Middle East Insider · Issue 044 · Wednesday, August 12, 2026

The Horseshoe Closes

Good afternoon. Today’s edition is a background file, not a news sweep. The subject is the documented convergence of the far right and the far left against American policy in the Middle East. On July 15, 103 Democrats voted for a Republican congressman’s amendment to end all aid to Israel. The pattern has a name: the horseshoe. Below: where the theory comes from, what the research shows, how the two ends arrive at the same policy, and which capital benefits. The board runs in brief: the President calls the blockade “a steel wall,” Tehran’s new security chief threatens “serious risks and casualties,” and tonight’s eclipse misses the region.

One amendment from the right, 103 votes from the left.

On July 15 the House voted on an amendment to the 2027 State Department appropriations bill that would have eliminated all $3.3 billion in annual military aid to Israel. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican, wrote it and cast the only Republican vote for it; 103 Democrats, just under half the caucus, supplied the rest, with ten voting present (Jewish Insider, AP). The amendment failed, 314 to 104, on Republican votes (Politico). Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed it while calling for “urgent change” in the relationship; Whip Katherine Clark voted yes. Earlier this year, 40 Senate Democrats voted to block certain weapons sales to Israel (Jewish Insider). The mechanics are the point: the populist right authored the measure and the progressive left carried it, nearly unanimously among its supporters. The two ends of the spectrum currently agree on one question, whether to arm America’s ally in wartime, and the shared answer is no.

Both flanks are on the record. On the right: Tucker Carlson, whose October interview gave Nicholas Fuentes and his Holocaust-revisionist politics a mostly unchallenged two-hour platform, and Candace Owens, whose conspiracies about “globalist Jews” are published daily (Jerusalem Post). In February, a member of a federal religious-liberty commission wore a Palestinian-flag pin to a hearing on antisemitism and declared she would “never bend the knee to the State of Israel. Ever!” (Jewish Journal). On the left: Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Zionist democratic socialist, holds New York City Hall, and Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination last week. El-Sayed told a debate audience that American foreign policy “has been handed to us” by Israel and AIPAC, called Israel a “rogue state,” and attributed the war to “the impact of AIPAC in our politics” (JTA, Jewish Insider). Sunday’s free special covered El-Sayed in detail (archive). The two flanks’ descriptions of the war rest on the same three claims: an entangling ally, a manipulated Washington, an establishment lying about the threat. The vocabularies differ. The policy conclusion is identical.

The relevance to a war brief is direct: the American consensus is itself a target. Per the Guardian, Tehran built its negotiating timetable around America’s midterms, on the theory that November will do to this President what 1979 did to Carter (Guardian). Mohsen Rezaee, the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, warned last week that continuation of the blockade means “American vessels and forces will face serious risks and casualties” (CNN). Tehran’s theory of victory is not naval; it is that the American center cracks before the Iranian economy does. Each recasting of the war as an Israeli project, from either end, supports that theory at no cost to Tehran. The precedent is on file: in the twelve-day war of June 2025, the two ends opposed American involvement loudest and simultaneously, and both compared the Iran intelligence to Iraq in 2003 (Jewish Insider). The fringes do not need to win the argument. Sustained erosion of the center is sufficient.

The horseshoe is a claim about destinations, not motives. The research below shows different mechanisms at the two ends: explicit hostility on the right, Israel-erasure on the left. The policy outcome is shared: an America that drops its allies, distrusts its own intelligence, and removes the pressure from a regime that recently planned an attack on the President’s aircraft. The administration is not part of this convergence. The President has held the position against both flanks at once, the isolationists inside his coalition and the progressives across the aisle, and the blockade’s 55 redirected ships record it. Tehran’s calendar assumes American exhaustion; the convergence documented in today’s file serves that assumption, knowingly or not. The answer is not suppression of either fringe. It is results neither fringe can argue with.

MEF Observer, Aug 11, The Stilwell Inspiration for the Hormuz Crisis: what a World War II supply road teaches about the strait, and why Washington and its partners should build pipelines from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea so no revolutionary regime can hold the world’s oil at a chokepoint again.

MEF Online, Aug 10, Palestinian Culture, Part 2: Without Violence, What Remains?: the second installment of the series on what Palestinian identity was built to oppose, and what it could be built on instead.

MEF Observer, Aug 10, “Cyprus Has Consistently Demonstrated That It Is a Reliable, Predictable, and Trusted Partner”: the Observer’s interview with Cypriot foreign minister Constantinos Kombos on the island’s role in the war’s logistics and the eastern Mediterranean’s new map.

The theory, and its critics.

Josef Joffe, longtime publisher of Die Zeit and a Hoover Institution fellow, wrote the theory’s standard statement in a 2008 essay on the populist surges then underway in Europe:

The claim is limited. It is not that a communist and a fascist believe the same things; it is that positions at the far ends of the spectrum converge: against the liberal order, its institutions, its alliances, its “elites,” and, with a regularity documented across four decades of scholarship, against the Jews, cast by one end as scheming globalists and by the other as the last colonial empire. The political scientist Jeff Taylor described the same geometry in his 2006 book Where Did the Party Go?: left and right as “two components of populism, with elitism residing in the Center.” In the LA Times, Jonah Goldberg wrote that 2023 was the year he started believing, after parts of the America First right and the anti-colonial left reached identical conclusions about October 7.

The objection is serious and is included here. Simon Choat, a political theorist at Kingston University, wrote the standard rebuttal in The Conversation: the two ends oppose the status quo for entirely different reasons, identify different elites, seek different worlds, and the theory flattens these differences into a centrist smear. On one point the academic record long supported him: surveys kept failing to find the horseshoe because they measured one kind of prejudice at both ends. The two studies below account for the discrepancy.

The evidence: convergent, but asymmetric.

The strongest evidence against the theory comes first. In 2022, Eitan Hersh of Tufts and Laura Royden of Harvard surveyed 3,500 American adults, with a large oversample of 18-to-30-year-olds, testing overt antisemitic statements across the seven-point ideology scale: Jews are disloyal, Jews have too much power, Jewish businesses may be boycotted for Israel’s actions. The finding, published in Political Research Quarterly: “Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.” Agreement with the overt statements ran two to three times higher on the far right, with young alt-right identifiers highest of all. On whether American Jews should be “held accountable” for Israel’s actions, 28 percent of the young far right agreed, against 4 percent of the young far left. On identical measures, the two ends are not equivalent.

The left’s pattern appeared in the same study under a different measure. Asked whether Jews must denounce Israel to participate in social-justice activism, the far left applied a standard to Jews that it declined to apply to Muslims, 47 percent to 31; on the right the double standard ran the other way. The second study addresses this problem directly. In December, Graham Wright, Shahar Hecht, and Leonard Saxe of Brandeis published a survey of nearly 4,000 non-Jewish undergraduates at 60 campuses in Politics, Groups, and Identities, classifying students by response pattern rather than a single score. Four groups emerged: 63 percent hostile to no one; 16 percent “Hostile to Jews,” endorsing the classic tropes, concentrated among alt-right and Christian-conservative identifiers; 17 percent “Hostile to Israel,” rejecting the tropes while denying Israel’s right to exist and refusing friendship with its supporters, positions most of their Jewish peers classify as antisemitic; and 3 percent hostile on all measures. The Israel-hostile class belonged to the far left: 43 percent of “extremely liberal” students fell in it. The authors’ summary: “explicit anti-Jewish attitudes are more common among those with far-right political identities, and beliefs about Israel that formal definitions and most Jewish students find antisemitic are more common among those who identify with the political left.”

The combined finding: the convergence is real, and its form is asymmetric. On the far right, the hostility is explicit and directed at Jews. On the far left, it operates through Israel: denial of the state’s legitimacy and exclusion of its supporters. Earlier research failed to find the horseshoe because it measured only the first form, and on that form the right is worse. Measured on both, hostility is lowest at the center and elevated at both ends. One further number: 43 percent of all non-Jewish students surveyed, not the extremes, agreed that “supporters of Israel control the media.” The classic conspiracy persists with one word substituted.

The policy consequences, and the beneficiary.

Disengagement. The respectable version of the argument exists: F. Gregory Gause of Texas A&M argues at POMEPS that America was never the regional hegemon it imagined, and that its grand projects failed accordingly. That is scholarship. The administration’s National Security Strategy answers it on the merits: the December strategy de-emphasizes the region deliberately, assigning burdens to a strong Israel and capable Gulf partners (Soufan Center). The difference in kind is the point: the strategy is a plan for holding American interests with fewer American soldiers; the fringes’ version is a plan for holding nothing. Alan Dowd identified the trajectory in Providence in January 2024: the horseshoe had become the actual coalition against aid to Ukraine and Israel. Eighteen months later it was a House roll call.

The allies. Per Luke Tress of the Times of Israel: “The far right, the far left and pro-Palestinian groups form the three pillars of the US anti-Israel movement,” blocs that “elide their differences to ally over their shared enmity” to the West, with the horseshoe “nearing a full circle” as right-wing anti-Zionism grows. The blocs move together: when Massie lost his May primary, the far left, the far right, and the Islamist press lamented it simultaneously, and the Times of Israel recorded the alignment at the time. By May, Ethan Kushner could write that 2026 is the first American cycle in which hostility to Israel is a shared language of both extremes, with Israel “directly at the point where that horseshoe closes.” The Jerusalem Post documented the rhetorical convergence in November: “far-right and far-left antisemites sound almost identical: both place Jews at the center of evil and power,” globalist puppet-masters in one telling, colonial oppressors in the other.

The machinery. The Forum’s file on this is extensive and consistent. Karys Rhea’s brief on the woke right describes a movement that wants “to tear down the current order, the post-World War II unipolar order in which America is kind of policing the global stage,” and states the theory in one line: far enough right or left, “you end up looping back around” (MEF Podcast). The historian Dominic Green, after Carlson’s two unchallenged hours with Nick Fuentes, told the Forum that “the right is going round the horseshoe” (MEF Podcast). The left’s half of the machinery is older: the red-green alliance of Islamists and the Marxist left, described by Philip Carl Salzman for the Forum as “an alliance of convenience” against the West (MEF Online), which launders Islamist aims into progressive causes and has, per Rhea, “found a new red” on the right. The amplification is not organic: “There is evidence that foreign funding from Qatar, Iran, and Russia foments civil unrest that woke right influencers promote on their platforms.” The mechanism ran in the open last week: a leading Islamist theologian’s claim that Zionists orchestrated Spain’s Ceuta migrant crisis reached an estimated 103 million people in 72 hours: far-right Great Replacement accounts, far-left anti-imperialist accounts, and Islamist accounts posted materially identical claims within a single news cycle, with antisemitism, per the researchers, “the connective tissue between audiences that share no other political ground.” The Forum’s October 7 assessment stands: both ends of the spectrum are being spoon-fed Islamist talking points, arriving at the same conclusions from different starting points.

The beneficiary. Tehran’s standing demands, per its own statements: end the attacks, end the blockade, remove American forces from the region, lift the sanctions, unfreeze the assets, pay compensation (CNN). The two ends of the American spectrum, between them, currently advocate five of the six. The Michigan nominee’s claim that AIPAC produced this war is Tehran’s own narrative, restated domestically. The Jerusalem Post’s description is accurate: “an active threat to Western collective defense.” The available response is neither censorship nor alarm. It is results: 55 ships redirected, a judgments docket that names what Tehran owes, a strait that reopens on Washington’s terms or stays shut. The convergence advances only where the center fails to produce them.

Blockade status, Tehran’s answer, and the Muscat track.

The wall. From the President, in the Oval Office Monday: “The only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy. We have a blockade that’s been infallible,” a barrier he called “a steel wall” (CBS). On the Muscat track, Tehran and Oman reached agreement last week on a shipping framework, a “middle corridor” running partly through Iranian waters (Fortune); Iranian officials stress that the framework does not itself reopen the strait, with that decision gated behind preconditions and the leadership’s sign-off (Al Jazeera).

The answer. Mohsen Rezaee, in his first days in the security council chair, posted that continuation of the blockade means “American vessels and forces will face serious risks and casualties,” and asserted Iranian-Omani sovereignty over the strait (CNN). As noted in Tuesday’s brief, Rezaee is wanted by Interpol for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. His first public message in the role is a threat against the US Navy.

The Senate. Senator Ted Cruz is arguing the maximalist case: “Our objective should be regime collapse,” with Washington arming Iran’s protesters (CBS). The operative Washington debate runs from blockade to collapse. The fringe debate, above, is whether to fight at all.

Carried forward from Tuesday’s board.

Damascus and Beirut. Following Tuesday’s rulings, the Assad death sentences and Lebanon’s abolition vote the same morning (Tuesday’s brief), three questions are open: whether Moscow acknowledges the verdicts against its guests, how the in-custody convictions proceed on appeal, and whether Hezbollah’s sequencing objection on the amnesty law hardens into a demand.

The Mecca pact, read from Tehran. Shay Khatiri’s Observer piece surveys the Iranian press on the Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey defense treaty: Nour News, close to the security council, describes Iran’s posture as “neither indifferent nor confrontational,” and a senior foreign ministry official tells ISNA the pact is aimed at the United States and shows “collapsing American hegemony” (MEF Observer).

Bab el-Mandeb. The Tihamah’s toll stands at four crew members per Yemeni officials, a figure flagged Tuesday for possible revision; traffic through the southern strait is holding near 32 ships a day (Tuesday’s brief).

Young adults on the far right were seven times more likely than their far-left peers to say American Jews should be “held accountable” for Israel’s actions: 28 percent to 4 percent, in the Hersh-Royden survey. The two ends differ in degree. The policy direction is shared.

Tonight’s eclipse misses the region.

This evening the moon’s shadow crosses Greenland, Iceland, and a band of northern Spain, with a partial eclipse at dusk in North Africa and no visibility over the Gulf or the Levant. The region’s turn comes August 2 of next year, when totality crosses Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, with six minutes of darkness over Luxor.

The Forum’s fall briefings are open for registration:

Boston · Tuesday, September 1: Bankrupt the Revolution: The Money War Against Tehran. Inside the regime’s books: the ghost fleet, the front companies, the crypto rails, and the boycott-and-divestment campaign the Forum is building to close them.

Philadelphia · Thursday, September 3: Finish the Job: What Victory over Iran Requires. The munitions spent, the production race, the case for hunting the archer rather than the arrows, and the choice between finishing the war and freezing it.

New York · Wednesday, September 9: The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life. The movement’s American franchise, and the Four D’s answer: defund, designate, debar, and force the patrons into daylight. Today’s feature covers the same ground.

All briefings run 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. Seating follows annual giving: donors of $500 or more attend one event, $1,000 or more three events, $5,000 or more all events gratis; $125 per additional seat. To host an evening on the tour, write Nikki Ellis ([email protected]) and me ([email protected]). More cities and speakers to be announced.

New reader? The frameworks in every MEF Take live in the Field Guide. Monday’s brief, What Tehran Owes, totaled the judgments docket; Tuesday’s, The Blockade Shoots Back, covered the first live-fire enforcement of the blockade. Every Forum donor receives premium with our compliments; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].

Corrections Desk. The docket is clear this Wednesday. If today’s brief earns a case, reply; the desk reads everything.

Forward this brief to a colleague who follows the domestic side of the war. If you want the Forum tracking the woke right, the red-green alliance, and the funding behind both, support the work directly and reserve a seat at one of the September briefings above.

Reply with your read: the convergence at the two ends, passing mood or durable bloc? I read every reply.