“WE GOT HIM!” Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that the second of two US airmen had been rescued from “deep inside” Iran struck a “triumphant” tone, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator – and no wonder.

The rescue brought to an end an episode that had begun on Friday, when a US air force F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over southwestern Iran – the first time a US fighter jet had been downed by hostile fire since the 2003 Gulf War. Both crew members had “ejected safely”. But while one was quickly recovered by US forces, the second, a weapons systems officer, was stranded for 36 hours, as the two sides raced to find him.

Iran, eyeing a propaganda victory, offered a £50,000 reward for his capture, said Paul Nuki in The Telegraph. Washington, in turn, was desperate to avoid a humiliation evoking memories of the botched US attempt to rescue 53 embassy staff held hostage by Iran in 1980. In the end, Trump was able to celebrate what he called “one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history”.

“Deep behind enemy lines”, seriously hurt, and armed only with a pistol, the officer had been in a terrifying position, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail. But his “survival, evasion, resistance and escape” (SERE) training kicked in, and he scaled a 7,000ft ridge in the Zagros Mountains, before hiding in a crevice and using a satellite device to report his location.

The CIA, meanwhile, hatched a “deception plan”, spreading word in Iran that it was moving the airman out of the country on the ground, said Greg Jaffe in The New York Times. Then, on Saturday night, the US launched a “vast and complex” rescue mission. Two MC-130 troop planes carrying more than 100 special forces commandos landed on a disused airfield near Isfahan, which they used as a forward operating base. Drones and jets provided air cover, striking Iranian forces that came near. Then commandos used mini-helicopters to reach the mountains, extract the weapons officer, and fly him back to the airfield.

It was here that a major hiccup occurred, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. The troop carrier planes became bogged down in the soil and had to be destroyed by the US to avoid them falling into enemy hands, while new planes were flown in. Although the US did get all its troops out, suffering no casualties, it lost hardware worth about $250 million (£185 million). The episode as a whole was a reminder that, for all America’s military superiority, Iran “can fight back” – and it would only need to “get lucky once” in this asymmetric conflict to secure a major propaganda victory.

A chorus of high-profile right-wing figureheads including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones recently criticized President Donald Trump’s ongoing Iran war. The president responded by denouncing them as “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” in a lengthy social media statement, essentially making them persona non-MAGA. But as the president struggles to contain blowback from his Middle Eastern adventurism, the MAGA fault lines are only growing.

The ‘biggest break thus far’

After several MAGA figures denounced the president’s actions in the Middle East and, in some cases, his presidency overall, Trump responded with a “blistering” 482-word Truth Social post that insulted them in “starkly personal terms,” The New York Times said. Trump’s missive came after “weeks of criticism” from the consortium of conservative figureheads, which he had “largely ignored” before this latest outburst. Jones, Kelly, Carlson and former Charlie Kirk collaborator Candace Owens are the “opposite of MAGA,” Trump said, before he began “insulting the pundits personally,” said The Hill.

Trump has “repeatedly dismissed suggestions” of an alleged “fissure in his MAGA coalition,” Forbes said. But criticism from MAGA notables “intensified” after Trump “threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization,” NBC News said. There is now a “growing schism within Trump’s base” over the Iran war, “particularly” given his campaign pledge of “no new wars.”

While Carlson in particular has been “highly critical” of the Iran conflict and “somewhat more gently critical of Trump the man, at least publicly,” the “gloves were off” this week “like never before,” said CNN. The result is “perhaps the biggest break thus far” between Trump and a “leading conservative influencer,” even as the GOP has “done its best to forestall these kinds of splits.” Carlson’s critiques won’t “suddenly equally divide Trump’s base,” but they are an “inauspicious sign” and “not helpful” for the party.

‘Deep anger’ and ‘quick rebukes’

Trump’s attacks on this batch of newly minted detractors reflect what seems to be a “deep anger” at once-loyal supporters, said Politico. The opprobrium runs both ways, as the targets of his ire offered “quick rebukes” to Trump’s attacks. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” Owens said in a “one-line quip” on X, said Forbes. “I’m just so sad that whatever’s happened to him has totally changed the man he once was,” said Jones in a video response on the same platform.

Iran has clearly “emerged as a growing weakness” for Trump, said CNN. While some MAGA supporters are “overwhelmingly on board,” the president’s wider base is “increasingly on a different page.” For Trump, the danger in rebukes by Carlson and other media figures is that it gives Republicans “skeptical of the war license to tilt into outright opposition to him.”

Several thousand people have been killed in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli war broke out, and the conflict has created an additional humanitarian crisis: delays and shortages of medical supplies. Hospitals and health care clinics throughout the Middle East are reporting critical lapses in supplies, which experts fear could lead to a surge in deaths even as the U.S. agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

What did the commentators say?

With the war in a state of flux, humanitarian centers “across the Middle East, Asia and Africa are facing the risk of running out of basic medication and food” due to the “restriction of shipments in the Strait of Hormuz,” said NPR. Some of this food, especially dry and canned goods, can “be stored for a long time,” Bob Kitchen, the vice president of emergencies and humanitarian action with the International Rescue Committee, said to NPR. But health care supplies are a different story, as most of the “medicines or treatments for malnutrition will expire.”

Many of these countries rely almost entirely on foreign aid for medical supplies. Sudan, for example, has “no manufacturing capacity and is entirely dependent on imported medication,” Omer Sharfy of Save the Children in Sudan said to NPR. This means health care workers “won’t be able to find alternatives in the local market.” The war has also “disrupted the movement of medical supplies from WHO’s global logistics hub in Dubai,” said the World Health Organization. By March 11, just 12 days into the war, over “50 emergency supply requests, intended to benefit over 1.5 million people across 25 countries,” were “affected, resulting in significant backlogs.”

Even countries far away from the conflict are bearing the brunt of these scarcities. Fears of syringe and IV shortages in South Korea are “spreading through Korea’s health care sector, prompting authorities to urge medical providers to refrain from stockpiling,” said The Korea Times. The problem is not that the Persian Gulf countries are “major drug producers. They’re not,” said health care news nonprofit Healthbeat. But these nations do “form ‘a critical pharmaceutical transit hub,’ where drugs and their basic ingredients from India, Europe and China routinely pass before heading to Africa, Asia and the United States.”

What next?

Some are hopeful that the two-week ceasefire, announced by President Donald Trump and initially agreed to by Iran, will allow the flow of medicine to restart. But while the U.S. has backed a ceasefire, Israel has continued its assault on the region, carrying out a series of strikes in Lebanon. Iran reclosed the strait in “response to Israeli attacks against the Hezbollah militant group,” said The Associated Press. Iran later accused the U.S. of also violating the deal and claimed that a long-term ceasefire was “unreasonable.”

Even before the strait was closed again, experts say it is unlikely its opening would have made a huge difference in moving global medical supplies. The ceasefire deal would not lead to a “‘mass exodus’ of ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” said The Guardian. The deal also allows Iran and Oman to “charge a fee of up to $2 million a ship on vessels transiting through the strait,” which could further limit the amount of supplies that are able to pass.

With no end to the larger skirmish in sight, fears persist that the shipment of medical supplies could remain at risk. All of these events are happening in an industry that was “decimated by funding cuts from the United States and Europe last year,” said The Washington Post, and is “now straining to meet demand that grows with each additional day of war.”

The fuel crisis sparked by the war in Iran has reached the airline industry, said Will Gottsegen in The Atlantic. In addition to oil and gas, much of the world’s supply of kerosene—the base product for jet fuel—passes through the Strait of Hormuz. But with the waterway effectively closed since early March, jet fuel prices have soared by more than 58%. Airlines, “which have always had razor-thin margins,” immediately felt the strain. They have already needed to reroute many flight paths away from the war-torn Middle East, “using up more fuel and putting more pressure on airlines to compensate elsewhere.” Travelers are now seeing the turmoil show up in their ticket prices. United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby this week warned fliers to book their “summer travel as soon as possible, before prices go even higher.”

The jet fuel crisis is so dire that “airlines are drawing up plans to cancel flights” if the war drags on, said Christopher Jasper in The Telegraph (U.K.). There is particular concern about the ability for some planes to refuel after long-haul flights to southeast Asia, a major Gulf oil importer, “potentially leaving aircraft stranded” at far-flung locales. “Because no one has a crystal ball, what this all means for travelers is up in the air,” said Aarian Marshall in Wired. But if the war continues for weeks or even months, “bigger changes—and inconveniences—might be headed to an airline near you.” Carriers could raise ticket prices, eliminate less profitable routes, or experiment with new fees—as they did during 2008’s “major and sustained” fuel shock, when charging passengers for luggage became the norm.

Wondering about the war’s impact on vacations “might seem distasteful,” said Andrea Felsted in Bloomberg. But it’s a serious problem for the tourism industry, which was “already at risk from a slowdown following the post-Covid travel boom.” Certain tourist spots like Dubai, the fifth-most visited travel destination last year, are a no-go now with the war happening. Another important global tourist spot, Mexico, is simultaneously witnessing “a wave of violence” following the killing of a Jalisco cartel leader, which will undoubtedly give travelers more pause. “While the super-wealthy will continue to travel, the simply comfortable might vacation closer to home, or not at all, particularly if the cost of energy deepens the cost-of-living crisis.”

The travel industry’s problems run deeper than the cost of jet fuel, said Ganesh Sitaraman in The New York Times. In recent weeks, travelers have endured thousands of canceled flights, hours-long lines at TSA checkpoints, and multiple safety crises, including a tragic crash at LaGuardia Airport. “Flying hasn’t always been like this,” and the culprit for America’s mess in the skies is deregulation. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 eliminated route and price regulation, setting the stage for the current era of “fortress hubs dominated by just one airline” at the
expense of smaller communities, as well as the relentless cost cutting that has made flying miserable. “Politicians need to learn the lessons of hundreds of years of infrastructure policy” and embrace “a regulatory and industrial policy that will once again make our air transportation system the envy of the world.”

What happened

The two-week ceasefire announced by President Donald Trump and Iranian officials earlier this week faltered Wednesday as the U.S., Iran and Israel argued over whether it covered the Israel-Hezbollah fight in Lebanon. Iran also accused the U.S. of violating several tenets of the agreement, and closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon that killed at least 254 people and wounded 1,100 more.

Who said what

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, a key mediator of the ceasefire, said it applied to “everywhere, including Lebanon.” Israel said Lebanon was not included, and President Donald Trump agreed Wednesday. U.S. allies, including the leaders of France, Australia and Spain, said Lebanon needed to be covered by the ceasefire.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Lebanon was included, and the “ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel.” Vice President JD Vance called the dispute a “legitimate misunderstanding.” Iran likely “thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t,” he told reporters, adding that Israel nonetheless “actually offered to be — frankly, to check themselves a little bit in Lebanon.”

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “faced swift criticism from political opponents on the left and right” over the U.S.-Iran deal, Politico said. “The ceasefire stopped the Israeli military campaign much sooner than Israel wanted,” and while Netanyahu had “no choice but to go along,” he can claim ongoing Lebanon strikes “as a victory with the Israeli public.”

What next?

Despite Wednesday’s “dueling threats to resume attacks if the ceasefire fell apart,” The New York Times said, Trump “seemed determined to plow ahead” with diplomacy, saying Vance would lead a delegation to Islamabad for peace talks starting Saturday.

After five weeks of war, Donald Trump has claimed “total and complete victory” over Iran. Tehran begs to differ. Agreeing to the conditional two-week ceasefire, Iranian officials said their country had dealt a “crushing historic defeat” to the US and Israel.

Meanwhile, commentators are pointing to real, quiet wins for both China and Pakistan, whose behind-the-scenes roles in pushing for the ceasefire have increased their global standing.

What did the commentators say?

Benjamin Netanyahu “looks set to be the biggest loser” of the conflict, said The Guardian’s senior international correspondent, Peter Beaumont. Pressuring Trump to agree to his decades-long goal of neutralising Iran has “turned out to be a bust”. The “political consensus” between Israel and the US is “visibly crumbling”, and there’s “domestic fallout” for Netanyahu in the run-up to an election.

Trump has also emerged as a “strategic loser”, said the South China Morning Post. Washington failed to achieve regime change in Tehran, and Iran retained control of the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict’s “most strategic asset”. Meanwhile, the US has used up “sophisticated air-defence missiles” intercepting “far cheaper Iranian drones and projectiles”. Iran’s nuclear programme has survived, along with the “stockpile of enriched uranium” from which it could “potentially produce a viable weapon”, said The Times’ Middle East correspondent, Samer Al-Atrush. That “will not be given up easily”.

Tehran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was a “high-risk” strategy that “paid off”, said DW. It “secured a ceasefire without conceding defeat”, which it “can present as proof that it withstood the US and all its military might”. The Iranian regime “survived, and bought time to try to shape” the phase of negotiations “on more favourable terms”.

In the longer term, it is actually Beijing that most “stands to gain”. America has “moved many military assets to the Middle East to protect shipping”, which “leaves fewer resources for the Indo‑Pacific, where Washington and Beijing compete for influence”. China has also had the chance to present itself “as a responsible global actor”, with its power brokers widely credited with pushing Iran to agree to the ceasefire.

China is “shaping up to be the big winner”, said Roger Boyes, The Times’ diplomatic editor. Unlike the US, it expected Iran to seize the strait and “amassed large oil reserves”, making itself “more resilient” to an energy crisis. “As a significant exporter” of other goods, it was still initially “hit hard” by the strait’s closure but then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ordered that China-bound vessels could pass through “toll-free”.

Pakistan’s credentials have been burnished, too. Its role in brokering the ceasefire was “unexpected” but the Islamabad Accord is the country’s “most consequential diplomatic moment in a decade”, said former UN peacekeeper Anil Raman on NDTV. Capitalising on its good relations with both the US and Iran, Islamabad will “press hard to consolidate” this “return to global relevance”.

What next?

J.D. Vance is due to lead a US delegation in negotiations with Tehran in Pakistan this weekend. The White House said the ceasefire between the US and Iran has created an “opening for a diplomatic solution and long-term peace”.

But the specifics of the terms to be discussed “remain murky”, said the BBC, “as is the current state of shipping traffic” through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian forces have warned that ships would be “destroyed” if they tried to sail through without permission.

“In the end, cooler heads prevailed – at least for now,” said North America Correspondent Anthony Zurcher on BBC News. After Donald Trump’s threats to launch attacks on Iran that would wipe out the “whole civilisation” in the country, both countries agreed a two-week ceasefire.

The President has since claimed that this could lead to a “Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”, while Vice-President J. D. Vance called the ceasefire a “fragile truce”.

As peace talks are expected to take place in Pakistan, both sides have claimed the ascendancy, though uncertainty surrounding key elements of the agreement, such as the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian nuclear capabilities, have left many sceptical of continued peace.

What did the commentators say?

This ceasefire move is “check, not checkmate”, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. In fact, we shouldn’t even consider this a proper ceasefire; it is merely a “fragile” and “conditional” “pause” in the conflict, which is “already under strain”.

“Beneath the surface, fundamental disagreements persist” in a logistical sense. There has been “no clearly defined start time” and “key uncertainties” remain. The proposed 10-point plan issued by Iran contains “discrepancies” between its Farsi and English versions, “most notably” over the state of uranium enrichment, as well as ambiguity surrounding movement through the Strait of Hormuz. “If this is the Third World War, it is not over.”

“It’s TACO Tuesday!”, said David Charter in The Times, using the Trump Always Chickens Out acronym coined last year during Trump’s “on-off tariff threats”. Even if the ceasefire holds, the US has “left in place a cadre of battle-scarred leaders, no doubt harbouring thoughts of revenge”.

As “king of the ultimatum”, Trump has “played fast and loose in pursuit of his goals”, isolating himself from “shocked” allies, who are now “on their guard” more than ever before. The “reckless” flip-flopping could have “far-reaching consequences for America’s standing in the world”. On the world stage, countries may come to fear America’s “increasingly unpredictable behaviour” more than its “terrifying” military might.

“Both sides have good reason to hope the talks succeed, despite the obstacles,” said The Economist. For the US, the war is “deeply unpopular at home”, and Trump is “keen to have it finished” before his mid-May summit with Xi Jinping in China. “For Iran, renewed fighting would be catastrophic,” with America and Israel expected to continue striking key economic assets. The only outlier may be Israel, which maintained that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon.

“Diplomatic jujitsu” will be required to bridge the gap between the views of a final peace agreement held by Iran and the US, said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. It is hard to imagine that a settlement between the nations could be reached in “two years, much less two weeks”. Neither Trump’s “tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels” or the “down-to-the-wire” negotiations have resolved the “fundamental issues that led to the war”. It took the Obama administration two-and-a-half years to negotiate the 2015 nuclear accord – which Trump tore up in 2018 – “and that was in peacetime”. Notwithstanding, “this negotiation will be held under the sword of a possible resumption of hostilities.”

The last-minute ceasefire is “in theory, a victory for real-estate geopolitics”, said Senior Foreign Correspondent Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. However, “as any real estate agent knows”, the devil is in the detail, and “closer inspection suggests Mr Trump’s triumph may not be quite as unalloyed as he claims”. Iran’s position is stronger than before the war, and has now “agreed to allow shipping through the chokepoint”, but “on its own terms and has not relinquished its claim to control it”. The country may have agreed to a ceasefire, but its negotiating position, “rhetorically at least, is now more hardline than before the war began”.

What next?

“What is certain is that the clock has been reset yet again,” said Sacerdoti in The Spectator. Providing the ceasefire holds, the “decisive moment” will come in two weeks’ time, when the “temporary pause” ends and the “question of whether it can be extended, or gives way to renewed fighting, will be answered”.

“The talks in Islamabad will be complicated, to say the least,” said The Economist. Significant work needs to be done, as the positions of both sides “could not be further apart”. “If both sides stick to their current positions, the talks could end up at the same impasse they reached just before the war in February.”

If talks were to fail, we would likely see an “uneasy return to the status quo”. Iran would face American sanctions and the continued “threat of further American strikes”, as well as remaining a “menace” in the Gulf region, and have “strong motivation to build a bomb”. “That would be a bad outcome for everyone: a weakened, hostile regime; an impoverished Iran; and a lingering threat to the global economy.”

Donald Trump has repeated his threat to pull the US out of Nato, after Britain and other allies refused to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Dismissing the alliance as a “paper tiger”, he told The Telegraph’s Washington correspondent that the idea of removing America from the defence treaty had now gone “beyond reconsideration”.

“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine,” Trump said. “And we would always have been there for them”. But, in an apparent misunderstanding of the limits of the alliance, the US president believes that, in the Iran conflict, “they weren’t there for us”.

What would it mean for Nato?

Nato, formed by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 by 12 founding countries, does not have its own army. Instead, member states pledged to provide collective defence and security. The US is Nato’s largest single military power, as well as funding 62% of its spending, so American withdrawal would dramatically weaken the alliance. Without Washington’s military might behind it, Article 5 – the treaty clause that states that an armed attack against one or more members will be considered an attack against all – would lose credibility .

Trump’s recent threats will further encourage Canada and the European member states in their efforts to rely less on the US for security – a shift that is a boon to their own domestic defence industries.

What would leaving Nato mean for the US?

The US would save money, both by ending its contribution to Nato spending and by no longer maintaining a presence in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. But it would also lose access to many military bases around the world, meaning the US Navy would have to “operate closer to America’s shores”, and US bombers would no longer be able to “reach targets halfway around the world”, said Modern Diplomacy. More broadly, the shift away from US global leadership would accelerate, with America increasingly divorced from an international framework.

Buyers for US arms could also dry up, as America’s former allies seek to re-arm elsewhere. The US spends more on its own military than any other country but that wouldn’t be enough to keep all its arms manufacturers afloat. Without crucial foreign sales, hundreds of thousands of US jobs would be at risk.

What would the process actually look like?

Leaving Nato wouldn’t be easy for the US because a 2024 law prohibits the president from doing so without the approval of a two-thirds Senate majority or an act of Congress. Even if all Republicans in the Senate voted for it, Trump would still need at least 14 Democrats to join them, and it’s unlikely he would even get unanimity from Republicans: Thom Tillis, Republican co-chair of the Senate NATO Observer Group, has already warned that leaving Nato would be an “enormous, enormous risk”.

Given the political obstacles, most Nato observers don’t think Trump will try to withdraw, “despite his obvious displeasure at alliance leaders”, said The Times. But he could use an executive order to suspend US participation, and eke that suspension out while legal challenges are mounted.

But, even without leaving, Trump could still “cause irreparable damage” to the alliance, said UnHerd. He could ignore an Article 5 request, withhold intelligence from Nato partners, cancel weapons deliveries, and limit the export of security-related technologies.

It’s an age-old question in politics: guns or butter? Government resources are limited, so leaders have to prioritize military spending or social welfare programs or try to strike an uneasy balance between the two. President Donald Trump is choosing guns.

The federal government is “fighting wars,” said Trump at a private luncheon last week, per NBC News. “We can’t take care of day care.” The job of the federal government is to “guard the country.” But it’s “not possible” for it to “take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare” and similar social programs.

Trump’s 2027 budget proposal, released last week, reflects these priorities, said The Associated Press. The document advocates “boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion” — an increase Trump “telegraphed” even before the war with Iran — while cutting nondefense programs by 10% by “shifting some responsibilities to state and local governments.”

Trump’s speech “clarifies” that military spending is a higher priority for him than the social spending that “many of his working-class supporters increasingly rely upon,” said The New York Times. Democrats seized on the comments, saying the president’s priorities are misplaced. Trump is “choosing to cut Medicaid and Medicare for more money for war,” said Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) on X.

What did the commentators say?

Republicans have the “worst budgeting idea possibly ever,” said Charles P. Pierce at Esquire. Voters are unlikely to reward a party “seeking to cut health care” while backing an “unpopular war launched by an extremely unpopular president.” It’s a politically “suicidal maneuver” that must have “every alarm bell ringing” in the heads of GOP incumbents fighting an uphill battle to keep control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

Health expenses are indeed a “major budgetary problem” for the federal government, said Aaron Blake at CNN. At $2 trillion a year, they are the “largest portion of federal spending” and growing. The president’s “biggest political problem” with the Iran war is “how much it’s costing,” according to a new CNN poll. There’s “precious little appetite” among voters to make sacrifices for the conflict. Trump chose perhaps the “most politically unhelpful terms imaginable” by pitting defense spending against child care.

Washington’s preference for “spending on butter over guns” has resulted in a “shrunken military industrial base” that has weakened U.S. defense capabilities, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget is thus a “credit” to Trump, doubling military spending from its 2021 levels. There are “savings to be had by cutting fraud in Medicaid and other welfare programs,” a necessary step in the face of the “multiplying threats America faces.”

What next?

Trump’s proposed budget faces tough sledding in Congress. “Supersizing” the military budget while “slashing” domestic spending “could cost Republicans in the coming midterms,” especially if voters hold the GOP responsible for “economic consequences of the Iran war,” said Politico. Trump may struggle to “build enough political will” among Republicans to “fulfill his defense goals.”

What happened

The U.S. military over the weekend rescued two airmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran last week. U.S. forces quickly rescued the pilot deep in hostile territory, but the second crew member was not exfiltrated until early Sunday following a “sprawling, high-risk rescue mission” involving about 100 Special Operations commandoes, the CIA and dozens of military aircraft, The Wall Street Journal said, citing President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials.

Who said what

The F-15E crew member, a weapons system officer, was injured when he ejected from the jet, but was able to climb about 7,000 feet and wedge himself into a crevice to evade the Iranian forces searching for him, officials said. The “almost cinematic mission” also “faced major obstacles,” The Associated Press said. Iran said it shot down at least two MH-6 helicopters during the rescue, and the U.S. bombed two of its own MC-130Js to protect sensitive technology after the $100 million stealth transport planes got stuck on a makeshift runway in remote Iran.

What next?

The rescue mission gave both Iran and the U.S. “a new narrative as the war enters its sixth week,” the Journal said. Tehran “portrayed the downing of the jet as proof that the U.S. could be bloodied” and did not have full “air superiority,” while Trump called the operation an “Easter miracle” in “triumphant interviews and posts” as he “seeks to mobilize flagging public support for the war.”

What happened

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday celebrated his first Easter as pontiff by urging leaders “who have the power to unleash wars” to instead “choose peace!” President Donald Trump invoked God in obscenity-laced social media posts threatening to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges unless it agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz by Monday evening. Indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets constitutes a war crime.

Who said what

“Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” Trump posted over the weekend. “Open the F--kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!” the president wrote, adding: “Praise be to Allah.” Trump’s post was “notable” for both its “vulgar language” and “somewhat desperate-sounding tone,” said The New York Times. It “would have stood out on any day, much less on what most Christians consider the holiest day of the year.”

The Vatican has become “alarmed” at the Trump administration’s “invocations of God” to “defend” the Iran war, The Washington Post said. Pope Leo has generally been “careful in his language,” leaving “more overt criticism” to U.S. bishops and “other senior proxies,” but he has “grown blunter in pushing back against suggestions that divine providence supports the use of force or violence.” In his traditional Urbi et Orbi blessing, Leo prayed that “those who have weapons lay them down” and choose a peace not “imposed by force” or the “desire to dominate others,” but through “dialogue.”

Some critics were more direct. Trump “is not a Christian,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a former Trump ally, said on social media over a screenshot of his Easter post. “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.”

What next?

Before Trump, no “other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes,” the Times said, and his “language and actions could have far-reaching consequences” for the U.S., Iran and the world. A “defiant Iran” responded to Trump’s threats by striking “infrastructure targets in neighboring Gulf Arab countries” and threatening to “restrict another heavily used waterway,” The Associated Press said.

As Donald Trump’s war wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that he has no “overarching strategy” and is now fighting a war of attrition, said The Guardian.

America is still striking at Iranian targets while building up troops in the region. Iran, in turn, keeps attacking Israel and the Gulf states. Last week, it hit a US airbase in Saudi Arabia, injuring 12 US personnel and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Tehran’s allies in Yemen have now entered the fray. The Strait of Hormuz remains shut. And while his officials talk about peace being “weeks, not months” away, Trump is still warning of far worse to come as he “searches for leverage”.

This week, the president said that the US could capture or “obliterate” Iran’s oil export hub, Kharg Island, and possibly even target Iran's energy and water systems – “war crimes by another name”.

Miles apart

Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure last month, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, only to row back, saying there would be no strikes for ten days to allow time for talks. That deadline elapses on Monday, but all the evidence suggests that he had no plan and was simply “playing for time”. And while he claims that Tehran is “begging for a deal”, the Iranians seem to think they have him “on the run”, and deny talks are even taking place.

Even if meaningful negotiations were on the horizon, the two sides are miles apart, said Richard Spencer in The Times. Iran is demanding not only an end to sanctions, but “an end to all attacks, including Israel’s, on Hamas, Hezbollah and other arms of the ‘resistance’”. It also wants reparations, and “sovereignty” over the Strait of Hormuz – a hint that it plans to charge for access, as Egypt does with the Suez Canal. The US, in turn, insists that Iran end its nuclear programme; give up its enriched uranium; and cut off support to its proxies.

When it comes to Trump’s rhetoric, a pattern is emerging, said Emily Maitlis in The i Paper. He reserves his most bellicose threats for the weekend, when the financial markets are closed, then starts talking up the possibility of peace so that the outlook seems more positive by the time traders are back at their desks. The markets, though, are getting wise to this tactic.

‘Escalate or talk’

As for Tehran, it seems unmoved by Trump’s threats. The fact is, Iran is far more capable than the US of both withstanding and inflicting pain, said The Economist. While the world counts the economic costs of this war, the regime is “making a mint” from sanctions-busting oil sales. Domestically, its hardline Revolutionary Guards remain in control. And overseas, its proxies continue to do its bidding: last Saturday, the Houthis provided a stark reminder of their capacity to ramp up the chaos when they fired missiles at Israel.

Trump, by contrast, is flailing. “Despite operational successes and his nonsensical claim of having already changed the regime in Tehran, he has yet to win any substantive gains from the fighting.” His choice now is to “escalate or talk”.

Given the risks of escalation, Trump will probably seek a deal to reopen Hormuz, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. But any outcome that leaves Iran with practical control over Gulf energy exports would be deeply unpopular with those states. It has even been suggested that the UAE and Saudi Arabia could “join the conflict rather than accept that outcome”.

‘The regime is hurting’

Trump will find the Iranians to be very tough negotiators, said Matthew Gould in The Times. The regime has shown its capacity before to withstand “repeated blows”, and is determined to stay in power no matter how much pain it causes its people. By contrast, Trump will be worrying about popular opinion ahead of the midterms. He is reportedly already “bored” with the conflict. And if it chooses, Tehran can use its trigger-happy proxies to derail the talks at any moment. That said, Iran has a habit of overplaying its hand and, “for all its bravado, the regime is hurting”.

Pakistan, in its role as mediator, has intensified its diplomatic efforts over the past week, said Saeed Shah in The Guardian; but Tehran is so far refusing to engage in face-to-face talks with US officials. Trump began the war confident that it wouldn’t take long to topple the Iranian regime, said Steve Bloomfield in The Observer. Its nuclear programme had been weakened, its allies had been hobbled, so the US and Israel seized the moment. Yet in the past five weeks, the mullahs have actually tightened their grip on power; and it’s the ordinary Iranians, who Trump promised to save, who will pay the price for this war. If it ends soon, other economies will bounce back. Iran could feel the impact for generations to come.

The best investing strategy during periods of geopolitical strife is to have no strategy at all, said Jeff Sommer in The New York Times. Rather than “panic about what the Iran war may be doing to your investments, try to forget about all of it.” That’s been “the standard long-term investing playbook for times of crisis,” and it still applies today, even as global markets whipsaw on the latest news developments. According to market researcher Jeffrey Yale Rubin, there have been seven major U.S. military campaigns since Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “One year after the start of these conflicts, the S&P 500, on average, rose 12.5%.” Investors who fled to cash missed out on those supersize gains. That’s a good “case for doing nothing” again this time around.

It’s easy to stick your head in the sand if you’re an investor with a long-term horizon, said Annie Nova and Ryan Ermey in CNBC.com. But “those on the precipice of retirement” aren’t so fortunate. They may need to re-evaluate their risk to ensure they can “get through a downturn without needing to sell their stocks at a discount.” Financial experts recommend having “at least five years’ worth of portfolio spending in cash or short-term bonds” or two years “if that goal feels daunting.” Those who haven’t rebalanced their portfolio in a while may be surprised by their allocations. Due to the strong performance of the stock market in recent years, a portfolio that was 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds in 2020 “would now be more than 68% in stocks and around 31% in bonds.”

That traditional 60-40 portfolio split “no longer works” as it should, said Jamie McGeever in Reuters. Investors have long viewed Treasurys as a “hedge against geopolitical, economic, or financial market risk.” But since the pandemic, America’s ballooning debt and elevated inflation have “steadily eroded Treasurys’ status.” Stocks and bonds now “move in tandem, especially during sharp market sell-offs.” That means traditional risk playbooks and diversification methods “go out the window.” Some wealth managers are pushing investors to “explore alternative hedging and diversification strategies,” such as private-credit funds or gold, but those have also come under pressure lately.

Investors should be on the defensive, said Jason Zweig in The Wall Street Journal—against bad ideas. Wars usually bring on a blitz of “opportunistic marketing messages from the financial industry” that promise to keep your money safe by buying into “these funds, this asset, that industry, these AI-driven recommendations, this secret set of trading signals, these proprietary algorithms.” A good financial adviser, though, should talk you out of taking drastic action. A sensible strategy would be selling a few losing investments to offset taxable gains. “Making wholesale shifts in response to fears that might never materialize is not.”

‘When capital can think, who pays?’

Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes at Newsweek

In the U.S., AI adoption is “growing at a remarkable pace,” but Americans are “concerned” about “layoffs tied to automation,” say Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes. So how should “public policy support” the transition? One answer: a “shift in how automation is taxed relative to human labor.” If capital is “taxed more and labor less, replacing people with AI is no longer the cheapest path,” and using AI to “augment human workers” instead “becomes a more attractive option.”

Read more

‘Birthright citizenship made me American. We can't lose it.’

Cynthia Choi at USA Today

On his “first day back in office,” Trump issued an executive order “seeking to deny citizenship to certain U.S.-born children,” says Cynthia Choi. But birthright citizenship is as “fundamental” to our country as “freedom of speech.” This is “not some isolated policy debate.” It’s a “broader effort by the Trump administration to put an end to multiracial democracy.” Children without citizenship will be denied “access to education, public benefits and the basic rights that come with belonging.”

Read more

‘Missile warfare is faster, deadlier and harder to control’

Hal Brands at Bloomberg

The Iran conflict “demonstrates how the spread of powerful, accurate missiles is changing warfare around the globe,” says Hal Brands. Even “relatively weak states now have fairly accurate weapons that can strike hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.” This means “fewer sanctuaries: Facilities and geographies that were once secure are now vulnerable to attack.” That could be “challenging” for the U.S., since “even relatively weak adversaries will be able to hold U.S. bases, perhaps even the homeland, at risk.”

Read more

‘AOC finally takes a position that makes sense on military aid to Israel’

Zeeshan Aleem at MS Now

On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who “struggled to take a clear position on supporting Israel in the past,” pledged to vote “against all military aid to Israel,” says Zeeshan Aleem. This was a “striking shift for a potential 2028 White House hopeful who, should she enter the race, would be the standard bearer for the democratic socialist left.” Her decision “does not just reflect demands on the left but the changing dynamics of the Democratic Party.”

Read more

The Iran war follows on the heels of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on allies and threats to take Greenland from NATO partner Denmark. Now, the president is demanding that other countries reopen the Strait of Hormuz closed by the war he launched. And critics say he has transformed the U.S. from the so-called leader of the free world into a rogue superpower that threatens global stability.

Trump has driven “deep and perhaps permanent wedges” between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia, said Robert Kagan at The Atlantic. The Iran war was launched with “no public debate, no vote in Congress” and no consultation with “allies other than Israel.” Europeans must now wonder if the war signals that the president is “more or less likely” to “take similarly bold action on Greenland.” American global leadership survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it may not survive this.

Weaker, lonelier and less effective

The fallout from Iran demonstrates the administration “either didn’t understand how its actions would affect other states or simply didn’t care,” said Stephen M. Walt at Foreign Policy. That leaves “every country in the world” trying to determine how to work with an “increasingly rogue” U.S. For now, its ostensible friends have to weigh whether U.S. power “could be used to harm them either intentionally or inadvertently.”

Every post-Cold War administration has taken on actual “rogue” states, said Matthew Kroenig at The Wall Street Journal. U.S. presidents have waged a “de facto campaign of toppling anti-American dictators” such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. And Iran is the “biggest prize” on the list. Even if the Islamic regime does not fall under the weight of U.S. attacks, it will be “too weak to pose a serious threat for years to come.” That puts Trump “on the verge of eliminating the world’s rogue states.”

A swaggering superpower “could be a collective asset for the democratic world,” said Hal Brands at Bloomberg. But Trump’s approach could transform the U.S. into an “out-of-control hegemon” at risk of being “weaker, lonelier and less effective than before.” Success in Iran might “create a new Middle East with a U.S.-led coalition at its core,” but failure will serve as a “damaging rebuff of U.S. power.”

Allies look to Beijing

The U.S. “had to do it ourselves” because other countries would not join the “decapitation of Iran,” said Trump in a Wednesday night prime-time address to the nation. The president has threatened to leave NATO over the issue, but there are “few signs that’s happening,” said Politico.

Polling shows residents of Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. now “believe it’s better to depend on China” than the U.S., said Politico. The U.S. “no longer works in partnership” with its old allies, said former Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Lambert to the outlet, and is “only focused on itself.”

Oil prices jumped last night after Donald Trump said the Iran conflict was “nearing completion”. Despite the US president saying the attacks on Tehran would end in “two to three weeks” and America doesn’t “need their oil”, the markets were not soothed.

“A word – or social media post” – from Trump “used to spark big moves in prices”, said the BBC. Investors would leap on “signs” that things “could escalate or come to an end”. But now traders seem “to be growing more sceptical about the value of his comments”.

What did the commentators say?

At the outset of the conflict, oil prices were “sensitive to Trump’s comments” but his view of the war “seems to change hour by hour”, said Tom Saunders and Eir Nolsoe in The Telegraph. “His stream of often contradictory statements” have made many wonder “whether they can trust the messaging” coming from the US administration, and some traders have drawn back from the market, “leaving prices increasingly untethered from reality”.

However many solutions to the current global oil crisis Donald Trump comes up with, the oil market isn’t listening anymore – “and the price of oil keeps rising”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. There’s simply no point in Trump “trying to talk the price of oil back down again. It just won’t work.”

His “Persian Taco” tactic “may have run its course”, said Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. “Making extreme threats” and then walking them back may “provide Trump with the illusion of agency” but he “no longer has control of events in Iran”. The markets are “figuring out” that it will probably be Tehran, not the US, that gets to decide when the conflict ends.

What’s next?

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is today chairing a virtual summit with almost three dozen nations, to explore measures to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said his government is determined to find a solution to the energy challenges, although “it will not be easy”.

And yet, “after nearly three weeks of this conflict”, the global financial system is “functioning without panic or alarming signs of stress”, said Zachary Karabell in the The Washington Post. “It’s important to distinguish between price movements” and stability. “The smooth functioning” of the financial system, “in the face” of crises like the oil shock, “gets little attention, probably because stability is not news”. But central banks, financial institutions and governments have “improved at monitoring” risks, and that should “at least provide some relief in a world full enough of fears”.

The U.S. may soon put proverbial “boots on the ground” in Iran. President Donald Trump is considering an operation to seize Kharg Island, a key oil hub for the Islamic regime, as he tries to bring about the end of the war on terms favorable to the United States.

Kharg could prove an attractive target as Trump seeks to “hobble Iran’s oil industry for leverage in negotiations,” said The Associated Press. But experts say a U.S. attack “would risk American lives” and possibly “still fail to end the war.” Kharg is not far from Iran’s mainland, so the regime “can potentially rain a lot of destruction on the island, if they’re willing to inflict damage on their own infrastructure,” said Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. American forces will find the island “hard to take,” said Danny Citrinowicz of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. “It will be hard to hold.”

Iran will probably respond to a Kharg invasion with “escalating strikes on energy infrastructure across the Middle East,” said Bloomberg. That would create additional turmoil for global oil markets, “where prices have already topped $100 a barrel” because of the war.

What did the commentators say?

Seizing Kharg “could be militarily feasible,” former Gen. Mark Hertling said at The Bulwark. But to what end? The U.S. can “seize terrain, conduct raids” and conduct other military operations with “unmatched precision.” But military campaigns require “alignment between ends, ways and means,” and right now “that alignment is not evident.” If the United States attempts to seize Kharg without a clear understanding of the end goal — regime change, the end of Tehran’s nuclear program or something else — “success will be temporary.” U.S. leaders owe troops a “strategy worthy of the risk we ask of them.”

“There are grounds” to believe that taking Kharg could force Iran’s regime to “capitulate before it implodes,” Marcus Solarz Hendriks said at The Spectator. The country’s economy “cannot limp on without crude oil exports.” A political system should not deflect such economic pain on its people, but the “Islamic Republic is capable.” The regime does not appear amenable to compromise or surrender. Tehran will back down only if “America projects unwavering resolve.” Trump’s path to victory, then, is “through escalation, even if the stakes are immense.”

What next?

Kharg is not the only potential target for U.S. troops. They could also try to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or seize Iran’s nuclear material, said The New York Times. The risks of any of those options “are enormous.” If troops do take the island, they could “be there for a while,” Trump said to the Financial Times.

The Pentagon is preparing for “weeks of ground operations” in Iran, said The Washington Post. That does not mean a final decision has been made. The Defense Department is working to “give the commander-in-chief maximum optionality,” said White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.

As AI adoption across personal and professional vectors increases so do the risks the industry takes on in the name of commercial growth and financial dominance. Mere weeks into the Iran war, the conflict has laid bare many of the fault lines upon which the AI industry has built its foundations. The result is a potentially perfect storm of intersecting factors that could pop the artificial intelligence industry bubble.

What did the commentators say?

The sprawling artificial intelligence industry has “propped up global trade and investment” and “pushed stock markets from the U.S. to Asia to record highs” for the past three years, said the Financial Times. But as one of the most “power-hungry inventions ever,” with a “slick chip production line that can cross more than 70 borders before reaching the final consumer,” the “fragilities in the AI supply chain” are now at particular risk from the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. “Hidden behind the fury” of the war have been new insights into AI and its mass adoption that will be “felt by all of humanity,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Foreign Policy.

Admitting he’s been an “AI enthusiast since 1991,” Chakravoriti said that while research suggests AI “can be transformational in a breadth of areas,” he is now “placing a high probability on an AI doomsday.” Multiple distinct “horsemen” of possible disaster range from an “epistemic crisis” to “wars, hot and cold.” Industry observers have “fretted publicly about an AI bubble” for the “better part of the past year,” said The Atlantic. But where fears of an AI crash leading to a “chain reaction across the financial system” once “felt hypothetical,” they now seem “plausible and, to some, almost inevitable.”

The Iran war has particularly unveiled a “paradox” for AI, said Bloomberg. The war could “destabilize” significant monetary investment in AI from Gulf State allies, while “surging energy costs threaten to make data centers far more expensive to run.” The resulting “aftershocks of the conflict” seem “less likely to kill the AI boom entirely” than to “cleave the market in two,” leaving juggernauts like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon the “most exposed to the shifting financial landscape.” High-profile startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, conversely, are poised to be “more insulated” from the fallout.

If the Iran war is what truly “brought conflict to Silicon Valley,” said Fox News, then the industry “was not ready” for what this conflict would expose. “Consider the threat receiving almost no attention,” which also carries perhaps the “greatest economic consequence for Americans at home”: helium production, a third of which takes place in Qatar. “No helium. No chips. No AI.” Without these elements, the “military edge carrying this war degrades.” The Middle East conflict “is proving, in real time” that the large-scale data centers used to power AI platforms can themselves be “wartime targets.”

What next?

The present day AI industry is “not made for the turbulence its leaders have helped usher in,” said The Atlantic. Even if AI manufacturers are “merely forced to slow down,” the “viability” of the enormous amounts of money leveraged to support the industry will “likely be called into question” in ways that could be “devastating for many.”

Although the war, as it currently stands, won’t see hyperscalers “walking away” from their existing infrastructure in the Middle East, it may “impact future investment in the case of drawn-out hostilities,” said CNBC. The war could “reduce the region’s appeal” as an AI data center hub, said the Financial Times, while national sovereign wealth funds might move to “redirect planned AI investments to local security needs.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Monday claimed “great progress” in his administration’s “serious discussions” with Iran’s “NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME.” But if a deal is “not shortly reached,” he added in a social media post, and “if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating” all its power plants, oil wells and “possibly all desalination plants!”

Who said what

“Deliberate attacks on desalinization plants” would “be a major escalation that could constitute a war crime under international law,” Politico said. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday the Trump administration “will always act within the confines of the law,” but Trump “is going to move forward unabated” to achieve his objectives in the war.

The “biggest danger” for the region “may not be what Trump could do to Iran, but how Tehran could retaliate,” The Associated Press said. Iran isn’t as reliant on desalination as its Gulf Arab neighbors, who “depend on it” to “sustain their current populations.” After Trump’s post, Iran “attacked and set ablaze a fully loaded crude oil tanker off Dubai,” Reuters said, and Kuwait said Iran hit a key power and water desalination plant.

What next?

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tehran wasn’t negotiating directly with the U.S. but had received a 15-point proposal filled with “excessive, unrealistic and irrational” demands. Trump claims a “new government is in charge in Iran,” The New York Times said, but the killing of its previous leaders makes it “more difficult” for the “fractured” leadership that remains to “negotiate with American envoys or make significant concessions.”

“It’s not easy to topple a $30 trillion economy,” said Alicia Wallace in CNN.com. But if the war in Iran keeps driving fuel prices higher, things will soon “start getting dodgy” for America. With Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz stopping the export of oil from many Gulf Arab states, and missiles and drones raining down on oil and natural gas facilities across the Middle East, the International Energy Agency warned last week that the world is facing the biggest energy crisis in history.

The U.S. is already feeling the shock waves. Oil has rocketed by roughly 30% to about $100 a barrel. Gasoline has hit a national average of $3.98 a gallon—up by a dollar since February—and is over $5 in California, Washington, and Hawaii. Understandably, some 45% of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about gas prices, according to an Associated Press poll. For a “first glimpse” of where we may be headed, “look at Asia,” said Alexandra Stevenson in The New York Times. In a region that relies on Middle Eastern energy, gas stations in Thailand and Vietnam are posting “Sold Out” signs. People in India are hoarding cooking gas. Asian airlines have canceled thousands of flights, after the price of jet fuel more than doubled—and all this after only one month of a conflict “with no clear end in sight.”

The war is also “driving the world toward a food crisis,” said Heather Stewart in The Guardian. Hormuz is a “key choke point” in the global supply of urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer that’s made using natural gas, and sulfur, “a by-product of oil and gas refining and another critical fertilizer ingredient.” Once farmers get hit by the “double whammy of higher energy bills and more costly fertilizer,” it could push some 45 million people around the planet into “acute hunger,” according to a U.N. estimate. Americans won’t starve, said Max Zahn in ABCNews.com, but they will pay more for everything “from groceries to smartphones.” A third of the world’s helium travels through the strait; that gas is essential for the production of microchips used in phones, AI servers, and almost all electronics. The chaos in the Middle East is also pushing up the cost of plastics, which are made of petrochemicals, and aluminum, because the region is home to several key smelters.

There is some “good news” for Americans, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Thanks to decades of tightened emissions standards—so detested by President Trump—our economy is “far less energy-intensive” than it used to be, with “every dollar of GDP created” requiring only half the energy it needed back in 1980. As long as the war ends soon, many economists think the U.S. can probably “scrape through this year without a recession.”

It’s already too late, said The Economist in an editorial. Even if fighting stopped today, it would take at least four months for oil facilities in the Middle East to restart production and process back-logged crude into usable fuel, and for markets and prices to regain “some semblance of normality.” And that’s a best-case scenario, said Rogé Karma in The Atlantic. If fighting escalates instead, Iran could reach for the “doomsday option” it previewed last week, when it responded to an Israeli strike on its largest natural gas field by attacking a Qatari facility that produces 20% of the world’s supply of liquified natural gas—causing natural gas prices to spike 35% in Europe. If there are more such attacks on energy infrastructure in the target-rich Middle East, our current energy crisis may become a global “economic catastrophe” that we’ll be living with for years.

Iran’s success at throttling fuel shipments through the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz has forced President Donald Trump to reframe his war in petrochemical terms. Bolstered by its ability to regulate oil shipping lanes, Iran has moved to weaponize its growing Gulf dominance. Last week, the Islamic Republic began to facilitate the passage of approved tankers through the bottlenecked waterway, a process that includes a reported $2 million transit fee to pass what is increasingly referred to as the Tehran tollbooth.

What did the commentators say?

Charging selective fees on ships hoping to move through the Strait of Hormuz is “another sign” of Tehran’s dominance over the world’s “most important maritime energy channel,” said Bloomberg. Although the current payment system is happening on a “case-by-case basis,” Iran has “floated the idea of formalizing the charges as part of a broader postwar settlement.”

Tehran is experimenting with a “new vetting and registration system” as part of its pivot toward a “selective blockade of the strategic waterway,” said Al Jazeera. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s pledge earlier this month that the strait is “open, but closed to our enemies,” signals a “de-escalation from earlier remarks” by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatening violent reprisals. Multiple nations, including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia and China, are “understood to be discussing vessel transit plans directly with Tehran,” said Lloyd’s List. Iran has created a “de facto ‘safe’ shipping corridor through its territorial waters” in the Strait of Hormuz, providing passage for approved ships in exchange for, “in at least one case, a reported $2 million payment.”

Collecting selective tolls is a sign of Iran’s new “sovereign regime” in the straits, said Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerdi in an interview with state media, per The Cradle. Charging $2 million “transit fees” from certain vessels “reflects Iran’s strength.” But this emerging toll system is a “shakedown” for which “tankers are happy to pay,” said the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The dynamic is “only exacerbated” by the Trump regime’s decision to enact “effectively condition-free, monthlong authorization for the sale of sanctioned Iranian oil.”

Iran’s chokehold on the Gulf has forced the White House to explore previously unimaginable fuel futures, including what a “potential spike” of up to $200 per barrel in oil prices would “mean for the economy,” Bloomberg said. Domestically, the “most visible impact” to date of the growing fuel crisis is an estimated 30% increase in retail gasoline cost, which has wiped away declines that Trump had “touted as a key economic achievement.”

Even if crude shipping was at 50% of prewar rates in the Strait, rather than the near-zero it is at now, it would produce “strong global economic headwinds” that would hit the U.S. “in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock,’” said military historian Bret Devereaux on his website. “Historically at least,” these types of economic jolts have “not been politically survivable for the party in power.”

What next?

The White House has been “effective, so far, at jawboning” crude prices below the $120 to $150 per-barrel levels some analysts have predicted, said Fortune. This works “for now” because “physical shortage hasn’t actually reached most of the world yet,” resulting in a spread between actual barrel prices in the Gulf and, for instance, “Texas futures, which have hovered below $100.”

Opening the Strait of Hormuz has become a “clear objective for ending” the war, said NPR. Multiple oil executives who had “privately begun” to push for a permanent U.S. presence in the Strait of Hormuz that would “remove Iran’s ability to attack oil tankers in the strait” were “caught off-guard” by Trump’s sudden push for a negotiated ceasefire last week, said Politico. However much one might argue that “‘the world’ will not allow the Tehran tollbooth to persist,” and the U.S. military will ultimately intervene successfully, “current events in Iran have not followed the predicted course,” said Lloyd’s List. “So don’t be too sure.”

What happened

President Trump claimed that “very good and productive” talks with Iran were underway this week, even as elite U.S. combat troops were dispatched to the Persian Gulf and Iran denied it was engaged in negotiations. “They want to make a deal so badly,” said Trump, who asserted that envoy Steve Witkoff, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance were all engaged in talks that had yielded “points of major agreement.” But Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, said no talks had taken place, and that Trump was using “fake news” to “manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.”

The administration sent a 15-point plan to end the war to Tehran, under which Iran would dismantle its main nuclear sites, suspend its ballistic missile production, and end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—a channel in the Gulf through which 20% of the world’s oil was shipped prewar. Iran publicly rejected the plan, which was delivered by Pakistan. But The New York Times reported that behind the scenes, some Iranian officials were considering meeting with U.S. negotiators in Pakistan next week.

The wrangling followed a threat by Trump to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless it reopened the strait within 48 hours. Trump, who a day before issuing the threat had said the war was “winding down,” backed off as the deadline neared, citing “productive” talks. Iran’s foreign ministry called Trump’s about-face a bid “to reduce energy prices and buy time for implementing his military plans.”

As Iran continued to exchange missiles and drones with the U.S. and Israel, the Pentagon ordered up to 3,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to head to the Middle East. The directive came as three warships redeployed from Asia approached the Gulf, carrying some 4,500 sailors and Marines. U.S. officials said the troops could potentially be used to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub, or to reopen the strait by seizing parts of Iran’s shoreline. Trump suggested a deal could be struck for the strait to be “jointly controlled.” Asked by whom, Trump said, “Me and the ayatollah. Whoever the ayatollah is.”

What the columnists said

Trump backed down from his “obliteration” threat after Arab allies warned him of “the dangers of following through,” said Ben Bartenstein in Bloomberg. They said the destruction of Iran’s energy infrastructure “would almost inevitably result in a failed state” on their doorstep, and that Iran would strike back against oil and natural gas facilities across the region. Trump, whose approval rating has sunk to 36% in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, had another motivation: “calming markets rattled by his threats and the ongoing conflict.” He issued the reprieve just before the start of U.S. trading this week; the S&P 500 then rebounded and the price of Brent crude dropped sharply.

Trump was so spooked by spiking energy prices that he made another concession, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review—this one utterly indefensible. His administration lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil, which will yield Tehran about $14 billion, money that will fund its “combat operations against the U.S., Israel, and U.S.-friendly Gulf states.” The administration claims the move will lower global crude prices and give the U.S. more time to topple the mullahs. In reality, all it does is reveal that Trump will “make valuable concessions to our enemies if they disrupt financial markets” and harm his poll numbers.

This whole war is an exercise in “hollow absurdity,” said Jacob Bacharach in New York. Why are we fighting? What is the endgame? With no coherent answers, “we are left with the weird machinations of a would-be despot” who “seems to operate entirely on his whims.” Part of Trump’s problem may be his information diet, said Katherine Doyle in NBCNews.com. Sources say that each day aides show him a two-minute video montage of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets.” Amid the triumphalist messaging, some allies fear he’s not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war.”

Let’s dial back the panic, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. The war’s “going better than you think.” In less than a month, we’ve crushed the military capacity of a hostile regime and decapitated its leadership. And we’ve done it with “no naval losses” and the deaths of only 13 personnel. Compare that with the 23 personnel we lost in the 1989–90 invasion of Panama, whose “military phase lasted a few days.”

Any negotiations to end the war face daunting odds, said Laurence Norman in The Wall Street Journal. Both sides have “maximalist demands,” with the U.S. insisting on unfettered passage through the strait and “zero nuclear enrichment,” while Iran wants full sanctions relief, compensation for the war, and removal of U.S. bases in the region. But if both sides want “an off-ramp,” there are ways to get there—perhaps a pause in enrichment and a “drawdown on sanctions” to be “phased in as Iran frees up the strait.” Other issues “could be kicked down the road.”

Trump’s military adventure has reached a dizzying impasse, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. So certain of a quick victory he lacked a Plan B, he’s now tossing out wild threats and claims of diplomatic breakthroughs and seeing what sticks. But the one thing Iran will never agree to surrender is its “ability to disrupt the global energy markets”—which is “the one thing Trump must have.” Amid the “torrent of feints, hype, invention, and bluster,” it remains disturbingly unclear “how Trump will find a way out of this morass.”

What next?

The war’s snowballing has left Trump with hard choices, said Seth Cropsey in The Wall Street Journal. But his task is clear: He “must put boots on the ground to open the Strait of Hormuz.” The “temptation to walk away” and declare victory is understandable. But leaving Iran with the power to control the strait “would destroy American credibility” and send our adversaries the message that the U.S. “has no stomach for a knockdown fight.” Any such operation would “pose considerable risk to American forces,” said The Economist. Iran has many ways to attack landing craft and ships, including missiles and drones, speedboats rigged with explosives, and underwater mines. The strait is only 24 miles wide at its narrowest, with bunkers storing anti-ship missiles along the coastline. Troops onshore would “be well within range of Iranian artillery,” and escorting tankers through the strait would be “complex and perilous.” And that “presumes there are commercial ships willing to run this gauntlet.”

Pope Leo XIV has said God ignores the prayers of those who wage war and have “hands full of blood”. In what appears to be a clear rebuke of Donald Trump’s administration, the US-born pontiff, celebrating Palm Sunday mass in St Peter’s Square, called for an immediate ceasefire to the “atrocious” conflict between Israel, the US and Iran, and said Jesus cannot be used to justify war.

Leo is “known for choosing his words carefully”; he “did not specifically name any world leaders” but he has “been ramping up criticism of the Iran war in recent weeks”, said Joshua McElwee in The Independent.

What did the commentators say?

“The papacy has always been political,” said Pete Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal. And now “some of the biggest challenges to its vision of society are coming from the US”. As the first American leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo “brings a deeper understanding” of US society and politics than any previous pope, so “his critiques” can’t be as easily dismissed by US politicians. But he will also be well aware that “millions of American Catholics voted for Trump”.

In marked contrast to other senior Vatican figures – such as secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who said American strikes on Iran risked setting “the whole world ablaze” – the pope’s initial response to the war had been “a tempered call for peace”, said Anthony Faiola and Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. Until now, Leo was delicately “navigating a minefield” with the Trump administration. Pitched by the Vatican “as a unifier and bridge builder”, he was striving to remain “above the fray”, while his allies in the Holy See, and cardinals and bishops in the US, “more directly challenge the administration”.

The problem is, said George W. Bush’s former speechwriter, William McGurn, in The Wall Street Journal, that “the moral witness of the papacy” has been diminished by successive popes’ “blinkered position on war”. “The kind of rightly ordered world” Leo “desires can’t be built by armies alone – but can almost never be built without armies and without the threat of force.” Traditional Catholic teachings, “grounded in the reality of man’s fallen human nature”, have been traded for “functional pacificism” that “risks being dismissed even by sympathisers”.

What next?

The Vatican potentially has great sway over US policy: Catholics, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, hold senior positions in the US administration, and are well represented on the Supreme Court and among leading House Republicans.

But a “major rift” has opened up in the Christian coalition that elected Trump, said John Grosso in the National Catholic Reporter. “Traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals” are split over the Iran war and, more broadly, “over the role Israel plays in US foreign policy”. Leo’s most recent comments could be “a moment of reckoning for Catholics caught up in Maga”, Austen Ivereigh, a biographer of Pope Francis, told the paper. How do they “reconcile obedience to church authority with support for Trump”?

Israel and the US went into this war together, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. But as the conflict drags on, some members of Maga’s “isolationist wing” are starting to complain that Israel “led” the US into it, in pursuit of its own agenda.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio lent credence to that theory some weeks ago, when he said that the US had struck Iran because Washington “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” that would prompt a retaliation. And only last week Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence chief, told Congress that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons, undermining any claim that Iran posed an “imminent threat”.

Convenient claims

It is pretty clear that it posed no such threat, said Donald Macintyre in The Independent – and it is well known that Benjamin Netanyahu had been trying to persuade the US to join in such a war for 25 years: successive US presidents blocked it. But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump was lured into a war by Israel, even if he sometimes finds it convenient to claim that the Israelis are acting without his knowledge.

For Netanyahu, this war is not just about destroying a hostile regime, said Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian. This autumn, he will face his first electoral test since the 7 October attacks. For the past two years, his poll ratings have been “stubbornly below levels that would return him to power”. Victory for Israel in this conflict – which has the support of 90% of Israelis – would do much to turn that around.

‘Draining support’

But in going to war with Iran, the PM is gambling with his country’s long-term security, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. For decades, the single biggest guarantee of that security has been the “strong bipartisan support” Israel commands in the US. “But the Netanyahu government’s actions – first in Gaza and now in Iran – are draining that support away.”

If this war turns into a costly “quagmire”, it’s “entirely conceivable” that both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2028 presidential race will propose curtailing support for Israel – an outcome that would be a “strategic disaster for the Israelis”.

Prediction markets like Polymarket let users bet on future events. At least one trader has been remarkably prescient about U.S. military operations in Iran, feeding fears that prediction markets are being manipulated by insiders with closely held knowledge of government plans.

The anonymous trader has made “dozens of well-timed Polymarket bets” on Iran that earned them nearly $1 million since 2024, said CNN. They won 93% of their bets “even though the events they predicted were unannounced military operations.” Many of the bets “came hours before U.S. or Israeli military activity” against Iran. That pattern is “strong signaling of insider activity” that looks “pretty suspicious,” Nick Vaiman, the CEO of the Bubblemaps analytics firm, said to the outlet. And it came after another trader made $400,000 earlier this year predicting the January U.S. strike that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Other markets are also seeing suspicious activity. A “spike” in oil futures trading totaling $580 million occurred right before President Donald Trump’s Monday announcement that he was seeking negotiations with Iran, said CBS News. The unusual burst of activity was“certainly enough to raise eyebrows,” Stephen Piepgrass, a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke, told CBS. The indication of insider trading in oil and on prediction markets is drawing scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators.

What did the commentators say?

Prediction markets “are a national security threat,” Matt Motta and Robert Ralston said at Responsible Statecraft. Insider trading raises obvious “fairness” issues, but it also creates the possibility that government officials might prioritize personal gain over national security. Officials with power to influence international affairs could “alter their actions in order to make a profit on a prediction market.” Prediction markets may also “become sources of intelligence for adversaries” by signaling when military action is about to happen. Congress should ban insider bets. “U.S. national security depends on it.”

Profiting from insider information about national security is “effectively a form of treason,” Paul Krugman said on Substack. There is a “blurry line” between using official secrets to make “lucrative trades” and selling those secrets “to the highest bidder.” And it raises broader questions of whether “decisions about war and peace” are being influenced by profit or the national interest. If that seems unthinkable, “you just haven’t been paying attention.”

What next?

A Polymarket trader who predicted the Iran war is “now betting on a ceasefire by next week,” said MarketWatch. Prediction markets are taking steps to tighten the guardrails. Kalshi recently banned two traders for insider trading, the “first time the company had publicly revealed investigations” into the issue on its platform. Polymarket, meanwhile, has updated its rules to ban trading when a user possesses “stolen confidential information” or “has the ability to influence the outcome of the event.”

Republicans and Democrats in Congress are “pressing” for legislation to “crack down on policymakers placing wagers” on the markets, said The New York Times. And if Washington does not act, states will. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday he will sign an order banning state officials from insider trading on the prediction markets.

“Amid the fog of war and the propaganda being pushed by all sides”, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with the Iran conflict right now, said Abubakr Al-Shamahi on Al Jazeera. On Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that Washington was speaking to the “right people” in the Iranian regime, which wanted a deal “so badly” and had given the US a “very big present worth a tremendous amount of money”. Tehran, however, insisted that the talks were “fake news” and accused the Trump administration of negotiating with itself. This confused picture followed days of conflicting messages from the US.

Last Saturday, Trump talked of “winding down” the war, but also threatened to attack every power plant in Iran in 48 hours unless Tehran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz. The regime responded by vowing to strike power plants in Israel and across the Gulf region. On Monday morning, shortly before US markets opened, Trump declared that he would postpone the power plant strikes for five days, citing his claimed diplomatic progress.

‘Trump’s evaporating credibility’

It’s “a measure of Trump’s evaporating credibility” that even Washington insiders were sceptical about whether talks with Iran had taken place, said Simon Marks in The i Paper. The postponement of the ultimatum looks like another case of what Wall Street investors call “Taco”, or “Trump always chickens out”. It could be that, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. But it may indeed be a response to backchannel negotiations, or a piece of “dislocation” designed to sow doubt and confusion within Iran’s leadership. Trump likes to keep people guessing.

Some sort of diplomatic effort does now appear to be in motion, led by Pakistan, said Andrew Roth in The Guardian. The reported interlocutor of the US is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament. But this process may just be another way for Trump to buy time before launching commando raids in Iran: the US is “still moving marines and airborne soldiers into position”.

There’s no mystery here, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “The truth inside Trump’s tornado of piffle is that he wants to get out of the mess he created.” He never expected the attack on Iran to lead to this desperate standoff, despite everybody warning him that it would. He thought the regime would swiftly collapse in the face of US might. He now wants Tehran to surrender its ability to disrupt energy markets, but it will never do so, no matter how much Trump blusters and rages. “It does not take a seer to guess that at some point he will hint at using nuclear weapons.”

Winding down the war certainly won’t be easy, said William Hague in The Times. The Iranian leadership is now “more hardline” and will “drive a hard bargain”: its officials have reportedly outlined five conditions, including a halt to assassinations, assurances against further attack, and hefty reparations.

To win, Iran needs merely to survive

Tehran appears in no mood to capitulate, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It’s still launching drones at nearby Gulf states, and last week demonstrated its wider threat by firing two missiles at the British-American military base on the Chagos Islands, some 2,400 miles away.

To win this war, the regime needs merely to survive, said Ilan Goldenberg in Foreign Affairs. Trump should cut his losses, declaring that the US has achieved its main aim of degrading Iran’s military capabilities. The regime may reject such a ceasefire initially, but if the US keeps pushing for de-escalation, Tehran will come under international pressure to follow suit. Admittedly, this will leave the US “entangled in the region, managing a weakened but more aggressive Iran”, but to double down in search of a decisive outcome would risk “a far worse result”.

I’m encouraged by reports that J.D. Vance is involved in Iran negotiations, said James Ball in The i Paper. The US vice-president is a “committed American isolationist” who stands zero chance of succeeding Trump if the Iran war doesn’t end soon. If he’s surfacing now, he must think there’s a chance of a deal.

The warring parties will have to reach a settlement at some point, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Iran’s regime can’t sustain an indefinite conflict. There must be some within it who are “rational enough” to realise this and understand the potential rewards of striking a deal with America. As things stand, Trump is demanding the freezing of Iran’s missile programme, zero uranium enrichment, and the decommissioning of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. The irony is that the US had all but secured agreement on these demands before Trump launched his “stupid, chaotic” war a month ago.

If the price of oil continues to rise, it could trigger a “steep and stark” global recession, said Larry Fink, CEO of US financial giant BlackRock. There will be “profound implications” for the world economy if Iran “remains a threat” and oil prices hit $150 a barrel.

The BlackRock boss has a “unique insight into the health of the global economy”, said the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack, because of his investment management company’s colossal “size and spread”, controlling assets worth £11 billion across the world.

What did the commentators say?

“The Iran war is metastasising into a global economic calamity,” said the Financial Times’ editorial board. Until now, financial markets have been “lulled by the belief that the conflict would not last long” but, as hostilities enter a fourth week, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “lasting damage” has been inflicted on critical energy infrastructure in the region, and “the worst-case scenarios for investors and policymakers are coming into view”.

If this crisis continues, “no country will be immune to the effects”, said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency on Monday. The global economy faces a “major, major threat” as the Iran war has a worse impact on energy prices than the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Prepare for the price of oil to reach $200 a barrel,” said Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesman for Iranian militias last week. And what seemed then “like bravado” is now “closer to becoming reality”, said Jesus Servulo Gonzales in El Pais. Were prices to rise above $150, let alone near $200, there would be “an inflationary crisis”: “the world would become poorer, and economic activity would grind to a halt until the situation recovered”.

The current oil-price “ructions” would have “to get much worse” to trigger a global recession but “less happily, they will almost certainly further stoke popular anger over the cost of living”, said The Economist. The price of Brent Crude is currently around $100 a barrel (it was $60 at the start of the year); two months at $140 “would push parts of the global economy” into a slump. Consumer confidence is already “close to an all-time low in America and scarcely higher elsewhere”, given many countries “seemed primed” for an economic downturn “even before the Middle Eastern chaos began”.

In the US, “many economists believe” the country “will scrape through this year without a recession”, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. “But this is simply guesswork.” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has said the surge in oil prices is “an energy shock” that has created so much uncertainty, “we just don’t know” what will happen.

What next?

We urgently need to get the Strait of Hormuz opened, oil market expert Rory Johnston told The New Statesman. It’s “too important” to the global economy to remain closed. The most likely path “is that the Trump administration and Israel pull back on their attacks in Iran, and Iran says, OK, we’ll re-allow” tankers down the waterway. But even if the strait “reopened to 100% of its prior flow” today, it would take two to three months “to renormalise the global system”.

Under the “doomsday scenario”, in which the strait stays closed indefinitely, “we’re not talking recession; we are talking depression”.

Iranian drone strikes on data centers in the Middle East signal “how wars will be fought in the future,” said John Herrman in New York. Tech companies are used to defending their systems against hackers. Now they need to worry about physical attacks too. Early in the Iran war, two Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” by Iranian drones, while another in Bahrain sustained damage from a drone strike nearby. Even these relatively small attacks led to internet disruptions that affected banks, financial tech companies, rideshare providers, and other popular services, raising questions about the vulnerabilities of massive Middle Eastern server farms. Our digital lives are increasingly cloud-based, but there is still a large, physical footprint required to make that happen. With a “remote-controlled drone that costs less than a new car,” a hostile actor can now cripple our “multibillion-dollar digital infrastructure.”

Iran has openly declared war on U.S. tech firms, said Dana Alomar in Wired. Last week, it published a list of offices and infrastructure run by U.S. companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and named them “potential targets.” Warfare has become “increasingly dependent on digital systems, from satellite data to AI-powered intelligence analysis.” So the infrastructure underlying those systems holds “strategic significance.” Companies were already thinking about ways to protect their data centers, said Rachyl Jones in Semafor. Some are building server farms “in underground, nuclear-hardened bunkers.” But this “introduces a new level of complexity”—not to mention added costs for projects that are already eye-wateringly expensive. For now, “the cheapest way to protect data is to duplicate it” and store copies in safe regions.

The Middle East sold itself as exactly that, said Indranil Ghosh in Rest of
World—“a safe harbor for the world’s data.” But the Iran war “has upended that pitch.” Less than a year ago, the region was being hailed as the next great AI hub after President Trump’s four-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE yielded more than $2 trillion in investment pledges. The security arrangements around those deals were mostly designed to keep advanced AI chips out of China’s hands. “Not one of them contemplated the possibility that a regional adversary would launch missiles at the physical buildings where those chips were meant to run.” This was an “obvious blunder,” said Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. Tech companies were “desperate to take advantage of huge subsidies and cheap energy offered by Gulf countries.” But putting massive, energy-draining, water-dependent facilities in a geopolitically vulnerable desert was “nuts.” Now, “the geopolitical and the geo-economic chickens coming home to roost.”

President Donald Trump has worked to steer U.S. energy policy away from wind and solar and back to fossil fuels. But the economic aftershocks from the war against Iran are revealing the limits of his oil-driven energy agenda.

Trump’s efforts at “blocking clean energy” have left Americans “more vulnerable to supply shocks caused by the war,” said The Associated Press. The president has gone “all in on fossil fuels” in his second term, expanding tax breaks for drilling and fast-tracking federal permits while repealing a government finding that climate change “endangers public health and the environment.” He even ended the tax break that subsidized electric vehicle sales. Those decisions are leaving consumers in a lurch as gasoline and oil prices rise. Fossil fuels “have their own supply risks, and the administration has no answers,” said Tyson Slocum, the energy director at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, to the outlet.

One result of the war will be the “acceleration of the global shift to low-carbon energy,” said the Financial Times. The Middle East crisis is an “opportunity to transition to renewable energy more quickly and at a large scale,” South Korean President Lee Jae-myung said at a cabinet meeting. Environmental advocates have made such arguments “for years,” said the Financial Times, but this time “they have an unusually strong chance of breaking through.”

What did the commentators say?

Americans are looking for ways to save money by “asking for quotes on home solar systems and looking up electric vehicles online,” Bill McKibben said at The New Yorker. The “good news” is that clean energy technologies like solar and wind can be purchased “more cheaply than we can buy oil.” And once in place, Americans who use those technologies will no longer have to depend on the flow of oil through the “indefensible, roughly twenty-one-mile-wide ditch” that is the Strait of Hormuz. They can rely instead on the sun, an “energy source that will last another five billion years.”

The Iraq war cost about $2 trillion. That is about the same amount of money it would take to build enough clean energy capacity in the U.S. to “make fossil fuels and their price swings irrelevant,” Paul Greenberg said at The New Republic. That enormous sum of money would pay for a “truly vast array of turbines and panels” across the country. And it would be more productive than waging war, “which destroys capacity of all kinds.” The question is what taxpayers “truly want our tax dollars to do.”

What next?

Oil executives have warned the White House that the war-driven energy crisis is “likely to get worse,” said The Wall Street Journal. The crisis is “going to cause economic destruction,” said Steven Pruett, the chief executive of Texas-based Elevation Resources, to the Journal.

Trump continues to fight the shift to clean energy sources. His administration on Monday agreed to pay $1 billion to a French company to “abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast,” said The New York Times. In return, TotalEnergies will invest the money in U.S.-based oil and gas projects.

The targeting of Iranian missiles at the Diego Garcia UK-US military base on Friday has sent alarm bells ringing in Europe. Diego Garcia is over 2,500 miles (4,000km) from Iran and, if a missile from Tehran can reach there, it could also reach Paris, Berlin or even London.

“Previously, we thought Iran’s missiles had a range of 2,000km (1,245 miles),” General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of Joint Forces Command, told BBC Radio 4 on Saturday.

One of the missiles fell well short of its target and the other was shot down, said Defence Secretary John Healey. But “the launch, however unsuccessful” has “fuelled fears” about the range of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, said the BBC’s defence correspondent Jonathan Beale.

What did the commentators say?

Israel has claimed Iran is developing weapons capable of travelling 2,500 miles (4,000km). “We have been saying it,” the Israel Defence Forces posted on social media. “The Iranian terrorist regime poses a global threat. Now, with missiles that can reach London, Paris or Berlin.”

This could “put continental Europe and possibly even Britain under threat”, defence analysts told The Telegraph’s Paul Nuki. Every European capital “now lies within credible Iranian reach”, Ran Kochav, former commander of the Israeli air and missile force told the paper.

Yes, it’s “conceivable” that an Iranian rocket “could reach London”, Sidharth Kaushal, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the BBC’s Beale. But “so what?” We’re talking about “a small number” of conventional missiles over “well-defended airspace”, and they are “quite inaccurate at very long ranges”. The risk to London is “pretty low”, research analyst Decker Eveleth of the CNA Corporation told Beale. A missile could travel the distance but it wouldn’t be “particularly aim-able”. It would also be spotted quickly. Using a network of satellites and powerful radars, the US Space Force can track the trajectory of “any missile fired across the globe”.

“Various sources” agreed that it was unlikely that missiles launched from Iran would be able to hit London, said Jamie Grierson in The Guardian. Britain is protected by Nato’s ballistic missile defence, a shield “designed to detect, track and intercept” weapons in flight, bolstered by two Aegis Ashore defence sites in Poland and Romania.

The UK government is “not aware of any assessment at all” that Iran is “even trying to target Europe, let alone that they could if they tried”, said Communities Secretary Steve Reed on the BBC’s “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg”. And “even if they did, we have the necessary military capability” to defend ourselves. “The UK is not going to be dragged into this war.”

What next?

Britain has “very little in the way of” independent “ballistic missile defences”, said the BBC’s Beale: “a glaring gap” acknowledged by the government’s recent Strategic Defence Review. But it’s “unlikely” that Iran has “large numbers of intermediate or even long-range ballistic missiles”. The fact that it only fired two towards Diego Garcia “suggests its long-range missile capability is limited”. For now, “the threat seems remote”.

Even if it were able, Iran is unlikely to single out the UK for a missile attack, according to a recent paper from the European Centre for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies. More likely would be “precision strikes on Nato logistics hubs, and economic disruption” through attacks on Mediterranean ports or liquefied natural gas terminals in Italy, Greece and Romania.

“Nato does have what it takes to defend alliance territory, to defend our one billion inhabitants,” said Colonel Martin O’Donnell, spokesperson for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Europeans “should rest easy at night”.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Monday paused until the end of the week his ultimatum for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or see its energy facilities “obliterated.” He said he was holding off because his envoys were making progress in “very, very strong talks” with a “respected” Iranian leader. Iran denied Trump’s claim, posted shortly before markets opened. “No negotiations have been held with the U.S.,” Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on social media. “Fakenews [sic] is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.” Markets did rally, but oil prices, which dipped on Trump’s suggestion of peace talks, rose again after Iran’s rebuttal.

Who said what

It wasn’t clear which Iranian official Trump was casting as the U.S.’ negotiating partner, but Trump envoy Steve Witkoff has reportedly “had direct communication” with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi “in recent days,” said The New York Times, citing American and Iran officials. An Israeli official and two other sources told Reuters the interlocutor was Qalibaf, though European officials said there have been “no direct negotiations” between the U.S. and Iran.

The White House is “quietly weighing” Qalibaf as a “potential partner — and even a future leader,” Politico said. Some White House allies viewed Trump’s kingmaking aspirations as “premature, even naive,” but his “interest in pinpointing a negotiating partner signals a desire to find some way out of the quagmire that Iran has quickly become.”

Trump “seized on initial contacts” with Iranian officials to “buy time to try reopen the Strait of Hormuz and to extract himself from a box of his own construction,” the Times said. But even as he “retreated from one military option, U.S. and Israeli officials said they were continuing to carry out other strikes against Iran,” and some 5,000 Marines are still headed to the region.

What next?

A “spate of diplomacy in recent days” carried out “through Middle Eastern intermediaries” has given U.S. officials “hope an agreement to settle the conflict was possible,” The Wall Street Journal said. And it “prompted early discussions about an in-person meeting in Pakistan or Turkey later this week.” Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Vice President J.D. Vance “were expected to meet Iranian officials in Islamabad this week,” Reuters said, citing a Pakistani official.

The Trump administration has identified a new enemy in its war on Iran, said Caitlin Vogus in The Guardian: the American media. Frustrated that outlets are daring to inform the public about U.S. casualties, the conflict’s economic fallout, and the administration’s “lack of planning or strategy,” President Trump and his allies are pressuring news organizations to provide favorable coverage—or else. Trump has mused online about “charges for TREASON” for journalists and “lowlife ‘papers’” that “perpetuate LIES.” Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr has threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters that air what he deems “hoaxes and news distortions.” And Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth has used Pentagon briefings to assail outlets for being insufficiently patriotic, saying “the sooner” CNN is taken over by Trump-friendly billionaire and Paramount owner David Ellison, “the better.” It seems that, rather than a free press, the Trump administration wants a media that “operates more like that in, well, Iran,” with “obedient, state-run broadcasters that run propaganda praising a supreme leader and his wars.”

“Carr’s threats ring hollow,” said Brian Stelter in CNN.com. The FCC hasn’t yanked a broadcaster’s license in decades, and any revocation attempt would spark an ugly, years-long litigation battle “with many opportunities for stations to beat back the Trump administration’s pressure.” Broadcasters would be favored to win any case, by arguing their free speech rights are threatened by “Trump’s retributive streak” and by noting that reporting the truth of the war is in the public’s interest. Still, “station owners have to be willing to defend themselves. And that’s not always a given.” Carr knows that some outlets will change their coverage rather than “go through the arduous work of defending themselves,” said Tom Jones in Poynter.org. And he knows that broadcasters are uniquely vulnerable to pressure when they have a merger requiring FCC approval—like station owners Nexstar and Sinclair, which temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show last year after Carr complained about the comedian.

This ongoing crusade against the free press is deeply un-American, but also highly revealing, said Steve Benen in MS.now. When a war is going well, administrations typically don’t “whine incessantly about media coverage” and threaten news organizations. If Trump and his team genuinely felt confident about achieving their objectives in Iran, they wouldn’t be making the “kind of hysterical press complaints we’re seeing now.” They can shoot the messenger, but that won’t change the fact that their unpopular war in Iran is not going to plan.

As President Trump boasts about the pain he’s inflicting on Iran, Americans are discovering “violence has a way of breaking containment,” said Campbell Robertson and Tim Arango in The New York Times. On March 1, the war’s second day, a gunman wearing a T-shirt with Iranian flag colors opened fire outside a bar in Austin, killing three people and wounding 15. A week later, two ISIS-supporting teenagers from Pennsylvania tried to explode homemade bombs at a protest in New York City. And in the space of two hours last week, an ISIS supporter fatally shot an ROTC instructor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and a Lebanese American man rammed an explosive-laden truck into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., where 140 children were attending preschool. The attacker, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, was killed by security; his was the only death. There’s no evidence Iran directed any of these attacks. But faced with an existential threat, the regime in Tehran might activate “sleeper cells” and conduct assassinations, bombings, and cyber strikes in the U.S. The violence in the Middle East could also inspire more attacks by “lone offenders” like Ghazali, who went on the rampage after an Israeli air strike on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon killed four members of his family.

“Team Trump may be less ready to deal with” such threats “than previous administrations,” said Daniella Cheslow in Politico. It’s not just that the Department of Homeland Security is partially shut down, with Democrats refusing to fund the department unless there are meaningful immigration enforcement reforms. It’s also that former DHS secretary Kristi Noem slashed the staff at an intelligence office “that would ordinarily focus on the kind of threats posed by Iran.” Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center, which fuses intelligence about threats from across government, has shifted its focus under Trump toward drug cartels. And then there’s Kash Patel, said former FBI agent Jacqueline Maguire in The New York Times. The “sophomoric” FBI director has redirected counter-terrorism personnel to work on Trump’s migrant crackdown and purged scores of agents, including a dozen Iran specialists just days before the war. Their crime: taking part in past investigations of Trump.

The deeper problem is that terrorism has evolved, said Kevin Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. In the years after 9/11, security agencies focused on keeping foreign radicals from either entering the country or recruiting people already here. But in 2026, most terrorists are “made in the USA,” like last week’s attackers: U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who “self-radicalize” and who are near impossible to identify before they act. Not everything has changed, said The Free Press in an editorial. We don’t help ourselves by ignoring the truth that these terrorists share the same Islamist ideology that motivated the 9/11 hijackers. “A society that cannot name its enemies cannot protect itself against them.”

If demonizing Muslims were enough to keep us safe, Trump might be the perfect leader for this moment, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. But it isn’t, and he isn’t. The same “recklessness” that led Trump to launch a war with no clear goal or exit plan has left us effectively undefended from “retaliatory attacks.” Our security agencies have been gutted. The professionals who ran them have been replaced with “genuflecting enablers.” And they answer to a president who, when asked last week if he expected Iran-related terrorism on U.S. soil, could only reply with a shrug: “I guess.”

What happened

President Trump lashed out at U.S. allies this week after they rebuffed his demand to help break Iran’s blockade of a crucial oil shipping route, as the energy shock unleashed by the U.S.-Israel war with the Islamic Republic reverberated around the globe. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the Persian Gulf channel that carries 20% of the world’s oil—has slowed to a trickle since the war started on Feb. 28, causing the cost of crude to spike more than 50% to above $110 a barrel. Few shipping companies want to risk a voyage through the channel: Iran has hit at least 16 ships with drones and missiles and, according to U.S. officials, has begun laying mines in the strait. Trump demanded that European nations, China, Japan, South Korea, and other countries “that receive oil” from the Middle East send warships to escort tankers, warning that if NATO allies didn’t step up it would “be very bad for the future.” No nation offered ships. “This is not our war,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. Trump then raged on Truth Social that the U.S. did not “NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE” to open the strait. “WE NEVER DID.”

Israel intensified its strikes on the Iranian regime, killing Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib and top security official Ali Larijani, the country’s de facto ruler. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “crushing” strikes had created “optimal” conditions for an uprising. Trump said asking unarmed Iranian civilians to take on a regime that killed up to 30,000 protesters in January was “a big hurdle to climb.” Officials in Tehran said more than 1,300 Iranian civilians had been killed in the war so far; at least 13 U.S. personnel have died, including six crew members onboard a refueling plane that crashed in Iraq last week.

U.S. National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent announced his resignation, saying he couldn’t support the war “in good conscience” and that U.S. soldiers shouldn’t die in a conflict started “due to pressure from Israel.” The departure of Kent, an outspoken member of the “America first” movement, came as warships carrying 2,500 Marines headed from Asia to the Persian Gulf, fueling speculation they could be used to seize the strait or Kharg Island, a departure point for Iran’s oil exports. Asked if he was worried that deploying ground troops might lead to a quagmire, Trump said, “I’m really not afraid of anything.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s “catastrophic” war “is the worst conceived in American history,” said Jen Rubin in The Contrarian. He was warned that a U.S. attack would lead Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz—and that attempting to topple an entrenched regime was fraught with risk. But pumped up by the lightning capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, he ignored the red flags. Now the war is raging out of control; the price of gas, diesel, and jet fuel is spiking; “and the economy is teetering.” Iran’s closure of the strait isn’t just a “blow to the global economy,” said Rich Lowry in National Review. It’s “an assault against one of the foundations of American power.” Allowing it to stand would bring “intolerable” economic damage and our “national humiliation.” Trump has two options: Negotiate a ceasefire with an enemy that’s just demonstrated “de facto control of one of the most consequential waterways in the world,” or “break their grip on the strait by force of arms.”

That won’t be easy, said Sarah Young and John Irish in Reuters. The strait’s shipping lanes—which are just 2 nautical miles wide—wind past a “mountainous coast that provides cover for Iranian forces.” While Iran’s navy has been obliterated, the elite Revolutionary Guard still has plenty of ways to attack, including speedy small boats, mines, and anti-ship missiles. Getting a few ships a day through with U.S. Navy escorts would be “feasible in the short term” but hard to sustain in the long run.

Three weeks into the war, Trump is staring down “a stalemate,” said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. U.S. and Israeli strikes have laid waste to the Iranian regime’s military and political infrastructure. But they haven’t “broken the mullahs’ will.” As they choke energy shipping and keep hitting our Gulf allies, Trump faces a fateful choice: to pull back or dive in deeper. If he retreats without reopening the strait or securing Iran’s nuclear materials, the words “Trump Always Chickens Out” will “be carved on his tombstone.” But to plunge “further into the chaos of an escalating and widening war” is loaded with other risks.

Netanyahu has his own goals, said Adam Rasgon in The New York Times. He’s betting that Israel’s attacks on Iranian security forces will destabilize a widely hated regime and pave the way for a popular uprising. “I’m telling the Iranian people,” he said this week: “The moment you can come out for freedom is getting closer.” U.S. intelligence agencies don’t think that’s likely, said Ellen Nakashima in The Washington Post. In their assessments, the regime will “remain intact and possibly even emboldened” by the war, “believing it stood up to Trump and survived.”

As a military campaign that was supposed to be a “quick, surgical operation” deepens, Trump’s White House allies increasingly fear the “off-ramps” are closing, said Megan Messerly in Politico. They see Trump being boxed into a corner where escalation and putting boots on the ground “become the only way to credibly claim victory.” Given the steep cost of walking away, fear is growing that Trump is “drifting toward the kind of open-ended Middle East conflict he has long railed against.”

What next?

Iran’s Kharg Island is “an appealing target for Trump,” said Anton Troianovski in The New York Times, but one that carries “high risks.” Seizing the island or wiping out its oil infrastructure could “cripple” Iran’s regime-sustaining energy industry. But that could prompt damaging retaliatory strikes against energy sites across the region, and pulling Iran’s oil from the world market could spike energy prices even further, “with all the economic and political problems that would accompany such a surge.” Trump could also try to seize Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium, said Michael R. Gordon and Laurence Norman in The Wall Street Journal. But locating and extracting them would be a complex, dangerous operation involving hundreds of troops. It could require “the largest special forces operation in history,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis. But leaving that uranium—much of which could be quickly converted to weapons grade—in the hands of a regime “looking to ensure its survival” would be “dangerous too.”

The Iran war is unlike any other conflict of the modern era, marked by shifting justifications, mysterious end goals and growing friction between the two primary aggressors, the U.S. and Israel. A new generation of large-scale artificial intelligence tools is further reshaping the way both countries approach and execute their military operations.

What did the commentators say?

The Pentagon is “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” in the war on Iran to help “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds,” said Admiral Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, in a video on social media. The tools allow military leadership to “cut through the noise” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.”

Pentagon AI systems can offer targeting recommendations “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Newcastle University lecturer Craig Jones to The Guardian. The “scale” and “speed” of AI military systems means the Pentagon can conduct “assassination-style strikes” while simultaneously “decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles” in a process that would have taken “days or weeks in historic wars.” Battlefield AI programs from the MAGA-aligned software company Palantir can “identify and prioritize targets, recommend weaponry” and account for “stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets,” said The Guardian. Palantir even has access to “automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.”

At the heart of the Pentagon’s shift to AI-animated warfare is Palantir’s Maven Smart System and its integrated use of Claude, the AI platform from software company — and occasional administration foil — Anthropic. While Claude had been used for “countering terror plots” and in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the past several weeks mark the “first time it has been used in major war operations,” The Washington Post said. Over the past year, the government has allowed the Maven/Claude system to “mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military.” Ours is now officially an “age of AI warfare,” said Paul Scharre, the executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, to CNN. Given the sheer volume and volatility of battlefield data needing to be assessed, “AI is incredibly valuable.”

State-level AI warfare isn’t “confined to physical territory” either, said The New Arab. Iran has deployed “AI-generated disinformation,” as well as “manipulated images and videos designed to create false impressions of events on the ground.” American and Israeli forces have meanwhile launched AI systems of their own to “detect and counter manipulation attempts in real time,” creating a “multi-dimensional battlefield” wherein information control is as “strategically important as control of airspace.”

What next?

We are currently in the “early stages” of what AI is “going to do to transform warfare over the next several decades,” said Scharre, particularly in terms of the “cognitive speed and scale” at which armies operate, which could “accelerate” the “tempo of operations” on the battlefield. But as AI use expands across the military, so has a commensurate effort to “focus on the protections that should govern its use,” said NBC News. Although none of the lawmakers contacted by the outlet said that AI should be “completely removed from military use,” many expressed a sense that “more oversight is needed.”

This is the “next era” of warfare, said Queen Mary University professor David Leslie to The Guardian. But overreliance on AI in the military might ultimately lead to “cognitive off-loading,” in which the human tasked with overseeing a particular operation feels “detached from its consequences” since the responsibility to “think it through” was made by a computer.

As an “inflection point” in demonstrating how “modern technology could work with existing military systems,” said The New York Times, the AI-fueled war in Iran is likely to “speed the adoption of more technologies” with “legacy and modern systems to be melded together, along with more powerful AI” in the coming decade.

What happened

President Donald Trump over the weekend gave Iran until Sunday to “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz” or the U.S. would “obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Trump later announced he was temporarily postponing these attacks, telling reporters Monday he had held “very strong talks” with Iranian officials. Iran said if Trump followed through with his threats, it would retaliate by destroying critical regional infrastructure used by the U.S. and its allies and sending soaring oil and gas prices even higher.

Who said what

If Iran’s power plants are eventually targeted, “vital infrastructure and energy and oil facilities” across the Gulf region “will be destroyed irreversibly, and oil prices will rise for a long time,” Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on social media. An Iranian military spokesperson said “fuel, energy, information technology and desalination infrastructure” would be attacked, and the Strait of Hormuz would be “completely closed” until damaged Iranian power plants were rebuilt.

Trump is “cycling through an increasingly desperate list of options” as he seeks a solution to the “crisis in the Strait of Hormuz,” The Associated Press said. His latest threat just “fueled criticism that he is grasping for answers after going to war without a clear exit plan.” It was a “dramatic reversal from just a day earlier,” when Trump said he was considering “winding down” the war without reopening the strait, Axios said.

Trump’s threats are “the only language the Iranians understand,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told NBC News on Sunday. “Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.” Attacks on power plants could “hurt Iran,” Reuters said. But “they would be potentially catastrophic for its Gulf neighbors,” which use roughly “five times as much power per capita” to make “their gleaming desert cities habitable” and desalinate nearly all of their drinking water.

What next?

Trump’s energy infrastructure threat and “surge” of 4,500 more U.S. troops to the region “have set the stage” for “the war’s possible endgame: a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz,” The Washington Post said. Reopening the strait to ship traffic now appears to be Trump’s “paramount objective,” but such an operation “could take at least weeks, put U.S. sailors and other forces at risk, and expose U.S. warships to attacks” for “an unknown duration.”

One of the most powerful and feared organisations in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plays central roles in the country's internal security, economy and foreign policy; it runs Iran's ballistic missile programme; and directs support to its network of allies.

The IRGC was founded soon after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as Islamists, nationalists and Leftists competed to set the course of the new republic. Initially, it was a street militia, designed to protect Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's leadership from the army and the police, which he did not trust. After a referendum, Iran became a constitutional republic, with universal suffrage, a president and a parliament, but one wrapped in a theocracy; ultimate authority rests with the supreme leader. The IRGC began to operate as a sort of parallel state, bypassing the government and answering directly to the leader.

How did it evolve?

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) transformed the IRGC into a conventional fighting force, with a structure similar to that of a Western military. Its soldiers fought alongside the regular army, the Artesh, supported by units from the Basij, the youth volunteer militia set up by the IRGC in 1980. The Guard and the Basij became known for their “human wave” attacks, in which waves of religiously inspired Iranian teenagers overran better-equipped Iraqi positions, incurring massive casualties (in some units, more than 40% of troops were “martyred”).

By the end of the war, the IRGC had built up great engineering and construction capabilities, for military logistics. To prevent a postwar collapse and to keep the IRGC funded, the government tasked it with rebuilding the nation. The result was Khatam-al Anbiya (“Seal of the Prophets”), today one of Iran's largest construction and industrial contractors.

How is the IRGC structured?

There are five main branches. It has about 200,000 troops in the three wings of its military service: ground forces, navy – which has a special responsibility for patrolling the Strait of Hormuz – and the aerospace force, which runs Iran's ballistic missile programme. In addition, there's the Basij paramilitary force, which claims it can mobilise some 600,000 volunteers, and the Quds Force, an elite unit tasked with spreading the influence of Iran and the Islamic Revolution abroad.

What does the Basij do?

It is best known in the West for enforcing Islamic codes and suppressing dissent: masked Basij gunmen on motorbikes patrol streets during periods of unrest. They were accused of beating, shooting, sexually assaulting and torturing Iranians during the 2009 election protests and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement in 2022. There are about 100,000 employees of the Basij, and a much larger number of volunteers. These are mostly young working-class men, who are paid cash bonuses for going on patrols, and also receive benefits comparable to those of party members in Communist states: access to welfare schemes, jobs, and university places for their children, for instance.

And the Quds Force?

The Islamic Republic has a constitutional commitment to “export the revolution”, and the Quds (Jerusalem) Force is the section of the IRGC tasked with that. It began sponsoring armed groups in the region in the 1980s: first, the Shia militias that would become Hezbollah during the Lebanese Civil War; in the 1990s, the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as Shia groups in Bahrain and Afghanistan. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Quds Force played a vital role in organising and aiding Shia militias fighting there against the US and its allies. Following the Arab Spring in 2011, the force was deployed to Syria, to prop up the rule of Bashar al-Assad; more recently, it has supported the Houthis in Yemen.

How about the IRGC's economic role?

It controls great swathes of Iran's economy, particularly in construction, energy and telecoms. Many of its interests are run via religious foundations, known as bonyads. US-led sanctions, since the 2000s, have actually bolstered the IRGC's position: it has developed sophisticated black-market and smuggling networks, orchestrating the sale of oil to China and drones to Russia, as well as, reportedly, smuggling drugs and alcohol. It is estimated that upwards of a third of Iran's GDP is controlled by the IRGC. “A lot of Revolutionary Guard commanders have become billionaire generals, more businessmen than military leaders,” opposition spokesman Shahin Gobadi told The Times.

What about its role in politics?

The IRGC is highly influential. Many former members have moved on to senior government roles – often appointed by the late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was closely involved with the IRGC. At least 16% of seats in the Majlis, the parliament, are held by veterans or active commanders. Former Guards tend to advocate a hardline foreign policy, and to support Iran's nuclear programme. Senior former IRGC officers include Ali Larijani, the head of the National Security Council, who was killed week. The IRGC's new commander in chief, Ahmad Vahidi, is the former minister of the interior.

What is happening to it now?

At least 30 IRGC generals were assassinated in the 12-day war with Israel last year; during the current war, the Israel Defence Forces claim to have killed 6,000 Guards, including the commander-in-chief – and the Basjij chief. Basij check points have been attacked by drones. Even so, the IRGC has played a leading role in launching missile and drone attacks. And its influence is arguably growing: Mojtaba Khamenei is said to have been the IRGC's choice as leader. Some analysts now describe Iran as a militarised “IRGC republic”.

Three weeks into this war, “it is clearer than ever that Donald Trump miscalculated”, said The Independent. “If he was warned that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz, he ignored it.” The president seems surprised that the odious Islamic regime has still not fallen; and America's allies in the region are bearing the brunt of its furious response. Trump seems to have no realistic policy for dealing with the resulting global oil shock.

‘Another forever war’

He is “a man without a plan”, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, and “hasn't the foggiest what to do next”. The costs for the US – 13 dead, 200 wounded, $11 billion spent in the first week alone – are mounting. Trump sought a “swift, painless victory from the air”; instead, “another forever war” looms.

Even with its leadership decapitated, “the Iranians fight on”, said David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. But then they have spent 20 years preparing for this moment. Their strategy, the Decentralised Mosaic Defence, is built around a “single brutal principle” – the “body” keeps fighting even if the “head” is cut off. Local commanders can “launch missile strikes, drone swarms, and even harass ships without seeking approval from above”.

The idea was to never “give the enemy a single target whose destruction can end the fight”. To some degree, it is working. Iran continues to deploy relatively cheap drones, which are expensive to intercept. Meanwhile, the US and Israel have burned through years' worth of munitions.

‘Remarkable progress’

If, as seems likely, the regime survives, it will only become more militant and hostile, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian – with “every reason to double down on its nuclear ambitions”. Iran's increasingly paranoid leaders are cracking down even harder on internal dissent, said Tom Ball in The Times. The Basij paramilitary unit has been deployed into residential areas of Tehran. Thousands of people are thought to have been arrested or “disappeared” since the campaign began.

The broad consensus seems to be that the US intervention is “unwise, unjust, is going very badly and certain to fail”, said Gerard Baker in The Times. But consider the facts. In just a few weeks, the US has achieved “remarkable progress” in wreaking “destruction on the capacity of a mortal enemy to wage war”. The strikes have wiped out an estimated 60% of Iran's missile launch facilities. Tehran's rate of missile and drone fire has been drastically reduced. Its navy and air force have been effectively destroyed. Iran's desperate decision to lash out at its neighbours and close the Strait of Hormuz has left it isolated. Key leaders – including security chief Ali Larijani, seen as Iran's day-to-day ruler – have been killed.

Trump's critics behave as if “the costs of inaction were zero”, said Muhanad Seloom on Al Jazeera. “They were not.” The regime is drenched in blood. Left unchecked, it would certainly have developed nuclear weapons, making it capable of holding the region hostage “indefinitely”. War is never clean, and the execution of this one has been far from perfect. “But the strategy is working.”

As the Iran war enters its third week, there is a divergence between how the United States and Israel conduct its operations against Tehran and what each nation hopes to accomplish. While President Donald Trump and his administration struggle to articulate an overarching goal for the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed ahead with expanding the front lines of his army’s assault not only on Iran but across Lebanon and Syria as well. With little end to the fighting in sight, is this still a single war of unified purpose, two separate conflicts being fought concurrently or a bit of both?

What did the commentators say?

The war on Iran may have been launched by Israel and the U.S. “at the same time,” said CNN, but it’s “becoming clear” the two nations have “some differences in how they see the war proceeding.” The pair enjoys a “number of overlapping objectives,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro to the outlet. But there remains “some divergence” between Israel and the U.S., which is only likely to increase “as time passes.”

The longer the conflict lasts, the more likely their “endgames and risk tolerance” may differ, said Axios. Trump, in particular, currently stands “more aligned” with the Israeli government’s “maximalist objectives” than many among his own staff. Israeli and American armed and intelligence services are “moving in concert,” although “their targets vary,” with the U.S. focused “almost exclusively” on military targets, while Israeli assassinations and other operations are “intended to lay the groundwork for regime change.”

Netanyahu may appear to be “flying high” after finding an American president “willing to go all the way” with his long-telegraphed war on Iran, but Israeli analysts are “increasingly aware of where the two countries’ strategies” may bifurcate, said The Economist. Netanyahu has been “blunt” about his nation’s wish for regime change in Tehran, even as Israeli leadership has come to feel that Trump’s goals rest “primarily on controlling the flow of oil from Iran.” Israel is “willing to use the war to inflict deeper damage” on Iranian state infrastructure, while Washington “shows little sign of a clear political endgame,” said Bloomberg. Netanyahu is thus “far more likely to favor a drawn-out campaign” than Trump, given the “growing economic and political pressure” the president faces domestically.

At the onset of this war, both Israel and the U.S. “stated their desire to lay the groundwork for regime change,” The New York Times said. But as the war goes on, Trump has acknowledged that a popular uprising “didn’t seem imminent.” Israel would “prefer” to extend their war “for as long as possible, potentially for weeks, to weaken the Iranians,” said Israeli policy analyst Ahron Bregman to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. Trump, meanwhile, will “seek a way to end this war, especially as oil prices continue to rise.” His goals “did not include regime change,” said CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a House Intelligence Committee meeting.

It is within this context that Israel’s “related but separate agenda” of concurrent attacks on Hezbollah is taking place, said Shapiro to CNN. Netanyahu is waging an “ulterior campaign to try to do significantly more damage to Hezbollah” in the hopes of spurring a “diplomatic process” with, or within, the Lebanese government. Trump generally supports dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure, yet Israel’s operations in Lebanon are “not of the same level of priority for U.S. interests.”

What next?

For the time being, the Trump administration seems publicly comfortable with the U.S. and Israel’s parallel-and-diverging strategies in Iran. The Trump regime “holds the cards” and has “clear” objectives, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday in a press conference. Israel is “pursuing objectives as well.”

Q: Why are we helping Israel prosecute this war if they're going to pursue their own objectives?HEGSETH: We hold the cards. We have objectives. Those objectives are clear. We have allies pursuing objectives as well.

— @atrupar.com (@atrupar.com.bsky.social) 2026-03-20T19:47:25.485Z

Netanyahu, for now, “appears to be operating on the assumption that Trump shares his goals,” said William Usher, a former CIA Middle East analyst, to Bloomberg. That may be true “regarding the total elimination of [Iran’s] nuclear program, but perhaps not much beyond that.”

What happened

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday defended an upcoming funding request to pay for the ongoing Iran war, as Congress balked at the reported $200 billion price tag. The global cost of the conflict rose again as oil prices surged above $119 a barrel before settling at just under $109 after a chaotic day of trading. Qatar’s state energy company said retaliatory Iranian strikes on its Ras Laffan energy hub had cut its natural gas capacity by 17%, costing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and affecting deliveries to Europe and Asia.

Who said what

“Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth told reporters Thursday. “As far as the $200 billion, I think that number could move.” Trump called the unspecified funding request “a small price to pay to make sure that we stay tippy-top,” pointing to the “vast amounts of ammunition” needed. It “was not immediately clear” how long the $200 billion was intended to last or “what operations it would cover,” The New York Times said. But the “significant sum” suggests that the Pentagon is “preparing for a significant engagement.”

The funding request “met with stiff opposition” in Congress, Reuters said, “as Democrats and even some Republicans questioned the need for the money” after they “approved record funding for the military” over the past year. Republican leaders “do not believe they have the votes to fund the war even in their own party without far more detailed plans from the White House,” CNN said.

While some House Republicans “blanched” at the $200 billion price tag, others are “embracing the eye-popping number to help energize a stalled” effort to pass a second GOP-only reconciliation bill, Axios said. Senate Republicans are “decidedly cooler” on that plan. “The alternative — relying on a handful of Democrats to push it through the Senate — doesn’t look any more likely,” Politico said, as “energy prices rise and more Democratic lawmakers dig in against an unpopular war.”

What next?

The $200 billion funding fight “could turn into a referendum on the war in Congress,” Axios said, which could be harrowing for Republicans given the “unpopularity of the war” and “the Pentagon’s existing $1 trillion budget.” Already, “anxiety is creeping up in the GOP,” CNN said, as the war drags on and energy prices soar ahead of this fall’s “critical election.”

The war in Iran has caused airlines “their biggest test since the Covid-19 pandemic”, said The New York Times.

Air traffic has been “paralysed” and more than 52,000 flights to and from the Middle East have been cancelled since the war began – that is “more than half of all flights planned in the region”.

“Costs are adding up” and tourism in the region has “effectively ground to a halt”. For Emirates and the other Gulf airlines, who “have the highest profit margins in the industry”, continued disruption could take a “substantial” financial and reputational toll.

‘Scrambling’ for alternatives

Since the first missiles were launched, air traffic controllers have been “shepherding passenger jets through safer but congested airspace on the edge of the war”, said the BBC. On a normal day, each individual controller would be responsible for around six aircraft “in their area at a time”. But in times of war it can easily be “double that”.

Shifts would normally be around “45-60 minutes long with 20-30 minutes off” but during times of conflict “they will likely only do a 20-minute stint and then break for the same length of time”. In times such as these, more controllers are brought in to manage the volume and “rotated more frequently to ensure they don’t become overwhelmed”.

Airlines “have been scrambling to find alternatives” to normal routes through Iranian airspace, and the effects are “rippling across the region”, said The New York Times. “Tens of thousands of flights” have been cancelled since war broke out, and the total numbers in the Gulf remain “well below normal levels”.

Airspace restrictions have become an “increasingly common challenge for airlines navigating a world shaped by geopolitical conflict”. The Russian invasion of Ukraine had a similar effect: the “Siberian corridor” over Russia used to be a “relatively direct connection” between Europe and Asia but is has become a “patchwork of workarounds”. Likewise, the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Qatar is now “largely devoid of commercial planes”. The war in the Middle East is “further fragmenting a once efficient and finely tuned global aviation network”.

As “established east-west routes are narrowing, the skies over Central Asia matter more than they did before”, said The Times of Central Asia. Countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are “not immune to the crisis” and cannot match the “far larger networks” and “deeper fleets” of other Gulf hubs.

But they can provide “overflight planning, air traffic management, and route resilience rather than headline passenger numbers”. Their “aviation systems clearly now carry far greater strategic and economic importance than they did only a few years ago”. Governments in the region have acknowledged the “strategic value of their territory for rail, road, and trade corridors”, but the disruption caused by the war in Iran has “added aviation to that argument”.

‘Ballooning cost’

The war in Iran has “exposed the fragility of modern travel”, said Bloomberg. As flight paths become “increasingly narrow”, airlines’ “long-term growth plans” have been thrown into “disarray”.

Diversions add many hours to flights so planes must carry more fuel, which is “an expensive burden in light of the spike in energy costs”. With shipping channels through the Strait of Hormuz “effectively shut”, the markets have been “driving up prices of crude and products like diesel and jet fuel”.

This will inevitably affect consumers. Carriers may “hike fares” and add “fuel surcharges to cover the ballooning cost”. Equally, airlines and other large energy consumers could begin to “panic buy oil derivatives contracts” to “shield them from wild price swings”.

In the longer term, continued instability could also change flight culture, with safety concerns “likely to remain front of mind for many travellers” for the foreseeable future. Higher inflation around the world could mean demand to fly is “reshaped”, even “spurring passengers to rethink long-haul trips” and “favour cheaper holidays closer to home”.

President Donald Trump wants to delay his upcoming summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, citing the demands of the Iran war. It’s a sign that the Middle East conflict could upend delicate relations with the United States’ most powerful rival.

The Iran war is “threatening a fragile détente” between the two superpowers, said The New York Times. Trump demanded China send ships to the region to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Beijing has “reacted coolly.” Meeting Trump’s request would be “tantamount to entering the war,” said Ding Long of Shanghai International Studies University’s Middle East Studies Institute. But China’s reluctance to come to America’s aid “may jeopardize a trade truce” with the U.S., said the Times.

Trump’s call to delay the summit “casts a shadow” over what had been a stable relationship following last year’s trade war, said Reuters. The Iran war “makes U.S.-China interactions this year more difficult,” said Fudan University’s Zhao Minghao. Both sides are prioritizing “keeping relations on an even keel,” however, and China has signaled that it wants to reschedule the summit soon. Face-to-face diplomacy “plays an irreplaceable role in providing strategic guidance ​to China-U.S. relations,” said a Chinese government spokesperson.

What did the commentators say?

Beijing is “not going to bail Trump out” in Iran, Edward Luce said at Financial Times. His request that China send ships to the Strait of Hormuz is a “black swan moment,” when the world’s leading superpower is “inviting its main challenger to help extract it from the world’s most combustible region.” China gets half its imported oil through the strait, but helping the U.S. is a nonstarter. “Why interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake?”

The Iran war “really is about China,” Doug Stokes said at The Spectator. Teheran and Beijing have developed a partnership in recent years, with the bulk of Iranian oil exports flowing to Chinese refineries “operating beyond the reach of American sanctions enforcement.” China also supplied Iran with weapons “specifically designed to kill American sailors and constrain American freedom of maneuver” in a future conflict. Making war on Iran weakens the “infrastructure of Chinese power projection.”

Trump’s war “could play into China’s hands,” Lyle Goldstein said at the Chicago Tribune. Beijing will benefit from the U.S. shifting forces to the Middle East. China’s strategists will also “get yet another chance to closely study U.S. military technologies and doctrines” and adjust their war plans accordingly. Going forward, China may be able to present itself as a defender of the global status quo, contrasting itself against a U.S. government “increasingly viewed as having gone rogue.”

What next?

China sees the summit delay as “less a setback than an opportunity to regroup” and meet when the U.S. president isn’t distracted by Iran, said Bloomberg. But the delay does “underscore the fragility” of both countries’ efforts to maintain trade peace, said Wendy Cutler, the senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, to Bloomberg.

President Donald Trump likes his military campaigns short and victorious. The quick overnight strike that removed Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro from power is his preferred model of warmaking. But the U.S. president may not be able to exit the war against Iran so easily.

Some of Trump’s supporters are concerned the president “no longer controls how, or when, the war ends,” said Politico. Iran’s Islamic regime still has a vote, and it’s voting to keep the conflict alive with its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The resulting fallout for the global economy means Iran’s leaders “hold the cards now,” said a White House ally.

Trump’s advisers had hoped he could and would “declare victory whenever he saw fit” and end the war quickly, said Politico. But now the conflict appears stickier than they anticipated. The “off-ramps” to de-escalate things “don’t work anymore,” said a second Trump ally.

Trump “expects a quick, clear victory,” said Axios. But the war’s outcome is “beyond unilateral control and quick fixes.” The president could “pull out tomorrow.” Iranian officials, though, have made it clear they “could continue shooting missiles and rockets” unless they get a guarantee that the U.S. will not reengage at a future date. Iran wants more than “just a temporary ceasefire.”

What did the commentators say?

The president’s options to end the war “keep getting fewer and worse,” said Thomas Wright at The Atlantic. Trump is getting closer to a point where he can either pursue a “decisive tactical success” and “prepare the country for a prolonged conflict” or seek a settlement involving “real compromise” with Iran.

The regime has proven “more aggressive and more resilient” than he anticipated, and if the government does collapse, it could “take a long time,” said Wright. Most wars start with hopes of a quick victory. “Few end as expected.” Trump chose to start the war, but the decision to conclude it is “no longer entirely his to control.”

The strait’s closure is “giving the Iranians leverage,” said the National Review. If the strait remains closed for months “rather than a few more weeks,” the global economic damage may become “truly disastrous.” Iran could end the war with its regime still in place and in “de facto control” of the strait. If that happens, Trump’s war will end up “eroding American deterrent power rather than enhancing it.” His administration must have some “urgency about reopening the strait” to ensure that does not happen.

What next?

Military officials are routinely including “off-ramps” in their war plans if Trump wants to end the conflict quickly, said NBC News. “So far, he hasn’t” chosen to. Some administration allies are going public with their push to end the campaign. The U.S. “should try to find the off-ramp,” said David Sacks, Trump’s AI czar.

Trump himself is sending mixed signals. The war in Iran is “just a military operation to me,” he said to reporters on Tuesday. Iran is “something that was essentially largely over in two or three days."

Does Pete Hegseth think “he’s in an action movie”? asked Casey Ryan Kelly in Salon. In his Pentagon news briefings on the war with Iran, the defense secretary has projected none of the solemnity you’d expect from a government official discussing the taking of human life. Instead, Hegseth seems giddy about the horrors of war, rhapsodizing about U.S. bombers and drones raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He’s dismissed concerns about the rules of engagement, explaining “it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down.” And he’s shrugged at news reports on America’s war dead, saying, “Tragic things happen; the press only wants to make the president look bad.”

This is what President Trump thinks a real warrior looks and sounds like, said David Smith in The Guardian. A Christian nationalist with tattoos of the Crusades-era Jerusalem Cross and slogan “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”), Hegseth won Trump’s attention as a Fox News host advocating for U.S. troops accused of war crimes. He’s the perfect figurehead for a White House that “revels in carnage,” and which last week posted a video online that mixed clips from video games and war movies with “real kill-shot footage” of strikes in Iran. This bloodlust may play well in the manosphere, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in the judgment of those leading this “murky new Middle East conflict.”

The “bellicose messaging” of this administration is accompanied by open “hostility to battlefield restraint,” said Missy Ryan in The Atlantic. We still don’t know why a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck an Iranian elementary school on the war’s first day, killing at least 175 people, most of them children. But we do know Trump and Hegseth have spent the past year dismantling the supposedly “woke” systems designed to prevent such tragedies, firing many military lawyers, or “JAGs,” and closing a policy shop focused on reducing civilian casualties. Hegseth says he won’t comment on the school strike, pending an internal investigation, but he was less reticent in savoring the “quiet death” of 87 Iranian sailors killed when a U.S. submarine torpedoed a possibly unarmed Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka. Distastefulness aside, said Charlotte Howard in The Economist, the deeper problem with Hegseth’s “machismo style” is that it’s now also the “substance” of U.S. military policy.

Machismo is part of the story, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. But the fetishization of violence for its own sake is also helping fill a “strategic vacuum.” Previous U.S. presidents went to war with a clear goal in mind (however unrealistic), whereas Trump is still deciding if the Iran operation is an air campaign to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, a full-scale “regime change” war, or something else entirely. The lack of a goal, and a plan for achieving it, leaves the White House with nothing to celebrate except the “rapid destruction of buildings and machines, and the killing of some enemy leaders,” all while praying that the public is “enjoying the fireworks” as much as Hegseth.

The tragedy is that Trump had very good reasons for going to war with Iran, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. The vicious Islamist regime in Tehran has waged war on the U.S., and the Iranian people, for almost half a century. “Given an opportunity to inflict massive damage on that enemy, the president boldly seized it.” But rather than make that persuasive case to the public, Trump and Hegseth have leaned on “intemperate, incontinent, infantilizing verbiage” that only weakens support for this just cause at home and overseas, and “corrupts our national culture.”

What happened

A defiant Iran intensified its attacks on Arab states and U.S. assets across the Middle East this week, as President Trump seesawed on America’s war aims and when the joint U.S.-Israeli offensive on Iran might end. Thousands of Iranian missiles and drones have rained down on Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other Arab nations, smashing into oil refineries, airports, residential buildings, and hotels and killing at least 16 people. At least 11 U.S. military bases have been hit, damaging communications infrastructure and air defense systems and partially collapsing some buildings, according to satellite imagery reviewed by The New York Times. The Pentagon said at least 140 U.S. troops have been wounded, eight seriously, and seven have been killed; in Israel, Iranian strikes have killed at least 13 people. As the damage mounted, Trump judged the operation “very complete, pretty much.” Within hours he backtracked, saying the U.S. was bent on “ultimate victory,” while still asserting it would end “very soon.” Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted the assault was at “just the beginning.” Asked which of those things was true, Trump said, “I think you could say both.”

Inside Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of assassinated
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was selected to replace his father as the nation’s supreme leader. Trump, who insisted he must approve any new leader, said the selection of Khamenei—a hard-line cleric with deep ties to the elite Revolutionary Guard—was “unacceptable,” judging it would “lead to more of the same problems.” The U.S. and Israel continued to pound targets across Iran; more than 1,300 Iranians have died in the strikes, most of them civilians, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. “They are striking everywhere: homes, schools, mosques, hospitals,” said one Tehran resident.

In Washington, Democrats berated Trump’s failure to articulate a clear plan. After a closed-door briefing, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut called the administration “incoherent.” He said it had backed off the previously stated goals of regime change and destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and that it had “no plan” for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, where shipping has come to a standstill. Meanwhile, defiant Iranian leaders ruled out a ceasefire or mediation. “Iran will determine when the war ends,” said Iranian Revolutionary Guard spokesman Ali Mohammad Naini.

What the columnists said

There’s a growing realization inside the administration that Trump and his team “misjudged” how the Iranian regime would respond to a conflict it views “as an existential threat,” said Mark Mazzetti in The New York Times. They thought the war would follow the same pattern as last year’s U.S.-Israeli strikes, when Iran’s retaliation was fairly muted. That Tehran responded with far more aggression has forced administration officials to “adjust plans on the fly.” Some “are growing pessimistic” about the lack of an exit strategy. But they are “careful not to express that directly” to Trump, who’s called the operation a “complete success.” “It is not too late” for Trump to build a case for the war, said Thérèse Shaheen in National Review. The Iranian regime has been “an active, aggressive foe” of the U.S. for 47 years, and was building “capacity to cause catastrophic damage” with its nuclear program. The public’s not buying it, said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. A poll aggregator found only 38% of Americans approve of the offensive—“the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever.”

Among Iranians, faith in the U.S. project is also in short supply, said Najmeh Bozorgmehr in the Financial Times. At the war’s outset, opponents of the brutal regime hoped better days were at hand. But the “terrifying” air campaign “has shattered that belief.” Choking on “toxic black smog” from burning oil depots, many Tehran residents are “shocked” by the destruction of schools, thousands of homes, and historic landmarks, and dismayed by the “resilience of the Islamic regime.” There’s no sign of the “anti-regime unrest” that erupted in January; instead, one sociologist in Tehran, a critic of the regime, sees a rising “sense of nationalism.”

Mojtaba Khamenei’s ascent is a grim sign, said Marc Champion in Bloomberg. Instead of a shift toward a “less confrontational” government, his selection “represents regime consolidation.” And Trump’s “tone-deaf demand” for veto power over Iran’s supreme leader is yet another sign he “profoundly misunderstands his opponents.” He thought they’d crumble at his shock-and-awe campaign. But “Iran has been preparing for this fight since 1988,” and they are “ready for a long war.” Now Trump must “decide if he is too.”

Trump should declare victory and “walk away,” said Jason Willick in The Washington Post. Regime change would be the ideal outcome, but that would require ground troops and take years and many American lives. As it stands, U.S. and Israeli strikes have severely damaged Iran’s military capability, knocking out missile launchers, air defenses, and more than 60 naval craft. Quitting now—as some advisers are reportedly urging—would serve Trump best politically while saving the U.S. from a potential “quagmire.”

Trump is “confounded by the war he started,” said Andrew Egger in The
Bulwark. Pumped with “hubris” after last year’s Iran strikes and the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, he and his team thought the U.S. “could simply impose its will on smaller countries,” with “little cost.” Now they’re waking up to the fact that they have “plunged into a morass” without the support of the American people. The president and his advisers didn’t anticipate an actual war, “but now they’ve got one, and they don’t have the faintest idea how to end it.”

Why is America at war with Iran? When will the conflict end? Two weeks after the launch of the joint US-Israel campaign, the answers to these questions remain no clearer, said Lee Siegel in The New Statesman.

Donald Trump's declared goals change all the time: it's to liberate Iranians; to eliminate an imminent nuclear threat; to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles; to avenge the US. As for how long the war could last, Trump declared last Friday that the US wouldn't stop until it secured Iran's “unconditional surrender”.

But in response to rising fuel prices and market turmoil, he softened his language on Monday, saying the war was “very complete, pretty much” and would end soon. His words helped calm markets: the price of a barrel of oil, which had soared to nearly $120, dipped back below $90. However, Trump later reverted to tough rhetoric, insisting that the US was set to press on as “we haven't won enough”.

‘Scorched-earth treatment’

Tehran, for its part, shows no sign of capitulating, said Arash Reisinezhad and Arsham Reisinezhad in Foreign Policy. While the tempo of its missile and drone attacks on neighbouring countries has declined since the opening days of the conflict, the strikes haven't stopped. The regime is aiming to prolong and widen the conflict – Azerbaijan and Turkey are the latest countries to be targeted with Iranian drones – to “generate pressure across multiple domains: energy markets, maritime logistics, regional alliances and domestic politics within the US and its partners”.

Wars between asymmetrical adversaries are rarely decided by the opening exchange of blows. More often, they become “contests of endurance”. Iran is now getting the “scorched-earth treatment”, said Patrick Cockburn in The i Paper. More than 1,000 civilians are thought to have been killed in the bombing so far. But air power alone is unlikely to defeat the Iranian regime. Just look at Gaza, where Hamas remained in control even after cities were razed to the ground.

Iran's ace card is its control over the Strait of Hormuz, said David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. About a fifth of the global oil supply normally passes through this narrow stretch of water, which is also a vital conduit for commodities such as nitrogen fertiliser and helium.

Tehran has effectively blockaded the strait by threatening to attack passing vessels, and several commercial ships have already been targeted. While Iran's regular navy has been largely put out of action, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is responsible for the strait, has access to many small, fast-moving craft and remote-control suicide drone boats. It also has missile launchers and drone systems deployed all along the coast.

If the strait remains closed for an extended period, the impact will be catastrophic: Qatar's energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, has warned that it could “bring down the economies of the world”. Trump has talked of providing naval escorts for vessels in the strait, said James Rothwell in The Daily Telegraph, but that would commit American forces to a complex and expensive logistical operation – one with the potential to become “a kind of maritime Vietnam”.

‘Escalation dominance’

Trump is in a trap of his own making, said Edward Luce in the FT. Two “very risky gambles” are available to him. One would be to launch a commando raid to seize what remains of Iran's 400kg stockpile of enriched uranium. “Success would offer Trump a spectacular off-ramp.” The other gambit would be to seize Kharg Island, the outcrop 15 miles off Iran's coast that serves as the nation's principal crude oil export hub. But that would require more boots on the ground, and there's little tolerance in America for more US casualties.

Trump's best option is to call it quits after degrading Iran's military capabilities, said The Economist. Critics will claim that he has left the job half done, and Iran may seek to rebuild its nuclear programme, obliging the US to launch future strikes. But “better for America to declare victory early than limp out of an unpopular war because of exhaustion”.

The markets are expecting Trump to do just that, before “he is overwhelmed by a supply-chain shock to match Covid”, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. However, the defiance of Iran's regime will make it harder for him. “It is we who will determine the end of the war,” the IRGC declared on Tuesday. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would fight on even after a US declaration of victory. The question now is which aspect of Trump's thinking will prevail: “his fear of losing the US midterm elections? Or his injured vanity and his psychological need to command ‘escalation dominance', always and everywhere?”

“I love a sunshine break as much as the next Sexy Beast,” said Colin Robertson in The Sun, but I have never holidayed in Dubai. Partly, this is because I have no desire to visit a “soulless sandpit” that’s hotter than hell, but mainly it’s due to the people who inhabit its “air-conditioned skyscrapers”.

I am not talking about the locals (precious few of them); or the immigrant labourers who keep the city running. No, I mean the “expats, celebs and ‘influencers’” who have spent years telling us – “via a thousand TikTok reels a day” – that their lives in Dubai are so much better than ours in rainy, crime-ridden Britain, and gloating that while we’ve been paying taxes, they’ve been lying on the beach, or cruising in their Lamborghinis.

Now, though, with debris from Iranian drones raining down, their lifestyles are looking rather less aspirational. Distressed that their dream has turned sour, these expats are desperate to get out. And guess what? We saps who paid our taxes are having to fund their evacuation.

Security shattered

The UAE worked hard to build Dubai’s reputation as a glitzy haven for a global elite, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, and the rich came in droves, to escape regulation, income tax or conflict. Workers in service industries followed, along with assorted tech bros and hustlers, and Reform-voting types too, who have railed against “broken” high-tax Britain from this sterile place – “a real-life Truman Show... sustained by stiff penalties” for those who dent its illusions.

Now, the UAE’s reputation for safety and stability risks being shattered instead by war. Tehran hopes its attacks – targeting US bases and energy infrastructure in Gulf nations – will persuade its neighbours to press the US to end its war. But they’re also a warning that if the regime falls, it will take Western-leaning Gulf states with it, by destroying their appeal to investors and tourists.

Fighting on

One real fear is that, in that effort, Tehran will seek to exploit a major vulnerability, said The Economist: the Gulf economies’ dependence on air conditioning for much of the year, and on desalinated water. Successful strikes on the region’s power stations and desalination plants could be “catastrophic”. But so far, most strikes have been intercepted, and the Gulf rulers are urging the US to fight on. They don’t want to be left with a “wounded, hostile regime on their borders”, especially not one that knows that it can alter Washington’s behaviour by pounding them.

As for Dubai, it is down, but not out, said Simeon Kerr in the FT. Many of its rich residents have opted to stay in this sunny, dynamic place where East meets West. And some of those that fled are already trying to get back, to secure their tax status.

The U.S. war on Iran has driven up gasoline prices, alarming drivers around the world and spurring renewed interest in electric vehicles. Gasoline prices are rising “and so are searches for EVs,” said InsideEVs.

The Iran crisis has thrown global oil markets “for a loop,” which has increased gasoline costs by 50 cents a gallon over the last month. Online searches for electric vehicles, both hybrids and full EVs, have “jumped over the last week.” Most of that gain came from “full EV searches.” A similar spike in oil prices and EV searches occurred when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Will the crisis in the Middle East “finally mean that people will want EVs?,” Matt Hardigree said at The Autopian. The end of tax credits for electric cars has produced a drop in EV sales, dropping by half from 12% of all vehicle sales in 2025. Automakers have “largely cut production” of EVs, and the EVs that remain on the market are “super cheap,” as dealers try to unload inventory. But a “prolonged period of higher energy prices” could change that dynamic. Come summer, “there might be fewer affordable EVs and higher energy prices.”

The road to energy independence?

Electric vehicles “are not the answer to oil shocks,” Kevin D. Williamson said at The Dispatch. Look to China, where oil consumption is increasing despite the proliferation of cheap and abundant EVs, because “there are many things you can do with oil other than refine it into gasoline and diesel.” Imported oil fuels the country’s growing petrochemical industry, which makes plastics and other products. Back in the U.S., commuters with “relatively short daily drives” might benefit from EVs, but that “would not have the effect of lowering U.S. oil consumption.”

Reduced oil demand “can lead to less conflict and more energy independence,” Jameson Dow said at Electrek. Most oil is used for transportation, and “more than half of that goes into the engines of the approximately 1.5 billion personal vehicles on the road today.” That is a “global overreliance” on a single resource, giving “massive amounts of control and wealth” to the countries that use it.

Fuel price security

American carmakers are bracing for “ripple effects” from the war, said The Detroit Free Press. They will face new challenges “if this stretches out and causes extended disruption to oil supplies,” said Sam Abuelsamid, the vice president of market research for Telemetry. General Motors, however, “might be in a good place with its electric vehicle lineup."

“I’m sure glad I bought an EV and solar panels,” Ryan Cooper said at The American Prospect. The stereotype is that electric vehicles are for “environmentally conscious liberals.” But they are also “much cheaper to operate than gas cars.” In a world with roller coaster gas prices, EVs offer “fuel price security,” which is easier on the wallet.

Donald Trump accused Tehran of “making us look a bunch of fools” and said he would “go in and take” an island from Iran. But this threat wasn’t made in 2026. Trump said it in 1988.

In an interview with The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee nearly 40 years ago, the now US president raged against the Iranians, saying: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.”

Situated northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategically important shipping route in the Gulf, Kharg Island has long been seen as Tehran’s Achilles’ heel. Grabbing it today could “let Trump beat Iran without sending a single soldier”, said The Telegraph.

What is Kharg Island?

Roughly 15 nautical miles from the Iranian mainland, this small coral outcrop is widely regarded by Iranians as the “Forbidden Island”. It is just five miles long and three miles wide.

Beyond its “imposing steel fences and military watchtowers” is a “pristine landscape” where “millennia of diverse human history quietly coexist”, said Al Jazeera. It is also home to the “beating heart of Iran’s modern energy empire”.

It has history with the US. When Iranian militants kidnapped 52 US diplomats in 1979, advisers to President Jimmy Carter suggested seizing Kharg but the plan was rejected as being too inflammatory. In 2016, 10 US marines were held after straying into Iranian waters near the island.

Why is it important?

It processes 90% of the nation’s total oil exports, handling approximately 950 million barrels a year. So if the US captured the island, it could cause a huge problem for Iran’s economy for years to come.

“Seizing” Kharg Island would “cut off Iran’s oil lifeline, which is crucial for the regime”, Petras Katinas, from the Royal United Services Institute, told The Telegraph. It could be used as a bargaining chip as oil exports make up nearly 40% of the Iranian government’s budget, so this would “give the US leverage during negotiations”, regardless of “which regime is in power after the military operation ends”.

The move “would be reminiscent” of the US intervention in Venezuela, when it “effectively took control of the country’s oil sector”, oil analyst Tamas Varga told CNBC.

So why hasn’t Trump seized it?

Taking the island would make American and Israeli troops vulnerable to attacks by Iranian forces. In the longer term, it would damage any future regime’s chances of managing the economy, something Washington might be keen to avoid.

Neil Quilliam, from the Chatham House think tank, told The Independent it is “unlikely” Trump would take over the territory. Previous US presidents have “steered away from Kharg understanding its strategic importance to global oil markets”.

But if Trump did control Kharg Island, he could “pressurise the existing regime into compliance”, or “all-out collapse”, forcing any new government to “toe Washington’s line” if it wanted to “regain sovereignty over oil exports”, said The Telegraph.

President Donald Trump spent the last year launching trade wars and pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, challenging the resiliency and foundations of the U.S. economic system. The Iran war is fast becoming another test of America’s economic stability.

Trump has been “living dangerously” with a series of “risky economic gambles” and “mostly getting away with it,” said Politico. That is because the U.S. economy is a “consumer-driven powerhouse that seems hard to crush.” (The public does not necessarily agree: A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows just 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s economic leadership.) But the attack on Iran is becoming an “acute economic risk situation,” triggering market jitters.

Worries about stagflation are “rising on Wall Street,” said Axios. Climbing oil costs, combined with last week’s “lousy jobs report,” are “driving the concern.” The crisis in the Middle East is “pushing up energy and food costs, lifting inflation and squeezing growth,” said Bloomberg strategist Skylar Montgomery Koning. Those forces could create “exactly the kind of stagflationary environment” that economic experts fear, said Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee.

What did the commentators say?

“Trump’s ‘warflation’ has just begun,” Catherine Rampell said at The Bulwark. Roughly a “fifth of the world’s oil” passes through the Strait of Hormuz but “shipping traffic through the strait has virtually stopped.” That is “turbocharging” gasoline prices, plus markets for liquid natural gas, aluminum and fertilizer are also affected. Trump is probably not trying to raise prices for Americans already consumed with concerns about affordability, “but if he were, it’s not clear how much he’d be doing differently right now.”

The war-driven oil shock “probably won’t derail the economy,” Greg Ip said at The Wall Street Journal. While those with “long memories smell stagflation” reminiscent of 1970s instability, the odds are against both stagflation and recession. The U.S. has become “less energy dependent” on foreign oil, consuming less gasoline while becoming a “net exporter” of petroleum and liquid natural gas. That, along with an AI-assisted “productivity renaissance,” has created resilience that “should help sustain growth and cushion cost pressures.”

Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran is a “military, diplomatic, environmental and humanitarian disaster,” Jeet Heer said at The Nation. Trump may be “indifferent to the human costs of war,” but the “economic shock” is “another matter.” Rising oil prices and leery markets could spook the president into pulling back from the conflict. “The fear of losing money is a powerful incentive.”

What next?

The Iran war is “becoming the world’s latest economic headache,” said The New York Times. World leaders are “scrambling for ways” to limit the damage, considering “tapping their national stores of oil” to increase the available supply and keep prices from rising too high. Officials say the price pressures should be short-lived, though. Gas prices will “drop dramatically once the objectives of Operation Epic Fury are achieved,” said a White House spokesperson.