Authored by Joseph Solis-Mullen via The Libertarian Institute

Barely four years after the Pretoria Agreement formally ended one of the deadliest wars of the twenty-first century, serious fighting has returned to northern Ethiopia. As we begin October, Tigrayan forces have seized the airports at Mekelle, Aksum, and Shire, launched coordinated attacks into neighboring Afar and Amhara regions, and declared themselves once again in a state of full-blown war with the federal government in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian military responded with drone strikes, artillery, and claims to have killed or captured hundreds of attackers. Flights were suspended, telecommunications disrupted, and civilians in Tigray began stocking food and cash in anticipation of another blockade.

In March of this year I warned in these pages that “the Horn of Africa is ready to explode” -pointing to unresolved territorial disputes, incomplete implementation of the Pretoria deal, military buildups, and the dangerous realignment of forces around Ethiopia, Tigray, and Eritrea. That assessment has, unfortunately, proven accurate. That fragile peace has given way to open conflict, and the risk of a wider regional conflagration is now higher than at any point since 2022.

The 2020–2022 Tigray War left somewhere in the area of 600,000 dead, millions displaced, and large parts of the region in ruins. Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara militias, and Eritrean troops fought the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in a campaign marked by mass atrocities, famine, and ethnic cleansing. The Pretoria Agreement called for a cessation of hostilities, disarmament of Tigrayan forces, restoration of services, and an interim administration. Implementation was partial at best. Disarmament remained incomplete. Territorial disputes in the center, north, and northwest of country went unresolved—including occupation of parts of Tigray by Eritrea. Political power struggles inside the TPLF eventually produced a hardline faction that reasserted control, reinstated the pre-war regional government, and began mobilizing and conscripting fighters.

By early August 2026, lower-level clashes had already resumed near the Sudanese border. Federal drone strikes followed. In mid-September the TPLF announced an alliance with six other armed groups, including elements of the Amhara Fano, with whom it has a fraught history and territorial dispute, aimed at removing Abiy’s government. Days later the airports fell and fighting spread. The former adversaries now appear to be cooperating on the battlefield against a common enemy in Addis Ababa.

This temporary marriage of convenience is one of the most striking features of the current round.

Equally significant is the role of Eritrea. During the last war, despite their history of enmity, Eritrean forces fought alongside the Ethiopian army against the TPLF. Relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara have since deteriorated sharply. Unsurprising, as since 2023 Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia has repeatedly emphasized the need of securing Red Sea access—particularly through the Eritrean port of Assab, which has understandably alarmed President Isaias Afwerki’s government. Ethiopian officials have accused Eritrea of financially and materially supporting the TPLF and the broader anti-government alliance. Eritrea denies the charges. Independent verification of direct combat involvement remains limited, yet the strategic logic is clear: a weakened or distracted Ethiopia reduces the immediate threat to Eritrean territory and ports.

Sudan adds another combustible layer. As I examined in detail earlier this month in “Could Washington Pick a Side in Sudan’s Civil War?” the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has already drawn in a complex web of external actors —the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel, and others—whose interests increasingly center on Red Sea security, ports, and the strategic geography of the Horn. Ethiopia has been accused of allowing the RSF to train and stage operations from its territory; the SAF has, in turn, been accused of hosting or assisting Tigrayan fighters. Neither claim has produced confirmed large-scale intervention in the present fighting, but the proxy relationships are already in place. A major escalation in western Tigray could easily merge the two wars, turning northern Ethiopia into another front in the broader contest over the approaches to the Red Sea.

This pattern of interlocking crises is not new. In “Washington and Africa Are Intertwining Their Chaos,” I illustrated how U.S. policy across the continent has repeatedly transformed local conflicts into regional infernos through arms, training, intelligence partnerships, and the selection of favored clients. Somalia remains the clearest long-running example. As I detailed in “The Opportunity Costs of Our War in Somalia,” more than two decades of American airstrikes and special operations have failed to defeat al-Shabaab, have helped create the conditions for its rise in the first place, and continue to consume resources while delivering no measurable benefit to the American people. The same institutional habits that sustain that campaign—inertia, bureaucratic self-interest, and the refusal to acknowledge failure—are precisely what raise the risk that Washington will eventually feel compelled to “do something” as the Horn destabilizes further.

From a military perspective, Abiy’s government enters this round in a stronger position than in 2020. It possesses a substantial arsenal of drones that proved decisive in the later stages of the previous conflict, and the federal army is larger. Yet it is also stretched by ongoing insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia. The TPLF has reconstituted forces, secured at least temporary local allies, and demonstrated the ability to seize key infrastructure quickly. Neither side appears confident of a rapid, decisive victory. Both appear willing to risk another prolonged and catastrophic war.

Outside powers have so far limited themselves to calls for de-escalation. That is the correct public posture. The danger lies in the temptation, already visible in some quarters, to treat the conflict as another arena in which Washington or its regional partners must choose a side for larger geopolitical reasons—Red Sea security, countering Iranian influence, or balancing against other Gulf actors, specifically the Houthis. American policymakers have a long record of entering complex local conflicts with incomplete information, overestimating their ability to shape outcomes, and then discovering that their preferred clients commit the same atrocities they once condemned. Sudan’s civil war already illustrates the pattern. Ethiopia does not need a second demonstration.

This is going to be new levels of nightmare https://t.co/fSZAj7QK0s

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) October 1, 2026

The human costs of renewed full-scale war would be immense. Tigray has not recovered from the last conflict. Hundreds of thousands remain displaced. Food insecurity is chronic. Another blockade, another wave of drone strikes on civilian infrastructure, and another cycle of revenge killings would deepen a humanitarian catastrophe that the international system is already failing to address. History in the Horn of Africa offers little evidence that military “solutions” produce lasting political settlements. They produce exhaustion, new grievances, and the conditions for the next round of fighting.

Diplomatic pathways still exist. They require genuine inclusion of Eritrea, credible confidence-building measures, and a willingness on all sides to implement the core provisions of Pretoria rather than treat the agreement as a temporary truce to be discarded when convenient—which requires settling the federal relationship with the necessary stakeholders and permanently putting to rest the dispute between Tigray and its Amhara neighbors. Whether that political will materializes remains doubtful. What is not doubtful is that another major war in the Horn will kill large numbers of people who have already suffered enough, further destabilize an already fragile region, and create new opportunities for external powers to meddle at the expense of the local populations.

Washington’s most constructive contribution would be to stay out—genuinely stay out—and to discourage its partners from treating northern Ethiopia as a secondary front in someone else’s strategic competition. The people of Tigray, Amhara, Afar, and Eritrea do not need another proxy war. They need the fighting to stop.

Over several years of the Ukraine war, Russia and various European countries have escalated their diplomatic war – amid parallel ‘spy wars’ and mutual accusations of sabotage efforts – which has resulted in tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.

A big exception to this trend until now was Hungary under Viktor Orbán. Having served as the Prime Minister of Hungary for a near 20-year total period across two separate periods, Orbán throughout the years of the Ukraine war until his defeat by Péter Magyar was a thorn in the side of the EU for his openness to Moscow and condemnation of NATO’s deepening role in propping up the Zelensky government.

Prime Minister Magyar, leader of the pro-European conservative Tisza Party, has been in office only five months and already he has drastically shifted the country on Moscow relations.

On Thursday Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it has moved to expel a group of Hungarian diplomats in a tit-for-tat action.

Starting Sept.8, Budapest under Magyar expelled ten Russian diplomats who were suspected of spying activities. Moscow in the wake of this lodged a formal and “decisive protest” over the “groundless and openly unfriendly” expulsion.

Such words would have been unthinkable under Orbán. And now, as state media confirms, several Hungarian diplomats have been sent packing:

Hungarian Charge d’Affaires in Russia Gabor Gergich, who was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry, was informed that, as a retaliatory measure, a group of employees of the Hungarian Embassy in Moscow and Hungarian Consulates General in St. Petersburg and Kazan must leave Russian territory, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“The Hungarian diplomat was informed that, as a retaliatory measure, a group of employees of the Hungarian Embassy in Moscow and the Consulates General of Hungary in St. Petersburg and Kazan must leave Russian territory within two weeks,” the ministry said.

As for the new era of Magyar he early on made clear he would not block a €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine which Orbán originally vetoed, resulting in a collective sigh of relief among Eurocrats in Brussels.

Beyond the Ukraine funding veto, it was Orbán’s refusal to submit to open borders and mass immigration that caused constant conflict with the EU.

Things are rapidly changing on multiple diplomatic fronts:

The first visit by an Estonian Foreign Minister to Hungary in seven years. 🇭🇺🇪🇪
Today, we are giving fresh momentum to our bilateral relations. Welcome to Budapest, dear @Tsahkna! pic.twitter.com/LXsidRg9e3

— Anita Orban (@_OrbanAnita) October 1, 2026

He was frequently referred to by the political left as a “dictator” and a “fascist” in part because of his strict border policies (even though he is voluntarily leaving office after losing the election, which is not the behavior of a dictator)

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The British state is compiling a list of people who criticise its own counter-terror programme. Ordinary X and Reddit users who questioned Prevent training, flagged a one-sided focus on the “far Right,” or simply criticised it have had their posts logged, stored and “investigated” by a Home Office-linked unit most of them have never heard of.

Officials spent more than a year trying to keep that database secret. They only released it after an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The public was never told their feeds were being trawled.

The Standards and Compliance Unit, or StaCU, was set up in February 2024 as an “opaque” body to handle complaints about Prevent, the safeguarding scheme sold as a way to stop people becoming terrorists. Documents obtained by The Metro and released by Rights & Security International show StaCU did more than wait for formal complaints.

“Social media posts criticising government policy are being listed, monitored and investigated by officials.”

The government are supposed to serve the public rather than monitor those who disagree with them by Orwellian surveillance and snooping. https://t.co/mH62tNEkYV

— James Melville ? (@JamesMelville) September 30, 2026

Between March 2024 and February 2025 it made 77 “observations” of critical online comments, most of them from X, with others from Reddit and even articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Jacob Smith, Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader at Rights & Security International, fought for a year to force the Home Office to publish the material.

“It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent – and then storing that information,” he said. “You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”

He added: “People should be able to express their views on social media without that being catalogued in government databases.”

Many of those logged, he said, had posted without thinking “that the government might be looking at their feed and taking that data. It is in an almost private setting.”

His conclusion was blunt: “It’s a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.“

A large share of the logged posts accused Prevent training of treating the “far Right” as the main threat while skating over Islamist extremism.

One X user was recorded after calling the training “complete bullshit.” They wrote: “Anyone’s who done the prevent training knows it only talks about the far Right. Islam extremism isn’t even mentioned.”

Another poster said they “sat through Prevent training at work … and the narrative was very much that the far Right is the biggest threat.” They added: “I kid you not!”

StaCU says it tries to independently verify claims about Prevent. It managed that for only 10 percent of the posts. The unit’s parent body, the Commission for Countering Extremism, sometimes replies in public, inviting the user to submit a formal complaint.

In one case, after a post accused Prevent training of “turning a blind eye to Islam,” the Commission wrote: “Hello, we process and investigate complaints about Prevent and are interested in finding out more about the training referenced above. Please feel free to DM us, tweet us back, or make a formal complaint using this link.”

What that reply does not say is that the user’s post has already been stored in an internal government list.

It was not only anonymous accounts. Open Rights Group had a tweet recorded that said: “How data is managed and stored under the Prevent programme lacks transparency.“

Sarah Lasoye, the group’s Programme Manager for Pre-Crime, told The Metro: “Prevent has expanded far beyond its stated aim of identifying people considered ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’, and has increasingly been used to justify extensive surveillance.”

She added, “It is deeply concerning to see the Prevent duty being used to enable the monitoring of people and organisations simply because they are critical of the programme. That raises serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest.”

“There is also a troubling lack of transparency about what happens to the information gathered through this social media monitoring: how long it is retained, who it is shared with, and ultimately what the Government is using it for,” Lasoye urged.

Rights & Security International says organisations including Hope Not Hate and Maslaha also appear in or around the observations. The Campaign Against Antisemitism had a post logged that did not even name Prevent. It criticised police for failing to take a Hezbollah vigil seriously. A spokesperson said: “We aren’t sure whether to be flattered or concerned that StaCU has picked up a post of ours.”

The group added, “If it’s because we’ve dared to be critical of law enforcement’s lax attitude toward Islamist extremism in this country, we stand by what we said and would reiterate it for as long as it takes to bring about change. But if our post was flagged because StaCU agrees with us that police forces have failed to train their officers on what Islamist terrorism looks like and which organisations are banned, we hope that the message is being received and change is coming.”

That last point tracks a long-running complaint. Sir William Shawcross, in his 2023 review of Prevent, wrote: “The bar for what RICU includes on Islamism looks to be relatively high, whereas the bar for what is included on the extreme Right-wing is comparably low.”

Home Office figures for the year to September 2025 showed 10,293 Prevent referrals. Twenty percent were recorded as extreme right-wing ideology. Eight percent concerned Islamist extremism.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Prevent does not track people who may have criticised the programme, and nor does it target any particular community.” The department added that keeping the public safe is “our number one priority” and that Prevent has “moved more than 6,000 people away from violent ideologies since 2015.”

The documents say otherwise on the first claim. StaCU collated the posts as “open-source complaints,” stored them internally, and the Home Office refused to release the list until the Information Commissioner forced its hand. Nobody outside the unit can say who else sees the file, how long it is kept, or whether it is shared with police, platforms or other departments.

This is not an isolated compliance desk. It sits inside a growing stack of state machinery built to police speech, “narratives” and online anger.

In June, we laid out how the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit has been used to manage the mass-migration story – briefing police to cast concerned citizens as “unsympathetic thugs,” shaping family statements after migrant-linked killings, and running a higher bar for Islamism than for the so-called extreme Right.

The same week, ministers moved to give Ofcom faster powers to block “false information” during so-called crisis events – a phrase wide enough to cover any unrest the government would rather you not describe accurately.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan had already demanded a central government social-media “disinformation” unit, complaining of an “outrage economy” while knife crime, robbery and theft climbed on his watch. “If platforms fail to act, the state must have the tools to make them,” he said.

Last week Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first United Nations speech to announce a National Centre for Information Defence – a new machine to “detect, attribute and disrupt” what ministers call hostile information attacks and to stop a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain.”

He wrapped it in Russia, bots and “community cohesion.” Nigel Farage called it a Ministry of Truth. “Never ever trust this authoritarian Government,” he said. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting insisted: “We’re not interested in policing domestic political dissent.” Labour’s record is why that promise is already worn thin.

Police have their own version. The National Internet Intelligence Investigations team, stood up after the 2024 Southport riots, has referred more than 100 “suspicious” posts to local forces, including dozens tied to protest-related activity.

Officials describe it as “a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called it “the beginning of the state controlling free speech.”

The arrest figures sit underneath all of it. Between 2021 and 2025 at least 62,199 people were arrested in Britain on suspicion of communications offences – section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and the Online Safety Act’s false-communications offence.

That is roughly 34 arrests a day. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said speech policing is “out of control” and called the result an “Orwellian mess.” Lord Toby Young asked why authorities spend so much time “policing our tweets when they could be policing our streets.”

Prevent is sold as safeguarding. The logged posts are not bomb plots. They are workers calling official training biased, campaigners asking how data is stored, and a Jewish group complaining that police treat a banned terrorist organisation too lightly.

If that is enough to enter a Home Office database, the category of “acceptable” speech is already whatever officials decide it is on a whim.

Britain does not need another unit to hunt “untrue narratives.” It needs a government that can survive being questioned without opening a file on the questioner.

There are two familiar trends related to the Ukraine war which have persisted. The White House is still reportedly trying to get creative regarding some kind of deal that would east tensions between Moscow and the West – including potential sanctions relief for the release of political prisoners – but at the same time the rhetoric between Russia and Europe has gotten increasingly dangerous.

The Kremlin this week highlighted another big issue which serves as an ongoing source of broader tensions. It announced Monday that arms control talks between Washington and Moscow should have begun “yesterday”.

As it stands, there are no existent nuclear arms control treaties remaining between the globe’s two biggest nuclear-armed superpowers. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned in fresh comments that the nuclear issue remains “completely unaddressed” at this stage.

The New START nuclear arms reduction agreement officially went defunct on February 5, 2026 – as it was not renewed, amid the backdrop of war in Ukraine and ratcheted US sanctions on Russia.

Revisit our: Uncharted Territory: US & Russia Now Have No Limits On Nuclear Weapons

“This is such a complex matter that it requires very lengthy, meticulous, and expert-level negotiations. Therefore, in any case, it will be a process that takes a long time,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed in 2010 by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, and limits the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 per side, and caps deployed delivery systems – including of missiles, bombers, and submarines – at 700.

The treaty was further designed to regulate targeting of each rival’s political and military centers in a potential nuclear conflict. 

The August 15, 2025 Alaska summit between Presidents Trump and Putin had as one of its many aims setting the “next stages” of discussions could include reaching “agreements in the area of control over strategic offensive weapons.”

“Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal … including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at ​isolating the Kaliningrad Region from the rest of the country,” says a document allegedly sent by Russia to NATO… pic.twitter.com/U2meg41cju

— MenchOsint (@MenchOsint) September 30, 2026

However, such an agreement has remained elusive and not even the New START Treaty survived, also given the Trump administration has long voiced that it wants to see China included in future landmark arms control deals.

Via Remix News,

In a system that rejects mass immigration, the population can fall, opening up room for cheaper housing, lower rents, and even an increase in the birthrate.

Across the West, native Europeans are dying out but rental prices continue to go up every year. While the left would like to point the finger at capitalists and greedy landlords, the primary factor driving the housing affordability crisis is mass immigration.

Berlin is a prime example of this trend, as German journalist and author Jens Winter pointed out on X using clear population and housing data.

“Rental prices on the market have more than doubled in Berlin since 2011 – plenty of money for corporations. But where is the increased demand coming from? While the native population of the capital has declined by 260,000 since 2011, the number of foreigners and people with a migration background has risen by 650,000 over the same period. That means: Without migration, there would be less demand for housing in Berlin today than in 2011,” he wrote.

In a follow-up post, he wrote that the German “conservative” party is just as guilty as the left.

“The CDU-aligned real estate lobby is raking in big money with migration in Berlin. The Germans have a choice: dying out in the CDU’s multikulti capitalism or in the Left’s multikulti socialism. Understandable response: If we’re going to disappear anyway, why bust our asses for it?” he wrote.

Die CDU-nahe Immobilien-Lobby scheffelt mit Migration in Berlin mächtig Geld. Die Deutschen haben die Wahl: Aussterben im Multikulti-Kapitalismus der CDU oder im Multikulti-Sozialismus der Linken. Verständliche Antwort: Wenn schon verschwinden, warum dafür dann hart arbeiten? https://t.co/GPrTp62SXO

— Jens Winter (@mr_jenswinter) September 26, 2026

While the doubling of rents is real, there is a basic supply and demand reality that the left would like to deny. It is indeed true that predatory property owners, major institutional players, and money printing have played contributing roles to the housing crisis, but no matter how many greedy property owners are involved, if the population of a city falls, rental and housing prices are almost inevitably going to fall.

Mass immigration means that population numbers never fall. Any breathing space for German families to repopulate, have more children, and fill in the gaps left by older generations passing away is immediately filled by hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

The data shows that the population of native Germans fell by 260,000 people. In a system that rejects mass immigration and foreign real estate investors, this could have been a boon for birthrates and increasing home ownership. For one, Germans who already lived in Berlin, and those looking to move to Berlin, would have been more easily able to afford rents and housing due to less competition on the housing market. Secondly, more native Germans would have had a chance to start families – and those who already had families could have afforded an extra child or two – by securing affordable housing.

However, Germany does not reject mass immigration.

Instead, 650,000 foreigners arrived in the same period of time and housing and rental prices soared. The left, however, refuses to do simple math.

There is of course another solution, but it is far more complicated than simply allowing population levels to fall in a country that has never had so many people living in it. Instead of ending mass immigration, left-wing parties, along with the CDU, demand more housing is built.

However, there are myriad reasons why the required housing is not being built, including high construction and material costs, red tape, zoning, and a lack of skilled workers. The same parties have been making the same demands for years now, but construction cannot keep pace with demand in Berlin or other major cities across Germany.

The Left Party may promise to build more, but the reality is that it will not happen. Nothing the left offers will lead to the necessary building. Before Olaf Scholz of the far-left Social Democrats (SPD) won the chancellorship, he promised that his “goal” was to create 400,000 new apartments per year, which would include 100,000 units of social housing, saying, “That’s not witchcraft, we just have to want to do it.”

It never happened under Scholz and it won’t happen under a left-wing government in Berlin either.

Should more housing even be built?

As Western cities race to replace their native European populations, the question becomes whether life really becomes better in a crowded multicultural city when it means more traffic, longer waiting times at hospitals, crowded classrooms, and imported crime – just to name a few ills.

The newcomers also did not fix the skilled worker shortage that could potentially build all the homes and apartments politicians and lobbyists claim Europe needs. While a certain number of new houses and apartments always need to be built, the question then becomes should Western civilization really be involved in endless building to accommodate millions of foreigners.

On top of all of these questions, the buildings developers managed to build are now in fact uglier than ever, more expensive than ever, and are built more slowly than ever.

In fact, data shows that the time from start to completion for a project is longer than it has been in decades. Again, where are all these young migrants from Africa and the Middle East to fuel a new construction boom with their master artisan and building skills?

The reality is they largely do not exist. Many skilled builders who are immigrants are from neighboring European countries, such as Poland, and they increasingly see fewer reasons to work in Germany.

The pro-migration left is making housing worse

Winter’s X post is especially relevant given that the Left Party recently won a first place finish in Berlin elections, securing over 25 percent of the vote. Commentators and analysts have contributed the rise of the party in Germany’s capital due a variety of factors, but two major components are the party’s ability to secure the vote of German citizens with a migration background and young voters.

The second factor is Berlin’s housing crisis, which helped drive support from groups like non-voters, the young, and foreigners.

German taxpayer-funded Deutsche Welle, wrote: “That makes sense to 17-year-old Liska, who voted for the socialists: ‘The Left Party did appeal to me, especially because of the social issues – getting prices down, making rents more affordable.’ Rents in Berlin are indeed rising at a massive pace – by some 7% in the last two years alone – and first-time tenants are likely to be the hardest hit. Polls also showed that by far the biggest proportion of Berlin voters – 37% – thought that the Left Party was the most likely to create affordable housing.“

The Left Party and various other left-wing parties have convinced young people that there are easy fixes to the housing crisis. The problem is not relegated to Berlin, as all of Germany has seen tight vacancies as more and more migrants arrive, as Remix News previously reported.

In the end, the left and its voters are choosing a path where more and more building only leads to overcrowding and environmental degradation.

Mass immigration and higher housing costs hurt birthrates

Numerous studies have shown that immigration has helped drive soaring rental and housing prices across the Western world – not just in Germany. In turn, studies have also shown that soaring housing prices have depressed birthrates, including in countries like the Netherlands, according to the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI).

Again, the same story is taking place in the Netherlands, with the natural population increase for the Dutch at near zero or negative. Nevertheless, the population rose from about 16.8 million in 2013 to 18.1 million in 2025, with net migration accounting for virtually all of the recent increase.

It must also be remembered that just like in Germany, most of these migrants want to head to the major cities, such as Amsterdam.

Official housing-need forecasts in the Netherlands also attribute a large share of future extra demand, often 45 percent or more of the extra dwellings required, to population growth that is itself 95 percent migration-driven.

Great for landlords, bad for the citizens.

Of course, the Alternative for Germany has tried to tie the housing crisis to mass immigration, and they have successfully made this case to some extent.

WATCH: 🇩🇪🇪🇺 Mass immigration is fueling the West’s housing crisis.

Here’s how it’s happening in Germany.

In a powerful speech in the German Bundestag, @AfD politician Carolin Bachmann slams the ruling government for allowing 2 million migrants into the country while families… pic.twitter.com/DMEqiV316S

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) February 15, 2024

The problem is that as more and more of the population becomes foreign, this argument holds less and less sway. Immigration may raise housing prices but if immigration brought a person to a country in the first place, and if more immigration might also enable more and more of their family members and fellow countrymen to arrive, then these voters have every incentive to keep immigration levels high regardless of housing costs.

Many of these migrants are not paying for rent anyway. There are millions of foreigners on social welfare, which means not only are they taking housing places of native Germans, but they are being paid to do it. They then often have far higher birthrates than native Germans, even with limited space, which entitles them to larger spaces.

The cycle is self-reinforcing and relentless. That means unless dramatic action is taken against mass immigration, housing and rental prices may never truly come down.

Beyond nuclear, the “powering up America” theme, AI, and the more recent “own the bottlenecks” theme, we have also outlined incoming tailwinds for drone and counter-UAS companies as the Department of War adapts to the wars in Ukraine and the Gulf area. That requires massive drone stockpiling and the development of conflict-free supply chains.

To do this, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is creating a four-star combatant command for autonomous warfare, seeking to accelerate the DoW’s purchases across all categories of drones, robotics, and AI to prepare the military for warfare that has forever changed – that inflection point arrived in March. 

The Autonomous Warfare Command, dubbed “AutoWarCom,” is set to become operational in the fall of next year, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

The WSJ quoted Hegseth as saying in a speech earlier at US Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, that this effort will be “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”

The key is the massive rearmament supercycle set to kick off, if it hasn’t already. It will provide massive tailwinds for drone companies as the military begins stockpiling all categories of drones and counter-UAS technology while fortifying military installations around the world. 

To do this, the US supply chain must be built out to produce millions of one-way attack drones with components made domestically or in conflict-free areas. In other words, drone engines, blades, sensors, and other components must be sourced outside China.

Owen West, a former Marine, assistant defense secretary, and Goldman Sachs trader, will initially lead the effort alongside Navy SEAL test pilot Max Strasiser, according to the outlet.

“Once we apply sustained budget to changed doctrine, we will outperform the world,” said West, who has been leading the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. “And by snapping in AI, we will be ahead of the world, because we are the leaders in AI.”

To understand the tailwinds coming to the drone industry, the report notes that the DoW has sought to triple spending on autonomous warfare, proposing $74 billion for drone and counterdrone technology in its largest-ever budget request.

Our drone theme began in late January, when we warned (read report) that every data center needs a kinetic interceptor (read here). The worst-case scenario materialized a month later when Iran attacked several data centers in the Gulf with one-way attack drones. Our pick in the space is Ondas.

Our reporting from last weekend shows that the DoW nearly doubled the value of a contract for Ondas’ ULTRA platform, which appears to be a lower-cost Group 5 drone that could complement the MQ-9 Reaper and eventually assume some of its ISR missions (read report).

Follow the money. 

* * *

Authored by Patty Nieberg via Task & Purpose,

The U.S. military-led mission to counter the Islamic State in Iraq has officially come to an end.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced Wednesday that the “orderly departure” of U.S. personnel and equipment from Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq was officially complete. Officials said the withdrawal marked the end to Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq, the U.S. military’s counter-ISIS mission in the country.

The Erbil Air Base had served as a central hub for the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve mission since U.S. forces had been invited back by the Iraqi government to fight ISIS insurgents in the country.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, and by 2011, American forces left the country. As ISIS insurgents took hold of broad swaths of the country, Iraqi authorities invited a smaller contingent of U.S. forces to help counter the growing threat. Operation Inherent Resolve, a U.S.-led international coalition of military partners, was then established in 2014.

A majority of the 1,500 American and coalition partners supporting these operations worked out of Erbil. The mission will now be headquarters based in Jordan for U.S. forces to continue its mission focused on Syria, officials said.

“As we step back and hand full primary responsibility for Iraq’s security to the Government of Iraq and the brave people of Iraq, U.S. and Coalition forces stationed across the region will remain ready to respond to any ISIS threats that arise,” Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM’s commander, said in a release. “Maintaining our vigilance and readiness is essential to protecting the U.S. homeland and strengthening regional security.”

For more than a decade, U.S. troops have trained and assisted Iraqi partner forces to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In 2024, the U.S. and Iraq reached an agreement for a new bilateral security partnership, which ended the coalition’s work in the country and moved the U.S. towards more of an “advisory” and “capacity-building” role for Iraqi security forces.

“ISIS no longer poses a systemic threat to Iraq’s national security and Iraqi security forces, including the Peshmerga and other Iraqi Kurdistan Region security forces, now possess the capacity, leadership, and operational independence to unilaterally manage threats to their homeland,” Cooper said.

When the new security partnership with Iraq was announced in 2024, U.S. officials would not say how many of the roughly 2,500 troops in Iraq would ultimately withdraw or stay behind. Department of Defense officials said in a release Wednesday that local security forces would lead counter-ISIS efforts in the country but that the U.S. would continue providing “targeted training and intelligence support to our Iraqi partners.”

In response to inquiries about how many American troops would be in Iraq going forward, a U.S. official declined to comment, citing operational security.

The withdrawal comes as the U.S. war with Iran enters its eighth month. The U.S. withdrawal prompted mixed feelings among Iraqis about the departure of American forces in the country after decades of war, and concerns from Kurdish officials who worry that the removal of U.S. air defense equipment will leave the Kurdistan region vulnerable to Iranian drone and ballistic missile attacks.

Here’s what White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said a mere week ago on the rationale for the US attacking Iran: “The President is courageously ensuring that such an evil country never possesses a nuclear weapon, which will make the entire world safer and more stable,” she said.

This week President Trump was asked why he seems OK with a deeply totalitarian state like North Korea and its dictator Kim Jong Un having nuclear weapons, and not Iran.

Trump’s blunt response really deflates the sham talking points of the war’s cheerleaders among Conservatism Inc, the FoxCon crowd, and NeoCon pundits and “intellectuals”. So much for the whole defeat the “mullahs because they’re evil!” fake morality tale…

Q: You said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. Why not? North Korea can have nuclear weapons.

Trump: Ahh because you had a different president. Kim Jong un. He’s a friend of mine. He likes Trump. I like him. As long as I’m around, he’s going to be fine. You know why? He… pic.twitter.com/TnnNJ5cMmJ

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 29, 2026

“Ahh, because you had a different president. Kim Jong Un. He’s a friend of mine. He likes Trump. I like him,” Trump said when a reporter pressed him.

“As long as I’m around, he’s going to be fine,” Trump continued. “You know why? He respects me.”

By this strange logic, Pyongyang – which has on many more occasions (than Iran) directly threatened the United States going back literally decades  – possessing nukes is just fine. Or in other words Kim=”friend”/Good, Ayatollah= Rogue Bad Guy, according to the simplistic equation. The inconsistency of the obviously self-defeating ‘moral high ground’ narrative advanced by the administration is baffling.

On a more serious note, the above exchange highlights something deeper: nation-states most often seek nukes precisely in order to get respect especially when facing destruction at the hands of a more powerful enemy.

The US and Israel have long claimed that Tehran is bent on annihilating Israel, and that its leaders will pull the trigger the moment they develop an atomic weapon (a pursuit the Iranians have over many years denied). Essentially, this is the mad mullahs myth, based on the NeoCon axiom that every Iranian leader is an irrational actor fundamentally bent on ushering in nuclear apocalypse against the Jews, self preservation or any other domestic consideration be damned.

When Trump said of Kim, “he respects me” – the irony here is in reality it is Washington that’s forced to ‘respect’ North Korea because it possesses dozens of nukes and has the military tech to deliver them. Countries like Iran want this ‘respect’ too.

On the level of strategic realism, it’s just the way the world works (ask Gaddafi)–>

From the perspective of its beleaguered leaders who’ve been under US bombs and blockade for seven months, Iran has two choices. It must choose one:

1. Become Libya

2. Become North Korea

“We Came, We Saw, He Died.” — Hillary Clinton

“We Came, We Saw, He Died.” — Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/PeVRk2peiA

— WarNuse (@WarNuse) June 27, 2025

Below: On the ‘moral mythmaking’ of Neocons & Liberal Interventionists VS. strategic realism in international relations, an important conclusion:

“These leaders need to be treated as rational actors that, in turn with other members of their government, act based on strategy.”

Rajan Menon, professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York, told Newsweek: “If you stand for nonproliferation, you can’t say it’s OK because they already have them.” And the reality is, Menon continued, “there’s no reasonable way to undo the fact that North Korea is a nuclear-armed state.”

*  *  *

An archived interview where retired diplomat Jim Jatras talks nukes and ‘rogue’ actors getting ‘respect’…

‘Possibility’ Iranians will now rather ‘be North Korea’ than become another Libya — former US diplomat Jim Jatras on repercussions of Trump’s attack on Iran

‘Kim Jong Un gets respect because he does have nukes’ pic.twitter.com/YoS7dFaAFp

— RT (@RT_com) June 22, 2025

On Monday we flagged that September was shaping up as the worst month for junk since 2022. We also noted that Paramount’s $12.4 billion high-yield tranche would be bigger than SoftBank’s recently issued record $11 billion junk deal. The next morning the company kicked off the high-grade portion. By Tuesday afternoon it reported $109 billion of demand. 

With so much excess demand, the offering was supposed to fly off the shelves. It did not: the deal priced on Wednesday, the same day a judge accepted the states’ settlement and the merger was scheduled to close on Oct. 6. It is the biggest takeover financing Hollywood has seen, for the biggest Hollywood buyout ever. Paramount won Warner Bros. from Netflix back in February.

While underwriters usually leave a little on the table for new-issue buyers, they didn’t this time, and all the new issues faceplanted the moment they broke for trading.

What was sold

Here is the full stack from the company’s pricing release. The $52 billion package has three parts:

• $30 billion of first-lien notes across eight tranches, from 2028 to 2066, rated BBB-/Ba1/BBB-.
• $11.4 billion plus €885 million of second-lien notes (i.e. junk) rated BB/B1/BB.
• An $8.5 billion and €850 million term loan B at SOFR/EURIBOR+275.

Every note priced at par.

Every tranche priced at par. The junk second-lien notes come with junk-sized coupons.

What happened next

On Wednesday evening, Goldman’s credit desk wrote that “IG cash felt firm, supported by beta compression and outperformance from PSKY.” That lasted about one night.

Here is Goldman’s credit desk Thursday’s 7:38am macro update:

“Despite IG cash feeling firm most of the day, PSKY traded heavy and is now +10 from the break, and the WBD 2L bonds are down ~3pts from new issue price. Generically, HY cash has continued to lag HQ with insurance and mortgage originators feel the most pain.”

Things got much worse from there. According to Bloomberg and TRACE data:

• The 8-year dollar second-lien notes, which priced at 100 on Wednesday, traded a touch above 95. That works out to a yield of about 9.7%. On the $4 billion tranche, that is roughly $200 million of paper losses within minutes of breaking .
• The $5.25 billion 10-year first-lien bond, issued at T+262.5, was quoted near T+278.
• Investment-grade paper alone booked more than $200 million of unrealized losses.
• Paramount’s 5-year CDS rose as much as 53bp to 432bp, the highest since April 2009.
• The stock fell as much as 7.5%.

Day-one returns for anyone who got a full allocation.

While widely trumpeted as a sign of relentless demand ahead of pricing, the (alleged) $109 billion order book shrank to about $80 billion by pricing. Demand at the long end fell by more than half. That is the same pattern as June’s $25 billion SpaceX deal, which also struggled once it was free to trade. The investors who stayed in received most or all of what they asked for, especially in the long bonds. Many of them didn’t feel like staying after the bonds didn’t rise after the break… and immediately sold on Thursday morning.

Traders reportedly called and messaged the lead banks (Apollo, BofA and Citi, syndicated across 18 banks) to complain. The bank, for their part, were quick to point out what a great offering this was (for them, and the company perhaps): Citi’s Leon Kalvaria said the financing “turned out incredibly well in a choppy market.” CFO Dennis Cinelli called the selloff “one-day choppiness.”

Goldman’s desks saw it coming

To be fair to the bankers, nobody who reads Goldman’s credit traders should be surprised. Goldman’s portfolio-trading desk (Sarah Zappone) wrote on Sept 26, before launch:

“$32bn in 1L secured IG bonds (whispered ~50bps steep on 10s30s!)… We suspect this package prices well wide of CHTR given the deal scale and elevated pro-forma leverage.”

Brad Shelofsky on the IG trading desk said the same day that “~$30bn will be wide trading 1L secured IG bonds.” Just the whispers about the deal had been enough to hit the market. Bonds trading wider than 200bp ended that week 9bp wider, versus 3.5bp for the 0-100bp bucket. He also warned that the risk was to credit curves steepening, since “the likes of PSKY will bring some wide trading duration.” Paramount alone was expected to push September high-grade supply close to the desk’s $230 billion estimate.

Alisha Pasi’s weekly “What’s Trending Across Credit” summed up the setup. SoftBank had just printed the largest non-IG bond sale on record, and Paramount was lining up “another potentially record-setting ~$12.4bn HY financing.” Pasi wrote:

“The ability of the market to absorb back-to-back jumbo transactions should be a useful test of demand at still-tight valuations… the margin for error has clearly narrowed.”

The test had a clear result.

Paramount also had no control over its timing. The lawsuits blocking the financing were only settled late last month, and the ticking fee kept running every day the deal stayed open. Goldman’s special situations desk calculates that WBD holders will receive $31.0167 a share at the Oct. 6 close, based on a ticking fee of 0.278 cents per day. Impax’s Tony Trzcinka put it simply: the timing was “partly forced.”

Needless to say, the window Paramount was forced into was one of the worst for credit in years. As we noted on Wednesday, credit was “cracking big time.” CCC spreads turned distressed for the first time since the 2023 bank crisis. Goldman’s credit monitor (Reid Zhou) shows how lopsided the damage was as of Wednesday’s close:

• USD HY OAS 311bp, up 37bp in a week (98th percentile over one year)
• CCCs at 1,007bp, a three-year high, up 76bp on the week
• IG OAS up just 4bp
• iBoxx IG all-in yields at 6.50%, the 100th percentile going back to 2004

The lower the rating, the bigger the move, and Paramount just brought $12.4bn of BB/B1 paper smack into the middle of it.

Rates added to the pressure. Goldman’s rates desk said the long end hit new highs on Wednesday “after US consumer spending rose at this fastest pace in a year… and Paramount priced their $30bn eight part offering.” It also said the long end was “potentially weighed down by corporate supply alongside hedging flows.” The 10-year went above 5.30% for the first time since 2002. The 30-year touched 5.60%. As Deutsche’s Jim Reid put it this week, “Equity investors see the growth, and bond investors see the bill.”

The “cycle’s TXU”?

The Bear Traps chat was less charitable. One CIO wrote:

“A mkt taking on 2 or 3 record / MONSTER equity IPOs (SpaceX, Anthropic) and this MONSTER debt offering at the same time – these are cycle TOP signposts… Paramount’s existing unsecured bonds? Primed. TXU (2007) is still the largest LBO ever, but this is our cycle’s TXU.”

That point about priming deserves attention. Holders of Paramount’s legacy unsecured debt now rank behind $30 billion of first-lien and $12.4 billion of second-lien secured paper.

And here is a technical twist on the Paramount loans, flagged by Goldman. The new Paramount term loan (marketed at $7.5 billion and upsized to about $9.5 billion at pricing) comes alongside repayment of WBD’s roughly $15 billion term loan. Nearly 90% of US CLOs under Fitch surveillance hold that loan, and O’Connor says “upon settlement, it will amount to one of the largest paydowns in history.” That is a large amount of CLO cash that will need a new home, at the same time the CLOs’ favorite collateral is being repriced.

The other side

For the bulls, JPMorgan’s Saul Doctor notes that the bank’s Fear & Greed index has hit oversold (83, versus a trigger of 80). CDX IG is just shy of 60bp, which is 6bp from the YTD wides. According to Doctor, three months of carry on CDX IG (30c) would recoup a move back to the wides. In other words, panic sellers of high grade have historically been the ones who lost money.

The problem is that Paramount’s new bonds are not CDX IG. They are a split-rated, 7x-levered, record-sized new issue whose biggest buyers were left holding more than they wanted. Those investors also learned within 24 hours that the “concession” was a markdown. Whether this was “one-day choppiness” will be clear soon enough: Paramount is still looking for equity, CDS is at 2009 levels, and the deal closes on Tuesday. And as for the key sponsor, Larry has many other problems on his mind.

One lesson governments never seem to learn is that when taxes push the legal price of something high enough, a black market will eventually show up to collect the difference.

Australia is now getting a particularly ugly demonstration of that principle. After more than a decade of relentlessly increasing tobacco taxes in an effort to crush smoking, the country has created an enormous price gap between legal and illegal cigarettes, and organized crime has rushed in to fill it, according to the Financial Times.

A legal pack of cigarettes now costs close to A$60, or roughly US$42, making Australian cigarettes the most expensive in the world. Excise taxes account for more than 70% of that price, and the cost of legally purchased tobacco has roughly tripled since the end of 2016. Meanwhile, contraband cigarettes can be bought for around one-fifth of the legal price.

Not surprisingly, smokers have migrated to the underground market. Australia’s tobacco regulator estimated that illegal cigarettes accounted for roughly 55% of the market last year, although other government estimates suggest illicit tobacco’s share of consumption may be considerably higher.

Criminology professor James Martin estimates Australians spend about A$8.5 billion each year on illegal cigarettes and vaping products, roughly twice what the country spends on cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin combined. In practical terms, criminal organizations have become major tobacco distributors.

FT writes that the consequences are no longer limited to lost tax revenue or smokers buying cheap cigarettes under the table. The business has become lucrative enough to produce violent competition between criminal groups, including extortion, robberies and a wave of firebombings in Melbourne and Sydney. A recent Senate report cited three deaths connected to the violence, while the convenience-store industry says there have been roughly 300 arson attacks associated with the tobacco trade.

The Senate report described the situation as reaching a breaking point and recommended halting further excise increases while substantially reducing tobacco taxes. The government has resisted, maintaining that expensive cigarettes remain an effective deterrent. There is evidence for that argument: the smoking rate among Australians over 14 reportedly fell from 8.3% to 5.6% between 2023 and 2025.

But nicotine consumption tells a less straightforward story. Wastewater measurements from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicate that nicotine consumption increased by almost 40% between 2017 and 2025, with illicit tobacco driving much of the increase. Illegal vaping products have also captured an overwhelming share of their market.

The fiscal side of the experiment has deteriorated just as dramatically. Tobacco excise revenue reached about A$16 billion in 2020, fell by more than half by 2025 and is projected to sink toward A$2 billion by 2030.

Authorities have committed A$365 million since 2024 to fighting the illicit trade, including efforts against smugglers and retailers. One recent joint operation with Chinese authorities intercepted roughly 60 million cigarettes shipped from Shanghai to Sydney, valued at about A$92 million. But the market continues to spread, with contraband reportedly sold online, from parking lots and through ordinary businesses such as barbers and fruit shops.

Australia’s tobacco experiment has therefore arrived at a strange destination. Legal cigarettes have been taxed to extraordinary prices, government revenue is collapsing, billions of dollars are flowing through an underground economy, and criminal groups are fighting over the proceeds. Whatever public health benefits higher taxes initially produced, policymakers are now confronting what happens when the legal price of a widely demanded product becomes disconnected enough from its black-market price to make breaking the law enormously profitable.