The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions on 22 tankers and dozens of individuals and companies linked to Iran’s oil trade, expanding its campaign to cut off Tehran’s remaining petroleum...
President Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Thursday that he didn’t intend to launch strikes against Iran prior to the US midterm elections that will be held on November 3, comments that came after multiple media reports said he was considering bombing the country before the vote. Trump claimed in the post […]
Trump said Thursday that the U.S. 'will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd.'
Trump said Thursday that the U.S. 'will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd.'
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has dismissed claims by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Tehran has repeatedly squandered chances for an agreement, saying the inversion of historical facts cannot erase Washington’s pattern of treaty-breaking from public memory.
Baghaei, responding to an IRNA question on Rubio’s assertion that “Iran has missed opportunities for an agreement multiple times,” stated on Wednesday, “The inversion of historical truths cannot remove the reality of America’s repeated breaches of commitment from the mind of public opinion.”
He pointed to Washington’s successive acts of bad faith, including its unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, the sabotage of diplomatic tracks, military aggression against Iran while negotiations were underway, and the subsequent violation of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding Iran reached on June 18.
Baghaei held the United States responsible for the insecurity prevailing in the region and for the economic consequences felt in America and worldwide.
“Blame-shifting and contradictory statements cannot overshadow the demand of American and global public opinion that those responsible for the illegal war and the crimes committed be held to account,” he said.
On the latest developments in contacts with the United States, the spokesman said the Islamic Republic’s considerations and conditions for ending the imposed war on all fronts and restoring security to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz have been set out explicitly and decisively.
The necessary response to the other side’s proposals will be conveyed through intermediaries. “The exchange of messages between Iran and the US is being conducted through intermediaries,” he added.
On diplomatic efforts related to regional peace and security, including commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Baghaei stressed that the security of navigation in the waterway matters more to the Islamic Republic of Iran than to any other party. Iran, in consultation with Oman as the other littoral state, has spared no effort to restore security to the Strait.
“The consultation process between Iran and Oman has proceeded successfully. In addition to agreeing on the geographical coordinates of safe two-way routes in the Strait of Hormuz, the two sides have reached an understanding on how the matter will be presented to the relevant international body, a step that will, God willing, be taken soon,” he said.
Asked about the possibility of a joint meeting involving Iran, Oman, and other Persian Gulf states, Baghaei said Iran will continue its efforts to strengthen trust and engagement among the region’s countries.
“Defenders of the homeland, in both the diplomatic arena and the field, stand shoulder to shoulder, resolute and steadfast in defending Iran’s sovereignty and securing the nation’s interests and security,” he concluded.
Indian refiners have cut back Russian crude purchases for November delivery, as rising competition from China pushes up prices at a time when buyers can tap alternative shipments from the Middle East.
Click to see full-size image. (U.S. Central Command)
The administration of President Donald Trump is preparing military options for renewed strikes on Iran that could be launched before the November 3 United States midterm elections, according to American media, as officials weigh whether a new offensive could produce a battlefield and political gain before voters go to the polls.
The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop strike options against Iranian targets that could be used ahead of the election, The Atlantic reported on October 7, citing two administration officials.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is compiling the plans, but their scale, targets and timing remain under debate and no final decision has been made.
Axios reported the same day that the Pentagon had instructed CENTCOM to complete preparations for a possible resumption of major combat operations in Iran.
U.S. officials said the order did not include a launch date, while U.S. and Israeli sources said operations could begin before the American elections. The plans could include extensive strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure and other strategic targets.
The possibility of renewed fighting comes as the U.S. has gone several weeks without striking Iran. Trump has repeatedly suggested that the war could resume after the election, but The Atlantic reported that he told aides and advisers that a strike before the vote remained an option.
In remarks last week, Trump said the U.S. would win the war “right after the election,” while adding, “Maybe before the election.”
The administration appears to see a limited operation as a way to demonstrate progress, strengthen Trump’s position and potentially improve the political outlook for Republicans, particularly if it could be followed by lower energy prices.
Officials supporting the idea acknowledge, however, that a limited strike alone would not force Iran back to negotiations, restore normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz or quickly reduce gasoline prices.
The military buildup gives the planning greater significance. The Associated Press reported on October 8 that roughly 9,000 additional U.S. troops were being sent to the Middle East aboard a group of ships, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and an amphibious readiness group.
The deployment could bring three American aircraft carriers into the region by the end of October, raising the number of U.S. sailors and Marines there to more than 20,000.
At the same time, Washington is continuing indirect negotiations with Tehran, with significant differences remaining over a ceasefire, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and conditions for reopening the waterway.
The administration has increasingly argued that Iran has been weakened by military and economic pressure, while Iranian leaders have shown little willingness to accept a settlement on U.S. terms.
Iranian retaliation would be a central risk of any renewed campaign. Axios reported that Israeli officials expect Tehran to respond with large-scale missile attacks against Israel, while U.S. officials have warned that American troops and Gulf allies would face renewed danger.
A new offensive could also further disrupt oil supplies and push energy prices higher, potentially worsening one of the main economic problems already hurting Republicans ahead of the election.
The administration nevertheless appears to be working from the belief that enough additional military pressure could force Iran to concede and allow Trump to claim that the war had effectively been brought to an end before the elections.
That outcome remains highly unlikely. Iran has repeatedly responded to U.S. strikes with attacks of its own, and the conflict has already lasted far longer than the administration originally expected. Another U.S. offensive is therefore more likely to trigger renewed Iranian retaliation and prolong the fighting than to achieve Washington’s objectives in time for the November vote, potentially carrying the war into the elections and beyond.
Russia is concentrating missiles on a smaller, more specific set of targets, and its jet-powered attack drones are part of the reason, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed. Its combined attack overnight on 7 October killed 22 people in Pryluky, the State Emergency Service (SES) said as of the morning of 8 October. Russian milbloggers noted the shift the same day.
Russia often uses concentrated drone and missile strikes to overwhelm localized Ukrainian air defenses and destroy urban centers, ISW noted. Pryluky, where the strike killed children, was one of the areas a Russian channel says drew a significant share of the Kh-101s that night. With winter close, ISW expects the same pattern against Ukraine's energy grid, with jet drones partly letting Russia keep its missiles for priority targets without firing many more.
Missile waves on a few areas, Russian channels claim
Russia launched 48 Kh-101, Iskander-K, and Kalibr cruise missiles overnight on 7 October, Ukraine's Air Force reported. It also fired ballistic missiles, Zircon and Oniks anti-ship missiles, and 130 strike and decoy drones, 46 of them jet-powered Shahed-type models.
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22 killed in Russian missile strike on Pryluky, including five children
Russian milbloggers claimed the same day that Moscow had grouped a large part of its missile salvo into repeated waves on a few areas, while other weapons kept stretching Ukraine's air defenses elsewhere. The pro-war Russian Telegram channel Dva Mayora described the change as a switch from striking with splayed fingers to a series of hits with missile "fists." Defenders must then absorb a sharply rising load around one chosen site as one wave follows another, the channel claimed.
Citing Ukrainian monitoring channels, it claimed that roughly 30 or more Kh-101 cruise missiles flew toward Pryluky, Kremenchuk, Svitlovodsk, and Oleksandriia in Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kirovohrad oblasts. It put the Kremenchuk group at up to 15 missiles, Kh-101s and Kalibrs among them, aimed at the area of Kremenchuk and its hydroelectric plant.
Jet drones take some of the load off Russia's missiles
ISW said the jet-powered versions penetrate Ukrainian air defenses deeper and more reliably than propeller models. In ISW's assessment, that partly lets Russia concentrate cruise and ballistic missiles on priority targets without significantly raising missile use. Russia builds about 3,000 Geran-4 and Geran-5 jet drones a month, Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR) told Militarnyi in August.
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Ukraine spent three years learning to catch Russian drones—so Russia made them fly faster
ISW expects Russia to apply the pattern in a likely brutal winter campaign against energy infrastructure. Russia likely intends to make city life untenable and force Ukraine to capitulate to its demands, ISW assessed. Such tactics have not worked before and are unlikely to work now, analysts added.
They called cheap countermeasures to jet drones and small cruise missiles vital, alongside Western air defense aid such as US-made Patriots, which can stop ballistic missiles. Ukraine has already paired a Soviet-era Kub launcher with American RIM-7 interceptors to catch jet drones.
Authoritarian states such as Russia and Iran are increasingly pursuing their opponents even after they find shelter in apparently safe Western countries. RFE/RL talks to some of those affected.
The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop plans for attacks on Iran that could be carried out before midterm elections are held on November 3, according to a report from The Atlantic. Unnamed Trump administration officials told the outlet that the planning underscores how much Trump wants to reduce gas prices and show […]
Vice President JD Vance suggested in an interview with Reuters that the Trump administration could accept a deal with Iran that would see the country reduce its nuclear enrichment levels, not end its enrichment program altogether, something Tehran was offering to do before the war. “If you don’t want a nuclear weapon, then why do […]
With Hezbollah squarely in the political opposition, Lebanese officials have been hoping for awhile that the ongoing Israeli invasion would further alienate Hezbollah from the public, as an active combatant force and, at least by Israel’s framing, the reason for the conflict. That’s been a polarizing issue, however, and Hezbollah is likely to score a […]
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei says the United States and the Israeli regime have a history of manufacturing false-flag incidents only to clean up their messes around the world.
In a Wednesday post on his X account, the Iranian official said such scenarios would not save them from the quagmire of the aggression against Iran.
Baghaei said telling lies about Iran and accusing it of having a role in security incidents would fail to justify the US-Israeli aggression against the Islamic Republic.
“In a world where the American and international public is weary of an unlawful war of aggression against Iran, and where the aggressors have no honest way to justify a war of choice, even a raft made of lies can look like salvation to those who are drowning,” he said in the post.
The post also included a video elucidating previous US and Israeli false-flag operations, including massive US media campaigns denoting the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which led to the invasion of the country in 2003, and Israel’s involvement in a case in Egypt in 1954, known as the Lavon Affair.
“False flags are an old craft: manufacture the incident, assign the blame, and harvest the consequences,” said Baghaei.
The post came after officials in the US and allied countries suggested that Iran may have had a role in recent security incidents, including on a Flydubai flight from the United Arab Emirates to the Israeli-occupied territories and in a suspected plot against an American base in Britain.
Iran has roundly rejected the accusations, calling them a pretext for launching renewed aggression against the country, months after the US and the Israeli regime were forced to end a previous offensive under a ceasefire reached in mid-April.
A new report from the Congressional Research Service has found that at least 81 US military aircraft have been damaged or lost in the Iran war since it was launched by the US and Israel on February 28. The report’s authors said the tally was compiled from statements by the Pentagon, US Central Command, the […]
Attacks on tankers sailing through the Strait of Hormuz hit their highest last week of any week since the Iran war began, according to maritime security sources tracking incidents, amid a bigger export push by Gulf producers.
The right-populist leader deserves scrutiny but offers clarity on Russia–Ukraine and Iran.
The frontrunner in France’s 2027 presidential race—Marine Le Pen from the right-wing National Rally party—has laid out foreign-policy views that American supporters of realism and restraint can approve of, regardless of how they feel about the rest of her program.
While the National Rally has been successfully marginalized and kept out of power in recent decades, one shouldn’t take it for granted that the French political establishment will find a way to thwart Le Pen—meaning her views could certainly become policy. The latest polls show the consolidation of her lead: According to Toluna-Harris Interactive, in a runoff she would take 57 percent against the centrist candidate (and a former prime minister under President Emmanuel Macron) Édouard Philippe and a staggering 69 percent against Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left firebrand.
Of course, the spring of 2027, when the elections are to take place, is still a long way off. Political fortunes can change—as the left-wing outlet Mediapart’s recent investigation into old social media posts written by a teenage Jordan Bardella, now the National Rally president, is meant to demonstrate—but the National Rally’s supporters see such attacks as evidence of the establishment’s ill-fated and cynical effort to derail Le Pen.
Whatever you may think of her, at least her foreign policy views are coherent. On Iran, Le Pen—once labeled a “Trump ally”—offered a far clearer assessment than Macron with his equivocations. “We would still need to know what Trump wanted to do there,” Le Pen said. “Because for now, we still do not know what he wanted to do. He clearly has not achieved his war aims and he is setting the whole planet on fire.” While Macron tends to caveat his criticisms of Trump’s war with accusations that Iran has sought to destabilize the Middle East, Le Pen simply condemns the war on grounds that it’s bad for the French people.
She’s also warned of global inflation “that will have consequences for all peoples” and argued it is “better to convince the U.S. not to go and wage war against a country and an ancient civilization, a complicated country, and probably much more powerful than Donald Trump imagined.”
The events have confirmed Le Pen’s judgement. A civilization of 90 million people with millennia of history cannot be simply bombed away, as Trump (and the Republican Party) are learning to their distress heading into a difficult midterm election season. Le Pen is well aware that the people in France, like elsewhere, are paying the price for this adventure.
On Ukraine, Le Pen has been equally direct while diverging from Macron more dramatically. She warned the conflict has only two possible trajectories: “Either NATO is drawn into this war, and it will be the Third World War, or we will witness a hundred years’ war.” She has called for a major peace conference, made clear she is willing to talk to both President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and insisted that Germany, Poland, and Turkey be brought into the negotiating process.
She has gone even further, promising to halt French military aid to Ukraine, on the grounds that France cannot afford to sustain the amount of assistance Macron has been authorizing. Here she will have to explain herself in greater detail. A blanket cutoff is not a serious policy if the goal is to bring the war to an end as soon as possible—any settlement would require Kiev’s consent, as well as Moscow’s.
But neither can “support Ukraine for as long as it takes” work without a clearly defined end-game, and France’s fiscal situation dictates it cannot remain the default policy. Negotiations with all parties, including Russia, should not be treated as an appeasement or betrayal. Any serious attempt to settle the war would require Ukraine to make painful compromises on its NATO aspirations and territorial integrity, while Russia would have to compromise too on credible security guarantees for Ukraine or at least a greenlight for Kiev to rebuild and maintain a credible conventional military deterrent. Le Pen has identified the problem and signaled openness to unavoidable parts of the solution, but she still needs to explain the strategy.
Compare that with what the mainstream is offering. Macron is playing up the “Russian threat” and apparent hybrid attacks by Moscow against Europe. Meanwhile, according to the well-informed Le Figaro journalist Georges Malbrunot, French intelligence officers, while acknowledging the threat, believe that Macron overstates it. Macron’s aim, Malbrunot writes, would be to “steer the choices of the French ahead of the presidential election, targeting Le Pen and Melenchon—the two extremes that are lenient toward Russia.”
In a similar vein, Le Pen’s center-right rival, Edouard Philippe, lashed out at her, saying that “weakening Ukraine, as Marine Le Pen wishes, is threatening the security of Europe and France. I will do everything to prevent it.”
Then there is Gabriel Attal, Macron’s protégé and a possible successor. He delivered a grand speech in Reims calling for a “United States of Europe.” Europe’s security, he said, is being attacked by Russia, its economy by China, and its values by the United States. The remedy is a federalist utopia that he promises to build in “a matter of years.”
There might be a compelling case for EU nations to deepen their economic and technological integration. But the grandiloquent federalism talk sounds tone-deaf when what the French voters care most about is purchasing power, immigration, and French security.
This is the state of France’s foreign policy debate. The mainstream candidates are frightening voters with threat narratives, selling unachievable federalist fantasies, and equivocating on the U.S. war with Iran. The one major candidate discussing how to end wars rather than prolong them, and how to engage non-Western great powers rather than simply pick “a good” side over “an evil” one, is described by the establishment as extremist.
This does not mean Le Pen deserves uncritical support. Her historic ties to Russia warrant scrutiny, and her promise to halt aid to Ukraine needs to be coupled with a more detailed policy proposal and a broader strategy to end the war.
She is right on Iran, but her party has also forged close ties with Israel, seemingly based on a common antipathy to Islamism and to fend off accusations of antisemitism. On the Middle East, it remains to be seen whether national interest or ideological anti-Islamism will primarily inform her policies should she be elected president. Also, given her party’s lingering toxicity among the French elites, it’s far from clear that a President Le Pen would be able to attract diplomatic talent from the center-right to translate her instincts into workable policies.
But these are debates worth having. It is no longer credible to simply dismiss Le Pen and offer fearmongering and fantasy as a substitute for a debate. Perhaps the French establishment should ask itself an uncomfortable question: Why is it that voices advocating for diplomacy and sanity come from the camps they call “extreme” (both on the right and on the left)? Instead, the mainstream should make the language of diplomacy and peace its own. If it doesn’t, it should not be surprised when voters turn to those who do.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran will never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon, declaring that preventing Tehran from doing so is a red line for President Donald Trump.
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