Tag: middle east

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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Middle East is ‘on fire’ – Kremlin

The US-Israeli war against Iran has set the Middle East “on fire,” reflecting Russia’s warning about the dangerous consequences of the move, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

On Sunday, US President Donald Trump escalated the tensions by issuing an expletive-laden demand to Tehran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained effectively shut since the conflict began on February 28.
“Open the f**king strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell,” he wrote on social media, threatening to demolish the Iranian power plants and bridges if it doesn’t happen by Tuesday. Tehran maintains that the key waterway is only closed for oil shipments by the US and its allies.

When asked by journalists about Trump’s rant on Monday, Peskov said that “we have seen those statements, but we prefer not to comment on them.”

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The Strange Case Of Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’

On January 22, 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Donald Trump signed the Charter of the Board of Peace before a room of world leaders, cameras, and a step-and-repeat backdrop plastered floor to ceiling with a repeating pattern that should have stopped every journalist in the room cold.¹

It was not the Board of Peace’s own logo. The BoP has its own emblem — a gold shield containing a globe centered on the Western Hemisphere, flanked by laurel branches, displayed prominently at the top of the stage. But the surface behind the signing table, the one that would fill every wire service photograph transmitted around the world, displayed the Great Seal of the United States: the eagle with spread wings, shield on breast, olive branch and arrows in its talons, stars above. Unmistakable. Incontestable.

The problem is that the Board of Peace charter explicitly states that Trump’s chairmanship “is independent of his presidency of the United States.”² The entire legal justification for bypassing Congress rests on the Board being a private international body — not a U.S. government instrument.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 713(a), displaying the Great Seal in connection with any public meeting in a manner reasonably calculated to convey a false impression of U.S. government sponsorship is a federal criminal offense.³ The Board cannot simultaneously claim independence from the U.S. government and wrap itself in that government’s sovereign seal. That is not a technicality. That is the architecture of deception.

Article 13.3 of the charter states that the Board “will have an official seal, which shall be approved by the Chairman.”⁴ If Trump approved the Great Seal of the United States as the Board of Peace’s official backdrop at its founding ceremony, that fact alone warrants a full accounting.

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US Mideast Allies including Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Others, Urge President Trump to Continue War on Iran

US Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia, UAE and other Gulf allies urge President Trump to continue war on Iran,

The US allies privately warned President Trump that Tehran has not been weakened enough.

The US Allies say four weeks of bombings has not been enough to destroy the barbaric Iranian regime.

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