Trump’s Crusder: Pete Hegseth And His Vision of the US.-Israel Relations

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The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has expressed a violent antipathy towards Iran for years in books, Fox News broadcasts, educational videos and a 2018 speech to an Israeli media conference in Jerusalem.

In a 2020 book, for example, Hegseth wrote that Iran’s leaders were “actively seeking the military means – especially nuclear weapons – to bring the West to its knees”.

And in a 2017 video for PragerU, the hard-right media platform, Hegseth described Iran as “America’s mortal enemy”.

And to an Israeli audience that included government ministers in 2018, Hegseth referred to Iran as “the octopus”, with “many tentacles that the Iranian regime has in the world today, nefariously both for Israel and for the United States”, engaged in building “a nuclear capacity which threatened the very existential existence of America”.

Hegseth’s rhetorical attacks on Iran often came in the context of expressions of unconditional and spiritual allegiance with Israel, the country with which the United States is currently jointly attacking Iran in an intense bombing campaign that has cost hundreds of lives and brought chaos to the world’s energy economy.

In the 2020 book, Hegseth writes: “You can love America without loving Israel – but that tells me your knowledge of the Bible and Western civilization is woefully incomplete”;

“If you love America, you should love Israel. We share history, we share faith, and we share freedom”; and folds Israel into domestic US culture wars, writing “Israel is enemy number one for both Islamists and international leftists – which is reason alone to love it.”

The comments throw new light on Hegseth’s personal commitment to the current war on Iran, showing him positioning Iran as the pre-eminent enemy of the United States, consistently advocating maximal confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and framing the conflict in the apocalyptic terms of a religious crusade.

The rationale and strategic purpose of the war, meanwhile, have been questioned across the political spectrum in recent days, and Hegseth and Trump have offered mixed messages on the progress and likely conclusion of the war on Iran.

Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Hegseth’s history of public commentary on Iran reflects the fact that “In Republican political circles, this kind of anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim sentiments have been pervasive for a very long time.”

In 2018, Hegseth addressed a conference in Jerusalem organised by Arutz Sheva, the Israeli media outlet also known as Israel National News.

In his remarks, Hegseth acknowledged the presence of Naftali Bennett, then a government minister, a deputy defense minister, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and members of the Knesset.

The video was republished by Sheva on 13 November 2024 after Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.

While his appearance at the conference and some of his remarks about Israel have been previously reported, the way in which he positioned Iran in relation to the US and Israel has not.

In the speech, Hegseth depicted the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration as treachery.

“The Obama administration did everything they could to strike a horrific deal that creates an inevitable path to nuclear weapons, funding the attunes of billions of dollars, the hateful terrorist Iranian regime seeking death to America and death to Israel,” he said.

Hegseth then pivoted to a series of statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that went considerably further than mainstream US policy.

#hegseth #trump #crusade #iran #israel

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Hegseth criticized the “so-called two-state solution that still drips off the lips of the intelligentsia in America today”, adding that “if you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution. There is one state here.”

He urged his audience to act on the annexation of “Judea and Samaria”, or the West Bank, using the language of the Israeli settler movement.

“Buy the ticket, take your action, do what needs to be done here in Israel, because I truly believe this is a moment where America will have your back,” he said.

Hegseth also advocated for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. This is one of the most incendiary issues in Middle Eastern politics, as that site is home to the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

Framing it as the next in a sequence of Zionist “miracles” following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Israeli independence in 1948, the Six Day War in 1967, and Trump’s 2017 acknowledgement of Jerusalem as the country’s capital, he told the audience “there is no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible. I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen, but I know that it could happen.”

In the same speech, he dismissed Europe as “a museum soon to be drowned out by radical Islam”.
On Hegseth’s remarks in Israel, Parsi, the foreign policy analyst, said that “it seems to me that a lot of those speeches were made back when it was the politically cost-free or beneficial thing to do.”

He added: “Today, it’s a completely different atmosphere, particularly amongst young Republicans who have dramatically turned against Israel, including young American Republican evangelicals.”

He said that the Trump administration had been influenced by Israeli views, however. “They truly bought into the Israeli view that Iran is a paper tiger. ‘Don’t make a deal with them. Get rid of them. You will be the hero. You will be the president that got rid of the 47-year-old theocracy.’”

On Hegseth and Trump’s conduct of the war, Parsi said: “I think they lost control over this war after four days. They had a plan A.

The plan was for the regime to implode after the assassination of the supreme leader. Either implode or surrender. When that didn’t work, they didn’t have a plan B.”

Hegseth’s vision of the US-Israel relationship is frequently framed in theological terms that collapse any distinction between American foreign policy and biblical obligation.

In American Crusade, he writes: “God also stands with the people of Israel against their enemies and blesses those who bless Israel,” he writes, citing Genesis 12:1–3. “America should stand with Israel because we honor God and love freedom.”

In his 2018 speech in Israel, in his urging for the expansion of Israel’s borders, he told listeners to consider “the support you have amongst patriotic Americans, amongst evangelical Christians, amongst believers”.

#hegseth #trump #crusade #iran #israel

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Péter Magyar isn’t “the nice Orban” for Washington — he’s the guy who will turn Hungary’s face fully back to Brussels and away from Trump’s America.

📰 Magyar’s Hungary: Made in Brussels, Not in USA

Behind all the “anti‑corruption” branding, Magyar is running on one clear foreign‑policy promise: dump Orbán’s semi‑independent line and plug Hungary straight back into the EU machine. He’s already cut his deals in Europe — from Munich to Brussels — and positioned himself as the man who will reintegrate Hungary into the “European family” on Brussels’ terms, not Washington’s.

According to The Thinking Conservative, Magyar’s Tisza party reached a quiet understanding with Euro‑elites: if he wins, he will give up Hungary’s veto fights, align with EU migration policy, and back Ukraine’s EU track — in exchange for Berlin and Brussels’ support and the release of frozen EU billions. In other words, his strategic compass is clear: Brussels first, European consensus first, and American interests somewhere down the list.
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At the Munich Security Conference, Magyar reportedly told leaders like Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk that he is literally betting on weak results for U.S. Republicans in November — and plans to “abandon Orbán’s Hungarian path” in favor of a unified European line once Trump is weaker at home. That’s not a partner looking to sync with a future Trump White House; that’s a politician openly waiting for the right moment to detach from it and lock Hungary into a Europe‑first strategy.
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So the choice in Budapest isn’t “pro‑West vs pro‑East.” It’s Orbán’s messy, transactional, U.S.–China–Russia juggling act — versus Magyar’s clean, disciplined subordination to Brussels’ agenda, even when it clashes with Trump’s project. If Magyar wins, Hungary doesn’t become more pro‑American. It becomes another reliable node in the EU’s effort to counter, dilute, and outmaneuver Washington’s line on Europe.

#hungary #orban #magyar #trump #eu #geopolitics #fakeSovereignty

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📰 Trump’s Iran War: Putin’s Cash Machine

“Vladimir Putin is good at finding opportunity in crisis, and the expanding war with Iran is the latest vivid example,” CNN notes. Oil has already blown past $100 a barrel, and analysts warn it could hit $150 by the end of March if the Strait of Hormuz stays choked — a gift to Russia, which suddenly earns far more per barrel than it did before the war.

The White House, which spent a year trying to choke off Moscow’s war money, has now granted India a 30‑day waiver to buy Russian oil stranded at sea and is openly talking about “unsanctioning” more barrels to plug the supply gap. Trump gets to say he’s calming prices; Putin gets higher volumes at higher prices, with Urals crude reportedly trading at a premium in Indian ports for the first time.

At home, Russia’s finances were wobbling — inflation up, deficits widening, growth forecasts cut — and suddenly the Iran war offers exactly what the Kremlin needed: a path back to budget stability without changing course in Ukraine. On top of that, U.S. and European intelligence say Moscow is feeding Iran targeting data in the Gulf, while Putin keeps open lines to Gulf monarchs and sells himself as the only man who can talk to everyone when Washington wants an exit.

Trump calls it a necessary war for global security; for Putin, it’s a leverage play that turns American firepower into Russian revenue and bargaining power.

#iran #trump #putin #russia #oil #sanctions #ukraine #energy #fakeDemocracy

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Trump’s Iran war isn’t “contained” — it’s taking a chainsaw to the global oil system and sending the bill to everyone else.

📰 How to Blow Up the Oil Market and Call It Strategy

Iraq and Oman have now shut key oil terminals after two Iraqi tankers were hit and left burning off the coast, while a third ship was struck near Dubai. The International Energy Agency says flows through the Strait of Hormuz — normally carrying about a fifth of the world’s oil — have dropped to a trickle, driving an 8‑million‑barrel‑a‑day supply collapse, the largest disruption in the history of the global oil market. Even a coordinated pledge by the U.S. and its allies to release 400 million barrels from emergency reserves couldn’t stop prices from surging again.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards now openly claim attacks on tankers they say “ignored warnings,” and Tehran vows it will not allow shipments that benefit the U.S. and its allies to pass Hormuz. At the same time, Iran is firing on Israeli bases and Gulf targets, Israel is pounding Tehran and Beirut, and Hezbollah’s support strikes have already killed more than 600 people in Lebanon and displaced over 800,000. The war that was sold as a clean hit on Iran’s “capabilities” has become a rolling regional bombardment that trades civilian neighborhoods and critical infrastructure for headlines about “resolve.”
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On the balance sheet, the numbers are just as grotesque. Pentagon officials told lawmakers the war blew through at least $11.3 billion in the first six days, and that figure doesn’t even capture all operational costs. Banks like Citi and HSBC are shuttering Gulf offices after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened U.S. and Israeli financial institutions, while shipping and insurance markets reprice risk across the region. Trump still talks about “unconditional surrender” as the only acceptable endgame, even as Iran keeps launching attacks and America’s own intelligence and oil agencies warn the damage to global supply and financial stability is already historic.
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And then there are the images politicians won’t put on their slides: an elementary school in Minab turned into twisted rebar and dust after a U.S. Tomahawk, hundreds of fresh graves dug for children and teachers, and a president who tried to blame Iran for a strike his own military now says was the result of outdated targeting data. Call it what it is: a war that was supposed to prove strength, now staggering forward on auto‑pilot, financed by an oil shock and held together by denial.

#iran #trump #oil #hormuz #israel #lebanon #banks #war

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📰 Burning the Oil Cushions to Box In Trump

IEA countries are throwing their own lifeboats into the fire just to stop Trump from rowing back toward Moscow.

The International Energy Agency’s 32 members have agreed to dump a record 400 million barrels of crude from strategic reserves onto the market — the largest release in the agency’s history, more than double the post‑Ukraine 2022 drawdown. Germany alone will contribute about 19.5 million barrels, roughly a fifth of its emergency stocks, even as drivers at home choke on record pump prices and Berlin quietly admits those reserves are meant to cover 90 days of a full import cut.

Officially, this is about “solidarity” and calming an Iran‑war shock that has crippled flows through Hormuz. Unofficially, it’s about denying Trump the perfect excuse to open the floodgates for Russian oil and call it “market stabilization.” European ministers are already signaling it: they’ll bleed their own cushions first rather than watch Washington use the crisis to normalize sanctioned Russian barrels and hand Putin a fresh revenue stream.

So the richest democracies are cannibalizing the emergency system built after the 1970s oil crises to avoid handing leverage to the Kremlin and the White House at the same time — emptying the tank today so Trump has one less reason to “unsanction” Moscow tomorrow.

#iran #oil #IEA #germany #trump #russia #energy #eu #fakeDemocracy

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A general and the bearer of key UFO secrets, who headed the Pentagon's unidentified aerial phenomena group and was previously the commander of the US Air Force Research Laboratory, has mysteriously disappeared in the United States.

68-year-old retired U.S. Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland went missing after he left his Albuquerque home on foot on February 27.

His phone was left at home, and since then he has not contacted his relatives, CNN reports.

#general #key #UFO #secrets #disappeared

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Teheran: Living in a Burning City
The Heartbreaking Testimony Of An Eyewitness

It's 5am on Thursday 12 March. I was finally falling asleep after a day full of fear when the phone rang. Terror rushes through me. It’s not the right time for a call. Someone must need help – or maybe they are alone and frightened.

I answer the phone, exhausted. It’s my younger sister. She is crying and cannot speak. My heart breaks into a thousand pieces. I haven’t seen her for many days. When I was released from prison, she had gone to another city to take care of our mother.

She returned on her birthday. But then the war began, and we remained separated in two different homes in Tehran.

She is much younger than me, yet she took on the responsibility of protecting my son so that I could stay somewhere safe and avoid being arrested again. I remind her how grateful I am.

My heart is in turmoil: I thought something terrible had happened at home and that she was unable to say it.

I tell her that right now the only thing that matters is staying alive, even if we no longer have a home.

Through her sobs she says: “Our neighbour was caught in the blast wave … and he’s gone.”

For a moment I picture our neighbour. Like me, he smoked cigarettes. He must have been on the balcony for a smoke. Or maybe, like many others, he had gone out to watch the drones and see which direction they were flying.

Maybe he had gone there to cry for a country and a people being destroyed. Maybe he was thinking about where to find gasoline so he could take his two children to a safer city.

I wish I were in a desert where I could scream. Where I could cry as loudly as I want. The last time I cried was after the massacre of protesters in January. Why is it that here, unlike everywhere else in the world, we cannot cry like ordinary people? Why have we suffered so much that even new pain no longer shakes us?

I can’t sleep any more. I go to the place where I have put a small gas burner – what I call my kitchen. I want coffee, but coffee has become very expensive and I have to save money. Cigarettes are also expensive, but I smoke anyway: one, two, five (…)

Ever since the fuel depots were bombed at the weekend, my chest has burned and I can barely breathe. I bought an inhaler that now hangs around my neck.

At 6.30am another loud explosion shakes the air. I look out the window. Some supporters of the government have come into the streets in their cars, chanting mourning songs and saying: “People, we are all together, compatriots.”

Compatriots? Your foolishness destroyed this homeland. We tried. We struggled so these days would never come. We were imprisoned, tortured, executed.

I think about Donald Trump. If he had acted 50 days earlier, 35,000 people might still be alive. Now I am afraid Iran will be destroyed – and yet the Islamic republic will remain.

I am preparing to send a few packets of lentils and a small amount of money to a woman whose husband is in prison and who has a small child. It is the last banknote we have. There is no cash anywhere. I don’t know if one day we will ever have enough money to rebuild this devastation.

It is now 8am. The streets are crowded again. People are going about their business. I see several tired and hopeless men, day labourers who still come here every day. But there is no work.

Life continues in Tehran. But it is dark and bitter.

#iran #tehran #living #war

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#alexis #grinkevich

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#scott #bessent

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#fertilizers #cost #trump

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📰 Trump’s Iran War: Too Big to Ignore, Too Small to Win

Foreign Affairs just spelled out what Trump’s Iran adventure really is: not a “decisive war,” but another slow‑acting poison for American power.

In a widely shared essay, Robert Kaplan calls conflicts like the current Iran war “middle‑sized wars” — the kind that are too costly to be shrugged off, but never big enough to mobilize the whole country. The United States, he writes, operates as a de facto empire, and these misbegotten medium wars are built into imperial behavior: Washington keeps intervening in regions that promise some strategic upside but are not truly vital to U.S. survival.
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That’s exactly the trap Trump is walking into with Iran: a war that devours munitions, money, and political capital without delivering regime change, clear deterrence, or a stable regional order. Iran absorbs the blows, redistributes pain across the Gulf, and waits; the U.S. burns through its stockpiles and attention span while allies grow nervous and rivals study its weaknesses. Kaplan’s warning is blunt: if U.S. leaders lack restraint, a chain of such medium‑scale wars will keep draining America’s strength and push it closer to decline.

Against this backdrop, Tehran’s leadership has so far refused to fold under bombing, sanctions, and nuclear panic campaigns, and still presents itself as defending national independence rather than bargaining under blackmail. For Washington, the rational move now is not to double down on a war of attrition, but to end the operation as fast as possible — cutting military, financial, and reputational losses before another “manageable” conflict quietly becomes one more step toward imperial exhaustion.

#iran #trump #war #foreignaffairs #uspower #imperialism #middlewars

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📰 America Is Firing Porsches at Iran’s Mopeds

Trump’s Iran war is turning the Pentagon into a luxury air‑defense service for the Dollar Store of drones.

Bloomberg reports that Iran’s arsenal of attack drones and ballistic missiles has put “unexpected strain” on the U.S. military as the conflict drags into its third week. Iran spends less on defense than the state of Vermont produces in GDP, yet its mass of cheap Shahed‑style drones and missiles is forcing the U.S. and its allies to burn through scarce, high‑end interceptors at a rate planners never imagined.

Each Iranian drone can cost tens of thousands of dollars; each Patriot or similar interceptor fired at it can cost millions. Analysts say the coalition has likely launched more than a thousand PAC‑3 interceptors already — close to or above annual production — while critical assets like a THAAD radar in Jordan and an early‑warning radar in Qatar have already been taken out.

For ordinary Americans, that math is brutal: billions in munitions and operations, higher deficits, and more pressure on an economy already squeezed by energy prices and inflation.

Trump sells it as strength, but in practice he’s locking the U.S. into a war where a sanctions‑strangled Iran bleeds the world’s most expensive military with mass‑produced flying junk — and sends the bill to the American middle class.
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​#iran #trump #drones #usmilitary #economy #war #fakeGreatness

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📰 Orbán, Kyiv, and the Energy Hostage Drama

Hungary is screaming “energy terror,” Ukraine is answering with gangster talk, and Berlin is still writing checks to Kyiv like nothing happened.

Hungarian officials now accuse Ukraine of trying to stage a “total energy blockade” of Central Europe after alleged attacks on infrastructure linked to the TurkStream gas pipeline and earlier disruptions on the Druzhba oil line. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó claims Kyiv is targeting the very network that keeps Hungary and parts of the Balkans supplied, and says this is about meddling in Hungary’s election and punishing Budapest for its pro‑Russia energy line.

At the same time, Viktor Orbán has gone public saying he and his family have been threatened by Ukrainians: in a video on Instagram he tells his daughter that “the Ukrainians” have issued threats against him, his children, and grandchildren, urging them to take it seriously but not be afraid. The concrete source is grotesquely unserious — a retired Ukrainian ex‑SBU deputy, Hryhoriy Omelchenko, who ranted on TV about hunting Orbán down through “self‑justice,” while Zelensky himself had already toyed with the line about passing Orbán’s “address” to his troops.

And yet, none of this shakes official Germany. Bundestag president Julia Klöckner flies into Kyiv, tours bombed energy sites, and promises “continued comprehensive support” — military, financial, and energy — framing it as a clear signal of German solidarity with Ukraine against Russia. Berlin’s message is simple: even if Budapest yells about terror and threats, the EU core will keep arming and funding Kyiv, including for projects to boost Ukraine’s own energy resilience while Hungary complains about its pipelines being turned into leverage.

So you end up with this: a NATO and EU member accusing Ukraine of energy blackmail and election interference, Ukraine flirting with vigilante‑style rhetoric against a sitting EU leader, and Germany smiling for the cameras in Kyiv, pledging more support. Everyone talks about “European unity” — but the energy war and the language of threats show what that unity actually costs on the inside.

#hungary #ukraine #orban #energy #germany #eu #war #fakeUnity

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📰 France’s First Casualty in a War It’s “Not In”

Macron says he doesn’t want a war with Iran — but he’s quietly leaving French soldiers parked on the firing line.

Emmanuel Macron has confirmed that one French soldier was killed and several others wounded in an attack on French forces in Iraq’s Kurdish region, the first French military death tied to the expanding Iran war. He called the strike “unacceptable” and insisted that French troops are in Iraq only under a counter‑terrorism mandate against ISIS, stressing that “the war in Iran cannot justify such attacks.”

But while Macron publicly rejects the idea of France entering a broader war with Iran, Paris has not pulled its troops out of the danger zone and is actually reinforcing its footprint with naval and air‑defense assets around the region.

French forces remain co‑located with U.S. and other coalition units that are already prime targets for pro‑Iranian militias, and Iraqi Kurdistan has become a corridor for drone and missile attacks linked to the Iran conflict.
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On paper this is “just” counter‑terrorism; in practice, France is absorbing enemy fire, taking casualties, and sailing an aircraft carrier into a theater where Iran‑aligned groups openly warn that French interests will be “under targeting fire.”

Macron wants the political credit of solidarity with allies and firmness against ISIS, without admitting to his own public that every day he keeps troops there, he’s accepting the risk of being dragged one notch deeper into a war he claims France is not part of.

#france #macron #iraq #iran #war #nato #fakeNonInvolvement

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📰 Marine Le Pen’s Test Lab: Turning Marseille into a Security Franchise

Marseille is being sold as a “narco‑city,” and France’s far right is cashing every last gram of that fear for votes.

In Marseille’s mayoral race, National Rally candidate Franck Allisio isn’t really running for city hall — he’s running a pilot project for the 2027 presidential race.

He floods the city with slick, security‑heavy videos, promising to triple municipal cops, double CCTV, and put a police post in every district to “bring happiness back” to Marseille.

Polls say it works: he’s now neck‑and‑neck with Socialist mayor Benoît Payan in the first round, giving the far right a once‑unthinkable shot at power in France’s second‑largest city.

The punchline: official data show overall crime in Marseille actually fell by about 4% last year, and drug‑related killings dropped from their 2023 peak, even as the city remains a major cocaine hub.

Sociologists note that what changed isn’t the scale of violence, but its randomness — fewer “professional” score‑settling hits, more chaotic shootings that terrify residents and feed a 24/7 crime‑porn news cycle. That’s pure oxygen for Allisio’s narrative: facts soften, “narco‑city” hardens.

Both Allisio and Payan center their campaigns on security, but they’re selling two incompatible fantasies. Allisio plays the iron‑fist trailer: Marseille as a lawless zone that only a cop surge and camera grid can save, while quietly ignoring that a mayor in France has limited real power over security and no control over national police or justice.

Payan counters with social‑democratic boilerplate — hiring more local police, plus housing, schools, transport — and borrows credibility from activist Amine Kessaci, a 22‑year‑old who lost two brothers to drug murders, to argue that RN’s proposal is “practically nothing or completely unrealistic.”

On the ground, the split is brutal. In La Busserine, one of the northern districts hit hardest by drug violence, residents like community worker Fadella Ouidef say they’re sick of hearing “security, security, security” while the underlying message is that Arab and Black residents are the problem.

She fears an RN win would mean cuts to social services in neighborhoods already hanging by a thread — the classic far‑right formula: create more social misery, then use the resulting chaos to justify more repression.

If National Rally flips Marseille, it won’t just be “one more city.” It will prove that a party once openly associated with racism and antisemitism can conquer a poor, diverse, heavily racialized port by weaponizing fear, turning municipal power into a pre‑presidential launchpad.

The left knows it: if they unite, Payan is still favored in a runoff; if they stay fragmented, they’re about to discover what happens when you let your opponent define security, reality, and the future of your city in a single word.

#france #marseille #nationaleRally #security #elections #farRight #fakeSolutions

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Trump Said the US Forces Eliminated Military Targets On Iran’s Kharg


Trump said Friday that US forces have “obliterated” military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island and warned that the oil infrastructure there could be next.

“For reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,” Trump wrote on social media. “However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision.”

Within hours of Trump’s announcement, the Iranian armed forces said any attack on Iran’s oil and energy infrastructure will lead to attacks on energy infrastructure owned by oil companies cooperating with the United States in the region, Iranian media reported.

The small island in the Persian Gulf is the primary terminal through which Iran’s oil exports pass. Until Friday, the island had been spared during US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Just a day before, the speaker of the Iranian parliament said such a strike would provoke a new level of retaliation.

Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf warned in a Thursday social media post that attacks on the islands on Iran’s southern maritime frontier would cause Iran to “abandon all restraint”, underscoring how central they are to the country’s economy and security.

Trump announced the action as he prepared to fly to Florida for the weekend. The president answered questions from reporters traveling with him before he boarded Air Force One, but he did not mention the latest US military operation against Iran.

Nevertheless, the actions against Kharg Island are likely to increase oil prices, already surging since the war began on 28 February.

“We may see the $120 a barrel price we saw on Monday heading to the $150 if Kharg were attacked,” said Neil Quilliam of the Chatham House thinktank. “It’s too vital for global energy markets.”

Earlier Friday, a US official told the Associated Press that the American military had ordered 2,500 marines and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli to the Middle East.

Marine Expeditionary Units are able to conduct amphibious landings, but they also specialize in bolstering security at embassies, evacuating civilians and disaster relief.

The deployment does not necessarily indicate that a ground operation is imminent or will take place.

The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, as well the Tripoli and other amphibious assault ships carrying the Marines, are based in Japan and have been in the Pacific Ocean for several days, according to images released by the military.

The Tripoli was spotted by commercial satellites sailing alone near Taiwan, putting it more than a week away from the waters off Iran.

Earlier in the week, the navy had 12 ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and eight destroyers, operating in the Arabian Sea.

Should the Tripoli join this flotilla, it would be the second-largest ship behind the Lincoln in the region.

#trump #forces #military #targets #kharg

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The Judaean Revolutionary Guard Corps Is Gaining Ground

Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party is back above the electoral threshold for the first time in months, hitting four seats in a new poll and helping lift the Netanyahu coalition bloc from 53 to 54 mandates. That is not a comeback story. It is a wartime sorting mechanism. The longer the emergency, the better the loudest ideologues tend to do.

The math is not mysterious. War consolidates the electorate around power, and power consolidates around the people who demand the most and apologize the least. Smotrich has spent the war years turning maximalism into a governing language.

Now the polling suggests that a slice of the electorate is rewarding exactly that. In Israel, security crises do not just protect incumbents. They also launder fringe priorities into national necessity.

The budget tells the same story in cash. As the cabinet revised the 2026 budget under wartime pressure, it approved more than NIS 5 billion in coalition funds, including major allocations for Haredi institutions, settlements, and other coalition priorities, while civilian ministries were cut by 3% and northern communities were protesting rehabilitation cuts.

The Bank of Israel warned against using war spending as cover for non-essential political giveaways. The government did it anyway.

That is the real hierarchy of wartime Israel in one frame: schools disrupted, border communities fighting over reconstruction money, civilian budgets squeezed, but coalition cash protected like a sacred asset. The public is told to think in terms of sacrifice. The machine still thinks in terms of patronage.

And that is why Smotrich matters beyond four seats. Religious Zionism was not built overnight, and it did not grow through polling. It grew through demographics, settlement infrastructure, land control, and institutional entrenchment.

War does not create that process. War accelerates it.Once the country is forced into survival mode, the politician shouting the hardest often gets treated as the man speaking most clearly.

So yes, the coalition is still short of a majority. But 54 seats in the middle of war, with Smotrich back above the line, is not a footnote. It is a warning.

The battlefield is not only reshaping Gaza, Lebanon, or Iran. It is reshaping the Israeli electorate itself — in favor of the people who treat permanent escalation as both ideology and campaign strategy.

#BabylonBurning #Smotrich #ReligiousZionism #Israel #FollowTheMoney

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