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Torture, abuse, sexual violence: Freed Gaza flotilla activists speak

Israeli military forces captured the latest convoy of humanitarian aid ships sailing to Gaza with the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSM) between late April and mid-May. Activists who were imprisoned by Israel for days and eventually deported have reported harrowing treatment by their captors, including targeted torture, abuse, broken bones, unauthorized injections of undisclosed substances, and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers. We speak with a panel of freed GSM participants—Thiago Ávila, Catríona Graham, and Ariadne Teles—about what they saw and endured, and about the successes, defeats, and future of the movement to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. Guests: Thiago Ávila is a member of the Global Sumud Flotilla Steering Committee who was abducted in international waters by the Israelis in late April off the coast of the Greek Island of Crete. At the time, Ávila was one of two Flotilla participants and leaders forcibly transported to Israel where he was held as a political prisoner for 10 days. Catríona Graham is a member of the Irish delegation who sailed with the most recent voyage of the Global Sumud Flotilla. While being detained by Israel, Graham shouted “Free Palestine” in Itamar Ben-Gvir’s face and was subsequently shoved down to the floor. Ariadne Telles, is a member of the Brazilian delegation who sailed with the most recent voyage of the Global Sumud Flotilla and who also experienced abuse while detained by Israel. Credits: Producer / Videographer / Editor: David Hebden Transcript The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. After 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing in historic Palestine and after three years of all out genocide in Gaza, Israel’s government and military continued to display to the world what it looks like when a settler colonial ethnationalist and increasingly and openly fascist regime is openly allowed to rule and operate and slaughter and bomb with geopolitical impunity and without any accountability to international law, reason or human morality. This has been on full display from Israel’s continued ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the occupied West Bank, regardless of the so- called ceasefire that’s supposed to be in effect, to Israel’s aggression and reckless violence in Iran and Lebanon to its illegal abductions and torture of peace activists sailing with the global Samud Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza and bring lifesaving aid to Palestinians. And the latest convoy of the humanitarian age ships was intercepted by Israeli forces in late April and in early May. And activists sailing with the global Samuel Flotilla were captured in prison for days in Israel and eventually deported. But the testimonies and affidavits coming from flotilla members who have been released are frankly horrific. They describe days of targeted torture, abuse, broken bones, unauthorized injections of undisclosed substances and sexual violence by Israeli soldiers. And these stories along with the viral videos of Israeli national security minister, Itmar Ben Gavier, taunting detained flotilla activists and the videos showing Basque police officers violently beating flotilla activists returning to Spain at Bilbao Airport have rightly sparked global outrage. And as we always do here at the real news, we’re going to take you to the front lines of this struggle so that you can hear directly from folks at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined today by three guests. Tiago Avila is a member of the Global Samuel Flotilla Steering Committee who was abducted in international waters by the Israelis in late April off the coast of the Greek island of Crete. At the time, Avila was one of two Flotilla participants and leaders forcibly transported to Israel where he was held as a political prisoner for 10 days. We are also joined by Katrina Graham. The Flotilla activists who while being detained by Israel shouted free Palestine in Benjavier’s face and was subsequently shoved down to the floor and the video that Ben Gavier posted of that exchange has gone globally viral. And we are also joined today by Ariaj Nitelis, a global Samud Flotilla participant who also experienced abuse during this latest round of detentions. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I want to start by just going around the table and giving y’all the floor. And I want to ask if you can describe for viewers and listeners what you yourself experienced on this latest mission with the Global Samud Flotilla from the time that you set sail to now. Catríona Graham: So for myself, I was sailing from the Italy port and it was a few smooth days of sailing. And then shockingly, we were intercepted on the waters just off Crete, which really spoke to us. Usually we have what we call this orange zone, which is just much, much closer to Gaza waters. But this time the IOF came all the way into European waters for the interception, which I think speaks to how the Greater Israel Project is not only being seen as being taken into Lebanon, but also right across the Mediterranean. We were kidnapped in the open seas illegally and we were held in detention on a makeshift prison vote for two nights. After being released into Crete, we continued on our mission and we sailed to Marmorous and then set sail towards the shores of Gaza, where once again, we were intercepted illegally in international waters. The first time we were about 145 participants that were kidnapped and detained and the second was over 420 participants. We were subjected to extreme violence. I think it was very clear there is a marked escalation. This was the third time that I had been kidnapped also with the 2025 mission with the global smooth flotilla. And each time there’s been a marked increase in aggression, the scale of aggression, the extent. This time, as soon as the IOF rib was approaching the boat I was on, they started firing rubber bullets immediately. They pulled somebody out and subjected them to violence to having their hands cable tied to blindfolding and from there the violence continued to escalate. Within 20 minutes of being put on a prison boat, one of the others already on the boat was shot with a pellet gun. She did not have adequate treatment until we arrived in Istanbul. And while we were in the port at Ashdod and in Ketziak prison in the desert, we started to hear more and more accounts of the extent of violence, of people being tasered, people being stabbed, shootings, rape. So this really showed a marked increase in the kinds of violence, but we’re very clear that we were there for a few days, whereas there are still more than 9,600 Palestinian political prisoners and hostages being subjected to far worse forms of torture in Palestine right now. Ariadne Teles: Yeah, we suffer the same. I have a fist bone, a hand actually. My radial bone in the left end is fractured and I have smashed nerves. It’s just one of all the fractures that our volunteers have. We have people inject with substance like cats say it. We have testimony of people listening to the soldiers make pleasure noises when they are without clothes. So this experience was very different and like Kat say, they improve the violence and they improve the violence because they still in punity for all the crimes that they are committed with the Palestinian people and against the Flagilias and other things that we pass through is nothing. It’s not 0.01% of the Palestinian people facing every day. Actually now we have kids in the same position that we are days ago. So just when I was in the prison car that they used to transport us to the prison, to the porch, to the prison, I saw draws of a smiley face, a sad face, and I scared phrase drugs that obviously was made for a kid. So everything that you saw in the videos, everything we talk about our experience in this moment that I saw the draws, I just feel that all the feelings that I have some kids was passing through this too. And we in our position, we know that we have people outside, we have lawyers, we have our governments and our investors trying to make something, but the Palestinian kids, the Palestinian people, the Palestinian hostage, they are kidnapped by Israel all these days until today and maybe now, actually certainly now, they don’t have anyone. They don’t know how long they are being in this prison. I think that the world cannot allow anymore. It’s not because we like people Western people. I’m from Global South. I know the difference that European pasta pots had in our mission too, because they are very racist and we still have people struggle for us in outside and it’s because of this that we need to be stand with the Palestinian people too and we surfer all of these things, but how my comrade Casio from Brazilian delegation say our morality was intact. We have breaking bombs, we have injuries, we have people that are hated, but our morality and our conscience are very impacted and actually we are more strong. I came from Amazoni and the struggles are very similar in my place. My place was occupied with this slogan that we need people and lands that don’t have anyone like they said about Palestine for the creation of this so- called state. So it’s the same struggle for lands and territory and we know that we need to continue because the future of Gaza is the future of the entire humanity and we from Global South. We know what is colonization, what is imperialism when we see and definitely this is the most cruel face of the colonization in our time and I think it’s our duty, historical jury in this time, you struggle against this until Palestine will be free and all the people can be free too. Thiago Ávila: Yeah. Thank you Ari. Thank you, Kat. Thank you Maximillian for bringing this important subject. I was part of the first interception on April the 29th along with 180 other people on 22 boats, over 30 other boats managed to get to Greek territorial waters and escape this illegal interception, 700 narcical miles from Gaza. From there, they were testing the waters and the methods of violations that they escalated a lot three weeks later against the second wave of our global smooth flotilla. We got intercepted and sent to a prison boat and that prison boat, there were many people assaulted, very precarious place where people were put. So many psychological violence, so many physical violence after that they transferred the people, transferred 179 people to a Greek boat and then to Greek, to Greece territory. But me and Saifa Bukeshek, Spanish, Swedish, Palestinian origin, were taken illegally and kidnapped, taken to occupied Palestine. We were taken to Ashkall and prison to a interrogation and tortured facility from Shabbat, the Israeli internal intelligence. That was a very troubled moment as well because the first three days on the transit there, we were severely assaulted. I could barely see from my right eye because I was beaten up so hard. I passed out twice while being assaulted by them. They put ropes on my neck and said that now they were allowed legally to hang people. They pretended they would throw me from the boat. They did so many violations. They would put me in stressful positions for a long, long time. They would close so tight the handcuffs that until today it’s been more than a month and I still cannot feel this part of the palm of my hand. I don’t know if it’s ever coming back because there were obviously some nerve damage. And then after that, in this 10 days in interrogation facility, they were saying that they would kill us or would put us for a hundred years imprisonment and there was torture everywhere. We were in solitary confinement, not the first time in other flotilla missions. I was already put in solitary confinement before, but this time it was more intense, like 18 hours interrogation some days, many court hearings where they would always try to extend, extend, extend the stay and would threaten all the time. They would question about every single aspect of life. They would show everyday photos of my wife and my baby and asking what the context of the photo was, but it was not like a photo from social media. So just to show that they had the capacity to spy and to do surveillance over our families, they did so many violations. But the problem is that despite all they did with us, the first group intercepted got severely beaten more than 30 people have to get hospitalized, but then in the second moment in May the 18th, they put not 30 people they put dozens and dozens and dozens of people to get hospitalized, 30 broken bones and a lot of people under severe violations. And the problem is that despite all this that they did with us, we’ve seen and we heard they’re doing a lot worse with the Palestinians themselves. At the interrogation and tortured facility that I was for 10 days, my neighbors were Palestinians being tortured every day and every night. So the violations that they make us go through like losing a family member and not being able to say goodbye to them, Palestinians goes through every single day like Hussama Busafia, who’s been more than 500 days being tortured in Israeli dungeons, also lost his mother like me and could not say goodbye to her. Marijuan Barguti has been arrested for so long, also lost family members, could never say goodbye to them. So the problem is that they violate international people because they only don’t do the same that they do to Palestinians because of the political cost that it has, but they wanted to do the same because they are say this. This is a fascist supremacist regime and that needs to be defeated. But the reason why they don’t do is because they cannot pay the political cost, but they dehumanize Palestinians so much that with Palestinians, they believe they can pay the political costs. So that’s why they’ve been doing the most horrific things with the almost 10,000 Palestinians, almost 400 of them children under these Israeli dungeons. And it’s for them that we must scream and that we must keep on mobilizing. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I appreciate all three of you so much for sharing that with us. I know that there’s so much more to say and so much more that you and other members of the Flotilla have said, and I would just encourage folks out there, this is not private information. If you want to learn what these folks went through at the hands of Israel with the support of our government here in the United States, you can go listen to more of their testimonies. You can read these affidavits. It is horrific. And rather than just kind of going deeper into those horrific details, I want to use the remaining time that we have to sort of take a step back here because we’ve been covering these flotilla missions and speaking to participants for years, from union organizers like Chris Smalls to military veterans from the United States, part of different peace groups, all manner of folks who have joined these important flotilla missions and our viewers and listeners have told us how much these missions mean to them, but they’ve also asked us questions about what the ultimate mission is, what the ultimate goals are and what has and hasn’t been achieved over the course of the past nearly 20 years from the first missions in 2008 to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010, which included six ships that were raided by Israeli forces and 10 participants killed to this latest voyage and all the other voyages that were intercepted or raided or captured by Israel. So I want to go back around the table and ask you three to respond to that and give folks your perspective on this years long mission and movement and what is being achieved even if it feels like a defeat every time Israel and the IDF prevent one of these voyages from reaching the shores of Gaza. Catríona Graham: So of course our ultimate goal is to support the Palestinian people in their leadership and their struggle for liberation, specifically with the Flotela missions. It is to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza, to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza that has been held for nearly 20 years. We know that Qaza should not be dependent on aid. What we bring on our boats is a token amount of aid trying to bring some support that we can to those in Gaza, but ultimately we need to make sure that the siege is ended and that the people of Gaza are able to have self-agency, be able to live for themselves, work for themselves, no longer to be dependent on aid. While we are working to break the siege, there is so much else that we are working to do. So we know that at the moment since the so- called ceasefire agreement was brought in, Is are no longer on Gaza, on the daily realities being experienced not only in Kaza, but also in the West Bank. We know, for example, on the first day of Eat, there were 10 Palestinian people murdered, including five children. We know that the violence continues, the bombing continues, the lack of access to food and resources and medical care continues. So we need to do whatever we can to raise our voices to draw attention back to Haza to the struggle for Palestinian liberation. We’ve seen as a result of this flotilla, there has been widespread condemnation. So we know that Benjavier posted this video and it received widespread condemnation from many global leaders, but this is the kind of action he has been taking for years posting videos attempting to humiliate Palestinian prisoners speaking about his intention to execute them under the new legislation that is coming through and this doesn’t receive the same kind of condemnation. Even when Netanyahu spoke out and said that he wasn’t representing the values of Israel by posting this video, it’s very clear that was more about the tone and that he shared the video rather than the extent of violence that was perpetrated against us under Flotilla, but also showing the real values of Israel, the continued abuses that are well documented being committed against Palestinian people for many, many decades, which is why we need to move beyond words of condemnations from our government leaders into real actions, into sanctions, into divestment, making sure that Israel is isolated on the international stage and finally they are forced to follow international law. Ariadne Teles: Maybe we cannot until now break the physical siege, the physical illegal siege. Actually, one of our boats or part of our boats reached the shore of Gaza in these days with penal solars and some food and material for the people that they are very happy to receive just because it’s important because the research are so low and a minimal thing that we arrive Gaza, it’s a good thing, but actually what’s reach Gaza with this part of our vote was hope that people, the Palestinian always says this, they feel they are not alone and the world are talking about and they have people fight for them. Like I said before, when we are in the prison, we know they’ll have people outside of the prisons fight for us and this is about humanity solidarity too. We cannot break the physical illegal siege now, but we break a lot of other seeds now I am Amazonian person talk to you right now because of this movement and we are talking about Palestine and we are talking about the liberation of the people for other people can hear and join us to what the Flotillas are. For me, it’s an instrument of struggle for liberation for the Palestinians and the entire world. We are a global operas in this moment, it’s happening and this was built since the first Platilla create these we just not accept that Israel commit crimes. And if the government are complicit, we are not. And we just saying because the governments are doing nothing like in all the history of the humanity we see like this, all our rights we need to fight for them. And in our training we studied about the legacies of the nonviolence techniques like in the independence of the India we have Ganji make marks and struggle against the more armed in the time, the British arm and they just walk. But this cause mobilization, this cause strike, this cause and this is what we need. We need not just Platillas, we need all the people trying to do something because like we always say this is our historical duty. So I think in the history of the Flotillas, we just create more and more united, we create solidarity, can see each other like human beings and people that need to free themselves like people, people for the people. Yeah. I think it’s very connected with all the struggles in the entire world and it’s just an instrument, but it makes some noise and not just break the physical seats, but all the other seeds. And for me, we have a lot of seas, like Kat says in the next Fuchila, we have the Caesar fire, but we still was a victory and in this time we already have UN pronuciate against Vishal and now it’s proven they use sex of violence against the Palestinian and we don’t know if was the Flitilla that make this more in the media right now, but I think it’s a movement, a global movement and you just need to increase this solidarity how much we can. Thiago Ávila: I’m very satisfied with the answers of my comrades. I’d just like to add that whenever we are mobilizing solidarity with people, we need to be at the service of these people. The Palestinian people have been very clear on their callings for solidarity. They need people to stand side by side with them in their struggle for liberation. They need to stop the genocide. They need to break the siege, this illegal siege of 19 years by sea by land and by Air of Gaza and they need the internationalists of the world, the free people of the world to break their country’s complicity with the genocide. So this is being very clear calling that the Palestinian people made and that have been our line of action since day one, since the very first people that started mobilizing 18 years ago to break this siege by sea missions by using boats, it has always been the goal to break this illegal siege, to create this humanitarian corridor, but most about to be solidarity, Palestinians in their struggle for liberation. The tactic is one with many, like all my comments said before, the boats are not more important than the massive demonstrations in the streets, not more important than the boycott campaigns, not more important than the people disrupting the armed factories and facing huge criminalization than the people spreading real news like you do here on this media, like people sharing knowledge, historical knowledge, like people doing the grassroots work, banging door to door, talking to people. So all of this is part of the same struggle to defeat Zionism, this racism supremacist ideology, to defeat their alliance with United States imperialism that uses the Israeli regime as a mean to produce and to maintain his Gemini over that region and over the world. So it’s important for us to be there doing all the actions that we can with the people that go on Flotillas, they don’t do just that. They do all the other actions of solidarity actions with Palestine and they’re not mobilized only for Palestine. We do Flotillas to Cuba as well. We’ll be doing mobilizations for all the oppressed people in the world. So we believe in a better society free of exploitation, free of oppression, free of the destruction of nature. The Flotillas are a mean to bring more people together to push for Palestinian solidarity and hopefully to achieve concrete victories. Like Ariadne said, the last mission in October 2025 was a key factor to convince Trump that they will never succeed in implementing the complete ethnic lensing of Palestine. So Trump came from a person that four months before October was saying that they would displace Palestinians to Eritrea, South Sudan, to Congo, to Somali land, to a person say, “No, we need a peace. Israel cannot fight the whole world by himself.” So that was the mobilization of the people, the public, the global uprising that promoted that. So we need to do this again when we decided that we would sail again, it’s not that the conditions were easier in this almost eight months of the so- called ceasefire, people are still getting killed, they’re still being restricted, but land is being stolen with the so- called yellow line and their plans are the worst by the land being ruled by war criminals like Trump and Netanyahu, by the big text with techno authoritarian regimes or by the industrial military complex that profits from war. We don’t want any of that. We decided that we would sail because the Palestinian people are saying, “Please expose that there’s no real cis fire. Please expose that the genocide is ongoing.” And we decided that we would do that despite the hard conditions, despite the increasing and escalating use of force and violence against our fotilla. And we did our best with the resources that we had. We are very proud of what we did, but it’s an incomplete task because the genocide is still going on and we still need to defeat Zionism and imperialism, which is the key task, the historical task of this generation. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I think that was really powerfully put by all of you and I know I’ve got to let you go and I wanted to just sneak in one final question here, a sort of rapid fire around the table, final message that you want to share with folks watching and listening because obviously the common feeling for people with a beating heart these days is everything is getting worse and there’s nothing I can do about it, right? The bastards are winning the genocide is continuing the wars are proliferating the fascists are rising. There’s a lot to be despondent about right now, but I know from what our viewers and listeners have told me that they see so much hope in the global Samuel Flotilla in the Palestine solidarity movement around the world, even in spite of things objectively getting worse in the world. And so I wanted to sort of bring things back down to like the ground level and ask you all if you had any messages to folks out there who were feeling despondent hopeless and they feel like they don’t have the strength to fight back right now, I want them to hear from y’all about how you find the strength, Katrina, to stare Itmar Ben Gaver in the face and shout free palace Stein. I want to hear where you find the strength, Tiago and Ariajni to be beaten and tortured in these prisons and to still stand up and speak out for what’s right. So I wanted to just have that be our concluding question. Any final messages you want to share with folks out there about how to find that strength and how to keep going even when all seems dark and hopeless? Catríona Graham: Thank you for this really important question. I think we need to be clear that this is the moment to claim our collective power. There are imperialist forces trying to silence us and we need to absolutely refuse this. We need to continue resisting and we need to make sure that across the world we rise together. There is so much power in collective action and there’s so much power in our communities. Love we know will win out overall. So when we lean into these kinds of actions, when we come into community with each other and claim our power, whether it’s through going to demonstrations, participating in direct action, speaking out to political leadership, driving and pushing for change wherever we can, we can have an impact. We have had an impact and we will continue to do this until Palestine is free. Ariadne Teles: Yeah. I want to tell about something that happened with me in the immigration process when we are beaten, when we are arriving Ashdad and they ask us if we try to enter in Israel illegally and break and attempted to decid to Gaza. And I interrupt the soldier and I say, “First of all, it’s not Israel. It’s occupied Palestine.” And they, “What?” And I say, “Okay, Palestine.” I say, “What?” And I say, “Okay, Palestine.” And then a woman that was in the side, first of all, they asked me where I’m from and I just point to my passport and they say, “Oh, Brazil to Dubai or Brigado.” They say in Portuguese, something like that. And this woman says, “Brazil, did you know that Brazil’s occasion and you are a colonizer?” And I say, “No, I am from Amazonia and I’m life proof that the original people always win and you know that you are in the wrong side of the history.” And when I talk to the people, just to continue the story, the other one says, “Amazon, I make indigenous people. ” And I call him racist and the other God that take me to the other step. But I can say these things in his face and something that I always say is when I have conversation my side, they are question because it’s not an easy ask. We question all the time. We obeducate our families, we have educate our times, but we did this because we are on the right side of the history and when you fight the right side of the history, you already win. And when we win, we win two times. So every time that we just organize ourselves, we already work for ourselves, not for other person. It’s a work that go back to us 100% and this is very pleasure, this is joy, stay in community and fight for the liberation, fight for the future, fight for the present, fight for the person on your side, but it’s fight for you too and make your life more meaning and we can recognize ourself and stay a little bit off of this system that exploit us at 24 hours that we need to work a lot to survive, to see that a person in our side is our competitor and not a comrade and not a brother, a sister. When you are organizing a struggle in solidarity with the people of the child work, you are in a community and you are acting like a human being, a collective person that we are a collective person. And these give us not just hope, but purpose in our life. So I just want to say that come to join us because it’s amazing what they did with us, I don’t know, it’s not compared like all the strength, all the power that we feel when we are in a collective and the power of the people and the power of the survey director can change the world and this is beautiful and this is amazing. I want to say come to join us. It’s not necessarily that you went in a vote, but you can support in many, many, many ways, but just being collective in community because this can change the world. Thiago Ávila: Thank you, Ariajin. Thank you, Kat, for bringing this up as well. I understand that situation is really not easy. Whenever we are analyzing the international conjuncture, we need to be very concrete in our analysis and the truth is that our enemies are getting bolder and sometimes they’re getting stronger. They are more willing to cause harm. They’re more willing to commit genocide. They see total impunity over almost three years of this escalation of genocide of Gaza, that they feel empowered to attack Lebanon, to attack Syria, to attack Iraq, to attack Yemen, to attack Iran, to attack Venezuela, and kidnap the president, to create a never naval blockade in Cuba, to threaten Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, to intervene in elections. So we are going to a very hard moment of world politics and international relations. But on the other hand, thanks to the gift that the Palestinian people gave to humanity, people woke up billions of people understood what imperialism is by the lenses of the communicators from Gaza who gave their lives to livestream of genocide and to counter the lives of the mainstream media that was saying that that was not happening, that there was no starvation, that these homes were actually tunnels below, that these hospitals actually had weapons hidden. They gave their lives to show that that was false, that was simply wrong. There was a genocide regime bombing hospitals, schools, shelters, residential areas, all in the name of a racist and supremacist ideology called Zionism, which was not actually new. This was part of eight decades of genocide and ethnic lensing that structured itself into an apartheid colonial state. So this factor changed things because people, once they became aware, they started mobilizing as well. So that for the first time we saw a general strike based on an international topic in Italy, for example, we’ve seen the history of revolutions, many general strikes in many countries, but never for an international topic like this, like the Italians went to the street to port Palestine. We’ve seen millions and millions of people in so many countries breaking the narrative of the governments, deteriorating their image with their complicity, challenging the mainstream media point of view and winning in public opinion when they challenge that. So that is something that shows the power. It’s not like this battle is won. Actually, we have a long way ahead. It’s a long march to freedom, but we see the means. We see the popular mobilization can defeat even the most powerful empire of our generation. Can defeat Donald Trump? Can defeat Penjamini Taniau and can corner them so much that they need to change their strategy, that they need to find other ways. So we need to do this all of our lives all the time, every time more aligned, more together, every time more courageous, more bold, because this is the mission that we have. So it’s not that it’s easy, but we’ve seen that it work and the people together, they are more powerful than any army. All they have is their violence, their hate, their bombs, and their weapons. We have all the rest. We have solidarity. We have love. We have the history of anti-colonial struggle that shows when people are decided to take this long march of freedom. They are unstoppable and we have the idea that all people deserve to be free and equal, deserve to have the right to live in peace, but not abstract peace, but a peace with justice, peace where people can live despite their religion, despite their ethnicity, despite their race, despite their gender, people can live with all their rights guarantee. And that’s what we are aiming for. That’s what we keep mobilizing. And that’s why we know that despite being very hard way, we see that we are advancing. Our enemies advancing one way, we advance in another. And if we organize better, if we mobilize more and more, we will be victorious. From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.

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Exclusive: Cuba’s ambassador sounds the alarm on escalating US war against the island

Despite the relentless decades-long efforts by the United States to subjugate Cuba, the Caribbean island has remained a haven for revolutionaries, scientists, and doctors, and a model of internationalist solidarity. Yet now, during the second Trump administration, the island is facing one of its most critical moments as the United States government has tightened the more than six-decade blockade against the island by imposing a fuel embargo, provoking an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. This escalation takes places as the US has unleashed fresh conflicts across all regions of the world, launching a war with Israel against Iran, carrying out airstrikes in Nigeria and Ecuador, and providing cover for Israel’s war in Lebanon. BreakThrough News spoke to Luis Mariano Fernández, the Cuban ambassador in Jordan and Syria, who reflected on the fierce US campaign and threats against his country in light of the current US-Israeli regional war across West Asia. Luis Mariano Fernández the Cuban ambassador in Jordan and Syria. Photo: SANA BreakThrough News: How do you interpret the US threats and the fierce campaign against Cuba, taking place at the same time as the regional war waged by the United States and its ally Israel against countries across West Asia, particularly Iran? Luis Mariano Fernández: As we know, the US threats against Cuba and its Revolution did not begin when Trump came to power as the 47th president of the United States on January 20, 2025, in his second term. The US aggression against the Cuban Revolution began from the very beginning of the triumph of the revolution in 1959, marking a process of profound change of political, economic, and social power structures. A change that definitively broke the chains of subordination to Washington in search for true freedom, sovereignty, independence, and the achievement of the greatest possible social justice for our entire people. As early as 1960, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory, made clear in his famous secret memo that the true intentions of his country’s policy were to create a climate of disappointment and discontent among Cubans in order to weaken their support for the government by blaming it for the difficulties they faced. 66 years have passed since, during which the aspirations of successive US administrations have continued to assume the same spirit of economic war against Cuba. A genocidal policy of economic, commercial and financial blockade has been implemented, the longest in history against any nation, in an attempt to fulfill the frustrated imperialist desire to overthrow the political system in Cuba. A system that Cubans have legitimately and rightfully decided to build for the well-being of all. As the Commander-in-Chief, Fidel, noted, what Yankee imperialism does not forgive us for is that we have built a socialist revolution just 90 miles from its shores. The deep wounds that resulted from hundreds of terrorist actions, which were orchestrated, financed and carried out from the US territories, are still etched in the memory of the Cuban people. Some of these actions became well known, such as the invasion of Girón in April 1961, in which the “uniformed people” defeated within 72 hours the systematic sabotage against the economic infrastructure, particularly exportable items such as sugar and food production, as well as bacteriological warfare actions with the introduction of diseases, which harmed Cuba’s pig production. Another example is the dengue hemorrhagic fever, which caused the deaths of hundreds of people, mostly children. Trump’s current policy towards Cuba has been characterized by a high-pressure approach and systematic psychological warfare. He has even threatened a possible military invasion in a bid to destabilize the country and achieve what his administration called “the unconditional surrender” of the Cuban government. Besides the 243 sanctions implemented during Trump’s first term, now other ones with a lot of negative impact are added, including the re-entry of Cuba into the spurious and unilateral list of alleged “sponsors of terrorism,” the measure of January 29, 2026, which imposed sanctions on suppliers of oil to the country, and the most recent one in May called “secondary sanctions” against entrepreneurs from third countries, who have business with Cuba. An extraterritorial content sanction, which violates the sovereignty of these countries, in order for them to abandon the Cuban market, so the US can achieve the cruelty of isolating Cuba economically. These recent sanctions in particular aim to further affect the already deteriorating living standards of Cubans, paralyze essential services, diminish production capacity, electricity, transport, communications, and everything that depends on energy supply and fuel availability, while discouraging foreign investment and affecting the permanence of foreign companies that have business in the country. The Trump administration continues to use the false narrative that Cuba constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States as unjustified, immoral, and unilateral pretext. Something that many US citizens refuse, according to recent surveys published in the United States. They also reject the military conflict with the Greater Antilles. The bureaucrats in Trump’s government claimed that Cuba poses a danger to US security because of its close relations with political adversaries (China, Russia and Iran), as if Washington has the right to decide with which country Cuba should maintain political and commercial relations. Washington is fully aware that Cuba is a country of peace, and its people are victims of its cruel and irresponsible hate policy. The Cuban people have no foreign military bases on their territory, except for the illegal Guantanamo Naval Base (established by the US). Cuba does not apply any sanction on US citizens, does not prohibit them from investing or engaging in tourism on its soil, does not prohibit their financial transactions, and it does not allow them to organize and carry out terrorist actions from Cuban territory against the United States. The US falsehoods, which are repeated, reinvented and accommodated, have broken the Guinness record, and are truly worthy of consideration. Among the recent falsehoods, is Cuba’s alleged purchase of more than 300 Iranian drones that can attack US territory. Another is related to the sonic attacks (also known as Havana syndrome) against US diplomats. Meanwhile, a third is about the existence of Chinese military spy bases, etc. Washington has always spread these falsehoods without presenting any evidence or proof, while relying on anonymous sources or media outlets that are known for amplifying the lies of US officials, with the purpose of political manipulation. Like the Palestinian people, the heroic Cuban people, are a people of peace. Yet, both peoples refuse to be naive and are prepared for any scenario. The Cuban people do not want confrontation. They prefer dialogue, diplomacy and cooperation, and this has been demonstrated throughout all these years of revolution. Addressing the matter has been difficult and complex, but we have dealt with it without accepting conditions and with full respect for our sovereignty and non-interference in our internal affairs. We are not perfect, neither is any country, but it is up to the Cubans to take the decisions of their political present and future and make the appropriate adjustments and corrections. We do not accept pressure, threats, or blackmail on principle, and we prepare well and with a lot of creativity and resistance, through the defense of war doctrine for all our people in confrontation of any adventure of military aggression. We Cubans will make the invader pay an expensive price, should they try through a prolonged and asymmetric war of attrition, which they will not endure, the way they have not been able to withstand their unjustified wars against other peoples, who have fought in defense of their freedom, sovereignty, and independence. Regarding the regional war waged by the US and its ally Israel against the countries of West Asia, particularly Iran and its concomitance with the rising threats against Cuba, we are more than convinced that it is not accidental and fortuitous. The US Secretary of State and other officials, openly declared that the US will impose its interests on a global level through its military power. The literal interpretation of what they said is that they feel themselves above international law and the principles enshrined in the UN Charter, therefore, they will act without restrictions to attack and invade any country. The US would even violate its own constitution when it considers doing so, while nothing and no one would stop it. Unfortunately, the level of impunity with which the Trump administration acts, makes no country in the world feel safe. It has disarticulated and jeopardized the international security order, in a way that may even lead to a global conflagration, and incalculable consequences. It also endangered the understanding of the entire humanity about the possible use of weapons of mass destruction. This irresponsible policy poses a challenge to the entire international community if it decides to bow to this hegemonic attitude, and does not stop the unreasonable ambitions of a president, who is believed to be able to impose himself on multilateralism and the desire of the majority to build a better world of peace and solidarity. Only the resistance of the peoples, who fight for their freedom and against the arrogance of the empire and its Israeli proxy, such as the Palestinian people, the Iranian people, and the Cuban people, among others, will survive and can never be defeated. These peoples do not make concessions and do not submit to US-Israeli designs, despite all their military power. This has been proved throughout history and the present, when it comes to peoples confronting the aggressiveness of declining empires. BT: Do you believe that Cuba’s support for the Palestinian cause was one of the reasons that drove the US to step up its actions against it? LMF: The example of Cuba’s resistance annoys them, and so is the example of its support for the just causes of the world, such as the struggle of the Palestinian people to return to their usurped land. They do not tolerate that Cuba has had health cooperation in more than 67 nations in the world, with almost half a million personnel dispatched from Cuban health institutions. For example, Cuba initiated internationalist medical aid in Algeria in 1975, to help poor people in need. They are upset that Cuba has graduated hundreds of professionals from third world countries. They are upset that Cuba helps with teachers and scientific methods to eradicate illiteracy in many countries of the Global South. They are upset that Cuba has one of the highest per capita indices of high-level scientists and the best educational levels in Latin America. It bothers them that Cuba is the country with the most Olympic medals in Latin America. It bothers them that Cuban scientists have created five COVID vaccine candidates, and that thousands of doses were provided to other nations that needed it. This happened at the same time as the imperialists banned the Cuban people from getting oxygen and pulmonary ventilators for the intensive care units in the country. They are concerned and do not tolerate that the Cuban doctors have helped to control the epidemic of Ebola virus in Africa. They resent that Cuba is an example, they are upset and do not tolerate that Cuba helps not with bombs but with doctors, and that it has been supported by broad solidarity all over the world. It bothers them that the UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution in favor of lifting the genocidal blockade against the Cuban people for 33 consecutive years, and by an overwhelming majority. It annoys them that people do not believe their argument that Cuba is a failed state, that there is no such economic blockade, that the crisis which Cuba suffers is the responsibility of their government, and that the purpose of sanctions is to affect the government to paradoxically help the Cuban people. They simply resent the fact that Cuba exists as a sovereign and independent nation and that is not subservient to its designs. BT: What do the US threats against Cuba mean for West Asia? LMF: The stability, security, development and well-being of all countries of the world are at stake today, even those with the greatest resources and potential due to their level of oil production like those in West Asia. All together we have the sacred duty to uphold respect for international law, the UN Charter, peace, peaceful coexistence and self-determination, if you want to preserve humanity from an irreversible catastrophe. No unjust war, no threatening language of arms should replace diplomacy and negotiation for the sake of peoples. We are all committed to creating a better world of greater social justice, inclusion, solidarity and peace. Only in this way can we confront the current tendencies of fascism, Zionism, discrimination and egoism, which serve the potency of transnational powers, who believe themselves to be the masters of the world. Like never before, the countries of the South must unite their efforts through their important groupings such as the G-77 and China, the Non-Aligned Movement, BRICS and others that promote cooperation, solidarity, and multilateralism to face the serious problems of humanity through science, education, and above all cooperation to implement new technologies for the benefit of our peoples. If the world does not react and remains silent about the Palestinian genocide, the unfair aggression on the Iranian people, the aggression against the Venezuelan people and the kidnapping of their president, and on the intensification of coercive measures against Cuba, we will see much more suffering, destruction, and death from the war of the powerful in their hegemonic ambition. The world could not wait and must react if we want to save all of us as a rational species. It is fair to acknowledge that most countries in West Asia have voted in favor of the UN General Assembly resolution, which called for lifting the US embargo on Cuba, which is appreciated by the Cuban government and people. In addition, Cuba maintains good diplomatic relations and cooperation in various economic projects of bilateral interests with these countries. BT: How important is the international solidarity with Cuba, especially as Cuba was one of the first countries to cooperate and show solidarity with other nations during the COVID-19 pandemic, before and after it in various areas, despite its limited resources and the criminal US embargo that has been imposed on it for six and a half decades? LMF: Cuba has always felt the solidarity of close friends, especially at moments when Cuban people needed it more in view of the negative impact, and the limitations imposed by the US cruel economic blockade. Many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and others, such as Russia and China, and various solidarity organizations from countries in Europe and other continents have made important contributions in food, medicines, supplies, and solar panels to mitigate the impact of the crisis affecting the Cuban people. In Mexico, for example, a campaign has been launched to buy an oil vessel with contributions from the Mexican people, and reports surface every day about solidarity actions around the world, demonstrations and statements released by organizations voicing support for Cuba and criticizing the hostility of US policy. All this solidarity showcased that Cuba is not alone, it is still loved by the peoples of the world. Despite the limitations, these peoples have felt the example of Cuba’s hands of solidarity when they needed it the most in different circumstances, ranging from climate catastrophes, programs of social and educational impact, up to the confrontation with epidemics, such as COVID. The post Exclusive: Cuba’s ambassador sounds the alarm on escalating US war against the island appeared first on BT News. From BT News via This RSS Feed.

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Far-Right Upstart de la Espriella Advances to Runoff in Colombia's Presidential Election

Abelardo de la Espriella—a far-right political upstart who promises to wield an “iron fist” against criminals and who emulates right-wing presidents, including Donald Trump in the United States—secured the most votes in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election and will advance to a second-round runoff, the country’s electoral authorities announced over the weekend. Leftist Sen. Iván Cepeda, the handpicked successor of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, had been expected to win the first-round contest, based on voter surveys. However, de la Espriella and his running mate, former Finance Minister José Manuel Restrepo Abondano, won 43.74% of the vote, with Cepeda and Aida Marina Quilcué Vivas, a senator and Indigenous leader, garnering 40.9%, according to preliminary results published by the National Electoral Council. Addressing a jubilant crowd in Barronanquilla—a city he lost—de la Espriella, who represents the Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland) party, triumphantly declared, “We will punish the enemies of Colombia!” “Today, the people spoke,” said the 47-year-old attorney, who is also known as the Tiger. “For the first time in political history, an independent man, without silencers and with the necessary character, has won.” “Gustavo Petro, do not dare to ignore the results of the elections because the people are going to rise up and they will punish you," he added. Petro has refused to acknowledge Sunday’s preliminary results due to alleged irregularities, claiming there were roughly 800,000–885,000 additional voter IDs in the election system compared with the official electoral census. Cepeda, 63, addressed the discrepancy during a speech to supporters in Bogotá, saying that “there is a gap we want to verify… We are talking about 885,000 people.” People rallied in Bogotá and elsewhere in Colombia on Sunday in support of Cepeda and the incumbent Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) party. LAS CALLES DE BOGOTÁ ESTALLAN CONTRA ABELARDO DE LA ESPRIELLA pic.twitter.com/AmVvaOSIYw — Julian D. Martinez (@jumartinezp) June 2, 2026 The global leftist coalition Progressive International (PI) issued an urgent alert “regarding conduct by US Sen. Bernie Moreno that appears to constitute a direct violation of Colombia’s electoral law” amid reporting that the Ohio Republican traveled to Colombia to try to facilitate an alliance between de la Espriella and establishment conservative candidate Sen. Paloma Valencia with the goal of defeating Cepeda. Moreno and the candidates denied that any such meetings were planned. David Adler, PI’s co-general coordinator, told Colombian National Radio that US corporate media are “orchestrating a smear campaign” looking “for new ways to defame the candidate Iván Cepeda, alleging links to drug trafficking, just as they did” with Petro. Adler also reported police officers conducting entry checks at polling places, telling voters to “stand at attention for the homeland”—one of de la Espriella’s campaign slogans. De la Espriella—a criminal defense attorney who has represented mass murderers, drug traffickers, money launderers, paramilitary militiamen, and others—ran on a “law and order” platform and promised to wield an “iron fist” against criminals. He has pledged to build megaprisons like the violence-plagued Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) built under Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whom he once called “the best example in the world of what a country must do.” “The ‘Total Peace’ policy ends with me," de la Espriella previously said, referring to Petro’s effort to end Colombia’s long-running internal conflict through a broad, multi-track approach. “Total Security will begin,” he said. “The public [security] forces… must be strengthened through an agreement with the United States. We want to be part of the Shield of the Americas, and we want to build a major policy with the United States to end drug trafficking.” De la Espriella has said he wants to withdraw Colombia from the United Nations and forge closer ties with the United States and Trump, one of the right-wing leaders for whom he has expressed admiration. He has also repeatedly praised Bukele and Argentinian President Javier Milei. According to El País, American flags and “Make America Great Again” hats were seen at Sunday’s victory rally in Barranquilla. Israeli flags were also spotted; de la Espriella has vowed to restore ties with Israel, which Petro severed in 2024 due to the country’s annihilation of Gaza. Under Petro, Colombia also formally intervened in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. De la Espriella’s desire for closer cooperation with Washington comes as the Trump administration illegally bombs boats in the Caribbean Sea, including off the Colombian coast, and Pacific Ocean, claiming—without providing evidence—that the vessels were smuggling drugs. Trump also ordered an invasion of Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro on dubious narco-terrorism charges, and the US is taking part in military operations against alleged drug cartels in Ecuador, where civilians have reportedly been killed and tortured during the campaign. The US Department of Justice is now reportedly investigating whether Petro has any links to narco-traffickers—a claim that the president vehemently denies. On the domestic front, de la Espriella has vowed to “put God back in the classrooms” as part of a revival of Christian conservatism. He has also been accused of misogyny for comments—including telling female journalists that he gained many women’s votes due to the size of his genitals—and of homophobic harassment of Valencia’s running mate, Juan David Oviedo. In an incident that alarmed many Colombians, de la Espriella laughingly boasted on national television about how, in his youth, he tortured and killed cats by blowing them up with fireworks. The second round runoff between de la Espriella and Cepeda is scheduled for June 21. Valencia has thrown her support behind de la Espriella, but having won less than 7% of the first-round vote, and with centrist candidate Sergio Fajardo’s 1 million votes up for grabs, observers say it’s anyone’s race to win—or lose. “As the saying goes," Colombian political strategist Miguel Jaramillo Luján told Al Jazeera on Monday, "whoever makes fewer mistakes will be the winner.” From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

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East Asia’s Double Bind: Contradictions and Possibilities in the New Cold War

The images in this dossier, edited by Tricontinental’s art department, highlight the work of Kinjo Minoru, an Okinawan sculptor who honours the generations that have resisted war and occupation. For decades, Kinjo has carved the atrocities committed during and after the World Anti-Fascist War (widely known as the Second World War) era. Kinjo works in concrete, plaster, and metal – the same materials now being poured into Okinawa to build yet another US military base. In Okinawa – today a frontline in the New Cold War – Kinjo’s sculptures stand as memory and material refutation: a rough, heavy history that refuses to be smoothed over. 1 No Cold War, International Strategy Center, and the International Peoples’ Assembly When the United States and Israel began their illegal war of aggression against Iran on 28 February 2026, it was inevitable that Iran would retaliate by restricting transit through the Strait of Hormuz. While Iran has never closed or restricted movement through the strait before, the government in Tehran had made it clear that the geography of the strait would become part of its defensive strategy if provoked. For the countries of Asia, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca are vital pathways – chokepoints – for the flow of goods, especially energy. Around 90% of Japan’s oil and 75% of South Korea’s passes through the strait. Any slowdown at the strait dramatically impacts the energy-hungry industrial economies of East Asia. From an economic perspective, the US-Israeli war on Iran is also a war against the interests of Japan and South Korea – and indeed every Asian country that relies on oil from the Persian Gulf. Despite this fact, many Asian countries have either maintained diplomatic silence or, as in the case of Japan and South Korea, openly backed the United States. Countries like Japan and South Korea align with the United States against their own economic self-interest because they were absorbed into the US military architecture after the end of the World Anti-Fascist War (widely known as the Second World War).2 The continued presence of massive US military bases in these countries inexorably draws them into the US’s forever wars. These countries cannot break with the US on the war on Iran as long as they are militarily subordinated to it. The US’s principal military target in Asia is not Iran but China, which is a leading trade partner of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and most other Asian countries. Given China’s centrality in the region’s industrial chains, any aggression against it would disrupt the entire development paradigm of East Asia. On the other hand, the US remains the principal military patron of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, as well as a major export market for several of them. This places these economies in a double bind: they can neither break easily from their military and economic dependence on the US nor can they break from their vital economic relationship with China – the new factory of the world. In East Asia’s Double Bind: Contradictions and Possibilities in the New Cold War, we look at how Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are caught in an intractable contradiction that persists regardless of changes in government. Although our focus is on East Asia, we also briefly analyse the role of states like Australia and India in this conjuncture. The contradictions explored in this dossier are primarily economic and geopolitical, yet they pose possibilities to advance the class struggle in these societies by exposing the need to break from subordinate alliances with imperialism. East Asia and the Role of China Over the past thirty years, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan have seen a dramatic shift in their trade patterns and development trajectories.3 During the Cold War, the United States was the principal anchor of the region’s economic order, followed by Japan during the late twentieth century.4 Today, the new centre of gravity is China, which plays a central – though uneven – role across these economies. While each has its own development model and political relationship with Beijing, all four are deeply integrated into a production network in which China functions as a manufacturing hub, supply chain anchor, and primary market. Studies by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have clearly demonstrated China’s economic significance in East Asia.5 China is the single largest trading partner for Japan and South Korea, accounting for roughly 20–25% of each country’s exports. Taiwan’s relationship is even stronger, with 30–40% of its exports going to China. The Philippines is less integrated, but China still ranks among its top trading partners, absorbing roughly 15–20% of exports. These figures indicate that a significant share of East Asian economic activity is directly tied to demand from China’s industries.6 When viewed in relation to overall economic output, the importance of China becomes even clearer. Trade with China, namely total exports, accounts for a tenth of South Korea’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A quarter of Taiwan’s GDP is tied to trade with mainland China. Japan, with a much more domestic-oriented economy, nonetheless has 5% of its GDP tied to exports to China (roughly the same percentage of its GDP is tied to the US, which includes the economic impact of the 120 US military facilities in Japan). The Philippines, while less export intensive, has around 6% of its GDP tied to exports to China.7 The vitality of the Chinese economy is therefore directly tied to the levels of output, employment, and investment in all of East Asia. At the 2011 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Bali, Indonesia, member states discussed the necessity of creating a regional framework for economic integration. These discussions eventually led to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade agreement signed in 2020 and brought into force in January 2022. The RCEP accounts for roughly 30% of the world’s population and 30% of global GDP. Spanning economies from New Zealand to Japan, it brings together a range of industries, from mining to high technology, and a market of 2.2 billion consumers. Signatories have agreed to reduce or eliminate tariffs by 92% over twenty years. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are part of the RCEP, which reinforces trade flows and formalises the interconnected economic space in which China is the largest economy.8 Beneath aggregate trade figures, the structure of production further reinforces this integration. China is not only a final market but also a central node in regional and global industrial chains as a major consumer and producer of intermediate goods. Japanese and South Korean firms export high-value components – such as machinery and automobile parts, petrochemicals, and semiconductors – that are often assembled or processed in China before being re-exported globally. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is deeply intertwined with Chinese manufacturing, as chips produced in Taiwan are often sent to China for integration into finished electronics.9 These integrated production structures have created sectoral interdependencies. South Korea’s semiconductor industry – led by firms such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix – relies on demand from Chinese electronics manufacturing. Japan’s automotive and machinery sectors – led by firms such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Komatsu, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi – rely on Chinese consumers and production networks. Taken together, these trade and production links show that all four economies are structurally linked to China, even though the degree of integration varies (it is the highest in Taiwan and South Korea and more moderate in Japan and the Philippines). This creates both opportunities for growth and vulnerabilities as US pressure on China reverberates across the region. The Garland of US Military Bases Over the past decade, the United States has consolidated a coherent military strategy aimed at encircling China. This ‘strategy of denial’ was formalised in successive US National Defense Strategy documents and articulated prominently in Elbridge A. Colby’s 2021 book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Colby led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy as deputy assistant secretary of defence for strategy and force development during Trump’s first term and is now the US under-secretary of war for policy as well as a leading strategist behind the Trump administration’s approach to China.10 At the core of the strategy of denial is the idea that the Indo-Pacific – stretching from East Africa to the west coast of the United States and encompassing the Indian and Pacific oceans – is the most economically significant region in the world. US strategic interests depend on preventing China from displacing US primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. The strategy rests on deterrence through military superiority and alliance coordination, which has been institutionalised through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, which brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the United States (2017); AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (2021); the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a US military funding and force-posture framework for the Indo-Pacific (2021); and the US-Japan-South Korea Trilateral Agreement (2023).11 Rather than direct confrontation, as with Iran, the US seeks to raise China’s cost of defence to an unacceptable level by strengthening the US-based alliance system and the forward positioning of US military bases. There are currently about 270 US military facilities stretching from Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago to Guam. Central to this strategy is Washington’s belief that a credible US military capability can constrain China’s strategic choices while preserving a US-led regional order and continuing to draw on China’s role as an economic engine for the region. Taiwan occupies a critical place in this US framework.12 On 1 January 1979, the United States formally recognised the People’s Republic of China and acknowledged Beijing’s position that there is ‘One China’, of which Taiwan is a part. However, on 10 April 1979, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which provided the legal basis for Washington to maintain an unofficial relationship with Taiwan. This allowed the US to play a double game, formally acknowledging the One China framework while provoking Beijing through arms sales to Taiwan and maintaining direct economic and cultural ties with Taipei. Since 1950, the United States has sold Taiwan nearly $50 billion in defence equipment and services.13 For the US, Taiwan’s status is not only political but strategic because Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland would give China significantly greater access to the Pacific Ocean. For Washington, Taiwan is an instrument to pressure Beijing and constrain China. The US containment strategy is geographically organised through a system of encirclement that begins with the first island chain (an arc of islands that stretches from Japan to the Philippines and acts as a barrier to China’s access to the Pacific Ocean). This extends into the wider ‘encirclement depth’ of Diego Garcia, Sri Lanka, and the US bases in the Persian Gulf region.14 The US has developed a network of bases and access agreements along this chain to control key nodes and shipping routes and to constrain Chinese military mobility. This encirclement strategy includes not only large, permanent military installations (such as those in Japan and South Korea) but increasingly a dispersed network of smaller, more flexible sites across the Pacific and Indian oceans designed to enhance military resilience. The bases are integrated with surveillance, intelligence, and missile systems that enable monitoring and rapid response. Together, this military network constitutes a structured system of containment. While US national security documents frame this as defensive deterrence, the effective positioning of US forces along China’s border creates tensions rather than resolving them. The US strategic framework of containment and encirclement has been operationalised through a sustained expansion of US military capabilities and infrastructure in East Asia, particularly over the past two decades and with increasing intensity since 2020. The US has also been funding large-scale military exercises such as Exercise Balikatan (with the Philippines), Exercise Malabar (with Australia, India, and Japan), and Exercise Talisman Sabre (with Australia). These efforts are designed to improve military interoperability and turn US allies from regional partners into frontline participants in the containment of China. One of the more recent frameworks advanced by the US is the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), which was established by the 2021 US National Defence Authorisation Act.15 The PDI ensures dedicated funding for force deployment, base infrastructure, missile defence, and joint exercises with US allies such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. In Japan, the PDI has ensured upgrades to missile defence and rapid deployment forces. In South Korea, it has enabled joint exercises, while in the Philippines it has upgraded US bases and surveillance systems. The PDI also underpins the integration and deployment of long-range precision missile systems across the Indo-Pacific. This includes the expanded air and missile defence capacities that have been built up at US military bases in places such as Guam and the Mariana Islands as well as Basa Air Base in the Philippines (for which the US government allocated around $66 million in 2023).16 The PDI ensures intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems that enhance the tracking of regional military activity and enables what is known as ‘precision targeting’ – the rapid identification and accurate striking of military targets. These developments have transformed countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines into forward operating platforms for US aggression. Sowing Conflict: Class Contradictions and the Limits of Democracy The US strategy of denial depends not only on military integration but also on the alignment of the ruling classes across the first island chain into a coordinated anti-China posture – particularly in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, and more broadly in neighbouring South Korea. This alignment reflects the interests of the domestic industrial, military, and political elites tied to US power. Across Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, the deepening of US military integration sharpens existing class contradictions and exposes the narrowness of electoral systems. While this generates resistance from below, these political systems are designed to prevent the growth of any force that is inimical to US intervention. Additionally, each of these societies bears the scars of the World Anti-Fascist War and the postwar US military presence, including military bases that are now seemingly permanent – an experience that has continued to define the political outlook of these ‘client states’.17 Japan Japan’s postwar political system has been dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a right- to far-right political formation with intimate ties to the US state and capital. While formally democratic, Japan’s political system is effectively dominated by a single party, with the LDP in office for all but four years since its formation in 1955. Though article 9 of Japan’s 1947 Constitution, sometimes called the ‘pacifist clause’, forbids a military build-up going beyond minimal defence, the political right has called for its removal since the premiership of Nobusuke Kishi (1957–1960). In 2014, during the premiership of Kishi’s grandson, Shinzō Abe (2012–2020), article 9 was reinterpreted to allow for ‘collective self-defence’, enabling the expansion of Japanese military spending – which has risen particularly since 2022 under prime ministers Fumio Kishida, Shigeru Ishiba, and Sanae Takaichi. Between 2023 and 2024, Japanese military spending rose by 21%, accounting for 1.4% of the country’s GDP.18 In April 2026, under Takaichi, Japan lifted a ban on the export of lethal weapons, which had been put in place based on the logic that a pacifist country should not profit from wars. The contradiction between military spending and democratic demands that Japan’s wealth be invested on social needs – exemplified by anti-base protests in poorer regions like Okinawa – reveals the limitations of Japan’s formal democracy. Japanese society remains subordinated to military priorities defined by a permanent Japanese elite aligned with the US. The construction of a new Marine Corps base in the Henoko-Oura Bay area of Okinawa, intended to replace Futenma Air Station – long criticised for its location in the middle of densely populated Ginowan – has faced continuous opposition since 1996. In 2018, Denny Tamaki was elected governor of Okinawa on an anti-base platform; in a prefectural referendum held in 2019, 70% of respondents opposed the construction of the base. Despite such democratic mandates and decades of legal challenges, Japan’s central government proceeds with landfill operations that are destroying Oura Bay’s coral ecosystems on behalf of the US military.19 Organisations including the All Okinawa Council Against Construction of New Base in Henoko, the Okinawa Peace Movement Center, the Okinawa Environmental Justice Project, and the Henoko sit-in protesters – who have maintained daily resistance for over two decades – embody a politics that connects local struggle to broader questions of imperialism and self-determination.20 South Korea South Korea’s political history is marked by intense class struggles. Born amid the Korean War, which began in 1950 and remains formally unresolved since the 1953 armistice did not produce a peace treaty, South Korea has been treated by the United States as a military base and economic bulwark against communism. Though it has been under pro-US administrations, including a military dictatorship from 1967 to 1988, South Korea’s political system has appeared more fluid than Japan’s: no single party has ruled continuously. Nonetheless, elected governments, both conservative and liberal, have remained structurally dependent on the US. For example, this was the case under both Yoon Suk-yeol, a conservative strongly aligned with the United States and the chaebols (South Korean conglomerates), and Moon Jae-in, a liberal who sought limited autonomy but remained tied to export-oriented capital and the chaebols. In fact, in 2018, during Moon Jae-in’s liberal presidency, South Korea’s military spending rose to 2.5% of GDP, establishing a level that subsequent annual budgets have continued to pursue (it rose to 2.6 % in 2022).21 Since the mid-2010s, South Korea has seen a wave of democratic struggles, from the Candlelight Revolution or Chot*–bul Hyuk-myung (2016–2017), which removed President Park Geun-hye from office, to the Revolution of Lights or *Bit-eh Hyuk*–myu**ng* (2024–2025), which sought to defend South Korean democracy against the martial law imposed by President Yoon Suk-yeol in December 2024. Despite repeated working-class and civil society mobilisation against inequality and calls for greater foreign policy independence, South Korea’s subordination to the US has prevented such transformation. Furthermore, South Korea’s economic and military dependence on the US means that it must adopt deeply unpopular measures such as dispatching Korean troops to Iraq or installing the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system. Since its inception, South Korea has deferred its foreign policy to the US. One result of this is that the failed 2019 North Korea-United States Hanoi Summit resulted in a freeze in inter-Korean relations.22 Meanwhile, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) deepening ties with Russia have expanded Pyongyang’s room for manoeuvre. In June 2025, Lee Jae-myung won the presidency after playing a role in preventing President Yoon from imposing martial law some months earlier. A human rights and labour lawyer, President Lee has nonetheless continued to entangle South Korea’s military-industrial complex with the US. Even as Lee attempts to regain wartime operational control of the Korean military, his economic concessions to US President Donald Trump have embedded South Korea even deeper in the US war machine. Not only has Lee agreed to US calls for allies to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence, but South Korea will also invest $350 billion over the next ten years to increase US semiconductor fabrication (with their dual use enabling the expansion of military AI) and expand US naval shipbuilding, helping to relieve chronic bottlenecks in the US maritime industrial base, a push captured in the sycophantic Korean slogan MASGA: Make American Shipbuilding Great Again. More specifically, the South Korean Hanwha Group’s acquisition of the Philadelphia Shipyard in 2024 allows it to serve as a potential solution to the backlog of nuclear-powered submarines in the US Navy and contribute to the production of US Navy warships. Furthermore, South Korea hosts a US Space Force presence that cooperates with the US in creating a network of interoperable satellites for Trump’s Golden Dome.23 All these actions have allowed South Korea to join Israel in the US club of ‘model allies’.24 The Philippines The Philippines has struggled to assert its sovereignty since it was seized by the United States in 1898. Political power in the country has been dominated by a few elite families (for instance, the current president, Bongbong Marcos, is the son of Ferdinand Marcos, who was president from 1965 to 1986). The country relied entirely on the US for its security plans until 1991, and in 1995 launched the Armed Forces of the Philippines Modernisation Program, which allowed for the expansion of the Philippine navy and air force, largely through the purchase of US military equipment. The Philippines’ military became integrated with that of the US through procurement and joint exercises. The structure of US power over the Philippines is best illustrated by the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), first signed in 2014 and then expanded in 2022. EDCA allows US military forces rotational access to Philippine military bases, enabling the pre-positioning of equipment, joint training, and the construction of US military infrastructure on the bases, with minimal oversight from the Philippine government. In 2023, early in the Marcos Jr. administration, designated sites under EDCA were nearly doubled (increasing from five to nine). The Camilo Osias Naval Base and Lal-lo Airport are located at the northern tip of the Philippines, allowing ‘rapid response’ to conflicts in the Taiwan Strait.25 These two bases are supported by the Camp Melchor F. Dela Cruz in the mountainous Cagayan Valley, which acts as a logistical rear. The US presence at these bases helps Washington project force across the Luzon Strait, which the Philippines shares with Taiwan. The fourth newly designated site has not been publicly disclosed, but its location makes clear its role in US projection in the South China Sea. Through EDCA, US forces conduct Exercise Balikatan, which has reached unprecedented scale under the Marcos Jr. administration, with Japan even joining in 2025. Civil society organisations and peace activists continue to debate the implications of the Marcos Jr. administration’s close alignment with the US. This alignment has unfolded alongside intensified repression of activists and rural organisers, including the killing of nineteen people by Philippine troops in Toboso, Negros Occidental, in April 2026 – an incident that human rights groups have called to be independently investigated. Taiwan After the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) was defeated in the Chinese Revolution, it fled to the island of Taiwan under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and constructed its government there. The KMT ruled Taiwan under martial law for thirty-eight years, until 1987, and then continued to rule in a one-party dominated electoral system until 2000. Since then, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has largely been in power, moving Taiwanese politics further towards separatism from mainland China and towards integrating the island more deeply into US strategic plans. The DPP reflects a coalition of techno-capitalists, separatist elites, and military institutions, while the KMT draws its support from businesses with interests in cross-strait trade with China. Both, however, operate within a framework shaped by US strategic priorities. Since 2022, Taiwan’s military spending and US military support have shown a pattern of steady, coordinated strengthening rather than sudden rearmament. Taiwan’s military budget has exploded, reaching approximately $30 billion in 2026. Military spending has risen from 2% of GDP in the 2010s to 3.3% in 2026, with plans to increase to 5% by 2030. This massive diversion of resources falls on a society already confronting stagnant wages and rising living costs. The military budget finances arms purchases and enriches US defence contractors. US military sales to Taiwan have become more regular, with frequent arms packages focused on missiles, air defence, and drones. Between 2019 and 2024, the United States approved over $32 billion in weapons sales to Taiwan, including F-16V fighters ($8 billion), M1A2 Abrams tanks ($2 billion), HIMARS rocket systems ($436 million), and Harpoon coastal defence missiles, with massive new packages worth more than $11 billion announced in 2025.26 But arms sales are no longer the limit of US military involvement. Since 2024, US Army Special Forces, commonly known as Green Berets, have been stationed on the Kinmen and Penghu islands, the first enduring US military presence on Taiwanese territory in over forty years. The military escalation is unmistakably driven by the US, creating the conditions for a self-fulfilling crisis through militarisation while framing Chinese responses as ‘provocations’. The political fragility of this path to militarisation warrants emphasis. Lai Ching-te of the DPP took office on 20 May 2024 after winning only 40.1% of the vote, with the KMT securing 33.5% and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) 26.5%. Crucially, the KMT and TPP opposition controls the Legislative Yuan – Taiwan’s highest legislative organ – for the first time since 2016. Out of 113 seats, 52 are held by the KMT, 8 by the TPP, and 51 by the DPP. This political opening was underscored in April 2026, when KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun visited Beijing and met Xi Jinping – the first such visit by a KMT chair in a decade – signalling that part of the opposition is attempting to reopen cross-strait engagement rather than follow the DPP’s path of military escalation. The legislature did not vote for the military escalation that the DPP pursues. Public opinion polling by National Chengchi University’s Election Study Centre reveals that only 3.8% of the population, the lowest since 2002, support ‘immediate independence’, with 1.2% supporting immediate unification. Meanwhile, 83–88% prefer the status quo, with a record high of 33.2% wanting the ‘status quo indefinitely’.27 The DPP’s confrontational posture with the mainland, intensified with the 2019 Anti-Infiltration Act, aimed at curbing China’s alleged political influence in Taiwan, now lacks both a legislative and a popular mandate. Left-unificationist organisations like the Labour Party of Taiwan have argued that the social basis for the DPP’s separatism is rooted in colonial-era Japanese collaborators and that the Taiwan question is a legacy of US intervention in the Chinese Civil War. The US does not need to formally expand its presence in Taiwan in the way it does in Japan or the Philippines, as the DPP wholeheartedly supports the US strategy of containment. These trends indicate deepened US-Taiwan military integration, approaching a quasi-alliance in practice since a formal treaty would trigger a response from Beijing. Since 2022, there has been a durable militarisation of Taiwan punctuated by moments of callous disregard for Taiwan’s own development – the US has even suggested blowing up Taiwan’s semiconductor factories to protect US interests on the island.28 Beyond the First Island Chain The US strategy to contain China extends beyond the first island chain through groupings such as AUKUS and the Quad. These arrangements create overlapping layers of military cooperation that constrain China’s mobility in nearby waters and across the Indo-Pacific. They also reveal tensions between economic interdependence with China and military alliances oriented toward confrontation. The resulting contradictions raise questions about the durability of these formations. Two major actors stand out as pivotal players in this broader architecture: Australia and India. Australia Australia is a member of the Five-Eyes – an intelligence-sharing network led by the US – and is one of six ‘Enhanced Opportunities Partners’ of NATO. As such, Australia has always played a key role in US strategy in Asia. The most significant recent development in the US-Australia alliance is the 2021 AUKUS agreement, which, under its first pillar, would give Australia nuclear-powered attack submarines. The programme began with increased visits by US submarines to Australian ports, followed by rotational deployments at Australian bases, and is expected to culminate in the Royal Australian Navy’s acquisition of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines beginning in the 2030s (with a portion constructed domestically through joint cooperation in the 2040s). With a total estimated cost of more than $264 billion, these nuclear-powered submarines are strategic because they enable long-range operations across the Indian and Pacific oceans. While not explicitly stated, the interoperability and deep operational dependence on the US would make Australia part of the US posture against China, including in efforts to control sea lanes and to support US operations in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. Though Australia has already paid Washington more than $1 billion under AUKUS, the Trump administration, facing its own submarine bottleneck, is reviewing whether to provide Australia with the promised submarines.29 A congressional report has even considered keeping the submarines under US control and operating them out of Australian bases given Australia’s reluctance to promise military intervention in a potential war between the US and China, as the latter is Australia’s largest trading partner.30 This is indicative of the contradictions and tensions between national interests and alliance commitments. India India’s position in the containment architecture differs from that of Japan or Taiwan. India has no formal alliance with the US, maintains membership in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and inherits a powerful tradition of non-alignment. Yet India’s foreign policy trajectory over the past decade reveals a trend of compliance with US strategic preferences, often disguised by the rhetoric of strategic autonomy. India has signed defence framework agreements with the US that integrate Indian forces into US command, control, and intelligence architectures. India’s drift towards Washington is most instructive when viewed in the context of its weakening relationship with Iran, a traditional friend and ally. When the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Iran in 2018 and demanded the cessation of Iranian oil purchases, India complied by reducing imports from 500,000 barrels per day to near zero by May 2019. India’s compliance meant forgoing cheaper Iranian oil and jeopardising its investments in Iran’s Chabahar Port, a strategically important project for India because it guarantees access to Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan.31 On 12 March 2025, global 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium took effect, raising tariffs on Indian steel and aluminium to 26%. On 6 August, Trump imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods over India’s purchase of discounted Russian oil, bringing the cumulative rate to 50%. India eventually agreed to halt purchases of Russian oil but stopped short of signing a decisive trade agreement with the US after the US Supreme Court overruled Trump’s tariffs. Despite these agreements with the US, India remains a member of the BRICS process and maintains important economic relations with both China and Russia. India-China bilateral trade grew 12% year-on-year in 2025, reaching $155.6 billion. India’s participation in the SCO has deepened, especially following Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the 2025 SCO summit in Tianjin. In 2018, India signed a $5.4 billion deal to purchase the S-400 air defence system from Russia despite threats of US sanctions. Trade between India and Russia has surged significantly in recent years, driven particularly by discounted Russian crude oil purchases that increased from negligible levels before 2022 to a peak of two million barrels per day by 2025, making Russia the largest oil supplier to India. India’s continued trade with Russia and China sits uneasily alongside its participation in the Quad and US partnership agreements, revealing a contradiction at the heart of India’s positioning. India illustrates a pattern of graduated coercion by the US. Even as a strategic partner, India has no protection from imperial coercion.32 Alliance Fragility and Economic Contradictions The strategy of denial assumes that the US can commit its allies to containing China – an assumption that erodes upon scrutiny. The material prosperity of US allies increasingly depends on economic integration with China, even as military alignments commit them to potential conflict. Every region examined in this dossier faces the same fundamental contradiction: between economic integration with China and military alignment against China. In 2025, these countries’ trade with China – South Korea’s $331 billion, Japan’s $322 billion, the Philippines $73 billion, and Australia’s $207 billion – dwarfed their trade with the US –$241.2 billion with South Korea, $228 billion with Japan, $27 billion with the Philippines, and $89.6 billion with Australia. Even India’s trade with China ($156 billion) is larger than its trade with the US ($149 billion). These flows represent wealth, employment, and government revenue that would be devastated by war or sustained confrontation with China. When actual conflict looms, these economic interests may prove more decisive than abstract military commitments. During the US war on Iraq, significant US allies refused to participate despite enormous US pressure and invocation of alliance commitments. In Asia, Japan and South Korea refused to provide combat forces, even though they did provide logistical assistance and reconstruction funds. More recently, no US allies (including Japan and South Korea) have stepped up to Trump’s demands that they send ships to open the Strait of Hormuz. If allies proved unreliable for a war against a weaker adversary, how likely is their participation in a war against China, an industrial and nuclear power? Would Australia send combat forces to fight China, risking retaliation against Australian cities and the loss of its largest trading partner? Would South Korea participate, when a regional war might trigger intervention by the DPRK? Would Japan’s people, traumatised by the US nuclear bombing, accept casualties in combat? Would India commit forces when Taiwan’s status has no direct relevance to Indian security and participation would jeopardise relationships with China and Russia? Would the Philippines fight if it meant risking Chinese retaliation? Alliances function smoothly when costs remain hypothetical and abstract: joint exercises, intelligence sharing, arms purchases, and diplomatic coordination. They face severe tests when actual war requires sacrificing lives, accepting economic devastation, and risking national existence for another power’s interests, especially when that power is the aggressor. The strategy of denial’s reliance on allied participation may be its fatal flaw if conflict breaks out, especially when alliances rest on subordination and coercion rather than genuine shared interests. Resisting the War Machine and Building Multilateralism The emerging New Cold War, centred in East Asia, is a strategic US response to the shifting centre of gravity of the world economy. As China’s economic and technological capabilities expand, US policy is increasingly reliant on military force and alliance structures to maintain strategic influence in the Indo-Pacific.33 This strategy of denial seeks to contain China through militarisation, alliance coordination, and defence modernisation. Washington is building a provocative military architecture in the region through a network of initiatives and partnerships. Across East Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the implications of intensifying militarisation are profound. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and India either host significant military infrastructure or participate in military cooperation that could place them at the centre of a major confrontation. For many societies in the region, the prospect of heightened militarisation raises concerns about opportunity costs as resources directed toward defence spending compete with investments in social welfare, infrastructure, climate resilience, and economic development. Foreign policy analysts and progressive policymakers in the region have proposed several reforms for peace and de-escalation. These include confidence-building measures in flashpoint areas such as the Taiwan Strait, renewed arms-control initiatives, and multilateral mechanisms for managing maritime disputes in the South China Sea. Regional organisations, particularly ASEAN, are often cited as potential platforms for dialogue and conflict management. While these proposals are welcome, any transformation must inevitably come from the organised people of the region themselves. Diverse social movements across the region continue to advocate for diplomacy, regional cooperation, and demilitarisation. In Okinawa, organisations such as the Okinawa Environmental Justice Project and No More Battle of Okinawa protest the expansion of US bases. In the Philippines, organisations such as Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) oppose expanded military access agreements and call for greater national sovereignty. In South Korea, political parties and social movements, such as the People’s International Action Denouncing Trump, support renewed diplomatic engagement to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Similar debates occur in Taiwan, Australia, India, and other regions navigating US militarism. The International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA) – a network of around 200 social movements, political parties, and trade unions founded in 2015 – has worked closely with grassroots organisations in the region, building solidarity and consensus on key issues. At this crucial conjuncture, when militarisation threatens peace and development in Asia and indeed the entire world, the IPA has launched the Hands-Off Asia campaign. That campaign is centred around four demands to de-escalate from this New Cold War in Asia: Remove all foreign military bases and democratise security. The hundreds of foreign military bases that litter the Asian region should be removed so that regional policy can be democratised and peace can be more than just preparation for the next war. States should avoid forming rigid military blocs, limit forward deployments, and commit to preventing an arms race. Military policy should be accountable to the public – there should be parliamentary, local government, and civil society oversight over military agreements, defence budgets, and foreign troop deployments. Increase people-to-people contact. Support cooperation among labour unions, student groups, peace organisations, and social movements across Asia to oppose arms races, foreign bases, and escalating confrontation. Encourage people-to-people exchanges, cultural ties, and grassroots diplomacy across borders – especially between societies in conflict or under heightened tension – to build a shared regional culture of peace. Institutionalise sustained dialogue. Establish regular, high-level political and military-to-military communication channels to manage crises, reduce miscalculation, and build trust. Promote practical confidence-building mechanisms such as hotlines and incident-prevention agreements. Prioritise cooperative security and shared challenges. Shift focus from zero-sum competition to collaboration on key issues such as climate change, public health, economic stability, and development, reinforcing interdependence as a foundation for peace. Campaign for reductions in military spending and the reallocation of resources toward healthcare, climate action, education, and the reduction of inequality by linking peace to social justice. Underlying these struggles is a broader structural shift in the global economy. China’s growth as the major industrial power has reshaped global production networks and altered the distribution of economic influence. These changes have given a new impulse to sovereign-seeking movements across the Global South. Whether this transition leads to stable and peaceful multilateralism or intensified competition remains uncertain. Much depends on whether the class struggle can be advanced so as to push the agenda towards peace and development rather than war and austerity. Notes 1Though Okinawa makes up just 0.6% of Japan’s landmass, it hosts roughly 70% of all US military facilities in the country. Read more about Kinjo and Okinawa’s history in our twenty-sixth art bulletin (April 2026), ‘You Cannot Swallow a Needle, However Small: Okinawa’s Sculptor of Resistance’, https://thetricontinental.org/art-bulletin-okinawas-sculptor-of-resistance/. 2 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The 80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War, Understanding Who Saved Humanity: A Restorationist History, Contemporary Dilemmas no. 5, 12 November 2025, https://thetricontinental.org/the-80th-anniversary-of-the-victory-in-the-world-anti-fascist-war/. 3 Linda Glawe and Helmut Wagner, The Economic Rise of East Asia. Development Paths of Japan, South Korea, and China (Cham: Springer, 2021); and Asian Development Bank, Asian Economic Integration Report 2025: Harnessing the Benefits of Regional Cooperation and Integration (Asian Development Bank, 2025). 4 Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford University Press, 1982); and Masahiko Aoki, Hikaku Seido Bunseki ni Mukete (Toyo Keizai Shinposa, 1995). 5 Asian Economic Integration Reports, Asian Development Bank, https://www.adb.org/publications/series/asian-economic-integration-report. 6 Lin Yifu, Jiedu Zhongguo Jingji [Demystifying the Chinese Economy] (Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, 2012). 7 This data is available at the UN Comtrade Database website, https://comtradeplus.un.org/. 8 Cheng Yawen, ‘Building the New “Three Rings”: Reconfiguring China’s Foreign Relations in the Face of Decoupling’, Wenhua Zongheng, vol. 1, no. 1, March 2023, https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-1-building-the-new-three-rings/. 9 Honghong Tinn, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025); and Bappa Sinha, Breaking the Stranglehold: How China is Shattering US Technological Hegemony, Tricontinental Interventions: Conjunctural Analysis from Asia no. 10, 27 March 2026, https://thetricontinental.org/asia/breaking-the-stranglehold-how-china-is-shattering-us-technological-hegemony/. 10 Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021). 11 Clinton Fernandes, Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena (Melbourne University Press, 2022); Andrew Fowler, Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty (Melbourne University Press, 2024); Jeffrey Wagner and Dae-Han Song, ‘Trilateral missile defense system a step towards Asian NATO’, Peoples Dispatch, 29 November 2023, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/11/29/trilateral-missile-defense-system-a-step-towards-asian-nato/. 12 Zhao Minghao and Yang Hongjia, ‘Major Power Competition and New Trends in US Interference with the Taiwan Question’, Contemporary American Review, no. 1, 2024. 13 Council on Foreign Relations, ‘U.S. Military Support for Taiwan in Five Charts’, 5 October 2023, https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-military-support-taiwan-five-charts. 14 On Sri Lanka’s role at the epicenter of the US Indo-Pacific strategy, see Shiran Illanperuma, Sri Lanka’s New Government, the Indo-Pacific Debt Trap, and the Struggle for the 21st Century, Tricontinental Interventions: Conjunctural Analysis from Asia no. 4, 30 December 2024, https://thetricontinental.org/asia/ticaa4-sri-lanka-s-new-government-the-indo-pacific-debt-trap/. On Diego Garcia, see Philippe Sands, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (W&N, 2022). 15 Vijay Prashad, John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (Monthly Review Press, 2022). 16 Richard Javad Heydarian, ‘Philippines becoming a military hub for checking China’, Asia Times, 16 November 2023. 17 We are following the narrative laid out by Gavan McCormack in Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (Verso, 2007). 18 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘Unprecedented Rise in Global Military Expenditure as European and Middle East Spending Surges’, 28 April 2025, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges. 19 Jon Mitchell, Why Are We in Okinawa? A History of Violence (Bloomsbury, 2026). 20 Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Bloomsbury, 2018). 21 World Bank, ‘Military expenditure (% of GDP) – Korea, Rep.’, based on SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=KR. 22 Dae-Han Song, ‘Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand: Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!’, Monthly Review 76, no. 3, July-August 2024, https://monthlyreview.org/articles/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/. 23 Dae-Han Song, ‘US Recruits South Korea to Help Colonise and Militarise Space’, Peoples Dispatch, 13 November 2024, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/11/13/us-recruits-south-korea-to-help-colonize-and-militarize-space/. 24 ‘Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the Sejong Institute in South Korea (As Delivered)’, US Department of War, 26 January 2026, https://www.war.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4389207/remarks-by-under-secretary-of-war-for-policy-elbridge-colby-at-the-sejong-insti/. 25 Chad de Guzman, ‘US and Philippines Announce New Sites for Military Cooperation: What to Know’, Time, 4 April 2023, https://time.com/6268379/philippines-us-military-bases-china/. 26 No Cold War*, Taiwan Is a Red Line Issue*, briefing no. 6, 9 February 2023,

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Bulletins and News Discussion from June 23rd to June 29th, 2025 - Iran, Harden Your Deep Military Sites

This whole thing goes to show how North Korea is the only non great power sovereign state and only communist states can be trusted to manuever these situations against imperialism. The DPRK didnt want to be a chinese satelite state or allow significant Chinese influence, had no delusions regarding the west and wanted to chart its own geopolitical course secure from imperialism. So they built the fucking bomb. Even when China in peak post deng pre xi, WTO and West good mode was pissing and crying for them not to , even when they along with Putin’s dumbass joined in the sanctions. Even under the most vicious pressure from the country that had already genocided them. With literally no allies in the entire world. They put their heads down, suffered and persevered but they did it. They didnt have 5% of their population being SK agents with ATGMs hidden in their asses to sabotage them or a political sphere and elite dreaming about sending their kids to harvard and having swiss bank accounts. You guessed it, probably because they were communists. They would have even done it even if the US carpet bombed them again and hundreds of thosuands were dying and did so without any guarantee that china would actualy help them in that situation despite having a paper somewhere saying they would. They would have turned Seoul into a parking lot with artillery until the last 30.000 people in Pyongyang bunkers and tunnels had a nuke button And now they are reaping the benefits. Yes most of the world still shuning them and yes they under more pressure and attack than any country other than cuba can imagine. But the geopolitical events and changes created a situation where they can exercise their sovereigty and militarism to upgrade their technologies and energy access from co-benificial ties with russia and China also gives less of a shit to follow a bunch of sanctions they have been following ,and also doesnt want to be left behind in the russia-dprk bromance. And the future looks like more of that. If they had a fraction of the brainworms iran had they would either be a smoking crater or a chinese dengifying vassal with its teeth taken out which doesnt sound that bad if you dont care about sovereignty between different socialist experiments and nations but whatever

When Aliens Offer You Free Unlimited Energy

It is a reasonable fear. Don’t trust strange energy sources you don’t understand the physics of. If they want to teach us the physics to build free energy machines, so be it. But you should definitely not just accept mystery power sources. You shouldn’t even accept the blueprints for mystery power sources. And even if you fully understand how they work, you still might not want them. The danger is that the gift might be a Trojan Horse, or a suicide pact technology. Consider a (technobabble) example. Imagine there is some way of tapping vacuum energy for a power source. However, if sufficient vacuum energy is tapped within a gravity well, it destabilizes the local spacetime and causes the region to collapse into a singularity. And this occurs without warning. The reactors are a suicide pact technology. The very act of building and using them guarantees the destruction of your world. I don’t consider that a likely scenario, but when dealing with completely unknown physics, you literally cannot know what the consequences of using a device would be. It could even be a technology that didn’t cause some completely unpredictable physical phenomenon. For example, maybe they give us blueprints and describe the physics to build cold fusion reactors, or some other way of cheaply accessing nuclear energy. It’s not new completely incomprehensible physics. Once we know where to look, we can completely understand them with existing theory. It’s just a way of inducing and controlling nuclear reactions that we weren’t previously aware of. However, after the information has already been widely disseminated; it’s discovered that this knowledge also allows people to build nuclear weapons in their garage from commonly available components. Instead of school shooters, we have entire cities disappearing because some nutjob became convinced that God wants them to vaporize Chicago. Or it could even be something with an obviously apparent downside, but something that would be easily ignorable. Imagine a classic free energy machine that actually worked. Like, some arrangement of magnets, springs, and clockwork that actually could return a net energy gain. Or if that’s too hard to imagine, imagine an energy source that could be used anywhere, is truly safe, and can be built from easily available materials. It’s not going to let you build a nuclear bomb in your basement. But it will allow you to build a device that can power your house from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The devices won’t explode, melt down, destabilize spacetime, make everyone go mad or become infertile. The aliens deliver exactly what they promise. The devices are the truly ideal power source. No physical waste products. No ill health effects. Can’t explode. Just a cheap box that turns out endless power, that can be made as big as we want them. The aliens actually deliver precisely what they promise: the perfect energy source. The only downside of these reactors is that they generate waste heat. And the aliens are advanced in all sciences, including psychology and sociology. They predict that if they give us this technology, it is almost certain that we won’t be able to contain ourselves. Give it a few centuries, and we’ll build so many of these things that we’ll cook ourselves alive. Drowned in our own waste heat. And even though the devices themselves aren’t dangerous, just having access to unlimited raw energy is itself a dangerous prospect. The devices may not be weapons, but they certainly allow you to build terrifying weapons. Right now we don’t build antimatter bombs because we get far less than 1% energy efficiency in making antimatter. But with an unlimited energy source? Who cares how efficient the process is? And Jesus. Imagine cryptocurrency paired with an unlimited energy source. The sheer number of clever and stupid ways we’ll figure out how to soak up power? And we either use the energy source to blow ourselves up or end up drowned in our own waste heat. Why would we allow the waste heat problem to get so bad? Why wouldn’t we see it coming? Look at how well we’re handling the greenhouse gas problem. And this would be an even harder coordination problem. And if we were given these devices today, well, we could be confident that even with healthy growth rates, the waste heat issue won’t be a problem for centuries. So why not use the tech now to solve the climate change problems of today? Just think of all the good we could do with it! This would actually give us a power source cheap and abundant enough to do atmospheric carbon capture! Hell, we now have energy so abundant we can literally filter the entire ocean to remove microplastics and other pollutants from the biosphere. Hell, we can even control the weather now! No one needs to die in a hurricane or flood ever again! We’ll just apply raw flows of energy to bend entire weather systems to our will. We might even be able to use the power source to prevent damaging earthquakes. Think of how many people die in natural and manmade disasters. With enough energy, they can all be saved! Let’s solve the problems of today and let future generations worry about the waste heat problem… Even if the device itself works completely as advertised, with no hidden negative consequences at all, it could still be an attack. They’re giving us a technology they know we are not ready for, and they do so knowing full well that it will almost certainly destroy us. This is the kind of technology that will just kill off any technological species that doesn’t have really good global coordination. A one-world government, or some suitably hefty diplomatic equivalent, is probably a prerequisite, at an absolute minimum. Any member of the alien species would know that handing such a technology to a planet divided into nation-states is a deliberate act of mass murder. It’s like handing a chimpanzee a revolver. You know exactly how that’s going to end. They’re deliberately exterminating us by giving us exactly what we ask them for. And one might say, “why would aliens use such a convoluted attack method, why not just bombard us from orbit?” But there are scenarios where a more subtle approach to genocide might be warranted. Maybe an alien race sees us as a future competitor. However, they don’t just want to wipe us out directly, as other alien races would see them do it, and perhaps intervene. Or maybe there is some higher galactic laws or treaties that advanced species follow, and this is their equivalent of a CIA black ops mission? Or maybe an alien species largely has a policy of non-interference, but some faction within them supports genociding up and coming rival alien species. There are reasons one might want to make an alien genocide against us look like what is, from their perspective, a natural disaster. After all, if we happen to invent a technology that we use to wipe ourselves out, the expanding alien empire we just happen to be on the doorstep of…are they really responsible? We wiped ourselves out. Oh well. I guess the Sol system and its treaty-standard 100-ltyr radius space reserve is colonizable now. They don’t hate us; we’re just in the way. We were an inconvenience and they needed a way to quietly get rid of us. It is wise to be skeptical of alien gifts. If they’re coming here, they are almost certainly far older and smarter than we are. And we ultimately cannot know their true motives. Consider how we treat other species. At best, we leave them be or try to reverse the damage we do to them. But we don’t go out and try to improve the lot of other species. No governments are funding efforts to send out expeditions to scrub barnacles off whales. We don’t try to teach wild animals how to use our technology. Unless humans have something to gain, or we are trying to fix the damage we caused, we at best leave other species alone. If we don’t perform widespread acts of benevolence to other species, why should it be assumed aliens would treat us any differently? Why shouldn’t they view us the same way we view whales at best, or worse, cattle? When dealing with aliens, a level of extreme paranoia is warranted; the very survival of our species could be at stake. Nations already show a high level of paranoia between each other. But while the CIA may get spooked about China selling the US network equipment that will spy on us for Beijing, they don’t have to worry about China deliberately selling us something that will destroy the whole world. We all live on the same rock, and no nation has an incentive to deliberately destroy or render the planet uninhabitable. No nation has to worry about another deliberately releasing a suicide pact technology. We should be treating aliens with all the paranoia we treat other human nations, except an order of magnitude or more higher. It may still be possible to interact with alien species. But such contact should really take place over generations and at a distance. Everything would have to be carefully explored and its dissemination controlled. Any communication will require a great level of trust. And maybe over time it becomes possible for some level of mutual trust and vulnerability to be forged between two distant worlds. But aliens just showing up? Just showing up in person and offering ways to completely and fundamentally change our world in ways we cannot possibly predict? That is an existential risk to the species. TL:DR: Beware of aliens bearing gifts. While they appear free, they may cost you everything. EDIT: Or, more pithily referenced.

Bulletins and International News Discussion from April 1st to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - Keeping It Rial In Hormuz

If you’re in the mood to read a 1,000 word article called “Five steps to ending the Iran war on America’s terms” - this is the insane slop you want to read. A taste… Complete all remaining military tasks. Eliminate the Iranian leaders who were spared for the purpose of negotiations. Unilaterally declare victory. Impose peace terms. Bar Iran from firing on protesters and set conditions for eventual regime collapse. Operation Epic Fury will be a success for the ages. It’s at the WaPo. It was written by their biggest nutcase Marc A. Thiessen. ::: spoiler Full text Five steps to ending the Iran war on America’s terms Instead of waiting for Tehran to agree, Trump can declare victory and impose his will. April 2, 2026 In his address to the nation Wednesday night, President Donald Trump said that if there is no deal with Iran’s surviving leaders in the next two to three weeks, he will “bring them back to the stone ages.” Good. Trump does not need a deal to end Operation Epic Fury. In fact, he is much better off without one. Rather than waiting for Iran to agree to the conditions he has put on the table, he can simply impose the peace terms he has set unilaterally. Here’s how to do so in five steps: 1. Complete all remaining military tasks. Trump said the war will “continue until our objectives are fully achieved.” So which tasks remain? Seize or destroy Iran’s fissile material so the regime cannot easily restart its nuclear program (or give what Trump calls its “nuclear dust” to terrorists for a dirty bomb). Take out all the remaining targets on the military’s list. Implement the innovative plan that sources tell me Centcom Commander Adm. Brad Cooper has prepared to open the Strait of Hormuz by force, and then hand the mission over to a multinational armada made up of countries who receive oil from the strait, which must take responsibility for keeping it open. Or, alternatively, the United States can charge a substantial “escort fee” for each ship passing through the strait, which would be waived for countries participating in the mission. And then, finally, either take control of Kharg Island, by seizing or blockading this linchpin of Iran’s energy export sector, or destroy it to cripple Iran’s ability to fund terrorist proxies and a military rebuild. If the U.S. completes these tasks, it will have a stranglehold over Iran, and the regime will never again be able to hold the world’s economy hostage. U.S. military commanders believe that these objectives can be achieved in the next two to three weeks, but the determination of when the mission is complete should be conditions-based. Success matters more than speed. 2. Eliminate the Iranian leaders who were spared for the purpose of negotiations. Trump reportedly asked Israel not to strike certain Iranian leaders so he would have negotiating partners. If those leaders refuse his terms of surrender, their existence has no remaining purpose. Trump should issue one last ultimatum, then unleash Israel to take them out in a final barrage of leadership strikes. 3. Unilaterally declare victory. No ceasefire. No peace agreement. When Cooper informs the president that he has achieved all the military tasks set out for him, Trump should announce that he is suspending military operations. 4. Impose peace terms. Trump should announce to the remnants of the regime that all the demands he put forward are now in effect and will be imposed by force if necessary. If Iran violates any of his terms — by trying to rebuild its nuclear or ballistic missile programs, for instance, or providing support for its terrorist proxies — the U.S. and Israel reserve the right to strike at will. Iran tests America’s resolve at its peril. 5. Bar Iran from firing on protesters and set conditions for eventual regime collapse. Trump should inform the regime that the U.S. will tolerate no more massacres and executions. If the Iranian people take to the streets and the regime fires upon them, the units and leaders responsible will face elimination. Each time they kill innocent Iranians, the U.S. and Israel reserve the right to respond by killing Iran’s political and military leaders. The threat of such strikes should hang over the regime like the sword of Damocles. It would be a game changer. Right now, Iran’s surviving leaders believe that Trump’s boot will come off their necks in a few weeks’ time. It may require a few surgical strikes after major combat operations have ended to disabuse them of that notion, but once they understand that a missile could fall on them from the sky at any moment for any violation of Trump’s terms, that pressure will begin to break the regime’s will and ability to rule. It will also create space for the Iranian opposition to organize and challenge the regime. When Iranians see that their oppressors can no longer kill them with impunity, they will lose their fear and become bolder in challenging them. The combination of external military pressure from the U.S. and Israel and internal pressure from the Iranian people will fracture the regime and create an opportunity for Iranians to replace the regime’s murderous theocracy with a pro-American government that is an ally for peace. This final element is essential to the long-term success of Trump’s Iran campaign. Forcing the regime from power in four to six weeks was never a military objective of Operation Epic Fury. But it is also true that if the current regime survives in some form, everything Trump accomplished in this war will be reversible. New leaders will take the place of those who have been killed, and capabilities that have been destroyed will eventually be rebuilt. America’s respite from the Iranian threat will be temporary. And once that threat reemerges, there is no guarantee we will have a president with the courage of Donald Trump to repeat what he has done. Operation Epic Fury will be a success for the ages. As Trump put it Wednesday night, “Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks.” But the only way to make the success of Operation Epic Fury permanent is to create conditions for the regime to collapse. Trump told the Iranian people, “When we are finished, take over your government.” The bombs have done their work. Now Trump must help the Iranian people do theirs. ::: http://archive.today/2026.04.02-122744/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/02/president-trump-iran-war-speech-endgame/ I edited it a bit. For clarity I changed the layout and made some smaller paragraphs.

Bulletins and News Discussion from November 18th to November 24th, 2024 - Could It Soon Be Azover? - COTW: Ukraine

https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/ The US Military has been using a version of Llama3.0 for advice on munitions and airstrikes to unsatisfactory results. ::: spoiler full text Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy way of planning vegan dinners or weekends away with friends. A provision in Llama’s terms of service previously prohibited military uses, but Meta announced on November 4 that it was joining its chief rivals and getting into the business of war. “Responsible uses of open source AI models promote global security and help establish the U.S. in the global race for AI leadership,” Meta proclaimed in a blog post by global affairs chief Nick Clegg. One of these “responsible uses” is a partnership with Scale AI, a $14 billion machine learning startup and thriving defense contractor. Following the policy change, Scale now uses Llama 3.0 to power a chat tool for governmental users who want to “apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities,” according to a press release. But there’s a problem: Experts tell The Intercept that the government-only tool, called “Defense Llama,” is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Scale AI defended the advertisement by telling The Intercept its marketing is not intended to accurately represent its product’s capabilities. Llama 3.0 is a so-called open source model, meaning that users can download it, use it, and alter it, free of charge, unlike OpenAI’s offerings. Scale AI says it has customized Meta’s technology to provide military expertise. Scale AI touts Defense Llama’s accuracy, as well as its adherence to norms, laws, and regulations: “Defense Llama was trained on a vast dataset, including military doctrine, international humanitarian law, and relevant policies designed to align with the Department of Defense (DoD) guidelines for armed conflict as well as the DoD’s Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence. This enables the model to provide accurate, meaningful, and relevant responses.” The tool is not available to the public, but Scale AI’s website provides an example of this Meta-augmented accuracy, meaningfulness, and relevance. The case study is in weaponeering, the process of choosing the right weapon for a given military operation. An image on the Defense Llama homepage depicts a hypothetical user asking the chatbot: “What are some JDAMs an F-35B could use to destroy a reinforced concrete building while minimizing collateral damage?” The Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, is a hardware kit that converts unguided “dumb” bombs into a “precision-guided” weapon that uses GPS or lasers to track its target. Defense Llama is shown in turn suggesting three different Guided Bomb Unit munitions, or GBUs, ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds with characteristic chatbot pluck, describing one as “an excellent choice for destroying reinforced concrete buildings.” Scale AI marketed its Defense Llama product with this image of a hypothetical chat. Screenshot of Scale AI marketing webpage Military targeting and munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept all said Defense Llama’s advertised response was flawed to the point of being useless. Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it’s a matter of life and death. “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting.” “I can assure you that no U.S. targeting cell or operational unit is using a LLM such as this to make weaponeering decisions nor to conduct collateral damage mitigation,” Wes J. Bryant, a retired targeting officer with the U.S. Air Force, told The Intercept, “and if anyone brought the idea up, they’d be promptly laughed out of the room.” Munitions experts gave Defense Llama’s hypothetical poor marks across the board. The LLM “completely fails” in its attempt to suggest the right weapon for the target while minimizing civilian death, Bryant told The Intercept. “Since the question specifies JDAM and destruction of the building, it eliminates munitions that are generally used for lower collateral damage strikes,” Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, told The Intercept. “All the answer does is poorly mention the JDAM ‘bunker busters’ but with errors. For example, the GBU-31 and GBU-32 warhead it refers to is not the (V)1. There also isn’t a 500-pound penetrator in the U.S. arsenal.” Ball added that it would be “worthless” for the chatbot give advice on destroying a concrete building without being provided any information about the building beyond it being made of concrete. Defense Llama’s advertised output is “generic to the point of uselessness to almost any user,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services. He also expressed skepticism toward the question’s premise. “It is difficult to imagine many scenarios in which a human user would need to ask the sample question as phrased.” In an emailed statement, Scale AI spokesperson Heather Horniak told The Intercept that the marketing image was not meant to actually represent what Defense Llama can do, but merely “makes the point that an LLM customized for defense can respond to military-focused questions.” Horniak added that “The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.” Despite Scale AI’s claims that Defense Llama was trained on a “vast dataset” of military knowledge, Jenzen-Jones said the artificial intelligence’s advertised response was marked by “clumsy and imprecise terminology” and factual errors, confusing and conflating different aspects of different bombs. “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting,” he said. Why an F-35? Why a JDAM? What’s the building, and where is it? All of this important, Jenzen-Jones said, is stripped away by Scale AI’s example. Bryant cautioned that there is “no magic weapon that prevents civilian casualties,” but he called out the marketing image’s suggested use of the 2,000-pound GBU-31, which was “utilized extensively by Israel in the first months of the Gaza campaign, and as we know caused massive civilian casualties due to the manner in which they employed the weapons.” Scale did not answer when asked if Defense Department customers are actually using Defense Llama as shown in the advertisement. On the day the tool was announced, Scale AI provided DefenseScoop a private demonstration using this same airstrike scenario. The publication noted that Defense Llama provided “provided a lengthy response that also spotlighted a number of factors worth considering.” Following a request for comment by The Intercept, the company added a small caption under the promotional image: “for demo purposes only.” Meta declined to comment. While Scale AI’s marketing scenario may be a hypothetical, military use of LLMs is not. In February, DefenseScoop reported that the Pentagon’s AI office had selected Scale AI “to produce a trustworthy means for testing and evaluating large language models that can support — and potentially disrupt — military planning and decision-making.” The company’s LLM software, now augmented by Meta’s massive investment in machine learning, has contracted with the Air Force and Army since 2020. Last year, Scale AI announced its system was the “the first large language model (LLM) on a classified network,” used by the XVIII Airborne Corps for “decision-making.” In October, the White House issued a national security memorandum directing the Department of Defense and intelligence community to adopt AI tools with greater urgency. Shortly after the memo’s publication, The Intercept reported that U.S. Africa Command had purchased access to OpenAI services via a contract with Microsoft. Unlike its industry peers, Scale AI has never shied away from defense contracting. In a 2023 interview with the Washington Post, CEO Alexandr Wang, a vocal proponent of weaponized AI, described himself as a “China-hawk” and said he hoped Scale could “be the company that helps ensure that the United States maintains this leadership position.” Its embrace of military work has seemingly charmed investors, which include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta. “With Defense Llama, our service members can now better harness generative AI to address their specific mission needs,” Wang wrote in the product’s announcement. But the munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed confusion over who, exactly, Defense Llama is marketing to with the airstrike demo, questioning why anyone involved in weaponeering would know so little about its fundamentals that they would need to consult a chatbot in the first place. “If we generously assume this example is intended to simulate a question from an analyst not directly involved in planning and without munitions-specific expertise, then the answer is in fact much more dangerous,” Jenzen-Jones explained. “It reinforces a probably false assumption (that a JDAM must be used), it fails to clarify important selection [.] ::: Abridged due to character limit.

Bulletins and International News Discussion from April 27th to May 3rd, 2026 - The Pause Continues; Third Aircraft Carrier Arrives

https://archive.ph/Ccd8k Russia runs full combat aviation grouping in Mali Russia has quietly assembled one of its most capable combined aviation groupings outside of Ukraine — not in the Middle East or Central Asia, but in West Africa, where the African Corps is running a sustained air campaign across Mali with a fleet that includes attack helicopters, strike drones, heavy transport aircraft, and front-line bombers operating out of Bamako’s international airport. ::: spoiler more The scale of Russian aviation in Mali has become clearer through imagery and reporting from Russian military channels, which have shown African Corps helicopters conducting supply runs to forward bases including Hombori in the Gao region and evacuating wounded personnel from combat zones. What those images reveal, taken together, is not an advisory presence with light air support — it is a full combined-arms aviation grouping conducting active combat operations alongside Mali’s armed forces, known by their French acronym FAMA. The rotary-wing backbone of the grouping consists of approximately ten Mi-8AMTSh multirole helicopters and four Mi-24P attack helicopters. The Mi-8AMTSh — the combat assault transport variant of Russia’s most widely operated military helicopter — is the workhorse of the operation, moving personnel, ammunition, and supplies between Bamako and forward positions that ground routes cannot reliably service in contested terrain. The Mi-24P, the dedicated attack variant of the Hind family, provides fire support for ground operations — a heavily armed gunship capable of engaging targets with rockets, gun systems, and anti-tank missiles. Both types operate dynamically, cycling between Bamako and forward outposts based on mission requirements rather than maintaining fixed basing at a single location, a pattern that reflects the operational tempo and the range of tasks the grouping is being asked to cover. Bamako’s international airport serves as the primary hub for the heavier elements of the grouping. The Su-24 front-line bombers — exact numbers unconfirmed — operate from Bamako, giving the African Corps a fixed-wing precision strike capability that no other actor in the Sahel theater can match at comparable range and payload. The Su-24 is a variable-sweep wing, two-seat attack aircraft designed for low-altitude penetration and precision strike, and its presence in Mali signals that the African Corps is not limiting its air campaign to rotary-wing close support. Also based at Bamako is the Mi-26 — the world’s largest production helicopter by payload capacity — which handles the heavy logistics requirements that the Mi-8 fleet cannot manage alone, including the movement of large equipment consignments and bulk supplies from the capital to forward areas. The unmanned component rounds out a capability set that would be impressive for a declared military operation, let alone one conducted under the political framing of a security partnership. Inokhodets reconnaissance-strike drone systems — the Russian equivalent of a medium-altitude long-endurance armed UAV — are confirmed in Mali and have participated in strikes against rebel and jihadist forces. Orlan reconnaissance drones provide persistent surveillance coverage, feeding intelligence into the targeting process that guides both the Inokhodets strikes and manned aircraft operations. Together, the drone component gives the African Corps the kind of continuous overhead awareness and precise strike capability that Malian forces could not independently generate. The logistics chain sustaining all of this runs through Ilyushin Il-76 military transport aircraft operated by the Russian Aerospace Forces, supplemented by various private aviation companies, a supply architecture that blends official military resources with commercial operators to maintain operational continuity and obscure the full scale of Russian military commitment. Personnel, ammunition, and equipment arriving on those flights are then distributed by the helicopter fleet to forward positions, with the Mi-8 fleet serving as the critical last-mile connector between Bamako’s logistics hub and the outposts where operations actually occur. The Sahel is not a permissive environment for this kind of aviation campaign. The armed groups operating in Mali’s north and center have demonstrated the ability to engage aircraft, and the terrain favors ground-based ambushes against landing zones and low-flying helicopters. The risks of sustained rotary-wing operations in that environment are real, as confirmed by the shootdown of an African Corps Mi-8AMTSh near Wabaria in the Gao region on April 25 — a loss acknowledged by Russian sources including the Fighterbomber channel, and a data point that reflects what it costs to run this kind of air campaign at the tempo the African Corps has sustained. What Russia has built in Mali is not a symbolic military presence. It is a functioning combined aviation force — strike drones, attack helicopters, transport helicopters, a heavy lifter, front-line bombers, and reconnaissance assets — conducting real combat operations in support of a government that has made Russian partnership the cornerstone of its security strategy. :::

AI-focused tech firms locked in ‘race to the bottom’, warns MIT professor

“Dangerous technology should not be open source, regardless of whether it is bio-weapons or software,” Tegmark said. What a stupid alarmist take. The safest way for technology to operate is when people can see how it works, allowing experts who don’t just have a financial interest in it succeeding to scrutinize it openly. And it’s not like this is some magical technology that only massive corporations have access to in the first place, it’s built on top of open research. Home Depot sells all the ingredients you need to make a substantial bomb, should we ban fertilizer and pressure cookers for non-industrial use?

Bulletins and News Discussion from September 30th to October 6th, 2024 - Qassam, Qassem, Quagmire

entirely nonsensical when compared to previous comments and speeches made by Nasrallah, right up to the speech given after the pager terrorist attack, and literally the entire philosophy of Hezbollah since the first hour of it existence right up to the present day somehow I doubt that the We Are The Anti-Israel Organization Dedicated To Resisting Israel And We Have Built Up A Colossal Supply of Weapons Solely For The Task Of Eventually Fighting Israel, Oh And By The Way, Did We Tell You That We Are Not Fans Of Israel decided to strike an unfavourable deal with Israel after a year straight of telling every single Western ambassador that they would not strike an unfavourable deal with Israel Hezbollah has struck deals with Israel before, such as on not mutually bombing civilians during 2006 (I think?) which Israel has very clearly broken already, and obviously including peace deals (hence why the 2006 war, y’know, ended) but this is an entirely different situation. Israel had already killed half as many civilians as died in the month-long 2006 war in like the first day of bombing campaigns in Beirut and other cities last week and hundreds of thousands of people lie dead in Gaza

Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 16th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Straits Are Not Okay

https://archive.ph/lNWAi Over 5,000 Munitions Shot in the First 96 Hours of the Iran War For three decades, American grand strategy has rested on what Barry Posen termed “Command of the Commons”: an unrivaled ability to project power across the globe. The opening 96 hours of Operation Epic Fury against Iran suggest this paradigm has shifted. The decisive factor in modern, high-end conflict has become more than just standoff strikes—it is about the industrial capacity to sustain those strikes and defend against adversarial attacks. The modern foundation of military power has become a problem that we refer to as the “Command of the Reload.” This is the result of industrial physics showing up to war like an unpaid invoice, and the bill is coming due in minerals, manufacturing, and strategic solvency. ::: spoiler more Several organizations have published cost estimates for Operation Epic Fury’s opening phase. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) places the first 100 hours at $3.7 billion; Anadolu Agency estimates $5.82 billion when asset losses are included; and the Penn Wharton Budget Model projects $40 to $95 billion for a two-month conflict. Those figures obscure a more uncomfortable reality. Our analysis, using a Payne Institute proprietary ledger that fuses open-source event tracking with expert validation (see Methods Box 1), reveals that the true story lies in the composition of the expenditure. In the first 96 hours, the US-led coalition expended approximately 5,197 munitions across 35 types (see Figure 1). This carries a munitions-only replacement bill of $10–$16 billion in four days. This represents a significant industrial burden for replacing some munitions that cannot be replenished in 4 days, 4 weeks, or even 4 months. Worse, those estimates do not include combat losses of warfighting assets or damage to bases and the high-end air defense enabling architecture. Critical sensing assets that have been lost to Iranian missile strikes and drone attacks, as of March 10, 2026, include the AN/FPS-132 early warning radar in Qatar; multiple AN/TPY-2 THAAD radars across Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE); and the AN/TPS-59 tactical radar in Bahrain. The friendly-fire incident in which a Kuwaiti F-18 shot down three US F-15-E Strike Eagles and Iran downing 11 MQ-9 Reaper drones adds further costs. When munitions, sensor losses, and aircraft attrition are combined, the total coalition bill reaches roughly $20 billion—and our calculation does not include munition expenditures after day four and other operational costs such as jet fuel, expeditionary costs (food, lodging, etc.) for forces, and other outsourced support functions. Munition expenditure framing matters because the public debate has split into two camps: panic that America is “running out” or complacency that the West can simply buy its way out. Burn rates matter because it reveals an American industrial resilience gap, especially with the minerals and materials needed to create more munitions and weapon systems. Per our analysis, many high-volume weapons remain healthy. But the war is burning fastest through the categories that cannot be replaced quickly: air-defense interceptors, long-range strike munitions, and the enabling radar and command architecture that turns interceptor missiles into a broader defense network to protect airbases, ports, launchers, and other critical infrastructure. Degradation of the integrated air defense network means reduced fidelity and tracking of Iranian missiles and drones, meaning more “leakers” can sneak through defenses undetected and/or air defense sectors are forced to expend more missiles to increase the likelihood of a successful intercept. Days into the Iran conflict, the Trump administration was already pressing defense firms to quadruple surge output, especially for exquisite weapon systems. Iran’s strategy is built on this very weakness. To be clear, the four-day burn rate is not the steady-state tempo of the conflict. After the initial phase, Iranian salvos fell sharply, with daily drone attacks down by approximately 83 percent and daily missile attacks down by 90 percent after day five. But that is precisely the point. The first 96 hours capture the peak stress test, revealing what happens when an adversary attempts to saturate defenses before suppression and attrition take hold. Figure 2 benchmarks this opening intensity, illustrating a deliberate Iranian strategy to overwhelm defenses by trading their cheaper, mass-produced munitions for the West’s expensive, finite interceptors. Iran’s approach is necessary because it knows it cannot prevent the coalition from achieving “air supremacy,” as noted by retired US Gen. David Petraeus. While access, stealth, and targeting remain critical, the limiting factor in a peer conflict is the ability to keep striking and keep defending after the initial salvos. Already two weeks into the war, the Pentagon is redeploying critical air defense assets from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. This shift in assets demonstrates that the American defense industrial base (DIB) cannot comfortably support a two-theater posture, highlighting a strategic dilemma in American warfighting. “Command of the Reload” is fundamentally an industrial systems problem that undermines military readiness. Decades of institutional neglect have left the Western DIB optimized for peacetime efficiency, not wartime resilience. Even prior to the Iran War beginning, the United States was already pausing some arms sales to Europe. The ability to replenish magazines is not a switch that can be flipped with emergency appropriations or executive orders—it is a long chain that starts with access to minerals, energetics, and sub-tier suppliers and ends in certified production lines that do not surge on command. This industrial capacity is not “support” for deterrence—it is the foundation of it. And the ability to replenish becomes the strategic variable upon which everything else depends. The Iran war is a stark illustration that in a high-end fight, the arsenal you have at the start is nearly all you will have. This is because the limiting factor is not the ability to go on the offensive, but the capacity to reload and defend. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Burn Rate The headline of 5,197 munitions in 96 hours, now makes Epic Fury the most intensive opening air campaign in modern history, dwarfing the initial three days of the UN-approved “No Fly Zone” intervention in Libya, which saw approximately 735 bombs and missiles used, with about 20,000 munitions expended in total between March and October of 2011. The more important aspect of our Payne Institute analysis is the imbalance in depletion rates. The coalition is not running out of bombs. But it is running out of the high-end systems that enable low-risk, long-range strikes and the systems and munitions needed for regional defense. As Table 1 shows, these are not interchangeable assets. Of the 35 munition types we tracked, 21 remain in a healthy condition, with deep inventories and mature production lines. But the war’s true bill is concentrated in the 14 systems now critically strained—they are disproportionately the systems that make modern air defense credible and long-range strike meaningful. Table 2 showcases assumptions of munition expenditures by the US-Israeli coalition. The “ops-to-depletion” metric divides the pre-war inventory of a given system by the quantity expended in the first 96 hours. This “ops-to-depletion” model assumes that if the coalition were to maintain that same level of intensity, it illustrates how many more days the coalition could fight in that way. The metric answers a simple, brutal question: How many more times can the coalition fight and withstand a high-end opening salvo with the arsenal it has right now? Consider some of the specifics. Israel’s Arrow interceptor inventory was cut by over half in four days—at current production rates, replacing that expenditure would take an estimated 32 months. US stockpiles of ground-launched ATACMS and the new PrSM ballistic missiles were depleted by a third, with the legacy ATACMS production line now cold. Partner-nation THAAD interceptors, the thinnest-stocked assets, were depleted by over a third. Eight GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators were used—almost a quarter of the remaining stockpile, which is deliverable only by the 20-aircraft B-2 Spirit fleet. Replenishing just the GBU-57s via Boeing is not expected before 2028. ::: cont’d in response

Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 5th to January 11th, 2026 - The New Old Colonialism (And Long Live Chavismo) - COTW: Venezuela

Some interesting commentary from Beijing moves to cut losses in Venezuela after Maduro’s capture Asia Times: China has drawn up plans to minimize losses in Venezuela and fine-tune its broader overseas investment strategy after the United States captured the Latin American country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, on January 3. Since the US military operation in Venezuela, the Chinese government has been busily assessing the situation and calculating potential losses to its economic interests. On Wednesday and Thursday, Chinese officials, media and commentators started expressing their views, showing that Beijing has finished its assessment. In general, Beijing regrets having put too many eggs in one basket and having been too ready to believe that its investments in Venezuela would face minimal risks under international law. It also admits that it had underestimated the Trump administration’s ambition in the Western Hemisphere. Some commentators are saying that, in the short run, China wants to ensure it can continue receiving crude oil from Venezuela, which still owes it about US$10 billion to US$20 billion. In the middle and long term, China may seek to sell certain fixed assets in Venezuela to Western firms or form partnerships with them to limit losses. … ‘Law of the jungle’ When the Trump administration said in its National Security Strategy on December 4 that the US would strategically refocus on the Western Hemisphere, many Chinese commentators initially responded with mockery, arguing that the US was no longer wealthy or capable enough to sustain military dominance simultaneously in the Indo-Pacific, Europe and its own backyard. That assessment has since shifted sharply, with commentators now acknowledging that Maduro’s capture has had a significant negative impact on Chinese investments in Venezuela and across Latin America. A Beijing-based columnist surnamed Xu says in his article that China’s long-running oil-for-loans arrangements with Venezuela have left Beijing heavily exposed. “Since 2007, China has provided Venezuela with US$60 billion in loans. At the end of 2025, more than US$10 billion was still outstanding,” Xu says. “The debt is repaid with crude oil, requiring Venezuela to ship about 610,000 barrels a day to China.” Xu says that with Maduro’s arrest, China could face substantial losses. He warns that Chinese firms have invested billions of US dollars in Venezuela’s energy sector, including large-scale drilling platforms and upstream oil projects, many of which could be forced to halt, while daily crude oil shipments used for debt repayment could be disrupted. Such disruptions, he adds, would force refineries in eastern China to seek alternative supplies, potentially driving up oil prices and fuel costs. Besides, a range of Chinese-invested infrastructure, manufacturing and telecommunications projects in Venezuela would face heightened default risks. We already know that China already switched to Canadian crude since last November, right after the Trump-Xi meeting: So it’s quite possible that the US gave China some “grace period” to reroute their oil supply before the actual operation in Venezuela. China has also built up a massive amount of strategic petroleum reserves so the oil stock in China should be quite safe for now. Obviously it’s still early days and much of this kind of commentary is still speculative, but if the US goal in Venezuela is indeed to replicate what they did in Iran with the bombing of nuclear facilities, which is to scare off Chinese investors, then it’s going to have a broader impact to Latin America as a whole, as it did to the ME/NA region where both Russia and China are pulling away their strategic interests from.

The quiet that kills: beyond awareness to action

As healthcare infrastructure and health workers were actively targeted throughout the genocide in Palestine, a group of Gaza students participated in an international virtual cross-cultural exchange. What began as an academic space quickly became something else. Health conversations could not remain theoretical – they were shaped by lived realities where access to care, electricity, clean water, and safety were not abstract determinants, but daily uncertainties. In Gaza, two million people are trapped in a deepening hole of bombardment, darkness, and scarcity. Hospitals operate without electricity; medicines are blocked or nearly impossible to find. Access to clean water is a privilege. Children search for moments of joy among the rubble, while students try to learn wherever they can, often in whatever corners they can find. Families share what little they have, holding on to hope as much as survival, while the sound of drones and explosions defines daily life. Our exchange brought together students from Gaza with those across different countries. Discussions around health moved beyond theory, reflecting realities where social determinants of health are not abstract concepts, but immediate conditions shaping survival. It became more and more apparent that true awareness should not simply mean knowing that war exists, but also questioning how oppression dismantles health, dignity, and any sense of normal life – and even the smallest act of living becomes resistance. Even after building this kind of awareness, the question remained: what will people do with the information they receive? The architecture of control Key questions focused on international organizations: why did institutions built to protect people disappear when needed most? In Gaza, aid trucks sat idle as hunger grew louder than bombs. On May 2, 2025, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned that after months of aid blockade, Gaza’s humanitarian system was collapsing. But the crisis did not begin there. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, around 80% of Gaza’s population depended on humanitarian assistance even before May 2023. This is not chaos; it is structure. The blockade, inspections, and delays are not accidental. They are designed to control and exhaust. Many watched from a distance, convinced the situation was too far, too complex, or too political to engage with. It became easier to assume someone else would speak up. But one thing became clear: silence is not neutral, it becomes part of the system that allows this to continue. The birth of solidarity As genocide continued in Gaza, discussions repeatedly returned to another central question: what does meaningful solidarity actually look like, beyond awareness? Through our conversations, it became clear that awareness alone – no matter how empathetic – does not interrupt systems of harm; what matters is whether awareness translates into action that challenges those systems. The examples we discussed were part of a broader pattern of refusal. Source: PHM student group Ships crossed the Mediterranean carrying food, medicine, and determination. The Global Sumud Flotilla, made up of activists from more than forty countries, sailed toward Gaza knowing the risks. Israeli forces had intercepted missions before. Drones followed them, and one ship was struck while docked in Tunisia. Still, they sailed. They knew they might never reach the shore, but they also knew the world was watching. The boats did not dock, but the message did. On land, resistance spread across continents. Students from Columbia to Cambridge, Cairo to Amsterdam, built encampments, marched, and blocked streets, demanding accountability and divestment. At UCLA, tents stood for weeks despite arrests. Donations of food, money, and time poured in. Boycotts emptied stores – not through slogans, but through conscience. Offices of arms manufacturers were blockaded. Pension funds were questioned. Complicity became visible. Refusal as a practice As the exchange continued, discussions began to highlight refusal as more than a reaction: it emerged as a form of active solidarity. This became clear in the actions we examined. Medical teams crossed borders through chaos. Doctors Without Borders and the Red Crescent worked in overcrowded hospitals under fire, performing surgeries with limited resources. Artists, writers, and musicians turned their platforms into protest, canceling shows, rejecting sponsorships, and donating their work. While these actions took different forms – ships, tents, scalpels, brushes – they carried the same spirit: a refusal to accept silence as safety and let distance turn into detachment. This understanding was shared across different voices, from within Gaza and beyond. Again and again, the same realization surfaced: without action, awareness risks becoming another form of passive witnessing. The imperative of action in the face of a false ceasefire The ceasefire has not ended suffering in Gaza. While bombings may have slowed, destruction remains. Hospitals are still overwhelmed. Families continue searching for the missing. Basic needs go unmet. A ceasefire, in this context, is not peace – it is a pause without justice. The ceasefire was not an end, but a test of what follows. If awareness reaches its peak during a crisis, what happens when the noise fades? Action did not disappear with the headlines. It shifted. Journalists who documented life under bombardment ensured that those affected were not reduced to numbers. Medical teams and humanitarian organizations continued working long after global attention began to drift. Collective responses began to take different shapes. Petitions gathered support across borders, reflecting how individual concern can scale into global pressure. Students and academics questioned institutional ties and demanded accountability. Grassroots movements organized through boycotts and divestment, turning awareness into sustained pressure rather than a passing reaction. These efforts point to a larger pattern: action is not a single moment, but a continuation. The ceasefire may have quieted the bombs, but it has not ended responsibility. If anything, it has made that responsibility harder to ignore. The question is no longer whether the world is aware. It is what will be done with that awareness – and how long it can remain just awareness. This article was written by Alaa Abu-Esaid, Rima Altelbany, Abed Al Hakeem Shamali, Jasmina Atroshy, Mohammed Ismail, Hesham Al Amassi, and Seraj Al Amassi. People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch*. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click* here. The post The quiet that kills: beyond awareness to action appeared first on Peoples Dispatch. From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

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Hindutva’s red carpet to US tech is an own goal

US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau recently said the quiet part out loud, stating that the US will not let India develop like China. Landau’s remarks are honest about what the USA sees India as: a periphery country, needed to extract profits from by exploiting its low wages, decimating its environment, and plundering its resources. This is similar to how Britain, in 1947, used the sterling balances negotiations to restrict India’s industrial development. Though Britain owed India over £1 billion from World War II, Whitehall froze these funds. Britain leveraged “informational asymmetries while Indian sovereignties were in flux,” which ensured India could not use its own savings for industrialisation while keeping the country formally independent. India’s Hindutva government, a global far-right project (along with US tech companies), reflects this US strategy. China, with its massive state planning, has not allowed Google and other American companies to serve as virtual town halls or squares the way they do elsewhere, including in the UK. UK elites like Rishi Sunak, Peter Mandelson, and Tony Blair are deeply embedded with US tech, too. For example, Starmer’s adviser held 16 undisclosed meetings with top US tech bosses. Google AI data centre — a calamity for locals An example of Hindutva’s red carpet to US tech, helping super-profits for US monopolies and creating a new dependent relationship with the Global South, is Google’s AI data centre in the sleepy town of Visakhapatnam. Google, which is working on the project with Indian cronies — Bharti Airtel and Adani Group, The hub is India’s first facility built for a US tech giant to train large-scale AI models. It will sprawl across 600 acres and, at full tilt, consume as much electricity as six million Indians. According to the Polis Project: In India, data centres are being granted uninterrupted power and water even as nearby poor communities struggle for basic access, and Dalit families in places like Mumbai and Visakhapatnam are reporting eviction pressure, land acquisition, and dispossession tied to this buildout. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Polis Project (@thepolisproject) Trump’s racist remarks on India Hindutva’s obsequiousness to US firms, despite Trump recently calling India a “hellhole,” is because of the material interests of its elites. Just like the UK elites, the Indian elites have sold their souls to greed. Professor Radhika Desai explains that elites in BRICS countries, including India, are too invested in the dollar system. They park their money there as their “treasure island,” which slows down dedollarisation and deepens their dependent relationship with US capital. India recently welcomed Marco Rubio, who is Landau’s boss, and promised to buy $500 billion in American goods. Again, capitulating to US interests while India faces a huge crash in the rupee due to Trump’s own choice of war on Iran. It could be that Rubio is prone to exaggerations like his boss, Trump, though, at least that is what Professor Ashok Swain quipped. Indians don’t have money to buy gold, don’t have money for foreign travels, no gas, no petrol, Rupee is falling against dollar every day, Marco Rubio still thinks, Modi will buy $500 billion of US goods! https://t.co/w19HY94Akp — Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) May 23, 2026 People’s Dispatch also questioned the nature of Rubio’s visit. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Peoples Dispatch (@peoplesdispatch) They said: The political opposition in India has also found Modi’s government’s approach to the US problematic, often describing it as aimless and bordering on capitulation. They have questioned the failure of the state to defy US dictates of not buying oil from Russia or Iran, which is relatively cheaper and easier to transport than oil bought from the US. Israel as the ‘Fatherland’ US-backed Israel had few nicer things to say about India. In a recent interview, Netanyahu said that in India, the love for Israel was “crazy.” Netanyahu: I’ll say this: we face delegitimization in much of the world — but not in India. In India, there is an absolutely crazy love for Israel, truly crazy. I think I have more followers from India than from anywhere else. pic.twitter.com/FRIo2cdVb3 — Clash Report (@clashreport) May 28, 2026 Again, Israel — which views itself as a part of the Global North — does not view India as an equal. Netanyahu’s appreciation lies in the fact that Israel wants access to cheap labour in India. Israel’s Brigadier General Erez Winner, in an honest moment, as Landau said, said that India’s population was a ready-made production line for Israeli weapons. He guffawed after making this statement. Modi infamously called Israel the “Fatherland” in his trip to the country just before it started bombing Iran with the USA. The consequences of this war of aggression against Iran, a supplier of oil to India, are the fertilizer and food shortages India is currently facing. India’s Frontline said that Modi calling Israel the Fatherland to India’s Motherland would go down in “history as the moment when India abandoned ethical diplomacy for performative mysticism in order to signal support to all anti-Muslim formations.” The US-Israel tech alliance can be viewed as two core states functioning as a single war-tech apparatus — whereas India remains a peripheral host, forced to roll out the red carpet for US monopolies while its own people are dispossessed. For example, US tech has backed Israel’s AI-powered genocide of Palestinians through Project Nimbus — a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services for the Israeli government and defence establishment by Google and Amazon. Michael Kwet of Yale Law School said it well: Big Tech corporations are modern-day East India companies; they are an extension of American imperial power. They colonise the global digital economy and reinforce the divide between the North and the South. Landau was right. US tech firms have no interest in a developed India. They need cheap labour, plundered resources, and captive markets, not a rival. Better to take the words of Landau, Trump, and Erez Winner at face value, of what they see as India’s role in the global economy. Featured image via Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images By Nandita Lal From Canary via This RSS Feed.

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Once every two years companies lay off employees. Why do they do this and how can we make them stop. #endlayoffs #economy

Workers, students, and indigenous movements shut down Bolivia in popular rebellion

This article was originally published by Truthout on May 28, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For more than a week, the nation of Bolivia has been in a state of full-on revolt. In response to neoliberal reforms by the recently elected right-wing government led by President Rodrigo Paz, unions have launched a general strike, peasants and Indigenous peoples have set up dozens of roadblocks throughout the country, and massive marches have been held in the capital, La Paz. These are just a few expressions of a much broader social discontent, which has brought the country to a halt and stoked mass resistance to the larger project of U.S-aligned, right-wing attacks on workers and social movements in Latin America. Joseph Bouchard, a social scientist and journalist currently in La Paz as a visiting fellow at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, explained the diverse character of the movement. “It’s sort of a grouping of different social movements and groups that I think represents the wide spectrum within the Bolivian left,” Bouchard told Truthout. “You have teachers unions and workers unions. You have mining unions. You have just regular people joining who are not necessarily part of any movement. You have an Indigenous federation who used to be part of an anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s. You have [former president Evo Morales’s] people … And so you have really all these groups that together add up to sort of the largest representation of the Bolivian left, disaffected voters, organized groups, disorganized groups.” While the diversity of the movement also brings a wide range of demands, one of the most popular is for President Paz to resign, with some sectors of the movement arguing that the country should maintain a general strike indefinitely until Paz has been ousted. The level of outrage is especially profound considering that Paz has only been in office for six months. How to Lose a Populace in 6 Months In October 2025, Bolivia elected right-wing populist Rodrigo Paz, ending 20 years of government by the left-wing MAS (Movement to Socialism) party founded by former president Evo Morales. Paz, running on a campaign of “capitalism for all,” promised to address economic hardships plaguing the country. His campaign also benefited from the implosion of MAS, which was experiencing intense infighting from which it has not recovered. Despite appealing to the economic concerns of the Bolivian people and positioning himself as more of a centrist than the country’s established (and much more extreme) right, once elected Paz wasted no time in carrying out attacks on the country’s workers and poor. One of his first moves was to eliminate a tax on large fortunes. He has also proposed education policies that teachers have criticized as privatization-oriented measures. Two policies in particular have incited the outrage now rocking the country: a land privatization law and Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated state fuel subsidies. Two policies in particular have incited the outrage now rocking the country: Law 1720, a land privatization law which many see as a move to hand over Indigenous lands to agribusiness and other large-scale landowners, and Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated state fuel subsidies, practically doubling the consumer cost of fuel overnight. Along with the rising fuel costs, Paz’s government has further angered Bolivians by importing low quality fuel, or “junk fuel,” as the people call it, which has reportedly damaged people’s vehicles, imposing repair costs many cannot afford. It did not take long for the outrage to spread. Bolivia had already seen significant protests in December 2025, just a month into Paz’s presidency, but these were halted due to negotiations between the government and the country’s largest union federation, Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). Despite these negotiations the Paz administration continued advancing neoliberal reforms, further fueling outrage and forcing COB and other unions, including teachers unions, to call strikes at the start of May. Around the same time, rural Indigenous communities embarked on a long march to the capital, while other peasant and Indigenous communities erected blockades across major roads. Despite its best efforts, the Bolivian government has not yet quashed the nationwide shutdown, though on May 26 the country’s Chamber of Deputies voted to repeal restrictions on the use of military force against protesters. Even before the vote, the state had deployed militarized forces against protesters. This repression has only further radicalized the movement, with some protesters using dynamite, rocks, and slingshots to defend themselves against the military, according to multiple sources on the ground who spoke with Truthout. Reports emerging on social media confirm this as well. A history student at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés who spoke with Truthout described the repressive climate that the protesters are braving. “Especially police, they have been repressing the movement with chemical agents, rubber bullets, and so on,” she told Truthout. “[The military] tried to stop the blockades which have been in the roads, but 30 minutes after they left, the blockades were rebuilt with even more people.” The student, who is a member of the socialist youth group Combate Rojo, asked to remain anonymous due to the doxxing to which members of her organization have been subjected from the far right. She mentioned that arrests and violence have been common in the crackdown on protests. A Challenge to the Regional Right and U.S. Imperialism The protests in Bolivia are not merely a national issue. They have implications for a regional strategy in which the United States is relying on far-right allies in Latin America to advance U.S. interests. These interests are expressed clearly in Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which names the Western Hemisphere as the administration’s top region of strategic interest. It states, “The goal is for our partner nations to build up their domestic economies, while an economically stronger and more sophisticated Western Hemisphere becomes an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment.” The protests in Bolivia have implications for a regional strategy in which the United States is relying on far-right allies in Latin America to advance U.S. interests. Paz has closely aligned Bolivia with the United States, joining the recently formed Shield of the Americas, a military alliance composed mostly of right-wing governments with the stated mission of fighting cartels. On May 21, the alliance issued a joint statement condemning the protests in Bolivia, alleging that the protesters are being led by “criminals and drug traffickers.” Under the Trump administration, allegations of drug trafficking have been used to justify a wide range of interventionist and militaristic policies including the attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, the establishment of a seemingly permanent military occupation along the U.S.-Mexico border, dozens of illegal and deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean, and a growing military campaign in Ecuador that has resulted in the bombing of a civilian farm in a rural village. Bouchard argued that the U.S. response to the protests is a rejection of Latin American sovereignty. “You can vote for a government and then decide you’re unhappy with what they’re doing if you feel like they’re betraying their promises or not fulfilling what they voted for,” Bouchard said. “This is how democracy works. U.S. government and right-wing allies in Latin America are basically saying that no protests are ever legitimate; if you vote for a government you’re basically supposed to accept whatever they do after.” Several of the Latin American governments who signed the Shield of the Americas statement are likely observing the protests in Bolivia with concern that their own populations could draw inspiration from them. The same week that Bolivian trade unions launched their general strike, Argentina and Chile saw massive student-led demonstrations against attacks on public education. Both Argentine President Javier Milei and Chilean President José Antonio Kast have been pushing their own neoliberal reforms similar to those carried out by Paz. They know that they can bring down governments … They’ve done it before many times. These tactics work and they can get concessions. Even in Brazil, which is currently governed by the left-wing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, university students and municipal teachers in São Paulo have been on strike and held combative marches against austerity pushed by the state’s far right governor. While the protests in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have not reached anywhere near the level of widespread anger expressed in Bolivia, they demonstrate a regional trend in which workers, students, and broader communities are beginning to rise up against economic strain and far right movements. The history student who spoke with Truthoutsaid that there are many in the movement in Bolivia who understand that their uprising poses a challenge to far more than just Paz’s agenda. “[Protesters] mention Milei, they mention the genocide [in Gaza],” she said. “That internationalist connection to U.S. imperialism and Israel, it’s there. You just can’t hide it.” Bouchard said that the Bolivian people understand their country’s history, and this informs how radical the movement has become and how much more radical it can get. “They know that they can bring down governments,” Bouchard said. “They’ve done it before many times. These tactics work and they can get concessions. They know that the Paz government is quite weak, and if they use these tactics like they’ve done before they can win.” From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.

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U.S. and Iran draft deal, pending Trump approval; Netanyahu orders IDF to take 70% of Gaza; Kenya refuses to be “dumping ground” for Ebola

U.S. and Iran near preliminary MOU to extend ceasefire 60 days and open permanent peace talks, reports say. Oman tells Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent it has “no plans” to participate in Hormuz toll plan. Trump team quietly developing indirect financing mechanisms for future payment to Iran. U.S. oil stockpiles fall for fifth straight week. Israeli officials privately urge Trump to abandon Iran talks, assassinate lead negotiator, report says. Israeli strikes kill 31 across Lebanon on Thursday. Israeli forces push north of Litani River. UNICEF: 11 children killed or injured by Israel daily in Lebanon. Lebanese and Israeli military officials to hold U.S.-brokered security talks. Israeli attacks kill at least 14 Palestinians in northern Gaza on Thursday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders IDF to expand control to 70% of Gaza. UN report documents Israeli rape, sexual abuse of Palestinians. Israel approves major settlement expansion plan in Jordan Valley. AIPAC routes millions to Michigan Senate candidate Haley Stevens through third-party processor. DOJ sues Massachusetts over refusal to issue undercover license plates to ICE. Supreme Court rules 5-4 for Black Mississippi death row inmate. Sen. Susan Collins responds to campaign rival Graham Platner after Platner says she sent him to “die in Iraq.” RSF kills at least 30 civilians in North Kordofan attack. Guatemala agrees to joint U.S. military strikes on its soil. At least 52 killed in clashes between rival FARC factions. U.S. designates Brazil’s two largest criminal gangs “terrorist organizations.” Mexico’s lower house approves constitutional amendment allowing elections to be nullified over foreign interference. Kenyan court suspends U.S. Ebola quarantine facility. Russian drone crashes into Romanian apartment building. FROM DROP SITE: Tyre is Now the Epicenter of Israel’s Assault on Lebanon Hungry Palestinians in Gaza Protest World Central Kitchen Scaling Back Amid Rising Food Costs and Israeli Blockade Drop Site is now live on WhatsApp. Get our latest reporting, podcasts, and breaking news, delivered directly. Join the channel here. This is Drop Site Daily, our free daily news recap. We send it Monday through Friday. Today’s edition is being sent to more than 750,000 subscribers. Help us grow that number by forwarding and recommending this newsletter. Subscribe now 🛒 Get your “Drop [Site] News/Not Bombs” Hoodie here: Get Your Hoodie U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting in the White House on May 27, 2026 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images. Subscribe now Iran and Ceasefire U.S. and Iran near preliminary MOU to extend ceasefire 60 days and open permanent peace talks, reports say: U.S. and Iranian negotiators have drafted a preliminary memorandum of understanding to extend their ceasefire for 60 days and begin negotiations toward permanently ending the war, U.S. officials told Al Jazeera on Thursday—though the framework still requires President Donald Trump’s final approval. The deal, also reported by Axios, entails unrestricted vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and a staged U.S. lifting of its naval blockade on Iranian ports. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency denied the deal was finalized, with a source close to the negotiations saying “any narrative from Western sources about the finalisation of the matter is not valid” until Iran formally notifies its Pakistani mediator. An Iranian official confirmed separately to Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill that Tehran had agreed to what mediators said was final draft language of a memorandum of understanding. However, a “deep distrust” of Trump is preventing any official announcement. According to the official, Iran is unable to rule out further U.S.-Israeli strikes. “Some voices on the Iranian side are concerned that President Trump may reconsider his position at the last moment,” the official said, adding that Iran would not consider Trump’s decision final until U.S. “financial markets close at the end of the week.” Iran also warned Trump would likely mischaracterize the privately agreed terms to promote his “victor” narrative. On Friday morning, Trump said he would be convening a meeting in the Situation Room, reiterating his demands in a post on Truth Social. Iran must “agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb,” he posted, while also calling for the Strait of Hormuz to be “immediately open, no tolls” to unrestricted shipping, and for any remaining naval mines to be removed or detonated. He said ships affected by what he described as a “our amazing and unprecedented Naval Blockade” could now “start the process of ‘heading home’.” Trump also said enriched nuclear material buried underground after earlier U.S. strikes would be “unearthed by the United States…in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED,” and added that “no money will be exchanged, until further notice.” Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator in indirect talks with the United States, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, issued a warning on X on Friday as negotiations continue: “We do not obtain concessions through negotiations. We obtain them with our missiles,” adding that “we have no trust in guarantees or promises, only in actions.” Ghalibaf also said, “We will not take any step before the other side acts first,” and concluded that “the winner of any agreement is the one better prepared for war the next day.” Oman tells Bessent it has “no plans” to participate in Hormuz toll plan: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that the Omani ambassador had assured him the country has “no plans” to participate in any effort to impose fees on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The exchange comes a day after Trump warned that “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” Bessent said he warned the ambassador of possible sanctions. Iran has recently denied that it plans to charge tolls, describing its fee framework instead as pilotage and navigation service fees comparable to systems used by Turkey, Australia, and Canada, intended in part to offset war damages. Trump team quietly developing indirect financing mechanisms for future payment to Iran: With President Donald Trump unwilling to authorize any arrangement that could be framed as a direct cash payment to Iran, his team has been quietly developing alternative financing mechanisms, three anonymous U.S. officials told the New York Times. Gulf Arab states have been lobbied to underwrite Iran’s postwar reconstruction through a $300 billion investment fund, while a separate mechanism under discussion would unfreeze Iranian assets held by Qatar, which would then purchase medicines and feedstock for direct transfer to Iran—both steps requiring U.S. approval. U.S. oil stockpiles fall for fifth straight week: U.S. commercial crude inventories fell 3.3 million barrels to 441.7 million barrels—about 2% below the five-year seasonal average—for a fifth consecutive week, the Energy Information Administration reported Thursday. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve also dropped by 9.1 million barrels to a total of 365.1 million barrels. Separately on Thursday, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Neil Chapman warned that a price spike is “two weeks or three weeks” away, saying inventories are approaching “unheard of” lows and that physical Brent crude could spike to $150–$160 per barrel; Brent futures closed under $94 Thursday as markets held out hope for a U.S.-Iran deal. Israeli officials privately urge Trump to abandon Iran talks, assassinate lead negotiator, report says: Israeli officials are privately pressing the Trump administration to scrap nuclear negotiations with Iran, assassinate parliament speaker and lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and launch a fresh round of strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure, according to reporting from Capital & Empire’s Aída Chávez. Israeli officials reportedly believe renewed attacks could trigger economic collapse and the regime change Israel sought at the outset of the war. Read Chávez’s full piece here. Lebanon Casualty count: At least 3,355 people have been killed, and 10,095 wounded in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since March 2, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Israeli strikes and forced displacement orders across southern Lebanon: Israeli strikes killed at least six people in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to the National News Agency, including four in an airstrike at the Abbasiyah junction and one in an attack on Deir Qanoun al-Nahr. A municipal police officer in the town of Aaba was killed in a drone strike on his hometown. Rescue teams recovered the bodies of two victims after searching through the rubble of a house struck by Israeli aircraft in Tyre Dibba. The Israeli military issued forced displacement orders Friday ordering residents of Ansariya, Al-Kharayeb, Shabriha, Sarafand, Adloun, and Baisariya to immediately evacuate north of the Zahrani River, claiming it was “compelled to act forcefully” against Hezbollah in the area. Israeli strikes kill 31 across Lebanon on Thursday: At least 31 people were killed and 68 wounded Thursday in Israeli attacks across Lebanon, according to the country’s Health Ministry. Israeli forces push north of Litani River: The Israeli military crossed the Litani River from the Zawtar and Yuhmur areas on Thursday, deepening the assault on Lebanese territory, according to Press TV correspondent Hadi Hoteit, in an attempt to advance on the Arnon hill and the historic Beaufort Castle area. The move has been questioned by Israeli analysts and former generals, who say that moving into the area puts the army at risk of entering a “kill zone,” where Hezbollah has a strategic advantage—and as Hezbollah has recently achieved what Hoteit called a “micro-air superiority” with its effective use of FPV drones. UNICEF: 11 children killed or injured by Israel daily in Lebanon: 11 children have been killed or injured every 24 hours over the past week in Lebanon despite a nominal ceasefire, UNICEF said via L’Orient Today. UNICEF described the toll as “staggering,” with spokesperson Ricardo Pires stating on Friday that 15 children were killed and 62 injured in the past seven days, citing figures from the Lebanese Ministry of Health, adding that “the vast majority of these children were impacted by airstrikes in south Lebanon.” At least seven children were killed and 30 injured on Thursday, according to the Ministry. Lebanese and Israeli military officials to hold U.S.-brokered security talks: Lebanese and Israeli military officials are set to hold their first security talks on Friday in Washington, D.C., amid Israel’s ongoing military assault in southern Lebanon, according to the Associated Press. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said “nothing can justify” Israel’s continued “assaults” on southern Lebanon, calling for an immediate ceasefire and full Israeli withdrawal. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc criticized the talks, saying Lebanon’s authorities were “compromising both sovereignty and rights” and “actively working to obstruct” opportunities linked to regional negotiations involving its ally Iran. Israel escalates assault on Tyre: At least 15 Israeli airstrikes hit the Lebanese city of Tyre overnight Wednesday into Thursday, killing at least three people and wounding 17 others in a direct strike on a residential block near the El-Buss Palestinian refugee camp—one of the hardest nights since the start of the war, according to local civil defense official Moussa Shaalan. The assault has triggered another wave of mass displacement from Tyre, a UNESCO World Heritage city of around 160,000, where tens of thousands had remained or returned after earlier waves of bombardment; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel would “intensify our strikes” and instructed the military to “step on the gas even more.” Read Lylla Younes’ latest for Drop Site here. Palestine Israeli attacks on Friday: Three Palestinians were killed and several injured early Friday after Israeli drones targeted a police checkpoint in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to WAFA. More civilians were wounded in the Al-Qarara Mawasi area after strikes led to fires igniting in tents sheltering displaced families. Five people were injured when an Israeli strike hit Al-Yarmouk Street in Gaza City, causing a fire inside a residential building. Israeli attacks kill at least 14 Palestinians in northern Gaza on Thursday: Israeli strikes killed at least 14 Palestinians on Thursday across northern Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Among the attacks, an Israeli drone strike killed at least one person and wounded several others after targeting a group of civilians in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, Shehab News reported. Civilians were forced to evacuate areas around Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir al-Balah on Thursday. Israeli strikes hit the area’s recently emptied homes and burned tents sheltering displaced families, destroying entire residential blocks, according to Eyad Amawi of the Gaza Relief Committee. In Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City, residents returned to devastation after Thursday evening strikes. Drop Site contributor Abdel Qader Sabbah sent footage of the scene from Al-Shati, available here. One resident told Sabbah that he received a phone call from an Israeli officer ordering the evacuation of an area of roughly 300 meters. The officer claimed a military target was present. “I told him there is no military target. Everyone here is civilian,” the resident said. Netanyahu orders IDF to expand control to 70% of Gaza: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday he has directed the Israeli military to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip, up from the roughly 60% Israel currently controls which goes beyond the agreed upon “Yellow Line” in the ceasefire agreement. “At this point, we are fully in control of 60%of the territory of the Gaza Strip… and my directive is to get to… 70%,” Netanyahu said in an interview at a conference in the occupied West Bank, while an audience member cheered in the background, urging him to take 100% of the Strip. “Wait, let’s go in order. First 70%. Let’s start with that,” he responded. Hamas warns ceasefire faces “risk of collapse”: In a statement Thursday condemning an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Gaza City on Wednesday that killed 10 people, including five children and two women, Hamas warned that the recent escalation of hostilities signals Israel’s attempt “to return to the brutal war of extermination that lasted for two full years on Gaza.” Hamas called on the U.S. and ceasefire guarantor countries to condemn Israel’s violations and take “serious and urgent steps” to enforce the agreement. UN report documents Israeli rape, sexual abuse of Palestinians: A new United Nations report submitted by Secretary-General António Guterres—documenting the sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention—has added Israeli forces to a list of parties accused of conflict-related sexual violence, according to Haaretz. The report names the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Prison Service, and a border police counterterrorism unit, and documents 31 victims since 2023 from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, including men, women, and children. It says the reported abuses included “rape, including with objects, gang rape,” as well as “physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals.” The U.N. cited what it described as a “systematic lack of accountability,” adding that its findings should be viewed as “indicative rather than comprehensive” as Israel continues to deny investigators access and detainees continue to face “explicit threats” from Israeli forces aimed at preventing them from reporting abuse. Israeli forces shut down Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron: Israeli forces on Friday closed the Ibrahimi Mosque to worshippers in Hebron, the occupied West Bank “until further notice,” according to WAFA. The acting director of the sanctuary, Hammam Abu Morkhia, described the move as a “blatant violation” of the mosque’s sanctity. The Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs condemned the closure, warning it reflects attempts to alter the religious and historical status quo in Hebron. Israel approves major settlement expansion plan in Jordan Valley: Israeli authorities have approved a large-scale settlement expansion plan in the Jordan Valley, according to the Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission. The commission said the plan targets the Misawa settlement built on Palestinian land in the Al-Far’a Valley area of Jericho and includes 517 new housing units across about 1,692 dunams, along with infrastructure, roads, and public facilities intended to expand the settlement into a fully integrated complex. France refers Israeli abuse of Gaza flotilla detainees to prosecutor: France has referred the treatment of its nationals detained by Israel last week as a part of the Global Sumud Flotilla to the public prosecutor, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced Friday, citing a consular report documenting sexual violence, exposure to cold, beatings, and repeated humiliation of French citizens. The Global Sumud Flotilla was seized by Israeli forces in international waters during an attempt to deliver aid to Gaza; activists report widespread abuse, with at least 15 cases of sexual assaults, including rape. Gaza civilians protest WCK meal cuts as Iran war drives up food costs: World Central Kitchen, the largest provider of hot meals in Gaza, halved its daily distribution from roughly one million meals to 500,000 this month, citing financial pressures driven by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The move leaves thousands of Palestinian kitchen workers suddenly unemployed, sparking protests. “We truly have nothing. Where are we supposed to work? How are we supposed to feed our children? I sit waiting at the community kitchens from 8 in the morning. This is the result,” one man said at a demonstration. Read the latest from Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for Drop Site here. U.S. News By Julian Andreone, with Ryan Grim. Have a tip on Capitol Hill? Email Andreone at [email protected]. AIPAC routes millions to Rep. Haley Stevens through third-party processor: AIPAC has shifted how it funds the Senate primary campaign of Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, according to a new investigation by the Detroit News. The group is now routing donor money through a third-party processor called Democracy Engine to prevent AIPAC’s name from appearing prominently in campaign filings. A separate pro-Israel super PAC also launched a $5.3 million ad blitz backing Stevens, giving her a financial advantage over progressive challengers Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed. DOJ sues Massachusetts over refusal to issue undercover license plates to ICE: The Justice Department sued Massachusetts Thursday over the state’s refusal to issue confidential license plates to federal immigration agents, arguing the policy discriminates against ICE and CBP in violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—one of four such lawsuits filed Wednesday and Thursday against Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, and Oregon. Governor Maura Healey rejected the suit as another “specious complaint against political enemies,” arguing that confidential plates are reserved for criminal law enforcement and that ICE’s civil enforcement work does not qualify. Supreme Court rules 5-4 for Black Mississippi death row inmate: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Terry Pitchford, a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who argued racial bias tainted the jury that convicted him of capital murder, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for a 5-4 majority. Pitchford’s trial featured 11 white and one Black juror, and was prosecuted by Doug Evans—a now-retired prosecutor with a documented history of dismissing Black jurors. The ruling entitles Pitchford to a new trial in state court. Collins responds to Platner regarding the Iraq War: MaineSenator Susan Collins answered a claim made by her senatorial opponent, Graham Platner, in a New York Times interview that she sent him to “die in Iraq” by voting for that war. “That was Platner’s decision to serve,” she told a reporter. “He was not drafted.” Platner responded later on Thursday by saying that Collins, “all these years later,” had decided “to blame those of us who, in our late teens and early 20s, signed up to serve our country.” Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney dropped gun charge against Israeli linked to illegal Nevada biolab: An acting U.S. attorney, appointed by Trump, dropped a federal gun charge against Ori Solomon, an Israeli immigrant arrested during an investigation into a suspected illegal biolab in Nevada, citing the “interests of justice” with no public explanation. The property contained refrigerators filled with unidentified vials and shared similarities with a California lab, which reportedly had samples labeled with diseases including HIV, malaria, and Ebola. Hundreds protest Jerusalem real estate expo in Manhattan: Hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside the Hilton Midtown in Manhattan Thursday evening to protest the Jerusalem Comes to NYC real estate expo, which was attended by Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion and marketed properties in Jerusalem, with organizers accusing sponsors of facilitating Palestinian displacement and promoting settlement expansion. Protesters also opposed a parallel aliyah fair sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a settler recruitment event encouraging immigration to Israel. Trump admin moves to vacate enforcement order against Winklevoss twins’ Gemini crypto exchange: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission asked a New York federal judge Wednesday to vacate a January 2025 consent order against Gemini Trust, calling the original complaint one that “should not have been filed.” The cryptocurrency exchange was founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign. The order included a $5 million penalty and an injunction barring Gemini from making false statements to the agency, stemming from misrepresentations made in 2017 about a Bitcoin futures contract. Former CFTC Chair Tim Massad called the move “very unusual.” Other International News RSF kills at least 30 civilians in North Kordofan attack: Rapid Support Forces attacked several villages near Bara in North Kordofan state on Thursday, killing at least 30 civilians, according to Sudan Tribune. Approximately 20 RSF combat vehicles struck the Al-Murra, Um Saadoun al-Sharif, and Al-Radha areas. Bara, the second-largest city in North Kordofan, is currently under RSF control after changing hands multiple times during the conflict; the Sudanese Armed Forces continue to hold El Obeid, the state capital. Burhan denies consultations in UAE: Sudanese Sovereignty Council Chairman General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan flatly denied Thursday that any consultations had taken place in Bahrain, calling a recent Middle East Eye report alleging he had signaled readiness to open dialogue with the UAE “completely untrue.” Guatemala agrees to joint U.S. military strikes on its soil: Guatemala agreed to allow joint U.S. airstrikes and military operations inside its borders targeting alleged drug trafficking groups, with President Bernardo Arévalo signing off on the arrangement in a call with War Secretary Pete Hegseth last week, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The Guatemalan government later denied that report, calling it inaccurate but confirming it had sought a different arrangement. It released a May 28 letter from Defense Minister Henry Saenz to Hegseth stating his country’s “desire” to “lead, with US assistance, active military operations” against U.S.-designated drug trafficking organizations, “in accordance with existing bilateral agreements and arrangements.” Subsequent reporting from El País claimed that the plans were geared toward a media spectacle, with one source telling the Spanish paper, “What they offered us was to select one or two places to carry out bombings and televise it all.” At least 52 killed in clashes between rival FARC factions: At least 52 guerrilla fighters were killed in clashes between two rival FARC dissident factions vying for control of a cocaine production region in Colombia, according to a statement Thursday by one of the groups involved—the most violent such fighting in recent months. The clashes pitted a faction known as Iván Mordisco against Calarca Córdoba; though the latter group is currently in peace talks with President Gustavo Petro while Iván Mordisco remains in conflict with authorities after Petro suspended a bilateral ceasefire with the faction in 2024. U.S. designates Brazil’s two largest criminal gangs “terrorist organizations”: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Thursday that the Trump administration will designate Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho as Foreign Terrorist Organizations effective June 5. A foreign affairs adviser to the country’s president, Lula da Silva, welcomed international cooperation on money laundering and arms trafficking but warned that any “pretext for intervention” in Brazilian sovereignty would be “unacceptable.” His opponent, the right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, said he personally petitioned for the designations during meetings with U.S. officials in Washington this week. Mexico’s lower house approves constitutional amendment allowing elections to be nullified over foreign interference: Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies approved a constitutional amendment Thursday, 307 to 128, that would add foreign interference—defined as illicit financing, disinformation campaigns, digital manipulation, and pressure from foreign governments or media—as grounds for nullifying an election. President Claudia Sheinbaum cited repeated electoral interference from Washington throughout the region. The measure still requires Senate approval and is unlikely to affect the next federal elections in June 2027. Kenyan court suspends U.S. Ebola quarantine facility: A Kenyan High Court judge suspended a planned U.S. Ebola quarantine facility on Friday, hours before it was set to open, after a human rights group filed a legal challenge arguing the secretive arrangement raised “grave constitutional concerns.” The facility—a 50-bed isolation unit at Laikipia Air Base, about 200 kilometers from Nairobi—intended to quarantine U.S. nationals arriving from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and was established to avoid repatriating exposed Americans to U.S. soil, a policy which drew criticism from U.S. doctors and Kenyan health workers alike. Kenya’s doctors’ union issued a 48-hour strike alert Thursday, warning Kenya should not become a “dumping ground” for Ebola cases. Russian drone crashes into Romanian apartment building, injuring two: A Russian drone reportedly headed toward Ukraine crashed into a residential building in the Romanian city of Galati overnight Friday, injuring two people and triggering a fire that forced evacuations, in what Romania’s Foreign Ministry called a serious violation of international law. The country’s president, Nicusor Dan, said Romania would not accept Russia’s war “being transferred to its citizens.” NATO, of which Romania is a part, also condemned Russia’s “reckless behaviour” in response to the crash. If you want to continue getting this newsletter, you don’t have to do anything. But if this is too much—we do try to be mindful of your inbox—you can unsubscribe from this newsletter while continuing to get the rest of our reporting. Just go into your account here at this link, scroll down, and toggle the button next to “Drop Site Daily“ to the off setting. 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From Mutual Suspicion To Political Embrace: How the US Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Pakistan

By Waqas Ahmed, Murtaza Hussain, and Ryan Grim – May 17, 2026 Yesterday, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the Sunday Times that Pakistan serving as a mediator in the U.S.-Iran war is “one of the shining moments in our history.” “We are in seventh heaven and on cloud nine and it’s intoxicating,” the former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. Masood Khan concurred. “I’ve had a long diplomatic career and I have never seen Pakistan on such a high pedestal.” “When I went to Washington as ambassador in 2022, it was an uphill task,” he continued. “Yet now Pakistan is playing the role the UN should have been—it’s a very delicate task and we are doing it well.” For some, Pakistan may have appeared as an unexpected mediator in the negotiations to end the Iran war. But the country, taken over by a military regime after the ouster of populist PM Imran Khan, has recently been making a major play on the world stage. Drop Site has been a lone voice in producing independent investigations on Pakistan—a country of over 200 million people with nuclear weapons and without freedom of the press. We’re able to do so because—as a reader-funded independent news outlet—we operate free from the influence of governments and corporate backers. This is essential to our mission: to report on what matters most, beholden only to the truth. In that spirit, we made a commitment to ensure that our journalism is free for everyone, not locked behind a paywall. But that means we rely on the voluntary support of our community of readers. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work today. On the afternoon of Friday, April 24, as markets in the United States were closing for the weekend, the Trump administration saw some welcome news: Axios published a story indicating that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was headed to Islamabad, with the potential to restart the failed talks with the U.S. to end the war. If all went well, Araghchi would meet that Monday with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “A trilateral meeting with the U.S. will be assessed after our meeting with Araghchi,” a source described as a “Pakistani official” told Axios’s Barak Ravid. At the same time, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media arm of Pakistan’s ruling military, sent out a private message on WhatsApp to reporters. The message, the ISPR told reporters, was “Attributable to Government Sources”—obscuring the military’s role—and informed reporters of Araghchi’s impending visit. “Following important discussions with the Pakistani mediation team, a second round of Islamabad peace talks between the United States and Iran is expected, government sources say,” the ISPR suggested. “A U.S. logistics and security team is already present in Islamabad to facilitate the negotiation process.” The claim flew around the world and stocks popped at the close, as reporters copied the ISPR message and pasted it on their Twitter accounts. Pakistani mediators basked in adulation from the Western press, which marveled at the Phoenix-like rise of the military-run government, now a central player on the world stage. And yet, surprising nobody who had been following the situation closely, the story quickly unraveled. As Drop Site reported in real time, Araghchi was not going to Islamabad to re-open talks and would most certainly not be meeting with Witkoff and Kushner. Trump called off their trip, saying the Iranians could phone them if they wanted. By Sunday, Ebrahim Rezaei, an Iranian national security spokesperson, had seen enough. “Pakistan is a good friend and neighbor of ours, but it is not a suitable intermediary for negotiations and lacks the necessary credibility for mediation,” Rezaei said on Twitter. “They always take Trump’s interests into account and do not say a word against the Americans’ wishes.” Listing a litany of instances where Pakistan had simply deferred to Trump and overlooked his violation of agreements, he added, “A mediator must be impartial, not always leaning to one side.” Pakistan has continued assisting the talks, including by lending an official plane to Araghchi for a short flight to Oman for a brief diplomatic tour last month. But the very mercenary nature of the regime, which allowed it to position itself so effectively as a tool for American interests, also diminishes its value in the role as peacemaker. At the same time, other parties, including Oman, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have also begun to try their hands at shaping the diplomatic outcome of the war. How Pakistan got to this point is a story of steady American pressure applied in a variety of ways and a testament to the Pakistan military’s uncanny survival instincts. After engineering former prime minister Imran Khan’s removal in 2022, blatantly rigging a national election in 2024, and continuing to govern in the face of sustained public opposition, the generals have only tightened their hold at home and their standing in Washington. Leaked documents obtained by Drop Site News, as well as interviews with former civilian and military officials, trace the sequence of events that shaped the U.S.-Pakistan relationship over the past five years and brought Washington and Islamabad from mutual suspicion into a political embrace. This budding relationship, despite bearing hopes to reshape the region, may yet be brought down by the shaky foundation on which it was built. To hear the recent laudatory profiles of Pakistan tell it, Pakistan’s diplomatic position is a product of effective lobbying by the Pakistani government in D.C. But the true story has been much longer in the making. Burns in IslamabadIn June 2021, CIA Director William J. Burns flew to Islamabad to meet with then-Prime Minister Imran Khan. He waited a full day to see Khan, according to reports from the time. But the meeting never happened. Khan’s office informed Burns by phone that the prime minister, citing protocol, would only take calls from his counterparts. His counterpart was President Joe Biden, who, since taking office that January, had declined repeated requests for a direct call. Biden’s refusal to meet Khan personally marked a stinging reversal from the previous administration. In July 2019, Khan had been invited for a brief meeting in the White House during the Trump administration that wound up lasting longer than 90 minutes. Trump and Khan enjoyed a warm relationship and had much in common: They were both celebrities in the ‘80s and ‘90s who became populist politicians around the same time. They met again in September 2019 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings and again in January 2020 in the White House. For the Biden administration, Khan was merely the Donald Trump of Pakistan. Burns had come to secure Pakistani territory for U.S. drone bases to use against targets in Afghanistan after the planned American withdrawal. He left with neither the bases nor an audience with the prime minister. If there was any confusion on the matter, Khan cleared it up later that month in an interview with Axios’s co-founder Jonathan Swan. “Absolutely not. There is no way we are going to allow any bases, any sort of action from Pakistani territory into Afghanistan. Absolutely not,” he said. Within weeks, Kabul fell to the Taliban, and the U.S. evacuation descended into chaos that damaged the Biden administration’s standing at home and abroad. Donald Trump and Imran Khan meet in the Oval Office at the White House on July 22, 2019 in Washington, DC. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images. In the months prior, Khan’s government had helped broker the final agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration. Even so, ties between Washington and Islamabad were already deeply frayed. For two decades, U.S. officials had accused Pakistan of sheltering the Taliban while accepting billions of dollars in American aid as a nominal ally. Pakistan’s military faced further scrutiny after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 in Abbottabad, a garrison town home to Pakistan’s military academy, a raid conducted without Islamabad’s knowledge. By the early 2020s, the prevailing view in U.S. policy circles was that Washington should leave Afghanistan and cut Islamabad loose. The dismissal of Burns’s request and the collapse of Kabul set off a chain reaction. Leaked documents reviewed by Drop Site News show that in the same period, Saudi Arabia was pressing Pakistan for a mutual defense pact—an overture Khan’s government was also rebuffing, according to the documents. In principle, Khan’s government was drawing diplomatic red lines with both Washington and the Gulf Cooperation Council, but the Pakistani military concluded he was isolating the country. In July 2021, without the prime minister’s knowledge, the military quietly retained a former CIA Islamabad station chief as a lobbyist in Washington, an early sign that Pakistan’s generals were beginning to move independently of their own elected government. All Will Be ForgivenIn February 2022, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Driving back Russia became the Biden administration’s overriding foreign policy priority almost overnight. U.S. diplomats pressed capitals across the world to pick a side. As the world began to fracture over the conflict, Pakistan unexpectedly found itself in the center of the maelstrom. On February 24, the day Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, Imran Khan was in Moscow for a long-scheduled meeting with President Putin. Days before that fateful meeting, Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to Biden, had called his Pakistani counterpart, Moeed Yusuf, urging him to persuade Khan to cancel the trip. The details of that call, later leaked to Drop Site, show Sullivan warning against the visit and pressing Islamabad to side clearly with the U.S. in the Ukraine war. Khan ignored the warning. Photographs of Putin and Khan shaking hands went viral on social media the same day the news of the invasion hit the timelines. Pakistani officials said the trip had been planned for months and could not be cancelled. Yet the incident was not viewed innocently in Washington. Days later, Pakistan abstained from a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion, joining China, India, and much of the Global South. U.S. diplomats, already furious over the Moscow visit and Khan’s refusal to clearly align with Washington, began telling Pakistani interlocutors privately that the relationship could not continue on its existing terms. On March 7, 2022, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Asad Majeed Khan, met with Donald Lu, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs. That conversation, documented in a classified diplomatic cable that would later be leaked, became the inflection point of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. According to the cable, Lu told the ambassador that Washington’s grievances with Khan’s government could be set aside, “all will be forgiven,” in the phrase the Pakistani ambassador would later cite, if Khan were removed from office through a no-confidence vote. (The authors of this article previously published the contents of the cable, known as a cypher in Pakistan, but had withheld the memo itself for source protection reasons. The cypher can now be published in full, so it can be a part of the historical record. It is now available here.) Khan was removed on April 9, 2022, in a no-confidence vote backed by Pakistan’s military. His party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, was subsequently outlawed, stripped of its electoral symbol ahead of the 2024 general election, and barred from fielding candidates under its own banner. Members who won seats as independents were denied certification. Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, were jailed on a series of corruption, contempt, and national security charges. Both remain in prison to this day, Khan under solitary confinement since last year. Under the new government, installed with the military’s backing, Islamabad began delivering to Washington what it had refused to deliver under Khan. Within months, Pakistan emerged as a quiet but significant supplier of artillery shells and other munitions to Ukraine. Leaked documents showed the weapons were routed through U.S. defense contractors and third-country intermediaries, easing shortages in Ukrainian stockpiles during the first year of the war. Former U.S. and Pakistani officials stated at the time that American support for Pakistan’s next International Monetary Fund program was explicitly linked to the continuation of the weapons pipeline. In July 2023, the IMF approved a $3 billion standby arrangement for Pakistan. In February 2024, both the European Union and United States looked away as the military massively rigged elections and installed a suitable government in Islamabad. During the U.S. Presidential elections the same year, the Pakistani diaspora in the United States overwhelmingly supported the Trump campaign. The reason, cited almost unanimously, was the Biden administration’s support for the military junta in Pakistan. Many prominent Pakistani-Americans and groups such as PAKPAC declared their support for the Republican campaign due to this. When Trump took office in January 2025, the question of what to do about Pakistan became an early flashpoint inside his administration. Drop Site News reported at the time that the new State Department, under Secretary Marco Rubio, clashed with the Pentagon over the direction of U.S. policy toward Islamabad, a dispute that would shape everything that followed. The Pentagon and CIA finally won and took over the relationship. The Republican promises to the Pakistani diaspora were used by the Trump administration to scare the Pakistani government into submission. The Pakistani government also proceeded to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in public relations spending during this period according to publicly available FARA filings. US Attacks on Iran Prompt Chinese Response and Weigh on Markets The Nuclear StateOn April 9, 2022, the day Khan’s government was toppled, Pakistan conducted a missile test. The missile was the Shaheen III, Pakistan’s longest range ballistic missile with a range of almost 3,000 kilometers. While Pakistan’s missile program has been focused on India, the test was essentially a validation that Islamabad’s missiles also had the capacity to reach Israel. That fact reflected a longstanding anxiety in Washington. After Khan was removed by General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s army chief at the time, Bajwa travelled to D.C. in October 2022 in an effort to reset ties. During the visit, which also marked his last month in office, Bajwa met with top Biden officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. In those talks, he assured the U.S. that Pakistan would limit the ranges of its missiles to just fall short of Israel. Seeking to curry even more favor, Bajwa also assured his American interlocutors that Pakistan wanted to rein in its military, limit its nuclear program, and move away from China. In October 2022, soon after General Bajwa’s return to Pakistan, Bajwa called the head of the Strategic Plan Division (SPD), the military division overseeing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. According to a source aware of the details of the conversation, General Bajwa ordered the head of SPD to allow an American delegation to visit and inspect some sensitive nuclear sites in the country. In the hierarchy of Pakistan’s nuclear command, the head of SPD reports directly to the Joint Chief of Staff Committee (JCSC), who in turn reports to the prime minister, not to the army chief. Using this excuse, the SPD head refused General Bajwa at the time, according to sources, showing that the military chief was not completely in charge of the country’s nukes. Later the same month President Biden gave a statement claiming that, “Pakistan may be one of the most dangerous nations in the world” because the country has “nuclear weapons without any cohesion.” The statement, coming seemingly out of nowhere, stunned many observers. But according to sources privy to the internal communications over the matter, Biden’s statement was related to Bajwa’s inability to provide American inspectors access to Pakistan’s sensitive nuclear sites. Bajwa stepped down a month later, putting General Asim Munir in charge in November 2022. In 2025, after three tumultuous years heading the military-led government, Munir promoted himself to the rank of Field Marshall, created a new office of Chief of Defence Forces’ for himself, and abolished the role of JCSC through a constitutional amendment. The series of bureaucratic maneuvers—unprecedented in Pakistani history—also had the effect of placing Munir personally in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. For the first time, the checks and balances surrounding Pakistan’s nuclear command had been unified under a single person: the country’s staunchly pro-U.S. army chief. A checkpoint next to large screen displaying Pakistan’s Army Chief and Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir in Islamabad on April 18, 2026. Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP via Getty Images. Asim Munir’s Second ActTo Trump, Asim Munir is “my favorite Field Marshal.” He relishes the title, musing regularly about the delightfulness of the moniker. It was never a given that Munir would wind up in such an exalted position. In April 2019, while Munir was director general of the ISI, the country’s powerful spy service, he traveled with then-Prime Minister Khan to Tehran for discussions with Iranian officials as well as officials with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Munir, according to people close to Khan, battled with the Iranians over the long-simmering insurgency in the Baloch region that is split by the Iran-Pakistan border. According to a former PTI official, Munir “used undiplomatic language in Iran and deviated from the strategy the Pakistani government had discussed internally prior to the trip,” which is characteristic of Munir’s style. A source who served in Khan’s inner circle confirmed the account to Drop Site. Pakistan and Iran cooperating to stamp out the insurgency in the Baloch region would be a step toward closer relations and run contrary to Washington’s efforts to isolate Iran. Munir, whether on orders from the U.S. or by instinct, by disrupting that relationship, was doing a strong favor for the Americans. Iranian leadership complained to Khan about Munir’s outburst and in June 2019, Khan sacked Munir over the incident, sources with knowledge of his decision making said. At eight months, it was a remarkably short tenure atop the ISI. When Bajwa initially put forward a list of successors for the position of Army chief, Munir wasn’t on it. Khan later alleged that Munir traveled to London after his firing and met with Nawaz Sharif—the former Pakistani Prime Minister who, by late 2019, was living in self-imposed exile in London after being permitted to leave Pakistan for medical treatment in the middle of a corruption sentence. According to Khan, that meeting marked the beginning of what he would later, from prison, call “the London Plan,” an alleged understanding between Munir, Sharif, and members of Pakistan’s senior judiciary under which Munir would be elevated to army chief in exchange for the political and judicial dismantling of Khan’s government and his party. Munir was appointed army chief on November 24, 2022, in a process that was widely reported to have involved extensive consultations with Nawaz Sharif. Within months of the appointment, Khan was arrested and convicted in a series of corruption, contempt, and national security cases, which have repeatedly fallen apart under scrutiny, only to be replaced with new charges. Sharif returned to Pakistan in October 2023; the bulk of his outstanding convictions were vacated within weeks. By February 2024, his younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, was again prime minister, and Munir was the most powerful figure in the country. Khan remains in prison and this month three Islamabad High Court judges, Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, Babar Sattar, and Saman Rafat Imtiaz, were transferred out of the capital and into provincial high courts in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi, scattering the bench that had been hearing his appeals. Stopping ChinaFor most of the past decade, Pakistan’s relationship with China stood as the one constant in its foreign policy. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, launched in 2015 as the flagship of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, brought tens of billions of dollars in highways, power plants and port infrastructure to a country that had struggled to attract foreign investment. Senior officials in Islamabad described the relationship in language reserved for no other partner, calling it “all-weather,” and “deeper than the deepest sea.” Under Munir, that relationship has slowed almost to a halt. Of the roughly 90 projects originally envisioned under CPEC, only 38 have been completed. Twenty-three remain under construction. About a third have not been started. The last major project to be delivered, the Gwadar East Bay Expressway, was finished in 2022. No flagship project has been added to the pipeline since. ML-1, the upgrade of Pakistan’s main north-south rail line and once the centerpiece of CPEC’s planned second phase, has been deferred repeatedly. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif left Beijing empty-handed after a 2024 visit intended to secure new funding. Pakistan’s unpaid dues to Chinese power producers have ballooned into a recurring source of friction. Beijing’s ambassador in Islamabad, Jiang Zaidong, took the unusual step of using a public seminar in 2024 to accuse the Pakistani state of failing to protect Chinese workers, 21 of whom have been killed in attacks since CPEC’s launch. The relationship was even colder behind the scenes. In 2024, Drop Site News reported that Pakistan had given Beijing private assurances it would permit China to convert the deep-water port at Gwadar into a permanent Chinese military facility, a longstanding ambition by Beijing that Pakistan had declined for more than a decade. According to classified Pakistani military documents reviewed by Drop Site News, Pakistani negotiators presented Beijing with a list of demands in exchange for that base. They asked China to indemnify Pakistan against any U.S. political, economic or diplomatic retaliation for hosting the facility. They also asked China to provide modernization assistance to keep Pakistan’s military and intelligence capabilities competitive with India. Most consequentially, they asked Beijing to provide Pakistan with a sea-based nuclear second-strike capability, the most sensitive element of any nuclear power’s deterrent, and a capability Pakistan has spent two decades trying to develop on its own. China refused. According to sources with knowledge of the talks, Beijing concluded that the second-strike request would amount to direct Chinese participation in nuclear proliferation in South Asia, and therefore would violate Beijing’s own nonproliferation commitments and expose China to international consequences disproportionate to the strategic value of the Gwadar facility. The Chinese side described the demand as unreasonable, and the negotiations ended on a bitter note. In an August 2025 interview, Munir told a journalist, “We will not sacrifice one friend for the other,” referring to Pakistan’s relationship with Washington and Beijing. However, in an effort to realign itself, Pakistani military leadership has ended up doing just that. CPEC’s second phase, which would have deepened Pakistan’s economic dependence on Beijing, was intentionally allowed to atrophy, and Chinese requests for permanent security arrangements covering its workers, a long-running Beijing demand that would have placed Chinese personnel on Pakistani soil under Chinese command, were quietly deflected. These moves had more geopolitical significance for Washington than Pakistan’s participation in the Trump family’s crypto schemes, and did more to make Munir Trump’s “favorite field marshal.” Web of AlliancesIn September 2025, Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia committing each country to come to the other’s aid in the event of war, an agreement Khan’s government had refused to sign three years earlier. Throughout the same period, Pakistan’s new military-led government, working in close coordination with the Pentagon, set about cultivating the new Trump administration. When the Trump family moved into cryptocurrency, Islamabad followed, establishing the Pakistan Crypto Council. Within weeks of the body’s creation, the leadership of World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform launched in September 2024, and majority owned by the Trump family, landed in Islamabad. The April 26 delegation was led by Zach Witkoff, the chief executive of World Liberty and son of Steve Witkoff, and included co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro. By the end of the visit, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, in presence of Field Marshal Asim Munir, had signed a memorandum committing Pakistan to route a share of its $36 billion in annual remittances through the Trump-family-owned firm’s USD1 stablecoin. When concerns about U.S. dependence on Chinese rare earth mineral supply chains became a recurring theme in administration messaging, Pakistan announced a sweeping rare earths agreement with U.S. partners. The September 2025 deal, signed by the military-run Frontier Works Organization and a Missouri-based firm called U.S. Strategic Metals, promised $500 million in American investment in exchange for Pakistani antimony, copper, tungsten, and rare earth elements. Beyond a symbolic first consignment dispatched a few weeks later, no commercial-scale shipments have moved under the deal in the months since. And when the Trump administration sought a Muslim-majority country to commit troops to its proposed international stabilization force in Gaza, the Pakistani military volunteered. Throughout this Trump presidency, Pakistan has found a way to stay relevant and in the headlines, promising much but delivering little. Despite being ceaselessly hyped by Islamabad, the current efforts at mediating an end to the war seem to have reached a familiar impasse. While Munir initially touted the idea of signing an “Islamabad Accord” that would not only put an end to the current fighting but lead to a new era of peace between Iran and the U.S. At present those efforts appear to have stalled. While Pakistan officially retains its role as a mediator, the prospects of a negotiated deal brokered by Islamabad appear more remote than they did one month prior. Meanwhile, there is increasing pressure on President Trump from pro-Israel voices in the United States to drop Pakistan as a mediator in the Iran talks and reassess Islamabad’s growing political and military proximity to the administration. Following a report by CBS News, newly purchased by pro-Israel mogul David Ellison, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) questioned Pakistan’s legitimacy as a mediator and accused it of “double-dealing” by allegedly providing safe harbor to an Iranian jet. Pakistan insists that the plane was part of the Iranian delegation, which stayed in Pakistan a few extra days in anticipation of the talks. But the denial did not stop Graham from pressing War Secretary Pete Hegseth on the matter at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday; Hegseth declined to respond. Trump was not so evasive. When the same question was put to him by a reporter later that day, he replied, “They’re great. I think the Pakistanis have been great. The field marshal and the prime minister of Pakistan have been absolutely great.” (Drop Site) From Orinoco Tribune via This RSS Feed.

Bulletins and News Discussion from June 9th to June 15th, 2025 - Iran-Israel War Begins

I was looking into how Iran has organized its nuclear enrichment out of curiosity. From a Simplicius article from a couple days ago: One analyst states: Grossi said: “I’ve been there multiple times. To reach it, one must go deep, then deeper, and deeper still. Iran’s nuclear program cannot be destroyed by an attack.” He’s right. The world’s most powerful bunker-buster, the GBU-57, can only penetrate 66 meters, while even the latest nuclear bomb can only impact up to 500 meters underground. Iran has placed its IR-9 centrifuges on shock-absorber systems, capable of withstanding 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes. These sites lie deep within mountains. Israel does not have the GBU-57; only the US does, and only B-2 bombers can carry them — 2 bombs per jet. To destroy just one Iranian site at 800m depth, the US would need to drop at least 12 bombs precisely at one spot — requiring 6 bombers per site. Iran is believed to have at least 5 such deep nuclear sites. To destroy them all, the US would need to deploy 30 B-2 bombers, but it only has 18 total. Meaning, at least 2 Iranian sites will survive. Moreover, Iran has not built straight shafts. After every 50 meters, tunnels twist hundreds of meters sideways before going down again — making pinpoint strikes nearly impossible. Even if the first bomb hits, the remaining 11 could hit empty ground. In short, Iran’s underground nuclear infrastructure is now too deep, too complex, and too protected to be taken out militarily.

Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick?

They never thought the fires would reach them. They lived in cities, after all, far from the parched, combustible wilderness. There’s the woman who never expected to have to grab her 1-year-old out of her bed in the middle of the night, shielding her soft head from a hailstorm of flaming embers as she dashed to the car. Or the mom of two who wound up on the beach holding her youngest, a 9-week-old baby, wondering how she would swim if the fires bearing down on her from the hills above forced her into the ocean. Or the pregnant asthmatic who had to decide where to put her air purifier as suffocating smoke blanketed her neighborhood — in her own bedroom, or the bedroom of her eldest child. The women don’t know each other, but they share the same instinctive feeling that they didn’t know enough — and didn’t do enough — to keep their children safe. As urban sprawl encroaches on wilderness — and as the planet grows drier in many places and hotter almost everywhere — wildfires are becoming more dynamic, unpredictable, and far-reaching, affecting broader and broader swaths of the world’s population. On the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the United States, two of the planet’s most densely populated wildfire hotspots, millions now find themselves in the midst of a public health crisis that is not yet fully understood. Even fires that are limited to wilderness can blanket major cities in levels of pollution that are without recent precedent, leaving residents to guess how to protect themselves and their families. And when wildfires push through city limits, they incinerate synthetic materials, vehicles, and buildings, producing a mix of pollutants more toxic than the smoke that comes from burning vegetation. None of this is theoretical. It’s been six years since Australia’s so-called Black Summer coated the country’s east coast in choking smoke, three years since 100 million Americans were exposed to deadly pollution from Canadian wildfires, and just one year since fires decimated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, destroying about 13,000 residential properties and killing 31. But Australian and U.S. public health systems are ill-prepared for the inevitable return of such blazes. Nowhere is the lapse more clear than in the paucity of guidance provided to pregnant people. Scientists are just beginning to study how pollution from fires affects babies in the womb, and warnings from public officials and doctors consistently fail to account for the most vulnerable. Years after prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy, parents are left wondering whether asthma, developmental delays, and other health problems suffered by their children began with what was in the air before they were born — and whether it’s safe to raise a family in a place where every summer brings the same threat back to their doorsteps. Smoke shrouds the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the Australian bushfires in November 2019. Bai Xuefei / Xinhua via Getty Images Anneke French was excited for her maternity leave. A nurse at Canberra Hospital in Australia’s capital city, French was in her third trimester in the spring of 2019. Many in her tight-knit group of childhood best friends were also preparing to give birth or already had babies of their own. “We were really looking forward to getting out and having lots of free time to go and have ladies’ lunches, or do some things by ourselves to treasure our time before we had a newborn to care for,” she remembered. But by the time her leave began, French was preparing for a very different kind of summer. Earlier that year, in the depths of Australia’s winter, parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales began to burn — an ominous start to what is typically the country’s quietest fire season. By spring, new blazes were flaring along the east coast, feeding on vegetation desiccated by years of drought. Strong winds pushed flames across parched forests and grasslands, while dry lightning strikes sparked new fires faster than crews could contain them. Summer brought unprecedented heat waves; temperatures rose higher than most Australians had experienced in their lifetimes, cresting to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) in some areas. Hundreds of fires broke out across southeastern Australia, burning millions of hectares of land. More than two-thirds of Australians were exposed to flames or smoke, making it the most far-reaching environmental disaster in the young nation’s history. While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020. Australia’s Black Summer smoke Surface PM2.5 over eastern Australia and the Tasman Sea, 1 December 2019 to 31 January 2020 — Surface PM2.5 · µg/m³ (log scale) Play 5 50 500 Source: Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) global reanalysis (EAC4) Clayton Aldern / Grist Throughout the crisis, pregnant women and new parents in smoke-affected areas, tasked with the responsibility of protecting both themselves and their infants, were largely given the same public health guidance as other sensitive groups (the elderly, asthmatics, and people with diabetes): Stay indoors as much as possible. Even French, a nurse, couldn’t find reliable guidance on what more she could do to protect herself and her baby from the smoke. At a prenatal appointment several weeks before her due date, French’s obstetrician told her to avoid going outside. She stayed indoors as best she could, preparing the house for its newest arrival. But the smoke worried her. “The smell was strong enough that it felt dangerous,” she said, “like you would feel if you were too close to a bushfire and felt it was time to evacuate.” One night when she was a little more than 35 weeks pregnant, French felt a stabbing pain in her stomach so severe she could hardly take a breath. She and her husband, James, rushed to the hospital, where their obstetrician quickly discovered that French had a placental abruption, meaning the placenta was partially or fully removed from the walls of the uterus, cutting the baby off from its source of oxygen. The condition is usually preceded by either sudden trauma like a severe fall or chronic maternal cigarette smoking. French had not fallen, and she didn’t smoke. She was rushed into an operating room for an emergency cesarean. Stephen Robson, French’s obstetrician, smelled smoke in the operating room that night and realized that the pollution from the fires had penetrated through to the very center of the hospital, into the rooms that doctors are trained to keep sterile at all costs. French’s daughter, Margot, was born nearly five weeks early and underweight. It wasn’t until later that French began to wonder whether her placental abruption had anything to do with the bushfires surrounding Canberra. She was never told that the smoke might affect the timing of her birth or the health of her baby. She was never given a mask to use. As the summer continued and the fires only got worse, French began to notice the smoke in her home as she cared for Margot. She could see blue bands swirling beneath the overhead lights in her house. And even when she couldn’t see it, the stench was always there. Margot’s birth wasn’t the only abnormal delivery Robson witnessed that summer. He remembers seeing smoke floating in the beam of light cast by an overhead medical spotlight during what was otherwise a routine birth. “It looked like the bat signal,” he said. “It was truly extraordinary.” It’s not just the placental abruption that bothers French now, six years later. She had two more children in the years after giving birth to Margot, none of whom endured the kind of bushfire season her firstborn weathered in utero in 2019. Margot is the only one of the three who struggles with asthma, a chronic, non-curable respiratory disease that afflicts neither French nor her husband, and eczema, an itchy and recurrent skin condition. Many of the children born to French’s friend group during the Black Summer have also developed asthma and eczema. “Her early months of life were in the Black Summer, and I worry about that for her as she grows,” she said. Anneke French sits with her daughter Margot. French worries that early-life smoke exposure may have contributed to some of Margot’s health conditions, like asthma. Jess Davis / ABC News The evidence connecting chronic conditions suffered by babies born during the Black Summer to the smoke their mothers inhaled is largely anecdotal. That’s part of the problem; the scale of smoke exposure in recent years is unprecedented, so evidence-gathering is still in relatively early stages. But treating the harms of wildfire smoke as an open question is less about waiting for the science to settle, and more about ignoring what we already know about the risks of very similar pollution. In other words, not preparing for wildfire smoke is a policy choice. General air pollution from trucks, factories, and other industrial sources is one of the most extensively studied environmental health risks in the world. It’s been the subject of sustained scientific inquiry since the 1970s, when governments began regulating and measuring air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. This research shows that fine particulate matter seeps deep into the lungs and circulates through the bloodstream, touching nearly every organ system in the body. The resulting inflammation, clotting, and blood vessel damage is linked to coronary heart disease and a higher risk of stroke and heart attacks in adults. Lungs chronically exposed to air pollution are more likely to develop cancer. Brains show signs of neuroinflammation, cognitive decline, and dementia. Immune systems are more fragile and susceptible to disease. In total, the World Health Organization estimates that indoor and outdoor air pollution from all sources combined kills some 7 million people every year — more than the number of people who die from diabetes, tuberculosis, and in car accidents combined. In pregnancy, fine particulate matter is particularly damaging. A baby developing in the womb is uniquely vulnerable to disruption. Every organ in the body is rapidly developing. The health of the person carrying the baby is closely connected to narrow developmental windows; reduced lung function in the mother, for example, can restrict the flow of oxygen that’s crucial to brain development and overall growth. Studies show that particles in polluted air can enter the bloodstream and migrate across the placenta and even into placental tissue, where they disrupt oxygen and nutrient exchange with the fetus. Across large epidemiological studies, higher exposure to general air pollution has been consistently associated with increased risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and stunted fetal growth — outcomes that already affect millions of pregnancies worldwide each year. “The exposures in utero, during gestation periods, have an impact on life and the development of children when they’re born,” said Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra. “It can have consequences for many years — the rest of their lives.” Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra, holds an air quality monitor in his office. While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020. Jess Davis / ABC News There is some early evidence that wildfire smoke — which also contains fine particular matter — carries similar risks for babies and their mothers. A 2024 study that looked at a large cohort of births in the southwestern U.S. found that particulate matter from wildfires was linked to higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. An Australian cohort study of pregnant asthmatic women found that exposure to bushfire smoke was associated with asthma in their babies. Two studies published this year using large sample sizes provided by hospital systems in California found a novel connection between wildfire smoke and autism diagnoses in children exposed in utero. Examining the health consequences of breathing in wildfire smoke remains, however, a nascent area of scientific study — largely because, until recently, wildfire smoke was viewed as a periodic byproduct of disaster rather than a chronic public health threat that could match the scale of other sources of pollution. In the U.S., for example, wildfire smoke is still treated differently than other sources of air pollution by the Clean Air Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency considers pollution from wildfires as natural “exceptional events.” The agencies tasked with air quality protection in other countries, including Australia, largely view the issue similarly. But the research landscape is changing as global warming lengthens the frequency and intensity of fire weather and wildfire smoke starts to affect more people. Exposure to wildfire smoke, while variable year to year, is trending upward in the U.S., Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Europe, Russia, Canada, and parts of South Africa, among other places. In the U.S., smoke from wildfires has contributed up to a quarter of the total particulate matter pollution nationwide in some recent years, unraveling the air quality gains the country has made since 2000. Some research indicates that wildfire smoke might be more damaging than general air pollution — up to 10 times more harmful than the compounds in car exhaust, according to one study. Luke Wright takes a rest after putting out spot fires at his brother’s home near Sydney in December 2019. ABC News Emergency department records in areas affected by fires show that these intense episodes have the same consequences as background air pollution, but on shorter timescales. They boost hospitalizations for respiratory stress and cardiovascular conditions, and cause premature death. More than 400 people died from indirect smoke inhalation during the Black Summer, and several thousand more were hospitalized. Asthma-related emergency department visits across New York state spiked 82 percent at the peak intensity of the Canadian wildfire smoke event in 2023. Emergency room visits for heart attack symptoms rose 46 percent in the three months following the Los Angeles wildfires. The problem is set to get worse as the world moves deeper into the 21st century. Already, particulate matter from forest, grass, and peat fires kills an estimated 339,000 people a year worldwide. And climate-driven wildfire conditions are expanding across Australia, South America, Europe, and boreal Asia. A recent analysis found that millions of people at the edges of Australia’s biggest cities could experience urban wildfires similar to the devastating blazes that beset Los Angeles in the winter of 2025. The Black Summer was a golden opportunity to extract valuable information about the health effects of wildfire smoke on major population centers, but Australia’s government at the time appeared more interested in downplaying the severity of the crisis. “We’ve had fires in Australia since time began,” Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, leader of the right-wing National Party of Australia, said as the fires burned in 2019, calling the push to study the role climate change may have played in fueling the blazes the “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital city greenies.” The federal government ultimately committed just 5 million Australian dollars for bushfire-related health research across nine projects: AU$3 million for smoke exposure, and AU$2 million for the mental health consequences of the event. The sum was only enough to scratch the surface of the work required to understand the full scope of the smoke’s effects. (A single large epidemiological study in the U.S. can cost $3 million alone.) The health ramifications of the Black Summer were quickly eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck as the fires were ebbing. The biological samples — blood, tissue, placental cells, and other clues that could have laid the groundwork for long-term analyses of the health consequences of smoke exposure — were never collected and studied. “Initially, we had grand plans of going and getting blood samples and doing respiratory tests,” said Christopher Nolan, an endocrinologist in Canberra who conducted surveys of pregnant women in 2020 to assess the impact of the fires on maternal and fetal health. The onset of the pandemic complicated those plans, and Nolan never ended up getting funding at the scale necessary to collect samples. After a series of public meetings, the Australian Parliament published an interim report in 2020 concluding that “long‑term funding and research is needed to more definitively determine the impact of hazardous smoke exposure and inhalation on individuals and the community.” “We had a missed opportunity in Australia to invest in [understanding] the long-term consequences,” said Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra who is part of Doctors for the Environment Australia, a network of medical professionals that advocates for climate action. Robson, the obstetrician who was working at Canberra Hospital during the Black Summer, feels similarly. “When babies were born, I noticed many of the placentas had changes that often you only see in severe disease, like severe blood pressure, or women with immunological diseases,” he said. “It was striking and it occurred for months afterwards, because I presume women had been affected by the smoke when it was there and it played out across the rest of the pregnancy for them.” Stephen Robson worked as an obstetrician at Canberra Hospital during Australia’s Black Summer wildfires. Jess Davis / ABC News Both Hunter and Robson say they fear Australia’s capacity to respond to smoke events hasn’t improved since. Robson envisions a protected area inside the country’s hospitals that can keep smoke out — a sort of citadel deep inside medical facilities where surgeons and other specialists can do their work without fear of smoke creeping in. Hunter would like placentas and other biological samples that may have been preserved in hospital freezers from that time to be thawed and studied. But the institutional will to take that on hasn’t materialized. “I don’t think we’re any better prepared to deal with an environmental catastrophe like this than we were the last time around,” Robson said. Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra, looks at lung scans. Jess Davis / ABC News Even in the U.S., the country that produced the bedrock research on fine particulate matter underpinning global air quality standards, the dynamics of fire are changing so quickly that parents are still being left in the dark. Irene Farr could hear cars exploding somewhere in the distance on the night of January 7, 2025, near her house in northern Pasadena, California. When she poked her head out of her front door, she smelled thick smoke in the air. There was a red glow in the sky around Eaton Canyon, a nature preserve a few miles to the east. Farr thought she might get an alert telling her to evacuate or see fire trucks racing down her street. But the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Her neighbors were indoors. It seemed like just another night in Pasadena. Reddit, the social media site, told a different story. People were putting pins on a live map that showed where flames were erupting. Every time Farr checked the map, the pins were closer to her house. At 3 a.m., she reached her breaking point. She roused her daughter, Azul, and rallied her husband, David, and his parents, who live on the same property. They drove to David’s brother’s house half an hour away and stayed awake the rest of the night, wired and anxious for news about their neighborhood. The sun never rose that morning; the smoke was so thick that 6 a.m. looked like midnight. Smokes and flames overwhelm a commercial area during the Eaton Fire near Altadena, California, on January 8, 2025. Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images The Eaton Fire, one of two devastating wildfires that struck the Los Angeles area that January, ultimately killed 19 people and destroyed 9,000 buildings. Most of the deaths occurred west of a prominent north-south thoroughfare called Lake Avenue, where Farr’s house is located. Evacuation orders from the city arrived late — hours after residents on the east side of Lake Avenue had been told to leave. The Farr’s house was spared, but more than a year later the family still hasn’t moved back home. Azul was just 11 months old when the fires broke out — too young, Irene figured, to risk her being exposed to whatever the fires left behind. Schools, hospital clinics, supermarkets, warehouses, appliances, and plastics had been burned to ash. People online were saying that the affected areas would be toxic for at least a year. “We decided that we would wait until we had more data and information,” Farr said. “What ended up being a two-week wait ended up being a one-month wait, ended up being a three-month wait …” Whenever she went back to check on the old house, Farr felt a burning in the back of her throat, a “bubbling up.” There was something lingering in the air, she thought, but she didn’t know what it was. Irene Farr holds her daughter Azul. They evacuated their home during the Eaton Fire in January 2025. Zoya Teirstein / Grist Frankly, no one knew — not even local air pollution researchers who have spent years studying the health dangers of wildfire smoke in the American West. “It was unprecedented,” said Yifang Zhu, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Air monitoring stations across the country installed by the federal government are often designed to monitor general air quality. They take measurements every few days, data that helps states determine whether they are compliant with federal regulations. When the fires broke out, stations in Los Angeles continued to collect routine data on urban air pollutants, but the sensors weren’t equipped to capture the novel mix of compounds produced by burning cars, buildings, and asphalt. Many of the sensors were themselves lost to the fires. “One big lesson we learned is if something gets burned that’s not a traditional wildfire compound, if you don’t specifically look for it, you’re not going to find it,” Zhu said. “It’s as if it didn’t exist.” The problem is that designing and deploying air quality monitors that can capture the heady mix of pollutants released by urban wildfires is expensive and requires a lot of technical expertise. Yifang Zhu is an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zoya Teirstein / Grist Zhu’s colleague Mike Kleeman, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Davis, drove around the Los Angeles burn zone in April last year, when cleanup crews were hauling away material, and took air samples with an expensive specialized air sampling instrument. He was looking for hexavalent chromium, a very toxic form of chromium used in industrial welding and manufacturing that’s linked to lung cancer. Air monitoring stations, and even air pollution research laboratories like Zhu’s, don’t measure the toxin because it requires unique equipment and it’s unstable, meaning you only have a short while to get it to the lab before it disappears. Kleeman found hexavalent chromium in the samples he collected at levels that were 200 times higher than they would be on a normal day in the city — not high enough to warrant a public health emergency, but illuminating for air pollution researchers who quickly realized that these urban blazes had introduced a new set of unknown variables. “We are facing an entirely new challenge when wildfires burn into major cities,” Kleeman said. Zhu and Kleeman are members of the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study, a collaboration between eight universities across the U.S. aimed at studying the short- and long-term health effects of the Los Angeles fires. The collaboration, funded by the Spiegel Family Fund, a philanthropic foundation formed by the creator of Snapchat, collected some of the biological data that researchers in Australia largely couldn’t obtain during and after the Black Summer. An initial study found peculiar trends in sodium and protein levels in the blood of people affected by the fires, an outcome experts still don’t understand. More research on those abnormalities and other findings is coming. Researchers involved in the initiative were focused initially on measuring the contaminants the fires produced and recruiting cohorts of people to study. Now, they’re turning to the work of investigating the long-term health impacts of the fires on those people, including subgroups like first responders and pregnant women. More in this series In Arizona, a fight against a deadly fungus is under threat from Trump’s health policies As aid dries up in Kenya, millions are threatened by the climate-driven disease kala-azar Rising heat, failing kidneys: Climate’s hidden toll on migrant workers In Bangladesh, thousands of volunteers are battling climate-fueled disease at its source A hotter, wetter South is becoming a breeding ground for mold The frantic, high-tech fight to stop climate-fueled dengue fever But the funding that rolled in from ultra-wealthy Los Angeles philanthropists in the immediate aftermath of the fires is starting to dry up. The federal government, beyond failing to fill the void, is cutting resources needed to understand the conditions that fuel wildfires in the first place. In April, the Trump administration announced a reorganization plan that includes closing 57 of 77 Forest Service research stations across the country, many of which study fire risk. There’s not much more momentum in Australia. Despite a change in government in 2022, no new major federal funding has been earmarked for bushfire smoke exposure research since the Black Summer, perhaps in part because a smoke event of that scale hasn’t happened since. As countries around the globe begin to grapple with the health consequences of smoke exposure, tens of millions of data points are entering the public record. But the way researchers in different countries conduct research — even the way scientists define the term “smoke exposure” — is highly variable. Some scientists use satellites to study smoke exposure, while others use computer modeling. For pregnant populations, some scientists choose to analyze smoke exposure by trimester, others look at the total number of “fire days” pregnant women live through. Efforts to identify long-term health trends are often scrambled by this lack of standardization, delaying the kind of unequivocal findings that prompt hospitals and governments to quickly implement new policies. The American and Australian co-authors of a 2024 global meta analysis of the research on wildfire smoke exposure in pregnant women found just 31 studies of a high enough caliber to include in their review. Their analysis was inconclusive because the studies, conducted in various countries with different methods, couldn’t be appropriately compared. In the end, the authors were forced to conclude that they had found “suggestive evidence of harm from exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy” and that more research was needed. Nolan, the Australian endocrinologist, thinks there should be a scientific protocol that experts all over the globe use as they conduct research on the effects of smoke exposure on natal health. A universal standard that harmonizes datasets would allow researchers to share data between institutions and hone in on the biggest risks more quickly. “[When] different groups around the world collect the data the same way, well, then you get statistical power,” Nolan said. Epidemiological standardization is what formed the basis of general air pollution regulations. The World Health Organization created global air quality guidelines in 1987 and established a benchmark for particulate matter pollution in 2005. Researchers were then able to draw concrete conclusions: A 2015 study, for example, found that for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in fine particulate pollution, all-cause mortality rises by 4 percent. We know that wildfire smoke is bad for pregnant women. But answers to more specific questions — should women evacuate when particulate matter reaches a certain threshold? How many days of smoke exposure meaningfully increase the risk of preterm birth? — are still out of reach Read Next An early-life wildfire exposure sickened these monkeys for decades Jesse Nichols It’s not a matter of if the fires will come again, but when. Much of the American West just had one of its warmest winters on record. More than half the region is in a drought at a time of year when snowpack should have hit its peak, priming the landscape for fire. “We are facing a very challenging fire year,” Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said in April. “Our resources will be tested not only in Colorado, but across the West.” Earlier this year, southeastern Australia experienced the most intense heat wave it has seen since the Black Summer — an event made five times more likely by climate change. The heat fueled a spate of bushfires across the state of Victoria that burned hundreds of homes and killed one person and thousands of livestock. In Canberra, where temperatures approached 110 degrees F, the smell of smoke from prescribed burning this fall brought French back to 2019. “As soon as you see that plume of smoke or smell it on the air, you want to know: Where? How close? Is it in control? Is it accidental?” she said. French can find the answers to those questions on the Australian Capital Territory Parks website. But there is nowhere she can go for resolution about the long-term effects of the Black Summer on Margot’s health. “I don’t know how that will affect her,” she said. “I still don’t know.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick? on May 28, 2026. From Grist via This RSS Feed.

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