hormuz teach us about control of the Strait of Hormuz today?

First, imposing conditions traders will see as unreasonable will simply lead to their seeking alternate routes. When Hormuz was at its height as an independent kingdom in the 1400s, most merchants simply paid a flat 10% of customs dues. Those from regions of Iran to which it was closely connected paid 5%. Under the Portuguese, however, other fees appeared, such as one for piracy suppression and others for weighing bulk goods. An estimate from around 1580 is that Portuguese merchants were now paying 11%, and all others close to 15%, in customs.

These higher fees and increased bureaucracy even for transiting goods led many merchants to seek alternate routes, sometimes other ports around the Gulf, often overland caravan connections that bypassed the Gulf altogether. Throughout the 16^th century, the Portuguese played a balancing act of trying to find new ways to extract revenue from the trade without driving it away.

Today, we see the same thing happening. Much of the oil transit trade through the Strait has been diverted to pipelines, truck convoys, and/or shuttle tankers rather than the massive supertankers used normally. These workarounds are less efficient, and developing proper alternative infrastructure would be a matter of years. However, mere fact that instability has been introduced into the equation commercial actors will look to build resilience into their supply chains and transport routes. At least in the medium term, Iran’s ability to threaten Hormuz is a wasting asset, a fact which may contribute to the government’s determination to institutionalize their control.

The threat of instability in the Strait of Hormuz owes a lot to the ease for disrupting it in modern warfare, when drones strikes are enough to create the threat that threatens lives, cargoes, and sends insurance rates soaring. With long range weapons and alliances, attacking alternate routes is also easier than it historically has been.

File photo, US patrol coastal ship in Strait of Hormuz. US Army Photo by Specialist Evens Milcette, Jr. Public Domain. Via Picryl

This is a contrast to the logistical preparations found in an earlier era of warfare over the Strait. Although Secretary of Defense (War?) Pete Hegseth believes manliness is the key to military effectiveness, military leaders since ancient times have focused on logistics, and in the Strait of Hormuz, supplying troops with water was both critical and complicated. The Portuguese fortress at Hormuz had two vast water cisterns capable of holding thousands of gallons, as well as several other cisterns added over the years. In 1718, before laying siege to the fortress of Hormuz itself, the Omanis captured the island of Qeshm, source of most of its water. In another episode from that war, they raided the city of Bandar Abbas, primarily shooting up water canisters that the Iranians had been hoping to use to relieve the defenders.

This potential for disruption threatens not only shipping through the Strait, but all Hormuz’s successors as global business hubs in the Gulf. At the height of conflict, Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City, and other points in the eastern Arabian Peninsula were attacked by Iran. The reason for this was doubtless their hosting U.S. bases and influence with the U.S. and Israel, but a strategic impact could have been to create an air of instability around them. And this, too, has precedent in Gulf history, as would-be rising emporia often harassed their predecessors militarily precisely so the traders would seek somewhere more secure. As the conflict in the Gulf continues, how the GCC states establish security is another lasting thread.

“The Trump administration has made clear its aim to destroy the ICC to shield US and Israeli officials from facing charges before the court,” said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “By attacking the court, the US government is threatening justice for victims of abuses from Palestine to Ukraine, Myanmar, and Sudan.” 

The ICC is a permanent international court created to try people, including senior officials, accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression. Following the genocides in the mid-1990s in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, the international community created the ICC to prevent those most responsible for serious crimes from evading justice. Nearly two-thirds of UN member countries have joined the court. In addition to its Palestine investigation, the court has opened investigations into alleged crimes in 17 situations, including in Afghanistan, Darfur in Sudan, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

The US government’s decision to sanction the ICC was announced on the same day that the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge and renowned international lawyer, in recognition of her central role “in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

In his October 9 announcement, Rubio stated the sanctions were aimed at shielding US nationals from investigation and prosecution at the ICC. The Trump administration has previously objected to the court’s investigation of Israeli nationals for their conduct in Palestine. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for serious crimes in Gaza. Palestine became an ICC member in 2015 and gave the court a mandate to address serious crimes committed on its territory or by its nationals since June 13, 2014. 

The Trump administration has already sanctioned ICC prosecutors, nine ICC judges, three prominent Palestinian human rights groups, and the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and called on ICC member countries to leave the court.

US sanctions have serious effects on those targeted, including frozen or closed bank accounts, rejected financial transactions, denied access to digital services, and US entry bans. US sanctions also have a chilling effect on non-US banks and other companies outside of US jurisdiction that could themselves lose access to the US banking system if they do not adhere to the sanctions. This means that the ICC could lose access to companies on which it relies for everyday functions, from banking to information, technology to travel. 

Human Rights Watch, together with three other human rights organizations, filed a lawsuit in US federal court on August 11, 2026, seeking to have the sanctions regime previously used to authorize court-wide sanctions struck down. A wide range of human rights organizations, other experts, and former US government officials have filed amicus (friend of the court) briefs in support of the suit.

ICC member countries, including the Netherlands which hosts the ICC in The Hague, the leadership body of the court’s Assembly of States Parties, the European Union, UN human rights experts, the UN secretary-general, the UN high commissioner for human rights, civil society organizations, and the ICC itself have repeatedly spoken out against the sanctions. 

The ICC and its member countries have also taken important steps to insulate the court from the potential impact of sanctions, but more action is needed to protect the court’s ability to continue its critical work. The EU should immediately activate its blocking statute, which aims to shield European operators from the effects of extraterritorial sanctions.

The Trump administration’s sanctions targeting international justice are part of a broader attack on the laws, institutions, and organizations created to protect human rights, Human Rights Watch said. The United States has also withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, while disengaging from the UN Human Rights Council. President Donald Trump and other senior US officials have also expressed contempt for international law, and threatened to commit war crimes. 

“The ICC was created to ensure that no one, no matter how powerful, can escape justice for the worst crimes,” Bolopion said. “Governments everywhere should take every available measure to counter the effects of the US sanctions and stand with the court and those relying on it to obtain justice.”

Via Human Rights Watch

(The Conversation) – Where has more than seven months of intermittent war, economic threats, stalled diplomacy and promises of a ceasefire in Iran left the concept of U.S. strategic credibility?

It is a question that political scientists and security and foreign policy experts like us have had to grapple with at each turn of the conflict.

Some commentators have argued that the bombings and multiple ceasefires actually strengthen American credibility by demonstrating American deterrence capabilities and resolve toward adversaries.

Others cite the lack of a persuasive justification for conflict, the strikes themselves and subsequent fits and starts of peacemaking as evidence that America’s global image has been undermined, as has the persuasiveness of its public claims. And this, in turn, has undercut the credibility of future pronouncements by the U.S. administration.

Either way, most observers insist that for the United States, “credibility is on the line in Iran.” But that has long been a central concern of U.S. foreign policy. As political scientist Stephen Walt observed in 2022, one of the most predictable aspects of virtually any debate over Washington’s involvement overseas is the “ritual invoking of ‘credibility.’”

But what, exactly, is “American credibility”? And why is there apparently so much groupthink about the concept and practice?

Vietnam and the credibility discourse

For policymakers, diplomats and scholars the technical definition is straightforward: Credibility refers to the perceived likelihood that a country will reliably keeps its promises, carry out its threats and deliver on its pledges. In this manner, a country is credible if allies and adversaries alike will believe it the next time. But as suggested by contemporary debates and usage, credibility, in practice, often means something more than simply keeping up with commitments.

Credibility is not only about whether nations successfully signal resolve, but also whether relevant audiences perceive their commitments as credible. In other words, contemplating a nation’s credibility is about assumptions over the “strategic culture” that undergird it – and this can include everything from a country’s military resources to abstract notions about its values.

Historical examples are useful here, in particular the Vietnam War, during which American credibility was at stake in unprecedented ways.

On the surface, Vietnam posed little intrinsic value to the United States – it was not a primary theater of the Cold War by most measures. Yet policymakers repeatedly insisted that Vietnam was the place where American credibility had to be demonstrated and established. Why?

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned in 1954 that communist expansion in Asia posed “a grave threat to the whole free community” and insisted that demonstrating resolve would prevent greater dangers later. National security adviser McGeorge Bundy similarly argued that the “international prestige of the United States” was deeply invested in Vietnam.

Credibility, to them, meant more than simply honoring commitments. Rather, it was bound up with broader questions of power, honor and America’s place in the world between competing powers.

Prestige, or the lack thereof

As diplomatic historian Robert McMahon observed decades ago, credibility has often been treated as if it were a concrete and measurable concept. Yet in practice it has always carried an important symbolic dimension – credibility has come to be a shorthand for American prestige itself.

And that variant of American credibility has in particular rested on anxieties about the continued dominance and superiority of the U.S.-led world order.

During one congressional discussion in 1965, U.S. policymakers warned that withdrawing from Vietnam would mean surrendering “all Asia to Communists,” prompting the reflection: “If a nation with 14 million can make Uncle Sam run, what will China think?”

An exchange between President Lyndon Johnson and Undersecretary of State George Ball in 1965 is even more illustrative. President Johnson worried that abandoning Vietnam would make “all these countries say that Uncle Sam was a paper tiger” and wondered whether America would lose the credibility built by three presidents. Ball’s response was, “No sir. The worst blow would be that the mightiest power on earth is unable to defeat a handful of guerrillas.”

The anxiety was not that America might fail to keep up with its word, but that the leader of the “free world” might fail to defeat a non-Western, technologically inferior opponent.

The credibility at stake was both America’s sense of national self and the perceived superiority of a Western-led world order.

Counterintuitively, while the Vietnam War was fought in the eyes of many policymakers to defend U.S. credibility, its conclusion shattered conventional notions of credibility. It called into question the U.S.’s place in the world in an era historians have termed an “Age of Fracture,” characterized by economic challenges such as stagflation, oil shocks and rising distrust in politics, government and institutions.

For many observers within and outside the U.S., images of the helicopters lifting off and fleeing from Saigon – and thereby deserting allies and a purportedly essential cause in the process – signaled a moment of American and Western decline. The phenomenon even led to a widely used term – “Vietnam Syndrome” – referring to the public’s unwillingness thereafter to commit to large-scale foreign interventions and nation-building exercises.

Credibility up to the present

That image of U.S. decline and impotence is one that has resonated ever since in foreign policy debates.

The perception of the loss of credibility in Vietnam has served as a yardstick for planning, assessing and implementing interventions in other regions. It has been both a way of warning about the dangers of rash interventionism and the consequences of hubris, as well as a rallying cry to avoid repeating past errors. yet maintain credibility through actions in places from the Middle East to Latin America.

The credibility issues central to the U.S. administration’s actions today in Iran – and Ukraine, Venezuela and elsewhere – are thus about the U.S.’s living up to pledges and following through to achieve objectives. As with Vietnam, they also concern clustering around nebulous concepts. of and aims about not looking weak militarily or diplomatically.

U.S. Marine Corps graphic by Lance Cpl. Haley McMenamin

But the Iran example – and particularly the ongoing episodic closures of the Strait of Hormuz – is one of the best illustrations today of how merely invoking credibility to act is not the same as having an overall endgame strategy.

While some commentators view this currently as a sign of a lack of resolve, or credibility, if we turn to Iranian actions and to the words of Iran’s acting Defense Minister Majid Ebn-e-Reza we find something else. Namely, Tehran views all threats from the United States as “real and credible” and “as a reason to bolster its defense.”

The U.S. and Iran agree on one thing in terms of credibility: America can credibly be relied on to carry out overwhelming violence.

But the problem, as it was in the Vietnam War, is that credibly engaging in war and violence is not a substitute for strategy. Credibility is affected deeply by strategic cultural assessments about superiority and inferiority, and notions about when, where, how and for whom the credibility matters.

Moreover, merely establishing credibility to act cannot necessarily overwhelm a resolute adversary, as has been borne out in Iran. In fact, it can also perpetuate never-ending conflict that serves to undermine the very prestige and world power that it was supposed to enhance.

Christopher Nichols, Professor of History, Hayes Chair National Security Studies, The Ohio State University and Kaveri Sarkar, PhD Candidate in Political Science, The Ohio State University

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