Category: Geopolitics, Economics, Middle East, Energy, US Foreign Policy

Dark editorial illustration of shadowy figures in ornate portrait frames on a gallery wall, a burning city visible through a window behind them, suggesting the architects and beneficiaries of a catastrophic war.

Netanyahu, MBS, Putin and the Useful Idiot 

Russia feeds Tehran American targeting intelligence. Netanyahu needs the war to continue. MBS counts his oil revenues. One hundred and seventy-five children were at school in Minab when the missile struck. The mathematics of this catastrophe have been visible from the start. That nobody in Washington appears to have done the sums is the most damning fact of all.

Aerial view of a destroyed girls' school in southern Iran, rubble strewn across a courtyard, small backpacks visible among the debris, emergency workers standing back at dusk as smoke rises from the ruins.

Double Tap? Double Depravity

As US and Israeli forces use double-tap airstrikes to kill survivors and first responders in Iran, Australia’s silence makes us complicit. Pine Gap is in the kill chain. Anthony Albanese had three hours to decide. He chose wrong.

Silhouetted figures in a darkened war room study maps and screens showing Middle East strike targets, while a crumpled peace agreement lies on the floor below, a telephone receiver off the hook beside it

He Was Warned. He Knew. He Did It Anyway.

Trump was warned by Iran, by his own intelligence services, by international mediators and by members of his own Congress. The warnings were not vague — they were specific, on the record, and entirely accurate. Iran had agreed to a nuclear breakthrough the day before. Netanyahu lobbied for the strike. MBS made private phone calls urging it. US intelligence said there was no imminent threat. Trump attacked anyway. Now the region burns.

Rubble and scattered schoolchildren's backpacks outside a bombed girls' elementary school, dawn light, Iran

We Bombed a School Full of Children. Call It What It Is.

Sara Shariatmadar was six years old. She went to school on Saturday morning and did not come home. At least 108 girls died — the governor says 148— when US and Israeli munitions struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. International humanitarian law is unambiguous. This is a war crime. The perpetrators should be indicted.

US Navy carrier strike group in the Strait of Hormuz at dusk, symbolising the tense US-Iran military standoff of early 2026.

Locked, Loaded, and Stuck: Why the Second Iran Strike Won’t Come Easy

Trump says the United States is “locked and loaded.” Israel has Operation Iron
Strike sitting authorised on a shelf. Yet the second blow on Iran hasn’t
landed — and the reason is written not in diplomatic fine print but in depleted
missile stockpiles and the darkening arithmetic of a CRINK alliance that neither
Washington nor Tel Aviv knows how to break. Vulnerability, not virtue, is
driving the pause.