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"Pissed" Trump Fires Kristi Noem, Replaces With Markwayne Mullin

"Pissed" Trump Fires Kristi Noem, Replaces With Markwayne Mullin

Aaaaaand, she's gone... Moments ago Bloomberg reported that Trump has named Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) to replace Noem. 

Trump posted the following on Truth Social:

"I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026. The current Secretary, Kristi Noem, who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at 'Homeland.'

Serving 10 years in the United States House of Representatives, and 3 in the Senate, Markwayne has done a tremendous job representing the wonderful People of Oklahoma, where I won all 77 out of 77 Counties — in 2016, 2020, and 2024! A MAGA Warrior, and former undefeated professional MMA fighter, Markwayne truly gets along well with people, and knows the Wisdom and Courage required to Advance our America First Agenda. As the only Native American in the Senate, Markwayne is a fantastic advocate for our incredible Tribal Communities. Markwayne will work tirelessly to Keep our Border Secure, Stop Migrant Crime, Murderers, and other Criminals from illegally entering our Country, End the Scourge of Illegal Drugs and, MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN. Markwayne will make a spectacular Secretary of Homeland Security. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP"

Developing...

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President Donald Trump is preparing to fire Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem amid growing frustration over her self-promotional leadership style and bruising congressional testimony this week, according to multiple reports.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) described Trump as "pissed," according to NBC News.

Trump's dissatisfaction has intensified following Noem's appearance Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she faced sharp bipartisan criticism over her handling of department matters, including a high-profile advertising initiative, the Wall Street Journal reports.

An unnamed adviser to Trump described the hearing as particularly damaging, highlighting widespread discontent with her stewardship of the agency, the Journal said.

A key point of contention has been Noem's decision to allocate approximately $200 million for a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign urging undocumented immigrants to self-deport, with promotional materials prominently featuring the secretary herself. White House aides said the president had long viewed the effort as overly self-promotional.

During the hearing, Noem claimed that Trump had approved the campaign in advance - a claim that drew further ire from the president, who has told advisers and others that he did not sign off on it.

Adding to the tensions, Noem was grilled Wednesday by House Judiciary Committee members over rumors of a romantic relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump ally who serves as an unpaid adviser at the department. 

The Daily Mail has reported that Noem and Lewandowski, both married, have been engaged in an extramarital affair - a claim they have repeatedly denied.

In a heated exchange, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) point blank asked Noem under oath if she was engaged in sexual relations with Lewandowski. 

A furious Noem refused to directly answer, calling the question "tabloid garbage" and "offensive." When pressed further, she reiterated that it was "garbage."

Meanwhile, NBC News reports Trump has begun soliciting suggestions from aides and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill for potential successors. Among the names that have surfaced in White House conversations are Republican Sens. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and Steve Daines (R-MT),who announced Wednesday that he will not seek reelection, according to NBC News. 

Noem made headlines last week when she claimed that DHS staffers had installed spyware on her phone and computer, as well as on devices belonging to other political appointees.

“You wouldn’t even believe what I’ve found since I’ve been in this department,” Noem told conservative podcaster Patrick Bet-David.

Noem said she discovered the spyware last year with the assistance of former DOGE chief Elon Musk and his team.
Noem then told Bet-David that the secret files were turned over to attorneys for review.

The DHS secretary went on to say she has seen “eye-opening” data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the National Laboratories regarding the scientists who traveled to the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to conduct gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses.

“It was eye-opening,” she said.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 13:39

Oracle Prepares To Axe Thousands Of Jobs In New Layoff Round

Oracle Prepares To Axe Thousands Of Jobs In New Layoff Round

Shares of Oracle moved lower in New York shortly after lunchtime after Bloomberg News reported that the company is preparing to lay off thousands of workers as it spends aggressively on AI data center buildouts. The timing is not ideal: credit markets are starting to crack, concerns about Blue Owl are mounting, and the data center CapEx boom is looking increasingly frothy.

The planned cuts will affect divisions across the company and may be implemented by the end of this month, according to the outlet, citing people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. Some of the cuts will target jobs that AI will replace, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Wall Street analysts forecast that the cloud unit's data center spending will drive Oracle's cash flow negative through the end of the decade, with a payoff not expected until 2030. Oracle has said it may raise up to $50 billion this year through debt and equity to fund data center buildouts.

This week, Oracle internally announced that it would review many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing or freezing the hiring process, according to the sources.

Separately, Oracle previously disclosed its largest-ever restructuring plan, up to $1.6 billion in the fiscal year ending May (including severance). That disclosure helped push ORCL CDS wider, and the spread has since blown out to its widest level since the 2008 financial crisis.

It seems as though the stock has a lot of catching up to do.

The latest Bloomberg data show the company has 162,000 employees globally as of the end of May 2025. There is no definitive number on how many workers will be laid off in the coming weeks. The people Bloomberg cited said these plans are still active and could change.

We can certaintly call a top in the number of Oracle employees this decade. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 13:30

Stocks Tumble On Report US Plans Licenses For Global Chip Exports

Stocks Tumble On Report US Plans Licenses For Global Chip Exports

In addition to real war with Iran, Trump appears set to restart the simmering trade war with China. 

According to Bloomberg, US officials have written draft regulations that would restrict AI chip shipments to anywhere in the world without American approval, giving Washington broad control over whether other countries can build facilities for training and running artificial-intelligence models, and under what conditions. In other words, while Nvidia has long been the world’s AI kingmaker, now the Trump administration is considering taking a formal role in the industry that would include similarly sweeping powers.

If the rule passes, companies would need to seek US permission for virtually all exports of AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, which represents a global expansion of curbs that currently cover around 40 countries. 

According to the report, the specific approval process would depend on how much computing power a company wants.

Shipments of up to 1,000 of Nvidia’s latest GB300 graphics processing units, or GPUs, would undergo a fairly simple review with certain exemption opportunities. Companies building bigger clusters would need pre-clearance before seeking export licenses. They could face conditions such as disclosing their business models or allowing the US government site visits, depending on the specifics of the data centers in question.

For truly massive deployments - more than 200,000 of Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs owned by one company, in one country - the host government would have to get involved. For context, 200,000 GB300s is the number that NScale, a UK company that specializes in renting AI chips to third parties, is planning to provide to Microsoft Corp. across four sites in the US and Europe. The firm described this deal as “one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts ever signed.” 

The US would only approve such exports to allies that make stringent security promises and “matching” investments in American AI, the people said, noting that the draft rule doesn’t specify an investment ratio.

The news promptly sparked a selloff across the semiconductor space, with Nvidia and AMD both tumbling alongside the broader semiconductor space...

... which in turn dragged the S&P and pretty much everything else - including Treasuries - to session lows.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 12:54

Energy Expert Warns UBS Just How Many Weeks A Hormuz Shutdown Would Send Markets "Out Of Control"

Energy Expert Warns UBS Just How Many Weeks A Hormuz Shutdown Would Send Markets "Out Of Control"

It is only the sixth day of Operation Epic Fury, and roughly the fourth or fifth day that commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been paralyzed (except for one Chinese-linked bulk carrier), whether by IRGC drone threats or by insurers suspending vessel coverage, and already energy economist Anas Alhajji warned on a webinar with top UBS analysts that "if this is going to last for four weeks, that's where things will be completely out of control."

Bhanu Baweja, Chief Strategist at UBS, asked Alhajji on the webinar: "How many days would the Strait of Hormuz need to remain shut for us to see a non-linear move in oil, with prices rising to $100 or $120 per barrel? Is there a timeline you can give us?"

Alhajji responded, "Our main scenario is that if this lasts four weeks, things will be completely out of control. And when I say out of control, I mean that even if China starts releasing oil from its inventories, the problem is that my guess is China would also restrict exports, which means that oil would remain in China. We were counting on that oil being in the market, and now it is not going to be in the market."

He continued, "The impact of the U.S. SPR is limited. Saudi Arabia is completely out of the picture. All of that spare capacity in OPEC is out of the picture. So what do we do? We are then left relying on demand destruction to curb prices. And because of the panic buying, prices would go above $100 easily in this scenario."

Alhajji warned about panic hoarding in the oil market. He said he questioned back in January why the Trump administration was hoarding Venezuela's oil after the Maduro raid, instead of bringing it to market.

Alhajji then emphasized, "I'm not talking about conspiracy theories. We were criticizing the Trump administration, companies, and trading houses that bought Venezuelan oil, and asking why they weren't able to sell it to end users and why they were hoarding it. Now we know." He was implying that this hoarding was in preparation for Operation Epic Fury.

Earlier in the webinar, Alhajji outlined critical questions:

  • Is the war about Iran's nuclear program, or is something much larger at play, with Iran serving more as a trigger or for broader strategic objectives?

  • The distinction matters significantly because the medium- and long-term outcomes would look very different.

  • Should attention be focused narrowly on Iran's nuclear program and regime change, or should the situation be analyzed within the much wider context of China, trade wars & tariffs, AI competition, Panama Canal, Red Sea, Venezuela, Syria, & Greenland?

  • Are we observing "conflicts" within a larger "CONFLICT," where some groups are opportunistically exploiting the situation to pursue their own "local" objectives?

As well as the problem:

  • The problem now is attacks that spark panic buying while Saudi Arabia cannot react. Thus, U.S. SPR release is limited, and China might ban exports. Prices would go above $100 easily, but fear would contain demand growth, limiting the increase in oil prices. The impact on LNG and NGLs is higher than on oil.

  • We cannot go back quickly to normal. It will take at least 2 months if the war stops tomorrow. (logistics and technical issues)

  • Lack of international cooperation (Every country for itself)

Who benefits from the Middle East in flames?

  • The US and Russia benefit the most.

  • Losers are the rest of the world, with the EU, India, and Arab Gulf countries losing the most.

  • China is prepared for the short run. If the war lasts months, China will be among the biggest losers.

Related:

The key question for readers is whether President Trump's Operation Epic Fury has effectively triggered an energy shock that, while not explicitly aimed at China, hits Beijing the hardest. It appears as if energy markets remain disrupted for at least a month, then the real issue is whether Asia's energy shock morphs into a financial crisis.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 12:53

Kharg Island Back In Focus As Seizure Talk Enters Mainstream Media Debate

Kharg Island Back In Focus As Seizure Talk Enters Mainstream Media Debate

Update (Thursday):

On the sixth day of the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury against Iran, seizing Iran's main crude export hub has entered the discussion in corporate media.

Former U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg joined Fox News and discussed the seizure of the single biggest energy and financing choke point of Iran: Kharg Island.

"What I would hope they would do is really go and take Kharg Island. If you take out that island, that's 80% to 90% of the petroleum usage the Iranians have," Kellogg told the Fox host.

He continued: "You basically shut them off economically. They cannot support China. They cannot support Russia. Sooner or later, the other side is going to realize this is bad news."

We first posed the question on Wednesday: once the military planners behind Operation Epic Fury (a campaign likely planned for at least a year, if not longer) finish degrading the IRGC's air, ground, and maritime capabilities, what comes next?

Our base case is that the next phase targets regime funding channels, and the highest-value energy node is Kharg Island.

It's only a matter of time before the Kharg Island discussion goes mainstream. Mentions across corporate media stories (via Bloomberg data) have begun to surge.

"Kharg Island handles up to 90% of Iran's oil exports. Is President Trump thinking about seizing it?" Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer asked on X.

Latest on Polymarket: Will the Kharg Island oil terminal be hit by March 31?

Kharg Island is now entering the mainstream conversation.

*   *   * 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said earlier that the U.S. is "accelerating, not decelerating" Operation Epic Fury, with U.S. and Israeli forces conducting at least 1,000 strikes over five days against high-value IRGC assets and leadership. As those strikes have significantly degraded the IRGC's capabilities on land, at sea, and in the air, the next big question is whether Iran's energy infrastructure will become the conflict's next major focal point, especially as the Strait of Hormuz remains paralyzed and Beijing grows increasingly concerned about disruptions to its cheap Iranian crude imports.

Operation Epic Fury has targeted key IRGC leadership, military support networks, and financial infrastructure, severely degrading core pillars of the regime. The next phase to watch is whether the Trump administration and Israel will move against Iran's critical oil and gas infrastructure, which remains both the regime's economic lifeline and an important source of cheap crude for China.

What comes to mind first is Iran's main crude export terminal in the Persian Gulf, called "Kharg Island." Think of it as Iran's oil jugular.

Reuters reports that about 90% of Iran's crude is exported via Kharg Island, located off the country's southern coast in the northern Persian Gulf, in Bushehr Province, about 34 miles northwest of the port of Bushehr.

The latest from Bloomberg reports that Iran continued loading crude onto tankers at Kharg on Monday, despite U.S. and Israeli strikes on IRGC targets countrywide. It remains unclear whether the loading terminal will still be operational through the end of the week, given that the Strait of Hormuz is paralyzed and that any shadow tanker carrying Iranian crude through the chokepoint could be targeted by U.S. and allied forces.

One observation is that the Trump administration and Israel may be deliberately preserving operations at the Kharg loading terminal. If military planners had intended to immediately sever the regime's funding pipeline, the terminal likely would have been among the first targets of the operation. This suggests that allied forces may be keeping the facility intact for the country's next leadership.

"Kharg Island handles up to 90% of Iran's oil exports. Is President Trump thinking about seizing it?" Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer asked on X.

Our view is that if the Trump administration intends to push forward with a new government, Kharg Island's oil and gas infrastructure is unlikely to be destroyed. Notably, it has remained untouched in the first five days of the conflict. If it is destroyed, China would be furious.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 12:40

The Spell Of Woke Is Broke: Let's Keep It That Way

The Spell Of Woke Is Broke: Let's Keep It That Way

Authored by Thomas F. Powers via American Greatness,

It is too early to know with any precision what the long-term effects of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts will be. We might take our bearings on that score by considering the fate of essays written by prominent law professors in the 1950s and 1960s touting this or that discrete step in the unfolding of the civil rights revolution—the latest Supreme Court decision, and so on—as if each were an all-or-nothing earth-shattering decision.

What we can now say with certainty is that what the Trump administration has done on the DEI front represents the beginning of a general reorientation of our politics away from wokeness. One need only survey what prominent leaders of the Left are saying about the political price the Democratic Party has paid on that score. What they are saying indicates a large political change, even if the Dems prove incapable of unmooring themselves from woke politics for the near future.

The first sign of this reorientation is a general shift in the popular mindset: the spell of woke politics has broken. This matters because it was always the way in which woke politics commanded assent in the citizens’ hearts and minds that was crucial. That assent has been questioned or denied now in a broad way, with the backing of public authority (Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, agency directives), and with widespread public support. Wokeness’s public hectoring, punitiveness, and censoriousness, and the extremism of many of its positions on the issues, is unpopular at the level of 70–30 or 80–20 opinion poll divides.

We ought to be confident, therefore, that the broken spell of wokeness augurs a permanent shift in our public life. What that means precisely, however, depends very much on how we understand wokeness and what is done going forward to ensure that woke excess does not return. Now, if, as many say, wokeness was the product of cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufo and a host of followers) or postmodernism (Jordan Peterson and another host of followers), then all that needs to be done is to combat bad ideas. On these interpretations, our universities in particular, and other cultural institutions where the influence of such ideas holds sway, need our attention. Certainly, cultural Marxism and postmodernism represent bad ideas, and the world would be a better place without their influence.

But if what wokeness represents above all is the explosive power of the civil rights revolution and the influence of an aggressive leftist interpretation of anti-discrimination politics, as another band of interpreters claims (I among them), then the task ahead is much bigger and much more difficult.

Trump’s anti-DEI measures, on this view, would represent only the first step in a broader campaign of civil rights reform. One could look long and hard without seeing much in the way of evidence for any such thing so far. Are these current efforts against DEI an illusion, a brief moment of political opportunism that will recede as public hatred of wokeness recedes—only to return in a few years when the next wave of anti-discriminatory passion rises up?

I don’t think that worry is justified. The anti-DEI campaign to date will have enduring consequences because even if it is not yet clear that what is at stake in DEI is civil rights politics, the current reorientation can only have the effect of raising our awareness of the role of anti-discrimination in our public life. This has begun on the all-important moral plane of civil rights politics. Precisely by breaking the spell of its puritanical commands, our anti-woke moment is reworking something essential to civil rights politics. Because public morality is the crucial filter of the human mind, a shift at this level will change what we see, what we think, and what we think we can say. Anti-woke sentiment, backed by changes in the law, is providing a moment of political, cultural, and mental freedom that will necessarily lead, after many decades during which this was not possible, to a general reappraisal of the moral power and the meaning of the civil rights revolution.

Morality, the Problematic Core of Anti-Discrimination Politics

The civil rights regime was always a collection of disparate, crucial elements. anti-discrimination politics began with the discrete groups who claim its protections (by now an overwhelming majority of the population), but it has been bolstered by laws and institutions and by a set of supporting “ideas” (critical race theory, postmodernist “difference” theory, critiques of “prejudice” by sociologists and anthropologists in the early twentieth century, e.g.). Its modes and orders have been advanced further in a hundred independent corollary efforts of cultural change throughout modern life (in the professions and in the domains of art, literature, and the like).

But central to the whole has always been the moral claim of the fight against discrimination. That moral claim has always been essential to civil rights politics and explains its great power in modern life.

Morality is crucial to anti-discrimination for a very simple reason: our perception of “discrimination” is a perception of an injustice. Indeed, what we mean politically by “discrimination” is always “unjust discrimination.” All human beings discriminate among classes of things, conceiving of better and worse, all the time; whenever we say “that’s discrimination” in a political sense, however, what we always have in mind is some kind of unfair or unmerited discrimination or negative judgment.

At the very beginning of anti-discrimination, we of course confront a form of unfair or unjust discrimination against blacks in America that any fair-minded person can very easily see was outrageous. Any decent person will say that an individual ought to be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin. Anti-black discrimination in America was also extremely harsh and harmful, entailing a wide array of harms, ranging from minor indignities all the way up to violence and homicide. Americans were powerfully reminded of the profound injustice of American racism at the moment of their great moral triumph over Hitler and Nazism, which revealed the full scale of the horror of the Holocaust.

The moral power of civil rights politics played a decisive role in the 1950s and 1960s when the anti-discrimination regime was launched. It is true that the American liberal democratic tradition had long expressed a certain wariness of moral crusades (like Prohibition or, before that, religious puritanism). Only a moral force of immense power, of the sort the civil rights revolution was, could overcome our hesitations along those lines. The only real parallel to the civil rights effort was the attempt a century earlier to deal with American race discrimination’s father, or grandfather, slavery, in the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history.

Victims of discrimination now carried a moral claim that could be used to demand attention from others. This moral starting point was supercharged and made hyper-spirited because, not entirely by conscious design, anti-discrimination enforcement came to institutionalize a hybrid of the civil law and criminal law. Policing harassment and discrimination borrows from the spirit of the criminal law at crucial points (naming offenders and victims, enlisting government prosecutors, paying close attention to intent and “motive”) but with the legal instrumentalities of tort law (looser procedures with lower standards of protection for the accused).

One consequence of this hybrid quasi-public, quasi-private legal structure was that enforcement of the machine could be handed over to employers, educational establishments, and other large (private or public) institutional entities acting in their capacity as “employers.” Enforcement was then implemented by our fellow citizens, acting under a sanction that was rooted in the law but not evidently or obviously “official” or governmental. The overall result was that anti-discrimination enforcement became a way of policing in an effective and relatively intimate way a significant portion of our social interactions, interpersonal behavior, and private speech—and policing how people treat one another is very much a matter of basic morality.

It was into this social domain that civil rights law, invited in by all-too-willing fellow citizens (bosses, deans, HR managers), imported the punitive and blame-casting spirit of the criminal law. At least as important, these individuals wielded the crucial coercive “corrective measure” of this privatized enforcement regime, above all, the firing of individuals. Punishment thus completes the picture for anything in the ballpark of “harassment”—and also for actions like demonstrating recalcitrance to the demands of the new order.

A New Morality?

As important as the victim/perpetrator injustice claims have been to the moral hold of civil rights politics, the morality of the anti-discrimination revolution is more complicated than that; moreover, its various claims are stated in much more precise terms. Indeed, a whole new system of public morality emerged out of the civil rights revolution.

To elaborate on this in detail would take more space than I have here, but in brief, a new terminology has emerged to clarify the harm of discrimination and to articulate the steps that must be taken to eradicate it. “Identity” is a vitally important term today because it names with some precision what it is in the individual that is threatened by group-on-group discrimination. “Respect” must replace mere “toleration” as a standard of interpersonal treatment because toleration is consistent with some kinds of discrimination (especially discrimination in the private sector). Claims from both identity and respect show that civil rights politics is thus necessarily a politics of “recognition.” New schemes of representation come into view as necessary as well—new, more “inclusive” schemes that reflect the “voices” of those previously excluded by discrimination. And, last but certainly not least, a host of new equality claims—systemic, structural, societal—call into question noticeable inequalities affecting the groups protected under anti-discrimination law. Such claims are now advanced under the heading of “equity.”

A whole new civic morality has thus emerged out of the political upheaval of the civil rights revolution; shamefully, our political scientists have nothing to say about this massive and astonishing fact of our public life.

It is the morality of civil rights as interpreted by the Left that supplies the key “ideas” that are at the core of the woke outlook—and not, I would insist, cultural Marxism or postmodernism or cultural relativism, and so on. To be sure, “ideas” there are here aplenty—identity, inclusion, recognition, respect, equity, etc.—but they are all ideas with a very simple and clear political origin. The lesson for us here ought to be this: political history as the cause of ideas, not intellectual history as the cause of politics.

One additional step remains: it is above all the moral logic of civil rights politics that must be “taught,” as a semi-official catechism, by way of the public and private enforcers of the regime, through things like diversity training, Title IX training, anti-bullying training, and the like—and with punitive sanctions for those who do not want to go along.

The moral power of the anti-discrimination revolution helps to explain how it could grow and grow, more or less unchecked, to the point where it became the monstrous woke regime against which the people have finally rebelled. This explains, too, why the American Left thought for so long that the Democratic Party could ride an anti-discrimination coalition to enduring political victory. Because of its moral content, the anti-discrimination regime—its groups, its laws, its ideas, its institutions, public and private—all seemed unquestionable, simply above criticism.

Our Doubts About the New Morality

What is crucial about the current moment is that anti-DEI sentiment extends to a new wariness concerning precisely the moralism of wokeness. Americans are heirs of the Enlightenment and heirs of liberal democratic constitutional government, and they have not entirely forgotten the suspicion of any politics that claims too much in the name of high and lofty ideals, religious or secular.

It’s true that almost no one is saying publicly that anti-wokeness is really at bottom opposition to civil rights moralism. But one need only consider in rough outline what it is that public anti-woke ire expresses in order to see why that is the case.

We don’t see this, however, and that is because the great moral power of civil rights still does its work to halt us from facing the enormous consequences of the social-political revolution that has taken place in its name. This is something that we see today, even in the Trump administration’s very effective anti-DEI measures. This is a huge effort of civil rights reform, in fact, unprecedented in its sweep. But does anyone call it by that name?

What is needed is a fuller and franker facing of the hold the civil rights revolution has on us. The greatest obstacle to that is its moral hold. How, then, to start to challenge—or at least to begin to think clearly about—something as important to American life as the morality of anti-discrimination without going off the deep end into a world that would welcome back discrimination of the kind American blacks endured before the 1960s. That is a price we cannot pay.

One answer is to begin to look at, to see, the civil rights revolution in its many conflicts with another morality that has great power in America—namely, the morality of the liberal democratic constitutional tradition. And when one begins to look on that level, there are indeed many, many conflicts between the logic of anti-discrimination and that older moral-political outlook.

Looking at anti-discrimination (as a whole) from the perspective of liberalism (as a whole), we will perhaps be able to begin, finally, to see the anti-discrimination regime as a distinct entity. We will, at the same time, be unable not to notice the many lines of tension between these twin poles of our moral-political order. That ought to free us up to start thinking more clearly about the relationship between them. Questioning one’s civic morality is not something to be embraced lightly, but fortunately for us in this situation, questioning one set of our moral categories may be done with a view to another, healthier, set.

* * *

Thomas F. Powers is Visiting Lecturer at The Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Cleveland State University and author of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime (St. Augustine’s Press).

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 12:35

Israel Targets Iran's Protest-Crackdown Forces With New Airstrikes

Israel Targets Iran's Protest-Crackdown Forces With New Airstrikes

Israel is striking Iran’s internal security apparatus in an effort to weaken the regime’s ability to suppress dissent and potentially open the door to a popular uprising, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday targeted figures and facilities tied to domestic repression, including members of the Basij paramilitary and senior intelligence officials, the Israeli military said. Israel and the U.S. have also hit internal-security institutions such as the Tehran headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which plays a central role in protecting the regime.

The IRGC and Basij led the violent crackdown on antigovernment protests in January, when security forces fired on demonstrators and killed thousands. Police and intelligence agencies also detained large numbers of protesters.

Israeli officials say the goal is to weaken Iran’s coercive apparatus from the air so citizens can challenge the government on the ground. Analysts caution that airpower alone may not bring down the regime.

“If the bet is that airstrikes will finish the job from above while Iranians complete it from below, it’s a bet that rests on no clear historical model,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group. “It also ignores the resilience of entrenched authoritarian systems like the Islamic Republic.”

The Wall Street Journal writes that recent strikes targeted dozens of internal security facilities, including the IRGC’s Tharallah headquarters, which coordinates intelligence, policing and Basij units during unrest. Israeli jets also hit the police special-units command, Faraja, responsible for riot control. Iran later confirmed the death of Faraja intelligence chief Golamreza Rezaian.

“These bodies were responsible for, among other things, suppressing protests against the regime through violent measures and civilian arrests,” the Israeli military said.

Joint U.S.-Israeli operations have also focused on western Iran’s Kurdish regions, long known as opposition strongholds. Rights groups reported strikes on police and detention sites in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj.

The conflict comes amid growing unrest inside Iran driven by economic hardship, political grievances and anger over the January killings. More than 7,000 people have died in the unrest, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran.

Still, the government retains a near monopoly on weapons across most of the country, and Basij patrols continue. Civilian casualties from the conflict—over 1,000 so far, including 180 children—could also strengthen hardline support for the regime.

Former President Donald Trump has urged Iranian security forces to defect. “I urge the IRGC, Iranian military, police to lay down your arms and receive full immunity or face certain death,” he said Sunday. “It will be certain death.”

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 11:40

Debate: What Should Trump Do Now In Iran?

Debate: What Should Trump Do Now In Iran?

LIVE NOW: 

***************************

Tonight at 7pm ET on the ZH homepage, we host a debate on the ongoing war with Iran.

Joining the discussion:

  • Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan and a prominent voice for the original America First right.
     
  • Max Abrahms, Northeastern University professor and widely cited scholar on terrorism and international security.

Moderating the discussion is Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologist and Dark Horse host.

Mills follows in Buchanan’s footsteps, who was early to sound the alarm about the United States being dragged into “Israel’s war”:

While Mills sees Israel as the largest thorn in the side of America and the chief cause behind Trump’s abandonment of his pro-peace promise, Abrahms sees Turkey as the “most annoying country for US national security goals in the Middle East”:

Abrahms is a staunch zionist though not nearly as radical as Senator Lindsey Graham (who is already advocating for Trump to bomb Lebanon). While broadly supportive of the stated goals of weakening Iran’s missiles and navy, Abrahms recognizes that regime change is too ambitious:

Tune in tonight at 7pm ET here on the ZH home or X feed.
 

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 10:55

Iran Says Strait Of Hormuz Open As China-Linked Ship Transits Maritime Chokepoint

Iran Says Strait Of Hormuz Open As China-Linked Ship Transits Maritime Chokepoint

"Some are criticizing us [Iran], saying that we have closed the Strait of Hormuz. We do not believe in closing the Strait of Hormuz at all," Iranian military commander Amir Heydari told Iranian state TV on Thursday.

The first sign that the critical maritime chokepoint was partially open came late Wednesday night, when we were among the first to report that a China-linked bulk carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz without incident, a notable development given earlier reports and market chatter that Iran might allow only Chinese-linked ships to transit.

Shortly after our report that the Iron Maiden vessel made it through the narrowest part of the waterway unharmed, Bloomberg also reported on the development, noting that the ship had changed its destination signal to "CHINA OWNER."

Latest activity in the Strait.

Earlier this week, Iran's IRGC said that any vessel sailing through the waterway "could be at risk from missiles or rogue drones," according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

China has urged peace and called for an immediate ceasefire to the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury to "prevent further escalation of tensions and stop the conflict from spreading and engulfing the entire Middle East."

Everyone knows why China is calling for peace: the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's cheap oil flows have effectively been closed to the world's second-largest economy, and that pressure is likely to be used as leverage by President Trump in his upcoming visit to China.

Trump has said the U.S. will offer insurance for tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz and, if necessary, provide naval escorts to help restart energy flows as the commercial shipping lane remains heavily disrupted.

Beijing is likely asking this question:

Even with ten or more tankers and other vessels reportedly hit by IRGC drones in or around the Strait, intelligence and military analysts told Reuters that the IRGC could sustain drone attacks in the waterway for months. The Strait has not been fully closed, in part because the Trump administration spent the week degrading Iran's naval capabilities, but the disruption is still severe because major European and global insurers have abruptly pulled or canceled war-risk coverage for the region.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 09:25

Futs Jump On Reports About Iran's Willingness To Give Up Uranium Stockpile

Futs Jump On Reports About Iran's Willingness To Give Up Uranium Stockpile

U.S. equity futures jumped around 4:00 a.m. ET after Bloomberg News reported that Iran had previously signaled a willingness to surrender its highly enriched uranium stockpiles in high-stakes negotiations, just before the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury.

Although the Bloomberg story relates to last week's U.S.-Iran developments, the market is extremely sensitive to headlines - even old ones - and that was enough to send S&P 500 E-mini futures surging, erasing earlier losses and now flat. Nasdaq futures are also little changed.

Main U.S. equity futures indexes

Here's what Bloomberg reported:

Iran told the U.S. in recent nuclear negotiations that its stockpile of highly enriched uranium "is the result of our practical achievements and that we are ready to get rid of it, provided we get something good in return," the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency cited Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi as saying.

Bear in mind this news is 'old' (we reported on Friday), but for it to repeated no in public is very different from saying it in private a week ago...

Absolutely huge late Friday developing news, if it's confirmed and assuming it sticks, via CBS: "Iran has agreed to give up its stockpile of enriched material - zero accumulation - and allow for full verification by the IAEA of its nuclear program according to US-Iran talks mediator, Oman's foreign minister Badr al Busaidi."

The Iranian side also seems to be confirming its willingness to make this significant concession, also to stave off a massive US attack, given the immense build-up of Pentagon assets in the region. According to more breaking details via CBS:

Negotiators from the U.S. and Iran have made "substantial progress" toward a deal to curb Iran's nuclear program, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS News on Friday, as President Trump considers strikes on Iran.

Albusaidi — who has mediated several rounds of U.S.-Iran talks over the last month — told "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan that a "peace deal is within our reach."

He said Iran has agreed that it will "never, ever have … nuclear material that will create a bomb," which he called a "big achievement." The country's existing stockpiles of enriched uranium would be "blended to the lowest level possible" and "converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible," according to Albusaidi.

Why this old news is being recirculated remains unclear.

Last week:

On Wednesday, CNN reported that Iranian intel officials had sent word to Washington about potential talks to end the conflict, yet no U.S. official has publicly confirmed that any negotiations are underway.

Interestingly while stocks jumped on the 'hope', Polymarket odds of a ceasefire by month-end slipped to just 1 in 4...

Iran potentially surrendering its uranium stockpiles may become the new "trade war" headlines for the stock market casino. We all remember those headlines from one year ago and in Trump's first term. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 07:41

China Halts Diesel, Gasoline Exports As Paralyzed Hormuz Risks Energy Shock

China Halts Diesel, Gasoline Exports As Paralyzed Hormuz Risks Energy Shock

Less than one week into Operation Epic Fury, Beijing has ordered its top refiners to halt gasoline and diesel exports as the Strait of Hormuz remained paralyzed on Thursday morning. The move exposes how China is one of the biggest losers in a prolonged Hormuz shutdown, with Beijing appearing to brace for an oil shock.

Beijing is scrambling after panicking at the start of the week and calling for an immediate ceasefire in the U.S.-Iran conflict. Since then, Iraq has begun cutting crude oil output, and Wednesday brought another major energy shock: Qatar’s massive LNG export operation declared force majeure, effectively removing about 20% of global LNG supply from the market, with roughly 80% of those volumes normally headed to Asia.

Bloomberg sources say that officials from the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planner, called for an immediate temporary suspension of refined crude product exports on Thursday. 

Chinese officials told top domestic refiners to halt any new export deals and cancel existing shipments, though jet and bunker fuel in bonded storage, along with supplies to Hong Kong and Macau, are exempt. 

NDRC's decision is merely viewed as a way for Beijing protect domestic fuel supply and energy security. We've made it very well known to readers that China is heavily exposed to Gulf energy. 

We've briefed readers (read here) that China is heavily exposed to cheap Iranian crude exports. About 80% of Iran's oil exports - about 1.6 million barrels per day - go to China.

... and so is the rest of Asia.

We asked a very important question on Wednesday evening: "Will Trump Seize Or Destroy Iran's Oil Export Island?"

Crude oil futures for April on the Shanghai International Exchange (priced in dollars) are near $100/bbl.

However, there is some good news overnight:

Any sustained closure of the critical waterway could trigger an energy shock in China, hitting first through higher prices and, if the disruption persists, through tighter physical supply. As the world’s largest crude importer, with roughly half of its oil imports linked to Gulf shipments, Beijing faces the risk of chokepoint disruptions. 

All of this comes just weeks before President Trump’s upcoming trip to Beijing, and with the U.S. military likely to provide tanker escorts through the narrow waterway, the leverage Washington appears to have gained ahead of any Trump-Xi meeting looks increasingly well calculated. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 07:05

Ex-OpenAI Researcher's Hedge Fund Reveals Big Bitcoin Miner Bets In New SEC Filing

Ex-OpenAI Researcher's Hedge Fund Reveals Big Bitcoin Miner Bets In New SEC Filing

Authored by Christina Comben via cointelegraph,

Leopold Aschenbrenner has built a US stock portfolio heavily concentrated in companies that supply the power and infrastructure behind the artificial intelligence boom.

The former OpenAI researcher, who left the lab’s superalignment team to launch San Francisco-based hedge fund Situational Awareness LP, has expanded it from $383 million in assets in early 2025 to a reported $5.52 billion in equity positions in its latest 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund’s 13F filing for Q4 2025 shows a highly concentrated portfolio built around betting that the real winners of the AI boom won’t be chatbots, but the power plants and data centers that feed them. Situational Awareness reported $5.52 billion in US equity positions across 29 holdings, with a large share of that value clustered in a handful of AI infrastructure names.

Those include graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud provider CoreWeave, fuel cell and power specialist Bloom Energy, Intel, optics maker Lumentum and Bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure play Core Scientific. 

Aschenbrenner first drew attention as a precocious AI thinker after publishing a widely read “Situational Awareness” manifesto on the race to advanced AI, then quickly parlayed that profile into capital. His San Francisco-based AI hedge fund now manages more than $1.5 billion, backed by prominent tech founders, family offices and institutions.

Aschenbrenner has been a substantial net buyer quarter-on-quarter, with Situational Awareness’ 13-F reported US equity and options portfolio increasing from about $254 million in Q4 2024 to more than $5.5 billion by Q4 2025. Over that period, the fund built sizable positions in Bitcoin miners and related energy infrastructure firms including IREN, Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Bitdeer and Applied Digital.

Bitcoin miners pivot from hashrate to horsepower

The bet aligns with a broader shift already reshaping Bitcoin mining. After the latest halving squeezed block rewards, large miners have started repurposing their high-density, power-rich sites as AI hosting hubs, treating megawatts and data center space as scarce assets in the new compute economy rather than just hashrate.

Core Scientific, for example, has signed a series of 12-year high-performance computing hosting contracts with AI cloud firm CoreWeave, while MARA acquired a 64% stake in French computing infrastructure operator Exaion, expanding into AI and cloud services.

Situational Awareness disclosed a 9.4% stake in Core Scientific via an amended Schedule 13D, representing 28,756,478 shares with shared voting and disposition power, effectively giving the fund a levered bet on CoreWeave’s expansion and the miner’s pivot from pure Bitcoin to AI and high-performance computing.

At the same time, the fund has taken aim at the other side of the AI transition with a short position in Indian IT giant Infosys, a wager that large language models and AI coding tools will pressure the traditional outsourced software services model.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 06:30

Free Speech Victory In Germany After Top Court Issues Landmark Rulings For 'Insults'

Free Speech Victory In Germany After Top Court Issues Landmark Rulings For 'Insults'

Via REMIX News,

The wave of police searches and prosecutions in Germany may be facing a new hurdle after Germany’s top court, the Constitutional Court, issued two landmark rulings strengthening freedom of expression. However, Fatina Keilani, editor in Welt’s freedom of expression department, said that these two decisions have gone largely unnoticed by the public, an oversight that she finds remarkable.

Karlsruhe: The Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court gathers. Photo: Uli Deck/dpa (Photo by Uli Deck/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Writing in Welt, Keilani reports that the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe handed down two resolutions in December that push back against what she describes as hasty convictions for insults. The rulings stem from two separate cases in which individuals used sharp, even offensive language against public officials and medical staff — and were criminally sentenced for it.

As Remix News has extensively reported, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of such cases in recent years. Some of these cases have even attracted international attention and led to questions about freedom of speech and growing repression in Germany.

Just late last month, German prosecutors launched investigations into dozens of comments under just one post criticizing Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with one user calling him “Pinocchio.” A number of constitutional lawyers were quick to slam the investigations, with one labeling it “hysterical madness.”

Now, Germany’s top court is strengthening freedom of expression at a worrying time.

The first case involved a retired police officer whose son attended a high school during the Covid pandemic. Angered by the school’s testing requirements, the father sent the headmaster a series of emails accusing him of serving a “fascist system and its henchmen” and of “fascist cadre obedience.” The Göppingen District Court sentenced him to a fine of 70 daily rates of €80 each for insult. He lost every appeal before taking his case to Karlsruhe — where he finally prevailed.

The Constitutional Court found that his right to freedom of expression had been violated, ruling that the lower courts had not examined the meaning of his statements carefully enough, nor struck an adequate balance between free expression and the protection of personality.

Keilani quotes the court directly: “Part of this freedom is that citizens can attack officials they consider responsible in an accusatory and personalized way for their way of exercising power, without having to fear that the personal elements of such statements are removed from this context and form the basis for drastic judicial sanctions.”

The second case involved a man who had been placed in a psychiatric hospital on multiple occasions and subjected to coercive measures. In a letter to his lawyer in 2023, he described hospital staff as a “psychiatric mob.” When he applied to have the letter formally served, a senior bailiff refused on the grounds that its content was punishable. The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court upheld that refusal — but Karlsruhe disagreed.

The Constitutional Court was pointed in its criticism, noting that the Higher Regional Court’s entire reasoning had been reduced to just two sentences, and that it had made no real weighing of the fundamental right to free expression at all. The case has been sent back for reconsideration.

For Keilani, both rulings carry a significance that extends beyond the individual cases. She situates them within a broader climate of concern, noting that “numerous decisions against freedom of expression have recently raised doubts in Germany about the rule of law and about the stability of the courts with regard to this crucial fundamental right.”

In particular, the wave of politicians weaponizing comments on the internet to launch police raids and drag social media users to court. Against that backdrop, she finds the Karlsruhe decisions reassuring — while also reading them as a firm instruction to lower courts about the standard they must meet when judging speech.

These rulings do not necessarily mean, however, that internet users are now able to freely insult politicians without consequence. For one, prosecutors and politicians still have incentive to pursue such cases, both in order to stifle dissent and to intimidate the populace. Social media users may be able to defend themselves in court, but it will likely take years and cost them substantial amounts of money. Furthermore, outright insults without context are still likely to be prosecutable offenses under current German law. For example, insulting a politician’s physical appearance or simply calling them a slur could land social media users in hot water.

Regardless, the country’s top court has drawn a line in the sand, according to Keilani.

She also cited the “urgent decision of the Cologne Administrative Court regarding the classification of the AfD” as also a welcome sign that rule of law still stands in Germany. In that ruling, the Cologne court found that the designation of the AfD as a “confirmed” case of right-wing extremism was not constitutionally sound.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 05:00

US, Ecuador Launch Joint Military Operations Against Terrorist Organizations

US, Ecuador Launch Joint Military Operations Against Terrorist Organizations

US Southern Command on Tuesday stated that the US military had conducted a joint operation with Ecuadorian forces against "designated terrorist organizations" in Ecuador, as the Trump administration continues to fight narco-terrorism. 

U.S. Marine Corps. Lt. Gen. Francis Donovan looks on during a Senate Armed Services Committee Confirmation Hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 15, 2026. Tom Brenner/Getty Images

"We commend the men and women of the Ecuadorian armed forces for their unwavering commitment to this fight, demonstrating courage and resolve through continued actions against narco-terrorists in their country," Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, said in a post on X.

The announcement comes after Donovan visited Ecuador on March 1 for a two-day visit, where he met President Daniel Noboa and senior Ecuadorian defense officials in Quito. They discussed security cooperation and US support of Ecuador's efforts to combat narco-terrorism. 

A Pentagon spox told the Epoch Times that the joint effort does not entail US troops in combat. 

"Ecuador is one of the United States’ strongest partners in disrupting and dismantling Designated Terrorist Organizations in the region," Donnovan said on Tuesday. "The Ecuadorian people have witnessed firsthand the terror, violence, and corruption that these narco-terrorists inflict on communities across the region."

Noboa announced on Monday that Ecuador had entered a new phase in its fight against narcoterrorism and illegal mining.

"In the month of March, we will conduct joint operations with our regional allies, including the United States," he said on X. "The security of Ecuadorians is our priority, and we will fight to achieve peace in every corner of the country."

As the Epoch Times notes further, the operations come amid increased U.S. involvement in the region, including the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January.

Military personnel patrol a market as they carry out weapons and drug checks in Quito, Ecuador, on Feb. 10, 2026. Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration in September 2025 classified two Ecuadorian cartels, Los Choneros and Los Lobos, as foreign terrorist organizations.

“Los Choneros and Los Lobos have attacked and threatened public officials and their families, security personnel, judges, prosecutors, and journalists in Ecuador,” the U.S. State Department said in a September 2025 statement.

On Feb. 2, the U.S. Coast Guard detained three suspected narco-terrorists northwest of Ecuador during Operation Pacific Viper, an ongoing U.S. Coast Guard-led campaign launched in early August 2025, to undermine drug trafficking in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

In March 2025, Noboa called for U.S. special forces, with assistance from Brazil and Europe, to dismantle the international narco-terrorist organizations, which have swelled to thousands of armed members.

“We need to have more soldiers to fight this war,” Noboa told the BBC at the time. “Seventy percent of the world’s cocaine exits via Ecuador. We need the help of international forces.”

Ryan Morgan contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 04:15

How Likely Is It That Pakistan Joins The Third Gulf War In Support Of Its Saudi Ally?

How Likely Is It That Pakistan Joins The Third Gulf War In Support Of Its Saudi Ally?

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Pakistan could set into motion a sequence of events that restores its role as the US’ top regional ally, returns US troops to Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase if they later team up against the Taliban, and therefore build a new regional order at the geostrategic crossroads of South and Central Asia.

Saudi Arabia has been attacked multiple times by Iran on the pretext that the US military infrastructure on its territory has been used to some extent in the US campaign against Iran, which led to what can be described as the Third Gulf War, in spite of the Saudi-Pakistani Mutual Defense Pact from last September. Iran clearly wasn’t deterred, but Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar still reminded Iran about it in what seems to either be another attempt to deter an escalation or intimate impending involvement in the war.

In his words, “We have a defence pact with Saudi Arabia. I conveyed to the Iranian side about our defence pact, to which he asked me to ensure that KSA’s land was not used. Then I had shuttle communication, as a result of which, as you can compare, the least attacks from Iran are to Saudi Arabia and Oman.” Objectively speaking, it reflects poorly on Pakistan that Iran ignored Dar’s reminder and still attacked Saudi Arabia, hence why he coped that “the least attacks from Iran are to Saudi Arabia”.

Mutual defense pacts are supposed to deter attacks, not simply reduce the number and intensity thereof, which in any case didn’t even happen like Dar claimed since Iran continues to attack Saudi Arabia with gusto. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now thrown into the dilemma of either activating their mutual defense pact to significantly escalate the conflict through their joint involvement therein, likely coordinated with their shared US ally if that happens, or tacitly admit that it’s militarily impotent.

The crushing reputational costs of failing to activate their previously hyped-up mutual defense pact place additional pressure upon their policymakers to do so, even if the decision is delayed till after the US and Israel destroy more of Iran’s air defenses and missile launchers to reduce the risks to them. Saudi Arabia hosts US bases and its economy is extremely vulnerable to large-scale disruptions from low-cost drone strikes alone, while Pakistan is a “Major Non-NATO Ally” with very close ties to Trump 2.0.

The aforesaid factors greatly raise the chances of them activating their mutual defense pact. In that case, Saudi Arabia might also lead some of the smaller Gulf Kingdoms that have also been attacked by Iran into battle against it as part of an even larger US-coordinated escalation, which could occur in parallel with Pakistani strikes and/or even limited ground ops on the anti-terrorist pretext of targeting Baloch separatists. Pakistan has three reasons to do this apart from the earlier-mentioned reputational one.

In brief, it wants to restore its role as the US’ top regional partner after India replaced it following the Indo-US trade deal, to which end doing the US a favor in Iran could also be the cover for destroying rival India’s port in Chabahar while improving the odds of them teaming up against the Taliban. Pakistan is actively destroying their leftover US stockpiles, which could facilitate Trump’s desired return of US troops to Bagram Airbase, thus possibly replacing Indian influence in Afghanistan with American and Pakistani.

Therefore, by activating its mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia after Iran’s attacks against its ally, Pakistan can set into motion a sequence of events for building a new regional order with the US at the geostrategic crossroads of South and Central Asia. This outcome could also see them aid their shared Turkish ally’s challenge to Russia in the latter region along its vulnerable southern periphery. These calculations are compelling enough that Pakistan’s involvement in the Third Gulf War can’t be ruled out.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 03:30

China Is Scrambling

China Is Scrambling

Authored by Zineb Riboua via Beyond the Ideological,

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the American-Israeli air campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.

Xi Jinping is scrambling. The word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, the current moment is acutely dangerous. Not because China faces a direct military threat, but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

Three Reasons Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic for Xi

First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior Party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” that America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of CCP’s dogma of inevitability, which rested on Iran’s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.

Khamenei was the man who made the thesis feel real. Beijing’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei’s survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and he was still giving Friday sermons. Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.

Second, Xi’s own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people, that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection, does not match what happened in seventy-two hours over Tehran. State media can suppress the footage and the censors can scrub Weibo, but the ones who matter most, the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living, know what they saw. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether it was ever right about anything else.

Third, the energy math turns against Beijing. China bought 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and takes over 80% of everything Iran ships. Half of China’s total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. With Ayatollah Khamenei now dead and Iran’s military leadership weakened, the Gulf’s strategic balance shifts decisively toward Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the United States are strengthening. China’s old selling point was very simple and transactional: we buy your oil and never mention human rights. That pitch loses its utility when Gulf producers already feel protected by an American security guarantee that just proved, on live television, that it works.

The Messaging Trap

Xi’s communications problem may be worse than his strategic one, because there is no good answer. If Beijing endorses the strikes, it loses the “Global South.” If Beijing condemns the strikes, it attaches Chinese prestige to a dead man’s regime, and risks provoking a Trump administration that has just demonstrated, through the act itself, that it does not bluff.

So Beijing chose the remaining option: hide behind the United Nations. Mao Ning called the killing “a grave violation of sovereignty.” The language sounds forceful, but the Belt and Road countries are watching, and what they see so far is a confused superpower reading from a script while American carriers do the actual deciding.

Every Iranian Move Is a Chinese Loss

The truly vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage lands on China instead. Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten the very oil infrastructure and port facilities that Chinese companies have spent billions investing in across the region.

The Strait of Hormuz is worse. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced within hours that no ship would pass through the channel, a threat designed as leverage against the West, except that the United States has a shale industry and a crisis-proof strategic petroleum reserve. In fact, according to Kayrros, as of March 31, 2025, China had only filled 56% percent of its above-ground strategic and commercial storage facilities.

Which means that nearly 45% of China’s own oil imports now sit/would sit hostage to a blockade that was never meant to hurt Beijing. The Houthis have resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping, every flare-up in Iraq threatens oil concessions that Chinese companies spent billions building, and the sum of Iran’s resistance amounts to a systematic disruption of Chinese commercial interests across every waterway and energy corridor Beijing depends on, executed in Khamenei’s name, with no regard for who actually pays the price.

Counting Moves

The clearest sign of Beijing’s disorientation is the absence of action: no emergency summits, no diplomatic maneuvers, no military repositioning, even as a Chinese citizen was killed in crossfire in Tehran and over 300 nationals were evacuated. The sum total of Beijing’s response to the largest American military operation in a generation remains a press conference.

Xi bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to withstand American pressure, and the bet did not pay off. Operation Epic Fury was designed to break the Islamic Republic, but it may also have exposed the uncomfortable truth that Chinese influence in the Middle East was only as durable as the assumption that no one would ever call it into question, and in Zhongnanhai, they know it.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 02:45

501 Afghans Sue Germany Over Revoked Resettlement Promises, Demand Entry Into Europe

501 Afghans Sue Germany Over Revoked Resettlement Promises, Demand Entry Into Europe

Authored by Thomas Brooke via REMIX,

A total of 501 Afghan nationals are currently suing the German government after previously granted commitments to admit them into the country were withdrawn.

The cases are directed against Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which revoked earlier pledges by the previous federal government to allow the individuals to resettle in Germany. The total number of legal cases was revealed following a parliamentary inquiry by the Left Party.

Despite the growing number of legal challenges, the Federal Ministry of the Interior has stated that a change in policy is “not intended,” Welt reported.

Most of the plaintiffs are currently in Pakistan, where authorities have called on Afghan nationals without long-term status to leave the country immediately. Many of those affected had previously received assurances of admission under resettlement programs introduced following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.

The legal action is being backed by left-wing NGOs as well as politicians from The Left. Clara Bünger, the party’s asylum spokesperson, described it as “shameful” that Afghans must sue to enforce what she said were firm pledges made by Berlin, and demanded that all original commitments be implemented without delay.

Their situation has deteriorated significantly in recent months. In July 2025, Pakistan began detaining Afghan nationals who had been earmarked for relocation to Germany but remained stuck in Islamabad after German authorities failed to complete their cases within the agreed timeframes. Around 2,500 Afghans were left in legal limbo as German background checks and visa procedures dragged on far beyond the three-month validity of Pakistani visas — often taking up to eight months.

A total of 501 Afghan nationals are currently suing the German government after previously granted commitments to admit them into the country were withdrawn.

The cases are directed against Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which revoked earlier pledges by the previous federal government to allow the individuals to resettle in Germany. The total number of legal cases was revealed following a parliamentary inquiry by the Left Party.

Despite the growing number of legal challenges, the Federal Ministry of the Interior has stated that a change in policy is “not intended,” Welt reported.

Most of the plaintiffs are currently in Pakistan, where authorities have called on Afghan nationals without long-term status to leave the country immediately. Many of those affected had previously received assurances of admission under resettlement programs introduced following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.

The legal action is being backed by left-wing NGOs as well as politicians from The Left. Clara Bünger, the party’s asylum spokesperson, described it as “shameful” that Afghans must sue to enforce what she said were firm pledges made by Berlin, and demanded that all original commitments be implemented without delay.

Their situation has deteriorated significantly in recent months. In July 2025, Pakistan began detaining Afghan nationals who had been earmarked for relocation to Germany but remained stuck in Islamabad after German authorities failed to complete their cases within the agreed timeframes. Around 2,500 Afghans were left in legal limbo as German background checks and visa procedures dragged on far beyond the three-month validity of Pakistani visas — often taking up to eight months.

Islamabad had repeatedly warned Berlin that it could no longer tolerate the presence of thousands of Afghans with expired documents awaiting onward travel. With no resolution forthcoming, Pakistani authorities began arresting those whose status had lapsed and initiated deportation proceedings.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alice Weidel praised Islamabad last year for doing what the German government wouldn’t. “Pakistan is deporting Afghans to their homeland, whom the conservative coalition government wanted to bring to Germany, thus thwarting these plans. A good thing! The German government must finally end the voluntary admission of Afghans,” she said.

The vetting procedures had already been exposed as deeply flawed. Last year, Bild reported that only one in eight Afghans who entered Germany through special protection programs had been fully vetted by security authorities beforehand. More than 31,000 Afghans, including family members, were said to have arrived without complete background checks.

Berlin has insisted that those flown in were primarily former local staff who had supported the German military during its deployment in Afghanistan. However, reports indicated that only a small proportion of passengers on recent charter flights were former employees of the Bundeswehr or their close relatives.

Security concerns were also raised by the German Police Union, which repeatedly called for Afghan relocation flights from Pakistan to be suspended, citing identity verification problems and potential risks. The union last year urged then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz to halt the program altogether.

In January of this year, it emerged that the federal government had attempted to reduce the backlog by offering financial compensation to Afghans willing to relinquish their resettlement pledges and drop litigation proceedings. According to a report cited by Die Zeit, around 700 individuals were contacted and offered several thousand euros to permanently withdraw from the admission schemes. By the end of the year, only 167 had accepted, while 357 rejected the proposal outright, leaving the majority still awaiting a decision on their future.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2026 - 02:00

How Operation Epic Fury Unfolded

How Operation Epic Fury Unfolded

Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Pentagon had been choreographing a prospective massive attack on Iran since 1980, but it wasn’t until December 2025 that U.S. President Donald Trump, after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, told military planners to give him that devastating option in case the fundamentalist Shia regime refused to end its uranium enrichment program.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Public Domain, Shutterstock

With that request, the countdown to Operation Epic Fury kicked off.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine told reporters during a March 2 press conference that with the president’s December request, the Pentagon began “setting the force and setting the theater” and shifted forces into place over the previous 30 days to “provide the president with credible options should action be required.”

After U.S. negotiators, led by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, left Geneva on Feb. 26 without concessions from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the die was cast.

The next day, the president called the Pentagon from Air Force One as it was en route to Corpus Christi, Texas, where he was scheduled to campaign for Republican primary candidates.

Caine recalled the exact moment he got the call: “H hour,” a military term for the time at which an operation begins, was 3:38 p.m. EST on Friday, Feb. 27, when the Pentagon “received the final go order from President Trump.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine holds a briefing about the U.S.–Israeli conflict with Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington on March 2, 2026. Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

“The president directed, and I quote: ‘Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck,’” Caine said.

With that one call, he said, “across the globe, [U.S. military] operation centers came alive,” and Adm. Brad Cooper, Central Command commander at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, assumed operational command in the theater.

When Trump issued the “go order” at 3:38 p.m. Feb. 27, it was just after midnight Feb. 28 in Tehran. In the nearly 10 hours between H hour and the actual launch of the attack, Caine said, “in the region, every element of the joint force made their final preparations.”

“Air defense batteries readied themselves, checking their systems to respond to Iranian attacks,” he said. “Pilots and crews rehearsed their strike packages for the final time. Air crews began loading their final weapons, and two carrier strike groups began to move towards their launching point.”

Plumes of smoke rise over the skyline following explosions in Tehran, Iran, on March 1, 2026. Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

“As dawn crept up, across the Central Command [area of operations], skies surged to life,” Caine said.

“More than 100 aircraft launched from land and sea—fighters, tankers, airborne early warning, electronic attack, bombers from the states, and unmanned platforms—forming a single synchronized wave.”

That wave arrived over Iran at 1:15 a.m. EST, 9:45 a.m. in Tehran.

That timeline was accelerated by “a trigger event conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces, enabled by the U.S. intelligence community” from the standard night attack to a mid-morning opening salvo that killed Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and up to 48 of the nation’s military leaders at a Tehran compound.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Public Domain

That was among more than 1,000 targets struck in the first 24 hours of the aerial, missile, and drone assault.

“The full strength of America’s armed forces came together in a unified purpose against a capable and determined adversary,” Caine said.

“This deployment included thousands of service members from all branches, hundreds of advanced fourth- and fifth-generation fighters, dozens of refueling tankers, the Lincoln and Ford carrier strike groups and their embarked air wings, sustained flow of munitions, fuel supplies ... all supported with command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance network. And the flow of forces continues today.”

(Top) Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112), USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121), Henry J. Kaiser-class fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO-187), Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Carl Brashear (T-AKE 7), and U.S. Coast Guard Sentinel-class fast-response cutters USCG Robert Goldman (WPC-1142) and USCGC Clarence Sutphin. Jr. (WPC-1147) sail in formation in the Arabian Sea, on Feb. 6, 2026. (Bottom Left) An F/A-18E Super Hornet, attached to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 14, prepares to land on the flight deck of aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) during Operation Epic Fury at Sea on March 1, 2026. (Bottom Right) U.S. sailors prepare to stage ordnance on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 28, 2026. Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford/U.S. Navy via Getty Images, U.S. Navy via Getty Images

The nation’s highest-ranking military officer laid out the order of battle and what forces, as of March 2, were engaged in Operation Epic Fury, a rapid assembly of forces that “demonstrated the joint forces ability to adapt and project power at the time and place of [the United States’] choosing” that included “several combat firsts” to be made public “at some point in the future.”

Before the first missile struck, Caine said, “the first movers” were Space Force, Army, and Air Force electronics and cyber warfare technicians “layering non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran’s ability to see, communicate, and respond.”

With Iranian communications disrupted and its air defenses “without the ability to see, coordinate, or respond effectively,” U.S. and Israeli air forces, with “swift, precise, and overwhelming strikes,” established local air superiority immediately, he said, setting the stage for a campaign the Pentagon maintains it can sustain, and expand if needed, for weeks.

Combat Firsts

With Iranian air defenses hacked or blinded before the opening salvo, the assault began with waves of Tomahawk cruise missiles—long-range precision weapons capable of striking targets hundreds of miles inland—launched by the aircraft carriers USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea and USS Gerald R. Ford in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and their battlegroup destroyers.

The USS Gerald R. Ford, which had been deployed to the region in June 2025 during the 12-Day War that badly damaged, but did not destroy, Iran’s uranium enrichment program and was then dispatched to the southern Caribbean to lead Operation Southern Spear off Venezuela, was ordered back to the Sixth Fleet in January and is now in its eighth month of sustained operations.

It is to be relieved eventually by the USS George H.W. Bush, a Nimitz-class carrier undergoing post-overhaul sea trials.

With missiles outbound, hundreds of Air Force F-15s, F-16s, and stealth F-22 Raptors merged with carrier-launched F/A-18 Hornets, stealth F-35s, and EA-18G electronic warfare jets in the massive aerial attack against Iranian air defenses and missile-launch sites.

The fighters were later joined by Air Force stealth B-2 Spirit bombers that flew 17 hours from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, which had struck suspected nuclear complexes with 30,000-pound “penetrator” munitions in June 2025.

(Top Left) A U.S. F-15 fighter plane prepares for landing in Mildenhall, England, on Jan. 7, 2026. (Top Right) B-2 Spirit Bombers fly over the White House on July 4, 2025. (Bottom Left) A U.S. F-35 fighter plane takes off in Mildenhall, England, on Jan. 7, 2026. (Bottom Right) A U.S. Air Force F22-Raptor takes off in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, on Jan. 4, 2026. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images, Eric Lee/Getty Images, Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP via Getty Images

In the opening phases of the Feb. 28 assault, they targeted ballistic missile sites with 2,000-pound precision-guided bombs, confirming that the focus was on degrading Iran’s air defenses and communications.

Ground-based Army precision strike missiles from the M142 high-mobility artillery rocket system mounted on “shoot and scoot” mobile launchers added to the fray, lobbing short-range ballistics into Iran from bases in the Gulf states, the first time the short-range ballistic missile system was used in combat.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that Operation Epic Fury is also the debut of a new low-cost ‌uncrewed combat attack system (LUCAS) drone—a one-way “suicide” drone reverse-engineered to mimic Iran’s Shahed 136 drone, which it has exported en masse to Russia for use in Ukraine.

Among the forces participating in the attack are Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drones carrying Hellfire missiles and guided bombs, twin-engine A-10 attack aircraft directed by E-3 Sentry and E-2 Hawkeye airborne surveillance and EA-11A BACN “Wi-Fi in the sky” reconnaissance jets, and KC-135 and KC-46 aerial refueling tankers.

Under attack from Iranian and Shia militias, there are about 2,400 U.S. soldiers in Syria and Iraq, including in Erbil, Iraq.

About 2,000 are from the Iowa National Guard, who are to be relieved by a unit from the 10th Mountain Division this spring.

At least 250 guardsmen left Iraq in mid-February, and on Feb. 27—before the attack was launched—the Iowa National Guard announced that 650 more were headed home.

It is uncertain what their status is now.

The U.S. base in Erbil is among installations across the region under sporadic Iranian and militia attacks.

Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have not ruled out dispatching “boots on the ground,” although there is no indication that Army and Marine infantry forces have been ordered to deploy.

Read the rest here...

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/04/2026 - 23:20

Why The GOP Could Defy Precedent And Win The Midterms

Why The GOP Could Defy Precedent And Win The Midterms

Historically, the party in power almost always loses seats in midterm elections. There are only two exceptions to this rule. In 1934, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then in 2002, under George W. Bush. Are there signs that 2026 could be another precedent-shattering year? A new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll survey conducted late last month suggests it could be. 

The poll has the generic congressional ballot tied at 50-50. Not only are these numbers on their face bad for the Democratic Party, but they also represent a significant shift from the Harvard CAPS/Harris January poll, when Republicans trailed Democrats by eight points.

The shift in the horse race is striking on its own. Perhaps the real question is why the GOP appears to have a fighting chance this year of defying precedent.

Pollsters handed respondents sample messages from both parties and asked whether they found them believable. 54% called the Republican pitch credible: "Republicans say that they are returning responsibility to government by arresting criminals, closing the borders, keeping taxes low, and lowering energy costs. We can't go back to the Democrats, who were allowing our cities and way of life to deteriorate and prices on energy and food to soar while fraud took billions and billions of dollars of their giveaway programs." 

Only 48% said the same of the Democratic counter, which promised free housing, free transportation, healthcare for all, free student loan relief, and a shakedown of billionaires to pay for it. Among likely midterm voters, the GOP message drives a 46-37 advantage in vote intent. The Democratic freebie platform produces a net one-point edge for Democrats among the same group — a rounding error.

Does that mean things can’t change? Not all at. In fact, 61% of respondents said they'd be receptive to the message that "we need to stop Donald Trump. He is a runaway dictator, and we need a check on his power by returning the Congress to the Democrats. His tariffs are increasing prices, and he is off on foreign adventures." That certainly implies that Democrat messaging can work; however, after both parties' full messaging was laid out to poll respondents, Republicans moved to a 51-49 lead on the ballot, a two-point GOP shift.

Trump's approval also gives the GOP signs of hope. His net approval improved from -6 points in January to -3 in February. Among likely midterm voters, he's net positive at 50-47. The trajectory matters as much as the snapshot, and it’s up.

Beneath the horse race, the structural terrain looks even less hospitable for Democrats. 

On economic management, voters trust the Trump administration over congressional Democrats 53-47. On whether today's economy reflects Biden-era or Trump-era policy, 59% say Trump, yet 52% say things are better now than under Biden. Republicans are credited and rewarded for that, a double-win for the GOP. While both parties’ approval ratings are underwater, the GOP edges out the Democratic Party by three points. 

The policy map reinforces the GOP’s positioning for the midterms. Lowering prescription drug prices commands a staggering 80% support. Deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes earns 75%. A full-scale crackdown on federal fraud comes in at 71%. Capping credit-card interest rates at 10% pulls 69%, and strengthening border security to close the border draws 67%. The same pattern showed up with President Trump’s State of the Union proposals. Banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks garnered 72% support, while federal retirement matching accounts attracted 70%.

On the issue of election integrity, it’s all great numbers for the GOP. Support for national voter ID gets 81% support. Removing non-citizens from voter rolls comes in at 80%. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote earns 75%. The SAVE America Act, which packages those provisions together, wins 71% overall support, including backing from half of Democrats and 69% of independents. When voters are asked to choose what matters more, 54% say preventing fraud outweighs maximizing access. Democrats have bet heavily that voter-integrity legislation is a political loser. This poll says otherwise.

The ideological fundamentals aren't moving in the left's direction either. Capitalism beats socialism 59-41 as voters' preferred economic system, with 76% saying America should run mostly as a free-enterprise country. 91% say people should own their own homes and private property. 84% want grocery stores to be private, not state-run. This is not good news for the party of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani.

None of this means November is a lock for the GOP. Eight months is a lifetime in American politics. But the picture that emerges from this data is of a Republican Party whose core arguments are resonating with a majority of the public, giving them a real chance to defy precedent.

Keep in mind that the poll was taken before Iran... so the next one should be interesting. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/04/2026 - 22:50

Under Beijing's Wing: Iran's Arsenal

Under Beijing's Wing: Iran's Arsenal

Authored by Zineb Riboua via Beyond the Ideological,

In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was sold to the American public and to the world as the definitive answer to Iran’s nuclear threat. The agreement placed extensive restrictions on uranium enrichment, centrifuge capacity, and stockpile levels, but said almost nothing about the one thing that would actually deliver a nuclear warhead to its target: ballistic missiles. Nothing about cruise missiles either. No limits on the development, testing, production, or deployment of the very weapons systems that transform a nuclear device from a dangerous secret in a bunker into a weapon that can destroy a city. A bomb is only as threatening as your ability to deliver it, and the JCPOA left Iran’s ability to deliver it completely unconstrained.

For Iran, this distinction matters more than it does for almost any other country on earth.

Decades of international sanctions have left Tehran with one of the weakest air forces in the region, an aging fleet incapable of penetrating the air defenses of Israel or any major Gulf state. Iran cannot deliver a nuclear weapon by aircraft. It cannot do so by sea with any reliability. The ballistic missile is the only component that gives the rest of the nuclear program strategic value.

What makes this failure even more consequential is who stepped in to exploit it.

Over the past two years, China has emerged as the principal external supplier of Iran’s ballistic missile program, providing everything from chemical precursors for solid rocket fuel to satellite guidance through its BeiDou-3 navigation network, which replaced American GPS across Iran’s entire military architecture. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned several Chinese entities for supplying the IRGC with chemicals used in missile fuel production.

Intelligence revealed Iranian cargo ships unloading shipments of sodium perchlorate at Bandar Abbas, a substance that bypasses existing monitoring mechanisms, in quantities sufficient to produce propellant for approximately 800 new missiles in a single delivery.

Beijing had also been negotiating the sale of CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles to Tehran, a system designed to sink aircraft carriers. In December 2025, American special forces raided a merchant vessel in the Indian Ocean carrying Chinese military cargo bound for the Revolutionary Guards.

By the time Operation Epic Fury launched, Iran possessed the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, an estimated 2,000 missiles of varying ranges dispersed across hardened underground facilities, rebuilt and resupplied in large part by Chinese industrial networks.

The Deferral

But let’s take a step back and look at what happened:

The Obama administration’s decision to exclude missiles from the 2015 JCPOA agreement represented a calculated concession, and more fundamentally, an act of deliberate deferral. In fact, both China and Russia categorically refused to include missile restrictions in the multilateral negotiations, and Tehran declared its indigenous missile development a non-negotiable sovereign right.

Naturally, the Obama team, determined to secure a landmark diplomatic achievement before leaving office, separated the nuclear file from the missile file entirely, treating them as two distinct problems when they formed two halves of the same threat.

Obama especially framed the deal in aspirational terms, saying it provided “an opportunity to move in a new direction,” but the direction left the missile program entirely unaddressed. In the language of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, the provisions on missiles merely “called upon” Iran not to conduct certain activities, far weaker than the binding prohibition in the prior Resolution 1929, which had explicitly prohibited Iran from pursuing ballistic missile technology capable of delivering nuclear warheads.

The administration even watered down the enforcement language of that earlier resolution to get the deal through, reasoning that missiles could be addressed later. That word, “later,” defined the entire approach. Iran tested ballistic missiles within weeks of the JCPOA entering into force, and no mechanism existed to stop it.

Free from constraint, Iran used the decade that followed to transform its missile program from a crude deterrent into a sophisticated, mass-produced strategic arsenal. It perfected guidance systems, extended ranges to cover all of the Middle East and parts of Europe, transitioned from liquid to solid-fuel propulsion, and constructed hardened underground launch facilities designed to withstand aerial bombardment. The interesting part? None of this violated a single provision of the deal.

And the missiles served a purpose beyond delivery: Iran aimed to amass such an overwhelming conventional arsenal that military action against its nuclear program would become prohibitively costly. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put today the math in stark terms: “They can build 100 ballistic missiles a month. We build 6 or 7 interceptors a month.” Each interceptor costs between $1 million and $15 million, while each Iranian missile costs between $200,000 and $500,000.

But the missiles did not stop at Israel’s borders. In the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, Iranian retaliatory strikes slammed into civilian areas across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Manama; debris from intercepted projectiles rained near Kuwait International Airport. In the UAE alone, three people were killed and at least 58 wounded. Iran, in this sense, was (and still is) holding Arab capitals hostage, using its missile arsenal as a coercive instrument to punish the Gulf states for daring to deepen their alignment with Washington and/or Jerusalem.

The cruelest irony is that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi saw this coming. Neither was consulted as a stakeholder during the JCPOA negotiations, and both warned — publicly and repeatedly — that any deal leaving Iran’s missile program untouched would one day endanger their populations. They were dismissed as alarmist. Iranian warheads landing on Gulf Arab soil have now settled the argument.

The Reversal

Rubio's articulation of the objectives behind Epic Fury collapsed a distinction that three decades of American diplomacy had fought to preserve. "The objectives of this operation are to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can't rebuild, and make sure that they can't hide behind that to have a nuclear program," he said. One sentence fused what the JCPOA had deliberately kept apart, the nuclear file and the missile file, and redefined what an acceptable Iran looks like.

The urgency is real. Israeli defense planners had tracked how Chinese components, machine tools, and technical guidance were accelerating Iranian production lines, and their projections pointed toward catastrophe: 5,000 missiles by 2027, potentially 10,000 by the end of the decade. Every warhead carried a Chinese fingerprint, from solid-fuel propellant chemistry to the precision guidance systems that turned inaccurate rockets into weapons capable of striking downtown Abu Dhabi. Beijing was not merely trading with Tehran.

The Chinese government was industrializing Iran’s capacity to hold the Middle East at gunpoint. Whatever Beijing’s full calculus, the military consequences of that investment are legible on at least three levels.

  • First, every interceptor the United States fires over the Middle East represents one fewer available for the Western Pacific. THAAD batteries, Patriot systems, and SM-3 carrying naval vessels all draw from the same overstretched production lines. By accelerating Iran’s missile output, China imposed a war of attrition on American munitions without deploying a single soldier.

  • Second, Every Iranian salvo also forces the United States to reveal electronic warfare capabilities, radar signatures, and interceptor performance data in real combat conditions, giving Chinese military intelligence a live laboratory to study American defense systems without ever confronting them directly.

  • Third, if the United States proved unable to shield its Arab partners from sustained bombardment, every ally watching from Tokyo to Manila to Taipei would draw the same conclusion: Washington’s promises have material limits.

The drain on American readiness had already begun.

During the twelve-day war in 2025, the United States burned through roughly 150 THAAD interceptors, munitions that take years to produce and that feed the same queue supporting Pacific deterrence.

Only a few dozen replacements followed. Iran was rebuilding faster than America could reload. Left unchecked, the math led to a devastating fork: accept Iranian nuclear breakout behind a missile shield too thick to penetrate, or fight a war in the Middle East with stockpiles earmarked for the Taiwan Strait. Beijing had engineered precisely this dilemma. Operation Epic Fury represented the decision to prevent that choice from ever arriving. By destroying the missiles, the United States turned years of Chinese strategic investment and billions in transferred technology to ash.

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Tyler Durden Wed, 03/04/2026 - 22:20

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