Category: 2026

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Al Jazeera: Iranians form human chains across bridges, at power plants

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 7, 2026

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At 6:32 this evening, we learned that the horrifying announcement of the morning was, indeed, cover for Trump to declare victory and get out of the crisis he has caused in the Middle East.
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Michael Rios of CNN reported that Iran’s media is claiming it has achieved a great victory, forcing the U.S. to agree in principle to its 10-point plan, which includes the end of sanctions against Iran, the removal of all U.S. combat forces from bases in the region, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. If these terms are correct, they leave the United States significantly worse off than it was before the war and leave Iran significantly stronger.
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Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” was not just a reference to Iran. If he had destroyed Iran in our names, unhampered by the Republican Congress members who have vowed to defend the U.S. Constitution, it would also have been an epitaph for the United States of America.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Joyce Vance: The Law of War

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Erika Solomon @ NY Times: Iran Downing of Plane and Daring U.S. Rescue Leave Both Sides Emboldened

James Eagle: Why Hormuz matters far beyond oil

What unsettles me about this set of charts is not simply the scale of the shock. It is how quickly the world rediscovers its dependencies. We like to talk as if the global economy has become more diversified, more flexible, more resilient. Then one strait tightens, one conflict escalates and the whole system starts reminding us how much still hangs on a few vulnerable routes and a few emergency buffers.

(James Eagle more…)

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 6, 2026

“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”

Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

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Jason Easley: It is Easter Sunday, and the United States has a president who can’t be quoted in front of children.

Dean Blundell: Pope Leo XIV, Urbi et Orbi, Easter Sunday 2026: We cannot continue to be indifferent! And we cannot resign ourselves to evil!

“Let those who have weapons lay them down,” Pope Leo XIV declared to the world. “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace. Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue. Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them.”

He wasn’t done. The world, he warned, is “growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent.” Indifferent, he said, “to the deaths of thousands of people. Indifferent to the repercussions of hatred and division that conflicts sow.”

Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez @ zeteo: Trump Threatens War Crimes, Praises ‘Allah’ on Easter Sunday

‘Praise be to Allah,’ the insane president posted, while threatening to blow up Iranian power plants and bridges if he doesn’t get his way.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 5, 2026

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And that is another way to look at the post from Trump’s social media account: that he is panicked that he has not been able to bully other countries into fixing the mess he created by attacking Iran and precipitating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and is now simply trying to bully Iran. In The Guardian last Monday, Sidney Blumenthal noted that Trump “has declared ‘victory’ more than eight times,” says he has “won” more than ten times, and said Iranian forces have been “obliterated” or suffered “obliteration” more than six times. Blumenthal noted Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power grid and has used the words “decimate” or “decimation” at least six times.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Heather Delaney Reese: The president has gone insane

… On Easter morning, while families across the country were gathering in churches, the President of the United States was threatening to bomb a country, driving to his golf course, and calling in to Fox News for a 15-minute phone interview about his war. He didn’t go to church. He went to worship himself instead.
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Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson: Trump’s war crime campaign, explained by an expert

… And Trump went even further on Thursday, first in a Truth Social post bragging about blowing up a bridge (a strike that reportedly killed at least eight civilians) and then in another post threatening even worse crimes to come.

As former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane pointed out when Trump made a similar threat days earlier, attacking civilian infrastructure as part of a punishment campaign is a textbook war crime.

(Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson more…)

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 4, 2026

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Michael R. Gordon and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump’s aides have been telling him Iran’s civilian infrastructure is a legitimate wartime target, despite the understanding among experts that such attacks are illegal. …

Ryan Goodman of Just Security commented: “That would be an F on a bar exam.” He observed, “This isn’t legal analysis. It’s idiocy.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Lauren Kent @ CNN: Iran’s ‘new’ regime looks much the same, only harsher

Eliana Silver and Imogen Garfinkel @ Daily Mail: Inside Iran’s underground missile cities that enabled them to defy Trump: How fortresses buried in granite mountains protect huge arsenal of weapons and hidden rocket launch ports

Stephen Kalin, Robbie Gramer and Alexander Ward @ WSJ: Iranian Strike on U.S. Embassy Caused More Damage Than Disclosed

Two drones hit the Saudi compound, sparking a fire that raged for hours

Steve Walsh @ NPR: Evacuation of U.S. troops from Mideast base sends community groups scrambling to help

NPR has learned that hundreds of sailors were evacuated back to the United States from their base in Bahrain after the base was attacked by Iranian missiles and drones. In addition to the base in Bahrain, NPR has learned that there have been evacuations at other U.S. military bases in the region, though the exact details are unknown at this point.
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WSJ: U.S. Searches for Missing Crew Member After Iran Downs 2 U.S. Warplanes

A search-and-rescue operation was under way after Iran shot down an F-15E. The other crew member was rescued earlier. The pilot of a second American warplane also hit by Iran was safe.
(WSJ more…)

Hans Christensen: 20,000 Seafarers Stranded in the Gulf

Since 28 February 2026, The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has confirmed 21 attacks on commercial ships, with 10 seafarer fatalities and several injured. Around 20,000 civilian seafarers remain aboard vessels in the Persian Gulf.

Motoko Rich @ NY Times: Hegseth Says U.S. Troops Are Fighting for Jesus. The Pope Disagrees.

In sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s calls for Christian prayers for the war effort, Pope Leo XIV says military domination is “entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”

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Trump: “We’re not supposed to be seduced that way, right? But I am. When somebody’s nice to me, I love that person. Even if they’re bad people. I couldn’t care less, I’ll fight to the end for them.” pic.twitter.com/cJ30S7M5qW

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 2, 2026

Heather Delaney Reese: Trump fights for bad people

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But most telling about the whole event was what happened after. Because shortly after the luncheon had ended, the White House made a move not often seen. They deleted the video recording of his entire speech. And we have to imagine that they did this because what he said was such a disaster that even they knew it would be a struggle to contain it. How do you explain the president saying, “When somebody’s nice to me, I love that person. Even if they’re bad people, I couldn’t care less. I’ll fight to the end for them.” And how do you make sure that the United States is safe from both domestic and foreign adversaries when the president says you can be “bad” as long as you are nice to him? Where does that leave us as a country?
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Tripti Lahiri, Krishna Pokharel and Emma Brown @ WSJ: How a Tsunami Was Unleashed at 17,000 Feet, Shattering Lives Below

RANGPO FOREST VILLAGE, India—Far from human eyes, nestled in the Himalayas at 17,000 feet, the South Lhonak Lake was growing. Late one night in October 2023, part of the shelf of rocks and ice that dammed the lake in northeast India collapsed.

What followed was part-tsunami, part-landslide.

The water that poured out of the lake picked up stones, sand and other sediment as it flowed through the rocky mountain channels, triggering a series of landslides along the way. In one town, the slurry knocked out a hydropower project, adding even more water to the deluge as it joined the Teesta, a Himalayan river known for its sinewy twists and turns.

Sometime after 2 a.m., Dharmendra Prasad, a 37-year-old taxi driver living far below the lake in the town of Rangpo Forest, awoke to a commotion, as townspeople desperately scrambled to get to higher ground.

Prasad bundled his 23-year-old wife, Priyanka Devi, who was due to deliver their second child, and his 5-year-old son, into his SUV. He then went to get his father, but couldn’t find him. He ran back to the car, but as he was about to jump in a wave of water hit him and he fell.

“When I looked around, neither my car nor my wife and child were there,” he said. “Somehow I managed to get out of the water and was shouting, ‘Save us, save us.’ But at the time, everyone was busy trying to save their own families.”

Shanti Rai, 45, runs a volunteer rescue group that helped save people stuck on rooftops and clinging to trees, and pulled bodies from the Teesta.

“I used to wonder where tears come from endlessly when we are sad,” said Rai, sitting at the riverside restaurant she built on the highway to Rangpo. “Looking at the river, I wondered: ‘Where is so much water coming from? Where in the mountains is there so much water?’”

As warmer global temperatures melt polar ice, ocean waters are rising, posing a threat to island nations and coastal communities. A parallel danger lurks in the Himalayas and other high mountain areas like the Andes, where melting glaciers have created thousands of new lakes.
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Summer Said, David S. Cloud and Michael Amon @ WSJ: U.A.E. Wants to Force Hormuz Open and Is Willing to Join the Fight

Gulf state begins effort to persuade U.S. and others to open waterway by any means necessary

The United Arab Emirates is preparing to help the U.S. and other allies open the Strait of Hormuz by force, Arab officials said, a move that would make it the first Persian Gulf country to become a combatant, after being hit by Iranian attacks.

The U.A.E. is lobbying for a United Nations Security Council resolution that would authorize such action, the officials said. Emirati diplomats have urged the U.S. and military powers in Europe and Asia to form a coalition to open the strait by force, a U.A.E official said, adding that the Iranian regime thinks it is fighting for its existence and is willing to bring the global economy down with it in a chokehold on the strait.

The U.A.E. official said the country was actively reviewing how it could play a military role in securing the strait, including efforts to help clear it of mines and other support services.

The Gulf state has also said the U.S. should occupy islands in the strategic waterway including Abu Musa, which has been held by Iran for a half-century and is claimed by the U.A.E., some of the Arab officials said.
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Jennifer Kavanagh @ Responsible Statecraft: Iran wipes out US-Israeli radars & sensors, changing course of war

This might be an answer to the biggest question today: why does the airspace suddenly seems penetrable, even against a wounded Tehran military?

A month into the U.S. military campaign against Iran, Israel’s vaunted air defense system is showing its limits. Just in the past 10 days, major cities including Tel Aviv, Dimona, and Arad sustained significant damage when Iranian missiles successfully evaded Israel’s network of interceptors.

The most obvious explanation for the apparent failures is that depletion of Israel’s interceptor stockpiles is forcing the Israel Defense Forces to ration munitions or prioritize targets. But the faults in Israel’s air defenses almost certainly have deeper roots. After all, even if forced to defend only the most important locations, Israel would almost certainly place Dimona — a city located near several of Israel’s key nuclear facilities — at the top of the list.

The more worrisome reality is that gaps in Israel’s air defenses may be detection (rather than interception) failures resulting from damage to the radars and sensors that underlie the integrated air defense network shared by the United States, Israel, and Gulf partners. If true, the implications would be dire. Operating without the “eyes” that the American military relies on to identify and mitigate threats, U.S. forces and assets would be much more vulnerable than previously understood.
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Paul Krugman: Is America Suffering from the “Resource Curse”?

Why the U.S. is the “last big petrostate” and why that’s bad for everyone
… David Roberts declared that “the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate.”

Last month Rana Faroohar of the Financial Times basically said the same thing.

At this moment in history critiques of economic reliance on fossil fuels often focus on changing energy technology. At a time of rapid progress in renewable energy and general economic electrification, many argue, as Roberts does, that clinging to fossil fuels means missing the boat.

However, warnings that reliance on oil or other natural resources can be a trap have been prominent in economic discourse for decades. They were widespread long before the current renewable energy revolution began and were largely separate from concerns about the environment. The term resource curse, coined by Richard Auty in 1993, refers to a familiar though controversial proposition in development economics. It says that nations rich in natural resources, especially minerals including oil, tend to do worse in the long run than resource-poor nations. As we will see, the resource curse proposition claims that countries with economies heavily tilted towards natural resource extraction are afflicted by a tendency towards backwardness compared to countries less dependent on natural resource extraction.

Historically, most discussion of the resource curse has been concerned with small or poor nations. At this point, however, many are arguing that the United States faces some of the same issues and that our success in extracting oil and gas is actually hurting us.
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