The Global Fight for Freedom

​The lines struck hard when I read them in April. I had just spent a week of late nights combing through military blogs, dissident publications, think tank pieces, and diaspora social media accounts seeking the truth about the war in Iran, and the author had perfectly captured my experience.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. was heralding a seismic shift in how we consume information. But what was most remarkable about his blistering media critique was the pages upon which it was printed.

Jenkins Jr. has written for the Wall Street Journal for over two decades. Here was a senior statesman of the mainstream press telling readers, in one of its flagships, that his industry had stopped being useful and that intellectual thought had moved elsewhere.

He was right, and this week’s stories provide further evidence.

Popular Media Narratives

1. Iran Has Doubled Their Leverage
2. It's Just a Land Dispute
3. A Story Only About Muslim Oppression

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

On September 10, drones fired from Iraq slammed into Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions, wounding workers and forcing Riyadh to shut the line. NASA satellites that track wildfires picked up heat blooming along the route south of Medina. The 750-mile artery moves up to 7 million barrels a day from the Gulf oil fields to the Red Sea, and since Iran closed Hormuz it has been the only route through which Saudi crude reaches the world. Crews are racing to restart one of its two parallel lines. Full repair could take five more weeks.

Less than 48 hours later, Iran's Yemeni clients struck too. The Houthis took the port of Mocha, then seized Perim Island — a volcanic rock inside the Bab el-Mandeb that splits the strait into two shipping lanes — along with the Hanish Islands and the rest of Yemen's Red Sea coast. More than 82,000 Yemenis fled. Brent jumped above $109, the highest since May.

From the outside nobody can measure how far Iran's nuclear program has been set back, and the President has flip-flopped between calling it obliterated and calling it a live problem. He said the missile program was destroyed, yet Iranian-supplied forces still hit shipping and burn their neighbors' energy infrastructure.

And Americans continue to pay for it. Regular gasoline hit a national average of $4.47 last week, up 57 cents in three weeks. The administration has clearly not been straight with the public, and there is a hard moral question in starving a country's households to break its government.

Performative Opinionating

But Americans deserve an accurate accounting from the media too.

What it gets instead is a narrative: A second front of the war had opened, and Iran now holds a knife to two chokepoints now instead of one, and winter is coming. CNN forecast a 31.3% jump in heating costs, a number that traveled through every local station in the country. Read to the fourth paragraph and it applies to homes heated with oil — just 4% of American households. The figure for everyone else is 8.7%, and that one assumes Hormuz traffic stops recovering.

A headline with that nuance wouldn’t have been scary enough.

If You Know Where to Look

Here is what Jenkins meant by knowing where to look: Robin J. Brooks is an economist who writes on Substack and for Brookings, which nobody mistakes for a pro-Trump operation. Shortly after the conflict began, as mainstream outlets ran oil forecasts of $200 and $300 per barrel, he put the ceiling at $125. He’s been right so far, so I keep reading.

Brooks leans on Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers, which counts hulls by satellite instead of regime press releases — "the best source for information on tanker volumes and oil infrastructure in the region," Brooks calls him. Madani has been accused of being MAGA, anti-Trump and Mossad, which is what an honest tally earns you these days.

Two days after the pipeline burned, Brooks worked the arithmetic. The drones came from Iraq rather than Yemen, meaning Tehran had run the operation. No second front had opened. Yanbu holds storage tanks that keep crude loading while crews weld. Assume the harshest case and factor for elasticity of demand, and he concluded Brent crude at $109 was priced about $10 too high—a result of market panic.

As I write this a week later, the price is back down to $97. That gives Brooks credibility CNN can’t earn.

Madani's data shows Gulf oil exports climbing steadily since Washington reimposed the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz on July 14, with the seven-day average on track to nearly double in the past two months. Iran's own exports are zero, so every one of those barrels belongs to an American ally. Central Command has moved 1,600 vessels and more than 800 million barrels since May, running night convoys under helicopters, fighter jets and surface drones.

Iran is losing the Strait. Supply lines are adjusting and the market is proving remarkably resilient. The supply shock is fading, not worsening.

You would only know this if you knew where to look.

Everything That Might Be Interesting

Meanwhile, Iran is being strangled. Oil exports have collapsed from about 2 million barrels a day to roughly a quarter-million in August. 70% of the country's basic-goods imports normally move through the ports now blocked. Food inflation hit 128%. The rial trades at 2.3 million to the dollar, leaving a minimum monthly wage worth about $72. Rice is up more than 200%, cooking oil more than 300%, and Tehran shopkeepers are being asked to sell bread on credit.

"We are ashamed that the public's income does not cover their expenses," First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref admitted this week.

Tehran is also alone. When Iran carried a Hormuz transit plan to Muscat, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain did not come and the Gulf monarchies refused to endorse it. The talks collapsed. Foreign investment this Iranian year is zero.

Seen against that, the attacks on the Saudis and the Yemeni coast read as the moves of a desperately flailing regime burning through what it has left.

Iran's nuclear and missile programs are diminished by a margin no outsider can measure, but greatly diminished. Its network has lost more. Hezbollah has never been weaker relative to Lebanon's government. Syria is holding together, and the violence still troubling it has nothing to do with Tehran. In Iraq, the government has ordered the Iran-backed militias to disarm by September 30 —the significance is that it felt bold enough to give the order. Two years ago none of this was thinkable.

Little of it has been deemed fit to print.

Living-Brain Analysis

It is taking far longer than promised, but Trump has Iran in a vice. Many urged him to seize Hormuz. He is making it irrelevant instead — pipelines, escorts, sanctions, patience — because he does not like spending American lives on ground he can render worthless. Expect him to hold that course through the midterms, even when his rhetoric suggests otherwise. If Brooks has the fundamentals right, gas could fall 10 to 20% by November. That appears to be Trump’s bet. Whether it saves him from his excesses is another question.

Americans have every reason to doubt this administration's judgment. They deserve an honest accounting from someone.

Meanwhile, the press has written a great deal about Iran's asymmetric advantages over the United States. It has not worked out that it is the biggest one.

Primary Sources: Wall Street Journal, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Iran International, CNN, Stars and Stripes, Robin J. Brooks (Substack), TankerTrackers.com

At 7:30 on a Sunday morning in August, more than a hundred gunmen casually strolled into Jwak Maitumbi, a farming village in Nigeria's Plateau State. Some residents were walking to morning service when the attackers opened fire. By the time they slipped back into the scrub, at least 30 people were dead. More than 50 buildings were left burning: homes, shops, the health center, the food barns families had filled for the year, and of course the churches.

Three weeks earlier, the same script ran in Naridon: gunmen going house to house: 30 dead, including eleven children. A Catholic priest had been stabbed to death in hours earlier. When Bishop Julius Kundi buried the dead, he lined the coffins up in a row and had them photographed. He called them "evidence."

Evidence for a case the Western press still refuses to try.

According to the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, a Netherlands-based monitor, Islamist attackers killed 18,915 Christians in Nigeria between October 2019 and September 2025. In the Fulani-militia raids that now cause more civilian deaths than Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa combined, Christians were roughly 2.7 times likelier than Muslims to be killed. The Nigerian rights group Intersociety counts 2,550 Christians killed in the first six months of 2026 alone.

More than 18,000 churches have been burned, and five million Christians have been driven from their land since the killing began in earnest in 2009.

Bishop Wilfred Anagbe put it plainly to a U.S. congressional hearing last year: "Militant Fulani herdsmen are terrorists. They kill and boast about it, they kidnap and rape, and they enjoy total impunity. None of them have been arrested and brought to justice."

But how would Americans know this if they didn’t know where to look?

In the Western media, the conflict is always framed as a "farmer-herder" clash: a land dispute, a climate story, cattle and crops. Everyone is a victim. The perpetrators’ ideology, unnamed.

CNN: it "is not limited to Christians." PBS: the reality is "more complicated." The Economists’ most recent piece on the conflict was exclusively spent deriding the Christian activists lobbying the Trump administration to intervene.

Those wicked Christians—trying to save lives.

On September 4, the ruling Myanmar junta’s newly promoted commander-in-chief, General Ye Win Oo, amassed 10,000 troops in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state under siege by the Arakan Army. He sent the first thousand, armed with Russian and Chinese weapons, in three columns in a multi-pronged assault. Operation 4926 was underway.

By September 9, the Arakan Army was recovering the bodies of scores of junta soldiers and launching a counteroffensive. A week later, they had seized four junta outposts. The junta attacked and finished with less ground than it started.

We have not reported from Myanmar since late 2025, in part because the line has barely moved. During that time, the war passed a grim milestone: at least 100,000 dead by ACLED’s count. That makes it the deadliest active war in Asia.

To recap, the junta generals seized the country in February 2021 and jailed the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Beijing began neutral, but then went to work against the resistance, forcing two factions of the Three Brotherhood Alliance into ceasefires with brutal tactics to protect its multi-billion-dollar port and mining interests. Yet the Arakan Army fights on, holding 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships as it continues to close on the capital of Sittwe.

Now ask why none of this reached your newspaper.

The military that staged the coup is a Buddhist nationalist institution that feared Suu Kyi would sell off Myanmar’s Buddhist identity. The Arakan Army is Buddhist too, but fights for Rakhine self-rule and representation. These pages have backed its cause over the junta’s because of its stated commitments to democratic principles and the inclusion of the Muslim minority.

China’s regional interests are occasionally covered in the press, but what draws the most Western attention is the plight of Rohingya Muslims, who share Rakhine state with the Arakan Army. The genocide committed by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya in 2017 was real, and we’ve covered it extensively.

But the media’s ledger runs one column. Seldom is the repression of the Arakan Buddhists themselves covered. Almost nothing on the 2016 and 2017 attacks by Rohingya Muslims that preceded the genocide, on when and why the Muslim migration from Bengal filled Rakhine state with refugees, or on the British arming Arakan’s Muslims in 1942 to fight the Buddhists who backed Japan. Human rights organization reports that the Arakan Army slaughtered fleeing Rohingya deserved every inch they got. The Buddhist junta’s abduction of Rohingya men to shield it from that same army got none.

Which begs the question: why is a nationalist political leader who happens to be Christian a Christian nationalist, but an Eastern nationalist leader who explicitly fights for Buddhism just a dictator?

The junta’s September 4 offensive has been repelled, and the Arakan Army’s counteroffensive gained new territory.

That is good news for global freedom, but Buddhist oppression of Buddhists is not fit to print.

Primary Sources: The Irrawaddy (Myanmar), Burma News International, Democratic Voice of Burma, Myanmar Now (Myanmar), Human Rights Watch

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