While Iran has approached the current negotiations from a practical, reality-based posture predicated on resolving the actual major points of difference between the US and Iran, the US is being held hostage by the politicized whim of an American President who needs to shape domestic public opinion in a way which transforms the reality of a humiliating defeat into the perception of a bold victory.
The US lost the first round of the war with Iran decisively. If Trump decides to go a second round, the results will be disastrous for American and its allies.
For nearly 40 days, Israel and the United States carried out an extensive aerial campaign against Iran designed to topple the government and suppress Iran’s ability to defend itself. This campaign failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. Instead, it devolved into a numbers game where inflated outcomes were sold to an unquestioning public by military professionals and politicians alike. The Iranian government not only withstood the efforts at decapitation-induced regime change, but actually strengthened its hold on power when the people of Iran, instead of turning on the Islamic Republic, rallied to its cause. Moreover, rather than suppressing Iran’s ability to launch ballistic missiles and drones against US military bases, critical infrastructure in the Gulf Arab States, and Israel, Iran not only sustained its ability to strike, but deployed new generations of weapons that readily defeated all missile defense systems while, using intelligence information that permitted accurate targeting, destroyed critical military infrastructure worth tens of billions of dollars.
Regional experts had long warned about the consequences of entering an existential conflict with Iran, noting that Iran would not simply allow itself to be erased as a viable nation state without ensuring that the other nations of the region were subjected to similar existential threats to their survival, and that global energy security would be disrupted in such a manner as to trigger a world economic crisis. These assessments were backed up by a belied that Iran would not only be able to shut down shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz, but also effectively target and destroy the major energy production potential of the Gulf Arab States.
It wasn’t that the politicians and military planners in the US and Israel doubted Iran’s ability to impact global energy markets or strike targets in Israel and the Gulf region.
They knew Iran had the potential.
They just believed that they would be able to achieve regime change in Tehran in relatively short order, thereby mooting any threat Iran might pose to energy supplies and infrastructure.
They were wrong, which is why the US was looking for an offramp from the war soon after it started.
The end result was this current ceasefire, which was ostensibly entered into to buy time for US and Iranian negotiators to hammer out a lasting peace plan.
There is a fundamental problem, however.
While Iran has approached the current negotiations from a practical, reality-based posture predicated on resolving the actual major points of difference between the US and Iran, the US is being held hostage by the politicized whim of an American President who needs to shape domestic public opinion in a way which transforms the reality of a humiliating defeat into the perception of a bold victory.
President Trump ran for office on a platform premised on the notion that he would keep America out of the kind of costly, open-ended military misadventures that had defined the US since the start of the 21st Century.
The war with Iran proved this promise to be a lie.
This lie, combined with numerous other political missteps that have transpired during the first year and a half of his second term in office, have put President Trump and his political legacy at risk, with critical midterm elections looming on the horizon that threaten to shift the balance of power in the US Congress away from the Republican Party, and to the Democratic Party. If the Republicans lose the House of Representatives, the impeachment of Donald Trump is all but a certainty. This alone would spell the end of Trump’s legislative agenda. But if the Democrats take the Senate as well, and with a wide enough margin, the Trump will not only find himself impeached, but possibly convicted.
And this would not only mean the end of the Trump Presidency, but also the end of the Trump brand, something Trump has been burnishing his entire adult life and which he has transformed into a political cult of personality that has redefined American politics.
Iran has entered the current round of negotiations focused on the practicalities and realities of geopolitics and national security.
Trump is about shaping perceptions to his political benefit.
These are not compatible goals and objectives, especially when Iran has emerged victorious from a war it did not want, and Trump is trying to invent a narrative that has him prevailing in a conflict his team not only should never have engaged in, but which they lost, and now Trump has to spin this dismal reality in a manner which benefits him politically.
Take the current impasse over the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has asserted control over all shipping transiting this strategic waterway, and by being selective about which ships can transit, has created a global energy crisis which has detrimentally impacted US allies in Europe and Asia.
It was the reality that the US had no military solution to the problem of Iran’s compelled closure of the Strait that led the US to seek a diplomatic solution to the problems it alone had created.
There are other outstanding issues as well, such as Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium (which the US apparently tried to seize in a failed special operations raid), as well as the issue of Iran’s nuclear program in general, which the US insists can continue only if Iran forgoes enrichment altogether, something Iran has said it will never do.
The US also wishes to curtail Iran’s ballistic missile programs, despite the fact it is these very missiles which provided Iran with the ability to prevail militarily over the US, Israel and the Gulf Arab States.
The US also insists that Iran cease its relationship with regional allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon (which is engaged in an open-ended conflict with Israel due to Israel’s ongoing occupation of southern Lebanon) and the Ansarullah movement in Yemen, which has been opposing a Saudi-led aggression since 2014.
There’s literally a snowball’s chance in hell Iran would concede any of these issues, especially after winning a war where all of the non-nuclear matters helped contribute to the Iranian victory.
And therein lies the rub.
Trump has largely bought into an Israeli-influenced narrative which defines victory as being predicated on Iran yielding on all of the issues listed above.
Something Iran will never do.
Trump has shown zero political acumen when it comes to trying to shape US public opinion in his favor.
Instead of taking credit for getting Iran to agree to open the Strait of Hormuz, Trump insists on posturing as a tough guy by insisting on continuing a naval blockade which exists in name only, prompting Iran to reverse course and close down the Strait.
And close down negotiations.
Leaving Trump further boxed into a corner of his own making.
With the only option available being the resumption of the very military operations that had proven unable to defeat Iran and, if initiated, will trigger consequences which will have a devastating impact on global energy markets—the very thing Trump was trying to avoid when seeking out the ceasefire to begin with.
But there may very well be other consequences.
Iran is at the point in this conflict where trying to play a game of escalation management is counterproductive.
If the US opts to resume its attacks on Iran, with or without Israel, Iran will have no choice but to go for the jugular from the start.
To strike not only the energy production capabilities of the regional actors, like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, that continue to provide assistance to the US when it comes to the conflict with Iran, but also their water desalinization plants and power production plants.
Denying these nations access to the very water they need to survive.
And power they need to provide air conditioning to the skyscrapers that have defined their status as modern oasis’ of civilization.
The hot summer months approach.
And if Iran eliminates water and air conditioning, then these modern Gulf Arab States become uninhabitable.
Cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi become uninhabitable. So, too, Kuwait City, Riyadh, and Manama.
Everything the rulers of these Gulf nations have aspired to accomplish over the course of the past several decades will lie in ruins, ghost cities in place of thriving metropolis’.
And Iran would likely do the same to Israel, destroying the critical infrastructure the tiny Zionist enclave needs to survive as a modern nation states.
Making the land of milk and honey uninhabitable for millions of Israelis who will have no choice but to go back to their homes of origin.
These are all known knowns—there is no mystery about what the consequences of resuming military operations against Iran will bring.
Albert Einstein is widely quoted as once noting that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result.
The US and Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran using the full strength of their respective air forces.
And they failed.
Today, Iran stands ready to receive a combined US-Israeli strike which will match, but not exceed, the destructive power of those initial attacks.
And Iran will respond with missile and drone attacks which will exceed by an order of magnitude the targeted destruction of its previous retaliatory strikes.
Iran will change the cycle of escalation by going straight for the jugular.
And Trump won’t know what hit him.
The consequences of incompetence are real.
Something Trump and the American people are about to find out in real time should the US go forward with the threats to resume bombing Iran in the next few days.
Black Hills Uranium Is More Dangerous. Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Trump is bombing Iran over uranium enrichment 6,000 miles away. He’s fast-tracking uranium extraction in the Black Hills on Lakota treaty land, above the aquifer that feeds Pine Ridge. Two fast tracks. Two manufactured crises. Both bypassing the consent of the governed. Tell Secretary Burgum the real uranium threat is here.
This administration has put two things on a fast track to destruction. One is a war in Iran. The other is a uranium mine in the Black Hills. Both manufactured crises. Both bypassing democratic oversight. Both moving at the speed of executive order, because if either one slowed down long enough for the people to weigh in, the answer would be no.
Congress never authorized the war in Iran. They’ve voted four times to stop it. Overruled. The Lakota people never consented to uranium extraction from treaty land. They’ve fought it for 20 years. Overruled.
On February 27, 2026, the U.S. Forest Service approved new drilling around Pe’ Sla — the ceremonial heart of He Sapa, the Black Hills — over formal tribal objections, with no environmental review, under a document falsely claiming there are “no known Native American or Alaska Native religious or cultural sites within the project area.” About land a half-mile from Pe’ Sla.
Now the Bureau of Land Management has opened a 30-day comment window on the Dewey-Burdock uranium project — 50 miles from Pine Ridge, in Lakota treaty territory. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty appears in the review exactly zero times. The document resolving cultural harm to Lakota sacred sites won’t be signed until six weeks after the comment period closes.
They will go to war over uranium in Iran. They will not protect our water from uranium 50 miles from Pine Ridge.
In the end, the only backstop on this runaway train is the consent of the governed. Use it.
Tell Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum:
1. Reverse the Pe’ Sla drilling permit — now
2. Remove Dewey-Burdock from the FAST-41 federal fast-track program
3. Suspend all extractive permits on treaty lands until full tribal consultation and a complete Environmental Impact Statement are done
The Black Hills are not for sale. Mni wiconi — water is life
There is a difference between strategic ambiguity and strategic incoherence.
The first deters adversaries. The second unnerves allies, emboldens rivals, and corrodes the very architecture meant to prevent catastrophe.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States’ nuclear posture is drifting dangerously toward the latter, and the consequences are now rippling through the global non-proliferation regime.
The warning lights are not subtle. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, hardly a sensationalist platform, has effectively accused Washington of taking a wrecking ball to decades of carefully constructed nuclear norms.
Across multiple recent analyses, the Bulletin outlines a pattern: erratic signalling, coercive use of force against nuclear-threshold states, and a cavalier attitude toward arms control obligations. The cumulative effect is not just instability. It is the potential unravelling of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) itself.
Let’s start with the basics. The United States still possesses one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world of around 3,700 warheads, according to the Bulletin’s Nuclear Notebook 2026.
That number alone is not the problem. It reflects decades of Cold War inheritance and gradual reductions. The real issue is how that arsenal is being politically framed and operationally signalled.
Trump’s approach has been marked by contradiction. On one hand, he speaks intermittently about arms control and reducing nuclear risks. On the other, he has openly floated resuming nuclear testing and declined to clarify whether the United States might actually conduct such tests.
Arms control depends on predictability. Treaties, verification regimes, and confidence-building measures exist precisely to eliminate guesswork.
When a nuclear superpower signals that it might abandon long-standing norms, such as the de facto moratorium on nuclear testing, it sends a clear message to others: restraint is optional.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s handling of Iran. According to the Bulletin’s April 2026 analysis, Washington’s actions risk teaching exactly the wrong lesson: that nuclear restraint does not guarantee security.
For decades, the NPT has functioned on a basic bargain. Non-nuclear states agree not to pursue weapons in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology and an implicit security framework backed by international norms.
But if a state that remains below the weaponisation threshold, maintaining “nuclear latency”, can still be attacked or coerced, that bargain begins to collapse.
The Bulletin puts it bluntly: states may conclude that only actual nuclear weapons, not compliance, not inspections, and not diplomacy, can ensure survival.
This is a profound shift. It transforms nuclear weapons from deterrents of last resort into perceived necessities for regime security. And once that logic takes hold, proliferation is no longer an aberration, it becomes rational behaviour.
The Bulletin’s other April piece goes further, accusing Washington of effectively undermining the NPT framework itself. The metaphor is deliberate: this is not erosion through neglect, but active damage.
The core problem lies in precedent.
International norms are not enforced by a global police force; they are sustained by consistent behaviour among major powers. When the United States disregards those norms, whether by sidelining diplomacy, undermining safeguards, or prioritising coercion, it weakens the legitimacy of the entire system
The NPT has survived for over half a century because it created a shared expectation: that nuclear powers would move, however slowly, toward disarmament, while non-nuclear states would abstain.
But that expectation is already fraying.
The expiry of the New START Treaty, the last major arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, has removed a critical stabilising mechanism.
Experts warn that this opens the door to renewed arms competition and eliminates transparency measures that helped prevent miscalculation. Without such guardrails, the NPT’s credibility suffers further. The broader trajectory is unmistakable. The post-Cold War era of gradual nuclear restraint is giving way to a more volatile, competitive environment.
The United States and Russia still control the overwhelming majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, around 86 per cent of the global inventory. Historically, their bilateral agreements set the tone for global stability.
Today, that leadership vacuum is being filled not by cooperation, but by suspicion.
Trump’s push for “multilateral” arms control involving China might sound forward-looking, but in practice it has produced little tangible progress. Meanwhile, the absence of concrete negotiations and the collapse of existing treaties are accelerating uncertainty.
Even more troubling is the renewed emphasis on nuclear signalling as a tool of coercion.
The 2026 conflict with Iran, coupled with ambiguous nuclear rhetoric, suggests a willingness to blur the line between conventional and nuclear deterrence. That ambiguity increases the risk of escalation, intentional or otherwise.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been ringing the alarm bell with increasing urgency. In 2026, it moved its famous Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest humanity has ever been to catastrophe.
This is not mere symbolism. It reflects a convergence of risks: nuclear, technological, and geopolitical. But nuclear weapons remain at the core of that assessment. The danger today is not just the existence of nuclear arsenals but the breakdown of the systems designed to manage them.
When arms control collapses, when norms erode, and when leadership becomes erratic, the probability of miscalculation rises sharply. And nuclear miscalculation is unforgiving. There are no second chances.
For countries like India, outside the NPT but deeply invested in strategic stability, the implications are particularly complex. A weakening non-proliferation regime could legitimise further expansion by nuclear and near-nuclear states across Asia.
If Iran, for instance, moves from latency to weaponisation, it could trigger a cascade of responses across West Asia. Similarly, the absence of US-Russia constraints may encourage China to accelerate its own arsenal expansion—already a concern in strategic circles.
In such a world, deterrence becomes more crowded, more opaque, and more dangerous. The risk is not just a bilateral arms race but a multipolar nuclear competition with fewer rules and weaker safeguards.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of Trump’s approach is not any single policy decision but the normalisation of instability.
When nuclear threats are used casually, when treaties are treated as optional, and when strategic clarity is replaced by improvisation, the entire system adapts to its own detriment.
What was once unthinkable becomes conceivable; what was once unacceptable becomes negotiable. The NPT does not collapse overnight. It erodes gradually, as states lose faith in its guarantees and begin hedging their bets. That process may already be underway.
The Bulletin’s warning is stark but credible: if current trends continue, the world could enter a new era where nuclear proliferation accelerates, arms control becomes an afterthought, and the threshold for nuclear use becomes dangerously blurred.
The global nuclear order has always been fragile, sustained less by enforcement than by mutual restraint. Under Donald Trump, that restraint is being tested as never before. An erratic doctrine, combined with coercive policies and the dismantling of arms control frameworks, is placing unprecedented strain on the non-proliferation regime.
The NPT, long considered the cornerstone of nuclear stability, is now under real pressure. Not from a single rogue state, but from the behaviour of its most powerful guarantor.
This is the paradox of the present moment: the country that helped build the system is now accelerating its decline.
And in the nuclear age, systemic decline is not an abstract risk. It is a countdown.
At that gathering of European officials in Berlin Wednesday, immediate pledges of new weapons supplies came to $4.7 billion, and there is more, much more, coming as Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, mooches his way around the European capitals.
Are the Western powers aware of the magnitude of the moment? I do not see how this can be anything other than so. Setting aside the Zionists’ obsessions and the visceral hatred Ukraine’s neo–Nazi regime nurses toward Russia and Russians, these conflicts are, when viewed broadly, about the defense of Western hegemony in its declining years.
In Iran and Ukraine, what is at stake — what is fought for and against — is a rebalancing of power that will prove of world-historical magnitude when it is at last accomplished.‘
First came news that, on April 8, Israeli jets bombed what is known as the China–Iran railway, a key component of Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Of all the targets the Zionist terror machine might have hit, why a Chinese-sponsored infrastructure project, you had to wonder.
Then on Wednesday came reports that officials from nearly 50 nations — I would love a list of these 50 — met in Berlin to make sure the fires of war against Russia do not flicker out. “We cannot lose sight of Ukraine,” Mark Rutte, NATO’s new secretary-general, declared a little forlornly.
There are other reports such as these of late. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced Thursday that the Pentagon has authorized the Pacific Fleet to interdict ships in the Indian and Pacific oceans if they are deemed to be carrying Iranian oil to Asian ports or “material support” from Asia — read China — to the Islamic Republic.
It is time for a stock-take.
The war in Ukraine drones (literally) on and on, the West showing no inclination whatsoever to take the Russian position seriously. In West Asia we find a variant: The United States and the rabid dog that Bibi Netanyahu has made of Israel have no intention of considering the 10–point document wherein Iran states its conditions for ending a war it appears perfectly willing to continue waging.
What are we looking at? What animates these two confrontations such that to understand our moment we must see Ukraine and Iran as two theaters of a single war?
I do not care for self-referencing commentators, but an exception to my rule is the swiftest way to my reply to these questions.
I have argued since the turn of the millennium that parity between the West and the non–West is the foundational imperative of the 21st century. Any given nation or bloc may favor or oppose this eventuality, but there will be no stopping the turn of history’s wheel: This was my take at the opening of the era that announced itself with the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
And it is the painful birth of this new time we witness as the wars in Europe and West Asia grind on. In each case what is at stake, what is fought for and against, is a rebalancing of power that will prove of world-historical magnitude when it is at last accomplished.
What have the Russians sought since Donald Trump began his second term and declared his intention to end the war in Ukraine and restore relations with Moscow to some kind of equilibrium?
It is the same thing Moscow hoped for at the Cold War’s end, and the same thing they proposed when, in December 2021, they sent draft treaties, one to Washington and one to NATO headquarters in Brussels, as the basis of negotiations for a comprehensive settlement between the Russian Federation and the West.
Moscow’s Push for Equal Standing
Moscow has been clear on this point the whole of the post–Soviet era: It seeks a security architecture that takes cognizance of its interests and, so, recognizes Russia as an equal partner in its relations with the West.
President Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his able foreign minister, speak of the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine and insist these must be addressed if any kind of enduring settlement between East and West is to be achieved. This is merely another way of saying what the Russians have said for the past 30–odd years. [See: Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale]
Neither has the West’s reply been any different: It amounts to one long list of refusals, however directly, dishonestly or incompetently these have been conveyed.
Last November the Trump regime issued a 28–point peace plan that was not less than shocking when cast against the past three and some decades of history. It called for a nonaggression pact Russia, Europe and Ukraine were to negotiate and sign. “All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled,” it read in part.
And further in this line:
“A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO… to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security…”
These 28 provisions proved too good to be true. The Americans who developed this document, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, the incompetent Trump insists must act as his “peace envoy,” simply did not know where the fence posts lie: While they almost certainly did not understand this, implicit in their 28 points was an East–West relationship based on parity.
Out of the question, as was immediately evident.
The Trump regime quickly abandoned its plan, despite its favorable reception in Moscow, and seems to have dropped all thought of “a deal” with Russia. The Europeans, freaked out at the very thought of a negotiated settlement, now resort to upside-down versions of reality I find it hard to believe they even try on.
At that gathering of European officials in Berlin Wednesday, immediate pledges of new weapons supplies came to $4.7 billion, and there is more, much more, coming as Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, mooches his way around the European capitals.
Boris Pistorius seems to have spoken for the group when the subject of peace talks arose. “The truth is, anyway, Russia has never taken them seriously,” the German defense minister declared. “This is why it is all the more important to support Ukraine.”
Russia has never taken negotiations seriously: Can you imagine how this kind of talk lands in Moscow? Can you imagine how low are the Russians’ expectations that the West will take their legitimate interests seriously until events on the battlefield force them to do so?
Tehran’s Conditions
The Iranians, it seems to me, are in a similar predicament.
Read the text of the 10–point plan wherein Tehran advances its demands for ending the war with the United States and Israel. An end to U.S. and Israeli attacks is merely the Iranians’ opener. The withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the region, a nonaggression pact with the United States, recognition of Iran’s rights on the nuclear side, war reparations: To borrow from the Russians, this is a demand to address root causes, a demand for “a new security architecture,” a demand — returning to my principal point — for parity as a non–Western power.
There is a lot in the press these days about a return to negotiations after Vice–President J.D. Vance’s debacle in Islamabad last weekend. I have no trouble imagining the Iranians are eager to avoid more of the savage, indiscriminate bombing their civilian population suffered prior to the two-week ceasefire that went into effect April 8. But I do not think, at the horizon, they will abandon the 10 demands they have advanced any more than the Russian will abandon theirs.
Both nations appear to have concluded it is time to confront the West in the name of that 21st century imperative I noted earlier. Two reasons. One, Russia and Iran have both gathered strength as non–Western powers in recent years, forged in the heat of incessant confrontations. This, indeed, is what history’s wheel looks like as it turns.
Declining Coherence & Power
Two, it is not difficult to recognize the declining coherence and power — and so the creeping desperation — of the United States and its European allies.
Are the Western powers aware of the magnitude of the moment? I do not see how this can be anything other than so. Setting aside the Zionists’ obsessions and the visceral hatred Ukraine’s neo–Nazi regime nurses toward Russia and Russians, these conflicts are, when viewed broadly, about the defense of Western hegemony in its declining years.
This is how I read that attack on the China–Iran railway. O.K., the Israelis did the wet work, as they say, but the bombing of a significant Chinese asset was not without intent: It reflects the United States’ mounting anxiety as the non–West’s premier power advances an imaginative global agenda that has the policy cliques in Washington, now that they belatedly recognize its significance, quaking.
Look at the map in this link. This rail line is key to China’s long-term plan to build efficient connections through southeastern Europe and on to the European capitals. To date, Beijing has reportedly spent 40 billion yuan, about $6 billion, on the project. This is part of the $400 billion investment agreement Beijing and Tehran signed in June 2020.
A little to my surprise, the Chinese have not reacted since the Israelis bombed their asset. There are several considerations at work here, but the most operative appears to be Beijing’s desire to assist in diplomatic mediations while presenting itself as a responsible world power in the face of the Trump regime’s serial insanities.
China Daily ran an editorial cartoon in its Tuesday editions that sheds useful light on Beijing’s perspective. It shows Uncle Sam profligately scattering money and weapons as he bounds through a field marked “War, Hate, Chaos and Greed.” The headline at the top is “The U.S. Reaps What It Sows.”
It is a darkly humorous reminder that Beijing knows very well what the war against Iran is fundamentally about and what time it is on history’s clock. You can always count on the Chinese to take the long view.
“Our assessment is that Trump effectively lacks both a coherent plan and the capacity to secure even a temporary agreement,” the official said. “His decision-making appears to be grounded in Israeli political and security assessments, conveyed to him on a daily basis.”
“Our assessment is that Trump effectively lacks both a coherent plan and the capacity to secure even a temporary agreement,” an Iranian official said.
Iran says it has no plans to negotiate with the US after President Donald Trumpsaid Sunday that “the whole country is going to get blown up” if Iran refuses to make a deal.
Trump claimed that Iranian officials were heading to Islamabad for another round of talks Monday with Vice President JD Vance, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
But Iran’s official IRNA news agency later reported that claims Iran was coming to negotiate were “not true” and described the announcement as “a media game and part of the blame game to pressure Iran.”
The Tasnim News Agency, which is linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reiterated the government’s previous position that it would not negotiate unless Trump lifts his blockade of Iranian ports, which Tehran considers a violation of the ceasefire between the US and Iran.
After Trump said the blockade would continue, Iran again shut down travel through the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, following a brief reopening Friday following the announcement of a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel.
IRNA added that negotiators decided not to return because of “Washington’s excessive demands, unrealistic expectations, constant shifts in stance, repeated contradictions, and the ongoing naval blockade.”
An unnamed Iranian official familiar with Tehran’s internal deliberations told Drop Site News on Sunday that Tehran is prepared for a long war.
He said negotiators would prefer to make a deal with the US that would give Iran the right to enrich uranium, provide sanctions relief, and establish a long-term non-aggression framework.
But the official said Trump’s erratic behavior and maximalist demands—including that Iran surrender all its enriched uranium—are causing Iranian officials to sour on the idea that he could ever be a trustworthy negotiating partner.
“Our assessment is that Trump effectively lacks both a coherent plan and the capacity to secure even a temporary agreement,” the official said. “His decision-making appears to be grounded in Israeli political and security assessments, conveyed to him on a daily basis.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Sunday that Trump’s apparent belief that he can use threats of mass violence to bully Iran into a favorable deal is pushing Tehran further from the negotiating table
“Due to poor discipline, Trump ends up prioritizing the optics of victory over actually getting a deal,” Parsi said. “Instead of using deescalatory signals from Iran to get closer to a deal, he declares victory and seeks Iran’s humiliation, and by that, he undermines his own diplomacy.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-no-talks-trump-threats
New England’s governors (two Republicans and four Democrats) have signed a joint statement recklessly condemning their region to the extended operation of dangerously aging nuclear reactors and the deployment of expensive and untested new ones.
Moreover, Republican governors Kelly Ayotte (NH), Phil Scott (VT) and Democrats Maura Healey (MA), Janet Mills (ME), Ned Lamont (CT) and Dan McKee (RI) failed to account for the simultaneous expansion of the long-term and mounting threat of unmanaged high-level radioactive waste. Since the nuclear energy and weaponry technology’s inception, it has not yet conceived or demonstrated a scientifically valid or community accepted plan to isolate it from the biosphere for tens of thousands of years.
Indeed, the New England public demonstrated its opposition by making the distinct connection between the immorality of passing along nuclear power’s unresolved poisoned legacy to future generations and the environmental crime to continue generating highly radioactive nuclear waste.
Many people are saying that Donald Trump is insane. He may be. So too Benjamin Netanyahu. But if so, it is a form of insanity that includes the calm sanity of Adolf Eichmann and Harry Truman as they went about their business of mass extermination.
Crazy, to use the vernacular, is an elusive word nearly impossible to define, especially when an entire society can be crazy, as Erich Fromm, the German-American social-psychologist, has argued. Obedience is a much touted virtue, not only in overt police regimes but in so-called democracies – but obedience to whom? To mass murderers?
Obedience can be imbibed through osmosis. I remember Regis, my Jesuit high school’s motto – Deo et Patriae, for God and country – and how it linked obedience to God with obedience to the United States. I am certain that such a linkage would be denied by school authorities, but of course the Jesuits are known for their guile. So it didn’t surprise me when I was applying for a discharge from the Marines during the Vietnam War and was being questioned by a group of Marine Officers and one starting screaming at me: “What the hell kind of God are you talking about? I’m a Catholic, too, and my God supports the Marines and the war in Vietnam.” It was hard not to laugh sardonically, especially as he gesticulated with his large cigar for emphasis. I was then sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation who told me, to my great surprise, that he agreed with me and that the country’s leaders were insane.
Adolf Eichmann was declared “perfectly sane” by a psychiatrist who examined him when he went on trial for his routine daily tasks of carrying out Hitler’s orders to exterminate Jews. It was just another day at the office for Eichmann.
Harry Truman was not examined after he ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he was assumed to be sane in committing these satanic crimes of mass murder. Just another state executive doing his duty by carrying out the orders of his puppet masters.
Those were the good old days when everyone knew who was sane and who was nuts. Now we seem very confused. Perhaps Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. have discombobulated many minds about who is sane or not, who is a mass murderer, who evil and who good, depending on which functionary is in the White House. Perhaps not.
If Trump is insane, how did he twice become the president of the United States? Do “sane” people – the well-adjusted ones? – not realize that Trump is the nominal head of an immense system whose history is one of mass murder from Wounded Knee to the recent U.S. slaughter of hundreds, mostly young girls, at the elementary school in Minab, Iran.
Trump gave the orders, but he did not launch those missiles. Nor did Netanyahu massacre Palestinians with his own hands. These fat boy killers prefer to keep their dainty hands clean of blood – to have their functionaries do the killing. I think of other functionaries and the names they gave to the atomic bombs they dropped on Japan: “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” And we talk about sanity.
The “sane” obedient ones do the killing; the soldiers who carry out orders. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his profound book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable, in 1966:
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.” The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless.
Our problem, as the historian Howard Zinn once said, is civil obedience, surely not civil disobedience, that people everywhere are so submissive to authority that they will dutifully obey the orders of people like Trump and Netanyahu. Such obedience, all false rhetoric to the contrary, is drilled into us from birth through overt and covert methods of fear inculcation.
My dear departed mother’s father was a New York City cop. When she was young, he made her and her mother, trembling with fear, sit at the kitchen table, upon which he put his revolver, and warned them to obey him or else. Such tyrannical behavior was slightly mitigated decades later when he and my grandmother lived with us. When he heard that any of us eight kids were misbehaving, he, old, feeble, and long retired, would don his police uniform and stomp down the stairs waving his long baton to frighten us. I never got to ask my mother why she tolerated this. Such is the long life of fear.
There are reports that by April’s end the U.S. will have 60,000 troops in Iran’s vicinity. If Trump gives the orders to invade Iran, how many will refuse? How many will refuse to send missiles into more Iranian schools and homes? If Trump gives orders for a nuclear strike, can we expect military individuals with consciences to disobey? Will any heed Pope Leo’s voice about this war? That it is immoral.
It takes a system to wage war, and civil and military obedience to support it. That system – what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has adroitly named MICIMATT: The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank system – is so deeply woven into American society and therefore the hearts and minds of its citizens and military personnel that one can only hope against hope that Trump’s orders will be disobeyed by many. It is a desperate hope, I realize.
War Is A Racket, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler once put it. It is waged for the tyrannical oligarchs and always kills mostly civilians. Over ninety percent now, probably more. Innocent people, little girls at school, babies in their mothers arms – it is organized state terror. War is immoral. It is not complex. It is simple. Like the gospel message the Pope is conveying.
Like all tyrants, Trump is surrounded by sycophants, fearful little people like Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Peter Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, Jr., et al. The whole crew groveling at his feet are implicated in his war crimes. To hear Kennedy defend Trump’s war on Iran, his Ukraine and other policies, by claiming his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, and his uncle, President Kennedy, would agree with Trump is to pass through the looking glass. Kennedy, also a staunch defender of Israel and its savage policies, makes me shake my head in wonder. Was his political conversion, like St. Paul’s, from a light from heaven that sent him to the ground where Trump’s divine voice asked him to hop on the MAGA train? Or was the voice more insidious and subtle, a quiet call from someone else late in the night? However it happened, it is complete, and he is now fully marching to the drums of war along with Trump’s ass-kissing entourage. I, once Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s ardent supporter when he announced his run for the presidency, feel like a fool.
Let me recommend an important film – Terence Malik’s A Hidden Life – about a different type of man, Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant farmer from an isolated small mountainous village who refuses to take an oath to Hitler and fight in the German army. He knew that his refusal would not stop Hitler; but he also knew his conscience came from God and not the state. So he said no. NO! I will not follow orders, despite everyone telling him to do so. For his refusal, he suffered terribly and was beheaded. In my review of this film which I wrote six years ago as Joseph Biden was three weeks into his presidency, I said:
While Franz is eventually put on trial by the German government, it is we as viewers who must judge ourselves and ask how guilty or innocent are we for supporting or resisting the immoral killing machine of our own country now. Hitler and his Nazis were then, but we are faced with what Martin Luther King called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’
Many Americans surely ask with Franz, ‘What has happened to the country that we love?’ But how many look in the mirror and ask, “Am I a guilty bystander or an active supporter of the United States’ immoral and illegal wars all around the world that have been going on for so many years under presidents of both parties and have no end? Do I support the new cold war with its push for nuclear war with its first strike policy? Do I support, by my silence, a nuclear holocaust?’
The questions still linger. Let first Thomas Merton and then the twenty-two years-old Bob Dylan have the last words:
“For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest and most ridiculous of all the false gods. We can call ourselves innocent only if we refuse to forget this, and if we also do everything we can to make others realize it.“
It seems clear that Donald Trump realizes that this war has been a catastrophe for him, regardless of what he says publicly. As the global economy barrels toward recession, he sees little use in persisting. His only option is to increase pressure on Iran with more destruction, which would only bring more Iranian retaliation and lead to an even greater global economic catastrophe.
Iran is not willing to sacrifice what it sees as its national right to enrich its own uranium for civilian use, something permitted them under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which they are a signatory, and, notably, Israel is not.
When U.S. Vice President JD Vance took to the podium after a long day of talks to end the American and Israeli war of choice on Iran, he made one thing clear. This had not been a serious attempt to reach a deal.
Although the talks went on for more than twenty hours, it’s just one day of negotiations. The very fact that the headline was that there had been no “breakthrough” in just one day displayed a fundamental lack of seriousness.
Despite Vance’s attempt at drama, neither side shut the door on continuing negotiations. The U.S. has even proposed extending the ceasefire, as Pakistani emissaries have arrived in Tehran to arrange further talks. Washington has even pressed Israel for a ceasefire in Lebanon, something that does not sit well with either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the Israeli Jewish population.
At the same time, the United States has moved to block Iranian ships from using the Strait of Hormuz, a sort of counter-blockade, and has dispatched thousands more troops to the region.
What does all of this mean?
Trump wants a way out of this war, but does he have one?
It seems clear that Donald Trump realizes that this war has been a catastrophe for him, regardless of what he says publicly. As the global economy barrels toward recession, he sees little use in persisting. His only option is to increase pressure on Iran with more destruction, which would only bring more Iranian retaliation and lead to an even greater global economic catastrophe.
In that context, Trump’s move to “blockade Iran’s blockade” in the Strait of Hormuz is best understood as an attempt to appear strong before being forced to accept terms that end this war with Iran in a stronger position than it was before.
Trump even went so far as to force Netanyahu to accept a brief pause in Lebanon. That’s not an easy feat, as Netanyahu is reeling in Israel from the lack of positive results from the wars in both Iran and Lebanon. Israeli Jews support both wars but believe Netanyahu has not handled them correctly, based on the lack of tangible political gains for Israel since they began, in contrast to what they see as military triumphs.
But while Trump may want a way out of the war, finding that exit may still be difficult.
One option is for Trump to simply leave the ceasefire in place without an agreement. That means the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, whether by Iran alone or by both Iran and the United States. Iran and Israel would continue to fight, but the fighting would likely be limited to those two countries, leaving the Gulf Arab states out.
That isn’t a very appealing option for Trump. He could talk about having “changed the Iranian regime,” but the reality of economic depression, ongoing fighting, and a strengthened Iran would be clear.
Moreover, Israel has been more vulnerable to both Iranian and Hezbollah attacks, as their supply of interceptors has dwindled. The U.S. can replenish them, but probably not at prior levels and not as quickly as Israel would need. The image of Israel getting pounded by Iranian and Hezbollah missiles is not one Trump wants his constituents to see.
Another option is simply to double down on force. Iran has already shown what the result would be if Trump chooses that option. Their recent attacks on Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, which serves as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz for the export of oil, were a warning of Iran’s ability to do a lot more damage to oil exports from the region. Iran has also threatened to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in Yemen have shown they can do this at will and that there is little the U.S. can do about it.
The third option is a realistic agreement. This seems to be the one Trump wants to take. The problem he faces is that American demands are unrealistic, and the compromises he would have to make would be extremely hard to sell as anything but capitulation.
According to reports, the talks in Islamabad crashed on the key issues of Iran’s nuclear program, its support of armed non-state actors in the region, and control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Dismantle all major nuclear enrichment facilities;
Surrender all highly enriched uranium;
Accept an American peace, security and de-escalation framework that includes regional allies;
End funding for regional allies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah;
Fully open the Strait of Hormuz, charging no tolls for passage.
If the American spokesperson was accurate in calling those “red lines” rather than negotiating points, they’re non-starters.
Iran has offered to suspend all nuclear enrichment activity for five years, countering a U.S. demand that they agree to a twenty-year suspension. Iran had, before the war, agreed not to stockpile enriched uranium, which would make it impossible for them to ever accumulate enough nuclear material for a bomb.
But Iran is not willing to sacrifice what it sees as its national right to enrich its own uranium for civilian use, something permitted them under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which they are a signatory, and, notably, Israel is not.
Demanding Iran give up that option is not realistic. Yet that very unrealistic demand has been made more pressing by the war itself. By attacking Iran, Israel and the United States have reinforced the evidence for what happens to countries that abandon the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Iran can look at itself along with Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine on one hand and North Korea on the other to see this obvious logic.
The path out of that paradox is Iran’s returning to the nuclear monitoring that it agreed to before Trump tore up the nuclear deal, and the U.S. accepting that Iran can enrich its own uranium, within reasonable limits. That creates a mutual deterrence; Iran would have to break off the inspections to even begin enriching uranium beyond its immediate needs, which it wouldn’t do unless the U.S. and Israel continue their belligerence.
It appears that such a resolution would be acceptable to Iran, but it would mean a significant climbdown for Trump. And, obviously, Israel will not accept it and would have to be strictly restrained by the United States. Yet it remains the only reasonable way out.
It is notable that there was no mention of Iran’s missile and drone capabilities among the red lines. That seems to imply that the United States has already backed away from a condition that amounts to convincing Iran to disarm itself in the face of not only American and Israeli aggression but also the understandably renewed hostility toward it from the Gulf Arab states.
That realization by the Americans reflects someone getting in Trump’s ear and making some headway on issues that are just absurdly unrealistic. Similarly, while Vance might have included support for non-state allies in his talks, that has not featured prominently in White House statements or in Trump’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings since the talks in Islamabad.
The nuclear issue seems to have the most prominent position, and that is always better. It is the issue on which Iran has the most flexibility, largely because it is based on Western fears and propaganda more than it has been based on reality until now. Yes, the war has probably made Iran’s nuclear ambitions much more real. The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei means his fatwa against nuclear weapons is no longer in effect, and, as noted, Iran has been given much more incentive to pursue a nuclear weapon than ever before.
Still, the fact that they were even willing to offer a five-year suspension of nuclear activity and have not stated any opposition to the idea of international inspectors would indicate that Iran is open to significant compromise on the nuclear issue.
The Strait of Hormuz may be more problematic. Iran has always and will always have the ability to disrupt shipping in the Strait. No American threat or international anger can change that simple fact of geography.
On the other hand, while neither Iran nor the United States has ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees safe and unimpeded passage to peaceful vessels through many waterways including the Strait, most of the world views Iran’s threats to passage in the Strait and to its plan to collect tolls for passage as unacceptable.
Iran wants to use its ability to threaten passage through the Strait to help press for the reparations they need and, more importantly, to ease the sanctions that have restricted Iran’s ability to participate in the global economy, particularly regarding trade with Asia and Europe. It is likely that they would abandon the legally dubious idea of collecting tolls in the Strait if they can re-enter the Asian and European markets and receive reparations for this war.
Again, though, this would be a huge concession from the United States. It would be impossible to sell such a concession as anything but a massive defeat, even to Trump’s most sheepish supporters. Iran would be significantly stronger and economically healthier than it was before the war. There’s no way to dress that up.
Israel’s Lebanon land grab
Finally, there is Lebanon. Trump surely had to exert extreme pressure to get Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, even a brief one.
Israel has not tried to hide the fact that this aspect of the war is a pure land grab. Netanyahu intends to extend Israeli control, if not its border, north to the Litani River. He is not about to abandon that goal lightly, even if he is forced to accept that his long-sought war on Iran is a failure.
The talks in Washington between Israel and Lebanon are a farce. No agreement there is possible, because what Israel wants is a permanent presence in Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah.
This Lebanese government would be open to a reasonable agreement with Israel, but those terms are obviously unreasonable. No country, especially not one as small as Lebanon, would simply give up a huge chunk of its territory.
But this Lebanese government wanted to address Hezbollah. They wanted to bring Hezbollah into the Lebanese military, thus disarming them and integrating them into a single, national force. That was never going to be easy, but Israel never stopped attacking Lebanon during the so-called “ceasefire” brokered in late 2024. If they really wanted the Lebanese government to eliminate Hezbollah as an independent fighting force, that was exactly the opposite of what they would have done.
The Lebanese are attending these meetings to help convince Trump to rein Israel in. Israel is doing it to convince Trump that they are willing to cooperate with his effort to end the Iran war. In both cases, the effort is merely a show.
Trump will take the exit from Iran as soon as he can find it, and Israel will find it hard to bring him back in again now that he has seen why all other U.S. presidents didn’t fall for Netanyahu’s “bomb Iran” pitch. But he will have little reason to exert the political influence that would be needed to keep Israel from occupying southern Lebanon permanently. Israel and Iran will also likely continue lobbing missiles at each other, even though Israel’s ability to fight Iran without direct American support is extremely limited.
That’s the best-case scenario for Trump, and it’s not a good one. It is entirely possible that, rather than admit a huge defeat, he will decide to keep fighting Iran to no possible better outcome.
Trump made this bed. He can either lie in it or take one of the less disastrous options to get out of it. Unfortunately for the world, he is not a man prone to making good decisions. .Plitnick is correct a fatwa in shiism if comes it from your marja is considered binding and upon his death is rescinded, apologies. I asked an al khoei who called for an unrelated reason. it’s not like that in sunni practise, can one never safely assume, i thought it would be ok this time.
On Wednesday night, the Senate rejected a pair of resolutions that would have blocked the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel.
Although the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval, which were introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) failed to pass, a record number of Senators backed the effort. 40 Senators backed a resolution would have blocked the sale of $295 million in D9R and D9T Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel and 36 members voted for a resolution that would have stopped a $151.8 million sale of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel.
“The fact that 40 of 47 Democratic Senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high water mark in holding Israel accountable for violating US and international law,” tweeted Center for International Policy Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams.
Sanders has attempted to pass similar resolutions on three other occasions. Last April, just 15 Senators voted for them, while 27 Senators supported them in July.
In a statement released after the vote, Sanders pointed out that 80% of the Democratic caucus backed the measures.
“When we started this effort there were just 11 votes,” said Sanders. “Now, there are 40.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Ahmad Abuznaid, Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), told Mondoweiss that activists have to keep pushing for a full arms embargo.
“The writing is on the wall, and we see politicians reacting to the fact that aid to Israel and AIPAC are toxic,” said Abuznaid. “But we have to dig deeper because there is a distinction. We need to control the narrative. We need to end support for genocide and occupation. That’s the moral, ethical, and legal position.”
In 2018, Canada published a strategic plan – a roadmap – to develop small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) across the country. An SMR is one designed to generate 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity or less, compared to Canada’s existing CANDU power reactors which generate 500 MW or more.
According to the “SMR Roadmap,” the first demonstration SMR was expected to be operating in 2026. In this milestone year, our report analyzes the financial and developmental status of the 10 SMR designs with some kind of presence in Canada.
On this page are the report and the recording of the report launch webinar on March 18, 2026.
The report authors are Susan O’Donnell, PhD, St. Thomas University and M.V. Ramana, PhD, University of British Columbia. The report was published by the CEDAR research project at St. Thomas University.
Report launch webinar
The SMRs report was launched during a webinar on March 18, 2026, An assessment of SMR projects: the case of Canada. The speakers were the report authors, Susan O’Donnell, PhD, St. Thomas University and M.V. Ramana, PhD, University of British Columbia with moderator Madis Vasser, PhD, Senior expert on SMRs for Friends of the Earth Estonia.
A fragile pause in the widening Middle East war is colliding with escalating rhetoric, conflicting claims, and continued violence on the ground.
In a flurry of social media posts, President Donald Trump declared that the United States had directly intervened to halt further Israeli strikes on Lebanon.
“Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer,” Trump wrote. “They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!! Thank you!”
The statement, issued amid a rapidly evolving ceasefire framework, suggests a level of U.S. leverage over Israeli military operations that officials and analysts have long debated—but rarely seen asserted so bluntly.
Yet even as Trump claimed de-escalation, events on the ground told a more complicated story.
Reports out of southern Lebanon indicated continued violence, including a drone strike that killed at least one person despite the announced ceasefire. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled no intention of ending the broader campaign.
“Israel is “not done yet” with Hezbollah, Netanyahu said, describing a strategy of pursuing both military pressure and political negotiation simultaneously.”
Hormuz Reopens—But Under Pressure
At the same time, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz—one of the world’s most critical oil chokepoints—would be reopened to commercial shipping during the ceasefire period.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated:
“Passage for all commercial vessels through [the] Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire.”
Trump quickly echoed the announcement, declaring the strait: “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE.”
But the reopening came with contradictions. While signaling relief for global markets—oil prices reportedly dropped sharply following the news—the U.S. simultaneously maintained its military pressure.
“The naval blockade will remain in full force and effect … until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100% complete,” Trump said.
In other words: open waters, closed fists.
Conflicting Claims, No Clear Deal
Despite Trump’s sweeping declarations—including that Iran had agreed to “never close the Strait of Hormuz again”—there was no immediate confirmation from Iranian officials.
On the ground and in diplomatic channels, uncertainty remains the defining feature of this moment.
Negotiations are reportedly ongoing, with proposals for a temporary framework lasting several weeks. But key issues—including sanctions relief, uranium enrichment, and regional military activity—remain unresolved.
Even Trump appeared to acknowledge the disconnect, insisting:
“This deal is not tied, in any way, to Lebanon.”
That separation may be more rhetorical than real.
Ceasefire or Illusion?
The current 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon has already shown signs of strain. While some displaced civilians have begun returning home, analysts warn that the underlying dynamics of the conflict remain unchanged.
“Hezbollah will keep its ‘finger on the trigger’” if violations continue, one warning noted, underscoring how quickly the situation could unravel.
And with more than a million people displaced and thousands killed in recent weeks, the pause—however real or temporary—offers only limited relief.
A War Paused, Not Ended
What emerges from the past 24 hours is not clarity, but contradiction.
A ceasefire declared—and violated. A waterway reopened—under blockade. A bombing campaign “prohibited”—while leaders vow to continue fighting.
The language of peace is here. The reality of war has not left.
And as global powers posture over oil routes, naval blockades, and regional leverage, the question is no longer whether the conflict can pause—
—but whether anyone is actually in control of it.
As the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran spills across the region, a sudden ceasefire in Lebanon is being framed as a breakthrough—but the reality is far more unstable. Iran’s influence appears to have forced a pause on one front, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and easing global economic panic, while Israel signals it has no intention of ending its campaign against Hezbollah. At the center of it all is Donald Trump, claiming control over both escalation and restraint—yet presiding over a situation where bombs still fall and tensions continue to rise.
In this live discussion from Breakthrough News, analysts break down what’s really driving the ceasefire, how battlefield dynamics forced political shifts, and whether Washington is actually capable—or willing—to restrain Israel. Is this the beginning of de-escalation, or just a temporary pause before a wider war?
“Iranian Jews are viewed by Iranians as indigenous,” he said. “They’re the original Bundists,” a nod to the Jewish political movement that “stood not just for socialism, but for do’ikayt—Yiddish for ‘hereness,’” the concept that a Jew’s homeland was in whatever nation they resided in (New York Times, 4/6/26).
An Israeli missile attack destroyed a Tehran synagogue during the Jewish Passover holiday (Religion News Service, 4/9/26). The Israeli military “expressed regret over what it called ‘collateral damage’ to a synagogue in Tehran caused by an overnight strike,” which was “targeting a senior Iranian commander,” said the Middle East Eye (4/7/26).
Photos of the wreckage at the Rafi-Nia Synagogue have accompanied many of these pieces. The Council on American-Islamic relations condemned the attack in a statement (4/7/26):
We strongly condemn the Israeli regime’s bombing of a synagogue in Tehran, which was the predictable end result of the indiscriminate US/Israel bombing campaign against mosques, hospitals, schools, apartments and other civilian sites across Iran.
The group challenged “various Israel advocacy groups and politicians that support this war in the name of protecting Israel to condemn Israel’s synagogue attack.”
Buried at best
The story of the attack on the Tehran synagogue was, at best, buried in the US corporate media. CNN posted a brief video (4/7/26) about the bombing but had no online article about it. The New York Times (4/7/26, 4/7/26) mentioned the attack, but as background in broader stories about the US/Israel war on Iran.
A search for “Rafi-Nia” on the Washington Post website yields no results. Ditto for the AP, although the news service did post a video to YouTube (4/7/26). Al Jazeera’s coverage (4/7/26) of the attack was a mélange of AP and AFP copy. CBS News (4/7/26) also used a few paragraphs of AFP copy to report on the attack, although it was buried in the middle of a general timeline about the war.
The Wall Street Journal (4/7/26) had the story, but led with Israel’s contrition over the destruction; that’s not a journalistic construction we see in US news coverage when it comes to the Israeli bombings of other civilian structures in Iran, Gaza or Lebanon. When Israel destroys a hospital, apartment building, encampment, etc., the stories don’t lead with official regret, but rather include Israeli claims that the civilian facilities were actually legitimate military targets. The Journal’s lead provided the government with public relations cover over the sensitive issue of destroying a Jewish house of worship.
Newsweek (4/8/26), once a bigger player in the US media landscape, led with condemnation of the attack from Jewish Iranian leaders, who declared “their unwavering solidarity with Iran in defending the homeland.”
Jewish presence in Iran
Underplaying the story obscures not only the wantonness of Israel’s aggression, but the actual nature of Iranian society, which is portrayed as obsessed with wiping Jews off the map (ADL, 6/25/25). “Iranian foreign policy freely mixes anti-Israel furies with anti-Jewish ones,” wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/13/26), a pro-war cheerleader (2/22/26, 3/24/26).
In fact, while Israel is obviously the center of Mideastern Jewish life, the Iranian Jewish population dwarfs those elsewhere in the Middle East. “Estimates range from 9,000 to 20,000 Jews currently living in Iran,” according to the Forward (6/18/25).
Wrote the Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Jewish presence in Iran is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, with roots that historians trace back more than two millennia.”
Yes, Iran is a theocracy; the government is no model for an open society. But there is a Jewish member of Iran’s parliament, who even went on record this year openly criticizing Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s handling of popular unrest (i24, 1/29/26).
‘Well-protected second-class citizens’
US media have covered the Jews of Iran before. USA Today (8/29/18) did a story in 2018, reporting from Tehran. Former Forward reporter Larry Cohler-Esses (8/12/15, 8/12/15, 8/18/15, 8/27/15) reported extensively and critically on Iranian Jews, indicating that the country was at least open to letting a reporter for a Jewish publication do their job.
Cohler-Esses told FAIR that Jews in Iran are “well-protected second-class citizens.” In fact, when he read about the attack, he “wondered if it was the synagogue I spent Shabbat in, but it wasn’t,” because there are more than a dozen active synagogues in Tehran—a reflection of the size of the Jewish community there.
Recalling his 2015 reporting trip, Cohler-Esses said that on Shabbat, Jews would spill out of their synagogues and mingle in the street after services, a sight he didn’t often see in many places in Europe. In one instance, after he left a synagogue service, one of the congregants ran after him through a street teeming with people, wearing a kippah and a tallit (traditional religious attire), and “no one batted an eye.”
The Jews of Iran do suffer discrimination, because Muslims are favored in the legal code over all non-Muslims, Cohler-Esses said. He noted that the Jewish population of Iran has shrunk significantly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“Iranian Jews are viewed by Iranians as indigenous,” he said. “They’re the original Bundists,” a nod to the Jewish political movement that “stood not just for socialism, but for do’ikayt—Yiddish for ‘hereness,’” the concept that a Jew’s homeland was in whatever nation they resided in (New York Times, 4/6/26).
Cohler-Esses was hopeful that coverage of the synagogue’s destruction in the Jewish and Israeli press (JTA, 4/7/26; Jerusalem Post, 4/7/26) had the “potential to make Jewish readers of Jewish media outlets go, ‘Oh, they have synagogues there.’” But with the underplaying of the story in US media, it’s a missed teachable moment for news consumers generally.
More robust press coverage of the attack could have taught Americans that the Jews of Iran do have something to fear: Israel.
The push for nuclear power has intensified. It’s as if the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power disasters never occurred —and the growing and widespread use of safe, clean, green energy, led by solar and wind, is not happening.
In this Enviro Close-Up, three experts on nuclear issues, each for many decades, analyze what’s going on. Kevin Kamps, executive director of the organization Don’t Waste Michigan, says the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has “from the beginning…not been about nuclear safety and nuclear security, the environment, public health, the list goes on…but it’s never been worse than it is now.”
Nuclear regulations are in freefall. It’s the “nuclear push on steroids,” says Kamps. Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry vice president who broke from the industry and for decades has been a leading nuclear whistleblower, says: “I’ve always said the NRC is a lapdog, but under Trump the lapdog has had its vocal cords cut and its teeth ground down.”
Attorney Terry Lodge, who has been in court battle after court battle in challenges to nuclear power, describes it as “the most dangerous, inherently technologically difficult way of boiling water…and it continues to be that.” Further, the NRC and the agency it replaced, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, have been “the absolute epitome, textbook examples of captive regulatory agencies….owned and dominated politically by the industry that they supposedly regulate.” Also, it’s “the most expensive” energy technology, and in financing it “we’re siphoning off money” from energy forms that are to create “faster…and cheaper, to feed a nuclear industry.” And the intensified nuclear push in the U.S. is going on elsewhere in the world.
Reading messages from President Donald J. Trump is an exercise in taunting masochism. It is one inflicted on commentators and the press corps the world over, and they are not better for it. The latest – and here, the latest will become distant and dated shortly – is that the Strait of Hormuz, predictably controlled by Iran with devastating global effect, was to be reopened for commercial traffic under certain conditions. Trump thought this undertaking absolute and indefinite, a rich suggestion coming from a man with such a fair-weather mind. “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!”
This proved typically premature: within a matter of hours, Iran’s decision was, if not reversed then heavily qualified. (The Strait technically always remained open to vessels favoured by the Iranian authorities.) On April 17, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Eshmaeil Baghaei affirmed two key principles in Tehran’s policies: Iran retained the right to control traffic moving through the Strait, and that it would not surrender enriched uranium, an issue “sacred to us as Iranian soil” and non-negotiable. The latter was certainly aimed at Trump’s dotty claim that Washington and Tehran would jointly deploy “lots of excavators” to remove fissile material (“nuclear dust”) and shift it to the US. On CBS News, the president claimed that “Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to get it.” This all suggested much confusion on the part of the Americans.
Iran’s moves on the Strait were always going to be governed by other impediments. There was the demand, for instance, that Washington release $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets. This was rejected. Trump has also insisted on a continued blockade of Iranian ports, which currently employs over 12 warships and something in the order of 100 fighter and surveillance aircraft. As he told Fox News, “we’re not going to let Iran make money on selling oil to people that they like and not people that they don’t like.” Maritime intelligence on this, however, suggests that the blockade has not been quite as effective as heralded by US officials. Martin Kelly, Head of Advisory at EOS Risk Group can point to the successful passage of sanctioned tankers and vessels of the shadow fleet such as LPG carriers Crave, Raine and NV Aquamarine.
On April 18, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy issued a statement that “no vessel is to move from its anchorage in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Oman.” A number of vessels had successfully managed to pass through under supervision since Friday night, but the Strait would be closed till the US ceased blocking Iran’s ports. “Approaching the Strait of Hormuz will be considered cooperation with the enemy, and the offending vessel will be targeted.”
The IRGC have been true to their word. According to UK Maritime Trade Operations, the Master of a tanker reported “being approached by 2 IRGC gun boats” without a VHF challenge, “then fired upon the tanker.” No injuries were sustained. Another report documented “a Container Ship being hit by an unknown projectile which caused damage to some of the containers.” There were no fires or environmental impacts reported. A third incident involved the sighting by the Master of a cruise ship of “a splash in close proximity to the vessel” regarded as suspicious.
The ongoing US blockade, argues Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), was also a violation of the ceasefire agreement between Tehran and Washington. As Tehran revealed in a statement, passage through the Strait would only take place through a “designated route” and only with Iranian authorisation. The opening or closing of the Strait, along with pertinent regulations governing it would be “determined by the field, not by social media.” The Council has also revealed that it is reviewing new proposals from the US that may form the basis of future talks.
Trump has also huffed that the latest developments in the Strait were “not tied, in any way, to Lebanon,” a barely plausible contention. Iran has insisted that any lasting ceasefire manoeuvres would have to include a cessation of Israeli strikes on Lebanon and Hezbollah positions, even if negotiations between the US and Lebanon did not involve any mention of the Shia militia. The US president duly went on Truth Social to bluster that Israel “will not be bombing Lebanon any longer.” They were “PROHIBITED from doing so by the USA. Enough is enough.”
The somewhat devalued currency of a ceasefire did not, as it was subsequently confirmed, prohibit Israel from resorting to its right to self-defence, a right so latitudinous as to be boundless. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that things were far from concluded. “I will say honestly, we have not yet finished the job.” Remaining rocket and drone threats needed neutralisation. Hezbollah would have to be dismantled through a “sustained effort, patience, and careful navigation in the diplomatic arena.”
There was also much room for lashing reluctant allies. “Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over,” declared Trump, “I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help.” With the usual flourish of petulance, he dismissed the call: Stay away unless you want to load up with oil. “They are useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!” Increasingly, the US imperium is resembling that tiger, incapable of stalking and capturing its far more resourceful prey.
In a vote that cuts straight through the carefully managed language of Washington diplomacy, seven Senate Democrats broke with much of their party and joined Republicans to block an effort that would have halted U.S. arms sales to Israel. The resolution—introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders—failed 40–59, ensuring the continued transfer of military equipment as the region slides deeper into war.
Seven Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, voted for the resolution. Which included Senators Richard Blumenthal, Chris Coons, Catherine Cortez Masto, John Fetterman, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jacky Rosen, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—voted to keep the pipeline open. Their decision ensured the failure of a measure that, while unlikely to pass, represented one of the clearest attempts yet to challenge U.S. complicity in Israel’s ongoing military campaigns.
At stake was not just a shipment of military bulldozers or thousands of 1,000-pound bombs. It was a question that has been building for months: whether the United States will continue to bankroll and materially support an expanding conflict that now stretches from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran.
The answer, at least for now, is yes.
The backlash was immediate—and public.
With Bernie Sanders making the statement: “When we started this effort there were just 11 votes. Now, there are 40,” Bernie Sanders said in a statement.
“That shift reflects where the American people are. Americans, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents, want to see our tax money invested in improving lives here at home — not used to kill innocent women and children in the Middle East and put American troops in harm’s way as part of Netanyahu’s illegal wars of expansion.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
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