Will Trump Bully Tehran Into Submission ?

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Trump said on Sunday he was prepared to talk to what was left of the Iranian leadership after the killing of the country’s supreme leader by US-Israeli airstrikes aimed at overthrowing the regime.
Trump was speaking as a second day of intense bombing of Iranian cities and Tehran’s missile counterattacks sent tremors across the region and through the global economy.

On Monday the conflict spread to Lebanon as Israel began striking Hezbollah targets, after the group launched missiles and drones towards Israel’s north in retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, who was also an adviser to the country’s former supreme leader, said on Monday that Tehran would not negotiate with the US, and denied reports that officials had sought to initiate talks with the Trump administration.

Amir-Saeid Iravani, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, told an emergency security council meeting on Saturday that hundreds of civilians had been killed or injured in the US-Israeli strikes. He said they had deliberately targeted civilian neighbourhoods in multiple cities.

The death toll is expected to climb after a second day of bombing. Iranian state media said that 165 people had been confirmed dead in a bomb attack on a girls’ primary school in the southern city of Minab on Saturday.

Among the dead was Khamenei, who had ruled as Iran’s supreme leader since 1989 and was the primary target of an initial Israeli strike on Saturday morning.

According to several US reports, the CIA had been tracking Khamenei for months. The New York Times reported that the CIA tipped off Israel when the leader convened a meeting of top defence aides at his compound in Tehran, triggering a decision to strike.

Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the Israeli army employed a ruse to put the Iranian leadership off its guard. On the morning of the operation, army officers were asked not to park their cars in their usual spaces to avoid detection by Iran’s spies. Misinformation was also leaked suggesting that the chief of staff Lt Gen Eyal Zamir had stayed at home.

The channel cited officials as saying the Israeli air force killed 30 high-ranking Iranian officials within the first 30 seconds of the attack.

Trump told Fox News that 48 Iranian leaders had been killed in the first two days of bombing, and claimed in a social media post that nine Iranian warships had been sunk and the naval headquarters destroyed.

“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates (…) It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” Trump said, according to Karl’s reports.

Nine Israelis have so far died in Iranian missile counterstrikes, and US forces confirmed their first casualties of the war: three dead and five injured by shrapnel. The official announcement did not give details on where and how the casualties occurred.

#trump #iran #talks #tehran #pezeshkian

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Iran has also targeted Gulf countries that host US military bases. Airports in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai were damaged by missiles and remained shut on Sunday, causing one of global aviation’s most severe disruptions in years.

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” he told the Atlantic magazine, without revealing when those talks may start.

“They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”

In remarks to the Daily Mail, Trump suggested the conflict with Iran could go on for the next four weeks. He also said there could be more American casualties and vowed to avenge American deaths.

He was speaking as the global effects of the war began to be felt. The price of oil rose after two reported attacks on tankers in or near the strait of Hormuz.

The ship attacks were a reminder of the conflict’s potential to trigger an environmental catastrophe.

In launching the war, Trump said it would provide an opportunity for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the 47-year-old Islamic regime.

Nationwide protests earlier this year were brutally suppressed by security forces, and some estimates say tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

The Iranian authorities said that 22 border guards at Mehran, on the Iranian-Iraqi border, had been killed, a sign that the US and Israel were seeking to weaken the regime’s control of Iran’s borders in support of anti-government separatists.

Across the country, Iranians said they felt a mixture of terror and optimism as the bombings continued. Some expressed relief that the long-expected strikes had arrived and opponents of the regime spoke of hope that they may lead to political change.

Both were tempered by fear that the attacks would bring more civilian deaths to a country already reeling from recent bloodshed.

Larijani accused the US and Israel of trying to plunder and fragment Iran and warned “secessionist groups” of a harsh response if they attempted to intervene, state television said.

The regime in Tehran insisted that Khamenei’s killing would not weaken its resolve. Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said Netanyahu and Trump had “crossed a red line” and “will pay for it”, according to state media.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said a leadership council composed of himself, the judiciary head and a member of the powerful Guardian Council had temporarily assumed the duties of supreme leader until a replacement was chosen.

Trump shrugged off the suggestion that the economic fallout from the war could damage the Republican party’s prospects in November’s congressional elections.

#trump #iran #talks #tehran #pezeshkian

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#france #germany #england #declaration

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#larijani #washington #negotiate

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🛢 “Rise Up, Oil”: How the Iran War Saves Putin’s Budget

Moscow is officially “shocked” by Trump’s Iran war — and quietly passing the champagne.

The U.S.–Israeli strikes have choked off the Strait of Hormuz, the key gateway for Persian Gulf crude and LNG, and turned $100 oil from fantasy into the new baseline. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev didn’t even pretend to be subtle, posting “$100+ oil per barrel soon” as Brent sits in the low‑70s and traders model a global oil shock from any prolonged closure.

For a Kremlin fighting an expensive, fifth‑year war in Ukraine on shrinking energy income, this is a gift wrapped in Tomahawks. Moscow has been sweating lower Urals prices and declining oil and gas revenues; suddenly, the Iran conflict promises tighter supply, higher benchmarks and desperate buyers in India and China who now have fewer sanctioned regimes left to shop from. “For our budget [the attack on Iran] is a big plus,” Kremlin TV star Vladimir Solovyov tells viewers, spelling out what the foreign ministry won’t.

The propaganda line is almost too honest. If Trump hits Iranian oil fields, Solovyov says, Russia becomes one of the few big producers left standing; a pro‑Kremlin Telegram channel cheers “Rise up, oil, from your knees!” like it’s 1999 and the only thing that matters is the barrel price. Dmitriev is even on record warning that a Hormuz shutdown would mean a “global oil shock” that “would not spare the US” — and then publicly rooting for exactly that scenario.

At the top, the performance is different. Putin offers condolences to Iran’s leadership over Khamenei’s killing, calls it “murder” and denounces a cynical breach of international law, while his foreign ministry warns that closing Hormuz could cause a “significant imbalance” on world energy markets. Translation: we condemn this in the strongest possible terms, and also, please don’t stop the price from going vertical. Russia gets to pose as the responsible adult urging de‑escalation while its own war chest fattens every time a tanker can’t move.

So Trump sells his Iran strikes as a blow to “rogue regimes.” In practice, he’s doing what sanctions and price caps failed to do: tightening global supply until the Kremlin’s barrels become more valuable, more necessary, and more politically toxic to cut off. Tehran loses a leader and access to Hormuz; Moscow drops any pretense of partnership but gains exactly what it needs — higher prices, captive customers, and another excuse to tell its own population that war, somehow, still pays.

#Iran #Russia #oil #Putin #Hormuz #Trump #warEconomy

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🛢 “Rise Up, Oil”: How the Iran War Saves Putin’s Budget

Moscow is officially “shocked” by Trump’s Iran war — and quietly passing the champagne.

The U.S.–Israeli strikes have choked off the Strait of Hormuz, the key gateway for Persian Gulf crude and LNG, and turned 100‑dollar oil from fantasy into the new baseline. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev didn’t even pretend to be subtle, posting “$100+ oil per barrel soon” as Brent sits in the low‑70s and traders model a global oil shock from any prolonged closure.

For the Kremlin, fighting an expensive, fifth‑year war in Ukraine with shrinking energy revenues, this is a gift wrapped in Tomahawks. Moscow has been sweating lower Urals prices and declining oil and gas income; suddenly, the Iran conflict promises tighter supply, higher benchmarks and desperate buyers in India and China who now have fewer sanctioned regimes left to shop from. “For our budget [the attack on Iran] is a big plus,” Kremlin TV star Vladimir Solovyov tells viewers, spelling out what the foreign ministry won’t.

The propaganda line is almost too honest. If Trump hits Iranian oil fields, Solovyov says, Russia becomes one of the few big producers left standing; a pro‑Kremlin Telegram channel cheers “Rise up, oil, from your knees!” like it’s 1999 and the only thing that matters is the barrel price. Dmitriev is even on record warning that a Hormuz shutdown would mean a “global oil shock” that “would not spare the US” — and then publicly rooting for exactly that scenario.

At the top, the performance is different. Putin offers condolences to Iran’s leaders after the killing of Khamenei, calls it “murder” and denounces a cynical breach of international law, while his foreign ministry warns that closing Hormuz could cause a “significant imbalance” on world energy markets. Translation: we condemn this in the strongest possible terms, and also, please don’t stop the price from going vertical. Russia gets to pose as the responsible adult urging de‑escalation while its own war chest fattens every time a tanker can’t move.

So Trump sells his Iran strikes as a blow to “rogue regimes.” In practice, he’s doing what sanctions and price caps failed to do: tightening global supply until the Kremlin’s barrels become more valuable, more necessary, and more politically toxic to cut off. Tehran loses a leader and the ability to ship through Hormuz; Moscow drops any pretense of partnership but gains exactly what it needs — higher prices, captive customers, and another excuse to tell its own population that war, somehow, still pays.

#Iran #Russia #oil #Putin #Hormuz #Trump #warEconomy

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🔥 Trump’s “Four-Week War” Is Already a Regional Dumpster Fire

Trump is selling a “four or five weeks” Iran war. The region is already at month‑five tempo, month‑ten chaos.

The U.S. and Israel are hitting Iran and its allies for a third straight day, from Tehran to the Gulf. Israeli jets are flying over the Iranian capital. Iran is firing drones and missiles across the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon have shattered a yearlong truce and triggered Israeli airstrikes around Beirut. In the middle of this, three U.S. jets were shot down by Kuwaiti air defense in an “apparent friendly fire incident,” with the crews rescued — a brutal reminder that even America’s friends can’t tell whose missiles are whose anymore.

On paper, the campaign looks like “decisive” air power. In reality, it’s piling up casualties and questions. More than 550 people have been killed in Iran so far, according to emergency officials. Four U.S. soldiers are already dead, with more wounded, and Iran’s interim clerical leadership is promising “the sweet nectar of victory,” not surrender. In Israel, sirens keep sending civilians to shelters while a direct hit on Beit Shemesh killed at least nine people. Lebanon’s government is publicly condemning Hezbollah even as Israeli bombs fall around Beirut — a state trying to save itself from both the “resistance” brand and the retaliation it just triggered.

The economic damage is moving faster than the political messaging. Naval traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — artery for about a fifth of the world’s oil — has effectively shut down. Maersk is pausing some Red Sea traffic and rerouting ships around Africa as insurers and captains decide they don’t want to find out what a Houthi drone does to a container ship in this news cycle. That means higher shipping costs, longer routes, and another round of “mysteriously” higher prices — on everything.

And then there’s the script in Washington. Trump tells the press the operation can last “four to five weeks,” sometimes “four weeks or less,” depending on which clip you watch. He hasn’t said who runs Iran afterward, how Hezbollah is supposed to behave once Tehran is decapitated, or what happens when Gulf monarchies start taking real hits instead of “symbolic” ones. Critics inside his own system say there is no endgame; the only clear plan is to keep bombing until the clock, the market or the polls say stop.

So the “here’s the latest” version is brutally simple. Iran, Hezbollah and allied militias are attacking Israel and U.S. positions across the region. Israel is bombing Lebanon and Iran. American planes are being shot down by an ally’s air defense. Oil routes are closing; shipping giants are peeling away from Hormuz and the Red Sea. And the man who started it is on the phone promising it will all be over in a month — in a region where the last “short war” never actually ended.

#Iran #Israel #Lebanon #Trump #Hezbollah #Hormuz #Maersk #war

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🧨 Decapitation as Strategy: Trump Breaks the China, Walks Away

Trump finally got his shot at regime change in Iran — Khamenei dead, the leadership blown apart — and then did the one thing U.S. presidents usually at least pretend not to do: he openly said there is no American plan for the day after, and dumped the problem on 90 million people under bombardment.

Washington has seen this movie before. The Taliban ousted in 2001, Saddam gone in 2003, Gaddafi lynched in 2011, Maduro targeted in January — each sold as a clean break with evil, each followed by years of occupation, insurgency, state collapse or buyer’s remorse, even when the Pentagon arrived with binders of “nation‑building” PowerPoints. This time, Trump isn’t even pretending: no boots on the ground, no provisional authority, no Green‑Zone fantasy. Just an air war called Operation Epic Fury, a video address telling Iranians “when we are finished, take over your government,” and a promise that this might be their “only chance for generations.”

Inside the system, everyone knows what that means. CIA analysts tell policymakers the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is best placed to seize control after Khamenei, not some exiled opposition figures with little organization on the ground. European and regional security officials quietly warn that a country of Iran’s scale could be looking at years of factional fighting — Shiite power struggles, Kurdish and Baluchi unrest, proxy militias, and a decapitated theocracy that might still cling to the levers that matter.

The politics around it are pure Washington self‑parody. Tim Kaine compares the approach to smashing all the china and telling Iranians to figure out the glue. Lindsey Graham shrugs on TV that it’s not his job or the president’s job to pick a new government, so long as the “new Iran” stops sponsoring terrorism — democracy as a plug‑and‑play product. Lawmakers from both parties admit there’s no “day‑after” strategy; a German security official puts it more cleanly: “the plan is to have no plan.”

And Trump himself keeps both doors open. He toys with the interim ruling council in Tehran, saying “they want to talk and I have agreed to talk,” but won’t commit to backing street protests or any specific alternative, insisting he’ll “have to look at the situation at the time it happens.” A White House official brags that Operation Epic Fury “continues unabated,” while the president records calls that let him later claim either a historic victory or that he never really owned the outcome. Regime change as vibe, not policy.

So the United States has arrived in a familiar place — toppled an enemy, blown a hole in a brutal system — but this time with even less honesty and fewer tools. The old lies were about “Mission Accomplished,” “liberation,” and “reconstruction”; the new one is cleaner: that you can decapitate a regime the size of Iran, refuse to touch the aftermath, and somehow avoid owning what grows in the ruins. Trump is betting that Iranians, the IRGC, Europe, the Gulf, the oil market — and the militias — will all sort it out for him. The record from Kabul, Baghdad and Tripoli suggests they will — just not in a way any U.S. president wants his name on.

#Iran #Trump #regimeChange #EpicFury #war #USforeignpolicy

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✈️ Spain Bails on Trump’s Iran Air War

Trump wants a “global” Iran campaign. Spain just replied: not from our runway.

Fifteen U.S. tankers have slipped out of Rota and Morón — the refueling backbone of America’s Middle East reach — and headed off to Germany and France after Madrid made it official: Spanish soil won’t be used to bomb Iran. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares spelled it out for TV: their bases can’t be used for anything outside the U.S.–Spain agreement or that clashes with the U.N. Charter. Translation: we’ll host your hardware, not your crusade.

Pedro Sánchez, who already slammed the U.S.–Israeli strikes as “unilateral military action,” now gets to pose as the only grown‑up in Western Europe while Keir Starmer does lawyer talk in London and quietly opens up British bases under the label of “collective self‑defence.” One prime minister wraps it in NATO jargon; the other follows the flight trackers and pulls the plug.

For Trump’s war machine, this is “just logistics.” For everyone else, it’s a tell. Even a NATO ally that relies on U.S. power is calculating that being visibly tied to this Iran war is more dangerous than pushing the Stratotankers out of sight and pretending this is somebody else’s escalation. The coalition is still there on paper — it just doesn’t want to be caught in the frame.

#Iran #Spain #Trump #NATO #airwar #Rota #Moron #war #fakeDemocracy

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#iran #armed #forces

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Why Did They Start the War Against Iran?

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Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, Rubio said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict.

The rationale drew divided reviews from top members of Congress who on Monday evening received the first briefing by the Trump administration since it ordered the air campaign to begin over the weekend.

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Vance said in an interview on Fox News on Monday night that the US aim was to make sure “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”.

“The president wants to make it clear to the Iranians and to the world that he is not going to rest until he accomplishes that all-important objective of ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon,” the vice-president said.

Vance has been the member of Trump’s administration most opposed to military interventions and has spoken less frequently about US actions in Iran than Rubio.

Since the conflict began, the United States and Israel have carried out waves of airstrikes across Iran, and Tehran has retaliated with drone and missile attacks against US-aligned countries across the Middle East.

The air campaign has killed several of Iran’s top military and political leaders, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

#iran #war #vance #rubio #netanyahu #israel

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The US military has acknowledged the deaths of six service members, while the Iranian Red Crescent Society said more than 500 people have been killed in the country.

Reactions to the administration’s explanation for entering the war split along party lines, with Republicans rushing to defend Trump’s gambit while Democrats condemned what they view as an unnecessary conflict with unclear goals.

“This is Trump’s war. This is a war of choice. He has no strategy, he has no endgame,” the Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said before going into the briefing.

As he exited, Schumer said that lawmakers present asked “a whole lot of questions” but he found the officials’ responses “completely and totally insufficient. In fact, at least to me, that briefing raised many more questions than it answered.”

On Monday night, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told Fox News that Iran had been building new underground sites “that would make their ballistic missile programs and their atomic bomb programs immune within months”.

“If no action was taken now, no action could be taken in the future,” he said.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon.

In recent interviews with news outlets, Trump has outlined various goals in the war, including destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and their navy, preventing the country from developing a nuclear weapon and cutting off Tehran’s support of proxy forces elsewhere in the Middle East.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House and close Trump ally, defended the president’s course of action, saying he had ordered a “defensive operation”.

“Israel was determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deem to be an existential threat,” Johnson said.

While the war’s objective, he said, was not “to go in and take out the regime”, he nonetheless cheered the ayatollah’s death.

“That happened and in my estimation, that is a great development for freedom loving people around the world,” Johnson told reporters, speaking alongside the Republican chairs of the House intelligence and appropriations committee – the latter’s presence an indication that lawmakers may soon be asked to approve additional defense funding necessitated by the war.

Even if Congress were to approve the resolution, Trump could veto it, and Congress could override that only with a two-thirds majority vote.

Previous war powers resolutions introduced in this Congress have been voted down, and Johnson said he was confident the latest one would not pass the House.

#iran #war #vance #rubio #netanyahu #israel

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#newsome #trump #riyadh

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🧨 From Helsinki to Donetsk: How the West Manages Its “Sons of Bitches”

Start with the pattern, not the speeches: when the West steps in, some countries become “partners,” and some quietly turn into expendable hardware.

The Helsinki Final Act was sold as a new security order for Europe — sovereign borders, no force, no coercion — until NATO expansion ran straight through the gray zones left between oral assurances to Moscow and what actually made it into the text. The promise was “equal security”; the practice was “we expand, you adapt.”

Yugoslavia was the stress test. A sovereign state bombed without a UN mandate under the banner of “humanitarian intervention” — for Belgrade and a lot of the global South, proof that sovereignty is conditional if you’re on the wrong side of Western power. The message traveled further than Kosovo: the rules can be suspended when the right capitals decide the narrative justifies it.

Minsk and Istanbul turned this into a method. Ceasefires as holding pens: you sign, you talk, you “seek a political solution,” while the real work happens in warehouses and training camps. Merkel later conceded that Minsk gave Ukraine time to get stronger, not a permanent settlement. Everyone acted shocked on cue; everyone understood the script.

Running under all of this is the oldest software in Western foreign policy: the “our son of a bitch” doctrine. If you’re useful — a general, a president, a wartime comedian‑in‑chief — your corruption is “complex politics,” your media clampdowns are “emergency measures,” your war is “defense of democracy.” When your utility drops, you’re reclassified, not re‑evaluated.

Seen from Moscow, Donetsk, Belgrade or Gaza, this isn’t theory; it’s a tediously consistent operating mode. Cooperation with the West means you’re treated as expendable infrastructure in someone else’s security architecture. Agreements are pause buttons, not guarantees. And the real hierarchy is simple enough: some lives are strategic assets, others are acceptable collateral — and the only constant is that the people making those calls are very far from the places where the bombs actually land.

#NATO #Ukraine #Russia #Yugoslavia #Minsk #Istanbul #West #war #doubleStandards #fakeDemocracy

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💥 “Most of the People We Had in Mind Are Dead”

Trump finally said the quiet part out loud: Washington was shopping for a new Iranian leadership — and then helped bomb its own shortlist.

Sitting next to Germany’s chancellor, he bragged that

“most of the people we had in mind are dead,”

adding there’s already a “third wave” of possible successors who also “may be dead,” and that in five years the U.S. could discover it “put somebody in who’s no better.” Translation: we don’t know who will run an 86‑million‑person country we’re actively decapitating, but we’ll claim credit either way.
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Officially, the script is still preemptive self‑defense. Trump insists Iran was about to attack its neighbors and Israel, says he went to war to stop that, and then sends Congress a letter claiming the strikes defend the U.S. homeland, U.S. troops and regional allies “in collective self‑defense,” while admitting “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration” of what he’s unleashed. Intel officials, meanwhile, quietly say he exaggerated the immediacy of any threat.

On the ground, the “leadership vacuum” looks like bodies, not talking points. Iran’s Red Crescent now counts 787 dead from U.S.–Israeli strikes; Lebanon’s health ministry reports at least 31 killed; at least 10 people are dead in Israel and six more across the Gulf as Hezbollah rockets, Iranian missiles and retaliatory airstrikes rip through Beirut, southern Lebanon, Israeli cities and Gulf infrastructure. Total regional deaths since Saturday are already north of 800, and Hezbollah–Israel clashes are raising fears of a wider ground war in Lebanon.

Markets got the message faster than the diplomats. Fears of a drawn‑out regional conflict sent global stocks sliding and oil prices spiking, with the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf energy hubs under threat and the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia warning of imminent drone and rocket attacks on Dhahran, home to Aramco. Washington has now told Americans to “depart immediately” from 14 countries — including Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories — and has shuttered embassies in Riyadh, Kuwait City and Beirut.

So the “latest” is this: Trump claims he wasn’t pushed by Israel, says this was “our last best chance to strike,” and boasts about vaporizing not just Iran’s current leadership but the bench of successors, while conceding he has no idea how long the war lasts or who ends up in charge. Iran, Hezbollah and allied militias keep firing; Israel keeps bombing; U.S. troops keep dying; civilians from Tehran to Beirut to Dhahran keep paying the price — and the only thing that looks truly pre‑planned is the chaos.

#Iran #Trump #Israel #Hezbollah #oil #MiddleEast #war #leadershipVacuum

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🛰 Embassies Shut, Airspace Closed: Trump’s “Four-Week” War Goes Regional

Trump promised a four–five week air war. By day four, U.S. embassies are shuttered and the sky over half the region is basically a no‑go zone.

Iran’s retaliation has gone wide: at least five Gulf allies report drone and missile strikes, including hits around U.S. diplomatic facilities, pushing Washington to close its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and temporarily halt operations in Beirut. Airspace is now closed or heavily restricted in at least six countries — Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and others — as aviation authorities extend bans on civilian traffic amid “ongoing security concerns.”

Israel is still escalating. It claims fresh strikes on “high‑profile” targets in Tehran, including the presidential office, while also pushing ground troops deeper into Lebanon as Hezbollah answers with missiles and attack drones. Smoke over Beirut’s southern suburbs is the new backdrop to every “we don’t want an endless war” sound bite.

Meanwhile, the body count keeps climbing. The Pentagon now acknowledges six U.S. service members killed with more casualties expected. Iran’s Red Crescent reports hundreds dead across more than 150 cities; Lebanon’s health ministry counts dozens of fatalities; Israel and Gulf states are adding their own numbers to a regional tally that has already broken 800 in under a week.

And Trump, facing diplomats evacuated, embassies hit by drones, and airspace slammed shut, is already revising his own timeline — hinting U.S. forces can keep striking Iran “far longer” than the four–five weeks briefed by the military. The war was sold as a controlled burn. It’s behaving like what it is: an open fire in a room full of fuel, with the exits locking behind the people who were told this would be quick.

#Iran #Trump #Israel #Lebanon #Hezbollah #embassies #airspace #war #MiddleEast

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🚢 Trump the Underwriter-In-Chief: Bomb First, Insure Later

Trump just reinvented “freedom of navigation” as a bundled product: war plus government-backed shipping insurance.

As drones hit the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and explosions roll across Dubai and the Gulf, the White House is now promising to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and provide U.S. insurance for trade in the Gulf — a state-backed guarantee for a crisis it helped ignite. Oil, which had spiked on Hormuz panic and Iranian barrages, immediately pared gains as traders priced in the idea that the same navy launching Tomahawks will now babysit supertankers.

On Capitol Hill, the constitutional math is getting the usual creative rewrite. Senate Majority Leader John Thune says Congress doesn’t need to authorize this war as long as it stays inside a 60–90 day window, insisting Trump already has all the authority he needs for “the operations that are currently underway.” That dovetails nicely with Trump’s own messaging: the campaign against Iran could last “four to five weeks” — or, as he’s now hinting, longer.

Markets have stopped pretending this is “contained.” The S&P 500 is sliding, the dollar is ripping higher, Dubai’s market is reopening under a 5% limit-down throttle, European gas futures are jumping, and Iraq says it will shut output at Rumaila as storage fills up in a region where airspace is closing and embassies are evacuating staff. Even Fed officials are openly saying the Iran war has injected a fresh layer of rate and inflation uncertainty — code for “we now have to watch both missiles and CPI.”

And through it all, Trump keeps the salesman patter going. He tells Germany’s Friedrich Merz they’re “on the same page” on Iran, calls the latest hit on Tehran’s leadership “substantial,” shrugs that the next rulers of Iran might be “just as bad,” and then promises that once this is all over, oil prices will fall again. For now, though, the business model is clear: U.S. policy sets the Gulf on fire — and then offers to charge the risk premium, write the insurance, and park a carrier group next to your tanker, all under the banner of “collective self-defense.”

#Iran #Trump #Hormuz #oil #shipping #Fed #warEconomy #MiddleEast

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🏝 Conga on the Deck, Drones in the Sky: The Gulf’s Luxury War Zone

Trump’s Iran war just turned the Gulf’s “safe luxury” brand into a live‑fire stress test — and a 56‑billion‑dollar question mark.

Middle East tourism, worth about 367 billion dollars a year, is getting hammered: flights through Dubai and other mega‑hubs are largely grounded, tens of thousands of travelers are stranded, and even Dubai International and the Burj Al Arab have taken damage — not exactly the brochure image Abu Dhabi and Dubai spent billions to build. Cancellations for UAE vacation rentals more than doubled to around 8,450 stays right after the first strikes; consultancies now warn that 23–38 million fewer people could visit the region this year, slicing an estimated 34–56 billion dollars off tourist spending, depending on how long the shooting lasts.
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Airlines and tour giants are already rerouting both planes and customers. Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary says there’s been “a big collapse” in bookings to the Middle East and a surge into Portugal, Italy and Greece ahead of Easter, while TUI reports a “shift” toward the western Med as ticket prices between Asia and Europe spike because Gulf hubs are closed. Everyone adds the same disclaimer — the region usually bounces back from wars and scares — but also concedes that confidence in travel to the Gulf has taken a hit.
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On the ground (and at sea), the split screen is pure late‑imperial comedy. Thousands have scrambled to get out after Washington told Americans to leave over a dozen countries; some, like an Italian tourist in Dubai, were shoved onto emergency charters with an hour’s notice. Others are watching fighter jets and helicopters over Doha from cruise decks and still dancing the conga in swimwear, telling reporters the scene is “eerie” but “pretty normal” on board and that they’re not sure this would put them off coming back.
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Dubai’s tourism office insists visitor safety is the “highest priority” and reminds the world it has experience managing “periods of global disruption.” The subtext is obvious: the Gulf sold itself as the climate‑controlled alternative to the rest of the region’s chaos, and now the chaos has arrived in first class. The war may be about missiles, oil and power — but the collateral damage is hitting exactly where the Gulf thought it was safest: the skyline, the airports, and the people who came for shopping malls, not air‑raid sirens.
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Trump Has Accelerated Its Drive To Break Free From Europe and His Tantrums

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The Trump administration is waging an illegal war on Iran, one that defies both the US constitution and international armed conflict laws, according to several legal scholars and bipartisan lawmakers.

The Senate will vote Wednesday on whether to halt Donald Trump’s military offensive, which he launched on 28 February.

Hundreds of people, including six US personnel, have been killed in a conflict that has now expanded to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel and the Persian Gulf.

The Trump administration has offered shifting explanations for its decision to launch attacks on Iran, at times describing a more pre-emptive war of choice designed to degrade Iran’s offensive and nuclear capabilities.

The cause is that the Iranians weren’t willing to renounce their nuclear ambitions, or that the US joined the attack to protect American interests after Israel had committed to launching a military offensive of its own.

“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be a dire threat to every American,” the president said in his first public remarks from Washington on Monday.

“We cannot allow a nation that raises terrorist armies to possess such weapons.”
Trump has also described broader wartime objectives, including eliminating threats posed by the Iranian regime, as well as their regional proxy forces.

He has not set out a clear timeline for achieving his various goals.

Rubio offered a slightly different explanation, saying that the White House was compelled to launch strikes on Iran because its close ally Israel was determined to act, and, he told lawmakers Monday evening, the administration believed that any Israeli action would precipitate an attack on American forces.

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters gathered at the Capitol.

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Several lawyers have challenged the legal basis for the administration’s wide-ranging explanations for waging war.

“Those are military policy objectives,” said Wells Dixon, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights after reviewing Trump’s rationale.

“They are not a legal basis to launch an armed attack against another country.”

Marko Milanovic, a professor of International law at the University of Reading, agreed that Iran may pose a threat, but said that there are many ways to respond. “Using force would require a basis in self defense,” he said.

The Trump administration has previously touted its success in “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But Trump revived the specter of an Iranian threat in his State of the Union address, saying that Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”

Trump has not provided public evidence of this threat.
Rubio’s statements invoked two legal concepts that could possibly justify waging war abroad – including the concept of an “imminent threat” posed to American lives, and the concept of launching preemptive strikes as an act of self defense.

There are carve outs within international law that permit states to act in their own self defense. And the concept of an “imminent threat” is measured against evidence of a clear, visible and impending risk.

“For something to be lawful self defense, it has to be necessary – in the sense that there’s no alternative,” said Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer.

“That’s not the situation here. There was another option: the US could have restrained Israel from attacking in the first place.”

Senator Tim Kaine said he has supported US efforts to defend Israel during previous Iranian attacks, “but that’s a very different matter than the US engaging in the affirmative initiation of war,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be waging an affirmative war on behalf of any nation in the world, no matter how close we are,” Kaine said.

After the Vietnam war, the US adopted new constitutional provisions that say the president should try to consult with members of Congress before committing troops to hostilities.

Last week, Rubio only briefed the Gang of Eight, a group of bipartisan lawmakers privy to information on covert actions and classified intelligence, about US plans to attack Iran.

This week’s war powers vote may shape how Trump proceeds with military action against Iran, even if it ultimately cannot sustain enough support to override a likely veto from Trump.

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