Donald Trump is teaching the world a lesson, but not the one he thinks. The attack on Iran was meant to be a dazzling display of military supremacy. It has instead illuminated chinks in the US’s armour. The US president’s formidable arsenal cannot summon up an insurrection from Iran’s tyrannised and leaderless opposition. It cannot force merchant ships to run a gauntlet of missile and drone attacks in the strait of Hormuz. The government in Tehran and the facts of geography that give it leverage over global trade are unchanged.…
Tag: Middle East and North Africa
Trump seeks to delay China summit as Vance denies ‘wedge’ over Iran war
Donald Trump revealed that he had asked China to delay his forthcoming visit to Beijing while the war with Iran was continuing, as he attempted to strike a united front on Monday with his vice-president JD Vance, who is believed to have been skeptical over attacking Tehran’s regime. Appearing together with Vance for the first time in two weeks, Trump said he did not think the conflict – which started on 28 February after the US and Israel opened hostilities – would be over this week but predicted victory would…
Trump’s threats to Nato reveal glaring absence of any strategy on Iran
If there was a moment when the absence of a US strategy on Iran was exposed, then this was it. Donald Trump demanded on Saturday that the UK, China, France, Japan and others participate in a naval escort for oil tankers through the strait of Hormuz. Despite launching the attack on Iran, with Israel, the White House does not seem to have fully anticipated what was likely to follow. Iran had few good military options for fighting back, but attacking US bases, US allies and merchant shipping in the Gulf…
Iran’s Hormuz blockade is its most powerful card against Trump and Israel. It won’t back down easily | Jack Watling
The US and Israeli decision to attack Iran has sent economic shockwaves around the world. About 20% of global oil supplies have been effectively blocked from transiting the strait of Hormuz since Iran began attacking ships, resulting in a huge jump in oil prices. Militarily, while the United States has the firepower to significantly reduce Iran’s capacity to use the strait as leverage, it is unlikely to be able to eliminate the threat entirely. Reopening the strait, therefore, is not only a question of military capabilities but of diplomacy, and…
Trump’s call for allied deployment to strait of Hormuz meets muted response
Countries including the UK, Japan, China and South Korea have said they are still considering their options but without making commitments after the US president, Donald Trump, urged them to send warships to the strait of Hormuz to secure the vital shipping route. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran. In his post, Trump alleged that “many countries,…
Fears about nuclear war are reaching a fever pitch. Another grim sign of the times | Judith Levine
Intimations of world war three – the big one, nuclear Armageddon – didn’t arise yesterday. But they got more urgent when Donald Trump was elected the second time. In December 2024, Newsweek published a map of the “safest US states to live during nuclear war”. The article was not reassuring. “Nowhere is truly ‘safe’” from such consequences as “contamination of food and water supplies and prolonged radiation exposure”, said the senior policy director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Another expert noted that “even a ‘small’ nuclear war…
If oil price shocks weren’t bad enough, Trump’s war could have other unintended consequences | Adam Hanieh
With the US-Israeli war against Iran in its second week, energy markets are in turmoil. On Thursday, the price of Brent Crude Oil topped $100, only slightly lower than the $119 peak per barrel on Monday. These swings have focused attention on key energy choke points such as the strait of Hormuz, where about one-fifth of the world’s shipped oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes each day. This shutdown of the strait will be felt in people’s everyday lives for months to come, particularly in the form of spiralling…
X suspends 800m accounts in one year amid ‘massive’ scale of manipulation attempts
Elon Musk’s X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the “massive” scale of attempts to manipulate the platform. The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network, with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China. As part of the battle against such content, X suspended 800m accounts in 2024 for breaching its rules on platform manipulation and spam, although it did not reveal which of those suspensions related to…
China calls for vessels in strait of Hormuz to be protected amid soaring shipping costs
The Chinese government has called for vessels passing through the strait of Hormuz to be protected by all sides in the escalating Iran conflict, as shipping freight rates soared. Maritime traffic through the strait – a narrow channel on Iran’s southern border that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman – has effectively been closed since the US and Israel launched missile attacks on Iran at the weekend, prompting a retaliation from Tehran. Beijing’s foreign ministry on Tuesday urged “all parties to immediately cease military operations, avoid escalating…
‘Imperialist undertones’: global south condemns US-Israeli war with Iran
The US-Israeli war on Iran has been condemned as illegal across much of the global south, with China saying it was unacceptable to “blatantly kill the leader of a sovereign state”. Many countries objected that negotiations between the US and Iran over its nuclear programme and missile capability were not given a chance to succeed before Washington and Israel began bombing, and analysts often saw the war in terms of a colonial-style exercise of might. Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, offered condolences over the killing of the Iranian supreme leader,…