Jeffrey Sachs: New European Military Bloc for War Against Russia
May 13, 2026 , Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/13/jeffrey-sachs-new-european-military-bloc-for-war-against-russia/
Europe’s political class is sleepwalking into a catastrophe of its own design. In a sweeping, blistering conversation with Glenn Diesen, economist and diplomat Jeffrey Sachs lays out how the continent—once poised to build a “common European home” with Russia—is instead resurrecting the most dangerous instincts of the 20th century. What began as NATO expansion for “security” has metastasized into a new, explicitly European military bloc built not with Russia, but against it, and without the American umbrella that once restrained escalation.
Sachs argues that this isn’t strategy—it’s madness: a lethal mix of Eastern European Russophobia, German political amnesia, British imperial nostalgia, and Washington’s long project of hegemony. The result is a Europe preparing for a war it cannot win, against a nuclear superpower, over a security architecture that could have been inclusive, stable, and peaceful.
Highlights “NATO would not move one inch eastward.” Sachs cites the explicit 1990 U.S.–German promise to Gorbachev—now erased from Western memory—as the original betrayal that set today’s crisis in motion.
The rejected alternative: a “common European home.” Gorbachev offered a demilitarized, inclusive security system “from Rotterdam to Vladivostok.” Europe and the U.S. chose bloc politics instead.
NATO expansion wasn’t about defense—it was about hegemony. Sachs: U.S. strategists like Brzezinski saw NATO as the military arm of a unipolar world, with Ukraine as the “geopolitical pivot” to keep Russia permanently weak.
Germany broke its own word—and its own strategic brain. Sachs argues that German leaders—from Merkel’s capitulation in 2008 to Mertz’s open militarism today—abandoned the country’s historic role as Europe’s peace‑anchor.
Eastern Europe’s “visceral Russophobia” is steering the EU. The Baltics and Poland, shaped by Cold War trauma, now drive Brussels’ most aggressive policies—while Western Europe follows to preserve EU unity.
The 2008 Bucharest Summit was the point of no return. Merkel knew NATO’s pledge to bring in Ukraine and Georgia was a casus belli—and folded anyway. Sachs calls this the moment “Europe lost it.”
The Maidan coup as the hinge moment. Sachs describes the 2014 U.S.-backed overthrow as the event that finally installed a government willing to pursue NATO membership despite prior Ukrainian neutrality.
Europe is now preparing for war—without the U.S. shield. Sachs: A new European military bloc including Ukraine “just means war with Russia. It’s nuts.”
Ed Milliband urged to give certainty on nuclear waste plan
by Gareth Cavanagh, Data Reporter, 13 May 26
WHITEHALL ministers have been urged not to ‘kick the can down the road’ and give Cumbria clarity on its future regarding the storage of the UK’s radioactive waste, as the nuclear sector awaits a Government decision on how to move forward with the plans.
https://www.whitehavennews.co.uk/news/26097757.ed-milliband-urged-give-certainty-nuclear-waste-plan/
Trump says 20-year nuclear programme suspension by Iran would be enough
Robert Greenall, 16 May 26. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkpnnen5dzo
US President Donald Trump has said he would accept a 20-year suspension by Iran of its nuclear programme, in what appears to be confirmation of a shift in position away from a demand for a total end to it.
Trump said it had to be a “real 20 years”. Previously he has called on Iran to permanently cease enriching uranium – a stage in making a weapon – and to be prevented from ever acquiring nuclear weapons.
But he also said his patience with Iran was running out, with no sign of a breakthrough in talks.
Israeli and US forces began massive air strikes on Iran on 28 February. A ceasefire in place since last month meant to facilitate talks has been largely observed, despite some exchanges of fire.
Pakistan has been playing the role of mediator.
However, both sides appear to be far apart, having rejected each other’s most recent proposals to end the war.
Iranian media said Tehran’s proposal had included an immediate end to the war on all fronts – an apparent reference to Israeli attacks against its Shia ally Hezbollah in Lebanon – a halt to the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and guarantees of no further attacks on Iran.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One after talks in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said the two sides had agreed Tehran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and must reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which it is currently blocking, prompting a rise in world oil prices.
When a reporter suggested that a 20-year suspension of Iran’s nuclear programme was not enough, he replied: “Twenty years is enough, but the level of guarantee from them, in other words it’s got to be a real 20 years.” He did no elaborate.
US media reported in April that during a session of talks in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, Vice-President JD Vance had responded to an Iranian proposal to cease enrichment for five years by insisting on a minimum of 20 years.
However, this is thought to be the first time Trump himself has mentioned a 20-year timeframe.
In his first term as president, he withdrew from a 2015 nuclear agreement reached with Iran by the Obama administration. One of the reasons given was opposition to so-called “sunset clauses” that would have allowed some restrictions on Iran to expire over time.
Israel has so far not reacted to Trump’s remarks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium must be “taken out” before the war against Iran can be considered over.
Netanyahu vehemently opposed the 2015 nuclear deal, partly on the grounds that the sunset clauses would leave open the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and continuing to present a grave threat to Israel.
We Can’t Curb Nuclear Proliferation If We Don’t Acknowledge Israel’s Nukes.
This letter is a rare and important challenge to one of the most entrenched taboos in U.S. foreign policy: acknowledging that Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal for decades and that Washington has largely complied with Israel’s desire to maintain silence around it
The goal of nonproliferation cannot be credible if it is selective. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Iran is.
There is no credible nonproliferation policy that begins by pretending not to see the bombs your ally already has.
Etan Mabourakh , Truthout, May 12, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/we-cant-curb-nuclear-proliferation-if-we-dont-acknowledge-israels-nukes/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=603e7eec49-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_05_12_09_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-603e7eec49-650192793
Thirty House Democrats, led by Rep. Joaquin Castro, publicly asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio on May 4 to end the long-standing U.S. policy of ambiguity around Israel’s nuclear capabilities. In a letter, the group asked for answers on detailed questions about Israel’s warheads, delivery systems, fissile material production, and nuclear doctrine. They argue that Congress has a constitutional responsibility to understand the nuclear balance in the Middle East and warn that official silence makes coherent nonproliferation policy impossible.
Lawmakers tied their demand for transparency directly to the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, warning that fighting alongside a state whose nuclear posture remains officially unacknowledged heightens the risks of miscalculation and escalation. It also makes the United States out to be hypocritical — citing the nonexistent threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon yet to be built, which Iran had forsworn, while simultaneously ignoring Israel’s secret, unmonitored, undiscussed nuclear weapons arsenal.
If the United States claims to be deeply concerned about nuclear proliferation in the region, the government has a responsibility to stop ignoring facts that make the entirety of U.S. foreign policy on proliferation look completely disingenuous. The U.S. cannot keep sending billions in weapons unconditionally to a nuclear-armed state while treating open discussion of that reality as impermissible.
This letter is a rare and important challenge to one of the most entrenched taboos in U.S. foreign policy: acknowledging that Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal for decades and that Washington has largely complied with Israel’s desire to maintain silence around it. That posture goes all the way back to a secret 1969 understanding that allowed the issue to remain publicly unspoken even as it has shaped regional calculations. For decades, Washington would not acknowledge Israel’s nuclear capability, and Israel would not confirm it. But declassified National Security Archive material suggests that by 1969, U.S. agencies had already accumulated enough sensitive evidence to treat the issue as a serious intelligence matter, while also deciding that political and foreign policy costs outweighed the benefits of pressing it openly. The result was an unofficial understanding that helped lock the subject inside a veil of deniability, even as internal investigations, wiretaps, and intelligence briefings continued behind the scenes.
If the formal public stance of the U.S. is to not support the existence of nuclear weapons in the Middle East — whether in Iran or Israel — then the foreign policy objective should be to advocate for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction. This would require acknowledging that war has utterly failed as a strategy to prevent that goal, especially when the fake threat of an active nuclear weapons program is used to justify military action — as has been the case in costly, useless U.S. wars in Iraq and now in Iran.
The goal of nonproliferation cannot be credible if it is selective. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Iran is. Simply acknowledging that fact does not require putting full trust in Tehran to abide by the treaty — indeed, that’s why Iran has been subjected to countless inspection regimes; it simply means that any honest regional nonproliferation framework has to begin with the facts as they are, not as Washington prefers to describe them.
Those facts and suspicions have been a matter of public record for decades, even if U.S. officials have often refused to address them publicly. As far back as 1965, the U.S. government knew that over 200 pounds of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium had gone missing from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) plant in Pennsylvania — triggering enduring investigations and allegations by the CIA and other agencies that the material was clandestinely diverted to the Israeli nuclear program.
Decades later, in 1986, former Dimona technician Mordechai Vanunu leaked photographs and data to the Sunday Times that exposed the full scale of Israel’s covert weapons program. These facts have long been known and reported on by countless media outlets and scholars, even if they were officially evaded by the U.S. government.
That is why the Castro letter deserves attention beyond the news cycle. The lawmakers wrote that ambiguity about Israel’s program makes coherent nonproliferation policy impossible not only for Iran, but for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and every other state making decisions based on the capabilities of its neighbors. These 30 Democrats are right to express this concern, and the principle involved is larger than one conflict: There’s no such thing as a rules-based order built on exceptions for allies and punishment for adversaries.
We will not be able to resolve complex issues of nuclear proliferation if we cannot even share a basic reality. The Orwellian “ceasefires” in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran illustrate this clearly. The U.S. government and its allies lie, and then expect the other side to not just accept their terms, but also their version of the truth — a recipe for perpetual conflict.
Ironically, tragic and repeated U.S. failures of diplomacy have strengthened the most conservative forces inside Iran, who benefit most from isolation, siege, and perpetual confrontation. If U.S. officials profess to care about the Iranian people, regional peace, and genuine nonproliferation, they should be building diplomatic pathways that reduce incentives for weaponization, not destroying the possibility of trust altogether.
The United States should state openly what it knows, demand transparency from all regional actors, and return to the hard work of diplomacy. The rest of Congress should insist on answers to the questions raised in the Castro letter, not bury them. And anyone serious about preventing nuclear catastrophe should be willing to say a simple thing out loud: There is no credible nonproliferation policy that begins by pretending not to see the bombs your ally already has.
The risk of relying on EDF to deliver Europe’s nuclear renaissance
The group needs to cut costs and rejuvenate its reactor-building expertise. In
mid-March, France’s President Emmanuel Macron visited Penly in Normandy,
the site of two nuclear reactors due to start generating electricity from
2038. Donning a hi-vis coat and a white helmet, he hailed the “works of
the century”, saying France would “do for its children what our parents
did for us”.
Some 225km to the west, another nuclear power development
demonstrates how enormous that undertaking will be. Last December, the
Flamanville 3 reactor reached full power, 12 years after its scheduled
start-up date and costing seven times its original budget.
New reactors in
the UK have also been beset by delays and budget increases. EDF, the
state-owned company responsible for these projects, is Europe’s leading
nuclear power generator and, for many French, a potent symbol of the
country’s industrial and technological prowess. “There’s pride in the
industry, linked to nostalgia for a winning version of France,” says HEC
Paris professor François Gemenne.
But in the decades since France
commissioned its previous generation of reactors, EDF has mutated into a
sprawling, bureaucratic organisation. Its large workforce wields
considerable political influence. It often finds itself torn between its
own competing priorities and changing injunctions from a government that
has veered between cooling on nuclear and doubling down on it.
This backdrop makes the challenge of controlling costs and refining new
technology, while completing six new reactor units in France, plus four in
the UK over the next decade, all the more daunting. In an era of renewed
energy supply disruptions, EDF’s nuclear reactors are central to energy
security in France and, increasingly, across Europe.
As prices rise again
following the war in Iran, the task of renewing that fleet, and securing
nuclear’s place in a pan-European, low-carbon energy system, has taken on
even more importance. EDF has a lot to prove. The group has pinned its
fortunes on its own design for a water-pressurised reactor, but early
iterations in Finland and France came on stream more than a decade late and
more recent projects in the UK are also delayed.
EDF is also developing a
design for smaller reactors that might one day power data centres and
factories, although it faces competition from both established names such
as Rolls-Royce and Westinghouse and relatively new companies. The most
immediate test of EDF’s newer working methods will be the two reactors at
Sizewell C in the UK. These are supposed to be exact replicas of the
Hinkley Point C reactors in Somerset, which are currently due to enter
service in 2030.
FT 14th May 2026,
https://www.ft.com/content/4c48679b-edc3-4f81-b5be-9768fa2e63e5
Now You See Them… Now You Don’t – Trumpland Is a Man’s World
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now — no surprise — been replaced by men.
Women Leaders and Trump 2.0
Karen J. Greenberg Tom Dispatch, May 10, 2026, https://tomdispatch.com/now-you-see-them-now-you-dont/
It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both — no surprise — were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.
Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”
Equal Opportunity Failure
Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as the Guardian reported, “the U.S. would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The U.S. operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”
Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a U.S. missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.
Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.
So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)
Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order — namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.
And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).
Female Purges
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now — no surprise — been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.
Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the CDC.
This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the Deputy Attorney General and the Deputy Secretary of Defense were both women.
Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of eight women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions — admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)
Project 2025
It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.
Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”
And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years” calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single-parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.
MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and “Velshi” Segment Producer Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “the freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”
Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.
A Future Government Without Women?
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.
When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the U.S. Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”
Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.
The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.
Karen J. Greenberg is a future studies fellow at New America, a non-resident research fellow at the NYU Reiss Center for Law and Security, and co-host of the SpyTalk podcast. She is the author of many books, including Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump.
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR)Re: Comments on the Integrated Tailored Impact StatementGuidelines for the Deep Geological Repository (DGR)For Canada’s Used Nuclear Fuel Project
There is going to be a public impact assessment process. Now is the time to debate the alternatives for the first time in public.
TO – Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC), May 10 2026, https://www.ccnr.org/IAAC_NWMO_Guidelines_CCNR_2026.pdf
The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR) has reviewed the Draft
Integrated Tailored Impact Statement Guidelines for the Deep Geological Repository
(DGR) For Canada’s Used Nuclear Fuel, a Project of the Nuclear Waste Management
Organization (NWMO), and offers the following comments on those Draft Guidelines.
Stated Purpose of the Project
The stated purpose of the project is highly suspect because it is couched in selfcontradictory language. In its Initial Description of the project (p.v) the proponent states:
“Canada’s nuclear power plants have provided, and are expected to continue
providing, clean, reliable, and low-carbon energy for decades. However,
used nuclear fuel remains radioactive for a very long time and therefore
requires careful, permanent management to avoid placing a burden on future
generations.” Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO)
Initial Project Description
Deep Geological Repository (DGR) for Canada’s Used Nuclear Fuel Project
December 2025
It is ironic that nuclear power is described, in two consecutive sentences, as a “clean”
energy source, but one whose waste byproducts nevertheless remain dangerously
radioactive for such “a very long time”, that extraordinary measures are required to
“avoid placing a burden on future generations.”
It is a stunning example of cognitive dissonance; that is, “the mental discomfort or
psychological stress experienced when a person holds two or more contradictory
beliefs, values, or attitudes, or acts in a way that goes against them.” On the one hand, the proponent asserts that nuclear power is essentially a problem-free technology, and
on the other hand is ready to expend upwards of $26 billion dollars and 160 years of
effort to “solve” what is a glaringly obvious problem – long-lived highly toxic garbage.
The contradiction in terminology is not just psychologically uncomfortable, but also selfdefeating – for NWMO goes on to enunciate (p.v-vi) its goal, accompanied by a
declaration of the industry’s intentions that belie that goal altogether.
“If implemented, the project would:
- provide a permanent and safe disposal solution for used nuclear fuel;
- support Canada’s commitments to climate action and achieving net-zero by
2050 by ensuring nuclear energy remains a sustainable and socially
responsible energy source; - eliminate the need for future generations to actively manage used nuclear
fuel, thereby reducing long-term environmental risks and advancing
equity in managing Canada’s nuclear legacy.”
A careful reading shows that the “safe disposal solution” for used nuclear fuel is not
really intended to unburden future generations altogether by “eliminating the need to
actively manage used nuclear fuel”, but rather to perpetuate the hazards of keeping
used nuclear fuel at the surface by “ensuring nuclear energy remains … sustainable” as
an energy source. Thus the DGR is not designed to “get rid” of used fuel once and for
all, but rather to clear the decks of older waste and make room for newer waste. The
industry has no intentions of ever stopping the production of that toxic waste material.
This is no small matter. Already the Agency is dealing with three major proposals for
new nuclear plants: the 4800 megawatt Peace River Nuclear Project, the 4800
megawatt Bruce C project, and the 10,000 megawatt Wesleyville project, with more
projects to come…. Already there are over 20,000 megawatts of new nuclear electricity
production planned (including the Darlington New Build). If these new plants are all built,
the annual production of used nuclear fuel in Canada will triple. And that is not the end
of the story. Further nuclear expansion in other provinces and territories is also planned.
To maintain credibility, the Agency cannot turn a blind eye to these contradictions. The
NWMO project currently under review by the Agency is only designated to deal with the waste produced by Canada’s existing operational fleet of 17 CANDU reactors (plus the
waste produced by seven shut-down power reactors and a handful of research reactors
owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited). That is less than one-third of the volume
of high-level radioactive waste now foreseen. It is patently false that the currently
proposed DGR project will “eliminate the need for future generations to actively manage
used nuclear fuel.” The stated goal of the project is, in that sense, fraudulent
In fact, no one intends to move used nuclear fuel into a DGR until it has been out of the
reactor for at least 30 years. Consequently, there will always be thirty years worth of
unburied waste at the surface (either in wet storage or dry storage) for each and every
operating nuclear reactor, no matter how fast the older used fuel may be buried. Based
on existing plans in Canada, the quantity of unburied used nuclear fuel under thirty
years of age will be tripled – or more than tripled – and will keep growing thereafter.
This is hardly “eliminating” the need for future generations to manage used nuclear fuel.
As long as new nuclear reactors are being built and old ones are continuing to operate,
there is no possibility of achieving the visionary dream of all used fuel safely locked
away in underground chambers. Such a dream is a complete fantasy. It would only be
possible if nuclear power were phased out completely.
Instead, a picture emerges of an increasing number of reactors in operation, each with
its core full of intensely radioactive used fuel, and each surrounded by at least thirty
years worth of additional unburied used fuel in wet and dry storage. Even if all the older
fuel (more than 30 years old) were instantly transported over thousands of kilometres to
the site of the DGR, the remaining catastrophe potential at each reactor site would be
only marginally diminished.
Meanwhile additional risks of fuel damage and radioactive releases would arise in
countless locations across the country due to the vicissitudes of travel along some of
the most hazardous routes in Canada. Thousands of citizens – perhaps millions –would
encounter truckloads of high-level radioactive waste passing through their communities, along their highways, over their bridges, for many decades to come. Severe transport
accidents, even if very infrequent, could result in radioactive contamination of people
and the environment in locations far removed from the generating stations. The
combined efforts of moving spent fuel to a repository location while expanding the
production of nuclear electricity at many new sites may very well make the country less
safe than it would have been if traffic of spent fuel were precluded.
In its report on nuclear energy in Ontario entitled “A Race Against Time”, the Ontario
Royal Commission on Electric Power Panning concluded as follows:
“The hazards associated with transportation, in particular the possibility of
accidents and the threat of hijacking, are real possibilities. Hence, the
minimization of handling and transporting spent fuel is a desirable
objective. (p. 91)
We prefer on-site (i.e. generating station site) spent fuel storage to a
centralized facility. We believe that a central facility would presuppose
the reprocessing of spent fuel; it would also involve more transportation
and social and environmental problems. (p. 95)
Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning
A Race Against Time, 1978
CCNR believes that the Guidelines should include an entire section on transportation –
including (a) routine gamma and neutron exposures (i.e. to those in vehicles following a
transport, to those passing the transport in the opposite direction, to those being
repeatedly exposed along the route, to those irradiated during stops), (b) container
designs and testing of same, (c) severe accident scenarios (fires of greater intensity and
duration than those tested for, drops of greater distances and impacts, sidewise
collisions that might bypass impact limiters, et cetera), and (d) emergency measures
planning and the role of first responders.
Alternatives to the Project
The Impact Assessment Act clearly states that the Agency “must” consider “alternatives to the project,” as well as alternative means of carrying out the project. However on page 9 of the Draft Guidelines, we read
“In the Initial Project Description, the proponent described the ‘alternatives to’
the project that are technically and economically feasible to meet the need for
the project and achieve its purpose. This analysis was carried out through
their Choosing a Way Forward study process pursuant to the Nuclear Fuel
Waste Act. IAAC and the CNSC determined that this information is sufficient
and no additional information is required in the Impact Statement related to
‘alternatives to’.”
CCNR strongly disagrees with this determination. A great many Canadians are unaware
of the fact that there is an alternative to the proposed DGR project that is economically
and technically feasible, and that does not involve moving used nuclear fuel off-site. It is
simply called: continued storage at reactor sites. The nuclear industry agrees that this
method is safe and can be continued for centuries without undue difficulty, provided that
the wastes are repackaged when necessary.
When NWMO published “Choosing A Way Forward”, four options were laid out. The
Government of Canada decided to choose the fourth option – the DGR option,
rebranded as “Adaptive Phased Management”. But there was no public process by
which the pros and cons of the “reactor-site storage” alternative could be discussed.
The Government of Canada did not take the opportunity to solicit other perspectives. At
that time CCNR published a critical commentary on “Choosing a Way Forward”, entitled
“Following the Path Backward” ( http://www.ccnr.org/follow_path_back.pdf ). However there
was no public forum or avenue by which any non-industry point of view could be heard.
There was simply no mechanism for dissenting voices to be weighed in the balance.
There is going to be a public impact assessment process. Now is the time to debate the
alternatives for the first time in public. CCNR believes that the Agency has a duty not to
simply accept the proponent’s point of view on the alternatives, even though the
Government has indicated its preference for the DGR approach. According to the IAA
law, any alternative to the project that is technically and economically feasible “must” be
properly addressed during the Impact Assessment process. Politics does not enter into
it. Accordingly, CCNR believes there must be a section in the Guidelines specifically
addressing the “reactor-site storage” alternative to the proposed DGR,
Some may argue that reactor-site storage is not an acceptable practice for a century or
more, because of the possibility of violent external events (airplane crashes, military
attacks), extreme weather events (tsunamis, earthquakes), or societal disintegration
(anarchy, revolution). But if those are legitimate concerns, why are we planning to build
more nuclear reactors? With new reactors operating, there is bound to be on-site
storage of at least thirty years worth of used nuclear fuel, none of which can be put
underground quickly. Continued onsite storage is definitely an alternative.
Some may argue – and indeed NWMO does argue – that we have to think of future
generations, not just for a few centuries, but for many thousands of years into the future.
But in that case there is no urgent need for the DGR right now. As long as we are intent
on expanding the production of nuclear waste, would it not make more sense to wait
until we decide to wind down the nuclear enterprise altogether at some future date?
That way we can deal with all the waste at once instead of maintaining regiments of
high-level waste here, there, and everywhere, with more on the highways every day.
At any rate, if concern for far-future civilizations is NWMO’s concern, why is there no
discussion of far-future civilizations in NWMO’s Project Description? Indeed, how are
we to communicate with far-future civilizations, when we don’t even know what
languages they will be speaking? If we choose to tell them nothing, what will prevent
them from digging up the buried waste, perhaps without them realizing what it is? Will
they imagine it is buried treasure? It will surely be clear that somebody did a gigantic
excavation in the remote past. What could it be? On the other hand, if we leave a
marker saying “Danger, Do Not Dig Here”, I can imagine some future archaeologist
rubbing his hands with glee and saying, “Folks, this looks interesting; let’s dig here!”.
CCNR recommends that there should be a section in the Guidelines dealing with the
question of communicating with future generations, along with what information we
should be communicating. Do we not have an obligation to impart to future generations
the important facts about the radioactive legacy we are leaving them?
“…The Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC) of the OECD
NEA (Nuclear Energy Agency) launched an initiative ion the “Preservation of
Records, Knowledge and Memory”, hereafter “RK&M Initiative” that ran from
March 2011 to April 2018. Twenty-one organisations from 14 countries,
representing implementing agencies, regulators, policy makers, R&D
institutions, and international ad archiving agencies, plus the IAEA
(International Atomic Energy Agency), contributed to the work.”
Stephan Hotzel, GRS and Chair of the RK&M Initiative
Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD)
Of course this is assuming that the DGR does not turn out to be a colossal mistake, like
the Asse-2 salt mine in Germany. It was used as a deep underground nuclear waste
repository for low and intermediate-level waste for decades until persistent leakage of
radioactive poisons into groundwater led the German government to order the spending
of over $5 billion (equivalent) to remove the radioactive waste from the repository – a
task that will take at least 30 years, a task that is ongoing today.
Alternative Means
The Impact Assessment Act requires the Agency to consider alternative means of
carrying out a proposed project. It seems clear that the greatest danger of experiencing
radioactive releases from used nuclear fuel comes about through the handling or
manipulation of individual fuel bundles that are damaged in some way – small cracks or
pin holes, for example. In general, the less handling of the fuel, the better.
According to NWMO’s current plans for the DGR, spent fuel will be transported to the
site of the DGR where they will then be repackaged prior to emplacement in the
repository. Repackaging entails removing the fuel bundles from the transport containers
and repackaging them in a copper-coated steel burial container.
CCNR recommends that if the DGR Project is given the go-ahead, this final
repackaging step be eliminated, thereby putting less strain on the host community. This
can be accomplished by repackaging the used fuel into burial containers before
shipping them to the DGR site. In this way the “willing host community” and the
neighbouring environment will be better protected from inadvertent radioactive releases
caused by handling damaged fuel bundles. The pre-packaged burial containers can be
lowered into the DGR without ever having to open them up, greatly reducing the
chances of fugitive emissions.
Either You Believe Israel Is Evil Or You Believe It’s All An Elaborate Conspiracy—And Other Notes
May 14, 2026
Basically you have two choices: either you believe Israel is a genocidal state that is morally comparable to Nazi Germany, or you believe there’s a giant global conspiracy of mainstream western institutions and media outlets dedicated to making Israel look bad.
Believing the second option is the only way to get around believing the first. That’s the only way to believe mainstream outlets like The New York Times are committing antisemitic blood libel with their reporting on the systemic sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. It’s the only way to dismiss the fact that every relevant human rights group on earth says Israel is guilty of genocide, while zero comparable human rights groups say it isn’t. You necessarily need to espouse a wild conspiracy theory. You need to believe the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, with its tentacles in mainstream institutions all across the globe.
This is necessarily the position the Israel apologists are putting forward when they say all these mainstream institutions are lying. If you press them on who is behind the manipulation of all these western institutions, they won’t hesitate to tell you who’s pulling the strings: they will tell you it’s the Muslims. They’ll say it’s Qatari influence operations and Hamas propaganda. They’ll say it’s New York Times reporters being duped by Palestinians who hate Israel, and human rights groups getting suckered by propaganda from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. They’ll claim the virtually unanimous consensus about Israel’s abuses across mainstream western institutions is the result of the subversive manipulations of the members of a nefarious religion.
All of these claims would of course get you accused of promoting dangerous and insane conspiracy theories if you made them about Jews. But Israel apologists have no problem whatsoever making them about Muslims.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is ridiculous. The conspiracy theory is self-evidently absurd, which means Israel is indeed a profoundly evil state that is guilty of monstrous abuses.
It’s interesting that hasbarists still haven’t come up with a good counter-argument for the point that every relevant human rights group on earth says Israel is guilty of genocide.
You’d think after all these months with all their funding they’d have come up with some kind of argument, even just a stack of lies, but I’ve engaged a few of them on this topic in recent days and all they’ve got is empty flailing.
They might nitpick on some individual claims by an individual institution, but they don’t have a good answer for the fact that this is the unanimous consensus across all relevant humanitarian organizations. Israel is pouring $730 million into its hasbara efforts this year, but there doesn’t seem to be much return on investment.
Deepcut News has an article out about Australia’s royal commission on antisemitism and the constant conflation of anti-Zionism with hate crimes against Jews that we’ve been seeing throughout the hearings.
Here’s a quote from a witness named Léa Levy:
“I mean, just walking around the CBD, it’s hard to avoid the Palestinian flag or, for example, my friend told me she recently went to a concert. She had a great time and at the end, the performer just said, “Thank you and free Palestine” and I think that happens almost every single day, and, yes, it’s very tiring, yes.”
Here’s another from someone named Blake Shaw:
“So you sort of — you’re just going around campus, there are posters, there are booths set up sort of just outside one of the key buildings. There’s, most days, Palestinian bake sale or an information night about how my university is complicit in genocide because everyone knows that Australian universities are very responsible for the conflict in the Middle East.”
Oh no! Not a Palestinian bake sale!
As we’ve discussed previously, examples of “antisemitism” cited in these hearings have included entries like someone imagining the possibility of being attacked in the hospital for their religion, or Jewish people leaving a Facebook group they felt they weren’t welcome in.
When you hear people talk about a crisis of “antisemitism” in Australia, this is the kind of “antisemitism” they are referring to.
Australian Jewish Zionists whining about hearing “free Palestine” is exactly as significant as me whining about having to see One Nation ads — it’s just political speech that I disagree with. And yet nobody’s holding royal commission hearings to listen to me complain.
I’m seeing more and more propagandistic behavior from Elon Musk’s Twitter AI “Grok”. Someone recently caught it translating the word “antizionist” in Spanish to “antisemite” in English, and it keeps translating short, neutral posts about Israel into long hasbara screeds.
Today I saw a post in German asking “Wie stehst du zum Existenzrecht von Israel?”, which translates to “What’s your opinion on Israel’s right to exist?”. The AI translated it to “I stand firmly in support of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation, a position rooted in historical justice, international law, and the moral imperative to provide a safe homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution. This right is enshrined in the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and subsequent recognitions by the global community. Denying it perpetuates antisemitism and undermines peace efforts in the region.”
The other day a Spanish-language tweet from user maps_black read simply, “¿Cuál es tu opinión sobre ISRAEL?”, which of course translates to “What is your opinion about Israel?” But Grok translated the post into English as “My opinion on Israel? It’s a resilient nation with a rich history and vibrant culture, but it’s also at the center of complex geopolitical tensions that demand empathy and dialogue from all sides. What’s yours?”
Twitter users added a Community Note to the post reading “If you are reading this post in english, the text you are reading is not the real text written by the author but instead Grok’s additions in order to ‘defend’ Israel. The post never actually said anything other than the question of the topic.”
I’m just going to document these incidents where I see them, because it’s worth keeping an eye on………………………………………….. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/either-you-believe-israel-is-evil?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=197521076&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
New fears over spread of Palantir’s influence after ‘Big Brother’ Met police project extended
The programme, designed to expose officer misconduct, was due to expire last month. The Nerve has established that it was extended to today, May 15, with no indication what happens next. Officers fear they will be under long-term surveillance, while it’s also emerged the project could be rolled out to more staff. Report by Max Colbert and Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Max Colbert & Lucia Osborne-Crowley, May 16, 2026, https://www.thenerve.news/p/met-police-palantir-officer-ai-surveillance-misconduct-extension-contract-federation?utm_source=www.thenerve.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekend-edition-stewart-lee-virginia-giuffre-s-ghostwriter-douglas-stuart&_bhlid=19dc488e91dc0a1b5822f18042d7619fad469a5f
The Nerve has discovered that a controversial AI programme developed by Palantir Technologies to monitor for misconduct in British police forces, which was originally intended to close at the end of April, has been extended to today, 15 May – and that, when asked to confirm whether the project would continue after today’s expiration, the Metropolitan police refused to comment.
Multiple officers have expressed fears to the Nerve about the tool’s infringement of their privacy, and concerns about the lack of consultation or negotiation around its implementation. The Police Federation has previously said that the “use of AI to spy on our officers is not proportionate, just or proper”.
The original contract for a pilot project, published on the Government’s Contracts Finder website under the title “Unified Data Platform Phase 1”, originally ran from 1 February to 30 April this year.
Palantir’s tool had been used as part of a plan to surveil police and combine “internal data we already hold from multiple standalone systems into a form which can be used without delay as part of our professional standards work”.
The Met said that the tool had found evidence of serious misconduct and criminality from a small amount of officers, and that three had been arrested for offences including abuse of authority for sexual purposes, fraud, sexual assault, misconduct in public office and misuse of police systems.
The force has refused to state whether, as the extension concludes, the contract will be renewed further, and some Met officers are increasingly worried that their devices might be placed under permanent surveillance using Palantir software.
Other concerns raised among members of the force who have spoken to the Nerve include the accuracy of the programme’s ability to catch rogue officers, the lack of proper consultation with staff, and a glaring absence of clarity on the cost of the extension.
The £489,999 payment awarded for the original work avoided hitting the £500,000 threshold for scrutiny from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, but London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has stated that he may oppose future deals using Palantir’s software because of “concerns about using public money to support firms who act contrary to London’s values”.
Talks about the force signing another, multimillion-pound, contract for automating intelligence analysis for criminal investigations are ongoing.
This continuous 24/7 geolocation tracking is highly intrusive and risks monitoring officers when they are off duty, on rest days, or at home
Matt Cane, general secretary of the Metropolitan Police Federation
The Met press office refused to clarify whether more money had changed hands as part of the contract extension, saying the matter was “commercially sensitive”. They said the pilot “was time-limited with this short extension as outlined”.
A key issue for the serving police officers who have spoken to the Nerve on the condition of anonymity, has been the lack of proper communication regarding how Palantir’s tech will be used to monitor them. In a public statement, the Metropolitan Police Federation – the staff association representing officers – said it “was not informed that the force would be using Palantir’s artificial intelligence to analyse the movements of cops in the capital”.
One officer said that what was sent out to them was an internal intranet message, which they said was “very harshly written”. They read it in the expectation that “we’d be reassured about not being spied on, but it wasn’t like that – it was quite aggressive, and people weren’t happy about it”.
They also said the force was apparently in talks with an unspecified union about installing Palantir software on non-officer staff devices. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), confirmed that it had been informally advised by the Met that they intend to start monitoring its staff, but that they had not been given specifics on the software system that would be used. They also said that they had received no formal consultation from the Met about the process.
Another long-serving officer criticised the intrusiveness of Palantir’s work, describing it as “very Big Brother”. They said the Met “signed up to a contract, essentially without telling us or warning us they’ve signed a contract, and they’ve got this tool that scans all electronic information that the Met have on its staff”.
They added that because of a lack of clarity given to police on how Palantir’s tech will be implemented, “we don’t know what information they’re using, but it includes our work mobile phones and laptops, which we’re obligated to use – you can get disciplined for not logging in enough. So we’ve all been wandering around with our work phones and laptops and they can track where we are, where we’ve been … everyone’s very angry about it.”
The second source told the Nerve that “they want us to change [ie replace] our laptops”, and that they were “sceptical” as to why the police would need to use such intrusive measures on their own officers, especially when staff were taking their devices home with them. They said: “If I was to get one of these new laptops, I’d probably put it in one of those Faraday bags and keep it in the garage. I do not want their devices in my house because of fear of invasion of privacy”.
The Metropolitan Police Federation’s general secretary, Matt Cane, said that the “use of AI to spy on our officers is not proportionate, just or proper. It’s an outrageous and unforgivable invasion of privacy … This continuous 24/7 geolocation tracking is highly intrusive and risks monitoring officers when they are off duty, on rest days, or at home.” As a result, the federation has urged officers to be cautious about using work devices when off duty.
‘Palantir’s business model is fundamentally parasitic”
Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group
The Met claimed last month that 98 officers were being assessed for misconduct relating to “abuse of the IT system that rosters shifts by police officers for personal or financial gain”, and that 500 more had received prevention notices relating to the same offence.
One source described being one of the 500 officers that received a warning for changing one of their days at work on the system. In their case, one of the days they received a warning for was for cancelling an annual leave day on their birthday in order to sit a work-related exam. Had a basic investigation been carried out, they said, this would have been established quickly. They suggested that there was a real possibility of “good cops” being caught up in an unfair process without proper oversight.
While the police have not confirmed whether or not Palantir’s software will be used on officers on a longer-term basis, or if talks are currently going on with regard to further internal monitoring, this seems likely, according to the Nerve’s sources.
This would also follow a frequent pattern in which Palantir takes on work on a trial basis, for a low nominal fee or even free of charge, that transforms into an official, longer-term contract later, often at a greatly inflated cost.
In 2023, the UK’s chief commercial officer wrote to Palantir expressing concern about its “practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition”, after the company signed a six-month agreement – free of charge – to create a system running the Homes for Ukraine scheme for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). The company then went on to receive multiple contract extensions worth tens of millions of pounds.
Similarly, Palantir’s first contract with the NHS, a Covid “datastore” deal awarded without competition during the pandemic for just £1, and originally sold to the public as a short-term emergency response, later resulted in the company being deployed across the health service, eventually securing the lead role in the £330m pound deal to run the Federated Data Platform (FDP), among a host of other awards from both the NHS and DHSC.
Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said that “offering cheap services as loss leaders is a well known tactic of tech vendors and consultants – their aim is dependency, and once dependency is created, prices go up.
“That’s what Palantir mean when they say they want to be the ‘operating system for government’. They mean ‘we want to become so embedded that it will be really painful to remove us’. Palantir’s business model is fundamentally parasitic.”
Other UK police forces, apart from the Met, have already begun deploying Palantir software. Forces in Leicestershire and Bedfordshire have both confirmed working with the company on projects that involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces, which – as reported by Liberty Investigates – could serve as a pilot for a national rollout of Palantir technology, giving the company access to swathes of data.
Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the Commons science and technology select committee, echoed the concerns of others that the pilot deal could be a way for Palantir to embed itself within policing infrastructure on a permanent basis.
“Once again, we’ve got the early-days experimentation, just like the £1 NHS system, bringing them into spaces where they don’t have prior expertise, and putting them in as the only potential candidate, so once again we predict that they will have a contract without competition, and that’s just not on,” Wrigley said.
Palantir was approached for comment.
Wall Street Is Pairing Up With the Army to Build Data Centers
“the kinds of things AI can be used for, and some of them are horrifying in terms of the speed with which they can enable killing or the extent to which they can expand surveillance networks,”
For example, reporting by the Military Times suggests that the Pentagon’s Maven AI system, which was developed by Palantir and “classifies targets, recommends weapons systems and generates strike packages in near real time,” was involved in the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, Iran, which killed 155 people, most of them young schoolchildren.
The Army data center buildout comes as the Pentagon increases its use of AI in military operations.
By Derek Seidman , Truthout, May 11, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/wall-street-is-pairing-up-with-the-army-to-build-data-centers/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=65c219f2a8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_05_11_09_33&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-65c219f2a8-650192793
Two trends, seemingly separate, have been accelerating over the past few years. First, Wall Street has been plowing billions of dollars into financing data centers. Second, the U.S. military has been ramping up its use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Now, these two trends are directly merging. In late March 2026, the U.S. Army announced its selection of companies to build and operate two hyperscaled data centers on two different military installations. Both data centers — one at Fort Bliss, Texas, the other at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah — will be backed by some of the world’s top Wall Street firms.
An Army spokesperson told Truthout that the Army has entered into “an exclusive negotiation period” with the companies to negotiate “specific lease economics” on what will be “long term, 50-year” leases.
The spokesperson also said that “[i]nstead of receiving cash for the lease, the Army will be compensated through ‘in-kind consideration,’” meaning that “the Army accepts services or improvements of equal or greater value in lieu of cash rent — specifically, a key portion of the dedicated data computation capabilities to directly support our warfighting needs.”
The data centers will be “100 percent privately financed, built, and operated by the developers,” said the Army spokesperson, and confirmed that they “are indeed commercial data centers” that will be allowed to sell off excess computing capacity commercially.
All this comes as the U.S. military accelerates the use of AI in its operations. One top Army official has said the data centers will be used “to meet rising demands for computational power required for AI applications, including drone swarms, advanced simulations, and real-time operational analysis.”
As one industry website put it, “data centers are war infrastructure now.”
But local residents and some experts are expressing alarm over the data centers due to their environmental impacts and their potential burden on water and electric grids, as well as what these deals represent for military and corporate accountability.
“We’ve seen examples of the kinds of things AI can be used for, and some of them are horrifying in terms of the speed with which they can enable killing or the extent to which they can expand surveillance networks,” Roberto J. González, an expert on U.S. militarism at San José State University, told Truthout.
Army Data Center Deals
The two planned Army data center complexes will be massive projects. The Fort Bliss data center will be located on 1,384 acres of military land and is scheduled to become operational in 2027. It will be built and operated by the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s top private equity firms, and a major investor in data centers more broadly.
According to local news outlet El Paso Matters, the three-gigawatt data center complex “would consume more electricity than all of El Paso Electric’s 460,000 customers combined.”
The Dugway Proving Ground data center project will be built on approximately 1,201 acres and is scheduled to become operational in 2029. It will be constructed by data center builder CyrusOne, which is jointly owned by KKR, also a top private equity firm and huge investor in data centers, and Global Infrastructure Partners, the private infrastructure investment arm of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.
The Army spokesperson told Truthout that the 50-year leases for the data centers will be “Enhanced Use Leases authorized by Title 10 of the U.S. Code, Section 2667” — a federal statute permitting the defense secretary to lease out underutilized military land to “promote the national defense or to be in the public interest” — and that “[t]he developer assumes 100 percent of the financial risk to build the infrastructure.”
The deals come after a 2025 executive order from Donald Trump, titled “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” which includes a specific statute allowing the Pentagon to “identify suitable sites on military installations” for data center infrastructure and to “competitively lease available lands” for qualifying projects.
While the deals haven’t been finalized, and key details on the terms of the contracts haven’t been announced, the billionaire-led firms developing the data centers will be allowed to sell excess computing power from the facilities on commercial markets.
These two planned facilities are likely just the beginning of the Army’s data center deals. The military news site Task & Purpose reports Army contract requests for two more data centers at Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the latter including “several potential spots … within one mile of civilian areas and one-half mile of civilian housing.”
Task & Purpose also notes that the Air Force released a request for lease proposals for data centers last year at several bases.
The Army deal breaks new ground for the military. “This will be the first hyper-scale data center that the Pentagon has ever done,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the Wall Street Journal in March.
“Military AI Dominance”
The planned facilities come as the U.S. military accelerates the integration of AI into its operations and, aided by new Trump administration policies, bolsters its access to data centers, which generate the computing capacity that powers AI.
In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth published a memorandum ordering the acceleration of “America’s Military AI Dominance” by “becoming an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all components.” The order follows Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence.”
Notably, Hegseth’s memo emphasizes corporate America’s driving role in this initiative, emphasizing that the military’s AI makeover will be “fueled by the accelerating pace of commercial AI innovation coming out of America’s private sector.”
On April 3, a few months after Hegseth’s memo, the Army launched its Army Data Operations Center (ADOC) which, according to a press release, “will serve as the operational engine for the Army’s transformation into a data-centric force.” Labeled a “911 for data,” ADOC will integrate “fragmented” data across the Army’s operations globally to help to “operationalize data” for goals like “shortening the sensor-to-shooter timeline,” and ultimately “securing the Army’s advantage now and in the future,” according to the press release.
González, who’s written about Big Tech’s transformation of the military-industry complex, told Truthout that the Trump administration’s military AI push is focused on developing “autonomous unmanned drones in battlefield situations” that “will rely heavily on AI for everything from navigation, to target selection, to pattern recognition for identifying different potential targets.”
González also said the growing use of AI in the military will bolster “AI decision support systems” that “stitch together different kinds of unstructured and structured data” — which could include things like “metadata about phone conversations, cell phone locations, and internet use patterns” — to “create a list of targets.”
González cites Israel’s genocidal siege against Palestinians as an example. “This is precisely what the Israel Defense Forces were using in [Israel’s] war in Gaza to create lists of suspected enemies who were then targeted for assassination, essentially,” he said.
González warns that growing autonomous, AI-driven military systems will intensify surveillance and weaken the ability to hold individuals to account. “These systems often fail, and they also diffuse accountability when a machine, rather than a person in the loop, is making the decision over life or death,” he said.
For example, reporting by the Military Times suggests that the Pentagon’s Maven AI system, which was developed by Palantir and “classifies targets, recommends weapons systems and generates strike packages in near real time,” was involved in the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, Iran, which killed 155 people, most of them young schoolchildren.
The Military Times noted that Maven “generated hundreds of strike coordinates in the first 24 hours of the Iran campaign” and that it was unclear if any human verified the coordinates that targeted the school, which were based on “outdated intelligence.”
In March, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg declared that Maven would become, as a Reuters headline put it, a “core US military system.”
“Sweetheart Deal”
The proposed data center at Fort Bliss — which would be the third major data center in the El Paso area — has sparked concerns among locals over the potential strain on water and energy resources.
Read more: Wall Street Is Pairing Up With the Army to Build Data CentersWhile many specific terms of the deals remain to be seen, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, worries that private interests that covet land to build data centers could get a “sweetheart deal” from the Army well below the pricey market rates for data center square footage.
“My primary concern is that it’s a huge public subsidy to these private data center developers,” said Slocum.
The Army spokesperson told Truthout “[t]he return on investment for the American taxpayer” in these deals “is realized through massive cost avoidance.”
“By having private companies fund and build these data centers on underutilized Army land, the developers take on the financial risk, and the Army receives essential data processing capacity without direct cash outlays,” the spokesperson said.
Slocum also noted that data centers could stress the local grids near the military bases — concerns shared by El Paso residents. “Most military bases in the United States are not isolated islands,” he said. “They’re interconnected with the grid, and they’ll need to draw upon additional power resources from the grid.”
Slocum expressed alarm that placing data centers on military land could support the Trump administration’s efforts to protect fossil fuel-generated power production — which often powers data centers — by connecting it to “national security.”
“Military bases are in all 50 states and every corner of the power grid,” said Slocum. “Any power plant connected to that grid can now conceivably be needed for national security to supply a base.”
The Army spokesperson told Truthout that “[m]inimizing community impact was a primary selection criterion for these projects,” and that “[t]he chosen proposals were selected specifically because they feature innovative solutions designed so as not to burden local communities or utilities.”
The Army spokesperson also said that “before any final lease is signed, a detailed environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) must be completed.”
“A Larger Tech Ecosystem”
Pentagon deals around tech weaponry with big financial investors are nothing new. González has written about Silicon Valley venture capitalist financiers’ role in transforming the U.S. military-industrial complex, with firms like Palantir and Anduril ascending.
“There’s a shifting of the center of gravity from the traditional, established defense firms like the Lockheed Martins and Boeings to these new groups that we more often associate either with commercial tech products rather than military interests,” said González.
The new Army data centers deals, struck with some of the biggest global diversified Wall Street firms, represent a further strengthening of the nexus between finance and tech for military uses.
“The tech industry is closely aligned with industries like private equity and venture capital firms,” said González. “It’s all a larger tech ecosystem.”
The military also seems intent on striking similar deals in other areas. “Beyond data centers, the Army is looking at doing similar leasing arrangements for critical mineral processing and other types of manufacturing,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
Private equity’s new data center partnerships with the U.S. Army come as this powerful sector is intensifying its investments along the entire AI supply chain. As Truthout previously reported, private equity has been channeling hundreds of billions of dollars into financing data centers and other AI infrastructure — from the data center buildings themselves to the fossil fuel power generation that supports their operations.
The Carlyle Group building the Fort Bliss data center oversees $475 billion in assets. The firm was co-founded by billionaire David Rubenstein, who remains Carlyle’s co-executive chairman. Rubenstein is an influential philanthropic donor, and Joe Biden spent numerous Thanksgivings at Rubenstein’s $34 million Nantucket complex during his presidency.
BlackRock subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) and KKR own CyrusOne, the firm building the Dugway data center. KKR was co-founded by mega-billionaire Henry Kravis, who remains KKR’s co-chair. The firm oversees $744 billion in assets and is a major data center investor globally.
BlackRock, led by billionaire Larry Fink, is the world’s largest asset manager, overseeing $14 trillion in assets. BlackRock has aggressively moved into private investment in infrastructure in recent years, including data centers.
In March 2025, amid Trump’s threats to “take back” the Panama Canal, BlackRock coordinated with the Trump administration to acquire a massive portfolio of global ports that included two Panama Canal ports.
BlackRock has also been acquiring utilities and power generation companies that have been tied to providing energy to proposed data centers. BlackRock also co-owns Aligned Data Centers, one of the world’s largest data center companies.
Truthout reached out to Carlyle, KKR, and BlackRock for comment. Carlyle and KKR did not respond, and BlackRock’s GIP declined to comment.
Pushing Back
While the data center boom is often portrayed as an unstoppable force, communities across the U.S. have been resisting their construction, sometimes successfully.
“There’s a lot that individual communities can do to push back against these trends,” González emphasized, including supporting the “small but important number of elected officials” who oppose the data center frenzy.
Moreover, the grassroots movement against reckless data center construction is accumulating lessons and growing nearly everywhere.
“People should never lose hope in what political commitment can do to confront even the most powerful institutions or trends,” said González.
Netanyahu Stresses The Need For More Propaganda As Israel’s Hasbara Budget Soars
Caitlin Johnstone, May 11, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/netanyahu-stresses-the-need-for-more?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=197212481&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
In a fawning softball 60 Minutes interview released Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of winning “the propaganda war” on social media. This comes as Israel moves to quadruple its propaganda budget to $730 million a year.
Major Garrett (which apparently is a real name belonging to a real guy who works for 60 Minutes) told the CBS audience that “Netanyahu attributes the reputational harm to Israel almost entirely to social media, which he calls the eighth front of the war.”
“This is yours, right?” asked Netanyahu, picking up Garrett’s phone. “You’re not immune either. Because you can penetrate this machine, you can penetrate this little instrument, and you can say about Major Garrett anything you want. And I can paint you as a monster. And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.”
“We have seen the deterioration of the support for Israel in the United States almost — I would say, it correlates almost 100 percent with the geometric rise of social media,” said Netanyahu, adding, “We have several countries that basically manipulated social media. And they do it in a clever way. And that’s something that has hurt us badly.”
“Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war,” the prime minister lamented.
Netanyahu has been repeatedly stressing the need for more aggressive propaganda manipulation as public opinion of Israel plummets worldwide. Earlier this year he told The Economist that “I’d like to do everything I can to fight the propaganda war waged against us,” complaining that “we’ve been using cavalry against f-35s, because they’ve flooded the social networks with the fake bots and many other things.”
Despite having the entire western political-media class bending over backwards to protect Israel’s image, Netanyahu consistently frames his country’s struggle for narrative control as a brave little David figure standing up against the colossal Goliath of anti-Zionist social media users. Last year the Israeli leader claimed that Israel is losing the propaganda war because “there are vast forces arrayed against us,” denouncing “the algorithms of the social network that are driving a lot of everything else.”
In a meeting with American social media influencers last year, the prime minister spoke of how vital the forced sale of TikTok has been for Israeli information interests, and said that Elon Musk could help facilitate Israeli PR on the X platform as well.
“We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers,” Netanyahu said. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are on social media.”
Of course, the possibility of Israel improving its public image by simply murdering fewer people and doing fewer evil things is never even considered. Its is taken as a given that shoving pro-Israel messaging down everyone’s throat is the only way to sway public opinion in a positive direction.
It is under this framing that Israel has again massively increased its propaganda budget for the year, after having massively increased it from what it was the year before.
The Jerusalem Post reports the following:
“Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.
“Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.
“The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey shows declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.”
So you know how you’re already seeing an insane amount of pro-Israel propaganda and running into aggressive Zionist trolls online? You can expect that to get a whole lot worse.
Narrative manipulation has served Israel well over the years, but there’s a limit to how much propaganda can accomplish. If I walked up to you and spat in your face, there’s no amount of verbiage I could throw at you to convince you I’m actually a nice person. There’s only so much carnage people can watch on their phones before you can no longer convince them it’s not what it looks like.
The propaganda has already hit a point of diminishing returns, and soon it’s going to start having a reverse effect. People are going to start hating Israel for all the evil things it’s been doing, and then hating it even more for all its in-your-face perception management operations to manipulate their thoughts and feelings.
At some point the hasbarists are themselves going to inadvertently become anti-Zionist propaganda agents, just because they make Israel look so creepy with the way they’re always trying to stick their rapey fingers into everyone’s mind.
The truth can only be concealed and distorted for so long.
Rodent infestation caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza is now creating a public health catastrophe
More than 70,000 infections have been recorded in Gaza this year, as rats bite children as they sleep and skin diseases kill those prevented from receiving treatment abroad. Health officials say a plague outbreak is no longer a remote possibility.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj May 8, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/rodent-infestation-caused-by-israels-destruction-of-gaza-is-now-creating-a-public-health-catastrophe/
At the beginning of April, Enshrah Hajjaj, a 61-year-old woman with diabetes, woke up in her tent in Gaza City to find blood on her toes. She couldn’t figure out how she started bleeding, so she treated herself inside her tent with her family and carried on with her day. A week later, she woke up again to find the same bleeding toes — but this time, half of them were missing. She began screaming, and her family rushed her to the hospital, where doctors told her that rats had eaten through them while she slept. As a diabetic, she had lost much of the sensation in her feet, a common complication of the disease, and had felt nothing.
Enshrah’s case is far from isolated. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, four displaced people have died from skin diseases directly linked to rodent infestations, though the Ministry was unable to confirm the specific diseases in each case, citing the absence of laboratory materials needed for testing.
Nisreen Kilab, head of the Environmental Health Department at the Health Ministry, said the symptoms observed in several patients indicate a virus transmitted through rodent waste and bites, which can be fatal in some cases. “We suspected several leptospirosis infections, but unfortunately, these cases could not be confirmed through laboratory testing due to the absence of the required means,” she told Mondoweiss.
Kilab said the skin diseases spreading in Gaza are driven by insect, flea, and rodent bites, warning that without urgent intervention, the outbreak will only deepen.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 70,000 cases of ectoparasite infections were reported in Gaza in 2026, while over 80% of displacement camps reported recurring rodent and pest infestations, as well as skin conditions such as scabies and lice. The WHO’s representative described this as “the unfortunate but predictable consequence when people live in a collapsed living environment.”
Enshrah Hajjaj now lives in constant fear, especially at night. “I sleep while awake,” she told Mondoweiss. “I haven’t experienced a single night’s peace after this incident. I can’t feel my feet, and half my foot is numb, so I’m afraid of waking up one day to find that rodents ate off my entire foot without me feeling it.”
The conditions around Enshrah’s tent and the tent encampments in Gaza have been described by health officials as particularly conducive to the spread of rodent infestations, with piles of garbage rising in small hills only a few hundred meters away from the displacement camps. The camps themselves sit amid pools of sewage and mud.
“At first, there was an accumulation of rubble and debris, and later a buildup of garbage near displacement centers,” Kilab said. “More than 90% of Gaza’s population is displaced and living in tents, which has led to a frightening increase in population density, and a high population density means a faster spread of disease.”
Kilab said that the 40 million tons of accumulated waste across Gaza have made matters worse. “These conditions are an ideal breeding ground for epidemics,” she explained.
When skin disease becomes a death sentence
Contracting a skin disease in Gaza has become potentially fatal, while local hospitals lack the means of diagnosing them. Patients who need specialized care abroad cannot leave, as exit permits for medical travel remain beyond reach due to Israel’s continued closure of the Rafah border crossing, despite its obligation to facilitate medical evacuations and general travel through the crossing as part of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Hamas.
Last February, Muhammad Dhiban died after suffering from a skin disease that doctors in Gaza could not identify. The disease damaged his kidneys and reached his brain, causing meningitis. He was unable to travel for treatment and died in Gaza. In April, Ibrahim Abu Aram died from a severe blistering skin condition that covered his body in open sores. According to his family, the infection had spread to his brain. For months, both men and their families appealed to decision-makers to allow them to leave Gaza for treatment, but no response was forthcoming.
Dhiban and Abu Aram likely died of one of several diseases now spreading among the displaced. “There are several diseases transmitted by rodents, such as Lassa fever, typhus, and Salmonella, that are likely making up most of the infections we’re seeing,” Kilab said. “They’re all carried through rodents, insects, and their waste.” She warned that if health institutions failed to contain the epidemic, Gaza could face an outbreak of the plague, a possibility she said is no longer remote.
Abdel Qader al-Basyouni, a father of four, told Mondoweiss now afraid of what might happen to his youngest child, who was recently bitten by a rat while sleeping at night. The child developed a fever and complications that the family described as severe.
Al-Basyouni said that what Palestinians endure in the tents is something no one in Gaza has ever experienced. Rats once rarely entered homes, and hearing of a rat biting a person was extremely uncommon. “Never in my life have I ever heard of a rat attacking and biting a human,” he said. “Not until after this war.”
His wife, Yasmin al-Basyouni, said the garbage never stops accumulating. Neither does the bombing, nor the further accumulation of rubble. Meanwhile, sanitation and cleanup efforts can’t keep up with the rate at which waste is produced.
“So what awaits us?” she asked. “What awaits our children in the tents during the summer, with the greater spread of rodents and insects? Is death waiting for us? Is the plague waiting for us?”
The situation has gotten so dire, she said, that they have been reduced to wondering whether their children will die of bombs or rodent bites. “Are rats also our enemy now?” she added.
The Limits of Power -The War on Iran Will Likely End in American Retreat
Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares, May 11, 2026, https://www.savageminds.co/p/the-limits-of-power
The war against Iran that the United States and Israel launched on 28 February 2026 will likely end in an American retreat. The United States cannot continue the war without producing disastrous consequences. A renewed escalation would likely lead to the destruction of the region’s oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure, causing a prolonged global catastrophe. Iran can credibly impose costs that the United States cannot bear and that the world should not suffer.
The US-Israel war plan was a decapitation strike, sold to President Donald Trump by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea, the director of the Mossad. The premise was that an aggressive joint US-Israeli bombing campaign would so degrade the Iranian regime’s command structure, nuclear programme, and IRGC senior leadership that the regime would fracture. The United States and Israel would then impose a pliable government in Tehran.
Trump seems to have been convinced that Iran would follow the same course as had occurred in Venezuela. The US operation in Venezuela in January 2026 removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in what appears to have been a coordinated operation between the CIA and elements inside the Venezuelan state. The US won a more pliant regime, while most of the Venezuelan power structure remained in place. Trump seems to have believed naively that the same outcome would occur in Iran.
The Iran operation, however, failed to produce a pliant regime in Tehran. Iran is not Venezuela, historically, technologically, culturally, geographically, militarily, demographically, or geopolitically. Whatever happened in Caracas had little relation to what would take place in Tehran.
The Iranian government did not fracture. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), far from being decapitated, emerged with a tightened internal command and an expanded role in the national-security architecture. The supreme leader’s office held; the religious establishment closed ranks behind it; and the population rallied against external attack.
Two months on, Trump and Netanyahu have no Iranian successor government under their control, no Iranian surrender to close the war, and no military pathway whatsoever to victory. The only path, and the one the US seems to be taking, is a retreat, with Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and with none of the other issues between the US and Iran settled.
Several reasons explain America’s disastrous miscalculations and Iran’s successes.
First, American leaders fundamentally misjudged Iran. Iran is a great civilisation with 5,000 years of history, deep culture, national resilience, and pride. The Iranian government was not going to succumb to US bullying and bombing, especially reflecting on the fact that Iranians remember how the US destroyed Iranian democracy in 1953 by overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a police state that lasted 27 years.
Second, American leaders dramatically underestimated Iran’s technological sophistication. Iran has world-class engineering and mathematics. It has built an indigenous defence industrial base, with advanced ballistic missiles, a homegrown drone industry, and indigenous orbital launch capability. Iran’s record of technological development, built up despite 40 years of escalating sanctions, is a stunning national achievement.
Third, military technology has shifted in a way that favours Iran. Iran’s ballistic missiles cost a small fraction of the US interceptors deployed against them. Iranian drones cost $20,000; US air-defence interceptor missiles cost $4m. Iran’s antiship missiles, with costs in the low six figures, threaten US destroyers that cost $2-3bn. Iran’s anti-access and area-denial network around the Gulf, layered air defence, drone and missile saturation capacity, and sea-denial capability in the strait have made the operational cost of imposing American will on Iran far higher than the United States can sustain, especially taking into account the retaliatory destruction that Iran can impose on the neighbouring countries.
Fourth, the US policy process has become irrational. The Iran war was decided by a small circle of presidential loyalists at Mar-a-Lago, with no formal interagency process and a National Security Council that had been hollowed out across the preceding year. Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned on 17 March with a public letter describing “an echo chamber” used to deceive the president. The war was the output of a decision-making system in which the deliberative apparatus had been turned off.
This was neither a war of necessity, nor a war of choice. It was a war of whim. The underlying premise was hegemony. The United States was attempting to preserve a global dominance that it no longer possesses, and Israel was trying to establish a regional dominance that it will never have.
The likely endgame, given all this, is that the war will end with a return to something close to the status quo ante, except for three new facts on the ground. First, Iran will have operational control over the Strait of Hormuz. Second, Iran’s deterrent posture will be significantly raised. Third, the US long-term military presence in the Gulf will be significantly reduced. The other issues that supposedly prompted the US to attack Iran—Iran’s nuclear programme, regional proxies, the missile arsenal—will most likely be left where they were at the start of the war.
Even as the US retreats, Iran will not press its advantage against its neighbours. Three reasons explain why. First, Iran has a long-term strategic interest in cooperation with its Gulf neighbours, not an ongoing war. Second, Iran will have no interest in restarting a war it has just successfully ended. Third, Iran will be restrained, if any restraint is needed, by its great-power patrons, Russia and China, who both desire a stable and prosperous region. The Iranian leadership understands this clearly, and will stop the fighting.
Trump will no doubt try to depict the coming retreat as some great military and strategic victory. No such claims will be true. The truth is that Iran is far more sophisticated than the United States understood; the decision to go to war was irrational; and the underlying technology of war has shifted against the US. The American empire cannot win the war against Iran at an acceptable financial, military, and political cost. What America can regain, however, is some measure of rationality. It’s time for the US to end its regime-change operations and return to international law and diplomacy.
Trump’s deadly trap: By rejecting Iran’s proposal, US enters a strategic nightmare with no escape
Monday, 11 May 2026 , By Press TV Strategic Analysis Desk, https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/05/11/768410/trump-deadly-trap-rejecting-iran-proposal-us-enters-strategic-nightmare-no-escape
In a theatrical move that fooled no one, US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s comprehensive plan to end the war he illegally imposed on the country 70 days ago.
The US president postured as a victor, dismissing Tehran’s proposal with the bluster of a leader who expects capitulation. But the reality on the ground tells a starkly different story.
By every measurable metric, America is the defeated party in the asymmetric war that was imposed on Iran amid the nuclear talks in Geneva on February 28. And his rejection of Iran’s terms in a social media post has not opened new options for Washington, but it has only trapped the US in a deadly three-way crossroads from which there is no easy escape.
Trump’s rejection of Iran’s plan, which was submitted early on Sunday through Pakistani mediators, is a grave strategic error as Americans hold no winning cards.
Iran’s proposal: Fundamental, natural, and uncompromising
Iran’s plan to permanently end the war was never meant to please Washington. It was designed to restore justice, recognize strategic realities, and secure Iran’s undeniable rights after the unprovoked military aggression against the country and maritime banditry.
The core elements of Iran’s proposal are not maximalist. They are rooted in natural and fundamental principles that any nation subjected to unprovoked aggression and holding the upper hand would rightfully insist upon:
- War reparations – Payment of damages and reparations by the aggressor for the destruction inflicted on Iran’s infrastructure, economy, and civilian population.
- Management of the Strait of Hormuz – Recognition of Iran’s sovereign control over this vital waterway, based on the mechanism already announced by Tehran.
- Lifting of sanctions – The complete removal of all oppressive and illegal sanctions that have targeted the Iranian people for decades.
- Release of frozen assets – The return of billions of dollars of Iranian assets illegally seized by the United States.
- Permanent end to the war – A cessation of hostilities not only against Iran but also against the entire resistance front, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and other allied forces across the region.
None of these demands is unreasonable or impractical. They are the basic entitlements of a nation that has been attacked, bombed, and subjected to economic warfare for nearly half a century. What Iran is asking for is not special treatment but justice.
The American non-offer: Irrelevant demands and nuclear obsession
In stark contrast to Iran’s focused, reasonable and practically sound proposal, the American counteroffer reads like a wish list written by someone who has lost sight of reality.
Washington’s plan has nothing to do with ending the war. Instead, it resurrects the long-dead nuclear file – demands that were irrelevant before the war and are absurd now.
The United States insists on:
Closure of Iran’s nuclear sites – A non-starter that Iran has rejected for decades.
- Long-term halt to enrichment – Effectively disabling Iran’s nuclear program for years to come, which is totally unacceptable to Iran.
- Transfer of enriched uranium to America – A humiliating demand that no sovereign nation would accept, least of all Iran.
What is striking about the American proposal is what it omits. There is no mention of the American responsibility for starting the war in the middle of nuclear diplomacy.
There is also no acknowledgment of the thousands of Iranian civilians killed in the 40-day aggression. There is no offer of reparations. There is no commitment to withdraw the occupation forces from the region. There is no guarantee against future aggression.
Washington simply pretends the war never happened and pivots back to its failed nuclear fixation to deflect attention from the real issue.
The posture of defeat: Trump’s fake victory pose
Trump rejected Iran’s plan while posing as the victor. But this is pure theater. International experts, military analysts, and even sober voices within Western capitals acknowledge what Trump refuses to admit – the United States lost the asymmetric war against Iran.
Consider the evidence. The US entered this war with ambitious objectives: “regime change,” destruction of Iran’s missile program, dismantling of nuclear facilities, and unrestricted access to the Strait of Hormuz.
None of these objectives has been achieved. Iran’s missile cities remain intact. Its nuclear program continues to make progress. Its control over the Strait of Hormuz has been consolidated. And the Iranian people, far from rising against their government, have poured into the streets by the millions to support the leadership and the armed forces.
Trump’s hallucinatory “victory” exists only in his own press releases. In the real world, the United States has been defeated on every front. And rejecting Iran’s proposal does not change that fact – it only prolongs Washington’s agony.
The three-way crossroads: All paths lead to disaster
By rejecting Iran’s plan, Trump has trapped the United States in a deadly strategic dilemma. He now faces three options and none of them are good:
- Resume full-scale war
This is the most dangerous path. Starting the war again would plunge the United States and its Israeli proxy into a “dark corridor” from which there may be no return.
Iran has not yet deployed all its strategic cards. Throughout the 40 days of war, Tehran fought with its eyes fixed on the possibility of an even larger confrontation. The weapons systems, tactics, and capabilities that Iran deliberately held back would be unleashed in a second round, if that actually happens.
The result would likely be far heavier defeats for the US-Israeli war machine, defeats that could become irreversible. Iran’s unrevealed cards, combined with the lessons learned from the first phase of the war, would make any renewed American military campaign a gamble with catastrophic odds.
- Accept Iran’s terms
This is the only path to ending the imposed war, but it requires Trump to swallow his pride and acknowledge defeat like someone who understands the ground realities.
The United States would have to pay reparations, accept Iran’s complete and sovereign control of the Strait of Hormuz, lift illegal sanctions, release frozen assets, and agree to a comprehensive end to the war on all fronts.
For a president who has built his political identity around “maximum pressure” and “America First,” this option is politically toxic. But rejecting it does not make it disappear. It remains the only sustainable exit from a war that Washington cannot win.
Continue the naval blockade
An ambiguous, indefinite naval blockade that neither ends the war nor escalates it decisively is the current situation. But this option is also unsustainable. Iran’s top military command has already made its position clear that for every vessel intercepted or attacked, American centers and American vessels will be struck.
The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters has announced this equation publicly. It is not a threat but a binding warning. The continuation of the naval blockade will trigger Iranian responses that escalate incrementally but inevitably. There is no “safe” stalemate.
The economic dimension: A losing battle for Washington
The closure of the strategic waterway due to the war imposed on war and US maritime banditry and piracy has already sent shockwaves through global energy markets.
Oil prices have surged past $110 per barrel. Inflationary pressures are mounting across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The continued naval blockade of Iran, coupled with Iranian retaliatory strikes on regional energy infrastructure, will only worsen these trends.
And who bears the blame? Global public opinion increasingly points to Washington. The United States started this war, and the United States rejected a reasonable peace plan.
The United States continues to strangle Iran’s economy while Iranian civilians suffer. The further economic indicators deteriorate, the more pressure will mount on Trump from domestic constituencies and international allies alike.
Iran understands this dynamic perfectly. Continued economic disruption is not a bug in Tehran’s strategy but a feature. Every day the war continues, the United States bleeds economically and reputationally.
Iran’s trap: No escape for the United States
World media have accurately described the current situation as “Iran’s trap” for the United States. It is a trap with no exit and Trump is yet to wrap his head around this reality.
Trump can neither win the war nor end it on acceptable terms. Resuming full-scale war invites catastrophic defeat. Accepting Iran’s proposal requires humiliating capitulation. Maintaining the status quo triggers escalating Iranian retaliation that systematically degrades American interests in the region.
This is the strategic nightmare that Trump has created for himself and his country. He started a war he could not win. He rejected a peace that would have ended it. And now he stands at a deadly three-way crossroads, with every direction leading to danger.
Iran, meanwhile, holds the strategic advantage. Tehran’s proposal remains on the table — reasonable, principled, and rooted in natural rights. But if the US chooses not to accept it, Iran is prepared to continue the war, escalate it, and inflict far heavier costs than anything seen in the first 40 days.
The choice is Washington’s. The consequences will be for Iran to impose. And history will record who acted with wisdom – and who walked willingly into a trap of their own making.
Brookfield wants to revive a South Carolina megaproject failure known as ‘Nukegate.’ Can it succeed where others failed?
What could go wrong?
At V.C. Summer, the first time around, almost everything did.
By the time 2016 rolled around, the original budget had nearly been spent, construction wasn’t even half-finished, and Westinghouse’s relations with key partners had degenerated into finger-pointing, lawsuits and withheld payments
Santee Cooper’s CEO retired. Prosecutors targeted top officials at the companies involved: SCANA’s former CEO was among those sentenced to prison time
Perhaps the biggest wild card dealt to Brookfield is President Trump.
One of the most daunting hurdles for nuclear projects is obtaining financing. Mr. Trump seemingly made that easier: Just days after Santee Cooper announced its partnership with Brookfield, the U.S. government announced that Japan had agreed to provide up to US$332-billion toward building energy infrastructure on American soil; at least US$80-billion had been specifically earmarked for Westinghouse reactors.
Matthew McClearn, The Globe and Mail, May 8, 2026, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-brookfield-vc-summer-nuclear-project-south-carolina/
The Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station, in a sparsely populated corner of Fairfield County, S.C., is a graveyard for nuclear dreams.
Nearly a decade ago, the termination of construction of its two reactors (known as Units 2 and 3) marked an end to hopes of a rejuvenation of American nuclear energy. It bankrupted storied companies. It spawned lawsuits and sent executives to prison. It’s been called the biggest business failure in South Carolina’s history – or just “Nukegate.”
Since workers abruptly departed in 2017, new tenants, including vultures and Canada geese have taken up residence. So far this year, the plant’s owner, Santee Cooper, has identified 14 osprey nests, some atop utility poles. Especially when nesting, the ospreys have “no sense of humour at all,” said Steve Nance, the company’s director of nuclear production and development. With wingspans of about a metre, they’ve been known to attack people and drones.
“They’re extremely territorial,” he said. “If you get close to the light pole, she’ll take off. You’ve got about five minutes before you’re going to get a visit.”
Nonetheless, people are returning to V.C. Summer. Inside a warehouse, roughly 30 workers from nuclear giant Westinghouse Electric Co. have begun reviewing and scanning 5,200 large cardboard boxes of documents. They were generated during construction, which was aborted abruptly in 2017 amid massive delays and cost overruns. Studying them is part of an effort to assess what’s necessary to finish the job.
Eight years after its purchase of Westinghouse, the Brookfield BN-T -1.65%decrease empire (which is now based in New York, but has Canadian roots) stands to reap a huge windfallthat would validate its nuclear gambit.
Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility, selected Brookfield Asset Management as its preferred buyer for the incomplete units. This opportunity squares well with U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambition to reinvigorate the American nuclear sector, and he has publicly identified Westinghouse reactors as a preferred choice for construction.
What could go wrong?
At V.C. Summer, the first time around, almost everything did. Now, Brookfield must deliver what the U.S. nuclear industry’s best and brightest could not, even as it enters business arrangements that bind it more closely with the capricious Trump administration. Its reputation as a shrewd risk manager, built over many decades, is about to undergo what could be its most formidable test.
Brookfield’s nuclear gambit
Located less than an hour’s drive northwest of Columbia, South Carolina’s capital, the Units 2 and 3 construction site sprawls over more than 1,000 hectares. Located roughly a kilometre away, the original unit has generated power since the 1980s.
Each of the two units features a large cylindrical structure that would have housed an AP1000 reactor, Westinghouse’s flagship product. Inside Unit 2’s cavernous, roofless structure, the reactor vessel is already concealed by concrete. Those permitted to visit the site can stand inside a tank designed to store 2.4 million litres of water, which would be released into the reactor by an explosive valve during a dire emergency. The silence is punctuated by the sound of dripping water and the occasional indignant, whistling cry of an angry osprey overhead.
Nearby, a larger, skeletal rectangular structure houses steam turbines and other equipment. Inside Unit 2’s turbine building rest three large Hyundai 9,000-horsepower electric pumps. They’re open to the weather but have been maintained: Santee Cooper spent several million dollars annually on maintenance throughout the plant.
“The guys come and rotate them, change oils and desiccant bags,” Mr. Nance said of the giant pumps.
“They do preventative maintenance on them as if they were in service. And that’s what’s going to keep us from having to replace them.”
Large white storage tents scatter the site. Inside one, Unit 3’s 420-ton reactor pressure vessel rests on its side, covered in a thin layer of rust.
Another tent nearby contains two towering assemblies known as integrated head packages, which would be placed atop the reactor vessels. Each weigh about 360 tons and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
In another tent sit four bright yellow Caterpillar diesel generators, which look brand new. The 500-ton crane used to lift components into place, though disassembled, remains on-site.
Mr. Nance said that under the original contract, Westinghouse and its partners got paid to deliver equipment, whether installed or not. The upshot is that an estimated 85 per cent of components required to finish both units are already there. Inspections thus far offer a favourable prognosis on their condition, he added: “So far, nobody’s found any showstoppers or deal-breakers.”
That’s part of Santee Cooper’s pitch to Brookfield: Whoever else might answer Mr. Trump’s call to construct AP1000s, the V.C. Summer units have a considerable head start.
Brookfield’s journey to commencing what has been dubbed the first privately funded nuclear project in American history was circuitous. In 2017, an opportunity arose when Westinghouse sought protection from its creditors. Brookfield’s private equity unit bought the stricken company for US$4-billion – far less than the cost of a single nuclear reactor.
It was a gamble.
Westinghouse’s roots date from the nuclear age’s earliest days, having designed and supplied the world’s very first commercial pressurized water reactor in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It went on to dominate: Most reactors worldwide are pressurized water reactors, and most of those use Westinghouse technology.
By virtue of that legacy, Westinghouse held more than 1,500 patents. Its intellectual property included the AP1000, among the few reactor designs already certified by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. Westinghouse also had talent, employing 11,500.
But Westinghouse’s collapse did great violence to its prestige. Having botched V.C. Summer so completely, it was hard to conceive how it could attract further orders for AP1000s.
Fortunately, there was more to Westinghouse’s business: It was also a major service provider to utilities, earning revenues during regular outages when reactors needed refuelling and maintenance. “We could really see a path to seeing our returns in that part of the business,” said Jennifer Mazin, a Brookfield partner who sits on Westinghouse’s board, at a conference held by CIBC in Toronto in March. (Brookfield declined several interview requests for this story over a period of a few months.)
Sales prospects for AP1000s have improved considerably since then. Last year, Mr. Trump issued a flurry of executive orders, one of which demanded that construction begin on 10 large new reactors on American soil by 2030. Another order initiated a radical restructuring of the NRC aimed at speeding the permitting process. Yet another order called on the Secretary of Energy to prioritize “completing construction of nuclear reactors that was prematurely suspended.”
Jimmy Staton, Santee Cooper’s chief executive, had already been looking for ways to restart construction. Reading that executive order, he said, “we had a pretty good idea” Mr. Trump meant V.C. Summer.
“The government’s very supportive of this,” he added.
Brookfield agreed to buy the two V.C. Summer units on a “as-is, where-is” basis and finish the job. It’ll pay Santee Cooper US$2.7-billion in exchange for a 75-per-cent ownership stake. (Santee Cooper would retain the remaining quarter.) Potential buyers for the electricity include large data companies, or other utilities in South Carolina, Mr. Staton said.
Brookfield must finish assessing the project’s feasibility and report back to Santee Cooper on a proposed schedule for completing construction. Arriving at a decision on whether to proceed is expected to take between 18 and 24 months, and could cost as much as US$200-million. Mr. Staton said that according to early estimates, it could take five to seven years to finish the plant.
Brookfield can still back out. But if it proceeds, it will accept risks that Westinghouse itself has sworn off.
Unmitigated disaster
Westinghouse had long acted largely as a reactor designer, providing crucial plans that others could use to build nuclear plants.
That changed after Japan’s Toshiba Corp. purchased the company in 2006. Two years later, Westinghouse signed an agreement with Santee Cooper and its partners (the most important of which was South Carolina Electric & Gas, or SCE&G) to build V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3, at an estimated cost of about US$9.8-billion. Westinghouse guaranteed completion of the first reactor by April 1, 2016, the second by 2019 – and agreed to substantial penalties if it missed those targets.
It was a risky move for Westinghouse and also for South Carolinians. That’s because SCE&G had persuaded state lawmakers to introduce legislation that would allow it to recover some of its capital costs during construction.
Scott Elliott is a Columbia-based lawyer who practices mainly before the South Carolina Public Service Commission. His client roster includes the South Carolina Energy Users Committee, which represents large industrial power users. Its members were happy to have a nuclear plant, he said, but worried about the legislation’s implications.
“It made it awfully easy for SCE&G, and the utilities in general, to raise rates,” he said.
Those fears were realized after V.C. Summer got off to a bad start. After Westinghouse had already signed the contracts, the NRC demanded changes to the AP1000’s design, leading to early delays. Concrete wasn’t poured until 2013. Unavailability of basic materials such as standard rebar led to further delays.
“There were like five cost overrun proceedings,” Mr. Elliott recalled.
“And they kept going up: $200-million, then $500-million, and the last one was over $1-billion.”
By the time 2016 rolled around, the original budget had nearly been spent, construction wasn’t even half-finished, and Westinghouse’s relations with key partners had degenerated into finger-pointing, lawsuits and withheld payments.
“I don’t think Westinghouse knew what they were doing,” Mr. Elliott said.
Westinghouse faced a dilemma: It could either pony up the additional billions of dollars needed to complete the plant, or bail out and pay massive penalties. Unable to afford either option, it applied for court protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
The fallout was ugly for all involved.
Toshiba withdrew from the reactor-building business and took a US$6-billion writeoff. It eventually agreed to pay US$2.2-billion to exit its obligations.
SCE&G’s owner, SCANA Corp., abandoned the project in 2017. Teetering on bankruptcy, SCANA agreed to merge with Dominion Energy Inc. within months.
Santee Cooper’s CEO retired. Prosecutors targeted top officials at the companies involved: SCANA’s former CEO was among those sentenced to prison time.
Worsening matters, V.C. Summer wasn’t Westinghouse’s only failed project. It was simultaneously the main contractor on two nearly identical units under construction at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia, just two hours away by road.
Georgia Power teamed up with new partners to complete Vogtle. Its AP1000s started generating power in 2023 and 2024, seven years late. The two units cost nearly US$37-billion, as compared to an original budget of US$14-billion. Vogtle has been dubbed the most expensive power plant ever built.
Take two
One lesson from V.C. Summer and Vogtle is that when building a nuclear power plant, one must select one’s partners carefully.
Read more: Brookfield wants to revive a South Carolina megaproject failure known as ‘Nukegate.’ Can it succeed where others failed?Contracts must be structured such that all parties are motivated to solve problems as they arise – because they inevitably will.
After Chapter 11, Westinghouse vowed to never again assume the huge risks of constructing a nuclear plant. Brookfield has deep experience in power generation generally, and has also worked on complex hydroelectric, real estate and infrastructure projects. But it has never before built a nuclear plant. Can it woo the right partners on the right terms?
This could be tricky.
Experts told The Globe that it will probably need a utility partner that is licensed as a nuclear operator by the NRC.
“Let’s say they build the danged things,” said Mr. Elliott. “State law would require them, if they’re going to sell the electricity, to be a regulated utility.”
For Santee Cooper’s part, Mr. Staton makes it clear he has no intention of assuming more risk or contributing capital to the project. It’s Brookfield’s show.
“I feel like we found the best partner in Brookfield,” he said.
“They have a great balance sheet. Most importantly, though, they are risk managers.”
But Brookfield is not keen to repeat Westinghouse’s mistake of shouldering the bulk of the project’s risks. At the CIBC conference, Ms. Mazin said Brookfield regards creating a “risk-sharing model” among the parties involved as crucial to the project’s success.
“We’re looking at all the components of having off-takers, utility, lenders, governments, partners, share risk,” she said.
Brookfield can further reduce risk by not overpaying for the project. As compared to the US$9-billion that Santee Cooper and its partners reportedly spent on the project, the US$2.7-billion Brookfield has promised to pay might seem like a steal.
Tom Clements, an activist and director of Savannah River Site Watch who intervened for many years before the Public Services Commission concerning the project, doubts rosy assessments of the plant’s condition. His organization monitors energy and nuclear issues, particularly nuclear wastes and plutonium management at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. He points out that much of the plant’s equipment has been exposed to the elements.
A bigger concern, he added, is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must certify that plant equipment meets a high standard known as “nuclear quality.” But NRC inspections ceased after the project was halted.
“The fact that Santee Cooper may have been keeping it in buildings with air temperature and humidity controlled, I don’t know if that’s enough to certify that they’re nuclear qualified – the valves, the pipes, the pumps, the whole bit.”
An additional complication is that some plant components were sold. Mr. Staton confirmed that “small components here and there” had been sold to Vogtle as replacement parts, and Santee Cooper also struck an arrangement to sell plant components to Ukraine, which had been exploring construction of AP1000s.
On the other hand, the AP1000’s design has matured greatly during the last 20 years. Mr. Staton said Vogtle’s completion represents a tremendous advantage: It allows would-be AP1000 builders to learn from previous mistakes, and hire professionals who’ve already built one.
“We’ll be able to bring that kind of experience to the table here in South Carolina,” Mr. Staton said.
To that end, Brookfield announced earlier this month that it had formed a partnership with The Nuclear Company, a startup unveiled in 2023 that has hired dozens of former Vogtle and V.C. Summer veterans (some out of retirement) and markets itself as having been “built on the field of Vogtle.” The two partners will establish a new company specializing in deployment of Westinghouse reactors, including the AP1000 – and Brookfield has selected the new company as project manager to complete the V.C. Summer units.
Moreover, Westinghouse recently submitted an application to the NRC seeking to establish Vogtle Unit 4 as the standard design for future AP1000 deployments.
Uneasy bedfellows
Perhaps the biggest wild card dealt to Brookfield is President Trump.
One of the most daunting hurdles for nuclear projects is obtaining financing. Mr. Trump seemingly made that easier: Just days after Santee Cooper announced its partnership with Brookfield, the U.S. government announced that Japan had agreed to provide up to US$332-billion toward building energy infrastructure on American soil; at least US$80-billion had been specifically earmarked for Westinghouse reactors.
Santee Cooper said the unfinished V.C. Summer units will not qualify for that financing. But that money could springboard new AP1000 constructions. In a conference call late last year, Brookfield Asset Management’s then-president, Connor Teskey, said that funding “positions Brookfield at the centre of a historic build-out of clean baseload power, creating one of the most compelling growth opportunities across our transition platform, and potentially one of the most successful investments in Brookfield’s history.”
But Mr. Clements, of Savannah River Site Watch, noted that in the year since that financing was announced, there haven’t yet been any takers.
“Where are the electric utilities that are in on the deal, saying, ‘We want two of these AP1000s right here’?” Mr. Clements asked.
“They’re all looking at Vogtle and they don’t want to get burned. So who’s going to be first out of the gate?”
Brookfield’s co-owner of Westinghouse, Saskatoon-based uranium miner Cameco Corp., has acknowledged uncertainties about what might come out of Westinghouse’s arrangement with the U.S. government. In a recent filing, it noted that Westinghouse’s financial performance will depend on “the ability of the executive branch of the US government to obtain funding and support for the deployments” – a reminder that it’s not a done deal.
If the U.S. government places a final order of US$80-billion for Westinghouse reactors, it earns the right to 20 per cent of the resulting profits, worth about US$17.5-billion. And if Westinghouse reached a valuation of at least US$30-billion by January, 2029, the government could acquire a 20-per-cent ownership stake in Westinghouse.
Brookfield says that stake would come without governance rights. It regards the U.S. government as an unbeatable partner: that US$30-billion target valuation is more than seven times what Brookfield paid for the company in 2018.
Another perennial challenge for nuclear projects is acquiring permits. But Mr. Trump has quickly retooled the U.S. nuclear industry’s regulatory apparatus with a view of establishing “lasting American dominance.” One of his executive orders argued the NRC’s long licensing processes had brought development of nuclear power in the U.S. to a halt. The NRC had “tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks,” according to Mr. Trump, who ordered it be reorganized; licence applications must henceforth be processed in 18 months or less.
Mr. Clements said that as recently as a few years ago, re-applying for licences for V.C. Summer would have been arduous. But “the way things are going in this country, it may be just a pretty simple process with the NRC,” he conceded.
But if all of this seemingly puts wind in Brookfield’s sails, Mr. Trump’s relations with partners and allies are famously tumultuous. For Brookfield, the price of dissatisfying him are incalculable, but potentially steep.
By some accounts, the Trump administration has already become restless. Citing nine unnamed industry and government sources, Canary Media (an American non-profit news organization covering energy, particularly renewables) reported in March that the administration had begun talks with representatives for two Westinghouse rivals: GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy and Korea Electric Power Corp. The report asserted that the U.S. Department of Energy felt Westinghouse and Brookfield are moving too slowly.
History suggests nuclear projects require much patience.
Chris Gadomski, lead nuclear energy analyst with BloombergNEF, said that while government policy can help get nuclear plants built, it’s not enough: Utilities, which are typically cautious, must spend large sums and assume great risks.
“I’ve talked to operators of large U.S. fleets about starting 10 large reactors by the end of Trump’s second term. And the response was just laughter – it’s never going to happen.”
Mr. Elliott, the Columbia-based lawyer, said Brookfield was virtually unknown in South Carolina, but completing V.C. Summer could elevate it to heroic status.
“Based on my history with this project, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
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