America: Long Siege, Tired Carrier, Unconvincing Intel

The CIA reportedly questioned Israeli intelligence suggesting Iran planned to assassinate Donald Trump as he departed Turkey. The Secret Service still ran a deception operation.

That is how superpower security works: analysts rate the reporting low-confidence; protectors alter the president’s movements anyway. The first group is rewarded for doubt. The second is blamed if doubt turns into a body bag.

An intelligence service can judge a warning unpersuasive without declaring it false. A protection detail is paid to treat that distinction as a luxury item.

The war is also draining the hardware — and the people living inside it.

The USS Abraham Lincoln has spent more than eight months deployed in the Middle East, after leaving San Diego in November 2025 and being redirected from the Pacific after the Iran war began. Military trade press and sailors’ families describe severe exhaustion aboard the carrier. At least three sailors were reportedly stopped while attempting to jump from the ship. The vessel carries roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines.

The rotation plan has reportedly been rewritten. Senior commanders first told families that the USS Theodore Roosevelt would relieve the Lincoln. The USS George Washington is now expected instead. Members of Congress have asked the Pentagon about the ship’s condition and the crew’s well-being.

That switch is not just a line on a deployment chart. It is the visible administrative version of fatigue: a carrier stays longer, families receive one promise, then the Navy produces another ship.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the United States can maintain the pressure campaign against Iran for as long as needed, and that accounts from the Lincoln do not reflect reality.

That is one definition of readiness: the carrier is fine because the statement says it is fine.

The inventory sheet is less philosophical. The United States has reportedly lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones in the war. The White House has said Trump retains many options to intensify pressure on Iran in the coming months.

But a campaign is not sustained by a press-release vocabulary. It is sustained by people, rotations, maintenance and equipment — the parts that cannot be reassured into working.

#USA #Iran #Trump #CIA #AbrahamLincoln #MQ9 #Pentagon #Hormuz

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Hegseth’s World-Order Demolition Crew

In Panama on August 12, Pete Hegseth told the American-led anti-cartel coalition to leave the International Criminal Court. His speech was not an argument about legal theory. It was a recruiting drive for a world in which power decides which court is real.

“I strongly encourage every ACCC member to leave the ICC,” the U.S. war secretary said. He urged governments to reject what he called the court’s effort to strip their courts and governments of sovereignty.

“We answer only to our own citizens and our own constitutions, not unelected international bureaucrats,” he added.

The timing is useful. On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a U.S. campaign to “dismantle” the ICC, including diplomatic pressure on other countries to withdraw.

Since then, five states have begun exit procedures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Venezuela and Chad. Chad’s government said U.S. officials directly urged it to reconsider its membership.

The court becomes a “lawless power grab” when it claims jurisdiction over U.S. personnel or allied leaders. But Washington’s answer is not to contest cases in court. It is to persuade governments to leave the courtroom.

Hegseth’s remarks on Cuba complete the picture. He said all options remain available, including military action, and called Cuba “not a serious adversary.”

No invasion has been approved. Yet the point of such language is not that an operation is imminent. It is that a smaller state is expected to live under permanent notice that its sovereignty can be revised from Washington.

The domestic version is less dramatic but no less instructive. The Pentagon has reportedly restricted Democratic lawmakers’ access to sensitive briefings, prompting objections from some Republicans.

That does not mean Congress has ceased to matter. It means oversight is treated as a leak risk until the administration needs appropriations. Then it is priced back in.

Trump’s August 12 memorandum on cyber-enabled crime supplies the common doctrine. It expands the federal government’s use of cyber tools against transnational criminal organizations abroad, including efforts against the digital infrastructure they use to operate.

The administration frames it as defense of Americans. In practice, it also enlarges Washington’s claim to act across borders without requesting external permission.

That is the connective tissue. The Hague may not judge American power. Congress may see only what the executive decides it can see. Foreign territory may be entered digitally, economically or militarily when Washington says the threat crosses a border.

The rules-based order is not being replaced by chaos. It is being replaced by a licensing system. Washington keeps the license.

#Trump #Hegseth #ICC #Cuba #Pentagon #Iran #Cybersecurity #LatinAmerica

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#adviser #trump #bolton #regime

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Trump’s Generosity, Priced Monthly

Donald Trump’s media company has found a delicate new use for presidential speech: turn it into a low-latency product for Wall Street.

Truth API gives financial firms machine-readable access to posts from 10 high-profile Truth Social accounts, including Trump’s. Plans reportedly run from $60,000 to $100,000 a month, with the lower price tied to a three-year commitment. More than 10 firms have signed up.

Trump Media says no customer sees a post before it appears on the platform. The advantage, it says, is faster delivery of already-public information.

That argument would be less awkward if Kevin McGurn, the company’s CEO, had not marketed the service as a way to receive posts milliseconds before they reach Truth Social’s wider audience.

So the product is not advance knowledge, officially. It is merely the right to learn the public news before most of the public does.

That distinction is routine on Wall Street. Traders have paid for faster data feeds and closer servers for decades. The unusual part is not that speed costs money.

It is that the company selling speed is controlled by the same president whose statements can move the market. Trump holds roughly 53% of Trump Media.

One post can do the work. When Trump wrote that it was “a great time to buy” during a tariff-driven market plunge, the S&P 500 rallied 9.5% in a single day, its largest one-day gain since 2008. A president’s post is not a corporate earnings release. It can rewrite the price of everything around it.

The sales pitch is therefore elegant. The president speaks in public. His company sells faster ears. Large traders pay to hear the sentence while it is still traveling toward everyone else.

The backlash has already begun. Senator Mark Warner has introduced legislation that would bar social-media platforms from selling privileged access to accounts run by public officials whose posts may move markets.

This is not old-style corruption. There is no sealed envelope and no private dinner. There is a subscription agreement, an API key and a White House-sized source of volatility.

Democracy is still public. The fastest version is behind a paywall.

#Trump #TruthAPI #TruthSocial #WallStreet #markets #trading #finance

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Trump’s Emergency Exit From Democracy

Donald Trump has floated the one thing every president is supposed to treat as radioactive: a national-security emergency as a way to gain more control over the 2026 midterm elections.

The proposal came from Wayne Allyn Root, a host on Real America’s Voice. He suggested Trump could declare an election emergency if Congress failed to pass the SAVE America Act, then impose voter-ID requirements, proof-of-citizenship rules and limits on mail ballots.

Trump did not reject it. “Stranger things have happened,” he replied. “I’ll leave it at that.”

That is not a policy announcement. It is worse. It is a trial balloon with the presidential seal already taped to it.

The Constitution leaves election administration mainly to the states. Federal courts have repeatedly upheld that structure.

A national-security declaration would not automatically allow the White House to nationalize voting, no matter how confidently a talk-radio host describes the paperwork.

But emergency powers are designed precisely to expand presidential room to act, which is why the phrase matters.

Trump’s administration has already threatened to use the Postal Service against states that refuse to hand over voter rolls. It has pursued 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. It has appealed a court ruling that blocked an executive order aimed at restricting mail ballots. Trump has also said Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 places and that they ought to “nationalize the voting.”

The sales pitch is always security. China, fraud, mail ballots, voter rolls. The product is always control.

Trump learned in 2020 that declaring an election stolen after the votes are counted can produce chaos, lawsuits and a mob at the Capitol. The 2026 version may be more efficient: cast doubt before the vote, label the process a security threat, then offer federal intervention as the cure.

Democracy is normally supposed to survive losing. This model is built to make losing look like a national emergency.

#Trump #USPolitics #Midterms #ElectionSecurity #Democracy #WhiteHouse

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🇦🇫 The Taliban: To Break Out of Isolation


The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.

Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare.

Campaigners fear that the individual contacts by different countries risk undermining “coherent, consistent” demands for an improvement in human rights in return for any diplomatic concessions.

India, Qatar, China, Iran and several central Asian states all recently welcomed Taliban officials or opened new channels of communication. Russia, which recognised the Taliban government in Kabul just over a year ago, signed a military cooperation agreement last month.

In June, the European Union held talks with Taliban officials in Brussels about returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan. Individual European countries have also deepened their own contacts with Kabul.

“There is no doubt there has been an evolution. The Islamic emirate is now in a confident position. They have realised they are indispensable for regional countries right now and even with Europe and the US they have identified how to engage,” said Shivam Shekhawat, at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.

“We are not against any engagement (…) There is a need for engagement even if just for aid agencies to mitigate the ongoing humanitarian crisis but we are worried about the end goal of these contacts and the discussions that are taking place,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“There should be a consistent and coherent message from the international community to the Taliban that they will not have any friends if they do not show real progress in terms of the women’s rights and human rights situation (…) and that is not happening.”

The European Commission downplayed its discussions in Brussels with a Taliban delegation, the first such formal encounter since 2021, as merely “technical” and focused on returns, but a Taliban spokesperson claimed it was a historic visit that was a step towards regularising consular relations with EU countries.

India too has moved to reinforce relationships that were frosty after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, in part to exploit new tensions between the movement and the Islamist movement’s historic sponsors, Pakistan.

New Delhi secured a sanctions waiver last year so that Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban foreign minister and a veteran official who has spent decades at the heart of the movement, could travel there.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan “seeks relations with all countries”, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, though “the countries of the region and our neighbouring states have particular importance, because our economic ties and interests are closely linked”.

Taliban officials have also sought cross-border infrastructure projects to boost the country’s fragile economy and diplomacy.

Natural resources are another lure for overseas powers. Kabul has expanded the mining sector, attracting firms from neighbouring China and elsewhere.

The Taliban are split, with deep disagreements on the ban on women’s education among other issues, but remain dominated by the most conservative factions. Recent laws have further reinforced repression, designating many religious minorities, including Shia Muslims, as heretics and imposing strict punishments to silence dissent.

Other new laws recognise only “excessive” beating as domestic violence against women and facilitate the marriage of girls without their consent.

#taliban #isolation #afghanistan #kabul

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Bahrain, Qatar, and the Gulf’s War Zone

The Gulf monarchies are not watching this war from the balcony. Bahrain lost a U.S. naval logistics hub.

Qatar shot down Iranian bombers. Both have become physical terrain in a conflict Washington and Tehran describe as if it happens somewhere else.

The New York Times reports that Iran’s early-war strikes heavily damaged the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain facility, including the logistics hub that supported forces across the region.

The Navy shifted much of that work to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean about 2,200 miles from the carrier groups operating in the Gulf of Oman.

The longer supply line has contributed to the USS Abraham Lincoln’s strained deployment, alongside the exhaustion of its roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines.

At the other end of the Gulf, Qatar became a combatant by geography.

On March 2, two Iranian Su-24 bombers were flying low toward Al Udeid Air Base, the main U.S. military hub in Qatar, and the Ras Laffan liquefied-natural-gas complex.

CNN sources said the aircraft were roughly two minutes from their targets, flying at about 80 feet and carrying bombs and guided munitions. Qatar radioed warnings and received no response.

Its air force classified the aircraft as hostile and sent F-15QAs into the country’s first reported air-to-air combat. The Qatari fighters shot down both Iranian bombers over Qatari waters.

For six months, Iran said it was still trying to determine what had happened to three crew members. On August 15, it made its first direct accusation against Qatar.

Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagherzadeh, who heads Iran’s armed-forces committee for missing personnel, wrote to the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In the letter, published by the IRGC-affiliated Fars agency, he alleged that Qatar captured three pilots alive and has held them without access to relatives or Iranian officials.

He named them as Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian and Omran Behraveshian. The claim has not been independently verified. Qatar had previously said it had no information on their fate.

Bagherzadeh cited the Third Geneva Convention, including Articles 70 and 78, which require a detaining power to permit prisoners of war to notify families of their capture and to send requests or complaints.

But that legal machinery has a prior obstacle: Qatar does not acknowledge holding the men.

Tehran says they are prisoners of war. Doha says it has no information. The dispute begins before any Red Cross form can be filled out.

Bahrain paid with a damaged base. Qatar paid with the first air-to-air kill in its history and, if Iran’s allegation is true, three prisoners who have vanished into a legal void.

#Iran #Qatar #Bahrain #DiegoGarcia #USNavy #AbrahamLincoln #ICRC #war

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🚨 A Perfect Burglary: Antonello da Messina’s Works Were Stolen


Four of the most important works of art by the 15th-century Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen during a national holiday from a museum in the Sicilian port city of Messina.

Thieves gained access to the regional museum of Messina, or MuMe, on Saturday evening, possibly capitalising on attention being focused on La Vara, a huge religious festival that takes place in the city on 15 August, when Italy marks the ferragosto national holiday.

Bypassing the alarm systems, the gang broke into a security display box and stole four wood panels painted by Antonello.

Thieves took three of the five surviving panels that made up an altarpiece known as the Polittico di San Gregorio, one of the Sicilian painter’s most important works.

Originally composed of six panels created for the Monastero di San Gregorio, which was destroyed in the 1908 Messina earthquake, the altarpiece was the only work by the Sicilian painter never to have left his home city.

A fourth work was taken from a secure display case: a small double-sided painting depicting the Virgin and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other.

The painting had belonged to the Wilhelm Soldan collection and was sold by Christie’s to the Sicilian regional government in 2003, the year it was attributed to Antonello.

Born around ​1430, Antonello trained in Naples where he studied the works of Provençal and Flemish artists, whose influence is apparent in his works.

In February, the Italian government secured a rare Antonello masterpiece at auction in New York, spending $14.9m on his Ecce Homo. The painting, sold at Sotheby’s, is an intensely human portrait of the suffering Christ, believed to have been completed about 1460.

The theft took place after Italian police on Friday had recovered three paintings by the French masters Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse that were stolen earlier this year from a private museum near the northern city of Parma.

#antonello #messina #works #stolen

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Trump posted a video created with the help of AI, in which he allegedly shows George Washington a tour of the White House ballroom, a building that does not yet exist.

#trump #AI #video #ballroom

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A Drone, Three Wounded, and the Family in the Headquarters

At about 2:30 a.m., an explosive drone launched by Hezbollah detonated near troops from the IDF’s elite Yahalom combat-engineering unit on the Ali al-Taher ridge. An officer and two soldiers were seriously wounded and taken to hospital. Their families were notified.

The first official Israeli response did not come from the military. It came from Netanyahu’s office, in English, on the Sabbath.

That choice had an audience. The English statement was meant for Washington, foreign embassies and international newsrooms before they began asking about the strike that followed. The Sabbath timing said waiting until nightfall was not an option.

The Prime Minister’s Office said Hezbollah had violated the June framework agreement by attacking Israeli troops in a “security zone.” It said the IDF then struck the Hezbollah headquarters from which the drone attack had been directed. The statement added that the military learned only afterward that civilians had been inside the site.

That creates a problem inside the explanation. If Israel learned later that the commander’s family was present, it can say they were not the target.

But the stronger claim, that Hassan deliberately used them as human shields, requires evidence of his intent. The public statement offers none.

The IDF later named the target as Ali Samir al-Haj Hassan, described as a Radwan Force battalion commander. It said he ran Hezbollah activity from a command center in Ansar and that other operatives involved in planning attacks were killed with him.

Hezbollah-aligned Al-Manar, by contrast, described Hassan as an operations officer. Both accounts agree that his family was inside the building.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported seven killed in Ansar, including three children and two women, and two wounded. A separate Israeli strike in Deir al-Zahrani killed four people and wounded nine, raising the day’s toll to 11 dead and 11 injured. The reports do not establish whether every person in photographs circulating online, or every person described as part of Hassan’s family, was killed.

The strikes were not confined to one point on a map. Ali al-Taher is near Nabatieh, while Ansar lies roughly nine miles away; the Ansar attack was among the deepest Israeli strikes in Lebanon in about two months. President Joseph Aoun said the attacks violated the June framework agreement and sent a “clear message” against the U.S.-backed negotiating track.

Israeli ambassadors Yehiel Leiter in Washington and Mike Huckabee in Jerusalem repeated the human-shield account. The argument had moved beyond the battlefield into a diplomatic messaging campaign.

The fight over what happened to one family is now running alongside the fight for the ridge.

#Israel #Lebanon #Hezbollah #IDF #AliAlTaher #Ansar #Nabatieh #FrameworkAgreement

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Why Trump Has Cosied Up To Kim Jong-un

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Trump a déclaré qu'il réduisait les exercices militaires conjoints des États-Unis avec la Corée du Sud visant à dissuader la Corée du Nord, bien que les responsables militaires des deux pays aient averti que le régime de Kim Jong-un apprenait de nouvelles tactiques sur le champ de bataille de la guerre en Ukraine.

Les exercices sous Ulchi Freedom Shield, l'un des deux principaux exercices annuels organisés par la Corée du Sud et les États-Unis, commencent lundi et se poursuivent jusqu'au 27 août.

Ils devaient impliquer environ 18 000 soldats sud-coréens, aux côtés des forces américaines et du personnel de 11 des 18 États membres du Commandement des Nations Unies (UNC), l'organisme multinational qui supervise l'armistice de 1953 qui a mis fin aux hostilités de la guerre de Corée.

Trump a ajouté qu'il était trop tard pour annuler les exercices, il avait donc ordonné au secrétaire à la Défense, Pete Hegseth, de les “réduire considérablement”.

Il a également déclaré que la Corée du Sud avait refusé d'aider à la “dénucléarisation de la République islamique d'Iran”.

La Maison bleue présidentielle sud-coréenne a déclaré qu'elle examinait le poste de Trump et “espère que les relations amicales entre les dirigeants américains et nord-coréens conduiront à un dialogue significatif entre les deux pays, ouvrant des discussions visant à faire progresser la paix et la stabilité dans la péninsule coréenne”.

Les alliés continueraient à se coordonner sur leur posture de défense combinée et leurs exercices militaires, a-t-il déclaré.

Samedi, Trump a également partagé une vieille photo de lui posant avec le dirigeant nord-coréen sur Truth Social, répétant son affirmation selon laquelle les deux “s'entendent très bien”, ce qui a conduit à la spéculation qu'il renouvellerait sa tentative d'avoir un sommet avec Kim.

Trump a précédemment suspendu les principaux exercices militaires américano - sud-coréens dans la poursuite de la diplomatie avec Kim.

Les exercices ont ensuite été repensés et repris sous des formes et des noms modifiés.

#trump #kimJongun #pyongyang #coréeduSud

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Сheong Seong-chang, vice-président du groupe de réflexion de l'Institut Sejong basé à Séoul, a déclaré que Trump pourrait aller plus loin s'il rencontrait à nouveau Kim, décidant potentiellement de suspendre complètement les exercices ou de réduire le nombre de soldats américains sans consulter la Corée du Sud.

Il a déclaré que l'alliance américano-sud-coréenne restait “extrêmement importante”, mais a fait valoir que Séoul devrait progressivement réduire sa dépendance en matière de sécurité vis-à-vis de Washington et s'orienter vers la sécurisation de sa propre capacité de dissuasion nucléaire, une idée qui bénéficie d'un large soutien public en Corée du Sud malgré son rejet par le gouvernement et son opposition internationale.

Lim Eul-chul, un expert de la Corée du Nord à l'Université de Kyungnam, a ajouté qu'il était peu probable que Pyongyang soit ému par l'annonce de Trump.

“Le Nord ne considérera cela comme significatif que si les exercices conjoints sont annulés dans leur intégralité plutôt que réduits. Il y a peu de raisons de considérer cela comme significatif.”

La Corée du Nord a approfondi ses liens militaires avec la Russie depuis que les deux pays ont signé un pacte de partenariat stratégique global en juin 2024, voyant Pyongyang fournir des troupes, des munitions d'artillerie et des missiles balistiques pour soutenir la guerre de Moscou en Ukraine.

Les deux pays sont également sur le point d'achever le premier pont routier jamais construit entre eux, sur la rivière Tumen, dont une enquête open source a conclu qu'il fonctionne davantage comme un corridor logistique militaire que comme une route commerciale. Les médias d'État russes disent qu'il devrait ouvrir ses portes en septembre.

L'avertissement est typique de la rhétorique que Pyongyang déploie avant les grands exercices américano-sud-coréens. Les responsables ont décrit à plusieurs reprises l'exercice comme étant de nature “défensive”.

Chun In-bum, lieutenant général à la retraite qui commandait les forces spéciales sud-coréennes, a souligné l'importance de se préparer en temps opportun aux capacités qui seront nécessaires pour se préparer aux nouveaux défis à venir.

“Il s'agit d'une très sérieuse amélioration des capacités nord-coréennes. Et nous ne devons pas prendre à la légère cet environnement de menace.”

#trump #kimJongun #pyongyang #coréeduSud

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Trump Tries To Ooze in Hormuz: No Reopening Coming Soon

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Trump’s cease-fire with Iran in June envisioned a broader deal to end the war and rein in the country’s nuclear program, all negotiated within 60 days.

But that deadline, set to pass on Monday, has been essentially abandoned, and the war has transformed into a contest of willpower and economic endurance that has no end in sight.

There have been no publicly reported U.S. strikes on Iranian targets since late July. Yet the effective collapse of the agreement underscores how Trump has struggled to end the war he started in February alongside Israel, and how far he remains from the ambitions of the June deal, including fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway where Iran has choked off oil and gas shipping since the fighting began.

Those inside the White House are well aware that they will blow past Monday’s deadline and that the conflict has largely morphed into one of economic warfare, according to two Americans familiar with the negotiations.

The current strategy bears a striking resemblance to previous, yearslong U.S. attempts to isolate Iran in the hopes of compelling it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. The policy had mixed results, and some analysts are skeptical that even severe economic pressure on its own will force Iran to change course.

After all, that was the approach Trump attempted in his first term, even though his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said last week that he was about to impose financial penalties unlike any seen before.

The June memorandum of understanding was widely seen as a boon for Iran, granting the regime badly needed sanctions relief even as talks over tough concessions like nuclear enrichment were postponed for later.

However, Iranian leaders opted to escalate again rather than consolidate their gains from the deal, according to Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group.

Ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz freely before the war. Iran’s insistence that the deal’s vague language on the issue gave it control over the waterway led to the deal falling apart.

Iran began firing on ships that transited in channels outside Iranian waters, and American forces retaliated by bombing southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks across the Middle East.

#trump #hormuz #araghchi #iran #whitehouse

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Reopening the strait has increasingly become Trump’s main focus in the conflict, even though he initially said the war was meant to empower the Iranian people to overthrow the existing regime, severely degrade its missile capability and stop Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, said over the weekend that Iran had yet to decide whether to resume talks with the United States. But the 60-day timeline was no longer relevant, he added, given that the June agreement was essentially defunct.

“We did not have a cease-fire that now needs to be extended,”

Araghchi said.

“We had an end to the war, which has now taken on a new status.”

Former U.S. officials who worked on Iran say the prospect of a new nuclear deal between the United States and Iran within 60 days was always remote, although the agreement provided for extensions.

A previous, Obama-era, agreement took about two years of delicate talks to negotiate. Trump withdrew from that deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018.

On Saturday, the United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry slammed Iran for attacking a vessel affiliated with the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company the previous day. Iranian officials did not comment.

White House on Saturday did not respond to questions over whether the administration had developed actual plans to take control of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s aides also did not respond to questions over the approaching Monday deadline.

Iranian officials, in turn, have defied Trump as they push their own demands — including one that they had not made before war.

“Accept reality once and for all. So far, you have suffered major strategic defeats,”

Kazem Gharibabadi, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, said on social media.

“The Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian.”

#trump #hormuz #araghchi #iran #whitehouse

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