US tells allies: Prepare for possible Iran strikes and retaliation

US tells allies: Prepare for possible Iran strikes and retaliation

Israel National News

The United States has warned several Middle Eastern countries and regional allies to prepare for the possibility of renewed American military strikes against Iran following next week's midterm elections, as well as potential Iranian retaliation targeting their territory, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Two diplomats familiar with the warnings said American diplomatic and defense officials had advised regional governments to take precautions against possible attacks by Iran and its proxy groups.

Both diplomats spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive communications.

According to the diplomats, President Donald Trump has not yet decided whether to authorize another military operation against the Islamic Republic, although he has repeatedly indicated that additional strikes could take place after the November 3 elections.

American officials have informed regional allies that a new offensive could last several days. However, officials in the Middle East are concerned that retaliatory attacks by Iran and its proxies could prolong the confrontation beyond the initial American operation.

The warnings specifically highlighted the possibility of Iranian strikes against energy installations and other critical infrastructure, prompting Washington to urge its partners to strengthen their defensive preparations.

The White House and other American officials declined to comment on the report.

The latest warnings follow a report published Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, which revealed that Washington had advised several Gulf Arab countries to prepare for a potentially brief but intensive military campaign against Iran after the midterm elections.

According to that report, the US military has already begun taking precautionary steps in the region, including reinforcing air defense systems and moving personnel away from bases considered vulnerable to Iranian attacks.

Trump, who has spent recent weeks campaigning for Republican candidates ahead of the November 3 vote, has declined to provide a definitive answer about whether he intends to resume military operations against Tehran.

During an election rally in Texas on Tuesday, the President defended his earlier decision to attack Iran and said he would make the same choice again.

“Somebody asked me yesterday, it’s very interesting, ‘If you had to do it again, would you have attacked Iran?’ I said absolutely," Trump told supporters.

“It’s one of the greatest things I ever did," he added.

Trump also insisted that he would determine when the conflict ends, emphasizing that any settlement must ensure Iran never obtains nuclear weapons.

"Somebody asked me before, when will the war in Iran end? I said, whenever I want it to end. It'll be very quick, but we have to have it end properly, with total and complete - a total statement, they will never have a nuclear weapon. Number one state sponsor [of terrorism]. They will never have a nuclear weapon."

The President had previously addressed the prospect of further strikes during an exchange with reporters on Saturday, refusing to disclose whether military action was imminent.

Fire briefly triggers emergency at South Carolina lab on former nuclear weapons site

Fire briefly triggers emergency at South Carolina lab on former nuclear weapons site

HALLIE GOLDEN

A fire at a national lab in South Carolina that is in a complex where key parts for nuclear bombs were once made triggered an emergency declaration Wednesday that shut down incoming traffic and restricted air and rail service in the area.

The fire at the Savannah River National Laboratory on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site was extinguished by Wednesday night and the site returned to normal operations. No detectable levels of contamination were found, according to a Savannah River Site statement.

The Savannah River Site is a massive complex where the federal government once produced materials used in nuclear weapons, primarily tritium and plutonium-239. The lab is in its northwest corner, near the edge of the site.

The site was opened in the early 1950s as the Cold War was heating up. Today it is used for environmental stewardship and cleanup, along with nuclear waste management and disposition of nuclear materials, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The lab currently does experiments with nuclear materials and also does processing work with radioactive material, including operating a facility for radioisotope recovery from used nuclear fuel, said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Lyman said it is reassuring that officials said there has been no off-site contamination, noting that there is a buffer zone between most of the facilities and the public areas.

But if you have a fire where there is radioactive material, “you need to take extreme precautions because of the potential dispersal of that material and the potential for contamination, potential for the public to be exposed,” he said.

The emergency declaration put out Wednesday is the second-highest of three categories of emergencies at the site and indicates “something more serious has occurred,” according to the site’s community preparedness information. The emergency declaration ended Wednesday night after the fire was extinguished.

The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

John W. Whitehead

This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us.

Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting.

But perhaps the most frightening monster of all is the government that has become so accustomed to wielding extraordinary power that it cannot imagine a future in which that power is diminished

Enter the Doomsday Plan.

Imagine it: The power grid goes down. Supply chains collapse. Communications fail. Cities are plunged into darkness. Ordinary Americans are left scrambling for food, water, medicine and shelter.

Not to worry, though. The government has a plan for the coming apocalypse.

Unfortunately, the plan seems to have more to do with keeping the police state operational than keeping the American people alive.

In what sounds like a plot lifted straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the Pentagon has unveiled an initiative designed to keep the war machine running even if a catastrophic war devastates the country’s civilian infrastructure.

Under an initiative called FORTRESS, the military is preparing major installations across the United States to operate independently for at least 90 days in the event of a catastrophic disruption. The plan includes portable nuclear reactors, independent power grids, stockpiles of fuel and ammunition, backup communications systems and arrangements for civilian factories to switch over to wartime production.

The Pentagon calls this preparedness.

The rest of us might reasonably wonder: what good is a government that can survive the end of the world if the people it was created to serve cannot?

This is the dark absurdity at the heart of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Kubrick’s 1964 satire about a collection of military commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation while congratulating themselves on their strategic brilliance.

As civilization faces extinction, the men in charge begin discussing how a select portion of the population might survive underground in mineshafts, eventually emerging to rebuild civilization.

Naturally, the planners envision themselves among the survivors.

The resemblance to the present day is difficult to ignore.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as though the Trump administration has been watching every dystopian film and Cold War nightmare ever made and mistaking the villains for role models

George Orwell’s 1984 gave us a surveillance state that watches everything and everyone. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worldimagined a population conditioned into compliance. John Carpenter’s They Live exposed a society manipulated by hidden powers, while Escape from New York envisioned an America where whole populations could be abandoned to incarceration and decay.

These works were supposed to serve as warnings.

Yet the machinery of government increasingly resembles the very dystopias they cautioned against: mass surveillance, militarized policing, automated systems of control, a presidency claiming ever-expanding authority, and now elaborate preparations to keep the military functioning in the event of societal collapse.

Of course, governments have a responsibility to prepare for emergencies. No reasonable person would argue otherwise. But there is a world of difference between preparing to protect the nation and preparing to preserve the power of those who govern it.

That distinction matters, especially when the same government that prepares for catastrophic war also helps create the conditions in which such wars become not only likely but imminent.

For decades, presidents of both political parties have pursued policies of military expansion, foreign intervention, escalating confrontation and permanent national emergency. The result has been an increasingly militarized national-security state that operates with fewer meaningful restraints and demands ever greater sacrifices from the American people.

We have been told that these extraordinary powers are necessary to keep us safe.

Yet the government’s answer to nearly every crisis—war, terrorism, civil unrest, economic instability, public health emergencies—has been more government power, more military involvement, more surveillance and fewer constitutional protections.

Now the Pentagon is planning for a world in which the civilian infrastructure that sustains ordinary Americans may no longer function.

What happens then?

The government’s answer, at least in the newly announced FORTRESS initiative, is to make sure the military can continue fighting.

But what about the rest of us?

If the electric grid collapses, who will restore power to civilian communities? If hospitals lose electricity, who will keep patients alive? If food and medicine stop moving through the country, who will feed the population? If communications fail, how will families find one another? And if civil institutions cease functioning, who will ensure that emergency military authority does not become a permanent substitute for constitutional government?

This is precisely the kind of future the Pentagon is anticipating.

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European Leaders Pick Up the Phone and Call Putin

European Leaders Pick Up the Phone and Call Putin

Martin Armstrong

Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre have finally done something that should have been happening throughout this entire war. They picked up the telephone and spoke directly with Vladimir Putin. 

On October 27, the two leaders initiated a conversation with the Russian president to discuss ending the war in Ukraine and restoring some degree of stability to Europe. What makes this development particularly significant is that Finland and Norway stated explicitly that they were acting as leaders of their own nations, rather than claiming to represent Europe as a whole. 

Imagine that. Two national leaders recognizing that they have a responsibility to protect their own people rather than waiting for Brussels to tell them whether they are permitted to speak to Moscow.

Stubb described the conversation as “frank and substantive” and acknowledged that Finland and Norway share borders with Russia and will be directly affected by the outcome of this war. 

He stated that ending the conflict requires direct discussions. That should be obvious to anyone who understands diplomacy. How can Europe possibly negotiate an end to a war when so many of its leaders have refused to speak with one of the principal parties? The European political establishment has spent years announcing sanctions, military aid packages, and increasingly ambitious security commitments. Yet the basic act of maintaining communication with Moscow has become so controversial that a telephone call between heads of state is now treated as a remarkable diplomatic breakthrough.

What makes Stubb’s decision especially interesting is his own record. When he was elected president in February 2024, he declared that Finland would not restore high-level political relations with Russia until the war ended. In February 2025, he delivered a speech in Kyiv in which he argued that Putin could not be trusted and called for continued sanctions, military assistance, and pressure upon Moscow. He has been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine, Finland’s NATO membership, and stronger European security arrangements. This is hardly a politician who has spent the past several years defending the Kremlin. Yet he now recognizes that direct communication is necessary if the war is ever going to end. That change in diplomatic approach deserves attention because it acknowledges the practical limits of trying to isolate a major military power indefinitely.

Norwegian Prime Minister Støre has been more consistent on this particular issue. As far back as October 2022, he warned the Norwegian parliament that the lack of direct communication with Russia was dangerous because it reduced the prospects of a negotiated settlement and increased the risk of further escalation. Norway shares a 198 km land border with Russia, along with a much longer maritime boundary in the Arctic. These countries cannot simply relocate themselves because politicians in Brussels dislike their neighbor. In May 2026, Støre again emphasized that Norway’s relationship with Russia must balance national security with the geographical reality that the two countries will remain neighbors. His government has supported Ukraine and maintained sanctions, but it has also recognized that certain practical contacts with Moscow remain necessary.

This is the fundamental problem with the European Union’s approach to foreign policy. The European Commission is not a sovereign nation. Its president is selected through the EU’s institutional process rather than directly elected by the population of Europe. 

The Commission nevertheless exercises considerable influence over sanctions, economic policy, and the political positions advanced in Brussels. National governments retain important foreign-policy powers, particularly in security matters, but European leaders have increasingly attempted to present a unified position on Russia. 

Unity can be useful when countries genuinely share the same interests. It becomes far more complicated when governments are discouraged from pursuing diplomatic contacts necessary to protect their own populations.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen immediately criticized the Finnish and Norwegian initiative, complaining that the two countries had acted independently rather than coordinating with the rest of Europe. She questioned what they expected to accomplish and argued that Europe should speak with one voice. 

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How Debt-Free Families Still Pay a Price for Washington’s Debt

How Debt-Free Families Still Pay a Price for Washington’s Debt

Peter Reagan

There’s a special satisfaction that comes with paying off your mortgage, isn’t there?

For most Americans, it’s one of the biggest financial milestones of their lives. No more monthly house payments. No more worrying about mortgage interest rates. The house is finally yours, free and clear.

Maybe you’ve paid off your vehicles, too. And maybe you pay your credit card balance in full every month.

Congratulations! You’ve achieved a degree of financial independence that a lot of Americans spend their entire lives working toward.

But here’s something you may not have considered…

You can pay off every dollar of your own debt and still suffer the consequences of somebody else’s borrowing.

Especially when that somebody happens to be the federal government.

See, Washington doesn’t borrow from some separate financial universe. It competes for financing in the same economy as the rest of us.

And when Washington borrows money on the scale we’re talking about today, the consequences can reach much further than most Americans realize.

Even those who don’t owe anybody a dime.

According to an October 17 report from Fortune, the federal government spent a staggering $1.05 trillion on net interest payments during the fiscal year 2026.

That’s approximately $2.9 billion every single day.

Now, I want to make an important distinction here.

That $2.9 billion a day isn’t how much Washington is borrowing. It’s how much Washington is paying in interest on money it hasalready borrowed. And already spent (or wasted, or lost).

To put those numbers in perspective, interest on the federal debt is now the third-largest category of federal spending, behind Social Security and Medicare.

Interest payments consumed 14% of the entire federal budget in fiscal 2026.

Think about that for a moment. More than one dollar out of every seven spent by the federal government went toward servicing its existing debt.

Not building roads. Not maintaining bridges. Not providing medical care or Social Security payments. Not building Tomahawk missiles or paying disabled veterans’ benefits.

Just paying interest.

And according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s estimate cited by Fortune, those interest costs reached consume the largest share GDP ever – surpassing the previous record set in 1991.

The problem is what happens when enormous, persistent deficits require enormous, persistent borrowing – year after year after year.

And here’s where the consequences become personal.

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