Category: Nation & World

BERLIN — It was supposed to be quick.

Still, six months after the U.S. and Israel launched massive airstrikes on Iran, the conflict drags on. The Trump administration has replaced its military war with an economic one, but the result is likely to be no different, analysts said, with a lack of American clarity about goals, a decline in U.S. credibility, and a strategic defeat.

One thing remains constant, however. The ordinary people of Iran are bearing the brunt of the war, victims of both the United States and their own leaders.

On the first day of the war, Feb. 28, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Six months later, his administration is trying to impoverish them further, hoping against hope that they will revolt against a repressive, militarized regime and overthrow it.

The Iranian leadership, increasingly dominated by military men, sees its own survival as the nation’s, and it considers the sacrifices of ordinary Iranians as a necessary act of patriotism and even martyrdom. It has been ever more ruthless in stamping out the slightest signs of dissent.

It is hard to dress up what has clearly been a U.S. failure to bend Iran to its will, despite the might of the combined U.S. and Israeli militaries. Not only has the Islamic Republic survived, but it effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz. It has strengthened its influence in the region, with even the countries it was bombing a few months ago trying to reinvigorate ties with Iran.

“The war has failed to deliver U.S. objectives,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.

Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and head of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, judged the war a failure. “We did a lot of damage to Iran, but they have come out stronger than before,” she said. Iran’s neighbors have decided they must find a modus operandi with an Islamic Republic that is not going away.

U.S. credibility among allies has suffered along with Trump’s own reputation for avoiding costly, interminable wars in the Middle East and promoting “affordability” at home. And it has made his promise to liberate ordinary Iranians look hollow.

“This war has really overtaken the Trump presidency,” Maloney said.

The regime survives

Operation Epic Fury began with a joint U.S.-Israeli surprise attack on Iran, which killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of his officials, while badly wounding his son and now successor, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Weeks of intense bombing destroyed much of Iran’s air force and navy and badly damaged its missile program. But the population did not rise up and the leadership did not fracture.

Iran’s military restored many of its missile launchers and attacked key U.S. allies in the region as well as U.S. bases, which were inadequately defended. It effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz and caused global economic disruption.

Several thousand Iranians, including children, have died — the numbers are hard to verify — and 18 U.S. service members.

The original Operation Epic Fury has been replaced with what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced as Operation Economic Outcast, designed to isolate Iran further and crash its badly damaged economy.

“This is a sustained campaign to collapse every last option for Iran,” Bessent said. “The campaign we begin today will gather force with every day that follows, and it will not end until this regime stands alone.”

Despite rhetorical flourishes about D-Day and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bessent did not indicate how long this economic war will last, what instruments it will use, or what it aims to achieve.

Is the U.S. goal once again the collapse of the regime? Or to force the opening of the Strait of Hormuz? Or to bring a more desperate Iran back to the negotiating table to reach a sustainable settlement of both the strait and Iran’s nuclear program?

“There is no clear articulation of America’s goals,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research organization based in London. “But if you don’t define behavior change, sanctions as coercion fail.”

Iran, already the target of many thousands of sanctions, is considered unlikely to surrender because of a few more. More likely, analysts said, is that the country will respond in time by escalating its attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf and on U.S. allies, which could produce another round of U.S. bombing.

Washington is betting it can achieve through intensified economic strangulation what six months of war could not, said Sina Toossi of the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank.

Washington is trying to do that by demanding international compliance even as its relations with much of the world grow more coercive and transactional, with more countries choosing to ignore Trump’s dictates.

“The capacity to hurt Iran is clear,” Toossi said. “The path from pain to capitulation or collapse is not.”

A risky stalemate

With U.S. objectives unclear, the confusion is real in Iran, too, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. They will wonder, he said: “Does the U.S. want to achieve collapse, capitulation, or compromise?”

Given that Iran’s leaders see the effort to strangle them as another form of warfare, Vaez said, the new U.S. strategy has two risks. If it fails, the only option left is to return to military escalation. And if it works, it may lead Iran to escalate to break the U.S. naval blockade.

“In either case, it won’t produce what the administration seems to want, which is to use sanctions as an alternative to war,” he said. “It’s more likely to be a prelude to another round of military warfare.”

Iran’s public-facing leadership, including President Masoud Pezeshkian and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, has been blunt about the economic imperatives to ending the war. They have warned of the consequences of hungry people and economic collapse.

They nonetheless take a consistent line on negotiating with Washington, insisting on a return at minimum to the June Memorandum of Understanding, which Trump signed but now says is “over.” They also continue to negotiate with Oman about managing the strait in a way Washington is unlikely to accept.

But no matter how much Iran concedes, there is a widespread mistrust that Trump will deliver on economic benefits and sanction relief. Despite the dire economy, the leadership appears united on retaining control of the strait.

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is seen as closer to the Revolutionary Guard and less risk-averse than his father.

Some wonder if Khamenei is even alive; he has not been seen in public and the last communiqué from his office was on Aug. 9.

For the moment, the situation is relatively static, a sort of phony war, with neither side firing at each other and relatively loose blockades of the strait in both directions, allowing some oil to escape.

The new strategy of enhanced economic strangulation has the benefit of being gradual and hard to monitor, lowering the temperature on the conflict, which may help Trump and the Republicans in the run-up to November’s midterm elections, while promising that victory, really, is just around the corner.

But the stalemate is also risky, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is an increasing view in the White House that you can’t deal with this Islamic Republic,” she said. “It’s a dangerous moment, with both Tehran and D.C. concluding that no deal is possible with the other.”

Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, remains puzzled why Trump has not taken any of the available off-ramps to ending an enormously unpopular war at home. By pushing even more economic sanctions, he said, Trump officials “are pretending they’re still fighting instead of pretending that they’ve won” — or admitting that they’ve lost.

As ever, Iran’s leadership won’t pay the cost, Shapiro said, it will be its people that do.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Trump administration has proposed giving a small parcel of land in Yosemite National Park in California to a private developer, according to federal officials and documents reviewed by the New York Times.

The potential deal, which has not yet been finalized, has alarmed conservationists and former federal officials, who say that Yosemite, the crown jewel of the nation’s park system, should be off-limits to development.

The proposal, details of which were first reported by the news outlet NOTUS, calls for transferring a small parcel just inside the western boundaries of Yosemite to a Las Vegas-based company. That firm wants to build a road and develop two 40-acre parcels near the park, according to documents submitted to Congress this year and reviewed by the Times.

In exchange, the company would purchase land of equivalent value, either near Yosemite or elsewhere in California, and hand it over to the National Park Service, the documents show.

The company is controlled by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a real estate private equity firm. The firm bought the parcels in 2024 for $4 million through a limited liability corporation called Sanctuary at Yosemite, property records show.

“This is so ridiculous, it makes you sick,” said Don Neubacher, a former supervisor at Yosemite who is now on the executive council of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a nonprofit group. Neubacher said a similar proposal had been raised in the early 2000s by previous owners of the parcels and was rejected, first by the park service and later in court.

The proposed swap would effectively provide Kingsbarn with a shortcut into the park.

Aubrie Spady, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the park service, said in a statement that no final decision had been made.

“Any land exchange or access proposal involving National Park Service lands would be subject to all applicable federal laws, regulations, and Departmental policies, including required environmental review and public notification processes,” Spady said.

The Interior Department notified Congress this year that it was considering paying for the exchange via the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The notification drew criticism from Democrats who said the fund was intended to pay for conservation programs on public lands.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) in a statement Friday called Yosemite “one of California’s natural wonders.”

“This administration appears hellbent on moving forward in the face of opposition from the public, Congress, and the courts,” he said. “But the only thing the administration cares about is whether there is money involved.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

TALKNAFJORDUR, Iceland — Gudlaug Bjornsdottir had warned her family. If the talk over the dinner table turned to Iceland’s coming referendum on opening talks to join the European Union, she would get up and leave.

Polls show a starkly divided country heading into the vote Saturday. Many people have strong opinions about whether Iceland should maintain its hard-won independence or seek the stability and protections that would come with EU membership.

So perhaps inevitably, despite Bjornsdottir’s admonitions, the dinner conversation in the tiny town of Talknafjordur one recent Friday eventually landed on the referendum. “I am leaving, like it or not,” Bjornsdottir stood and said, a wineglass still in her hand.

Her family promised not to mention it again, and she returned to her seat.

This exchange, in Iceland’s remote northwest, encapsulated an unusually heated debate in this proudly agreeable nation over what could be a watershed moment for its 400,000 people. If the vote passes, the country will start a yearslong process of EU accession negotiations. A second referendum, on whether to actually join the bloc, would be held once a deal was reached.

Many Icelanders have spent months wrestling with how to speak with each other about the divisive choice.

“It has become something of a ‘hot potato,’” Arni Ingolfsson, a 55-year-old program manager at a tech company, wrote in an email. He said he was avoiding talking to his co-workers and even a close relative about the issue.

“It’s bombarding everyone, from every angle — everywhere,” said Lisa Margret Gunnarsdottir, 31, an advocate for Icelandic students. She said that there were extreme disagreements in her immediate family and that no one talked about anything else.

“The sauna is hot and uncomfortable these days,” said Greta Gudjonsdottir, 57, who works in tourism. She said she had not yet decided how she would vote but just wanted the whole thing over with.

With this vote, Icelanders are trying to figure out the best way forward in an increasingly precarious and divided world. For years, they had little reason to doubt that their country would remain safe, stable, and sovereign. Then NATO, to which Iceland has long entrusted its security, threatened to crack under pressure from President Donald Trump, while wars, climate change, and tariffs shook the global economy.

Some “yes” voters say that Iceland should seek strength in numbers — and the financial stability of being part of one of the world’s biggest economic blocs — by moving toward joining the EU.

Many opponents worry that membership in the bloc would cost Iceland its autonomy on several fronts. Icelanders are acutely aware that their country only gained full independence in 1944, after centuries of Norwegian and Danish rule.

Fishing is widely seen as the biggest concern about EU membership, with many “no” voters worrying that joining the bloc could hurt this major industry.

“It feels very existential, this debate,” said Eirikur Bergmann, a politics professor at Bifrost University in Iceland. “It’s really a fight over where Iceland belongs.”

Of course, Iceland has had contentious times before.

The 2008 global financial crisis hit the country particularly hard — its banks collapsed, and its currency plummeted. The strife led Iceland to explore EU membership, but that effort fizzled after its economy started to recover.

Still, many Icelanders live with the memory of that economic precarity, which is animating the referendum debate for both sides. Some think joining the European economic bloc could help lower Iceland’s high inflation and interest rates, while others worry that it could burden the country with regulations that make it less nimble.

Bjornsdottir and her husband, Thor Magnusson, who were having the recent family dinner in Talknafjordur, make their living off fish. He goes out alone on a boat. They work together to prepare the catch and sell the fish out of a glass house, which runs on the honor system.

Like other Icelandic fishermen, they believe that staying out of the EU will give them more control over their own fate.

The discourse over the referendum has become so heated that Margret Einarsdottir, a law professor at Reykjavik University, said she saw echoes of American-style polarization and misinformation in some of the ugliest corners of the domestic debate.

“I’m sad about how much anger is in this discussion,” she said. Icelanders do not shy away from disagreement. But this feels different, she and other experts said.

“We are not used to it,” Einarsdottir said.

Others see things more positively, saying it is a good thing that Icelanders can disagree openly but cordially, and still keep their tight communal bonds.

“It’s a lively debate, which is also a very healthy sign of democracy,” said Bjarni Mar Magnusson, a partner at a law firm, Polestar, and a former dean of the law faculty at Bifrost University.

Hallgrimur Oddsson, the founder of Evropustraumar, an Icelandic think tank focused on relations with the EU, said that despite the acrimony, Icelanders still share the same values.

“At the end of the day,” he added, “we can still talk to our neighbor.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.