US begins review of its military presence in Europe
The United States has launched a review of its military presence in Europe, a move aimed at shifting greater responsibility for conventional defence onto European NATO allies. The decision follows months of criticism from the Trump administration over what it sees as insufficient European contributions, including during the war in Iran.
US Under Secretary of Defence Elbridge Colby said the review would ensure NATO moves “fast and irreversibly” towards Europe taking the lead in its own defence. The announcement follows comments by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth last month, when he warned allies that some countries would need to increase their efforts or risk falling short.
The move, while expected, has unsettled European partners already adapting to uncertainty over Washington’s long-term security commitments. Leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have stressed the need for Europe to strengthen its own defence capabilities and reduce reliance on the US. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance must become “more European” while maintaining a strong transatlantic partnership.
Tell Tells 2 Stories About the Limits of Containment in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria
Competing Israeli and Palestinian accounts of the deadly confrontation near Nablus highlight deep disputes over settler violence, terrorism, and the risk of wider unrest
The deadly confrontation in Tell near Nablus last week and the conflict that followed have intensified competing claims over settler violence and Palestinian attacks, while raising a broader question: how much further can the West Bank/Judea and Samaria deteriorate before localized confrontations develop into a sustained uprising in the form of an intifada?
The precise sequence of events at Tell remains hotly contested.
Palestinian accounts said armed settlers entered the area surrounding Tell, southwest of Nablus, and confronted residents. During the encounter, a Palestinian seized a weapon from one of the Israelis and opened fire. Israeli soldiers then became involved. Four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed.
Israeli accounts characterized the incident as a terrorist attack and emphasized that Palestinians had taken possession of a firearm and used it against Israelis. Publicly available videos documented parts of the confrontation but did not conclusively establish who fired every shot or the sequence leading to each fatality.
Naomi Kahn, director of the International Division at the Israeli land-use advocacy group Regavim, cautioned that her assessment was based only on publicly available information. She nevertheless argued that initial allegations against settlers often receive greater attention than later information complicating the original account.
It comes onto the screen with a roar, and it goes off the screen with a whimper
“It comes onto the screen with a roar, and it goes off the screen with a whimper,” Kahn told The Media Line.
Simcha Rothman, an Israeli lawmaker, similarly argued that the classification of an incident can determine the wider narrative.
“We do not count as victims of terrorism people who went out to attack others and died as a result of self-defense,” Rothman told The Media Line.
He said Palestinians who attacked Israelis, seized a weapon and were subsequently shot could still be recorded in international databases as Palestinian fatalities connected to settlers. Rothman described the wider discourse surrounding settler violence as “a blood libel and wild lies,” he said.
Nidal Foqaha, a Palestinian political analyst, disputed the idea that Tell could be understood separately from the conditions surrounding it. He described the incident as a foreseeable result of settlement expansion, agricultural outposts and pressure on Palestinian land and livelihoods.
“Unfortunately, this is the result of the Israeli government’s ongoing policies on the ground, particularly the expansion of the settlement project through the many farms spread across the Palestinian territories, mainly throughout Area C. It has now started expanding into Area B and probably even Area A,” Foqaha told The Media Line.
“This policy, which is linked to violent and terrorist behavior by radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank, has created enormous despair and frustration among Palestinians. As a result, we witnessed what happened on Friday in Tell,” he asserted
According to Foqaha,“Palestinians have found themselves losing their sources of livelihood, including their land, olive trees, sheep and cattle. This situation resulted in this explosion. Unfortunately, it was expected. Anyone looking at the reality on the ground and what is happening in the West Bank would have expected that it would come one day,” he claimed.
Unfortunately, it was expected. Anyone looking at the reality on the ground and what is happening in the West Bank would have expected that it would come one day
Abdallah Abu Rahma, director general of Popular Action and Resilience Support at the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, said Palestinian residents were initially unarmed and inside the village when the Israelis approached.
“The Palestinian citizens in Tell were not armed. They were on their own land and inside their homes,” Abu Rahma said. “They did not go to the settlers. They were in their homes. The settlers were the ones who came to them.”
He acknowledged that a Palestinian later took possession of a weapon but disputed the interpretation that the man intended to carry out a premeditated attack.
“It is clear that Farouq was running away from them,” Abu Rahma said. “Farouq then managed to throw away the weapon he had taken because he did not want to carry out any operation. He went to surrender himself to the army,” he added.
Israeli accounts maintain that the seized firearm was used against Israelis, and the public material does not resolve every stage of the encounter.
The territorial status of the area is also disputed. Kahn placed the confrontation “more or less on a seamline between Area C” and “Area B.” Under the Oslo framework, Area C remains under full Israeli civilian and security control, while in Area B the Palestinian Authority(PA) administers civilian affairs and Israel retains security authority. Several international outlets, however, located the event in Area A, where the PA holds civilian and security responsibility.
Rothman argued that unauthorized entry into an area does not justify violence against the person who entered.
“Israeli Arabs, citizens of Israel, enter Area A all the time,” he said, noting that many travel there to shop. “There is a subtext that says that if you are Jewish, there are areas you are forbidden to enter.”
Beyond the legal dispute, the four interviews produced sharply different assessments of why armed civilians approached the village, how the military responded and whether Israeli security forces apply the law impartially.
Abu Rahma argued that the distinction between settlers and the military has become increasingly blurred since October 7, 2023, as reservists and members of local security units were mobilized.
“Today, the role of the army and the settlers is comprehensive. In previous stages, we used to say that the army protected the settlers during their attacks. But today, what we see is that the army participates in the settlers’ attacks,” he claimed.
Kahn rejected the characterization of settler violence as an organized campaign. She acknowledged that some Israelis attack Palestinians but described those involved as “a small handful of generally very young people,” including minors who have left conventional family and educational frameworks and sometimes also confront the IDF.
“It’s not an organized anything,” she said. “It’s a collection of troubled teens,” she added.
Kahn estimated that fewer than 0.2% of the Israeli population living in Judea and Samaria/The West Bank had participated in such confrontations. She described genuine attacks against Palestinians as “deplorable” and said those responsible should be investigated and prosecuted, but rejected using those cases to characterize the broader Israeli population in the territory.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has documented a sustained rise in incidents involving Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian casualties or property damage, including physical assaults, damage to homes and vehicles, livestock theft, destruction of agricultural land and restrictions on access to water and grazing areas.
Regavim disputes how those incidents are categorized. Its 2025 report, False Flags and Real Agendas, examined 8,332 incident entries used in an OCHA dataset covering January 2016 through April 2023. The organization argued that the database combined deliberate attacks by Israelis with acts of self-defense, administrative enforcement, confrontations involving Israeli security forces, and Palestinians injured or killed while carrying out attacks or alleged attacks. It cited OCHA’s definition, which says its data “also includes Palestinians killed or injured during attacks or alleged attacks they perpetrated against Israeli settlers.” Regavim acknowledged that Israelis sometimes commit violence against Palestinians and said such cases merit condemnation and prosecution.
OCHA’s figures document reported events and their consequences but do not resolve the disputed circumstances of every case. Regavim’s methodological criticism, in turn, does not establish that all or most reported attacks were incorrectly classified.
For Palestinians living near settlements and outposts, the effect is measured not only through casualty data but also through access to farmland, roads, grazing areas and water sources.
Foqaha said agricultural outposts were particularly consequential because a small number of residents could establish control over a much larger area.
“We are talking about approximately 130 farms in the West Bank. We are not talking about tens of thousands of people living on these farms. Most of them contain between five and ten people, and sometimes even fewer,” he said.
“This means that, if there is a political decision and if there is the will, the phenomenon can definitely be contained. But until today, there has been no such decision,” he added.
In the Jordan Valley, Foqaha said he had personally witnessed the effect on Palestinian agriculture.
“I see that the settlers throughout the Jordan Valley have not left a single water spring for Palestinians to irrigate their crops or provide water for their livestock,” he claimed.
“This is an example of what is happening throughout the Palestinian territories. Palestinians are aware that there is an ultimate objective behind all these policies. When you take away all their sources of livelihood, prevent them from working inside Israel and impose all these restrictions on them, it is an attempt to push them out of this space,” he added.
Abu Rahma separately claimed that small groups based in settler outposts communicate and coordinate with one another.
“These groups are organized and coordinated. They communicate with one another in order to attack Palestinian citizens,” he alleged.
That assertion directly contradicts Kahn’s description of those involved as disconnected and troubled young people rather than participants in an organized structure.
Following Tell, the Israeli military intensified operations across the northern West Bank/Judea and Samaria. Roads and village entrances were blocked, searches were conducted, and dozens of Palestinians were detained. Israeli authorities described the operations as necessary to locate suspects, seize weapons and prevent further attacks. Kahn argued that the restrictions primarily concerned access to Israeli-controlled territory rather than movement within areas administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Abu Rahma said the closures extended across a broader network of Palestinian roads and village entrances.
“The Israeli army is blocking roads. This is the army’s role alongside the settler groups,” he said. “Villages are completely closed, and their gates are closed, preventing citizens from entering or leaving,” he added.
The Israeli army is blocking roads. This is the army’s role alongside the settler groups.
“This affects freedom of movement, freedom of worship, access to education, access to medical treatment and the ability to work,” he said.
The military response was accompanied by rhetoric of retaliation from members of Israel’s governing coalition, while further attacks and confrontations were reported around Nablus, Hebron and nearby villages.
Rothman placed responsibility for Palestinian attacks on the Palestinian Authority’s education system, official media and prisoner-payment policy. He also argued that “European governments financing Palestinian institutions should examine where that money is directed and whether it supports structures that encourage violence.”
Foqaha, by contrast, defended the PA’s decision not to deploy its forces into an open confrontation with the Israeli army or armed settlers.
“The suggestion that it should send forces into a confrontation is not realistic at all, and it is not responsible,” he said.
The suggestion that it [the PA] should send forces into a confrontation is not realistic at all, and it is not responsible
“This is actually what the radical, extreme voices in Israel want. They want an open confrontation with the PA in order to turn the entire West Bank into what happened in the Gaza Strip—or, in the least severe scenario, into what happened in the refugee camps,” he alleged.
Foqaha said the PA had instead chosen political and diplomatic channels to prevent further deterioration.
“It would bring extremely damaging and fatal consequences for both Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “This is what the Palestinian Authority does not want,” he added.
The danger is that the ability of political and security institutions to restrain events may weaken as confrontations become more frequent and geographically dispersed.
Abu Rahma called for peaceful popular resistance, local protection committees and international intervention.
“One side has protection and assistance from the army, the police, the judiciary and legislation, as well as access to weapons,” he said. “The other side consists of civilians whose fundamental means of resistance are remaining on their land and maintaining their resilience,” he asserted.
He warned that continued attacks on families, homes and property could eventually produce reactions political institutions might be unable to contain.
“It is a human instinct to defend our children, our property and our existence,” Abu Rahma said. “Unfortunately violence can lead to further violence,” he added.
Rothman rejected the premise that the principal danger of escalation stems from Israeli military operations or settler violence. Citing open-source material concerning PA forces, he described them as “an organized army of the Palestinian Authority” and claimed that elements within the system were “planning an October 7 for us, from their perspective, in Judea and Samaria.”
Kahn likewise said Israel could not depend entirely on PA forces to prevent violence, pointing to previous cases in which Palestinian security personnel were accused of attacking Israelis. She argued that Israel must retain the ability to enter PA-administered areas, arrest suspects and impose temporary restrictions when necessary to prevent “further flare-ups.”
Doctors took a look at man’s painful shoulder—they found the joint was missing
A 45-year-old construction worker went to the emergency department for his right shoulder, which was extremely swollen and becoming progressively more painful. Doctors took an X-ray to try to see what was causing the problem. But when the images came through, it was what they didn’t see that explained the situation: His entire shoulder joint was gone, seemingly blasted apart into small, lingering pieces.
The shoulder joint is a ball-and-socket joint, with the sphere-like head of the upper arm bone (humerus) sitting in the socket of the shoulder blade. According to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the man’s X-ray showed that he no longer had a ball at all or an intact socket. His upper arm bone was detached from the joint, and the sphere-like top of his upper arm bone (humeral head) was completely gone. The broken, headless humerus was instead left to float freely in the man’s arm, unattached to his upper body.
The man’s shoulder, visibly swollen, and his X-ray showing destruction of the humeral head with a free-floating upper arm bone.
The man’s shoulder, visibly swollen, and his X-ray showing destruction of the humeral head with a free-floating upper arm bone. Credit: New England Journal of Medicine, 2026
Magnetic resonance imaging, meanwhile, found that the man’s rotator cuff—the group of muscles and tendons that holds the upper arm firmly in the socket—was also destroyed. Three of the four main tendons (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, and subscapularis tendons) had full-thickness tears.
The doctors diagnosed the man with a rare, ruinous condition called “Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome” or MSS. The term was coined in 1981 based on the cases of four elderly women in Wisconsin who, like the man, had severe destruction of their shoulder joints and massive tears to their rotator cuffs. The condition is similar to—and possibly a subtype of—rapid destructive arthritis, which was identified a year later in 1982.
Despite being identified decades ago, the exact trigger of the joint-demolishing condition is still unclear. But doctors have hypothesized a series of events that leads to the disintegration. The hallmark of MSS is the deposition of calcium-containing crystals, specifically hydroxyapatite crystals, in the joint. These crystals may spur the production of enzymes that can attack and destroy tissues around the joint, including the rotator cuff. The attack is followed by inflammation and swelling that together cause damage that snowballs to complete joint destruction, which can progress rapidly. In the man’s case, he said his shoulder pain had mounted over just two months.
MSS is most often seen in women and has been linked to prior shoulder trauma and surgeries. It’s unclear why the middle-aged man in this case had the misfortune of developing it, but his doctors noted he had a pre-existing rotator cuff injury, and his work in construction put him at higher risk.
When caught early, MSS may be treated conservatively with anti-inflammatory medications and sometimes colchicine, a treatment for gout. But for a case as bad as the man’s, the main treatment is a full shoulder replacement. His doctors in the emergency department gave him pain and anti-inflammatory medication and referred him for a surgery evaluation.
RSF unit surrenders to Sudanese army with full military equipment
A unit of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) surrendered to the army on Friday, handing over its personnel and full military equipment, according to the state-run Sudan News Agency (SUNA).
The agency said the force belonged to the RSF’s “Group 26” but did not specify the number of fighters involved or the type of equipment surrendered.
It said the group was received by Al-Nour Ahmed Adam, known as Al-Nour al-Qubba, alongside senior officers from the Sudanese army and the General Intelligence Service.
Al-Nour al-Qubba, one of the RSF’s founding members, defected to the army in April after previously serving among the paramilitary’s senior commanders and taking part in the battles for El Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, which the rebels captured in October 2025.
He said the regular armed forces received the surrendering group and similar surrenders were continuing, with a number of RSF members having joined the army in recent months.
READ: Sudan resumes voluntary return convoys from Egypt as 1,200 citizens travel home
Al-Nour al-Qubba described the RSF as lacking “principles, a cause and a strategy,” adding that foreign support for the group “will not change the outcome of the battle” and serves only “personal interests.”
Capt. Othman Al-Nour Hasab Khalil, one of the surrendered fighters, said he joined the Sudanese army together with the group after arriving from the city of Bara in North Kordofan state.
He urged his former colleagues in the RSF to abandon the fighting and join the army, saying the decision to surrender was driven by the war’s “racial and regional character” and by the group’s sense of marginalization.
There was no immediate comment from the RSF.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in war between the army and the RSF. The conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions of others and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
READ: Sudanese army says it has secured key supply route after capturing Jereikh
Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA
When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we’ve interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them.
But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes. It was hard to pin down, though, at least in part because the 2 percent on average of Neanderthal DNA found in many populations does not guarantee that any two individuals will have the same 2 percent. So having the genomes of those two groups made sense of some things researchers had already been seeing.
But knowing what we do about Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is now allowing researchers to answer a somewhat different question: Is there anything else? Using recently developed analytical techniques, they find evidence of a third lineage that we apparently interbred with before any modern humans left Africa. Again, there were hints of this earlier, but so far, there’s been no genome from a modern human relative to help us understand the details—the source of this DNA remains a “ghost lineage.”
Old, and yet young
The new work, done by a group largely based at Berkeley, relies on developments from elsewhere in the field of genomic analysis. Any site in a given person’s genome is the product of a mixture of common descent and random mutations, and its relationship to its neighbors can be mixed up by recombination, when pairs of chromosomes swap segments of DNA.
With enough genomic data, computers can be used to reconstruct what are called ancestral recombination graphs that try to reconstruct this history. For each base in the genome, ancestral recombination graphs estimate its history: How many generations back that particular base first appeared in the genome and when it has been involved with recombinations. Because of the randomness of some of these things and complexities like deletions, many of the individual inferences about history will be wrong. But those are likely to be the exceptions, and the average picture across the genome’s three billion bases should be informative.
The Berkeley team made a few inferences about what these ancestral recombination graphs should look like in cases where a separate lineage contributed DNA to modern humans (a process called “introgression”). One is that there should be a cluster of sequences that look consistently old, since they shouldn’t have as many of the same variants that the modern human genomes have picked up while the lineages were separate.
Normally, sequences that have been around for a while have more chances to be involved in a recombination. But these sequences were reintroduced to the human genome later in our history, so recombination should be far less frequent relative to a genome that’s been in the modern human lineage the whole time.
So any part of the genome that introgressed from a separate lineage should have two properties: Many of its bases should look “old” in the sense of how far back their common ancestry can be traced, yet they should look “young” in terms of how much recombination has taken place. So the researchers developed a software tool they call TRACE to look for these sequences.
Like a ghost
To test the tool, they had convenient examples: the Neanderthal and Denisovan sequences we’ve already identified in the human genome. If TRACE couldn’t pick those out, it wouldn’t find anything else useful. The development of ancestral recombination graphs is still a work in progress, so the researchers used two different tools to generate them and stuck with the one that produced the best results. The combination produced a very low false discovery rate (less than a quarter of a percent) while having an accuracy of over 90 percent.
In another demonstration, the researchers performed the analysis on African populations, which only received Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA when individuals from Eurasia migrated back. TRACE found only 0.1 percent of ancestry from these archaic lineages in these African genomes, consistent with its low false error rate.
Given about 500 modern human genomes, TRACE pulled out the expected Neanderthal and Denisovan segments. But it also revealed a lot of DNA from a ghost lineage. The percentage was small, at about 0.5 to 1.1 percent of current human genomes. But collectively, they covered nearly 1.5 billion bases. For context, the full human genome is three billion bases.
It was present in all modern human populations, indicating that the interbreeding occurred before the out-of-Africa expansion. But African populations carry more diverse segments and some that are distinct, a consequence of some of the diversity that was lost when only a fraction of the total population expanded into Eurasia. In fact, the researchers could identify about 100 areas of the genome that lack ghost lineage DNA entirely in non-African populations.
Based on the last common ancestor of the sequences, the researchers estimate that the lineage last shared a common ancestor with modern humans over 800,000 years ago, making it about the same age as the split with the ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans. The segments in the human genome are, on average, shorter than Neanderthal and Denisovan segments. This means they’ve been around in the modern human genome longer, which is consistent with them having arrived before modern humans left Africa.
The modern human genome has areas, called “deserts,” that lack Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA entirely. That has led to the suggestion that the human genome can’t tolerate dramatically different variants in these areas. But the ghost lineage DNA shows up in both Neanderthal and Denisovan deserts. So there seems to be something actively problematic with the DNA from those lineages in these regions.
Super Archaic
Something else suggested by other data is that the Denisovan population had also undergone a separate episode of interbreeding, this with a far older lineage. This “super archaic” lineage appears to have split from modern humans far earlier, suggesting it came from Homo erectus or another human ancestor. Because some populations—primarily in Southeast Asia and Oceania—have relatively high levels of Denisovan DNA, it’s possible that some of this superarchaic DNA found its way into our genomes.
The team went looking for it, searching for DNA that looked considerably older than the three known lineages. There’s not much—only about 0.3 percent of the Denisovan DNA in genomes from Oceania can be traced back to the superarchaic lineage. So although a tiny fraction of the genomes in some modern humans comes from this introgression, it’s definitely out there. And it apparently comes from a lineage that branched off from ours nearly 1.8 million years ago.
The work doesn’t really get into the significance of these archaic sequences. They’re less common in the neighborhood of genes, but some genes nearby are often involved in metabolism and immune function. It’s not clear whether these ancient variants are adaptive in any way, though. It’s also impossible to say much about the ghost lineage beyond the fact that our ancestors encountered it in Africa.
Still, we now have samples of a fair amount of its DNA. And there’s always a chance that ancient DNA or archeology could ultimately tell us a bit more about what these ghosts might have been.
Gulf states back plan to let Iran collect voluntary fees to use Hormuz
Gulf states have backed a proposal aimed at reducing disruption to global oil trade by allowing Iran to collect voluntary fees from ships using the Strait of Hormuz, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
The plan is part of wider efforts to restore stability after weeks of conflict between the United States and Iran, which disrupted shipping through one of the world’s most important energy routes. Around one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies previously passed through the strait.
Under the proposal, Iran would not have exclusive control over the waterway and any payments from ships would be voluntary. The arrangement would follow a model similar to the Strait of Malacca, where countries receive voluntary contributions to support navigation, environmental protection and search-and-rescue operations.
US President Donald Trump said there was a possibility of progress in talks with Tehran but warned that military strikes could resume if negotiations fail. Iran, however, has denied seeking new discussions with Washington.
The diplomatic efforts follow a period of heightened tensions, including US and Israeli strikes on Iran and retaliatory attacks in the region. The easing of hostilities has contributed to a fall in oil prices as markets responded to hopes of a more stable energy supply.
On Tuesday, Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., will face off in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The race is the next biggest test of whether progressives can win statewide, particularly in purple territory.
The Michigan race is one of the most expensive primaries of the cycle. Outside groups have spent upward of $50 million in support of Stevens or against El-Sayed. Most of that money is coming from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups — close to $30 million, which their largest investment ever in a single race, according to The AP.
“It’s just anti-democratic on its own terms,” El-Sayed, the former public health official, tells The Intercept Briefing. “I always ask people, “OK, you’re covering this as a very close race, but would it be close if they didn’t have $60 million to spend? Would it even be a close race at all?’”
This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Akela Lacy asks, can progressives win outside of blue cities? El-Sayed argues, if you focus on the issues people care about and act on them, you can: “Look, you have an option that’s not bought off by all the same corporations. And that option is desperately clear about wanting you to have healthcare, and also wanting your kid to have a good school, and also making sure that there’s not a data center that gets planted in your backyard to automate your job away.”
Lacy explores that question further with Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin state representative and founding member of the state legislature’s current Socialist Caucus, and Thom Hartmann, a progressive political commentator.
Clancy says voters he speaks to in Milwaukee “want a fighter. People want people in office who are going to fight for the middle class, fight for actual transformative change.” He adds, “The idea that in order to win in a purple district that is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, that you need when you’re a Democrat, to look as much like a Republican as possible is just not helpful.”
Polling suggests that El-Sayed has a commanding lead over Stevens in the Democratic primary. But polls for the November general election narrow sharply when El-Sayed is up against Trump-backed Republican candidate Mike Rogers; one shows Rogers beating him by 10 percentage points, which the Stevens’s campaign has leaned into.
“We’ve been in this change moment. We’re sick and tired of neoliberalism. We’re sick and tired of Reaganism. We’re sick and tired of the status quo. We’re sick and tired of a dying middle class. We have been living in this moment, in my opinion, since 2000, and I think in a big way since 2008. Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies,” says Hartmann. “I’m not sure if we’re there yet to the point where a good message like El-Sayed’s message can overcome millions of dollars from Israel and from big corporations. That’s going to be the big challenge.”
The Intercept invited Stevens on the program for an interview but as of publishing have not heard back yet.
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
What do Democratic voters really want? It’s the question that’s animated primaries so far this cycle in the ongoing battle over the future of the Democratic Party.
Progressives and democratic socialists say their recent wins from New York to Maine to Colorado, including a slew of races where insurgent candidates beat incumbents or others backed by the Democratic Party, have pushed their skeptics to move the goalposts.
The main criticism facing the left is no longer that its candidates can’t win — it’s that they can’t win in “normal” places outside of city enclaves full of young, educated, left-leaning voters.
AL: That argument has reared its head again ahead of key primaries in the Midwest set to test the power of progressives to win in statewide races pitting them against the Democratic establishment in states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, we’re talking about the question we just can’t seem to get away from: Can the left win in the Midwest?
We put that question to one of the candidates at the center of that debate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday. We also asked his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, to discuss the issues, but she has not gotten back to us.
But first, I’m joined by Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin state Rep. and founding member of the state legislature’s current Socialist Caucus and the first democratic socialist lawmaker elected in Milwaukee in more than half a century.
Ryan Clancy, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Ryan Clancy: Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this.
AL: We’re also joined by Thom Hartmann of the “Thom Hartmann Program” on radio stations across the country, and the author of “Who Killed the American Dream?”, about an 1886 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations constitutional rights. Thom, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Thom Hartmann: Thanks, Akela.
AL: So we’re talking about the question of whether the left can win in the Midwest, but I want to start with the premise of that question. Why is there this idea that the left can’t win in the Midwest? Where does that come from? Ryan, let’s start with you, and then Thom.
RC: I think it’s coming from two different places. One is just fear. In Wisconsin here, we’ve lived now for 16 years under Republican control. We haven’t had the abilities to even get bills hearings, much less pass things into law and do what Wisconsin needs us to. So I think there is some valid concern that people just don’t want another Republican.
But there really is no basis for not wanting somebody from the left unless you’re a Democrat who’s just a conservative or moderate and one of the folks who is, I think, on the way out both in Wisconsin and across the country.
AL: Thom, what’s your take?
TH: I think it’s astonishing that we’re calling this “the left.” I’m assuming that Ryan is not calling for all of the big companies in America to be owned by the government.
RC: Not until next week. [Laughter]
TH: Exactly. Right now where progressive Democrats are at is where Dwight Eisenhower was at. He ran for reelection in 1956 on the fact that he had almost doubled the number of people on Social Security. He’d expanded the benefits. He’d almost tripled the number of people eligible for union jobs and increased union membership by almost 100 percent.
My mom, in the 1950s, went to college, and she paid her way through Michigan State University and graduated — with a summer job as a lifeguard in Charlevoix, Michigan. That was the world.
Today, if anybody proposed that you should be able to go to college and work a part-time job for three months to pay for an entire year of a major Big Ten school!
Healthcare was inexpensive in Michigan where I grew up. Blue Cross Blue Shield was required by law to be a nonprofit. In fact, all of the insurance here, all of the hospitals in the state were required by law to be nonprofits. If anybody were to propose this stuff now, they’d be screaming “communism!” This is just common sense.
To the extent that America has been radicalized, I would say it’s the radical middle, not the left. The real left largely doesn’t exist in America.
RC: Yeah, you’re totally right. I think the reason for the resurgence of the left, really, is the economic conditions. It’s people having really been let down by capitalism, by so many years of moderate and Republican control.
We’ve seen the average age for somebody buying their first home go from the 20s years ago: It’s 41 now. The idea of the American Dream really is out of grasp for many people, even people who are working really hard to get there.
TH: Again, in the 1950s, my dad bought the house that I grew up in 1957. He was able to do that because he finally got a union job at a tool and die shop. With that one union paycheck, he was able to buy a house. He bought a new car every three years. He took a vacation every year. He retired and traveled the world. He put four boys through college — on a single paycheck!
If you use that as the definition of the middle class, 65 percent of Americans were there because a third of us had union jobs when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981. Today, it’s 41 percent of us who can make that claim, who can satisfy all those tick marks for the middle class — and it requires two paychecks to do that.
This is 45 years of Reaganomics that’s just essentially ripped America apart, torn apart the middle class. So you’ve got people reacting and saying, no, we want to either go back or go forward — however you want to define it or frame it — to a world where work is honored, regardless of educational attainment. If somebody works a 40-hour week, they should be able to have housing and transportation and food and a decent life.
The reactionaries, the Reaganites, the crazies on the right start screaming “leftism” and “communism.” I’ll call myself the left, but the Overton window has just been — it hasn’t moved, it’s been blown off the side of the map.
“If somebody works a 40-hour week, they should be able to have housing and transportation and food and a decent life.”
RC: Absolutely.
AL: We were talking about this today in a meeting with some of my colleagues about criticism when reporters use the word “centrist Democrat” or “moderate Democrat.”
I think that’s the perfect counterpoint to the point that you both are making, which is that not only have policies that were considered common sense or mainstream half a century ago [are now] portrayed more and more as radical. But policies that are overtly conservative among the Democratic Party are portrayed as the common sense or the centrist position, when in reality, they are increasingly reflective of a right wing — a strong right wing — within the Democratic Party. How has that happened?
That subtext feels like it’s missing from all of the conversations that we’re having around this midterm cycle. Part of this is the messaging battle, right? That Republicans are very good at fearmongering — and Democrats are good at fearmongering around the left. But what has made that shift possible and that sort of flipping of these definitions?
RC: I think it’s a lack of political bravery. In Wisconsin 16 years ago, we had a trifecta, and Democrats totally missed the moment. We didn’t codify abortion rights. We didn’t raise the minimum wage from $7.25, where it has languished for many years now. The sub-minimum wage in Wisconsin is $2.33 for service industry workers that are customarily tipped.
When Democrats have the ability to make real substantial change, and they don’t, we’re in trouble. I think we see that window moving, slipping slowly to the right and have for the last 15 years.
TH: I think it’s important to put this in a historical context. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in ’33, only about 20 percent of America was in the middle class. He set out to create, and succeeded in creating, the world’s first middle class that was more than half of the nation’s population. And the principal thing that drove that was unionization.
He legalized unions in 1935 with the Wagner Act. So from the mid-’30s all the way up until really 1992, what you saw was that the Democratic Party was largely funded by unions, and the Republican Party was largely funded by corporations and fat cats. But in 1981, Reagan went after the unions. A third of us were in unions at that time when he was elected, and he starts with PATCO [the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization], and he just deconstructed the unions.
He puts an anti-union lawyer in charge of the Labor Department, et cetera. So by ’92, right when Clinton wants to run for president, the unions are down to like 10 percent of the American workforce, maybe 9 percent of the American workforce. They got no money.
So Clinton’s looking around going, “I can’t get enough money to run for president. What do I do?” And the solution that these guys came up with — and it was a reasonable one at the time in 1992 — was to say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to take corporate money, but let’s take it from the good corporations. Let’s take it from health insurance companies and banks and pharmaceutical companies, not those awful oil companies or the chemical companies or the mining operations.”
So we got all this speechification from Clinton about the new jobs and everything else. But the bottom line was that was the point at which the Democratic Party essentially sold out to neoliberalism and this “moderate position.” In fact, Clinton called it the Third Way, The Third Way Democrats, and the new Democrats. The same thing was going on in the U.K. It wasn’t really until the Obama campaign in 2008 that we discovered that the internet was capable of raising money for a presidential campaign, enough to get somebody into the White House. But the Democrats had not, or at least about half of the Democrats right now, have still not sworn off that money that Clinton lurched at.
So you’ve got about half the Democratic Party that is beholden to their donors. That’s why you’re not seeing them take advantage of these opportunities like Ryan was talking about. Then you got another half of the Democratic Party, the Progressive Caucus in the House, about 100 members, who are not taking corporate money and are explicitly saying, “No, let’s work toward what people want.”
That schism — that split — in the Democratic Party, it’s way behind the American people. The Democratic base is 80, 90 percent with the progressives. The American public is 60, 70 percent with the progressives. But the institutional Democratic Party and the old line, or these on-the-take Democrats, I call them the Jared Goldens and Josh Gottheimers of the world — they’re going to fight like hell to hang on to that money and all those perks that go with it. That’s the real tragedy of this moment because it just cripples our ability to challenge the genuine fascists who are running our government right now and trying to take our country apart.
AL: Ryan, we’re two weeks out from a very big primary in Wisconsin. What are you hearing from your constituents on the issues that resonate with them from a democratic socialist perspective? Do voters in Midwestern states actually prefer more conservative Democrats?
RC: They absolutely do not want conservative Democrats. The playbook that I think a lot of Democrats are working from is old. I don’t think that it was really the case even 10 or 20 years ago. But the idea that in order to win in a purple district that is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, that you need, when you’re a Democrat, to look as much like a Republican as possible is just not helpful.
It’s not what people want on the doors. People want a fighter. People want people in office who are going to fight for the middle class, fight for actual, transformative change. That’s the reason that we saw some voters move from a Bernie Sanders to a Donald Trump. It wasn’t necessarily the specific policies; it was the idea that they wanted somebody who would mess with the system.
“People want a fighter.”
I knock on Republican and Independent and socialist, libertarian doors all over the place. And there’s a critical mass of folks right now who still want that change, but they realize that it’s not going to come. The sort of change they want is not going to come in the form of a Donald Trump or in a Tom Tiffany, who is the likely Republican nominee for governor.
But they do want Democrats who are going to fight for them in ways that we’ve really missed the moment on in over the last decade and a half.
AL: The next biggest test on these questions, particularly whether progressive wins that we saw earlier this cycle will carry over into statewide races, is the upcoming Michigan Democratic Senate primary.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens are facing off on Tuesday. El-Sayed, a former public health official, has the backing of some of the most well-known progressives in Congress, from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Stevens, on the other hand, is backed by members of the Democratic establishment, like Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Sen. Chuck Schumer said she had the best shot of winning, though he didn’t officially endorse her.
This is one of the most expensive primaries of the cycle. Outside groups have spent upwards of $50 million in support of Stevens or against El-Sayed — most of that money coming from one single group, the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent a record amount, more than $25 million, on the race.
Stevens and El-Sayed debated on Monday. Let’s hear from both their opening statements.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: My friend is going to frame this race about me and her. It’s not about that. It’s about you. It’s about what you deserve. It’s about you deserving a politics that’s not bought off by the same corporations picking your pocket at every single turn.
I’m looking forward to the conversation about how we get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, and pass Medicare for All.
Rep. Haley Stevens: Look, Michigan deserves a senator who can win and who can deliver. I’m the only one on this stage who has flipped a Republican seat, and I was named Michigan’s most effective Democratic lawmaker in Congress because my only focus is you. Abdul is running for celebrity. Republicans are propping up his campaign.
RC: You could not have candidates that are more starkly contrasted with each other.
You have somebody who’s backed by AIPAC. In that same interview, actually, she was asked point-blank if she took money from their power company [two major Michigan utility companies]. And she said no, that she had not, and absolutely did.
RC: She is backed by all of the institutions that average people across that state, and across the U.S., absolutely revile. AIPAC is wildly unpopular now — so are power companies, for that matter.
You have a candidate who is very clearly beholden to his community, somebody who came up as a doctor in public health; and then you have somebody who claims to be successful. Her version of success is collaborating with Republicans to pass bad policy. That is not the definition of “effective” that most voters in the United States right now want. They want people who will be fighting for something better, not rolling over and collaborating with the people that have made it worse.
“Her version of success is collaborating with Republicans to pass bad policy. That is not the definition of ‘effective’ that most voters in the United States right now want.”
AL: Thom, what are the biggest takeaways from this race so far, and who do you think is going to win?
TH: It’s a classic example of the kind of Hillary–Bernie divide brought into this era. In that 2016 election, I was living on a boat in Washington, D.C., in the marina there. We were doing our show from D.C.
Maybe a third of the people who lived in that marina were either active-duty or retired Coast Guard or Navy, living in boats. Men mostly, and almost all every single one of them that I can recall called himself Republican. During that primary, most of them were actually planning on voting for Bernie, these Republicans, because they thought that he was going to bring genuine change.
But when the day finally came, and afterwards, I talked to many of them, a lot of them ended up voting for Trump because they thought that he would actually bring change.
“Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies.”
We’ve been in this change moment. We’re sick and tired of neoliberalism. We’re sick and tired of Reaganism. We’re sick and tired of the status quo. We’re sick and tired of a dying middle class. We have been living in this moment, in my opinion, since 2000, and I think in a big way since 2008. Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies.
I’m not sure if we’re there yet to the point where a good message like El-Sayed’s message can overcome millions of dollars from Israel and from big corporations. That’s going to be the big challenge. We’re seeing this now. In the 2024 election, 20 percent of all the spending in that election came from a handful of billionaire families, all for Republicans.
So it’s going to be really interesting, and it’s going to be really instructive, I think, next Tuesday to see how this shakes out. But it’s really a challenge of big money.
“It’s really a challenge of big money.”
AL: The irony being that Haley Stevens, in the last couple of debates in the final weeks of the race, has tried to make that argument against Abdul El-Sayed, saying he’s got all this personal wealth: “I’m the only non-millionaire in this race.” Meanwhile, she has the vast majority of outside spending on her side; it’s not even a comparison.
El-Sayed has been leading Stevens in primary polls, but her campaign has been touting other polling that shows her leading Republican Trump-backed candidate Mike Rogers in November, and El-Sayed losing to him.
This is another classic case of voters potentially having a different preference for the direction of the Democratic Party and the party pushing back against that with the electability argument. But if the less popular Democrat actually wins — either in the primary or in the general — where does that leave the party in the long term? Does that not aggravate voter frustration even more and set up a situation where the GOP gets the upper hand anyway?
TH: It does, and it always does. I would argue that when you look at these match-ups, with the general population voting and El-Sayed starts dropping — what you’re seeing there is racism and anti-Muslim bigotry probably more than anything else. And apparently it’s a bigger force, at least in this election, than misogyny. In addition to all the money that’s been spent.
AL: I will say my colleague Jonah Valdez did a great piece on Islamophobia in this race that I encourage all of you to read at The Intercept. This is for our listeners.
Ryan, did you want to add anything on that?
RC: I do think that the polls, both in Michigan and in here and other places, they are not measuring the enthusiasm gap as they should. I think they are underrepresenting these dynamic leftist candidates. Because when somebody is asked, they can only say yes so forcefully, right? A yes is a yes. But voters and people who are really engaged with these campaigns, when you knock on their doorstep and you ask them about somebody and they light up — these are the folks who are going to drag their friends to the polls, both for primaries and again in November, in a way that somebody grudgingly backing a centrist candidate just isn’t.
So I think he’s going to do fine.
AL: The counterpoint to the argument that progressives or a leftist archetype doesn’t work outside of blue cities is that there is an archetype that works. And it’s dictated largely by the Democratic Party and its campaign committees. But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other groups aligned with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party have had a very rough cycle.
They’ve lost races in Arizona, California, and Colorado, while other incumbents lost in New York and Texas. The DCCC recently added a candidate that they endorsed against in Arizona to their coveted Red to Blue list, which typically helps boost candidates with fundraising. That addition to the list comes along with another candidate, Sam Forstag, who’s running for a competitive congressional seat in Montana against Republican Aaron Flint.
Forstag is a firefighter and a union organizer who won the endorsement of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last month, and she spoke at a rally for him in Montana in May. This is a rare case of overlap between the DSA and the establishment wing. Is that surprising to you? Is this a model that we could potentially see in other races?
RC: It has to be, otherwise it is the death of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party as a brand is not polling well at all. If I was the Democratic machine, if my goal was to make sure that the Democratic Party was strong and vibrant and thriving, I would be encouraging these awesome candidates on the left into my party.
But increasingly we are hearing Democrats talk about a big tent, but they only mean big to the right. For some reason, the tent flap is just not big enough to cover those on the left in a lot of cases. But ultimately that unity and saying, “Oh, the candidates on the left within our own party are not a threat to us, they are the future, they are how we get through this,” really is inevitable. And they have to do this or fall out of power even more than they have.
TH: Yeah, they’re 20 years behind the electorate right now.
AL: I want to turn now to the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary on August 11. Francesca Hong, democratic socialist candidate, has been leading in recent polling, while other Democratic candidates in the race like Mandela Barnes and David Crowley, who dropped out of the race and quickly reentered after the establishment pick Sara Rodriguez dropped out over a campaign finance scandal, have been polling below Hong.
What do you think it would take for a more progressive candidate to win in Wisconsin or throughout the Midwest? We’ll start with Ryan, and then I’ll come to you, Thom.
RC: Folks on doors are really concerned about everyday things. They’re concerned about affordability. They’re concerned that they cannot afford healthcare. They’re concerned that they can’t afford rent and that they’ll never be able to afford a home because everything’s getting more expensive.
“I’ve never seen people more concerned for themselves and their families.”
But they also have these existential concerns. I’ve never seen people more concerned for themselves and their families. I talked to a woman on doors a couple weeks ago who broke down crying at the door because rather than me showing up and saying, “Here’s who I am and, will you vote for me?” My question was, “How are you? What are you concerned about?” And she started crying and talked about how she was concerned about a family member being abducted by ICE and the ever-present threat of that. So we need people who are going to meet the moment, who are going to address those very real concerns from affordability to concern for community in a way that we haven’t yet but that we need to.
TH: I think that it’s really important that people who are concerned about this political future and where things are going and whatnot get inside the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, it’s a billion-dollar corporation. It’s just sitting there, saying, anybody can come in and volunteer and participate.
I’ve had a bunch of people call into my program over the years since I’ve been ranting about this for a decade, who have gotten inside their local Democratic parties. And once you become a precinct committee person, you’re the person or the people who write the platform for the party. You’re the ones who determine who the primary candidates are going to be. You’re the first ones that when your congressperson or your senator comes into your state to talk to the people, you’re the first one they talk to. You have incredible power and influence. A lot of people are just sitting around complaining rather than doing something like this.
Progressives, social democrats, right across the board, I think that we need to be taking over the Democratic Party. We need to learn from the way that the GOP got flipped by the right a decade and a half ago.
AL: Ryan and Thom, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.
I will just mention for our listeners: Thom’s new book gets at one of the root causes of many of the issues that we’re talking about, giving corporations the same rights as people. Thank you both again for the time. This was a great conversation.
TH: Thank you.
RC: Thank you so much for having us.
[Break]
AL: The race on everyone’s minds is happening on Tuesday in Michigan, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is running against Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
El-Sayed joins me now. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Abdul El-Sayed: Akela, it’s a privilege to be with you. You gotta call me Abdul.
AL: I will. Thank you. We also reached out to Stevens’s campaign to join us on the podcast and did not hear back.
Abdul, let’s just jump in. I’ve been listening to a lot of your interviews, and one thing that has stood out to me is that you’re walking this delicate line between providing what you say is an alternative for voters who’ve been disenchanted with both parties, while also trying to demonstrate your capacity to beat a Republican in November.
How do you square those two objectives between attracting support in a state that Trump won — including potentially from people who might have supported him — and also making this case that you can and will beat Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate Trump endorsed in the race and was campaigning with earlier this week.
AES: I don’t think about it as much as walking a line as I do about building something that is magnetic for everyone. I think walking a line implies a frame of this, like, left–right divide. “You don’t want to go too far left, otherwise you might lose the people who are on your right!” And I just don’t think that’s the reality for most people.
Most people don’t walk around asking, “Where do I sit on the left–right spectrum?” Most people are walking around asking, “What the hell’s going to happen if I get sick? What’s going to happen if I lose my home or I lose my job? Or AI, literally, they automate out the possibility of my being able to earn the money I need to provide for my family? Also, why does my kids’ school look like it did 50 years ago?”
I think those are the things that unite most Michiganders. You can go anywhere in the state, and you hear the same concerns. I’m looking to build a movement that pushes back on the bipartisan consensus that we ought to build a politics that is paid for by corporations, Big Tech, Big Pharma, DTE [Energy], Blue Cross — and that gives you milquetoast answers to most problems.
I’m looking to build a politics that takes the questions that we’re asking head on and answer them by telling folks that we really can get past the corporate-bought version of politics that’s too often forced into our eyeballs in tens of millions of dollars of spending on ads, and to a question of, let’s solve these things because we’re not bought off by the people who caused the problem in the first place.
AL: Touching on, this flipping the left–right divide framing on its head: Have you spoken with voters who’ve supported Trump? Are you courting those voters?
AES: They come to my events. That’s the thing is, that people think you gotta kinda go to different places to court different voters.
The nature of this world — you and I are talking by virtue of a set of microphones and cameras. This is going to go out into the ether, and it’s probably going to be clipped, and then people are going to hear these clips. What that means is that it’s a lot easier for folks to hear something, and then if that sounds kinda right, they’ll come and find you. And then they’ll come to your events.
I can’t tell you how many people have come to events of mine saying, “I voted for Donald Trump three times, and I’m voting for you.” I give them a kinda quizzical look. I’m like, “Me? Me?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” I ask why, and it’s because, “Hey, I really think you want me to have healthcare.” I’m like, “I really want you to have healthcare.” They’re like “I think you really are America first, like you want to keep my tax dollars here.” I was like, “I really want to keep your tax dollars here.” And they’ll say, “Look, I voted for Donald Trump not because I agree with him on everything, but he didn’t look like politics as usual.” And they’re right. He didn’t look like politics as usual. He was like the most heinous version of the worst things about politics as usual.
I’m out here trying to say, “Look, you have an option that’s not bought off by all the same corporations. And that option is desperately clear about wanting you to have healthcare, and also wanting your kid to have a good school, and also making sure that there’s not a data center that gets planted in your backyard to automate your job away.”
Imagine what that could look like. So what happens if, instead of Donald Trump, the person pushing back on politics as usual on both sides of the aisle is a doctor who rebuilt health departments to eliminate medical debt, provide Narcan, and put glasses on kids?
“I don’t do this because I care about the future of the Democratic Party. I care about the future of Michiganders.”
AL: You’ve said Trump is a symptom of the bigger problems in our political system, not the problem itself. A core part of your campaign is highlighting what you’ve described as the corruption of politics on both sides of the aisle by corporate and special interest money, as you’ve mentioned already, as we’re talking. Democrats just launched a new campaign hitting Trump’s corruption ahead of November, tying it to rising costs for Americans. And they’re preparing to make this the centerpiece of their agenda should they take control in Congress after the midterms.
Is that an effective strategy? What do you make of that effort? Is that an approach you share, or would you do anything differently?
AES: Yeah, I think we should take on his corruption. His corruption’s insane. It’s like he’s made $2 billion off of the White House. He just took out the East Wing because he wanted to, and is now fixated on drapes despite the fact that he took us into a war he doesn’t seem to know how to take us out of.
I think the issue here is corruption, but I also think that in order to talk about corruption, it really helps to be somebody who’s not played that game at all and will never play that game. We need more Democrats who make sure that we are not playing on that side so that the contrast is clear.
Look, I don’t do this because I care about the future of the Democratic Party. I care about the future of Michiganders. But if an election is an exercise in contrasts, and your argument is that they’re corrupt, it helps to make sure that you have not taken a dime of that corruption money.
AL: Democrats can’t make that argument in your race, right? One of the most expensive primaries in this cycle due almost wholly to the spending of one super PAC, United Democracy Project, AIPAC super PAC. But why does —
AES: Akela, if I can push back on that. Actually, UDP has only spent half the amount of money: $61 million, they’ve spent $31 million of it. So the other money is, it’s buried in these shell 501(c)(4)s.
Part of it is probably DMFI money, part of it’s also probably other AIPAC money, but a lot of it is also just your usual standard issue, Big Pharma, Big Tech, big everyone else. DTE, our local utility who’s one of the worst corporate actors in Michigan. So it’s all bundled in one and the same. Obviously, UDP is just insane amounts of money. They set a record against me in terms of the amount of money that they’ve spent.
But it is everyone, and part of it is also the point that it’s just anti-democratic on its own terms. I always ask people, “OK, you’re covering this as a very close race, but would it be close if they didn’t have $60 million to spend? Would it even be a close race at all?”
Then if it’s their corruption money against a campaign of grassroots organizers knocking nearly 10,000 doors a day, what kind of politics do we actually want? One where corporations and people who want to send your money abroad get to dump $60 million into a race? Or one where young organizers are coming together to build a movement, to knock doors, to have conversations about who we are and who we want to be?
It’s anti-democratic on its own terms. And Democrats, they’re all so worried about what this all means. I’m like, “It means that we still have an opportunity to inspire people, y’all. That’s what it means, and we can win if we do it.”
AL: One of the questions that we’ve been talking about a lot on this podcast is, why are Democrats so afraid of the message that you’re sending in terms of getting big money out of politics? Could the Democratic Party exist in its current form if they didn’t rely on these kinds of outside groups spending to prop up their preferred candidates, particularly in primaries?
“Democrats, they’re all so worried about what this all means. I’m like, “It means that we still have an opportunity to inspire people, y’all.’”
AES: Look, if you’re somebody like Chuck Schumer and your experience of politics is to be able to dictate where a whole bunch of money from big corporations and their lobbyists goes, so that you can handpick your senatorial colleagues who will do exactly what you want them to do, and then you get invited to their fancy cocktail parties and have a nice life — if that’s your vision of politics, then, yeah, you’re probably scared of somebody like me. Because, A, I’m not coming to your cocktail party. B, I’m not somebody who’s going to do what you tell me. And C, I don’t need you or your money. So I think that’s why they’re all so afraid. Now, of course, they hide behind the idea of, “Well, can somebody with his politics win in Michigan?”
If you were out there solving actual problems for people — if groceries weren’t inflating like a balloon, if people could afford their gas because you actually were an opposition party that could stand up to this absurd war, if people had healthcare and didn’t have to worry about it because you weren’t so bought off by Big Pharma and health insurance corporations, I think we would have so much better an opportunity to both win races and actually govern.
The problem, though, is that there’s a cynicism to this kind of politics. You retain a certain level of power, but the other side of it is you can’t actually solve the problems because, of course, that means opposing the very corporations who create the problems in the first place.
AL: Digging a little bit more into specific policy issues. You’ve said AI has taken over climate change as the biggest risk, though the two are inextricable. How has AI and the issue of data centers come up in your conversations with voters?
AES: Yeah, I don’t want to say biggest risk, just most urgent — because it’s imminent, right? And climate change feels imminent now that we’re all worried about trying to dodge air coming from wildfires in Canada. It looks like Europe is burning. So yes, I don’t want to undercut —
AL: They’re linked. They’re two sides of the same issue.
AES: They’re linked. It’s just this one is exceedingly urgent. I want all of us to step back and just remember that moment where ChatGPT came out. It was the end of 2022. It is now the middle of 2026, and I want you to think about just how much money is being flowed into the economy to enable research that’s foundationally unregulated, that could cause danger in so many different ways.
The first is, it can disrupt the social contract as we know it to the ability to sell your human capital on a market for money, when intelligence is now automated — that part.
Then there’s the question of data centers. This comes up all the time, and it comes up usually from communities where data centers are trying to be placed. Or it comes up from young people who are actually the most avid users of AI and also have this pit in their stomach about the existential risk of not having a job in the future.
I gotta be honest with you, the worry that I have is that you’ve got probably three nine-figure super PACs that are out there in the world right now. Two of them are AI PACs; the third one is AIPAC. They are trying to throw their body weight around in a way that could render AI ungovernable.
The reason I say this, and I started with this question of do you remember where you were, less than four years ago, is that it’s only been three and a half years. So what happens in the next three and a half? If our Congress is not capable of setting the regulatory framework now, we might reach escape velocity. I don’t love that future when a few billionaires get to decide what happens with the most powerful technology that’s ever existed.
“If our Congress is not capable of setting the regulatory [AI] framework now, we might reach escape velocity.”
AL: Abdul, you’ve criticized what you say has been a conversation about climate change that’s been held in esoteric terms. This is a criticism that Democrats have faced on other issues beyond climate too — criminal justice reform, racial inequality, et cetera, talking about issues in a way that can feel inaccessible or stuck in the ivory tower. Are there other policy issues where you see Democrats making that same mistake?
AES: I think a lot of them. I think AI is one of them. I think we need to be talking about the closest risk that people perceive, rather than the long-range risk that people don’t. It’s particularly hard when the causes of the problem feel less connected to the outcome of the problem.
Then when we don’t take seriously a lot of the pushback in the short run when it comes to the climate crisis, we all know that the pathway to solving it needs to be to get to 100 percent renewable energy. But so often we’ve situated it in the well-being of polar bears or the melting of ice caps, and I don’t know, I’ve never seen an ice cap. In fact, if I ever see an ice cap, I live in Michigan, I’m trying to get it off of something. I’ve never met a polar bear, and if I did, I would run like hell.
It’s a lot easier to just talk about the smokestacks that are pushing putrid chemicals into the lungs of our kids. It’s a lot easier to talk about how we could create an insane number of really high-quality jobs and reduce the price of your electricity in the process by investing in a renewable energy future.
But because we’re so busy talking about these other things, we’ve allowed those who want to continue to run interference for the worst actors — Chevrons and Exxons of the world — to win the argument about jobs and the price of electricity. They’ve used that to drive us backwards, even though our argument is the better one.
It’s because we’re out here having this academic conversation about 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius, rather than have a conversation about, “Hey, we can create a whole lot of jobs that they want to end. We can bring down the price of your electricity, which they want to jack up, and we can do it without burning stuff into the lungs of your kids, which they seem dead-set on doing.”
We win that argument every single day, but, like, enough with polar bears.
AL: Talking about this messaging question, talk about Democrats messaging on criminal justice reform. You’ve been criticized over talking about defunding the police in 2020. You’ve addressed this, and this issue has been litigated over and over in many races, not just yours.
But distinguishing the fact that calls to defund police meant in practice funding social services and addressing the root causes of crime. You’ve deleted some of those posts and said you didn’t want them taken out of context. I’m not asking you about this to relitigate it because I think it misses the broader point and can be an exercise in beating a dead horse or confirming priors rather than clarifying something about your policy position.
But I do want to ask you about this line of attack from a strategy standpoint because you’ve talked about Democrats always being on the defensive. I think we really saw that in the aftermath of calls to defund the police in 2020. Democrats didn’t just shy away from that slogan — they shied away from doing anything meaningful to address concerns around policing.
We’ve seen this narrative coming out of midterms that this cycle, candidates who backed away from campaigning on addressing police abuse are winning. What happened there?
AES: I’ve spent the last several years leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services. Among the roles that I performed in that job was overseeing health in the jail, and that meant overseeing a privatized contract — which taught me that you shouldn’t be privatizing anything having to do with incarceration. Because at the end of the day, who wins? It’s some private contractor. Who loses? It’s the whole system. Everybody whose job is to be taken care of, everybody who works in the system — all of those folks lose.
I also got to work alongside law enforcement. At the end of the day, all of us want to get home safely. That’s the goal here. And often, our answer to that has been a person with a gun for every problem. Turns out that there’s a lot of ways to make sure everybody gets to get home safely that is not that.
So the question of what we want is about investing in the kinds of intervention programs that can prevent a beef from turning into a full-on gun crime. The kinds of things we want are behavioral health responders who can answer a call when somebody’s in a mental health crisis. We want the mental health infrastructure that we have not funded and need to have in local communities.
And we want law enforcement, in the circumstances where the answer to a call needs to be a person with a gun, we want that person with a gun to come from the local community. So that instead of thinking of themselves as policing against that community, they’re policing with the community because those folks are their neighbors.
That means you gotta invest in recruitment, retention, retirement, so people can see themselves having a good, long-range career. If you’re underfunding the folks that you ask to show up with a gun — ask yourself whether or not you’re getting the best-equipped, most empathic folks that have the gun.
“No slogan really captures the complexity and the nuance of what we really want.”
It’s about what we want. And I think the hard part with sloganeering — which is the way we did all things in the early 2020s — is that no slogan really captures the complexity and the nuance of what we really want. But all of us are on the same idea: Everybody should get home safely. Whether you’re somebody who’s being policed against or you’re law enforcement doing the policing, everybody should get home safely.
If we keep that in our minds, I think you can architect a set of solutions that get us past the lack of nuance of a slogan and into the kind of future where people are protected, their bodily autonomy is protected, and that you are answering the call with the right kind of resource to actually make sure that you get to that goal where everybody gets home safely in the end.
AL: There’s been an effort to paint you as a socialist, right? Particularly among Republicans, but also among some centrist Democrats, though you’re not a democratic socialist. You’re not affiliated with DSA. And you’ve said you’re a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.
But why do you think it’s important to tell people that you’re not a socialist, despite having endorsements from the two biggest Democratic socialists in the country? If your policies are similar, why is that a meaningful distinction?
AES: Honestly, I’m just not out there really talking about it. I get asked about it all the time. But it’s not something I’m out there talking about. I’m trained as a scientist, and anybody who knows me knows that I demand data all the time. Make a claim, and then show me why your claim is correct.
Right now, I don’t really ascribe to any one ideology. I want solutions to problems. I know what our goal is. We want a America where everybody can get the healthcare they need, when they need it, without going into bankruptcy or worrying about their financial future.
We want to be able to breathe clean air, drink clean water. We all want to get home safely. We want an economy where everybody is dignified, they have the wages they need to be able to live their life, and nobody is oppressed upon by a few people who can extract from them. Those are all goals that we have.
“I’m trying to solve problems in the actual world.”
So I’m just trying to identify solutions around those problems, which is how I come to my policy positions. I just don’t come at it from an ideological bent, which apparently is what folks want me to do, but I just don’t. It’s just not how I operate in the world.
You get arguments from every side: “Why won’t you say this? Why won’t you—?” I’m like, because, I read a lot, unfortunately. For better or worse, I try to read about the things I talk about. The reality of it is that you might agree about a solution set to a particular problem, but when you ascribe to an ideology, what you’re also ascribing to is the extrema of both ideologies, right?
So I’m not a corporatist. I don’t want corporate capitalism; I want regulated capitalism. I’m also not a socialist because I don’t agree on the extreme on that part, either. I’m trying to solve problems in the actual world. That’s what I’m actually trying to do.
When I think about that, I want everybody to bring data — and maybe it’s just because of my training as a scientist, maybe it’s because of my training as a doctor. But at the end of the day, we’re like, all right, what actually works here? Show me what works, and we’ll do the thing that works. If we can do the thing that works, and we can get all the problems out of the way of the thing that works, then more people have the things that they need, and I’ve done my job.
AL: Turning back to money in this race, this is a big topic of discussion. As we’ve already mentioned, this is one of the most expensive primaries of this cycle. AIPAC has made its biggest investment ever spending against you.
But your opponent has been focused on your tax returns and claimed that the $2.1 million in wealth that you disclosed, including a home in Dubai and earnings from consulting and capital gains and other incomes, undermines your working-class message.
This came up in your debate with Stevens on Monday.
Rep. Haley Stevens: And you have not released your full tax returns. $300,000 in other income, while you sat in the podcast chair and you hawked junk healthcare cures that RFK Jr. would thumbs up. You talk about getting money out of politics and putting money in people’s pockets, but still no one knows who’s putting the money in your pocket.
AL: But you released your tax returns after requesting an extension that would have released them after the primary. Why did you request that extension originally?
AES: You know that property that you mentioned? It’s not mine. It is in the name of my wife, shared with all of her siblings and her parents. They inherited property, and then they sold it, and they purchased a different property. And if you’ve ever transacted with the real estate system or any system in India, it’s not the fastest system. And I would have loved to put everything out immediately. The hard part is that all of the powers that be to get us the forms to do all of those things just did not comply.
In the end, I love my wife, and I’m so grateful for her contribution in this race, and she happens to have property in different places, and that transaction happens to have happened this year, and it takes time to get those numbers.
AL: I know you’ve said you’re focused on Michigan, but you’ve also articulated, at least in private, a vision beyond this cycle for progressives in the left more broadly, talking about how progressives can win other races, primary someone like Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and even put forth a presidential candidate ahead of 2028.
That approach has struck fear in the heart of the Democratic Party apparatus, which has been part of the efforts we discussed to drive fear around this idea that you’re another piece of this insurgent wave that’s threatening their existence, which in many ways you are.
But it sounds like you’re saying that in some ways, your campaign is part of this insurgent wave, but in other ways, it’s not. Is that right?
AES: My job is to serve Michiganders. Everything I’m doing is about trying to make sure that they can afford their groceries, that they know that they have stable housing, that they can get healthcare when they need it, and that their money is kept here.
Now, I’m going to the U.S. Senate because I want the U.S. Senate to vote for legislation to do those things. So part of my job is to make sure that we’ve got a U.S. Senate that can actually do that work. And my hope is that the conversations I can share with the 99 other senators, the persuasion that we can all do for the world that we want to build is enough. But also, let’s be clear, I want to serve Michiganders, and part of doing that is making sure that the U.S. Senate serves their interests.
I think that a lot of people are paying attention to this race because Michigan’s a microcosm of this country. It’s the most important state in the entire country — I’ve always known that — but I think people are starting to figure out why. And that’s because the things that Michiganders need and deserve, frankly, are the things that people across this country need and deserve.
AL: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, thank you so much. We’re going to leave it there.
AES: Thank you.
AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278.
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Two men who were detained and questioned early in the desperate search for Nancy Guthrie, the missing mother of Today show anchor Savannah Guthrie, are preparing to file a $3.25 million wrongful arrest lawsuit against the Pima County sheriff.
The move comes as the investigation into Nancy’s disappearance reaches the six-month mark with no arrests, no confirmed suspects and no sign of the 84-year-old woman since she vanished from her Tucson, Arizona, home.
Nancy was last seen safe on February 1. Authorities, including the FBI, believe she was kidnapped. Investigators have followed multiple leads and reportedly found blood spatters inside her home, but the case remains painfully unresolved.
On Thursday, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department marked the grim milestone in a social media post, saying the investigation “remains active and ongoing” and again asking the public to come forward with credible information.
At the same time, authorities released two disturbing ransom-style notes that had been sent to news outlets shortly after Nancy disappeared. The FBI’s Phoenix field office and the sheriff’s department said they were making the full messages public in hopes of generating new tips about Nancy’s whereabouts and the person or people responsible.
The first note was addressed to Savannah and claimed Nancy was alive.
The writer said Nancy was “safe but scared” and demanded $4 million in bitcoin for her release. The note warned that she would only be held for a maximum of seven days and threatened that she would be killed if payment was not received.
“Your mother is aware of this and her life is in your hands,” the message said, according to authorities.
The second note, addressed to the “Guthrie Family,” claimed Nancy had died shortly after being taken.
“We did not fully grasp the seriousness of her physical condition,” the note read. “We never intended to hurt her, that was not our intention. She perished shortly after she was taken. We believe it was heart related. She is buried in nature now.”
The release of the notes came just days after Savannah posted an emotional video to Instagram, saying her family had “done our part” but remained trapped in the agony of not knowing what happened to their beloved matriarch.
The 54-year-old NBC anchor called the case “a nightmare that will not end.”
Now, a separate legal fight is brewing over how the early days of the investigation were handled.
According to NBC News and Tucson affiliate KVOA, Carlos Palazuelos and Daniel Maddox have issued a notice of claim against Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and a detective involved in the case. A notice of claim is typically the first step before filing a lawsuit.
The claim alleges wrongful arrest, reputational damage and property damage.
Palazuelos was detained on February 10, questioned and later released without charge. He is now seeking $2.5 million, claiming he is innocent and that his home was “ransacked” during the investigation. The notice says the ordeal caused him physical, emotional and reputational harm.
Maddox was reportedly placed in handcuffs outside a home belonging to his mother, Josefina Maddox, while investigators searched the property. He was also released without charge after several hours of questioning. Maddox is seeking $500,000, while his mother is seeking $250,000 for alleged property damage.
The legal notice claims that Sheriff Nanos posted on social media that a person had been arrested and was being questioned in connection with Nancy’s disappearance. The men argue that the post, combined with statements from the sheriff’s office, made Palazuelos appear to be a suspect in the eyes of the public.
Nanos had already faced scrutiny earlier in the investigation over his handling of the high-profile case.
The sheriff became embroiled in a public dispute with the FBI after claims surfaced that his office had withheld critical evidence from federal investigators. Nanos strongly denied those allegations.
He also survived an effort in May to remove him from the case.
This week, Nanos again pushed back on criticism from FBI Director Kash Patel, who had claimed in June that agents “showed up immediately” to help but “were not let in for four days.”
Appearing on the Sharpe Exchange podcast, Nanos said Patel was “misinformed” and said the two had never spoken face-to-face.
“When information is put out there that’s not accurate, it hurts the case,” Nanos said.
The Guthrie family is offering a $1 million reward for information that leads to Nancy being found. The FBI has added a separate $100,000 reward for conclusive information.
Federal authorities have said they are searching for a man believed to be approximately 5-foot-9 to 5-foot-10 with an average build.
For now, Nancy’s family is still waiting for answers — and the investigation that began as a terrifying disappearance has now widened into a battle over alleged wrongful detentions, damaged reputations and the actions of law enforcement in one of Arizona’s most closely watched missing-person cases.
How Iran Brought Israel Closer to Middle East Nations
Israel-Lebanon negotiations, a possible Syrian security arrangement, renewed Bahrain-Israel engagement and US pressure on Saudi Arabia point to diplomatic movement—but analysts disagree sharply over whether it can produce durable agreement
A series of diplomatic moves across the Middle East is raising the prospect of new regional arrangements even as the continuing confrontation between Washington and Tehran places governments under mounting military, economic and political pressure.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Washington on Tuesday, July 28, for their first face-to-face talks since the United States and Israel began their current war with Iran. Details of the specific topics under discussion were not released.
The meeting came days before Israeli and Lebanese representatives were scheduled to return to Rome. An Israeli official confirmed that the next round would begin on August 4, following previous US-mediated discussions over border arrangements, Israeli withdrawals and proposed “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon.
The diplomatic activity extends beyond Lebanon. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said in an interview broadcast on July 26 that Damascus was working with several countries to reach a security agreement with Israel. According to al-Sharaa, a successful arrangement could create a path toward comprehensive peace without requiring Syria to relinquish its claim to the Golan Heights.
On the same day, Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke by telephone with Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. The two discussed bilateral relations, the Abraham Accords and recent regional developments. The call, initiated and publicized by Bahrain according to an Israeli report, was characterized by experts interviewed for this article as apparently the leaders’ first publicly disclosed call since the October 7 attacks.
These moves have coincided with new uncertainty surrounding Saudi Arabia. Washington and Riyadh signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement on July 22, but Trump subsequently said he would not allow it to proceed unless Saudi Arabia normalized relations with Israel and joined the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia has maintained that formal normalization requires a credible path toward Palestinian statehood.
Taken together, the developments suggest that diplomacy is continuing alongside—not subsequent to—the region’s widening confrontation. Yet four regional specialists offered markedly different assessments of whether the current movement represents a genuine opening, a limited security adjustment or a temporary diplomatic response to an unresolved war.
Syria’s Security Overture
Dr. Nir Boms, a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, argued that Israel and Syria have overlapping long-term interests—including security arrangements and the approach to Hezbollah—despite the continuing territorial dispute and uncertainty surrounding al-Sharaa’s political trajectory. “I think there is pragmatism involved in the Syrian policy. And I think al-Sharaa understands that at this point, there is a real challenge coming from Israel in the south,” he told The Media Line.
Boms said the two sides share an interest in limiting radical armed actors in southern Syria and restricting weapons-smuggling networks connected to Hezbollah. “In the context of the long-term strategic interests, I think Israel and Syria share the aspiration that we’re going to limit the presence of radical forces in the Syrian south and in Syria overall,” he said. “He needs to help stop smuggling lines that also influence the dynamics with Hezbollah. And some of that is happening in the Triangle area and in Israel-Lebanon-Syria proximity.”
A security arrangement, Boms argued, could help al-Sharaa consolidate authority over Syrian territory. “… That’s one thing that can potentially help him get to that agenda,” he said.
Joshua Landis, professor in Middle East Studies and co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, offered a more skeptical assessment.
“Al-Sharaa has got a big problem on his hands because Israel has occupied this additional land beyond the Golan Heights. And he needs to get Israel out of that land if he is going to have a peace agreement,” Landis told The Media Line.
While al-Sharaa could conceivably accept continued Israeli control over the Golan Heights as part of an agreement, Landis argued, he could not domestically accept the loss of additional territory occupied following the collapse of Bashar Assad’s government. “He can sign a deal which gives the Golan Heights to Israel,” Landis said. “But not a deal that gives the extra territory that’s been taken recently in southern Syria.”
Landis said the fundamental imbalance between Israel and the new Syrian administration limits Damascus’ negotiating leverage. “Syria is too weak. Israel is too strong, and Israel’s made its position very clear, which is we’re staying in this situation, and I can’t see Israel backing off of that,” he said.
Syria is too weak. Israel is too strong, and Israel’s made its position very clear, which is ‘we’re staying in this situation,’ and I can’t see Israel backing off of that
“And I don’t think the international community is going to rally behind Syria and put a lot of capital into this,” he added.
A former Bahraini diplomat, who requested anonymity, interpreted the Syrian overture as a product of military weakness, the search for sanctions relief, and the need to restore international legitimacy. “Faced with incomplete territorial control near the Golan, an urgent need for international reintegration, and sanctions relief from Washington, I believe Damascus is pragmatically forced to treat Israel as an unavoidable reality,” the former diplomat told The Media Line.
“The Syrian approach aims for a functional security arrangement—ideally restoring the pre-1974 disengagement lines and pushing back Israeli incursions from Al-Sheikh Mount [widely known as Mount Hermon]—while explicitly reaffirming sovereignty over the Golan Heights to preserve domestic and Arab legitimacy,” he explained.
The diplomat added that Syria was unlikely to restore its former strategic relationship with Tehran. “Crucially, Syria has no incentive to realign with Tehran; the country’s state image suffered heavily from direct Iranian intervention during the Assad era, making a return to the ‘Axis of Resistance’ politically untenable,” he said.
Instead, he noted, Turkey now plays a central role in Syria, effectively replacing Iranian influence. In his view, while this shift sidelines Tehran, it creates a separate strategic concern for Israel.
Chama Mechtaly, a policy adviser pioneering the bottom-up movement of the Abraham Accords and founder and executive director of the Emma Lazarus Institute for Liberty and Tolerance, described the Syrian development more optimistically, although she warned that regional integration could provoke armed opposition. “The diplomatic movement is real,” Mechtaly told The Media Line. “The Lebanese framework is a step in the right direction. Syria appears to be moving closer to a security arrangement, potentially in the near term,” she said, adding that normalization can also trigger hostility from proxy groups, which see greater regional integration as a threat to their influence.
Lebanon’s Talks Face the Hezbollah Question
The same disagreement extends to Lebanon, where negotiations are continuing despite fundamental disputes over Hezbollah’s weapons, the Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon, and the sequencing of any withdrawal.
Boms argued that the Lebanese state ultimately faces a choice between restoring its authority and continuing to accommodate Hezbollah as a separate military structure. “I think Lebanon understands that there is a choice that needs to be made and that it’s either Lebanon, or Hezbollah. And in some ways, you can’t have them both,” he said.
I think Lebanon understands that there is a choice that needs to be made and that it’s either Lebanon, or Hezbollah. And in some ways, you can’t have them both.
However, he cautioned that weakening Hezbollah would also require an alternative political structure capable of preserving representation for Lebanon’s Shia population. “You need to create a Shia power framework that is divorced from Hezbollah. And I don’t think that’s impossible.”
Landis rejected the likelihood that the Lebanese state could carry out such a process under current conditions. “Hezbollah is not going to be defeated. The Lebanese army is in no position to take them on,” he said. “The politicians in Lebanon are not interested in pushing a military confrontation internally.”
Landis therefore viewed the negotiations primarily as a mechanism for containing immediate escalation rather than resolving the underlying conflict. “So, I think this is a lot of talk in order to try to deescalate things, but that’s it,” he argued.
He was similarly doubtful that the existing roadmap would produce a complete Israeli withdrawal.
“There is a roadmap for Israeli withdrawal, but the chances of that roadmap ever being carried out seem very slim because it requires defeating Hezbollah,” Landis said. “And who’s going to do that? It seems like an impossibility.”
The former Bahraini diplomat also questioned whether the negotiations could survive without a broader regional understanding. “Given the hardline rhetoric from Israeli ministers opposing the talks themselves and advocating a permanent military presence, I think that these negotiations risk becoming short-lived diplomatic bubbles,” he said.
He said that Hezbollah, which seems to retain significant popular support and military infrastructure, remains prepared for a prolonged war of attrition in coordination with Tehran. “The Lebanese government currently lacks both consensus in the south and the military capacity to enforce disarmament, rendering any diplomatic agreement fragile without a broader regional settlement.”
He said that, in his view, it is simply a matter of time before the next escalation erupts.
Mechtaly, by contrast, described the Lebanese framework as a potentially meaningful step while emphasizing that Hezbollah and other Iranian-aligned groups were likely to interpret regional agreements as a direct challenge. “We therefore have to watch Hezbollah and the Houthis closely,” she said.
From her perspective, the success of diplomacy will depend not only on agreements between governments but also on whether states are prepared to confront the networks that can obstruct their implementation.
Bahrain and the Durability of the Original Accords
Herzog’s conversation with Bahrain’s king has added another dimension to the diplomatic picture. Bahrain joined the Abraham Accords in 2020 and has maintained formal relations with Israel despite the regional fallout from October 7 and the subsequent wars.
The former Bahraini diplomat described the call as an indication that Manama continued to view its relationship with Washington and Israel as central to its security. “Despite enduring sustained missile and drone pressure from Iran and its regional allies, Bahrain appears to remain firmly anchored within the US-Israel defense umbrella,” he said.
“Implicitly, this signal reflects Manama’s firm belief that the US-Israel coalition maintains the capacity—but lacks the strategic appetite—to fully deter Iran,” he added.
Implicitly, this signal reflects Manama’s firm belief that the US-Israel coalition maintains the capacity—but lacks the strategic appetite—to fully deter Iran
The diplomat nevertheless warned that continued reliance on external deterrence could become politically and strategically unsustainable if the campaign against Iran failed to produce a clear result. “Should US deterrence fail to produce a decisive strategic outcome, even frontline states may eventually, and unfortunately, be forced to complement this posture with pragmatic regional adaptation.”
Mechtaly interpreted the call as evidence of the institutional relationships that had developed among the original Abraham Accords countries.
“The original Abraham Accords countries have already accumulated something that cannot be manufactured overnight: trust, relational capital, institutional cooperation, and a record of standing by the relationship during moments of enormous pressure,” she said.
She distinguished between governments that treat normalization as a long-term strategic commitment and those that use its symbols for tactical advantage.
“For some states, normalization is the product of a genuine strategic investment in regional security, economic integration, and the recovery of state sovereignty from militias and transnational ideological movements,” Mechtaly said. “For others, the language and imagery of normalization are being used tactically, as public relations, as narrative warfare, and as insulation from scrutiny in Washington.”
Boms also pointed to signs that regional exchanges had continued despite Israel’s diplomatic difficulties after October 7. “We’ve seen more developments on trade with Israel and the Gulf. We’ve seen the dynamics coming back,” he said, adding that Israel does not appear to be completely isolated.
But he warned against interpreting those contacts as an automatic restoration of Israel’s regional position. “I’m not arguing that Israel is gaining its legitimacy right now … irrespective of other things,” Boms said. “But there is a window of opportunity. Israel will be asked to also do its part.”
Saudi Arabia Remains the Central Test
Saudi Arabia would represent a far larger diplomatic breakthrough than any previous expansion of the Abraham Accords, but all four perspectives point to serious obstacles despite Trump’s pressure.
Boms argued that Riyadh was unlikely to enter the existing framework without attaching normalization to the Palestinian question. “Saudi Arabia is not going to join the Abraham Accords,” he said. “The Saudis, I think, would like to maybe show that at some point they’re able to move forward and create a breakthrough when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That will be their path to a potential rapprochement.”
Landis was equally doubtful that the current regional environment could support Saudi normalization. He argued that the ongoing war in Iran and the unresolved Gaza conflict made the timing particularly unfavorable. “Saudi Arabia has made it very clear that they’re not going to move ahead on Abraham Accords unless there’s a pathway for Palestinian statehood,” he said. “And I don’t see that happening.”
Saudi Arabia has made it very clear that they’re not going to move ahead on Abraham Accords unless there’s a pathway for Palestinian statehood
The former Bahraini diplomat emphasized that Saudi Arabia’s status as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites makes the reputational consequences of normalization different from those faced by smaller Gulf states.
“Saudi Arabia’s stature as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques in Islam represents its ultimate soft power and geopolitical weight across the Islamic world,” he said.
“I believe that surrendering this leverage easily through formal normalization without an explicit, irreversible path to Palestinian statehood carries a reputational cost that far outweighs the incremental security benefits of the Accords,” he asserted.
In his opinion, Riyadh recognizes that intelligence, economic, and technological cooperation with Israel can be deepened pragmatically behind the scenes without the political exposure of formal embassies.
A Region Without Fixed Blocs
The competing interpretations converge on one conclusion: The emerging regional order is no longer adequately explained by a single division between an Iranian axis and a US-aligned camp.
Mechtaly described the process as “a race toward normalization,” but one driven by different interests and levels of commitment.
“The most important development, however, is that the region can no longer be understood as one or two fixed blocs,” she said. “We are witnessing the death of the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], and the death of the Arab world as ideologically bound units. Every state has its own interests, vulnerabilities, and theory of survival.”
The former Bahraini diplomat similarly described increasingly divergent Gulf strategies. Oman and Qatar continue to favor engagement and mediation, Saudi Arabia is attempting to preserve both US security ties and diplomatic channels with Tehran, while the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait have leaned more heavily on Western-backed defense structures.
We are witnessing the death of the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], and the death of the Arab world as ideologically bound units
“The current confrontation demonstrates the structural limits of relying solely on military deterrence or containment to secure vital maritime corridors and regional stability,” the diplomat said. “If Washington’s campaign fails to achieve a decisive outcome against Iranian asymmetric capabilities, the Gulf states—including those currently leaning on Western/Israeli security guarantees—will inevitably be compelled to pursue a new, pragmatic security framework that accommodates Iran as a permanent regional stakeholder.”
Landis offered the most pessimistic view of the conflict’s trajectory, predicting that neither the United States nor Iran was positioned to make the concessions required for a comprehensive settlement. “I see it as a forever war that’s going to stumble forward,” he said. “And the Lebanon situation is a forever war which is going to stumble forward, and it’s going to suck Israel in. Israel will stay there, and it’ll sort of be a low simmer.”
Boms saw greater room for regional actors to shape the outcome but agreed that the United States was increasingly unwilling to police and resolve every conflict itself. “America is not going to be able to, does not have the will to … lead the policing or the solutions for the region overall, and the region needs to do this itself,” he said, adding that this could lead to some “real opportunities.”
Whether those opportunities produce formal agreements—or merely limited arrangements intended to manage an ongoing war—may depend on unresolved questions about the future of Iran’s military capabilities, Hezbollah’s weapons, Syria’s territorial integrity, Palestinian statehood and the willingness of Arab governments to absorb the domestic costs of closer relations with Israel.
Google plans to exempt sanctioned nations from Android developer verification
We are a month away from the initial rollout of Google’s Android developer verification system, and the company contends this policy does not impinge on the platform’s open nature. Still, the restrictions will be a big change, and there are still some unanswered questions. An issue that has come up repeatedly in the run-up to verification is what will happen to devs who can’t verify because of where they live. It turns out that Google has a cryptic answer for that buried in an FAQ.
Developer verification will soon block the installation of apps from unverified developers on any Android device running Google services, which is functionally all Android phones outside Russia and China. Developers who want to keep releasing software, even if it’s not in the Play Store, have to provide Google with their ID and pay a small fee.
But what if you’re an Android developer living in a sanctioned nation? Currently, the US sanction list includes Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and occupied areas of Ukraine. Given the current uncertain state of US foreign policy, that list could change in the future. Google doing any business with developers in those places is a thorny issue, and it seems like the company has decided to just leave them hanging.
A rather lengthy FAQ a few levels deep on the Google developer site addresses various issues around dev verification. Smack in the middle is this:
How does this program impact developers in sanctioned countries? Devices in sanctioned countries will be excluded from Android developer verification checks. This allows any developer to continue distributing apps in these regions without verification, though users there won’t benefit from the enhanced security benefits of the program.
The wording is bizarre because the answer doesn’t directly address the most important question—it dodges it. The vague FAQ appears to suggest that these developers won’t be able to verify, but that’s OK because phones in their countries won’t require that. But this comes with a real downside for those people.
A spokesperson has expanded on the FAQ and confirmed to Ars that people living in sanctioned nations will not be allowed to go through the verification process. That means they will not be able to effectively distribute software through any channel internationally.
Today, someone making an app in, say, Cuba can distribute it freely around the world, as well as at home. Anyone can install it and see their work in action after tapping through a few sideloading alerts. In the coming months, that will no longer be the case. These unverified apps will only be easily installable in the sanctioned countries where verification doesn’t exist.
Advanced flow or no flow
Earlier this year, Google clarified its plans for the “advanced flow” to bypass developer verification. It requires a bunch of steps, scary warnings, and a 24-hour wait. That gives tech-savvy folks a way to get around the new restrictions, but most people won’t know such an option even exists. Verification will necessarily create a two-tiered system of apps: verified ones that anyone can install and unverified apps that almost no one can install. Google says this change is necessary to combat scam apps.
Paradoxically, the situation in sanctioned nations will actually provide more app freedom. And these are Google-certified phones at issue here. In places like Cuba and Iran, most phones are Android devices with full Google certification because they’re imported from other places where Google officially operates. So Google is essentially acknowledging in this FAQ that its mobile services are being used and nominally supported in these places.
Google probably sees this as a legal tightrope. It can’t engage with developers in these places to verify them, but it seems determined to move forward with developer verification. The solution, apparently, is to leave devs in these regions behind—no verification, but no enforcement, either. The rest of us will have a more restricted app experience as users, but most developers around the world will be able to distribute their software anywhere as long as they verify. Sanctioned developers, meanwhile, will be in a second-tier bubble. Google has therefore tied the ability to distribute Android apps to the whims of the US Treasury Department, which maintains and enforces economic sanctions.
Currently, Google plans to activate the verification restrictions on September 30 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The program is expected to expand globally in 2027.
