Iran

Friday

Freddy Gray

Will Trump strike a ‘final blow’ on Iran?

Will America’s ground invasion of Iran begin in the early hours of tomorrow? Everybody knows, by now, that Trump likes to initiate action late on Fridays, after the markets close. And late last night, the so-called Pentagon Pizza Watch channel – which monitors late-night food orders from the Pentagon for evidence that something big is afoot – reported a surge of activity, leading to all sorts of prediction-market bets that a new military operation would start this weekend. Of course, with so much money to be made on war gambling – there’s now a Polymarket "situation room" bar in Washington, DC – the odds of someone trying to dupe the markets are short.

Wednesday

Chris Mondics

Why every president ignores Congress on war

Is there a plausible legal basis for going to war with Iran? Senate Democrats say no, and late yesterday forced a vote on a war powers resolution to bring the hostilities to a halt. It failed along largely partisan lines, 53-47, but Democrats say they intend to bring it up again, citing widening public disapproval of the war. “We have created a catastrophe in the Middle East,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, who sponsored the resolution. “This is what you get when you put talk show hosts and real estate developers in charge of national security.” The Trump administration has made it plain that providing a legal justification for the war isn’t terribly high on its list of concerns.

War Powers
Tim Shipman

‘We’re into 1973 territory now’: How bad could the energy price crisis get?

The energy price surge caused by war in the Middle East has sent shockwaves through Westminster. It has pushed up inflation and the cost of borrowing, causing panic in the cabinet and the recognition that government intervention could be needed on a vast scale to support the cost of living. The Prime Minister told a private audience: ‘The assumption that the growth of the developed countries can proceed steadily on the basis of cheap energy has been shattered almost overnight.’ He further observed: ‘The problem is not simply one of inflation. It is the whole structure of the economy.’ In the Treasury there is something approaching a siege mentality. The Chancellor has ‘to spend [her] time firefighting’.

Monday

Damian Thompson

Iran: why Shia Islam’s tradition of martyrdom is key to understanding the conflict

From our UK edition

29 min listen

When Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated early in the Iran conflict, and during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, it was celebrated by the Trump administration – who saw this as a large step towards regime change in Iran. Yet, for Khamenei's supporters, his death secured him a place amongst other celebrated Iranian martyrs. Shia Islam has a long tradition of martyrdom, something under-appreciated in the global West, and which goes some way to explaining why the current regime has survived in the face of external threats. Yet, as Dr Eric Lob explains, there is still nuance between the faith of the theocratic regime and those adherents of Shia Islam in the country who are less political.

Iran: why Shia Islam's tradition of martyrdom is key to understanding the conflict

Sunday

Kabir Singh Bawa

Iran’s strike exposes the danger of the Chagos handover

In a sharp escalation, Iran attempted to strike the joint UK-US base Diego Garcia with two intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Both failed: one broke apart in flight and the other was targeted by an SM-3 interceptor from an American warship. The base was left untouched. The significance, however, lies less in the failure than in the fact that the attempt was made at all, which has expanded the scope of the existing conflict zone beyond all expectations. Diego Garcia forms part of the Chagos Archipelago – sovereign British territory – and is one of the most critical platforms for American power projection anywhere on earth.

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Has Giorgia Meloni really turned against Donald Trump?

I often think that the dissemination of news is like a game of Chinese Whispers. Giorgia Meloni, for instance, has not condemned the US-Israeli war on Iran. Yet such esteemed exponents of the noble craft of reportage as the Times of London and the Daily Beast are adamant that she has. Even Meloni – President Donald Trump’s favorite EU leader and closest European ally – has turned against the President, or so they are saying. Proclaimed the Times: "Giorgia Meloni comes out against Trump’s ‘illegal’ war on Iran." Crowed the Daily Beast: "Trump humiliated as key right-wing ally slams his deadly war." There was only one aspect of the war that Meloni condemned in her speech: the killing of civilians No, as a matter of fact, no she has not.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Iran and America’s new protection racket

"Whoever rules the waves rules the world" – Alfred Thayer Mahan. Would Donald Trump have attacked Iran on February 28 if the Supreme Court had not ruled against his tariffs on February 20? The two issues may seem unrelated. Yet, as a fascinating piece by Captain John Konrad has pointed out, a closer inspection of Trump’s international agenda reveals his administration’s intense focus on trade, energy and maritime control – and that might help explain the otherwise inexplicable folly of the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.  Trump is determined to bring about an American Golden Age. That involves controlling gas and oil, aggressively reducing China’s expanding control of shipping lanes, and establishing US dominance over key maritime chokepoints.

Strait of Hormuz
Jonathan Spyer

Israel can’t assassinate its way to victory over Iran

The killing of the Iranian senior security official Ali Larijani this week is the most significant "targeted assassination" undertaken since Israel’s killing (in cooperation with the US) of supreme leader Ali Khamenei on the opening day of the war. These two very high-level hits have been accompanied by a long list of killings of less well-known senior Iranian officials. These have included Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) commander Mohammad Pakpour, intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, armed forces chief of staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, defense minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, military intelligence chief Saleh Asadi and many others. Around 30 officials in all have met their deaths at the hands of this campaign.

war powers
John R. MacArthur

The outrageous cynicism of the Democrats on Iran

Given my longstanding disgust with America’s lawlessly interventionist and self-destructive foreign policy, I should be outraged by Donald Trump’s cavalier remarks justifying – and weirdly minimizing – his surprise attack against Iran in collaboration with Israel. After all, a president stupid enough to mock the new Supreme Leader as “damaged” and only “alive in some form” – while simultaneously urging sitting-duck oil tanker captains to “show some guts” by running the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – is someone who logically should be rebuked in the firmest possible terms. But this wildly unstable solipsist is very different from other politicians.

Thursday

Lynne O’Donnell

Why the Afghanistan-Pakistan war matters

More than a decade ago, during a tense visit to Islamabad as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton gave Pakistan’s leaders a warning: "You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors." She was referring to the Taliban and other militant groups that Islamabad had long tolerated as part of its "strategic depth" policy aimed at countering India’s regional dominance. Now, as Pakistan’s jets strike targets inside Afghanistan and the Taliban mobilize forces along the border, that warning seems like a prophecy.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Is ‘international law’ practical?

The acceleration of history and the increasingly rapid advancement of the postmodern project, aimed at the transcendence of humanity by itself, makes consideration of the fundamentals of the progressive project necessary, but also inevitable. Among them is its dedication to the hectic search for hitherto unsuspected “human rights” and their instant realization in the name of “natural law,” a subject the French historian and political philosopher Pierre Manent has studied in depth and brilliantly illuminated in a number of works, most recently Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Iran isn’t Trump’s only ‘imminent threat’

President Trump thought it would be a cakewalk. Far from capitulating, his nemesis seems to be on the comeback trail. Gabbard acknowledged that there was no compelling evidence that Iran was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell thus announced on Wednesday that unless a successor is confirmed by the Senate, he has “no intention of leaving.” The bad news keeps mounting for Trump. Inflation is ticking up, King Charles’ upcoming visit is starting to look rather iffy, the President's gilded ballroom project looks as though it will be smacked down by a federal judge, and energy prices are rising precipitously.

Reid Tillman Smith

Joe Kent’s resignation was an act of political positioning

Reflecting on the resignation of Cyrus Vance, James Thomson, the American historian and journalist, wrote in the Washington Post that the former secretary of state “has done us all a great public service.” In doing so, Thomson argued, Vance gave “new life and spine to a somewhat rare and weak convention in our nation: resignation in protest of an issue of principle.” The year was 1980. Vance had resigned in protest over the Carter administration’s decision to authorize Operation Eagle Claw, the ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran after the Islamic revolution. The mission ended ignominiously. President Carter pulled the plug after equipment failures and a deadly helicopter collision killed eight service members. Vance was vindicated.

Joe Kent

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

Why Iran will hasten MAGA’s demise

Readers may disagree with the cover line of this issue. Pronouncing “the end of Trumpism” feels somewhat similar to declaring “the end of history” – a provocative, albeit less grandiose, statement that risks being mocked in the near future. We should start by saying we hope that we are wrong. Trumpism, as this magazine understands it, has been a boon to America. As Christopher Caldwell argues, the rise of Donald Trump was a healthy democratic response to a fetid political system. On many fronts, the Trump administration, now in its second and more dynamic term, has made great progress. It has fought illegal immigration with vigor.

Christopher Caldwell

The end of Trumpism is nigh

Having Donald Trump as your president probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before China mercifully let the matter drop. Then came the even more reckless decision to join Israel in bombing Iran’s Fordow nuclear installation; Iran agreed to halt hostilities just as it was figuring out how to penetrate Israeli airspace with its missiles. But now the President has pressed his luck. He has joined Israel in a campaign of aerial assassination and bombardment against Iran – this time of an almost incredible violence – and has wound up trapped.

Rod Liddle

Trump should ditch the faux concern for the people of Iran

From our UK edition

Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who would have thought there was a darker side to Benny Hill? His harmless and uplifting degradation of women was one of our regular delights, especially the bits where semi-naked babes chased him around parks, with a silly expression on his face, accompanied by fruity music. How we laughed. And so to find out now that all the time he was living a double life as a murderous IRA terrorist is kind of too much to bear.

Charles Moore

The only living being on our banknotes should be the monarch

From our UK edition

This Middle East conflict ought to be much easier than the oil embargo which followed the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The Arabs came quite close to winning, whereas Iran has no chance. The embargo, imposed on all countries, including Britain, which had supported Israel in the war, was backed by almost all Arab states, few of which were fanatically Islamist, and by the Soviet Union. It lasted for six months. America depended on Saudi Arabia alone for 25 per cent of its oil (only a bit over 5 per cent of imports today). The price rose by 400 per cent. The economic disruption was massive. In 2026, by contrast, almost all Middle Eastern states detest Iran and want their oil to flow without let or hindrance. There is plenty of money and power in the world to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

David Whitehouse

How we wage war in space

Operation Epic Fury marks a turning point in the art of war. The key to 20th-century battles was air power. In the past, space and cyber activities have traditionally played supporting roles as so-called force multipliers. But this is no longer the case. In this conflict they have become mainstream, carving out new fronts for the wars of the future. The use of space is no longer something that is just nice to have, because everything from comms to intel to navigation uses space and cyber assets. Along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages US spy satellites, the US Space Force uses a global sensor network of ground-based telescopes and radar on every continent except Antarctica.

Roger Kimball

Dinner in Tehran, anyone?

Who wants to join me for dinner in Tehran or Havana? I suspect that both will be open for business very soon. I suppose we could even go to Caracas. As I write, the American flag has been raised at the American Embassy there for the first time in seven years. Amazing, isn’t it? And in Cuba? In mid-March, protesters were setting fire to the office of the Communist party in the town of Morón in the Ciego de Ávila province. Elsewhere across the island, protesters were in the street shouting, “Down with communism!” The nervous Cuban government released dozens of political prisoners. Since Donald Trump cut off its supply of Venezuelan oil, much of the country has been without electricity. This saddened Greta Thunberg.

Tuesday

Jawad Iqbal

Decapitating Iran’s leadership might not topple the mullahs

Iran’s most powerful leaders are being picked off one by one by Israeli and American military strikes. The latest scalp claimed by Israel is Ali Larjani, Iran’s security chief, and widely believed to be the most powerful figure in the present Iranian leadership. The reported killing comes just days after Larjani went on a public walkabout in Tehran, all defiance and bombast as he greeted members of the public during the Quds Day rally last Friday in the capital. Larjani also spoke to state media during the march, claiming that the Americans and Israelis were “running out of steam”. Well, not quite in his case, it turns out. Few will mourn the demise of Larjani.

larjani