U.S. policy – Globalities

Trump’s Iran backdown

Helena CobbanJanuary 16, 2026January 17, 2026Iran, Israel, Persian Gulf, U.S. policy2 Comments

There was Trump, on Tuesday, shouting all over the internet, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! … HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.” And there was Trump just a day later saying, “We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping — it’s stopped — it’s stopping… And there’s no plan for executions, or an execution, or execution — so I’ve been told that on good authority.”

He was racing backward from the incendiary regime-change rhetoric of the previous day.

This was– for now, anyway– a clear case of “TACO, Iran-style”, to borrow the FT’s great acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Read on to see where I think this leaves us all now. But first, a bit of essential background.

Back in late June, in the aftermath of the “12-day War” that the U.S.-Israeli axis launched jointly against Iran June 13, I made a number of judgments, and shared some of them here and here. In the first of those essays, I judged that the reason that war ended so (relatively) swiftly and cleanly was that by June 24-25 both Israel and Iran found themselves locked in a “mutually hurting stalemate.” It was most certainly not any kind of “cakewalk” for the U.S.-Israel axis, and it certainly did not result in the unassailable U.S. win that Pres. Trump hurried to present it as.

Why a set of treaties from 1648 CE is more important than ever

Helena CobbanJanuary 5, 2026January 6, 2026Diplomacy, Europe, Global governance, U.S. policy, United Nations

If you’ve never learned about the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, then now is an excellent time to do so. This set of treaties, agreed to by the leaders of more 100 little European statelets and dukedoms in an era in which the modern-style “nation state” was only just emerging, laid the ground rules for the international state system that has existed until today. Its core principle was the sovereign independence and equal standing of all states in the system.

That principle, as extended to and embraced by all the 193 states in today’s international system, lies at the heart of the Charter of the United Nations, as adopted in San Francisco in 1945. In Article 2, the UN Charter states clearly that:

(1) The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members…

(4) All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

As we know, in the 80 years since 1945 many states have violated these principles of the Charter (and many others.) But the action the U.S. government took on January 3, sending military forces to violently blast their way into the home of the head of another sovereign state and to snatch him and his wife and take them to U.S. territory on a flimsy judicial pretext, has been among the most egregious and the most threatening to today’s whole system of international law.

As the UN crumbles, what?

Helena CobbanNovember 21, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global governance, U.S. policy, Uncategorized, United Nations

As someone born in the early 1950s, I have never known a world without the United Nations. But by adopting Security Council Resolution 2803 (text) on November 17, the 15 states that sit on the UN’s most authoritative body, the Security Council, have now knowingly given a green light to the genocidal American-Israeli assault on Gaza, in clear violation of all the norms and values on which the UN was founded.

Thirteen of those states (including four Muslim-majority nations) voted for the U.S.-presented resolution. China and Russia, either of which could have blocked it by wielding a veto, chose not to do so. It seems that all those 15 states are prepared to rip up the entire international “system” of which the UN is the linchpin, and to let the world crumble into a stew of “might-makes-right” anarchy.

Craig Mokhiber, the 30-year veteran of the UN’s human-rights system who resigned his post in late October 2023 when he accused the UN of having failed to prevent Israel’s already-underway genocide in Gaza, published a powerful and well-documented piece on Resolution 2803 on Mondoweiss November 19. It clearly laid out the many ways in which Resolution 2803 violated longstanding UN norms, including those enshrined in its 1945 Charter.

In a discussion with Ali Abunimah on the EI Livestream yesterday, Mokhiber developed his critique even further. He noted that Resn. 2803 gives Pres. Trump the sole authority, via his position as head of the grotesquely mis-named “Board of Peace”, to do anything he wants regarding the administration of Gaza. Mokhiber’s comment: “It’s not even colonial, it’s King Leopold-esque.” (That recalled the fact that during the grossly genocidal period of “Belgian” rule over the Congo, 1885-1908, that whole vast territory was being administered as the personal property of Belgium’s King Leopold II.)

Zionism (& other settler colonialisms) in world-historical perspective

Helena CobbanOctober 24, 2025December 5, 2025Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy3 Comments

It’s been a long time since I read either Fayez Sayegh’s seminal Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) or Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973.) In the intervening decades, a lot has happened…

Sayegh was one of the intellectual fathers of the famous “Zionism is Racism” resolution that UN General Assembly adopted in 1975, and rescinded, under super-heavy American pressure, 16 years later. He died in 1980…

Rodinson was a brilliant French Marxist and an early and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. (His use of the question-mark in his book’s title I emulated in my 2004 book Amnesty After Atrocity?; in both cases, it was a way of indicating that we had heard and engaged with the arguments of the critics of our main thesis.) Rodinson died in 2004…

Other things that have happened since I read those two books were:

The status and meaning of Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal

Helena CobbanOctober 14, 2025December 20, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, U.S. policy

On October 10, the devastating bombings and other attacks that the Israeli military has undertaken against Gaza nearly continuously for the past two years finally came a halt. (Or nearly so, see below.) The Israeli military’s massive tanks and bulldozers began to lumber their way out of some– but far from all– of the parts of Gaza they had devastated over those 24 months. Some aid trucks started to roll in. Hundreds of thousands of the Palestinians who’d been forced, under withering Israeli fire, to evacuate south from Gaza City started to trudge back north to their former– very often completely pulverized– homes.

Phases of withdrawal in Trump’s plan. Source. Click to enlarge.

U.S. Pres. Trump was the one who successfully forced the Israeli government to sign onto that ceasefire agreement. (He could, at any moment since his inauguration back in January, have used Washington’s near-complete sway over Israel’s military decisionmaking to force that same outcome… And so, at any point in the preceding 15 months, could his predecessor in the White House. How many thousands of lives and destinies would have been saved?)

On October 13, as the reciprocal captive-exchange portions of the October 10 agreement were completed, Trump organized two large, splashy public events– one in Israel, one in Egypt– at which with his now horribly familiar braggadocio he took his victory laps for the ceasefire.

Hamas in negotiations– and on the ground

Helena CobbanOctober 10, 2025October 10, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Qatar, U.S. policy1 Comment

Text of Oct. 9 agreement. Click to enlarge.

The clock started ticking at Noon Palestine Time today on implementation of the 6-step ceasefire + captive-release agreement negotiated in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, by Pres. Trump and his three Muslim-state mediation partners. Those talks were held on a “proximity” basis with, presumably, the Israeli negotiators in one room, the Palestinian resistance alliance led by veteran Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya in another, and various groups of mediators shuttling between them.

(That’s Khalil Al-Hayya, above.)

The negotiators in Sharm had reached agreement on their 6-step plan on Thursday, but per Step 2 therein, implementation awaited the approval of the Israeli government. That was achieved this morning.

The prescribed ceasefire and many signs of an Israeli military pullback started at Noon today (local.) By that time, thousands of Palestinians whom the Israelis had previously expelled south from Northern Gaza under fire were already streaming back toward their homes in the north.

On ‘Condemning Hamas’

Helena CobbanOctober 1, 2025October 2, 2025Diplomacy, Discourse suppression, Gaza, Israel, U.S. policy

I was at an in-person event here in Washington yesterday, and I raised the matter of Hamas, noting that the title of Rami Khouri’s and my recent book Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters is still very relevant. One of the speakers was the Egyptian-American Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. He responded by making a few fairly smart observations– but then he loudly repeated the injunction that has been his watchword throughout the past two years: “We must condemn Hamas!”

I guess that is the price Hamid feels he must pay to have access to the pages of Jeff Bezos’s failing, but still influential, rag here in the U.S. capital. Maybe he even believes it. But why? What does it actually mean to “condemn” an entire movement– and one, moreover, with which our national government has been negotiating, with varying degrees of intensity, for more than 18 months now?

A movement, therefore, whose inner workings and worldview it would presumably be very useful for both government officials and informed citizens to understand as well as possible…

Netanyahu’s big roll of the dice in Iran

Helena CobbanJune 21, 2025June 21, 2025Iran, Israel, U.S. policy

In the early hours of June 13, the Israeli Air Force, reportedly aided by special forces/spy units pre-deployed into Iran, launched a barrage of massive strikes against Iranian air-defenses, nuclear facilities, command-and-control nodes, and individual targeted Iranians, military and non-military. Iranian government negotiators were planning to meet in Muscat, Oman, just two days later, in the next phase of the talks that U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had maintained for the previous two months. (Israel’s attack reportedly killed some of the Iranian specialists who were planning to attend those Muscat talks.)

The Israeli attack almost certainly took the Iranians by surprise. Israel killed many senior military leaders, especially in the elite Iranian revolutionary Guard Corps. But within just a few hours, Iran’s command system proved capable of responding in kind; and since June 13, every night has seen an exchange of deadly missiles between the two countries. Israel has delivered much of its ordnance against Iran from air-force planes flying right over Iran, or close to its Western border in the skies of Iraq and Syria protected by U.S. surveillance (and potential interception) capabilities, while Iran has delivered its missiles, including some hypersonic missiles, from its own home turf.

The Israelis claim they have destroyed many significant Iranian military and nuclear-research facilities. Their attacks– along with calls from Pres. Trump for the “evacuation” of the whole of Tehran–have caused deep disruptions in the lives of millions of Iranians.

The human casualties of this war have been very much higher in Iran than in Israel–though not on a per-capita basis. In Israel, families who have never previously experienced “incoming” attacks that caused more than minor damage have now been seeing the much larger level of damage inflicted by those Iranian missiles that manage to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and partly U.S.-supplied) anti-missile shields.

The two sides have seemingly become locked into a deadly war of attrition with no clear end– or even a plausible diplomatic off-ramp– in sight. (There have meantime been some reports that Israel’s stock of “Arrow” anti-ballistic missiles has been depleting at a rate that can’t be sustained for very much longer.)

Within this picture of a possibly lengthy, slugging-it-out war of attrition, there are a number of possible wild cards:

For the commanders of Western hegemony, cruelty is a vital tool

Helena CobbanApril 19, 2025April 20, 2025China, Global governance, Indian Ocean, Israel, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy

The painting above is of Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque

For Pres. Trump, cruelty is a vital tool as he bulldozes through all constitutional requirements to undertake (and publicize) exemplary deportations of undocumented immigrants and of any legally documented visitors like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil whom he arbitrarily chooses to punish.

For Israel’s PM Netanyahu and his ministers, cruelty is similarly a vital tool as they deploy waves of bombers and incendiary drones against two million Palestinians huddling under tarps on Gaza’s trash-piled shores while totally blocking the entry into Gaza of all the basic necessities of life.

Indian Ocean trading routes before da Gama. Click on image to enlarge.

It’s worth noting that cruelty has been a vital, and deliberately deployed, tool for the architects and commanders of “White” empires ever since the 15th century CE. In 1415, Portuguese navigators started carving their way down the coast of West Africa to establish heavily fortified “trading” (plunder) posts in their quest for gold. Those navigators were also intent on finding a sea-route to the richest trading zone they’d ever heard of, the one that traversed the Indian Ocean and wove the riches of East Africa, India, and distant Cathay (China) into the most advanced manufacturing and consumption area then known to humankind…

Musk’s digital coup in Washington: Effects and prospects

Helena CobbanFebruary 4, 2025February 4, 2025U.S. policy, U.S. politics

(Above: A scene from the post-Inauguration lunch in the U.S. Capitol. See Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Justice Bret Kavanaugh, Apple’s Tim Cook, and others…)

The digital coup that Elon Musk launched to capture the U.S. government started on January 20 (though it had been prepared for many weeks before then.) On January 20, shortly after Pres. Trump took the oath of office and briefly dropped by a lunch at which tech billionaires mingled closely with Supreme Court justices and senior legislators, he signed an Executive Order that stated,

This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.

We could think of this as “Communiqué Number 1” of the Musk-Trump coup that we’ve seen playing out ever since.

On January 20, Musk and his digi-goons were ready. By the next day, civil servants arriving in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building found the door to the space there that had long housed the White House’s Office of Digital Services (ODS) sported a note describing it as now housing “DOGE.” DOGE, the non-governmental body that Musk had been running for some time out of the DC office of his Boring company, had already burrowed itself deep into the core of the U.S. federal apparatus.