• Israel’s far-reaching attack on Iran is the latest round in its campaign to eliminate or degrade every one of its regional opponents. In the wake of the Hamas attack in October 2023, it has waged a brutal campaign to destroy the Palestinian people as a meaningful political force, an effort that has been described as a genocide by leading human rights organizations and numerous academic experts. It has decimated the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon through airstrikes, booby-trapped cellphones, and other means. It has attacked the Houthis in Yemen and bombed post-Assad Syria to destroy weapons caches and prevent forces it sees as dangerous from exercising political influence there. And the latest attacks on Iran aim to do more than just damage or destroy that country’s nuclear infrastructure. At a minimum, Israel wants to end the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program; cripple Iran’s ability to respond by killing top Iranian leaders, military officials, diplomats, and scientists; and, if possible, drag the United States deeper into the war. At a maximum, it hopes to weaken the regime to the point where it collapses.

   

• At first glance, this possibility seems far-fetched. How can a country with fewer than 10 million people (only about 75 percent of whom are Jews) possibly dominate a vast region containing several hundred million mostly Muslim Arabs, plus more than 90 million Persians?

   
• Its citizens are better educated and highly patriotic and have usually been guided by more effective leaders than their Arab counterparts. Israel gets generous and steadfast support from a wealthy and politically influential diaspora, and in the past received invaluable assistance from major powers such as Great Britain and France. Most of its Arab rivals have faced a variety of internal schisms, upheavals, or coups, and they have been divided by inter-Arab rivalries
• Moreover, because modern military power depends more on technological mastery, training, and skillful command than on sheer numbers, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has always been far more capable than the forces it fought against. That advantage has grown as warfare has become increasingly reliant on expensive and highly sophisticated weaponry. Although both Hezbollah and Hamas became more capable over time, neither was ever able to threaten Israel’s existence or match the amount of damage that Israel could inflict on them. Israel’s sizable arsenal of nuclear weapons and vaunted intelligence capabilities reinforced its position even more
• Without that assistance, those roughly 10 million Israelis would be able to defend their own territory—remember, they have nuclear weapons—but have little chance of dominating the surrounding region.
• the United States has not faced a significant military challenge from within the hemisphere since the late 19th century. This privileged position allowed Washington to focus its foreign and defense policies on Eurasia, with the aim of preventing any other power from achieving a similar position within any strategically significant region.

• Moreover, the entire justification for these latest attacks was the fear that Iran might one day acquire nuclear weapons. The risk was not that Iran would use a bomb to attack Israel—which would be suicidal—but rather that an Iranian bomb would limit Israel’s ability to use force in the region with impunity. That Israel’s leaders saw that possibility of having to act with greater restraint as a danger reveals that they do not have the kind of “free security” that the United States—the world’s only true regional hegemon—has long enjoyed.

   

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• The recent unilateral strikes by the United States on Iran’s nuclear development sites underline the fact that multilateralism is dead, and has been so for some time.

      

• The World Trade Organization has never recovered from the collapse of the Fifth Ministerial in Cancun in 2003, with the United States, in fact, taking the lead in emasculating it by preventing appointments to its decisive unit, the appellate court.

      
• As Viktor Orban, the European figure most admired by Trump, has noted, his fellow strongman’s plan is to retrench to the Americas, focusing on reinvigorating the imperial heartland, North America, while strengthening the U.S. grip on Latin America in an aggressive reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine. And Orban adds, “there will be no more export of democracy.”

• What is emerging is an imperialism that is on the defensive, that prioritizes tariff walls against foreign imports. It has adopted harsh measures to prevent the entry of non-white migrants and expel undocumented workers, uprooted the global supply chains set up by U.S. transnational capital, and reshored or brought back their productive facilities to the United States, and, last but not least, divorced the United States completely from collective efforts to address the climate crisis. The MAGA program espoused by ideologues like Peter Navarro, Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon is very popular, though to orthodox economists, it is madness.

      

• The world is likely entering an era of geoeconomic competition whereby free trade and the free movement of capital are being replaced by close cooperation between national capital and the state to limit foreign penetration of the domestic market and prevent the acquisition of advanced technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI), by rival corporate-state actors. This is industrial policy with a reactionary vengeance. In the case of Trump, the preferred methods of dealing with the Global South are unilateral economic actions rather than multilateral initiatives via the Bretton Woods institutions, and unilateral military strikes rather than joint assaults under NATO, such as the recent attacks on Iran, and definitely no boots on the ground.

      
• Among the candidates is the formation known as the BRICS, which is backed by something that the G77, for all its virtues as a site of alliance-building for the developing countries, lacks: economic clout.
• As of the end of 2021, the cumulative lending of the NDB came to only $30 billion, a fraction of World Bank lending for the period 2015 to 2021.

• Are these hopes for the BRICS exhibited by many in the Global South realistic?

      
• So one big question is: Are the key actors in the BRICS going to be open to sharing decision-making power over their resources?

• A related question is: The leading forces in the BRICS are a mix of authoritarian and formally democratic states; is it not realistic to expect that they will bring their regime preferences and styles of governance to a multilateral setting?

      
• But the Bandung Declaration was not just a document promoting political and economic decolonization. Indeed, the very first of the 10 points of the Declaration was “respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the charter of the United Nations.”

• Two of the key movers in Bandung were India and China, who play central role in the BRICS. Nehru and Zhou En Lai were exemplary voices of the Global South in 1955, when decolonization was the burning issue. However, when it comes to the first Bandung principle, their governments today are not exactly paragons of human rights. India today is ruled by a Hindu nationalist government that considers Muslim second-class citizens. Beijing is accused of carrying out the forcible cultural assimilation of the Uygurs, though there might be exaggeration of this process by the West. As for the other key sponsors of the Bandung meeting, the military regimes in Myanmar and Egypt are notorious for massive human rights violations.

      

• Indeed, most states of the Global South are dominated by elites that, whether via authoritarian or liberal democratic regimes, maintain problematic social and economic structures. The levels of poverty and inequality are shocking. The gini coefficient for Brazil is 0.53, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world. China’s 0.47 also reflects tremendous inequality, despite remarkable successes in poverty reduction. In South Africa, the gini coefficient is an astounding 0.63, and 55.5 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. In India, incomes have been polarizing over the past three decades with a significant increase in billionaires and other high-net-worth Individuals.

      

• The reality is that for the vast masses of people throughout the Global South, including indigenous communities, workers, peasants, fisherfolk, nomadic communities and women are economically disenfranchised, and in liberal democracies, such as the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa, and Kenya, participation in democracy is often limited to casting votes in periodic, often meaningless, electoral exercises. South-South investment and cooperation models such as the Belt and Road Initiative and free trade agreements frequently entail the capture of land, forests, water, and marine areas and extraction of natural wealth for the purposes of national development. Local populations—many of whom are indigenous—are disposessed from their livelihoods, territories, and ancestral domains with scant legal recourse and access to justice, invoking the specter of home-grown colonialism and counterrevolutions.

      

• Two points are important here. Although the Global North has played a role in the perpetuation of poverty and inequality in the Global South, much of our current condition is the creation of the Global South’s own elites. Second, democratic governance at the global level cannot be delinked from democratic governance at the local level.

      

• There is a third, not minor, consideration when it comes to assessing the future of the BRICS, and here it is useful to compare Bandung’s historical moment to today. At the time of the Bandung Conference, the political economy of the globe was more diverse. There was the communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. There was China, with its push to move from national democracy to socialism. Neutralist states like India were seeking a third way between the communism and capitalism. With decades of neoliberal transformation in both the Global North and the Global South, that diversity has vanished. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet.

      

• The dynamic centers of global capitalism may have moved, over the last 500 years, from the Mediterranean to Holland to Britain to the United States and now to the Asia Pacific, but capitalism continues to both penetrate the farthest reaches of the globe and deepen its entrenchment in areas it has subjugated. Capitalism continually melts all that is solid into thin air, to use an image from a famous manifesto, creating inequalities both within and among societies, and exacerbating the relationship between the planet and the human community. Whether market-driven, developmental, or state capitalist, the same dynamics of surplus extraction, with massive planetary externalities, cut across these variants of capitalism.

      

• Is it possible to move towards a new, more participatory system of multilateralism without bringing forth a post-capitalist system of economic, social, and political relations?

      
• the Europeans should be allowed to save multilateralism in Sevilla and Belem.

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• Beinart’s and Mishra’s backgrounds in South Africa and India, respectively, inform their writings. Beinart draws parallels with South Africa’s history, and Mishra offers stimulating insights into the psyche of colonized peoples. Shlaim, having grown up in Israel, knows it from within, and only later develops a more critical perspective on it from the outside. 

• Mishra meticulously documents the colonialist practice of devaluing native lives, clearly evident in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. To underscore how far Israel has strayed from Jewish ethical traditions, he cites a 1942 plea sent by Bundists (members of a Jewish socialist movement) from the Warsaw Ghetto to Winston Churchill: “Underground Jewish Labour Movement in Poland in tragic days of annihilation of entire Jewish population by German conquerors considers it her sacred duty to share request for freedom loving elements throughout the world to release Mohandas Gandhi most prominent leader of people of India who are striving to liberate their country.” 

• Mishra notes that concerns about the “Nazification” of Zionism have been voiced since its beginnings. He reminds his readers that David Ben-Gurion, fiery founder and first prime minister of Israel, called his rival Ze’ev (born Vladimir) Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler.” The precursor of the Likud party, which claims political descent from Jabotinsky, was denounced as fascist early on by prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. It is logical that Netanyahu, the current leader of Likud, directs the genocidal operations in Gaza. 
• Nowadays, as more Jews lead the struggle against Israel’s actions in Gaza, calls to excommunicate anti-Zionists “from within the Jewish people“ are growing insistently louder. Beinart observes that “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself. … We have built an altar and thrown an entire [Palestinian] society on the flames.” For Beinart, a former Zionist, the destruction of Gaza marks a turning point in Jewish history, one that demands moral reckoning for the cruelty inflicted by Israeli Jews and those who encourage them to ignore all moral norms and to justify such actions “in the name of survival.” He writes, “The false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defence.”
• He quotes Arendt who, although not religious, concluded in 1963: “The greatness of our people was once that it believed in God. And now this people believes only in itself.”

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• Trump-Musk foreign aid cuts could cause 14 million deaths by 2030, study warns

    

• What many forget is that defections did not peak until late in 2012 and into 2013, well after the revolution had already turned into full-scale war. These men witnessed the changes inside the barracks – how the regime became even more paranoid and abusive, the way loyalist soldiers celebrated in the carnage, and how the entire security apparatus quickly became a tool of sadistic violence against anyone deemed “the enemy.”

• A defining feature of Ali’s time in the army was the pride with which many officers boasted of their crimes against civilians. As a “trusted Sunni” serving in the command’s headquarters, he was privy to many of the stories, constantly testing his ability to blend in with the loyalists.

• In some contexts, however, precisely because there are no pressure release valves such as elections, and because every protest is treated as a serious problem, repertoires of resistance — whether protests, strikes, or riots — can  achieve more than in more open societies.

• So, for instance, in Canada or the United States, there are often protests over polluting chemical plants or something similar. In China, there are also protests against these plants, and some have led to multi-million dollar projects being cancelled in really short order. Just the fact that lots of residents in a city showed up was seen as enough of a big deal that local authorities had to shut the problem down.

• I provide statistics on increased spending on something called the People’s Armed Police, which is a paramilitary force that gained elevated status after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 as part of the state’s response to domestic unrest. The idea was that it would take on the role of maintaining domestic order in place of the military. The People's Armed Police gets promoted in places where there is more unrest. 

• To my mind, Xi's “common prosperity” agenda seems largely symbolic and lacking in substantial welfare reforms or labour law changes. Xi has cracked down on workplace activists, and his policies appear more focused on encouraging corporate donations than real structural change.

• Сould you recommend some readings for activists about the Chinese labour movement?

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• Drawing on the Organizational Department of the CPC as its source, South China Morning Post reports that CPC membership in 2019 consisted primarily of managerial and technical workers. Agricultural and “blue-collar” workers combined make up roughly a third of Party membership (a slight decrease from 2012). The Party is also aging, with about 18% of members being retirees and around a third being at least 61 years old. Female representation is horribly low and improving only at a snail’s pace. The composition of the Party, increasingly “white collar” and stubbornly male, cannot but impact the internal decision-making dynamics of the CPC going forward

• which was the “worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” This phrase has been used by Netanyahu, Biden, Harris, etc., attempting to link the armed struggle against Israel with the Nazi genocide.

• How does this compare to other antisemitic massacres since the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945? The military coup in Argentina on March 24, 1976, killed an estimated 3,000 Jews.

      
• As Saúl Sosnowski told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2016: “Jews in Argentina only made up 1 percent of the population, but they were about 10 percent of the disappeared.” As was the case in other countries and epochs, Jews were overrepresented in the revolutionary movements like the Montoneros and the Trotskyists — and thus drew the ire of the generals.

• As Juan Pablo Jaroslavsky explained to the Guardian in 1999, “We have identified 1,296 Jewish victims by name out of the official list of 10,000 victims. But if the unofficial figure of 30,000 total victims is correct, then the number of Jewish victims could be over 3,000.”

      

• This was no coincidence: After the Second World War, the government of Juan Perón provided refuge to thousands of Nazi war criminals, and the Argentinian military was full of antisemitism. Many officers believed in the Andinia plan, a conspiracy theory about Jewish subversives hoping to create a second Jewish homeland in Patagonia. (Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had indeed considered Uganda or Argentina as possible locations for a Jewish state, but rejected them in favor of Palestine in the early 1900s.)

      

• The military coup was part of Operation Condor, a U.S.-backed plan to eliminate the Left in the Southern Cone. Henry Kissinger gave a “green light” to the mass disappearances in Argentina. The junta got tens of millions of dollars in military aid from the U.S., and Germany was another vital backer.

      

• If I knew that it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.

   

      

• At the same time, Israel continued to supply Argentina’s military with weapons — weapons that were being used to murder Jews. Tel Aviv remained one of the Junta’s main allies, even as disagreements grew between Buenos Aires and Washington.

      

• Javier Miliei, Argentina’s far-right president today, is a big supporter of Israel and also a defender of the generals who murdered thousands of Jews. This is yet another example of how antisemites love Israel and vice versa.

      

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• But many don’t know that in 2024, he invaded Romania — with tweets

• Back in 2024, Putin spent millions to elect a pro-Russian president in Romania. His method: infiltrate elections, support authoritarian-leaning candidates and manipulate digital platforms to bend public perception. So, the Russian leader boosted candidate Călin Georgescu from obscurity, and in just two weeks, Georgescu had captured 21 percent of the vote, leaving a divided field of 15 candidates stunned.

      

• Violating common sense, reality, as well as Romanian law, Georgescu claimed he neither raised campaign contributions nor incurred campaign expenses. Instead, he had a malevolent benefactor in Putin.

      

• Citing serious violations of electoral law and foreign interference, the country’s constitutional court annulled the first round of the election and ordered a do-over. When the second round was held, voter turnout surged past the average 51 percent to nearly 65 percent, as Romanians responded to the crisis with clarity and courage. They rejected Putin’s candidate and chose the democratic, pro-NATO path by a decisive 54 percent to 46 percent margin.

   
• After Nicusor Dan’s victory in the presidential race

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• Last week in Washington, technical teams from both countries initialed a draft agreement in the presence of US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Allison Hooker, ahead of the formal ministerial signing held on Friday, which was witnessed by Rubio.
• The Luanda Process, a regional diplomatic initiative, laid the groundwork by producing a “Harmonized Plan” to demobilize rebel fighters and reduce tensions. The new agreement builds directly on this roadmap and the April 25 Washington declaration of principles.

• The agreement calls for the creation of a Joint Security Coordination Mechanism within 30 days, bringing together military and intelligence officials from both countries to track armed groups, share intelligence, and oversee compliance. The US and Qatar will serve as observers.
• The parties agreed to cooperate with MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, recognizing its role in protecting civilians. The agreement also created a Joint Oversight Committee – involving the US, African Union, and Qatar – to monitor implementation and mediate any disputes.
• Beyond security, the deal sets a forward-looking agenda. Within three months, Congo and Rwanda will launch a Regional Economic Integration Framework aimed at boosting cross-border trade, formalizing mineral supply chains, and developing joint economic projects. The initiative is expected to involve US investors alongside African regional organizations like the African Continental Free Trade Area, the East African Community, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region.

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