标签： Asia

In a last-minute, unanticipated move that has intensified partisan friction over executive war authority, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives scrapped a planned Thursday vote on a war powers resolution that would have curbed former President (now current, per context) Donald Trump’s authority to resume open military hostilities against Iran. This would have marked the fourth congressional attempt to assert legislative oversight of Iran policy under the 1973 War Powers Resolution since February of this year.

The vote had been scheduled as one of the final items on the legislative agenda ahead of the House’s extended Memorial Day recess, and all signs pointed to it passing. Just one week prior, a nearly identical measure tied at 212-212, when three House Republicans broke ranks with their party to join Democrats in supporting the push to reaffirm Congress’s constitutional authority over declarations of war. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, a Democrat, told reporters Thursday that supporters had already secured enough votes to pass the resolution on the floor. “Every Democrat was on board. We had the sufficient number of Republicans on board,” Meeks said, adding that GOP leaders scrapped the vote solely because they knew the measure would pass. “Republicans pulled this vote because they knew they were going to lose it. They know this war is a political and strategic disaster,” he added.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise offered a different explanation for the cancellation, telling reporters that the vote would be delayed until June due to a number of absent Republican lawmakers who could not make it to Washington for the vote.

The development follows a similar move in the Senate earlier this week, where a companion war powers resolution advanced by a 50-47 margin after three Republican senators were absent from the chamber. Two of those absent senators have already fallen out of favor with Trump: Thom Tillis, who dropped his re-election bid after facing relentless primary attacks from Trump, and John Cornyn, who lost Trump’s endorsement in his Texas Republican primary this week to a far more pro-Trump challenger.

To contextualize the debate: The 1973 War Powers Resolution was designed to check executive war authority, allowing any senator to introduce a resolution forcing a vote to withdraw U.S. armed forces from unauthorized conflicts. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress, not the executive branch, holds the explicit power to declare war — a point that constitutional scholars emphasize is unambiguous. “There are some things about the Constitution [that] are not clear [but] this point is crystal, crystal clear,” said Chris Edelson, a constitutional scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an interview with Middle East Eye. “The framers of the Constitution debated war power. They gave Congress the power to declare war. The one exception was if the United States is attacked, the president could act to defend the country… and of course that’s not what happened here.”

Since the 9/11 attacks, the open-ended nature of the global “war on terror” has allowed successive presidential administrations to expand executive war-making authority, with the U.S. carrying out hundreds of air strikes in countries ranging from Somalia to Pakistan without ever securing a formal declaration of war from Congress. While the 1973 War Powers Resolution gives presidents 60 days to conduct unilateral military action before requiring congressional authorization, or an additional 30-day extension, Edelson argues the law’s ambiguous wording leaves it too weak to enforce constitutional checks on the executive branch.

The current debate stems from the brief U.S. hostilities against Iran that began in late February. Three weeks after Pakistan brokered a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in late March, a senior Trump administration official told Reuters that for war powers purposes, “the hostilities that began on Saturday, February 28, have terminated.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth later backed this position during a Senate hearing, arguing that the 60-day unilateral war window outlined in the 1973 law is automatically paused when a ceasefire goes into effect. That interpretation has been firmly rejected by Democrats and a handful of congressional Republicans.

While the ceasefire has held so far, it remains extremely fragile. Just this week, Trump announced he would call off plans for a “full, large scale” military offensive against Iran after Gulf Arab leaders urged him to delay any new hostilities until after the annual Hajj pilgrimage season.

Notably, bipartisan opposition to new hostilities with Iran has shifted dramatically in recent months. At the start of the year, many establishment Democrats were open to military pressure on Iran, with party leadership even attempting to slow down earlier efforts to invoke war powers oversight. Many establishment Democrats have also consistently aligned with hawkish positions on Iran, even as they have declined to condemn Israeli military actions in Gaza that leading international scholars and the United Nations have labeled genocide. But that position shifted as public opinion polls consistently showed broad opposition to a new war with Iran among U.S. voters, and as rising tensions pushed gasoline prices higher just as the peak summer driving season began.

“It’s clear it didn’t go well. Who wants to be seen as supporting this?” Edelson said. “I mean, there are Republicans who do, but even for some Republicans, it’s getting hard.”

The upcoming November midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress alongside dozens of gubernatorial and state local races, will serve as the first major electoral test of public opinion on Trump’s second term foreign policy. This is not the first time Congress has attempted to curb Trump’s Iran war authority: back in 2020, after Trump ordered the drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, both chambers of Congress passed a war powers resolution limiting Trump’s authority to take military action against Iran. Trump ultimately vetoed the measure.

This reporting comes from Middle East Eye, an outlet that produces independent, on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and broader global affairs.

An ancient Chinese proverb holds that a master hunter does not waste energy chasing prey — instead, they position themselves where the rabbit is destined to run. For critics and supporters alike, one fact stands out about Xi Jinping’s long-term statecraft: he has moved with extraordinary, deliberate patience. Now, over a single historic stretch of weeks, that patience appears to be paying off, as both Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.S. President Donald Trump traveled to Beijing for high-level summits in quick succession.

Far from a random confluence of diplomatic schedules, the dual visits are the product of decades of intentional geopolitical architecture. The fact that both Washington and Moscow — two powers that formally occupy opposing poles of the existing global order — have been drawn to Beijing in parallel carries a clear, unignorable message: the center of geopolitical gravity has shifted. China is no longer a passive actor responding to rules set by others; it is now actively, quietly reshaping the global system on its own terms.

Putin’s Visit: A Partnership Framed By Growing Asymmetry
Putin’s trip to Beijing carried a clear, unspoken subtext: what was framed as a meeting of equal partners was in reality a visit from a power increasingly dependent on Chinese goodwill. Since the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Russia has faced sweeping Western sanctions, and has pivoted its entire economic infrastructure eastward, redirecting the bulk of its energy and raw material exports to Chinese markets. These sales are made at steeply discounted rates, negotiated from a position of weakness: Russia has few alternative buyers for its vast energy resources, a reality Beijing has leveraged to its full advantage.

Take the long-stalled Second Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline as a case in point. Moscow has pushed aggressively to finalize the project for years, while Beijing has faced no pressure to rush the deal. This dynamic mirrors a broader historical pattern: great powers that allow themselves to become economically dependent on a single major partner gradually, then suddenly, lose their strategic independence. Just as Habsburg Spain, awash in New World silver but reliant on Genoese bankers for financing, saw its foreign policy constrained by financial obligation, modern Russia retains its military standing and nuclear deterrence, but its room for independent geopolitical maneuver has shrunk steadily into a corridor defined by Beijing’s priorities.

This shift has ripple effects across South Asia, where India has long maintained a close relationship with Moscow as a counterbalance to Chinese and Western pressure. Today, every Russian arms deal, energy contract, and diplomatic signal carries an implicit Chinese veto, a reality New Delhi has noted with quiet but growing discomfort.

Trump’s Summit: Exposing American Diplomatic Uncertainty
If Putin’s visit laid bare Russia’s growing structural weakness, Trump’s trip to Beijing revealed a more striking shift: America’s growing diplomatic disorientation. Trump arrived in Beijing accompanied by a cohort of top U.S. corporate CEOs, a choice that read to global observers as a solicitation for Chinese investment and access, a far cry from the image of unrivaled American power that Washington has projected for decades.

Xi received Trump with the calm authority of a leader who already holds the upper hand in setting the terms of engagement. When he invoked the Thucydides Trap — the theory that a rising power and an established hegemon are fated to clash — he framed it not as a warning to avoid, but as an almost settled verdict. China’s posture made clear it has already completed its rise; the open question is whether the U.S. will accept the new global order or exhaust itself trying to reverse it.

The most striking outcome of the summit was what did not happen: there was no joint statement from the two sides. This absence speaks far louder than any negotiated communiqué could. When two leading global powers meet at the highest level and cannot agree on a shared public statement, it confirms that the gap between their core worldviews is too wide to paper over with diplomatic language. The two sides released separate readouts, and the U.S. version was notably muted, stripped of the triumphal rhetoric Trump typically deploys after meetings he claims as a win. A man who once described a brief phone call with a foreign leader as “incredible and productive” only called this meeting “good” — a telling retreat from his usual boosterism.

On core issues from trade and Taiwan to technology restrictions and rare earth exports, China has clearly abandoned its past approach of quietly absorbing U.S. pressure. Today, it retaliates systematically, with growing confidence in its ability to impose meaningful costs on Washington. The 2025 Chinese export restrictions on critical rare earth elements, which directly disrupted U.S. defense supply chains, were not the action of a power afraid of confrontation. They were the calculated move of a state that has modeled its leverage and is confident in its position.

The Push for a G-2 Global Order
Xi’s most consequential move during the Trump summit was not a trade concession or a diplomatic compromise — it was a conceptual shift. By framing the bilateral relationship as a “constructive, stable strategic relationship,” and emphasizing that China and the U.S. share joint responsibility for global peace, Xi advanced a framework Washington has long resisted: the formal recognition of a G-2 world order.

Beyond the headline disputes over tariffs and technology, this is China’s core demand. It is not chasing symbolic equality on paper; Beijing has long moved past that need. Instead, it wants structural recognition that the international system cannot function without Chinese consent, that no global crisis — from the Middle East to Ukraine to the Taiwan Strait — can be resolved without Beijing’s active or implicit cooperation.

The unresolved standoff over Iran underscores this reality. Washington’s failure to decisively end the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz, through neither military pressure nor diplomatic leverage, served as visible evidence to Beijing that American power now overstretches its grasp. Xi did not need to point this out; the global status quo said it for him.

The Quiet Construction of a New Geopolitical Center
The deeper significance of these two back-to-back visits has little to do with Putin or Trump themselves. It is proof of the decades-long, patient project China has pursued to make itself indispensable to every corner of the global system: to energy markets, global supply chains, diplomatic crisis resolution, and the infrastructure ambitions of the Global South.

China did not stumble into its central position in global affairs; it engineered it, through initiatives from the Belt and Road to its deliberate buildup of rare earth market dominance, to the construction of a trade network centered on its own economy. This kind of multi-decade strategic thinking is structurally difficult for Western democracies, bound by short electoral cycles and shifting public attention, to match.

As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once observed, great powers rarely announce their dominance openly. Instead, they simply begin making decisions that other powers find themselves bound by. Beijing is increasingly in that position today. When both your primary geopolitical rival and your most prominent Eurasian partner travel to your capital within weeks, each seeking your support for their most urgent challenges, the question of who holds the structural advantage answers itself. Xi Jinping did not need a joint communiqué to declare victory; the visits themselves were the announcement.

The world is not becoming Chinese in culture or ideology. But it is becoming a system where Beijing’s preferences carry a weight that cannot be erased by sanctions, tariffs, or rhetorical pushback. That is the new geopolitical reality that both Washington and Moscow are now forced to reckon with, whether they are willing to admit it publicly or not.

UNITED NATIONS — After four weeks of tense negotiations among 191 global signatories, the latest United Nations review conference for the landmark Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) concluded on Friday with no consensus on a final outcome, derailed by sharp open confrontation between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s contested nuclear program.

Do Hung Viet, Vietnam’s U.N. Ambassador and the chair of the 2025 review conference, confirmed that participating states could not reach agreement even on a heavily compromised, watered-down closing document. While he declined to name which delegation or group of delegations blocked consensus, the entire conference was overshadowed by escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran that intensified ahead of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran that launched in late February.

This outcome marks the third consecutive failure for a major NPT review conference, a discouraging milestone for the global pact that has stood for more than five decades as the foundational framework for international nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament efforts. The 2022 NPT review also ended without agreement, after Russia blocked consensus over language condemning its invasion of Ukraine and its illegal occupation of Europe’s largest nuclear facility, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

Clashes between U.S. and Iranian delegates dominated the conference from its opening session on April 27. The U.S. opened with sharp accusations that Iran has openly violated its NPT commitments, escalating those attacks in closing remarks that labeled Tehran a “prolific treaty violator” that spent the conference evading accountability for “grotesque violations” of its obligations. U.S. officials point to Iran’s previous enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade purity, as well as its refusal to grant inspection access to nuclear sites damaged in U.S. airstrikes last June, as evidence of its noncompliance. Under the NPT, all signatory nations are required to grant full, unrestricted access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to verify civilian nuclear activities.

Iran has pushed back aggressively against these claims, rejecting U.S. assertions that it is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and maintaining that all its nuclear activities are strictly for peaceful civilian purposes, including energy production and medical research. Iranian delegates countered that the U.S. and Israel’s repeated airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities themselves represent clear violations of international law, and accused the U.S. of leading a “relentless campaign” to frame Iran’s defensive actions and legitimize Washington’s own unlawful military attacks on the country.

The failure to reach agreement has sparked deep concern among arms control experts, who warn that the deadlock signals growing erosion of the global nonproliferation framework. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, noted that while many nations continue to express rhetorical support for the NPT, the landmark agreement’s foundational pillars are weakening due to persistent inaction, disengagement, and intransigence from major global powers.

“Much more enlightened, engaged, and pragmatic leadership and diplomacy will be needed to guard against the growing risks of an unconstrained nuclear buildup, threats to resume nuclear testing, and the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran,” Kimball said.

Rebecca Johnson, founding executive director of the U.K.-based Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, extended criticism to the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals, the U.S. and Russia, arguing that both major powers have consistently refused to uphold their own NPT disarmament commitments. She charged that the two nuclear superpowers continue to double down on explicit nuclear threats, shift blame to other nations, and actively undermine or ignore the disarmament obligations they agreed to under the treaty and related global pacts.

In the wake of escalating tensions over the Gaza conflict, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has released an 80-page official brochure that has ignited fierce controversy for conflating legitimate pro-Palestinian speech and criticism of Israeli military action with antisemitism. Titled “Hidden Messages — Anti-Semitic Codes and Ciphers,” the document was published last week with the stated goal of raising public and educational awareness of covert antisemitic rhetoric and imagery. However, its sweeping categorization of pro-Palestinian advocacy as inherently antisemitic has drawn sharp condemnation from human rights organizations, which warn it legitimizes a broader crackdown on peaceful pro-Gaza protest across the country.

The brochure builds on a prior controversial BfV dossier released just days earlier, which labeled iconic Palestinian symbols — including the watermelon, a widely used visual shorthand for Palestinian solidarity, and Handala, the famous cartoon of a displaced 10-year-old Palestinian refugee — as identifying markers of “secular pro-Palestinian extremism.” For its new publication, the BfV adopts the widely contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which the agency frames as a universally accepted standard. The definition expands the scope of antisemitic harm to include targeting the State of Israel as a Jewish collective, a framing that critics argue effectively shields Israeli policy from legitimate political critique.

Targeted primarily at teachers and educational staff as a guideline for identifying antisemitic speech in academic and workplace settings, the brochure is also distributed to members of the public interested in German social and political developments. In its opening section, the BfV frames antisemitism as a persistent “bridging phenomenon” that connects disparate ideological groups across the political spectrum — from mainstream society to right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, Islamist extremism, and a vaguely defined category of “foreign-related extremism.” The document claims that despite rare actual collaboration, shared anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment can unite otherwise opposing groups, pointing specifically to post-October 7 pro-Palestinian protests. It argues that left-wing and far-left expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement normalize Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks, a claim that lacks supporting statistical data on connections between antisemitic attacks and the groups it names. To visualize this purported cross-ideological alliance, the BfV included an AI-generated graphic showing different ideological groups connected by bridges leading from antisemitism to the “middle of society.”

The bulk of the brochure catalogs historic and contemporary symbols, terms, and images the BfV classifies as antisemitic. It correctly includes classic Nazi-era antisemitic tropes: the octopus motif used to falsely claim Jewish control of global society, caricatures depicting Jews as power-hungry, the ancient blood libel myth, dehumanizing imagery comparing Jews to rats, parasites or monkeys, and modern dog whistles such as references to “Wall Street” and the “East Coast” as code for Jewish-controlled financial power. However, the publication mixes these unambiguous hate symbols with examples of peaceful pro-Palestinian advocacy and documentation of civilian harm in Gaza, labeling them antisemitic by extension.

Two high-profile examples included in the brochure have drawn particular criticism. The first is a viral graphic circulated online to highlight the catastrophic child death toll in Gaza, which reads: “Israel kills an entire classroom every day – 28 kids.” The image was created to draw attention to data from Save the Children, released in September 2025, which recorded that at least one Palestinian child had been killed on average every hour by Israeli forces in Gaza, with total child fatalities surpassing 20,000. While the BfV includes a minor disclaimer acknowledging room for interpretation over the image’s antisemitic content, it argues the graphic reverses perpetrator and victim, erases the October 7 Hamas attacks and the broader context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and revives the historic antisemitic “Jewish child murderer” trope by framing Israeli killings of children as a ritualized act.

The second contentious example is a political cartoon depicting an Israeli soldier pulling the plug on an incubator holding a Palestinian infant, while asking “Do you condemn Hamas?” The cartoon references a verifiable real-world event: a November 2023 Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s al-Nasser Medical Complex that cut oxygen to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. When medical staff returned following a ceasefire days later, four unevacuated babies were found dead. The BfV labels the cartoon antisemitic, claiming it simplifies the decades-long conflict into a binary good-versus-evil framing and reinforces the antisemitic trope that Jews lack basic human morality out of a ruthless desire for power. The brochure makes no mention of the actual real-world event that inspired the cartoon.

Critics point to a key absence in the document: it never acknowledges that rising criticism of Israel is a direct response to Israel’s large-scale military campaign in Gaza that has killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Human rights groups including Amnesty International have already condemned the German government’s broader crackdown on peaceful pro-Palestinian activism, a crackdown that this brochure serves to validate. Germany has long been one of Israel’s most prominent international backers, despite its own 20th-century history of genocidal violence against Jewish people, Slavs, Roma, and Indigenous populations in colonial Namibia. The publication has amplified concerns that German authorities are using the country’s historic responsibility to combat antisemitism to silence legitimate dissent against Israeli military action and marginalize pro-Palestinian voices within the country.

The fragile diplomatic balance between the United Kingdom and Israel has been thrown into sharp relief this week, as senior UK officials publicly praised the longstanding bilateral relationship at an event marking Israel’s 76th independence anniversary, just days after viral footage of a far-right Israeli minister’s confrontation with Gaza-bound peace activists triggered a formal diplomatic summons and shocking allegations of detainee abuse.

On Wednesday, UK Security Minister Dan Jarvis delivered a pre-recorded video address to the London-based independence celebration, emphasizing the deep, historically rooted partnership between the two nations. Jarvis, a member of the newly elected Labour government, noted that the Labour Party has long stood as a formal backer of the Israeli state, highlighting shared values he said underpin the bilateral relationship. “Together we share a commitment to robust democratic governance, rule of law, and judicial independence … and an unwavering dedication to defending our open societies against security threats,” Jarvis said, according to reporting from Jewish News.

Also in attendance at the event was Jon Pearce, a Labour lawmaker and parliamentary private secretary to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and former chair of the pro-Israel lobbying group Labour Friends of Israel. Other high-profile British attendees included former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, and senior leadership from the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The celebration went ahead just hours after graphic footage of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir taunting activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla spread rapidly across social media platforms. The civilian-led flotilla had been attempting to break Israel’s long-running blockade of the Gaza Strip to deliver humanitarian aid when Israeli forces intercepted the vessels and detained all 430 activists on board.

The following day, the UK Foreign Office formally summoned Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, Israel’s acting top diplomat in London—Israel has not had a permanent ambassador in the UK since Tzipi Hotovely completed her term last September—to protest Ben Gvir’s conduct. In a formal statement following the meeting, the Foreign Office condemned the confrontation. “This behaviour violates the most basic standards of respect and dignity for people,” the statement read. “We are also deeply concerned by the detention conditions depicted and have demanded an explanation from the Israeli authorities. We made clear their obligations to protect the rights of all those involved.”

In remarks to event attendees earlier Wednesday, Grudsky Ekstein echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rebuke of Ben Gvir’s actions, distancing the Israeli government from the incident. “The unacceptable, harmful conduct of one of our ministers is not representative of our government’s policy. It is not the face of Israel,” she said. She also framed rising global antisemitism, a growing concern for Jewish communities worldwide, as a moral rather than purely political crisis requiring coordinated action.

Following their detention, all 430 activists were deported by Israeli authorities to Istanbul, Turkey, on Thursday evening. Multiple activists have since come forward with detailed, graphic allegations of systematic abuse in Israeli custody, including claims of rubber bullet fire, physical beatings, and sexual assault. Miriam Azem, a legal representative with the Israeli human rights group Adalah, documented one account of a detainee being “forced to strip naked and run while guards were laughing.” Australian activist Juliet Lamont also gave a harrowing account of her treatment, saying she was “tied with cables, water-tortured and sexually assaulted,” adding that other detainees “had broken ribs, were tased in the face, and injected with unknown sedatives.”

The post of Israeli ambassador to the UK has remained vacant for months amid a domestic political scandal in Israel surrounding the nominee, Tzachi Braverman, Netanyahu’s former chief of staff. Braverman has been accused of obstructing an official investigation into leaks of classified information related to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, charges he and the prime minister’s office have repeatedly denied. In February, Israel’s civil service disciplinary board recommended a six-month suspension for Braverman, and opposition leader Yair Lapid has publicly called on Netanyahu to withdraw the ambassadorial nomination entirely.

This week’s diplomatic friction is the latest in a growing string of strains on UK-Israel relations, which remain complicated by competing political priorities and international legal obligations. Netanyahu has not visited the UK since the 2023 outbreak of the Gaza war, and a visit is unlikely in the near future: the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the military campaign.

Last June, the UK imposed formal economic sanctions on Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich over their repeated public incitement to violence against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. In October 2023, Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli sparked a diplomatic row when he made a derogatory comment referring to Starmer as “Palestinian” after the UK prime minister criticized Chikli’s decision to invite far-right British extremist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson to visit Israel.

Despite these public tensions, the UK has maintained extensive military and political cooperation with Israel throughout its 19-month campaign in Gaza. Declassified UK and independent investigative outlets have confirmed that Royal Air Force aircraft have carried out hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza since the war began, a mission the UK Ministry of Defence has repeatedly claimed is solely focused on supporting efforts to rescue Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Critics have questioned this framing, however, noting that the program has been kept entirely secret from public scrutiny, and that UK intelligence has been shared with Israel on days when Israeli airstrikes killed British citizens in Gaza.

The backbone of bilateral defense cooperation is a 2020 bilateral military agreement between the two states, which was designed to formalize and expand defense partnership and joint activities. The full text of the agreement has never been released to the public; in 2024, Labour junior defense minister Luke Pollard confirmed that the accord remains classified and cannot be released under freedom of information rules, with the Ministry of Defence confirming last October that the agreement is still in force.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has scrapped a planned £50 million AI intelligence partnership between the Metropolitan Police and U.S. tech firm Palantir Technologies, a move that has drawn cautious praise from pro-Palestine advocacy groups and British Green Party politicians who warn that unchallenged smaller existing contracts between the force and the controversial company still stand.

Khan’s official rejection of what would have been Palantir’s largest ever UK law enforcement contract came on Thursday, with the mayor citing a clear, serious violation of UK public sector procurement protocols as the core justification for the decision. Under existing London governance rules, any Metropolitan Police spending exceeding £500,000 requires formal sign-off from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), the independent oversight body tasked with ensuring legislative compliance and transparent public spending.

According to Khan’s announcement during Mayor’s Question Time, Mopac identified multiple critical red flags during its review of the proposed deal. The Metropolitan Police failed to submit its full procurement strategy for pre-approval from the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, as required under Mopac’s formal delegation rules. Instead, the force advanced procurement negotiations all the way to the final contract award stage before requesting oversight approval. Beyond procedural violations, Khan’s office added that the agreement failed to demonstrate guaranteed value for taxpayer money and would have left the force locked into a long-term proprietary technological dependence on Palantir.

The proposed £50m deal was intended to deploy Palantir’s artificial intelligence tools to automate criminal investigation intelligence analysis, but the company has long faced widespread condemnation for its deep ties to the Israeli government and military. In January 2024, after Israel launched its large-scale military campaign in Gaza, Palantir signed a formal contract with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to provide technology for “war-related missions”. Company CEO Alex Karp has openly acknowledged strong demand for Palantir’s services following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, and the firm’s board held a high-profile meeting in Tel Aviv explicitly framed as an act of solidarity with Israel. Human rights advocates directly link Palantir’s surveillance and AI tools to Israeli military operations in Gaza that have been labeled as genocide by multiple advocacy groups and global political bodies.

Even before the proposed £50m deal, the Metropolitan Police had already secured a series of smaller, lower-value contracts with Palantir that fall just under the £500,000 threshold that triggers mandatory Mopac oversight, a structure that critics say was intentionally designed to avoid public scrutiny. The force launched an initial pilot program with a £10,000 contract, later extending the arrangement for three months at a cost of just under £490,000, bringing the total value to just under the oversight threshold. Under the pilot, Palantir’s AI is already being used to analyze data stored on Met officers’ personal devices, a policy that has drawn fierce criticism from the Metropolitan Police Federation, the union representing Met officers. In late April, the federation warned officers to be “extremely cautious” about carrying their work-issued devices while off duty, arguing that the AI monitoring has severely eroded officer trust in force leadership and sent already plummeting morale even lower.

During a Wednesday meeting of the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee, Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Matt Jukes defended the force’s choice to partner with Palantir for the pilot, noting that the firm is already an approved supplier on the UK government’s G-Cloud 14 procurement framework and is widely used across multiple British government departments. Jukes acknowledged that Palantir is a “divisive supplier” from a reputational standpoint, but emphasized that the company’s existing use across 72 NHS trusts and its status on national government frameworks made it a qualified choice for the Met. When asked whether Palantir had offered the pilot at a discounted rate to intentionally avoid crossing the oversight threshold, Jukes said the full cost of the pilot had been clearly documented.

Reaction to Khan’s decision to block the £50m deal has been mixed, with human rights and pro-Palestine groups welcoming the move while pushing for further action to cancel all existing Met contracts with Palantir. Amnesty International UK campaigns manager Kristyan Benedict called the cancellation “positive news”, noting that Palantir tools are currently deployed by the Israeli military during its military campaign in Gaza. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which has led widespread advocacy against the deal, credited its grassroots campaigning for pushing Khan to reject the contract, arguing that “Palantir supplies Israel with AI and surveillance technology used in its genocide in Gaza. It should not receive a penny of public money.” The group is now calling on Khan to go a step further and cancel the existing nearly £500,000 pilot contract, and is demanding the UK government scrap all national public sector contracts with Palantir, including a £330m deal with NHS England to build and maintain a national patient data platform that has been opposed by health workers, patients and human rights organizers across the country.

Green Party London Assembly member Benali Hamdache, who first raised public questions about the Palantir partnership, also welcomed the cancellation of the large contract, but echoed calls to end existing agreements. “It’s good that this £50 million contract was blocked, but the Met still has contracts with Palantir worth nearly £500,000 that haven’t been challenged,” Hamdache said in a statement to Middle East Eye. He added that the current procurement rules, which allow deals under £500,000 to bypass mayoral oversight, create dangerous loopholes that could allow similar controversial agreements to move forward in the future. Hamdache also pointed to additional red flags around Palantir, including the company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for immigration enforcement operations, and a recent public manifesto adapted from Karp’s writings that openly espouses far-right ideological positions and defends high-profile far-right figures including Elon Musk.

Palantir already holds nearly $1 billion in total contracts across multiple UK government bodies, including the Ministry of Defence, NHS, and multiple regional police forces. Founded by high-profile Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, the firm has faced growing grassroots resistance across the UK over its human rights record and geopolitical ties. Critics argue that the current case exposes deep flaws in UK public procurement rules that allow controversial contractors to split large projects into smaller agreements to avoid oversight and public accountability.