Abstract

The 2026 US-Israel war on Iran and the subsequent near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz has triggered consequences far beyond a regional energy crisis. This paper argues that the conflict has simultaneously fractured Western alliance structures, accelerated the decline of the petrodollar, and catalysed the emergence of a genuinely multipolar world order — outcomes that are the precise opposite of what US strategic planners presumably intended. More fundamentally, the paper argues that Western analysis of this geopolitical shift is impoverished by a persistent failure to understand the historical experiences of Russia and China — nations that bore the overwhelming human cost of the Second World War and whose foreign policy is shaped profoundly by that experience. Understanding this context is not an endorsement of authoritarian behaviour. It is a prerequisite for meaningful diplomacy in the emerging multipolar order.

 

Part One: The Crisis in Context

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran. In retaliation, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz - the world’s most critical energy chokepoint - to shipping from hostile nations, triggering the largest oil supply shock in recorded history.

 

The scale of the disruption is stark. Before the war, approximately 20 million barrels of oil per day flowed through the Strait, representing 20 percent of global petroleum consumption. By May 2026, flows had fallen to roughly 6 million barrels per day.

 

Rather than closing the Strait entirely, Iran implemented a sophisticated “toll booth” regime — granting selective passage to non-hostile nations through the IRGC-controlled Larak Island corridor, in exchange for diplomatic accommodation and transit fees increasingly settled in Chinese yuan. Countries such as China, India and Pakistan have negotiated with Iran seeking safe passage through the Strait, with many other countries following this lead.  The fractures in Western alliance solidarity have been severe.

 

Beneath the energy crisis, a deeper financial transformation accelerated. Iran’s yuan-denominated toll booth transformed de-dollarisation from theory into operational reality. Transit fees that were routed through China’s CIPS payment system - paid by a number of US allies - created a practical precedent for yuan-denominated energy transactions that bypasses dollar infrastructure entirely. The petrodollar system, already weakened by Saudi Arabia’s failure to renew its exclusive dollar commitment in 2024 and the dollar’s decline from 70 percent to 57 percent of global reserves since 1999, faced its most serious structural challenge since 1974.

 

Developments such as the bilateral deal architecture, alliance fractures and the petrodollar pressure have been extensively documented elsewhere. What follows is less well examined.

 

Part Two: What the Crisis Reveals

1. Russia and China: The Unintended Beneficiaries

One of the most striking features of the 2026 crisis is that its two greatest beneficiaries have achieved their gains without direct military involvement in the conflict.

 

Russia’s position is paradoxical. Ukrainian drone attacks actually reduced Russian oil output by approximately 460,000 barrels per day compared to 2025. Yet Russia’s revenues surged by $6.3 billion as higher global prices more than compensated for lower volumes. Russian Urals crude - previously sold at a discount — traded at a premium in Asian markets as buyers scrambled for non-Hormuz supply. Russia earned up to $150 million per day in additional budget revenues during peak price periods, without firing a single shot in the conflict.

 

More significantly, Russia benefits strategically from every fracture in Western alliance architecture. France blocking UN resolutions alongside Moscow and Beijing, European nations negotiating directly with Tehran, NATO members refusing Trump’s military requests - each of these developments serves Russia’s long-term interest in a fragmented, less cohesive Western order. Russia needed only to watch.

 

China’s gains are deeper and more structural. Beijing is the indispensable intermediary in the new energy order — its CIPS payment system processes yuan-denominated transactions; its manufacturing capacity supplies what oil producers need in exchange for energy; its diplomatic positioning as a neutral mediator enhances its global standing. Every tanker that pays Iran’s yuan toll deepens the practical infrastructure of a parallel financial architecture that operates alongside, rather than within, the dollar system.

 

The profound irony is that the United States initiated a war presumably intended to demonstrate American power and reassert strategic dominance. The actual consequences have been the systematic empowerment of both of America’s principal strategic competitors — without either needing to deploy a single soldier.

 

2. The Global South and the New Energy Diplomacy

The crisis has reshuffled the strategic positioning of the developing world in ways that will outlast the conflict itself.

 

Southeast Asia experienced acute pain. Yet these countries responded not by aligning with the US position, but by pursuing bilateral energy diplomacy with Iran regardless of formal alliance obligations. Indonesia’s response was particularly instructive. President Prabowo Subianto - who had recently joined Trump’s “Board of Peace” -  executed what analysts described as a sophisticated four-country diplomatic circuit between late March and mid-April 2026, visiting Japan, South Korea, Russia and France to advance energy diversification and supply chain resilience.

 

India navigated most skillfully of all — securing passage for Indian tankers from Iran early in the crisis, positioning itself simultaneously as a critical redistribution hub for Middle Eastern crude and a country maintaining warm relationships with both Washington and Tehran. India exemplifies the “strategic autonomy” model that the new multipolar order makes possible for large middle powers: the freedom to pursue national interests without being conscripted into someone else’s alliance structure.

 

China’s offer to refinance African governments’ dollar-denominated loans in yuan at lower interest rates - observed at a Dakar conference in May 2026 - extends this dynamic further. For countries long subject to IMF austerity conditions attached to dollar debt, this represents a genuine alternative architecture. The petrodollar’s grip on the Global South is loosening not through ideology but through the pragmatic arithmetic of better terms.

 

3. A Multipolar World: The Honest Assessment

The emergence of a multipolar world order from this crisis raises a question that deserves honest engagement rather than ideological reflexivity: will it be better or worse for humanity?

 

The case for multipolarity as an improvement rests on serious arguments. The concentration of such extraordinary power in any single nation is structurally incompatible with genuine global democracy. The US-led order, for all its accomplishments, too frequently served American interests dressed in the language of universal values - regime change operations, dollar-denominated debt conditions, extraterritorial sanctions law, support for authoritarian governments when strategically convenient. Alternatively, in a world in which multiple currency options exist, development finance comes without political conditionality, and no single power can impose its preferences through financial system dominance, represents genuine gains in sovereignty for smaller nations.

 

But the case against multipolarity deserves equal weight. The alternative poles of the emerging multipolar world are not obviously more benign. Russia under Putin is an authoritarian state that has invaded neighbouring countries and dismantled democratic institutions. China is a one-party surveillance state that has suppressed minorities and eliminated Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms. A world in which these models gain legitimacy is not straightforwardly an improvement on the one it replaces. More fundamentally, the truly existential challenges facing humanity - climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemic preparedness, artificial intelligence governance - require global cooperation at scale. Historical evidence suggests that fragmented multipolar systems find such cooperation harder to achieve than hegemonic ones, however imperfect those hegemonies may be.

 

The conclusion is that the emerging multipolar world may be fairer in its distribution of power while simultaneously being less capable of coordinating responses to shared existential threats. Whether it proves better or worse will depend on choices not yet made - above all, whether the emerging powers choose to build genuinely inclusive multilateral institutions or merely use multipolarity as cover for their own dominance within regional spheres.

 

4. The World War II Context: What the West Persistently Fails to Understand

No analysis of the emerging multipolar order is adequate without confronting a historical context that Western commentary almost universally ignores: the catastrophic human losses suffered by Russia and China in the Second World War, and the profound ways in which those losses shape both nations’ strategic thinking today.

 

The casualty figures are not in dispute, though their scale defies easy comprehension. The Soviet Union suffered between 20 and 27 million deaths - the highest of any nation in the conflict. Approximately 11.4 million were military deaths; the remainder were civilians killed by military activity, famine and disease. A quarter of the entire Soviet population was killed or wounded. China suffered approximately 20 million deaths, the vast majority civilian, as a consequence of Japanese invasion and occupation. Poland lost approximately 5.9 to 6 million people - 20 percent of its pre-war population. The United States lost approximately 420,000 people - less than 0.3 percent of its population - in a war conducted entirely on foreign soil. No American city was besieged, bombed to rubble or occupied. Life on the American mainland continued largely uninterrupted.

Critically, approximately 85 percent of all Allied deaths in the Second World War were Soviet or Chinese. The countries that bore the overwhelming burden of defeating fascism were Russia and China. However, the post-war international order was designed primarily by the nation that had suffered least.

 

These numbers are not merely historical statistics. They are the living foundation of how Russia and China understand the purpose of state power, the meaning of national security, and the limits of trust in Western intentions.

 

For Russia, the Second World War - the Great Patriotic War - is not distant history but living national identity. The siege of Leningrad alone, lasting 872 days, killed more people than the entire American losses in the war. When Russian leaders insist they will never again permit hostile military forces to mass on Russia’s borders, this is not propaganda. It is a deeply felt national commitment forged in the most catastrophic suffering any modern nation has endured. NATO’s eastward expansion after the Cold War, experienced by Russian leaders through this historical lens, carried echoes of the encirclement that preceded the 1941 invasion. Western dismissal of this perspective as mere excuse-making reflects a failure of historical imagination rather than hard-headed strategic analysis.

 

For China, the Japanese invasion and occupation produced comparable national trauma. The Nanjing Massacre, the biological warfare of Unit 731, the systematic destruction of Chinese cities - these events are within living memory, and they form the bedrock of Communist Party legitimacy: the party that ended the “century of humiliation” in which China was repeatedly invaded and exploited by foreign powers. China’s insistence on absolute sovereignty, its deep resistance to foreign interference, its determination never again to be in a position of military weakness - all of these are comprehensible, even reasonable, when viewed through this history.

 

None of this requires endorsing either government’s actions today. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine caused immense suffering to a people who themselves bore staggering losses in the Second World War. China’s treatment of Uyghurs and its suppression of Hong Kong deserve clear-eyed criticism regardless of historical context.

 

But the West’s persistent refusal to acknowledge these historical experiences - to treat Russia and China as simply irrational adversaries rather than nations shaped by specific and comprehensible historical traumas - does not make Western analysis more rigorous. It makes Western policy less effective and more dangerous. You cannot negotiate meaningfully with a country whose most fundamental security anxieties you refuse to understand.

 

The current crisis illustrates this failure acutely. The United States initiated a war against Iran to further extend US military power in Eurasia apparently without serious consideration of the hypersensitivity of other nations. The result has been precisely the acceleration of the multipolar alignment that US policy has long sought to prevent.

 

5. The Profound Irony of Strategic Overreach

The deepest irony of the 2026 Iran war is that it has delivered, with extraordinary speed, precisely the outcomes that those most opposed to US global dominance had long sought but struggled to achieve through deliberate effort.

 

De-dollarisation advocates had spent decades arguing that the petrodollar system was a mechanism of American domination. The Hormuz crisis compressed decades of gradual change into months, by creating a practical, operational yuan payment mechanism that US treaty allies were willing to use.

 

Advocates of multipolarity had argued that American overreach was eroding the legitimacy of US leadership. The Iran war has validated these arguments more comprehensively than any theoretical paper or diplomatic initiative could. Russia and China had sought for years to demonstrate that the Western alliance was less cohesive than it appeared. The spectacle of France blocking UN resolutions alongside Moscow and Beijing, of European nations negotiating directly with Tehran, of Japan and South Korea quietly cutting energy deals with Iran while publicly maintaining alliance commitments, has exceeded what either power could reasonably have hoped to achieve through their own efforts.

 

Nobody planned this outcome. It was not a Chinese strategy or a Russian plot. It emerged organically from the collision of American maximalism with the energy realities of a deeply interdependent world. The United States initiated a war presumably to demonstrate power. The actual demonstration has been of power’s limits - the inability to reopen a strait it cannot control, the failure to hold alliance solidarity under economic pressure, the acceleration of the financial architecture designed to displace the dollar.

 

History may record the 2026 Iran war as the moment the American century effectively ended - not on a battlefield, but through the quiet, transactional decisions of dozens of countries choosing energy security over political loyalty, and yuan over dollars.

 

Conclusion: Toward a More Empathetic Geopolitics

The Hormuz crisis of 2026 is not primarily a story about oil. It is a story about the collapse of assumptions - about alliance solidarity, dollar dominance, the effectiveness of military power in a complex interdependent world, and the durability of a unipolar order built on the foundations of a very different era.

 

The most important contribution that Western analysis can make to navigating the transition now underway is not more sophisticated containment strategies or more targeted sanctions regimes. It is the harder, more humbling work of genuine historical empathy - understanding why Russia and China see the world as they do, not to excuse their actions, but to make possible the kind of mutual comprehension on which any durable peace must be built.

 

The 27 million Soviet dead and the 20 million Chinese dead of the Second World War are not merely historical statistics. They are the foundation of a worldview that will shape international politics for generations to come. A West that takes the time to truly reckon with those numbers - to feel their weight, to understand what they mean for the nations that bore them - will be far better equipped to build a stable world than one that continues to paint the emerging order in the simple colours of good and evil.

 

The world is not choosing between Western virtue and Eastern malevolence. It is navigating a transition between imperfect configurations of power, each shaped by historical experiences that deserve to be understood on their own terms. The quality of that navigation will be determined by whether we can find the wisdom to approach it with open eyes, open minds - and the humility to learn from history that was not our own.

________________________________________

This paper was developed through an extended analytical dialogue examining the Hormuz oil crisis from first principles. The analytical framework and core arguments — including the World War II casualty context as an explanatory foundation for Russian and Chinese strategic behaviour — were developed by the author. AI assistance was used in research, fact-checking and drafting. The author takes full responsibility for all conclusions.

On May 14-15, Trump visited Beijing. It was the first American presidential visit in nearly a decade. The summit produced agricultural purchases, a Boeing order, some easing of chip export restrictions, and a commitment from Xi Jinping to visit Washington in September.

As a trade deal, this is small. The concessions on both sides are modest, and Trump didn't need to fly to Beijing to get them. Over the weeks surrounding the summit, Trump has also done something harder to quantify: his rhetoric toward China has softened. The confrontational language of the tariff era has given way to cooperative framing. He has credited Chinese leadership with helping to bring about the April ceasefire with Iran. He has spoken about partnership.

Trump is not sentimental about China. If the cooperation is real, he is getting something for it. The visible deliverables are too small to explain the investment. So there is probably something else on the table.

There is a war going on with Iran. It has been going on since late February. The Strait of Hormuz is disrupted. Iran is under bombardment. A ceasefire has held since April 8, but no deal has been signed. The MOU's terms are roughly within range. Enrichment moratorium, sanctions relief, Hormuz reopening. Reports over the past weeks have described the remaining gap as narrow.

A signed MOU would be the clearest political win available to Trump before the midterms. He wants it.

China's influence over Iran

China played a key role in the April 7 ceasefire. The New York Times reported it. Trump confirmed it. Pakistan's prime minister credited China's "invaluable support." On April 4, President Pezeshkian failed to move IRGC commanders in a direct confrontation. By April 7, the IRGC had accepted a ceasefire. China is the most plausible explanation for what changed in between.

How does this influence work?

China absorbs over 80 percent of Iran's oil exports. Chinese firms fill commercial gaps created by Western sanctions across energy, construction, telecommunications, manufacturing. Chinese satellite data, reconnaissance capabilities, and missile supply chain components flow to the IRGC directly. A Financial Times investigation documented a Chinese-built reconnaissance satellite secretly acquired by the IRGC Aerospace Force. The 2023 China-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization deal built direct personal channels between Chinese officials and IRGC-connected figures.

These are not relationships mediated through Iran's foreign ministry. They are institution-to-institution links between Chinese entities and the IRGC's operational infrastructure, built during years of sanctions when no other major power was available. This is the pathway through which China's influence operates.

China can also offer something that other actors cannot: a credible assurance that the IRGC's position in the post-war order will be preserved. China's commercial and military-technical relationships are with the IRGC's own networks, not with Iran's civilian government. They were built during the sanctions era precisely because Western companies were absent. When sanctions are eventually lifted, Western firms will re-enter Iran's formal economy. They will not displace the parallel architecture that Chinese firms and the IRGC built together, because that architecture is already embedded in how Iran's economy actually functions.

Who rules Iran

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the February 28 strikes. His son Mojtaba was installed in early March, reportedly under IRGC pressure. He has not appeared in public since. Statements attributed to him arrive via Telegram. American intelligence has questioned whether he is functional.

President Pezeshkian has been systematically overruled. The IRGC rejected his ministerial nominees, seized wartime administrative authority, and controls the negotiating delegation's composition and mandate.

The decision-maker is IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi.

Vahidi's public statements reject negotiations "under current conditions." His actions are more ambiguous. The ceasefire was honored. His deputy Zolghadr was placed inside the Islamabad negotiating delegation. When negotiators exceeded his limits, he pulled them back without closing the channel. On May 18, Iran submitted a fresh proposal through Pakistan.

What Vahidi wants is to be the center of Iran's political order. Not an instrument of the Supreme Leader's authority, not a servant of revolutionary ideology, but the principal. This is what power is.

How Trump pays

Trump wants the war over. He cannot reach Vahidi. Washington has no direct channel to the IRGC, and Trump's public threats have produced no movement. China can reach Vahidi through the institutional and commercial relationships described above. So Trump needs China's cooperation.

What does he offer in return?

China faces structural pressure toward confrontation with the United States: technology restrictions, Taiwan, trade architecture, military posture in the Pacific. These pressures exist regardless of who is president. What keeps them from accelerating is the political frame. As long as Trump frames the relationship as cooperative, the American confrontation apparatus — congressional hawks, the national security establishment, aligned media — has no opening to build momentum. The moment Trump reframes it as adversarial, that machinery accelerates.

Trump can abandon the cooperative frame at any time. It costs him nothing. China cannot generate it on its own. This asymmetry makes the cooperation narrative Trump's most valuable bargaining chip.

This is what explains the Beijing summit. Not the agricultural purchases or the Boeing order. Trump is sustaining the cooperative frame, and in return, China helps deliver the Iran MOU. The MOU gives Trump a political win. The cooperative frame gives China breathing room against the structural headwinds. Both sides get what they need.

This is also what explains Trump's rhetorical shift. The softened language toward China, the public credit for the ceasefire, the partnership framing. These are not gestures of goodwill. They are the ongoing maintenance of a bargaining chip that works only as long as Trump keeps using it.

China's delivery

China has been working toward the MOU.

On March 31, China and Pakistan jointly issued a five-point peace initiative, formally inserting Beijing into the mediation framework. On April 7, China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have formalized US-led escort operations in the Strait of Hormuz, blocking an arrangement that would have diminished the IRGC's post-war leverage.

On May 6, Foreign Minister Wang Yi met Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi in Beijing. Wang publicly called for the restoration of normal passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran's foreign ministry, in its Telegram statement about the meeting, omitted that demand.

The demand was made. It was not allowed to be visible inside Iran. This is a small detail, but it reveals the structural limit of China's influence. China can push toward the MOU through direct channels. It cannot be seen pushing. Whatever pressure China applies to Vahidi must be invisible to the Iranian public, because visible foreign pressure toward concessions is exactly the material that Vahidi's domestic opponents need.

On May 18, three days after the Trump-Xi summit, Iran submitted a new proposal through Pakistan. Trump paused a planned military operation, citing progress.

The domestic obstacle

The external alignment is clear. Trump wants the MOU. China wants it. Vahidi's desire for centrality is not threatened by the MOU's terms, which defer all substantive concessions to a later negotiation. The channels are open. The gap on terms is narrow.

But signing is not just about terms. Signing is a political act. Even a one-page document that commits to nothing irreversible creates a fact: Iran agreed to negotiate with the United States. That fact requires a framework to interpret it, and the only framework currently available in Iranian political language defines it as betrayal.

The Paydari Front is small. Marginal in parliament, never victorious in a presidential election, narrow in public support. But it controls IRIB, the only legal terrestrial television broadcaster. Its allies dominate IRNA, the official news agency. Its mouthpiece, Raja News, sets the terms of daily political debate.

During the Supreme Leader's absence, Paydari used these channels to produce a concept: any accommodation with the United States is betrayal. The concept has precise criteria. Nuclear concessions, missile concessions, abandoning the resistance axis. And it has no structured competitor. There is no equally defined concept in Iranian political language that describes what an acceptable deal looks like. Opposition to Paydari's framing exists as sentiment. Sentiment has no name, no criteria, no transmissible structure. A fully formed concept dominates a political vocabulary even without majority support, as long as nothing of equal structure competes with it.

The 12.5 percent of Iranians who watch state television overlap with the IRGC's social base: Basij networks, the seminary system. These are the people who staff the machinery of political enforcement. And the concept, once produced, circulates beyond its original audience. It sets the terms of debate even for people who disagree with it, because disagreement without a counter-concept is just noise.

The concept is now attributed to the Supreme Leader. Mojtaba has said nothing since March. His silence was a vacuum, and Paydari filled it. What the public understands as the Supreme Leader's will is what Paydari placed there.

Vahidi may control Mojtaba. He may have the ability to produce a fatwa, a decree redefining the MOU as legitimate. But Mojtaba has been unseen for months. A sudden pronouncement contradicting what the public already believes would not override the existing concept. It would confirm the suspicion that the Supreme Leader's office has been captured and the decree manufactured. Using the institution would destroy the institution's authority in the act of using it.

What comes next

The MOU is one page and fourteen points. A declaration that the war is over and a thirty-day negotiation period begins. No permanent concessions, no irreversible transfers. Everything substantive is deferred.

Whether this is small enough to pass beneath Paydari's threshold is not obvious. A procedural document about starting negotiations is harder to frame as capitulation than a visible act of surrender. Parliament has been closed since February, removing one institutional platform. But state television remains operational, and Paydari's ability to frame a political act does not require parliamentary debate.

If the MOU is signed, the thirty-day negotiation period opens harder questions. Enrichment duration, sanctions architecture, the IRGC's formal institutional status, the future of the Strait of Hormuz. These are the points where interests genuinely diverge, and where the current alignment between Trump, China, and Vahidi may not hold. The coalition that brought the MOU into existence was built on the fact that the MOU itself defers everything that matters. The next stage will not have that luxury.

By An Onlooker of East Asian Peace

The global order is unraveling exactly as financial historian Ray Dalio warned in The Changing World Order. Burdened by a staggering national debt exceeding 120% of its GDP, the United States is increasingly turning to short-term, transactional foreign policies to cut costs. In East Asia, this has manifested as a dangerous reliance on Japan—greenlighting Tokyo’s aggressive push for remilitarization in exchange for regional burden-sharing. However, American policymakers must realize that outsourcing Indo-Pacific security to an unrepentant former aggressor is a profound strategic blunder that will destabilize the entire globe.

In his seminal book, Japan at the Crossroads (갈림길의 일본), political scientist Professor Hun-Mo Lee exposes the deeply rooted systemic crises within Japanese society. Decades of economic stagnation and political insularity have bred a profound sense of helplessness among its citizens. Historically, Japan has attempted to resolve its internal socioeconomic crises by projecting aggression outward—a trait that led to the devastation of World War II. Today, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s administration is weaponizing this domestic anxiety to dismantle Article 9 of its Peace Constitution. Rearming a nation that consistently plays the victim while denying its historical atrocities is not a recipe for peace; it is a catalyst for an uncontrollable regional arms race.

Even pragmatic conservative voices within the U.S. Republican Party, such as Senator Mitch McConnell, have warned that viewing alliances strictly through a financial lens undermines American credibility and inadvertently empowers adversaries like China. Forcing a Japan-centric security framework on East Asia disrupts the delicate geopolitical balance and threatens the vital artery of global trade. Over 50% of the world’s container ships pass through the Taiwan Strait, and East Asia remains the global epicenter of advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Triggering a conflict here would cost the global economy an estimated $10 trillion—a catastrophic collapse that, when compounded by the ongoing climate crisis, could spell irreversible doom for modern civilization.

If Washington wishes to maintain a resilient, long-term presence in Asia, it must stop settling for dangerous short-term fixes. The United States needs to elevate South Korea and Taiwan as its primary, respected strategic partners. Unlike Japan, which refuses to look back at its history, South Korea is a vibrant democracy equipped with an elite standing military and irreplaceable cutting-edge industrial capabilities in semiconductors and defense manufacturing.

>America stands at a crucial junction. Trusting an insular Japan that seeks to bury its past will only lead to collective ruin. Recognizing and empowering dependable, values-driven partners like South Korea is the only true win-win strategy for global stability.

Interesting piece arguing that the strategic cost of America’s Iran war is now showing up less in dollars or casualties than in the assets Washington may have to trade to manage the fallout: Taiwan arms deliveries, rare-earth access, chip policy and election-year timing.

Is this a useful way to think about great-power overstretch, not as immediate defeat, but as a loss of bargaining freedom in the next theater?

A Duginist leader published a text on Atlanticism, arguing that the concept still has great explanatory power in portraying the projection of American power.

Indeed, there is much utility in the overarching idea of ​​Maritime Power, present in Classical Geopolitics, and of which Atlanticism is an application. It is worth noting, however, that the Russian geopolitician Alexander Dugin falls into a strict dichotomy in his approach to these terms, giving them a "metaphysical" and eschatological content that leads to contradictions that are difficult to escape.

The Brazilian author of the cited piece states that, according to Dugin, "maritime powers (like Athens, Carthage, and Great Britain in other eras) are those driven by a mercantile ethos. Their existential center being the exchange and accumulation of goods, this has implications in other areas. The method of expansion is the construction of trading posts and coastal colonies; the values ​​are materialistic, egalitarian, and individualistic. Instability and precariousness are positively valued, so there is an impulse to relativize all types of limits, borders, and taboos."

This is indeed the framework within which the Russian thinker frames his "philosophy of history," marked by the confrontation between thalassocracies (maritime powers) and tellurocracies (land powers). However, in doing so, Dugin deviates in a Manichean way from the writings of Carl Schmitt, an intellectual whose work is only fully understood against the backdrop of Christian theology. Schmitt considered the Eastern Roman Empire [better known as the "Byzantine Empire"] a civilization of the sea, alongside Venice, and Athens and Carthage, cited by our Duginist author.

It is worth remembering that Constantinople is the Mother Church of Russia. It was through this Thalassocratic (Sea) Empire, supposedly of "materialistic, egalitarian, and individualistic values," that Orthodoxy not only arrived in Kievan Rus', but also spread and developed throughout Muscovy. If Russia could call itself the "Third Rome," operating the myth of translatio imperii so well-liked by Dugin, it is because it considers itself in the lineage of a maritime civilization.

For Schmitt, the great danger lay not in the Sea as an expression of individualistic or mercantile values, but rather in the 'spatial' rupture that occurred at the dawn of Modernity, and which created conditions for the complete conversion to the Open Sea, that is, to the Oceans, later unified.

It is true that this situation allowed for the emergence of an Oceanic World Empire capable of encircling all lands. However, nineteenth-century technological developments provided the possibility for land powers to also fight for a World Empire, a fundamental point in the work of Halford John Mackinder (the struggle for the "Heartland"). Both land and sea can fall into what Schmitt called Caesarism, the Bonapartist re-emergence of a type of non-Christian imperial power. An Empire that is not Katechon, in the words of the German jurist.

Katechon is the figure cited by the Apostle Saint Paul as an "obstacle" to the reign of the Antichrist. In traditional theology and in Schmitt, it refers to a Christian and providential idea of ​​the Roman Emperor, a function that would always be exercised by a character or State throughout history. Dugin, in turn, mobilizes these ideas in a fetishized way, claiming that Katechon is the Russian people themselves, whom he calls the "Throne of God," an epithet that the offices of the Orthodox Church actually confer on the All-Holy and Pure Theotokos (that is, the Blessed Virgin Mary).

According to Dugin,

>"Russia, which today enters the final battle against chaos, is in the position of one who fights against the antichrist himself. But how far we are from this high ideal, which the radical nature of the final battle demands. And yet... Russia is the 'prepared throne'. From the outside it may appear to be empty. But it is not. The Russian people and state carry the katechumens. [...] We, the Russians, carry the Throne of the Prepared. And in the history of mankind there is no mission more sacred, more lofty, more sacrificial than to lift Christ, the King of kings, upon our shoulders. As long as there is a Cross on the throne, it is the Russian Cross, Russia is crucified on it, she bleeds her sons and daughters and all this for a reason... We are on the right path to the resurrection of the dead. [Dugin, Genesis and Empire, 2022 - an excerpt from this book is also available here]

However, for Schmitt, the function of Katechon was also performed by Constantinople, a maritime power. And against a land power:

>"[The Eastern Roman Empire], as a maritime power, achieved what Charlemagne's land power was unable to: it acted as a bulwark, a Katechon, as it is said in Greek. Despite its weakness, it withstood the attacks of Islam for centuries, preventing the Arabs from conquering all of Italy. In the absence [of Constantinople], Italy would have become part of the Muslim world, like North Africa, and all of ancient and Christian civilization would have disappeared." [Schmitt, 1942]

The German even goes so far as to claim that the British Empire of the early 19th century was a Katechon in the pursuit of global equilibrium.

Schmitt's perspective on the dispute between Land and Sea—which he believed had been shaken by another revolution, the conquest of the element of air, which also provides several interesting reflections, including from a theological and metaphysical point of view—was not that of a Manichean confrontation between Good and Evil, repeated indefinitely throughout history. Land and Sea are representations of two mythological monsters, and as such, powers of Nature, to which men, in their freedom, can choose to adhere. There is no intrinsic problem in either of them, as long as they are under divine aegis, or complemented by elements of Nature not contemplated in this duality of Classical Geopolitics.

Dugin's Manichean tendency to demonize one of the elements of Nature will have repercussions on his approach to gender and on his noology, given the distorted Platonism of the Russian thinker, who associates Thalassocracy with woman and matter, and both with chaos that must be subdued through war, as in the myth of Kulturkampf. But this is a contradiction to be addressed elsewhere.

Text taken from Sol da Pátria

1. Iran went against the two largest Air Force’s in the world

2. Iran went against the largest military as the most sanctioned country on earth for decades

3. Weeks prior Mossad and Trump admitted to giving violent rioters weapons to break the social order and directed them to attack police stations.

4. Iran was able to lock onto and target F-35 Lightnings a feat that no other country on earth did

5. Iran was 1 versing a ton of countries. France had an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean helping out, Cyprus and the UK were helping out, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain all allowed their countries to be used to launch attacks and opened up their air space.

6. Iran was caught by a sucker punch and surprise attack in the middle of negotiations

And yet they’ve held it together and anyone outside the U.S. or Israel is writing that Iran has emerged as a greater power and is better off today having defended and prevented Trump from achieving any of his five strategic objectives.

This is a modern day David versus Goliath story

Geopolitical Piece regarding Iran and Kharg Island and other options

In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union suffered 10,000 to 20,000 deaths and 400,000 wounded. As far as I know, this war became one of the causes of the Soviet Union's collapse.

In the Vietnam War, the US suffered 58,000 deaths and 300,000 wounded, which sparked a nationwide anti-war movement.

In the Iraq War, 4,800 US soldiers died and 30,000 were wounded. The casualties and financial toll in Iraq became one of the reasons for Obama's victory in 2008.

In the current Ukraine War, hundreds of thousands of Russians have died and over a million have been wounded, yet there seems to be absolutely no public opposition to this war in Russia right now.

Looking at the news, Putin's approval ratings consistently show high numbers of around 70% to 80%. Furthermore, when I visit Russian websites and use a translator, the atmosphere is incredibly peaceful, as if nothing is happening at all.

What is the reason for this?

Curious how you’d approach the current failed war.

I think I would

1. Not fall victim to sunk cost fallacy and pull out
2. Use sanctions relief as primary lever for negotiations. And negotiations would be direct. Not through intermediary and certainly not through Kushner or Wytkoff.
3. Longer-term Iran is an ancient civilization with robust industry and smart people. They also sit in a geographically important area. I would seek strengthening ties and see a win win.
4. Aid to Israel would be withheld if they interfered with negotiations or American strategy. If they don’t respect that they’d get sanctioned.

I'm searching for articles, books, pieces of media with hindsight and detailed analysis on the war against drugs during Rodrigo Duterte's term in 2016-2022.

This topic drew a lot of attention from western media during Duterte's presidence because of the extra judicial nature of the repression and the number of killed but I've found very few in depth article at the time.

Some sources say the war against drugs was effective to reduce drug proliferation, some say it failed and it was a cover up to benefit a drug syndicate with ties to Duterte and eliminate rival factions.

Marcos Jr criticized Duterte's war on drugs when he became president and arrested him. Duterte was extradited to the Hague in 2025 for crimes against humanity.