He wrote:

“In line with the ceasefire in Lebanon, the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced by Ports and Maritime Organisation of the Islamic Rep. of Iran.”

Araghchi’s announcement came in the wake of an announcement of a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon (actually Hezbollah). Ordinarily such ceasefires with Israel aren’t worth the paper they are printed on, since the Israeli authorities repeatedly and egregiously violate them with impunity. After the so-called ceasefire of November 27, 2024, Israel went on bombing Lebanon daily even in the absence of Hezbollah rocket fire, reaching 1000 air strikes by late last year and committing an estimated 10,000 violations of the agreement. Tel Aviv took the ceasefire as an opportunity to attempt to assassinate Hezbollah leaders and degrade their military capabilities, though the effort failed to cripple the Shiite party-militia of southern Lebanon. It has local support because people feel it is the only thing that stands between them and Israeli occupation, annexation, and settler colonialism. Israel occupied ten percent of Lebanon 1982-2000 and was only dislodged by the Hezbollah resistance.

If the current ceasefire turns out to be any different, it would be because of successful Iranian pressure on President Donald Trump through the threat to further disrupt the Persian Gulf and so prolong the era of high gasoline prices. This threat hangs over Trump going into the US midterms. It should, however, be noted that Israel has destroyed all the seven bridges over the Litani river linking Lebanon to its South, and has already occupied southern Lebanese territory up to several kilometers, having blasted entire historic hamlets out of existence, and vowing to prevent Lebanese Shiite internally displaced families from ever returning home. Israeli politicians and activists are talking about squatting on Lebanese land the way they do on Palestinian land.

So if Araghchi’s pronouncement depends on the situation in Lebanon, that is a frail reed.

Then there are questions about what it means for the Strait of Hormuz to be “completely open.”

Iran’s Fars News reports that it was told by an insider in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps that according to the ceasefire plan brokered by Pakistan, Iran was supposed to issue daily permits for a number of ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Because the Israelis continued to bomb Lebanon, however, Iran declined to follow through.

Fars says that the source told them that Iran had three conditions for reopening the Strait:

First, passage would be by peaceful commercial vessels only. No military ships would be allowed, and no commercial ships or cargo of belligerents would be allowed. It seems to me that that provision would exclude petroleum or LNG with Israel or the United States as their destination. It would also cement the closing of the US naval base at Manama, Bahrain and its end as HQ of the Fifth Fleet. If this provision is what the Iranians are demanding, it would be the biggest change in Gulf security architecture since Britain formally withdrew from the Gulf in 1971, and since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s gradually brought the US in to succeed London.

Second, the ships must follow the designated Iranian route, something that Araghchi seems to refer to in his posting.

Third, all passage must be permitted by and coordinated with the Iranian forces.

The source said that the framework for the implementation of these three conditions was an end to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and an expeditious end to the US blockade of Iranian vessels exiting the Strait of Hormuz. Should the US blockade continue, the source averred, it would be considered a violation of the ceasefire and would lead Iran to close the Strait once more.

The US is saying that it won’t lift the blockade on Iran until Tehran accedes to Washington’s demands.

File photo. (Feb. 5, 2021) – Amphibious transport dock ship USS Somerset (LPD 25) transits the Strait of Hormuz. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Brendan Mullin). Public Domain. Via Picryl

It should be remembered that even though Trump is still able to talk up the markets, no significant oil or gas flows are yet coming out of the Gulf, and so the real-world shortages of fuel that Asia and Africa are feeling keenly continue.

Diplomacy by social media is to say the least insubstantial, and it isn’t clear yet what the shape of a settlement will be, since both Iran and Washington still have demands unacceptable to the other. Is Araghchi really on the same page with the hard liners that Trump promoted to the top of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps? Can Trump really restrain his pit bull, Benjamin Netanyahu?

Still, a ceasefire in the sense of no one shooting, and continued diplomacy via Pakistan and other regional players is far preferable to continued warfare.

Washington, Tel Aviv, and their allies—including some within Lebanon itself—will continue to deny this reality. Acknowledging Iran’s role would mean admitting that a historic precedent has been set: for the first time, forces opposing the United States and Israel have succeeded in imposing conditions on both.

This is not a minor development. It is a strategic rupture. But it is not the only fundamental shift now underway: Israel’s very approach to war and diplomacy is itself changing.

After failing to secure victory through overwhelming violence, Israel is increasingly relying on coercive diplomacy to impose political outcomes.

Over the past two to three decades, this Israeli strategy has become unmistakably clear: achieving through diplomacy what it has failed to impose on the battlefield.

‘Diplomacy’ as War

Israeli ‘diplomacy’ does not conform to the conventional meaning of the term. It is not negotiation between equals, nor a genuine pursuit of peace. Rather, it is diplomacy fused with violence: assassinations, sieges, blockades, political coercion, and the systematic manipulation of internal divisions within opposing societies. It is diplomacy as an extension of war by other means.

Likewise, Israel’s conception of the ‘battlefield’ is fundamentally different. The deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is not incidental, nor merely ‘collateral damage’; it is central to the strategy itself.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaza. Following the ongoing genocide, vast swathes of Gaza have been reduced to rubble, with estimates indicating that around 90 percent of the whole of Gaza has been destroyed. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, women and children consistently account for roughly 70 percent of all of Gaza’s casualties.

This is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate destruction of a civilian population, an act of genocide that is designed to force mass displacement and remake the political and demographic reality in Israel’s favor.

The same logic extends beyond Gaza. It shapes Israel’s wars in Lebanon against Hezbollah and its broader confrontation with Iran.

The United States, Israel’s principal ally, has historically operated within a similar paradigm. From Vietnam to Iraq, civilian populations, infrastructure, and even the environment itself have borne the brunt of American warfare.

A Faltering Model 

It is often argued that Israel turned to ‘diplomacy’ following its forced withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 under resistance pressure. While this moment was pivotal, it was not the beginning.

Earlier precedents exist. The First Intifada (1987–1993) demonstrated that a sustained popular uprising could not be crushed through brute force alone. Despite Israel’s extensive repression, the revolt endured.

It was in this context that the Oslo Accords emerged—not as a genuine peace process, but as a strategic lifeline. Through Oslo, Israel achieved politically what it could not impose militarily: the pacification of the uprising, the institutionalization of Palestinian political fragmentation, and the transformation of the Palestinian Authority into a mechanism for internal control.

Meanwhile, settlement expansion accelerated, and Israel reaped the global legitimacy of appearing as a ‘peace-seeking’ state.

Yet the last two decades have exposed the limits of this model.

From Lebanon in 2006 to repeated wars on Gaza (2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and the ongoing genocide since 2023), Israel has failed to secure decisive strategic victories. Its ongoing confrontations with Hezbollah and Iran further underscore this failure

Not only has Israel been unable to achieve its stated military objectives, but it has also failed to translate overwhelming firepower—even genocide—into lasting political gains.

Some interpret this as a shift toward perpetual war under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But this reading is incomplete.

Perpetual War? 

Netanyahu understands that these wars cannot be sustained indefinitely. Yet ending them without victory would carry even greater consequences: the collapse of Israel’s deterrence doctrine and, potentially, the unraveling of its broader project of regional dominance.

This dilemma strikes at the heart of Zionist ideology, particularly Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s concept of the ‘Iron Wall’—the belief that overwhelming, unrelenting force would eventually compel indigenous resistance to surrender.

Today, that premise is being tested—and found wanting.

Netanyahu has repeatedly framed current wars as existential, comparable in significance to 1948—the war that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba and the establishment of Israel.

Indeed, the parallels are unmistakable: mass displacement, civilian terror, systematic destruction, and unwavering Western backing—once from Britain, now from the United States.

But there is a critical difference: The 1948 war led to the creation of Israel; the current wars are about its survival as an exclusivist settler colonial project.

And herein lies the paradox: the longer these wars continue, the more they expose Israel’s inability to secure decisive outcomes. Yet ending them without victory risks a historic defeat—not only for Netanyahu, but for the ideological foundations of the Israeli state itself.

Israeli society appears to recognize the stakes. Polls throughout 2024 and 2025 have shown overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for continued military campaigns in Gaza and confrontations with Iran and Lebanon.

Public discourse frames this support in terms of ‘security’ and ‘deterrence’. But the underlying reality is deeper: a collective recognition that the long-standing project of military supremacy is faltering.

Having failed to subdue Gaza despite the genocide, Israel is now attempting to achieve through diplomatic maneuvering what it could not secure through war. Proposals for international oversight, stabilization forces, and externally imposed governance structures are all variations of this approach

But these efforts are unlikely to succeed.

Gaza is no longer isolated. The regional dimension of the conflict has expanded, linking Lebanon, Iran, and other actors into a broader, interconnected front.

Balance is Shifting 

In Lebanon, Israel has been repeatedly forced toward ceasefire arrangements not out of choice, but because it failed to defeat Hezbollah or break the will of the Lebanese people.

This dynamic extends to Iran. Following the joint aggression on Iran starting February 28, both the United States and Israel were compelled to accept de-escalation frameworks after failing to achieve rapid or decisive outcomes.

The expectation that Iran could be quickly destabilized—replicating the models of Iraq or Libya—proved illusory. Instead, the confrontation revealed the limits of military escalation and forced a return to negotiations.

Photo of Beirut by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

This is the essence of Israel’s current predicament.

Diplomacy, in this model, is not an alternative to war—it is a pause within it. A temporary tool used to regroup before the next phase of confrontation.

But in Israel’s case, this aggressive ‘diplomacy’ is increasingly becoming the only available tool, precisely because its military strategy has failed to deliver victory.

Lebanon was meant to be the exception—a theater where Israel could isolate and defeat Hezbollah. Instead, it became further evidence of strategic failure.

Efforts to separate the fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran—have collapsed. Iran has explicitly linked its diplomatic engagement to developments on other fronts, forcing Israel into a broader strategic entanglement it cannot control.

This marks a profound shift.

The foundational pillars of Israeli strategy—overwhelming force, fragmentation of adversaries, narrative control, and political engineering—are no longer functioning as they once did

Yet Netanyahu continues to project victory, declaring success at regular intervals, invoking deterrence, and framing ongoing wars as strategic achievements.

But these narratives ring hollow.

The reality, increasingly evident to observers across the region and beyond, is that the balance is finally shifting.

For the first time in decades, the trajectory of history is no longer bending in Israel’s favor.

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.

Via Middle East Monitor

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.

( Middle East Monitor ) – The Strait of Hormuz is a single waterway that at its narrowest point is barely 33 kilometers, but its significance is understated as it can disrupt global energy flow and halt economies. After the United States and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran on 28th February 2026, to effect a regime change, Iran took retaliatory action by effectively blockading the Strait of Hormuz in March. This move resulted in a nightmare for states depending heavily on the Gulf States’ oil and gas. Now, after its closure, the Strait of Hormuz stands between the world and an energy catastrophe of historic proportions. 

What began as a targeted military campaign to change the Iranian regime and neutralize its nuclear and missile program has turned into one of the most severe energy security crisis in the world. The crisis of Hormuz also uncovered two uncomfortable truths about energy politics. The first is that the global energy structure is vulnerable because it is based on the routes that pass through a handful of geographical chokepoints. The second point is that during such a geopolitical catastrophe, some suffer while others profit from the chaos. Understanding both is essential to making sense of the world after Hormuz.

The world’s most dangerous bottleneck

The Strait of Hormuz has long been described as the world’s most significant chokepoint. Its importance is not rhetoric, as the number of energy vessels that pass through fully communicates the repercussions of its closure. In 2025, approximately 25 to 30 percent of the world’s seaborne oil trade and roughly 20 percent of all Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) transited this narrow passage. That translates to around 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day, along with over 110 billion cubic meters of LNG annually. Some 93 percent of Qatar’s LNG exports and 96 percent of the UAE’s LNG exports passed through the Strait. Presently there is no cost effective alternative. Countries such as Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain rely almost exclusively on the Strait for their energy exports, unlike Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have limited overland pipeline capacity to reroute a combined 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels per day from the east coast to west.

Before the war, approximately 138 ships transited the Strait each day, according to the Joint Maritime Information Centre. Since the beginning of March, fewer than 100 vessels have made the crossing in total, with an average of just five to six per day. Most of the ships that are permitted to pass have connections to Iran itself. Several Gulf oil producers, unable to export, have been forced to cut total output by more than 11 million barrels per day as onshore and offshore storage fills. The prices are also staggering; before the conflict, Brent crude oil traded at $71.86 per barrel. Currently, it has risen above $116. Oil prices have risen nearly 60 percent in just over a month. J.P. Morgan has estimated that even a moderate scenario, with Brent crude holding at $80 per barrel through mid-year, would depress global GDP growth for the first half of 2026, and it would also push global consumer price inflation above 1 percentage point.

A prolonged crisis would be far worse, and in that scenario $200 oil per barrel would not be far-fetched.

The economic shockwave

The immediate economic fallout is severe, and it is also widespread. When shipping through the Strait was effectively halted, global insurance markets went into crisis mode. Furthermore, the higher energy prices are not merely an inconvenience for import-dependent economies, but they are existential for everyone. Europe, which entered 2026 with gas storage levels, faces a second energy crisis following the one triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has been estimated that European gas shortage will be around 22-27 percent. Dutch TTF gas benchmarks nearly doubled to over €60 per MWh by mid-March. The European Central Bank has already postponed planned rate cuts and raised its inflation forecast for the year from 1.9 percent to 2.6 percent. The closure of the strait has not simply affected the energy market; damage has spread to other markets as well.  Around 46 percent of the world’s fertilizer comes from the Gulf, and with Qatar’s largest Urea plant halted, agricultural supply chains in South Asia and Africa face compounding shortfalls. Aviation has been severely disrupted: key flight corridors between Africa, Asia, and Europe have been closed, and airlines are forced onto longer routes around the Arabian Peninsula, significantly raising airfare. 

The vulnerability of the single route

The crisis has also unraveled an uncomfortable truth about the world’s energy architecture. Decades of investment in global LNG trade created the illusion of energy diversification; however, all roads and routes led through a 33-kilometer gap between Iran and Oman. The 2022 Russian gas crisis revealed Europe’s overdependence on a single supplier, and now the 2026 Hormuz crisis showed something more fundamental: that the global energy system is critically over-dependent on a single transit point. Now, the Strait, once thought of as a reliable passage because of its importance to all parties, has been weaponized, and all parties, whether importers or exporters, are bearing the brunt. In the past, Iran repeatedly threatened to close the Strait if anyone violated its sovereignty. Now that the taboo has been broken and its repercussions have been observed, the likelihood of future blockade of the Strait has increased.

Who is benefiting from the chaos?

No country has benefited as starkly from the Hormuz crisis as Russia. A combination of heavy Western sanctions and falling oil prices had been steadily eroded Moscow’s energy revenues since 2022, with oil and gas income dropping from 45 percent of the federal budget in 2021 to around 20 percent in 2025. The war in Iran has reversed that trajectory overnight.

In the first two weeks of the conflict alone, Russia earned an additional 672 million euros in oil sales, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. President Trump, facing a global energy emergency, granted India a temporary 30-day waiver on Russian oil sanctions on 6th March, effectively legitimizing Moscow’s role as a swing supplier. Tankers carrying Russian crude have been rerouted mid-voyage from China to Indian ports to meet surging demand. Russia is also eyeing Europe’s gas storage crisis as an opportunity and in March alone the overall Russian exports to Europe increased by 17 percent  (from 1.33 million tons to 1.7 million tons). For the Kremlin, the Hormuz crisis has been a geopolitical windfall with higher revenues, renewed strategic leverage, and, as the European Council President Antonio Costa noted, reduced international attention to the Ukrainian front.

American LNG exporters are the other significant commercial winners of the crisis. U.S. LNG exports are now approaching 11.7 million metric tons in March, and with benchmark gas prices domestically hovering around $3 per MMBtu compared to over $20 in Europe and Asia. The largest buyer of American gas is Europe with 7.49 million tons, a total of 64 percent of entire American export in March. Other important buyers are Egypt (with 620,000 tons in March), Jordan, South Africa and South America. American exporters are generating revenues of $870 million per week. Sellers of U.S. LNG are making at least $40 million per cargo compared to less than $5 million before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered the first energy crisis of the decade. New production capacity at Golden Pass, Calcasieu Pass, and Corpus Christi is scheduled to add 3.5 billion cubic feet per day of additional LNG by the end of 2026. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and EU nations have all signaled their intent to increase long-term American LNG purchases. The Trump administration has been explicit about seizing the moment to entrench U.S. LNG’s global market position.

STRAIT OF HORMUZ (Dec. 26, 2015) The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) transits the Strait of Hormuz. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class M. J. Lieberknecht). Public Domain. Picryl

Among the quieter beneficiaries are Canada and Norway. These two countries are major oil and gas producers, entirely unaffected by the Hormuz closure. Norway is pushing Artic oil ambitions to support European energy security, primarily selling to EU nations seeking to replace lost Qatari and Iranian volumes. Canada is exploring ways to increase its export capacity to the US Gulf Coast.

Both face infrastructure bottlenecks that limit how quickly they can ramp up supply, but their geopolitical stability and geographic insulation from the Middle Eastern conflict make them increasingly attractive long-term partners for energy-anxious importers in Europe and East Asia.

What comes next?

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not merely disrupted energy markets; it has nullified the assumptions that the international energy system has rested on for decades. The idea that global LNG trade had created genuine supply diversification has been exposed as partly illusory, since that trade still funneled through one narrow chokepoint. The belief that the strait was too important to be weaponized has been refuted. The notion that Western sanctions had neutralized Russia as an energy power has also been challenged.

What comes next depends on the duration of the conflict and the extent of infrastructure destruction. A swift ceasefire might allow markets to partially recover, though the damage to the infrastructure will constrain global supply for years. A prolonged conflict will speed up every trend already happening: the rise of U.S. LNG in global energy trade, the rehabilitation of Russian oil as an indispensable swing supplier, the urgent pursuit of renewable energy as a strategic rather than merely environmental imperative, and the growing fracture of the global energy market into geopolitical blocs. Countries profiting from this crisis do so not from wisdom or virtue but from geography and timing. The countries suffering are paying the price for a structural vulnerability decades in the making. The world’s energy architecture must be rebuilt with redundancy, diversification, and resilience at its core, and the Strait of Hormuz has made that argument more forceful.

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.

Sidra Shaukat is working as a Research Officer at Strategic Vision Institute Islamabad and her work involves conducting research in the areas of nuclear strategy, safety, and security.

Via Middle East Monitor

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.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – War against Iran. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela. Threatening to take over Cuba and Greenland. Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources to feed the insatiable appetite of American capitalism are indeed afoot and, in the age of Donald Trump, U.S. imperialism is back with a particular vengeance. Not, of course, that it ever went away. In fact, it’s been there from the beginning.

After all, the United States was launched as an act of settler colonialism, dispossessing the New World’s indigenous inhabitants. President James Monroe issued what became known as the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823, proclaiming the country’s exclusive right to determine the fate of the rest of the western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the slave trade and slavery constituted an imperial rape of Africa by America’s planter and merchant elites.

And by the turn of the twentieth century, Washington had announced its “Open Door” policy, meaning it intended to compete for access to the world’s markets while joining the European race for colonies. It proceeded to do so by brutally taking over the Philippines in 1899, while the U.S. armed forces would make regular incursions into countries in Central America to protect the holdings of American corporations and banks. And the story that began there has never ended with bloody chapters written in Guatemala, Vietnam, most recently Iran, and all too many other places.

As the dispossession of indigenous populations and the enslavement of Africans suggest, the “homeland” (itself an imperial locution) has long been deeply implicated in the imperial project. Indeed, various forms of repressive military and police measures used abroad were first tested out against labor, Black, immigrant, and native insurgents. Rebellious immigrant workers in the nineteenth century were compared to “Indian savages” as local police and federal militia treated them with equal savagery. White supremacist ideology, nurtured at home, would then be exported to the global south to justify U.S. domination there. In fact, this country’s vaunted economic prosperity for so much of the last century was premised on its exploitative access to the resources of the global south, as well as its post-World War II hegemony over Western Europe.

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Today, Donald Trump’s government exercises a reign of terror over our immigrant brothers and sisters, millions of whom are here because their homelands were economically despoiled by this country’s business and financial powerhouses. Homegrown resistance to our imperial adventures abroad has always been met by government repression, the stripping away of democratic rights, and the creation of a surveillance state.

In the Beginning

The United States was always conceived as an imperial project, its DNA infected from the outset.

The earliest settlers were simultaneously colonial subjects of the British and other European empires, and themselves colonizers exercising their dominion over indigenous populations. Native Americans — agrarian communities, hunting and trading tribes, seafaring and fishing societies — were systematically stripped of their lands, resources, and ways of life (not to speak of their actual lives) by the newly arrived settler colonials.

Sometimes their undoing was left to the silent workings of the marketplace. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the fur trade catered to the appetites of the world’s aristocracy — in Russia, China, and across Europe. Native American fur-trapping and trading societies entered into commercial relations with fur merchants like John Jacob Astor, the country’s first millionaire. But the terms of trade were always profoundly unequal and eventually undermined the viability of those fur-trapping communities.

Often enough, however, the colonizers resorted to far less “pacific” kinds of actions: military force, legal legerdemain, illegal land seizures, and even bio-warfare, as European-borne diseases nearly wiped out whole indigenous populations. The social murder of those peoples went on through the nineteenth century, from “the Trail of Tears” (the forced removal of the “five civilized tribes” from Georgia in 1830 on the orders of President Andrew Jackson) to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Imagine the United States minus that historic erasure.

There’s no way, since the very geographic borders we take for granted would be utterly different. Much of this country’s most fertile land, crucial water resources, mineral-rich deposits, as well as the industries that grew up around them using buffalo hides for conveyer belts and horses to pull street-cars (not to speak of the oil wells that made certain Americans so rich drilling in territory that once had been part of the Comanche empire) would have remained outside the “homeland.” Where would America the Great have been then?

Less tangibly, but perhaps more essentially, without that emotional elixir, the sense of racial superiority that still poisons our collective bloodstream and helps justify our imperial brutality abroad, that sense of being perpetually at war with savages — President Trump only recently called Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags,”— who knows what this country might have been.

Slavery and Manifest Destiny

Of course, slave labor disfigured the homeland for centuries, thanks initially to the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the imperial powers of Europe and eventually the United States. Shipowners, merchants, bankers, slave brokers, and planters, backed by the authority of the Constitution, grew extraordinarily wealthy by kidnapping and plundering African peoples.

Wealth accumulated in the slave trade or thanks to slavery found its way into industrial development, especially of the textile industries that powered the earliest stages of this country’s industrial revolution. We may fancy the notion that such a revolution was homegrown, a manifestation of a kind of native inventiveness, but factoring in the imperial assault on Africa makes the homeland’s vaunted industrial miracle seem less miraculous.

Territorial acquisition is often a hallmark of the imperial quest. And so it was in the case of this country’s expansion into the southwest and west, sometimes by purchasing land, but all too often by war. In fact, the seizure of a vast region that today stretches from Texas to California — sometimes referred to as the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) — was actually an invasion driven by the appetites of the slave owners of the American South for fresh lands to cultivate. Indeed, the most avaricious leaders of the Southern planter class wanted to take parts of Central America to extend the reach of the slave economy, as one imperial adventure whetted the appetite for another.

The phrase “Manifest Destiny,” the rubric deployed by American politicians to explain away their predatory behavior as something fated to be, remains part of an inbred American hubris. We, of course, make war and destroy only for the most idealistic motives: to save democracy, uplift the poor, hunt down demonic rulers, or bring the blessings of the American way of life to the benighted.

Exacerbated as well through the experience of conquest was a racialized ideology already deeply embedded in the country’s psyche. If, today, Donald Trump’s America is infected with an aversion to Latinos (not to mention African Americans), or immigrants of any non-White kind, look to the American imperial experience for its source. Earlier exercises in racism, including lynchings and church burnings in the Jim Crow South, became dress rehearsals for assaults on Muslims in our own moment of Trumpian paranoia.

Imperialism Without Colonies

Looked at from this vantage point, the American story turns out to be a serial exercise in imperial ambition. And yet, compared to its European competitors, the United States had precious few actual colonies.

True, after the Spanish-American War of 1898, it did run Cuba for a time, while establishing an unofficial protectorate over the Philippines (after waging a horrific counterinsurgency war there against a guerrilla independence movement). During that conflict U.S. forces mastered techniques — the establishment of concentration camps, for example — that they would deploy later against similar anti-colonial movements, particularly in Vietnam in the twentieth century.

Of course, the U.S. military also occupied various Central American nations — the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, among other places — during the opening decades of the twentieth century, taking control of their government finances and so ensuring that they paid debts owed to American banks. That was the original version of what came to be known as “gunboat diplomacy” and is now being revisited. (Think of the recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife by the Trump administration.)

At the beginning of the previous century, Secretary of State John Hay developed a different approach to establishing American imperial hegemony, something less haphazard than those semi-colonial one-offs. In 1899, he announced an “Open Door” policy which, on the face of it, seemed eminently fair. The United States claimed that it sought equal access to markets, particularly China’s, that had previously been carved into exclusive zones by the great European powers.

Opening that door eventually led to American global economic dominance, not counting the part of the world controlled for about 75 years by the Soviet Union (in parts of which China is now dominant). U.S. economic preeminence after World War II, backstopped by the world’s most powerful military machine, proved irresistible, while functionally Europe became something like an American colonial possession under the auspices of the Marshall Plan and NATO. That door, in other words, was opened wider than Hays had ever imagined.

Mind you, his imperial perspective was trained not only on the outside world but on the homeland as well. By the turn of the twentieth century, this country’s business and political elites were worried that the domestic market for America’s huge industrial and agricultural output was fast approaching exhaustion. Periodic and severe depressions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century seemed like evidence of that.

What was needed, key Washington strategists came to believe, was an “open door” for U.S. commodities and capital investment globally. Such a policy would, they believed, not only ensure American prosperity but also dampen the chronic class warfare between the haves and have-nots that had raged in this country throughout the Gilded Age, threatening the viability of American capitalism.

From the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, many people believed that the United States had entered a “second civil war,” as the titans of industry (sometimes backed by the country’s armed forces) faced off against the mass strikes of working people and farmers trying to survive the ravages of a capitalist economy. Ever since then, this country would have been inconceivable without its various versions of “open door” imperialism to buoy up the home front and pacify the natives — that is, us.

Acting the role of the hegemon, while lucrative, is also expensive. Public money still pours into sustaining and enlarging the warfare state to ward off all challenges to American supremacy. (The Pentagon only recently, for instance, asked for another $200 billion for its war in Iran.) It does so at the expense of social welfare programs, while starving investment in productive activities like the development of alternative forms of energy and new infrastructure, housing, and rapid transit that would improve life for everyone.

At times, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the warfare state has engendered full-blown domestic economic crises. Vietnam led to punishing years of hyper-inflation followed by years of economic stagnation. Moreover, such war expenditures nearly collapsed the world’s financial system in 1968.

Today, we may be beginning to experience something similar as the global economy teeters on the edge of collapse thanks to Trump’s war on Iran.

Democracy and Imperialism

From the beginning, however, there was resistance to the homeland’s imperialism. Native peoples waged war. Slaves revolted. Mexicans became anti-imperialists. Abolitionists took on the slavocracy. The Spanish-American War elicited opposition from middle-class folk and public figures like Mark Twain. During World War I, thousands of anti-war radicals had their organizations raided and their newspapers shut down by government decree, while some were imprisoned and some deported. Similarly, government repression sought to quell the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s, culminating in the killing of four Kent State students in 1970.

Democracy and civil liberties, thought to make up the essence of the homeland’s civic religion, can’t survive the imperial drive. Today, violations of the most basic rights to free speech, privacy, a fair trial, and the right to vote are appalling and commonplace. Immigrants, often here because they couldn’t survive the ravages of American capitalism in their homelands, are treated like outlaws. The most basic constitutional requirement — the exclusive right of Congress to declare war — is ignored with impunity (and had been long before Trump took over). The imperial state, the surveillance state, and the authoritarian state are hollowing out what’s left of the democratic state.

Imperialism does massive and fatal damage abroad. The wars in Gaza and Iran are the latest bloodbaths for all to see. Less visible are the wages of imperialism at home. An equation might clarify the historical record: The Imperium = land, labor, resources, power, and wealth. The Homeland = cultural brutalization, dispossession, fear, misogyny, racism, repression, slavery, tyranny, and war.

Donald Trump turns out to be a purveyor of both imperialism (notwithstanding his promises to “stop wars” and refrain from “forever wars”) and its toxic outcome. Conjoined in his person is the perfect amalgam of America’s imperial history of aggressive aggrandizement and the ubermensch cruelty that history has instilled in the American psyche.

Copyright 2026 Steve Fraser

Tomdispatch.com

In Europe, gasoline is up as much as 17% and diesel is up 20%-30% since February 28 when Netanyahu and Trump launched their war.

In Asia, the question goes beyond mere high prices to the question of physical barrels. That is, if this war goes on, there simply may not be any vehicle fuel, which would be an enormous catastrophe.

In South Korea, gasoline is up nearly 10% and diesel is up 15%. These percentages would be higher but the country capped fuel prices because of the crisis.

The Iran War has hit South Korea harder than almost any other country in the world, sparking high inflation, crashing its stock market, and leaving it with only a month of gasoline.

A lot of people in South Korea, the world’s tenth-largest economy, are just staying home more, reading novels and playing video games instead of going out. Of course, that hurts the retail sector.

South Korea depends on the Persian Gulf for 70% of its petroleum imports. The country has had to go hat in hand around to producers outside the Gulf to secure 273 million barrels of crude, enough to last it 3 months. That’s the level of crisis — countries are securing fuel for 3 months, with no assurances of what will happen after mid-July. Although many expect the war to end and the Strait to open by then, it will take time for exports to ramp up again.

South Korea secured 18 million barrels of petroleum from Kazakhstan, which ships it by pipeline to a Russian port on the Black Sea, where it can be loaded on ships and taken through the Red Sea to Asia, as long as the Red Sea route remains open. It also was able to secure some Saudi production, which is piped to Yanbu on the Red Sea. It is a scramble. And South Korea’s success means less of this petroleum will go to Europe, where prices will rise and shortages may develop.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, a human rights lawyer, engaged in a shouting match with Israel this past week, posting last Friday a 2024 video clip of Israeli soldiers disrespecting a dead Palestinian fighter in the West Bank by pushing his corpse off a building. He initially misidentified the body as that of a live child.

Informed that it was the corpse of an adult, Lee replied, “A small relief, if any, is that it involved a corpse rather than a living person, But even so, such treatment of a body constitutes a violation of international law.”

This is correct.

He added, “The sovereignty of each nation and universal human rights must be respected, and aggressive war should be rejected.”

Detail. President Donald Trump speaks with President Lee Jae Myung of the Republic of Korea in the gift shop at the Gyeongju National Museum, South Korea on Wednesday, October 29, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok). Public Domain. Via Picryl

When the well-greased Israeli propaganda machine squawked about the criticism, saying that the clip was from 2024 and the incident had been “investigated,” [why would either thing matter?] President Lee responded,

“It’s disappointing that you don’t even once reflect on the criticisms from people around the world who are suffering and struggling due to relentless anti-human rights and anti-international law actions. When I am in pain, others feel that pain just as deeply.”

The dispute is not only about Israel’s abysmal human rights record, among the worst in the world, but about the way it has made wars of aggression its way of life in the Middle East, rather creating an inconvenience for everyone else.

There are 26 South Korean oil tankers stranded in the Persian Gulf because of Netanyahu’s war on Iran.

South Korea is a major economic player in the world, and it can’t be having its economy messed about by Netanyahu every few months. Israel’s belligerence is not only hurting it badly in Europe but is creating deep resentments in Asia, where Israeli propaganda has little purchase.

(The Converstion) – The Trump administration claims its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is working, with nine ships complying with orders to turn around.

One of those was a Chinese-owned tanker called the Rich Starry that turned around in the Gulf of Oman on Wednesday to head back through the strait.

Iran, meanwhile, maintains it still has control over the strait and it will determine which ships transit through the crucial waterway. It also said if its ports are threatened, “no port in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman will remain safe”.

No matter how the blockade plays out, Iran will be in a far better position in the long term when it comes to maintaining control over the strait – not the US.

Iran’s powerful new tool

For decades, Iran had threatened to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage against its adversaries. It avoided doing so, however, until the current war against the United States and Israel, which it sees as existential.

Ironically, while the US and Israel aimed to weaken Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, the conflict has given Tehran a powerful new tool – control of the strait.

Tehran is now likely to make this control a core part of its long-term strategic thinking. In fact, Iran’s negotiators in the recent peace talks with the US had added Iranian sovereignty over the strait to their list of demands.

This leverage serves at least three key purposes.

First, it provides significant revenue potential from the tolls and transit fees it is already charging ships going through the strait.

By imposing minimal transit-related costs — estimated at around US$1 per barrel or up to US$2 million (A$2.8 million) per tanker — Iran could reportedly generate some US$600 million (A$836 million) per month from oil and another US$800 million (A$1.1 billion) per month from gas shipments.

Economists say at least 80% of the tolls would be paid by the Persian Gulf states – or as much as US$14 billion (A$20 billion) a year on oil alone.

Second, the strait functions as a security guarantee. By demonstrating its ability to disrupt a critical global energy artery, Iran has raised the cost of any future military action against it. This creates deterrence through economic risk rather than purely military means.

Third, it gives Iran geopolitical leverage, particularly with countries in the Global South. Control over the strait allows Iran to bargain with energy-dependent states, encouraging them to circumvent US sanctions on the regime and deepen economic engagement in exchange for concessions accessing the strait.

The US is now trying to neutralise Iran’s leverage over the strait. Yet, this “siege of a siege” faces clear structural limitations.

For one, Iran’s control over the strait is much easier to maintain than a US blockade in international waters. Even with allied support (which has yet to materialise), the US would struggle to restrict access to the strait for an extended period. Such an effort would be highly costly for the US military and would have significant consequences for the global economy.

In this sense, Hormuz risks becoming America’s Suez moment — a strategic chokepoint that reveals the limits of power rather than its reach.

How will China react?

But could China, which buys more than 80% of Iran’s oil, play a role in pressuring Iran to relax its control over the strait?

It has not done yet, and is unlikely to do. So far, China is blaming the US and rejecting its blockade.

In fact, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun used forceful language this week, calling the blockade “dangerous and irresponsible”.

Although one Chinese tanker has been turned around, others have transited through the new “tollbooth” system in recent days. This is an indication of China’s need and willingness to abide by Iran’s new rules – at least for the moment.

While China is exposed to the US blockade – about 40% of its oil imports come through the waterway – it has prepared for this moment.

It has diversified its oil imports to avoid being too reliant on any one supplier. And China is believed to have enough petroleum reserves to replace imports via the strait for up to seven months.

Still, it remains to be seen if China would support a toll system in the long term. Despite Beijing’s silence so far, some experts believe it would oppose this. China has repeatedly stressed the need to return to “normal passage” through the strait as soon as possible.

China’s expanding role in the region

China also stands to benefit from the political shifts that could come after the war.

The war has pushed the Gulf states toward a shared realisation that alignment with the US and partnership with Israel do not necessarily guarantee their security.

As a result, they may seek to diversify their relationships. This is reflected in the crown prince of Abu Dhabi’s visit to Beijing this week.

Trade between the Gulf states and China has grown significantly, with total exchanges reaching approximately US$257 billion (A$358 billion) in 2024, narrowly surpassing the Gulf’s combined trade with major Western economies.

Strait of Hormuz. Public Domain. Via Picryl

China is also expanding its diplomatic footprint in the region, helping to mediate the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023 to normalise relations and playing an indirect role in the recent Pakistan talks between Iran and the US to end the war. It clearly sees a bigger role in the region in the future.

Looking ahead, Iran may seek to leverage this moment to pursue a more regionally based security framework with the Gulf states, potentially with China acting as a guarantor or facilitator. Such a development would mark a significant departure from the longstanding US role as the primary security provider in the region.

Ali Mamouri, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies, Deakin University

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

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, spoke candidly years ago about why Republicans like tax cuts so much. In his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, he confided that tax cuts served the purpose of creating budget deficits that could then be used to justify spending cuts on government programs. Typically, administrations only cut spending for a program if it’s no longer necessary, and the resultant surplus may then be used as a tax cut to stimulate the economy. However, Stockman turned this on its head by using the tax cuts to create a budgetary crisis that would then require cuts in spending regardless of whether the programs were necessary or not.

In other words, Stockman used tax cuts to create a revenue problem that the Reagan administration could then mask as a spending problem. This is known as “starving the beast.” The administration starves the beast—important government services—of important tax revenues in order to slash government spending.

Stockman himself admitted the failure of this strategy since budget deficits during the Reagan administration did not bring down public spending in a meaningful way. This failure, however, didn’t stop the next generation of conservatives from making it a key part of their larger political project. In 2001 and 2003, for instance, George W. Bush pushed through massive tax cuts meant to impose a “fiscal straitjacket” on Congress. This then prompted Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to gut government programs.

Republican lawmakers attempted this again after they took control of the House of Representatives during the Obama administration in 2010. At the time, the U.S. economy was struggling through the Great Recession, which congressional Republicans blamed on government profligacy and “out of control spending.” Not only did they hold the debt-ceiling hostage to prevent future spending, but they urged more tax cuts to stimulate the economy. In general, starving-the-beast has become a more common, and outright underhanded, stratagem by which lawmakers have gone about cutting federal spending.

This strategy has also functioned as a form of class politics: wealthy elites are often the main beneficiaries of the tax cuts financed by cuts in social services on which the average American is more likely to depend. For instance, Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act slashed top marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent, a rate that only the top 2 percent of Americans paid (those rates dropped even further to 28 percent in 1986). This cut was largely paid for with reductions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid funding, student loans, and other social services. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 served the same agenda. According to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 20 percent received 65 percent of the benefits of those tax cuts, while the top 5 percent received 38 percent. Spending was then cut under the Deficit Reduction Act by targeting Medicaid, Medicare, the Migrant and Season Farmworkers Program, literacy programs, and others.

The American public is now far more aware of who has, and who has not, benefited from cuts in taxes and spending, and public opinion makes it harder for lawmakers to starve the beast. New polling shows that only 19 percent of Americans support the idea of cutting taxes on the wealthy, while 58 percent say the wealthy should be paying more (this number rises to 63 percent when asked about large businesses and corporations). At the same time, the majority of Americans want the government to maintain spending on the kinds of programs that are usually targeted, such as Medicaid and food stamps, medical and cancer research, federal childcare programs, or the arts in public schools. In other words, Republican lawmakers are going to have a harder time gutting these programs by further cutting top marginal tax rates.

That is why they are finding new ways to starve the beast. The latest strategy has been to leverage the heavy cost of national security issues.

Nowhere is this more evident than through the U.S. and Israel’s joint war with Iran. The bombing of Iran has proven to be even more expensive than the initial stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the daily burn rate averaging around $1-2 billion a day. Shortly after launching the war in late February, President Trump sought an additional $200 billion from Congress to fund it. The GOP is now using that price tag to plan massive cuts to important government programs.

In early April, for instance, Republicans proposed a reconciliation bill they claim would save $30 billion but would also drive up the out-of-pocket premium costs and increase the number of people without health insurance. Later that week, Trump candidly spoke of his intentions to slash government spending against the backdrop of a budgetary crisis caused by the war:

We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars […] Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection—we have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.

Trump’s claim that the United States can’t afford these programs are patently false. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid are planned spending that are not responsible for budget deficits.

However, the president’s comments make sense when contextualized against his longer-term plans to rein in federal spending. Through the creation of DOGE, Trump attempted to usher in an era of “government efficiency,” which included sharp reductions in several programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Although technically still operational, DOGE is largely seen as a failure as it never achieved its goal of major spending cuts (in fact, government spending increased 6 percent in 2025).

File photo. Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Aircraft. Public Domain. Via Picryl.

The Iran war can complete the job that DOGE couldn’t. Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64 percent increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades. In doing so, Trump is essentially reviving the starve-the-beast strategy by fitting it into a large military project.

Although the strategy to starve the beast has changed, the class politics remains the same. Those affected will be those most reliant on programs designed to provide healthcare, education, and food. However, in this case the consequence are no longer restricted to the American taxpayer. The increase in military expenditures will be used to inflict harm upon vulnerable populations abroad. The strikes in Iran have already killed thousands of people and displaced over a million civilians.

The horrifying reality is that this carries the very real danger of becoming a common finance strategy. What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs? Trump’s war in Iran establishes just such a dangerous precedent. For this reason, the American people must realize that their livelihood at home requires placing greater controls on what a president can do abroad.