Zionist oligarchs’ assault on national sovereignty is becoming a global threat

Matt Wolfson Source: Al Mayadeen English

From media monopolies to global finance, Matt Wolfson explores how corporate power is reshaping sovereignty across the US, the Middle East, and beyond.

In March of 2026, the longtime Wall Street operator Gerry Cardinale was securing his reputation as arguably Wall Street’s most successful dealmaker via his central role in Paramount Skydance’s generationally significant purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery. Still, Cardinale made time to sit down for an interview with the Financial Times in the cafeteria of the Cardinale-owned Italian football team AC Milan. In the course of this conversation, handsomely garnished with wine and grappa, Cardinale shared his thoughts on commerce near and far. He divulged that, though UK government scrutiny had forced him to withdraw from another of his deals, to buy the British newspaper The Telegraph, “the gamble still paid off: [Cardinale’s investment company] RedBird sold control of the paper to Axel Springer for £575mn, a premium to the roughly £500mn it had paid.” He also divulged that, though “Italians and Brits perceived him as a hard-charging American investor trying to buy a national treasure and running straight into a proud, defiant local culture,” these naysayers were unrealistic, since “the only way you’re going to get change in these very complicated ecosystems is if you embrace a public-private partnership.” And he divulged his future plans in the “public-private partnership” direction: “I would like to get to a point where, if I’ve established enough credibility, I could go to Rome and sit down with [Prime Minister] Meloni or whoever and say: look, let’s have a plan for how we re-underwrite [the professional football league] Serie A. Let’s make Serie A one of Italy’s greatest exports.”

There is a common denominator in all of these references—whether to the corporate house always winning no matter what the state decides to do, or to pesky local cultures mounting ineffective resistance to “change,” or to the “change”-maker’s aim to exercise immediate influence on questions of interest to the nation’s citizens. That denominator is oligarchy: the control of a nation’s interests by a wealthy and, in this case, a global elite. This is a game in which “winning” or “losing,” for the oligarchs, is always relative, since there’s a profit to be made even in a loss (“the gamble still paid off”). It’s also a game in which politicians nominally representing the will of the people are conceived by oligarchs as rotating players (“Meloni or whoever”) there to align the nation’s interests with the global market. And it’s a game that, in the oligarchs’ presentation, is inevitable: go with the market’s “flow” or die. As Cardinale puts it, “there is enormous resistance to evolving. But evolution is unavoidable.”

One striking aspect of Cardinale’s version of oligarchy is how closely it aligns with the rather more unadorned version put into oligarchs’ mouths by their critics. In the 2020 BBC miniseries Roadkill, starring Hugh Laurie and written by the famously Left-wing playwright David Hare, a Tory Prime Minister is forced from office by her most powerful donors, defense contractors, after she briefly blocks their weapons sales when they accidentally kill three British citizens in Yemen. When this PM claims a “duty to represent the citizens of the country,” a contractor/donor responds, “Do you know what your country is? It’s arms manufacturing and pharmaceuticals”: a blunter version of Cardinale’s “public-private partnership.” The politico whom the donors/contractors line up as the new PM believes, in true Cardinale fashion, that “the world is changing so fast” and “the exciting thing is keeping up.” His unironic political motto is “always put the past behind you.” And, much as Cardinale sees politics in terms of “Meloni or whoever,” Hare’s defense contractors ease their new pick into the PM’s office with a warning: “All prime ministers are stopgaps, just so few of them know it.” In other words, we are dealing when we deal with Cardinale with someone who follows the logic of a classic dramatic villain, in this case a rapacious extractor of profit over people. It’s only his anodyne “globalist” language and the endorsement of powerful media outlets that make him look otherwise.

The other striking aspect of Cardinale’s version of oligarchy is how closely his logic aligns with the faith of the avowed nationalist and self-proclaimed dealmaker Donald Trump. Cardinale described Trump to the Financial Times as a kind of fully formed Meloni, exemplifying Cardinale’s aims for what a “public-private partnership” might come to be in Italy. Cardinale claimed to be able to arrange public-private partnerships in America “in my sleep,” and, to the extent that this is the case, Cardinale does this thanks to the support of Trump’s government and the Zionist financial players who largely underwrite it. As I have reported for Al Mayadeen English, the transaction that secured Cardinale’s reputation as Wall Street’s top deal-maker, the 2025 merger of David Ellison’s Skydance Media and Paramount Global, occurred only because relevant players perceived it as matching the interests of first the "state of Israel" and then the Trump Administration. As I have also reported for Al Mayadeen English, the deal that cemented Cardinale’s reputation was Paramount Skydance’s 2026 merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which was waved through by regulators because of Donald Trump’s and key Jewish Zionists’ support. These are not accidents of the political or commercial winds: the false alignments of circumstance. They are signifiers of a broader trend.

This trend is deeply counterintuitive. Despite Donald Trump’s apparent longstanding commitment to nationalism, a self-described “globalist” player like Cardinale is not just a beneficiary of Trump’s second administration. He and his cohort are the people the system is designed to serve. What began in 2015 with Trump’s “America First” presidential campaign, then sharpened over the next ten years into a movement against globalism, has now become a different form of globalism which, ironically enough, calls itself nationalism. In a narrow, superficial sense, this “nationalist” label is accurate. Trump’s agenda deports unauthorized immigrants, diminishes American aid abroad, and encourages countries to pay for their own defense budgets while using tariffs as leverage over trade. But in broader practice, this Globalism 2.0 weakens both “the nation” at issue (in this instance, America) and foreign countries by using financial instruments and military force to diminish sovereignty and expand oligarchy.

These anti-sovereignty/pro-oligarchy operations range from the sales of Paramount and Warner Bros. to foreign investments in AI and energy infrastructure in America; from the remaking of Armenia and Azerbaijan to the reconstitution by force of Lebanon and Palestine; and from the overt globalization of much of Latin America to the stealth globalization of Miami. These operations are executed without consulting the citizens of whatever nation is in question, and they function to dilute political control from these countries’ citizens toward a global financial elite. And they are all executed via the influence of Jewish Zionists who helped fund Trump’s 2024 election campaign; who are deeply connected to the president financially and personally; and who appear to be steering his second-term agenda. In fact, it is these operators who, in many ways, give the key to the larger game being played: the creation of a borderless world which serves the interests of monied players like Cardinale and of one primary nation, Israel. Tracing the actions of this relatively small roster of players, who all know each other and who are all either Jewish Zionists or who rely on those networks for their success, opens the window onto the unprecedented incursions on sovereignty in the Americas and Eurasia in Trump’s second term.

Gerry Cardinale, who is not Jewish, represents a promising place to start tracing this roster of activity, activity which begins in the US but extends far beyond it, because he owes the benefits he has gleaned from his financial incursions to Jewish Zionist networks. As I have reported for Al Mayadeen English, Cardinale started his career with the help of the Harvard lecturer and New Republic publisher Martin Peretz and the Goldman Sachs trader John Lawson Thornton: members of an older and comparatively less overt generation of America’s Jewish and WASP elite. But Cardinale catapulted to the top of the Street off younger and far more powerful Jewish Zionist connections. Judging from interviews, the main inside movers behind Cardinale’s marquee Paramount and Warner Bros. plays are Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood superagent and longtime Cardinale client, who helped corral Trump’s support for the mergers; David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison and client of Cardinale’s who owns the behemoth that the mergers created; and Shari Redstone, who sold Paramount to Ellison’s Skydance after October 7, 2023 so she could serve the Zionist cause.

The point of these mergers is monopolization, or the cornering of a large part of a particular market by a single owner. This is particularly the case with the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, which at $111 billion is likely the largest in media history. The merger creates a Leviathan on several different playing fields: the largest theatrical distributor in the country; the owner of media powerhouses in their own right like CBS, CNN, and HBO; and the captor of intellectual property like the D.C. Comics, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Top Gun, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek franchises. Intellectual property, as Cardinale has repeatedly said, is the key to this merger, because it will potentially allow Paramount Skydance to use AI to make sequel after sequel to these franchises at ever-lower price points. The human cost of this approach is stark: in the words of one Hollywood veteran, “[they] are pillaging this… thing… [Their] top five executives are going to make a billion dollars in compensation with the sale, and they’re going to cut at least six thousand jobs. And that’s just getting started.” Also stark is the cost to Americans, who, judging by the history of monopolization, will have access to fewer entertainment and news sources, with the ones remaining now pushing a relentlessly oligarchic and Zionist social-political line. Unsurprisingly, the Ellisons’ Paramount network is already mobilizing to cast recent anti-Zionist populist politics in New York as "anti-semitic", a framing which makes sense considering the Ellisons are the largest single private donor to the IDF.

But Zionist interests are not the only ones being serviced with deals like these. Cardinale’s role in the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal, a deal which was widely considered overleveraged, was to secure investments from "Israel’s" ally, the United Arab Emirates. In fact, the UAE was a familiar player already in both Cardinale’s business and in the United States: Cardinale had already worked with the UAE on the aborted deal for The Telegraph, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, a prominent Jewish Zionist with deep ties to Zionist financial networks including Jeffrey Epstein’s, had just approved the UAE to invest $1.4 trillion in America’s economy. The United Arab Emirates remains, to most Americans, a misunderstood country: under Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his extended family, it currently functions less as a nation and more as an economic construct. It is “home” to 11 million people, 10 million of whom are foreign workers. It invests in oil and energy extraction inside its territory, which traps impoverished workers in low-wage, dangerous jobs. It also invests in agricultural and mineral predations around MENA, depriving nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan of arable land and mineral wealth. Thanks to Cardinale and Lutnick, the UAE is now investing in America: in AI infrastructure, parking meters in Chicago, a smelting factory in Oklahoma, the NBA, and Paramount Skydance. This investment sounds, on its face, more constructive than the UAE’s extractions or predations abroad, but the line between all three of these concepts is blurrier than it might appear. The key example to this effect is data centers.

There is nothing that makes Americans feel more disempowered in 2026 than data centers. Data centers house computer servers, storage systems, and networking equipment for the exchanging, processing, and storing of information, and are vital for powering the internet and AI–but at the expense of colonizing land and energy from surrounding communities across the nation. According to NBC, protestors “blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March” of 2026. The UAE is one of the biggest investors in these data centers: the Abu Dhabi-based company MGX and the Dubai-based investor Hussain Sajwani, businesses with close ties to the government, have been the major players in this effort. In the name of “investing,” in other words, the UAE is extracting Americans’ space and electricity to serve its own predatory bottom line. And yet Americans’ concerns about this expansion have been largely ignored by the Trump White House. This is largely thanks to David Sacks: the Jewish Zionist who, along with Larry Ellison, serves on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).  

A hint of where investment like this by the UAE might eventually lead in America comes from two other nations where the UAE’s investment has been facilitated by Jewish Zionists in the Trump White House: Azerbaijan and Armenia. Beginning in 2023, the UAE invested $3.2 billion in Azerbaijan. Much of this investment has centered around “sustainable energy solutions and investment opportunities,” especially “solar power plants, wind farms, and solar farms.” An instructive case study of the “radical transformation” these investments give rise to is new “smart villages” in Azerbaijan “ostensibly intended to boost the rural economy through high-speed Internet access, green technology, and the digitization of many aspects of life.” In reality, experts say these amenities are a cover for surveillance communities where citizens’ every movement is monitored, with the most obvious examples being the “smart cities” of Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE.

This erosion of the daily and communal life of citizens via foreign investment, the very definition of a play against sovereignty, is also occurring in Armenia, thanks to an investment project in both Azerbaijan and Armenia, which runs under the heading of a “cessation of hostilities” signed between both countries in 2025. The main mover behind this treaty was Steve Witkoff, the Jewish Zionist real estate investor appointed by Trump to be special envoy to a number of what are generically called “conflict zones.” Playing a secondary role in the deal was Jared Kushner, also a real estate developer and President Trump’s son-in-law. Witkoff and Kushner were operating from a familiar playbook. They have lately been hopscotching MENA “conflict zones” using American and Israeli forces and finance, as well as a roster of Jewish and Israeli connections to underwrite similar developments, sometimes by commerce and sometimes by force.

In Lebanon, Witkoff has spent his time loosely negotiating a settlement to "Israel’s" invasion of the country’s southern region—a “negotiation” which has allowed "Israel" to spend most days since March using its incursions into Southern Lebanon to settle Israelis across the area. This process also extends to Syria, where, last month, “dozens of Israeli occupiers from the so-called ‘Bashan Pioneers’ movement entered the Syrian village of Hader, where they climbed onto a building and waved Israeli flags in the presence of Israeli forces.” And it extends more implacably to Gaza. There, Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu, who have known each other since the 1990s, have used Trump’s newly established "Board of Peace" and the IOF to clear Gaza of Hamas with the aim of constructing a “smart city” modeled on Singapore. This transformation of Gaza is a longtime dream of politicians across the Israeli spectrum. It will function to turn an area of small businesspeople, farmers, and entrepreneurs into a destination for the super-rich, “Gaza on the Riviera,” with Palestinians reduced to low-level workers servicing them.   

The desired outcome for these Middle East maneuvers by the political operatives who are underwriting them is the creation of “Greater Israel". This is, famously, an iteration of the "Jewish state" which not only includes Palestine but stretches past the Jordan River to include substantial portions of Lebanon and Syria and even Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The comfortable fiction under which this radical agenda has been presented to the public for the past half-dozen years is the "Abraham Accords": normalization agreements between "Israel" and several Arab states brokered by Jared Kushner in 2020 with the aim of expanding Israeli investment across the region. In Trump’s second term, the "Abraham Accords" have explicitly become a model for the entirety of the Middle East. Posters have gone up in Tel Aviv, with Trump, the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and a collection of other states posing together, heralding a new era of commerce and peace. In reality, most of this investment amounts to what it amounts to in Azerbaijan and Armenia: a relentless leveling of sovereignty in favor of corporations linked to "Israel" and Zionist oligarchs, a kind of “Greater Israel” in everything but name. Meanwhile, the locus of resistance to this commercial expansion, Iran, has been subject to a war of attrition waged by the United States, "Israel", and the UAE: a war prodded into motion by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The most recent example of what "Abraham Accords"-style development looks like—and who benefits from it, and who loses—is in Kazakhstan. Last September, two months before becoming the first post-Soviet Central Asian nation to formally join the "Abraham Accords", Kazakhstan signed over substantial deposits of tungsten, “a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods,” to a US company with links to companies run by Donald Trump’s and Howard Lutnick’s sons. The ensuing deals benefited not just the Trumps and the Lutnicks but also Howard Lutnick’s old finance firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, an institution at the center of Jewish Zionist power in New York. The entity these deals did not benefit was the Kazakh economy, since American companies “control 70% of a joint venture and sales of the metal,” whereas the Kazakh stake is 30 percent. Notwithstanding the fact that Lutnick is considered a “respectable” Wall Street player, the distance between a deal like this and something more akin to a scam executed by con artists is not necessarily so far as it might seem.  

And this reality of commerce as an eraser of particularity and community and citizenship and prosperity for the benefit of oligarchs and "Israel" has now gone truly global with its infiltration into Latin America via the "Isaac Accords". The "Isaac Accords", an explicit imitation of Kushner’s "Abraham Accords", are funded by a handful of Jewish Zionist billionaires via the offices of Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, and Shimon Axel Wahnish, an Argentinian Jewish Zionist who now serves as Milei’s Ambassador to "Israel". Specifically, Milei has established a foundation, the American Friends of the "Isaac Accords", which aims to provide Latin American countries “Israeli expertise in water technology, agriculture, cyber defense, [financial technology], healthcare, and energy,” while also “aim[ing] to encourage partner countries to move their embassies to Jerusalem, formally recognize [Iran’s proxies] Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations.”

The Foundation’s reach is wide. It “will initially focus its efforts on three Latin American countries: Uruguay, Panama and Costa Rica” and “ultimately aims to expand its mission to Brazil, Colombia, Chile and potentially El Salvador by 2026.” But recent actions suggest a wider play. In Honduras, President Trump, helped by his longtime consigliere Roger Stone, effectively helped swing a recent election toward a pro-“public-private partnership” candidate and away from the moderate Leftist then occupying Honduras’s presidency. In the process, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Trump and Stone ensured the preservation of

Próspera, a semiautonomous city on the Honduran island of Roatán…backed by…Trump-aligned tech moguls such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; corporations there pay incredibly low taxes to Honduras. It was built in a “special economic zone,” a rapidly multiplying form of territory with its own business-friendly laws, like looser environmental regulations and labor standards.

Prospera, like the new Gaza, is eerily dystopian when it comes to its government. According to The New York Times, it was founded in the late 2010s by a Delaware-based company that raised $120 million from players like Thiel and Sam Altman to fund it. “Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city” where “security is provided by a private firm of armed guards” and “an arbitration center staffed by three retired Arizona judges handles dispute resolution.” The Times noted that this framework is similar to the “Build – Operate – Transfer (BOT) framework” developed by associates of Jared Kushner for the “raze-and-rebuild” of Gaza, and the newspaper’s observation understates the case. As I reported in more detail last year, [the Gaza] framework will be invested in by unnamed countries which will become “equity shareholders with a 50-year lease,” with “the sovereignty for the residents” only “be[ing] addressed…after the 50-year lease arrangement is complete.” In lieu of self-government by residents, government will be “subcontracted to the selected investors and/or their representatives.” Under this model, “civil administrators” will be “brought into Gaza” to set up a bureaucracy based on “‘private provision of public services’” while creating “the ‘rule of law.’” Additionally, “a revitalized education system will be instituted based on a reformed UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabian curriculum…staffed by international educators based on the Singapore IB model.” Also, “the introduction of an urban environment with an above ground rail system and 100 percent solar power throughout the strip.” And “a three-sector Gaza economy (tourism, agriculture and high tech)…will be implemented to address alternative pathways for the development of this sovereign non-militarized green economy…" This model doesn’t call for much in the way of citizens, who are not mentioned in the proposal layout, nor does it call for anything in the way of free market entrepreneurship. But it calls for a great deal of government-backed investment.

But whereas the people of Gaza have little choice but to acquiesce to the Build-Operate-Transfer framework that creates a “special economic zone,” Hondurans had used their electoral process to push back against Prospera—and it was this electoral process that Trump and Stone worked so assiduously to circumvent. Now, not coincidentally, with its new “pro-development” president, Honduras is now not only preserving and expanding Prospera but also queuing for inclusion in the kind of technological investment from "Israel" whose apex is the "Isaac Accords". Inclusion in these Accords may also eventually be the trajectory for Venezuela and Cuba, the two Left-wing sovereigntist outliers in the region, thanks to an actual and a threatened intervention in those countries’ governments by the Trump White House.

Again, the footprints of the usual Zionist suspects run across these Honduran, Venezuelan, and Cuban plays. Peter Thiel’s Palantir has deep contacts in "Israel". Marc Andreesen is a Zionist and the business partner of the Jewish Zionist Ben Horowitz and serves alongside David Sacks and Larry Ellison on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The Venezuela play was run by Stephen Miller, President Trump’s chief domestic advisor and a Jewish Zionist, as well as Marco Rubio, President Trump’s Secretary of State, who owes much of his past political support to Jewish Zionist financiers. Paul Singer, the Jewish Zionist hedge fund operator who was one of Rubio’s major political funders and also sold AC Milan to Gerry Cardinale, has interests in Venezuela, which he secured via the Trump White House’s recent intervention there. The result of these operators’ plays in Latin America is much the same as Kushner’s and Witkoff’s plays in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Palestine, and Lebanon: to erode traditional economies and communities and “expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.”

The emerging capital of the western hemispheric end of this new empire of financial elites is its own “special economic zone,” but without the paperwork: Miami, Florida, the American city which has long functioned as the “gateway” to Latin America. Called by Jewish Zionists their “New Jerusalem” and open in its ambitions to displace New York as America’s hub of financial capital, Miami is now home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of billionaires and one of its largest concentrations of Jewish Zionists. These new arrivals, mostly transplants of the last few years, are increasingly displacing Miami’s middle and working-class population, so that the city is actually losing residents even as its economy is nominally booming. Jewish Zionists like Stephen Ross have invested massively in the real estate of Miami and surrounding areas; Zionist-connected companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir have opened outposts there; and the UAE and Saudi Arabia have become major presences there. This, again, is a special economic zone in all but name. Its leaders’ mantra (“We keep taxes low, we keep people safe, and we lean into innovation,” becoming “the capital of capital”) means in practice that captured politicians allow billionaires and foreign interests to sponsor corporate and real estate development against the wishes and interests of the actual citizenry.

Upper-tier white-collar workers, many of them Zionists, have also brought their wealth to the area. Gerry Cardinale’s family lives in Palm Beach, and Roger Stone, a longtime resident of South Florida, is a regular presence in Miami and Palm Beach. Jared Kushner has a home in Miami, and Marco Rubio grew up there. Tony Doukopil, the evening anchor of CBS, now owned by the Ellisons via Paramount Skydance, is a Jewish convert and a Zionist whose second broadcast was an emotional paean to Miami, his hometown. And David Sacks has openly predicted Miami will achieve its goal of “dethroning” New York as the center of American capital. In sum, Miami and its environs are becoming a clearinghouse for an international Zionist financial elite. These are people whose only demonstrated loyalties are to finance and "Israel". To benefit themselves and "Israel", they are engaged in a raze-and-rebuild project extending across the Middle East and portions of Latin America, even as it is turbocharged inside America via data centers and massive commercial buyouts of entertainment media.

More frighteningly, this project is going on largely under the radar of reportage. Snippets of what’s happening surface casually in op-eds about the Honduras or Lebanon plays or the Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. merger in The New York Times; or in tempered coverage of Jared Kushner’s plans for Gaza in a center-Left paper like The Guardian; or in a dutiful report on American discontent with data centers in The Wall Street Journal. But no major media outlet connects the dots to reveal the larger play in the works. The clearest articulation, however mediated this articulation might be, comes through fiction like David Hare’s.

One likely reason for this silence is that, as I reported in my most recent analysis for Al Mayadeen English, these publications have deep connections to financial networks with interests in the UAE and "Israel". Another likely reason for this silence is that many of the owners or editors of these publications are Jewish, and they hold the understandable concern that exposing a play run by extremist Jewish supremacists will rebound on Jews who in no way support these extremist supremacists’ actions. But the price of these owners’ concern is silence about arguably the world’s main threat to global peace and national sovereignty. The answer to the question of whether the rest of us succeed in breaking this silence and identifying the threat in such a way that we break through the media sound barrier comes with high stakes. It will go some way toward determining whether we live in Cardinale’s projected future, a world where nations’ trajectories are determined by public-private partnerships and quick drop-ins by oligarchs to whatever leader is in power—or in a world where citizens determine the course of their nations through collective action, which is to say through popular politics.

Iran’s missile campaign exposed the limits of Western deterrence

by Ayeza Areej

Smoke trails are seen in the sky over Jerusalem as missiles launched from Iran following the Iranian Armed Forces’ announcement of a new wave of missile and drone attacks targeting Israel and U.S. interests in the region on March 01, 2026. [Gazi Samad – Anadolu Agency]

On 28th February, 2026, Iran launched Operation “True Promise-4,” a wave of ballistic missiles and drones into Israeli airspace. The strikes were in response to the US and Israeli attacks on Iranian territory, which saturated the most heavily protected skies until even success became unaffordable for their adversaries.

Iran went into the war with the most sophisticated ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, including the solid-fuel Fateh family, hypersonic-adjacent Fattah-1 and older Shahab-3 variants. It fired over one hundred heavy missiles in each wave; analysts called it “volumetric saturation”– overwhelming the target with more missiles than any interceptor network could handle. Israel’s Iron Dome, David’s Sling and long-range Arrow defence systems had created the most multi-layered air-defence system ever deployed. However,

Israel had used approximately 81 per cent of its Arrow interception units before the war ended. This was not because of a failure of the system, but simply because there was no defensive architecture that can withstand such saturation for an extended period of time.

Iran’s more recent solid-fuel rockets, such as the Fattah-1 and Kheibar Shekan, were intentionally integrated with older, low-cost liquid-fuel missiles. This was not redundancy; it was design and strategy. The newer missiles do not technically qualify as hypersonic glide vehicles but have manoeuvrable re-entry vehicles which can jink at speeds over Mach 5 during the terminal phase, making it difficult to intercept by systems like THAAD and Arrow. Legacy missiles, meanwhile, tend to serve as expendable decoys, which compels the defender to use high-cost interceptors to counter low-cost projectiles. Early March strikes against Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion airports, followed by salvoes over northern and central Israel, have been assessed by open-source intelligence to be fired from cluster-type payloads on systems like Khorramshahr-4. Reportedly, these systems have dispersed approximately 80 submunitions over a broad area, a tactic used to maximise the damage under a strained interception capacity.

Not even the US airpower was completely shielded. For instance, a US F-35 jet conducted an emergency landing after being hit by Iranian fire during a combat mission.

Though Iran did not prevail militarily, it proved that a state under decades of sanctions and lacking a sophisticated Airforce could still create significant attritional pressure on a technologically superior coalition through saturation attacks and cost imposition asymmetry.

This was not just a battlefield anecdote but a doctrinal shift.

The clearest evidence lies in Washington’s own ledgers. During Operation Epic Fury, the United States launched over a thousand Tomahawk class cruise missiles and up to two thousand advanced interceptors. Costing approximately USD 15.5 million per interceptor, THAAD was used at a rate of somewhere between 150 and nearly 290 units, accounting for more than half of the system’s pre-war national inventory. Before the war, there were reportedly just 3,000 to 4,500 missiles in reserve — nearly a quarter of America’s arsenal used in a single war against a non-peer foe. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out that Iran had manufactured more than a hundred missiles per month, while the US has been manufacturing no more than a handful of interceptors in the same period. Centre of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) now estimates that it would take until late 2029 to restore THAAD inventories alone. In fact, the Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request for 785 more Tomahawks is an admission that the war was not a temporary inconvenience, but rather a structural vulnerability. That vulnerability does not stay contained. These depletions have also caused the Pentagon to rethink its Taiwan contingency plan due to concerns that diminished stockpiles would not be enough to maintain deterrence in both theatres. Throughout this period, China has been accelerating its missile arsenal and area denial systems while also keeping an eye on the numbers. Consequently, a war in the Middle East may have opened a new window of vulnerability in the Taiwan Strait where the US faces a more formidable adversary.

Western military powers have been treating technological overmatch as a substitute for numerical strength by assuming that future wars would be quick and precise. Iran’s asymmetric strategy has taken advantage of this illusion by making the war unsustainably expensive rather than defeating Israeli or American airpower. The repeated interception of USD 50,000 drones with USD 2 billion interceptors does not constitute a tactical victory but a strategic failure through exhaustion. Although the US-Israel war against Iran offered a glimpse of this reality, a war over Taiwan, against a substantially larger adversary, would strain the western magazine depth within just days.

This aspect yields important lessons from two pertinent concepts: first, magazine depth, which is the number of missiles and interceptors a state can maintain in the fight; and second, magazine breadth, which is its ability to use a diverse mix of capabilities against different threats at varying costs. Reliance on a handful of expensive and high-end interceptors is dangerous, as sustenance and adaptability are becoming crucial in the modern era.

The future deterrence will thus be based on a combination of magazine depth and breadth. Consequently, advanced interceptors and lower-cost kinetic systems, AI-based battle management, the use of electronic warfare, directed-energy weapons, and other layered defences that are able to withstand the saturation attacks, will define the future of warfare. For the US emergency procurement of interceptors is already underway with both RTX and Lockheed Martin, but this is not likely to provide a viable solution. The more significant requirement is the cost-exchange ratio with the new generation of defence technologies, left-of-launch networks that neutralise missiles before they hit the launch pad, and allied industrial ecosystems that would be able to rapidly replenish stockpiles during war.

In an era of contested aerospace dominance, the most advanced weapons do not guarantee air superiority and strategic success, rather it is the deepest magazines, the broadest defensive toolkit, and the industrial capacity to regenerate combat power under fire that determines the outcome.

The Iranian media battle

Roberta Rivolta Source: Al Mayadeen English

Roberta Rivolta argues that Iran’s wartime media campaign has broken through Western narrative dominance by speaking directly to younger global audiences in the language and aesthetics of US popular culture, marking a historic reversal in which Washington’s own communication tools are being turned against it.

Many articles have been dedicated by Western mainstream media to the Iranian successful communication campaign launched during this war, and especially to the Lego videos that are going viral on the web.

The scale of this phenomenon is more significant than it appears at first glance, because this operation undermines one of the most strenuous and fruitful efforts undertaken by the United States since it adopted an aggressive imperialist foreign policy on the international stage.

This is why almost all Western articles, after expressing lukewarm appreciation for the quality of the videos, invariably go on to try to denigrate them—insinuating possible affiliations of the creators with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, or attempting to debunk their content ("the great Persian empire has nothing to do with the repressive, fanatical and religious obscurantism of the Iranian theocracy," reads an editorial published by a major Italian newspaper. The BBC takes care to point out that the videos would be “littered with factual inaccuracies”).

The problem is that all these attempts to contain the success of the Iranian operation fall flat, because they ignore—and this in itself is a significant fact—that the audience to which Iranian communication primarily addresses is not the same audience that reads BBC or Washington Post articles. It is a younger audience, one that has not yet absorbed decades of Western propaganda and is therefore still relatively open to different points of view. Unsurprisingly, this is the audience that, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Center, is showing an increasing hostility towards the blatant violations of every civil and moral law committed by "Israel", particularly in the last two and a half years.

On March 26, Forbes recorded 145 million views and tens of thousands of shares of the Lego videos produced by the Iranian enterprise Explosive Media.

On X, there has been a surge in the number of followers of Iranian embassies. Among the others, the most active, and therefore most popular, seem to be the embassy in Zimbabwe, with 87,000 followers and the embassy in South Africa, that boasts over 160,000 followers.

President Masoud Pezeshkian has nearly 600,000 followers, and Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi over 700,000.

And all of them are gaining about a thousand new followers per day.

Viral has been also the video in which Ebrahim Zolfaghari, the Iranian military spokesperson, mocks US President Trump by turning two of his famous catchphrases against him: "You're fired" (from the TV show The Apprentice) and "Thank you for your attention to this matter" (the usual ending of Trump’s posts on Truth).

Similarly, photos of messages and dedications on drones and missiles by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have gone around the world. Especially those carrying the slogan "One Vengeance for All," linking the Iranian cause to a broader global struggle. The slogan was launched by a video, also viral, in which a missile strikes the Statue of Liberty, bringing a smile to the face of all the victims of US imperialism throughout history: from Native Americans to the Minab elementary school, via Hiroshima, Vietnam, Yemen, Gaza, Epstein Island, and ending with General Qassem Soleimani and Sayyed Ali Khamenei.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Pezeshkian published an open letter to American citizens, explaining the true causes of the war and correcting the misperceptions about Iran induced by US media and politicians.

All these messages, which simultaneously use multiple channels of dissemination, share common traits: they are in English and use narrative and aesthetic canons typical of US entertainment products: a cartoonish graphic style, made of bright colors, sharp outlines, caricature figures; the speed and brevity of social media communication; simple messages, devoid of nuances, two-dimensional characters, clear lines of demarcation; rap music as a musical accompaniment.

It is a total appropriation by Iran of the languages and communication strategies that the United States has used since the founding of Hollywood to impose its narratives on the world.

Iran appears to have carefully studied its media strategy to launch a massive counterattack on the communication front as well as on the military one. And just as it has demonstrated great intelligence on the battlefield in making the most of its own resources and others' weaknesses, so too in the media domain it has managed to reverse the balance of power with remarkable effectiveness.

This is an operation of epochal significance, because it is the first time in history that the United States has found itself on the receiving end of a media offensive of this magnitude.

The United States has always invested enormous resources in the battle of communication.

We all know the story of the loving correspondence between the CIA and Hollywood, and we know how the US has always worked to ensure control over global information and communication flows.

In 2000, French economist Serge Latouche wrote, in his book La Planète uniforme: "There are more than a hundred news agencies scattered around the world; yet five transnational agencies alone control 96% of the global flow of information. Every radio station, every television channel, every newspaper on the planet subscribes to these agencies. 65% of the world's news originates in the United States. Between 30 and 70% of television broadcasts are imported from the center [i.e., the Global North]."

Today, the internet makes it more difficult to exercise such pervasive control; nevertheless, the monopoly over information and communication technologies still guarantees the US a dominant role in shaping Western and non-Western public opinion. There are multiple tools that US platforms resort to to silence dissenting voices: censorship of images (remember the removal of photos of General Qassem Soleimani following his assassination); deletion of posts containing flagged words; suspension and ban of disfavored accounts; reduction of post visibility; imposition of biased fact-checking; use of labels to denigrate specific sources (Iranian state television channels, for example, are labeled as "Iran state-controlled media," as are Russian and Chinese ones, but the same label is not applied to Western public broadcasters such as France24, the BBC, or Italian RAI). Besides, West-controlled search engines prevent citizens from finding results on the web from sources not aligned with Western ideology.

On the other hand, the United States invests billions of dollars each year to keep media networks operational in foreign target countries.

There are countless Western channels that publish or broadcast in Farsi to reach the Iranian people, with the aim of sowing division and hostility toward their institutions.
Social media platforms and digital media were also the Trojan horse that prepared the war against Syria.

The goal of the United States is naturally to secure a monopoly over everything that creates narrative (media, social networks, cultural products), because whoever controls the narrative controls the perception of events and determines the construction of shared meanings, thus shaping public opinion and, ultimately, defining "reality."

The very spread of the English language as an international idiom was not a totally spontaneous process.

It is worth remembering how in 1997, at the dawn of the globalization of communication networks, David Rothkopf, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, wrote: "Globalization has economic roots and political consequences, but it also has brought into focus the power of culture in this global environment. [...] For the United States, a central objective of an Information Age foreign policy must be to win the battle of the world's information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas."

Unsurprisingly, Rothkopf dedicates an entire paragraph to criticize "fundamentalist Iran" and "communist China" for not allowing easy access to US products, which he himself declares are formative for consumer culture: "American music, American movies, American television, and American software are so dominant, so sought after, and so visible that they are now available literally everywhere on the Earth. They influence the tastes, lives, and aspirations of virtually every nation."

And again: "It is in the economic and political interests of the United States to ensure that if the world is moving toward a common language, it be English; that if the world is moving toward common telecommunications, safety, and quality standards, they be American; that if the world is becoming linked by television, radio, and music, the programming be American; and that if common values are being developed, they be values with which Americans are comfortable." (David Rothkopf, In Praise of Cultural Imperialism? Effects of Globalization on Culture)

As Rothkopf hoped, English has not only definitively been established as the international language but in many cases, although to varying degrees from country to country, tends to overwrite pre-existing national languages—especially, but not only—in the fields of technology, economics, and business. Just as English has become the quintessential language of new technologies, new technologies have in turn become vehicles for its expansion. To the point that today it is hard to find a country where there is not a substantial portion of the population that daily consumes cultural and technological products in English.

But, like culture, language is not a neutral tool. Language carries with it an entire system of thought; it implies conceptual categories, values, ideals, hierarchies, and moral judgments.

And it is a medium for political content.

Consider the global spread of concepts such as "governance," "green economy," "accountability," or even "inclusivity."

After the overthrow of the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an emblematic lexical replacement emerged: in demonstrations, posts, and articles by Syrians expressing concern for their country's future, the word "inclusivity" recurred almost obsessively. Until then, Syrians had always used the image of the mosaic to describe the cultural, religious, and ethnic richness of their nation.

Yet, since December 8, 2024, the word "mosaic" virtually disappeared, supplanted by the English neologism "inclusivity." But there is a profound difference between the two terms. The metaphor of the mosaic – one of most ancient art forms – implies the equivalence of all the pieces in composing the picture.
The term  "inclusivity"—not even a century old, and not coincidentally a battle horse of the US liberal left—presupposes by definition the prior existence of exclusion, i.e., discrimination. And it introduces hierarchies among different segments of the population where none existed before.

It would be interesting to investigate this phenomenon further, but in-depth analysis is not necessary to conclude that its origins certainly lie in the Western media's seizure of the narrative following the collapse of the indigenous government.

The establishment's control of public opinion through information and culture also works in the opposite direction.

If cultural imperialism aims to impose US ideology abroad, equally rigorous attention has always been paid to preventing divergent points of view from penetrating the US cultural landscape.

According to data, only 3% of the books published in the US are works of translation. 58% of which are written in French, Spanish, German, or Italian. This means that less than 1.26% of books translated for the Anglophone readers come from non-Western cultures. Non-English language movies make up about 18.8% of all movies released in North American cinemas. However, these films together gross just 1.1% of total domestic box office. The same goes for streaming entertainment services, where foreign productions make up only 3.5% of available titles.

In Europe, the situation is apparently rosier. The percentage of non-Western authors translated is certainly higher, but the war on Syria demonstrated incontrovertibly how strict the censorship imposed on content is. No cultural product introduced to the European market during the war expressed positions aligned with the legitimate Syrian government.

Likewise, all the major Iranian directors recognized by Western academies and festivals are known for their open opposition to their own government.

Alongside policies of extreme cultural protectionism, in fact, another tool for controlling public opinion is the construction of distorted images of countries under attack through the promotion of dissenting artists. Consider the success garnered in the United States by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, or the clamor raised by the Russian rock band Pussy Riot, or the celebration of Iranian artists such as Shirin Neshat and Shervin Hajipour.

The promotion of these artists, combined with the disproportionate resonance given by news outlets to the voices of dissident "exiles," generates in the Western public a false sense of familiarity with these countries, making it even more hostile and impenetrable to different perspectives.

One can therefore understand how the media operation promoted by Iran during this war is unprecedented in its implications: for the first time in history, a foreign country has breached the impenetrable fortress of Western culture.

And it did so by bypassing the controls of the establishment and mainstream media and addressing the population directly.

For the first time, the English language, social networks, and even US popular culture itself have become weapons aimed at Washington.

For, while it is true that Iranian President Pezeshkian (and Sayyed Ali Khamenei before him) has not been the first political leader to address an open letter to the American public, all his predecessors had to rely on diplomatic channels or Western media outlets to disseminate their messages (think of Putin's editorial published in the New York Times in 2013 or Gorbachev's televised message in 1986). While today, the internet has allowed Pezeshkian to do without any intermediary and speak directly to the American public, in their own language.

The animated videos, the X posts from embassies, the satirical cartoons going viral online, as well as the dedications on drones—all of these also address Western audiences directly. And they tell a completely different story from the one imposed by decades of unchallenged US propaganda.

They tell of an immoral political class, centuries of looting and aggression against defenseless populations, repeated infanticides, and systematic repression of internal dissent. On the other hand, they paint a portrait of a country as ancient as it is advanced, with a refined mastery of technological tools, a very high level of education, a political apparatus far more efficient, dignified, and morally upright than that of its regressive counterpart, and of a cohesive people loyal to its institutions.

From a formal standpoint, this communication is highly effective because it relies on the infallible weapons of irony and symbolism.

Consider the power with which the cartoon of a taped-up airplane limping along with a crutch destroys the myth of American military strength.

Or consider the stark contrast between the noose-shaped pin worn by Ben-Gvir at the Knesset on the day of the approval of the world's most criminal law, and the backpack-shaped pin worn by the Iranian delegation in Geneva, to remember the 168 little victims of the Minab massacre.

Irony and symbolism are forms of communication endowed with an evocative power that penetrates where verbal language cannot reach, because they break through the resistances rooted in rational thought.

This too is a strategy not unknown to the West, where media manipulation relentlessly relies on a rhetoric of emotions aimed at the gut of the public to win them over to the cause of wars.

And who knows if there might also be a touch of fatigue in the more empathetic part of the Western population, constantly called upon to shoulder all these supposed dictatorships, and bombarded with images of suffering and injustice—false and artificially created, yet too hammering to ignore.

How liberating, then, to finally be able to laugh at the empire and the emperor. How much hope these messages of justice, of redemption of the oppressed, of the triumph of good over evil have rekindled. It is a breath of fresh air that seems to be bringing to the surface a hidden desire for emancipation from the burden of American imperialism in portions of European societies that previously dared not express, or even imagine, such a sudden turn in world history.

And so, Western media still struggling to discredit Iranian voices before an audience that does not even listen to them are the perfect counterpoint to a president completely detached from reality, who hurls rambling threats from the solitude of a social network where he stands virtually alone, while the rest of the world proclamis the Iranian foreign minister “the most loved person on the internet.”