By Gustavo de Arístegui,
February 6, 2026
I. BRIEF INTRODUCTION
The events of February 6, 2026, encapsulate, as if through a prism, the major tensions of the international system: a terrorist Iran forced to negotiate in Oman out of sheer fear of American power; a Russia attempting to shield its illegal annexations while sitting in Abu Dhabi discussing “peace”; a nuclear arms control architecture teetering on the brink of collapse with the expiration of New START; a Gulf fractured by the Saudi-Emirati divorce that is bleeding Yemen dry; an Arctic that is ceasing to be a periphery and becoming a central chessboard; and an increasingly sophisticated economic encirclement of Castroism, aimed at strangling the regime without abandoning the people. All of this unfolds in a climate of moral decay in which the extreme left and its flotilla activists shout against Israel and “the West,” while maintaining a deafening silence in the face of the massacre of tens of thousands of Iranians at the hands of the ayatollahs’ regime and downplaying the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Given this landscape, the only intellectually honest and strategically sensible position is a firm defense of liberal democracy, an unapologetic Atlanticism, maximum toughness on jihadist terrorism and Russian-Iranian expansionism, and a frontal critique of extremism and the moral imposture of much of the radical left.
II. MOST IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE LAST 24 HOURS
1. US-Iran: Oman, negotiations under the threat of force
Facts
In Muscat, the capital of Oman, the first major round of high-level negotiations between the United States and Iran since the June 2015 US attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities is taking place. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, accompanied by Jared Kushner, are at the table. The talks, initially limited to the nuclear issue, which Tehran has tried to shield from any discussion of ballistic missiles and terrorist proxies, have since been broadened by Washington and several Arab mediators. The meeting comes after a January marked by the brutal repression of the ayatollahs’ regime—with tens of thousands dead in the streets—military incidents such as the downing of a Shahed drone by a US F-35C, and a significant deployment of US resources in the region. The Trump Administration has made it clear that it prefers diplomacy, but is keeping all military options on the table, and senior Treasury officials are already talking about Iranian elites “pulling money out of the country” like rats abandoning a sinking ship.
Implications
Iran is not arriving in Oman as an equal partner, but as a cornered terrorist regime that rightly fears a targeted attack capable of triggering the internal implosion that Khamenei so desperately fears. It attempted to reduce the talks to a mere technical nuclear adjustment precisely to avoid any questioning of the pillars of its power: the missile program, the network of Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and its systematic use of theocratic violence against its own people. The presence of Kushner, the architect of the Abraham Accords, reveals that Washington is not only thinking about nuclear limits, but also about a potential regional arrangement that links the Iranian issue to Israel’s security and normalization with the Sunni Arab world.
Perspectives and scenarios
The most likely scenario in the short term is an Iran attempting to buy time, offering cosmetic concessions and portraying itself as a victim to a Western left willing to swallow any narrative if it goes against Washington and Israel. The only real check on the regime remains the credible threat of surgical strikes at the heart of its revolutionary and nuclear apparatus; if that threat dissipates, Tehran will revert to its old ways. The best-case scenario involves an extremely robust agreement on verification, missiles, and proxies, accompanied by internal and regional pressure; the worst, a miscalculated escalation leading to open conflict in which the true loser, once again, would be the Iranian people and the stability of the entire Middle East.
2. Russia-Ukraine-US in Abu Dhabi: prisoner exchange and war by other means
Facts
The second round of talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States concluded in Abu Dhabi with the first prisoner exchange in five months—314 fighters in total—and a commitment to continue meetings. The presence of top security and intelligence officials at the table indicates that this was not merely a symbolic gesture. Meanwhile, a high-level military dialogue channel between Washington and Moscow has reopened, while the Kremlin leaks new maximalist demands—including the claim that its sovereignty over illegally annexed territories must be recognized—and launches massive attacks against the Ukrainian energy grid on the eve of the talks.
Implications
The prisoner exchange is an undeniable humanitarian relief, but it shouldn’t obscure the underlying reality: Russia is using the negotiating table to legitimize its conquests and buy time, not to rectify its aggression. It seeks to transform its annexations into a fait accompli, sanctioned by the international community, violating the fundamental principle that force does not confer territorial rights. The resumption of military dialogue with the United States is positive as a de-escalation mechanism, but Moscow has already amply demonstrated its ability to combine armchair diplomacy with missile strikes against civilian infrastructure.
Perspectives and scenarios
For Ukraine, the risk is twofold: being pushed into an agreement that freezes an unacceptable occupation, or being left isolated if parts of the West succumb to fatigue and energy blackmail. The only path consistent with international law and genuine Atlanticism is to support Kyiv politically, militarily, and financially until any compromise excludes the legitimization of annexations and offers real security guarantees. Any “peace” that enshrines the Russian conquest will be an armistice on the road to the next aggression, in Ukraine or elsewhere on the eastern flank.
3. New START: Nuclear containment architecture enters a shadow zone
Facts
With the expiration of New START, the world is left for the first time in more than half a century without a legally binding framework limiting the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, nor with robust mechanisms for mutual verification. Moscow hinted that it might continue to respect the limits de facto if Washington did the same; the White House, for its part, has spoken of the need for a “new and better” treaty that includes China.
Implications
Without limits or inspections, the risk of misunderstandings, suspicions, and worst-case scenario planning increases. No one has a real economic interest in a new arms race, but the absence of rules encourages the temptation to deploy more warheads on existing systems and to test new delivery systems. The message to non-nuclear states is devastating: the powers that preach against proliferation are incapable of upholding their own containment commitments.
Perspectives and scenarios
An informal understanding that maintains the limits while a successor agreement is negotiated would, today, be the lesser evil. Realistically, the reasonable course would be to move toward a framework that incorporates China and, eventually, other nuclear powers, without allowing Moscow to use the nuclear issue as leverage to gain forgiveness for Ukraine. Abandoning all limits, on the other hand, would return us to a much more complex “balance of terror” logic, with more actors, more technology, and fewer restraint mechanisms than in the Cold War.
4. Saudi Arabia-UAE: a predicted divorce being fought over Yemen
Facts
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are now openly displaying a deep rivalry for control of southern Yemen and for how to manage the Red Sea and Horn of Africa region. Saudi Arabia accuses the Emirates of arming and supporting separatist forces that threaten its border security; the UAE responds by withdrawing counterterrorism units and defending its network of local allies. The dispute extends to Sudan, Somalia, and Libya, where each supports different actors.
Implications
What for years was sold as a unified “pincer movement” against Iran and the Arab Spring is now revealed for what it was: a tactical convergence between two very different visions of the regional order. Saudi Arabia, with a 1,800 km border with Yemen, cannot accept a mini-state armed and aligned with Abu Dhabi on its southern flank; the UAE has made proxy politics its way of multiplying its influence. The big loser is Yemen, which has become a battleground for intra-Gulf rivalry in addition to its confrontation with the pro-Iranian Houthis.
Perspectives and scenarios
In the short term, a cold rivalry is likely, without direct clashes, but with bloodier proxy wars in Yemen, Sudan, and the Sahel. For the West, the message is clear: Red Sea security cannot continue to be outsourced to competing actors without demanding a serious roadmap regarding territorial integrity, the fight against jihadism, and the containment of Iran. The risk is that the fracturing of the Gulf will further weaken the common front against Iranian expansionism and Russian-Chinese penetration.
5. Greenland: Western Consulates and Late Awakening in the Arctic
Facts
France and Canada have opened career consulates in Nuuk as an unequivocal political gesture of support for Danish sovereignty and the right of Greenlanders to decide their future, in the face of the openly annexationist ambitions that Trump has expressed on several occasions. This move adds to a growing presence of Western actors on the island, while concerns are mounting about competition with Russia and China in the Arctic.
Implications
The French and Canadian move carries symbolic weight, but it comes after decades of European neglect in a territory where Moscow and Beijing have advanced in infrastructure, economic influence, and disinformation campaigns. If the EU merely plants flags and establishes consulates without providing security, serious investment, and development alternatives, it will once again lose to those who fail to distinguish between diplomacy, business, and military deployment. Greenlanders have the right to complain about the abuses of Denmark’s past, but they also have the right to be told the truth: Russia and China are not coming to “liberate” them, but to exploit their location and resources.
Perspectives and scenarios
For Europe, Greenland is a test of strategic maturity: either it truly integrates the Arctic into its security thinking, with a tangible presence and not just rhetoric, or it will remain dependent on the United States even when Washington is willing to cross red lines with allies. Now is the time to unequivocally support Danish sovereignty and, at the same time, listen to and support Greenland’s legitimate aspirations for autonomy in the face of third-party opportunism.
6. Cuba: selective energy strangulation and conditional aid
Facts
Washington has tightened its grip on the Castro regime by combining an increasingly stringent energy embargo—including pressure on third-party oil suppliers—with humanitarian aid packages for the Cuban people. The central idea is clear: to cut off the economic lifeline to the mafia-military apparatus that governs the island while simultaneously mitigating the impact on the most vulnerable population. Meanwhile, Mexico is seeking ways to continue sending fuel without risking trade retaliation from the United States.
Implications
Using oil as leverage against a dictatorship that has lived off decades of ideological rents and transfers from its allies is a legitimate strategy if it aims to accelerate the regime’s fall and not perpetuate its victimhood. Castroism, the direct heir of a military-party caste, has turned Cuba into a laboratory for social control and a platform for exporting repression to Venezuela and Nicaragua; it deserves no leniency. That the Sheinbaum government dedicates more energy to keeping Castroism and its allies in the Bolivarian undercurrent alive than to recovering Mexican territories seized by the cartels is, quite simply, a political and moral aberration.
Perspectives and scenarios
If the combination of energy embargo and targeted aid is managed intelligently, in coordination with allies, and through transparent channels of communication with civil society, it can accelerate the regime’s disintegration without triggering an uncontrollable humanitarian collapse. The risk lies in third countries acting as lifelines for Castroism due to ideological affinity, weakening the pressure and prolonging the agony of an exhausted system. The option consistent with a firm commitment to Atlanticism is clear: no political or economic respite for Castroism until there is a genuine transition.
7. Fleet activism and the extreme left: the obscene moral double standard
Facts
A new “solidarity” flotilla is being organized to try to break the security cordon around Gaza, with the enthusiastic support of the Western far-left, old and new militant NGOs, and the usual professional “activists.” The same circles that mobilize so enthusiastically for these kinds of media-driven stunts maintain a deafening silence regarding the systematic massacre of Iranians in the streets of Tehran, the mass executions, torture, and repression of the ayatollahs’ regime.
Implications
The moral obscenity of this histrionic and exhibitionistic radical left is difficult to overstate: they turn the Palestinian cause into a stage for their political narcissism, yet they don’t raise a finger for murdered Iranian women, dissidents hanged from cranes, or tortured students. They are not “pacifists”; they are selective militants, obsessed with demonizing Israel and the West while finding excuses or simply looking the other way in the face of jihadist barbarity. This double standard not only insults the victims of the Iranian regime; it also harms the Palestinians themselves, because it reduces their tragedy to ammunition in the culture war against liberal democracies.
Perspectives and scenarios
Let’s be clear: those who board these shoddy flotillas, while remaining silent in the face of Tehran’s murderous theocracy and Hamas’s terror, are not on the side of human rights, but rather on the side of an ideological narrative that selects victims for convenience. Serious democracies must reclaim the narrative: defend without hesitation the security of Israel, the dignity of Palestinian civilians, and the rights of Iranians, and expose the emotional blackmail and deceit of an extreme left that has lost all moral compass.
8. Russia: Aggression, Cynicism and Hybrid Warfare
Facts
While negotiating in Abu Dhabi, the Kremlin continues to attack Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, conduct cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against European countries—including Italy—and attempt to exploit every weakness on the western front. The Russian propaganda machine portrays the talks as recognition of its “new territorial realities” and depicts Ukraine as responsible for any impasse.
Implications
Russia is not a “difficult interlocutor”; it is today a systematic aggressor that combines conventional warfare, energy terror, cyberattacks, and information manipulation to destabilize democracies and erode the liberal order. Anyone who continues to speak of “mistakes on both sides” or of “understanding Moscow’s security concerns” while Ukrainian cities are being bombed and millions are displaced is objectively participating in this whitewashing campaign. Putin intends to demonstrate that one can invade, annex, deport children, and then demand to be treated as a guarantor of stability.
Perspectives and scenarios
The Western response must remain far more forceful: sharp sanctions, sustained military support for Ukraine, reinforcement of the eastern flank, and a relentless fight against Russian propaganda on social media, in the press, and in international forums. Any sign of weakness will be interpreted by the Kremlin as an invitation to further escalation. The lesson of Georgia, Crimea, and Donbas is clear: when Moscow is granted a sphere of impunity, it exploits it to the fullest extent.
III. MEDIA RACK
- The mainstream American and European press focuses on four vectors: Oman (USA–Iran), Abu Dhabi (Ukraine–Russia–USA), the New START vacuum and the growing Saudi Arabia–UAE clash in Yemen, with the Arctic and Greenland emerging as a prominent chapter.
- The financial media highlight the nervousness of the markets due to the combination of geopolitical risk (Iran, Russia) and the fragility of the nuclear containment architecture, while they continue to digest the technological turbulence and the oscillations of Bitcoin as a thermometer of confidence and fear.
- Major European media outlets highlight the French action in Nuuk as a symbol of an Arctic awakening, but there is still more rhetoric than real strength in the EU’s response.
- The Russian media ecosystem tries to present the Abu Dhabi negotiations as a kind of inverted Yalta, where a sphere of Russian influence is enshrined; the reality on the ground belies this, but the narrative resonates in Western sectors prone to relativism.
- The media constellation of the extreme left and the Wok movement focuses on the flotillas to Gaza and the umpteenth narrative of Israel as the absolute villain, with almost total silence regarding Iranian repression and Russian crimes in Ukraine.
IV. RISK TRAFFIC LIGHT
🟥 Red (maximum risk)
– US-Iran escalation if Tehran interprets the diplomatic route as weakness and continues its provocations through drones, missiles and proxies.
– Ukrainian front: risk that the Kremlin will use negotiations to consolidate annexations and, in case of a deadlock, resort to a new wave of massive attacks against civilian infrastructure.
🟧 Orange (high risk)
– Saudi Arabia-UAE fracture: intensification of proxy wars in Yemen, Sudan and the Sahel, with growing opportunities for Iran, Russia, China and jihadism.
– Practical dismantling of the nuclear arms control architecture after the expiration of New START, with increased opacity and temptation for silent rearmament.
🟨 Yellow (vigilance)
– Arctic and Greenland: possibility that the European diplomatic awakening will remain just gestures, in the face of a very real competition with the United States, Russia and China for routes and resources.
– Cuba: risk of humanitarian deterioration if the energy blockade is not accompanied by effective mechanisms for direct aid to the population and coordination with allies.
🟩 Green (opportunity)
– Negotiating window in Oman: possibility of forcing Tehran into real concessions if the combination of maximum pressure, support for the internal opposition and a credible threat of force is maintained.
– Abu Dhabi Process: an opportunity, still incipient, to build a format in which Ukraine obtains security guarantees without sacrificing essential principles of sovereignty and international law.
V. EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
What the last twenty-four hours have revealed is an open battle for common sense in international politics. On one side, regimes like Iran, Russia, and Castro’s, which thrive on violence, lies, and exporting instability; on the other, European and American democracies wavering between the necessary firmness and the temptation of appeasement, while deafeningly vocal sectors of the far left try to turn any crisis into an excuse to settle scores with their favorite enemy: the West.
It is no coincidence that those who join the flotillas against Israel remain silent about the mass executions in Iran, downplay the Russian aggression against Ukraine, or minimize the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. Their problem is not injustice; their problem is with liberal democracy, the market economy, NATO, and everything they represent. That is why they are lenient with the perpetrators when they don’t wear a Western tie, and merciless with any mistake—real or imagined—made by our open societies.
Faced with this charade, the line we defend is clear: heartfelt Atlanticism, unwavering Europeanism, uncompromising defense of Israel and the victims of jihadism, outright rejection of Chavista narco-socialism and its Caribbean allies, absolute firmness against Russian expansionism and Iranian theocracy, and zero tolerance for the “Wokism” and cancel culture that attempt to morally disarm democracies from within. This is not about idealizing anyone—not even Trump—but about recognizing that a realistic and firm foreign policy, combining robust diplomacy and deterrent capabilities, has achieved more concrete progress in less than a year than decades of wishful thinking.
If liberal democracies are to remain so, they need to reclaim the quiet pride of what they are: imperfect but reformable systems, based on freedom, equality before the law, and the protection of fundamental rights. This reclaiming requires calling things by their names—terrorism, aggression, dictatorship—not ceding the narrative to the extreme left or the extreme right, and understanding that in the multifaceted risks of the 21st century, there is no room for naiveté. Either the liberal order is actively defended, or Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Havana will write the rules of the game. And that world would undoubtedly be far less free, less prosperous, and far more dangerous.