Read the daily news to learn English

Middle East crisis live: Rubio claims Iran operation expected to conclude in ‘weeks not months’

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has said that Friday’s strikes contradicted Donald Trump’s pledge to postpone attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure for 10 days after he claimed talks were “going well” – and that Tehran would exact a “heavy price” for the attacks. In a post on X, Araghchi that Israel “has hit 2 of Iran’s largest steel factories, a power plant and civilian nuclear sites among other infrastructure”. “Israel claims it acted in coordination with the US,” Araghchi said, adding that the attack “contradicts POTUS extended deadline for diplomacy”. Iran will “exact HEAVY price”, he said. Less than 24 hours ago, Trump extended his pause on attacking Iran’s power grid, pushing back his deadline – again – for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz by another 10 days. The US president claimed the delay was “per [an] Iranian government request” and also claimed that talks between the US and Iran about ending the war were “ongoing and ... going very well”.

Man questioned over trafficking allegations in Mohamed Al Fayed investigation

Police have questioned a man over allegations of human trafficking and facilitating rape in connection with the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed. The suspect, who is in his 60s, was interviewed under caution this month after 154 people came forward to report allegations of sexual abuse by Fayed, the Metropolitan police said. The interview with the unnamed suspect follows the questioning of three women in their 40s, 50s and 60s between 25 February and 5 March on suspicion of aiding and abetting rape and sexual assault, assisting the commission of sexual offences and human trafficking for sexual exploitation. Police said no arrests had been made and the investigation was continuing. Scotland Yard previously said it was investigating more than five people who may have facilitated Fayed’s alleged crimes. It is understood that detectives have identified several more suspects who will be questioned in the coming months over allegations that they may have facilitated or enabled abuse. It is alleged that Fayed, who died in 2023, aged 94, used his wealth and power to attack scores of women over four decades, with his youngest victim being 13. The Met previously said officers had taken accounts from Fayed’s accusers and other witnesses over the past 18 months. The force said information from those interviews led to the force including alleged human trafficking in its investigation. Lawyers representing Fayed’s alleged victims had also urged police to treat the scandal as “trafficking allegations”. They claimed that Operation Cornpoppy, the code name for the investigation, was initially too narrow in scope. The alleged crimes span between 1977 and 2014, and the Met said about 400 offences may have been committed. Fayed also allegedly targeted employees at the Ritz hotel in Paris, which he bought in 1979. The French authorities have reportedly been investigating an allegation that Fayed trafficked a woman he took on as an assistant at the hotel. Before his death, 21 allegations about Fayed were made to police but he evaded justice. In January last year, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said two complaints from survivors about the Met police’s handling of allegations would be investigated by the Met’s directorate of professional standards (DPS) under the IOPC’s direction. Police said they had now examined more than 50,000 pages of evidence, including victim statements, and retrieved “significant amounts of material” from previous reports about Fayed stored in their archives.

Missing aid boats have safely reached Cuba, US confirms

Two sailing boats that went missing while carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba have safely reached the Caribbean island, the US Coast Guard said on Friday. Earlier in the day Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, had said his country would do everything it could to save the people on the two boats that disappeared while travelling to Cuba from Mexico. The boats, which set sail from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo last Friday as part of an international aid mission, had been expected to arrive in Havana by Tuesday or Wednesday, the Mexican secretariat of the navy said in a statement. But the alarm was raised after the vessels – which were part of the Our America convoy – failed to reach their destination. The Mexican newspaper El Universal said the country’s authorities were in contact with representatives of Poland, France, Cuba and the US, “the home countries of the people onboard”. On Friday, Díaz-Canel voiced “deep concern” over the fate of the nine people thought to have been on the boats. “We are doing everything possible to search for and save these brothers in arms,” he wrote on X. A spokesperson for the convoy told AFP: “Mexican authorities have activated their search-and-rescue protocol for two sailboats en route to Havana as part of the convoy, which have not yet arrived.” “The captains and crews are experienced sailors, and both vessels are equipped with appropriate safety systems and signalling equipment,” they added. Later on Friday the US Coast Guard, which was not involved in search efforts, announced it had received a report at 10.36am (2.36pm GMT) that “the two vessels safely transited to Cuba”. Cuba has been plunged into one of its worst crises since the 1959 revolution in recent months, thanks to a US oil blockade ordered by Donald Trump that has left millions of citizens in the dark. Trump’s decision to abduct Nicolás Maduro, the president of Cuba’s key ally Venezuela, in January was a sucker punch to the island’s Communist party leaders. “We haven’t received a drop of fuel for nearly four months,” Díaz-Canel complained in an interview with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada that was published on Friday. The convoy to Cuba was organised by the leftwing political organisation Progressive International in an attempt to deliver aid and shine a light on the Caribbean country’s plight. The mission reportedly involved activists from 30 different countries. Those who travelled to Havana by boat or plane included the former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Spain’s former deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias and the Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap. “The aim of the criminal blockade is clear: to starve the Cuban people into submission,” Corbyn wrote in Novara Media. The aid convoy’s organisers said they had sought to bring “critical humanitarian aid”, including food and medicine, to Cuba’s people in the face of “the criminal US blockade”. “There is no time to waste, as the Trump administration ramps up its assault on the island and its campaign to isolate its people,” they said on the eve of the convoy’s arrival.

European intelligence agencies believe Russia is supplying drones to Iran, says official

Intelligence agencies in Europe believe Russia is in the final stages of preparing to supply drones to Iran for use in its war with the US and Israel, according to a senior European official. Russia has already been providing intelligence sharing with Tehran to help it target US forces in the region, the official said, but the upcoming delivery of explosive-laden drones would mark the first evidence of lethal support since the start of the war. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to provide details on the scale of any deliveries, but confirmed an article by the Financial Times that said “western intelligence reports” found Russia was close to completing a phased shipment of drones, medicine and food to Iran. Iranian and Russian officials began secretly discussing drone deliveries days after Israel and the US attacked Tehran in late February, the news website said, citing officials briefed on the intelligence. It said drone deliveries could be completed by the middle of next week. Responding to the claim of Moscow sending drones to Iran, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted as saying: “There are a lot of fakes going around right now. One thing is true – we are continuing our dialogue with the Iranian leadership.” Russia and Iran signed a strategic partnership agreement last year and Moscow has sent more than 13 tonnes of medicine to Iran through Azerbaijan. Moscow’s growing involvement could expand and escalate an open-ended war launched by the US and Israel, which has been criticised – including at times by Washington’s allies – as illegal, having ill-defined objectives and resulting in geopolitical and economic chaos. It could also anger other countries in the region. Tehran’s response to the attacks has included firing thousands of relatively cheap attack drones across the Gulf, hitting sites in multiple countries including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates. Tehran says it is targeting US interests in the region. Russia has been producing similar one-way attack drones, which are based on Iranian Shahed designs, for use in Ukraine. European foreign ministers used a G7 meeting in France on Friday with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to press the case that Russia was helping Iran target US forces. The German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, accused Russia of helping Iran identify potential strike targets, saying President Vladimir Putin was hoping to use the Iran war as a distraction from his attack on Ukraine. “Putin cynically hopes that the escalation in the Middle East will divert our attention from his crimes in Ukraine,” he said, speaking to reporters. “This calculation must not succeed. We see very clearly how closely the two conflicts are intertwined. Russia is evidently supporting Iran with information about potential targets.” The British foreign minister, Yvette Cooper, said she was “deeply concerned about the links between Russia and Iran that have been longstanding in terms of shared capabilities”, including drones. Reuters contributed to this report

‘Tempolimit? Nein, danke!’: why German petrolheads won’t slow down – despite the energy crisis

Death-defying thrills are not what draws Lutz Leif Linden to zip down the Autobahn faster than a plane taking off. Instead, the feeling of freedom and an appreciation of technological mastery play a part in his “almost loving relationship” with driving cars faster than most people can imagine. The top speed he has reached on the road in Germany, the world’s only democracy without a blanket speed limit on motorways, is 400km/h (249mph). “It’s like an airplane,” said Linden, the president of the Automobile Club of Germany (AvD). “You are faster than an Airbus at start.” Often compared to the US’s attachment to guns, the German need for speed has weathered decades of pressure to hit the brakes even as environmental and political crises have mounted. Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued the latest appeal for drivers to slow down as it urged countries to cushion the price shock from the biggest blow to oil supply in history. The long-running debate over speed has become an emblem of a fight between shared green benefits and personal freedom in a country where cars – particularly fast ones – are still considered king. “It’s like the German DNA,” said Linden. Germany restricts speeds on about 70% of its Autobahn, giving motorists on the rest of it the freedom to drive faster than the 130km/h (80mph) guideline. Public opinion has long been split on the merits of introducing a blanket Tempolimit, but in recent years has tipped slightly in favour. Yet the political mood has not caught up. In Bavaria, the conservative home of carmakers such as BMW and Audi, the Christian Social Union (CSU) channelled Germany’s famous anti-nuclear slogan in 2020 when it campaigned under the banner: “Tempolimit? Nein, danke!” Christian Lindner, a Porsche-driving former finance minister, described the debate as “nonsensical” during the 2022 energy crisis. Friedrich Merz, the centre-right chancellor, has dismissed the proposal as “purely symbolic”. The IEA’s latest call to hit the brakes has been roundly ignored. Opponents of a speed limit argue a blanket ban is unnecessary and that country roads are more dangerous, with some calling for maximum speeds to be adjusted based on traffic and weather. When it comes to the benefits of driving fast, they cite the time saved over long distances and an appreciation of the freedom to set their own speed. “When you’re in the right car, the road is clear, and you can really open it up, you enter a kind of flow state,” said Ariane Lattke, the president of the German Women’s Automobile Club. “You’re fully focused, keeping an eye on everything around you, and your mind becomes clear. Calm and in control. It feels like your brain is working faster.” Researchers have made the case for slowing down in terms of money, fuel and lives. A study in 2023 found a speed limit of 130km/h would lead to nearly €1bn a year in societal benefits. In 2024, the German Environment Agency found the proposal would cut greenhouse gas emissions from road transport by 2.2% and other toxic air pollutants by slightly more. In October 2025, the first study of its kind in half a century found the 130km/h limit would not save lives to a level that is statistically significant, but a slightly stricter limit of 120km/h would reduce motorway deaths by 36%. Public opinion appears to have shifted. A majority support the Tempolimit among voters of all the big parties except the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and the market-liberal Free Democrats, a YouGov poll found in 2024. Even among members of the ADAC, the country’s biggest motorist association, support has gone up over the last decade to reach 55% last year. On Thursday, as regional transport ministers from across Germany’s federal states gathered, civil society organisations used the latest oil crisis to demand change. Groups ranging from environmental activists to police unions called for a general speed limit on motorways, along with caps of 80km/h outside built-up areas and 30km/h in cities. Germany’s love for cars dates back to the late 1800s, when Carl Benz patented the first “vehicle powered by a gas engine”, but it was after the second world war that motorised vehicles became cemented in the national psyche. The roaring success of the German car industry created jobs, gave citizens the freedom to travel and brought in tax revenues that helped finance a prosperous welfare state. Part of its success came from speed. The “Made in Germany” brand – world-renowned for high quality and precise engineering – was boosted by customers flying in to buy fast cars, testing their limits on unrestricted motorways and then shipping them home to countries where they would never move so fast. “The Tempolimit itself is the most reasonable thing to do because the absence of it kills people, very plainly,” said Luisa Neubauer, a climate activist from Fridays for Future. “But it would be the end of the mentality that we need fast cars … Germany must be the beacon that keeps up that hope, even if it’s just pretend.” The industry has found itself in a crisis as high energy prices and competition from China on electric vehicles have resulted in factory closures and job losses. Germany led successful efforts to water down an EU ban on the sale of combustion engine cars from 2035. A spokesperson for VDA, Germany’s biggest car lobby, described the climate impact of a blanket speed limit as “minimal” and “increasingly insignificant” as the car fleet becomes more electrified. “It is clear that sections of motorway with an increased risk of accidents, high traffic volumes or roadworks should be subject to a speed limit,” the spokesperson said. “But this does not require a general, rigid speed limit on open-road sections of the motorway.”

‘Really, really long lines’: ICE agents now at US airports to help beleaguered TSA – to mixed results

Hartfield-Jackson Atlanta international airport turned off the digital wait-time sign days ago. Predicting passenger behavior can be hard; predicting the behavior of unpaid TSA agents is also hard. Keeping an accurate clock has been impossible. Even though ICE agents have started filling in for TSA screeners at some airports, a morning flight might mean a three-hour slog with lines winding around baggage carousels, from the security checkpoint all the way outside to the curb. Travelers across the county might have found themselves in Disneyland-like lines at an airport on Thursday, while others got to the concourse in 20 minutes, with wait times unpredictable. The fatal collision between a cargo plane and a fire truck at LaGuardia in New York scrambled travel plans nationwide, ripping from Seattle to Miami, anywhere connecting flights needed to be made. But on Thursday, drummer Kenny Wollesen didn’t miss a beat on his way to the Big Ears festival in Knoxville. “That’s one of the easiest check-ins I’ve ever had,” he said. Wolleson had a well-worn round leather bag of brass cymbals on his back, and usually the metal means extra time. But not this day. “The whole thing was 15 minutes.” Airports are life for Wolleson right now. “I’ve been flying for the last two weeks, basically two flights a day, because I’ve been on tour. I just got back from Europe yesterday,” Wolleson said, noting new biometric screenings that began this year. “It takes a little bit longer, and there have been some really, really long lines for Americans.” The US Senate voted early in the morning on Friday to fund the Department of Homeland Security, sending the bill back to the House. Earlier on Thursday night, Donald Trump said he was willing to sign an executive order paying 50,000 TSA agents out of other government funds allocated to the Department of Homeland Security. “I am using my authorities under the Law to protect our Great Country, as I always will do!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “Therefore, I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports.” Both developments would probably bring relief to travelers who are looking for a resolution to the dispute as soon as possible and certainly before the World Cup. On Thursday, people in Atlanta waiting to clear screening or board planes talked about how they had rescheduled flights, or left home for the airport four or five hours before a flight. There is no indication that passenger volume has decreased substantially, despite the disruptions. Spring break creates a travel surge right now in most years. The problem is that the bottleneck at the start of the day is shaping behavior. A shortage of TSA screeners, with nearly 500 reportedly quitting in recent weeks thanks to the gridlock in Washington and missed paychecks, creates a bottleneck. Word is getting out in Atlanta that morning flights have terrible wait times, and that screening times rapidly shrink after noon, though they bump up a bit for evening flights. “We arrived at 1pm and literally, we’re 20 minutes and checked a bag – international – and we’re an hour in line,” said Lindy Rosenkampff of Alpharetta, Georgia. She and Gail Smith of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, were flying to Europe for a vacation. Smith cleared her local airport in under half an hour. Both were aware of ICE agents at the airport. On Monday, ICE was not doing much at the airport except standing around in military-style equipment harnesses in packs of three and five, looming from balconies or trying to be unobtrusive amid the chaos. They still drew stares on Thursday. “I’m not afraid of anybody,” said Funsho Ladipo, a Nigerian emigre and American citizen who flew on Thursday to Atlanta from Minnesota, on his way to Lagos. “I’m a citizen, so I’m not afraid. I’m not a criminal. It depends on how you present yourself.” Ladipo said he felt like this was a normal Thursday at an airport for him. But ICE’s presence demanded responsibility, he said. “Everybody in this country believes they have freedom. Dear human beings, they are carrying guns. That’s one thing that I do tell people. Be careful.” Libby Belden was coming from Madison, Wisconsin, for a trip to Morocco. She found ICE’s presence problematic. “It’s absolutely horrible,” she said. “It’s a violation of people’s rights to move about the country. I find it disgusting.” By Thursday, ICE agents had started making tentative steps toward productivity, staffing TSA security terminals where passengers provide their ID. They aren’t operating screening stations, a task which requires a couple of months of training. They wore no masks. They smiled at travelers, sometimes. Travelers smiled back, sometimes. Mostly, people moved along. “They know they have an optics problem, a PR nightmare right now, and so they’re doing everything they can to change that,” Rosenkampff said. “And by helping and pitching in and meeting hundreds and thousands and millions of people that are traveling, they’re able to maybe change that.” “This move is made to rehabilitate ICE’s image,” said a federal employee who asked for his name to be withheld. “They’re extremely polite, smiling. It’s all fake to me.” If ICE can replace TSA agents, then that diminished the incentives for Congress to come to terms on a funding bill, he said. “It’s almost like they want them to take over.” “I think they’re in a pissing match,” Smith said. “I think they’re trying to see who’s going to blink first and, you know, to the victor go the spoils. I’m not sure what the spoils are.”

‘My heart is breaking’: Lebanese family grieve daughter killed by Israeli bomb

Rana Jaber told her husband that if God blessed them with a daughter, she would be named Narjis, Arabic for daffodil. After having twin boys, Jaber wanted a little girl she could dress up. Jaber got her girl and made good on her promise: Narjis was born in 2020. Her mother was delighted to find that just like her namesake flower, her daughter’s hair was light. Narjis seemed “wise beyond her years”, Jaber said, recalling how her daughter would comfort her whenever she would cry. As Jaber rushed to pack her daughter and two sons into the car on 2 March as she fled Israeli bombs, Narjis comforted her once again. “Mama, you’re my life. Don’t cry, I love you so much,” Narjis told her mother as stress began to overwhelm her. It was one of the last things Jaber remembers her daughter saying. A few hours later, Israel dropped a bomb on their family home in Maifadoun, south Lebanon, killing six-year-old Narjis and her aunt. “I keep replaying it. How our lives were torn apart. She was like a blossom. This girl … Oh my heart is breaking. I still can’t believe my daughter is gone,” Jaber said through sobs. The 34-year-old mother and her two 10-year-old sons, Abbas and Ali, were trapped under the rubble after the airstrike but survived with mild injuries. Jaber has no shortage of pictures of her daughter: Narjis always has a wide smile, wearing the many dresses her parents bought for her, posing in her classroom with a papier-mache apple bearing a capital “A” held proudly in her hands. “She wanted to be a doctor,” Jaber said. Narjis was one of the first children killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the war began on 2 March after Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel, triggering an Israeli military campaign. Since then, 120 other children in Lebanon have been killed by Israel, nearly 10% of all deaths in the country. Her death, three weeks later, has left Jaber’s family in shock. Jaber’s voice, already spoken at a whisper, begins to break as soon as she mentions her daughter’s name. Abbas goes to the shop and wants to buy chocolates for his sister. His mother has to remind him that Narjis is gone; he starts to cry. Later, he will act as if she is coming back again. “Their behaviour has changed. They do strange things now. My sons weren’t like this before. Now if he hears a loud noise, he panics and starts shaking, crying,” Jaber said. Other families have no members left to mourn the dead children. All six members of the Basma family – mother, father and four children – were killed in an airstrike on their home in Nabatieh on 14 March. “They were a poor family, it’s sad. I told them to flee, but they said they didn’t have the money. As soon as I heard there was an airstrike on the neighbourhood, I called [the father]. But he didn’t pick up,” said Hussein Youssef, a neighbour and close friend of the family. The family had fled during the last Hezbollah-Israel war in 2024, but this time the father, who worked as a painter, could not afford a prolonged displacement. “They were very kind, quiet, peaceful children. They were all very social kids in the neighbourhood, they brought life to the whole area,” said Youssef. The death of the family deeply upset Youssef’s own children, who were very close to the family. They did not expect to lose their classmates so suddenly. “My son cried a lot. He and his friends keep posting their photos and talking about them all the time,” Youssef said. “He was especially affected by the death of the little girl: she used to jump on him and play with him. The little girl really broke his heart.” Children growing up in Lebanon have experienced two wars in just a three-year time span. Israeli bombing, while primarily targeting south Lebanon, has touched virtually all parts of the country, shattering a sense of safety for children. Experts say exposure to violence in children can lead to developmental and antisocial behavioural issues later in life. The longer the conflict goes on, the more severe and long lasting the symptoms. “Children wake in fear, parents carry unbearable worry, and the hurt will echo for years, if not generations, after the bombs fall silent,” said Dr Rabih El Chammay, the head of the national mental health programme at the Lebanese ministry of public health. Jaber said she would seek psychological treatment for her two sons as soon as the war ended, and she was deeply worried about the long-term trauma the bombing will have on them. Until then, she and the rest of the family are left to deal with the immense weight of Narjis’s absence by themselves. “She was different from all the other children. She would tell me: ‘Mama, I want to sleep next to you. I want to sleep in your heart,” Jaber said, crying. “She was incredibly kind, gentle. More than I can describe.”

A war of regression: how Trump bombed the US into a worse position with Iran

Four weeks into a war that was going to take four days, and that has so far cost the US about $30-40bn and Israel $300m a day, Washington is further away from a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was in May 2025. Not only has the war failed to persuade Iran to agree to dismantle its nuclear programme in the comprehensive and irreversible way the US demanded in a 15-point paper that it tabled on 23 May last year, Washington is now having to negotiate to reopen the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that has been open ever since the invention of the dhow, with a short exception of a tanker war in the 1980s between Iran and Iraq. This regression is proving to be perplexing for the American high command. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, recently said that “the only thing prohibiting transit in the strait right now is Iran shooting at shipping”, but this was not quite right. Iran has not been shooting at shipping that much in recent weeks. Instead, it is the fear of Iran shooting at shipping that is scaring off insurers and tanker owners. Still worse from the US perspective, Iran has set up a waterside stall whereby prime ministers and tanker owners can bargain with the Iranian navy over the toll they are willing to pay for their tankers to be given “free passage”. Iran plans to turn the strait into a money spinner, just as Egypt charges for access to the Suez canal. By some calculations, given the massive scale of the traffic that passes through the strait each year, Iran could raise $80bn a year. If a law currently being rushed through the Iranian parliament passes, tankers carrying oil from favoured non-hostile nations such as India, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea and China will be waved through or offered cheaper rates. Little wonder Trump is thrashing around. The US along with Israel continues to bomb Iran, but he has now twice put back the date of threatened strikes on Iran’s civilian power stations – an action that would constitute a war crime. He continues to insist Iran has been defeated and yet Iran continues to behave as if it is not. That is partly because this struggle is not just being fought in command posts, but on the trading floor. The price of oil is the key metric for Iran’s success, along with its remaining supply of missile launchers. As a result, 95% of traffic through the strait of Hormuz remains blocked, depriving the markets of 10-13m barrels of oil each day. Such is Iran’s stranglehold even Trump describes Iran allowing ships through as a “present” to the US. Trump admits he is surprised the price of oil is not higher. Jason Bordoff, the founding director at the Center on Global Energy Policy, agrees. “At some point, the physical reality of the loss of that much oil per day has to catch up with the paper markets, the trading expectations,” he says. “There is no policy intervention that can cope with a disruption that large.” For Iran, oil trading anything above $100 a barrel is pitched high enough to destroy demand and disrupt the world economy. But it is not just oil. The strait provides passage for chemicals, helium, metals and fertilisers. As during the Covid pandemic, the world is discovering something new about the inter-connectedness of supply chains and how geography has blessed Iran with a unique chance to break these chains. Mary I supposedly said: “When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart” – a reference to the painful English loss of Calais to the French in January 1558. For Trump, the word may be Hormuz, the waterway where his presidency ran aground. For it is hard to find a serious commentator, of any nationality or expertise, who thinks the advantage in this war currently lies with the US. Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, told the Economist that – much as it pained him – it was Iran, his old adversary, that had the upper hand. “The reality is the US underestimated the task and I think, as about two weeks ago, lost the initiative to Iran. In practice, the Iranian regime has been more resilient than anyone would have expected. They took some good decisions as early as last June about dispersing their weapons and delegating authority for using those weapons which has given them extra resilience. Through the strait they have globalised not internationalised the conflict. They have played a weak hand pretty well.” Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group, says: “It is becoming painfully clear that not only the United States and Israel are losing this war, but that this is one of the biggest strategic failures of the west, with the most significant consequences for regional geopolitics and the global economy since world war two.” She said the US was nowhere near meeting its original strategic goals and had only created new problems. Domestic politics in the US is also becoming ominous. Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative, says: “Trump’s legacy is at stake in Iran: if the war drags on, that will be all that will be remembered of his second term. George W Bush also did not want to be a war president: he had goals regarding education, immigration and social welfare. None of this was accomplished; his record was crushed by the war in Iraq.” Americans, including Republicans, want this war to end, adding to the pressure on Trump to prove that sending 10,000 troops to the Middle East would not be the definition of a strategic quagmire. Inside the Iran regime, where survival was the objective, there is a growing sense that the balance is tilting in their favour, so much so that Iran may indeed overplay the weak hand to which Younger referred. The Iranian media, for instance, is repeatedly picking up stories from western thinkers and retired generals claiming Trump’s strategy has failed. The speaker of the parliament, and supposedly Trump’s preferred leader, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is clear: US soldiers will only find they cannot fix what their generals have broken. Without naming the United Arab Emirates, he said he was aware a country was planning to join a US effort reopen the strait by force and that country would find nothing would be spared. Not surprisingly, at his more than hour-long pre-cabinet press conference on Thursday morning, Trump denied that the US was ensnared. He reiterated that the military campaign was well ahead of schedule. The Iranians know they have a disaster on their hands, he said, adding that “they were begging to negotiate, not me”. He said: “If they don’t negotiate, we are their worst nightmare. I am the opposite of being desperate.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, reiterated the US’s key demands laid out in his updated 15-point plan: no domestic uranium enrichment, no stockpiles, removal of enriched uranium from Iran, restrictions on missile capability and reopening the strait of Hormuz. Witkoff claimed there were strong signs that the Iranians knew after their 27-day pummelling that they were at an inflection point. But he took no account of the counterdemands now tabled by Iran on the strait of Hormuz, a problem that has only arisen owing to the US decision to attack Iran, or on sanctions relief. Philip Gordon, a former foreign policy adviser to Kamala Harris when she was US vice-president, thinks “there is no chance Iran will agree to Trump’s demands and the longer the US holds out for them, the more costs and pain everyone will endure. In the short term at least, limits on Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, support for proxies and threat to the strait are all more likely to be ensured through deterrence and prevention than with a comprehensive, formal agreement, and the sooner we recognise that, the better off we will be.” The former head of the Iran desk at Israel’s military intelligence, Danny Citrinowicz, also predicted that by the expiry of Trump’s latest 10-day deadline, Iran would not surrender, would not accept the 15-point framework, would not relinquish control of Hormuz and would continue attacks on Israel and the Gulf states. After that, Trump will face a decisive choice: a further escalation of tensions, a retreat or a push for a negotiated settlement similar to the one Iran offered in March. The UN is not going to sanction the use of force to reopen the strait, Europe will not participate and the G7 will not endorse it. One diplomat recently involved in the peace talks says he fears that if Trump cannot see a way out, he will resort to a nuclear weapon. Emile Hokayem, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, senses that “Trump wants to avoid a long, protracted war of attrition so the Pentagon is giving him high risk, high investment options with potential high impact, as if one big blow will change the trajectory of the war, or at least the perception of it – ie that Iran retains strategic leverage by having identified and developed control over the centre of gravity of the war, Hormuz. “This reminds me of when US and Israeli analysts and officials were arguing that Rafah in May 2024 was going to be the big, final blow in the Gaza war. How did that work?”