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The Iran War could last another year if not longer, a top Trump ambassador told the Financial Times in remarks published Friday.
Mike Waltz, the ambassador to the UN, said he hopes Iran will settle the war before then, but “the president and the U.S. Navy can maintain this blockade [on Iranian ports] for the foreseeable future.”
The unpopular war, now approaching its ninth month, has roiled energy markets, worsened inflation, and created headwinds for Republicans ahead of U.S. midterm elections in November. In its early days, President Donald Trump had said the war would last for only “four to five weeks.”
Trump is now mulling a renewal of intense hostilities, as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells him devastating strikes could trigger regime change, according to media reports. Iranian officials have warned another round of fighting would not be quick and that Tehran would expand its retaliation to new targets, including digital infrastructure.
The price of Brent crude oil spiked to $114 on Friday—nearing its highest level in the war—after Iran claimed successful attacks on seven tankers around the Strait of Hormuz. The tankers have been reported as damaged. Trump on Thursday accused Iran of “making up fake hits” to drive up oil prices.
The post Iran War Day 238: War Could Last Another Year, UN Ambassador Admits appeared first on The American Conservative.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
There is an awful lot of smoke going up around the whole war thing these days. The USS Theodore Roosevelt is in transit to the Persian Gulf region, where it is expected to arrive late next month. Pete Hegseth popped over to Israel Monday for a quick visit to Benjamin Netanyahu, whose air force has been engaging in some rather scary-looking maneuvers around Iranian airspace. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi penned an op-ed for the Financial Times discouraging the U.S. and company from taking another crack at his employer; Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme National Security Council, gave comment to Drop Site News to the same effect, albeit with a lot more growling and baring of teeth. The State Department is sending folks home, and the number of troops at regional bases is being reduced. The New York Times reports that the next round of strikes is planned for after the American midterm elections
Sometimes you have to restate the obvious—dirty work, but someone has to do it: Another round of strikes is unlikely to accomplish this war’s stated political goals, which themselves change on a regular basis. While never-ending, mindless destruction for its own sake has its charms, I guess, generally speaking a war is supposed to accomplish something; the “something” here has been at various times and non-exclusively the end of the Iranian nuclear program, reopening the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before the war), and regime change. The going theory among the teeming intellects downtown appears to be that yet another movement in the symphony of death, in concert with Scott Bessent’s exotic economic maneuvers, will get the Iranians to cry uncle and/or provoke a change of management in Tehran.
Anything is possible, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even if you ignore the actual public support for the Islamic Republic that this war has engendered, an indigenous uprising against the regime would likely provoke a civil war. Such a scenario won’t make the Hormuz safe or secure Iranian nuclear assets; energy markets will continue to make unhappy faces and low moaning noises until there is something like a settlement. Iran is not Syria; it is simply too large for us to indulge in a decade-long luxury war there. Instability will demand continued and intensive American attention until there’s a resolution.
But, if we fall short of triggering a civil war and the regime remains securely ensconced, why would the Iranians be more tractable after yet another round of bombing? What will make this time different? (And if there is something substantively different about this approach, why didn’t we try it before burning through years’ worth of Patriot interceptors and compromising our force posture everywhere else in the world?)
If this line of questioning seems repetitive, that’s because it is. There has been a fundamental disjunction of military means and political ends from the very beginning of this war (really, since the 12-Day War, but we can afford to be generous when there are so many more recent and egregious stupidities to anatomize). Getting Iran to—to what? To dismantle its nuclear program completely? To give up its newfound leverage in the Hormuz? To embrace liberal democracy? The answer continues to change, depending on the day and which creeping thing from the administration is doing the talking. In any case, getting Iran to do it, whatever it is, can only be accomplished by negotiation or the application of main force. (Welcome to the academic discipline of international relations.) Main force is expensive and painful, and you always need more of it than you think; even after a couple years of indiscriminate air war, Nazi Germany didn’t fall until there was a ground invasion, and it went down fighting tooth and claw. The ceiling for negotiated outcomes may be lower, but diplomacy is less costly and less painful.
But, as the song says, you can’t get what you want ‘til you know what you want. Political prudence is about matching means to ends. While the baboon-like Hegseth and his catamites at CENTCOM may find meaning and pleasure in death per se, the actual humans in the administration should reconsider blowing another few dozen billion dollars on more of the same. A fresh round of bombing is unlikely to move us closer to economic normality and a stable settlement in the Middle East; nor is it likely to move the Republicans further away from the electoral pillory, not just in the midterms, but in 2028. The fundamentals haven’t changed. Why hasn’t our strategy?
The post What Is Another Round of Bombing in Iran Actually Going to Achieve? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that American and Israeli war-planners are preparing to resume active strikes on Iran following the November 3 U.S. midterm elections.
The report, citing anonymous officials, noted that President Donald Trump had ordered and canceled fresh strikes a number of times. Per the Times, the new plans focus on Iran’s nuclear program and energy infrastructure, but avoid striking refineries and oil infrastructure.
Some believe the action may come sooner. An Iranian official told Drop Site News that the Islamic Republic anticipates renewed fighting perhaps even before the October 27 Israeli parliamentary elections. The White House denied planning such strikes in a comment to Drop Site.
Axios reported Wednesday that the Israeli Air Force has been conducting aggressive maneuvers near Iranian airspace. The State Department spokesman Tommy Piggott said Wednesday on X that the U.S. was evacuating nonessential personnel from American diplomatic posts in Saudi Arabia because of the threat of Houthi strikes. In the same post, he denied reports of a broader evacuation from regional embassies and consulates.
Iran has continued its operations in the Persian Gulf, claiming strikes on four tankers in a Thursday statement. Brent crude opened at $110. AAA reported a national average price per gallon of $4.27 for regular gas and $6.31 for diesel.
The post Iran War Day 237: U.S., Israel Planning to Resume Strikes in November, Per Report appeared first on The American Conservative.
President Trump should tell Western allies what the U.S. will do and let them decide how to respond.
President Donald Trump wants the Europeans to spend more on their militaries. A lot more. His hectoring—and, more important, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats—have spurred continental defense efforts.
Many NATO officials sound confident about Europe’s capabilities, even defiant. In September, Secretary General Mark Rutte grandly announced that “if the Russians want to do something against Finland or one of the Baltic nations or Poland or whichever country in NATO, we will see a build up… [and] if there is a build up, we will see it and we will deal with it, if anything happens.” Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the supreme allied commander for Europe, said something similar a couple weeks later: “Let there be no doubt: should war come, we will block, blunt any attack, and then, if it does not cease, we will break the forces conducting aggression against us.”
Yet Europe’s defense remains largely dependent on the United States. And despite Washington’s demands, increasingly tumultuous political dynamics are limiting European military outlays. In the UK, the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is looking at a $47 billion budget gap. The dicey fiscal situation is exacerbated by rising interest rates, which threaten a fiscal “black hole” and bond crisis. Despite promises to spend more on the military, the British government announced this week it was cutting some $2.7 billion from front-line army equipment, as Burnham’s chancellor tries to balance the budget by trimming defense.
Other countries face even greater challenges. France’s Marine Le Pen, the right-wing leader favored to win next year’s presidential election, recently said of aid to Ukraine: “Financially, we can’t do it anymore.” And over the weekend, France endured a wave of rioting and violence that is likely to bring severe economic as well as political consequences. Reports the Telegraph:
France is bracing for a fresh sell-off in government debt after a wave of violent protests erupted across the country… Higher borrowing costs will pile more strain on the country’s troubled public finances, while also stoking fears that the violence will lead to a more populist, free-spending candidate coming to power.
Nor is France alone in confronting domestic turbulence. The populist right is rising across the continent, and it is generally critical of devoting more resources to the military. According to Politico Europe: “In France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Poland and Romania, [populist] parties are looking to turn voters’ cost-of-living concerns into opposition to aid for Kiev, and rejection of higher national defense budgets and a greater role for the EU in defense.” Protests against higher security outlays have spread across the continent. In many European nations, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain, discontented publics oppose increasing taxes to spend more on the military.
The frustration of the Trump administration is therefore likely to grow, and it may respond by applying greater pressure to recalcitrant governments. For instance, Washington has recently taken to playing NATO favorites, holding exclusive meetings with “model allies.” Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, claimed “the idea is to pull the whole alliance along.” However, last month Trump sounded less welcoming when he declared, “Hundreds of Billions of Dollars was given to Ukraine and NATO, free of charge, that Europe would have paid for—If they were only asked, but we will be asking for that money, though somewhat belatedly!”
Yet Washington’s European allies are ever less inclined to heed the president. In a recent Politico Europe piece, Italian parliamentarian Lia Quartapelle was quoted offering a blunt assessment: “We realize [Trump] cannot be trusted and we are on our own.” Former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba explained that the Europeans “have got used to him” and, moreover, are “drowning in their own problems.” And Daniel Fried, a former U.S. diplomat and assistant secretary of state, noted:
Trump wants Europe to do more militarily, but it must buy American… But we can’t sell to the Europeans because of our needs, so they will have to wait even though they can’t build it themselves. Nonetheless, they have to carry the load in Ukraine without us. That’s utterly inconsistent, and they are exasperated by it.
The president once threatened to pull U.S. forces from the continent—a move that is long overdue eight decades after the end of the Second World War. The Cold War was a unique moment, but it too has now passed. Russia is much less threatening than the Soviet Union; Europe is now capable of providing for its own security. As Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk admitted, it makes no sense for some (adjusting his numbers) 540 million Europeans to expect 350 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. He concluded: “We must rely on ourselves, fully aware of our potential and with confidence that we are a global power.”
However, many European governments have continued to resist U.S. pressure and slow-walk their response to Trump’s demands. His oft-hostile rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, the president has done little to press his point, instead using European defense dependence to engage in economic extortion and demand painful commercial concessions. And the Europeans seem to have basically accepted this state of affairs, admitting that complying with the administration’s trade and investment demands is the price of preserving the American defense dole.
The result is a bad deal for everyone. Although the Europeans get a cheap defense ride, they remain dependent on an increasingly unhappy, irascible, inconsistent, and unreliable ally. They can’t be certain that America will race to the rescue in an emergency, especially if it blames them for being ill-prepared. Yet Uncle Sam’s protection still encourages confrontation with Russia, making a crisis more likely—even though the U.S., an ocean away, might actually choose to stay out of a conflict.
The United States continues to underwrite Europe’s security, forcing Washington to maintain an oversize military and risk American lives and wealth on behalf of prosperous, populous allies able to defend themselves. Yet the Europeans are ever less willing to follow American geopolitical dictates, despite enjoying a de facto subsidy for their more generous welfare states. And Trump’s commercial extortion hurts Americans more than it helps them, raising prices, distorting trade, and inflaming conflict.
Washington should instead encourage the emergence of Europe as a friendly, if at times competitive, geopolitical player, able and ready to promote shared economic, political, and other international objectives. To do so, the administration should stop trying to micromanage European military efforts. Instead, Washington should explain what it intends to do and offer to assist Europe in adapting its policy accordingly. If the U.S. reduces its commitment to the continent’s defense, European governments will have to assess security threats and implement appropriate policies, including the creation of sufficient military forces. That means balancing perceived international threats with domestic imperatives. How Europeans respond should be up to them, not Washington.
Should the United Kingdom and other European NATO members spend more on their militaries? That is their decision, and their decision alone. Should Washington force Americans to subsidize the Europeans? No, irrespective of what the latter are willing to spend. Both sides should respect each other’s interests. In doing so, Washington should treat European governments as allies, not dependents. That would be a worthwhile agenda for a president who promised to put America first.
The post A Better Way Than Bossing Europe appeared first on The American Conservative.
Over seven months after Operation Epic Fury started on February 28, it’s difficult to avoid the depressing conclusion that the United States has been exposed as something close to the “pitiful, helpless giant” President Richard Nixon warned of 56 years ago. Nixon, of course, used the phrase to rally an American public disillusioned with the Vietnam War. But the descriptor also applies to today’s ongoing war against Iran—a war the majority of Americans thought was a mistake at the outset.
In its eagerness to defend the decision to go to war and spin a narrative of victory, the Trump administration has spent months explaining to the American people (and our allies abroad) just how much damage has been inflicted on Iran’s military infrastructure. When he is not assuring the nation that the war will be over after the midterm elections, President Donald Trump repeatedly claims that the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway the Iranians have turned into its greatest source of leverage, is under complete U.S. control. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is quick to note the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s diminishing capacity. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in his quest to throw around Washington’s considerable financial heft, speaks as if the Iranian economy is only a few short weeks away from total implosion.
Yet it’s been glaringly obvious for a while now that the administration is wearing rose-colored glasses. The reality is the geopolitical equivalent of a smelly dumpster-heap of economic costs, military strain, and strategic malfeasance. By now, the list is long and well-known to anybody even vaguely paying attention to the news. Oil flows through the critical Strait of Hormuz have been throttled by Iran for months. By the Pentagon’s own admission, the war has cost U.S. taxpayers over $40 billion (and that’s a low estimate, since it doesn’t account for the extensive damage Iran has inflicted on bases in the region). Our munitions cupboard is running empty, with the U.S. military using up over 60 percent of its entire stockpile of air defense interceptors and many of its high-end (“exquisite”) precision munitions, including the all-important Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). Washington’s Asian allies and partners, including Japan and Taiwan, are seeing their own orders of U.S.-manufactured missiles delayed for months, if not years. Others, like South Korea, watch as U.S. air defense equipment normally stationed to defend the region is moved to the Persian Gulf.
The blows to U.S. credibility can’t be swept under the rug either. Although foreign policy analysts tend to assume the worst whenever the U.S. is compelled to end its involvement in overseas conflicts—the U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam in 1973 and Afghanistan in 2021, for instance, didn’t precipitate the irreversible decline of U.S. power in Europe and Asia many predicted at the time—the “little excursion” Trump opted to wage in the Persian Gulf has thrown more than a few wrenches into the U.S.-sponsored order the conventional Beltway establishment is so fond of defending. Gulf Arab leaders, once confident in the strength and durability of U.S. security guarantees, are now sitting in their opulent palaces wondering whether the United States is truly the best horse to back. With Iranian missiles and drones slamming into buildings in Dubai and oil pipelines damaged, the very U.S. bases and outposts in their respective countries that were constructed to strengthen deterrence against Tehran are looking more like antiquated museum pieces.
Yet all hope isn’t lost. With every setback comes an opportunity to reassess the situation and plan next steps accordingly. As pointless as the conflict has been on its own terms, it also has the potential to serve as a moment of positive transformation for the Middle East and America’s military presence there. For if the Iran War has underscored anything, it is that the regional order our foreign policy establishment has pursued for the past three and a half decades—one in which the United States acts as the Mideast’s chief external referee and security provider—has outlived whatever usefulness it once had.
That is just as well. The last quarter-century is chock full of examples of this approach undermining rather than bolstering geopolitical stability. Ultimately, what the Middle East and America need above all else is less of each other. When it comes to security commitments, each is better off without the other.
The United States currently operates a constellation of long-standing bases and smaller facilities stretching from the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to Western Turkey. Although it depends on how one counts, there are over 20 sites in the Middle East to which the U.S. military maintains access, with many of these—Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, for instance—serving as major, permanent bases. Despite repeated efforts by U.S. presidents over the last 15 years to downsize American military presence, tens of thousands of U.S. servicemembers remain deployed in the region. U.S. defense officials try their best to keep at least one U.S. aircraft carrier in the vicinity during peacetime.
Today, the large U.S. military posture in the Middle East elicits a mere shrug. But it wasn’t always so. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, the Middle East was only considered vital to the extent that its energy resources were threatened by the Soviet Union, America’s superpower rival at the time. U.S. naval maneuvers in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea were hardly as intense as they are now. (The one exception was the 1987–88 U.S. Navy operation, dubbed Operation Earnest Will, which escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran–Iraq War.) On some occasions, the mission flared into violence, such as when a U.S. Navy ship hit an Iranian mine on April 14, 1988 and retaliated by destroying several Iranian oil platforms.
The genesis of the current U.S. force posture can be traced back to the 1991 Gulf War, when roughly a half a million U.S. troops, in coordination with a multilateral coalition including Arab states, expelled the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait. After approximately a month of heavy U.S. airstrikes and a U.S. ground war that lasted 100 hours, President George H.W. Bush announced the conclusion of major combat operations.
Still, the end of the war didn’t bring an end to the large U.S. military presence. The March 1991 U.N. Security Council Resolution that formalized the ceasefire mandated tough terms on Saddam: destroying all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs; eliminating all Iraqi missiles beyond the range of 93 miles; bringing all of its nuclear-related materiel into the custody of the International Atomic Energy Agency; and mandating Baghdad’s unconditional cooperation with a special U.N.-authorized commission. Thus it virtually guaranteed that the Iraqi dictator would try to skirt his obligations. And sure enough, that’s precisely what happened, giving the George H.W. Bush administration reason to keep U.S. forces around Iraq to compel its compliance. By August 1992, U.S., French and British combat aircraft were patrolling no-fly zones in roughly two-thirds of Iraq.
Throughout this period, the United States struck multiple defense agreements with Gulf Arab states that remained petrified about more Iraqi aggression. Although Saddam’s army was bloodied and defeated, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates still viewed U.S. troops on their soil as the best insurance policy. In October 1991, seven months after the Gulf War ended, Bahrain struck a deal with Washington, which allowed the U.S. military to stockpile defensive equipment on the island and granted U.S. servicemembers access to its naval and air facilities. A similar deal was signed with Qatar in 1992 and with the UAE in 1994. This, combined with the Clinton administration’s “dual containment” policy of both Iraq and Iran, two adversaries that Washington believed could upend the regional balance of power, virtually guaranteed a continuous U.S presence there. George W. Bush’s war on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, which culminated in a trillion-dollar occupation of Iraq whose reverberations are still felt 23 years later, only brought the United States deeper into a swamp so sticky that his successors have failed to get out of it.
If the United States was once believed to be the Middle East’s chief stabilizer, the war with Iran has turned this image into a caricature. Rather than keeping the peace and preserving a stable regional balance, its self-defeating actions churn up conflict. Instead of maintaining deterrence, it attracts the very kinds of attacks a forward U.S. military deployment is designed to prevent. U.S. bases, which Washington’s Arab partners bet were key enablers of stability for their countries, are not strong points, but vulnerabilities. Based on satellite imagery and public reporting, hundreds of buildings on U.S. military bases in at least eight Mideast countries have been damaged by Iranian fire during the course of the conflict. Facilities long presumed to be impenetrable to disruption, like the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, are now seen as so vulnerable to Iranian assaults that re-supply operations have to be undertaken at Diego Garcia, more than 2,000 miles away.
For defense planners, the war is forcing a much-needed reevaluation of how the U.S. military conducts operations in the region and whether the juice of an unending presence there is worth the squeeze for U.S. security interests. Damaged U.S. military infrastructure, which would cost billions to repair, has generated conversations in the Pentagon about whether continuing with the status-quo is the right move. The same outposts in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar that were seen as sound investments in the 1990s and early 2000s no longer look so wise in 2026. When the war is all said and done, there is a decent chance of U.S. forces re-deploying from the Persian Gulf to areas further west, perhaps to western Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. There are likely some officers in the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as on the staffs of the various U.S. combatant commands, who would prefer the Trump administration to kick the Middle East further down its list of priorities. They have a point. The war has not only laid bare the fallacy of America’s grand ambitions in this part of the world but also depleted the Pentagon’s stockpile of munitions to such an extent that U.S. defense officials have had to beg defense manufacturers to speed up the production process.
The Arab states are highly unlikely to sever their defense relationships with the United States anytime soon. Qatar, for instance, deepened its own ties with Washington in September 2025, a decision that came about in part due to Israel’s attempted assassination of a senior Hamas official in Doha weeks earlier. Saudi Arabia continues to spend tens of billions of dollars on U.S. defense platforms; according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 77 percent of Riyadh’s defense imports between 2021–25 came from the United States.
Even so, the Trump administration’s rush into a war no country in the Middle East outside of Israel wanted, and the inability of U.S. bases to provide much protection, is a giant red-neon warning light to Gulf states that for decades have relied on Washington for external protection. The message: New security arrangements must be made, or at least explored. In August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, whose central tenet—an attack on one is an attack on all—is identical to NATO’s Article 5. Weeks later, Kuwait, one of Iran’s most persistent targets, clinched its own defense accord with Pakistan, with a focus on bolstering security at Kuwait’s borders. The UAE has even strengthened relations with Israel and reportedly allowed the deployment of Israeli air defense systems in its territory early in the Iran War.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment will likely look at all these moves as a reflection of American weakness. Trump, some will argue, has degraded U.S. credibility to the point where some of its most longstanding security partners now see Washington as part of the problem rather than the solution.
But so what if they do? The reality is that the United States and the Middle East could use a divorce. From the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 air campaign over Libya to U.S. involvement in Syria during that country’s 14-year-long civil-war, the record of U.S. interventions is one of hubris, failure, and unanticipated costs.
In the process, Washington winds up creating a whole slew of additional stressors that the people of the Middle East ultimately have to live with. During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, those unwanted repercussions included the growth of Al Qaeda branch that in later years turned into the Islamic State, a sectarian civil war that killed tens of thousands, and the growth of Iranian influence in a country that had historically served as Tehran’s chief balancer. In Libya, it was the implosion of the state, the proliferation of warlords and militia groups, and ultimately a massive surge of migration to Europe. America’s most recent war of choice is no different in this respect—just ask the Kuwaitis, Iraqis and Qataris, all of whom have seen their energy exports and associated revenues plummet as the Strait of Hormuz remains bottlenecked by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The United States hasn’t learned much of anything from its previous follies, so you can’t blame the Gulf Arab states in particular for changing how they do business. After all, who wants to put their faith in a clumsy actor who has the power to upend the regional equilibrium? Thanks to Trump’s war, lessening dependence on what’s left of the U.S. security umbrella is now an acknowledged goal in Mideast capitals; across the region, countries are pursuing solutions ranging from developing their domestic arms industries to building regional alliances.
Many inside the Beltway will likely seek to discourage these conversations from happening. Worried about the loss of U.S. power, Washington may seek to offer even more military assistance to these states as a desperate form of compensation.
But this would be a mistake. Instead, we should let the chips fall where they may. Rather than squelch discussions over a post-American Middle East, Trump and whoever comes after him should encourage them. Ideally, the United States should force the issue by removing its own forces, particularly the assets in large, permanent bases that are so vulnerable to Iranian strikes. This will all come as a big shock to the current orthodoxy, which typecasts any retreat as a defeat of epic proportions. But it would not be the first time a U.S. president decided to boldly cut the country’s losses, and it will not be the last either.
The sooner Americans abandon their quest to police the Middle East, the sooner the region will achieve lasting geopolitical stability.
The post The Iran War’s One Benefit appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Ukrainian leader faces escalating crises.
Like the man in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky may be crying, “I’m not dead.” It is too early to perform a postmortem on Zelensky’s political career. But it may not be premature to attempt an analysis of his deteriorating condition and struggle to survive.
Zelensky’s strength is being undermined on four fronts: overall domestic support, support from his party, financial support from Europe, and a collapsing relationship with President Donald Trump.
Polls show that Ukrainians, who wanted Zelensky to lead them through the war, no longer want him to lead them after the war. Indeed, having fed Ukrainians with fantastical promises of pushing Russia out of all Ukrainian lands and being welcomed into NATO, and having depended on a cooperative relationship with Ukrainian ultranationalists who oppose a compromise peace with Moscow, Zelensky may have put himself into a position where his presidency cannot survive the war. Polling shows a collapse of domestic support for Zelensky, suggesting that he would lose by a wide margin in the next election.
But, while the foreign media has been entirely focused on the war, domestic attention in Ukraine has also turned to corruption. Zelensky was elected on the twin platform of making peace with Russia and ending Ukraine’s self-destructive corruption. He has delivered on neither.
A key metric is Zelensky’s trust rating. Asked recently which political figures they trust, Ukrainians ranked their president a damning sixth, with only 18 percent of respondents fully trusting him. His main potential political rivals, Valeriy Zaluzhny, Kyrylo Budanov, and Mykhailo Fedorov are all more trusted. A fifth of those who say they do not trust Zelensky cite corruption as the main reason, and 72 percent of Ukrainians say he is personally responsible for corruption in his government. Amid his latest spat with Trump, one recent poll found Zelensky’s trust rating had risen, but the overall trend is still bad, and the rally-around-the-flag effect may prove fleeting. Zelensky has hurt himself with his handling of a snowballing corruption scandal that is reaching deeper and deeper into his inner circle.
And Ukraine’s president is not only losing ground with voters—he’s also losing the support of his party, which once was solidly behind him. He is being confronted by unfamiliar resistance, with dozens of MPs in his Servant of the People party boycotting or rebelling. His legislative supermajority is reportedly at risk as a result of defections.
The lack of support at home also puts in jeopardy EU funding on which the Ukrainian government relies. Ukraine is facing a massive budgetary shortfall totaling tens of billions of dollars. Kiev wants money promised by the EU for 2027 to be provided sooner. But the release of badly needed funds from the EU is contingent on the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, enacting corruption reforms—and Zelensky’s party has refused to pass such measures. Even a package of tax bills that was passed last week and that could unlock $4.3 billion dealt only with less controversial items, and avoided addressing many of the more serious demands being made by the EU.
Earlier this month, the EU rejected Zelensky’s appeals and refused to accelerate payments to cover the shortfall, again tying funding to corruption reform. According to Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, neither Slovakia nor Hungary will participate in another EU loan to Ukraine. Other, more pro-Ukraine EU nations would have trouble filling the gaps. France, for example, is convulsed by riots motivated in part by the rising cost of living, and populist critics of the establishment are quick to remind voters of the vast sums that have already been sent to Ukraine. The right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, currently the favorite to win France’s next presidential election, recently said that, if she wins, Paris will cut financial aid to Ukraine.
But Zelensky’s biggest challenge comes from Ukraine’s most crucial supporter. Shaky relations with U.S. presidents are nothing new for Zelensky. In the first year of the war, when Joe Biden authorized further military assistance for Ukraine, Zelensky complained about what he wasn’t getting. Biden reportedly “lost his temper” during a call with the Ukrainian leader. “Raising his voice,” he told Zelensky to “show a little more gratitude.” The next year, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times reported, “There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—considerably more than has been reported.”
But Zelensky managed those challenges. Even following last year’s public debacle that saw Trump throw him out of the Oval Office, Zelensky was able to repair his relationship with Trump. That work has now exploded.
Earlier this month, Trump made three decisions that seemed to collectively amount to a breaking point for a reluctantly conciliatory Zelensky. He made a deal with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that would allow Russia to sell diesel fuel, he announced a surprise energy ceasefire that demanded Ukrainian armed forces stop all strikes on Russian refineries, and he waived new sanctions on Russia.
This trio of announcements apparently led Zelensky to conclude that his conciliatory approach was no longer working. According to a person close to Zelensky, he let it be known that “plain speaking” was now needed, and he made the decision to publicly criticize Trump.
Zelensky said Trump’s behavior “is certainly not how partners should treat each other.” When Ukraine struck another Russian refinery, Trump said Zelensky “better damn well stop.” Zelensky said Trump was not being fair or honest. He called Trump weak, and juxtaposed his leadership to the “real leaders” in Europe. Trump fired back, declaring, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president…. I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.” Trump later expanded: “I think if they are going to end up with a settlement of some kind, they are not going to do it with him.” On Monday, Trump added, “To be honest, I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.”
The gloves were off, and Zelensky was in danger of losing Trump. The military-grade version of Starlink, which Ukrainians use for battlefield communications, as well as U.S. early warnings of incoming Russian missiles went silent. “He is not a good guy for us to deal with,” Trump said of Zelensky Friday, adding that he is “more difficult to deal with than Putin.” Zelensky, he said, had “destroyed that country.”
When Russia kept pounding Ukraine’s electricity grid with drones, ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and with access to U.S. intelligence was restricted, Zelensky defied Trump’s orders, letting it be known that the block on attacking Russian refineries was off.
Zelensky is a political survivor, but the latest constellation of crises is the most difficult challenge to his leadership yet.
The post Prepping a Postmortem for Zelensky’s Presidency appeared first on The American Conservative.
On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had directed his military to prepare for new attacks on Iran this month, before deciding to call off the operation. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter, the FT said the IDF had planned for “a multi-day bombing campaign to take place on the week of October 10 that would have targeted civilian infrastructure such as electricity plants, as well as nuclear facilities and regime targets.” According to the FT’s sources, Netanyahu decided against the strikes because of the opposition of President Donald Trump, who wants to avoid reopening the war until after the U.S. midterm elections.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Wednesday that indirect diplomacy with the United States was continuing. According to Iranian state media agency IRNA, Araghchi stated that “negotiations with the United States, conducted via mediators such as Pakistan and Qatar, remain ongoing without interruption.” The foreign minister also published an article in the Financial Times Wednesday; in the piece, Araghchi argued that “false assumptions” about his country were “dangerous,” and said that although Iran was still committed to diplomacy, it had “no trust whatsoever in the sincerity of the US administration’s professed desire for peace.” This follows remarks by the chief of Iran’s national security council Tuesday that his government will not allow any amount of enriched nuclear material to leave the country, which some interpreted as a hardening of Tehran’s stance on the issue.
Brent crude opened around $109 per barrel Wednesday morning. AAA reports that the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.26 per gallon, and the average price of diesel is $6.32 per gallon.
The post Iran War Day 236: Netanyahu Pushing for New Iran Strikes, Per Report appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president’s latest mood swing opens diplomatic possibilities on Ukraine and Iran.
The Iran War just might help end the Russia–Ukraine War. And the Russia–Ukraine War just might help end the Iran War. But first, senior Trump advisors need to play their cards right.
President Donald Trump is both uniquely independent of his political advisors and uniquely dependent on them. “Independent” in that he makes big decisions on impulse, often while ignoring wise counsel. “Dependent” because Trump’s erratic persona ensures policy successes will be rare unless the White House translates his impulses into a coherent strategy.
Trump of late has been acting extra erratically. In two recent cases—the canceling of a planned execution livestream and the firing of a new White House press secretary—key Trump insiders steered the tornado-man president into political fiasco. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had boasted that a high-profile execution by firing squad would be public, only for the public to predictably oppose the idea. And Trump whisperer Natalie Harp had urged hiring as press secretary Katie Zacharia, who proved less-than-composed before a firing squad of reporters.
The walkbacks were embarrassing, though expedient, suggesting Trump is sensitive to popular opinion ahead of the midterm elections in November. I’m normally not one for optimism when it comes to Trump 2.0 foreign policy, but here’s an idea: Trump’s enhanced sensitivity to popular opinion could lead to resolutions of the two biggest foreign policy crises of Trump’s second term—if admin officials find a way to channel his impulses productively.
Much has been made of the perilous military connections between the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran and the risks of World War III. But the economic and diplomatic connections between these two wars bring new possibilities for peace.
The deeply unpopular Iran War, in a roundabout way, has wound up pushing Trump toward diplomacy with Russia. Iran continues to disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, raising prices at the pump and lowering Trump’s tolerance for Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s oil refineries. Earlier this month, Trump not only struck a deal with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel—a move intended to calm oil markets—but also called on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to halt the refinery strikes.
Amid the resulting spat with Zelensky, the Trumpian pendulum continued to swing in Putin’s favor. Trump waived new Russia sanctions passed by Congress, and Zelensky said the U.S. had cut intelligence sharing to Ukraine, including advance warning of ballistic missile strikes. Meanwhile, Ukraine has run out of the U.S.-provided munitions needed to defend against those attacks, and the Pentagon is delaying new shipments.
To be sure, these are grim developments for Ukraine. On Monday, Zelensky announced that a Russian strike on a park had killed several civilians, including a one-year-old baby girl. Ukrainians have described the added terror of ballistic missile strikes when air raid sirens don’t warn civilians to take shelter.
But the security situation in Ukraine was growing ever more dire even before Trump’s turn against Zelensky. Russian attacks on Kiev and other population centers have been escalating for many months, and the Iran War has depleted global stockpiles of missile interceptors. Moreover, the White House isn’t simply kicking the Ukrainians in the teeth. Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner told Kiev the diesel deal was part of an effort to “soften” Putin and jump-start peace talks, a point reiterated publicly by Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
It’s not a preposterous notion. The strategy of pressuring Putin has tended to make him dig in and lash out, not back down. By introducing some carrots into the mix, Washington stands a better chance of rebuilding trust and coaxing Moscow back to negotiations. Indeed, in the same October 9 call on which Trump and Putin hammered out a diesel deal, the Russian leader proposed trilateral, Russian–American–Chinese talks on a Ukraine peace settlement, an idea that gained traction this week.
Of course, Zelensky would prefer that Ukraine and its European partners had seats at the table, but there’s a silver lining in all this for him. Wartime leaders, after years rallying their nations, can struggle to reach negotiated settlements, which require painful concessions from the weaker side. If Trump plays the bad guy, pushing Zelensky to accept a hard peace rather than continue a horrific war, the Ukrainian leader will have more political leeway.
The Europeans too would prefer they were the ones talking to Putin—but that itself is a new development brought about by Trump’s latest mood swing. On previous occasions when Trump turned against Ukraine, European leaders embarked on a groveling charm offensive to get him back onside, but not this time. “There is a growing consensus in European capitals that the continent’s leaders can no longer tolerate a situation where only the Americans are talking to Putin,” reports Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times. “Channels with the Russians are already open and a call between European leaders and Putin may happen soon.”
All this suggests Trump’s new anti-Zelensky groove, though motivated by short-term political calculations related to the Iran War, is reinvigorating diplomacy on Russia–Ukraine. And if you squint, you’ll notice this incipient outbreak of diplomacy, handled responsibly, could be brought full circle, raising the chances of productive peace negotiations with Iran.
During their October 9 phone call, Putin laid out for Trump an Iranian peace proposal. And this Monday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov flew to Tehran for talks with top Iranian officials, his first visit to the country since the war began. A Russian government readout said discussions centered around strengthening the two nations’ security partnership, but also expressed Moscow’s “readiness to help bring about a solution regarding the situation around Iran.”
Again, this whole sequence of events appears to have been sparked by Trump’s concerns about gasoline prices, rather than any commitment to enlightened statecraft. Nevertheless, Trump’s latest seesaw has raised a diplomatic opportunity that White House officials should seize.
The post How Trump’s Turn Against Zelensky Can Lead to Peace appeared first on The American Conservative.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Israel Monday, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, per a report in Axios.
Sources did not disclose the content of the men’s meeting to the press. The visit occurred amid ongoing reports that the U.S. is considering another round of strikes against Iran. Netanyahu, who scored President Donald Trump’s endorsement in Israel’s October 27 elections, said while campaigning this week that he was still seeking regime change in Iran.
The British Defense Minister Wes Streeting announced Tuesday that the UK would conduct defensive air operations over Saudi Arabia against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have struck Saudi airports and energy infrastructure in recent weeks. The Iran-aligned group has intensified its siege of Taiz, the third-largest city in Yemen.
Iranian operations against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz have kept pressure on energy markets. Brent crude opened Tuesday at $109 per barrel. AAA reported national average prices per gallon of $4.28 for regular gasoline and $6.32 for diesel.
The post Iran War Day 235: Hegseth Visits Netanyahu appeared first on The American Conservative.
J.D. Vance could learn a thing or two from Harold Macmillan.
The Anglo leader looked across the globe and saw a Muslim nation, which had already been stirring things up, potentially threatening a vital waterway. At the same time, Israel had its own beef against that country, and was pushing for a joint first-strike. So together, the two governments launched a military attack.
But things did not go well. Casualties were low, but the political blowback was shattering.
Is this a sketch of the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran? Some might so assert, and that can’t be helped. Yet these are the outlines of the Suez Crisis of 1956.
Back then, Britain, Israel, and also France joined together to “safeguard” the Suez Canal and to take the anti-colonialist Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, down a peg. Not many celebrate that conflict, but for those who do, 70th anniversaries are coming up, starting with October 29, when Israel commenced Operation Kadesh, followed a few days later by the Anglo-French Operation Musketeer.
The attacks were a military success, but a political failure. Amid international uproar, a ceasefire was declared, and the foreign forces were soon withdrawn, leaving Nasser to declare victory. Many cheered his willingness to stand up for the liberationist aspirations of not only Arabs, but also the entire Third World (then a fresh phrase, coined four years earlier).
So yes, history rhymes, and yet each historical moment sounds its discordant notes. For instance, back in 1956, the U.S. strongly opposed the Suez operation. President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired general, had seen enough of fighting; in fact, when he came into the White House in 1953, his top priority was to settle the Korean War, which he did. The 34th president was, for sure, a determined Cold Warrior against the Soviet Union, but he wanted to keep the focus on opposing communism, not snuffing out the various nationalisms then springing up, including in Egypt. As they say in the Army, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing—and for Eisenhower, that meant containing Moscow, not Cairo.
Moreover, Ike’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, epitomized an earlier era in U.S. diplomacy, when the State Department strove to be even-handed—critics said, pro-Arab—in the Middle East.
Eisenhower and Dulles worried that the Suez invasion would inflame the Egyptians and others, driving them toward the Soviets, who were encouraging movements of “national liberation.” So as the crisis unspooled, Washington and Moscow found themselves on the same side, telling the invaders to get out.
Suez is generally reckoned as the last hurrah of British imperialism. Yes, there’d still be overseas missions to come, but, with the glaring exception of Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq, the United Kingdom’s appetite for wars of choice had basically abated. (The story of France is similar; as for Israel, well—it’s different.)
Yet there’s another aspect to the Suez saga that should be heartening to conservatives, if not neoconservatives: Parties of the right might make a geopolitical mistake, but if they can fix it, changing their errant ways, they can recover their political standing. Indeed, they can win even bigger in the next general election. That’s what happened in the UK back in the 1950s, and the precedent is worth a ponder.
In the meantime, here’s an American precedent to consider: When U.S. presidents launched wars of choice that didn’t turn out well, their instinct was often to double down—and it was costly for them and their party (as well as, of course, for the country).
For instance, as the Vietnam War started to look quagmire-y in the mid-1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent more troops. The results were huge defeats for Johnson’s Democrats in the 1966 and 1968 elections (including the loss of the presidency). Similarly, as the Iraq War turned into a disaster in the mid-2000s, President George W. Bush hung tough on the “moral clarity” of the mission and then “surged” more troops. For their part, the voters didn’t approve: Bush’s Republicans were walloped in the 2006 and 2008 elections, including again the loss of the White House. The lesson is clear: If you make a mistake, get out as quickly as you can.
The British prime minister who ordered the Suez attack was Anthony Eden, a capital “C” Conservative. The revulsion against him was severe; his health suffered a collapse that was described, publicly but unconvincingly, as a purely physical ailment. In search of relief, Eden traveled not to a hospital, but to the Caribbean, spending nearly a month at the Jamaican estate of the James Bond novelist Ian Fleming.
Upon his return to London, Eden agonized for another month before announcing his resignation on January 9, 1957. Doctors’ orders, he claimed. (Wags said Eden had committed Suez-cide.) Interestingly, once freed from the stresses of office, Eden lived another 20 years, unrepentant about his military misadventure. (The idea that a leader wouldn’t wish to admit a mistake is unsurprising—it’s certainly familiar to American Republicans, surveying their party’s presidents over the last few decades.)
Yet now the Suez saga starts to get decidedly cheerier for the party of the right—and offers hope to conservatives on this side of the Atlantic.
Eden’s successor at 10 Downing Street was Harold Macmillan, who had been serving in the cabinet as chancellor of the exchequer. So Macmillan’s portfolio was finance, not foreign policy. As a member of the team, he had supported Operation Musketeer, albeit while harboring private concerns; his own preferred solution was a peaceful and international economic consortium to subsume the Canal controversy in foreign investment. That was, of course, a road not traveled, but when the fog of war was lifted, Macmillan had no clear fingerprints on the Suez stinker.
That fuzziness served him well in the byzantine succession process that followed Eden’s withdrawal: Macmillan was acceptable to the Edenite dead-enders in the Conservative Party, as well as to more dovish members.
One of the most acute studies of the man captures his essence. Macmillan: A Study in Ambiguity was the title of Anthony Sampson’s 1967 analysis. Sampson quotes Macmillan’s assessment of the situation, given to his son-in-law: “I think Anthony’s going to have a rough ride for the next few weeks. In fact, I shouldn’t be surprised if he lost his seat.”
Mindful that Macmillan was more positive in public, Sampson raised, and then dismissed, the theory that Macmillan had actually encouraged Eden to launch the war, so that he, Macmillan, who was three years older, could get the younger man out of the way. (For what it’s worth—probably more for theatricality than veracity—this sneaky scenario was included in the Netflix miniseries The Crown.)
The new premier’s most urgent task was repairing Britain’s relationship with the United States; as Randolph Churchill would write:
Among the most serious consequences of the Suez debacle was that it nearly destroyed the Anglo-American alliance. It was one of Mr Harold Macmillan’s greatest acts of statesmanship that he was able to heal the breach so very soon after he became Prime Minister.
Macmillan’s great strength was measured deliberation. He was, after all, a chess player and a reader who preferred novels to newspapers.
Born in 1894 to bourgeois wealth—the family business, Macmillan & Co., was even then a publishing powerhouse—young Harold would seem to have had it easy. Yet he had to overcome adversities, from a bullied childhood to a cuckolded marriage.
And, most profoundly, the experience of the First World War. Macmillan volunteered for the army, where he met men very different from those he had known at Oxford. As he told his family in a letter from the front:
A company has just passed my house, back from a long route march, singing wonderfully the dear soldier songs, with silly words and silly tunes, but which somehow seem, sung by their great childish voices, from the depths of their very lovable hearts, the most delicate music and the most sublime poetry. Indeed, of all the war, I think the most interesting (and humbling too) experience is the knowledge one gets of the poorer classes.
In 1915, he was shot through his right hand; for the rest of his life, he could never manage a firm handshake.
Macmillan recovered well enough to be sent back to the front, where, at Ginchy, France, on September 15, 1916, he sustained his most grievous wound. Macmillan biographer D.R. Thorpe sets the scene, incorporating Macmillan’s own words of recollection:
Caught by machine-gunners from the left flank, Macmillan was hit in the left thigh and in the pelvis, and “rolled down into a large shell-hole, where I lay dazed, but not—at first at least—unconscious.” For the next ten hours he intermittently dozed, treated himself with morphine, feigned death as Germans skirted round the shell hole.
He was rescued from no man’s land by Company Sergeant Major Norton and a team of stretcher bearers. These experiences left him with both only a lifelong shuffling gait and a deeper social outlook:
He developed an empathy for those who suffered with him, and for the first time an understanding of those who had not had the advantages of his upbringing and education… and resolved after the war to pursue the Disraelian political ideal of “One Nation.”
So while Macmillan was always a Conservative in politics, he was also always a moderate, rejecting both laissez-faire and socialism. In 1938, by then a rising figure in Parliament, he published a book that defined his corporatist worldview. Its title: The Middle Way.
Fast-forward to 1957. As recalled by yet another Macmillan biographer, Alistair Horne, one Tory member of Parliament wrote at the time that “everybody feels such a load of depression, because an ill man was led by illness into folly.” The MP was referring, of course, to Eden. Horne continues:
The country at large had never felt flatter, more discouraged, more bewildered or more uncertain of the future. The picture was of a Britain thoroughly menaced, at odds with America, all her alliances shaken after Suez. The nation too had become infected by Eden’s disordered bile duct.
Yet while the psychological impact of Suez was seismic, by a cold numerical reckoning, it was something of a blip. In a week of fighting, just 16 British soldiers were killed (add to that 10 French soldiers and 177 Israelis; Egyptian losses, meanwhile, were closer to 1,000).
So here we can pause over a parallel on Iran today. While the political backlash against the Iran war has been enormous, nevertheless, a utilitarian calculus might count this conflict as small in the scheme of things. As this author observed in these pages nearly three months ago, American deaths in the Iran conflict total fewer than two dozen; even after an upward revision in October, the figure remains small. For purposes of comparison, in 2025, a total of 828 American service personnel died of various causes while on active duty.
The point here is not to minimize the carnage of the Iran war. Rather, a look at actual numbers can help put matters into proportion. Indeed, perspective helps make clear the possible analogy to that earlier misfired Mideast war, seven decades ago, which hurt the responsible political party, but not for long—once that party made the right repairs.
The beginning of the Conservative recovery after 1956 could be seen in the way the war was framed by opponents, who attributed it to Eden personally. During the fighting, Aneurin Bevan—a longtime Labour mainstay, soon to be the party’s spokesman on foreign affairs—roared to an anti-war rally at Trafalgar Square:
Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing; he could argue that he was entering the house to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be, then he is too stupid to be a prime minister.
Echoing Bevan, The Daily Mirror, then the largest-circulation newspaper in Britain, headlined “Eden’s War.”
The opposition’s focus on Eden was, in fact, a gift to the Conservatives, because once the singular bogeyman was gone, the Tories didn’t look so bad; neither Macmillan nor anyone else in his government talked about “finishing the job” in Egypt. As for imperialism in general, some 14 British colonies gained their independence during Macmillan’s tenure; in 1960, his “wind of change” speech in South Africa received worldwide attention.
With their fears of endless war allayed, and with Macmillan’s charming of Eisenhower and Dulles, Britons could return to domestic concerns, and were free to recall the privation suffered under six years of Labour rule, 1945–51, when the socialist regimen was price controls and queues. (The National Health Service, enacted under Labour, was, of course, enduringly popular; Macmillan’s Conservatives wisely made their peace with the NHS, even as they tweaked it.)
Macmillan’s truly was the Middle Way, tilting only slightly to starboard. Margaret Thatcher recalled in her memoirs, with a tincture of right-wing disdain, “The natural path to promotion and success at this time lay in the centre of politics and on the left of the Conservative Party.”
As Macmillan said of his governing philosophy, “Our first objective must be to keep the party together, at all costs united.” With that in mind, in a 1957 address to his fellow Tory MPs, he paddled toward platitudes, while keeping his partisan pointedness:
I hear a lot of silly talk about the Left and the Right. To the broad stream of our philosophy there are many tributaries. Indeed we are always adding to this flow as the Parties of the Left break up into a kind of delta of confusion. And so our great river flows on triumphantly to the sea.
Macmillan posted a sign on the door to the Cabinet room: “Quiet calm deliberation disentangles every knot.” Thorpe adds that the new PM was eager to disentangle one knot in particular: “He made sure that this coded distancing of himself from the frenetic atmosphere of the Suez crisis became widely known.” Indeed, writing from the vantage point of 2011, Thorpe detailed Macmillan’s irenic activities and added his own tart comment: “Unfortunately, the lesson was not heeded at the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003.”
Providentially, the British electoral calendar gave Macmillan time to breathe, and he made the most of it, focusing on peace and prosperity. “Let’s be frank about it,” he said in 1957, “most of our people have never had it so good.”
Then, in his 1959 re-election campaign, Macmillan’s party operatives sharpened the contrast with the socialists: “Life’s better with the Conservatives. Don’t let Labour ruin it.” Voters agreed: The Tories were returned with an increased majority in Parliament. Even Thatcher, first elected to Parliament that year and well to the right of her leader, recalled, “On top of the sense of prosperity, there was an awareness that in Harold Macmillan Britain had a statesman capable of acting a distinguished role on the international stage.” (In fact, Macmillan’s big-tent governance made room for Thatcher: She would later accept a junior ministerial position.)
For a time, he was so popular that he was dubbed “Supermac,” and the moniker was only semi-ironic. Yet by 1963, Macmillan was almost 70 years old; four decades in public life had worn him down, and so he left office.
His was a worthy career in service to his country. Amid all the terrors and radicalisms of the 20th century, Macmillan had steered the ship of state on a safe and steady course. To be sure, other successful politicians on the right have had the same idea: In the 1920s, Republicans won on “normalcy” and “Keep Cool with Coolidge.” In the 1950s, Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats won West German elections using the slogan Keine Experimente! (“No experiments!”). And in 1984, the Reaganite GOP reminded voters, “It’s morning again in America… Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
This is the obvious winning formula for parties of the right: We’re careful, we won’t do risky or dumb things. Most conservatives think they think that way—the challenge is to prove it. And so if a conservative leader veers off track, well, the conservative party had better get back on track, for the sake of the country, as well as itself.
In America today, the electorate does not seem pleased with its leadership. The incumbent party faces severe challenges, and yet the opposition party, too, is mistrusted. Still, somebody has to win in November, and the auguries bode better for blue than for red.
Yet whatever happens in 2026, the more consequential election comes in 2028. In the meantime, if we listen carefully, we can hear the historical rhyme of Vice President J.D. Vance with Macmillan. To be sure, Vance was not born rich, and yet he, too, is a book-reading war veteran, well placed in the succession order.
Still, there’s a rip in the rhyme: It’s known that Vance privately opposed the Iran war, whereas Macmillan supported the folly of Suez. But, just like Macmillan in the 1950s, Vance is a team player and a party-builder—for better or worse, he’s no Thomas Massie. The VP keeps his focus on the other party.
In September, Vance said, “I’m not asking anybody to agree on every single policy of the administration. What I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals.” Continuing in that vein, he added, “Do not throw the baby out with the bath water. Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.” These points are now, in fact, a feature of his stump speech.
Whatever happens in the 2026 elections, we can look ahead to 2028 and anticipate that the Democrats—including their ascendant hard left—will be emboldened. This will put their foibles more fully on display, and so make them more vulnerable, as Vance already suggests, to a thorough comparing-and-contrasting.
If Republicans can get back to being the normal party of peace and prosperity, they can say in 2028, in the spirit of Macmillan’s successful campaign of 1959, “Life’s better with Republicans. Don’t let Democrats ruin it.”
Of course, the preceding paragraph starts off with a big “if.” Can the GOP put foreign war in the rearview mirror, as did Macmillan? Some are already comparing the Iran war to Suez, and yet some had earlier compared the Iraq War to Suez—and yet obviously that lesson then didn’t stick. So in 2028, a victory-minded Republican will have to work extra hard to convince voters that this time, the GOP president will stick to a vision of prudent restraint. Be a normal conservative, pushing peace and prosperity, not regime change somewhere in the Middle East.
If so, the same Republican can then put the onus on Democrats for their abnormal ideas and impoverishing agendas (and yes, point to the riots in France as a warning of what happens when progressive open-border policies meet the engorged welfare state).
We can’t yet know whether such messaging will win in 2028. Yet the British version won in 1959. And we know that history rhymes.
The post These Conservatives Fought an Ill-Fated War, but Recovered and Won the Next Election appeared first on The American Conservative.
Fighting between the Houthi rebels and Saudi-aligned forces continued over the weekend, with deaths and injuries reported in both Yemen and Saudi Arabia. A Houthi spokesman said Saudi warplanes had carried out ten airstrikes in Yemen since Saturday, killing or wounding over 30 people. In Saudi Arabia, six people were reported injured in a Houthi strike on the southern city of Najran, and Saudi authorities said multiple missiles and drones targeting Riyadh were intercepted Sunday.
Mehrdad Akhlaghi Ketabchi was confirmed as Iran’s new defense minister by the country’s parliament Sunday. He is the first permanent appointee to the role since the previous defense minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh, was killed on the first day of the war. Ketabchi’s professional background is reportedly in defense technology and industrial organization.
AAA reports that the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.30 per gallon, and the average price of diesel is $6.32 per gallon.
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In a statement posted to Truth Social on Sunday, President Trump announced his “Complete and Total Endorsement” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election bid. “Bibi Netanyahu has been a Great Warrior Prime Minister,” Trump wrote, “and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Trump went on to describe Netanyahu as “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant,” adding that he was “the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much.”
The president also suggested that if Netanyahu did not win, the United States may rethink its military operations against Iran. “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” he wrote, “America will have to do this work [i.e., fighting the Iran war] ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.”
Israel will hold its parliamentary elections on October 27. Netanyahu, who is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, is seeking to win enough seats for his Likud party and its parliamentary allies to continue his premiership. His closest rival is former IDF general Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar party holds a narrow lead in most polls.
Although U.S. presidents have historically avoided endorsing candidates in foreign elections, Trump has broken with precedent to back political allies in Poland, Argentina, Hungary, Japan, Honduras, Chile, Colombia, and now Israel.
The post Trump Endorses Netanyahu in Israeli Election appeared first on The American Conservative.
Iranian strikes on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz have surged recently, with four tankers coming under attack in the last day and around two dozen vessels reported hit in the last two weeks. This makes October the worst period for shipping since the opening weeks of the war.
Two ships were struck by projectiles on Friday, and two supertankers reportedly struck mines on Saturday. According to the official Iranian news agency IRNA, the IRGC Navy said Saturday that the Strait of Hormuz was “closed.”
Also on Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said his country had transmitted to the U.S. government a plan to reopen the Strait. “Through Qatar, we have conveyed a concrete seven-day plan,” Araghchi said in remarks delivered at a regional forum in Iraq. “If the necessary conditions are met, the Strait can be reopened and normal maritime passage restored within seven days. The choice now rests with the United States.”
AAA reports that the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.31 per gallon, and the average price of diesel is $6.33 per gallon.
The post Iran War Day 232: Attacks on Hormuz Shipping Surge as Iran Says Strait ‘Closed’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
That makes winning the midterms difficult, to say the least.
In the last consumer price index report before the midterm elections, inflation was up to 3.7 percent. It’s still a far cry from the 9.1 percent peak under former President Joe Biden, but that offers little comfort to vulnerable congressional Republicans.
President Donald Trump’s job approval rating on the economy sits at just 33.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. On inflation specifically, only 27.2 percent approve of the job he is doing, while nearly 70 percent disapprove. A Fox News poll this month found that 77 percent disapproved of Trump on inflation, while a meager 22 percent approved.
It is against this backdrop that Republicans will be defending their narrow congressional majorities. And while the polls in some of the most competitive Senate races look iffy, the national electoral environment is indisputably bad for the GOP.
These dire conditions have arisen as a result of Trump’s own choices. The biggest driver of the most recent inflation is a spike in energy prices caused by the Iran war.
Just as Biden chose to do another COVID stimulus right as lockdowns were ending and people were going back to work, Trump chose to start a war with Iran he cannot now end.
Biden was warned by political allies that what he was doing would exacerbate inflationary pressures on the economy but persisted anyway, dooming his party’s congressional majorities and, ultimately, his presidency.
Trump was warned that the Iran war would have similar political consequences. He was counseled by his own team that the regime in Tehran was not as close to collapse as outside agitators for war were claiming, and he was advised that an attack would cause the Iranians to close the Strait of Hormuz and choke off oil supplies.
Like Biden before him, Trump ignored all these warnings and pressed ahead. The electoral impact is likely to be similar.
Biden had defeated the socialists who demanded passage of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries, only to then follow their lead on opening the border and jacking up federal spending.
Trump had routed the neoconservatives, running many of them out of the Republican Party entirely, yet ended up giving them the war George W. Bush never did (albeit mainly because W. couldn’t, having already taken their lead on Iraq).
Both disasters were predictable and predicted. Trump even had the benefit of watching Biden so spectacularly misread his mandate. Trump’s successor-turned-predecessor’s errors paved the way for his own return to the White House.
And yet here we are.
Trump’s tariffs have also been unhelpful. Voters associate them with higher prices, even when the connection is dubious. (Though it is true that tariffs raised some prices.) But at least Trump had made some kind of case for trade protectionism and reshoring American jobs on the campaign trail, even if the electorate was then more concerned about the cost of living than jobs and unemployment.
While Trump appealed to Republicans with disparate views on foreign policy, there was little in his first term and virtually nothing in his 2024 campaign to indicate to voters that a war with Iran was in the offing.
Inflation was always going to be a difficult issue for Trump. Even if he did nothing to make the problem worse, price increases are cumulative. In most cases, he was only going to be able to cause the rate of inflation to decline, slowing price increases rather than immediately dropping them back down to where they were in his first term.
But inflation likely would have continued to come down if he had avoided the Iran war. His positions would then have been more defensible, even if midterm elections are typically hard for the party that controls the White House.
Trump could have more plausibly made the resurgence of inflation Biden’s legacy. Now he shares responsibility for this, and his party will almost certainly share the same fate as the Democrats in Congress who enacted Biden’s spending plans. And this GOP Congress didn’t even get to vote on the war (unless you count the war powers resolutions voted on after hostilities began).
Trump says the latest round of inflation is a small price to pay for preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yes, high gasoline and diesel prices are preferable to nuclear annihilation, if you believe those were the stakes.
Most voters don’t, however. And Trump himself was ready to end the fighting back in June. This war is continuing because of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump went down this road. But if and when the president succeeds at breaking this oil logjam, he will not receive the same credit for fixing a problem he helped create.
Now Trump is on the campaign trail, sometimes in the reddest parts of the country, seeking to stop an electoral bloodbath like that suffered by the GOP in 2006, when another ill-advised Mideast war shredded its congressional majorities.
Trump, in other words, is furiously trying to fix a problem of his own creation.
The post Trump, Like Biden, Has Become a President of Inflation and War appeared first on The American Conservative.
Andrew Day and Luke Nicastro discuss the Trump-Putin diesel deal, the Trump-Zelensky spat, the “energy ceasefire” that wasn’t, Ukraine’s grim prospects this winter, and a new book on progressive foreign policy edited by Matt Duss, A World for All.
The post TAC Right Now: Trump Turns on Zelensky appeared first on The American Conservative.
In an interview Thursday, President Trump said the United States may need to strike Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground site believed to play a key role in Iran’s nuclear program. “We’re looking at Pickaxe Mountain,” the president told Newsmax. “We may have to go there. We’ll take a shot at that one. We’ll knock it out fast.” Trump also addressed reports that he was considering using the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB; popularly known as the “mother of all bombs”), refusing to rule out the weapon’s deployment against Iranian targets.
On Friday, Saudi military spokesman Major General Turki al-Maliki announced the interception of multiple missiles and drones targeting Saudi forces and infrastructure. This follows a deadly Houthi attack Thursday on the presidential palace in Aden, the Saudi-backed government’s de facto capital. Fighting also reportedly continued around Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city, which is currently held by the government but encircled by Houthi forces.
Also on Friday, Iran’s army chief suggested that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen if U.S. forces withdrew. In a post on X, General Mohammad Akraminia wrote that “if America leaves the region, the Strait of Hormuz will reopen and collective security will be established with the participation of the region’s countries, and the global economy will improve.” He added that “if [the U.S.] doesn’t leave, we’ll expel it.”
Brent crude was trading at around $106 per barrel Friday morning. AAA reports that the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.33 per gallon, and the average price of diesel is $6.33 per gallon.
The post Iran War Day 231: Trump Says U.S. ‘May Have To’ Strike Pickaxe Mountain appeared first on The American Conservative.
The late senator’s legacy threatens Darline Graham’s political future.
“Lindsey liked war,” said President Donald Trump on the day of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) funeral in July. “He’s never seen a war he did not like.”
Now Graham’s sister might find out that voters even in ruby-red South Carolina like the Iran War a great deal less than her brother did.
Appointed three days after her brother’s death to finish out his term, Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) faces an actual election in South Carolina, where Republican senators have been safe for at least 20 years.
Not this year. A late September poll by the right-leaning Trafalgar group showed a neck-and-neck race between Graham and her Democratic challenger, the pediatrician Annie Andrews, with the Republican leading by only 1 point. Another survey from Insider Advantage, taken in the same period, also revealed a 1 percent difference favoring Graham. A Rasmussen poll released Friday showed Graham at 49 percent and Andrews at 45. Six percent of respondents were not sure.
By contrast, Lindsey Graham defeated his 2020 Democratic opponent by 10 points.
A number of red states this election year are seeing unusual surges by Democratic candidates due to voters’ concerns about rising gasoline prices and general inflation, and South Carolina is no exception. Andrews has not only centered her messaging around high costs but tied them to the Iran war. And the Democrat repeatedly emphasizes that Darline Graham voted three times for that war to continue.
In their only debate, televised on Sunday night, Andrews highlighted the war again while the Republican senator hewed to the standard neocon posturing worthy of a Graham.
“My opponent… had the opportunity to vote to end the war,” Andrews charged. “But three times in a row, she voted to continue it.”
“Why in the world would we stop now when they’re still dangerous?” Graham said. “And we are close to ending the war. Again, I think the president wants to end the war. I know he does. We all want the war to end.”
This is the closest Graham came to sympathizing with South Carolina voters who have tired of the war and the resulting price spikes. It felt like some recognition that the situation was dire on this front, for the state and for her campaign.
Still, the hawkish hits kept coming.
“But I support a strong military,” Graham added. “I believe in peace through strength.”
“I fully believe that we need to stand with Israel,” Graham added, predictably. “The same people that want to hurt and attack Israel want to come after us.”
“The terrorists that were close to getting a nuclear weapon will come here,” she said, repeating the common neocon refrain. “So, we need to stand with our strongest ally.”
She even tried to blame the war on Democrats.
“Let’s not forget again how the war started,” Graham continued. “The Democrats let Iran get a nuclear weapon almost.”
The 2003 Iraq War, including the fight-them-over-there-so-you-won’t-have-to-fight-them-here rhetoric, was popular at one time in “Bush Country,” as South Carolina has been called.
Today’s Iran War? Not so much. Andrews has capitalized on antiwar sentiments as she tries to yank a Senate seat from the Republicans.
“This reckless war in Iran has helped drive fuel prices to record highs,” Andrews said at a campaign stop. “Darline Graham has voted multiple times to continue this war that is directly responsible for the six-dollar diesel.”
“We need to lower the damn diesel,” she said.
When Lindsey Graham was still Andrews’s target—and when she had far less chance of becoming Senator than she does today—her rhetoric was even sharper on the war. “Lindsey Graham wants to send your sons and daughters to war,” Andrews said in March. “Your sons and daughters are the reason I am in this fight.”
Her focus now is on the impact of the war on voters’ pocketbooks. Judging by the polls, that new rhetorical strategy is working.
As a South Carolinian, I would still put my money on Graham winning. But the closeness of this race would have been unthinkable absent the political context created by Trump’s war. Moreover, many South Carolinians are uncomfortable with how the sister of the late Senator was awarded a high office by bloodright. Adding to the difficulty for Darline, a sizable number of South Carolina conservatives had supported Lindsey’s closest primary challenger, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who ran as an “America First” war skeptic. Many who had pinched their noses and voted for Lindsey may not do the same for Darline. Some Norman supporters have even pushed for a write-in campaign.
The Iran War itself probably won’t sway the election, but the higher prices very well could, and voters do know the former led to the latter. Voters watch the news. They budget. They pump gas.
They also see Republican leaders treating them as if they were stupid.
“Everybody’s frustrated about fuel prices, obviously, but that’s not related to policies, that’s not related to Republicans in office,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recently said in an interview, adding “this is related to the Strait of Hormuz.”
Well, what else could be related to the Strait of Hormuz? Perhaps the Iran War—a signature policy of “Republicans in office,” especially the one in the White House.
Antiwar Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently shared that clip of Johnson and asked, “Who wants to tell him?”
Exactly. No one needs to tell South Carolina’s voters that the war is helping cause their financial pain.
Trump is right: Lindsey Graham loved war. His greatest legacy is arguably the U.S. war with Iran.
It meant a lot to him. It could also cost his sister his Senate seat.
The post Could Lindsey Graham’s War Cost His Sister a Senate Seat? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The proxy war against Russia is running aground on the physical limitations of the American war machine.
It looks as if we’re getting to the tough choices part of the program. CNN reported Thursday that Ukraine has run out of Patriot interceptor missiles. This news came after several days of wrangling and slap-fighting between Washington and Kiev over intelligence-sharing, internet support for Ukrainian operations, and whether or not Ukraine would continue striking Russian energy infrastructure.
This is bad for Ukraine, although not altogether surprising. For months, the press has been full of ominous stories and analyses about the dire state of American munitions stockpiles after the U.S. began its latest little jaunt in the Middle East. (Including those in The American Conservative—please subscribe!) Two weeks ago Axios reported that the U.S. had moved Patriots to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to protect energy interests in the Persian Gulf region from Iran and its allies. That decision was hardly a shock; the main weapon Iran has deployed against the U.S. and its fellow travelers has been wreaking havoc on oil and gas interests, and consequently on Western economies. Keeping Aramco up and running is a priority for the White House, especially as fuel prices have become the thematic issue for the American midterm elections.
But the fact is that material reality is beginning to bite. As Jennifer Kavanagh has written in these pages, interceptor stockpiles are probably still at a level where the U.S. can comfortably continue the war in Iran without undue risk to American assets, but such a continuation will come at the cost of readiness in other theaters. The competition between Ukraine and American clients in the Middle East for advanced munitions is not a new phenomenon, and has previously resulted in some resource-shuffling that would be amusing if it weren’t so desperate. The Iran War is new, though, and it is a war that, because of direct American involvement and its bearing on American economic interests, will always tend to demand more attention and resources than the proxy conflict in Europe. America’s extension (one might justifiably say overextension without a hint of partisanship) doubtless has informed Russia’s escalating attacks on Ukraine.
One reasonable interpretation of the White House’s alleged fresh hostility to Ukraine—widely decried in the pro-Ukrainian sections of the Western press—is that it arises from the bare recognition of this physical reality. There are only so many missiles to go around; the U.S. is not going to sacrifice the safety of its own military personnel and its own economic security for Ukraine. The well is dry, and the Ukrainians are going to have to pack things up here.
Of course, the question is whether the pushme-pullyou dynamic inherent to the Ukraine War will now take over. When things are going badly for the Russians, the Ukrainians become more intractable; when things are going badly for the Ukrainians, the Russians have less incentive to quit. Hence the argument for the necessity of President Donald Trump’s deal to waive sanctions on Russian diesel to “soften” Russia’s position: offer some goodies in exchange for Russia calling off the dogs. The proof will be in the pudding, but prospectively it is not clear that the volume of diesel moved under the deal will amount to a very large goodie at all.
After five paragraphs of even-keeled exposition of the news, is it too early to say we told you so? We really, really told you so. The limitations of the American defense-industrial base and the finite nature of American munitions stockpiles are not fresh topics! No amount of will or principle, no amount of admirable Ukrainian valor and ferocity, can overcome physical reality, and this physical reality was as large and obvious as an iceberg hulking on the horizon, or a volcano twitching and smoking over a city, or a tornado ripping merrily through the green fields of Kansas toward an idyllic trailer park. The United States is a polity of unparalleled wealth and might, but it is not, in the end, exempt from the laws of the universe; Uncle Sam is not quite up to the challenges of godhead. We told you so, and now the Ukrainians, our allies in the Middle East, and the American people are going to bear the consequences of going ahead and trying to sustain vast wars in two separate theaters anyway. It’s just a matter of deciding who is going to get to hold the muddiest part of the stick.
Trying to continue in this fashion is, I would submit, madness, but we may not even have the luxury of indulging madness at this point. The missiles are running out. That is the end of the story.
And you know what? Don’t even mention Taiwan.
The post The End of the Story in Ukraine? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Amid continued uncertainty about next steps in the nearly eight-month Iran War, CNN reported Thursday that the Trump administration is considering using the United States’ largest conventional ordnance to hit Iranian nuclear sites and infrastructure.
American officials told CNN that the military has prepared strike plans featuring the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb or MOAB—nicknamed “the mother of all bombs”—for a possible resumption of combat operations before or after the U.S. midterm elections. One official expressed doubts that the MOAB, which is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the American arsenal, would be able to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear sites.
President Donald Trump is reportedly weighing military options against the Islamic Republic as Iranian attacks on tankers continue to disrupt energy markets. Brent crude opened Thursday at $106 per barrel, and AAA reported national average prices per gallon of $4.33 for regular gas and $6.32 for diesel.
Even as operations around the Strait of Hormuz remain in limbo, the war’s Yemeni front saw significant action in the past 24 hours. The Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels struck the presidential palace of the internationally recognized Yemeni government at Aden with missiles, reportedly killing two security guards. The Yemeni government says its officials were unharmed.
The post Iran War Day 230: U.S. Considering Use of ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on Iran, Per Report appeared first on The American Conservative.
Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels traded strikes Monday and Tuesday, disrupting regional travel and endangering energy infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia retaliated for weekend attacks on the Riyadh airport, which prompted some regional airlines to suspend service to the Saudi capital, with a Tuesday strike on a Houthi oil facility in Sanaa. The Houthis threatened counterstrikes on Aramco facilities. The rebel group continued its encirclement of Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city.
Haaretz reported that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Saudi Arabia through intermediaries for permission to join the campaign against the Houthis. According to the report, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is hesitant to greenlight the proposal because he believes it will play poorly with the Saudi public.
The Yemen campaign has kept energy markets tight, along with continued Iranian operations around the Strait of Hormuz. UK Maritime Trade Operations reported that Sunday a record six vessels were struck in the Persian Gulf. Brent crude opened Monday after the long weekend at $106 per barrel. AAA reported a national average price per gallon of $4.34 for regular gas and $6.28 for diesel.
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The price of Brent crude oil on Monday morning topped $105 per barrel—a two-week high—amid an escalation in fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni Houthis, an Iran-aligned group. President Donald Trump said Saturday he may join Saudi Arabia’s retaliatory strikes following attacks by the Houthis including on the main international airport in Riyadh.
The skies over Riyadh were empty on Monday as Saudi Arabia maintained a suspension of operations at the airport.
Iran said Sunday night it had offered to mediate between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. “Insisting on a military approach and ignoring a political solution will further complicate the current situation,” said a statement published by the Iranian foreign ministry on social media. While the Houthis are often described as a “proxy” of Iran, regional experts say they act independently of Tehran in pursuit of their own distinct objectives.
A 2022 truce between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces broke down in recent months. The resumption of fighting in Yemen, as well as successful Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, have raised fears of an escalating regional war drawing the U.S. and Iran back into major direct hostilities.
Iran’s national security advisor said Sunday that Tehran would target digital infrastructure in the Gulf if fighting with the U.S. resumed.
The post Iran War Day 227: Oil Prices Climb as Trump Mulls Joining Yemen War appeared first on The American Conservative.
The State Department confirmed that one American was among the 12 reported dead from the Houthis’ Saturday strike on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The statements released after the attack Saturday and Sunday did not disclose the victim’s name.
The Yemeni front in the wider Middle Eastern war, which has pitted the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels against the American-aligned Saudis, has seen some of the most intense action in the region over the past week. The internationally recognized Yemeni government claimed Sunday to be advancing to retake territory on the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint for Red Sea traffic that the Houthis seized in September.
Meanwhile, Iran appeared to continue its campaign against tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf. The UKMTO reported that a projectile struck a tanker transiting the Strait of Hormuz Sunday morning.
The ongoing operations in the Strait reflect the diplomatic deadlock between the U.S. and Iran. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told the state-affiliated Tasnim news agency Sunday that the United States’ responses to Iranian conditions for ending the war contained “ambiguities” and were considered “inadequate.”
Despite improved flows through the Strait, the war’s strain on energy markets has only modestly decreased. AAA reported a national average price per gallon of $4.36 for regular gasoline and $6.28 for diesel.
The post Iran War Day 226: One American Dead in Houthi Attack on Saudi Airport appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Kremlin said Saturday that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin relayed Iran’s terms for ending the war to President Donald Trump in a Friday phone call.
According to the Russian state-backed RIA news agency, Dmitri Peskov, a government spokesman, said, “In coordination with the Iranian president, Putin conveyed the Iranian side’s views on a possible resolution to the conflict to Trump.” Putin and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian met on the sidelines of the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Turkmenistan last week.
The Trump–Putin phone call yielded a deal for sanction waivers on Russian diesel as the Trump administration tries to ease pain at the pump before the November 3 midterm elections. Iranian operations in the Strait of Hormuz have continued to pressure world energy markets, despite improved traffic through the waterway.
The ongoing conflict between the Iranian-aligned Yemeni Houthis and Saudi Arabia has also disrupted global logistics. Saudi Arabia closed the Riyadh airport Saturday after a Houthi missile attack.
Brent crude closed at $105 per barrel Friday, slightly up from its opening price. AAA reported a Saturday national average price per gallon of $4.37 for regular gas and $6.28 for diesel.
The post Iran War Day 225: Putin Relays Iran’s Terms to Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Iran catastrophe could revitalize America First.
The resumption of tit-for-tat strikes between American forces and an emboldened Iran in early September shattered any illusion of a lasting lull as the conflict entered its seventh month. Meanwhile, the escalating situation in Yemen—where the Houthis have tightened their control over strategic regions surrounding the Bab al-Mandab Strait and struck key Saudi oil infrastructure—has not only sent oil prices soaring, but also fully exposed the Iran War’s regional scale and global implications. And now, Tehran has stepped up attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz as the U.S. tries to reopen the waterway.
But beyond the immediate news cycle, the tendency to fixate on shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and similarly tactical developments leaves Washington blind to the true historical significance of the current moment. The Iran War is a structural watershed as seismic as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We are witnessing the logical end of U.S. overextension in the Middle East and the birth of a post-American West Asia defined by a new regional equilibrium.
The combined effects of the Trump administration’s incoherent military objectives, optics-driven approach, and chaotic prosecution of the war find close parallels in the overextension of the Roman Empire. In 260 AD, Emperor Valerian marched toward the rugged terrain of western Persia anticipating a swift, decisive victory over the Sassanid Empire. Instead, plague struck and his supply lines collapsed, leaving Valerian’s legions trapped. He was taken captive by his enemy, the Shahanshah Shapur I, and forced to live out his life as a prisoner of war in Persia. This development represented far more than a simple tactical defeat. Valerian’s downfall sent shock waves across the civilized world, exposing the hard limits of imperial power projection in a faraway land. It signaled that Rome was overextended, strategically exhausted, and no longer capable of maintaining an offensive posture along its distant frontiers.
President Donald Trump’s promises to end foreign conflicts, prevent World War III, and recalibrate America’s bloated Cold War alliances played a major role in his 2024 campaign. But instead of making good on these pledges, he launched a new forever war in Iran (despite multiple warnings from officials in his own administration), undermined U.S. military credibility, and proved even more bellicose than the liberal internationalists in DC he claimed to have vanquished. MAGA foreign policy has devolved into a form of “red-pilled globalism,” driven by arbitrary executive impulse, economic coercion, and unilateral military interventions. Predictably, it has run into a brick wall: The structural limits of American power in the 21st century are now fully visible to adversaries and friends alike.
Yet, the Iran War could ultimately prove a “Pyrrhic defeat,” a strategic chastening that also serves as a necessary catalyst for long-overdue structural adjustment and a grand strategic reset. By laying bare the futility of Washington’s ideological hyper-interventionism and permanent military presence overseas, Trump’s Valerian-style fall could be a blessing in disguise, forcing Washington to finally withdraw from the Middle East and adopt a realist, clear-eyed “America First” foreign policy.
For nearly five decades, American strategy in the region has been shackled to the Carter Doctrine. Promulgated in 1980, it declared that the United States would use any means necessary to prevent outside domination of the Persian Gulf and guarantee the free flow of Middle Eastern oil. Today, the underlying rationale for that commitment has vanished. The Cold War has long ended. The United States is the world’s leading producer of crude oil and natural gas, and it now has access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
Ironically, the ongoing war in Iran and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz have crippled global oil supplies and sent energy prices soaring, worsening inflation and raising the risks of a global economic recession. Operation Epic Fury failed to topple the Islamic Republic. Iran’s asymmetric strategy—leveraging the country’s highland geography, its web of underground “missile cities,” and mass-produced drones—has shown U.S. military bases in the region to be vulnerable targets rather than valuable platforms for power projection. MAGA militarism has proven that the continued pursuit of global primacy in a post-unipolar era destabilizes the world order and harms U.S. interests.
The shift in the distribution of power is probably irreversible. American bases and clandestine sites have suffered repeated and debilitating attacks from Iranian forces. Given the exorbitant costs and scale of the damage, the Pentagon is considering reducing the U.S. military footprint in the Persian Gulf after the war. The conflict has also consumed massive quantities of sophisticated U.S. munitions, leading to critical shortages in both stand-off offensive weapons (e.g., PrSMs, ATACMS, Tomahawk cruise missiles) and defensive interceptors for air defense systems like THAAD and Patriot. America remains an extraordinarily powerful country, but its failures against Iran demonstrate the essence of strategic overreach: not weakness in absolute terms, but a mismatch, worsened by the emerging multi-nodal world, between expansive commitments and finite resources.
The end of the Carter Doctrine in West Asia should not be mourned. Rather, it should be seen as a vital strategic correction that could yield immediate dividends, provided the transition is handled with prudence. Extricating the U.S. military from the Middle East would save tens of billions of dollars annually while halting the diversion of critical defense hardware from the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific.
Furthermore, removing the American security umbrella would force regional powers to confront their own security environment and negotiate a pragmatic balance of power. Indeed, the Iran War’s far-reaching repercussions are already driving a new security architecture through the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement among Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The framework could yet extend to Egypt and, perhaps, eventually Iran—creating a Nixonian concert of powers centered on these five dominant states of the Middle East plus Israel (ME5+1). A retrenched Washington could also transform itself into a neutral arbiter and reengage with the region as an economic partner, advancing its commercial ties and business interests across the greater West Asia without being dragged into local conflicts. The new equilibrium could thus serve both American interests and regional stability.
Most importantly, any path toward exiting the Iran quagmire also clears the way for an authentic, durable, and disciplined “America First” foreign policy—one properly understood not as a disguised ideology or an ephemeral political movement tied to a single personality like Trump, but as a tradition of sovereign realism rooted in the American founding and concrete national interests.
Like every great power in history, the United States faces geographical, material, and institutional constraints that cannot be wished away. America’s resources and hard-earned capital are too valuable to squander indiscriminately, myopically, or on a whim. A post-Iran War U.S. grand strategy must reorder America’s hierarchy of interests accordingly: defending the homeland and Western Hemisphere, rebuilding the domestic industrial base to ensure U.S. economic and technological competitiveness, maintaining a decisive balance of power in Asia and the Pacific by helping allies build up their capabilities to counterbalance China, and encouraging capable middle-tier and regional powers to assume primary responsibility for the peace and stability of their own neighborhoods.
The revealed hollowness of MAGA’s exceptionalist rhetoric and unilateral militarism may feel today like the reckoning undergone by Valerian, but ultimately it could unleash a sober America First realism that would remedy and revitalize American power. Still, ensuring that the Iran predicament is remembered as a “Pyrrhic defeat”—not a total loss for America’s global power and prestige—involves making a pivotal choice: Washington must forgo its hubris, resist institutionalized complacency, and adapt to the new systemic realities worldwide.
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President Trump said Thursday that the U.S. would not attack Iran before November’s midterm elections. In a post on Truth Social, the president wrote that “while Iran is in very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily, and while the Blockade will remain in full force and effect… we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections.” In the same post, he also said that “productive discussions” were underway with Tehran. The statement comes following media reports earlier in the week that Trump was looking to restart combat operations imminently.
Also on Thursday, two Houthi missile attacks killed three people in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The strikes targeted Riyadh’s international airport, and according to Saudi officials hit both the airport building itself and an aircraft belonging to state carrier Saudia. Thursday’s strikes follow similar attacks on Saudi airports conducted on October 6 and 7.
Oil prices eased slightly on Friday, with Brent crude trading at around $103 per barrel. According to AAA, the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.37 per gallon.
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The Trump administration is missing the bigger picture.
In the classic martial arts film Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee’s character is instructing a young, aspiring fighter. Irritated at the lack of progress his student is making, he points to the sky. “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon,” he says as the student tries to focus on what his teacher is saying. “Don’t concentrate on the finger,” Lee says, slapping him on the head, “or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” The quote is derived from an old Buddhist text called the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, and the point is clear: Sometimes if you focus on what is immediately in front of you, you can miss the point entirely.
Something like this is happening in Washington, DC, right now. For almost two weeks, the debate around the progress or lack thereof in the Iran War has been focused on activity in the Strait of Hormuz. A whole host of maritime experts have emerged suddenly to inform us that the Trump administration has succeeded in reopening the crucial waterway to shipping. Maximalists are claiming that this means the United States has effectively won the war in the Middle East. Others are making the more modest claim that this reopening of the Strait will solve the looming energy crisis.
These were the two perspectives that most people who were not deeply involved in the debate heard. There was, however, a small but vocal minority who questioned whether the Strait had been opened at all. If Iran had effective fire control over the Strait in spring and summer, they asked, then why would they suddenly lose it now? Almost immediately after this question was raised, Iran settled the debate by striking an enormous number of ships: 12 and counting in less than a week.
To those of us who were paying attention, the whole exercise felt like looking at Lee’s finger as he points to the moon. As these debates unfolded, the market for U.S. Treasury debt continued an epic sell-off. Bloomberg quoted an investment banker who stated that Treasuries were “trading like a meme stock.” U.S. Treasury bonds have now experienced their worst long-run returns in history.
Treasury bonds are not just any old asset. For one, they are the debt of the U.S. government. If they become uninvestable, the capacity for Washington to live beyond its means through debt issuance is open to question. Treasuries are also the benchmark asset for the entire global dollar system that has allowed the U.S. to run enormous deficits for decades. If this asset starts “trading like a meme stock” and generating awful returns, foreigners will opt for something else. This week, the president of the German central bank stated that “the case for further diversification into gold remains significant.” People are talking.
In mid-September, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, posted an equation on X. Unusually for an obscure piece of algebra, the post garnered nearly 7 million views. The equation was a modified version of what economists call the “Taylor Rule,” a method that economists and central bankers use when setting central bank interest rates. In normal times, the equation factors in expected future inflation and how much slack is in the economy. But Ghalibaf’s equation—which he called the “Straits Taylor Rule” —included two new variables: the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, the two waterways currently under fire from Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, respectively.
The equation is a stripped-down representation of Iran’s strategy. By controlling these waterways, Iran and its allied groups have gained control over the global energy market. By squeezing these chokepoints, Iran can assert de facto control over America’s financial markets by pushing up expected inflation. Central banks like the Federal Reserve realize that this is no mere bluff and have already started raising interest rates. Ghalibaf’s equation explains, to a very large extent, why American government debt is currently trading like a meme stock.
Meanwhile, at the same time as these pressures are felt in American financial markets, the real economy is undergoing a squeeze too. Recent reports from the Energy Information Agency suggest that American heating-oil bills are expected to rise by 21 percent this winter. Diesel markets are entering into a genuine crisis, with President Donald Trump floating the prospect of banning diesel exports to ensure that there are no shortages. Diesel is the lifeblood of the American logistics chain. If there are shortages, trains and trucks will not run and goods will not be delivered to shelves. Trump has walked back the diesel export ban for now, after strong-arming the Europeans to dump their oil and diesel reserves, but there is every chance that this option appears back on the table as the crisis worsens. Food prices are rising too, with sugar prices looking particularly worrisome.
Once again, Ghalibaf outlined how this is part of Iran’s overall strategy. In an X post this week, the speaker published a rudimentary graph—coupled with a haunting image of a ghost—showing rising commodity prices and interest rates on one side, and falling consumer confidence, foreign interest in U.S. Treasuries, hyperscaler investment, and housing affordability on the other. The Iranians are not just trying to squeeze the American financial system—they are aiming to put extreme stress on the entire economy—and it looks increasingly like they intend on making this pressure felt before American voters go to the polls on November 3.
The Trump administration has become fixated on the Strait of Hormuz, seeing it as a decisive battlefield on which the U.S. can win the war. But the Strait is merely a means to an end. For Iran, that end is to slowly demolish the American economy and financial system until the pressure becomes too much and the U.S. backs off. The idea that you can “win” such a battle is delusional.
The Strait is merely the finger in Lee’s analogy. It is Iran’s overall economic strategy—the moon—that we should focus on. And when we do, we come to the worrying conclusion that by the time the Trump administration cries uncle, the damage done to the American economy and financial system will be so severe that it could take many, many years to recover.
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The Strait was open before the war began.
Repeat after me: The Strait of Hormuz was open before the Iran War began. Sing it, shout it, say it three more times—you might even record yourself whispering the phrase then listen to the softly spoken words of wisdom as you fall asleep.
I doubt the architects and supporters of this big dumb war will take this advice, but if they did, they might finally get the message. For now, they’re still boasting that the U.S. is winning “the battle of Hormuz”—hardly a stupendous accomplishment given the fact which you are, once more, implored to recite:
The Strait of Hormuz was open before the Iran War began.
The “battle of Hormuz” phrase, as best I can tell, was coined by Mark Dubowitz of the uber-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. I first heard him use it in late March during a podcast conversation he had with Ross Douthat, at the time a New York Times opinion writer.
Back then—as it was becoming obvious that the American-Israeli strikes were not about to topple the Islamic Republic—Dubowitz argued the U.S. should prepare for a fierce battle to wrest control of the Hormuz from Iran, which effectively closed the waterway within days of the war starting. More recently, he’s taken to arguing that Iran has already lost the battle.
Senior White House officials too have emphasized American achievements in the Hormuz. “The Straits of Hormuz are open,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday. “There’s almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began, so they’ve lost complete control of the Straits.”
To be sure, more tankers have been getting through and more oil has been getting out, while Iran struggles to ship its own exports because of a U.S. blockade. But contra Dubowitz, the battle isn’t yet won, as events of the last two weeks have made clear. In that time, Iran has escalated its attacks on Hormuz shipping—striking a dozen or so vessels—and at least one ship has turned tail on orders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
The escalation vindicates Middle East experts who have been offering a much less optimistic assessment than Dubowitz. “I don’t think you can win a battle until the battle is over,” Rosemary Kelanic of Defense Priorities told The American Conservative. “And I think we can continue to fight this battle for a long period of time.”
A prolonged battle would be costly. The U.S. is spending an estimated $42 million per day, or around $1.3 billion per month, enforcing its blockade on Iranian maritime exports. Some additional resources are needed to help other countries move their oil through the waterway—surveillance, air support, guiding vessels through the darkness of night—though reliable figures are hard to come by and to disaggregate from the blockade.
Under the memorandum of understanding signed in June by President Donald Trump and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, the Islamic Republic was empowered to administer the strait and perhaps, eventually, charge fees for passage. But the MOU broke down after the U.S. tried to set up a new shipping corridor near the Omani coastline, outside Iranian control.
“We have something like a third of deployed U.S. naval assets in the world working on this mission to blockade Iran and get oil through the Strait of Hormuz, so it’s highly resource-intensive,” said Kelanic. “The American taxpayer is footing the bill instead of having the world pay tolls.”
And the costs transcend U.S. government spending. The price of Brent crude, an international benchmark, lately hovers around $100 per barrel, up from around $70 just before the war. Some commentators have asked why global oil prices remain so stubbornly elevated even as exports via the Strait of Hormuz approach pre-war levels.
Kelanic suggested the question evinces a fundamental misunderstanding (somewhat embarrassing for me, since I asked it). “It’s moving through the Strait because prices are a hundred dollars a barrel, right?” Kelanic said. “That’s the price the market will bear to deal with the risk from Iran, because the U.S. evidently cannot prevent Iran from attacking over and over and over again.”
That’s bad news for Trump—and for Republican candidates in this year’s midterms, for whom elevated prices at the pump have created powerful headwinds. Catch-22: Getting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t translate into lower prices, since higher prices are needed to incentivize captains and sailors, carriers and insurers, to brave the sea passage.
And there’s another problem: “Ships are ferrying almost as much crude oil out of the Strait of Hormuz as they were before the Iran war,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. “But they are barely moving any barrels of the fuel the world needs most: diesel.”
As if all that wasn’t enough cold water to pour on Dubowitz’s grand pronouncements, top experts have been speculating that some countries are covertly paying tolls for passage (a proposition Kelanic considered unlikely).
And Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, based on his conversations with Iranian insiders, suspects Tehran is allowing the strait to stabilize—to maximize the shock to energy markets when it initiates a new round of hostilities.
We shall see. In any case, it’s clear by now that “winning the battle of Hormuz” was a myopic framing that conveniently enabled supporters of this catastrophic war to argue for its continuation, and to claim some kind of victory. The rhetoric, evidently, failed to move American voters: Opposition to the consistently unpopular war just hit an all-time high.
Perhaps Americans never lost sight of a fact most inconvenient for the war hawks: The Strait of Hormuz was open before the Iran War began.
The post What ‘Winning the Battle of Hormuz’ Got Wrong appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the U.S. withdrew its bombers from the British Fairford air base over the weekend because of concerns about a potential Iranian drone attack.
The withdrawal of about a dozen B-1 planes, which was first reported Sunday, followed British authorities announcing that several men had been arrested for plotting an attack on the base. The Post, citing a British official and “two people familiar with the decision,” said that the U.S. had received intelligence about potential attacks. Vice President J.D. Vance said the planes had been moved out of “an abundance of caution.”
Despite improved numbers of transits through the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic struck 11 ships in the past week. Iran has also been operating in the southeast of the country to suppress unrest from separatist elements in its Baluchistan province.
The Iran-aligned Yemeni Houthis claimed strikes on airports in the Saudi cities of Riyadh and Abha and in the Yemeni central government’s temporary capital of Aden.
Brent crude opened Wednesday at $101 per barrel. AAA reported continued easing in still-elevated consumer prices with national averages of $4.37 per gallon of regular gas and $6.30 per gallon of gasoline.
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Pythia doesn’t see anything good coming for Trump or the U.S. of A.
I met with Pythia, God Apollo’s high priestess known as the Delphic Oracle whose prophecies throughout the ages are legendary. I used to date Pythia back in Ancient Greece when I was young, but it ended badly because she forecast what I was about to do before I had even thought of doing it. Especially where other women were concerned.
Never mind, she has now forgiven me, and she and I had a very friendly chat near her temple in a beautiful part of the old country. What I wished to know was not if I have a chance with, say, the divine Lily James, but what are the chances of peace in the Middle East. “None whatsoever,” was her answer. “The Israeli lobby is much too strong and disqualifies anyone who dares to broach the subject of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.”
But why can’t Donald Trump read the riot act to the Israelis and to the neocons who are urging Netanyahu on? “He’d be toast tomorrow,” said the priestess. “The neocons got us into the Iraq war with lies and emerged as strong as ever. The Ellison media conglomerate Skydance, headed by an Israeli-American, Ynon Kreiz, with CBS in the hands of the Likud loyalist Bari Weiss, ensures that CBS and CNN will act as cheerleaders for Netanyahu’s policies.”
We conversed in Ancient Greek, of course. I asked her what is to be done: “Stop subsidizing Israel’s crimes, there’s genocide and deliberate starvation,” was her answer. “Without America’s backing, Israelis would have reached a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians long ago. The Palestinian Authority may be corrupt, and Hamas not exactly democratic, but after 75 years of illegal occupation, jailing of innocents, and lands stolen by Israeli settlers, insurgency and radicalism are certainly understandable. The malevolence of the Netanyahu cabinet excludes any peaceful settlement. The secret Israeli plan is ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and eventually the West Bank, and it’s well on its way. Only if America ensures Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination will there be peace.”
I was impressed. Pythia might spend her days in a trance induced by some exotic fumes provided by Apollo, but she sure understands the mess we’re in, especially in the Middle East. The Delphic Oracle did not mince her words: “Trump is flailing, his family is enriching itself, and the midterms will punish Republicans.” She then took up AI.
“The world will pass beyond our understanding. You cannot trust the Altmans and Zuckerbergs of this world with the future of humanity. Meta was already caught concealing evidence that its products seriously harmed kids. Altman and his kind should be held accountable for the dangerous and illegal actions of their systems. The riskiest of all products should be regulated and monitored by the government, not greedy individuals.”
What about Iran, I asked her. “One doesn’t dispatch a slumlord and an opportunistic fundraiser and expect to win at diplomacy,” she replied. “The pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests is nothing new.” She insists that Trump is mired in a war of his own making. Israel’s role is that of Iago, but the Israelis are not the ones that will pay the price in the November elections. It will be a bloodbath for Republicans. Is there a chance the Iranian regime will collapse due to sanctions and the people having had enough, I wondered aloud. Certainly not before the elections in November was the answer.
According to Pythia, Trump’s weakness is his lack of historical knowledge. Louis XVI of France had the most powerful land army in Europe, but while helping the Americans kick out the Brits back in the 1780s, Louis bankrupted his country. We all know what followed: a revolution that not only got rid of the ruling nobility, but also cost poor Louis and his wife their heads. Beware of extreme generosity to so-called allies and friends—and I’m thinking of all the missiles and billions we’ve spent in the Hormuz and with our gifts to Zelensky.
The oracle got excited once I mentioned the First World War, and how every great power sleepwalked into it. Unlike peace, war comes rapidly, she said, and once it begins, change for the worst is inevitable. Those who dismiss history, according to her, more often than not find themselves surprised and appalled.
I had to agree with everything she said. Unfortunately she made no predictions—which is her job, after all—but her wisdom about current events was undeniable. All the warning signs are there, signs that something terrible might happen with armed conflicts the world over. Actually, what I wanted to know from her, and what she failed to deliver, was Trump’s thinking. Why are we involved with Ukraine, Iran, even the Middle East? Why isn’t he concentrating on the midterms and boosting American pocketbooks? Why is he wasting his time overseas? Why is he ignoring the dangers posed by AI in the hands of greedy midgets?
The quagmire in the strait reminds me of the start in Vietnam. A few hundred advisers one day, 500,000 plus grunts a few years later. We just left Iraq 23 years after “mission accomplished.” Trump was one of the few leaders who seemed to understand the failure of past quagmires. Now he’s in one of his own making. I should have asked Pythia what happened to Trump, what changed him, but she was back in one of her trances.
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The internationally recognized government of Yemen pushed back Houthi territorial gains around the Bal al-Mandab, per the government-affiliated Saba news reported early Monday.
Forces are preparing a new assault to retake the Houthi-occupied capital, Sanaa, per Saba and Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya. Saudi Arabia provided air support for Yemeni ground troops. Despite the setbacks elsewhere, the Houthis are advancing on the city of Taiz.
Amid the new offensive, the foreign ministries of Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia reaffirmed their commitment to the collective defense measures of the Mecca Pact in a Monday statement.
Despite improved flows through the Hormuz and gains along the Red Sea shipping lane, energy markets remain distressed. Amin Nasser, Saudi Aramco’s CEO, said that 3 billion barrels of oil have been lost from markets since the beginning of the war and described world reserves as “scarily thin.”
Iran continued targeting ships transiting the strait, also contributing to the continued elevation of energy prices. Brent crude opened at $103 per barrel. AAA reported some easing in consumer fuel prices, with a national average price per gallon of $4.37 for regular gas and $6.32 for diesel.
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We cannot Christianize America by militarizing its historic faith.
On August 30, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told the Jewish American Summit that he believed he was “chosen by Hashem”—i.e., by God—to serve in Jerusalem. He called his appointment “an Isaiah moment,” quoting Isaiah 6:8: “Here am I, send me.” He described his diplomatic post as “something engineered in heaven.”
A few weeks later, on September 18, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went to Texas A&M University to launch the Pentagon’s “Send Me Tour.” In a speech the next day, he cited the same verse from Isaiah to frame American military service as a divine calling.
Huckabee and Hegseth are using biblical language to place the authority of God behind their use of government power. Both powerful political appointees are claiming God personally commissioned them. That should alarm all of us—and especially Christians.
This is a blatant misuse of the text. Before Isaiah says, “Send me,” he cries, “Woe is me.” He comes to God in his brokenness and confronts his own personal shortcomings and his nation’s corruption. Only after he confesses and receives forgiveness is Isaiah sent out.
Moreover, Isaiah is sent to call his own people to repent, not abroad to represent his government, and certainly not to destroy his nation’s enemies.
So if Huckabee and Hegseth are looking for an Isaiah moment, they should start by considering whether they have anything to clean up in themselves and their own country.
Representing the United States as an ambassador or cabinet member is an honorable calling. But neither job comes with a divine endorsement or special entitlement to God’s favor or chosenness. What troubles me in Huckabee’s and Hegseth’s words, or when I hear the same kind of thing from any politician, is the attempt to frame their policies as a mandate from heaven and thereby not open to dispute. You can debate a cabinet secretary, but you cannot argue with God.
I write with a deep brokenness in my spirit. I love the United States. This country gave me a new home and a future as a Christian Palestinian-American immigrant who came here from Bethlehem. I also care deeply about the suffering unfolding in the Middle East, which is affecting millions of Americans as well. The catastrophic situation in the Middle East is the result not only of disastrous policies, but also of American officials who have enlisted Scripture to justify territory expansion and military power.
Huckabee has been talking about Palestinians and the Holy Land in this way for years. In 2008, he said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” His reasoning was that Palestinian identity had been used as a political tool against Israel. Earlier this year, the influential commentator Tucker Carlson pressed him on his interpretation of the biblical promise of land stretching from the Nile toward the Euphrates. “It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee replied.
Like Huckabee, I revere Scripture and believe that God keeps his promises. But turning an ancient covenant promise into a claim about the borders and sovereignty of a modern secular state is theological malpractice. Huckabee is telling the world that his diplomatic strategy is not bound by U.S. policy, international law, or the grim reality of millions of people living under Israeli occupation.
Hegseth’s “Send Me Tour” carries a similarly dangerous payload, but his words of choice focus less on land and more on force. When President Donald Trump renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War, Hegseth promised “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” Later, addressing America’s senior military leadership, he complained about “stupid rules of engagement” and promised to “untie the hands of our warfighters” to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.”
His callousness would get even worse. At a Pentagon press briefing this March, Hegseth said, “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” Weeks later, at a Christian worship service inside the Pentagon, he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” I wonder how the Christian servicemembers in that room heard those words. What does it do to a soldier’s conscience when his civilian leadership speaks of war in the language of divine sanction and concludes his message in Jesus’ name?
Hegseth’s prayer for “no mercy” directly contradicts the words of Jesus. A doctrine of “no mercy for our enemies” shares nothing with “blessed are the merciful” or the command to love one’s enemies. Granted, governments have a duty to defend their people, and Christians should have the opportunity to enter military service. But Christian leaders in public offices cannot legitimately invoke God as an escape from moral restraint. Scripture must never become a shield for policies that violate U.S. and international law and cannot stand up to moral scrutiny.
As a boy in Bethlehem, I learned the story of Isaiah as a call to humility, justice, and repentance. Today, people in power are misappropriating that text to validate shockingly inhumane policies. America’s good standing in the world has never rested on the dangerous illusion that our leaders are infallibly executing God’s agenda, and certainly not on how merciless we can become. It rests on honoring God and respecting all human life. We cannot Christianize America by militarizing its historic faith. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah was sent by God to speak truth to power, not to become its press secretary.
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Senior Trump administration officials held a “highly unusual meeting” to discuss next moves in the Iran War and other regional matters, Axios reported Friday.
Vice President J.D. Vance chaired the meeting, which also included Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine.
“Things were decided or at least deeply discussed,” one U.S. official told Axios.
European leaders agreed to release a “massive amount” of diesel reserves to help lower global prices, Trump said on Friday. Diesel prices in the U.S. smashed records in recent weeks, hitting $6.53 a gallon and remaining elevated, even as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has increased.
One vessel was struck in the waterway Friday and another was struck overnight into Saturday.
The average price of regular gasoline in America was $4.38 per gallon on Saturday, down ten cents from a week ago.
Loud explosions were heard in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, on Saturday. The Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group, reported airstrikes by Saudi Arabia. Fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis broke out this July and Riyadh has urged Trump to join the conflict.
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An aircraft carrier and roughly 10,000 troops are headed to the Middle East, per the Wall Street Journal, where they will join the two carriers and 50,000 servicemembers already deployed against Iran.
The Journal reported Thursday, citing U.S. officials, that the USS Theodore Roosevelt left San Diego for the Persian Gulf theater Sunday, and the Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group followed on Monday.
Axios reported Thursday that the U.S. also in recent weeks moved two Patriot missile batteries to the region, one each to Saudi Arabia and to Qatar, to protect energy infrastructure in the event of renewed hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. President Donald Trump’s recent public statements about Iran have suggested he expects a return to combat soon.
The diplomatic track, however, has not been entirely abandoned. Bloomberg reported Thursday that Iran offered to allow inspectors into the country’s bombed nuclear sites in exchange for sanctions relief.
Brent crude opened Friday at $102 per barrel. AAA reported national averages of $4.40 per gallon of regular gas and $6.37 per gallon of diesel.
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President Donald Trump has said an Iranian peace proposal delivered last week is “not good enough” and that it’s “possible” he’ll ramp up bombing after the midterm elections in November.
The comments came in a Monday interview with Time magazine published Thursday.
During the United Nations General Assembly last week, Iran offered to suspend hostilities for seven days and open the Strait of Hormuz if America ended its own naval blockade of the waterway and released frozen Iranian assets, among other measures. The proposal resembled the “memorandum of understanding” signed this June by Trump and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, a framework peace deal that swiftly fell apart.
Trump, asked why he had rejected the latest proposal, answered, “Because things that I wouldn’t have approved a year ago I wouldn’t have today.”
Asked how a self-styled peace president could threaten to “annihilate” Iran, as Trump did at the UN summit, he said, “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanded that Iran’s UN delegation leave New York, Axios reported Wednesday night. Iranian negotiators had stayed in the city after the General Assembly to continue peace talks mediated by Qatar and Pakistan. Rubio had issued his order—which Axios called “a highly unusual diplomatic rebuke”—on Monday. The Iranians departed hours later, though U.S. officials said they were scheduled to soon leave in any case.
The Pentagon on Wednesday declared an end to its military operations against ISIS in Iraq and announced it had withdrawn all U.S. forces from the country. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards—a major force in the Iranian military—had also fought against ISIS but celebrated the American withdrawal, vowing to continue supporting Iraqi militia groups. Analysts say Iran’s influence in the region grew after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, an enemy of Tehran.
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Zelensky’s former spokeswoman: Kiev’s effort to ramp up pressure on Moscow has led to an intolerable situation at home.
It is time to talk about victory in the Russia–Ukraine War. Politicians and the media regularly use the word, yet it has come to signify nothing. In Ukraine, a political battle is breaking out over which narrative of victory will be accepted by the people.
For some, a 10-year-old dancer with a prosthetic leg is a living advertisement for Ukraine’s “unbreakability.” But a growing number of Ukrainians are done participating in that story. Incessant preaching about “resilience” while the situation on the ground only worsens has exhausted their patience. Many now say Kiev should become more open to a compromise peace to prevent injuries and gruesome wounds that would haunt Ukraine’s children for the rest of their lives. Outside the world of political sloganeering, “unbreakability” produces broken bodies and a maimed generation.
“The only way to stop these sufferings of all Ukrainians is the soonest possible peace,” Sofia Stuzhuk, a mother of five and a Ukrainian blogger with several million followers, told me. “And all sensible Ukrainians understand this.”
Public opposition to the controversial forced mobilization has reached a boiling point. Despite what you may hear from supposedly pro-Ukraine Western voices, ordinary Ukrainians of limited means often see evasion and resistance as signs of dignity and honor. Mobilization centers have become synonymous with torture, unexplained conscript deaths, and rampant corruption. Yet a former U.S. presidential adviser, Keith Kellogg, is calling for the mobilization of women. His daughter, Meaghan Mobbs, provoked a wave of outrage when she posted this message about a Ukrainian man who drowned in a river while fleeing mobilization officers: “He died a coward. He could have died a hero.”
Russian strikes have escalated and widened to the point that Kiev, far from the front, now feels like a near-frontline city. That alarming development comes after President Volodymyr Zelensky’s much-advertised 40-day “pressure” operation, which, in practice, is ongoing and has predictably led to a counterescalation by Moscow. Russian forces are tearing up railways and other logistical lines, choking agricultural exports, wrecking what was left of the metallurgical industry and the power system, and hitting gas stations and warehouses for basic goods. As a cold winter approaches, a humanitarian disaster looms. Meanwhile, corruption scandals have consumed the Zelensky government, and the fiscal situation is rapidly deteriorating.
People draw opposite conclusions from these developments. Some want to double down on the tactics that produced these results, while others see an urgent diplomatic end to the war as the only way out. Zelensky is part of the first group. He promises “revenge” after every attack, even as each new exchange of strikes takes more from Ukraine’s people and its economy than from Russia’s. But online, more and more Ukrainian voices now call for a realistic peace and challenge Zelensky’s understanding of what “victory” even means.
In 2022, winning meant getting all the land back. Officials even talked about reclaiming the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. Back then, ordinary Ukrainians argued over which they’d rather recover first: the sunny subtropical tourist resort on the Black Sea, or the industrial core situated in the eastern Donbas region.
But by now the mood has changed entirely. Even a poll conducted by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology—a private organization perceived to be friendly to Ukraine’s leadership—found that 61 percent of Ukrainians would support a comprehensive peace deal that included territorial compromises. For some, that still feels like surrender or defeatism. But with Russian strikes getting progressively more damaging and Ukrainian losses rising, the case for such a peace is hard to ignore.
Western countries pouring aid into a war of attrition, year after year, has become good business for the arms makers and for politicians controlling public budgets. But five years into the war, this aid has not given Ukrainians real protection nor put the economy on anything resembling a firm footing. If this goes on, can Ukraine—a country where every third budget dollar comes from foreign aid—even continue to provide basic services, much less beat Russia on the battlefield? For all the talk of Russia’s “war economy,” Moscow is still spending only around 7 percent of GDP on defense, against Kiev’s 44 percent, and its debt-to-GDP ratio is practically the same it was before the war. Russia also has between two and four times as many men of mobilization age.
Attritional warfare has always favored Russia historically. While its army may lose battles, the capacity of Russians to endure exhaustion confers a significant advantage on Russian governments, including President Vladimir Putin’s present system. Russia is capable of spending lives and resources for as long as it takes, and it remains prepared to do so now.
Ukraine has reached the point where the only victory worth believing in requires accepting a bad peace rather than sustaining or escalating a horrific war. At least the former would give Ukraine a chance to survive as an independent country. By contrast, the present course—with flagrant corruption, fiscal crisis, escalating Russian strikes, and a worn-out, demoralized population—probably leads to Ukraine losing not just the war, but its independence and its future.
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An Iranian government spokeswoman said that Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi presented an American counterproposal for reopening the Strait of Hormuz at a Wednesday cabinet meeting.
Fatemeh Mohajerani said in a Wednesday post on X that the counterproposal had been delivered through Qatari mediators, but she did not describe its substance.
The 1,500 American servicemembers in Iraq’s Kurdish region withdrew from the country Wednesday, marking the first time in years that the U.S. had no military presence in Iraq. CENTCOM announced the withdrawal from Erbil Air Base and the conclusion of Operation Inherent Resolve, the effort launched in 2014 to subdue the Islamic State.
A FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing Wednesday in Saudi Arabia after the copilot attacked the pilot and the plane lost altitude precipitously. A passenger and crew member forced their way into the cockpit and restrained the copilot, and two pilot passengers landed the plane. Israel is investigating the case as a terrorist hijacking. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it appeared the copilot intended to crash the plane deliberately, and that he has been arrested by Saudi authorities. FlyDubai issued a statement asking the public to refrain from “premature speculation.”
Despite improved oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which analysts say have returned to near pre-war levels in recent days, energy prices remain elevated. Brent crude opened at $103 per barrel. AAA reported a national average price per gallon of $4.43 for regular gasoline and $6.41 for diesel.
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Consumer confidence fell in September amid worsening concerns about high energy costs and general inflation, according to a monthly survey by The Conference Board published Tuesday.
“The Consumer Confidence Index deteriorated notably in September, following two prior months of softening,” said Dana Peterson, the nonprofit’s chief economist. “Over the next six months, consumers expected both business conditions and the labor market to weaken.”
The index declined by 6.7 points to 81.9, the lowest level in a dozen years. In 2014, consumer confidence was still rebounding after the 2008 financial crisis.
Oil prices have spiked as a result of the Iran War, with average prices at the pump rising from $2.98 per gallon to over $4.40 as of Wednesday. The rise in energy prices has contributed to higher overall inflation. Annual inflation was 3.4 percent in August, according to the Consumer Price Index, above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent.
The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers—another respected measure of Americans’ economic sentiments—also found that consumers grew more pessimistic in September.
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President Trump said Sunday that he anticipated U.S. and Iranian negotiators would continue talks on the war this week, following his reported rejection of an Iranian proposal over the weekend. “I expect more talks with Iran [this week],” the president told Axios. “They want to make a deal, but it is not the deal that I want to make,” he added. “It is what we would have maybe agreed to a year ago. They overplayed their hand.” Trump confirmed to reporters today that U.S. and Iranian representatives spoke Monday through mediators, though no breakthroughs have been reported.
Separately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X that economic pressure on Iran was yielding results. “Operation Economic Outcast has caused the rial to hit record lows,” he wrote, alongside a graphic showing the rial’s current exchange rate of 2.44 million to 1 U.S. dollar.
In the United Kingdom, five men involved in a possible plot targeting a British airbase were released on bail Monday. Their release raises new questions about what had previously been characterized as a potential terror attack on RAF Fairford, which hosts U.S. bombers and supports operations against Iran. The base’s role in the Iran War has led to speculation that Tehran may have been involved, although no evidence has been publicly adduced to support such a link.
Brent crude was trading around $104.46 on Monday morning, a rise from the previous trading day. AAA reports that the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.48 per gallon.
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The U.S. is starting to lay the foundations for a democratic transition.
Delcy Rodriguez, acting president of Venezuela, is preparing to put herself out of a job. In an address to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Rodriguez declared that Venezuela is getting ready for a return to democracy.
“I want to make this very clear at this General Assembly: There will be elections in Venezuela,” said Rodriguez Wednesday. “Venezuela has initiated a process of democratic transformation for its rebirth, an orderly, institutional, and verifiable process.”
Exactly when that orderly process will produce an election is not yet clear, although a rough plan is beginning to take shape. The rump Chavista government, under the careful management of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has been in talks for some months now with the political opposition. The National Reconciliation Council, as the body mediating these discussions is called, is intended to ease a prospective transition by integrating some key opposition members into Venezuela’s government, thereby providing a measure of confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.
Allowing the opposition such a foothold, or even just visibility into government operations, is an important step toward ensuring a workable transfer of power. Opposition politicians, judges, and functionaries were systematically excluded from government posts under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, and in some cases the structure of the state itself was reorganized around institutionalizing Chavismo, or specifically benefiting regime clients and supporters. Some of those changes have been rolled back under Rodriguez; others remain much as they were before Maduro’s capture.
If, as is probable, opposition parties win the promised election, they will face a number of daunting tasks. They will assume control of a government that is institutionally hostile to them and filled with functionaries who fear being held to account for their previous actions. New leadership would have to reassert control over the basic functions of the state—ideally without eroding public order or indulging in sweeping purges or other acts of political revenge. (The U.S. is very familiar with the hazards of de-Baathification.) This will require reorganizing the courts and the bureaucracy, which are currently stuffed with Maduro loyalists who may make it difficult to implement the policies of a new government. The most powerful bodies, like the National Electoral Council and the Venezuelan Supreme Court, may require the most extensive renovations, but by necessity most of the people who will fill the lower posts in government will have achieved their position under Chavismo. The opposition will have to figure out how to command and restrain them.
The new government will also need to reassert civilian control of the military. This is perhaps the most difficult and dangerous issue facing a democratizing Venezuela. For decades now, the military has been recruited, trained, and organized around loyalty to the regime above all else. In order to secure this loyalty, Chavez and Maduro granted their generals lucrative sinecures, powerful posts in the government, and opportunities to profit from Venezuela’s rampant corruption and crime. A number of military officers have intimate ties with the cartels and other criminal bodies engaged in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
With the backing of Washington—and the implicit threat of the Pentagon meting out the same treatment to recalcitrant generals as it did to Maduro in January—a new Venezuelan government can shake up its military leadership, cashiering the worst offenders and putting in new officers who are amenable to civilian control. Many of the new leaders will likely be relatively junior, with careers heretofore stymied by the aging generals who dominated things during the Maduro and Chavez years. But the corruption in the officer corps and the poor state of the army will take decades to overcome—and there is no guarantee that the U.S. will maintain an active interest in Venezuela throughout that period.
Overcoming such challenges would be hard in the best of circumstances, but the new government will not have the luxury of a stable economy or even full control over its own territory as it attempts to rebuild. The Venezuelan economy has been shattered by decades of poor management, international isolation, and corruption. Since the removal of Maduro, trade has opened up and the oil industry is beginning to function again, but the country remains deeply impoverished and loaded with debt and dysfunction. Many in its professional classes—lawyers, doctors, engineers—have fled abroad, and while some will return, most will probably prefer to remain in their new countries of residence.
Perhaps the most dangerous elements are the cartels, which control significant stretches of the interior. Venezuela’s mineral fields, especially its gold deposits, have proven lucrative resources for cartels to exploit. Mining is a vital part of many criminal organizations’ supply chains, as the sale of illegally mined gold provides a convenient way to launder money made by extortion and drug trafficking. Efforts to professionalize the military and law enforcement will inevitably cause conflict with the cartels, who have made arrangements to avoid excessive government interference with their operations.
Conflict with the cartels has been a significant challenge for neighboring Colombia, which has an effective and professional military. Open war between the cartels and an incoming Venezuelan government, which would have relatively few resources and a weak military of questionable loyalty, could plunge the country into a wave of crime and violence similar to that engulfing nearby Ecuador. Support from the U.S. could help keep a lid on things, but fighting organized crime in South America often requires military and police ground operations against heavily armed criminal groups—and no administration will be eager to send American troops to occupy the Orinoco Mining Arc.
All of this would be difficult enough with watchful and consistent American oversight. But the timelines that have been suggested for holding a vote in Venezuela—late 2027 or, more likely, 2028—mean a transfer of power may not occur until after the next U.S. presidential election. This makes sense for domestic political reasons: The Trump administration can close with the successful administration of a new election in Venezuela, ushering in a democratic, pro-American government just before the presidential election at home. Any negative consequences of the transition will be another White House’s problem.
But the potential for confusion, miscommunication, and misalignment in this scenario is immense. Managing another country’s affairs is a difficult business; and only time will tell whether U.S. nation-building efforts in Latin America will meet with greater success than they have in the Middle East.
The post Democracy Is Coming to Venezuela—Eventually appeared first on The American Conservative.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he anticipates further talks with Iran in the next week, despite his rejection Friday of a ceasefire proposal.
“I expect more talks with Iran [this week]. They want to make a deal, but it is not the deal that I want to make. It is what we would have maybe agreed to a year ago,” Trump told Axios. “They overplayed their hand.”
Axios said Gulf sources confirmed that talks through Qatari mediators were ongoing.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters Sunday at the UN General Assembly in New York that Iran’s conditions for opening the Strait of Hormuz have not changed. He said that the Iranian team was still awaiting a “definitive” response to the ceasefire proposal through mediators.
The IRGC Navy claimed Sunday to have captured another American underwater drone in the strait.
AAA reported a national average price of $4.98 per gallon of regular gas and $6.47 per gallon of diesel.
The post Iran War Day 212: Trump Says Negotiations to Continue This Week appeared first on The American Conservative.
Can you really fight a war by having people do random, tiny things for no reason?
A number of small quadcopter drones found laden with explosives last month at Leipzig Airport have been identified by German authorities as originating in Russia, the Kremlin’s presumed intent being to blow up some Ukrainian cargo aircraft using the runway. Naturally, Russia has denied all responsibility, calling the accusation “absurd” and saying Germany put the devices there itself.
Who would possibly be so gullible as to believe such a line? Hard-left politicians like the habitually anti-Western UK Labour Party backbencher Diane Abbott, who at precisely the same time as Berlin was blaming Moscow, went online to allege, “The imminent threat from Russia is a NATO fiction to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending. The increase should not go ahead.”
I can understand why it may be that some people out there might find it difficult to accept the extent of Russia’s campaign of hybrid warfare across Europe: because, in an alleged parallel campaign, alongside attempting quite logically to blow up airplanes, the Kremlin has purportedly attempted to undermine the West via a far more low-key infinitude of microscopically trivial “cognitive strikes” against NATO nations too. In practice, this seems to mean little more than perpetrating a series of strange practical jokes against them.
Leaked documents suggest a Kremlin-linked PR firm, the Social Design Agency, has been engaged to design what amount to a series of infantile open-air pranks across European cities, intended to unsettle the domestic population. In Paris, severed pig’s heads were lined up outside mosques to upset Muslims and green paint thrown over a Holocaust museum to offend Jews; there were also plans to float blow-up sex dolls bearing the message “F*ck migrants!” down the Seine. In Germany, hundreds of cars had their exhaust pipes blocked with expanding foam overnight, with the aim of making motorists think environmentalists had done it, whilst plastic skeletons were dotted around near the Brandenburg Gate to disturb the easily frightened.
Faced with accounts of such hard-to-believe events, you can perhaps see why persons like Diane Abbott could have trouble accepting Putin is up to no good. If you can create an environment in which every tiny little thing that goes wrong gets blamed on Russia, then eventually people will just stop listening, and even the plausible hybrid warfare attacks like those at Leipzig Airport will be drowned out amid the noise.
When we are seriously told that the Russians were even behind a supposed plot to get young male models from Ukraine to bomb the previous homes of the former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to make it look like he was gay (voters were supposed to conclude they were angry rent-boys he hadn’t paid), then many more people than Abbott will find it incredibly difficult to accept the Russians really are doing such unlikely-sounding things.
I recall some strange events here in the UK from 20 or more years ago, the very period when Putin was just consolidating his early power, when people in towns across the country woke up one morning to find biscuits had been senselessly sellotaped across their front doors, or their car windows had been smashed open and the interiors completely filled with Rich Teas and chocolate digestives. At the time, I blamed either art students or some very bored extraterrestrials. In retrospect, maybe they were early proof-of-concept trial exercises for Putin’s future cognitive shock-troops?
I joke, but such laughably small-scale death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategies are not solely Putin’s own modern-day invention. During the Second World War, the United States pursued a similar crusade of micro-scale hybrid warfare when the military’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) launched its Simple Sabotage Field Manual in 1944. Intended for use by disenchanted Germans against their unwanted Nazi overlords on home-soil, the booklet suggested rebels attempt to undermine Hitler’s war-machine via such incredibly quotidian means as surreptitiously urinating inside cars’ gasoline-tanks, or removing toilet-paper from restrooms. Other saboteurs were encouraged to enter cinemas and open up bags containing moths, to allow them to flutter around in front of the screen, thereby ever-so-slightly obscuring the propaganda message being imparted by Goebbels.
Telegraph operators were instructed to cause confusion by intentionally misspelling the words “minimum” and “maximum” (which are the same in German as in English) as “miximum”, so recipients wouldn’t know which instruction to follow. Bureaucrats, meanwhile, could gum up the machinery of government by asking “endless questions,” constantly delaying, and insisting upon making use of byzantine and interminable back-office procedures rather than just allowing people to get on with simply doing anything useful. (What did the OSS think bureaucrats spent their time doing all day long anyway?)
Besides wasting Germans’ time, some of the OSS’s more fantastical minds wasted that of their own men too. Perhaps the strangest example was “Operation Cornflakes,” which aimed to completely destroy German morale by the fiendish means of substituting ordinary Nazi postage stamps featuring images of Adolf Hitler with fake ones bearing a doctored image of the Führer as a living skeleton, complete with his trademark toothbrush mustache on his skull’s upper-jaw. Intelligence officers were enlisted to type or handwrite real German addresses onto envelopes to create around 96,000 fake pieces of mail. Then, U.S. warplanes were to bomb Nazi mail trains, but only just enough to damage them and make the postal bags fall out onto the tracks.
After this, substitute mail sacks, filled with fake letters containing free samples of the skull-stamps, would be dropped in the hopes everything would get mixed together, and the fake stamps begin to circulate through Nazi Germany. Then, Germans on the homefront would collect their mail, open it up and find a free stamp tucked inside, containing a small image of Hitler looking like an hirsute Skeletor, before—what? Feeling a bit puzzled for 10 seconds, maybe? Will such otiose tactics have helped shorten the course of the war by even a single second? It seems doubtful to say the least. Yet the cost, in time, money, lives, and even stamps (which can be quite expensive) must have been considerable, or at least vastly out of all proportion to any possible utility.
In the 1950s, as the Cold War began to blossom, the OSS’s successor organization, the CIA, took up the reins, employing a whole suite of people to sit around thinking of ridiculous ideas. One scheme was to float balloons over Soviet territory bearing gifts for citizens which would “prove” Yankee Western imperialism was preferable to Stalinist autocracy after all—wonderful “proofs” of the innate superiority of capitalism like cheap wristwatches with pictures of Mickey Mouse painted on them.
To really get imaginative in this respect, the CIA actively sought out crazies to dredge up new ideas about what else could be tied onto the balloons. One recruit was habitual prankster Hugh Troy, who became known to CIA agents after he had carved a human ear out of beef and attempted to display it at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as having once belonged to Vincent Van Gogh.
Allegedly, Troy’s big idea (possibly apocryphal) was to float boxes of giant-sized condoms over Moscow, but with the words “EXTRA SMALL” printed on the side, to make Americans, fed up on apple-pie and steak since birth, appear to be innately more masculine than the gruel-raised Muscovites. “Mine’s bigger than yours” was the implied message; as with members, so with missiles. It has all the hallmarks of a Thomas Pynchon novel—except this Department of Absurdist Warfare, unlike that depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow, was actually real.
So, to those like Diane Abbott who still prove skeptical towards the suspicion Vladimir Putin might genuinely be getting bemused spies to meaninglessly chuck sex-dolls into rivers, or position large model skeletons in the rough vicinity of major European urban landmarks, I say they should just take a look back at history—which is, and will likely continue to be, a tapestry of absurdities
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President Donald Trump told reporters Saturday that he had rejected a proposal for a week-long ceasefire with Iran and expects to resume the air war after the November midterm elections.
“They have made a proposal and I rejected it,” Trump said, confirming a Friday report in the Wall Street Journal.
Iran had proposed reopening the Strait of Hormuz in return for the U.S. lifting its blockade on Iranian ports. The Journal’s report says the president is skeptical that Iran will accede to his demands. In a Tuesday speech at the UN General Assembly, Trump had said he expected the war to conclude after the midterm elections and threatened to “annihilate” Iran.
Iran’s delegation to the UN, led by President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, is still in New York. Axios reports that negotiations are ongoing.
At the same time, the American economic campaign against Iran is intensifying, as the Treasury readies new sanctions on banking institutions and airlines that do business with Iranian interests. The Supreme National Security Council denied that it was planning to retaliate militarily over flight restrictions, per a report in Iran’s Tasnim.
Brent crude closed Friday at $104 per barrel. AAA reports a national average of $4.49 per gallon of regular gas and $6.48 per gallon of diesel.
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Trump, Zelensky, and Pezeshkian each gave speeches worthy of reflection.
This week’s UN General Assembly brought attention-grabbing speeches from the presidents of the United States, Ukraine, and Iran. Each speech contained small moments that didn’t make it into the headlines, but deserve attention nonetheless.
Let’s start with President Donald Trump’s speech, which swung like a wild pendulum between the ridiculous and the horrifying.
Ridiculously, Trump twice referred to the “51-year menace of Iranian terror.” The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in 1979. Trump also said he would end the war in Ukraine “more quickly than people understand.” Previously he’d promised to get the war resolved on the first day of his presidency.
Trump’s speech, however ridiculous, was not funny. It was horrifying. He stood in front of the world’s foremost international organization and threatened to “annihilate the Islamic Republic of Iran and do it quickly” and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” He defended the theft of Venezuelan oil with the boast that “to the victor belong the spoils.” He said that American pressure will cause Cuba to “fall.”
Trump also let slip an accidental truth, admitting that the U.S. raid this January in Venezuela constituted “a war.” At the time of the operation, the legal justification offered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio was that it was not a war but “a law enforcement function” to apprehend the Venezuelan president.
Trump promised that he “will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” But it was Trump, in his first term, who walked away from the JCPOA, the agreement that provided the best chance of preventing Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon. And it was Trump who authorized attacks on Iran, rather than keeping up the negotiations that might have yielded a lasting deal.
Trump also said that “Iran’s goal was to complete their mad dash to a nuclear bomb.” The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review concluded that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.” That assessment was repeated in the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, which stated that U.S. intelligence continues to assess “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” In March, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi verified that “no evidence” had been found “that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.” And then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate Intelligence Committee that since America’s June bombing of Iran, “there has been no effort… to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.”
Trump consistently exaggerated America’s military achievements in Iran. He said that Iran’s “missiles and drone manufacturing capacity is almost gone.” But Iran has continued to demonstrate the capacity to strike targets with its ballistic missiles and drones. U.S. intelligence and the military assessed earlier this year that Iran still had at least 60 percent of its missile launchers and 40 percent of its attack drones. And many of the missile stockpiles that were protected deep underground were untouched by the most intense American strikes. American intelligence now reports that Iran has resumed production of ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, the U.S. has burned through dangerous quantities of its most valuable weapons, resulting “in strategic inventory shortfalls.”
Trump said that “more oil is flowing” through the Strait of Hormuz “than at any point since the start of the war” and that as many as 37 ships are transiting the strait every day. But the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations group has said “independent monitoring shows significantly fewer commercial vessels are transiting the Strait of Hormuz than figures released by the U.S. military.” Other reports suggest that the number of ships transiting the strait daily has recently dropped below the average of 17. Before the war, that figure was 125.
On to the speech by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky made a number of claims that were misleading. He said that “the Russian army lost 248,964 people on the battlefield in Ukraine in 8 months.” But in fact, it may be the Ukrainian army that has lost around that number, according to both Ukrainian official Kyrylo Budanov—who recently said Ukraine needs 30,000 new soldiers a month “to maintain what we have”—and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who recently said that Kiev told him 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers were being killed or wounded each month.
Following the failure of a PR campaign to convince the world that Ukraine has turned the tide, the new campaign to keep Europe on board is reaching a crescendo with warnings that Russia is planning a conventional attack. Zelensky repeated the warning that Russia “constantly threatens Poland and the Baltic States,” that “Russia may go further into Europe, even into NATO territory,” and that “leaders have intelligence showing Russian intentions.”
Both claims are dubious. General Alexus Grynkewich, head of U.S. European Command, said over the summer that there is no need for concern about Russia expanding the war by attacking a Baltic country because “Russia is not looking for a conflict” and they wouldn’t “risk” something when they “understand that… they won’t succeed.” Asked in July about the warnings of Russia attacking a Baltic country, Ulf Kristersson, prime minister of nearby Sweden, agreed: “We don’t see any signs of that.” Estonian intelligence likewise assessed that “Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year” and that “we are likely to reach a similar assessment next year.”
Finally, we come to Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian. Among the more notable features of his speech is that he said about the U.S. the kind of thing that Zelensky has accurately said about Russia: that a major power attacked his country “but we did not bend the knee. We did not bow our head.”
Perhaps the most important thing about the speech is that Pezeshkian stressed Iran was prepared for a return to negotiations but that it had learned “we need strength, because a people which is unable to defend itself will be trampled upon in today’s world.”
While signaling openness to diplomacy, Pezeshkian reiterated that Iran will not give up its right to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear purposes: “No nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology,” he said, adding that “Iran does not seek special treatment” but that holds that nuclear technology should not be “at the exclusive disposal of some, of a handful.”
Pezeshkian also pointed to the growing momentum toward an inclusive regional security architecture, saying that Tehran has “a deep belief that no one in this region will have security alone. Either we will build it together, or we will have to live under insecurity together.”
The post Three Presidents Pitch Their Wars at the UN appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Mecca Pact creates new opportunities for Islamabad—and new headaches.
Pakistan has long practiced a careful balancing act to manage relations with Iran and the Gulf Arab monarchies. But against the backdrop of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and the emergence of Yemen and the Red Sea as the “Western Front” of this regional crisis, the balancing act is getting harder to sustain.
Pakistan has strong strategic and economic ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, and has long seen stability in the Gulf as important to its interests. So Islamabad naturally has no appetite for Iranian or Houthi attacks on targets in GCC states, and officials in Islamabad have been quick to condemn such aggression. At the same time, Pakistan has much at stake in its relationship with Iran, with which it also seeks stable and cordial ties.
Geography dictates that Pakistan accept fundamental differences between its relationship with Iran and those with Gulf Arab states. The Pakistan–Iran border is long and difficult, and cross-border militant activity, particularly in Balochistan, is a persistent concern for both countries. Iran’s engagement with Afghanistan also affects Pakistani security interests in its near abroad. Nor is the relationship limited strictly to security. Pakistan has sought to expand bilateral trade and remains interested in energy cooperation, including the long-discussed Iran–Pakistan gas pipeline. Iran’s position on the Gulf of Oman also touches Pakistan’s maritime and economic interests, to say nothing of Tehran’s relationship with New Delhi.
Therefore, Pakistan’s regional balancing act requires recognizing that while Saudi Arabia is a crucial strategic, defense, and economic partner, Iran is Pakistan’s immediate neighbor. A serious deterioration in relations with Tehran could generate direct consequences for Pakistan’s border security, regional stability, and economic interests, underscoring why Islamabad has such strong incentives to preserve a functional relationship with Iran, independent of its desire to maintain its partnerships with Saudi Arabia and other GCC members.
Domestic politics matter too. Pakistan has a sizable Shia minority, which includes elements sympathetic to Iran, so there is a chance taking a harder line toward Tehran could trigger protests at home.
Pakistan wants to see the current U.S.-Iran crisis resolved as quickly as possible, which is why its government has invested considerable diplomatic energy in trying to de-escalate the conflict, seeking to position itself as a bridge between the two sides. Preserving that intermediary role requires Pakistan to avoid becoming an active belligerent.
Unveiled last month, the new Mecca Joint Defense Agreement—a security configuration consisting of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—and Pakistan’s recently ratified defense pact with Kuwait stand to significantly complicate this delicate balancing act.
The latest Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia are an early test of what these new security commitments actually mean. The Mecca pact does not appear to create an automatic obligation to fight if a member is attacked; rather it provides a framework for consultation and collective action. The affected country requests assistance under the agreement, and the members themselves determine what form that assistance should take. Nevertheless, such an arrangement can strengthen deterrence without guaranteeing immediate military response.
The alliance itself is still a work in progress. The military and policymaking integration necessary to implement such an agreement takes time. And, notably, Saudi Arabia has not actually requested direct Pakistani or Turkish military intervention. For now, Islamabad is more likely to contribute through diplomacy, intelligence, air-defense capabilities, and technological assistance, and perhaps supporting a multinational naval presence around the Bab al-Mandeb. (It’s worth noting that this past May, Pakistan reportedly deployed a detachment including 8,000 troops and 16 military aircraft to Saudi Arabia.)
There are good reasons for this restraint. Pakistan has previously resisted becoming a combatant in Yemen, highlighted by a parliamentary vote on April 10, 2015, to reject a proposal to join the Saudi-led military coalition fighting the Houthis. At that time, Pakistani parliamentarians vowed “unequivocal support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” while also declaring that Islamabad “should maintain neutrality in the Yemen conflict so as to be able to play a proactive diplomatic role to end the crisis.”
Today, sending troops into the conflict would still carry serious domestic, economic, security, and diplomatic costs for Pakistan. More importantly, joining the war on the Saudi side could undermine Islamabad’s channels with Tehran and its effort to facilitate U.S.–Iran de-escalation.
Here is a dilemma. An alliance’s credibility ultimately rests on its members’ willingness to commit to collective defense in the face of real costs. If Pakistan consistently avoids direct military involvement, members and non-members alike may come to wonder how far the pact’s security guarantees actually extend.
Nevertheless, restraint should not automatically be interpreted as failure, especially at this early stage. Pakistan can contribute meaningfully, whether by diplomacy or through the provision of ancillary military support, in ways that don’t require the involvement of combat forces. The challenge for Pakistan is to use those contributions to demonstrate that its defense commitments are credible, without widening a regional war or endangering its role as a mediator.
The post Pakistan’s Defense Dilemma appeared first on The American Conservative.
Inflation concerns and central bank responses have prompted evasive action from the Treasury secretary.
Last Wednesday, in the first rate hike in over three years, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate—the Federal Funds Rate—by a quarter of a percentage point, to 4 percent.
“Inflation is too high and has been for too long,” Chairman Warsh said in a press conference announcing the hike, adding that inflation had remained above the Fed’s target for more than five years.
This goes against the president’s repeated requests to lower interest rates in recent months (indeed, many saw Trump’s nomination of Warsh as predicated on the belief the latter would cut rates). It also throws a wrench in the plans of Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, the self-proclaimed “leading bond salesman” in America, who faces a mounting debt crisis.
The Government Accountability Office reports that in fiscal year 2026, the Treasury will need to refinance $9.7 trillion, or about a quarter of the national debt. The Joint Economic Committee estimates as much as a third of the national debt will mature within 12 months. Doing so as Treasury yields climb to decade highs poses the risk of massive fiscal costs to pay off interest. Interest payments already surpass defense spending, and will make up an ever larger share of government expenditures when that debt is inevitably refinanced rather than retired (given that spending isn’t coming down).
Warsh raising rates to fight energy-driven CPI inflation undermines Bessent’s refinancing efforts. But the Fed has not been complacent on the Treasury market, increasing its Treasury holdings by $366 billion since December 2025 and $97 billion since Warsh took the job as Fed chair—numbers that dwarf the Treasury’s own $6 billion in buybacks. The Fed appears to be replacing its maturing mortgage-backed securities with Treasury securities, but that isn’t enough to push down yields in the face of the Iran War, rising fuel prices, and the increasingly dire fiscal situation.
And the inflation hawks are also making moves in other major central banks.
The European Central Bank (ECB), concerned by energy shocks and attendant inflation, just raised rates by a quarter of a percentage point to 2.5 percent—its second hike since the war between the United States and Iran began.
The ECB doesn’t seem optimistic about its trajectory, projecting that inflation will stay above 2 percent until at least 2028. This lays the groundwork for future rate hikes, should the conflict continue and inflation persist. An additional inflationary risk that is to some degree already a foregone conclusion is the shrinking gas stores that Europe relies upon for winter.
The Bank of England last week did not raise rates, but still struck a hawkish tone. The Wall Street Journal quoted Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey:
So far higher global energy costs have had a limited effect on price and wage setting in the U.K. But the longer this volatility persists, the bigger the impact it will have on inflation, and the more likely it is we will need to raise the bank rate.
It’s really at the Bank of Japan (BOJ) where the shenanigans are most interesting. Bessent has made himself into a fiscal disciplinarian for the Japanese government and central bank, in an attempt to stave off a potential fiscal crisis for the largest foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries.
The yen plummeted against the dollar in August, leading the Treasury Department to engage in drastic measures to halt its fall—lest the Japanese have to sell their Treasuries to get the dollars necessary to buy yen. The Treasury boosted the yen by purchasing some of the currency, but is bound by the Exchange Stabilization Fund’s budget in ways that the Federal Reserve may not be.
Bessent wants to avoid Japan selling off Treasuries, which would push down bond prices and increase yields. He publicly encouraged the Federal Reserve to increase the cap of its repo facility (the Foreign and International Monetary Authorities) to accommodate stabilization of the yen.
Using these facilities, the Federal Reserve gives the Japanese dollars that they will use to buy yen. In exchange, they are temporarily given the Bank of Japan’s U.S. Treasuries as collateral—which will be repurchased later with interest. This boosts the yen through purchases by the BOJ, but doesn’t change the secondary Treasury market itself.
The Fed did not act on Bessent’s call to raise the cap at the most recent Federal Open Market Committee meeting, but the Treasury secretary went further to encourage the Bank of Japan to help the Japanese government get its house in order.
Bessent views the Japanese as partially to blame for the yen slipping. Low interest rates have helped push the yen down, which puts Japan’s position on Treasuries in a precarious situation. By raising short-term rates to 31-year highs, the Bank of Japan was able to prevent itself from selling too many U.S. bonds under the cover of fighting inflation.
And inflation has become a new problem for Japan. While the central bank’s target is 2 percent, and inflation is 1.7 percent, the BOJ is still anxious to address rising prices stemming from the Iran War’s energy shock and the falling yen. Thus its rate hike was not unexpected, but is entangled with Secretary Bessent’s claims that he has “pretty good insight into what the Japanese, what the Bank of Japan is going to do.”
“I am the house now,” he said.
In recent months Bessent has put public pressure on the Japanese government to get its fiscal situation under control so that its spending wouldn’t undermine the BOJ’s battle against inflation. If Japan’s bond yields rise while spending continues to grow, it will create larger issues for the Treasury, making the motive behind Bessent’s call for higher rates and fiscal tightening quite clear.
It appears that Bessent can wheel and deal his way into a favorable interest rate decision with the Bank of Japan. The Federal Reserve appears less amenable; as the Iran War and unrestrained spending continue to frustrate the administration’s desire for lower rates and lower prices.
Warsh has given an answer to the question, “Is he his own man?” But the White House may not like it.
The post As Bessent Muscles Bank of Japan, the Fed and European Central Bank Set Their Own Courses appeared first on The American Conservative.
Markets opened sharply down and oil prices up Thursday on inconclusive reports about diplomacy to end the Iraq War.
Multiple outlets reported communication Wednesday between the Iranian and American delegations at the UN General Assembly in New York, during which Iran gave its conditions for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, but the extent of the talks remained unclear. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff claimed on X that the discussions were conducted through mediators, as did the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei, but Middle East Eye reported a direct meeting between the American special envoy and Araghchi, citing a Gulf official and Iranian state media.
Per Baghaei, the lifting of the naval blockade and sanctions remained preconditions for the reopening of the strait.
Markets expressed pessimism about a diplomatic breakthrough. Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at 51,415.75, down nearly 100 points from the previous day’s close. Brent crude oil opened at $103 per barrel. AAA reported a national average price of $4.48 per gallon of regular gas and $6.51 per gallon of diesel.
POLITICO reported that the Trump administration is preparing a 90-day export ban on diesel, which has hit record high prices in the past week, to ease short-term supply.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian used his Wednesday speech at the UN to condemn American “terrorism,” showing pictures of the dead from the American bombing of a school in Minab and the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump gave his speech at the assembly Tuesday, when he threatened to “annihilate” Iran.
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Xi’s visit may yield incremental improvements, but a grand bargain is unlikely.
Last October, the United States and China agreed to a one-year pause in the trade war set off by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The truce stabilized economic ties, and is likely to be extended when President Xi Jinping visits the White House this week for a summit sure to be heavy on pageantry (President Donald Trump is expected to personally greet Xi at the airport). But progress in areas besides commerce will be elusive without a meeting of minds on the long-term direction of the relationship. The baseline scenario is that a narrow trade truce keeps things just above water and leaves higher-stakes issues to the future—perhaps until after Trump leaves office. Improving this precarious trajectory will require both sides to restrain their most zero-sum impulses and take steps to expand engagement beyond trade to the political issues dividing them.
The “truce era” of U.S.-China relations is pitched between visions. The first is suggested by a “constructive relationship of strategic stability,” the awkward framing both sides adopted at the Beijing summit in May. In this view, a durable “strategic stalemate” requires a bilateral reset. Beijing and Washington must accept that the power gap between them has narrowed to such a degree that the relationship must be recast to sustainably protect each side’s redlines, particularly regarding political issues like Taiwan and the U.S. alliance system.
The second is that the truce is just what it sounds like: a useful lull for each side to get its house in order. Trump 2.0, in this read, is just a temporary exception to the hawkish impulses of official Washington, and the bilateral power gap is not guaranteed to continue narrowing in China’s favor—especially given the revolutionary promise of AI. It follows that the truce is not an opportunity to set the relationship on a more sustainable path, but rather to patch techno-economic vulnerabilities, corral allies, and prepare for a long-term resumption of confrontation and instability.
The deliverables most likely to emerge from Xi’s visit will be notionally compatible with both visions. They will sustain the truce and begin to flesh out the “constructive relationship of strategic stability,” but they will also be easily reversible in the event of a sudden downturn in the relationship. Under the October deal, both sides rolled back tariffs, the U.S. paused an expansion of export controls on Chinese firms, and China agreed to resume rare earths exports to the U.S. and pause a licensing regime that could restrict trade in any goods containing Chinese inputs.
The Chinese side reportedly wants to extend this arrangement until the end of Trump’s term, but the U.S. has offered only six months, possible because it believes China has not fulfilled its promise to restore rare earths shipments. Preparatory talks last weekend between Treasury Secretary Bessent and China’s Vice-Premier He Lifeng did not settle the issue. The truce is vague and fragile. This summer it was strained by U.S. import bans on Chinese robots and power equipment and retaliatory Chinese sanctions on American firms. Still, it is low-cost for both sides and now serves as the central ballast of the relationship. Expect it to be renewed when Trump meets Xi.
The Bessent–He talks apparently produced a tentative agreement to create a “U.S.-China AI dialogue.” According to Bessent’s remarks to reporters last Sunday, the body will help establish joint understandings of AI threats and might also include a “notification mechanism” for each side to alert the other of AI safety incidents such as the recent cases of rogue behavior by AI agents. Like the 2024 Biden–Xi agreement to keep AI out of each side’s nuclear command and control systems, a notification mechanism is not enforceable or verifiable. The best case is that it becomes a frequently used channel for both sides to develop a common vocabulary of AI policy and communicate red lines. The worst case is that it suffers the fate of previous U.S.-China hotlines: No one will pick up the phone.
Progress on military-to-military talks will be similarly incremental and reversible. This week’s meeting will reportedly build on work done to resuscitate bilateral military contacts in the wake of the Busan and Beijing summits. This might include regularized meetings between U.S. and Chinese theater commanders, as well as a resumption of the arms control talks China broke off in 2024 following U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
The arms-control mechanism may lead to other crisis stability measures, such as a formal missile launch notification agreement (U.S. officials pushed for this late in the Biden administration). And Elbridge Colby, the head of the Pentagon’s policy office, may finally get the green light to visit Beijing, reportedly a longstanding goal of his. These would all be valuable measures, but they will make flimsy scaffolding absent efforts to address the political sources of the U.S.–China rivalry.
First among those is Taiwan. Trump’s decision to pause a $14 billion arms sale to the island has probably been vital to sustaining the truce. After the Beijing summit he told Fox News the sale is a “good negotiating chip” and that he is “not looking” for Taiwan to go independent. With each passing summit, Washington’s China-watching community holds its breath, concerned that Trump may assent to China’s wishes and significantly weaken the US commitment to Taiwan. A U.S. policy shift such as formally “opposing” Taiwan independence given in exchange for commensurate Chinese concessions would signal both sides are willing to reconcile their interests to sustain “constructive strategic stability” in the long run.
But despite many China-watchers’ fears (and some restrainers’ hopes), a grand bargain is unlikely. Trump disciplines his rhetoric about precious few topics, and one of those topics is Taiwan. Unlike his predecessor, who said four times the U.S. would definitely defend Taiwan, Trump consistently hews to the traditional US policy of “dual deterrence,” which sustains the status quo by keeping both Taiwan and China guessing about US intentions.
An overture to Kim Jong Un is a more promising avenue for political cooperation. Xi and Trump will recall that their coordination in 2017–18 helped end the Korean missile crisis. It also served as a stabilizing force for the broader U.S.–China relationship, which at that time was strained by Trump’s first tariff war. Since then, North Korea has tripled its nuclear arsenal and entered into an expansive security alliance with Russia. Its neighbors, including China and South Korea, increasingly accept that denuclearization is no longer a viable basis for relations with the Kim regime; still, they continue to see engagement as in their national interests. In August President Trump renewed his diplomatic push on the issue and said he wants to meet with Kim “this year.”
The North has rebuffed Trump so far, likely because it sees no evidence Washington is modifying its insistence that U.S.–DPRK relations can only improve if denuclearization occurs. China reportedly offered to help broker a potential new round of Trump–Kim talks, and this week’s summit could bring those into being. The White House readout from the Beijing summit contained the stock reaffirmation of the goal of denuclearizing North Korea. New joint language this time—perhaps explicitly elevating stable engagement over denuclearization—would signal to the North that the U.S. is serious about talks. It would also provide an opportunity for U.S.-China cooperation on a regional security challenge that touches both sides’ vital interests.
This week’s summit will mostly be an exercise in marking time, yielding smiles and incremental agreements. That is better than many alternatives. It was easy to imagine that the second Trump administration would pick up China policy where the first one left off and resume the Covid-era hardline. Instead, Trump kept the China hawks in his administration at bay. Neither Trump nor Xi is allergic to confrontation, but each ultimately sees the other as a powerful peer he must work with to secure his own country’s interests. This week, and in the two further meetings to come in 2026, both sides need to begin to give political expression to “constructive strategic stability.” Otherwise, the truce will wither, and the relationship will remain at the mercies of accident and force.
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In a speech to the UN General Assembly Wednesday, Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian condemned the U.S. and Israeli war against his country. Holding up pictures of children killed in a U.S. attack on a school in Minab, he claimed that Iranians were “victims of terrorism.” “Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions,” he said, “and we defended ourselves with utmost strength.” Pezeshkian also stated that his country was not seeking nuclear weapons, but insisted on its “inherent” right to nuclear power. “We say it clearly: No nuclear weapons and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology.”
The speech also criticized the response of the international community to what Pezeshkian characterized as Israeli aggression. “Israel kills, but Iran is subject to sanctions,” the Iranian president said. He concluded with a message for the White House: “We will never bow our heads or bend the knee. We are ready for dialogue, diplomacy and negotiations but will never accept the language of force.”
Pezeshkian’s speech comes a day after President Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran in his own address to the UN. Speaking Tuesday morning, Trump talked up the purported successes of the Iran War, and said he had a “big decision” to make. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” he asked, “or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
There have also been discussions between high-level Iranian and U.S. representatives on the sidelines of the General Assembly this week. In a meeting brokered by Qatar, representatives including Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and special envoy Steve Witkoff held talks that Trump later told reporters were “very productive.” This is the first meeting between the two sides since June.
Brent crude oil opened at around $98.43 per barrel Wednesday, down somewhat from recent highs. AAA reports that the average price of regular gasoline in the United States is $4.47 per gallon, a slight decline from yesterday.
The post Iran War Day 208: Iran Tells UN It Won’t ‘Bend the Knee’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president’s UN speech articulated his second-term foreign policy in its purest form to date.
The UN is, if not quite a punchline, at least not an institution with oodles of heft in 2026. Maybe it never was, really; as far as preventing international conflict goes, it was broken to begin with.
At the same time, the leader of the free world showing up to the body’s annual General Assembly and going on one about the various wars he has started without so much as a how-do-you-do to the international community is a fresh strain. Most of President Donald Trump’s Tuesday address to the congregation was devoted to self-congratulation about American aggression. Pride of place was given to the Iran War, of course, with the usual invocations of the Iranian nuclear program, the Beirut barracks bombing, and the 72,000 Iranians the president is currently alleging the regime has killed in the past year. (A few weeks ago, while Trump was speaking to Fox News’ Trey Gowdy, it was only 50,000, which suggests that Trump is more annoyed than usual about the war.) We got to hear about the sinking of the Iranian navy, the destruction of radar installations, and the great success of the American efforts to escort oil tankers out of the Strait of Hormuz.
The nub of it: Will there be a deal, or will Trump “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
“Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” mused the president. “But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to. They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don’t realize is that I’m not running. I did that already and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide, and I’ll be here for two and a half years.”
A solemn thought. There is something to it—there is a segment of Iranian policymakers who think a midterm defeat is going to hobble Trump’s ability to wage the war, which is, for them, dangerously misguided. Even if the Democrats blow the doors out, it is unimaginable that they will have a veto-proof majority, even if they wanted to start exerting congressional war powers (a very unlikely hypothetical). But so much for Iran; the more programmatically interesting section of the speech was the discussion of our Venezuelan caper.
In addition to repeating all the usual rah-rah stuff about the military operation itself (I, for one, was surprised to learn that apparently Caracas is considered an impregnable fortress, “flawless against attack”), Trump touted the recently announced deal for rights to Venezuelan oil reserves.
“It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made,” said Trump. (For whatever it’s worth, the administration’s public position at the time was that it was “not a war.”) Then, with a smirk: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Here perhaps is the purest expression so far of this administration’s foreign policy schema; it’s nice to have it out there, even if it’s a little hair-raising. The going theory around the editorial office is that, in the period of American hegemony (or empire, if you’re feeling shirty), our political class has deprecated actual national interest in favor of international ideological projects. Well and good. But the upshot is not actually that the United States has been insufficiently predatory in its behaviors, but that imperialism is inherently at odds with the American project in its ideal form. An idealistic empire is bad, but you can maybe get people to go along with it. Nakedly predatory empires tend to have a much shorter shelf-life. And things tend to go poorly for their governing powers after the empire is gone: Ask the Germans, or the Assyrians, or, if you really want to make the point, the Athenians—the Delian League is perhaps not a great blueprint for the post-Cold War world system. If the decline of American hegemony is determined by material factors—a good bet—ticking everyone off on the way out is perhaps not the best way to insulate American interests in the post-hegemonic world. If your plane is going down, you can try to land it, or you can keep flying until it crashes.
The man himself appears to have made his decision. The main foreign policy portion of his speech—before he moved on to insisting on calling artificial intelligence “super intelligence” and talking about the “transgender utilization [sic]” of children—wrapped up with some threatening noises aimed at Mexico and especially Cuba, which is apparently the source of all ideological dysfunction here at home. If it’s working so well so far, why give it up?
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