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Thursday, January 22, 2026
NATO chief says allies must step up Arctic security in Greenland deal with Trump
Reuters | Breaking International News & Views
31 mins ago
NATO chief says allies must step up Arctic security in Greenland deal with Trump
Secretary General Mark Rutte said NATO allies will need to step up their presence in the Arctic under a framework deal with President Donald Trump after he backed off tariff threats and ruled out taking Greenland by force.
Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 on X: "🚨 🇨🇳 BREAKING: China has achieved a major breakthrough in semiconductor production technology. China has sucessfully developed a domestic tandem high-energy hydrogen ion implanter (POWER-750H), which successfully achieved beam extraction recently. https://t.co/xv1tGQOx3M" / X
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Fr. Bob's Reflection for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time -
John the Baptist is not the most traditional or charming character in the Gospels. In all likelihood, he would not be on our guest list for a dinner party.
His appearance is rugged, clad in camel hair, disheveled with no haircut and a long beard. His message is always loud and unfiltered: “Repent!” Yet, Jesus speaks about him with unmatched admiration: “Among those born of women, no one has risen greater than John the Baptist.”
John’s greatness was not about his appearance; it was about his calling. He was great in God’s eyes, because he had an uncommon assignment. His whole life had one focus: every step, every word and every moment was pointed toward Jesus.
He made it very clear: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” He never pointed to himself. He tells us that he is not Christ. He tells the priests and the Levites, “Among you stands One who you do not know. The One whose sandals I am not worthy of loosening. He must increase, I must decrease.”
His purpose, to prepare the way for Jesus, began before he was even born. Remember when Mary, newly pregnant, rushed to the hill country to meet Elizabeth?
Elizabeth was six months along with John. At the sound of Mary’s greeting, John leapt for joy within the womb – already recognizing Jesus, already responding to the Light, though unseen and unheard. John’s life was Christ-centered from the very beginning.
It should not surprise us that John the Evangelist places John the Baptist in the prologue to his Gospel. He was a man sent from God, who came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe, through him – not as the light, but always pointing to it.
Like John, you and I are called to bear witness to God; to be God’s presence in the world. We, too, have a mission to point to Christ. God’s presence is seen in the world through His image and His likeness – which lives in us.
So, how do we act like John and point to Christ? It’s simple. We can act like Christ. It’s not an impossible mission. To be Christ-like is to follow Him on His journey.
We do not need to reproduce every action of Jesus’ life. We do not have to copy Him down to the smallest detail. We do not have to repeat His every word and action, like a movie script. To be Christ-like means something deeper. It means embracing the foundation that guided Jesus’ life. It means choosing God’s will over our own.
Each time we pray, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven,” we commit ourselves to God’s purpose. And if we Christians do not point others to Christ, who will?
No matter where God has placed you, the root principle that motivates you should be the same root principle that powered the life of Jesus. Remember His words: “I seek not My own will, but the will of the One who sent me.”
The way we act, the way we live – that is the way others must learn the impact that Christ had; how He made a difference in our world. We hold the power to remind those around us of Jesus: The way we love, show mercy, practice patience and serve quietly in everyday moments.
My friends, it is not a pious impossibility. This is our Christian vocation – to point to Christ and say, “Here I am, Lord. I have come to do Your will.”
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Robert Warren, S.A.
Spiritual Director
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
[Salon] The End of Autonomy: Syrian Government and SDF Reach Historic Integration Deal ArabDigest.org Guest Post
The End of Autonomy: Syrian Government and SDF Reach Historic Integration Deal
Summary: President Ahmed al-Sharaa and the SDF have signed a 14-point agreement to integrate Kurdish forces and territory into the Syrian state, effectively ending over a decade of Kurdish autonomy. The deal follows a major government military advance into strategic oil and energy hubs, though it has been overshadowed by deadly clashes in Raqqa and widespread Kurdish outrage over human rights abuses during the transition.
We thank Winthrop Rodgers for today’s newsletter. A journalist and analyst who spent several years in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, he focuses on politics, human rights, and economics and is an associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. @wrodgers2
On Sunday Syrian President al-Sharaa announced a 14-point agreement with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) chief, Mazloum Abdi, marking a major blow to Kurdish ambitions for autonomy and effectively ending more than a decade of de facto self-rule in northern and eastern Syria.
The deal, which mandates the integration of the SDF and Kurdish security forces into the Syrian defence and interior ministries, follows an advance by government troops across Kurdish-held areas of the country's North and East which saw the capture of the strategic city of Tabqa, the Euphrates Dam (a vital hydroelectric facility), and major energy resources including the Al-Omar oil field (Syria's largest), as well as the Tanak, Safyan, and Al-Tharwa fields. The Kurdish administration has agreed to the immediate handover of the Raqqa and Deir Ezzor provinces to the central government.
A key component of the deal is that the Damascus government will now take responsibility for Islamic State (IS) prisoners and their families currently held in Kurdish-run camps and jails. However, it also attacked these same prisons before a clean hand-over could be made, with Al-Shaddadi Prison falling out of SDF control on January 19.
Despite the agreement, deadly clashes are reported to have continued in Raqqa between the SDF and local fighters loyal to the government. Government forces have brought in reinforcements to “comb” parts of the city.
This major political and military shift comes just days after Syria’s transitional government captured the Kurdish-controlled neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsud and Ashrafieh in northern Aleppo city in a four-day military operation. That assault sparked a wave of outrage from Kurds around the world, with videos of human rights abuses against civilians and fighters circulating on social media.
Importantly, the operation against Aleppo and the subsequent offensive against other SDF-controlled territories have reinforced the fissures that remain deeply embedded in the new Syrian state. The challenge of creating a stable country where the rights of minorities are respected and the legacy of Ba’athist chauvinism is left behind likely became much more difficult as a result. The end of Kurdish control in the east may yield a short-term victory for Damascus but will likely cause friction in the future.
While the dust is still settling in place like Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, the example of Shiekh Maqsud is instructive. The Kurdish-majority enclave in northern Aleppo had remained under local control throughout the civil war. However, it came under increasing pressure from the new government over the past year, even as Damascus engaged in negotiations with the SDF For some analysts, this suggests that planning for the eventual assault on the neighborhoods had been in motion for some time.
Syrian government troops tear down a Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) (Kurdish women forces) statue in the northeast of Syria as the autonomous Kurdish-led region, which has existed for a decade, comes to an end
According to media reports, the two sides were in active discussions days before the government launched its ground assault. The talks were suddenly terminated on January 4, however, with sources variously pointing the finger at the influence of Turkey and the US. The attacks on Sheikh Maqsud began on January 6 and lasted for four days, by which time the government forces had taken full control of the neighborhood.
Approximately 155,000 people were displaced during the fighting and at least 21 civilians were killed during the operation, though the full death toll is not yet known. Eventually, the local Kurdish forces were forced to leave the city for SDF-controlled areas to the east.
The capture of Sheikh Maqsud sparked an intense reaction from Kurds around the world. This was driven largely by allegations of human rights violations against civilians and captured fighters. Videos on social media showed government-affiliated forces humiliating huddled groups of civilians and young men being marched off to an uncertain fate. Footage of artillery damage to the Khalid Fajr Hospital was widely published by media outlets in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.
A video of a dead female fighter being thrown off of a building proved particularly galvanizing. It spawned a meme with her represented as an angel, with various iterations appearing widely across Kurdish social media.
So far, there is no evidence of the type of massacres that government-affiliated fighters committed last year in coastal provinces or Suweda. However, Kurdish activists have circulated a list of several hundred civilians that allegedly went missing during the operation.
The outrage was not just contained to social media, but voiced in protests across Europe and the Kurdistan Region. ‘Attacking Kurdish citizens is a war crime’, read one sign in London where demonstrators waved Kurdish flags and SDF banners near Downing Street. That outrage is now magnified by the more serious collapse of Kurdish authority across the rest of Syria.
This kind of cross-border solidarity is normal for Kurds – as is anger at perceived betrayal by central governments like Damascus and its backers, including those in the West. However, the level of feeling on display in recent days was noteworthy and far above ordinary.
Moreover, this outrage extended beyond the street and included prominent Kurdish political leaders. In an official statement on January 8, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Masrour Barzani said that ‘the targeting of Kurds in an effort to change the demography of the area and create threats to the lives of civilians, raise questions about the authorities in Damascus and the conscience of the international community’.
Kurdish anger was exacerbated by a perception that the Syrian government and its Western partners felt that retaking the neighborhood was justified in the interests of Syrian unity and that Syrian Kurds should simply accept this, along with the abuses that occurred during the Sheikh Maqsud operation and the apparent release of ISIS fighters from the prisons that the SDF had guarded for so long.
A tweet from US Syria Envoy Ambassador Tom Barrack following a meeting with Syria’s foreign minister on January 10 was instructive. While nodding to the importance of Kurdish rights and the sacrifices of the SDF in the fight against Islamic State (ISIS), he emphasised that the US wants to see an ‘inclusive and responsible integration process — one that respects Syria’s unity, upholds the principle of a single sovereign state, and supports the goal of one legitimate national military’.
After the deal was agreed on Sunday, Barrack met with both the Syrian President and the Kurdish leader, calling the agreement a “pivotal inflection point.” The U.S. supports both the new authorities in Damascus and has also historically backed the Kurds. While Sharaa issued a decree granting Kurds official recognition, many Kurds still felt the gesture fell far short of their needs. In the Kurdish stronghold of Qamishli, hundreds of residents protested the deal, chanting in support of defending their “heroes”, the SDF.
There is immense work to be done if Syria is serious about turning its back on the attitudes that underpinned the Ba’athist dictatorship of Assad — and, from a Kurdish perspective, that challenge has become much more difficult because of recent events.
[Salon] China's Arctic Leverage - Guest Postby Lily Ottinger
China's Arctic Leverage
Russian polar dominance is on thin ice
Lily Ottinger
Jan 20, 2026
Trump claims the US needs Greenland to counter Chinese presence in the Arctic, but in fact, Beijing’s Arctic strategy appears to prioritize encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence, not Denmark’s. Today’s guest post was authored by Nima Khorrami, a Stockholm-based Research Associate at the Arctic Institute, Centre for Circumpolar Security Studies.
The Arctic has re-emerged as a central arena in global geopolitics; not only as the shortest strategic corridor between the United States and Russia but also as a rapidly militarising frontier where intensified great-power rivalry meets accelerating climate transformation. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has sharpened the Alliance’s northern posture, while Russia’s expansive military footprint and China’s expanding scientific and economic presence further internationalise what was once thought to be a ‘zone of peace’. At the same time, global forces, ranging from population growth and the demand for critical resources to technological innovation, are integrating the region more deeply into global systems of trade, energy, and communication.
The economic and technological stakes are particularly significant. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) offers a potential alternative to both Eurasian land corridors and the Suez Canal, cutting transit times between Asia and Europe by nearly half and thus holding major implications for global logistics. The Arctic is also home to vast reserves of oil and gas alongside critical minerals such as nickel, cobalt, and titanium. Realising this potential, however, depends on two infrastructural pillars: icebreakers and small modular reactors (SMRs). Icebreakers are indispensable for maintaining year-round navigation along the NSR, while SMRs offer scalable and affordable energy solutions for remote settlements and resource extraction. Together, they underpin both the material and symbolic dimensions of Arctic power.
Yet, an increasingly overlooked dynamic in discussions of Sino-Russian cooperation in the Arctic is the trajectory of Russia’s icebreaking industry — and the implications this holds for the ‘balance of leverage’ between Moscow and Beijing. The conventional view assumes that China’s Arctic ambitions remain conditioned by Russia’s willingness to grant access, with Moscow acting as the gatekeeper to the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
Yet this assumption is becoming increasingly tenuous. Russia’s shipbuilding sector faces deepening structural constraints: sanctions, labour shortages, cost overruns, and the accelerating obsolescence of its fleet. Projections to 2035 suggest that Russia’s operational icebreaker fleet — currently standing at around 45 vessels — could contract to between 25 and 35 as retirements outpace new deliveries. Flagship projects are delayed, and major shipyards such as Zvezda (Звезда) and the Baltic Shipyard are financially strained and technologically dependent on sanctioned foreign components. Even under favourable scenarios, the outcome looks more like stagnation than renewal. This erosion of capability calls into question Russia’s ability to independently sustain year-round NSR operations at a time when the Kremlin is tying the Arctic ever more tightly to its great-power identity and future economic strategy.
The effects of sanctions, however, extend beyond immediate access to Western equipment. They disrupt complex supply chains of high-grade steel, propulsion systems, control electronics, and precision engineering tools, which cannot be rapidly substituted by domestic production. Financing pressures compound these difficulties. Russian banks face higher borrowing costs and limited access to foreign credit lines, constraining large-scale investment in long-lead infrastructure projects. Moreover, the departure of European engineering firms has left gaps in certification, safety testing, and design integration that Russia’s domestic industry struggles to fill. These interlocking industrial bottlenecks resemble systemic weaknesses that inflict other sectors of the Russian economy, including semiconductors and drones, where external isolation and insufficient domestic innovation capacity reinforce one another.
China, by contrast, is quietly moving in the opposite direction. Its fleet remains modest in absolute terms but is steadily expanding, with two icebreakers already operational and several heavier vessels under construction. The progress is gradual, yet the determination is clear: Beijing is building technical competence in polar operations, just as Russia struggles to preserve its existing capacity. Although China is unlikely to surpass Russia in fleet numbers before 2035, its relative trajectory grants it increasing leverage in shaping the terms of its Arctic cooperation with Moscow.
One of China’s five currently operational icebreakers. The name XuÄ› Lóng 雪龙 means “The Snow Dragon.” Source.
These diverging trends make some form of functional cooperation increasingly likely and, for Moscow, perhaps unavoidable. Russia’s desire to maintain year-round NSR operations collides with the limits of its industrial base, while China seeks opportunities to gain experience and influence without challenging Russian sovereignty outright. Such cooperation, in turn, could take several forms. Jointly operated or co-developed icebreakers may be deployed along the NSR, nominally under Russian command but incorporating Chinese financing, technology, or crew. Joint shipbuilding projects — whether at Zvezda, the Baltic Shipyard, or in Chinese yards — could accelerate production and fill critical component gaps. The key point is not that Russia will one day lease Chinese vessels to patrol its Arctic waters, but rather that the two sides will converge around joint ventures and technical partnerships as the only feasible means of sustaining capability.
This emerging interdependence, moreover, is likely not confined to the icebreaking sector; it may also extend into other strategic domains where Russia’s industrial constraints meet China’s growing technological capacity. Small modular reactors (SMRs) exemplify this broader pattern. They are central to Russia’s Arctic vision, offering scalable and continuous power for remote settlements, critical infrastructure, and energy-intensive extractive projects such as mining. Russia currently operates the world’s first floating SMR, the KLT-40S, and is constructing its first land-based unit in Yakutia to supply both local communities and nearby mining operations.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) notes that eighteen countries are currently developing SMR designs, but Russia and China dominate the field. As of mid-2025, only two SMRs are commercially operational — one Russian and one Chinese. Yet the same sanctions, supply-chain disruptions, and financing pressures that hamper Russia’s shipbuilding sector also threaten its ability to manufacture and deploy SMRs at scale. China, meanwhile, brought its first land-based SMR online in December 2023, outpacing Russia and other competitors. Should these trends persist, Russia may find itself relying on Chinese technology, components, and investment to advance its Arctic nuclear projects, just as it increasingly does in shipbuilding.
By sustaining Russia’s symbolic strength while deepening its material dependence, Beijing gains influence at minimal political cost. Joint ventures in icebreaker construction and SMR deployment allow China to accumulate operational experience, Arctic know-how, and infrastructural leverage without openly challenging Russian sovereignty. The result is a quiet hybrid dependency: Moscow retains formal control while China increasingly provides the technological and financial backbone. For Moscow, this evolving dependency is both a source of unease and a pragmatic necessity. Russian analysts acknowledge that China’s growing financial and technological role carries latent risks of overreliance, yet they also stress that current geopolitical isolation leaves few viable alternatives. The prevailing view is that partnership with China must continue, but within clearly delineated boundaries that preserve control over strategic assets such as ports, nuclear facilities, and resource extraction zones. In practice, this means balancing rhetorical assertions of sovereignty with quiet efforts to diversify partners, indigenise technologies, and craft legal safeguards that prevent a gradual erosion of decision-making autonomy. Russia’s approach thus blends cautious accommodation with latent anxiety — a recognition that sustaining Arctic ambitions increasingly depends on the very partner whose influence it seeks to contain.
Seen this way, it is reasonable to assert that the balance of leverage in the context of Sino-Russo Arctic partnership is quietly yet decisively shifting in China’s favour; a dynamic now formalised through joint NSR governance mechanisms such as the 2025 Rosatom–Chinese Ministry of Transport agreement, which enshrines cooperation while entrenching material asymmetry beneath the surface of parity. In this sense, the evolving Arctic relationship mirrors the logic of Sino-Russian engagement in Central Asia, where China has become the dominant economic actor while carefully avoiding direct intrusion into defence and security affairs. The Arctic may soon follow a similar path: symbolic parity concealing a growing asymmetry.
For Western policymakers, this dynamic suggests that expecting China to act as a counterweight to Russian Arctic ambitions is misguided. Beijing’s strategic interest lies in maintaining Russia’s façade of sovereignty while quietly embedding itself within the material fabric of Russia’s Arctic infrastructure. For Russia, this arrangement masks reliance beneath the rhetoric of partnership, preserving the narrative of Arctic sovereignty even as the material basis for that sovereignty erodes. For China, the partnership represents an opportunity to build leverage over Moscow while expanding its influence in the far north.
Note from John Whitbeck
FM: John Whitbeck
Transmitted below is an AI-generated image which Donald Trump has posted in advance of his speech at Davos tomorrow.
European Union leaders are scheduled to meet in Brussels on Thursday to try to agree on a coordinated European response.
I can envision two distinct responses, both of which would be politically and intellectually coherent:
1. Since European leaders consistently and properly insist that the future of Greenland can only be decided by the people of Greenland, European governments could seek to defuse and defang Trump's lust for legacy-enhancing territorial expansion, which clearly has nothing remotely to do with "security" and which is probably enhanced by the "Mercator projection" on flat maps, which makes Greenland look even bigger than it really is, by organizing and promptly scheduling a self-determination referendum through which the people of Greenland could choose democratically between maintenance of the their current political status and the U.S. government's best offer to them, committing European governments to respect the result of this referendum and urging the U.S. government to do likewise.
2. Since European leaders could and should view the challenge posed by Trump as one whose significance extends well beyond Greenland, they could decide to get up off their knees, to stop groveling and boot-licking, to assert the permanent independence of their once great countries from Israeli/American domination and control and, by doing so, to make Europe proud and respectable again, necessarily terminating Europe's subservient military relationship with the United States in the process.
Since it is exceedingly difficult for 27 governments to agree on any coherent foreign policy position, it is more likely that, as usual, an incoherent "compromise" which Trump would view as further evidence of European weakness will be reached. Of course, the traditional European "compromise" has been to fall dutifully in line behind whatever policy the United States is advocating on any issue, but, with the adversary and potential enemy now being the United States itself, anything is possible. We are living in interesting times.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115925897257210763
Truth Details
Monday, January 19, 2026
[Salon] Surviving the Hybrid War: How Iran Thwarted a Western-Israeli Regime-Change Attack - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Surviving the Hybrid War: How Iran Thwarted a Western-Israeli Regime-Change Attack
Summary: recent violent unrest in Iran was not a spontaneous protest but a sophisticated foreign-orchestrated hybrid attack, involving economic sabotage, armed cells, and digital disinformation coordinated by Western and Israeli intelligence to overthrow the government. Though Western media promoted a false narrative to justify military intervention the operation failed, a sign of declining imperial power.
The events that have unfolded in Iran over the past weeks represent a pivotal and brutal confrontation, one that has been profoundly misrepresented by a near-universal tsunami of Western propaganda. What began in late December 2025 as protests over economic hardship - a condition directly engineered by years of crippling American sanctions - rapidly escalated into a violent, coordinated insurrection. As the dust settles and the full picture emerges from a flood of videos, official reports, and material evidence, the inescapable truth is clear: this was not a spontaneous popular uprising. It was a sophisticated, foreign-orchestrated hybrid attack, a deliberate “October 7th”-style assault designed by Israeli and Western intelligence agencies to shatter the Iranian state. Its comprehensive failure marks a historic inflection point, revealing both the desperate aggression of a declining imperialist order and the resilient defiance of a nation under siege.
To comprehend the crisis of January 2026, one must first examine its manufactured origins in the preceding year. In March 2025, the Trump administration intensified its “maximum pressure” campaign, sanctioning Chinese refineries that purchased Iranian oil and deliberately triggering the rial’s catastrophic freefall. By autumn, hyperinflation meant the cost of food and rent consumed 130% of an average worker's salary, a state of affairs openly celebrated by US officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted that American sanctions had put Iran’s “currency and living conditions in freefall,” proving the economic misery was a deliberate weapon. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani gloated that US sanctions had forced Iranians to sell their organs in the street. This engineered destitution provided the tinder for the unrest.
The spark was lit with precise geopolitical timing. Coinciding with a meeting between Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a sudden and suspicious crash of the Iranian currency occurred, a classic tactic of financial warfare. If a single financier like George Soros could break the British pound, the combined might of the US Treasury and intelligence services could certainly destabilise Iran. This manufactured collapse ignited initial, genuine protests in Tehran's Grand Bazaar on 28 December. Yet these organic economic demonstrations were swiftly hijacked and transformed into something far more sinister.
What followed was not a protest movement but a paramilitary operation. The comforting Western narrative of “brave, peaceful protesters” was utterly dismantled by a deluge of video evidence emerging from Iran itself. The footage depicts a chilling reality: groups of black-clad, agile operatives, described by eyewitnesses to the Financial Times as looking “like commandos”, firing hundreds of rounds in coordinated assaults on police stations; the brutal murder and beheading of unarmed security volunteers; and systematic arson attacks on over 250 mosques, shrines, libraries, and fire stations, where firefighters were burned alive. This was not civil disobedience but urban terrorism.
The hardware of this rebellion betrayed its foreign provenance. Iranian security forces announced the seizure of 60,000 weapons in Bushehr, all destined for insurgents in Tehran. Most damningly, the New York Times itself, while peddling a fairy-tale narrative, admitted that roughly 50,000 Starlink terminals were active in Iran. This admission is a stunning self-indictment: how could a “ragtag network of activists” in a heavily sanctioned country possibly afford or smuggle in tens of millions of dollars worth of cutting-edge, embargoed technology? The implausibility reveals the truth. These terminals, alongside weapons and funding, were supplied and distributed through intelligence networks to various militant and separatist groups inside Iran, creating a distributed network of armed cells primed for coordinated action.
Had the coup succeeded, Iran would have faced years of chaos, Palestine would have been wiped out, and Zionist hegemony would have been locked in place
This was a meticulously planned regime-change operation, not a popular revolt. Iranian intelligence revealed a detailed US- and Israeli-linked plot, spearheaded by the exiled Reza Pahlavi’s key ally Bijan Kian. This project, years in the making, involved drafting a post-overthrow constitution, funding cyber operations, and even grooming a symbolic female figurehead to front the coup. The plan aimed to use small, armed cells to seize key points once nationwide chaos was triggered, a model copied from insurgencies in Sudan and Venezuela.
While this violent insurrection raged, the Western media performed its designated role in the hybrid war: manufacturing consent for military intervention. It was a textbook propaganda blitz, chillingly reminiscent of the lies that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Major outlets performed a staggering act of omission, willfully ignoring the overwhelming video evidence of terrorist violence to frame events solely as a government “crackdown on peaceful protests.” They became megaphones for grotesquely inflated casualty figures, uncritically citing numbers from US-government-funded NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy-backed Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. CBS News and the Mossad-linked outlet Iran International propagated claims of 12,000 to 20,000 dead, numbers designed to scream “genocide” and justify a “humanitarian” invasion. Laughably, the UK government, which overthew Iranian democracy in 1953 and has arrested thousands for peacefully protesting the ongoing US/Israeli genocide, demanded the Iranian authorities respect the right to protest.
The stage management was brazen. The performance of US intelligence asset Masih Alinejad - who spoke of “millions massacred” and broke down in tears at the UN Security Council - was broadcast widely without the crucial context revealed in a 2009 State Department cable. Her act was a direct echo of the “Kuwaiti incubators” lie that fuelled the 1991 Gulf War. Alinejad has received over $830,000 directly from the US government for propaganda projects against Iran.
Meanwhile, editorial pages openly advocated for destruction. The Wall Street Journal argued for the dismemberment of Iran, suggesting the “best option may be to help secession happen.” The scale of the narrative assault was immense; The Guardian alone ran 74 articles on Iran in seven days, while the BBC disgracefully misquoted the Iranian Supreme Leader and misrepresented vast pro-government rallies as anti-regime protests.
The digital dimension of this information war was equally brazen. An Al Jazeera investigation exposed a massive Israeli astroturfing campaign (#FreeThePersianPeople), which used AI-generated content and fake accounts to promote the restoration of the monarchy and call for US military strikes. A separate Haaretz investigation revealed an Israeli state-linked influence operation using fake accounts to push Reza Pahlavi - who had publicly called for government workers to be killed - as a viable alternative. Most tellingly, Israeli officials and media openly boasted of their involvement. A Channel 14 journalist tweeted, “foreign actors are arming the protesters...Everyone is free to guess who is behind it,” while phones from arrested rioters were found to have a video of a woman - clearly a foreign intelligence agent - giving instructions on how they should act when caught.
Faced with this unprecedented multi-front assault - economic, military, digital, and psychological - the Iranian state did not crumble. Its decisive counterstroke was to identify and neutralise the attack’s central nervous system: the Starlink-enabled coordination network. With Russian technical assistance, Iranian electronic warfare units deployed advanced systems to disrupt the GPS signals upon which Starlink depends, effectively blinding and isolating the insurgent cells. Once this digital umbrella was shattered, the coordinated groups lost all cohesion. Iranian security forces, now able to pinpoint the remaining terminals and armed cells, moved decisively to quell the violence. The insurrection was defeated not by a crackdown on peaceful dissent, but by a sovereign state successfully neutralising a foreign-funded terrorist invasion.
The calm that returned was underscored by vast popular marches across Iran, with thousands of citizens fervently denouncing foreign interference and reaffirming national sovereignty - scenes that were almost entirely blacked out in Western coverage. The events of January 2026 constitute a second failed imperialist onslaught against Iran in just seven months, following the unsuccessful US-Israeli military strikes in June 2025. This was a test of unprecedented scale, combining years of sanction-driven destabilisation with a sophisticated, boots-and-bytes hybrid offensive. Its success would have rewritten the geopolitical landscape: Iran would have been plunged into decades of chaos, Palestine would have been obliterated, and the racist apartheid genocidal Zionist project would have cemented its hegemony over the region.
That this did not happen is of profound historical significance. It demonstrates that the coercive power of the Western imperial order - its ability to economically strangle, militarily sabotage, and narratively smother a nation - is meeting its limits. Iran, composed and focused, weathered the storm. The old CIA-Mossad playbook of manufacturing chaos and screaming “right to protect” was executed in full view and still failed. This failure is a stark testament to Iranian resilience and a clear signal that the era of effortless regime change is over. The empire’s most powerful weapons - sanctions, propaganda, and proxy terror - are being met, and countered, on the ground. The decline of unipolar domination is not an abstract theory; it is being written, defiantly, in the streets of Tehran.
Religion & Politics | Armstrong Economics
Religion & Politics | Armstrong Economics
Justinian Al Malek
QUESTION: Marty, you have said that every religion has undergone some schism. That implies that governments have also seen splits and even civil wars. Is this what Socrates has uncovered that unity cannot exit in ant group setting?
Byzantine Iconoclasm 1
ANSWER: There have been major upheavals in religion, such as the Byzantine Iconoclasm, a profound religious and political crisis that rocked the Byzantine Empire for over a century (with two main phases: 726–787 and 814–842 AD). While the act of putting Christ’s image on coinage by Emperor Justinian II (c. 692 AD) was a highly significant and a controversial event that intensified theological debate and foreshadowed the coming conflict, it is not considered the beginning of Byzantine Iconoclasm. However, the Muslims were using the Byzantine coinage until this event. That is what caused Islam to begin to issue their own coinage.
[Salon] Trump’s Greenland threats send a visceral shock through Europe - Guest Post by Simon Nixon, Washington Post
Trump’s Greenland threats send a visceral shock through Europe
U.S. tariffs against eight European nations will start Feb. 1 unless the president’s demands are met.
January 18, 2026
Danish soldiers disembark at the harbor in Nuuk, Greenland, on Sunday. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/via REUTERS)
By Simon Nixon
Simon Nixon writes the “Wealth of Nations” Substack newsletter, focusing on European political economy.
It is hard to overstate the shock in much of Europe in response to President Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs against countries accused of trying to thwart his goal of annexing Greenland. ‘’We will not let ourselves be blackmailed,” said Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer: “Completely wrong.” French President Emmanuel Macron: “Unacceptable.” Their countries, along with Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, will be hit with 10 percent tariffs, possibly rising to 25 percent, starting Feb. 1. What was their sin? Daring to send a handful of troops to Greenland in a feeble show of European solidarity.
For the past year, Europeans have watched with alarm as Trump has appeared to try to actively tip the scales of the Ukraine war in favor of Russia. They accepted a humiliatingly one-sided trade deal last summer in the hope that doing so might buy leverage with Trump in Ukraine peace talks. They read with alarm a new National Security Strategy that was far more critical of European countries than of Russia and China, and which contained an explicit threat to intervene in domestic politics on behalf of parties that many Europeans consider extremist.
But never in their darkest moments did anyone imagine, despite Trump’s occasional musings about Greenland, that the United States might threaten to seize — perhaps even militarily — the sovereign territory of a European Union and NATO member state. The reaction in Europe has been emotional, even visceral. Not because Greenland is of vital strategic importance to Europe, or because of any atavistic attachment to a barely inhabited, remote island far from the continent, whose approximately 57,000 inhabitants have long signaled their desire to break with Denmark.Follow
The agitated European response is because Trump’s demands represent such a flagrant assault on the most cherished principles of the international rules-based order — in which nowhere is more fully invested than Europe, and which underpins its own internal order.
Yet the depth of the emotional reaction also reflects the extent to which Trump’s aggression has revealed Europe’s own weakness. As the president and his acolytes have ramped up their rhetoric, so too is there excitable talk in European political circles and among analysts and commentators in the media about possible reprisals and retaliation against the U.S.
Some have called for Europe to threaten to close U.S. military bases if Trump tries to seize Greenland by force. Others have called for trade sanctions. The European Parliament leaders say they will pause the ratification of the E.U.-U.S. trade deal agreed last summer. Macron has called for the activation of the E.U.’s anti-coercion instrument, the bloc’s ultimate trade weapon.
Yet, as always in Europe, the challenge will be to forge a united position around any one course of action. Even amid such a fundamental breach of trust, there will be many arguing, at least in private, for the need to reach a deal with Trump that keeps the security relationship with America intact. Countries close to the Ukrainian border, nervous over Russia’s expansionist designs, will ask why their security should be jeopardized for Greenland’s.
Will southern European countries that have played a minimal role in supporting Ukraine be willing to pay a high cost to defend Danish sovereignty over Greenland?
Britain, whose nuclear deterrent is dependent on U.S. maintenance, and whose defense industry — including a new nuclear submarine program — is deeply entwined with America’s, would be unlikely to break even with a rogue U.S.
Similarly, the barrier to coordinated trade reprisals is likely to be high. Much will depend on whether and how Trump’s latest tariff threats are applied. Many details remain unclear, and he has backed off tariff threats before. But while the stalling of the E.U.-U.S. trade deal now seems certain, the E.U. struggled last year to agree on even a modest package of retaliatory measures in response to Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, and may do so again.
Activating the anti-coercion instrument is a lengthy, multilayered process requiring the backing of a qualified majority of E.U. member states. Europeans know that in a trade war, America has escalation dominance.
They also know that their best hope of thwarting Trump lies in the U.S. itself. Their hopes will be pinned on the prospect of a bipartisan alliance in Congress acting to block the threatened use of force against a NATO ally, and perhaps on the U.S. military refusing to obey an order that many argue would be unconstitutional. Yet even here, optimism will be tempered by the knowledge that Congress has so far proved little impediment to Trump’s exercises of executive authority.
Nonetheless, Europeans are right to warn that there will inevitably be a cost to this historic breach of trust. The humiliation will likely reignite latent anti-Americanism never far beneath the surface in parts of Europe — including among some of the far-right parties that the Trump administration sees as its “civilizational” allies. Consumer boycotts of American goods, similar to the mass rejection of Elon Musk’s Tesla cars last year, could harm trade. Investment may be put on hold.
Perhaps the humiliation will also be the spark that ignites a far bigger push toward European integration and strategic autonomy — hardly what the Trump administration is seeking. Or perhaps it will lead to greater fragmentation, weakness and decline, if Europeans blame technocrats in Brussels for this fiasco.
Either way, Trump’s attempts to annex Greenland threaten to be the greatest geopolitical shock that Europe has faced since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. That was a moment for joyous celebration. The only people celebrating this time will be Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.
Sunday, January 18, 2026
[Salon] Fw: Chas Freeman: "The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela" (SPEECH) -
To:
Subject: Chas Freeman: "The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela" (SPEECH)
TO: Distinguished Recipients
FM: John Whitbeck
As people around the world wake up every morning wondering whether the United States or Israel has attacked yet another country while they slept, transmitted below is the latest wisdom from my exceptionally wise distinguished recipient Ambassador Chas Freeman.
Remarks to an Emergency Roundtable
The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
By Video, 12 January 2026
We are here to avert a tragedy – the apparently inexorable unfolding of foreseeably terrible events. As German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has just warned us, we are in the midst of a “breakdown of values” that is turning the world “into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want” and where entire regions or countries are treated as the property of a few great powers.
My country, the United States of America, is the most powerful in the world. It has now followed its Israeli protectorate into protracted war on the truth, repudiation of the rule of law, and shameless bullying and violations of the sovereignty of all who oppose it. The already wealthy once again feel free to rob the poor with impunity. We are back to the law of the jungle and aggressive imperialism. Ever more governments emulate the Mafia’s protection racket practices and intimidation techniques. If this is not stopped, we are headed for a second Dark Age.
The purpose of international law has always been to ensure that the strong could no longer victimize the weak. Insistence on this principle, even if imperfectly respected, is what has separated civilization from barbarism. If the law is no protection, nations will be forced to rearm against potential attack by others. If they face the threat of nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, they will build their own weapons of mass destruction to deter this. If alliances are no longer reliable, nations will hedge or simply abandon them to combat or cut their own deals with adversaries. This is not speculation. It is the visible trend of our times.
As we have seen in the case of the Gaza genocide, words alone cannot halt atrocities. Nor can unenforced decisions of the United Nations or international courts. Intensifying citizen protests have failed to wean allegedly democratic governments from tolerance, complicity in, or support for increasingly blatant crimes against humanity and brutal efforts to subjugate or curtail the freedom of independent nations and peoples.
The collective West continues to profess that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But this now has no credibility. We support Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, its efforts to dismember Syria, its depredations in Lebanon, and its preparations for renewed aggression against Iran and Yemen. To defend this hypocrisy, our democracies now emulate authoritarian regimes by suppressing freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. We have abandoned due process to punish anyone who effectively refutes the official narrative. Evidently, we believe that it is necessary to betray Western values to save them. This is a disastrous misjudgment.
In the new world disorder, neither the norms of international law nor public opinion constrain the behavior of great powers. They have learned how to manipulate their citizens’ perceptions of reality to assure public support and achieve impunity for their amoral abuses of power. Mass media faithfully echo official propaganda, journalists self-interestedly amplify it, while corporate media platforms treat anything that challenges it as seditious and ban it.
Western media refused to consider or report the strategic anxieties that prompted Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. They portrayed the U.S. effort to exploit Ukraine’s distress to requisition its rare earths as compassion, not greed.
Unconcealed vanity and hubris have now brought about U.S. naval acts of piracy against Venezuela and murders of its citizens in its near seas, the decapitation of its government, the theft of its natural resources, and its proposed reduction to an economic colony of the United States. So much for the respect for national sovereignty that is the foundation of the United Nations Charter and international law!
The United States now unabashedly presents itself as an untrustworthy expansionist power that substitutes unilateral diktats, intimidation, and the use of force for diplomacy. This gangster logic is contemptuous of the interests and honor of other countries. It now menaces Greenland, a self-governing part of Denmark, a member of NATO and a loyal ally of the United States. The transformation of the U.S. from protector to predator threatens not just to splinter the core of Western civilization but to unravel the transatlantic alliance.
Washington seems to have decided to abandon Europe to its fate in order to impose a tyrannical monopoly on the political economy of the Western Hemisphere. It aims to expel the influence of competing great powers and keep them at bay, especially China, without regard to the interests of those the United States proposes to dominate. This brutal reinvention of the Monroe Doctrine seems less likely to bring the nations of South America to heel than to encourage them to seek Chinese and other foreign protection against North American control. The kickoff was military aggression against Venezuela, but Washington has made it clear that this was merely an opening move, with much more belligerence to come.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to defy international law and norms of human decency with impunity. It seeks to annihilate those Palestinians it cannot subject to apartheid. It treats the scheduling of negotiating sessions with its opponents as opportunities to murder them, not to make peace. It signs ceasefires only to violate them. Its armed forces and security services routinely invade the sovereignty of its neighbors. It has no plan for peaceful coexistence with them. It aims instead to consolidate a US-backed Israeli sphere of influence in West Asia within which it can continue to expand at will. This is a formula for the ongoing destabilization of the region in endless, escalating warfare and resistance to maltreatment through terrorism. It promises even greater insecurity not just for Israelis but for their Western backers.
The world cannot permit a continued descent into a moral and legal abyss. If governments do not counter lawless behavior with concrete actions, the precedents now being set in Europe, West Asia, and South America will be replicated elsewhere and life everywhere will be increasingly nasty, brutish, and short.
Rhetorical resistance to lawlessness is not enough. We have come to a tipping point. If we cannot now persuade our governments to take effective action to punish and deter further crimes against the Westphalian order of sovereign states, it and the rules-regulated international order it birthed will surely perish from the earth.
We must now acknowledge the reality that the structures we created to promote peace and progress after World War II have finally failed. Their failure is mirrored not only in the absence of effective statecraft to resolve conflicts, but in domestic constitutional crises and the erosion of democratic freedoms everywhere. It is past time for a fundamental reappraisal of institutions and policies that have manifestly failed by the governments responsible for their failure.
In this regard, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is entirely right to make the commonsense argument that peace in Europe demands that Europeans talk to Russia, not just among themselves and to Ukraine. Like it or not, Russia is part of Europe. Without dialogue with Russia about the warfare that threatens Europe and is consuming Ukraine, Europeans cannot resolve the conflict or protect their long-term security interests. The United States is no longer able or willing to do this for them. It is surely anomalous that Europeans should entrust the crafting of a peace that is central to their subcontinent’s stability to amateur envoys of an American president who says he regards them as competitors and who seems to have little interest in them except as wealthy purchasers of American weaponry.
Recent U.S. efforts to subjugate Venezuela underscore the dangerous unrealism of the argument that “every country [including Ukraine] has the right to choose its international alliances” without regard to the impact of their alignment on others. Unscrupulous predators now take what they can; their prey yield what they must. Might may not make right, but it is foolish to ignore it. Whatever Mexico may think about past U.S. aggression, it is careful not to align itself against the United States. Vietnam prudently avoids military alliances aimed at China as Bangladesh does against India. There is no future for a less circumspect approach by Ukraine to its mightier Russian neighbor.
Russian statecraft is dominated by memories of foreign invasion from both the east and west. Moscow’s security anxieties are not irrational. Both France and Germany have invaded Russia. Any peace in Europe must address both Russian anxieties about another Western attack on it, especially as Germany rearms, and Western concerns about Russia. Europeans need to take charge of defining their own destiny. They – non-Russian and Russian alike – are the parties directly at interest in composing a mutually reassuring security architecture for their subcontinent. Prime Minister Meloni deserves the support of other European leaders in a joint effort to engage Russia in dialogue about how peace in Ukraine might help bring forth such an architecture.
Peace in Europe would benefit the entire world, but it alone would not cure the manifest infirmities of our legacy global institutions. If the United Nations Security Council cannot regulate world peace and development or enforce the decisions of the International Court of Justice, we must explore work-arounds and alternatives to it. There is nothing to prevent countries from gathering in ad hoc conferences to agree on the application of collective rules and actions that address common concerns. There is nothing to prevent members of the crippled World Trade Organization from recreating its functions at the regional level. There is no reason to allow the ideal of universality to preclude action at less than universal levels to address and resolve problems that most members of the international community regard as urgent. If the U.N. system, like that of the League of Nations, has failed, it is time to discuss how to repair or replace it.
The breakdown in values to which German President Steinmeier referred has engendered a disastrous collapse of international law and institutions. It took a devastating disintegration of global order in two world wars to give birth, respectively, to the League of Nations and the United Nations. The current world disorder could well produce another global war, this one nuclear and possibly fatal to our species. Surely, it is in our collective interest to forestall this by taking action to reconfigure the dying 20th century system to create something better.
I sense that our governments are beginning to understand that, in the newly anarchic circumstances, they cannot continue business as usual. We must demand that they meet the challenges of the day and no longer allow them to silence those who insist they do so.
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