Veterans, Military Members, and Families Marched Against Fascism and War on July 4

In the largest veterans’ protest since the Vietnam era, 500 veterans, active-duty service members, and military families marched in Philadelphia against ICE, the occupation of American cities, the war on Iran, and threats to deploy troops at polling sites in November.


Hundreds of vets and military families marched through Philadelphia on the 250th anniversary of the United States, along with the People’s Parade, calling for common sense reforms on July 4, 2026 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
(Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for About Face: Veterans Against The War)

Gerry Condon
Jul 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

On the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, a coalition of more than 500 veterans, active-duty military members, and military families gathered in the birthplace of the nation to reject what they called the “Trump administration’s fascist vision for the country’s future.”

Undeterred by 101°F heat that forced the cancellation of the official Philadelphia parade, the coalition—About Face, 50501 Vets, Veterans For Peace, Common Defense, Military Families Speak Out, Fayetteville Resistance Coalition, and Center on Conscience and War—marched under the banner “Veterans Against Fascism.”

“We cannot continue the next 250 years as we have the last 250,” proclaimed About Face organizing director Rebecca Roberts, a 12-year veteran of the New Jersey National Guard who resigned her commission in protest of US foreign policy.

“Our neighbors are being kidnapped by ICE and put into concentration camps; VA, Medicaid, and SNAP—vital services—are being cut to instead fund war crimes abroad, and for troops to occupy cities like DC, Memphis, and New Orleans,” said Roberts.

“So who is with me?” asked Roberts, as she led attendees in a call-and-response, asking marchers to raise their fists if they demand:No Troops and No ICE in the Streets or at the Ballot Box.

An End to Endless Wars and War Crimes.

Divestment From War and Funding Communities at Home.

Roberts noted the march returned to the same ground where veterans and military families gathered 50 years ago, led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, to demand a country that took care of them as they suffered and healed from the wounds of war.

The Veterans Against Fascism coalition was the front contingent of the larger Peoples’ Parade, comprised of local Philadelphia groups and national groups such as the American Friends Service Committee, AFL-CIO Philadelphia Council, Juntos, and No ICE Philly. Over 1,000 people marched on July 4 in what the Peoples’ Parade called “an act of decisive opposition to the current state of American politics and material conditions, including mass deportation, forced displacement, climate crisis, and international war.”

Michael McPhearson, executive director of Veterans For Peace, invoked the Declaration of Independence signed 250 years ago in the same city:
On this anniversary, hundreds of veterans and military families have come to sound an alarm for democracy, as our national leaders ignore these basic truths, trample our rights, and treat us as subjects of the billionaire class, not as self-governing equals.

McPhearson reminded service members of “your duty to refuse illegal orders” and called on the public “to honor our service not with ‘thank yous’ but by organizing and acting to protect our elections and stop fascism.”
Largest Gathering of Service Members for Anti-War Protest since Vietnam

Hundreds of vets and military families marched through Philadelphia on the 250th anniversary of the United States, along with the People’s Parade, calling for common sense reforms on July 4, 2026 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for About Face: Veterans Against The War)

Among the marchers were at least a dozen currently-serving members of the US military, part of the Service Members’ Anti-War Contingent. Cam White of the Center on Conscience and War, marching alongside active-duty members of the Army, Marines, Air Force, and Navy, said:
There are more active duty troops at this protest than there have been in generations, because people in uniform today are waking up. Many service members are facing the greatest crisis of conscience that they have ever dealt with in their lives.

White reminded attendees that “service members do not take an oath to a president or a government; they take an oath to the Constitution. Troops have a duty to disobey unlawful orders.”

Maxine Rebeles, a Navy veteran and member of About Face and Common Defense, tied the march to her work with the No Border Wall Coalition and Frontera Federation in her hometown of Laredo, Texas, describing efforts to stop a border wall and river buoy obstructions that endanger riverfront communities’ only water source:
We’re watching militarized law enforcement like ICE and Border Patrol harass, intimidate, and outright murder people who were standing up for their neighbors. This is an alarm bell for the country. And we don’t intend to be quiet about it.

“The future does not belong to billionaires, it does not belong to bulldozers, and it does not belong to fear,” she said. “It belongs to our children, it belongs to our communities, and it belongs to us.”

Johnny Odom, a retired US Army Sergeant First Class, combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and member of Military Families Speak Out, spoke as the father of a service member currently deployed to Jordan since the start of the war with Iran.

“Today I stand here before all of you as a father... to denounce this illegal and unjustified war against the people of Iran and the mis-utilization of American forces without congressional approval and, most important, the people’s approval,” said Odom.

“In my multiple deployments, I honestly can’t tell you why we were in Iraq or Afghanistan or what we achieved other than violence and trauma. Now my son is repeating the cycle in Jordan, and it tears me up inside to think he is in harm’s way for no good reason.”

Odom called on veterans and military families to help “restore the standards and traditions that make this country truly unique,” warning:
We are at a crossroads. We can choose to build and fight for the country that we all deserve, or we can let a wealthy few steer us down a path of ruin.

Another participant, Savanna Rostad of Milwaukee, was full of praise for the marchers:
A key word I would use to define the July 4 Veterans Against Fascism march in Philadelphia is “care.” From the medic team who worked tirelessly in the heat to distribute water to the crowd, to the leaders who centered our collective voice around a message of unity and hope, everyone demonstrated care for each other and for our collective future. Witnessing this community in action redefined what nationhood means to me. I now feel a sense of meaning and belonging.

Gerry Condon
Gerry Condon is a Vietnam-era veteran and former president of Veterans For Peace.
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No Country on Earth Fully Respects Workers’ Rights, and It’s Getting Worse

By Pete Dolack

July 9, 2026

Source: Systemic Disorder

“Union Unity,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2024.

Class warfare continues to be waged incessantly. And that war’s offensives continue to be more intense. In just the past year, the world’s working people have seen more attacks on the rights of free speech and assembly, more attacks on civil liberties, more arrests and imprisonments, more refusals to engage in collective bargaining with unions and more technology used to monitor, discipline and silence workers.

None of this new, but it is getting worse. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has issued its 2026 Global Rights Index report, and has been the case in past years, the annual report makes for grim reading. Once again, no country on Earth fully protects workers’ rights.

In past years, there were only nine countries that met the qualifications for the best category, “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” That was the case for the 2023 and 2022 reports. This year? Only eight countries were found to be merely “sporadic violations of rights.” Those countries are Austria, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Uruguay, with Uruguay newly promoted to this level from a year ago.

Before we dip into the details, the larger picture is alarming. And the advanced capitalist countries, you won’t be surprised to know, are no exceptions. “In Europe and the Americas, workers’ rights are suffering an alarming decline. Both regions registered their worst average country rating since the Index began in 2014, and the increasing influence of the far right is putting workers and unions at risk in countries such as Argentina and France – two out of four countries to be downgraded in 2026,” the ITUC said in its report. Nor are the reasons behind these developments a mystery. “This year’s results reinforce the ITUC’s view that we are witnessing a global erosion of democratic principles – a ‘billionaire coup against democracy’ – funded by the rich and delivered by far-right and authoritarian leaders,” the report said. “As a snapshot of the violations of workers’ rights, the 2026 Index exposes a pattern that the powerful would rather keep hidden: the systematic weakening of democracy through attacks on workers, unions and collective bargaining. From repression of strikes to the erosion of legal protections and the criminalisation of unions, these are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy to silence dissent and entrench inequality.”

Fully half of the world’s national governments launched attacks on the rights to free speech and assembly, and half also arrested or detained workers, the highest total yet. Workers in three-quarters of the world’s countries had their right to union organizing impeded, also a record high, and 80 percent of countries restricted the right to collectively bargain. Worse still, 87 percent of countries violated the right to strike.

For the past decade, the number of countries that exclude workers from the right to establish or join a union, that violate the right to collective bargaining, that violate the right to strike, that arbitrarily arrest and detain trade union members, and that deny or constrain freedom of speech and assembly have all risen.

The global rise of hard right governments has gone hand-in-hand with the deterioration of workers’ rights. Argentina, where President Javier Milei has carried out his promise to impose the harshest variety of austerity that he can get away with, achieved the unprecedented “accomplishment” of falling in the ratings for two consecutive years. Argentina is now classified in the ITUC survey as a 5 rating, the worst category, representing the worst offenders where workers “have effectively no access to rights.” The ITUC lists Argentina has one of the world’s ten worst. “Milei has led a staunchly anti-union agenda since coming to power in 2023, undermining basic workers’ rights, civil liberties and union activity,” the Confederation reports. “Workers and unionists face systematic abuse and the shrinking of civic space. … Union offices, including the headquarters of the glassworkers’ union, were infiltrated and vandalised.” High union officials have fled the country after a police roundup. “Employers in Argentina engage in union busting and exploitative practices with impunity,” the report concludes.

In France, which also saw its rating decline, there is a “sustained deterioration of workers’ rights, an increasingly hostile political atmosphere, and incrementally regressive government policy since nationwide protests against pension reform deeply shook the political landscape in 2023.” Furthermore, in an atmosphere of the government attempting to impose regressive labor policies, “more than 1,000 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) activists have fallen foul of state and employer crackdowns and a spate of violent attacks by far-right groups.”

And what of the two countries that love to claim their defense of democracy is unwavering and endlessly point fingers at other countries? The United Kingdom was rated as a “regular violator of rights,” a ranking of 3, the middle of the five categories. That was actually an improvement from a year earlier, with the ITUC crediting the outgoing Starmer administration for “repeal[ing] excessive restrictions to industrial action introduced in the previous Conservative government’s 2016 Trade Union Act.” And the United States? Once again given a rating of 4, the category for countries that have “systematic violations of rights,” the second worst ranking.

“In 2025, Trump stripped collective bargaining rights from more than a million federal workers across more than 30 agencies — perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history,” the report said. “The move, reserved in the past for emergencies, was portrayed by the Republican administration as being in the interest of national security. It means entire departments, such as the Departments of State and Justice, and even the Food and Drug Administration, are excluded from this basic right.” The ITUC also cited Trump leaving the federal labor arbitration body, the National Labor Relations Board, without a quorum so that no cases brought by unions can be heard, as well as imposing an intimidating environment for immigrant workers, the excessive force used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and arbitrary arrests of union leaders. “The harm caused by these militarised enforcement practices extends well beyond these high-profile cases, as hundreds of other workers and trade unionists have been arrested and deported or detained in life-threatening conditions without charges or due process,” the report said.

The Global Rights Index ranks the world’s countries from 1 to 5, with 1 the best category, denoting “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” Those are the aforementioned eight countries. (These are green on the report’s maps.)

Rating 2 countries are those with “repeated violations of rights,” defined as where “Certain rights have come under repeated attacks by governments and/or companies and have undermined the struggle for better working conditions.” Countries with this rating include Australia, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. (These are yellow on the report’s maps.)

Rating 3 countries are those with “regular violations of rights,” defined as where “Governments and/or companies are regularly interfering in collective labour rights or are failing to fully guarantee important aspects of these rights” due to legal deficiencies “which make frequent violations possible.” Countries with this rating include Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Mexico, South Africa and Switzerland. (These are light orange on the report’s maps.)

Rating 4 countries are those with “systematic violations of rights,” defined as where “The government and/or companies are engaged in serious efforts to crush the collective voice of workers, putting fundamental rights under threat.” Countries with this rating include Brazil, Greece, Israel, Peru, the United States and Vietnam. (These are dark orange on the report’s maps.)

Rating 5 countries are those with “no guarantees of rights,” defined as where “workers have effectively no access to these rights [spelled out in legislation] and are therefore exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices.” Countries with this rating include Argentina, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. (These are red on the report’s maps.) In addition, there are countries with a 5+ rating, those with “No guarantee of rights due to the breakdown of the rule of law.” The dozen countries listed here include Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen.

The ITUC determines its ratings by checking adherence to a list of 97 standards derived from International Labour Organization conventions. Those 97 standards pertain to civil liberties, the right to establish or join unions, trade union activities, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike. As a self-described confederation of national trade union centers, it says it represents 191 million workers in 169 countries and has 340 national affiliates.

Outside the scope of the International Trade Union Confederation’s report is the ability of workers to even have a job. Unemployment statistics notoriously greatly understate the number of people out of work and ignore altogether those with part-time work who need a full-time job. Even those lesser known statistics, such as such as the U-6 in the United States and R8 in Canada, that reveal higher numbers because of a more expansive definition of counting unemployment than the standard measures, undercount. One estimate of the true rate of un- and under-employment is 24.3 percent, calculated by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity. The International Labour Organization estimates that 2.1 billion workers are employed informally, far fewer than those with regular work. The ILO notes that “Informality is typically associated with lower job quality due to limited access to social protection, rights at work, workplace safety and job security.” And all this at a time when the gigantic sums of money shoveled into the pockets of billionaires and other capitalists is so high that there is not enough outlet for investment or other productive use, and instead the money is shoveled into financial speculation — the volume of trading in currency (foreign exchange), stocks, bonds and their derivatives exceeds the size of the global economy in 10 business days.

As we yet again have cause to note, class warfare is intensifying and remains decisively one-sided. For how long?

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This article was originally published by Systemic Disorder; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Pete Dolack

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet, and photographer. He has been involved in various activist organizations, including Trade Justice New York Metro, National People’s Campaign, and New York Workers Against Fascism, among others. He has authored the books "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future and "What Do We Need Bosses For: Toward Economic Democracy," which analyzes past and present efforts to establish systems of economic democracy on a national or society-wide basis. He authored the book "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future.

How Unions Pave the Way to the American Dream

By Roxanne D. Brown

July 9, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

The vote was a key test of whether the UAW could springboard the Stand-Up Strike gains into new organizing. The union narrowly lost previous drives here in 2014 and 2019. Photo: Central Labor Council of Tennessee

Marcelo Assis recalled how his family arrived in the United States about 35 years ago, “poor as hell”—yet certain that America offered the path forward that they’d never find in their native Brazil or anywhere else.

The following years brought ups and downs, with Marcelo serving as a combat medic in the Army and then falling disillusioned with low-paying nonunion work that held him back instead of helping him move ahead.

But Marcelo ultimately landed back-to-back union jobs that catapulted him into the middle class and firmly anchored him there. Just as he clearly recalls his arrival in this country, Marcelo vividly remembers the moment years later when he looked around his newly purchased home, thought about the good life he provided to his family, and realized for the first time that he’d made it.

“This is the American dream,” he said to himself.

Marcelo’s experience shows how unions pave the way to a brighter future. That’s true even now—a time when the majority of working people feel as though the American dream has slipped out of reach because of rampant economic inequality, skyrocketing costs, and the callous indifference of the greedy rich.

In all, nearly 70 percent of Americans no longer see the country promising mobility or financial security to those who work hard and strive to get ahead, according to a January 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll.

A separate survey, conducted in conjunction with the nation’s 250th birthday by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that half of respondents lost faith in the American dream. Many see America working for the wealthy, not people like them.

But Marcelo, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 12000 and a mechanic at Southern Connecticut Gas, will be the first to say it doesn’t have to be this way. After helping him fulfill the American dream, the union now enables him to hold on to it.

A USW contract provides Marcelo with the good wages he needs to ride out Donald Trump’s inflationary economy, including the runaway costs of groceries, utilities, and house insurance. It affords him retirement security even as Republicans threaten to cut lifelines for the elderly.

The contract delivers quality, employer-sponsored health care, while more and more Americans today have no choice but to put off doctor’s visits or treatments because of the spiraling costs.

“There’s the stability of knowing you have benefits,” Marcelo said of the contract, which he and his coworkers negotiated. “You don’t have to worry.”

This is all fabulous. But it isn’t unique.

Union members across the country make significantly more money than their non-union peers. They’re also more likely to have family leave, paid time off, and work-life balance. This all adds up to cars in the garage, summer vacations, and sports leagues for the kids, along with all of the other pluses that make life worth living.

This is what independence looks like. Marcelo simply calls it the “union life.”

There’s more.

Because unions provide a voice on wages, safety, and other issues, they empower workers at a moment when a depressing sense of helplessness haunts many other Americans.

Union members also forge a bond that transcends the shop floor. Everyone looks out for everybody else, and that’s a formidable counterweight to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation also plaguing the country right now.

Even better, this shared identity galvanizes union members to fight together for the greater good and to assert an ownership stake in their communities, often through the kind of volunteer work and political advocacy that Local 12000 members do.

“Doing it together makes it a much easier climb than doing it by myself,” Marcelo said of the solidarity uniting hundreds of his coworkers.

It’s a message that’s resonating with the growing number of workers weary of working their tails off, only to fall further behind while the rich get richer.

Polls show record levels of support for unions, and workers in every part of the country are joining them to take the future into their own hands.

The American dream endures. We just have to stand together to claim it.Email

Roxanne D. Brown

Roxanne D. Brown is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Identity, Religion, Nationalism, And Political Mobilization In The Middle East – Analysis

July 8, 2026 
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Key Takeaways

Identity Politics in the Middle East is Fluid and Instrumentalised — Nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender are not fixed but continuously renegotiated by state and non-state actors depending on power, legitimacy, and political opportunity.

Modern Constructs Meet Deep Cultural Repertoires — While Arab nationalism and state borders were modern inventions (shaped by colonialism and print capitalism), they draw on pre-existing ethnic, religious, and symbolic resources that give them strong affective power.

No Single Identity Dominates — Secular Arab nationalism declined after 1967, Islamism rose then adapted, and sectarian/ethnic identities persist — all are strategically mobilised rather than primordial, with outcomes shaped by context and elite competition.

Introduction

The politics of identity—encompassing nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender—provides the affective and normative fuel of political mobilisation across all regime types, and its comparative analysis has generated some of the most vibrant and contested debates in the discipline. Nationalism, as the ideological claim that the legitimate unit of political authority is the nation, was analysed by Anderson (1983/2006) as the product of particular conditions of modernity—print capitalism, vernacular standardisation, and the displacement of religious cosmologies—rather than as the natural political expression of pre-existing primordial communities. Gellner’s (1983) structural account, which derived nationalism from the homogenising cultural demands of industrial society, and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) constructivist emphasis on the ‘invention of tradition’ converge on the insight that national identities, however experienced as ancient and organic, are modern political constructions whose genealogies are contingent and recoverable.

The Middle East, however, poses a set of complications for this modernist consensus that make it an especially productive terrain for comparative analysis. First, the region’s national boundaries were substantially the product of external imperial cartography—the Sykes-Picot arrangement and the League of Nations mandate system—such that the ‘nation’ frequently postdated, rather than preceded, the state (Hourani, 1991; Fromkin, 1989). Second, Islam supplies a transnational normative vocabulary—the umma, the caliphate, sharī’a—that both antedates and persistently competes with the territorial nation-state as a locus of ultimate political loyalty (Piscatori, 1986; Zubaida, 1993). Third, ethnic and sectarian cleavages—Kurdish, Amazigh, Shi’a, Sunni, Christian, and others—cross-cut and often subvert the nationalist project, producing what Makdisi (2000) termed ‘the culture of sectarianism’ as a durable political technology rather than a residue of primordial hatred. This essay argues that political mobilisation in the Middle East is best understood not as the triumph of one axis of identity over the others but as a continuous, historically contingent renegotiation among nationalist, religious, ethnic, class, and gendered idioms of solidarity, each instrumentalised by state and non-state actors according to shifting configurations of legitimacy and power (Barnett, 1998; Telhami & Barnett, 2002).

Theorising Nationalism: Modernism, Ethno-Symbolism, and Their Limits

The modernist paradigm associated with Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm (1990) treats the nation as an artefact of capitalism, bureaucratic rationalisation, and mass literacy. Anderson’s (1983/2006) concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’—imagined because its members will never know most of their fellow-nationals yet nonetheless perceive a horizontal fraternity—rests on the technological precondition of print capitalism, which standardised vernacular languages and created the simultaneity of experience that national consciousness requires. Gellner (1983) located the causal mechanism instead in the functional requirements of industrial society, which demands a culturally homogeneous, literate workforce mobile across an anonymous labour market; nationalism, in this reading, is the political roof that industrialism requires. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) edited volume complements both accounts by demonstrating empirically how ostensibly ancient traditions—kilts, coronations, civic rituals—were frequently fabricated in the nineteenth century to manufacture the historical depth that new political communities required (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).


Against this modernist current, Smith (1986, 1991) advanced an ethno-symbolist corrective, arguing that modern nations, whatever their political novelty, typically crystallise around pre-existing ethnies—named human populations with shared ancestry myths, historical memories, and cultural markers—such that nationalism’s ideological work is one of reinterpretation and mobilisation rather than pure invention. Connor (1994) pressed a related point about the affective, quasi-kinship character of national feeling, cautioning that instrumentalist accounts of nationalism-as-elite-manipulation understate the visceral force such identities exert once activated. The Middle Eastern cases discussed below vindicate elements of both positions: Arab nationalism’s ideologues self-consciously constructed a modern qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) using print media and party organisation in a manner consistent with Anderson and Gellner, yet they did so by reworking pre-existing linguistic, tribal, and religious materials whose symbolic resonance—per Smith and Connor—could not simply be manufactured ex nihilo (Dawisha, 2003; Choueiri, 2000). The analytical task, then, is not to adjudicate definitively between constructivist and ethno-symbolist positions but to trace how political entrepreneurs mobilise available cultural repertoires under specific structural constraints (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).
Religion and the Nation-State: A Structural Tension

A second complication specific to the Middle East concerns the relationship between religion and the nationalist project. Piscatori (1986) demonstrated that Islamic political thought has historically resisted full assimilation into the Westphalian logic of territorially bounded, mutually exclusive sovereignties, since the umma is conceived as a single moral-political community transcending ethnic and territorial particularism. Zubaida (1993) extended this analysis by showing how modern Middle Eastern states have nonetheless successfully appropriated Islamic symbolism in the service of territorial nationalism—Egyptian, Moroccan, and Saudi state Islam each construct a nationally bounded religious authority that domesticates the universalist claims of the umma. Ayubi (1991) characterised this appropriation as constitutive of what he called ‘the over-stated’ Arab state: a state apparatus strong in coercive and symbolic reach yet weak in autonomous legitimacy, compelled continuously to borrow religious authority to compensate for thin nationalist consensus.

Halliday (2000) usefully disaggregated the analytic confusion that often attends discussions of ‘religious nationalism’ in the region, distinguishing between religion as a marker of communal boundary (a functional equivalent of ethnicity), religion as a totalising political ideology (Islamism proper), and religion as a legitimating discourse instrumentalised by incumbent states. These are analytically distinct even though empirically entangled: Ba’athist Syria’s minority-inflected Alawite leadership deployed a studiously secular Arab nationalist idiom precisely because sectarian identity could not supply legitimating universality (Batatu, 1999), whereas Saudi Arabia’s ruling family fused dynastic nationalism with Wahhabi religious authority from the state’s founding (Al-Rasheed, 2010). The variation across cases confirms Barnett’s (1998) broader point that Arab and Middle Eastern politics unfold within a shared normative field—pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, sovereignty—whose meaning is nonetheless perpetually contested and redeployed by rival elites for domestic and regional advantage (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).

Arab Nationalism and Its Vicissitudes

Arab nationalism (qawmiyya) emerged in the late Ottoman period among Christian and Muslim intellectuals of the Levant who sought, per Anderson’s (1983/2006) model, to construct a horizontal fraternity transcending confessional and dynastic loyalty through a shared Arabic print culture (Hourani, 1991; Dawisha, 2003). Its interwar and post-independence apotheosis under Nasserism and Ba’athism reworked this cultural nationalism into a state-centred ideology of anti-imperial liberation, non-alignment, and Arab unity, most spectacularly embodied in the short-lived United Arab Republic (Choueiri, 2000). Yet as Ajami (1978) diagnosed with prescient bitterness, pan-Arab nationalism’s normative claim—that the Arab nation, not the individual territorial state, constituted the legitimate unit of sovereignty—generated a persistent legitimacy deficit for the very states that invoked it, since qutriyya (territorial patriotism) and qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) pointed in mutually undermining directions.

The 1967 defeat is conventionally treated as the watershed moment in this ideology’s decline (Ajami, 1978; Kerr, 1971), discrediting the secular nationalist regimes’ claim to have mastered the instruments of modern statecraft and creating the ideational vacuum into which Islamist movements would later expand (Kepel, 2002). Batatu’s (1999) monumental study of Syria demonstrates how, even as pan-Arab rhetoric persisted, Ba’athist power became increasingly captured by minority-sectarian and rural class networks, such that official nationalist ideology functioned less as a description of the regime’s social base than as a legitimating veneer over what was, in practice, an exclusionary patrimonial order—an early instance of the instrumentalisation dynamic elaborated below (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).

The Islamist Alternative: Religion as Mobilising Ideology

The eclipse of secular pan-Arabism created the political opening that Islamist movements—the Muslim Brotherhood chief among them—were organisationally and ideologically positioned to exploit (Kepel, 2002; Wickham, 2002). Wickham’s (2002) ethnographic study of Egyptian Islamist activism reframes mobilisation theory itself: rather than treating Islamism as a spontaneous outpouring of religious sentiment, she demonstrates how movements like the Muslim Brotherhood built dense networks of social provision, professional syndicates, and moral community that functioned as parallel infrastructures of solidarity where the state had retreated under structural adjustment. Ismail (2003) similarly emphasised the everyday, associational, and disciplinary dimensions of Islamist politics—mosque study circles, dress codes, neighbourhood surveillance of moral conduct—arguing that Islamism’s political effectiveness lay as much in its capacity to reshape the texture of daily life as in its formal ideological claims.

Roy’s (1994) comparative analysis complicated any triumphalist reading of political Islam’s ascendancy, arguing that Islamism as a totalising revolutionary project—aiming at the wholesale Islamisation of state and society—had substantively failed by the 1990s even as ‘neo-fundamentalism,’ a more socially conservative, depoliticised piety movement, continued to expand. This distinction proved analytically prescient: the subsequent trajectories of Islamist parties after 2011, from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s brief and calamitous experience of incumbency to Tunisia’s Ennahda’s pragmatic accommodation with pluralist competition (Cavatorta & Merone, 2015), illustrate the instability of Islamism’s relationship to formal state power, in contrast to its comparatively greater durability as a social and associational force. Kandiyoti’s (1991) work on gender and Kepel’s (2002) transnational history of jihadist trajectories further indicate that Islamist mobilisation itself fractured along multiple axes—reformist versus revolutionary, quietist versus militant, nationally bounded versus transnational—undermining any monolithic characterisation of ‘political Islam’ as a single actor or ideology.

Sectarianism, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Fragmentation

Where Arab nationalism and Islamism each aspired, in different registers, to transcend sub-national particularism, a third body of scholarship has examined how ethnic and sectarian identities have been actively produced and instrumentalised as bases of political mobilisation rather than surviving as inert pre-modern residues. Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism is foundational here: he shows that the very category of a fixed, politically salient sectarian identity was itself a product of nineteenth-century Ottoman reform and European intervention, which recast a more fluid social order into administratively legible confessional communities—an argument structurally parallel to Anderson’s (1983/2006) and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) treatment of nationalism as constructed rather than primordial. Salloukh et al. (2015) extended this analysis to contemporary Lebanon, arguing that the post-civil-war confessional power-sharing arrangement did not merely reflect sectarian identity but actively reproduced and hardened it, since political elites’ access to patronage resources depends on the perpetuation of confessional voting blocs—an instance of what Cammett (2014) termed ‘compassionate communalism,’ whereby sectarian parties furnish welfare goods in ways that entrench, rather than dissolve, communal boundaries (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).


Comparable dynamics obtain for ethnic mobilisation more broadly. Kurdish nationalism, straddling Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, illustrates Brubaker’s (1996) argument that nationalism is best conceptualised not as the property of bounded groups but as a relational, contingent ‘nationalising’ practice pursued by state elites, homeland minorities, and external patrons in dynamic triadic interaction; Kurdish mobilisation has accordingly taken sharply divergent institutional forms—armed insurgency in Turkey, federal autonomy in Iraq, and localised self-administration in Syria—depending on the specific configuration of state strategy and external alliance in each context (McDowall, 2004; Romano, 2006). Amazigh (Berber) mobilisation in North Africa presents a further variant: rather than seeking territorial secession, Amazigh movements in Morocco and Algeria have pursued cultural and linguistic recognition within the existing nation-state, contesting the Arabo-Islamic monopoly on official national identity while working through, rather than against, state institutions (Maddy-Weitzman, 2011; Silverstein & Crawford, 2004). This variation across the Kurdish and Amazigh cases underscores that ethnic mobilisation, no less than religious or nationalist mobilisation, is shaped by the political opportunity structures within which it operates rather than by the intrinsic content of ethnic grievance alone (Wimmer, 2013).
Class, Gender, and the Intersectional Terrain of Identity Politics

Identity politics in the Middle East cannot be reduced to nationalism, religion, and ethnicity alone; class and gender constitute intersecting axes that mediate how the former are experienced and mobilised. Batatu’s (1999) analysis of Syria already demonstrated the inseparability of sectarian and class dynamics, as rural, minority-sect officers used the vehicle of Ba’athist party organisation to displace an urban Sunni landholding elite—sectarian mobilisation, in this instance, cannot be understood independently of the class realignment it accomplished. Bayat’s (2010) concept of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ similarly reframes subaltern class politics in the region away from formal movements and towards incremental, informal appropriations of urban space and resources by the poor, a mode of mobilisation that operates beneath, rather than through, the nationalist or religious idioms more commonly studied.


Gender constitutes an equally constitutive axis. Kandiyoti’s (1991) edited collection demonstrated that nationalist and Islamist projects alike have relied on the regulation of women’s bodies, dress, and family status law as a primary terrain upon which competing visions of authentic national or religious identity are enacted and contested—the female body functions, in this literature, as a privileged symbolic site onto which anxieties about modernity, authenticity, and communal boundary are projected. Moghadam’s (1993) comparative study extended this argument by tracing how state-led modernisation projects across Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere instrumentalised women’s legal and social status as an index of national progress, only for subsequent Islamist reactions to reverse these very reforms as a means of repudiating a discredited secular-nationalist order. Joseph’s (2000) concept of ‘relational rights’—wherein legal and political personhood in much of the region is mediated through kinship and confessional status rather than direct individual citizenship—further demonstrates how gender, sect, and nationality are structurally co-constituted within the region’s legal and political architecture rather than analytically separable variables (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).
Authoritarian Durability and the Instrumentalisation of Identity

A final dimension concerns the relationship between identity politics and the durability of authoritarian rule that long characterised, and in most cases still characterises, the region. Bellin’s (2004) influential ‘robustness of authoritarianism’ thesis located regime durability primarily in the coercive apparatus’s institutional cohesion and willingness to repress, but subsequent scholarship has argued that coercive capacity alone cannot explain variation in regime survival without attention to how identity cleavages are managed. Anderson (1991) had earlier shown that Middle Eastern monarchies in particular derived resilience from dynastic and tribal legitimating formulas unavailable to republican regimes, which were correspondingly more reliant on the nationalist and populist legitimation whose 1967 collapse Ajami (1978) diagnosed. Brownlee’s (2007) comparative analysis of party institutionalisation similarly demonstrated that regimes which successfully channelled elite competition through ruling-party structures—again frequently articulated through nationalist or religious idiom—proved more durable than those relying on coercion alone (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).

Lynch’s (2006) study of the post-2000 Arab public sphere added a further dimension: the proliferation of satellite television and, later, social media created a transnational discursive space in which pan-Arab identity was reactivated—now channelled through networks like Al Jazeera rather than Nasserist state broadcasting—generating new forms of mobilisation, most consequentially during the 2011 uprisings, that cut across the boundaries of individual authoritarian states even as those states’ formal identity-management strategies remained nationally bounded (Lynch, 2012). The uprisings themselves, and their profoundly divergent outcomes—democratic transition in Tunisia, military restoration in Egypt, state collapse in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—confirm that identity mobilisation is neither uniformly liberalising nor uniformly authoritarian in its effects; rather, as Barnett (1998) and Telhami and Barnett (2002) argued in advance of these events, the political consequences of identity mobilisation depend on the specific institutional and coalitional context into which mobilised sentiment is channelled, not on the intrinsic content of the identity invoked (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).

Conclusion

The comparative study of identity politics in the Middle East vindicates the modernist premise, shared by Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), that nationalism and its cognate identity formations are historically contingent constructions rather than primordial essences—a premise borne out empirically by Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism, Batatu’s (1999) account of Syrian Ba’athism, and Dawisha’s (2003) history of Arab nationalism’s rise and decline. Yet the region’s experience equally illustrates the limits of a purely constructivist account: religious, ethnic, and communal identities, once activated by political entrepreneurs, acquire an affective density and institutional entrenchment—through confessional power-sharing, welfare provision, and associational life—that render them resistant to unmaking even after the political conditions that produced them have changed, a durability closer to Smith’s (1986) and Connor’s (1994) ethno-symbolist emphasis (Chtatou, 2022, January 11). The overarching lesson for comparative politics is that nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender in the Middle East are not competing, mutually exclusive vectors of political mobilisation but a continuously reconfigured repertoire, whose relative salience at any moment reflects the shifting strategic calculations of state and non-state actors operating within specific, historically produced structures of opportunity and constraint (Barnett, 1998; Wimmer, 2013).


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About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.

View all posts by Dr. Mohamed Chtatou →

Sulfur-Laden Bulkers Face Corrosion Threat After Hormuz Delays

A stockpile of raw elemental sulfur at a refinery (P. Wei / iStock)

Published Jul 6, 2026 6:32 PM by The Maritime Executive

The Gulf states are some of the world's most prolific exporters of raw sulfur, the core ingredient for sulfuric acid, the world's most-produced industrial chemical. The region's energy industry enables the trade by putting out an abundance of raw sulfur: when sulfurous Mideast gas and oil are processed, large quantities of the substance are dumped out as a byproduct, then loaded onto bulkers and shipped to industrial end-users. But there is a hitch, according to maritime consultancy Brookes Bell - the Hormuz crisis has delayed many of those bulkers well past the safe time limit for storing sulfur in a steel hold, exposing ships to risk of severe and rapid corrosion. 

The consultancy's head of non-destructive testing, Arron Jackaman, is encouraging shipowners and insurers to begin looking closely at any bulkers that have been stuck in the hot, humid Gulf with a load of sulfur for the past two months. The sooner the inspection process begins, he says, the lower the likelihood of damage and high costs for repairs - which often require cropping and replacement of the hold's plating.   

The process of safely shipping sulfur usually begins with a limewash coating. The hold is cleaned of any prior cargo's residues, then a fresh barrier coating of lime wash is applied to the hold's surfaces. The lime counteracts the natural formation of sulfuric acid from raw sulfur, slowing down - but not stopping - the process of corrosion. But the wash isn't effective forever: it is generally considered acceptable for up to 20 days, after which accelerated corrosion begins. Moisture and sulfur mixed together lead to the inevitable formation of an acidic environment, turning steel  into iron sulfide in rapid progression - swiftly causing heavy pitting in local areas. The rate of attack is far faster than ordinary saltwater corrosion, and far more aggressive; entire ships have been declared a total loss due to sulfur-driven corrosion in the past, according to vendor RBM. 

Some of the vessels stuck in the Gulf because of the Hormuz crisis have been there for three times as long as the rated protective time of a limewash application. "That protection has long since been exhausted," says Jackaman. His firm has found pitting of up to a quarter of an inch deep in as little as 50 days - enough wastage to blow through the sacrificial corrosion allowance for tank top plating, bulkhead stools and sloping hopper plating under IACS' Common Structural Rules. 

But the appearance of sulfur-driven pitting is often worse than the actual impact on the steel, Jackaman says, and visual assessment can be inaccurate. 

"Localized pitting tends to concentrate at points where grab discharge equipment has broken the coating barrier, and on cargo hold tank top plating, which is left uncoated by design. Without correct measurements and quantitative assessment, there is a significant risk that steel within class limits is condemned unnecessarily," he says. 

Iran Resumes Attacks on Merchant Shipping With Strike on LNG Carrier

NASA file image

Published Jul 6, 2026 11:58 PM by The Maritime Executive

Iran's military forces have once again opened fire on merchant shipping in the Strait of Hormuz in a renewed push to dominate control of the waterway's traffic, according to multiple maritime security sources. 

The UKMTO has confirmed that one tanker was hit by an unknown projectile on Monday night at about 2100 hours UTC. The incident occurred east of the Musandam Peninsula, off the small port of Limah. However, the maritime security agency has not confirmed the vessel's name. Security consultancy Vanguard Tech reports that the attack caused a fire, which has since been put out. 

Iranian state broadcaster IRIB confirmed one attack on one tanker, and said that it was attacked after "repeated warnings."

According to Martin Kelly of EOS Risk Group, the vessel was the laden LNG carrier Al Rekayyat (IMO 9397339). Bloomberg has confirmed this report with multiple shipping sources. LNG carrier attacks carry a risk of extreme fires if a munition breaches a cargo tank, a rare event that occurred earlier this year in the attack on the LNGC Arctic Metagaz.

Kelly suggested that a second attack occurred, targeting a ULCC in laden condition. He predicted that the U.S. would launch retaliatory strikes in response, as in past cycles of escalation.

"Iran is making another push to direct all Hormuz traffic to its shipping lanes, away from the Omani side," said Bloomberg commodity analyst Javier Blas in a social media post. "Part of its plan seems, too, allowing multiple Japanese ships to cross: yesterday six Japanese oil tankers crossed, and two more are crossing today."

Regime-aligned social media account Dolfiniran confirmed early Tuesday that Iran has intensified its campaign of military pressure to "monopolize passage through the Strait of Hormuz." The account reiterated Iran's interpretation of the recently-agreed White House ceasefire deal: from Tehran's perspective, the MOU requires Iran to facilitate free and unobstructed passage for shipping - but only through Iran's shipping lane, not the Omani lane. 

"Iran's commitment is solely to opening the Strait of Hormuz by implementing Iranian arrangements, which are now being implemented, including the designation of the route. Iran will accept no form of compromise regarding the Strait of Hormuz," Dolfiniran suggested. 

Shipping interests appear to be reacting to the renewed threat, at least based upon AIS-visible transit data. "The inbound tanker flows have slowed to a trickle and with the latest attack from IRGC using missiles (previously drones), the situation appears to be escalating," wrote contrarian investment outfit HFI Research. "From a flow standpoint, inbound tanker rate is insufficient to change the production shut-in math."

The new disruption comes just as tanker traffic through the strait was beginning to find its footing again. Over July 4-5, Windward counted nearly 80 transits in and out of the waterway - about two-thirds of pre-conflict volumes. 

Crooked Donald and the Strait of Hormuz

By Tom Engelhardt

July 4, 2026

Source: Tom Englehardt

Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr

It will soon be the 250th anniversary of this country and the Trump administration is already planning its own set of celebrations. In that context, let me be as straightforward as I can: amid his latest war (or do I mean peace?), there’s nothing strait about President Donald J. Trump, despite his recent bombing attacks around the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, his assault on Iran has been about as crooked as you can get, but all too sadly, not as crooked as Donald Trump and his pals (including, of course, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth) might still prove to be.

Let me start, though, by saying this: before he suddenly attacked Iran, more or less out of the blue, none of us would have had the faintest idea (including possibly him) that he might do so. And, of course, given the size and military power of the two countries, if you had paid no attention to American history since the Korean War began in 1950, you might (like “our” president) have imagined that, should he launch an attack on Iran, victory would be a given or at least a more than reasonable probability. As has indeed been true, however, since that war in Korea ended in a victoryless fashion in 1953, no such luck — not for the United States of America anyway — not even, I would bet, if he does convince Congress to increase the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) a year.

And as for his full-scale air assault on Iran, as David Faris put it recently at the Nation magazine, it’s turned out to be “a long-overdue Waterloo for America’s decades-long project to topple the Iranian theocracy or force it to its knees.” A Waterloo indeed! And that, of course, makes Donald Trump the world’s strangest modern version of Napoleon Bonaparte. If only he could be exiled to the island of Elba (though, of course, that didn’t work out too well the last time, did it?) or, since I’m not picky, perhaps Long Island, not so far from the city where he was born.

And here’s the truly strange thing in the United States of America in 2026: none of us know what President Donald J. Trump will do two hours, no less two days, two weeks, or (yes, he’ll probably still be president!) two years from now — not even, I’m quite sure, him. And of course, there’s a simple enough reason for that. Donald Trump is a first-class mystery — even, undoubtedly, to himself. And so, while he and his crew have certainly issued militarized threats against both Cuba (”Make a deal before it’s too late”) and Greenland (“One way or another, we’re gonna get it”), that doesn’t faintly mean that those are the places he’s going to face off against and possibly attack next (as he did Iran).

Now, given his record the second time around, he’s not just a war president but PW or President War. And, of course, no one, including him, really knows what he might do next when it comes to this country’s war docket or just about anything else.

The other day, though, it crossed my mind that perhaps, if Iran doesn’t flare up too many times and manage to take the global economy down with it (proving to be a classic Trumpian version of that TV series of his childhood and mine, Victory — or, these days, of course, Defeat — at Sea), and he has a little time on his hands, maybe he might like to take us back to where it all began after September 11, 2001, and launch a new war against Afghanistan. I mean, why not change the subject, especially given how badly Iran has gone for him and the possibility of a war-induced global recession (among other things)?

And what could be a better change of subject than to return to the days after 9/11 by sending the U.S. military back into Afghanistan? I mean, honestly, what could possibly go wrong?

Now, of course, I admit that that’s a completely weird, off-the-wall prediction about our already all-too-strange Trumpian future, especially since, to give him full credit, he did begin the final American military withdrawal from Afghanistan before his first term in office ended (when he was, of course, a different Trump). But hey, why not? Or maybe he’ll just pull a Nicolás Maduro and try to kidnap Afghanistan’s Supreme Leader. (Wouldn’t having the two of them in the same jail cell in Brooklyn be cool?)

And by the way, let’s not forget that at any moment Donald Trump might also go back to war with Iran. Yes, it could certainly happen… or not, which is what you could say about almost anything having to do with him as president.

The thing about Donald Trump is you simply never know… and oh, while I was writing that sentence, I noticed this, in what then was the Guardian‘s latest piece of reporting on Iran: “Iranian negotiators have suspended high-stakes talks with the US in Switzerland in protest at a stream of threats issued by Donald Trump to bomb Iran, and even to kidnap the Iranian negotiating team unless the strait of Hormuz is reopened” or as the president of the United States so charmingly put it then, “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.” (Of course, he’s also been threatening to blockade the Strait himself or to put all-American tolls on it. But that’s him for you. Nothing he ever says is the final word, not when Donald J. Trump is speaking.)

And give him credit for bluntness, too. Of course, by the time this piece actually comes out, all of the above will undoubtedly be ancient history and who knows where we’ll be, or rather where he’ll be taking us?

In short, on the 250th birthday of this country, he’s distinctly planning to give history new meaning. Think of it this way: When it comes to Donald J. Trump, there is nothing straight about the Strait of Hormuz or, for that matter, anything else and his crooked version of history and of the present moment, just couldn’t be weirder. Maybe — my final thought — sometime in the near future, he’ll launch an operation to kidnap himself. Really, when it comes to him, nothing is beyond the bounds of possibility, is it?

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This article was originally published by Tom Englehardt; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Let’s Leave the Strait of Hormuz Alone

by Ron Paul | Jul 7, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

President Trump was reportedly “shocked” to see many thousands of Iranians in the street mourning at the funeral of the country’s late leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the weekend. Khamenei was assassinated by the United States at the beginning of the February US surprise attack on Iran.

The US attack on Iran was sold to Trump by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US neocons as an easy “cake walk” that would lead the Iranian government to fall and be replaced with a US-friendly regime.

“I thought they hated him,” Trump said of the murdered religious leader of Iran.

Not only did the Iranian people not rise up to replace their leadership with one friendly to Washington, but the society seems to have become even more cohesive and patriotic. This should surprise no one, as when similar tragedies occurred in the United States – assassinations, 9/11, etc – we also as a society came closer together.

In Soccer when you kick the ball into your own goal, it is referred to as an “own-goal.” That is what President Trump achieved with his attack on Iran on February 28th. In fact, it was not just one “own-goal,” but a series of them. The blunder will likely go down in American history as one of the worst foreign policy moves in our history.

The Iranians did not rise up and declare support for the US. American military bases throughout the region are so severely damaged by Iranian retaliation that most cannot be brought back online. Scores of US military equipment has been destroyed or damaged at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. Countries in the region are rethinking their decision to essentially become protectorates of the United States now that it is demonstrated that they cannot be protected by the United States. American military power suddenly looks less powerful.

But perhaps the most destructive “own-goal” of the US attack is the Iranian decision to establish control over the Strait of Hormuz. Even in the US/Israeli attacks of last June, the Strait was kept open by Iran. It is a vital trade route and in everyone’s best interest to keep open for business.

The February attack and Iran’s strong regional response led the country to embrace what some have called a de facto nuclear weapon: control of the Strait. Explaining why he signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran last month, President Trump mentioned the damage being done to the US economy by the closure of the Strait and the possibility that matters may even get worse without the agreement. The US economy desperately needed the Strait to be open.

Now, however, progress toward peace with Iran continues to be thwarted by the stubborn insistence on the US side that the Strait of Hormuz must not be controlled by Iran and that a fee system for passage through the Strait cannot be instituted by Iran and Oman. Several skirmishes have already taken place in the area, threatening to take the US back to war.

It is in the best interest of the United States to abandon claims on Hormuz – which is thousands of miles away – and live with the consequences of Trump’s mistake. Another war cannot win what two previous wars have lost. Let Iran control the Strait and let international trade and commerce be re-established. Let’s leave the Strait alone!

Ron Paul is a former Republican congressman from Texas. He was the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president.