标签： North America

### After Collapsed Islamabad Negotiations, Washington Unveils Aggressive New Strategy Amid Rising Political and Global Risks

It has been one month since the United States entered open conflict with Iran, and a fragile two-week ceasefire agreed last week to facilitate face-to-face negotiations is now teetering on the edge of collapse. After a 20-hour diplomatic session in Islamabad led by U.S. Vice President JD Vance failed to produce a breakthrough deal to end the conflict, President Donald Trump outlined his administration’s next move in a series of Sunday morning posts on Truth Social.

Trump announced that the U.S. would implement a full naval blockade of Iranian waters, stating that any vessel that pays what Washington defines as an “illegal toll” to Tehran would be blocked from safe passage through international waters. At the same time, the president confirmed that U.S. naval forces would continue demining operations in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints, to guarantee unimpeded access for shipping aligned with U.S. allies. He added that U.S. military assets are fully prepared and “locked and loaded” to resume offensive strikes against Iran if an “appropriate moment” arises.

Trump claimed that the talks made incremental progress, but that Tehran ultimately refused to meet Washington’s core demand to abandon its nuclear program. However, a senior U.S. official close to Vance’s negotiation team pushed back on this framing, revealing that the two sides face far broader, deeper disagreements beyond the nuclear issue. These unresolved disputes include Iran’s sovereignty claims and control over access to the Strait of Hormuz, as well as Iran’s long-standing support for regional armed groups including Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Unlike Trump’s incendiary threat from last week to “end Iranian civilization,” the president’s latest announcements avoid apocalyptic rhetoric. Even so, the new blockade strategy opens the door to a cascade of unanswerable risks and unprecedented challenges for the United States. Key open questions remain: Will ongoing demining missions put U.S. naval vessels at heightened risk of targeted Iranian retaliation? How will Washington verify whether commercial ships have paid tolls to Tehran? Will the U.S. use military force against civilian ships flying foreign flags that defy the blockade? How will major oil-dependent economies that continue to import Iranian crude, most notably China, respond to the new restriction? And could the blockade, designed to cut off Iran’s primary export revenue, send global oil prices soaring to new record highs? As of yet, the Trump administration has not offered clear responses to any of these critical questions.

The new policy has already sparked division within U.S. political circles. Senate Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia questioned the strategic logic of the move, telling CNN Sunday, “I don’t understand how blockading the strait is going to somehow push the Iranians into opening it.” By contrast, former House Intelligence Committee chair Republican Mike Turner of Ohio defended the blockade as a necessary coercive measure to force a resolution to the standoff over the Strait. Speaking on CBS’ *Face the Nation*, Turner noted that by rejecting Tehran’s right to control access to the waterway, Trump is rallying U.S. allies to engage on the issue, adding that “this needs to be addressed.”

The current impasse comes as Trump faces the same unresolvable dilemma that pushed him to agree to a ceasefire and talks last week. Before the Islamabad negotiations, the president had two unappealing options: continue escalating offensive strikes on Iran, which would cause irreversible damage to Iranian civilian infrastructure, deepen an already worsening humanitarian crisis, and send further shockwaves through the already fragile global economy; or step back from a conflict that has never been popular with the U.S. public, and has even started to alienate core Trump supporters who backed him on his promise to avoid draining foreign wars and new entanglements in the Middle East.

Recent polling underscores the political risk for Trump and his party ahead of November’s midterm elections. A new CBS survey finds that 59% of U.S. voters believe the war is going poorly for the United States. Large majorities of voters from both parties agree that achieving core U.S. war goals – keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, securing greater political freedom for the Iranian people, and permanently eliminating Iran’s nuclear program – is critical, but most voters say none of these objectives have been met nearly a month into the conflict.

Almost a week after the ceasefire took effect, and despite the administration’s claims of early military success, Trump’s core predicament remains unchanged. Speaking to Fox News Sunday morning, the president struck an optimistic tone, claiming Iran will eventually concede to all U.S. demands. He acknowledged that global oil prices could stay steady or rise in the coming months, but insisted the U.S. economy would withstand the pressure. This prediction is at best a high-stakes gamble, political analysts note: with midterm elections just months away, Trump’s Republican Party could face devastating electoral losses if the president’s assessment proves wrong.

In a striking juxtaposition to the high-stakes diplomacy unfolding in Pakistan, Trump spent Saturday night in Miami attending a UFC mixed martial arts cage fighting event, where top fighters competed in a violent, blood-spattered ring. Members of the press pool covering the event described the moment as surreal: the U.S. president watched the bouts, mingled with celebrities, and held urgent strategy discussions with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other senior advisors in full view of thousands of spectators.

Unlike the structured, rule-bound sport of mixed martial arts – which always ends with a clear winner and a defined time limit – the war with Iran offers no such clarity. As the conflict enters its second month and the ceasefire nears collapse, it has devolved into a brutal test of wills: can Iran withstand continuing strikes from the U.S. and its ally Israel, or will Trump buckle under growing economic and political pressure from the costs of the war? When this high-stakes standoff ends, all parties involved may leave diminished.

It has been more than two centuries since Napoleon Bonaparte offered one of history’s most cutting observations of geopolitical strategy: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” For policymakers in Moscow and Beijing, this maxim has guided their response to the recent weeks-long U.S. war in Iran, and even with a 14-day ceasefire now holding between Tehran and Washington – both sides have publicly declared victory – the two great power rivals continue to reap strategic benefits from what many analysts have labeled Washington’s latest strategic blunder in the Middle East.

Over the course of the conflict, China and Russia have navigated a carefully calibrated diplomatic balancing act. Neither country has thrown its full public support behind Iran – a partner that both nations count as an ally to varying degrees – nor have they committed substantial resources to the war effort. Instead, they have limited their backing to small-scale intelligence sharing and targeted diplomatic support.

As a scholar of international security and great power politics, I argue this restrained approach is rooted in clear strategic logic. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow have long recognized that Iran cannot achieve a decisive military victory against the combined military strength of the United States and Israel. For their own geopolitical interests, however, Iran does not need to win – it only needs to survive the conflict to weaken Washington’s global standing. The 2025 Iran war has eroded U.S. influence in four key ways that play directly into the hands of China and Russia.

### 1. A Reverse of Washington’s Push to Counter Great Power Influence in the Middle East

As outlined in my book *Defending Frenemies*, the United States has struggled for decades to reconcile competing strategic objectives in the Middle East. During the Cold War, Washington’s core priority was blocking Soviet expansion in the region, even as it navigated the nuclear ambitions of two problematic allies: Israel and Pakistan. By the 2020s, U.S. regional strategy has shifted to limiting the expanding influence of its great power rivals – China first, and Russia second.

Under President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both China and Russia have worked steadily to expand their regional footprints through a mix of formal partnerships and informal outreach. For Russia, this has meant deepening alignment with Iran, including joint efforts to prop up former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime throughout the Syrian civil war. For China, influence growth has come largely through diplomatic diplomacy, most notably its successful 2023 mediation of a deal restoring diplomatic ties between historic rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The irony of the 2025 Iran war is that it broke out just after a string of setbacks for Russian and Chinese influence expansion. The December 2024 fall of Assad’s regime stripped Russia of its most reliable regional ally, while U.S. President Donald Trump’s May 2025 tour of Gulf states secured major new technology and economic agreements with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, explicitly designed to roll back China’s growing economic and diplomatic clout in the region.

Now, however, the war has shifted perceptions dramatically. As the United States grows increasingly seen as an unreliable security partner, Gulf nations are far more likely to pursue deeper security and economic cooperation with Beijing and Moscow to hedge their bets.

### 2. The War Pulls U.S. Focus Away From Its Core Stated Strategic Priorities

Over the past two decades, China and Russia have expanded their economic, diplomatic and military ties across the Middle East by exploiting a deliberate U.S. shift: after the costly decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington had signaled it planned to reorient its assets and strategic attention away from the region toward higher-priority theaters.

Trump’s decision to launch a full war against Iran directly contradicts the U.S. national security strategy his own administration released just months earlier, in November 2025. That document explicitly identified the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific as Washington’s top priorities, declaring that the Middle East’s strategic importance “will recede” in U.S. planning.

By launching the war in Iran alongside Israel without prior consultation with U.S. allies, Trump has openly dismissed the strategic and economic concerns of partner nations. Already fractured by Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw from NATO and his unilateral designs on Greenland, the alliance has seen new, deep rifts open over the Iran conflict – divisions that China and Russia have long worked to exploit for their own gain.

Again, irony abounds: the Iran war comes at a moment when Trump’s agenda of consolidating U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere was actually making progress. Putting aside questions of international law and legitimacy, Washington had recently removed the Maduro regime in Venezuela, a longstanding thorn in its side, and installed a far more compliant government.

### 3. The Conflict Creates Disproportionate Economic Benefits for U.S. Rivals

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz – the chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s global oil supplies pass – the move was as predictable as it was damaging to U.S. interests. For Russia, however, the closure has driven up global oil prices, providing a major boost to its war-focused economy. It has also led to a temporary but ongoing easing of U.S. sanctions on Moscow, a critical economic lifeline after years of punishing pressure tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While a prolonged closure of the strait and widespread damage to oil and gas infrastructure across Iran and the Gulf would harm China’s energy security and economic growth, Chinese leaders have signaled they are willing to accept these short-term risks. Years of investment in strategic petroleum reserves, and a push to diversify energy supplies to include solar power, battery storage and domestic coal production, have left China far better positioned to weather a global energy crisis than the United States. Beijing has also spent years reorienting its economy to rely more on domestic consumption for growth, rather than overreliance on global trade, buffering it from the global economic shock triggered by the war.

As the United States struggles to reassert control over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, particularly as Iran enforces targeted restrictions on vessels from unfriendly nations, its regional influence erodes further.

### 4. The Conflict Accelerates the Transfer of Global Soft Power Leadership From the U.S. to China

Trump’s choice to abandon diplomatic talks in favor of immediate war, paired with the contradictory rhetoric his administration has deployed throughout the conflict, has severely damaged the global perception of the United States as a neutral, credible global leader. That shift has delivered a massive soft power windfall for Beijing.

It was China that pressured Iran to accept the 14-day ceasefire proposal brokered by Pakistan, marking the latest step in Beijing’s slow erosion of the United States’ longstanding status as the global mediator of first resort. China has already successfully mediated high-stakes diplomacy between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and has launched similar mediation efforts for the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More broadly, the Iran war reinforces Beijing’s core narrative that the U.S.-led liberal international order has collapsed. Even though China benefited from the continuation of the conflict, its role in brokering the ceasefire demonstrates it is increasingly stepping into the global leadership vacuum that the United States once filled.

For Russia, the war offers a different, equally valuable benefit: by splitting NATO and drawing U.S. strategic attention back to the Middle East, it shifts global focus and U.S. involvement away from the ongoing war in Ukraine, easing pressure on Moscow.

This analysis is by Jeffrey Taliaferro, professor of political science at Tufts University, republished under a Creative Commons license from The Conversation.

Nearly a decade after Jeffrey Epstein’s first arrest and years after his controversial prison death, the trove of court and investigative files tied to the disgraced convicted sex offender remains a raw, dividing issue within former President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement—even as top headlines have shifted to pressing international crises like the ongoing conflict in Iran. For 19-year-old Cayden McBride, a Rome, Georgia college student and self-identified lifelong Trump supporter, digging through thousands of pages of declassified documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has become a daily routine. After wrapping up his classes each day, McBride opens his laptop and spends hours sifting through flight logs, witness transcripts, photos, and video footage, chasing new details about Epstein’s crimes and his long-rumored connections to powerful figures across U.S. politics and public life.

A high-stakes political drama has unfolded in American politics this week, after the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office confirmed it has opened a formal investigation into multiple sexual misconduct allegations against U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for governor of California.

Four women have now come forward with accusations against the congressman, ranging from persistent sexual harassment to non-consensual sexual assault, with one of the alleged incidents occurring on Manhattan soil. Swalwell, who has represented a Northern California district covering areas near San Francisco since 2012 and launched a high-profile bid to replace outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom in this year’s election, has forcefully denied every claim. In public statements, he has pledged to clear his name using documented facts and has not ruled out pursuing legal action against his accusers.

In an official public statement released Saturday, the New York prosecutor’s office extended an invitation for survivors and any other individuals with information relevant to the allegations to reach out to its Special Victims Division. “Our specially trained prosecutors, investigators and counselors are well-equipped to help you in a trauma-informed, survivor-centered manner,” the office said. Representatives for Swalwell did not issue an immediate response to repeated requests for comment from the BBC following the announcement of the investigation.

The first public allegation against Swalwell appeared Friday in the *San Francisco Chronicle*, from a woman who previously worked as a staff member in his Castro Valley district office. She told the outlet that shortly after she was hired, Swalwell began making unwanted inappropriate comments, repeatedly solicited her for sexual encounters and sent unsolicited sexual messages. The former staffer alleges she was assaulted by Swalwell on two separate occasions: the first in September 2019, after the pair went out for drinks, and the second in 2024 following a charity gala in New York City. Both times, she told the newspaper, she was too impaired by alcohol to give legal consent. The BBC has not been able to independently confirm the details of her account or verify her identity, but has reached out to her legal representation for comment.

Shortly after the first report, CNN published accounts from three additional women, bringing the total number of accusers to four, all raising claims of varying degrees of sexual misconduct against the congressman. The network also reported that Swalwell’s legal team has already sent cease-and-desist letters demanding retractions to two of the women making accusations.

In a public video message posted to Facebook Friday, Swalwell addressed the allegations directly to voters. He acknowledged he has made errors in judgment earlier in his life, framing those past mistakes as private matters between himself and his wife, to whom he issued a deep apology for the public scandal. “I do not suggest to you that I am perfect or a saint,” he said. “I’ve certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past. But those mistakes are between me and my wife. And to her, I apologise deeply for putting her in this position.” He reiterated his denial of all the misconduct allegations, stating: “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action.”

The timing of the allegations could not be more consequential for Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign. The investigation comes just weeks before California begins mailing out ballots to voters for the June 2 primary, in an open race to lead the nation’s most populous state. Before the allegations surfaced, two separate public opinion polls ranked Swalwell as one of the top two front-runners for the Democratic nomination in the crowded primary field. Within hours of the first reports of the accusations, Swalwell lost the public endorsement of several of his most prominent political backers, including U.S. Senator Adam Schiff and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whose support had been a major boost to his campaign credibility.