Ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, one might have expected President Donald Trump to lower the temperature with Iran. Instead, Washington has continued applying economic and military pressure while Tehran has concentrated on convincing Americans that the confrontation is costing the United States more than Iran.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, has made that case through U.S. economic indicators. When the 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.1 percent on September 24, he wrote in a post on X, “Happy 5.1% 10Y America,” and warned of “high gas prices” and “diesel shortages.” Three days later, Ghalibaf cited the premium in oil prices to challenge Washington’s claim that Iran had lost control over the Strait of Hormuz, writing that “either the market’s dumb or the US narrative-laundromat is faking it.” On September 30, he projected growing U.S. financial stress through November and into 2027.

In many ways, this is the core of Tehran’s information campaign. Rather than answer questions about the damage the IRGC is absorbing, Iranian officials point Americans toward the costs they can see at home and argue that continued confrontation will only make them worse. The timing, weeks before the midterms, is hardly incidental. Ghalibaf’s message is that Washington may pressure Iran, but Americans will eventually decide the price is too high. That argument, however, tells us little about Iran’s ability to sustain the confrontation or preserve the regional system Tehran spent decades building.

In fact, Washington appears to be pursuing a broader objective. The current approach is better understood as what I would call “strategic asphyxiation,” and it has an interesting Cold War precedent. On January 17, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 75, or NSDD-75, which laid out U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union. Washington would seek “to contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism” by “competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas.”

NSDD-75 reflected a broader strategic principle: containing Soviet expansion required Washington to weaken the foundations of Soviet power and challenge its influence abroad. Economic pressure, technology restrictions, military competition, and support for forces resisting Soviet influence worked together to raise the cost of Moscow’s ambitions. As these pressures mounted, the Soviet Union would find it increasingly difficult to sustain its commitments abroad on an already strained economic and technological base.

Iran is a very different adversary, but its character as a revolutionary state makes this approach particularly relevant. Over several decades, Tehran has built a regional power system centered on the IRGC, linking the regime’s financial resources, military industries, procurement networks, and allied armed movements. Through this system, Iran converts revenues into weapons, technology, training, and logistical support that sustain its influence across the Middle East. The Houthis in Yemen and Iran-aligned militias in Iraq operate within this broader structure, relying to varying degrees on the resources and capabilities Tehran provides. Pressure on these groups can weaken Iran’s regional reach, but its effects will remain limited so long as the regime retains the financial and industrial capacity to replenish their losses. A sustained strategy must reach the Iranian system that makes their operations possible.

In this sense, the strategic asphyxiation strategy has four defining features:

• Economic constriction: Reduce the revenues and access to foreign currency that finance the wider system. Operation Economic Outcast targets this layer through oil exports, trade, financial intermediaries, and sanctions-evasion mechanisms.

• Network disruption: Target the IRGC financial, procurement, shipping, and logistical networks that convert money into technology, components, weapons, and support abroad. Economic pressure has a limited effect if Tehran can still move resources through alternative channels.

• Industrial degradation: Damage the military infrastructure that converts technology and materiel into missiles, drones, and other weapons. Strikes on production facilities make losses harder and more expensive to replace.

• Regional attrition: Increase the cost of Iran’s external commitments by weakening the armed groups and supply networks through which Tehran projects power. Pressure in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and elsewhere forces Iran to spend increasingly constrained resources defending investments accumulated over decades.

The campaign also works on morale. Clausewitz placed “moral forces” alongside physical ones because military power depends partly on confidence. For decades, Tehran cultivated the expectation that Iranian support would remain available despite losses or sanctions. Once that expectation weakens, the effect reaches beyond the weapons or money Iran has actually lost.

The results are already visible. The rial has lost more than half its value over the past year, falling to roughly 2.7 million to the dollar, while inflation has climbed above 70 percent. Tehran has also acknowledged a sharp contraction in trade. But these figures are only the most visible signs of a broader weakening. Iran spent decades converting economic strength into regional influence, and the strain is increasingly visible in Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.

As a matter of fact, the Houthis face growing challenges, Baghdad is pressing Iran-aligned militias to bring their weapons under state control, and Lebanon has entered negotiations with Israel as Hezbollah’s position weakens. The talks may lead nowhere, but their very existence speaks to how much the regional balance has shifted. Iran’s mounting economic troubles and the growing vulnerability of its regional network reinforce each other, leaving Tehran with fewer resources to sustain its allies and fewer allies capable of defending its interests.

Washington still has work to do, but sustained strategic asphyxiation will sooner or later force the Islamic Republic to confront a fundamental choice: abandon the revolutionary ambitions that have cost Iran and its people billions of dollars, or pursue them at an increasingly unbearable price until the revolution itself consumes what remains of the regime.

This piece was originally published in The Free Press

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Over the past week, Saudi Arabia has come under attack—on two fronts.

First, in Yemen, the Houthis seized the port city of Mocha on September 10 and advanced along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a vital waterway for Saudi exports. Meanwhile, drones from Iraq struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, the roughly 750-mile artery carrying oil from the eastern fields toward Red Sea export terminals.

The attacks coincide with the Iraqi government’s September 30 deadline for nonstate groups in the country to disarm, and with mounting U.S. and Israeli pressure on the Islamic Republic that arms and sustains them.

They also come amid a much broader campaign against the regional proxy system that Tehran has spent decades building. Since the U.S. war with Iran began on February 28, Operations Epic Fury and Economic Fury have placed the Islamic Republic under severe military and financial strain, while the U.S. Treasury Department has targeted Iranian oil exports, shadow-fleet tankers, financial intermediaries, and foreign procurement networks.

Clearly, that pressure hasn’t dissuaded the Houthis. For months now, the Islamist militia based in northern Yemen has terrorized commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Efforts from international forces—including the United States—have failed to stop them, despite an extraordinary disparity in conventional military power.

The question—as Saudi Arabia finds itself under attack, rebuffed in its requests for U.S. aid, and caught in the middle of a U.S.-Iran war now dragging into its seventh month—is why? Why is this seemingly ragtag militia group so hard to beat? And, in the wake of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Monday meeting with the head of U.S. Central Command, what does the Houthis’ continued activity mean for the broader regional order?

First, some context. The Houthis originally emerged in the 1990s from the Zaydi Shi’ite heartland of northern Yemen, fought six wars against the Yemeni government between 2004 and 2010, and seized the capital city of Sanaa in 2014. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia led an Arab coalition in a major anti-Houthi military intervention—yet more than 11 years of warfare failed to dislodge them from the capital or much of Yemen’s densely populated northwest. Meanwhile, Iranian support for the Houthis helped transform a northern insurgency into a force capable of operating ballistic and cruise missiles, one-way attack drones, anti-ship weapons, and unmanned vessels. By late 2023, the Houthis could use that arsenal to disrupt international shipping across the Red Sea.

All of the countries that have tried to intervene against the Houthis over the past decade—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United States—had more money, better aircraft, and superior intelligence, plus precision weapons. They also killed Houthi commanders, destroyed missile sites, intercepted weapons shipments, and sanctioned financiers. But none of those advantages produced a Houthi defeat.

Four reasons explain why.

First, in 2015, Saudi Arabia fought under constraints that steadily narrowed its freedom of action. The kingdom entered Yemen with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the Arab world, but that concealed a difficult political equation: Riyadh had to defend oil fields, refineries, pipelines, airports, desalination plants, ports, and cities across more than 800,000 square miles, while the Houthis merely needed to hold Sanaa and preserve enough military capacity to threaten the kingdom. Cheap missiles and drones allowed the Houthis to impose costs far greater than the price of the weapons it launched.

U.S. policy added another constraint. The Barack Obama administration initially provided intelligence, logistical assistance, and other support to the Saudi-led intervention, then progressively reduced that support as civilian casualties mounted. After a coalition air strike hit a funeral hall in Sanaa in October 2016, the White House reviewed U.S. assistance and publicly warned that cooperation with Riyadh was “not a blank check.” Obama had already unsettled Gulf allies by arguing that Saudi Arabia and Iran needed to “share the neighborhood,” reinforcing Saudi concerns that Washington increasingly saw accommodation with Tehran as part of the regional balance.

The political pressure continued under Joe Biden. In February 2021, his administration ended U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen and revoked the Houthis’ Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, citing the humanitarian consequences of the designation for a country dependent on imported food and fuel. Washington retained sanctions against individual Houthi leaders, but the broader change came while the Houthis continued launching attacks against Saudi territory.

All the while, reasons for Saudi Arabia to withdraw from the intervention were growing. Civilian casualties had damaged its standing in Washington, prolonged warfare had complicated its intended economic transformation, and Houthi missiles kept Saudi infrastructure vulnerable even when the coalition dominated the air. By contrast, continued control of Sanaa and the ability to threaten the kingdom allowed the Houthis to survive without achieving a conventional military victory.

Second, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were fighting the same enemy, but they were not fighting for the same Yemen. And as the war continued, their coalition developed political divisions. Riyadh wanted a Yemeni state capable of securing the Saudi border and preventing an Iranian-aligned military organization from dominating the country, while Abu Dhabi cultivated southern forces in Yemen, whose ambitions for autonomy or independence conflicted with Saudi priorities.

Internal competition spread. Anti-Houthi factions devoted resources to struggles over territory and political influence, while the Houthis consolidated their position in the north. Tensions between Saudi- and UAE-aligned forces again erupted into clashes in southern and eastern Yemen in late 2025 and early 2026.

Houthi cohesion gave the movement an advantage that conventional measures of military power missed. Its leadership maintained a comparatively centralized command while opposing factions fractured. Yemen’s terrain magnified those divisions: Aircraft could destroy missile depots and command centers, but ground forces had to secure mountain roads, ports, islands, border crossings, and cities. Disagreement over Yemen’s future repeatedly prevented battlefield superiority from producing lasting political control.

Third, sanctions constrained the Houthis without isolating them. For much of the war, sanctions failed to cut off the Houthis from the technology and financing required to replenish their arsenal. Iranian assistance had already given them the expertise to assemble increasingly sophisticated weapons inside Yemen, requiring the Houthis’ enemies not only to intercept complete missiles and drones but also to cut off the components used to build them.

China became especially important. The Treasury Department has traced Houthi procurement networks to Chinese companies supplying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) components, missile-guidance electronics, and chemical precursors used in ballistic missiles and explosives. Yiwu Wan Shun Trading Company, for example, coordinated large-scale purchases of UAV components from Chinese suppliers beginning at least in 2021. Other firms concealed dual-use equipment inside ordinary commercial shipments. The scale of China’s industrial market made replacing a sanctioned supplier far easier than eliminating Houthi access to the underlying technology.

Beijing’s role went beyond supplying components. In April 2025, U.S. officials accused Chang Guang Satellite Technology, a Chinese company with links to the country’s military-industrial sector, of providing satellite imagery that helped the Houthis target U.S. warships in the Red Sea. Washington raised the issue with Beijing, yet U.S. officials said the assistance continued. China was also buying the overwhelming majority of Iran’s exported oil, providing Tehran with revenue while Chinese companies appeared repeatedly in Houthi procurement networks.

For years, this left the Houthis room to recover from sanctions and military losses. A company could be designated, a shipment intercepted, or a weapons depot destroyed without depriving the Houthis of access to the markets behind them. Today, Operation Economic Fury is making that recovery more difficult by tightening pressure on Iranian oil revenue and the shipping and financial networks that keep it moving. That means the Houthis’ ability to continue replacing what they’ve lost now depends increasingly on a system under pressure of its own—though that pressure is still not sufficient to neutralize them.

Fourth, previous U.S. policy tried to contain the Houthis without weakening Iran first. For much of the war, Washington treated Yemen and Iran on separate diplomatic tracks. Obama backed the Saudi intervention initially, but his administration progressively reduced that support as civilian casualties mounted. He then pressed Riyadh toward a negotiated settlement, even as the White House pursued the nuclear agreement with Tehran. Biden pushed the separation further, seeking renewed nuclear negotiations with Iran while distancing from Saudi Arabia.

That approach left the kingdom confronting a movement whose military development remained closely tied to Iran. Years of training and technology transfers had given Houthi engineers greater capacity to assemble and modify missiles and drones inside Yemen, while Iranian revenue and procurement networks kept the wider system functioning. Every improvement in local production made the Houthis harder to weaken through air strikes and interdiction alone.

The limits became clear as U.S. military involvement expanded. Even the intensive U.S. campaign from March to May 2025, which inflicted substantial damage, couldn’t destroy the Houthis: An Oman-brokered agreement halted Houthi attacks on U.S. vessels, allowing the group to remain in power and retain the capacity to threaten other shipping.

Which brings us to today. Operations Epic Fury and Economic Fury start from a different premise than previous interventions. Rather than fighting the Houthis while leaving much of their strategic depth intact, the current campaign coincides with severe pressure on Iran itself. Tehran must now absorb military losses, defend its revenues, and rebuild capabilities at home while its regional partners continue to demand money, weapons, and technical support. For the Houthis, a weaker Iran changes something that previous bombing campaigns rarely could: the reliability of the system they counted on to recover.

Houthi behavior already points toward greater concern over relying exclusively on Iran. They have expanded contacts across the Gulf of Aden, including coordinating with the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab on weapons smuggling, training, and drone expertise. UN investigators recently received information that nearly 100 Somalis linked to al-Shabaab traveled to Houthi-controlled Yemen for military and ideological training, while Houthis reportedly traveled to Somalia to train al-Shabaab members in explosives, drone adaptation, and weapons maintenance. For a movement whose rise depended heavily on Iranian weapons, expertise, and protection, the search for alternatives is significant.

This all said, Saudi Arabia may still struggle to turn the present circumstances into a military victory. The Houthis control substantial territory, command experienced forces, and have spent more than a decade adapting to air strikes, sanctions, and interdiction. Yemen remains exceptionally difficult terrain for any force seeking a decisive outcome.

But everything around the Houthis has changed. Iran is weaker; its finances are under heavier pressure; its military institutions have suffered damage; and the networks that supplied the Houthis face greater scrutiny. Tehran also finds its hands increasingly tied elsewhere.

In Iraq, the government’s upcoming deadline to bring weapons under state control threatens the autonomy of Iran-backed militias and the political and economic structures that have allowed them to operate as extensions of Iranian power. Tehran has responded by courting Baghdad and Iraqi public opinion. During a visit to Iraq in August, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared that relations between the two countries were at their highest level and argued that true victory “begins when you win the hearts of the people before the battle starts.” The message was revealing. By stressing the need to win over the Iraqis, Araghchi implicitly acknowledged that Iran can no longer rely on armed networks alone.

Lebanon adds another source of pressure. Israel-Lebanon talks are testing the future of Hezbollah and the military autonomy that made it Iran’s most powerful Arab proxy. The negotiations may ultimately lead nowhere, but the process itself places Hezbollah’s weapons, territorial position, and relationship with the Lebanese state under sustained political pressure.

Combined, these developments amount to a broader campaign of political and psychological war against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) revolutionary system, all while it faces immense economic hardships at home.

Previous campaigns against the Houthis asked Saudi Arabia to defeat them while many of the conditions sustaining them remained intact. Riyadh does not face that problem to the same degree today. That hardly guarantees a Saudi victory, but wars often turn when the assumptions that sustained one side cease to hold. Saudi Arabia may be on the outs with the United States and suffering under a two-front war, but since 2015 the Houthis could count on their opponents tiring before the system behind them did. That calculation rested on an Iran capable of replenishing weapons, protecting allied militias, and sustaining several theaters simultaneously. For the first time, the Houthis can no longer make that assumption.

This piece was originally published in City Journal

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Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center on the divide between Islamic and Western civilizations. Thirty years later, however, and a quarter-century after 9/11, the principal fault line runs through Islam itself, separating two ideological worlds.

Within Western diaspora communities, Islam has become intertwined with Third-Worldism and postcolonial theory, both of which see Western imperialism as the great evil of the modern era. Meantime, much of the Middle East and Asia has turned toward pragmatism, normalization, and acceptance of Western predominance as a geopolitical reality. The gap between these rival outlooks now exceeds the divide between Islam and the West that Huntington anticipated when his book first appeared.

After 9/11, American strategy focused on political Islam. Al-Qaeda and its eventual Islamic State offshoot, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Islamic Republic differed sharply in theology and tactics but shared a revolutionary ambition to overturn the Western led order. Today, that Islamist challenge has fragmented. Al-Qaeda has splintered, the Islamic State has lost its caliphate, Egypt has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Gulf monarchies increasingly treat Islamist movements as threats.

Iran remains the principal revolutionary holdout. The Islamic Republic defines itself through opposition to the United States and Israel while sustaining a regional network of armed proxies. Yet the foundations of that project have weakened. Hezbollah has suffered major battlefield losses, Iranian influence in Syria has contracted, nationwide protests in 2019 and 2022 exposed deep domestic disillusionment, and the ideals of the 1979 Iranian Revolution command little enthusiasm among younger generations. Tehran still exports its revolutionary ideology, but its influence across the broader Middle East continues to wane.

Much of the Middle East has chosen a different course. The Abraham Accords institutionalized security cooperation and trade with Israel. Morocco expanded ties with Jerusalem to strengthen diplomacy, defense, and economic growth. The United Arab Emirates built partnerships spanning artificial intelligence, aviation, finance, and defense. Saudi Arabia evaluates normalization through the lens of security guarantees, advanced technology, its Vision 2030 modernization program, and regional stability. Across the region, partnerships are judged less by ideology than by the capabilities they deliver.

This transformation reflects a broader shift in how Arab and Muslim states understand statecraft. Scientific discovery, industrialization, and institutional innovation have long rewarded societies that adopt the world’s most advanced technologies, regardless of their origin. Middle Eastern governments have embraced the same logic after experiencing the costs of resisting Western innovations—most notably, the Ottoman Empire’s centuries-long restriction on printing in Arabic script until 1727, which left the region lagging in the spread of knowledge long after Europe had surged ahead.

That historical stagnation gave rise to a century of Arab intellectual discourse centered on the crisis of modernity: the painful question of why Islamic societies had fallen behind the West. Thinkers such as Shakib Arslan, in works like Our Decline: Its Causes and Remedies, diagnosed cultural isolation and technological backwardness as the root of the problem and urged selective emulation of Western advances. Leading-edge technologies have become strategic assets because they determine military capability, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical influence. Leaders once legitimized through anti-Western resistance now measure success through modernization.

Western intellectual life has followed a different trajectory. Universities interpret the Middle East through postcolonial theory, with Edward Said’s Orientalism becoming one of the field’s canonical texts. Within that framework, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict serves as the paradigmatic story of settler colonialism and resistance. After October 7, these ideas spread beyond academia into campus protests, divestment campaigns, professional associations, philanthropic organizations, and elections. Palestine became the organizing symbol for broader critiques of American influence, capitalism, and the liberal international order. Muslim identity merged with narratives of dispossession and resistance.

The consequences extend well beyond the campus. Anti-Israel activism once largely confined to Islamist organizations now operates comfortably within progressive politics. Zohran Mamdani’s appointment of Ramzi Kassem—who represented Ahmed al-Darbi after his conviction for the al-Qaeda-linked MV Limburg bombing—as New York City’s chief counsel illustrates that institutional migration. University encampments, municipal resolutions invoking “from the river to the sea,” and coalitions organized around decolonization reflect the same evolution. Revolutionary Islam now finds expression through postcolonial theory rather than religious doctrine. Iranian-aligned clerical networks in places such as Dearborn, Michigan, frame public life around opposition to American influence and solidarity with Tehran.

The same rift has hardened in Europe, where diaspora activism contrasts with the pragmatism of Middle Eastern governments. Universities and progressive institutions have embraced postcolonialism, entrenching narratives of permanent resistance and contributing to a sharp rise in anti-Semitism, particularly on British campuses, where incidents increased more than fourfold after October 7. Gulf states view these environments as incubators of radicalization. The UAE, for example, removed British universities from its state scholarship program—even though nearly 9,000 Emirati students had studied in the U.K. in recent years—while still funding study in Israel.

These trajectories suggest sustained confrontation. The version of Islam that has emerged within Western universities, activist groups, and progressive politics clashes with both the Western societies in which it operates and the Middle Eastern governments now abandoning revolutionary politics.

Three forces drive this collision. First, the opposing sides draw political legitimacy from different sources. Much diaspora activism is rooted in historical grievance, anticolonial struggle, and opposition to Western influence, producing an anti-system worldview in which cooperation with the U.S.-led order can itself signify submission or betrayal. Pragmatic Middle Eastern governments increasingly see cooperation with the United States and Israel as a means to strengthen security, attract investment, acquire technology, and accelerate economic growth. This divide now plays out across Western democracies, where boycotts, campus protests, municipal resolutions, and electoral campaigns target both Arab governments pursuing these partnerships and the Western institutions that support them.

Second, priorities have diverged between governments in the Middle East and North Africa and some of their diasporas in the West. Regional governments increasingly prioritize investment, technology, military strength, and economic growth. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, are investing heavily in AI and data centers. Meantime, several pro-Palestinian movements in the West have expanded their campaigns from opposition to Israeli technology contracts to opposition to the data centers and cloud infrastructure supporting them. The divide increasingly places diaspora activism at odds with the economic and technological priorities of regional governments and complicates relations with the United States.

Third, Western institutions amplify the diaspora vision far beyond its demographic weight. Universities, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, media organizations, and segments of electoral politics have absorbed postcolonial ideas that recast Middle Eastern affairs through the lens of decolonization and racial justice. By contrast, Gulf restrictions on Islamist financing and expanding cooperation with Israel reflect a deliberate effort to contain the same ideological currents sweeping across Western public life. The United States and Europe thus face pressure from two directions: an ideological movement extending its institutional reach at home; and regional allies that regard that same movement as a direct threat.

Huntington was right that culture would matter after the Cold War, but he misidentified the principal fault line. Political evolution within civilizations matters more than the boundaries between them.

The United States will continue to confront Islamism in the twenty-first century. But the principal challenge will not come from Huntington’s civilizational Islam, but instead from the version the West has itself helped cultivate: a diaspora Islam molded by Third-Worldism, postcolonial grievance, and a politics of permanent resistance.

For months, I have made the same argument: the IRGC is weak and will lose. The numbers have taken longer to surface than the strategic reality, but they are now increasingly difficult to dismiss. More interesting is why recognition took so long. Part of the answer lies in the effectiveness of the Islamic Republic’s propaganda. Another part lies in assumptions about Iran and the Middle East that have remained remarkably resistant to evidence.

Three assumptions in particular have distorted much of the debate about Iranian power.

The first is the role of the proxies. IRGC power has never just been about missiles, drones, or the nuclear program. Tehran’s real competitive advantage lay in force multiplication across multiple theaters. Hezbollah threatened Israel from Lebanon, Hamas from Gaza, Iraqi militias targeted U.S. forces, the Houthis menaced shipping and Gulf states, and Assad’s Syria provided the logistical corridor to the Levant. That network gave the IRGC strategic depth, distributed deterrence, and an economy-of-force model that allowed Tehran to impose multi-theater pressure while limiting Iran’s direct exposure and forcing its adversaries to disperse assets, attention, and operational capacity.

Since October 7, almost the reverse of what Tehran wanted has happened. Assad fell. Hamas is fragmented. Hezbollah is confused and has lost much of the leadership structure that made it such a powerful partner to the IRGC. By September 2024, Israel eliminated Hezbollah's top commanders, and Syria, which for years gave Tehran geography, logistics, and access to Lebanon, is no longer available in the same way. The regional system Iran spent decades building has taken one blow after another.

That change is central to understanding IRGC power. Tehran’s strength came from force multiplication. Iranian missiles were far more threatening when combined with militias, logistical corridors, political allies, and pressure across several theaters. Iran still has serious military capabilities, but many of the mechanisms that once amplified them are weaker, less coordinated, or gone. The U.S. campaign may look slow from the outside, but much of its effect comes from compounding those losses.

The second assumption concerns the Islamic Republic itself. Kissinger once said that “Iran had to decide whether it wanted to be a nation or a cause.” The Islamic Republic has always tried to be both, a state governing Iran and a revolutionary project extending beyond it, sustained by clerical institutions, security bodies, the IRGC, religious foundations, commercial networks, patronage systems, militias, and political organizations.

That complexity has historically given the regime considerable resilience because overlapping institutions could absorb shocks and compensate for losses elsewhere in the system. Recent strikes have tested that capacity by disrupting command structures, removing senior figures, and damaging military capabilities across several nodes at once. Reconstitution now comes at a moment of severe economic strain, with inflation projected at roughly 69 percent. Tehran now faces a regeneration problem as much as a military one: rebuilding capabilities, replacing personnel, preserving elite cohesion, maintaining domestic order, and sustaining the remaining regional network all draw on the same shrinking pool of resources.

The third assumption is that Iran can live with sanctions forever because it has already done so for decades. That argument sounds convincing until one looks at how sanctions actually worked. Tehran retained considerable room to sell oil, move foreign currency, use exchange houses and front companies, work through foreign financial centers, and keep money flowing to the IRGC. Sanctions existed, but enforcement left large gaps.

The present U.S. campaign is different because enforcement is increasingly aimed at closing those gaps. Since February 2025, OFAC has sanctioned more than 1,000 Iran-related people, vessels, and aircraft. Treasury is targeting oil networks, shadow banking, shipping, currency exchanges, procurement channels, digital assets, and intermediaries in China, Hong Kong, the UAE, Turkey, and elsewhere. The objective is to follow the money from the moment Iran earns it to the moment the IRGC can actually use it.

The recent Hezbollah designation is a good example. Treasury redesignated Hezbollah under its counterterrorism authority on the basis of its relationship with the IRGC Qods Force and simultaneously targeted the financial channels moving Iranian money through Lebanon, Turkey, the UAE, and Iran. The significance lies in how the U.S. campaign is being structured. Washington is increasingly treating the IRGC, its proxies, and the financial networks behind them as part of a single system.

Hormuz offers another example of why assumptions about Iranian power need to be reconsidered. The Strait was always a temporary card. Iran needed to weaponize it hard enough and long enough to produce two things: a serious global economic shock and enough political panic to constrain the President of the United States. Tehran caused disruption and pushed an enormous propaganda campaign around the Strait. The political effect it needed never materialized.

Reliance on Hormuz also exposed the limits of IRGC power. At the height of Iranian regional influence, maritime pressure could have been combined with sustained escalation from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza. By the time Tehran needed that system at full strength, several of those fronts had already been badly weakened. Missiles, drones, shipping threats, and economic disruption were left carrying much more of the burden.

The broader U.S. campaign makes more sense when seen this way. Why spend so much political capital on Lebanon? Why bring Iraqi leaders to the White House? Why work with the UAE on financial pressure? Because IRGC power has always depended on much more than Iran itself.

The real question today is no longer simply whether the Islamic Republic survives, but what it must sacrifice to do so. Tehran is trying to preserve a revolutionary project whose costs are rising as the state’s resources shrink. Something has to give. Either the project contracts, or the state absorbs the cost of keeping it alive. That choice will be watched across the region, and this is where the U.S. campaign can win: by exposing the gap between the power Iran claims and the power the IRGC can actually mobilize.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced today the launch of Operation Economic Outcast, the next phase of the Trump administration’s campaign against Iran following Operation Epic Fury (the military dimension) and Economic Fury (Iran’s shadow-banking system and the commercial pipeline connecting Iranian oil to China, which is mainly constituted by shell companies and shadow-fleet vessels to independent teapot refineries).

For those who have been following my writings on the war, I wrote back in May that Iran’s economy is already collapsing. Read here.

What is different now, I think, is that the economic pressure is approaching a point of no return, in the sense that it is ultimately going to lead to a power struggle within the IRGC. In fact, for all the IRGC’s rhetoric of “survival,” repeated by its propagandists with memes, and too often amplified by outlets invested in portraying the United States as losing, the scale of the damage can no longer be concealed with AI videos. The numbers speak for themselves: the rial has fallen to a record low, inflation is approaching 70 percent, and the economy is contracting by 5.4 percent this year.

More importantly, figures at the top of the political system are now acknowledging the economic cost of the war. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf are openly arguing that Iran must find a way out of the war and turn its attention back to the economy. Pezeshkian was pretty much blunt about it: “It would be better to end the war today, when we have power and dignity, and with the whole world acknowledging our victory.” But as long as the IRGC maintains its aggressive posture, Trump has little reason to ease the pressure.

Bessent’s speech made clear that the campaign has entered a new phase, with economic pressure moving beyond containment and toward the economic and political incapacitation of the IRGC. Treasury itself describes the strategy as one of total “isolation”, but my personal working assumption, especially given the behavior of neighboring states, is that Iran is already politically isolated across much of the region. Gulf governments that once tried to hedge between Washington and Tehran increasingly see Iran as a security and economic liability, while the UAE has already halted trade and others are tightening their exposure to it. Iran isn’t economically sealed off, especially as long as China and its shadow networks remain available, but the political space around the regime has already narrowed considerably.

The distinction matters because Treasury is now trying to turn Iran’s existing political isolation into an unbearable economic constraint, closing the routes through which the regime can still convert oil, currency transactions, and foreign intermediaries into usable cash. In practice, the goal is to leave the regime with fewer resources to rebuild its arsenal, maintain repression at home, and finance the militias it has created across the region. That last point is often overlooked. The IRGC sits at the coercive core of a parallel state and serves as the expeditionary arm of a transnational revolutionary project, sustained by a vast proxy network whose weapons, salaries, logistics, and operations are financed with wealth extracted from ordinary Iranians.

For perhaps the first time in its history, the IRGC is forced into a choice it has spent decades avoiding. It can retrench, abandon parts of the regional system it built, and preserve resources at home, or it can continue financing a war and a network of proxies that are steadily consuming the financial and industrial foundations of its own power.

What also transpires from Bessent’s speech, beyond his willingness to impose enormous costs on the IRGC’s enablers, is that he is capitalizing on Tehran’s own strategic errors. The Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be Iran’s ultimate coercive card. Before the war, 20.9 million barrels crossed the Strait daily, representing one-quarter of maritime oil trade. Tehran’s geostrategic calculation had two goals: to inflict an energy shock severe enough to force Washington and its partners to retreat, and then to exploit the Gulf states’ dependence on the Strait of Hormuz to divide them. Neither objective was achieved.

First, Washington blunted the initial energy shock. At Trump’s request, the International Energy Agency approved the largest emergency stock release in the agency’s history, totaling 400 million barrels, including 172 million from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. U.S. crude and refined-product exports reached a record 12.9 million barrels per day, flows to Asia nearly doubled, and political-risk insurance and naval escorts helped keep commercial traffic moving.

Second, Iran’s weaponization of Hormuz accelerated investment in alternatives to the Strait. The UAE is moving to double the capacity of its 1.8-million-barrel-per-day Habshan–Fujairah pipeline, TotalEnergies is investing in that expansion and in a route carrying Iraqi oil through Syria, while Saudi crude is increasingly exported through Yanbu and Egypt’s Sidi Kerir.

China is also reducing its exposure, as Chinese state-owned shippers have pulled back from the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb. Iran International reported that COSCO Shipping Energy Transportation and China Merchants Energy Shipping have avoided both chokepoints since late July after receiving guidance from Chinese central authorities, according to sources cited by Reuters. The two firms operate more than 100 large crude carriers, each capable of transporting around 2 million barrels.

Crucially, Iran’s actions have immensely damaged the image the IRGC has spent decades cultivating as the champion of resistance to “American and Israeli imperialism.” By attacking Muslim countries it claims to defend and lead, the IRGC exposed its coercive and aggressive behavior, weakening the regional legitimacy on which much of its influence depends.

In many ways, Economic D-Day is the logical culmination of Iran’s own miscalculations. For years, the regime survived on the assumption that its adversaries would never fully close the financial and commercial channels that kept it afloat. That era is over. Iran is losing its financial lifelines, its partners are stepping back, and Syria and Iraq are offering a glimpse of what the region can look like without the IRGC. That makes the old excuse and convenient talking point that the United States is responsible for every regional disaster harder to sustain. And sooner or later, Iran’s leaders will face a more dangerous question at home: why did so much of the country’s wealth go to militias and proxies abroad while Iranians themselves were left with stagnation and decline?

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Short note on some developments worth watching across different sectors.

1. DRC’s Ebola Outbreak

It has been reported that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is currently facing the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in its history, with more than 5,000 confirmed cases and 2,500 deaths. This week, UN officials have warned that transmission of Ebola is accelerating rapidly across the country, in fact, the disease is now spreading across more than 50 health zones in six provinces.

Important to note that containing the outbreak has historically been complicated for DRC, especially given the ongoing armed conflict in eastern Congo, as the groups involved have restricted access to affected communities and disrupted the movement of medical supplies.

Outbreaks result from zoonotic spillover – animal to human transmission. Infected humans, which can include dead bodies, then pass on the disease to others through body fluids such as vomit, blood and semen. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle pain and headache followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash and internal and external bleeding. It has a 50% death rate.

There are four types or strains of Ebola that affect humans: Zaire, Sudan, Bundibugyo and Tai Forest. The latest outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo virus. There have only been two previous outbreaks involving this strain, in 2007 and 2012.

Source: The Guardian

The other problem DRC is facing is that while the government is trying to contain the outbreak, the Congo River and its tributaries are major transportation routes connecting remote communities with large urban areas, allowing suspected cases to infect others over considerable distances before being identified.

2. Somali Piracy Is Back?

The NYT reported that Somali piracy is experiencing its sharpest resurgence in years. At least 13 vessels have been attacked off Somalia or in the Gulf of Aden in 2026, compared with 5 in 2025. The latest target was the Eritrea-flagged Sibu 1, which was part of Iran’s shadow fleet of ships exporting oil around the world, was boarded off Yemen on 20 August and diverted toward Somalia.

This further complicates the security picture in the Red Sea. The Houthis have already shown, especially since October 7, that they can threaten and disrupt shipping through one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. Somalia’s instability adds another layer of risk while the U.S.- Israel conflict with Iran is still ongoing.

Somalia has also become a battleground between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, though for different reasons. On one hand, Ankara has aligned itself closely with the federal government in Mogadishu, where it operates a large military facility and trains Somali forces, on the other hand, the UAE has built deeper ties with Puntland, whose strategic position is only growing.

Puntland finds itself at a critical political crossroads, confronting a dilemma that is both unavoidable and increasingly urgent. On one side stands the United Arab Emirates, a key provider of security assistance and economic investment. Emirati support has strengthened the Puntland Defense Force and police, contributed to counter-terrorism operations against ISIS, and financed major infrastructure projects, notably the expansion of Bossaso Port and Bossaso International Airport—assets central to Puntland’s economy and to wider regional stability.

Source: wardheernews

3. Instability in Libya

Libya’s fragile political balance is being tested by a new wave of violence. A series of drone attacks around Zawiya in western Libya struck fuel storage tanks, an oil-blending facility and a power substation, causing fires and electricity outages. The National Oil Corporation warned that continued attacks could force it to declare force majeure and suspend operations at Zawiya, Libya’s largest operating refinery.

The attacks are significant because Libya remains heavily dependent on oil while much of its energy infrastructure sits within areas controlled by armed groups that are only loosely tied to the state. Zawiya alone has recorded more than 30 armed clashes this year. Direct drone attacks on infrastructure introduce another vulnerability, particularly as Libya is trying to increase oil production and attract foreign investment.

Political tensions have risen at the same time. Fawzi Al Mansouri, the head of military intelligence in eastern Libya, was killed in a car bombing in Benghazi, while Central Bank governor Naji Issa submitted his resignation to Libya’s rival legislative bodies. His attempted departure is especially important because his appointment in 2024 had itself been one of the few successful compromises between eastern and western Libyan authorities.

All of this comes just as there had been some movement toward reunifying Libya’s institutions. Eastern and western military leaders met in Sirte in July, the rival camps approved the country’s first unified national budget in more than a decade, and US and UN efforts continue to push toward a unified executive and eventual national elections. Dbeibah has also continued developing Libya’s relationship with Italy, particularly around economic, security, and Mediterranean cooperation. The latest violence is another reminder that political deals at the top remain vulnerable to armed groups and institutions that have never been fully brought back under state control, the crux of all issues.

UN Special Representative for Libya Hanna Serwaa Tetteh told the Security Council that the country faces a “striking paradox”: around $1 billion is spent each month on fuel imports, yet electricity systems remain vulnerable to fuel shortages.

Tetteh also raised concerns over the alleged large-scale diversion of subsidized fuel in the electricity and security sectors. She called for stronger oversight, accountability and coordination to ensure public resources are used to provide essential services.

The crisis has also triggered protests in the capital, Tripoli. Weeks earlier, more than 100 protesters dumped rubbish outside a Libyan oil company, chanting against the authorities and demanding an end to prolonged power outages.

The UN says those responsible for diverting subsidized fuel must be investigated and held accountable.

Source: AfricaNews

4. Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Politics of the Nile

Egypt has renewed its opposition to Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Irrigation Minister Hani Sewilam told Al Arabiya that Cairo continues to see the dam as “illegitimate,” arguing that Ethiopia constructed and operates it unilaterally, without a binding agreement with the two downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan.

The stakes are particularly high for Egypt, which depends on the Nile for the overwhelming majority of its freshwater. Cairo has also become more concerned about what comes after GERD. Reports that Ethiopia could build additional dams on the Nile prompted Sewilam to say that Egypt “will not allow” new projects that threaten its water interests.

The dispute also sits inside a wider geopolitical competition. Sudan has coordinated closely with Egypt in demanding an end to unilateral Ethiopian measures, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and the broader Arab camp have repeatedly backed Egyptian water security.

The United States has also moved closer to Cairo under President Trump, who offered to restart mediation and said in June that Egypt had been “very unfairly treated” over the dam. China is in a more complicated position. Chinese financing and companies helped build the transmission infrastructure connected to GERD, and Beijing has deep economic ties with Ethiopia, but China also has a major strategic relationship with Egypt and has generally preferred African Union-led negotiations rather than openly taking Ethiopia’s side. The disagreement now reaches beyond one dam to the balance of power in the Nile Basin and the Horn of Africa.

5. Iraq Tries to Reclaim the State

Iraq is making a renewed attempt to bring Iran-backed militias under state control.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has set a September 30 deadline for armed factions to surrender or integrate their weapons. Several groups have accepted the principle, but Kataib Hezbollah has refused and insists that it will retain its “resistance weapons.” The difficulty is that these groups are no longer simply militias operating outside the state. Many are embedded in Iraq’s political, security, and economic institutions, which makes disarmament a test of how much authority Baghdad can actually recover.

The stakes are particularly high for Saudi Arabia. Iran-backed groups operating from Iraq have been accused of launching drones against Saudi oil infrastructure, prompting joint US-Saudi strikes on militia positions in July. Riyadh wants a stronger Iraqi government capable of preventing its territory from being used against the Gulf, while also expanding economic ties with Baghdad. Zaidi has sent senior officials to Saudi Arabia to seek a larger OPEC production quota, giving the relationship an important economic dimension as well as a security one.

For Turkey, a stronger central government in Baghdad could open a different kind of opportunity. Iraq is trying to reduce its dependence on the Strait of Hormuz by expanding oil exports through Turkey’s Ceyhan port and developing additional routes toward the Mediterranean. Ankara has already been building influence through trade, infrastructure, and security cooperation. If Baghdad succeeds in weakening autonomous armed factions, Turkey would gain a more reliable state partner and greater leverage over the commercial corridors linking Iraq to Europe.

For Iran, the same process would amount to an immense strategic loss. Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf have both traveled to Baghdad as Tehran tries to preserve its position, with Ghalibaf calling for a “new regional order” with less U.S. influence. Historically, Iraq’s militias have given Iran immense political leverage and the ability to threaten US and Gulf interests without acting directly. Their disarmament would weaken one of Tehran’s most important regional networks.

Two recent statistics struck me as particularly alarming:

• 52% of Americans aged 18 to 29 were living with one or both parents during the pandemic,

• and, more recently, according to Bloomberg, 60% of Gen Zers and millennials reported moving back home in the past two years.

The economic explanation is straightforward: everything is expensive. But shifts of this scale have enormous political consequences, geopolitical even, as they fundamentally reshape the conditions in which people first experience two major elements of political life: authority and governance.

In fact, Anglo-American societies developed unusually strong traditions of individual freedom alongside an equally unusual family structure. The English historian Peter Laslett called this the “Western family pattern.” By examining parish registers, household listings, and population records from 16th- and 17th-century England, he showed that this pattern existed well before industrialization. Young people often left their parents years before marriage to work in another household. Marriage came relatively late, and married couples generally established their own households instead of remaining within a multigenerational family home.

A good example comes from a 16th-century English village. A farming household might include not only parents and their children, but several unrelated teenagers or young adults. They were called “servants,” who were the children of other farming families who had temporarily left their own homes to work for wages. A farmer’s 16-year-old son or daughter, for example, might leave their parents, move several villages away, and spend a few years working in another household. They each would later marry and establish households of their own. Historians such as Peter Laslett and Richard Wall refer to this period between leaving the parental household and marriage as “life-cycle service.”

This created a distinct period between childhood and marriage. By his early 20s, a young Englishman might already have spent years earning wages, living among strangers, going on adventures, changing employers, and moving between communities and villages. Independence (in the modern sense) was, therefore, experienced well before the formation of a family of one’s own.

Yet the deeper significance of life-cycle service, as historian Alan Macfarlane has argued, lay in teaching the young to prize freedom of thought and freedom of action. These values later formed the basis for liberalism as a political doctrine. Another important aspect of this is that once the extended family no longer structured most of adult life, other relationships became essential, such as the ones with the church or with various employers, which paves the way for an individualistic society that requires people to cooperate with those to whom they are neither related nor permanently bound. There are other important factors, naturally, such as rural and land reforms. Still, there is clearly something to the relationship between family structure and the political dispositions a society develops over time.

The Russian peasant household offers, for example, a revealing contrast to the English. Into the 19th century, a household could consist of an elderly father as well as several married sons, their wives, and their children, functioning as a single socio-economic unit. Marriage in that context didn’t necessarily end or start parental authority, since a man could become a husband and father while remaining subordinate to the head of the larger household.

French historian Emmanuel Todd argued that the Russian peasant family structure “habituated” generations to a particular combination: relative equality among brothers under strong vertical authority. Habituation here refers to how, long before political doctrines enter the picture, family life teaches people which forms of objects and subjects of authority are normal and which are not. Communism, in that sense, introduced a political order whose underlying structure was not entirely unfamiliar to Russians.

The Middle East presents another variation. In parts of Arabia, the family extended well beyond the household, linking several generations and branches of kin into networks that also shaped economic and political life. For instance, fathers, sons, and uncles provided one another not only with capital but also with political access. What is often called “tribalism” grew partly from these networks of “trust,” especially where formal institutions were weak, compromised, or absent.

In many ways, the lives of peasants in England and Russia, as well as traditional households in the Middle East, illustrate the same point: The family is an early school of authority. Repeated across generations, its patterns of dependence, autonomy, and obligation enter a long process of habituation, gradually forming social expectations and the cultural ground on which political doctrines can later take root. Across centuries, arrangements of family life can pass into a society’s political inheritance.

This is why the growing number of young Americans who remain in their parents’ home deserves more attention. A prolonged adolescence under family protection delays a more fundamental passage into adulthood: drawing a boundary between oneself and others, forming judgments apart from the household, bearing the consequences of one’s choices, and discovering the limits and extent of one’s own authority. For much of Anglo-American history, these were formative experiences of adult life.

Freedom, too, is partly a matter of habitus. As the social arrangements that once accustomed Americans to independence recede, the political culture they sustained will eventually follow.

Long Cycles is published on the 15th of every month and explores the structural changes transforming societies beyond the Western world. Demographic trends, migration, political realignments, AI adoption, urbanization, and generational change are examined not as isolated events but as part of longer historical trajectories.

1. Turkey's Population Crisis

For much of the 20th century, Turkey's strength rested on a young and rapidly growing population. That demographic advantage is now fading. According to new data from Turkey's statistical agency, the country's fertility rate fell to 1.42 children per woman in 2025, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 and the 9th consecutive year below that threshold. In 2001, the figure stood at 2.38.

Population mobility remains high as well. During 2025, 403,216 people emigrated from Turkey, a 5 percent decline from the previous year. Of those leaving, 248,097 were foreign nationals and 155,119 were Turkish citizens. Although emigration eased slightly, departures continued to exceed arrivals, highlighting that Turkey faces not only a fertility crisis but also sustained population outflows.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government increasingly treats today's demographic trends as a national security issue. Ankara has designated 2026–2035 the "Decade of Family and Population" and introduced policies intended to encourage marriage and larger families. Whether those measures can reverse a trend already visible across much of Europe and East Asia remains uncertain. Once fertility falls well below replacement level, few countries have managed to restore it for long.

“In Türkiye, while the child and youth population is decreasing, the share of those aged 65 and over is increasing. As of 2025, the elderly population share has risen to 11.1%.

According to all population projection scenarios, the 0–14 age group and the 65-and-over age group are projected to converge between 2030 and 2040. By 2100, the share of the elderly population is projected to reach 33.6% under the main scenario and 42.8% under the low scenario. Even the most optimistic (high) scenario foresees that by 2100 about one in three people (28.2%) will be elderly.”

Source: Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Services

Read More:

• Türkiye’s shrinking families set off demographic alarm bells

• Immigration to Türkiye rises by 25% in 2025: TurkStat data

• New official data show Turkey’s demographic crisis deepening as birth rate falls to 1.42 children per woman

• VISION DOCUMENT - The Decade of Family and Population

2. Kyrgyzstan's Return Migration Strategy

For decades, one of Kyrgyzstan's greatest economic challenges has been the steady outflow of workers. Hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz citizens have left to seek employment abroad, particularly in Russia, sending home remittances that account for a substantial share of the country's economy. While those transfers support many families, they also leave Kyrgyzstan dependent on foreign labor markets and vulnerable to demographic decline.

To address that challenge, the Kyrgyz government has continued encouraging members of the ethnic Kyrgyz diaspora to return. According to the Ministry of Labor, Social Security and Migration, 387 ethnic Kyrgyz received returnee (kairylman) status during the first seven months of 2026.

The kairylman (кайрылман) program, whose name literally means “returnee,” is designed for ethnic Kyrgyz whose families settled outside the country’s borders, often during the Soviet period or earlier. The status allows them to relocate to Kyrgyzstan while receiving healthcare, education, pensions, social benefits, and employment rights comparable to those of citizens for up to three years as they complete the process of obtaining full citizenship.

The policy has been part of Kyrgyzstan’s nation-building strategy since independence in 1991. More than 90,000 ethnic Kyrgyz have resettled in the country over that period, and roughly 70,000 have gone on to receive Kyrgyz citizenship. Beyond increasing the population, the government hopes returning families will strengthen the labor force, help offset outward migration, and reinforce cultural and linguistic ties with Kyrgyz communities that remained outside the country’s borders after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“Over the seven-month period, ethnic Kyrgyz who arrived from the following countries were granted kairylman status:

• Uzbekistan — 16 people;

• Tajikistan — 351 people;

• China — 10 people;

• Russia — 5 people;

• Afghanistan — 1 person;

• Other countries — 4 people.

Under Kyrgyz law, kairylmans are provided with social guarantees and benefits largely equivalent to those available to citizens of the republic. Status holders are entitled to social benefits, pensions, healthcare, education and employment in Kyrgyzstan.”

Source: 24.kg

Sources:

• В Кыргызстане 387 этнических кыргызов получили статус кайрылмана

• Ministry of Labor, Social Security and Migration (mlsp.gov.kg)

• Law of the KYRGYZ REPUBLIC of November 26, 2007 No. 175 - About the state guarantees to the ethnic Kyrgyz moving to the Kyrgyz Republic

3. Saudi Arabia Builds an AI Powerhouse

For decades, Saudi Arabia’s economy was defined by oil. Today, the kingdom is investing billions to ensure that artificial intelligence becomes another pillar of its future economy. Data centers, advanced computing infrastructure, and AI research have become central to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 strategy to diversify the country beyond hydrocarbons.

The scale of that effort is becoming increasingly visible. In its 2026 World Development Report, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, the World Bank ranked Saudi Arabia among the world’s top 10 countries for private investment in artificial intelligence. The report reflects several years of rapid expansion. Saudi Arabia’s data-center capacity grew from 68 megawatts in 2021 to 467 megawatts by the first quarter of 2026, nearly a sevenfold increase in just five years. Investments in the sector have exceeded 16 billion Saudi riyals (approximately $4.3 billion) since 2016.

The country’s technology workforce has expanded just as quickly. Nearly 426,000 people now work in the sector, an increase of 186 percent since 2018, while women account for 35 percent of information and communications technology jobs. Saudi Arabia also ranked first in the world for government AI strategy and first in the Arab world, 14th globally, in a United Nations-linked Global AI Index. Earlier this year, the government designated 2026 the “Year of AI,” underscoring the central role artificial intelligence now plays in national economic planning.

The latest step came on 13 August, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, and Google Cloud announced plans to establish an advanced AI center near the city of Dammam on the Persian Gulf coast. The project will deploy Google’s most advanced computing hardware, including Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and the company’s Vertex AI platform for developing generative AI applications. Subject to regulatory approval, Saudi officials estimate the partnership could contribute more than 265 billion Saudi riyals (roughly $70 billion) to the country’s economy over the next eight years.

Sources:

• World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence

• صندوق الاستثمارات العامة و”جوجل كلاود” يطلقان مركزًا متقدمًا للذكاء الاصطناعي في المملكة

• Saudi Arabia ranks among world’s top 10 for private AI investment as data center capacity rises nearly sevenfold

4. Madagascar’s Fragile transition

Nine months after mass protests led largely by Generation Z forced President Andry Rajoelina from power, Madagascar remains in a fragile political transition. A military-backed interim government led by Colonel Michael Randrianirina is attempting to restore stability while preparing the country for elections currently scheduled for 2027.

The unrest reflected more than dissatisfaction with a single government. Madagascar is one of the world's poorest countries, with roughly three-quarters of the population living in poverty despite possessing some of the world's most valuable deposits of critical minerals, including graphite, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths that are increasingly important for batteries, electric vehicles, and advanced technologies. A rapidly growing and youthful population, limited economic opportunities, and accelerating urbanization have intensified demands for political and economic change.

The transitional government is pursuing two parallel objectives. Politically, it has begun long-delayed national consultations on constitutional reform after repeated postponements. Economically, the government is reopening Madagascar's mining sector after a 16-year pause (except gold), hoping that renewed investment in critical minerals will generate jobs, attract foreign capital, and strengthen public finances.

Securing foreign partners has become central to that effort. In February 2026, Randrianirina made his first official trip outside Africa to Moscow, where he met President Vladimir Putin to discuss expanded cooperation in mining, energy, agriculture, defense, education, and healthcare. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later reaffirmed those discussions with his Malagasy counterpart, Alice N'Diaye, ahead of Madagascar's participation in the next Russia–Africa Summit.

Questions of sovereignty have also moved to the forefront.

On 1 July 2026, Madagascar's National Assembly adopted Law No. 2026-007, providing for the automatic transfer to the state of land titles that remained registered in the names of foreigners on 26 June 1960, the eve of independence, and had never subsequently been transferred to Malagasy ownership.

On 3 August, the High Constitutional Court upheld the legislation as constitutional, clearing the way for its implementation. Authorities have presented the measure as completing the unfinished process of decolonization by restoring national control over land and natural resources.

The law excludes diplomatic and consular properties, land that had already been transferred to Malagasy citizens before the cut-off, and properties owned by foreigners who later acquired Malagasy nationality and properly registered their ownership. Madagascar's approach reflects a broader debate across Africa over the legal legacy of colonial land ownership, although unlike the redistribution programs pursued in countries such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia, it focuses specifically on unresolved colonial-era land titles rather than contemporary foreign-owned property.

“That upheaval interrupted Madagascar's engagement with the IMF. An IMF staff mission led by Constant Lonkeng visited Antananarivo from March 26 to April 8, 2026 to hold discussions on the combined third and fourth reviews of the country's Extended Credit Facility (ECF) and Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF) arrangements — programs originally approved by the IMF's Executive Board in June 2024. Pending staff-level agreement and formal Board approval, Madagascar stands to receive a combined disbursement of roughly SDR 134.4 million, or about $183 million, under the two facilities. The resumption of talks after the political interruption is itself a signal that the transitional authorities are seeking continuity with the prior government's reform commitments rather than a wholesale reset of economic policy.”

“According to the African Development Bank's African Economic Outlook 2026, Madagascar's real GDP growth slowed to 3.2% in 2025, down from 4.3% in 2024, even as agriculture (5% growth), metallurgy (9.6%) and banking and insurance (14.5%) continued to expand.”

Source: Madagascar’s Uneasy Reset: Mining Reopens as Poverty and Political Transition Test the Economy

Sources:

• Madagascar strongman sacks government after just 5 months

• Madagascar: New World Bank Program Set to Provide Reliable and Affordable Energy to Over 2.5 Million People by 2030

• African island nation moves to reclaim colonial-era land still registered to foreigners

• Transcripts: Russian-Malagasy talks

• Лавров: глава МИД Мадагаскара подтвердила участие президента в саммите Россия—Африка

5. Brazil Becomes China's Space Anchor in Latin America

China and Brazil are taking another step in a space partnership that has lasted for more than three decades. The two countries have announced plans to jointly develop CBERS-5, a new geostationary satellite designed to provide continuous monitoring of weather, climate, and environmental conditions across South America. Scheduled for launch in 2030, the satellite will improve the region’s ability to track storms, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events in real time, strengthening disaster preparedness and early-warning systems.

The project builds on the China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program, which started in 1988 and has produced several Earth observation satellites since the first launch in 1999. Brazil was the first Latin American country to partner with China in the satellite sector and has the region’s largest aerospace industry, making it Beijing’s most important space partner in Latin America. Unlike earlier CBERS satellites, which orbit the Earth and pass over the same location periodically, CBERS-5 will operate in geostationary orbit, remaining fixed above the continent and providing continuous, 24-hour coverage. That capability will allow meteorological agencies to monitor rapidly changing weather systems with much greater precision.

The partnership, however, has expanded well beyond satellites. This year, China and Brazil began also constructing a joint laboratory for space technologies while continuing work on a major telescope project in South America, further deepening scientific cooperation. The expansion comes as China’s broader space ambitions in Latin America face growing geopolitical headwinds. The United States successfully pressed Argentina and Chile to freeze two high-profile Chinese-backed astronomical observatories in the Andes, citing concerns that their locations and technical capabilities could support satellite tracking, surveillance, or other dual-use military applications. Governments in both countries aligned with Washington’s security concerns amid broader strategic competition with China and wider trade and diplomatic tensions. Against that backdrop, Brazil has become an even more significant partner for Beijing’s long-term scientific and space ambitions in the region.

Sources:

• Wikipedia – China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite program

• China, Brazil to launch 24/7 disaster early warning satellite for South America

• Agência Espacial Brasileira (AEB) – Official announcement of joint development of CBERS-5

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Dear Readers,

Thank you sincerely for subscribing, commenting, and engaging with my work.

I started Beyond the Ideological because I enjoy developing and reworking concepts (most recently Third Worldism), connecting dots, and sharing things I find intriguing.

Unfortunately, my Substack has grown less organized and less fun than I would like, and I want a structure that is easier for me to sustain and, more importantly, easier for you to follow.

Starting August 15th, you can expect five formats:

• The Meridian — A weekly column or essay on geopolitics, a crisis, a war, a controversy, or idea consuming the political and intellectual debate of the moment.

• From Elsewhere — Every Friday, a short note on some developments worth watching across different sectors paired with selected links, books, and excerpts from sources that rarely enter the usual conversation, including Arab and Israeli media and publications from Latin America, Europe, Africa, and beyond.

• Long Cycles — On the 15th of every month, a closer look at some of the long-term forces reshaping societies beyond the Western world, from political causes, demographics, and migration to technology/A.I. adoption, urbanization, and generational shifts.

• The Palimpsest — On the 30th of every month, a translated short text from literature, history, or political thought that I believe deserves a wider audience.

• Beyond the Ideological Podcast — Periodically.

The purpose is to bring together developments too often examined separately and to share more of the background that informs my analysis and conclusions. Geopolitics cannot be separated from markets, energy from industrial capacity, or political movements from the intellectual traditions that animate them. Third Worldism, liberalism, Islamism, technological utopianism, and other ideological doctrines also shape how events are interpreted and which solutions appear desirable. In this sense, I consider Beyond the Ideological a very humble effort to look at both the forces moving the world and the battles over how to understand them.

I hope you will enjoy the next chapter of this project!

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Since the Arab Spring, Morocco's Islamists have struggled to offer a credible governing agenda. Instead, they have spent years convincing young Moroccans that their country has no future. Through alliances with NGOs, partnerships with European activist networks, and relentless claims that Morocco's ties to Israel and the United States make it a conspirator or aggressor, they have pursued a single political objective: to delegitimize the state, deepen public disillusionment, and convert that resentment into votes in September.

For a long time, Islamist rhetoric in Morocco has painted Europe as a kind of promised land, a place where welfare never runs out, chances are everywhere, and prosperity comes easily, with barely any effort required. The objective has always been to weaken trust in Morocco's own institutions and steer young people toward leaving.

But those very currents held power after the 2011 constitutional reforms tied to the Arab Spring. Their time in government produced a sluggish economy, unfulfilled promises, and a public that steadily lost faith. Since then, the pitch has barely changed. The same refrains keep coming back, while Morocco is framed as a failed state, not worth anyone’s loyalty, not worth building, not worth investing in.

In that narrative, Morocco is often branded a kafir state, and the King is attacked as not Islamic enough. Young Moroccans are urged toward jihad and a permanent stance of confrontation with the West. Amazigh (Berber) identity, too, is mocked or dismissed as backward, even primitive. Year after year, the effort has been to drain the spirit out of an entire generation, to sell them on one bleak claim above all: their country has no future.

And whatever Morocco’s problems, the country is not collapsing. There is no war, no state failure, no institutional breakdown. Development is still moving through some of the biggest infrastructure and industrial efforts in modern Moroccan history: the extension of Africa’s first high-speed rail network, the expansion of Tanger Med into the continent’s leading port, and large commitments in renewables and desalination. Morocco has also built one of Africa’s most advanced aerospace sectors, with over 150 companies employing about 25,000 skilled workers and bringing in close to $3 billion a year in exports. Safran, Boeing, Airbus, and other international manufacturers run sites producing aircraft engines. Compared with many developing states, Morocco has put its emphasis on infrastructure first, on pulling in investment, and on laying the groundwork for long-term growth, then, after that, widening social benefits.

The same ideological current also pushes a claim that Morocco is trying to “reclaim Muslim land” via Ceuta and Melilla. In reality, no Moroccan government has expressed such a demand to the United Nations or any similar international body. Official diplomacy has kept those enclaves separate from Western Sahara, where Rabat has made a formal, explicit sovereignty claim for decades. That difference says a lot about the distance between Morocco’s actual foreign policy and the Islamist storyline built for ideological mobilization.

It’s also worth noting where the loudest demand has come from. A Moroccan Islamist leader has publicly argued that the country “must eventually regain control of Ceuta and Melilla.” By projecting that position onto the state while brushing aside official statements and practice, Islamist activists manufacture a thin appearance of legitimacy for a campaign that aims to weaken state authority, and amplify the message online for global support. Morocco’s ties with Israel and the United States then get turned into a weapon as well, presented as proof that the government itself lacks legitimacy.

Since October 7, this has sharpened, in part because Islamists now face a possible political rival in Fouzi Lekjaa, the highly capable president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation. Lekjaa is widely credited with driving Morocco’s historic run to the semi-finals in the 2022 World Cup and with turning the national team into a global force. Now he is using his key role in winning and preparing for the 2030 World Cup, co-hosted with Spain and Portugal, to bolster his profile as a potential prime minister, and to deepen his standing as one of the country’s most influential public figures.

Morocco remains a developing country. Real social and economic difficulties persist, and legitimate frustrations deserve to be taken seriously. Still, describing the country as hopeless helps no one, not Moroccans and not anyone interested in meaningful reform. In practice, that narrative mainly benefits two groups: people looking to justify illegal migration, and those trying to strip the Moroccan state of legitimacy.

Contrary to the conspiracy talk that spreads online, Morocco gains nothing from uncontrolled crossings. Some critics point to Algeria’s relationships with European governments, but every major European state keeps channels open with Algiers, Giorgia Meloni’s Italy has a notably strong relationship, while Morocco’s day-to-day cooperation has stayed consistently solid across the board. That includes strong migration frameworks with France and Germany, including a bilateral partnership signed with Berlin in 2024 that has driven higher returns, deportation arrangements with Hungary and Poland, and, most recently, close operational coordination with the United States.

What actually happened looked far less like state orchestration and far more like online coordination and crowd movement. Facebook groups coordinated mass pushes toward the border cities, while a curated stream of clips showed traffic police, whose authority extends only within narrow legal limits, alongside videos of cars and buses heading north. All of it was then repackaged into the claim that “Morocco is behind it.” Missing from that online narrative were images of Moroccan security forces actively pushing back, deploying in Nador, Tangier, and surrounding areas, and the fact that Morocco itself suspended train service to slow the flow. Criminal networks sought to overwhelm the response by bribing people and urging the largest possible numbers to move simultaneously. In the end, Morocco mobilized the army across multiple cities.

The truth is that Morocco is itself under heavy migration pressure coming from the Sahel. In 2025 alone, authorities intercepted 73,640 attempted irregular crossings, and sub-Saharan nationals now account for nearly 60% of foreign residents.

Last year, several thousand Sudanese and other Sahel-origin migrants also crossed the eastern border, adding to the strain already felt in Moroccan cities, it’s a pressure ordinary Moroccans regularly complain about. The chaos of the past two days only worsens Morocco’s position rather than helping it: once the impression of an open or uncontrolled border spreads, it draws in even more refugees and irregular migrants, piling additional weight onto a burden that is already substantial.

Islamist voices now invert reality and accuse the Moroccan government of orchestrating the entire episode. Many NGOs, including those in Europe with ties to Islamist groups, have amplified the falsehood by branding Morocco a “Zionist proxy.” This ignores the fact that Morocco’s position on Gaza does not favor Netanyahu: Rabat has repeatedly and firmly condemned Israeli military operations and ceasefire violations, called for an immediate and lasting halt to the fighting, demanded unrestricted humanitarian access, and insisted on a two-state solution with East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

The timing is also interesting: general elections are set for 23 September, and Islamist operators understand that border chaos, magnified on social media, can destabilize the incumbent narrative before the vote.

Morocco is further constrained by Spanish policy choices under Pedro Sánchez. Effective migration management requires reciprocity. The security budget allocated to Ceuta has remained inadequate, particularly with a regional government led by the Partido Popular (whose president, Juan Jesús Vivas, belongs to a party long hostile to Sánchez).

Morocco shoulders the burden of physical presence, patrols, interceptions, and surveillance along the entire land and maritime perimeter. By contrast, Spain’s preventive spending is limited: Spain allocates roughly €60 million per year to measures aimed at preventing irregular arrivals (border technology, Frontex participation, and limited aid to North African partners), while spending more than €1.8 billion annually on reception and support for irregular migrants. A multi-year Spanish government plan of €711 million for Ceuta and Melilla through 2026, covered by El País in 2022, directed the bulk of funds to education, social services, and economic development not pure border security.

This structural imbalance renders Spanish policy unsustainable as it provides more incentives to illegal crossings, not less. Morocco has no legal prerogative to extract individuals once they are inside Spanish territory, including Ceuta. Spanish Supreme Court rulings that have extended asylum protections to certain “swimmers” which were published a few weeks ago only complicate the picture further.

This latest episode will primarily benefit Islamists who want Europe to fail and Morocco, denounced in their rhetoric as a "Zionist" state, to fail alongside it. Every crisis that deepens polarization, weakens European governments, and reinforces the narrative of a failing Morocco advances the ideological project they have pursued for years.

“If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.
If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics.”
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

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It’s official. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers agree with me that Third-Worldism is one of the biggest challenges that the United States is confronting, and I’m obviously very glad the notion is gaining traction.

For some reason, it has slipped out of the standard encyclopedia of ideologies even though intellectuals like Raymond Aron identified it early and explained precisely what it would become.

I have warned for a while about its rise in the United States, especially after October 7, and also about how China, Russia, and Iran use it to promote anti-Americanism and conduct information warfare campaigns. Naturally, naming the ideology is the first step toward countering it.

In a statement, Secretary Rubio explained: “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country. The American people deserve to know.”

What makes Third-Worldism uniquely dangerous is its ability to not only present itself as a moral creed, almost a secular religion, but also in how it helps advance every single interest but the United States’. Indeed, foreign propaganda usually arrives bearing the marks of an adversary and is discounted accordingly. Third-Worldism, by contrast, speaks in an American vocabulary through Americans in universities, newsrooms, philanthropic foundations, and legislatures, cultivating a domestic constituency that steadily narrows what elected officials consider politically defensible. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Havana understand the strategic value of cultivating these narratives. They benefit from activist movements already inclined to embrace them. After all, a citizen persuaded that his own country's power is fundamentally illegitimate does more to advance their interests than any intelligence agency could hope to accomplish.

Third-World and Third-Worldism

Understanding why requires distinguishing the ideology from the Third-World that named it.

Alfred Sauvy coined the term in 1952 by analogy to the third estate of the French Revolution, describing a bloc that was ignored, exploited, and scorned, and that wished to become something. The phrase later on designated a set of places belonging to neither the Western bloc nor the Soviet one, and the category has long since dissolved, since states once gathered under it now include some of the wealthiest societies on earth alongside powers projecting force well beyond their borders.

On the other hand, Third-Worldism is a symbolic conception of those places rather than a description of them, which is why it outlived the geography that produced it. The central claim of the Third-Worldist cosmos holds that the fundamental division in world politics runs between a dominating North and a dominated South, that this cleavage precedes and explains every other political fact, and that every conflict resolves into a single story of colonizer and colonized. What the ideology fundamentally demands but also delivers in a way that is hypnotic is a totalizing moral hierarchy in which victimhood confers legitimacy and power confers guilt, a formula that can be applied to any dispute anywhere, indefinitely.

As I mentioned in an earlier piece, François Furet gave the clearest account of what such a structure actually is. A French historian of the Revolution who broke with the Communist Party in 1956 and spent the remainder of his career dismantling the Marxist historiography he had once served, Furet argued in Penser la Révolution française and later in Le Passé d'une illusion that revolutionary politics operates as a mentalité rather than a body of doctrine, a way of inhabiting political reality in which history moves toward a redemptive rupture and the believer locates himself on the correct side of it.

His insight was that the mentalité survives the falsification of every proposition attached to it, because it was never held as a set of propositions in the first place, a finding he reached by tracing how Western intellectuals sustained their commitment to the Soviet project across every disclosure that should have ended it. And I believe that Third-Worldism operates on exactly that basis, which is why no accumulation of evidence, even when coming from the Third-World about the outcomes it produces, has any effect on the conviction of those who carry it.

The Ideology That Outlived Its Subject

In that sense, a mentalité that survives the falsification of its propositions will also survive the downfall of the state that housed it, which is why communism and its supporters did not vanish with the Soviet Union.

As a matter of fact, Western governments read the institutional victories of 1991 as the conclusion of a contest that had merely mutated, and the mutation followed a pattern familiar from certain pathogens, which shed the features that make them recognizable while conserving the mechanism that makes them transmissible. Class struggle and other forms of “Wokeism” proved dispensable and were discarded without difficulty, while the underlying partition of humanity into oppressor and oppressed survived every ideological battle by locating fresh categories to inhabit, so that class yielded to race, race yielded to colonizer and colonized, and the present arrangement arrays the West against everybody else.

Cuba demonstrates perfectly that the mutation worked and is working, having grasped before Moscow did that the Third-Worldist frame traveled further than doctrinal orthodoxy and having built the institutional machinery to prove it. The Tricontinental Conference of January 1966 assembled delegates across countries and produced two permanent bodies, the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Latin American Solidarity Organization.

From those bodies came a journal circulating in several languages and a poster output running to hundreds of designs distributed worldwide, which promoted this sort of “global resistance” to audiences that never opened a page of Marx.

The 6th Non-Aligned Movement summit followed in Havana in 1979, handing Fidel Castro the chairmanship for three years, and the Havana Conference on Third World debt came in 1985 with representatives of high caliber. The catch was that participation in any of it required no communist commitment, which was precisely the point, and Cuban intelligence built slowly but surely its relationships within American academic, activist, and policy circles around the frame instead of the party, so that those relationships outlived the Soviet collapse entirely.

Cubans themselves are the first casualties of what their government exports, since decades organized around “resistance to imperial domination” have yielded ration books, a medical system in ruin that the regime continues to advertise abroad as a great success, and an exodus so large that the diaspora now constitutes a substantial fraction of the nation. And every material failure receives the same explanation: colonialism, a category convenient enough to absorb responsibility for outcomes the leadership's own decisions produced.

Iran adapted the model as well to a different context and region and produced its most operationally successful version, namely “Khomeinism”, presenting itself as the vanguard of the mustazafin, the oppressed of the earth, a formulation that carries the North-South ideological framework intact under theological terms.

Why this Matters

First, the State Department, like much of the national security establishment, has struggled for years to identify conceptually the threat.

Communism is an inadequate label. The term has lost much of its explanatory power in the American political imagination, burdened by the legacy of the Cold War and associated with an economic doctrine that few contemporary activists openly embrace. More importantly, today’s progressive movements draw their energy from universities, media, and cultural production rather than from the industrial working class that Marxism once claimed as history’s revolutionary agent.

Islamism is equally insufficient, though for the opposite reason. Most of the college-educated Americans advancing the ideas of Hamas or Jihadism hold no commitment to divine sovereignty, Islamic law (Shariaa), or religious governance. Shared opposition to the United States and Israel, rather than shared theology, explains their alignment with Islamist movements. Common enemies frequently produce political cooperation without ideological agreement.

Also, Third-Worldism explains the coalition’s looseness better than either label because the doctrine furnishes the shared premise both alternatives miss: the revolutionary subject cannot err, and anti-imperial grievance is fuel. A movement organized around grievance rather than program can migrate from climate to Gaza to Cuba without contradiction, because the object of protest is interchangeable so long as the accused remains the same.

The irony is that many societies classified as “the Global South” increasingly reject the revolutionary governments claiming to speak for them. Cubans flee Cuba. Iranians risk their lives protesting the Islamic Republic. North Koreans defect whenever escape becomes possible. Developing states seek closer relations with the United States, Europe, and Japan rather than with self-proclaimed revolutionary regimes. The principal constituency for Third-Worldism sits not in the Third-World but in the West.

Second, accommodation with Third-Worldism appears in the conduct of American foreign policy itself.

Washington has almost always treated revolutionary hostility as a negotiating posture to be managed rather than a declared purpose to be believed, extending recognition, multilateral standing, remittance channels, and sanctions relief to governments whose legitimacy rests on the promise of defeating the United States. Havana and Tehran, for example, have never concealed that resistance to the West forms the foundation of both regimes and the justification they offer their populations for everything withheld from them.

Third, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism constitute one commitment expressed at two levels of a single hierarchy.

Anyone who accepts the case for decolonizing Israel has already accepted the case for decolonizing the United States, since the same premise governs both, and the Third-Worldist view has never permitted the exception that adherents assume they are drawing when they endorse the first and decline the second. Israel has always been the entry point in the longer argument against the United States.

Finally, and most importantly, the State Department for the first time explains to Americans why they should refuse the logic of decline that the Third-Worldist doctrine promotes.

The ideology asks a country to accept that its power is a historical accident awaiting either correction with a sort of new Red Terror or annihilation, that its founding contaminates everything built since, and that the proper posture toward the rest of the world is apology. One can entertain this only for so long, a country persuaded that its strength is illegitimate will not be able to keep it.

One year ago on a night like this one, a terrorist criminal shot my dear friend Yaron and his fiancée, Sarah.

The next morning, my phone lit with a message from my friend Ethan. He told me “It’s Yaron”. I searched the headlines and found a news report about two Israeli embassy staffers killed in a targeted attack. I got it. I will never forget that moment.

For a few seconds, part of me still believed I was hallucinating. Then I understood it was real. The gunman had walked into the Capital Jewish Museum and killed them both. I sat in the dark early in the morning, cried, dressed, and went to work, because Yaron and Sarah had planned to join me that day for the first conference I had ever organized, and I decided that keeping moving was the only form of honor I had left to offer.

His name was Elias Rodriguez, 31 years old, from Chicago. When event security apprehended him, he pulled out a keffiyeh, said “I did it. I did it for Gaza,” and began chanting “Free, free Palestine.”

Less than an hour after the shooting, a manifesto titled Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home appeared on X under his name, defending armed violence against Israel and situating it within an ideological framework of anti-imperialist resistance. The FBI examined the manifesto and found little ambiguity about what it said. Rodriguez was not some feral actor without a history. He had ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and arrived at that reception with a real purpose.

Growing up, I absorbed a great deal of propaganda and came away largely immune to ideological capture, though I cannot entirely explain why. That immunity prepared me for nothing when it came to confronting the actual logic of murder. What has become clear to me in the year since is that there are people who loved that Yaron died. They genuinely did.

They announced the murders online, reveled in them, and framed them as justice delivered to an enemy of the people. I had not been prepared for that.

I found comment sections full of ordinary people, many of them educated and professionally credentialed, expressing satisfaction that Yaron was dead. “This is what you get.” That he was a Christian who had dedicated his life to Israeli-Palestinian peace was irrelevant to that judgment. He was an Israeli who worked in America, and that was sufficient. The genocide charge and the Great Satan designation did the rest.

In fact, the newspaper of Ali Khamenei's regime praised the killer, calling him "our dear brother." "Our dear brother Elias Rodriguez, who killed two Israelis in the U.S., has founded the Washington Basij," the paper wrote. Khamenei himself joined the chorus, making clear that the approval was an official endorsement from the top of the Iranian state.

What changed in me was precisely this, the understanding that ideas and policies have logical conclusions, and that I spent too long assuming those conclusions were hypothetical.

When people chanted "globalize the intifada," when they declared “Americans evil” or “the West genocidal”, I processed those slogans from a comfortable analytical remove, as political theater. Yaron's death ended that for me. The slogans had always been instructions. I had simply chosen to read them otherwise.

In the year that followed, I have tried to honor that reckoning by writing more, explaining more, and staying close to what remains. I have met Yaron’s brothers and sister and his parents, and I have stayed in contact with the family. I bury that grief very deep, deeper than I know how to say. Looking at his brother’s face, I see Yaron’s exact smile, and that alone is painful.

I want to thank my family, and every one of you who reached out, who sent a note, an email, or simply checked in. I am deeply grateful, and I apologize to those whose messages I never answered.

I am writing this because I want people to remember that it happened, to remember who did it and under what ideological sanction, and to resist the drift toward forgetting that follows every act of political violence once the news cycle has moved on. I recognize how that sounds. But in the year since Yaron and Sarah were killed, I have watched enough reactions online, from enough people in enough countries, to understand that the forgetting is not always passive. Some people were never troubled by it to begin with.

That is what frightens me, more than the killer himself. The killer was one person. The people who smiled or rejoiced are beyond counting.

Yaron and Sarah deserve to be remembered and the circumstances of their deaths deserve to be named with precision.

His death taught me, among other things, the importance of friendship and what it means to nurture it. I am, by habit and by temperament, someone reserved who works too much and disappears into the work. The burn I carry from his killing has stayed with me, and I expect it will remain, but it has taught me that the people who matter require more than good intentions.

I have also made myself a promise. Whenever I am demoralized, whenever I am mocked or insulted, whenever the work feels useless and the cost of doing it feels too high, I will remember that I am fighting for Yaron and Sarah. That promise has held me, more than once, when nothing else could.

There is so much more I want to say, so much I want to explain, but this is the best I can do. Please don’t forget them.

Below is my tribute, special thanks to Tablet Magazine for publishing it.

Losing Yaron

MAY 26, 2025

Tablet Magazine - Piece

The memory of my last hug with Yaron Lischinsky stays with me. It was quick and familiar, as I crossed the street. He smiled, warm and full of life, and said goodbye with a steadiness that made it feel like we’d see each other again the next day. I didn’t know it would be the last time.

Now every detail stands out. The light in his eyes. The way he carried himself. How he made ordinary moments feel meaningful. Yaron was a rare person, thoughtful, kind, and generous. He had a way of making people feel valued.

He was also one of my closest friends.

Though we both held public roles in spaces that demanded constant engagement, we were more reserved by nature. We found comfort in the pauses that didn’t need filling, in the ease of simply being around each other. Where the world pushed for attention, we found meaning in presence, in the steady rhythm of thoughtful conversation.

We met two years ago, and since our first exchange, we never stopped talking. Long lunches between meetings, dinners stretched by ideas, I would find every excuse to invite him to events I was hosting. We spoke about books, belief, politics, and the future. After Oct. 7, when the world shifted in ways that were hard to name, I could see something change in Yaron. His expressions became more focused, his silences heavier. The work he had always taken seriously now carried an added urgency. He spoke less, but when he did, it was with clarity shaped by grief and resolve. The hostages weighed on him. He thought about them and their families constantly.

Yaron’s life was a testament to duty without fanfare: a man who served not for recognition, but because it was who he was. Working with him was a rare kind of partnership. His insights brought steadiness to discussions. I was often the fire in our conversations. I would vent about writings, ideas or opinions that bothered me. Yaron was always calm. He’d listen, lean back, a faint smile tugging at his lips, and say, “Ah, you know ...” Then, thoughtfully, he’d unravel the knot of my anger, helping me carry it without letting it consume me. I left every exchange with a clearer head, more certain of what mattered.

His memory was a gift that held your words long after they were spoken. Days after a conversation, a message would arrive, a quote, an article, a recommendation, always prefaced with, “You’ll find this interesting …” And it always was.

Years earlier, he had pursued an Asia studies minor in college and had studied Japanese, and those interests remained with him. They shaped how he saw global dynamics, how he thought about responsibility, and how seriously he took the inner lives of other nations. He also told me how much he wished there were more academic programs like this, ones that could help Israelis understand Americans more deeply, and Americans come to know Israelis beyond headlines and policy debates, through real conversation and mutual respect.

For Yaron, this kind of understanding required more than policy. It required taking belief seriously. His Christian faith and belief in grace were the pulse of his life. His interest in theology shaped the way he approached everything. He once told me, “People who don’t understand religion should never be in politics.” He believed that without understanding what others hold sacred, leaders fail to grasp what drives loyalty, fear, and hope. For Yaron, religion was part of what made people human.

I never met Sarah, but through Yaron’s words, she became intimately familiar to me. His voice softened when he spoke of her, his eyes glowing with admiration for her strength, her joy, her unwavering commitment to peace. Sarah dedicated her life to building bridges between Israelis and Palestinians, work that mirrored Yaron’s own mission to foster understanding in a region torn by conflict. Together, they carried a shared purpose: a Middle East where coexistence was not just possible but real. He told me she loved my native Morocco, that she and I should get together and think of what we can do for Morocco’s Jewish heritage, he believed we’d get along perfectly. He was ready to propose to her, to weave their lives into a shared future, and I teased him about cooking couscous for their ceremony.

Then came that shattering Thursday. I woke, the air thick with an unplaceable dread. My phone glowed with a friend’s message: “Hey, I don’t want to say this, but it’s Yaron.” My heart stopped. I scoured the news: “Two Israeli embassy staffers killed in targeted attack.” No names. No faces. But I knew.

I wept in the dark willing it to be untrue. It was 4 in the morning. I had to get ready, go to work, keep things moving, at least in his honor, because that day, I knew Yaron and Sarah were supposed to be with me at a conference at the Hudson Institute. I forced myself to smile to trick my brain.

The hatred Yaron confronted, with patience, clarity and grace, had found him. At the conference he helped me plan, his name tag waited: “Yaron Lischinsky,” printed, cut, expectant. He had registered. He had made time, as he always did.

But he was gone. And so was Sarah. Taken not by chance, but targeted. A man looked at them and saw something he could not tolerate, and he pulled the trigger. Yaron had spent his life naming that danger. Sarah had spent hers forging relationships. It was often painful. But they persevered, because they believed that understanding mattered. That the people around them still deserved to be reached.

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were thoughtful, kind, and full of promise. They should have been able to build a life and grow old together. Instead, their families are left with grief, their friends and colleagues with silence.

But the way they lived still matters. They moved through the world with care, with purpose, and with love that asked nothing in return.

It lives in memory, in absence, and in the responsibility of carrying them forward.

The situation is obviously dynamic, but from reading today’s statements, here is my takeaway.

When Iran sealed the Strait of Hormuz, its genius strategists believed they held a winning hand. They expected two things: a global energy shock to force Washington into negotiations and the Gulf states to blame the disruption on US belligerence. Today, as President Trump sat across from Xi Jinping in Beijing, the first statements emerging from that summit began to reveal how thoroughly Tehran had misjudged the situation.

Diplomatic readouts on both sides are written to obscure as much as they reveal, but the White House statement from the meeting is unusually legible. The two leaders agreed that the strait must remain open to support the free flow of energy, and agreed that Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons (or, from China’s side, that Iran should have peaceful nuclear energy). Read at face value, these are bland formulations. Read against the backdrop of the past several months, they represent a significant Chinese repositioning, one Tehran will have noticed immediately.

Reports that Iranian authorities had begun allowing Chinese vessels through the strait coincided almost to the hour with the statement’s release. That synchronicity was not accidental. Tehran's opening passage for Chinese ships is less a concession to Washington than a signal of how much ground it has lost with Beijing.

The deeper story here is what Iran’s gambit cost with its most important patron.

China had extended substantial support to the Islamic Republic through the sanctions years, sustaining Iranian oil exports through teapot refineries, enabling a shadow fleet to move Iranian crude, and providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations. That relationship carried an implicit logic whereby Beijing would absorb some international costs of the Iranian partnership because it served Chinese interests. Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz broke that arrangement entirely.

Roughly 40-50 percent of China’s crude oil imports pass through the strait, and by threatening the waterway indiscriminately, Tehran was undermining the energy security of the one government still willing to shield it.

When China subsequently blocked a Bahrain-sponsored UN resolution condemning Iran's weaponization of the strait, it exposed the contradiction at the center of its Gulf strategy: defending a partner whose conduct was actively alienating the regional relationships Beijing valued most. Which is why this morning’s statement reads as if Beijing had stopped absorbing that contradiction.

The nuclear language in the summit statement also deserves particular attention, especially given what Tehran was still saying just days earlier.

On May 10, Iran’s ambassador to China, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, said Beijing could serve as the guarantor of a future deal between Iran and major world powers, and that any agreement should ultimately be endorsed by the UN Security Council. The statement reflected Tehran’s long-standing preference for multilateral guarantees over bilateral commitments, but more immediately, Iran was still counting on China as its primary diplomatic anchor.

Beijing’s summit statement reaffirmed its longstanding support for Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities, as the IRGC expected, but by endorsing the anti-proliferation standard with Washington, Beijing withdrew diplomatic cover from the IRGC’s weapons ambitions at the precise moment the IRGC most needed that cover.

The context around Xi Jinping’s interest in purchasing greater quantities of US oil sharpens the picture.

Days before the summit, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical, one of China’s largest petrochemical refineries and a known processor of Iranian crude subject to sanctions. The interesting part is that Beijing had been enabling Iranian crude exports while simultaneously trying to shield its own companies from U.S. designation, a dual position that Xi’s pre-summit order prohibiting Chinese firms from complying with U.S. sanctions could not sustain once Washington refused to ease the pressure.

This is why Trump’s offer of US energy to China during the summit carries immense consequences.

China has always sought the cheapest available energy to fuel its industrial base, and Iranian crude, heavily discounted under sanctions, served that purpose for years. Cheap U.S. energy offers Beijing an alternative that does not come with Gulf relationships to manage or Chinese companies to protect from U.S. sanctions.

However, reading Beijing's repositioning as a strategic alignment with Washington against Tehran entirely misreads the relationship. What the past several months have demonstrated to China is that enabling the Islamic Republic generates compounding liabilities, and those liabilities now have a price tag attached to specific Chinese firms. A less entangled China is not a hostile China toward Tehran, but a China that can afford to watch Iranian decisions produce their own consequences without intervening to soften them.

More crucially, every future barrel China sources from the Western Hemisphere is a barrel that does not flow through the IRGC’s revenue stream, and that revenue is what sustains the weapons programs, the proxy networks, and the institutional ambitions that have kept the region in a state of managed instability.

Whether the energy arrangement materializes remains to be seen, but the offer is attractive to Beijing, which has watched the US Treasury designate Chinese-linked companies that sustain Iranian crude exports without hesitation. Operation Epic Fury is already compressing the IRGC’s economic base, and these signals, taken together, will not necessarily alter the IRGC’s strategic course. What they will do is amplify the perception of Iranian isolation, which, for a leadership that tracks X posts and meme cycles as proxies for regional sentiment, carries its own weight.

This piece was originally published in the New York Post

Read Full Piece

In the past, the notion of “peace through strength” was read as a military proposition: Assemble enough force, and adversaries will stand down.

Operation Epic Fury has shown the error of that presumption.

We’ve seen in Iran how deterrence multiplies when military power, economic pressure and alliance consolidation strike together.

America’s response to the China challenge has suffered the same narrowness — until now.

Washington spent years treating competition with Beijing as a discrete series of problems — of the Indo-Pacific, or artificial intelligence, or trade balances — as though China were competing selectively, in specific theaters.

China, however, has been competing across every domain and every region simultaneously, building energy dependencies, embedding financial architecture and acquiring port access from the Atlantic to the South China Sea.

The Middle East was always a theater in that competition, and Iran was always a central CCP asset.

Beijing’s investment in Iran went well beyond oil.

Chinese companies supplied Tehran with sanctioned dual-use technology that kept Iran’s weapons programs advancing through years of international pressure.

In 2021, Beijing gave the regime access to BeiDou, its state-owned global positioning satellite system, directly enhancing Iran’s military targeting capacity.

In July 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi assured Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi that China would “continue to support Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty and dignity” and in “resisting hegemonic and bullying policies.”

China was sustaining Iran’s defiance at every level — financial, technological, diplomatic — and normalizing it in the process.

Operation Epic Fury plowed directly through that arrangement.

Its defining doctrine has been military force and economic statecraft applied simultaneously, leaving no window for adaptation or rerouting.

Washington degraded Iran’s military capacity and squeezed the financial architecture sustaining it at the same time.

The operation exposed a structural reality Beijing can’t escape: The United States has a deep alliance system in the Middle East, while China’s links are tenuous at best.

It also laid bare China’s vulnerability, as it relies on resources it does not control.

In the Persian Gulf itself, Beijing had sought to build real diplomatic capital.

By brokering the Iran-Saudi normalization deal in 2023 and the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement, it presented itself as the indispensable outside power.

Gulf states then watched America run a sustained military campaign against Beijing’s partner — and according to reports this week, at least one of them, the United Arab Emirates, participated in military strikes on Iran as well.

The campaign is shattering the myth of a Middle East arrayed against Washington, vindicating every government that joined the Abraham Accords and named Iran as its primary threat.

In the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran’s closure move aimed to change President Trump’s calculus and turn Gulf states against Washington.

It achieved the opposite, proving to Gulf capitals precisely why Tehran cannot be permitted a nuclear arsenal.

They watched, too, as China absorbed economic damage it had no instrument to stop.

Japan drew the operational conclusion from the regime’s closure action, committing over $6 billion to US liquefied natural gas supply chains.

But the economic track is where China is taking the worst damage.

The US Treasury hit Hengli Petrochemical, teapot refineries and 40 shadow fleet operators with sanctions.

The State Department then designated several Chinese entities for supplying Iran with satellite intelligence on US and allied military movements, placing Beijing’s complicity on the public record.

Xi Jinping responded by invoking China’s anti-extraterritoriality law, directing Chinese firms to ignore US sanctions — but in practice, Beijing has little leverage over companies whose survival depends on access to the dollar system.

Israel was central to all of it: The targeting precision and sustained strike capacity that degraded Iran’s military infrastructure required an ally of its caliber, and China has no equivalent partner in the region.

And as the military action proceeded, the United States made gains across the map aimed at limiting China’s reach.

The Pentagon locked in a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with Indonesia — the archipelago that sits astride Malacca, Sunda and Lombok, three straits through which most of China’s energy imports flow.

In the Philippines, a new 4,000-acre US-governed economic security zone on the Luzon Strait is anchoring an American presence at the doorstep of the South China Sea.

In the western Balkans, the US signed deals at Dubrovnik’s Three Seas Initiative Summit — a $1.5 billion Croatia-Bosnia gas interconnection, a $6 billion Albanian LNG framework and a $58 billion AI data center investment — foreclosing Chinese capital from the Adriatic in a single package.

Trump heads to Beijing this week carrying immense leverage over China.

To earn any sanctions relief for designated Chinese firms, Xi may well have to dismantle the Iranian military procurement network Beijing spent a decade building.

The summit is the test of whether the president can hold what his administration has built.

By Michael Doran and Zineb Riboua

This piece was originally published in the Wall Street Journal

The U.S. has launched a new phase in the competition with China over artificial intelligence. On April 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned U.S. embassies worldwide that Chinese companies, including AI firm DeepSeek, are waging a state-backed campaign to steal advanced American technology.

The warning is necessary, but defensive measures alone won’t secure American leadership. Success demands an offensive strategy: reshaping the competition through AI alliances hardened against Chinese espionage.

One promising area for such collaboration is in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to American and Israeli officials, the two countries are discussing a joint initiative there, which the Israelis call Project Spire. The plan is for an AI base that has the security of an American military installation and the creative output of a Silicon Valley hub.

The U.S. is evaluating three Israeli-proposed sites in the western Negev, where Israel is prepared to grant a long-term lease for American use. The base would be home to research and development, large-scale server infrastructure, and energy systems to meet the enormous demands of AI training and deployment. Engineers would design chips, build models and run them on site inside a secure perimeter. The base would also house advanced chip fabrication, thus reducing dependence on semiconductor production in exposed regions like Taiwan.

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What the War Inherited

Many forget that Iran entered the conflict carrying the most severe economic crisis in the history of the Islamic Republic.

President Pezeshkian had already warned that the country’s infrastructure was nearing the edge: “In Tehran, if we cannot manage and people don’t cooperate in controlling consumption, there won’t be any water in reservoirs by September or October.” The damage today runs well beyond water management and is visible across three dimensions: the currency, the labor market, and the industrial base.

The rial’s collapse to 1.45 million per dollar in January triggered massive unrest, and the currency has since deteriorated further, now trading at 1.87 million per dollar. Iran’s central bank issued a public warning, cautioning citizens against buying foreign currency, suggesting prices could reverse with intervention. “If expectations are adjusted, supply increases or the central bank makes targeted intervention, there is a possibility that prices will return and buyers at high rates will suffer losses,” the central bank said. A central bank warning its own population against holding dollars signals that the state has lost one of the most basic functions of monetary governance.

Moreover, the labor picture compounds the monetary one. The Iranian Deputy Minister of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare admitted last month that the war had directly destroyed over 1 million jobs, with 2 million additional losses due to different and indirect factors.

However, the government's own officials cannot agree on the scale of the damage. Or perhaps do not want to admit that U.S. and Israeli strikes have hit strategic assets. Indeed, some of them cited Social Security data suggesting that only 100,000 unemployment insurance cases may be added. Labor Minister Ahmad Meydari released another third figure that 150,000 Iranians have recently registered for unemployment benefits.

What is striking is that each figure comes from a different ministry, is measured through a different methodology, and serves a different political purpose. More than anything else, it reveals a government far more concerned with managing the perception of unemployment than with addressing the problem itself.

“In the past year, Iran’s working-age population expanded by roughly 825,000 people, yet only 57,000 new jobs were created.” Financial Tribune

Underlying both is the damage to Iran's industrial base.

Mobarakeh Steel, among Iran's most consequential industrial assets, took direct and heavy hits. More than 27,000 workers have since been left without a clear employment status. Skilled technical staff who previously took home over 100 million tomans — roughly $568 — a month now earn close to the statutory floor, a reduction to roughly a fifth of former wages, according to Iran International.

The problem that runs through everything else is that Iranian steel manufacturing depends on petrochemical feedstocks and energy inputs, while the petrochemical sector relies on domestic steel for plant construction and upkeep. These two industries function practically as a single interconnected system, and what made US attacks lethal is how they struck at two of its load-bearing points. This is also especially damaging for the IRGC, since that system carries substantial weight in the Iranian economy, with petrochemicals generating approximately $13 billion in export revenue annually, ranking as the country’s second-largest source of foreign currency after crude oil.

Notably, drug prices have surged by as much as 400 percent, pharmacies report shortages across the country, and the internet shutdown that has long served as the regime's preferred instrument for controlling the narrative may succeed in keeping Iranians from footage of IRGC battlefield failures, but it cannot keep them from a currency that has lost more than half its value.

In this sense, what Operation Epic Fury has achieved so far is forcing the Islamic Republic to manage two fronts simultaneously, one facing outward toward protecting a mosaic military enterprise built on proxy funding, missile threats, and an unrelenting nuclear program, and one facing inward toward managing a population that has shown repeatedly, at the cost of its own lives, that there is a threshold the regime keeps pushing past.

The Blockade and the Sanctions Architecture

Alongside the strikes on key industries, the U.S. naval blockade has been severing export revenue at the source, with Kharg Island approaching storage capacity, satellite imagery capturing a large oil slick west of the terminal, the IRGC has been losing roughly $170 million a day, and the Pentagon is placing total lost oil revenue at $4.8 billion to date.

Choking off oil exports, however, leaves untouched the financial network Iran built to process, move, and shelter that revenue through Chinese intermediaries, and that is precisely where Operation Economic Fury operates.

Understanding it requires recognizing that previous rounds of sanctions fell short precisely because China absorbed Iran’s crude through teapot refineries, moved its funds through shadow banking networks, and supplied the IRGC with the intelligence infrastructure that kept its regional operations functional. Economic Fury goes after all of it. As Secretary Bessent put it: “We will relentlessly target the regime’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds, and pursue anyone enabling Tehran’s attempts to evade sanctions.”

Trump’s economic campaign runs on two levels.

The first level is about targeting the financial network through which Iranian oil moved outside the reach of Western regulators.

U.S. Treasury designated Hengli Petrochemical, China’s second-largest teapot refinery, roughly 40 shipping firms tied to Iran’s shadow fleet, and independently operated teapot refineries serving as the primary processors of sanctioned Iranian crude. Beijing’s answer was a formal prohibition order directing Chinese citizens and companies not to comply, and the order itself was the tell: a government reduced to issuing emergency instructions to shield its firms from U.S. designations has run out of more discreet ways to do business with a designated terrorist organization.

The second level is about converting economic pressure on the IRGC into a political-exposure campaign directed at China.

The designations against Meentropy Technology, The Earth Eye, and Chang Guang Satellite Technology for supplying Iran with geospatial intelligence to monitor U.S. and allied military movements place Chinese complicity in Iranian military operations on public legal record, furnishing regulators with a documented predicate for broader action against Chinese commercial remote sensing.

Those watching the ceasefire negotiations and concluding that the conflict is winding down are misreading the situation in ways that carry real analytical consequence, because while the strikes have paused, Operation Economic Fury continues to function as both the accelerator and the anchor of what the military phase set in motion, converting battlefield destruction into institutional deterioration that compounds over time and denies the IRGC the fiscal and organizational capacity to reconstitute what Epic Fury dismantled.

The IRGC likes to boast about its immunity to external pressure, but the economic situation reveals an organization that is disoriented, operating a model so rigid and so dependent on conditions that no longer exist that it has no productive response to the pressure now bearing down on it.

IRGC’s Dilemma

The Islamic Republic was never held together by ideology alone, nor by coercion alone. What sustained it more than anything and what made it so sophisticated was this sort of layered and cohesive system in which ideological commitment, selective repression, and material patronage reinforced one another, with each element compensating for the others when one weakened.

Hezbollah received an estimated $700 million annually. The Houthis, the Popular Mobilization Forces, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a range of other proxies all drew from the same source. Ideology may explain why men join a revolutionary movement, but it rarely explains why they stay, and it never explains why they fight consistently for a long period and in different domains and areas. That requires payment, logistics, and a state capable of delivering on its end of the arrangement.

Across a region where state institutions had long proven predatory, inefficient, or simply absent, the IRGC offered what was genuinely scarce: an organization that paid on time, supplied its partners with functioning equipment, and followed through on its commitments. That operational reliability secured its regional influence as much as any ideological affinity, and the same principle sustained the regime’s domestic claim to institutional authority.

Authoritarian regimes can absorb significant popular pain, and the Islamic Republic has repeatedly demonstrated that capacity. Sustained endurance, however, rests on two conditions operating in concert. The first is a coercive apparatus possessing the organizational coherence and material resources to deploy force at scale. The second is a population that still calculates the cost of protest as exceeding the cost of compliance. Both conditions are now objectively in measurable decline.

The signs of erosion have already begun to surface at the institutional core. In March, members of the Special Units Command received notice that salary payments for certain units had encountered processing failures, the third such delay in wages for those forces within the year alone. The consequences were immediate, as some personnel refused to attend pro-government mobilization gatherings, causing visible disruptions to deployments in major cities. Retirees and segments of the regular army went unpaid for a second consecutive month.

Senior commanders have begun accusing the IRGC of exploiting the financial crisis at Bank Sepah to undermine the police force and consolidate resources toward bodies tied to the clerical establishment. What this pattern reveals is a military apparatus that, even with full awareness of a population pushed to its limits, has abandoned the collective management of scarcity and begun to redistribute it as a weapon among its constituent institutions.

The strategic environment has now narrowed the IRGC to two paths, each leading to a different form of institutional destruction.

The cruelty of the dilemma is that choosing either path only accelerates the collapse that the other path already threatens.

Path 1: A deal with Trump

Accommodation with Washington would force the IRGC to surrender its network of construction contracts, import monopolies, and financial institutions that turned political power into wealth, and to do so in front of a population that has endured decades of falling wages, collapsing savings, and decaying infrastructure while national resources were poured into foreign conflicts.

Path 2: Continue the war

Prolonged confrontation offers no escape either. It would push operational demands beyond the organization’s capacity, tighten sanctions that already cut off revenue streams, erode military credibility with each new engagement, and intensify internal rivalries among the clerical leadership, the IRGC, the bureaucracy, and the regular military as they fight over a shrinking pool of resources. A system built on patronage cannot survive once the patronage dries up.

The dilemma is structural and no short-term fix can resolve it.

Every available path undermines the very conditions the organization needs to survive. This exposes the central contradiction of what the Islamic Republic constructed over four decades: a parallel military state within the state, a regional empire of proxies, and a financial system shielded from accountability, all built for outward projection of power yet wholly unprepared for the mounting pressure now coming from both inside and outside.

My debut in The Washington Post

Vladimir Putin’s ambitions are dying in Africa. As jihadists swept through Mali late last month, they also swept aside the assurances that Moscow had dangled to governments in the Sahel for years. That collapse threatens the region but also offers Washington an opportunity to reassert the control it had foolishly relinquished.

The scale of the terror offensive came into sharp view in a single weekend as the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) — al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate — and nomadic Tuareg rebels seized towns and military installations across the country. On April 25 a JNIM suicide car bomber killed Defense Minister Gen. Sadio Camara at his residence in Kati. Abu Hudhayfa al-Bambari, a local jihadist commander, said that the “entire city” of Bamako, the capital, “is under lockdown.”

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This piece was originally published in Sky News Australia

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“The Strait of Hormuz,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News this week, “is an economic nuclear weapon.”

He was describing the IRGC’s core strategic intention, to hold the world’s most critical oil chokepoint as leverage over global markets and Washington itself, but Iran never got to pull that trigger.

The US Navy’s blockade of the Strait denied the IRGC that instrument before it could be used, and Operation Economic Fury now ensures the failure compounds, turning against Tehran the same economic pressure Iran spent decades positioning itself to inflict on the world.

What most ceasefire commentary has missed is that the military campaign's pause does not mean the conflict has paused, because the economic campaign is running at full force, its targets extending from Tehran’s financial network to the Chinese industrial architecture that keeps it alive.

That architecture took decades to build.

For years, the IRGC sustained itself through shell companies, rotating vessel identities, and shadow banking corridors that kept oil revenue flowing far from formal financial channels, turning every prior sanctions round into a temporary inconvenience absorbed and rerouted within months.

Washington kept targeting individual nodes while leaving the broader network intact, which gave Tehran reasonable confidence that Epic Fury’s ceasefire, like every pause before it, would open another window for recovery.

That calculation is wrong this time, because the cost of each passing week compounds rather than eases, with Treasury’s action targeting the evasion architecture itself rather than its individual components, ensuring that what Tehran reads as time purchased is in fact institutional capacity being permanently stripped away.

That architecture survived as long as it did for one reason: China built the infrastructure to sustain it, and Xi Jinping made that a deliberate strategic choice on three levels.

First, Beijing built the financial plumbing, developing methods for shadow banking, obscuring the origins of Iranian crude, rotating ship identities, and layering payments through third-country intermediaries.

Second, its teapot refinery sector absorbed most of Iran’s oil exports to China, conducting those transactions through the US financial system in dollar-denominated deals and providing the IRGC with the hard currency needed to fund missile, drone, and weapons transfers to regional proxies.

Third, and most critically, Xi used Iran as a rehearsal space, refining evasion techniques he intended to deploy on a far greater scale if Washington’s pressure ever turned directly toward China's core interests.

The volumes document exactly how deeply that relationship ran.

The IRGC operated a rotating fleet of tankers under falsified identities to conceal Iranian crude shipments to Chinese buyers, while Hengli Petrochemical, China’s second-largest independent refinery, received more than five million barrels of IRGC-affiliated crude through that same network.

The arrangement served Beijing on both ends: Chinese refiners purchased Iranian crude at steep discounts unavailable on open markets, while every successful evasion transaction simultaneously stress-tested the financial infrastructure Xi intended to activate over Taiwan.

However, the US Treasury’s latest action forecloses that confidence by sanctioning 35 entities and individuals operating Iran’s shadow banking architecture, simultaneously targeting 19 shadow fleet vessels, and putting every firm paying IRGC tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz on notice.

The Strait carries roughly 20 percent of global oil supply, giving Tokyo, Seoul, and every European capital with energy exposure to Gulf shipping a direct stake in whether the IRGC retains the capacity to weaponize that chokepoint, which means Washington is acting on behalf of the entire alliance system, not just its own strategic interests.

The stated objective of Operation Economic Fury is to coerce the IRGC into surrendering its nuclear program and abandoning its revolutionary ambitions across the region, an objective whose outcome remains uncertain.

What is already underway, as a direct consequence of pursuing it, is the dismantlement of the laboratory Xi spent two decades building, with Washington systematically mapping, documenting, and countering the instruments produced there.

What appears to be a pressure campaign against the IRGC and another against Beijing’s financial architecture is, in fact, a single operation.

On Saturday, April 25, explosions and sustained gunfire erupted near the Kati military base outside Bamako, where General Assimi Goïta, leader of Mali's military junta, has installed his residence. Simultaneous strikes followed near the Modibo Keïta International Airport, in Kidal and Gao to the north, and in the central Mopti region.

The assault belongs to a longer trajectory.

Since September 2025, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, JNIM, has imposed an economic blockade upon Bamako and the principal supply routes of the country, a slow strangulation that has produced fuel shortages, intermittent electricity, and the closure of schools.

Understanding Who is Who:

• AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb): The North African affiliate, formed in 2007 from the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and the parent organization from which the Sahelian jihadist constellation, including JNIM, was generated.

• JNIM: Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel, formed in 2017 through the merger of several Malian and regional jihadist factions such as Macina Liberation Front, Ansar Dine, and al-Mourabitoun.

  The group funds itself by ransoming captives, taxing locals, smuggling weapons, and extorting human and drug traffickers.

• The Tuaregs: A Berber people of the central Sahara whose ancestral territories straddle Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso, and whose history with Bamako has been marked by recurring rebellions over the autonomy of the north, most notable one was in the 1960s. Estimates place their total population at 2–3 million.

• Azawad: The name Tuareg separatists use for the northern half of Mali. It was declared an independent state in April 2012 by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and is being actively claimed by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA).

The instinctive response to this debacle is to reach for the counterterrorism file but that way of framing the problem conceals the deeper geopolitical implications: a major strategic setback for Russia in the Sahel and a direct threat to NATO’s southern flank.

The Origins of the Crisis

The Sahelian crisis traces its proximate origins to the collapse of the Qaddafi regime.

The 2011 NATO-backed fall of Tripoli unleashed consequences that Bamako and the West failed to anticipate, prevent, or counter — chief among them the return of Tuareg fighters previously integrated into Qaddafi’s security apparatus. These men arrived in northern Mali heavily armed and carrying deep-seated resentments over marginalization that had already fueled multiple earlier rebellions against the central Malian state.

By early 2012, Tuareg separatists of the MNLA had already formed tactical alliances with jihadist groups already active in the Sahara. They also declared the independent state of Azawad and rapidly overran the northern half of Mali. Which led to the disintegration of the Malian army and a military coup in Bamako in March 2012 that only deepened the chaos. By January 2013, the jihadist coalition — now dominant over the Tuareg separatists — was advancing southward toward the capital.

It was at this critical juncture that France intervened. Operation Serval (January 2013) shattered the jihadist offensive, retook the northern cities, and prevented the total collapse of the Malian state/government.

Due to the immense structural issues, Operation Serval was later replaced by the broader regional mission Operation Barkhane, which for nearly a decade maintained a fragile equilibrium across the Sahel. That stability rested on three institutional pillars: the sustained presence of French forces, empowering local partner governments, and a regional security architecture built around the G5 Sahel joint force (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) and the UN mission (MINUSMA).

The Russian Intervention

However, that French architecture was already under significant strain when Russia moved to dismantle it. Françafrique had been gradually eroding for years, facing growing domestic and regional criticism. Even when French operations delivered tangible security gains, they encountered increasing political contestation and accusations of overreach.

After the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023, Wagner later rebranded as Africa Corps, accelerated the expulsion of French forces from Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, delivering the final blows to France’s longstanding influence across its former colonies.

At the same time, they fueled tensions between the Sahelian juntas and Washington, which ultimately led to the U.S. withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger, a key strategic drone facility that had cost American taxpayers 110 million dollars.

The interesting part regarding Russia’s campaign is that it operated on two parallel tracks: the operational and the informational.

On the informational front, Wagner conducted sustained disinformation operations to delegitimize France as a credible counterterrorism partner. A notorious example took place in April 2022 at the Gossi base. After French forces departed, surveillance drones captured Russian mercenaries digging and staging a mass grave, then attributing the atrocity to the departing French troops. Such episodes exemplified their broader methodology across the region.

France was then forced to retreat. President Emmanuel Macron withdrew 400 special forces from Burkina Faso, 2,400 troops from Mali, and suspended military cooperation with the Central African Republic.

In February 2023, he announced a new security partnership focused on training and support rather than direct security guarantees, diplomatic language that masked a clear drawdown.

Moscow seized then the opportunity and consolidated further its operational gains with the active involvement of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who backed the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) which united Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as a direct counterweight to ECOWAS and the African Union, institutions long central to Western and NATO-linked regional cooperation against terrorism and other threats.

Mali: Russia's New Afghanistan

However, despite its early successes in the Sahel with a limited number of operators, Russia made costly strategic errors in Mali. The most visible case occurred on 25 July 2024 at Tinzaouaten, near the Algerian border, where Tuareg forces ambushed a joint column of Wagner mercenaries and Malian troops, delivering what remains Wagner’s most significant defeat in Africa to date.

The toll was heavy as roughly 20 Russian mercenaries were killed and around 10 Malian Armed Forces (FAMA) soldiers dead, several armored vehicles destroyed, and at least one helicopter lost.

More importantly, when viewed alongside the rapid expansion of jihadist groups and their growing cooperation with Tuareg factions, the Tinzaouaten defeat revealed early on that Russia is repeating in West Africa the classic doctrinal mistakes of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. One can argue that it made similar ones in Syria as well, but given the overwhelming historical evidence and archives, I chose to focus on Afghanistan as a template.

Four errors stand out.

The first error is the primacy of total regime preservation over meaningful territorial command, sustained by systematic disinformation campaigns. Much as Soviet strategy in Afghanistan centered on shoring up Kabul's communist leadership while effectively ceding the countryside, Africa Corps today channels its resources into protecting the Malian junta and securing gold extraction corridors — leaving vast interior territories open to JNIM expansion.

Indeed, Russian messaging operations paper over this de facto withdrawal by manufacturing the perception of Malian junta competence and military momentum. In the near term, this posture can appear functional, but it intensifies the vulnerabilities bearing down on the central government. Any perceptible sign of fragility risks triggering an escalatory cycle of jihadist attacks, hastening precisely the systemic breakdown the strategy was designed to forestall.

The second pattern is an institutional refusal to grapple with the genuine ethnic and political grievances that give the insurgency its sociological fuel. Moscow and the Bamako junta have met Tuareg claims with coercion rather than negotiation. The Tuareg are a historically subaltern, predominantly Berber-speaking pastoral-nomadic people whose territoriality and social organization are anchored in the northern Saharan and Sahelian ecozones, and who have long articulated demands for autonomy from a sedentary, south-dominated central state whose administrative logic sits in fundamental tension with their segmentary social structures.

The Soviet parallel is instructive: Moscow systematically bypassed the autochthonous institutional frameworks sustaining Afghan social order, among them the jirga, the deliberative council rooted in tribal and lineage structures, and the qawm, the primordial solidarity group defined by overlapping ties of kinship, locality, and patron-client reciprocity that constituted the foundational unit of political allegiance.

The junta and its Russian patrons have reproduced this failure at large scale in Mali, misrecognizing Tuareg ethno-political identity as a security variable to be neutralized rather than a deeply embedded sociocultural formation requiring genuine interlocution. The consequence has been the progressive and gradual reintegration of Tuareg factions into tactical convergence with JNIM, enlarging the insurgency's ethnic constituency and territorial reach.

The third pattern is the excision of Mali from any broader architecture of legitimacy or multilateral cooperation. Following the coups in Burkina Faso in 2022 and Niger in 2023, the Sahelian juntas made a calculated break with ECOWAS, the regional body that had formally condemned the seizures of power and signaled the possibility of sanctions and military intervention. The Soviet precedent is structurally illuminating. Moscow progressively confined itself to a narrow, deeply illegitimate client government in Kabul, hemorrhaging both domestic Afghan support and international standing in the process.

The Sahelian juntas have traced a comparable trajectory, opting for open confrontation with regional institutions and Western interlocutors rather than seeking multilateral accommodation. The consequences have been predictable. Diplomatic encirclement, economic sanctions from regional bodies, and near-total security dependence on Moscow as the sole patron willing to underwrite their survival have followed in sequence.

What makes this pattern particularly damaging for Mali, however, is that isolation is not symmetrical in its costs.

For Moscow, the severing of Mali’s Western and regional partnerships is strategically rational, as it deepens junta dependency, forecloses alternative patrons, and consolidates Russian leverage.

For Bamako, the calculus is far more punishing. The rupture with Western partners and regional bodies has effectively dismantled the intelligence-sharing architecture that previously provided actionable information on jihadist networks, financing flows, and cross-border movements. JNIM operates across porous Sahelian frontiers, and countering it requires precisely the type of multilateral intelligence cooperation that isolation has rendered unavailable.

Fourth, the chronic underestimation of the adaptive capacity and structural resilience of local insurgent networks. Soviet planners entered Afghanistan with the assumption that a conventionally superior military apparatus could rapidly dismantle a fragmented tribal resistance. The mujahideen confounded that assumption entirely, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for tactical improvisation, terrain exploitation, and the construction of durable decentralized organizational forms that proved highly resistant to attrition.

Russia and the Malian junta have reproduced the same foundational miscalculation. They have operated under the recurring assumption that concentrated firepower, mercenary deployment, and periodically visible operational successes such as the seizure of Kidal would progressively degrade JNIM and Tuareg resistance to the point of collapse.

The insurgents have instead demonstrated a sophisticated repertoire of adaptive strategies by integrating guerrilla tactics with economic strangulation and colonizing governance vacuums left by state absence.

Implications for Europe and NATO South

The unfolding crisis in Mali carries profound strategic consequences for Europe.

The first and most immediate risk is a renewed surge in migration.

Mali lies at the center of the main overland migration corridors from sub-Saharan Africa toward Libya and the Mediterranean. The loss of state control in Bamako and across its northern and central regions is already accelerating irregular migrant flows. These movements are larger in scale than previous waves and arrive in a Europe still politically scarred by the Libyan and Syrian crises.

The second risk is the weakening of NATO’s southern flank and the growing difficulty of effective intervention.

Jihadist groups, particularly JNIM, are actively seeking to replicate in Niger and Burkina Faso the same strategy of territorial expansion, economic blockades, and coordinated attacks that has succeeded in Mali. A contiguous zone of instability stretching across the three Alliance of Sahel States members would grant jihadists strategic depth, operational sanctuaries, and easier access toward coastal West Africa and the Maghreb. This dramatically raises the cost and complexity of any future European military engagement while leaving Europe’s southern frontier increasingly exposed and harder to defend.

In essence, the disintegration of authority in Mali should be seen as the leading edge of a wider process that threatens to destabilize the entire central Sahel and export its consequences directly into Europe.

This piece was originally published in The New York Post

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On Monday, China’s Xi Jinping let the mask slip.

After weeks remaining largely absent from the diplomatic picture as the US conducted Operation Epic Fury against Iran, Xi called Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman to publicly urge a peaceful reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The pressure on Beijing is showing.

At least five Iranian-linked tankers heading from the Gulf of Oman to Malaysia have changed course after the US Navy warned that ships carrying Iranian oil would be intercepted anywhere in the world.

And now, every concession the IRGC withholds costs it more than the one before.

Operation Epic Fury destroyed the military capacity Iran has used to threaten to close the strait, and dismantled the architecture the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps built to survive the decapitation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

What remains is a rump regime without the arsenal, command or finances that lent its threats weight.

President Trump should read this as the strongest card he holds against Beijing.

Xi spent a decade cultivating the Islamic Republic as the armed underwriter of Chinese influence in the Middle East.

Its erosion in this campaign hands Washington immense leverage.

Three fronts establish the stakes.

The first is military.

The US campaign dismantled the arsenal that Chinese industrial networks spent years building.

China had emerged as the principal external supplier of Iran’s ballistic missile program, providing chemical precursors for solid rocket fuel as well as satellite intel and navigation systems.

Indeed, the Treasury Department sanctioned several Chinese entities for supplying the Revolutionary Guard with chemicals used in missile fuel production, and US intelligence documented Iranian cargo ships unloading sodium perchlorate at Bandar Abbas in quantities sufficient to fuel approximately 800 new missiles.

Beijing was also negotiating the sale of CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers.

In December, US special forces raided a merchant vessel in the Indian Ocean carrying Chinese cargo bound for the Revolutionary Guard.

The second front is financial.

Iran served as China’s proving ground for sanctions evasion, the laboratory in which Beijing refined the techniques it expected to deploy at scale against US sanctions.

“Operation Economic Fury” has contested it.

The Trump administration sent letters to financial institutions in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and China, citing evidence that these institutions moved Iranian funds linked to illicit activity.

The letters are reportedly the first step toward secondary sanctions that would sever those institutions’ ties to the US financial system.

The third front is diplomatic.

Beijing brokered the Iran-Saudi normalization in March 2023 and presented it as evidence of a new Chinese diplomatic order.

The missiles and drones Iran fired at sites throughout the region during the recent conflict exposed the agreement as a paper arrangement that Beijing couldn’t enforce.

The damage deepened when the United Arab Emirates aligned with the US-led coalition and called for the reopening of the strait, while Beijing remained silent on the weaponization of the waterway that carries its own energy imports.

The Gulf monarchies now know what a Chinese security partnership amounts to when Iranian aggression reaches their territory.

The same pattern holds for the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela’s dictatorship has fallen, Nicolás Maduro is in US custody and Beijing’s position in Latin America has collapsed.

Within months, Washington has broken the two regimes through which Xi projects influence into the regions that matter most to the United States.

Washington is already collecting the gains in Asia.

Indonesia signed the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership on April 13, pulling Jakarta into the American security architecture through a framework for military modernization and professional military education.

The Philippines has joined that architecture and will host a 4,000-acre industrial hub anchoring supply chains that Washington intends to build outside Chinese reach.

The geography of those partnerships carries its own message.

Indonesia flanks the Strait of Malacca, through which the bulk of Chinese energy imports travel.

Washington has just demonstrated in the Strait of Hormuz the operational template for denying a chokepoint to a state that depends on it.

Beijing will draw the inference without being told.

Trump postponed his visit to China and refused the supplicant’s role Beijing had prepared.

He’ll travel on his own timetable, with those facts established before the first handshake.

Tehran saw the Strait of Hormuz as its ultimate coercive instrument, yet US power exposed it as a threat it can fairly easily overcome.

Xi Jinping will open the conversation knowing that Washington has broken his proxies, closed his laboratory and reduced to rubble an arsenal he spent a decade underwriting.

The card is in Trump’s hand. The administration has already begun to play it.

Asia is where the greatest returns are landing, and Beijing is where the reckoning comes next.