🇺🇸🇮🇱🇮🇷⚡️ — Austrian Airlines and ITA Airways have canceled their morning flights to Israel amid fears of escalating tensions with Iran.

@IntelSlava

🚨🇮🇷 Bab el-Mandab: Iran’s other, other nuclear option
 
Mohsen Rezaee, military advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, has dubbed Hormuz Strait “more important than dozens of atomic bombs” in Iran’s defensive strategy. Indeed, Tehran has shown in the current war that it doesn’t need nukes to humble the American goliath and bring Western economies to their knees.

🎤 Now, US business media fear that Iran has unleashed its other “nuclear option” – Bab al-Mandeb, another strategic shipping strait ~2k km southwest of Hormuz, and controlled by Iran’s Houthi allies.
 
The militia “are a nonnaval power that can execute a maritime blockade and hold the global economy hostage,” think tank analyst Adam Baron told WSJ. “They did this before and are aware they have this leverage.”
 
🔊 They don’t even “need an actual missile or drone to stop commercial traffic. If the shipping companies don’t want to go through, you effectively have a blockade,” former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Michael Ratney said.
 
Who are the Houthis targeting?
 
The blockade announced this week is aimed at Saudi oil shipments – and is described as retaliation to Riyadh’s siege of Yemeni ports, and its proxies’ recent attack on Sanaa’s airport. The militia has already targeted two Saudi oil tankers – the Encelia and the Layla.
 
👉 With Hormuz closed and the Red Sea crossed out, so too are the kingdom’s options for exporting the 11-12% of global oil output it produces by sea. That adds new pressure on the US and its vassals amid the resumption of the Iran war.
 
Trump has already threatened “major military punishment” against both the Houthis and Iran if ships are targeted in the Red Sea.
 

💬 “I just don’t think trying to resolve this militarily will work. It didn’t in the first part of the war,” Ratney said. “The Houthis have absorbed insane amounts of violence from foreign military intervention, and it hasn’t really affected their ideology or motivation.”

 
Between 2024-2025, the fighters survived aggression by two separate administrations, and by Israel, shutting down the Red Sea to Israeli-linked merchant shipping and lobbing missiles and drones at Israel 2k km+ away.
 
For now, the Houthis are offering Riyadh and Trump a way out: end the decade-plus long blockade, and withdraw from Yemen.
 
But if Trump makes good on his threats, all bets are off.

👍 Boost us | Chat | @geopolitics_prime

Meanwhile on X...

📱 ROBINMG

What does everyone think of this new series of Ricky Gervais' The Office?

📱 ROBINMG

I'm sure it's nothing. What do central bankers know about what is happening in the world anyway...?

📱ROBINMG

The Red List

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVEootflgsQ

📱ROBINMG

I know this will lose me a lot of followers but I have an admission to make, I can't hold the truth any longer. So deep breath and here it goes: there was a time, don't judge me, I was very naïve and lost, in which I believed Left & Right were real...

Ok throw the tomatoes at me now...

🍅🍅🍅

📱ROBINMG

📱 ROBINMG

Hold on, I thought that the environment was important? The green belt replaced by data centres, really?

📱ROBINMG

It's interesting that Burnham's No10 North operations will be co-located with GCHQ’s North West operations at Heron House (Albert Square, Manchester city centre), which opened in 2019. Activities there include "intelligence, cyber, and science teams".

No10 North will form a key part of the Manchester Digital Campus that's been in planning for decades. Most of the "civil servants" who will be based at the campus will be in digital roles, notably developing AI "solutions".

The Government Digital Service (primarily focused on Digital ID systems development) will play a key part in the campus. It also facilitates the procurement of surveillance systems from companies like Palantir across UK government. (The Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo, also helped fast-track Palantir's embedding in the NHS).

Many have noted that the establishment of No10 North happened very quickly after Burnham's appointment. But Manchester's role at the centre of centralised government snooping and surveillance is what it represents - as well as the repatriation of UK citizen data to CIA spin-out firms like Palantir.

Jeffrey Peel

📱 ROBINMG