Over a barrel
Iran, Israel, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Serbia, and Argentina.
Hello,
Here are the five things you need to know today:
IRAN. Trump bends again after a weekend of strikes.
ISRAEL. TURKEY. US allies dredge the past to shape the future.
PAKISTAN. AFGHANISTAN. Fresh attacks upset connectivity plans.
SERBIA. The president says he’ll resign, not step down.
ARGENTINA. Milei sacks his chief aide, but the rot has set in.
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IRAN. Crude but effective
Trump bends again after a weekend of strikes.
Oil futures settled after Axios said peace talks would resume with Iran after a weekend of escalating attacks, including on key US military bases. Donald Trump earlier said “Iran will no longer exist” if the US was forced to “complete the job”.
INTELLIGENCE. The report, an hour before stock futures opened, repeats a familiar script, but even if confected, it signals a genuine reluctance to return to war. Tehran, for whom the current deal is probably as good as it gets, will unlikely push too far, though the weekend’s events suggest it retains comfortable escalation dominance. Arguments in IRGC-linked media that Iran needs a nuclear weapon are overstated. It already has a far more valuable deterrence.
FOR BUSINESS. At the signing of the MoU, Trump said the US had about four weeks’ left of oil. Restored flows since then would have unlikely replaced any further decline in domestic stocks, at a post-1983 low. For Iran, reclosing the Strait remains the ultimate card. And while this leverage will diminish, as alternative pipelines get built, alternative sources come online, and electric vehicles replace demand, the timescale for doing so will be beyond Trump’s term.
ISRAEL. TURKEY. Two genocides of the same coin
US allies dredge the past to shape the future.
Turkey slammed Israel's "political" move to recognise the 1915 Armenian genocide as Tayyip Erdogan said a "genocidal" Zionism threatened Turkey's very survival. Benjamin Netanyahu said he had drawn Turkey’s rhetoric to the US’s attention.
INTELLIGENCE. The war of words is primarily about alliance management. Israel