I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
A group of extremist Jewish settlers
equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his
group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank,
the Democratic representative disclosed on 9 July.
“We were at a village that Israeli
settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had
destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.
“And these hoodlums come in with machine
guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block
off the road.” Khanna said, adding, “And then they call the IDF and
the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.”
Khanna’s aide, Cameron Kasky, said the
delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian
hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing
to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them.
Khanna’s visit to the occupied West Bank
comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm
elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats
for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC).
Israel’s favorability rating among
Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in
May 2026, according to recent polls.
The US lawmaker’s confrontation with
extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of
state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into
systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank.
As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an “unprecedented” expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.
Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a “systematic campaign” of “Jewish terrorism” intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.
An Oxfam analysis
based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers
have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the
previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.
Over 540 settler attacks were reported in
the first quarter of 2026 alone, alongside a record 925 movement
obstacles that restrict Palestinian life.
Amnesty International concluded,
based on independent investigations, that the Israeli government is
implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing, supported by digital
evidence, satellite imagery, and field investigations.
Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and his Omani counterpart
discuss “appropriate mechanisms” for safe passage of ships through Strait of Hormuz during talks in Muscat.
In his first message since the funeral
of his father, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has pledged to
“avenge [his] innocent blood”, adding that “revenge is the will of our
nation”.
Earlier, the US president said 1,000 missiles are “locked and loaded
and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran” with thousands more to
follow if it tries to assassinate him.
Israeli air attack have hit areas of southern Lebanon.
A
massive crowd gathers for funeral prayers for the late Iranian Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family at the Holy
Jamkaran Mosque in Qom, Iran, Tuesday, July 7, 2026. [AP Photo/Ahmadreza
Taheri]
The Trump administration continued its
bombing of Iran for a third day on Thursday, striking the rail lines to
Mashhad, as mourners buried Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader
assassinated by US and Israeli forces on the first day of the war.
The strikes delayed the burial by eight hours, the Telegraph
reported Thursday. Khamenei was laid to rest at the shrine of Imam Reza
in the city of his birth, at the end of six days of funeral processions
through Iran and Iraq that Iranian state media said drew up to 43
million people. Mourners carried red flags symbolizing revenge and
banners reading, “We Will Kill Trump.”
The turnout demonstrated the failure of
the American effort to overthrow the Iranian government and subjugate
the country by force.
Khamenei, who had served as supreme leader
since 1989, was assassinated at the age of 86 on February 28, in a
US-Israeli strike on his compound in Tehran. The US and Israel also
murdered his daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law and 14-month-old
granddaughter.
The strike that murdered Khamenei came in
the middle of negotiations, two days after US and Iranian diplomats held
nuclear talks in Geneva. To assassinate an adversary under the cover of
negotiations is an act of perfidy, illegal under the laws of war.
The Iranian government said US strikes hit
a bridge 55 kilometers from Mashhad on Thursday, blocking passenger
trains from Tehran, and that cruise missiles struck a second bridge near
Aqqala, in Golestan province, on a line that carries the country’s
overland trade with Russia and China. The Financial Times reported Thursday that these were “the first attacks on Iranian infrastructure in months.”
On Monday, at the White House, US
President Donald Trump said: “We can knock down their bridges in one
hour, we can knock out their energy supply.”
The rail strikes followed two nights of
heavy bombing. The fighting began Monday, when projectiles struck three
commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz—a Qatari gas carrier, a Saudi
oil tanker and a third vessel. The US military blamed Iranian forces;
Tehran did not claim responsibility.
US warplanes struck more than 80 targets
Tuesday night and about 90 more on Wednesday, hitting the ports of
Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Konarak and Sirik and, the Iranian government
said, the perimeter of the Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr.
More strikes took place Thursday night.
The US military said the targets included
air defenses, coastal radar, missile and drone depots and more than 60
Revolutionary Guards boats. Iran’s health ministry said the bombing
killed 14 people and wounded 78 across five provinces, including three
dead at the port of Sirik.
Iranian forces fired missiles and drones
at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar and, the Revolutionary Guards
said, 10 ballistic missiles at the Azraq air base in Jordan, of which
the Jordanian military said it intercepted eight. The price of Brent
crude jumped more than 5 percent Wednesday to $78 a barrel, and the
United Nations shipping agency urged shipowners to keep their vessels
out of the strait, citing the danger to nearly 6,000 sailors in the
region.
At a news conference at the NATO summit in
Ankara on Wednesday, Trump declared the ceasefire over. “To me, I think
it’s over,” he said. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore.” He
called Iran’s leaders “scum,” “sick people” and “evil people,” said
“let’s just finish the job.” He threatened to seize Kharg Island, the
center of Iran’s oil exports, and to bomb power stations and
desalination plants: “We’ll take them out if we have to.”Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
The ceasefire Trump broke had taken effect
June 17. Under it, the United States lifted the naval blockade it had
imposed on Iran’s ports in April, and the Iranian government agreed to
open the Strait of Hormuz toll-free for 60 days. On Tuesday the U.S.
Treasury revoked the waiver permitting Iranian oil exports, the
agreement’s central benefit for Tehran.
Congress had twice voted to end the
war—the House on June 3, the Senate on June 23—the first war-powers
resolution ever to pass both chambers. But the votes were non-binding,
and Trump resumed the bombing without the authorization they demanded.
Asked what the war had taught him about the limits of his power, he
answered, “There are no limits.”
The war on Iran is only one front in a
global eruption of imperialist violence. Trump oversaw the attacks from
the NATO summit in Ankara, which was given over to expanding wars, above
all, against Russia.
At the summit’s arms forum on July 7, NATO
advertised more than $50 billion in weapons deals, though the
Associated Press reported that no prices were disclosed and that several
of the contracts predated the summit. Buyers lined up for Saab’s
GlobalEye surveillance planes, Northrop Grumman drones and Airbus
tankers, and Britain led a dozen European states and Canada, without the
United States, in a $50 billion program to build missiles that can
reach Moscow. NATO said financial institutions had “already mobilised
$217 billion” for the buildup.
NATO’s leaders cheered the widening war on
Russia. They praised Ukraine’s drone strikes deep inside the country,
among them the attack on Russia’s largest oil refinery, at Omsk, 2,500
kilometers from Ukraine, which the Financial Times reported
this week had cut Russian refining by a fifth to two-fifths. The US
bombing of the Iranian rail line belonged to the same offensive. In a
single week Washington struck the infrastructure binding together Iran,
Russia and China.
At the same time, Israel is continuing its
onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon. An Israeli drone murdered at least four
people in Lebanon on July 6, among them a school principal and her
mother. In Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000
Palestinians, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday
Israeli forces would not leave Gaza, Lebanon or Syria.
US
President Donald Trump has relaunched American imperialism’s illegal
war of aggression against Iran, after repeatedly making Hitlerite
threats in recent days to destroy the country’s basic infrastructure and
rain death and destruction on its people.
Speaking Wednesday on
the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump effectively repudiated
the 60-day truce reached between Washington and Tehran last month. “As
far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” he declared. He went on to vow that
the US will continue the campaign of air strikes launched on Iran in the
early hours of Wednesday morning. “We’re going to hit them hard
tonight,” boasted the fascist would-be dictator president.
This
was coupled with a flurry of other threats, including the possible
resumption of the US blockade of Iranian ports and the “takeover” of
Kharg Island, Iran’s principal Persian Gulf oil export hub.
On
Tuesday, Washington canceled the oil export sanctions “waiver” that it
had granted Tehran as part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that
underpins the truce. Hours later, the US mounted air strikes on more
than 80 targets in southern Iran, killing, according to Iranian
authorities, eight military personnel.
In his characteristic
gangster-style fashion, Trump denounced Iran’s leaders in his Wednesday
remarks, reveling in his capacity as the head of the US imperialist war
machine to order execution air strikes like that which killed Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei at the war’s outset. “I do not want to
deal with them any more, they are scum. They are sick people,” he
snorted.
Tehran, for its part, has warned that the US is in breach
of the MoU. An Iranian Foreign Ministry statement issued Wednesday said
America’s “repeated illegal attacks against Iran,” the re-imposition of
sanctions on Iranian oil and Israel’s continuing aggression against
Lebanon “have rendered important and fundamental parts” of the truce
agreement “ineffective.”
Iran has responded to the Pentagon’s
Tuesday night attack with counter-strikes on US military bases in Kuwait
and Bahrain and by warning the region’s other oil sheikdoms that they
will be similarly targeted if they continue to facilitate US aggression.
The
truce has been hanging by a thread since it was formally signed by
Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 17.
Trump
has repeatedly threatened to renew hostilities even as more information
has emerged about the depletion of US missile stocks and the damage
Iran has inflicted on US bases across the region.
The truce,
coming after a long stream of proclamations from Trump, his Secretary of
War Pete Hegseth and other minions about an overwhelming US “victory,”
represented a debacle and humiliation for Washington. While unleashing
massive wanton violence and suffering, the Trump administration
manifestly failed to achieve any of its stated objectives—regime change,
the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile
arsenal, and the cessation of its support for Hezbollah and other
regional allies. Moreover, Iran was quickly able to establish effective
control over the Strait of Hormuz, choking off energy and other exports
from and to US allies. Trump himself made reference to the devastating
impact US imperialism’s illegal, unprovoked war has had on the world
economy, when in justifying the truce he invoked the threat of an
economic catastrophe akin to the Great Depression.
Yet some three
weeks later Trump and the US oligarchy on whose behalf he rules have
recklessly reopened hostilities, threatening to plunge the region and
world into an even larger conflagration and economic morass.
They
do so in the face of a massive show of popular opposition to US
imperialism on the part of ordinary Iranians. Since July 4, millions of
Iranians have joined what are to be six days of funeral observances for
Ayatollah Khamenei and family members, including his 14-month-old
granddaughter, who were killed in the February 28 decapitation strike
with which the US and Israel launched their criminal war.
Even
sections of the Western media have been forced to concede the popular
character of the funeral observances and the palpable mass anger and
mood of defiance, as well as genuine anguish, that have characterized
them. They have mobilized what remains of the Islamic Republic’s
traditional base among the urban and rural poor but also broad sections
of working people with deep-rooted grievances against Iran’s bourgeois
nationalist regime. They recognize that imperialism represents the
greatest obstacle to realizing the social and democratic aspirations of
Iran’s workers and toilers and are implacably opposed to the bipartisan
drive of the US political establishment to reduce Iran to the type of
neo-colonial bondage that existed under the bloody rule of the
US-installed Shah prior to the 1979 revolution.
On Wednesday, the
funeral possession passed over into Iraq, which like Iran has been the
victim of decades of US imperialist aggression, including the invasion
and occupation launched in 2003 under a web of lies about “weapons of
mass destruction.” There it was similarly greeted with mass outpourings
of popular anger against US imperialism and its Israeli attack dog
The
Trump administration’s belligerence is born of crisis—a crisis that is
itself rooted in the ever-accelerating decline in the world position of
US imperialism and the basic contradictions of the capitalist social
order. It faces mounting opposition and growing political radicalization
at home as manifested in the mass participation in the “No Kings”
protests and a wave of strikes involving broad sections of the working
class across the country, from auto parts workers, to educators,
healthcare workers and transit workers. Terrified of this growing threat
from below, Trump rails against the danger of “communism” and
accelerates his drive to impose a presidential dictatorship.
As
for the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats, they work with the
trade union bureaucracy to contain and suppress working class
opposition. Their objections to Trump’s policies largely revolve around
questions of US imperialist foreign policy and strategy. This has been
exemplified in their response to the Iran war. The entire Democratic
Party leadership, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, supported the narrative used to justify
their war—that Iran, a historically oppressed country, is an aggressor
and a threat. Insofar as they have made criticisms, it has been over
procedural issues (such as the administration’s failure to give Congress
a role in planning and overseeing the war) and Trump’s maladroit
conduct of it.
The Democrats joined with powerful sections of the
military-security establishments and financial oligarchy in attacking
Trump for agreeing to a truce with Iran that failed to achieve any of
Washington’s war objectives. California Senator Adam Schiff called it “a
thorough capitulation,” while his Connecticut colleague, Chris Murphy,
termed it “essentially a surrender to Iran.”
Trump’s relaunching
of the war on Iran unfolded against the background of a NATO summit
dominated by the imperialist powers’ competing agendas in what is a
developing global war for the control of resources, markets, production
networks and strategic territories akin to the imperialist world wars of
the last century—only on a far greater and more lethal scale.
The
European powers, joined by Canada, used the summit to escalate the war
on Russia, boasting of their accelerating rearmament drive and role in
providing their Ukrainian proxy with the capabilities of striking deep
inside nuclear-armed Russia. Trump, meanwhile, denounced them for not
being more supportive of the US-Israeli war on Iran, demanded Greenland
be ceded by Denmark to the US, reiterated his support for a US-Russia
deal to end the Ukraine war at the expense of America’s NATO “allies”
and threatened to cut off all US trade with Spain.
The imperialist
powers and the capitalist system they lead are dragging humanity to the
abyss. The only progressive answer to their rival predatory agendas for
rearmament and war, austerity, and the evisceration of democratic
rights is the revolutionary mobilization of the international working
class. The World Socialist Web Site has long insisted that the
same crisis of global capitalism that is fueling global war is
intensifying class conflict, creating the objective conditions for the
emergence of a mass movement of the working class for socialism.
The
critical question is to politically arm the growing working class
counter-offensive with a revolutionary socialist program, strategy and
leadership. It is to this task that the International Committee of the
Fourth International and its respective national Socialist Equality
Parties are dedicated.
Representatives of the NATO
military alliance met Tuesday in Ankara, pledging to escalate their
rearmament and war-making across the globe. The 36th summit of the
32-member alliance, hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at
his presidential palace, opened with a wave of new arms contracts and
fresh demands that every member spend 5 percent of national output on
its military.
President
Donald Trump, right, speaks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
at the Bestepe Presidential Palace during a formal welcome for the NATO
summit in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, July 7, 2026. [AP Photo/Francisco
Seco]
Against the backdrop of the summit, the
United States again bombed Iran on Tuesday. That evening the US military
announced “a series of powerful strikes against Iran,” hitting air
defenses, coastal radar and missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz,
hours after the Treasury cut off Iran’s oil sales. It was the latest
escalation of the war that began on February 28, when US and Israeli
strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has
now dragged on for more than four months.
The bombing fell as vast crowds mourned
Khamenei in Qom and the Iraqi city of Najaf. Iranian state media
reported explosions at Bandar Abbas, Qeshm and Sirik, where shrapnel
wounded several people at a commercial pier. US President Donald Trump
had declared on Monday, in the Oval Office: “We’re either going to make a
deal, or we’re going to finish the job.” He added, “It won’t be tough
to finish the job.”
The summit’s main business is the
escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The opening of
the summit followed a sustained barrage of long-range strikes by Ukraine
deep inside Russian territory, which the assembled powers openly
celebrated. “Ukraine has a window of opportunity and is changing the
dynamics on the battlefield,” NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila
Shekerinska told the summit. “Russia, for the first time, is faced with
the reality of war.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
told the summit’s defense-industry forum that Ukrainian drones had hit a
refinery at Omsk, deep in Siberia, 2,700 kilometers beyond the front,
and boasted, “We have completely eliminated the very idea of Russia
having a strategic rear.” A senior NATO official said Ukraine had
launched 10,000 long-range drones at Russia in May and knocked out a
fifth of its oil refining.
NATO announced the arms deals Tuesday at
the summit’s Defense Industry Forum, which it billed as its “big
reveal,” staged to pounding techno music. “I’m coming straight from the
NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum, where contracts were signed among
Allied companies worth tens of billions of dollars,” Shekerinska said.
Alliance members announced the joint purchase of Saab GlobalEye
surveillance planes by 11 nations, up to five Northrop Grumman Triton
drones by four more, and Airbus refueling and transport aircraft by
fifteen.
Britain, France and Germany announced a
$50 billion program on Tuesday to build long-range missiles, without US
involvement, capable of striking targets more than 2,000 kilometers
away—far enough to reach Moscow. Banks including Citigroup, Deutsche
Bank and BNP Paribas had already “mobilized $217 billion” for the
buildup, NATO said. By the Associated Press’s account, no prices were
attached to the showcased weapons, and some of the deals had been signed
long before. The contracts are guaranteed profit for Lockheed Martin,
Saab, Northrop Grumman and Airbus, drawn from European treasuries.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called
the spending “money well spent.” Shekerinska pressed industry to keep
up: “Cash is flowing… We need industry to rapidly produce capabilities
and keep up with the increased demand for weapons and equipment.” Allies
were spending on “core military requirements—troops, equipment,
weapons,” she said, “but also on our collective resilience,” and
“investing in our defense industrial base.”
The numbers are staggering. “In 2025
alone, European Allies and Canada increased defense investment by 139
billion US dollars,” Shekerinska said, “an increase of almost 20%
compared to the previous year. And just one year into a 10-year project
that is the Hague Defence Investment Plan.” European members and Canada
will add a further 11 percent in 2026, bringing their total to $634
billion, against a US budget of $850 billion. European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen boasted of €800 billion in EU rearmament
by 2030.
Shekerinska cast the summit’s aims as
“enhanced deterrence and defense” and “defense industrial
collaboration,” and said NATO would “breathe life into the concept of
NATO 3.0: a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO.” The formula means
Europe shouldering more of its own defense so that Washington can
concentrate its forces against China; the United States is already
pulling troops from Europe, 5,000 from Germany. “We have
responsibilities elsewhere in the world, as the world’s only
superpower,” the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, told
reporters.
Even as they plotted war around the world,
the imperialist gangsters quarreled among themselves. Trump renewed his
threat to annex Greenland, the territory of NATO member Denmark,
calling it “an important part for the United States” that “should be
controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” and warned that
Washington could “remove all of our soldiers out of Europe.” Danish
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen answered that a US seizure of the
island “is not going to happen.”
Trump opened his part of the summit with a
stream of threats. Standing beside Erdoğan, he said he was “very
disappointed with NATO” and berated the European powers for refusing to
join the war on Iran. “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of
dollars, and they’re not there for us? We’ve always been there for
them,” he demanded.
Turkey locked down Ankara for the summit.
In the weeks beforehand, Erdoğan’s government banned all demonstrations
in the capital for thirteen days and detained 225 people—among them
leftists, lawyers, a university professor, a gay-magazine editor and a
comedian who had mocked the president—jailing 103 of them. On Sunday,
police detained scores of anti-NATO protesters and fired tear gas to
break up their march.
The failed Iran war presents costly proof that global dominance was always beyond Washington’s grasp
People wait to re-enter the event site
after being evacuated due to storms during Independence Day celebrations
in Washington, DC, on 4 July 2026 (Amid Farahi/AFP)
On the fourth of July, the United States turned 250 – an event that summoned the founders who spoke of a republic seeking “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”, rather than dominion over them.
Yet the story that matters most for our
own moment does not begin in 1776. It begins 35 years ago, with the
collapse of the Soviet Union – the moment the US mistook the
disappearance of its main rival for a mandate to remake the world in its
own image.
What followed was an overdrive of hubris.
Washington read the unipolar moment of 1991 as a global manifest
destiny, and set about entrenching its primacy in every region of the
globe.
The mood was captured with startling
candour by political scientist and former American national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard
(1997), a meditation on how the US might dominate the Eurasian landmass
and forestall the rise of any power capable of challenging it.
Primacy ceased to be a momentary fact and
hardened into a doctrine – and, for a generation of US policymakers, an
obsession that no defeat seemed able to shake.
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Strangely, much of the Arab world embraced
it too. Time and again, Arab governments acceded to American designs on
the premise that only the US could supply what they wanted: security
above all, but also advanced weaponry, technology and finance.
The bargain seemed prudent, since the Arab
world would accept US leadership and enjoy American protection. Nowhere
was this clearer than in the network of US bases strung across the
Gulf, from the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and Al Udeid in Qatar, to Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia, Al Dhafra in the UAE and Ali Al Salem in Kuwait.
All those bases, and yet the question remained: who were these bases really serving?
Myth demolished
Some governments went further, entering what became, in effect, a strategic alliance with the US and Israel,
on the old assumption that one should always back the strongest side.
The myth of the indispensable protector became the organising principle
of the Arab region’s diplomacy.
The Iran war has demolished that myth. On 28 February, the US and Israel attacked Iran, assassinating the supreme leader and many senior officials, all in brazen defiance of the United Nations Charter and with the declared aim of regime change.
And then the mightiest military on earth
ran headlong into the limits of its power, military and political alike.
Iran did not collapse. It named a successor to the supreme leader,
struck back across the region, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a fuel crisis and wrecking the global economy.
After months of US and Israeli bombardment, billions of dollars wasted, thousands of lives squandered, and a region set aflame – from Lebanon
to the Gulf – Washington settled not for the regime change that it had
promised, but for a fragile and repeatedly broken truce.
The only choice left for the US is whether
to accommodate a world it can still help to shape but no longer
command, or to spend its remaining strength resisting the irreversible
The American-Israeli war failed,
conclusively. It neither toppled the Iranian state nor subdued it; it
enriched the arms industries but no one else; and it left every Gulf
capital that had sheltered under the American umbrella more exposed, not less.
In failing, it taught two lessons at once
about the limits of American power, and the folly of the Arab states
staking their national security upon it. Every government that built its
strategy on the permanence of American dominance now has reason to
think again.
On this national birthday, two awakenings are overdue: one in Washington, and one in the Arab capitals that trusted it.
For the US, the lesson is that the age of
forcing American and Israeli solutions on the region is over. No arsenal
can any longer impose the outcomes that American power once asserted.
The honest course for the US would be to pursue, at last, what international law and justice have always required, which is a genuine solution for Palestine. This
can be a two-state solution, with Israel and Palestine living in peace
side by side, or a single bi-national democratic state.
In either case, it must be the end of the Greater Israel project, which aims for Israel’s permanent occupation
of Palestinian lands and territories in neighbouring countries. The
Greater Israel project has been the main source of the region’s
perpetual wars.
The path forward
For the Arab world, the subservience to US
power should end as well. There is no rational reason for the Arab
world to outsource its security to a distant, unreliable and biased
patron.
The path forward is Arab unity, rather
than competition for Washington’s favour; to make peace with Iran,
recognising that Arabs and Iranians are permanent neighbours and not
proxies in someone else’s contest; and to build genuine strategic
autonomy in a multipolar world, dealing with the US, China, Russia, and every power on equal terms and according to the region’s own interests.
How a regional defence pact could deal the final blow to Israel’s violent expansionism
A security architecture
designed in the region, rather than in Washington, is now both possible
and necessary. The Gulf states in particular command the capital, the
energy, and the human talent to shape their own future – and, in the
coming age of clean power, to help lead it.
We live in the age of multipolarity, and that is the Arab world’s surest road to dignity, security and peace.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the
American republic announced itself to the world as a member of the human
family, not as its master. The Iran war is the costly proof that global
primacy was always beyond its grasp.
The unipolar moment that Washington
mistook for a permanent world order has ended. The only choice left for
the US is whether to accommodate a world it can still help to shape but
no longer command, or to spend its remaining strength resisting the
irreversible.
The wisest gift the US could give itself
at 250 is to recognise multipolarity at last, and to rejoin the
community of nations as one cooperative power among many.
The wisest gift the Arab world could give
itself is to stop waiting for a patron – and to stand, at last, in
unison, on its own feet.
Happy birthday to the United States, and for all of us, may this be a new birth of realism and peace.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor
and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia
University. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions
Network, Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition,
and Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has
been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and
currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary General António
Guterres. He spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard
University, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees
Even as frustrations mount over Israeli military campaigns across the Middle East, governments keep buying weapons from Israel — making it one of the world’s largest arms exporters.
As experts tell Responsible Statecraft,
Tel Aviv uses these weapons sales to lock countries into long-term,
strategic relationships that make recipients less likely to hold Israel
accountable for their behavior in Gaza and Lebanon or in its West Bank
policies. They stress that sustained U.S. support, including billions in
military grant aid each year and the co-development of many Israeli
weapons systems, helps make this all possible.
A weapons exports boom
Following October 7, Israel’s defense industry has exploded: the number of startups there nearly doubled, from 160 in July 2024 to 312 in April 2025. Its arms exports, which account for 75% to 80% of all Israeli weapons production, have grown in tandem. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data published in March, Israel was the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter between 2021 and 2025, surpassing the United Kingdom.
Tel Aviv raked in a record $19.2 billion from arms exports in 2025, a jump up from the $14.8 billion it made the previous year.
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Arms sales as political leverage
As Seth Binder of the American Committee
for Middle East Rights (ACMER) told RS, “arms deals are expensive and
often create a long tail to negotiate, complete, and fulfill over the
life of [a given] contract.”
Over time, these contracts provide Israel a
way to build relationships that other governments have strong
incentives to preserve. Exports can “entrench relationships that
constrain others’ ability to hold [Israel] accountable,” Daniel Levy,
the president of the U.S./Middle East Project (USMEP), said.
A growing global demand for weapons is playing to Israel’s advantage. A case in point is Europe. Spurred by fears of Russia and U.S. pressure to increase defense spending, some European countries are buying Israeli weapons to supplement their fraught
rearmament efforts. The purchases continue despite disquiet across the
continent over Israel’s actions in the Middle East, which have led some
European Union countries to pursue arms embargoes or suspend export licenses to Israel.
Germany signed multi-billion euro deals for the Israeli-made Arrow-3 missile defense system, Heron drones, and Spike anti-tank missiles last year. Greece spent about $740 million on 36 Precise & Universal Launching System (PULS) rocket artillery systems in December. Romania signed a deal worth about $2.3 billion for Spyder air defense systems earlier this week and is now set to acquire its own version of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.
Outside the EU, the value of U.K. arms- and ammunition-related imports from Israel skyrocketed from just $508,343 in 2020 to nearly $7.97 million in 2025 — a nearly 1,500% increase. A senior Israeli defense official told Reuters in early June that European countries are expected to order more air and missile defense systems soon.
But depending on Israel for critical
defense needs may prove risky. “A government that might otherwise
respond to public demands for sanctions or arms embargoes [against
Israel] now faces the prospect of degrading its own air defense…if it
does so,” Levy told RS.
Similar dynamics are playing out among Abraham Accords nations; Israeli exports to those countries jumped fivefold between 2023 and 2025.
“No one has any illusions that Israel is popular right now in [the Abraham Accords] countries,” an Israeli diplomat told
The Economist last fall. “But their governments have made long-term
investments in their defense ties with Israel, and they’re not about to
change course.”
More broadly, continued prospects for arms
sales turn Israel’s controversial military actions — in which Israeli
defense technologies are being used against civilians — into a commercial selling point. As Omar Shakir, the executive director of DAWN, told AP
last month, Israeli defense and technology companies have been “able to
parlay the use of their products in Gaza to attract more business.”
Israel’s arms exports blitz: fueled by Washington
Israel’s weapons industry is booming in part because “the U.S. has long subsidized it,” Binder told RS.
Israel receives Foreign Military Financing
from Washington, which provides funds for acquiring American weapons
equipment, training, and adjacent services. The support is even more
direct through what is called Off-Shore Procurement (OSP),
which Binder said allows Israel to “use a portion of its Foreign
Military Financing provided by the United States to pay for [its own]
arms.”
Although OSP is set to phase out
by 2028, Binder told RS that “Israel’s arms industry has arguably
established itself as a competitor” to America’s weapons sector through
the program.
Meanwhile, Israeli firms have gained a
competitive edge, thanks to what former State Department official Josh
Paul calls a “larcenous” approach toward U.S. intellectual property.
“Many technologies developed by U.S. industry are [simply] re-developed
and re-packaged by Israeli companies,” he told RS.
American support is often evident in the
export deals themselves, where, for example, the Arrow-3 system Germany
bought from Israel was co-developed with the U.S., which helped fund its development. Because of Washington’s role in the program, U.S. approval was required before the initial sale could proceed.
Altogether, the International Trade Administration observed
that U.S. assistance has “turned the Israeli military industry and
technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military
capabilities worldwide.”
Currently, a series of congressional
proposals under consideration — including one that Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed as his “personal plan” — stands to give Israel’s defense sector a deeper foothold in the U.S. market.
Indeed, section 219 (previously section 224) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027 would move to more closely integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries. The provision would further incorporate Israeli technologies and companies into U.S. supply chains, likely creating more opportunities to sell its weapons.
As Paul told RS, Israel being positioned
“to become a supplier to the U.S. military is just a further example of
[it] using [its arms] sector as a tool of influence.”
(Photo credit: Ammar Awad /Reuters)
![Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi [File: Manish Swarup/AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ap_6a3107ab2fbf0-1781598123.jpg?resize=730%2C410&quality=80)
