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Trump tore up the nuclear deal in 2018. Tehran kept it alive for another year, and that was not weakness. It was strategy.
I’ve had this article sitting in storage waiting for the right moment to publish it. Tonight, Mario Nawfal hosted a debate on Iran that featured Robert Barnes and Matt Tardio. Matt put out so much disinformation and falsities that I believe now is the time to set the record straight about what happened to the JCPOA. I was tempted to attach the prefix, “RE” to Matt’s last name but decided not to go down the ad hominem path. Instead, let’s just deal with the facts.
On May 8, 2018, Donald Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement that Iran had signed with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China three years earlier. He reimposed every sanction the deal had lifted and then piled on more under a policy he called “maximum pressure.” Iran had not violated the agreement. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which had inspectors at every Iranian nuclear site, had certified again and again that Iran was keeping its side of the bargain.
Most people in Washington expected Tehran to respond in kind: throw out the inspectors, restart the centrifuges and race for the bomb. Some in the administration hoped it would, because that would have justified the next step. Iran did the opposite. For a full year it continued to abide by every limit in the agreement, keeping its enrichment at 3.67%, its stockpile under 300 kilograms and its doors open to the IAEA. Understanding why tells you a great deal about how Iran’s leaders actually think, and it undercuts the caricature of a reckless regime that dominates American commentary.
It put the United States in the wrong
The first reason was legitimacy. By staying in the deal, Iran turned the dispute from “Iran versus the world” into “the United States versus everyone else.” Washington, not Tehran, was the party that had broken an agreement endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. Europe, Russia and China all said so. For the first time in decades Iran held the diplomatic high ground, and its leaders understood that giving it up would reunite the coalition that had sanctioned them before 2015.
That calculation paid off in a way few predicted. In August 2020 the Trump administration tried to invoke the deal’s “snapback” clause to restore all UN sanctions on Iran. Thirteen of the fifteen members of the Security Council rejected the move, on the grounds that the United States had left the agreement and could not use its provisions. Had Iran walked out in 2018, the snapback would have been automatic and unanimous. Patience bought Iran protection at the United Nations.
It gave Europe a chance to deliver
The second reason was economic hope. The deal’s value to Iran was sanctions relief, and the Europeans promised to preserve some of it. They created a special trade channel, INSTEX, designed to let European companies do business with Iran without exposure to American sanctions. Tehran gave Europe time to make it work. It never did. INSTEX completed its first transaction, a shipment of medical supplies, only in March 2020, and European companies fled Iran rather than risk being cut off from the American market and the dollar. Iran’s oil exports collapsed from about 2.5 million barrels a day to a few hundred thousand. But Iran’s leaders had to test the European promise before they could declare it worthless, and they did.
It denied Washington and Israel a pretext
The third reason was security. Iran’s leaders knew that any visible move toward a bomb would be used to justify military strikes. Hawks in Washington and Jerusalem had argued for years that the deal only delayed the inevitable; an Iranian walkout would have proved their case. By staying inside the agreement, with inspectors on the ground, Iran made it far harder to sell a war. The IAEA’s reports were Iran’s best defense.
This was consistent with the position Iran’s leadership has held publicly for two decades. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a religious ruling forbidding nuclear weapons, and Iran remained a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty throughout. Whatever one thinks of the sincerity of that position, Iran’s conduct after May 2018 matched it.
It bet on outlasting Trump
The fourth reason was time. Iran’s leaders had watched American politics closely, and they knew presidents come and go. The deal had been negotiated by one administration and abandoned by the next; it could be restored by a third. Staying in the agreement kept that door open. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had staked their political careers on the deal, and they argued that Iran should wait out Trump rather than burn the bridge. Khamenei, who had always been skeptical of American promises, allowed them to make that case. It was a wager that the United States would return to its word.
Why the patience ran out
Iran’s patience was not unlimited, and it was never unconditional. On May 8, 2019, exactly one year after Trump’s announcement, Rouhani said Iran would begin to scale back its commitments in stages. Iran invoked paragraph 36 of the deal itself, which allows a party to stop performing its obligations if another party is in significant non-compliance. Each step was announced in advance, carried out under IAEA observation and described as reversible the moment the United States returned and lifted sanctions. In July 2019 Iran exceeded the stockpile limit and enriched to 4.5%. In November it resumed enrichment at Fordow.
Then came the events that hardened Tehran. The United States killed General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in November 2020. The Natanz enrichment plant was sabotaged in April 2021. Each attack was answered with another step: 20% enrichment, the end of expanded inspections, and finally 60%. The Biden administration had a chance to restore the deal in Vienna in 2021 and 2022, and those talks collapsed too.
Sixty percent as leverage
The most alarming of Iran’s steps, the decision in April 2021 to enrich uranium to 60%, is usually cited as proof that Tehran was racing for a bomb. Look at the timing and the terms and it reads very differently. Talks to restore the deal opened in Vienna on April 6, 2021. Five days later the enrichment hall at Natanz was sabotaged in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Iran announced 60% enrichment two days after that.
The move was a message aimed at the negotiating table. Iran was telling the remaining parties, and the United States, that every month they failed to honor their commitments would cost them, and that the cost would rise. Iran’s government spokesman, Ali Rabiei, said publicly on April 20 that the step “can quickly be reversed” if the other parties returned to their obligations, and that enrichment would then go back to the level set in the 2015 accord. The parliament’s law of December 2020, which ordered higher enrichment and fewer inspections, was written the same way: it tied every escalation to the absence of sanctions relief.
That is leverage, not a breakout. Iran had watched Europe fail to deliver for three years and the United States refuse to return without new concessions. Staying at 3.67% had won it praise and nothing else. Raising the stakes was the only tool it had left to make the other signatories take their own commitments seriously. Iran enriched to 60% so that it would have something to give back.
What the critics will say
Critics make three arguments that challenge my thesis. The first is that Iran was provoking the United States all along through its missile program and its support for allies across the region. But neither was covered by the JCPOA. The deal was deliberately limited to the nuclear program because that was the only issue on which agreement was possible. Holding Iran responsible for breaking terms that were never in the agreement is not a fair test.
The second is that 60% enrichment has no civilian purpose. That is largely true, and it is the point. A bargaining chip has to be valuable to the other side, and 60% was valuable precisely because it worried Washington, Europe and Israel. Iran never enriched to 90%, never left the Non-Proliferation Treaty and never expelled inspectors during this period.
The third is that in early 2023 the IAEA found uranium particles enriched to 83.7% at Fordow. Iran said they were the result of unintended fluctuations in the enrichment process, and the agency did not report any stockpile at that level. Particles are not a stockpile, and a stockpile is not a weapon. Iran’s accumulated 60% material did grow, to about 87.5 kilograms by that report and far more later, and that growth was dangerous. But it was the predictable price of a policy of pressure that gave Iran no reason to stop.
The lesson
The record shows a government that responded to the breach of an international agreement with restraint, then with measured and reversible pressure, and only escalated after its economy had been strangled and its officers and scientists killed. That is not the behavior of a regime determined to build a bomb at the first opportunity. It is the behavior of a government that wanted the deal to survive and concluded, slowly, that the United States would not let it.
There is a lesson here for Washington. When the United States walked away from an agreement that was working, it did not get a better deal. It got an Iran with near-weapons-grade uranium, fewer inspectors and every reason to doubt American promises. Iran kept the JCPOA alive for a year after Trump abandoned it. The question we should be asking is not why Iran eventually stepped back, but why the United States walked away from a deal that was keeping Iran a year away from a bomb.
MOAB Won't End Iran War /Scott Ritter
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive
Streamed live 79 minutes ago
Transcript
Chapter 1: Trump's Iran strategy President Trump said he is considering striking Pickax Mountain in you in Iran with a MOAB, a mother of all battles, a mother of all bombs, sorry. He says though, it's kind of like a tiny nuke, but he's not going to use a nuke, he actually says. But then one has to wonder what is the objective here? What are we trying to get
done? It's unclear from what President Trump has said so far, and we have perfect timing. uh former UN weapons inspector and US Marine Scott Ritter is here to join us today uh to find out what exactly do you think President Trump is doing here? What is the objective of striking Pickax Mountain with a MOAB or anything else? Well, I mean you know I can't uh you know say with absolute certainty what
the um destructive power of the MOAB is. We we know it was used um in Afghanistan. Uh and um its impact was highly exaggerated. Um it didn't have the impact on ISIS that uh that the US military said it had, but it was visually pleasing. I mean, we could see the big bomb drop out. We could see an impact. We saw the big uh flash boom in the in the cloud. I
think that's what we're looking at here. I don't think the MOAB has the ability to uh to destroy Pickax Mountain or any of Iran's deeply buried sites. I think what the president's looking here for here is a visually pleasing moment to create the perception of decisive military intervention so that he could declare victory and get the hell out of Iran. Um, you know, he did this once before. You go back to
uh Operation Midnight Hammer, you know, the B2s and the F-22s and F-35s penetrating Iranian airspace and dropping all those GBU57s on top of the buried facilities and we created nuclear dust. Remember he said nuclear dust. It's all gone. I solved the problem. And the American people, who are the dumbest people in the world today, except your audience about the world we live in, uh, said, "Yeah, nuclear dust, USA all the way,
baby." But then we got into a negotiation in February where it turned out we didn't do a damn thing because the Iranians said, "No, we got all 60 uh we got we we got the totality of the 60% enriched uranium uh in containers. We're willing to hand them over." Remember, they were getting ready. They negotiated said, "We're going to hand them over." But you didn't make nuclear dust. Okay, that didn't happen.
Um, and now Trump is like, well, what do I do? He has to make nuclear dust again in the minds of the American people. And so, he'll drop the MOAB. It'll go boom. It'll look great. He'll declare victory. And the Iranians, who have already said they understand the United States is looking for an elegant, face- saving way out of this war. Those are the words of the speaker of the parliament, the
lead Iranian negotiator, uh, spoken when he arrived in Baghdad a couple months ago. Um, I think Iran will be more than happy to let the president declare victory and get the hell out of there. They want him the hell out of there. They don't care about domestic American politics. If the president wants to tell the American people he won, so be it. The Iranians know what the reality is, and uh they're
not going to let his rhetoric get in the way of uh of their victory. Uh the president needs to get out of Iran. He's not going to win this war. We can't win this war. Physically impossible. Um the Moab, I believe, is a um crowd-pleasing um uh political solution to the problem the president's made. A problem of his own making. We didn't have to go to war against Iran. It was a
war of choice. Iran posed no threat to us. Uh and now we're dealing with the consequences. And uh I think the president's trying to create a uh a political way out. He must convince the American people that through his decisive actions, the American military has prevailed. [clears throat] Uh he has long said that the reason he's doing all of this is that Iran will never have a nuclear bomb. He knows Iran
doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, but he can't admit it. So what he's going to do is destroy it. In his mind, in the minds of the American people, the reality of what's happening on the ground is irrelevant. And of course, it's going to be interesting to see what he does because if he just comes in, if if if he would almost certainly, I would imagine, signal to the Iranian side if
he's just going to drop a Moab on Pickax Mountain and that's it. That's the only thing he hits, then I think there's a possibility that the Iranians do exactly what you suggest because it would be in their interest to do so. But if he makes that as part of a larger strike and hits energy infrastructure or does anything at Car Island, uh what do you think Iran's reaction would be then? Yeah,
I I agree with you. I um uh if he strikes energy, you know, it's funny. Chapter 2: Saudi Arabia's future I'm sure we're going to get to this, but um you know, we're here. We're talking about Moab, Pickax Mountain, and all this. Uh what we're not talking about is the future of Saudi Arabia. Um it reminds me of uh you know what would happen if we went back to 1977 um and
we sat down and had a conference in the um in the in in in the region. Uh we we'd be talking about the uh the dominance of the peacock throne, the the sha of Iran, how dominant he is. And you know and this wasn't you know just rhetorical dominance. We we were giving we green lit a nuc a nuclear program that had a weaponization aspect of it. 5 minutesPeople forget that we
were talking about giving Iran access to nuclear weapons on lance missiles. Um, we were also selling them F-14s with the Phoenix missiles. We didn't sell that to any of our allies, but we sold it to Iran. We were giving them advanced naval destroyers of a class that that what we were given was far better than the destroyers we were building for the US Navy. This is how much, you know, influence the
the the sha of Iran had. Two years later, he's gone and the whole region was um was was thrown into commotion. Today we have NBS Muhammad bin Salman. He's the crown prince [cough] and prime minister of Saudi Arabia. But thanks to this war that's ongoing in particular the the extension of the con conflict into uh Yemen, Ansrella, um he's an existential threat right now. His uh his economy is all but shut
down. They're they're not getting oil to market either through the straight or movine into the Red Sea. Um it's not just oil storage facilities are being struck but oil production facilities are being struck by Ensrella and there's nothing he can do to stop this. Um you know he is probably going to fall soon and we don't know what's going to replace him. We don't know if the House of Saud will survive
this. Uh and so what Trump is doing right now in Iran I think will be mooted by developments down the road. Um Trump I think needs to get out of Iran before Saudi Arabia collapses. otherwise he'll be trapped in a uh in a in a completely losing proposition. Um and and I think Trump knows this. So the other thing that happens if he bombs Iranian energy infrastructure that Iran will immediately destroy
the totality of Saudi Arabian energy infrastructure along with Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Emirates and then we have a global energy crisis that uh no amount of uh diesel sales from uh from Russia or getting Europe to dump their diesel on the market is going to is going to resolve. So, I I I think again it's hard to tell with Donald Trump and his adviserss, but I think he's been um
cautioned that um you need to have a crowd-pleasing moment, but don't do anything meaningful to Iranian energy infrastructure. And and speaking of the Saudi Arabian side, President Trump was uh openly musing about the possibility of helping uh Saudi Arabia in its fight against the Houthies. And we hadn't had a lot of good results with trying to go after the Houthies. really even going back to the Obama administration, what they tried to
help Saudi Arabia uh or the Biden administration or Trump in 2025 in the Red Sea. Uh do you think that he's going to fall for that trap again or is this just uh trying to talk while he does nothing? Donald Trump has a a tendency to talk while he does nothing. Uh to post to tweet uh I guess we don't call it tweets. He postes on true socials or whatever they call
that. Um but um You know what is the Pentagon going to urge him to do? Send more aircraft carriers into the Red Sea? The last time we sent an aircraft carrier into the Red Sea, had to make an emergency uh evasion maneuver and it threw an F-15 an F-18 overboard. Then they had to flee through a deal cut uh between the United States and Ensala. A deal that left Israel out of
it. Remember that when we fled from the Red Sea and we fled from the Red Sea, the deal did not include Ensala stopping its ballistic missile attacks against Israel. That's how desperate we were to get out of this situation. So, what are we going to do now? We're not going to put a carrier back into the Red Sea. That's suicide. So, we're going to park carriers off the, you know, into the
Indian Ocean and bombard. That didn't work last time. Remember when the last time we attacked uh the the Hoodi? We had the entire infrastructure of American bases intact in the Middle East region that were supporting military operations. We don't have those anymore. They've been destroyed by Iran. we've been essentially evicted from the region. There it is. I mean, it just doesn't get any uglier than this if Chapter 3: Geopolitics of oil
and power you're an American. Um, and so, you know, we're very weak today. We don't have the ability to project military power like we had back when we lost the conflict with the Hoodi uh in 2025. So, I don't think we're going to be doing anything. I don't think we're going to dig this hole any deeper. Trump wants out of the Middle East. He doesn't want to double down on stupid. So
I think what you're seeing is a lot of uh you know politically charged rhetoric but um I don't see him coming to the assistance of uh of Saudi Arabia and we also have to remember this um and people tend to forget this Saudi Arabia is not the friend of the United States. Please America understand that uh they export Wahhabism which has empowered al-Qaeda and ISIS abroad. Um the FBI has recently unc
declassified documents that show that there was a intelligence operatives out operating out of the Saudi embassy uh working directly with two of the hijackers in San Diego uh enabling them to carry out the 9/11 attacks. Uh Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the United States. Moreover, NBS is not a friend of Donald Trump. uh we you know we have diplomatic relations and everything but in the during the pandemic when uh we
desperately needed Saudi Arabia to intervene to control the price of oil, Donald Trump went to Saudi Arabia almost crawling on his knees asking for NBS to make uh adjustments to Saudi oil policy and Saudi Arabia refused. Um, not only that, but NBS is the man who butchered uh Kosogi, the Washington Post journalist on his own on his orders, was uh arrested, detained in Istanbul, his body dismembered while he was still alive.
This was the instruction of NBS and then dissolved in a vat of acid. Um, he's not a good man. He's an evil man. And um, you know, I think his days are numbered. Trump doesn't like NBS. Trump actually disdains NBS. So the idea of Donald Trump bending over backwards to come to the assistance of a Saudi leader who has disrespected him um and disrespected the United States and and and again 1974
the petro dollar um Saudi pact uh where Saudi Arabia committed to buying uh you know selling its oil using dollars exclusively uh in exchange for American security. Well, Saudi Arabia backed away from that pack. They're no longer part of it. They sell their oil to China. They don't sell any oil to America anymore. They sell it all to China using Chinese currency. Saudi Arabia is not the friend of the United States
or actively conspired to undermine the economy of the United States. And the idea that Donald Trump will commit political suicide by supporting a regime in decline, I think, is absurd. Well, let's let's hope let's hope that that does indeed happen as you suggest. uh that would be good for American although it wouldn't be without cost I wouldn't imagine because if the house of SA does fall and there it is it is
far from certain they will maintain their position at least with NBS at the top uh what do you think that would do to the the Saudi oil how would that affect especially if if it's already not being done in dollars uh how does that affect American interest and and the global oil supply well I mean again now now we get into a lot of speculation here but um you know the United
States and going to war with Iran sought to control Iranian oil and the United States has um you know that the the policy towards Russia is about indirectly gaining access to Russian energy um and controlling that. Why? Because we want to choke off the Chinese economy. I think there's a recognition that the Chinese have a dominant economy and left to their own devices they will continue to dominate. We can't compete with
China. Um what so what we need to do is control the energy China needs to maintain its uh current economic uh posture. We've done that by taking over Venezuela. Um you know and and and now the Chinese cut off China gets its oil from Saudi Arabia. They sell a whole bunch of oil to China and they get it from Iran. Um, you know, Iran, we're in the process trying to negotiate a
way out of this conflict. And one of the ways will be to maybe find a way to exchange the lifting of sanctions for retaining some sort of um influence on on on on Iranian energy sales, maybe getting Iran to commit to u, you know, 13 minutesselling them using a certain you know, certain percentage of dollars to to help prop up the petro dollar which is in danger of collapsing. Uh but the
other thing that needs to happen and if if you're going to put an emphasis on Iran is to deemphasize Saudi Arabia, you need to eliminate Saudi Arabia as a supplier of oil to uh China. And the way you do that is to uh not only collapse politically the house of Saud, but to oversee the physical destruction of the the the the Saudi Arabian oil enterprise. Saudi Arabia made a fatal mistake walking
away from the petro dollar because they [clears throat] that dissolved the American uh the the guarantee of American security although America can't deliver on that even if we wanted to. Uh but you know right now is in the process of physically destroying Saudi oil infrastructure if there's a larger war with uh Iran that blends into energy uh Iran will complete that mission. But I don't think the United States is in um
the position of allowing Saudi Arabia to maintain um its status as a global energy economic power. I think we're looking to dismantle that. And one of the ways we do that is to sit by and do nothing while Ensala um does the dirty job of destroying Saudi Arabia's oil production capacity. Well, I I'm I'm all about America not plunging into another war that we can that [cough] we have no business of
fighting. we should stay out of it and I Chapter 4: Israel and the US policy hope we do. U speaking of stay out of it, if President Trump does what you suggest and and maybe has a big splashy hit on Pickax Mountain alone, let's let's hope that it's it's limited to that. Um and then tries to say, "All right, now then we're going to declare victory and walk away." The problem with
that one is uh will uh Israel allow President Trump to walk away or will they keep the war going because they seem to have a lot of interest in having that conflict continue to rage on because if the US walks away that's going to leave Saudi or Iran still in control of the straight of Hormuz still charging a fee and that's going to elevate their position regionally not even just in the
Middle East but in that part of the world. What do you see uh do you have any concerns that Israel may try to gun that up? Well, there's always concerns that Israel will try and gum up the works. Israel's been gumming up American national security and uh and foreign policy for decades now. They were able to get away with it because Israel was able to buy control of the United States Congress.
They openly bragged about it. You know, spent $100 million last congressional elections to take control of Congress. They spent up to $60 million to get rid of Thomas Massie. So, we know that Israel, you know, it plays a larger game. The problem for Israel is that the American people are starting to recognize that um you know what what what game is a foot. Um you have, you know, 60% inching towards 70%
of American people no longer supporting America's policy towards Israel. You have many Americans recognizing that uh the Trump policy of make America great again was actually nothing more than make Israel great. Um and so Israel itself has recognized that it's lost America. many Israeli uh commenters talking about the absolute need for Israel to unplug from America and create its own uh capabilities. The problem is that that's a future project. Israel is
not at that point right now. Israel can't unplug for America. If Donald Trump wants out of the region, um there's nothing Israel can do to prevent that. Israel is incapable of engaging Iran militarily one-on-one in a conventional uh perspective. And Israel um I don't think politically can use nuclear weapons unprovoked. If Iran has nuclear weapons or threatened to use nuclear weapons against Israel, that's a different issue. But to use nuclear weapons
unprovoked will open up an entire can of worms that Israel doesn't want to open up, which will be the entire world demanding the dismantlement of Israel's nuclear enterprise. Uh Israel doesn't want that discussion on the table. So I don't think there's a danger of Israel using nuclear weapons and I don't think Israel can go to war against Iran without American assistance, without American backing. If Israel were to attack Iran, the United
States, remember there's a precedent here. I already mentioned it. Donald Trump disengaged from the Hoodi um and fled the Red Sea and didn't do anything to stop Ansala from attacking continuing its attack on Israel. If Israel were to attack Iran without the backing or support or permission of the United States, I believe that the United States would sit back and do nothing while Iran pounded Israel into oblivion. And Israel knows this.
So, I'm not so worried about Israel. Plus, Israel has some bigger things to worry about. Turkey, for instance, um and also now what happens if a power vacuum occurs in Saudi Arabia. The last thing Israel needs to do is disenfranchise itself from the United States. Um, Donald Trump just recently said he doesn't trust Benjamin Netanyahu. Um, and so, uh, you know, the the idea of this golden relationship between BB and Donnie,
um, I I think is is that's times past. Israel will, I believe, sit back and do nothing unless the United States wants them. Now, whether or not Donald Trump will incorporate Israel into a larger strike against uh, Iran, there's a lot of talk about planning to that effect. But again, I think Donald Trump wants to be unplugged from the Middle East, not uh to encourage a larger, broader war that we can't
win. I just want to remind people, we hit Israel in February of this year with everything we had conventionally. [clears throat] So did Israel. We don't have it anymore. We've used all our long-range standoff weapons. We're not talking about the ability to do a 394-day war. We're talking about a three-day war against uh Iran because that's all we have. If it goes beyond that, we exhaust ourselves. we have no ability to
defend against, you know, an Iranian ballistic missile threat that's stronger today than it was when the conflict began in February. So, I I all factors point to Israel not getting involved in this fight. Well, whether they want to or not, they they uh hopefully will uh even if they just Chapter 5: The declining US-Israel bond have to grit their teeth and and suck it down, uh that may be the case because
uh Rubio, you may recall, said on the second day of the war that we got into it because Israel said they were going to go and that quote, "We had to go join them then for all those reasons." But I think that the conditions have changed and if Israel tries to pull that card again, uh I think it's very possible, as you suggest, that Trump may go, "Yeah, you're on your own
then." Because just yesterday, I think it was yesterday, maybe last night, uh, on Newsmax, it was interview with President Trump, and one of the questions he was asking there was, um, you know, are you still good, you got good relationship with Netanyahu, etc. And he wouldn't even use his name. He actually just said, I have a relationship and talked about some other things, but he given the chance to say, "Oh, no,
he and I are great." And, you know, buddies, like he has said in the past, he distanced himself from that. I think that was pretty loud, even more what he didn't say than what he did. No, I agree. I I I think that the relationship is part of first of all, there's a domestic political imperative on everything. The American people are walking away from Israel dramatically. So, um the second thing is
it's impossible to support Israel. I mean, everything we Israel is a genocidal state. That's a statement of fact. That's not speculation. Um moreover, what we're finding out is everything about October 7th that the Israelis and their supporters in America have tried to foist on the American public has turned out to be a lie. Netanyahu knew the attack was coming and sat back and did nothing. Which means, what about the Hannibal directive?
If you knew the attack was coming, then the Hannibal directive was a deliberate act, too, to pump up the death. Israel slaughtered Israelis. That's the reality of October 7th. There was no mass beheading of babies. There was no sexual assault. The United Nations had come out and admitted there's no evidence whatsoever of a single act of sexual assault carried out by Hamas against an Israeli female. It's all made up stuff. So
the entire propaganda of Israel is collapsing. Netanyahu is going to come under tremendous internal political pressure as people explore the fact that he knew about October 7th, it did nothing. And then the Hannibal director will come and play. The American people can't support this. It's unsupportable. Um, and then we have the again the the the it's the economy stupid factor. If Israel can't change the price of gas, then Israel is no
longer a player in the American body politic. The things that's going to impact the American voter uh is what happens at the pump. And u right now Trump may have a plan to alter that. But doubling down on stupid, doubling down on a genocidal state, doubling down on uh a nation that's sucking away American wealth and American uh you know um you know our reputation abroad. Israel hurts America and more Americans
are coming to that recognition. And I don't think that Israel has the ability to influence American politics the way it did. It'll take one or two election cycles to purge Congress of the Apac infected uh sellouts that currently reside there. But the American people are waking up and every two years we get a chance to vote to remove congressman. And I think uh taking Apac money isn't going to be the positive
that it once was. I think it's going to be the kiss of death. And as soon as a can't influence, that's the end of Israel. So I think we're walking away from Israel. I, you know, it's not going to happen overnight. Israel is too deeply embedded. Um Zionism is deeply embedded. But I think there's a growing recognition that Zionism isn't a good thing. that it's an infection that's destroying America and the
American people are in the process of trying to purge themselves of this disease. Yeah. And it's it's even harmful for Israel. If you're a big fan of Israel, I mean, they're they're so they've been significantly harmed by this. And if and if people do start walking away around the world, that's going to harm them even more politically and diplomatically. So, uh it's all bad and they gota they got to get that
fixed. I mentioned this Newsmax article last night. I want to shift gears a little bit on something else President Trump talked about last night that has a lot of influence on that other big ward that's on the table that President Trump has an albatross like uh hold around his neck. Uh and he was uh mentioning about Zalinsky. Now of course as many people are aware uh lot of friction going on between
Trump and Zilinsky here. It's it's made its way into the media really on both sides of the equation here with President Trump doing a diesel deal with with Russia because that's in our interest to do so. Uh it's not in Zalinsk's personal interest which he has been very vocal about but uh last night pres the newsmax asked President Trump what he thought about Voteir Zalinski. Chapter 6: Ukraine's existential crisis I thought
you asked President Zilinsky not to do that. Zalinski is a not a good guy for us to deal with. Biden gave him hundreds of billions of dollars billions and billions of dollars worth. Well I think they're going to if they're going to end up with a settlement of some kind. They're not going to do it with him. He doesn't want to settle. Uh he says he wants to settle, but he doesn't.
No, I'm not a I'm not a big fan of Zilinski. People, does that war end before you leave office? Uh it should end soon. I think they actually both would like to see it end, but I think I find Zillinsky to be more difficult to deal with than Putin. So that's that's I mean that's that's true, but it's interesting that President Trump said that because this kind of goes back to the
February 2025 explosion in the Oval Office, but that got mullified and then kind of disappeared. What do you think's going to happen this time? I think it's over. I think there's a this there's a there's there's a divorce. Um, you know, Donald Trump, um, if you just listen to the the the discussion that, for instance, uh, Deputy Secretary of Defense, uh, Colby, I guess Secretary of War Colby had, uh, with the
Europeans about NATO 3.0. NATO 3.0 is basically the United States unplugging from NATO. Um, there that's the direction we're heading. We're not heading to doubling down on Europe. Um, you know, there there's talk about, you know, America, you know, sending troops to Poland. We can't. There's no base structure there. There's no agreement. It will take years and billions of dollars that nobody has. Um, so the Americans are on their way out
of Europe. Um, and that's the strategic direction we're heading. The same thing with the Middle East. We we we said this in the in the National Security Strategy of the United States published by the Trump administration uh I think in November of 2025. 25 minutesum you know so we're we're we're we're we're moving out. We're not trying to get involved. We need this conflict to come to an end. Also, there's a
recognition that we need to have good relations with Russia. That um you know and and and it's not because we want to inherently be friends with Russia. I think there's a strategic understanding that the biggest threat we face in the world today is from China. And there's this belief that if we can improve relations with Russia, somehow we can drive a wedge between Russia and China. I think that's misguided belief, but
it still appears to be the philosophy that's underpinning a desire to get better relations with Russia. So, our strategic direction isn't to double down on Ukraine. Our strategic direction is to end the conflict with Russia. Um, we were willing to make certain compromises with Ukraine. Um, you know, and and and pretend that we we cared about Ukraine. I mean, it's it's hilarious to see the narrative that's now, you know, coming out
of um, you know, out of the social media after the diesel deal, how people are saying, you know, Ukraine is the defender of democracy. There's nothing democratic about Ukraine. It's a military dictatorship um, run by a man who has embraced the ideology of Steon Bandera, which means fascist ideology linked to Adolf Hitler. Americans don't understand this. You know, the US Congress used to back in 2015, 166, 17, the National Defense Authorization
Act, specifically prohibited US taxpayer money being used to underwrite the AOV uh regiment at that time, saying that they are neo-Nazis, white supremacists. We know the reality of Western Ukrainian nationalism, and it now dominates Ukraine today. Just in July, the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, authorized the Ukrainian president, that's Zilinski, to build a pantheon of heroes. Who were the heroes? Stephan Bandera and the other bander on the soil of Petara Lavra. This
is holy soil to Russian orthodoxy. So this is the reality of Ukraine. It's an evil uh fascist regime. Has nothing to do with democracy. They don't have any shared values with us. We've been using Ukraine as a tool to bring down Russia. But now we want to change policy direction and actually improve relations with Russia, which means we have to get rid of the tool. So we're in the process of dumping
the tool today. Um and I think that's just the the the tragic reality. The sad thing is because we don't view Ukraine as a nation state worthy of our support, but rather as a tool that we can dump at any time, the the the the byproduct of this failed policy is the extinction of Ukraine as a modern nation state. Already their population has dropped from being over 50 million to just around
20 million. Uh half of those are pensioners. Um and you're going to see because of the winter, the lack of energy, etc., uh mass u migration fleeing refugees fleeing Ukraine uh this coming spring Ukraine may not have 10 million people left. Um wow. And that's that's the end of Ukraine. So uh that's the direction we're heading. Donald Trump isn't going to do anything to save Ukraine. Europe can't do anything to save
Ukraine. And um it's the tragic reality. all those people out there who, you know, Keith Kellogg and his wonderful daughter, Megan, uh, you know, the bravest woman ever to serve as an air delivery platoon commander in Afghanistan. Um, you today talks about people dying in Ukraine while she makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, all they've done in in saying Slava Ukraine is to ensure that there will be new Ukraine when
this is done. It's we're looking at the physical extinction of a nation and its people. And somebody who has not gotten that memo yet is the man at the center of all this, the Voodimir Zalinski uh who went uh in front of the camera today, earlier today to complain that he's getting a raw deal from Trump and all he's asking for is a few missiles in return. And if there is no
energy ceasefire, give us anti-bballistic missiles so that I could protect my energy facilities. Don't give too many. Give us for the period you you'll need for the duration of the diesel deal. I have not received that. I I mean what what number one Ka Callis of course who hates Russia and loves everything about this war herself about a week ago admitted that nobody in Europe is willing to give him any of
these missiles. We are definitely not going to as where you mentioned a minute ago how low we are even in the Middle East. So what is in the mind of this fellow to go and again to try to shame Trump into giving him missiles that we don't have that oh by the way don't work either. Well it's it's interesting you know when we when when you talk about you know divorces because
we're looking at divorce now between the United States and uh and Ukraine between Trump and and Zalinski. You know a lot of people who don't want the divorce reflect back on better times. Uh you know oh when times were better. They forget how they got to where they're at. Right now, Zalinski is reflecting on the fact that the United States and Europe invested hundreds of billions of dollars into creating the most
sophisticated integrated air defense system in the world. One that was even better than the one that Israel had because um you know the Ukrainians were needed to protect themselves from Russian air power and ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, etc. And they did. They assembled it. that we delivered patriot batters that I don't think we gave them that but we gave them uh you know Irish tea we gave them everything else um and
it was there you know when we talk about the war with Ukraine everybody's focused on the ground war um nobody's talking about the suppression of enemy air defense campaign that Russia's been running since the fall of 2022 the literal dismantlement of this sophisticated NATO backed integrated air defense system today the Ukrainian NATO air defense system has been completely destroyed by Russia it is no more and it can't be resurrected. It's impossible
to resurrect it. Um and and what Zalinsky wants is, you know, for the United States to go through the motions of, you know, providing systems that could be plugged into an already defeated air defense system. There are no Pat first of all, Patriot, you know, a Patriot means nothing. A Patriot 2, a Patriot 2 plus uh can't shoot down advanced Russian ballistic missiles. So, it's a meaningless gesture. the the pack three
um advanced version might be able to shoot down some, but it can't shoot down the more advanced ones. So, first of all, it's it's just a total fiction that giving Ukraine missiles. But the the missiles allow Ukraine to for the president to say, "I'm doing something." It creates a perception of the continued viability of Ukrainian resilience to justify Europe investing billions of more dollars. That's all this is. It's not about really
building an air defense system. is create about creating the perception of an air defense system. The perception that Ukraine is capable of defending itself, therefore justifying continued investment. Right now with no air defense, Zalinski can't turn to Europe and realistically say continue to fund me because he is going to die. He is dying. This is why he needs this. But there are no missiles to give. There's nothing. And let's let's even
further this out now. With no missiles, you hear you might be hearing a lot about the Freya system. uh the the the Freya anti-bballistic missile. Zillinsky has been talking about this. It's a Firepoint scam. Firepoint is the Ukrainian u defense industrial front for uh corruption. Um they build drones. Uh the FP1 drone that they use to strike Ukraine uh Russian energy. Uh they charge $55,000 each for a $5,000 drone. Uh that's
the scale of corruption that's taking place. Uh the Freya missile is basically, you know, they're saying, I love the Ukrainian propaganda. We we have done in two years what no other nation can do. We have built an air defense missile. It took the United States years to build the Patriot. We've done it in two. No, you haven't. What you did is inherit a system, an industrial infrastructure premised on the S300 Russian
surfacetoair missile, and you've uh modified it with a couple European components to create something called the Freya, which doesn't work by the way, which doesn't even exist. But what they're trying to do is say, "We need this Euro missile defense system because the Ukrainians are offering this now to Europe as well. Uh but we need all your investment." those investments cycle their way through Ukraine and then make it into the pockets
of the various corrupt schemes. It's there's no real missile defense system called Freya. It's just a corruption scheme that Ukraine is running again under the premise that they need air defense. This war is over. Russia has won. Russia will destroy Ukraine. There's nothing the West can do to stop it. Even if we provided Ukraine with PAC 3 missiles, the Russians have already defeated the integrated air defense system of Ukraine. you cannot
resurrect this beast. Uh this is just a political game being played right now because Zalinsky is nothing more than a front of corruption. Uh he he creates the perception of need that then gets serviced by European and American taxpayers and that money doesn't go to the defense of Ukraine. It goes into the pockets of corrupt Ukrainian officials including Zilinsky and then fed back into the pockets of the people. The greatest scam
here is that all the aid that we say that we're giving to Ukraine to promote Ukrainian democracy, the vast majority of it cycles back into the pockets of corrupt defense industrial um you know um leaders. And you know, I I I wonder if uh President Trump is not belatedly coming around to that. I He should have done that when he first came into office and claimed that's what he was going to
do about ending this war, but whatever, he didn't. But I'm wondering if when he talked to uh the Russians first of all when uh the CIA director went over there and then Kushner and Witoff went over after that and then they made this deal with Trump got on the phone that there not other things being talked about as well because it's starting to look to me like that uh Russia is getting
ready for maybe kind of the the endgame on this. I Chapter 7: Russia's endgame in Ukraine mean that here again overnight you mentioned that the integrated air defense system has now been destroyed. So Russia now has free reign to literally just methodically destroy everything that Ukraine needs to continue this war. Meanwhile, uh this is kind of news here. Uh this is on Russian media military review channel uh page. They say political
scientist says that Russia has returned to Robin uh for total war. Russia intends to create a large-scale humanitarian crisis with these cities to cease function uh as key sources or places of concentration of Ukrainian economy, military industrial complex and political administration. Obviously, he says there is such a plan and I do not rule out that Saravkin was returned for an allout war to destroy say civilization or a functioning economy on the
on the taste of Ukraine. Do you think that Russia, whether it's Sarrakin or anyone else, has said, "All right, we're getting ready to kick into a higher gear and move to a military endgame here." Well, I mean, it's not a matter what I think. It's what President Putin has said himself. Um, he said that we didn't want to do this. We didn't want to do any of this, but Ukraine forced us.
It was Ukraine that made the decision through the 40-day uh campaign, drone campaign to begin on June 25th that's been extended now indefinitely to bring pain to the Russian people. That was a fatal mistake because now Putin has said we're going to end this. Um and there's nothing that can be done to resolve this. [clears throat] I was just in Russia. Um if if Surrovin is back, that's news to everybody because
he's not. uh Surrovin um I was told is still heavily involved in uh in Africa and and running the Russian Russian relationship there. There's no need for Surrovikin to come back. He he served his purpose but remember he's um politically tainted because of his relationship with uh Puggoan the former head of the now defunct Vagner group. uh Srovan um um may not have intervened as decisively needed to be at the critical
times in June of uh of 2024 or 2023. So I I don't think he's been resurrected. 37 minutesThey don't need him. They have military planners who were are up to speed on the reality. Remember the Russian defense industry has changed. The Russian military profile has changed since left in 2023. um different weapon systems are available, different intelligence factors, drone warfare has changed. So why would you bring a man who's out of
touch with these realities when you have the current crop of Russian military leadership that's fully cognizant of everything that's going on, knows how to use it and is using it effectively. Uh it's not like Russia's losing the war. You need Servikin to come in to win it. Russia's winning the war and the people that have enabled Russia to get to this point, I think, are going to be allowed to finish the
job. But Russia is winning. We are looking at a campaign that's designed I mean it's tragic again we come we're talking about the physical extinction of a nation the city of Kiev this winter I've been told um you know a lot of high-rise buildings a lot of people live in those buildings uh but when you deny them access to electricity water no longer can be pumped up and you you you you
have a dysfunctional system what will happen is that the um the up the water in the upper levels of the building is going to fail. The sewage will fail and you're going to have raw sewage plummeting down through the building into the streets. So, literally each one of these highrises is going to be a wash with uh human waste. Um it's unlivable. Uh this is the future of Kiev. That's why uh
Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, is saying we need people to evacuate now. That the city will become unlivable this winter. That's the goal. That's the objective of Russia. And that you can sit there and say the Russians are criminals in doing this. I I want to remind people that um it's that there are uh senior Ukrainian voices including the commander of the drone force and a former commander of uh of AOV
who have come out and said that they the Ukrainians are uh integrating their defense industrial capabilities with the civilian population for instance on drone manufacturing and it's openly bragged about you see on uh on Facebook and other uh Ukrainian Housewives. I'm playing my part. I have a 3D printer in my apartment and I'm printing up drone parts in my apartment and then we collectively, the community, get together in the basement and
we assemble the drone parts in our apartment building and turn them over to the Ukrainian military. They've turned a civilian housing area into a defense production facility. Um, and I think what Russia's doing, they're not striking the apartment buildings per se, but Russia now has basically opened up the target deck to start striking dual use facilities, furniture facilities, um, food storage facilities, which have been converted into military production. Um, and Russia
is starting to take that out. They're taking out energy infrastructure. They're taking out the the the the things that are necessary for modern societies to sustain themselves and survive. Ukraine will die a very hard death this winter. Uh but they only have themselves to blame. And you know that again when you when you look at a rational person, a rational leader would say, "Okay, I don't have the ammunition and the technology
I need to defend myself." The Russians have the technology to defend themselves and to attack us in ways that we can't stop. So, it is literal suicide to continue fighting if you can't if you can't even participate, if you can't fight, if you can't even put up a good slug because it's inevitable that you're going to lose. That's that's just a simple calculation of reality. But there was a piece in the
uh the Kiev Post today to where that they're more focused on getting mad at President Trump and Chapter 8: Human cost of the conflict calling him a betrayal. My only guess is that they're saying this to uh to try and shame President Trump into coming back. But this last part here is what really got my attention, especially in light of what you've just been saying. Meanwhile, left with a stark choice, or
rather the ultimatum of to be or not to be. Ukraine will continue its fight for existence with or without those who turn their backs. Fundamental change should begin in Washington, not Kiev. Now, if they mean by to turn their backs to the United States and they think that they're going to turn their faces and that Europe is going to pick this up, what do you think is going to happen? First of
all, we're starting to recognize the um fundamental reality of the true nature of Ukraine. Remember, Ukraine today uh the the ideological foundation for the modern Ukrainian state is Steon Bandera in his Banderist ideology. Steon Bander is a man who has said that in order to promote the concept of Ukrainian nationalism, he's willing to sacrifice millions of people, including Ukrainians. Life means nothing to these people. And so the ideologues who today populate
the decision-making centers of uh of Ukraine are Banderas. So of course, the Banderas newspaper uh in Kiev is going to promote uh you know this existential to be or not to be truggle. Um, you know, even the Nazis, even the Nazis, uh, when it came down to it when, uh, the war was lost, you know, they they didn't run to the, you know, implement operation werewolf and go up to the mountains
of the Alps and fight to the bitter end. They put the white flag out there and they surrendered. When it came down to it, when they could no longer defend themselves, the Germans surrendered and they survived. Um, these Banderas right now are talking about a fight to the death. At some point in time, the remaining Ukrainian population is going to say, "No, we we refuse." Up until now, because of the infusion
of uh of European and American um money, Ukraine has been able to buy off the Ukrainian people. Up until a few months ago, if went to Kiev, it was a party scene in Cardov, a party scene in Odessa all summer, a party scene. While, you know, the Ukrainians trying to say, "We're bringing pain to the uh to the Russians." in in Kiev, you had these parties, the these vibrant parties, half- naked
women, guys drinking and partying all. They ain't having a party scene now. Uh because it's over. Uh you they can no longer fake it to make it. Um Ukraine is finished as a modern society. Right now, they're in survival mode. At some point in time, a sufficient number of Ukrainians are going to come to the conclusion that they don't want to commit suicide along with Steon Bandera followers. And when that happens,
you'll see the collapse of society and the end of this conflict. That's uh that is so painful uh to reality to realize here. And as much as I uh condemn uh the Biden administration, the Trump administration up to this point and and the Europeans and and Zalinsky especially, uh it's always been the billpayers on the the Ukrainian people and and now continuing into the Russian people in the in the in the
near term where they can hit them. Uh or in car uh what is it that old blast they went into? I forget whatever last year. uh all these people pay the 44 minutesprice for the insanity and the irrational and illogic of this war here and and they're still paying the price and it's it could it could actually many times the casualty accounts go higher in wars in the last phase when the
when it's clear that the war is going to be over but they keep fighting and I fear that however many people may already have been died it could go into the hundreds of thousands more if these guys get a chance to play it out and keep fighting on the ground when by all rational reason the war should come to an end and that's that's what uh it really grieves me that so
many more people may pay the price. Well, you know, like I said, I just came from Russia and I had some very interesting conversations with some very interesting people. Um you know, the Russians have been reticent about committing to casualty figures on either side. Um what I will say is um from somebody who [laughter] is in a position to know and does know uh the Ukrainian casualties exceed 3.5 million. Um and
the Russian casualties are um are are you know significantly less than that. Um you know the the total Russian casualties killed and wounded over time is is under a million by a significant factor. Uh a lot of Russians have died. A lot of Russians have been wounded. There's no minimizing this. But the idea that uh that the Russians are the ones suffering the casualties. You know what has happened over time is
that the the Zalinsky government in order to shield the the reality of the failed war to the Russian to the Ukrainian people, they have taken their casualty figures and projected them onto uh onto Russia. And and we've seen this play out. Remember when uh the the the Ukraine 30,000 Russians die a month? 30,000 Russians die a month. But then Budanov came out and said we need to uh recruit 30,000 people a
month to maintain the status quo. That means that 30,000 Ukrainians are dying a month. And Ursula Vandonder sort of gave away the secret when she said 27,000. Um, so we know what the truth is. The Russians aren't suffering anywhere near that casualty figures. Anybody who's an expert in war knows this. The probability to kill PK, you know what that is. Um, you just you just play out Ukraine's PK capability and you
don't generate those kind of casualty. Russia on the other hand has massive PK capability. And now you have the current fiction coming from Zolinsky and his supporter. 47,000 Russians dying a month. Ladies and gentlemen, that ain't the case. You know what's happening? 47,000 Ukrainians are dying a month. And one of the reasons why the numbers have spiked is because of the failed offensive that's taken place in the vicinity of Leman. You've
seen the social media talk about how they've pushed the Russians back. No, they didn't. All they did is punch into a gray zone and got slaughtered. And that's why their numbers have gone up. Um, Ukraine is running out of men. Now they're talking about bringing women in. And again, we talk about the extinction of a nation. I might have mentioned this before, but you know, without the war, without the 3.5 million,
uh, the the the dead the dead to living uh, replacement factors, four uh, certified deaths for every live birth. Um, you don't continue a nation with that rate. Um, now the only thing that can save Ukraine is the ability to birth more babies. Um, you need a woman to do that. I'm sorry for all the people out there who embrace alternative lifestyles, but the reality is a man must meet with a
woman. The woman must get pregnant and give birth to a baby in order for life to continue. And now what the Ukrainians are doing is saying that they're going to mobilize the women. Now, the Ukrainian women are the true victims here. You know, look, Colonel, I don't give a damn about men. We make our own, we make manly decisions. We decide to go to war, not to go to war. We pay
the price. Women should be protected. I'm not saying women aren't capable of fighting. Of course, they are. Our history has proven that. But um women should be protected by their man, their men. That's a society's role, I believe. What has Ukraine done and what has Europe done for the Ukrainian women? Uh the future of Ukrainian women is stark. They can either flee to Europe or they'll fall into the sex trade. If
you go to Europe today, it's Ukrainian women who dominate the sex trade. They're out there with the prostitutes on the street. And it isn't a pretty life to be a prostitute. uh you get raped, you get beat, you uh you were povertystricken, you're drug addicted, and you end up dying in a corner of a bad abortion or of a drug overdose. So Ukrainian women now have gone to Europe where they are
victimized by the Europeans who claim to want to support them. Or you can stay in Ukraine where you will be sent to the front line. They say, "Oh, it's only as a drone operator. The the most dangerous job in Ukraine is drone operator." Um and so you can either die on the front line or die as a hooker in uh in Europe. That's the fate of Ukraine's women. So for all you
Slava Ukraine people out there, go to hell because you've condemned an entire nation to extinction. Yeah, that that's that's literally playing out. That's again, as you say, that's not an opinion. That's an it's the numbers. Just counting the numbers. Listen, uh Scott, really appreciate you coming on. It's it's kind of been kind of a sobering uh information here, but it's it's something that needs to be shouted from the rooftops so that
we don't realize that to say Slava Ukraine and and you know, let's support Ukraine is only condemning more of them to death and we need to stop that really quickly. Thank you so much for that clarity. Thanks for having me on and we appreciate you guys too and we will look forward to seeing you tomorrow on the Daniel Davis deep dive. Please consider becoming a member. Member support means that we get
to spend more time reporting and less time giving you ads like miracle supplements or gold. Deep dive survives because of members like you who support us. Thank you. [music] [music] [music]
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I am back in NYC at the invitation of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Unlike my previous appearance before the full UN Security Council, this was an Arria session. An Arria-formula meeting is an informal meeting called by one or more Security Council members to hear from people who normally can’t address the Council. These include NGOs, civil-society figures, experts, victims and witnesses, and non-state actors. It isn’t a formal Council meeting and has no basis in the Council’s rules of procedure.
All fifteen members of the Security Council were represented. Their response was quite revealing (I will reveal that below). Here was my statement:
Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, thank you for the opportunity to address you.
My name is Larry Johnson. I served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency and later in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. I spent more than two decades working with United States Military Special Operations Forces. I come to this Council not as a spokesman for any government, but as someone who has spent a career studying how wars are fought and how civilians suffer in them and how hostilities are accompanied by disinformation campaigns.
For more than four years this Council has heard that Russia is waging a war against Ukraine and is targeting civilians. You do not need to come to the Security Council to hear this narrative, it is all over media and internet. I ask you to test that claim against the evidence.
Today we heard horrific stories of civilians targeted, of prisoners of war being tortured, and civilians held against their will by Ukrainian armed forces.
Ask yourselves a couple of questions: why are the civilians dying in Russia from drone attacks discounted and why are the civilians that were killed in Ukraine before February 2022 ignored? Based on my experience, the crisis in Ukraine has been accompanied by a sophisticated disinformation campaign designed to place all blame on Russia while exonerating Ukraine.
Begin with the scale of the fighting. By the Ukrainian government’s own figures, Russia has fired well over approximately two and a half million tons of munitions. This includes one hundred thousand glide bombs, attack drones, missiles and millions of artillery rounds since February 2022.
Now consider the human toll. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has verified 16,431 civilian deaths through the middle of this year. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, and I do not minimize any of them. However, the ratio of civilian deaths to munitions expended is extraordinarily low for a war of this intensity.
Compare those numbers with what the United States did in the Second World War, a war my country rightly regarded as just. Allied bombers dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe and killed between half a million and three-quarters of a million civilians in Europe.
In the Pacific, the United States dropped about 160,000 tons of bombs on the Japanese home islands. In all, American air attacks on Japan killed somewhere between 330,000 and half a million civilians.
Put the figures side by side. In total, the United States killed somewhere between half a million and more than a million civilians in the Second World War. The verified toll in Ukraine, after more than four years, is a small fraction of that.
These numbers do not happen by accident. The record of Russia in Ukraine is consistent with a policy of not targeting civilians. These facts contradict the claim that Russia is waging a campaign of extermination against Ukraine’s civilian population.
The same standard must apply to Ukraine.
The killing of civilians in this conflict did not begin in February 2022. From 2014 through 2021, the OHCHR recorded at least 3,404 civilian deaths in the Donbass. From 2018 through 2021, the OHCHR found that 81 percent of civilian casualties from Ukrainian shelling, small-arms fire and drone attacks occurred in areas held by the Donetsk and Luhansk authorities. Those victims are forgotten by the world media and by the United Nations. Few call for any investigation or accountability.
Since February 2022, according to figures the Russian Foreign Ministry presented to the Human Rights Council last month, Ukrainian strikes have killed more than 9,000 civilians in the territories under Russian control and wounded more than 25,500. This Council has rarely discussed those victims. They deserve the same attention and the same investigation as every civilian killed on the other side of the line.
Today we heard some of the circumstances of their deaths. I hope that the United Nations will include those numbers in their reports in order to give an unbiased record of events…. At least 12,404 civilians have been killed by Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2014.
Thus, we come to the simple fact that the number of civilians killed on both sides of the front line are not that different even if we take numbers offered by OHCHR at their face value –12,404 compared to 16,431. And I know that the Government of Russia strongly challenges them, citing in particular the questionable OHCHR claim that Russia was responsible for Bucha.
Why is the focus exclusively on Russia while we hear nothing about Ukrainian Armed Forces committing crimes against civilians?
I am not asking this Council to excuse any unlawful act. Where a strike violates the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution, it should be investigated, whoever carries it out. I am asking the Council to apply a single standard. The nations that sit in judgment of Russia should measure Russia’s conduct against the evidence and against their own history, not against a narrative.
False accusations and biased reports are not the most effective way to protect civilians in Ukraine. The key to protecting civilians is a negotiated end to this war. I urge the members of this Council to put their full weight behind that goal.
Thank you.
The biggest shock came from the US representative. Unlike my previous appearance before the Security Council when the US representative was aggressive and dismissive of my remarks, the guy sitting in the US chair today spoke as if the US had no role whatsovever in the war raging between Russia and Ukraine. He was quite subdued. A complete change in tone and attitude. This told me there is a definite change in the US policy towards Russia.
The Europeans on the other hand were out of their fucking minds. The representatives of Denmark, Latvia, France and Greece were aggressive and rude. They are boiling for a fight. The purpose of the meeting was to present evidence of Ukrainian attacks on civilians in territory now occupied by Russia. Instead of dealing with the facts, the European Lilliputians howled at the Russians.
Even the British representative took a low key approach. That also was surprising. The remaining eight members of the Security Council made measured, neutral remarks. My commentary was in support of Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Ambassador tasked with investigating attacks on civilians. Rodion is a good man and an honest investigator. All in all, a fascinating day.
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The East-West line to Yanbu is breaking down, and with it the kingdom’s last reliable route around Hormuz
When the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February, Saudi Arabia had what almost no other Gulf producer had: a way out at scale. The East-West pipeline, known in the industry as Petroline, carries crude 1,200 kilometers across the desert from the oil fields of the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Its maximum capacity is about 7 million barrels a day. For seven months it has been the reason the world could still count on Saudi oil. That lifeline is now failing.
How the system works
Karl Miller has just mapped the network, and his work makes clear why the pipeline is so vulnerable. Oil does not simply flow from a well into a pipe. It is lifted from wells across the great fields, Ghawar, Khurais, Shaybah and the rest, and sent through gathering lines to gas-oil separation plants, where oil, gas and water are separated. It then moves to Abqaiq, the stabilization hub at the center of the system, which has 18 crude stabilization units. Only then does it enter the East-West corridor.
The pipeline itself depends on 11 mainline pumping stations that push the crude across the country, plus two separate pressure-relief stations that protect the line but add no pumping power. At Yanbu the crude goes into storage, to refineries and onto tankers. Every link has to work. As Miller puts it, a pipeline is a connected system of pressure, power and controls, and Yanbu can stop loading without a single bomb hitting the port if the crude stops arriving.
Four stations down
That is what is now happening. I can confirm that four of the pipeline’s thirteen stations are out of service. A drone strike on September 11 knocked the line largely out of action for weeks; Riyadh blamed Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. Repairs had only partly restored flows when, on October 4, a strike hit the pumping station at Khurais, east of Riyadh, for the first time, and the line stopped again. No one has claimed that attack.
Miller cautions that you cannot simply divide stations into capacity: losing a third of the stations does not mean losing exactly a third of the flow. What matters is where the damaged stations sit, what bypasses exist, and how much pressure the remaining pumps can sustain. But a pipeline that has lost several of its pumping stations cannot run anywhere near its rated capacity, and the replacement pumps, turbines and transformers are custom-built equipment with long lead times. Using a throughput benchmark of 5.8 million barrels a day, Miller calculates that a complete interruption of the corridor would put 40.6 million barrels of crude movement at risk in a week and 174 million in a month.
The pipeline is under pressure at both ends. On the Red Sea side, Ansar Allah has seized islands at the mouth of the Red Sea, including Perim inside the Bab al-Mandab, and in July declared a “maritime ban” on Saudi shipping. Product tankers leaving Yanbu and Rabigh for Asia and East Africa now have to turn north through Suez, adding nearly a month to their voyages. So even the barrels that reach Yanbu are slower and costlier to sell.
What Iran did
The damage to the wider Saudi system has come in two separate campaigns, and it is worth keeping them distinct. Iran’s strikes came in the first weeks of the war, in March and April, and hit the Gulf coast and the export outlets. The 550,000-barrel-a-day Ras Tanura refinery was shut for about a week. Yanbu’s loadings were briefly halted, and a drone came down at the SAMREF refinery in Yanbu. In April the 460,000-barrel-a-day SATORP refinery and petrochemical complex at Jubail halted units, the Riyadh refinery was hit, fires at the Ju’aymah gas plant disrupted LPG and natural gas liquids exports, and production capacity was cut by about 300,000 barrels a day at each of Manifa and Khurais. Shaybah was targeted repeatedly. Public reporting did not always name the attacker for every spring strike, but they came during Iran’s campaign and followed its pattern: the coast, the processing hubs, the exits.
What Ansar Allah has done
Ansar Allah’s campaign began later, has lasted longer and keeps moving north. In August it struck Aramco’s Jizan refinery, which caught fire on August 9, and claimed an attack in Najran. On September 7 and 8 it hit Aramco sites in Jizan, Najran and Abha, halting operations and wounding 73 people. On October 3 it claimed a strike on an Aramco facility south of Riyadh. Then on October 10 it struck Ghawar, the largest conventional oil field in the world. I have independently confirmed that Ghawar was hit. Riyadh has said nothing about damage. A movement that began this war firing at targets near the Yemeni border has now reached the source of the oil that feeds the pipeline, more than 1,000 kilometers away.
Put the two campaigns together and the picture is stark. Iran damaged the Gulf coast refineries and processing plants; Ansar Allah is attacking the fields in the interior and controls the sea lane at the far end of the corridor; and the pipeline in between has lost four of its thirteen stations. Saudi Arabia is losing its Gulf exit, its Red Sea exit and the line that connects them.
The economic damage
The cost is already showing. In the second quarter Saudi oil activity fell 24.7% from a year earlier and the economy shrank 4.8%, its worst quarter since the pandemic. Oil exports were worth about $212 billion in 2025, roughly 17% of GDP, and oil revenue pays for the Saudi state and much of what is counted as the non-oil economy.
Measure / Scale
East-West pipeline / 4 of 13 stations out; rated capacity about 7 million b/d
Full corridor stoppage (Miller) / 40.6 million barrels at risk per week; 174 million per month
Each 1 million b/d of exports lost / About $30–33 billion a year at $80–90 oil
Manifa and Khurais capacity cuts (spring) / About 600,000 b/d; roughly $20 billion a year at $90 oil
Ghawar / On the order of 3.8 million b/d of capacity exposed
Gulf reconstruction (Miller) / $550 billion to $2.28 trillion over seven to ten years
Revenue estimates are my calculations. Field and pipeline capacities are approximate.
Miller’s latest assessment puts the cost of rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy system at $550 billion to $2.28 trillion over seven to ten years. That covers the whole region, but Saudi Arabia will be competing with Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates and Iraq for the same manufacturers, engineers and crews. Pumping stations are not repaired with spare parts from a warehouse.
For the rest of the world, the East-West pipeline was the insurance policy. As long as it worked, Saudi crude could reach market whatever happened in Hormuz. With four of its thirteen stations out, Ghawar hit and the Red Sea contested, that policy has lapsed. The global shortage of diesel and jet fuel will deepen, and Saudi Arabia, the supplier of last resort, is now fighting to protect its own economy rather than rescue anyone else’s.
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Karl Miller’s new assessment: a seven-to-ten-year rebuild, a trillion-dollar bill, and a diesel crisis that Saudi Arabia can no longer cushion
For most of this war, Saudi Arabia has been the shock absorber of the world oil market. When Hormuz closed, Riyadh pushed crude west through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea and kept at least part of its exports moving. That bypass is now under attack. Ansar Allah has seized islands at the mouth of the Red Sea, declared a “maritime ban” on Saudi shipping and claimed strikes on Saudi airports, and in September drones knocked the East-West pipeline largely out of service. Riyadh blamed that strike on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. On October 4 a pumping station at Khurais, east of Riyadh, was hit for the first time and the pipeline stopped again.
Karl Miller, whose earlier assessment of the global fuel emergency I have drawn on before, has just completed a new analysis of what this means for Saudi Arabia and for the world. His conclusion is stark: the Gulf’s energy system will take far longer and cost far more to rebuild than anyone in Washington is admitting, and Saudi Arabia can no longer be counted on to cover the gap. Here are his key findings.
1. The bypass is the weak point
Miller’s starting point is that a pipeline is not a pipe. It is a connected system of pumping stations, power supplies, controls, storage tanks and loading berths, and it is only as strong as its weakest link. The September damage to the East-West pumping stations, the October interruption at Khurais, a fire at the Riyadh energy complex and the disruption of Saudi aviation all hit that system at different points. The pipeline has been partly restored, but Miller warns that permanent equipment losses remain unresolved. Yanbu can be shut down without a single bomb hitting the port: if crude stops arriving, tankers stop loading.
He also cautions against counting damaged stations as if each represented a fixed share of lost capacity. What matters is throughput, and he measures it against a benchmark of 5.8 million barrels a day through the corridor. A complete interruption for seven days would put 40.6 million barrels of movement at risk; for 30 days, 174 million. He stresses that this is a stress calculation, not a claim that the line is fully shut.
2. The rebuild now runs to 2033–2036
In his previous paper Miller set a five-year horizon for rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy complex. He has now extended it to seven to ten years for the most severely damaged, interconnected systems, meaning recovery between roughly October 2033 and October 2036. Partial output will return sooner, but full, reliable operation will not.
The reason is equipment. Large compressors, turbines, high-voltage transformers, specialized pressure vessels and integrated control systems are custom-built and cannot be pulled from a warehouse. His critical path for replacing such a package is 84 months: a year to define the damage and fund the design, three years to procure and manufacture, two years to deliver and install, and a year to commission and stabilize. Insecure sites, financing gaps, factory queues and repeated attacks could add up to three more years. As he puts it, money can reserve a manufacturing slot, but it cannot compress every stage of engineering and fabrication.
3. A bill of $550 billion to $2.28 trillion
Miller models the reconstruction of the wider Gulf energy system, Saudi Arabia included, in three scenarios. He is explicit that these are funding envelopes built on stated assumptions, not audited damage estimates and not a Saudi-only bill.
Source: Karl W. Miller, Saudi Arabia: The Breaking Point (12 October 2026). Covers the broader Gulf reconstruction portfolio.
In the central case, $180 billion must be committed in the first two years alone, rising to $540 billion in years three to five. Over seven years that averages more than $170 billion a year. And every Gulf state will be competing for the same manufacturers, engineering firms, fabrication yards and specialist crews. A transformer slot taken by Kuwait or Qatar is one that Saudi Arabia does not get.
4. Delay is expensive
Miller puts numbers on what waiting costs. A three-year delay on the central program could add $76 billion to $125 billion in cost escalation and another $42 billion to $90 billion in financing charges. Meanwhile the fuel must still be bought somewhere: each year that 1 million barrels a day of fuel supply stays offline means 365 million barrels to replace, about $55 billion at his illustrative price of $150 a barrel. Leaving his full 3 million barrel-a-day gap unrepaired for three more years implies nearly $500 billion in replacement purchases.
5. The diesel gap gets wider
Miller’s baseline remains a minimum global shortfall of 3 million barrels a day of diesel and jet fuel. The Saudi attacks threaten to push it higher. If disruption leaves 1 million barrels a day of crude unable to reach working refineries, the loss of diesel and jet fuel is roughly 300,000 to 450,000 barrels a day. An additional net loss of 500,000 barrels a day would raise his baseline to 3.5 million, an increase of one-sixth, adding 15 million barrels of shortfall every month.
He is careful not to double count: lost crude, the refinery output it would have produced and the missed export cargo may all be the same barrels. But the direction is clear. Saudi Arabia was the Gulf’s main source of relief. If its bypass is unreliable, the global deficit grows.
6. America cannot fill the hole
Miller’s test of American capacity is sobering. Over the four weeks to October 2, US refineries produced about 5.17 million barrels a day of distillate, exported 1.56 million and used 3.77 million at home. Replacing a 3 million barrel-a-day gap from the United States alone would require 58% more distillate output than American refineries produce today. US production is only about 150,000 barrels a day higher than a year ago; the global gap is nearly 20 times that. Promising more exports does not create more fuel. It simply moves the shortage from one buyer to another and drains American inventories.
7. Food, freight and flights
The fuel crisis is already reaching the real economy. Cereal prices are 17.2% higher than a year ago. Farmers need diesel before the harvest pays, truckers before their invoices are settled, and refrigeration before food reaches the shelf. Airlines need certified jet fuel at the airports they serve, and diesel cannot substitute for it. Miller’s warning is that the weakest buyers, countries short of foreign exchange and credit, will not just pay more. They will be priced out entirely.
My take
Miller’s assessment confirms what I have been arguing for months: the energy damage from this war is not a temporary price spike that ends when a ceasefire is signed. Reopening a shipping lane does not rebuild a refinery. Saudi Arabia, which only months ago was the world’s insurance policy, is now itself a source of risk, and its economy shows it: Saudi oil activity fell by a quarter in the second quarter and GDP shrank 4.8%. The rebuilding of the Gulf will be measured in years and trillions of dollars, and the world will be short of diesel for much of that time.
That should be the frame for every promise coming out of Washington, whether it is Russian diesel, export bans or claims that prices are about to fall. As Miller concludes, recovery will be proven by fuel actually delivered, not by repairs announced or by a lower headline price.
A Thimble for a Flood: Trump’s Russian Diesel Deal… Why the announced volumes barely register against the global distillate shortage
by Larry C. Johnson
10 October 2026 https://sonar21.com/a-thimble-for-a-flo ... -shortage/
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On Friday night Donald Trump announced that, after a call with Vladimir Putin, Russia would ship diesel to the United States and world markets. Treasury followed with a temporary general license lifting sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027. The President promised that diesel prices would fall “in record numbers” and “fast.” With the midterms three weeks away and diesel at $6.23 a gallon, up from about $3.67 a year ago and just off the record $6.52 set on September 22, I understand the political appeal. But when I put the numbers next to the size of the shortage, the deal is a rounding error.
What was announced
According to Trump’s own post, Russia will supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel “immediately,” 500,000 tons in November, 1 million tons “immediately thereafter,” and a further 3 million tons “within a short period of time.” Converting at roughly 7.45 barrels per tonne, that comes to:
Tranche / Barrels (approx.) / Comment
300,000 t “immediately” / 2.2 million / Less than one day of US diesel consumption
500,000 t in November / 3.7 million / Delivery timing unclear; White House has not said when cargoes arrive
1,000,000 t “thereafter” / 7.5 million / No date given
3,000,000 t later / 22.4 million / Conditional and undated Total announced / 35.8 million / Spread over an undefined number of months
Conversion is approximate; Forbes used a similar factor and arrived at about 35.5 million barrels. Only the Kremlin’s general “readiness to supply” has been confirmed from the Russian side; the tonnages come from Trump’s post.
The size of the hole
Karl W. Miller, whose assessment of the global energy emergency I rely on, puts the current global shortfall of middle distillates (diesel, gasoil and jet fuel) at a minimum of 3 million barrels a day. That gap comes from destroyed and impaired Gulf refining, disrupted crude supply to refineries abroad, damaged utilities and blocked product exports. At that rate the world must find 90 million barrels every month, 270 million barrels every 90 days and nearly 1.1 billion barrels a year, either by producing it elsewhere, drawing it from stocks or doing without. Miller expects the damaged Gulf complex to take about five years to rebuild.
Here is how the Russian deal compares:
Measure / Russian deal (35.8 million barrels)
Days of Miller’s minimum 3 mb/d gap / About 12 days
Share of the 90-day gap (270 million bbl) / About 13%, and only if every tranche arrives within 90 days
Share of one year’s gap (1.095 billion bbl) / About 3%
Daily rate if spread over six months / About 0.2 mb/d, or 6.6% of the 3 mb/d gap
Firm, dated tranches only (1.8 Mt, ~13.4 million bbl) / About 4.5 days of the gap; 5% of a 90-day requirement
Days of US diesel demand (3.77 mb/d) / About 9.5 days
Days of current US distillate exports (1.56 mb/d) / About 23 days
US figures are four-week averages to 2 October 2026 as cited by Miller. The 3 mb/d gap is Miller’s proprietary minimum estimate; his calculations assume it persists.
Put simply, the entire package, if every tonne arrives, covers less than two weeks of the global shortfall. The first 300,000 tons cover about 18 hours of it.
Why even those barrels are not all new supply
The headline volumes overstate the relief for several reasons.
• Russia may be short itself. Moscow has banned diesel exports since July and extended the ban through the end of October. The IEA claims that Russian diesel output has fallen about 30%, and Russian refineries have suffered repeated outages. If true, every barrel Russia ships abroad is a barrel it must spare from its own farms, military and trucking. However, Russian sources dispute the IEA claim.
• Redirection is not production. Miller makes this point about American exports and it applies equally to Russian ones: moving existing fuel from one buyer to another relocates the shortage; it does not shrink it. Before the war Russia was the world’s second-largest diesel exporter. Its traditional buyers, such as Turkey, Brazil and parts of Africa, will compete for the same limited volumes, so some of what is sold under a US license will displace other flows rather than add to the total.
• It is diesel only. Miller’s gap covers jet fuel and kerosene as well. Nothing in this deal addresses the aviation side.
• The US does not need imports so much as the world does. The United States already produces about 5.2 million barrels a day of distillate and exports about 1.56 million. American prices are high because they are set in a global market that is short, not because American refineries lack product. A few Russian cargoes entering that market will not change the marginal price that a 3 mb/d deficit sets.
• Timing and logistics are unresolved. The White House has not said who will pay for the fuel or when it will arrive, and only the first two tranches have even notional dates. As Miller puts it, fuel secured in another basin is not relief until it reaches the consuming network.
What the market said
Diesel futures dipped on the announcement, which I read as a headline reaction rather than a change in fundamentals. A European diplomat told reporters the deal was “very unlikely to have a real impact on prices.” Even Ukraine’s sanctions official, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, who has every reason to oppose it on other grounds, made the arithmetic point: the United States burns about 3.5 million tons of diesel a week, so 300,000 tons is trivial.
The real winner: Moscow
If the deal does little for the diesel shortage, it does a great deal for Russia. The volumes that are trivial against a 3 million barrel-a-day gap are not trivial as cash, because diesel is now one of the most valuable commodities on earth. US diesel futures settled at about $4.80 a gallon in September, roughly $200 a barrel. Using Miller’s illustrative replacement price range of $150 to $200 a barrel, the numbers look like this:
Volume / At $150/bbl / At $200/bbl
Firm tranches (~13.4 million bbl) / $2.0 billion / $2.7 billion
Full announced package (~35.8 million bbl) / $5.4 billion / $7.2 billion
My estimates. Actual realized prices will depend on discounts, freight and delivery terms, and the revenue is earned first by Russian companies, reaching the state through taxes.
That money arrives when Moscow needs it. Russia’s budget was built on $59 Urals crude; in early 2026 Urals was selling in the mid-$40s to mid-$50s at deep discounts imposed by sanctions, and Bloomberg reported that, at those prices, the shortfall in oil and gas revenue would push the deficit to almost 2.2 trillion rubles, about $29 billion. On my numbers, the full diesel package alone would cover roughly a fifth to a quarter of that gap.
The sanctions relief is worth more than the announced tonnage. Treasury’s general license is not limited to fuel bound for the United States. It allows Russian diesel to be sold on the global market, and any cargo loaded while the license is in force is exempt from US sanctions until April 2027. That means:
• Every exportable barrel benefits, not just the announced tranches. Once Russia lifts its own export ban, all of its diesel can be sold openly for six months, not just the volumes in Trump’s post. If Russia exported even 0.5 million barrels a day over that period, a figure I use only for illustration, it would earn roughly $14 billion to $18 billion at the same prices.
• Smaller discounts. Sanctioned Russian crude sold at a discount of about $26.50 a barrel to Brent in February. Diesel sold legally to mainstream buyers, with conventional shipping and insurance, does not need to be discounted the same way. Each dollar of discount removed is a dollar more for Moscow.
• A crack in the sanctions wall. This is the first diesel license longer than the standard 30 days since the war began, and it comes weeks after Trump signed a law calling for tariffs of up to 100% on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas. Moscow and its customers will draw the obvious conclusion: US sanctions are negotiable, and enforcement of the new law is now in doubt.
My assessment
This deal is politics, not supply. It gives the White House a talking point before the midterms and gives Moscow billions of dollars in hard currency plus a six-month sanctions reprieve it has sought since the war began, but it does not move the needle on the global diesel shortage. At best it offsets two weeks of a deficit that, on Miller’s assessment, will persist for years while the Gulf rebuilds. Lower pump prices, if they come, will come from demand destruction, stock draws or a reopened Strait of Hormuz, not from 35 million barrels of Russian diesel trickling in over the winter.
The larger cost is strategic. Easing sanctions for a volume this small hands Russia a financial lifeline for its war budget and trades away leverage over Moscow, and strains relations with Kyiv and Brussels, for a benefit that disappears in the noise of a 3 million barrel-a-day hole.
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The global economic damage caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is generally not understood by most policymakers. Public and policy discussion of the Strait of Hormuz closure has fixated on crude oil: tanker counts, Brent prices, strategic petroleum reserves. That focus is understandable, but it misses much of the damage. The Persian Gulf is also a dominant global supplier of liquefied natural gas, urea, sulfur and helium. Each feeds a different part of the world economy (power and industrial gas, food production, phosphate fertilizer and metals refining, and semiconductors and medical imaging), and none can be replaced by drawing down an emergency stockpile the way oil can. The loss of these flows has received a fraction of the attention given to oil, even though for several import-dependent countries it is the more consequential shock.
This paper addresses two of these neglected commodities, sulfur and urea. It explains why they matter to the global economy, sets out how much the Gulf states produce, and identifies the countries most adversely affected by the cutoff. LNG enters the analysis only where it bears on fertilizer production; helium is outside the scope of this paper.
Urea and sulfur are low-value bulk commodities that sit underneath two of the world’s most important production systems: food and metals. Urea is the world’s main nitrogen fertilizer. Sulfur, converted to sulfuric acid, is the indispensable input for phosphate fertilizer and for leaching copper, nickel and cobalt. The Persian Gulf is the single largest export source of both, and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since 28 February 2026 has removed most of that supply from world markets.
The damage is not evenly distributed. The countries hit hardest share three characteristics: heavy import dependence on Gulf product, little or no domestic substitute, and thin stockpiles. On that basis the most adversely affected are India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal in South Asia; Brazil and Australia among major agricultural exporters; Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Chile on the sulfur-to-metals side; Morocco and China as phosphate producers; and a group of low-income East and Southern African importers that WTO analysis flags as the most exposed of all.
Urea prices have largely retraced their April spike thanks to Chinese export quotas and weaker demand. Sulfur has not, because it is a byproduct with no quick replacement, and because Russia and China have simultaneously restricted their own exports. The sulfur shock is therefore the more durable and less appreciated of the two.
Why urea matters
Urea (46% nitrogen) is the most widely traded nitrogen fertilizer and the cheapest way to deliver nitrogen to cereal crops such as rice, wheat and maize. It is made by converting natural gas into ammonia and then reacting the ammonia with carbon dioxide. Gas is roughly three-quarters or more of the cash cost of production, which is why the industry has clustered where gas is cheapest: the Gulf, Russia, North Africa and, for domestic use, China.
Nitrogen cannot be skipped for a season without yield loss, so demand is inelastic in the short run. When urea becomes unaffordable, farmers in poorer countries apply less and yields fall the following harvest; the food-price effect therefore arrives with a lag. Beyond agriculture, urea is used in diesel exhaust fluid for trucks, in urea-formaldehyde resins for wood panels, and in animal feed.
The Gulf’s weight in the urea trade
Estimates of the Gulf’s share vary with definitions (production vs. exports, Middle East vs. Hormuz-dependent only, seaborne vs. all trade), but all point to the region being the single largest source:
• Argus puts Middle East urea exports at about 20 Mt/yr, roughly 35% of seaborne trade, with just over 17 Mt/yr either loading inside Hormuz or coming from Iran.
• RaboResearch estimates about 30% of global urea normally transits the Strait; NDSU puts the Gulf at about 43% of seaborne urea exports; a farmdoc daily scenario paper uses about 40% of globally traded urea.
• IFA estimates that roughly 12 Mt/yr of urea moves through Hormuz.
Why sulfur matters
Sulfur matters almost entirely because of sulfuric acid, the most heavily produced industrial chemical in the world. The largest single use is the acidulation of phosphate rock to make phosphoric acid and from it DAP, MAP and TSP fertilizers. The second strategic use is hydrometallurgy: heap and agitation leaching of copper ores (SX-EW), and high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL) of nickel and cobalt laterites, which is the backbone of Indonesia’s battery-metals industry. Sulfuric acid is also used in petroleum refining, titanium dioxide pigment, viscose, paper and water treatment.
Two features make sulfur shocks unusually severe. First, almost all elemental sulfur is a byproduct of removing hydrogen sulfide from sour gas and crude, so no producer can raise output in response to price. Second, consumers who process metals often cannot run at partial rates: Kpler notes that HPAL plants are effectively either on or off.
Scale of metals exposure
• SX-EW is roughly 15% of global copper cathode output, concentrated in the DRC, Chile and the United States; acid use runs from about 3 t to more than 20 t per tonne of copper depending on ore grade (Kpler).
• HPAL nickel needs roughly 10 t of sulfur per tonne of nickel, so every $100/t rise in sulfur adds about $1,000/t to nickel cost (Red Door Research via S&P Global).
• One industry estimate holds that without sulfuric acid about 30% of nickel processing, 50% of copper processing and 70% of cobalt processing would stop (SunSirs). Treat this as indicative.
The Gulf’s weight in the sulfur trade
The Middle East produces about a quarter of the world’s sulfur but supplies about 45% of seaborne trade (SMM); IFA puts the share at 49% of global sulfur trade, or about 15 Mt/yr through Hormuz; S&P Global cites about 20 Mt/yr, half of traded supply. Because Gulf states consume little of what they recover, nearly all of it is exported.
Gulf production snapshot
Sulfur (USGS MCS 2026, all forms, thousand metric tons)
Country / 2024 / 2025 (est.) / Share of world 2025
Saudi Arabia / 7,200 / 7,200 / 8.6%
United Arab Emirates / 6,300 / 6,300 / 7.5%
Qatar / 3,000 / 3,100 / 3.7%
Iran / 2,000 / 2,100 / 2.5%
Kuwait / 1,300 / 1,300 / 1.5%
Iraq, Bahrain, Oman / not reported separately / — / small
World total / 83,900 / 84,000 / 100%
Shares calculated from USGS figures. Iraq, Bahrain and Oman are not broken out by USGS; their output is believed to be small (Oman a few hundred kt; Bahrain and Iraq less), but these are estimates, not sourced figures.
Urea (capacity or output, million metric tons per year)
Some commercial databases report Bahrain urea output of over 6 Mt and Iran over 11 Mt; both exceed known plant capacity and should not be relied on. Oman’s two plants lie outside the Strait and have continued to ship.
The 2026 cutoff and the compounding shocks
The US-Iran war that began on 28 February 2026 brought commercial dry-bulk traffic through Hormuz to a halt. Several further shocks then compounded it:
• Physical damage. QatarEnergy halted production in March after attacks on its Ras Laffan and Mesaieed sites; Mesaieed is home to QAFCO. SMM expects damaged gas and refining assets in Qatar and the UAE to keep exports below pre-war levels in the medium term, which directly limits recovered sulfur.
• Gas cutoff to importers’ own plants. Loss of Qatari LNG forced urea plants in South Asia to shut, converting an import problem into a domestic production problem. Reuters reported that Bangladesh shut four of its five urea plants.
• China’s sulfuric acid export ban. On 10 April China replaced its acid export quota with a full ban through August; Chile, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia were its main buyers (Kpler).
• Russia’s sulfur export ban. Extended on 25 June to 31 December 2026, removing the other major swing supplier (SMM).
Measured impact
• The International Trade Centre found urea exports from Hormuz-dependent economies fell 83% by volume in April 2026 versus April 2025, and that alternative suppliers had not replaced the lost urea or sulfur.
• RaboResearch estimated the closure was removing about 2 Mt of fertilizer a week from world markets, with farm fertilizer costs up 30–40% since the war began.
• The WTO’s Hormuz tracker showed fertilizer shipments through the Strait still near zero in September, even as urea prices fell back toward pre-war levels (around $386/t) on Chinese quota releases.
• Sulfur has stayed high: ADNOC raised its July official selling price to $1,000/t FOB, and delivered prices in Indonesia exceeded $1,000/t (SMM; CRU). China’s sulfur imports in May were down 66% year on year.
Countries most adversely affected
The ranking below weighs three factors: share of supply drawn from the Gulf, ability to substitute (domestic production, alternative suppliers, stockpiles), and economic or food-security consequence. Countries are grouped by the channel through which the shock reaches them.
Country / Channel / Exposure / Severity
India / Urea, ammonia, sulfur, LNG / About two-thirds of nitrogenous fertilizer imports from the Gulf (WTO); 81% of ammonia supply tied to the Gulf (farmdoc); ~54% of all fertilizer imports in 2024 (NDSU). LNG loss also curbs domestic urea output. / Very high
Bangladesh / LNG, urea / Four of five urea plants shut for lack of gas; limited stockpiles (Reuters). / Very high
Pakistan / LNG, urea / Gas-fed fertilizer plants curtailed; named by Reuters and Rabobank as hit hard, with thin stocks. / High
Sri Lanka, Nepal / Urea / Listed by the WTO among the most exposed importers; small, fully import-dependent markets with fiscal constraints. / High
Brazil / Urea, phosphate / Almost entirely import-dependent for urea, ~40% of it from the Gulf; also loses Moroccan phosphate as a substitute because Morocco lacks sulfur (NDSU; Reuters). / Very high
Australia / Urea / 68–72% of urea from the Gulf, the highest share among major producers; local shortages reported (NDSU; farmdoc; Reuters). / High
Thailand / Urea Nearly half of nitrogenous fertilizer imports from the Gulf (WTO). / Moderate–high
Indonesia / Sulfur (nickel, phosphate) / Imported 5–5.3 Mt of sulfur in 2025, ~75% from the Middle East; HPAL nickel producers moved from bottom to top of the cost curve; Q1 sulfur imports down 30%; cutbacks under study (S&P Global; CRU). / Very high
DRC and Zambia / Sulfur (copper, cobalt) / The African Copperbelt takes about 90% of its sulfur from the Gulf (CRU); DRC imported 1.3–1.4 Mt in 2025. Zambia imposed acid export permits on 27 March. / High
Chile / Sulfuric acid (copper) / Consumes ~9 Mt/yr of acid, 4 Mt imported; lost ~1.5 Mt/yr from China to the export ban (Trafigura via S&P Global). One trade source reports a 6% fall in H1 copper output (unconfirmed). / High
Morocco / Sulfur (phosphate) / OCP, the world’s largest phosphate exporter, depends on imported sulfur; IFA and NDSU flag it among the most affected supply chains. / High
China / Sulfur (phosphate) / Large sulfur importer for phosphate; responded by banning acid exports, which shifted the pain onto Chile and Indonesia. / Moderate
East and Southern Africa / Urea, phosphate / Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe (WTO) and Somalia (Reuters): low stocks, weak currencies, seven least-developed countries among the most exposed. / High (food security)
United States / Urea, phosphate / About two-thirds of urea and DAP/MAP supply is domestic; the rest is partly Gulf-origin. Price exposure is real but supply is buffered (farmdoc). / Moderate
Notes on the leading cases
India is the largest single loser in absolute terms. It is hit three ways at once: imported urea and ammonia, imported sulfur for its phosphate plants, and imported LNG for its own urea plants. The government has revised its roughly $4.5 billion nutrient-based subsidy programme and is prioritising gas for fertilizer, which shifts the cost onto the budget rather than eliminating it.
Brazil is the most exposed major agricultural exporter. Because it imports nearly all its nitrogen and most of its phosphate, and because the sulfur cutoff simultaneously constrains Morocco’s ability to supply phosphate, Brazil loses both its direct and its substitute sources. The consequence matters for world soybean and maize supply, and therefore for China’s feed imports.
Indonesia is the clearest case of the sulfur channel reaching the industrial economy. With more than half of world nickel output and HPAL capacity that depends on Gulf sulfur, the shock passes through to stainless steel and battery cathode supply chains. CRU reported nickel prices rising alongside a record copper price of about $13,000/t.
The African Copperbelt illustrates the value of self-supply. Operators with captive acid, such as First Quantum in Zambia and the Kamoa-Kakula acid plant in the DRC, reported limited disruption, while leach operations dependent on imported Gulf sulfur face output cuts.
Offsets and relative winners
• Producers outside the Strait: Oman’s Omifco and SIUCI, and Saudi Arabia via Red Sea ports; SABIC has trucked urea overland from Jubail to Yanbu, though at small scale (Fertilizer Daily).
• China has released urea export quotas, which did most of the work in bringing urea prices back down. Russia benefits on urea but has chosen to keep sulfur at home.
• Producers with domestic gas and captive acid, notably the United States, Canada and integrated smelter-acid copper operations, are relatively insulated.
Outlook and indicators to watch
Urea will normalise first once ships move, because Gulf plants outside the damaged sites can restart quickly and other exporters have spare capacity. Sulfur will lag, because recovery depends on gas and refinery throughput in Qatar and the UAE, some of which is damaged, and because Russian and Chinese export restrictions run at least to year-end. Key indicators: weekly Hormuz bulk transits; QatarEnergy and ADNOC sulfur OSPs; Indonesian HPAL operating rates; Indian urea tender volumes and prices; Chinese export quota decisions; and whether Russia renews its sulfur ban beyond 31 December 2026.
The Promise of False Security
by Larry C. Johnson
16 October 2026
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Karl Miller’s new report says the Gulf paid for protection it never got, and that it is time to walk away
For years the Gulf monarchies have been told that the path to security runs through Washington and Tel Aviv. Sign the Abraham Accords, buy Israeli defense and surveillance technology, invest in the right American funds, and you will be protected. Then came this war. Refineries in Saudi Arabia, LNG trains in Qatar and energy facilities across the region were hit, and none of those partnerships kept the missiles and drones away.
Karl Miller, whose assessments of the Gulf energy crisis I have relied on throughout this war, has now turned to the money and the politics behind that security bargain. His new report is titled, provocatively, “How the Gulf Countries Were Extorted to Fund Economic and Individual Genocide in Palestine.” The title states his allegation. What makes the report worth reading is that Miller is careful to separate what he alleges from what the documents prove, and the documented record is damning enough on its own.
Follow the money: Affinity Partners
At the center of the report is Affinity Partners, the investment firm Jared Kushner founded after leaving his post as senior adviser in his father-in-law’s first administration, where he was a principal architect of the Abraham Accords. Gulf sovereign money flowed in almost immediately. Miller reconstructs the publicly reported commitments:
Investor / Reported commitment / Note
Saudi Public Investment Fund / $2.0 billion / Initial commitment
UAE investor(s), initial round / More than $200 million / 2023 reporting
Qatari investor(s), initial round / About $200 million / Similar to UAE
Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s Lunate / $1.5 billion / 2024 round, reported March 2025
Total fund commitments / About $4.5 billion / Of which about $3.9 billion identifiably Gulf
Source: Karl W. Miller, The Promise of False Security (16 October 2026), compiled from public reporting. Commitments are not the same as cash paid in.
The fees followed. By September 2024 Affinity had collected about $157.5 million in management fees from foreign investors, including $87 million from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. A congressional letter in March 2026 estimated more than $60 million more for 2025. That is over $217 million across those two periods. Yet by July 2024 the fund had deployed only about $1.1 billion, roughly 37% of what investors had committed. Miller’s verdict: too much compensation for too little demonstrated delivery. Affinity did make investments, he notes, but the manager was paid handsomely before its Gulf backers saw proven returns.
Where the money led
The most explosive part of the report concerns where some of that capital ended up. Affinity bought into Phoenix, one of Israel’s largest insurance and investment groups, under a permit allowing indirect holdings of up to 10%. After selling a quarter of its shares in July 2026, it still holds about 7.4%. Phoenix, in turn, holds positions in a long list of Israeli defense companies, including a reported stake of at least $265 million in Elbit Systems, the country’s largest arms maker, and holdings in makers of drone cameras, artillery fuzes and armored-vehicle components. Research on its portfolio also reports Phoenix financing for housing in the West Bank settlements of Emmanuel and Efrat, and an 80% interest in a shopping mall in occupied East Jerusalem.
The International Court of Justice found in its July 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s settlement enterprise in the occupied territories is unlawful, as did UN Security Council Resolution 2334. In other words, Gulf money that was raised in part on the promise of Arab-Israeli peace now sits, through a minority stake, in a company with exposure to Israel’s arms industry and to settlement-linked business.
Miller is precise about the limits here, and so should I be. The exposure is indirect. A 7.4% stake in Phoenix does not mean Affinity owns or directs everything in Phoenix’s portfolio, and the settlement loans he cites were made before Affinity invested. But for Gulf governments that publicly champion Palestinian statehood, the fact that their sovereign wealth is anywhere in this chain should be intolerable.
The UAE: dependence sold as protection
The second strand of the report concerns security. Since the Abraham Accords the United Arab Emirates has built deep ties with Israel’s defense industry. In March 2021 the Emirati defense conglomerate EDGE and Israel Aerospace Industries agreed to develop a counter-drone system together, explicitly linking the project to the Accords. In November 2021 the same partners announced unmanned surface vessels with uses that included maritime security and oil and gas operations. Separately, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala paid $1.025 billion for 22% of Israel’s Tamar gas field in 2021.
In Miller’s assessment, this integration has compromised the UAE’s security autonomy, embedding foreign suppliers in critical institutions and constraining the government’s freedom of action. He does not claim, and the record does not show, that Israel controls the Emirati government. His argument is subtler and, I think, more important: a country that cannot operate, repair or replace its own critical systems without a foreign supplier is not sovereign over them.
The false-security thesis
This is the heart of the report. Political access and advanced weapons are not the same as protection. Gulf states bought counter-drone systems, surveillance tools and privileged access in Washington. What they needed, Miller argues, was the ability to keep oil and gas flowing from the wellhead to the paying customer: production, processing, power, pipelines, ports, shipping and payment systems. A counter-drone system can defeat a defined threat; it cannot guarantee that a refinery stays online, a pipeline keeps pumping or a tanker reaches its buyer. The events of this year have proved the point. The partnerships were announced with great fanfare. The infrastructure was hit anyway.
Exit, recover, regain control
Miller’s recommendation is blunt. Gulf governments and their sovereign funds should exit the Trump-Kushner financial relationships and replace their dependence on Israeli defense and surveillance suppliers. Specifically, they should:
First, stop all new commitments, renewals and expansions. Second, use every available contractual right to withdraw, transfer or sell their fund interests and recover capital, while demanding a full accounting of the fees, carried interest and other benefits the manager has received. Third, take back control of data, software keys and administrative access from foreign suppliers, but in a careful sequence that does not shut down essential systems. Fourth, buy replacement security on the basis of tested performance and sovereign control, not political promises. And fifth, protect the oil and gas revenue chain throughout.
He is equally clear about what his report does not prove. It does not establish extortion in the legal sense, a single command structure linking Washington, Tel Aviv and Affinity, or personal criminal responsibility for anyone. Those questions require investigators to connect specific promises, threats, decisions and payments. Miller’s point is that the Gulf does not need that proof to act. The fees are documented. The exposure is documented. The failure of the promised protection is visible in the smoke over the Gulf’s refineries.
My view
The Gulf states were sold a bargain: normalize with Israel, buy its technology, invest with the President’s son-in-law, and America and Israel will keep you safe. They kept their side. The protection did not arrive. Their money paid fees to a politically connected manager and found its way, indirectly, into Israel’s arms industry and settlement economy, while their own oil and gas infrastructure burned.
Miller’s advice is the right advice. Get out, get the money back and take control of your own security. The rulers in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha should ask themselves a simple question: what exactly did they buy?
BREAKING: The US asked Iran for permission to strike Iran's Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site without retaliation, and Iran rejected the request, per IRIB state media correspondent Morteza Ghoroghi.
He said "Trump's statements today point to war within the next 24 hours," and that Iran's military forces are "in a state of complete readiness."
6:48 PM · Oct 16, 2026
South Korea weighs deploying naval mission to Hormuz under US pressure: Report
The US is deploying a third carrier and 9,000 troops to West Asia ahead of threatened strikes on Iran
by The Cradle
News Desk
OCT 16, 2026 https://thecradle.co/articles/south-kor ... ure-report
South Korea is considering expanding its naval mission in West Asia to the Gulf of Oman, the gateway to the Strait of Hormuz, as US President Donald Trump presses Seoul to support the US-Israeli war on Iran, Kyunghyang Shinmun reported on 15 October.
Citing no sources, the outlet said South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s government is looking to stretch the operational reach of its Cheonghae anti-piracy unit beyond the Gulf of Aden. The president plans to ask parliament to renew the unit’s mandate before it lapses at the end of the year, possibly with a frigate dispatched to bolster it.
The South Korean Defense Ministry told Reuters that an extension beyond 31 December 2026 was under review, but that no details had been settled.
Deployed since 2009, the unit comprises roughly 300 personnel operating a 4,400-ton destroyer, a maritime operations helicopter, and up to three rigid-hull inflatable boats, according to broadcaster YTN.
Seoul has been considering a deployment toward Hormuz since early September, when a presidential official acknowledged that military measures were among the options.
Any deployment, the official said, would still have to satisfy South Korean law, pass a review of military readiness on the Korean Peninsula, and win a National Assembly vote.
The official was pushing back on reports by JTBC and MBC a day earlier that Seoul was preparing to send assets, including a maritime patrol aircraft and a mine detection and clearance unit, before the end of the year.
The review came weeks after Trump ordered the Pentagon on 17 August to “substantially reduce” joint drills with South Korea hours before they were set to begin
The US president said that South Korea had rejected his call to join the illegal war on Iran, and called the drills costly and hostile toward Pyongyang, attributing the decision to his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea dismissed the cutback and said the exercises remain provocative and aggressive.
The Pentagon is weighing dropping the “mother of all bombs” on Iran’s energy and nuclear sites, according to CNN, with US officials conceding it would not win the war but valuing its capacity to slaughter civilians and terrorize the population as a symbolic exit that would let Trump dress up defeat as victory.
The plans follow the deployment of the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, an amphibious group, and about 9,000 troops toward West Asia, revealed by US officials on 1 October, as Trump threatened to escalate the bombing of Iran after the 3 November midterms.
