What Happens ‘When the World Sleeps’
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese shares stories of the immense suffering in Palestine and laments the gutting of international law in her book, “When the World Sleeps.”
Declaration of Independence 1776: Declaration of Abdication 2026
As the United States commemorates the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the nation is set to abdicate its independence 250 years later.
The U.S. Congress is slated to pass the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – “must-pass” legislation that determines military spending and outlines defense policies for the fiscal year.
Consistently over 3,000 pages, the massive funding bill is rarely scrutinized and passes with little or no opposition. This year, the Trump administration has asked for an historic $1.5 trillion in total defense spending.
Buried in the pending NDAA, is a gravely consequential proposal to create permanent structures that would merge the militaries of the United States and Israel. The measure, Section 219 (in the House) and Section 1217 (in the Senate), titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” blurs the lines between conventional cooperation between allies.
Section 219 would require the U.S. defense secretary to appoint a single “executive agent” to synchronize cooperative military and defense efforts between the two countries. The provision includes bilateral integration of military planning, intelligence sharing, technological development, procurement systems and strategic operations.
If signed into law, Congress would have essentially ceded the nation’s autonomy to a foreign power. Israel has, over decades, successfully secured its influence within U.S. governmental, economic and media institutions. Legislative efforts to integrate the military sectors, as proposed, would complete and legalize their influence.
The effort to fuse the two militaries was spearheaded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a coalition of U.S. legislators and Israeli advocacy groups, like the powerful lobby, America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Facing waning public support, pro-Israel groups are attempting to institutionalize an irreversible U.S.-Israeli military-industrial merger. By burying this alliance deep within the Pentagon bureaucracy, they aim to bypass congressional oversight and American voters.
Israel and its enablers – whose ideas formulated the legislation – have been discreetly moving the relationship away from patronage and/or partnership toward a more asymmetrical structure designed to make Israel “the indispensable state”and to harness American power to achieve Zionist expansionist aims.
For example, Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) and Prime Minister Netanyahu met on 27 May 2026 in Jerusalem to discuss transitioning the U.S.-Israeli defense alliance. One week after the meeting, Stutzman introduced a House resolution to reshape the relationship.
Most revealing is the specific language Netanyahu used in his letter of gratitude (1June 2026) to the Congressman. Upon receiving the pending initiative from Stutzman, Netanyahu thanked him for forwarding it and called the strategy “my plan.” Later in the letter, he framed it “our plan.” In addition, Netanyahu specified that he wanted integration as well as continued U.S. military aid ($3.8 billion annually), by proposing a “draw down” rather than an immediate halt to funding. Netanyahu wrote:
“I was glad to receive your proposed Congressional resolution endorsing my plan to shift the framework for U.S.-Israel defense cooperation from aid to partnership… I am heartened by your enthusiastic support for our plan to develop a new Memorandum of Understanding with the United States government that will draw downS. financial assistance over the next decade and replace it with what you refer to as a ‘new framework of joint defense cooperation, co-development, co-production and mutual investment in areas including advanced missile defense, artificial intelligence unmanned systems, cybersecurity and next generation military platforms’.”
After introducing the restructuring legislation, H. Res. 1339, on 3 June 2026, Stutzman released the following statement: “Above all, the United States and Israel stand together against totalitarianism and for freedom. We are bound by the shared Western values that built both our nations. As long as those values are under threat, we will defend them side by side.”
The Congressman’s lofty rhetoric about “shared Western values” glosses over a grim reality: both nations share violent histories of colonialism and genocide that persist into the present.
It should be noted that Stutzman’s resolution also commended Israel for its “joint military operations against Iran,” ignoring the fact that the 28 February 2026 “operation” killed at least 3,468 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren in Minab, murdered on the first day of the illegal unprovoked U.S.-Israel war on Iran.
Israel’s resolute defender, AIPAC, was also instrumental in advancing the legislation. In a 5 June 2026 press release, the lobby applauded the House Armed Services Committee for including pro-Israel provisions in the NDAA.
The current push towards cooperative militarization and defense integration raises fundamental questions: what geopolitical and economic factors are driving it?
For close to a century, the energy resources of the Middle East have been central to American hegemony and economic supremacy. Since the 1990s, Washington has sought to cement its control over the region by uniting its two core geopolitical pillars: Israel and the Gulf monarchies. U.S. administrations have attempted to do so through the implementation of various accords and normalization schemes, like the 1990 Oslo and 2020 Abraham Accords.
Washington’s normalization agenda and the broader global balance of power were upended by the October 2023 Hamas-led uprising and Israel’s protracted genocidal war on Gaza. In addition, the June 2025 and February 2026 joint U.S.-Israel wars against Iran have further weakened American hegemony in the Middle East and globally.
These all-important pivotal events have catalyzed the Global South and accelerated China’s influence as an alternative major power, while hastening America’s decline. The remaining good relations that existed between China, Russia and the United States have been exhausted by current realities.
Washington, steeped in outdated great-power politics, has categorized China as a primary adversary to be weakened rather than engaged. And unable to break Iran through military force, Washington and Tel Aviv are struggling to resurrect their collapsing regional hegemony. In a desperate bid to preserve dominance, they are working to deepen their strategic military pact.
The U.S. and Israel share complementary strategic objectives. Washington leverages the relationship to maintain its regional and global standing, while Israel – the anchor for projecting American power in the Middle East – uses it to achieve its Zionist expansionist designs. By synchronizing their military and intelligence networks, the U.S. and Israel seek to eliminate regional challengers and reverse the decline of U.S. power.
That the proposed resolution grants a foreign government unprecedented access and involvement, is tucked away in a massive spending bill, and has not been openly debated, is alarming and speaks to Israel’s extraordinary influence within the American political system.
There are numerous reasons, in addition to the loss of American independence, to reject this unwise mandatory merger. It skirts constitutional accountability, bypasses legislative debate on foreign policy and aid, places independent decision-making at risk, creates dependence on Israeli technology, transfers advanced U.S. technologies to a foreign regime. Most critically, it will legally bind the United States as an accessory to Israeli war crimes and to its official endorsement of illegal land appropriation and “settlement” expansion in occupied Palestine.
Essentially, if the 2027 NDAA passes as is, the United States will officially give its imprimatur to apartheid and genocide. It will, after 250 years, lift the veil on what the nation has become and on the future it envisions.
© 2026, M. Reza Behnam, Ph.D.
Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia. His “Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,” published by University of Utah Press, and still in print, was recognized by Choice as Outstanding Academic Book for 1987-1988.
Renewed Gulf Hostilities, Elevated Regional and Global Uncertainty
The United States and Iran traded new attacks overnight into Thursday, intensifying an exchange that has threatened the collapse of their agreement to end the war. According to President Trump, the ceasefire between the United States, Israel and Iran was “over.”
The deadly exchanges included reported U.S. strikes against Iranian military-related targets, Iranian retaliation against U.S. interests and regional partners, and continued Israeli military operations.
It’s a familiar pattern in U.S./Israel-led regional conflicts. Ceasefires may temporarily interrupt hostilities, but absent an accompanying political framework they fail to resolve the structural drivers of conflict.
The renewed confrontation has expanded beyond the bilateral U.S.-Iran relationship. It now intersects with Israel’s continuing military operations, the Gaza genocide, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, lethal tensions in Lebanon, persistent unease in Syria, Jordanian balancing between adversaries, Iraqi efforts to avoid being dragged in an economic abyss, the Gulf countries’ disrupted security and broader regional security rivalries.
Rather than isolated crises, these theaters increasingly form an interconnected strategic landscape in which developments in one arena quickly reverberate across others.
Israel’s continuing campaign
Since the June ceasefire, the Netanyahu government has publicly reaffirmed its commitment to maintaining military pressure against Iran. Prime Minister Netanyahu absolutely needs strategic tension at the eve of the fall election.
As a result, Israeli leaders argue that previous operations significantly degraded Iran’s military capabilities while emphasizing that continued vigilance remains necessary to prevent their reconstruction. Read: only the Obliteration Doctrine can finish the job.
This declared policy extends beyond Iran itself. Israeli operations have continued in Gaza, southern Lebanon and, periodically, Syria, reflecting a security doctrine that views these fronts as strategically interconnected rather than separate conflicts.
Rather than viewing Gaza, Lebanon and Iran independently, Israeli strategic planning increasingly treats them as components of a single security environment – essentially, a recast Greater Israel vision – shaped by deterrence, military superiority and the perceived need to prevent hostile capabilities from emerging across multiple fronts.
Over time, this strategy has no future. While military operations may reduce immediate threats, they also increase the probability of regional retaliation, strengthen incentives for asymmetric responses and complicate diplomatic initiatives.
Military success on individual battlefields does not translate into durable regional stability.
One regional theater, not separate wars
The conflicts stretching from Gaza to Iran increasingly resemble a single regional security system rather than discrete wars.
In Gaza, military operations continue amid an ongoing humanitarian crisis. But neither Palestinian genocide nor the West Bank’s settler violence and ethnic cleansing is any longer considered newsworthy.
Along Israel’s northern frontier, exchanges with Hezbollah and operations in southern Lebanon remain volatile. Meanwhile, Israeli mass atrocities and bombardments have displaced over 20% of Lebanon’s population.
Yet, Gaza and Lebanon are barely reported in Western media any longer. When mass atrocities become daily staple, they’re no longer news.
Syria continues to serve as a theater for strikes targeting military infrastructure associated with Iran and allied groups, with Israel’s incursions into the Quneitra and Deraa provinces, presumably to search civilians.
Caught in the crosshairs, Jordan is scrambling to intercept hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and Israeli targets.
As bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq are frequently targeted by Iranian-aligned non-state militias, Iraqi officials can only condemn U.S. strikes on Iraqi soil as a violation of sovereignty. Local citizens bear the brunt of violence. Direct military exchanges between Israel, the U.S. and Iran have moved beyond the proxy confrontations that characterized much of the previous decade.
These theatres are linked through overlapping military deployments, intelligence networks, missile capabilities, logistics corridors and alliance structures. Decisions taken in one arena now have immediate consequences elsewhere.
Strategic costs of escalation
This regionalization also alters strategic calculations. States increasingly evaluate military operations not solely in terms of local objectives but also their implications for deterrence across the wider Middle East.
Paradoxically, escalation risks, which should be reduced and marginalized, have become cumulative rather than isolated – which means that they are being amplified and compounded.
The consequence is a conflict system whose boundaries continue to expand geographically while becoming progressively more difficult to compartmentalize or contain.
Renewed hostilities carry consequences extending well beyond the battlefield. Military expenditures likewise continue to rise as regional governments devote additional resources to missile defense, intelligence, naval deployments and force readiness.
Such expenditures inevitably compete with (and over time, crowd out) longer-term investments in infrastructure, education and economic diversification.
These economic consequences are not confined to the Middle East. Higher transportation costs, volatile energy prices and increased geopolitical uncertainty affect inflation, financial markets and global growth prospects.
As previous periods of regional instability have demonstrated, the cumulative economic burden of sustained military confrontation frequently exceeds the immediate physical destruction associated with individual military operations.
Economic costs of energy shock, food security
The Middle East remains central to global energy markets, maritime commerce and international investment flows. Consequently, even limited disruptions around the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz influence shipping costs, insurance premiums and commodity prices.
Investors typically respond by increasing risk premiums while delaying investment decisions amid heightened uncertainty.
Unlike previous regional crises, the current conflict directly involves the world’s principal energy chokepoint – the Strait of Hormuz – through which roughly one-fifth of globally traded crude oil and a significant share of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports transit.
Even absent a sustained closure, heightened military risks can raise insurance costs, reroute shipping and increase market volatility.
Under a contained conflict scenario, crude oil prices could remain in the US$85-100 per barrel range.
However, any prolonged disruption to Gulf shipping or energy infrastructure could push prices toward US$110-140. At the same time, an extreme scenario involving significant interruption of Hormuz traffic could temporarily drive prices above US$150, even if strategic reserves moderate the shock.
Natural gas markets – particularly in Europe and Asia – would experience parallel upward pressure through LNG supply constraints and higher transport costs.
Heaviest burden in the Global South
The implications extend far beyond energy. Higher fuel prices increase fertilizer production costs, transportation expenses and irrigation costs, placing additional pressure on global food systems.
Low-income food-importing countries in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia would face renewed import inflation, deteriorating balance-of-payments positions and heightened fiscal stress.
Countries already affected by conflict, drought or debt distress would be especially vulnerable. Such indirect consequences often persist long after military operations themselves have subsided.
Whether viewed through legal, humanitarian or strategic perspectives, the cumulative effect is growing pressure on norms that have traditionally governed the conduct of armed conflict.
The renewed U.S.-Iran confrontation, together with Israel’s continuing regional military campaign, spread corrosive damage across the region.
As economic risks accumulate alongside humanitarian pressures, the space for negotiated political settlements narrows.
The original commentary was published by the Informed Comment (US) on July 10, 2026.
Trump’s New Iran Strikes Are Turning Failure Into a Wider Disaster
The easiest mistake in war is to confuse the ability to strike again with proof that the previous strike worked. Donald Trump is making that mistake in Iran. The latest U.S. attacks may destroy more military assets and infrastructure, but they do not answer the political question that has haunted this war from the beginning: what outcome is all this destruction supposed to produce?
The Trump administration launched the initial campaign claiming that it would curb Iran’s nuclear program and break the military power behind what Washington described as Tehran’s regional threat. Months later, Iran has not surrendered, the nuclear dispute remains unresolved, and the Strait of Hormuz has become an even more dangerous center of confrontation. The United States is still negotiating through intermediaries over shipping and other unresolved issues. Trump says talks can continue even as he declares the ceasefire over and orders new attacks. This is not a strategy approaching success. It is a strategy using escalation to avoid confronting its own failure.
That pattern is the central danger. Each time force fails to produce the promised political result, the administration treats the failure not as evidence that its strategy is wrong, but as evidence that it has not used enough force. The inability of the initial campaign to compel Iran becomes the justification for another round. If that round also fails, its failure can authorize the next. The strategy becomes almost impossible to disprove because every setback is reclassified as unfinished business.
Iran has suffered enormous damage. The opening attacks killed senior political and military figures, while the wider campaign struck thousands of targets and degraded military capabilities. Yet destruction did not translate into political compliance. Even the scale of the funeral ceremonies for the Iranian leader assassinated in the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes, while not proof of national unanimity, showed that foreign bombardment had not produced the easy collapse in political authority some advocates of war expected.
Supporters of escalation will say Washington simply stopped too soon. Iran was weakened but not weakened enough, and more punishment will eventually force Tehran to concede. But this logic turns every failure into a reason to repeat the policy that caused it. If bombing does not secure surrender, bomb more. If retaliation follows, strike harder. If negotiations remain necessary, claim that diplomacy works only because the bombs created leverage.
Damage, however, is not leverage unless it moves the opponent toward the outcome being demanded. The initial campaign changed the arena of bargaining without resolving the conflict. Hormuz, not the nuclear file, has become Iran’s most powerful instrument of pressure. Tehran now treats control over the waterway as its strongest strategic card. Washington went to war in the name of eliminating Iranian leverage. Instead, it helped elevate a maritime chokepoint through which the equivalent of about one-fifth of global oil and petroleum-product consumption passed before the war into the central battlefield of the relationship.
The confrontation in the strait is therefore evidence that the initial campaign failed according to its own declared logic. Washington presented the reopening of Hormuz as proof of success. Yet commercial shipping remains exposed, tanker traffic has slowed, Iran continues to assert authority over passage, and the United States is again using force to impose the access it claimed had already been secured. A victory that must be repeatedly recreated through bombing is not a durable victory. It is an unstable military arrangement waiting for the next incident.
The deeper problem is that Trump has no visible theory of how escalation ends. Is the objective a nuclear agreement, unconditional access through Hormuz, the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capacity, regime change, or punishment for attacks on shipping? Each goal would require a different strategy and political settlement. The administration’s shifting objectives obscure how little the bombing has accomplished. Ambiguity allows every new strike to be described as necessary while preventing the public from judging whether the war has succeeded.
This is how an unsuccessful campaign becomes permanent policy. Iranian retaliation justifies American escalation; American escalation produces further retaliation; and the resulting insecurity is presented as proof that restraint would be dangerous. War becomes both the cause of the crisis and the proposed solution.
The military cost is already substantial. The initial campaign consumed advanced U.S. munitions at a rate that exposed the limits of the industrial base. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that the United States may have used more than half of its prewar inventory in four of seven key systems, with one to four years required to rebuild those stocks. Each new round narrows future choices, increases competition among theaters and allies, and turns scarce production capacity into fuel for a war without a defined endpoint.
A serious “America First” policy would treat this as a warning. It would ask whether another missile fired at Iran makes the United States safer or merely postpones the moment when Washington must negotiate. Trump instead treats the act of striking as its own strategic justification. Firepower substitutes for political purpose, even as escalation depletes military readiness and deepens dependence on the diplomacy the administration publicly derides.
The economic costs follow the same pattern. Hormuz connects energy prices, shipping, insurance, manufacturing, agriculture, and household expenses. Oil prices fell when diplomacy appeared to reduce the risk of disruption and rose again when U.S.-Iran fighting resumed. That volatility is not incidental. It is one of the principal ways the war transfers its costs to people far from the battlefield.
A sustained campaign would raise insurance and freight costs, unsettle investment, and increase pressure on fuel-dependent industries and food production. The burden would fall on workers whose jobs depend on stable trade, families already struggling with prices, and communities repeatedly told that housing, health care, schools, and infrastructure are unaffordable. A government cannot plausibly claim to put Americans first while exposing them to a preventable energy shock and treating public resources as an inexhaustible reserve for escalation.
The regional political cost is equally serious. U.S. operations depend on Gulf states for bases, logistical support, and access. Yet those states absorb the immediate danger when Iran retaliates. The more Washington turns their territory into infrastructure for an open-ended conflict, the stronger their incentive becomes to hedge and seek arrangements that reduce their exposure. Trump’s escalation risks weakening the very network of relationships on which American power in the region depends.
Restraint is not surrender. It is the recognition that force without a political theory of success becomes an expensive ritual. Before any further attack, the administration should state its objective, explain how military action will achieve it, define the conditions for ending operations, identify the risks of retaliation, and provide the legal authority for widening the war. Congress should demand those answers rather than allowing a failed campaign to expand through presidential momentum.
The initial campaign proved that Iran could be damaged without becoming politically compliant. The renewed strikes are proving something more dangerous: Trump is prepared to weaken American military readiness, economic stability, regional relationships, and democratic accountability rather than acknowledge that bombing did not produce the settlement he promised. The responsible course is to use the remaining diplomatic channel to reduce escalation and negotiate the unresolved issues. Otherwise, every failure will become the excuse for another attack, and the United States will turn a failed strategy into a permanent war.
Brian Hudson is a political analyst and independent journalist. His work has appeared in publications including Common Dreams and other independent news outlets.
Democratic Party candidates are perceived by many voters as part of the system, part of the establishment, which indeed most are. The most common profession of Democratic congressional representatives and senators is law. Most don’t seem to share the common experiences of working class and lower middle-class people, because in fact they don’t. Lawyers’ average incomes range between $150,000 and $250,000, while the median income for American workers is $45,000 to $64,000,
So progressive Democratic Party operatives decided they needed to find candidates with a populist message speaking to voters concerns about the cost of living who also resembled the working-class voters to whom they wished to appeal. A couple of young political scouts went to Maine where the Democrats would challenge Republican senator Susan Collins who has served five terms in a Democratic majority state. Talking to local activists these two scouts identified Graham Platner as the candidate who could and would defeat Collins. Defeating Collins, would be key to the Democrats taking control of the Senate.
Platner had served eight years in the U.S. Marines, two tours of duty in Iraq and one with the Maryland National Guard in Afghanistan where he stayed on as a military contractor. Then he returned to his home state of Maine and became an oyster farmer. He married Amy Gertner, a school teacher who became the business manager of his oyster farm.
Platner had progressive politics. He opposed the corporations and supported Medicare for all, he talked about genocide in Gaza and opposed AIPAC, the Israeli lobby. Moreover, he looked the part; he was a brawny guy with of a mustache and beard, tattoos, and a charismatic speaking style. With support from progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders, Platner quickly gained an enthusiastic following and won the Democratic Party primary.
But Platner was not what he appeared to be. He wasn’t from the working class; his father was a lawyer and his mother a business woman. And Platner the oyster farmer was himself a small businessman.
Then the revelations began. Platner had a Nazi tattoo, a Totenkopf (a death’s head), though he denied knowing what it was when he got it. Platner, who suffered from PTSD, also had a lot of emotional problems. Investigations by the media revealed that he sent sexually explicit emails to several women, some of them married. Former girlfriends described him as volatile and one said physically threatening. Then in July a former girlfriend accused him of rape, his prominent supporters such as Sanders abandoned him, and Platner was forced to withdraw from the campaign. Now Democrats will have to find a replacement for him at a special convention with only a few months left until the November election.
Critics have blamed the Democrats’ mistaken choice of Graham Platner on insufficient vetting. There are, however, bigger issues. Unlike candidates of the Democratic Socialists of America who have won in New York and Colorado, Platner was not a member of a left organization and so had no experience of common study, planning, and work as a socialist. He was active in Acadia Action, a local aquaculture and fishing advocacy group in Sullivan, Maine, and—more civic involvement than actual activism—he served as the town harbormaster and chair of the planning board. He did not have the kind of experience that comes from being a labor union activist or being involved in militant confrontations with authorities.
Chosen by young, self-proclaimed political scouts, Platner did not have a proven record of activism, which would have given people a better understanding of who he really was. A friend in Maine wrote, “It was a great ride while it lasted,” But without an experienced activist candidate, it couldn’t last long.
12 July 2024
