Did Biden just escalate the Gaza War? | Responsible Statecraft

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On Thursday night, President Joe Biden — acting without congressional approval — ordered airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, an escalation in the regional spillover from Israel’s war in Gaza that now directly involves US military personnel.

Biden chose to escalate the conflict and bomb Yemen in response to Houthi fighters' Red Sea attacks. His unconditional support and steady flow of weapons to Israel appears to be increasing the likelihood of a regional war. Instead of using the U.S.’s considerable leverage over Israel to push for a ceasefire, Biden is enabling a brutal war that has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, and ties his administration to Israel’s decisions as it inches toward an all out war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Biden should be honest with Americans: the longer Israel's siege of Gaza persists, the greater the chances of a regional conflagration that will put American lives in danger.

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Will Democrats pop Trump's $50 billion trial balloon for war?

Top image credit: Sens. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) sit look on during a congressional hearing in January, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA)

Will Democrats pop Trump's $50 billion trial balloon for war?

Washington Politics

On Wednesday, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told CNN that he would support new funding for the U.S. war with Iran — but only if Israel and Arab Gulf states help pay for it.

“We’re using our taxpayer money to protect those countries,” Gallego said. “We’re using our men to protect these countries. They need to throw in and have skin in the game too.”

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Polymarket Iran War

Top photo credit: Polymarket logo (Shutterstock/PJ McDonald) and Scene following an airstrike on an Iranian police centre damaging residential buildings around it in Niloofar square in central Tehran on march 1, 2026. (Hamid Vakili/Parspix/ABACAPRESS.COM)

Prediction markets are a national security threat

Hours before an Israeli attack in Tehran killed Ayatollah Khamenei, an account on the prediction market Polymarket made over half a million dollars wagering that Iran’s Supreme Leader would vacate office before 3/31. That account, named “Magamyman,” was not the only one to cash in on the attacks.

Half a dozen Polymarket accounts made over $1.2M betting that the U.S. “strikes Iran by February 28, 2026.” Those accounts were allegedly paid for through cryptocurrency wallets that had previously not been funded prior to Feb. 27. Overall, prediction market users bet over $255M on markets related to the attacks in Iran on the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket alone.

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Indonesia stock exchange

Top photo credit: (Shutterstock/Triawanda Tirta Aditya)

Trump's ‘move fast and break things’ war slams into economy

The launch of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran could lead to economic and financial disruptions that ripple across the countries of the Global South with devastating effects. And while a quick end to the war could dampen these effects, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has acknowledged that the war could even last up to 8 weeks, and Israel is now reportedly expecting a "weeks-long" war with Iran.

The fundamental issue here seems to be an increasingly expansive vision of American — and particularly Israeli — war aims. These have now gone well beyond Iran’s offer of substantial denuclearization to regime change, and some quarters have even more extreme visions like the potential Balkanization of Iran into multiple statelets. Such mission creep on the part of the U.S. and Israel has in turn changed incentive structures in Iran towards an expansion of the conflict to target both the Gulf States and global oil markets, a dynamic that threatens to broaden the conflict and extend it, with profound impacts on the global economy.

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