In the immediate aftermath of a historic Democratic sweep in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, as electoral outcomes continued to be finalized, the official White House X account shared a stark, formal photograph of Donald Trump seated behind his Oval Office desk, accompanied by the blunt caption: “Trump is still your president.” The carefully curated message was a deliberate attempt to project an image of unshakable executive resolve, framing the sitting president as fully in command despite a devastating partisan setback at the polls. What the post omitted, however, was the dual reality of Trump’s remaining term: while U.S. chief executives retain sweeping unilateral authority even without congressional majorities, Trump has already established a track record of pushing the outer boundaries of executive power, yet the clock is rapidly winding down on his remaining two years in office, creating growing constraints on his ability to act unilaterally. Over his tenure, the president has relied far more heavily on presidential executive orders than formal legislation passed by the previous Republican-controlled Congress to advance his signature agenda: these actions include sweeping tariffs applied uniformly to both U.S. allies and geopolitical adversaries, unilaterally authorized military operations targeting Venezuela and Iran, and across-the-board cuts to congressionally approved federal agency spending. Even with Democrats now holding majority control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, Trump retains the legal authority to continue pursuing many of these same unilateral actions, alongside additional unannounced policy moves, for the remainder of his term. Should Democratic legislators attempt to roll back his policies via new bills, the U.S. Constitution grants Trump a powerful defensive tool: the presidential veto, which cannot be overridden by the narrow Democratic majorities projected to take office in the new Congress. Still, formal legal authority alone does not guarantee Trump has the political capital and institutional support to execute his desired agenda. Incoming Democratic lawmakers have run explicitly on a platform of unyielding opposition to every element of his policy agenda, and the most significant barriers to his plans may emerge not from across the partisan aisle, but from within his own Republican ranks. For the first two years of his presidency, Trump maintained an ironclad grip on the Republican Party, keeping congressional Republicans and grassroots partisan supporters fully aligned through a shrewd mix of targeted political rewards and unapologetic, hardball threats. Recent signs, however, indicate that his once-unassailable hold on the party is beginning to fray. A growing number of Republican officials are now openly criticizing his policy decisions, a level of public pushback that was virtually unthinkable just a few months prior. Even Vice President JD Vance publicly published a lengthy social media post explicitly blaming the U.S.-backed Israeli military campaign in Iran, ordered by Trump, for the sweeping Republican electoral losses on midterm Tuesday. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so,” Vance wrote. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” Unconfirmed reports have also begun circulating that senior members of Trump’s White House staff may face imminent dismissal. Per CBS News, the president has privately consulted close inner-circle advisors about whether to oust Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of the primary architects of the Iran military campaign, though Trump has publicly denied these rumors. The scenario bears striking parallels to former President George W. Bush’s 2006 decision to remove Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the central figure behind the Iraq War, in direct response to a sweeping Democratic midterm landslide that handed the party full control of Congress for the first time in over a decade. “Republicans who think that they need to pivot away from Trumpism and from the Make America Great Again movement are going to either try to emphasise different policy issues, or they’re going to try to frame themselves in ways that show some daylight between themselves and Donald Trump,” noted David Miller, an assistant professor of government at American University. On the night of the midterm vote, Trump made a series of conflicting public statements across social media platforms and live media interviews, alternating between pledges of bipartisan cooperation with the incoming Democratic Congress and explicit threats to veto any progressive legislation the new chamber might pass. The following Wednesday, as construction crews installed the final structural beam for the new White House ballroom Trump has overseen building, even amid an ongoing legal lawsuit seeking to halt the project, he addressed reporters briefly about his political path forward. “I’ll get along probably with the Democrats, unless they want to be destructive,” he stated. “But I have the power of the veto.” The situation echoes the 1995 political moment, months after Republicans seized full control of Congress in a wave election that left Democratic President Bill Clinton politically isolated and on the defensive. At the time, Clinton famously insisted, “The president is still relevant here,” as he sought to reassert his political influence. Unlike Clinton, who was in his first term and had sufficient time to rebuild his public standing and win re-election the following year, time is not on Trump’s side. While he will likely attempt to make the same case for his continued relevance to Washington’s political class and the U.S. public, the man who has spent his entire political career dominating the U.S. media spotlight may soon find that both his formal powers, and the political authority required to wield them effectively, are steadily slipping from his grasp.
作者： admin
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Dapo Akande elected as ICJ judge, restoring British presence inside highest UN court
In a landmark judicial election at the United Nations, renowned British international legal expert Dapo Akande has secured a seat on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), marking the return of British representation to the UN’s highest judicial body after an almost 10-year gap. The Tuesday vote saw Akande elected alongside four other global legal figures: France’s Francois Alabrune, Singapore’s Rena Lee, Jordan’s Mahmoud Daifallah Hmoud, and Kenya’s Phoebe Okowa, with nine total candidates competing for the five open judicial seats. The new cohort will commence their nine-year terms on 6 February 2027; Hmoud and Okowa, who had previously served partial tenures to fill mid-term vacancies, have now earned full, regular terms on the bench.
Akande, currently the Chichele Professor of Public International Law at the University of Oxford and a sitting member of the UN International Law Commission, will be the first British national to serve as an ICJ judge since 2018. A widely respected jurist whose professional portfolio spans armed conflict regulation, international criminal law, human rights frameworks, intergovernmental organization governance, and interstate dispute resolution, he has built a distinguished track record of shaping landmark international legal arguments. His prior work includes developing rigorous legal frameworks for establishing genocide accountability and defining the illegality of de facto and formal annexation of Palestinian territories, positioning him to participate in the ICJ’s ongoing high-profile case brought by South Africa, which alleges Israel has violated the Genocide Convention in its military operations in Gaza.
UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband hailed Akande’s election as a resounding endorsement of the United Kingdom’s longstanding commitment to the international rule of law, noting it strengthens the nation’s ability to advocate for its core values on the global diplomatic and legal stage. Janina Dill, Akande’s co-director at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict, praised his professional character in a post-election comment to Middle East Eye, describing him as a deliberate, nuanced jurist with exceptional communication skills, and highlighting his consistent even temperament and profound wisdom as qualities that will greatly benefit the court at a critical juncture for global human rights and conflict resolution.
The ICJ election process requires successful candidates to win an absolute majority in concurrent, separate ballots in both the UN General Assembly (97 votes required) and the UN Security Council (8 votes required), with a key procedural safeguard that bars the Security Council’s five permanent members from exercising their veto power over judicial appointments. Per ICJ foundational rules, all elected judges serve entirely independently of their national governments, with no binding obligation to advance their home state’s policy interests. Headquartered in The Hague, the ICJ functions as the primary judicial body for resolving formally submitted disputes between sovereign states and issuing authoritative, non-binding advisory opinions on critical international legal questions; unlike the separate International Criminal Court, it adjudicates state-level legal responsibility rather than prosecuting individual persons for crimes, and its judgments in interstate disputes are legally binding on the parties involved, though enforcement of rulings often depends on collective state action and the often politically divided Security Council.
Akande’s election arrives as the ICJ prepares to deliver its highly anticipated judgment on 19 November in The Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar, which addresses widespread atrocities perpetrated against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. Akande previously served as lead counsel for the UK’s legal team in that case, alongside Alison Macdonald KC and Naomi Hart, when Britain intervened jointly with Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and the Netherlands to submit coordinated arguments interpreting the Genocide Convention. The coalition of states pushed back against unreasonably high evidentiary thresholds for proving genocidal intent that would make securing genocide convictions functionally unachievable, and emphasized that genocide encompasses a far broader scope of prohibited acts than mass killing, including systematic sexual violence and the imposition of deliberately destructive living conditions that target civilian populations. Their submissions also underscored that the unique vulnerability of child populations must be central to judicial assessments of serious harm, systemic deprivation, and forced population displacement. This high-profile Myanmar genocide case has recently become a target of criticism from U.S. officials, with newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz accusing the case’s ad hoc judge, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay, of attempting to lower genocide proof thresholds to enable future legal action against American and allied military personnel. Waltz publicly warned that Washington would closely monitor the ICJ’s handling of the proceedings, explicitly referencing the sweeping U.S. sanctions regime previously imposed against the International Criminal Court to signal potential retaliatory measures.
Akande’s prior ICJ appearances also include representing Japan during the court’s landmark advisory opinion proceedings on the illegality of Israel’s long-running occupation of Palestinian territories. During those hearings, he argued forcefully that a state cannot evade the international legal ban on seizing territory by force simply by declining to issue a formal public declaration of annexation, noting that sustained actions including mass population transfers, systematic land seizures, mass evictions of long-term residents, construction of permanent state infrastructure, and exploitation of shared natural resources such as water can collectively constitute de facto annexation, particularly when state officials explicitly frame those changes as permanent. He further rejected the legal claim that states can retain seized territory under the justification of self-defense, noting that international law frames self-defense as a mechanism to protect already sovereign territory, not to seize additional land, and concluding that “Permanent annexation can never be a proportionate response to an armed attack.”
Notably, Akande has a long track record of challenging the British government’s official legal positions before international judicial bodies, despite the UK’s formal support for his ICJ candidacy. During 2018 ICJ hearings on the Chagos Islands dispute, in which the UK separated the archipelago from Mauritius prior to the latter’s independence, he represented Zambia to directly refute core British legal arguments. The UK had claimed the case was a narrow bilateral territorial dispute between London and Port Louis that fell outside the ICJ’s purview without British government consent, but Akande countered that the proceedings centered on binding international legal obligations related to decolonization, and that the fundamental right of colonized peoples to self-determination was a universal concern for all UN member states, not just the two direct parties to the dispute. He further rejected the UK’s assertion that the principle of self-determination had not yet been enshrined in international law in 1965, when the Chagos Islands were formally severed from Mauritius, citing the UK’s own official public statements from that era that explicitly affirmed the universal right of all colonized peoples to self-governance.
His willingness to challenge official UK legal stances extends to military action as well: in a 2018 formal legal opinion commissioned by then-UK Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson, Akande dismissed the British government’s legal justification for airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria as “significantly flawed,” concluding that the military operation violated the UN Charter and established international law. He noted that international law does not recognize the unilateral, uninvoked right to “humanitarian intervention” that the British government had claimed, and that even if such a right were widely accepted, the 2018 airstrikes failed to meet the UK government’s own stated conditions for legitimate action. Akande also publicly challenged the legal basis for the UK’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq: in 2010, he led a cohort of leading international law academics in a formal submission to the official Iraq Inquiry that rejected the UK government’s argument that a 1990 UN Security Council authorization to use force against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait could be reactivated more than a decade later due to Iraqi breaches of 1991 ceasefire terms, describing that interpretation as “an untenable interpretation of the UN Charter.” The submission further argued that even if that contested legal argument were accepted, a November 2002 Security Council resolution did not meet the required conditions for authorizing military action, meaning then-UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s formal conclusion that the invasion was lawful was legally unsound.
In his formal candidate statement submitted during the ICJ election process, Akande pledged full commitment to legal rigor, collaborative engagement across diverse global legal traditions, and uncompromising judicial independence. “If elected, I will decide cases on the basis of a faithful and impartial application of the law having listened carefully to the arguments of participants in the proceedings,” he stated. The election of Akande adds a widely respected, independently minded legal voice to the ICJ at a moment when the court faces unprecedented global scrutiny over high-stakes cases related to genocide, territorial occupation, and the limits of legitimate military action. -
‘The alternative to diplomacy is war’: Polisario warns of risks after collapse of Western Sahara UN mission
A landmark 35-year UN peacekeeping presence in Western Sahara came to an abrupt end last week, after the UN Security Council collapsed into gridlock and failed to extend the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), stoking widespread alarm that the long-running territorial dispute could spiral into open military conflict while fading entirely from global diplomatic attention.
First established in 1991, MINURSO was founded with two core mandates: to oversee a formal ceasefire between the Moroccan state and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, the armed independence movement fighting for self-determination for the Indigenous Sahrawi population, and to lay the administrative groundwork for a long-promised independence referendum for the territory. Neither of those foundational goals was ever fully realized: the fragile 1991 ceasefire completely unraveled in 2020, and the self-determination vote was never scheduled, leaving the mission adrift in a diplomatic no-man’s-land for years.
The final death knell for MINURSO sounded on Sunday, when dueling vetoes from Russia and the United States scuttled competing resolutions aimed at extending the mission’s mandate. The U.S.-backed draft resolution would have stripped the word “referendum” entirely from MINURSO’s official name, rebranding it the United Nations Mission in Western Sahara, and enshrined Morocco’s widely criticized 2007 autonomy proposal as the sole legal framework for all future peace negotiations. That decades-old Moroccan plan offers the territory limited local self-governance while retaining full Moroccan sovereign control over Western Sahara, a framework that has won tentative backing from many UN member states and was described for the first time last year by the Security Council as “a most feasible outcome” for resolving the conflict, but has been repeatedly and categorically rejected by the Polisario Front.
For the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the Polisario-led governing body that administers five Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and roughly 20 percent of Western Sahara’s territory, the Security Council stalemate was framed as a unexpected win. “The Russian veto saved the legal basis of self-determination,” SADR Foreign Minister Mohamed Yeslem Beissat told Middle East Eye, noting that the longstanding Polisario view of MINURSO was that it was at best ineffective, and at worst actively complicit in advancing Morocco’s occupation of the territory. Beissat added that the now-dead U.S. push to prioritize Morocco’s autonomy plan had been completely neutralized by the veto gridlock, as Russia would block any future attempt to table that framework before the Security Council. “At least in the short to medium term future, they cannot bring it again to the Security Council,” he explained. “Now we are back to square one.”
Western Sahara is widely recognized as Africa’s last remaining formal colony, and remains listed on the UN’s official roster of non-self-governing territories. Morocco seized control of the vast, resource-rich desert territory in 1975 following the withdrawal of former colonial power Spain, triggering a decades-long armed conflict with the Polisario Front that displaced hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Sahrawi people, hundreds of whom still reside in refugee camps in southwestern Algeria. Independence activists living in the 80 percent of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco have long reported systematic state repression, including arbitrary detention and restrictions on peaceful protest.
The 2020 collapse of the 1991 ceasefire followed a U.S. diplomatic deal struck under the Trump administration, in which Washington formally recognized Morocco’s full sovereignty claim over Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco agreeing to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, a position the Biden administration has retained with no major policy shifts, despite limited hopes for change following recent U.S. midterm elections. Beissat criticized both Washington and European Security Council members that backed the U.S. draft resolution for acting against their own national interests, warning that a return to large-scale conflict in North Africa would trigger widespread instability and refugee flows directly into the European continent. “The alternative to diplomacy is war. That’s the message the UNSC have sent to the world,” he said. “They didn’t care. It’s more important for them to rally with America than defend their own interests in the peace and stability of North Africa.”
The UN has already initiated the formal process of winding down MINURSO’s operations in the Western Sahara coastal city of Laayoune, transferring all remaining mission assets to Moroccan authorities. In a public statement released Wednesday, the Moroccan government insisted it would uphold its “voluntary” commitment to a ceasefire in the territory, while vowing to defend what it calls its national security and territorial integrity. Morocco controls its 80 percent share of Western Sahara behind a massive, 2,700-kilometer sand defensive barrier known as “the Berm,” which it constructed in the 1980s to separate its controlled territory from the smaller Polisario-held zone and the Algerian border.
Since the 2020 ceasefire collapse, low-level skirmishes have persisted across the demarcation line: the Polisario Front has launched repeated attacks on Moroccan military outposts along the Berm, while Moroccan forces have carried out targeted drone strikes against Polisario positions, displacing thousands of local civilians who have fled to safety in either Mauritania or Algeria’s refugee camps. Analysts warn that the total removal of UN monitoring personnel from the long-patrolled buffer zone between the two sides eliminates the last remaining guardrail against wider war. “The risk is that a military incident inside Western Sahara’s buffer zone, no longer monitored by the UN, could ignite a larger military escalation, with Rabat potentially taking over this area and the Polisario attacking Moroccan defence facilities directly from Algerian territory,” Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa project director at the International Crisis Group, explained. “It’s this kind of scenario that the disappearance of the Minurso will make more plausible from now on.”
For decades, the Western Sahara conflict has been largely sidelined in global diplomatic discourse, overshadowed by higher-profile crises including the Israel-Palestine conflict and other armed conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa. Sahrawi human rights activists warn that the full withdrawal of MINURSO will erase the last formal mechanism that kept the long-simmering dispute on the UN Security Council’s regular agenda. “For more than 30 years, Minurso kept Western Sahara on the Security Council’s agenda – it meant that the world’s most powerful states had to address our situation, and that the UN secretary-general had to report regularly on developments,” said Asria Taleb Mohamed, a Sahrawi artist and human rights campaigner. “Without that presence, I fear Western Sahara will become easier for the world to forget.”
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Police urged to investigate London event advertising settlement-linked Israeli agency
A UK-based legal advocacy group focused on Palestinian justice has formally called on London’s Metropolitan Police to launch an urgent probe into the presence of an Israeli state agency heavily involved in illegal settlement construction at the ongoing World Travel Market (WTM), one of the global travel industry’s largest annual trade shows. The event, which runs through Thursday in London, already drew large-scale pro-Palestine demonstrations on Tuesday, with tensions flaring as event security physically removed two activists from the exhibition floor. The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) submitted an official letter to the Met Police’s dedicated war crimes unit on Tuesday, demanding immediate investigation and the consideration of preventative measures targeting the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), which is participating at WTM via its tourism outreach platform iTravelJerusalem. The JDA, a statutory body jointly overseen by the Israeli government and Jerusalem municipal authorities, has been extensively documented as a lead implementer of settlement expansion projects across occupied East Jerusalem and Palestinian territories, in direct violation of international law. Its high-profile ongoing plans include the forced eviction of 40 Palestinian families from the Umm Haroun compound in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to build a 320-unit illegal settlement, a 2020-approved Jerusalem cable car project that would displace local critical water, sewage and telecommunications infrastructure while clearing hundreds of native trees, and a major new housing settlement adjacent to the Palestinian community of Beit Safafa. Since 2023, the agency has retained a contract with global marketing firm Finn Partners to promote occupied East Jerusalem as a leisure tourism destination across the UK. The ICJP’s letter raises specific concerns about the financial relationship between the WTM organisers and the JDA, noting that any exhibition fees or direct financial benefits the event may derive from the settlement-linked agency’s participation could constitute a potential criminal offence under UK laws targeting complicity in illegal settlement activity. The Israeli national pavilion at WTM, which hosts dozens of Israeli tourism and commercial entities, prominently features the iTravelJerusalem stand that markets travel experiences across occupied Palestinian land. The Tuesday demonstration organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) saw protesters gather directly outside the Israeli stand holding large banners reading “Every settlement is a war crime”, before two attendees were forcibly escorted out by private security staff. PSC Deputy Director Ryvka Barnard condemned the Israeli state’s presence at the event as a “utter disgrace”, pointing out that UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron publicly acknowledged the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories just months prior, and pledged to ban all promotional activity for illegal Israeli settlements. “This is a critical test for the newly elected Labour government,” Barnard stated. “Voters are watching to see if they will honour their public commitments, move to shut down this stall and launch the requested criminal investigations into its organisers, or if their earlier statements will be exposed as nothing more than empty political rhetoric.” The pressure on authorities comes days after 15 sitting UK Members of Parliament sent an official letter to the British government on Monday, demanding that ministers intervene directly with WTM leadership to remove all exhibitors and promotional materials that facilitate or market illegal Israeli settlements. The UK government formally recognised Israel’s 57-year occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal last month, and announced a sweeping new package of sanctions targeting illegal Israeli settlement operations. Palestinian Ambassador to the UK Hussam Zomlot also released a public statement last Thursday in response to initial reporting on the JDA’s WTM participation, condemning the decision to platform “Israeli companies guilty of ethnic cleansing” at a major London industry event, and calling on the UK government to turn its previously stated commitments into tangible enforcement action to ensure all parties complicit in the illegal occupation and settlement expansion face meaningful legal consequences. Middle East Eye, which first broke the story of the JDA’s scheduled WTM appearance last week, has reached out to both the Metropolitan Police and WTM event organisers for official comment, with no public response issued as of press time.
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Trump’s loss limits powers at home, but it will likely be different abroad
After a decisive midterm election defeat that handed opposition Democrats control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress, President Donald Trump faces unprecedented constraints on his domestic legislative and political agenda, but retains sweeping unilateral authority over U.S. military and foreign affairs that many analysts warn he could deploy to distract from his domestic political losses. Long famous for framing every outcome through superlatives, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated a visceral refusal to be perceived as a “loser,” a core character trait that has driven his frequent, unorthodox policy U-turns designed to deliver high-profile, media-friendly wins. With his ability to dictate domestic policy now largely neutralized by the newly empowered Democratic congressional majority, White House watchers and global allies are closely tracking two high-risk foreign policy flashpoints where Trump could pursue dramatic, headline-grabbing actions to rebrand himself as a decisive, strong commander-in-chief untainted by the midterm rout that he has already attempted to frame as irrelevant because his name did not appear on the ballot. The first major potential flashpoint centers on Iran. In the weeks leading up to the midterms, the Trump administration ramped up military deployments to the Persian Gulf, culminating in a limited pre-election airstrike on an Iranian island. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who attended a closed-door classified briefing on proposed military options against Tehran before suffering a stroke, publicly condemned the preliminary plans as “insane,” warning that any large-scale strike on Iranian civilian infrastructure would not only violate international humanitarian law and qualify as a war crime, but trigger devastating retaliatory strikes targeting U.S. allied assets across the Gulf. Tehran, which has closely monitored U.S. political shifts, has openly noted that its ongoing enforcement of partial restrictions on shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz has driven up global prices for fuel, fertilizer and other core commodities, a dynamic that contributed to Republican losses in the midterms. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf issued a stark public warning on social media, stating that American voters had rejected further war in the midterms, and that any U.S. administration that defied that public mandate to pursue conflict would face crippling consequences. Israeli interim Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, currently locked in tense coalition negotiations after recent national elections, has been openly lobbying Trump to pursue regime change in Tehran, a move that analysts note would allow Netanyahu to bypass his current parliamentary deadlock and form a dominant national unity government in the event of a large-scale regional war. The second high-stakes theater where Trump could pursue unilateral action is the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has now surpassed the length of the First World War. Prior to the midterms, Trump unilaterally rolled back a set of sanctions on Moscow to enable increased imports of Russian diesel, a move intended to ease domestic U.S. fuel price inflation ahead of voters going to the polls. Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has publicly expressed hope that the midterm results will not disrupt Trump’s self-styled “peace-making” efforts to end the conflict, which have consistently centered on forcing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept sweeping territorial concessions to Russia that would amount to a de facto capitulation for Kyiv. To date, the Trump administration has declined to fulfill repeated Ukrainian requests for additional U.S.-made air defense interceptors, even as Russian ballistic missile attacks on civilian Ukrainian population centers have increased in frequency and scale. Analysts caution that while Trump’s notoriously unpredictable governing style makes specific policy forecasts highly unreliable, one constant remains clear: the president has no intention of remaining a lame-duck leader quietly winding down his term in office. Barred from advancing his domestic agenda by the new Democratic congressional majority, there is growing consensus that Trump will prioritize high-stakes foreign maneuvers to cement his political legacy, with the explicit goal of proving that even after a major domestic electoral defeat, he retains the power to shake global geopolitics to their core.
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‘I think a part of it was Iran’: Trump acknowledges war’s impact on midterm election losses
In post-election reflections published Wednesday, former U.S. President Donald Trump publicly conceded that the ongoing military conflict with Iran was a contributing factor to the Republican Party’s devastating across-the-board losses in the latest U.S. midterm elections, which handed full control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to Democratic candidates who ran heavily on anti-war platforms.
During a series of one-on-one media interviews dissecting the scale of the GOP’s electoral defeat, Trump told reporters, “I think a part of it was Iran… Iran was a piece of it.” Even as he acknowledged the war’s political fallout, the president remained unapologetic for his 2025 decision to greenlight joint U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran, a move that directly contradicted the “no new wars” central promise of his 2024 presidential campaign. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he doubled down: “I did the right thing. I would have done it again.”
The U.S. and Israel launched full-scale military operations against Iran in late February, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented Trump with purported Mossad intelligence claiming the campaign would trigger a popular uprising among Iranian citizens that would topple Tehran’s ruling regime. Despite the operation succeeding in killing dozens of top Iranian government and military figures, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Iranian state remained fully functional. Iranian military forces subsequently seized full command of the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz, triggering a global surge in crude oil prices that rippled directly to U.S. consumers via skyrocketing gasoline and general consumer goods costs — a line of attack that Democratic candidates across every U.S. district hammered on throughout their campaigns to tie the Republican incumbent to soaring cost-of-living burdens.
Public polling has consistently shown the Iran war remains deeply unpopular with the American public, and Trump has repeatedly shifted his public framing of the operation’s stated objectives in the months since it began. When pressed by reporters in the aftermath of the midterm vote on unconfirmed reports that he had considered deploying nuclear weapons against Iranian targets, Trump brushed off the question, claiming, “I don’t need it, we’ve knocked them out already, 90 percent.”
Across the globe in Tehran, senior Iranian officials reacted to the U.S. midterm results with public approval. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf posted a statement on social media platform X on Wednesday that read, “Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message.” -
Why Trump’s midterm rebuke won’t likely tank the buck
TOKYO — The US dollar’s recent rally to a 17-month peak reflects far more than the relative strength of the American economy: it is a magnet drawing global capital chasing elevated yields and the high-flying, AI-fueled US growth narrative, creating cascading risks across emerging Asian markets even as the 2026 US midterm elections delivered a historic, sweeping victory for Democratic candidates that secured majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The full scale of the Democratic rout of Donald Trump’s Republican Party remained unconfirmed for days after polling day, though Trump initially appeared to concede the lopsided defeat in public press interviews, defying widespread fears that he would attempt to interfere with vote counting as he did after the 2021 presidential election.
Global financial markets swung sharply in the immediate aftermath of the results, as investors priced in potential policy pivots from a newly empowered Democratic legislature spanning fiscal spending, AI regulation, responses to the ongoing Iran conflict, and formal oversight investigations into the Trump White House. Broad US equity benchmarks trended upward in early post-election trading, while the dollar saw modest, temporary dips against the Japanese yen, British pound and euro. Even so, the broader market consensus points to another extended, seemingly gravity-defying run of dollar strength as the political dust settles.
Analysts at MUFG Bank note that the Democratic sweep will likely deliver modest upside for Asian currencies, as the resulting legislative gridlock curbs expectations of unfettered new US government spending, easing pressure on Treasury yields and blunting some of the dollar’s upward momentum. Manulife Investment Management’s global head of asset allocation Nathan Thooft echoed that divided government will introduce a degree of policy stability that reduces near-term market volatility, but cautioned against overstating election outcomes as a long-term currency driver: foreign exchange movements are far more closely tied to cross-border differentials in growth, inflation, interest rates and capital flows than short-term political shifts. J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Asia chief strategist Tai Hui added that Trump retains significant unilateral policy levers even with Democratic majorities in Congress, including authority over trade tariffs, foreign policy direction and existing regulatory frameworks, noting that Democrats would need a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers to override any presidential veto.
A sustained dollar surge poses acute risks for Asian economies: it will push regional currencies lower, tighten global credit conditions at a moment when governments across the Asia-Pacific are already navigating economic headwinds from the Middle East conflict and the threat of new US tariff hikes. The region has painful historical precedent for this dynamic: the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis traced its origins to the US Federal Reserve’s 1994-95 tightening cycle under Chair Alan Greenspan, which doubled interest rates in 12 months, triggered a Mexican currency collapse, and drove a dollar rally that made the region’s long-standing currency pegs unsustainable. Thailand was the first to devalue, followed by Indonesia and South Korea, which collectively secured $118 billion in IMF-led bailout packages, while Malaysia and the Philippines teetered on the edge of collapse without requesting external support. Emerging markets have remained wary of Fed tightening cycles ever since, a risk that was clearly visible during the 2013 “taper tantrum” selloff in global assets.
Today, the ongoing Iran war has reawakened the dollar’s historic potential to act as a destabilizing “wrecking ball” for regional markets. The Indonesian rupiah has fallen 8.8% in 2026 to hit all-time lows, the Philippine peso is down 7.7%, and both the Thai baht and South Korean won have dropped 7% — all despite persistent structural pressures on the US economy including record national debt, elevated inflation, protectionist tariffs, sweeping tax cuts and massive federal spending packages.
A key, underappreciated factor driving the current dynamic is the performance of the Federal Reserve under Chair Kevin Warsh, who took office in May 2026 and has run the US central bank far more hawkishly than Trump anticipated when he appointed him. While Warsh could still pivot to cut rates to align with the president’s priorities, US inflation remains anchored at 3.7% — a key factor cited by analysts for the Republican Party’s heavy midterm losses — and the US labor market has proven far more resilient than forecast, leaving Warsh with a highly complex policy balancing act.
This stance has thrown the Bank of Japan into extreme policy disarray. Markets are already pricing in additional Fed rate hikes before the end of 2026, a dynamic that pulls capital away from Japanese assets and into higher-yielding US Treasuries, threatening to derail the Nikkei’s multi-year bull run. The weak yen that previously boosted Japanese corporate profits has now left the country exposed to skyrocketing import costs and renewed inflationary pressure, as Japan teeters on the edge of stagflation: 2026 growth is tracking at just 0.7% while inflation hovers around 2%. The Bank of Japan’s September rate hike to 1% — a 31-year high — is widely expected to be the last tightening move for the foreseeable future, leaving a policy gap between a hold-harsh BOJ and a tightening Fed that sets the stage for renewed sharp yen depreciation.
No market participants can reliably forecast the Fed’s policy path six months from now, nor how Trump — who previously attempted to fire and prosecute former Fed Chair Jerome Powell — will react if his hand-picked Fed leader refuses to deliver the rate cuts he has long demanded. A surging dollar amid a new Fed tightening cycle was nowhere on Asian policymakers’ 2027 risk outlook, but it has now emerged as a top-tier threat. HSBC chief Asia economist Frederic Neumann notes that regional monetary authorities will have to remain on high alert for the foreseeable future: “A bouncy US dollar means there is little reprieve for now, and a sharp rally threatens to suffocate Asian currencies and leave governments across the region scrambling to sandbag their financial systems.”
Despite the prevailing bullish sentiment on the dollar, there are seven distinct, well-documented reasons to believe that current optimism over the currency may be misplaced. First, US political instability persists: the American political system has never fully recovered from Trump’s 2021 attempt to overturn his presidential election loss, and lingering chaos from the 2026 midterms is likely to cloud policy clarity for months. Second, oil and Middle East geopolitics remain a dominant wild card: CIBC head of foreign exchange strategy Sarah Ying notes that oil prices are the most important near-term driver of dollar movements, and any sharp shift in energy markets will easily outweigh midterm election impacts, adding that her team is positioned for dollar downside given the Trump administration’s recent more conciliatory tone toward Iran. Third, the Fed may prove far less aggressive than markets currently price in: Warsh could eventually argue for rate cuts to stabilize the US economy, a move that would narrow US-yield differentials with peer economies and push capital flows toward Europe, Japan and emerging markets. Fourth, US economic growth is likely to lag the rest of the world in 2027, weighed down by tighter Fed policy and Trump’s tariff regime, even if the country avoids a formal recession: as China’s economy stabilizes, Europe’s industrial recovery gains traction, the Bank of Japan slows its hiking cycle and emerging market fundamentals hold steady, global investors will have clear incentives to rotate capital away from US assets. Fifth, the AI investment boom that has driven most recent US capital inflows carries significant downside risk: total debt held by major US tech firms has swelled 90% in six months to $3.2 trillion, and if AI investment returns disappoint and valuations correct sharply, the dollar will lose its core fundamental support. Deutsche Bank’s global head of FX research George Saravelos adds that the AI dynamic cuts both ways: foreign purchases of US stocks currently fully fund the entire US current account deficit, but roughly 90% of the $20+ trillion in US equities held by overseas investors reflects price appreciation rather than new net inflows, leaving the market highly vulnerable to sudden outflows.
Sixth, America’s twin fiscal and current account deficits are reaching unprecedented levels, with total national debt now exceeding $40 trillion. The US has long benefited from the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the world’s dominant reserve currency, a term coined by 1960s French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, but that status relies entirely on global investor confidence. If that confidence erodes, the dollar could face downward pressure not seen since the 1970s, and Treasury yields could surge past levels last recorded in the early 2000s. Seventh, cross-market wildcards could upend current trends: the dollar could extend its rally further if AI bubble fears prove overblown, or if Trump de-escalates the Iran conflict or rolls back tariffs, while Japan represents a major countervailing force: after decades of exporting capital in search of higher overseas yields, Japanese institutional investors could begin repatriating funds as the Bank of Japan shrinks its balance sheet and domestic JGB yields rise. Standard Chartered’s global head of FX research Steve Englander argues that higher Japanese government bond yields will make the yen far more attractive, and its low market beta, undervalued pricing and newly restored yield advantage will drive sharp appreciation if global markets shift into risk-off mode unrelated to oil price shocks.
Massive regional holdings of US Treasuries add another layer of systemic risk: Japan holds nearly $1.1 trillion in US government debt, China roughly $620 billion, and the broader Asia-Pacific region holds more than $2.5 trillion in total. Even a small hint of coordinated selling from Tokyo or Beijing to defend their domestic currencies could trigger panic among other major US creditors including the UK, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and Taiwan. This dynamic explains why US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined Japan’s Ministry of Finance in coordinated yen buying operations starting in July 2026, a move Trump publicly framed as a gesture of “friendship” that in reality reflected deep mutual fear: a disorderly yen selloff would send shockwaves across global markets, and Tokyo could retaliate by selling US Treasuries to support its currency, sending US yields spiraling higher. Notably, Bessent funded the intervention with euro reserves rather than newly printed dollars, a deliberate choice to avoid expanding the US money supply.
If US efforts to deliberately weaken the dollar backfire, policymakers in the Bessent Treasury could end up facing far higher Treasury yields than they currently project. The dollar’s decades-long strength rests entirely on global credibility and the widespread belief that US officials will not manipulate its value for short-term political gains, and recent ambiguous signals from the Treasury have reopened a deeply unpopular question on Wall Street: is Washington actively trying to push the dollar lower?
Asian governments face a cascade of additional policy risks in the post-midterm landscape. A wounded, lame-duck Trump White House could unleash a new wave of punitive tariffs, lash out at China for refusing to agree to a proposed “grand bargain” trade deal, pressure Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to accept a $550 billion “signing bonus” to secure a bilateral trade agreement and increase annual payments for hosting US military bases, use Taiwan’s political status as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Beijing, or hold an unplanned high-profile summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that upends regional security arrangements.
As 2026 draws to a close, the surging US dollar has once again upended Asia’s economic development plans for the coming year. The world’s most powerful capital magnet is siphoning away the liquidity Asian economies need to fund fiscal deficits, stabilize domestic bond markets and support buoyant equity valuations, and widespread uncertainty over the long-term direction of Warsh’s Fed policy is amplifying regional anxiety. For Asia, the core risk is no longer simply that the dollar keeps rising: it is that the world’s dominant reserve currency is evolving into the single most destabilizing force threatening regional financial stability for years to come.
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Democrats won Congress in a blue wave. Now comes the hard part.
The 2026 US midterm elections delivered a historic upset for the Democratic Party, as Texas state legislator James Talarico flipped a long-held Republican US Senate seat to blue, handing the party full control of both the Senate and House of Representatives for the upcoming congressional term. The decisive electoral landslide sparked jubilant scenes across Democratic headquarters on election night, with presumptive incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries proclaiming, “Today begins the great American comeback” to cheering party supporters.
Yet behind the celebratory fervor, Democratic lawmakers are already confronting the steep challenges of translating months of ambitious campaign promises into tangible policy action, as they enter a divided power dynamic with sitting Republican President Donald Trump still occupying the White House. For months on the campaign trail, Democratic candidates pledged to root out government and corporate corruption, slash sky-high costs for healthcare, groceries and gasoline, and curb the administration’s ongoing military engagement with Iran. But party leaders openly acknowledge that holding congressional majorities does not guarantee smooth delivery on these commitments, given Trump’s sweeping executive authority to veto any legislation he opposes.
Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons emphasized the party’s precarious political position in an interview with the BBC, noting, “We need to prove we can get stuff done, actually deliver answers to their concerns and questions about low wages and rising costs in particular. The Democratic Party is still deeply unpopular — we are less unpopular than the Republican Party, much less unpopular than Donald Trump.”
A top priority for House Democrats, led by incoming Oversight Committee Chairman Robert Garcia of California, will be sweeping oversight investigations into the Trump administration. Garcia famously told allies to “Lawyer up” on election night, outlining a sprawling oversight agenda that will probe alleged conflicts of interest involving Trump and his family, corporate corruption, reported abuses within the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the long-classified files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The new Democratic Senate majority will also wield significant institutional powers, including full authority to confirm or reject all of Trump’s cabinet and federal judicial nominees. If a vacancy opens on the US Supreme Court during the remainder of Trump’s term, Senate Democrats will be able to block hardline conservative nominees and force the White House to advance more moderate candidates that can win bipartisan support. While the House holds the constitutional power to launch impeachment proceedings against the president, Democratic leaders have signaled deep reluctance to pursue that path: the two prior impeachments of Trump during his first term resulted in full Senate acquittals, and a two-thirds 67-vote supermajority required to convict the president remains far out of Democratic reach. Jeffries has repeatedly refused to rule out or confirm any impeachment plans, telling CNN in August, “We haven’t ruled anything in. And we haven’t ruled anything out.”
Legislative analysts warn that the era of divided government could bring unprecedented levels of Washington gridlock, at a time when public approval of Congress already hovers at a dismal 14% according to an October Gallup poll of registered voters. George Washington University legislative affairs professor Casey Burgat noted, “If you thought legislating was hard in the last Congress with unified Republican control, that will get much more complicated.” While Democrats can easily pass their priority bills through both chambers with their comfortable majorities, they lack the two-thirds supermajority required to override any Trump veto.
The president has sent conflicting signals about his willingness to collaborate with the new Democratic Congress: in comments to the New York Times on election night, he struck a conciliatory tone claiming “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them. We’ll probably work something out,” only to post a photo on his Truth Social platform minutes later of his signature red campaign hat emblazoned with the single word “VETO.”
Key policy priorities for House Democrats include reversing steep Republican-backed cuts to Medicaid and expanding Affordable Care Act tax credits to lower healthcare costs for millions of low-income Americans. But even areas with traditional bipartisan overlap, including consumer affordability policies, AI industry regulation, reform of military aid to Israel, and efforts to rein in the Iran war, face significant risk of collapse as congressional Republicans, already positioning for the 2028 presidential election, have little incentive to hand Democratic lawmakers legislative wins.
Deep internal rifts also threaten to derail Democratic unity, most notably over US military funding for Israel. Progressive incoming senators including Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and a cohort of newly elected House Democrats have pledged to push for strict cuts to Israeli military aid, a position that puts them on a direct collision course with more centrist Democratic leadership. Efforts to constrain Trump’s unilateral war-making powers in Iran also face major legal hurdles: a bipartisan resolution passed by both chambers in June to halt hostilities with Iran was simply ignored by the Trump White House, which claims broad executive authority to conduct foreign military operations. Brookings Institution senior governance studies fellow Scott Anderson noted that Congress’s ability to force the president to comply remains an untested legal gray area, requiring potential litigation to resolve through the courts. As Coons warned his party colleagues in the wake of their historic midterm victory: “It is overwhelmingly a rejection of Donald Trump, and his agenda and policies. But if we overreach, or if we fight too much internally, we could miss this moment.” -
Man who killed parents and brother found guilty of manslaughter
A harrowing triple homicide case in County Louth, Republic of Ireland, concluded recently at Dublin’s Central Criminal Court, where 32-year-old Robert O’Connor was cleared of murder charges in the 2025 stabbing deaths of his parents and younger brother, but found criminally liable for the three deaths via a verdict of manslaughter by diminished responsibility. The three victims — 56-year-old Louise O’Connor, 54-year-old Mark O’Connor, and their 27-year-old son Evan, who lived with autism — were discovered deceased at their family home in Drumgowna in late September 2025, with a combined total of 139 stab wounds across all three bodies. Court proceedings confirmed that O’Connor fully acknowledged he had inflicted the fatal injuries, but entered dual defences: a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and an alternative guilty plea to manslaughter on the grounds of impaired mental function. The 12-member jury, made up of six men and six women, deliberated for a total of four hours and eight minutes across two full days of hearings before returning unanimous verdicts on all three counts. The case turned on conflicting expert testimony from two consultant forensic psychiatrists, who agreed O’Connor was suffering from an acute relapse of schizophrenia at the time of the killings, but diverged on whether his condition met the legal threshold for a full insanity acquittal. Defence witness Dr Fiona Toal testified that O’Connor was unable to recognize his actions were morally wrong and lacked the capacity to stop the violent attack, meeting the criteria for a special insanity verdict that would have mandated long-term dedicated mental health care. In contrast, prosecution psychiatrist Dr Ronan Mullaney argued O’Connor did not qualify for that special ruling, pointing to evidence the defendant had expressed remorse to Irish Garda officers after his arrest, and had asked law enforcement what length of sentence he might face — comments that indicated he retained a clear awareness of his role in the deaths. Additional evidence presented in court revealed that in the months leading up to the killings, O’Connor had stopped adhering to his prescribed schizophrenia medication and was using cocaine regularly. He told investigating officers the violence erupted after a verbal altercation with his parents over his drug use, and that he had initially only intended to kill his father and Evan, who he had cornered at knifepoint in the family sitting room, while his mother begged him to spare their younger son. A pathologist confirmed that the vast majority of Evan’s stab wounds were inflicted while the 27-year-old, who lived with autism, was still conscious. Lead defence counsel Michael Bowman SC told the jury during closing arguments that O’Connor had been repeatedly failed by health services in the years prior to the killings: he had received an incorrect initial diagnosis, and subsequent episodes of psychotic distress were misattributed entirely to recreational drug use, rather than recognized as symptoms of his underlying schizophrenia. Bowman emphasized that a full insanity verdict would have secured O’Connor the specialized, long-term mental health treatment he had never accessed in his life. Following the jury’s verdict, Mr Justice Mícheál P O’Higgins acknowledged to the panel that the proceedings had been “a difficult and really very sad case” for all involved. O’Connor has been remanded in custody ahead of a formal sentencing hearing scheduled for 14 December.
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Mugabe’s son arrested over ‘assault’ during luxury car smuggling probe
Zimbabwean law enforcement officials have confirmed the arrest of Bellarmine Mugabe, the youngest son of the country’s late long-ruling former president Robert Mugabe, in connection with an ongoing assault investigation. The 29-year-old is among a group of five men taken into custody on Tuesday, a development first corroborated by regional digital news outlet The New Zimbabwe as part of a broader probe that initially centered on the alleged illegal smuggling of two motor vehicles across Zimbabwe’s borders. Those two vehicles have since been impounded by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission, per verified local media disclosures.
The full cohort of detained individuals has been identified by police as 43-year-old Munashe Mubawu, 42-year-old Terrence Johannes Chinyemba, 33-year-old Fredson Peter, 34-year-old Solomon Pamire, alongside Bellarmine Mugabe. Official police statements outline that the group is linked to a reported assault incident that unfolded at Harare’s Brompton Guest Lodge at approximately 18:30 local time (16:30 GMT) on November 3. All five suspects are scheduled to make their first appearance before a Harare magistrates’ court on November 5 to face the formal charges against them.
Bellarmine Mugabe is the youngest child of former president Robert Mugabe and his second wife, Grace Mugabe. Robert Mugabe, who led Zimbabwe for 37 years following the country’s independence, was ousted from power in a 2017 political transition at the age of 93, and passed away two years later in 2019. The arrest of the former leader’s youngest son has drawn widespread public attention across Zimbabwe, given the longstanding public scrutiny of the Mugabe family’s ties to high-profile legal and regulatory proceedings in the post-2017 era. The accompanying image, distributed via Gallo Images through Getty Images, captures the broader context of law enforcement operations related to the ongoing investigation in the Zimbabwean capital.