๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐โ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐
DD Geopolitics Protagonist HQย andย Ibrahim Majed, Jun 09, 2026
The fragile calm that had prevailed across much of the Middle East since April, excluding the ongoing Israeli war on Lebanon, unraveled within hours, exposing a strategic reality Washington has long sought to avoid.
What began as a localized escalation rapidly evolved into a broader geo-economic crisis with consequences extending far beyond the battlefield.
At the center of the crisis lies a structural imbalance within the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
While Washington remains Israelโs principal military, diplomatic, and economic backer, recent events have highlighted the extent to which regional escalations can impose costs on the United States regardless of American preferences.
The result is a dynamic in which decisions made in Tel Aviv increasingly shape the strategic environment that Washington must manage.
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ฌ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐๐ซ๐ข๐ ๐ ๐๐ซ
he latest escalation stemmed from Israelโs continued military operations in Lebanon, including renewed strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, despite mounting regional warnings and Iranโs explicit signaling that further escalation in Lebanese territory would cross a red line.
These actions effectively collapsed the fragile de-escalation framework that had begun to take shape in recent months.
Yet the strategic significance of the crisis did not stem solely from direct military exchanges.
The conflict quickly expanded through an asymmetric front.
Yemenโs Ansarallah movement announced a comprehensive blockade targeting Israeli-linked maritime traffic through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, transforming what might have remained a localized confrontation into a wider geo-economic challenge.
The implications were immediate.
One of the worldโs most critical maritime chokepoints suddenly became a theater of strategic pressure.
Energy markets reacted rapidly, with oil prices surging as traders assessed the risks posed to global shipping routes and regional stability.
What began as a military confrontation was now exerting pressure on the economic infrastructure that underpins global commerce.
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ฅ๐๐ฌ๐ก ๐จ๐ ๐๐จ๐ฅ๐ข๐ญ๐ข๐๐๐ฅ ๐๐ข๐ฆ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ง๐๐ฌ
The military escalation unfolded against the backdrop of a growing political divergence between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hours before the strikes, Trump projected confidence that Washington remained firmly in control of events.
According to reports surrounding a high-level phone conversation, the American president conveyed the impression that he retained decisive influence over Israeli decision-making and could prevent a broader confrontation.
The subsequent Israeli strikes conveyed a different message.
Regardless of Washingtonโs preferences, events on the ground proceeded according to Israeli calculations.
The operation demonstrated the limits of American influence at a moment when the White House was attempting to contain regional tensions and preserve diplomatic channels.
More importantly, it reinforced a perception increasingly shared across the region: while the United States remains the dominant external power, its ability to dictate the behavior of key allies is not unlimited.
๐๐ซ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ฉโ๐ฌ ๐๐ฅ๐๐๐ญ๐จ๐ซ๐๐ฅ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ก๐ญ๐ฆ๐๐ซ๐
For the White House, the timing could hardly be worse.
The administration entered 2026 seeking to reduce regional tensions, stabilize energy markets, and avoid another Middle Eastern crisis capable of dominating domestic political discourse ahead of the Midterm Elections.
Escalation threatens all three objectives simultaneously…………………………………………………………………….
๐๐๐ญ๐๐ง๐ฒ๐๐ก๐ฎโ๐ฌ ๐๐ฎ๐ซ๐ฏ๐ข๐ฏ๐๐ฅ ๐๐ข๐ฆ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ง๐
Netanyahu, however, is operating according to a very different political timetable.
His government faces mounting domestic pressures, including declining public support, growing political fragmentation, large-scale protests, and unresolved disputes surrounding the conscription of the Ultra-Orthodox community.
Current political trends suggest that a return to normal political conditions could expose the governing coalition to severe electoral risks…………………………………………..
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ญ๐ซ๐ฎ๐๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐๐ฅ ๐๐ซ๐๐ฉ
The deeper problem for Washington is that its options remain constrained.
Despite occasional public disagreements, successive American administrations have found it politically difficult to impose meaningful costs on Israel during periods of confrontation.
Congressional support, entrenched institutional relationships, domestic political considerations, and long-standing strategic commitments collectively limit the range of coercive tools available to the White House.
As a result, American policymakers frequently find themselves attempting to contain the consequences of decisions they neither initiated nor fully control.
This dynamic creates a strategic trap.
The United States absorbs the diplomatic costs of regional instability, bears responsibility for protecting maritime trade routes, manages the economic consequences of energy market disruptions, and remains expected to provide security guarantees throughout the region.
Yet its ability to shape the behavior that generates those costs remains constrained by political realities at home.
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ญ๐๐ ๐ข๐ ๐๐จ๐ฌ๐ญ
The deeper danger for Washington extends far beyond the immediate crisis.
What has emerged is a growing divergence between Israeli domestic political imperatives and broader American strategic objectives………………………………………………………….
Ultimately, the central question is no longer whether the United States can continue supporting Israel.
Rather, it is whether American policymakers can reconcile unconditional strategic commitments with a regional reality in which their own interests are increasingly exposed to decisions made by an ally pursuing a very different political agenda.
If the current trajectory continues, the greatest challenge to Washingtonโs Middle East strategy may not emerge from its adversaries, but from the widening gap between American interests and the actions of the partner it remains committed to defending. https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/75a?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1769298&post_id=201184525&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
โThe Humiliation Just Compoundsโ: Trump Tells Netanyahu Not to Bomb Iran, Then Israel Strikes Anyway
US President Donald Trump โappears unwilling to spend the political capital necessary to rein in Netanyahuโbeyond angry phone calls and tough public statements,โ said one analyst.
Jake Johnson, Jun 08, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-netanyahu-iran-2677009860
The Israeli military bombed Iran on Monday shortly after US President Donald Trump urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to respond to an Iranian missile barrage, which came in retaliation for Israelโs earlier bombing of Beirut.
โI am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate,โ Trump told Axios on Sunday, noting that the Iranian strikes did not appear to cause any injuries. โEach of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We donโt need another one.โ
Iranโs missile attack on Israel was the first since a tenuous ceasefire agreement took effect in early April, and the exchange intensified concerns of a return to full-blown regional war. Iranโs Foreign Ministry said the Sunday strikes were a defensive response to the Israeli militaryโs bombing of southern Beirut as well as โIsraelโs persistent breaches of the April ceasefire, including its collaboration with the US military in attacks on Iranian ships and targets in southern Iran over the past two weeks.โ
The Israel Defense Forces vowed to โcontinue to operate all across Lebanonโ and said it would not โallow fire toward Israel.โ
Esmail Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iranโs Foreign Ministry, said during a press conference on Monday that despite Trumpโs public comments, โno one in the region believesโ that Israel attacked Lebanon or Iran โwithout prior coordination and cooperation with the United States.โ
โThe United States bears responsibility as a party to the April 8 ceasefire understanding,โ said Baghaei. โWhatever happens in the region, whether the US itself violates the ceasefire by attacking Iranian commercial ships or targeting southern parts of the country, or whether violations are carried out through the Zionist regime in Lebanon with US complicity, the direct responsibility of the United States is clear, and the consequences of any escalation will also fall on Washington.โ
Trump told the Financial Times following Iranโs missile attack on Israel that he did not believe it would undercut the prospects of a diplomatic agreement. The US president also said Netanyahu would have no choice but to accept any agreement the Trump administration reaches with Iran, declaring: โI call the shots. I call all the shots. [Netanyahu] doesnโt call the shots.โ
But critics of Trumpโs illegal and costly war of choice in Iran, which he launched in coordination with Israel in late February, said Netanyahuโs swift defiance of the presidentโs call for restraint underscored how disastrous the conflict has been for the US.
โThis war has been humiliating for Trump and American power generally,โ US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media. โAnd when Trump announces he is going to call Netanyahu and tell him not to retaliate, and within hours Netanyahu retaliates, the humiliation just compounds.โ
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in a blog post following the Israeli attack on Iran that Trump โappears unwilling to spend the political capital necessary to rein in Netanyahuโbeyond angry phone calls and tough public statementsโunless he knows that he has a deal with Iran.โ
โFrom Trumpโs perspective, it is only worth doing if an agreement with Iran is already secured. In short, Trump is willing to restrain Israel to preserve a deal, but not to obtain one. Iran, however, wants evidence that Trump can restrain Israel before agreeing to a deal,โ Parsi wrote. โAs a result, the most likely scenario is another round of Iranian and Israeli strikes, with Trump declining to meaningfully constrain Israel.โ
The National Iranian American Council noted that Iranโs leadership โhas already threatened a broader and more destructive campaignโ in response to Israelโs strikes.
โThe coming 24 to 72 hours will likely determine whether this becomes a contained crisis or the beginning of a new phase in the regional conflict,โ the group added.
Trumpโs Sedition Act for Israel
โyou canโt be an American if you donโt love Israel.โ
Byย Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Global Research, May 25, 2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-sedition-act-israel/5927389
At all times and places it has been difficult to speak freely.
Even the founding fathers had their Sedition Act of 1798 that criminalized statements against the US government. Shortly afterward President Thomas Jefferson got most of it repealed.
President Abraham Lincoln during his 1861-1865 invasion of the Confederate States of America had a de facto sedition act. Lincoln used executive orders, military directives, martial law, and the suspension of habeas corpus to shut down free speech. At one time Lincoln had 300 Northern newspaper editors in prison.
In 1918, Congress passed a new Sedition Act that applied when the US government was at war. The law prohibited speech and opinion that put the US government and its war effort in a bad light. The bad light was that US President Woodrow Wilson promised Germany no territorial loss and no reparations in exchange for an armistice, and betrayed the promise. The result was the Treaty of Versailles that as British economist John Maynard Keynes correctly predicted led to World War II.
President Donald Trump has declared his own Sedition Act issued not by Congress, increasingly an irrelevant government institution, but by Trumpโs personal defense lawyer currently serving as US Attorney General. Trumpโs Sedition Act is unique. It protects from criticism not the US government, but a foreign one โ Israel. The May 19 press release of the US Department of Justice (sic) says:
โPresident Trump has made clear that this administration will not tolerate antisemitism, and the Department of justice is committed to implementing that directive.โ (See this)
Understand that the US Department of Justice is now the protector of Israel, as is the US military and US taxpayers, and antisemitism means any criticism of Israel. For example, Israelโs genocide of Palestine and its people, Israelโs interference in tenure decisions of US universities, the hiring and contracting policies of state governments such as Texas and Florida, Israelโs funding of the primary defeat of US Republican Representative Thomas Massie, Israelโs assassinations of foreign leaders, Israelโs suspected assassination of Charlie Kirk, suspicion that Epstein was a Mossad agent collecting blackmail information against Americans in a position to influence US foreign party in the Middle East, and on and on. Every thought, question, statement of fact that can be interpreted as hostile to Israel has become anti-semitism and will not be tolerated by the US Department of Justice (sic).
Clearly, the Trump regime, essentially a Zionist regime, has no intention of permitting any correct information to be aired. If you challenge or taunt the Regime, you are shut down like Colbert, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and so many others.
The Washington Post published an article on May 21 about President Trumpโs efforts to silence late night TV hosts. Apparently, Trump succeeded in intimidating CBS to cancel Stephen Colbert. NBCโs Seth Meyers and ABCโs Jimmy Kimmel believe they are on the hit list. See this.
A discredited media unable to hold Trump to account has replaced a former biased media.
During my professional lifetime the print and TV media had a liberal bias, coming down hard on conservatives and Republicans and lightly, if at all, on the leftwing and Democrats. The liberal media was more or less at the beck and call of the CIA, but the New York Times did finally decide to publish the leaked Pentagon Papers, an act that contributed to the end of the Vietnam War.
During the 1980s and I think the 1990s the New York Times asked me twice a year for an op-ed article addressing a specified subject. If memory serves, two was the annual limit for outside contributors, although perhaps not for liberal-left ones. As I had been a presidential appointee in the Reagan administration, a trustee of the Committee on the Present Danger, a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, and a contributing editor of National Review, the liberal media regarded me as a conservative instead of a person who thought for himself.
The Washington Post was also friendly in a limited way. The Postโs editorial page editor was pleased to occasionally have me on her page and once took me to lunch with some of her colleagues. When at the end of the 20th century I could no longer stomach the corruption and backstabbing of the Washington snake pit and departed to the beach in Florida, the Washington Post sent a star reporter and camera team to my Florida home for a full-fledged interview and expressed regret that an honest voice had forsaken the nationโs capital. The fact that the Washington Post thought that I was honest did not mean that the Post thought I was correct.
In those days large newspapers like the Times and Post comfortably existed on advertising revenues so varied that no advertiser could, very often, influence the newspaper. Media had a liberal bias, but that was their own decision. It wasnโt imposed on them. Unlike today, there was enough belief left in the media in debate in place of silencing critics, resulting in occasional presentation of alternative explanations to the official narratives.
In the 21st century the media for whatever reasons has become censorious, demonizing those in opposition to official narratives. The result has been to discredit the media as a source of information.
Today we donโt have, as existed in my 25 years in Washington, a media even partially open to different explanations.
With the traditional TV and print media discredited, and the lack of transparency of most of the Internet media, to whom do we turn for credible explanations? My own attempts to deliver truth are compromised by invalid accusations against me by Zionist organizations, the political left, and liberals who still believe that more government is the answer. The assaults on me are intended to limit my readership, and the assaults have had a partial success. I suspect that I am now read more abroad than in the United States.
Perhaps I have failed in my approach to insouciant Americans who, despite the high stakes, are unaware of the demands on them of our time. If so, my failure is small compared to that of the media, which by destroying its own credibility, has destroyed the mediaโs checkmate on the rise of a Caesar.
America now has a president who goes to war at the request of his most important campaign contributors without authorization of the US Congress as long as the request is in Israelโs behalf. The legal advisor to the US Department of State, Reed Rubinstein, has penned a justification for Trumpโs military attack on Iran which states the United States initiated its military campaign against Iran (Operation Epic Fury) โat the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli allyโ. Note that the State Department defines aggression as self-defense. Clearly Under President Trump, the United States of America now commits its resources and lives of its military personnel to the achievement of the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel. Americans are now taxed and die for Israelโs domination of the Middle East. If you dissent, you are punished as an โanti-semite.โ
Until the 21std century, I cannot imagine the American media allowing this to happen. The digital revolution by putting the power of money over the media in a few hands has cancelled even a biased free press. In its place there is a propaganda ministry.
President Trumpโs anti-semitism policy cancels the First Amendment if it is used by Americans for criticism of Israeli government policies, such as the genocide in Palestine.
When the Israel Lobby can cancel the First Amendment, you know that the United States is no longer a sovereign country.
A country at Israelโs beck and call is America today, thanks to Donald Trump. Yet, a significant percentage of Trumpโs supporters conflates MAGA with MIGA. American patriotism now requires patriotism to Israel. As the latest mantra goes, โyou canโt be an American if you donโt love Israel.โ You have to hand it to the Zionists. They have even stolen our patriotism.
Trump and Netanyahu: The odd couple
June 5, 2026 . byย Jamal Kanj, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260605-trump-and-netanyahu-the-odd-couple/
โHeโll do whatever I want him to do,โ Donald Trump declared recently about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The statement may be one of the most revealing statements Trump has ever madeโnot for what it says about Netanyahu, but for what it reveals about Trumpโs psychology. It was intended as a display of strength. Instead, it exposed the opposite.
Trump has built a political persona around hyperbole, self-aggrandizement, and declarations of superiority to cover up for an oversized inferiority complex, he only knows its extent. When he insists that Netanyahu is acting at his command, he is projecting an authority he does not possess. The louder the boast, the more apparent the insecurity beneath it.
“If there is one lesson since the election of Trump, it is that Netanyahu, not Trump, has consistently dictated the pace of Americaโs wars in the Middle East. Trump may occupy the White House, issue ultimatums, and proclaim himself the master negotiator, but the facts on the ground tell a different story. Again and again, Netanyahu acts, and Trump adjusts.“
For years, Netanyahu worked relentlessly to pull the U. S. into another made-for-Israel war, this time against Iran. Successive administrations, despite their deference to Israel, stopped short of falling for the scheme. Trump, however, proved far more susceptible to the influence of his Israel-first donors and to Netanyahuโs chicanery. Yet he continues to portray himself as the one calling the shots.
This week, Trump proudly recounted a phone call in which he supposedly instructed Netanyahu to halt a planned Israeli attack on Beirut. It took little time after Trumpโs statement for Israelโs defense minister to announce that military operations โwill continue under all circumstances.โ True to that pledge, Israel launched fresh attacks on hospitals and villages in southern Lebanon, killing and wounding civilians despite the so-called Trumpโs war cessation.
“Two days later, on Wednesday June 3rd, Lebanese and Israeli delegations meeting in Washington announced anotherย ceasefire. The third suchย extensionย since last April. One day after reaching the agreement, Israelย resumedย strikes on โSouth Lebanon and said it would neitherย withdrawย norย ย allowย Lebanese civilians back to their homes in the south.“
It is almost certain, when the Lebanese resistance eventually counters the repeated Israeli violations, Trumpโas he has done beforeโwill condemn the retaliation rather than the provocation. To save face and avoid appearing weak before Netanyahu, he will once againย blameย the Lebanese side while ignoring the Israeli occupation and military actions that triggered the response.
The same pattern is evident in the negotiations with Iran. For months, Trumpโs stated objective was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weaponโa framework which aligns with Tehranโs declared position. But nuclear-armed Israel, which never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty that Iran did, has different goals entirely. Netanyahuโs government will not be satisfied with anything short of the destruction of knowledge and the reduction of Iran to a failed state, precisely the fate that befell Iraq and Libya after both countries agreed to surrender their nuclear ambitions.
For Israel, a negotiated agreement between the U.S. and Iran, may be far less desirable than the continuation of regional turmoil. For its objective is the preservation of a strategic environment that sustains military and geopolitical dominance. Zionism has long viewed the emergence of democratic, technologically advanced, and self-reliant neighboring states as a threat. Fragmentation and disorder in surrounding countries serve that objective by limiting the rise of independent regional powers that could one day, potentially challenge Israeli primacy. In this case, Israel may be unique among nations: it derives strategic advantage not from a stable and prosperous region, but from entropy, and has built a regional doctrine whose success depends on propagating chaos.
The cost to ordinary Americans is tangible, and personal. They feel it every time they fuel their cars, pay inflated prices for goods, or watch Congress cut healthcare or financial student aid for Americans in order to finance another military aid package for Israel.
“Americans are not only financing Israelโs wars through tax dollars and weapons transfers. They are also paying what amounts to anย Israeli surchargeย tax at the pump.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been trying for weeks to assure consumers that gas will hover around $3 a gallon between June and September, as if it is acceptable for Americans to pay elevated prices until Netanyahu deigns to approve a ceasefire, especially when Trump boasts that America is a net oil exporter.
Gaza is another front in Israelโs endless wars. Trump personally signed the ceasefire agreement in Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2025, chirping โwe have peace in the Middle East.โ He had since watched in silence as Israel systematically dismantled every commitment it had made. During the โceasefire,โ it maintained a starvation diet blockade, murdered more than 800 and wounded thousands.
Under Phase One of the agreement, Israeli forces were required to withdraw to approximately 53 percent of Gaza. Phase two stipulated further withdrawal. Instead, Netanyahu ordered the seizure of an additional 32 percent, increasing total Israeli military occupation to 70 percent of the besieged territory, confining 2.3 million Palestinians to 30 percent, or roughly 50,000 human beings per each square mile of rubble.
On all fronts, Trump did not merely follow Netanyahuโs lead. He enabled it, funded it, armed it, and defended it diplomatically. Then, standing before television cameras, he attempted to compensate for this reality by insisting that he was the one in control.
To that end, and following recent Republican primary elections, lame-duck Republican members of Congress have already begun treating the Trump administration as a lame-duck presidency, long before the midterm elections. The recent congressional vote to limit presidential war powers is a telling sign that Trumpโs political capital is eroding far sooner than expected.
Nevertheless, Americans may be witnessing a historic inflection point in the decades-long power of Israel-first Zionist influence over American political life. It is clear the political landscape is shifting, and the assumptions that long governed Washingtonโs relationship with Israel no longer appear as immutable as they once did. From growingย dissentย within the Democratic Partyโand among Republicanย influencersโto deepening unease across the Washington Beltway, genuine cracks are appearing in a system that for generations treated Israel as a sacred cow. Eight decades of unquestioned manipulation and political leverage over American leaders is now facingย resistanceย from constituencies that were once among its most reliable friends.
“Hence, no amount of presidential bravado or social-media posturing can obscure what has become undeniable: under Donald Trump, American foreign policy has served Netanyahuโs Israel-first agenda, not Americaโs. And when the history of this era is written, this odd couple may be remembered for ushering in the sunset of Israel-first Zionist dominance over the U.S. government.“
Fusing the US Military and the IDF
A billโs provision to integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries will go to a U.S. House vote after an effort to stop it failed Thursday. Passage will make it nearly impossible to end the U.S.-Israel special relationship, writes Alan MacLeod.
Alan MacLeodย forย MintPressย News, ย June 6, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/06/fusing-the-us-military-and-the-idf/
Amid widespread and growing public opposition to the Israeli genocide of Gaza and South Lebanon, a controversial new bill seeks to formally integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries like never before, making it difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) proposes to join the two forces together at the hip, laying the groundwork for extensive cooperation into โseemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation,โ according to the Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
This includes the research, development and production of modern, hi-tech arms, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, drones, directed energy, cyber and autonomous weapons systems. It would compel the United States to integrate Israeli arms and technologies into its defense supply chain, and fuse the countriesโ data-capturing and storage facilities together, meaning that Israel could have access to essentially all the U.S. militaryโs data.
The bill also requires the creation of a new position within the Department of Defense: an executive agent whose role is to coordinate cooperation and integration between the two parties.
In essence, then, it would dramatically change the relationship between the two states, from one where Washington supplies Tel Aviv with money, weapons, and diplomatic support, to a situation where the two are fundamentally intertwined.
It would also make the relationship far less transparent, as aid to Israel currently requires an annual public debate and vote. However, by moving it away from the political realm into that of defense acquisition, oversight and accountability mechanisms will be removed, and the public will have little right to know the details going forward.
Judging by its sponsors, Section 224 has strong support on Capitol Hill. It was put forward by Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Adam Smith (D-WA), the panelโs highest-ranking Democrat.
[On Thursday Rep. Ro Khannaโs effort to revoke the provision from the massive military funding bill failed, paving the way for the NDAA to advance to a full House vote.]
The news that a new bill could essentially fuse together the U.S. and Israeli militaries has been met with pushback online, but provoked little comment in Washington, D.C.
One lawmaker who has spoken up is Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, who has promised to offer an amendment to strip Section 224 from the bill on the House floor. โWe are a sovereign country,โ he said on Saturday.
Massie, a strong critic of U.S. support for Israel, recently lost his primary to challenger Ed Gallrein, after AIPAC and other Israel Lobby groupsย floodedย the race with tens of millions of dollars, making it the most expensive contest in American history.
Massie at a speaking event in Las Vegas in 2024. (Gage Skidmore/ Flickr/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Analysts have noted that, if passed, the bill will โextraordinarilyโ expand Israeli influence in domestic American politics, giving Tel Aviv the opportunity to pull powerful political levers through the tried and tested method of offering jobs.
As the Institute for Responsible Statecraft warns, by expanding or starting new arms production facilities like they already have in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could use the influence of bringing jobs to districts to buy the support of American members of Congress.
The U.S. already provides Israel with enormous amounts of military aid, having sent hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons since 1948.
Since 2008, it is required by law to protect Israelโs โqualitative military edge,โ by supplying it with advanced weaponry.
Section 224, however, would transform and deepen this relationship, making it all-but-impossible to democratically break the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
That alliance is under increased scrutiny, as support for Israel is collapsing across the United States. A new poll published by Israelโs Institute for National Security Studies found that 60 percent of Americans (including 75 percent of respondents under 30 years old) hold a negative view of the country. When asked, a large plurality says that Israel holds too much sway over American politics and politicians.
A 2025 study found that half of American voters believe Israel is carrying out a genocide against its neighbors in West Asia.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, among others, on charges of crimes against humanity.
The United States, however, has refused to accept the ICCโs actions, attempted to shut down proceedings, and imposed sanctions on the court. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan stated that Senior U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham โ one of Netanyahuโs closest allies in Washington โ told him that his court is only โfor African thugs like [Russian president Vladimir] Putin. It is not for democracies like Israel and the United States of America.โ
The response from the governments of Israel and the United States to the increasing opposition to the genocide has been to crack down on dissent and to censor social media.
As Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of pro-Israel pressure group, the Anti-Defamation League stated, โWe really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem.โ The Trump administration forced through the sale of TikTok to the family of Larry Ellison, a passionately pro-Israel tech billionaire who is the largest private funder of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Ellison, no doubt, will support Section 224. Yet the effective merger between the U.S. military and the IDF will have profound consequences for the future of America, and should provoke stiff opposition nationwide. Whether it passes will depend largely on the nature and scale of that opposition.
Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer forย MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books:ย Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreportingย andย Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well asย aย numberย ofย academicย articles. He has also contributed toย FAIR.org,ย The Guardian,ย Salon,ย The Grayzone,ย Jacobin Magazineย andย Common Dreams.ย
Tortured US history with Iran goes back 73 years, not 47.
Walt Zlotowย ย West Suburban Peace Coalitionย ย Glen Ellyn ILย , 8 June 26
US neocons reveling in the current US war to destroy Iran tell the monstrous lie Iran has been at war with America 47 years. In their deranged world view it began with the 1979 Iranian revolution that disposed the hated US puppet ruler Mohammed Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran and took 66 US embassy hostages. Their lie claims that during that 47 years Iran killed thousands of Americans and no president defended America till Trump attacked Iran February 28.
ย These war lovers omit the current truth that Trumpโs war is a total failure for 100 days now. Fourteen US service persons are dead. Hundreds injured. All US Gulf States bases damaged or destroyed. Israel suffered the worst destruction in its 78 years. US offensive, defensive missiles so depleted they will take years to replenish. Americaโs defeat is irreversible. Worst of all? The US forced closure of the Strait of Hormuz choking off a fifth of the worldโs oil and vital economic supplies, likely risking worldwide recession, if not depression. Todayโs neocon war was stupidity on steroids.
Their stupidity omits the historical truth that the US is the warmonger here, not Iran, going allย the way back to 1953 when the US collaborated with the UK to depose the democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh. Patriot Mosaddegh sought to nationalize the British controlled Iranian oil industry being exploited by the UK for decades. To prevent this the Brits cooked up Operation Ajax and brought the US on board to overthrow Mosaddegh on the pretext he was a commie.ย
The US enlisted Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of premier US warmonger President Teddy. As a top CIA official, Kermit was tasked with exploiting fake anticommunist sentiment to oust Mosaddegh in a violent coup. Kermit used his contacts among Egyptian Anglophiles and pro Shah forces to get Mosaddeghโs removal started. But advance knowledge of the coup allowed Mosaddegh to prevail, so much so, Roosevelt’s CIA bosses demanded he leave Iran immediately. Instead, he conjured up the ghost of TR, inspiring him to instigate a second coup on his own that succeeded.
It became the model for CIA backed coups, both successes and failures, throughout the Cold War. A year later Ike secretly gave Kermit a National Security Medal for keeping Iranian oil safe for the West. Apparently, Ike didn’t want to go public with an illegal, immoral and criminal overthrow of a sovereign government.
Seventy-Three years on the neocons of today ditched coup for all out war to reclaim Iran for a new American sock puppet, one candidate of whom is Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah deposed in 1979. Unlike Kermitโs successful coup in โ53, Trumpโs war is a colossal failure that signals the end of US hegemony in the Middle East and possibly the entire world. The Gulf States, looking at their shattered US bases and degraded oil infrastructure, will likely turn toward Russia, China, even Iran for security. Europe has largely given up on America. The Far East, seeing the US claw back its missiles for its Iran misadventure is also rethinking its defensive strategy.ย
Unlike the clever Kermit Roosevelt Jr., todayโs coup plotters and warmongers, including Trump, Hegseth and Rubio, are blithering idiots.
Hegseth Compares D-Day Troops to Europeโs Migrants
You could argue that Hegseth was confused in this analogy, and simply misspoke. But he and the administration he is part of have taken over Nazi talking points on racial hierarchies,
Juan Cole, 06/07/2026, https://www.juancole.com/2026/06/hegseth-compares-migrants.html
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) โ Whiskey Pete Hegseth, speaking 82 years after the Allied storming of the beaches of Nazi-occupied France, appears to have sided with . . . the Nazis. He said, โSadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?โ
He compared the 156,000 US, Canadian and British troops who landed at five beaches on the Normandy coast of Vichy France on June 6, 1944, to the desperate โboat peopleโ coming to todayโs Europe in risky voyages on leaky vessels across the Mediterranean. About 150,000 a year make it across alive, to a continent of 743 million Some 30% are summarily deported. I.e., each yearโs irregular migrants constitute 0.013% (a little over one hundredth of one percent) of the population.
Now, Iโm sure that Operation Overlord, helmed by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and Commander of all Allied ground forces British General Bernard โMontyโ Montgomery, was viewed by German Field Marshals Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Rundstedt as a landing of tens of thousands of undocumented aliens from barbarian races. After all those who hit the beachesย includedย Jews, Slavs, Hispanics, indigenous Americans, Chinese Americans and 2,000 African Americans, whom the Nazis viewed with the same horror and disdain that Hegseth views todayโs migrants to Europe.
But it is more than a little odd that the successor of Department of War head Henry L. Stimson should take the Nazi view of the matter.
You could argue that Hegseth was confused in this analogy, and simply misspoke. But he and the administration he is part of have taken over Nazi talking points on racial hierarchies, as I observed in some detail in my analysis for Tomdispatch.com of the Trump National Security Strategy regarding Europe. I wrote,
โTrump claims that heโs no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washingtonโs โreliable allies.โ That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, โIf you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.โ And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants arenโt just coming from the Middle East, โtheyโre coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.โ In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trumpโs Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Of course, heโs completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has beenย 4.3 millionย Ukrainians. The majorย sourcesย of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europeโs future reliability, Trump has already said that he โcanโt trustโ Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country wonโt give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness toย break upย the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.
Aryan Reliability
The underpinnings of Trumpโs reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, heโs assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recentlyย assertedย that โtheyโll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.โย Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as havingย restoredย British-U.S. diplomatic relations after years of strain.
In reality,ย studiesย show that socio-economic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian-Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish-Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term โimmigrantsโ in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted thatย nineย of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as โmajor non-NATO alliesโ are Muslim-majority
His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germanyโs because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trumpโs NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitlerโs thinking โ that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitlerโs conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trumpโs NSS.
โMongols and Negroesโ
Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. Theย idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrรจsย wrote, โToday, new French have slipped in among usโฆ who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.โย He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. โThe name of France might well survive,โ he commented, but โthe special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.โ Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction ofย Captain Alfred Dreyfusย (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrรจsย denouncedย the famed French novelist รmile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as โnot Frenchโ but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.
Fifty years later, the French Naziย Renรฉ Binetย (1913-1957) coined the phraseย โGreat Replacement.โ An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffelย or SS). After the war, in his 1950 bookย Theory of Racism,ย he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by โMongols and Negroesโ โ that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didnโt, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized White Europeans.
Sadly enough, Binetโs ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his twenty-first century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted โJews will not replace usโ (and President Trump called the assembled protestors, as well as those who opposed them, โvery fine peopleโ).
Read the rest here.
Revealed: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy & Open Society Quietly Bankroll Cubaโs โIndependentโ Media In Push for Regime Change
All this, however, pales in comparison to the resources the U.S. has dedicated to Radio and TV Martรญ. Founded in 1985 by the Reagan administration, the Miami-based network boasts dozens of full-time employees and receives tens of millions of dollars from Washington annually.
Anti-government media are only a small portion of the huge array of groups Washington secretly funds and supports. From musicians and academics, to civil society, educational, and religious groups, to think tanks, charities and NGOs, there exists a vast nexus of organizations receiving vast sums of money from the U.S. government.
Alan Macleod, 6 June 26, https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-usaid-ned-open-society-quietly-bankroll-cubas-independent-media-in-push-for-regime-change/290942/
Amid escalating U.S. aggression towards the Cuban island through a maximum pressure campaign and the threat of military intervention, the United States government has been covertly funding a huge network of Cuban media outlets that claim to be independent in a push for regime change against the independent socialist government.
These outlets present themselves as unbiased investigative journalism, but are quietly being financed by Washington through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundation in order to sow discontent across the Caribbean nation, softening it up for a potentially โimminentโ invasion by the Trump administration.
Cuba faces some of its worst energy blackouts in its history, thanks to the U.S. blockade, which is attempting to strange the island into submission. As a Communist state defying U.S. orders, Cuba has, since 1959, been in the crosshairs of Washington, who are attempting to overthrow the government. MintPress sheds light on this shady regime change nexus.
CubaNet is one of the most influential and well-established news outlets covering affairs on the Caribbean island. Founded by anti-government activists in 1994, the site has become the go-to source of information for corporate media, who regularly cite it, and present it as an objective and unbiased independent media (e.g., The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and The Los Angeles Times). CubaNet reporters have written op-eds in major U.S. newspapers such as USA Today, calling for an immediate change in government on the island.
‘Independent Journalism,’ Brought To You By The U.S. State Department
But CubaNet is not as independent as it seems. The outlet is bankrolled by the U.S. national security state. CubaNet has received millions of dollars in funding from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as the Open Society Foundation.
One currently active $500,000 USAID grant, for instance, was awarded to CubaNet to โengage on-island young Cubans through objective and uncensored multimedia journalism.โ While ostensibly a laudable goal, even the grantโs own one-sentence description hints that its purpose is to undermine and attack the Cuban government. It states that it will (emphasis added) โincrease the free flow of information to and from Cuba in order to offset the regimeโs disinformation campaigns.โ
Another news organization receiving huge sums of money from Washington is ADN Cuba. Literally meaning โCubaโs DNA,โ the outlet has amassed a significant following online, boasting over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, over 200,000 on Instagram, and over 1.3 million on Facebook. It describes itself as โan independent media outlet committed to freedom and democracy in Cuba.โ Yet it is actually based in Spain. And it does not seem particularly committed to transparency about its funding.
What is clear, however, is that ADN Cuba has received millions of dollars from the U.S. national security state. In September 2024, USAID approved a $1.1 million grant to ADN Cuba โ a gigantic amount of money for an organization that publishes barely one story per day on its website. This was on top of a $1.5 million allocation for the 2022-2024 period. Indeed, since 2020, ADN Cuba has received in excess of $3 million from USAID alone. This relationship is not disclosed to readersโ even in stories directly covering USAID funding Cuban mediaโ and is relegated to the footnotes of obscure U.S. government funding databases.
Diario de Cuba is another Spanish-based news outlet that publishes a wide variety of stories, all with one thing in common: a deep aversion to the Cuban government. The BBC describes it and CubaNet as key sources for impartial news, run by journalists who โreport without censorship and to paint a broader picture on the countryโs reality.โ
And just like CubaNet, Diario de Cuba has received seven-figure funding from Washington. Between 2016 and 2020, Diario de Cuba received $1.3 million in USAID cash โ almost as much as CubaNet over the same period. This generous funding has allowed it to reach a global audience, with over 600,000 followers on Facebook alone.
Regime Change Networks
Read more: Revealed: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy & Open Society Quietly Bankroll Cubaโs โIndependentโ Media In Push for Regime ChangeThe Central Intelligence Agency used to directly (and secretly) sponsor hundreds of media outlets across the world. However, after a series of scandals and more information about its nefarious activities came to public attention, Washington decided to outsource many of its most controversial foreign operations to organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
โIt would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,โ Carl Gershman, the NEDโs longtime president, said, explaining the 1983 decision to create his organization. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: โA lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,โ he told The Washington Post.
Under the guise of democracy promotion and human rights, the U.S. government channels money to political and social groups across the world in order to maximize its strategic goals, including regime change.
In recent years, the U.S. has used the twin organizations of the NED and USAID to bankroll anti-government protests in Hong Kong, to attempt a color revolution in Belarus, to overthrow the government of Ukraine in 2014, and to organize riots across Iran earlier this year.
In Cuba, the NED and USAID played a critical role in organizing a (failed) uprising against the government in 2021. USAID in particular spent millions of dollars funding, organizing and promoting the San Isidro Movement โ a collective of musicians, artists, and journalistsโ to lead a counter-revolution on the island.
San Isidro members were at the forefront of a wave of nationwide protests that July. The demonstrations were immediately signal boosted by Western corporate media, top celebrities, and U.S. politicians, including President Biden. Neitzens were flooded with the astroturfed โSOS Cubaโ campaign, that trended across the Internet for days.
In the end, however, the coordinated efforts of the U.S. failed to convince ordinary Cubans to take to the streets, and the movement quickly petered out.
Esteban Rodrรญguez, a key member of the San Isidro movement, is a producer at ADN Cuba.
When U.S. Money Is Paused, โIndependentโ Media Immediately Collapse
The importance of U.S. government money to the survival and operations of these outlets was underlined early last year when the Trump administration chose to freeze funding to USAID and the NED. Announcing the decision, Elon Musk, then head of the Department of Government Efficiency, described USAID in particular as a โviperโs nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.โ
The effect on Cuban media was immediate. As soon as the money stopped flowing, dozens of organizations faced immediate liquidation. CubaNet published an emergency editorial asking readers to make up the shortfall. โWe are facing an unexpected challenge: the suspension of key funding that sustained part of our work.โ they wrote; โIf you value our work and believe in keeping the truth alive, we ask for your support.โ โWithout [USAID] funds, it will be extremely difficult to continue,โ CubaNet director Roberto Hechavarrรญa Pilia added.
Diario de Cuba was in similarly dire straits. Its director, Pablo Dรญaz Espรญ, noted that โaid to independent journalism from the government of the United States has been suspended, which makes our work more difficult,โ asking readers to donate.
Muskโs decision accidentally revealed a sprawling network of over 6,200 reporters and nearly 1,000 outlets worldwide that were quietly being trained, supported, and bankrolled by the CIA front, all under the banner of promoting โindependentโ media and freedom of information.
Another supposedly independent Cuban outlet plunged into crisis was El Toque (The Touch). Founded in 2014 and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED, El Toque publishes in Spanish and English, and attempts to manipulate the exchange rates in Cuba.
The funding cut hit them badly, with editors announcing that they would immediately have to lay off half their staff (15 people) and stop working with dozens of freelancers, while looking for alternative funding sources.
El Estornudo (The Sneeze), is also generously financed by NED. In 2021 alone, the endowment awarded the investigative journalism outlet $180,000. It also receives copious support from the Open Society Foundation, although it insists that none of this U.S. money comes with any strings attached or affects its output.
While Western media often portray the Cuban media landscape as a David-and-Goliath fight between plucky independent media facing repression, and a sprawling state-sponsored propaganda apparatus, the gigantic sums handed out to these โunderdogsโ make them by far and away the best funded outlets on the island. A 2023 Guardian article, for instance, profiled 24-year-old photojournalist Pedro Sosa, who worked for both El Toque and El Estornudo. It presented the pair as โoffer[ing] real reporting over stodgy state mediaโ and journalists as poor and vulnerable truth tellers standing up for โfreedom,โ and facing a โcrackdownโ from the state.
But it also let slip that working for U.S.-backed media is not as bad a career move as portrayed, and is, in fact, an extremely lucrative profession. It casually mentions that salaries at tiny El Toque are ten times that of even the most senior journalists working in Cuban state media. In reality, then, these oppressed free speech warriors are actually some of the richest individuals on the entire island, thanks to the power of the U.S. dollar, which pays them handsomely to produce a constant stream of anti-government news.
In the end, the U.S.-backed outlets need not have worried, and NED and USAID funding resumed after some restructuring.
Jobs For the Boys
All this, however, pales in comparison to the resources the U.S. has dedicated to Radio and TV Martรญ. Founded in 1985 by the Reagan administration, the Miami-based network boasts dozens of full-time employees and receives tens of millions of dollars from Washington annually.
Unlike the rest of the journalism industry, workers at Radio and TV Martรญ enjoy strong job security and six-figure wages, despite the fact that the Cuban government is able to jam and block many of their broadcasts from reaching Cuba, meaning precious few people consume its content.
Since its creation, Washington has spent at least $800 million on Radio and TV Martรญ.
The outlets profiled make up only a small portion of the network of anti-government media being funded by the United States. Most of the recipients of American money remain anonymous โ a decision taken in part to hide their identities and preserve their credibility inside Cuba.
The National Endowment for Democracy considers Cuba a โlong-standing priority,โ and is currently officially funding 32 separate projects on the island.
Media related grants include one $80,000 project titled โStrengthening Access to Information,โ which promises to:
โ[E]nhance access to information and promote critical thinking, the organization will produce daily reporting and analysis across various formats, providing independent perspectives on issues affecting citizensโ daily lives, including freedom of expression, public safety, human rights, and other pressing social concerns.โ
Another $115,000 grant, titled โExpanding Access to Uncensored Mediaโ notes that it will:
โ[P]romote independent information, the organization will provide narrative journalism on censored topics, conduct investigations, and produce in-depth articles, photo essays, and opinion pieces while strengthening the mediaโs operational capacity.โ
Thirty-one of the thirty-two projects hide the recipientโs name and identification, meaning that those groups working with the CIA cutout organization are generally only ever identified if they advertise this relationship, or, like when U.S. money was temporarily halted in 2025, they call for help.
Anti-government media are only a small portion of the huge array of groups Washington secretly funds and supports. From musicians and academics, to civil society, educational, and religious groups, to think tanks, charities and NGOs, there exists a vast nexus of organizations receiving vast sums of money from the U.S. government.
Two of these bodies include The Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos (Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, or OCDH) and lawyersโ group, Cubalex.
Both groups produce reports denouncing the Cuban government, and are regularly cited as impartial authorities on human rights on the island in Western outlets, such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post. But what readers are not told is that both organizations are bankrolled by the U.S. national security state.
Records show that USAID has given almost $1.5 million to the OCDH. NED support, meanwhile, was crucial to Cubalexโs inception in 2010, and Washington continues to pay its staff wages to this day. As the companyโs executive director, Laritza Diversent said last year,
โWithout the support of National Endowment for Democracy, Cubalex would not have existed; to do the work we do requires resources. For 14 years, NED has been supporting us. Last October, after trying a lot of times, we [also] achieved a state Department grant.โ
Thus, there is barely a corner of the anti-government Cuban opposition that has not been reached by U.S. money, either through government organizations such as the NED or USAID, or through institutions such as the Ford Foundation and Open Societies Foundation, which have historically performed a similar role in promoting American interests abroad.
Many of these groups are headquartered in South Florida, where U.S. government money is helping to subsidize thousands of jobs for the Cuban-American community. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that a significant part of Miami economy is propped by taxpayer money funding counter-revolutionary forces. Ironic, considering that conservative Cubans often vehemently object to government welfare programs in both the U.S. and Cuba.
Digital Bombardment
In 2010, a new social media and messaging app, Zunzuneo, took Cuba by storm. From nowhere, it went viral, picking up tens of thousands of users โ a very large number for the time on such an internet-sparse island.
None of its users, however, were aware that the platform had been secretly created by USAID in order to promote regime change. Their plan was to first provide an excellent service that would capture the market, then to slowly drip feed Cubans anti-government messaging, and finally to direct them to join โsmart mobsโ, aimed at triggering a color revolution.
In an effort to hide its ownership of the project, the U.S. government held a secret meeting with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, aimed at getting him to invest in the project. It is unclear to what extent, if any, Dorsey helped, as he has declined to speak on the matter.
Zunzuneo was abruptly shut down in 2012, perhaps because the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (which oversees TV and Radio Marti) had already created a new program called Piramideo.
Piramideo marketed itself as an app that allowed Cubans to receive world news for free, and without censorship. Almost immediately, however, locals reported being deluged with fake news about anti-government protests that never happened. Piramideo was shut down in 2015, after reporting on U.S. government meddling in Cuba caused a scandal and diplomatic embarrassment.
Today, however, with Cubans increasingly using American social media apps, this kind of subterfuge is largely unnecessary, as it can be done out in the open. During the 2021 San Isidro protests, apps such as Instagram and Twitter were openly participating in the attempt to overthrow the government, taking no action against a massive boom of clearly fake bot accounts parroting the exact same messages (down to the typos) and using the same astroturfed hashtag. Twitterโs editorial team even placed the protests โ which drew barely a few thousand people into the streets nationwide โ at the top of its โWhatโs Happeningโ for over 24 hours, meaning that every user worldwide would be notified. The failed putsch has come to be known as the โBay of Tweets.โ
Unending War on Cuba
In October, for the 33rd consecutive year, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly (165-7) to call for an end to the American blockade against Cuba. This economic war was established by the Eisenhower administration, in response to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
These illegal unilateral coercive measures, which an internal U.S. government memo states are designed to โdecrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government,โ cost Cuba billions every year, and severely impede its development.
The U.S. attempted to invade Cuba in 1961, and brought the world to the brink of annihilation during the subsequent Cuban missile crisis. It reportedly attempted to kill its leader Fidel Castro hundreds of times, and carried out waves of terror attacks against the country, including using biological weapons on the island.
Successive administrations continued the economic war against Cuba, which was ramped up after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Trump State Department, run by Cuban-American Marco Rubio, has taken it to a new level, declaring the island to be one of its top priorities.
Trump himself has declared that Cuba is โnextโ on the list of countries being targeted for regime change. โWe may stop by Cuba after weโre finishedโ with Iran he said last month.
In response, Cuban president Miguel Dรญaz-Canel said his country was ready to repel any U.S. invasion, as it did during the Bay of Pigs, stating:
โThe moment is extremely challenging and calls upon us once again, as on April 16, 1961, to be ready to confront serious threats, including military aggression. We do not want it, but it is our duty to prepare to avoid it and, if it becomes inevitable, to defeat it.โ
It is in this context that the U.S. governmentโs funding of a vast array of media outlets targeting Cuba should be seen; the media attack is just one facet of Washingtonโs multipronged approach to regime change.
Many of the organizations profiled here publish in English, and nearly all are used as supposedly credible sources of information on Cuba for Western corporate media, meaning that U.S. State Department narratives are laundered into the public consciousness through this network.
Many Cubans and Americans are completely unaware that their news about the island comes largely through a matrix of shady outlets quietly funded by the U.S. national security state via the NED and USAID. Their purpose is to keep up the flow of negative stories in order to soften the public up into accepting regime change on the island. After all, in war, truth is always the first casualty.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.
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3 CommentsMay 15th, 2026
Alan Macleod
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The Israelization of the United States Military Is Proceeding. โWhere and How Will it All End? Ask Donald Trump!โ
A persistently pro-Zionist Congress has accomplished this shift in the relationship quietly, almost secretly. Though it has been done clearly channeling through the White House and Netanyahuโs leadership, it has been obtained without the knowledge and consent of the American people to whom the US government is allegedly responsible. And, of course, all the integration expenses will be borne by the US taxpayer.
Byย Philip Giraldi, Global Research, June 02, 2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/israelization-united-states-military/5928401
Thank You Congress and President Trump!
Few Americans know the history of how Israelโs โwag the dogโ relationship with the United States developed.
Israelโs 1967 successful war against its neighbors demonstrated to military planners in Washington how a qualitative edge in weapons could enable a small country to resist much larger and seemingly more powerful adversaries. Israel was largely supplied with French weapons at the time that reportedly out-performed the Russian equipment in the hands of Syria and Egypt.
As a consequence, in 1968, with strong support from a heavily lobbied Congress, Zionist influenced US President Lyndon B Johnson approved the hitherto blocked sale of F-4 Phantom fighters to Israel, establishing the precedent for continuing US support of Israelโs Qualitative Military Edge, generally referred to by the acronym QME, over its Arab and Christian neighbors.
Five years later, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the United States and Israel came to an understanding whereby they tacitly adopted the doctrine of active US maintenance of Israelโs QME. After that war, the United States also quadrupled its foreign aid to Israel, effectively replacing France as Israelโs largest arms supplier.
This de facto commitment to maintaining Israelโs qualitative edge was subsequently made explicit by President Ronald Reagan and has been confirmed by every US administration since that time. Substantial supplementary weapons shipments under Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have even supported Israelโs genocide in Gaza and its attacks on non-threatening Syria and Lebanon. This policy was in part justified initially based on a US adoption of the Cold War strategy of opposing Arab client states of the Soviet Union and was also due to the growing power of Israelโs US Lobby. Today, Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign military aid, receiving $3 billion per year guaranteed plus many extra weapons in support of specific needs and initiatives which many have linked to the enablement of a policy of systematic aggression by Israel and the commission of war crimes.
So what was once seen as a form of security guarantee for Israel has now become a monster, with Israel using the support provided by the relationship to initiate wars against its neighbors, to include most recently Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The White House and Congress have invariably supplied Israel with all the weapons it seeks as well as providing money for its economy and political support in international organizations like the United Nations. Israelโs Lobby, regarded as the most powerful foreign policy lobby deployed against Congress and the White House, has used its access to power to constantly expand its role in weapons development to satisfy what Israel sees as threats against it. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become the dominant partner in the relationship, including regarding the decision making about war and peace.
Currently Israel and its friends in Washington are moving to complete integration of many aspects of how our military operates at various levels with Israeli counterparts. No other US โally,โ which the Jewish state is not technically, including NATO members, has anything like this access and ability to influence developments.
Those who think Israel has too much power have a point as it is even strong enough to shut down First Amendment Freedom of Speech, both by suppressing or even criminalizing what it regards as criticism of itself. Few Americans are aware that even though Israel is widely known to be a major nuclear weapons power, members of the US government are not allowed to state that that is the case because it would embarrass the Jewish state and plausibly trigger legal restrictions on the weapons that the US could supply it with. And the irony is that Israel only has the weapons because it stole the nuclear fuel and timers from the United States. President John F Kennedy tried to stop the nuclear weapons program and many believe he was assassinated by Israel as a result!
And the one-way street benefitting Israel gets worse! Per the story that I reported recently, Congress is considering passing a bill that will give Americans serving in the Israeli army US government provided full benefits like education, jobs and medical care just as if they had been serving in the United States military. Indeed, the legislation currently working its way through Congress would, for the first time in American history, treat service in a foreign army both legally and in practice as equivalent to service in the US armed forces โ but only where that foreign army is Israeli. House Resolution 8445, sponsored by Republican Congressmen Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania and Max Miller of Ohio, would amend existing legislation so that Americans who enlist in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) are treated โin the same manner as service in the uniformed servicesโ of the US. Not surprisingly, many of the โAmericansโ involved are also dual national Israeli citizens. If the changes come into effect the result will be to considerably and uniquely narrow the gap between Israel and the US in terms of rights and benefits but with benefits going only in one direction, i.e. to serve Israeli interests and with the US taxpayer paying the bill!
In addition to that, the most recent US government gift to Israel sponsored by the United States House of Representatives, a misnomer as the House is actually the Knesset West, is the national Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2027 released on May 13th. Section 224 of the House version of the Act entitled โUnited States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiativeโ integrates โUS-Israeli military research and development, co-production of weapons systems, licensing agreements, AI, directed energy, data integration, and missile defense.โ It creates the framework for โbilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation.โ
The result is to completely connect the functionality of the US military with that of the Israeli military. The implementation of the agreement would arguably do more to irreversibly link the US military to the Israeli military than the $200 billion in military assistance Israel has received from the United States since its founding in 1948.
Critics note how Section 224 would combine the US and Israeli defense sectors in many areas particularly vital to the battlefields of the future, including autonomous systems and cyberwarfare. It would also greatly increase Israeli influence over the US beyond what it already has through the Israel Lobby and its dominance of the mainstream media. It would enable Israel to expand or start new co-production facilities likeย it already hasย in a number of states, giving the Israeli government additional leverage through providing jobs in the US, thereby securing friends in Congress whose districts are affected. The result could well be a White House backed by Congress that is even more prone to go to war based on the Eretz โGreaterโ Israel fantasies of people like Netanyahu and his insaneย Security Chief Itamar Ben-Gvir.
A persistently pro-Zionist Congress has accomplished this shift in the relationship quietly, almost secretly. Though it has been done clearly channeling through the White House and Netanyahuโs leadership, it has been obtained without the knowledge and consent of the American people to whom the US government is allegedly responsible. And, of course, all the integration expenses will be borne by the US taxpayer. Interestingly, of course, it should also be noted that the integration of the US military with that of Israel comes at a time when the American public is expressing unprecedented levels of distrust in and dislike of the Israeli government. That is perhaps no coincidence as Netanyahu seeks to create unbreakable legal and administrative ties between the two countries though with little in the way of obligations on the part of Israel.
Ben Freeman at the Quincy Institute observes how
โThe shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent. And this all comes at a time when the Israeli military has repeatedly used U.S. weapons in strikes that have violated international humanitarian laws in Gaza, and as Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires (as has the US itself) in the Trump administrationโs unnecessary war with Iran.โ
So there you have it. The United States is on a downward spiral engineered by its own government in collusion with a tiny apartheid state that specializes in crimes including torture, genocide and assorted other offenses against humanity.
Where and how will it all end?
Ask Donald Trump!
Starve, Strangle, Invade: How Washingtonโs Siege of Cuba Is Pushing a Nation to the Brink
What makes the situation particularly tragic, Benjamin argued, is Cubaโs long history of providing medical assistance to the world. She recalled being treated by Cuban doctors while working in Africa and noted that Cuba has trained physicians and deployed medical missions across dozens of countries. Even under severe economic constraints, Cuba has maintained a reputation for international medical solidarity that far exceeds what might be expected from a small island nation.
Yet today, she says, the country that has helped save lives around the globe is struggling to obtain the fuel and medical supplies needed to care for its own people.
June 3, 2026, Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/03/starve-strangle-invade-how-washingtons-siege-of-cuba-is-pushing-a-nation-to-the-brink/
Medea Benjamin warns that a decades-long economic war against Cuba has escalated into what she calls a โmedieval siege,โ as fuel shortages cripple hospitals, food systems and daily life while U.S. officials openly discuss military options.
For more than six decades, Washington has tried to force Cuba to its knees. Today, according to peace activist Medea Benjamin, that campaign has reached a new and dangerous stage. Fuel shipments have been blocked, foreign companies threatened, humanitarian aid obstructed and military rhetoric intensified, creating what Benjamin describes as a modern-day siege designed to break the Cuban economy and the Cuban people alike.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Margaret Flowers, Benjamin argues that the crisis unfolding on the island is not the result of natural disaster or governmental incompetence, but of deliberate U.S. policy. She details how shortages of fuel have crippled transportation, disrupted hospitals, spoiled food supplies and contributed to worsening public health conditions. The goal, she says, remains largely unchanged from the earliest days of the Cold War: create enough hardship that Cubans turn against their government.
But the discussion goes beyond Cuba. Benjamin places the escalating pressure on Havana within a broader pattern of U.S. foreign policy โ one that relies on sanctions, coercion and military power to maintain global influence even as that influence declines. From Venezuela and Iran to Palestine and beyond, she argues that economic warfare has become a preferred tool of empire, inflicting immense humanitarian costs while remaining largely invisible to the American public.
At a moment when reports of possible military action against Cuba are once again circulating, Benjamin issues a stark warning: what is happening in Cuba today is not simply a foreign policy dispute. It is a test of whether the United States will continue down a path of punishment, intervention and regime change, or whether ordinary people can build enough pressure to choose diplomacy, solidarity and peace instead.
For more than sixty years, the United States has sought to isolate, punish and ultimately reshape Cuba through economic warfare. Yet according to longtime peace activist and CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, what is happening today goes far beyond the familiar story of sanctions and diplomatic hostility. Speaking with Margaret Flowers on Clearing the FOG, Benjamin described a rapidly escalating campaign that she says has pushed Cuba into a humanitarian emergency while raising fears that Washington could be laying the groundwork for direct military intervention.
Benjamin did not mince words when describing current U.S. policy.
โI struggle to find the correct adjective,โ she said. โIt is so horrific that thereโs almost no words.โ What began decades ago as an attempt to create economic pressure on Cuba has, in her view, evolved into something far more extreme: a policy designed to systematically cut off every possible source of fuel, trade, investment and survival.
The consequences are visible throughout Cuban society.
According to Benjamin, the island is facing severe fuel shortages that have crippled transportation, disrupted industrial production and created rolling blackouts that affect nearly every aspect of daily life. Hospitals struggle to maintain services. Refrigerators stop working, causing food to spoil. Public transportation becomes unreliable or nonexistent. Families living in apartment buildings face interruptions in water supplies because pumps cannot operate consistently without electricity.
Perhaps most alarming, Benjamin pointed to rising infant mortality rates as evidence of a public health crisis that she believes is directly connected to the tightening blockade. Cuba once boasted one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere, often outperforming wealthier nations including the United States. That achievement, she warned, is now being undermined by shortages of medicine, medical equipment and basic necessities.
What makes the situation particularly tragic, Benjamin argued, is Cubaโs long history of providing medical assistance to the world. She recalled being treated by Cuban doctors while working in Africa and noted that Cuba has trained physicians and deployed medical missions across dozens of countries. Even under severe economic constraints, Cuba has maintained a reputation for international medical solidarity that far exceeds what might be expected from a small island nation.
Yet today, she says, the country that has helped save lives around the globe is struggling to obtain the fuel and medical supplies needed to care for its own people.
At the center of the crisis is oil.
Benjamin explained that the Trump administration has effectively declared that โnot one drop of oilโ should reach Cuba. Since January, she said, only a single Russian tanker has successfully delivered oil to the island, while other shipments have reportedly been pressured, delayed or canceled. Countries that might normally assist Cuba have faced threats of sanctions, tariffs or other forms of retaliation from Washington.
The blockadeโs reach extends beyond governments. New sanctions target foreign companies operating in key Cuban sectors such as energy and mining. Benjamin cited the example of a Canadian company that had worked in Cuba for decades but is now severing ties under mounting U.S. pressure. The strategy, she argued, is designed not merely to isolate Cuba economically but to make normal commerce virtually impossible.
China has attempted to provide assistance, sending rice and helping construct solar energy projects, while solidarity groups continue delivering humanitarian aid. But Benjamin stressed that food aid alone cannot solve the crisis. Without sufficient fuel, transportation networks collapse, power grids remain unstable and basic economic activity becomes impossible.
The contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy became especially clear when Flowers asked about Washingtonโs proposal to provide roughly $100 million in assistance to Cuba through selected organizations.
Benjamin called the offer deeply hypocritical.
The economic damage caused by sanctions, she argued, amounts to billions of dollars annually. Offering a fraction of that amount while continuing the policies responsible for the suffering is akin to creating a crisis and then presenting oneself as the rescuer. She noted that Cuban officials estimated the proposed aid represented only a tiny portion of what sanctions cost the country.
While humanitarian groups continue delivering food and medicine under limited exemptions to U.S. sanctions, Benjamin warned that aid alone cannot address the scale of the crisis. Organizations including CODEPINK, Global Exchange, Global Health Partners and others have mobilized delegations and donations, but they are attempting to fill a gap created by a policy that deliberately restricts Cubaโs access to international trade and finance.
More troubling still is the growing discussion of military action.
Benjamin pointed to reports that U.S. military assets have been repositioned in the Caribbean and that officials connected to Southern Command have indicated preparations exist for a possible operation against Cuba. While she acknowledged uncertainty about whether Washington intends a full-scale invasion, targeted regime-change operation or continued economic strangulation, she argued that the rhetoric itself creates instability and fear.
She believes advocates of regime change are hoping that worsening conditions will eventually provoke unrest and political upheaval on the island.
The recent U.S. indictment of Raul Castro, now 94 years old, further fuels those concerns. Benjamin argued that reviving a decades-old case involving the โBrothers to the Rescueโ aircraft serves less as a legal action than as a political pretext. She compared it to earlier efforts to criminalize leaders in other targeted countries before pursuing broader interventionist objectives.
The larger issue, however, extends far beyond Cuba.
Throughout the interview, Benjamin repeatedly returned to a theme that has defined much of her activism: the connection between U.S. foreign policy and domestic inequality.
Americaโs military spending, she argued, continues to grow even as political leaders claim there is insufficient money for healthcare, affordable housing, education and other public needs. She pointed to a Pentagon budget that now exceeds one trillion dollars annually and questioned why basic social investments remain politically impossible while military expenditures expand almost without debate.
Benjamin also linked foreign intervention to migration, surveillance, policing and the erosion of civil liberties at home. The consequences of empire, she suggested, do not remain overseas. They eventually return to shape life inside the United States itself.
Yet despite her grim assessment of current events, Benjamin ended on a note of cautious optimism.
She argued that the global balance of power is shifting. Countries across the Global South are developing alternatives to U.S. dominance through new economic partnerships and institutions. China, BRICS nations and other emerging centers of influence are creating a world that is increasingly multipolar, reducing Washingtonโs ability to dictate outcomes unilaterally.
At home, Benjamin believes ordinary people must build new forms of solidarity and political engagement. She highlighted the โSummer of Peace and Loveโ initiative, which seeks to create community spaces for organizing, education, mutual aid and antiwar activism. Drawing inspiration from movements such as Occupy Wall Street, she argued that people need opportunities not only to protest existing systems but to model alternatives rooted in cooperation and democracy.
As the interview concluded, Benjamin delivered a straightforward message: Americans who oppose military escalation should pressure Congress to support measures that would block any invasion of Cuba and reject another chapter of interventionist foreign policy.
Whether one agrees with her analysis or not, the warning she offers is unmistakable. Cuba is not simply facing another round of sanctions. According to Benjamin, the island is confronting a coordinated campaign of economic suffocation whose human costs are already being measured in shortages, blackouts, deteriorating health conditions and growing uncertainty about what comes next. In a world already scarred by war and confrontation, she argues that the last thing the Caribbean needs is another conflict manufactured in Washington.
Nuclear Startups Are in “Advanced Negotiations” to Buy Cold War Plutonium
While it seems like a win-win for nuclear waste cleanup and clean energy development in the United States, some critics are concerned about safety and security implications of the deal. Currently, this highly dangerous, weapons-grade material is kept in a highly regulated and secure environment. Selling it to energy companies would significantly compromise oversight. “The plan has generated debate and some unease among nonproliferation experts,” the New York Timesย reports. “If finalized, it would mark the first time the U.S. government has made weapons-grade plutonium available to private companies.”
Byย Haley Zarembaย – Jun 03, 2026, https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Nuclear-Startups-Are-in-Advanced-Negotiations-to-Buy-Cold-War-Plutonium.html
- The Trump administration is in “advanced negotiations” with nuclear startups, including Oklo, to convert more than 50 tons of weapons-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel — the first time the U.S. government would make such material available to private companies.
- The move is framed as a fix for a critical nuclear fuel supply chain bottleneck, with Russia controlling roughly half of global uranium conversion capacity and squeezing Western reactor development.
- Nonproliferation experts are raising safety and security concerns, warning that moving weapons-grade material out of tightly controlled government facilities significantly reduces oversight.
As nuclear energy regains favor around the globe, competition for nuclear fuel is heating up. In an era of multiple and compounding energy crises driven by conflict, climate, and the power-hungry artificial intelligence boom, nuclear has resurfaced as a highly strategic option for building up energy security and independence for many nations around the world. But nuclear fuels supply chains are highly concentrated, and many of them are controlled by Russia, presentingย critical geopolitical tradeoffs.
Today, there are only five plants in the world that operate large-scale uranium conversion, and half of that capacity is in the hands of the Kremlin, resulting in a critical resource bottleneck and geopolitical pain points. Accordingly, “U.S. nuclear energy faces fuel supply chain vulnerabilities, with tight uranium supplies, geopolitical risks, and rising costs threatening both existing reactors costs and advanced reactor development,” according to a Januaryย reportย from Stanford Energy.
It is thereforeย in the United States’ strategic interest to build up alternative nuclear fuel supply chains, preferably home- and friend-shored ones. But it’s a little late for the United States to get a foothold in alternative uranium markets, as Russia and China, which never saw a decline in their respective nuclear sectors, have already been cornering themย for years.
“Russian and Chinese players have been very keen to secure access to resources in central Asia and Africa, creating a very aggressive competitive environment,” Benjamin Godwin at Prism Strategic Intelligence told the Financial Times last year.
The United States is taking steps to build up its own uranium supply chains, as the country is home to plentiful natural reserves of the 92nd element. But the country is also home to another vast reserve of nuclear fuel that is far more readily accessible — decades of stockpiled nuclear waste. Research into recycling spent nuclear fuel indicates that resource utilization could be boosted by a jaw-dropping 95 percent.
“Used nuclear fuel is an incredible untapped resource in the United States,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish told World Nuclear News back in February. “The Trump Administration is taking a common-sense approach to making sure we’re using our resources in the most efficient ways possible to secure American energy independence and fuel our economic growth.”
And now the Trump administration is looking to a new, and significantly more controversial, source of recycled nuclear fuel — cold-war era nuclear warheads. The government wants to convert weapons-grade plutonium into viable nuclear fuel as part of the Trump administration’s aim to “reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy.
The United States is sitting on more than 50 tons of plutonium left behind by nuclear weapons programs. The Department of Energy had previously planned to dilute and bury the hazardous material, but the Trump administration wants to give it new life in nuclear reactors and has entered into “advanced negotiations” with a handful of nuclear startups to begin the process of selling the plutonium for use as nuclear fuel.
“A lack of fuel is one of the biggest choke points in expanding nuclear power right now,” said Jacob DeWitte, the chief executive of Oklo, one of the companies in conversation with the Trump administration about acquiring plutonium to power its next-gen small nuclear reactors. “This will help us get more nuclear power online faster.”
While it seems like a win-win for nuclear waste cleanup and clean energy development in the United States, some critics are concerned about safety and security implications of the deal. Currently, this highly dangerous, weapons-grade material is kept in a highly regulated and secure environment. Selling it to energy companies would significantly compromise oversight. “The plan has generated debate and some unease among nonproliferation experts,” the New York Timesย reports. “If finalized, it would mark the first time the U.S. government has made weapons-grade plutonium available to private companies.”
The Disappearing Aid Check: The Future of USโIsrael Defense Support
What top Israeli officials โ including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu โ are quietly backing is not a reduction in American support, but a reorganization of it: shifting billions in resources from State Departmentโadministered foreign aid grants into general Pentagon procurement accounts, industrial partnerships, and sustainment pipelines. The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Steven Simon, May 26, 2026
Executive Summary
The United States and Israel are now approaching the renegotiation of their 10-year defense Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU. Israeli officials have said they want to phase out US military grant aid โ a position that sounds like a step toward ending US military assistance to Israel. It is not.
What top Israeli officials โ including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu โ are quietly backing is not a reduction in American support, but a reorganization of it: shifting billions in resources from State Departmentโadministered foreign aid grants into general Pentagon procurement accounts, industrial partnerships, and sustainment pipelines. The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.
Since fiscal year 2019, the United States has provided $3.3 billion per year in Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, grants to Israel, plus an additional $500 million per year for missile defense cooperation. About 25 percent of this FMF grant money has gone toward offshore procurement, or OSP, funds allocated to Israel to spend domestically on its own defense industry and military equipment. Effectively, it is a US subsidy for Israelโs military industrial complex.
This OSP precedent is slated to end with the expiration of the current MOU. This has fueled Israeli proposals to phase out FMF grants altogether, replacing them with a relationship centered on USโIsraeli defense integration. This would embed Israeli firms and Israeliโorigin intellectual property inside larger Pentagon programs and production. Unlike the foreign assistance process, the military procurement framework would not be subject to the political scrutiny of Congress and the State Department, but would be evaluated on bureaucratic criteria such as cost, readiness, and capability. This shift would likely be justified by reframing US support not as a handout to Israel, but as an investment in American military readiness, industrial capacity, and jobs.
At a time when the USโIsrael relationship should be scrutinized in light of Israeli actions that run counter to US interests, such a structural shift would be counterproductive. To avoid this outcome, any procurement-centered relationship should meet these three basic requirements:
- Clear metrics to assess whether Israeli participation in Pentagon programs serves US defense requirements.
- Program-level transparency regarding the existence, scale, cost, and rationale of each procurement program.
- Cross-committee coordination in Congress to ensure visibility and accountability to non-military congressional oversight committees.ย
The current deal โ and why it is running out of road
This brief explains what the shift in US aid for Israel means: where the money actually goes, who controls it, who benefits, and why the standard debate about ending aid misses the consequential change.1……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What โending aidโ actually means
…………………………………. ending aid in this context does not mean ending US financial support for Israelโs military and defense sector. It means changing the institutional form through which that support is delivered. The concept, in effect, is not to reduce support for Israelโs military; it is to shift it from the foreign-operations budget and the State Departmentโs oversight to the Pentagonโs procurement, research and development, industrial base, and sustainment machinery…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The new architecture โ how money moves in a defense-industrial model
To understand what replaces the grant, it helps to understand how the Pentagon actually spends money on defense cooperation, and why that process looks so different from foreign aid…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Conclusion โ quieter does not mean smaller
The post-2028 USโIsrael defense relationship will likely be recast to reduce its political profile. The annual aid vote, one of the most predictably contentious moments in future US foreign-policy debates, may fade away, replaced by procurement decisions that attract little public attention and even less organized opposition. Israeli officials will be able to claim, accurately in formal terms, that Israel no longer receives American aid. American officials will be able to defend the spending as investment in US readiness rather than largesse to a foreign partner…………………………………………………….
For observers trying to understand USโIsrael relations, the practical implication is methodological. The aid vote is no longer the right place to look. Instead, the key data will be located in the procurement budget, industrial-base investments, sustainment pipeline, IP licensing arrangements, and workshare provisions. The consequential decisions will be made in those domains.
Annex: Key terms and reference figures………………………………https://quincyinst.org/research/the-disappearing-aid-check-the-future-of-us-israel-defense-support/?ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_1_21_2025_13_26_COPY_01)&mc_cid=3131e3a216#h-annex-key-terms-and-reference-figures
Trump blasts Netanyahu as Iran Talks Stall over Beirut
Juan Cole, 06/02/2026, https://www.juancole.com/2026/06/blasts-netanyahu-beirut.html
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) โ Monday began with a statement issued by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs cautioning that the United States and Israel, by their egregious violations of the ceasefire concluded on April 8, are jeopardizing the ongoing talks aimed at achieving an armistice. The ministry, which is headed by Abbas Araghchi, underlined that the ceasefire involved a cessation of hostilities on all fronts.
The ministry accused the United States of repeatedly violating the ceasefire by its attacks on commercial Iranian shipping. Moreover, it said, Israel has grossly violated the ceasefire by launching a vicious attack on Lebanon, violating its sovereignty and killing or wounding thousands of Lebanese and displacing two million, while destroying essential infrastructure.
The ministry said that the US has a direct responsibility to cease attacking Iranian shipping and an indirect responsibility to rein in the Israel atrocities, warning that Iran will take measures to act in self-defense to ensure its interests.
The Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, reported that these violations of the ceasefire, especially the Israeli invasion and devastation of south Lebanon, had led the Iranian side to cease all talks and the exchange of texts through mediators.
The agency said that the Iranian government insists on the end of Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon and its complete withdrawal from Lebanon. Otherwise there will be no further dialogue with the United States.
Moreover, the report said, Iran is determined to block the Strait of Hormuz completely, and to activate further fronts, including the Bab al-Mandeb or โStrait of Tearsโ at the mouth of the Red Sea. The Red Sea has been an alternative route for shipping, including of oil and gas, given the closure of the Persian Gulf.
The official status of these threats is unclear, according to BBC Monitoring .
Israel has sent troops deep into Lebanon and has expelled some 275,000 people from the metropolitan area of the coastal city of Tyre in the south, making threats to level the suburbs of Beirut where Shia Muslims predominate and to bomb the Lebanese capital. Hezbollah has continued to fight back against the Israeli invasion, showering northern Israel with rockets and sometimes managing to kill or wound Israeli troops and to take out Merkava tanks.
Asked about these reports of a halt to negotiations by CNBCโs Eamon Javers, President Donald J. Trump replied , โI donโt care if theyโre over, honestly.โ In case the message wasnโt clear, he repeated, โI really donโt care. I couldnโt care less.โ He complained that the talks had โstarted to get very boring.โ
Trump attempted to intervene in reality by Tweet, saying he would ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu โwhatโs going on with Lebanon.โ He thundered, โThere will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back.โ
He claimed to have spoken to Hezbollah indirectly, saying, โthey agreed that all shooting will stop โ That Israel will not attack them, and they will not attack Israel.โ
Netanyahu remained defiant, boasting of having taken the Crusader castle Beaufort and threatening, โif Hezbollah does not cease attacking our cities and citizensโIsrael will attack terror targets in Beirut. This stance of ours remains unchanged. In parallel, the IDF will continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon.โ
Barak Ravid at Axiosย reported that according to a US official, Trumpโs phone call to Netanyahu was explosive, with the American president โpissed offโ about Netanyahuโs threat to bomb Beirut. Ravid reports that his source alleged Trump told the prime minister, โYouโre fucking crazy. Youโd be in prison if it werenโt for me. Iโm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.โ
Trump for his part insisted that the negotiations with Iran were continuing โat a rapid pace.โ
Many energy analysts believe that if the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues through the summer, by September we could see $200 a barrel petroleum and a severe global economic recession. The consequent economic crisis domestically could produce a blue wave, i.e. a big Democratic victory in the midterms, which would hobble Trump in his final two years in the White House.
Trump Finally Admits Aloud: โWe Shouldnโt Have Been in Iranโ
June 1, 2026ย Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/01/trump-finally-admits-aloud-we-shouldnt-have-been-in-iran/
Donald Trump may have delivered the most honest assessment of the Iran War yet โ entirely by accident.
In an interview conducted not by a journalist but by his daughter-in-law on Fox News, Trump stumbled into a confession that cuts through months of White House triumphalism, media cheerleading, and endless declarations of victory. After boasting that Iranโs navy was โ100% gone,โ its air force was โ100% gone,โ and that the United States had effectively defeated the country militarily, Trump casually admitted something extraordinary:
โWe should not have been in Iran.โ
There it was. Buried beneath the bluster, threats, and self-congratulation was the truth opponents of the war have been shouting since the first bombs fell.
The problem is that Trump wasnโt offering a reckoning. He wasnโt acknowledging the thousands killed, the billions spent, the global economic disruption, or the dangerous precedent of launching another war based on claims that Iran was racing toward a nuclear weapon despite years of intelligence assessments saying otherwise. Instead, he delivered the admission while simultaneously threatening to โfinish it off militarilyโ if negotiations fail.
This is the defining contradiction of American empire. Leaders admit the wars were mistakes only after theyโve launched them. They acknowledge the disasters while preparing the next escalation. Iraq was a mistake. Afghanistan was a mistake. Libya was a mistake. Yet the machinery that produced those catastrophes continues to operate exactly as designed.
Trumpโs interview wasnโt merely a display of contradiction. It was a rare glimpse into a political system so detached from accountability that a president can openly admit a war should never have happened while still insisting it was necessary, successful, and ready to resume at any moment.
For the families burying loved ones, for Americans paying the bill, and for a region left smoldering in the wake of another U.S. intervention, that isnโt leadership.
Itโs a confession.
Will Trump sideline Israel in order to make a deal with Iran?
Donald Trump reportedly has a deal on the table to suspend fighting and begin negotiations to end the Iran war and the resulting global economic crisis. But Israel and Iran hawks see it as a disaster and are working to undermine it. Who will win out?
Mondoweiss, Byย Mitchell Plitnickย ย May 31, 2026ย
According to available reports, the purported agreement on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran to entrench the current ceasefire was ready to be signed and presented to the public, and Trump was going to retire to his โsituation roomโ to confer with his people and announce it.
If that seemed too good to be true, it turns out it was, at least for the moment.
Eventually, Trump is going to have to decide whether to accept an MOU that will be harshly attacked by Israel and Iran hawks or resume the fighting. Choosing the former is out of character for the beleaguered president, but resuming the fighting will bury him deeper in this quagmire and will intensify the global economic crisis.
This mistrust is why Iran wants this MOU rather than a comprehensive deal. They want to move slowly, confirming American sincerity with actions, not words, every step of the way.
Trump, on the other hand, is struggling to decide what to do amid conflicting, powerful political pressures. His team has, apparently, negotiated the terms of the MOU, but he is indecisive about implementing it. These are the consequences of a weak, unqualified person in the White House.
This political quicksand that Trump continues to sink into is another in the long list of reasons why other presidents have refused to let Israel draw them into a war with Iran. Now that Iran has the upper hand, it is dictating the framework of ending the war.
Trump wanted to end it with a comprehensive deal, a grand bargain. That has been completely thwarted by Iran, which insists on a staged process to confirm American intentions after two surprise attacks. Trumpโs absurd idea of expanding the Abraham Accords was a last, desperate attempt to try to come out of this debacle with a win big enough for him to claim that it was all worth it.
He made that desperate grab because the MOU, although not addressing some of the biggest issues, would include some immediate concessions to Iran that will be viewed by Trumpโs allies as significant setbacks.
The concessions that have been rumoredโwhich include funding Iranโs reconstruction, sanctions relief, and releasing frozen Iranian funds, for which he will be accused of โsending pallets of cashโ to Iran, just as Trump once accused Barack Obamaโare going to be attacked by Iran hawks. But for Trump, the immediate priority is reopening the Strait of Hormuz quickly and doing as much damage control as he can before the congressional elections in November.
The MOU would, according to the reports, accomplish that. Iran would allow ships to move through the Strait and would start removing impediments, such as mines, from the area, while concurrently, the U.S. would gradually lift its blockade of Iranian ports. The fighting would stop, including in Lebanon, although the specific terms of that and whether Israel would be forced to completely withdraw from southern Lebanon have not been mentioned. Iran would reiterate its long-standing pledge not to create a nuclear weapon.
Beyond that, the MOU would outline the topics for further talks that would, it is hoped, lead to a permanent peace deal. 60 days would be allotted for those talks, which would include Iranโs nuclear program, a proposed $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, a permanent system for managing the Strait, the lifting of sanctions, and the release of frozen Iranian assets.
Trump unintentionally confirmed much of the rumored content and limitations of the MOU:
โIran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb. The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions. All water mines (bombs), if any, will be terminated (we have removed, through detonation, numerous such mines with our great underwater mine sweepers. Iran will complete the immediate removal and/or detonation of any mines that are left, which will not be many!). โฆ The enriched material, sometimes referred to as โNuclear Dust,โ โฆ will be unearthed by the United States (which, it is agreed, is the only Country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so!), in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED. No money will be exchanged, until further notice.โ
Though the language is Trumpian, there is much to read into this message, both in its contents and its omissions.
Trumpโs demand about destroying the so-called โnuclear dustโ leaves open the option of Iran diluting its highly enriched uranium and agreeing to IAEA inspections going forward. Thatโs an Iranian proposal, which Trump is trying to own. Doubtless, Iran would be fine with him making that claim for his own political purposes.
Dilution, however, would not be good enough for Israel or its allies in Washington. Nor are they going to be happy about Trump even mentioning money. His declaration that no money will change hands โuntil further noticeโ implies that there will, eventually, be such โfurther noticeโ if the process of the MOU is followed.
It is worth noting that nowhere in any of the talk of either the immediate terms of the MOU or the framework for negotiations going forward that it would imply is there any mention at all of Iranโs missile and drone programs or its support of regional allies, which are often termed โproxiesโ by the media.
A disaster for Netanyahu and Iran hawks
Israeli reporter Ben Caspit, citing a โsenior Israeli political source,โ reports that Benjamin Netanyahu faces a political disaster if Trump ends the war.
โThis time, the prime ministerโs hands are tied. He is completely paralyzed and knows that he will not be able to do anything, even if the agreement signed between the United States and Iran remains the disaster he now defines it as,โ an anonymous Netanyahu associate told Caspit.
That same insider also said that Netanyahu now longs for the days of Joe Biden. It is a classic case of being careful what you wish for……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The next president, whomever that might be, will have the same opportunity. The terms for a permanent agreement with Iran will be clear: a workable agreement on the Strait, IAEA inspections ensuring Iran doesnโt develop a nuclear weapon, and a path forward that includes a resuscitation of the Iranian economy, and regional agreements to ensure the security of the Gulf states, including Iran.
In other words, the JCPOA, in all the dimensions Obama envisioned. All we need to get there is the same resolute determination to do the sensible thing that Obama showed when he too froze Israel out of the process so he could do something wise.ย https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/will-trump-sideline-israel-is-order-to-make-a-deal-with-iran/
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PLEASE OPPOSE HR 8255 AND S.3639 – bills would accelerate satellite deployment, with no environmental review or safeguards – https://ncstd5li.quorum.us/campaign/169331/
โTo see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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