Tag: iran

No Way To Win in Iran

On 29 January 2026, I was on the “Deep Dive” with Lt. Col. (ret.) Danny Davis. We had an excellent discussion on what President Trump’s options are in a war against Iran. We both agreed that he has no good military option at this point or for the foreseeable future, which is not to say Trump will not attack. But all the evidence indicates that he would be foolish to do so. Indeed, it is quite clear that the Israelis, who asked him not to attack on January 14th, when he appeared ready to do so, still have reservations about the wisdom of an attack.

It is worth noting that the Israelis launched major attacks by themselves against Iran on 19 April 2024 and 26 October 2024. They then launched major attacks with the United States against Iran during the 12-day war in June 2025. Today, Israel is apparently planning to sit on the sidelines while the US attacks Iran by itself.

What is going on? Netanyahu tried hard to drag the Biden administration into attacking Iran with Israel in 2024, but failed. Biden and his lieutenants understood that a war with Iran was not in the American national interest. Netanyahu succeeded, however, in getting Trump to join forces with Israel and attack Iran in June 2025. Now he has helped maneuver Trump into contemplating a US-only war against Iran, although it appears that the Israelis are getting cold feet. Someone is being played for a sucker.

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Western spies say Iran not making nukes – NYT

Western intelligence agencies see no indication that Iran is enriching uranium for “bomb-grade material,” the New York Times has reported, citing sources. While activity has been detected at nuclear sites, including those damaged by last year’s strikes, no high-level enrichment is underway, the report claims.

Last summer, the US and Israel carried out coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, justifying the campaign as preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons – an ambition Iran denies. The attacks targeted the Fordow and Natanz enrichment plants and the Isfahan research center.

In its report published on Thursday, the NYT claimed uranium buried at the struck sites – material closest to weapons-grade levels – remains in place. Work at the sites appears limited to excavation aimed at creating more secure facilities. No new nuclear sites have been detected, though limited activity has been observed at two incomplete sites near Natanz and Isfahan, according to the paper.

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Israel’s ‘worst-case scenario’ on Iran and a warning to Washington: ‘Without a strike, you’ll look weak’

As tensions with Iran reach a critical point, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir conducted a secret visit to Washington over the weekend, following earlier visits by Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder and, two weeks ago, Mossad Director David Barnea.

Zamir’s meeting with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine was described as top-level strategic coordination, amid growing concern that Iran could retaliate against Israel in response to a potential U.S. strike.

The Israeli visits coincide with senior U.S. military travel to Israel, including CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper. Over the weekend, the guided-missile destroyer USS Delbert D. Black docked at the port of Eilat before departing to continue operations in the Red Sea. The move is part of what U.S. President Donald Trump has called a “big armada” sent to the region, including the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and eight guided-missile destroyers.

Security cooperation between Israel and the United States has reached unprecedented levels across all tiers: the IDF, the CIA and the political leadership. Israel has shared its most sensitive intelligence, including detailed information on the brutal suppression of last month’s protests in Iran, the scale of killings and the systematic massacre of demonstrators.

Much of the dialogue has focused on preparations for both offense and defense. In Israel, planners are preparing for the possibility of a unilateral U.S. strike on Iran. Washington may ask Israel to join the operation, citing the experience Israel gained during last June’s Operation Rising Lion. U.S. officials are also seeking lessons learned from that conflict.

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Engineering Iran’s Unrest

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919): 

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

The United States mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic sanctions and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On Jan. 19, we published “The US–Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,” describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on Venezuela and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. 

This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.

On Jan. 20, just one day after our article, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official U.S. policy.

“It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior… This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives.”

In an interview at Davos, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how U.S. Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign to deny Iran access to international finance, trade, and payment systems.

Bessent explained:

“President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.”

This is the explicit causal chain whereby U.S. sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail.

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US Media Keen on Iranian Unrest—Less So on US and Israel’s Role in It

When protests against high inflation swept Iran in late December, the usual international suspects wasted little time in endeavoring to hijack the unrest—which prompted a violent government crackdown—for their own purposes.

On January 10, Donald Trump—fresh off his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—took to his preferred social media platform to showcase his signature manic reliance on random capitalization and exclamation points: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” A few days later, another encouraging message: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

The protests have since dissipated, without any successful “help” thus far in the form of regime change or US/Israeli military attack, although Trump has dispatched a “massive fleet” to the Middle East “just in case.” The Iranian government, which blames the US and Israel for fueling the bloody upheaval, has put the death toll at 3,117 (Al Jazeera, 1/21/26), including state security personnel. The Canada-based International Centre for Human Rights—aptly described by prominent Mideast analyst Mouin Rabbani as a “faux human rights organization”—claims that no fewer than 43,000 Iranians were killed by government agents. In between those two extremes, all manner of other numbers have also been flung about.

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Rubio Hints at Preemptive Strike Option Against Iran

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while testifying before the Senate, hinted that the United States could take preemptive action against Iran and told lawmakers that Tehran’s leadership is at its weakest point in years.

“I think it’s wise and prudent to have a force posture within the region that could respond and potentially, not necessarily what’s going to happen, but if necessary, preemptively prevent the attack against thousands of American servicemen and other facilities in the region and our allies,” Rubio said during Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Venezuela, Gulf News reported.

The Trump administration’s push to strengthen U.S. assets in the Middle East, including the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, is aimed at protecting more than 30,000 service members in the region.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that, but that’s, I think what you’re seeing now is the ability to posture assets in the region to defend against what could be an Iranian threat against our personnel,” Rubio said, referring to a potential preemptive strike.

He added that Iran’s military capabilities are “weaker” than they have ever been, but warned that the country has “thousands and thousands” of long-range ballistic missiles even though its “economy is collapsing.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has publicly supported protesters in Iran, warning Tehran that violence against them would bring military consequences.

He repeated that warning Wednesday, saying future action against Iran would be “far worse” than last summer’s strikes on its nuclear facilities.

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Iran Is Not Libya: Why Destabilization Risks Global Chaos

The drumbeat of escalation against Iran has grown louder in Western capitals, from fresh sanctions rhetoric to renewed strike speculation. Beyond the headlines, a dangerous shift is occurring in the strategic thinking of policymakers. The old Neoconservative framework of “regime change”, which assumed one could swap a government while keeping the nation intact, is being shadowed by a far more perilous drift toward policies that risk state collapse.

Whether driven by the momentum of broad sanctions or a lack of viable alternatives, the current trajectory suggests that Western powers are risking a repetition of the “Libya Model” in Iran. A sober analysis of data, geography, and demographics indicates that this path would not lead to democracy, but to a geopolitical catastrophe that creates a security vacuum from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.

The Libya Mirage vs. The Iranian Reality

The allure of this strategy rests on a kind of amnesia about the outcome of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Sold as a humanitarian necessity, the removal of central authority did not produce a liberal democracy. Instead, it shattered the state’s monopoly on violence. Over a decade later, Libya remains a fractured territory where rival militias compete for control and human trafficking networks operate with relative impunity.

Attempting to replicate this outcome in Iran involves a profound misreading of scale. Iran is not Libya. It is a nation of nearly 90 million people, roughly thirteen times the population of Libya in 2011. Geographically, it sits atop the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery through which a major share of globally traded oil passes each day.

In contrast to the isolated Gaddafi regime, a destabilized Iran would not implode neatly. It would likely erupt across borders. The collapse of central authority in Tehran could plausibly trigger large refugee flows toward Europe and create conditions conducive to extremism and narcotics trafficking. From a purely Realist perspective, the cost of coexisting with a difficult Iranian state is significantly lower than the cost of managing a major zone of ungoverned instability in the heart of Eurasia.

Sanctions and the Fragility Trap

Some advocates of “maximum pressure” argue that economic strangulation creates leverage for democratization. The economic data suggests a different outcome. While sanctions have undeniably devastated the Iranian economy, driving high and persistent inflation and eroding the national currency, they have failed to produce political liberalization.

In practice, these policies create what economists call a “fragility trap”. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that geoeconomic fragmentation and the weaponization of trade are fracturing the global economy. In Iran, this dynamic systematically hollows out the middle class. By destroying the economic foundation of independent civil society, Western policy eliminates the very social stratum historically required for stable democratic transitions.

As citizens are pushed into a struggle for biological survival, facing documented obstacles to accessing some critical medicines and shrinking purchasing power, their capacity for organized political activism diminishes. They rarely become builders of stable institutions; survival takes over. Thus, the current policy does not weaken the grip of the state; it weakens the resilience of the society.

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Iran will treat any attack as ‘all-out war against us,’ says senior Iran official

Iran will treat any attack “as an all-out war against us,” a senior Iranian official said on Friday, ahead of the arrival of a U.S. military aircraft carrier strike group and other assets in the Middle East in the coming days.

“This military buildup – we hope it is not intended for real confrontation – but our military is ready for the worst-case scenario. This is why everything is on high alert in Iran,” said the senior Iranian official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“This time we will treat any attack – limited, unlimited, surgical, kinetic, whatever they call it – as an all-out war against us, and we will respond in the hardest way possible to settle this,” the official said.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the United States had an “armada” heading toward Iran but hoped he would not have to use it, as he renewed warnings to Tehran against killing protesters or restarting its nuclear program.

“If the Americans violate Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, we will respond,” said the Iranian official. He declined to specify what an Iranian response might look like.

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The US-Israel Hybrid War Against Iran

The question is not if the US and Israel will attack Iran, but when. In the nuclear age, the US refrains from all-out war, since it can easily lead to nuclear escalation. Instead, the US and Israel are waging war against Iran through a combination of crushing economic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns. This combination strategy is called “hybrid warfare.”

Both the American and Israeli deep states are addicted to hybrid warfare. Acting together, the CIA, Mossad, allied military contractors and security agencies have fomented chaos across Africa and the Middle East, in a swath of hybrid wars including Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen.

The shocking fact is that for more than a quarter century, the US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies have laid waste to a region of hundreds of millions of people, blocked economic development, created terror and mass refugee movements, and have nothing to show for it beyond the chaos itself. There is no security, no peace, no stable pro-US or pro-Israel alliance, only suffering. In the process, the US is also going out of its way to undermine the UN Charter, which the US itself had brought to life in the aftermath of World War II. The UN Charter makes clear that hybrid war violates the very basis of international law, which calls on countries to refrain from the use of force against other countries.

There is one beneficiary of hybrid war, and that is the military-industrial-digital complex of the US and Israel, with firms like Palantir and others profiting from their AI-supported assassination algorithms. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address of the profound danger of the military-industrial complex to our society. His warning has come to pass even more than he imagined, as it is now powered by AI, mass propaganda, and a reckless US foreign policy.

We are witnessing two simultaneous hybrid wars in recent weeks, in Venezuela and Iran. Both are long-term CIA projects that have recently escalated. Both will lead to further chaos.

The United States has long had two goals vis-à-vis Venezuela: to gain control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt, and to overthrow Venezuela’s leftist government, in power since 1999. America’s hybrid war against Venezuela dates to 2002, when the CIA helped to support a coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez. When that failed, the US ramped up other hybrid measures, including economic sanctions, the confiscation of Venezuela’s dollar reserves, and measures to cripple Venezuela’s oil production, which in fact has collapsed. Yet despite the chaos sown by the US, the hybrid war did not bring down the government.

Trump has now escalated to bombing Caracas, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, stealing Venezuelan oil shipments, and imposing an ongoing naval blockade, which of course is a continuing act of war. It also seems likely that Trump is thereby enriching powerful pro-Zionist campaign funders who have their eyes on seizing Venezuelan oil assets. Zionist interests also have their eye on toppling the Venezuelan government, since it has long supported the Palestinian cause and maintained close relations with Iran. Netanyahu has cheered on America’s attack on Venezuela, calling it the “perfect operation.”

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Reports: Iranian Regime Accused of Using Chemical Agents in Crackdown on Protesters

Growing allegations that the Islamic Republic of Iran may have used chemical agents against protesters have intensified scrutiny of the regime’s most recent crackdown, described by observers as the deadliest suppression of public dissent in the country’s modern history. The claims gained momentum following the circulation of footage from Sabzevar showing Iranian security forces equipped with protective gear typically associated with hazardous chemical environments, as well as testimony from protesters in Tehran describing prolonged and unusual medical symptoms after exposure to what authorities labeled “tear gas.”

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