An Ugly World Order Takes Shape (S01E26)

Tuesday, March 17, 2026, IstanbulOne million people have been displaced by the Israli invasion of southern Lebanon. This puts enormous pressure on the fragile government in Beirut, where missiles struck near the country’s only international airport.Meanwhile, Israel claims it killed or tried to kill Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, a longtime Tehran regime fixture seen as a relative pragmatist. Joe Kent, a longtime US spy, resigned from his high-ranking post at the US Directorate of National Intelligence over the Iran war. He said in his extraordinary resignation lettter that Iran posed no imminent threat, and alleged that Israel and its American lobbyists gaslit President Donald Trump into it:High-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that.badlands is a reader-supported publication. To receive support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.Predictably, Trump’s allies immediately denounced Kent as an anti-Semite and the media smeared him as a conspiracy theorist. But Trump himself conceded on Monday that the US went to war against Iran on behalf Israel and the arms industry:We did it. It’s almost, you could say, we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. But we did because we have some good allies there, we have some great Middle East countries there, Israel there. So we did it for a lot of reasons. The Guardian, in a piece on Tuesday, reported that a British diplomat was among the negotiators at the last round of talks between the US and Iran over the nuclear program before war broke out. He was quoted as saying Iran was offering the US substantive concessions that could have led to a diplomatic breakthrough. But one diplomat with knowledge of the talks told The Guardian that the American negotiators, Jared Kusher and Steve Witkoff, sabotaged any potential deal. ‘We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of,” The Guardian quoted the dipomat as saying. Kent’s resignation has prompted speculation over whether the former CIA employee, with his high security clearance, is privvy to knowledge of an impending, high-risk, and potentially ugly new phase in the US war against Iran—perhaps a ground invasion by expeditionary force of US Marines headed to the Middle East. During an interview with India’s News X on Tuesday (above), I was asked about whether the war was reshaping the world and establishing a new global order, the same way World War I and World War II.I don’t know about a new order. It does appear that the last vestiges of the flawed post-WWII era are collapsing. Leaders are no longer even paying lip service to international law and norms.Israel’s expansionsist militarism, the US bullying of Iran, Venezuela, and everyone else that gets in its way, and even Russia’s unprovoked attempt at conquering Ukraine are all violations of the so-called rules-based order. Flawed as that era has been, doing away with it leaves only unmitigated savagery by the powerful. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit borzou.substack.com/subscribe