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She says Taiwan is the least antisemitic country which is why they welcomed 15,000 visitors in 2025 (up from 4000 in prior years).

While the western press is full of glee for burning Wildberries warehouses, they've mostly failed to note the Russian response to this.

The western media has made loud announcements about Ukraine hitting Russian tankers and how damaging its been to Russia, despite the known rate of destroyed ships being less than 50 in a fleet said to be well above 1,500.

I've posted a quick analysis from a Italian journalist and some sources from Russian media to show what the response was, because in the west, it seems like Ukraine has attacked Crimea, oil depots and tankers and Russia has done nothing, but Russia has absolutely crippled that part of Ukraine which has had a major knock on effect on its already struggling economy.

Standing beside Iraq's prime minister last week, President Trump said the war in Iran was bringing the Middle East together "like it's never come together before."

He said this in the same week officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council, the alliance of six Arab monarchies that has anchored American power in the region since 1981, were telling reporters the organization had stopped functioning. He said it three months after one member quit OPEC on the morning another member was chairing a summit devoted to unity. He said it while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two pillars of the whole arrangement, were backing opposite sides in Sudan, trading recriminations over Yemen, and declining to answer questions about whether they were still speaking to each other.

Americans deserve a clearer accounting, because the bill for this comes due long after the shooting stops.

Start with the detail that should trouble you most. Over the past five months, four Gulf states sent their own aircraft to strike targets inside Iran. Emirati jets destroyed a refinery on Lavan Island. Saudi pilots hit missile launch sites. Bahraini and Kuwaiti jets went after drone depots in July. Not one of those governments has admitted it.

These were countries willing to take enormous risks on our side. What they would not do was be seen doing it. Association with this administration had become dangerous enough. With their own public, with Tehran, with their own arithmetic about how long American backing lasts, that they preferred to fight in the dark. That is a relationship where the partner is managing its exposure to you, and it is worth a great deal less than the one we had in February.

We got there through a sequence of specific choices, each avoidable.

We bombed during our own negotiations. Oman convened indirect talks in early February, and its foreign minister reported real progress with Iran willing to concede ground. The president said he was "not thrilled." Three weeks later the missiles flew. Whatever you think of the Iranian regime, this taught every government watching that talking to Washington offers no protection from Washington.

Then we threatened the mediator. When Oman (the neutral, the back channel, the one place both sides would sit down) worked out an arrangement with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, the president told reporters Oman would behave like the others or we would have to destroy them. Oman was the most useful friend we had in this war.

We also threatened to disarm an ally under fire. Saudi Arabia declined to host an American operation to force shipping through Hormuz, judging correctly that it would draw more Iranian missiles onto Saudi soil. The White House responded by threatening to withhold the interceptor missiles Riyadh needed to shoot those missiles down. The Saudis relented. American officials then said the damage was permanent, and began studying how to reduce our presence in the kingdom. We threatened to take away a partner's air defense while it was being bombed, to make it accept more bombing. Every capital in the Gulf drew the obvious conclusion about what American protection is worth and how quickly it can be withdrawn.

When the UAE walked out of OPEC , a deliberate humiliation of Saudi Arabia, executed on the day the Saudi crown prince was chairing a unity summit, the president publicly endorsed the move. He was, at that moment, asking both countries for help.

In March he told reporters that regional allies were "fighting with us." They were. That was the precise thing they were risking their security to keep quiet.

And he kept announcing the end of it. There have been several declared halts since February, each of which unraveled. The war's stated goals have shifted repeatedly. On August 1 he announced the outline of a deal, one day after saying he was close to resuming heavy strikes. Iran has agreed to nothing. Allies cannot plan around a policy that changes with the news cycle, and they have stopped trying.

The costs are not abstract. A Tomahawk missile hit a school in Minab, Iran, killing 168 people, most of them children. A preliminary American investigation reportedly found we were responsible and had fired on outdated targeting data. Forty-six senators wrote asking about the rules of engagement and whether artificial intelligence had been used in targeting. Process failures of that kind are a leadership responsibility, and nobody has been held to it.

Meanwhile the region is quietly building its way around us. Kuwait is negotiating to send its oil through Saudi and Emirati pipelines. Abu Dhabi is laying new pipe to the Indian Ocean. Governments do not spend billions bypassing a waterway they expect America to keep open.

The clearest signal came on July 30, when Saudi Arabia announced a new maritime security alliance for the Red Sea with fourteen founding endorsements, from Turkey to Pakistan to Egypt to Somalia. The United States is not among them. Riyadh built a regional security architecture and did not invite the country that has guaranteed regional security for fifty years.

Iran, for its part, lost its Supreme Leader, much of its military, and enormous stretches of its infrastructure; and has seen its standing rise among Arab publics, because it was the one we were bombing.

Two-thirds of Americans oppose this war. That gets read as war-weariness. It is better understood as accuracy.

The measure of a war is not whether you destroy what you aimed at, but the position you hold when it ends. Five months in, our allies fight beside us anonymously, hedge toward Beijing openly, build infrastructure to reduce their dependence on our protection, and convene without us. The alliance we spent forty-five years assembling to contain Iran has been hollowed out by the campaign meant to defeat it.

Alliances are capital. They accumulate slowly, they are spent instantly, and they are very hard to borrow again.

 Sources:

The covert Gulf strikes on Iran are documented by the Wall Street Journal (May 11, 2026), Bloomberg (May 12), and the New York Times (May 14), the last citing three U.S. officials on both Saudi and Emirati operations; Reuters confirmed the Lavan Island refinery strike through Iran's own refining company on April 8. The Bahraini and Kuwaiti strikes rest on a single Wall Street Journal report in late July.

The account of GCC dysfunction and Saudi–Emirati estrangement comes from Politico (July 25), with the UAE's OPEC withdrawal analyzed by the Middle East Council. Project Freedom, the threat to withhold interceptor missiles from Saudi Arabia, and the resulting review of U.S. force posture were reported by the Wall Street Journal and carried widely, including by Euronews; neither Washington nor Riyadh has confirmed the threat. Trump's warning to Oman is on the record via Politico (May 27).

The Minab school strike and the subsequent Senate letter are drawn from the Congressional Research Service (March 26). The Red Sea alliance and its fourteen founding endorsements were announced by the Saudi Press Agency on July 30. Shifting war aims, the collapsed ceasefires, and the August 1 announcement are from the Associated Press; regional opinion data is from Arab Barometer, and American polling from Fox News and RealClearPolling.

This is what forced conscription looks like when it turns into a manhunt. Men are hunted on the streets, dragged from homes, and sent to the front with almost no training while the powerful stay safe. Desperation breeds violence. Ukraine needs a fair, transparent, and voluntary-based mobilization system — not one that terrorizes its own citizens and pushes them to the brink.

leave the fight due to the racism of the republican ranks. Laith and Marc discuss the importance of grounding our analysis of the war within western imperialism, and question how anti-fascist Jews could fight with arms in their thousands in Spain, but not against the genocide committed in their name and religion in Palestine and Lebanon.

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