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There is a distinctive hush that settles over policy circles and media airwaves after the first thunder of a new war fades. It is the quiet of think tank analyses being pulled from public view, of confident cable news predictions scrubbed from on-screen banners, of bold promises that “this conflict will be different” crashing headlong into the unyielding truth that, more often than not, it never is. Three months into the open war with Iran, that silence now rings louder than the steady thud of bombing raids across the region.

It is critical that we revisit the core promises made by the war’s champions before the first strike, because we owe it to ourselves to hold to account the assumptions that brought us to this moment. Proponents of the conflict laid out a clear, optimistic roadmap: the offensive would be surgically precise, they argued, and Iran’s already weakened regime would shatter under pressure. Years of crippling sanctions, the decimation of Hezbollah’s deterrent capabilities, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus had left Tehran isolated and fragile, they claimed, and it would fold quickly under concentrated military force.

Worse still, war backers insisted that the February 28 assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei would spark political upheaval — if not an immediate democratic “Persian Spring”, then at minimum a cowed, compliant new leadership willing to bend to Western demands. They promised that American military resolve would keep the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, open for global shipping. Gulf Arab monarchies, despite public ambivalence, would quietly back the campaign, they claimed, and a single well-timed push would spark mass uprising on the Iranian street that would finish the job of regime change for Washington.

Today, every one of these core assumptions lies in ruins, undone by a single shared structural flaw: the dangerous conflation of a regime’s fragility with willingness to comply. These two traits are not interchangeable. A wounded nation is not a docile one. When a regime loses its founding, unifying charismatic leader, it does not automatically liberalize — as Iran’s new Interim Leadership Council has shown, it can instead harden its position, decentralize decision-making, and become far less predictable and open to negotiation than the old order ever was. War hawks mistakenly confused the absence of one single decision-maker with the total absence of cohesive decision-making, a mistake that has upended every subsequent military and political calculation.

The second catastrophic miscalculation was the theory that Iran would limit its retaliation to preserve its own survival. War planners argued that Tehran would calibrate its response to avoid total annihilation, absorbing heavy blows while only lashing out symbolically before returning to negotiations on terms favorable to Washington and Jerusalem.

This was always a baffling assumption to make about an adversary that spent 20 years building an entire strategic doctrine centered on proxies, long-range missiles, and maritime harassment specifically designed to make limited war impossible. This fact was included in every U.S. Central Command briefing for two decades, but when the time came to launch the offensive, planners insisted Iran would behave according to a Western definition of “rational” action, not the framework shaped by Tehran’s own ideological and strategic priorities.

The results are impossible to ignore. Iran has now launched strikes on American military bases across Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. Yemen’s Houthi movement has closed the Bab el-Mandeb, another critical global shipping lane connecting the Mediterranean and Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz only operates intermittently, at Iran’s unilateral sufferance. This outcome was never a surprise; it was widely predicted by critics before the war ever began.

The third miscalculation centered on the supposed regional coalition backing the campaign. The war’s architects genuinely believed the Abraham Accords had created more than a temporary, transactional set of relationships between Israel and Gulf Arab states. They assumed that the Gulf’s quiet long-standing animosity toward Tehran would translate into open, active participation in an American-led war. It has not.

Saudi Arabia allowed the U.S. to use its airspace for strike operations, but within 48 hours, Riyadh was on the phone with Beijing seeking diplomatic mediation. Pakistan, bound by a long-standing defense pact with Saudi Arabia, has spent the past 10 weeks caught between competing interests, attempting to mediate a ceasefire it has no power to enforce while trying to protect irreconcilable strategic equities on both sides. Turkey has opted for strategic hedging, refusing to commit fully to either camp. Even the UAE, which intercepted Iranian missiles aimed at its territory, has simultaneously expanded trade corridors with Tehran’s key commercial partners. This is not a functioning coalition. It is a region scrambling desperately to avoid being dragged into a catastrophic conflict by its own American security guarantor.

The fourth miscalculation — and the one that will be hardest for war defenders to confront — is that no one ever clearly defined what “victory” would actually look like. Tracing the official justifications for the war reveals shifting goalposts that change by the week: first, it was to degrade Iran’s nuclear program; then to restore Western deterrence in the region; then to force regime change; now it is to reassert American global primacy. These are not just different objectives — they are often incompatible with one another. When a war’s stated purposes multiply as its human and economic costs mount, it is clear that its architects had no clear idea of what they wanted to achieve before they ordered the first strike.

This is not a minor quibble. It is the core failure of the entire enterprise. Carl von Clausewitz, the foundational theorist of modern war, wrote extensively about the danger of launching military campaigns without a clear, achievable political objective — and every word of his warning has proven correct here.

The fifth and final miscalculation concerned American public opinion. War supporters assured themselves and the public that the absence of a large-scale U.S. ground troop commitment would keep the conflict politically manageable at home. They are now learning what U.S. policymakers learned in 1965 in Vietnam, in 1991 and again in 2003 in Iraq: wars that begin with airstrikes never end with airstrikes. They end with returning troop coffins, crippling naval blockades, global energy price shocks, and a public that eventually begins to ask the fundamental question: who even authorized this war in the first place?

The ongoing naval blockade of Iran, the collapsed ceasefire talks in Islamabad, the growing risk of escalation across the Lebanese front: none of these outcomes were mentioned to the American public when they were sold this conflict. The current reality is nothing like the clean, quick war voters were promised.

This commentary takes no pleasure in being proven right by disaster. The realist foreign policy tradition does not celebrate vindication that comes at the cost of regional chaos and rising human suffering. It would far prefer to have been ignored quietly, proven correct only in an unread footnote of policy analysis.

Yet it has become a repeated pattern of Washington’s foreign policy establishment to mistake the absence of immediate cost for the total absence of cost. They confuse the quiet that precedes consequences for the absence of consequences entirely. Iran’s deliberate restraint in 2024 and 2025 was read in Washington as a sign of weakness. It should have been recognized for what it was: strategic patience.

In time, the war’s defenders will fall back on the same excuses they always produce after failed campaigns: the core plan was sound, only the execution was flawed; the Iranians refused to behave as they were supposed to; regional allies were unreliable; the White House held back from committing enough force; the American public lacked sufficient resolve. From these excuses, they will draw the same wrong lesson: that next time, the U.S. must be more committed, more unified, and more willing to do whatever it takes to win.

But these are the lessons you draw when you refuse to learn the actual, harder lesson that has been available to policymakers for generations: the Middle East is not a problem to be solved by outside military force. Iran is a sovereign nation with its own history, politics, and ideology, not just a target set for American bombs. The gap between what American military power can destroy and what it can build remains the central, unhealed flaw of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.

We were warned about these mistakes before the first strike. Today, those warnings are history. The only question that matters now is what we will do with the warnings that are still to come.

In a move that has reignited international scrutiny of Israeli policy in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s civil administration – a body operating under the country’s defense ministry that enforces Israeli rule in the occupied territory – announced Tuesday it will expropriate 28 acres of land spanning the Palestinian communities of Beit Iksa and Nabi Samuel. The parcel includes the site of the Tomb of the Prophet Samuel (known locally as Nabi Samuel), a centuries-old religious landmark revered across three major Abrahamic faiths that has long been managed by the Islamic Waqf, a Palestinian religious endowment.

The site, perched 885 meters above sea level on a hilltop just six kilometers northwest of Jerusalem, holds layered religious and historical significance for multiple communities. Byzantine Emperor Justinian first ordered the construction of a church on the site, believed to be the burial place of the prophet Samuel, and the Crusaders later revered it as the “Mountain of Joy”, the first vantage point from which they viewed Jerusalem. After the Crusader period, Muslim rulers built commemorative structures on the site, and the standing mosque today retains architectural features dating to the Ayyubid and Mamluk eras, with an on-site shrine that Muslim worshippers consider Samuel’s resting place, making it one of the most important Islamic religious sites in the region. Prophet Samuel is similarly venerated in Jewish and Christian tradition.

Israeli authorities frame the seizure as a public benefit measure aimed at preserving the site’s archaeological heritage. But Palestinian analysts and officials universally condemn the action as the latest step in a long-running campaign of “Judaisation” – a term describing the Israeli government’s use of archaeology, religious policy and land control to erase Palestinian and Islamic cultural identity and assert exclusive Israeli claim over occupied Palestinian land.

Map and settlement expert Khalil Toufakji, a leading researcher on Jerusalem affairs, confirmed that all seized land belongs to the Alami family, and has been held as a hereditary Islamic waqf for generations. This is not the first change Israeli authorities have imposed on the site since they occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War. Over the past decades, Israel has built a synagogue in the underground chamber that houses the traditional tomb, restricted Palestinian access to large portions of the site, reduced allocated Muslim prayer space, and gradually shifted control of site facilities to Israeli management. In 1995, Israeli authorities designated the entire Nabi Samuel area a nature reserve, paving the way for large-scale excavation work. Toufakji says the latest land seizure amounts to de facto annexation, following a deliberate, incremental strategy first formalized by the Israeli Knesset: advance claims through archaeological and religious sites, then build Israeli infrastructure to solidify permanent control. This same tactic has already been used to forcibly displace Palestinian residents in Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood to make way for Israeli excavations searching for an alleged ancient “lost Jewish city”.

Omar Rajob, head of the media office for the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem governorate, added that decades of Israeli excavations at Nabi Samuel have produced no evidence to support the exclusive Jewish historical narrative Israeli authorities promote. Instead, digs have uncovered extensive clear evidence of Islamic heritage, including the standing historic mosque itself. Despite this, Rajob says Israeli authorities use archaeology as a political tool: official information panels at the site only present a Jewish narrative of the site’s history, completely erasing its centuries-long Islamic and Palestinian heritage.

Rajob emphasized that the current seizure goes far beyond controlling surrounding land; it aims to impose full Israeli sovereignty over the entire religious and archaeological landscape of Nabi Samuel, including the historic mosque itself. Today, he added, the Islamic Waqf’s only remaining function at the site is opening and closing the mosque’s doors.

The seizure of Nabi Samuel is the third major takeover of a Palestinian-controlled religious and archaeological site in the occupied West Bank in less than six months. In November 2025, Israeli authorities seized 444 acres surrounding the Sebastia archaeological site, and in January 2026, the Israeli military stripped Palestinian authorities of municipal control over Hebron’s iconic Ibrahimi Mosque, a move widely condemned as a takeover of one of Islam’s most sacred sites.

The action also aligns with a broader push by Israel’s far-right ruling coalition to consolidate control over Palestinian heritage sites in the West Bank. The Knesset is currently debating a bill that would create a new Israeli heritage authority to take full control of all West Bank archaeological sites from the civil administration, formalizing Israeli control. On the same day the Nabi Samuel seizure was announced, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party – held an election campaign event at Solomon’s Pools, a historic Palestinian-run reservoir in the West Bank, where he declared he would work to take the site from Palestinian control, calling it “inconceivable” that it remains under Palestinian management. Toufakji predicts the next target will be Joseph’s Tomb, a major religious site in Nablus currently under Palestinian Authority control.
“What is happening in Nabi Samuel cannot be separated from broader Israeli policies in occupied Jerusalem, which are based on reducing the Palestinian presence, expanding colonial control, and linking the settlements surrounding the city into a single geographical belt,” Rajob explained. “Palestinian archaeological and religious sites are being transformed into political tools used to reshape the landscape demographically and symbolically.”

A spiraling cycle of cross-border attacks between U.S. and Iranian forces has thrown fragile ongoing peace negotiations into deep uncertainty, just days after U.S. President Donald Trump claimed progress toward a potential end to the illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The escalation, which unfolded across roughly 24 hours, has underscored deep divisions between the two sides and cast serious doubt over whether a diplomatic breakthrough can be reached.

The sequence of hostilities began on Monday, when U.S. Central Command announced it had carried out what it framed as “self-defense strikes” against targets in southern Iran. The military command said the raids targeted Iranian missile launch sites and naval vessels that it accused of planning to deploy mines, framing the action as a necessary measure to protect U.S. troops deployed in the region. The strikes came mere hours after Trump publicly claimed that peace talks with Tehran were moving forward smoothly.

Early Tuesday, the Iranian military issued a sharp response, confirming that its air defense units had downed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone, and had engaged an RQ-4 surveillance drone and an F-35 fighter jet that had entered Iranian airspace. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which issued the official statement carried by multiple Iranian state news outlets, characterized its actions as legitimate self-defense, and insisted it retains the full right to respond to any violation of sovereign Iranian territory by aggressive U.S. forces.

Independent experts have laid out a more detailed sequence of events than either side has publicly released, based on Iranian sources. Hamidreza Azizi, a foreign policy researcher and visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, explained that the exchange escalated through multiple sequential rounds. “It reportedly began when U.S. forces attacked two IRGC naval boats, killing four Iranian military personnel,” Azizi said. “Iran responded with anti-ship missiles targeting U.S. vessels. Iranian air defense systems then shot down at least one – some reports say three – U.S. drones operating in the area. After that, the U.S. hit Iranian anti-ship missile positions and air defense sites, prompting a second Iranian response targeting U.S. ships in the Arabian Sea with additional anti-ship missiles.”

To date, independent verification of casualty counts, damage assessments, and which side initiated the clash remains severely limited. The competing accounts of the incident fit a well-established pattern in the conflict, with both nations framing their own military actions as just responses to the other’s aggression. What is clear, however, is that the multi-round escalation over a single day is far harder to de-escalate than an isolated one-off incident, raising urgent questions about the future of the indirect peace talks currently underway between the two countries.

Diplomatic efforts have been on shaky ground for days, even before the latest military clash. Trump has publicly claimed that a final peace deal is close at hand, and on Monday evening released a social media post laying out his demand that Iran hand over all its enriched uranium to the U.S. for destruction, or destroy it under international supervision. Tehran has not accepted this proposal, and Iranian officials have pushed back hard on Trump’s claims that an imminent deal is near.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that negotiators have been working toward a 14-point memorandum of understanding that would implement an immediate ceasefire, open the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping after a U.S. blockade, lift some sanctions on Iran, unfreeze Iranian assets held abroad, and set up a 30-day window for broader negotiations that would later address Iran’s nuclear program. According to anonymous sources cited by the outlet, the U.S. is pushing for upfront commitments from Iran on its nuclear program, while Iranian negotiators are demanding concrete, detailed guarantees of sanctions relief before any final agreement is signed.

During a press briefing on Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei acknowledged that significant progress has been made on many core issues, but rejected any suggestion that a final deal is imminent. “It is correct to say that we have reached a conclusion on a large portion of the issues under discussion,” Baghaei stated. “But to say that this means the signing of an agreement is imminent – no one can make such a claim.”

Baghaei emphasized that the top and only priority of current negotiations is ending the war on all fronts, including the ongoing Israeli offensive in Lebanon. Contradicting Trump’s public claims, he confirmed that nuclear program issues and the long-term governance of the Strait of Hormuz are not on the table in this round of talks. “How this region should be managed concerns the littoral states,” Baghaei said, referring to Iran and Oman. “We understand that the security of the Strait of Hormuz is a concern for the entire world.”

The spokesperson also hit out at shifting U.S. negotiating positions and what Tehran says is consistent Israeli efforts to sabotage the diplomatic process. A major sticking point in the talks, he noted, is Iran’s demand that any ceasefire agreement must include an end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which have killed or wounded more than 12,000 people to date. Even after a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire took effect in early April, Israel escalated its strikes, killing and wounding more than 1,400 people in a single 24-hour period. “One should expect nothing from Israel except the sabotage of any process,” Baghaei added.

Trump later tempered his earlier claims of an imminent deal, posting on his Truth Social platform that “Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are proceeding nicely! It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all – Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before – And nobody wants that!” Trump also added a new demand to the negotiations: that all regional mediating countries including Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan be required to join the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords normalization agreements with Israel, and suggested that Iran itself should also normalize ties with Israel as part of any deal, a proposal Tehran has not engaged with publicly.

Analysts warn that the latest military escalation has created an extremely high-risk environment for the negotiations. “Fighting and talking at the same time is quite a common thing in a negotiation at the end of a conflict that has been very intense and hasn’t been resolved,” said Samir Puri, a visiting lecturer in war studies at King’s College London. “The key … is to keep talking and to not allow the talks to collapse by these escalations – because these may not be the last escalations. What we don’t know is whether this is the storm before the calm or the calm before the storm. We don’t know whether these negotiations need to be sustained and to absorb these sorts of escalations for days, for weeks, for months. It could be a very long negotiation process still to come.”

Domestic political opposition to a potential deal has emerged on both sides of the conflict, as well as from Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he supports U.S. diplomatic efforts, but insisted that any final deal must eliminate what he calls Iran’s nuclear threat – a position that contradicts long-standing assessments from both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, which confirm Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the early 2000s and has not resumed it. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid joined pro-war Republican U.S. lawmakers in criticizing the emerging framework, calling the proposed deal “bad for Israel, bad for the region, bad for the citizens of Iran.”

Some U.S. Congressional Democrats have also raised objections to the terms of the potential deal, even as they support an immediate end to the conflict. The war has already killed or wounded more than 30,000 Iranians, most of them civilians, according to the Iranian Ministry of Health. “If this deal with Iran is real, I will welcome it because every day this insane war goes on, America gets weaker,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said Sunday. “The priority is to end the war – now. But make no mistake: These are Iran’s terms. Our nation emerges humiliated.”

Murphy, a long-time opponent of the war, noted that Trump, who withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal during his first term, has failed to achieve any of his stated war goals. “A hardline regime is still in charge. Iran still has its ballistic missile and drone program. They still have a navy that can close the strait,” Murphy said. “And now that we are dropping sanctions, we have less leverage to get them to give more in future negotiations. Of course, none of those things could be accomplished by an air campaign – which is why so many of us opposed this war. And now the new regime is emboldened. They took our best shot and beat us. Iran emerges more powerful.”

Iranian military leaders have reaffirmed that their forces are fully prepared to resume and escalate hostilities if negotiations collapse. “Look, Americans talk too much and keep changing their story by the minute,” Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters Commander Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi said Monday. “We’ve said it many times before: On the battlefield, we’ll show what we’re capable of.”

Over the weekend, Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler confirmed a growing trend across the African continent: a rising number of African states are pushing to adopt the long-developed ‘Somali model’ partnership that Ankara and Mogadishu have built over more than a decade, aiming to secure Turkish security and economic support to strengthen their own national capacity. Speaking on the sidelines of the Efes military exercises held in western Turkey, Guler emphasized that Turkey continues to deliver specialized military training and technical assistance to armed forces across African nations in response to their formal requests, supporting steady progress in local defense capacity building. ‘In this context, several other countries are requesting the same comprehensive model we implemented in Somalia,’ Guler noted, adding that Turkish officials are currently reviewing each incoming request.

A growing far-right nativist British political party that has drawn high-profile backing from X owner Elon Musk is facing internal backlash and public scrutiny just weeks ahead of a critical by-election that could reshape the country’s political landscape. Led by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, Restore Britain has risen rapidly in prominence over recent months, galvanized by viral mobilization on the social media platform X, where Lowe and party-aligned accounts collectively boast hundreds of thousands of followers.

Restore Britain built its support base on a hardline anti-immigration, anti-Muslim platform, promising to roll back what it labels the “Islamisation of Britain”, ban kosher and halal animal slaughter, and achieve net-negative migration through mass deportations. The party’s explicitly nativist ideology sets it apart from even the right-wing Reform UK: in February, party spokesperson Charlie Downes made clear that while Reform UK holds that any person from any background can become British, Restore Britain defines British national identity as tied to indigenous ancestry and the Christian faith. The party has also called for the British armed forces to prioritize recruitment from the “native majority” rather than recruiting from minority communities, and Lowe has repeatedly made inflammatory public comments targeting immigrant groups from Muslim-majority nations, claiming foreign men from these backgrounds harass women and disrupt public order.

The party has shaken up the race for the upcoming Makerfield by-election, where popular Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is running as the Labour Party candidate. A Labour win would put Burnham in position to mount a leadership challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. A late Survation poll the previous week placed Labour at 43% support, Reform UK close behind at 40%, and Restore Britain at 7% in third place. Multiple campaign sources, however, have told reporters that on-the-ground canvassing data shows Restore Britain outperforming this polling number significantly. Elon Musk’s public endorsement of the party – including a recent post declaring “Only Restore Britain can save Britain” – has supercharged its growth, and the party now claims more than 123,000 registered members. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accused Musk of deliberately splitting the right-wing vote to tip the race to Labour, saying “Quite what he’s trying to achieve, I have no idea.” With the right-wing vote split between Reform and Restore, polling and political analysts agree that the split is helping Burnham maintain his lead in the constituency, which is largely working-class and majority-white, where right-wing parties draw higher overall support than Labour.

The party’s momentum has hit a major crisis following the wedding of Lowe’s son Angus over the previous weekend, after Lowe posted a wedding photo of the couple to X that drew immediate outrage from his own far-right base. The bride, Yasmin Mezran, is the daughter of Karim Mezran, a prominent Libyan-Italian academic who currently serves as director of the North Africa Initiative and resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for Middle East Programs. Mezran, a well-known expert on political Islam and Mediterranean geopolitics, has a decades-long track record of advocating for Muslim integration and religious pluralism in Europe, and has publicly criticized anti-Muslim nationalist policies from far-right European governments. Outrage among Restore Britain supporters intensified after it was confirmed that a halal meal option was available for Muslim guests at the wedding reception – a direct contradiction of the party’s official policy to ban halal slaughter nationwide. Mezran himself reposted a social media note highlighting the contradiction between the wedding’s arrangements and Restore’s official platform.

Mezran’s long career of academic and policy work stands in stark ideological opposition to Lowe and Restore Britain’s core mission. In 2013, he published a major paper arguing that Muslim communities in Italy needed a formal agreement with the Italian state to guarantee their equal rights, noting that previous attempts at such an agreement had been blocked by widespread prejudice among the Italian public and a lack of political courage from state institutions. He has repeatedly advocated for pluralistic integration that aligns with the democratic values of constitutional tolerance, and in 2022 warned the Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that its anti-Muslim nationalist rhetoric would damage Italy’s diplomatic relations with Middle Eastern nations. Following Pope Francis’ death in 2025, Mezran praised the late pope for his public advocacy for Palestinian rights during the war in Gaza. He has also pushed back against stereotypes of Islamist political groups, arguing in 2012 that Libya’s elected Muslim Brotherhood did not fit common negative tropes, and called for cross-ideological cooperation between liberal and religious conservative politicians in the country. In a 2023 analysis, he framed Algeria as a critical pillar of regional stability for Italy and the European Union, arguing that closer Italian-Algerian ties would strengthen Mediterranean security.

Lowe, a millionaire former businessman, farmer, and ex-chairman of Southampton FC, was suspended from Reform UK in March 2024 after he publicly criticized Nigel Farage and called Reform a “protest party led by the Messiah”, prompting his split to form Restore Britain. He is no stranger to public controversy: last year he drew widespread condemnation after revealing he had asked his gamekeeper to shoot his 17-year-old pet dog in the head after the dog lost the use of its hind legs, a decision he defended as humane. Advocacy group Hope Not Hate CEO Nick Lowles noted that Restore Britain’s aggressive on-the-ground campaign in Makerfield is being heavily amplified by far-right vloggers and Musk’s platform, and that Reform UK’s focus on attacking Restore Britain is inadvertently boosting its appeal to racist voters across the country. Middle East Eye has reached out to Karim Mezran for additional comment on the ongoing controversy.

In recent weeks, consecutive back-to-back state visits to Beijing by Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.S. President Donald Trump have thrust China’s role in global diplomacy into the center of international discussion. Many international analysts have framed this flurry of high-level summits as proof of China’s emerging status as a stabilizing global actor: a capable broker capable of hosting two competing major powers within days, and a core pillar of global order. Other observers go further, arguing that the wave of visits cements China’s position as an indispensable global power, and its leader as a central global figure that must be engaged and courted by the international community.

Chinese analysts add broader context to this trend, noting that Putin and Trump’s visits are not isolated events. Over the past six months, Beijing has welcomed heads of state from across the globe, including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea and Germany. Notably, many of these trips marked long-awaited returns to Beijing for top leaders: it was the first UK prime ministerial visit in eight years, and the first such trip in nine years for leaders from Canada, South Korea and the United States. Chinese state media has embraced this narrative, describing Beijing as a global “living room” that offers much-needed stability amid global turbulence, with one headline declaring the world has entered “Beijing time.”

But while the string of summits has undeniably elevated China’s global profile, these celebratory interpretations overlook three critical, underreported factors that change the picture of Beijing’s growing diplomatic centrality.

First, the true motivation behind many leaders’ trips to Beijing remains unclear. While many frame the visits as a victory for proactive Chinese diplomacy, a large share of these trips are instead driven by foreign leaders’ desire to gain greater leverage in their own tense dealings with the second Trump administration. For example, when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to Beijing in January, widespread analysis framed the trip as a direct response to Canada’s deep structural economic dependence on the United States, paired with growing policy volatility under the second Trump administration. Many international outlets noted Carney was effectively playing the “China card” to strengthen his hand in upcoming trade negotiations with Washington.

Second, access to Beijing’s diplomatic “living room” comes with a high tangible price, and many visits have been tied to significant policy concessions from visiting leaders. During his 2025 Beijing trip, for instance, Trump reversed earlier campaign and policy proposals that would have blocked Chinese nationals from purchasing U.S. farmland and imposed strict caps on Chinese university students studying in the United States. Chinese state media itself was quick to highlight the fierce backlash these concessions drew from Trump’s own MAGA base and rival Republican lawmakers in Washington.

Similarly, Carney’s trip yielded a major trade concession for Beijing: a new bilateral deal that cut Canadian tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles to 6.1% for the first 49,000 imported vehicles annually. This marked a sharp reversal from late 2024, when Canada imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EV imports, and even clashed with Carney’s own 2025 election campaign rhetoric, where he called China the “biggest geopolitical threat” to the West. The tariff reversal drew sharp criticism from Canadian opposition politicians, who warned it would open the door to a flood of low-cost Chinese EV imports without securing any binding guarantees for reciprocal Chinese investment in Canada’s domestic economy.

Third, the string of high-profile visits has not produced any measurable shift in China’s long-held core foreign policy positions, despite repeated appeals from visiting leaders. European leaders’ diplomatic outreach, for example, has not altered Beijing’s ongoing material support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nor has it reduced China’s persistent large bilateral trade surplus with the European Union. Similarly, Beijing refused to commit to supporting the Trump administration’s policy goals around Iran, even after Trump publicly praised Xi Jinping’s leadership and paused a controversial planned arms sale to Taiwan that Beijing had strongly opposed. Even Vladimir Putin, a close strategic partner of Beijing, left his Beijing visit without resolving longstanding disagreements over the Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline, a project Putin has prioritized for years. If completed, the pipeline would carry 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China annually — equal to roughly 12% of China’s total domestic gas consumption in 2025.

So what does this wave of visits actually signal, if not a rise in China’s effective global leadership? The surge in top-level trips to Beijing is more a reflection of growing systemic uncertainty across the existing global order, argues author Czeslaw Tubilewicz, a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Adelaide University. The sharp, unpredictable shifts in U.S. foreign policy under the second Trump administration have sparked deep anxiety among Washington’s long-standing traditional allies, creating a vacuum that China has been quick to fill by positioning itself as a reliable, stable alternative partner after years of more confrontational “wolf-warrior diplomacy.”

Yet this growing diplomatic visibility does not equate to more effective Chinese diplomacy. Domestic economic pressures and competing conflicting international priorities still severely limit the tangible concessions and outcomes Beijing can deliver to global partners. To prevent widespread factory closures and hit official annual economic growth targets, for example, Beijing provides massive state subsidies to key domestic manufacturing sectors, generating massive surplus output that is exported to global markets (including the EU) at artificially low prices. Beijing cannot afford to rein in these exports, even as it fuels trade tensions with Western economies that are critical to China’s own long-term economic growth.

At the same time, China has continued to provide diplomatic and material support to Russia and Iran as they challenge U.S. and European security order, even as this ongoing support creates lasting rifts with Western economies that are central to China’s economic development. The end result is that high-profile summits in Beijing deliver heavy ceremony and global visibility, but very few tangible, lasting policy outcomes.

In sum, the recent visits by Putin, Trump and a stream of other world leaders have certainly made China appear far more central to global diplomatic affairs. But this newfound visibility does not automatically translate into effective, influential global leadership.

In a bombshell new interview with Al Jazeera published Sunday, former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has lifted the veil on coordinated political pressure, intimidation tactics and punitive sanctions designed to force her to abandon a landmark investigation into alleged war crimes committed in occupied Palestine. Bensouda, who led the ICC’s prosecution division from 2012 until 2021, laid out a years-long campaign of harassment that began just months after she opened a preliminary examination into the Palestinian situation in 2015.

The first incident came when two unidentified men showed up unannounced at Bensouda’s private residence in The Hague, where the ICC is headquartered. The men left her an envelope holding $500, claiming the cash was a thank-you gift from a party she had previously assisted. But Bensouda told the outlet she quickly recognized the encounter for what it was: a deliberate threat designed to prove that her opponents could track her down to her home. She immediately reported the break-in visit to ICC security and Dutch law enforcement, which later traced phone numbers linked to the two men back to Israel. No further action was ever taken in the case, according to Bensouda, leaving her feeling abandoned and unprotected by the institutions she served.

Beyond the surprise home visit, Bensouda detailed repeated, high-level pressure meetings with Yossi Cohen, who led Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency during her tenure. One of the most notable encounters took place in a New York City hotel during the annual United Nations General Assembly, where Cohen made his organization’s position explicitly clear. According to Bensouda, the meetings opened with superficial friendly overtures and attempts to coerce her through persuasion, before quickly shifting to direct, uncompromising demands that she end the Palestine investigation. When asked to confirm a prior Guardian report that Cohen explicitly warned her proceeding with the probe would put her personal safety and her family’s security at risk, and that Israel could “take care” of her if she complied, Bensouda answered plainly: “He did. He did.” The former prosecutor said she had no doubt that the messages amounted to direct threats against her and her loved ones, all aimed at killing the investigation.

Bensouda went on to link these Israeli intimidation efforts to the sweeping sanctions imposed against her by the first Donald Trump administration in September 2020. The punitive measures were implemented after the ICC moved forward with investigations into alleged war crimes by both U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Israeli troops in occupied Palestine. The sanctions froze her global assets and imposed broad travel restrictions, upending both her professional and personal life in ways the public rarely sees, she explained.

Beyond barring her from entering the United States, the sanctions triggered cascading financial disruptions that affected nearly every part of her daily life. Her long-held account with the UN Federal Credit Union, opened decades earlier during her work at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, was shut down immediately. Basic routine transactions from booking hotel rooms to sending money to ICC member states became impossible. Even Dutch banks, which fall under the scope of U.S. financial regulations, were forced to cut ties: the bank that held her mortgage closed her account entirely. It took coordinated intervention from the ICC registrar and Dutch authorities to arrange for her salary to be deposited at a bank that already worked with the court, and eventually for a second Dutch bank to take over her basic transactions, even with strict limits on her activity. Even after that workaround, transfers to family members regularly failed when intermediary correspondent banks refused to process the payments out of fear of U.S. penalties. Her own son, a resident of The Gambia, had his personal bank account blocked as a result of the sanctions.

Bensouda also confirmed that her husband was targeted for surveillance in the lead-up to the 2020 sanctions designation, with efforts to collect intelligence through photographs and audio recordings. The U.S. only lifted the punitive sanctions against Bensouda in early 2021, shortly after Joe Biden took office. Since that time, the politicization of the ICC has only escalated. After returning to the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump reimposed broad sanctions targeting ICC personnel in an executive order signed in February 2024. The order authorizes economic and travel restrictions for any individual working on ICC investigations into U.S. citizens or U.S. allies including Israel. To date, current ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who succeeded Bensouda in 2021, both of his deputy prosecutors, and eight sitting ICC judges have been added to the sanctions list. Khan has since narrowed the scope of the Afghanistan investigation to focus exclusively on atrocities committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State, effectively dropping the probe into alleged U.S. war crimes.

In addition to detailing the pressure campaign, Bensouda pushed back against longstanding criticisms that the ICC disproportionately targets African nations for investigation. She noted that the vast majority of the court’s African investigations were launched at the formal request of African governments themselves, rather than being imposed by the court unilaterally. “People always forget that ICC did not go to Africa to start investigating. It was Africa that came to the ICC,” she said.

Despite the growing bipartisan and international political attacks on the court’s authority, Bensouda reaffirmed her unwavering support for the ICC’s core mandate of advancing international justice. “There will be attempts to make the court disintegrate and fade away. But I know that there are still people, institutions and countries that want justice,” she said.

Bensouda spoke out publicly ahead of her keynote address at last week’s Hague Rights Forum, where she urged the European Union to take concrete action to shield the ICC and its personnel from extraterritorial sanctions imposed by outside powers. She called on the EU to activate its blocking statute, a regulation designed to protect European companies and individuals from the extrajurisdictional impact of third-country sanctions, and to share technological resources from the bloc’s autonomy initiatives with the court to strengthen its resilience.