Newsletter, 6/18/26
ALL 4IR
{Abu Dhabi, the U.A.E. Image by AFP, via istaelhayom dot com}
Doing an edition today because i’m taking tomorrow off. Long weekend, barring Special Editions.
Sounds like the agreement by the Iran state/business entity to re-open the Strait of Hormuz without demanding fees from transiting vessels is only good till the end of the 60 days negotiation period. Also today, JD Vance held a media conference and made nonsense assertions about the agreement, perhaps thinking no one present bothered reading the very plain English the document is available in (as well as Farsi). Mainstream media and even many pro-Trump media are featuring analysis that Trump got taken to the cleaners, with the US entity paying the Iran one up to $350 Billion to temporarily re-open the Strait, which was open for full free passage into March. They say he showed himself too eager for a deal at any price. Reality is that he and his friends in the Qatar entity, the top mediator, and his Qatar-financed crew (Vance, Witkoff, Kushner) will personally benefit He has little use for vague notions such as “the national interest” or even the general interests of the US state/business entity.
Iran announces plans to bring in maritime fees for strait of Hormuz. Tehran says fees to cover cost of managing waterway will come into effect at end of 60-day negotiation period. Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor, 6/18/26.
Iran has announced plans to introduce a system of maritime fees in the strait of Hormuz in two months, after the 60-day period of negotiation that has been triggered by the signing of the memorandum of understanding. Tehran, claiming a historic victory over the US, said the strait was under its control and a European plan for a naval mission to escort ships though the strait would not be welcome.
The warning came as the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had said Israel “will maintain the security zone in south Lebanon as long as our security needs require it”, referring to the more than 600 sq km of Lebanese territory occupied by Israeli troops along the border. On Iran, Netanyahu stated that Israel would continue to “adhere to the supreme objective” of not allowing Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Iran insists the deal referring to territorial integrity of Lebanon requires a full Israeli withdrawal, making Donald Trump accountable for Israel’s withdrawal. Israeli drone attacks and artillery shelling continued on Thursday morning. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a series of attacks against Israeli forces in the Kfar Tebnit-Ali al-Taher area in recent days.
The threats to the agreement came as a planned formal ceremony marking the signing of the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran on Friday was cancelled. Trump and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, have already personally signed the document, translated into English and Farsi.
The cancellation of the formal ceremony means the chief mediator, Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, will now not travel to Switzerland, a blow to Pakistan that would have welcomed a moment in the global limelight. The US vice-president, JD Vance, said he still intended to travel to Switzerland but admitted he did not know what would happen……..
In a blow to those hoping the strait of Hormuz would be restored to full and permanent freedom of navigation, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, said the strait needed to be managed, which would come at a cost. But the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, challenged the Iranian plan. He said: “The management of the strait was working fine before the conflict. There were no issues. Ships were navigating freely. There was no safety issue. There was no environmental issue. “So why should we now, as a result of a conflict, accept some novel arrangement that is going to be imposed on it? That, to me, doesn’t make sense. So I think we need to go back to the way it was, and that worked fine, and that should be the end of it.”
Muath Alwari, the UAE’s director of policy planning, said the UAE was arguably the recipient of the most Iranian strikes during the war, which targeted hotels, tourist sites and civilian infrastructure. He added that the UAE’s relationship with Israel got stronger during the war, as it found Israel to be a solid defence partner. The country’s engagement with Israel would only deepen after the war, Alwari said. “It does not change our calculus that motivated us in the very beginning to pursue the Abraham accords.” The accords normalised relations between the UAE and Israel.
The two statements from key Gulf figures came as the Iranian foreign ministry started the long process of repairing relations with its Gulf allies. It hopes that the Gulf will contribute substantially to a planned $350bn Iran construction fund, which the US has agreed to establish and is supposed to attract largely private-sector investors in the region.
Trump is defending the agreement.
‘Jealous or stupid’: Trump hits back at Iran deal critics as Netanyahu seeks influence. As Trump defends the memorandum with Tehran, critics on both right and left say the concessions outweigh Iran’s commitments; CNN reports Netanyahu hopes pro-Israel media figures and senators can sway the president. Lior Ben Ari, 6/18/26.
U.S. President Donald Trump is facing sharp criticism at home over what many opponents are calling a “surrender agreement” with Iran, and, as usual, he is firing back. “These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid,” Trump said Thursday, attacking critics of the memorandum.
The criticism has come both from opponents of the war and from some of those who initially supported it. Fox News, the conservative network usually friendly to Trump, took the unusual step of airing criticism of the president’s position, citing arguments that the memorandum gives Iran major economic benefits without requiring the dismantling of its nuclear infrastructure.
Although the administration has presented the agreement as a breakthrough, critics say the concessions granted to Tehran far outweigh the commitments obtained in return. MSNBC also argued that Trump had been “played by the Iranians,” saying the White House agreed to extend a ceasefire that failed to achieve any of its prewar goals while granting major economic concessions to Tehran.
In Israel, officials have also expressed disappointment over the extent of the concessions to Iran. Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance, responded directly to two of the Israeli government’s most outspoken critics of the deal. “Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, what is your proposal?” Vance asked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has maintained a publicly friendly line toward Trump, even as Israel signals it has no intention of backing down from its security demands.
A senior Israeli official close to Netanyahu told Reuters that “Israel is conducting tough negotiations with the United States” and has “no intention of withdrawing from its positions in southern Lebanon.” Netanyahu later said Israel would “maintain the security zone.” Another Israeli source spoke to foreign media about the memorandum and the emerging deal, which Israel believes will not serve its interests. The source told CNN that “Netanyahu still believes there will be no final deal.” According to the source, Netanyahu has doubted Iran’s intentions throughout the U.S. talks.
“He cast doubt on Iran’s intentions throughout the talks with the U.S.,” the source said. “They were never prepared to negotiate in good faith. Even now he assesses that there will be no deal. Tehran will not really agree to restrictions on its nuclear program.” Despite that skepticism, the source said Netanyahu is seeking to influence Trump through media figures and senators considered friendly to Israel, who could apply pressure on the president. The source said Netanyahu is trying to mobilize Israel’s supporters, including conservative media figure Mark Levin, who said Wednesday that “the deal makes no sense” and described the Iran reconstruction fund as a “slush fund,” a phrase that in American political slang can imply corrupt political money…..
The Gulf States are moving to make good with the Iran entity.
The Gulf states have moved on, leaving Israel behind. The signing of the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran marks the beginning of a new regional order. While the Gulf states are returning to dialogue with Iran and focusing on economic stability, Israel is still talking about continuing the struggle. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha have internalized that Tehran remains a major player in the region, and that it is better to learn to live alongside it than to try to subdue it. Yoel Guzansky, 6/18/26.
The signing of the US-Iranian memorandum of understanding points to the emergence of a new regional order, one Israel will not like, but one the Gulf states are already rushing to adapt to. While Israel will still spend a great deal of time debating why the war failed to achieve its objectives and asking, “What went wrong?” the Gulf states have already internalized the reality: Iran remains a dangerous neighbor and, in some respects, has even emerged from the campaign strengthened. Behind the congratulations from Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha over the agreement lies not optimism, but relief that the war has ended and that they can return to focusing on their economic priorities.
For many in Israel, the Gulf states’ willingness to resume dialogue with Iran is surprising, since some of them were hurt more than Israel. But precisely for that reason, they are not asking how Iran can be defeated, but how to live alongside it. To my knowledge, this is one of the central lessons the Gulf states drew from the war: The US is not prepared to invest the resources required to topple the Iranian regime or force it into submission. Once that assumption took hold, the road back to dialogue with Tehran was short. In fact, the war did not change the direction in which the Gulf states were moving, but accelerated a trend that began years ago.
The war worsened the Gulf states’ situation. It demonstrated Iran’s willingness to block the Strait of Hormuz and strike critical energy infrastructure on their territory. In such a reality, from their perspective, there is no better alternative than maintaining the most normal relations possible with Iran. According to reports, this also includes money from Gulf states being transferred to Iran in order to “buy quiet.” For the Gulf states, economic stability is not merely a desirable goal, but an existential interest. The development visions of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar depend on stability, openness to foreign investors and integration into global markets, and any regional confrontation undermines those foundations.
The results of the war also expose a strategic gap between them and Israel. While the Gulf states have internalized the limits of their own power and the limits of American power, Israel continues to speak the language of war. From their perspective, the renewed rapprochement with Iran does not reflect trust in, or identification with, the regime in Tehran. Quite the opposite. Iran remains their main external threat. But the war illustrated just how difficult it is to eliminate that threat by military means alone, and certainly how risky it is to rely on the US to do so for them.
Therefore, those in Israel hoping that the Gulf states will join an anti-Iranian camp and actively seek to bring down the Iranian regime are likely to be disappointed. Instead, the Gulf states will strengthen their defensive capabilities, diversify their partnerships and return, for lack of any better option, to détente with Iran.
Moreover, a combination of factors could push the Gulf states further away from expanding normalization with Israel. First, many in the Gulf blame Israel for embarking on a military adventure whose security and economic price they were forced to pay. Second, after Iran demonstrated its asymmetric military advantage in the Gulf, its neighbors will have to take its positions into account more than before. Under these circumstances, it will be easier for Tehran to pressure the Gulf states to cool their ties with Israel. Added to this is the Israeli government’s ongoing refusal to engage on the Palestinian issue, a matter that remains important in the Arab world, even if at times Israel appears to prefer ignoring it.
The agreement has been signed and the new regional order is beginning to take shape. While Israel will undoubtedly examine options for continuing the struggle against Iran, the Gulf states are already in the day after. In my view, the question they are asking is not how to start another war, but how to prevent one.
From Facebook, once again this Iranian-born dissident living in Athens, Greece, who has a “take no prisoners” attitude toward ALL state/business entities. Considers himself a socialist, though at times his notion of what this means is questionable.
Siyâvash Shahabi, 6/17/26.
Trump says the United States does not stop other countries from investing in Iran. On the sidelines of the G7 summit in France, he said investment is “the countries’ own decision,” while also calling the figure of 300 billion dollars “fake news.”
Whether this number is real or not, capital does not enter Iran because of one political sentence. Let us look at the technical limits.
This money has to pass through banks, insurance companies, funds, contractors, transparency systems, beneficial ownership checks, anti-money laundering rules, and counter-terrorist financing rules. This is where FATF, Palermo, and CFT come in.
Removing sanctions on Iran does not automatically mean money will flood into the country. Iran is still on the list of “high-risk jurisdictions subject to a call for action,” and the February FATF meeting kept Iran on that list once again.
So when so called experts say Iran could receive 20 to 30 billion dollars within 60 days, this is not new investment. It is Iran’s own blocked money.
Opening the path for investment could move Iran toward regional power. But the financial compliance chain would still remain in place. In today’s world, power passes through bank forms, risk reports, compliance departments, and banks’ fear of heavy fines.
On Palermo, Iran registered its accession document with reservations. They were implementation of the articles within the framework of Iran’s constitution and domestic laws, the priority of domestic law in cases of conflict, and the insistence that the convention must not harm the rights of groups fighting occupation. FATF described these reservations as “too broad” and said Iran’s domestic commitment does not match its standards.
So the problem is not signing a few documents and lifting sanctions. Iran has signed them. The real question is whether the global banking system sees this signature as trustworthy.
In the these days texts of these reservations, and in the official language around them, there is no mention of Palestine. What exists is Hezbollah in Lebanon. If the war on the Lebanon front ends, which occupier will Hezbollah be fighting? And if its work is supposed to be about Palestine, why is Palestine itself not named?
This is no longer about war or U.S. intervention. China and Russia are involved here too. As long as FATF keeps Iran on the high-risk list, major banks will not easily enter large-scale deals with Iran, even with a political green light from Washington.
China has avoided doing this for years. Russia is in a different position, because it is itself under heavy sanctions over the war in Ukraine and has built a shared banking system with Iran. But China and the rest of the world do not operate like that.
This becomes even more serious when institutions linked to the IRGC, front companies, regional networks, and the Islamic Republic’s definition of “terrorism” and “resistance” are part of the picture.
A word from the Ruling Spectacle’s sponsor, the energy/ raw materials/ecosystem bio/chemical/physical base which makes the very existence of the global capitalist industrial system which enables the existence of the Spectacle and is what it continually presents to us as “reality” and “news.”
Overlooking the Biophysical Basis of Human Societies. Steve Bull, 6/18/26.
On June 4th, 2026, economist Thomas Piketty and a large team of collaborators unveiled a proposal that is, in its scope and ambition, unlike almost anything in contemporary economic discourse. Outlined in detail on the Global Justice Project’s (GJP) website, the plan is built on three interlocking pillars (a summary can be found here).
The first is a progressive global carbon tax, conceived not merely as an emissions penalty but as the financial engine of a “just transition”. Its revenues would flow into a newly created Global Justice Fund, explicitly designed to shield low-income countries and households from the costs of decarbonisation. What is immediately striking about this framing is how thoroughly it reflects a carbon tunnel vision that has come to dominate climate policy discussions, as though the planetary predicament were reducible to a single gas. The proposal appears almost entirely silent on the other planetary boundaries that humanity is currently transgressing — biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, land-system change, freshwater use, and the release of novel entities into the biosphere to name a few.
A global carbon tax, however progressive, addresses only one dimension of a multidimensional overshoot crisis, and the revenues it generates could easily be deployed in ways that seemingly alleviate carbon emissions while accelerating damage elsewhere, such as through the mining and processing of transition minerals or the expansion of biomass energy systems that compete with food production and intact ecosystems.
To be fair, the third pillar’s welfare Gross Domestic Product (GDP) metric does gesture toward a broader environmental accounting, but the plan’s revenue-generating mechanism remains singularly focused on carbon, and the earlier silence on other planetary boundaries suggests that carbon, not overshoot, is the operational centre of gravity. A genuine whole-system approach would integrate all boundaries from the start rather than relegating them to a secondary accounting adjustment. The plan’s narrowness on this point is not a minor oversight; it is symptomatic of a broader failure to grasp that climate disruption is but one symptom of the overshoot dynamic, not its master cause.
The second pillar is a progressive global tax on wealth and income, targeting the world’s largest fortunes and most profitable corporations. This would permanently fund a massive expansion of development aid, health systems, and education, institutionalising a continuous flow of resources from the global rich to the global poor.
Here the proposal drifts into territory that can only be described as a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even setting aside the political implausibility of such a tax regime, the plan treats the expansion of health systems, education, and development aid as unalloyed goods, without pausing to consider the broader ecological consequences of such an expansion. Indeed, the plan may actually widen the rupture in the Titanic’s hull given that much of the wealth held by the ruling elite is on paper whereas the proposal would propel such paper wealth into a significant expansion of money being directly funnelled into material throughput.
Modern healthcare and education systems are themselves materially intensive enterprises, dependent upon equipment, infrastructure, digital technologies, and the energy to power them — all of which carry significant ecological footprints. Expanding these systems to a global scale, however morally compelling the case, would increase material and energy throughput at precisely the moment when throughput must contract.
A degrowth advocate might counter that health and education could be redesigned to be far less materially intensive — more preventative, community-based, and low-tech. The difficulty is that the GJP proposal offers no such redesign; it simply projects an expansion of existing institutional models, leaving their resource demands intact and assuming that redistribution alone can substitute for the deep structural reimagining that genuine degrowth would require. The proposal seems to imagine that redistribution can substitute for reduction, as though a different distribution of the pie eliminates the need for a smaller pie. It does not.
The third pillar is a conceptual redefinition of prosperity: the proposal envisions replacing conventional GDP with a new measure of “welfare GDP,” which subtracts environmental damage and adds the value of unpaid care work and health improvements, making the hidden costs of growth visible in the very arithmetic of national success.
The accounting question that begs to be asked is whether this new measure would include the “costs” of the significant expansion of services the proposal itself argues for. Would the material footprint of building thousands of new hospitals, the energy demands of expanded educational systems, and the resource extraction required to manufacture the infrastructure of a globally-scaled welfare apparatus be entered on the debit side of the welfare GDP ledger? If so, the net benefit might prove embarrassingly modest, even negative. If not, the entire exercise becomes a rhetorical device for dressing up continued material expansion in the language of post-growth accounting. Either way, the redefinition of prosperity, however well-intentioned, risks becoming an elaborate means of hiding the biophysical contradictions at the heart of the plan rather than resolving them.
Regardless of some of the oversights I immediately noticed and commented upon above, the practical implications of the GJP’s proposal are stark. Wealthy nations would be expected to slow their economic growth in a very deliberate fashion and reduce their material and energy consumption radically, converging toward a globally-shared, ecologically-bounded standard of living. For “advanced” economies this would mean a dramatically shorter working week, deep cuts in industrial and construction activity, and a reorientation of consumption patterns away from resource-intensive goods.
All well and good in theory. To enforce this convergence, however, the proposal envisions trade sanctions and conditionalities administered by a new supranational body, overcoming what its authors see as the fatal weakness of voluntary climate agreements. The whole edifice is framed not as austerity but as a positive-sum reorganisation: poorer nations gain fiscal space and ecological room to develop, while richer nations gain time, equality, and well-being beyond GDP.
This is the blueprint that political economist Veronique de Rugy’s recent critique attacks with the full rhetorical arsenal of market liberalism.…….
The degrowth movement, for all its moral clarity, has long carried a freight of denial and bargaining — as if the right policies, the right leaders, or the right supranational framework could yet steer the world toward a soft landing. Such an approach may have had some purchase many, many decades ago, before the momentum of global human overshoot had locked in so many irreversible changes. Today, having travelled so much further down the path of planetary damage, and with the ever-enlarging avalanche of consequences already in motion, the window for a globally orchestrated degrowth has almost certainly closed.
This is not simply a matter of political will, but of structural interest. Complex societies, as they evolved over millennia, have always generated a ruling caste whose privileges depend upon the extraction and distribution of surpluses. Whether one adopts an Integrationist view — in which governing institutions arose to solve collective problems and the differential rewards to elites are the price of centralised coordination — or the Conflict Theory perspective that sees the state primarily as a coercive mechanism to maintain economic stratification, the outcome is the same. Growth is the lifeblood of that arrangement. It supplies the revenue streams, the shared economic interests, and the narratives of moral validity that allow the ruling few to maintain their position without resorting constantly to naked force.
The shift in recent decades toward the creation of fiat currency on an unprecedented scale has only deepened this dynamic, allowing taxation to be hidden within inflation while the blame is deflected elsewhere. A genuine degrowth programme, one that deliberately and permanently shrinks the material basis of the economy, would undermine the very foundation of elite privilege. It is, therefore, naive in the extreme to expect any government — least of all a supranational body of staggering complexity — to implement such a programme faithfully. The far more probable outcome is that the language of degrowth will be co-opted, certain palatable elements cherry-picked, and the whole enterprise repackaged as “green” or “just growth,” an agenda that sustains the status quo while marketing itself as salvation…...
Neither de Rugy’s paean to growth nor GJP’s supranational contraction apparatus meets the magnitude of the predicament. The former refuses to see that the material conditions for growth are dissolving; the latter imagines that a political machinery of staggering complexity can manage a planetary contraction without itself driving collapse — and without being captured by the very ruling caste whose interests it would threaten.
The most uncomfortable truth is that we are still fighting the same rhetorical battle, with the same accusations of methodological fraud and élite indulgence, while the consequences of the overshoot that both camps either deny or misunderstand continues its quiet, relentless advance. In the face of that advance, the only meaningful response may lie not in any global plan, but in the stubborn, grounded work of preparing our own communities for the world that is already emerging.
Ending this segment and this edition, new signs that the global runaway climate crisis is accelerating.
Northern permafrost switches from carbon sink to carbon source earlier than thought in models including deep soil carbon. Krystal Kasal, Phys dot org, edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan, 6/15/26.
The Arctic and northern high latitudes are warming about 2–4 times faster than the global average, allowing ancient permafrost to thaw and release stored carbon. These permafrost soils currently store roughly one-third of the world’s organic soil carbon, much of which has remained frozen for thousands of years. As the soils thaw, organic matter from dead plants and animals within them starts to decompose, and greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are released.
However, because warmer temperatures also boost plant growth, which acts as a carbon sink, most current global climate models treat northern areas with permafrost soil as a whole as a net carbon sink for the rest of this century. But a recent study, published in Science Advances, updates these models to include some previously ignored factors. The results indicate that permafrost may actually shift from a carbon sink to a source earlier than expected…….