🇺🇸🕊🇮🇷 The U.S. might not rebuild the bases destroyed by Iran during the 3rd Gulf War

The Pentagon is evaluating its military footprint in the Middle East in an early sign of the Iran war’s potential to transform the U.S. presence in the region, according to eight people, including officials and others familiar with the matter.

One of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America’s large overseas military bases have been battered by months of Iranian strikes, two people familiar with the ongoing analysis said.

The damage to these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled that it might not rebuild its bases as they were before the conflict.

The evaluation is being led by the Pentagon’s policy office, though a senior Pentagon official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive analysis, said that the Joint Staff and U.S. Central Command were also studying the issue.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had not yet ordered a formal review of U.S. posture in the region, the official said. Instead, the official cast the analysis as “prudent planning” that could eventually inform how the administration addresses whether to rebuild the bases damaged during the war.

“Decisions are going to have to be made on some of this stuff,” the official said.

U.S. Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East, normally stations about 40,000 troops across almost 20 sites in a 1,500-mile arc from Jordan to Oman.

Since early this year, the military has surged warships, fighters, air defense assets and other scarce military equipment to the region to defend U.S. forces and carry out more than 13,000 strikes against Iran.

People familiar with the Pentagon’s analysis said the issue is likely to intensify a debate between camps within the administration that support military interventions and others that have argued the Pentagon should curtail some of its security commitments to refocus on defending the U.S. homeland or deterring more powerful adversaries, like China.

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/18/pentagon-evaluating-smaller-us-military-presence-persian-gulf-after-iran-war/

🔼 🇺🇸 🛢 US oil prices rise above $87/barrel for the first time since July 24th as President Trump says "Economic D-Day" is coming for Iran.

US Treasury Yields are rising as inflation expectations mount.

📎 KobeissiLetter

🇺🇸❌🇱🇧 The U.S. Treasury Department has introduced new sanctions on Hezbollah and weapons smugglers working with it

Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is designating 10 individuals that are part of a network responsible for transferring cash to Hizballah. The network utilizes couriers travelling on commercial airline flights between Lebanon, Turkiye, the UAE, and Iran to move up to hundreds of millions of dollars between jurisdictions, providing an avenue outside the formal financial system for Hizballah to obtain foreign currency and evade sanctions. OFAC is also re-designating Hizballah for service to the Iranian regime under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF).

🔗 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0611

🏦 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 Pilkington: The US is losing control, not just over global markets, but over their own bond markets.

Philip Pilkington’s read on this week comes down to one thing: control. More specifically, who is starting to lose it.

He points to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s intervention in the bond market, where Treasury sold short-term bills to help fund purchases of longer-term bonds. It was an unusual move that effectively stepped into territory normally handled by the Fed. It lasted less than a day before yields climbed again.

For Pilkington, the bigger issue is what the move says about the system: Treasury appeared willing to fight its own central bank in the middle of a crisis, suggesting the coordination between Washington’s institutions is starting to break down.

He sees something similar in the yen intervention. Washington shorted the euro to support the yen, which Pilkington sees as a departure from the usual rules of currency diplomacy. He interprets the ECB’s warning about a possible AI bubble as a response rather than a neutral observation.

His argument is that European pension funds could take that as a signal to start quietly reducing their exposure to U.S. equities.

His strongest analogy is the doorknob. You never think about how it works until suddenly it doesn’t. Pilkington argues that the same is true of things like the U.S. military’s reputation, the dollar’s perceived safety and the Fed’s authority over markets.

Much of that power depends on confidence and expectations. His view is that Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz has put several of those assumptions under pressure at the same time.

He is also skeptical of the Axios report suggesting oil shipping through Oman has returned close to pre-war levels. He points instead to diesel crack spreads above $100 and reports from contacts receiving genuine requests for physical fuel.

His China argument also runs against the obvious assumption. Beijing no longer needs to protect the U.S. economy in the way it once did, because years of shifting exports toward the Global South have reduced its dependence on American demand.

If Washington responds with secondary sanctions, Pilkington expects China to retaliate by restricting rare earth exports. In his view, that could hit the AI industry very quickly rather than gradually.

The system won't collapse on a particular day. He is arguing that several pressures are building at once, and that systems can look stable right up until the moment they aren’t.

📎 Mario Nawfal

🇸🇾🇸🇾⚡️ — NEW: SDF chief Mazloum Abdi says the integration of Kurdish-led forces into the Syrian state has been completed, describing it as the beginning of a “new stage” for the country.

Abdi said all non-Syrian Kurdish fighters who helped the SDF have now left Syria, while adding that “our struggle will continue to guarantee the rights of the Kurdish people in the Syrian constitution.”

🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — The USS Abraham Lincoln has departed the Middle East and begun its journey home to San Diego after a nine-month deployment, with the Japan-based USS George Washington taking its place, NYT reports.

The Lincoln departed San Diego on November 21 and spent nearly all of its 272-day deployment at sea while supporting U.S. operations against Iran. Its roughly 5,000 sailors now face a 13,000-mile journey home expected to take four to five weeks.

🇺🇸❌✝️ New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill Signs Bill Banning Praying Outside Abortion Centers

New Jersey Right to Life (NJRTL) strongly condemns Governor Mikie Sherrill’s decision to sign S2260 into law. This legislation grants sweeping legal immunity to abortion providers and erects new barriers against accountability for activities the state now broadly labels “reproductive health care,” shielding them from certain investigations, legal actions, and records requests originating outside New Jersey.

“Governor Sherrill just signed a blank check for the abortion industry and a death warrant for countless unborn children with beating hearts, and she did it despite thousands of emails from New Jersey residents urging her to veto this bill,” said NJRTL Executive Director Marie Tasy. “S2260 does not protect women. It protects the people who end the lives of living human children already growing in the womb. New Jersey should be a sanctuary for mothers and babies, not a legal fortress for those who profit from abortion.”

The bill also creates a new crime of “interference with reproductive health care services.” “Because terms such as “threat,” “intimidate,” and “coerce” are inherently subjective and rest on individual feelings, this language poses a serious danger to free speech,” said Tasy. “Peaceful sidewalk counseling, prayer, holding signs, or simply offering help and alternatives outside a facility can easily be labeled “intimidation” by someone who claims to feel threatened, leaving pro-life advocates open to criminal charges that are difficult to disprove and chilling constitutionally protected expression.”

“The use of the term ‘reproductive’ to describe abortion defies the very meaning of reproduction. Reproduction has already taken place once a child is conceived. Abortion does not advance reproduction; it ends the life of a living human child whose heart is already beating. Calling a procedure whose intended outcome is the death of that child “health care” is a perverse distortion of both language and reality.”

🔗 https://www.lifenews.com/2026/08/20/new-jersey-gov-mikie-sherrill-signs-bill-banning-praying-outside-abortion-centers/

🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 JD Vance on Iran:

We're kind of now in a new phase where the most effective tool that we have is the economic pressure that we can apply to them.

And this is a delicate dance because we apply economic pressure to them. They're going to try to apply economic pressure to us.

But what has been true over the last couple of weeks is they felt a lot more pressure than we have.

We're going to keep that going because we think that's the best way.

📝 Anon: The U.S. put Cuba under an embargo in 1960 and the communist regime there is still surviving after all those years. Cuba is an island nation reliant on food and oil imports and is surrounded by enemies but the Trump Admin for some reason believes that what didn't work on Cuba will work on Iran who has much easier access to the Russian and Chinese markets to buy and sell goods.

📝 Anon: The Trump Admin admitting that economic pressure is the only option left that can "hurt" Iran is the closest to an admission of defeat in the 3rd Gulf War one can get from the current Administration.

🔗 Clash Report (@clashreport)

🇺🇸⚡️ — New research suggests more than 150 Polymarket wallets may have traded using inside information about U.S. military operations, Reuters reports.

The Anti-Corruption Data Collective identified 152 highly successful wallets betting on military and defense events, collectively earning about $8 million with an average win rate of 97.2%.

Some suspicious wagers were placed shortly before U.S. military actions, including strikes involving Iran, and were subsequently copied by large traders and automated bots. Researchers warn that because Polymarket transactions are publicly visible, such activity could inadvertently signal sensitive information to foreign intelligence services.

The findings do not prove insider trading, and researchers acknowledge that luck or other explanations are possible. However, they have intensified concerns about national security risks and calls for tighter oversight of prediction markets.

🗳 🇺🇸 📊 Hypothetical 2028 Presidential Matchups

2028 GE: Presidential Election

🟥 Marco Rubio: 48%
🟦 A. Ocasio-Cortez: 43%
—
🟥 JD Vance: 46%
🟦 AOC: 44%

Emerson (A) | 8/16-17 | 1,000 LV

📎 InteractivePolls