SCO’s Parallel Checkout

Masoud Pezeshkian came to Bishkek claiming Iran dealt the United States and Israel “heavy strategic defeats.”

Then he offered Washington a way back into the ceasefire memorandum it allegedly broke less than two weeks after signing. Tehran says it will “immediately reciprocate” if the U.S. returns to its commitments.

That is not surrender. It is a proposal to restart the same transaction with a different receipt. Iran wants de-escalation without admitting military defeat. Washington wants Hormuz open without accepting Tehran’s control of the terms.

Both sides say they want peace. Both need the other side to sign first.

Pezeshkian also pitched the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a sanctions survival system. He called for an SCO bank, an export-credit and investment-insurance union, an energy consortium, a strategic-security research center and a parliamentary forum. The financial core is obvious.

Build enough institutions to trade, insure and lend without asking Washington’s dollar system for permission.

Vladimir Putin supplied the scale. SCO countries represent more than 40% of the world’s population and roughly one-third of global GDP, he said.

He urged members to expand trade in national currencies and speed up common financial institutions. Those figures do not make a common currency. They do make a large customer base for alternatives to the dollar.

Pezeshkian met Xi Jinping on the sidelines. Iran needs Chinese buyers, Chinese technology and Chinese payment channels. China needs cheap Iranian energy and a partner that helps test the limits of U.S. sanctions.

The SCO cannot replace the Western financial system tomorrow. It can make every sanction less clean, every oil payment harder to trace and every U.S. ultimatum more expensive to enforce.

#Iran #China #Russia #SCO

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The Gulf of Aden Franchise

The Houthis have turned Yemen’s war into a regional export business. Since 2023, they have reportedly built a weapons-and-training network with Somalia’s al-Shabaab, using smugglers and intermediaries across the Gulf of Aden.

The requested hardware reportedly included shoulder-fired air-defense missiles, 107mm rockets, anti-tank missiles, attack drones, night-vision gear and small arms.

A 2025 U.N. report said Houthi and al-Shabaab representatives met in Somalia at least twice in 2024. The reported deal was simple.

The Houthis would provide weapons and technical expertise. Al-Shabaab would expand piracy and help collect ransoms from ships off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden.

At least 100 al-Shabaab fighters are believed to have received training in Houthi-controlled Yemen, according to regional reporting.

The shared target is maritime control. Houthi networks want eyes on the African side of the Gulf of Aden, including radar and ship-tracking capacity.

Al-Shabaab wants weapons, cash and operational knowledge. Israel is a useful slogan for both sides. Cargo routes are the real asset.

The network’s alleged Somali coordinator was killed in a U.S. strike in February. Al-Shabaab reportedly replaced him. Smuggling networks do not collapse when one broker dies. They issue a vacancy notice.

In Yemen itself, Saudi-led coalition special forces and Yemen’s Counterterrorism Force 22 killed ISIS spokesman Abu Hudhayfah al-Ansari in an operation that was meant to capture him. Yemeni authorities did not disclose the location.

One local source said the raid happened in Seiyun, Hadramout, and that al-Ansari died after being wounded and detained.

The coalition has removed one ISIS spokesman. The Houthis are building a maritime network across the water.

Counterterrorism is winning the press release. Smuggling is winning the geography.

#Yemen #Houthis #AlShabaab #RedSea

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The Water System Hits Pause

Five of Israel’s six major Mediterranean desalination plants shut down again Tuesday morning. Only Hadera remained operating after the Sorek plants briefly returned overnight and then stopped when seawater turbidity rose again.

The cause is not sabotage or a cyberattack. The Water Authority says suspended material in the Mediterranean has clogged the plants’ filtration systems.

Researchers believe an unusual microalgae bloom, likely originating near Egypt’s Nile Delta, is behind the turbidity. Operators stopped production to avoid permanent damage to membranes that could take months to replace.

Homes remain the priority. Authorities say household drinking-water supply continues, though residents in Jerusalem, the Judean Hills, Maale Adumim, Beit Shemesh and parts of the Negev have been warned of possible low pressure or local outages. Public irrigation has been suspended. Sderot residents received notice that water for gardens has stopped.

Farmers get the bill. In the Nitzana area near the Egyptian border, about 20,000 dunams of vegetable crops are at risk. Growers say 24 hours without irrigation can cause irreversible damage during the growing season.

The Ramat Negev Regional Council has cut fresh-water supplies for agriculture, leaving farmers dependent on reclaimed water.

Israel built its water security around desalination. Then the Mediterranean delivered a reminder that even a high-tech water system still starts with seawater, filters and weather.

#Israel #Water #Desalination #Agriculture

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US-Iran War Flares Up Again 🪖


The US has launched new airstrikes on Iranian targets, prompting counter strikes by Tehran targeting American interests in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, fuelling concerns about a ⁠wider renewal of hostilities.

US Marine Corps base Camp Titin in Jordan was targeted for an “intense ballistic missile attack”, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said early on Wednesday, according to Iranian news outlet Tasnim.

The Jordanian army said it intercepted 10 ballistic missiles fired from Iran, and did not confirm any injuries or hits on the US training camp located on the Gulf of Aqaba, near the borders with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Three other missiles landed in remote areas, it said.

Missile and drone attacks were also reported in Kuwait, where the army said it was responding to Iranian hostilities. Agence France-Presse reporters in Bahrain heard alert sirens for airborne attacks go off early on Wednesday. The IRGC also claimed it struck a US base in Erbil, Iraq.

US central command (CentCom) said it had completed a new wave of strikes that targeted the IRGC. It said the strikes were in response to attempted attacks on commercial shipping in the strait of Hormuz and against American service members.

The Iranian Red Crescent said four people, including a child, were killed and more than 50 were wounded when shrapnel from a US missile attack hit a home where a wedding celebration was taking place in the city of Kuhestak.

Asked if the US military had received any credible reports of civilian casualties, US CentCom spokesperson Captain Tim Hawkins said “the US military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC”.

Iran’s state broadcaster reported explosions on Iran’s Qeshm Island, on the northern side of the strait, and state-linked news agency Nour ‌News reported explosions in the port city of Bandar Abbas.

Oil prices are ​already on the rise after an exchange of attacks by the US and Iran at the weekend, the first since July, and after reports that two tankers had been hit in the strait of Hormuz, the global oil supply waterway that Iran has effectively closed to shipping.

Tehran warned ⁠that it would prevent oil being exported from the Gulf, despite a threat by Trump to hit Iran “hard” in response to the Iranian strikes, and a warning from Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, that Washington was about to ⁠impose new sanctions.

The six-month conflict had shifted into an economic standoff before the weekend strikes, in which US forces attacked Iran’s Larak Island on Sunday and Iran responded by launching missiles at two US airbases in Jordan.

On Tuesday, Trump warned that if Iran retaliated against the US’s latest strikes, “they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level, but it will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings and, when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

In its statement, the IRGC said that “in blind and desperate attacks”, the US had bombed several locations, including civilian areas. It described them as “attacks that tightened the blockade of the strait of Hormuz and strengthened the determination of the fighters to suppress the foreign forces interfering in the strait of Hormuz.”

Pezeshkian, Iran’s president, had said early on Tuesday ​that Tehran would reciprocate immediately if Washington honoured its commitments under a June memorandum of understanding that was intended to halt the conflict.

“I am stating clearly that if the US returns to its commitments under the ⁠memorandum of understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately reciprocate,”

Pezeshkian said in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, at ​a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes Russia ​and China.

“If the enemy wants us not to export oil from the Persian Gulf, no one will be ​able to export oil,”

Mohammad Baqer QalibafIran’s parliament speaker was ​quoted as saying by Iranian media.

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Netanyahu’s Split Screen

Benjamin Netanyahu wants the far right to merge before the October election. He says every small party must unite or right-wing votes will be wasted below Israel’s 3.25% electoral threshold. His problem is that the people he needs to merge prefer their own logos.

Netanyahu has urged Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Moshe Feiglin and former general Ofer Winter to consolidate. Ben Gvir rejected a joint list with Smotrich immediately and called the decision “final and complete.” Smotrich and Feiglin are still negotiating, while Winter’s new party is drawing voters from both Likud and Religious Zionism.

Polls explain the panic. One survey gave Winter six seats and pushed Smotrich below the threshold. Another showed a Smotrich-Feiglin alliance reaching seven seats while Winter fell out. Netanyahu is not preaching ideological unity. He is conducting electoral damage control with a calculator.

Tally Gotliv has become part of the rearrangement. Netanyahu’s associates publicly moved against her and fellow Likud lawmaker May Golan after reports they might leave for Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit. Gotliv says she remains loyal to Likud and Netanyahu, but said she would “seriously consider” a strong offer from Ben Gvir.

Then she went on Kol Barama and said Netanyahu “stabbed me in the back.” A former Lod deputy mayor has petitioned Likud’s internal court to remove her, accusing her of threats against Netanyahu and harm to the party. Those allegations are now for the party tribunal to assess.

Netanyahu wants Likud to look moderate enough for the center. Ben Gvir wants the voters who think Gotliv is too moderate. The prime minister wants fewer parties. His coalition is auditioning for a remake.

#Israel #Likud #Netanyahu #Elections

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#trump #hollywood #voight

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Kazakhstan Will Receive Its First Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft ✈️🇰🇿


The Kazakhstan Air Force is scheduled to receive its first fifth generation fighter aircraft within two years, according to reports from multiple Kazakh and Russian sources, which will mark a major milestone in the fleet’s modernisation.

A number of sources have indicated that the orders for the Russian Su-57 fifth generation fighter have already been placed, following confirmation in 2025 that multiple countries have already ordered the new aircraft. The Air Force currently operates exclusively Soviet and Russian origin combat jets.

While the majority of sources have not confirmed the type of fifth generation fighter that will be procured, only three such aircraft are currently available for export worldwide, including the Chinese J-35, U.S. F-35, and Russian Su-57.

While F-35 sales are unlikely for political reasons, the J-35 has long been expected to be a leading competitor to Russian aircraft in Central Asia. China achieved its first major fighter sales to the region in the early 2020s, supplying JF-17 Block 3 fighters to Azerbaijan, and J-10C fighters to Uzbekistan, both to replace MiG-29 fighters inherited from the Soviet Union.

While not confirmed, the Su-57 is a likely option for Kazakhstan due to its close defence ties with Russia, and the type’s far higher combat potential than other Russian combat jets.

The Kazakhstan Air Defence Forces currently operate MiG-31 interceptors inherited from the Soviet Union, and subsequently modernised to the MiG-31BM standard in Russia in the 2010s.

The service also received Soviet Su-27 air superiority fighters from Russia in exchange for Tu-95MS bombers it had inherited from the Soviet era, and subsequently procured the Su-27’s enhanced derivative the Su-30SM which currently forms the backbone of its fleet.

The Su-57 is expected to replace the Su-27, and possibly later the MiG-31, in Kazakhstan Air Defence Forces service, providing a significant improvement to combat capabilities. A procurement would make Kazakhstan the second Soviet successor state to field fifth generation fighter aircraft after Russia, and the likely second foreign client for the Su-57 after Algeria.

The Su-57 is in many respects less sophisticated than the J-35 and F-35, but has a number of advantages including lower maintenance requirements, a much longer range, a far higher degree of combat testing, and access to several unique missile types.

#kazakhstan #generation #fighter #aircraft

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The $40 Trillion Tab

U.S. public debt passed $40 trillion for the first time on Aug. 18. By Aug. 31, Treasury’s daily ledger put the total at $40.175 trillion. About $32.4 trillion is held by investors, pension funds, banks and foreign creditors. Another $7.8 trillion is money the federal government owes to its own trust funds.

That works out to roughly $290,000 to $300,000 per U.S. household. But the real bill is not a hypothetical invoice in the mailbox. It is interest.

Federal net interest costs are on track to exceed $1 trillion this fiscal year, making debt service one of Washington’s largest budget items.

Both parties created this tab. Republicans cut taxes, expand defense and call the borrowing growth.

Democrats expand spending, defend programs and call the borrowing investment. Then each side discovers fiscal discipline when the other side holds the pen.

The United States can carry debt in its own currency because the dollar remains the world’s reserve asset. That privilege gives Washington room that Iran, Russia or Venezuela do not have. It does not turn every deficit into free money.

As rates rise, more tax revenue goes to bondholders instead of infrastructure, housing, research or industrial capacity.

The dangerous fantasy is that America must choose between rebuilding at home and acting abroad. A country that abandons allies does not automatically build factories. It may simply save less than expected, lose markets and spend more later when the crisis returns.

The problem is simpler. Washington borrows for tax cuts, wars, consumption and political theater, then calls the result leadership.

Forty trillion dollars is not proof that America is bankrupt. It is proof that every administration found a reason to send the bill to the next one.

#USA #Debt #Economy #Trump

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Xi’s Sanctions Waiting Room

Donald Trump tried to make Washington the only door to the global economy. Xi Jinping opened a second waiting room in Bishkek.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Xi hosted Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Masoud Pezeshkian alongside leaders from a bloc that now includes 10 member states.

The New York Times called the gathering a display of Beijing’s ability to support U.S. adversaries in peacetime and during war.

Iran needs buyers, payment channels and political cover while U.S. sanctions squeeze its trade. Russia needs markets and technology that do not come with NATO conditions. India needs room to buy Russian oil and resist U.S. tariffs without becoming China’s client. China is the only country large enough to keep all three at the same table.

That does not make the SCO a united anti-American command. India distrusts China. Russia sells energy to China because it has fewer options. Iran wants Chinese protection but fears dependency. The club is held together less by friendship than by the price of access to Western systems.

Still, the direction matters. Putin called for more trade in national currencies and shared financial institutions.

Pezeshkian proposed an SCO bank, an export-insurance union and an energy consortium. Such plans will not end dollar dominance next week.

They can make sanctions slower, oil payments harder to trace and U.S. pressure more expensive.

China’s leverage does not come from winning every war. It comes from remaining useful when Washington turns trade, finance and technology into weapons.

Trump tells states to choose sides. Xi offers them a table, a market and a currency workaround. They may not trust Beijing. They still show up.

#China #SCO #Russia #Iran

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🌎🇨🇳 Xi’s Power Play: Building a New Global Order


As the leaders of China, Russia, India, Iran and other nations converged on Central Asia for a two-day summit beginning on Monday, one thing was clear from the outset.

Even as Trump tries to bend the world to revolve around Washington, Xi Jinping of China has his own powerful orbit.

The Chinese leader’s arrival in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, for a meeting of the 10-nation political and security grouping known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization underscored Xi’s broad ability to sustain Washington’s foes, both in peacetime and in war.

The talks come against the backdrop of two wars that have pushed the globe into a period of intense geopolitical instability, suppressing economic growth and driving up inflation.

Those challenges were at the heart of discussions taking place simultaneously on the other side of the globe in Asheville, N.C., at a gathering of finance ministers from the Group of 20 countries.

The meeting in Bishkek, in contrast, was a showcase for the incredible leverage that the wars have given Xi.

No nation has been more critical to Russia and Iran in sustaining their economies and war efforts than China. Xi has undermined efforts by the United States and its allies to pressure Russia and Iran economically, employing Beijing’s vast geopolitical and economic clout as the world’s largest importer of crude oil and exporter of consumer goods.

Xi’s biggest rival, the United States, has been distracted by the war in Iran and has pulled some of its military forces from Asia and Europe. Last month, the Chinese leader was able to brush off threats by Trump that the United States would inflict an “economic D-Day” on countries that provided Tehran with a lifeline.

Trump once made similar threats about purchasers of Russian oil, but did not follow through with any actions against Beijing.

#trump #xi #beijing #russia

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The Blindness Campaign

The United States says it launched a new wave of strikes on Sept. 1 to blind Iran before Iran could blind the global economy.

CENTCOM says it hit Revolutionary Guards air-defense sites, radar systems, maritime facilities, mine-laying capabilities and communications sites.

The stated trigger was recent Iranian attempts to attack commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and U.S. personnel in the region. More than 50,000 American service members are now deployed across the Middle East.

The target list makes the strategy clear. Washington is not just hitting missile launchers. It is trying to degrade Iran’s ability to see, communicate, lay mines and rebuild its coastal pressure system.
The Pentagon wants Hormuz open without negotiating the conditions of passage with Tehran.

Iran’s response shows why this is not a clean operation. Tehran says it launched missiles and drones at U.S. sites in Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait.

It also claims that a U.S. strike hit a wedding gathering in Sirik, killing five people including a child and wounding dozens. CENTCOM has not publicly addressed that allegation.

Two Saudi oil supertankers were hit by unidentified projectiles while sailing outbound through Hormuz on Monday night, according to shipping-data firms Marisks and Kpler. The incidents came within minutes of each other. No side has publicly established responsibility.

Washington calls it a limited response. Tehran calls it aggression. Commercial shipping calls it another reason to avoid the strait.

A mine does not need to sink a tanker to work. It only needs to make the next captain hesitate.

#Iran #Hormuz #USA #CENTCOM

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Four Countries, One Message

Iran answered U.S. strikes with missiles and drones aimed at American positions in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The targets were spread across four states because Tehran’s problem is not only the U.S. military. It is the regional network that hosts it.

Jordan gave the clearest account. Its air defenses engaged 13 Iranian ballistic missiles. Ten were intercepted and destroyed. Three landed in remote areas away from population centers. Jordan reported no casualties. Two U.S. officials told Reuters that initial assessments also found no American casualties.

The IRGC claimed a “heavy” missile strike on Camp Titin, a U.S. Marine facility near Aqaba, and said many Americans were killed.

It also claimed strikes on bases in Erbil, Bahrain and Kuwait, including the headquarters and residence of the U.S. commander at Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base.

Bahrain’s authorities said they intercepted and destroyed Iranian drones. Kuwait said it activated air defenses against Iranian drone and missile attacks. Air-raid sirens sounded in Bahrain. Neither government publicly confirmed major damage or casualties at U.S.-linked facilities.

Iran says any state that works with the U.S. military will face “more severe, broader and more destructive” responses.

That warning is designed to do more than hit bases. It tells Gulf capitals that an American security guarantee may also function as an Iranian target marker.

The Iranian barrage did not produce a verified U.S. casualty count or confirmed strategic damage.

It did produce what Tehran needed most. Four governments spent the night defending American bases inside their borders.

#Iran #USA #Jordan #Gulf

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🇮🇱 From The Apprentice to Jerusalem: How Jewish New York Helped Shape Trump

🔤🔤🔤🔤1️⃣

To understand Trump’s relationship with Jewish America and Israel, it is tempting to begin with the White House — with the embassy in Jerusalem, Jared Kushner, the Abraham Accords, or Trump’s unusually close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the story actually begins much earlier. It begins in New York, in the worlds of real estate, television, law and deal-making that shaped Trump long before he entered politics. And one of the most revealing places to start is television.

In 2004, Trump became the star of The Apprentice, the reality show that transformed him from a famous New York developer into a national celebrity.

The program did more than put Trump on television. It created a political persona before Trump was even a politician: the powerful businessman, the ruthless negotiator, the billionaire who supposedly knew how to recognize talent, punish failure and make decisions without hesitation. His signature phrase — “You’re fired” — became part of American popular culture.

The show was created by British television producer Mark Burnett, but its success depended on something Trump had already spent decades cultivating: his image as the ultimate New York deal-maker.

The Apprentice turned that image into a mass-market product. Millions of Americans who knew little about Trump’s actual business career suddenly knew his face, his voice and his mythology.

Years later, political analysts would point to the show as one of the most important pieces of infrastructure behind Trump’s political rise. Before he had a political movement, he had an audience. Before he had a campaign organization, he had a recognizable character.

Television had already done much of the work of introducing “Donald Trump” as a national political brand. There was also a revealing Jewish connection to the television chapter.

During negotiations over his Apprentice contract, Trump reportedly wondered whether he needed a Jewish agent because he believed a Jewish representative might be better at negotiating the deal.

The anecdote, reported by The New York Times and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2016, is striking less as evidence of some hidden influence than as a window into Trump's own understanding of New York’s business culture.

Trump had spent his entire adult life in a city where Jewish lawyers, bankers, developers, agents, media executives and entrepreneurs were an important part of the professional networks surrounding real estate and entertainment. He understood that network as a source of power. But television was only one part of the story.

Perhaps the most consequential Jewish figure in Trump's early career was Roy Cohn.

Cohn was a powerful New York lawyer, political operator and one of the city's most controversial public figures. He had worked as a prosecutor in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, became a close associate of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and eventually established himself as a formidable fixer in New York’s legal and political worlds.

Trump met Cohn in the 1970s, when the young real-estate developer was facing battles with New York authorities over alleged discriminatory practices in his apartment buildings.

Cohn became Trump's lawyer and, over the following years, much more than that. He became a mentor. The lessons Trump absorbed from Cohn were not primarily about Judaism or Israel. They were about power.

Cohn's philosophy was famously combative: never concede weakness, attack opponents aggressively, use the media, and turn legal or political pressure into a public relations battle. Trump adopted many of these habits and carried them with him for decades.

#trump #apprentice #jews #jerusalem #washington

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🔤🔤🔤🔤2️⃣

The style that would later define his presidential campaigns — personal attacks, relentless media engagement, refusal to apologize and an instinct to treat politics as combat — has often been traced back to the world of Roy Cohn.

That relationship is crucial because it demonstrates the difference between “Jewish influence” and an ethnic or religious conspiracy.

Cohn was one individual. He was Jewish, but the influence he exercised over Trump came from his personality, his profession, his connections and his political experience — not from representing Jewish people as a group.

The same distinction becomes essential when we look at Trump’s later relationship with Israel.

Trump did not suddenly discover Israel after becoming president. His connections to Jewish Americans and to the Israeli-American political world had been developing for decades. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, a member of a prominent Orthodox Jewish real-estate family.

Kushner eventually became one of the most powerful figures in Trump's political orbit. During the first Trump administration, he served as a senior White House adviser and became deeply involved in Middle East diplomacy. His role was particularly significant because he was not merely a symbolic Jewish connection to the president.

He was part of Trump's inner circle and had direct access to the president on some of the most consequential foreign-policy questions facing the administration.

Through Kushner, Trump's personal and political worlds became even more intertwined with American Jewish institutions, donors and Israel-related policy circles. Then there was David Friedman.

Friedman was a bankruptcy lawyer, a longtime friend of Trump and another figure from the New York legal world.

Unlike many traditional American diplomats, Friedman was an outspoken supporter of Israel's settlement movement and maintained close ties to Israeli leaders and right-wing political circles. Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Jason Greenblatt, another Orthodox Jewish lawyer who had worked for the Trump Organization, also became a central figure in the administration's Middle East policy. Together with Kushner and Friedman, he helped develop the administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The policy consequences were enormous. In 2017, Trump announced that the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and would move the American embassy there. The embassy officially opened in Jerusalem in 2018.

The administration also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019, a dramatic break with longstanding American policy. And in 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement, taking a position strongly favored by Netanyahu's government and many American supporters of a more confrontational policy toward Tehran.

Then came the Abraham Accords. In 2020, the Trump administration helped broker agreements that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by normalization moves involving Morocco and Sudan.

The agreements represented one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of Trump's first term in the Middle East.

None of this can be explained simply by saying that “Jewish advisers influenced Trump.”

Trump himself had strong political instincts about Israel. Evangelical Christians were a major part of his electoral coalition and among the strongest supporters of his pro-Israel policies. Republican donors and activists also played an important role.

Netanyahu's government had its own strategic interests. And Trump increasingly saw confrontation with Iran as central to his Middle East worldview.

#trump #apprentice #jews #jerusalem #washington

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🔤🔤🔤🔤3️⃣

The Jewish influence was therefore neither singular nor uniform.

American Jews themselves are politically diverse. Many are liberal Democrats and have been deeply critical of Trump. Others are conservative Republicans and some became enthusiastic supporters of his Israel policies.

Orthodox Jewish communities, evangelical Christians, pro-Israel organizations, wealthy donors, Republican strategists and Israeli officials all interacted with the Trump administration in different ways.

That diversity is precisely why the story is more interesting than a simple claim about “Jewish influence.” What we see instead is a series of relationships.

A Jewish New York lawyer, Roy Cohn, helped teach a young Trump how to fight and how to use publicity as a weapon.

A television industry turned that New York persona into a national brand.

Trump's daughter entered an Orthodox Jewish family through her marriage to Jared Kushner, bringing one of America's most prominent Jewish real-estate families into the president's immediate family circle. Kushner became a senior political adviser.

Friedman and Greenblatt brought their own views, networks and experience into Trump's foreign-policy operation.

And the resulting administration made decisions on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Iran and Arab-Israeli normalization that fundamentally changed American Middle East policy.

There is another dimension to this story as well: Trump's own understanding of Jewish success.

Throughout his career, Trump repeatedly operated in environments where he encountered successful Jewish businessmen, lawyers, media executives and political figures. Sometimes his comments about Jews were crude or stereotypical; sometimes they were admiring; often they reflected the transactional worldview through which he understood almost every relationship.

Trump tends to see politics through people rather than institutions — who is loyal, who is useful, who has access, who can negotiate, who can deliver. In that sense, the individuals around him mattered enormously. Personal relationships often became channels through which policy was shaped.

And that may be the most important point. The history of Trump's relationship with Jewish America is not the history of a president being controlled by “the Jews.” There is no evidence for such a collective explanation, and it reduces a complicated political history to an ethnic stereotype.

The real story is more concrete — and arguably more fascinating.

For decades, Trump moved through a particular New York ecosystem of lawyers, developers, financiers, entertainers and media figures. Some of the people who became important to him were Jewish. Some were not. What mattered was not their ethnicity alone, but their individual influence, access, expertise and ability to operate inside the worlds Trump trusted.

By the time he reached the White House, many of those relationships had evolved into a political network.

The journey from Roy Cohn's Manhattan office to the Oval Office, from The Apprentice to Jerusalem, was not a straight line. But it reveals something fundamental about Trump: his politics did not emerge from nowhere in 2016. They were built over decades, in the institutions and relationships of New York — and some of the most consequential figures along that path were Jewish.

Trump's relationship with Jewish America and Israel, in other words, did not begin in the White House.

It began much earlier — in the boardrooms, courtrooms, television studios and social networks of New York.

And by the time Trump arrived in Washington, those old relationships were already part of the architecture of his power.

#trump #apprentice #jews #jerusalem #washington

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The Attrition Startup

Russia’s war machine was supposed to crack under sanctions, battlefield losses and a Western arms pipeline. Instead, Moscow appears to be turning the battlefield into a product-testing lab.

The Financial Times reports that Russian manufacturers are combining Soviet-era industrial capacity with cheap, scalable tools: drones, compact electronic-warfare systems and autonomous platforms.

The point is not to rebuild the army Russia lost. It is to build one that can lose hardware faster than NATO can approve replacement contracts.

Moscow reportedly plans to produce 7.3 million FPV drones in 2026. More than 130,000 low-cost electronic-warfare systems were reportedly delivered in 2025.

The West still sells “technological superiority” as a premium product, complete with parliamentary delays, procurement lawyers and a maintenance package.

Russia has vulnerabilities. Its drone industry remains heavily dependent on Chinese components, while critical machinery and software still rely on foreign supply chains. But dependency has not stopped production. It has merely given the war economy a Chinese subcontractor.

Ukraine needs weapons. Europe needs deterrence. But a strategy built on drip-fed deliveries assumes Russia will eventually run out of men, shells and industrial breath. Moscow is betting on the opposite, that democracies will run out of invoices they are willing to sign.

#Russia #UkraineWar #NATO #DefenseIndustry

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