By Arnaud Bertrand, Twitter, 3/1/26

These takes about China not intervening in Iran are, quite literally, obscene.

I mean, the sheer insanity of a former U.S. ambassador to China publicly taunting China and Russia for not intervening against them – and thereby triggering full-fledged WW3 – is genuinely unhinged.

And completely stupid, I might add: these people are so high on their own propaganda that they’re mocking nuclear-armed powers for exercising the very restraint that’s keeping them alive.

Because it IS propaganda: the notion that there exists a so-called “alliance of authoritarianism” has absolutely zero basis in reality. Heck, “authoritarianism” itself has zero basis in reality: it’s a purely propaganda term designed to flatten the enormous diversity of non-Western political systems into a single derogatory category.

It’s the geopolitical equivalent of calling everyone you don’t like the same insult – it says nothing about them and everything about your inability, or unwillingness, to understand them.

That’s often the thing about U.S. propaganda: they invent completely artificial and self-serving concepts like lumping every country they dislike together as an “axis of authoritarians” and then, when said axis doesn’t materialize in practice – simply because it actually doesn’t exist – they mock these countries for not living up to a fiction they made up.

It’s true that China is friendly to Iran and that they do not follow Washington’s unilateral sanctions against it – because why would they? These are American sanctions, not international law. The actual offense here is independence, the refusal to go along with U.S. aggression.

But not being a US vassal is not the same thing as being in a military alliance. The distance between “we trade with whoever we want” and “we’ll go to war with the U.S. for you” is absolutely enormous. Confusing the two is the product of a worldview so distorted by U.S. imperialism that any act of independence registers as an act of war.

Lastly, let’s not forget what’s actually happening: the U.S. is bombing a country of 90 million people, killing religious leaders (Ayatollah Khamenei), public servants and diplomats, massacring schoolgirls, etc.

And the discourse in Washington – even by the opposition (Burns was in the Biden administration) – isn’t about the chaos, death and destruction their country is once more unleashing on a region that they’ve been destroying for decades (for what result?), coming right on the back of a genocide they sponsored, but it’s about point scoring against China, as if not waging war was a character flaw…

All in all, this tweet 👇 is actually a perfect encapsulation of how profoundly sociopathic U.S. elites have become: mid-massacre they’re taunting others for their lack of bloodlust – against them (!). Which is, when you think about it, an inadvertent confession: you don’t expect retaliation for something you truly believe is justified.

By Glenn Greenwald, Substack, 3/15/26

On Friday morning, I taped an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program to discuss the ongoing Iran War, growing Israeli influence in the U.S., and proliferating attacks on free speech in the West in the name of shielding that one foreign country from critique. (I presume it will air in the next few days.) Perhaps the most notable part of our conversation was what Tucker told me prior to the cameras rolling.

Tucker said he had learned from several high-placed sources — and he obviously has many within the Trump administration — that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ. The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others living in Iran prior to the start of the Trump-Netanyahu war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.

Despite how innately shocking this claim is, I had and still have zero doubt that Tucker was telling the truth about what he heard. I have known him for many years, spent much time talking to him both in front of a camera and away from one, and never once has he lied to me or misled me. Tucker has been in public life as a journalist and media figure since his 20s. There have been many harsh criticisms launched against him during those decades, many of which — as he will be the first to tell you — were ones that were quite valid.

Notably, many of the harshest attacks on Tucker came from me during my first decade after becoming a journalist (last year, Tucker discussed our friendship in a podcast conversation with Chris Cuomo and he noted that, during the War on Terror and his ongoing war cheerleading, “nobody was meaner to me than Glenn Greenwald”; Cuomo said the same was true of him).

But it is precisely because I have gotten to know him so well over the past decade or so that I am thoroughly convinced about the authenticity of his epiphanies regarding how lifetime immersion in D.C. culture led him to all sorts of false beliefs; his deeply felt regret and shame about much of what he supported in the past (including but not at all limited to the Iraq War); and the clearly new prism through which he sees the world, clarity enabled by leaving both Fox News and the dual prisons of incestuous D.C. culture and corporate media constraints.

All of that is to say that I harbored zero doubts that Tucker was accurately conveying to me what he had heard. And I also knew this was not just idle low-level D.C. gossip. Tucker’s decades in mainstream media and especially his years as the highest-rated prime-time cable host in the history of the medium — to say nothing of his closeness to key figures in Trump world — have resulted in an array of friends and sources at the highest levels of American power centers. His regular visits to the White House to meet with Trump prove that point.

But still, the idea that an American journalist of any kind, let alone one of Tucker’s stature, could be surveilled by the CIA and then criminally investigated by the DOJ for treason or related offenses — all for trying to report the truth about an imminent and indescribably dangerous war — is so inherently shocking and unimaginable that I just assumed his sources were hyperbolically sounding an alarm out of caution.

Perhaps that reaction was more wishful thinking than objective analysis. After all, I have lived through many American wars — especially the Iraq War, but others, too — where it was commonplace to equate war criticisms with treason, and journalistic reports at odds with the U.S. Government’s rosy pictures of imminent glorious victory as some sort of anti-American subversion.

Still, the possibility that someone like Tucker could be in serious legal jeopardy for the crime of critical war reporting seemed vanishingly low to me: until I woke up the next day and saw Saturday’s morning tsunami of clearly orchestrated commentary, discourse and pressure campaign from Israelis and their hordes of American loyalists demanding Tucker’s arrest.

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Perhaps I was being naive, but I still regard the prospect of Tucker Carlson being charged by the Trump DOJ with felonies for his reporting to be quite low. But the fact that it is being aggressively promoted — not by random accounts online but some of the most influential voices in Washington — is, at the very least, designed to create a climate of fear and intimidation for anyone who has been harshly criticizing both Israel and the Trump-Netanyahu war and, especially, for those reporting that the U.S. government’s triumphalist claims do not correspond with reality.

Hours after we concluded our interview, Tucker on Saturday night published on various social media platforms a five-minute summary of what he had told me. The video, entitled, “We Discovered the CIA Is Reading Our Texts to Frame Us for a Crime,” described how the CIA’s referral to the DOJ is based on private conversations which Tucker, as a journalist, had with people inside Iran.

As Tucker explained, the only way for the U.S. government to have obtained those conversations is through eavesdropping and surveillance on his texts and calls: carried out either by the NSA through domestic surveillance or through use of the Mossad or some other allied spying agency which furnished those conversations to the CIA. One major part of the reporting we did from on the Snowden files detailed how the NSA often used allied spying agencies to snoop on Americans and provide them with the findings, all a way to circumvent constitutional and other legal limits on the ability of American security state agencies to spy on their own citizens.

This is not the first time that the NSA and/or allied agencies have spied on Tucker in his work as a journalist. Both times that he attempted to arrange an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, those conversations were intercepted by US spies

and leaked to the U.S. media. This is simply the nature of being a dissident American journalist, or a citizen of any kind, in the world of ubiquitous domestic, warrantless surveillance we have allowed our government to create.

The reaction to Tucker’s announcement of this CIA criminal referral was as revealing as it is dangerous and nauseating. All sorts of Israelis and their most devoted loyalists in the U.S. threw caution to the wind and just explicitly demanded Tucker’s arrest, simply assuming his guilt.

One Israeli politician — Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, until recently the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who has served and continues to serve in all sorts of official and quasi-official Israeli entities — issued this demand: “Tucker Carlson should be arrested and tried for treason.” Ponder how much hubris and entitlement an official of a foreign country must possess in order to publicly demand that the U.S. Government arrest and prosecute an American journalist for “treason”: which, by definition, is the ultimate crime that defines loyalty to the United States, not to Israel.

One would think that any American claiming primary allegiance to the U.S. would — no matter their views on Israel — be deeply offended by this brazen and aggressive interference by a foreign official into American affairs and, specifically, her efforts to dictate how the duties and obligations of American citizens should be defined. But one would be wrong. Many prominent American citizens who have long demonstrated that their loyalty is to Israel (at least as much if not more so than to the U.S.) echoed Hassan-Nahoum’s demands for Tucker’s arrest and even went further.

Laura Loomer — who, in a minimally rational world, should be entirely ignored and perhaps even institutionalized as a mentally unwell, attention-desperate freak show, but who is, instead, so influential in the White House that Trump found the time to speak with her on the night he ordered the attack on Iran, as American troops were dying — is leading the campaign for Tucker’s arrest. The same is true of many of the most extremist and repellent Israel loyalists in the U.S.

On early Saturday morning, Loomer cited the mention by Iranian media of Tucker’s view that the U.S. war effort is going more poorly than anticipated to conclude: “This is TREASON, and Tucker needs to go to prison.” Unable to contain her raging fantasies of Israel critics in the U.S. being punished as harshly as possible, she later added: “I can’t wait to see Tucker Carlson go to prison.”

Congressman Randy Fine (R-FL), whose entire life has been gluttonously devoted to Israel despite running for the American Congress, cited a biblical verse to imply that Tucker is being punished by God for his lack of loyalty to that foreign state. One of the most militaristic Israeli social media influencers, Eli David, announced that Trump purposely met with Tucker prior to the war because Trump knew Tucker was a spy for Iran and used Tucker’s criminal disloyalty to feed him disinformation to take back to his masters in Tehran.

I could spent weeks detailing such accusations and demands from prominent Israel loyalists and still not have created anything close to a comprehensive list. Their long-time quest to criminalize dissent on Israel in the U.S. seems to them closer than ever, and that perception is far from unreasonable.

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Even as I report all of this, I am consciously aware that this is all so inherently deranged. It is such malicious propaganda on behalf of a foreign state that it should not warrant even passing commentary, let alone a long article warning of its gravity. But that is simply due to the fact that many have not fully processed just how deep and pervasive the influence and infiltration of Israeli subterfuge in American discourse and government are: a threat that has only grown as American support for Israel has collapsed.

There are so many ways to illustrate this dangerous subversion, many of which I have covered extensively. Many of America’s largest and most influential news and social media outlets — from CBS News and TikTok to Paramount, Warner Brothers and CNN — have been quickly consolidated in the hands and under the control of Larry Ellison, the largest-ever donor to the Friends of the IDF.

Trump himself boasted during the 2024 campaign of how loyal he was to Israel, how much he gave them in his first term, and then vowed to “Make Israel Great Again.” Throughout 2025, Trump used the leverage of his termination of federal funds to American universities to force them to institute radically expanded hate speech codes that define “anti-Semitism” in such a way as to ban a wide range of commonly expressed criticisms of both Israel and certain Jewish individuals. His administration has eliminated the precise kind of DEI programs they vowed to abolish for disfavored groups: but then forced on the same colleges classic new DEI programs that benefit only Israeli and Jewish faculty.

Though it has long been true, AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups exert immense and virtually unparalleled power in American election. They have easily removed members of Congress who have questioned U.S. financing of Israel by pouring obscene sums into their districts, and are currently targeting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) for the same crime, by using the unlimited funds of pro-Israel billionaires such as Miriam Adelson, who gave Trump’s campaign more than $100 million in 2024 alone (even as Trump himself suggested that Adelson, born in Israel, has greater loyalty to Israel than the U.S.: a comment ironically banned on American campuses thanks to Trump’s imposition of expanded hate-speech codes to protect Israel).

Both parties in Washington banned TikTok on the ground that it was permitting too much anti-Israel content and forced its transfer into the hands of Ellison, who now has a former IDF soldier censoring content about Israel. And, of course, we are currently engaged in a dangerous and increasingly deadly war against Israel’s primary adversary: a war that Netanyahu has admitted he dreamed of luring the U.S. into for decades.

All those facts have been well-reported, including by my journalism over years, and are more known than they ever were before. That is one reason public opinion polls in the U.S. now consistently reveal a rapid collapse of support for Israel among every demographic group other than elderly and rapidly aging Fox and Hannity viewers.

But permit me to show you a highly relevant video clip which, though not nearly as known as these other events, vividly illustrates what is going on in the U.S. when it comes to the otherwise-inexplicable dominance of this small foreign country. It is an excerpt of a speech delivered by one of the most beloved Israel-loyal neocons in the U.S. She is a Harvard Professor of Yiddish named Ruth Wisse. She in an old-school neocon, one of the most vocal proponents of the War on Terror, the War in Iraq, and every other U.S. war in the Middle East against Israel’s enemies.

In a speech at The Jewish Agency for Israel in Connecticut in 2019, Wisse explained the core duty and mission of Jewish Americans. Please listen to what she said. Clearly not all Jews subscribe to this sermon but many of them do, including influential American Jewish figures in media, politics, entertainment and beyond. That is why she is regarded as an influential figure and not a fringe one:

Wisse’s decree is nothing less than a directive to American Jews that they have a supreme and inescapable moral duty to “enlist in the army of public opinion” — not to defend their own country, the United States, but to defend a foreign country many have been taught from birth to revere and defend. And there are countless American journalists and politicians — and not only the obvious examples of Mark Levin, CBS News President Bari Weiss, Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Rep. Randy Fine, White House Advisor Stephen Miller, new media barons Larry and David Ellison — who do indeed see this as their overarching goal because they were taught from birth to embrace it. This fact is one reason why it is so commonplace to see Americans (such as the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg) leave the U.S. to go join Israel’s military, but never the U.S. military.

The collapse of Americans’ public support for Israel since October 7 has only made these efforts more desperate and panic-driven. And it is all of that which, in turn, has led us to the previously unthinkable campaign to actually arrest and prosecute an American journalist for the crime of opposing an American war he believes is devastating for the interests of his own country, even if beneficial for Israel.

No discussion of these events is complete — or really even comprehensible — without noting how Israel and its loyalists now perceive Tucker Carlson as the greatest danger to Israel’s ability to dominate American politics, especially conservative politics, for its own interests. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — who last year boasted to Tucker one of the most notorious confessions a major US politician has ever made: “I came into Congress to serve Israel and I work every day to do that” — spoke to the Republican Jewish Conference and pronounced him “the single most dangerous demagogue in the country.”

It is now commonplace amount junior-varsity Israel loyalists to label Tucker “the single most dangerous anti-Semite in America” (which is code for: one of the most influential Israel critics in years). Just two weeks ago, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt accused Tucker of having “a long history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and lies about Jews and the Jewish state.” And virtually the entire mainstream Israeli media and government united to demonize him as such when he sought to enter Israel to interview U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

I hope there is nobody naive or rosy-eyed enough to believe that the campaign to now demand Tucker’s arrest and prosecution for “treason” is somehow unrelated to his clear status as Public Enemy Number One of the Israeli government and its army of American loyalists. Israeli demands for the arrest of Israel critics has become commonplace, and quite effective, throughout the democratic world.

Behold the indescribably horrifying arrest of this 18-year-old Australian citizen this week for wearing a t-shirt with what the law calls a “legally banned slogan” (“from the river to the sea”). This ban is a part of a new law that Israel demanded Australia adopt, a repressive speech-destroying trend repeating itself throughout the West not in the name of protecting citizens of those countries but of Israel:

American journalist have not only the right but the duty in war time to ensure that Americans hear not only from their own government but also from the governments of the countries we are attacking. Large corporate outlets have often failed in that duty through a combination of fear of name-calling, misplaced patriotism, and even war-heightened repression that typically results when the U.S. initiates new military conflicts. The E.U. criminally banned any and all media outlets from platforming Russian state media at the start of the war in Ukraine to ensure its citizens heard no counterpoints to state propaganda about the war.

Tucker deserves praise, not vilification, for ensuring that his reporting and analysis of this war for his audience is informed not just by mimicking what the Pentagon and CIA tell him to say, but also by the views and perspectives of all countries in the region, including Iran. This type of reporting is not welcomed in censor-heavy Israel during its wars, but thankfully, America has a much more robust tradition of free speech and a free press even during wartime, even when it has often been under attack. At least that had been true — imperfectly true, but still true — until the recent spate of increasingly aggressive Israeli attacks to curb free speech in the democratic world for the benefit of that foreign country.

Many believe, with good reason, that the U.S. is now involved in an extremely volatile war because of Israel. The last thing we should want, or tolerate, is having American citizens and journalists threatened with arrest due to the commands of Israelis and their rabid pack of loyalists embedded throughout our country’s institutions. Even if Tucker ends up not being arrested or prosecuted, the message to journalists and other American citizens with far fewer resources and far less of a platform than Tucker is unmistakably clear and deliberately chilling. And that message should be crushed and rejected by any American purporting to care about American national interests and believe in the core rights that we were always taught defined our country.

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Belgium PM: EU should negotiate with Russia and strike a deal over Ukraine
The Brussels Times, 3/15/26

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever (N-VA) has called for the EU to negotiate with Russia to bring an end to the war in Ukraine and for the “normalisation” of relations with Russia.

In an interview with L’Echo, De Wever, said: “The official line is that we’ll continue until Russia is brought to its knees. This would only be realistic with 100% US support, but they’re not at all on Ukraine’s side. I sometimes think they’re closer to Putin than to Zelensky.

“Since we can’t threaten Putin by sending weapons to Ukraine and we can’t strangle it economically without US support, there’s only one option left: a deal. But without a mandate to negotiate in Moscow, we’re not at the negotiating table where the Americans will push Ukraine to accept a deal. And I can already say that it will be a bad deal for us.”

He added: “Europe is the only country still funding Ukraine, without being at the negotiating table. We can keep saying we’re going to win this war, but that’s not true in a military sense: in my opinion, there will be a freeze resulting in a military border, like between the two Koreas.”

‘European leaders tell me I’m right, but no one dares to say it out loud’

During the interview, De Wever said he advocates normalising relations with Moscow, in part to facilitate access to cheap oil and gas supplies.

“What’s the point of prolonging this war without being able to achieve a clear and decisive victory? he asked L’Echo. “The Chinese are profiting by having access to cheap fossil fuels; the United States is making money by selling us the weapons supplied to Ukraine.

“We’re losing on all fronts. We must end the conflict in Europe’s interest. Without being naive about Putin. That’s a mistake we must never repeat. We must rearm and remilitarise the border. And at the same time, we must normalise relations with Russia and regain access to cheap energy. It’s common sense. In private, European leaders tell me I’m right, but no one dares to say it out loud.”

‘It’s an unwelcome truth’

Responding to questions over Ukrainian sovereignty and interests, De Wever said: “We mustn’t abandon Ukraine, which must remain a sovereign, democratic country, capable of defending itself, and which we must integrate into the European family. That’s non-negotiable.

“The question is what we have to offer to convince Russia to accept this. Because we can’t force them, even if they try to sell us that illusion. That would be the case if the West were unified, but it isn’t, and Putin knows it.”

He added: “It’s complicated as long as it gives the impression that we’re going to betray the Ukrainians… Because it’s an unwelcome truth, you’re immediately accused of being anti-Ukrainian, of being in Putin’s pocket. And nobody wants to be labelled like that.”

The interview with L’Echo was part of a series of interviews with the Belgian Francophone press to coincide with the release of the French language version of De Wever’s latest book, Prosperité.

Late last year, De Wever came under significant political and diplomatic for his refusal to give the go-ahead to an EU plan to use €210 billion in frozen Russian state assets to finance Ukraine’s war with Russia.

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 3/3/26

All my investigations are free to read, thanks to the enormous generosity of my readers. Independent journalism nonetheless requires investment, so if you value this article or any others, please consider sharing, or even becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is always gratefully received, and will never be forgotten. To buy me a coffee or two, please click this link.

In the weeks leading up to the Empire’s catastrophic decision to instigate war against Iran, negotiations between Tehran and Washington were intensively ongoing. The Islamic Republic was ordered to accept sharp limits on her ability to develop ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and agree to never stockpile enriched uranium. The former stipulation was a significant sticking point, for such restrictions would gravely undermine Iran’s national and regional security architecture. However, Tehran was intensely relaxed about ceding the latter.

On February 28th, mere hours before the US and Israel unleashed hell on Iran from the skies, it was widely reported Tehran had undertaken to “ensure forever” she would not develop or possess nuclear weapons. This pledge was entirely in keeping with consistent messaging from senior Islamic Republic officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated that same day in Judeo-American airstrikes on his official residence. From the mid-1990s onwards, Khamenei had consistently endorsed a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons.

Still, concerns about Iran’s supposed nuke ambitions have lain at the core of direly ever-worsening relations between Iran and the US since May 2018, when Donald Trump shredded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action mediated with Tehran by Washington three years earlier. Under its terms, the Islamic Republic granted the International Atomic Energy Agency virtually unhindered access to its secret nuclear complexes, in return for sanctions relief. The deal was torn up despite the IAEA consistently certifying Iran’s compliance.

The JCPOA was inked following a period in which public and state attitudes across the West – and its vassal states – towards the Islamic Republic became highly belligerent. From 2006 onwards, governments and international bodies – including the EU and UN – one by one imposed ravaging sanctions against Tehran, devastating its economy, influence, and standing. Within six years, Iran was the most sanctioned country on Earth. Ever since, these excessively punitive measures have produced soaring inflation, unemployment, preventable deaths, and other egregious ills.

As pressure on Iran ratcheted, numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions demanded Tehran cease enriching uranium, and cooperate with the IAEA. In November 2011, the Association expressed “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” Throughout this period too, mainstream media became awash with scaremongering reports the Islamic Republic would imminently develop nukes, if she hadn’t done so already. Israel, and the wider West, were purportedly under urgent threat.

This demonising narrative was relentlessly disseminated by senior Western government officials, military and spying apparatchiks, think tank pundits, and ‘journalists’. Yet, no evidence was ever presented to support the bombastic charge. The grim truth is Iran’s alleged nuclear desires are a fable, cooked up by British intelligence. What follows is the sordid tale of how MI6 operatives infiltrated ostensibly independent international institutions, then manipulated them and Western governments, ultimately leading the world to perilous, potentially nuclear conflict.

‘Information Operations’

In October 2008, The Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked assessment of then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, prepared by London’s ambassador to Washington. While identifying many areas of consensus, it foresaw a “potential clash” between Downing Street and an impending Obama administration, over Iran “his desire for ‘unconditional’ dialogue with Iran.” This was at odds with Britain’s commitment to the UNSC’s “requirement of prior suspension of enrichment before the nuclear negotiations proper can begin.” It was thus necessary to change the future White House incumbent’s thinking.

Unbeknownst publicly, during this time MI6 was embroiled in a covert operation to “develop understanding” among foreign governments of the Islamic Republic’s apparent quest for nukes, and therefore “pressurise Iran to negotiate.” A leaked CV of Nicholas Langman, longtime British intelligence dark arts specialist and head of MI6’s Iran Department 2006 – 2008, boasts how he “generated confidence” in its assessment Tehran secretly had a dedicated program to develop nuclear weapons among “European, US and Middle Eastern agencies.”

Then, from 2010 – 2012 Langman led an “inter-agency” effort to comprehensively infiltrate the IAEA, while “[building] highly effective and mutually supportive relations across government and with senior US, European, Middle and Far Eastern colleagues for strategy.” These dark handshakes with MI6 “enabled major diplomatic success [sic] of Iranian nuclear and sanctions agreement.” Britain’s central, clandestine role in corralling global public and political opinion behind the fraud Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, and producing all that followed, has never been acknowledged by the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, Langman’s intimate involvement in the con is deserving of intense scrutiny. He holds the dubious distinction of being publicly ‘burned’ as an MI6 operative on two separate occasions. First, in 2001 it was revealed Langman had been active in Paris at the time of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in the city on August 31st 1997, and was charged with conducting “information operations” to deflect widespread public speculation British intelligence was responsible for her death.

Then, in 2005 he was exposed by Greek authorities for overseeing the abduction and torture of 28 Pakistani guestworkers in Athens, suspected of having contact with the individuals accused of perpetrating the 7/7 bombings in London that year. Langman moved straight from this post to running MI6’s Iran Department. That he wasn’t reprimanded over the Greek incident strongly suggests he enjoyed a high level of protection, and London approved of his vicious intelligence-gathering methods – known to invariably elicit false testimony from detainees.

Was MI6 ‘intelligence’ Tehran posed a global nuclear hazard the result of torture? Regardless, as forecast by London’s ambassador to the US, the Obama administration was during its first year in office formally committed to non-interference in the Islamic Republic’s affairs. This policy was enforced so stringently, a State Department official almost lost his job for endorsing protests in Tehran in June 2009. Evidently, Britain’s interventions with foreign partners and the IAEA were decisive in shifting the White House away from conciliation, and towards war.

‘No Return’

MI6’s black propaganda operation was most welcome to senior Zionist entity officials, in particular Benjamin Netanyahu. Ever since the early 1990s, Israel’s current Prime Minister had been publicly warning on a regular basis that Tehran was on the verge of acquiring nukes. He was widely mocked for crying wolf. British intelligence provided seemingly independent verification of Netanyahu’s bogus claims, and influenced Western states into adopting hostile stances on the Islamic Republic. This connivance was of enormous benefit to Tel Aviv.

In the decades since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has supported an ever-expanding and strengthening nexus of anti-Zionist Resistance forces across West Asia. This includes Palestine. The MI6-triggered sanctions significantly hampered Tehran’s ability to provide practical, material and financial assistance to these groups. They also severely truncated the Islamic Republic’s involvement in battling CIA and MI6-sponsored extremist proxy forces and outright civil wars in neighbouring Iraq and Syria, over the past two decades.

Not coincidentally, following the historically devastating sanctions being imposed on Iran, Israeli assaults on the Occupied Territories and their populations, and Zionist theft of Palestinian lands and property, ratcheted significantly. With opposition weakened, the slow motion genocide of Gaza inexorably gathered pace, ultimately leading to Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th. With Gaza now flattened and ripe for Zionist seizure, Tel Aviv is preparing to commit a second Holocaust in the West Bank. Lawmakers in the Knesset have passed legislation facilitating its formal annexation.

A fantastical desire to neutralise Iran outright before moving in on the West Bank may lie behind the conflict waged since February 28th, with the spectre of nuclear weapons an ideal cover. Israel justified its calamitous 12 Day War on an intelligence dossier, which concluded the Islamic Republic had reached the “point of no return” in acquiring nukes. Its findings relied heavily on a May 2025 IAEA report that provided zero fresh information, but concluded Tehran supposedly maintained “undeclared nuclear material” until the early 2000s.

However, London has reasons of her own for seeking to subjugate Iran. Nationalisation of the country’s vast oil reserves by elected leader Mohammad Mossadeq in May 1951 crippled British Petroleum’s vast profits locally, placing Britain on a war footing with Tehran. Mossadeq was unseated in an MI6-orchestrated coup two years later, leading to the brutal reign of Shah Pahlavi, who presided over a highly pliant Anglo-American colony. The Islamic Revolution sent Pahlavi fleeing in 1979, and relations with London have been largely sour since.

The US-led War On Terror was heavily influenced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s rabidly interventionist perspectives, which discounted any and all considerations of international law. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Blair privately wrote to President George W. Bush, urging him to exploit “maximum” global sympathy produced by 9/11 to launch military interventions across West Asia. The first two targets on the list were Afghanistan and Iraq, both former British imperial holdings.

Were it not for the Empire getting so ruinously bogged down and overstretched in the War On Terror’s initial phases, Iran – which is sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iraq – would likely have been targeted for regime change and occupation by Anglo-American forces following those two conflicts. Today, an invasion of the Islamic Republic seems ominously close to fruition. However, Britain won’t allow the US to use her bases to strike Tehran, and wishes to stay out of the conflict she was instrumental in starting entirely.

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Iran War Cost Tracker

https://iran-cost-ticker.com

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 2/15/26

In late January, the US Department of Justice dumped millions of documents detailing the criminal activities of US oligarch and serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, including his vast rolodex of paedophilic celebrities, financiers, politicians and public figures. The tranche is so vast, independent journalists and researchers have barely scratched the surface yet. But preliminary investigations amply demonstrate Epstein was centrally enmeshed with multiple foreign spy agencies. First and foremost, the Zionist entity’s notorious Mossad. The horrors wrought on West Asia as a result are incalculable.

A recurrent phenomenon in the newly-released documents, emails and text messages is Epstein and his grand global nexus seeking to profit from Western-inflicted misery the world over. On March 18th 2014, in the Maidan coup’s immediate, violent aftermath, he emailed Ariane de Rothschild, a French banker and CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Group since March 2023, due to her marrying into the famous, powerful Jewish family. Epstein was exhilarated. “Ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunites [sic],” he wrote.

De Rothschild was drained after a “very long day sitting on bank board,” but delighted to hear from her close friend. “Miss our talks and hope you’re well,” she gushed. “Will be at home tomorrow night, will you be free? And let’s discuss Ukraine.” The “opportunities” Epstein perceived in the shattered post-coup country, as it plunged into Western-sponsored civil war, could’ve ranged from an untapped reservoir of young girls and vulnerable women, to pillaging the country’s vast resources.

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By Nicole Grajewski, Russia Matters, 3/5/26

Nicole Grajewski is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI), Sciences Po in Paris, an associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum last June what Russia would do if the United States or Israel assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, he declined to answer. “I do not even want to discuss this possibility,” he said. “I do not want to.” Eight months later, the scenario became reality. Russia’s response was a Foreign Ministry statement condemning “unprovoked acts of armed aggression,” four phone calls to Gulf leaders offering to mediate and silence from the Kremlin itself.

Russia’s immediate stake in the conflict is straightforward: any war that preoccupies the United States, depletes Western munitions stockpiles, divides alliance attention and forces Washington to prioritize the Middle East over Ukraine serves Moscow’s purposes. Every day the fighting continues, American attention and resources are split between two theaters. Every Patriot interceptor expended over the Gulf is one unavailable for transfer to Kyiv. Every week Washington is consumed by the Middle East is a week it is not pressing Moscow on Ukraine.

Beyond this tactical windfall, Russia has a structural interest in Iran’s survival as a partner. Iran is one of a small number of states that shares Moscow’s interest in fracturing the U.S.-led international order and a node in the constellation of relationships Russia has cultivated to complicate Western strategy globally. An Iranian defeat, particularly one resulting in regime change or a forced strategic reorientation, would extinguish that partnership. Russia fears, above all, a post-war Iran reoriented toward the West.

Russia therefore has strong reasons to raise the cost of the conflict for Iran’s adversaries and to prevent a rapid Iranian defeat. But it also has reasons for restraint: the risk of direct confrontation with the United States and Israel, the need to preserve the relationship as an ongoing asset rather than exhaust it in a single crisis and the reality that some of the most valuable support it could provide would cross thresholds even Moscow calculates it cannot afford. 

Unlike the United States’ expansive military backing of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, or the West’s sustained military mobilization for Ukraine in 2022, Russia will not come to Iran’s defense with airpower, troops or open confrontation with Washington. It will posture diplomatically and perhaps assist quietly behind the scenes, but it will not fight America over Iran. Russia’s position in Iran’s war is that of a well-equipped backstage partner with a clear interest in the conflict’s prolongation and a sophisticated, if selective, toolkit for achieving it.

No Mutual Defense

In April 2025, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko addressed the State Duma to clarify the nature of the comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that Russia and Iran had just formally ratified. It was not, he emphasized, a mutual defense pact. If Iran were attacked, Russia was under no obligation to provide military assistance. The statement was not a surprise to Tehran—the Iranians had negotiated the same document and purposely avoided any commitment to send their troops to Ukraine. 

Neither Moscow nor Tehran was ever willing to bleed for the other. The design of the relationship, from its acceleration after 2022 through to its formal codification in 2025, was always something more limited and more durable: each side would help the other last longer on its own terms, sharing technology, intelligence and operational learning, without taking on the exposure of a formal alliance commitment. That was the deal, and the current conflict is revealing it under pressure rather than contradicting it.

The arrangement has deep structural logic on both sides. Russia’s war in Ukraine has made explicit alliance commitments genuinely unaffordable—in political, military and economic terms simultaneously. Iran, for its part, has domestic constituencies deeply suspicious of Russian intentions and a historical memory of Russian imperial behavior toward Persian territory that no amount of current partnership fully overcomes. The comprehensive strategic partnership is real and consequential, but it was built to deliver specific things: technology transfer in sanctioned categories, diplomatic cover in multilateral forums and operational learning from shared adversaries. It was not built to function as a mutual defense guarantee, and neither side ever pretended otherwise.

Limits

Russia cannot meaningfully arm Iran in its moment of greatest need because both states are consuming the same categories of weapons in their respective wars, running the same supply deficits and in some cases competing through the same illicit procurement networks. The ceiling on dramatic Russian military support is inventory and time.

Consider what Iran most urgently needs: ballistic missile components, air-defense interceptors, loitering munitions at scale and precision navigation hardware resilient to jamming. These are, with minimal variation, precisely what Russia is consuming at maximum rate in Ukraine. Moscow’s own S-300 and S-350 interceptor reserves have been under sustained pressure since 2022. Its domestic ballistic missile production has been prioritized entirely for the Ukrainian theater. Its loitering munition output, however impressive in absolute terms, is committed to filling gaps created by attrition rates that exceeded all prewar planning assumptions.

Even where inventory could theoretically be found or diverted, the time problem is severe. Modern weapons systems are not transferred—they are integrated. A consignment of S-300 interceptors without trained operators, calibrated fire control software, spare parts pipelines and maintenance infrastructure is not an air-defense capability; it is an expensive liability. The integration timeline for a major system transfer, conducted under wartime conditions, across a logistics chain that must avoid Western interdiction and Israeli intelligence collection, runs in months at minimum. A conflict that changes shape in days does not wait for that timeline. The same logic applies to ballistic missile components: Iranian Fateh and Fattah variants require specific guidance packages, propellant formulations and ground support equipment that cannot be improvised at pace. Delivering components is the easy part; integrating them into a functional, sustained firing capability under active attrition is the hard part, and there is no shortcut to it.

This shared scarcity creates a structural ceiling on the relationship that is analytically as important as any diplomatic calculation. The absence of large-scale Russian arms transfers to Iran in the current conflict is not evidence of a partnership in retreat. It is evidence of a partnership operating within constraints that were always present but are now visible under pressure.

Adaptation

The most consequential thing Russia has contributed to Iran’s military capacity over the past two years is not a weapons system. It is a process: a sustained cycle of operational feedback, engineering iteration and battlefield learning that has transformed the platform Iran first sold Russia in late 2022 into something considerably more dangerous.

Iranian Shahed systems arrived in Russia as functional but relatively unsophisticated one-way attack platforms—GPS-dependent, predictable in their flight profiles and vulnerable to the jamming and interceptor combinations that Ukrainian forces developed with notable speed to counter them. Over the following two years, those airframes became laboratories. Russian engineers modified them, scaled production domestically under Alabuga factory expansion programs and subjected the evolving designs to sustained combat testing against a peer-capable air defense system. The lessons generated by that process are operationally precise: which jamming geometries defeat which receiver types; which flight profile modifications improve low-altitude survivability; which approach corridors avoid specific radar coverage arcs; how to construct mixed packages that impose discrimination dilemmas on interceptor operators.

Whether those lessons have been transmitted back to Tehran in systematic form is suggestive but not conclusively established, and precision matters here.

What is observable is that Iranian drone employment in the current conflict differs in several respects from patterns documented in earlier campaigns, including the strikes of April and October 2024 and the 12 Day War. Route geometries in larger raid packages appear more complex than earlier profiles, with greater variation in altitude and more pronounced use of terrain masking. Some analysts tracking flight path data have assessed that certain Shahed variants display behavior consistent with routing that accounts for known or anticipated radar coverage—approaching defended areas from directions and altitudes that imply an updated picture of the air defense environment rather than fixed pre-planned waypoints. Low-altitude profiles that were documented inconsistently in earlier Iranian employment appear more systematically integrated into larger packages now.

The most plausible explanation, given the timeline and the depth of Russian-Iranian technical cooperation since 2022, is that some portion of the operational learning Russia has generated through sustained Shahed employment in Ukraine has been transmitted back to Iranian engineers and mission planners. Likewise, large Iranian strike packages in the current campaign have displayed a sequencing logic—strikes that appear to prioritize radar and command infrastructure before the main wave of fires—consistent with the complex raid architecture Russia has developed and refined in Ukraine. Iranian strikes against Saudi refinery infrastructure, UAE logistics facilities and Israeli electrical grid nodes in the opening 72 hours of the current campaign reflect this pattern, though not exclusively so.

Future 

Where direct weapons transfers run into the problem of inventory shortages, other forms of Russian assistance do not. Understanding what Moscow can still provide is therefore more important for anticipating the trajectory of the conflict than cataloguing what it cannot deliver. The most plausible form of assistance is intelligence and targeting support. The Strategic Partnership agreement specifically alludes to joint support in intelligence, a unique facet of the treaty compared to others that Russia has. Western intelligence assessments have reported that Russia provided the Houthis with satellite-derived targeting data, drone routing guidance and strike sequencing advice, demonstrating both the willingness and institutional capacity to provide this type of support to partners. Whether a comparable arrangement exists with Iran is unknown, but the capability maps directly onto what Tehran would find valuable.

A second area to watch is signals intelligence and electronic order-of-battle support. Drones that consistently route around radar coverage rather than directly through defended airspace require an updated picture of the electromagnetic environment: where emitters are located, how their coverage geometry evolves and where gaps in detection may exist. Producing that level of situational awareness across a theater stretching from the Persian Gulf to Israel is difficult to achieve using ground-based collection alone. Some of the routing behavior observed in Iranian drone operations is at least consistent with access to a broader and more dynamic electronic picture. That does not prove Russian involvement, but it illustrates the type of enabling intelligence that Russia could provide with minimal political risk. For Moscow, this form of assistance is attractive precisely because it raises the operational effectiveness of Iranian strikes while remaining difficult to detect or attribute.

The domains in which Russia can most credibly and deniably raise the costs of the war for Iran’s adversaries lie in electronic warfare and navigation resilience, where some cooperation already exists. Russia supplied Iran with Krasukha jamming systems in 2025 and has reportedly shared lessons from its extensive GNSS jamming campaign in Ukraine. Over two years of combat, Russian forces have refined which frequencies, power levels and geometries are most effective against GPS-dependent Western munitions. That knowledge has direct applicability to the Middle Eastern environment and could help Iran degrade the accuracy of precision weapons such as JDAM-ER and JSOW used against dispersed or hardened targets. More consequential still would be assistance in protecting Iranian systems from jamming. Russia has invested heavily in controlled reception pattern antenna technologies, such as the Kometa system, that allow munitions to maintain satellite navigation while filtering jamming signals. If this expertise migrates into Iranian drones or cruise missiles, it would not expand Iran’s arsenal but make existing systems far harder to defeat.

All of this will ultimately depend on how the conflict evolves and what Iran determines it needs over time. Moscow’s willingness to provide deeper support will also hinge on whether doing so risks distracting resources or attention from Russia’s war in Ukraine. For now, the relationship offers Russia a range of ways to cooperate with Iran without committing itself directly to the fight. If the war continues or intensifies, these quieter forms of cooperation may become more important than large weapons transfers. Technical assistance, operational lessons and selective intelligence support allow Russia to raise the costs of the conflict for Iran’s adversaries while limiting its own exposure.

Conclusion

What makes the current dynamic analytically important is that it reflects the fundamental character of the Russia-Iran relationship rather than deviating from it. Russia is not coming to Iran’s rescue because the relationship never contemplated rescue. It contemplated something more limited and more sustainable: enough technical transfer, operational learning and intelligence support to raise the cost of the conflict for Iran’s adversaries and extend Tehran’s capacity to absorb punishment, without Moscow taking on the exposure and expenditure that direct intervention would require.

Russia’s position in this war is that of a well-equipped backstage partner with a clear interest in the conflict’s prolongation and a selective but sophisticated toolkit for achieving it. The constraints on that role—the inventory ceilings, the integration timelines, the thresholds Moscow declines to cross—are not an aberration from the partnership. They are its operating logic, now visible under the pressure of a war neither side fully anticipated.

Opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.

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Iran War Cost Tracker

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