Tag: china

Satirical editorial cartoon showing a dancing monkey in a gold tie on a Middle East map, flanked by two organ grinder figures – one in a Western suit, one in Gulf robes holding a bone-saw. A burning oil tanker sits on dark water behind them. A dragon watches from above. A small applauding figure stands in the corner. Illustration in the style of George Grosz and Gerald Scarfe.

Don’t blame the organ-grinder; the monkey had a choice.

Trump didn’t stumble into the Iran disaster alone. Every catastrophe has its infrastructure – the courtiers, the flatterers, the transactionalists, the true believers, and the merely opportunistic who supplied the scaffolding. Bibi and MBS worked the organ grinders’ handles with professional dedication. But the monkey chose to dance. And in the corner, a daggy bloke from Cronulla was clapping.

Silhouetted figures seated at a circular table in a bare, harshly lit room, backs turned to a door standing slightly ajar, light bleeding through the crack.

No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play about three people locked in a room with an unlocked door nobody would walk through. He called it No Exit. He was writing about Operation Epic Fury seventy years before it happened. A forensic anatomy of a war built from mutual imprisonment, strategic miscalculation, and the fatal habit of assuming the other side thinks like us.

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.

As Trump Threatens Weekend Strike on Iran, Albanese Pretends Pine Gap Isn’t Complicit

Albanese’s Iran Illusion: How Australia Sleepwalks into Someone Else’s War While our federal government waffles on about rules based order, Iran is rewriting the rules of modern warfare. Trump is threatening regime-change. The Strait of Hormuz has become a kill box where $13 billion aircraft … Continue reading As Trump Threatens Weekend Strike on Iran, Albanese Pretends Pine Gap Isn’t Complicit

AUKUS Caucus

Australia has built a $368 billion cargo cult and called it strategy. The AUKUS Caucus offers money, bases and sovereignty in exchange for submarines that do not exist, built by shipyards that cannot deliver, on timelines that belong to fantasy. The only thing arriving on schedule is the bill.