If you get your picture of the war in Ukraine from the Institute for the Study of War, you could be forgiven for thinking Russia has spent 2026 standing still. According to reporting on ISW’s latest assessments, Russia’s actual territorial gains this year come to roughly 100 square kilometers, about 40 square miles, or a...

Washington and Israel are talking again about “finishing the job” in Iran. Before they do, someone should take a hard look at the bill for the jobs already done. My friend Karl Miller, who has called this region correctly more often than most of the people paid to do it, sent me his latest assessment...

I am back in Moscow for the first time in ten months, and the first thing that strikes you is the distance between the city in front of you and the city as it is described five thousand miles away. Moscow and St. Petersburg are thriving, modern, and — this is the word I keep...

Nine weeks before the Houthis stunned the region by breaking out of their northern strongholds, Karl Miller told me it was coming. In a private note dated July 1, he reasoned that Mohammed bin Salman was running his familiar balance-of-power game — placing bets around his perimeter to deny Iran, Turkey, and Iraq any added...

On 14 September 2026, with American diesel having crossed six dollars a gallon for the first time in history, President Trump settled the question of blame in a single sentence posted to social media: “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” A day earlier, at his golf resort...

A chokepoint is not a wall. It is a tollbooth — expensive, annoying, survivable — and the traffic always finds another way around. That is the single lesson I would press on anyone in Washington who believes the dollar can be made into a cage for Iran, and it is a lesson the last great...

NEW DELHI — The 18th BRICS summit opened on September 12 with the bloc taking its most concrete step yet toward loosening the grip of the US dollar, adopting a 45-page New Delhi Declaration on the first day and endorsing a payments architecture built to route cross-border trade around the Western financial system. For most...

It has not been much of a secret, but I am back in Russia with Judge Napolitano and a couple of other podcast luminaries, to participate in a series of academic seminars dedicated to finding a way for Russia and the US to build a collaborative partnership rather than risk World War III. Life on...

When U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an interviewer this weekend that the Strait of Hormuz would “become irrelevant” within two years — with more than half the energy now crossing it rerouted through underground pipelines — he was indulging a pipe dream. Bessent fails to grasp that Iran’s ability to use the Strait of...

According to a Wall Street Journal report citing US officials, President Trump has been privately weighing the possibility of declaring victory against Iran and ending the war without securing a nuclear deal, . Trump reportedly has floated to senior aides that if the US can keep Iran’s nuclear program in check and traffic resumes through...

Although Donald Trump insists that the Strait of Hormuz is open, it ain’t. There are no direct talks between Iran and US representatives. In fact, it looks like Pakistan’s attempt at mediation is going nowhere. Iran has been talking with Oman, but those talks — despite claims of progress — appear to have stalled. Iran...

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a trilateral defense pact on Friday, ostensibly binding three of the Muslim world’s most militarily and economically significant states into a mutual-defense arrangement, but the details of the agreement have not been published. Signed in the holy city of Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President...

I remain skeptical that the US and Iran will soon reach an agreement regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The US wants it open to all ships and strongly opposes Iran charging any kind of fee or toll for ships entering or leaving the Persian Gulf. Iran’s position is unchanged… It is going to collect a...

Cybele Mayes-Osterman, a reporter at the USA Today, wrote a story on April 16 that buried the lede… The enlisted personnel on board ships deployed to the Iranian war zone are not being adequately fed. Her article — Cookies, deodorant, socks. Iran war puts military packages in limbo — carried a misleading title, most likely...

Robert Barnes’ 1776 Conference is a great event. I took a selfie — posted above — with some of the key participants. President Trump announced Saturday night that he is canceling a planned bombing campaign against Iran, saying negotiators had reached a rough framework for an agreement — an eleventh-hour reversal that pulls the five-month...

No podcasts today. I traveled from Florida to Tennessee to attend Robert Barnes’ 1776 LAW CENTER CONVENTION, where I will be speaking along with Daniel Davis, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, among others. I did find an excellent Pub: Hair of the Dog. You can smoke cigars, eat great food and drink a pint for...

Short answer… I think so. On Wednesday July 29, 2026, at roughly 3:20 pm CET, a drone struck the Energos Winter — a Marshall Islands-flagged floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) owned by US company New Fortress Energy — on its starboard side at Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Damietta, in the northern Nile Delta. The...

We are seeing a major escalation in the Red Sea in the undeclared war between AnsarAllah and Saudi Arabia and this may spill over to the war the US is waging on Iran. As I write this the Houthis have retaliated to a Saudi attack on the Houthi-held port of Hodeidah. So let’s go through...

Donald Trump made news briefly this week by proposing civil nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia that includes support for building nuclear reactors using US technology. This is not actually a new development. Discussions between the US and Saudi Arabia on a formal civil nuclear cooperation agreement (known as a “123 Agreement” under the U.S. Atomic...

What’s going on with the Israeli hardliners? Following a security cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Smotrich said: The current situation, in which the conflict between Iran and the United States remains limited, is the right one and the best for us. We are not looking to get involved. He elaborated that Israel’s...