International Glance
US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.
“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.
“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.
Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.
In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.
Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.
“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”
US political commentator and journalist Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had caught and “arrested Israeli Mossad agents planning bombings in those countries”.
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he’s “not happy” with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not joining the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, though he allowed US forces to use UK bases.
The search for the dead in the apparent U.S. or Israeli missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school in Iran has officially ended.
Explosions were reported in the Russian port city of Novorossiysk overnight between Sunday and Monday.
There's electricity on Kyiv's left bank today, so a small elevator carries visitors up to Liliya Martynivna Lapina's 10th-floor apartment. The 88-year-old has been spending her days in her bed under a pile of blankets by a bright but cold window, trying to stay warm.
