The Duran

The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, and Trump's own admission that the US is 'in a war' it hasn't won confirms there is no resolution in sight before the midterms. Instead of being weakened by the resumed war, Iran's Houthi proxies have been emboldened, retaking Mocha and now threatening both Saudi oil installations and control of the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Mercouris still reads Tehran's hardliners as vindicated that long-term deals with Washington get broken, though the war of attrition now looks set to grind on past the midterms rather than resolve in Washington's favor. Now says the Houthis control the whole Yemeni Red Sea coast and can close the southern exit at will, that economic strangulation will never be enough to force regime change in Tehran because BRICS partners can offset it, and that the dominant mood in Washington points to an all-out attack after the midterms, which he calls a reckless gamble.

Ukraine’s military, fiscal, and political position is collapsing in parallel, and Zelensky’s actual endgame is to extract cash and flee rather than hold power through victory. Mercouris now calls this the war’s greatest crisis for Ukraine yet, citing fuel shortages, resumed strikes on Kiev, encirclements and a collapsing tax base, while Christoforou reads claimed counteroffensive gains near Krasny Liman as public relations to justify more Western money. Now says Russia is deliberately and gradually isolating Kiev, hitting rail links, energy and drone warehouses and the Kiev to Poland train line, to force a Western pullout and an eventual collapse of the Ukrainian government's legitimacy, and that Russian drone and satellite capability has advanced faster than expected. Now describes an underreported Ukrainian economic collapse: Black Sea ports shut, the rail system under attack, debt to GDP past 100 percent, and a 33 billion dollar external funding need against 21 billion secured.

Christoforou: Israel will never allow the US to agree an MOU-style deal with Iran.

China, and to a lesser extent Russia, remain wary of closer alignment with Iran, which complicates any Iranian pivot away from Washington. But Beijing is now also the target of Bessent's apparent plan to squeeze the yuan toward a Plaza Accord-style deal, meant to mask the domestic energy shock at home. The Duran calls that plan reckless and doomed, since China has spent years building financial buffers and deepening ties with Russia precisely to withstand this kind of pressure.

Mercouris reads Merz as "obviously a dead man walking," a peculiarly bad chancellor whose authority is draining away as CDU support collapses and the AfD leads the polls in western as well as eastern Germany: "The whole political system in Germany is now in crisis." Argues the establishment misread Saxony-Anhalt, because it is war and peace and economic anxiety rather than immigration alone that are winning the AfD support, so playing the result up as an extremist surge only deepens it. Expects Brussels to reach for the funding-restriction tools it used on Hungary and Poland, a far riskier game against a country that is 40 percent of EU GDP and hosts the ECB. Now reads Trump as scapegoating Zelensky for a failed, Washington-authorised drone offensive against Russian refineries, with an internal fight running between a Ratcliffe-led escalation faction and a Witkoff and Kushner faction pushing a softer line, and calls claims that Poland or NATO could crush Russia in weeks delusional. Now says confirmation has come that the BRICS presidency passes to China next year, that the Trump administration will back Eduardo Bolsonaro in Brazil's election with a good chance he wins, and that Washington will ramp up tariff pressure on India as the weakest link among the three core BRICS states. Now says that despite Washington’s public neutrality on the Saudi crisis the Americans are undoubtedly still supplying Riyadh with intelligence and satellite data, so the disengagement is more rhetorical than real.

Reads the governing coalition's real platform as preparing for war with Russia by 2030 while hollowing out German industry to pay for it, a policy of deindustrialization that runs against the country's engineering and manufacturing culture. Argues the visible decline, in dirtier and less orderly cities and in lost industrial pride, is what is shocking ordinary Germans into backlash. Now argues the diesel and oil shortage is self-inflicted by Washington, which controls the targeting data behind the refinery strikes and could halt them instantly, making the blame-Zelensky framing theatre. Now expects a rerun of last year's EU dispute over seizing frozen Russian funds, with Belgium refusing and Brussels pushing to move ahead anyway. Now says Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is down and the kingdom can export through neither Hormuz nor the Red Sea, its worst crisis since the founding of the kingdom, with financial reserves that are not especially deep and thin US and European reserves behind it. Now argues the Fed is misdiagnosing a Middle East supply shock as a demand problem, with guest Ray Zucaro putting a recession inside 12 to 18 months while Washington's rollover costs climb on 11 trillion dollars of debt due within a year.