Source: US claims on southern Hormuz oil route a ploy to manipulate energy prices

An informed security source in Tehran has dismissed American claims regarding the transit of a significant volume of oil via the southern route of the Strait of Hormuz, labeling the claims as a ploy to manipulate global energy prices.

Speaking to Press TV on Saturday, the source said these claims are "contrary to realities on the ground" and part of a widespread psychological warfare by the United States.

According to the source, Washington is attempting to portray the southern route through the strategic waterway as operating smoothly while simultaneously projecting the northern route as ineffective.

The source further asserted that Iran's operations to keep the strategic chokepoint closed are real, contrary to false US narratives. This is evidenced, as the informed security source noted, by vessels that violate regulations being struck and oil tankers altering their routes in response to decisive and clear warnings.

He questioned the validity of US claims by asking why, if the southern route were indeed functioning, Washington would press Tehran for an agreement and maintain its illegal naval blockade.

The source also pointed to rising gasoline prices in the US as evidence contradicting American claims of the southern route being open.

The remarks come amid heightened tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for global oil shipments, amid continued US aggression and maritime banditry.

Ship-tracking firms have reported that the traffic through the strait remains suspended, with no crude oil shipments visible, in contrast to hundreds of vessels that traversed it daily before the US and the Israeli regime launched aggression against Iran in late February.

The source's comments also align with recent public statements by Iranian officials, including Parliament Speaker and lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who mocked what he described as US attempts to manipulate "paper oil markets" and asserted that Iran maintains control over the key oil transport route.

The denial of US claims regarding oil flow coincides with US President Donald Trump's public acknowledgment that Americans should brace for higher fuel prices as the war against Iran continues. Trump urged the American public to accept slightly higher gasoline costs.

The average US gasoline price has risen dramatically from the previous year, reflecting the inflationary impact of the crisis resulting from the US-Israeli war against Iran.

From erasure to eternity: How Sliman Mansour turned Palestine’s loss into art, memory, and unyielding sumud

By Humaira Ahad

Sliman Mansour never left Palestine, even when Palestine, piece by piece, was taken from him. The distinguished painter, who died on August 24 aged 79, spent five decades turning that loss - olive trees, embroidered dresses, cracked earth - into an image Palestinians could recognize as their own.

He painted the same land for fifty years, and it kept changing under him. Mansour began exhibiting his work in the early 1970s, when Palestinian art had no institutions and no galleries of its own.

Israeli military authorities could, and often did, walk into an exhibition and shut it down. By the time he died, he had built much of that infrastructure himself and left behind hundreds of paintings that Palestinians of several generations have used to recognize themselves and their homeland.

His funeral was held at the church in Birzeit, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, in the presence of Palestinians from different walks of life.

In his message of condolence, Ahmed Norouzi, head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’s (IRIB) World Service and Press TV CEO, described his passing as a loss not only to the art world but to Palestine’s visual memory and collective consciousness.

Norouzi said Mansour had used his art to preserve what had been erased from the Palestinian landscape, bringing villages, homes, olive trees, Jerusalem and the experiences of displacement and steadfastness onto his canvases.

“He did not paint Palestine, he brought Palestine out from beneath the rubble of oblivion,” Norouzi wrote, portraying Mansour as a chronicler who transformed “displacement into memory, earth into identity and silence into a global cry.”

He added that although the artist had died, his legacy would endure in his paintings and in the generations of Palestinians who continue to remember the homeland and its hope for freedom.

Movement built from nothing

Mansour was born on July 27, 1947, in Birzeit, a town north of occupied Al Quds (Jerusalem), one year before the Nakba, or the catastrophe that befell Palestine in 1948. It resulted in the dispossession of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine and the uprooting of much of Palestinian society in the process of the establishment of the Zionist regime.

The Palestinian painter grew up inside the aftermath of that displacement and came of age under the Israeli occupation that followed in 1967.

He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in occupied Al Quds, graduating in 1970, and from there began the work that would occupy the rest of his life: painting a homeland whose borders, ownership and very visibility were under occupation.

In the mid-1970s, Mansour and a small group of fellow artists, most of them just out of art school, founded the League of Palestinian Artists in 1973, the first official Palestinian art body to organize under the Israeli occupation.

Mansour served as its president more than once, at a place where forming an artists’ union required navigating Israel’s military administration, which treated even cultural organizing with suspicion and punishment.

Two decades later, in 1994, he co-founded the al-Wasiti Art Center, housed in a renovated old building in occupied Al Quds. Its purpose was to give Palestinian artists living under occupation a way to connect with the much larger number of Palestinian artists who had been living in exile for years, some since 1948, unable to return home.

Mansour was also a founding board member of the International Academy of Art–Palestine in Ramallah and taught for years at Palestinian institutions, including Al-Quds University, where former students remember him as generous with his time and blunt with his critiques.

Farmers, olive trees, and the language of sumud

Mansour’s paintings returned obsessively to the Palestinian countryside: men and women tilling soil, picking olives, harvesting wheat.

These were not just pastoral scenes but studies of sumud, the Arabic word for steadfastness that has become shorthand for what it means to stay on the land under occupation, where even remaining on the land can be an act of defiance.

He built a personal iconography out of that landscape and used it with the consistency of a signature.

Orange trees, in his paintings, meant the land seized by the regime in 1948. Olive trees meant the land occupied by Israel in 1967, and the groves that Israeli settlers and soldiers have uprooted or cut off from their owners in the decades since. Women in embroidered thobes stood in for the land itself and for the resistance movement built to reclaim it.

The stone terraces cut into hillsides by generations of farmers stood for a labor and a claim that predates any occupation. And Al Quds, usually rendered through the Dome of the Rock, stood for the city that many Palestinians, including those who live only an hour’s drive away, are barred by the Israeli occupation from entering.

His most widely reproduced painting, “Jamal al-Mahamel” (Camel of Hardships or Camel of Burdens), shows a porter bent under the weight of Al Quds itself, carried on his back like cargo.

Camel of Hardships

The image was copied onto posters, postcards and stickers and circulated across the occupied territories, where Israeli military authorities regularly confiscated artwork, closed exhibitions and shut down galleries.

Owning a print of Mansour’s camel could itself be a risk, with possession of Palestinian cultural symbols exposing people to reprisals from the occupation forces.

When the paint itself became political

The First Intifada, which began in 1987, changed how Mansour worked. That year, he and three colleagues, Vera Tamari, TayseerBarakat and Nabil Anani, founded the New Visions art movement, responding to a call from the resistance leadership to boycott Israeli products, including the oil paints and canvas that most artists relied on.

The group had to find another way to make art, and they found it in the ground beneath them: coffee, henna, clay and mud.

Mud became Mansour’s material for the next several years. He mixed it with straw and coloured it with local herbs and spices, developing a technique that let the surface crack and dry until it resembled parched earth or an excavated ruin.

This image carried its own argument about memory, history and a land under occupation.It was the material from the land itself, turned into art, and through this technique he refused to depend on the occupation systems.

The Shrinking Piece (1996) conveys the sense that "Palestine is disappearing."

“Sliman chose to work with mud and straw, adding colorants from natural local herbs and spices,” Vera Tamari, a Palestinian visual artist and Islamic art historian who worked alongside him in the collective, wrote in Mondoweiss.

“He perfected the production of cracked surfaces from this new amalgam, giving the semblance of parched earth and archaeological sites, in a powerful reference to memory and history.”

The New Visions group first showed this work at the Hakawati Theater in Al Quds in 1989, an exhibition that later traveled to Germany, Italy and the United States, carrying paintings made from Palestinian soil to audiences who had likely never set foot on the land.

Al-Wasiti, and a life spent explaining Palestine to the world

The al-Wasiti Art Center, which Mansour and his New Visions colleagues opened in 1994, took years of work to build.

“I remember the countless meetings and discussions we held to make al-Wasiti a specialized art and cultural venue for the public in Jerusalem and its environs,” Tamari recalled.

Its opening exhibition, “From Exile to Jerusalem,” brought together work by Palestinian artists living abroad, among them Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Samia Halaby, Kamal Boullata, Vladimir Tamari, Samir Salameh and Naser Soumi, artists whose relationship to Al Quds was, because of Israeli occupation, conducted from a distance.

Mansour spent much of his later career travelling internationally, representing Palestinian art in exhibitions abroad while still based in a homeland where movement itself was restricted by Israeli soldiers.

Tamari remembers him as consistent in style even as his audiences grew. “He travelled widely, becoming an internationally renowned artist and an eloquent ambassador of Palestinian art and culture,” she said.

“He appeared in both the media and local and international arenas, always speaking simply, but with convincing arguments grounded in extensive research.”

In one of his later paintings, a woman wraps her arms around a tree with two intertwined branches, one heavy with oranges, the other with olives. It is a small, quiet image, and among Palestinians, an unmistakable one.

For the Palestinian artist, the act of painting was a form of resistance. When land was confiscated, villages disappeared, movement was restricted and Palestinian cultural expression was policed, he placed those things on canvas, making the landscape itself a record of what occupation sought to erase.

Mansour leaves behind hundreds of paintings, the institutions he spent decades building and a generation of Palestinian artists who studied under him. His legacy of nearly fifty years is the record of a people determined to keep that homeland visible. In his hands, painting became a way of remembering, asserting identity and resisting erasure.

South Africa’s ICJ dossier on Gaza challenges a world where intl. law bends before power and impunity

By Iqbal Jassat 

South Africa has officially submitted a substantial dossier to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), detailing Israel's continued non-compliance with legally binding provisional measures.

The submission, formally handed over on 25 August 2026, serves to assist an ICJ committee of judges tasked with monitoring the implementation of the court's orders in Gaza.

According to the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), Israel's non-compliance directly undermines the protective functions of international justice. 

Hence, the submission is a vital milestone in the struggle for global accountability. By formally documenting Israel’s refusal to adhere to the court's binding provisional measures, Pretoria is doing far more than advocating for Palestinian survival. 

It is actively defending the fraying credibility of the international legal order. At a time when powerful states treat global treaties as optional recommendations, this dossier demands that international law mean what it says.

When the World Court issues emergency interventions, those orders must carry consequences. South Africa’s latest submission provides the ICJ monitoring committee with the precise, devastating metrics of non-compliance. 

By all accounts, the human cost is staggering, but beyond the sheer numbers, the dossier exposes a deliberate, systemic collapse of civilian life.

Pretoria’s evidence meticulously tracks the engineered reality on the ground: artificial starvation, the targeted destruction of healthcare infrastructure, and the mass internal displacement of millions trapped under bombardment. 

Crucially, the dossier highlights the informational blockade shrouding these acts. By barring independent foreign journalists and UN-mandated investigative bodies, Israel has attempted to prevent a formal, verifiable archive of its operations. 

South Africa’s legal intervention ensures that this defiance does not happen in the shadows, creating an unassailable record for global scrutiny.

For decades, nations across the Global South have watched the West champion a so-called "rules-based international order" while applying its principles with staggering selectivity. 

Double standards have eroded the legitimacy of global governance, fostering deep cynicism. South Africa’s persistence directly challenges this hierarchy.

By consistently working within the ICJ framework, Pretoria forces a fundamental question onto the world stage: Do international laws apply universally, or do they exist only to shield the powerful and punish the weak? 

This case is a litmus test for global justice. If the highest court in the world can be ignored with impunity, the entire post-WWII legal architecture collapses into irrelevance. 

South Africa is refusing to let that happen without a fight, leveraging its own historic legacy against institutionalised oppression to demand systemic fairness.

Filing this dossier cannot be treated as the final destination; it must serve as the catalyst for immediate, concrete enforcement. 

The ICJ’s judges possess immense legal authority, but they do not command armies, deploy peacekeepers, or control international trade. They provide the legal truth, but the political willpower to enforce that truth must come from the global community. 

Third-party states can no longer hide behind comfortable expressions of "concern" while binding orders are systematically trampled.

This dossier gives the ICJ committee of judges the factual ammunition required to act. It keeps the pressure on the global legal system to enforce its own rulings. 

True justice requires persistent tracking, relentless exposure, and unwavering moral clarity. South Africa has delivered exactly that.

Iqbal Jassat is an executive member of the Media Review Network, Johannesburg, South Africa.

The integrated front: Why Iran links any war-ending deal to ending US-Israeli aggression across all fronts

By Press TV Strategic Analysis Desk

Iran has made its position absolutely clear, and the world would do well to listen. The end of the war against Iran must mean end of the war on all fronts of the resistance axis. An act of aggression against one component of this axis means an act of aggression against all components – from Iran to Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq and Palestine.

A ceasefire cannot happen in the Persian Gulf while aggression in any form or manifestation against Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq or Yemen continues. It is a strategic doctrine established in clear terms by the Islamic Republic after the recent two US-Israeli imposed wars.

Security in the region is an interconnected reality, and any lasting peace must include an end to acts of military aggression, maritime banditry, illegal naval blockade, assassinations, occupation, and provocative actions against Iran and the Resistance fronts.

From this perspective, a separate peace has no meaning, because continued war on one front could once again draw the entire region into a cycle of confrontation.

To understand why Iran holds this position with such unwavering conviction, one must first understand the architecture of the Axis of Resistance and the strategic logic that binds its disparate parts into a single, integrated defensive network.

For Iran, the ongoing war imposed on it by the US-Israeli coalition proved a moment of reckoning. It brought the Axis of Resistance closer together against the common adversary. The US-Israeli war machine has pursued a strategy of fragmentation to isolate Gaza from Lebanon, to separate the Ansarullah from Hezbollah, and to drive a wedge between Iraq and Iran.

Today, the resistance axis is not a loose alliance of convenience but a strategic partnership built on mutual interests and common goals. Strike one front, and you strike all. This is the core of Iran's integrated security vision, and it is why Tehran has consistently refused to entertain any ceasefire that does not address the full spectrum of aggression across the region.

Lebanon

The Lebanese front is the most important, immediate and visible front in the ongoing war against the resistance axis. Iran has insisted, with unwavering clarity, that the Israeli regime must end its unprovoked aggression against Lebanon, particularly in the South, which stands in direct violation of the terms of the Iran-US war-ending Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

This MoU was A carefully negotiated framework designed to establish clear red lines and prevent further escalation and it was signed after the US lost all its cards and admitted defeat. Yet Israel has, in brazen disregard of the memorandum, repeatedly attacked South Lebanon, carried out targeted assassinations, and military incursions into Lebanese territory.

Iran will not leave the Lebanese people alone in this battle against the murderous Zionist regime and its American backers. This is a moral and strategic obligation that Tehran has honored through decades of support, from reconstruction aid to military training to diplomatic backing at international forums. Lebanon has bled for the Resistance cause, and Iran has made it unequivocally clear that abandonment is not an option.

This unflinching solidarity is not about exporting revolution or imposing Iranian will but about the simple recognition that a people under siege and fire deserve support from those who share their vision of dignity and sovereignty. The Lebanese people, particularly in the South, have endured Israeli invasions, occupations, and bombardments for decades. They have built a resistance movement that has proven itself capable of deterring aggression, and Iran stands firmly with them in that effort.

The issue of Hezbollah's disarmament must also be seen in its proper context – a context that is consistently distorted by Western media propaganda and diplomatic theatrics. The persistent calls for Hezbollah to lay down its arms are not expressions of concern for Lebanese stability but a cunning ploy to expose the Arab country to Zionist aggression without any resistance.

Those who demand disarmament are, whether they admit it or not, advocating for Lebanon's defenselessness against a regime that has demonstrated, time and again, its willingness to bomb, invade, and occupy. Hezbollah's arms are not the cause of conflict but a form of deterrence against Zionist aggression.

If those arms were taken away, the Israeli regime would feel more emboldened to attack Lebanon with impunity, and the entire balance of power in the region would shift catastrophically in favor of unchecked Zionist expansion.

The Resistance front will not accept this, not because it seeks war, but because it understands that peace without deterrence is merely surrender by another name. Hezbollah's military capability has prevented a full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon for decades; to disarm it would be to invite the very catastrophe that its weapons have forestalled until now.

Yemen

Yemen also forms an integral part of the Axis of Resistance, and Iran will not abandon it. For years, the Yemeni people have endured a brutal, US-backed Saudi aggression and a crippling blockade that has brought them to the brink of famine.

The Saudi-led coalition, with American logistical, intelligence, and diplomatic support, has bombed schools, hospitals, markets, and wedding parties in the poorest Arab country. It has systematically targeted civilian infrastructure, starved a population to break their will, and waged a war of aggression that has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.

And yet, the Yemeni Resistance has not broken. It has adapted, fought back, and emerged as a formidable force that controls critical strategic terrain along the Red Sea, including the Bab el-Mandeb strait, one of the world's most vital shipping chokepoints.

The aggression against Yemen – which has intensified in recent weeks and months – must end immediately. The illegal blockade and bombardment are collective punishment of an entire nation. The Yemeni people have the right to self-determination, and the Resistance has the right to defend itself against foreign aggression in any form and shape.

The US and Saudi Arabia cannot bomb Yemen into submission and then expect the Axis of Resistance to simply accept a ceasefire elsewhere. Yemen is not a side issue but one of the important fronts in this war, and its security is inextricably linked to the security of Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran itself.

The Ansarullah have demonstrated that they can strike deep into Saudi territory, that they can disrupt global shipping, and that they can exact a price from those who wage war on them. This is self-defense, and it is entirely legitimate under international law.

If the United States and its allies want the war to end and the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, they must ensure the blockade of Yemen and the military aggression that has spawned a humanitarian catastrophe ends immediately. The Yemeni people have suffered enough, and their Resistance has earned its place at the negotiating table.

Iraq

Iraq occupies a uniquely complex position in this regional calculus. On one hand, it is a sovereign nation with its own government, its own internal dynamics, and its own path forward. On the other hand, it remains a battleground for external powers seeking to impose their will, and more importantly, seeking to destabilize the entire region.

The United States, which continues to have a military presence in the country, continues to pressure the Iraqi government to disarm the Iraqi resistance, a demand that should not be heeded simply because Americans want it. The decisions regarding Iraq's internal security, its armed factions, and its political future should be left to Iraqis themselves, not dictated from Washington or Tel Aviv. Iraq's is a right that Iraqis have fought for and died for.

The acts of aggression against the Iraqi people and the resistance must also end. False flag attacks carried out by the Israeli regime with US backing in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as unprovoked Saudi aggression against Hashd al-Shaabi offices, are not isolated incidents. They are a systematic campaign to weaken Iraq's sovereignty, fragment its society, and eliminate any force capable of resisting external domination.

The Hashd al-Shaabi represents a legitimate component of Iraq's defense infrastructure, and targeting its offices is an act of war against the Iraqi state. These unprovoked attacks are designed to provoke a reaction, to create chaos, and to justify further intervention – a classic imperial tactic that has been deployed across the region for decades.

This is also a form of US-engineered war that must end. The American presence in Iraq has long outlived its stated purpose, and the continued pressure on Iraqi resistance factions is about control. The Resistance in Iraq has made it emphatically clear that it will not be bullied into disarmament and surrender, and Iran has made it equally clear that it supports Iraq's right to determine its own security arrangements.

The war on Iraq's resistance is a war on Iraq itself, and it cannot be separated from the broader war engulfing the region. Iraqis have the right to defend their country against foreign interference, and the Axis of Resistance stands with them in that defense.

Palestine

Finally, and most importantly, the situation in Gaza and the occupied West Bank remains grim and demands serious attention. This is not merely another front against the US-Israeli war coalition but the moral and political center of the Resistance axis.

Iran's top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, recently declared that Gaza and the occupied West Bank are part of the resistance front and that the cessation of Israeli aggression in both places must be achieved if the United States wants the Strait of Hormuz to reopen and the war to end.

This statement is significant as it reaffirms that the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation is a key goal for the broader resistance axis. By including Gaza and the ocupiued West Bank in the calculation, Iran has once again proven that it will never abandon Palestine – not for diplomatic gain, not for economic incentives, not for any price.

It is a principled stance rooted in decades of solidarity, first introduced by founder-Leader of the Islamic Revolution Imam Khomeini after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and later strengthened by the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyyed Ali Khamenei.

The Palestinian people have endured occupation, displacement, and systematic oppression for over seventy years. They have faced genocide in Gaza since October 2023, illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, and relentless attempts to erase their identity.

The Resistance axis, from Tehran to Beirut to Sana’a, has made the Palestinian cause its own because it recognizes that the occupation of Palestine is the original issue from which all other issues in the region are linked. Jerusalem al-Quds is a sacred land and Gaza is a testament to the resilience of a people who refuse to be erased or exterminated.

A ceasefire that excludes Palestine is not a ceasefire at all. It is an invitation to continued war, continued suffering, and continued instability in the region. The people of Gaza are human beings with rights, dignity, and a future that cannot be denied.

The international community, and particularly the United States, must recognize that there can be no peace in the region until the Zionist occupation ends, until the genocide ends, until the campaign of extermination ends, until the siege is lifted, and until the Palestinian people are free to determine their own destiny. Iran has made this clear and the world must listen.

The logic of integrated security

What unites all these fronts – Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, and Iran itself – is a single and simple principle: regional security is an interconnected whole.

A war on one front is a war on all fronts. The weapons, fighters, and strategies may vary, but the underlying war is the same. It is a war between those who seek domination through force and those who seek liberation through resistance. It is a war between empires that carve the region into spheres of influence and peoples who refuse to be bullied.

Iran's position is for an end to all aggression. It is a demand for a comprehensive peace and stability, across the region, and an end to American hegemonic ambitions. 

Iran has consistently demonstrated its commitment to this vision through its actions. It has supported all these fronts unconditionally and it has also engaged in principled diplomacy.

The problem is not that Iran is inflexible but the problem is that the United States and Israel have consistently demanded that Iran abandon its allies, dismantle its deterrence, and accept a regional order designed by and for its adversaries.

The world has grown accustomed to treating the West Asia region as a series of separate conflicts to be managed, contained, and occasionally resolved through incremental diplomacy. This approach has failed. It has failed the Lebanese, who have lived under the shadow of Israeli aggression for decades. It has failed the Yemenis, who have been starved and bombed for years. It has failed the Iraqis, who have been subjected to foreign interference and military occupation. And above all, it has failed the Palestinians, who have been denied their most basic rights for generations and subjected to genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The alternative is to recognize that the war must end on all fronts – from Iran to Lebanon, from Yemen to Iraq, from Gaza to the West Bank – for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

A ceasefire on one front while others remain active is a vicious trap. War on one of these fronts means war on all fronts, and only a comprehensive, integrated peace can break this cycle. Respect the sovereignty of Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine and allow the peoples of the region to determine their own futures without foreign interference.

Any enduring agreement with Iran will work only if the war on other fronts also comes to an end. Without that, the resistance will continue against the occupation and aggression.

Why expelling US military and dismantling their assets are key to regional peace and stability

By Press TV Strategic Analysis Desk

The prospect of a stable and peaceful West Asia has remained elusive for decades, primarily because the military presence of outsiders has been detrimental to regional security.

The 40-day war waged by the US-Israeli coalition against Iran, which started on February 28, 2026, has brought this reality into sharper focus than ever before.

The unprovoked and illegal war has starkly illuminated that the very military apparatus designed to provide security has instead become the primary engine of instability and destruction. What was marketed as a protective shield has proven to be a catalyst for precisely the kind of large-scale warfare it was ostensibly meant to prevent.

This war has therefore raised a fundamental and uncomfortable question about the strategic logic underpinning the long-standing illegal US military presence across West Asia.

It is worth examining how the deployment of American forces, particularly in the immediate vicinity of Iran, has created a profoundly dysfunctional dynamic. In this arrangement, the host nations are not genuinely protected but dangerously exposed, their national security callously sacrificed on the altar of US strategic objectives that bear little relation to the welfare of the local populations. The allies have become hostages to an agenda not of their making.

This creates what might be described as a "protection paradox." Persian Gulf states host foreign military forces in the expectation that they will enhance their security. Yet the very same military infrastructure can rapidly morph into a source of strategic vulnerability when the protecting power engages in reckless military adventurism in the region.

The presence of military bases, logistics hubs, airfields, and intelligence facilities associated with the US military presence transforms host territories into legitimate targets. It narrows the distinction between being protected by an alliance and being geographically exposed by it, reducing them to forward operating bases in a war against their neighbor they never sought.

The recent war has consequently demolished the long-standing assumption that the US military presence functions as a "security umbrella." The US military footprint has made the host countries shields; their territories transformed into legitimate targets for Iranian retaliation.

A sustainable peace, therefore, requires the host countries to expel the hostile external forces that contribute to destabilization and exacerbate tensions between countries in the region.

The false promise of a security guarantee

For decades, the United States has cultivated an extensive network of military bases across the region – in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia – all under the pretext of providing security to host countries. This sprawling military infrastructure was presented to hosts as an ironclad guarantee against external threats. Yet the recent war exposed this "guarantee" as a dangerous fiction, a one-way street where the costs are borne entirely by the allies for the foolhardy military adventures of Washington.

When the US-Israeli coalition launched its unprovoked and illegal aggression against Iran on February 28, the response was not merely swift but devastating against American assets in the same countries.  The host countries may or may not have had a say in the decision to attack Iran, yet they bore the full and catastrophic brunt of the consequences.

They were dragged into an unnecessary war they never wanted; their sovereign territories were transformed into active battlefields because of the foreign military infrastructure there. This is the essence of what might be called the "dependent trap" – states that sought American protection to enhance their security found themselves ensnared, their fate contingent on the whims of a desperate and dying superpower whose strategic interests are not merely misaligned with their own, but completely antithetical to them.

The illusion of protection has proven particularly devastating for the smaller Persian Gulf states. These countries, with their limited military capabilities and vulnerable populations, sought American security guarantees precisely to offset their strategic weaknesses. Instead, they have discovered that these very guarantees have made them more vulnerable than ever before.

Iran's lethal calculus

The devastating reality of the shielding effect became horrifically clear as the war unfolded. On February 28, Iran announced that its retaliatory strikes would target all US military bases and assets across the region. Tehran had long warned against it and was now prepared to execute.

In the days that followed, Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks struck multiple American and allied military installations across the region with devastating precision. The attacks were not aimed at the host countries but at the US military infrastructure embedded within them.

The scale of the damage was staggering. Estimates suggested that billions of dollars in destruction was inflicted across numerous US military installations in multiple countries. Bahrain's Naval Support Activity, the headquarters of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, was among the hardest hit, suffering immense damage to its headquarters, barracks, and warehouses, the very symbols of American naval power in the region reduced to smoldering ruins.

Other American bases in the region suffered even greater damage, and expensive air defense systems were totally wiped out, leaving the bases and the host countries increasingly exposed.

If the United States was willing to use bases in host countries to launch aggressive attacks against Iran, then those bases were legitimate military targets under any reasonable interpretation of international law. The Iranian leadership had repeatedly warned that it would strike US military bases and assets across the region if the American war machine attacked Iran.

That is precisely what happened. The Iranian retaliation followed the script it had long announced, targeting all critical US military infrastructure in the region and inevitably exposing the host countries to fire.

The diplomatic solution

The best evidence that the US military presence is the problem lies in its centrality to the ongoing diplomatic efforts to end the imposed war. The draft Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Tehran and Washington enshrines a core demand from Tehran: the expulsion of American occupation forces from the region, particularly from areas surrounding Iran.

It is a fundamental precondition without which no lasting peace can be achieved – in the region or in the world. The MoU is a direct policy response to the hard realities of the war that was imposed on Iran. United States must withdraw its forces from the areas surrounding Iran and lift its naval blockade. In return, Iran would commit to restoring commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for global energy supplies.

The MoU's very existence, and its explicit focus on the withdrawal of US forces, confirms that the presence of these troops was not merely an irritant but a primary obstacle to regional peace. The memorandum has already been violated by the American side through military aggression and maritime banditry, repeating what they did to the 2015 nuclear deal.

For decades, the United States justified its military presence as essential to regional security, portraying its bases as pillars of stability in a volatile neighborhood. Now, after the recent war, even the host countries recognize them as the primary obstacle to peace in the region.

The MoU represents a complete repudiation of the entire rationale for American military basing in the region. It acknowledges what regional states have long understood but were politically unable to articulate until now: that foreign military occupation breeds insecurity, not stability; that the presence of external forces invites war rather than deterring it; and that the only durable security architecture is one built by the region's own countries.

A region reassesses its future

The 40-day war that ended in the American debacle has led to a historic recalibration of alliances, the likes of which the region has not witnessed in generations.

A senior diplomatic source, speaking to Press TV, indicated that the regional countries hosting US bases are now deeply disappointed and disillusioned with their alliances with the US.

They are actively seeking to open new chapters in their bilateral ties with Iran, a development that would have been unthinkable just months ago. This is not a minor adjustment in diplomatic posture but a tectonic shift in the regional balance, one that signals the unraveling of the security architecture and the emergence of Iran as the regional superpower.

This sentiment is echoed across the broader strategic landscape. Confidence in US security commitments among Persian Gulf and Arab states has been significantly eroded, as Washington's approach is increasingly perceived as selective, unreliable, and heavily centered on Israel's military interests at the expense of its Arab partners.

The United States is transitioning from an absolute security guarantor to a reactive crisis manager, a fundamental shift that has eroded trust among its Arab allies.  Regional powers are already exploring new security arrangements that do not depend on American protection.

The recent signing of new defense agreements between some regional states represents a direct and clear challenge to the US-led security architecture. These agreements signal a clear desire to build an autonomous regional security framework, one that is not wholly dependent on a single, unreliable external power.

The economic dimension of this reassessment is equally significant, if not more so. When Iran retaliated by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the pain was felt across the board. The blockade led to massive drops in oil production from pre-war levels and triggered a regional and global energy crisis, exposing the profound economic insecurity that comes with being hosts of the world’s most rogue military.

The economic cost of hosting American bases has proven staggering, and this financial burden is a powerful driver of the desire for a new, more independent and stable regional order.

The way forward

The path to a stable West Asia lies not in deepening security dependence on outsiders but in empowering regional actors to chart their own sovereign course. The MoU between Iran and the United States, with its unambiguous demand for the withdrawal of American forces, stands as a testament to this new reality.

The growing disillusionment of the Persian Gulf states with their American ally, coupled with their decisive pivot toward regional diplomacy and autonomous security structures, signals a profound and irreversible change in the region's political landscape.

The old order is rapidly crumbling, and from its ruins, a new vision is emerging, one defined by regional ownership, not external domination. Regional states are beginning to understand a fundamental truth that has long been obscured by the fog of alliance politics: only they can bring peace to their region, not outsiders.

The United States has no genuine stake in the long-term stability of West Asia beyond its own narrow strategic interests and those of its Zionist ally. When those interests diverge from regional stability – as they inevitably and repeatedly do – the host countries are left to bear the devastating consequences.

The recent war demonstrated this with absolute clarity. The allies who trusted in American protection were abandoned to the flames of a war they never sought.

The security architecture of the future in West Asia cannot be built on promises of an outsider. It must be built on mutual respect, genuine dialogue, and the unshakeable recognition that the countries of the region are the only ones who can guarantee their own peace.

It demands courage, vision, and a willingness to forge new partnerships based on shared interests rather than inherited rivalries.  

The withdrawal of US forces – from the ground and water – will create the necessary space for regional dialogue and cooperation to flourish. The Persian Gulf states and Iran share common interests: maintaining stable energy markets, ensuring freedom of navigation, and preventing the spread of extremism. These shared interests can form the bedrock of a new regional security framework, one that does not depend on outsiders but on the collective will of regional countries to coexist peacefully.

Iran's willingness to distinguish between US military targets and host countries in its retaliation demonstrates a mature recognition of the need for regional coexistence. The host countries' growing desire to open new chapters in their bilateral ties with Iran reflects a pragmatic understanding that their security cannot be achieved through confrontation.

The era of the United States as the regional policeman is ending, and for the sake of the people of West Asia, it cannot be allowed to return. The real path to peace is through the expulsion of foreign military forces and the establishment of a region where security is defined by co-existence, not by the presence of an army.

All the military bases of the United States in the region must be dismantled without exception, and the American naval presence in the region – particularly in waters close to Iran – must also come to an unequivocal end. The biggest US military base in the region – the Zionist regime – will die a slow death once its life support, the US military presence in the region, is taken away.