The Bottom Line

Retired Senior Colonel Zhou Bo of the People's Liberation Army joins Sreenivasan Jain to make the case for China's vision of a multipolar world - one Beijing says would be fairer, more balanced and less dominated by a single superpower. But does China's conduct, from the South China Sea to its dealings with the Global South, match its rhetoric? Zhou offers a rare view from inside the Chinese establishment on where the world order is heading. Contributors: Zhou Bo – Retired senior colonel, People’s Liberation Army of China

President Donald Trump was able to purge his most vocal critics within the Republican Party, as Americans voted for the congressional candidates who will run in November’s midterm elections. One of the most prominent politicians to be unseated was Representative Thomas Massie, who pushed for the release of the Epstein files. The Democratic Party partially released a report about performance that noted “a persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters”. Host Steve Clemons asks former Trump aide Hogan Gidley, and Matt Duss – former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders – about the challenges facing both parties.

When United States President Donald Trump measures success by counting how many Iranian leaders the US and Israel have killed or how many Iranian boats or missile launchers have been destroyed, he’s looking at the “wrong metric”, argues a former US special envoy to Iran, Rob Malley. Malley told host Steve Clemons that the only way out of this war is “a settlement that respects our core interests, but also theirs”. To calculate the odds of a deal, Malley said, psychologists may be more useful than experts because “it really depends on the mindset of President Trump.”

When the United States threatens to take over countries and destroy civilisations, “these are the wild gesticulations of a sinking enterprise”, argues Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Wolff tells host Steve Clemons that US leaders refuse to face the reality that the US empire is in decline. Around the world, he adds, people are “deeply internalising” the lessons from the US's inability to defeat Iran. The people in the US are becoming “bitterly angry” at their situation, where the richest 10 percent of Americans own 80 percent of corporate stocks, making the stock market “utterly irrelevant” to the masses. Subscribe to our channel: http://bit.ly/AJSubscribe Follow us on X : https://twitter.com/AJEnglish Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera Check our website: http://www.aljazeera.com/ Check out our Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/aljazeeraenglish/ Download AJE Mobile App: https://aje.news/AJEMobile

Israel is in a race against time to “lock in its domination” across the Middle East, argues former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy. Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, tells host Steve Clemons that Israel’s strategy of “permanent war” allows for only two types of countries in the region: either dependent, or “too collapsed, failed and fragile to pose any challenge”. Israel can try to block a US-Iran deal by advocating for “just one more major military operation” against Iran, and “heating things up” with constant attacks on Lebanese and Palestinians despite ceasefires on paper, Levy says.