[EurasiaReview] The murder of a Shia gathering in the territory of a shrine, Injil district, Herat, on 10 April 2026 is not a one more episode of the tragic history of violence in Afghanistan. It is an incontrovertible wake-up call that in Taliban-controllable land, Afghanistan has transformed into a terror-permissive state in which the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP, continues to exist, evolve, and strike with disastrous regularity. At least 10 people were killed and more than 30 injured in Herat, who included many ordinary civilians who were brought together to hold a religious gathering. All that is required to puncture a hole in the Taliban a common slogan that it has restored security. The regime is unable to stop sectarian massacres in shrines, restaurants, mosques, hotels and diplomatic offices, it cannot claim to be a stability force.
The meaning of Herat attack is that it is in an established pattern since now. The sporadic and marginal violence experienced by ISKP during the Taliban rule is not random. The group has been able to show that it has been capable of assaulting minorities, foreign nationals, diplomatic interests and city centres with an unprecedented degree of tenacity. That is what maintained operation space seems to be like. When the same organization can attack on various years, in various provinces and targeting several things, the inference is quite evident: the environment is loose enough to plan, recruit, move, facilitate and execute.
It is self-explanatory. On 19 January 2026, ISKP staged a suicide attack on a Chinese restaurant in the Shahr-e-Naw district of Kabul, killing over seven individuals and wounding over a dozen others. It was not a raid on a far out-post in the district, or a defenceless country convoy. It was a strike in the capital of Afghanistan which was targeted to a location linked to foreign nationals. Prior to that, on 12 December 2022, ISKP gunmen raided a hotel in Kabul where Chinese citizens are expected to stay, deploying explosives and small arms in the attack that revealed the inability of the Taliban to ensure even high-profile urban buildings. Suicide bombing of the Russian Embassy in Kabul on 5 September 2022 caused the deaths of diplomats and civilians, which proved that even in places where security was already considered very high, such as the diplomatic premises, it was possible to penetrate.
Springtime migrations aren’t just for birds. Last week, ExxonMobil, a Fortune 10 company, decided to leave its longtime corporate domicile of high-tax New Jersey for business-friendly Texas. There goes the neighborhood.
For decades, a handful of states such as Delaware, with its hospitable corporate law, and California, Illinois, and New York, with their capital resources, held too strong a grip on the American corporate engine. These states have too often treated successful businesses as ATMs to underwrite the steep costs of progressive governance. But businesses are now increasingly confronting the reality: High taxes and heavy regulation in left-wing states are harming innovation, growth, and the economic prospects of the people who live there.
As a result, we are now witnessing a historic migration, as some of America’s most iconic companies pack their bags and head for the heartland. Companies such as Chevron and Caterpillar didn’t leave their historic homes on a whim. Chevron was incorporated in California for 145 years before moving to Houston. Caterpillar was a mainstay of the Illinois economy for nearly a century before decamping to a Dallas suburb. These companies — combined with ExxonMobil — account for roughly $1.41 trillion in market cap flowing from high-tax states into Texas and other states that have set out to create business-friendly environments.
#3
Locusts traveling to new feeding grounds. They fucked up these states and will now fuck up Texas, too. Turning Texas blue will turn America into California, a single-party government. Democrats will pack the Supreme Court with 25 judges, return internet censorship and put NPR, PBS and USAID back in business. Not to mention NATO and foreign aid to ungrateful countries will be back, permanently.
#4
^ On the upside, Vaushnik spy and flag boys will be able to return to their comfortable old roles and chants and dance steps and whatnot! [cue Wild Acadians]
[Real Clear Wire] I've been in bar fights. Real ones. The kind where you find out very quickly who your friends actually are.
Here's the code every veteran, every operator, every person who has ever had to make a split-second decision about loyalty understands at a bone-deep level: you show up. Whether your buddy started it or not. Whether he's right or wrong. Whether the odds are good or bad. You get off your barstool, you stand beside him, and you sort out the details after the fists stop flying. That's not bravado. That's the foundational contract of any alliance worth the name.
For seventy-five years, America has honored that contract with NATO. Every time. Without conditions. We showed up in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Libya, and most recently Ukraine, where I personally and so many other Americans helped integrate supply chains, equipment, and logistics after Russia came across the border. Not as a government official. As an American who understood what the moment required and had the relationships to act.
Europe, now, has largely watched from the barstool.
The frustration is not new. And it is not partisan. I remember standing aboard Air Force One, waiting for President Trump to board, with Secretary James Mattis shortly after he returned from a NATO meeting where he had delivered the Trump administration's blunt message: pay your fair share. I asked him, "What did you say to them?" He looked at me and said simply: "I asked them, who is going to care more about your kids than you?"
He was trying to shame them off the barstool. A four-star Marine general, reduced to appealing to basic parental instinct because decades of diplomatic pressure had produced nothing.
#1
The EU needs to start seeing there is darn little they can offer the USA, that the USA cannot get from its own Geographical area, or Political sphere of influence.
Vs what the EU needs from the USA maintain it stablity.
As we have seen, the EU is headed in the direction that it will either adopt a form of Commercialized Socialism, or Modified EU-ISLAM in the next 20 years.
TRUMP has already taken steps to see that the USA has what it will need for generations to come. Despite being fought tooth and nail by the increasingly Social Democrat Party
#2
Europe is lost as the old Western Roman Empire was. The Eastern Roman Empire would last in various forms for about another thousand years. Everyone needs to grasp why our European forefathers left the place to begin with.
#3
/\ Everyone needs to grasp why our European forefathers left the place to begin with.
Exactly correct. It wasn't a 'Gilligan's Island' series of events. It had everything to do with freedom and survival. The bitterness shown to the US by those left behind in the caldron of Europe is palpable.
[FrontPage] The United Nations is the single worst enabler of human rights abuses in the world even as it claims to protect human rights.
As UN Watch reports, the United Nations continues elevating Iran, China and other human rights abusers to leading positions in shaping and determining human rights findings and enforcement.
And Iran, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, in particular will be in a position to shape policy terrorism prevention.
On Wednesday, the UN’s 54-nation Economic and Social Council nominated the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN’s Committee for Program and Coordination, which meets next month to shape policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament, and terrorism prevention. ECOSOC’s nomination is effectively decisive, as the UN General Assembly customarily rubber-stamps such nominations without a vote.
In addition, ECOSOC by acclamation elected China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan to the influential Committee on NGOs, which oversees the work, accreditation and UN access of thousands of human rights and civil society groups that enjoy consulative status at the world body.
The United States was the only ECOSOC member to object, saying that Iran, Cuba and Nicaragua were “unfit.”
Henhouse meet fox. The UN can’t counter terrorism becomes the terrorism is coming from inside the house. The UN is the problem. And the sooner we get rid of it, the better.
[Real Clear Wire] On paper, Iran should be a spent force. The United States and Israel have struck hard, targeting leadership, degrading command networks and gutting conventional air defenses. In the traditional calculus of 20th-century warfare, this is the "breaking point" - the moment a state’s military machine grinds to a halt.
Yet, the missiles keep flying.
Despite suffering decapitation strikes and sustained losses, Iran continues to launch drone swarms and missile volleys across the region, striking shipping lanes and allied infrastructure with rhythmic persistence. It forces dispersion, imposes massive economic costs and sustains a level of operational pressure that defies conventional military logic.
This is the paradox of modern warfare: We are witnessing the collapse of the "decisive strike" strategy. From the Middle East to the steppes of Ukraine, the era of achieving victory through technological overmatch is being replaced by a grimmer reality - the triumph of the distributed system over the centralized state.
THE RETURN OF DECENTRALIZED WAR
The explanation for this persistence is not found in resilience alone but in a malign evolution of structure. Iran is not fighting as a peer state attempting to preserve a centralized chain of command; it is fighting as a distributed, hydra-headed network.
By weaponizing a system of regional proxies, mobile missile units and semi-autonomous drone cells, Tehran has ensured that there is no single point of failure. Authority is pushed downward by design. Even when the head is removed, the tentacles continue to strike. It is a model that treats the loss of control not as a disaster but as a feature.
The uncomfortable truth for Western defense analysts and strategists is that while we have written about decentralized command as a "future concept," our adversaries have operationalized it under fire. They have proven that a force does not need to be intact to remain lethal; it only needs to be sufficiently distributed, adaptive and cheap to regenerate.
THE RISE OF PRECISE MASS
This shift is driven by the arrival of Precise Mass. For decades, precision was a Western monopoly - expensive, scarce and exquisite. Today, precision is a commodity - A drone costing $20,000 can now threaten or destroy a platform worth $200 million.
This creates what can be called the "Interceptor Paradox." When a defender is forced to use a $2 million missile to down a $20,000 drone, the attacker is winning the war of attrition regardless of whether the drone hits its target. Warfare is no longer about "silver bullets" - it is about sustaining pressure through volume and cost-asymmetry.
Ukraine has demonstrated the noble side of this logic. Forced to fight without air dominance, Ukrainian forces have used small, dispersed units and maritime drones to push back a conventional navy and stall a once considered “superpower.” They have turned the distributed war model into a tool of national survival, proving that innovation can overcome raw mass.
#1
Nonsense. Terrorists - and MM are terrorists just like their proxies - enjoy an asymmetry of fighting against Western powers bound hand and foot by non-reciprocal "laws of war". Once this, totally immoral*, attitude is ditched - the Iranians, the Hamas, the Hizballonians will get that's coming to them.
*A putative code of ethics NOT based on reciprocity is devil's deception.
Hundreds of supertankers, the kind that carry two million barrels each, are currently racing toward the US Gulf Coast from every direction. Atlantic, Indian Ocean, around Africa, the scenic route, the "we were heading to Saudi Arabia but NVM" route.
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and everyone panicked. Oil hit $126 a barrel. Gas hit $4 a gallon. Cable news did the thing where they put a red banner on screen and say "CRISIS" in a font that suggests you should be hoarding toilet paper.
And then something happened that nobody in media seems interested in reporting, for obvious reasons. The world just... switched suppliers? Like changing your internet provider except the internet provider is the entire effing global energy economy.
American oil exports are approaching record levels. Gulf Coast refineries are running at 95% capacity. Supertankers that were mid-ocean on their way to the Persian Gulf literally turned around and headed to Texas. That's not a metaphor. Ship tracking data shows them doing U-turns in the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile China, which was getting 45% of its oil imports through Hormuz and paying basement prices for sanctioned Iranian crude, is now competing with Japan and Europe for the same expensive American barrels. Chinese manufacturers are already raising prices 20% on goods headed to the US.
So to summarize: Iran played its biggest card and the main result is that the United States became the world's emergency gas station and China's cheap energy subsidy evaporated.
This is either the most elaborate coincidence in the history of geopolitics... or someone planned the sequence Venezuela -> Iran -> profits!
I'll let you figure out which one
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
04/12/2026 11:30 ||
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[BatyaUSsubstack] Netanyahu wanted regime change—and Trump said no. The horror! The betrayal! The perfidy!
The New York Times has the smoking gun: Israel tricked us into war with Iran!
At a meeting at the White House early in February, the Times reported this week, Netanyahu told Trump that Iran was ripe for regime change. He promised that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.
The next day, senior intelligence officials broke down Netanyahu’s pitch into four parts: Killing the Ayatollah Khameini, crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors; a popular uprising in Iran, and regime change with a secular leader replacing the Islamic Regime.
Per the New York Times, the U.S. officials believed the first two objectives were achievable with American intelligence and military power. They thought the third and fourth goals were detached from reality, and told President Trump these goals were “farcical.”
The question became whether the first two goals—killing the Ayatollah and crippling Iran’s ballistic capabilities—were worthwhile in their own right.
Yes.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Trump, ”If our goal is regime change or an uprising, we shouldn’t do it. But if the goal is to destroy Iran’s missile program, that’s a goal we can achieve.”
“I think we need to do it,” the president told his advisors. He said they had to make sure Iran could not have a nuclear weapon, and they had to ensure that Iran could not just shoot missiles at Israel or throughout the region.
So they did.
At that, they’ve been incredibly successful.
But you wouldn’t know it from the way the media has covered the war, starting with the New York Times. The piece was shared online breathlessly by the enemies Israel and Trump, claiming it proved that Israel dragged us into this with false promises. The nefarious Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington and oversold our ability to do a regime change in Iran, snookering President Trump into a war that could not be won!
In fact, the Times piece showed nothing of the sort. It showed an ally doing what everyone does—overselling an operation that’s in its interests—and our President immediately clocking the oversell, and picking instead the version that is most advantageous to us.
The piece didn’t just exaggerate its own reporting. It left out the role that Saudi Arabia played. Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of the KSA, urged President Trump to strike Iran, something that happened between Netayanhu’s visit and the decision to go to war. And since, MBS has urged President Trump not to stop until the job is done.
Why, you might ask, are there no breathless, 5,000 word New York Times pieces about MBS snookering Trump into war?
No Jews, no news! As we like to say.
Of course, it’s not just the Times. Not to be outdone, Stephanie Ruhle of MSNOW wants you to hand it to Iran!
MS NOW's Stephanie Ruhle commends Iran for having "deep belief in something" to fight for. Why is MS NOW fangirling over Iran?
They will literally cheer Iran using children as human shields because they are shielding Iran from Trump.
Meanwhile, the Economist desperately wants you to think Trump is losing in Iran.
Per The Economist, “Not all wars have a winner. But every war has at least one loser and if—a big if—the ceasefire marks the end of the war in Iran, the biggest loser will be Donald Trump. The conflict has set back his chief war aims and revealed the shallowness of his vision for a new way of wielding American power.”
This, of course, is nonsense.
We don’t know how this will end. Things are in flux. But some things are already true:
We’ve eviscerated Iran’s ballistic and nuclear capabilities, and revealed China and Russia as the perfidious, feckless losers that they are.
Our grandkids won’t have to fear a nuclear Iran.
We’re forcing China to buy oil at market rates, a huge leverage point for the President’s tariff negotiations with Xi Jinping.
We’ve restored the supremacy of the petrodollar.
We’ve brought Saudi Arabia and Qatar closer to us and closer to Israel.
We’ve exposed our NATO “allies” as freeloading traitors.
And we’ve reestablished ourselves as the world’s only superpower thanks to our energy dominance.
But if you ask the liberal media, it’s Iran that’s winning- because it’s at war with Trump.
Posted by: badanov ||
04/12/2026 10:59 ||
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#1
The man said no nukes and turn over what enriched uranium you had. The Iranian said no. Simple as that. And add a long list of terrorism since 1979.
#3
I'm of the opinion that, if China decides to support Iran's continued efforts in this war, they will find they now have a lot more to lose than they did in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Personally, I'd like to see that happen.
As for Russia, they now have their own war to fight and may not feel they can afford to help Iran.
Iran might be screwed, especially if Trump can keep the pressure on long enough for the Iranians to run out of money and missiles. The big question is whether or not Trump can continue to fend off Democrat opposition to anything and everything he does. But, at the very least, he has already disabled the Iranian nuke program and the world is safer for it.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/12/2026 16:54 Comments ||
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#4
a blockade of Iran's ports would keep CCP weapon parts from the IRGC
it would also allow a lot of other things
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
04/12/2026 20:53 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Real Clear Wire] On paper, Iran should be a spent force. The United States and Israel have struck hard, targeting leadership, degrading command networks and gutting conventional air defenses. In the traditional calculus of 20th-century warfare, this is the "breaking point" - the moment a state’s military machine grinds to a halt.
