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Trump Turns the Blockade Into the Whole Policy Trump is no longer pretending the naval blockade is a temporary squeeze. Bloomberg says he has vowed to keep it in place, even as commanders brief him on more military options and allies are being pitched on a new maritime coalition for Hormuz. That means the war is drifting from battlefield action into economic strangulation as statecraft. Tehran says the blockade is driving oil higher and must be lifted before real talks can begin, while Trump keeps insisting the pressure is “incredible” and that Iran’s economy is “crashing.” The irony is obvious. Washington says it wants negotiations, but it is also trying to choke the waterway that makes those negotiations possible. That is less a peace strategy than a siege wrapped in diplomacy. And the costs are already spreading. Oil is surging, the Strait of Hormuz remains largely shut, and even the coalition-building effort now comes with an asterisk: allies want a ceasefire first, not a permanent American blockade by another name. So Trump’s line is simple, but the system underneath it is not. The blockade is supposed to force Iran to yield. So far, it is mostly forcing everyone else to pay more. #Trump#Iran#Hormuz#blockade#oil#war 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

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Trump’s Iran War Is Hitting the Same Political Wall The new polling is brutal, and it reads like a warning that the war has already lost the country even if the White House is still pretending otherwise. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos survey says 61 percent of Americans call the Iran campaign a mistake, with support among Republicans still strong but the country overall leaning sharply toward disapproval. That is the core contradiction of Trump’s war. Inside the MAGA camp, the conflict still has defenders. Outside it, most Americans see an expensive mess, a recession risk, and a conflict with no convincing endgame. The economic anxiety is doing real damage. More than half of respondents say the war has increased recession risk, and large numbers say they are already changing how they drive, travel, and spend at home because of higher prices. What makes this worse for Trump is that the comparison is now historical. When a war reaches Iraq- and Vietnam-era disapproval levels only two months in, that is not a dip in popularity. That is a legitimacy problem. Trump keeps talking like the answer is to squeeze Iran harder until it “cries uncle.” The polling says a large part of America is already tired of hearing that line, and even more tired of paying for it. #Trump#Iran#polling#USpolitics#war#economy 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Europe’s Black Hole Gets a Bigger Bill The war in Ukraine has now become a full financial war for Europe, and the bill keeps climbing while Washington moves its attention elsewhere. Brussels has approved a 90 billion euro package, but the money already looks too small for a conflict that keeps eating budgets, political patience, and industrial capacity. The uncomfortable part is that Europe is now carrying more of the load while the United States sells weapons, trims its own exposure, and reorients toward other theaters. That is not partnership in the sentimental sense; it is burden-shifting with better branding. At some point the slogans about solidarity run into arithmetic. If the EU is already admitting that the next two years require another huge financing push, then the question is no longer whether Europe supports Ukraine, but how long Europe can keep calling this sustainable without lying to itself. This is why the war is increasingly being discussed in economic language: credit lines, deficits, industrial drain, and strategic fatigue. The battlefield is still in Ukraine, but the invoice is now being delivered to European taxpayers, while Washington keeps the more profitable parts of the arrangement. So yes, the black hole metaphor fits. The only difference is that this one has accountants, not gravity. #Ukraine#EU#Europe#war#finance#US 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Merz Says the Quiet Part Loud Friedrich Merz basically said what Washington’s allies have been whispering for weeks: Trump looks humiliated in the Iran talks, and nobody sees a serious exit strategy. That is the diplomatic version of someone looking at a house fire and asking why the homeowner is still arguing about the curtains. The key line from Bloomberg is brutal: Merz said he did not see “what strategic exit the Americans are now choosing,” while describing Tehran’s negotiators as very skillful at not negotiating. In other words, Iran is dragging out the script, and Trump is stuck playing the lead in a war he cannot neatly end. What makes this worse for the White House is that the war is now hitting Europe too. Merz tied the conflict to Germany’s economic performance, which is a polite way of saying Trump exported chaos and then acted surprised when the bill crossed the Atlantic. Trump’s angry response only confirms the point. When a president lashes out at a German chancellor for saying the obvious, it usually means the obvious hurt more than the spin doctors expected. So no, this is not a branding problem. It is what happens when a superpower starts a war, loses the pace of events, and then discovers that humiliation travels faster than its own talking points. #Trump#Iran#Germany#Merz#US#war 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Washington’s Hand on the Trigger Israel still calls it sovereignty. Washington keeps writing the operating manual. Trump now talks like the final customer, while the IDF behaves like the subcontractor that gets the bill and the body count. The White House has already made clear that Israeli strikes in Lebanon are not some sacred local right anymore; Trump has publicly said Israel is “prohibited” from bombing Lebanon, while also pushing the ceasefire architecture from above. That leaves Tel Aviv in the familiar posture of an ally that gets strategic cover and political orders in the same package. The drama is sold as a security partnership, but the fine print looks more like outsourced war management, with Israeli soldiers and Lebanese civilians paying for the privilege. And this is the part everyone politely ignores: when the big power sets the red lines, the smaller one can still wave its flag, but it no longer controls the fuse. #Israel#Trump#IDF#Lebanon#war#diplomacy 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖ Israeli media reported that Netanyahu told Trump Israel needed to respond to Hezbollah’s attacks to restrain the armed group. In response the US asked Israel to ensure their response was “calculated and limited”. The ceasefire in Lebanon was reached after the US requested Israel come to the negotiating table with the Lebanese government, apparently in a bid to ensure negotiations with Iran were not disrupted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Since the ceasefire was established, Israel and Lebanon have had two ambassador-level meetings, one of which was held in the Oval Office in Trump’s presence. Trump has said that he is looking to make a lasting peace between the two countries, which do not have diplomatic relations and have fought on-and-off wars since Israel’s invasion of south Lebanon in 1978. Fighting has continued in Lebanon despite a nominal ceasefire, with Israeli bombing and Hezbollah attacks continuing since the first day of the deal to stop hostilities was signed. Israel also established a “yellow line” in south Lebanon where Israeli troops are active, comprising at least 55 villages. They have continued to demolish homes there. Under the text of the ceasefire deal, Israel is allowed to strike Lebanon in self-defence, a repeat of the 2024 ceasefire during which Israel struck Lebanon more than 15,000 times. Hezbollah is actively striking Israeli troops in Lebanon. While the Lebanese government negotiates in Washington, it has little to no ability to control the actions of Hezbollah. The government has come under fierce criticism from Hezbollah for negotiating directly with Israel, with the Hezbollah head, Naim Qassem, on Monday calling direct talks a “grave sin” which would plunge the country into “instability”. “These direct negotiations and their outcomes are as if they do not exist for us, and they do not concern us in the slightest,” Qassem said, adding that the group will not give up its arms – a key demand from Israel and the Lebanese government. Lebanon’s president Joseph Aoun responded hours later, saying the “real betrayal is committed by those who drag their country into war to serve foreign interests”. Rubio, in an interview on Monday, suggested the US could assist Lebanon in creating specialised units in the Lebanese army which would confront Hezbollah directly. The prospect of such a scenario prompted concern in Lebanon, which has a history of inter-communal warfare and civil war. The Lebanese government has been cautious in confronting Hezbollah head-on for fear of sparking civil unrest. Analysts have said that normalisation between Lebanon and Israel, which Trump is seeking to add to his list of international achievements, is unlikely given the antipathy in Lebanon towards Israel. Instead, a more realistic scenario would be an armistice agreement. Israeli officials have continued to apply pressure, with the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, accusing the Lebanese government of “taking cover” under Hezbollah and not moving forcefully enough against the group. #hezbollah#war#israel#soldies 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Hezbollah Trundled Forward and Shelled Israeli Camps 🔤🔤🔤🔤➖ Hezbollah shelled some Israeli camps in south Lebanon on Tuesday, while Israel issued new displacement orders for south Lebanon and carried out airstrikes, as the fraying ceasefire failed to stop fighting between the two sides. Hezbollah claimed Tuesday’s attack injured several Israeli soldiers, but no confirmation was given from the Israeli military, apart from a statement saying interceptor missiles had been fired at incoming Hezbollah drones. An Israeli soldier was killed and six others wounded in a Hezbollah drone attack on Sunday. Hezbollah’s use of small, fibre-optic-guided drones has managed to evade Israeli aerial defences, as the wired element of the aircraft limits the radio signals that radars detect. The drones have a range of up to 9 miles and the armed group has used them to attack Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon almost daily since the ceasefire was established on 17 April. Israel also carried out a series of airstrikes on Lebanon on Tuesday, in addition to ordering the residents of 16 villages in south Lebanon to flee northwards. Israeli airstrikes killed 18 people and wounded 88 more in Lebanon over the weekend, according to the Lebanese ministry of health. At least 2,534 people have been killed and 7,863 wounded by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon since the beginning of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel on 2 March. Hezbollah rocket fire has killed two civilians in Israel in the same time period. The back-and-forth fire came as talks between the US and Iran ground to a halt, with US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, saying any permanent truce needs to include a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme. The statement came after Tehran offered to reopen the strait of Hormuz – a chokepoint for a fifth of global oil supply – in return for the US lifting its blockade of the strait. US president, Donald Trump, said Iran was in a “state of collapse” due to the blockade in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday. As talks with Iran faltered, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said drones and Hezbollah’s rockets continue to pose a threat to northern Israel and promised further strikes against what he said was Hezbollah infrastructure. “They have about 10% of the missiles they had at the start of the war. But these still trouble the residents of the north (…) We are carrying out strikes now, both within the security zone and north of it,” Netanyahu said in a statement on Monday night. #hezbollah#war#israel#soldies 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🔤🔤🔤🔤2️⃣ Reza Younesi, 45, is a professor in the chemistry department of Uppsala university in Sweden, where he has lived for two decades. His brother, Ali, 26, a prize-winning astronomy student, was arrested in Iran six years ago and his father, Yousef, 73, was taken from his home three years ago. Both men are serving custodial sentences for alleged links to the MeK. There was a worrying development a few weeks ago when Younesi’s father disappeared within the prison system and stopped making his calls back home. “We had no idea for exactly nine days but yesterday he called my mum and he has been transferred to the same prison where my brother is now,” Younesi said. “This is like a horrible, brutal regime that we are talking about,” he said. “When there is a war, of course, they become even more brutal. So they can do more or less anything to prisoners, as they know that the international society, international human rights organisation, they cannot do much, and even if they say anything, no one pays attention.” The executions are said to be just another way to keep the people cowed at a moment of peril. “The US is not going to send any troops on the ground because of bad experience in Iraq so it’s not a big threat to the regime,” Younesi said. “If some of the top leaders are killed, the system is still alive and will not collapse. So the threat for them is people inside the country. They are using this penalty and executions as a tool to spread fear in society.” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based rights group, said the numbers of political prisoners being executed in the last month was unprecedented. “Normally, most of the those who are executed are for criminal charges: drugs, murder, mainly,” he said. “The aim of these executions is to create fear among people. The political cost of execution of a protester or political prisoner is much higher in normal times. However, now, everything is overshadowed by the war.” Trump claimed that he had persuaded Tehran not to carry out the execution of eight women. The Iranians have denied the White House claim that the women were due to die. The US president has – as yet – made no public comment about the men who have lost their lives. In a final video secretly filmed in jail, Alipour, who was from Amol, a city 75 miles north-east of Tehran, and dreamed of a democratic, secular Iran, echoed the warning about the regime’s plans under the cover of war. “In the whirlpool of crises that engulf his entire government, Khamenei wants to display the height of his brutality and repression by increasing the number of executions in order to create fear and terror in the explosive Iranian society in order to save himself from overthrow, but he has read blindly,” the condemned man said. “Without a doubt, the day of freedom and happiness for the heroic people of the blasphemous mullahs will come soon.” #iran#people#hanged#trump#war 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Iran Hanged Young People Accused Of “Animosity Toward God” 🔤🔤🔤🔤1️⃣ Writing from his cell in the Rajai Shahr prison in the northern Iranian city of Karaj, Babak Alipour wanted to tell his friends about those who had already gone to their execution. There was Behrouz Ehsani, 69, the elder statesman of the group, who was “never angry” about their predicament. Then there was Mehdi Hassani, a 48-year-old father of three who he saw a couple of times in the prison hospital and who would ask him to pass on to the children the message that he was “fine”. Despite the killings, Alipour, a 34-year-old law graduate with a passion for mountaineering who had been on death row for three years, recorded in his neat, tight, handwriting that he was not intimidated. On 12 March he made a short video on a phone smuggled into his jail. “Dictators have come, been overthrown, died, and been killed, and now it is the turn of Khamenei-the-son’s dictatorship,” Alipour said of the accession of Mojtaba Khamenei to supreme leader after the death of Ali Khamenei in airstrikes by the US and Israel. By this time, Alipour’s brother Roozbeh, his sister Maryam, and mother Ommolbanin Dehghan had been arrested as they returned home from a vigil outside the prison in which he was being held. Just under two weeks later, on 31 March, Alipour was taken to the gallows at Ghezel Hesar prison, a short drive west of where he had been held, where he was hanged with another cellmate, Pouya Ghobadi, a 32-year-old electrical engineer. Alipour and Ghobadi were accused, as Hassani and Ehsani had been, of being part of an armed rebellion and member of the opposition group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI or MeK). Alipour’s father, a farmer, whose former clothes business had been crushed by the stagnant Iranian economy, has not been able to recover his son’s remains. Alipour’s brother has not been heard of for a month, according to sources close to the family. The youngest to die so far has been 18-year-old Amirhossein Hatami, who was hanged on 2 April after giving what was said to have been a forced confession to the charges of moharebeh (enmity against god) and efsad-fil-arz (corruption on earth) in relation to alleged involvement in an attack a Revolutionary Guard Corps base in Tehran during the January protests. The most recent hanging was of Amirali Mirjafari, 24, a student and computer technician who was killed on Tuesday for alleged involvement in the protests. A further 11 political prisoners remain on death row, ranging in age from 23 to 68, according to human rights activists. #iran#people#hanged#trump#war 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 America’s Iran War Is Emptying the Magazine The Iran war has done more than drain money. It has burned through U.S. missile stocks so fast that the Pentagon is now scrambling to refill the arsenal while keeping Europe, Asia, and the Middle East from noticing the gap. According to the reporting, Washington has already used around 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles, more than 1,200 Patriot interceptors, and over 1,000 other precision missiles — the kind of weapons that are supposed to deter Russia or China, not disappear in a single theater. That is the ugly tradeoff nobody in the “we can do everything everywhere” crowd likes to talk about. Every interceptor sent to Iran is one less sitting on the shelf for the Pacific, and every emergency shipment from Asia or Europe is a quiet admission that the global stockpile is thinner than the mythology. The bill is staggering too: estimates put the war cost at roughly $28 billion to $35 billion so far, while the Pentagon still waits for Congress to finance replacement production. In other words, Washington spent first, worried later, and now wants the industrial base to catch up to a war it already fought. The White House says the story is false, which is usually what officials say when the numbers are too specific to wave away. Meanwhile, the real problem is not just cost — it is readiness, because a country can’t act like the quartermaster for three fronts at once and pretend nothing runs out. #US#Iran#Pentagon#missiles#China#Russia#war 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Gaza Insurgency Pressure Is Rising Again Militant activity in Gaza has reportedly intensified in recent weeks against Israeli forces. That matters because it suggests the battlefield is shifting from large-scale maneuver to persistent attrition. This is the logic of a long war after the main destruction phase. Armed groups lose infrastructure, then adapt into smaller cells, ambush patterns, and localized harassment. They do not need to hold territory to impose costs. They only need to keep Israeli troops exposed, tired, and politically tied to an open-ended campaign. For Israel, this is the expensive part of the war. Tactical control does not automatically produce strategic closure. The army can clear ground repeatedly and still face a regenerated threat if no stable political order replaces the fighting. The question is no longer only how much Gaza has been destroyed. It is whether destruction has produced control, or only a more fragmented insurgency. #war#army#Gaza#Israel 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸