Houthis have once again struck Riyadh’s airport, taking three innocent lives. My thoughts are with the families of the victims. We stand in full solidarity with the people of Saudi Arabia and all our Gulf partners. Attacks on civilian infrastructure are unacceptable. Iran's proxies must stop their reckless and violent acts.

After losing access to its bases around the Persian Gulf...

Argentinský kolega o nepravé NAZA

Someone sent me this analysis and asked me what I think… Yes, there is more oil flowing through the strait—with the exception of Iranian oil. But people misunderstand the issue of control of the Strait of Hormuz and overstate its importance in the positioning of Iran, the Gulf, and the U.S. as the war drags on. Specifically, this analysis on oil export volumes and its impact on negotiation positions overlooks two more important factors. First, Iran may not be able to disrupt energy flows as effectively as in the early stage of the war, but it retains undiminished capabilities to destroy stocks, by which I mean the underlying production infrastructure, whether upstream or downstream. Second, the assessment fails to consider that Iran can still choose to escalate by hitting these production targets if it determines that Trump isn’t feeling enough pain to take the diplomatic off-ramps being put in front of him. Importantly, we know what happens when Iran is exporting no oil and there is no realistic pathway for diplomacy—we saw it in the Abqaiq and Khurrais attacks on Aramco facilities in 2019. So while the risk premium around oil flows may seem tolerable for Trump, the threats to energy production infrastructure the Gulf remain significant, which is exactly why regional countries are still trying to mediate a return to a durable ceasefire and diplomatic agreement. Trump too, is erratic, and could give cause to Iran to escalate in this way through his own fixation on “winning” the war. Markets are able to price this, especially not when traders are so fixated on short-term price action. In this respect, the strait isn’t really Iran’s principle source of leverage. It never was! The attacks on U.S. bases and Gulf cities and infrastructure were far more consequential, but these dimensions of the conflict were downplayed because of what it would mean to acknowledge that Iran has such dangerous capabilities that the U.S. was unable to mitigate or degrade during the entirety of the fighting. Sure, the U.S. navy can escort vessels (at great cost) and keep oil flowing. But the more fundamental issue of the failure of U.S. security guarantees over the entirety of the Gulf remains unresolved, and this is what provides Iran leverage in the negotiations. Iran did not wage a scorched earth campaign—but it may yet do so if the current situation persists for too long. That is what everyone who actually follows this region and its dynamics is worried about.

Saudi Arabia is learning a lesson that money and American weapons could never erase: you cannot buy your way out of geography. For years, Riyadh behaved as though its oil wealth and its alliance with Washington made it immune to the consequences of its regional policies. It accumulated weapons, hosted foreign forces and poured billions into military adventures while treating Iran as an enemy to be contained. Now the bill has arrived. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively strangled and the kingdom’s vital East-West oil pipeline to the Red Sea disrupted, Saudi Arabia’s ability to move its most valuable commodity has been severely compromised. The kingdom can possess some of the world’s largest oil reserves, but reserves sitting underground do not pay the bills. Oil has to reach the market. And suddenly, the country that imagined itself the dominant power of the Gulf may have to knock on Tehran’s door. That is the bitter irony. Iran, the state Saudi Arabia spent years trying to isolate and contain, now possesses enormous leverage over the regional environment in which Saudi Arabia must operate. If Riyadh wants relief, it may have to negotiate with Tehran,and Tehran will not be doing favors out of charity. Iran will demand a price. It will demand political concessions. Security guarantees. Changes in Saudi regional policy. An end to support for hostile operations. Whatever the final bargain looks like, one thing should be obvious: Saudi Arabia will be negotiating from weakness, not strength. And what of the United States? The American military presence has not prevented this strategic nightmare. Billions spent on weapons and decades of dependence on Washington have not abolished the vulnerability created by geography. American bases cannot make the Strait of Hormuz disappear. They cannot permanently protect every pipeline. They cannot manufacture a stable regional order through military force. So perhaps it is time for Riyadh to ask the question it has avoided for generations: Why should Saudi Arabia continue hosting US military forces when those forces have failed to provide the strategic security they promised? The answer should be a complete rethink. Get rid of the permanent American military footprint. Stop treating the Gulf as an arena for American-Iranian confrontation. Stop imagining that endless weapons purchases constitute a foreign policy. And start negotiating directly with the countries that Saudi Arabia actually has to live beside. Because Iran is not going away. Iraq is not going away. Yemen is not going away. The Gulf is not going away. Washington can send aircraft carriers. It can deploy troops. It can sell another hundred billion dollars of weapons. But it cannot change the map. Saudi Arabia's real security will ultimately have to come from diplomacy, regional arrangements and mutually understood limits,not from renting an American shield while antagonizing its neighbors. The age of assuming that Washington will solve every Saudi security problem is over. If Riyadh now has to negotiate with Tehran, it should negotiate seriously. And if that means paying a steep price for years of strategic miscalculation, perhaps that is precisely the point. Sometimes the price of avoiding diplomacy is eventually having to negotiate from your knees.

The Syrian Minister of Health tests a pistol at an exhibition in Damascus.

If you or I say the Israeli prime minister ‘influences’ American politicians to get them to think his way and fight his wars, it’s antisemitic. But if the Israeli prime minister says it…

Kdo je v Izraeli extremista? Břetislav Tureček v ostrém rozhovoru popisuje radikalizaci některých tamních politiků, ale i bezvýchodnost konfliktu s Palestinci, nepochopení Evropy nebo to, jaký je dnes opravdu Írán.

He had already threatened to sanction and bomb Oman months ago for talking to Iran about SoH. This time Oman talked to Tehran with U.S. knowledge and approval and still he threatened to bomb them!! He has been holding a grudge with Oman since its FM went public with progress in nuclear talks to undermine U.S. case for war and then wrote about it again in the Economist. ft.com/content/d4d07198-498d…