As Spencer Ackerman notes below, an ongoing, long-term Strait closure is actually less disruptive than a Heisenberg Strait, potentially open and closed at any given point. Long term, shipments can be routed over land, pipelines can be built, the Strait can be worked around. But those options are only economically viable if they’re handling most or all of the current volume transiting the Strait. That’s why they haven’t been built previously.

So the real power that Iran wields, which was simultaneously completely predictable and largely unprecedented, is the flipping of the switch, not the position of the switch at any given time. The switch creates the same panic and turmoil as Trump utilized by having tariff rates set by random number generator. The same chaos as the Supreme Court, affirming or overturning decades of precedent with the stroke of a pen.

Usually it is the US that gets to fuck with the global economy, to the detriment of everyone else. Threatening sanctions, dangling removing sanctions, threatening violence, enacting violence, providing the weapons of death and destruction, providing the money that finances the hoarding of those weapons.

The US has been, and remains, at its core, a merchant of death. Indigenous death, enslaved death, death of “those” people, deaths of neglect, deaths in detention, deaths due to poverty, deaths due to lack of health insurance. Deaths discounted because you are Black or brown or poor or a woman.

The commonality is the need to target someone else, anyone else. It doesn’t matter who or why, just that there is someone to demonize, blame, direct your ire toward. Otherwise you’d realize you were suffering because of devotion to profits, extraction at all costs, accumulation of everything. US individualism and exceptionalism means you grasp at individual villains when what actually drives your circumstances is the system, working as designed.

That other can be Palestinians, even children. It can be women, even girls. It can be trans people, even trans kids, just trying to understand themselves. The specifics don’t matter, there is no why. All that is required is that your target can’t defend themselves. How broken can a society be that we would allow adults to shift so much blame for their problems to children that they could then justify violence against those kids?

That, is America.

Listening

The children Gaza lost - Pocket Casts

A UN inquiry has documented the scale of child deaths in Gaza since October 2023. It lays out mass killings, destroyed hospitals, and blocked aid, even accusing Israel of war crimes and possible…

Reading

Iran's Forever Leverage by Spencer Ackerman

At the risk of stating the obvious—worth doing, since Trump is out to obscure the obvious, lest it cause a sustained market reaction he can't afford—the Memorandum of Understanding does not end the war. It inaugurates a 60-day period of negotiations, scheduled to begin tomorrow (we'll see), for which every difficult question deferred by the MOU, particularly the nuclear file, must be resolved. 

While extendable by mutual consent, the collapse of negotiations will mean Iran closes the Strait again, despite the risk of American bombing. If the Iranians perceive Israeli intransigence over the MOU's demand for "the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon," they will close the Strait. Should the Americans prove intransigent, including after any hypothetical deal is reached, Iran will—you guessed it—close the Strait. Welcome to a new regional reality. 

The terms of the MOU reflect how thoroughly the United States lost the war it and Israel initiated. Section Four stipulates: "The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final Deal." I don't presume to know the form that fulfillment of this clause will take, if it gets fulfilled at all. But the Trump administration has agreed in principle to a transformation of its military posture in the Middle East. 

Every previous retrenchment from the Middle East or South Asia, with the exceptions of the 2019-20 Taliban negotiations and the collapse of the 2011 U.S.-Iraq basing negotiations, have been unilateral American decisions. All of them in the past 15 years have come in the form of bivouacking to what was thought to be defensible positions arrayed against Iran. However much Section Four is compelled by accurate Iranian missile and drone fire cratering the airfields and blowing up the radar systems of the constellation of U.S. bases hosted by now-nervous Gulf and regional allies, it's an unambiguous retreat. This is categorically different and far worse for the U.S. than 2019-21 or 2011. Iran is flexing a might that neither the Taliban nor post-Saddam Iraq could possess. 

On top of that, Section Seven pledges the U.S. to "terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran." Section Eleven obligates Washington to "make fully available for use, the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MoU." 

In other words, no more American economic or military coercion. That's how badly the U.S. lost. And if the United States needs a reminder, Iran can always close the Strait. 

…

We should not expect consistent Strait closure. We should instead expect sporadic Strait closure. That is most likely to disrupt western economies and create pressure on western governments. What equilibrium will exist over the Strait of Hormuz will revolve around the imposition of maritime tolls. This is a historic thing for the United States to lose. What happens if other states, located at similar geographic chokepoints, decide to take up the toll-road precedent? Something we haven't seen since the rise of western liberalism and its handmaiden, the British Royal Navy. 

Iran's Forever Leverage

The status quo ante in the Strait of Hormuz is gone for good. This is what losing a war against a strong adversary looks like. It's also an anti-Zionist opportunity

The best Iran war meltdowns by Owen Jones

Instead, it has ended with Trump signing up to terms which have left the people who spent years inciting this catastrophe - and then cheering on their fantasy as it opened with the mass slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls - in a state of total despair, anguish and terror.

…

The warmongers have been discredited again and again and again.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now Iran.

They must never be listened to ever again.

https://www.owenjones.news/p/the-best-iran-war-meltdowns

Israel continues to commit genocide by targeting children in Gaza, UN inquiry finds by Oliver Holmes

A significant body of research by legal and rights experts has concluded that Israel is intent on destroying Palestinians, including analyses by UN investigators, rights bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and genocide scholars worldwide.

…

The ​UN commission said in its report, released on Tuesday, that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted and killed during the ‌war, including after a ceasefire came into effect ‌in October 2025.

It said this was a key element in establishing genocidal intent by Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, ‌in Gaza.

“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, the commission’s chair, in a statement accompanying the report.

…

Israeli forces continued to use high-payload munitions and weapons with widespread effects in densely populated residential areas, despite mounting child casualties, the commission said.

“This indicates that ‌such attacks, which killed children in such high numbers, were intentional,” it said. It added that it believed children were targeted collectively because the Israeli security forces considered the civilian population as a whole to be associated with Hamas and other armed groups.

Israel continues to commit genocide by targeting children in Gaza, UN inquiry finds | Gaza | The Guardian

Independent report says by aiming at children Israel is undermining capacity of Palestinian people to exist

For far-right extremists, the rise of a new enemy: Women by Odette Yousef

Just as writings of neo-Nazis and white nationalist killers often use offensive slurs for Jewish people, the document uses a dehumanizing term meant to shorthand "female humanoid organism."

"That section on women uses dehumanizing language that's really popular in the misogynist incel community," DiBranco said, referring to "involuntary celibate" communities, which have evolved into virulently misogynistic online spaces and have even been linked to femicide. "[It's] a term that is intended to indicate that women are actually not human, that they are 'humanoid,' and this has been popular for a number of years."

DiBranco said that the line of thinking expressed in the suspects' writings follows a tired trope: that women are essentially responsible for everything wrong in the world. She has helped to develop a framework for this category of narrative, which she terms "anti-feminist conspiracies." She said that it is important to broaden public understanding of the ties between these narratives and white nationalist violence.

For far-right extremists, the rise of a new enemy: Women : NPR

Misogyny is an increasing factor in far-right attacks, but it often goes unnoticed.

What Is Liberal in Liberal Socialism by Paul Crider

Everything I discussed above can be grounded in liberal values. Even classical liberals can get behind ending apartheid, ending genocide, abolishing a secret police force of kidnappers, and cutting a cadre of antiliberal tycoons down to size. The more ambitious policies are well within the philosophy and practice of liberal egalitarianism.

It’s worth recalling what was illiberal about socialism in the twentieth century. For most of the twentieth century, socialism was associated with the antidemocratic and totalitarian governments of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. These governments crushed dissent and freedom of thought as a matter of political course. In economics, they enacted central planning that both stifled human creativity and caused poverty, famine, and mass death. Individual flourishing was suppressed in theory—individual lives were inconsequential next to the transcendent collective—and in practice, as human rights were sacrificed to the all-too-human corruption of one-party rule and cults of personality. These were the governments of the gulag and borders militarized against escape.

What Is Liberal in Liberal Socialism

Local DSA chapters may have much to offer resistance liberals.