Trump Took Iran at Its Word — History Will Reward Him

 From Tierney's Real News:

The leaking and finger-pointing on Iran by MAGA disloyalists have begun. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned President Donald Trump that if he attacked, “Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market.” Her admonition “echoed warnings Trump was receiving from all corners,” the Journal wrote, including from top military leaders who expressed “concerns about the weapons stockpile and readiness problems for an overstretched force” and from Vice President JD Vance, who “promoted a more cautious approach” focused on negotiations that would be “less costly than a war with unwieldy consequences.”

The message of the leakers is clear: Had Trump only listened to us, we would not be in this mess.

In fact, these self-serving leaks actually show the opposite — by demonstrating what a courageous decision Trump made. Virtually alone, surrounded by naysayers, Trump acted to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Indeed, Trump not only ignored the words of the naysayers; he did something few presidents before him have ever done: He listened to the words of the enemy.

The most tragic mistake that world leaders made over the past century was the failure to take the words of the monsters of history seriously. These tyrants repeatedly stated precisely what they intended to do, but their ideas were assumed to be too foolish, or too fantastic, to be serious.

In the early 1900s, Vladimir Lenin published a pamphlet called “What Is To Be Done?,” in which he laid out his plans to overthrow the Russian czar and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The world didn’t take his words seriously, and the totalitarian empire he founded spawned communist revolution across the globe that killed an estimated 100 million people and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf,” in which he laid out his plan to establish a thousand-year Reich in Germany and eradicate the Jews. The world didn’t take his words seriously, and his Nazi regime built gas chambers, set the world aflame and killed 17 million people.

In the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on the West, calling on all Muslims to wage “jihad against the enemies of God, your enemies the Israelis and Americans.” The world didn’t take his words seriously, and on Sept. 11, 2001, his followers flew airplanes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin published a 7,000 word manifesto explaining that Ukraine had been stolen from Russia, its “historical motherland,” and promising to reunite them. The world didn’t take his words seriously, and a few months later he launched the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II — a war that has resulted in more than 2 million dead and wounded among military personnel and civilians so far. (Read more.)

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How Iran-Backed Pirates in Yemen Are Raising Your Gas Price

 From Tierney's Real News:

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis just seized the strategic port of Mocha (Mokha), pushed into the coastal town of Dhubab, and took Perim Island (also known as Mayyun) in the heart of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Multiple reports confirm the group now effectively controls Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline and the critical island that splits the narrow strait’s shipping lanes.

The stretch between Perim and Ras Siyyan in Djibouti is the most narrow point of strait, measuring just 20 km. This will give the Houthis excellent opportunities to block this maritime trade route leading up to the Suez Canal. If the Houthis decide to expand their naval blockade from just Saudi ships to all international cargo vessels, then all maritime trade will have to be rerouted around Africa again.

Bab el-Mandeb is the southern gateway connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden—the “other” strait that has become Saudi Arabia’s primary remaining outlet for crude. It normally carries about 10–12% of global seaborne trade and, pre-crisis, 8–9+ million barrels per day of oil and products. India, China, Japan, South Korea and others depend on it for Middle Eastern and Russian crude.

The Houthi forces have publicly stated that their blockade explicitly targets Saudi-linked shipping. Despite their public assurances that wider international commercial traffic is safe, energy markets react to the geographic proximity of heavy weapons to a channel that is only 18 miles wide. (Read more.)

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Our Sea Ports

 From ColonelRETJohn:

Not since World War II did we seriously show concern over the security of our ports from enemy threats.

Now with drones being used regularly to attack ships in the Black Sea, Mediterranean ports of Egypt, and the U.S. conducting its first drone attack against the Iranian Bandar Abbas Naval Base, the realization is that our own ports may be vulnerable to attack.

What’s to keep a drone from coming into Puget Sound in Washington State, New York Harbor, or the Chesapeake in Virginia and striking one of our many naval installations or container terminals?

Right now, not much.

The U.S. Coast Guard is in overdrive to figure out ways to ensure our ports are protected.

“Faced with a growing threat from uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), the USCG is seeking technology not just to detect these weapons, but to defeat them. Ports and other maritime facilities are vulnerable to this kind of attack vector, and our adversaries surely know it. The effort is being led by the Coast Guard Futures Development and Integration (FD&I) Directorate, which oversees research, modeling and simulation, technology forecasting, and field experimentation. It is part of the service’s role to protect U.S. maritime assets and comes as adversary militaries and non-state actors alike, are developing a wide array of UUVs for surveillance, strike and sabotage.”

Threat actors like Iran and China watch everything we do and try to play it back at us, so it is important that the Coast Guard comes up with solutions fast to protect our ports. (Read more.)

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How Trump Duped Iran

 From Tierney's Real News:

By signing a deliberately vague Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Islamabad on June 17, 2026, I believe that the Trump administration set up Iran - while President Trump, Oman and Iraq worked together with Israel and the rest of the Gulf to neuter the IRGC.

While Iran believed the agreement would hand them de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz and their proxies - allowing them to establish tolls, inspections, and a new revenue stream run by the IRGC - the Trump administration had other plans.

Google Gemini* reluctantly admitted I was right about this and the MoU. Trump fooled Iran into signing it as is and then Trump worked with Oman to allow ships to pass on a different route through the Strait. Iran thought Oman would side with them - wrong!!! (Read more.)

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Trump Changed the Math

 From Direct Line News:

We have an Iranian Peace framework deal that doesn’t sell out our allies, to judge every Iran agreement against the same standard: did it stop the bomb? That is the wrong question. The right question is simpler and far more revealing. Did it change Iran? By that measure, the 2015 Obama nuclear agreement was a polished failure wrapped in diplomatic ribbon. And by that same measure, the Trump framework now taking shape is something categorically different.

Critics of the emerging Trump deal have been quick to note surface similarities to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Both involve inspections. Both involve enrichment caps. Both involve sanctions relief. But this comparison confuses the instrument with the goal. The JCPOA was a transaction. The Trump approach is a transformation. Or at least it must become one, because anything less will leave America managing a threat it should have ended years ago.

Let us be honest about what the JCPOA was and was not. It was a nuclear agreement. Nothing more. Iran’s enrichment capacity was capped, its stockpiles were reduced, and international inspectors were invited to monitor compliance. Supporters argued, with some justification, that it extended Iran’s theoretical nuclear breakout time from months to roughly a year. That is not nothing.

But here is what the deal did not touch. Iran kept thousands of centrifuges spinning. It retained its enrichment infrastructure intact. The agreement included sunset clauses that would eventually expire, at which point Iran would be legally entitled to expand its nuclear activities far beyond pre-deal levels. Most critically, the JCPOA said precisely nothing about Iran’s ballistic missile program, and not a word about Hezbollah, Hamas, or the network of regional proxy forces that Iran used to destabilize Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. (Read more)

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The Iran Deal

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL. Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had. Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands.

At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States. We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future.

Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly. If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!"

If you didn't know, the IRGC booby-trapped the openings to the nuclear dust - just like they booby-trapped the Hormuz Strait with mines - so it's not an easy one day mission to get the so-called “nuclear dust” as the fake news would have you believe. Even CNN admits that now:

CNN: Iran has 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐩𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 at its nuclear facility in Isfahan — the site where its cache of near-weapons-grade uranium is believed to be buried underground. The stockpile: 𝟒𝟒𝟎.𝟗 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝟔𝟎%-𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐮𝐦, the IAEA’s own figure as of June 11. Sixty percent enrichment is one technical step from weapons-grade. At that quantity, Iran holds 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝟏𝟎 𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬. That entire cache is now locked inside collapsed tunnels beneath a mined facility.

(Read more.)

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Could Iran Acquire A Nuclear Weapon – Right Now?

 From AND Magazine:

We have imposed a naval blockade of Iran. In the wake of the imposition of that blockade, Pakistan announced the opening of six land routes into Iran from its territory. Vessels now dock in Pakistan, and containers are offloaded there for overland transit into Iran. It’s a bit more tedious and labor-intensive than simply sailing into a port on the Persian Gulf, and overland transport does not substitute for super tankers when it comes to oil.

For pretty much anything else you want to send to Iran, it works just fine. We here at AND have documented time and again how the Chinese are continuing to provide the Iranians with everything they need to build drones and missiles. Are we sure they would not use the same mechanism to help the Iranians across the finish line to nuclear weapons capability?

In April 2026, Gwadar Port in Pakistan processed around 11,000 standard shipping containers. For context, the same port handled roughly 8,300 containers throughout all of 2025. A large proportion of these containers came from China. Gwadar sits roughly 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz. It has a deepwater port that allows large cargo vessels to dock. Anything could come from China via Gwadar and then be trucked into Iran. We have done nothing to interdict any of the major overland routes.

Even if we think Beijing is too sober-minded to arm Iran with nuclear weapons, are we sure North Korea would not? What about Pakistan, or for that matter, some cabal of radical Islamic Pakistan generals in Islamabad?

North Korea has a well-documented history of assisting Iran, primarily in ballistic missile technology and related military cooperation, dating back to the 1980s. This relationship is supported by U.S. intelligence assessments, UN reports, congressional research, and open-source analyses.

North Korea operates sophisticated, long-standing transnational networks for smuggling weapons, dual-use technology, and related materiel to evade UN sanctions and generate revenue. These networks rely on front companies, diplomats, intelligence operatives, ship-to-ship transfers, and third-country facilitators. (Read more.)

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How China Helps Iran Kill Americans

 From AND Magazine:

On March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones struck a U.S. command center at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait. Six U.S. Army reservists from Iowa were killed. Dozens more were injured, suffering traumatic brain injuries and shrapnel wounds.

No unclassified forensic examination of the remnants of the drones in this attack has been completed to our knowledge. More generally, however, the construction of Iranian Shahed drones has been documented extensively, and it has been well established that while these weapons are ultimately fully assembled in Iran, many if not most of their key components come from China.

The engine used in the Shahed drone is a copy of one originally designed in Germany. All of the engines are now made in China. Several different Chinese companies are involved, including Xiamen Victory Technology, Xiamen Limbach Aircraft Engine Co., Harbin Bin-Au, and Jinhua Hairun.

Xiamen Victory Technology is so proud of its contribution to the construction of Shahed drones that it even includes imagery of the drone on its website for marketing purposes. While the United States was bombing Iran, Xiamen was continuing to send marketing emails to Iran and focusing on expanding sales. (Read more.)

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Update on Iran

 From Tierney's Real News:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Iran has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years (DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!), and then finally hit “pay dirt” when Barack Hussein Obama became President.

Obama was not only good to Iran, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and 1.7 Billion Dollars in green cash, flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter.

Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out — It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it.

They had never seen money like this, and never will again. It was taken off the plane in suitcases and satchels, and the Iranians couldn’t believe their luck. They finally found the greatest SUCKER of them all, in the form of a weak and stupid American President.

He was a disaster as our “Leader,” but not as bad as Sleepy Joe Biden! For 47 years the Iranians have been “tapping” us along, keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests, and recently wiping out 42,000 innocent, unarmed protestors, and laughing at our now GREAT AGAIN Country. They will be laughing no longer!” (Read more.)

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All's Not So Quiet on Any Front

 From James Howard Kunstler:

Project Freedom. Cute move! Notice that it’s not Operation Freedom. That would frame it as a military move. The President is tactically framing this as a humanitarian action. Mr. Trump has advised Congress as of May 1 that hostilities with Iran (Operation Epic Fury) are terminated, at the 60-day limit of the War Powers Resolution. Commercial ships from countries not involved in the Iran / US dispute will now get escorted safely through the Strait of Hormuz by US naval vessels. (Later amended by CENTCOM, around 9a.m. Monday as being protected by US Navy vessels “in the vicinity.”)

Any attack on these ships by Iran would prompt a forceful response and trigger a re-wind of the clock on the War Powers Resolution (WPR), meaning, another sixty days to conduct military operations, such as the destruction of key bridges and electric power plants promised earlier. Iran’s leadership — whoever that is — thought it could juke Mr. Trump on the 60-day deadline by stalling negotiations while it reorganized its remaining missile launchers. Tactical fail. Incidentally, the Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the WPR’s constitutionality or enforced the 60-day limit.

Also, by the way, the “neutral and innocent bystanders” designation means that oil tankers from Kuwait, the Emirate states, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia will be given safe escorts out of the Persian Gulf. That will have two effects: 1) avert the “shutting-in” of their productive oil wells (and the prospective geological damage to the oil fields); and 2) alleviate the price pressure on oil generally with new supply reentering the global oil market. (Read more.)

 

From John Zmirak at Chronicles:

Conflict between popes and secular leaders has been a running theme of Western history since Constantine’s conversion. It’s all too tempting for my fellow Catholics today, surveying such incidents, to thoughtlessly side with the papacy in any conflict. But countless faithful believers over the centuries did not.

The Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperors against the grander claims of medieval popes, were equally Catholics in good standing; they simply regarded the pretensions of given popes as excessive, misguided, or wrong. The great theological poet Dante was technically a Guelph (the pro-papal party), but he wrote in De Monarchia that a strong, faithful emperor was equally crucial to the health of Christendom. Going back to the 10^th century, it took the Emperor Otto the Great invading Rome and deposing a corrupt pope to free the papacy from what historians call the “Pornocracy,” or “rule by harlots,” the dominion of local nobles who picked the popes, sometimes delegating that power to influential courtesans.

Sometimes God uses Caesar to rebuke or correct sinful heirs to St. Peter. I’d like to see the Trump administration act in that direction, relying on the faithful Catholics in its midst, such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, to explain to the public that it’s acting on behalf of Catholic laymen against corrupt and politicized clerics. While too many online Catholics are busy complaining about Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved network it’s easy to forget that the U.S. bishops in the past 40 years have enabled far more sex crimes than Epstein could have imagined. (Read more.)

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The Iranians Ask Us To Surrender

 From AND Magazine:

The Iranians have trotted out a new “peace” plan, which the United States says it is currently reviewing. The exact text of the proposal has not yet been seen publicly, but multiple press outlets, including those tied to the Iranian government, have made clear that the plan includes all of the following points:

• An end to all hostilities within 30 days. This includes Lebanon.

• The complete withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from the region. Understand what this means. This is a demand that the United States remove its military forces from the Middle East. This is a demand that we pull out of Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, and anywhere else we have bases in that part of the world.

• A guarantee of non-aggression from both Israel and the United States. We are expected not only to end hostilities and withdraw from the region but to promise that we will never again attack Iran. Ever.

• An end to the naval blockade and all restrictions on Iranian ports and shipping.

• The lifting of all U.S. and international sanctions. Iran will be free to buy whatever it wants, including components for advanced weapons, and to sell whatever it wants to allies and surrogates around the globe.

• The release of all frozen Iranian assets. This means billions of dollars currently locked up in accounts all over the world will be handed over to the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism.

• Reparations. As we leave the Middle East with our tail between our legs, we will be expected to pay Iran for all the damage we have caused, not just in the bombing but by virtue of the sanctions we have imposed for many years.

• The creation of a new mechanism for control of the Straits of Hormuz. One must assume, from the overall tone of the demands, that this will boil down to a recognition that Iran controls this crucial waterway and will charge a fee to anyone who wants to pass through it.

(Read more.)

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The Iranians Are Recruiting Worldwide – But For What?

From AND Magazine:

The Iranians have launched a worldwide campaign to sign up Iranian citizens living abroad to be ready to sacrifice their lives and embrace martyrdom for the homeland. Iranian embassies have been directing people to log in to the Mikhak system using their national ID and click the Jan Fada option to sign up.

Analysts assess that the move is mostly a propaganda campaign designed to show that the regime in Tehran has broad support. The so-called Jan Fada campaign launched in March/April 2026.

Iranian state media and officials claim tens of millions have signed up (figures like 10–30+ million are reported but unverified independently). This includes officials, athletes, and public figures. Iranian Embassies are promoting the campaign online using language like “give our bodies to be slain” or “sacrifice life for Iran” to show solidarity and national will. There have been no reports of actual training, deployment, or transport of overseas registrants. (Read more.)

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Iran’s Pirates

 From Tierney's Real News:

If you’ve never cracked open a history book, the mess coming out of Iran right now probably looks like total chaos with no pattern to it. You’ve got top officials posting contradictory things on social media. You’ve got wild accusations flying back and forth about spies and traitors inside their own government. And you’ve got this desperate scramble to keep Iran’s oil moving toward Communist China while Iran’s entire economy falls apart at the seams. None of this is random. These are the classic signs of a regime that’s cracking under real pressure—the same exact pattern we saw with the Barbary Pirates more than 200 years ago.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the IRGC—and the hardline Shia Twelver Muslim clerics who run things there are behaving like modern-day pirates. They’ve hijacked their own country, holding their own people hostage, just like those North African corsairs once held American sailors captive on the high seas. A corsair was basically a state-backed pirate—not just some random criminal on the high seas, but a sailor who had official permission from his government to attack enemy ships and coastal towns.

President Trump sees it clearly, and he’s responding the same way Thomas Jefferson did back then: with a naval blockade and absolutely no willingness to pay tribute or give in to blackmail. The end is near for this terrorist regime. Let me explain exactly what’s happening, step by step, so you can see how history is repeating itself and Trump is holding the line just like Jefferson did. (Read more.)

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Why America is at War with Iran

 From Culturcidal:

America’s entanglement with Iran really started when they elected a prime minister who soon thereafter nationalized their oil industry, which the British then controlled. We tried to mediate the issue between the countries, but we were closer allies with Britain and soon began to fear that Iran was going to drift toward the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviets treated the whole planet like pieces on a chessboard, this drove a lot of our foreign policy decisions. In this case, it prompted us to partner with Britain and help the Shah of Iran, who was already part of the government, to take FULL CONTROL of the country.

The Shah was friendly to us. He also wanted to Westernize Iran and make it into a regional power. He had some success on this front. Economic conditions improved rapidly, he gave women the right to vote (although voting for everyone was limited), their military became stronger, and things were going in the right direction in Iran in many respects.

That being said, the Shah was a dictator and would still throw you in prison if you stood against him. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Although many groups across Iran helped to get rid of the Shah, ultimately, the religious crazies led by the Ayatollah Khomeini ended up in charge. As it turned out, they were more oppressive than the Shah, more murderous, and the rapid improvement of Iran that happened under the Shah dramatically slowed down and even regressed in many ways. (Read more.)

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The Deep State Diplomats Who Failed

 From Amuse on X:

On April 15, 2026, TIME published a piece by Philip Wang carrying the headline “It’s Not Working: Diplomats Fear Trump’s Iran Envoys Are Making Things Worse.” The article rests almost entirely on three named former officials, Aaron David Miller, David Satterfield, and Robert Einhorn, who are presented as sober experts watching amateurs fumble a delicate file. The framing is familiar. The evidentiary basis is weaker than the framing suggests. It is worth walking through what these three men actually did in government, what they did not do, and what the record shows about the men they are criticizing. Once that is done, a further question comes into view. It concerns whether the category “experienced diplomat” is doing the analytical work Wang assumes it is doing, and whether, in fact, the opposite proposition may be closer to the truth.

Begin with Miller. He spent 24 years at the State Department, from 1978 to 2003, advising six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His principal file was the Syria-Israel track. That track produced no agreement during his tenure. The Camp David summit in July 2000, at which he was present, collapsed. Miller has been candid about this record. His own CNN biography describes him as having spent “a couple decades in and around failing Arab-Israeli negotiations,” and his 2008 book is titled “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” In a History News Network essay, he wrote that he knows “a thing or two about failure.” This is not a partisan characterization. It is his self-description. A reader is entitled to ask why a man who acknowledges having worked on failed negotiations for thirty years is positioned by TIME as the benchmark against which current envoys should be measured.

Consider next Satterfield. He is associated in the public mind with the Israel-Lebanon maritime border agreement, and he did work on an early framework for those talks between 2017 and 2019. But the agreement itself was signed on October 27, 2022, and it was brokered by Amos Hochstein, not by Satterfield. AIPAC credited Hochstein by name. Al Jazeera credited Hochstein by name. Satterfield was one of at least four American envoys who handled the file over a period of years, and he was not the one in the room when it closed. His more recent work is also worth noting. From October 2023 to May 2024, he served as President Biden’s Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues. In December 2024, he told CBS News that Trump was “exaggerating” Turkey’s influence over Syrian rebel forces. Wang does not disclose the Biden role or the CBS appearance to his readers.(Read more.)

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The Panicans were Wrong

 From Tierney's Real News:

Remember, oil was $120 a barrel under Biden and the DOW never got over 42,000. Now oil is down 35% from record highs under Obama and the DOW is up 20%!

So I’m saying this once and for all: the panicans and RINO doomers were wrong—again.

Six weeks ago, “the experts” swore that Trump’s showdown with Iran would crash the stock market, send oil over $200, and drag us into a permanent war. Instead, look at the results: oil is down around $80 per barrel, the Dow is back at record highs, the Strait of Hormuz is open and safe, and Iran has agreed not to build a nuclear weapon or keep enriched uranium. Not only that, but a ceasefire is holding in Lebanon, and Israel and Lebanon are headed to the White House for talks after 34 years of silence.

Trump didn’t run from the fight; he stared down the Iranian regime, the Axis of Resistance, and the doom‑porn media—and he won. The world is less dangerous, the markets are stronger, and the “forever‑war” narrative that his critics hyped has already collapsed. (Read more.)

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Trump’s Strategic Masterclass

 From Tierney's Real News:

Many people still think President Trump’s recent foreign policy moves are scattershot — a tariff here, a blockade there. But if you zoom out, and look past the bluster, the bigger picture becomes clear: there’s a method to it all, a global strategy to stop the BRICS nations, especially Communist China and Russia and Iran, from tightening their grip on the world’s oil, trade routes and resources.

Trump’s not reacting. He’s positioning. While the fake news still chases quick photo-ops and weak “summits,” Trump’s locking down key economic and military chokepoints that decide who really holds power in the modern world.

President Trump’s recent moves against Iran, Venezuela, and even Greenland aren’t random. They’re smart, calculated steps in a bigger plan to stop the Islamo-Communist BRICS nations - led by Communist China and Russia and backed by the UN - from controlling America and the world. (Read more.)

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Waiting Game

 From Tierney's Real News:

President Trump’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz has shattered the Iranian regime’s long-held illusion that it could simply outwait American resolve. By choking off crude exports from Kharg Island, Trump’s pressure campaign has forced Iran into a storage crisis with just 13-16 days before tanks overflow.

The Iranian regime now finds itself in a corner. With nowhere to ship its oil, Iran faces a looming crisis: Kharg Island doesn’t have enough tanks to hold the crude being pumped from its fields. If the exports remain stalled, the regime will soon have no choice but to cut off oil extraction on the mainland entirely.

Trump’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, aimed squarely at Iran’s crude exports from Kharg Island, doesn’t just raise the stakes- it changes the game entirely. This is no longer about lost revenue or discounted barrels. It’s about physics. Oil has nowhere to go. And when oil can’t move, everything stops.

Iran’s export infrastructure depends heavily on Kharg Island. Oil from Iran’s fields is pumped to the island through undersea pipelines and then stored in tanks and then loaded on oil tankers - mostly headed to China. If oil tankers stop loading at the Island, crude begins to pile up. Once storage tanks on the Island fill - and by some estimates, that could happen in as little as two weeks - Iran must shut down oil extraction AND production all together! (Read more.)

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Iran Won the Media War, Then Lost the Only War That Matters

 From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

For a few glorious weeks in the spring of 2026, the foreign policy establishment believed it had witnessed the impossible. Iran, a nation whose air defenses had been systematically dismantled, whose navy had been reduced to wreckage on the floor of the Persian Gulf, whose supreme leader had been killed by an American strike, had somehow emerged from 38 days of devastating combat as the victor. That, at least, was the story the drive-by media told. European leaders repeated it with undisguised satisfaction. Democrats echoed it with barely concealed glee. Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical energy chokepoint, and was now charging tolls on the tankers that dared to pass. The regime that had just absorbed more than 13,000 precision strikes was now, according to this narrative advanced by renown national security experts like UChicago Professor Robert Pape, the gatekeeper of global commerce. Checkmate. Game over.

Except none of it was true. Not the tolls, not the control, and certainly not the checkmate. What happened next revealed not Iranian strength but the strategic patience of an American president who understood something his critics either could not see or refused to admit: Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz. It never had. And President Trump, having waited calmly while the world congratulated a broken regime on a victory it had not won, moved with devastating precision to prove it.

The story of how we arrived at this moment requires revisiting the hysteria that followed Iran’s announcement of its strait closure. When the Islamic Republic declared that it was imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and would begin collecting transit tolls from commercial shipping, the reaction from European capitals and American newsrooms was immediate and euphoric, at least for those who had spent the prior 5 weeks insisting that Operation Epic Fury was a catastrophic miscalculation. French President Macron began negotiating directly with Tehran. Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, did the same. European nations that had not maintained diplomatic relations with Iran in years suddenly began reopening embassies. Iran, which just weeks earlier had been absorbing wave after wave of American airpower, was now the belle of the ball. (Read more.)

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Talking Nonsense in the Name of God

Let us remember that the Crusades were initiated by the popes to free the Holy Land from Muslims. Various nations of Islam had committed sacrilege in the Holy Places, raped monks and nuns, destroyed churches or turned them into mosques, while enslaving thousands of Christians. Girls were sold as sex slaves. Boys were often castrated so they could serve as eunuchs in the sultan's palace. This went on for over a thousand years. Various popes called upon Christian warriors to fight the Muslims in order to free the Christians of the Middle East. So while popes encourage peace most have known that sometimes battle is necessary to liberate the persecuted.  

Meanwhile, in the present day, so many Catholics do not know the most basic moral teachings about chastity, contraception, abortion, celibacy outside of marriage, and keeping holy the Lord's Day. Not to mention all the theological teachings about the Holy Eucharist and the Blessed Mother. It is the responsibility of the Shepherds to teach them! And where is the outcry from our Shepherds about the Christians being murdered, raped and enslaved around the world, in Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, China, Indonesia, India! What about the blatant and repeated human rights violations in several Muslim countries against their own women? What about the slave trade which flourishes in Africa? What about the human trafficking in the Americas? There are some major moral issues which require the full attention of the Holy Father and the bishops.

From Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem:

If the faithful are nothing else, they ought to be clear-eyed and honest about the way things are. Politicians can deal in virtuous-sounding lies, but not priests. A politician can say, “Poverty is the underlying cause of crime,” in order to sell the public on some useless program that will increase his patronage power and line the pockets of his friends. But God-fearing men should see that the logic doesn’t hold. How, for instance, does such an idea explain well-heeled criminals like Jordan Belfort and Bernie Madoff? A Christian should understand that the sinful human heart, with its greed and cruelty, is crime’s real cause. Poverty merely limits the sorts of crimes one can commit. Once you see that, ideas like defund the police and end incarceration reveal themselves to be works of either ignorance or cynicism. Sin is with us until the end of days. So, therefore, are cops and jails.

Likewise war. In a world where men like Hitler and ideas like Islamism can define the ethos of a people, bullets will sometimes have to fly. I say this without jingoism or belligerence. It is a simple fact of life. We can’t love our spouses, play with our children, do our jobs, read books or stroll through parks unless tough guys with weapons guard our borders and our streets, ready to fight when the need arises. Pacifism, if it is not suicidal, is just straight up wicked. It simply shunts the moral responsibility of waging war onto another man’s shoulders.

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” Jesus said, “and unto God the things that are God’s.” I take this to mean in part that his preachments, if they are to make any sense, cannot be taken as a political program. “Love your enemy,” is not a foreign policy prescription. “Turn the other cheek,” is not a recommended reform of the justice system. These are formative ways of seeing the world and its inevitable troubles as God sees them: as tragedies that spring from the bottomless fountain of our sin. They will continue to exist as long as we are what we are. One hopes that leaders shaped by the Christian ethos will deal with them as justly as possible.

Each person born is going to find himself in that blood-soaked melodrama known as history. He may have the good luck to live in a rich and secure society governed by the rule of law, or he may get the short end of the stick and find himself dumped into the midst of chaos and oppression. Accepting Christ can teach him humility, grant him peace and lead him to salvation. But it can’t shield him from the truth — because it is only by and in and for the Truth that he is saved. (Read more.)

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