Congress has a choice to make: Protect democracy and states’ rights, or hand a blank check to Big Pork lobbyists who refuse to accept that voters, family farmers, and the marketplace have already moved on.

Buried in the House-passed Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (Farm Bill) is a provision known as the “Save Our Bacon Act,” a slickly named attempt to wipe out state farm animal welfare laws like California’s Proposition 12. The House passed the farm bill on April 30 by a vote of 224-200, after the Rules Committee blocked a bipartisan amendment that had the votes to pass on the floor that would have stripped the Save Our Bacon language from the bill.

Now the fight moves to the Senate. And every Democrat and Republican who claims to respect states’ rights should be on notice: This provision is not about saving bacon. It is about overriding voters, punishing family farmers who adapted, and using federal power to erase state laws that powerful corporate interests dislike.

Proposition 12 was passed by nearly 63% of California voters in 2018. At its core, the law set a basic standard for certain animal products sold in California, including pork: A mother pig should have enough space to stand up, turn around, and extend her limbs. That is not radical. It is the bare minimum.

The message should be simple: Respect the voters, respect the farmers, respect the courts, and keep this attack on states’ rights out of the Farm Bill.

The pork lobby sued anyway, arguing that California had no right to decide what products could be sold within its own borders. They took that argument all the way to the US Supreme Court—and lost, even before a conservative court. In 2023, the court upheld Prop 12.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and its allies went to Congress and asked lawmakers to do what the courts would not: nullify the will of voters through federal legislation. The Farm Bill is their latest vehicle to pass the Save Our Bacon Act.

Supporters dress this up as a defense of interstate commerce. But let’s be honest about what it really is: a federal override of state decision-making.

That should alarm conservatives who believe Washington should not dictate every policy choice from the top down. It should alarm progressives who believe voters have the right to pass laws protecting animals, consumers, workers, and communities. And it should alarm anyone who thinks Congress should be solving actual problems in the farm bill—not sneaking in special favors for a trade group that lost in court, lost at the ballot box, and is now trying to win through backroom legislative maneuvering.

The irony is that Prop 12 has not caused the collapse its opponents predicted. Pork has remained on California shelves. Major producers have adapted. Nearly all major food companies now offer Prop 12-compliant pork. Many farmers invested in compliant systems and rely on the market that Prop 12 created.

In fact, some of the loudest claims against Prop 12 have aged terribly. The NPPC’s own vice president testified before Congress while describing himself as a fourth-generation hog farmer who produces Prop 12-compliant pork—then argued against the very law he already follows. That contradiction says everything. Compliance is possible. The industry knows it. The marketplace has shown it.

The people who stand to lose from the Save Our Bacon Act are not the multinational corporations that have already adjusted. They are the family farmers who spent money to meet higher standards, the small and mid-sized producers who gained access to premium markets, and the voters whose laws would be wiped away because a lobby did not like the outcome.

This is why opposition to the provision has not fallen neatly along party lines. A bipartisan group led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to remove the language from the Farm Bill, joined by Republicans and Democrats including Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), David Valadao (R-Calif.), Nancy Mace (R-SC), Mike Lawler, (R-NY), and Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), according to industry reporting.

That bipartisan resistance matters. It shows this is not a left-versus-right issue. It is a question of whether Congress will respect state authority or gut it when a powerful industry lobby complains loudly enough.

For Democrats, the choice should be easy. Prop 12 reflects humane treatment, consumer transparency, and democratic accountability. It was passed by voters and upheld by the courts. A farm bill should not become a vehicle for rolling back animal welfare progress and silencing state-level reform.

For Republicans, the choice should be just as easy—at least for those who mean what they say about states’ rights. If California voters cannot decide that pork sold in California must meet basic animal welfare and food safety standards, then what exactly does “states’ rights” mean? Does it only apply when a state passes laws that corporate lobbyists like?

The Save Our Bacon Act is also a warning shot far beyond animal welfare. If Congress can erase state laws protecting farm animals because they affect interstate commerce, what stops future Congresses from targeting state laws on food safety, environmental protection, public health, labeling, or consumer standards? Opponents have warned that this kind of language could threaten hundreds of state agricultural laws and undermine state and local authority well beyond Prop 12.

That is why lawmakers should strip this language from any final farm bill.

The farm bill should support farmers, strengthen food systems, expand nutrition access, invest in conservation, and build resilience. It should not be hijacked by a narrow industry faction trying to relitigate a Supreme Court loss. And it certainly should not punish the farmers and companies that did the right thing by adapting to higher standards.

Animal welfare progress is real. Across the food system, companies, producers, and consumers are moving toward more humane practices. Cage-free eggs now make up a major and growing share of the market. In pork production, many supply chains have reduced or eliminated gestation stalls. The trend is clear: Extreme confinement is becoming harder to defend and easier to replace.

The progress did not happen by accident. It happened because voters demanded it, farmers built it, companies responded to it, and advocates kept pushing. The Save Our Bacon Act would turn back the clock—not because the system failed, but because it succeeded.

Congress should not reward obstruction. It should not let Big Pork use the farm bill to override voters. And it should not allow a fake “states’ rights” argument to become a federal power grab against the states that actually exercised their rights.

Democrats and Republicans who genuinely believe in democracy, federalism, and fair markets should stand together and reject the Farm Bill if it includes the Save Our Bacon Act language.

The message should be simple: Respect the voters, respect the farmers, respect the courts, and keep this attack on states’ rights out of the Farm Bill. Call your US senators today and tell them to oppose Big Pork’s attack on democracy and oppose any Farm Bill version with the "Save Our Bacon" language included.

It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington—or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.

While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both—no surprise—were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, President Donald Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.

Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”

Equal Opportunity Failure

Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as The Guardian reported, “the US would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The US operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”

It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm.

Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a US missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.

Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.

So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)

Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order—namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.

And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).

Female Purges

Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.

Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now—no surprise—been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.

Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the deputy attorney general and the deputy secretary of defense were both women.

Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of 8 women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions—admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)

Project 2025

It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.

Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”

The fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.

And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.

MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and “Velshi” Segment Producer Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “The freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”

Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.

A Future Government Without Women?

It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.

When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the US Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”

Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.

The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.

What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.

Theoretically, representative democracy is a process by which candidates for elected office accurately assess people’s biggest concerns and develop popular plans to fix the problems. However, politicians from both parties, especially Republicans, seem to prefer radical and novel redistricting schemes so that they don’t have to convince anyone and can still win.

The post Let Them Eat Gerrymandering appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

RE:  IMPEACH PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP NOW OUT OF SELF-INTEREST The myopic, anemic, feckless orthodoxy among “leadership” Democrats in Congress mulishly resists seeking to impeach President Donald Trump for a counterrevolution against July 4, 1776. Trump has crowned himself with infinite, extraconstitutional powers restrained only by his imaginary moral conscience that daily finds expression in industrial…

One of the main findings of those who study conflict resolution is that it is easier to climb up the conflict escalation ladder than to climb back down. Also, the deeply-entrenched enemy images on both sides, with Iran’s belief that the US is “the Great Satan,” and US references to Iran belonging to the “Axis of Evil,” confirm that a long history of conflict and grievances make the conflict harder to resolve.

The most significant concern in recent years has been Iran’s uranium enrichment and fear that it could be used to make nuclear bombs, a major source of angst for both the US and Israel—as presumably are Israel’s 90 or so undeclared nuclear weapons for Iran. Since the need for security and safety is one of the most fundamental issues at the heart of many conflicts, this is a classic case of the “security dilemma,” where a state’s actions to increase its security cause reactions from other parties that lead to a decrease in its security. Indeed, Iran’s nuclear enrichment led to the first iteration of this armed conflict, where in response, on June 22, the US and Israel launched a surprise airstrike on three Iranian nuclear facilities.

Of course, US President Donald Trump’s annulment (reportedly encouraged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (painstakingly negotiated over a 20-month period with the P5+1 and European Union)—even though Iran was abiding by the agreement (as certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency)—surely undermines Iran’s trust in any agreement that it may now reach with the US.

The apparent trigger for the current hostilities was a visit by Netanyahu to Washington on February 11, where Trump and his inner circle met with Netanyahu, the director of Mossad, and Israeli military staff, in a highly unusual classified meeting in the Situation Room, in which Netanyahu made an hours-long, hard-sell pitch “suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint US-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.” He apparently argued that this could be accomplished in three to four days. Trump (who according to an article in The Atlantic has actually supported a hard-line approach against Iran since 1980) ended the meeting by saying, “It sounds good to me.”

Although various pundits, as well as the parties themselves, are arguing that one side or the other is “winning,” in fact, both are losing—and stand to lose even more (as does the rest of the world) if they cannot find an off-ramp.

In subsequent discussions about whether to go to war, Trump’s inner circle engaged in “groupthink” by not expressing their concerns openly and mainly acquiescing to Trump’s judgment. Groupthink occurs where there is pressure to reach a consensus without critical evaluation, resulting in irrational or dysfunctional decision-making. In decisions about whether to initiate war, it typically “includes an illusion of invulnerability; an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality; collective efforts to discount warnings; stereotyped views of the enemy as evil; self-censorship of deviations from the group beliefs; a shared illusion of unanimity; suppression of dissent; and the emergence of self-appointed mind guards who screen the group from dissent.”

Just over two weeks later, in Operation Epic Fury, Israeli military strikes, informed by US intelligence, assassinated a number of senior Iranian officials, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—in a major breach of the international norm against the assassination of leaders. Moreover, the attacks were launched unexpectedly in the midst of an ongoing negotiation process between the US and Iran on its nuclear program, again undermining Iran’s trust in negotiations with the US. The US and Israel also targeted other military and government sites, with Iran, in turn, responding with missile and drone strikes on Israel, US bases, and US-allied Arab countries and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting global trade.

Once the threshold to armed conflict has been crossed, parties typically become caught in a rapidly-spiraling vortex of aggressive interactions, which ensure that the conflict becomes worse and worse. As each inflicts increasing damage on the other, anger and a desire for revenge grow exponentially and each sees the other’s actions as provocation that must be responded to, typically with greater intensity than the action it follows, causing the conflict to grow in size and importance.

As each experiences losses or injury at the hands of the other, the desire to punish the other and to right the wrong that has been done increases. Conflicts then begin to operate in a “retaliatory spiral,” as both now have truly hostile intentions toward one another, further poisoning the relationship, and making a peace process ever more difficult. Reduced communication also makes reality testing more dubious and allows distorted images of the other side to grow.

Threats and ultimatums grow increasingly more alarming as both attempt to use “leverage” to influence the other. Trump, for example, threatened that Iran would be “blown off the face of the Earth,” “blasted into oblivion,” and “bombed back to the Stone Ages!!!” In early March, Ali Larijani, the head of the Iranian National Security Council, posted on X: “Be careful not to get eliminated yourself.” The next day, he, too, was assassinated.

What those making such threats fail to appreciate is that parties do not always respond to leverage as hoped. The use of heavy-handed leverage, especially threats and punitive measures, frequently backfires. All too often, parties react against these attempts to influence their behavior and refuse to comply—sometimes even at great cost to themselves. “Reactance” is a well-studied phenomenon that typically occurs when the party trying to achieve influence does not fully take into account all of the factors that affect the motivation of those they are trying to influence. In such cases, the blunt use of leverage is seen by the party for what it is—an attempt to “manipulate” it to act in a certain manner against its will or interests. In some cases, preserving one’s freedom of choice and control over a situation and not being seen by one’s constituents to cave to external pressure may be more important than avoiding punitive sanctions—even when they are severe. In such situations, leverage not only fails to bring about the desired result, but may even cause the party to become more entrenched in its resistance.

Reactance tends to be strongest in relation to punitive measures (“sticks”) but can also occur in relation to positive incentives (“carrots”), especially when they are perceived to be “bribes,” which erode an actor’s freedom of choice. Indeed, the creative use of incentives that are tailored to the parties’ interests will be much more likely to influence the other party than the blunt or simplistic use of leverage which may stir up resistance.

When previously defined limits to a conflict, termed “saliences,” are crossed, it tends to redefine the rules of the conflict. The US and Israeli action in breaking the taboo of assassinating leaders, and Iran’s decision to block the Strait of Hormuz—for the first time ever—represent two such saliences which caused an increased sense of outrage and injustice and more extreme retaliatory behavior in response. In frustration at the blockage in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump wrote on his social media account on Easter morning: “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” A couple of days later, he warned: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

At this point, the international community became concerned about what further saliences Trump might cross (e.g., committing war crimes or using a nuclear weapon) and insisted on the parties agreeing to a two-week ceasefire, which had been proposed by Pakistan. Signed on April 8, the ceasefire did calm the situation significantly, as they often do (if not egregiously violated).

Soon after, when face-to-face marathon talks were held in Pakistan (which I’ve written about elsewhere), but no agreement was reached, Trump imposed his own blockade against Iranian ports—another first. Since then, although there have been no further face-to-face negotiations, the Pakistani mediators have passed papers back and forth between the parties, outlining their latest positions. One major factor that has slowed the process is the pairing of offers with threats, since the reactance it has engendered inclines the parties to reject the other’s offers.

Although various pundits, as well as the parties themselves, are arguing that one side or the other is “winning,” in fact, both are losing—and stand to lose even more (as does the rest of the world) if they cannot find an off-ramp.

Iran’s blockage of commercial ships carrying oil, gas, and fertilizer has been very costly for the US domestically, not only at the gas pump, but in terms of an economic downturn, inflation, and projections that the war will ultimately cost $1 trillion. Iran has also caused significant damage to US military bases in the Middle East (only recently reported) and a serious depletion of US military stockpiles. Moreover, US standing in the world has suffered considerably. Finally, for Trump, his ratings have fallen and there is concern that his party could lose in the midterms.

Iran has suffered not only the obliteration of its senior leadership, but also severe damage to its infrastructure; considerable civilian and military mortality; and loss of significant military assets, such as its navy, missiles, military bases, etc. The International Monetary Fund has projected Iran's economy will shrink by over 6% n 2026, with inflation running at almost 70%. It will take years for Iran’s reconstruction.

The rest of the world has and will also suffer greatly. For example, The World Food Programme has predicted that roughly 45 million more people could be pushed into acute hunger this year, and the World Central Kitchen has warned that fertilizer shortages could lead to a multiyear famine.

To work toward a peace agreement, both the US and Iran will need to recommit to and extend their ceasefire to give themselves sufficient time to engage in a well-planned third-party mediation process. Such a process would include adequate time to create an agenda of issues acceptable to both; exploration of the interests of each party in relation to each agenda item; discussion of creative problem-solving options that might meet their respective interests; and an innovative integration of proposed options into a more comprehensive agreement, acceptable to both.

Although it’s advisable for the Pakistani mediators, who have been committed and involved throughout, to continue in this role, it might be best to choose a venue such as Geneva rather than Islamabad that would allow both delegations to feel safe and have sufficient time for the process to unfold. Finally, technical experts, such as senior staff from the International Atomic Energy Agency, should be included to ensure understanding of the technical issues with regard to uranium enrichment and to propose new ideas.

To arrive at such an agreement, the parties will also need to reduce the number of tit-for-tat attacks on one another; lower their threats and hostile rhetoric; and do their homework to consider what inducements they could offer to one another.

Of course, another danger that will need to be anticipated is the possibility that either Netanyahu, who has recently said that “it’s not over”—or hardline factions in the US or in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—could act as “spoilers.”

Obviously, the fundamental issue is the need for a better understanding and institutionalization of the knowledge and practice of conflict prevention and resolution, so that such incredibly destructive and senseless wars can be prevented and disputes of the future more sensibly settled by constructive rather than destructive means.

“The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic." —President Donald Trump, greeting British King Charles on April 28, 2026.

“The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address are descendants of the Magna Charta— supreme symbols of Anglo-Saxon souls striving for freedom, justice, and humanity. Anglo-Saxons established this Nation, wrote its code, and sent their sons into the wilderness to gather fresh stars for the flag. . . . The making of America is fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon achievement. Anglo-Saxons brains have guided the course of the Republic. Our ideals are Anglo-Saxon, our social traditions, our standards of honor, our quality of imagination, and our indomitability.” —from “Americans Take Heed! Scum O’ The Melting Pot,” a 1921 KKK pamphlet.

Donald Trump’s most recent contribution to his year-long “America 250” celebration was truly bizarre, with British King Charles somehow serving as a symbol of the heritage for which the American Revolution was fought. That Trump simultaneously posted a photo of the two leaders, under the heading “Two Kings,” only added to the weirdness. But, as Jonathan Chait has noted, along with many others, accompanying the weirdness was something dark and dangerous—the idea that the US is an “Anglo Saxon” nation, and that the idea of “freedom” announced in the Declaration of Independence is a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant idea that is “alien” to “alien” peoples and cultures.

It was thus interesting that on the same day that he feted King Charles with encomiums to their common Anglo-Saxon heritage, Trump also announced his new “America 250” commemorative passport, featuring on one side an enormous drawing of his head against the background of the Declaration, and on the other the famous John Turnbull painting of the Continental Congress. Trump’s Kim Jong Un impression notwithstanding, it is entirely fitting that he would commemorate his “America 250” vision with a passport, for the policing of borders, long with the massive campaign of immigrant kidnapping, AKA/detention, and deportation, are the hallmarks of his administration.

Trump made this commitment clear while speaking at the Republican National Convention and accepting the party’s presidential nomination on July 19, 2024, reiterating what he has been saying for well over a decade:

The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them. They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I, you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen “The Silence of the Lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.

The Trump administration’s violent and sometimes murderous assaults on Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Washington, D.C., and especially Minneapolis, began only months ago and continue still, even if in less obtrusive ways. Mass deportation is simply one element of a much broader attack on refugees and immigrants. Last November, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced a total ban on reviewing asylum applications. Common Dreams reports that “Not a single refugee who isn’t a white South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department’s most recent arrivals report.” Meanwhile, Trump continues to disparage Somalia, its people, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in viciously racist ways, recently doubling down on his vile 2018 comment:

Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.

For Trump, there is absolutely no contradiction between white supremacy and the unabashed celebration of American patriotism. It sometimes seems as if he is single-handedly trying to validate the most radical versions of the “critical race theories” that he hates, personifying a past, and present, of exultant White supremacy.

Trump is hardly the first White supremacist to occupy the White House. And yet, in a sense, his every move confirms what Ta-Nehisi Coates observed back in 2017, in labeling him “The First White President.” “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power," Coates argued. "In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”

While Trump has many ideological predecessors—George Wallace springs immediately to mind—one has to go back an entire century, and to a perhaps unexpected place, to locate a public figure who so powerfully conjoins racism and xenophobia.

Back in May of 1926, the North American Review--founded by Boston Brahmin intellectuals in 1815, and widely considered the first significant literary magazine published in the US—featured just such a figure: Hiram Wesley Evans, the Vanderbilt University-educated author of a substantial, 30-page essay entitled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” Evans was an up and coming public figure seeking to promote the restoration of American Greatness. He was also the Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). And his essay, described by the editors as an “authoritative paper on the Ku Klux Klan by the foremost representative of that Order,” inaugurated a symposium featuring essays by four “writers of national authority”: Martin J. Scott, S.J.; Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman, Rabbi Emeritus, Temple Emmanu-el, New York; W. E. Burghart Du Bois, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and William Starr Myers, Professor of Politics, Princeton University.

It may seem surprising that such an eminent journal would feature a serious symposium on the KKK centered on a substantial essay by its “Imperial Wizard and Emperor.” But indeed, the KKK—boosted by the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation," whose legendary ending featured the glorious rescue of vulnerable Whites by heroic Klansmen on horseback—had just experienced a rebirth under the leadership of William J. Simmons. Simmons was a vicious racist. He was also a patriot, and he dedicated his organization to the “sublime principles of a pure Americanism,” and declaring that “[T]he Klan is a purely American organization assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy.”

As Linda Gordon notes in her 2017 classic, The Second Coming of the KKK, by the 1920’s the Klan was a nationally important organization whose reach extended far beyond the South and claimed between 4 to 6 million members. More important: “the 1920’s Klan’s program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920’s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries.” Over the course of the decade, it elected governors in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas., and exerted influence in a range of other states from Ohio and Michigan to New York.

The organization was particularly strong in Indiana, where in the mid-1920’s it claimed both the state’s governor and a majority of both houses of the General Assembly. Gordon indeed opens her book by describing a 1923 Fourth of July Klan celebration that attracted thousands of supporters in Kokomo, Indiana, and which featured a speech by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. The speech—entitled not “Why We Hate Blacks, Catholics, and Jews” but rather “Back to the Constitution"—declared: “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. . . The American Revolution was fought for principles of self-government…then embodied in a federal constitution the like of which man never seen, are sacred now as they were then.”)

By 1923, Hiram Wesley Evans had been named Imperial Wizard of the Klan, supplanting Simmons and initiating a campaign to raise the profile and advance the political influence of the Klan. “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” was, in effect, his vision statement. And its parallels with the rhetoric of Trump’s MAGA movement are chilling.

Evans begins by noting that while in 1915 the nation was “in the confusion of sudden awakening from the lovely dream of the melting pot, disorganized and helpless before the invasion of aliens and alien ideas. After ten years of the Klan, it is in arms for defense . . . “ The Klan, he insists, is dedicated above all to “the idea of preserving and developing America first and chiefly for the benefit of the children of the pioneers who made America, and only and definitely along the lines of the purpose and spirit of those pioneers.”

According to Evans, the Klan hates no one, and simply seeks to protect the American homeland from invaders who threaten true Americans: “We are a protest movement—protesting against being robbed . . . our great cities . . . taken over by strangers . . . the Nordic American is today a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him.”

And while Evans denounces the alien hordes, he also blames “liberals” (also referred to as “Mongrelized liberals”) for the civilizational crisis at hand, insisting that liberalism “provided no defense against the alien invasion, but instead has excused it—even defended it against Americanism. Liberalism is today charged in the mind of most Americans with nothing less than national, racial, and spiritual treason.”

As America is being besieged by enemies without and within, he insists that “the Klan alone faces the invader . . . the Klan is the champion, but it is not merely an organization. It is an idea, a faith, a purpose, an organized crusade,” one that indeed has “won the leadership in the movement for Americanism.” Standing firmly “against radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds,” Evans insists that the Klan alone stands for American Greatness without apologies: “We believe, in short, that we have the right to make America American and for Americans.”

The anticipations of Trump here are striking.

Trump does not explicitly denounce Catholics, Jews, Asians, and Blacks in the manner of Evans and his turn of the 20th century Klansmen, nor does he invoke the language of “Nordic” racial superiority in the manner of Evans, who praises “the instincts of loyalty to the white race, to the traditions of America, and to the spirit of Protestantism, which has been an essential part of Americanism ever since the days of Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. They are condensed into the Klan slogan: ‘Native, white, Protestant supremacy.’”

And yet, minus the reference to “instincts of loyalty to the white race,” it is easy to imagine Trump speaking in much the same way. The distinction between real, Anglo-Saxon Americans and aliens; the contempt for people of color; the obsession with stemming a literal alien invasion; the representation of liberals and radicals as traitors to the nation—these are the core themes of Trumpism.

Trump does not wear a white robe and pointy white hat, or claim to be a Grand Wizard, or burn crosses, or talk of Nordic racial superiority. He does display a remarkable solicitude for tiki torch-bearing neo-Nazis, Confederate battle flag carriers, violent Three Percenters, and Proud Boy insurrectionists.

But Trump is no Klansman. He is the twice-elected President of the United States. And yet his defensive, xenophobic, and frankly reactionary vision of “Americanism” bears a striking resemblance to the vision put forward a century ago by the Klan—a group whose ideology was, and is, closer to the center of American politics than we might like to believe.

Contributor's note: I would like to thank Robert Orsi and Bob Ivie for their comments on this piece.

Is it antisemitic to say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? More generally, is it “hurtful and insensitive” for someone to acknowledge the suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people? In recent weeks, actions by two different institutions of higher learning brought these two questions to the forefront.

On April 15, a group of faculty and student organizations at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, hosted celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha to speak at the campus. During his appearance, to set the stage for the poems he was to read, Abu Toha shared his experiences living in Gaza during the start of the Israeli assault. He told of the members of his and his wife’s families who had been killed in Israel’s bombing campaigns. Entire families erased, neighborhoods laid waste, memories eradicated. It was, he stated, a genocide.

Days after event, Le Moyne’s president issued a statement apologizing for the discomfort that Abu Toha’s remarks may have created for some in the college community. The letter noted that his use of the word genocide in connection with the state of Israel caused “real hurt” and was leaving “some members of our community to feel unwelcome.” The president concluded by affirming that “antisemitism, along with all forms of bigotry and hate, has no place at Le Moyne.”

Abu Toha responded to the president’s letter with an “open letter” of his own, rejecting the implication that using the word genocide to describe Israel’s actions could be termed antisemitic.

It is worth noting that the assumption underlying this assertion fits hand-in-glove with the claim of real antisemites who argue that the consequences of Israel’s bad behaviors can legitimately be visited on all Jews.

“Seriously?” he asked. “Are the crimes of the Israeli state representative of all Jewish people? I personally refuse to believe that is the case… I never used the word ‘Jewish’ during the entire event; I refuse to conflate the faith of Judaism with the actions of Israel.”

He concluded: “If anyone told you they felt ‘hurt’ because I used the word genocide, then I ask you: How should I feel? How should my wife feel after losing her father? How should my three children feel after losing their grandfather?”

And then, this past weekend, the University of Michigan held its commencement ceremonies. One of the speakers was the president of the faculty senate. He began his short but eloquent remarks by noting that while the university celebrates its athletes and their accomplishments, there are other heroes who should also be celebrated—those who challenged the stale and unjust status quo of the university by opening the doors to inclusion and understanding.

He began by mentioning a young woman who in 1858 challenged the school’s opposition to enrolling women as students. He went on to note the first Jewish faculty member and the Black Action Movement that pressed the university to expand their curriculum to honor the black experience, and closed by recognizing the “student activists… who sacrificed much to open our hearts to the injustices happening in Gaza.”

His remarks were so beautifully constructed and presented that they elicited a roar of approval from those in attendance. The video of the event appearing on the university’s website shows his colleagues and administrators applauding the speech.

Within a few days, the same university president who is seen applauding issued a letter denouncing the professor’s speech as “hurtful and insensitive” and “inappropriate.”

(To avoid “further controversy” the university removed the video of the event—in which the president is seen applauding the speech—from the website).

The question that must be asked, in addition to those noted above, is what is the logic behind this claim that the remarks of both Abu Toha and the faculty senate president were hurtful to the point of being antisemitic?

The place to begin is by asking: “What is antisemitism?” The simplest and clearest definition is that antisemitism is hatred of, stereotyping of, or discrimination against Jewish people because they are Jews. Like other forms of bigotry, it claims that there are inherent characteristics or behaviors that are shared by all Jews, simply because they are Jewish.

Given this, the only way that criticism of Israeli actions can constitute antisemitism is if the critic implies that Israel does what it does because it is Jewish and “that’s the way Jews are,” or if the person making the claim of antisemitism maintains that because Israel says it is a Jewish state that whatever it does represents all Jews and therefore criticism of Israeli policies is the same as criticism of the Jewish people.

This latter position has long been propagated by pro-Israel organizations. Until recently, this proposition was mostly rejected, but it has now come to gain acceptance. It is dangerous precisely because it posits that Israel represents all Jews and therefore criticism of Israel becomes criticism of the Jewish people. It is worth noting that the assumption underlying this assertion fits hand-in-glove with the claim of real antisemites who argue that the consequences of Israel’s bad behaviors can legitimately be visited on all Jews. Interestingly, this is the same logic that has long plagued Arab Americans who have been victims of hate crimes because it was claimed that their ethnicity or religion made them legitimate targets in response to the actions of some Arab groups in the Middle East.

The other consequence is that, as Abu Toha correctly notes, it denies the victims of Israel’s behaviors their legitimate right to speak of their pain and call out, with specificity, the agent who caused it because of the hurt that might cause those who support Israel—or in the case of the University of Michigan, to deny the right of students to empathize with and demand that Palestinian victims be heard, because acknowledging Palestinian pain might also cause hurt feelings.

Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth urged Congress to pass a 2027 Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion. He justified the increase by saying we need a modernized, high-tech military to counter China.

US lawmakers have been using China as a military budget increaser and ultimate policy-generator for years. Competition with Beijing is invoked to justify military expansion, new regional alliances, AI weapons development, semiconductor restrictions, and rising nuclear expenditures. In Washington, framing a policy as necessary to “counter China” has become one of the quickest ways to secure bipartisan support. As a result, the “China threat” rhetoric proliferates while the military budget skyrockets.

In truth, China is not the existential threat that Hegseth and others claim it to be. For one, China’s military posture remains far more regionally focused than that of the United States, whose global military footprint spans hundreds of bases worldwide. China has instead actively shaped its military around “active defense,” with a navy designed to stay close to its shores and defend the country should any invasion occur. Any increase in China’s defense spending should come as no surprise, considering the US military buildup across the first island chain, just off China’s coast. China has also expressly stated, both through words and action, that it has no desire for war. It has been nearly fifty years since China was involved in a conflict. There are no signs of a policy shift when it comes to China’s pursuit of diplomatic solutions, and there is no use for any projection of “what-ifs” with zero historical background or evidence.

The greatest contradiction in the US-China tech race is that the United States increasingly undermines its own strengths in the name of defending them.

So no, China is not a military threat, but it is a threat to the political and economic balance of power. China’s growth over the past decade is unprecedented, and its economy is soon set to surpass that of the United States. Not only that, but China has become a global leader in research and technological advancement. While this poses no real threat to the American people, it does rattle the ruling class and business elite who rely on US imperial behavior to maintain a monopoly on advanced tech revenue streams. That’s one reason US tech giants like Palantir are currently paying content creators thousands of dollars to promote a looming “China AI threat” and advocate support for American AI companies.

The US claims that the US-China “tech race” is about national security, but it is really a struggle over resource control, economic power, and wealth accumulation. Instead of benefiting the American people, it drives militarization and undermines the very scientific progress the United States claims to seek.

The US has historically responded to external threats, military or otherwise, through force. When socialist projects cropped up across the world, instead of establishing diplomatic arrangements with their leaders, the US launched interventions and regime change operations. This crippled economies and forced governments to adhere to US interests. In response to China’s economic growth over the last decade, the US has responded by militarizing the entire Asia Pacific region. A simple regime change operation would not work, so a longer, more strategic operation was necessary. Over the past decade, a steady and well-funded campaign has convinced the general public that China is the greatest threat to the safety and security of the American people. It’s been largely successful, which is why using China as a policy generator works so well.

The truth is that the $1.5 trillion war budget isn’t meant to protect the American people but to pursue the agenda of the ruling class. The US is not trying to “deter” a future China threat; it is preparing for a war it will attempt to bring to fruition should all else fail.

Advanced technology will define the future. And currently, the US and China are building their own tech ecosystems, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The US refers to this as a “strategic rivalry” with wider national security implications. This perspective only exists because China is considered a rival. China does not have to be considered a rival. China could just as easily be considered a development partner. And indeed it should, because cooperation on tech is the only potential avenue for ensuring the continued existence of the planet.

Instead, the tech race is exacerbating militarization and war while levying harsh costs on the environment. The US still heavily depends on China for rare earth minerals and other resources critical for weapon systems and technological development. In order to compensate for this dependency, the US has looked to other regions of the world — namely Venezuela and Iran — for access to oil and rare earth minerals.

Iran, in particular, holds significant untapped potential for rare earth elements. In 2023, Tehran reported the discovery of 8.5 million tons of lithium-rich hectorite clay. Its zinc, copper, and iron reserves are among the largest globally, just as Venezuela is home to the largest oil reserve in the world. These targets are no coincidence, and are not about “neutralizing a potential threat” as US leaders often claim. They align with a larger strategic plan to obtain resource dependency, advance business interests, and prepare for a potential war against China.

If the US really wants to win a tech race against China, it is shooting itself in the foot. Scientific progress in this country is funded in accordance with its military applicability. So instead of pursuing scientific advancements that could improve the daily lives and well-being of the people, it is pursued solely for military intentions. There are a lot of possibilities that go uninvestigated because the potential profit is not high enough.

China is not a military threat, but it is a threat to the political and economic balance of power.

Additionally, the US has launched a war against Chinese scientists and scholars in the United States. Last year, Marco Rubio announced the administration would start intensively revoking visas for Chinese scholars in “critical fields” such as science and technology. Since then, numerous Chinese scholars studying at universities around the country have been questioned, detained, and deported. Just last month, semiconductor researcher Dr. Danhao Wang reportedly fell from the third floor of a University of Michigan building after being targeted by federal authorities. While the circumstances surrounding Dr. Wang’s death remain under investigation, the incident has intensified concerns among Chinese researchers who already feel increasingly scrutinized and unwelcome in the United States.

The persecution of Chinese scholars is ultimately hurting US technological advancement. In its desperate bid to over-securitize the field, the US is systematically destroying the avenues it has historically used to advance. Many Chinese scholars have since returned to China; others are now too afraid to come to the US in the first place for fear of persecution.

Additionally, the US continues to sanction Chinese technology to protect US industries. This is especially absurd when it comes to critical technology such as electric vehicles and solar panels. Instead of enabling the transition to affordable and sustainable systems, the planet is continuously sacrificed for profit.

The greatest contradiction in the US-China tech race is that the United States increasingly undermines its own strengths in the name of defending them. Scientific collaboration is plagued with suspicion, technological progress is subordinated to militarization, and urgently needed green technologies are restricted in the name of corporate greed. The result is a self-inflicted weakening of the very systems required to address the crises of the future.

After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind. The Iranians, of course, responded by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that promptly removed about 11% to 13% of all petroleum from the world market, day after day, week after week, setting off a cascade of steeply rising prices for diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas.

Donald Trump’s brilliant idea of joining the blockade of that Strait should be considered the equivalent of coming to the aid of a strangulation victim by pressing a pillow over his or her face. The shortages hit first in Asia (particularly reliant on fuel flows from the Strait of Hormuz) and Africa and then in Europe. The German air carrier Lufthansa only recently cut 20,000 summer flights for fear of fuel shortages (and it will undoubtedly prove all too typical). Nor will the U.S., despite having its own supplies of oil, escape such negative developments. While there have been oil price crunches before, as in the 1970s and 1980s, this one is different. It’s a watershed moment globally, heralding the Ragnarök — the Norse “twilight of the gods” — of petroleum.

Forced to Run on One Engine

While American drivers have been complaining this spring about high prices at the pump, in the Netherlands and Denmark consumers are already paying the stunning equivalent of around $10 a gallon. In Asia, where reliance on petroleum that travels through the Strait of Hormuz is enormous, the situation is far worse, since there are already distinct shortages of fuel of a staggering and still growing kind. Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., recently declared a national energy emergency, as his country had only a little over a month’s worth of petroleum left. Hundreds of gas stations, nearly 3% of the country’s total, announced temporary closures, resulting in long lines at those that remained open.

South Korea, which unwisely dragged its feet when it came to turning to green energy, is now scrambling to find just three months’ supply of petroleum from non-Hormuz sources, but the world’s 10th-largest economy faces a potential economic cataclysm. The government has already restricted parking for commuters. The rise in gasoline costs has led many consumers to simply stay home if they can, spurring a buying spree of novels and video games. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, a human rights lawyer, implicitly blamed Israel’s blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law for the calamity, engaging in a days-long internet flame war with Tel Aviv in early April.

In Bangladesh, the state-owned Eastern Refinery has been forced to close due to a lack of crude oil to process. Meanwhile, the government has allowed gasoline and diesel prices to rise by 11% to 15%, putting pressure on the costs of transportation, agricultural production, and consumer items, while creating endless lines for what gasoline remains. With boat operators, ferries, and fishing boats unable to secure enough diesel fuel for their motors, a whole range of livelihoods are being hurt. As Al Jazeera reported, Bangladeshi ferry operator Abir Hussain typically offered this complaint: “We are struggling to maintain our regular schedule. We are forced to run on just one engine to conserve diesel, due to the fuel shortages.”

Heavily dependent on fossil gas for its electricity plants, Bangladesh has already suffered widespread outages, harming factories and schools — and, of course, even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen soon, the pain throughout Asia is likely to be long-lasting.

Stagflation

Oil price crises are hardly new. Because of a boycott of Europe and the United States by Arab oil producers during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the rising power of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel, the price of petroleum actually quadrupled between 1970 and 1980. That energy crisis produced economic malaise in the United States, where the economy became afflicted with “stagflation” — both stagnation and inflation, two phenomena not usually found together.

So much capital flowed to the oil states of the Persian Gulf then, particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran, that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger schemed to avoid deflation in the U.S. by pressuring those countries to buy enormous amounts of American military equipment. Over the decades, that oil-arms nexus would drive the United States toward ever more ruinous conflicts in the Gulf region, since arms manufacturers and oil companies, two of the more influential corporate sectors in American politics, had a motive for lobbying repeatedly to get Washington to intervene there. And of course, their behind-the-scenes pressure to continue the country’s forever wars in that region would be bolstered by the Israel Lobby.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-1979, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf War of 1990-1991, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were all further shocks to the energy system. The major industrialized countries responded to such challenges by increasing their fuel efficiency, while switching to nuclear power, coal, and natural gas for ever more of their electricity and heating. In the U.S., in part because of government regulation, the average passenger car went from a fuel efficiency of 13.5 miles per gallon in 1975 to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985, while global per capita use of petroleum declined after the 1970s oil shock and has never recovered.

The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis

The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis of 2026 has the potential to permanently reduce petroleum demand far more radically. The deadlock in the Strait of Hormuz has all the hallmarks of a chronic ailment. After all, Israel and Iran have struck each other four times now — in April and then October 2024, in the 12-day war of June 2025 (when President Trump joined in), and again this spring. None of those four military actions successfully established Iranian deterrence, leaving Tehran eternally vulnerable to further Israeli and U.S. strikes.

And yet Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s determination to destroy Iran’s industrial base has also failed so far. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Israeli elite won’t try again once their country and the U.S. have built back up their depleted stores of interceptors and so become more confident that Tel Aviv will be able to withstand further Iranian ballistic missile and drone barrages. In addition, Iran’s new claim that, from here on in, it will have the right to charge tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, though it may have some support in international law, is unacceptable to the U.S., the Arab Gulf states, and Israel, and so forms an irritant likely to lead to further conflict.

In short, Israel and the United States have destabilized the Persian Gulf and global oil and natural gas supplies for the foreseeable future.

How different today’s crisis is from the Middle Eastern one set off by Washington’s Operation Desert Storm, aimed at expelling the Iraqi military from Kuwait in 1991. Since the strength of Baathist Iraq then lay in its armored forces, the U.S. and its allies could use their own armor and air power to bottle them up inside Iraq and deny that country’s military the ability to further destabilize the Persian Gulf region.

In contrast, since then Iran has put much of its military energy into ballistic missile and drone production, weapons that, no matter what the U.S. and Israel do, can continue to strike sites across the Middle East. While petroleum prices doubled during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, they quickly fell once it was over. Subsequent losses from sanctions on Iraq and oil fires in Kuwait were offset by increases in OPEC production, especially in Saudi Arabia. That country is, in fact, one of the few major swing producers left in the world. The U.S. and Russia still produce a great deal of crude oil, but they use most of it themselves. On the other hand, because of its vast oil fields and small population, Saudi Arabia can vary its production, lowering it when the price falls too low for its liking and increasing it substantially during a crisis.

Phantasmagoric Assertions

At the moment, however, the Saudis can’t substantially offset the shortfall in crude oil through Hormuz because it’s caught up in the crisis itself and its pipeline to the Red Sea has limited extra capacity; nor, despite President Trump’s phantasmagoric assertions, can the U.S., since it’s not a net exporter but a net consumer of crude oil. It is, however, a net exporter of liquid hydrocarbons, including hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGLs), primarily propane, which make up about 25% of total U.S. gross “petroleum” exports. Propane, however, is mainly used for heating buildings and you can’t fill up on HGLs at the pump. Since gasoline and diesel prices are set by the world market, the U.S. production of crude will not keep American prices at the pump from rising.

The oil supply for vehicles is relatively inelastic. And yet a world that used roughly 104 million barrels a day of petroleum in 2025 has been limping along this spring with as little as 92 million barrels a day, while chronic shortages loom, even once the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, since numerous major refineries in the region have been badly damaged. Demand also will remain relatively inelastic as long as owners locked into vehicles with internal combustion engines have to keep on buying gasoline and diesel fuel (no matter how high the prices go) to get to work, ensuring that those prices will remain elevated until the supply increases substantially.

The Hormuz crisis, however, differs from past oil shocks in significant ways. As a start, it’s happening at a time when scientists are discovering ever more unsettling consequences from fossil-fuel-caused climate change — most recently, a potentially calamitous slowdown in or possibly even future collapse of the crucial Atlantic Ocean current system by midcentury, which could have a devastating impact on the planet. As a result, wise governments have an increasing motivation to enact policies encouraging the electrification of public transport of every sort and so much else as well.

In addition, the recent conflict in the Strait of Hormuz signals an ongoing geopolitical volatility in the heart of oil country that may not subside, even though the latest oil war has arrived at a time when there is an increasingly robust alternative to gas-powered transportation in the form of electric vehicles (EVs), to which consumers are already switching in striking numbers. Countries are also turning ever more to wind and solar power, no small thing since the crunch in the Strait also affects the global distribution of natural gas from Qatar. The five countries in the European Union with the most green energy are set to save nearly $10 billion more in costs than fossil-heavy EU countries.

The Elephant in the Showroom

In the United Kingdom, EV sales spiked a record 24% in March over the same month last year. Moreover, there was a potentially game-changing turning point there, as the average cost of an electric vehicle for the first time fell below that of a similar gasoline-powered car. Meanwhile, renewable energy generation in England also swelled strikingly.

Asia, however, was the place that saw the most dramatic changes. Vietnam now makes its own electric car, the Vinfast, and its sales skyrocketed by 127% in March. Some 40% of new vehicle sales there last year were already electric, a percentage that is expected to rise rapidly in the wake of the Strait of Hormuz disaster. Vietnamese schoolteacher Dao Thi Hue caught the mood of the moment while visiting a Vinfast dealership by saying, “Driving an EV is so much better than driving a petroleum vehicle, in terms of costs and also in terms of saving fuel, queuing to fill up.”

Of course, the elephant in the global EV showroom is China. In 2024, it produced more than 12 million electric, hybrid, and fuel-cell vehicles (also known as “New Energy Vehicles”). That figure amounts to 70% of global production and EVs accounted for 53% of new car registrations in China last year. Moreover, China already has the ability to produce 20 million EVs annually, so it is only producing at 65% capacity. And the rush to buy electric vehicles isn’t just focused on passenger vehicles but also on heavy trucks.

Although domestic sales in China faced some headwinds because government incentives for such purchases lapsed late last year, March sales of 1.25 million New Energy Vehicles there were up slightly from the previous year and recent sales were up 67% from this February’s. The big news, however, is that Chinese EV growth was driven primarily by exports, a record 371,000 units in March, a 130% increase over the same month in 2025. Chinese lithium battery exports were also up in the first quarter by 50.1%, a figure that is only expected to grow as the effects of the Hormuz blockade tear through the world economy. Overall, China’s Greentech exports are surging.

Periodic Shocks

Count on this: ever more consumers are likely to purchase electric vehicles globally, since they’re immune to the periodic price shocks caused by Persian Gulf instability. Moreover, their sticker prices continue to fall. New discoveries of lithium resources and new, less expensive batteries also promise to bring their prices down even further. Moreover, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Company (or CATL), a giant battery manufacturer, has just announced that it has developed a new battery that will enable an electric vehicle to travel 932 miles on a single charge (which, by the way, would only take six and a half minutes to complete).

These are potentially internal-combustion-engine-killing developments. Governments of countries lacking significant oil resources like India are already committing themselves to vast build-outs of charging stations and creating ever more incentives to buy EVs and phase out gas-driven vehicles. Because the Hormuz crisis is hitting Asia (with its vast population of 4.8 billion people) hardest, the new and somewhat frantic commitment by so many of its governments and its consumers to the electrification of transport will have the effect of further dropping prices globally for electric batteries and other technology and so will be pivotal in the fight against climate change.

In short, count on one thing: however devastating the immediate effects of the disaster in the Strait of Hormuz, the latest horrific Iran war is also helping to change the world forever in ways that could prove positive indeed.

The war launched by Israel and the United States on Iran on February 28 has already proven a turning point in world history. So many elements of geopolitics have coalesced in it that we won’t understand its full significance for some time to come. A ceasefire, especially one as chaotic and fragile as this one, is not the end of war, so the new realities may soon be replaced by others. But safe to say that none of the countries of the regions directly impacted by this war so far—from the Levant and the Persian Gulf all the way to South Asia, and of course the United States and Israel—will be able to return to the status quo antebellum. The abrupt withdrawal of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from OPEC in late April has already destabilized the Saudi-led oil cartel, and with Emiratis doubling down on their alliance with Israel, the future of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) itself is now uncertain. No one can reliably predict whether the glitzy global lifestyles of the Gulf countries, those of the UAE in particular, will survive long-term the shock they have received via Iranian missiles and drones. It is likely that the economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the damage to energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf will be felt in far corners of the world for years in unpredictable ways. Already, crisis conditions exist in many countries, especially in the Global South—power and food shortages and higher prices across the board.

Marine traffic may start to flow safely again through the strait at some point, but on whose terms will that be? Certainly not those of the United States, whose leaders are only starting to realize that they cannot conclude the hostilities as and when they see fit. Iran has used the hiatus in active fighting to begin to develop, in consultation with Russia, China, and Oman, a new framework for governance over the strait. No one should doubt that China and Russia have sided with Iran in the war, though each did so “without showing its hand,” to put it in war-gaming language. Aside from openly condemning what it called unprovoked aggression, Russia maintained a balanced posture. China has kept an even lower profile, leading to many supporters of Iran asking why it was not coming to the latter’s aid as it was battered by two of the most powerful militaries. But a few days into the war, The New York Times reported on concrete US intelligence that Russia was providing Iran with actionable information on US targets across the Gulf. In early May, the Times reported that the Caspian Sea has become a route for Russian supplies for Iran’s drone production.

And China’s involvement, however concealed, could be sensed even before the war in the fact that in January Iran moved from the US-owned GPS to the more advanced Chinese BeiDou satellite constellation. It has also been reported by The Financial Times that in late 2024, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) took possession of a high-resolution Earth-observation satellite from a Chinese company, delivered to it mid-orbit and hence fully functional. This report was denied by the Chinese government. But if true, it would mean that the US is facing in war for the first time ever an adversary that has access to satellite imagery as precise as its own. So, it is likely that China has aided Iran in the same way it helped Pakistan in May last year in its conflict with India, assistance that was confirmed at the time by the latter’s military: quietly sharing its space-, cyber- and electromagnetic-spectrum capabilities. It cannot be denied that Iran has deployed its missiles and drones with unexpected accuracy.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the damage to energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf will be felt in far corners of the world for years in unpredictable ways.

The confrontations in South Asia and the Gulf over the last year are in fact linked in one other way: its performance in the war with its much larger neighbor and traditional adversary raised Pakistan’s geopolitical stature in the region to the point that it could present itself as a mediator in the Iran war when the need arose for one, a surprising turnaround for what has often been considered in the West something akin to a rogue nation. But the Pakistani military establishment has long experience of ingratiating US administrations without surrendering its own interests, and in Trump, his family, and allies seems to have met an equal partner in corruption. China and Russia did finally “show their hand” on April 7 but on a diplomatic battleground in Manhattan, far from the kinetic battlespace of the Gulf. They both vetoed Bahrain’s Security Council resolution, which called for Iran to unilaterally relinquish its control over the Strait of Hormuz but made no mention of the launching of the war against it during ongoing nuclear negotiations. Obviously, just one country’s veto would have sufficed. A point had been made.

A movement of the geopolitical tectonic plates is perceptible in these developments, and it doesn’t appear to be favorable to the powers that launched this war. Whatever the agreements, if any, that materialize from the Islamabad process, Iran has demonstrated its capacity for closing and opening the strait at will and may emerge from the war as a major regional power which can control 20 percent of the world’s oil and LNG production and other vital supply chains. If this happens, Israel’s war on Iran, intended to give it the ability to act at will throughout the region, will have resulted in failure. Given his own domestic political and legal vulnerabilities as an election approaches, can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu afford to let that happen? And can US President Donald Trump prevent Netanyahu from scuttling any agreement he might be willing to sign with the Iranians to evade his own political reckoning in the fall mid-terms? The peace of the world depends on how these questions are answered. Israel itself appears very unimpressive relative to Iran at this moment, busy killing civilians and bulldozing villages north of its border in Lebanon while Iran strengthens its geopolitical position.

By successfully backing Pakistan without showing its hand last May, China had already staked a claim to being a preeminent power in South Asia. And repeating that strategy now with Iran, it has made a bid for a similar position in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Observers have argued for some time, and we have all vaguely sensed, that we now live in a multipolar world, not the unipolar one of the Post-Cold War years, with the US as singular global hegemon. But when exactly did this passage take place? Some date the end of US unipolarity to Xi Jinping’s speech to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in 2017; others, to the beginning of China’s Road and Belt Initiative in 2013, which now includes more than 140 countries worldwide. Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be the more convincing one, the “rise” of China and its alliance with Russia are obviously at the core of this ongoing geopolitical transition.

Soon after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” last year, which tore up the global trade regime, China had already calmly forced a retreat, decisively weaponizing its unassailable position in global supply chains. But some in Washington still act as if geopolitics today are the way they were described by Zbigniew Brzezinsky in 1997, in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, a semiofficial encomium to the unipolar world that was then emerging: he seemed to envision a geopolitical game of chess with effectively one player moving all the pieces. Brzezinski believed (or hoped) that no US administration would be careless enough to allow the formation of an alliance between Russia, China, and Iran to challenge American power in Eurasia, which he considered central to its newfound global “supremacy.” Much the same point had been made in January 1993, by outgoing Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, in his parting memorandum to his incoming successor, Warren Christopher. That dreaded alliance of the future identified by Eagleburger and Brzezinski is now a reality.

During this war, Iran has suffered enormous physical damage, from which it will take decades to recover, even under the best of postwar conditions. And for the regime in Tehran, even if it looks at mere survival, not unreasonably, as a triumph, this might eventually turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, as the basic problem of legitimacy that it faces with respect to portions of its own citizenry still remains, although it has been temporarily suspended during the war. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that, quietly backed by Russia and China, Iran has succeeded for now in bringing its powerful foreign foes to a stalemate, a standoff that formally announces the end of the unipolar world. Calls from some “America-firsters” for the US to shrink its global footprint and focus on its own hemisphere are in line with the larger geopolitical changes it is now living through.

During the so-called ceasefire, senior officials from across Europe and the Middle East have been making their way to Moscow and Beijing. We should expect an increase of interest across the Global South in BRICS and the linked Shanghai Security Organization (SCO)—Iran is a full member of both—and their vision of an alternative multipolar world order, which calls for strengthening multilateral institutions, above all the United Nations, while the US acts more and more unilaterally, even when this clearly undermines its own interests. It may turn out that Trump is the last American president to proceed under the presumption of a unipolar world, a vision that has now had a brutal collision with multipolar reality.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Since Virginia’s Supreme Court struck down state Democrats’ new congressional map and SCOTUS narrowed the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are arguing that Republicans’ aggressive moves to dismantle Black- and Hispanic-majority districts in the South will outrage voters of color and spur them to the polls in record numbers.

•  The former mayor of Arcadia was expected to plead guilty after being charged with acting as an illegal agent of China. Eileen Wang, who was elected to the Arcadia City Council in 2022, as well as Yaoning “Mike” Sun of Chino Hills, allegedly worked at the direction of China and operated “U.S. News Center,” a news source for the local Chinese American community between late 2020 and through 2022.

• Israeli legislators have approved a bill to establish a special tribunal with the power to impose the death penalty on Palestinians accused of involvement in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. The bill explicitly permits mass trials that deviate from standard rules of evidence, including broad judicial discretion to admit evidence obtained under torture.

•  Kuwait accused Iran of sending an armed paramilitary Revolutionary Guard team to launch a failed attack earlier this month on an island in the Middle East nation home to a China-funded port project. The accusation came as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said that Israel sent Iron Dome anti-missile batteries and personnel to operate them to the UAE.

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The political ground beneath unconditional US support for Israel has shifted dramatically. For Democrats in particular, continuing to arm a genocidal apartheid state has always been morally indefensible, and is becoming increasingly politically incoherent.

That shift is already visible inside the Party, as demonstrated with the mid-April 2026 Senate vote on the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs). A substantial majority of Democratic senators voted to block the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars in offensive weapons to Israel, including 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers almost certain to be used in the destruction of Palestinian homes and the bombing of neighborhoods across occupied Palestine and Lebanon.

Still, many of the Democratic senators who voted against those resolutions, along with House members who continue refusing to sign onto legislation to “Block the Bombs” and halt US investment in such terror, remain unable to recognize what even Trump has recently acknowledged: The Zionist state is increasingly becoming a political liability, with unconditional support no longer automatic or easy to defend.

Over the past few months, Democrats have by and large criticized the war and overwhelmingly voted in favor of War Powers resolutions, seeming at the very least eager to capitalize on mounting anti-Trump sentiment. Even longtime, steadfast allies of Israel within the Senate and broader Democratic leadership—many of whom have been proud to serve as political representatives for Israeli interests inside the US Congress—have shown a willingness to publicly draw a line on Iran.

Yet when it comes to publicly condemning Israel itself, or calling to end ongoing arms transfers, many of these same members of Congress remain in lockstep with both the Israeli regime and the US administration they would otherwise claim to oppose.

Beyond the blatant hypocrisy and duplicity of such a position, many Democrats appear unable to grasp how dramatically public consciousness around Israel has shifted. Recent polling has shown that a growing number of Americans believe the war on Iran is being fought more in service of Israeli interests than those of the United States.

A rising portion of the public recognizes the absurdity and futility of continuing to bankroll a wider war that promises nothing beyond mass civilian death, economic hardship, geopolitical fallout, and endless regional escalation. For an ever-loyal MAGA base, when anti-Iranian propaganda fails to persuade, Israel emerges as the next most digestible explanation for this violent catastrophe. Rather than confronting Trump’s own agency or private interests in dragging the US into another intractable conflict with no coherent objective, many instead frame him as having fallen captive to Israeli interests—fulfilling ambitions Netanyahu has articulated for decades to advance the “Greater Israel” project.

The GOP itself has increasingly begun fracturing along the fault lines of unwavering support for Israel. Some of the party’s most prominent public figures and media propagandists have emerged as unusually vocal critics of Israel. While there remain conservatives whose Zionist ideology produces a near cult-like acceptance of Israeli violence and even an embrace of apocalyptic regional war, others increasingly view unconditional support for Israel as directly conflicting with Trump’s otherwise nationalist, supposedly “America First” agenda. For Democrats—whose base polls far more critically of Israel—that shift should be setting off political alarms.

Democrats, then, who will publicly rage that the war on Iran endangers public welfare, costs taxpayers billions, and undermines long-term US “security” objectives, yet remain staunch allies of Israel committed to subsidizing its arms transfers, prove themselves incapable of recognizing their own political reality. To say they have lost sight of their own constituencies, if not captured by Zionist PAC donor interests, would be an understatement.

Last week, fourteen US citizens were abducted by the Israeli military in international waters, only 37 miles off the coast of Greece, for participating in a international, nonviolent direct action aimed at challenging Israel’s ongoing illegal siege and blockade. Israeli forces violently seized and sabotaged civilian vessels belonging to the Global Sumud Flotilla before abducting more than 175 civilians, many of whom were subsequently assaulted, brutalized, and tortured inside Israeli prisons.

That American civilians were attacked by a foreign military in blatant disregard for international law should have provoked outrage across the United States. Instead, it was met with near total silence from both mainstream media and US lawmakers.

Only a small cohort of nineteen members of the House of Representatives, and not a single Senator, made any formal statement on the matter. The few who did speak out were largely the same contingent of progressives who have long been willing to condemn Israel since it launched its full-scale assault on the Palestinian people and the destruction of the Gaza Strip in 2023.

After years of functioning as the primary political and PR shield for the genocide in Gaza under the Biden administration, it is perhaps no longer surprising that much of the Democratic Party remains unwilling to confront Israeli terrorism–even when waged against US citizens.

But this silence is not just another profound abdication of Congressional duty and moral responsibility. It is political idiocy.

It has now been months since the DNC’s own political autopsy reportedly found that Democratic backing of the genocide likely cost Harris a significant percentage of votes in the presidential election. The rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani has further underscored how dramatically the Democratic voter base has shifted on Palestine. It has shown that even as pro-Israel lobbying groups and militarized donor networks spend tens of millions attempting to shape electoral outcomes and discipline Democratic politicians, anti-Zionist candidates can still win, while establishment-backed candidates can—and likely will—lose.

And as always, the material reality of what Democrats continue funding and shielding has become too horrific, too visible, and too widely documented to continue obscuring behind the language of “self-defense.”

Gaza remains under an Israeli blockade engineered to sustain a biological genocide. The almost total restriction of food, water, medicine, fuel, and other basic life-essentials, alongside the systematic destruction of hospitals, sanitation systems, and civilian infrastructure, has produced a deliberately manufactured catastrophe of disease, displacement, and mass malnutrition.

In Lebanon, civilians continue to be massacred daily in Israeli strikes that mirror the total, genocidal bombardment of Gaza, while Iranians endure US and Israeli war crimes–including attacks on schools, hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure. Across occupied Palestine, especially in the West Bank, Israeli settler attacks and military raids continue to escalate in pace, scale, and brutality, as Israel moves ever more openly toward ethnic cleansing and the seizure of Palestinian land. This all falls under the full protection of the so-called global “Board of Peace."

Israel also continues pushing the boundaries of what world governments are willing to excuse, as the impunity protecting its violence deepens without consequence. That now includes abducting foreign nationals like Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila in international waters before imprisoning and torturing them without charge for an entire week.

Israel’s level of depravity may not register as morally or legally disqualifying to members of Congress, but it has become untenable to continue parroting the absurd claim that US weapons transfers to the state are remotely connected to legitimate “security” objectives. The underlying ambitions of the Zionist project become harder to conceal with every noose pin worn, every land grab and expulsion openly celebrated, and every new Kushner-Witkoff contract signed or verbal slip exposing the true agenda.

Many Democrats also fail to recognize another political shift unfolding among their own base: the growing tendency to connect the Trump administration’s expanding authoritarian “immigration crackdown” and investment in DHS ‘detention’ infrastructure with Israel’s militarized apparatus of surveillance, occupation, and control.

As public outrage has intensified over the unfathomably cruel separation of families, disappearances, deaths, and systemic abuse and neglect inside DHS concentration camps, along with the targeting and killing of US citizens standing in peaceful solidarity against ICE operations, more communities, civil liberties advocates, and grassroots movements have begun drawing direct connections to Israel.

In particular, many have pointed to Israeli surveillance technology, along with longstanding institutional relationships and tactical training involving the Israeli military, US policing and ‘immigration enforcement’ agencies.

So while Democrats position themselves against Trump’s masked “secret police,” many still fail to recognize how deeply these systems have been shaped by the broader US-Israeli “security” relationship itself.

It is the very same political culture that normalizes Israeli military occupation—including the systematic torture, abduction, imprisonment, and repression of Palestinian men, women, and children—that helps legitimize and operationalize hardline state violence in the United States. For many younger voters, immigrant rights advocates, civil liberties groups, and grassroots organizers, these issues can no longer be viewed as separate.

Palestine has thus become a broader test of moral clarity and political corruption. At this point, continued support for arming Israel signals not only complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and mass destruction on a scale that will take generations to repair, but alignment with the same predatory billionaire political class that profits from state violence and racist repression domestically.

Arming genocide has never been political realism. It is moral collapse and structural rot elevated for decades as inevitability—a party consensus built around unwavering support for the United States’ supposed ‘greatest ally.’ It is the delusion of a political class profoundly removed from the violence it defends and facilitates.

Democrats who continue clinging to that collapsing consensus increasingly stand in direct opposition to both the consciousness of their own base and the political reality taking shape around them.

We strongly urge legislation pursuant to section 4 of the 25th Amendment to depute Congress in lieu of the Vice President and principal officers of the executive departments with the power to determine whether the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” As regards President Donald Trump, the attached letter…

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The world is at a precipice, facing existential threats while fascism is on the rise. Yet we lack the proper governance structures to address global challenges, and it also seems that it falls upon the left to defeat fascism once again. So argues political scientist/political economist, author and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri.

Alexandra Boutri: We live in a time of great uncertainty and profound disillusionment. We see a global escalation of violence and a lack of accountability. Even Israel’s genocide goes unpunished, which speaks volumes of the hypocrisy of western governments with regard to human rights and international law. There is a global wave of democratic backsliding, massive amounts of inequality by design, and extreme power concentration. Am I painting too bleak of a picture for the current state of the world?

C. J. Polychroniou: No, you are not exaggerating the current state of the world. The truth is that it is far worse than that. We are witnessing the resurgence of naked imperialism and the emergence of a new world of spheres of influence and, concomitantly, the death of international peacemaking institutions. The continued existence of nuclear weapons, which today are far more powerful than ever before, poses an existential threat to humanity while at the same time human beings are on a collision course with the natural world. To be sure, not only do we live in an era of polycrisis but in one in which developments are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. We need polysolutions, yet neither the mechanisms are in place nor is there any detectable willingness on the part of current world leaders to pull humanity back from the precipice.

Political hypocrisy per se is not the major issue here. Pathological hypocrisy is a constant in the behavior of western governments. What I find most disconcerting is the sharp decline of rational thinking in contemporary society. Misinformation is spreading faster than facts and trust in science has virtually collapsed, especially in the United States. For example, scientific studies have concluded that climate change is mainly caused by human activity and scientists have documented the dangerous disruptions in nature. Yet you have the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, calling climate change “con job” and “scam.” Trust in healthcare and public institutions has also declined in recent years, and it is not a coincidence that these trends occur with the political ascendancy of right-wing extremism. Fascism is organized mass irrationality and leaders like Trump have been doing their best to design a society sustained by ignorance while at the same time normalizing cruelty and destruction. So, yes, we live in a world of increasing uncertainty, profound confusion, and maybe even civilizational decline. We are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our ability to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a good and just world order. That being said, the world is not coming to an end any time soon, and we actually know that there are solutions for the world’s biggest problems. But paradigm shifts in political, social, and moral thinking are urgently needed for a sustainable future.

Alexandra Boutri: Is the nation-state at the present historical juncture a hindrance to the realization of a sustainable future for humanity?

C. J. Polychroniou: The general consensus among scholars about the nation-state is that it was a consequence of modernity and that it represents a progressive development in the course of human political history. It was an invention designed to unify people, the state, and the country. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, established a new system of political order based upon the idea of co-existing sovereign states. Subsequently, the norm of Westphalian sovereignty became central to international law and world order. It shifted the balance of power, but it did not end conflicts. The nation-state sparked nationalism across Europe, and war over resources, driven by capitalist modes of production, remained predominant in the modern world. In fact, nationalism and capitalism have worked in tandem to make war a permanent feature of the modern world system. In any case, whatever benefits have accrued over the centuries because of the emergence of the nation-state (social solidarity, human rights, and democracy), it has become increasingly clear that the nation-state is not capable of managing, on its own, the globalized forces. And collective institutions in general have suffered a severe blow from the wrecking ball of neoliberalism. The climate crisis is a case in point.

Actions taken so far to combat climate change are insufficient. Moreover, while local and national climate policy efforts are important, the new energy infrastructure needed for establishing a zero emissions global economy must be global in scope. Economist Robert Pollin, who has done extensive work on building a green economy, has made a compelling case for the necessity of implementing a Global Green New Deal (GGND). Pollin has described in fine detail the impact of a GGND on economic growth and how it can be financed. But we are nowhere near to achieving such a goal. The problem is political in nature, not economic. Are nation-states capable of the type of international collaboration needed to secure a global green transition in order to save the planet? Are capitalist nation-states even able to sacrifice short-term interests for long-term benefits?

My own view is that the nation-state is indeed a hindrance to a sustainable future for humanity, but that doesn’t mean that the global governance structures needed to ensure that human civilization will endure despite the many existential threats it faces will inevitably happen. Such an outcome requires imagination, courage, and bold action. But it is not inconceivable that an alternative world order may emerge at some point in the future. After all, as sociologist Andreas Wimmer has convincingly shown, the creation of nation-states was mainly the result of external circumstances (geopolitical factors) rather than internal processes (ethnic homogeneity or nationalism). The climate crisis might very well become at a certain juncture a turning point for the emergence of new global governance structures. Hopefully, it won't be too late by then.

Alexandra Boutri: Where does the Left stand on the question of universalism and the nation-state?

C. J. Polychroniou: This is a very complicated issue, especially since the Left is not monolithic. Generally speaking, however, the traditional Left has always held internationalist principles and viewed the nation-state as a modern phenomenon tied to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. That was pretty much Marx’s own view on the subject. Lenin also argued that Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism. Communists and revolutionary socialists opposed World War I as an imperialist war. But most socialist parties and trade unions abandoned the internationalist vision and backed their respective governments. On the other hand, communists defended their own countries during World War II. This is because they came to view World War II as a “people’s war” against fascism. Communists fought heroically in World War II but also against fascism everywhere. The International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War represented a remarkable expression of international solidarity, a response of anti-fascists to the emergence of a new tyranny.

In the contemporary period, a significant segment of the Left has been critical, even dismissal, of the nation-state but has also championed self-determination. Yet the question of how to circumvent the nation-state remains. The neoliberal hyper-globalization wave of the 1990s that envisioned the world becoming a global village transcended the boundaries of nation-states, but the new rules were made possible only through enforcement from the capitalist state itself. In fact, there was/is a symbiotic relationship between capitalist states and neoliberal globalization.

The Left is obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism and the nation-state. It must envision and fight for a world where the rights of labor reign supreme and the means of production are collectively owned by workers. There can be no socialism without collective ownership and democratic management of the means of production. The former USSR took a major step in the direction of collective ownership but a bureaucratic elite controlled the state and drained life out of society. Socialism in the twentieth-first century must be democratic, put average people at the center of society, and give priority to sustainability. And the rise of the socialist state must be of such socio-cultural nature that it inaugurates an authentic cosmopolitan horizon.

Alexandra Boutri: Today, the Left is in disarray while the far right is surging all over the world. Hard-right parties are most popular in many parts of Europe, although there is a ray of hope for reversing the trend on account of Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat in last month’s Hungarian election. Why is the western left weak and disoriented when the problems caused to society by the policies of neoliberal capitalism are so destructive?

C. J. Polychroniou: There are no definite answers to that question. Moreover, the problematic of the political condition of the left in western societies is not new. The weakening of the western left has been long in the making. The traditional left undergoes a major ideological and political crisis with the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Yet its decline had started as early as the mid-1970s and the 1980s. Take for instance the case of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). From the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, the PCI was the largest communist party in western Europe, gaining a historic 34.4% of the vote in the 1976 parliamentary elections. Under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, the PCI had distanced itself from the Soviet Union and promoted “Eurocommunism,” an attempt on the part of certain western communist party leaders to reconcile parliamentary democracy with the transition to socialism and overcome the constrains of the Cold War. To further enhance the image of the PCI as a non-revolutionary party, Berlinguer also introduced the compromesso storico (the historic compromise), a proposal of an agreement between the Communist and Christian Democratic parties, for reforming the economy along capitalist lines and proclaimed his support for NATO.

Obviously, the leadership of the PCI felt that breaking away from the tradition of revolutionary socialism was the surest and safest path to power. But the experiment failed miserably. By the time of Berlinguer’s death, in 1984, the PCI was already losing support among the industrial working class and was officially dissolved in 1991 and then transformed into the Democratic Party of the Left. From the 1990s onward, left parties and conservative parties in western Europe became virtually indistinguishable. This is a key factor in explaining the decline of the western left. But this doesn’t mean that if the left had not become reformist and still clung to forms of socialism associated with the Soviet experience or with revolutionary Marxism that it would have become a hegemonic political power in advanced capitalist societies. Clearly, the western left needs to challenge capitalist social relations and hegemony but must also offer to the masses a convincing vision for an alternative socioeconomic order. It has yet to do so.

We must also recognize the fact that advanced capitalist societies are complex, multilayered systems, divided into several different classes. Class matters as much as ever, even if neoliberalism has reshaped the working class internationally. Moreover, while there is a widening social class divide, the class of the exploited remains fragmented. There is indeed a difference between a class “in itself” and a class “for itself.” In that regard, there can be no denying that the left has changed the way people think about exploitation, human rights, freedom, and personal identity, and has indeed “a great story to share about alternatives to capitalism.” But for various reasons, which include major structural factors, the ideological battle over capitalism and alternative worldviews has yet to be won. As Frederick Jameson once remarked, it appears that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Alexandra Boutri: What does the end of Viktor Orbán’s reign in Hungary mean for Trump and the far right in the US and globally?

C. J. Polychroniou: I do not wish to downplay the significance of this development but, at the same time, it is politically naive to think that it will have an impact on the way the Trump administration behaves. It is true of course that Hungary under Orbán provided inspiration for the MAGA movement and the far right across Europe. In fact, Orbán’s anti-immigrant ideology and immigration policy became the norms across Europe. But I would argue that Trump is far more dangerous than Orbán ever was. Orbán never denied election results, nor did he engage in acts of state-led violence. Orbán eroded the rule of law in Hungary and, for that, Trump thought he was a “fantastic man” and once even praised him as the “great leader” of Turkey. But Trump has already caused far more damage to US society than Orban caused to Hungary with his political shenanigans, and Hungary’s new prime minister is not a liberal. Nor do I think that Orbán’s defeat will have any impact on the political fortunes of the far right elsewhere. In Germany, the far right AfD has become the country’s strongest party. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right The National Rally (RN) is “already the biggest single opposition party in parliament” and its rise to power seems unstoppable.

Neofascism is on the rise, and the conservative/liberal/neoliberal establishment does not know what it will take to defeat it. It won't even address the very structural factors that gave rise to the far right. So far, the establishment in both France and Germany has confined itself to labeling RN and AfD respectively as “extremist” entities as if that will deter voters from casting a ballot for those parties. As far as I can see, it falls upon the left to defeat the rising tide of fascism once again.

The U.S. national debt just crossed a once-unthinkable threshold on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World War II: It now exceeds 100 percent of America’s gross domestic product.

As of March 31, our publicly held debt was $31.27 trillion, while America’s GDP in 2025 was $31.22 trillion. This puts the ratio at 100.2 percent, compared with 99.5 percent when the last fiscal year ended September 30.

That 100.2 percent figure will likely climb, because the federal government is running historically large annual deficits of nearly 6 percent of GDP, which add to the debt. The final tally will depend on Iran war spending, tariff refunds, and the strength of the economy.

Should you worry? Well, it’s not as if we’re heading into a depression. Passing the 100 percent threshold won’t suddenly cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar.

The real problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget—and your tax dollars—is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. That’s money we don’t spend on education, healthcare, roads and bridges, social safety nets, or (if we actually needed more spending on it) national defense.

As the debt continues to grow, interest payments continue to soar. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend each year on Medicare.

So, who exactly receives these interest payments? This is an issue you hear very little discussion about, because the wealthy and powerful of this country would rather you didn’t know.

You probably do hear that a chunk of our debt is held by foreign governments and foreign investors. That’s true, but they hold only about 30 percent of our debt. The rest—roughly 70 percent—is held domestically. That is, we pay the interest to ourselves.

And who, exactly, is the “ourselves” who receive these interest payments? The Federal Reserve holds part of this debt, state and local governments hold part.

But the biggest chunk—nearly half—is held by mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and banks. And who owns them? The Americans who invest in these funds—and who thereby, directly or indirectly, hold Treasury bills.

And who, exactly are these Americans—the Americans who are directly or indirectly collecting a large amount of the interest we’re paying on the national debt? It’s the people at the top.

The richest 1 percent of U.S. households hold about 35.6 percent of all financial assets—shares of stock, corporate bonds, and Treasury bills—so it’s safe to assume they hold at least a third of all Treasury bills.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Here’s where things get really interesting.

Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far, far higher than it is today. In the 1950s, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the richest Americans paid a marginal tax rate of 91 percent. (Tax deductions and tax credits meant that the top effective marginal rate was lower than this.)

Fast forward. Now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money and collecting interest payments on those loans.

Interest payments on the national debt this year are expected to reach $1 trillion.

There are roughly 128 million households in the United States. Dividing $1 trillion in annual interest among U.S. households would amount to $650 per household per month. (This is a simplified average, of course; actual burdens vary based on tax status, income, and spending.)

The point is that a big chunk of the growing interest payments American taxpayers make on the federal debt is going to wealthy Americans.

Keep following the money. One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts—starting with the George W. Bush administration in 2001 and extending through Trump’s 2018 and 2024 tax cuts—have reduced government revenues by $10.6 trillion.

Most of the benefits from those tax cuts are going to the wealthy. Since 2000, 65 percent of the benefits from tax cuts have gone to the richest fifth of Americans—22 percent to the top 1 percent.

So, you see what’s happened?

The wealthiest Americans used to pay higher taxes to finance the government. Now, the government pays wealthy Americans interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on wealthy Americans.

Which means a growing portion of everyone else’s taxes are now paying wealthy Americans interest on those loans, instead of paying for government services everyone needs.

So, from now on, whenever you hear someone say how huge, horrible, and out-of-control the national debt is, explain to them that it’s because of tax cuts to the wealthy—who are also the major recipients of interest on that debt.

America’s wealthy have never been wealthier. If they paid their fair share of taxes, we wouldn’t have such a huge federal debt. And we wouldn’t be paying them so much interest on that debt.

The Trump administration will host a new round of talks this week aimed at ending the latest warfare involving Israel and Lebanon.

No new developments on the Lebanese front give reason for optimism that this round will yield an agreement that two prior rounds did not. The Trump administration, however, has an incentive to push for an agreement because of President Trump’s need to extract himself and the United States from the impasse involving the Strait of Hormuz.

The last time Iran lifted its closure of the strait—a move Tehran reversed when Trump continued his own blockade—was in response to the announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Iran has insisted from the outset of the war that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, covering what Israel is doing in Lebanon as well as combat in the Persian Gulf. Israel and the United States have resisted linking these two Middle Eastern theaters. But if either side in a conflict says that two things are linked, then there is linkage, whether the other side likes it or not.

The Iranian perspective on this question reflects the fact that the military operations in Lebanon grew directly out of the war against Iran. Shortly after Israel and the United States launched that war in late February, Lebanese Hezbollah responded by firing rockets into northern Israel.

Hezbollah has always been an ally of Iran. No one, least of all the Israelis, should have been surprised by this response.

The fighting on the Lebanese front since then has been as one-sided in the resulting death and destruction as Israeli combat with Palestinians. The Israeli assault has killed 2,700 people in Lebanon, while Israeli fatalities have been 18 military personnel and two civilians. At the height of the offensive, more than a million people—about a fifth of Lebanon’s population—were displaced, and most remain so. Israeli forces have destroyed entire villages in southern Lebanon.

The ceasefire that the United States brokered in March, like most ceasefires involving Israel, has seen at most a slowing of the tempo of offensive operations rather than a cessation of them. In addition to continued lethal operations in the south of Lebanon, Israel conducted one of its bolder airstrikes in the Beirut area, which destroyed an apartment building in the city’s southern suburbs.

The talks this week in Washington will be unusual as peace negotiations go, in that they are not really between two belligerents. The weak government of Lebanon has not sought a war with Israel, and the war that is taking place is as asymmetrical in nature as the casualty figures suggest. Israel says its enemy is Hezbollah, but Hezbollah will not be in the conference room.

Israel’s central demand involving Lebanon has been that Hezbollah must be disarmed. No one is talking about disarming Israel, or even limiting its arms, even though Israel has inflicted far more of the suffering on this front than Hezbollah has. In any event, even though many figures in the Lebanese government would welcome Hezbollah’s disarmament, that is far easier said than done.

The hurdles to any disarmament of Hezbollah are partly a matter of physical capability. They also are a matter of political realities within Lebanon. Hezbollah speaks for a substantial proportion of the Lebanese population, especially the nearly one-third of Lebanese who are Shiites. It holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament and did well in municipal elections last year.

One indication of those realities comes from Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament and one of the most powerful politicians in Lebanon. Berri heads Amal, the other major Shiite party in Lebanon and an ally of Hezbollah. Berri said last week that there should be no negotiations with Israel until Israel ceases its offensive military operations in Lebanon and withdraws from the south of the country.

That similar sentiments extend beyond the Shiite portion of Lebanon’s population is reflected in the position of President Joseph Aoun, who, like all Lebanese presidents, is a Maronite Christian. Aoun has resisted US pressure for him to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that any such meeting must await a cessation of Israel’s offensive operations and a withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. Aoun’s stance is why this week’s talks are being held at the ambassadorial level.

Hezbollah is not a prime mover of mayhem that somehow arose through spontaneous generation, now was it imposed on Lebanon by Iran. Hezbollah owes its existence and rapid rise in the 1980s to previous Israeli aggression and occupation of portions of Lebanon. Hezbollah presented itself as a defender especially of Lebanese Shiites but also of all Lebanese against Israeli predation.

That history is especially relevant to what Israel is doing to Lebanon today. In addition to the lethal aerial assaults, it is occupying much of southern Lebanon, in a replay of what it did four decades ago. It has singled out Shiites with a demand—not equally directed toward other sectarian groups—to abandon their homes in that portion of Lebanon.

Such discriminatory demands will stoke additional resentment and desire for revenge within the confessional group that has always been Hezbollah’s main base of support.

The results are already being seen in the attitudes even of some Lebanese who wish Hezbollah had never fired rockets in support of its Iranian ally and who blame the group for drawing Lebanon into the US-Israel-Iran war. In the face of the suffering from the new Israeli offensive and the inability of the Lebanese government to do much about it, many of these Lebanese are again looking to Hezbollah as their main hope for defending themselves.

An implication is that even if some agreement is reached that silences the guns for now, the ingredients will remain in place for future rounds of fighting on the Israel-Lebanon front. A lasting peace would depend on a complete and permanent Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and some assurance by the United States that it would use its influence to keep the withdrawal permanent.

Violence on the Israeli-Lebanese front is a reminder of how much instability in the Middle East stems from Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians and the violent resistance that it inevitably provokes. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 involved going after the exiled Palestinian Liberation Organization—an organization that would not exist if there were no perceived need to liberate Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The last previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in October 2024 grew out of the devastating Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that had been ongoing for a year, in response to which Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The government of Lebanon wants the United States to exert enough pressure on Israel to end the current Israeli offensive. Lebanon is one of multiple fronts in the Middle East in which the biggest variable in determining whether instability will lessen is whether the United States will pressure Israel. In this case, Trump’s desire to extract himself from the Iran quagmire may be sufficient to yield at least a ceasefire that holds up better than the one that currently is being repeatedly violated.

Whether even that limited form of agreement is achieved will depend mostly on the US-Israeli dimension of this week’s talks, more than the government of Lebanon’s role in the negotiations. Given the linkage with events in the Persian Gulf, it may also depend partly on any wider bargains struck in Pakistani-mediated negotiations between Iran and the United States.

Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.

In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.

Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal and controlled access to it for 70 years.

After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956, and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.

The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s...

But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, France, and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war of independence.

Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries in the region, and, after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.

Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States, Great Britain, and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.

British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas."

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal and try to overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President Dwight Eisenhower told a press conference, on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed that the US would ultimately support them once combat began.

Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and then Britain and France landed forces in Port Said at the north end of the Suez Canal, under the pretense of protecting the Canal from both Israel and Egypt.

But before Britain and France could fully seize control of the Canal, the US government intervened to stop them. The US began selling off its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to Britain, triggering a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons against Britain, France, and Israel.

The UN Security Council used a procedural vote—which Britain and France could not veto—to convene an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” process. Resolution 997 called for a ceasefire, a withdrawal to armistice lines and the reopening of the Canal, and was approved by a vote of 64 to 5.

Four days later, Prime Minister Eden declared a ceasefire. British and French forces withdrew six weeks later, and the Canal was cleared and reopened within five months. Egypt subsequently managed the Canal effectively, and did not block British or French ships from using it.

The Suez Crisis was the pivotal moment when the British government finally learned that it could no longer use military force to impose its will on less powerful countries. Like Americans today on Iran, the British public was way ahead of its government: opinion polls found that 44% opposed the use of force against Egypt, while only 37% approved. As Prime Minister Eden dithered over the UN’s ceasefire order, 30,000 people gathered at an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square.

Eden was forced to resign, and was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who withdrew British forces from bases in Asia, expedited independence for British colonies around the world, and repositioned Britain as a junior partner to the United States. That new role included arming British submarines with US nuclear missiles, which is now a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Macmillan’s successor, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, would later keep Britain out of Vietnam.

Britain charted a successful transition to a post-imperial future through its relationships with the United States and the British Commonwealth–an association of independent states that preserved British influence in its former colonies. On the domestic front, there was broad political support for a mixed capitalist-socialist economy that included free education and healthcare, publicly owned housing and utilities, nationalized industries, and strong trade unions.

Macmillan was reelected in 1959 with the slogan, “You’ve never had it so good.” When a cartoonist mockingly dubbed him “Supermac,” the nickname stuck.

Britain’s Tories were dyed-in-the-wool imperialists, much like Trump and his motley crew today. But they did not let their imperial world view blind them to the lessons of the Suez Crisis. They could see that the world was changing, and that Britain had to find a new role in a world it could no longer dominate by force.

Most Americans today have learned similar lessons from failed, disastrous US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But like the British people who opposed Eden’s invasion of Egypt, Americans have been repeatedly dragged into war by the secret scheming of leaders blinded by anachronistic, racist, imperial assumptions.

Trump is now encountering the same kind of international pressure that forced Britain and France to abandon the Suez invasion. Another Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly and a new “Uniting for Peace” resolution might also be helpful.

But ultimately, the resolution of this crisis, and the future of the United States in today’s emerging multipolar world, will depend on whether US politicians are capable of making the kind of historic policy shift that Macmillan and his colleagues made in 1956 and the years that followed.

Macmillan was not an opposition politician, but a senior member of Britain’s Conservative government, up to his neck in the Suez fiasco. The secret plot with the Israelis was his idea. President Eisenhower personally warned him at the White House that the US would not support a British invasion of Egypt. But unlike the British Ambassador who sat in on the same meeting, Macmillan assumed that, when the chips were down, Eisenhower would stand by his old World War II allies.

Maybe it was the shock of getting it all so wrong that persuaded Macmillan and his colleagues to take a fresh look at the world and radically rethink British foreign and colonial policy.

Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades.

The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire. The question is whether anyone in Washington today is capable of grasping the gravity of the crisis and making the required policy shift.

To follow Britain’s Suez example would mean closing US military bases around the world; renouncing the illegal threat and use of military force as the main tool of US foreign policy; and relying instead on multilateral diplomacy and UN action to resolve international disputes.

But where is the Macmillan in the Trump administration or the Republican Party? Or the Harold Wilson in the Democratic Party, whose leaders have never even tried to formulate a progressive foreign policy since the end of the Cold War? Obama’s belated outreach to Cuba and Iran in his second term were their only flirtation with a new way forward.

The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s and now cornered Trump into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice between an unwinnable war with Iran and a historic diplomatic defeat.

Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades. Trump’s dead end in the Persian Gulf must also be the final end of this ugly, criminal neoconservative era, and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful future for Americans and all our neighbors.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Writing in The New York Times, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) argues that the Left is picking on Israel but gets a free pass: “The Democratic condemnation piled on Israel’s government is overwhelming in comparison to other allies. It’s also louder than Democrats’ condemnation of Iran’s regime for the slaughter of thousands of Iranians in December and January. Israel has been decried by some leading Democrats as an ‘apartheid’ state. But I haven’t heard any of them claim apartheid when it comes to how women and LGBTQ people are treated across the Middle East.”

•  A report, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” in jails and prisons that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

• Netanyahu says he wants Israel to wean itself off the $3.8 billion it gets from the US each year over the next decade.

• Six people are found dead inside a cargo train boxcar in Laredo, home to one of Texas’ largest hubs for trade with Mexico, accounting for roughly 62% of the state’s land port trade, or $340 billion.

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Microplastics, those miniscule particles smaller than 5 millimeters which plastics physically break down into, have now infiltrated every part of the planet – from the highest point of the Himalayas; to the deepest depths of the sea; to the snow of Antarctica. They penetrate all layers of ocean and are often mistaken for zooplankton and consumed by fish. Consequently, people of coastal countries and islands who are highly dependent on the sea for food are consuming microplastic contaminated fish.

Scientists have recently detected microplastics in human blood, breast milk, heart arteries, lungs, testicles, brains and placentas, foreboding serious human health consequences.

A 2024 study found that 99 percent of seafood samples in stores and West Coast fishing boats were contaminated with microplastics. Plastics, made from oil and gas and toxic chemicals and manufactured largely in poor, communities of color in Texas and Louisiana, are a major source of greenhouse emissions and air pollution. Plastic recycling is a master myth, given 5-6 percent are actually recycled in the U.S. as of 2021, despite a century of existence.

When I first learned that plastic flakes filled my lightweight winter jacket, I thought “great”—recycling plastic rather than throwing it away. But I have since learned what Judith Enck, author of The Problem with Plastics, and other critics prescribe: the best thing we can do is reduce the use of plastic in our lives to bring our planet back from this runaway pollution. Yes, we can re-use as much as certain plastic allows, which is not back to itself like wood, paper, metal, and glass. It is “down-cycled” at best, like the filling in my jacket, before disposed in a landfill, or incinerated, or dumped unconscionably in a poor, developing country.

Invented a century ago, plastic is now ubiquitous, having increased from about 2 million tons annually in 1950 to one half billion tons a year today, and projected to triple by 2060. Plastics are derived from fossil fuels, which are converted into chemical components such as ethylene and propylene—the building blocks for plastics. They were first manufactured as nylon and PVC, then boosted by use in WWII and subsequently Increased by the middle-class love affair with single-use products, such as straws, coffee cups, and water bottles. Agricultural fields are polluted with plastic through the use of plastic-contaminated sewage sludge. irrigation water, and plastic films to suppress weeds. These then decompose into microplastic and enter streams, rivers and, ultimately, the ocean.

With the growth of renewable technologies replacing fossil fuels, oil and gas corporations are aggressively promoting plastics, such that greenhouse gases from plastics are poised to surpass those of coal. Because of the plethora of toxic chemicals added to it, plastics are now associated with the rise of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, reproductive cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.

The plastics industry aims to account for one-half of oil and gas demand by 2050, unless (and that is a questionable unless) the world’s countries can reverse the failed 2025 Plastics Convention.

What we can do?

Stop using single-use plastics, which constitute some 40 percent of plastics today. This would immediately reduce throwaway plastic, greenhouse gas emissions, our exposure to hundreds of toxic chemicals in plastic, and diminish ocean pollution. Further, critics advocate never using plastic to package food because research shows that chemicals can migrate from plastic food packaging into food.

One thousand strategies with tens of thousands of people in the lead advocating for city, state and federal bans on single-use plastics are needed. Surveys indicate that the public (both Republicans and Democrats) support ‘a pause’ in new manufacturing facilities and legislation to protect oceans from further plastic pollution.

Beyond Plastics provides a guide for Meals on Wheels, restaurants and dry cleaners to reduce use of throwaway plastics and also invites organized groups to join them as an affiliate and to use the model legislation they provide.

Women lead the charge against plastics. Author Judith Enck recounts the story of nearly a dozen women, some from Cancer Alley and the Gulf Coast, whose unstinting activism has blocked plastic industries from their neighborhoods.

For decades the US and higher-income countries have exported much of their plastic waste to low-income countries – an environmental injustice on a massive scale. Researchers found that poor people living in more than 25 developing countries burn the flammable plastic waste to cook and heat their home, making plastic pollution a “daily health and survival issue.” Women in poor countries., responsible for all the household chores and childcare, inhale disproportionately these toxic plastic fumes. Additionally, smoke from chimneys in packed slum neighborhoods contaminates everything: people, water sources, soil and crops.

Plastics, “the terrible debris of progress,” is an immense environmental injustice. We must stop this juggernaut.