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. But Tehran begs to differ: as it accepted the conditional two-week ceasefire, it declared victory, too, saying it had dealt the US a “crushing historic defeat”.

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 on Friday. 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.

The United States under President Donald Trump is, for the time being, the brightest star in a growing network of ultra-nationalist governments hoping to reshape the global order in their authoritarian mold. While MAGA America is the powerhouse, it’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary that has been the backbone of the worldwide lurch rightward. Yet as Hungarians prepare to vote on April 12, Orbán and his Fidesz party seem headed for an electoral upset that could send shock waves across hard-right spheres.

Government ‘revered by authoritarians everywhere’

A “pro-Kremlin, anti-EU strongman” who has spent nearly two decades “building a template for Christian nationalist rule,” Orbán is now the “cornerstone of President Trump’s vision for Europe,” Axios said. In the 16 years since he was first elected, Orbán forged a “state apparatus — courts, media, election administration — loyal to his party” and has “never lost under the system he built.”

As the “center of the Trump administration’s shifting policy toward Europe,” Orbán’s Hungary “firmly” aligned itself with “far-right parties and immigration restrictionists in countries such as France and Germany,” said Al Jazeera. While this has “mired relationships in Europe,” it has also been a “source of inspiration for the U.S.”

“Whatever Hungary decides will resonate throughout Europe,” said Argentine President Javier Milei, a South American nationalist, during his address at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. Orbán is a “beacon” for those who “refuse to accept that the West’s destiny is one of managed decline.”

CPAC-Hungary, where Milei spoke, has become an “important calendar event for Euro-Atlantic hard-right networking,” said Balkan Insight. The event hosted “667 foreign guests from 51 countries” who heard from “prominent European political figures” such as far-right Dutch PVV leader Geert Wilders and Alice Weidel of Germany’s ultra-nationalist AfD. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while initially scheduled to appear in person, instead sent a “warm message of support” in pretaped remarks played on the conference’s first day, Cleveland Jewish News said.

Orbán is “revered by authoritarians everywhere,” said Salon. But as a “path-breaking autocrat” who has demonstrated a “new soft fascism,” his potential loss is making many of those same authoritarians “nervous.”

Effects that would ‘reverberate well beyond Hungary’

Should Orbán’s government fall, the “dreams” of his authoritarian admirers in the MAGA movement “might be shattered” as well, said Vox. As a “close Russian ally,” Orbán’s loss would be a “considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.” Cumulatively, then, Hungary’s elections are “not just like any other vote,” and could end up as “one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade.”

An Orbán loss would prompt authoritarian allies to ask “what it could mean for them,” said Salon. “After all,” his “anti-democratic” domestic policies were designed to “not only prevent a defeat from happening” but to “keep people from ever wanting it to happen.” Such a defeat would “reverberate well beyond Hungary,” calling into question the “durability of a political system” marked by “hardline nationalism and an erosion of democratic checks” and “touted as a blueprint for reshaping Western democracy” by many conservatives, said Reuters.

“I am here for a simple reason,” Vice President JD Vance said at a pro-Orbán rally in Budapest this week: “I admire what you are fighting for.” But Vance’s visit may have ultimately done “more harm for Orbán than good,” The Guardian said. By asserting that the Trump administration would work with any eventual Hungarian elected leader, the vice president seemingly undercut Orbán’s campaign promise that “he — and his connections — were the only means of keeping Hungary safe in a volatile world.”

For some observers, Vance’s visit is unlikely to change the electoral calculus in Hungary, where “domestic issues such as the ⁠cost of living dominate the election,” said Reuters. No matter what happens in Hungary’s immediate future, Orbán’s global footprint will surely be felt for years to come.

What happened

Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated living veteran, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with two counts of “war crime — murder” and three counts of abetting such crimes, according to documents presented in court on Wednesday. The charges relate to the killings of five unarmed civilians while he was the patrol commander of an elite Special Air Service Regiment in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012.

Who said what

Roberts-Smith is “only the second Australian veteran of the Afghanistan campaign to be charged with a war crime,” said The Associated Press. He has “consistently denied all wrongdoing,” said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But his “public image was shattered in 2018,” when several newspapers published articles accusing him of killing Afghan civilians, The New York Times said. He sued for defamation and lost. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said in a statement that the five Afghans at the center of the charges were unarmed, “under the control” of the Australian military and “not taking part in hostilities at the time of their alleged murder.”

What next?

Roberts-Smith’s trial could become the “most consequential military prosecution” in Australian history, said the Times. The maximum penalty for each charge is life in prison.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening said he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, subject to a “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” The announcement defused his threat from earlier in the day that “a whole civilization will die tonight” absent a deal.

Iran said it would abide by the ceasefire, proposed by Pakistan, but maintain control of the Strait of Hormuz. Israel also agreed to stop attacking Iran, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday morning the “ceasefire does not include Lebanon,” contradicting an earlier statement from Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Who said what

Iranian state TV said Trump had accepted Iran’s terms in a “humiliating retreat.” Trump told APF that the ceasefire was “100%” a “total and complete victory” for the U.S. His “apocalyptic threat” of civilizational erasure “certainly helped him find” the “offramp he had been seeking for weeks,” said The New York Times. But his “down-to-the-wire tactical victory” resolved “none of the fundamental issues that led to the war.”

The ceasefire’s terms were “clouded in uncertainty,” The Associated Press said. Trump said on social media that Iran’s 10-point plan was “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” But that plan appears to cross several of Trump’s red lines. Notably, Iran and Oman “plan to charge transit fees for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz,” CNN said, something that wasn’t in place before the war. Iran’s caveat that “safe passage” through the strait was contingent on “coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces” and “technical limitations” means Iran will keep the “power to speed up passage, or slow it down,” The Wall Street Journal said. The U.S. will be “helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted. “Big money will be made,” and “Iran can start the reconstruction process.”

What next?

The “ceasefire appeared shaky in its early hours,” Politico said, with Iran firing missiles at Gulf Arab countries and Israel continuing to strike Iran. The U.S. and Iran “are expected to hold peace talks on Friday in Islamabad,” Axios said.

Donald Trump’s threats to wipe out a civilisation and Israel’s alleged use of white phosphorus in Lebanon have once again shone a spotlight on the rules of war.

“Collective punishment on a population and the targeting of protected civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international law,” legal experts told ABC News of Trump’s threats, while his promises to take the country’s oil, “which could amount to pillaging” is also “barred under the law”.

In Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said it was able to verify that Israel was again using the “notorious weapon”, “reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war”, said The Guardian.

When asked whether his threats constituted a war crime, Donald Trump answered, “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon”.

So what constitutes a ‘war crime’?

War crimes are “violations of international humanitarian law” that, unlike genocide and crimes against humanity, “always take place in the context of an armed conflict, whether international or not”, said the United Nations.

These include cases of murder, torture, pillage, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and non-combatants such as humanitarian aid workers, as well as the deliberate targeting of religious and educational buildings, hospitals and, in some cases, vital infrastructure such as power stations and key transport links.

The use of weapons banned by international conventions, such as chemical weapons or cluster munitions, can also be considered a war crime.

What are the major conventions and treaties?

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols introduced in subsequent decades are international treaties that serve as the “most important rules limiting the barbarity of war”, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Ratified by all 196 UN member states, in times of war they protect non-combatants, such as civilians, medics, aid workers, and those who can no longer fight, including the wounded, sick or prisoners of war.

There are also additional conventions banning the use of biological weapons (1972), certain conventional weapons (1980), chemical weapons (1993), anti-personnel mines (1997), and cluster munitions (2008).

What happens if someone breaks the rules?

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established under the Rome Statute in 2002, “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression”.

“Champions of the court say it deters would-be war criminals, bolsters the rule of law, and offers justice to victims of atrocities,” said the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank. Yet it has, since inception, also “faced criticism from many parties” and has been fundamentally weakened by the refusal of several major powers to join.

As well as the US, Russia and China, non-signatories include India, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Recent arrest warrants for national leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have “generated mixed reactions from Washington and raised questions over the future of the court”, said the CFR.

As “no formal ICC jurisdiction applies” to countries that have not signed up to the ICC, the “more immediate legal framework” remains the Geneva conventions of 1949 onwards, said The Guardian.

The Conventions and their Protocols contain stringent rules to deal with those who commit what are known as “grave breaches”, who must be pursued and tried or extradited, whatever their nationality.

The key point here, said Professor Andrew Clapham in OpionioJuris, is that the rules for offences deemed war crimes under the Geneva code apply to “everyone irrespective of whether their state has ratified the ICC Statute, and they can be tried in multiple states around the world, irrespective of whether those states are parties to the ICC Statute”.

“The idea that anyone can avoid accountability for grave breaches by sticking to non-ICC states for one’s trips is fallacious when that person is alleged to have committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”

Russian commanders are charging “up to £30,000 to spare soldiers from the front lines in Ukraine”, said The Telegraph. Recruits unwilling or unable to pay are “reset” – a “euphemism for sending them to their deaths” in large-scale offensives with astronomical casualty rates.

Wounded soldiers must “pay thousands” to be declared unfit for active service, said PBS. Those who do not are “forced to literally limp into battle”. Seth Jones, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that injured soldiers, sometimes on crutches, are being “used as bait” to “draw fire” from hidden Ukrainian artillery.

Estimates put the number of Russian casualties in the war against Ukraine since 2022 at around 1.2 million, according to the CSIS. Ukrainian officials have also claimed that in March Russia suffered its highest number of losses – more than 35,000 killed or seriously wounded – since the launch of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” programme last year, said the UK Defence Journal.

‘System of extortion’

“Corruption and slave labour have long been features of the Russian and Soviet armies,” said The Economist. Soldiers are not just seen as “grunts” – serving as “cannon fodder” for their superiors – but more troublingly as a “source of enrichment”.

There is a “system of extortion and punishment” in the Russian ranks, where infantry soldiers must “buy their own” military gear. Other collections begin “under the pretext of raising money for drones, equipment or food”, but payments are expected to continue. “Soldiers who refuse to pay may be thrown into dug-out pits for torture.”

In extreme cases, sources have reported that commanders “requisition troops’ bank cards and PIN codes” before sending them into battle. “The dead are declared missing, and commanders withdraw the money they earned from their bank accounts”. As one soldier was told by a new commanding officer, survival is “not a matter of luck, but of ability to pay”.

In the Russian military, “men learn quickly to fear their commanders more than their foe”, said PBS. Videos appear on social media depicting the “horrific punishments” faced by soldiers if they fail to pay up, with reports of some “being locked in cages, electrocuted and sexually assaulted”. According to the independent Russian station Radio Echo, nearly 12,000 complaints were filed over six months last year, accusing commanders of “corruption and violence towards their own men”.

‘Public resentment’

The Russian military recruitment drive has “poured blood and money into the system, resulting in a vast battlefield economy”, said The Economist. The front line has become a “marketplace where everything has a price: drones, medals, home leave and life itself”.

The problem is widespread, said The New York Times. In the last two years, “at least 12 high-ranking Russian military officials and generals, as well as dozens of lower-ranking officers, have been indicted on corruption charges”.

Most recently, Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Frolov – known as “Executioner” – has been put on trial in a military court, facing charges of fraud, bribery and weapons trafficking. He is accused by the Investigative Committee (Russia’s equivalent of the FBI) of leading a scheme where “more than 30 soldiers and medics” in his regiment “used weapons to shoot themselves in order to obtain payouts for battlefield injuries”. The plot reportedly defrauded the army of “200 million rubles, or $2.6 million”.

This case in particular has “fed public resentment of the economic and social privileges” of high-ranking officials, who are accused of perpetuating the war “only for the money”.

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.”

The EU’s longest-serving current head of government has turned his country from a liberal democracy into something quite different. Orbán has been variously described as a populist strongman, an authoritarian capitalist, a “soft autocrat” and a “21st-century dictator”.

He himself announced in 2014 that he was building an “illiberal state”, parting from “Western European dogmas” and learning from Turkey, Russia and China. By then his Fidesz party had already rewritten Hungary’s constitution, modified its electoral system, and packed the courts and other institutions with party loyalists. Orbán's Hungary is seen as an inspiration to the populist Right across Europe and in the US, particularly to Donald Trump.

What is Orbán’s background?

Born in 1963, in a village some 35 miles west of Budapest where his father worked on a collective farm, he went on to study law in Budapest, and political philosophy at Oxford, on a scholarship. A former member of the Young Communists, he became a fierce critic of communist rule, co-founding Fidesz – originally a liberal centre-left youth movement – which demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

In 1998, he led Fidesz to electoral victory, becoming Europe's youngest prime minister. A year later, Hungary joined Nato. By then, Orbán had already set about transforming Fidesz into a conservative nationalist party; but in 2002, he lost his re-election campaign to a Socialist coalition. According to his biographer, he resolved to return to power and change “the rules of the game” so that he’d never lose again.

How did he do that?

Fidesz was elected in 2010 with 53% of the vote, but quirks of seat distribution gave it a two-thirds majority – giving Orbán, as PM, considerable power to reshape the country. Ahead of the 2014 election, Fidesz passed a new electoral law that cut the number of seats from 386 to 199; districts were redrawn behind closed doors to favour Fidesz's rural strongholds. Voting rights were granted to ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries, who voted over 95% for Fidesz.

He quickly muzzled the free press. In 2010, a new law created a media council with the power to levy heavy fines on outlets for “unbalanced” anti-government reporting. The biggest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, was bought then shuttered in 2016 by a company linked to one of the PM's allies; TV and radio stations and websites also came under the control of friendly oligarchs. It’s estimated that today, Fidesz directly or indirectly controls 80% to 90% of the media.

Did Hungarians approve of this?

To a large extent, yes. Elections are free, if not fair, in the sense that opposition politicians are allowed to run, and ballots are counted correctly. And Fidesz has won three more general elections since 2010, never gaining less than 49% of the vote. Orbán has tried to unite the nation against perceived enemies, external and internal: refugees, particularly during the 2015 migrant crisis; the EU, with its “oppressive”, “imperial” system; gay people; “globalists” such as George Soros, the Hungarian-born US financier who has funded liberal causes across the world (and who paid for Orbán’s Oxford scholarship); and, more recently, Ukraine.

Orbán portrays Hungary as a “Christian democracy” under continual, existential threat – a canny policy in a country with a long history of foreign domination at the hands of Ottomans, Habsburgs and Soviets. Fidesz ideology is based on the pillars of “God, Nation and Family”: LGBTQ+ rights have been curtailed, and pro-natal tax breaks have been given to incentivise women to have children.

How are his relations with the EU?

Orbán's flouting of democratic norms has meant constant conflict with Brussels. In 2022, the EU parliament passed a symbolic resolution declaring Hungary to be a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”. Brussels has frozen billions of euros in EU funding, and has launched legal challenges against laws passed by Fidesz; but has so far stopped short of invoking the “nuclear option” of suspending its voting rights in the European Council. Orbán has continually sought to hobble EU action against Russia, a close ally that provides nuclear technology, and low-priced oil and gas to Hungary.

In February, Orbán used veto powers to block a €90 billion EU aid package to Ukraine, which he blames for disrupting oil supplies, and also claims to view as a military threat. He said this month that Hungarians should “fear the EU more than Russia”.

Why is his rule under threat now?

In the elections on 12 April, Orbán faces a challenge from Tisza, the centre-right opposition party led by Péter Magyar, formerly of Fidesz.

The “Orbán model” relied on delivering rising living standards in return for political dominance; but the economy has stagnated and living standards have declined. Magyar’s politics are not dissimilar to Orbán's, but he paints the PM’s rule as corrupt and “feudalistic” – with some justification. Hungary is often described as a kleptocracy. A circle of oligarchs tied to Orbán dominates the economy and lucrative public contracts. Orbán’s son-in-law is one of Hungary's richest men. A recent scandal concerns György Matolcsy, the former national bank chief, who spent €210 million renovating the bank, and had a deluxe bathroom made for himself, complete with a golden toilet brush. The golden toilet brush has become a symbol of Orbán’s elite.

Will Orbán lose?

Tisza is leading by at least 10 percentage points in independent polls, probably enough to offset Fidesz’s structural advantages. However, while Orbán and Fidesz retain control of much of the media and the machinery of state, the outcome, and the PM’s willingness to accept defeat, are far from certain.

From his podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump reminded his base how he differed from past presidents. “It turned out that I was able to stop wars from happening,” he said.

That was in 2024, said Natalie Allison at The Washington Post. A year later, the newly installed president was back at CPAC, boasting about being “a peacemaker, not a conqueror”.

Notable absences

This year, Trump skipped the jamboree for the first time in a decade: he was too busy managing the war with Iran he’d launched a month earlier. And he wasn’t the only high-profile no show, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. At the last event, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio spoke, and Elon Musk ramped up the carnival atmosphere by brandishing a chainsaw on stage; this time, one attendee noted that there were more journalists present than politicians. That the event was rather more subdued than usual was due to several factors – including its relocation from DC to Texas; but the lack of buzz was indicative of the troubled state of the GOP as it gears up for the midterms.

A little over a year into his second term, Trump is discovering that for all his efforts to extend his authority, there are still constraints on what he can do, said Gerard Baker in The Times. Public revulsion has forced him to temper his migrant deportation policy; the Supreme Court has struck out his signature tariffs policy; the markets are squealing about the war in Iran. And even in his own backyard, the voters are restive: in late March, a Florida Democrat seized a red seat that takes in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Base betrayal

The die-hards remain intensely loyal, said Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic, but polls show that Trump is losing support among the coalition of younger Americans and Latinos that gave him his victory in 2024. Many already felt betrayed by his attempt to block the Epstein files and by the impact of his Big Beautiful Bill on the deficit. Now, they’re furious that he has taken the US into a war that is costing billions and further driving up the cost of living.

In the manosphere, prominent voices who rallied behind his “anti-woke” rhetoric in 2024 are complaining that Americans were duped. The podcaster Joe Rogan has called the war “insane, based on what [Trump] ran on”. There is dissent within Maga too, some of which has veered into antisemitism: Tucker Carlson and others have been peddling the line that Israel manipulated Trump into the war. Disenchanted Trump fans are unlikely to vote Democrat in November; but they might easily just tune out of the election – and so inadvertently deliver a “blue wave”.

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.

Almost from the moment she was elected in 2022, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, has seemed “in complete control”, said Hannah Roberts on Politico. The working-class girl who grew up in a down-at-heel Roman suburb, and shot to power as leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, had – until last week – been shrouded in “an aura of political invincibility”.

Her centre-right coalition – dominated by her own party in alliance with Matteo Salvini’s populist party, Lega, and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – has proved the most stable government Italy has had in years. But that invincible aura has now been shattered by her decision to call a referendum on her proposed judicial reforms, a flagship policy she claimed was needed to end supposed political interference by the courts.

The decision backfired spectacularly: in a vote last week that many considered a plebiscite on her leadership, some 54% of Italians opposed the constitutional amendment, which, among other things, would have separated the career paths of judges and public prosecutors, and reconstituted the bodies that oversaw them.

To Meloni’s critics, this proposal was a threat to judicial independence, and Italy’s three largest cities – Rome, Milan and Naples – all convincingly rejected it. In Naples, where the “No” vote received 71% support, dozens of lawyers and judges revelled in her resounding defeat: at the headquarters of the National Magistrates’ Association they sung the famous anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao” as they quaffed champagne. Her defeat has also given the opposition reason to be cheerful: Italy’s “torpid politics suddenly look competitive again”.

‘Spirit of vengeance’

The PM’s big mistake was to politicise the reforms, said Mario Orfeo in La Repubblica (Rome). Italy’s judicial system is in desperate need of overhaul, not least on account of its routine staff shortages and excessively long trials.

Rather than attempting to make it more efficient, however, Meloni was driven by “the spirit of vengeance”. For decades, the Italian Right has raged about the court’s perceived left-wing bias, a rage stoked by the “Mani pulite” (“Clean Hands”) investigations of the 1990s, in which hundreds of politicians were accused of corruption and had to stand down. The outrage grew under the premiership of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who had to face dozens of lawsuits over his business dealings, and who damned the judicial system as “a cancer of democracy”.

It’s in that spirit that Meloni and her allies – enraged by judicial rulings that have blocked plans to send asylum seekers to Albania and to build a $13.5 billion bridge to Sicily – approached this referendum. A “parallel Mafia”, is how the justice minister, Carlo Nordio, depicted prosecutors. Italy will be flooded with illegal immigrants and rapists, warned Meloni, if the “Yes” vote loses.

‘Surprisingly clumsy’

Meloni, who has immense political talents, has prospered by being pragmatic and forming viable alliances, said Luzi Bernet in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zürich). But on this occasion she was “surprisingly clumsy”, foolishly assuming that her parliamentary majority would guarantee a simple victory.

But it wasn’t just hubris that led to her defeat, said Christian Rocca on Linkiesta. That “heavy blow” should also be put down to her close relationship with the “radioactive” Donald Trump: in Italy, where fears of rising petrol and electricity prices are rife, Trump’s Iran war is deeply unpopular.

This defeat marks a “major political turning point”, said Le Monde (Paris). Meloni is now weakened: the opposition Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement and the Italian Socialist Party, all smell blood. They are hamstrung, though, by a “glaring lack of leadership”. But a defeat like this will expose the PM to internal attacks and “sow doubt in the ranks”, said Federico Capurso in La Stampa (Turin). So ahead of the 2027 general election, Meloni will have to spend a year “in the trenches”. She may claim nothing has changed: the reality is that “everything has already changed”.

India has long recognised a “third gender” and was one of the first countries to allow people legally to self-identify as transgender. But its parliament has just passed controversial amendments to such laws, which remove the right to self-identification and narrow the definition of ‘transgender’.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government got the bill through both houses last week, despite a boycott by opposition parties and widespread protests by the LGBTQ+ community.

Virendra Kumar, minister for social justice and empowerment, says the amendments still protect people who “face severe social exclusion due to their biological condition”. But Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi called it a “brazen attack” on transgender rights.

‘Third gender’

People of a “third gender” have been recognised in India for thousands of years. They feature heavily in Hindu holy texts – the half-male, half-female deity Ardhanarishvara, for example – and were often revered under Muslim rulers of the Mughal Empire.

The most common third-gender group in South Asia are the hijras: often born male, they dress in traditionally female clothing, and many choose to undergo castration; others are born intersex. Hijras were traditionally “treated with both fear and respect”, said Harvard Divinity School but that “did not survive” colonial rule. The British, “shocked by third-gender people”, classified them as criminals in 1871. Criminalisation was repealed shortly after independence, but years of stigmatisation “took a toll”.

Hijras are expected to perform ritual roles at Hindu births and weddings but are otherwise “often treated with contempt” and “almost always excluded from employment and education”. They are “often stricken by poverty” and “victims of violence and abuse”.

But in 2014, India’s Supreme Court “officially recognised third-gender people as being citizens deserving of equal rights”. And that paved the way for the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, which included the hijras and the kinnars, another third-gender group, along with transwomen and transmen in a more inclusive definition of transgender people. The act also affirmed the right to self-identify as transgender or non-binary.

‘A major reversal’

The new amendments to the 2019 law remove those rights to self-identify, requiring instead a medical certification of gender reassignment. It also limits the definition of transgender to intersex people and those from socio-cultural groups such as the hijras.

The government argues that the changes protect those facing “extreme and oppressive” discrimination, and strengthen laws against exploitation and trafficking. They say the definition of transgender is “too vague” and makes it difficult to identify the most marginalised; a narrower definition would help welfare benefits “reach those who need them”.

But critics say the new bill will exclude many, and that mandatory medical certification for those undergoing gender transition “undermines dignity and autonomy”. The amendments “appear to contradict the 2014 ruling”, which held that “requiring medical procedures for recognition was both unethical and unlawful”, said Delhi-based journalist Namita Singh in The Independent.

“It has shattered our identity,” transgender rights activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi told reporters. India’s last census in 2011 recorded nearly half a million people in the “other” gender category. The true number is likely far higher; some estimates reach six million.

If India’s president signs the bill into law, it will be “a major reversal” of “hard-won rights”, said Jayshree Bajoria, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. It also puts people at risk by introducing additional offences of “coercing or alluring” people to be transgender. That’s “reminiscent of the colonial-era laws” that criminalised hijras.

This law, said N Kavitha Rameshwar in The Times of India, “seeks to be that one rogue wave that will wash away” a decade of progress in transgender rights, “as if it were all but a castle of sand”.

Much has been made of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran war, given that the passage is a major lifeline for the global economy. But it is just one of five major waterways that play a significant role in world trade — several of which have their own history of conflicts.

Panama Canal

As the only entry in this list located in the Americas, the Panama Canal is a vital waterway for one main reason: It connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This shortcut lets ships “avoid the lengthy and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America,” said the International Trade Administration. Not forcing ships to circumvent an entire continent “contributes to the reduction of carbon emissions and helps mitigate the environmental impact of global maritime transportation.”

President Donald Trump has pushed for the U.S. to gain full control of the canal, but the “facts are that Panama has managed the canal incredibly well,” said the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The “revenues generated by the canal are important for Panama, representing about 4% of their GDP. They represent less than 1/10,000 of the U.S. GDP.”

Strait of Hormuz

The strait, which cuts between Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, is one of the “world’s busiest oil shipping channels,” said BBC News. It is used by almost all of the world’s major oil companies, and in 2025, about “20 million barrels of oil and oil products passed through the Strait of Hormuz per day,” equivalent to nearly $600 billion of energy production per year.

The recent closure of the waterway could impact more than just gas prices, as the strait is also a “vital channel for imports to the Middle East, including food, medicines and technological supplies,” said BBC News. If it is not reopened soon, the ripple could “go far beyond the region, affecting energy markets, maritime transport and global supply chains,” said the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.

Strait of Malacca

Like the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia is a passage between two oceans: the Indian and the Pacific. It represents “one of the most strategically, economically and politically significant maritime chokepoints in the world,” said The National Bureau of Asian Research. The strait is important to the nations around it as well as “great powers with interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

But climate change is leading to “increasing heavy rainfall and extreme flood heights” around the strait, said a study from World Weather Attribution. This could threaten the strait’s “densely populated regions,” particularly near heavily populated countries like Sri Lanka.

Suez Canal

The Suez Canal is the “only place that directly connects the waters of Europe with the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the countries of the Asia-Pacific,” said CNN, making it an essential waterway for cargo. If the canal didn’t exist, ships in the region would have to “traverse the entire continent of Africa, adding hefty costs and substantially extending their journey times.”

An example of the canal’s importance was seen in 2021, when a cargo ship became stuck across the waterway, cutting off the shipping lane. Any disruptions “can have outsized impacts on global commerce and energy markets,” said the Atlantic Council, given that over $1 trillion goods are transported through the Suez annually.

Turkish Straits

The two Turkish Straits hold “strategic importance as the only waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea,” said Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But crossing these two straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, is not easy, as “strong currents, sharp turns and unpredictable changes in weather conditions make it all the more difficult to navigate safely.”

During a war, the straits also become vital due to a 1936 treaty regulating their passage, which “states that, at times of conflict, ‘vessels of war belonging to belligerent powers shall not pass through the Straits,’” said Arab News. The implication of this treaty has often demonstrated Turkey’s “ultimate say over any warship if it deems its movement to be a security threat.”

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

Israel’s parliament on Monday gave final approval to legislation that makes death by hanging the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis. The Knesset approved the bill 62-48 amid condemnation from human rights groups, Palestinians and several European governments.

Who said what

“From today, every terrorist will know, and the whole world will know, that whoever takes a life, the State of Israel will take their life,” far-right National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, the driving force behind the bill, told lawmakers. Capital punishment was already legal in Israel, but only two people have been executed in 78 years, most recently Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

“In theory, Jewish Israelis could also be executed under the law,” the BBC said, but the law’s language precludes that in practice. “The intent is clearly for the law to apply to Palestinians and not to Jewish terrorism at all,” Yoav Sapir, the former head of Israel’s public defender’s office, told The New York Times.

What next?

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has already asked the Supreme Court to annul the law. The court will likely strike it down over its discriminatory provisions, Sapir told the Times.

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.”

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.”

The United Nations has taken a major step in trying to correct a historic wrong. It’s calling for reparations for African nations that were subjected to the transatlantic slave trade, after voting to recognize slavery as a crime against humanity. Though African countries welcome the U.N.’s resolution, other nations, including the U.S., view the vote with skepticism.

What did the UN vote for?

The U.N.’s resolution was spearheaded by Ghana, one of the countries from which an estimated 12.5 million people across the African continent were captured by Europeans during the height of the slave trade. It declares the “trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans” to be the “gravest crime against humanity” due to the “scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labor, property and capital.”

Ghana’s president, John Mahama, “called on U.N. members to ‘engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology’ as well as measures of restitution and compensation,” said Bloomberg. The full scope of these reparations remains unclear, and a specific dollar amount wasn’t noted. Some believe reparations “should go beyond direct financial payments to also include developmental aid for countries, the return of colonized resources and the systemic correction of oppressive policies and laws,” said The Associated Press.

Why are some countries against this?

The resolution was largely well-received, passing 123-3. But the three countries to vote “no” were significant: Argentina, Israel and the United States. There were also 52 abstentions, including the United Kingdom and all members of the European Union. The U.S. vote comes as “policy groups, human rights organizations and academics have accused President Donald Trump of minimizing Black history,” said The New York Times.

Critics often point to Trump’s gripe against the Smithsonian, which the president has accused of “focusing too much on ‘how bad slavery was’ and not enough on the ‘brightness,’” said the Times. U.S. officials claim the decision to vote “no” on the resolution was not about race. The U.S. “strongly objects to the cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point in an attempt to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims,” Deputy U.S. Ambassador Dan Negrea said in a speech to the U.N.

The White House also “strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy,” said Negrea. British officials used almost identical language: The U.K. is “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities,” British Ambassador James Kariuki said in his U.N. speech. The U.N. “should approach all historical injustices with the same seriousness, empathy and respect.”

Others felt the move by the United Nations was a necessary one. The resolution was “significant as it represented the furthest the U.N. has ​gone in recognizing transatlantic slavery as a crime against humanity and in calling for reparations,” Justin Hansford, a ⁠law professor at Howard University, said to Reuters. The action “marks the first vote on ​the floor of the U.N. I cannot overemphasize how large of a step that is.” And despite the backlash from some Western nations, the “longstanding calls for reparations,” said Reuters, have “gained momentum in recent years.”

What happened

The U.S. is allowing a sanctioned Russian “shadow fleet” tanker to deliver oil to Cuba, President Donald Trump said Sunday, effectively breaking his de facto blockade. “If a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with that, whether it’s Russia or not,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

Who said what

Trump’s administration has gone after Cuba “more aggressively than any U.S. government in recent history,” The Associated Press said. The oil blockade was “an effort to force regime change,” but it has had “devastating effects” on civilians, “leaving many desperate.” The delivery of the roughly 730,000 barrels of oil on the Anatoly Kolodkin tanker will “reduce pressure” on Havana as it faces “a looming economic collapse,” The New York Times said. It was “unclear why the White House” is allowing the tanker to reach the island, but the decision “avoids a potential thorny confrontation with Russia just off the coast of Florida.”

Trump’s Cabinet was “limited in what it could legally do to stop the tanker,” The Washington Post said. “Seizing or boarding a Russian vessel while simultaneously managing an active military conflict in Iran” would also “pour fuel on already volatile energy markets,” Brett Erickson with Obsidian Risk Advisors told the Post.

What next?

The Anatoly Kolodkin was expected to dock in Cuba by Monday morning. Erickson told Reuters that the “two and a half weeks of oil” on the Kolodkin “can be extended to about a month in total.” The 730,000 barrels “buys them time” in Havana, University of Texas oil expert Jorge Piñón told the Times. “But this is not a magic wand.”

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”.

What happened

Tehran on Wednesday rejected a 15-point U.S. proposal to pause the increasingly costly Iran war and offered its own maximalist demands while insisting the country was not in negotiations with President Donald Trump. The U.S. plan, as described by Pakistani intermediaries, included Iran agreeing to abandon its nuclear program, hand over its enriched uranium, curb its missile arsenal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials said on English-language state-run Press TV they wanted war reparations, an end to hostilities and assassinations, safeguards against future attacks and recognition of Iran’s “exercise of sovereignty” over the strait.

Who said what

The passing back and forth of “warnings” and “positions” is not negotiation, just “an exchange of messages,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Wednesday to state broadcaster IRIB. “We have no intention of negotiating,” and “that they are now talking about negotiations is an admission of defeat.” The Iranians “are negotiating, by the way,” Trump said at a fundraiser Wednesday night, “and they want to make a deal so badly, but they’re afraid to say it because they figure they’ll be killed by their own people.”

Trump “can’t stop talking about how much his administration is negotiating with Iran,” and Iranian leaders “can’t stop denying” it — “almost as if they’re trying to troll him,” The New York Times said. And both “strategies make sense.” Trump is “raising hopes that the war might end soon” because rising gas prices and other costs have made it increasingly “unpopular with the American public.” Iranian leaders want to “keep oil prices high” and “would also like to stay in power,” and defying Trump “might help them do that.“ These “competing incentives are probably pushing both parties toward more serious negotiations.”

What next?

Trump “appears increasingly interested in finding an off-ramp with Iran,” the BBC said, but the recent “head-spinning developments” did not ease “growing concern inside the administration that Trump doesn’t have a concrete plan for what comes next.” Of course, “ending the war isn’t up to Trump alone,” The Wall Street Journal said, as Iran and Israel are showing no interest in pausing the fighting. “Iran will end the war when it decides to do so,” an unidentified Iranian official said on state TV, “and when its own conditions are met.”

“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.

Activists have returned to court in South Africa to try to enforce a court order banning an anti-migrant group from blocking foreign nationals from accessing public health facilities and schools.

The campaigners say that migrants and their children are still being barred from two Johannesburg clinics by Operation Dudula, a controversial group, despite a judge ordering authorities to “stop the harassment” in December, said News 24.

‘Aggressive tactics’

In the Zulu language, “dudula” means to remove something by force. The “populist movement” was founded in 2021 as a vigilante force against crime and drug trafficking in the township of Soweto, just outside Johannesburg, said Deutsche Welle.

Operation Dudula, now registered as a political party, also campaigns against migrants in South Africa, which is home to about 2.4 million migrants, just under 4% of the population. They come mainly from neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho and Zimbabwe.

The group’s supporters are known for “aggressive tactics”, including “forcing their way into residential buildings, searching for migrants, checking their ID cards, and blocking access to public services”.

Although it’s often “accused of using force to make its point”, an Operation Dudula candidate will fight a by-election in Johannesburg next month. “We are trying to put our people first,” Alton Stephens, a 51-year-old security company director, who will stand as a ward councillor, told The Telegraph.

‘Contemporary scapegoats’

Apartheid “created two societies in South Africa”, Fredson Guilengue, a project manager at the left-wing Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Johannesburg, told DW: a “white society with an abundance of security, good health, education and prosperity” and a “society of Black people without rights” in which they “had to compete for the few resources available”.

Now, foreigners have “become the contemporary scapegoats” for South Africa’s continuing inequalities, three decades after apartheid ended.

Operation Dudula’s supporters see its activists as “concerned citizens taking a stand to defend the rights” of South Africans and their “straining public services”, in a country that’s “overrun by migrants”, said The Telegraph. But to their critics they’re “mob-rule vigilantes trading in dangerous xenophobia”.

In 2022, a report by the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria found that many of Operation Dudula’s claims are based on exaggerations about the number and effect of foreign nationals in South Africa, including “false claims that immigrants commit most crimes or overload public services”.

But the “fringe movement poses no real threat” to the country’s democracy, Lizette Lancaster, one of the report’s authors, told DW, because “most South Africans, over 90%, do not support violence against migrants in their communities”.

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.

While the world is distracted by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, another conflict is erupting between Iran’s neighbours.

Pakistan has declared “open war” on Afghanistan after fighting intensified over recent weeks. In a dangerous escalation from cross-border skirmishes, Pakistan launched air strikes at the end of February, targeting major cities including Kabul. Afghanistan’s Taliban regime responded with drone attacks. Both sides blame the other for the conflict.

More than 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed or injured, and 100,000 displaced. In one air strike on a Kabul drug rehabilitation centre last week, 400 people were killed, according to Afghan officials. With a ceasefire to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr set to expire, there are no signs of a desire for de-escalation.

What’s the background?

This is “not a sudden rupture of relations”, said Rabia Akhtar on The Conversation. It’s the “intensification of long-simmering, historical security concerns” along their disputed 1,600-mile border: the Durand Line.

Afghanistan has never formally recognised the border, drawn in 1893 through ethnic Pashtun areas. That’s caused “sustained and persistent tension” since Pakistan’s independence in 1947. The countries also took opposite sides in the Cold War, with Pakistan “embedded” in the US-led framework and Afghanistan maintaining “closer ties” with the Soviet Union (until it invaded). All of this “entrenched cross-border militant networks”.

When the Taliban retook power in 2021, Pakistan “anticipated a more cooperative security environment” than the series of US-backed Afghan governments. It hoped the Taliban, which it had covertly supported all along, would help “rein in” several militant groups, said The New York Times. This was a “strategic miscalculation”.

Instead, terrorist attacks within Pakistan increased, particularly by the Tereek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Pakistan Taliban). The group took advantage of Pakistan’s political chaos to further entrench its power in the border lands and threaten the country’s all-powerful military. The TTP also took a share of the US military equipment left in Afghanistan when America withdrew. This, and the release of hundreds of its fighters from Afghan prisons, erased much of Pakistan’s efforts to defeat it.

What triggered this outbreak?

The TTP has been increasing its attacks in Pakistan as it grows in power, killing 4,000 people in the last four years according to Pakistani authorities. Last year was the most violent for militancy in a decade, according to the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies. The separatist Balochistan Liberation Army also claimed attacks that killed almost 50 people. Islamabad has long accused the Taliban of harbouring such groups, allegedly allowing them to operate from sanctuaries within Afghanistan.

Pakistan launched air strikes against alleged TTP hideouts in Afghanistan last year, warning it would no longer tolerate “safe havens” for fighters. It also accused its historic foe, India, of supporting the Taliban, allegedly with Indian-made drones used in recent attacks. India then effectively normalised relations with the Taliban.

Both India and the Taliban “vehemently deny” Pakistan’s accusations, said the BBC. They say the TTP is “an internal matter” for Islamabad: a “Pakistan-created problem”. That’s “done little but to further infuriate” Pakistani leaders.

Violent clashes erupted on the border in October, and Pakistan carried out air strikes before suspending trade with landlocked Afghanistan. A truce didn’t last long; after years of diplomatic efforts, Pakistan “now says that there is nothing to talk about”.

What’s the significance?

Middle Eastern powers that have been mediating between Afghanistan and Pakistan for years currently have “limited bandwith” to de-escalate, said Chietigj Bajpaee on Chatham House. Despite Pakistan’s “superior military”, the Taliban has “a significant capacity for asymmetric warfare”. And if Pakistan “perceives an Indian hand behind Kabul’s actions”, there could also be renewed hostilities between India and Pakistan – two nuclear-armed states.

Exacerbating tensions is “the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees” from Pakistan and Iran; an estimated 2.7 million Afghans were returned last year, further straining Afghanistan’s “stretched public services” and economic woes.

Pakistan has been “taking advantage of the West’s disengagement” and regional powers’ distraction, said the Financial Times. It is “enraged”. But all-out war “threatens stability” across Asia. There is “the very real risk” that Afghanistan becomes “an incubator for terrorism” again.

For the “shaky truce” to endure, the intervention of the US and China is required. Although “precedents for a settlement are not inspiring”, the stakes are “too high for the world to keep looking away”.

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.”

Funerals may be postponed, new dress codes are being imposed at work and people are taking the stairs rather than escalators, as the war in Iran has curious effects in Asia.

Countries across the region are facing “crippling shortages” of oil and gas, said The Guardian, because most supplies have been “held up in the Gulf” since the US and Israel began bombing Iran.

Shrinking reserves

Sri Lanka is introducing a four-day working week to “preserve its shrinking fuel and gas reserves”, said the broadsheet. Starting this week, state institutions, schools and universities, began to operate only four days a week, and civil servants are being ordered to work from home where possible.

After an emergency meeting chaired by the president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the commissioner general of essential services said the government was also asking the private sector to “declare every Wednesday a holiday from now on”.

As well as changing how people work, the war could also alter how they mourn, because it is “threatening sacred funeral ceremonies” in Thailand, and Buddhist temples are “scrambling to obtain diesel for cremations”, said Bloomberg.

The abbot of Wat Saman Rattanaram in Chachoengsao province, about 50 miles east of Bangkok, warned that cremation services may have to be suspended. “In more than 50 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

Last week, the Thai government ordered civil servants to take the stairs rather than the lift, and it’s increased the air-conditioning temperature to 27C. It will tell government employees to wear short-sleeved shirts rather than suits.

Vietnam has asked companies to allow people to work from home to “reduce the need for travel and transportation”, while the Philippines is pushing for a four-day work week, and has told officials that travel should be limited to “essential functions only”, said Fortune.

Load shedding

In Bangladesh, the final Ramadan holidays began early for students, “but for all the wrong reasons”, said The New York Times. Lectures at the country’s main universities have been cancelled until later this month as the government closed the campuses to save electricity.

The government has also begun to impose temporary blackouts and other measures to conserve power, because “if the gas runs out, so does the electricity that turns on the lights and powers the factories that are crucial to Bangladesh’s export-oriented economy.”

Bangladesh already uses “load shedding”, or planned blackouts, to “reduce the strain on over-burdened power stations”. Usually lasting a couple of hours, they are the “scourge” of modern factories, which can’t afford to “idle thousands of workers”.

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”.

“Just a few weeks ago, Nato marked the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with fresh pledges of solidarity and assistance,” said The Daily Telegraph. Today, that war “risks becoming the forgotten conflict”.

Advanced US-made weapons that Kyiv's allies could have bought to help it deflect Russian attacks are being fired at cheap Iranian drones instead – depleting supplies that could take years to restock. European leaders are distracted by threats to their allies in the Gulf region, and the potential shocks to their economies.

Feeding the war machine

To cap Kyiv's dismay, Donald Trump has suspended sanctions on Russian oil, said the Daily Mail. The deal – apparently struck during an hour-long call with Vladimir Putin – should “curb rising prices” on US forecourts, but at what cost to Europe's security? It was recently reported that Moscow might be forced to slash its non-military spending by 10%, owing to the spiralling cost of its war in Ukraine and the impact of sanctions. Now it can feed its “bloody war machine” with billions in extra oil revenues instead.

The war presents “political opportunities” for Russia too, said Mark Galeotti in The Sunday Times. Trump's broadsides against Keir Starmer, and Madrid's fury at Berlin for not backing it in the face of his attacks, have great propaganda value. The Kremlin is also looking at this as a case study for just how united Europe is likely to be against future challenges, “especially as America pivots away”. Still, any glee in Moscow will have been tempered by Washington's decision to strike Iran while nuclear talks were ongoing. This caught Moscow off-guard, and dented its confidence in its ability to read the US president.

‘Extremely triggered’

Tehran is not just an ally of Moscow, said Cathy Young on The Bulwark. It has also been a role model for it – showing the possibility of surviving both Western sanctions and popular discontent. Now the Americans have killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Putin has again been exposed as unable, or unwilling, to help an ally in trouble – a humiliating outcome for a man who liked to pose as the “leader of global resistance to Western hegemony”.

Events in Iran may shake Putin in other ways, too: he is said to be “extremely triggered” by the assassinations of dictators elsewhere. And while Ukraine being pushed down the agenda would be a win for him, this war could also leave Trump too busy to force Kyiv into a bad peace deal with Russia. Similarly, if the war drags on, it might boost Putin, or cost the Republicans the midterms, and so empower Kyiv's allies in Washington. In the fog of war, future-gazing is a mug's game.

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.”

Even though it has long been known that Russia engages in censorship of its citizens, recent experiments in Moscow are raising fears that the Russian government is augmenting its information blockade. This new era of censorship, which involves blacking out internet communications other than approved websites, has raised concerns in Russia and among outside observers.

‘Severely limit what people can see’

Throughout March, people in Moscow have “found themselves without connectivity on their phones” due to internet outages created by the Kremlin, said NBC News. These blackouts have “disrupted the daily lives of millions of residents and hit businesses that rely on mobile internet,” though the Russian government has repeatedly said this is being done in the name of security due to threats from the war in Ukraine.

Certain “websites and apps, including government portals and banking services, may remain accessible through ‘whitelists,’” said Business Insider, as the Kremlin may allow “certain services to keep operating even while broader internet access is restricted.” Beyond government portals, some of the sites on these Russian whitelists may also include “state media outlets and Russian homegrown apps such as Max, a messaging platform controlled by the government,” said The Wall Street Journal.

This effort to control internet access is not new: Russia has been “honing and testing similar infrastructure for the past year,” said the Journal. Many officials believe these rolling blackouts will “likely be in place until the end of the war.” This comes as Russians are already “contending with rising inflation and economic strain more than four years into the war in Ukraine.”

‘Massive headache’

As the Kremlin continues to clamp down harder, many Russians, particularly those in the workforce, say they are having trouble going about their lives. The outages are a “massive headache,” Dmitry, a consultant in Moscow, said to The Guardian. “I’m having trouble ordering a taxi, sending work emails or even just messaging my family.” The blackouts are also “slamming businesses that rely on cellphone internet,” said The Associated Press.

Muscovites who run “cafes, restaurants and shops that rely on mobile internet have suffered massive losses as customers have been unable to pay for the services,” said the AP. Many of the city’s ATMs and parking meters that “rely on cellphone internet stopped working,” further complicating Moscow life. Businesses in the city “lost between 3 and 5 billion rubles [$38 million to $63 million] in five days of shutdowns.” However, businesses with “broadband access and residents with broadband at home have not been affected.”

Many are turning to more low-tech options, with Russians buying old-school technology like walkie-talkies and pagers. Sales of walkie-talkies “increased by 27%, sales of pagers for communication with clients and staff by 73%, and landline telephones by about a quarter,” said Russian news outlet RBC. Muscovites are also looking for less high-tech ways to navigate the area. “Sales of road maps increased by 170% in physical units, foldable maps by 70% and Moscow maps by 20%.”

What happened

Israel on Wednesday struck Iran’s part of the massive South Pars/North Dome natural gas field it shares with Qatar, prompting two Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Qatar’s main energy hub, Ras Laffan Industrial City. Qatar condemned both Israel and Iran, while Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warned other Gulf Arab neighbors that the U.S.-Israeli strikes on South Pars made their refineries and gas fields legitimate targets as well.

The attacks and counterstrikes, combined with Iran’s ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, sent oil and natural gas prices soaring on global markets. The U.S. and Qatar “knew nothing about this particular” Israeli attack, President Donald Trump said on social media, but if Iran strikes again, the U.S. “will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field.”

Who said what

“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL” on South Pars “unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” Trump said. His comments “seem to be an effort to de-escalate the situation,” but Trump “green-lit the Israeli strike,” Axios said, citing U.S. and Israeli officials. “While Qatar didn’t know about the Israeli strike in advance, Trump did,” having coordinated it with Israeli leaders.

“Trump approved of the strike” to “pressure Iran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz,” The Wall Street Journal said, citing U.S. officials. But Israel “struck at the crown jewel of Iran’s energy industry” to quash “an important source of revenue” for the country. While Israel hit oil tanks in Tehran earlier, striking South Pars was “orders of magnitude more alarming,” the Journal said. And Gulf Arab states, which had “aggressively lobbied the Trump administration” to prevent escalatory strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure, were “furious about Israel’s attack and the U.S. failure to head it off.”

What next?

Iran’s ongoing ability to damage U.S. interests “evokes a decades-old pattern of unrealized expectations for American interventions” in the Middle East, The New York Times said. “Air power is the U.S. drug of choice — we love to believe that it can achieve big political effects and also big military effects,” Caitlin Talmadge, a Gulf security expert at MIT, said to the Times, but the “historical record doesn’t support that.” Trump is reportedly “considering deploying thousands of U.S. troops to the region,” Reuters said, as the Pentagon “prepares for possible next steps” against Iran.

When the US and Israel attacked Iran, many turned to China to see its response.

For decades, Beijing had been the Islamic Republic’s most important economic ally, maintaining close diplomatic ties with Tehran through years of Western sanctions and international isolation.

But China’s relatively muted response to the US-Israeli strikes, its lack of military intervention and calls for de-escalation on both sides, has led many to question whether leader Xi Jinping is a fair-weather friend – or whether there’s a bigger game afoot: its delicate truce with the US, and their battle for global supremacy.

What is the background between China and Iran?

China was once “an important supplier of arms to Iran” before joining UN sanctions in 2007, said The Wall Street Journal. US officials say Chinese companies continued to be “a critical supplier of goods with potential military applications”, such as motors for Iran’s Shahed drones.

When in 2002 George Bush declared Iran part of an “axis of evil”, Beijing “saw an opportunity”, said Richard Spencer in The Times. It “began signing multibillion-dollar oil and gas deals” with Iran, culminating in a 25-year economic cooperation agreement in 2021 that centred on the sale of Iranian oil to China, reportedly worth $400 billion.

About 90% of Iran’s crude exports are sold to China every year, at a steep discount. In return, Iran “kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East”, said Geoffrey Cain in The Spectator. Its regional proxies “added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China”. That was “extraordinarily useful” and cost Beijing “almost nothing”.

In 2023, China helped Iran restore diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, among its other mediation efforts in the Middle East. It denounced what it called “unilateral” US sanctions and brought Iran into Beijing-backed diplomatic alliances. Beijing’s ties with Iran “blunted America’s efforts” to isolate Tehran, said Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. China has held regular joint military drills with Iran, and Chinese firms have even supplied chemicals used in Iran’s missile programme, according to Reuters.

How has China responded to the US-Israeli attacks?

Iran says China is helping in various ways, including with “military cooperation”. According to its foreign minister, China is a strategic partner in the war. But so far, China hasn’t provided any direct military support, or deployed any forces, or provided “new weapons assistance to any party involved”, said The Diplomat. It has “primarily engaged through diplomatic channels”.

China has expressed opposition to the US-Israeli strikes, emphasising that they could undermine regional stability. But that has been “notably more restrained” than after the strikes on Iran last year. Beijing has also criticised Iran’s retaliatory attacks on its Gulf neighbours, and its de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

But it is also not willing to assist the US. Trump has demanded that China send warships to the Gulf. In response, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing called on “all parties to immediately cease military operations”.

Why has China’s response been so muted?

For Xi Jinping, “a hard-nosed pragmatism is at play”, said CNN. Iran “ranks below his top priorities”, including China’s fragile détente and trade truce with the US, ahead of the upcoming summit with Donald Trump in Beijing. China “sees no benefit in heightening tension with the US over Iran,” said International Crisis Group analyst William Yang.

Iran’s “strategic importance” to China is far more limited than many assume, as trade and investment flows are “eclipsed” by those with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. China might even appreciate Washington’s resources being diverted from the Indo-Pacific. A sustained campaign could “deplete America’s weapons supplies”.

Trump this week announced that he is delaying the summit, as he pressures China to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But a delay could also be in China’s interests. “If the war drags on, added pressure on Washington could mean more leverage for China,” said The New York Times.

China also “gains diplomatically from the worldwide perception that America is an out-of-control bully”, said Spencer. It does not lose much “whatever happens to Iran” – except oil.

Despite its massive investment in renewables, China is heavily reliant on crude from the Gulf. And as much as 40% of its imports are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.

China is better placed to weather the storm than most. It had “long braced for a Gulf oil supply shock”, stockpiling one of the world’s biggest oil reserves and diversifying its supply, said the BBC. Still, disruption is “putting its resilience to the test”.

As the US continues to attack Iran and Donald Trump continues to criticise Keir Starmer, calls are growing to delay or cancel King Charles’ state visit to America.

The visit hasn’t yet been formally announced but Buckingham Palace has been preparing for the King to visit Washington and New York in April, to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence. The hope was that the visit, the first by a British sovereign in nearly two decades, would help smooth fractured relations between the two nations.

But as violence in the Middle East intensifies, it may be “safer to delay it”, said Labour’s Emily Thornberry, chair of the foreign affairs committee. It would be going ahead “against a backdrop of a war and that, I think, is quite difficult”, she told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme. “The last thing that we want to do is to have their majesties embarrassed.”

What did the commentators say?

“While the war is continuing”, the visit is “problematic”, said Peter Westmacott, former British diplomat and former deputy private secretary to King Charles. The US is conducting a war that the UK “initially thought clearly was illegal”, he told The Times. The UK government has “a duty to protect the monarchy in a situation like this”, and “a duty to reflect public opinion in this country”. How will a state visit be perceived? Might the King appear to be “endorsing” what the US president is doing?

Nearly half (46%) of Britons think the visit should definitely be cancelled, according to a YouGov poll of 12,002 adults last week. Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has said going ahead with it would hand a “huge diplomatic coup” to Trump. But postponing, rather than cancelling, is the way to avoid offending “thin-skinned” Trump and protect the “special relationship”, said Westmacott. That’s “a statesmanlike way of managing the issue”.

A state visit would “be nothing but a show of political appeasement” towards an administration that is “leaning more towards authoritarian instincts every day”, said Alex Hannaford in The Independent. It is “betraying the very values” of democracy that America’s 250th birthday is meant to celebrate. Plus, the timing “could not be more fraught” for the King. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest last month “reignited the Epstein scandal”, and the “spectre of awkward questions” from victims’ lawyers and advocacy groups “looms over the visit”.

The case for cancelling is indeed “powerful”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Trump will certainly “exploit a royal visit” for personal gain. But if the King didn’t go, it might seem “prompted by domestic politics” and would be “a severe blow to Anglo-American relations”. It would be “better by far” to “elevate it well above the level of current events” and let it honour the tight links between Britons and Americans that have held since US independence. A state visit is “a bonding of nations”, not governments.

What next?

Trump said yesterday that Charles would be visiting “very shortly”. Hosting Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin at the White House, he told reporters: “I do look forward to seeing the King.”

Official travel by the King and Queen is subject to the approval and advice of the government. Downing Street’s current refusal to comment on the matter “suggests an understandable indecision”, said The Guardian’s Jenkins. All could depend on how long the war continues. “Leaving the question open might add to pressure on Trump for an early ceasefire.”

Downing Street won’t want to risk “subjecting the monarch to Trump’s frequent rants against Britain”, Westmacott told CNN. Nor will it want to risk “angering the president” by cancelling. Still, “there could be a moment when the government decides that the risks of going ahead are greater than the risk of causing offence”.

What happened

Israel assassinated Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the feared Basij plainclothes militia, in overnight airstrikes Tuesday. Iran confirmed the deaths and vowed revenge, especially for the killing of Larijani, the country’s de facto leader since Israel killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening hours of the Iran war.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday slammed U.S. allies for declining to send warships to free up the oil languishing on tankers as Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz. But he also faced domestic dissent as his National Counterterrorism Center director, Joe Kent, resigned, saying in a letter posted to social media that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and he “cannot in good conscience” back Trump’s war.

Who said what

The deaths of Larijani and Soleimani were the “most damaging blow to the Iranian leadership” since Khamenei’s assassination, said The New York Times. It also “highlighted how heavily Israel is relying on targeted killings to achieve its war aims,” a strategy that “carries a risk of backfiring in unforeseeable ways.” Larijani’s death “will deprive the Iranian leadership of one of its most astute and powerful voices,” said CNN. But losing such an influential pragmatist “may make any negotiations to end the war more difficult,” prolonging the conflict.

Israel’s targeted killings of “thousands of regime members” has fueled a mounting “sense of disorder” in Iran, The Wall Street Journal said. In the short term, the “likely outcome” of Larijani’s death is “a more volatile situation: a harder military posture in the war and harsher repression at home,” said the BBC. But over time, “a system that continues to lose senior figures may find it increasingly difficult to function effectively.”

What next?

Kent’s “stunning defection” highlights how much Trump’s Iran war has “divided some of the most loyal corners of his administration,” Politico said. It also “raises questions” about the status of Kent’s boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another “outspoken critic of U.S. wars in the Middle East.” Gabbard and other top U.S. intelligence chiefs are scheduled to testify before Congress this week on the Iran war and threats to the U.S.

This summer’s controversy-laden men’s Fifa World Cup took on a whole new layer of jeopardy when the US, the main co-host, attacked Iran, one of the competitors.

The football tournament, hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico and due to kick off on 11 June, had already been beset with criticism. There were worries about logistics and infrastructure, calls for a boycott over Donald Trump’s travel bans, and fears about fans’ safety in a US where Ice agents have been sweeping into cities for violent immigration crackdowns. Fifa itself has also been under fire – for its president Gianni Infantino’s sycophancy to the US president, and its “strategic partnership” with Trump’s Board of Peace.

Now Iran’s participation has been thrown into doubt by the war in the Middle East. Fifa seems unwilling to grant the Iranian football federation’s request to relocate its US fixtures to Mexico, and Trump has already said it would not be “appropriate” for the Iranian players to take part “for their own life and safety”.

Will Iran participate?

“When Trump has explicitly stated that he cannot ensure the security of the Iranian national team, we will certainly not travel to the United States,” said Mehdi Taj, the president of Iran’s football federation, on the Iranian embassy in Mexico’s X account.

Moving Iran’s fixtures to Mexico would be logistically tricky but not unprecedented. But then there’s the issue of the knockout stages: if the US and Iran both finish as the runner-up in their group, they would play each other in the last 32. Should Iran decide to withdraw, they would be the first qualifying team to do so since 1950.

As the schedule currently stands, Iran’s first group fixture is against New Zealand in Los Angeles on 15 June. New Zealand told The Athletic that it is continuing to “monitor the situation” but is making plans to play Iran “until we hear otherwise”.

What about other Middle Eastern teams?

Iraq has a chance to qualify for its first World Cup finals since 1986 but it needs to win a play-off against either Suriname or Bolivia on 31 March – in Mexico. With airspace currently closed over the Middle East, it’s hard to see how the Iraqis can travel to their match.

The Iraqi team coach, Graham Arnold, has called for the play-off to be postponed, and the country’s football chief, Adnan Dirjal, has, has written to Fifa to explain the “difficulty of the journey”. In the meantime, he has made plans for the team to travel Mexico by private plane, according to the BBC.

What else is a concern?

There are worries that Ice officers will be deployed at US World Cup venues, for security purposes. And there is alarm about the wave of violence in Mexico since the death of a cartel boss in Jalisco state. Guadalajara, the state capital, is due to host four games.

Last month, the EU Sports Commissioner, Glenn Micallef, urged Gianni Infantino to “help safeguard fans”, said Politico. He has since asked again as violence escalates in the Middle East but said there has been “no further communication from Fifa”. It’s “legitimate” to seek assurances from a “public security point of view”, particularly as “one of the hosts of this biggest sporting event in the world is party to a war,” he told the news site. “Let’s say there’s room for more clarity.”

Fifa also has “a lot to answer for” on its role with the Trump-backed Board of Peace, said Micallef. It may have pledged $75 million for football infrastructure in Gaza, but Europe would “prefer to partner up” with organisations that “respect the international rules-based order, like Unesco and Unicef” on such sports-related projects.

Safety and security at the World Cup is a “top priority”, said a Fifa spokesperson. We are “confident that efforts being made by Canada, Mexico and the US will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved”.

Dubai is known for being one of the world’s most opulent cities, as well as a bastion of safety in a region under the perpetual threat of violence. But the recent start of the Iran war has shattered the image of peace in the United Arab Emirates’ largest city. Iranian drone attacks and missile launches against the Persian Gulf have turned Dubai into a place where its residents must walk cautiously.

‘Built itself this image’

The war in Iran has “punctured the notion that towering skyscrapers, financial clout and the embrace of luxury and diversity in the Persian Gulf can act as impenetrable shields against the region’s turmoil,” said The Wall Street Journal. Since the war broke out, Iran has launched over 1,900 missiles and drones toward the UAE, according to the country’s defense ministry, with Dubai bearing the brunt of these. Iran is largely attacking the city in an effort to disrupt global trade routes.

Iran’s attacks have been “shutting down the airport, striking the iconic Burj Al Arab hotel and Dubai’s deep-water port, and killing several people across the UAE,” said the Journal. This marks a significant change for Dubai, as its wealth and status as a financial hub have largely made it “impervious to conflict — a haven of stability untouched by the wars, corruption and upheaval around it.”

Dubai has “built itself this image that people aspire to,” Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political science professor from the UAE, told The Washington Post. And publicly, leaders in the region say Dubai is still safe and have “projected confidence in their defense capabilities,” said the Post. The UAE’s anti-missile system has had a “94% overall intercept success,” the Emirati embassy in Washington, D.C., said on X. This system has “largely kept” the “country safe from Iranian attacks.”

‘The shine has definitely been taken off’

Despite the public confidence in Dubai’s safety, many residents seem to feel differently, especially in a city where “more than 90% of its roughly 4 million residents are foreigners,” said the Post. There are “tens of thousands of residents and tourists that have fled Dubai” since the shelling began, said The Guardian, though the city’s “large population of migrant workers largely don’t have that privilege.”

“The shine has definitely been taken off,” John Trudinger, a British teacher and resident of Dubai for 16 years, said to The Guardian. Many of his colleagues in the city are “deeply traumatized and really struggling to cope.” Zain Anwar, a taxi driver from Pakistan, had a similar story. “I don’t want to be in Dubai anymore, there is no business, we are earning nothing since this war and I don’t see the tourism coming back,” he told The Guardian.

Life is going on in certain ways for those who do remain. The situation in the city is “functioning but tense,” Nick Rowles-Davies, a lawyer who moved to Dubai in 2022, said to CNBC. There is “visible vigilance in some areas, particularly at night when interceptions have been audible.” Those living in Dubai are not in a “panic, but there is a clear recognition that this is no longer distant geopolitics.”

What happened

Cuba’s aging electrical grid collapsed Monday, leaving the island nation of some 11 million people without power amid a U.S. oil blockade. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel last week blamed the U.S. embargo for Cuba’s economic problems, saying no oil shipments had arrived for three months. But in a national broadcast, he acknowledged for the first time that his government was in talks with the Trump administration to “identify the bilateral problems that need a solution.” President Donald Trump on Monday told reporters he believed he would have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

Who said what

“I think Cuba sees the end,” Trump said at the White House. “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah, taking Cuba — I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.” The Trump administration’s opening demand in negotiations is Díaz-Canel’s ouster, The New York Times said, citing four people familiar with the talks. That would “topple a key figurehead while keeping in place the repressive Communist government,” giving Trump a “symbolic win” he can sell to the American people and “Cuban exile community,” though the lack of regime change would “likely disappoint many conservative Cuban exiles.”

Cubans “have grown accustomed to power outages,” Reuters said, but the current crisis “sparked a rare violent protest” over the weekend. The oil blockade has crushed tourism, fueled unaffordable gas prices, forced hospitals to ration care and left garbage piling up in the streets.

What next?

Cuban Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga told NBC News in a clip broadcast Monday morning that Havana was “open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies, also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.” Government officials “had planned to announce the economic changes on an evening television program” but did not, the Times said, possibly as a “result of power outages.”

In the immediate aftermath of Poland’s Communist collapse, the country was considered one of the most economically dire in Europe — but the status quo has changed in a major way. Poland now has the 20th largest economy in the world, the country’s statistics agency announced last week, marking its highest-ever global ranking. Experts say there are a variety of factors that led to Poland becoming Europe’s new economic gem.

What did the commentators say?

Poland entered the top 20 economies by leapfrogging Switzerland; it reported more than $1 trillion in economic output for 2025, with its gross domestic product increasing 3.6% year-over-year, according to Poland’s statistics agency. This is a far cry from the early to mid-1990s, when Poland “rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned,” said The Associated Press.

But in “35 years — a little less than one person’s working lifetime — Poland’s per capita GDP rose to $55,340 in 2025, or 85% of the EU average,” said the AP. One of the most important factors in Poland’s economic growth was “rapidly building a strong institutional framework for business,” economist Marcin Piatkowski of Poland’s Kozminski University told the AP. This includes the creation of antimonopoly agencies and regulatory bodies, ensuring that Poland’s economy “wasn’t hijacked by corrupt practices and oligarchs, as happened elsewhere in the post-Communist world.”

Poland was also given significant help from the European Union both “before and after it joined the bloc in 2004,” said the AP. Once Poland became an EU state, it got additional funding as a result of its membership that “helped modernize Polish industry and expand an increasingly digitalized services sector,” said The Wall Street Journal. Above all, Polish business leaders “do not feel intimidated or constrained by any lingering sense of inferiority,” Dominik Kopiński, a senior adviser at the Polish Economic Institute, told Deutsche Welle. They “take opportunities when they see them and, more importantly, they are trailblazing for other companies.”

What next?

Even as Poland enjoys economic prosperity, not everyone is convinced that it will last. The country has a low birth rate and an aging society, meaning that “fewer workers will be able to support retirees,” said the AP. Wages in Poland are “lower than the EU average,” and “while small and medium enterprises flourish, few have become global brands.”

The country “must also contend with rising public debt,” said the Journal. Poland’s budget deficit of 6.8% is “significantly higher than the 3% benchmark for EU member states.” If Poland wants to continue climbing the economic ladder, its government will “need to rein in spending and raise taxes in order to ease debts over the coming years.” But there is also some good news, as Poland’s private-sector debt “remains low by EU standards.”

There is also the possibility of Poland leaving the EU, which could create further economic turmoil; dubbed ‘Polexit,’ Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has accused “right-wing opposition parties of steering the country toward leaving the bloc,” said Politico. “Polexit is a real threat today!” Tusk said on X. If his country left the EU, it “would be a disaster for Poland. I will do everything I can to stop them.”

A viral video of a young girl being pushed over as she poses for a photo in the street has sparked consternation about safety in Japan’s public spaces.

The clip, posted last week by a Taiwanese social media user, was filmed in February at Tokyo’s famous Shibuya crossing. Like others around her, the girl pauses to smile for the camera and someone in a mask “strides up from behind” and “shoves the girl, who falls to the ground”, said the South China Morning Post. “This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place,” said The Guardian. It was “one of the most visible examples” of butsukari otoko – literally “bumping men” – incidents in Japan.

‘Reflection of modern society’

The butsukari otoko phenomenon “entered the Japanese public consciousness in 2018”, said The Guardian, after a video went viral of a man “deliberately barging” into women at the busy Shinjuku railway station. Other incidents were reported at Tokyo’s Tamachi station; one woman was hit so hard, she “suffered broken ribs”. Last year, a 59-year-old professor in Fukuoka was arrested on suspicion of assault, for allegedly striking pedestrians with his bag as he walked past.

The term refers to men who deliberately collide with others (mostly women) in crowded public spaces like stations and crossings. But “it’s not just men doing the bumping”; at Shibuya crossing, it was a woman, and other social media clips show men and women alike “purposely striding” through public spaces “in readiness to administer a shoulder barge to unsuspecting victims”.

It is a “reflection of modern society”, said Kiryu Masayuki, a specialist in criminal psychology at Toyo University, last year. “Old-fashioned ideas” about gender roles and male superiority “are still deeply rooted” in Japanese society. And “in today’s world, where the job market is tough and people are uncertain about the future”, bumping into women is a “low-risk way” to vent frustration.

Intimidation, aggression

“Japan remains incredibly safe, but the clip highlighted a real pattern of harassment that people here have observed for years,” said Japan Today. Butsukari otoko is “typically about intimidation or aggression”. Commentators also cite factors like “a desire for control, displaced anger, stress or the anonymity of dense crowds”, exacerbated by Japan’s tourism boom. Bollards and designated pedestrian lanes have been introduced to “better separate commuter traffic”.

There are no official figures because shoving attacks are not counted separately in Japan’s crime statistics. “Considering how fast it happens and how easy it is to brush off as an accident, it goes largely under-reported.” But, in a 2024 survey of nearly 22,000 people by IT consultancy MediaSeek, 14% said they had been the victim of butsukari otoko, and 6% said they had witnessed it. Of course, “crowds of people in a hurry make it easy to dismiss a forceful collision as part of the rush-hour chaos” and that’s what makes the phenomenon “so frustrating: the perpetrator keeps walking, no one intervenes and the victim is left wondering whether they are imagining the intent”.

The trend has begun to spread from Japan to other large world cities like New York and London. It’s “commonly associated with misogynistic subcultures and self-identifying incels”, said Glamour. “I’m struck by what this trend exposes: a deeper, systemic discomfort with women taking up space,” clinical psychologist Arianna Masotti told the magazine. “It’s about reminding women, in a visceral way, that their bodies don’t belong in public.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “finally found a president willing to buy into his Iran dream,” said Alon Pinkas in The New Republic. Eliminating Iran’s threat to Israel has been “the be-all and end-all of Netanyahu’s political identity,” and he clearly helped talk President Trump into a joint, all-out assault on Iran. The hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also has boasted of playing a key role in helping Israel manipulate Trump into embracing a regime-change war contrary to his “America first” foreign policy. Graham, who golfs with Trump and knows his psyche, reminded the president of Iran’s 2024 attempt to assassinate him and urged him to take decisive action, saying that it would cement his legacy as a president even more consequential than Ronald Reagan. “If you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff,” he told Trump. Graham even traveled to Israel, met with its intelligence agency, and coached Netanyahu on what to say to get Trump on board.

Don’t blame Israel for Trump’s decision, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He’s the most powerful person on Earth, and the U.S. attack on Iran “is the responsibility of the man who ordered it.” Despite his isolationist rhetoric, Trump has shown “an abiding belief in military coercion as a solution to American problems” and has advocated attacking Iran and seizing its oil since 1980. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio fed into right-wing scapegoating of Israel by saying the U.S. knew Israel planned to attack and joined the bombing to defend its bases from Iranian retaliation. But Trump then denied that, insisting, “I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

Still, Israeli officials are worried about how this ends, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. They reportedly are anxious about maintaining “good relations with the U.S.,” as Americans in both political parties voice concerns about the costs of a prolonged war. Support for Israel among young Americans, especially progressives, has already eroded. The risk of antisemitistic blowback is real, said Michael A. Cohen in MS.now. Blaming Israel for manipulating Trump into attacking Iran plays “into a millenniaold antisemitic trope” about all powerful Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes. Critics on both the Left and Right are already pointing fingers at Israel, with some portraying Netanyahu as Trump’s puppet master. “This is, as American Jews are prone to say, ‘bad for the Jews.” If the war drags on, casualties mount, and gas prices stay high, the need for a familiar scapegoat will grow. That could put “a target on the backs of American Jews.”

When José Antonio Kast was elected as Chile’s next president in late 2025, it was “one more alarming case of a worldwide trend toward nativist authoritarianism,” said the Chilean American author Ariel Dorfman at The New York Times. It was also a sign of the “rehabilitation” of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, one of the continent’s “most infamous autocrats.”

Kast, as a vocal supporter of the notoriously brutal Chilean strongman, was elected in part for his hard-right bona fides, only to take office in a very different world than the one in which he campaigned. With war raging in the Middle East and a White House demonstrating an eagerness for regime change across the hemisphere, what does Kast’s unapologetically right-wing ascent mean for one of South America’s most robust economies?

‘Nostalgia’ for dictatorships past? Or ‘frustration with the status quo’?

President Kast “built his career” in government by “railing against liberal values from the fringes of Chilean politics,” said National Public Radio. But during this recent election, he “avoided all mention of the hard-line moral agenda” that has been “synonymous” with his decades-long career in public office.

The son of a Nazi party member who fled to South America following the Holocaust, Kast has shown admiration for Pinochet that has left political analysts questioning whether the new president is showing “nostalgia for Latin America’s past dictatorships” or expressing signs of “frustration with the status quo,” said Al Jazeera.

Regardless of Kast’s personal motivations, the global right-wing excitement over his victory transformed the “routine transfer of power” at last week’s inauguration into a “celebration of a movement that is gaining momentum across the hemisphere,” The New York Times said. Kast is now part of a “growing roster of leaders” in South and Central America “aligned” with the Trump regime as the White House leans on “ideological allies” to address narco cartels and “purge Chinese influence from the region.”

Kast has “avoided” commenting on “controversial issues” both domestic and international, but he has nevertheless “made overtures to the Trump administration,” The Associated Press said. Indications of those types of overtures “intensified recently” with his cancellation of a planned submarine cable between Chile and China that had garnered “intense criticism” from — and deepened diplomatic tensions with — the United States.

For his supporters, Kast’s electoral victory and now presidency come as part of his promise to take a “harder line” on migration, crime and poverty — issues Chileans claim have “eroded the country’s sense of order,” said Zeteo. Critics counter that Kast’s “strongman rhetoric, Trump-style political playbook and backing from hard-right coalitions” revives acute “fears of authoritarianism.”

Grappling with an ‘increasingly challenging’ geopolitical landscape

Kast now assumes the Chilean presidency, a position whose relationship with the U.S. has “deteriorated significantly under the second Trump administration,” the AP said. Kast’s predecessor was a “vocal critic” of Trump, at one point labeling Trump’s leadership “as that of a ‘new emperor.’”

Although Kast seems interested in renewed rapprochement with the U.S., he enters office in an “increasingly challenging international geopolitical landscape,” said Guillermo Holzmann, a political analyst from the University of Valparaíso, to Reuters, including “economic risks from the Iran war, the U.S.’ security strategy in the region and China’s influence in Latin America.” Chinese sway, in particular, poses an acute risk to Chile, the “world’s ​largest copper producer,” given that ⁠China is the “biggest purchaser of the metal.”

While the Trump regime “looks on enthusiastically at this trend” of arch-nationalist conservatives taking office across Latin America, said the Times, it “remains unclear” whether Kast’s Chile and others will “work with the United States on security” and move away from China, their “dominant trading partner.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Sunday said he was “demanding” that “about seven” countries reliant on Middle East oil help force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has effectively halted traffic through the narrow, heavily trafficked strait, sending oil and gas prices sharply higher.

Trump, speaking to reporters on Air Force One after a weekend of golf and fundraising in Florida, did not identify the seven countries. But in a social media post Saturday, he said “many” countries “will be sending War Ships” to help the U.S. “keep the Strait open and safe,” and “hopefully” that list will include China, France Japan, South Korea and Britain. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO,” Trump told the Financial Times. “Whether we get support or not,” he said on Air Force One, “we will remember.”

Who said what

Trump and his top aides “spent the weekend framing their Iran operation as a resounding military success while imploring other countries to join” a Hormuz escort coalition they plan to unveil “as soon as this week,” The Wall Street Journal said. Trump’s call for help in this “costly and risky” campaign was “notable because it was the first time he had sounded eager to build a broad coalition to counter Iran,” The New York Times said. And notably, “he was asking for backup from allies who were largely not consulted about the decision to plunge into the war.”

Trump has “grown more agitated with news coverage and has failed to find a way to explain why he started the war — or how he will end it — that resonates” with a U.S. public worried about mounting deaths and soaring gas prices, The Associated Press said. “Iran wants to make a deal,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday, but “I don’t want to make it because the terms aren’t good enough yet.” Iran “never asked for a ceasefire, and we have never asked even for negotiation,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told CBS News. “We are ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes.”

What next?

U.S. allies have “responded to the idea of sending warships to the strait with caution, if at all,” the Times said, and Beijing has “little incentive” to participate because “Iran is allowing Chinese ships through the strait.” It is in the European Union’s “interest to keep the Strait of Hormuz open,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Monday morning. “We have been in touch with the U.S. colleagues,” but this “is out of NATO’s area of action.”

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.

With the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran now two weeks old, Iranians are coming to terms with the new normal of daily conflict. But the war has not only affected those living in the country currently under attack, as Iranians living overseas also find themselves caught in the middle of a geopolitical storm. While the Trump administration views the war as a net positive for the world, many of the Iranian diaspora say their feelings are more complicated.

‘Attacking each other on social media’

With the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the installation of his son as his successor, media outlets have “rightly focused on trying to understand how the conflict came about, where bombs have fallen and how many have died,” said The Guardian. But what can “easily get lost are the voices of the people directly affected,” including Iranians living abroad, whose views are “far from uniform.”

In the United States, various factions of Iranian emigrants are “attacking each other on social media, bullying shopkeepers and restaurant owners to promote their political agenda,” Kowsar Gowhari, an Iranian-born attorney living in Maryland, said to The Christian Science Monitor. Despite the new Iranian supreme leader coming to power, there are “some who believe this government is done, finished,” but others “don’t want [President Donald Trump] to destroy the place and to put in place a puppet government.”

Iran has always been a “melting pot with diverse views,” Mohamad Machine-Chian, an author and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who is a native of Iran, told the Monitor. When the first ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, took over Iran in 1979, Iranians “thought that the Islamic revolution was the way to go. Forty years later, they can see the disaster that has been created.”

The cultural divide has been especially prominent in California, where “half of all Iranian-Americans live,” said The Economist. And many of the “American-born children of Iranians who left after the revolution are now in their 30s and 40s.” Their memories of Iranian politics are “not of the regime but of America’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Many fear that the current situation in Iran could “bring continued conflict rather than liberation.”

Other countries

It is not just the U.S. where Iranians have mixed feelings about the war. Since the conflict began, Iranians abroad feel like they are “living in a parallel universe,” Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini, a council member in Oxford, England, who previously lived in Iran, told The Guardian. This parallel world is one where “life carries on normally — looking after patients, talking to colleagues — while at the same time you open your phone and see the destruction of places that mean so much to you.”

But it isn’t just the emotional toll of the war that could have an impact; Iranians living overseas have been threatened with the seizure of their property and could “face other legal penalties if they express ​support for the United States and Israel,” said Reuters. Those who do “will be met with the confiscation of all their properties,” Iran’s prosecutor general said in a statement.

This hasn’t stopped Iranian emigrants from speaking out. No “Iranian outside, ​in the diaspora, is really and truly worried about themselves and their properties and equity ‌and belongings ⁠when people inside Iran, they go out, barehanded, without anything, they will stand in front of live ammunition, and they actually get killed," Meyam Aghakhani, an Iranian living in London, told Reuters. “So my war and my fight continues without any hesitation.”