Tag: perpetual war

Trump to declare Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory

President Donald Trump on Friday stated that he would declare the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory after the end of the Iran war.

Trump made the remarks during a speech at the Nassau County Police Academy in New York.

“And after we finish defeating Iran… pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” he said, to raucous applause.

The U.S. currently maintains a naval blockade of the critical waterway, through which as much as 20% of the world’s oil supply flows. Iran, meanwhile, has harried commercial vessels moving through the Strait.

The war began in late February with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The conflict was in a state of nominal ceasefire for weeks until the breakdown of negotiations.

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USS Abraham Lincoln sailors tried to jump overboard amid extended deployment – reports

Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as its 5,000 sailors and marines endure a record-breaking deployment at sea tied to the war with Iran.

Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.

Worried families vented their anxieties about loved ones onboard the Lincoln at an emotional town hall meeting with navy leaders in San Diego last Thursday, Stars and Stripes reported. One spouse among the 200 or so family members said that her husband had texted her that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”.

The families’ worries were expressed directly to navy leadership, represented at the town hall by the acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, and other top officials.

A woman at the meeting told Cao that the navy had “broken trust between us and the leadership”, the paper reported.

The Navy Times gave details of thwarted suicide attempts onboard the aircraft carrier during the current deployment. Annabelle Loma told the outlet that her husband had tried to jump overboard after his spell at sea kept being extended.

“He’s scared. He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out his 13-year career is ruined, just like that,” she said.

The paper quoted another sailor’s wife whose husband was involved in a separate incident onboard the Lincoln in which he prevented a fellow crew member from jumping, grabbing them and bringing them back on deck.

Mike Levin, a Democratic member of Congress from California, has sounded the alarm over conditions onboard the warship, which is in its fifth month of combat operations against Iran. He described the lot of the crew on X as “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”

Jason Crow, a Democratic Congress member from Colorado who is a former army ranger having served in Afghanistan and Iraq, has warned that the strain on service members and their families on the Lincoln is “building week by week”.

The current crunch has been months in the making. The warship left San Diego on 21 November and was originally intended for the Pacific but was redirected to the Middle East once the US-Israel war with Iran began.

Since then, MS Now revealed, the 5,000-plus crew has had only two days on land, in Guam in December and Oman in July. The deployment was scheduled to end in May but has been extended a couple of times amid the ongoing war.

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Courage for Peace, Not for War

In September of 2025, during a Saturday vigil in Stockholm’s Odenplan Square, Isak Hernández, age nine, asked if he could recite a poem he wrote. Deeply troubled by images he saw, day and night, from Gaza, he resolved not to be silent. “Their lives are not numbers,” Isak declared. “Their dreams are not ashes.” His refrain repeated: “I won’t be silent,” and he begged the world, “Listen to me.”

Isabella Lundgren, a Swedish jazz vocalist, heard Isak deliver his poem. She felt his words had reverberated throughout Sweden. No one could possibly turn away. Everyone, she said, bore the responsibility of witnessing. She and Isak collaborated to turn his poem into a song entitled “Their dreams are not ashes.”

Their witness is crucial for counteracting decisions on the part of countries which have newly decided to enter NATO.

We should acknowledge that NATO has done nothing to stop the U.S. provisioned Israeli genocide or to restrain Israel.

On the contrary, NATO seeks fuller integration of Israel’s “security” into NATO strategies. What’s more, trade between Israel and European countries continues.

The Swedish government ought to argue that NATO must force Israel to end their genocide of Palestinian people.

We should note that Israel possesses at least ninety-one thermonuclear weapons which it refuses to declare. Each of these weapons would cause the death of at least six million people – a Holocaust – in a can, waiting to be opened on human civilization’s last day. A planetary omnicide comprising every conceivable genocide, military analysts agree, is almost certain to occur days, hours, or even minutes after any of these weapons are ever again used.

Sadly, Sweden’s hurried entry into NATO in 2024, alongside the rise of armaments industries and even support for nuclear weapons acquisition, compromises Sweden’s historic capacity to resist the rush into unimaginable genocides.

What are the major threats we all face? Surely, the list must begin with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Next, we must reckon with possible ecological collapse. Following this, we must prepare for outbreaks of new pandemics. And, achingly, we must oppose genocide. War is not the answer. Militarism exacerbates each of these threats.

Now, as corrupt political leaders extract the hard-earned resources of people throughout Europe and pour those resources into bulging coffers of, primarily, U.S. military contractors, it’s crucial to hear Isak Hernández’s pledge not to be silent. We also can learn from the legacy of Sweden’s heroic diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte.

As Vice President of Sweden’s Red Cross, during World War II, he witnessed first-hand how prisoners in concentration camps suffered. He resolved to negotiate with SS leader Heinrich Himmler for the release of prisoners. Bernadotte collaborated with Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian relief groups to create the White Buses campaign. Ultimately, they managed to free over 17,000 thousand prisoners from concentration camps.

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The Two Terrorists: Britain Jails Tweets While the West Crowns al-Qaeda’s Man in Damascus

Two men, one word. Next Monday, at Kingston Crown Court in London, a 72-year-old grandfather goes on trial for terrorism; the evidence is a tweet of seven words, and the maximum sentence is 14 years. Nine months ago, a man who founded al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch and carried a $10 million American bounty on his head became the first Syrian head of state ever received at the White House. Tony Greenstein and Ahmed al-Sharaa have never met. Between them they define what the word “terrorist” now means – and for American readers there is a further twist: the seven words that may cost the pensioner his freedom are fully protected speech in the United States, which is why Washington has developed other methods for its own dissidents.

Take the pensioner first, and take his record in full, because the prosecution will. Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party in 2018; he lost a libel action against the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which had called him a “notorious antisemite,” the court finding the phrase protected as honest opinion; he accepted a suspended sentence over a Palestine Action attack on an Elbit arms factory. He is abrasive, litigious and unrepentant – a Jewish socialist from Brighton, a carer, the son of an Orthodox rabbi who marched against Mosley’s Blackshirts. None of that is the charge. The charge is that in November 2023, goaded by an anonymous account demanding he declare himself, he posted: “I support Hamas against the Israeli army.” Five weeks later, at 6:30 in the morning, counter-terrorism officers took his computers and phones, held him for nine hours, and released him under conditions that banned him from posting about the war at all. “This is Orwellian,” he told the arresting officers. He undersold it.

Now the other man, whose record requires no libel lawyer to establish, because the United States government wrote it down. Ahmed al-Sharaa – then Abu Mohammad al-Jolani – joined al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, was captured by American forces and imprisoned for five years, then crossed into Syria to found al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, pledging allegiance on video to Ayman al-Zawahiri. The State Department’s own wanted notice recorded that under his leadership the group “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians” – and itemized them: roughly 300 Kurdish civilians abducted from a checkpoint; 20 residents of the Druze village of Qalb Lawzeh massacred in Idlib; suicide bombings claimed in Damascus, Homs and Quneitra. In 2014 he called for retaliatory attacks on the American-led coalition itself. For this the UN froze his assets and banned his travel, and the $10 million bounty placed him among the five most wanted jihadist leaders on earth, on the same short list as Baghdadi and Zawahiri. That is the conduct the word “terrorist” was coined for: emptied villages, detonated city centers, a decade of American soldiers and Syrian civilians in the ground.

While the state prepared its case against the tweeter, it laid siege to the man. Eleven months to charge him; a trial date pushed back the better part of a year; thirty-two months, in the end, between the dawn raid and the jury. And one by one, his banks left him. In a statement published two weeks before trial, Greenstein described being cut off by five institutions since his arrest: Nationwide after a quarter-century, HSBC and First Direct – closing, among others, the account kept for the care of his autistic son – then Santander, which froze his personal accounts and those of a registered charity he serves as treasurer, then a savings bank that shut out his family entirely. None gave a reason; none has to, since banks warned about a customer are forbidden by law to tip him off. Nor is his suspicion of state involvement far-fetched: the government’s own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned in 2023 that proscription enforcement would push banks toward jettisoning clients – “de-risking,” the trade calls it. When Coutts closed one account belonging to Nigel Farage, the affair drew condemnation from the prime minister and toppled a chief executive. A pensioner debanked six times en route to a terror trial has drawn silence. A defendant is presumed innocent; his accounts are not.

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Paper Tiger: The Failure of America’s Trillion-Dollar War Machine

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?

A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza, is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10th that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.

Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq’s air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.

In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions, were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.

The US has already depleted a third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3 and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.

So the US is using multi-million dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500 lb. GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the sixty it already had stationed in Israel.

The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry, the Pentagon top brass and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.

The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the U.S. armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”

Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman), whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.

The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.

But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.

Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.

In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers – not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multi-trillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion – a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.

US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet  America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder – first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.

We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while Trump, a Republican,  assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.

Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11th, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.

Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely-acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it  with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done…We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened.”

By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the UN and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11th.

The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”

The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history – together with the outrageous cost – have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade Members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons and false pretexts for war.

Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed NDAA authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.

The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.

But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft-carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.

Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driven the US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.

Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.

On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit – for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.

The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.

As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control and absurdly expensive war machine.

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US territory turned tropical maternity ward has produced thousands of ‘American’ babies for parents living in China

Pregnant Chinese women have turned a tropical paradise into a maternity ward — pumping out babies who automatically become US citizens daily.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, has been flooded with so-called “birth tourists” since 2009 when then-president Barack Obama introduced a visa-waiver program for Chinese nationals.

China-watchers estimate about 1,000 companies offer birth tourism to the Northern Mariana Islands, other US overseas territories and even the US mainland. They claim a gob-smacking 1.5 million American babies are being raised in China by Chinese parents who’ve participated in birth tourism.

In a March 9 letter to three Trump Cabinet secretaries, Republican lawmakers demanded an accounting on Chinese birth tourism.

“The concern is about these children born to Chinese parents — do the parents have connections to the Chinese Communist Party, which is an adversarial government to the US?” Chris Chmielenski, president of the nonprofit Immigration Accountability Project, told The Post regarding the letter.

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Ukraine Defies Vance Warning With Massive Strike On Russia’s Key Black Sea Port, Shuttering Grain Terminals

Did President Zelensky and the Ukrainian armed forces not listen to US Vice President JD Vance’s warnings and request after all?

On Wednesday a “massive” Ukrainian drone and missile strike was unleashed on Russia’s port city of Novorossiysk, which badly damaged grain export terminals at what also constitutes the the last major Russian naval base on the Black Sea.

Three were killed, including an eight-year-old child, and also 24 people were injured in the Wednesday nighttime attack.

Zelensky acknowledged the rocket and underwater drone attack in what he hailed as a “unique operation” to strike the Russian naval base at Novorossiysk.

It seems Zelensky is distinguishing this instance as a hit on a purely ‘military target’ given he did not mention the grain export terminal aspect to the destruction.

“The occupying fleet and all the infrastructure that supports it will not be safe as long as Russian aggression continues,” Zelensky said.

Many Russian assets previously docked at the longtime Russian fleet’s home base of Sevastopol were forced to vacate during earlier phases of the war, given the frequent prior targeting of the historic Crimean naval hub. Some ships have even been relocated as far away as the Caspian Sea in order to protect them.

The attack could seriously impact global food supplies, particularly in the African continent.

Reuters has said shutdowns resulted: “Two of Russia’s biggest grain terminals at the southern port of Novorossiysk have suspended operations as a result of overnight Ukrainian drone strikes, four industry sources told Reuters on Wednesday.”

“Russia is the world’s ​largest wheat exporter and most of those exports are shipped via its Black Sea ​ports like Novorossiysk. Russia’s main grain lobby group warned last month that Ukrainian ⁠drone attacks could shut down grain exports via the Black Sea in the near future, ​pushing up prices and causing hunger in Africa and the Middle East,” the report added.

Novorossiysk is also home to vital oil export ​infrastructure. Kiev has essentially declared open season on Russian oil exports, arguing that proceeds fuel Russia’s military machine.

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British Royal Navy’s Spy Drones Have Cameras Suspected of Sending Back Data to China

Who are these drones spying for, in the end?

The Royal Navy is fighting a war with Britain, to have resources to modernize and expand the much-diminished forced, said to be the smallest-ever.

But even when modernization efforts do come, they are not without issues, as we’ve learned this week.

It’s been widely reported that the Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces had cameras suspected to be secretly sending sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Telegraph reported:

“The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were transmitting information to a device in the country.

The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.

The revelation raises fears that Beijing has been attempting to spy on Britain’s military after years of security warnings about the threat from the country.”

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Ukraine Is Taking the War Deep Into Russia

Ukraine’s latest strike inside Russia confirms the direction this war has been moving for some time. Ukraine is no longer limiting its attacks to border regions, occupied territory, or Russian military positions near the front. It is deliberately taking the war into Russia’s economic and industrial interior.

Ukrainian drones struck Nizhnekamsk in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, roughly 1,200 kilometers or 750 miles from the Ukrainian border. Ukraine’s General Staff said it hit the TANECO oil refinery and started a fire. Russian authorities said the attack killed 13 people, including a child, and injured dozens more. The conflicting reports regarding the number injured range from 39 to 75, and the precise circumstances of the civilian casualties have not been independently established.

TANECO is not some minor roadside operation. It is one of Russia’s most advanced refineries and processed approximately 17 million metric tons of crude during 2024. Nizhnekamsk also contains another refinery and a major petrochemical complex. This was an attack on a critical industrial center that helps supply the Russian economy and, by extension, its war machine. The strike reportedly marked the third attack on the TANECO complex this summer. That alone demonstrates that these are not isolated raids. Ukraine has developed a sustained strategy intended to dismantle Russian refining, transportation, storage, and export capacity one facility at a time.

Ukraine cannot defeat Russia through a conventional war. Russia has more people, more territory, greater industrial depth, and more resources. Kyiv therefore shifted toward economic warfare, using inexpensive long-range drones to attack refineries, pipelines, ports, airfields, factories, warehouses, power systems, and logistics centers deep inside Russia.

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Iran Demands China’s Anti-American BRICS Coalition Provide More Support During War

Iran’s representative at a meeting of the anti-American BRICS coalition on Wednesday used the opportunity to demand that member countries invest more of their time, money, and energy into “practical initiatives” to help Iran, a call that follows months of minimal support from the bloc during the ongoing war with America.

BRICS — named after core countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — is an economic, security, and diplomatic coalition largely led by communist China that seeks to overthrow the current, Western-led global order. It presents itself as a vehicle to aid the development and prosperity of the “global south” despite the presence of Russia and China, promoting interdependency among its members at the expense of ties with America. In addition to its core members, the group consists of Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, and Indonesia. Another 13 countries, mostly rogue states such as Cuba and Belarus, received BRICS “partner” status in 2024, a second tier of cooperation inferior to full membership.

The BRICS coalition has persistently been challenged by the fact that the member countries do not fundamentally share national interests. Since the founding of the bloc, India and China have engaged in territorial warfare, South Africa has had to protect its economy from China’s malignant goods dumping schemes, and the UAE has supported Ukraine against Russia’s ongoing invasion. Iran has been the most overtly problematic member of the group, however, actively bombing the UAE then diverting the agenda of BRICS meetings to demand other countries support its terrorist activity.

Wednesday’s BRICS finance minister and central bank governor meeting continued the trend of Iran hijacking the coalition to prioritize its own interests. Iranian Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati lamented in his remarks, according to Iranian state media, that BRICS was not doing all it could to offer concrete support to Tehran.

“BRICS will have the greatest impact when it can turn policy dialogues into practical initiatives and operational mechanisms,” Hemmati stated, according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.

“Referring to the difficult and complex regional and international circumstances, as well as the U.S.-Israeli military aggression against Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Tasnim added, “Hemmati said economic and financial stability cannot be achieved without peace, respect for international law, and adherence to the principles of the U.N. Charter.”

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