Tag: middle east

Israel not Iran is major nuclear threat in Middle East – professor

The major nuclear danger facing the Middle East originates not from Iran but from Israel, Professor Theodore Postol, a former Science and Policy Adviser on Strategic Nuclear Issues to the Chief of Naval Operations, has told RT. The expert warned that the leadership in West Jerusalem had placed the Jewish state on an increasingly perilous course.

Israel is widely believed to possess an undeclared nuclear arsenal, although authorities in West Jerusalem have consistently refused to either confirm or deny the allegations. The issue of Iran’s nuclear program has served as the justification for launching strikes against Iran earlier this year.

“Do not think Iran is the big nuclear threat, is the big nuclear instability in the Middle East, Israel is,” the prominent MIT physicist said during an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi, which aired on Friday.

Postol noted that Israel’s leadership pushed the country into a situation where even its own military commanders are warning that their forces are “on the ropes” and have reached the limits of what they can do.

Citing reports, the former strategic adviser to Pentagon said that Israeli military leaders have told PM Benjamin Netanyahu that they “cannot do any more,” adding that the country is suffering heavy troop losses.

Postol said he found Trump’s apparent fear of nuclear weapons somewhat reassuring, describing it as a positive trait. The expert said that Trump is “extremely horrified and afraid of nuclear weapons, which is good,” adding that he believes the head of state would be warned that any decision to use such capabilities would “open a box that none of us want to see opened.”

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Did Iran Establish a New Equation in the Middle East Through Its Attacks on Israel?

It remains unclear whether Iran’s effort to establish a new equation in the region has truly succeeded — an equation in which, for the first time, Iran would directly strike Israel if Israel attacks Lebanon.

What is clear is that recent events suggest the strategic landscape may be shifting. Israel chose to defy President Trump and carry out strikes against Iran. Yet according to both Iranian and American sources, those Israeli attacks appear to have been deliberately calibrated to inflict limited damage, perhaps reflecting U.S. pressure to avoid a broader escalation.

Iran, for its part, responded by striking Israel once more after the Israeli attacks. The full extent of the damage caused by Iran’s two rounds of attacks remains unknown, however, due to extensive Israeli military censorship. As a result, outside observers still lack a complete picture of the military and strategic consequences of these exchanges.

The real test of whether a new regional equation has emerged may not lie in what has already happened, but in what comes next. Specifically: Will Israel strike Beirut again?

Even if it does, Israeli decision-makers will now have to factor in a cost that did not previously exis t— the likelihood of a direct Iranian response against Israel. For decades, Israel enjoyed near-complete freedom of maneuver in much of the region. It could bomb targets in Lebanon at will without facing meaningful costs imposed by third parties. That assumption may no longer hold.

At the same time, the United States has signaled clearly that it no longer intends to be an active participant in Israel’s confrontation with Iran. The White House has, for instance, stated that it did not partake in Israel’s defense this time around. This would be a first and a very alarming development for Israel, if true. Washington’s desire to avoid direct involvement has become increasingly evident, even as it continues to support Israel in other ways.

Taken together, these developments suggest that a new strategic reality may be in the making. The picture remains murky, and it is far too early to declare that a durable deterrence framework has been established. Much will depend on future Israeli actions, Iranian responses, and the degree to which both sides internalize the risks of escalation.

But if Israel now has to weigh the prospect of direct Iranian retaliation before striking Lebanon, then something important has changed. Whether that change proves temporary or enduring remains to be seen.

The next question is whether this emerging equation can be translated into renewed momentum for U.S.-Iran diplomacy.

The Iranians believe that their action demonstrated to the US that the value of the Memorandum is so low that Iran is willing to risk a complete collapse of diplomacy. The hope is that Trump yields on what appears to be the last sticking point in the talks, which is the release of $12 billion of Iranian frozen assets.

Trump, on the other hand, may calculate that the exchange of fire demonstrated both the cost to Iran if full-scale war were to break out again, as well as Trump’s ability to impose certain restraints on the Israelis. As a result, the Iranians should feel confident in Trump’s ability to deliver on his end of the bargain and not insist on the release of the assets at the outset of the MOU.

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US Service Members Targeted Via Commercial Location Data, Pentagon Tells Senators

Adversaries have used commercially-available location data to attack individual US service members in war zones, according to a report furnished by the Department of Defense to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, and first reported by Reuters. Wyden is a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee. 

Responding to four questions Wyden had posed about this potential avenue of vulnerability for service members deployed to the Middle East, the Pentagon said that US Central Command “has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater. The Threat Fusion Cell identified, tracked, and disseminated these threats through the USCENTCOM Threat Working Group and to component force protection personnel.” 

Elaborating on the nature of the threat, the Pentagon noted that: 

“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes.” 

The Pentagon’s brief set of responses did not provide details on any specific incidents. Early in the US-Israeli war on Iran, two DOD officials were wounded in an Iranian drone strike on a Crowne Plaza hotel in Bahrain. After the strike, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran had built a “target bank” of both American and Israeli personnel.  “The fact that they’ve now pinpointed the residences/locations of some of these forces has really caught the Americans and Israelis off guard,” the official said, without detailing Iran’s methodology. He did say the building of the target bank began after the 2025 12-Day War.   

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Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has for the moment turned international attention away from Gaza as Israel moves from high- to low-intensity genocide.  The genocide may be the horrific culmination of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, but in order to make sense of it we must analyze the radical transformations that have taken place in the Middle Eastern and global political economy in recent decades.

The impulse to genocide has always been built into the Zionist project. But that impulse has been activated by the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The Al Aqsa Flood attack of October 2023 furnished Israel with the historic opportunity for which they had been waiting for decades.  If the Zionists are still in pursuit of their elusive Eretz Israel, the United States has been heading up a much more expansive project, one that places Gaza in the very center of global capitalism and its epochal crisis.  In the game plan of the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, Gaza is now to become an experimental field for a new and deadlier phase of global capitalism.  It is this larger picture that we want to lay out in this article.

The contemporary crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional. Structurally it is a crisis of overaccumulation, which refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are built up but this capital cannot find productive outlets for reinvestment.  This overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as transnational capitalists undertake a predatory search for where to unload massive amounts of surplus capital and open up new spaces for profit-making.  This violent expansion involves the seizure of markets and resources around the world through war, displacement, and repression.  The U.S. state and beyond it, what we will call Global Trumpism, is its out-of-control instrument in this expansionary wave.  At the core of Global Trumpism is the Washington-Tel Aviv axis.

The larger backdrop to the Israeli genocide is the transnational integration of capital over the past half century and the radical restructuring of global class relations and power blocs that capitalist globalization has brought about. Globalization in West Asia region began in the 1980s and accelerated with the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed the establishment in 1997 of the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs and IMF-supervised austerity.

This integration unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism and other services.  It brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in emerging global circuits of accumulation.  In this way, nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies as the entire region became incorporated into the globally-integrated production, financial, and service system that came into being over the past half century.

Israel, far from remaining excluded, integrated into these expanding regional and transnational capitalist networks on the heels of the Oslo “peace” accords, signed in 1993, as the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies began to develop common class interests.  In 2020 the UAE and Bahrain, along with Morocco and Sudan, signed the Abraham Accords, joining Egypt and Jordan in normalizing relations with Israeli, an opening that allowed Gulf investment groups to pour billions of dollars into the Israeli economy.  The October 2023 Al Aqsa attack and the subsequent Israeli siege placed further normalization on hold.  The new U.S.-Israeli strategy revolving around the “Board of Peace” (henceforth, Board of Genocide) seeks to bring the Arab and other states in the region back into the Abraham architecture.

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U.S. bears brunt of Israel’s missile defense, Pentagon assessments show

The U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iranthan Israeli forces used themselves, according to Defense Department assessments described toThe Washington Post.

The imbalance, according tothree U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes duringOperation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world.

The United States launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in defense of Israel — roughly half of the Pentagon’stotal inventory — along with more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors firedfrom naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, said the U.S. officials, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 of its Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors, some of which were used against less sophisticated projectiles fired by Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Lebanon.

Military analysts said the data describedto The Post offers a rare window into how the United States and Israel work together.

“The numbers are striking,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines. Even if the operational logic was sound, the United States is left with roughly 200 THAAD interceptors and a production line that can’t keep pace with demand.”

The shortage of U.S. interceptors has alarmed U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States as a deterrent to potential threats from North Korea and China. “That bill risks coming due in theaters that have nothing to do with Iran,” said Grieco.

U.S. and Israeli officials routinely tout their close cooperation and the strength of Israel’s multilayered air-defense system. But the Defense Department assessments suggest a more lopsided dynamic.

“In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles,” said a U.S. administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.

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Why Does the US Have So Many Military Bases Overseas?

You can’t make this stuff up. The “liberal” New York Times has now explained why the U.S. has so many overseas military bases in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Anton Troianovski, who covers global diplomacy, writes:

The Persian Gulf war in 1991 ushered in the era of permanent, large-scale military bases in the Middle East — in part to protect oil supplies. The rationale evolved to include crushing Al Qaeda, promoting democracy and fighting the Islamic State. The bases are part of a military network spanning the globe that officials say helps project America’s economic and political power. Russia and China also have global ambitions, but their military footprint is much smaller. Russia’s main military presence outside the former Soviet Union is in Syria, where its influence has declined after the fall of the Assad regime in 2024. China has an African base near the Red Sea and is expanding elsewhere — Cambodia, for instance.

Where to begin?

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PIMCO Privately Lends Over $10 Billion To Dollar-Strapped Gulf States

Just days after the UAE hinted at a growing dollar shortage in the Gulf nation by requesting swap lines with the Fed, Bloomberg reports that as Iran’s struggling neighbors scramble to build cash buffers to deal with any potential economic fallout from the Iran war, one large buyer has stepped in: the world’s largest bond manager, Pacific Investment Management Co.

Since the start of the Iran war, Pimco has lent more than $10 billion to state-backed and government borrowers in the Gulf via so-called private placements. The $2.27 trillion asset manager has been a significant buyer of privately placed bonds issued by the governments of Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Kuwait, as well as by Qatar National Bank. Pimco also participated alongside other investors in several placements that boosted the size of existing Abu Dhabi bonds by a combined $2.5 billion. 

In total, regional borrowers raised $13.8 billion from Feb. 28 to April 23, in privately placed bonds denominated in hard currency, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, with Pimco accounting for a majority of that lending.

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US Sends Thousands More Troops to Middle East, Considers Ground Ops in Iran

The US is sending thousands of additional troops to the Middle East and is considering restarting the bombing campaign against Iran or launching ground operations in the country, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed US officials.

The report said that the forces include 6,000 troops aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush and its accompanying warships. Notably, the Bush traveled around southern Africa on its way to the region instead of going through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, the typical route of US warships, signaling the US is concerned the Houthis in Yemen could close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

About 4,200 other US troops, including thousands of Marines, are heading to the region from the Pacific aboard the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group. The Post said they are expected to reach the Middle East by the end of April. Once both forces arrive, the US will have more than 60,000 troops in the region.

The buildup and the US blockade of Iranian ports are framed as an effort to get Iran to agree to US demands for a diplomatic deal. But according to President Trump, the US is continuing to demand that Iran make a commitment to never again enrich uranium for civilian purposes, a condition that’s seen as a non-starter and will likely lead to a renewal of the bombing campaign if the US sticks to it.

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Seven Messages – Can Israel Survive Defeat without Setting the Region Ablaze?

The moment a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran was announced – brokered through Pakistani mediation on April 7 – Iran declared that Lebanon was included in the arrangement. It was a clear message: the war could not be compartmentalized, and the fronts were linked.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to deny it. But the denial exposed more than it concealed. Lebanon and other resistance fronts were already embedded within Iran’s broader ten-point proposal – a framework the Trump administration had accepted as a workable basis for negotiations set to begin Friday.

Netanyahu was left politically and strategically exposed.

Iran was never just another battlefield. It was the culmination of a long campaign of perpetual war that Netanyahu has sustained for years – beginning with the genocide in Gaza, expanding into Lebanon, and stretching across multiple fronts whenever his political survival demanded escalation.

Each war served a purpose: to silence dissent within his coalition, to distract from collapsing approval ratings, to evade accountability in corruption trials. War became governance.

But the Iran gambit failed. And failure, for Netanyahu, is never an endpoint. It is a trigger. With no victory to claim and no strategic gains to present, he turned – once again – to Lebanon.

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Iran has prevailed, and the Middle East has changed

US President Donald Trump has, in the end, found a way out of the situation he created by embarking on a reckless war against Iran. The threat of destroying an entire civilization provided him with the pretext to step back.

Indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington, conducted through intermediaries, primarily Pakistan and, behind it, China, have produced a ceasefire. Trump may claim that Iran was cowed by his threats, but the reality is different.

A ceasefire under conditions where the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control suggests that Tehran has not backed down. Washington, in effect, has.

It is too early to speak of any “golden age” emerging from these talks. But the outlines of the conflict’s outcome are already visible.

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