Lawrence Wilkerson

Iran’s missile precision and mine warfare have neutralized US and Israeli military superiority in the Gulf, while Washington’s Iran nonproliferation stance is undercut by its own promotion of a Saudi nuclear program. Now says Iran holds the top of the escalation ladder and is climbing it in a disciplined, effective way the US cannot answer; Washington has no coherent strategy left, just daily improvisation to delay an already apparent defeat. Now argues the June strikes failed to set back Iran’s nuclear programme and that Iran went and built a weapon afterwards, "a nuclear weapon or two or three", under a hardened leadership. Now reads the new Iran-Oman Hormuz mechanism as an almost impregnable blockade that shuts down the US-backed shipping route, a development he calls bad for world commerce. Now says Iran has established itself as the real power in the Gulf and could destroy Israel with ballistic missiles at will if it chose to preempt any Israeli move. Now says Ansar Allah has mastered combined-arms warfare at the tactical, operational and strategic level and cannot be beaten by Saudi Arabia or the United States absent outside intervention, and puts it as a near certainty that Iran already holds at least half a dozen nuclear weapons mated to its best missiles with good targeting on Israel.

The war has entered its closing stages on terms overwhelmingly favorable to Russia, and Zelensky’s removal is a likely precondition for any real settlement (a "bull’s-eye on his back"). Now argues the US strategy of trying to peel Russia away from China to isolate Beijing has failed and instead fused a durable Russia-China, now plus Iran, alliance; Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy is secondary to his domestic political needs. Now puts the endpoint plainly: Ukraine becomes a landlocked rump state with no port and no way to export its agricultural produce, while Europe’s rearmament talk proves hollow. Now says Russia is basically going to win this on the battlefield and will simply wait for whoever succeeds Trump to reset relations, and argues the EU’s own January ban on further Arctic LNG purchases from Russia will end up freezing Europe as much as Moscow.

The US has become "Israel’s poodle" rather than the reverse; an unrestrained Netanyahu risks provoking a catastrophic Iranian retaliation. Now says Netanyahu and Israel’s government are reckless and destabilizing the region, and that if Netanyahu tries to finish the war against Iran without direct US military backing, he has no doubt Netanyahu would resort to nuclear weapons rather than accept failure. Now reads Netanyahu’s battlefield appearances as election-season stagecraft and doubts Israel has the conventional capacity to defeat Iran at all. Now goes further: casts Israel as the real destabilizing actor behind regional false-flag operations and says its trajectory under Netanyahu could end, in his view, in the dissolution of the Jewish state itself, which he calls forthcoming. Now says that in a full nuclear exchange Iran would come out on top and Israel would not exist.

China’s overhead-intelligence support to Iran and its economic dominance show it is decisively winning the contest with the US. Traces this partly to decades of US coercion of Japan, from the postwar occupation through the 1980s yen-dollar peg, which left lasting resentment now pushing Japan and others to plan a future that bypasses US-centered infrastructure. Now says China does not want US-style global hegemony and deliberately checks its own centralizing tendencies, but is positioned to benefit passively as the US-backed Gulf order collapses.

The American empire is in accelerating decline, with real White House power now concentrated in unelected staffers like Stephen Miller and Russ Vought rather than elected officials. Now adds that US standing is collapsing as allies including Japan and the Gulf states quietly reposition away from Washington, and the world is building infrastructure that routes around US influence. Now says the United States will never again have a significant ground presence in the Gulf region, calling it a coming geopolitical earthquake, and blames Washington for engineering Europe’s present dysfunction. Sums up American capacity in a sentence, "we are running out of assets," as Gulf states negotiate their own Hormuz arrangement with Iran that Washington cannot veto. Now says the US empire is repeating the denial and lying pattern of the Iraq War, is heading for full military retreat from the Middle East with no ground forces left in the region, not even in Egypt, and may be the first empire in history to face collapse with nuclear weapons in play; puts Saudi Arabia’s odds of disappearing as a nation-state at 50/50 absent outside rescue. Now says the US has no military wherewithal left to bail out Saudi Arabia, with Gulf states scrambling unsuccessfully to Europe for the air-defence help Washington will not give, and that the US is exiting the Western Pacific sooner rather than later while Japan and South Korea hedge their bets.

Despite Trump’s claim the Strait of Hormuz is open, the southern route is largely closed and only a fraction of normal oil volume is moving. Sanctions and the Hormuz disruption are counterproductive to disastrous, driving up oil, diesel and food prices and pushing roughly two-thirds of world GDP to hedge away from the US, a shift he says the BRICS New Delhi declaration branding secondary sanctions illegal now formalizes. Now says oil-market signals (WTI/Brent, insurance surcharges up from 8% to 15%, a major US refinery outage that will take weeks if not months to fix) already show serious energy-system disruption despite official denials from Trump, Vance and Bessent, and says the US financial position has so many holes in it he would be surprised if it floats much past the end of 2026 or the middle of 2027.