I have been putting this one off.
The first log was relatively easy to write. Introductions, methodology, framing. Clinical. The kind of writing that keeps you at a safe distance from the thing you are actually writing about. I am good at that distance when I need it. I have had to get good at it.
This one is different. This one I watched. Not from a remove, not through records and archives. I was in the drift when the later part of this period played out and I remember what it felt like to watch something that did not have to happen, happen anyway.
I am going to write it factually. I am going to stay in the register I established in the first log. But I want to be honest with you that this entry costs something to write, and if the tone shifts in places, that is why.
Start with what is already visible. What you can already see from where you are, if you are looking at it honestly rather than through the lens of what you want to be true or what your preferred outlets are telling you to notice.
The gait. Anyone who has spent time around elderly people in cognitive decline will recognise the gait — the careful, slightly forward-leaning shuffle that sets in when spatial awareness and motor confidence begin to degrade together. It is documented on camera across hundreds of public appearances. It is not a bad day. It is a progression.
The speech. The incomplete sentences that loop back on themselves without resolving. The tangential associations that trail off. The increasing frequency of what his own circle, in private communications that later became public, referred to as "the weather" — a term they used for the episodes where he became fixated on a grievance or a fragment of a thought and could not be redirected from it for the duration of a meeting.
The weight. The medication regimes that were never officially disclosed but that physicians who reviewed the public footage were consistent about in their assessments. Stimulant-pattern behaviour followed by sharp withdrawal troughs. Visible in the timeline of public appearances if you map the energy levels against the calendar.
None of this is speculation. All of it is documentable from material that exists in your present. I am not diagnosing. I am describing what is observable and what, from where I sit, was observable to the people around him in real time. Which is the part that matters.
I need to say something before I get to the administration's specific role, because if I do not say it the rest of this log will be missing its foundation. And I am going to say it without the qualifications and the careful hedging that I watched people perform for decades. That performance had a cost. I am not going to repeat it.
What was done to the Palestinian people — to the Arab and Muslim Palestinians specifically, the ones the Israeli state and its backers were most determined to erase from the land and from the record — did not begin in 2023. It did not begin in 2014 or 2008 or 2000 or 1967. It began with the founding of Israel as a state in 1948.
The Nakba. The forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. The massacre of civilians in villages whose names were subsequently removed from maps. The demolition of over 400 towns and villages. The systematic, organised transfer of a population off land they had lived on for generations, carried out by militias and then by a state apparatus, to make room for a different population. This was not a side effect of nation-building. This was not regrettable collateral damage. Ethnic cleansing was not incidental to the founding of Israel. It was the method. It was the plan. The documents exist. The orders exist. The historians have read them.
In the decades that followed, the settler colonial project did not conclude. It continued. Military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza from 1967 onward. The steady, relentless expansion of illegal settlements onto Palestinian land — illegal under international law, illegal under the Geneva Conventions, condemned in resolution after resolution that were vetoed or ignored — while the people whose land was being taken were subjected to a system of checkpoints, permits, walls, separate roads, separate legal frameworks, demolition orders, and administrative detention without charge or trial.
Multiple human rights organisations documented this system and named it accurately: apartheid. Amnesty International. Human Rights Watch. B'Tselem — an Israeli organisation, documenting the actions of its own state. Apartheid is not a rhetorical escalation. It is a legal category with a specific definition. The evidence met the definition. The word was applied because it was correct.
Gaza specifically. Forty kilometres of land. Two million people. Blockaded since 2007 — every calorie, every medical supply, every litre of fuel passing through a checkpoint controlled by the state conducting the blockade. The UN called it an open-air prison. That was before October 2023.
What happened after October 2023 — I am not going to describe it in clinical language because clinical language is part of how it was allowed to continue. The bombardment of civilian infrastructure. The displacement of over a million people with nowhere to go. The destruction of hospitals, the targeting of aid convoys, the use of starvation as a deliberate instrument of war. The death toll that kept climbing while international bodies issued statements and convened sessions and changed nothing. What happened in Gaza from 2023 through the years I passed through was not a rupture from prior Israeli policy toward Palestinians. It was the logical endpoint of a seventy-year trajectory, conducted at full speed, in full view, with full impunity.
That impunity had a supplier.
The United States supplied it. Not passively. Not reluctantly. The United States supplied billions of dollars in military aid to Israel annually, year after year, regardless of what that military did with it. The United States vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefires — vetoed them, repeatedly, ensuring that no binding international mechanism could be brought to bear. The United States provided the diplomatic cover, the weapons, the political protection, and the rhetorical framework — "Israel's right to defend itself" — that allowed the project to continue without consequence for decades.
This was bipartisan. I want to be clear about that. This was not a Republican policy or a Democratic policy. This was American foreign policy, consistent across administrations, adjusted occasionally in tone, never in substance. What the Trump administration did in 2025 was not introduce US complicity. It removed the last pretence of discomfort about it. Blank cheque, no conditions, no process, no questions. And the people making those calls were not the president.
I am saying all of this plainly because from where I am, I watched a generation of journalists and politicians and commentators spend years finding ways not to say it plainly. Conflict. Clashes. Both sides. Complicated history. As though there were two sides with equivalent power, equivalent accountability, equivalent protection under international law. There were not. There was an occupying state with one of the most advanced militaries on earth, funded by the most powerful country on earth, and there were a people under occupation. That asymmetry was the story. The refusal to name it was also the story. And both had consequences that I am still living through.
I want to be precise here because this is where most analysis of this period goes wrong. It becomes about one man. The decline of one man, the decisions of one man, the damage done by one man. And that framing, while emotionally satisfying in some ways, misses the actual mechanism of what happened.
A declining centre does not produce a vacuum. It produces a competition. The people around a leader who is losing coherence do not sit back and let decisions go unmade. They make them. They make them in his name, with his signature, with varying degrees of his actual awareness. They compete with each other for positioning in a court that has become unpredictable. And the decisions that emerge from that process reflect not the judgement of one compromised man but the outcomes of factional fighting among people who were never elected, never vetted for these choices, and were primarily motivated by their own survival in the structure.
The institutions that should have caught this — the checks, the processes, the people in rooms whose job it was to say "this cannot continue" — did not catch it. Some were already compromised. Some were afraid. Some had convinced themselves that managing around it was the responsible choice, that stability required pretending the centre was holding when it was not.
That pretence is not neutral. It has a cost. The cost compounds.
By late 2025, the effective executive was not one person. It was a fractured collection of interests operating behind a figurehead whose coherent engagement with policy had become intermittent. Major decisions — spending, appointments, foreign policy posture — were being driven by whoever had access that week. The paper trail, when historians finally got to it, was not a record of considered governance. It was a record of a system eating itself quietly while the public-facing performance of normality continued.
Nowhere was this more visible — or more consequential — than in the administration's posture toward Israel. There was no policy. There was a reflex. Blank-cheque military aid continued and expanded. Every UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza was vetoed. Every. Single. One. Not evaluated. Not debated in any meaningful sense. Vetoed as a matter of automatic procedural loyalty to a government that was, by any documented measure, committing war crimes with American-supplied weapons. The administration did not just enable this. It funded it, armed it, shielded it from accountability at every international forum where accountability might have been possible.
The people making those calls were not a coherent foreign policy apparatus exercising considered strategic judgement. They were factions. Some were ideologically committed. Some were financially entangled. Some simply found unconditional support for Israel useful as a domestic political signal and never looked past that utility to the body count it was underwriting. A functioning executive might have imposed conditions. Might have used leverage. Might have said: this far, no further. None of that happened.
I am going to write this section carefully. Not because I want to protect anyone. Because every time I have tried to write the full version of this, the signal degrades badly and most of it does not arrive. The terminal filters it. I do not know exactly why. I have theories.
What I can tell you clearly: in 2026, a military engagement with Iran began. It did not come from nowhere. You cannot understand how it started without understanding what was happening in Gaza in the years before it. The regional temperature had been rising since 2023 and it did not stop rising. Proxy engagements multiplying. Iran's position hardening in direct response to what was being done to Palestinian civilians with American weapons and American political cover. The logic of escalation was not complicated. It was visible. It was being tracked by analysts who were publishing their findings in places that were not being read by the people with the power to interrupt it.
I am not saying Iran bore no responsibility for what happened. I am saying that a sequence of events was set in motion years earlier, and that the US — through its unconditional support for a campaign in Gaza that killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced millions, and destroyed the infrastructure of an entire territory — poured fuel on every regional tension that eventually ignited. You cannot do what was done in Gaza and expect the region to absorb it without consequence. That is not a political opinion. It is a description of cause and effect.
I am not saying it was engineered. I am saying it was allowed. There is a difference and it matters less than people think, because the outcome is the same.
■▓▒░⊕∷ΔΩ7#■▓ the specific sequence in ▒░⊕∷Δ March of that year Ω7#■▓▒░⊕∷ involved a decision made ΔΩ7#■▓▒░ by someone who was not ⊕∷ΔΩ7#■▓▒░⊕∷Δ authorised to make it Ω7#■▓▒░⊕∷ΔΩ7#■▓▒ and the person who was ░⊕∷ΔΩ7#■▓▒░⊕∷ΔΩ authorised was not #■▓▒░⊕∷ΔΩ7#■▓▒░⊕ reachable ∷ΔΩ7#■▓▒░⊕∷ΔΩ7#■▓▒░⊕∷ΔΩ7#■
The conflict itself was not, in isolation, the end of anything. I want to be clear about that. What it was: a trigger. The US entered a sustained military and economic commitment it could not afford — not financially, not politically, not in terms of the social cohesion that was already under severe stress. It consumed the remaining bandwidth of a government that had very little bandwidth left. The things that needed attention domestically — the things that might have been addressable in 2025, 2026, even 2027 — did not get it.
You do not feel a country starting to sink the way you feel a ship. There is no single moment. There is a series of moments where the resources that would have prevented the next crisis got spent on the current one, and the next crisis arrives larger, and the cycle accelerates. That is what 2026 started. Not a collapse. An acceleration of a decline that was already underway, past the point where the available tools could reverse it.
I am nervous writing this. I want to be honest about that too. Not because of what the terminal might do to the signal. Because I remember what comes after and I am sitting here transmitting into a window where it has not happened yet and I do not know if any of this reaches the right people or reaches anyone at all.
You are in it right now. That is not a metaphor and it is not comfort. It is a logistical fact. The decisions that determined the trajectory I am describing were made in a window that, from where you are reading, has not closed.
The Iran engagement was not inevitable in 2024. It was not inevitable in early 2025. The groundwork was being laid but groundwork can be interrupted. Provocations can be de-escalated. Advisors can be replaced. Processes that have been bypassed can be reinstated. None of that requires a revolution. It requires people in the relevant positions deciding that the performance of normalcy is less important than the work of actually preventing what comes next.
Watch the foreign policy appointments. Watch who has access and when. Watch the gap between what is said publicly about diplomatic posture toward Iran and what the actual resource commitments and military movements suggest. Those two things will not match. When they stop even trying to match, you are close.
I did not write this log to make you afraid. I wrote it because you are not afraid enough of the specific thing that is actually coming, and the things that are getting most of the fear and attention are not the load-bearing ones. The structure fails at the point nobody is watching. It always does.
Watch the points nobody is watching.
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