Editor (Diplomacy & Politics) — an independent international affairs publication. I write on power and its misuse, international law and who it protects, the Global South and the cost it pays. No neutrality. No noise. Just argument.
Ben-Gvir films the spectacle and administers the system. Nuremberg hanged Streicher for the propaganda and Pohl for the administration. Ben-Gvir is both. Washington funds his government. The master is in his cabinet. The court is in The Hague.
Putin went to war for Russian sovereignty. He flew to Beijing this week hoping Xi will finalise a gas pipeline replacing the European market Russia destroyed. The act of independence produced the most comprehensive dependency in Russian history.
Trump's Board of Peace calls Hamas the obstacle to peace while Israel controls 60% of Gaza and kills daily. A framework requiring one side to disarm while the other expands is not a peace process. The occupation has a peace plan. The occupied are being asked to fund it.
Netanyahu attended a state dinner in Budapest under an active ICC arrest warrant. Hungary withdrew from the court. He flew home. The warrant is real. The enforcement is not. It is working as the powerful designed it to work. Eighty years of Jewish history makes that truth unbearable to confront.
Israel killed Hamas's last senior military commander in a residential building under an active ceasefire. 850 Palestinians dead since October. Strikes up 35 per cent since the Iran war paused. The word ceasefire has been doing a great deal of work in Gaza.
Trump flew to Beijing and left weighing whether to lift sanctions on Chinese companies buying Iranian oil. The country being bombed will fund the relationship being repaired. The Global South paid the price of the war. It will pay the price of the peace.
Xi asked Trump if they could avoid the Thucydides Trap — the theory that a rising power and an established one are destined for conflict. Trump said China was beautiful. That is not an answer to Xi's question. It is confirmation the question was not understood.
The Iran war did not arrive without a library. Every development since February 28 — the collapsing ceasefire, the Security Council vetoes, the Global South paying costs it did not vote for — was anticipated by books written long before the first strike.
As Trump's plane touched down in Beijing, Chinese social media was circulating his nickname: Chuan Jianguo — the Country Builder. The implication is sardonic and precise. His policies built China's power more than America's. Now he has come to ask for a favour.
Huckabee confirmed Israel deployed Iron Dome batteries and troops to the UAE at a public conference in Tel Aviv. The UAE has Israeli soldiers on its soil and Iranian missiles in its skies. Nobody asked Abu Dhabi. The Abraham Accords were a peace deal. They were a down payment on a military alliance.
Trump flies to Beijing on Thursday carrying a war he cannot finish and a strait he cannot reopen. He is going to ask Xi Jinping for help. Beijing did not need to do anything to earn this moment. Washington created it by starting a war it cannot end without China's assistance.
Bessent called China a funder of terrorism for buying Iranian oil. Then asked China to use those ties to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In the same interview. Washington built this crisis on the premise that China's relationship with Iran was the problem. Now it needs that relationship to survive.
