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Hello Reader,
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The Global Fight for Freedom
- Scared Strait: The Mosquito Fleet Swarms
- Total Blackout: The Death Throes of Tyranny
- Voodoo Coup in the Sahel's Last Democracy
- Our Enemy's Enemy Is Our Friend
- China's Technology Suffers "Epic" Humiliation
Country names are followed by their 2025 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.
On March 11th, two Iranian projectiles tore into the Thailand-flagged Mayuree Naree as she threaded through the Strait of Hormuz, setting the bulk carrier ablaze. Three crew members vanished into the smoke-filled engine room. Twenty others evacuated to Oman's shores.
It was the latest in more than two dozen Iranian attacks on commercial vessels since Operation Epic Fury launched: Shahed suicide drones screaming from the sky, C-drone unmanned surface vessels packed with explosives, highly transportable anti-ship cruise missiles loaded onto trucks, and sea mines seeded silently across shipping lanes. $25,000 drones against $100 million tankers.
Iran's conventional navy has been decimated. But its second navy remains: the IRGC's "mosquito fleet" — hundreds of small, fast attack boats crammed with explosives, swarming from coastal hideouts along Iran's mountainous shoreline. It only takes one sting to freeze the whole fleet.
Thus, the Strait belongs to whoever holds the shore. Just two 1.86-mile channels run deep enough for fully laden supertankers — a two-lane highway through a “kill box” that Iran commands from its home. 20% of the world's oil and gas flows through those four miles of water. Some 250 oil tankers sit paralyzed in the Gulf. Five transit daily, against a prewar average of 125.
Iran learned these waters under fire. During the 1980s tanker wars, Iranian mines and speedboat attacks turned the Persian Gulf into a graveyard of burning hulls. The chaos nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts when a mine broke her keel in 1988. Then came July 3rd: the USS Vincennes, disoriented by battle fog, misidentified Iran Air Flight 655 as a military threat and shot it down, killing all 290 souls aboard.
The air campaign is already underway — U.S. forces struck military targets on Kharg Island, Iran's critical oil-export terminal, on Friday. But Washington isn't betting everything on airpower alone. Trump has deployed a Marine expeditionary unit — thousands of sailors, attack jets, and 2,200 Marines. A ground campaign to seize Iran's southern coastline is on the table.
The war won't end until those four miles are free. Freeing them will be costly — in dollars, in ships, and in American lives.
"¡Abajo el comunismo!"
“Down with Communism!” The chants shook Morón Saturday night as protesters stormed the Communist Party headquarters. Rocks shattered windows. Men hauled furniture to the upper floors and hurled it into the streets, where it fed a bonfire blazing outside. Palm branches set ablaze were thrown through the building's entrance. Then a single gunshot cracked the night air. "¡Libertad!" the crowd roared back.
Ninety miles away in Miami—home to the world's largest Cuban diaspora—city officials are now preparing for "large-scale spontaneous celebrations throughout the city," citing "current intelligence indicators."
The regime is on its knees. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed Friday that his government has entered talks with Washington. Just hours before his televised address, Havana quietly freed 51 prisoners through Vatican mediation. Cuba hasn't received an oil shipment in three months—some provinces can't pump water, bakeries burn wood to bake bread. Power flickers—then darkness again.
Yesterday, the blackout became total as Cuba's grid collapsed entirely—the sixth nationwide blackout in eighteen months—leaving ten million residents in complete darkness. Restoration could take days.
But for the Cuban people, there could be light at the end of this blackout. Trump's instinct — to trade sanctions relief for narrow concessions, democracy be damned — hits a legal wall here. The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and 1996 Helms-Burton Act—authored by Republicans Jesse Helms and Dan Burton—strip the president of unilateral authority to lift sanctions. Only Congress controls relief, and only after Cuba legalizes political opposition and holds free elections. Unlike in Venezuela and Iran, Trump cannot deliver without democracy.
Six decades of Communist tyranny are in their death throes — and thanks to two legislators who saw a future Trump coming, the regime is unlikely to be resurrected.
Friday: We investigate who's really responsible for Cuba's humanitarian crisis—and the answer isn't what the international press is telling you.
At 3 a.m. on December 7th, Benin's army chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Abou Issa, crouched barefoot behind two living room chairs in Adidas shorts, firing his AK-47 down at masked gunmen storming his house. His wife had barely dodged a bullet on the balcony. A dead woman lay in a car at his gate. For 45 minutes, Issa held them off alone. When soldiers finally "rescued" him, they beat him unconscious with rifle butts, then smeared raw chicken eggs over his body—an old voodoo trick to neutralize his supernatural powers.
By dawn, coup leader Lt. Col. Pascal Tigri had seized state television and declared power. By afternoon, Nigerian Super Tucano attack planes were rocketing the mutineers' base into rubble. Within 24 hours, it was over.
The jihadist threat the mutineers claimed to be fighting is real—Trump's Christmas Day Tomahawk strikes against Islamic State camps in northwest Nigeria sought the same target. Since 2020, military coups have consumed Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Niger. Each expulsion of Western forces—particularly France's battle-tested Sahel counterterror mission—left a vacuum that al-Qaeda and Islamic State filled faster than Russian mercenaries ever could. Jihadist fatalities along Benin's Nigeria border have surged to record highs.
Benin was once Africa's democratic miracle. In 1990, dictator Mathieu Kérékou became the first African leader peacefully voted from power, inspiring transitions across the continent. That legacy is fraying. Talon weaponized a terrorism tribunal against political opponents on fabricated charges, doubled electoral thresholds to kneecap opposition parties, then barred the main opposition candidate on a single disputed signature.
The mutineers had real grievances. But their coup would have handed the jihadists further instability. Though imperiled, Benin remains the last functioning democracy between the Sahara and the Gulf of Guinea.
Topple it, and the jihadist highway runs to the sea.
As families gathered for nightly Ramadan prayers on February 26th, Pakistani jets screamed over the Afghan capital of Kabul. In Nangarhar, a laborer named Abdul Wahid was buried in his own home at midnight. "All these bricks fell on me," he told reporters. "Women and children were under the rubble. I was there for 10 minutes as if it was my last breath."
Pakistan calls it Operation Righteous Fury. Sound familiar?
Pakistan claims it has killed more than 270 Taliban members and injured over 400. The irony cuts deep. Pakistan sheltered and funded the Afghan Taliban for decades as a proxy against India. That alliance shattered after 2021, when the Taliban began harboring the Pakistani Taliban — the TTP — whose bombers have since killed hundreds. On February 6, a TTP suicide bomber killed 32 at a Shia mosque in Islamabad.
I've been critical of Trump's embrace of Field Marshal Asim Munir — a strongman who has consolidated more power than any Pakistani leader since Musharraf, jailing politicians, suppressing media, trying civilians in military courts. The TTP terrorism wave was Munir's justification to seize power. But realpolitik sometimes demands choosing the lesser of two evils. As Pakistan bombs the Taliban — the same regime that this January legalized husbands beating their wives, provided no bones are broken — the choice gets clearer.
America needs Pakistan: counterterrorism intelligence, sustained pressure on TTP and ISIS-K, geographic leverage over landlocked Afghanistan, and a nuclear arsenal that demands we keep Islamabad's generals inside the tent. None of that obligates us to play neutral arbiter in their dispute with India.
But the clash reminds us: your enemy's enemy must sometimes be your friend.
At 7:00 AM on February 28th, Tehran's skies erupted. Nine hundred American and Israeli strikes in the first twelve hours. B-52s thundering over missile batteries. F-35 stealth jets and Tomahawks threading through Iran's air defenses like they didn't exist. Ayatollah Khamenei—dead at his compound before noon.
Iran had prepared. After Israel obliterated its Russian S-300 systems in the 2025 twelve-day war—a $1 billion investment vaporized—Tehran pivoted to China. HQ-9B missiles, reportedly acquired via an oil-for-weapons barter, were reportedly deployed around Tehran and nuclear sites at Natanz and Fordow.
It didn't matter. Multiple analysts report the HQ-9B batteries—reportedly three destroyed in the opening hour by American EA-18G Growler jamming aircraft—fired no interceptors. Defense analyst publication Domino Theory challenged whether HQ-9Bs were deployed at all, citing zero photographic evidence. Either way: China's flagship export was exposed as a failure or a ghost.
This wasn't the first humiliation. In May 2025, Pakistan's HQ-9Bs couldn't stop India's four-day Operation Sindoor.
Beijing is ramping up regardless, announcing a 7% defense spending increase to $277 billion officially—. That still trails America's nearly $1 trillion, but its navy now fields 370 ships against America's 290, with aircraft carrier capacity at 3 versus America's 11.
Iran bought Russia's best. Then bought China's best. Both turned to scrap in a single morning.
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