by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
September 20, 2026
There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.
This was one of those weeks.
Yes, if you’ve been keeping track of the unfolding geopolitical drama over the past week, you’ll already know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t been keeping track of that drama, strap in and get ready, because you’re about to get a data dump on the latest news about the world of warfare.
From the 5th-generation war on everyone to the series of escalating regional wars that are threatening to merge into a full-scale, global WWIII, the latest news has something for everyone!
XI-TRUMP SUMMIT
If the defining conflict of the (stage-managed and manipulated) WWIII that the deep staters are cooking up is the one between the US and China, as I posit, then next week’s meeting between Trump and Xi may indeed be consequential.
An item on that agenda: AI and cognitive warfare.
Last week, the Chinese Ministry of State Security issued their first statement on AI last week. And, to the surprise of absolutely no one, it seems the Chinese-led “AI safety” conversation does not revolve around the threat of “rogue AI agents,” the chance of human extinction or the need to “pace the frontier,” as it does here in the West. Rather, it’s about the safety of the glorious Chinese government.
Various hostile forces and people with ulterior motives are abusing generative artificial intelligence technologies such as deepfake audio and video, AI-generated text and images, and intelligent bot armies to fabricate political rumors in low-cost, mass-produced fashion. [They are] spread[ing] harmful information and incit[ing] antagonistic emotions, carrying out public-opinion warfare and cognitive warfare against us and directly threatening our political security, system security and ideological security.
Oh, heavens! Won’t someone think of the ideological security of the Chinese state?!
Given this narrative framing, and given the fact that all the biggest boosters of pedal-to-the-metal AI data center erection in the West have used the Chinese bogeyman as their excuse for why the US and its allies need to be building out their AI infrastructure as fast as possible, it will be interesting to see what, if any, joint statement the two leaders will issue on the subject.
But beyond the hot-button, headline-hogging issue of AI, what else will be on the agenda at this historic summit? Why, “almost everything,” of course! Although Trump’s typically vague and hyperbolic statement about the scope of the talks clarifies precisely nothing, one would expect that “almost everything” includes the US-China trade war, the Taiwan issue and the Iran war.
Will we start to see some of the real fault lines appear in the (staged and manipulated) battle of the 21st century, i.e., the battle between the American Eagle and the Chinese Dragon? Stay tuned to find out!…
In the meantime, there’s an ongoing dumpster fire in the Middle East to worry about!
SAUDI UNDER FIRE
It’s been a disastrous week for the Saudis.
First came the news that the oil kingdom was going to have to close its critical East-West oil pipeline after a drone attack had seriously damaged it.
Then came the news that that “temporary” closure was in fact going to last weeks because the damage to the pipeline turned out to be more extensive than originally reported.
Now, Saudi Arabia is bewailing its “worst-case scenario.” Namely, it’s under attack by Iran and by the Houthis and the US is not coming to the Saudis’ aid.
According to reports, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with CENTCOM Chief Brad Cooper this week but he evidently did not get the reassurances and safety guarantees he was seeking. As a result, the once-cocky oil regent is having to rethink his country’s position in the region and their overall security posture.
So, what does this mean? This means:
1) The petrodollar—the system for recycling Saudi oil dollars back into US banks and US Treasuries in exchange for Uncle Sam’s military umbrella—is now effectively over. (But what else is new?)
and
2) The Saudis are going to have to start looking elsewhere for their security.
The consequences of these developments for the overall security situation in the Middle East are hard to overstate. We’ve already seen the emergence of the Saudi Arabia-Pakistan alliance in recent years, with the signing of a mutual defense pact in 2025 that brought the Saudis under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella.
Now that the region has been utterly destabilized by Trumpanyahoo’s Iran war, that security umbrella is expanding. Just last month, Turkey (which, for some reason, is now being spelled “Turkiye” in English language publications) joined the Saudis and the Pakistanis in a trilateral defence agreement known as the “Makkah Joint Defense Agreement.” Due to its inclusion of a collective defence clause in which the three members agree that an attack on any member will be considered an attack on all, the pact has been referred to as a type of “Muslim NATO“ and is seen as the potential seed for a wider regional security framework that does not involve Uncle Sam.
But lofty rhetoric and paper promises are one thing. Actually committing military forces in the event of an attack is another. So, will this agreement be worth the paper it’s written on? We’re about to find out! Now that the Saudis are back in active combat with Yemen and the US is declining further military aid, will the Makkah Agreement be invoked? Saudi is petitioning Pakistan for help under the terms of the agreement, but Islamabad has yet to make a decision, meaning we’ll soon discover if the “Muslim NATO” is D.O.A. or whether it’s a viable institution that can reframe the security calculus in the region.
Either way, there’s a lot of security calculus going on in the region! That’s because…
THE OIL SHOCK IS BACK!
Just when you thought that whole oil panic from the early days of Operation Epic Fury was a thing of the past, along come the latest shocks to Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure. For those not versed in the intricacies of oil geopolitics, this means that, yes, your gas prices are going to be going up again soon.
Yes, it turns out those attacks on Saudi’s East-West Pipeline mentioned above are going to be pretty consequential for world oil markets. That’s because the East-West Pipeline just happens to be the main “Hormuz bypass” that the Saudis have been using to move up to 4 million barrels of crude a day to the Red Sea terminal at Yanbu. As a consequence, for the first time in history, Saudi oil output dropped to zero this week.
This is bad news.
For the visual learners out there, let me explain the bad news with a map:
Meanwhile, the Iran-Arab summit on Hormuz, which was seeking to secure a deal to restore traffic through the strategic oil chokepoint, has ended in disaster. According to an Iranian ministry spokesman, a meeting of regional foreign ministers in Oman that had been scheduled to finalize the deal was called off by Saudi Arabia.
This means the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed to tanker traffic, a point underlined by the three tankers that were attacked by the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps Navy this week. The latest such attack involved the Togo-flagged tanker, Trend, which the IRGC claims was set ablaze to stop its “illegal passage” through the Strait. These attacks have already caused massive ecological disruption in the waterway, with oil spills already covering hundreds of square kilometres in the Strait.
But as you might expect, it’s not the environmental effects of this chaos that are making headlines; it’s the economic effects. A few of the data points that point to what’s coming economically from this oil flow disruption are:
- European natural gas futures just hit their highest level since December 2022;
- Diesel prices have just hit a record high in the U.S., with a gallon of diesel now costing $6.42.
- Oil prices in China have just hit their own record highs, with oil futures in Shanghai reaching $129 a barrel on Wednesday, well past their previous peak of $121.80, which was set in the early days of the Iran war.
Oil prices began to moderate toward the end of the week as investors started to bet that the Saudi pipeline disruption wasn’t as bad as reported, but at this point it seems evident that it will take months if not years to restore infrastructure in the region and get oil production and distribution back to pre-Iran war levels.
But even if everything in the Middle East were to be smoothed out overnight, that doesn’t mean the world would be at peace. That’s because war is still raging in Eastern Europe.
UKRAINE/RUSSIA SPILLS OVER
Yes, in case you were wondering, the Russia/Ukraine war is still raging on.
The latest development on that front includes the two combatants’ tit-for-tat exchange on each other’s energy infrastructure, with Russia claiming that Ukraine attempted to strike “one of the energy facilities on Russian territory” this past Monday and Ukraine claiming they had struck an oil refinery in Russia in response to Russia’s attacks on gas stations in Kiev and on other Ukrainian energy installations. All of this comes after Trump’s assertion earlier this week that both Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure.
But perhaps more concerning than the never-ending Ukraine/Russia back and forth are the latest signs that that conflict is spilling over into a wider war. Just this week, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski escalated the war of words between Poland and Russia by boasting that his nation could “quite quickly defeat Russia” in battle due to NATO’s air power advantage.
Sikorski’s invocation of the NATO specter is an implicit threat of a full-on conflict between superpowers, with nuclear-armed Russia facing off against a US-fronted, nuclear-armed NATO bloc.
Sikorski’s schoolchild-level braggodocio (”my intergovernmental military alliance could beat up you guys!”) is no mere empty rhetoric. In fact, as ZeroHedge reports:
Ukraine war spillover into NATO ‘eastern flank’ members’ airspace is now becoming a weekly reality, which presents added pressure and dangers which could potentially lead up to a major Russia-Western military confrontation. Lead NATO powers like Germany have of late also alleged Russian intelligence ‘sabotage’ campaigns involving drones near aviation hubs in central Europe.
One of the latest incidents of Ukraine war “spillover” occurred in Lithuania, where a NATO-allied fighter jet shot down a Russian jet-powered drone that had crossed into the country’s airspace from Belarus. The incident prompted Lithuanian foreign minister Kestutis Budrys to affirm that NATO stands “vigilant, committed, and ready” in the face of such threats.
No word yet on a response from Igor Chaika, head of Russia’s Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation…
…but yes, the Russia/NATO provocations are becoming more and more serious, and there does not seem to be a convenient exit ramp for either Putin or the NATO-emboldened EU. Instead, NATO’s infamous Article 5 “collective self-defense clause” is seemingly emboldening peripheral states like Poland into more and more reckless provocations of the Russian bear.
In other words, it’s quite possible that historians of the future will be writing about how some apparatchik in Krakow caused the deaths of tens of millions of people in the Great Nuclear Holocaust of 2027.
SYDNEY SWEENEY UNDER FIRE
Actress Sydney Sweeney has come under fire from female athletes who are claiming that Sweeney’s latest promotional stunt—an ad campaign for US sports-prediction market Novig in which parts of her naked body are conveniently covered by various sports paraphernalia—sets women back decades by reducing their role in sports to that of hypersexualized objects.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with WWIII. I just thought it would be a slightly less glum story to end on than one involving the deaths of tens of millions of people. After all, it sure beats that story about how an AI system hallucinated the fact that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components to Iran, an “error” that very well could have sparked WWIII.
Anyway, enjoy your weekend, everyone!
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