标签： Asia

In a move that escalates regional military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea officially announced Wednesday that its latest round of projectile launches carried out Tuesday involved a suite of advanced weapon systems — including a nuclear-capable cruise missile powered by artificial intelligence navigation, which leader Kim Jong Un has ordered deployed to front-line units positioned opposite South Korea. The disclosure comes amid Pyongyang’s sustained push to expand and modernize its nuclear and conventional military capabilities, a years-long effort that has shifted into higher gear in recent years.

The confirmation from North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) followed a Tuesday statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which first announced it had detected multiple projectiles launched into the peninsula’s western waters, including at least one short-range ballistic missile that traveled approximately 80 kilometers. South Korean officials did not initially identify other weapons tested in the exercise, and did not issue an immediate response to North Korea’s full disclosure of the test components.

According to KCNA’s detailed account, Kim Jong Un personally oversaw Tuesday’s test activities, which featured three distinct types of armaments: ballistic missiles fitted with new warheads engineered for battlefield nuclear deployment, the AI-guided nuclear-capable cruise missiles, and 240-millimeter rocket artillery outfitted with cutting-edge “ultra-precision” navigation systems. The outlet added that Kim expressed full satisfaction with the test results, particularly the performance of the new cruise missile systems, which are earmarked for assignment to front-line long-range artillery units stationed along the inter-Korean border.

Kim further ordered accelerated work to modernize and bolster North Korea’s artillery corps, with the goal of building a force that “no one can match,” KCNA reported.

The latest tests align with a well-documented pattern of escalating military development from Pyongyang that began after 2019, when nuclear diplomacy between Kim and then-U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed without reaching a disarmament agreement. In the years since, Kim has adopted an increasingly hard-line stance toward Seoul, officially branding South Korea North Korea’s “most hostile enemy” and moving to sever decades-old established diplomatic and communication ties between the two nations. Just one week before the latest tests, during a meeting with senior military commanders, Kim outlined plans to strengthen border front-line units as part of a state objective to transform the entire inter-Korean frontier into “an impregnable fortress,” per prior KCNA reports.

In recent years, Kim has also reshaped North Korea’s foreign policy orientation, leaning heavily into closer alignment with Moscow. Multiple open-source and Western intelligence reports confirm that North Korea has supplied thousands of troops and massive shipments of conventional weapons to Russia to support its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Pyongyang has also sought to deepen its longstanding economic and strategic partnership with China, its primary ally and main economic lifeline, while framing itself as a core member of a growing global counter-Washington bloc.

Despite former President Trump’s repeated public calls to restart bilateral diplomacy with Kim, Pyongyang has rejected all such overtures to date, maintaining that Washington must first drop its requirement that North Korea commit to nuclear disarmament as a precondition for any renewed negotiations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the first time in 69 years, India is left without a single state government led by a communist party, marking a defining turning point for one of the world’s longest-running experiments in democratic communist politics. The recent electoral defeat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala, which closed out a decade of Left rule, brings to a close a chapter that reshaped the country’s political landscape for generations.

At the height of their influence, India’s communist parties controlled governments across key states spanning West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura, touching the daily lives of more than 100 million people through deep roots in trade unions, peasant movements, student organizations, and a tightly disciplined cadre network. In West Bengal, the Left Front held uninterrupted power from 1977 to 2011, standing as one of the longest-serving elected communist administrations in global history. Across Tripura, the Left governed for a total of 35 years, including a 25-year unbroken stretch before it was ousted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2018. Today, West Bengal’s once-mighty communist bloc holds just one seat in the state’s 294-member legislative assembly, a stark marker of its collapse.

Kerala carved out a unique political trajectory from the start. In 1957, it became one of the first regions in the world to vote a communist government into power, led by iconic leader EMS Namboodiripad. For decades after, power rotated consistently between the Left and the national Congress party, cementing the communists as a durable, if never permanently dominant, political force. That democratic legacy made Kerala’s recent defeat all the more significant in closing the book on communist-led state government across India.

Nationally, Indian communism once exerted outsize influence on the country’s federal politics. In 1996, Jyoti Basu, CPI(M) founding member and then chief minister of West Bengal, came within a hair’s breadth of becoming India’s prime minister at the head of a national coalition government. The party ultimately rejected the offer, a decision Basu later famously called a “historic blunder.” A decade later, in 2008, Left parties pulled their parliamentary support from former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government over its landmark civil nuclear deal with the United States. Holding 62 seats in the lower house of parliament at the time, the Left forced Singh into a high-stakes confidence vote before the deal ultimately passed.

Beyond electoral politics, communist thought shaped India’s economic, intellectual, and cultural life far beyond its regional strongholds, even as critics pointed to economic stagnation in West Bengal and slipping educational outcomes during decades of Left rule. Today, that influence has faded dramatically, and the movement survives in fragmented form across the country. While the LDF suffered defeat in Kerala, the party remains a major political force there; in Tamil Nadu, communists persist largely through alliance with larger regional parties; in Bihar, the breakaway CPI (Marxist-Leninist) has built an active grassroots presence in some rural pockets; and Left-backed student groups still perform well in the country’s top universities.

But in the former communist strongholds of West Bengal and Tripura, the movement has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Nationally, the CPI(M)’s share of the national popular vote has plummeted from more than 6% at its 1980s peak to less than 2% in recent national elections.

Communist leaders attribute the decline to larger structural shifts that have reshaped Indian politics over the past 30 years. CPI(M) West Bengal secretary Mohammed Salim argues that the simultaneous rise of Hindu nationalism and market liberalization starting in the 1990s created a “religious, political and economic onslaught” that squeezed the Left from all directions. The new political order sold the middle class on a vision of development, modernization, and infrastructure growth that stoked new consumer aspirations, he says, while a growing politics of caste and religious identity fractured the class solidarity that formed the backbone of communist organizing. “Politics of division weakened class unity,” Salim notes.

Political analysts, however, argue the decline cannot be blamed solely on external forces. Unlike communist parties in China or Vietnam, India’s communist parties only ever governed states within the country’s federal democratic system, says Sanjay Ruparelia, a politics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. This structure left regional communist governments under constant pressure to attract private investment and deliver rapid economic growth, creating internal contradictions that ultimately undermined their support. In West Bengal, that contradiction erupted publicly: the party that rose to power through landmark pro-peasant land reforms was later accused of forcibly dispossessing small farmers to clear land for industrial development.

Kerala’s communist model, while widely celebrated for its achievements, faced its own unaddressed strains. The state earned global acclaim for decentralized governance, top-tier social indicators, near-universal literacy, dramatic poverty reduction, and a robust public health system. But it remained heavily dependent on remittances from overseas workers, a revenue stream that has grown increasingly volatile, leaving the state with mounting fiscal pressures and chronic job shortages, particularly among young people. Most notably, Kerala’s communist leadership gradually shifted toward the very pro-market economic model it once opposed: a 2022 CPI(M) policy document explicitly embraced private investment, public-private partnerships, private universities, and global integration of the state’s technology sector. For Ruparelia, this shift reveals a deeper truth: India’s communist parties have long been better understood as social democratic movements than revolutionary communist ones. Rather than pursuing systemic overthrow, they functioned primarily as parliamentary parties focused on advancing welfare, labor rights, and economic redistribution.

CPI(M) general secretary MA Baby defends that trajectory, noting that state governments in India’s federal system always operated within tight constraints. “They have limited financial and administrative powers. The real power lies in Delhi,” he says. “We used state governments to show that even within the capitalist socio-economic structure, pro-people policies and alternatives are possible despite limited powers.”

Still, the social base that sustained that model has eroded steadily over time. Organized labor, the core of communist support, has always been a small minority in India’s vast informal economy. As welfare politics has shifted away from class-based mobilization toward direct cash transfers and identity-based electoral coalitions, the Left has lost its traditional foothold. The 2020 nationwide farmers’ protests against Modi’s controversial agriculture laws underscored this shift: while the Left joined the movement, serving as what analyst Shikha Mukherjee calls “the voice of conscience,” it no longer led the movement. That leadership role has been taken over by regional parties and independent farm unions.

“The Left has lost its place as the principal voice of rights and entitlements. It has struggled to adapt to the modern economy, and ideological confusion now lies at the heart of the movement,” Mukherjee says. The irony, analysts note, is that modern India is now grappling with soaring economic inequality, persistent youth unemployment, and deepening working-class insecurity – conditions that once would have created fertile ground for a resurgence of Marxist politics. As Ruparelia puts it, “the objective conditions, as leftists are wont to say, should benefit them.” Yet the Left has failed to capitalize on this discontent. “The Left should have been out on the streets. Where are they?” Mukherjee asks.

This paradox is not unique to India. After the 2008 global financial crisis, new left-wing parties emerged across Europe, but many have struggled to compete with nationalist populist movements that mobilize working-class voters around anti-immigrant sentiment and ethnonationalism rather than class solidarity, Ruparelia notes. India’s Left faces a parallel challenge from the BJP’s brand of majoritarian Hindu nationalism.

Even so, writing off the Indian communist movement entirely is premature. For decades, it has survived internal splits, state repression, and repeated electoral collapses, and its diminished organizational networks still maintain a presence across large swathes of the country. The question now is whether the movement can reinvent itself to rebuild political relevance. Mukherjee argues the CPI(M) must adapt to operate within the liberalized economic order created by 30 years of reform, rather than simply opposing it.

In West Bengal, Salim says the party is already in the process of “regrouping, repositioning and rejuvenating.” Eager to shed its reputation as an ageing, change-resistant movement, the party has elevated a new generation of younger leaders to prominent roles. “Communists must constantly rejuvenate themselves. The only constant is change itself,” Baby says.

The scale of the Left’s electoral decline remains undeniable, however: in West Bengal’s most recent election, the CPI(M) won just one legislative seat and captured barely 4% of the popular vote. Kerala remains the outlier: even in defeat, the LDF held roughly a third of the popular vote, confirming that the communists remain a major force in state politics there, while a return to power in Tripura remains distant for the foreseeable future. Still, party leaders insist that electoral results do not tell the full story of their ongoing social and political relevance. “Are we hopeful? Of course,” Baby says. “In fact, we ask: without us, what future is there? Seats matter, but our place in the hearts of the people matters more.”