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Last week an investigation from Haaretz drawing on sources inside Gaza and IDF testimony highlighted continual Israeli efforts to bolster Gaza militias to combat Hamas, a recurring strategy that has fueled societal strife in a Gaza already devastated by Israeli forces.

A June 2025 article from the Times of Israel described how Israel had been facilitating arms transfers to the Abu Shabab Clan inside the Gaza Strip, with Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party proclaiming:

“The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with Islamic State, at the direction of the prime minister.”

Netanyahu confirmed this was true shortly after Lieberman’s statement.

The gang, headed by Rafah resident Yasser Abu Shabab until he was killed in a clash with local families in December 2025, has ties to extremist groups through members such as Issam Nabahin, who had previously fought alongside ISIS against the Egyptian army. The gang has also been found responsible for looting humanitarian aid in Gaza, according to the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories. Netanyahu has placed almost all blame on Hamas for stealing aid in the strip. However, Israel’s starvation blockade on Gaza caused mass hunger and eventually a famine in August 2025, and Netanyahu himself acknowledged backing a criminal gang, one that was looting humanitarian assistance.

Following the October 2025 ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip brokered by Donald Trump, Hamas forcefully cracked down on rival factions in Gaza in an effort to maintain dominance, predicating much of its actions on targeting “collaborators,” explicitly referring to Israeli-backed militias.

After Yasser Abu Shabab was killed in December 2025, Ghassan al-Duhaini, who was previously in the ISIS-aligned Gaza militia Jaysh al-Islam, vowed to lead the Popular Forces against Hamas.

Beyond lethal attacks in Gaza by Israel, which have killed over 1,000 Palestinians since the ceasefire, its divide and conquer strategy continues to fracture Palestinian society and foment unrest within a population that has endured industrial collapse and genocide.

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Since the U.S. launched war on Iran on February 28th, betting on geopolitical outcomes has become an increasingly popularized phenomenon on prediction apps. This differs from more conservative examples of wartime commodification that was oriented around media depictions, signaling an evolution from what some may have deemed persuasive but more passive cultural entertainment.

Concerns on the prospect of insiders betting on military action for personal gain have been a prevalent and consistent worry throughout the year. In April 2026, the Department of Justice alleged that Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, due to insider knowledge, was able to win over $400,000 on Polymarket for betting on the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January. Van Dyke pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan court and was released on a $250,000 bond. In August 2026, an investigation from Reuters and the Anti-Corruption Data Collective found “cluster betting” patterns were used by 150 anonymous wallets on Polymarket to achieve a 97.2% success rate with information likely from private military sources. While this investigation did not definitively reveal who placed the bets, its findings suggested that insider military information is behind them.

Besides the risk of insider trading amongst those in places of prominence, wartime gambling has created a new form of profit incentives for everyday civilians, differing from more traditional forms of wartime commodification intended for the masses.

Prediction markets, notably Polymarket, have seen thousands of bets oriented around potential military action by everyday users, especially prior to February 28th, when users made predictions on whether Israel would strike inside Iranian territory. More traditionally, media with sensationalized war depictions have been served to the masses through mediums such as video games or film. A prominent example would be the popular first-person shooter game franchise Call of Duty, where you play through a plethora of historical and also imagined military scenarios. Examples would include the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1989 Invasion of Panama. The scenarios that are fictitious consist of examples such as firing on enemies via gunship in Western Russia or defending the South Koreans in Seoul after North Korea launches an invasion. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who illegally armed Contra death squads against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s, was one of the figures consulted for the story and script of Call of Duty Black Ops 2. The developers of the 2014 release Call of Duty Advanced Warfare worked with a Pentagon scenario player in order to conceptualize potential threats that could be illustrated in the game’s narrative. In the film world, the Pentagon has approved scripts for a number of projects where it has allowed film crews to have special access to advanced and secretive military equipment, with examples being American Sniper and Captain Marvel. These examples of military marketization, even when successfully driving up army enlistments or engagement, are still passive when compared to wartime gambling. Media commodifies wartime depictions, and prediction markets commodify wartime unpredictability.

A foreign policy gambler, influenced by profit motives, plays a role in not just observing violence but relying on it for the sake of profit motives. Entertainment exemplifies sensationalized depictions of war, whereas gamblers have a financial stake in it. The expansion of geopolitical gambling is a stark reminder that financially driven incentives flourish in times of conflict, regardless if it’s over matters of life or death.

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Jason Arday, a 41-year-old Cambridge University academic who was tragically found dead in his London apartment in August 2026, has been at the forefront of a media discourse oriented around personal scandals and what the implications of his case are for our society. His death has fueled a narrative: one characterizing it as the result of psychological stress emanating from a racially motivated media hit job, and this narrative has been coupled with calls for inquiry into the press. While one can object to media coverage of Arday, viewing it as ill-intentioned or sensationalized, the existence of journalism taking a critical look at a figure in an esteemed academic position facing severe allegations should not be characterized as just a mob-like monolith, nor should said objections be a justification for press suppression.

Arday, who was the youngest Black professor at Cambridge, faced immense scrutiny from many different fronts, such as accusations of plagiarism, and details about his backstory came into question. According to Arday’s account of his life story, he had suffered from multiple medical conditions during his life, such as epilepsy and autism, while also being unable to speak until 11 and illiterate until 18 before completing a PhD at around 30. These claims were separate from his self-described athletic achievements, with Arday having also said that he had run 600 miles in 6 days. Journalist Jack Grove, who had conducted an investigation into Arday, stated that the Metropolitan Police of London had contacted him earlier this year to inform him that he was at the forefront of a now closed complaint regarding Arday. Grove said that he emailed Arday asking for a reply to allegations that he plagiarized his PhD. Regarding the police response, Grove said:

“But it was important, the officer explained, that I not contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.”

Besides the intervention by the UK police, Arday’s legal team had also sent a letter to the British law firm Carter-Ruck, which called into question Grove’s motives behind pursuing the investigation.

Facing an emotional toll from the media spotlight focused on whether self-made claims about his personal background were accurate, Arday resigned from Cambridge on August 5th.

When looking at the scale and scope of Arday’s claims, it is hard to be surprised by the large volume of stories that have accompanied them, regardless of whether one believes that the media coverage oriented around Arday comes from a place of poor intent or not. A New York Times investigation drawing on internal Cambridge and interviews with Arday’s former colleagues revealed that the university expressed public optimism about his hiring and continually defended him despite internal concerns about his work. According to the investigation, an academic from a separate university raised questions regarding Arday’s work, and a racism complaint from Arday himself followed. Regarding Arday’s claims of being unable to speak before 11, a speech professional and classmates who knew Arday as a child recalled that, while he had, he was still able to verbally communicate with those around him, although the speech professional said he had a language delay.

Characterizations of the media being the key actor in Arday’s death have extended beyond op-ed pages and manifested into broader calls for censorship. An open letter to the UK prime minister Andy Burnham calling for an inquiry into media coverage focusing on Arday prior to his death has received over 30,000 signatures, including from politicians such as Labour MPs Diane Abbott, Bell-Ribeiro-Addy, Nadia Whittome, and Clive Lewis. According to the BBC,

“The letter, issued by the campaign group Good Law Project - which had been representing Arday after he stood down from his Cambridge role amid a plagiarism row - said many of its signatories had privately warned media outlets about the intensity of their reporting.”

The language of the letter implies that the Ardays’ death is a symptom of psychological stress caused by a media system that has failed to “self-regulate,” going on to say.

“Two weeks of relentless harassment followed, continuing even after his resignation as a professor when the reasonable public interest in the story had diminished or evaporated. On 14 August, Dr. Arday died in the most tragic circumstances. His tragic death did not result from the allegations of plagiarism but from the press coverage.”

While the letter does not explicitly call for a comprehensive strategy for government press control, it is reasonable to be concerned about how an inquiry calling for government intervention could lead to it having a more direct role in classifying acceptable media coverage. On top of this, other petitions such as Arday’s law, with the support of human rights groups, have called for “legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame” to ensure protection for the emotional health and secrecy of subjects.

Such oversight over the press would raise questions around who should be deciding what constitutes coverage that is well-intentioned and substantive or malicious, as well as when it should be limited. Restrictions based on quantity have the potential to suppress developments that can help to significantly develop or contextualize a story, even if the subject personally deems the reporting inflammatory. Information that a subject perceives as negative and degrading may be valuable to the general public and rooted in substance worth analyzing. Those who see the media as prominently to blame for Arday’s death often point to the fact that 249 articles appeared in the press focusing on him in the span of 22 days, with critics viewing this as overbearing. However, even assuming that this coverage was excessive and sensationalized, this would not constitute a standard necessitating government limits on stories, especially when media reporting varies in terms of length and depth. While one can believe that the media went overboard on covering Arday, there were also valid reasons to focus on his case due to his status. Besides his position at an elite institution, Arday was someone who had both given testimony in front of parliamentary committees and advised the British government regarding the national school curriculum. On August 12th, Cambridge itself said it would investigate “the circumstances around his appointment” to adhere to the institution’s standards of academic excellence. Investigative journalists who questioned Arday’s work did not only have complaints filed against them but, in the case of Jack Grove, were reported to the police. One can argue that the coverage surrounding Arday before his death was excessive, but it should not all be portrayed as monolithic. At the end of the day, Arday’s death still remains a great tragedy, for his friends, family, and those who valued his presence, and such a tragedy should not be exploited for the sake of increased censorship and government control.

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A controversy has emerged over reports of escalating stress sailors overseas on the USS Abraham Lincoln face amidst the U.S. war with Iran. Families of sailors have reported crew members attempting to jump overboard, poor ship conditions, and intense emotional distress. These concerns have been heard by Navy leadership during town hall meetings, with one spouse alleging that her husband on deployment sent her a message saying, “He hopes he does not wake up tomorrow.” The Lincoln has gone a record number of days without a port stop and has spent over eight months overseas since its November 2025 deployment from San Diego. Families of crew members have reported food and water shortages, delays in mailing services, moldy showers, and broken toilets. The USS George Washington will replace the Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, continuing enforcement of a blockade with the intent to prevent Iranian ships from entering the country. The criticisms from the sailors’ families have not just focused on the poor conditions in the ships but also the military and the Trump administration more broadly, highlighting a theme of soldiers having their experiences minimized while serving.

When asked about whether families of loved ones aboard the Lincoln were worried, President Trump replied by saying, “No, they’re not.” In response to these comments, the naval families with relatives on the Lincoln have pointed their criticisms at the president directly. One spouse of a sailor told Responsible Statecraft:

“If my spouse were to be injured or killed, I feel like the military wouldn’t even tell me. I’ve lost all trust.”

A sister of another crew member told The Guardian

“I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry.”

The Trump administration has restated a pledge to support the troops, but the recent posture coming from D.C. contradicts this sentiment. On top of the fact that the U.S. war on Iran is unpopular with the American public, families of those serving have expressed growing discontent and a lack of trust in American leadership. As the experiences of soldiers continue to be undermined, a continued erosion of trust can be expected to follow, with one aircraft carrier serving as another symbol of a straining war effort.

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Last week, a controversy emerged when President Trump lashed out at reports highlighting U.S. munitions shortages in the Iran war, stating on Truth Social that the leakers of the information would be “hunted down,” while insisting that U.S. stockpiles remained “massive.” According to administration officials, continuous reports of low US munitions in wartime have driven Trump “crazy,” with the president believing the coverage undermines his leverage while emboldening the Iranian regime. The Center for Strategic & International Studies estimates that the U.S. currently has between 759 and 827 Patriot Interceptors, with the prewar number in comparison sitting at 2,330. Trump’s responses suggest he does not want to appear weak and vulnerable, but this mindset is not exclusive to him, as aiming for favorability at the expense of accurate information during conflict has been a recurring pattern during wartime. Trump is no outlier.

There are several motivations that explain wartime messages that sacrifice candor for comfort. Much of the time, it is to bolster morale and to quell widespread opposition to specific policies. Case in point during the Iraq War, where, in response to a flurry of human rights criticisms regarding treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration created a Pentagon-backed information apparatus, which saw groups of analysts making trips to the detention center to produce sanitized television content intended to deflect from abuse allegations. The Bush administration’s detainment of terror suspects without due process was one of the key ways in which civil liberties and the U.S. Constitution were eroded and a climate of fear was escalated in the name of combating terrorism. The optimistic political messaging surrounding Guantanamo was a notable effort to quell opposition not only to the detentions but also, in a broader sense, to the climate that the War on Terror was developing.

Another dimension of wartime messaging is a sense of optimism to mask uncertainty or failure, where realities that highlight the shortcoming of strategy are suppressed. Arguably the most famous example of this would be the Pentagon Papers commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967, who ordered the landmark study out of growing increasingly frustrated with the U.S. war in Vietnam, despite initially being a stalwart cheerleader for it. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst at the Rand Corporation until 1970, grew to view the war as both immoral and a blunder when faced with its reality and started leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in June 1971, with the many deceptions employed to sell the war in Vietnam now being front and center in the public eye. The papers exposed a massive gap between the public presentation of the war, which was optimistic, and actual battlefield realities. That same year, in an Oval Office meeting with White House Chief of Staff Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman, President Nixon, while expressing deep anger over the media leaks exposing the war, very transparently highlighted that the whole situation made the U.S. look terrible. The war in Vietnam was failing, and the war for hearts and minds on the domestic front faced the threat of reality. A more recent example of wartime deception would be the public-relations apparatus that was coupled with the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan that was launched on October 7th, 2001, in response to the September 11th al-Qaeda attacks. While the initial goal of destroying al-Qaeda seemed like a clear objective, the U.S. would then expand the mission after initial military successes in late 2001 and would do so without a clear idea of who the enemy was in a country largely misunderstood by the national security establishment. This was coupled with a pursuit of nation building, allocating funding to a corrupt Afghan government, propping up violent warlords in an effort to enhance law and order, and boosting a local insurgency in the Taliban through a failed counter-narcotics campaign aimed at the expanding opium trade. The Afghanistan Papers, a series of interviews published by the Washington Post with over 400 people involved in the conflict, highlighted how, despite a campaign of public optimism, policymakers deemed the war to be unwinnable due to a poor understanding of the country and a lack of a coherent, feasible, and universally agreed-upon objective. Since the early years of the war, “snowflakes” sent by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to other administration officials highlighted the deep concern regarding a path forward in Afghanistan, a widespread sentiment that would continue despite messaging to the public that the conflict was under control. While public messaging was oriented around progress and stability, administration officials privately expressed confusion, uncertainty, and all-around unease about what the future of Afghanistan would entail.

Trump’s hostile approach towards reported shortcomings of the U.S. strategy in Iran is reflective of past efforts to minimize focus on unfavorable battlefield realities that expose vulnerability, and this extends beyond combating coverage of munitions shortages. Since July 7th, the Pentagon has been reporting U.S. military casualties under a new webpage titled “Overseas Operations,” rather than having a unified number including deaths since the start of the war. An earlier April analysis from The Intercept, stemming from unreported casualty data and a variety of defense sources, found that the Pentagon regularly sent outdated statements on U.S. casualty numbers, which resulted in undercounts, although the Pentagon denies this. On the offensive front, as U.S. munitions become depleted, Iran has continued to discover new ways to maneuver U.S. air defenses and adapt to the changing battlefield realities to its benefit, as evident by recent Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan. While there may be a national security dimension to fears of leaking sensitive information, the concern comes when national security is invoked in a fashion to prevent legitimate criticism of government action. Despite Trump’s outrage over reporting on munitions shortages, public access to this information is an essential component to the U.S. political system, and as Jennifer Kavanagh states in The American Conservative:

“Officials inside the Trump Administration publicly flagged concerns about U.S. weapons supplies when cutting aid to Ukraine. Under Biden and then Trump, the Pentagon has requested massive sums to expand the defense industrial base, arguing that munitions stockpiles need to be replenished.

This is why the faux outrage about the “leaking” of information regarding the depletion of U.S. military supplies is so bizarre and nefarious.”

Even if the United States were to escalate the air war, Tehran maintains economic leverage through its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz waterway between Iran and Oman, disrupting much of the Persian Gulf’s oil and natural gas exports. As it stands, the unfavorable battlefield realities of the U.S. war on Iran may prove impossible to conceal, despite the continuous efforts to do so.

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One of the cornerstones of modern American discourse has been the ever-shifting, sometimes unaware, but always present emphasis on identity politics as a catalyst for orchestrating change that different factions find favorable. Inevitably, this causes rival political sides to accuse one another of focusing on cultural symbolism to an excessive degree, despite the fact that vastly different ideologies can all be found guilty of this. This is true with the alt-right, which, through its nationalist advocacy, falls victim to a similar identity-based framework found in modern progressivism, just from the polar opposite side of the spectrum. Identity politics refers to political actions that orient social interests around membership in specific racial, gender, religious, cultural, or ethnic groups, and a tendency to adapt this framework can be found in discourse across the ideological aisle. Ideology oriented around identity may not characterize the entirety of the American right, but its presence within conservative ecosystems demonstrates that overreach regarding identity politics is not only a feature of the contemporary left.

The term “woke,” broadly in its original political meaning, is synonymous with an alert to injustice. The Cambridge Dictionary definition of “wokeness” reads as

“A state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”

“Woke” in a classic sense historically gained its meaning through struggle. Such language was used in editorials advocating for Black voting rights, like in a 1904 issue of Baltimore Afro-American, one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country, calling for its readers to “wake up.” Similar language would be later used in blues music through the 1920s and 1930s, with the genre itself regularly featuring lyrical symbolism about rejecting a status quo of intertwined racism, labor exploitation, and economic disparities. In the modern context, while “woke” still broadly carries its social-justice roots, it comes with a more negative connotation that intends to focus on the detriment of the excesses of identity politics and cancel culture.

In accordance with recent political discourse, the term “woke” is frequently used pejoratively to describe censorship employed to curb perceived “discriminatory” or bigoted language or actions. Academia that articulates this sentiment positions wokeness as a form of overreach, particularly in educational institutions, that stifles debate and academic rigor for the sake of promoting a sense of safetyism that undermines a world full of potential offenses. This critique is substantive, as the Department of Education explicitly says that punishable harassment is not broadly equivalent to the “mere expression of views, words, symbols, or thoughts that some person finds offensive.” In accordance with the general critique of censoriousness in the name of emotional protection, there have been many instances of speakers and faculty facing censorship for their political beliefs. Examples would be Berkeley cancelling a visit from right-wing activist Ann Coulter over “safety” fears and a Loyola University professor being investigated for creating a “hostile” learning environment due to his lectures on economic slavery and the gender wage gap. One notable story was when Georgetown law professor Ilya Shapiro was suspended and investigated for criticizing then-president Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, claiming on social media that it would result in the court getting a “lesser black woman” in comparison to judge Sri Srinivasan. Shapiro would eventually be reinstated, but he decided to resign. Regarding identity politics, colleges and universities regularly implemented “safe space” policies commonly for LGBTQ+ students, ethnic minorities, women’s organizations, and other groups that have faced historical disenfranchisement. Supporters of safe space argue that they are necessary for students from marginalized groups to engage in an academic setting without facing harm or harassment. The contention with safe spaces is that they are counterintuitive to what an academic experience should be, shielding students from rigorous disagreement for the sake of emotional protection.

The conservative backlash to identity politics would lead one to believe that they reject any familiar political framework, but the record does not show this to be true. Take, for example, the popularized “manosphere” on social media, portraying men as the victims of changing cultural norms who have to maintain a sense of control through a sense of domination over women. The manosphere has since developed into what a piece from Wired describes as a “multibillion-dollar grievance industry,” where machismo content creators sell digital subscriptions that are presented as the ultimate help guide for disenfranchised men seeking help.

The manosphere, through its content presentation, broadly utilizes an identity politics framework to sell its message.

Other examples of a sort of sectarian discourse remain visible in certain right-wing spaces. One example would be when the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk debated an opponent who referred to Jewish people as a collective indulging in “satanic acts.” Many parts of the online political landscape have demonstrated an appetite for perspectives portraying different hierarchies of religion, race, and gender while claiming mainstream Republican leadership is too soft. The case in point is the rise of the white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes, who has cultivated an audience of what he calls “groypers,” while regularly promoting racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and a new conservative movement that is not afraid to embrace his brand of nationalism. Such identity-based discrimination was also documented by Politico when leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country had their Telegram chats leaked, revealing a plethora of bigoted messages. Some examples would be a “love” for Hitler and the characterization of Black people as “watermelon people.”

Identitarian rhetoric, while commonly attributed to the alt-right, has also seen prevalence in more mainstream conservative discourse. MAGA-aligned figures, such as Laura Loomer, who herself is known to help craft policy in the Trump administration, regularly take to social media portraying Islam as a unique threat to America. Some Republican lawmakers have called for the mass expulsion of Muslims, and while no such legislation has been enacted, the proposal itself gives insight into the identity-based mindset found in swaths of the American right.

It would be an oversimplification to declare all Republicans or Trump voters as bigots, as many who supported him in the 2024 election did so out of a belief he would meet the economic needs of middle- and lower-class voters, a sentiment elevated through his positioning as a populist. No group is a monolith, and this should be remembered if we are to push for a less primitive political discourse. However, the presence of sectarianism in facets of right-wing discourse, often intended to be the antithesis of excessive identity politics on the American left, has demonstrated a willingness to indulge in a similar identitarian framework to push extremism. This is not to say that censorship is the answer, as speech suppression has already shown to be a useful tool for both Democrats and Republicans to enact partisan gains when convenient. The issues are both the mechanisms of said identity politics and how they are exploited by groups claiming to oppose them, serving as a vessel for heightened political tribalism and extremism.

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The war in Ukraine has tilted in Kyiv’s favor–at least this has been a prominent sentiment among Western politicians and media outlets. From a CNN portrayal of Ukrainian deep strikes into Russia serving as a “turning point” in the war, to the late U.S. senator Lindsey Graham in awe during a visit to a Ukrainian drone factory late last month, or Finnish president Alexander Stubb saying that Ukraine has “already won”, the current consensus portrays Kyiv as changing the reality on the battlefield to its advantage against a stronger adversary. President Trump expressed support for Ukraine striking deep into Russia at the July 8th NATO summit in Ankara, something that he previously viewed as an escalation that would continually provoke the Russians and prolong the war. In a July 23rd meeting at the Southeast Asian Summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated the Russian position to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, stating that weapons sales to Ukraine are “unacceptable.” Washington has continued a hawkish posture towards Russia, not only through its proposal to allow Ukraine to produce U.S.-made Patriot missiles, but also through the unveiling of a new sanctions bill negotiated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This all begs the question: is the sentiment that Ukraine is altering war dynamics to its advantage rooted in battlefield realities, or is Russia continuing to be the dominant military and territorial actor?

A key point of measurement for battlefield dynamics would be a look at Russian territorial gains and what they reveal about the broader state of the war. During the last four weeks, Russian advances into Ukrainian territory have slowed, with the Russians having made a net gain of 10 square miles, certainly less than in June when Russia made a net gain of 31 square miles. In early July, a Harvard University analysis of data from the Ukrainian Deep State OSINT Group found that despite a net loss in May, Russia continues to move into Ukrainian territory in June, even if its gains are incremental. An example of Russia’s continual push would be its assault on the Ukrainian city of Kostyantynivka, which serves as a key point to the remainder of the Donbas region. Therefore, if the Russians were to conquer Kostyantynivka, it would significantly improve its prospects to seize the Donbas in its entirety. A look at the territorial reality calls for a comparison of battlefield metrics, such as casualty counts and drone warfare.

A key component of the case of Ukraine shifting the battlefield dynamics has been its ability to inflict damage on critical Russian infrastructure through drone strikes. While Ukraine has found innovative ways to employ specialized tech for domestic drone innovation, Russia still maintains thousands of medium- and short-ranged ballistic cruise missiles and warplanes. While Ukraine has successfully hit large Russian oil refineries, Russia has demonstrated a willingness to retaliate, such as on July 2nd, when Russia killed 21 in Kyiv through a drone and missile attack, serving as one of the biggest aerial assaults since the war was launched in February 2022. Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure have long served as a way for Kyiv to put economic pressure on Moscow, and while the Russian economy is feeling the hurt from strikes on its infrastructure, Western sanctions, and the cost of war, Russia can still expect GDP growth by 1% this year, which according to The Economist, is as good as Canada or France. This is because Russia can partially defy Western sanctions through increased trade with countries such as India or China, and through Moscow’s insistence on defense spending, state-linked sectors remain afloat, even if this translates to a slow economic expansion.

Ukraine’s ability to escalate does not come without a cost, as evident by Zelensky requesting 300 patriot missiles from Trump during a late July meeting in the Oval Office. This comes at a time where the U.S. only has between 759 and 827 patriot missiles, with the war in Iran being a key driver in munition shortages, as the prewar number before February 27th hovered at around 2,330.

Besides munitions, a key factor that has disadvantaged Ukraine is its manpower shortages, with Russia’s population roughly four times bigger. Due to shortages of volunteer forces and the Russian threat being existential, Ukraine has a system of conscription and mandatory mobilization, which has resulted in violent clashes between civilians and army officers. In January 2026, then Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated that 2 million Ukrainians were “wanted” for dodging military service. Forced conscripts have been a catalyst for resentment within Ukrainian society, with demonstrations taking place in cities such as Lviv in opposition to the military draft. Russia, which does have a draft system requiring men ages 18-30 to serve in one year of military service, has been successful in using other financial incentives that allow for tens of thousands of soldiers to be recruited monthly to compensate for battlefield losses, with conscriptions, although present, not generating the same levels of societal disruption as in Ukraine.

While Ukraine has certainly had successful attacks on significant Russian targets, the current battlefield reality does not indicate that Kyiv has shifted the trajectory of the war to its ultimate advantage. Past Ukrainian counteroffensives, such as the 2024 Kursk campaign, were also characterized as real turning points for the war, even if they largely ended up being unsuccessful. Analysis of Ukrainian shortcomings in the war often gets relegated to being labeled as “Russian propaganda,” making it harder to separate political messaging from honest analysis. However, if further atrocity is to be prevented and a more stable future is to prevail, an assessment of genuine battlefield realities and realistic steps forward would be a start.

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In June 2026, the Senate Agriculture Committee released a draft of a Farm Bill that did not include the Save Our Bacon Act, a legislative proposal that would nullify animal welfare laws at the state level. The Save Our Bacon Act (H.R. 4673) was introduced on July 23rd, 2025, and has since been incorporated in the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (H.R. 7567), which passed the House of Representatives in April and awaits action in the Senate.

If passed, the Save Our Bacon Act would override local and state laws that limit the sale of animal meat from farms that use intense forms of animal captivity, such as the forcing of pigs into tight and restrictive gestation pens. An analysis of the proposed legislation by the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School found that it has the potential to nullify over 600 existing state and local laws relating to animal welfare, public health, and food safety, shifting state authority over agricultural production to the federal government.

In gestation crates on factory farms, pigs are confined to a 7-foot by 2-foot cage, causing them to be unable to turn around in a claustrophobic environment, resulting in intensified physical pain and stress. Factory farms characterize these gestation crates as necessary to separate pigs so they do not bite each other, although the National Library of Medicine has found that this is a symptom of the frustration that comes with being confined in an environment without stimulation. At just seven months old, pigs are deemed ready for breeding, being forcefully impregnated through a rod being put into the pig to perform Artificial Insemination. Once forced into the gestation crate, pigs, unable to engage in their typical behavior while having their movement restricted, face a deterioration in their bones and cardiovascular system, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Pigs, despite being regarded as highly intelligent animals, capable of demonstrating a wide array of emotional, problem-solving, and social skills, regularly face widespread chronic stress from the factory farming industry.

As it stands, the Save Our Bacon act faces widespread opposition from health professionals, animal welfare groups, and prominent voices from both sides of the political spectrum, but the prospect of the legislation passing still remains largely uncertain. The exclusion of the Save Our Bacon Act from the Senate Agricultural Committee’s Farm Bill draft is a promising development, but the fight for the pigs remains active, and to minimize harm and cruelty, engaging in it would be an essential endeavor.

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The U.S. hot war with Iran appears to have resumed following the collapse of the June Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). President Trump made this clear by declaring the temporary ceasefire “over” on July 8 at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The U.S. struck Iran on June 7th after Iranian strikes on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran’s posture regarding the Strait of Hormuz has been that commercial shipping can resume as long as ships use approved routes, and if they don’t, they risk facing a lethal response. From the Iranian perspective, controlling the strait is essential for the country to maintain leverage, with the waterway passing between the Omani and Iranian coastlines serving as a key economic choke point through which much of the Persian Gulf’s natural gas and oil exports pass. From the American perspective, the MOU allows for an open strait where vessels can travel through different lanes without the necessity of coordinating with the Iranians. In the words of Iran analyst Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft:

“Both sides are clearly testing each other’s red lines. If the dispute were solely about ensuring the safe passage of commercial shipping, vessels could simply transit through the Iranian shipping lane. Tehran has not prevented ships from using the northern corridor. Instead, the insistence on using the southern corridor without notifying Iran appears designed to challenge Tehran’s claim that it exercises authority over the Strait—a claim the United States and most Gulf states have long rejected.“

The dispute over control of the strait lies at the forefront of the new escalations, as it will largely determine who has more of an advantage amidst a return to fighting.

Since the U.S. strikes on Iran after the collapse of the ceasefire, Tehran has responded by targeting U.S. Gulf bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, and while Iran was able to inflict heavy damage on U.S. sites in the last round of hostilities, it relies on authority over the Strait of Hormuz as its primary pressure point. This became evident during the first round of hostilities after the U.S. launched the war on February 28th, as the closure of the Strait, according to the IEA, was resulting in the biggest energy crisis “in history.” Since the end of February, the IEA found that global oil inventories have fallen by at least 360 million barrels. Trump is well aware that this is Iran’s strongest weapon and has made efforts to assert that the U.S. is, in the words of one of his Truth Social posts, “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT.” Trump’s announcement of a blockade targeting ships from Iranian ports while leaving the strait open to the rest of the world is emblematic of a strategy he embarked on in April, which Iran responded to by attacking commercial ships. Because Trump’s blockade was limited to ports, he was unsuccessful in reopening the Strait. Trump’s announcement of the new U.S. blockade came with the proposal of a 20% fee for all cargo shipping through the strait, which he then renounced less than 24 hours later in order to secure “Trade and Investment” deals with the Gulf states. Besides the blockade, Trump has also threatened to bomb power plants and bridges in an effort to bring Iran to the negotiating table. While the U.S. clearly is dominant in military might, and since the start of the war has inflicted heavy damage on Iran, notably on its naval assets, Trump seems unable to neutralize Iran’s dominance over the Strait of Hormuz, which thereby allows it to keep leverage while ensuring its survival.

It can be expected that Iran will play hardball to ensure it remains dominant over the Strait of Hormuz, which has allowed it to survive a militarily superior great power. While Trump has threatened to escalate attacks on Iranian critical infrastructure, it has all been done with the intention of driving a hard bargain to force Iran back to the negotiating table. However, as Trump has threatened deeper military action, which could include escalated airstrikes and ground forces sent to seize Iranian islands near the strait, the risks remain high. Ground troops could be left wide open to Iranian missiles, as Iran has retained roughly 70% of its missile arsenal since the war was launched, while escalated asymmetrical warfare could result in U.S. stockpiles being even more critically depleted while global energy flows are imperiled. While Washington seems to be pushing for increased asymmetrical warfare, at the moment, it lacks the ability to compel Iran to surrender. Despite conventional military superiority, the U.S. has yet to demonstrate that it can break Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz through military might, and as long as Tehran keeps this leverage, it is likely to have escalation dominance.

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Last Thursday, demonstrations emerged in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, with protestors attacking military recruitment officers and overturning a military vehicle. This was in response to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s conscription program amidst the country’s war with Russia. As the war has raged on, clashes between conscription officers and Ukrainian citizens continue to escalate, with over 100 incidents in 2026 alone. In response to the demonstrations, Ukraine opened a criminal investigation, while some Ukrainian officials have called on citizens to direct their anger away from the army towards the Russians.

The resentment fueling demonstrations such as these did not emerge in a vacuum. Ukraine has a system of conscription and mandatory mobilization for its army, where all men between ages 25 and 60, while being barred from leaving the country, are subject to being drafted. The Ukrainian government sees this system as a necessary means of pushing back against a militarily dominant force with more manpower, with Russia’s population being nearly four times that of Ukraine’s. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian parliament has taken many steps to expand conscriptions in a war it deems existential. As of July 2026, Zelensky has sent two bills to the Ukrainian parliament to extend martial law and conscriptions for another 90 days. This action comes at a time where 85% to 90% of new Ukrainian fighters arrive through the military draft.

The military draft has generated widespread tension within Ukrainian society. Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, received 6,127 complaints regarding potential acts of violence from enlistment officers in 2025, which, according to Lubinets, is 333 times more than the number he received since the beginning of Russia’s invasion. Some draftees have included the mentally disabled and, according to a Ukrainian brigade commander, men with no teeth or tuberculosis. Resistance against the draft has oftentimes turned violent, whether it be conscription officers stabbed on duty or getting shot at by draft offices. To ensure that citizens comply, draft officers have resorted to violence themselves to force conscriptions, using tactics commonly referred to in Ukraine as “busification.” Numerous videos posted on social media have showcased conscription officers grabbing Ukrainian civilians and dragging them into vans for recruitment, as well as other altercations and acts of violence. A notable instance of aggression was in April 2026, where draft officers abducted a man and drove him around Odesa, subjecting him to psychological torment and physical assault while demanding a $30,000 bribe. Although the men responsible for this act were arrested, violence from draft officers remains continuous.

In January 2026, Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated that two million Ukrainians were “wanted” for military service, while thousands of Ukrainians have illegally crossed the border to avoid military service. Security has used lethal methods in an attempt to limit this, such as in June 2024 when a Ukrainian deserter was shot and killed by border security while attempting to reach Moldova.

In August 2025, a Gallup poll found at least 69% of Ukrainians want the war to end in a negotiated settlement as soon as possible, showing a stark contrast from earlier polls in 2022 closer to the launch of the Russian invasion, which found over 70% of Ukrainians wanting to fight until victory. Ukrainians, who rallied around the flag to fight to victory after Russia’s 2022 invasion, have largely grown exhausted. Before Ukraine’s draft age was lowered from 27 to 25 in April 2024, Western policymakers, such as the U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, had advocated for easing restrictions on conscriptions. In a March 2024 visit to Kyiv, Graham said:

“I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27.”

Going on to say:

“You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27.”

In November 2024, the Biden White House urged Ukraine to increase the size of its military by decreasing the draft age to 18, a proposal that Zelensky rejected.

The path to a negotiated settlement in the war seems increasingly narrow. At the July 8th NATO summit in Ankara, Trump took a hawkish posture towards the conflict, saying that he would allow Ukraine to produce U.S.-made Patriot missiles and would support long-range strikes into Russia, stating:

“It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”

Trump’s statement reflects the viewpoint of many European leaders, who believe that such strikes can allow Ukraine to turn the tide of the war through low-cost mechanisms that can bring a desperate Russia to the negotiating table. However, despite optimism from Western leaders regarding Ukrainian battlefield prospects and high praise being heaped onto the country’s drone arsenal, Ukraine’s disadvantage lies in its lack of manpower in comparison to Russia. Ukraine’s increasingly aggressive conscription efforts illustrate this, with such measures appearing likely to continue as long as the war escalates and a settlement becomes less and less likely.

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On July 8th at the NATO Summit in Ankara, President Trump said that he would allow Ukraine to produce U.S.-made Patriot missiles and would support long-range strikes into Russia, stating:

“It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”

Trump’s comments echo the consensus of many European leaders who believe that such strikes constitute a low-cost strategy that could impel Russia to come to the negotiating table. However, with this comes a risk of escalation, as the Russians could escalate through heavier bombing in a conflict that they, as well as the Ukrainians, view as existential.

In November 2024, right after Trump had won the election, then-President Joe Biden had allowed Ukraine to strike Russia with long-range U.S. missiles, a move that Trump himself objected to, saying:

“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done.”

Moscow warned that Biden’s decision would cause Russia to further involve itself in the fighting.

A rhetorical cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign was ending the war in Ukraine through diplomatic means, as he promised to end the conflict in 24 hours. While such a proposal was destined to be exaggerated, something that Trump later referred to as “sarcastic,” from a broad perspective, the language demonstrated a desire to eventually end the war.

By 2026, Trump has adopted a more hawkish approach to the war, which is what he had previously criticized Joe Biden for.

Escalatory postures from Europe, as well as the U.S., come after a serious uptake in fighting between Russia and Ukraine, with the two sides trading intense back-and-fourth strikes. After Ukraine struck a large Russian oil refinery on July 1st, reportedly with U.S. intelligence, Russia retaliated by launching a drone attack on Kyiv and killing 21. The Russian response to attacks on oil refineries by Ukraine, which have generated widespread fuel shortages in Russia, is an example of Putin being willing to indulge in heavy firepower as a result of pressure. Such was also the case in late May when Russia launched a barrage of drones and missiles on Kyiv after Ukraine hit a dormitory in the Russian-held Luhansk region, killing 21.

While the consensus in the West is that Putin often draws red lines and does not act on them in the ways he threatens, this dismissal has the potential to obscure Russia’s willingness to use force when it perceives its security interests to be at stake. While both Ukraine and Russia view the war as existential, less of an effort has been made to address Russian security concerns, despite it being the dominant player in the conflict with the capability to inflict harsher damage. While Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it can be interpreted that the West’s dismissal of Putin’s security concerns-particularly regarding NATO expansion-served as the vehicle that did not justify but provoked the conflict.

From the Russian perspective, particularly President Putin, there is a perception that the West has taken efforts to make Ukraine a rampart on its 1,974-kilometer border, and because of this view, Western action, notably through proposals to expand NATO to Ukraine, is deemed a threat. Putin makes this clear in the speech he gave after he launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, saying:

“Even now, with NATO’s eastward expansion the situation for Russia has been becoming worse and more dangerous by the year. Moreover, these past days NATO leadership has been blunt in its statements that they need to accelerate and step up efforts to bring the alliance’s infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders. In other words, they have been toughening their position. We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us.”

NATO expansion began in 1999, welcoming the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and then continued in 2004, bringing in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Romania. At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, then-president George W. Bush backed both Georgia and Ukraine for membership, a proposal that Putin considered a “direct threat” to Russia.” It was not just Putin who made this case, but also the U.S. ambassador to Russia, WIlliam Burns, who, in a now-leaked State Department cable, warned:

“Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

A Gallup poll from that same year found that 43% of Ukrainians were most likely to view NATO expansion into their country as a threat, with 15% feeling that it was a protective force and 30% feeling indifferent. U.S. officials were aware of this concern, as a leaked diplomatic cable revealed that the Americans were working with prominent Ukrainians on how to make NATO expansion “more favorable” to the country’s general public.

Warnings about the potential negative effects of NATO expansion from other prominent U.S. diplomats had pre-dated Burns’ remarks. George Kennan, widely regarded as the “father of containment” who halted Soviet expansion in the late 1940s, said in a 1997 op-ed for The New York Times:

“I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

Going on to say:

“Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

William Perry, Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, threatened to leave the administration in 1994 when the proposal for NATO expansion moved forward. Years later, in an interview with The Guardian, Perry said:

“Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In August 2008, after the Bucharest Summit, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, supported by the U.S. and dedicated to bringing his country into NATO, had his military launch massive rocket and artillery assaults on South Ossetia. He wanted to reincorporate the two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, something that Putin vehemently disapproved of, prompting him to join the war, working to push the Georgian fighting force back, exemplifying a desire to prevent Georgia from gaining NATO status.

In November 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a supporter of Ukrainian neutrality in relations with the West and Russia, rejected an EU association agreement for a Russian counteroffer, sparking demonstrations opposing his decision. The EU deal was contingent on Ukraine accepting austerity measures in order to secure a bailout program from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which Yanukovych resisted due to the prospect of interest hikes and high taxation. Russia offered Yanukovych a $15 billion bailout and threatened to withhold it if Yanukovych took the EU offer.

When demonstrations arose in Ukraine in response to Yanukovych’s decision, the U.S. threw its support behind the protestors. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State of European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Republican senator John McCain were two of the U.S. officials that supported and joined in the demonstrations. In December 2013, McCain shared a photo with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, which had become a faction of the demonstrations. According to the EU in 2012, the Svoboda party had demonstrated tendencies that were “racist, antisemetic, and xenophobic.” Mainstream outlets such as NBC News, while acknowledging the different sects of Ukrainian society in the demonstrations, reported in January 2014 that “right-wing militia-type toughs are now one of the strongest factions leading Ukraine’s protests.”

A deal was struck that would have allowed Yanukovych to stay in power on February 21st, 2014, until new elections were held, but the protestors were insistent that he leave office, and after a series of violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Putin, now worried about further Ukrainian integration in the EU, annexed Crimea in March 2014 and supported Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine. In April 2014, in response to a rebellion of mostly ethnic Russians in southeastern Ukraine, Kyiv launched military operations cracking down on the insurgency, which led to fighting breaking out in the Donbas. CIA Director John Brennan visited Kyiv that month to bolster intelligence-sharing operations between the U.S. and Ukraine, and thus, the new “covert war” started.

Just months before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russia presented a draft U.S.-NATO security agreement in December 2021, demanding that the parties permanently deny Ukraine entry into NATO while halting eastward expansion. NATO rejected this, with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying:

“NATO’s relationship with Ukraine is going to be decided by the 30 NATO allies and Ukraine, no one else.”

Earlier in June 2021, at the summit in Brussels, NATO, while not granting membership to Ukraine and Georgia, reaffirmed its commitment to the proposal in 2008 in Bucharest while recognizing a Membership Action Plan (MAP) as a key part of the process.

The Biden administration also rejected the draft agreement. From the American perspective, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, admitted that NATO expansion was “not on the table” in terms of negotiations. In December 2025, former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council under Biden, Amanda Sloat, in a recorded chat with Russian pranksters posing as Ukrainian President Zelensky, admitted that NATO expansion may have played a role in fueling the conflict. In the recording, Sloat said:

“We had some conversations even before the war started about, what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion’ — which at that point it may well have done.”

The Biden administration was insistent that NATO maintained its open-door policy, leaving little room for compromise.

Now in 2026, as U.S. and European officials take a more hawkish posture towards Russia, they are repeating a long-standing mistake, not acknowledging Russian security concerns, and if this continues, atrocity will continue to prevail.

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Israel is seeking to rename its plan that pushes for the removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, working to replace the “voluntary migration” title for a “plan for free movement” in an effort to quell widespread opposition to the proposal, which even Israeli human rights groups label as “ethnic cleansing”. This rebranding, as reported on by Israel’s Channel 13, citing anonymous Israeli officials, is in line with other efforts by the state to respond to international pressure symbolically or rhetorically in efforts to minimize negative global perceptions.

An example of this would be in May 2025, when Gaza’s entire population was facing acute hunger due to an Israeli humanitarian blockade; Netanyahu authorized what he described as “minimal humanitarian aid” and said in a video posted to social media:

“We must avoid famine, both for practical reasons and diplomatic ones. Without international backing, we won’t be able to complete the mission of victory.”

Israeli officials had spelled out their motivation to prevent any humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, which would inevitably escalate food shortages for the civilian population, framing it as a way of applying pressure on Hamas to free Israeli hostages. Some examples would be the following:

“Seeing the reports on the debate over who should bring “humanitarian” aid into Gaza: Well, this is a fundamentally foolish debate, because no gram of aid should enter the entire Strip at all, as long as our hostages are being held there—not by an external party, and not by IDF soldiers. This is the situation today, and only by continuing it will it be possible to bring Hamas to its knees and to free our hostages by force of arms.”

-Post on X from Minister of National Security of Israel Itmar Ben Givir (April 23, 2025)

“As I mentioned in my message, Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and preventing humanitarian aid to Gaza is one of the main pressure tools that prevents Hamas from using this means against the population, in addition to the other steps that Israel is taking—and it’s a shame that there are those who try to mislead.

No one is going to introduce any humanitarian aid to Gaza in the current reality, and no preparations are being made to introduce any aid of this kind.

I emphasized that with regard to the future, a mechanism for using civilian companies must be built as a tool that will not allow Hamas access to the issue even in the future.”

-Post on X from Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz (April 16, 2025)

“I had the honor and privilege of meeting with senior figures in the Republican Party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots must be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”

-Post on X from Minister of National Security of Israel Itmar Ben Givir (April 23, 2025)

“Not even a grain of wheat will enter the strip.”

-Quote from Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich at the Yedioth conference (April 7, 2025)

After the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the taking of Israeli hostages, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

Going on to say:

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Israeli politicians have openly expressed desires to starve the entirety of Gaza’s population while also addressing the prospect of worldwide condemnation for doing so, with such an example being in August 2024, when Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said

“We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”

When Israel resorts to symbolic gestures in an effort to mask actions that would generate widespread uproar, it is oftentimes part of a deliberate strategy to ease worldwide pressure.

There have been several proposals for an Israeli plan regarding the remaining Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip, but the current end goal revolves around Israel’s efforts to maintain military control over the strip while pushing for mass emigration of the people living there. In June 2025, Defense Minister Israel Katz put forward a plan that would involve the creation of a “humanitarian city” in the ruins of Rafah where Gaza’s population would be congregated to be security screened and permanently confined. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected this proposal, characterizing it as being not “realistic.” Later that month, according to an Axios scoop, Mossad chief David Barnea visited the U.S. to seek help in persuading other countries to potentially take thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, telling the White House that Israel was in contact with Ethiopia, Libya, and Indonesia. In February of 2025, reporting indicated that the U.S. and Israel were looking to relocate Gazans to Africa and were in contact with Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland. Caroline Glick, a U.S.-born advisor to Netanyahu, was tasked with “relocating” the Gazans and had approached Somaliland and the Congo to initiate a transfer, although this was proven to be unsuccessful. While December 2025 reporting from The Times of Israel has claimed that the Trump administration has backed away from the plan to relocate Gaza's population, it has continued to pursue measures that enrich Israel’s control in the Gaza Strip.

After the October 2025 U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, Trump proposed the “Board of Peace,” which has been presented as a new international organization to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza but grants executive control to Trump, where countries wishing to join the board are required to pay $1 billion in cash. Despite the board being specifically focused on Gaza through a supposed reconstruction effort and the disarming of Hamas, its founding charter lacks any mention of Gaza, and the board lacks any Palestinian representatives on its executive or steering committees. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law and the founding executive member of the Board of Peace, has unveiled a “master plan” that envisions the transformation of Gaza into a luxury resort filled with advanced data centers, beachfront resorts, and other modernized investments. As Palestinian journalist Qassam Muaddi says:

“Kushner’s plan doesn’t foresee any restoration of Palestinian neighborhoods or villages, and offers no place for natural Palestinian life to exist. Only fixed residential blocks, surrounded by investments.”

While pursuing the “master plan” is still key to the agenda of the Board of Peace, it has faced many hurdles, mainly in its lack of structure for strong governance and a shortage of necessary funding.

As of July 2026, a draft resolution has indicated that the Board of Peace is looking to grant itself sweeping immunity to shield its members from legal proceedings in Gaza. White House officials have denied this, labeling it as “categorically false.”

From the Israeli perspective, PM Netanyahu has endorsed the “master plan” and is a sitting member on the Board of Peace and has ordered the IDF to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip while trying to pressure Hamas to disarm. Defense minister Katz has insisted that the plan for “voluntary migration” will occur and has rhetorically floated the idea of reestablishing Israeli settlements in Gaza. Finance minister Itmar Ben-Gvir has called for Gaza to be resettled by Israel and has supported the idea of building luxury neighborhoods for the Israeli police over the ruins of Rafah.

The Israeli assault on Gaza has severely escalated an already dire humanitarian situation, with strikes on civilian infrastructure rendering the majority of the territory “uninhabitable” according to Human Rights Watch. The UN found that over 1.9 million Gazans had been internally displaced to locations inside the Gaza Strip and that reconstruction efforts for infrastructure damages are estimated to cost around $71.4 billion. In total, the attacks on infrastructure in Gaza have left over 60 million tonnes of debris.

While the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza remains uncertain, Israel’s proposal, whether labeled “voluntary migration” or “plan of free movement,” remains unchanged, with the language playing a role in attempting to make a widely condemned plan more diplomatically acceptable.

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A UN Commission of Inquiry investigation from June 18th, 2026, concluded that Israeli forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, thereby embarking on a strategy to “destroy the biological continuity of the Palestinians in Gaza.” The report identifies the targeted killings as part of a broader campaign to fragment and repress Palestinian society through fostering an environment dominated by trauma, fear, and brutality.

The findings from the report include intentional killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces via shootings, which have been extensively documented before the report’s release. One notable description is the murder of a 15-year-old boy in Khan Younis, as the UN report says:

“On 24 January 2024, at around 08:30, a family was preparing to evacuate from their ground-floor apartment in a seven-storey building at al-Amal, west of Khan Younis, following receipt of an evacuation order by the Israeli security forces. The father noticed quadcopters hovering over the area and presence of the Israeli security forces about 100 meters east of their house, instructing people to head west to Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis. His 15-year-old son stepped out of the house holding a white cloth, when the father, who was inside the house, heard a gunshot from the eastern side where Israeli soldiers were located. The boy was hit in the left foot, and he fell on his face. As he attempted to stand, two more gunshots were fired within seconds from the same direction. One shot hit the boy on his back and another on the left side of his neck. Seeing this, the boy’s 20-year-old brother ran towards him and was also shot on the left side of his chest. He collapsed on top of his younger brother.”

It goes on to say

“The victims’ mother waved her hands at the south side window to signal for an ambulance when the Israeli security forces fired bullets which hit her too, slightly injuring her in her left hand. The father tried several times to pull away the bodies of both his sons but, every time he tried to advance towards them, the Israeli security forces fired in his direction.”

The commission found that the killing was carried out with a DAN 338 sniper rifle, with a precision range of more than 1,200 meters. It concluded that the Israeli soldier should have seen he was targeting a child.

The findings are consistent with previous reports from international doctors operating in the Gaza Strip. A group of 15 of those doctors told de Volkskrant that they found children 15 years or younger with gunshot wounds in the head or chest with bullets from both Israeli snipers and drones. Together, in what was the lowest count, they saw 114 examples of such wounds.

Israeli soldiers, notably from the Nahal brigade, have admitted to shooting Palestinians seeking aid with sniper rifles in testimony, highlighting how Israeli forces have engaged in targeted killing that continues during the ceasefire. One sniper from the brigade told Haaretz:

“It’s like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different direction every time, and I’m there with the sniper rifle, and the officers are yelling at me, ‘Take him down, take him down.’ I fire 50-60 bullets every day, I’ve stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I’ve killed, a lot. Children.”

During Israel’s full-scale assault on Gaza, the Israeli security forces created arbitrary lines around the Netzarim corridor that were deemed “kill zones,” where anyone who crossed, even unarmed civilians and children, was murdered and made a number in the militant body count. Israel has implemented a similar system following the October 2025 ceasefire with Hamas, with security forces creating a “yellow line” inside of Gaza separating territory controlled by Israel and Hamas. Those who cross the yellow line are treated as threats, with Palestinians who cross the line, whether civilian or not, risking being fired on. A doctor operating in Gaza said to the commission:

“It is difficult for Palestinians to know where the yellow line is, as it is just some random yellow blocks placed at random distance and there is nothing clearly marking it (e.g. fences), so it is impossible for people, particularly children, to know or locate the line. This yellow line also keeps moving and it is not an internationally recognized line; it’s an arbitrary line by Israeli security forces.”

The UN report describes killings by Israeli forces of Palestinian children who crossed the yellow line, saying:

“The Commission is not aware of any formal investigation initiated by the Israeli security forces against those responsible, similar to other attacks which have not been investigated to date, underscoring a systemic impunity relating to the killing of Palestinians including children. By maintaining that the children killed were “suspects”, the Israeli security forces have deflected responsibility to Palestinian children, portraying them as “terrorists” rather than casualties. Such tactics by the Israeli security forces serve to distort the factual narrative and further marginalize affected children and their families.”

Itmar Ben Givir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, has openly suggested shooting children approaching the yellow line in cabinet discussions.

Israeli politicians have advocated for the killing of children before the ceasefire began, with the UN report saying:

“During a Knesset plenary session on 9 May 2025, in response to Ahmad Tibi, a Knesset Member and chair of the Ta’al Party, Michal Waldiger, Knesset Member from the Religious Zionist Party, argued that military operations in Gaza must continue without restraint, declaring, “I cannot understand how this establishment does not shake when someone stands here, a member of the Knesset and speaks ill of IDF soldiers…I was a member of the Ethics Committee here we have determined repeatedly that IDF soldiers are above this argument and cannot be blamed. What was done in Gaza, it’s a shame that it did not get worse. There are no uninvolved. We saw what happened on October 7... IDF soldiers are the purest good, and they do everything to protect human life in the State of Israel… they fight every enemy… including children… Sometimes there is no choice…it’s a war. There are casualties in war.”

Israeli drones have also been responsible for the killing of Palestinian children in the strip, which has also continued after the ceasefire, with one description from the report saying:

“On 29 November 2025, two brothers, aged 10 and nine, were killed in an Israeli drone strike near Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. The boys were gathering firewood for their wheelchair-bound father when the strike occurred. Israeli security forces stated that soldiers spotted two “suspects” crossing the ‘yellow line’, acting suspiciously and approaching their forces, so a drone eliminated the “immediate threat”. At the outset, the Commission notes that the boys were located more than 300 meters from the Israeli soldiers’ rifles, meaning that they could not have posed any immediate threat from such a distance.”

During Israel’s assault, surgeons in Gaza testified that they saw Israeli drones targeting Palestinian children. Nizam Mamode, a surgeon working at Nassar Hospital in August and September 2024, said:

“The drones would come down and pick off civilians - children.”

Going on to say:

“We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’

Like in the Gaza Strip, children in the West Bank have been killed via Israeli attack drones, with the UN report saying:

“Similarly to the Israeli military tactics in Gaza, the Israeli security forces have increasingly used attack drones in the West Bank, resulting in harm to children. In one case investigated by the Commission, on 8 January 2025, at around 09:30, a 10-year-old boy and an eight-year-old boy, along with their 23-year-old male cousin, were killed by a drone in Tammun village while they were sitting in front of their home. At the time of the incident, Israeli soldiers were approximately 800 meters away from the site. After the shootings, the Israeli soldiers arrived at the scene with an Israeli ambulance, ordered the family to go inside the house, confiscated their phones (presumably to destroy any video of the shootings) and surrounded the house so that family members could not step out. The Israeli security forces took and held the bodies for ten hours before returning them in the evening to the Palestinian authorities.”

Besides Israeli security forces, Zionist settler movements have been at the forefront in terrorizing the civilian population in the West Bank. Regarding the settlers, the UN report says:

“Palestinian children face violent assaults by Israeli settlers, with several cases involving abduction, reflecting a pattern of targeted intimidation. In one case investigated by the Commission, in April 2025 two settlers abducted two siblings, a girl and a boy under five years, while they were playing outside their village home. The settlers dragged the children at knifepoint to an olive grove, while covering their mouths. They tied the children to a tree using plastic hand ties. The family arrived at the scene some five minutes later, untied the children and released them. The two settlers were likely from the Itamar settlement, which is the closest settlement to their home. The Commission learned that the children have since been displaying signs of psychological trauma, such as nightmares and fear of stepping outside their house. In another case documented by the Commission in August 2024 a group of armed settlers abducted two 15-year-old boys who were herding cattle and physically and sexually assaulted them. The boys were beaten, blindfolded and stripped of their clothes by the settlers. A settler urinated on one of the boys and fractured his leg.”

A UN report on Children and Armed Conflict (CAC) from June 16, 2026, identified six main violations committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, with them being

-Killing and maiming

-Recruitment and use

-Denial of humanitarian access

-Attacks on schools or hospitals

-Rape and sexual violence

-Abduction

The same report found 38,558 grave violations in 2025 impacting 24,174 children.

Besides armed attacks on Palestinian children, Israeli security forces have used starvation as a weapon, with the June 18th UN investigation saying:

“Israel’s use of starvation as a method of war, imposed through a blockade and siege, has produced acute and chronic malnutrition among children in Gaza, removing the basic conditions necessary for their survival. Children, including newborns, have been deprived of calories, proteins, and nutrients necessary for growth, with visible effects such as damaged hair, skin, teeth, and paralysed limbs. Immunological vulnerabilities have also contributed to the re-emergence of diseases like polio. Growing food insecurity, destruction of healthcare, and reduced immunization have severely undermined children’s health. Israel’s use of starvation as a method of war has also caused severe reproductive harms to women and girls, impacting all aspects of reproduction, including pregnancy, childbirth, post-partum recovery and lactation, as well as adversely impacted the health of newborns.”

In August 2025, the UN found Israel guilty of creating a “man-made” famine in the Gaza Strip through a humanitarian blockade. Even before the classification, the UN had reported in July 2025 that 320,000 children in Gaza were at risk of becoming acutely malnourished due to Israel’s aid restrictions, which had caused the population to become food-insecure. In their words, field workers in Gaza have admitted that they were “torn apart” from watching children die from hunger.

Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with over 20,000 being killed in the 23 months of bombardment before the October 2025 ceasefire, with more than one child being killed every hour. The UN documentation of Israeli soldiers targeting Palestinian children stands with long-standing evidence of targeted killings, crimes of collective punishment aiming to continuously tear apart the fabric of a society.

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President Trump and Iran appear to have reached a peace agreement, with Trump having signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding (MOU) on June 17th, in an event that has created a fallout revolving around a simple question: What exactly is Trump’s foreign policy? The truth is that he never was an isolationist, but simply somebody who was able to see the failures of both neoconservative and liberal interventions and used that to help build his political persona oriented around opposition to interventionism, even if this was not truly who he was.

This proposal of peace with Iran has already generated an immense backlash from hawkish members of Trump’s coalition, such as Senator Ted Cruz and MAGA social media influencer Laura Loomer, who were supportive of the war effort and hoped for the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran. On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Trump positioned himself as being “pro-peace,” with this being a key rhetorical theme he expressed. However, despite his supposedly anti-interventionist rhetoric, Trump never was an anti-war figure. While Trump has since falsely claimed to NBC News that he did not make a campaign promise of “no new wars.” The sentiment behind this claim, that being that he did not demonstrate a firm ideological commitment to non-interventionism, is true.

Trump had plenty of space since the start of his political career to position himself as the antidote to neoconservative foreign policy consensus. On the debate stage in 2016, Trump chastised Jeb Bush, the brother of former president George W. Bush, saying to his face that the Iraq war was a “big, fat mistake.” Even when Trump was in office, he asserted that

“We’ve spent $7 trillion in the Middle East and we’ve got nothing for it. Nothing, less than nothing, as far as I’m concerned.”

While the moral implications of the War on Terror were more than apparent in 2016, with over 432,000 civilians having been killed as a result of post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen, Trump framed opposition to war primarily through the lens of strategic failure.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq gave Trump a point of attack. From the start, the Iraq war was predicated on accusations spread by the Bush administration that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was linked to Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, as well as false claims that he was possessing weapons of mass destruction. After the war was launched in March 2003, the violence of the intervention helped fuel jihadism in the region, resulting in the expansion of international terrorism from groups like Al-Qaeda, with the Camp Bucca internment facility, run by the U.S. military, serving as a breeding ground for a large number of ISIS fighters, including its founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. ISIS itself spawned from al-Qaeda in Iraq, with the Sunni group founded by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi serving as a key counter to U.S. forces and the eventual Shiite government that rose to power after the fall of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party. The war in Iraq left a power vacuum that ISIS eventually took advantage of to occupy the country in large numbers. War in both Iraq and Syria has cost America $2.89 trillion between 2003 and 2023, and American troops remain occupied in Iraq to this day.

Beyond using the legacy of the Iraq war to attack the Bush family in 2016, Trump was also able to attack his opponent on the Democratic ticket, Hillary Clinton, who had already demonstrated her interventionist tendencies in both her campaign rhetoric and time as secretary of state under President Obama. Clinton was the architect of the 2011 U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya, framing it as a humanitarian mission to protect demonstrations against Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi, although the real agenda was regime change. CIA intelligence gathering was used to bolster Libyan rebel groups and fuel the air campaign from both the U.S. and NATO. Much of the Libyan insurgency consisted of extremists, such as militants in Misrata, who characterized themselves as “the brigade for purging slaves-black skin.” The air war left a power vacuum in Libya, resulting in the re-emergence of open-air slave markets for African migrants and the expansion of militia-run human trafficking camps. The postwar situation even led to Obama himself referring to it as a “shit show.” Trump, who never was outright against the proposal of striking Libya surgically, criticized the handling of the intervention, saying in 2016:

“I wasn’t for what happened. Look at the way — I mean look at with Benghazi and all of the problems that we’ve had. It was handled horribly. … I was never for strong intervention. I could have seen surgical where you take out Qadhafi and his group.”

The 2016 election also lived in the backdrop of the Syrian civil war, with the U.S. still supporting rebel groups to oust Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after demonstrations formulated against him in 2011, with Clinton herself being an advocate of bolstering the war effort. When debating Trump, Clinton advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria, which she later admitted would “kill a lot of Syrians” in a secret Goldman Sachs speech. The CIA operation in Syria, titled Timber Sycamore, was an arm and equip program to bolster anti-government rebels against Assad’s forces, with many of the recipients of weapons being aligned with Jabhat al-Nusra, the official Al-Qaeda branch in Syria. The U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army had members who fought alongside both Al-Qaeda and ISIS against the Syrian army for several months during the conflict. Mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times acknowledged the fact that U.S. weapons were reaching al-Qaeda, but even beforehand, U.S. officials had acknowledged Al-Qaeda as a strategic partner in the conflict, with Jack Sullivan at the State Department, in an email to Clinton, saying:

“AQ is on our side in Syria”

Clinton, who took a hawkish posture on Syria towards the end of her tenure as secretary of state, faced backlash from Trump on the matter, who said the following:

“You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt, what happened

with Egypt, a total mess. They don’t back — we don’t back any of our allies. You look, she was truly, if not ‘the,’ one of the worst secretary of states in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

Beyond Clinton’s record, her campaign rhetoric took a very hawkish and confrontational approach to Russia in comparison to Trump’s pledge to “seek common ground based on shared interests with Russia,” even claiming that Trump was a “puppet” for Putin on the debate stage. Even after Trump won, Clinton fueled a narrative that Russian president Vladimir Putin colluded with Trump associates to give Trump the White House. An investigation of supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in 2016 was headed by former director of the FBI Robert Mueller. The April 2019 Mueller Report found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in his 2016 run, despite Clinton’s consistent rhetoric implying Trump was a Russian agent even just months before the report was released.

The 2016 Trump campaign was a product of the current political moment, with Trump himself oftentimes verbally advocating for a rejection of neoconservative dogma, but beyond rhetorical flourishes, how did he adhere to this?

Through his first term, Trump did not start any new wars, but he escalated conflicts that already occurred under prior administrations and took actions that helped fuel conflicts down the line.

Trump continued U.S. financing and arming of Saudi Arabia and supported its bombing campaign in Yemen, with Riyadh intervening after the Yemeni civil war that broke out in 2015 between the Shia Houthi movement and the Saudi-backed government. Saudi Arabia enjoyed logistical and intelligence support from the Obama administration in its Yemen military campaign, even as it bombarded the civilian population, deliberately struck impoverished Yemeni farmers, and created a blockade around a country that imports over 85% of its food and medicine. In his first term, Trump expanded support for the Saudi coalition, vetoing bipartisan legislation introduced in 2019 to end American weapon sales to Riyadh.

In the Middle East, Trump also reversed a diplomatic breakthrough that Obama had struck with Iran, terminating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The 2015 deal saw Iran, in exchange for sanctions relief, promise not to enrich uranium above 3.67% and agree to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its nuclear sites. In March 2018, just months before the deal was destroyed, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said:

“I can state that Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments.”

Trump maintained his hawkish posture towards Iran throughout his first term. After Trump destroyed the JCPOA, he began a sanction campaign on Iran dubbed “maximum pressure”, disproportionately affecting the civilian population by limiting its access to essential health care while expanding unemployment. In 2020, Trump assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani through a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport. The Trump administration attempted to justify the strike by claiming that Soleimani posed a dire threat to American interests, but the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution wrote:

“No evidence was provided that General Soleimani specifically was planning an imminent attack against U.S. interests, particularly in Iraq, for which immediate action was necessary and would have been justified.”

Mike Pompeo, then Trump’s secretary of state, had advocated for killing Soleimani months before the strike was ordered in Iraq. The attack provoked a retaliatory strike from Iran, launching two ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq, injuring, but not killing, any U.S. soldiers.

U.S. militarism increased in a plethora of other ways throughout Trump’s first term, such as through increasing the Pentagon budget, escalating the drone war, and canceling a requirement for U.S. intelligence officials to publicly report civilian casualties in drone strikes. Prior to Trump’s first term, Obama had rapidly accelerated drone warfare, carrying out over 500 strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, causing between 384 and 807 civilians to be killed in the countries. The Trump administration escalated the lethality of the drone war, with drone strikes fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria having killed at least 1,257 civilians by 2019, with larger estimates from civilian watchdog groups such as Airwars putting the count at 7,500.

In just 2019, the Trump administration also dropped a record number of bombs on Afghanistan, withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty (INF) that Reagan signed with the Soviets in 1987, and escalated cyberattacks on Russia’s power grid.

The 2024 presidential campaign shared many similarities with the 2016 campaign, with Trump positioning himself as an arbiter of peace that was an antithesis to bipartisan foreign policy dogma. Trump claimed that the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris would “get us into World War III,” and criticized her decision to campaign with Liz Cheney, the daughter of George W. Bush’s Vice President and Iraq War architect Dick Cheney. While Trump was never a dove, the 2024 Democratic Party Platform criticized Trump for not being more hawkish in many instances, such as when it claimed he demonstrated “weakness in the face of Iranian aggression” during his presidency. However, even prior to his 2016 election, when Trump ran on a platform that chastised neoconservative dogma, he still threatened using military force. He threatened to “bomb the hell out of ISIS,” and even though he expressed his opposition to the handling of the Libya intervention, he still said that surgical strikes in the country may have been a viable option. From the standpoint of foreign policy, Trump was never an isolationist but has expressed rhetorical opposition to long-term wars that he perceived as detrimental to American interests, while having always favored quick and kinetic military action.

During his second term, Trump has engaged in a much more militaristic and hawkish foreign policy, starting new wars and escalating conflicts. In March 2025, he greenlit an eight-week-long bombing campaign in Yemen that killed at least 224 civilians, and in September of that year, he began a still-ongoing bombing campaign in the Caribbean that has killed over 200 people, with the administration claiming that they are killing drug traffickers, despite a lack of evidence demonstrating that this is the case.

In the Gaza Strip, Trump has put little pressure on his Israeli allies to end hostilities, with a January 2025 brokered ceasefire between Palestinian Hamas and Israel being broken by Israel in March of that year. In Gaza, conservative estimates have placed the number killed after the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel at around 70,000, with Israel also responsible for creating a famine in Gaza due to a starvation blockade restricting goods from entering the strip. While Trump was able to broker another ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, Netanyahu has since pushed for the Israeli military to take 70% of Gaza, while Israeli forces continue to kill Palestinians in the strip, including deliberately targeting Palestinian children. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have continued to expand settlements that are illegal under international law, with UN experts stating that settler violence constitutes a “daily terror” for the Palestinians living there. The Trump White House has occasionally vocalized its opposition to Israeli settlement expansion, but the administration has failed to create an incentive for them to be stopped.

Trump’s most consequential foreign policy decision occurred on February 28th, 2026, when he, joined by the Israelis, decided to launch a war in Iran to topple the Islamic Republic. Trump justified the war on a variety of different pretexts but mainly emphasized the idea that Iran posed a threat due to the prospect of it becoming a nuclear power and its ballistic missile program, as well as its support for a regional armed network consisting of groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas. A day before the war was launched, the Omani mediator overseeing the talks between Iran and the U.S. in Geneva told CBS News that a deal was “within reach,” with Iranian officials familiar with the talks indicating that Iran was willing to suspend nuclear enrichment for three to five years. A 2025 Defense Intelligence Agency report concluded that Iran did not currently have intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S., and in March of that same year, the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community said:

“We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear program and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.”

Despite some small tactical successes, the U.S. failed to dismantle Iran’s ballistic missile program, topple the Islamic Republic, and force Tehran to stop supporting its regional allies. Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, where one fifth of the world’s crude oil typically passes through, resulted in a predictable economic strain, with American consumers seeing their gas prices rise by 50% and farmers losing their access to essential fertilizer for their crops.

The Israeli government was a major driving force behind Trump’s decision to strike Iran, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu having long pushed for the regime change of a geopolitical enemy in the Islamic Republic, thereby also working to weaken a regional competitor and its axis. Israel’s plan to orchestrate regime change revolved around fomenting unrest within Iranian society through the Mossad intelligence agency, as well as bolstering an uprising of Iranian Kurdish fighters who would cross the border from Iraq and counter the Islamic Republic. The strategy, which initially had U.S. backing, never came to be fully realized, especially after leaks of it to the media and disapproval from other regional players. In a meeting in the White House Situation Room with Trump on February 11th, Netanyahu pitched the idea of the Mossad helping to foment an uprising after decapitation strikes of the Iranian leadership. The larger regime change plan met with skepticism from many Trump administration officials, but the prospect of decapitation strikes and weakening Iran’s ability to attack offensively was what sold the president. This prospect within the proposal spoke to Trump’s gravitation towards quick and kinetic military action, which had been heightened after Trump authorized a special focus night raid that successfully captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro inside Caracas in early January.

Trump never was a non-interventionist, and despite much of his rhetoric oriented around combating traditional American militaristic dogma, he never outright opposed it. His foreign policy record continues to be a demonstration of this point, as he attempts to find new ways to project American power abroad beyond traditional nation-building, and with the results of the Iran war, it seems that the cracks in his dogma are more apparent than ever.

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In late May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave state honors for a ritual honoring Ukrainian nationalist leader Andriy Melnyk, a World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist who had aligned with Nazis due to their shared opposition to Soviet rule. When Germany invaded Ukraine in 1941, Melnyk saw the Nazis as a viable collaborator that could help ease Ukrainian suffering under the Soviets. At Melnyk’s reburial, Zelensky personally referred to him as a “great Ukrainian figure,” with the honorary acclaim reportedly being seen as contentious to Ukrainian allies such as Poland.

This moment reflects broader concerns over how the U.S. policymakers have addressed extremist elements within Ukraine both before and after the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Groups with historical ties to neo-Nazis and far-right ideology are embedded in part of Ukraine’s military structure, such as the Azov Battalion, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, a group that has historically deemed Jews “subhuman” and has advocated for a white Christian crusade against them. While the group had been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard since November 2014, Congress banned arms to the militia in 2018 due to its neo-Nazi links. After a vetting process by the State Department under the Leahy Law, the previous ban forbidding weapons sales to Azov Battalion was lifted in June 2024. While organizations such as Human Rights Watch received “credible allegations” of “torture and other egregious abuses by Ukraine’s so-called volunteer battalions Aidar and Azov,” the U.S. considers them to be safe recipients of U.S. weapons and training. However, while the ban was lifted in June 2024, online photos from months before posted by the brigade showcased figures wearing American military apparel and fatigues accompanying those holding Azov insignia flags. From the Ukrainian perspective, manpower shortages in wartime combined with the Russian threat being deemed existential has helped to fuel the utilization of far-right militias.

In November 2013, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an advocate for neutral relations with the West and Russia, rejected an EU Association Agreement, triggering demonstrations in what was dubbed the Euromaidan Revolution. The deal itself was contingent on Ukraine accepting austerity measures in order to secure a bailout program from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which Yanukovych thought Kyiv was unprepared for. As a result, Russia offered Yanukovych a $15 billion bailout and threatened to hold it if Ukraine took the EU deal. Yanukovych’s decision sparked antigovernment protests that peaked in February 2014. Support for the demonstrations was divided, with polling data by the Ukrainian Research & Branding Group from December of that year suggesting that 50% of Ukrainians did not support the protestors. Republican senator John McCain and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State of European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland were two of the U.S. officials that supported and joined in the demonstrations. McCain shared a photo with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Svoboda party, which, according to the EU in 2012, had “racist, antisemitic, and xenophobic tendencies.” By January 2014, although the demonstrations consisted of a diverse cross section of Ukrainian society, mainstream outlets, notably NBC News, had reported that “right-wing militia-type toughs are now one of the strongest factions leading Ukraine’s protests,” with Svoboda being one of the opposition parties in the demonstrations.

Yanukovych was ousted in February 2014 after months of increased clashes between demonstrators and security forces, with Oleksandr Turchynov becoming president, prompting Yanukovych to flee to Russia. After the ousting of Yanukovych, Putin, fearful of further Ukrainian integration with the EU and NATO, annexed Crimea in March, and backed Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine through intelligence operations in April. In response to a growing rebel group of mostly ethnic Russians in the south-east protesting the new government, Kiev launched military operations against the separatists, leading to an escalation of fighting between the two sides in the Donbas. The Azov Battalion was founded to combat the Russian separatists and incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard shortly after its founding.

While it would be a generalization to conclude that the entirety of Ukraine’s fighting force subscribes to Nazi ideology or has malicious motivations, this does not change the fact that Western leaders have been willing to tolerate extremist elements within Ukraine if there is a perceived benefit in doing so. While these forces have played a role on the battlefield as effective soldiers, their opposition to a common adversarial power should not override legitimate concerns about the presence of radicalism in Ukraine, nor should it exempt Western policymakers from scrutiny when they choose to cooperate with such elements for tactical advantage.

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In January 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview with The Economist, stated that he is pushing for a reduction of U.S. military aid to Israel within the next decade, saying:

“I want to taper off the military aid within the next 10 years. That’s not saying that I don’t want to fight for the allegiance and support of the American people, I do. You’d have to be crazy not to.”

In 2016, then U.S. president Barack Obama negotiated a memorandum of understanding with Israel for the U.S. to provide $3.8 billion in military aid on a yearly basis until 2028, thereby requiring Israel to buy from U.S. defense contractors. This does not mean that this is the maximum amount of aid that Israel will receive in a year, as Israel receives supplemental funding during wartime. For example, since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, the U.S. has been a major force in funding Israel’s destruction of Gaza, having provided $21.7 billion worth of military aid.

While Netanyahu’s rhetorical posture of signaling an end to the U.S.-Israel aid policy may give off an impression that they are pushing to act more independently militarily, recent developments reveal a contrary picture.

As of June 2026, Congress has signaled a plan to further intertwine both Israel and the U.S. militarily. Ben Freeman of Responsible Statecraft highlights how Section 224 in the newly released 2027 National Defense Authorization Act proposes the Israeli and American defense sectors would be interconnected more than ever.

Freeman writes:

“Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”

Regarding the proposal, Netanyahu wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress on June 1st, thanking it for endorsing what he referred to as “my plan.”

In American life, Israel’s popularity continues to be on a downward spiral, with research from PEW indicating that 60% of adults in the U.S. have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel. A February 2026 survey by Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians, while 36 percent sympathize more with the Israelis. Josh Paul, a former State Department official in the Biden administration who resigned in protest of the U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza following October 7th, 2023, said Netanyahu is “reading the room, seeing the very clear direction that American politics are going and asking how can Israel maintain the military-to-military relationship and the security cooperation relationship, but do so in a way that is sheltered from American politics — whether that’s Congress, or American public sentiment writ large.”

While Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) introduced an amendment to strip Section 224 from the National Defense Authorization Act, this was rejected by the House Armed Services Committee.

While section 224 has not been signed into law, its existence and the push it has received from Netanyahu and neoconservative voices in D.C. demonstrate that, despite the proposal of tapering off U.S. aid to Israel, the special relationship is not only intact but is also attempting to be expanded.

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Last Friday, the U.S. military struck a boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing three. Over 200 people have been killed in U.S. boat strikes during Operation Southern Spear, with combat operations beginning in September 2025 to combat drug trafficking. After the first boat strike on September 2nd, 2025, Trump posted a video of it on social media, with the caption saying:

“The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in international waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No U.S. forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!”

The Trump administration has failed to provide evidence that the boats struck were transporting narcotics. International law experts at the UN labeled the strikes as “extrajudicial killings” and have said:

“International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.”

and:

“Criminal activities should be disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.”

Besides the unlawfulness of the strikes, there is also little to no evidence that the strikes have halted the flow of drugs such as cocaine. Public health experts have found that the strikes have had little to no effect on the ease of traffickers to get the stimulant from South America to the U.S. As Dr. Carl Latkin at Johns Hopkins University says:

“Cocaine remains highly available, highly prevalent and relatively inexpensive.”

He goes on to describe the strikes by saying:

“In addition to being morally abhorrent, this method is as likely to succeed as much as would bombing a handful of McDonald’s in Dallas, Texas, and claiming that you’ve made America healthy again.”

In March 2026, Operation Southern Spear also saw the U.S. military conduct Special Operations raids in Ecuador, joining up with Ecuadorian forces against “designated terrorist organizations,” according to the Trump administration. U.S. officials released a video reportedly showcasing a drug trafficking camp in Ecuador being destroyed, but residents on the ground said that what was hit was a dairy farm.

Trump has found a close ally in Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa in the drug war, with Noboa positioning himself as a hardliner when it comes to anti-cartel operations. Despite his posture, the Colombian publication Revista Raya obtained leaked documents revealing that Noboa’s family business had been concealing cocaine in crates for their banana company and shipping them out to European countries.

According to the Revista Raya investigation, shipments of cocaine were seized at the Naportec port in Guayaquil multiple times throughout the 2020s. The crates that the cocaine was found in had the logo of Banana Bonita, a company part of the Noboa family business.

Daniel Noboa is not the only figure with ties to drug trafficking that Trump has embraced in his Latin America posture. In November 2025, he pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to prison in the U.S. in 2024 for conspiring to import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Hernández succeeded Porfirio Lobo, who had come to power after a military coup in 2009, as president in 2014, and, despite allegations of drug trafficking, he remained in good standing for being a strong U.S. ally until his arrest and sentence.

In the November 2025 Honduras presidential election, Trump endorsed Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the National Party, the same one as Hernández, while signaling he would not work with other candidates, posting a message to social media saying:

“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is. Tito will be a Great President, and the United States will work closely with him in order to ensure the success, with all of its potential, of Honduras! Additionally, I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”

Before Asfura’s eventual victory as ballots were being tallied, Trump accused the Honduran officials of stopping the count and threatened “hell to pay” if the results were tampered with.

Leaked audio files obtained by the Spanish newspaper Diario Red alleged an effort by Honduras, Argentina, and the U.S. to undermine the governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia through a deception campaign. In one of the files, Hernández tells Asfura that the outcome of the recent election can largely be attributed to Trump’s endorsement. These recordings also state that securing a pardon for Hernández came after extensive lobbying from Republicans, such as Roger Stone, with backing from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Regarding the deception campaign, the recordings feature Hernández telling Honduran VP María Antonieta Mejía that the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, has provided funding for a media outlet aimed at Republican lawmakers that demonizes Latin American governments Hernández disapproves of. President Claudia Sheinbaum weighed in on the prospect of the deception campaign being orchestrated, saying:

“There may be days of confusion, but if we remain true to our principles ... nobody will affect the transformation project.”

According to an investigation from The Intercept, the U.S. has since targeted Latin American countries with its own state-run information campaign via AI-driven content through a website called La Tilde. While the site appears as a typical lifestyle website, it is actually funded by the U.S. government and operates as a messaging platform for U.S. Special Operations Command South, according to a defense official. According to the investigation, the AI-produced content serves as a veneer for the content that aims to push a more favorable image of the Pentagon.

While Trump may claim that it is countering criminality in Latin America, the forces that the administration aligns with in the process and its own actions paint a different picture.

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The ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran appears to be increasingly fragile, as on May 27th, the U.S. struck a military site and a drone around the Strait, claiming it was a defensive action. This comes just days after the U.S. struck Iranian missile launch sites and boats in southern Iran, with CENTCOM spokesperson Tim Hawkins claiming the strikes were “defensive” and the Iranian Foreign Ministry responding shortly after the attack by characterizing it as a “flagrant violation” of the ceasefire. Despite the strikes, reports insist that Trump feels that a deal is near but also does not feel an incentive to rush to a settlement and that he believes Iran is negotiating on “fumes.”

While Trump’s rhetorical posture towards describing the negotiations may signal that the U.S. has the upper hand in the war, is this really the case?

On the first day of the war, the U.S. and Israel carried out an operation that killed Iranian Supreme leader Ali Khamenei, resulting in his son Mojtaba stepping up. Prior to the killing, the CIA had assessed that if Khamenei were to be killed, he could be replaced by hardliners within the IRGC, which is essentially what happened. By March 11, sources close to U.S. intelligence had said that Iran’s leadership remained intact despite the bombardment by the Israelis and Americans. The goal of regime change, while endorsed by the Trump administration, was largely pushed by the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in a meeting with Trump in the White House Situation Room on February 11th, briefed Trump on the idea of the Mossad helping to incite protests after decapitation strikes on Iranian leadership. This proposal was accompanied by a video presentation showcasing a montage of prospective Iranian leaders who could ascend to power if the proposed plan were to result in the defeat of the current leadership. Israel’s plan for regime change was largely oriented around fomenting civil unrest within Iranian society via the Mossad, as well as igniting an uprising of Iranian Kurdish fighters who would cross the border from Iraq and serve as a militant threat to the Islamic Republic, in a strategy that never came to fruition after leaks to the media and disapproval from regional players. Despite the military campaign with the objective of regime change, the Iranian government has become more “hardened,” with an amplified sense of their capability to resist attacks from foreign adversaries due to their ability to hit energy infrastructure in the neighboring Gulf states and to use the Strait of Hormuz as an economic choke point.

Destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities to reduce Iran’s lethal capabilities was a key objective Trump had in the war and, as of right now, has been a prominent example of where the U.S. has been unsuccessful in its efforts. Since the war was launched, the Iranian military has destroyed at least 228 pieces of military equipment or structures at U.S. bases throughout the Middle East, which has even resulted in some of them being declared too dangerous to staff and troops being evacuated. Around 1 billion dollars worth of U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones have been destroyed by Iran since the conflict began. In comparison, Iran appears to have maintained more of its most critical weapons. Iran has retained around 70% of its prewar stockpile and restored operational access to almost all of its missile sites it has along the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. has burned through 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the conflict, being around 10 times its purchases each year, and while the Pentagon claims that over 13,000 targets were hit with U.S. firepower, U.S. officials say that this number masks the sheer amount of force that has been used due to the same areas being struck multiple times. An April 2026 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has found that the U.S. has used over 53% of its THAAD interceptors in the conflict, which are defensive weapons systems used to shoot down ballistic missiles. While media outlets have generally put the death toll of U.S. servicemen at 13, an analysis from The Intercept, stemming from unreported casualty data and a variety of defense sources, alleged that nearly 750 have been killed or wounded and that previous figures were outdated.

Besides destroying Iran’s ballistic missiles, much of the war has been predicated on eliminating the supposed nuclear threat the Islamic Republic posed. However, the U.S. Annual Threat Assessment from March 2025 stated:

“We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear program and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.”

Rafael Grossi, the director of the IAEA, who himself had reservations on whether Iran’s nuclear program was entirely peaceful, said that his agency found “no evidence” that Iran is building a nuke. Other experts, such as Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, have said that Iran was not “close to a nuclear weapon.” During the talks in Geneva that led up to the war, Iranian officials had claimed that Iran had signaled to the U.S. a willingness to suspend uranium enrichment for three to five years, with Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi claiming the two sides made “good progress” in talks. Omani mediator Badr Albusaidi, who was overseeing the talks, had told CBS News on February 27th that a deal between the U.S. and Iran was “in reach.”

The war has taken a heavy toll on Iran’s civilian population. On the first day of the war, a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile hit a girls’ school in Minab, killing 175 people, mostly children. HRANA, a U.S.-based human rights group that is anti-Islamic Republic, has said that at least 1,700 civilians have been killed, while the UN has found that 3.2 million Iranians have been temporarily displaced due to the war.

In the U.S., the war has been largely unpopular domestically, with some polls indicating that only 26% of respondents believed that military action in Iran was worth it, much of which illustrates how the economic strain of the war has been felt at home. Gas prices in the U.S. have gone up 50% since the war began as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where one fifth of the world’s crude oil typically passes through. Americans have spent more than $45 billion on diesel and gasoline during the same period last year as a result of the war, and some analysts have found that the war is costing American taxpayers $1 billion a day, while the Consumer Price Index has risen 3.8% from last year due to high energy costs for consumers. The launch of the war and subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz have also limited access to fertilizer, straining American farmers trying to maintain their crops. Faith Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), has said that the war has caused the biggest energy crisis “in history.”

The war overall has reportedly cost $29 billion according to the Pentagon, but U.S. officials familiar with internal assessments have claimed that the price tag is actually closer to $50 billion.

While the future of the conflict may be in an uncertain state, the last few months of war have constituted a strategic blunder, and the U.S. would be wise to defuse tensions rather than climb the escalation ladder.

Through my work, I aim to provide free-to-read, informative, and truly independent analysis free from constraints and partisan fervor, for the people first and foremost. If you like my work, please consider becoming a paid or free subscriber or just sharing with friends or peers. Your support goes a long way to ensure that I can continue doing this work. Thanks everyone!

On the night of Tuesday, May 5th, Park East Synagogue in the Upper East Side neighborhood in New York City saw Palestine solidarity demonstrations being restrained by NYPD officers, as the synagogue was hosting the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” a showcase intended to persuade buyers to purchase land in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Media accounts of the scene, notably from the New York Post and Fox News, were quick to describe the chaos of the moment, but less coverage was dedicated to the fact that, from an objective standpoint, the event itself was rooted in the abandonment of international law.

When observing the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” website, the booking section allows users to select areas that they are potentially interested in for land purchase, with one of the areas being Gush Etzion of the occupied West Bank. Since 1967, after the Six Days War, the area referred to as Gush Etzion has been applied to areas in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, multiplying in size from the original four kibbutzim established between 1943 and 1947 that were then destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, with Zionist settlers having made efforts to settle the area since the late 1920s. The event in NYC was attended by The Intercept, which said that the company Harey Zahav displayed a map of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and had brochures that provided an in-depth look at properties in the occupied territories. On its website, Harey Zahav describes itself as “a real estate development company specializing in building homes in Judea, Samaria, and Southern Israel,” Judea and Samaria being the biblical term for the geographic area that is considered the occupied West Bank.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to the UN, are considered a “flagrant violation” of international law, and other human rights groups such as B’Tselem largely come to the same conclusion, highlighting how the settlements restrict freedom of movement for Palestinians as their land gets confiscated through settler violence through an apartheid system. A UN report from January 2026 states that Israeli policy towards the West Bank “resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.” Gabor Rona of Cardozo Law School explains that the real estate sales of Israeli settlements are illegal due to their neglecting to adhere to international legal obligations, saying:

“In keeping with the law of armed conflict’s fundamental principle of distinction—that only combatants and military objectives may be the object of hostilities, while civilians and civilian objects must be protected—the law of occupation requires the occupying power to respect human and sovereign rights in occupied territory.”

The criminality of Israel’s behavior in the West Bank shows no signs of slowing down, with the Great Israeli Real Estate Event being a domestic example of the country’s long-standing commitment to land grabs.

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The reactions following the shooting at the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) have fueled a long-standing partisan blame game, long played by both the right and left, to demonize ideological opponents and fabricate pretexts to usher in civil liberties abuses. Immediately after the shooting, members of Congress and administration officials have asserted that what unfolded is a product of hostile rhetoric coming from the left or liberal opposition to Trump, essentially subscribing to the idea that words are equivalent to violence. Trump himself even said that the “hate speech” from the Democrats is very “disturbing,” citing it as a danger to the country. This sentiment contradicts what was prevalent within right-wing sentiment in the late 2010s and early 2020s, notably the emphasis on an opposition to the framework that rhetoric is equivalent to violence. The term “hate speech” does not have a universally agreed-upon definition, and the United States Supreme Court, through cases such as NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware Co. has ruled that language, however inflammatory it may be, does not constitute violence. Since Trump entered the political landscape, certain Democratic politicians and those who identify as liberals have likened Trump to Hitler and made contentious comparisons, but if their rhetoric is to be seen as equivocal to a push for violence, Trump, who has referred to the left as “the enemy within,” could be held responsible for inciting violence, judging by the same standard.

The American right, previously vocal in its criticism of the idea that speech constitutes violence, has since adopted a similar dogma, even before the WHCD. After the shooting and killing of conservative pundit and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, certain American right pundits such as Laura Loomer took to social media to denounce the “lunatic leftists,” declaring them a “national security threat” and attempting to demonize a broad portion of the American political spectrum as bearing responsibility for violence on right-wing figures. To apply the standard evenly, would these same pundits find it fair if one were to reference atrocities motivated by far-right ideology, whether it be the shooting and killing of nine at a Black church in Charleston by the white supremacist Dylan Roof or the historical list of attacks on abortion providers, as proof that the American right has to broadly be characterized as a national security threat? After the MAGA-led protest and riot at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer proposed using the FBI and DHS to put Capitol rioters on no-fly lists, the same no-fly lists that were infamous for ushering in the post-9/11 surveillance state where those broadly deemed a domestic threat, oftentimes innocent citizens, were surveilled by the FBI without due process. Many conservatives understandably opposed what had all the makings to be an assault on their rights stemming from a partisan perspective. This highlights human nature in that those across the political spectrum will rebel when feeling threatened by domestic attacks predicated on flawed premises.

The conservative case against big-tech censorship expanded in the early 2020s as a result of factors such as the fallout of January 6th, as previously addressed, amidst a list of other examples. During the 2020 election, Facebook and Twitter worked to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden using his father’s status while he was vice president to secure favors to benefit a Ukrainian energy company that paid him handsomely to sit on their board, which was one of the many examples of tech interference that fueled anti-establishment sentiment among many Americans, but particularly the American right. Many who found themselves in opposition to tech censorship and the banning of Donald Trump on Facebook after January 6th, 2021, migrated to new social media apps that characterized themselves as being free from the policing of Silicon Valley, such as Parlor. Parlor was banned by Google on January 9th of that year, with liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg expressing her support for the suspension and the deplatforming of right-wing voices in an op-ed just days after. In 2022, the conservative movement was also vocal in its opposition to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to demonstrations by truckers opposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates, freezing funds donated to the trucker group that dubbed itself the “Freedom Convoy.” The Federal Court of Canada ruled Trudeau’s decision as unconstitutional in 2024, years after American Republicans had thrown their support behind the truckers. The punishment of dissent, aimed at voices on the right, caused American conservatives to position themselves as the antithesis to suppression during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Since Trump’s second term, large parts of the American right who were previously vocal in their criticism of liberal censorship have been silent on or supportive of Trump’s violations of their supposed principles. One of the notable examples would be the actions of Marco Rubio, who, when discussing the Munich Security Conference on CBS News in February 2025, said, “People are- you know, you don’t have to agree on someone’s speech. I happen to agree with a lot of what he said, but you don’t have to agree with someone’s speech to- to at least appreciate the fact they have a right to say it and that you should listen to it and see whether those criticisms are valid.” Just weeks later, Rubio oversaw efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University who served as a mediator between the faculty and the student-led encampments protesting Israel’s subjugation of the Gaza strip. The administration did not allege that Khalil committed a crime before threatening to deport him, with Press Secretary Karoline Levavitt claiming that Rubio was allowed to personally deem him a threat by being “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.” The Trump administration, which initially postured itself as being the antidote to speech suppression, particularly with Vice President Vance’s rebuttal of censorship in European countries during his 2025 Munich Security Conference speech, has embraced much of the dogma that it has claimed to oppose. The case of Mahmoud Khalil is one of the many examples where criticism of the state of Israel has been met with threats of or outright punishment. Trump has pressured Ivy League universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Definition of Antisemitism (IHRA), a definition that conflates “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” with antisemitism and characterizes other claims as being rooted in bigotry, such as “claiming the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.” In February 2025, federal agents had also detained Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk for co-signing a pro-Palestinian op-ed. Jenin Younes of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a vocal critic of Covid-19 mask mandates and lockdowns who had sued the Biden administration for an alleged censorship case, said that Ozturk’s detainment at the hands of federal agents was “worse than anything Biden ever did.”

Examples of suppression of speech often characterized as left-wing can largely be found in censorship of Palestine solidarity movements and anti-war causes more broadly. Student-led university encampments that had gained traction in 2024 during Israel’s assault on Gaza faced heavy opposition when a group of billionaires with a vested interest in keeping Israel in good standing coordinated with NYC Mayor Eric Adams via WhatsApp to use police to disrupt the protests. Amichai Chikli, Israel’s diaspora affairs minister, had himself proposed using a private intelligence firm called Black Cube to investigate the Students for Justice in Palestine group in 2024 but did not follow through due to fears of damaging relations with the U.S. Many of the suppressions of pro-Palestine speech and anti-war voices parallel, and even surpass, fears of censorship and big-tech suppression that emerged in right-wing circles during the 2020s. Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the emergency act in 2022, which resulted in the freezing of funds to the Freedom Convey without a court order, broadly parallels instances of financial institutions punishing dissent on the left. For example, the anti-imperialist outlet The Grayzone had faced a freeze on reader donations via PayPal that were paired with messages mentioning the word “Iran” in 2020. In 2010, PayPal had also frozen donations to the whistleblowing group Wikileaks after a strong U.S. government pressure campaign, declaring with little detail that the organization was involved in “illegal” activity.

Rhetoric invoking the importance of free speech is often dictated by partisanship rather than principle, and as long as this remains the case, calls for censorship and speech suppression show no signs of slowing down, with the WHCD shooting being a firm reminder.