分类： politics

A high-profile British journalist and author has refused to back down amid demands from pro-Israel lobbying groups that law enforcement open a criminal investigation into her public support for Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who has pulled her entire catalog of works from UK distribution over her backing of the proscribed activist group Palestine Action.

Sarah Helm, a 83-year-old veteran former foreign correspondent for *The Independent* and long-standing critic of Israeli government policy toward Palestinians, is married to Jonathan Powell, who currently serves as national security, foreign policy, and intelligence advisor to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government, a role he retained after Andy Burnham took office earlier this year.

The controversy ignited after veteran Sky News journalist Adam Boulton attacked Rooney during an on-air segment Thursday, claiming the best-selling author held a “very strong pro-Palestine, and, I have to say, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish stance”. In response, Helm posted a concise, pointed retort to X: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action. Sounds like Adam would have all our books swept off the shelves in a jiffy.”

Shortly after Helm’s post went live, Campaign Against Antisemitism – a pro-Israel organisation that has repeatedly faced accusations of bad-faith targeting of public critics of Israeli policy – formally called on London’s Metropolitan Police to launch a criminal probe into Helm, demanding she “face the full force of the law” over her comments.

Instead of retreating, Helm has doubled down on her position, drawing widespread cross-party support from critics of the Starmer government’s controversial July 2025 ban on Palestine Action. The proscription, which marked the first time a UK government has outlawed a direct action protest group, criminalises membership in or public expressions of support for the organisation – which targets infrastructure tied to companies manufacturing weapons for export to Israel – with penalties of up to 14 years in prison. Human rights groups have universally decried the ban as a draconian attack on free speech, and thousands of people across the UK have been arrested for low-level acts of support, including holding pro-Palestine Action placards at demonstrations, since the ban took effect.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski publicly defended Helm’s comments, telling independent outlet Middle East Eye that the journalist “is speaking absolute common sense and should be commended for her bravery”. Polanski pointed to the sweeping fallout of the proscription: “In a week when the Labour government’s ludicrous and authoritarian proscription of Palestine Action has led to the banning of one of the most influential authors from our bookshelves and pensioners continue to be arrested for opposing a genocide, it is obvious to everyone apart from this Labour government that Palestine Action must be de-proscribed immediately.”

When reached for comment Saturday, Helm pointed reporters to a 2020 interview she conducted for Middle East Eye with 92-year-old Yaakov Sharett, son of Moshe Sharett – one of Israel’s founding fathers, the country’s first foreign minister, and its second prime minister. In that conversation, Yaakov Sharett offered a scathing rebuke of modern Israeli policy that aligns closely with Helm’s own views. “Now, at 92-years-old, I realise that the story started with the very idea of Zionism, which was a utopian idea. It was meant to save Jewish lives but at the cost of a nation of occupants who inhabited Palestine at this time. The conflict was unavoidable from the beginning,” he told Helm. He went further to say that “the treatment of the Palestinians today is Nazi treatment. We don’t have gas chambers, of course, but the mentality is the same. It is racial hatred. They are treated as subhuman,” branding Israel a “criminal state” and arguing that distinguishing between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel is a critical line that global observers too often fail to uphold.

Helm, who released her latest book *Gaza: The Long Road to Destruction, 1870-2024* – a comprehensive historical account of the region featuring interviews with 1948 Nakba survivors – earlier this year, addressed the growing backlash to her post in a follow-up statement on X. “Thanks to all supporters. As an 83 yr old survivor of the Nakba and one of my many friends in Rafah (now obliterated) said to me when I was last there, ‘keep writing Sarah we need all the pencils we can get’,” she wrote.

70-year-old retired tax adviser and grandmother Marji Mansfield, who was arrested earlier this year for defying the Palestine Action ban and had counter-terrorism officers visit her home over a short social media clip expressing support for the group, said Helm’s willingness to speak out reflects the growing resistance to the government’s crackdown. “Sarah Helm is similarly at risk of arrest for speaking out against the first ever ban of a direct action protest group in Britain. We are on the right side of history,” Mansfield said.

As of this weekend, the Metropolitan Police confirmed that Helm’s original post “is in the process of being assessed to determine whether any further police investigation may be required”. A Downing Street spokesperson distanced the government from Helm’s comments, noting that “These views are held by an individual who does not represent the government in any capacity,” even as internal fractures within the Labour administration over the ban have begun to surface in recent weeks.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband acknowledged last month that the Burnham government is internally reviewing the political wisdom of the proscription, admitting that the administration never intended the ban to lead to mass arrests of ordinary activists. “I don’t think anyone’s intent was to have those people criminalised, but obviously the Supreme Court has got to look at this issue, and obviously it’s something we keep looking at as government,” Miliband said.

The controversy follows news earlier this week that Rooney, who previously canceled a 2024 trip to England to accept a major literary award over fears she would be arrested for her pro-Palestine views, would voluntarily withdraw all her books from UK distribution after stating she would donate a portion of her book royalties to Palestine Action following the group’s proscription.

A major new rift has emerged between Saudi Arabia and Iran, just 18 months after the two regional rivals reestablished diplomatic ties in a China-brokered agreement. In an unusually frank public address to journalists on Friday, Saudi Deputy Minister for Public Diplomacy Rayed Krimly directly blamed Tehran for the sharp escalation of Houthi attacks on Saudi civilian and strategic infrastructure, saying the Iranian support for the militia breaches both UN Security Council resolutions and the commitments Iran made in the March 2023 Beijing-brokered deal.

Krimly’s accusation marks the first time Saudi officials have publicly acknowledged that the ongoing conflict in Yemen has put severe strain on the fragile detente between Riyadh and Tehran. That 2023 agreement was widely hailed at the time as a landmark diplomatic breakthrough, and a demonstration of China’s growing influence in the Middle East, as Beijing maintained stable, cooperative relations with both nations to bring the long-feuding rivals to the negotiating table. Under the terms of the widely understood agreement, Iran committed to restraining Houthi forces in Yemen to back a UN-supported ceasefire.

“Iran continues to arm, train and support the Houthi militia in violation of relevant UN Security Council resolutions and in violation of its commitments in the Beijing agreement,” Krimly told reporters.

Tensions between the two nations have risen steadily since the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iranian-linked assets across the region, putting the 2023 rapprochement to its most severe test. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia even joined U.S.-led retaliatory strikes on Iranian targets, before shifting back to a diplomatic mediation role, and Riyadh has so far kept its diplomatic channels to Tehran open. Just this week, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan held a scheduled phone call with Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi, and earlier this month, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Iran publicly attended the funeral of Araghchi’s sister as a gesture of diplomatic goodwill.

But that measured diplomatic approach has been upended by a wave of deadly Houthi attacks that have hit critical Saudi infrastructure in recent weeks. The militia, which first gained popular support across much of the Muslim world after targeting Israeli and commercial shipping in the Red Sea following the outbreak of the 2023 Gaza war, has drawn widespread backlash for expanding its attacks to Saudi civilian targets. Among the most deadly was a Saturday missile strike on Riyadh’s airport that killed at least 13 people—many of them Umrah pilgrims—and left hundreds more severely wounded, according to verified footage from the attack site. Strikes have also targeted core Saudi assets including oil facilities and the corporate headquarters of energy giant Aramco.

The current escalation traces back to a resumption of open conflict in Yemen earlier this year, after eight years of Saudi-led military intervention that began in 2015. That original intervention, launched when Houthis seized control of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, triggered a years-long bombing campaign that contributed to what the United Nations has labeled the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. A 2022 ceasefire between the internationally recognized Yemeni government—backed by Saudi Arabia—and the Houthis held for nearly two years, even amid regional tensions, until fighting reignited in July 2024. That resumption came after Saudi airstrikes on Sanaa airport targeted an incoming plane that Middle East Eye reported carried Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah military advisors along with weapons systems.

In response to the July airstrike, the Houthis declared a naval blockade on all Saudi shipping and launched a rapid ground offensive along Yemen’s Red Sea coast that has outpaced Saudi and Yemeni government defenses, while the group has fired hundreds of missiles and drones into Saudi territory. Longstanding open-source intelligence confirms Iran has provided the Houthis with consistent financial support, weapons, military training and intelligence backing for their operations against Saudi targets.

This report draws on independent on-the-ground reporting from Middle East Eye, a leading source of independent coverage of Middle East and North Africa affairs.

TEL AVIV — As Israel prepares to head to the polls on October 27, there is a political figure whose influence overshadows every candidate on the ballot, and that figure is not even Israeli: former (and current) U.S. President Donald Trump. When Trump joked back in May that he could run for Israeli prime minister and claimed a 99% approval rating in the country — a figure no public opinion poll has ever backed up — the quip landed with audiences because it was only half a joke. Thirteen days out from election day, Trump remains the most popular political force in the entire campaign, even as he is not running for any office.

The close relationship between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defined Israeli politics for the better part of a decade, but as the 2026 election approaches, that once rock-solid alliance has grown noticeably frayed. To understand how we got here, we have to go back one year, when the bilateral “romance” between Trump and Netanyahu hit its peak. On October 13, 2025, the last 20 remaining hostages held in Gaza were released as part of a ceasefire agreement brokered by Trump’s diplomatic team, and Trump addressed Israel’s Knesset that very same day. Israeli television broadcast his speech alongside live coverage of the hostages reuniting with their families, and for millions of Israeli viewers, the two events became inextricably linked in the public consciousness.

Highest honors followed the hostage deal. Netanyahu called Trump “Israel’s greatest friend ever” and broke decades of institutional tradition to announce that the Israel Prize — an award normally reserved exclusively for Israeli citizens — would be granted to the U.S. president. Through 2026, major diplomatic and military milestones followed in quick succession: a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran launched in February, a lasting ceasefire reached in April, and a disarmament agreement for Hamas announced by Trump in July.

While Trump’s 99% approval claim is exaggerated, polling bears out that his popularity in Israel is very real. A Pew Research survey from mid-2025 found 69% of Israelis held confidence in Trump, and a February 2026 poll from the Jewish People Policy Institute put that number even higher, with 73% of respondents rating Trump as better than the average U.S. president. Tel Aviv University researchers have even coined the phrase the “Trump effect”: when Jewish Israelis — especially right-wing voters — are told a diplomatic initiative with Palestinians has Trump’s backing, they become far more open to supporting it. No sitting Israeli politician has that kind of cross-party pull; only Trump can make it happen.

This dynamic has created a lopsided dynamic in the 2026 campaign. Back in 2019, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party hung massive billboards over Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway showing Netanyahu and Trump shaking hands under the slogan “In another league,” and Trump himself reposted the image to his social media. That was the original bargain: Netanyahu got to borrow some of Trump’s immense political popularity for his own campaign, and Trump got the flattery and international prestige that came with being celebrated in Israel. This time around, however, the U.S. president is holding back any public endorsement.

Back in June, Trump said he would “most likely” back Netanyahu, but added that the endorsement would depend on who his opponent was. When former Israeli general and centrist candidate Gadi Eisenkot joined the race, Trump noted that he had not heard anything bad about Eisenkot. In a recent TIME magazine interview, Trump dodged the question of who he would endorse three separate times, and when reporters asked him about it as he boarded Marine One earlier this week, he only offered that “We may endorse somebody” — no name, no further context. The closest Trump has come to taking a side was a September link to a Newsmax poll showing Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc slightly ahead shared on his Truth Social platform, and it is not even clear that Trump himself posted the link.

What’s more, Israeli media reports indicate that both the centrist Eisenkot camp and the right-wing Naftali Bennett camp have privately reached out to Trump’s inner circle asking him to stay neutral in the race. So far, their request has been granted. With the race so tight, Trump’s deliberate silence matters: across five separate polls conducted in September, Eisenkot’s Yashar party averaged 22.2 seats in the 120-seat Knesset to Likud’s 21.2. Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc held a narrow average lead of 54.4 seats to the opposition Zionist coalition’s 51, putting both blocs well short of the 61 seats needed to form a majority government.

The growing distance between Trump and Netanyahu is not just one-sided. Over the summer of 2026, as Washington pursued new diplomatic talks with Tehran, Trump pressured Netanyahu to scale back Israeli military operations in Lebanon and withdraw troops from parts of southern Syria. Leaked reports from Axios confirm that during a heated phone call, Trump openly called Netanyahu “crazy” with an expletive, and has told associates that “Bibi is his own worst enemy.”

Israeli voters have picked up on this shift. A poll from the Israel Democracy Institute conducted this summer found that the share of Israelis who believe Trump prioritizes Israel’s national security fell from 44% in May to just 28% in June. Among Jewish Israeli respondents, the share who believe Israel can fully rely on Trump’s support dropped a staggering 38 points between March and June. Only one-third of respondents now believe that Israel’s strategic position is stronger than it was before the joint war against Iran earlier this year.

The strangest part of this entire dynamic, however, is that despite growing doubts about Trump’s policy commitments to Israel, his personal popularity among Israeli voters has remained remarkably solid. Even as voters question his approach, they still hold a favorable view of the man himself. Netanyahu’s campaign has already had to navigate this: when a businessman placed on the Likud party list was revealed to have called Trump “morally corrupt,” the candidate issued a public apology within hours, reaffirming that Trump is Israel’s greatest friend ever in the White House. In Israeli politics, insulting Trump remains a career-ending campaign misstep that no candidate can afford.

So what does this all mean for Israel’s upcoming election? It is not that Trump owns Israel; it is that he has become the central gravitational force that every Israeli politician has to navigate. Netanyahu’s entire campaign is built around being Trump’s closest ally. Eisenkot’s campaign is built around not being an enemy of Trump. Every candidate across the political spectrum is competing to prove they can manage the relationship with Trump better than their rivals.

This level of dependency on a foreign political leader is remarkable for a robust, proud, and deeply fractious democracy like Israel, and it has created some highly unusual outcomes. It was Trump who pressured Netanyahu into accepting a 20-point Gaza reconstruction and security plan that no Israeli political coalition would ever have drafted on its own. It was also Trump who sent an official letter to Israeli President Isaac Herzog demanding that he grant a full pardon to Netanyahu ahead of the election, in the ongoing criminal corruption trial against the prime minister. That kind of direct intervention in Israel’s domestic legal affairs would spark massive public uproar if it came from any other foreign leader — but it has been largely accepted as par for the course when it comes to Trump.

On October 27, Israeli voters will cast their ballots for their next prime minister, but for many voters, the real question they are asking themselves is not who they should vote for — it is who will the White House call first after the results come in. Welcome to Israeli politics in 2026: the most influential voice in the entire election cannot cast a ballot here, and for now, he is not saying a word about which way he wants the results to go.

This analysis was written by Leon Hadar, a journalist, blogger, policy analyst, author, and consultant.

### Shifting Global Power: US Turmoil, US-China Truce and the Unfolding New Geopolitical Order

Today’s global geopolitical landscape is defined by overlapping chaos and unexpected pauses, with a dynamic that echoes the endless waiting of Samuel Beckett’s *Waiting for Godot*: much of the world is watching to see how China will navigate the unfolding crisis centered on the United States.

The US is currently bogged down in two active conflicts that are reshaping its domestic and foreign priorities. In Ukraine, Washington is quietly positioning itself to negotiate a compromise with Moscow, while in the Middle East, it is pursuing a campaign to destabilize the Iranian regime, which Tehran’s supporters argue supports regional militant groups and disrupts global oil transit through the strategic Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Together, these two conflicts have triggered a global energy crisis unmatched in severity in more than 50 years, dragging down the approval ratings of sitting US President Donald Trump ahead of November 3 midterm elections.

Polling and political analysis suggest Trump could face a decisive defeat in the upcoming vote, opening two high-stakes scenarios for American governance. If Trump contests the election results, the US will be plunged into a months-long crippling political stalemate that absorbs all of Washington’s bandwidth. If he concedes, a new Democratic-controlled Congress will almost certainly launch aggressive investigations and partisan battles against the Trump administration. In either outcome, the US will have very little remaining political and diplomatic capital to dedicate to its stated top foreign policy priority from the start of Trump’s presidency: confronting the People’s Republic of China under President Xi Jinping.

For Beijing, this moment presents a clear strategic calculus. Chinese leadership has no incentive to step in to resolve America’s problems. Mediation carries major risks: any misstep could draw China into a conflict it did not start, and if Beijing successfully eases US pressure, Washington would likely immediately return its focus to hostile confrontation with China. By contrast, a strategy of inaction, allowing the consequences of US policy to play out, positions Xi to approach the 2027 Chinese Communist Party Congress with significant domestic political capital. Within China’s official historical narrative, such an outcome would frame Xi as the first Chinese head of state to force a leading Western power into a vulnerable position, more than two centuries after the Opium War opened a period of foreign domination that official education frames as the “Century of Humiliation.” For many in Beijing, this strategic victory would carry greater symbolic weight than even the formal reunification of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as part of its sovereign territory while the island operates as a de facto independent state.

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#### The New Geopolitical Context: A Bilateral Truce That Hollowed Out Multilateralism

This strategic shift comes against a drastically reshaped global backdrop. When the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York on September 23, the world’s two largest powers chose to skip the multilateral gathering to hold a bilateral summit in Washington, effectively sidelining the UN as a central forum for great power diplomacy. If the two most influential nations do not engage with the General Assembly, many global analysts question the body’s ongoing relevance for great power negotiations.

The September meeting marked a notable shift from the two powers’ earlier May summit in Beijing, which was largely viewed as a temporary ceasefire in their bilateral tensions. The September talks, by contrast, established what appears to be a durable truce that is expected to hold at least through the 2027 Chinese Party Congress, when a new central leadership lineup will be confirmed, and could extend all the way to the 2028 US presidential election. This truce does not eliminate the risk of occasional tension flare-ups, but it sets a baseline for cautious engagement.

Under this truce framework, the two powers are expected to take limited, delicate steps toward rebuilding engagement. The first key step is the reopening of formal military-to-military dialogue. Talks were previously derailed by US demands for formal codes of conduct to govern air and sea encounters between the two militaries; China has resisted these rules, arguing that they would implicitly legitimize US military activity in maritime and air regions Beijing claims as its exclusive sovereign domain.

A second critical dimension of the summit is how closely regional powers, most notably Japan, have monitored the talks. Japan has positioned itself as a leading regional actor aligned against Chinese interests, and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi traveled to Washington the day before Xi’s arrival, confirming she held a direct call with Trump immediately after his meeting with Xi. This underlines a key reality: the Trump-Xi summit was never purely a bilateral negotiation. It had clear multilateral implications, and Washington explicitly signaled it would take the concerns of its Asian allies into account in its negotiations with Beijing.

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#### A New Global Outline: Uncertain Long-Term Strategies

This current moment marks a clear departure from the start of the Trump presidency, when Trump launched an aggressive tariff campaign meant to economically corner China, based on the assumption that Washington held the upper hand as the primary export market for Chinese goods. That simplistic approach has been entirely abandoned, but Washington has not yet articulated a clear new long-term strategy for managing China’s rise. Key questions remain unresolved: Will the US treat China as a normal peer competitor in the global system, or will it follow through on its 2016 campaign pledge to fully decouple China from global markets?

For China, equally big strategic questions remain unanswered. Will Beijing continue to hold back and wait for the US to set the terms of engagement? Will it adjust its financial, economic and political frameworks to deepen integration into the existing Western-led global order? Or will it move to systematically undermine the current system and build a parallel global order led by Beijing?

Over the next two years, the durability of the current truce will be tested. It could devolve into an even more confrontational conflict, or lay the groundwork for longer-term stable coexistence. A third outcome, which many global analysts are already warning about, is that the truce will become a semi-permanent state of limited confrontation, shaping what has been called “Cold War 2.0.”

The ongoing standoff over Iran will serve as the first major test of the truce. In the joint statement released after the summit, China stated it opposes a nuclear-armed Iran and supports unimpeded oil transit through the two key straits, where Houthi forces aligned with Iran control access to Bab el-Mandeb. The Houthi threat to Saudi Arabia has already raised the risk of a larger regional conflict, and how Beijing navigates this crisis will set a precedent for its future global role.

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#### Financial Rivalry: China’s Alternative System and Its Limitations

A core question for China’s challenge to the existing global order is whether it can build an independent economic, commercial and financial system to rival the Western-led framework. The foundational step for this project would be decoupling the renminbi from the US dollar, a move that carries significant economic and political risks.

To date, Beijing has already made notable progress in reducing its reliance on the US-dominated SWIFT global payment system, which routes nearly all international transactions through US financial hubs. China has built its own alternative cross-border payment system, CIPS, which allows Beijing to keep its international transaction details confidential, preventing US authorities from tracking the flow of Chinese funds globally. In the past, SWIFT transparency allowed US officials to document that China had violated international sanctions despite public pledges of compliance.

Meanwhile, the US dollar is undergoing a major paradigm shift. After abandoning the gold standard in the 1970s, the US is now moving to develop stablecoins: cryptocurrencies pegged to tangible real-world assets. As prominent economist Paolo Savona has warned, this monetary transformation carries significant untested risks: there is no guarantee that the assets backing these new stablecoins are sound. This mirrors the conditions that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, when poorly understood and underregulated derivatives, backed by unstable subprime assets, triggered a global economic collapse. Despite these risks, the US is moving forward with this monetary experiment, while China has not launched any comparable effort to reform its currency or reshape the global financial system.

For the foreseeable future, the conditions for a fully functional Chinese alternative to the dollar-led Western financial system do not exist. The US dollar and Wall Street remain the central pillars of the global financial order, and China is currently operating on the strategic defensive.

Many analysts argue that to build long-term global influence, China must pursue meaningful domestic economic and political reforms, even at significant short-term cost. With a population of 1.4 billion, China cannot sustain long-term growth relying solely on exports to the 350 million consumers in the US and 500 million consumers in Europe. There are signs Beijing has begun this process: Chinese fiscal authorities have recently launched a campaign to collect unpaid taxes from the country’s wealthiest individuals, a reflection of growing strain on state finances and a need to increase revenue from the groups that have benefited most from China’s decades of rapid growth. This is an extraordinarily delicate political move: if the government forces higher tax payments, it will either need to grant new political representation in exchange for tax contributions, or risk discouraging entrepreneurial activity that drives overall economic growth.

If Beijing moves forward with these reforms, official announcements are expected at the 2027 Party Congress. Some factions within China still adhere to the traditional Marxist-Leninist thesis that global capitalism is inherently doomed to collapse. While that outcome is theoretically possible, the prediction has stood for 200 years, and capitalism has repeatedly emerged stronger after severe crises. It is unlikely that a total collapse of the Western system will occur in the near term, leaving China’s strategic options still unresolved.

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#### Broader Regional Chaos and Europe’s Long-Term Decline

China’s strategic choices are complicated by the growing instability in ongoing global conflicts. Russia has failed to secure its stated goals in Ukraine, while Iran, which has disrupted global oil markets by blocking transit, is reeling from the effects of US-led sanctions that have collapsed Iranian oil exports and gutted the country’s economy. Neither conflict shows any clear path to resolution in the short or medium term, and as a key backer of both Russia and Iran, China is left with no clear long-term path to advance its interests in these regions. By contrast, the US, built on centuries of resilient capitalist development, retains far more medium and long-term strategic options despite its current missteps.

A strategy of waiting may work for China in the short term, but the global landscape is shifting rapidly. Iran or Russia could make concessions that change the balance of power, new political crises could erupt across Europe, and the Houthi standoff could draw Turkey into a wider regional conflict. Any unexpected major event could disrupt Beijing’s plan for a calm, stable lead-up to the 2027 Party Congress, forcing Chinese leadership into a more defensive, cautious posture. While limited global tension benefits China by diverting international scrutiny of its actions, widespread chaos can easily spill over into Chinese domestic and economic interests.

For Trump, the combination of foreign instability and domestic political turmoil could play to his political strengths as an outsider who thrives on chaos, or it could end up engulfing his presidency entirely. If new major instability erupts in the next 12 months, Beijing’s carefully laid plans for 2027 could be completely upended.

Europe, long a key pillar of the Western-led order, is largely sidelined from these great power shifts, facing deep structural weaknesses of its own. For decades, Europe has outsourced nearly all core strategic functions: it relies on the US for defense, Russia for energy, migrant labor for its workforce, and China and the US for industrial production and technology. While limited outsourcing is practical, over-reliance has left Europe with almost no areas of global leadership beyond cultural tourism. The US has also outsourced industrial production and labor, but it retains global leadership in markets, defense and technology.

Europe’s structural weaknesses date back to the end of the Cold War, when the breakup of Yugoslavia exposed deep divisions between European powers: France and the UK backed Serbia, while Germany supported Croatian independence. Fearing that open division would ignite continental conflict, the EU begged the US to intervene to resolve the crisis. As strategic analyst Edward Luttwak argued at the time, European powers should have intervened themselves to build a common European identity and political union through shared sacrifice. Instead, European leaders dragged their feet, relying on the US to resolve their own regional disputes, while launching the euro without sufficient coordination or agreement with Washington. EU expansion to pro-American Eastern European nations has only partially healed the rift between the US and Western Europe, and the confrontational approach of the Trump administration has left ties strained, with Washington increasingly viewing Europe as a strategic burden rather than a key asset.

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#### Soft Power Rivalry: Narrative and Strategy in the New Global Order

All of these shifts have shaped the global soft power and public image competition between the US and China, and the gap between the two sides has grown in recent years. After the end of the Cold War, the US dismantled the global information and propaganda apparatus it built to confront the Soviet Union, and for decades it failed to invest in projecting a positive global image at a time when the ideas of freedom and democracy needed a new framing for a post-Cold War world. The Trump administration has doubled down on this disinvestment, focusing almost exclusively on galvanizing domestic support by appealing to working-class Americans who feel their economic interests have been betrayed by globalization and foreign competitors. While this message won Trump the presidency, it has severely damaged America’s global image.

China has taken the opposite approach, investing heavily in projecting a positive global narrative that resonates across much of the developing world. China’s core narrative centers on its extraordinary 40 years of development: it has gone from widespread poverty to building cutting-edge, world-leading infrastructure, with high-speed rail networks, sprawling skyscraper-studded megacities, innovative young tech creators, and globally competitive electric vehicle manufacturers that dominate growing global markets. A comparison to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary *Chung Kuo*, which captured the simple, impoverished daily life of Beijing more than five decades ago, underscores the scale of China’s transformation.

Beijing has leveraged this progress to argue that its authoritarian political system is more effective at delivering tangible development outcomes than Western liberal democracy, pointing to US failures to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan after decades of intervention as evidence of Western system weaknesses. This narrative is widely persuasive across the developing world, and the US has so far failed to mount an effective, cohesive counter-narrative. That said, the full picture is more complex than Beijing’s curated narrative suggests.

For the US, there are clear lessons to learn from China’s approach. China has built a highly effective system of long-term strategic planning that guides the country through short-term volatility, while the US completely rewrites its foreign policy strategy with every new presidency, and under Trump, new policy shifts can occur on a daily basis. This lack of consistent long-term strategy leaves the US without a clear geopolitical roadmap, and as military strategists often note, brilliant tactics without a clear strategy are just noise before defeat.

The US needs a consistent long-term strategic vision for the global order it wants to build, one that accommodates China’s rise while protecting core US interests. The challenges China poses are a central part of that vision, but ongoing global conflicts demonstrate that the US-led order faces a far broader set of challenges. During the Cold War, the US maintained consistent strategic policy across successive presidencies, and it needs to rebuild that kind of consistency today. To do that, the US needs to find common ground in the political center and marginalize radical factions on both the left and right, just as it did 80 years ago ahead of World War II. If the US can find that balance, it will be able to credibly deter Chinese expansion; if it fails to find balance, China will continue to pursue its own opportunistic strategy amid growing global chaos.

*(This article was developed with input from discussions with Giuseppe Rippa and Marco Mayer, and is republished with permission from the Appia Institute, where author Francesco Sisci serves as director.)*

Three weeks ahead of the November 3 U.S. midterm elections — where every sitting member of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate face re-election, and results are widely seen as a referendum on the sitting president’s policy agenda — a coalition of U.S. activists is set to embark on an unprecedented 10-day, 5,000-kilometer cross-country journey this Saturday. Dubbed the “Freedom Convoy USA”, the initiative aims to push American voters to confront and question the long-standing bipartisan U.S. relationship with Israel, at a moment when shifting public opinion on the issue is reshaping the national political landscape.

Organized by a diverse group of participants spanning multiple religious traditions, including former federal government employees and military veterans, the convoy plans to center its outreach work in the American South’s Bible Belt — a region where conservative Evangelical Christianity has long deeply intertwined support for Israel with core religious doctrine. Hazami Barmada, a veteran activist who gained national attention for her 2024 Gaza war protest encampment outside former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence, framed the mission in an Instagram statement ahead of the launch. Even in one of Washington D.C.’s wealthiest, most highly educated neighborhoods, Barmada noted, widespread lack of awareness about the reality of Israel’s actions and governing ideology persists.

Crucially, Barmada emphasized that the convoy’s goal is not just to raise awareness of Palestinian suffering. Instead, she argued, the core priority is to educate Americans on the nature of Zionism itself, framing it as a racist, settler-colonial project that creates an ethnonationalist state — and asserting that the ideology is inherently antisemitic. Forty-two participants will take part in the journey, which kicks off at noon local time Saturday at a gathering outside the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, before stopping to host community discussions across 17 states including Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

Organizers do not claim they will shift long-held public attitudes overnight, acknowledging that decades of targeted pro-Israel messaging have shaped mainstream perspectives in communities across the country. Instead, Barmada explained, the convoy’s core aim is to plant seeds of doubt: to encourage Americans to question the narratives they have been taught about Israel for generations. The trip comes on the heels of mounting international condemnation of Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories. For decades, leading global human rights organizations have documented that Israel has committed systematic grave human rights violations against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza Strip with near-universal impunity. Last year, the United Nations’ top independent investigative body for the region concluded that Israel is carrying out acts of genocide in Gaza.

Successive rounds of polling from major U.S. research firms in 2025 confirm a dramatic, long-term shift in American public opinion three years after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and the outbreak of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. Just last week, polling from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs made history: for the first time since tracking began, a 56 percent majority of Americans now support cutting or ending U.S. military aid to Israel. Israel’s overall favorability rating hit a new low of 44 on the survey’s 0 to 100 thermometer scale, matching findings released earlier this year by leading U.S. pollsters Gallup and Pew Research Center.

Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor who has tracked American attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1989, described the shift as a lasting, paradigmatic change rather than a temporary fluctuation. Speaking at an event hosted by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research this week, Telhami noted that public opinion now increasingly frames Israel as a villain, even a genocidal one, a shift that runs far deeper than many political analysts acknowledge.

The Freedom Convoy USA is scheduled to arrive at the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. on October 26, where organizers plan to deliver a “We The People” petition to congressional offices. With lawmakers currently back in their home districts campaigning ahead of the midterms, the initiative is tying its criticism of U.S. Israel policy to domestic economic frustrations that top voter priorities. In its official press release, the convoy pointed out that millions of American families continue to struggle with skyrocketing costs for healthcare, childcare, and housing. The group is calling for policymakers to reorient federal spending priorities to put the needs of American communities first, and end taxpayer funding that contributes to the suffering of Palestinians.

For more than 30 years, the tree-lined stretch of road beside Delhi’s 18th-century Jantar Mantar astronomical observatory has stood as India’s most iconic space for peaceful public dissent. From mass movements that toppled ministerial posts to small, solitary demonstrations of marginalized groups fighting to be heard, this patch of central Delhi has been the go-to gathering place when all other avenues for advocacy closed. That era, however, may now be coming to an abrupt end.

This week, Delhi Police announced that Jantar Mantar, located just 3 kilometers from India’s national parliament, will no longer be designated as an official protest site. The announcement caps months of escalating tension and restrictions that began after the summer 2026 “Cockroach” demonstrations, a mass gathering led by the Gen Z-organized Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) – a non-partisan collective born as an online joke that grew into a formidable protest movement. Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered at Jantar Mantar earlier this year to demand the resignation of federal education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a protest that ended with Pradhan stepping down.

Within days of that demonstration, police erected permanent barricades across the road, blocking new protests. Last week, a fresh attempt by CJP supporters to march to Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner was met with a harsh police crackdown. Protesters seeking to demonstrate are now being redirected to three alternative sites across the capital. Two of the locations are located far from central Delhi and the seat of national power, while the third – the large Ramlila Ground – is typically booked months in advance. Unlike the free-to-use space at Jantar Mantar, all three alternative venues charge tens of thousands of rupees in daily rental fees.

Delhi Police officials frame the decision as a response to a recommendation from the Supreme Court, which suggested authorities identify alternative protest locations with improved public infrastructure. But critics warn the move will effectively bar ordinary Indians from exercising their constitutional right to peaceful assembly, pushing dissent far from the halls of power and into venues that are financially and geographically out of reach for most grassroots organizers.

Jantar Mantar’s life as India’s preeminent protest hub began in 1993, when the ruling Congress party moved to ban demonstrations at the Boat Club lawns opposite the old parliament building, the historic center of Indian dissent for decades prior. Historian Harleen Kaur notes that this shift was part of a decades-long pattern: successive Indian governments have consistently implemented new rules that push protest sites further away from parliament and the prime minister’s residence. Kaur explained in a 2023 academic paper that Jantar Mantar was originally accepted as a protest space precisely because its distance from the heart of government allowed authorities to contain crowds without shutting down dissent entirely.

Even so, the road beside the observatory hosted decades of transformative protest action. In 2008, activist Rachna Dhingra, a leading advocate for survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster, led a five-month encampment at Jantar Mantar, pushing the government to meet demands including the creation of a rehabilitation resource commission. Through blistering summer heat and monsoon rains, Dhingra and hundreds of other survivors held press conferences, lobbied politicians, and chained themselves to railings near the prime minister’s residence to draw attention to their cause. For Dhingra, Jantar Mantar was more than a protest site – it was a community. “It can be lonely to protest but that place became a home for so many of us. We shared each other’s stories, struggles and victories,” she said, recalling the cross-movement solidarities built there, from Tibetan pro-independence activists to anti-dam organizers to lone protesters who traveled from small towns to the capital with nothing but a placard and a grievance.

Academic Dipa Sinha, who has worked with India’s Right to Food campaign for decades, traces the passage of some of the country’s most impactful social welfare legislation – including the landmark rural employment guarantee scheme, the National Food Safety Act, and the Forest Rights Act – to organizing that began at Jantar Mantar. “It was a place where you could discuss issues with people who came to Delhi from across the country,” Sinha explained. Protesters would often travel to hold demonstrations outside key government ministries, where they faced frequent detentions, before returning to Jantar Mantar to regroup, debrief, and plan their next steps.

The site has faced threats of closure before. In 2017, the National Green Tribunal ordered protests barred from Jantar Mantar, citing poor infrastructure and complaints from local residents. But a year later, the Supreme Court overturned the order, upholding the constitutional rights to free speech and peaceful assembly that the site had long embodied.

For activists, the site’s proximity to power was critical. When first-time protesters arrived in Delhi, Dhingra recalled, they would say: “That’s the president’s house? Does the prime minister live there? How can they not listen to us when we are at their gates?” Jantar Mantar’s location near key journalistic hubs including the Press Club and Constitution Club also made it easier to attract media attention and secure meetings with sitting politicians, advantages that distant alternative venues cannot match. In recent years, rules around the site have already tightened dramatically: overnight protests are no longer permitted, a restriction that makes long-term sustained demonstrations impossible for groups whose members travel hundreds of miles to Delhi to advocate.

Not all observers frame the end of Jantar Mantar as a death knell for Indian protest culture. Gender studies scholar Mary E. John, who has lived and worked in Delhi since the pre-1993 Boat Club era, notes that dissent has always shifted locations as governments restrict access to iconic central sites. She points to recent mass movements – including the year-long farmers’ protest camped at Delhi’s borders, the Shaheen Bagh sit-in demanding repeal of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, and the 2012 national anti-rape protests that spread across central Delhi – as evidence that protest movements adapt and occupy new spaces when old ones are closed off.

Right now, Jantar Mantar is unrecognizable from its decades-long identity as a hub of dissent: yellow barricades block both ends of the road, hundreds of paramilitary personnel stand guard with batons, and the slogans and placards that once filled its sidewalks are gone. The future of the site remains uncertain: the Supreme Court is currently hearing legal challenges to the government’s decision to revoke its protest site status, while opposition leaders and CJP organizers have pledged to “reclaim” the space for the Indian people. As legal and political debates unfold, one question hangs over the historic site: will it ever echo with the sound of protest again?

Facing skyrocketing diesel prices and growing voter pressure ahead of upcoming midterm elections, the Trump administration is actively exploring a controversial policy shift: easing sanctions on hundreds of \”shadow fleet\” oil tankers linked to Russia and Iran, multiple sources and a senior U.S. official have confirmed. This potential reversal of years of harsh sanctions targeting these nations’ energy sectors comes amid an unprecedented global tanker rate crisis that has pushed shipping costs to historic highs and sent domestic fuel costs spiraling.