United States: This summer, DSA enters a new period

By Neal Meyer

Published 15 August, 2026

[Editor’s note: Ella Teevan, of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

First published at The Call.

There are elections where nothing happens — this is usually the case — but every once in a while there are elections where big things happen. The back-to-back primaries in New York on June 23 and in Colorado on June 30 were both the latter kind of event.

The scoreboard

The slate backed by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America triumphed across the board in the state’s Democratic primary on June 23. Both of the chapter’s endorsed congressional candidates won decisive victories. Union organizer and state assemblymember Claire Valdez won her election to represent the “most left-wing district in the country,” which straddles the border of Brooklyn and Queens. She defeated progressive Democrat Antonio Reynoso, a Brooklyn politician, 56 to 36 percent. Palestine solidarity movement activist Darializa Avila Chevalier won a shocking upset victory (49 to 46 percent) against another “progressive Democrat” and long-standing leader of one of the city’s Democratic machines, Adriano Espaillat. DSA’s congressional foothold was further strengthened on the last day of June with the victory of Melat Kiros in Denver, Colorado, who defeated a long-term Democratic incumbent by almost 10 percentage points.

DSA also won big in the New York state legislature. NYC-DSA candidates Aber Kawas, Christian Celeste Tate, David Orkin, Eon Huntley, Illapa Sairitupac, and Samantha Kattan all won, in almost all cases with close to 60 percent or more of the vote (Sairitupac’s was closer, but the vote was also split six ways). Conrad Blackburn was the chapter’s only loss, though Blackburn came close to winning. Outside of NYC, Adam Bojak, a member of Buffalo DSA, also won his election to the State Assembly. They will join a bench of existing socialist legislators — three senators, five returning assemblymembers — all of whom won reelection. Assuming there are no surprises before the General Election, this means that DSA will now hold 4 of 63 seats in the State Senate and 10 of 150 seats in the State Assembly.

The recent slew of victories at the federal and state level are just the latest wins in a banner year for DSA’s electoral project. DSA-endorsed candidates have made breakthroughs in state and city elections across the country — including in Louisville, Kentucky, where Bread & Roses member Robert LeVertis Bell won his race for state assembly.

Big impact

The victories in NYC by Valdez and Avila Chevalier were international news, making headlines from Germany to Brazil, Colombia, the UK, Spain, Pakistan, Singapore, and more. They are a major morale boost for DSA, and the organization is growing rapidly in their wake: nationally DSA added 4,000 members in the first 72 hours after the election, and the NYC chapter now has more than 15,000 members — over 800 of them who joined in the week after Tuesday’s election. No doubt Kiros’s win will only add to this momentum.

The victories and the response to them are also proof that the organization has truly “come of age,” almost exactly ten years after its rebirth in November 2016. The Left in the United States, with DSA at its center, is now a national force that can’t be ignored or treated as a marginal player. At the federal level, Valdez, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, and Chris Rabb, who won his Philadelphia primary in May, will join fellow DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to bring DSA’s foothold in Congress to 6 members. DSA could add a further seat depending on what happens in the election contested by Oliver Larkin in Florida on August 18 (though Larkin will then have to go on to win a competitive general election). At 6 members, DSA’s hold in the House surpasses the high point in the 20th Century for an organized left-wing presence that was achieved by the Farmer-Labor Party in the mid-1930s.

More important than numbers is the program on which the DSA candidates were elected. All won, not in spite of, but because they supported a clear platform: Medicare for All, strong unions, taxing the rich, abolishing ICE, an end to Trump’s War on Iran, and an arms embargo on Israel.

How it was won in NYC

Three factors were decisive in DSA’s victory in the Big Apple (others will have more to say about the results in Colorado and upstate New York).

First, the mounting sense of disgust among the Democrats’ base with the party’s leadership has reached a new high. The party is currently led by Senator Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of Brooklyn. Their timidity in the face of Trump’s relentless assault on civil liberties and his wars abroad, coupled with their support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and Lebanon and their inability to offer a positive program has lost them the support of their base. The vast majority of establishment Democratic politicians who follow them have fallen into disrepute with Democratic voters, too, for much the same reason. DSA has been able to make the argument to growing numbers of activists and voters that a much bolder course is needed. Critically, the base for a new kind of politics — while still limited for the most part to the big cities — has included both middle-class and working-class voters of all racial backgrounds.

Second, Zohran Mamdani has successfully used his role as Mayor of New York City to prove that an alternative political program and strategy is not only desirable, it also can work in practice. In the first six months of his administration, Mamdani fulfilled two of his three major campaign promises: he expanded the city’s childcare program and froze the rent for almost half the city’s renters. He has also not been shy about promoting these victories, and he has used his bully pulpit to take on the city’s landlord class and its most exploitative employers. As a result, Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez and Avila Chevalier was a major boost for their campaigns. Mamdani gambled big, going all out to support both candidates and putting his reputation on the line. That wager paid off.

Finally, NYC-DSA’s own contribution — combined with the support of the United Auto Workers and a host of smaller reformed unions and community groups — deserves major credit. The army of volunteers from DSA overwhelmed the opposition all over the city. As Alex Pellitteri described in The Call earlier this week, if you walked through some neighborhoods on election day, you would have seen a DSA activist on almost every major intersection. NYC-DSA also built a strong socialist identity for our candidates that proved to be a boon to our ability to link all these different races together.

Blowback from Democratic leadership

Victory for the Left also meant defeat for the Democratic Party leadership. This time, they did not take it in stride. Outraged Democratic leaders denounced the rise of DSA. Many of course also fear for their own careers: Schumer and Jeffries, to start with, could face serious primary challenges in two years. Other leaders representing big cities will — if all goes well — face similar challenges.

The days are gone when Democratic leaders could ignore DSA’s growing strength. What this will mean for the future is unclear. But it seems reasonable to think that Democratic leaders will no longer take a “ strategic silence” approach to a growing democratic socialist movement.

Some Democratic leaders — current (see Neera Tanden, president of the party’s leading think tank, the Center for American Progress) and former (see Jamie Harrison, past chair of the Democratic National Committee) — have begun to suggest that DSA has a “parasitical” relationship with the Democrats. DSA is fiercely critical of the party, and rightly so, but makes use of the opportunity Democratic primaries provide to win elections.

There’s a sense in which the “parasitical” accusation is correct, though the solution would be for Democratic leaders to back reforms like proportional representation for House elections and ranked choice voting for presidential and Senate elections. Socialists should welcome reforms to electoral rules that would allow us to get a “divorce” from centrist Democrats and their business class backers. That’s why Rashida Tlaib is right to support the Fair Representation Act, which would transform US elections. Hopefully DSA’s new congressmembers will follow suit. But so long as Democratic politicians support an electoral system that 1) makes forming an independent party difficult and 2) leaves the path open for socialists to make major electoral advances in primary elections, there’s no reason for DSA to abandon that tactic. Running independents and experimenting with fusion ballot lines also make sense as electoral tactics depending on which of the six different party systems in the US that DSA is working with, but — given the hand dealt us — it would be a mistake to abandon work inside Democratic primaries.

A new period in DSA’s history

The elections weren’t just a defeat for the leaders of the Democratic Party. They were also a blow to the progressive Democratic wing that occupies the middle space between party leaders on the one hand and the democratic socialist left on the other. Valdez, Avila Chevalier, and Kiros all ran against progressive Democrats who had the support of many of that wing of the party’s leaders and organizations. In Valdez’s district, the progressive Working Families Party helped lead the Reynoso campaign. Their stunning defeat revealed how small their social base actually is in the city. The leading group on the Left, for now and at least in New York City, is DSA.

These breakthrough victories took place as many speculate that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will launch a presidential campaign next year. But compared to all the positive developments so far this year, AOC’s role in the primary elections has been a major disappointment. Despite being arguably DSA’s highest-profile member, AOC maintained strict neutrality in all the congressional races DSA contested. By contrast, Mamdani and Bernie Sanders both endorsed different combinations of the socialists. AOC herself endorsed two other candidates for Congress this year who were to the right of DSA’s candidates and came to Hakeem Jeffries’ defense days after the New York election, just as more people began to question whether or not he should be the Democrats’ leader in the House.

AOC has repeatedly demonstrated a tactical conservatism and an unwillingness to rock the Democratic boat, qualities that are a major liability in a party still dominated by its pro-business wing. It was this tactical conservatism and desire to “unify” the party that also led her to defend Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inexcusable support for the genocide in Gaza. AOC will decide whether or not to run for president independently of DSA. If she does run, DSA will have to decide whether or not to support her. But her overly-cautious approach to internal party politics raises serious doubts about her ability to lead an insurgent movement in the presidential election, not to mention her ability to lead the party and the federal government were she to win.

DSA’s more contentious relationship now with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the emerging challenge of how to handle the presidential campaign are just a taste of the challenges that await DSA in this new period. Since its rebirth in 2016, DSA has slowly built up a presence in the labor movement, in social movement campaigns, and in state and local governments. But it has remained relatively distant from national politics because its weight in Congress has been so minimal. As important as Tlaib and AOC have been to the Left, they have also maintained a greater independence from DSA, in large part because they could credibly claim to have an independent power base.

But DSA’s involvement in national political fights will have to increase significantly now as candidates enter Congress who are much more “of” the organization. Valdez especially is a serious, long-term DSA activist who was previously an elected member of NYC-DSA’s chapter leadership. To adapt to this new situation, DSA’s members and caucuses will have to demonstrate a new level of maturity. We will also have to take national debates much more seriously. The National Political Committee will have to debate and take positions on emerging political questions on a much more regular basis, and we will need a stronger communication operation to promote our ideas and build off our recent breakthroughs to strengthen our organization.

All this is doubly important because DSA also has a new level of responsibility in the fight against Donald Trump and MAGA. Mamdani’s win in 2025 and the new string of victories this year prove that there is a growing base of both working- and middle-class voters who are ready to support democratic socialist politics. DSA can’t just be critics on the sidelines, we have to take seriously our role as a national force. For example, DSA’s position on the 2028 presidential elections will matter much more than it ever has before. That means that it will no longer be possible for the organization to abstain from choosing a side in the General Election, unless it really views both the Democratic and Republican candidate as “two sides of the same coin” — something that is hard to imagine will be the case.

This, in short, is the stuff that turns a routine election cycle into something else entirely. A new period for democratic socialists in the US has arrived.

Neal Meyer is an editor for The Call and a member of NYC-DSA. He is doing a PhD on the transformation of the Democratic Party in the neoliberal era at NYU Sociology. He also co-writes the Left Notes newsletter.

Paper Tiger: The Failure of America’s Trillion-Dollar War Machine

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies | Aug 13, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?

A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza, is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10th that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.

Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq’s air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.

In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions, were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.

The US has already depleted a third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3 and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.

So the US is using multi-million dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500 lb. GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the sixty it already had stationed in Israel.

The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry, the Pentagon top brass and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.

The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the U.S. armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”

Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman), whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.

The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.

But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.

Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.

In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers – not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multi-trillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion – a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.

US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet  America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder – first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.

We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while Trump, a Republican,  assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.

Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11th, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.

Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely-acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it  with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done…We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened.”

By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the UN and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11th.

The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”

The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history – together with the outrageous cost – have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade Members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons and false pretexts for war.

Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed NDAA authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.

The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.

But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft-carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.

Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driven the US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.

Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.

On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit – for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.

The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.

As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control and absurdly expensive war machine.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

The Secret Marriage: How Arab States Betrayed Palestine While Denouncing Gaza

by Richard Edain | Aug 13, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

Someone had to organize the catering; that’s the detail that got me.

From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Arab states have issued a steady stream of condemnation – labeling it genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing – even as they’ve been secretly deepening their military ties with the very state carrying it out. The secrecy, however, hasn’t protected them.

That was the conclusion of a leak obtained by the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – published in October 2025, months before the United States and Israel’s own war on Iran began: five CENTCOM PowerPoint presentations documenting an entity called the “Regional Security Construct” – a secretive network, operating since 2022, tying Israel to six Arab states: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, with Kuwait and Oman standing by as “potential partners.” Every one of these governments has at some point in the last three years stood up and condemned the genocide in Gaza. Every one of them has also helped keep Israel’s military machine running. It’s a staggering betrayal.

The condemnations at the UN in September 2025 were strong: Qatar’s emir called it genocide; the Saudis said starvation and ethnic cleansing; Egypt and Jordan agreed.

Now look at what those same states were getting up to in private. In May 2024, high-level Arab and Israeli military officials met to coordinate – at Al Udeid Air Base, the US facility located inside Qatar. Traveling the usual way – the airport at Doha, passport and diplomatic controls – would leave a paper trail, hence the Israelis bypassed formalities and instead flew directly onto the base.

The internal planning document for the meeting contained a section with the heading “MUST NOT DO”, and strictly forbade photographs and any media contact. Beneath the itinerary, a note reminded staff they should observe culinary restrictions for both Muslim and Jewish delegates: “No pork / crustaceans.” Someone still had to sort the catering for this shadowy military alliance. Mirrors, Cocteau said, are the doors through which Death comes and goes. In this case, it was the catering memo.

Governments lie, everyone understands this. However, these documents are about a lot more than that. The slides state clearly that the partnership “does not form a new alliance” and that meetings are to be “held in confidence.” Concealment was part of the blueprint, and of course they all played along.

As Palestinians in Gaza were being bombed, the men whose governments claimed to speak for Palestine were coordinating regional air defenses with Israeli military officials down the hall – discussing radar coverage against Iran over lunch, while the genocide continued next door. By 2024, CENTCOM had linked most of the seven partners – the six Arab governments plus Israel – into a joint radar and air-defense picture focused on Iranian missiles and drones.

A detail in the slides that catches the eye: a 2025 meeting at which a Saudi representative and a US intelligence official jointly delivered an “intelligence overview” – Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Islamic State – one of the two briefers from a kingdom with no formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

All of this elaborate scheming failed spectacularly when Doha was struck on 9 September 2025 in a sneak assassination job on Hamas officials. The complex air-defense system the Arab-Israeli network had just spent three years building amounted to nothing. The American radar was pointing in the wrong direction, since the attack didn’t come from Iran – but from Israel. Qatar’s separate air defense systems missed it too. The Trump administration reportedly leaned on Netanyahu, who apologized three weeks later.

The network’s failure wasn’t limited to Doha. On 28 February 2026, the day the US and Israel opened their war of aggression on Iran by killing its Supreme Leader, Iran’s retaliation went for the network’s jugular – ballistic missiles and drones struck the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, while simultaneous strikes smashed a THAAD missile-defense radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and a phased-array radar in Qatar, with widespread damage reported across the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Following a brief pause, hostilities resumed in early July, and on 23 July Iran’s military said it had destroyed a second radar and a Patriot system at another US base near Azraq, in Jordan. Every partner state named in the CENTCOM documents except Egypt has now had its radar coverage hit, disabled, or claimed destroyed.

On 29 July, Iran returned to Muwaffaq Salti – the same US/Jordanian base it struck earlier in February – launching ballistic missiles in what CENTCOM had the cheek to call a “surprise attack.” CENTCOM did not clarify whether it came before or after the US and Saudi Arabia struck Iran-backed militias in Iraq that same morning. Trump’s response was characteristically restrained: “We are going to beat the f**king sh*t out of them.”

Fresh strikes were hinted at for the first weekend in August but did not materialize – according to reports that came to light during the pause, Washington’s munitions stockpiles, both defensive and offensive, have been significantly depleted since the start of its war on Iran in February. The secret network that these Arab states built in collaboration with Israel and the US to guard the Gulf is in ruins. The global hegemon that built it with them is running low on ammunition.

The system is crumbling under the threat it was built to stop.

So why the secrecy? Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies identified the answer: it allowed everyone involved to sidestep the bitter pill of the political argument. Working covertly with Israel’s generals is more palatable than being seen as direct collaborators. But, he said, the network masks how profoundly these states distrust each other and Israel – a distrust the Qatar strike exposed. “A key member of the American effort has attacked another,” he said, “with America seen as complacent, complicit, or blind.”

Mainstream media coverage has largely framed this as merely embarrassing – hypocritical Arab leaders caught out, business as usual. Except that is not what the documents are about, and it lets the governments involved off far too lightly. The same regimes that normalized ties with Israel have essentially reduced the Palestinian cause to lip service – and the CENTCOM documents show exactly how far that abandonment extends, as The Electronic Intifada has argued. This goes way beyond leaders occasionally crossing paths with their Israeli counterparts on the sidelines of a conference. Built by the United States, this three-year-old network has its own dedicated bureaucracy – a cyber center, an encrypted messaging network, information-operations planners, even special dietary instructions and a “MUST NOT DO” slide – all of it built to hide an alliance that Israel’s genocide in Gaza had already made politically toxic.

The Palestinians are not an incidental factor; they are the reason for all the secrecy. The Gaza genocide is built into this, with each government named in these documents consciously choosing to sustain it.

Richard Edain is a teacher and writer based in the UK and Vietnam. His long-form historical journalism appears on Substack as the Ulysses Files and has been published on Antiwar.com. Contact: edainrichard@gmail.com.

When ‘Victory’ No Longer Justifies the Iran War

The question for Washington is not whether it can keep fighting, but whether the mission still warrants the lives, munitions, and future military readiness being spent on it.

by Timothy Hopper | Aug 13, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

CNN reported this weekend that Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has privately urged senior Trump administration officials to look for an “off-ramp” from the war with Iran. According to three sources familiar with the discussions, Caine has warned that further escalation could backfire and that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve President Donald Trump’s stated objectives. His team declined to discuss confidential conversations, and the White House emphasized that Caine provides the president with options rather than policy prescriptions. That distinction matters. Caine is the president’s senior military adviser, not the official who decides where the war should end.

But the report exposes the question Washington can no longer avoid: not whether the United States has enough power to continue fighting, but how much of its future power it should spend on a mission whose political endpoint remains uncertain. A powerful country can continue a war. A strategically disciplined one must also know when further fighting begins to reduce, rather than increase, its security.

The Cost of Consuming Power

The U.S. military exists to achieve political objectives, not to make the continuation of military activity an objective in itself. A mission therefore needs a defined purpose, a measurable standard of success, and a reasonable relationship between expected gains and costs. When additional strikes no longer improve the chances of producing the desired political outcome, the ability to keep striking is not, by itself, a strategy.

Reuters reported last week that the United States has used much of its inventory of highly accurate long-range missiles during the five-month conflict, while advanced air-defense inventories have also come under pressure. President Trump has disputed suggestions that the military is short of munitions, saying the United States has more than it needs. The disagreement over exact stockpile levels does not erase the underlying strategic issue: high-end weapons take time to replace.

Not every military cost can be treated the same way. Money can be appropriated. Some weapons can eventually be replaced. But rebuilding inventories takes time, and the lives of American service members cannot be restored. Every operation therefore has an opportunity cost: resources committed to Iran are resources that cannot simultaneously be held at the same level of readiness for another contingency.

That matters because the United States does not maintain a military only for today’s war. Its own 2026 National Defense Strategy places major emphasis on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific while maintaining commitments and partnerships in Europe and the Middle East. A prolonged war of attrition in one theater can therefore affect deterrence in another. The relevant measure of strength is not simply how much force America can employ today, but what military options remain available tomorrow.

This is why asking whether the mission is worth American lives and scarce military capacity is not an anti-military argument. It is an argument for using the military with discipline. Service members should be placed in harm’s way when there is a clear political purpose, a genuine security requirement, and a reasonable prospect that military action can achieve the intended result. Continuing a war primarily to demonstrate that the United States will not “back down” risks substituting political symbolism for strategy.

Define the End Before Escalating Again

The administration’s own public descriptions of the war illustrate the problem. At the outset of Operation Epic Fury, the White House identified several objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat, destroying its ballistic-missile arsenal, degrading proxy networks, and crippling its naval forces. These are not identical goals, and each demands a different measure of success.

If the objective is to eliminate a nuclear threat, Washington needs a credible standard for determining what capability has been destroyed and what can be rebuilt. If the objective is to change Tehran’s behavior, the relevant question is whether additional attacks make a change in behavior more or less likely. If the objective is a negotiated settlement, Washington must judge whether military pressure is improving its bargaining position or hardening Iranian resistance. And if the objective has expanded during the war, the administration owes the public an explanation of what the new endpoint is.

Supporters of continued pressure can make a serious case. De-escalating while Iran continues to resist could be read in Tehran as evidence that endurance works. It could reduce American bargaining leverage, reassure Iran that Washington lacks staying power, and make future coercive threats less credible. Those risks should not be dismissed.

But that argument only works if further military action is actually moving the United States toward a defined political result at an acceptable cost. Resolve is not measured by the duration of a war. If additional attacks consume scarce capabilities without materially improving the probability of achieving the objective, continuing them can weaken the leverage they are meant to demonstrate.

This is where the idea of an “off-ramp” should lose its stigma. An off-ramp is not necessarily surrender. Negotiation is not necessarily weakness, and reducing military operations is not automatically defeat. If core objectives have been achieved, or if military action has reached the point of diminishing strategic returns, changing course can preserve rather than squander American power.

The alternative is the logic of sunk costs: because lives, money, and munitions have already been spent, Washington concludes that it must spend more so the earlier costs will not appear wasted. That logic has prolonged wars before. Past sacrifice can explain why a decision feels difficult; it cannot by itself justify future sacrifice.

The real test of Trump’s Iran policy will therefore not be the number of targets destroyed or the length of time the United States remained willing to fight. It will be whether America emerges from the conflict safer, strategically stronger, and better prepared for the next threat.

The United States is powerful enough to continue the war. That is not the same as having a sufficient reason to do so. The standard should be objective, outcome, and cost. If American lives, hard-to-replace munitions, and future military readiness are being spent, the administration must show that the strategic return justifies the price. If it cannot, searching for an off-ramp is not an admission of weakness. It is an exercise in judgment.

Timothy Hopper is an international relations graduate of American University and a freelance foreign policy writer.