Gustavo de Arístegui,
July 29, 2026
I. BRIEF INTRODUCTION
The events of the last twenty-four hours paint an unsettling yet perfectly coherent picture. Three of the five news stories that deserve attention today share a common thread: war is no longer fought only where it is declared. It is fought in the bill of lading of a shell company registered in Hong Kong, in the registration number of an old Boeing 727 parked on the military apron at N’Djamena airport, and in the programmable logic controller that regulates the water treatment plant in a Minnesota municipality that doesn’t appear on any strategic map. It is the war of variable temperature taken to its purest form: constant aggression, impossible attribution, and an invariably delayed response.
The first of these news items is undeniably serious and, surprisingly, hasn’t warranted a single line in the Spanish press. While Washington suspends its bombing campaign to allow time for negotiations that Tehran doesn’t even recognize as such, the Islamic Republic is rearming itself through Chinese channels. Not with exotic systems or sensational headlines, but with what can do the most damage to the only tool that has allowed the partial reopening of the Strait of Hormuz: man-portable air-defense systems. The pause is not a truce. It’s a resupply period.
The rest of the day confirms the same lesson. In Sudan, a United Nations panel of experts names and identifies the logistical support for a militia accused of genocide, pointing to a business network linked to a US military contractor. In Minnesota, more than thirty municipal water systems suffer a coordinated attack, and no one yet knows who ordered it. In Caracas, a transitional dialogue begins while the streets fight over the narrative. And in Kyiv, a Ukrainian negotiator proclaims he holds all the cards just as US mediation has been frozen for six months. Five scenarios, one diagnosis: the initiative lies with those operating in the gray area, and the West continues to react piecemeal.
II. MOST IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE LAST 24 HOURS
1. Iran rearms via China: up to 400 portable anti-aircraft launchers on their way to Tehran
Facts
A Reuters exclusive by John Irish and Jonathan Saul, published on July 29, reveals that Iran expects to receive the first shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) within weeks. Three sources familiar with the deal estimate its value at between $60 and $70 million. The contract covers between 300 and 400 MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems), models QW-12 and FN-16, both infrared-guided and designed to engage low-flying aircraft, helicopters, and drones. The deal was signed with Zhongqing Baoshang International Investment, a Hong Kong-based company that, according to the same sources, acted as an intermediary between Iran and the Chinese supplier. Two Western intelligence sources and an Iranian official add that Tehran has also explored land routes to move military equipment and dual-use components more discreetly. Reuters notes, in all professional honesty, that it has not been able to determine whether the deal was ultimately executed.
The context is crucial. Washington suspended thirteen days of continuous bombing on Saturday, and President Trump has warned that he will resume it if negotiations fail. Tehran, through its Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Bagaei, has been unequivocal: there are no negotiations with the United States at this time, and what exists cannot be called a ceasefire. The only ongoing talks are those with Oman regarding the management of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran presents as strictly bilateral and unrelated to Washington. Merchant traffic through the strait remains at a standstill: fewer than ten ships carrying raw materials passed through on Monday, compared to well over a hundred on a normal day before the war.
Implications
Here’s the crux of the matter, and it needs to be stated clearly because no one else is. Since March 19, when General Dan Caine confirmed from the Pentagon that A-10 Thunderbolt IIs had entered combat on the southern flank, the partial reopening of the Strait of Hormuz has relied on a very specific formula: ground-attack aircraft flying low and slowly, and AH-64 Apache helicopters hunting down speedboats and mine-laying devices belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Admiral Brad Cooper estimated that more than one hundred Iranian vessels had been destroyed; Caine himself later raised the count to more than one hundred and twenty ships and forty-four mine-laying devices. On May 4, Apaches and Seahawks sank six more speedboats. That’s the tool that has kept the strait open, and that’s precisely the tool a MANPADS is designed to destroy.
A QW-12 doesn’t shoot down a B-2 or intercept a cruise missile. It doesn’t need to. It shoots down anything that flies low, slow, and predictably, which is precisely the profile of the A-10 on a maritime interdiction mission and the Apache on coastal patrol. Four hundred launchers scattered along the Iranian coast, the Gulf islands, and oil platforms don’t restore Iran’s strategic air defense—that was destroyed and can’t be rebuilt with shoulder-fired missiles—but they brutally increase the cost of the only operation that works today. It’s pure asymmetry: sixty million dollars to put platforms at risk whose unit value, and above all, whose political cost in pilot lives, is incomparably greater.
There is a second, equally unsettling interpretation. Beijing is once again doing what it does best: propping up the aggressor without ever appearing in the picture. A shell company in Hong Kong, an intermediary absorbing formal responsibility, alternative land routes to circumvent maritime interdiction. China isn’t defending Iran; it’s buying influence over the global energy supply at the bargain price of a light weapons contract. And it’s doing so, moreover, while negotiating with the West at other tables as if nothing were amiss. Anyone who still believes that monitoring Chinese expansionism is merely an obsession of Atlanticist analysts should read this news twice.
The third interpretation is the one that should concern us most, and it points to General Ahmad Vahidi. The commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps since March 1, who is subject to an Interpol red notice for the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires and who led the crackdown on the 2022 protests, is now the man who decides whether Iran negotiates or resumes its attacks. A rearmament contract finalized during the pause speaks volumes about his intentions more than any statement from the Foreign Ministry. Vahidi isn’t managing an exit strategy; he’s managing a temporary pause.
Perspectives and scenarios
The first scenario, the most likely in the short term: the goods arrive, are dispersed, and are not used immediately. Tehran stores them as insurance for when Washington resumes attacks, and in the meantime, continues to prolong Omani negotiations on the Strait of Hormuz to consolidate a de facto toll right over the strait. This is the scenario of institutionalized extortion.
Second scenario: an A-10 or an Apache is shot down. The operational impact would be manageable; the political impact, devastating. A US pilot killed or captured in the Gulf forces Trump into a disproportionate response, and that’s where the lack of a plan for the day after becomes the central problem. Because this report has been arguing the same thing for months: the attacks against the military and nuclear infrastructure of the Tehran regime were fully justified, but no one has yet explained what happens if the regime capitulates, much less what happens if it implodes.
A third scenario, the least likely but most relevant: that the interdiction works. That Western intelligence locates the shipment in transit and intercepts it, whether by sea or on its land route. This would demonstrate that sanctions and proliferation control still serve a purpose. It would also be, and this is crucial, a direct message to Beijing about the cost of continuing to play at being the discreet arsenal of revisionist regimes.
2. Sudan: UN links opaque air network to supplying Rapid Support Forces
Facts
A draft report by the UN panel of experts on Sudan, scheduled for publication in September and seen by Reuters, concludes that three Boeing 727 aircraft transported Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters, foreign mercenaries, and military equipment—including drones and weapons—to Darfur. The panel claims to have received reliable information from four separate sources, including two eyewitnesses in Nyala, the RSF’s main logistics and military hub in the region, and communications from two member states. The report’s wording is stark and damning: the RSF used the N’Djamena-Nyala air corridor to smuggle fighters, foreign mercenaries, and military equipment into Darfur.
The three aircraft were previously identified by a Reuters investigation published on July 15. One was sold in Brazil to a company linked to the American businessman and military contractor Shaulis; the other two were acquired from Kalitta Charters II, a Michigan-based company. They appeared in Chad starting in November 2024 and operated from the military apron at N’Djamena airport. United Nations experts highlight a crucial technical detail: no movement of the three aircraft was recorded after their arrival in N’Djamena, leading them to suspect that they took deliberate measures to avoid detection in flight. In other words, they turned off their transponders. Between January and July 2026, according to the report, multiple Boeing 727s and some Ilyushin Il-76s landed at night in Nyala.
It is mandatory to record the responses of those involved, and this report does so meticulously. Craig Munro, co-owner with Shaulis of Contractor Airways, the South African company that purchased two of the aircraft, denied any connection to RSF to Reuters and, to the best of his knowledge, called the conclusions about landings in Nyala and Kufra false. Kalitta’s lawyer maintains that the company conducted thorough due diligence before the sale and that no sanctions checks raised any red flags.
Implications
The underlying phenomenon is the one that has been eroding the international security architecture for years: the privatization of violence under the Anglo-Saxon euphemism of contractors. Let’s call things by their name. When a private company transports fighters and weapons to the theater of operations of a militia that even United Nations investigators accuse of genocide in Darfur, we are not dealing with a logistics business with a reputational problem. We are dealing with the material infrastructure of a crime against humanity. And the legal sophistication of the chain—a sale in Brazil, a purchase in Michigan, a company in South Africa, an operation from Chad—is not an accident: it is by design.
Sudan is the quintessential forgotten conflict, and this is neither accidental nor innocent. It is the direct consequence of insufficient oil, insufficient headlines, and a diaspora with the capacity to exert pressure on Western capitals. While the world measures the events in Hormuz in hours, a constant barbarity unfolds in Darfur with media coverage that doesn’t even reach a fraction of that. This asymmetry is not a failing of journalism: it is a collective moral failing for which Europe, with its perpetually humanitarian rhetoric, bears particular responsibility.
There is also a dimension that no Western government will want to address. If the report is confirmed, citizens and societies in allied countries have participated, knowingly or through culpable negligence, in the logistical support of a genocidal militia. The international sanctions regime, as it is currently structured, has proven incapable of detecting this in time. Verification came from investigative journalism, using satellite imagery and telephone data, not from state surveillance mechanisms. That should shame more than one foreign ministry.
Perspectives and scenarios
The publication of the final report in September will mark the turning point. If the Security Council acts—and the conditional here is particularly heavy-handed, because the Russian veto and the Chinese abstention are entirely predictable—we could expect individual designations and sanctions against the companies involved. If it does not act, which is most likely, it will once again demonstrate that the multilateral system rigorously documents what it is subsequently unable to prevent.
The intermediate, and most realistic, scenario involves unilateral action: US Treasury designations, export restrictions, and pressure on jurisdictions of convenience. This would only be partially effective, as the fleet would be replaced and registrations changed, but it would increase costs. It will also be important to monitor the role of the United Arab Emirates in the financial backbone of the RSF, an issue the West has been handling with a delicacy it doesn’t extend to others.
3. Minnesota: Coordinated cyberattack against more than thirty municipal water systems
Facts
Minnesota IT Services, the state’s technology agency, announced Tuesday that a coordinated cyberattack targeted the operational technology of more than 30 community water systems between Sunday, July 26, and Monday, July 27. Four municipalities publicly reported the attack: Plymouth, South St. Paul, Maple Plain, and Braham. In Braham, the water treatment plant was briefly taken offline Monday morning. In South St. Paul, the attack affected automated controls, and public works personnel had to manually maintain water and sanitation operations. In Plymouth, communications for two elevated reservoirs and several pumping stations were compromised. No ransom demands were detected, and service to residents was not interrupted. The state Department of Health has no record of any municipality asking residents to adjust their drinking water usage.
The State Department’s Director of Information Security, John Israel, has indicated that the timing, access methods, and nature of the targeted infrastructure share characteristics with other coordinated incidents. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the FBI are investigating. It is crucial to emphasize what is still unknown: the attack has not been attributed to any specific actor. TJ Sayers of the Center for Internet Security has confirmed that there is no attribution and that it is not even clear whether the programmable robots (PLRs) that federal authorities had warned about days earlier were used. Previous known attacks on U.S. water infrastructure were attributed to Iranian-affiliated groups, but establishing that connection here without evidence would be precisely the kind of wild guesswork this report forbids.
Implications
The relevant factor is not the damage caused, which has been minor, but the nature of the experiment. Thirty-odd small municipalities attacked simultaneously in forty-eight hours is not common crime, nor is it extortion: there was no ransom demand. It is armed reconnaissance. It is empirical proof that basic infrastructure, distributed among thousands of tiny operators with minuscule budgets and scarce personnel, can be reached in a coordinated manner. And the partial success of the experiment is, in itself, a warning sign. The mayor of Braham put it better than any analyst: local governments are expected to defend essential systems against sophisticated foreign adversaries with minimal staff, outdated technology, and insufficient resources.
Water, along with electricity, is the most profitable vector for gray warfare. There’s no need to poison anything—that would require a leap of faith that no state is yet willing to take—it’s enough to demonstrate that it can be done. Reverse deterrence works the same way: the message is that the vulnerability exists and that the attacker knows the map. And here it’s worth remembering that a regional hospital can run out of water in a matter of hours. The distance between a technical failure and a health catastrophe is much shorter than the public imagines.
Europe would do well not to view this as merely an American anecdote. Our water consortia, our river basin authorities, and our municipal wastewater treatment plants present precisely the same vulnerability profile, exacerbated by a fragmentation of responsibilities that multiplies blind spots. The NIS2 directive is mandatory on paper; the budgetary reality of a municipality with five thousand inhabitants is what it is. Anyone who believes that the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure is a technical matter and not a top-priority issue of national security has not grasped the 21st century.
Perspectives and scenarios
In the coming weeks, we will almost certainly see either a formal attribution or a prolonged silence, which in cyber matters usually means that the attribution exists but it’s not advisable to make it public. Both are informative.
The worrying scenario is that of escalation through replication: that the same pattern will appear in another US state or, worse still, in a European country in the coming weeks. This would confirm that the recognition phase has ended and the pressure phase has begun. The desirable, and perfectly achievable, scenario is that this incident will serve as a catalyst for serious federal and European investment in protecting small operators, which is where the weak link lies. Experience teaches, however, that democracies only invest after a disaster, not before.
4. Venezuela: the transition table begins with divided streets and no electoral calendar
Facts
Several demonstrations took place in Caracas on Tuesday, ahead of the start this week of talks on Venezuela’s political transition. Supporters of María Corina Machado marched to demand presidential elections. On the other side, pro-government groups maintain that interim president Delcy Rodríguez is negotiating with a gun to her head. In early July, the interim government and a group of former opposition members of parliament announced a US-backed plan for strengthening democracy.
Meanwhile, Delcy Rodríguez received a delegation from the United States Congress in Caracas, headed by Republican Representative Brian Mast of Florida, accompanied by fellow Florida Republicans Randy Fine and Kat Cammack, and Illinois Democrat Jonathan Jackson. This is the first US congressional delegation to visit Venezuela in a decade. According to the official Venezuelan version, both sides reviewed bilateral cooperation frameworks aimed at combating transnational organized crime and improving border security. The legislators then met with officials from the Ministry of Defense and the National Anti-Drug Superintendency, and held a meeting with Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly, which he described as fruitful. Adding to this is a significant legal development: Foreign Minister Félix Plasencia announced on Friday Venezuela’s formal withdrawal from the Rome Statute, a decision he described as firm and irrevocable, and which Washington was quick to celebrate.
Implications
It’s important to be blunt, because this is precisely where the moral credibility of the West in the hemisphere is at stake. The Chavista regime is, and remains, a gigantic mafia organization that has destroyed the richest country in South America, forced nearly eight million Venezuelans into exile, and transformed the state into a platform for drug trafficking. The fall of Nicolás Maduro hasn’t altered this nature; it has simply redistributed it among the Rodríguez siblings, who for two decades have been the cold, hard intelligence of an apparatus that Maduro merely personified. Delcy in the interim presidency and Jorge in the National Assembly are not a transition; they represent a continuation with better manners and better English.
The withdrawal from the Rome Statute confirms this with undeniable clarity. A government that genuinely intends to democratize a country does not abandon the jurisdiction of the court that investigates crimes committed within its borders. It is those seeking protection who do so. And Washington’s celebration of the decision, driven by its own political interests toward the International Criminal Court, is a critical error that could prove extremely costly: impunity has been handed out for nothing, and at the worst possible moment, precisely when the only real leverage against Chavismo was the threat of individual prosecution of its leaders.
That said, and consistent with our position, U.S. pressure on Venezuelan drug trafficking and operations against drug-running boats have been and continue to be effective. The problem isn’t a heavy-handed approach; it’s that a heavy-handed approach without a political framework produces precisely this: a regime that survives by negotiating its own survival under the guise of anti-drug cooperation. A congressional delegation meeting with the Anti-Drug Superintendency of an apparatus labeled a narco-state illustrates this dilemma with almost cruel precision.
Perspectives and scenarios
Most likely scenario: the talks make progress on secondary issues—guarantees, political prisoners, opening the oil sector to US capital—and systematically stall on the only thing that matters: an electoral calendar with international observers and with Machado and Edmundo González in a position to compete. Chavismo has demonstrated for twenty years an exceptional ability to turn every negotiation into a postponement.
An alternative, and not entirely out of the question, scenario is that combined pressure from the streets, the diaspora, and the US Congress forces a date to be set. That would reveal whether the establishment has the necessary cohesion to accept an electoral defeat, something it has never done.
A rupture scenario: a fracture within Chavismo between those seeking a negotiated solution with personal guarantees and those with too much to lose. Maduro’s departure has already demonstrated that the regime prefers to sacrifice the leader rather than the body. It is reasonable to expect it to do so again if the price of collective survival demands it.
5. Ukraine claims to have the initiative while US mediation remains frozen
Facts
Sergii Kislitsya, First Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of Ukraine and a member of the negotiating team since 2025, argued in an interview with NPR, published Tuesday, that Kyiv currently holds the upper hand. His argument is twofold. First, long-range Ukrainian drones are repeatedly striking Russian oil and gas installations, causing fuel shortages and eroding the Kremlin’s ability to sustain the war effort. Second, the Russian military has ceased making significant ground gains. Kislitsya, a former ambassador to the United Nations who delivered one of the most memorable speeches in the Security Council on February 24, 2022, describes the conflict as a 21st-century war that is no longer fought solely with infantry and artillery.
The context is more relevant than the statement: official negotiations mediated by the United States have been stalled since the beginning of the year, the Trump administration being absorbed as it is by the war with Iran. Kyiv does, however, maintain contact with US envoys and, occasionally, Russian ones. On the table remains Moscow’s main demand: recognition of its claims to five Ukrainian regions, three of which are fully occupied and two partially.
Implications
Kislitsia’s assertion is partly operational truth and partly a negotiating position. Both can be true simultaneously, and it’s important to distinguish between them. It’s true that the Ukrainian campaign of deep attacks against Russian refineries and energy hubs has reached a level of effectiveness that no serious analyst anticipated two years ago, and that it has transformed Russian energy vulnerability into the main point of leverage available. It’s also true that the Russian ground front is advancing at a pace that, measured in kilometers of casualties, is unsustainable even for an autocracy with the Kremlin’s tolerance for attrition.
But it’s also true that a negotiator doesn’t publicly proclaim they have the upper hand when they actually do: they proclaim it when they need their main backer to pay attention again. And that’s the real message of the interview, directed not at Moscow but at Washington. The US focus on the Iranian front has kept Ukraine out of the spotlight for half a year, and in a war of attrition, the attention of an ally is a strategic resource as scarce as 155mm shells.
On the matter at hand, our position remains unchanged and admits no nuance: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is a flagrant violation of the principle that has underpinned the international order since 1945, namely the prohibition of acquiring territory by force. Any agreement that enshrines the recognition of Russian annexations—and that is precisely the content of the demand regarding the five regions—would not be peace, but rather a notarized certification that the conquest is working. And whoever signs that certification will be writing the instruction manual for Beijing on Taiwan, for Caracas on the Essequibo, and for any revisionist with an outstanding territorial claim and a weak border to contend with.
Perspectives and scenarios
First scenario: the pause in Iran frees up US diplomatic bandwidth and mediation is reactivated in the fall. This is the scenario Kyiv is pursuing with this interview.
Second scenario, and today the most likely: the stalemate continues, the war continues by inertia, and the negotiating position of both sides is determined in winter, when the cumulative effect of Ukrainian attacks on the Russian energy system and Russian attacks on the Ukrainian power grid is felt simultaneously.
A third scenario, the one Europe should be preparing for but isn’t: Washington strikes a deal with Moscow over Europe’s heads and based on Russian territorial demands, leaving Europeans to foot the bill for reconstruction, security guarantees, and the problem itself. That this scenario remains plausible in the fifth year of the war is a precise measure of European strategic failure.
III. MEDIA RACK
A preliminary methodological caveat, consistent with the strict verification requirements of this report: what follows reflects the coverage actually verified in the last 24 hours. No media outlet is attributed with coverage that could not be verified.
Reuters has made history with two top-tier exclusives, both published on July 29: one on Iran’s anti-aircraft rearmament through China, by John Irish and Jonathan Saul, and the other on the UN panel of experts’ report on Sudan, by David Lewis, Reade Levinson, and Alexander Dziadosz. This is investigative journalism at its finest, supported by corporate documents, aviation records, satellite imagery, and telephone data. It’s worth stating unequivocally: without the British news agency, neither of these stories would exist.
International dissemination of the Iranian scoop: picked up with virtually no original analysis by US News, AOL, the Italian newspaper Internazionale—which automatically translated it—and a constellation of local US broadcasters. The Business Standard of Bangladesh was one of the few Asian media outlets to highlight it. Silence here is more eloquent than noise: there is no significant coverage in the Spanish press, which is simply incomprehensible in a country that depends on the Strait of Hormuz for a substantial part of its energy supply and whose ships transit the area.
The Sudanese exclusive was disseminated by Al-Monitor, The Star of Malaysia, Yahoo News UK, MarketScreener, and Internazionale. The leading Arab press outlets—Asharq Al-Awsat, Al-Hayat, and Arab News—have not offered any verifiable coverage of the story during this period, which speaks volumes about the regional tensions surrounding the Sudanese case and, in particular, the financial backstop of the Rapid Support Forces.
Minnesota: dense, high-quality coverage of the US ecosystem, with CBS Minnesota providing operational details on the Braham plant shutdown, Fox 9 and KSTP offering a municipal overview, and the specialized publications Cybersecurity Dive and StateScoop providing technical and public policy analysis. Reuters provided international coverage. There was a near-total absence of coverage in the European press, consistent with the tendency to treat cyber incidents as technology news rather than national security stories.
Venezuela: Agence France-Presse published an internationally distributed account of the clashes between the marches in Caracas. Al Jazeera offered the most comprehensive analysis of the reasons for withdrawing from the Rome Statute. Media outlets aligned with Chavismo disseminated the official version of the meeting with the US congressional delegation, presenting a semblance of diplomatic normalcy that should be viewed with caution.
Ukraine: The interview with Kislitsia is an exclusive NPR piece, conducted by Joanna Kakissis from Kyiv, and has been rebroadcast by the network of US public broadcasters. Its European reach has been limited, confirming the displacement of the Ukrainian front from the continental news spotlight. This is a significant fact in itself.
The day’s headlines: it belongs entirely to the news agencies and investigative journalism. The major newspapers have been left behind. And the Spanish press, once again, has been absent from the three most strategically important stories of the season.
IV. RISK TRAFFIC LIGHT
Scale: red, critical risk with possibility of sudden deterioration; orange, high risk; yellow, medium-high risk under surveillance; green, stabilized situation.
| Theater / Vector | Level | Scale | Trend | Observation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Persian Gulf / Strait of Hormuz | ● | Critical | On the rise | Iranian rearmament via China during the pause. Merchant traffic at historic lows. No agreement, not even a ceasefire recognized by Tehran. |
| Western critical infrastructures (cyber) | ● | Critical | On the rise | First coordinated, multi-city attack against operational water technology in the United States. No attribution. A precedent that could be replicated in Europe. |
| Sudan / Horn of Africa | ● | Critical | Stable at the worst | Documented genocide in Darfur, opaque air logistics chain and almost absolute international silence. |
| Venezuela | ● | High | Volatile | The transition process begins without an electoral calendar. There is a risk of Chavismo being whitewashed under the guise of stability. |
| Ukraine / Russian Federation | ● | High | Stagnant | Negotiations frozen due to US takeover of Iran. Russian energy depletion in the face of maximum territorial demands. |
| South China Sea | ● | High | Slow rise | Recurring physical friction in Second Thomas and Scarborough. Beijing is testing attrition below the conflict threshold. |
| European defense | ● | Medium-high | Deteriorating | Franco-German rupture in the sixth-generation fighter jet program. Europe without a common program and without a sense of urgency. |
| Energy markets | ● | Medium-high | Highly strung | Geopolitical risk premium sustained by Hormuz and by the Houthi threat in Bab el-Mandeb. |
V. EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
There are days when news stories, placed side by side, convey something that none of them individually can. Today is one of those days, and what they’re saying is that the revisionists have the initiative.
Let’s start with the obvious. The attacks against the Islamic Republic’s military and nuclear infrastructure were fully justified: the aim was to disarm a terrorist state that has spent four decades exporting instability through Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and the Shiite militias in Iraq. Nothing argued here should be interpreted as a challenge to that premise. But the premise wasn’t the plan, and therein lies the problem. Five months after the start of the campaign, with the Supreme Leader dead, the military leadership decapitated, and the Revolutionary Guard’s navy virtually annihilated, no one has yet explained what will happen next. Whether the regime will capitulate or implode. And this lack of planning now has a tangible and measurable cost: a pause that Tehran is clearly using to rearm itself through Chinese cooperation. When there is no strategic design, every truce works in the enemy’s favor.
This is where President Trump’s foreign policy reveals its duplicity more clearly than ever. No honest person can deny that his pragmatism has yielded real and verifiable diplomatic successes in less than a year: Cambodia and Thailand, Gaza, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. When he acts prudently and listens to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the machine works. The problem arises when decisions are made on intuition, impulsively, or based on short-term transactional calculations. Suspending thirteen days of bombing without having obtained from Tehran even acknowledgment of a ceasefire—Bagaei has stated unequivocally that what exists cannot be called a ceasefire—is not a negotiating pause; it is a unilateral concession. And celebrating Venezuela’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute because it fits into his own campaign against the International Criminal Court, when that withdrawal actually shields the leaders of a mafia-like organization that Washington is pursuing for narco-terrorism, is a contradiction that no advisor should have allowed. We trust that the system and the good sense of those around him will ultimately prevail. But trust is not a strategy.
And meanwhile, where is Europe? Exactly where it has been for the last twenty years: watching. On the day it becomes known that Iran is buying four hundred anti-aircraft missile launchers from China, jeopardizing the operation that keeps the strait open—the channel through which a large part of our energy arrives—the European conversation on defense remains mired in the ruins of the FCAS program. France and Germany have blown up the most ambitious sixth-generation fighter project the continent has ever attempted—a €100 billion undertaking, nine years of work, €3.2 billion already spent—over an industrial dispute over workload allocation and intellectual property between Dassault and Airbus. Not over a fundamental strategic disagreement. Over a shareholder squabble.
Let’s be clear about what this means. It means that Paris will develop its fighter jet on its own, that Berlin is hastily forming a national alliance and looking toward the British-Italian-Japanese program or deeper integration with the F-35, and that Spain—which had achieved a respectable industrial role through Indra—is left waiting to see what it will be left with. It means that Europe, at the moment of greatest danger to its security since 1945, has been unable to keep its main project of military technological sovereignty together. And it means, above all, that the mediocrity and shortsightedness of our 21st-century political class have reached a level that can no longer be explained by individual incompetence, but by a structural inability to take its own destiny seriously. The Treaties of Rome were signed in eleven months. The workload allocation for a fighter jet has remained unresolved for nine years.
The third story of the day brings the story full circle. Thirty-odd municipalities in Minnesota, simultaneously attacked through their water systems, with no ransom demanded and no known perpetrators, are not a cyber incident: they are a dress rehearsal. Gray warfare consists precisely of this: operating permanently below the threshold that would trigger a response, until constant aggression becomes commonplace. Our democracies are constitutionally ill-equipped to respond to something that has no declaration, no front, no flag. But the inability to respond is not an acceptable excuse: it is a vulnerability that the adversary has already measured and taken note of.
Sudan remains, and above all, the moral discomfort surrounding it. A genocide documented by the United Nations, sustained by an air logistics chain that turns off transponders to fly to Nyala at night, and media coverage that doesn’t even reach a fraction of what it deserves. There isn’t enough oil, enough headlines, or enough political pressure. Europe, which never misses an opportunity to lecture the rest of the world on humanitarianism, remains silent. And this silence, which in Brussels will be justified with the usual rhetoric of a lack of resources, is definitive proof that our foreign policy is driven not by principles, but by a timetable.
I end as I began. Five news items, one diagnosis. Iran is rearming during the truce, China is supplying it covertly, shell companies are fueling an African genocide, someone is testing the water supply shutdown of a Western power, and Chavismo is legally shielding itself while negotiating its own continuity. Faced with this display of initiative, the West offers pauses without a plan, celebrations without criteria, and a combat fighter program derailed by a dispute over industrial division. Representative liberal democracy, the market economy, and the rule of law remain, by a wide margin, the best system humanity has ever devised. But no moral superiority can survive indefinitely in the face of strategic incompetence. Our generation still has the opportunity to demonstrate that it has learned something. The signs, today, do not inspire optimism.