Bag Ortega Before the Houthis Bag Haifa

Houthi missile batteries have officially entered a kamikaze phase, mimicking the exact suicide tempo that the Iranian regime deploys against global shipping and sovereign cities on this side of the world. Illustrating the stakes, Saudi air defenses intercepted a hostile drone south of Mecca on September 16, 2026, and neutralized a ballistic missile over Riyadh just four days later. While previous Houthi launches toward Israel resembled stray theater fire, this current barrage deliberately targets regional capitals and will inevitably hit places like Haifa if left unaddressed. Consequently, Jerusalem requires American munitions, tankers, and diplomatic cover more urgently than at any point since October 7, 2023. President Donald Trump proved that regime extraction works when Operation Absolute Resolve lifted Dictator Nicolás Maduro from Caracas on January 3, 2026. Now, the State of Israel, for the sake of the Washington-Jerusalem alliance and its security interests, must replicate this success for Washington in Managua, using the same precision that Shin Bet and the Israel Defense Forces employed in Gaza City on September 1st, 2026, to apprehend Hamas’s internal security chief, Muein al-Arabid.

Nicaragua’s Dictator Daniel Ortega directly supports the regional lawlessness that we live in the Middle East. Driven by the “sister revolutions” term he coined back in 1979, Managua routinely operates on Iranian instructions. In November 2025, Nicaragua—which severed ties with Israel, backs ICC warrants against our leaders, and supports the ICJ genocide case—voted with Beijing, Moscow, and Minsk at the IAEA to shield Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. But this geopolitical alliance isn’t pure “blind loyalty”; it relies on a massive illicit gold apparatus. Between 2022 and 2025, Nicaragua exported $4.3 billion in gold, while the Ortega family firms Grumixsa and Capital Mining skimmed $80 million through predatory fees at a cash-only Chinandega mill. After the Maduro regime’s collapse stripped Hezbollah of its Venezuelan mining hubs—threatening its $400 million narcotics empire and Tehran’s $700 million subsidy—Managua stepped in. Venezuela’s Conviasa Airlines flew Caracas’s gold to the Nicaraguan Mining Company, which laundered it as domestic product. Alas, this vital pipeline directly funds the illicit networks manufacturing suicide drones and hiding Western hostages.

Nicaragua presents a significantly thinner defensive target than a place like Cuba and a far more manageable theater than the Gaza Strip. Its entire military apparatus stagnates on a meager $98 million annual budget, fielding just 12,000 active troops, 89 obsolete tanks, and 17 rudimentary aircraft. Managua’s navy lacks a single major surface combatant, commanding only a dozen minor patrol boats beneath a brittle, factionalized leadership of 28 aging generals. Crucially, accessible land borders with Costa Rica and Honduras offer tactical approaches Gaza’s heavily fortified coast never could. Western policymakers frequently forget Operation Rooster 53—the December 1969 raid where Israeli paratroopers dismantled a seven-ton Soviet radar on an Egyptian beach and flew it home. Today, Managua is that same beach, populated only by an isolated dictator.

Geostrategic realities harden the indictment against the Sandinista regime. Presidential Decree 05-2026 authorized the deployment of 230 Russian troops on Nicaraguan soil through December this year, while twenty-two state-backed Chinese firms secured mining concessions stretching across 1.3 million hectares—a full tenth of the country. Ortega thoroughly abolished democratic elections on July 20, 2026, commanding his rubber-stamp National Assembly to bar political dissidents from public office permanently.

But Nicaragua did not reach this point randomly; in fact, Cuban intelligence officers originally trained the Sandinista cadres that now have hostage the country, leaving Ortega as Havana’s last socialist regional ally after Maduro’s ouster. Nowadays, these extra-regional adversaries actively convert this corrupt group’s gold racket into a forward operating platform against the United States and a sophisticated sanctions-evasion desk for the Iranian regime.

Indisputably, the State of Israel possesses the clear operational capability and justification to execute a high-profile snatch operation. Because Iran and the Red Sea crisis consume the vast majority of Washington’s bureaucratic bandwidth, a surgical Israeli raid buys the vital munitions and political cover Jerusalem needs to prevent the Houthis from turning their Saudi targeting practice into direct bombardment of our territory.

To legitimize America’s support for Israel (today more than ever!), the Netanyahu administration must act immediately by executing four decisive maneuvers in a single night—forcing Washington to cash them without hesitation. First, American prosecutors must pair an unsealed narco-terrorism indictment against Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo (Ortega’s younger wife and heir to his “throne”) with a joint Sayeret Matkal-Shin Bet extraction modeled on the tactical craftsmanship validated against Maduro and al-Arabid. Delivering the duo directly to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York mirrors the successful Maduro sequence, bypassing the bureaucracy that American officials routinely use to postpone decisive action. This rapid decapitation strike hands Washington immediate control over illicit gold flows and the strategic canal zone without establishing an overt American military footprint in Central America.

Second, the tactical, geopolitical vacuum this creates must trigger a sweeping economic and intelligence overhaul of the region the moment the extraction helicopter departs. The U.S. Treasury Department must freeze Grumixsa, Capital Mining, and adjacent Chinese corporate entities instantly, turning Beijing’s mining assets into stranded liabilities overnight. Third, the CIA and Mossad must leverage the raid to inaugurate “Southern Eyes”—establishing the Buenos Aires Financial Fusion Cell while deploying Israeli biometric gates, Elbit surveillance sensors, and ThetaRay analytics tools into Costa Rica and Honduras to permanently dismantle the Iran-Hezbollah gold-and-cocaine corridor. Ultimately, the United States and Israel must condition the survival of any successor Nicaraguan government on a signed strategic package ensuring American control of gold reserves as a hedge against de-dollarization, an immediate U.S. takeover of the proposed interoceanic canal to deny Beijing a maritime chokehold, and the creation of an FBI-SOUTHCOM Isthmus Deterrence Channel. By signaling to Cuba’s Dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel that Havana must reform or face Ortega’s exact fate, Israel removes the tyrant while Washington secures the hemisphere.

Enshrining these counterterrorism milestones into an exportable security doctrine for Latin America, Israel can decisively roll back adversarial penetration in the Western Hemisphere—while exposing the strategic blindness of the intersectional American left and dismantling the isolationist delusions of the JD Vance right. Merely sharing hardware and intelligence with Washington will no longer suffice; Jerusalem must employ this strategic leverage to force a reality check on its critics and secure its position as an indispensable global asset.