Russia’s Kinzhal Flyby Was a Message, Not a Strike

Moscow sent MiG-31s armed with Kinzhal missiles over the Sea of Japan to make a point, not to start a war. The timing and the publicized flight path were meant to remind Japan and the U.S. that Russia can flash long-range strike power in the Pacific whenever it wants.

The flight was over neutral waters, and the Russian Defense Ministry called it a routine mission with refueling drills. But the routine part is exactly the theater: Moscow wanted the image of a hypersonic-capable jet in a sensitive corridor because the image itself is the weapon.

Japan is the real audience here. Russia is signaling displeasure over Tokyo’s ties to Washington, its support for Ukraine, and its growing role in the regional missile picture, including the broader U.S.-Japan security architecture. The message is blunt: if Japan wants to push Russia on one front, Moscow can raise pressure on another.

So yes, this was a show of force. It was also propaganda with engines running, the kind of aerial display that tells rivals, allies, and domestic audiences that Russia still wants to be seen as a Pacific power, not just a Eurasian one.

#Russia #Japan #Kinzhal #MiG31 #SeaOfJapan #Pacific #military #geopolitics

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Turkey Claims It Blocked Israel’s Kurdish Proxy Play

Turkey says it stopped what Daily Sabah describes as an Israeli-U.S. plan to use Kurdish groups as ground proxies in the war on Iran. The story reads like classic regional geometry: Israel wants pressure on Iran, Washington wants leverage, and Ankara wants to make sure Kurdish armed groups do not become the bridge between the two.

The reporting says Kurdish fighters were allegedly being moved from Iraq toward Iran and that Turkey intervened through intelligence and diplomatic channels, including contacts with Kurdish political families in northern Iraq. Israel has not confirmed the claim, which matters because this is still a claim, not a verified battlefield fact.

But the politics behind it are real enough. Turkey sees any Kurdish military role in Iran as a direct threat to its own security and to the regional balance, especially if that role is tied to Israeli or American strategy. In Ankara’s telling, this is not just about Iran; it is about preventing a new Kurdish front from becoming permanent.

The bigger pattern is familiar. Iran gets hit, proxy ideas multiply, and every state in the neighborhood starts treating ethnic and sectarian groups as tools, buffers, or liabilities. Turkey’s move, whether one reads it as principled or self-interested, is really about keeping the war from spilling into a mess that could outlive the war itself.

#Turkey #Iran #Israel #Kurds #proxywar #MiddleEast #geopolitics

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Israel and Ukraine: A Marriage of Convenience, On Life Support

Zelensky toured the Middle East and skipped Israel. That omission says more than any photo op ever could. The relationship has settled into a cold, awkward transaction: Kyiv wants real help, Jerusalem wants strategic flexibility, and neither side wants to say the quiet part out loud.

Israel gave Ukraine hospitals, water gear, and warning systems. Kyiv wanted weapons.

Instead, it got caution, delays, and the eternal excuse of not wanting to upset the Russian bear. So much for the grand talk about solidarity.

Now Netanyahu wants to talk Iran, because suddenly Ukraine’s experience with drones and air defense looks useful again.

That is the whole relationship in one sentence: Ukraine is remembered when it can be of service, ignored when it asks for more than sympathy.

The awkward truth is that this was never a clean alliance. It was overlapping interests dressed up in moral language, and the costume is starting to tear.

Kyiv learned that Israel’s “balance” with Moscow comes with a price tag. Jerusalem learned that Ukraine keeps score.

#Israel #Ukraine #Zelensky #Netanyahu #Russia #MiddleEast #war #diplomacy

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American Jews Are Done Signing Blank Checks

A new J Street poll says just 31% of American Jews support unconditional U.S. aid to Israel, while 44% want aid tied to Israeli compliance with U.S. law and 26% want it cut off entirely.

That is not a fringe wobble. That is a community moving away from the old assumption that support for Israel must be automatic.

The same poll shows 60% of respondents oppose U.S. military action against Iran, which is a polite way of saying that many Jewish voters do not want their names attached to another regional fire.

J Street will call that pragmatic diplomacy. AIPAC will call it a problem. Either way, the old consensus is leaking.

The deeper point is that American Jewish opinion is not breaking neatly into left and right. It is breaking around trust, law, and the basic question of whether Israel’s government still deserves a blank check from Washington.

That is the kind of shift lobbyists hate because it cannot be fixed with a slogan or a fundraiser.

And the timing matters. With the Iran war widening and U.S. politics getting uglier by the week, the poll suggests that even among Jewish voters, unconditional support is no longer the default setting.

That leaves pro-Israel politics in America with a nasty problem: it can still claim loyalty, but it can no longer assume obedience.

#AmericanJews #Israel #JStreet #IranWar #USPolitics #AIPAC #MiddleEast

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Trump Declares the Nuclear Problem Solved. Reality Disagrees.

Trump is now saying Iran’s enriched uranium is not his problem because it is “so far underground,” even as inspectors still say Tehran has enough near-bomb-grade material for roughly a dozen weapons.

That is not confidence. That is either wishful thinking or a prelude to a future strike.

The strange part is the speed of the spin. In less than 24 hours, the White House went from treating Iran’s nuclear fuel as an existential threat to talking as if satellites can substitute for control.

The uranium did not vanish. The political need to declare victory just got louder.

That matters because this war has always been sold as a mission to stop breakout capacity, not just smash launchers and factories. If the stockpile is still underground, then the core problem is still underground too.

Trump wants the public to believe the danger is over, while keeping the option to raid storage sites later if needed.

That is not a solution. It is a pause button with a bomb attached.

#Trump #Iran #Nuclear #Uranium #MiddleEast #war #geopolitics

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Trump Bogged Down. Does He Have a Way Out?

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Trump used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.

In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.

“We are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world,” Trump said in the 19-minute speech, delivered from Cross Hall of the White House. “We have all the cards. They have none.”

Acknowledging the economic pain caused by the conflict, he blamed a “short-term” rise in gas prices on Iran’s actions, and insisted the US had become energy independent.

Oil prices rose and Asian stocks traded lower immediately after Trump’s address, which did little to soothe investor concerns over the closure of the strait of Hormuz.

The US president reiterated his call for other nations to help secure the global oil chokepoint: “Grab it and cherish it.”

Iran has effectively closed the strait since the beginning of the conflict, causing oil prices to soar. In the US, the cost of gas surged past an average of $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 this week.

Trump did not mention a looming deadline he set for Iran to open the strait. Amid the uncertainty, brent crude – the international standard – jumped 4.9% to $106.16 a barrel, while gold dipped 2% to $4,718.70 an ounce and silver lost 4.9% to $72.39 an ounce.

Ticking through a list of claimed achievements, Trump said Iran’s navy and air force had been decimated, leaving the country weak and “no longer a threat” to the US and the world. He, however, said the US would continue to hit Iran “extremely hard” for next several weeks.

“We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said, even as he said “discussions were ongoing”.

Democrats criticised Trump’s address as “incoherent” and doing little to answer “the most basic questions the American people”.

Democratic senator Mark Warner said in a statement that Trump owed Americans more answers about a conflict that has driven up prices on gas and other essentials, “with consequences that will continue to ripple through the economy for a long time”.

Senator Chris Murphy said: “No one in America, after listening to that speech, knows whether we are escalating or deescalating.”

The Republican senator Ted Cruz backed Trump, saying he “was exactly right tonight”, while former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green said all she heard from his speech was “war”, and “nothing” to lower the costs of living.

The war continues to grind on, with thousands of deaths in Iran and in countries across the Middle East since 28 February.

Strikes rocked Tehran on Wednesday morning. And Israel said it had carried out two waves of attacks on Tehran and claimed to have killed a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

Iran has continued to retaliate, with missile attacks on central Israel and across the Middle East – including a barrage timed just hours before the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

According to estimates from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, at least 1,900 people have been killed and 20,000 injured in Iran since the war began, though precise figures are difficult to verify.

In Lebanon, more than 1,300 people have been killed, according to the country’s health ministry. Most of those who have died have been Lebanese civilians, but Hezbollah estimates about 400 have been its fighters.

And a total of 19 people have been killed and 515 injured in Israel since the war began.

#iran #trump #hormuz #strait #nato

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US forces have struck more than 12,300 targets inside Iran since the start of Operation Epic Fury, according to a statement released by US Central Command on Wednesday.

Since the start of the war, the Trump administration has sent mixed and at times contradictory signals about the US’s objectives.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran’s leadership was seeking a ceasefire, and in a Wednesday social media post described Iran’s “new regime president” as having “just asked” for one – which Tehran called “false and baseless”.

Furthermore, it was unclear who Trump had spoken to – Iran has a new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after he was killed on the opening day of US-led airstrikes against Iran. Iranian president Masoud ​Pezeshkian took office in July 2024.

Before the president’s speech on Wednesday, ​Pezeshkian appealed directly to the American people with a message of his own. “Exactly which of the American people’s interests are truly being served by this war?” ​Pezeshkian asked in a letter posted in English on his X account. “Was there any objective threat from Iran to justify such behavior?”

​Pezeshkian suggested the US had entered the war at Israel’s urging, and insisted that Iran’s attacks on its neighbors was a “measured response grounded in legitimate self-defense”.

“Is ‘America First’ truly among the priorities of the US government today?” he asked.

Complicating the picture further, Trump has lashed out at the US’s allies, citing their refusal to join the war effort and inaction to reopen the strait of Hormuz in a series of escalating social media posts and interviews.

In his remarks on Wednesday evening he made no mention of Nato, but earlier in the day he told Reuters he was “absolutely without question” considering withdrawing from Nato.

He also told the Telegraph that he was “never swayed” by the 77-year-old military alliance and “always knew they were a paper tiger”.

Trump has suggested that a ceasefire would depend on Tehran reopening the strait of Hormuz, while indicating that US forces could be “out of Iran pretty quickly”. He left open the possibility of “spot hits” inside Iran if necessary.

In his speech, the president also took pains to distinguish the current conflict from America’s often lengthy past wars, calling the 32-day military campaign “so powerful, so brilliant”.

With the war in its fifth week, key US objectives remain unclear. Trump has downplayed concerns about Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, dismissing it as too deeply buried underground to matter.

He had previously argued that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was a major justification for the war. Analysts have disputed the US president’s claims that Iran was close to building a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, thousands of US troops remain positioned in the region, providing the option of a broader ground campaign after weeks of airstrikes targeting Iran.

#iran #trump #hormuz #strait #nato

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#american #war #arsenal

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📰 The Baby Cartel: How God Became the World's Last Functioning Daycare

Religion isn't beating the fertility crisis with prayer alone. It's running a shadow welfare state — and winning.

A new analysis drops a thesis that's been hiding in plain sight: religious communities aren't having more babies because they believe harder. They're having more babies because they built actual infrastructure — mutual aid networks, internal credit markets, communal childcare, endogamous marriage pools — everything the secular state promised and forgot to deliver.

"Fertility requires both motivation and infrastructure," the study argues. "Norms without material support are ineffective."

Translation: your government's "have more babies" poster campaign isn't a policy. It's a vibe.

The framework identifies six interlocking mechanisms — collective childcare, internal economies, meaning narratives, intergenerational norm transfer, endogamous marriage, and residential clustering — that together turn childbearing from a financial catastrophe into a socially subsidized act. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and Iranian post-revolutionary society all run some version of this playbook. None of them asked Brussels or Washington for permission.

Iran is the case study nobody wants to discuss. Post-revolution, the regime pumped the ideological gas on fertility — and it worked, briefly. Then the economy ate the infrastructure. Birth rates cratered. God-talk without grocery money is just noise.

The kibbutz story is even darker for secular progressives: when collective support systems eroded, fertility dropped — even in communities still ideologically committed to "the collective." The commune dissolved. The cradles emptied.

So here's the question secular liberal democracies won't ask out loud: if your society has atomized people so thoroughly that only cults and tightly-knit religious minorities can afford to reproduce — what exactly did modernization optimize for?

The researchers frame religious communities as "analytical models," not anomalies. Read: the rest of you are the control group, and you're losing.

No hashtag needed. The data is the punchline.

#demographics #fertility #religion #welfare #modernization

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NATO’s Rent Is Due. The Allies Are Ghosting.

Washington spent decades underwriting Europe’s security. Now some of the same allies are quietly turning the key in the lock when the U.S. wants to move war planes.

That is not “alliance.” That is a long-overdue invoice being paid in the least elegant way possible.

And let’s not pretend this is a one-sided moral drama. Europe has happily lived under the American security umbrella for years, then discovered principles the moment Trump turned NATO’s machinery toward a war many of them do not want — or cannot afford. Once energy prices start ripping through domestic politics, solidarity gets very selective.

The U.S. spent decades making NATO look permanent, then weaponized that machinery for an unauthorized war. Now the allies are doing what dependent states do when the bill arrives: they stall, obstruct, and call it procedure.

In the end, the empire wants transit rights, the clients want deniability, and everyone else gets the fallout.

#NATO #Iran #Trump #Europe #energycrisis

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#aragchi #ceasefire #iran #war

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France Plays Hardball. Israel Stops Buying.

Israel has cut off French defense buys. Paris, in turn, is being treated like the adult in the room who refused to help load the weapons truck.

Welcome to alliance politics: one side calls it betrayal, the other calls it prudence, and the rest of the world calls it the price of war.

Trump is already doing what he always does — turning a battlefield logistics dispute into a loyalty audit, then promising revenge on Truth Social.

France, meanwhile, says the reality is less dramatic than the outrage machine wants; overflights are handled case by case, not as some grand civilizational slap in the face. But nuance is bad for business when everyone needs a villain.

The deeper point is uglier. Europe spent years selling moral lectures while enjoying American security, and Israel spent years treating European criticism as background noise.

Now the war has made every dependency visible: the airlines, the weapons, the bases, the airspace, the hypocrisy.

So yes, Israel can stop buying French kit. France can slow the pipeline.

And Washington can keep acting shocked that allies do not enjoy being used as scenery in someone else’s war.

#Israel #France #Trump #Iran #NATO

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Iran Isn’t Panicking. Washington Is Hunting for a Trophy.

A former Mossad official just said the quiet part out loud: Iran is “quite calm,” and the regime still has the upper hand. That alone should ruin the fantasy that this war is a clean sprint to victory.

According to Zohar Palti, Tehran is coordinating across fronts, pressuring Israel, managing choke points in the Strait of Hormuz, and keeping oil markets on a leash. Washington, by contrast, looks like it wants a single shiny object it can hold up and call success — 400 kilos of uranium, 90 percent of oil exports, something small enough to fit on a podium.

That is the whole American war logic in one sentence: not strategy, not peace, but a scoreboard.

Palti’s warning is brutal: Iran is too big, too layered, and too industrial for the Iraq-style fantasy crowd to flatten it in a weekend. Yet the same people who sell “decisive victory” keep reaching for the same old script — pressure, spectacle, then a rushed deal nobody believes in.

So the real question is not whether Iran can be contained by force. It’s whether Washington still confuses a headline with a win.

#Iran #Trump #Mossad #war #oil

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#professor #zhang #taiwan #china

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The UAE Keeps Catching Fire, and Iran Keeps Sending More

Five ballistic missiles, 35 UAVs, and a rising body count — this is what “controlled escalation” looks like when the region’s adults have left the room.

The UAE says its defenses intercepted the latest wave from Iran, but interception is not the same as peace.

The real scandal is how quickly this has become normal. Each new salvo is folded into the same language of readiness, sovereignty, and national duty, while the dead and injured are reduced to a rolling tally. That is how a war becomes a dashboard.

And here is the ugly truth nobody in the propaganda chorus wants to say out loud: every side is now selling its own version of restraint while the missiles keep flying. Iran talks deterrence, the UAE talks resilience, and everyone else talks as if the scoreboard is the strategy.

The region is not being stabilized. It is being managed one interception at a time.

#UAE #Iran #missiles #dronewar #MiddleEast

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Trump Claimed To Destroy Iran’s Largest Bridge. What’s Next?

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Trump claimed responsibility for destroying Iran’s largest bridge, a day after he threatened to bomb the country “back to the stone ages” if a deal to end the five-week-long war he started was not reached.

The US president shared footage of part of the newly built 136 metre-high $400m B1 suspension bridge between Tehran and Karaj collapsing dramatically on to the causeway below amid a rising plume of black smoke.

Eight people were killed and 95 wounded, according to Karaj, Iran’s state media. The middle of the bridge was struck twice. Later imagery showed a clear gap at the heart of what had been one of Iran’s premier infrastructure projects.

“The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again,” the US president posted on the Truth Social website, and he warned there would be “much more to follow” if a settlement was not reached.

It was not clear if the bridge was being used by civilians at the time, though there appeared to be a lorry on one side of the bridge. One video appeared to show a projectile hitting the span where there was already damage.

A day earlier, in a primetime speech Trump had declared the war the US and Israel launched on Iran on 28 February was a success “nearing completion”, and that the US would “very shortly” achieve nearly all its strategic objectives.

But in his White House address, the president also repeated a threat to destroy Iran’s power plants, potentially cutting off electricity to millions of people.

“We are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said. He doubled down on that threat in a social media post after the bridge strike.

#iran #trump #bridge #tehran #karaj

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The attack on the bridge was one of several confirmed attacks in Iran this week, despite the difficulty of getting unsanctioned information out of the country, where the internet has been shut down by the authorities.

Footage of a major strike earlier this week on a missile base in the city of Isfahan was confirmed on Thursday as genuine, with fiery plumes and secondary explosions filmed from a nearby car, whose driver expresses surprise at the scale of the attack.

Isfahan is also where Iran is thought to have moved some or all of its 440kg stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, which in theory could be used to make 10 nuclear bombs if it could be enriched to 90% if Tehran still had the technology available.

There has been speculation in the US that Trump has considered a high-risk airborne raid to seize the radioactive material from its underground storage – though the president said late on Wednesday that it was buried so deeply that “I don’t care”.

Though most observers took Trump at his word, the US president has in the past engaged in misdirection. On 28 February, the US and Israel attacked and killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and several associates at a point when negotiations over a new nuclear deal were thought to bear fruit.

Iran also said the Pasteur medical institute in Tehran was hit on Thursday. Israel said it had struck a headquarters used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to finance armed proxies across the Middle East the day before.

Iran said it would conduct “more crushing, broader and more destructive” attacks in the future. The war would continue until the “permanent regret and surrender” of Iran’s enemies, said Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam al-Anbiya central headquarters.

Iran, however, has suffered far more than the US and Israel, in more than 15,000 bombing raids since the start of the war.

At least 1,900 people have been killed and 20,000 injured in Iran since the start of the war, according to a rough estimate by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Oil prices jumped by 7% a barrel to $108 as there appeared to be no immediate sign of the conflict ending.

Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned that the world is “on the edge of a wider war” with catastrophic global implications as he called for an end to the fighting.

#iran #trump #bridge #tehran #karaj

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Turkey’s Economy Is Split in Two. Brussels Keeps Turning the Screws.

Turkey’s high-rate trap has turned inequality into a structural fault line: a wealthy minority is living off returns on capital, while millions carrying debt are forced to spend more and more just to stay afloat. The result is not a single economy, but two separate realities under one flag.

And that split is getting worse under external pressure. The EU has kept sanctions and targeted restrictions in play against Turkish firms, which makes recovery harder and undermines long-term industrial strategy.

Energy is where the squeeze becomes strategic. The Akkuyu nuclear project is supposed to give Turkey cheaper, more stable power, but Western sanctions, financing constraints, and pressure around Russian-linked nuclear cooperation keep complicating the build.

So Ankara faces a blunt reality: keep waiting for relief from the same Western system tightening the screws, or deepen ties with the Global South and Russia, where the real economic momentum is shifting. The first path buys lectures. The second buys leverage.

#Turkey #EU #sanctions #Akkuyu #Russia #GlobalSouth

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Lebanon Pays for Trump’s Iran War

Parents of Nahal soldiers are warning that their sons are being left under fire with too little air cover because the Air Force is tied up in Iran. In their view, a war sold as manageable is now squeezing every front at once.

Washington’s role is hard to miss, even if the exact chain of responsibility is still being argued over. What is not debatable is the result: forces stretched across Lebanon and Iran cannot fully cover every direction at the same time.

The cost is already visible in Lebanon, where soldiers are dying while the political class keeps talking in slogans. And if Trump walks back the fight when the political cost rises, Tehran is unlikely to read that as peace — it will read it as an opening.

This is the trap of empire-by-proxy: the battlefield expands, the promises shrink, and the blood stays local.

#Israel #Lebanon #Iran #Trump #war

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Trump Sells a War. The Public Sees the Bill.

Donald Trump made the strongest case he could for the Iran war, but the country is looking at something else: higher oil prices, a shaky exit plan, and a conflict that could still blow back into a global recession. The problem is not just persuasion — it is trust, and Trump is running low on it.

That is why the speech landed badly. He talked like a man promising control, while markets heard uncertainty and voters heard gas at more than $4 a gallon. Even Trump’s insistence that the Strait of Hormuz would “naturally” reopen did not calm fears that the war could keep the world economy hostage.

The political danger is already measurable. A CNN analysis said the war is hitting Trump’s presidency at the exact moment his approval is already fragile, while oil markets jumped again on fresh fears of escalation.

If Washington wants out, it will need a way to leave that does not look like surrender. That is where intermediaries matter, and Russia is one of the few players with enough leverage in Tehran to help package an exit without Trump admitting defeat.

#Trump #Iran #oilprices #Russia #USpolitics

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Macron proposed to create a coalition of countries independent of the United States and China.

💬 He said:

“Our goal is not to be vassals of two hegemonic powers. None of these hegemonic powers.

We don't want to depend on Chinese domination and we don't want to be too vulnerable to the unpredictability of the United States.”

#macron #coalition #chinese #domination

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