分类： politics

Diplomatic tensions around proposed talks between Iran and the United States have taken a new turn this week, after a senior insider close to Iran’s negotiating team refuted widespread Western reports claiming a bilateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) had already been completed. As reported by Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency on Thursday, the anonymous source pushed back against assertions that the draft text was only waiting for a formal public announcement from both national governments, emphasizing that such claims do not align with the actual status of negotiations.

The source made clear that the full text of the proposed MoU has not yet reached a finalized version, contradicting the earlier report published by U.S.-based outlet Axios. Earlier the same day, Axios broke the story claiming that negotiators from both Washington and Tehran had already agreed to a draft MoU that would extend a existing ceasefire for 60 days and open the door to formal negotiations over Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

Beyond confirming the draft remains unfinished, the source added that Iran has not yet notified Pakistani mediators, who have been facilitating the backchannel talks between the two sides, that the work on the document has been concluded. The insider stressed that Tehran will follow a clear public protocol once negotiations on the text wrap up: Iranian officials will first formally alert Pakistani mediators of the completion, then issue a public announcement to disclose full details of the agreement.

Until that formal process is completed, the source argued, any Western reports that claim the MoU has already been finalized carry no credibility. The development highlights the ongoing volatility of backchannel diplomacy between Iran and the U.S., two nations with decades of strained bilateral relations, as international observers continue to monitor progress on potential nuclear talks and ceasefire extensions.

SINGAPORE — When defense leaders, top diplomats and senior security officials from across the globe gather this week for Asia’s most influential annual defense summit, two interconnected forces will dominate closed-door discussions and public agendas alike: China’s accelerating military modernization and increasingly assertive posture across the Indo-Pacific, and growing global uncertainty over long-term U.S. strategic priorities in the region.

Hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue opens against a backdrop of spreading global instability that extends far beyond Asia’s borders. Just days ahead of the summit, new violent clashes have eroded the fragile ceasefire in the ongoing Iran war, pushing tensions in the Middle East to a new boiling point. Meanwhile, Russia has escalated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, intensifying missile strikes and ground operations that have stretched Western military support for Kyiv to its limits.

The summit gets underway Friday with a landmark keynote address from Vietnamese leader To Lam, who has reshaped Vietnam’s political landscape this year by consolidating power into his hands, holding both the post of Communist Party general secretary and state president — a break from the Southeast Asian nation’s long-standing tradition of split collective leadership. For Vietnam, a strategically positioned nation that lies at the geographic and economic intersection of competing U.S. and Chinese interests, the balancing act it has perfected for decades is now under unprecedented scrutiny.

Like many Indo-Pacific coastal states, Vietnam maintains long-running overlapping maritime territorial claims with Beijing that have sparked multiple high-profile confrontations in recent years. At the same time, Hanoi remains deeply economically intertwined with China, which holds the position of Vietnam’s largest two-way trade partner. On the other side of the geopolitical divide, the United States is Vietnam’s top export market, and Washington has worked steadily over the past decade to deepen diplomatic ties and secure new defense contracts, aiming to shift Hanoi away from its decades-long traditional defense partnership with Russia.

Even after Hanoi and Washington elevated their bilateral relations to the highest diplomatic level in recent years, newly leaked official documents reveal that Vietnam’s military leadership remains deeply skeptical of U.S. intentions in the region. The documents show Hanoi has already taken concrete defensive planning steps to prepare for a potential future American “war of aggression” against the country, laying bare the deep mistrust that persists despite warming diplomatic ties. Against this complex backdrop, observers widely expect Lam to frame his opening address around a call for regional consensus-driven dispute management and collective cooperation to advance shared stability and development, avoiding overt alignment with either global power.

Following Lam’s opening, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will take the stage Saturday to outline the Trump administration’s updated Indo-Pacific strategy. This marks Hegseth’s second appearance at the summit; his 2024 address drew fierce condemnation from Beijing when he declared that “the threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent,” claiming China’s military was “rehearsing for the real deal.” At the time, Hegseth pledged that the U.S. would bolster its regional defensive posture to counter what the Pentagon frames as growing Chinese aggression, particularly against self-governing Taiwan.

This year’s speech comes just two weeks after President Donald Trump’s high-profile meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, a summit that injected new uncertainty into U.S. policy across the Taiwan Strait. During the meeting, Xi issued a stark warning that the two superpowers could face direct military conflict if the Taiwan issue is not managed in line with Beijing’s core interests. After the talks, Trump publicly praised Xi as a “great leader” and claimed the two nations would build a “fantastic future together.” The U.S. president also sparked widespread concern by openly questioning Washington’s long-standing commitment to Taiwan’s defense, calling a proposed $14 billion U.S. arms package for Taipei — which he has yet to approve — “a very good negotiating chip for us” with Beijing.

China claims the self-governing, democratic island of Taiwan as an integral part of its territory, and Beijing has repeatedly refused to rule out the use of military force to bring the island under its control. For decades, the U.S. has supplied Taiwan with advanced fighter jets, missiles and other defensive weaponry, while maintaining a long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would intervene militarily if China launched an attack. Trump’s open ambivalence toward Taiwan’s security has far outpaced that of any of his predecessors, fueling growing global speculation that he could be willing to roll back long-standing U.S. support for Taipei in exchange for concessions from Beijing.

A Pentagon spokesperson said Hegseth’s Saturday address will outline the military’s “common-sense approach to safeguarding U.S. vital national interests in the Indo-Pacific.” Most analysts agree that coming so soon after Trump’s Beijing summit, Hegseth is unlikely to make any dramatic remarks that would contradict the president’s recent conciliatory comments toward Xi.

China is scheduled to present its official perspective on regional security during Sunday’s plenary sessions, but Chinese state media has confirmed that Beijing will send only a lower-level delegation to this year’s summit, and it has not yet confirmed which official will deliver China’s address. Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun also skipped last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, continuing a pattern of reduced high-level Chinese participation in the annual forum.

While the Shangri-La Dialogue has always centered primarily on Indo-Pacific security, two ongoing global conflicts will be impossible to avoid on the summit’s sidelines and in public debates: Russia’s 3-year full-scale war against Ukraine and the escalating Iran war that has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints. In normal peacetime, roughly 20% of all globally traded oil passes through the strait; since its effective closure following the outbreak of hostilities, global oil prices have spiked sharply, triggering widespread economic disruption across energy import-dependent nations worldwide. Qatar’s defense minister is among the senior Middle Eastern officials scheduled to address the summit over the weekend.

Ahead of the conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent a formal letter to President Trump and the U.S. Congress requesting additional shipments of American-made air defense ammunition to help Ukraine fend off intensifying Russian ballistic missile attacks on Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure. While Zelenskyy made a surprise in-person appearance at the 2023 Shangri-La Dialogue, he is not expected to attend this year’s summit. But a roster of senior European defense officials from NATO frontline states including Lithuania and Poland are scheduled to speak, ensuring the war in Ukraine remains a core topic of discussion.

Tensions spanning the Persian Gulf have taken a tentative turn toward diplomacy, after negotiators from the United States and Iran hammered out a preliminary agreement to extend an existing bilateral ceasefire for 60 days. The deal, crafted to create a window for talks on a permanent end to hostilities, still requires formal sign-off from both US President Donald Trump and Iran’s supreme leadership, the White House has confirmed.

The breakthrough comes at a moment of rapidly escalating friction between the two nations, as the current ceasefire framework collapsed into open conflict in recent days. The US launched a series of airstrikes targeting Iran’s Bandar Abbas port, prompting Tehran to retaliate with a missile strike against a US military installation based in Kuwait.

If finalized, the 60-day truce is expected to clear the way for negotiations on deeply divisive core issues that have strained US-Iran relations for decades, including Iran’s civilian nuclear program and the rollback of crippling US economic sanctions. According to reporting from Axios, the tentative agreement includes specific security provisions for the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical global energy chokepoints. Under the terms, Iran would guarantee unimpeded, toll-free passage for all commercial shipping through the strait and clear all naval mines from the waterway within 30 days of the ceasefire taking effect.

The question of transit fees for the Strait of Hormuz has already sparked sharp pushback from US leadership. Iran had previously pushed to impose a transit charge on ships passing through the waterway, holding preliminary discussions on the proposal with Oman, which shares territorial water boundaries with Iran in the strait. During a press briefing Wednesday, Trump issued an explicit threat against Oman if it backed the Iranian proposal, insisting the strait must remain open to all global traffic as international waters. “No, the strait is going to be open to everybody,” Trump stated. “It’s international waters, and Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on this threat Thursday, announcing the US would “aggressively target” Oman if it assisted Iran in implementing a toll system for the strait.

Additional terms of the draft ceasefire include a gradual lifting of the US naval blockade on Iranian ports, with the easing of restrictions tied directly to verified increases in restored commercial shipping activity out of Iranian terminals. The memorandum of understanding also includes a preliminary Iranian commitment not to pursue the development of nuclear weapons, with the disposal of Iran’s existing stockpiles of enriched uranium set to be one of the first topics addressed during expanded negotiations.

Tehran has long made sanctions relief and the unlocking of billions of dollars in Iranian assets frozen overseas core demands for any long-term agreement. Per Axios’ reporting, the tentative 60-day truce commits US negotiators to open formal discussions on both of these demands during the ceasefire period. The draft framework also includes provisions to negotiate a formal mechanism that would allow Iran to receive essential commercial goods and humanitarian aid from the international community.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran former US State Department negotiator with decades of experience working on Middle East diplomacy, framed the tentative deal as a small first step rather than a breakthrough, writing on social platform X that the agreement amounts to “a ticket to a negotiation – a letter of intent – if you will – to negotiations on all core issues.” He cautioned that the coming talks would be fraught with difficulty, adding, “Get ready for painful negotiations that will feel like daily root canals and migraine headaches.”

Fresh explosive testimony released from the ongoing Independent Inquiry into UK actions in Afghanistan has laid bare how senior British special forces leadership deliberately suppressed serious war crime allegations against the SAS between 2010 and 2013, choosing an internal whitewash over a mandatory military police investigation to protect operational momentum and force morale.

A retired former chief of staff of UK Special Forces (UKSF), identified only by the inquiry cipher N2252, told the closed-door investigation that top commanders made the fateful 2011 decision not to refer allegations of extrajudicial killings, falsified operational reports and the deaths of unarmed civilians and children to the Royal Military Police for two core reasons. First, leadership feared a full formal investigation would pull SAS operators off the high-tempo counter-Taliban campaign targeting insurgents and IED bomb-makers, disrupting ongoing operations by forcing units to focus on probes rather than planning new missions. Second, N2252 confirmed a major unspoken factor was that much of the initial evidence implicating the SAS had come from a rival UK special forces regiment, creating institutional distrust that swayed the decision to ignore red flags.

This intentional choice meant that military investigators remained unaware of widespread concerns about SAS conduct for years, even as multiple senior officers at UKSF headquarters raised alarms about troubling patterns on the ground. Those red flags included multiple accounts of detained, handcuffed suspects being shot dead during raids, a persistent mismatch between the number of people killed in operations and the number of weapons recovered from kill sites – a common indicator of unlawful extrajudicial killing – and formal complaints. A high-profile international conflict monitoring organization submitted complaints about unlawful killings, and even Afghan partner special forces refused multiple times to deploy alongside the SAS over outrage at the alleged murder of civilians.

Instead of meeting their legal obligation to report suspected war crimes to military police – a requirement binding all British military commanding officers – UKSF’s then-director ordered a rapid internal review led by an officer closely affiliated with the SAS unit under scrutiny. The inquiry has confirmed the review was completed in just seven days, signed off by the unit’s own commanding officer, and concluded no evidence of criminal wrongdoing existed.

N2252 told the inquiry that the leadership also believed that external police scrutiny would erode trust between command and frontline SAS troops, arguing that questioning operators’ official accounts would send a demoralizing message that headquarters did not believe their on-the-ground judgments. The testimony, first heard in closed session in 2024, was only released in declassified summary form by the inquiry this Friday, marking the latest in a series of damning disclosures about UK special forces conduct during the Afghanistan deployment, which began in 2009.

Not all witness testimony has aligned on what senior leaders knew. Another senior UKSF headquarters officer, identified as N1788, told the inquiry he only was aware of tactical errors and never received formal complaints or rumors of extrajudicial killings, evidence tampering or falsified records. However, inquiry lawyers directly contradicted that account, noting it clashes with prior testimony from N1788’s superior officer, who confirmed the two discussed the risk of extrajudicial killings and planted weapons, as well as testimony from an Afghanistan-based senior officer who recalled N1788 asking in a phone call whether the “m-word” – murder – was relevant to the allegations.

A third witness, a UKSF officer deployed on the ground in Afghanistan codenamed N889, acknowledged that he may have been overly trusting of SAS operational reporting in real time. “I totally accept, you know, all these years later looking back that perhaps one should have taken a slight harder view,” he told the inquiry. “I maybe naively read this stuff, believed it and carried on.”

The Independent Inquiry into Afghanistan is continuing its work examining the full scope of allegations against the SAS, with additional disclosures expected as more closed testimony is declassified in the coming months. The BBC has issued a public call for additional whistleblowers with information about the case to come forward through secure, encrypted channels including Signal and the BBC’s Tor-based SecureDrop platform to protect the anonymity of sources.

In a surprise development this week, the second Trump administration has confirmed it will extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for an estimated 11,000 Lebanese citizens currently residing and working legally in the United States. The six-month extension will push the expiration of their protected status to November 27, 2026, marking the first such voluntary extension of the program since President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025.

The official notice of the extension was submitted to the U.S. Federal Register on Wednesday and is set for formal publication this Friday. Contrary to many assumptions about the Trump administration’s broader aggressive rollback of TPS programs across multiple nations, the extension for Lebanese nationals is not a deliberate policy shift, but an automatic procedural renewal. According to the filing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin lacked sufficient time to complete a full formal review of Lebanon’s TPS designation and issue a final determination 60 days ahead of the program’s original expiration date, triggering the automatic six-month extension under existing regulations.

First established to allow foreign nationals to remain and obtain work authorization in the U.S. when their home countries face unsafe conditions such as armed conflict, natural disaster, or humanitarian catastrophe that make return impossible, TPS grants temporary extensions of up to 18 months at a time with no statutory cap on total extensions. Lebanon was first added to the TPS program by the outgoing Biden administration in October 2024, amid a sharp escalation of Israeli military operations in the country that began after a Hezbollah attack on Israel in October 2023, launched in solidarity with the group’s ally Hamas in Gaza.

As of this week, the ongoing Israeli campaign has killed more than 3,000 Lebanese people, injured close to 10,000, and this week saw a major expansion of ground operations into southern Lebanon beyond previously declared buffer zones, with more than 135 strikes on alleged Hezbollah targets in a single 24-hour period, including strikes in the capital Beirut that killed at least 14 people, among them children. This escalating violence comes as top U.S.-brokered military security talks between Lebanese and Israeli officials are set to open in Washington on Friday, the first high-level direct talks between the two sides in more than 30 years, following an initial meeting between their ambassadors hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month. Notably, a permanent ceasefire was not on the agenda for the initial talks, and Hezbollah, the core Lebanese faction involved in the conflict, has no representation at the negotiating table, leaving Lebanese negotiators with limited authority to reach substantive agreements.

The TPS extension applies only to Lebanese nationals (and stateless individuals who last resided in Lebanon) who have continuously lived in the U.S. since October 16, 2024, and will remain in effect from May 28, 2026 through November 27, 2026.

This extension marks a departure from the Trump administration’s broader agenda of dismantling existing TPS programs across the globe. Since taking office in January, the administration has moved aggressively to terminate TPS designations for multiple nations including Haiti, Somalia, and Venezuela, though many of these termination attempts have been temporarily blocked by federal court orders. Last month, advocacy groups and affected TPS holders filed a federal lawsuit challenging the administration’s termination of TPS for Somali nationals, arguing that the country still faces a decades-long humanitarian crisis marked by ongoing armed conflict, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killing, torture, and widespread severe human rights violations that make return unsafe for Somali nationals. Somalia has held continuous TPS designation since 1991, with every successive administration from 2002 to 2024 reaffirming that ongoing instability meets the criteria for protected status. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the administration’s move to end Somalia’s TPS earlier this year, claiming that “temporary means temporary” and that conditions in Somalia have improved enough that it no longer meets the legal standard for the program, which the administration argues was never intended to serve as a pathway to permanent residency.

Israel’s latest push for natural gas exploration off the coast of the Gaza Strip has sparked sharp criticism from Palestinian rights organizations and environmental campaigners, who argue the initiative violates international law, undermines Palestinian sovereignty, and poses unnecessary threats to marine ecosystems and the global climate.

In February 2024, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen formally approved the country’s fifth round of offshore gas licensing in the Mediterranean Sea. Per official documentation from Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, the auction opens up roughly 8,600 square kilometers of Mediterranean waters for exploration, split across six distinct exploration blocks.

Adalah, a Haifa-based legal organization that advocates for Palestinian rights, has revealed that two of these six blocks sit within internationally recognized Palestinian maritime territory off Gaza’s shore. This is not the first time Israeli licensing rounds have encroached on Palestinian waters: the group notes that the previous offshore auction also extended into waters claimed by the State of Palestine.

Last month, Adalah submitted an official letter to both Cohen and Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara challenging the legality of the new licensing round. The correspondence, which has been shared with independent news outlet Middle East Eye, argues that the plan is unlawful because approximately 1,000 square kilometers of the proposed exploration area lies in waters over which Palestine claims full sovereignty. Adalah emphasizes that Israel holds no legal authority to conduct resource activities in these Palestinian maritime areas, noting that any exploration here would violate both Israeli domestic legislation and binding international law.

The organization rejects Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territories as a valid justification for denying the inherent sovereign rights of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian people. It further points out that the drilling plans directly contradict the 1993 Oslo Accords, the landmark agreement signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization that laid out frameworks for Palestinian self-governance in occupied territories. Under international humanitarian law, Adalah notes, occupying powers are explicitly prohibited from exploiting natural resources in occupied territories for their own benefit—a rule the new exploration plan clearly violates.

Suhad Bishara, Adalah’s legal director, framed the gas plans as an inseparable component of a broader accelerating Israeli policy aimed at formalizing annexation and permanent control over all Palestinian land and natural resources. “This is not merely a violation of international law,” Bishara explained in a public statement. “It is a deliberate attempt to entrench permanent Israeli control over Palestinian territory and resources, directly undermining the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to self-determination.”

To date, the Israeli energy ministry has not publicly released the results of the licensing round since the tender was first announced, and Middle East Eye’s request for comment on the allegations went unanswered as of the original publication of this report.

Adalah’s investigation also connects the new exploration round to a long-standing pattern of Israeli restrictions that have systematically denied Palestinian access to their own offshore energy resources. Since the early 2000s, Israel has blocked the Palestinian Authority from developing the Gaza Marine gas field, which independent experts estimate holds up to 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Development of this field would generate an estimated $4 billion in revenue for the Palestinian Authority, according to industry projections. The organization also notes that Israel already exports billions of dollars worth of natural gas to Egypt via the Ashkelon-Arish pipeline, which traverses Palestinian maritime territory without any consent from Palestinian authorities.

Joining the condemnation are Israeli environmental advocates, who warn that the exploration plan carries severe ecological risks and runs counter to global efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. Yuval Arbel, a policy specialist with the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli group focused on protecting marine and freshwater resources, argues that Israel already holds sufficient domestic gas reserves to meet all its current and future energy needs. “There is no justification for expanding gas production,” Arbel told Middle East Eye. “Our policy priority should be accelerating the transition to renewable energy, not opening new fossil fuel exploration blocks.”

Arbel warned that offshore drilling carries inherent major risks to delicate Mediterranean marine ecosystems, and that expanded gas production will only worsen climate change by increasing global greenhouse gas emissions. He noted that while the energy ministry justifies new exploration on the grounds that renewables alone cannot meet future Israeli energy demand, the policy is primarily driven by the pursuit of short-term profit. “Even if extraction moves forward, production will not begin for another six to 10 years,” Arbel pointed out. “No one can accurately predict what global gas demand will look like in 10 or 15 years. There is no tangible public benefit for Israel in extracting more gas—this is solely about generating extra export revenue for the state.”

These claims are backed by recent official revenue figures: in 2024, the Israeli energy ministry reported record revenues from domestic gas production, with the state collecting 2.3 billion shekels (roughly $640 million) in royalties, an increase of more than 8% from the previous year. Israel’s offshore gas sector has been a major source of state revenue since it was privatized in 2015, and currently hosts operations from a range of international and domestic energy firms, including UK-based Energean and U.S. energy giant Chevron. Just one year prior, BP and Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy firm SOCAR won bids in Israel’s fourth licensing round, which was also widely criticized for violating Palestinian maritime sovereignty.

Arbel emphasized that even a low probability of a catastrophic oil or gas spill is unacceptable given the irreversible damage it would cause to Gaza’s and Israel’s Mediterranean coastlines. “The potential damage from drilling is so severe that even a small risk of disaster is not worth taking,” he said.

Over the past decade, natural gas has become Israel’s dominant source of electricity generation, displacing coal as the country’s top fuel. Knesset data shows that gas accounted for just 49% of Israeli electricity production in 2014; a decade later, that share has jumped to more than 70%, with coal and renewable energy each contributing roughly 14% of total generation.

The gas exploration plan off Gaza aligns with a broader aggressive policy agenda pursued by Minister Cohen since he took office in 2024, which centers on consolidating Israeli control over occupied Palestinian territories in line with demands from the Israeli settler movement. Just last week, Cohen announced plans to expand natural gas infrastructure into the occupied West Bank, explicitly framing the move as an exercise in de facto Israeli sovereignty. The project will extend Mediterranean gas supplies to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and earlier this week Cohen told Israeli outlet Channel 14 News that new power plants and gas pipelines across the West Bank are “the economic key on the path to one million settlers” living in the occupied territory.

The push for new fossil fuel exploration comes as Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza has already had extreme climate and energy impacts. Research published last year by the Social Science Research Network found that the carbon footprint generated in the first 15 months of military operations in Gaza exceeded the total annual emissions of more than 100 countries combined. Since October 2023, Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s already fragile energy infrastructure, leading to near-total nationwide electricity blackouts throughout 2024, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Before the current war, Gaza residents received an average of just 10 hours of electricity per day, with the entire occupied Palestinian territory relying almost entirely on energy supplies from Israel. Pre-war data from the Institute for Palestine Studies shows that Palestinians sourced 87% of their total electricity from Israel, with the remaining 13% coming from Egypt, Jordan, and small-scale local solar generation projects.