Warming climate threatens Greenland’s ancestral way of life

By AFP
February 9, 2026


Musher Nukaaraq Lennert Olsen rides with his sled dogs near the 'dog town' of Sisimiut, Greenland - Copyright KCNA VIA KNS/AFP STR

Nioucha ZAKAVATI

Standing in his boat with binoculars in hand, hunter Malik Kleist scans the horizon for seals. But this February, the sea ice in southwestern Greenland has yet to freeze, threatening traditional livelihoods like his.

“Normally the seals are on the ice or in the more calm waters. But today we had to sail all the way into the fjords to find them,” the 37-year-old tells AFP.

The Arctic region is on the frontline of global warming, heating up four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979, according to a 2022 study in scientific journal Nature, causing the sea ice to retreat.

Seals rely on pack ice to give birth, to rest and for protection.

Hunters increasingly have to sail farther along the jagged coast of Sisimiut, navigating into the fjords for several hours to find them.

Traditionally, hunters’ boats would head straight out to sea, slowly pushing through the ice and creating holes that attract seals coming up for air.

But without any ice, “it’s too windy and the waves are too big,” Kleist says.

Last year was exceptionally warm in the vast autonomous territory, with several temperature records beaten, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).

In December, the Summit Station, located at the height of Greenland’s ice sheet, recorded an average temperature of -30.9 degrees C (-23.6 Fahrenheit), 8.1C higher than the December average during the period 1991-2020.

“It affects everything we do. Because normally around November, December the ice comes. And this year there’s no ice, so it affects our living a lot,” Kleist says.

– Financial woes –

For the same reason, the government has also had to postpone the annual winter musk ox hunt that was due to start on January 31.

There wasn’t enough snow and ice to transport the massive animals that roam the Arctic tundra back from Kangerlussuaq where they are predominantly found, around 165 kilometres (103 miles) away. Greenland has no roads connecting its towns.

That has left some Sisimiut hunters with less income than usual.

“This time of year there is not much to hunt. So we rely on musk ox meat and skin,” Kleist says.

“Many of my fellow hunters are struggling with money right now.”

Every part of the animal, from the fur to the meat, is either used or sold.

The summer hunting season has therefore gained importance, enabling Greenlanders to fill their freezers to get them through the winter months, he tells AFP over a steaming bowl of fish stew.

The shorter winter season has also impacted another key activity in Greenland, one that has become increasingly important to the tourism sector: dogsled tours.

In the Sisimiut neighbourhood where the dogs are kept, their thunderous barking mounts as Nukaaraq Olsen, a 21-year-old musher, attaches them to the sled.

Raring to get going, his 18 dogs are hard to hold back. Twenty minutes later, the group bounds off.

But the road is bumpy, and several times Olsen has to get up to manually push the sled, stuck on the tundra’s rocks in patches where there is no ice.

“This year we had a lot of hot, warm days, even though it’s December or January,” he says.

Other parts of the route are no longer safe to use, due to repeated melting and freezing of snowfall which causes uneven layers, he explains.

– Dehydrated dogs –

The dogs’ health is also affected by the changing climate.

They are used to quenching their thirst with snow, but with little or no snowfall, they can easily get dehydrated. Mushers have to take that into account when caring for their animals.

Many have even had to get rid of their dogs, the business of maintaining them no longer profitable with the dogsled season shrinking to just two months, says Emilie Andersen-Ranberg, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen who runs a dog clinic in Sisimiut.

Others, such as 72-year-old Johanne Bech, are finding novel ways to adapt.

She plans to put wheels on her sled to continue running dogsled tours during the summer period.

That solution is growing in popularity, as “the window with snow is getting more and more narrow,” the veterinarian says.

Over the past 20 years, the number of sleddogs has been halved from 25,000 to 13,000, according to a 2024 article from the University of Greenland in 2024.

Yet Johanne Bech remains optimistic about the future.

“I hope this is just for a short time, so we can go back to a little more stable snow or more ice in the future.”

Column: As global metals fever spreads, markets buckle under the heat

Reuters | February 7, 2026 | 

Stock image.

The word on the Chinese street is that metals are the next hot thing. All you need to join the bull party is an online trading account, a bit of cash for the initial margin and access to the right WeChat chatroom to meet like-minded punters.

China’s metal exchanges have for two months been struggling to contain the unprecedented liquidity rush caused by the spreading metals mania.

The Shanghai Futures Exchange and the Guangzhou Futures Exchange have between them raised margins and tightened trading rules 38 times to maintain order.

The spate of interventions has covered the metallic spectrum from precious metals gold and silver to industrial inputs such as nickel and lithium.

China has a long history of manias in markets as obscure as ferro-silicon but nothing before on this scale.

Moreover, metals fever has swept up the rest of the world. The speculative stampede has generated extreme volatility in the silver market and rocked even safe-haven gold.

ShFE volumes of aluminum, copper, nickel and tin

Mass momentum

The Shanghai Futures Exchange registered record levels of trading activity across multiple metal contracts in January.

Tin volumes exceeded one million metric tons on a single day as the price accelerated to fresh all-time highs. That’s more than twice the world’s annual physical usage.

The crowding of retail investors acts as a giant momentum fund, every price gain feeding the next leg higher as more money joins the uptrend. Short positions held by industrial hedgers are stopped out, throwing further fuel on the flames.

Outside of China, only silver has seen similar mass surges in the past, most notably in 2021, when the Reddit message board launched a wave of retail buying in pursuit of a mythical market short.

No surprise then that silver has once again been the wildest of all markets in recent days.

But this phenomenon is spreading.

The late-January surge in the CME copper contract to a record high of $6.58 per lb wasn’t accompanied by any outsize increase in managed money long positions.

CME micro copper and micro gold volumes

Rather, the real action was taking place in the CME’s smaller contracts aimed squarely at retail investors.

The micro copper contract, which at 2,500 pounds is a tenth of the size of the main contract, saw volumes mushroom from 369,000 lots in December to 969,000 in January. That’s equivalent to over one million metric tons of physical metal.

The micro gold contract has experienced an equally dramatic jump in activity after bursting into life around the middle of last year.

Delta force

The wave of investment money has been flowing into metal options as well as futures.

The CME’s copper event option contract, which offers a simple binary punt on the underlying price, notched up volumes of almost 83,000 lots in December and January, more than the total traded since the product was launched in September 2022.

Options act as accelerators on already super-charged rallies.

With everyone looking to snap up call options, conferring the right to buy, sellers have to hedge their exposure by themselves buying into a rising market.

Such delta-hedging creates a mechanistic feedback loop, which runs until the momentum turns, at which point the process starts working in reverse as those who sold the options sell back their cover in a falling market.

The whiplash can be extreme, as silver investors have just found out.

Liquidity trap

Animal spirits, compounded by options leverage, created the conditions for both the wild upswing in precious metals prices and the subsequent violent unwind.

Gold should be cushioned against such speculative storms by central bank reserves but it too is ultimately a finite physical commodity.

Analysts at Citi calculate that were investors to increase their purchases of gold from the current $300-400 billion per year to $2 trillion, the price could exceed $10,000 per ounce.

That may sound like a lot of money but an increase from $1 trillion to $2 trillion would represent just one six-hundredth of global household wealth, according to Citi.

If even gold is vulnerable to the raw power of money, consider the potentially destructive impact on smaller industrial metal markets such as nickel or tin.

That’s why China, the world’s foremost industrial metals producer and consumer, has been taking ever more stringent measures to prevent paper market wildness contaminating real-world supply chains.

Theme and meme collision

January’s perfect metallic storm marks the collision of two powerful investment themes.

The fear of dollar “debasement” is causing both institutional and individual investors to diversify into harder assets.

Metals, meanwhile, were already attracting investor interest due to their central role in both energy transition and internet-of-things mega-trends.

Silver, which is both a precious and industrial metal, has been the pivot between macro- and micro-investment narratives.

In the new world of social media, these colliding metallic themes have morphed into internet memes, amplified by message boards such as WeChat in China and Reddit in the West.

The result is unprecedented investment appetite for metals, both precious and base, at global scale.

And it’s unlikely to be sated any time soon.

More turbulence seems guaranteed until the fever breaks.

If it breaks.

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, Andy Home, a columnist for Reuters.)

(Editing by David Holmes)

Big pharma's dirty secret finally met its wrecking ball

Robert Reich
February 6, 2026 
RAW STORY


FILE PHOTO: A pharmacist stands in the background as a sign rests on a counter at a Walgreens pharmacy store in Austin, TX, U.S., March 26, 2018. Picture taken on March 26, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammad Khursheed/File Photo

Today I want to talk about prostates. (Wait! Don’t delete this post! Give me a minute to explain why you might be interested.)

All of us are getting older, and some of us are becoming quite old.

Many old men, like Joe Biden and me and several million others in the United States, have prostates that contain cancerous cells.

But because prostate cancer grows very slowly, most of us old geezers will die with it rather than because of it.

Yet some prostate cancers will threaten our lives if we do nothing about them. (A tip-off is if a man’s prostate-specific antigen — PSA — starts rising.)

Biden’s is reported to be aggressive, prompting a wave of sympathy from normal, empathetic people. (Not surprisingly, the moment the news came out, Mr. Compassion in the Oval Office made the baseless claim that Biden had covered up his cancer while he was in the White House.)

What to do? The standard treatment is a combination of radiation and drugs to lower testosterone levels (prostate cancer needs testosterone to grow). My understanding is Biden is getting both.

Unfortunately, testosterone-lowering drugs have some unpleasant side effects — fatigue, weight gain, declining bone and muscle mass, reduced sex drive, impotence and erectile dysfunction, hot flashes, mood changes, liver damage, and greater risk of heart attack.

Think menopause for men.

Long story short, I was about to take a testosterone-reducing drug when a doctor offered a second opinion, urging me to use estrogen (estradiol) patches instead. She told me about recent research in the U.K. showing the patches to be just as effective as testosterone-reducing drugs in lowering testosterone and fighting prostate cancer — but without most of the awful side effects.

Oh, and the patches are far cheaper than the drugs.

So, you may ask: Why are testosterone-reducing drugs still being prescribed when they have all sorts of lousy side effects, and when estrogen patches are just as effective without most of those side effects, and they’re cheaper?

Answer: because pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) prefer the more expensive drug treatment.

Okay, now I need to give you a bit of background on PBMs.

PBMs rake in big profits by controlling the pharmaceutical market and siphoning off some of the profits to the biggest insurance companies, from which they extract rebates.

Ergo, they have every incentive to push for pricier drugs because that’s where the money is. (This also explains why research into cheaper remedies is so often done in the U.K. and elsewhere rather than in the United States, where the PBMs have a lot of influence over what’s researched.)

Under former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan (whom I spoke with recently), the FTC released a series of damning reports on PBMs — and filed a critical antitrust case against them for inflating the prices of insulin.

The FTC found that the big three PBMs — Caremark Rx, LLC (affiliated with CVS), Express Scripts, Inc. (with ESI), and OptumRx, Inc. (with OptumRx) — marked up generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by thousands of percent.

Lina Khan says these include many lifesaving drugs, such as those to treat cancer.

Which is why Pharmacy Benefit Managers have been pushing more expensive drugs to treat prostate cancer — drugs that also have worse side effects than estrogen patches.

But here’s the good news. Congress has just reined in PBMs.

Based on the work of Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mike Crapo (R-ID), Congress issued rules that prohibit PBMs from discriminating against smaller pharmacies or keeping any part of the rebates they extract, limiting them to flat dollar amounts rather than percentages of a drug’s price, and requiring them to give their customers full pricing information.

The new rules were included in the Department of Health and Human Services spending bill that Trump signed into law Tuesday. Most of these changes will go into effect in 2028.

(I don’t know how Joe Biden is doing but, should you be wondering, my patches and the radiation seem to have done exactly what they needed to do. Enough said.)

Be well, my friends. And be safe.

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

There’s More Than Iranian Protest Behind the Iran Protests


by Ted Snider | Feb 6, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM


The protests that erupted in the streets of Iran at the end of December and beginning of January were the largest since the protests of 2009. They were ignited by an economic crisis and the collapse of the Iranian rial that led to a cost-of-living crisis. As the protests grew from demands for economic change to demands for political change, President Masoud Pezeshkian’s push for dialogue and a moderate response lost to other elements in the regime’s demands for repression. The resultant crackdown was excessive and brutal, and thousands of people were killed.

But there was more behind the protests than domestic demand for change. That demand is real. To ignore it is to miss the grievances and anger of the protestors. But to ignore the role of the U.S. in causing the conditions and stoking the protests is to miss the larger geopolitical issue.

The economic grievances that pushed the people into the streets are severe and real. But they were partly manufactured in America. Iran was verifiably honoring the JCPOA nuclear agreement that promised an end to sanctions. But the U.S. did not honor the agreement, and, instead of an end to sanctions, the first Trump administration illegally exited the deal and increased the sanctions. Those increased sanctions contributed significantly to the cost-of-living crisis because, though Iran has joined BRICS and the SCO and increased trade with Russia, China and the East, Vali Nasr, Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told me they have not yet created an “economic outlet large enough to compensate for the impact of the sanctions.” He explains that “BRICS and SCO – and specifically China – have provided a floor for the Iranian economy, but not a true compensation for sanctions impact.”

Unfair American sanctions caused the economic conditions that drove the people into the streets to demand economic reform that the government was incapable of making without an end to the sanctions. But U.S. terms for ending the sanctions were too dear. The U.S. demanded an end to Iran’s legal civilian nuclear program, and end to Iran’s legal ballistic missile program and even loudly suggested an end to the regime. The cost of calming the protests was the security of the state and the government.

Sanctions were not a blind policy that was meant to pressure Iran in some unspecified way or meant merely to bring about a change in Iran’s nuclear policy. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently explained that “the Iranian currency [was] on the verge of collapse. President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street…. This is economic statecraft… Things are moving in a very positive direction.” Bessant is clear that the sanctions were intended to collapse the economy and catalyze the protestors to take to the street. That, he says, is how we know the sanctions worked.

The U.S then followed causation of the protests with encouragement of the protests. Trump first offered safety to the protestors by promising not to allow the Iranian government to violently repress the protest: “America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” He then promised, not only protection, but that “The USA stands ready to help!!!”

Offers of help then grew to calls for a coup. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump posted before explicitly stating that “It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran.”

Iran’s President Pezeshkian said on January 31 that the U.S. and its partners “rode on our problems, provoked, and were seeking – and still seek – to fragment society. They brought them into the streets and wanted, as they said, to tear this country apart, to sow conflict and hatred among the people and create division. Everyone knows that the issue was not just a social protest.”

Trump’s policies and threats may not only have helped cause the protests and increase their demands, his threats may also have played a role in increasing the government’s repressive and violent response.

By inserting himself into the dynamic, Trump created a situation in which, the longer the protests went on, the greater the motivation for the U.S. to intervene. In a recent webinar hosted by the Quincy Institute, Vali Nasr said that “that reality provides motivation for the regime to end the protests quickly, making the response more brutal.” American confidence and boldness at this moment is partly due to an American belief that the Iranian regime is at its weakest moment since the revolution. In the Quincy webinar, Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor of Amwaj.media, added that the decisive government response may have come, in part, form a desire to demonstrate to Trump that the regime is still in control, and its options aren’t limited. In the same webinar, Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow and deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, suggested the terrible possibility that countries’ new realization that Trump sides with strength may have also led Tehran to show a more violent response.

There may even have been more help from outside. There were suggestions that foreign agents were on the ground with the protestors in Iran. And there were hints that unspecified foreign actors may have been arming them.

Though the consequences of U.S. policy were intended, the suspicions, and public announcements, of foreign involvement on the ground may have had one unintended consequence. Former Iranian nuclear negotiator [ret] Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian says that “public revulsion against violent infiltrators prompted hundreds of thousands of people to join a government-organized rally in the second week of January, signalling opposition to foreign interference.” While a foreign contribution may have helped grow the protests, it may also have helped end the protests.

With several options still being considered by the Trump administration, including limited strategic bombings, a decapitation operation to remove the Supreme Leader and total regime change, there is still one more option being considered that demonstrates the U.S. policy of stoking the protests to bring down the regime.

Reuters has reported that one option Trump is considering is “targeted strikes on security forces and leaders to inspire protesters” in order to create conditions for “regime change.” According to “two U.S. sources familiar with the discussions, the plan would include striking “commanders and institutions Washington holds responsible for the violence, to give protesters the confidence that they could overrun government and security buildings.”

It cannot be dismissed that the protests are homegrown and that the anger is real. It also cannot be dismissed, though, that a significant role has been played by the United States.


Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net

A Plea for Humility and Self-Awareness Prior to War With Iran

Matthew Hoh

 February 6, 2026

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USS Lincoln Carrier Strike Group. Photo: US Navy.

God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.

– Otto von Bismarck (attributed)

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes, we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

I have a rational fear, and I say rational to distinguish myself from the war mongers and fanatical Islamophobes who see enemies and Muslims under their beds and in their closets, that the US is vulnerable not only to defeat in overseas warfare but is exposed to attack from its adversaries here at home.

Regarding defeat in war against foreign states, I’ve spoken before about the US military’s failure and underperformance in the last few years:

+ The US Navy had to retreat from the Red Sea not once but twice against Yemen’s Houthis. Both Biden and Trump administration officials, civilian and military, seemed to delight at the prospects of the naval campaign, invoking WWII-style battles and promising Houthi capitulation. In 2024 and again in 2025, the campaigns ended in face-saving “truces”, but the results were clear: Houthi control of the Red Sea.

+ US industry can’t produce munitions to keep up with wars in the Middle East and Europe, a weakness going back to the US air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria a decade ago, and one of the chief reasons for Donald Trump’s intervention in last year’s 12 day war between Israel and Iran (both the Israelis and Americans were running out of missiles to intercept Iranian missiles and drones). The inability of the US weapons industry, along with European weapons companies, to meet the needs of Ukraine is made all the more alarming as the Russians, despite the largest sanctions regime in history, not only are satisfying their armament needs, in the largest conventional war since WWII, but exporting weapons for considerable profit.

+ The US Navy is unable to keep enough of its 11 aircraft carrier battle groups at sea to allow President Trump to threaten both Venezuela and Iran at the same time; note the belated entry into to the Persian Gulf theater of the Abraham Lincoln battle group. The Navy-Marine Corps amphibious ready group (ARG) that would normally be in the Mediterranean, and able to transit to the Arabian Sea to support operations against Iran, is in the Caribbean. An ARG is necessary, for many things such as providing search and rescue for downed pilots, the seizure of vessels or oil platforms, serving as a floating base for commando missions, like the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, reinforcing ground units, or evacuating American citizens from the region. Traditionally, there is an ARG on station in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea, but that ARG seems to have only left the US west coast recently. With 175,000 Marines, nearly 300 ships and a trillion-dollar budget, you’d think the American war machine would be able to have 3 ships with 2,000 Marines and some helicopters anywhere in the world it wants, let alone the Middle East, but it can’t.

+ It’s very possible that the US-Israeli regime change operation that blended into and then hijacked organic and legitimate Iranian protests last month was unable to be realized due to the lack of American naval forces in the area.

+ IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir stated last week, after meeting with US generals in Washington, DC, that the US would carry out military strikes against Iran in 2 weeks to 2 months. That time frame may coincide with weather conditions in the region (recall both Iraq War I and II began late winter/early spring, and despite technological advancements from 35 and 23 years ago, weather does still matter) and the desire of the Trump administration to go through with at least a few rounds of negotiations with the Iranians, but it is likely the timeframe primarily has to do with getting US forces in position in the region.

+ Just as Donald Trump, a year ago at his first press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu, asserted the US would take over the Gaza Strip…and will own it, which is being realized through Trump’s Board of Peace, Trump also made a firm commitment regarding Iran. At that meeting last February, I believe Trump and Netanyahu agreed to carry out regime change in Iran. A year’s worth of planning, preparations and operations went into aligning regional conditions and Iranian domestic unrest. This included:

* Last June’s 12-day war against Iran, itself a regime change attempt;

* further weakening and fracturing Lebanon with over 1,000 Israeli airstrikes, IDF occupation of parts of Southern Lebanon – essentially cleansing parts of Southern Lebanon of its population, and American political pressure meant to increase division within Lebanon;

* supporting Syria’s reformist al-Qaeda government in its consolidation of power, not the least, by the US abandoning its Kurdish allies once again (at the same time that Damascus consolidates power, Israel carries out continual bombings, occupation of parts of southern Syria and incites sectarian violence to bolster Israel’s regional dominance);

* pressuring the Iraqis to clamp down on and control the mostly Shia Popular Mobilization Units as well as manipulate Iraq-Iran relations, particularly through the American control of Iraqi oil revenue, which accounts for 90% of Iraq’s budget;

* getting the Europeans to re-introduce the draconian snap-back sanctions on Iran last fall, which were critical to ensure the economic conditions needed to get Iranians on the streets in protest; and resolving the Gaza genocide with a victory for zionism, billionaire real estate developers and genocidal settlers.

+ It’s quite possible that as everything aligned for an attempt at regime change last month, the Trump-Netanyahu plan for Iran was not fully realized because the US naval forces, including those needed to defend Israel from Iranian missiles and drones, were 7,000 miles away in the Caribbean.

+ The Air Force has its own manpower and maintenance problems, and its ability to surge additional squadrons to the Middle East is further constrained by commitments worldwide. In 2024 (latest data available), 2 out of 5 Air Force planes were unavailable due to maintenance. That’s almost 2,000 aircraft, which I guess is ok because the Air Force is also about 2,000 pilots short. We should note before going further that the US Air Force hasn’t faced an opponent capable of inflicting significant losses or contesting control of the sky since the Vietnam War. This century, only one Air Force plane has been shot down by enemy forces, an A-10 in Iraq in 2003 (a second plane, an F-15E that crashed in Iraq in 2003, was not confirmed to have been shot down).

+ The above 2 out of 5 number reflects what are called Mission Capable rates, meaning the plane can do at least one of the tasks it is assigned to do. For example, if the lights on your car don’t work, it would still be considered mission capable because you could drive it during the day, just not at night. So, a fighter plane that can’t fire its weapons would still be considered mission capable. The full mission capable (FMC) rate is more important, as it tells us how many planes can actually do the job taxpayers paid for them to do. The Air Force’s F-35A, which costs well more than $100 million each, has an FMC of 36%. That means barely 1 out of 3 Air Force F-35s are available to carry out any assigned mission. Somehow, though, an FMC of 36% is better than most of the rest of the Air Force’s other fighters and bombers. Support aircraft, limited in number and incredibly vital to any operation, are just as unreliable.

+ As this 2024 Air Force report notes, 61% of KC-46 aerial refueling tankers deemed mission capable include those with broken booms that cannot refuel other aircraft. When those tankers that can’t refuel other airplanes are removed, the mission capable rate falls to 37%. A refueling tanker literally has one mission: refuel other planes. Yet, when a tanker can’t do that, the Air Force still says it is mission capable. Going back to the analogy of your car, according to the Air Force, your car is still mission capable even if it is missing all four wheels because you can still listen to the radio. I am going at length here with regards to Air Force maintenance rates to not simply demonstrate why taxpayers should be outraged, but to ask: Do you think an Air Force that understands itself through such mendacity is going to perform well in a war against an actual opponent?

+ As detailed last year in The New York Times, Russian generals defeated American generals operationally in the Ukraine war. While the last two years of the Ukraine-Russia war have been more or less an attritional slug fest dominated by drones and small units along the frontlines, the first two years saw attempts by both sides at some form of more traditional combined arms, large unit warfare, including the catastrophic 2003 summer offensive by the Ukrainians. The men commanding the big arrow movements of the Ukrainian forces were American generals in Germany. This may not have been a surprise to those of us who understood this war as a US proxy war, but the disturbing thing is not the continued refusal by many Western military commentators and analysts to accept this definition of the war as a proxy war, but to acknowledge this operational defeat of US generals by Russian generals. Have no doubt, the result would have been the same if the men dying under American generals were from Colorado Springs, El Paso or San Diego rather than Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih or Lviv.

+ Even the successful campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, this century’s greatest example of blowback, did not come under the command of American generals but was the result of coalition efforts in both Syria and Iraq, with Russian and Iranian generals commanding the bulk of the ground forces and overall campaigns. The Americans certainly played a critical role in both Syria and Iraq, especially with air support and logistics, but you can say the same for the Russians in Syria. The Iranian leadership role, especially in Iraq, was paramount. So, the one successful American military campaign of this century that realized its objectives, which is all that ever matters in the end, was a victory in which American generals had, in Syria, a shared role with Russian, Iranian, Syrian and Kurdish commanders, while in Iraq, American generals were effectively subordinate to Iranian generals.

The examples above, again, are only from the last few years. We can go back farther and examine the failures of the Afghan, Iraq, Libyan and Yemeni wars, review the multitude of counterproductive and ruinous outcomes of past regime change operations, or weigh the decades-long systemic and structural weaknesses of the US military (enlistment, retention, size, procurement, etc), but I think the point is made. The American military is overextended, limited in its resources, unable to be reliably resupplied by US industry, and commanded by incompetent generals and admirals. It is a military in grave danger of defeat over the course of a campaign and of failing to achieve US objectives. War with Iran would not just be another illegal and immoral war, but another unwinnable and stupid one as well.

All that I have said above regarding the US military needs to be juxtaposed against the strategic success of the US and Israel in separating their adversaries in the Middle East from one another in order to deter, diminish or destroy them. Conditions in the Middle East are different than a year ago and dramatically different from two years ago. This political and strategic success in the region to advance Israeli dominance doesn’t contradict my critique of the US military and my belief that it will lose a war in the future. The means utilized to defeat enemies, while solidifying support among regional allies (essentially the entire region except for the Axis of Resistance), was not US warfare in a traditional sense, but primarily the use of proxies and regional partners (Syria), sanctions and threats of more sanctions (Iraq), and the Israeli Dahiya doctrine of mass war crimes committed as a blitz (Lebanon). Where US military forces were employed, the results were defeat in the Red Sea and a hasty truce with Iran, engineered by a theatrical B-2 display, as US munitions stocks were quickly expiring.

We may not see a regime change attempt against Iran that resembles what we conventionally imagine. Last month’s kidnapping of Maduro, which provided the policy effects of regime change while leaving the Venezuelan government intact, is very instructive, and so there might be alternative efforts to achieve US and Israeli ambitions in Iran without war. Based on the regime change efforts in Iran last June and last month, sabotage, assassinations, cyber attacks and other destabilizing attacks would be likely, as well as using sectarian pressures. Last month, it seems much weight was put by the US and Israel on utilizing Kurdish separatists as belligerents to, if not achieve regime change, cause a Syria or Libya-esque civil war. Classic US: abandon an ally in one place and give them guns and pledge them our support in another. I am sure the Syrian Kurds have some advice for their cousins in Iran. As Henry Kissinger said, it’s dangerous to be America’s enemy, deadly to be its ally.

Enter Bismarck and Orwell

Long gone is the world of Otto von Bismarck, who stated: The Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.

Those Americans in favor of these wars see themselves as immune to the consequences. So a defeat in the Persian Gulf (or the South China Sea to gaze a little farther into the future) is not reckoned to harm those who want these wars most. Previous wars haven’t touched them; if anything, those wars improved their bank accounts and gave them a bloody flag to wave on TV and social media. Yet war is changing and evolving, as warfare does, and those who celebrate and promote war should be paying attention to that, as the US, within its boundaries, is becoming increasingly more vulnerable.

This week on Judging Freedom, Judge Nap asked:

How is the average American going to be harmed if the Straits of Hormuz are closed because Donald Trump has attacked Tehran?

My response (transcript edited for clarity and correction):

Well, our gasoline prices, Judge, will go up to five or six dollars. That’ll be the immediate consequences. But there’ll be the continuing devaluation of the American dollar, the continual flight from American treasuries, a continuing pursuit of alternatives to the American monetary and financial and economic world order that will have great effects on the American people in the coming decades in terms of just a very decreased quality of life; which is really tough to say as more than 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck now.

What’s it going to be like when we don’t have the world’s reserve currency? What’s it going to be like where nations aren’t lining up around the block to buy our treasuries to fund our debt? I mean, so what’s going to happen then when our country, that doesn’t really manufacture much, except for weapons, essentially, is [unable to provide for its citizens]…and we are a massive importer. What’s going to happen to American families when inflation is a constant seven, eight, nine percent because the dollar has crashed? We can’t manufacture what people need and it costs a fortune to import [due to a devalued dollar]. So there’s these long range things, not just this immediate pending war with Iran, but the overall trajectory of American foreign policy.

But there’s also something else I want to bring up, Judge, and my friend Rich, who’s a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, he makes a very compelling argument about this, about just how vulnerable the United States within our borders is to attack. Whether it’s things that have been brushed aside, not spoken of during the war on terror, they occur, and then they disappear. I’m talking specifically about things like the attempted Times Square bombing, the Pulse nightclub massacre, just a year ago when the guy with the Islamic State flag on his truck ran over and killed, what, a dozen, 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve.

None of those attacks, and there are others, are carried out by men who are saying convert or die. What they’re saying is that you’re now getting a part of this war. What they’re saying is stop attacking my country. Stop attacking my faith. Stop attacking my people. And the inability of the American people to understand that…I think most Americans still probably don’t realize that the 9/11 attackers had three motivations for their attack: American support for Israel, the American sanctions and bombing of Iraq, and the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia. All pretty much solid motivations. You don’t have to agree with them, but they’re reasonable. And none of [those attackers] are saying convert or die.

And so my friend Rich’s point is that we live in a country that has a lot of soft targets and, particularly in this day and age where you don’t need the sleeper cells anymore that have been part of the neocon fever dreams of the last 40 years, that there’s Iranian or Hezbollah sleeper cells all over the United States. You just need a handful of like-minded folks, people who are inspired by what they see on television, people who are inspired by Iranians being massacred by American and Israeli bombs, to pick up a rifle and start doing some damage.

And Rich’s point is specifically about our electrical infrastructure. A couple of years ago, we had a couple of guys shoot up a power station in North Carolina. They never caught these guys. And it caused great trouble for that part of North Carolina for a pretty long time several days. And so imagine what if just a handful of people around the countryside grab rifles and go out and start shooting up our electrical substations? How could that cripple the United States for days, for weeks, cause long-term problems, and cause real problems for Americans here at home? I mean, just one example of how we’re vulnerable.

And I’m reminded, Judge, that George Orwell, writing about the Spanish Civil War, and the Spanish Civil War, for folks who aren’t too familiar with it, that was the first real concentrated use of aircraft to attack civilians, to attack targets behind the front lines. And Orwell wrote, after being on the front line himself: I’m comforted by the evolution, by the introduction of airplanes into warfare, because it brings the war behind the front lines. And I think his comment was, it’d be great to see some jingoists with bullet holes in them.

This idea of those who support the wars the most, they’re usually the furthest from the front lines and they’re usually facing no threat whatsoever. I think that’s something to keep in mind as we go forward here [with this potential war with Iran], that whether it’s a [Senator] Blumenthal or Graham, or McConnell or Fetterman, these are men and women in Washington, D.C. who, by and large, are immune from the harm that they’re causing with their policies overseas.

The airplanes Orwell referenced that could put bullet-holes into jingos have evolved into drones. Drones, one part of this latest generation of war, have irreversibly changed warfare, just as the airplane itself did. The prospects are dystopic. This scene from 2019’s Angel Has Fallen is no longer speculative:

Five years ago, I critiqued a Chris Pratt action film set 30 years in the future as failing to incorporate drones adequately. If that film were set in the present day, it would be just as inaccurate. It is not just that drones have turned the frontlines of the Ukraine-Russia war into no man’s lands where units larger than 3 or 4 men can’t operate, but their presence far beyond the frontlines that is this century’s revolution in military affairs. The Ukrainians last year launched drones from the back of a truck far from the frontlines in Russia. We have trucks and drones here. The same AI programs that enable Israeli drones and warplanes to kill Palestinian resistance fighters when they are present with their children can be duplicated or designed. What would keep that, or anything else adversaries can imagine, from happening here? Adversaries being either foreign or domestic.

Immediate (and long-term) economic shock, men with rifles shooting up power stations or nightclubs, and drones assassinating politicians and media figures are just a few possibilities of war with Iran that I don’t believe the American people understand. As much as the thought of some modern-day American jingos ending up with bullet-holes in them pleases me, I don’t think the risk to innocent Americans is worth that form of justice. Certainly, the great harm that will come to the Iranian people, and people throughout the region, isn’t worth any of this.

So far, whether it be luck or Providence, and Bismarck offers both, the United States, except veterans and their families, has largely avoided the harsh and cruel reality of the wars it wages overseas. Those twin guardians of the United States, luck and Providence, are diminishing. Luck, because its nature is to run out, and Providence, because we do not deserve such a blessing. History applies to us all, we are no exception, and in this age, the once-great fortress walls of the Atlantic and Pacific can no longer defend us. However, more than the technologies that enable an adversary to disregard thousands of miles of ocean, it will be our government’s actions that are to blame for future wars brought to the American people on their own soil. Iran has not come across the world to fight us; we are the aggressor. If war with Iran comes, what comes of it is of our making, whether it be defeat abroad or loss at home.

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One last quote, from Abraham Lincoln (emphasis mine):

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonapartefor a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

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My interview this week with Judge Napolitano. As the entire episode concerned Iran, I will post the transcript in a future post.

 

Matthew Hot is a senior fellow with Eisenhower Media Network