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Saturday, April 11, 2026
Friday, April 10, 2026
Thursday, April 9, 2026
The Empire of Cannibals -
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/the-empire-of-cannibals?publication_id=65949&post_id=193726985&isFreemail=true&r=1y80w&triedRedirect=true
[Salon] Trump and Netanyahu face a reckoning - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Trump and Netanyahu face a reckoning
Summary: the ceasefire that Donald Trump accepted has stopped the war and with the president signalling he does not want a resumption Tehran has secured a significant victory over its greatest enemies.
Is this the emperor has no clothes moment for Donald Trump? The two week ceasefire he announced at the 11th hour, literally the 11th hour saw him “staring into the abyss in the Trumpiest way possible, as if he were a reality-show producer teasing the season finale” as The Economist’s Greg Carlstrom put it.
The New York Times in an exclusive piece took readers into the Situation Room on 11 February when Benjamin Netanyahu sold Trump the ultimate bad deal convincing him that a quick win was possible and that regime change was a few easy steps away from being achieved:
Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.
He also baldly claim that the Iranian people would rush into the streets to overthrow the regime abetted by Mossad’s intervention to encourage rioting and revolution (see our newsletter of 19 January.)
In the days that followed the Times says that various people questioned the narrative Netanyahu had stitched together. The head of the CIA John Ratcliffe told the president that the notion of achieving regime change was “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a tad earthier. He told Trump it was “bullshit.”
And yet no one, other than the vice president JD Vance, argued in a forceful way that the war was utter folly. Vance noted that the Iranians would close the Strait of Hormuz with huge consequences for, amongst other impacts, the price of petrol at the pump. He warned the war would alienate his supporters which it did (as Jon Hoffman argued in our podcast of 1 April pointing to a growing split between MAGA always Trumpers and America Firsters angry that the president had broken his promise not to engage in foreign wars.)
Trump brushed aside those concerns because as he told Tucker Carlson who had also intervened at a late stage “everything will be OK because it always is.” The president’s instincts were what mattered and those around him accepted against all the evidence and all the odds that he must be right when in fact he could not have been more wrong.
The president claimed a win even as in an extraordinary volte-face he embraced the Iranian counter-proposal to his 15 point surrender document:
We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated.
Iran has declared a "historic and crushing defeat" of the US and Israel after 40 days of war, forcing Washington to accept a 10-point Iranian proposal that includes a permanent ceasefire, the lifting of all sanctions, and the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
The defence and security analyst and our podcast contributor Andreas Krieg (you can find his latest AD podcast here) used social media to describe the ceasefire deal as:
the worst strategic defeat for the US since Vietnam and possibly the worst strategic defeat for Israel ever. IF the ceasefire term are translated into an agreement, Iran will be able to rebuild capabilities within a year.
Benjamin Netanyahu had no choice but to confirm that Israel would join the ceasefire while attempting to save face by declaring the war against Lebanon will continue. As Haaretz noted the prime minister in doing so had not achieved two of his key aims when he and Trump launched the war:
The first is Iran's nuclear program, with the fate of its enriched uranium still unclear. There is also, for now, no Iranian commitment to abandon its ballistic missile program, which Netanyahu has defined as an "existential threat" and which has been a primary focus of Israeli air force operations over the past month.
Netanyahu’s chief opposition rival Yair Lapid who had backed the war when it was launched was quick to go for the jugular:
There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in our history. Israel was not even at the table when decisions were made on core issues of our national security…. Netanyahu failed diplomatically, failed strategically and did not meet a single goal he himself set.
Iran’s National Security Council issued a statement that concluded “Iran has achieved a massive victory and forced criminal America to accept its 10-point plan.” While the degree of the victory will be debated it is without doubt a win for the Iranian regime. Not only has it survived by playing leverage of the Strait of Hormuz with great skill it has won a huge propaganda success by forcing the world’s most powerful military to come to the negotiating table on its terms.
The war has also forced a reckoning on the Gulf states. Another of our podcast contributors Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil in a social media posting argues:
the Gulf will be more vulnerable than ever before and therefore in need of U.S. help. But Gulf populations have begun to question the United States’ reliability and the value of hosting American bases. To better protect themselves, Gulf leaders must therefore now try to wrest some autonomy from the United States by strengthening cooperation, foremost among themselves.
(Sanam Vakil’s latest AD podcast Iran and regime survival is here.)
For Trump a career both in business and politics that has long defied gravity has crashed to earth with a thud that is echoing around the world and most emphatically in America. The loyalists he has surrounded himself with in his second term have seen the would be emperor without any clothes. That will shake them. But beyond the confines of the White House his attempt to sell to a majority of Americans that the ceasefire was a win is not likely to succeed with political implications for the president and the party he had claimed to make his own.
Netanyahu too will face a reckoning. His brutal and genocidal war in Gaza, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the destruction of Lebanon and the ruthless bombing campaign he and the Americans inflicted on Iran have turned Israel into a global pariah state. Most crucially his self-serving policies have squandered support for Israel in the country that matters most: the United States.
Benjamin Netanyahu had boasted that the war would change the Middle East forever. It has but not in the way he thought it would.
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
[Salon] Syria on the edge of regional escalation - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Syria on the edge of regional escalation
Summary: Syria is suffering collateral damage as Israel and the US pursue their war against Iran; with its airspace violated by both sides and the economy reeling a country just beginning to emerge from 14 years of civil war risks being pulled further into the conflict.
We thank Sirwan Kajjo for today’s newsletter. Sirwan, a regular contributor to the AD podcast, is a Kurdish American journalist based in Washington D.C. focusing on Kurdish politics, Islamic militancy, extremism, and conflict in the Middle East and beyond. He is the author of Nothing But Soot about a twentysomething Kurdish man whose quest for a permanent home never ends. You can find his latest podcast here.
It is unusual to see Syria not directly involved in a conflict that includes Iran. Under the leadership of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country has so far avoided direct military engagement in the ongoing U.S.-Israel-Iran war.
Yet despite its formal neutrality, Syria remains deeply entangled in the broader regional dynamics surrounding the war. As the conflict continues, the risk of spillover grows, making it more plausible that Syria could find itself pulled into a wider war with ominous consequences.
Syria is already functionally entangled in the conflict. Its airspace has been used both to carry out attacks against Iran and to intercept Iranian missiles and drones. In practice, Damascus lacks the capacity to enforce or deny control of its airspace, meaning its protestations carry little practical weight in determining who operates there.
From Tehran’s perspective, however, this reality could be interpreted as complicity. Given Iran’s increasingly aggressive actions toward Gulf states since the outset of the war, and should military pressure from the United States and Israel intensify, Iran may expand its regional response to include Syria directly.
On Friday a large group of Syrian pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the UAE embassy in Damascus protesting at the country’s support for Israel amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Syria has seen incidents in which Israeli air defence systems intercept Israel-bound Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. These engagements, often unfolding over Syrian territory, have resulted in both civilian casualities and material damage. A Syrian base near the border with Jordan and Iraq, which until recently hosted US forces, was also struck by drones launched from Iraq, likely by Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Iran’s Iraqi proxies have also launched drone attacks on multiple occasions on two US military installations in Syria’s Hasakah region.
The economic impact of this war is equally visible. For a country still reeling from 14 years of civil war, any regional escalation inevitably casts a long shadow over its fragile recovery. This is especially true for Syria, whose rebuilding efforts remain heavily dependent on regional Arab partners for fuel supplies, investment and broader economic relief. Syria’s energy sector was the first to feel the impact of the war. Just two days after the conflict began on February 28, the Syrian Ministry of Energy announced that daily electricity hours would be reduced due to disruptions in natural gas supplies transiting through Jordan. Syria receives much of its natural gas from Egypt, which in turn imports from Israel – whose natural gas exports were indefinitely suspended on the first day of the war.
Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been major financial backers of Syria’s interim government since the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime. They have pledged substantial investment initiatives aimed at reviving Syria’s devastated economy. However, as Iran intensifies attacks on Gulf states and their infrastructure, their priorities may shift inward, especially as oil production declines significantly. This could reduce their capacity and willingness to sustain external economic commitments.
Prices of everyday commodities have risen sharply, driven by higher shipping costs from regional markets. Economists estimate that inflation for some essential goods climbed between 20 and 40 percent two weeks after the start of the war. This is an especially severe burden in a country where 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Syria remains a devastated country, still grappling with significant domestic challenges. Damascus’s efforts to avoid becoming a direct participant in the conflict are rooted in this reality. But Syria’s ostensible neutrality is less a strategic choice than a reflection of its vulnerability. Lacking both the capacity to control its own territory and the resilience to absorb further shocks, Damascus is navigating a conflict whose consequences it cannot fully avoid. The longer the war persist, the more tenuous this posture becomes. With no end in sight for this conflict, Syria risks once again becoming not just a bystander, but a battleground where external rivalries are projected onto a fragile state still struggling to stand on its own.
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