Sivan Tal

Everything - and I mean everything - Chellaney is saying is a bald-faced lie. Which is absolutely disgusting: using such a tragedy - which killed hundreds (if not thousands, we don't know yet) of Nepalis and Chinese alike - to manufacture an entirely fake geopolitical narrative is genuinely beyond the pale. 1) The collapse happened on the Nepal side, not the "Tibetan side": as confirmed by Nepal themselves (nepalitimes.com/central-nepa…) and as obvious from satellite imagery (xitter.gq/RnaudBertrand/status/2…), Langtang Lirung, where the glacier collapsed, is entirely within Nepalese territory - this is not even a borderline case. 2) There is exactly zero "Chinese hydrological modifications and infrastructure footprint" in this area. You just need to check satellite imagery around the collapse side to check it out: maps.app.goo.gl/UHMLdA1aGJP8…. It's an extremely wild and unpopulated mountainous area. The only "infrastructure" there is a border checkpoint, a road, and a bridge that have existed in some form since the 8th century (tibettravel.org/blog/gyirong…). There are no dams. No hydrological modifications. Nothing. 3) On the "no warning" claim: this one is probably the most egregious of all because Chellaney is blaming China for not warning Nepal about something that happened **inside Nepal**. And, in any case, once the mountain collapse, warnings would unfortunately not have changed people's fates: the mudslide reached the border crossing - just 25km away - within just 7 minutes and 40 seconds (xitter.gq/CdnElectWatch/status/2…). There is no conceivable warning system that would have enabled a meaningful evacuation in under eight minutes. 4) If anything, one of the lessons of this terrible tragedy is that you actually WANT more infrastructure footprint in that area, Chinese or otherwise, if only to monitor if nearby mountains or glacier are showing signs of instability. Entire mountains just don't collapse from one day to the next without showing early signs of weakness that the right sensors could pick up days or weeks in advance. So the right answer to save lives in the region in the future, which I strongly suspect Chellaney doesn't give the slightest damn about, is more Chinese-Nepali cooperation on joint monitoring infrastructure. This is unfortunately not Chellaney's first rodeo with anti-China narratives designed to sow division and hatred between developing countries. He is the man, for instance, who infamously coined the "debt-trap diplomacy" narrative (since thoroughly debunked - see chathamhouse.org/2020/08/deb… - but still widely believed) to poison developing countries' relationships with China and thereby deprive them of infrastructure investment they badly need. How many roads, ports, and railways were delayed or canceled across Africa and Asia because governments were scared off by a narrative that turned out to be false? It's exactly the same pattern here: a catchy lie designed to sow division and hatred between countries at the exact moment they need each other most. I hate to say this but, behind all this, there is also a wider India angle. Anyone who's followed posts on X about this tragedy know that the overwhelming share of the disinformation about it - all aimed at weaponizing the tragedy to blame China - has come from thousands of Indian accounts like Chellaney's. And, given how aggressively India censors social media (shutting down up to thousands of X accounts a week: aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/8/…), the tolerance about this anti-China misinformation campaign unfortunately speaks for itself. All the more, in this instance, since Chellaney is deeply connected in the Indian government and was a member of India's National Security Advisory Board (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma…). At the risk of stating the obvious, it's pretty pathetic and deeply short-sighted. This is the case for this specific strategy: every glacier that threatens Nepal threatens northern India just as much: the next collapse could just as easily send a wall of mud into Uttarakhand. And if it does, India will need exactly the kind of cross-border China-Nepal monitoring cooperation that narratives like Chellaney's are designed to destroy. And it is the case more broadly too: when your strategy consists of turning your neighbors against each other based on lies, sooner or later they realize that the one thing they actually have in common is being deceived by you - and that makes you, not China, the common threat.

There's one interesting dimension of the US's sanctions on the ICC 👇 that, as far as I saw, no media caught. The US has sanctioned many ICC officials over the past few years but Abdoulaye Seye - one of 2 persons sanctioned this time (the other being ICC President Tomoko Akane) - was the first non-elected one. So there is something quite unique about his case. Seye's role at the ICC? Senior Trial Lawyer and Head of the Team handling the Situation in the State of Palestine (I know, quite a mouthful): in other words, the guy is the ICC's lead lawyer on the Palestine case. Already, that alone should make it absolutely obvious that these sanctions have nothing to do, as Marco Rubio wrote, with "protecting Americans" but everything to do with protecting Israel. But that's not the only thing special about Abdoulaye Seye. See, ICC judges are elected officials: they serve non-renewable nine-year terms, and these terms are staggered so that one-third of the bench (6 judges out of 18) comes up for replacement every three years. All 124 member countries vote by secret ballot. And that's where things get interesting: the next election is coming up in December this year and Seye is actually candidate to becoming a judge, proposed by his country of Senegal (asp.icc-cpi.int/elections/ju…). There are 14 candidates running for the 6 judge seats (asp.icc-cpi.int/elections/ju…) and Seye is the only one sanctioned by the U.S., which actually puts him at enormous practical disadvantages versus the other candidates. For one thing, very concretely, the election takes place at the UN in New York, and being on the US sanctions list means being physically barred from entering the United States. And it's not just about the vote itself. The whole campaign plays out in New York over months: in particular during the UN General Assembly in September, the High-level meetings, the candidate public roundtable interviews on November 4–5, and the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) session in December. That's where candidates meet delegations and lobby for votes. The other 13 candidates will be freely doing this. Seye cannot do any of it. So there is actually a huge election meddling angle to this: with these sanctions, the US is effectively rigging the race by banning one candidate from the entire campaign trail. Perhaps more importantly, it also re-raises the question of whether the US is a fit place to host international institutions at all. It's painfully obvious that a host country that weaponizes its territory to influence elections at international institutions (which, in the case of the ICC, it doesn't even belong to) is not an appropriate ground: for their own survival, these institutions should be as far away and as insulated from the US as possible. It also raises the crucial question of how the rest of the world should respond. The insanity here is that almost no other country globally - be in the West or the Global South - stands with the US on this, save for a handful of exceptions (like Israel). Yet they all behave like deer in the headlights (or, as we say in French, like "ostriches burying their head in sand") and do absolutely nothing concrete about it besides meaningless "we're preoccupied" statements. The EU's behavior is particularly egregious in this regard. They too host a number of international institutions, such as... the ICC! ICC bench elections may be occurring in NYC but it's in The Hague, Netherlands, that the institution is physically located (I visited the place last year with my daughters: xitter.gq/RnaudBertrand/status/1…). So, given that they oppose these sanctions and literally host the court, you'd expect the EU to take some measures to protect the institution and the officials targeted by the sanctions. All the more because they have a tool designed EXACTLY for this purpose: the so-called "blocking statute", a regulation that prohibits EU entities from complying with extraterritorial US sanctions. On its own website the EU describes it as "an important achievement of unified EU action to protect EU operators, whether individuals or companies, from the extra-territorial application of third country laws" (finance.ec.europa.eu/eu-and-…) It's perfect: activate the blocking statutes, and European banks can no longer close ICC officials' accounts, cancel their credit cards, or freeze their transactions just because Washington says so. It's exactly what China did (they have their own "blocking statute") when the US started sanctioning Chinese refineries to prevent them from buying Iranian oil (see ): they activated their blocking statutes, making it illegal for Chinese companies to comply with these US sanctions and there is jack shit the US can do about it. It's a very powerful legal tool. Yet, incomprehensively, the EU refuses to activate it. The blocking statute sits there, purpose-built but completely unused, while European companies have no choice but to enforce America's sanctions. It's insane: the EU literally standing by while Washington destroys the lives of people on European soil - they oppose it, have the perfect tool to fight it, but they stand by. Again: incomprehensible. All the more incomprehensible because it's actually a golden geopolitical opportunity for Europe: if Europe wants to be taken seriously as an independent actor on the world stage - as it keeps saying it does - there is literally no easier win than this. Activate a tool you already have, protect an institution you already host, defend a principle you already claim to believe in. The fact that even this is too much unfortunately tells the rest of the world everything it needs to know about what European "sovereignty" actually means in practice.

Another day, another rabidly idiotic statement. There is truly no overstating how much of a walking disaster Kallas is for Europe. Yesterday she called China a "disease" for Europe (specifically "cancer"), and now she's saying the EU can't have a Middle East strategy because - brace yourselves - there's just too much going on there. This comes among hundreds similarly idiotic statements - basically every time she opens her mouth. When you choose people like this to be your voice to the world, you deserve every ounce of irrelevance and mockery coming your way.

Julian Assange once said (in this London speech: youtube.com/watch?v=TQVBZQz6…) that wars are always ultimately started by the media, via the manufacturing of consent to prepare public opinions. He asked: "Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press: what is the average death count attributed to each journalist? [...] Who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists. Journalists are war criminals." Assange didn't precise this but it is not just journalists: to manufacture consent for most recent wars they were in an unholy alliance with an ecosystem of so-called "human rights" activists who constructed the arguments, the reports, the talking points for their articles. People like @AlinejadMasih and @NazaninBoniadi (👇) in the case of Iran, who tirelessly for years built the arguments for the war, providing the "moral" scaffolding for it. They too very much are war criminals. I've made that argument for years. If you genuinely care about human rights (and if you genuinely care about journalism), you should be in direct opposition to most (not all) human rights organizations and activists in the world today because they have so thoroughly corrupted the concept - turning it into little more than the humanitarian packaging in which wars and sanctions are wrapped and sold to the public. It's supposed to be a shield meant to protect the vulnerable and they've made it into a weapon used to justify their persecution and destruction. As the war goes on and their own country and people get destroyed and massacred, Iran's "human rights" activists will try to distance themselves from it - as they're already starting to do 👇- but, make no mistake, this is the very logical consequence of their own actions and they couldn't not have known. Every single time it's exactly where this road leads: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all justified - to some extent - on the basis of "human rights", of "saving women from oppression", of "liberating" people or "giving them a voice." And every single time the result was the same: tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the country destroyed. They saw this, they knew this, and they did it to their own people anyway. You simply can't plead ignorance. In many ways it's even worse in the case of Iran because their "human rights" activists even actively called for war. Just this January, Alinejad wrote an op-ed in the NYT (nytimes.com/2026/01/27/opini…) in which she explicitly called for U.S. military intervention against her country, dismissed comparisons to Iraq and Libya as "paralysis" and a "permanent permission slip for every dictator," and went full Orwell by framing the **absence** of war as having "a body count." She literally preempted the very argument I'm making - that previous interventions destroyed countries - and explicitly dismissed it. So she definitely can't plead ignorance! Same story with Boniadi. She herself in her screenshotted tweet 👇 acknowledges that she advocated for "targeted intervention to bring down the regime." And at the Munich Security Conference just 3 weeks ago, she was on stage alongside Reza Pahlavi (securityconference.org/en/ms…), actively lobbying for foreign military intervention and regime change. Assange was right that journalists are war criminals - but at least journalists can hide behind the pretense of "reporting." These people literally campaigned for the war, making it their life's cause. The bombs falling on Tehran, the current acid rain and the schoolgirls massacred are not a betrayal to them - it's exactly what they were calling for! I know I'm being utterly naive but at some point there should really be a reckoning for the entire ecosystem that makes these wars possible, and for what has been done to the very concept of human rights.

This WaPo article is unreal: they unironically mock China for not being imperialist and failing to use force to defend its interests, arguing that they're losing out to the U.S. (in Venezuela, Panama, etc.) which does precisely that. In essence the article can be summarized as: "You Chinese losers thought you could gain influence by actually building things? The only thing that actually works is bombing people." I'm not even exaggerating. The author literally writes that "China can spend all the money on infrastructure it wants... But in a crunch, it is only military force that counts." He argues that China's approach was "a colossal waste of money" because "control of infrastructure can be changed" with a US-led "change of regime" and "ownership of any asset can be overturned." His article's conclusion? "You can’t buy an empire, nor can you purchase global influence. It is only hard power that counts for anything." As cynical and brutish as the article is, it's also refreshingly honest. It is factual that China's strategy was to win over the Global South by investing in their infrastructure and development, while the U.S. maintains its influence through regime change, various forms of coercion, and the threat (or use) of force. The conclusion that it is China that should feel embarrassed by this as opposed to the U.S. is, however, completely insane. Every sane person on earth should hope that it is China's approach that ultimately prevails, for the sake of our collective future as humanity. China is ultimately trying to prove that one can prevail geopolitically without violence, by building instead of destroying: don't be like this idiot WaPo writer and root for the answer to be "no". Src for the article: washingtonpost.com/opinions/…