World Archives

Sunday

April 5, 2026

Iran has offered Trump an olive branch

There are few figures in Iranian politics as simultaneously familiar and enigmatic as Javad Zarif. To some in Washington he remains the smooth-talking apologist of the Islamic Republic; to hardliners in Tehran, he is still the man who gave too much away in the nuclear negotiations. When such a figure publishes the necessary elements for a new US-Iran deal that will end the Third Gulf War, it is worth paying attention. Zarif’s recent article in Foreign Affairs, framed as a set of reciprocal steps between Tehran and Washington, is best understood as a sort of olive branch. In diplomatic parlance, he is “flying a kite”: testing how far the wind

Friday

April 3, 2026

Jonathan Aitken

The UAE and Oman could be the big winners from the Iran war

Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40 years, commented gloomily: “When two fish are fighting in these waters, the British are behind it.” I estimate that I must have made at least 250 visits to the Gulf States in the intervening six decades. The key question which would surely now be asked by the ghosts of my former Middle East interlocutors –

Gus Carter

Trump falls back on ‘you’re fired!’ as midterms loom

Pam Bondi’s departure as attorney general has prompted the usual Kremlinologist speculation. One theory has it that Donald Trump was furious that she may have warned Democrat Eric Swalwell about a planned FBI release of documents detailing his past relationship with a Chinese spy. Bondi’s replacement, Todd Blanche, dismissed these claims as false. Another theory is that the President had finally had enough of her errors over the handling of the Epstein files, given Bondi was recently subpoenaed in a bipartisan effort by the House. And Trump is widely reported to be frustrated at her failure to indict his archenemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General

Irwin Stelzer

This is what Trump means by ‘victory’ in Iran

President Trump has now told us something very important about the war with Iran. Ponder his address to the nation this week and you discover how he defines victory. Nothing that happens from here on out will change that. As Trump sees it, he is the winner, having achieved all his goals. He has accomplished regime change in Iran by eliminating the men who led the regime when the war started. America has so damaged the country’s military infrastructure that it will not be able to produce or deliver a nuclear weapon for at least a decade, by which time it will be up to a future American president to

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Prediction: by the time you read this, the joint US-Israeli operation in Iran will be all but over. In fact, it had mostly ended by the start of April. The Kool-Aid-dispensing press has been telling us since the conflict began that Iran was winning. They wanted it so badly to be true. Being adept at magical thinking, they also believe that what they wanted to be the case would suddenly, hey presto, become the case. A cover story in the Economist declared “Advantage Iran.” “A month of bombing Iran,” that once-sober publication announced, “has achieved nothing… For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.” Not to be

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is going on a firing spree

The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche her temporary successor. It’s that he waited as long as he did. After exercising what is for him unusual restraint – his cabinet was in a state of perpetual upheaval during his first term as president – Trump is going on a firing spree. “He’s very angry, and he’s going to be moving people,” one top administration official told Politico yesterday. Next on the chopping block could be a host of Trump loyalists – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Remer, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National

Geoffrey Cain

How the West is empowering China’s war machine

The West’s technology brains and universities are arming China. A few of them are potentially breaking the law to do it, but most of them don’t need to. The front door has been open for years, and nobody in London or Washington has thought to close it. According to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan last month, on December 18, 2025, in a warehouse somewhere in Southeast Asia, a team of men used a hair dryer to peel serial-number labels off genuine server boxes and press them onto fakes. The real servers, loaded with some of America’s most restricted artificial intelligence hardware, are alleged to have long since been shipped

Thursday

April 2, 2026

Cockburn

Bondi out: is Trump culling the beautiful women from his cabinet?

More like Pam Gone-di! President Trump this afternoon confirmed that Attorney General Pam Bondi would be moving on to pastures new. In a Truth Social post announcing her dismissal, Trump called Bondi a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend” who “did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.” “We love Pam,” wrote Trump. Deputy AG Todd Blanche, who Trump dubbed, “a very talented and respected Legal Mind,” will serve as Acting Attorney General. Bondi was Trump’s second choice as AG after his attempt to nominate Matt Gaetz failed. She will now “be transitioning to a

Rod Liddle

The real reason the left hates Israel

“Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,” a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s rambling Iran address was full of wishful thinking

In his nationwide address on Wednesday, Donald Trump could not have been clearer about the course of the Iran war. It’s not ending any time soon and there will be no deescalation of military force. Instead, channeling his inner General Curtis LeMay, Trump announced, “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.” No, they don’t. It was a jarring reference to an ancient and proud Persian civilization that has been commandeered by a gang of thugs. Apart from the dubious morality of luxuriating in the prospect of annihilating an entire country, the practical problem is this: the “Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age” strategy didn’t work in

Roger Kimball

Trump touts the successes of his war for peace

“Ceasefire!” Some people worried that President Trump was taking to the air waves tonight in order to declare a ceasefire with Iran. That, clearly, was what Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran hoped for in his careful, lengthy and mendacious “Letter to the American People” today. Pezeshkian said that “portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts.” Tell that to the hundreds of American victims of Iranian aggression. Tell it to the thousands of victims of Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas. President Trump was having none of it. Operation Epic Fury, he said, was all about targeting the world’s leading sponsor of state terror and preventing

Wednesday

April 1, 2026

Sam Olsen

Donald Trump would regret leaving NATO

Donald Trump has yet again raised the prospect of the United States leaving NATO. The President called the alliance a “paper tiger” and said he “was never swayed by NATO.” It is tempting to dismiss it as political theater. But this time feels different. Trump’s frustration with European allies has sharpened, particularly over their reluctance to back his approach to Iran, where the absence of a clear political end-state has made support difficult to sustain. That hesitation has deepened transatlantic irritation. Combined with tensions over Greenland and Denmark, this is no longer an abstract complaint about burden-sharing but an accumulation of grievances. What once sounded like brinkmanship now carries the

Stephen Bayley

Trump’s presidential library is predictably crass

Maybe a tad prematurely for a term that ends only in 2029, the Trump Organization has released a short video on Truth Social revealing, with a dizzying CGI fly-throughs, proposals for the Donald J. Trump presidential library. Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design It’s not about Making America Literate Again: there’s not a book in sight. I could not even see a reference to Trump’s own great contribution to world literature: The Art of the Deal. By contrast, the Ptolemies’ great library in Alexandria had perhaps 700,000 papyrus

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump has already checked out of NATO

Donald Trump, who will deliver an address from the Oval Office tonight, isn’t giving up on his aims for his war in the Middle East. This time his target isn’t Iran but NATO. “You don’t even have a navy,” he declared about Britain before going on to denounce the North Atlantic alliance. “I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. There hasn’t been such a loony interview since Kaiser Wilhelm II created an international furor in 1908 in the same paper by denouncing the English as “mad, mad, mad as March

Christopher Kennedy-Barnard

War and fishing in the Strait of Hormuz

On February 28, I jumped on a fishing charter with some friends and headed out into the Strait of Hormuz. There was barely any wind. The sea shimmered in the heat of the Gulf sunshine. On the very first drop of our lines, something hit my metal jig and went off like a rocket. After a couple more brief runs, a very stout, double-figure grouper rose through the water column, which I guided safely into the waiting net. It was a personal-best hamour (The Arab word for grouper), weighing between 10 and 12 pounds. I went on to catch a few interesting tropical fish, including a snapper, but I didn’t

Daniel DePetris

Europe is in mutiny against Trump

The longer the war in Iran churns on, the President Trump’s frustration grows. On Tuesday, Trump was lambasting Washington’s European allies on Truth Social for sitting on their hands and refusing to lift a finger to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf chokepoint through which around 20 percent of the world’s crude oil passes. Calling out the United Kingdom specifically, Trump went on to scold the allies much as a parent would tell a lazy 28 year-old to get out of the house. “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” Trump

Tuesday

March 31, 2026

Freddy Gray

Is this the end of America’s empire?

Freddy Gray is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn, Americano regular and editor of the National Interest. They discuss the Strait of Hormuz, rising energy prices and whether the US can extricate itself from a conflict it may not be able to win – and whether we’re watching the end of Trumpism.

Andrew Tettenborn

The Chagos deal is unraveling

We don’t know what the end of the Chagos affair will be, but it is rapidly spinning into farce. The latest brickbat is an immensely awkward judgment delivered today by Justice Lewis KC, Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory (as well as the Falklands and the British Antarctic Territory). The judgment finds that a 2004 administrative order passed by Tony Blair’s British government to take away the native Chagossians’ right of abode could not do that. It also found that the government’s consistent practice since then of simply denying the Chagossians’ right to land on their own homeland is illegal. Coming after an earlier judgment six weeks ago

Jane Stannus

Canada wants to make quoting the Bible illegal

Easter is almost here – and Canada’s Liberal government has chosen this sacred season to display its utter contempt for Christianity. It is currently forcing through the outrageous Bill C-9, which could make it a hate crime to quote from sections of the Bible. The Liberal government has laid the foundations for religious persecutions More than 40 civil and religious groups had asked that for the Bill’s language be clarified and its scope more carefully defined so that religious texts would not be subject to hate crime legislation. But all in vain. After a hot debate in the House of Commons, the Liberals highhandedly ended a Conservative filibuster and fast-tracked the bill.

Stephen Daisley

Israel needs to rethink its relationship with Christians

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The story