Latest from Coffee House

Wednesday

8 Apr 2026

We’re stuck at the worst possible oil price

A ceasefire has been agreed with Iran. The Straits of Hormuz will reopen. And the oil market will get back to normal very quickly. By Wednesday morning, it looked as if the energy crisis was over. Finance ministers will be breathing a sigh of relief as the crisis abates. But hold on. In reality, the truce is fragile, and huge amounts of supply have been taken out of the market. So long as that remains true, the price of oil, and with it the global economy, will remain stuck. The average price of $90 to $100 a barrel is not what anyone really thinks a barrel of oil is worth The price of oil has been on a wild ride ever since the United States and Israel started the attack on Iran a month ago.

Jonathan Spyer

The winners and losers of the Iran ceasefire deal

The abrupt announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war between the US, Israel and Iran resolves none of the issues which caused the conflict. Beyond an agreement to cease attacks, the arrangements that will hold during the two-week period appear themselves unclear. Each side in the last hours seemed to commit to different versions of the ceasefire in key areas. Iran remains an aggressive and dangerous power, with the ambition of expelling the US from the region, dominating the Gulf states and destroying Israel From Israel’s point of view, the bottom line is clear. The Iranian regime has been significantly weakened in its capacities in a number of key areas. At the same time, the regime has not been destroyed or even severely damaged in its continued ability to rule Iran.

Paul Wood

Trump’s fantasy of victory

Among the many gifts the Watergate scandal gave us was Nixon’s White House press secretary declaring: "This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative." That was after months of sticking to increasingly threadbare denials. In Donald Trump’s White House, operative statements become inoperative from one day to the next. That’s especially true of Iran. In 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday this week, Trump went from "a whole civilization will die tonight" to "this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!" TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out, as the meme has it. The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran is a lesson that you can win every battle but lose the war. (This is the lesson the United States learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to forget it again.

Daniel DePetris

Why Trump stepped back from the brink

At 5 p.m. ET speculation was rife that a deal between the United States and Iran was in the works. Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif pleaded for President Trump to extend his 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline – before he destroyed every bridge and power plant in Iran – by another two weeks in order to give diplomacy more time to work. Yet the New York Times reported that Iranian officials cut off direct contact with their American counterparts. And the White House wasn’t offering definitive answers about whether Trump was leaning toward escalation or a ceasefire.

Jacob Heilbrunn

What will the Iran ceasefire cost Trump?

Might Donald Trump travel to Tehran this spring to open an American embassy and declare that he’s fallen in love with the new Iranian leadership? His volte-face on Tuesday night – announcing a two-week ceasefire with Iran – suggests that Trump is embarking upon a new course in the Middle East. After threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, Trump announced that it’s time to call the whole thing off: “We received a 10-point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.” What that negotiation will look like is an open question.

Tuesday

7 Apr 2026

Jacob Heilbrunn

Why Trump is tempting 25th Amendment talk

During his remarks in Budapest, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is trying prop up Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as he runs for reelection, appeared to think the unthinkable. Vance, who has been a hero for MAGA anti-interventionists, went all-in on attacking Iran. He indicated that America might resort to “tools” in its arsenal that “we so far haven’t decided to use.” Now the White House is denying that it plans to deploy nuclear weapons against Iran, after frenzied social media speculation that it might. Negotiations with Tehran are ongoing – and Trump told Fox's Bret Baier that "if negotiations move forward today, and there is something concrete" that tonight's 8 p.m. deadline "could change.

Charlie Gammell

Why Iran thinks it’s winning

President Trump has what he so dearly craves; the attention of the global media and the world hanging on his every word. As time ticks down to Donald’s deadline, after which he is threatening to commit war crimes on an unprecedented scale against the Iranian people, the gap for negotiations narrows and the likelihood of a US ground invasion into Iran widens. We should be honest about the talks’ chances of success: very low. At present it is likely that negotiators are seeking only to find common ground, however thin, from which a pause in fighting can be agreed upon. We are talking here about the foothills of a framework of an agreement. That’s a million miles from a deal that will satisfy the White House’s demands. And for all that oil.

Oleksandr Sukhoi

The new battle over American airspace

Last month, a mysterious drone swarm led to a lockdown at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Nothing was damaged and none of the 40 B-52 bombers or their cruise missiles were hit. At least not this time. But modern war no longer starts with an open attack. Instead we see hybrid actions: cyberattacks, information and psychological operations, GPS disruptions, damage to undersea communication cables and, increasingly, drone incursions into military sites and critical infrastructure. There is rarely a formal declaration. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since the Second World War, was labelled a “special military operation.

Monday

6 Apr 2026

Charles Lipson

Trump’s threat to destroy Iran is detailed and credible

Monday’s White House press conference came in two distinct parts. The first was an extraordinary tale of heroism in the rescue of two downed pilots. America’s military and intelligence leaders provided details that were new to the public. The danger of a daytime rescue mission in the face of enemy fire. The harrowing climb by one officer to a crevice in the mountains. The technical sophistication needed to find him. And the misdirection executed to confound Iranian forces in the area, determined to capture the American serviceman before help arrived. It was impossible to listen to that tale of bravery and professional excellence without an overwhelming sense of patriotic emotion, suffused with gratitude for the men and women who have pledged their lives to keep America safe.

Natasha Feroze

What can Artemis II tell us about the wonders of the Moon?

Artemis II departed on the most ambitious mission yet, something which has not been tried for 50 years. Four astronauts were launched into the air on a ten-day expedition with the aim of traveling 5,000 miles past the far side of the Moon. Natasha Feroze is joined by David Whitehouse, astroscientist and writer to discuss the difficulty involved in the mission, how little we think about the significance of the Moon and whether the US will beat China in its quest to have footsteps back on the Moon.

Daniel Hummel

Is Pete Hegseth waging a Christian Zionist war?

In his war briefings, Pete Hegseth pushes religion almost as much as US military might. This has raised questions about whether the War Secretary is a Christian Zionist – and if he views current events in the Middle East as prophetic of the end times. His Pentagon updates often include prayers, Bible readings and religiously-inflected statements about pursuing “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” When asked during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing if he was a "Christian Zionist," Hegseth affirmed, "I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state of Israel.

Sunday

5 Apr 2026

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will Trump really obliterate Iran on Tuesday?

Was Donald Trump’s profane and threatening tweet, which included an F-bomb and an allusion to Iran’s leaders as "crazy bastards," on Easter Sunday itself a bunch of BS? Trump is riding high after the daring rescue of an American airman from Iran, but its leadership doesn’t appear to be overly impressed by his tweet threatening a major attack on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. On Saturday, Iran’s military leadership indicated that it had no intention of complying with Trump’s demands, dismissing his vow to destroy its infrastructure as a "helpless, nervous, unbalanced and stupid action.

Michael Coren

What we really know about the first Easter

A friend who spent much of his life as an archaeologist in Israel once told me that there were three levels of authenticity when it came to Christian pilgrimage sites in the holy land. There were those that were almost certainly inaccurate but soaked in prayer. Those that may or may not be the real thing, of which there are many. Finally, those that according to most of the experts were the real thing. "No serious doubt," he said with a smile, "it happened here." It’s not altogether different when it comes to Christian history or the places and events that shaped the early church, including Easter. So, what do we know?

Nicholas Hopton

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 might carry a new idea without committing to its consequences.

Saturday

4 Apr 2026

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

Pakistan, the world’s only Muslim nuclear power, has traditionally been an international sideshow. No longer. The country has reportedly been passing messages between Washington and Tehran in efforts to bring an end to the Iran war. It is has a five-point plan aimed at restoring “peace and stability” across the region. How have the Pakistanis pulled off this remarkable diplomatic makeover? The answer starts with some critical decisions the Pakistanis took last year. After the four-day armed conflict between Pakistan and India in May 2025, both sides claimed “victory”. But crucially Islamabad publicly acknowledged Washington’s role in achieving a ceasefire (something India refused to do). Pakistan later nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery.

Friday

3 Apr 2026

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 Letitia James. Those who are sympathetic to MAGA will have their own reasons for being unhappy with Bondi.

Druin Burch

What the death of my beloved son taught me about Easter

The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds, but not my boy? In the Emergency Department I met the woman who became my wife.

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 take the needed action. So, no need to cart away or destroy Iran’s enriched uranium.

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 Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – whom the President has found wanting.

Thursday

2 Apr 2026

Brendan O’Neill

Why the keffiyeh classes have forgiven Kanye West

And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says "Heil Hitler" gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets canceled. Threaten to go "death con 3 on Jewish people" and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it. In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel That was my first thought upon reading that Kanye West will headline all three nights of the Wireless festival in London's Finsbury Park in July.

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 much needed and important new job in the private sector.” Is there no justice in the world?

David Whitehouse

Will Artemis II fulfill our Space Age dreams?

As the Artemis II mission thundered into the sky last night, a full moon rose above Cape Canaveral. It was no coincidence: the timing of the lift-off was ordained by lighting requirements and the mechanics of the Moon's orbit. The mission set off not in the direction of the Moon, but towards where the Moon will be in five days’ time when the spacecraft swings around it in what is called a "free-return trajectory." The crew of four are the first in almost 54 years to go to the Moon. In a way, things have not changed so much since then.

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.

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.

Wednesday

1 Apr 2026

Alan Dershowitz

Trump’s presence won’t sway the Supreme Court

For the first time in memory – and perhaps in history – an American president has attended a Supreme Court argument in person. I recall attorney general Robert Kennedy attending an argument back when I was a law clerk in the early 1960s. But I have seen no record of presidential attendance. Not that there is anything wrong with that, even if it was intended to convey the president’s strong belief in his side of the argument. Any fear that President Trump’s presence would influence the justices was immediately belied by the nature of the justices’ questions – which suggested some hostility to the Solicitor General’s argument limiting birthright citizenship.

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 weight of intent.

Alexander Larman

Does Prince Harry regret his ‘Mr. Mischief’ messages?

Prince Harry used to be fun. It is easy to forget this given the Meghan-Montecito-highly litigious incarnation of the Duke of Sussex, but there was a reason why, for many years, he was the most popular and accessible member of “the Firm.” Less stiff than his brother and considerably less cerebral than his father, he conveyed a sense that he was Harry Wales, the royal you’d want to go for a pint with. Or, as we now know, to have “movie snuggles” with journalists, with whom he could complain about being “hungover again for the third day running.

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 rolls. But that was there-and-then and POTUS 47 is nothing if not here-and-now.

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 hares" for their alleged hostility to Germany.

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 recognize most of them. It was on our journey back to the Abu Dhabi port that things changed.

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 wrote.

Tuesday

31 Mar 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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.