2026-07-20 ATS briefing¶

An Iranian Vision of the New Middle East¶

The memorandum collapsed not because of bad faith on one side but because the two parties never agreed on what was being signed. Tehran read the text as a temporary, conditional arrangement to be jointly administered with Oman; Washington read it as an unconditional surrender of Iranian sovereignty over the strait. That gap was not a diplomatic failure to be closed by better wording — it was the surface expression of a deeper asymmetry. For Iran, control of the Strait of Hormuz is the only material lever it possesses to make the cost of war exceed the cost of negotiation. For the United States, the strait is a global commons that must remain friction-free if the pivot to Asia is to succeed. One side’s existential bargaining chip is the other’s routine logistical assumption.

Zarif’s argument is therefore more interesting than the usual plea for regional security architecture. He is not asking for trust. He is describing a strategic reality: the US cannot eliminate the Iranian state, and the war has fused the strait question with national survival in the Iranian public’s mind. The old distinction between commercial and military transit is politically dead. Every tanker is a potential platform for the next strike. That is not a negotiating position — it is a fact produced by the war itself.

What Zarif does not say is perhaps more telling. The pivot to Asia is a euphemism for the US recognising that its relative power is declining and that it must concentrate forces against China. But the war in West Asia is consuming the very resources and attention the pivot was meant to conserve. The contradiction is concrete: the US cannot leave the region without a settlement, and it cannot reach a settlement without conceding the strait’s status as a legitimate instrument of Iranian statecraft — which would mean accepting a permanent Iranian veto over global energy flows. That is not a diplomatic problem. It is a structural one, and no memorandum can resolve it.

Pakistan Won the War in Iran¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The article treats Pakistan’s mediation between Washington and Tehran as evidence of a new kind of geopolitical influence — one that rewards states without the traditional credentials of major-power status, economic weight, or liberal democratic norms. The claim is that a disordered, multipolar system creates openings for “nontraditional powers” to perform order-stabilising functions that the UN and established powers cannot. Pakistan, in this telling, succeeded where China, India, and European states did not because it could hold relationships across divides and because it possessed credible coercive power — specifically, a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia that could have drawn Islamabad into the war on Riyadh’s side, threatening the Iranian regime’s survival.

What the analysis elides is the material basis of that leverage. Pakistan’s mediating role was not a function of diplomatic agility alone. It rested on the threat of military escalation — the possibility that Pakistan would enter the war, catalyse other Muslim-majority states, and isolate Tehran. That is not order-stabilising statecraft; it is the management of conflict through the credible threat of its expansion. The article presents this as a new model of influence, but it is better understood as a symptom of a system in which no single power can impose a settlement, so ad hoc coalitions of regional states with specific coercive assets step in to contain the damage. The cease-fire is fragile, the article admits, and the broader settlement uncertain. That is not a sign that the system is rewarding new kinds of states. It is a sign that the old powers have exhausted their capacity to manage crises, and the new ones can only patch the leaks, not rebuild the vessel.

For revolutionary politics, the implication is straightforward: the inter-imperialist rivalry that produced the war in Iran has not been resolved by Pakistan’s mediation — it has been deferred. The underlying drivers — competition for control of energy chokepoints, the fragmentation of the US-led order, the inability of any single power to stabilise the region — remain intact. Pakistan’s moment in the spotlight is a measure of the system’s dysfunction, not its renewal.

Trump: Latest strikes on Iran ‘in honour’ of killed US military personnel¶

Source: Al Jazeera

Trump frames the ninth consecutive night of strikes on Iran as a tribute to fallen US personnel — 17 dead, over 420 wounded since the war began. The gesture is macabre but instructive. Each night of bombing extends the casualty list it claims to honour, while the stated rationale — retaliation for attacks in Jordan and Iraq — dissolves into open-ended escalation. The strikes are no longer tethered to a discrete provocation; they have become their own justification, a rolling performance of resolve that generates the very conditions for further American deaths.

The numbers matter here, but not as a body count. Seventeen dead is low by the standards of recent US wars, yet the political weight is disproportionate. Every service member killed becomes a fresh mandate for escalation, a debt that can never be fully repaid through bombing — only compounded. The administration is trapped in a logic where withdrawal would dishonour the dead, while continuation guarantees more names to honour.

What is absent from Trump’s framing is any terminal objective. There is no talk of degrading Iranian capabilities to a specific threshold, no mention of de-escalation terms. The strikes have become an end in themselves, a permanent state of punitive violence that serves domestic political cohesion far more than any military goal. For the anti-war movement, the challenge is that each new round of bombing reinforces the very nationalist sentiment that sustains it — a feedback loop that will not break on its own.

US releases footage of ninth consecutive night of strikes on Iran¶

Source: Al Jazeera

Nine consecutive nights of US strikes on Iran, and CENTCOM is releasing footage like a studio dropping a trailer for an extended season. The targets — command centres, air defence, coastal surveillance, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, communications networks — read less like a punitive raid and more like the systematic dismantling of a state’s ability to see, coordinate, or strike back. This is not a reprisal for a single incident; it is the opening phase of a campaign to degrade a regional military power.

Trump frames the strikes as being “in honour” of killed US personnel, a justification that wears thin by night nine. The scale suggests the objective has shifted from retaliation to strategic demolition. Each night of bombing destroys infrastructure that took years and billions to build, and which cannot be replaced quickly under sanctions. The US is burning through ordnance at a rate that would have been unthinkable outside a major war a decade ago, but the real cost is being paid by Iran’s capacity to project force — and by the Iraqi and Syrian civilians living near the targeted sites.

The footage release itself is a political weapon. It signals to Tehran that the US can strike at will, and to domestic audiences that the administration is projecting strength. But a campaign this sustained carries its own logic: once you have bombed for nine nights, stopping looks like weakness. The strikes are creating the very escalation they claim to deter.

US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq¶

Source: BBC News

The eighth day of US-Iranian strikes has produced a grim accounting logic: two US soldiers killed in Jordan, one more in Iraq during ordnance disposal, an American pilot declared dead, at least 50 Iranian fatalities from US bombing. The numbers are asymmetrical but the dynamic is symmetrical — each side frames its violence as retaliation for the other's, and each strike generates the justification for the next. The preliminary ceasefire that collapsed in July was never a peace; it was a pause that both sides used to reposition, and Trump's declaration that the agreement was "over" merely formalised what the continued attacks had already demonstrated.

The Strait of Hormuz closure is the most concrete escalation. Iran's IRGC now warns that vessels ignoring its prohibition will face "accidents", and two ships have already been involved in one. Washington's response — reimposing a port blockade and bombing what it calls military logistics infrastructure — is framed as defending commercial shipping, but the effect is to militarise the entire Gulf waterway. The GCC states are caught in the middle: they condemn Iranian strikes on civilian infrastructure while hosting US bases that make them targets. Jordan's summoning of Iran's charge d'affaires, insisting its security is "a red line", reads less as sovereign posturing than as a plea not to be crushed between the two.

The legal wrangling over civilian versus military targets is almost beside the point. Both sides know that bridges, power plants and airports become "military logistics infrastructure" the moment they are useful to the enemy. The UN nuclear watchdog's call for restraint at the Darkhoveyn plant — which contains no nuclear material — is a reminder that the conflict has no off-ramp built into its logic. Each side's definition of legitimate targeting expands to cover whatever the other side values.

A Turning Point for African Industrialization¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The Dangote refinery is a genuine industrial achievement, but the framing of it as a template for African development deserves scrutiny. Dangote’s success rests on a specific foundation: decades of accumulated capital from cement and sugar monopolies, deep political connections, and the ability to absorb the $20 billion price tag without flinching. This is not a model that can be replicated by states or smaller capitalists across the continent.

The proposed second refinery, involving multiple East African countries, reveals the real dynamic. Cross-border cooperation is presented as enlightened policy, but it is a necessity forced by the scale of modern refining. No single East African economy can absorb the output or guarantee the crude supply. The collaboration is less a political vision than a technical requirement of capital concentration.

What goes unmentioned is the global context that made the first refinery viable. The post-2022 energy crisis created a window where refining margins exploded, and Europe’s scramble for non-Russian diesel made a Nigerian refinery suddenly profitable. That window is already closing as global refining capacity expands and the energy transition accelerates. Dangote’s timing was impeccable, but timing is not a strategy.

The deeper question is whether adding value to raw materials within existing global supply chains constitutes industrialisation or merely a shift in the geography of extraction. Processing crude in Lagos rather than Rotterdam changes the location of surplus capture but not the logic of accumulation. For African labour, the refinery means some formal employment and a lot of precarious work in the surrounding service economy. The continent’s industrialisation remains dependent on the very global capital flows and commodity cycles that have historically kept it subordinate.

Chris Mason: Burnham is fifth PM in four years - now he'll try to buck the trend¶

Source: BBC News

Five prime ministers in four years is not a symptom of British political chaos. It is the normal metabolism of a state that has exhausted its capacity to deliver even minimal stability for capital. The churn at the top — Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, now Burnham — is the political form taken by a crisis that no government can resolve, only inherit and pass on faster than the last.

Burnham’s pitch is to break the pattern by governing differently: fewer suits, no lectern, “People’s Question Time”, a Manchester power base. The content of this style is less important than what it signals — that the previous Labour government’s approach (managerial competence, fiscal discipline, quiet competence) has already been consumed by the same unpopularity that ate its Tory predecessors. Starmer’s team boast about falling immigration and NHS waiting lists, but the national mood remains “impatient” and “fragmenting”. The material basis for that mood — stagnant living standards, the cost of energy, the post-pandemic hangover — has not changed. Burnham cannot buck the trend by changing the furniture.

What matters is not whether Burnham wears a suit but whether the state he now commands can deliver what capital needs: a stable investment climate, subdued labour, and a credible fiscal framework. The appointment of a cabinet minister for artificial intelligence is a telling detail — a gesture toward the next wave of accumulation, but one that does nothing to address the immediate crisis of energy bills and housing costs that will define his first months. The real test is whether the churn slows, or whether Burnham becomes the sixth prime minister in five years.