Glenn Diesen

Frames the Houthi conquest of Yemen's Red Sea coast and Perim Island as a bigger strategic shift than the Hormuz standoff, since it lets Yemen counter-blockade Saudi Arabia and puts a large share of global oil flow at risk. Reads this as transforming the wider Iran war and undercutting the assumption that time favors Trump, since new fronts keep opening even as Washington claims only a tactical win at Hormuz. Sees Saudi Arabia as now facing an impossible choice between escalating against the Houthis or lifting its own blockade.

Nord Stream remains the unaddressed elephant in the room while evidence-free Russia-blame narratives like the Leipzig drone story dominate German coverage; Western deterrence logic against Russia is incoherent because NATO is the revisionist actor. Now says Ukraine appears to be heading toward collapse across the front lines, the economy, and political and social stability, with no way left to reverse the trend, calling a turn within six months quite possible. Now says Ukraine is cracking on every measurable front and that Russia will take strategic territory if diplomacy fails to restore Ukrainian neutrality, with Slaviansk and Kramatorsk semi-encircled. Now agrees, with Douglas Macgregor, that Ukraine is on the ropes, pointing to panic among European officials and Kyiv insiders' own pessimism. Now says the West has effectively been fighting a proxy war with Russia since 2014, and that Western narratives denying it are collapsing into open war-with-Russia rhetoric. Now says each rejected deal leaves Russia with more territory and worse terms the next time, and expects any future settlement to be worse for Ukraine than what was on the table at Anchorage.

Reads the 200-signatory letter from prominent Israelis condemning West Bank violence as a sign of real internal fracture over the war, even though government policy has not shifted.

Arming Taiwan to deter an invasion is self-defeating: it fuels secessionist sentiment and crosses Beijing’s red lines, potentially provoking the invasion it is meant to deter.

Reads BRICS as anti-hegemonic rather than anti-American: it decentralises global economic decision-making toward multipolarity without functioning as a bloc against the United States. Puts the Delhi summit in that frame, as a shift in where decisions get made rather than the formation of a rival alliance. Now says a US retrenchment from global hegemony, the restrained-republic path, is becoming the only realistic option as the alternatives keep failing.

Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and its ability to condition oil sales threatens the petrodollar system underpinning the US-led economic order; US moves to seize Iranian tankers and European plans to confiscate Russian funds show the rules-based economic order being dismantled by its authors. Now frames Iran’s leverage as economic, bleeding the US economy while Washington’s only answer is force that resolves nothing.