I won’t be buying any new cars from 2026 onward….

Federal Law Forces Invasive Driver Surveillance Systems into Every New U.S. Car by 2027

Congress enacted Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, directing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to mandate advanced impaired driving prevention technology in all new passenger vehicles.

This federal requirement locks in for model year 2027, with rollout accelerating toward late 2026.

Infrared cameras, AI-powered algorithms, and biometric sensors will embed directly into vehicle dashboards nationwide.

These systems will relentlessly scan eye movements, head position, pupil changes, breathing rhythms, steering behavior, and other vital signs in real time.

Detection of suspected impairment, whether accurate or triggered by a false positive, triggers automatic intervention: the car refuses to start or abruptly limits speed, stranding drivers without appeal.

NHTSA’s own February 2026 report to Congress admits current technology falls far short of required accuracy, warning that even high detection thresholds could generate millions of erroneous shutdowns annually.

Yet the statutory mandate presses forward unchanged. Congressional efforts to repeal or defund it (including amendments backed by Rep. Thomas Massie) collapsed in January 2026, sealing the timeline.

Every new vehicle will carry an extra several hundred dollars in hidden costs.

The law creates a vast, uncharted biometric data ecosystem inside private cars, with no ironclad protections against hacking, insurer access, or warrantless government queries.

Sensitive personal information—your gaze, fatigue levels, potential medical signals—will flow through systems ripe for abuse as surveillance capabilities expand.

This marks a chilling federal takeover of personal mobility.

Americans will sit under constant algorithmic judgment every time they enter a new vehicle, with machines empowered to override human decisions on the open road.

I do not consent to this government-mandated surveillance embedded in my car.

Do you?

Copied from Kari Bundy

 

Why Is No One Talking About the Fact That Ghislaine Maxwell's Eldest Sisters Built Tech Surveillance Infrastructure for U.S. and Israeli Intelligence?

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST
Apr 28, 2026

As President Donald Trump considers a pardon for convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (with a majority of Republican members of the House Oversight Committee publicly favoring the move) two of her older sisters, fraternal twins who built surveillance and data-mining systems used by the FBI and Israeli intelligence, have received little public scrutiny.

Isabel and Christine Maxwell, 75, were born August 16, 1950, in Maisons-Laffitte, France. They are daughters of Robert Maxwell, the British media tycoon whose 1991 funeral was attended by six sitting heads of Israeli intelligence services and eulogized by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stated Maxwell had “done more for Israel than can today be said.” Biographers Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon documented Maxwell as a high-level Mossad (Israeli intelligence) asset who used his empire to distribute PROMIS — a stolen, backdoored Department of Justice database system Maxwell sold to nations, intelligence agencies, and other institutions worldwide, including U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories in New Mexico.

Both twins worked at Information on Demand, the company Robert Maxwell used to distribute PROMIS software inside the United States. Robert Maxwell purchased the company in 1982. Christine Maxwell headed it from 1985 until her father's death in 1991, during which period she helped sell the bugged software to several Fortune 500 companies. Isabel Maxwell also worked there. The FBI opened an investigation into Information on Demand in October 1983. The FBI's own sources, cited in congressional records, indicated that top DOJ officials conspired to obstruct related PROMIS investigations during the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese, under President Ronald Reagan.

Christine Maxwell

In 1982, Christine Maxwell acquired Information on Demand.

After co-founding the early search engine Magellan with Isabel — sold to Excite in 1996 — Christine co-founded Chiliad, a software company specializing in federated search across disparate databases. She also partnered with CIA official Alan Wade to market Chiliad’s homeland security software to the U.S. national security state.

Christine Maxwell also served as a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, the private complexity-science research center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded by nuclear weapons scientists, that Jeffrey Epstein used as his primary intellectual justification for purchasing Zorro Ranch. Epstein stated publicly that he bought the ranch in order to be near the institute's scientists.

Ghislaine Maxwell told investigators in a 2025 deposition that it was she who led Epstein to New Mexico and encouraged him to buy the ranch. Her sister Christine, she has said, connected Epstein to the Santa Fe Institute and its head at the time, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, in the 1990s. Robert Maxwell’s foundation, through Christine, had donated $300,000 to endow a Maxwell Professorship at the institute beginning in 1990 — three years before Epstein bought Zorro Ranch. Christine Maxwell's trusteeship at the institution that served as Epstein's stated reason for planting himself in New Mexico has not been widely reported, if at all.

Following the September 11 attacks, the FBI contracted Chiliad to build and operate its Investigative Data Warehouse, the agency’s primary counterterrorism database, enabling searches across millions of classified documents from multiple agencies. According to a 2008 Business Wire report, the system connected to databases of the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon, with 8,000 active FBI user accounts executing one million searches per month. Christine Maxwell served as a board director of Chiliad as recently as August 2019. No public record of a counterintelligence review of that contract exists, and no public record documents when or whether it ended.

Christine is married to Roger Malina, a physicist and astronomer who holds dual appointments as distinguished professor of arts and technology and professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas. The marriage places Christine in Dallas, where public records show the couple own an apartment less than three hours from Ghislaine’s current prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Public records also show Isabel has used the same Dallas apartment as a base.

Roger Malina’s lineage is its own thread. His father, Frank Malina, was a rocket propulsion engineer and the second director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — one of the builders of America’s early space program. The FBI labeled Frank Malina a socialist during the McCarthy era and forced him to flee to Paris, where he became a kinetic artist and founded Leonardo Journal, the peer-reviewed publication at the intersection of art and science that his son Roger now edits for MIT Press. Leonardo Journal was first published by Pergamon, Robert Maxwell’s company. The son of the man the FBI surveilled and drove into exile married the daughter of the man who allegedly sold backdoored software to American intelligence agencies, and that man published the magazine his father founded. Roger Malina has spent his career at the institution his father helped build, now embedded at a Texas university three hours from the prison holding his sister-in-law.

Christine and Roger Malina’s sons extend the family’s reach further. Their son Xavier worked on the Obama-Biden 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently served in the Office of White House Personnel at the Executive Office of the President, before becoming a lecturer at UC Berkeley and a product analyst at Google. Their son Yuri co-founded SwipeSense, a venture-backed healthcare startup whose technology was used for contact tracing and electronic monitoring in hospitals, acquired by SC Johnson in 2020. Public records show Yuri Malina also holds a patent jointly with his aunt — convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell — for a wearable gel sanitizer dispenser.

Isabel Maxwell

After her father’s death, Isabel Maxwell became president of CommTouch, an Israeli-American email security firm, in 1997. The company went public on NASDAQ in 1999 after receiving $20 million personal investments each from Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. CommTouch was later rebranded CYREN and focused on cybersecurity before ceasing operations in February 2023.

Isabel also served as president of iCognito, an Israeli web content filtering company later renamed Puresight, from 2003 to 2004. She joined the board of Israeli technology company Backweb alongside Gil Shwed, co-founder of Check Point Software and a veteran of Unit 8200, the Israeli signals intelligence directorate. She served on the board of the Shimon Peres Center for Peace and was a regular participant at the Herzliya Conference, an annual closed-door gathering of senior Western intelligence and security officials.

In a parallel to her sister’s family connection inside a United States presidential administration, Isabel’s son, Alexander Djerassi, worked as a policy associate on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before being appointed chief of staff and special assistant in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs under Secretary Clinton. He served from 2009 to 2012, working on the Arab Spring and representing the United States at the Friends of Libya and Friends of the Syrian People conferences.

Isabel Maxwell’s first husband Dale Djerassi's father invented the birth control pill; David Hayden, her second husband, co-founded the search engine Magellan with her and her sister.

Her third husband was Al Seckel, Epstein's reputation manager and island conference organizer.

Seckel, an American self-described cognitive neuroscientist and expert in optical illusions, married Isabel around 2007. He had fabricated his academic credentials. He was later exposed as a serial fraudster who left behind a trail of debt, court actions, and bankruptcy when he and Isabel fled the United States for France around 2010.

Before the exposure, Seckel had made himself useful to Epstein in two documented ways. He co-organized the Mindshift Conference, a science gathering held on Epstein’s private island Little Saint James in 2010 and 2011, featuring scientists and cryptocurrency entrepreneur Brock Pierce. He also ran a paid reputation-management operation for Epstein post-conviction, coordinating efforts to suppress negative search results, manipulate Wikipedia to remove Epstein’s mugshot and references to pedophilia, and push down critical press coverage. Epstein paid him tens of thousands of dollars for these services. The operation is documented in emails spanning from at least 2009 through 2013.

Seckel died in 2015 at the bottom of a 100-foot cliff near their home in France. French authorities ruled the death a suicide, concluding he jumped as he was about to be publicly exposed as a fraud. Questions about the circumstances of his death persisted for years. He appears in 1,723 documents in the DOJ-released Epstein files.

Federal Record

When FBI agents arrested Ghislaine Maxwell in July 2020, they tracked her using an IMSI-catcher device monitoring a phone she used to call three people: her husband Scott Borgerson, one of her attorneys, and her sister Isabel.

In April 2026, seven days after Melania Trump issued a surprise White House statement denying personal ties to Maxwell and Epstein, Maxwell sent prosecutors a USB drive via FedEx containing a self-written motion to vacate her conviction and approximately 50 exhibits she described as substantial new evidence — filed past her legal deadline. Prosecutors called the motion meritless. The government has until June 5, 2026 to respond.

It should be noted that the new owners of Zorro Ranch, Mary Catherine and Donald Huffines, are also in Dallas. They tried to purchase the ranch secretly but were outed by The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper in January 2026.

In a parallel to the sons of the Maxwell twins, a Huffines son, Russell, was placed in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs as Associate Director of Agency Outreach in June 2025 — during the same period the family owned Epstein's ranch under a concealed LLC and Russell’s boss, Donald Trump, was weighing a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell.

No link has been established between the Maxwell and Huffines families, though the Huffines have kept the two FCC licenses assigned to the bidirectional private, military/industrial grade microwave radio communications network on the ranch active, in the Zorro Development name, with Epstein’s former ranch manager, Brice Gordon, still listed on the license.

(Please note: Ghislaine’s other sister Anne is an actress who appears to live a quiet life.)

SOURCES

— Newsweek, “Will Trump Pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Bettors Think It’s Looking More Likely,” April 24, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-pardon-ghislaine-maxwell...

— Spectrum News, “Lawmakers push back against pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell,” April 24, 2026. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/.../ghislaine-maxwell...

— Forbes, contacted 25 Republican Oversight Committee members, April 25, 2026. Cited in multiple outlets.

— Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002.

— Yitzhak Shamir eulogy, documented in multiple biographies and news accounts of Robert Maxwell’s 1991 funeral.

— Whitney Webb, “The Maxwell Family Business: Espionage,” Unlimited Hangout, July 2020. https://unlimitedhangout.com/.../the-maxwell-family.../

— Whitney Webb, “Meet Ghislaine: Daddy’s Girl,” Unlimited Hangout, December 2021. https://unlimitedhangout.com/.../meet-ghislaine-daddys-girl/

— MuckRock / Emma Best, “The Undying Octopus: FBI and the PROMIS Affair Part 1,” May 2017. https://www.muckrock.com/.../2017/may/16/FBI-promis-part-1/

— The Inslaw Affair, Chapter 17, U.S. House Judiciary Committee records. https://ia801309.us.archive.org/.../Chapter%2017%20...

— Christine Maxwell, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maxwell

— Business Wire, “Chiliad, the Company That Solved the 9/11 ‘Connecting the Dots’ Problem, Hires Dan Ferranti as CEO,” March 3, 2008. https://www.inknowvation.com/.../chiliad-company-solved...

— InformationWeek, “FBI Shows Off Counterterrorism Database.” https://www.informationweek.com/.../fbi-shows-off...

— Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Report on the Investigative Data Warehouse.” https://www.eff.org/.../investigative-data-warehouse-report

— Christine Maxwell, Wikipedia, board director of Chiliad as of August 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maxwell

— Santa Fe New Mexican, “Jeffrey Epstein files shed light on ties to Santa Fe Institute scientists,” February 2026. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/.../jeffrey-epstein.../

— Christine Maxwell, Wikidata, employer listed as Santa Fe Institute. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18209212

— Christine Maxwell, Wikipedia, former trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Maxwell

— Roger Malina, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Malina

— Frank Malina, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Malina

— NASA JPL, “Dr. Frank J. Malina (1912-1981).” https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/.../dr-frank-j-malina-1912-1981/

— Pasadena Now, “Frank Malina: JPL Co-Founder and Rocketry Pioneer Finally Gets His Due,” November 2022. https://pasadenanow.com/.../jpl-co-founder-and-rocketry...

— Leonardo/ISAST, “Our History” — Leonardo Journal first published by Pergamon Press 1968-1991. https://leonardo.info/history

— Adina Flores Substack, “Ghislaine Maxwell’s Family Moved to SF Bay Area for AI & Gene Studies,” June 2025.

— Yuri Malina personal website.

https://www.yurimalina.com

I HAD TO EXPLAIN PART OF THE MAJOR DEPOPULATION AGENDA TO SOMEONE AND I AM NOW SHARING IT WITH YOU:

Joanne Birsan Addis, the 5G grid is already in place in most of the world. The United States has it all over and Europe is coming on strong with it too. It is what is killing the people in China, Spain and Italy, and it was installed onto the "Princess" cruise ship, also. 5G makes the Electrons in the Oxygen molecules move very quickly so, when the Oxygen is in the lungs, the Hemoglobin Protein in the blood stream cannot absorb the Oxygen, because of the speeding Electrons. Therefore, the Oxygen does not reach the brain and that is why you have people in Wuhan falling over dead and people with weak respiratory systems dying in different countries where the 5G grid has been installed. Wuhan installed 5G as a "pilot test" in 2018. They knew exactly what they were doing because, they put the Coronavirus in the forced vaccinations that the Chinese citizens had to take in 2019, right before the Coronavirus bioweapon was blamed on a false "Outbreak" from an animal market. Why do you think the only BSL-4 biological laboratory in all of China is in Wuhan? The Coronavirus is not a very dangerous virus actually and only kills people that have very weak immune systems or are terminally ill amongst other complications. The Coronavirus is being used to cover up the same symptoms of the much more dangerous 5G electromagnetic radiation. This is the MAJOR DEPOPULATION AGENDA.

#pureblood #massawakening

 

 

What a Data Center Does to Where You Live — And How Far the Damage Reaches

They tell you it's just a building full of computers. Here's what they don't tell you.

AT THE FENCE LINE:

The air around a data center is not the same air you grew up breathing. Diesel backup generators — which these facilities require by the dozens or even hundreds — release fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) linked to asthma, heart disease, and respiratory illness. Those generators emit 200 to 600 times more nitrogen oxides than natural gas plants. (World Resources Institute) At the xAI facility in Memphis, a Time Magazine investigation found that nitrogen dioxide levels in the air markedly increased from pre-data center levels in areas immediately surrounding the facility. (Sehn)

The noise never stops. Internal noise levels can reach up to 96 decibels — well above the 85 dB threshold considered harmful to human hearing. (PubMed Central) Neighbors near a Virginia facility described sound levels of 90 decibels at their homes. One resident said he can no longer open his windows. Another put mattresses against the glass to block it out.

The light from hyperscale facilities runs all night, disrupting the natural circadian rhythms of the body — including melatonin production and sleep-wake cycles. (EHP) Sleep disruption. Chronic stress. Hearing loss. These aren't hypotheticals. They are documented outcomes in communities that said yes before they understood what they were saying yes to.

WITHIN A MILE:

The land changes. The average data center site in 2024 covered about 224 acres — roughly 450 football fields — a 144% increase in footprint since 2022. (World Resources Institute) Farmland gone. Forests cleared. Viewsheds destroyed.

The water starts disappearing. A mid-sized data center uses roughly 300,000 gallons of water per day — the same as 1,000 homes. (Nixon Peabody) Between 80 and 90 percent of that water comes from surface water or groundwater — often the same sources your tap water comes from. (Fwpcoa) Most of it evaporates in the cooling towers and never comes back.

Wildlife starts acting differently. Researchers describe data centers as potential "sensory danger zones" — places where light and noise exceed the thresholds at which there are measurable fitness consequences for species. (National Wildlife Federation) Animal communication breaks down. Migration patterns shift. Nesting fails.

MILES AWAY — AND DOWNSTREAM:

The water table doesn't stop at the property line. Heavy reliance on groundwater can lead to aquifer depletion that threatens ecosystems and diminishes long-term water availability for surrounding communities — not just those next door. (Waterplan)

The power plants that feed these facilities pollute far beyond the data center itself. Datacenters rely heavily on energy from large-scale power plants — facilities now increasingly co-located with data centers to avoid delays in grid upgrades. (arXiv) Whatever that plant burns, your airshed absorbs.

A September 2025 study found that air pollutants from data center operations increase rates of respiratory diseases and cardiovascular conditions, and elevate cancer risks among nearby communities. (EHP)

THIS IS PENNSYLVANIA RIGHT NOW.

From Penn Forest Township to Kline Township to Salem Township to Archbald Borough — proposals are moving. Permits are being filed.

Ordinances are being written or ignored.

The research is clear. The damage is real. The question is whether your municipality is asking the hard questions before the ground gets broken — or after.

You deserve to know what's being built next to your water. Your air. Your land.

PA Data Center Accountability / Carbon County, PA

Unpaid. Independent. Sourced.

#VESTLife #Amazon #SusquehannaRiver #Pennsylvania #DataCenters #DontBelieveThoseLies

Sources: National Wildlife Federation (Sept. 2025) · World Resources Institute (Feb. 2026) · Environmental Health Project (Feb. 2026) · PMC/Public Health Research (2025) · Science & Environmental Health Network (Aug. 2025) · Nixon Peabody/Joyce Foundation (2024) · Smithsonian Magazine (Sept. 2025)

 

While Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein for a military intelligence pedophile compromat operation, her two oldest sisters — twins almost nobody has heard of — were quietly building surveillance infrastructure technology for the CIA and Israeli intelligence. Their work has been a continuation of their father Robert's intelligence spy software work. One twin built the FBI's post-9/11 counterterrorism database, still in use today. The other became Israel's primary back door into Silicon Valley, with backing from Bill Gates.

Keep that in mind as we watch in utter disbelief as congress supports the pardon of Ghislaine in coming days.

Whatever dark things can be known about the lawmakers who will decide Ghislaine's fate, her sisters surely possess.

I have a piece about the twins coming on Monday.

No one in corporate US news media is telling the truth about this family or the child sex trafficking ring.

~ Alisa Valdes Rodriguez

The Pugilist, Substack

 

The family of Robert Maxwell is so saturated with unadulterated evil it makes one wonder if there isn't a bloodline connection with the Rothschild's'.

 

Scott Ritter: It is a bad time to be a Gulf Arab State.

The United States and #Israel took a gamble when launching their surprise attack on #Iran on February 28 of this year. To the extent that they were consulted beforehand, America’s Gulf Arab allies did so as well.

They lost.

No discernable political or military objectives were attained by the practitioners of perfidy—neither regime change, missile suppression, nor control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead, the anti-Iranian cabal was compelled to seek a ceasefire that left Iran in total control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, throttling both regional and global economies by blocking the transit of the very energy that they rely upon for their functioning, and their military intact, capable and defiant, able to deliver devastatingly damaging blows to their enemies lairs.

The 40-day war between the US/Israeli/Gulf Arab States cabal and Iran has underscored a reality that is difficult for many to accept—that military capability of the United States to project force into the Middle East has eroded to the point of near impotence, and that the original US-centered security architecture that has been in place for decades has failed to prevent Iran from acquiring de facto control over the very energy chokepoints the US was supposed to secure. This new reality will compel the region and the world to move away from concepts centered on US-based military-centric deterrence to a multipolar security framework derived from economic reality which will involve #Russia, #China, and #BRICS-like relationships. The legacy military doctrine upon which the old security relationships were founded is no longer viable, and any effort to revive legacy military doctrine would be prohibitively expensive, and ultimately unachievable.

In short, the US lost because its foundational military-centric approach toward regional problem solving was no longer effective, and no amount of defense spending can reverse this reality.

This is going to be a very difficult reality for those nations, like the Gulf Arab States and #India, who had premised their strategic postures on the premise and promise of American military dominance.

Now these nations warn the world about the weakening of the rule-of-law when it comes to losing control of the Strait of Hormuz, noting that there are numerous similar chokepoints which could be at risk if the Hormuz precedent stands, risking wider conflict and disruption of globalization. These leaders now promote the notion that peace depends on co-prosperity, pipelines, trade, and sustainable economic networks rather than military occupation or escalation.

These, of course, were precisely the policies Iran has been promoting for decades, only to be given the stiff arm by their Arab neighbors who felt safe and secure behand a US security umbrella which proved illusory.

Indian officials likewise reside in a never-never land which seeks a return to the pre-conflict status quo. It is too late for this, however. India has habitually been on the wrong side of the equation when it comes to Iran, siding with Israel (which Prime Minister Modi visited on the eve of the war) and the US when it comes to Iran and its strategic partners, like China. India’s involvement in the Quad does not escape notice at a time when the US is promoting the naval blockade of Iranian shipping.

The reality for the Gulf Arab States is that the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and that their past assumptions about the automatic military-based reopening by the US Navy no longer holds. While the energy producing nations of the region seek concrete contingency measures such as expanded use of the East–West pipelines in Saudi Arabia and proposals for additional pipelines and increased loading capacity at Yambor and Fujairah, the reality is that the majority of the regions energy production capacity remains locked in the Persian Gulf, unable to reach market. production remains locked in. Even if the war ended today, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and regional infrastructure recovery would require months to resolve.

The arrogance of the Gulf Arab States remains manifest, however. These nations posture that the Gulf states need not accommodate Iran, and that these same Gulf states are waiting for Iranian good faith before engaging on solutions to the problems that exist today.

It’s as if the Gulf Arab States didn’t have decades of history of colluding with the US and Israel against Iran, including providing facilities and territory used by both nations to stage the military. intelligence and logistical resources which enabled the February 28 surprise attack. The Gulf Arab States were complicit in this perfidy, and yet today they wish to play the victim card.

Iran isn’t buying it.

The bottom line is that the Gulf Arab states have effectively lost whatever strategic position they enjoyed before the war. Instead of seeking a reset to a time when their complicity was ongoing yet not openly acknowledged, the Gulf Arab States must—if they wish to survive this current crisis intact—accept the strategic defeat of the US-led regional anti-Iranian cabal, and recognize the permanence and prominence of the Islamic Republic. To do this, these Gulf Arab States must learn to think beyond a US-dominated paradigm, and instead embrace a new reality where Russia, China, and eastern powers factor in future security planning.

Simply put, a resumption of the war is not an option the Gulf Arab States can entertain, if for no other reason that they will not survive such a turn of events. The Iranian government has published the strategic energy production infrastructure which will be targeted for destruction by Iran should Iran be subjected to an attack. If Iran were to follow through on their threats—and past precedent strongly indicates it would do so—then the Gulf Arab States would suffer permanent crippling of their energy-based economic capacity, which would be the knell for these nations as viable modern nation states.

Diplomacy is the only path forward that does not lead to the certain destruction of the Gulf Arab States. There is no military option. And given the fact that Iran holds all the cards (despite what President Trump says), the Gulf Arab States must understand that any diplomatic solution to the current crisis must acknowledge and comply with Iranian demands to remove the US military presence from the region.

The bottom line is that, going forward in the Middle East, there must be a recognition by all parties involved that the US is the problem, not the solution, and any nation which continues to rely upon the US to get them out of the current predicament will only find sorrow and despair.

There is a new Middle Eastern power paradigm at play today.

And it doesn’t include the United States