Jacques Baud

Iran is not losing its confrontation with the United States and Israel. It has fielded a new ballistic missile built to adjust its trajectory in the terminal phase and so threaten moving warships, and has warned that any further US attack will draw a disproportionate reply, though he notes Tehran's missile reserves are finite and it will not go all-or-nothing. Reads Iran's own rhetoric about mines and resumed fire as theatre to prove it is still in business rather than evidence of weakness, and dismisses gunboat diplomacy from an ego-driven White House as no way to end the war. Now argues Ansar Allah's battlefield success comes from national and tribal cohesion and a strategic rather than merely tactical approach to war, that it and Hezbollah are supported by Iran but are not proxies running Tehran's foreign policy, and that Iran never went beyond NPT limits, making the war unnecessary.

Russia, not the West, now dictates what happens on the battlefield, and it is winning by design, applying calibrated and incrementally escalating pressure while holding capability in reserve. Ukraine is losing big, in his phrase, bleeding roughly 30,000 casualties a month simply to hold the line, and is trapped by a Western refusal to let it negotiate from the far stronger position it held in the rejected April 2022 draft. Russia rejected the Kushner and Witkoff proposals outright. Now says US and allied missile stockpiles are depleted, leaving NATO exposed, and that Washington now sees the war heading toward a Ukrainian defeat that would be read as a defeat of the West itself.

Israel's intensifying campaign in Lebanon and its provocations toward Iran are a self-defeating attempt to drag the United States into direct war, and it has achieved none of its stated objectives against Iran. Holds that Netanyahu tricked Trump into the war and remains its real centre of gravity, and that renewed hostilities risk consolidating a Sunni collective-defence bloc against Israel over the Al-Aqsa question. Now says Israel has militarily crushed the Palestinians but has not destroyed their will, so on his account it has not achieved its actual objective.

China is winning the Gulf arms-sales contest by selling without political strings, unlike the United States, citing Turkey's loss of F-35 access over its S-400 purchase, and its equipment is now credible, pointing to reports that Chinese fighters outperformed the Rafale in the India-Pakistan clash.

The United States is getting weaker economically, politically and diplomatically and has substituted sanctions for diplomacy, while Europe decays into powerlessness. Argues the West is destroying its own credibility through indiscriminate sanctions and disregard for allied sovereignty, pushing states toward BRICS and the SCO, and that a law-based international order has been replaced by a rules-based one in which the rules are whatever the strongest power says they are. Credits Iran, Russia and China with a strategic rather than merely tactical understanding of war. Now reads the new Saudi, Turkey and Pakistan defence pact as Gulf states organising collective defence outside US influence, having concluded that Washington protects Israel rather than them.

Overuse of sanctions has left the West with no other diplomatic tool, and it is pushing countries to escape dollar dependence rather than achieving Washington's aims, accelerating de-dollarization and eroding the appeal of the US-centred economic order. Now says the West fatally underestimated Russia's ability to absorb oil sanctions and overestimated how much the oil sector mattered to its economy, and reads Trump's pressure on Zelensky to stop striking Russian energy infrastructure as driven by US petrol and diesel prices.