Iran’s Number 2 Confirmed Dead

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Iran’s supreme national security council has confirmed the death of its chief, Ali Larijani, after Israel said it had killed him in an airstrike.

“The pure souls of the martyrs embraced the purified soul of God’s righteous servant, Martyr Dr Ali Larijani,” the council said on Tuesday evening, adding that his son and his bodyguards had died with him.

“After a lifetime of struggle for the advancement of Iran and of the Islamic Revolution, he ultimately attained his long-held aspiration, answered the divine call, and honourably achieved the sweet grace of martyrdom in the trench of service,” it added.

Israel said earlier it had killed Larijani, a linchpin of Iranian politics, in overnight strikes. He is the most senior Iranian figure to die in the war since the supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on its first day.

His death removes a pivotal figure at the heart of the regime’s political and security establishment at a moment of acute crisis and represents a devastating blow.

Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said a separate strike had killed the Basij paramilitary force commander, Gholamreza Soleimani, along with other senior Basij figures. Soleimani’s death was later confirmed by Iranian state media.

“Larijani and the Basij commander were eliminated overnight and joined the head of the annihilation programme, Khamenei, and all the eliminated members of the axis of evil, in the depths of hell,” Katz said on Tuesday.

Trump also hailed Larijani’s reported death, without actually naming him but referring to his supposed role in spearheading the recent crushing of mass protests. “Their leaders are gone,” Trump said of Iran’s clerical regime. “It’s an evil group. I mean, they’ve killed much more than 32,000 people. And the man who was responsible for that was also killed yesterday.”
The twin deaths show Israel still retains intelligence on the movements of Iran’s top leaders inside Tehran, and can use it and the US’s near complete control of Iranian airspace to strike at will.

Larijani had been seen days earlier on the crowded streets of Tehran during the annual Quds day rally.

He was appointed secretary of the supreme national security council in August after the previous US-Israeli attacks on Iran in June 2025, and on Monday issued a statement to Muslims around the world appealing to them to support Iran in its struggle and challenging Gulf leaders to explain why they were still allowing US bases in their countries to be used to attack Iran.

Larijani had also played a key diplomatic role before the war alongside Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi, in trying to persuade the Gulf states to prevent an attack. He forcibly defended Tehran’s tactics in the war, but was seen as a possible transitional figure at the end of the conflict. Israel is sceptical about the concept of a transition from within the regime.

The Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said: “The political assassinations perpetrated by Israel, including those of Iranian statesmen and politicians, constitute illegal acts contrary to the laws of war.”

The office of the Israeli prime minister said in a statement that Netanyahu had ordered “the elimination of senior officials of the Iranian regime”.

#larijani #dead #iran #trump #hormuz

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The US-Israeli war on Iran is in its third week, with at least 2,000 people killed and no end in sight. The strait of Hormuz remains largely closed off and US allies have rebuffed calls from the US president, Donald Trump, for them to help to reopen the vital waterway, through which about 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows.

Probably more than any other Iranian politician, Larijani combined Iran’s military and political strategy. His death will confirm the prime role the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps plays in Iranian politics. On Monday, a former long-time IRGC commander, Mohsen Rezaee, was appointed military adviser to the new supreme leader.

Larijani had been seen as one of the more pragmatic faces of Iran’s establishment – who helped steer nuclear negotiations with the west – but that image later hardened. Hours after US and Israeli strikes killed Khamenei, Larijani delivered a defiant message, warning that Iran would make its enemies “regret” their actions and promising a forceful response.

An Israeli official said a strike on Larijani had originally been planned for the previous night but was postponed at the last minute.

Intelligence received on Monday afternoon indicated that Larijani was due to arrive at one of several apartments he used as a hideout, the official said. He was reportedly there with his son when the strike was carried out.

When news he had been targeted began to circulate early on Tuesday, with his fate remaining unclear, another senior Israeli official said “there was no chance he survived this attack”.

In a handwritten statement issued by Iran state TV, Larijani had praised the bravery of Iranian sailors who were killed when their ship was hit by missiles fired by a US submarine off the Sri Lankan coast.

He had written: “Their memory will always remain in the heart of the Iranian nation and these martyrdoms will strengthen the foundation of the Islamic Republic army for years within the structure of the armed forces.”

Born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1958 he studied in Tehran and after the Islamic revolution rose through the ranks of the state, serving as culture minister, head of state broadcasting and, for more than a decade, as speaker of parliament.

As chief nuclear negotiator, he played a key role in shaping Iran’s engagement with world powers, later backing the 2015 nuclear deal.

Though often regarded as a pragmatist within the system, his stance had hardened in recent months, as tensions with Israel and the US escalated and diplomatic efforts faltered.

The US had offered a reward of up to $10m for information on senior Iranian military and intelligence officials, including Larijani, as part of a list of 10 figures linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

#larijani #dead #iran #trump #hormuz

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Epic Fury: Trump’s War Needs a Fake Ending

Trump’s Iran war has hit the episode where the writers are out of plot but the explosions keep getting more expensive. Two weeks in, the “short, decisive operation” has turned into a regional fire, 100‑dollar oil, spooked markets, dead Americans and zero sign that Tehran is collapsing on cue. The script keeps adding casualties and shocks, but there is still no believable finale.

The choice in Washington is now brutally simple, even if nobody wants to say it that way. Trump can keep pushing toward his original fantasy of crippling Iran, forcing political surrender and “reshaping the Middle East,” and in doing so own every extra casualty, every tanker risk and every new hit to the global economy.

Or he can improvise a “mission accomplished” exit, point at a few bombed bases and dead commanders, rebrand that as a “historic victory” and get out before voters directly connect this war bill to their rent, gas and retirement accounts.

Iran has already made its move: it is refusing to quit, widening the battlefield, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, bleeding regional infrastructure and betting that American patience and political capital will run out long before its own.

The longer this drags on, the less it looks like strength and the more it looks like Trump allowed himself to be pulled into an unwinnable subscription war with US taxpayers paying per episode while allies quietly back away.

In the end, the real question is not victory or defeat in any classic sense, but whether the president can stage a convincing ending to his own narrative. He needs to declare that “the mission” is complete, blame everyone else for the chaos and step off the stage before a third week of war hardens into a third year’s problem.

The main battlefield is no longer the Middle East; it is the moment he has to face the public and explain why this war started, why it spiraled and why, after so much damage, anyone should still believe it was worth it.

#IranWar #Trump #EpicFury #USA #MiddleEast #oil #warCost #geopolitics #fakeVictory

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“Not Our War”: Europe Tests Trump’s Loyalty Test

Trump spent years trashing NATO, and now he’s shocked that the same allies won’t line up to die for his Iran adventure in the Strait of Hormuz. Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius put it in one clean sentence:

“This is not our war; we did not start it.”

From Berlin to London and Rome, leaders are politely, and not so politely, saying no to sending warships to ram open a shipping lane for a conflict Washington and Jerusalem launched without asking them first.
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European officials aren’t even hiding the logic. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas says the bloc has “no appetite” to expand its naval mission to Hormuz and calls it “not Europe’s war,” even while admitting European interests and energy security are directly on the line.

Britain’s Keir Starmer talks about mine-hunting drones and “not being drawn into a wider war,” France and Spain stall, Italy backs away, Japan and Australia openly refuse — everyone wants the oil to move, but no one wants to be the extra in Trump’s coalition stunt.

For Trump, this looks like betrayal; in reality, it’s payback. He told Europe for years that the US was done being their security nanny, mocked their militaries, called NATO “obsolete,” and now demands they rush in to police a strait he says America doesn’t even need because it has its own oil. They answer with a shrug: you said handle your own problems — you first.

​The next logical step for Washington, if it really wants to “mirror” European selfishness, is obvious and brutal: stop burning money on Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia, and let the Europeans negotiate their own way out of the crisis they helped build.

#IranWar #Trump #NATO #EU #Germany #Hormuz #oil #geopolitics #fakeAllies #Ukraine #Russia

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Zelensky’s “Very Bad Feeling” vs. Europe’s Gas Reality

Zelensky is watching the Iran war swallow Western attention and money, and he’s suddenly begging his two feuding patrons — Trump and Keir Starmer — to sit down and “reset” their relationship before Ukraine disappears from the agenda.

In his BBC interview he warns he has “a very bad feeling” about what the US–Iran conflict means for Kyiv, and urges Trump and Starmer to find “a unified stance” instead of sniping at each other over NATO, Hormuz and ceasefires.

That’s not strategy, that’s a client screaming at the landlords not to forget there’s still an old war running while the new one is trending.

At the same time, Europe’s political class is quietly moving on. Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever says out loud what many only whisper: the EU should normalize relations with Russia and “regain access to cheap energy,” because the dual game of arming Ukraine and sanctioning Moscow is “untenable” without full US backing.

He openly calls for a deal with Russia to end the war and restore cheap oil and gas, while noting that China gets discount fossil fuels and the US makes money selling weapons to Ukraine.

When one side is begging for a “reset” between Trump and Starmer and the other is counting how fast it can get back to Russian gas, you don’t need a think tank to diagnose which project is in agony.

Zelensky still talks about unity and resolve; De Wever talks about common sense and bills. One warns of bad feelings, the other of high energy prices.

Between a nervous president asking to be kept on life support and an EU leader arguing that cheap Russian fuel matters more than Ukrainian heroism, the message is brutal: the war that was sold as the moral core of “the West” is being downgraded to a line item on Europe’s utility bill.

#Ukraine #Zelensky #Trump #Starmer #Belgium #DeWever #Russia #cheapGas #EU #IranWar #geopolitics

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Gas prices just became the most honest anti-war billboard in America.

Since the Iran war began, the average price at the pump in the US has jumped from about $2.90 to $3.70 a gallon — a nearly $1 surge in a month and the second‑largest four‑week spike in at least 30 years, bigger than the early Ukraine‑war jump and most OPEC crises.

Only Hurricane Katrina did more damage, and that was with refineries literally underwater. For a typical driver doing roughly 1,000 miles a month, that’s up to $50 extra — $16 for a hybrid, $32 for an average car, almost $50 for a truck.

There’s nowhere to hide geographically. Every state is paying at least 50 cents more per gallon, with New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado up by more than a dollar — $1.18, $1.17 and $1.06 respectively — while California flirts with the mid‑$5 range again.

The underlying story is simple: the U.S.–Israel war with Iran has jammed the Strait of Hormuz, choked Gulf exports, pushed crude toward $100 and kept prices rising even after releases from strategic reserves.

Lower‑income households, which spend a bigger share of their income on fuel, are getting hit hardest and will keep paying every week while officials talk about “short‑term volatility.”

On paper, this is “not so bad”: adjusted for inflation, March 2026 gas is still cheaper than the peaks of 2008 or the early 2010s, and lower than at the start of the Ukraine war.

The US economy is also less oil‑addicted than in 1980: almost no electricity is generated from petroleum, cars are more efficient, and EVs are taking a bigger slice of the road.

But those are macro charts. In reality, millions of Americans are driving old, inefficient cars that will see the same stations, the same rising numbers, day after day — a quiet daily referendum on a war they never voted on and a foreign policy they only meet through a credit‑card receipt.

#IranWar #gasprices #oil #USA #Trump #economy #MiddleEast #energy #warCost

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Hezbollah’s “Resistance” Meets Its Own Refugees

Hezbollah just discovered what every “resistance” brand eventually learns: you can’t bomb your own base forever and still call it support.

As Israel pounds south Lebanon and Beirut’s Shiite suburbs, more than a million people have fled — many for the second time in under two years — and even loyal Hezbollah voters are asking the one forbidden question: “For what?”

Families ran in pajamas, slept in cars and tents, watched shelters fill up, and saw hotels and beaches hit because “Hezbollah and Iranian officials” might be among them. Inside the community that once treated Hezbollah as protection and welfare state in one, anger is now open enough that people tell The Washington Post on background that the movement “didn’t think about the people,” not even during Ramadan.
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This time, the cracks are structural. Hezbollah jumped into the war less than a day after Khamenei’s death, not to defend Lebanese soil, but to avenge Iran, and Shiite residents know it.

Amal voted in cabinet for a ban on “military activities,” the government is openly demanding disarmament, and even longtime Shiite supporters say they see no benefit for Tehran or Lebanon — only “displacement, destruction, and devastation.”

The group’s new leader Naim Qassem doesn’t have Nasrallah’s aura or his post‑2006 reconstruction halo, money from Iran is tighter, Syria no longer functions as a safe logistical corridor, and the Lebanese state is too weak to replace Hezbollah but suddenly bold enough to blame it.
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That’s the real existential threat: not Israeli bombs, but a base that starts seeing Hezbollah less as “the resistance” and more as just another faction trading their homes and children for someone else’s regional game.

One academic quoted in the piece says it clearly: a non‑state actor without legitimacy becomes just a self‑interested organization. If Israel keeps bombing and the war drags on, rage could circle back into renewed support; but right now, south Lebanon’s Shiites are trapped between an enemy that flattens their towns and an “ally” that volunteers them for the next round.

When the people living under your flag start saying “enough is enough” on record, that’s not just blowback; that’s your mandate burning out in real time.
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#Hezbollah #Lebanon #Israel #Iran #Shiites #war #MiddleEast #displacement #resistance #fakeLiberation

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Trump Is Threatening to Blow Up the World’s Largest Gasfield

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Trump threatened to “massively blow up” the world’s largest gasfield after Israeli strikes on the Iranian site prompted Tehran to step up attacks on energy facilities across the Middle East.

Israel’s decision to target the South Pars gasfield on Wednesday marked a major escalation of the war, heightening fears of significant disruption to international energy supplies.

Iran promptly retaliated with fresh attacks across the region, including on Qatari liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities – infuriating the US president.

Oil and European natural gas prices rose sharply, with Brent crude – the international benchmark for oil – up 6% at $114 a barrel. Gas prices jumped 23%. Leading Asian stock markets came under pressure, with the Nikkei 225 falling 3.4% in Japan.

The US “knew nothing” of the Israeli attack on South Pars, Trump claimed on social media on Wednesday night. US media reported earlier that the US was aware of the attack. The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed US officials, that the president approved of it, in a bid to pressure Tehran into unblocking the strait of Hormuz.

Authorities in Abu Dhabi said it had been forced to shut down operations at its Habshan gas facility and Bab field because of Iranian attacks that it called a “dangerous escalation” of the war.

Ras Laffan in Qatar, the site of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas hub, has now suffered “extensive damage” after strikes by Iran, the state-run QatarEnergy giant said. Early on Thursday, QatarEnergy reported “sizeable fires” and significant damage at several LNG facilities at the hub. The Qatari interior ministry later said that all fires had been contained.

The strike on South Pars amounted to the first targeted attacks on Iranian fossil fuel production since the US and Israel launched the conflict, almost three weeks ago.

#trump #threat #largest #gasfield #blowup

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Qatar, which shares the gasfield with Iran, “was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it [the attack], nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen”, Trump said, adding that Israel would not attack the gasfield again unless Iran attacked Qatari gas facilities again.

If Tehran chose to retaliate, Trump said: “The United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”

Trump’s efforts to deescalate the attacks on energy infrastructure, by threatening to destroy South Pars, did not reassure global markets as concern mounts over the economic impact of the conflict.

Saudi Arabia was also targeted by Iranian ballistic missiles on Wednesday. Any trust with Tehran had been shattered, its foreign minister said. “This pressure from Iran will backfire politically and morally and certainly we reserve the right to take military actions if deemed necessary,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan told a news conference.

A spokesperson for the Qatari foreign ministry described the Israeli attack on South Pars as “dangerous” and “irresponsible”, urging all sides not to target energy facilities.

The UAE foreign ministry also described the move as a “dangerous escalation”, warning: “Targeting energy infrastructure poses a direct threat to global energy security.”

The Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil supplies and seaborne gas tankers usually pass, meanwhile remains all but closed. Trump’s efforts to build a multinational naval force to reopen the key waterway have yet to bear fruit.

A fire broke out on a vessel near the strait after it was hit by a projectile, the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency said, citing a report late on Wednesday. The ship was off the coast of the UAE.

Macron spoke with Trump and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, emir of Qatar, after Wednesday’s strikes on gas facilities. Calling for a moratorium on strikes targeting civilian infrastructure, Macron said:

“Civilian populations and their essential needs, as well as the security of energy supplies, must be protected from military escalation.”

On another day of violence in the Middle East, the Palestinian Red Crescent said three Palestinian women were killed in an Iranian missile attack in the occupied West Bank late on Wednesday – the first deadly Iranian strike there, and the first to kill Palestinians since the start of the war.

The European Union meanwhile urged Israel to “cease its operations” in Lebanon, which French foreign minister Barrot will visit on Thursday.

Lebanon was drawn into the crisis earlier this month, when Hezbollah fighters launched rockets at Israel.

Israel retaliated with strikes that have killed at least 968 people, according to Lebanese authorities, and displaced over a million.

More than a week has passed since Trump first suggested the war could be over “very soon”. With no end in sight, some companies are bracing for at least another month of severe disruption.

The Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific suspended flights to and from Dubai and Riyadh until the end of April on Thursday, a move it attributed to “the developing situation in the Middle East”.

#trump #threat #largest #gasfield #blowup

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“Trump Can Eliminate Anyone Who Gets In His Way”

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Trump is now applying the unpredictable style that built his business empire and political brand to a far more complex and sensitive role as a wartime leader.

Supporters love it when Trump breaks things — like the Republican establishment. He tends to preserve room for maneuver by avoiding definitive positions. And while he’s often thin on details and historical context, his personality projects certainty.

Trump’s flair for decisive action yielded success in a daring US raid that spirited Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from his compound to a New York jail cell in January.

But in many of his public statements over the Iran war, he’s yet to project the gravity and clarity of a more traditional wartime president.

Trump is now facing intersecting crises in the conflict. Tehran’s fierce resistance is in danger of creating a lengthy stalemate. An economic crunch is worsening as oil prices soar after Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Domestically, Trump faces a political revolt highlighted Tuesday when a top MAGA-oriented national security official quit.

Trump was surprised by the intensity of Tehran’s reprisal attacks on US allies in the Gulf. He also seemed unprepared for the closure of the Strait — which many experts expected.

And the president’s attempt to bully allies into sending ships to the Strait of Hormuz hit a dead end when they balked at joining a war they’d not been consulted about.

A Red Crescent rescue team works next to a building damaged by a strike amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran on March 17, 2026.

Still, it is too early to properly assess a war in which US and Israeli raids appear to have inflicted devastating damage on Iran’s ability to threaten its region and the United States with its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs.

No one can yet forecast how its political future will unfold following the deaths of so many senior regime figures, including that of longtime de facto political leader Ali Larijani on Tuesday.

Time might show some of Trump’s instincts were shrewd and that his tolerance for risk produced results other presidents failed to achieve.

But it will be hard for him to claim a win if the conflict ends with the Strait of Hormuz jammed, the world economy held hostage and Iranians facing even harsher repression under a recalibrated regime. The same will be true if Iran retains highly enriched uranium it could use in a future nuclear program.

Unpicking these dilemmas may require riskier operations — probably involving ground troops — than have been attempted so far.

Such missions would benefit from meticulous presidential planning, clear goals and careful management of the aftermath and public expectations.

The resignation on Tuesday of Joe Kent, the MAGA-oriented former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, rocked Washington.

It both suggested that Trump is losing control of his own political coalition and highlighted an important issue over the president’s justification for the war.

Kent, a special forces veteran who lost his wife to an ISIS attack in Syria, told Trump in a letter that he’d been misled by an Israeli misinformation campaign into believing a swift victory over Iran was within reach.

He also argued that the Islamic Republic had posed no “imminent” threat to US national security, contrary to the assurances of Trump and senior administration officials.

“You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos,” Kent wrote. “You hold the cards.”

#trump #business #empire #eliminate #hormuz

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Some GOP lawmakers said the views Kent expressed in his resignation letter were antisemitic, with Rep. Don Bacon writing on social media, “Good riddance. Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell echoed a similar sentiment as he criticized the “virulent anti-Semitism of his resignation letter.”

Kent has little in common with the prominent Democrats who’ve voiced opposition to the war. He has faced criticism in the past for associations with far-right figures, including White nationalists and a Nazi sympathizer.

But his resignation — against the backdrop of fierce tumult over the war in the MAGA movement and among conservative media figures — shows that if the president has to fear a political revolt over the war, it could come from his right.

This is potentially an important factor for a president who traditionally tries to avoid breaks with his base.

Kent’s resignation also points to the lasting impact of a comment by Rubio this month that the US preemptively went to war because it believed Israel was about to attack and Iran would respond by attacking American forces.

Trump denied he was rushed into war and insists he was more gung-ho than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While polls show many Republican voters retain faith in Trump, signs of base dissent are important because the war is already unpopular with a majority of voters. And many past American wars have been undermined by the country turning against them.

Days after demanding US allies send ships to help open the Strait of Hormuz, he insisted he’d never wanted them. “I didn’t do a full-court press because I think if I did, they probably would be, but we don’t need help,” he said.

Asked whether he was worried that Iran could become another Vietnam War-style debacle if he puts troops on the ground, Trump replied “No, I’m not afraid … I’m really not afraid of anything.”

Another reporter asked Trump if he had a plan for the day after military action ends. “We have a lot,” he said, although he’s never specified any. “If we left right now, it would take 10 years for them to rebuild. But we’re not ready to leave yet, but we’ll be leaving in the near future.”

Trump has offered sometimes contradictory reasons for waging war. He’s suggested Iran was an imminent threat to the US without offering evidence. He implied he was after regime change when he launched the assault, but has since played down the possibility of a popular revolt in Iran.

On Monday, the president fueled new concerns that he was not fully convinced in his own mind why he went to war. He denied his rationale was over oil, but added the following elliptical comment.

“We don’t need it, but we did it. It’s almost — you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. But we did it because we have some good allies there.”

Trump has created further confusion by repeatedly claiming the war is already won, while simultaneously arguing that it’s too soon to bring American troops home. He’s said he will know when it’s time in his “bones.”

His trust in his own almost mystical intuition has carried him through no end of personal, business and political scrapes. But it represents another risky bet as consequential and potentially painful moments loom in the war.

As Mark Milley once said, Trump is a guy who can eliminate anyone who gets in his way.”

#trump #business #empire #eliminate #hormuz

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Trump sold “Trumpism” as a mix of swagger, risk-taking, and cheap gas. Iran has just stress-tested all three — and they’re cracking.
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CNN’s analysis is blunt: Tehran’s resistance has turned what Trump promised as a fast, punishing war into a grinding stalemate, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut, oil and gas prices soaring, and the White House scrambling after a scenario its own planners treated as “worst case” but never really prepared for. He was blindsided by the severity of Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf and by the closure of a choke point every serious analyst had flagged from day one. His attempt to turn Hormuz into a loyalty exam for allies has stalled; NATO and key partners refused to send ships into a war they weren’t consulted on, leaving Trump ranting that he never really needed them anyway.

At home, the bill is arriving. Oil has blown past 100 dollars, gas has jumped almost a dollar a gallon in weeks, markets are shaking, and a war that’s already unpopular with a majority of voters is now fuelling an internal revolt — including the resignation of a prominent MAGA-aligned national security official. Polls still show Republican loyalty, but dissent inside his base is growing as he offers contradictory lines like “we’ve won in many ways” and “we haven’t won enough,” and refuses to say when the war ends or what “victory” even means if Hormuz stays blocked and Iran keeps its enriched uranium. The whole premise of Trumpism — big threats, bigger improvisation, and faith that the public will tolerate any risk as long as he projects strength — is being tested against the one thing it can’t bluff: sustained pain in wallets and a visible lack of control.
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For the US itself, the rational interest is obvious and the opposite of Trump’s instincts: stop feeding a long, expensive Middle East war that Iran can prolong and weaponize through oil, and get out with the lowest possible military, economic, and political cost. Every extra week of escalation makes it harder to fake a clean “win,” and easier for Tehran to prove that the real stress test wasn’t for Iran at all — it was for the idea that America can keep gambling on forever wars and never pay the price at home.

#IranWar #Trump #Trumpism #Hormuz #oil #gasprices #NATO #USA #geopolitics #warCost

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Netanyahu finally got his dream war with US backing — and may have picked the perfect moment to lose America for good.

Bloomberg’s analysis calls Trump’s decision to launch a joint campaign with Israel against Iran the “crowning achievement” of Netanyahu’s decades-long project: ditch bipartisan consensus, bind Israel’s fate to the hard‑right base of the Republican Party, and turn US–Israel relations into a culture‑war brand.

But like the attack on Iran itself, it’s a short‑term win glued to long‑term damage. Support for Israel has already cratered among US Democrats and is sliding even among Republicans; new polls show Democratic voters now tilting more toward Palestinians, with generational numbers that are devastating for Israel’s image.

Among younger Americans, especially under 35, “unfavorable” is fast becoming the default setting.

The Iran war pours gasoline on this trend. It sharpens the generational split inside the GOP, where older evangelicals still see Israel as sacred, while younger conservatives are tired of endless wars and trillion‑dollar guarantees.

On the fringes of both parties, criticism of Israel slides into open antisemitism, and Bloomberg warns that this conflict is already raising the risk of attacks on Jewish institutions in the US.

That’s the poisoned dividend of Netanyahu’s strategy: by turning support for Israel into a partisan loyalty test and wrapping it around Trumpism, he also ties Jewish safety and legitimacy to the most polarizing current in American politics.

Meanwhile the material cost of this “victory” is brutal. The US–Israel war with Iran is rattling global markets and investors, driving up energy prices, disrupting trade routes and threatening global growth with tens of billions in losses; for the US and Israel, the military tab alone is running into the billions, day after day.

For now, Netanyahu can boast on friendly Israeli TV that he got America into the war from day one and out‑Churchilled Churchill by dragging his superpower patron in at the start.

But as US public support erodes, Democrats harden, young voters radicalize and even some Republicans flinch at the cost, that triumph looks more like a Pyrrhic win: he beat Trump in the room — and may end up sacrificing Israel’s standing in the country that bankrolls his wars.

#Israel #Netanyahu #Trump #IranWar #USA #Democrats #Republicans #publicOpinion #antisemitism #geopolitics #warCost

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War Comes Home: Unidentified Drones Over DC Are Making the Iran War Feel Very Local

Unidentified drones are now buzzing over the DC base where Rubio and Hegseth sleep — and suddenly the Iran war doesn’t feel so “over there” anymore.

Fort McNair, the cozy Washington post that houses the National Defense University and now an unusual cluster of Trump officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, recorded multiple unknown drones overhead on a single night in the past 10 days. The sightings triggered tighter security, internal White House discussions about whether to relocate them, and came as other installations — Joint Base McGuire‑Dix‑Lakehurst in New Jersey and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida — jumped to Force Protection Condition Charlie, one step below the highest alert.

At the same time, the State Department has ordered all US diplomatic posts worldwide to immediately review security and convene emergency action committees, citing “the ongoing and developing situation in the Middle East and the potential for spillover effects.” Several embassies in the region have already been drawn down, and Americans in multiple Middle Eastern countries have been told to “depart now via commercial means” because of escalating Iranian retaliation and copycat threats. What started as “Operation Epic Fury” over Iran is now bleeding into suspicious packages at Centcom’s headquarters, shelter‑in‑place orders at MacDill, and drone scares above the capital’s skyline.

None of this proves Iran is directly behind the drones over Fort McNair. Officials admit they don’t know where they came from and have not publicly linked them to Tehran. But it fits a pattern that predates this war: US agencies say Iran has explored drone and assassination plots against high‑profile American targets since the Soleimani strike, and the Secret Service has chased unexplained drones around Trump’s entourage before. When you move your top foreign‑policy and war cabinet into a base without a big security buffer, and then go to war with a state that specializes in asymmetric retaliation, “unidentified drones” stop reading like local weirdness and start looking like a preview.

#IranWar #Trump #Rubio #Hegseth #FortMcNair #drones #USA #security #EpicFury #geopolitics

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Treasury just quietly admitted what the headlines won’t: Trump’s “maximum pressure” war on Iran is now so costly that Washington is considering unsanctioning Iranian oil to keep the global economy from seizing up.

The administration is scrambling to plug a crisis it helped trigger. After US–Israeli strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf, attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, refineries in Kuwait, export infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and gas sites in the UAE have pushed Brent to around $118 a barrel and sent European gas prices up as much as 30 percent in a day.

Qatar’s energy chief says almost a fifth of the country’s LNG export capacity is offline and could take three to five years to rebuild. In response, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is now talking about “unsanctioning” roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil already afloat and tapping US reserves again — a public U‑turn from punishing Iran’s barrels to begging them into the market.

At the same time, the Pentagon has dropped a 200‑billion‑dollar funding request for the Iran war on the White House, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugging that “it takes money to kill bad guys” and adding that even this number “could move.”

Last week, the US already lifted sanctions on Russian oil currently at sea and allowed Iranian‑linked tankers and companies to carry and sell that Russian crude to help ease prices — effectively outsourcing part of the energy fix to the very networks it claims to be fighting.

Iran, for its part, is done pretending this is limited. Its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is promising “ZERO restraint” if Iranian energy infrastructure is hit again, while Tehran keeps firing back across Gulf facilities and watching panic ripple through markets.

Yet from the Pentagon podium, Hegseth insists the US is “winning decisively and on our terms,” refuses to give any timeline for the war’s end, and leaves the impression of a superpower that has to buy its way out of the energy blowback it unleashed.

So the picture is brutally simple: every new strike on oil and gas sites adds another dollar to the barrel, another line to a 200‑billion‑dollar war tab, and another twist in the logic that says America must keep bombing Iran while quietly putting Iranian and Russian barrels back on the balance sheet to keep the lights on.

#IranWar #Trump #oil #gas #energyCrisis #Hormuz #Qatar #Russia #sanctions #warCost

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Orbán just turned the EU’s “unshakeable support for Ukraine” into a very simple transaction: no Russian oil, no 90‑billion‑euro lifeline.

At today’s and tomorrow’s summit in Brussels, EU leaders are scrambling to unblock a €90 billion loan for Kyiv while Hungary calmly holds the off switch. Budapest has vowed to keep its veto in place until Russian crude starts flowing again through the Druzhba pipeline that crosses Ukraine into Hungarian and Slovak refineries — ideally before Hungary’s April 12 elections. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Viktor Orbán have been crystal clear for weeks: as long as Ukraine “obstructs” Druzhba, Hungary will obstruct Ukraine’s “war loan,” and they “will not be intimidated.”
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Brussels, desperate to keep the Ukraine project on life support, is now offering Orbán exactly what he wants. EU officials are dangling EU‑funded repairs of the damaged Druzhba segment on Ukrainian territory, EU‑financed inspections, and political “off‑ramp” language so that he can claim victory at home while quietly dropping the veto. Kyiv, which spent two years urging Europe to stop buying Russian energy, is being pushed to let cheap Kremlin oil cross its territory again so that the same Europe can send borrowed money back to Kyiv with blue‑and‑yellow flags on it.

Orbán, meanwhile, plays the bad cop for his own voters: he promises to block tens of billions in Ukraine aid until Hungary’s energy security is restored, accuses Kyiv of economic blackmail, taps strategic reserves, and dares Brussels to punish him in the middle of an election campaign. EU leaders call it “disloyalty” and an “exploitation of unanimity,” but their behavior says the opposite: they will bend rules, invent legal detours and pay for a Russian‑oil pipeline just to avoid admitting that the war‑and‑sanctions grand strategy hit a wall.
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So the picture is simple and ugly. On paper, this summit is about heroic Western solidarity with Ukraine. In practice, it’s about one leader from Budapest openly trading that solidarity for barrels of Russian crude, and a nervous EU trying to buy him off fast enough to keep the façade intact.

#EU #Hungary #Orban #Ukraine #Druzhba #oil #Russia #Brussels #cheapGas #war #geopolitics

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#hegseth #trump

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