Robert Cohen

#Zimbabwean social observer. Exercising restraint

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

Cuba’s🇨🇺 achievements in healthcare despite the illegal US embargo:

• Cuba has of the highest doctor-to-population ratios in the world, with roughly 8 doctors per 1,000 people, several times the global average.

• First country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis (WHO validated, 2015). Cuba reduced HIV transmission from mother to child below 2%, with only 2 babies born with HIV and 3 with congenital syphilis in 2013.

• Medical internationalism: More than 600,000 Cuban healthcare professionals have served in over 160 countries since the 1960s, responding to disasters, epidemics, and healthcare shortages.

• Developed the world’s first effective vaccine against meningococcal B meningitis. Cuba’s VA-MENGOC-BC vaccine was introduced in 1989, tackling a disease that had caused major outbreaks.

• Created Heberprot-P, a treatment for diabetic foot ulcers that has reportedly reduced the need for amputations in many patients and has been used in dozens of countries.

• Built a biotechnology sector from scratch despite decades of illegal unilateral sanctions. Cuba now produces the majority of its own vaccines and exports medical products internationally.

• Developed multiple COVID-19 vaccines, including Abdala and Soberana, becoming one of the few countries in the Global South to create and manufacture its own COVID vaccines.

• Infant mortality is comparable to many developed countries, despite Cuba’s much lower GDP per capita. Cuba’s infant mortality rate has often been lower than that of the USA.

• Near-universal vaccination coverage, with childhood vaccination rates consistently above 95% for many major diseases.

• Universal healthcare coverage, providing free access to primary care, specialist care, hospitalisation, and preventive medicine nationwide.

These are reasons Trump and Rubio want to destroy Cuba; because Cuba didn’t only dare to resist the suffocating US embargo, but also showed the world that it could triumph with an alternative model of development.

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

Did you know? Cuba🇨🇺 not only exported its army of doctors around the world, but also a revolutionary system to eradicate illiteracy; Yo, Si Puedo.

The system was designed to bring literacy to poorer and rural areas which had limited access to training and teachers.

Rather than relying on traditional textbooks and teaching, the program used a combination of numbers, letters, audiovisual lessons, and local facilitators to teach adults how to read and write.

The system was adapted for dozens of languages in international usage, as well as indigenous languages.

Venezuela🇻🇪 widely used the revolutionary program in its own literacy campaign, with the country being declared illiteracy free by 2005. Bolivia🇧🇴 under President Evo Morales also used the program to eradicate illiteracy in the country.

Nearly 10 million people learned to read and write through the Yo Sí Puedo method between 2002 and 2016, the program was implemented in over 30 countries.

[Going Underground @GUnderground_TV]

Nelson Mandela slams the US’ opposition to South Africa’s🇿🇦 close relations with Cuba🇨🇺:

‘The first country we approached in the 1960s for assistance against apartheid was the United States of America…they refused to assist us.

BUT CUBA, the moment we appealed for assistance, they were ready to do so, and they did so.

Why would we now listen to the Western world when they say we should have nothing to do with Cuba? It’s just unreasonable.’

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Yet another striking illustration of just how ideologically rigid the West has become compared to what we used to be.

This was the obituary The Economist published for Mao in 1976 - at the height of the Cold War.

Read this part:

"In the final reckoning Mao must be accepted as one of history's great achievers: for devising a peasant-centred revolutionary strategy which enabled China's Communist party to seize power, against Marx's prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao's words, 'stand up' among the great power."

Show this text to any Economist "journalists" today - without telling them it's from their own paper - and they'd reply: surely it's "CCP propaganda" 😏

Yes, incredible as it may sound, there used to be a time when Western journalists could assess a geopolitical rival honestly and respectfully without being accused of being a traitor. And this honesty was in no small part a key factor why the West won the Cold War.

Today we call honest assessment "propaganda," and we harass, smear, and blacklist people for it. And we're puzzled why the West is in steep decline.

Truth matters.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.

Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”

“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”

Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false.

In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before.

But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too.

The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term:

“All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”

Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure.

The war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers.

These moves were planned years in advance, and would have been rolled out regardless of what impotent meat puppet happened to be wheeled into office in January 2025.

You don’t get to vote out an empire. Whether or not the US will continue working to dominate the planet will never be on the ballot. We will continue seeing reckless US wars of immense human consequence until the empire falls, or until the American people bring the revolutionary change to their country that the world so desperately needs.

[Patricia Marins @pati_marins64]

It had been a while since I read something so foolish.

The Chinese are happier than ever. They are carefully observing, photographing, and documenting every doctrine and vulnerability of the American navy and air force.

They are laughing at the depletion of interceptor stocks that will take 5 to 7 years to replenish, not to mention the guided munitions that will take several more years to replace.

They are laughing at America’s impotence in protecting its bases and its allies. But more than that, they are paying close attention to the loss of more than $1 billion just in aircraft.

There is no one happier today than the Chinese strategists who are watching from the front row as the false American umbrella, sold at a premium price for decades to several countries, is being exposed.

Based on what we have seen in the Gulf and knowing the number of batteries on both sides, I dare say that the air defenses of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan would be exhausted in 48 hours in the event of a Chinese attack.
And there is nothing that can be done about it in the short term.

It is time for everyone to adjust diplomatically and stop growling while relying on American dentures, because Trump and Netanyahu have exposed the vulnerabilities of this model and thrown away decades of work.

[The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow]

Jesse Watters: How does taking out a dictator in Venezuela help the average American?

VP JD Vance: It means is we are going to be able to control the incredible natural resources of Venezuela. @acyn (2026)

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

And we're told it's the other side that's a fanatical theocracy...

[غفران 🔻 @maybe_ghuf]

This is so dystopian man. An entire nation under a medieval-style siege, slowly being strangled to death while the rest of the world simply turns a blind eye.

[Robert Cohen @robontheground]

@MasukuDee @Jamwanda2 Lol...... they're stuck in there aren't they?

[Robert Cohen @robontheground]

@MasukuDee @Jamwanda2 Why dont you research a bit before you have to pull both feet out of your mouth

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

BREAKING: Iran’s Foreign Minister just told you exactly how the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Not with mines. Not with missiles. Not with warships. With a spreadsheet.

Abbas Araghchi posted on X this morning:

“Strait of Hormuz is not closed. Ships hesitate because insurers fear the war of choice you initiated, not Iran. No insurer, and no Iranian, will be swayed by more threats. Try respect.”

He is not lying. He is describing the mechanism that nobody in Washington, Brussels, or on any trading desk wants to name out loud. Iran did not physically seal the Strait of Hormuz. Marine war risk insurers did. Major providers scrapped cover for vessels operating in the Persian Gulf. Without insurance, no tanker sails. Without tankers, no oil moves. Without oil moving, 15 million barrels of crude sit trapped every day. Iran’s weapon is not the mine. Iran’s weapon is the risk premium. The mine is the trigger. The insurer is the transmission mechanism. The underwriter’s spreadsheet closed the strait, not the warhead.

This is why 22 countries coordinating with NATO will not reopen it. You cannot escort a tanker through a strait if no insurer will write the policy for the cargo. You cannot force Lloyd’s of London to underwrite a voyage at gunpoint. The mine clears. The drone threat neutralises. The coastal batteries degrade. And the insurer still says no, because the war is still happening, because the 48-hour ultimatum is ticking, because Iranian missiles just hit Diego Garcia at 4,000 kilometres, because the IRGC retains 90 percent of its minelayers, and because the actuarial model does not care about press conferences.

The AAII sentiment survey published March 19 shows 52 percent of individual investors are now bearish, the highest reading since spring 2025. Bullish sentiment has fallen to 30.4 percent. The bull-bear spread is negative 21.6 percentage points. These are not numbers from a market worried about earnings. These are numbers from a market that has processed the same mechanism Araghchi just described. The war is not being fought in the strait. The war is being fought in the risk model.

The market is splitting in two. Energy stocks have hit 20 all-time highs in 2026, the most since 2013. The sector is up 29 percent year-to-date and 367 percent since the 2020 pandemic low. New US home sales collapsed 17.6 percent month-on-month to 587,000, the lowest since 2022, with the median price down 6.8 percent year-over-year. Bitcoin fell below $68,000. One half of the market is pricing a world where oil stays trapped. The other half is pricing a world where everything else breaks.

US intelligence assessed before Epic Fury that Iranian regime collapse was low probability. The IDF says weeks more of fighting remain. Araghchi says the strait is not closed. Trump says open it in 48 hours or he destroys the power grid. Iran says if the power grid is hit, the strait closes permanently and all regional energy infrastructure becomes a target. The insurer hears all five statements and reaches the same conclusion: the policy stays cancelled.

The strait is 21 miles wide. The insurance policy is one page. And the one page is doing more damage to the global economy than every mine, missile, and drone Iran has fired in 23 days of war.

https://t.co/iFmUcarGdV

[Robert Cohen @robontheground]

@MasukuDee @Jamwanda2 FYI, Angola imports 70% of its domestic fuel, & Namibia 100%

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Iran fired two ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia this week. That’s a tiny British-American dot in the Indian Ocean that most people couldn’t find on a map, which is precisely why it matters.

The range was 4,000 kilometers. Four thousand. To put that in perspective, 4,000 kilometers from Tehran gets you to Rome. Athens. Cairo. Southern Europe is well within reach. London and Paris are further, but don’t sleep too well either.

This is not what Tehran told anyone their missiles could do. So either they’ve been lying, or the intelligence community has been spectacularly wrong. Possibly both.

One missile failed mid-flight, which is the kind of thing that happens when you build intercontinental weapons in a country that can’t keep the lights on. The other was shot down by a U.S. warship with an SM-3 interceptor, which Trump has already counted as winning the war. For the third time.

Now here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud: the strike came hours after Britain’s Keir Starmer gave Washington permission to use Diego Garcia to bomb Iranian missile sites. So Iran bombed the base we lent them. With a missile nobody knew they had.

The war just acquired a completely new dimension. And the man in the White House is busy declaring victory.

Iran decides when this stops. Not him.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is probably the most important article of the month: an op-ed by Oman's Foreign Minister, who mediated the talks between the U.S. and Iran, in which he writes that the U.S. "has lost control of its foreign policy" to Israel.

He repeats that a deal was possible as an outcome of the talks (something confirmed by the UK's National Security Advisor, who also attended: https://t.co/XkfSpkMjCf) and that the military strike by the U.S. and Israel was "a shock."

Interestingly, given he is one of Iran's neighbors and given that Oman has been struck multiple times by Iran since the war began (https://t.co/IXNdwD6f3j), he writes that "Iran’s retaliation against what it claims are American targets on the territory of its neighbours was an inevitable result" of the U.S.-Israeli attack. He describes it as "probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership."

He says the war "endangers" the region's entire "economic model in which global sport, tourism, aviation and technology were to play an important role." He adds that "if this had not been anticipated by the architects of this war, that was surely a grave miscalculation."

But, he adds, the "greatest miscalculation" of all for the U.S. "was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place."

In his view this was the doing of "Israel’s leadership" who "persuaded America that Iran had been so weakened by sanctions, internal divisions and the American-Israeli bombings of its nuclear sites last June, that an unconditional surrender would swiftly follow the initial assault and the assassination of the supreme leader."

Obviously, this proved completely wrong, and the U.S. is now in a quagmire. He says that, given this, "America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth," which is that "there are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it," namely "Iran and America."

He says that all of the U.S. interests in the region (end to nuclear proliferation, secure energy supply chains, investment opportunities) are "best achieved with Iran at peace."

As he writes, "this is an uncomfortable truth to tell, because it involves indicating the extent to which America has lost control of its own foreign policy. But it must be told."

He then proposes a couple of paths to get back to the negotiating table, although he recognizes how difficult it would be for Iran "to return to dialogue with an administration that twice switched abruptly from talks to bombing and assassination."

That's perhaps the most profound damage Trump did during this entire episode: the complete discrediting of diplomacy. If Iran was taught anything, it is: don't negotiate with the U.S., it's a trap that will literally kill you.

The great irony of the man who sold himself as a dealmaker is that he taught the world one thing: don't make deals with my country.

Link to the article: https://t.co/FZxtqV3RC4

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

BREAKING: While the world debates oil prices and war strategy, the actual crisis is unfolding in silence.

The molecules that produce half the planet’s food are physically trapped behind a war zone. And the biological window to apply them closes in weeks. Not months. Weeks.

This is not a drill.

Roughly one-third of all seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz according to UNCTAD. Nearly 49% of globally traded urea is tied to conflict-exposed exporters. Nearly half of global sulfur trade, the chemical without which phosphate fertilizer cannot be processed anywhere on Earth, is Gulf-dependent. Transit has collapsed 97%. There is no alternative route. There is no strategic fertilizer reserve anywhere on Earth. There is no Plan B.

Right now, as you read this:

Bangladesh has shut five of six urea factories. Boro rice season, which produces over half the country’s grain, is underway with no domestic nitrogen supply. India is operating fertilizer plants at 60% capacity and has formally asked China for emergency urea. China said nothing and banned its own phosphate exports through August. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, faces $28 billion in debt repayments while the bread subsidy feeding 69 million people hemorrhages money at prices it never budgeted for. Sudan, already in confirmed famine, sources 54% of its fertilizer from the Gulf. WFP shipping now takes 25 extra days rerouting around the war zone. Australia imports virtually all its urea, two-thirds from the Gulf, and its entire heavy trucking fleet runs on AdBlue made from the same urea that is not arriving. No urea, no AdBlue, no freight, no groceries on shelves in Sydney.

318 million people were at crisis-level hunger BEFORE February 28.

The number that should haunt every policymaker on Earth: the yield response to nitrogen is not linear. It is quadratic. In wealthy countries that over-apply fertilizer, a 15% reduction costs maybe 3% of yield. In the Global South where farmers already apply one-seventh the global average, the same reduction pushes crops off a biophysical cliff where production does not decline. It collapses. Sri Lanka proved this in 2021. One season without synthetic fertilizer. Rice output collapsed 40%. Government fell. Now multiply Sri Lanka across thirty countries simultaneously.

During a potential El Nino that Skymet says carries a 60% chance of below-normal Indian monsoon. While 51% of US corn-growing areas are already in drought. While Australia’s root-zone soil moisture sits in the lowest 10% since 1911. While corn farmers are abandoning nitrogen-intensive planting because they cannot afford $900-per-ton ammonia against $4.50 corn. While the Fed is trapped at 3% core PCE with no room to cut and food inflation about to surge through every grocery aisle in America six months from now.

Nobody is talking about this.

CNBC leads with oil. Bloomberg leads with equities. The Pentagon leads with strike counts. But the actual weapon of mass destruction in this conflict is not a missile. It is a calendar. The Corn Belt needs nitrogen by mid-April. India needs to prep Kharif by May. Australia needs urea by June. Miss those windows and no subsequent intervention reverses the yield loss. The food is not decided by diplomats in six months. It is decided by soil chemistry in the next six weeks. The prices hit your table by Christmas.

Both sides rejected ceasefire talks this week.

The world spent fifty years preparing for an oil shock. It spent zero years preparing for a fertilizer shock. Half of humanity eats because of a single industrial process that runs on natural gas from the Persian Gulf, exits through 21 miles of water that are currently mined, uninsured, and unescorted.

The planting window does not care about your geopolitics.

It is closing.

Full analysis: https://t.co/iFmUcarGdV

[Francis Fukuyama @FukuyamaFrancis]

North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons https://t.co/LKfeFgpEE4

[Robert Cohen @robontheground]

@steve_hanke Please can we have an update on Zimbabwe's inflation?

[Robert Cohen @robontheground]

@cricali766 @stevensmithclub I dont quite get what the commentator says.

Please give me some context to the hug?