This is hilarious
Yesterday, Trump was scolding Pete Hegseth over the shortage of long-range attack munitions and defensive missiles.
TRUMP: “You know, because of the shortage of these weapons, we were unwillingly forced to stop the attacks.” PETE HEGSETH: “We had enough munitions. We just never anticipated that Iran would stretch this war out for so long.”
7 August 2026 07:37 BST | Last update:2 days 19 hours ago
Propelled by disinformation, arms deals and surveillance tech, right-wing governments have helped to increase Netanyahu's reach, undermining the region's historical alliance with Palestine
Petro has accused the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm BlackCore of deploying half a million bot accounts to flood Colombian voters with disinformation ahead of the June run-off, which De la Espriella won by less than a single percentage point.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t wait for that dispute to settle before celebrating online, congratulating the president-elect and declaring that “Israel’s friends continue to win”. The region is home to some 700,000 Palestinians and 500,000 Jews.
Cuba, destroyed by decades of US suffocation and now pursuing American-promoted economic reforms (met with even more sanctions), may not be far behind.
This issue has become another front for elite-citizen divides in the region. The Brazilian election may help bridge, or deepen, that rift
Underpinning all of this is a security relationship in which Latin American electorates don’t get a say. Pegasus, the intrusive Israeli spyware sold to governments across the region, has repeatedly been used to target journalists and opposition figures, rather than terrorists and criminals.
Brazilian police, among the most lethal in the region, use a plethora of Israeli weapons in the favelas. Police violence across the country results in thousands of deaths annually. And in recent years, Israeli intelligence operatives have worked alongside Brazilian authorities to investigate an alleged Hezbollah presence in the country.
There is a clear test ahead with Brazil’s October election. Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the convicted former president, launched his campaign against incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with a video endorsement from Netanyahu and fiery support from Argentinian leader Javier Milei, who has called himself a “fanatic of Israel” and plans to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem.
Lula, the sitting president, remains by contrast one of the last major heads of state in Latin America still willing to call Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide. He has even compared it to the Holocaust, drawing public outrage in some quarters.
Both Brazil and Mexico, the latter now governed by a leftist president of Jewish heritage, Claudia Sheinbaum, face mounting pressure from Washington over their posture - including economic warfare, threats of strikes, sanctions, and terrorist designations that open the door to incursions.
Ironically, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s Maga darling dictator, is himself of Palestinian descent - but he has nonetheless built his repressive security state partly on Israeli weapons and surveillance equipment, now turbo-charging repression across Latin America.
The new president of Honduras, Nasry Asfura, who was pushed to power with Trump’s meddling, is also a deep ally of Israel, despite being of Palestinian descent. He has visited Israel and met Netanyahu.
Leaked audio recordings dubbed “Hondurasgate” allegedly captured former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Asfura and Milei discussing plans to use Honduras as a staging ground to target leftist governments across the region - a plot that reportedly involved Netanyahu’s assistance in securing Hernandez a pardon from Trump after a drug trafficking conviction.
These new right-wing, mostly populist governments have helped to increase Israel’s reach, propelled by surveillance firms, arms deals and disinformation campaigns, despite the region’s populace growing increasingly wary of Israel.
This issue has become another front for elite-citizen divides in the region. The Brazilian election may help bridge, or deepen, that rift.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Joseph Bouchard is a journalist and researcher from Québec. He is currently a PhD student in Politics at the University of Virginia, and a Doctoral Fellow in Latin American Politics at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
8 August 2026 10:12 BST | Last update:1 day 14 hours ago
Tactical victories in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran have not built up Tel Aviv's hegemony - they have eroded it
Domination, according to philosopherAntonio Gramsci,is the capacity to coerce, to compel obedience through force. Hegemony is leadership secured through consent - an order that feels natural to those who live under it, so minds acquiesce before bodies are made to obey.
Domination can prohibit and destroy; it cannot persuade, build or lead. This is the standard against which Israel’s supposed “hegemony” should be judged in light of its continuous war, which has extended from 2023 to the present day.
These tactical victories, however, have not resulted in the construction of hegemony, but its erosion. They have exposed the fact that genuine hegemony never existed - only naked domination, sustained by an American strategic umbrella.
Size is not power, superiority is not leadership, and presence is not integration. Measured across three dimensions - the global economy, the region’s rules and regional networks - Israeli hegemony is either steadily eroding or never existed at all.
Israel’s high-tech sector is roughly 17 percent of the country’s GDP, with its export share reaching a record 57 percent in the first four months of last year, and the country boasts the highest civilian research and development (R&D) spending relative to GDP.
But one cannot confuse the size of a sector with the power to write the rules that govern it. Mastering a game whose rules were written by someone else is excellence, not power.
The picture is also less rosy than it appears: Israel’s own Innovation Authority warns of stagnating employment, a decline in R&D staff and a shrinking number of startups.
Paradox exposed
The one field where Israel genuinely sets global rules is cybersecurity: it hosts R&D centres for seven of the world’s top 10 companies in the field, and its cloud security firm Wiz was recently acquired by Google for $32bn. In another major recent deal, Palo Alto Networks acquired Israeli information security company CyberArk for $25bn.
But these deals expose a paradox: the pinnacle of Israeli tech success is its absorption into the American ecosystem - excellence within one room of a vast palace, not ownership of it. Step outside cybersecurity and the claim fades.
The shekel is not a reserve currency, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange orbits Nasdaq, and Israel’s security dependence on Washington is close to existential, with more than $130bn in American assistance since 1948.
Military dominance remains. Hegemony does not, and the gap between the two keeps widening
The Iran war tested this: Ben Gurion Airport shut down for 40 days, yet markets stayed resilient. The Google-Wiz deal closed during an active regional conflict, reflecting dependent integration rather than self-sufficiency.
This is the resilience of a patient on life support, not of healthy lungs. But the greater danger is the erosion of Israel’s most important asset: human capital.
Tellingly, this shift began with the domestic judicial-reform crisis in early 2023, before a single Hamas rocket was fired in the Gaza war - a vote with people’s feet, by the professionals who generate Israel’s only genuine structural advantage.
Israel’s position is neither “startup nation” nor collapse, but rather a deeply integrated, subordinate economy whose niche is gradually eroding.
Shifting perceptions
Hegemony’s second dimension - legitimacy, the acceptance of power rather than merely its possession - cannot be measured in budgets. Does Israel lead the region, or merely possess the capacity to disrupt it?
Its military superiority is not entirely its own. During the Iran war, US forces fired hundreds of interceptors in Israel’s defence, drawing down nearly half of the Pentagon’s Thaad stockpile. Roughly 80 percent of Israel’s own Arrow inventory was depleted within weeks, underscoring that it is a highly capable deterrent inside a costly American security architecture - not an invincible, self-sufficient power.
If Israel’s military position reveals dependence, its legitimacy reveals open erosion: an International Court of Justice genocide case, International Criminal Court warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, a UN inquiry finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and 157 states now recognising Palestine.
The deepest shift, though, is in public consciousness: a 2025 Pew survey of 24 countries found 62 percent held unfavourable views of Israel, against 29 percent favourable. This trend holds even with Israel’s principal ally, as around 60 percent of US adults now have an unfavourable view of Israel.
Across the Arab world, 87 percent oppose recognising Israel, while more than a quarter name it the greatest regional threat.
So who is writing the rules of the emerging order? Saudi Arabia still rejects normalisation, absent an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood. The Gaza ceasefire was imposed on Israel, not brokered by it, and the Iran-US nuclear deal is being negotiated without Tel Aviv.
Regional diplomacy is driven instead by Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, Turkey and Pakistan - none dependent on Israel, which can obstruct but not impose its own vision. It retains the power to veto, not to lead.
Here lies the deeper paradox: each of Israel’s military victories has generated a corresponding loss of legitimacy. Has Israel become a hub around which the Middle East is reorganising, or the obstacle around which new networks are built?
Regional air defences intercepted thousands of drones and missiles during the Iran war, seemingly showing integration - but this is an American-led architecture, not a network linking Israel to its neighbours. Arab states cooperate with Washington, and Washington cooperates with Israel; the bridge is the US, not Israel.
Widening gap
The same pattern holds in energy and trade. Gas exports to Egypt are cited as proof of Israel’s indispensable role - yet this collapsed at the first real test, when Israel shut its biggest gas field for roughly 33 days amid the Iran war, leaving Egypt with electricity shortages and costly LNG imports.
Across all three dimensions, the same pattern recurs: Israel displays power without legitimacy and presence without integration, while maintaining a core dependency on the American strategic umbrella. Israel does not anchor networks through its own gravitational pull, but rather hangs from a single supporting thread; if that thread weakens, the structure becomes unstable.
Over two years of genocide, Gaza endured. But Israel lost the world
This is what the erosion, or absence, of hegemony means. Israel is not becoming militarily weaker - its superiority remains formidable - but that superiority has failed to convert into authority that sets the region’s rules, commands legitimacy, or draws neighbouring states to organise their interests around it willingly.
Military dominance remains. Hegemony does not, and the gap between the two keeps widening.
One trend deserves attention: the gradual effort of Arab and regional states to organise themselves around Israel as little as possible. Over time, Israel risks shifting from an indispensable node to a function that can increasingly be assumed by Gulf, European, Indian, Turkish and Egyptian actors - especially if Washington’s commitment wanes, and alternative corridors multiply.
Yet this should not be mistaken for a prediction of imminent collapse. Domination without hegemony can endure for decades before unravelling; a crisis of legitimacy is necessary for decline, but not sufficient, and naked power can survive so long as its patron bears the costs.
The erosion described here will only constrain Israeli power if the region remains capable of collective political action.
Should resistance disappear, and neighbouring societies fragment into competing enclaves, Israel’s failure to integrate could become an advantage rather than a liability - and when the American umbrella eventually weakens, as every imperial guarantee does, the underlying landscape may become clearer: not a region organised around Israel, but one built despite it.
Networks, like water, find a way around an obstacle - but only where a channel has first been carved.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Hesham Gaafar is a researcher specialising in Islamic thought and movements and conflict resolution. He served as editor-in-chief of the Arabic section of IslamOnline.net portal from 2000 to 2010. He co-founded the Regional Center for Mediation and Dialogue and serves as a consultant to a number of international institutions in the field of conflict resolution.
Augustus never recovered from three words. When news reached Rome that three legions had been annihilated in the Teutoburg Forest, the emperor is said to have wandered his palace for months, striking his head against the doorframe and crying, “Quintili Vare, legiones redde!” Give me back my legions, Varus. Varus had been warned. A German chieftain named Segestes had told him, in plain language, that his ally Arminius was leading him into a trap. Varus outranked the warning. Three legions ceased to exist in an afternoon.
Washington is not Teutoburg. But six months into a war with Iran that was supposed to last four to six weeks, the pattern of ignoring the men whose job is to know better has become impossible to miss.
Start with the man who no longer holds his job. General Randy George, the Army’s Chief of Staff, was forced into immediate retirement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early April. No official reason was given. The timing did the talking: the order came one day after President Trump’s address signaling intensified strikes and a renewed three-week promise of resolution.
George was a four-star infantry officer with four decades in uniform, including the Gulf War and Iraq. By most accounts inside the Pentagon, he was the general most willing to tell the president plainly that a ground campaign in Iran risked becoming what analysts were already calling operational suicide. He did not resign. He was removed. The distinction matters, because it tells you what happens to professional dissent in this administration: it gets fired, not heard.
Then there is General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a man Trump himself once praised as the general who thought bigger than his Washington advisers. For months, Caine has reportedly been doing precisely the job his position demands, privately telling Trump’s inner circle that airpower alone will not deliver the president’s stated objectives, and that the country needs an off-ramp.
The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post both reported that Caine briefed the White House on the declining state of America’s air-defense interceptor stockpiles. The president’s response was not a course correction. It was a Truth Social post declaring the country has “massive amounts” of munitions and a promise to “hunt down” the leakers, with “long-term jail sentences.”
Caine, when reporters pressed him to confirm or deny what he had told the president, said nothing. Silence, in that building, is its own kind of testimony.
The numbers Caine was reportedly worried about are not classified guesswork. CSIS estimates the Patriot interceptor stockpile fell by roughly two-thirds since February, THAAD by comparable margins. Replenishing them will take years, because the industrial base for this kind of demand no longer exists. The roughly fifty defense manufacturers that could surge production during the Cold War have consolidated into a handful of prime contractors, bound by multi-year contracts never designed for a war of this tempo. The Pentagon has since signed a $58.6 billion contract with Lockheed Martin and pushed Northrop Grumman to triple and quadruple production lines. That is not the language of abundance. It is the language of an institution refilling a tank it emptied faster than anyone budgeted for.
The strain reaches beyond American shelves. Gulf allies dependent on U.S. air defense have begun quietly shopping elsewhere, some reportedly exploring Patriot and THAAD alternatives from South Korea, aware that Washington’s own reserves are stretched thin. That is a warning about the erosion of American leverage in the very region that leverage was meant to reinforce. A war fought to project strength is teaching allies to look elsewhere for the hardware that keeps their skies closed to Iranian missiles.
None of this happened by accident. It began, by most reconstructions, on 11 February, when Netanyahu arrived at the White House for a closed-door Situation Room meeting, Mossad chief David Barnea appearing on the screens behind him, laying out a case for striking Iran’s leadership. Fresh intelligence, including reported warnings of an assassination plot against Trump, accelerated a decision that had been building for weeks.
The strikes began 28 February. The promise, at the time, was measured in weeks. Iran was expected to buckle. Six months later, Tehran is dictating the terms of passage through the Strait of Hormuz, negotiations are stalled, and the midterms are approaching with a war that has no visible exit.
The Greek historian Herodotus recorded a warning from Artabanus to King Xerxes before he marched into Greece: that fortune strikes down the greatest before the small, because pride invites its own correction. Xerxes did not listen either, and marched an empire into a campaign that broke against Salamis and Plataea. Sun Tzu put the same lesson more plainly, and it has outlived every empire that ignored it: there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare. Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded armies before he governed a country, put it in five words that every commander-in-chief since has quoted and few have practiced: plans are useless, but planning is everything. The generals plan. It is the political class that too often decides not to listen, and mistakes the silence that follows for agreement.
There is a simple, almost childlike arrogance in a leader who believes he understands the battlefield better than the men who have spent their careers on it — the same arrogance of a boy who ignores his parents because he is certain he already knows better. The difference is that a boy’s mistakes cost him a grounding. A president’s mistakes cost a Patriot battery, a THAAD interceptor, a soldier’s life, a nation’s leverage at the negotiating table. History does not remember the leaders who listened to their generals as weak. It remembers, with far less mercy, the ones who didn’t.
Yesterday, Trump was scolding Pete Hegseth over the shortage of long-range attack munitions and defensive missiles.
TRUMP: “You know, because of the shortage of these weapons, we were unwillingly forced to stop the attacks.”
