China Hit by “Deadly Weather Events”

Thursday 23 July 2026, by Pierre Rousset

During the first ten days of July, cyclones (typhoons), tornadoes, storms, severe weather, floods, and landslides wreaked havoc in the central and southern parts of the country—and beyond. China is facing extreme weather events intensified by the climate crisis.

Natural disasters are common in China, particularly in the summer, when some regions experience heavy rainfall while others are plagued by extreme heat. However, the frequency and scale of these events are increasing as global warming accelerates—driven, in particular, by the use of fossil fuels. Among the affected regions are Guangxi, Guizhou, and Hunan in the south and center of the country, home to a population of over 150 million—more than in Russia.

In fact, a significant portion of the country is affected by this series of weather events. Maysak, the first typhoon of the season, made landfall on July 6 in the southern island province of Hainan, having originated in Vietnam. In Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi region, and its surrounding areas, floodwaters breached the dams of three reservoirs, according to local authorities. The city of Nanning and its surrounding areas were flooded, forcing many residents to take refuge on rooftops, with some 55,000 people evacuated. On the same day, a tornado struck the city of Ezhou in Hubei Province (central-east). In fact, two destructive tornadoes swept through central China that evening, when warm air from the south, driven by Typhoon Maysak, collided with cold air from the north.

On July 9, a landslide in Gansu (northwest) occurred following violent thunderstorms and torrential rains, leaving 39 dead, 9 missing, and hundreds injured, according to press reports. It was caused by “a severe episode of atmospheric convection” (i.e., a temperature contrast) that triggered “thunderstorms and strong winds” which swept through cities such as Huangshi and Huanggang, according to state media.

In the city of Guigang, a metropolitan area in the Guangxi Autonomous Region (in the south), floodwaters turned a major road into a lake, submerging cars and rushing down a hillside as muddy torrents before pouring onto a construction site.

On July 11, Typhoon Bavi, originating in the Philippines and Taiwan, struck the coast further east, prompting the evacuation of nearly 2 million people. Shortly before that, torrential rains in the capital Beijing (in the northeast) led authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 people.

A typhoon was also expected over the weekend on the east coast, south of Shanghai, bringing with it violent gusts of wind.

In southern and central China, violent thunderstorms and torrential rains have left about 17 people dead and hundreds injured. The central province of Hubei was also affected. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated in the southern region of Guangxi, where some 40 rivers and streams burst their banks and torrents of water poured out after the dam walls of a reservoir broke, according to state television CCTV.

In an exotic twist, some 800 to 900 snakes (including cobras) escaped after a snake farm was destroyed by the floodwaters in the city of Hangzhou.

According to government authorities, torrential rains were expected in mid-July to reach certain coastal and eastern areas of Guangxi, as well as the southwest of the neighboring province of Guangdong—home to a major manufacturing hub—putting the integrity of reservoirs and dikes to the test and potentially triggering further population evacuations.

The Chinese press reports on effective prevention and relief efforts. The alerts certainly enabled preventive evacuations in some areas, but not in all, as evidenced by these accounts gathered by an Agence France-Presse correspondent who was able to visit the town of Liulan (Guangxi), where floods destroyed homes, swept away livestock, and caused the collapse of a major dam (and another, smaller one near the town of Gantang). The dam’s walls collapsed, unleashing torrents of muddy water downstream, with a preliminary death toll of 26 and seven people missing.

Many of the affected residents in this town had not fully grasped the gravity of the situation. According to Mr. Huang, “it has never been this bad before.” “We didn’t receive any warning. If we had, we wouldn’t have suffered so many losses.” Even belongings on the upper floor of his house were destroyed by the floodwaters. “In several hundred years, this is the first time the floodwaters have reached the first floor,” Bi Yunchun, another resident of Gantang, told AFP.

China’s compensation system for flood victims was expanded in 2025 to include storage areas where authorities deliberately divert floodwaters to reduce flooding downstream. The scope of compensation for people living or working in these storage areas has been expanded. Previously limited to draft animals, it now includes livestock and poultry that could not be evacuated, with the central government covering 70% of the costs and local governments covering 30%. Compensation remains conditional and does not cover all risks.

Furthermore, there can be a wide gap between the law and reality. The selection of storage zones obviously involves a political dimension (affluent residential neighborhoods or business districts related to those in power will be spared). Corruption is endemic at all levels of the administration, and repression is commonplace. In the absence of more or less independent social organizations, it is very difficult to ensure the collective defense of the rights of working-class, peasant and popular communities over the long term. Under these conditions, with every extreme weather event, new segments of the population are plunged into poverty—a situation from which they will find it all the more difficult to escape as climate disasters follow one after another.

More generally, climate-related disasters threaten to wipe out the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars in commercial activity each year due to urban flooding, halted industrial activity, submerged crops, and livestock swept away by the floodwaters—all while the Chinese economy is already sluggish.

18 July 2026

Source: ESSF.

Attached documents

• china-hit-by-deadly-weather-events_a9655.pdf (PDF - 1.2 MiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article9655]

China

• Iran’s shockwave in Asia
• Leftist studies in China and the United States
• BRICS media are not an alternative for anti-imperial resistance
• Iran Between the Russian and Chinese Models
• Purges and Regime Crisis in China

Climate

• Super El Niño: Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold
• Some Reflections on the Water Crisis in Puerto Rico
• Record-breaking heatwave in Europe: Does the continent have a new climate?
• There’s a class struggle under the sun; the heat is eating away at wages
• Heatwave Reflections: We Won’t Return to the World Before, But We Still Have the Possibility of Living, and Living Well

• Pierre Rousset

  Pierre Rousset is a longtime activist of the Fourth International and a founding member of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières (ESSF). He specialised in Asian revolutionary movements, particularly in China and the Philippines. He was co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1993.

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Everyone Is a Foreign Agent Now

A German blogger reposted four videos. Europe's highest court has just ruled that makes him a criminal – and the same machinery is being built on both sides of the Atlantic.

by Thomas S. Karat | Jul 22, 2026 |

In a corner of the Saarland, a man ran a blog. It carried no advertising and charged nothing to read. It was funded the way a busker is funded, by whoever chose to drop something in the hat – €60,038.65 in voluntary donations over sixteen months. On four occasions in 2023 the blog embedded videos from RT, the Russian state channel the European Union had banned. That is the entire factual basis of a case that climbed to the Court of Justice of the European Union and produced, on 2 July 2026, a judgment that should frighten anyone in Europe who publishes anything.

The blog belonged to a writer who works under the name Traugott Ickeroth. German prosecutors in Saarbrücken charged him and two others under the country’s Foreign Trade Act, which turns a breach of EU sanctions into a criminal offence carrying three months to five years in prison. The regional court, to its credit, hesitated. The law bans “operators” from broadcasting listed Russian content. Was a private individual with a donation button an “operator”? The judges in Saarbrücken were not sure, and referred the question upward.

The Court’s answer removed every doubt, and with it every limit. An “operator,” the Fourth Chamber held, is any natural person who makes the banned content available to the public. Not a company. Not a professional. Not someone turning a profit. The word appears in thirteen language versions of the regulation without the adjective “economic” attached, and the Court seized on that absence to rule that commercial character is irrelevant. So is scale. So is duration. Four videos or one, for money or for nothing – the act of publishing is the crime.

There is a detail here worth pausing on, because it tells you which way the wind is blowing. The European Commission’s own guidance had said the ban applied only to those exercising a “commercial or professional” activity. The Court overruled the Commission – and overruled it against the citizen. The executive branch had read its own prohibition more narrowly than the judges were prepared to. Brussels asked for less reach than Luxembourg delivered. When a court strains to be harsher on the individual than the government that wrote the rule, the machine has acquired a momentum of its own.

The penalty is not theoretical. Under Germany’s Außenwirtschaftsgesetz the sentence runs from three months to five years, and a further amendment has added an aggravated tier reaching up to ten. Poland’s implementing statute prescribes a minimum of three years. And here the trap folds back on itself: the very donations that keep an independent site alive are what a court can treat as a “professional” income stream – which lifts the offender into the aggravated bracket. The reader-funded writer, the one with no corporate backing and no advertiser to please, draws the longer sentence precisely because he is independent. Independence is reclassified as aggravation.

Understand what this ruling plugs into, because the ruling alone is only half the apparatus. The European Union now runs two mechanisms against disfavoured speech, and this judgment welds them together. The first is a list. Under the hybrid-threats sanctions regime the Council of the European Union adds names by administrative decision – no trial, no charge, unanimity reached behind closed doors, with judicial review available only after the asset freeze has already bitten. The second is the criminal prohibition this case just widened, which reaches anyone who relays listed content whether or not they themselves are listed. The Council controls who goes on the list. The Court has now ruled that anyone who touches what the listed outlets produce is a criminal. The net expands every time the list does, and no further judgment is required to make it happen.

The reassuring official story is that all of this is aimed at the Kremlin. It is worth testing that story against the record, because the “Russia” label has already proven to be a wrapper rather than a wall.

Consider who has been swept up. Nathalie Yamb, a Swiss-Cameroonian activist with no residence in the Union, was sanctioned for adopting “Moscow’s language” in campaigns directed against France and the West in Africa. No court convicted her of anything; a council of ministers decided her message served a hostile interest, and that was enough. In December 2025 the Council’s designations reached foreign-policy analysts embedded in think-tanks and universities, “influencers,” and – the phrase is in the official record – former Western European military and police officers. By March 2026 two Western nationals were named outright: the British blogger Graham Phillips and the French former soldier Adrien Bocquet. When Yamb was added the regime already reached forty-seven individuals and fifteen entities, and it has grown with every package since.

The most telling admission comes from the Union’s own diplomatic service. The European External Action Service defines the “foreign information manipulation” it exists to combat as, in its own words, “a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour.” Read that again. The conduct being sanctioned is one the sanctioning authority concedes is not, in the main, against the law. The offence is not what you did but whose ear your words might reach.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights was meant to be the floor beneath all this. Recital 10 of the founding regulation insists the measures are “consistent with” Article 11, the guarantee of freedom of expression. That consistency was tested once already, when RT France challenged its broadcasting ban and the General Court upheld it in 2022. The reasoning then was that the outlet’s rights survived because it could still conduct research and interviews, and remained free to broadcast outside the Union – the essence of the freedom, the judges said, was untouched. Free-expression scholars, among them Dirk Voorhoof and Ronan Ó Fathaigh, noted the flaw at the time: the body imposing the ban was a council of governments, not the independent tribunal the European Convention requires. Whatever force the “you can broadcast elsewhere” reasoning had for a state television network, it has none at all for a private citizen facing ten years. There is no elsewhere. There is only the prison.

An American reading this may permit himself a moment of constitutional smugness. It could not happen here, he thinks; the First Amendment forbids it. He should hold the thought lightly, because the tool already exists in his own country, it is older than RT, and it already reaches private citizens for the crime of publishing.

The tool is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed in 1938 against Nazi propaganda, and its harsher companion, Section 951 of the criminal code. On the same RT money the European Union uses to jail the man who reposts, the United States moved against the people who paid: in September 2024 the Justice Department indicted two RT employees over a scheme that had quietly financed an American content company to the tune of nearly ten million dollars, seeding more than two thousand videos. The Department’s own advisory carried the chilling clause – that even unwitting work on behalf of a foreign principal could invite investigation. Intent optional, on both continents.

Then there is Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst and Korea scholar, prosecuted under FARA in part for the act of publishing – for opinion articles and policy advocacy the government cast as the work of an unregistered foreign agent. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed briefs warning that the theory was, in substance, indistinguishable from ordinary journalism, and that letting it stand would chill every scholar and reporter who talks to a foreign source. The court let the prosecution proceed past its motion to dismiss and on toward trial. The constitutional objection did not stop it – which is the point worth marking, whatever verdict eventually lands. The precedent is set the moment a citizen can be tried for what he published.

None of this is new. In an earlier age the same statute was turned on W.E.B. Du Bois, prosecuted in his eighties for circulating a foreign organisation’s peace literature. The mechanism sleeps and wakes according to the politics of the hour, and the hour decides which foreign voices are poison and which are merely policy.

Which brings us to the only thing that presently stands between the American citizen and the European outcome. It is not the Constitution – the courts have not blocked these prosecutions. It is a memo. In February 2025 the Attorney General narrowed criminal FARA enforcement to conduct resembling traditional espionage, disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Seven months on, a September 2025 presidential memorandum — NSPM-7 – pointed the same weapon in a new direction, expressly ordering the scrutiny under FARA of non-governmental organisations and of American citizens residing abroad with close ties to foreign governments, foundations, or influence networks. The specialist bar drew the obvious conclusion: FARA could no longer be treated as a low enforcement priority. What one memorandum narrows, the next widens. The citizen’s protection is a document the executive can rewrite between breakfast and lunch, and the statute underneath it never changed at all.

And the enforcement follows no party. In December 2025 the President pre-emptively pardoned a sitting Democrat, Congressman Henry Cuellar, weeks before a foreign-bribery trial – while another Democrat, former Senator Robert Menendez, drew eleven years for acting on behalf of a foreign government. The tool belongs to no party; only its aim shifts with the hand that holds it. And that is the shape of the thing on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe has switched the mechanism on through a court, criminalising the individual who relays the wrong foreign voice, threshold by threshold stripped away until nothing protects the man with the donation button. America keeps its version holstered by executive grace – a grace that diminishes with each administration, and has already begun to expire.

A blogger reposted four videos. A continent’s highest court has ruled him a criminal, and a second continent has built, and half-drawn, the same weapon. The disproportion is the whole story: between the smallness of the act and the size of the machine now trained on it, and between what these governments say they are defending – the open society, the free mind – and what they are quietly constructing to defend it. The Pachamama, an activist once said of another dispossession, will never return. Neither, once a citizen can be jailed for what he chose to publish, will something the West used to insist was the difference between itself and its enemies.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

Zionists Are About To Learn It Doesn’t Pay To Sentence Socrates to Death

by Jason Jones | Jul 23, 2026 

Reprinted with permission from The Jason Jones Show substack.

“Our children are being indoctrinated,” says Senator Ted Cruz after the latest poll showing young Americans’ growing opposition to the Israeli government (He carefully picked one with a forced binary choice between Israeli forces and Hamas – obscuring the general thrust of young people’s moral revulsion to Israel’s violence visible in numerous polls). Daily Wire influencer Jordan Peterson says he’s “sickened” by the trend, which he flatly frames as “the rising tide of antisemitism.” (He chose to make his case as a defense of “Judeo-Christian” values, but in the same post quickly makes clear he is defending the literal state of Israel). Peterson jeers at young people’s “oh-so moral” reasons for opposing Israel and calls its critics “despicable,” adding: “The fate of Israel at the hands of the Islamists is the fate of the West.”

“Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens!” these Zionists might say, calling for the death of the Gadfly. But they’re about to learn it doesn’t pay to sentence Socrates to death.

Outwitting the Heart

To listen to a certain stripe of cynical ideologue (a stripe that runs through both the major parties, especially when it comes to foreign policy), you’d think that young Americans had suddenly become a pack of heartless Nazi or communist authoritarians – eager to tear down Western Civilization just out of spite.

What’s more, we’re told the spite is unprovoked and almost inexplicable. After all, nothing of significance has happened over the last three years…

It’s not like young people have spent their formative years watching video after viral video of unarmed men, women, and children being mangled and buried under rubble by the thousands in a livestreamed, U.S. taxpayer-funded genocide.

And it’s not like there’s been an artificial intelligence revolution that threatens the future well-being and employability of the youngest generations just as they enter the workforce.

And it’s not like AI is being used to surveil, to target, and to kill – while some of the American tech oligarchs behind the biggest AI firms openly talk about tracking anti-Israel speech online, and others openly defend the genocide.

And it’s not as if the president young men voted for in historic numbers just over a year ago – in part due to promises that he’d reject “stupid wars” – was then maneuvered into another disastrous war in partnership with the nation guilty of that genocide. A war that has worsened the economic prospects of the young even further, to say nothing of its cost in terms of human life.

It’s not as if on Day 1 of that war, in a moment that was decidedly not lost on young Americans, the U.S. military struck a girls’ school in Iran, killing over 100 people, most of the victims being schoolchildren… a disastrous crime that, according to widespread reports, may have been due to the Pentagon’s use of AI for targeting.

And finally, it’s not as if, with more elections around the corner, the vice president just revealed that Israeli operatives are working to scuttle the Trump administration’s efforts to end this war – all while yet another well-funded Israeli propaganda campaign targets young Americans in an effort to avert their wariness of even further military cruelties already planned by Israel.

‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing’

I’m sure you see what I’m getting at. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist’s brain for trivial knowledge to see what’s wrong (and not trivially wrong) with this picture. It only takes a heart.

As the Catholic poet Alexander Pope once wrote, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” There’s a difference between those who learn truths piecemeal in service of their own ends and those who devote themselves to the truth for its own sake.

In fact, it’s significant that so many of those who dismiss young people’s moral outrage today do so by calling the young stupid. They’re idiots, the cynics say, because they haven’t studied the lessons of history. They don’t know about the Holocaust. About the mathematical impossibility of socialist economics. That’s what makes them a threat to public order. To Western Civilization!

But here’s the irony. By going so far afield from the urgent moral crises of the moment and instead focusing on the machinery of things – of rocket science, of reason, and even of the outline of Western thought – these people are showing themselves to be totally ignorant of the heart of Western thought.

For all the “critical thinking” these elders claim young people lack, “critical thinking skills” without a grasp of first principles is called “sophistry” – the kind of smarts that proved to be the nemesis of Socrates’s philosophy.

This is the kind of thinking that has brought us a long series of patent offenses against Western Civilization – injuries to which the corrupt elders of our Athens have added the insult of calling them “defenses” of that civilization. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which soon led to youth-led mass protests against nuclear bombings, the use of unjust means against civilian targets in the Vietnamese War – also widely opposed by the young, the use of lies to drum up support for the Gulf War – decried by yet another youth movement. The list goes on, through the Iraq invasion under George W. Bush, the inhuman drone strikes that killed civilians in Yemen and Libya under Barack Obama, and, of course, Israel’s current genocide and today’s Iran War.

Far from a sudden heartless love of spiteful communism or Nazism, what moves young people today is what has moved young people from age to age since the time of Socrates: the supranatural law on which Western Civilization was founded: the law that scripture says is written on the human heart. A law that seems always to have the power in particular to give young people (they not yet having had the chance to become corrupted like so many denizens of Washington, D.C. are) a heartfelt hatred of dehumanizing violence.

But just as the foolish politicians of Athens preferred the thinking of the sophists, which could bend any truth against the public and toward the “public interest,” today’s Zionists and so-called “establishment” figures prefer the brand of “Western Civilization” to the real thing.

And they show that they’ve forgotten what the death of Socrates brought about: it changed the course of history – bending it against his enemies and toward justice. It’s from Socrates, together with his student Plato and his student’s student Aristotle, that we have inherited Western philosophy. Blended with Christian revelation, the Socratic tradition became the basis by which we applied the law revealed in Scripture to public life.

In short, those who today claim to be defending Western Civilization by attacking the moral instincts of the young are in fact attacking that civilization.

The Undoing of the Sophists

But in the end, it may be that the cloud of Zionist rhetoric today has a silver lining: It serves as a reminder that many of those who have held political sway during recent decades are woefully unschooled in the principles they now claim to champion, that it’s young people who carry those principles in their hearts, and that there is therefore reason to hope for Western Civilization to be carried forward and revived in the near future.

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Wait, I Thought We Won the War Already?

I was reliably informed by President Trump that we had defeated the Iranians and that this war would end swiftly. What's going on here?

by Nolan Denaro | Jul 23, 2026 | 

The Iran war was originally intended to be short. Due to the fast-paced news cycle, this fact has been forgotten by many. On February 28, 2026, when the U.S. and Israel officially launched their military campaign, the administration was expecting this war to last only weeks, and for the Iranian regime to fall rather quickly. President Trump told The New York Times that he intended for strikes on Iran to continue for “four to five weeks.”

That was on March 1, 2026. It is now July.

The sporadic timeline shifts have not deterred the administration’s attempts to portray the campaign as a massive success. We have heard dozens of times now from Donald Trump that we have won the war, and that it will be wrapping up shortly.

However, the words of Donald Trump don’t comport with the military realities.

All pain, no gain

If we look back at the stated objectives set by the administration for what they sought to achieve from this war, none of them have come to fruition.

The Iranian’s stockpile of missiles and drones have not been meaningfully diminished.

The Iranian’s enriched uranium stockpile has not been destroyed or removed from the country.

The IRGC has not been cut off from their network of proxies across the Middle East. We have seen this in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has managed to deal some significant blows to the IDF in the south of the country. The Iranians are also considering activating the Houthis in Yemen to cut off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, should U.S. strikes on Iranian infrastructure continue.

Regime change has also not occurred. The rhetoric coming from the White House at the beginning of this conflict described their intent to overthrow the IRGC and make room for “the people” to rise up and implement liberal democracy in its place.

Not only did this not happen, but by all accounts, this war has had the opposite effect. At the funeral of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the streets of Tehran were flooded with Iranian citizens pledging to defend their nation and avenge the death of their leader. We saw a “rally around the flag” effect, the predictable result of bombing major cities and killing government and religious leaders in foreign lands.

If the goal was to inspire an embrace of Americanism within Iran, this war has done the opposite.

Perhaps launching a war of aggression against a population and killing their religious leader isn’t the most effective way to make them embrace your influence over their society. Just a thought.

The biggest U.S. blunder has been seen in the Strait of Hormuz, where a waterway previously open to international transit has been shut down by the IRGC, putting a massive strain on the global energy market. By using missiles and drones to close the Strait, Iran has gained a major piece of leverage. They have the ability to hold 20% of the world’s energy supply hostage, inflicting tangible financial pain on U.S. consumers at the gas pump. This will also likely cause domestic political pain for Donald Trump and the Republican Party in this year’s midterm elections.

Military realities

From the very beginning of this war, reports began circulating that indicated the U.S. military was dangerously low on key munitions. Specifically, defense systems are in short supply, as many have been used up in Ukraine and Israel over the past few years.

On April 23, 2026, Jonathan Swan and Eric Schmitt reported for The New York Times:

“Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.

The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.”

In contrast, Iranians have not faced these same issues. According to reporting from The Washington Post on May 7, 2026, Iran “retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said.”

Similarly, The New York Times reported on May 12, 2026, that “Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.”

While America has relied on expensive missile defense systems throughout this war, Iran has been able to deliver serious damage to U.S. bases across the region and halt nearly all shipping in the Strait of Hormuz through the launching of cheap and quick-to-make drones and missiles.

Despite this concerning data, the Trump administration has remained committed to “finishing the job.” We are still yet to hear a consistent explanation regarding when this vague objective will have been achieved. To make matters even more confusing, as we are in the midst of a desperate escalation, we are still being told daily that Iran has been defeated, and this war is essentially over. If this were true, why would we need to escalate? Make it make sense.

Next steps?

Escalation seems, at least as of now, to be on the menu. This is the only path remaining for the unhinged minority, who truly seek to destroy the Iranian regime no matter the human and financial costs.

As a result, the global economy is once again in peril. Reporting has consistently shown that so long as Iran maintains their missile and drone capabilities, they will have the ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Simultaneously, the U.S. has made it clear that they intend to “liberate” the Strait and reestablish freedom of navigation.

However assertive and confident Donald Trump appears in press conferences or on Truth Social, his words alone cannot change the realities of this conflict. He can declare victory as many times as he wants, but it doesn’t make it so.

The only way this cycle can end with a glimmer of positivity is if he uses one of these victory declarations as a means to deescalate and end the war. Unfortunately, he is yet to show such wisdom.

Nolan Denaro is a political commentator, writer, libertarian, and host of “The Quest For Clarity” podcast on YouTube and Spotify. He writes opinion pieces on his Substack, and his work has been featured on Antiwar.com.