When President Trump said, “Iran must unconditionally surrender”, it suggests he has not read the history of this nation. Surrender is the worst thing for us. It’s the same with calling for zero enrichment, giving up our missiles and our allies – they don’t understand the identity of the Iranian people. We fought against Saddam Hussein for 8 years to ensure we did not lose a centimetre of our land. When you don’t understand things like that, it can cause many mistakes, as we have seen.

“They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people. There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” Trump said after bombing Iran yesterday and threatening to tear up the MOU. The pussy-grabbing Leader of the Free World has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilizations becoming daily occurrences. 

As a dress rehearsal for the coming war on China, RIMPAC is a big deal. This year's event is billed as bringing together global naval forces to address ‘the current threat China is posing in the Indo-Pacific region’. Every two years the US Pacific Fleet/Indo-Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, hosts the Rim of the Pacific exercise, the world's largest international maritime exercise.  RIMPAC gathers the US and its allies together for a show of force and a building of interoperability, cementing relationships and ensuring countries like Australia and New Zealand are increasingly integrated into weapons procurement and US war plans so they can act as  “force multipliers” for the United States.

We are in an era of American statecraft that is largely based around violence, threats of violence and the deployment of sanctions, other forms of financial strangulation, physical blockades and the intimidation of even the US’s closest allies. It didn’t start with Trump.

In this interview with Russian Federation Ambassador to Wellington Stanislav Krans we discussed the legality/illegality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the state of Russian-Western diplomacy, and the central role diplomats should play in bringing the war to an end. We also touched on what it is like to be a Russian diplomat in a Western country. 

In recent weeks swarms of Ukrainian drones have traversed the Baltic states on missions to take the war to Russian cities like St Petersburg. It is the latest in a string of “incremental escalations” that military and geopolitical analysts I follow fear may be some of the opening shots in transitioning the “Russo-Ukrainian War” (with massive Western backing) into an open “Russo-European War”. God help us all. 

Western countries, including  Australia and New Zealand, were quick to line up to support Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli blitzkrieg on the Islamic Republic of Iran. They were effectively throwing international law into a cauldron of blood and mayhem.  These same Western powers – and the Gulf Arab states that stand with them – may soon live to regret it.

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed over 150 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018. I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.  

Cuba believes a genuine “third way” can only exist if it defends the economic sovereignty of states against coercion. For more than sixty years, our country has been subjected to a policy explicitly designed to generate material hardship in order to force political change. The issue therefore is not ideological but systemic: no nation can claim strategic autonomy while tolerating that another punishes third countries for lawful trade.

If Israel and the US attack Iran, the cosy worlds of Europe, Australia and New Zealand could be swept up in an economic catastrophe. Should the Iranians survive a terrifying onslaught, they have vowed to strike back in a way that could crash the global economy.  How they could quite possibly do this is the topic of this article.

It’s time to stop this Medieval siege. UN Security Council Resolution 2397 has already killed thousands of North Korean civilians. As long as it remains in force, hundreds of thousands of innocent people remain at risk in a country that is suffering dire food insecurity. New Zealand, Australia and the US have played a major role in inflicting foreseeable lethal consequences on North Korean civilians. Sanctions against the North’s weapons programme have achieved nothing but human misery.

Trump’s rough woo-ing of Canada to become the 51st state, and his threat to use military force to seize both Greenland and the Canal, speak to a back-to-basics focus for American imperialism – a shift in US policy that will bring it closer to its core strategic interests

As protests unfold in Iran, Israeli and US figures openly talk of regime collapse. Foreign interference risks worsening violence and derailing change from within. What’s really going on?

The leading political and military leaders in Europe are sounding the alarm: major war is coming to Europe; millions of soldiers could be fighting in the cities and plains of the continent within five years as a violent, expansionist Russia seeks to re-establish its empire. What is really happening?