In attendance were China’s President Xi Jinping, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran’s President Massoud Pezeshkian, and the heads of state of the Central Asian member states.

At the end of the summit, member nations jointly issued the Bishkek declaration. So far only the Russian text is on the internet, but news services such as Al Jazeera have given lengthy summaries.

The Bishkek statement forthrightly condemned the Netanyahu-Trump war on Iran, saying that member states are concerned about strikes on Iranian territory, noting the civilian casualties and extensive economic damage.

The Trump administration wants to strong-arm other nations into helping it strangle Iran economically, but I think it has received from the rising Asian powers a resounding “No!”

The legal grounding for this protest is “the norms of international law” and the “UN Charter.” They don’t cite specifics, but the UN Charter forbids one UN member to launch a war on another UN member except under two conditions. One is self-defense and the other is where the UN Security Council designates a government as a source of world disorder (as happened when Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990). Needless to say, Iran had not attacked the United States militarily in the period before February 28, 2026, when Trump abruptly let loose with 13,000 strikes on Iran in conjunction with Israel. And needless to say, the UN Security Council had not authorized this war. It was a pure war of aggression.

The SCO nations slammed Trump and Netanyahu even harder with the next paragraph, which Al Jazeera gives as “Member States express their sincere condolences to the people and Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the tragic death of Supreme Leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and to the families of the victims.”

The statement said, “Member States, reaffirming their support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran, advocate a resolution to the conflict solely through political and diplomatic means. In this regard, they welcome all efforts aimed at de-escalating the situation in the region.”

Photo by Mike Dudin on Unsplash

The SCO also upheld Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, which is recognized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but which is effectively denied to Iran by the US. Al Jazeera reports that the organization’s members asserted “‘their inalienable right’ to develop research, produce and use atomic energy ‘for peaceful purposes and to pursue equitable, sustainable, and mutually beneficial international cooperation in this area without discrimination.'” They branded attempts to curtail this right as “contrary to international law.”

“Member States note that the only possible way to ensure peace and stability in the Middle East is a comprehensive and just settlement of the Palestinian question.”

The statement called on nations to “combat terrorism, including the cross-border movement of terrorists, with the UN playing a central role by fully implementing relevant UN Security Council resolutions and the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy in accordance with the UN Charter and the principles of international law.”

But it condemned “double standards” and hypocrisy in the fight against terrorism. I think they mean that the US uses terrorist groups against its enemies even while condemning terrorism.

(The Conversation) – When Washington unveiled its economic “D-Day” on August 19, the latest tightening of the financial siege and the blockade around Iran’s ports, it believed it was applying decisive leverage. But in Tehran the move was read as something else entirely – as confirmation that the US still prefers pressure to any settlement it might one day have to honour.

Across a political system that agrees on almost nothing, the interpretation was remarkably uniform. The economic stabilisers around the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, saw the US as reneging on a deal, while Ahmad Vahidi’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders saw their own warnings about American perfidy vindicated.

So whatever faith remained in Iran about US willingness to close a deal has thinned further. That erosion of trust now shapes what Tehran will and will not accept.

It is important to realise that Iran is making existential decisions about the survival strategy of the Islamic Republic itself. The old vocabulary of reformist against principlist – or moderate against hardliner – no longer reflects the real struggle inside the system.

The contest that matters runs between those who believe the Islamic Republic survives best by converting its wartime leverage into economic and diplomatic gains and those who believe survival depends instead on permanent confrontation. Both camps are loyal to the regime, and both argue in good faith about how to keep it alive. That makes the debate far harder to resolve.

It is also a debate with no single arbiter, because Iran today is best understood as a network state. Power runs through a decentralised structure that is horizontal in the way it is organised. The vertical hierarchy once associated with the former supreme leader Ali Khamenei has quietly dissolved.

His son Mojtaba Khamenei sits at the formal apex and shapes outcomes largely through appointments. He has installed Mohsen Rezaee, a founder member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as his representative on the supreme national security council. He is also rebuilding the Bayt – the office of the supreme leader that has long been the system’s true centre of gravity – around loyalists such as his new chief of staff, Mahdi Khamoushi.

Yet Mojtaba rules as a balancer rather than a decider, careful never to let any one node or hub dominate the system. Beneath him, authority is spread across the nodes of the security establishment. Rezaee coordinates strategy from the council, while Vahidi commands the military muscle, from the missile force to the naval pressure in the Strait of Hormuz.

Parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, brokers the relationship between parliament and the security men. Pezeshkian’s government shoulders the economy, and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, handles the messages abroad. No single figure combines all of these functions in one pair of hands.

Iran’s shifting power balance

But this horizontal picture is shifting, because the war has centralised power even in a system built to disperse it. The longer the confrontation with Washington runs, the more the IRGC moves from being merely the strongest node toward becoming the effective decision-maker.

The IRGC still cannot run the economy, conduct diplomacy and preserve clerical legitimacy all at once. This is why it governs through that coalition rather than in place of it. But a prolonged state of war is exactly the condition under which that necessity begins to erode, because all decisions become related to the conflict and how best to prevail.

The current system in Iran and its position towards a negotiated deal out of the war exists on a spectrum. At one end stand the economic stabilisers around Pezeshkian and Araghchi. Their camp consider the prolonged stalemate untenable and want sanctions relief, the release of frozen assets, and an end to the blockade.

Next come the pragmatic sovereigntists led by Ghalibaf and Rezaei – regime insiders who see diplomacy as the only way out, but not when it comes at the expense of strategic autonomy. Their camp will accept negotiation only from a position of strength and insist that the missile programme and the regional network of proxies stay off the table entirely.

Further along sit the security-first coercionists gathered around Vahidi and the IRGC, who view diplomacy as a tactical instrument at all times subordinate to military leverage.

At the far end are the ideological rejectionists of the Paydari Front and Saeed Jalili’s network. These fundamentalists regard any agreement with Washington as a form of surrender. They function less as a governing bloc than as a spoiler capable of raising the political cost of any deal.

A chance to talk

It is misleading to mistake Iranian dissent for dysfunction, when in truth it is neither. Here is a system arguing with itself about existential questions of statecraft. What is striking about the country now is not the depth of the disagreement but the extent to which the factions agree on the fundamentals.

The spectrum has, without ever announcing it, largely agreed that some form of negotiation is the way out of the crisis. The stabilisers want a deal to rescue the economy. The sovereigntists want one to bank the gains of the war. Even the IRGC appear to want a channel of its own, as recent reports about the Trump administration relaying messages via Iraqi Kurdistan directly to the IRGC leadership suggest.

The fight is therefore no longer about whether to bargain. It’s about the precise ways and means of improving Iran’s position before it commits to anything irreversible.

Washington needs to understand that Iran has already begun to make its choice. Every US economic D-Day that reaches once more for the escalation trap strengthens the rejectionists who insist that confrontation with the US and Israel is permanent. It weakens the factions that have, against considerable odds, talked the system toward the negotiating table.

Photo by Mohsen khorrampour on Unsplash

By seeking to talk to the IRGC, Donald Trump has shown he understands he has a unique opportunity to get out of this self-inflicted quagmire. But he must not allow his ego to stand in the way of the mediators’ arduous efforts.

Andreas Krieg, Associate Professor, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London

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

The president after him, Lyndon Johnson, who had a knack for vulgarity, launched the major bombing campaign there (while at one point strolling the White House grounds, insisting, “I don’t know what the fuck to do about Vietnam”). President Tricky Dick Nixon followed up charmingly in Vietnam by insisting that, “if, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” And then, of course, he did indeed bomb the shit out of another country by carpet-bombing Cambodia.

Still, none of that was broadcast publicly to the entire world. It simply came out later. Donald Trump, however, represents a first when it comes to so many things and that includes a recent violent form of presidential cursing in public, while threatening war with — don’t doubt it for a second — so much more to come.

Yes, leave it to “our” president to have employed such language publicly in an interview with a reporter at (big surprise!) Fox News when he said, in the midst of his war on Iran, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”

Of course, the question, when it comes to that Gulf monarchy and longtime ally of this country in the Strait of Hormuz, is: in the way of what? Perhaps Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings? After all, they recently dropped from a distinctly less than spectacular 37% of all Americans to a grim 33% (and by the time you read this, they may be lower yet). Or his failures in the very war he launched so haphazardly and haplessly with Iran six months ago?

 

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Or could he have meant that Oman might get in the way of his decision to relabel the Strait of Hormuz, now blocked by Iran, as “U.S. territory”?

Hey, that’s something that he recently claimed, all too publicly, might indeed happen, saying: “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” And not long after, he insisted that, “essentially, that’s what it is.” (Unfortunately, in a mistake of the moment — and yes, even Donald Trump can make them — the American president evidently didn’t bother to tell Iran’s leaders, or any other leaders in the region, that he had indeed defeated them and taken full control of the Strait of Hormuz.)

And yet, just facing off against Iran in the first place, while displaying the urge to make that strait U.S. territory, couldn’t have been more rational or logical of him, right? After all, it’s located just to the east of New Jersey (by perhaps 6,500 miles), so what could possibly go wrong? And as if to make his point even more emphatically, he posted a map of the area on his social media platform at Truth Social with that very strait labeled “New U.S. Territory.”

So, give him full credit for Hormuzing it up the wazoo in this ever-stranger world of ours — or do I mean his?

Who Knows What the President of the United States Will Do Tomorrow?

Okay, but let’s be realistic. However bad any of that may sound, don’t forget his urge to shove South Korea off a cliff and make North Korean leader Kim Jong Un into his best buddy by having a chum-to-chum meeting with him this very year! And don’t forget as well that this is the president who has ensured that, when future visitors to the White House are done dancing in his new ballroom (which, if the Supreme Court doesn’t step in quickly, will be fully constructed and will double as a national security post with “top secret military facilities” and even “bomb shelters”), they’ll be able to head home from the helipad that workers are building on a nearly round-the-clock schedule — 20 hours a day, seven days a week — on the South Lawn of the White House. And hopefully, it will be finished two days before China’s Xi Jinping visits Trump in late September. (“We might make it for President Xi,” the president said recently. “That’d be nice but not imperative.”)

Phew! Sorry to pour so much into a sentence or two, but you understand, I’m sure. After all, you know just whom we’re dealing with and, in truth, I’ve barely started when it comes to “our” president!

I mean, a lawn south of the White House? Whoever needed that? Honestly, why shouldn’t the president of the United States bomb the shit out of it?

Let’s face it, “it” couldn’t be more obvious. Sorry, I couldn’t help using that second it, but the president — yes, president! — of the United States is now clearly living ever more in his own self-constructed fantasy world. And that should be considered an unnerving, if not genuinely dangerous (ir)reality for the rest of us.

I mean, who knows what Donald Trump will do tomorrow? Pause those Canadian tariffs again or send them even sky-higher (50% being a piddling amount after all)? Put his name and inscription (”Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump”) on — well, feel free to choose the place yourself: perhaps the front of the White House, the halls of Congress, or the entrance to the United Nations. Or, of course, he could simply focus on either putting his face on Mt. Rushmore next to Abraham Lincoln’s or, if that’s not possible, bombing the shit out of that mountainside. I mean, why in the world not?

Photo by Arman Taherian on Unsplash

And don’t think Donald Trump is finished yet. After all, only recently, six months after he began his failing war on Iran, he announced what, in essence, is likely to be an attempted full-scale economic war (”tremendous economic consequences“) on any country that even keeps trade relations with Iran. (“Today, I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Any country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face tremendous economic consequences.”)

And hey, cheerily enough, that, of course, could include Iran’s largest trading partner, China, despite its leader’s scheduled visit with President Trump in Washington next month.

When it comes to the president who, more or less out of the blue, started a war with Iran, a country halfway around the world from the United States, and now is threatening to extend it to more of the planet, you might indeed say that, in Trumpian terms, he’s distinctly bombing the shit out of yet another country! Oh, and the one I distinctly have in mind is, of course, the United States of America.

Via Tom Engelhardt Substack

Apparently the Ellison family’s attempt to drum up support for Donald Trump and his Iran War by buying up CBS News and gutting it as a respected news organization was a costly failure. Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and his various pro-Trump organs, from Fox Cable News to the Wall Street Journal, have not pulled the wool over the public’s eyes in the ways that Murdoch hoped. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of the effort he expended convincing the American people to go to war with Iran, saying he had a thousand hours on US television , but while he may have prevailed on the gullible and avaricious Trump to fall on that country like a ravenous wolf, he did not succeed in altering the views of the American public on the desirability of such a war. The only significant impact of Netanyahu on most Americans has been to convince them that the Israeli government is a combination of genocidal maniacs and welfare queens that Americans should cut off economically and perhaps even militarily.

The Umass poll asked a weighted sample of respondents how well Trump has handled his Iran War. The response of 55% of those asked this question was “not well at all.” Ouch. Another 13% replied “not too well.” So 68%, over two-thirds, think he has done a piss-poor job on his Iran War, which was his war of choice. Two-thirds is the percentage needed in the Senate to impeach and remove a president, so if our representatives actually mirrored public opinion, Trump would be toast.

That question had to do with Trump’s handling of the war. Asked whether they approved of the war on Iran, a majority, 54%, said they strongly or somewhat disapproved, and another 20% were noncommittal, which I would interpret as not actively supporting the war even if they didn’t particularly oppose it. Those statistics yield a picture of a war that nearly three-fourths of Americans either oppose or about which they just don’t care. It isn’t what the commander of a war would want to hear from his own public.

A majority think the war was a mistake and question whether it has made the US safer or forestalled an Iranian bomb.

Another way of putting it is that only about a quarter of respondents think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.

The Umass report on the opinion poll noted that Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll, said, “Americans are overwhelmingly negative about Trump on the Iran situation.” He continued, “Only 1 in 4 Americans thinks he is handling Iran well. The real divide is increasingly between Trump’s hardcore MAGA base and almost everyone else. Among Republicans who identify very strongly with MAGA, 87% approve of Trump’s handling of Iran. But that falls to 58% among Republicans who are ‘somewhat MAGA’ and just 30% among Republicans who say they are ‘not MAGA at all.’ The more loosely attached Republicans are to the MAGA identity, the more skeptical they are of the war.”

File photo. Trump, Hegseth, Netanyahu. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok). Public Domain. Via Picryl

Conducting a war in the Middle East, as even the cowboys in the G. W. Bush administration recognized, requires at least some allies. But Americans don’t think Trump plays well with other children. Asked how he has handled working with allies in global affairs, 52% say “not well at all” and 12% say “not too well,” showing that nearly two thirds view his foreign policy performance negatively.

Based on this sounding, we can further project that Americans are even more angry about the main fallout of the failed war on Iran, which is high inflation. Fully 80% of respondents said that the Iran War has increased the cost of gasoline and groceries. Asked about how Trump has dealt with inflation, 57% responded, “not well at all.” A further 18% said “not too well.” That is 75%, fully three-fourths, who disapprove of his handling of inflation. Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well, and I presume they are wealthy investors in Trump’s casino stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 14% – 16% so far this year.

( Middle East Monitor ) — On 24 August, the Trump administration launched an operation called “Economic Outcast”, describing it as the largest economic offensive ever undertaken against Iran’s financial links around the world, aimed at cutting off every potential source of revenue that funds the country, and as more forceful than any such campaign the United States has previously launched against its adversaries. This operation threatens any party dealing with the Iranian regime with direct confrontation with the United States. Washington is returning to the use of an economic blockade against Iran after failing to achieve the outcomes it sought from the war it launched against the country. The blockade was tested during Donald Trump’s first term and inflicted damage on Iran, but failed to achieve its intended objectives. This American approach reflects another failure for the United States resulting from the war, after the terms of the agreement Washington reached with Iran several months ago reflected a defeat for Washington, from which it subsequently withdrew. Nor is this operation expected to succeed. China and Qatar, immediately after Washington announced the blockade, declared that they had no intention of complying with illegal, unilateral sanctions. The question, then, is whether the United States can today determine the outcome of the war by economically blockading Iran, in a regional and international environment more complex than the one that prevailed during Trump’s first term.

Although ceasefires have been put into effect more than once through Pakistani mediation, most recently through a memorandum of understanding concluded last June, this has not brought an end to the tensions and confrontation between the two sides in the war initially launched by the US and Israel against Iran. Six months into the war, despite Trump’s statement at its outset that it would last no more than four or five weeks at most, and despite the United States’ military superiority, the war has failed to resolve the issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme, the development of its ballistic missile system, and Iran’s regional footprint. Instead, the war has added a new issue: the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has recently turned to the economic blockade against Iran, having previously resorted to this option following Washington’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018. The US sanctions, imposed as part of the maximum pressure campaign, inflicted damage on Iran, but failed to destroy the Iranian economy or reduce its oil exports to zero, and did not achieve the objectives for which they had been imposed. The international and regional environment at the time helped Trump implement that sanctions campaign, but that environment has changed today. Over time, those sanctions also helped Iran develop an extensive system for circumventing them, relying on intermediaries in a number of countries and on complex, interconnected financial, commercial and oil networks.

Iran has therefore become highly experienced in containing sanctions. China represents a key factor in limiting the effectiveness of any sanctions regime against Iran, as it is the largest buyer of Iranian oil. Taken together, these factors point to the difficulty of this campaign succeeding today.

During Trump’s first term, the region was deeply divided. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed relations with Qatar, while Kuwait and Oman maintained theirs. The list of demands presented to Qatar reflected the extent to which the crisis within the regional order at the time extended to Türkiye and Iran, as it included reducing relations with Iran and closing the Turkish military base in Qatar. The divisions also extended to other parts of the region. Ankara and Doha supported Libya’s internationally recognised Government of National Accord, while Egypt and the UAE backed Khalifa Haftar’s forces. By contrast, the current war has unfolded in a different regional environment. Since 2021, the region has witnessed a reduction in polarisation between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the emergence of broader areas of regional understanding. The Israeli attack on Doha on 9 September 2025 reinforced concerns among regional states about the widening scope of Israeli threats and the fact that they were no longer confined to traditional arenas of conflict. These concerns were further heightened by the unjustified US-Israeli attack on Iran, which was not condoned by the countries of the region. At the same time, Saudi Arabia has maintained its explicit rejection of normalisation with Israel in the absence of a political horizon leading to a Palestinian state.

The region entered the 2026 war with greater convergence among its principal powers, less willingness to participate in Washington and Israel’s strategy against Iran, and a stronger inclination to safeguard the independence of its regional decision-making and its international relations. These shifts reduce Washington’s ability to recreate the regional environment that accompanied the maximum pressure campaign during Trump’s first term.

Compared with Trump’s first term, the regional environment is not the only factor suggesting that his current campaign to impose an economic blockade on Iran may not succeed. Shifts in China’s and Russia’s positions towards both Iran and the United States may also be among the factors influencing the effectiveness of that blockade, given the importance of the two countries’ geographical proximity to Iran and their international standing.

During Trump’s first term, following the implementation of his “maximum pressure” campaign, China opposed the policy and argued that the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement was the real cause of the tensions. Nevertheless, major Chinese state-owned companies reduced their dealings with Iran. The China National Petroleum Corporation withdrew from a major Iranian gas development project known as the South Pars project, China’s official imports of Iranian oil declined, and some banking transactions were restricted. A substantial proportion of oil purchases and refining shifted instead to small, independent and unofficial refineries and companies. In other words, China maintained a careful balance at the time: it opposed Trump’s maximum pressure policy against Iran and simultaneously preserved its relationship with Tehran, but did not enter into an economic confrontation with Washington. Trump’s current punitive campaign against Iran comes amid changes in China’s relations with Iran on the one hand, and with the United States on the other. Trump’s confrontational policy towards China during his first term, which continued under Joe Biden and reached its peak during Trump’s current term, has produced a firmer and more resolute Chinese position towards Washington.

Against this backdrop, Chinese-Iranian relations developed further in 2021, when China and Iran signed a 25-year comprehensive cooperation plan. China’s purchases of Iranian oil expanded to the point that China has today become its principal buyer, as well as an important source of technology and economic networks that openly help Iran mitigate the impact of Western sanctions.

The two countries also have gained experience in informal dealings through small Chinese refineries and extensive, informal transport networks involving commercial intermediaries and financial channels operating outside the Western banking and financial system. When the 2026 war broke out, China did not limit itself to criticising it, but also supported Iran’s position politically at the United Nations, described Iran as a “reliable strategic partner”, and called for Middle Eastern countries to take their destiny into their own hands within a shared regional political and security framework, and to pursue genuine strategic autonomy for the countries of the region. Today, US sanctions against Iran are being imposed in the context of deeper and more complex commercial, economic and financial networks, as well as a more confrontational and contentious US-China relationship. For this reason, a number of American experts consider China’s cooperation crucial to the success of Trump’s current economic punitive campaign against Iran.

Russia, like China, also criticised the United States’ withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 and had been a party to the nuclear negotiations, but it did not obstruct the Western sanctions imposed on Iran through the UN Security Council before the Russia-Ukraine war. That war marked the real turning point in relations between the two countries and their transition to the level of a strategic alliance, although Russian-Iranian cooperation has a much longer history. Since August 2022, Iran has supplied Russia with armed drones, in return for military and technical support provided by Russia to Iran. Amid cooperation aimed at confronting US hostility and the Western isolation of both countries, this cooperation expanded to include the joint production of drones, military technology, and the linking of economic and financial networks that help both countries withstand sanctions. This culminated in the signing of a strategic partnership treaty between the two countries in 2025. The 2026 war reflected a firm Russian position against the US-Israeli attack on Iran, expressed through clear political and diplomatic positions at the United Nations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also spoke of an initiative to establish a collective security architecture in the Gulf, similar to the proposal put forward by China.

Photo by reyhaneh ahmadi on Unsplash

The first maximum pressure campaign targeted Iran at a time when Russia still maintained some room for cooperation and negotiation with the West. Today’s campaign, by contrast, comes after years of war in Ukraine and amid increasingly extensive and deep economic, political and security ties between Russia and Iran.

It is difficult to interpret the United States’ use of economic sanctions today except as part of an attempt to circumvent the consequences of its failure to achieve its goals in Iran, and this approach may produce further negative consequences for Washington. Does the United States still possess the international leverage it once had to turn its sanctions on Iran into genuine international isolation? Could Washington’s renewed attempt to isolate Iran unintentionally create stronger incentives for regional powers to expand arrangements that move beyond exclusive reliance on the United States? And do these developments represent early signs of an emerging international order moving away from a unipolar political system?

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

Sania Faisal El-Husseini is a Professor of International Relations at the Arab-American University in Palestine, and a writer and researcher who has published numerous political articles and research papers. El-Husseini worked with the Palestinian National Authority for more than two decades in information and diplomatic roles. She has worked as a lecturer in several universities in Palestine since 2008, such as Birzeit University and Al-Quds University. She was invited as an academic visitor by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in 2013-2014, and Georgetown University in 2017-2018. Recently El-Husseini became a faculty member of the Department of Conflict Resolutions and Department of Diplomatic and International Law at the Arab-American University.

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

( Yale Climate Connections ) – Electric vehicle sales are a surprising beneficiary of the Trump presidency – at least outside of the United States.

The Iran conflict caused global oil prices to surge above $100 per barrel in March, April, and May of this year. Gasoline prices soon followed suit, exceeding $4 per gallon in the United States most days since April Fools’ Day.

As the biggest consumer of oil from the Middle East, Asia was hit hardest by its rising prices, shortages, and restrictions. But China’s measures to cut back on its oil imports have prevented global oil prices from escalating as high as many experts predicted.

Electric vehicles are one contributing factor. A recent analysis estimated that China’s rapid adoption of EVs has reduced the country’s oil consumption by 1.5 million barrels per day, or nearly 10%.

A new global electric car market report from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, also concluded that the Iran conflict and associated energy crisis “has clearly reinforced the case for EVs as a way to address energy security and fuel cost concerns,” and that it “may therefore further accelerate ongoing shifts in global car markets towards more electrification.”

The share of global new car sales that are electrified – meaning both fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids – has grown steadily in recent years, according to the IEA. In 2020, EVs represented under 5% of global new car sales. That share rose rapidly to 20% in 2024 and reached one-in-four new cars sold last year. 

A slump followed by renewed interest

EV policies in China and the U.S. are a big deal, because 38% of all cars sold in 2025 were purchased in China and another 18% in the United States. 

“China and the U.S. are such big markets in absolute terms that they shape the global picture,” explained Euan Graham, senior analyst at the energy think tank Ember, in an email.

As an example, EV sales abruptly slumped during the first two months of 2026, after Republicans eliminated the U.S. federal EV tax credit and China slashed its EV tax exemption.

But on the last day of February, the U.S. and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against Iran, which responded by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the global oil supply previously flowed. 

The price of oil and refined fuels spiked, and interest in EVs followed. Since March, electric car sales have surged in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. In Europe, the world’s third-largest auto market, EVs now represent nearly 30% of new car sales. Their popularity has even begun to rebound in China and the U.S.

As to just how much the Iran conflict supercharged EV sales, “I think it’s a bit tricky to nail down precisely,” said Elizabeth Connelly, energy technology and transport analyst at IEA and co-author of the report, in an email.

That’s because individual countries’ policies and economic conditions have a big influence on consumer behavior. But the data certainly indicate that the war and resulting high fuel prices made EVs more appealing to consumers.

For example, the IEA report noted that in China, total car sales have declined this year due largely to an economic slowdown in the country. That slump has hit internal combustion engine car sales particularly hard. While the EV share fell to 42% of China’s new car sales in the first two months of the year when government subsidies were first slashed, it quickly rebounded after the Iran conflict began. Electrified vehicles set records by exceeding 60% of China’s reduced volume of new car sales in each of the past three months.

That makes the United States’ persistently stagnant EV market unique. 

“As some markets see a step change in EV sales this year, boosted by the conflict in Iran, the U.S. is seeing sales slump having rolled back policy support,” Graham said.

Electrified vehicles have represented under 7.5% of new American car sales in each of the 10 months since federal tax credits were eliminated. Although rising gasoline prices spurred record domestic purchases of hybrid cars and used EVs, new EVs have not experienced the same sales boost.

Read: The rest of the world is lapping the U.S. in the EV race

The future of the car market is electric, to China’s benefit

As China’s domestic car sales have slowed this year, the country’s automakers have responded by ramping up their vehicle exports. That’s especially true of EVs, which the IEA reports surged to 35% of Chinese car exports in 2025 and 45% in the first half of 2026.

And the IEA data illustrates that fossil-fueled cars are quickly going the way of the dinosaurs. Global internal combustion engine vehicle sales reached their apex in 2017. The COVID pandemic caused car sales to plummet, and although they have now rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, all of the post-pandemic sales recovery has come from EVs. Fewer cars with internal combustion engines are being sold around the world today than were in 2011.

And a recent forecast by JD Power predicted that EVs will comprise a majority of new global car sales by 2033, reaching over 80% of the new car market by 2040.

The IEA is a bit less optimistic in its EV sales forecasts. 

“Our two policy-based scenarios project around a 50% electric car sales share by 2035,” Connelly said. 

The IEA is particularly bearish about the U.S., expecting no more than 20% of new American car sales to be electrified by 2035 unless new policies are introduced. 

“The changes in U.S. policy over the past two years have pulled down the projected global EV sales share,” Connelly said. “That being said, there is upside potential to our outlook based on the progress seen in emerging markets and developing economies, and more broadly depending on how policymakers respond to the recent energy crisis.”

Chinese automakers dominate the electrified sector, accounting for about two-thirds of all global EV sales today. Expanding Chinese EV exports have contributed to rapidly growing electric car adoption in countries around the world, including Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Belgium, the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Ethiopia. In total, the IEA reports that 50 countries set records for EV sales in the second quarter of 2026.

Can American automakers survive?

The rapid global transition to EVs and the Chinese dominance of that market have American automakers frightened about their companies’ futures. Recent U.S. government policies and regulatory rollbacks have undercut an already weak domestic EV market, and with the exception of Tesla, American automakers have been unable to compete with Chinese EVs in the international market. 

Photo by JUICE on Unsplash

There remain a few glimmers of hope in the American EV market. California, which accounts for one-quarter to one-third of annual electrified vehicle sales in the country, just launched its own rebate program for first-time EV buyers. And American legacy automakers like Ford and newcomers like Slate are taking innovative approaches in an effort to introduce more affordable electric vehicles.

But unless those efforts achieve success soon, the formerly dominant American auto industry will be relegated to fighting over the scraps of an ever-shrinking internal combustion engine vehicle market as the world transitions to an electrified future, unintentionally supercharged by the consequences of Trump’s Iran war.

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

Via Yale Climate Connections

In response, Iran launched eight missiles toward two US bases in Jordan, which Jordanian authorities said were intercepted. There appear to have been no casualties in Jordan.

The US Navy may have been especially jittery about new mines being launched because on Saturday an oil supertanker was hit by mines as it attempted to enter the Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz. It was the third ship hit in the past week.

Kpler and maritime data suggest that only 5 ships a day transited the Strait this weekend, all of them medium-sized. On Friday 14 ships passed the Strait, including a Qatari oil supertanker that had turned its transponder off.

Before Netanyahu and Trump fell upon Iran, roughly 130 ships a day transited the Persian Gulf, carrying 20% of global petroleum and 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The total traffic nowadays in the Strait may be higher than the figures given above because many ships go dark, turning off their transponders, and so cannot be tracked. The difference is not huge, however, and there is little doubt that 12 million barrels a day or so of crude is being kept off the global market because of the Hormuz impasse. Even during the period when the Memorandum of Understanding was being observed by the Trump administration, only 6.1 million barrels per day were coming out of the Gulf, not the 15 million bpd that had been the daily average in 2025. We’re probably back down now to half the exports of the MOU period, leaving a 12 million barrel a day shortfall compared to last year.

The other shoe will likely drop in December, when the industrialized nations’ reserves, on which we are now all living, run low.

The price of petroleum jumped on the news of the Larak strikes.

According to The Independent, the AAA is saying that the price of gasoline in the US was above $4 a gallon every day of August, which is an unprecedentedly high price, even greater than in August 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before Netanyahu and Trump attacked Iran, the price was $1.87 a gallon.

File photo. Photo by GG on Unsplash

In March-May 2026, Americans paid nearly $60 billion more to fill up their tanks than they did the previous year. So that price tag likely has doubled over the summer.

Since diesel costs are even higher than gasoline, and trucks carry 70% of US commodities to market, the high petroleum prices have put up the inflation rate since Netanyahu-Trump went blithely off to war.

The tit for tat strikes in the Gulf on Sunday show that the conflict is unlikely to end soon, and therefore high gasoline prices are here to stay for a while, as well as higher inflation. In fact, the Federal Reserve may have to put up interest rates in September.

( Middle East Monitor ) – The discrepancy between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements and those of the EU shows where the political deficiency lies. Predictably, the EU’s failure to address settler-colonialism and Israel’s existence as a colonial enterprise is failing to curb expansion. Words without action fulfil nothing except the publication of futile statements. Netanyahu, on the other hand, is adamant about settlement expansion in both rhetoric and action.

Speaking about illegal settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu told the settlers, “You are fulfilling the vision of the Land of Israel, and this is our land.” If it really was Israeli land, settlement expansion would not be illegal under international law.

However, declaring only part of Israeli settlements illegal while dismissing the structure that provides cover for settlement expansion – Israel itself – only serves to create further impunity for Israel, and complicity within the international community.

On Sunday, the EU High Representative’s office issued a statement condemning the publication of a tender for 1,200 housing units in the E1 area, saying that the plan “fundamentally harms the prospect of a two-State solution”.

Every time Israel proceeds with settlement expansion, the EU response is to issue variations of the same statement. And yet, attaching the same criticism to each settlement project is not preserving Palestinian territory for the Palestinian people.

The EU, like the rest of the international community, treats each announcement separately from Israel’s colonial existence and the concept of Greater Israel. EU statements, therefore, are characterised by phrase repetition and lack of continuity. They do not condemn colonialism and colonial expansion; only separate settlement projects.

A joint statement by the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands and several other European countries used similar rhetoric, saying the E1 project violated “the territorial contiguity of the Palestinian territories” and undermined “Israel’s international standing”. What is meant by undermined, however, is not explained. Is Israel’s international standing truly undermined, when settlement expansion and settler violence are ongoing without repercussions, not to mention the support Israel received from the international community for its genocide in Gaza?

Photo by Carl Campbell on Unsplash

Israel’s standing is not truly undermined until repercussions for colonialism are implemented by the international community.

On the other hand, Israel is creating colonial continuity through its statements and colonial expansion. It knows that each settlement project harms the two-state politics, to the point that there is no more talk among Israeli officials of a hypothetical Palestinian state. It is only the international community that keeps the paradigm alive, knowing that both settlement expansion and international inaction against colonialism have eliminated any possibility of a Palestinian state.

The EU should not only address the illegality of Israel’s settlement expansion; it should do so within the entire colonial context. It should also take note of its own role in enabling Israeli colonial expansion to continue by insisting upon a failed paradigm that serves nothing but international politics.

If a Palestinian state is impossible, then Palestinians are automatically excluded. Due to its defunct state, the two-state paradigm can only serve Israel and the international community. It has done so for decades now.

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

Via Middle East Monitor

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(The Conversation) – Reports from the USS Abraham Lincoln describe a crew running on almost no sleep and suffering mental strain.

The Navy’s own account acknowledged that the Lincoln spent 266 days deployed, 200 of them in a combat zone. It said that meal plans were adjusted when fresh resupply was unavailable, and that its sailors and Marines had been “pushed to their limits.”

The instinct may be to pity the soldiers, but I believe pity misses the point. The question is not whether we should ask hard things of people who volunteered for hard things. It is whether what the Department of Defense asked them to do was necessary and worth the military readiness – the ability to complete missions and respond to threats – it has consumed.

I know something about this. When I served in the U.S. Army, I worked three consecutive 12-hour day shifts, had three days off, then worked three nights. My husband was on a different rotation – six days on followed by two days off. We did not think we were being wronged. We were soldiers, and that was the job.

‘An overstretched force’

In February 2026, alongside Israel, the Trump administration chose to engage in war with Iran. The administration did not choose it blind.

Days before the conflict began, President Donald Trump was warned that the war might produce a harder-line Iranian leadership more determined to build a nuclear bomb. He was informed that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz and that a prolonged war would draw down stocks of precision-guided munitions. Military leaders also expressed concerns about “readiness problems for an overstretched force.”

This is where operational tempo – the pace and duration at which military units operate and the time they receive to recover in between – stops being a personnel statistic and becomes a strategic one. A higher tempo means units don’t have time to recover, since deployments tend to get extended.

This is not just a Navy problem.

In May 2025, an Army sergeant major warned that the Army’s operational tempo had surpassed the demands of the war on terror after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He said it was threatening readiness, retention, physical and mental health, and family stability. Two years earlier, another sergeant major said that soldiers were “busier now than we ever have been.”

Degrading conditions

The Iran war did not begin with a rested force or a readiness account at zero. It landed on a joint force that was already running hot.

The military rotation cycle is a planned schedule that moves military personnel between training, assignments and rest at home to prevent burnout. It exists because readiness is a finite reserve, which gets spent whether or not the war was necessary.

Ships and aircraft accumulate wear that must be repaired in the yard. Experienced service members accumulate fatigue that eventually shows in broken relationships and failed reenlistments.

I believe this is the actual lesson of the past two decades, and it is not a lesson about tired troops. During the U.S.-Iraq War, the Army pushed tours to 15 months and forced service members to stay on duty past the end of their enlistments. Those soldiers fought superbly – that was never in doubt. What was in doubt, and turned out badly, was the judgment that put them there.

The Navy learned its own version later. To keep ships in advanced positions where commanders wanted them, the Navy deferred maintenance on overseas-based ships. In 2015, the U.S. Government Accountability Office warned that the operational pace of deployments at sea was limiting training and maintenance and degrading the condition of overseas-based ships.

By June 2017, 37% of warfare readiness certifications for cruiser and destroyer crews in Japan had expired. That year, the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain collided with commercial vessels in separate incidents, killing 17 sailors.

They died in a readiness system that had learned to treat the schedule as something nobody could refuse.

Borrowing military capacity

The U.S. appetite for military commitments has not tracked any comparable rise in danger.

International relations scholar Sidita Kushi and I built a database of every U.S. military intervention from 1776 through 2019. During the Cold War, while facing a nuclear-armed superpower, the United States began just over 2.3 new military interventions a year. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, that rate rose to 3.48, an increase of nearly 50%.

Meanwhile, the same data shows the waning strategic importance of the countries where the U.S. intervened. The U.S. got safer, yet it intervened more often in places that mattered less to Washington.

One number captures the whole pattern. In our data, 1974 was the last year in which the United States did not launch a military intervention.

A military force that has sustained more than 50 years of interventions is not a fragile one. But it has never been allowed to reset.

So the condition of the USS Abraham Lincoln is not evidence that our sailors are soft. Nor does it prove that the fleet is too small.

File photo. USS Lincoln. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Kittie VandenBosch. File# 020421-N-8794V-001. Via Picryl

The crisis on the Lincoln is six months old and self-inflicted. Holding one ship past its return date does not create capacity; it borrows capacity from the next maintenance cycle or from another theater.

The USS George Washington, normally based in Japan, has now moved to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. That allows the Lincoln to come home, but it leaves the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier. The Navy closed one gap by opening another.

This reframes the overstretch argument now underway in Washington. I believe the force is not overstretched relative to the threats the U.S. faces – it is overstretched relative to the wars the U.S. president selects.

The crew of the Lincoln will do its job, and do it well, and not complain in public. That is precisely why I believe the burden of justification rests entirely on the civilian leaders who sent them, who were warned, and who chose war anyway.

Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

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