America
How Elon Musk fuses private empire with state power, Ben Tarnoff explains
In an in-depth interview broadcast on the foreign policy and current affairs platform Harici YouTube channel, host and journalist Erman Çete spoke with Massachusetts-based author and technologist Ben Tarnoff regarding the political, economic, and ideological framework built around billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Tarnoff, who is the author of Internet for the People and co-author alongside historian Quinn Slobodian of the book Muskism, offered an exhaustive analysis of how Musk’s industrial practices, corporate structures, and ideological trajectory provide a structural lens for understanding contemporary capitalism.
Çete opened the discussion by noting that Muskism explicitly evokes Henry Ford and Fordism, which served as a defining concept for the twentieth century, and asked Tarnoff to explain why the authors propose Muskism as a prospective operating system for the twenty-first century rather than terms centred on other prominent figures such as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Tarnoff explained that their intellectual departure point began with the historical analysis of Fordism, a category formulated by twentieth-century social theorists such as Antonio Gramsci to decipher the societal conditions that made mass-scale manufacturing viable.
“Well, when Quinn, my co-author and I sat down to think about how possibly writing this book, our point of departure was the concept of Fordism, which is an idea developed by a number of different theorists of the 20th century,” Tarnoff said. “Antonio Gramsci is one famous example, but there are a number of others as well. And what these theorists did was that they looked at the life and the work of the famous American industrialist Henry Ford, and they attempted to infer or extrapolate a broader social system from his ideas and practices. So they asked, not simply why did Ford become Ford? But more broadly, what kind of world is necessary for the production practices for the factories of Henry Ford to be possible?”
“An operating system for the world”
Tarnoff pointed out that Ford was regarded as an archetype of his era, embodying a configuration of industrial capitalism defined by mass assembly, high industrial wages, and institutional stabilization aimed at preserving a mass consumer market. In his view, Musk occupies an identical cultural and systemic position today.
“And Ford was at the time taken to be a representative capitalist, was someone who embodied capitalism at a particular point in time in the 20th century,” Tarnoff remarked. “Now, when you look at Musk, I think it’s fair to say that Musk also personifies or embodies where capitalism is at our particular point in history in ways that are quite comparable to the ways Henry Ford did. Incidentally, the two men have a lot of personal similarities, but even beyond that, they both seem to serve as avatars for capitalism in a particular era.”
Addressing why Musk provides a superior analytical lens compared to figures like Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel, Tarnoff stressed Musk’s sheer systemic footprint, wealth, and unique pedagogical value.
“So my co-author and I wanted to ask, well, if we looked at the ideas and practices of Elon Musk, how he organizes his factories, how he organizes his businesses, how he accumulates as a capitalist, could we zoom out and extrapolate a broader social system, an operating system for the world, if you like, from those practices and call it Muskism?” Tarnoff explained. “He is both more powerful than those other figures. I mean he is the richest man on earth by quite a wide margin actually. But also his empire spans so many very important sectors from AI to space to the provision of internet service, to automobiles, to brain-computer interfaces and so forth, that there’s a breadth there that the other figures that are often cited don’t have. There’s a geopolitical influence that that gives him that the other figures don’t have. But finally, and this I think brings us back to Fordism: He has a pedagogical value that the others don’t have. That looking through the lens of Musk, you can learn something about how capitalism operates in the 2000s and how this phase of capitalism came to be that you can’t really do looking through the lens of a Peter Thiel or a Jeff Bezos.”
Çete then observed that while many view Musk as an anti-statist figure, especially in the wake of his involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Muskism demonstrates that his empire emerged directly out of profound entanglement with the US state, citing government sponsorship of GPS, the commercial privatization of the internet, and the late 1990s dot-com bubble.
Responding to Çete’s query about the relationship between capital and public governance, Tarnoff delineated how post-Fordism, typically associated with the neoliberal era from the 1970s onwards, had historically been interpreted by the left as an era of the shrinking state marked by the surrender of sovereignty, privatization, and binding free-trade arrangements.
“What Musk shows us, and this is again his pedagogical value, is that a different kind of state has been emerging and I think has now really materialized quite vividly in the West, and particularly in the United States,” Tarnoff stated. “Which is not really a state that is diminishing its sovereignty. Not a state that is shrinking or privatizing, exactly. But something stranger is going on, which is this is a state that is fusing symbiotically with the private sector. And Musk has been an agent of this throughout his career. He is not and has never been a libertarian. He has, on the contrary, always instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit.”
“Increasing state capacity through private means”
Tarnoff underlined that Musk’s commercial trajectory relied on the public sector as a central client and financier, noting that SpaceX emerged during the war on terror primarily as an official government contractor. Rejecting simplistic terms such as cronyism, Tarnoff argued that this dynamic constitutes a mutually reinforcing structural integration.
“It’s not about shrinking the state, as in the neoliberal imagination, but rather it is about increasing state capacity through private means,” Tarnoff asserted. “So this symbiotic integration of public and private, which Musk really embodies throughout his career, but especially in the case of SpaceX, it’s important that we understand it not as the relationship of parasitism or what some people would call crony capitalism, because Musk does, of course, gain from this interaction. He builds very large and powerful businesses from this fusion with the state, but importantly, the state also gains something from this interaction.”
Illustrating this mechanism through national security operations, Tarnoff observed: “So if you are the Pentagon or if you are one of the American intelligence services, you through SpaceX have the capacity to put satellites into space more cheaply than ever before. And that arguably enhances sovereignty, enhances state capacity understood in a particular domain. It’s not about shrinking the state so much as augmenting it through the means of private service provision.”
Çete interjected to note that the Pentagon has increasingly brought Musk into advisory capacities for future military conflicts, pointing to institutional reorganizations in defense planning and suggesting that the growing militarization of Western policy accelerates this symbiotic model.
Tarnoff confirmed this trajectory, pointing to recent public-private arrangements such as Project Meridian, which links Musk with figures like Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense technology company Anduril. Tarnoff noted that while a newer crop of Southern California startups is building autonomous drones and flexible software platforms adapted for warfare seen in conflicts like Ukraine, Musk established the blueprint long before it became fashionable.
“He was doing this again before it was cool,” Tarnoff stated. “Musk has been doing military contracting for decades at this point. So he is, if you like, the kind of old seasoned veteran of this kind of interaction and has helped open up this entire sector to startups who can compete with the legacy so-called defense primes like Lockheed and Northrop Grumman who since, you know, the Cold War if not before have dominated the business of war.”
Turning to another core concept of the book, Çete brought up “financial fabulism,” asking how Musk reconciles the necessity of constantly painting radiant, hyper-optimistic corporate narratives to maintain investor valuations with his increasingly dark, apocalyptic public rhetoric concerning the decline of Western civilization and humanity.
Tarnoff described financial fabulism as Musk’s singular talent for speculative storytelling to unlock immense capital flows, a technique honed during the 1990s dot-com era that continues to define his major commercial appeals.
“What we describe as financial fabulism is Musk’s talent in telling stories about the future in order to unlock capital from investors that he needs to fund his ventures,” Tarnoff noted. “If you look at, for instance, the SpaceX prospectus that they had to file with American regulators before going public on the stock exchange, he’s still speaking in that science fiction mode, if you like. He’s talking about data centers in space, he’s talking about factories on the moon, he’s talking about cities on Mars. This is still very much Musk as financial fabulist. And all indications are that the audience is still loving it. I mean, he’s still able to raise money on the basis of his narrative techniques.”
“His existential terror of what he describes as wokeness”
However, Tarnoff affirmed that a profoundly darker ideological horizon has consumed Musk over the past decade, shaped by two interlocking developments: his outlook on artificial intelligence and his radical political migration toward the far right.
“A darker view of the future has entered the picture over the last decade or so,” Tarnoff said. “And this has much to do with two things. One is his view of artificial intelligence. And the second, which is distinct but related, intimately related, is his political turn toward the far right and his existential terror of what he describes as wokeness and how wokeness could in fact destroy human civilization. And that is a fear that is wrapped up with this fear of AI in ways we could discuss. But these twin threats have, I think, darkened his view of the future.”
Çete connected this techno-pessimism and transhumanism to what Tarnoff and Slobodian classify as “fortress futurism,” asking how Musk’s upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa shaped an obsessive focus on absolute sovereignty, autarky, and technological containment.
Tarnoff explained that sovereignty under Muskism assumes a fundamentally antagonistic, hostile world populated by internal and external adversaries against whom one must fortify oneself, mirroring the structural mindset of apartheid South Africa’s ruling elite.
“The assumption here is one of a hostile, unstable world that is filled with enemies, filled with undesirables that you have to protect yourself from,” Tarnoff observed. “And this is a worldview that has much resonance with the worldview of apartheid South Africa. We talk about it in those terms as fortress futurism. The leadership of apartheid South Africa, where Musk was born and raised, thought of themselves correctly as embattled. They were surrounded by the Black-led decolonizing states of Southern Africa. They actually go to war with them at one point. They also are facing a hostile Black majority within the borders of their own nation that is organizing against apartheid, eventually successfully.”
To preserve its rule, the apartheid regime pursued technological shielding through imports like IBM mainframes alongside aggressive import substitution, establishing an autarkic domestic auto sector with Western corporate partners. Tarnoff argued that this siege mentality directly informs Musk’s corporate strategy of vertical integration.
“If you think about the apartheid regime as pursuing degrees of technological and economic self-reliance in order to garrison their regime, their white supremacist rule, from the enemies that it perceives everywhere, there’s actually quite a lot of resonance with Musk’s own entrepreneurial career,” Tarnoff explained. “So when he starts to build cars and rockets at SpaceX and Tesla in the 2000s, he pursues what is called vertical integration, which is an effort to own as much of the supply chain as possible.”
“Musk wants to try to build as much as possible himself, rather than relying on external suppliers,” Tarnoff added. “And this is a view of the factory as an enclave, as a fortress. The emphasis is on resilience, it’s on control. It is not importantly on global supply chains and the global circulation of commodities. And a kind of view, very kind of ’90s view of free-market globalization as a frictionless space where everything is just flying around. That’s not the Muskist view.”
Tarnoff pointed out that this fortress orientation proved extraordinarily prescient for current global shifts, as states increasingly abandon frictionless free trade in favour of protectionist industrial policy.
“For our purposes, what’s particularly interesting about this is how prescient this Muskist production model was because now look at us, we’re in 2026 and policymakers all over the world are now talking about deglobalization,” Tarnoff observed. “They’re talking about trying to reduce their reliance on global markets, whether global energy markets, global commodity markets. They’re making investments in reshoring and friendshoring and more regionalized and localized production networks so that they don’t have to rely too heavily on suppliers flung halfway across the world. So that new model, which has a lot to do with the deteriorating security situation in many parts of the world, a lot to do with this new geoeconomic mindset where economic matters are now seen as connected to national security matters in a way that they weren’t before, all of those developments are really things that Musk himself prefigured.”
“He’s selling deglobalization to all sides”
Çete pushed back by highlighting the structural contradictions within Muskism, pointing out that Tesla remains deeply reliant on manufacturing operations in Shanghai despite escalating US-China tensions, and noting the paradox of an anti-woke cultural crusade that attacks environmentalism while heading the world’s most prominent electric vehicle firm.
Tarnoff acknowledged these tensions, elaborating on how Musk originally navigated international deglobalization by commercializing national energy security across competing jurisdictions.
“When we think about Musk as an agent and a beneficiary of deglobalization, it’s important to understand that at least at that stage of his career, he’s selling deglobalization to all sides,” Tarnoff explained. “He’s selling to the Chinese, to the Europeans, to the Americans, to a number of other people, the capacity to improve their energy sovereignty, what we describe as electric autonomy: the ability to use investments in renewables to reduce one’s reliance on global oil markets, which is something the Chinese have been doing for decades.”
Tarnoff pointed out that geopolitical shocks, including the war on Iran and destabilized global energy markets, have driven regions like Southeast Asia toward renewable energy to avoid petroleum dependency. Musk capitalized on this anxiety by framing Tesla as a plug-and-play toolkit for state autonomy:
“What Musk is doing is selling different countries, different national projects, a kind of toolkit,” Tarnoff said. “He’s saying, ‘We’re going to just drop this Tesla module down in your country and this is going to accelerate your efforts to reduce your reliance on external markets by building up your renewable capacity, whether the Germans, the Chinese, or so forth.'”
However, Tarnoff emphasized that this universal sales pitch collapsed once Musk tied himself directly to Donald Trump’s political movement.
“The problem, however, is when his affiliation with Trump becomes so close, particularly in the 2024 presidential cycle, he becomes politicized in a new way,” Tarnoff observed. “And that becomes a problem for him because he can no longer present himself as a neutral salesman of this toolkit. So now if you’re the Chinese, if you’re the Germans, you might think twice about letting someone who is so closely aligned with Trump, so closely aligned with the MAGA coalition, into your country as a provisioner of high technology. I think this is one of many respects in which his politicization toward the right has harmed him financially.”
The interview next addressed ownership models. Çete cited theorist Melinda Cooper’s concept of “patrimonial capitalism,” which characterizes modern capital accumulation through tightly held, dynastic family enterprises that resist regulatory oversight, asking if Musk’s dynastic familial habits and corporate management reflect this trend.
Tarnoff offered a qualified assessment, arguing that while Musk maintains total personal authority, his structure differs radically from traditional private family firms because it is completely fused with modern public equity markets.
“Musk is someone who has managed to combine, let’s say, a high degree of personal control with integration in global financial markets,” Tarnoff said. “Both SpaceX and Tesla are publicly traded companies. They are both on indices that accelerate the purchase of their stock by pension funds around the world.”
Contrasting Musk with Henry Ford, Tarnoff noted that Ford harboured intense hostility toward Wall Street, which was mediated through his antisemitism, leading Ford to fiercely resist public listings until well after his death. Musk, by contrast, leveraged sophisticated modern financial instruments.
“Musk is not exactly a family capitalist,” Tarnoff noted. “Because so much of Musk’s empire is predicated on his ability to summon billions of dollars out of thin air by speaking to the global investor class. He relies on the Norwegian oil fund, he relies on pension funds, on big institutional investors around the world. And because of the structure of SpaceX and Tesla, because they have what is very common in Silicon Valley, which is so-called dual-class share structure where Musk controls a majority of the so-called super-voting shares, he can remain in charge. He can retain that model of kind of 19th-century entrepreneurial capitalism of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, but he can fuse that with financialization. And that means that there’s vastly more money at his disposal.”
Building on this structural analysis, Çete remarked that Musk focuses on capturing critical infrastructure rather than traditional physical territory, marking a qualitative shift from classic twentieth-century statecraft.
Tarnoff agreed, identifying this phenomenon as the transition where “sovereignty becomes infrastructural before it is territorial.” He noted that this development extends beyond Musk to a tight network of critical enterprise firms including Palantir, Anduril, and Anthropic, upon which governments are becoming existential dependents for warfare, surveillance, and baseline governance.
“The single biggest beneficiary of DOGE was Palantir”
Çete then asked how Musk compares to venture capitalist Peter Thiel, particularly regarding their divergence on whether technology should be used to escape the state or to re-engineer its coercive apparatus to preserve social stratification.
Tarnoff drew a sharp distinction between the self-curated intellectual posturing of Thiel and the unvarnished practical operations of Musk, while revealing that Thiel’s corporate interests benefited immensely from Musk’s governmental initiatives.
“When it comes to Peter Thiel, it’s important to understand that Thiel has always liked to present himself as an intellectual,” Tarnoff noted. “These days he presents himself as a libertarian Christian theorist of the apocalypse. Thiel is someone who is interested, however provocatively and trollishly, in presenting himself in humanistic terms, as someone who has a syllabus, has a reading list, is making interventions along the lines that people who are trained in political philosophy would be able to interpret. Musk has never been that person.”
Beneath the rhetorical posturing, however, Tarnoff emphasized their institutional alignment: “Thiel, despite his many libertarian pronouncements, of course, is the co-founder of Palantir, who has, along with Musk’s SpaceX, perfected this dynamic of state symbiosis. Operationally, Thiel is just as embedded in the state as Musk is. In fact, when you look at Musk’s time at DOGE in the federal government, the single biggest beneficiary of DOGE was not actually Musk’s companies, but was Palantir. Palantir has racked up a large number of federal contracts since Trump has taken office for his second term.”
For researchers, Tarnoff argued, Musk’s refusal to engage in academic self-justification makes him an exceptionally clear object of analysis: “You actually have to do the harder work of inferring his ideas from his practices. You have to say not, you know, which philosophers is he citing this morning, but rather what kind of worldview, what kind of assumptions about human beings and their interaction with one another are implied by his production process, by him as a capitalist doing capitalism. And I think that’s ultimately a more fruitful approach.”
Moving into the geopolitical sphere, Çete asked whether Muskism possesses an intrinsically colonial or imperialist dimension, citing Musk’s public attacks on foreign governments, his hostility toward the Global South, and his infamous social media post regarding the 2019 coup against Evo Morales in lithium-rich Bolivia, in which Musk declared: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Tarnoff pointed out that Musk’s discourse is explicitly shaped by white ethno-nationalism and European far-right ideology, which can be observed directly on his X profile.
“There’s a strongly ethno-nationalist component,” Tarnoff asserted. “A centerpiece of that worldview and something he spends a lot of time posting about is the notion that white European civilization is under attack by immigration from non-white countries. In his view, and this is echoing the so-called Great Replacement theory that originated with the French New Right and has become very popular in far-right circles throughout the world, particularly in the United States, that this uncontrolled wave of immigration is being orchestrated by liberal establishment politicians cynically for their own benefit, because they’re going to persuade these immigrants to vote for them and as a result are channeling welfare services and generous state subsidies to these populations. And in the process white culture, white civilization is being corrupted and will ultimately be annihilated unless very stern measures are taken.”
“Embodied human viruses, computer bugs that needed to be purged”
Tarnoff pointed out that Musk has openly amplified calls for remigration and civilizational warfare even during critical corporate milestones, demonstrating that these commitments are not passing distractions.
“These measures typically involve what is described by the European far right as remigration, as the forced expulsion of not only immigrants, but people who are descended from immigrants,” Tarnoff said. “Even as the lead-up to the SpaceX IPO was happening, which was the biggest IPO in history, one might expect that Musk would be preoccupied or less inclined to post inflammatory opinions on social media. To the contrary, if you looked at his X feed during that time, you would see, among other things, him endorsing a call for a new Reconquista of Europe. So that notion of a hierarchy of humanity in which white European civilization is considered the most human and everyone else is less than human is a core feature of his worldview.”
Çete linked these ideological frameworks to a chapter in Tarnoff’s book titled “Delete and Remove,” suggesting that computational metaphors of deletion are applied directly to human populations deemed surplus or undesirable by the ruling elite.
Tarnoff confirmed that this logic guided Musk’s operational focus within federal institutions, particularly regarding border enforcement and algorithmic deportation drives under DOGE.
“This was particularly evident at DOGE, where one of the big initiatives, and certainly probably the biggest consequence of DOGE, was providing new tools for the federal government to identify undocumented people for deportation,” Tarnoff stated. “And in Musk’s language, these individuals were increasingly understood to be embodied human viruses, computer bugs that were walking around and needed to be purged from the database of the state and from the database of society.”
This computational reductionism forms the core ontology of Muskism, Tarnoff argued: “It’s very much a computer-first view of the world. It’s the understanding that what happens in the computer, what happens in the network is reality and everything else is downstream of that. So if you can change the code base, then you can change reality. He often talks about the Matrix and about reprogramming the Matrix. Reality is seen as a computer program and that if you can modify that program, you can modify reality. And in the case of undocumented immigrants, they are understood to be data out of place within this system. And just as you would in the case of ensuring the smooth functioning of an IT system, you need to identify those issues and you need to purge them.”
Concluding the interview, Çete asked whether the structural trends Musk anticipated, such as the re-engineering of the administrative state, industrial rearmament, and deglobalization, mean that Muskism represents the inevitable future of Western society.
Tarnoff cautioned against fatalism, emphasizing that Muskism should be understood as a historical convergence of forces that can be politically challenged and dismantled.
“The way we’re using Muskism is to describe an ensemble of historical forces that have converged in the person of Musk,” Tarnoff stated. “Some of those forces will likely continue to develop and evolve. When we think about deglobalization, I find it hard to believe that deglobalization would simply vanish from the historical stage if Musk were to disappear tomorrow. The same could be said about hyper-digitization of the sort that is now powering the AI boom. But I think it’s important that we’re not fatalistic about these developments. Our hope here is to give people a new way of understanding how we came to this present moment characterized by multiple overlapping crises, and how Musk provides the most useful lens for clarifying our basic contours.”
Ultimately, Tarnoff asserted, Muskism possesses a fatal analytical flaw in its mechanistic understanding of human beings, which leaves it vulnerable to organized political resistance.
“Musk and Muskism has a very weak understanding of politics,” Tarnoff concluded. “It understands human society as being configured by computers and networks. And in fact, that’s not true. That’s not how people acquire their ideological or political frames. They do so in the course of their interactions with members of their family, with co-workers, with community members. There is actually quite a lot of room for human politics. That’s in fact the only kind of politics that currently exists.”
Pointing to mounting social opposition across the country, Tarnoff closed on an optimistic note regarding democratic agency: “I think that one could find sources of social hope in a number of different places. We have right now in the United States an enormous popular revolt against data centers. This is becoming a very serious issue for the upcoming congressional elections. We also have just generally a very dim view that people have of the tech industry in general. People generally really hate these companies and really hate AI. And there is a lot of energy these days on the socialist left in the United States. The type of hierarchy of humanity that Musk has represented and advocated for is one that many Americans resolutely reject and are organizing on that basis.”
Assessing the seismic fallout of the latest US midterm elections, Dr Mehmet Ali Tuğtan, associate professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University, delivered an exhaustive analysis of the shifting dynamics in American governance during an interview on the Harici YouTube channel.
Speaking with the program’s host, Tuğtan explained that while public opinion polling had pointed toward legislative setbacks for the Republican Party, the actual margins delivered a shock to the political establishment. Pre-election surveys had indicated that the Republicans were on track to yield the Senate by a margin of 53 to 47 and drop the House of Representatives by approximately 230 to 200 seats. However, the sheer scale of the defeat redefined expectations across the political spectrum.
“It wasn’t just losing; losing by such a wide margin was something no one expected,” Tuğtan said, recalling the nationwide anticipation leading up to the vote. “People were wondering, will it be a blue wave? Or will it be a blue tsunami? It turned out to be a blue tsunami.”
The conversation addressed the root drivers behind this historic electoral repudiation of Donald Trump and the broader Make America Great Again movement heading into the second term of his presidency. Tuğtan asserted that the electorate’s verdict represented both a direct reaction to Trump’s policy execution and a systemic transformation within the opposition party.
On the domestic and economic fronts, Tuğtan argued that the administration’s flagship initiatives produced severe unintended consequences that alienated ordinary voters. Trump had campaigned on terminating open-ended overseas conflicts, yet his administration found itself entangled in a widening military confrontation. “He said he would withdraw from the endless wars. He doesn’t even know how to get out of the war he started in Iran,” Tuğtan noted. The outbreak of hostilities in the Persian Gulf led directly to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, an arterial transit corridor for global energy supplies, precipitating severe inflationary pressures across the domestic market. “Because of the Iran war, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the cost of living skyrocketed,” Tuğtan pointed out. Concurrently, Trump implemented his pledge to dismantle conventional free-trade frameworks and erect protectionist trade barriers to shield domestic manufacturing, but the policy backfired. “As many economists warned, the reflection of this on the economy was negative,” Tuğtan said, adding that voter discontent was further compounded by public scrutiny surrounding his family’s business entanglements and ties to elite technology billionaires. “On one hand, there were the rumors of corruption involving his family and the dirty relationships with those ‘tech-bros,’ the tech billionaires around him. All of this was reflected back to the public.”
Simultaneously, the Democratic Party executed a generational and ideological pivot that resonated with an evolving electorate. Tuğtan pointed out that the party leadership decisively moved past its entrenched vanguard, discarding political figures who had maintained unconditional support for Israel, adhered rigidly to market-driven economic orthodoxies, and offered stale solutions to widening income disparity. In their stead, a demographic cohort emerged that reflected the country’s diverse social fabric. “The Democrats finally got rid of the old faces, those from the older generation who constantly said the same things, who unconditionally supported Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and who claimed more neoliberalism could solve problems like the society’s growing income inequality, and replaced them with a new generation of more communal, more left-leaning candidates,” Tuğtan observed. “With candidates representing all the colors of this mosaic, when the Democrats stepped up, success followed.”
“A new generation of leadership has taken over”
This structural realignment marked a clean break from the generational cohort that had steered the Democratic Party for decades. Tuğtan highlighted that the party skipped an entire intermediary generation in its succession process. Rather than passing power from octogenarians such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton to officials in their late sixties or seventies, authority transferred directly to figures in their thirties, forties, and early fifties. “A new generation of leadership has taken over in the Democratic camp,” Tuğtan said. “Some Turkish broadcasters call them the ‘boomers,’ the generation of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who have finally retired. And in their place came not just the next generation, but the one after that. So those in their 80s retired. They weren’t replaced by those in their late 60s or early 70s. They were replaced by people in their late 40s, early 50s, or even some in their 30s. This generational change has brought a huge fresh wave of energy to the Democratic Party.”
When asked by the host how this emerging leadership engages with the traditional establishment, Tuğtan explained that the internal gravity of the party has shifted markedly. Even figures traditionally viewed as moderates or institutionally aligned, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, operate substantially further to the left than their predecessors. “Even the establishment figures have shifted to the left within the Democratic Party,” Tuğtan emphasized, demonstrating that the center of political gravity has moved.
Defining the core tenets of this modern American leftism, Tuğtan outlined three structural elements: a revival of statism, the formal abandonment of trickle-down supply-side theory, and a fundamental critique of the neoliberal consensus that has governed economic policy since the 1980s. He contrasted the incoming cohort with the “Atari Democrats” of the 1990s, who rallied behind Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” philosophy. While Clinton accommodated global market flows, offshore manufacturing, and service-sector flexibilities to produce 17 million precarious jobs, that compromise eventually exhausted its utility. Subsequent administrations under Barack Obama and Biden failed to deliver equitable prosperity following the 2008 global financial crisis, eroding institutional credibility.
“Now, the new generation says openly, ‘We are public-minded.’ There are those among them who say, ‘We are socialists,'” Tuğtan remarked, summarizing their economic thesis. “In other words, ‘Brother, we no longer believe in the neoliberal order or the neoliberal prescription.’ Those who say, ‘We believe the state should ensure income justice through taxation, taking from the rich and transferring to the poor,’ are now in the majority in the new generation.”
“They meet at the horseshoe”
This ideological realignment extends far beyond fiscal policy into foreign affairs, where the incoming cohort has abandoned the uncritical interventionism that characterized previous administrations. While earlier Democratic centrists embraced global hegemony and accepted unilateral overseas expeditions, current lawmakers place primary emphasis on domestic civic welfare and heavily scrutinize long-standing strategic alliances.
“The new generation is much more inquisitive about this. Their priorities are America, the welfare of the American citizen, and most importantly, they are questioning the special relationships that this American hegemony has created with certain third parties abroad,” Tuğtan noted. “The most significant of these, in terms of American domestic politics, is the relationship with Israel. Of course, previous members of the Democratic Party who were close to the establishment never made the United States government’s special relationship with Israel a subject of debate. However, after Gaza, after the Gaza genocide, the new generation of Democrats in the world is much more inquisitive and much more critical of Israel.” Pointing to the Georgia senator as a clear manifestation of this shift, Tuğtan added: “Jon Ossoff is a profile that breaks all molds in this context. He is a leftist, Jewish senator who is currently critical of Israel. This is not a profile we were very used to seeing in the previous generation.”
Responding to the host’s observation that earlier progressive figures like Obama ultimately accommodated traditional foreign policy and Wall Street imperatives, Tuğtan detailed how structural constraints previously dictated executive appointments. “Back then, when Obama was coming to the White House, the Democratic Party establishment handed him Timothy Geithner like a briefcase. ‘Here, take this as your Treasury Secretary from Goldman Sachs,’ they said. Can you say no? You couldn’t say it in 2008. Now you can. That’s the biggest difference.”
According to Tuğtan, the traditional power structure suffered catastrophic institutional damage under Trump’s successive presidential terms, eroding its ability to control party machines. “The establishment, through Trump’s 2016 and subsequent 2024 presidencies, has largely lost its influence, having been bulldozed and trampled like a bull in a china shop,” he said. The recent midterm results laid bare this collapse: “In these last midterms, almost all billionaire-backed candidates lost. Elon Musk probably made the most inefficient purchase in his commercial history. He spent 475 million dollars and got absolutely nothing in return. Secondly, AIPAC-backed candidates. Almost all candidates of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lost. If the establishment’s old power and influence were still in place, these things we’re saying wouldn’t be possible.”
This erosion has enabled populist figures to challenge establishment orthodoxy without fear of political marginalization. Tuğtan cited Michigan progressive Abdul El-Sayed as an example of a candidate who eschewed corporate political action committees, confronted AIPAC, and maintained explicit solidarity with marginalized populations without derailing his political trajectory. “You’re going to campaign without support from super PACs. You’re going to clash with AIPAC. You’re going to openly accuse Israel of genocide and get elected as a senator,” Tuğtan remarked, contrasting the current political climate with the rigid operational boundaries of 2008.
Analyzing the structural cleavages governing the contemporary political environment, Tuğtan posited that a dual axis now defines the landscape: the conventional left-right spectrum alongside a deep rift between globalists and anti-globalists. On matters of international trade and multilateral engagement, the progressive left and the populist right converge against party centers. “They meet at the horseshoe. Exactly that,” Tuğtan concurred with the host. Yet on domestic state functionality, the two factions diverge completely: while the populist right seeks the total privatization of public services, the democratic left insists on broadening bureaucratic capacity, strengthening social safety nets, and redistributing capital through progressive taxation. “Trump drove a bulldozer into the establishment and, in a sense, while tragic for him personally, he created this highway-like void that the left wing of the Democrats utilized,” Tuğtan noted.
“The issue of class has returned to America”
A critical breakthrough for the Democratic resurgence in these midterms was a conscious pivot away from hyper-individualized identity politics toward working-class material issues. Tuğtan argued that during the 1990s and 2010s, liberal elites substituted cultural and identity issues for structural class concerns, operating under the flawed premise that foundational economic problems had already been resolved.
“One of the most important characteristics of this new left, which we mentioned emerged in the 90s, was substituting identity issues for class issues. Meaning, the new left had an attitude like, ‘Class-related problems are now solved. We are the ones embracing identity-related problems,'” Tuğtan analyzed. “The Democratic Party candidates showed us that embracing identity issues does not eliminate the primacy of class issues; on the contrary, without talking about class issues, a significant portion of identity issues cannot be solved. This is one of the most significant innovations of this election for the left wing of the Democratic Party. The issue of class has returned to America.”
By neglecting the material hardships of the impoverished majority, earlier Democratic platforms inadvertently surrendered broad segments of the working class to the MAGA coalition. “The moment you do that, who are you leaving out? You are leaving out the white, Christian, heterosexual poor,” Tuğtan argued. “What are they worried about? They are worried about poverty. But they don’t hear this from the left. The Democratic Party worries about them being white, Christian, or American, but it doesn’t worry about their poverty. How will that work? How are they going to go and vote for the Democratic Party?”
In contrast, candidates such as El-Sayed neutralized polarizing culture-war attacks by grounding their campaigns strictly in collective material well-being. “They insisted on saying to Abdul El-Sayed, ‘You are a Muslim.’ ‘Do you have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?’ ‘This or that?’ Almost the entire Republican campaign was based on this. He insisted on not answering any of them. ‘My concern is the food, the jobs, and the healthcare of the people of Michigan. It is having proper schools. Come to me with these,’ he said,” Tuğtan explained. By rejecting identity-based politics, the party successfully reclaimed core socioeconomic terrain: “Now, this new generation has taken class as a central issue again, and with discourse emphasizing its importance, that mass has shifted back to where it belongs.”
Looking ahead to the 2028 presidential cycle, Tuğtan suggested that while it remains premature to identify a definitive Democratic standard-bearer, leaders capable of bridging the wing-to-center divide will command a substantial advantage. He highlighted Ossoff, Newsom, and Texas Congressman James Talarico as figures to monitor once formal primary contests commence in late 2027. “I think Ossoff would be a suitable candidate. Precisely because of his status as a disruptor of the status quo,” Tuğtan assessed. “You can’t call the guy an antisemite. He is Jewish himself. You can’t say he has a marginal profile, that he hates the rich or is hostile to wealth. He isn’t. But if you say he isn’t a leftist, well, one must be honest; the man is a leftist in his rhetoric and actions.” The party demonstrated broad cohesion across the country, with only isolated defections, such as Michigan Representative Haley Stevens crossing party lines to endorse Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers shortly before balloting.
“Donald Trump actually abused American state power”
Turning to international security, the discussion examined why Trump, despite running on an anti-interventionist platform, embroiled the country in an escalating war with Iran. Tuğtan rejected the notion that institutional deep-state pressures forced the administration’s hand, arguing instead that personal financial motives, family alliances, and sectarian electoral commitments dictated the decision.
“The thing that dragged Trump into the war was his own base rather than the establishment. Trump didn’t enter that war for the sake of the establishment,” Tuğtan stated. He explained that Trump’s primary political constituency includes an evangelical community that unconditionally endorses Israeli expansionism, while the administration maintained intricate personal and commercial ties with Israeli leadership. “On a personal level, he has extremely complicated relationships with leading figures of the Israeli government and business world, starting with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, including Netanyahu himself. The role Kushner played wasn’t just, ‘I’m going there in the name of America for diplomacy and peace’; we are talking about billions of dollars in wealth changing hands and trillions of dollars in fund flows. Therefore, Trump didn’t enter this war because he was interventionist in principle. He entered it directly for himself. In other words, Donald Trump actually abused American state power because his personal political and economic interests demanded it.”
Tuğtan added that external leverage, including public sensitivity surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files, further constrained the president, who was ultimately misled by promises of a rapid military campaign. “He believed the ‘quick victory’ scenario that was sold to him,” Tuğtan explained. “Because there was no one around him to question it, criticize it, or stop him, he got himself into a situation he didn’t know how to get out of. And that, as a matter of fact, became his political end. Right now, he has a war on his hands that he doesn’t know how to end, and he has already paid the price for it politically.”
This dynamic makes the final two months of 2026, leading up to the January 2027 congressional swearing-in, extraordinarily hazardous. “Ironically, this is also Trump’s most dangerous time right now. Because he has nothing left to lose. There is no price left for him to pay politically. I mean, if oil hits $200 instead of $100 from now on, what harm will that do to Trump?” Tuğtan warned, pointing out that an outgoing Secretary of Defense faces no future electoral test. “Therefore, the upcoming two months, November and December, are very critical. People are saying they might attack this weekend. We shall see. I hope he doesn’t do anything that crazy, but you know, when Trump and craziness are mentioned together, the verb at the end usually isn’t ‘doesn’t.’ Rather, it usually is ‘does.’ So, we are all waiting anxiously.”
“He has run out of moves domestically”
In the Middle East, the political landscape in Israel mirrors this acute volatility following legislative elections where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost power, prompting heightened regional tension. Facing domestic exhaustion, Netanyahu confronts an unprecedented challenge: Israeli Arab political parties have extended external backing to former Chief of General Staff Gadi Eisenkot, opening a path to form a government.
“Netanyahu also needs a game-changing move within these 2-3 months. He has run out of moves domestically,” Tuğtan observed. “Because Netanyahu was always playing on the lines between Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens, which he believed were impassable. For the first time, we see that these lines can be crossed. After the Arab parties’ statements of support for Eisenkot, if these lines can indeed be crossed, it means the end of Netanyahu’s domestic policy built on marginalization, hatred, and polarization.”
Tuğtan characterized Eisenkot’s maneuvering as politically astute: “Eisenkot, very smartly, did not directly say, ‘I will not cooperate with the Arabs.’ He listed the fundamental principles that ensure Israel remains a Zionist state and said, ‘I will accept the support of anyone who doesn’t have an issue with these principles.'” This development represents an immense psychological breakthrough, particularly given Eisenkot’s personal tragedy: “The reason Eisenkot entered the race for prime minister is that his son died while fighting in the Gaza clashes on December 7, 2023. The man lost a son and two nephews in the Gaza clashes. This man is a former Chief of General Staff. Now, for a profile like this, accepting Arab support to form a government is truly a very difficult threshold to cross. If he succeeds in this, Netanyahu really has no moves left to make internally.”
Blocked at home, Netanyahu faces intense pressure to alter the regional equation through direct strikes against Iranian sovereign facilities. Tuğtan noted that commentator Tucker Carlson had repeatedly disclosed warnings regarding potential strikes on the Natanz nuclear site. “Tucker Carlson has been saying this since April. Since April, about once every month, he’s been saying nuclear weapons could be used at any moment. In this context, he has somewhat taken on the role of an unappointed Medvedev. But, of course, this doesn’t mean it won’t be used right now. The fact that this is constantly being repeated is a serious enough situation, and conditions in these next two months are quite favorable for this for both sides, that is, for both the Israeli and American sides. Therefore, this is, of course, the most disturbing situation for the international system and the region.”
“The Democrats might just reopen that page”
Looking toward the longer-term horizon when the newly elected Democratic majorities take office in 2027, Tuğtan predicted a comprehensive attempt to institutionalize human rights, civic welfare, and international law as core principles of US statecraft. While Washington’s capacity to unilaterally dictate terms to the broader international system has receded, Democratic leadership will likely demand that formal allies align with fundamental governance benchmarks.
“American leadership has come to an end in the context of the world. I mean, America lost the ability to impose this on the rest of the world a long time ago,” Tuğtan observed. However, regarding strategic partners such as Türkiye or India, expectations will shift away from transactional arrangements toward defined political standards: “The Democrats might just reopen that page. It might do this to its allies. It could present it as a prerequisite. Like, if you are an ally of America, you will be governed by democracy. You will have, for better or worse, a capitalist economy. You will abide by the rules-based international system established after the World War.” Rebuilding ties with traditional European partners, strengthening Pacific alliances involving Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, and the Philippines, and engaging New Delhi will form the foundation of this foreign policy architecture. “If the Democrats come with a claim of a new America, a restored American leadership, one, they will want their allies to resemble them. Two, they will bring the emphasis on a rules-based international system back to the agenda much more strongly. And that will be the most important difference between them and Trump,” he said.
Concluding the interview, Tuğtan addressed the self-critical remarks recently delivered by US Vice President JD Vance regarding the administration’s military adventures. Tuğtan characterized Vance as the primary voice of the Republican Party’s isolationist, secular-nationalist wing, which opposed the conflict with Iran from its inception and remains deeply critical of US interventionism. However, Vance faces an uphill battle in unifying a party fractured by profound internal contradictions.
“In the Republican Party, besides the wing-center integration, there are serious conflicts within the wings between the evangelical theopolitical wing and the more secular fascist wing,” Tuğtan pointed out. While Vance represents an isolationist faction seeking to dismantle bureaucratic regulations while opposing corporate bailouts, he remains constrained by the 80 million-strong evangelical voting bloc whose theological convictions mandate unwavering involvement in the Middle East. “You have to get the votes of 80 million people somehow,” Tuğtan explained, drawing parallels to the 100 million evangelicals in Brazil who formed the political backbone for Jair Bolsonaro.
“The wing Vance represents is currently extremely troubled by Trump’s foreign policy. Because they think the domestic consequences of that foreign policy are costing the Republican Party, they are criticizing Trump through Vance’s voice,” Tuğtan concluded. “If you look at it now, Vance is the strongest presidential candidate for the Republican Party for the 2028 elections. Therefore, there is nothing surprising about Vance having already started the campaign. However, he has a very big disadvantage. What is that? It is very difficult for a vice president not to pay his share of the bill for the actions of a Trump administration.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having a relationship with a woman whom US intelligence concluded was passing information to China.
Nvidia announced on Sunday that its board of directors had launched an investigation into its CEO and co-founder, who confessed to having a close relationship with a businesswoman identified by US intelligence as a Chinese spy.
Huang’s involvement with the woman, known as Alice Huang, emerged as a matter of concern for the US government after surveillance operations revealed that she was funnelling information directly to Beijing.
Apologising in a message sent to the company, Huang said: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”
Nvidia’s board of directors stated that there was “no reason to believe national security or Nvidia confidential information was compromised,” but noted that “the board’s inquiry will review all available information.”
The statement added that Huang “fully supports and is cooperating with the inquiry.”
Independent board members will select outside legal counsel to conduct the investigation. Company spokesperson John Rizzo stated that Huang will not take part in the selection process.
The board announced that the 63-year-old Huang will remain at the helm of the company throughout the investigation.
As a co-founder of the company, Huang created a unique operating structure at Nvidia in which he directs all facets of the business while supervising approximately 60 people who report directly to him.
“Today’s news will not slow Nvidia down,” Rizzo said. “Jensen remains committed to leading Nvidia as CEO without interruption.”
Speaking briefly to reporters on Sunday evening as he prepared to depart Florida, Trump defended Huang.
The president said he would “certainly take him along” on his upcoming trip to China.
“I haven’t heard that he did anything wrong,” Trump said. “He did business with somebody, but you know, everybody does.”
Trump said he had not spoken with Huang regarding the matter, adding: “I know he’s a good person, but you never know what’s going on.”
Trump also added that he did not regret failing to take action roughly a year ago, when he was informed that US intelligence agencies were electronically monitoring Huang:
“I think he’s an honourable guy. He probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it out. No, you cannot treat people like that. He has done a magnificent job for our country.”
Asked whether Huang should continue in his role as Nvidia’s CEO, Trump replied: “I think so. Yes, of course.”
Public scrutiny surrounding Huang’s relationship began last month after The New York Times first reported that American intelligence agencies had discovered the Nvidia chief had established a close relationship with a Chinese citizen and chip buyer whom US officials concluded was gathering intelligence on behalf of Beijing.
The chip buyer was Huang Le. Her biography noted that she worked as a television reporter in China before becoming a senior executive at a Singapore-based data centre firm that grew into one of Nvidia’s largest customers in Southeast Asia.
That company had purchased chips worth more than $4.8 billion since June 2024.
Nvidia continued to do business with Ms Huang’s company, Megaspeed, even after the NYT reported last year that the Department of Commerce was investigating whether the firm was helping smuggle restricted artificial intelligence chips into China.
Nvidia and its CEO initially maintained that there was nothing problematic or out of the ordinary regarding his relationship with Huang Le.
In an interview with Bloomberg last month, Jensen Huang said his interactions with Huang Le were “related to Megaspeed, and all of it was completely normal and nothing out of the ordinary.”
According to the NYT, as business expanded rapidly, Jensen Huang placed his family at the core of the enterprise. His son, Spencer, is a product management director playing a leading role in the company’s robotics initiatives.
His daughter, Madison, serves as a senior director of product marketing, working both in robotics and across the company’s communications and marketing operations.
His son-in-law, Nico Caprez, works on the company’s business development team.
Huang had noted that his wife, Lori, whom he married in 1985, was the person who made founding the company possible. The pair met while Huang was a teenager studying engineering at Oregon State University.
Lori was one of three women in an engineering laboratory of 250 students. Having graduated high school two years early, Huang managed to join Lori’s laboratory group and sought to impress her with his intellect.
Conducting an investigation on suspicions that Megaspeed might be diverting advanced Nvidia AI chips to China, the US government placed Le under surveillance more than a year ago.
During the surveillance operation, it was revealed that Ms Huang was in contact with a US citizen identified as Mr Huang.
Officials reviewing the intelligence said they became certain the relationship between the two was romantic.
This development undermined misleading statements Nvidia had given to the NYT and other outlets over the past year regarding the nature of the relationship between Mr Huang and Ms Huang.
Last spring, Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the drafting of a top-secret memo detailing intelligence that showed Alice Huang had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to target Jensen Huang.
The memo was circulated earlier this year, shortly before the president’s trip to China.
Once reports emerged that Le Huang was being monitored by the US, Jensen’s room for manoeuvre vanished almost completely.
Congress was likely seeking his testimony under oath, and the monitoring reports raised the probability that US intelligence was aware of the nature of his relationship with Le.
Pressure was mounting on Nvidia’s board as well. In a social media post last month, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee that oversees overseas chip sales, said Mr Huang and the company’s board of directors had “an obligation to answer to Congress” regarding the relationship with the spy.
Venezuelan billionaire Alejandro Betancourt has become the Donald Trump administration’s key partner in the country’s oil sector.
According to a report by The Washington Post, Betancourt is building an energy empire by securing rights to oilfields holding 63.7 billion barrels in reserves with Washington’s backing.
In return for the cooperation, the US is expected to acquire a stake in the billionaire’s company and obtain a portion of the extracted crude at a discounted price.
Under the terms of the 50-year agreement reviewed by the newspaper, the US administration will take over a 35% stake in Betancourt’s company, North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), virtually free of charge.
The businessman has also pledged to sell 20% of the extracted oil to Washington at $30 per barrel, a price lower than one-third of its current market value.
The Venezuelan state, meanwhile, will receive royalty revenues ranging from 16% to 40% of production, depending on the location and type of the field.
Described as a controversial figure in the Venezuelan business world, Betancourt worked in the past with the government of Hugo Chavez supporters and was among the suspects in a lawsuit involving alleged embezzlement of public funds.
While Swiss and Spanish authorities continue to investigate the billionaire over suspected money laundering, Betancourt denies the wrongdoing allegations against him.
Mauricio Claver-Carone, a former Trump administration official responsible for contacts with Venezuela’s new leadership, justified the choice of Betancourt by citing the businessman’s efficiency and his track record of successfully implementing oil projects.
Having raised daily oil production from 18,000 barrels to roughly 223,000 barrels since his return to Venezuela at the end of 2023, Betancourt aims to bring this figure to 275,000 barrels by the end of the year and to 350,000 barrels next year.
Seeking to expand his business volume, the billionaire plans to channel nearly all of his cash flow, which is expected to exceed $5 billion in 2026, into new fields.
Experts, on the other hand, view the agreement’s future with scepticism, pointing out that operating new fields in the Orinoco oil belt will require massive investments and years of work.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado criticised the deal over a lack of transparency, announcing that the terms could be reviewed if she comes to power.
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez supported the agreement, describing the process as one of the pillars of her interim government.
In addition, Bloomberg reported in early September that a $100 billion plan between the US and Venezuela to boost oil production was jeopardised by financing uncertainties.
The report noted that Washington had not clarified who would provide these funds to repair the country’s devastated oil infrastructure or under what terms.
US President Donald Trump announced on 29 August that Washington had reached an agreement to secure control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil through a private sector partnership.
Trump stated that the agreement would more than double US oil reserves, increase global oil supply, and lower petrol prices in the long run.
Identifying NABEP as the project’s primary private operator, Bloomberg noted that the company lacked sufficient resources to finance an operation of this scale on its own.
The agency also pointed out that a portion of the declared oil reserves lacked credible confirmation, that repairing the infrastructure would require high costs and many years, and that completing the project before Trump’s presidential term ends in January 2029 appeared difficult.
The Financial Times also reported that despite plans by the Trump administration and Caracas, Venezuela faced a shortage of the qualified labour needed to revive the oil sector and boost production.
Blue tsunami and Iran conflict expose deep US cracks, Dr. Tuğtan says
The Mecca Defence Agreement, the Ottoman Empire, and the facts
George Szamuely dissects European decline and strategic rifts with US
Nvidia investigates CEO Jensen Huang over link to Chinese spy
US secures 35% stake in Venezuelan firm NABEP under 50-year deal
-
Diplomacy1 week agoSecular dress code dispute exposes deeper Türkiye-Azerbaijan strains
-
Russia2 weeks agoUS and Russia weigh energy deals and corporate return in peace talks
-
Europe2 weeks agoMerz visits Asia to seek new markets for German defence firms
-
Europe2 weeks agoSerbia opposition wins snap vote as Vucic concedes defeat
-
America2 weeks agoPentagon prepares US bases for 90-day siege in global war plan
-
Europe2 weeks agoAfD drops Dexit to back single market in new Europe strategy
-
America2 weeks agoLula defeats Flavio Bolsonaro to seal historic Brazilian comeback
-
Middle East2 weeks agoUS warns Gulf allies of possible Iran strikes after midterms
