Author: nick
President Trump was presented with a great opportunity on Saturday to take the off-ramp from his war on Iran. After threatening Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” Trump managed to get a two week pause in the war with the intervention of the Pakistani government. A window opened to end this illegal war. Vice President Vance traveled to Pakistan to negotiate with a high-level Iranian delegation and from press reporting progress was made on many issues. Unfortunately, after a month and a half of war, where tens of billions of dollars have been spent, every US base in…
This headline captures President Donald Trump and the Republicans’ midterm election problems in a nutshell: Inflation in March hit its highest level in two years as the Iran war spiked energy prices. There is simply nothing that has happened in American politics between Trump’s epic 2024 political comeback and the Democrats’ romp in last year’s off-year elections running on an affordability mantra that would suggest voters prioritize a foreign war over higher prices. A thousand clips of Trump expressing his distaste for the ayatollahs or a hundred polls showing rank-and-file Republicans still support him do not prove otherwise. Before the…
Image Wikipedia. Amidst Donald Trump’s wild Middle East War declarations, the tech billionaire push to nuclear reactor suicide has escalated with the shock relicensing of California’s two nuclear power plants at Diablo Canyon, now being pushed by the state’s liberal Governor Gavin Newsom, who has also joined Trump in their all-out attack against renewable energy. Together, Trump and Newsom are pushing decrepit, virtually uninsured, militarily indefensible nuclear power plants whose drastic deregulation may now rival the dangers posed by any bombs Iran could produce They also make no economic or ecological sense. Despite the latest tsunami of “Nuclear Renaissance” hype,…
Face-to-face talks over the weekend between U.S. and Iranian delegations in Islamabad ended without a peace agreement. Vice President J.D. Vance, who led the American team, said in a press conference following the marathon talks that the Iranians had not accepted the American terms, and that the failure to reach an agreement is “bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States.” That need not mean an inevitable return to war. The incentives to avoid it are today as powerful as they were before the talks. We are still in the first half of the…
So the Iranians wouldn’t give up their uranium enrichment or dismantle their enrichment facilities. Or hand over their already enriched uranium. So President Trump turned the tables, applied some Trumpian Jiu-Jitsu, and put a United States naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that will be enforced in the Gulf of Oman. I’m not sure anybody yet knows how this is all going to go down, but at least beginning today, here’s what America’s Central Command said: “Any vessel entering or departing the blockaded area without authorization is subject to interception, diversion, and capture. The blockade will not impede neutral…
Monday, April 13th on RealClearPolitics – Joined by James S. Robbins, Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics, and RCP National Correspondent Su… Source link
Tehran needs positive incentives, not just pressure. Source link
The fact that our government and institutional media downplay accurate casualty figures only makes it more urgent to find them, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies. The funeral on March 3, for the victims of the U.S.-Israeli attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Tasnim News Agency/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0) By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. DaviesCommon Dreams After the breakdown of talks in Pakistan, the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is more fragile than ever, and now seems likely to give way to a new phase of the war. The ceasefire and talks have…
After the breakdown of talks in Pakistan, the ceasefire between the US and Iran is more fragile than ever, and now seems likely to give way to a new phase of the war. The ceasefire and talks have failed to end Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon or to negotiate international access to the Strait of Hormuz, now under Iran’s control. Mourners dig graves during the funeral of children killed in an airstrike on a primary school in Minab, Iran, 3rd March The world must use this pause in the war to push for a permanent ceasefire and peace agreement, but…
The fastest way to understand the Iran war scare isn’t cable news hype, it’s leverage. We sit down with Larry Johnson to map what Tehran is demanding, why Washington looks desperate for an exit plan, and how a single chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, can squeeze the global economy. If ships need to pay a steep user fee to move in and out of the Persian Gulf, the story instantly becomes bigger than battlefield headlines: it’s oil prices, shipping risk, inflation pressure, and a potential global recession. We also pressure-test Trump’s public posture that Iran “has no cards” against the…