US strikes Iran: What you need to know

President Donald Trump, in between blockading the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Strait, and curtail the country’s nuclear program.

So far, he’s been unsuccessful — and during his first term in office, he tore up the US’s previous nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015.

President Donald Trump’s fast pivot on Iran — from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to a benign return to negotiations — has a whipsawed world scratching their heads. What was he up to?

One possibility: Many Western analysts believe that Russian nuclear doctrine includes a concept called “escalate to de-escalate,” in which Moscow would use a tactical nuclear weapon early in a conflict to shock a stronger adversary into backing down from a conventional conflict. (The Russians deny this strategy exists.)

How closely does President Donald Trump’s war in Iran compare with America’s last conflict in the Middle East?

Both the Iran war and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have paired conventional American military dominance with shifting, ambiguous objectives. And both feature an American president desperate to declare the mission accomplished.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Donald Trump warned in a Truth Social message on Tuesday, the most extreme threat the president has issued yet in nearly 40 days of war with Iran.

The latest message was a follow-up to post over the weekend in which he instructed Iran to “open the Fuckin’ Strait” of Hormuz by Tuesday night or he would make good on earlier threats to destroy all bridges and power plants across the country. (Notably, it’s been less than a week since Trump claimed not to care about the Strait and promised it would open on its own once the war ended in a couple of weeks.)

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s war with Iran has pushed US gas prices to their highest point in more than three years.

For the past 20 years, there’s basically been one guy in Republican politics who was known as the Iran war guy.

For years, even decades, John Bolton has argued for regime change in Iran, and for America to take a proactive military role to make that happen. Bolton served as the US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush and, later, as national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first term.

Since the war with Iran began, the White House has been posting videos featuring the US military bombing targets in Iran, interspersed with clips from video games, sports highlights, and Hollywood movies. The White House says the videos are meant to highlight the success of the US military.

Some of the captions read like this: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” Others list goals for “Operation Epic Fury,” including: “Destroy Iran’s missile arsenal,” “Destroy their navy,” and “Ensure they NEVER get a nuclear weapon.” And ending with the words, “Locked in.”

One way or another, President Donald Trump would like you to believe the war in Iran is wrapping up soon.

Trump said this week that he is “very intent on making a deal” and that his team has had good talks with unnamed Iranian leaders, who also “want to make a deal badly.” He has insisted that the war has already been won and that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.” Wall Street, rattled by the war’s disruptions, seems to love the new happy talk about negotiations.

After more than three weeks of war in Iran, the US has destroyed major components of Iran’s military, including ballistic missile sites and much of the country’s navy.

One advantage Iran retains, though, is the Shahed-136. The Shahed, a one-way, single-use attack drone, is small, inexpensive, and highly accurate. Iranian drone attacks have led to the death of six US service members, damaged oil and natural gas facilities in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and are quickly depleting America’s interceptor stockpiles.

It’s okay; you can laugh. There is indeed something farcical, albeit grim, about the purported negotiations between the US and Iran.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump claimed the two countries had made “very good” progress toward ending the war. Hours later, Iran’s foreign ministry denied that any such conversations had ever occurred. Trump then clarified that his envoys had talked to other Iranian officials but did not name any names. (The word “clarify” is admittedly doing lots of work in that sentence.)

The Trump administration’s rhetoric on the war in Iran tends to be heavy on words like “lethality” and “obliteration,” so it was notable that the president seemed almost apologetic on Wednesday, when discussing an Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field, which prompted Iranian retaliation against natural gas facilities in Qatar and sent global energy prices skyrocketing.

“The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. (Israeli officials say the US was informed ahead of time.) He added that “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field” unless Iran launched more attacks against Qatar.

The war in Iran will enter its fourth week on Saturday, with no real end in sight. The Pentagon is reportedly requesting $200 billion to fund the ongoing military operation, even as it unsettles the world economy. Meanwhile, Iranians say that airstrikes are growing louder and more intense as the US and Israel pursue high-ranking officials, infrastructure and other targets in densely populated cities.

Today, I want to focus on that latter perspective — the view from inside Iran. The country has been under a near-total internet blackout since attacks started, making it difficult for Western media to fully capture the mood inside the country or the scale of the damage.

The Trump administration’s end goals for the war in Iran, never particularly well-defined to begin with, appear to be narrowing.

While President Donald Trump once spoke ambitiously about regime change and insisted that he should play a role in selecting Iran’s next supreme leader — similar to Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela — the White House now says the war will continue until Iran can “no longer pose a military threat.”

There are already clear losers from the war in Iran: The battered Iranian regime itself, the civilians under heavy bombardment in Iran and Lebanon, the Gulf countries’ whose reputation as a stable safe haven have been shattered by missiles and drones, the people everywhere — but particularly in the world’s poorest countries — impacted by high fuel and fertilizer prices and disrupted supply chains.

For the moment, it’s also not going very well for the Trump administration, which, despite some early US military success, finds itself stuck in an unpopular and costly war without a clear exit strategy. What the war will mean for others, from Israel to Iranian society, is still too early to say.

There is a photograph on Instagram of a girl who shares almost my exact name — Roya Rastegar. She is 33 years old. She is from Isfahan, my grandfather’s city. Security forces raided her home in January and arrested her. No one has heard from her since.

Every morning, I wake up too early and reach for my phone to check Signal and Telegram. It has been just over two weeks since bombs began falling on Iran. To understand what this period has meant to people inside the country, you have to understand what happened in the weeks before, and the 47 years before that. The American and Israeli strikes in Iran began as Iranians inside and outside the country were still reeling from the largest ever uprising against the Islamic Republic’s theocratic dictatorship — and from the massacres the regime carried out to crush it on January 8 and 9. Conservative estimates put the death toll from those two days at around 30,000.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the recent airstrike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, an elementary school for girls in the Iranian city of Minab. The investigation confirmed what all public evidence had pointed to: that an American Tomahawk missile destroyed the school, killing roughly 175 people per Iranian estimates — most of whom were children.

Alongside the article, the Times posted a verified video from the school in the hours following the bombing. You can see, on the remains of the building’s outer wall, a light blue mural depicting a child playing with a butterfly. You can hear, in the video’s audio, the inhuman wails of someone who had just lost a child dear to them.

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In the less than two weeks since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the war has already killed over 1,900 people across 11 countries and displaced up to 3.2 million people. It has destroyed schools, hospitals, and critical infrastructure across the region, and threatens to plunge countries near and far — many of which rely on now-disrupted shipping routes for fuel and fertilizer — into economic and humanitarian crises.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: A US strike killed nearly 200 children on the first day of the Iran war, according to the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the deaths.

President Donald Trump continues to give mixed messages about the war in Iran. But what is clear is the impact that the conflict is already having on the US and global economies.

Oil prices, which briefly crested $100 a barrel on Monday, are higher than we’ve seen in years. People are already seeing the impact at the pump, with average gas prices above $3.50 per gallon. But the impact doesn’t stop there: It also means that the price of, well, everything, can go up.

Last week, President Donald Trump spoke with Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish leaders, reportedly offering “extensive US aircover” and logistical support for armed groups to cross the border from Iraq into Iran to push out regime forces. As one of these leaders put it, his message was that “Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran.”

Turning to Kurdish ethnic minorities, who are spread across multiple countries in the region, to be America’s frontline fighters is a formula that’s worked before, most recently in the fight against the Islamic State. But the plan seemed to fizzle out this time, and over the weekend, Trump changed his tune, telling reporters, “We don’t want to make the war any more complex than it already is. I have ruled that out, I don’t want the Kurds going in.”

The landmark speech given by French President Emmanuel Macron last week — with a nuclear submarine serving as a dramatic backdrop — announcing the expansion of France’s nuclear arsenal, didn’t get that much attention in the United States. That’s understandable: There’s a lot going on in the news, not least of which is the ongoing war in Iran.

But while not directly related — the Macron speech had been planned for some time — the two stories are examples of the same phenomenon: In today’s world, thanks in large part to the policies of Donald Trump’s administration, nuclear weapons look more attractive than ever. This holds true for America’s allies as well as its adversaries.

The United States has been chasing the rhetorical goal of energy independence — the ability to produce enough domestic energy to be essentially free of dependence on imports — since the energy crisis of the 1970s exposed the country’s reliance on Mideast oil. President Donald Trump has put his own spin on the idea, pushing beyond independence to “energy dominance.”

If you look just at oil extraction, the US seems to have succeeded. Thanks to the fracking revolution, it is now the largest oil producer in the world, and it exports more petroleum and other liquid fuels than it imports. The US is, in fact, a dominant player in the global energy market.

This is not how it was supposed to go for Iran.

For years, the Islamic Republic worked to build up a network of allies throughout the Middle East, widely known as the “axis of resistance,” which, in the event Iran itself were attacked, could rain down destruction on Israel, the US military, and American allies in the region.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is already starting to cost Americans money.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The US is four days into a war with Iran — and the Trump administration still can’t consistently explain why it’s doing it, or what it hopes to accomplish.