Dear citizen, listen well to this historic expose by Ritika Chopra in The Indian Express and ask yourself the question: are we the largest democracy or the most compromised one?

Indeed, it is a question that our beloved prime minister, who is so occupied in righting the woes of the world, might take up for immediate attention.

Given the details of the internecine ruptures among the three Election Commissioners (ECs), two on one side and one on the other, the two, who, according to IE, have not once but several times put their strong observations regarding the dubious legality of steps taken by the Election Commission of India (ECI) often without any intimation to them in writing, may well now rethink the desirability of their continuance on the commission.

According to the exposé, Sukhbir Sandhu and Vivek Joshi have felt obliged to take the unprecedented step of alerting the cabinet secretary about the goings on within the commission.

It is to be noted that as per the terms of appointment of the three-member ECI, the three are equals in all manner of prerogative, the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) being ceremonially first among equals.

It is also stated in those terms of appointment that no decisions can be made by the commission except with mutual consent or with a majority of two, and that the CEC has no extraordinary authority to bypass that stipulation.

Indeed, after what has emerged, and with more possibly in the offing, every law-abiding citizen would expect Gyanesh Kumar to consider his own position.

In the meanwhile, the revelations seem already to warrant a complete rescinding of the so-called Special Intensive Revision exercise, which now seems to have been more a special rigging one, and to revert to the electoral rolls that pre-exist this dystopian endeavour of a coloured SIR.

Meanwhile, every harassed and duped citizen must call upon the media as a whole to jettison greed and pusillanimity and go back to good old-fashioned journalism—that is if the corporates who own them truly desire a credible democracy in addition to profit maximisation.

Some weeks ago this columnist had popped the question to the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) that they need now to worry about the subversion of the electoral system per se if all their other efforts were to have meaning.

It is heartening that they have now taken note of this reality and called for Gyanesh Kumar to demit the office within 48 hours.

Originally produced for The Wire.

On a September morning in New York, the United Nations General Assembly became a theatre of the absurd and the sublime. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ascended the podium, diplomats from approximately 77 nations rose from their seats and walked out, leaving behind a sea of empty chairs that would become the most photographed furniture in modern diplomatic history.

Among the departing were Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Algeria. The images circulated globally: a speaker addressing a half-empty chamber, holding up props, declaring genocide allegations “the biggest lie of the century,” while the visible architecture of the room itself pronounced a different verdict.

Yet the walkout was not total. A small cluster of Muslim-majority states remained seated: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Albania, Azerbaijan, Mali, and Guinea. Their occupied chairs became the object of fierce contestation. Were they complicit? Pragmatic? Sovereign? Cowardly? The question of why they stayed is not merely a question about diplomatic tactics.

It is a question about the nature of sovereignty, the ethics of presence, and the very meaning of political community in a world where the ummah is invoked but never enforced.

Out of roughly 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, nearly 80 to 85 per cent boycotted or walked out. The walkout was a collective rebuke delivered in the most formalised institutional space in global politics. But the staying nations were engaged in something more radical than protest. They were deciding, in the Schmittian sense, that the exception did not exist for them—that the normal diplomatic order of bilateral relations, strategic partnerships, and institutional protocol continues even when the moral foundations of that order are contested.

The UAE and Bahrain, as Abraham Accords signatories, have staked their regional positioning on diplomatic realism. Their logic is that cutting communication strips them of leverage. By maintaining active diplomatic presence, they position themselves as essential mediators capable of negotiating humanitarian access, ceasefires, and future reconstruction.

For Azerbaijan, the calculus is starker. The country relies on Israel for approximately 69 per cent of its major weapons imports and maintains a strategic partnership that counterbalances Iran and Russia. Staying seated was not merely about arms imports—it was a signal to Tehran that Baku would not be intimidated into abandoning its strategic partnerships.

The UNGA walkout thus became a theatre for bilateral conflicts that have nothing to do with Palestine, revealing the impossibility of a unified Muslim position on the question that has defined the ummah for generations.

The analytical reality beneath the symbolism is brutal. The Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted in 2005 after Rwanda and Srebrenica, has played no significant role in debates about Gaza. Research shows that global efforts to address the humanitarian catastrophe have been ineffective because of the politicisation of R2P—the doctrine’s inherent faults compounded by the power politics of key actors on the Security Council. The walkout states understood this. Their protest was not an invocation of R2P; it was a recognition that the doctrine is dead.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu in November 2024, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. But enforcement depends entirely on the voluntary cooperation of states. The Court possesses no police force, no enforcement authority. Western states, particularly France, invoked Article 98 of the Rome Statute to declare that Netanyahu enjoys immunity on their soil.

The same France that welcomed the ICC warrant for Vladimir Putin in legally identical circumstances found itself unable to comply with the warrant for Netanyahu. The difference was not legal but political. The ICC is not a world court; it is a treaty body whose enforcement depends entirely on the political will of states. When that will is absent, the court becomes a paper tiger.

The International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in South Africa v. Israel, finding that the rights claimed by South Africa were “plausible.” The plausibility standard is deliberately lower than proof—a threshold designed to allow urgent action when evidence of genocidal intent is not yet conclusive but the risk of irreparable harm is immediate. Israel has transparently ignored the orders.

The final judgement on genocide may take years. This creates a liminal juridical space where the possibility of genocide is judicially cognisable but not yet actualised in law. The plausibility standard, designed to enable urgent action, has become a mechanism for deferring action indefinitely.

The entire episode exposes the tragic friction between what the world is—an anarchic system of self-interested states—and what it ought to be—a morally unified human community where human life outweighs capital, alliances, and veto power. Kant’s cosmopolitanism demands that all human beings belong to a single moral community, regardless of borders.

Under this view, the world has a strict, non-negotiable duty to protect fellow humans, and universal human rights transcend state sovereignty. But the staying nations operated on a different philosophical calculus. They asserted that sovereignty is the precondition for any meaningful humanitarian action. Neither sublation resolves the contradiction. Both merely restate it in different forms.

What does the walkout tell us about the relationship between theory and the moral life of international politics? The answer is that moral action is analytically irreducible. The walkout was at once a realist signal, costless solidarity for domestic publics, a liberal act within institutional norms, a postcolonial gesture, and an ethical protest refusing complicity. It exceeds any single theoretical lens because it is a lived reality, not a theoretical construct.

The empty chair remains. It remains as a protest, as a memory, and as a hope. It remains as a reminder that the choice to walk out is always available and that the choice to stay is always a choice. History has a way of judging those who stayed when they should have left. The empty chair is not a failure; it is a promise that the struggle for justice continues and that one day—perhaps in the distant future—the international order will be reconstituted on foundations of justice rather than power.

It’s become the disease of affluence: How do wealthy countries limit, restrict or totally bar migrants (whether they arrive through regular channels or otherwise) who are seen as ills to be shunned rather than solutions to be treasured? A country like Australia would be a shadow of itself without its migrants, either of the long-stay variety or those of shorter duration who come in and do the indispensable, from offering medical services to fruit picking and filling the “hospo” (hospitality) sector. But the malady of affluence has afflicted the Canberra establishment, much of it due to the jittery demagoguery of One Nation, a party with ideas so few you could place them on the back of a napkin.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, much like its British facsimile, Reform UK, is particularly obsessed with the alleged failings of immigration. It promises to cut it to “net negative” levels over the course of three years and throttle existing visa rules. (The numbers promise to be a staggering 750,000 or thereabouts.) Migrants will be restricted in bringing family members to Australia, and international education (those on visa subclass 500) is in for a hammering. Some 75,000 “illegal migrants,” according to the party’s website, will be deported, and numbers of overall immigration will be cut by over 570,000 “from current labour levels by capping visas at 130,000 per year to ease pressure on housing, wages, and infrastructure.” Skilled visas are suspect, legal avenues for review are condemned, and “migrants from nations known to foster extremist ideologies” are excoriated. Australia’s commitment to the UN Refugee Convention, a fidelity so often unreliable and hypocritical, is also to be terminated.

The large question here is how seriously the proposals by One Nation should be taken. Reducing international student numbers, for instance, is an interesting idea, but not for the reasons Hanson and her advisors assume. The university sector in Australia has treated the international student body as a never-ending milch cow without necessarily concerning itself with their welfare. The focus away from domestic student numbers has also meant a lazy reliance on higher-paying foreign students that has made education suffer. The assembly line of consumers rather than learners comes before the groves of knowledge. To take the blowtorch to such numbers as the temporary graduate visa population, however—a reduction from 270,000 to 40,000—would be economically perilous.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation decided to needlessly fan the babble with a National Forum replete with commentary that did little to clear the air. But it got 535,000 viewers, so that must have meant something. And the economic spokesperson for One Nation, former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, could tell everybody that “The will of the Australian people is so pronounced; this has to be dealt with, we will deal with it.”

Joyce reflects that broader mood of playing the opportunistic hangman to the eggheads, the experts, and those sneeringly called the intelligentsia. He is particularly keen to rage against economists, an admittedly charmless cadre at the best of times. “The issue of what it is going to cost, I think, is contentious, but I have no concern about following the will of the Australian people.” One’s country, right or wrong.

This shows a degree of abdication from leadership that is impressively stunning. It also suggests that One Nation has a direct, plagiarist’s line to the White House and the more mind-rotting aspects of Trump’s land. “I think the Australian people are sort of tired of the fact that you have to go to an economist to come up with public policy, to go to the Parliamentary Budget Office, and, to be frank, I have been around this game for a while, and I have never seen forward estimates in any budgetary paper be even close to the mark.” With confidence, he could dismiss their expertise: the Parliamentary Budget Office, let alone any arm of the public service, could hardly be trusted to assess the merits of One Nation’s migration policy “because they’re not elected, I am.”

Political commentator George Megalogenis tried to be sensible at the Forum, yearning for days of yore when governments did steer debates instead of being led by panicked social media warriors, attention seekers and mob elements motivated by the will. “If you’re going to take … 766,000 people out of the Australian economy and society for three years, you have tanked the economy in a way that is on the scale of the depression of the 1890s and 1930s,” he reasoned.

Instead of seizing the sensible high ground, the Albanese government is fumbling on some middle terrain in the hope of nullifying the influence of One Nation. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke opted for some mild demagogy in his National Press Club address, during which he blew from the Hanson blowhorn, if only tentatively. Australians, he thought, were no longer believers in the “pure demand-driven approach to major parts of the immigration system”; the government needed to “take a higher level of control.” The focus here would be haughty and disciplinary: “Who arrives, who stays, and who leaves?”

Blows against various groups were promised. International students and graduate visa holders will not, for instance, be able to bring family members with them to Australia, with some exemptions applying to doctoral dissertation students and Pacific and ASEAN students. These changes are not retrospective. “We’re not going to be breaking up families on shore.”

In a tribute to One Nation’s eagerness to target those naughty illegal non-citizens, Burke announced a greater regime of invigilation, with the hiring of 100 additional compliance officers to smell out those visa overstayers and an additional 250 beds for detainees in immigration holding centres. “What we will do is simply go back to what Australia always did before 2015.” Cheerful times, they were.

A ballot system will be introduced for working holiday makers (subclasses 417 and 462) wishing to stay for more than a year, with the second and third years being particularly challenging. In the second year, a cap of 45,000 places will be introduced through a randomised ballot. By the third year, the number will fall to a trickling 5,000. Stints of regional work will have to be done to be eligible for those ballots. The Australian Restaurant and Café Association chief, Wes Lambert, anticipates staff shortages in hospitality. Mike Guerin, chief executive of the National Farmers’ Federation predicts a rise in food prices and “emptier supermarkets.” Burke simply suggests that those in agriculture make better use of the Pacific Australia labour mobility scheme. From the perspective of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, the measures of greater enforcement would make Australia “smaller, meaner and more divided.” (Is that possible?) The Greens deputy leader, Mahreen Faruqi, abhorred the increased focus on immigration detention and the ban on foreign students bringing family members into the country. “Labour’s move to force people to choose between their family and a chance to study in Australia is a soulless mimicry of One Nation tactics.”

Former labour advisor Lidija Ivanovski further notes that Indians stand to suffer most in this “bidding war” of incessant targets. “It seems to be about what One Nation might perceive as the browning of Australia and will arrest that.” Indians comprise 13.6% of temporary visas holders: the modelled reductions would result in a fall of 23.3%. “South Asians comprise 25.4 per cent of temporary visa holders but would represent almost 46 per cent of the cuts.”

The clear point is that the government is running scared, despite claiming the summit of sensibility on immigration. Polls have turned them into lemmings on the hop, despite the fact that net overseas migration has fallen to 292,000 in the year to March, a fall of 47% from its post-Covid peak. The opposition coalition have not done much better to enlighten the electorate, horrified that they will be reduced to an even smaller rump than they already are in parliament. Hard feelings are in, resentment is in vogue, and this threatens to remain voguish for some time. The hope for rational policy on this subject seems too much to expect.

China’s President Xi Jinping concluded his three-day state visit to the US on Friday, 25 September, with hopes of enhanced cooperation and partnership between the world’s two largest economies.

Xi arrived in the US on Wednesday and received a large-scale welcome from President Donald Trump. Though this was their third in-person meeting, it was Xi’s first state visit to the US in over a decade.

On Thursday, the leaders had a long in-person conversation in the White House and finished the day with a state dinner with 130 guests, including tech executives. Though the US is yet to release its version of the official proceedings, reports indicate they discussed a range of outstanding issues, such as the dispute over trade and tariffs, cooperation in artificial intelligence, the issue of Taiwan, and the US-Israeli war on Iran.

During the meeting with Trump, Xi called for strategic stability in the China-US relationship, which will benefit both countries and the people around the world, Xinhua reported.

“China and the US should be partners, not rivals,” Xi said.

Xi’s statement comes at a time when the two countries are negotiating a longer trade deal after briefly facing each other in a tariff war last year. Both countries agreed to extend their temporary trade truce, which halted the tariff war till January, to give their negotiators more time.

The so-called Busan Trade Truce was set to expire in November this year.

Xi hoped that “both sides would stay committed to the principles of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation and promote the sustained, stable and sound development of China-US economic and trade relations.”

Technology and AI

Successive administrations in the US have characterised China’s advancements in technology and other economic sectors as a threat to American interests and have tried to curb them by restricting its access to technology.

In his attempt to address such apprehensions, Xi proposed that “both sides work towards a relationship featuring cooperation as the mainstay, moderate competition, manageable differences, and the promise of peace.”

Talking about the competition in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Xi offered increased coordination and cooperation between the countries as a way of mutual benefit.

While emphasising that “two sides should maintain human control over AI technologies, uphold a people-centred approach and the principle of using AI for good,” he proposed greater exchange of information to “prevent any misuse and abuse of AI.”

Xi also expressed hope that Chinese companies “are treated fairly in the US” while inviting more US companies to invest in China. “Working together, we can lengthen the list of cooperation and shorten the list of issues,” he underlined.

The US has sanctioned or put a large number of Chinese companies, including its AI firms, on various watch lists in recent years after accusing them of working with the Chinese armed forces or being involved in the so-called technology theft.

Notably, however, major US tech and finance executives such as Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Eric Yuan of Zoom, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, Larry Fink of Blackrock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla were present at the state dinner for Xi’s visit hosted at the White House on Thursday, 24 September, though no details of cooperation between US and Chinese tech firms have emerged.

Taiwan

Reiterating China’s resolve to “safeguard national reunification and territorial integrity,” Xi expressed hope that the US will “adhere to the correct position on opposing ‘Taiwan independence’ and handle the Taiwan question with caution.”

China has repeatedly accused the US of promoting the separatist cause in Taiwan, despite officially adhering to the “one China policy.” The US under Trump has sold or agreed to sell billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Taiwan in complete disregard of China’s objections.

China has also accused the US and its allies in the region of promoting an arms race by deploying advanced weapon systems close to its borders.

Xi said if the US follows the correct position on Taiwan, it “will enable both the countries to lay a solid foundation for their strategic cooperation and the development of their bilateral relationship.”

US-Israeli war on Iran

China has refused to intervene or get involved in the US-Israeli war on Iran, despite Trump’s repeated calls for them to do so. China has maintained the war was unnecessary and repeatedly warned against its prolongation. It has supported the interim peace deal signed in June under international mediation.

Xi reiterated this position during his visit to the US, expressing hope that both Iran and the US would soon return to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and end the war.

Xi claimed that “China-US cooperation may not solve every problem in the world, but without it, it would be hard to solve many of the world’s problems” and proposed more dialogue and “mechanisms of crisis communication and prevention” between their armed forces.

In his speech at the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2026, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian “strongly condemned a ‘double standard’ on the issue of nuclear development, stating that Israel, which is not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has weapons of mass destruction yet has never been inspected. ‘The nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran. Israel kills, but Iran is subject to sanctions,’ he stressed (UN News, 2026; UN Web TV, 2026).

Does this suggest a change of tack on the part of the Iranians regarding this central issue given that Iran has hitherto tended to downplay Israel’s nuclear weapons? This was most recently confirmed in the Iranian demands for an end to their closure of the Strait of Hormuz and for a lasting peace between Iran and the US. No mention was made of Israel’s nuclear weapons in the 14-point Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding [MoU] of June 2026. Yet, despite being attacked by Israel and the US, two nuclear powers, in June 2025 and again in February 2026, article 8 of the memorandum states: “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons” (US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, 2026). This position was reiterated by Pezeshkian in his speech. However, US President Trump soon annulled the memorandum, and there is at present little sign of it being reactivated.

Despite Israel’s “ambiguity”—meaning that it does not affirm or deny—it has long been understood that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal. Indeed, back in 1986, former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu publicly exposed Israel’s nuclear programme at the Dimona facility in The Sunday Times, in which it was estimated that Israel possessed between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads (Times Online, 2004). But Israel did not sign up to the NPT, so it has never had any inspections from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).

Yet, it is Israel that has relentlessly been calling for an end to Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment, arguing that this is a short step to its developing nuclear weapons. Whether Democrat or Republican, US presidents have dutifully followed Israel’s demand that Iran must never have nuclear weapons, a stance also observed by western nations in their entirety. Under the enormous influence of Israel, they have not expressed any concerns over Israel’s nuclear arsenal; indeed, they resolutely refrain from mentioning it.

This is the double standard rightly stressed by Pezeshkian. The presumption in the West explains their hypocrisy, that is, Israel can be trusted with nuclear weapons, so there is no mention of any kinds of sanctions, while Iran, by contrast, most certainly cannot be so trusted and so must never be allowed to develop or acquire them. Even though it adheres to Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons and does not possess them, Iran is heavily sanctioned by the West. Though the fatwa was a political signal to the US and its western allies that their concerns about Iran’s supposed desire for nuclear weapons were mistaken, it was blithely ignored.

Iran’s response to Israel’s chutzpah and Western hypocrisy has been to downplay Israel’s nuclear arsenal. This is paradoxical, and the reasons for this puzzling stance are not clear. This is not to say that Iran has completely kept silence on the issue—for example, in April 2010, at the opening of the First International Conference on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation: World Security without Weapons of Mass Destruction, held in Tehran, then Iranian President Ahmadinejad explicitly referred to Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which he argued was safeguarded by the United States, while Iran is prevented from establishing a nuclear energy programme for peaceful purposes (Haaretz, 2010). However, the conference, including Ahmadinejad’s speech, was largely ignored by Western governments and the media.

A previous clear example of Iran’s downplaying of Israeli nuclear weapons was that this was not mentioned in the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] of 2015, thereby preventing discomfort for then-US President Obama, who would have had to explain the double standard especially as the whole purpose of the JCPOA was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

So, it is clear that Iran has avoided drawing attention to Israel’s nuclear stockpile and attendant Western hypocrisy with any great vigour. Why this is so has not been stated in public statements, but one can surmise that this is to block the inference that Iran’s highlighting of Israeli nuclear weapons would be the pretext for developing its own. If true, this is a most dubious explanation for which little evidence exists. Indeed, the opposite would be a legitimate reason for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons: to act as a deterrent against Israel, a nuclear-armed country that is unremittingly hostile to it.

It remains to be seen whether Pezeshkian’s speech suggests that Iran, rather than underplaying Israel’s nuclear arsenal—for whatever reasons—will henceforth robustly draw attention to its existence and highlight Western hypocrisy in remaining silent about it. Given that Iran has repeatedly been bombed by Israel and the US and may well be bombed again, the one deterrent that can ward off a future attack is the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Hence, the assurance given in the MoU, and affirmed by Pezeshkian, that Iran shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons, is self-defeating.

If this undertaking stems from Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwa, then his son, Mujtaba, the new supreme leader, should rescind it. He, and other Iranian leaders, should remember that in his speech at the UN General Assembly, US President Trump threatened once more to annihilate Iran, in which endeavour Israel will surely join.

References

Haaretz (2010) “Ahmadinejad: Israel has nukes while Iran banned from nuclear energy”, 17 April, http://www.haaretz.com/news/ahmadinejad-israel-has-nukes-while-iran-banned-from-nuclear-energy-1.284439

Times Online (2004) Mordechai Vanunu: The Sunday Times articles—Times Online

U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding: Full Text (June 2026)

UN News (2026) At UN, Pezeshkian turns terrorism accusation back on Iran’s critics | UN News

UN Web TV (2026) Iran—General Debate, 81st Session | UN Web TV

Thousands of students across Germany were once again on strike against conscription and militarisation on Friday, 25 September. Actions took place in at least 100 localities as young people demanded a sharp turn from the government’s chosen path.

“We don’t want to be forced into military service, and we don’t want to go to war,” the students wrote in a declaration after their last strike in May.

This is the fourth time students have exchanged classrooms for streets since the end of 2025. The mobilisation has strengthened its resistance to the Merz administration’s plans to build the “strongest conventional army in Europe”—including by drawing more people into the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces.

While authorities insist military recruitment remains voluntary, students have warned of a clear tendency toward outright conscription. Local strike committees and activists also emphasised the widespread repression ahead of actions. This included scheduling of exams on strike days and locking in students on school grounds, they pointed out.

Billions for the Bundeswehr, cuts for schools and youth services

Over recent months, the government has sent thousands of questionnaires to map voluntary interest in joining the armed forces. According to German media, the response has been underwhelming: tens of thousands of students have disclaimed no interest whatsoever. Not even a multi-million-euro budget allocated to promoting the army has been able to shake this opinion.

“They sell us war service as an ‘adventure’ while we know that what awaits us is coercion, humiliation, sexism, right-wing extremism, and racism,” the student declaration adds.

Instead of taking the message seriously, authorities recently advanced the implementation of medical checks among their targeted population, drawing further frustration from students.

“We don’t want compulsory questionnaires, fines, draft physical examinations, conscription assessment centres across the country, nor planned integration of the Federal Volunteer Service into military service,” they wrote. “These are means to prepare the reintroduction of the draft and thus another war originating from Germany.”

“In case of conscription, we’ll be trained as cannon fodder, forced into the trenches,” students added. “War costs us our lives, while corporations like Rheinmetall make record profits.”

Students on strike have expressed solidarity with other ongoing struggles against militarisation and budget cuts. They stated they would join peace demonstrations planned for early October in Berlin and Stuttgart, as well as a trade union-backed mobilisation against budget cuts on Saturday, September 26.

Their decision reflects the widespread understanding that youth and education services are among those impacted by this round of austerity. According to junge Welt, the federal ministry responsible for education will face close to €1 billion in cuts—while €140 billion will be made available for so-called defence in 2027.

“Every tank, every rocket we pay for with dilapidated schools and social cuts,” students remarked.

China called the latest US threats of secondary sanctions on airline service-providing companies across the world an illegal unilateral measure without any basis in international law. The US said the sanctions would be applied if these companies do not stop providing services to Iranian airlines.

China said they “firmly oppose illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law and lack UN Security Council mandate,” Guo Jiakun, official spokesperson of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a regular press conference on Wednesday, 23 September.

China’s reaction came on the same day the latest US sanctions against Iran went into effect.

The US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asked companies across the world who are involved in providing services such as refuelling, ticketing, and other kinds of ground support to stop serving Iranian airlines starting at midnight on 23 September. If they fail to comply, they will be “locked out of the dollar system,” Bessent threatened.

The latest sanctions against its airlines is part of the recently announced US attempt to completely isolate Iran from the global economy in order to pressure its government to re-open the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz following the resumption of US airstrikes as well as Washington’s attempts to bypass Iranian control over the waterway in the Persian Gulf since July. Iran has claimed that those American moves were in violation of the peace deal signed under international mediation in June.

The adoption of new sets of sanctions is widely seen as an indication of Washington’s failure to achieve its objectives in Iran militarily, even after seven months of war, which began on 28 February.

Iran has reiterated that no amount of economic coercion will open the Strait of Hormuz. They listed the withdrawal of the US naval blockade, the unfreezing of its international assets, and an end of the war on all fronts in the region as preconditions for opening the Strait.

Air blockade

While some of the countries in the region cancelled Iranian flights to their airports in fear of US sanctions, Iran claimed most of its international flights remained scheduled and operational. Some countries also decided to close their airspace for Iranian airlines.

Iraq has diverted most of the Iranian flights from its Baghdad airport to Najaf.

If the flights remain suspended for a significant number of countries for a longer duration, it would amount to an air blockade on Iran. This will have an effect on thousands of people employed in the aviation sector in the country, which is already heavily facing tremendous economic troubles due to existing sanctions.

A prolonged suspension of flights could also impact hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have to travel out of the country for medical or other reasons.

Iran has maintained that unilateral US sanctions are illegal and an “act of terrorism” against Iranian people. It has urged the nations across the world to not succumb to the unilateral actions of the US.

Chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei, in an interview on Wednesday, warned neighboring countries against submitting to US pressure to shut down Iranian flights, claiming such acts will force Iran to retaliate.

Dear Members of Congress,

In truly deranged remarks to world leaders at the UN, Donald Trump declared that “I have a big decision to make,” whether to negotiate a deal with Iran or instead to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and drive Iran “into hell with no chance of survival.”

He posed it as his personal choice. The fact that the American people are dead set against Trump’s war means nothing. And as for the voters, he added that he gives “absolutely no credence” to the coming midterm elections in deciding on his actions and on Iran’s fate.

Nothing binds this President. He is not bound by law, the Constitution, the UN Charter, or public opinion at home and abroad. When asked at the start of the year whether he has any limits on his power, he said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump opened his speech with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, hailing America’s freedom. The fact is that Trump’s authoritarianism far outdoes that of King George III, against whom the colonies rebelled. Among the founders’ indictments of Mad King George was that “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” Yet our own mad king has decided that the survival of a whole civilization is in his hands alone.

Trump is emboldened in his contempt for Congress because the Republican members of Congress have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities, terrified of their own president, and forsaking their constituents for campaign lucre from AIPAC and the military-industrial complex.

The Constitution is unambiguous regarding Congress’s responsibility. Article I, Section 8 assigns Congress, not the President, the sole power to declare war. That is not a choice or an option. The Constitution doesn’t say that Congress can play dead and let the President declare war. The Framers made this choice deliberately, because they were explicitly rejecting the power of a king to take the nation to war.

In Federalist 69, Hamilton assured the public that the President’s war powers would be far less than the British monarch’s. Madison stated the principle plainly in a letter to Jefferson in 1798: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.”

The founders’ careful design has been overturned because of the unconstitutional subservience of the Republican members of Congress to Trump and to the military-industrial-digital complex. And yes, under Democratic presidents, most Democratic members of Congress also looked the other way when those presidents chose to go to war.

The war with Iran is Trump’s folly but Congress’s disgrace for not stopping it. It is a war without a purpose that has created mass suffering in Iran, tens of billions of dollars of direct outlays, and staggering damage to American military bases in eight countries of the Middle East. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent world and American prices soaring for oil, gas, fertilizers, and more. And the world has duly noted that Iran can hold its own against US aggression, albeit at great sacrifice to the people of Iran and the region.

America’s much vaunted AI battlefield has been exposed in the most horrifying way. On the first day of the war, an American missile struck the girls’ elementary school there, killing more than 150 people, most of them girls aged seven to twelve, and the military’s own inquiry reportedly found that overreliance on artificial intelligence contributed to the targeting. Trump blamed “Iran or somebody else,” and seven months later the administration has offered no findings, no apology and no compensation to the families.

The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world. It also violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits even the threat of force against another state. Nearly all the world stands aghast.

I write to you because you cannot simply walk away from Trump’s recklessness, shaking your heads silently. You have a job to do, so do it. The craven Republican Party has to find even a minimal level of guts to tell Trump, “No, you do not have the power to destroy Iran. Any war with Iran depends on us, and we don’t support you and our constituents want this war to stop.” A clear majority of Americans oppose this war, and poll after poll shows that the opposition to the war is growing. A few Republicans have found that courage. Last week three more Republicans broke ranks to support ending the war. Their colleagues should follow.

Many of you receive campaign contributions from military contractors and technology companies deeply involved in the war. Many of you take money from AIPAC, which champions the war that Netanyahu did so much to help launch. This has to stop, as it is a dereliction of your constitutional duty and a violation of your oath.

Congress holds the power of the purse. The fiscal year ends on September 30, and every bill that funds the Pentagon is your opportunity to prohibit funds for unauthorized offensive operations against Iran.

The right course for the US is simple. Congress should cut off funding, and the US should stop further attacks and go home. We need no agreement with Iran or anyone else to stop the war that we started. By ending the war you will immediately restore some sanity and safety to the world energy markets, food supplies, and prices faced by Americans and others around the world.

How America has declined from the glorious moment when John F. Kennedy stood at the same podium at the UN on September 20, 1963, after having negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. He told the assembled leaders that the treaty can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: “Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.” My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.

Members of Congress, to save our nation’s honor and our Constitution, you must do your duty to stop this war, and stop Trump’s brazen, destructive, and unconstitutional grab for power.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey D. Sachs

University Professor, Columbia University

Artificial intelligence was the concept of choice among European speakers during the first days of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Prime ministers and presidents recognised opportunities and invoked stronger regulation—then returned to advocating for more military spending, planning deterrence, and avoiding harsh words for the Trump administration.

“I’m afraid I may lack originality in describing it [the situation in the world],” French President Emmanuel Macron remarked, referring to the overlaps between interventions. For once, he was not wrong. Most European speeches described the world in terms of crisis, yet failed to spell out the connections between that situation and the behaviour of the United States. Macron’s speech was no true exception.

Instead, most seemed keen to endear themselves to the Trump administration. Newish British Prime Minister Andy Burnham called the UK “America’s closest ally” and announced a new “AI defence partnership” with the US—giving listeners something to truly worry about when AI is concerned.

The East European anti-communist set

Others were even friendlier to the UNGA host country. Romanian President Nicușor Dan said it was a particular pleasure to address the assembly in the US, “a country with which Romania shares a long history of friendship, a nation towards which Romanians look with respect and gratitude, including for its essential contribution to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of my country’s path towards democracy and freedom.”

Remarks directed against Eastern European countries’ socialist past were echoed by Polish President Karol Nawrocki and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković. These speeches reaffirmed commitment to the West, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and gratitude for positive changes these leaders perceived over the past 30 years.

“Millions of Romanians know from their own experience the difference between a communist system that oppressed them and stifled their initiative and freedom of choice and a democracy that rewards work, innovation, and personal responsibility,” Dan added.

None of these Eastern European leaders addressed the mass unemployment, emigration, and crumbling public services that soared while “work, innovation, and personal responsibility” took over.

Peace through protection, resilience through military strength

European interventions went to great lengths to reaffirm support for Ukraine and, perhaps more notably, criticism of the Putin administration. Plenty used the floor to repeat the belief that European countries must rearm in the face of a perceived—and still materially nonexistent—“Russian threat.”

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to a vision of “peace through protection” and showcased defence cooperation agreements, Burnham talked of resilience through military strength.

Some commended themselves for quickly approaching NATO’s 5% expenditure commitments. Others turned to “obstructions” of freedom of navigation—referring, of course, to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused by the illegal US-Israel war on Iran. Yet most European speeches did not even mention the US in this context, let alone offer comparable words of condemnation dedicated to Russia.

Spain vows to continue believing “humanity can continue to progress”

As has become customary, the speech delivered by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was among the few to stray from the underwhelming regional tone. Sánchez, whose administration has been attacked by the US government on several occasions, spoke of the conditions facing the world today as exacerbated by the selfishness, ignorance, and cruelty of some UN member states—not naming anyone in particular.

He singled out cruelty as the worst of these pillars driving powerful nations’ behavior in international spaces: “A cruelty that no longer flinches at the sight of a starving child’s ribs or a hospital reduced to rubble.”

Sánchez said Spain would not give in to attacks on multilateral institutions, nor would it stop believing “that humanity can continue to progress.”

“We are not going to do it, because we want to live up to our children’s expectations. Because we know that, in a few years, future generations will look back. They will study this decisive decade. And they will ask us what role each of us played. They will ask us what we did when some countries began to break the rules and others decided to turn a blind eye. They will ask what we did when defending what we believed in began to cost dearly. And when that happens, we want to be able to tell them that we did not stop fighting. We did not. We want to be able to tell them that we gave everything to leave them a more peaceful, sustainable, and fairer world.”

Page Six Hollywood recently declared: “War of Open Letters Erupts Between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine Factions in Hollywood.” Only a few years ago, a headline like this would have seemed unthinkable.

The article described an increasingly open struggle between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces within the entertainment industry. On one side are artists and other industry figures taking a clear stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza; on the other are defenders of Israel attempting to deny that genocide in the face of irrefutable evidence.

Yet even this framing failed to tell the whole story. What is unfolding is far more consequential than a quarrel among celebrities or a “war of open letters.” It is part of a brewing cultural revolution in American society—one that has now reached the highest echelons of the country’s cultural establishment. And in that struggle, Israel is losing—and losing badly.

Though the article acknowledged that support for Palestine has become powerful enough to divide Hollywood openly, it concealed the scale of the transformation underway by presenting the moment as a ‘war’ between two factions.

Long before Israeli filmmakers, production companies, and actors established a significant presence in Hollywood, the industry’s cultural infrastructure routinely elevated Israel at every opportunity. Film and television constructed a glossy image of a heroic nation whose establishment and continued survival were portrayed as miraculous, while the dispossession and violence underpinning that narrative were largely erased from view.

Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, meanwhile, were almost invariably cast in a negative light: the uncultured and menacing ‘other,’ supposedly possessing no legitimate claim to civilization, no recognizable morality, and no history or identity worthy of serious consideration.

Indeed, Hollywood played a central role in the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians in Western popular culture. When thousands of actors, filmmakers, producers and artists begin taking principled public stands for Palestine—often at considerable professional risk—we can therefore speak confidently of a cultural shift of historic proportions.

Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Cynthia Nixon and Riz Ahmed are only some of the most visible names on an ever-expanding list of morally driven and courageous artists confronting an archaic industry establishment.

The story, however, extends far beyond Hollywood. Consider the major controversy that recently erupted in the US following Macklemore’s removal from the remaining dates of Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour.

Macklemore is far more than a pro-Palestine singer. The Grammy-winning rapper and songwriter is a gifted political storyteller whose career has combined mainstream artistic success with an enduring commitment to social causes. Since the beginning of the genocide, he has emerged as one of the most powerful voices of Palestinian solidarity in the US and beyond.

During Sheeran’s recent concerts at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Macklemore expressed solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, called for a ‘free Palestine’ and performed ‘Hind’s Hall,’ his protest anthem honoring Hind Rajab, the Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The response to Macklemore’s courageous stand was immediate, but also predictable. The billionaires who controlled the venues reached for the weapon still at their disposal: financial power. Robert Kraft, the owner of Gillette Stadium, refused to allow Macklemore to perform there.

Sheeran, who appeared to underestimate the gravity of the moment, went on the defensive. “I am not complicit,” he declared, insisting that Macklemore’s removal had been the promoter’s decision rather than his own. But such a weak response by one of the world’s most influential musicians, particularly while an artist on his own tour was being punished for speaking out, could hardly be presented as a politically ‘neutral’ position.

In the past, the story might have ended there. Macklemore would have been isolated and his career placed in jeopardy, while Sheeran, the promoters and the stadium owners continued largely untouched.

Those days are gone. Global solidarity with Macklemore—and, by extension, with Palestine—spread so rapidly that the people responsible for his removal were forced to issue a succession of defensive and sometimes contradictory explanations.

By then, however, the damage had been done. Sheeran faced mounting boycott calls, protests and even the suspension of his music by an Irish radio station. Finneas, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe withdrew from the tour, while Beoga, Sheeran’s backing band, also pulled out. Artists and public figures began speaking openly about the genocide, freedom of expression and the power of billionaires to dictate the political boundaries of art.

Podcasters and social-media commentators also mobilized, reaching audiences of millions and digging deeper into the controversy. They began asking who Kraft was, examining his longstanding relationship with Israel, his campaign against BDS and the enormous financial machinery behind his political advocacy.

The attempt to punish Macklemore ultimately placed Kraft, Sheeran and the entertainment establishment itself under unprecedented scrutiny. Far from silencing the message of Palestinian freedom, their actions amplified it.

Ultimately, this is not a story about two feuding artists, just as Hollywood’s transformation cannot be reduced to two camps trading open letters. Both are manifestations of a much larger cultural upheaval rooted in grassroots American society, where people from diverse backgrounds are finally opening their eyes to Israeli crimes and to the extraordinary influence Tel Aviv has long exercised over their country.

Beyond the occasional opinion poll, that story rarely makes headlines. But when the pendulum swings this far, neither Kraft’s money nor the stadiums he controls can stop the movement.

Nor can they silence Macklemore’s cry of ‘Free Palestine’—a cry now echoed by millions of people throughout the world.

This month has seen the United Nations issue two reports alleging the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the United States in two theatres of engagement. In one, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran concluded that the US had committed war crimes in two attacks on Iran on the first day of the war, killing civilians, including over 120 children. The other, featuring exploits in the Caribbean Sea entitled Operation Southern Spear, involved the extravagantly murderous campaign waged by the Trump administration against alleged drug traffickers using small vessels. These narco-strikes (a reported number of 68, resulting in the deaths of 223 people), provoked the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism, Ben Saul, to find “reasonable grounds” that they constituted “crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law”. The killings were “unlawful and intentional under international law”.

On 28 February, in the opening phase of its preemptive, illegal war against Tehran, the US armed forces bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. Over 160 people died, among them 123 children under 13 years of age. The school, which had been labelled by the Defence Intelligence Agency a legitimate military target, was struck by three missiles. (This had been casually euphemised as a targeting error based on obsolete intelligence: the site of the school had originally been part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval base but was separated from that facility between 2013 and 2016 and converted into a civilian educational site.) That same day, an athletic facility in Lamerd city, Fars Province, where girls were undergoing sports training, was struck by a precision strike missile, resulting in the deaths of 22 civilians, including two schoolgirls, two schoolboys and a 2-year-old girl playing in front of her home.

The attack on Minab was found to be “a violation of the obligation to distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives and the prohibition of making civilian objects the object of an attack, as well as the principle of precaution”. The strike on the Lamerd facility also gave the mission “reasonable grounds to believe” that it constituted “the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.”

The Minab attack had been targeted “with the requisite mental element of recklessness (dolus eventualis).” This assessment was reached given the “deprioritisation” by the Trump administration on mitigating harm to civilians, evidenced by public statements by senior officials scornful of international humanitarian law, and the failure “to update information in relation to the school in […] targeting databases” that would have accounted for the current status of the building. “Rather, the United States directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

On Operation Southern Spear, Saul’s briefing note found that the attacks launched against the designated narco-vessels amounted “to serious extrajudicial killings in violation of the right to life, being unjustified in national or personal self-defence or under international humanitarian law, the international law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter-terrorism law”. Rather damningly, these strikes had also done nothing to stem the supply or price of cocaine, instead producing “ballooning effects” while ignoring the primary cause of overdose deaths in the US: fentanyl and opioids. Most cocaine, in any case, tended to be transported “on container ships (not small boats), most of which are never inspected at ports and then cross the United States’ land borders”.

Saul also took issue with the exculpatory grounds of self-defence, so adamantly insisted on by the Trump administration. There was no inherent “right to use self-defence against the criminal groups listed as terrorist organisations.” Even if the vessels and crew were members of criminal groups so listed as terrorist in nature, these entities “have not mounted any ‘armed attack’ on the United States so as to trigger a right of self-defence.” The US had not claimed these vessels and crew to be armed with military means to launch attacks with the scale and gravity expected by conventional forces.

The issue of an imminent threat to life had also not been demonstrated in the context of these killings. “The concept of an imminent threat to life does not stretch to encompass an attenuated chain of causation in which potential future deaths result from drug consumption after numerous intervening steps occur.” Nor was there evidence that the use of force was a matter of last resort, let alone necessary and proportionate, given the admission by Secretary of State Marco Rubio “that vessels could have been intercepted, but the United States instead chose to destroy them to deter other drug traffickers.”

In terms of recommendations, Saul’s report proposes that Washington conduct necessary, impartial, independent and transparent investigations into the killings to comport with international standards; prosecute the relevant perpetrators in the chain of command, both military and political, and provide appropriate remedies and reparation to the victims and families. It also notes, with regret, the penalisation of former military personnel who had insisted that illegal orders be disobeyed. “Even if humanitarian law applied, every combatant has a duty to disobey a manifestly unlawful order, including orders to commit the war crime of murdering civilians, and bears criminal liability where the person knew the order was unlawful or should have known because of the manifestly unlawful nature of the act so ordered.”

The outcome of these reports will be few and inconsequential. The war against Iran continues in staggered fashion, threatening, if anything, to expand. At the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump continued airing threats of existential annihilation against Tehran while fantasising about war aims unfulfilled. Killing alleged narco-terrorists continues to fixate those buccaneers at US Southern Command. On 19 September, for instance, SOUTHCOM announced, not giving anything resembling detail, the killing of “four narco-terrorists” in a “lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean.” The intelligence behind the operation had been “confirmed”, something only the most credulous inside or outside the Pentagon would believe without question.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has filed eight articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, citing the strike against the school in Minab and Operation Southern Spear and good grounds for doing so. Relevantly, Article IV charges the Secretary “with ignoring laws that minimise civilian casualties”, while Article V alleges the replacement of “maritime law enforcement with unauthorised military targeting of suspected drug traffickers, resulting in at least 221 deaths.” While this should have been brought to a full House vote on 17 September, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP grandees saw fit to cancel that day’s proceedings of the chamber, thereby prolonging it till after the midterm elections. The rot, having set in from the top, shows few signs of being addressed.

US President Donald Trump signed into law the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act on Friday, 18 September. The law, if implemented, is expected to cause new disruptions to the global economy, already under strain due to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The US law is named after Lindsey O. Graham, a hawkish Republican senator who died in July. He was the initiator and one of its ardent advocates.

The US House of Representatives adopted the bill in a bipartisan vote, with 262 voting in favour and 159 voting against it, on 17 September. The Senate had already approved the bill in August with an overwhelming majority.

It imposes new sanctions on Russia and its high officials, including President Vladimir Putin. It targets the so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers allegedly used by Russia to evade the US sanctions and imposes a 500% tariff on goods imported from the country.

However, the most significant aspect of the law is related to the discretionary powers it gives to Trump. According to the law, Trump will have the power to impose tariffs of up to 100% on goods imported from the top buyers of Russian oil and gas or its military supplies.

Over 100 protests took place across France during the weekend of 19-20 September, as left parties, grassroots organisations, and human rights associations mobilised against a new law on the use of force by law enforcement. Dubbed the “License to Kill” bill by progressives, the legislation presumes that police and gendarme officers who draw their firearms do so legitimately unless proven otherwise.

Despite a petition against the law collecting over 730,000 signatures in a matter of weeks, the French government—backed by the votes of the far-right National Rally—forced the proposal through the National Assembly on 7 July. In what critics described as a vote of shame, 313 parliamentarians voted in favour of the proposal, including all 122 representatives of the extreme right party.

The progress of the bill led to widespread fears. Among them, legal experts emphasised risks posed to the rule of law and the normalisation of the use of firearms—not to mention dangers posed to populations who are already exposed to profiling by the authorities.

The legislation is now set for consideration by the Senate and, if passed, is all but certain to bring devastating consequences for Black, migrant and working-class communities in the country.

The legislation’s central issue is changing the way use of force by law enforcement officers is regulated. As of now, it is the state that must prove that the use of force was legitimate; according to the new law, the default presumption will be that officers act in legitimate self-defence.

Bosniak and Serb politicians, intellectuals, and religious leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-Dayton quasi-protectorate have a not particularly unusual talent for reducing geopolitics to a provincial costume drama. Bosniaks are a South Slavic people whose religious and cultural heritage is predominantly Sunni Muslim, while the Serbs are likewise South Slavic but predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian. In their self-imposed isolation, these elites cultivate the illusion that powerful friends abroad stand ready to serve as the eternal “protectors” of their perpetually endangered peoples. Some pose for photographs with Israeli flags, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s government subjects the population of Gaza to mass killing, starvation, and the systematic destruction of the basic conditions of life; others have written to the king of Saudi Arabia praying that Allah grant him victory, even as the Saudi monarchy under King Salman spent years subjecting Yemen’s population to bombing, blockade, biological destruction, and starvation. Then both sets of deferential local elites return home to explain to an increasingly bewildered population that they, and they alone, constitute the last bulwark of civilisation in the Balkans.

To understand the essence of this routinely cheap political pageant, it is worth returning to an old interview with Ami Ayalon, the former director of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, and former commander of the Israeli Navy. Interviewed by Charlie Rose on 8 August 2012, Ayalon laid out his vision of the new regional order emerging after the Arab Spring. His proposal was for a coalition of Sunni-majority states, among them Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which, together with a U.S.-led international order, would work to contain Iran. As early as 2011, Ayalon had argued that Turkey might serve both as a model of regional democracy and as a strategic counterweight to Iran.

For anyone who had been following the Middle East, then, this was no conspiracy theory but a perfectly transparent strategic concept. Indeed, Ayalon believed that resolving the Palestinian question was precisely what could open the way for such a coalition. Nor was his basic geopolitical intuition unique. By 2014, the Brookings Institution was already writing about the convergence of Israeli and Saudi interests vis-à-vis Iran. In 2015, Israel’s defense minister at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, spoke openly of a “Sunni camp,” including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and other states whose interests, he argued, were drawing closer to Israel’s because of the perceived threat posed by the expansion of Iranian power. And in 2017, Israeli minister Yuval Steinitz publicly acknowledged the existence of partly secret contacts with Saudi Arabia.

Yuval Steinitz, a long-time member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and Israel’s energy minister at the time, who had previously also held the strategic affairs portfolio, went a step further in 2017, publicly acknowledging that Israel maintained partly secret contacts with Saudi Arabia precisely on the basis of their shared concern over Iran. Nor, for that matter, does the latest defence pact among Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, signed in Mecca on 7 August 2026, and built around the principle that an attack on one member is to be regarded as an attack on all three, represent some sudden reversal in relations among Sunni-majority states. Rather, it marks a new phase in a much longer regional realignment centred on Iran, Gulf security, and the U.S.-led system of alliances.

And this is where political reality in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-Dayton quasi-protectorate becomes so absurd that even its own propagandists can no longer outdo it.

Milorad Dodik, for decades the dominant political figure in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority entity, now presents Israel not merely as a friendly country but as a model and strategic partner for Republika Srpska itself. In an article entitled “Survival Is Not Entrusted to Others,” he links Iran to wartime assistance provided to the Bosniak side during the 1990s, as well as to Hezbollah and Hamas, while portraying Republika Srpska and Israel as communities confronted by the same ideological enemy. As early as 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel, Dodik declared that Republika Srpska “fully supports” Israel, while the Palace of the Republic in Banja Luka, the seat of the entity’s president, was illuminated in the colours of the Israeli flag. In March 2025, he met Benjamin Netanyahu and once again reiterated his support for Israel.

Željka Cvijanović, the Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three-member state presidency, followed much the same diplomatic path. In Washington in March 2026, she met with representatives of B’nai B’rith, members of the American Jewish Committee, and other Jewish organisations, emphasising the friendship between Republika Srpska and Israel. Yet on that very same day, 4 March, she also sent letters expressing solidarity with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait following Iranian attacks on those countries. In May, again in Washington, she attended a celebration of Israel’s Independence Day at the invitation of the Israeli ambassador. These ties are now being translated into attempts at practical cooperation as well, encompassing security, cybersecurity, policing, and business.

Sarajevo’s Bosniak political and religious establishment, on the other hand, while officially appalled by the bombing and starvation of Gaza, displays a distinctly Dayton-era hypocrisy of its own: the same geopolitical arrangement, once it passes through Sarajevo’s rhetorical customs house, emerges on the other side as a certificate of moral superiority.

When Saudi Arabia launched its bombing campaign in Yemen on 26 March 2015, a group of Bosniak professors and Islamic intellectuals—Džemaludin Latić, Safvet Halilović, Šefik Kurdić, and Izet Terzić—described Operation Decisive Storm, in a surviving text of their letter to King Salman, as an action that had “restored dignity to the Islamic ummah,” meaning the worldwide Muslim community, and prayed that God would grant the king assistance in carrying it out.

Mustafa Cerić did much the same. Cerić, an influential Bosniak theologian and intellectual, had served for nearly two decades as the reis-ul-ulema, or grand mufti and head of the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 14 April 2015, the official Saudi Press Agency published his letter supporting King Salman’s policy toward Yemen, along with a similar message from the prominent Islamic theologian Bilal Dervišić.

A year later, another group of Bosniak theologians and professors—again including Latić, Halilović, and Kurdić, this time joined by Halil Mehtić, Fuad Sedić, and others—responded to a Houthi missile fired toward Saudi Arabia by congratulating the Saudi armed forces “under the leadership of King Salman and the government.” The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country’s central institutional body of Sunni Islam, was still officially condemning Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia in September 2026, although its statement also called for an end to the war and a return to negotiations.

On that same 22 September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s foreign minister, Elmedin Konaković, met Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir to discuss strengthening political, economic, and even defense-industrial cooperation. Konaković thanked Riyadh for its “long-standing political and material support” for Bosnia and Herzegovina and briefed al-Jubeir on the glorification in Serbia of Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted of crimes against humanity and other grave wartime offenses.

Thus the moral condemnation of Serbia’s relationship to war crimes was duly delivered to a monarchy whose record in Yemen had long since, and infamously, surpassed Mladić’s own.

Indeed, thanks in no small part to the monarchy Konaković had just briefed, Yemen had long since ceased to be merely a geographical designation and had become one of the most horrific places on the planet. The United Nations Development Programme estimated that, by the end of 2021, the conflict would have caused approximately 377,000 deaths. Roughly 154,000 were attributable directly to combat and violence; another 223,000—nearly 60 percent of the total—were indirect deaths caused by hunger, disease, lack of clean water, and the collapse of the health-care system.

The most horrifying figure is still to come. According to the same UNDP estimate, 259,000 of those conflict-attributable deaths—almost 70 percent of the total—were children under the age of five.

And these modeled estimates of the war’s wider human cost should not be confused with the narrower tally of civilians individually documented as killed or wounded in military violence. By 9 August 2018, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had documented 6,592 civilians killed and 10,470 wounded in Yemen. Air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition accounted for the majority of those verified civilian casualties. The places struck included homes, markets, schools, hospitals and other medical facilities, wedding gatherings, and civilian vehicles—including buses carrying children.

None of this, of course, was the product of Saudi operations conducted independently. As early as 25 March 2015, Barack Obama provided the Saudi war with what, in the language of great powers, is called “support”: intelligence, logistics, and joint planning. Aerial refueling, arms transfers, and military advisers followed—a neatly administered package of assistance that allowed the destruction of a country to be conducted as a technically proper allied undertaking.

The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, like the Bosniak theologians and intellectuals discussed above, does not, of course, support Israel. How could they, according to their own elevated moral worldview, possibly side with a regime whose actions they describe as monstrous? Fortunately, geopolitics requires no such unpleasant formality as direct support. It is quite enough to spend years backing Saudi policy toward the Houthis and Iran and eventually find oneself, by perfectly respectable means and without a single Israeli flag hanging in the office, on the same side of the regional ledger that Israeli security circles had been publicly laying out since the beginning of the previous decade.

Nor, however, do Republika Srpska’s self-appointed domestic “fighters against radical Islam” travel in any particularly different direction. They ride the same geopolitical train as Saudi Arabia, a monarchy that spent decades pouring enormous sums into the global export of its own Salafi religious orthodoxy and that today remains one of Washington’s key security partners and part of the same anti-Iranian regional alignment in which Saudi and Israeli interests repeatedly overlap.

The result is that the local defenders of Christian Europe against “radical Islam,” after delivering the requisite speeches about the struggle for biological survival, eventually take their seats in the same carriage as a state whose religious policy spent decades helping to spread precisely the ideological milieu they now claim to be fighting.

During election season, of course, this modest condition of dependency is temporarily suspended on the advice of hired political consultants. Voters are then invited to choose between slogans such as “Civic. Land of Lilies” and “Only SDA”—the latter referring to the Party of Democratic Action, the main traditional Bosniak nationalist party—on one side, and “Always with the People, Always with Srpska” on the other. For a few weeks, the citizen can therefore be forgiven for imagining that the fate of civilisations is being decided before his eyes, rather than the distribution of personnel among the offices of a remarkably cramped political order.

As soon as the ballot boxes close, however, it becomes clear that the guardians of the “land of lilies” and the guardians of “Srpska” are equally well integrated into the same American-Israeli networks of power in the Balkans, that they seek patrons at the same addresses, and that their grand historical movements in the opening decades of the twenty-first century are taking place within the walls of the same prison yard.

At that point, every local story about “our” friends and “theirs” falls away. What remains is the old question of how politically tolerable someone else’s civilian death becomes when the bomb is dropped by an ally and how easily geopolitics can be sold as cheap moralism when someone else is left to pay the bill.

And in this case, the bill for these grand geopolitical arrangements is delivered neither to Sarajevo professors nor to the dreary bureaucracy of Banja Luka, nor, for that matter, to the entire procession of self-appointed interpreters of the national interest on social media. It is sent to a very different address. In Yemen, it was received by people living under bombs, blockade, and deliberately manufactured hunger; in Gaza today, it is being received by those whose homes have been reduced to numbers in statistics of destruction, in a landscape where more than eighty percent of all structures have been damaged or destroyed, and where terrified orphans, their cheeks gnawed by rats as they sleep, cry for a piece of bread.

In the end, the dead on the margins of the world are simply entered under different headings in the ledger. When the perpetrator is an enemy, he produces victims; when he is an ally, he produces “collateral damage.” The former kills children; the latter carries out a “strategic necessity.” Conscience is then brought into line with the foreign policy of the day, the file receives the stamp of national interest, and the matter is archived.

And when some future historian one day opens those files, it may turn out that the greatest disgrace was not that the “great” killed the small—for that is the global habit of tyrants—but that our own truly small men, never smaller than this, shamelessly and servilely washed the little bloodied knives of those “great” powers.

Long before Little Red Riding Hood—or Rotkäppchen—and even before Tacitus’s Germania (98 AD), Germans had a quasi-mythical relationship to their forests.

About 150 years ago, the German forest became very important. At that time, a young lawyer by the name of Karl Marx wrote a series of articles published in 1842 in the famous Rheinische Zeitung, or Rhineland News. In English, it is known as “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.”

Marx’s articles are about the criminalisation of a traditional practice carried out by local peasants for decades: gathering fallen branches, deadwood, and berries from forests that had once been considered common land. Under capitalism’s changing property laws, forest owners were converting these customary rights into strict private-property claims—disused fallen wood suddenly became a commodity.

Gathering wood that had previously been treated as a communal resource was being redefined as theft. This might have helped the young Karl look at capitalism in a way that led to what is today known as Das Kapital—still the best analysis of capitalism ever written.

One hundred and twenty years after that, Alexandra sang “Mein Freund der Baum ist tot. Er fiel im frühen Morgenrot” [“My friend the tree is dead. It fell in the early dawn light“ in the late 1960s.

Since then, things have not gotten better for Germany’s beloved forests—a country that, despite rampant industrialisation, massive “concretisation,” endless miles of the Autobahn, land clearing, and the best efforts neoliberal capitalism can muster to exploit and vandalise Germany’s natural environment, still has forest cover of about one-third.

Instead of preserving Germany’s forests, German capitalism displays true hubris—true arrogance toward the Earth and the environment.

As has been predicted many times over, this will inevitably lead to the downfall of a people addicted to hubris. As The New Yorker once put it, “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

It will play out exactly as the UN’s Guterres said: “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell, and the truth is we have control of the wheel.”

This is exactly where capitalism, greed, the free market, and profit have driven humanity: to a fatal crossing of the border between profit and survival, reflected today in the corporate-made climate crisis known as global warming.

The people of Europe have felt the direct consequences of that—well, many died—across the whole continent during last summer’s fire season, which grows ever longer and more severe.

It featured heat waves that caused mass death, massive droughts that halted shipping, and, of course, extended forest fires from Greece to Spain and from France to Sweden. It is as if nature has taken revenge with divine wrath. The tormented environment has reacted with physical precision to its destructive exploitation by corporate greed.

In past centuries, a robust mix of forests filled Germany. But it was soon replaced with “resilient”—the crypto-official codeword for “profitable”—softwood plantations. These are the dreaded, sterile, and stale monocultures that create dead zones for plant and animal life.

Meanwhile, the ever-increasing droughts of recent years have even attacked these carefully crafted and cultivated monocultures. Weakened by heat and drought, trees fall easy prey to the bark beetle, dealing them ever more severe blows. Now substantially weakened, these dry forests are not only defenceless—they also burn almost every year, with cumulative intensity.

Germany’s southern neighbours are even worse off. They fight eternal battles against the forces that global warming brings every summer. They fight seas of flame. Nevertheless, far too little is happening on the political side to deal not only with this homemade climate crisis but also to make Germany’s—and indeed Europe’s—forests nature-friendly, sustainable, and, ultimately, survivable.

Corporate Europe has sown the seeds of destruction. Now others reap the harvest of ashes. This is not unique to Germany or Europe. Sadly, forest fires are setting records worldwide and frequently.

There are record-breaking temperatures, droughts, dried-up soil (with “peak soil” now behind us), and forest fires announced year after year. This is now the recurring headline that defines each year’s “world news”—a marker not just of global warming but of the “Capitalocene.”

It follows from the human- and corporate-made climate crisis. Drought, dry soil, and forest management driven by profit rather than sustainability increase the risk of forest fires and their spread around the world. The lack of political action on forest protection and climate protection only pours—almost literally—oil on the fire.

Tellingly, the conservative German government of Helmut Kohl (1982 to 1998) renamed the country’s official Waldsterbensbericht (forest-death report) to Waldzustandsbericht (forest-condition report)—from “dying forests” to forests that merely have a “condition” (Zustand).

With this reality-denying, anti-environmental sleight of hand, Kohl’s government could suddenly declare that all was fine in Germany’s forests. Despite Kohl’s media manipulation, the forests continued to die.

According to the European Space Agency’s Earth observation programme, Copernicus, Europe had the highest emissions from forest fires in 2025 since ESA‘s records began 23 years ago.

The extent of the destruction is shown in detail. Approximately 47.3 million tonnes of CO₂ (equivalent to roughly 13 megatonnes of carbon) were released—equal to the total annual carbon emissions of a country like Portugal, from fires alone.

In everyday life, such quantities are almost impossible to grasp, but a comparison helps: it is the equivalent of the annual output of 10.5 million gasoline cars, or of running twelve coal-fired power plants—one of the most polluting sources of energy—around the clock, all year.

It gets worse. Particularly alarming is what is known as the “catch-up dilemma.” To filter these 47 million tonnes of CO₂ out of the atmosphere within a single year, Europe would need 22 million hectares of healthy forest—twenty times the area that burnt in 2025.

It gets worse still: there is “double damage.” In addition to the direct emissions from the destroyed forest, that forest is also lost as an active carbon store in the fight against the climate crisis.

According to preliminary evaluations from Germany’s national weather service (Deutscher Wetterdienst), spring 2026 in Germany was exceptionally mild, dry, and sunny. Nationwide, only 68% of normal precipitation fell—a third was missing. Regional differences made this worse still: some parts of Germany saw heavy rain, while southern Germany suffered historic drought.

According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), 580,000 hectares of forest had burnt as of mid-August—significantly more than the long-term average of about 243,000 hectares.

This was especially severe in France, which experienced a historic extreme during July; Portugal, Spain, Germany, and parts of the Balkans were also hit hard.

Intensive commercial forestry with monocultures makes forests far more vulnerable to drought and pests. What is needed is a significant change in forestry: a close-to-nature forest, with cool, moist mixed habitats that conserve more water, can survive prolonged, global-warming-induced droughts while also capturing CO₂.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of current examples of forest fires and the danger they pose. In France, Spain, and several other Mediterranean regions, locals were fighting the flames even as Germany itself was burning.

• France: The area burnt was five times that of a “normal” year—though under global warming’s drive toward climate hell, there are no more “normal” years. Two firefighters died. In the Département of Gironde, in and around Bordeaux, up to 220,000 people had to be evacuated from the flames.

• Spain: Fires were eventually brought under control after a long, hard battle. At the beginning of August 2026, no fewer than 40 large-scale fires had burnt 250,000 acres of forest—compared with 15 simultaneous fires the previous year. Global warming and fires are accelerating together.

• Germany: Soil moisture levels had already fallen to levels as threatening as those seen in 2018 and 2022. Less moisture means drier forests and more intense fires. Germany’s forest-fire danger index (Waldbrandgefahrenindex) has been ringing alarm bells: by 2 August 2026, the index had reached 22 days at extreme warning levels—more than twice the average for 1991 to 2020. The consequences are visible, especially in southern Germany, where an unusually high number of trees were already shedding their leaves by midsummer; with the foliage gone, sunlight hits the ground directly, and the forest heats up further.

• South and East Germany: Germany’s coniferous forests in the hotter southern and eastern regions are particularly sensitive.

• Unexploded Ordnance: In some remote, mountainous areas of eastern Germany, there is an added risk from old, slowly decaying ammunition—grenades and shells left behind from former military training grounds. Some can self-ignite in extreme summer heat and start fires.

• Lower Saxony: The water needed to fight forest fires in the Lüneburg Heath area (Main-Kinzig-Kreis) led local authorities to ask residents to stop showering. Alongside the risk to forests, grassland fires are also becoming more frequent.

• Canada: Europe is by no means alone in this. Other continents are also suffering forests in flames. In the Canadian province of British Columbia, for example, 20,000 people fled a runaway forest fire.

• Brazil: Amid all the bad news, there is one bright spot. Brazil—no longer run by the “clerico-neo-fascist” Jair “Messias” (!) Bolsonaro, but by Lula—has had notable success with its forest conservation policy. Under President Lula, deforestation has declined to a ten-year low, and 80% less of Brazil’s forest area burnt compared with the previous year.

On the obvious question of what causes forest fires, natural events like lightning strikes are among the least common causes. Data from Germany’s Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung, BLE) show that in Germany in 2025, no more than 3% of such fires were caused by natural events.

By far the single greatest cause of forest fires is people. High on the list is carelessness—a discarded cigarette, for example. In some countries, it is slash-and-burn agriculture.

Compounding this is the human-made climate crisis, which intensifies the frequency and spread of forest fires, producing a fatal downward spiral:

• global warming leads to

• more frequent heat waves, which lead to more droughts, which cause

• crops, forest plants, and trees to become dehydrated, while soil and forest floors grow ever drier, and as a result,

• More forest fires occur.

On the inevitable question of what can be done: recent data confirms that drought alone does not cause forest fires. Rather, poor forest management (Forstwirtschaft) plays a crucial role, particularly when profit-seeking weakens ecosystems:

• Monoculture: Planting predominantly, or even exclusively, one species of tree brings serious disadvantages. Such monoculture plantations are no longer natural habitats for many animals, fungi, and plants. Trees become more vulnerable than they would be in their natural setting, soil becomes more acidic, and the natural water balance is disrupted. Rewilding a forest can reverse all of this.

• Non-native species: For example, highly profitable conifers such as pines grow naturally in colder regions like Scandinavia and at higher altitudes. Across much of Germany, many of them would not grow naturally at all. For decades, profit-driven forestry has relied on fast-growing conifers to maximise profits. This needs to change, in a shift that puts nature and our common survival ahead of profit.

• Heavy machinery: To make forestry even more profitable, heavy machinery is run through the forest—no longer Little Red Riding Hood’s woods, but the domain of diesel-powered bulldozers and trucks. This equipment is highly damaging to Germany’s sensitive forest floors. So-called full-harvesting machines (harvesters) can fell a tree, strip its branches, and trim it within minutes—processing over 100 trees a day. Efficient (the magic word of all management) and profitable, yes, but deadly to nature: machines weighing 40 to 100 tonnes compact the forest floor, rendering it uninhabitable for microorganisms and plant life. The damage is permanent and must stop.

• Reforestation: Reforestation is expensive and labour-intensive, even though nature itself—through rewilding—would do it far better. Worse, commercial reforestation for profit, using fast-growing monocultures, erodes the genetic diversity of parent trees. Left alone, forests develop a natural diversity that is stable—something forests have achieved over millions of years.

• Pesticides: Commercial (that is, for-profit) forestry relies on the heavy use of pesticides to secure short-term profits and compensate for the weaknesses of monocultures. Worse, in the effort to combat the much-feared bark beetle, the forest is turned into a zone of chemical warfare.

• Land clearing: Hard to believe, but still true: Germany continues to practise land clearing and so-called “clear-cutting.” This happens most often in forests already heavily damaged by bark beetle infestations and storms, but it also occurs in other forests—even in protected areas. Rather than allowing the forest to regenerate, heavy machinery cuts down the trees and hauls them away, destroying the delicate forest floor in the process.

• Protected areas: Although 67% of all forest in Germany lies within protected areas, only a minuscule 2.8% is actually protected from logging. In short, “protected areas do not protect.” This is no accident—it gives politicians a double advantage: they can claim to protect the environment while logging and land clearing continue, largely unhindered, across 97.2% of all protected areas, much as they do in unprotected ones.

What is needed is a radically different forest policy in Germany. Built on decades of conservative-neoliberal forest policy—under Kohl (1982 to 1998), Merkel (2005 to 2021), and Merz (since May 2025), spanning, with only a few brief interruptions, the better part of the last 40 years—Germany’s forestry policy has promoted intensive, for-profit forest management, with next to no incentive for its woods to return to a natural state.

If German forests are to remain allies in the fight against global warming, forest management in its current form cannot continue. Germany, Europe, and the world need an urgent turnaround in how we—humanity, or more precisely the profit-driven businesses that act on our behalf—use, misuse, and abuse forests.

What is needed is a sustainable forest policy, grounded in an ecosystem approach that ensures our planet’s survival, today and into the future. Earth observation programme

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has made digital safety, especially regarding children, a mooring of his premiership. Politically, he is so invested in it as to have become a salesman of sorts. In September last year, when paying a visit to the UN General Assembly High-level week in New York, he hosted an event at a room overlooking the East River. A motley crew were in attendance to hear from grieving families whose children had taken their lives after sustained online bullying. Leaders from Greece, Fiji, Tonga and Malta approved of Australia’s programme to ban social media platforms for children under 16. The European Union President Ursula von der Leyen revealed that Australia was being eyed for its efforts in that regard. From time to time, it seems that every government needs to have a good ban to target an alleged vice.

This September, according to his office’s media release, Albanese is spending 18 to 24 September in the US visiting Apple Headquarters in California before heading the Australian delegation to the General Assembly in New York. “During High-Level Week, the Prime Minister will promote Australia’s commitment to multilateralism and meet international partners to find collective solutions to shared challenges, including building a safe digital future.”

The aspirations for the visit involve a jumble of wishful thoughts in an age overseen by the mass distraction antics of US President Donald Trump, with his sneering disposition towards international alliances; accreting European anxieties, many of them pathological (refugees and Russia feature as twin bogeymen); the bold strides made by China; and gluttonous global military expenditure. Albanese’s own government had done much to encourage an increasingly provocative line of militarism and potential warmaking characterised by continued praise for the AUKUS pact, a security commitment unequally shared with the United States and the UK that promises more doom, more cost and nothing by way of genuine security assurances. Thus far, it is turning Australia into a garrison base for US interests in the Indo-Pacific, from which nuclear-armed bombers and submarines will be able to “project force,” as the armchair strategists like to call it.

For such reasons, Albanese’s remarks sound quaint: “Australia’s prosperity and security depend on a strong global system, where nations work together, agreed rules are respected, and cooperation delivers shared benefits.” That may be, but he goes on to reflect about the very things that are showering doubts upon these assumptions, including “fuel costs, climate change and conflict.” Elephants in the room are left unmentioned and undescribed. Instead, he parades his cherished objective of selectively abominating the Big Tech titans in favour of the child protection canard. “Australia is working to prevent online harm, particularly of our children, and I am proud that Australia is setting the world standard for digital safety.”

On 20 September, Albanese paid Tim Cook, the Executive Chairman of Apple’s Board, a breezy visit at Apple Park in Cupertino. It was an occasion for mutual congratulation, with Apple not being seen as quite the Big Tech rotter as other companies when it comes to corrupting and spoiling youth. Apple, the PM’s office noted, had “worked to support Australia’s online safety laws and taken additional steps to protect kids online.” Cook, in turn, gave Albanese “a demonstration of Apple’s new tools which allow parents to more easily manage the content their children can see, who they can communicate with, and when they have access to apps.” With that heavy note of paternalism struck, the Australian PM was in a good mood. “Walking through Apple Park today and seeing these new safety features in action proves that when we draw the line in the sand, tech companies will step up.” Cook and his company had shown “that industry can, and must, compete on safety credentials, not just convenience.”

All this was a prelude to launching Australia’s campaign for a two-year term on the UN Security Council for 2029-30. The public relations side of it is being given over to hawking the merits of digital safety, simply another description for government regulations and restrictions in the name of righteous demagoguery. The campaign for the seat is taking place under the following meaningless banner: “We listen. We partner. We protect.” Speaking to reporters at UN headquarters, Albanese explained that Australia’s presence on the Security Council would make it “part of shaping some of these biggest issues [including technology and artificial intelligence] which are facing the world and our nation.” Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong also insisted that a constructive role could be played by Canberra. “As an active and ambitious middle power, we have a practical contribution to make to international peace and security.”

The press stable seemed, for the most part, uncritical of the Albanese government’s elevation of digital safety and restraints to the level of high advertisement and international cooperation. They might have mentioned that the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 (Cth) is failing to bite, despite propaganda-sweetened figures provided by the eSafety Commissioner’s office. (The January 2026 compliance update celebrated the removal or restriction of 4.7 million accounts from mid-December 2025.) An analysis by researchers from the University of Newcastle on the effects of the legislation published in June in the medical journal BMJ offered a more sobering picture. The observational study of 408 children between the ages of 12 and 17 found that over 85% of the participants “reported using social media platforms subject to the Act at follow-up.” Between 54 and 68% reported the use of their own accounts; 66% “reported exposure to platform age verification, most commonly self-declared age (24-39%) or uploading a picture (‘selfie’) (13-27%).” Instances of circumvention or the use of social media via a private browser (6-11%) were also noted.

In July, the eSafety Commissioner released a report that should have poured much cold water over the initial, warm bath assessment of the social media ban. Grudgingly, the office concedes that “we saw only a relatively modest decrease in the use of age-restricted social media platforms from baseline to three months.” With the ban three months old, 81.5% of children were still using an age-restricted social media platform. The office identifies the predictable culprit for these unimpressive results: the “ineffective implementation of age assurance measures by platforms.” Cyber safety commentator Susan McLean offers a more apt assessment: you “cannot ban your way to safety.”

The Guardian Australia resorted to some utter silliness in observing that the Albanese had “shown a level of leadership not always expected from a smaller country.” This smaller country is so utterly enmeshed in the vassalising arrangements of a nuclear superpower keen on causing mischief in the name of defence. This supposed middle power are so keen to impress upon the world that technology bans work when they do not, targeting children who have already subverted restrictions or been left stranded from digital communities they have come to value. In all of this, where did the issue of education, instruction and guidance go?

President Xi Jinping is set to visit the United States from 23 September to 25. His visit must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.

In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents are the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.

In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognise that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.

That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an “irreplaceable” role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from the permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.

But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or, to be precise, four realities.

The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion), the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.

The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialisation, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatisation of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.

The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilising cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.

Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theatre.

Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.

The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.

The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.

There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognise that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.

This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.

Confrontation offers neither country a future.

Collaboration offers the world a chance.

Somaliland, a separatist-controlled region in the northwest of Somalia, has offered Israel and the US more than 7.5% of its soldiers for deployment to Gaza as part of the International Stabilisation Force (ISF) under Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace.​

It is the largest percentage of troop strength offered so far for the ISF, which is tasked, among other things, with disarming Hamas. With Indonesia indefinitely suspending its commitment of 8,000 troops earlier in March, the contingent offered by Somaliland is also the largest in absolute numbers.​

Yet Somaliland is not even a country. The UN and African Union regard it as part of Somalia. No country except Israel recognises the secessionist regime’s claim to sovereign statehood.​

It has only 25,000 soldiers, plus 1,500 coast guard personnel. From this small force, Somaliland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, has offered 2,000 soldiers in what would be its first-ever foreign deployment, if his offer is accepted.​

He is only waiting to be asked for troops by the US or Israel, he told the Jerusalem Post in an interview on the sidelines of the MEAD conference in Washington, DC. “If they ask me, I am ready,” he said. His readiness comes at a time when Somaliland has already lost over half of the territory it had once claimed.

Iranian news outlet Press TV called the detention of its West Bank correspondent Naqaa Hamed by the Israeli forces an “aggressive terrorist operation” aimed at silencing the truth about its occupation and genocide of Palestinians. It demanded the immediate intervention of the international community for her release.

“The desperate attempt by the Zionist war and security machine to block the flow of free news and boycott structured crimes in the West Bank is clear evidence of the occupier’s fear of independent reporters who expose widespread human right violations,” the Press TV statement, published on Thursday, 17 September, said.

Naqaa Hamed was abducted by the Israeli armed forces from a checkpoint at Tuqu, near Bethlehem, in the occupied Palestinian territory on 15 September.

She, along with her cameraman, was returning after reporting about rising Israeli settler violence on Palestinians in Masafer Yatta.

One eyewitness, a TRT journalist accompanying Hamed in her car, claimed that they were detained at the checkpoint and made to sit on the ground for 45 minutes while Hamed was taken alone for interrogation.

After the interrogation, the cameraman and TRT journalists were let go, but Hamed was arrested and sent to an unknown location.

Later it was reported that her detention has been extended until 23 September by an Israeli court.

Though no official confirmation has come forward about the charges against Hamed, Israeli media quoted unidentified military sources claiming her arrest was linked to her alleged cooperation with “the enemy entity”, presumably Iran, and espionage.

Hamed (38), a Palestinian-American and mother of three children, has been subjected to repeated physical attacks by Israeli forces in the last few months. She has also been subjected to a smear campaign on social media.

According to Press TV, rubber bullets were fired at her when she was reporting near Qalandia camp in December 2025. She was injured again in August this year by an Israeli stun grenade and tear gas fire.

The intimidation and smear campaigns on social media, started by pages affiliated with the Israeli occupation regime, targeted Hamed by questioning her credibility and calling her a part of the “Iranian propaganda machine”.

Israel is the worst place to be a journalist.

Israel has one of the worst records when it comes to killing and arresting journalists. Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have been either killed or arrested by the Israeli occupation forces since the beginning of the war and genocide in Gaza.

According to various sources, Israel has killed over 250 journalists and media workers in the West Bank and Gaza since October 2023.

According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, currently nearly 40 Palestinian journalists are in Israeli detention, including five women. Almost half of these journalists are kept in prison under the draconian provision of administrative detention, which allows the authorities to keep them in jail for an indefinite period without any formal charges or trial.

The Iranian media channel Press TV underlined that Hamed’s arrest by Israeli forces violates international laws about immunity to journalists in war zones. It demanded the UN, its High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other international human rights groups come out of their “shell of inaction and meaningful silence” and take measures to end Israel’s impunity.

“As long as responsible institutions remain in the shell of silence and inaction, Naqaa Hamed will not be the first, nor the last journalist to be targeted by the illegal actions of the Zionist regime,” the Press TV statement said.

Prabowo Subianto turned weeping for Palestine into a shield for his own failures. Days after calling his own experts “stupid,” he stood at Gontor, wept for Gaza, and declared “Free Palestine” three times. The choreography was perfect. The timing was deliberate. This is whitewashing as statecraft: using a distant moral cause to cleanse the stain of a welfare programme that has poisoned 50,000 people, a stock market down 32 per cent, and a credit outlook rated negative by Moody’s and Fitch.

It is diversionary foreign policy wielded like an explosive charge—designed to rally the base, silence scrutiny, and bury the food poisoning data beneath a keffiyeh. When a leader weeps for children thousands of miles away while his own lie hospitalised, the spectacle of moral distance becomes a weapon of mass distraction. Global strategists take note: this is not diplomacy. It is humanitarian theatre deployed as a domestic political movement, and the audience is being played.

What happens at the opening of the story? So, when the family house is on fire, a leader can use rhetorical magic to redirect the gaze outward, identify a distant cause worthy of righteous indignation, and let the smoke at home fade gently into the background. In September 2026, President Prabowo Subianto will have mastered the magic.

At the 28th anniversary of the National Mandate Party in Jakarta, in front of an audience of his own supporters, the President of the world’s third-largest democracy looked at the economists, public health specialists, and policy analysts who had questioned his flagship programmes and said one word: goblok. “Terserah pakar-pakar yang menganggap dirinya pakar,” he responded. “Saking pintarnya jadi goblok.” Allow the specialists who believe they are experts—so knowledgeable they have become foolish.

It was not an offhand remark. It was a philosophy. Within days, the President stood before a different audience—thousands gathered at the Gontor Islamic boarding school’s centennial celebration—and wept. He spoke of Palestine, of children bombed and butchered, of a nation rendered helpless. “Free Palestine,” he declared, three times, his voice cracking. The keffiyeh was draped. The headlines were written.

Two moments, two rhetorics, one presidency. And in the space between them lies the defining paradox of Prabowo’s Indonesia: a leader who weaponises compassion abroad while disarming scrutiny at home; who projects moral grandeur on the global stage while the fiscal foundations of his own state groan under the weight of a welfare programme that poisons the very children it was meant to feed.

For strategists and policymakers watching from global capitals, the message is clear. The world is watching the methodical breakdown of institutional guardrails in a G20 economy while clothed in a Palestinian flag and receiving a standing ovation.

The fiscal arithmetic of the Makan Bergizi Gratis programme—Free Nutritious Meals—is as staggering as its human cost. Initially budgeted at IDR 335 trillion for 2026, the programme has been slashed to IDR 268 trillion as economists warn that full implementation would push the state deficit to 3.34 per cent of GDP, breaching Indonesia’s constitutional 3 per cent ceiling.

The programme has already consumed IDR 75 trillion by April 2026, reaching 61.96 million beneficiaries across nearly 28,000 distribution kitchens. Yet by September, health ministry surveillance data revealed that food poisoning incidents linked to the programme had affected 50,059 people across 560 cases in 245 districts and cities across 36 provinces.

The human toll is not abstract. Over 5,000 schoolchildren have been hospitalised. In West Java alone, mass poisoning outbreaks in Cianjur, Garut, and Tasikmalaya exposed a structural catastrophe: a National Nutrition Agency dominated by retired military and police personnel rather than certified nutritionists, operating a cold-chain logistics network that simply does not exist.

Meals were prepared hours in advance, transported in standard vehicles under tropical heat, and delivered to schools with zero temperature control—a perfect biological incubator for Salmonella and E. coli. In military command chains, subordinates do not critique operational flaws; they hide them. So local kitchen operators concealed logistics failures, and the failures compounded into a national emergency.

This is what happens when a state treats public health as a military mobilisation campaign. It is also what happens when expertise is systematically delegitimised. Fajar Junaedi, a communications scholar at Muhammadiyah University of Yogyakarta, placed the President’s rhetoric in precise analytical terms: “The word from the President shapes the discourse climate,” he observed. “Pejorative language easily becomes a precedent that differences of opinion may be resolved through status humiliation.” The state commands ministries, intelligence apparatus, and an unparalleled data infrastructure.

If an expert’s figures are flawed, the government’s obligation is to counter data with data, argument with argument—not to retreat behind name-calling and defensive religious rhetoric.

Yet the deeper structural danger lies not in the insult itself but in what it signals about institutional governance. Moody’s and Fitch have already downgraded Indonesia’s credit outlook to negative, citing reduced policymaking credibility and persistent concerns over fiscal sustainability under Prabowo’s administration.

S&P maintained Indonesia’s BBB rating with a stable outlook, but its analysts were explicit: recent fiscal strains could be temporary, but the erosion of policy credibility in the face of rising fiscal concerns was real.

The market’s verdict has been brutally swift. Foreign investors have sold a net USD 3.9 billion worth of Indonesian stocks in 2026—the largest sell-off since at least 1996. The benchmark stock index has tumbled 32 per cent, making Jakarta the world’s worst-performing equity market this year. The rupiah has weakened 7.3 per cent against the dollar, hovering just above all-time lows—worse than levels seen during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Foreign holdings of government securities have fallen to their lowest share since at least 2009.

This is the macroeconomic cost of rhetorical contempt. When a head of state dismisses fiscal technocrats as “stupid,” global debt markets price in institutional risk premiums. Bank Indonesia has been forced to allow benchmark 10-year bond yields to surge, locking the state into high-interest debt cycles that divert trillions of rupiah away from productive investment.

The very fiscal engine required to sustain Prabowo’s populist promises is being structurally damaged by the anti-expert posture that defends those promises. And yet the applause continues. The President’s supporters view his raw, unscripted language as a sign of authenticity—a warrior-president who refuses to let bureaucratic caution stand in the way of feeding hungry children.

This is the classic populist binary: the virtuous masses and the corrupt elite; the man of action and the paralysed intellectual; the moral urgency of a child’s empty stomach and the abstract hesitation of economists who have never known hunger. Prabowo has tapped into something potent and dangerous. But he has also, perhaps unwittingly, exposed the structural fragility of the state he governs.

Consider the trajectory. The President who mocked experts at a party celebration in September had, by mid-September, already removed his finance minister—the third such change in less than two years. The finance ministry, once the anchor of Indonesia’s hard-won investment-grade status, has become a revolving door. The signal to global capital could not be clearer: policy predictability is a luxury this administration no longer offers. Trimegah Sekuritas chief economist Fakhrul Fulvian put it bluntly: “Predictability is the biggest problem.”

Into this void of institutional credibility steps the spectacle of global solidarity. The “Free Palestine” declaration at Gontor was, on its surface, entirely consistent with Indonesia’s long-standing foreign policy tradition. Indonesia has never recognised Israel, has consistently advocated for Palestinian statehood, and has leveraged its status as the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation to champion the cause across the Global South. But the timing and the emotional choreography matter. The Palestinian declaration came at a moment of acute domestic vulnerability: stock market freefall, capital flight, currency depreciation, and a flagship welfare programme that has poisoned 50,000 people.

This is what political scientists call diversionary foreign policy—the amplification of external moral causes to redirect public attention from internal governance failures. The Palestinian cause carries near-universal emotional weight across the Indonesian electorate. By leading passionate chants and displaying deep, visible emotion on the Gontor stage, the President could pivot the media cycle away from cold, unphotogenic realities—food poisoning data, bond yields, kitchen hygiene audits—toward an arena where he cannot be easily criticised.

But the diversion works only if the domestic audience does not cross-reference. And increasingly, it does. Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second-largest Islamic organisation, has broken with the administration’s narrative. Its chairman, Haedar Nashir, publicly reminded the president that national policy must be guided by data, science, and objective expertise—a rebuke delivered from within the very Islamic constituency Prabowo has courted most assiduously.

Muhammadiyah’s central leadership has called for a temporary suspension of the MBG programme pending a thorough evaluation, with senior figures describing it as “non-transparent and anti-democratic.”

The mental architecture of this paradox is not new. Indonesia has seen it before. Under Sukarno’s Old Order, economists who warned of hyperinflation were dismissed as “textbook-thinkers” and Western puppets; the Revolution, they were told, could not be calculated by accountants. Under Suharto’s New Order, independent academic critique was treated as subversion, a threat to “National Stability”.

Prabowo’s contribution is to merge Sukarno’s emotional nationalism with Suharto’s technocratic authoritarianism, adding a layer of military populism that frames expertise itself as unpatriotic obstruction. The vocabulary has changed. The structural logic has not.

What is genuinely novel—and genuinely dangerous—is the global dimension. The “Free Palestine” rhetoric does more than distract; it actively recruits international media into the construction of a simulacrum. Global outlets, hungry for a sympathetic Muslim leader taking a principled stand against Israeli aggression, amplify the emotional performance while neglecting the domestic governance record.

They consume the spectacle of a weeping statesman draped in a keffiyeh without cross-referencing the 50,000 food poisoning cases, the 32 per cent stock market collapse, or the negative credit outlooks from Moody’s and Fitch. The international audience becomes complicit, unwittingly, in the erasure of domestic accountability.

For global strategists and policymakers, this should be a moment of clear-eyed recalibration. This polity is not merely a regional actor; it is a central pillar of regional stability, a fellow democracy, and a partner whose institutional health directly shapes the strategic environment—and, by extension, the credibility of the rules-based international order itself.

The erosion of fiscal credibility, capital flight from domestic markets, and the hollowing out of expert institutions are not abstract concerns. They are early warning indicators of a state whose capacity to deliver on its commitments—domestic and international—is being eroded from within, with direct consequences for its global credibility. Observers have already noted that such an approach to criticism could complicate international relations. The warning deserves amplification.

The closing irony is almost operatic. Prabowo’s global performances have been rhetorically effective. They capture headlines. They rally the base. They project an image of strength and moral clarity. But they cannot feed children safely. They cannot stabilise a currency. They cannot restore investor confidence. And they cannot answer the fundamental question that every rating agency, every foreign investor, and every Indonesian parent is now asking: if the experts are so stupid, why are the meals still poisoning the students?

The fiscal trajectory is unsentimental. The bond market does not weep for Gaza. The credit rating agencies do not applaud standing ovations. And the children of West Java—hospitalised, dehydrated, their parents waiting in corridors that smell of antiseptic and fear—do not care about the rhetorical distance between Jakarta and Ramallah. They care about the meal that was supposed to nourish them and nearly killed them instead.

That is the truth that no amount of moral grandstanding can sanitise. The wizardry of moral distance works only so long as the audience does not look behind the curtain. In Indonesia in 2026, the curtain is fraying.