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President Donald Trump's war on Iran satisfied no one, but two foreign policy experts say its failure may provide one enduring silver lining.Hawks who cheered the initial strikes are furious he stopped short of toppling the regime, doves are furious he started a war at all and, by nearly every measure, the campaign was a failure, wrote former Iran envoy Robert Malley and historian Stephen Wertheim in a new op-ed for the New York Times."Donald Trump has done the impossible once more," Malley and Wertheim wrote. "He went where his predecessors never dared, joining with Israel in a bid to overthrow or incapacitate the regime in Tehran. Having achieved neither, he appears to have accepted worse terms than he could have obtained through diplomacy. His war was a political albatross as well, garnering, at the start, less support from the public than any other major conflict in modern U.S. history.""Everyone is worse off and no one is happy: a fitting, extraordinary finish to a Trumpian war," they added.Missile defenses and aircraft damaged more than 20 U.S. bases, the Strait of Hormuz remains under Tehran's control and they have a nuclear program that, despite the bombing, can still only be resolved through negotiation. Iran, if anything, emerged emboldened, and yet Malley and Wertheim argued those failures might be the most useful thing to come out of the war."Those opposed to yesterday’s Iran war have a stake in preventing tomorrow’s, to break the entanglement of the United States in conflicts it regrets more quickly and more intensely the more they keep happening," the duo wrote. "This mission is hardly impossible. Military defeat — which is what the United States just suffered — has repeatedly compelled Americans to re-evaluate the severity of a threat they could not eliminate."The experience was painful enough that it may be hard to repeat, they argued. Just as Vietnam taught Americans that the "dominoes" wouldn't fall and Afghanistan taught them to separate the Taliban from Al Qaeda, a humiliating defeat — not persuasion or argument — has historically been what forces Washington to reconsider whether a threat was ever as dire as advertised.A clean, low-cost victory might have only emboldened the next intervention. It's precisely because this war went so badly — drained munitions needed elsewhere, alienated Gulf allies and fractured the U.S.-Israel relationship to the point of public rebuke — that hawks now have a weaker case for trying again.Trump, the analysis suggests, may end up as an accidental peacemaker, not because he sought restraint, but because he tested the limits of force against Iran and got burned. "Iran, by all rights, should not be one of America’s top problems," Malley and Wertheim concluded. "One day, one way or another, it will cease to be. The question is when, and at how terrible a price."

Written in 1947, Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s account of the horrors of the atomic bomb attack will be published in August and is being made into a filmThe memoir of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima is to be published for the first time this summer after its discovery in a US archive.The 230-page memoir was written almost 80 years ago by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the city’s destruction after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. He will now be portrayed in a feature film by Takehiro Hira, whose acclaimed roles include the detective in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri/Haji. Pre-production begins in November, ahead of the shoot in February 2027. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump appeared angered by a reporter's suggestion on Monday that his negotiation tactics with Iran may be giving the regime leverage over him. Trump held a press gaggle in the Oval Office after he signed an executive order to support America's quantum computing industry. While he was taking questions, one reporter asked Trump if he was willing to cause economic mayhem by striking Iran again, which Trump said was an option that he's considering. The back-and-forth escalated from there. "War with Iran could cause worldwide depression, as you noted, Mr. President," the reporter began. "Are you willing to risk economic catastrophe and strike Iran again?""Well, not the way I'm doing it. It won't cause depression," Trump replied. "Nuclear weapon supersedes depression. Depression is real bad. Nuclear weapons will cause depression."The reporter then asked if Trump's willingness to cause economic harm to Americans to continue fighting Iran gives the regime leverage over the Trump administration. Trump scoffed at the suggestion. "Their Navy is gone. Their Air Force is gone. Their leaders are all dead. Their country is a mess. Their economy is shot," Trump began, repeating his claims from the weekend that recent reporting from The New York Times is "all wrong" about the state of Iran. "The reason the news is doing so badly, or, put it another way, the reason why I won in a landslide even though I got 92% negative press is that nobody believes the press anymore, and they have to start believing," Trump said. "The Times and everybody else, they're grasping for straws."Trump then claimed that the U.S. economy is doing well and continues to "set records" in performance. That's despite the most recent inflation report showing that inflation hit its highest point since the COVID-19 pandemic last month. "So, when you ask a question like that," Trump said to the reporter, "it's so stupid."

A former GOP operative argued President Donald Trump "is drowning in his own failure" in a video on Monday.Anti-Trump conservative Steve Schmidt described how Trump's failed Iran war, struggling economy and blunders around the algae-ridden reflecting pool have further damaged the United States. He suggested the next move would be the Trump cabinet meeting inside the Situation Room, and how future generations would view this "as a portal into understanding the insanity of this moment.""The economy is wrecked. The nation dishonored, the people divided," Schmidt said. "Ghislaine Maxwell sitting in minimum security. All of it a function of our national raft ride down the sewer river of Donald Trump's creation." "It may not seem like we are all of us, on a boat, together, upon that fetid pool. But trust me. We are," Schmidt said.

JD Vance's path to the presidency may run through Tehran, and not in a way that helps him. That is the striking implication of a new analysis by Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, who argues in The Atlantic that the vice president's political future now depends heavily on whether hardline Iranian officials decide to play along with Donald Trump's latest gamble.Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lays out how Trump handed Vance responsibility for an enormous and unlikely task: not merely striking a new nuclear deal, but engineering a wholesale transformation of US-Iran relations after a war that Sadjadpour says ended in humiliation for the president. The memorandum that paused the fighting, he writes, is so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran drafted it, with 13 of its 14 provisions amounting to boilerplate or favoring Iran outright.That is the project Vance has been told to deliver, and Trump has been remarkably candid about who absorbs the blame if it fails. "If it works out, I'm going to take the credit," the president said, according to the piece. "If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming J.D."The expert's sharpest observation is about where that leaves the vice president. Vance's prospects, Sadjadpour writes, "may rest as much on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers as on Republican-primary voters." In other words, a man eyeing the 2028 nomination has tied his standing to the cooperation of the very military and clerical figures who built their careers on resistance to the United States.Vance is reportedly pinning hopes on Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC general and current speaker of Iran's Parliament, with whom he spent more than 20 hours in Islamabad and supposedly developed a rapport. Sadjadpour is skeptical that private warmth means anything. He notes that Qalibaf's public appearances, where he mocks America, praises Hezbollah, threatens Israel, and celebrates partnership with China, are a far more reliable guide to Tehran's intentions than any backroom assurances.The broader picture Sadjadpour paints is of an Iranian regime that thrives on isolation and treats sabotaging American presidents as a point of pride. He traces that pattern back to the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis that helped sink Jimmy Carter's reelection. This time, he suggests, Tehran stands to claim an unusually rich prize. The Islamic Republic, he writes, may get "a two-for-one": the presidency of Donald Trump, and the presidential ambitions of JD Vance.If Sadjadpour is right, Vance has accepted a mission whose success is largely outside his control, with a boss already rehearsing the line that will pin any failure on him. The clerics and generals in Tehran, not the voters in Iowa, may end up deciding how that story turns out.

Authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat is predicting that President Donald Trump's praise for China's Xi Jinping will end the same way his Iran standoff did: with the president backing down to a strongman he admires.Her forecast came in response to an Axios clip in which Trump gushed about the Chinese leader on "The Axios Show." Asked about Xi, Trump described him in the language of physical admiration he often reserves for fellow autocrats, calling him tall, "6-foot-2," and praising his "great stature," "great confidence," and intelligence. For Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism and author who has spent years studying how leaders flatter and accommodate dictators, the fawning was a tell rather than a throwaway line."He will cave to Xi in the end just as he capitulated to Iran," Ben-Ghiat wrote, situating the comment within what she sees as a consistent pattern across Trump's foreign policy. She tied the prediction to a larger argument about whose interests the president ultimately serves, describing Iran as "an ally of China" and noting that Trump "has consistently acted to help Russia," which she also called a Chinese ally. Her conclusion was blunt: in her telling, Trump "is in office to make the strongmen leaders he admires do well."The framing reflects the through-line of Ben-Ghiat's broader work, which holds that authoritarian-minded leaders are drawn to one another and that public displays of admiration often precede real concessions. Her reference to Iran points to the recent memorandum of understanding that ended Trump's war, a deal numerous analysts described as lopsided in Tehran's favor. By her logic, the same dynamic of tough talk giving way to accommodation is poised to repeat itself with Beijing.Ben-Ghiat's argument lands at a moment when Trump's critics are increasingly scrutinizing the gap between his strongman rhetoric and his actual outcomes. Her point is that the admiring description of Xi's height and confidence is not idle praise but a window into how the president approaches the world's most powerful authoritarians, and that the flattery, in her view, tends to be a preview of where the policy is heading.

Rob Jetten acknowledges grief and pain of Moluccan families as crowdfunded monument unveiled in RotterdamThe Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, has formally apologised for the “heartless” mistreatment of thousands of Moluccan soldiers who fought for the Dutch colonial army during Indonesia’s struggle for independence.About 12,500 people – men who had served in the Royal Dutch East Indies and their families – came from a group of Indonesian islands to the Netherlands in 1951, many having been given no choice. They thought it would be a temporary evacuation after Indonesia had won independence. Continue reading...

Donald Trump's habit of punishing Republicans who cross him may have just cost him the political cover he needs to sell his Iran deal, according to political analyst Sabrina Haake, who argues the president's domestic vendettas are actively undermining him abroad.In her latest newsletter, Haake makes the case that Trump's "personal thirst for revenge at home is hurting him on Iran." Her logic is straightforward: the lawmakers Trump targeted in primaries, several of whom lost as a result, no longer owe him anything and are now free to attack his foreign policy without fear of consequences. As she puts it, they "have zero Fs left to give."The result has been a chorus of Republican criticism aimed at the memorandum of understanding that ended Trump's war with Iran. Haake points to Sen. Bill Cassidy, who called the agreement "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades" and warned that Iran learned "threatening the Strait of Hormuz works." Sen. Thom Tillis flagged the war's $100 billion price tag, while Rep. Thomas Massie noted that figure is five times what Congress spends annually on roads and bridges. Even former Vice President Mike Pence said the deal "smacks of appeasement," and Sen. Ted Cruz blasted a reconstruction fund he described as handing "billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics."Haake's central argument is that this is a self-inflicted wound. Trump alienated the very voices he would now need to defend the agreement, and he is reportedly planning to skip the congressional review required under the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, a move that members of both parties have urged him not to make. Having burned those bridges, she contends, he is left without allies to make his case.The analyst is also sharply critical of the deal's substance, which she says bears no resemblance to the "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" Trump demanded fifteen weeks ago. Instead of regime change, disarmament, or American control of Iranian oil, Haake writes that the MOU waives sanctions immediately, lets Iran resume oil exports, and steers an estimated $300 billion reconstruction package toward the country, while securing only a temporary 60-day window of toll-free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. She frames it bluntly as the US "effectively paying Iran to stop threatening international shipping."