Richard Sakwa

Iran, "with a 3,000–5,000-year history," will not be intimidated — like Russia, the most-sanctioned country, more sanctions just entrench resistance. Demolishes Jack Keane's "we appeased Iran since 1979" framing as absurd (the JCPOA was diplomacy, not appeasement) and reads the "economic D-Day" as another round of a 47-year-failed playbook. The real question is who cracks first — and "it won't be Russia, and it won't be Iran." Notes the ~10-day-old hardliner consolidation in Tehran and the warning issued to 47 tankers. Now says the United States has bitten off far more than it can chew fighting Iran, that there is no military solution, and that Iran's alliance network and continued Chinese oil purchases are sustaining it.

The war is "provoked," traceable to NATO enlargement and the 2014 forced regime change — not the "war of choice" of the hypernormalized Western narrative, in which the security dilemma and 2014 "simply do not exist." Reads Zelensky's 35th-anniversary triumphalism (and PM Burnham's "Ukraine has been Europe's protector" speech) as detached from a battlefield where Ukraine is out of air defense, Russia is partially surrounding Slavyansk and advancing on the Kharkov/Sumy/Zaporozhye fronts, and the regime is mired in corruption and refuses elections. Speaks for "the other Ukraine" — the pluralist, non-ethnonationalist country — and expects the war to end on the battlefield, not at the table. Now says military momentum has tilted decisively toward Russia on several fronts, that Ukraine is running out of men and facing a funding shortfall, and that Kiev's sanctioning and jailing of critics undercuts the West's democracy-versus-autocracy framing.

Israel's increasingly aggressive and reckless behavior — bombing Qatar, occupying and expanding into southern Syria, striking a Turkish-controlled airfield, the flotilla interceptions, intensifying West Bank settler violence around Jenin, "hammering" southern Lebanon, and Gaza — is itself a driver of the regional realignment, alarming Turkey above all. Western governments are actively complicit, not merely providing diplomatic cover. Now calls the EU and UK moves to sanction West Bank settlements welcome but a little too late, with Gaza's devastation still unaddressed.

Points to the "CRINK" alignment (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) and the U.S. as an increasingly "unelable" counterpart nobody can strike a durable deal with. China and Russia will not comply with the secondary-sanctions push, and (per an unconfirmed report he flags as such) China may already be quietly supplying Iran — a multipolar backstop giving Tehran confidence it can hold on.

All of these conflicts are "militarily unattainable": the U.S. cannot defeat Iran, Israel cannot defeat all the enemies it has chosen, and while Russia can eventually grind Ukraine down, Ukraine cannot destroy Russia — so the wars simply grind on, benefiting only a "super-wealthy elite," with the West disengaged from reality and the U.S. no longer a credible security guarantor. The clearest sign of that lost credibility is the Mecca pact — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and NATO-member Turkey signing a mutual defense pact, with (rumored, Larry-Johnson-sourced and explicitly unconfirmed) reports that Iran and even Bahrain want in, plus an Iraqi-proposed Saudi-Iran security council, while the Abraham Accords are "lying in tatters." A vulnerability of democracy: well-organized ideological/commercial interest groups capture policy against the public interest. Now reads the Mecca Accords, with Bahrain and Bangladesh reportedly weighing membership, as a new regional security alignment forming because the United States can no longer guarantee security, and calls the collective West a hermetic, self-talking echo chamber.

Together Russia and Ukraine supply ~30% of global wheat exports (Russia #1, Ukraine #5), and with Black Sea grain ports damaged and Odessa blocked the grain isn't reaching market — a major global repercussion building as winter approaches, layered on top of the Houthi threat to Red Sea/Suez traffic. The chokepoints bite well beyond oil. Now reads the Hormuz and Red Sea oil shock as a global poly-crisis hitting Europe hardest, with the EU sanctions regime on Russia fraying as Slovakia and France block renewal even while the bloc keeps importing Russian LNG.