8,000 Strikes, Zero Surrender: Trump’s Iran War Hits the Diego Garcia Wall

Four weeks in, the scoreboard looks impressive on paper: more than 8,000 targets hit, 130 vessels damaged or destroyed, and US commanders bragging that Iran’s “fighting power” is substantially degraded. In reality, Tehran is still firing missiles and drones at Israel and US partners, still enforcing a de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for Western shipping, and now feels confident enough to lob two ballistic missiles 2,500 miles toward Diego Garcia — the joint US‑UK base in the Indian Ocean that’s supposed to sit outside the blast radius.

The Diego Garcia shot is the clearest tell. One missile failed mid‑flight, the other was shot down by a US warship, and nobody in the Pentagon thinks Iran can hit the continental United States. But the range alone surprised US officials and underlined what Trump himself hyped in his State of the Union: Iran is working on systems that can reach far beyond the Gulf. The further they fire, the less accurate the missiles get — yet Tehran still chose to send a message at a base that anchors US power projection into the Middle East and Asia. That’s not a posture of a regime ready to fold; it’s a regime showing it can still reach out and touch a symbol.

At the same time, the war is cornering Washington into policy backflips. The Treasury has just temporarily relaxed sanctions on Iranian oil already at sea, allowing roughly 140 million barrels into the market to calm prices — a move that, by definition, sends money to the very state the US is bombing. It comes on top of earlier waivers for Russian oil in transit and underlines how desperate the White House is to tame an energy shock it helped unleash. The Iran war was sold as a way to crush an adversary and stabilize the region; within a month it has produced Hormuz disruption, price spikes, and a US Treasury that has to subsidize adversarial barrels to cushion the blow.

The nuclear question is the next trap. Iranian media report another strike on Natanz, a core site in the enrichment program, after it was already bombed in the June war; Israel denies involvement, the US refuses to comment, and experts keep repeating the same line: you can’t bomb away a nuclear program that’s spread out, hardened and backed by stockpiles of enriched uranium. That leaves Trump weighing something far uglier — a ground operation to seize uranium on Iranian soil — while delivering contradictory public messages about whether the war is already a “great success” or just getting started.

On the ground, the human and political costs keep climbing. Israel’s defense minister is promising that joint US‑Israeli attacks will “escalate significantly” in the coming week, as the Israeli Air Force hammers southern Beirut and refuses even direct Lebanese offers of cease-fire talks and Hezbollah disarmament. Death tolls are already in the thousands: at least 1,348–1,398 civilians killed in Iran, more than 1,000 in Lebanon, 14 in Israel, and 13 American service members dead — with no endgame in sight beyond “more.”

So the war’s real update isn’t the target count; it’s the strategic picture. Iran’s arsenal is weaker but still firing, its missiles now reaching for Diego Garcia, Hormuz is still effectively weaponized, the US is relaxing sanctions to buy time on oil, and the nuclear problem is unsolved. The operation that was supposed to restore deterrence is instead proving that there’s no airstrike number large enough to force Tehran to bend — only a deepening bill in blood, barrels, and credibility.

#IranWar #Trump #USA #Israel #DiegoGarcia #Hormuz #oil #sanctions #nuclear #Hezbollah #MiddleEast

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The Trump Ultimatum: 48 Hours to Reopen the Strait of Hormuz

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Trump gave Iran 48 hours to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to navigation or face the destruction of its energy infrastructure, as Tehran launched its most destructive attack to date on Israel.

The ultimatum, issued just a day after the US president declared that he planned to “end” military operations after three weeks of war, came as the main oil passage effectively remained closed and thousands of other US Marines were heading to the Middle East.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that the United States would ”strike and destroy“ the Iranian power plants, ”starting with the largest first", if Tehran did not fully reopen the strait within 48 hours, or 23:44 GMT on Monday depending on the time of his post.

Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi said Tehran had imposed restrictions only on ships from countries involved in attacks on Iran and would help others who remained out of the conflict.

In response to Trump's threat, the Iranian military said it would target energy and desalination infrastructure “belonging to the United States and the regime in the region,” according to the Fars news agency.

Trump's ultimatum came hours after two Iranian missiles struck southern Israel, injuring more than 100 people in the most destructive attack since the war began. Netanyahu, promised to fight back “on all fronts”.

The strikes, which passed through Israel's missile defense systems, tore the facades of residential buildings and dug craters in the ground.

First responders said 84 people were injured in the city of Arad, 10 of them seriously. A few hours earlier, 33 people had been injured in the nearby town of Dimona, where AFPTV images showed a large hole dug in the ground next to piles of rubble and twisted metal.

Dimona hosts a facility widely considered to be the site of the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, although Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons.

The Israeli military told Agence France-Presse that there had been a "direct missile strike on a building" in Dimona, with casualties reported at several sites, including a 10-year-old boy in serious condition with shrapnel.

Netanyahu promised to continue hitting Iran. A few hours later, the Israeli military said that its forces had launched a wave of strikes on Tehran.

#trump #stopthefire #hormuz #japan #iran #tehran #attack

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Iran, quant à lui, said the targeting of Dimona was a retaliatory measure against Israeli strikes on its Natanz nuclear facility, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) saying the forces had also targeted other cities in southern Israel as well as military sites in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

After the Natanz attack, the head of the UN nuclear surveillance, Rafael Grossi, reiterated his call for “military restraint to avoid any risk of nuclear accident”.

The Natanz facility houses underground centrifuges used to enrich uranium for Iran's disputed nuclear program; it suffered damage in the June 2025 war.

The Israeli military denied being behind the Natanz strike, but said it struck a facility at a Tehran university that it said was being used to develop nuclear weapons components for Iran's ballistic missile program.

The United Arab Emirates said on Saturday it was facing air attacks after Iran warned it against authorizing strikes from its territory on disputed islands near the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has choked off the vital waterway, which carries a fifth of the world's peacetime crude oil trade.

The impasse has pushed up crude oil prices, with Brent North Sea crude now trading above $105 a barrel, as the long-term consequences for the global economy become an acute concern.

A joint statement by the leaders of several countries – including the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, condemned the “de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces”.

“We express our willingness to contribute to the appropriate efforts to ensure a safe passage through the strait”, they said.

Trump called NATO allies “cowards" and urged them to secure the strait.

On Sunday, Japan said it may consider deploying its army for demining in the Strait of Hormuz, if a ceasefire is reached.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Toshimitsu Motegi, said “If there were to be a complete ceasefire, hypothetically speaking, then things like demining could happen”.

“It's purely hypothetical, but if a ceasefire was established and the naval mines created an obstacle, then I think it would be something to consider”, Motegi told Japanese television.

Japan's military actions are limited under its pacifist post-war constitution, but the 2015 security legislation allows Japan to use its self-defense forces abroad if an attack, including against a close security partner, threatens Japan's survival and no other means are available to deal with it.

#trump #stopthefire #hormuz #japan #iran #tehran #attack

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#ruhl #interview

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There are reports of the beginning of full-scale military operations in Ethiopia, where militants from FANO, with the support of neighboring Eritrea, launched a major offensive in the South Gondar zone in the Amhara region, attacking government forces.

Some regional sources claim that up to 650 government soldiers were killed as a result, and another 418 were captured.

#fullscale #military #operations #ethiopia

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Trump’s 48-Hour Ultimatum: Lights Out or Strait Open

Trump just turned a regional energy war into an explicit threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants, the grid that keeps tens of millions of civilians alive, unless Tehran fully reopens the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. Iran’s answer wasn’t to blink; it was to fire.

Missiles struck Dimona and nearby Arad, injuring more than 10 people and landing just eight miles from Israel’s main nuclear complex, while commanders in Tehran warned that any attack on their energy system would be met with strikes on desalination plants and other critical water and power infrastructure used by Israel, the U.S. and Gulf partners.

Four weeks and thousands of U.S.–Israeli strikes into this war, Iran’s arsenal is battered but still firing daily salvos at Israel and enforcing a de facto embargo on Western shipping through Hormuz. Trump’s own messaging is all over the map: public statements rejecting a cease-fire and sending more troops and ships, alongside talk of “winding down” operations; a warning to Israel days ago not to hit Iranian energy, followed by his own threat to do exactly that.

Israeli commanders are telling the public they are only “midway” through the war and should expect fighting through Passover, while in Lebanon the campaign against Hezbollah has displaced more than a million people and stepped-up house demolitions increasingly resemble the early architecture of a de facto occupation zone.

The casualty numbers show where this is heading: well over 1,300 civilians killed in Iran, more than 1,000 in Lebanon, at least 15 people dead in Iran’s attacks on Israel and 13 U.S. service members killed — with both sides now openly placing each other’s electricity and water systems on the target list.

Trump’s 48‑hour countdown doesn’t look like a plan to calmly reopen a shipping lane; it looks like the next step toward turning the entire region’s civilian infrastructure into a legitimate battlefield — and locking the U.S. into an attrition war it still can’t explain how to end.

#IranWar #Trump #Hormuz #Israel #Dimona #energy #powerGrid #desalination #Lebanon #Hezbollah #MiddleEast

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Trump Turns Airport Chaos Into a Deportation Stage

Trump is now officially turning TSA’s funding crisis into live theater: he says ICE agents will start deploying to airports on Monday, not because they’re trained to run X-ray machines, but because Democrats won’t sign his Homeland Security deal on immigration enforcement. ICE, he says, will “help our wonderful TSA Agents” and “do Security like no one has ever seen before,” including arrests of “all Illegal Immigrants … with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.” In other words, your stalled spring break line is leverage — and a backdrop.

Even his own former officials say the plan makes no operational sense. The bottlenecks are at X-ray belts, baggage screening and ID checks — jobs that require specialized training — while the administration admits ICE will mostly guard doors and glance at IDs. The point isn’t efficiency; it’s optics and pressure. Democrats are trying to pay TSA separately while forcing basic constraints on ICE raids after federal agents killed two protesters in Minneapolis. Republicans stapled TSA paychecks to full ICE and CBP funding with minimal new rules — and now the White House is dangling “untrained ICE at your gate” as the price of saying no.

So the picture at the terminal is simple: TSA officers working without pay for more than a month, walking off the job in growing numbers, security lines stretching for hours — and a president who would rather drop deportation cops into that mess than tell his own party to pass a clean bill to pay them. If you’re flying tomorrow, the message from Washington is clear: welcome to security theater, season two — this time, the show is about scaring Congress, and you’re the unpaid extra.

#Trump #ICE #TSA #shutdown #airports #immigration #DHS #USA #securityTheater

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Trump’s Hormuz Roulette: Blackouts for Iran, $112 Oil for Everyone Else

Trump has turned the Hormuz crisis into a two‑day game of nuclear‑scale chicken: either Iran “fully opens, without threat” the world’s key oil chokepoint, or the US starts hitting its power plants — the same civilian grid that keeps hospitals, cities and industry running.

Tehran’s answer is pure mirror: any strike on its power facilities means closing Hormuz “completely” and hitting “all energy, information technology, and desalination infrastructure” tied to the US and Israel in the region, from Gulf pipelines to the plants that literally keep their drinking water flowing.

Four weeks in, the war has already shut most traffic through a strait that normally carries a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG, pushed Brent above 112 dollars and sent some refined products over 200 dollars a barrel, helped wreck fertilizer flows, and put global food production into the blast radius.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent now openly says the goal is to crush Iran’s air force, navy and coastal defenses and “deny” it any ability to project power, while Netanyahu says the aim is to “break completely” Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and create conditions for regime change.

Western intel, meanwhile, says the regime isn’t even close to falling; missile salvos into Israel have intensified, 115 people were just injured around Arad and Dimona, and Iran just proved it can throw ballistic missiles 2,500 miles toward Diego Garcia — a capability beyond what many in Washington publicly admitted.

The body count is already above 4,000 across the region, with more than three‑quarters of the dead in Iran and over 1,000 in Lebanon as Israel ramps up strikes on Hezbollah and infrastructure that Lebanon’s president warns could be “a prelude to a ground invasion.”

Yet instead of shrinking the target set, both sides are now explicitly putting power plants, desalination facilities and IT networks on the list, moving from “precision strikes” to system‑level punishment.

For Europe, China, Japan and the Global South, the punchline is simple: the US is pumping record oil at home, but the war it launched with Israel has made everyone else pay in $112 crude, fertilizer shocks and food‑chain risk — and now the man who promised “American energy dominance” is threatening to turn off another country’s lights while betting the world won’t notice the fire spreading from their grid to its own economy.

#IranWar #Trump #Hormuz #oil #gas #energyCrisis #Israel #DiegoGarcia #Lebanon #Hezbollah #inflation #foodSecurity

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Oil at Monday’s Open: Trading a 48‑Hour Threat Clock

Oil just stopped pretending this is about “volatility” and started trading directly on Trump’s ego and Iran’s survival instinct. At Friday’s close, Brent was at 112.19 dollars — a near four‑year high — before the president slapped a 48‑hour ultimatum on Tehran: fully reopen Hormuz “without threat” or watch the U.S. “obliterate” your power plants.

Just the day before he was musing about “winding down” the war; now markets get a countdown clock to see whether he takes out the grid that keeps 100‑plus Iranian gas power stations feeding cities and industry.

Tehran’s answer is simple: hit our power, and we hit yours — or at least the stuff that keeps your friends’ cities habitable. Iran is openly threatening U.S.‑linked energy and desalination plants across the Gulf, after already striking ports and refineries in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar; four days of global supply — roughly 440 million barrels — have already vanished during 22 days of quasi‑closure in Hormuz.

Analysts aren’t talking about price “noise” anymore: one calls Trump’s move a “48‑hour ticking time bomb of elevated uncertainty”; another says the real story isn’t Iran caving but “scorched earth for Gulf infrastructure.”

The real nightmare isn’t just crude; it’s water. Iran has so far held back from hitting the big desalination plants in Saudi Arabia and the UAE — the ones that keep entire Gulf metros alive — but Western risk assessments are stark: sustained attacks could leave some cities unlivable in weeks, triggering mass evacuations and cascading power failures.

Fatih Birol at the IEA says fixing Middle East Gulf supply could take up to six months even without that scenario. Meanwhile the Trump team is floating plans to blockade or occupy Iran’s Kharg Island to “force open” Hormuz, as if physically sitting on another country’s export terminal has no blowback risk in a region already pricing 112‑dollar Brent, double‑digit weekly gains in crude and the widest WTI–Brent spread in 11 years.

So Monday’s trade isn’t about “whether oil ticks up”; it’s about whether the White House walks back its own threat, or lets the deadline run and turns a shipping crisis into a test of who’s willing to bomb water plants first.

Traders will tell you this is uncertainty; civilians in the Gulf might call it something else: a market run by men who treat your tap, your light switch and your plane ticket as expendable props in a pricing experiment.

#oil #IranWar #Trump #Hormuz #energy #desalination #Gulf #markets #inflation #recession #securityTheater

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Campus Crackdown: Trump’s New Voter ID Lab

Trump’s people finally found a place where “election integrity” can’t talk back: freshmen dorms. While the SAVE America Act crawls through Congress, the administration is already doing the quiet work — cutting off the money, scaring the institutions, and calling it “protecting democracy.” The Education Department has barred colleges from using Federal Work Study to pay low‑income students for voter registration or basic civic work, scrapping Biden‑era guidance that explicitly allowed nonpartisan get‑out‑the‑vote jobs and rebranding them as “political activity.” Translation: if you’re poor and in school, you can still clean the dining hall for aid — you just can’t be paid to hand your classmates a registration form.

At the same time, the department is warning colleges not to “aid and abet” fraud, telling them they may “limit” who gets voter registration forms, and launching a FERPA probe into Tufts’ National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement — the main dataset schools use to figure out whether their students actually vote. One letter told more than 1,000 university presidents to stop using NSLVE reports or risk their own investigations; the National Student Clearinghouse has already walked away from the project, and Tufts has delayed its 2024 turnout report until the feds are done leaning on them. Official line: this is about privacy and the “integrity” of records. Practical effect: the one large, nonpartisan tool for measuring student voting is frozen right before a midterm where youth turnout could decide control of Congress.

On paper, Republicans say they’re not afraid of young voters, just of “young voters who only hear one side of the story,” and they’re pushing voter ID as “common sense.” In practice, more than a dozen mostly red states already restrict campus IDs at the polls, with Florida, New Hampshire and Indiana tightening rules further, and a Trump‑backed bill that would codify strict citizenship and ID checks into federal law. Youth turnout has risen since 2016 — and on campuses it’s higher than among the broader 18–29 crowd — which is exactly why the federal message to colleges now is: stop paying students to help each other vote, hand fewer registration forms to fewer people, and don’t you dare use your own voting data without clearing it with Washington first.

The beauty of this design is that nobody has to say “we’re suppressing student votes.” You just redefine voter registration as political work, redefine data as a privacy problem, and redefine colleges as potential fraud accomplices until they back off anything that smells like civic engagement. If turnout drops, it’s not the administration’s fault — it’s “compliance,” “statute” and “neutral enforcement.”

And if you’re a 19‑year‑old trying to vote in your first midterm, the lesson is simple: the same federal government that tells you to be a “responsible citizen” is quietly making sure no one on your campus is paid to help you act like one.

#USA #elections #Trump #students #voterSuppression #highered #workstudy #FERPA #youthvote #fakeDemocracy

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#trump #japanese #china #us

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📰 The Five-Day Ultimatum That Became a Schedule

Forty-eight hours ago:

“I will obliterate their power plants.”

Now:

“Very good, productive talks. Delaying strikes for five days.”

Same man. Same week. Different stock portfolio.

Iran didn’t open Hormuz. The oil mines didn’t vanish. Brent didn’t fall. The only thing that changed was Trump’s Monday mood — and a few nine-figure bets on Wall Street.

“We had extremely productive negotiations,”

he says.

Translation: someone just cashed in on the world’s most predictable “black swan.”
An hour before the tweet hit, futures whispered like insiders at a poker table — the market’s usual doomsday trio suddenly switched sides.

One mystery trader bought 30,000 SPY calls at $0.85 apiece before Trump’s “peace” post. Minutes later, they were worth $25. That’s $70 million in an hour. Divine intervention? Or just good timing from someone who gets notifications from the Oval Office five minutes early.

Investigators now chase footprints through offshore funds and crypto wallets. But here’s the real story: Trump turned presidential statements into derivatives. The presidency itself became an algorithmic trading signal.

And the punchline? No one even argues what was traded — only who got the push alert first.

#markets #insidertrading #trump #iran #wallstreet

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📰 Patriot Wars: Florida Edition
Over the weekend, Ukraine’s delegation flew to Florida not for palm trees and photo-ops, but to pressure the Trump administration for fresh anti-Russia sanctions and a secure place in the Patriot missile queue.

Zelensky set the tone in advance, saying he has “a very bad feeling” that the war with Iran will drain Patriot stocks and U.S. attention faster than Russia is dismantling Ukraine’s power grid. While the Gulf lights up with Patriot launches, Kyiv is counting how many of those same interceptors will never be fired at Russian missiles over the Dnipro.

In this setup, Ukraine isn’t the “front line of democracy” — it’s a nervous client who feels its reservation at the U.S. arms restaurant is about to be bumped for a louder, more profitable Middle East VIP drama. That’s why the delegation is acting less like a modest partner and more like an activist shareholder, pushing Washington to hit Russia harder, squeeze Iran, and guarantee that Patriot deliveries won’t quietly shrink.

Washington, for its part, plays the Trump-era classics: big talk about “progress,” careful language about future support, and no clear, immediate commitment on Patriots. Everyone claims they’re talking about peace, but the real negotiations are about oil, missiles, and who gets priority on American hardware.

The irony is simple: Zelensky fears the Iran war will cost Ukraine its Patriots — but the deeper risk is that every new conflict pushes Ukraine further down the list of Washington’s foreign policy priorities. When a new theater becomes the main show, the previous one turns into background noise — and background noise doesn’t get top-shelf weapons.

#ukraine #usa #trump #iran #patriot #war #geopolitics #sanctions

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📰 Trump Sells Peace, Iran Sells Denial, Markets Buy Everything
Trump pressed “post,” the market said “amen,” and Iran said “what the hell is he talking about.” That is basically the Middle East risk model in 2026.

At 13:09, Trump blasts on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran have had “very good and productive” talks toward a “complete and total resolution” of hostilities, and that he’s ordering a five-day delay in strikes on Iran’s power and energy infrastructure. Oil dumps, stocks rip, the shekel jumps — because the market doesn’t need truth, just a headline and a timestamp.

Then he does the TV tour: tells Fox Iran “urgently” wants a deal, hints at “regime change,” says there are “15 points of agreement” and that Iran has agreed to no nukes, and brags that they were literally about to hit power plants that would cost 10 billion dollars to rebuild. Somewhere between the “respectable man” who is not the supreme leader and the 15 bullet points, the whole thing starts sounding less like diplomacy and more like an earnings call for geopolitical volatility.

And then comes Tehran’s answer: absolutely not. Iranian officials line up to declare there were no talks, no deals, and that Trump is just gaming energy prices and buying time for his war plan. The speaker of parliament — the same man Western and Israeli sources say is involved in contacts — tweets that this is “fake news” to manipulate oil and financial markets and to escape the “swamp” the U.S. and Israel are stuck in. Oil spikes back up on the denial. The market, as always, listens to whoever moves the chart.

Meanwhile, in the background, there’s the shuttle circus: Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, and others quietly passing messages between Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Iran’s foreign minister, trying to assemble a meeting that might or might not happen in Islamabad or Ankara. Officially, everyone is denying they’re talking. Unofficially, everyone is talking — mostly to the cameras, the traders, and their own security elites.

So we’re left with a simple riddle: if Trump swears there were “very good and productive” talks, Iran swears there were none, and intermediaries swear they’re shuttling messages — who’s actually negotiating with whom, and is the real audience the enemy, the allies, or the options desk on Wall Street?

#iran #trump #war #oil #markets #middleeast #geopolitics #fakepeace


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📰 Solidarity à la Salmonella: Europe’s Ukrainian Egg Diet

Europe wanted to save Ukraine. Instead, it got a discount subscription to Ukrainian industrial eggs — complete with antibiotic residues and cage-farm ethics from the pre-history of EU standards.

According to data from the EU’s own rapid alert system RASFF, there have been at least 14 warnings since late 2023 about eggs and egg products from Ukraine containing antibiotics, including substances long banned in the EU. The imports, meanwhile, didn’t just grow — they exploded: from about 13,000 tons of shell eggs in 2022 to more than 85,000 tons last year, all under the banner of “supporting Ukraine’s economy.”

The beauty of the scheme is in the invisibility. Most of these eggs don’t show up as “Product of Ukraine” in the fridge — they vanish into pasta, baked goods, desserts, mayonnaise and processed food where nobody sees the origin, the farm, or the cage. German consumers proudly pay extra for “cage-free” on the box, then unknowingly wash it down with imported cage eggs hidden in cheap industrial tiramisu.

Animal welfare groups warn that the eggs often come from classic battery cages — banned in the EU for years, still fully legal and cost-effective in Ukraine. Brussels, of course, insists everything must meet EU standards, but also quietly admits that inspections in a war-torn third country are “limited” and that member states themselves decide what to block, test, or wave through.

Ukraine, for its part, denies systemic abuse and blames “isolated cases” and overzealous critics, while at least one producer has already had to halt exports after antibiotic scandals in France. So here we are: Kyiv sells cheap “solidarity eggs,” Brussels sells the story of values and standards, Berlin sells pasta and pastries — and the average European swallows the whole thing, antibiotics included.

#ukraine #eu #germany #food #antibiotics #agribusiness #warEconomy #solidarity


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📰 Trump Says ‘Talks,’ Iran Says ‘Lies,’ Israel Says ‘Keep Bombing’

The U.S., Iran and Israel just spent a full news cycle proving one thing: nobody’s really talking peace, they’re just talking to their own audiences — and to the oil market.

Trump tells reporters there are “very strong talks” with Iran, “many, like 15 points” of agreement, and a five-day pause on strikes against Iranian power plants so diplomacy can work. Oil and gas prices immediately ease off record highs, because traders don’t care if it’s a deal or a hallucination — as long as it buys a few hours of relief.

Tehran, in public, calls it fiction: the speaker of parliament accuses Trump of spreading false statements to calm energy markets and buy time for more attacks, while officials insist Iran will keep fighting. Yet the same reporting confirms that messages are quietly moving through intermediaries, with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff holding preliminary phone contacts about de-escalation — just don’t call it “negotiations.”

Netanyahu, meanwhile, plays his own double track: after talking to Trump, he says the U.S. thinks it can “leverage” military gains into an agreement — then immediately promises that Israel will continue its campaigns against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. On the ground, nothing stops: new U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, continued offensive in Lebanon, and more than 2,000 dead so far, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, with casualties also in Israel and among U.S. troops.

So the “peace process” looks like this: Trump uses optimism as a market tool, Iran uses denial as a resistance brand, Israel uses the chaos to widen its military room for maneuver — and the only place where “talks” definitely work is in moving Brent, gas futures and defense stocks.

#iran #trump #israel #war #oil #markets #middleeast #peace

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Epic Bluff: Trump’s Iranian Campaign Seems To Be Doomed to Failure

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Trump has claimed there have been talks between the US and Iran over the past day in which the two sides had “major points of agreement”, appearing to avert a potentially severe escalation of the conflict.

Tehran has denied the claim, in which Trump also speculated that a deal could soon be done to end the war. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said no talks had been held with the US since the bombing campaign began 24 days ago.

Trump’s threat at the weekend to “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power stations and energy infrastructure if Tehran did not allow shipping to move freely through the strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s threat to destroy infrastructure across the Middle East in retaliation, had raised fears of a deepening conflict and global economic crisis.

In a flurry of presidential announcements on Monday, Trump first posted on social media that he had extended his deadline by five days, saying the US and Iran had held “very good and productive conversations” in recent days, then told reporters in Palm Beach, Florida, that his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and close aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner had held “very, very strong talks” with the Iranians a day earlier.

Later on Monday, Trump played up the chances of a deal, saying:

“We’re giving it five days and then we’re going to see where that takes us. And I would say at the end of this period, I think it could very well end up being a very good deal for everybody.”

A European official said that while there had been no direct negotiations between the two nations, Egypt, Pakistan and Gulf states were relaying messages.

A Pakistani official and a second source told Reuters that direct talks on ending the war could be held in Islamabad this week.

The Pakistani official said Vance, as well as Witkoff and Kushner, were expected to meet Iranian officials in Islamabad this week, after a call between Trump and Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir.

The White House confirmed Trump’s call with Munir. When asked about a possible visit by Witkoff and Kushner to Islamabad, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said:

“These are sensitive diplomatic discussions and the US will not negotiate through the press.

#tehran #iran #israel #trump #hormuz #operation

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This is a fluid situation, and speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.”

Oman, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan have all been reported to have been involved in efforts to broker an end to hostilities in recent days, but it is unclear how substantial or productive such contacts have been.

Oman’s foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, said on Monday that Oman was working hard to secure safe passage through the strait of Hormuz.

Keir Starmer told a parliamentary committee on Monday that the UK was aware discussions were happening.

The EU chief, Ursula von der Leyen, called for an immediate end to hostilities, describing a “critical” situation for energy supply chains globally.

“We all feel the knock-on effects on gas and oil prices on our businesses and our societies,” von der Leyen said on Tuesday, on a visit to Australia.

“It is of utmost importance that we come to a solution that is negotiated, and this puts an end to the hostilities that we see in the Middle East,” she added.

In reaction to the intensifying energy crisis, Japan said it will release another part of its strategic oil reserves from Thursday, and will tap into joint stockpiles held by producing nations in the country by the end of the month.

Early on Tuesday, state-run Iranian media reported another round of missiles fired at Israel, and rescue services in Israel showed images of a damaged building in the north but reported no casualties.

Lebanese state media said Israel carried out seven air raids on south Beirut overnight.

In all his comments, Trump declined to say with whom the US was speaking in Iran. “We’re dealing with the man who, I believe, is the most respected and the ‘leader’.

It’s a little tough – we’ve wiped out everybody,” Trump said, stating only that the US had not talked to current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters the US had requested a meeting with Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, but that the supreme national security council had yet to decide on any proposed talks and Iran had yet to respond.

Qalibaf himself described “fake news (…) used to manipulate the financial and oil markets”.

The Fars news agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), had earlier also denied any talks, saying there were neither direct nor indirect communications with the US.

Iran’s IRGC said they were launching fresh attacks on US targets, and described Trump’s words as “psychological operations” that were “worn out” and having no impact on Tehran’s fight.

The Iranian state news agency Irna quoted a foreign ministry spokesperson as saying “friendly countries” had sent messages indicating that the US wanted talks to end the war but none had taken place.

Iran has been defiant in the face of Trump’s threats and more than three weeks of the joint US-Israeli offensive.

In response to Sunday’s ultimatum, Tehran threatened to target power plants supplying US bases across the Middle East, vital desalination facilities in Gulf countries, and to intensify strikes on Israel.

#tehran #iran #israel #trump #hormuz #operation

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📰 Trump Bombs Iran, Saves Putin’s Spreadsheet

For Vladimir Putin, the Iran war isn’t a crisis. It’s found money and free PR cover.

As one analysis put it, when Trump greenlit strikes on Iran, Putin may as well have cheered: global attention swung from Ukraine to the Gulf, oil prices exploded, and Washington’s diplomatic and military bandwidth shifted away from Kyiv. With Brent soaring and sanctions on Russian oil quietly relaxed at the margins, Russia’s hydrocarbon economy just got an emergency cash infusion that years of “energy transition” had been slowly choking off.

Data backs it up: in just the first weeks of the Iran war, Russia booked billions in extra fossil fuel revenue, with higher prices and strong demand from India and China reversing a long decline in export earnings. At the same time, Ukraine is stuck watching EU aid stall, U.S. attention drift, and Trump’s team treat the Middle East as the new main theater while Kyiv begs not to be quietly downgraded to a legacy conflict.

The punchline: Moscow sells oil at war-premium prices, watches the West burn political capital in another Middle Eastern quagmire, and tests new offensives in Ukraine while the cameras stare at Hormuz. But none of this makes Trump a “Russian asset” in any literal sense — it just makes him a U.S. president whose biggest foreign-policy gamble accidentally turned into the best macro hedge the Kremlin could dream of.

#russia #putin #iran #trump #oil #war #ukraine #geopolitics

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📰 Europe’s Trump Fans Just Discovered ‘America First’ Means ‘Europe Last’

The Iran war is doing what four years of Trump speeches couldn’t: teaching Europe’s nationalist politicians what “America First” actually sounds like when the bombs start falling.

Across the continent, far-right leaders who cheered Trump’s re-election are suddenly backing away, complaining they “cannot be the lapdogs” of a U.S. president who slaps them with tariffs at home and then sends them the bill for his Middle East adventure. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Trump’s tariff regime didn’t fix the politics — it just exposed how much resentment had already built up underneath.

Then came Iran. Trump launched a war, demanded “burden sharing,” and expected Europe to show up with ships, soldiers and flags, while Washington and Israel run the operation and take the glory. Instead, European leaders from Berlin to Athens started saying the one word Trump hates most from allies: “No.”

Publicly, nationalists who once branded him a model of “sovereign leadership” now question why their voters should pay for an American war that detonates energy prices, wrecks European industry, and drags NATO into a fight no parliament actually approved. In private, they’ve simply realized the deal on offer is terrible: Europe gets the inflation, the refugees and the political blowback, while the U.S. keeps command and the arms contracts.

So yes, Trump has managed a rare diplomatic feat: his Iran adventure is alienating not just liberal Europeans who already hated him, but also the nationalist camp that tried to copy him. “America First” turned out to mean what it always meant — everybody else pays retail.

#trump #europe #iran #war #natofail #americaFirst #geopolitics

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The Peacemaker Who Played Havoc With the Middle East

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Violence has continued across much of the Middle East a day after Trump said the US was in “very good” talks with Iran to end the war in the region soon.

Iranian barrages targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq on Tuesday, while Israeli and US warplanes continued to carry out strikes across Tehran and on other targets in the Islamic Republic.

Multiple official sources in Tehran have denied any talks are under way. The Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has been cited as a potential interlocutor with the US, said in a social media post:

“No negotiations have been held with the US (…) fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets.”

Tehran distrusts any US offer of negotiations, in part because it was in talks with the US before the surprise attack that started the war and killed the supreme leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials.

Iran was also in talks last year when the US and Israel attacked its nuclear facilities, starting a 12-day war.

“We must think wisely,” Esmail Kowsari, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Fars news agency.

“Their nature is to sow discord so that they can make people distrust officials and believe that such actions have taken place, whereas no such action has occurred.”

However, potential intermediaries including Pakistan, Oman, Egypt and others have confirmed tentative efforts to establish channels of communication between Washington and Tehran.

Analysts point out that there are deep divisions among surviving senior officials in Tehran, which could explain some of the defiant Iranian reaction.

#middle #east #trump #hezbollah #israel

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