Oman

The US gangster chief threatened to bomb Oman if the country “gets in the way” of US efforts to resolve the ongoing war with Iran and reopen the strategic Strait of Hormuz. The threat coincided with the expiry without resolution of a 60-day diplomatic deadline to reach a broader peace agreement with Tehran, following immediate and multiple US violations of the MOU that the two countries signed on June 17.

The crime boss is opposed to Oman’s working with Iran to establish a joint authority that could also allow both nations to charge fees on shipping traffic through the strait. It is not thought likely that this traffic is going to include any time soon the ships of the US, Israel or any other country that has lately proven itself hostile to Iran, including the ships of neighboring Gulf nations.

South Korea

The gangster chief also ordered the Pentagon to cut down joint military drills with South Korea, a staunch US proxy in east Asia that contributes to US attempts to contain China, along with Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh and others, citing his “very good relationship” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He was angry with Seoul for refusing to help in the US conflict with Iran. This is the result of two unprovoked attacks by the US on the sovereign nation of Iran including complicity with Israel in the murder of Iran’s leader, many members of his family, and other senior Iranian figures.

South Korea was understandably reluctant to participate in an illegal, meritless and possibly losing war that has already threatened its economy. Trump’s sudden decision has strained the 70-year alliance with South Korea while renewing a direct, friendly diplomatic push toward Pyongyang.

North Korea

This is, of course, an absurdity, since North Korea, facing off against US resistance, has become a significant nuclear power (possessing missiles that can reach the continental USA) even while Trump continuously claims that the key purpose of his war with Iran is to stop it becoming a nuclear power, and even though all credible evidence shows that up until now Iran has had no nuclear weapons, does not want nuclear weapons, and that the claim that it does has been constructed by none other than the nefarious Israeli gangster chief, Netanyahu, for the past two decades. Indeed, at least until the US-Isrseli gangsters launched theirt recent wars, Iran even subscribed to IAEA supervision and inspections of its nuclear energy plant at Bushehr. All this, while Iran’s nemesis and Trump’s best buddy, Israel, has built a vast nuclear armory, having stolen the technology from the USA over half a century ago, and operated without the approval of or any surveillance from the IAEA which nonetheless and with total lack of conviction, professes to be a neutral agency.

It is extremely unlikely that North Korea would allow itself to be lured away from its current, solid, brotherly relationship with Russia, whose army it augments with men and whose weaponry it augments with drones.

Israel

Meanwhile, Israel, whose military intelligence had wisely advised Prime Minister Netanyahu, prior to the second US attack on Iran last February, that there was no guarantee that Iran would readily collapse - advice that Netanyahu and Trump recklessly ignored – has been encouraged by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to continue its genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, land which the property developer would love to clear and build resorts on (particularly since a comparable if smaller scheme in Albania is falling apart under consistent pressure from the popular Flamingo resistance).

Antiwar.com reports today a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Kushner that ended with an agreement that Israel will continue so-called “targeted strikes” in Gaza (i.e. the odious discourse of the US that wouldn’t “restrict Israel’s right to defend itself”). Yet the very day before, Kushner had attended a meeting of the “Board of Peace” (a Trump mockery of the UN) in the presence of the equally odious Tony “WMD” Blair, at which Hamas had committed to a disarmament plan.

Far from tempering its violence in Gaza and in the West Bank, Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, says Israeli forces should “kill 30 or 40” people in Gaza every night and go beyond “those who pose a danger … at that particular moment,” while Israel pushes further forward in its invasions of neighboring countries. Israeli forces continued their offensive against southern Lebanon on Monday, with an airstrike reportedly targeting a location in Wadi al-Hujair as Israeli ground vehicles advanced deeper into the country, chiefly in the Ali al-Taher area. For Antiwar.com, Jason Ditz reports that the latest push began over the weekend with the deadliest strikes Israel has launched since mid-June The US has reportedly given Israel the green light to invade and seize Ali al-Taher, if it would exercise restraint.

In short, there are no indications whatsoever that the conditions that the US agreed with Iran in the now expired framework of the MOU, especially those that are contingent on Israeli collaboration, will be met any time in the foreseeable future.

Red Sea and Hormuz

Meantime, the crisis grows worse. Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen have attacked another Saudi ship in the Red Sea. They launched ballistic missile and drone strikes targeting a Saudi military landing ship and four escort boats in the Red Sea off Mocha, causing the main vessel to catch fire.

Such escalation is putting additional pressure on the official price of Brent Crude ($87-91 a barrel). This increase is worrying, but prices are not reaching the levels seen earlier in the conflict and seem to fall well short of outright panic. I have commented on this discrepancy many times in the past few weeks, noting, for example, the various workarounds that have been established by the Gulf Countries, including Iran (whose ships must avoid the US blockade) to get their energy products to market, and the (seemingly failed) experiments of the US to establish alternative routes through the Gulf with the cooperation of Oman.

Working Around the Crisis

This was the topic of a long analysis yesterday by Larry Johnson at Sonar21, written in the wake of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s threats of new sanctions that would bring about Iran’s capitulation, sanctions that might once have worked when Iran was shut off from the rest of the world and operated only in dollars but are less likely to work now that Iran is well networked with countries like Russia, China and North Korea, and trades in local currencies.

Tehran has been a member of the BRICS since in January 2024, and in August 2026 it moved toward membership in the bloc’s New Development Bank which offers project financing outside the Western financial system that sanctions weaponize. Moscow and Beijing are increasingly offering Iran active material support, including real-time intelligence on the positions of American warships and aircraft, and they have rushed air-defense support.

“This lattice of support rests on a formal scaffolding — a 20-year Iran-Russia strategic partnership signed in January 2025, a 25-year Iran-China accord from 2021, and a trilateral Iran-China-Russia strategic pact signed on January 29, 2026, whose central plank is unified opposition to reimposed sanctions. The powers that once helped seal Iran’s isolation are now helping it fight the war and rebuild its shield.”

There is now a land bridge that bypasses the blockade entirely. Pakistan has announced six overland transit corridors linking the ports of Karachi, Port Qasim, and Gwadar to Iranian border crossings at Gabd and Taftan. These corridors send goods from third countries, including China, to reach Iran by road, entirely outside the reach of a naval blockade.

De-Dollarization

Iran, China and Russia have simply stopped using the US dollar machinery.

“Iran now sells its oil to China — which buys more than 80% of Iran’s seaborne exports — settled in Chinese yuan rather than dollars, routed through China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), the renminbi clearing network the People’s Bank of China built in 2015 explicitly to move money across borders without touching the US-dominated dollar-clearing and SWIFT infrastructure. A transaction that never touches a dollar and never clears through a US-linked bank is a transaction Washington cannot easily see, freeze, or block. That is not sanctions evasion at the margins; it is the removal of the chokehold itself.”

More than 100 countries now access the CIPS system.

Resistance is not only monetary. Iran, Russia and China held their first trilateral naval exercise in 2019, at Iran’s initiative and it has recurred almost every year since, becoming a fixture following American withdrawal from the JCPOA in May of that year.

The US blockade will not hold against overland routes that include Pakistan’s roads to the east, and the long-standing rail and road links north to Russia through the Caspian and the International North-South Transport Corridor. A reduced US Navy may not have the logistical depth to sustain a comprehensive blockade indefinitely, especially since its former Gulf bases have been crippled by Iranian strikes.

“A blockade is only as durable as the logistics sustaining it, and those logistics are stretched to the point of failing at the galley….A state that imports through Pakistani roads, finances through a BRICS bank, sells its oil for yuan beyond the dollar’s reach, and fights under a shield that Moscow and Beijing help repair has room to endure that the Iran of 2015 did not.

Who Will Endure Longest?

In brief, Johnson is arguing that in this attritional phase of the conflict initiated by the US and the political West, Iran has far more endurance capability than it had a decade ago.

An alternative perspective is offered by Brian Berletic at New Atlas. Berletic’s perspective holds tenaciously to the view that whatever the US does internationally is motivated by a policy of restoring and maintaining US global primacy.

Looked at through this prism, marginal embarrassment for the US over Iran barely matters. Nor does the US fear a long attritional war with Iran.

It welcomes it.

US or Chinese Hegemony, or Multipolarity?

What is important is the continuing preparation by the US for the diminution of the threat to US hegemony that China represents. The US has, for a very long time, maneuvered into position a ring of US bases and hostile governments around China. (It is shooting itself in the foot at the moment by taking out its carriers from the Asia Pacific; if China thinks it needs to invade Taiwan, it should do so now, although I do not for one moment expect that it will).

In the Berletic narrative, and there is a lot to be said for it, the crises in the Gulf and in the Red Sea are not reducing US primacy, they are strengthening it.

China has now been deprived of oil from both Venezuela and from Iran. This does not cripple China by any means, since it is significantly self-sufficient in energy (when one includes coal) but it increases the overall cost of energy for China. Perhaps even more importantly, it impoverishes the allies that the US had nurtured to contain China: they are deprived of oil, their energy costs increase, they are forced to depend more heavily on LNG from the US. Their number include Japan, whose economic misfortune are not being resolved by the recent US sale of Euros to boost the Yen and which might very well soon have to divest its holdings of US Treasuries.

Most significantly, the USA’s Asian proxies have less money to trade with in business with their most important trading partner. And the most important trading partner for most of them is China. So this too also rebounds negatively on China, while making the US in some ways stronger, if only in relative terms.

Europe

Much the same is true of the USA’s relationship with Europe. The US had already crippled the European economy when, through one means of another, it succeeded in executing Biden’s threat to kill Nord Stream pipeline deliveries which had been the foundation of German and European prosperity.

This generation of European leaders, through an ideology of neoliberalism which promised them an all-too-brief era of glowing prosperity in the peak years of “globalization” exuberance that persuaded them to renege on the welfare state compromises with big capital that were characteristic of the immediate, guilt-filled post-war period, now see themselves umbilically tied and subordinate to US primacy even at the expense of increasing economic anguish, for them. Their deal with Satan, in this case the USA, requires them to execute the US goal of diminishing and fragmenting the Russian Federation through the weaponization of its proxy, Ukraine, even when the US no longer seems to have the interest, resources or the nerve to do this just by itself.

Russia-Ukraine

In this battle, Russia, like Iran, has shown itself extraordinarily resilient and adaptable and powerful. Whereas for Iran the challenge is purely defensive, for Russia it must also be offensive. Because Ukraine was weaponized against Russian security interests from the time of the US-instigated coup d’etat on the Maidan in 2014, Russia eventually had to accept (in 2022) that its own defense required it to establish effective authority over the largely pro-Russian regions of the Donbass and further afield.

So Russia’s war, although often described as “attritional” is a lot less “attritional” than in the case of Iran. But it has been a long, hard, slow struggle. So slow that many analysts, including this one – and with some justification – have criticized Moscow for failing to use its weapons of deterrence to actually deter the ever escalating levels of Western aggression against Russia that have included strikes on its nuclear triad and on the life of Putin himself and, more recently, have included strikes on Russian oil refineries, Russian tankers and grain cargo ships, and Russian ecommerce warehouses.

We have seen in the past few months that this Western aggression has provoked – at last, some would say – Russia to a new level of counterattack, as in its effective land, sea and air blockade of Odessa.

But although some pro-Russian analysts profess to be awfully convinced as to the proximity of the collapse of the Ukrainian economy, or the collapse of the Ukrainian army, or the collapse of Ukrainian governance, while downplaying and belittling the importance of Ukrainian attacks deep into the heart of Russia….well, we have been here so many times before that any expression of confidence is hardly worth the effort.

For sure, Russia’s recent strikes on Odessa, which I have covered many times in recent posts, along with its gathering forces for the establishment of Russian control over the remaining conurbation (Slavyansk-Kramatorsk) in Donetsk, its approaches in Zapporizhzhia to Orikhiv (now said to be 20% controlled by Russia) and its bombing of a major bridge across the Dnieper in the city of Zapporizhzhia itself, not to mention its constant incremental gains in Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv, all these things testify to Russian strength.

They are further assisted by the deterioration of air defense mechanisms in Ukraine, the diminution of weapons stockpiles throughout the political West - especially in such things as Patriot interceptor missiles – and the growing, successful use by Russia of AWACS, Rassvet satellites and ground towers for the annihilation of the hundreds of Ukrainian drones sent into Russia every 24 hours, and Russia’s continuing ability to out-produce the political West in ballistic missiles and major new weapons innovations.

Will any of this be enough to bring about a new security architecture for EurAsia and for the World?

I do not see this as remotely likely on the current horizon, given the situation that we have, and given the people we have in power in the political West who, for the most part, are outstanding only in terms of their absence of moral sensibility,pompous self-deception, greed, self-regard, short-sightedness, corruption and intellectual poverty.

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Flashback

My attention was caught by a title I used for my post of Nov. 17, 2023 !

Russia Can Win This Now. Why Doesn’t It?

Here is the text:

Ruminations on a Victory Interrupted

On the Military Summary Channel, Dima calls attention to the growing intensity of the Russian offensive and opines that Russia is executing the “third Maidan” strategy of replacing Zelenskiy and his regime with an alternative system of governance that will be distinctly more favorably disposed towards Russia. I have my doubts as to whether regime change best explains the logic of the Russian geopolitical bid for security.

When looking at the overall picture, I am struck by three contradictory things: (1) what the western powers like to call the “stalemate” along the combat lines (a word that completely fails to convey the intensity of actual fighting from Kherson in the south to Kupyansk in the north); (2) evidence of the deterioration across many dimensions of Ukrainian armed forces, amidst pressures for mobilization on the most vulnerable members of the citizenry namely, women, young people and people who are considerably older than conventional fighting age, and given a relative absence of actual and potential reserves; (3) evidence of a considerable Russian army, with large numbers of reserves and the potential for many more mobilizations, if necessary, from conventional fighting-age populations, backed by an industrial capability for exponential increase of most categories of weaponry including armored vehicles, fighter jets, nuclear submarines, all categories of missiles from nuclear downwards, bombs and shells, with the support of an even greater industrial power namely, China, which the collective West has done everything in its power to alienate and to weaken its trust in Western capacity for rational policy making.

I am drawn to three conclusions.

The first (1) is that the appearance of “stalemate,” follows from the extraordinary length of the combat line, some 700 miles, a length that cannot possibly be fought over in its entirety. This, then, leads to sporadic concentrations of forces in areas of perceived greatest value, including the industrial heartlands of eastern Ukraine in terms, particularly, of mines and transport. A concentration of forces on one side, of course, immediately attracts a comparable concentration of forces by the other side. One side then tries to reduce the concentration of forces of its opponent by moving north or south to open a new area of combat, with a view to enticing its opponent to redeployment of forces from the first position. And so and so on in a seemingly eternal dance.

But (2) this dance is only necessary so so long as both sides maintain roughly equivalent strengths. Ukraine’s strength is matched by Russia’s.

But (3) whereas Ukraine’s strength is its absolute strength, Russia’s strength is simply relative, calibrated only to match, not greatly exceed, that of Ukraine.

In other words, (4) Russia has greater capability and could, if it so determined, double the strength of its forces at all the major points of conflict along the combat line or simply greatly increase the number of points that it chooses to defend or where it chooses to position its forces. These are options that Ukraine does not have. The presumption is that nuclear forces would only ever be used in the event of an existential threat to the continued existence of the Russian Federation.

(5) Therefore, it appears to me, Russia could, if it chose, win the war now, especially given its currently daily attacks by bomb and by drone on energy, transportation and military targets across Ukraine and which Ukraine fears will be intensified with the onset of winter. Consideration should also be taken of the speed of growth (4-5%) of the Russian economy and the increasing size of its GDP (2-3% now and for the next two to three years) and the likely continuing high flow of oil and gas revenues at prices well above the misjudged western oil price cap and racing ahead of half-hearted western efforts to curtail existing Russian classic and LNG energy exports to Europe.

If so, we have to answer the question: if Russia could win the war now, why doesn’t it just proceed to win and get the damn thing over with (something that would now, it appears, have the support of the majority of the Russian people)?

Several possible answers suggest themselves:

(1) A “Big Arrow” Russian offensive will win whatever it is that Russia wants, but it will do so at a very heavy price in Russian as well as Ukrainian lives, a price that the Russian governing elites choose not to pay; further, it is likely to involve much greater destruction of infrastructure, infrastructure that Russia may intend to incorporate into the Russian Federation;

(2) A slow win is a safer, more predictable process than a sudden win, because it is more humanitarian, because it will create less anguish in a population with which Russia still at some point will have to try to get along with, and because it leaves more opportunities, more doors open to potential peace initiatives whether these come from Washington, Brussels, Kiev or Moscow, or even from the UN;

(3) A slow win better follows the logic of attritional warfare wherein not only are Ukrainian forces greatly reduced over a longer period of time, but so too are the forces and the weapons and the treasure of the collective West, reducing the ability of the collective West to constantly threaten the world with existential and nuclear annihilation scenarios whether these be against Iran in the Middle East, against Palestine in Israel, against China in Taiwan and, of course, against Russia whether this be over Ukraine, or Georgia or Armenia or wherever.

This logic therefore (4) involves a steady decline in the political, economic and military prowess of the collective West as there is a corresponding process in reverse among the powers of the BRICS and in the Global South, involving the end of the petrodollar and de-dollarization, ushering in a new epoch of the disappearance of a rogue hegemonic superpower - one that stops at nothing to secure the interests of its plutocracy, even at the expense of its own people - in favor of a more equitable distribution of power in a multipolar world.

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