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Trump open to talks with Iran as conflict deepens in Middle East

Donald Trump said on Sunday he was prepared to talk to what was left of the Iranian leadership in the wake of the killing of the country’s supreme leader by US-Israeli air strikes aimed at overthrowing the regime. Trump was speaking as a second day of intense bombing of Iranian cities and Tehran’s missile counter-attacks sent tremors across the region and through the global economy. Oil prices jumped 10% to $80 a barrel for Brent crude, amid predictions that the continuing war could soon drive it to $100, after attacks on two ships largely choked off tanker traffic through the strait of Hormuz out of the Gulf. Amir-Saeid Iravani, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, told an emergency security council meeting on Saturday that hundreds of civilians had been killed or injured in the US-Israeli strikes. He said they had deliberately targeted civilian neighbourhoods in multiple cities. The death toll is expected to climb after a second day of bombing. Iranian state media said that 165 people had been confirmed dead in a bomb attack on a girls’ primary school in the southern city of Minab on Saturday. Among the dead was the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who had ruled since 1989 and was the primary target of an initial Israeli strike on Saturday morning. According to several US reports, the CIA had been tracking Khamenei for months. The New York Times reported the CIA tipped off Israel when the leader convened a meeting of top defence aides at his compound in Tehran, triggering a decision to strike. Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the Israeli army employed a ruse to put the Iranian leadership off its guard. On the morning of the operation, army officers were asked not to park their cars in their usual spaces to avoid detection by Iran’s spies. Misinformation was also leaked suggesting that the chief of staff Lt Gen Eyal Zamir had stayed at home. The channel cited officials as saying the Israeli air force killed 30 high-ranking Iranian officials within the first 30 seconds of the attack. Trump told Fox News that 48 Iranian leaders had been killed in the first two days of bombing, and claimed in a social media post that nine Iranian warships had been sunk and the naval headquarters destroyed. Nine Israelis have so far died in Iranian missile counter-strikes, and US forces confirmed their first casualties of the war: three dead and five injured by shrapnel. The official announcement did not give details on where and how the casualties occurred. Iran has also targeted Gulf countries that host US military bases. Airports in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai were damaged by missiles and remained shut on Sunday, causing one of global aviation’s most severe disruptions in years. Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile vowed to intensify the aerial attacks on Iran. The Israeli prime minister said: “Our forces are now striking at the heart of Tehran with intense power, and this will only escalate in the days ahead.” Trump claimed the assault on Iran, launched with the stated aim of regime change, was “moving along rapidly”. In a separate interview, Trump said he was open to talks with Iran’s surviving and newly appointed leaders. “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” he told the Atlantic magazine, without revealing when those talks might start. “They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.” Asked whether he was ready to prolong the war in support of an Iranian popular uprising against the regime, Trump was non-committal, saying only he would “look at the situation at the time it happens”. He was speaking as the global effects of the war began to be felt. The oil price spike followed two reported attacks on tankers in or near the strait of Hormuz. Iranian state television said an oil tanker was struck and was sinking after trying to “illegally” pass through the strait, which Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards has declared closed. Some 150 tankers were reported to have dropped anchor rather than transit the waterway, a route for about a fifth of the world’s traded oil. Major container shipping companies, including MSC and Maersk, have suspended navigation in the region. The ship attacks were a reminder of the conflict’s potential to trigger an environmental catastrophe. In launching the war, Trump said it would provide an opportunity for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the 47-year-old Islamic regime. Nationwide protests earlier this year were brutally suppressed by security forces, and some estimates say tens of thousands of civilians were killed. Iranian authorities said that 22 border guards at Mehran on the Iranian-Iraqi border had been killed, in a sign that the US and Israel were seeking to weaken the regime’s control of Iran’s borders in support of anti-government separatists. Across the country, Iranians said they felt a mixture of terror and optimism as the bombings continued. Some expressed relief that the long-expected strikes had arrived and opponents of the regime spoke of hope that they might lead to political change – but both were tempered by fear that the attacks would bring more civilian deaths to a country already reeling from recent bloodshed. Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, accused the US and Israel of trying to plunder and fragment Iran and warned “secessionist groups” of a harsh response if they attempted to intervene, state television said. The regime in Tehran insisted that Khamenei’s killing would not weaken its resolve. Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said Netanyahu and Trump had “crossed a red line” and “will pay for it”, according to state media. President Masoud Pezeshkian said a leadership council composed of himself, the judiciary head and a member of the powerful Guardian Council had temporarily assumed the duties of supreme leader until a replacement was chosen. Khamenei had not designated a successor. Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, said he expected the process of selecting a new supreme leader to be relatively quick. “Of course, there is no fixed timeline,” Baghaei told the MS Now Velshi programme. “They can decide as quickly as possible. I don’t think it would take that long because we are under this critical situation of an imposed war of aggression by the United States and Israel. So I guess the process would be expedited.” In his interview with the Atlantic, Trump shrugged off the suggestion that the economic fallout from the war could damage the Republican party’s prospects in November’s congressional elections. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had,” the president claimed. However, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll on Sunday, only about one in four Americans approve of the attack on Iran, before any inflationary pressure from a war-driven oil price spike has begun to be felt in the US.

US-Israel war on Iran live: Trump says attack could last four weeks as death tolls rise across Middle East

The leaders of Britain, France and Germany said they were ready to take steps to defend their interests in the region after the “indiscriminate and disproportionate” missile attacks by Iran “We will take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region, potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source,” they said in a statement. “We have agreed to work together with the US and allies in the region on this matter.”

Netanyahu’s latest war has few critics in an Israel embracing militarism

In June, Benjamin Netanyahu declared “a historic victory, which will stand for generations” after the 12-day war on Iran. His decision to attack Iran again, less than a year later, was greeted with broad and enthusiastic support from Israeli politicians, including the prime minister’s bitter rivals, and a public willing to endure death and massive disruption to their lives. Few prominent Israelis have asked questions about why the legacy of one historic victory is another war – or whether the stated goal of regime change from the air is realistic. After Iran acknowledged the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed, backing for the war deepened even as deaths and damage from Iranian attacks mounted inside Israel. “The only thing I’m sorry is that we didn’t do it earlier, last June,” a 30-year-old Tel Aviv tech worker, Tom Yaakov, said as he inspected damage to his apartment building from an Iranian missile strike. “It’s like an Israeli story I can tell my children, the tyrant was down and my building was hit.” That strike killed a 28-year-old Filipina care worker, who was hit by shrapnel taking her employer to a bomb shelter. Hours later, nine people were killed in a direct missile hit on a bomb shelter in Beit Shemesh. Donald Trump and Netanyahu seem to share a world vision that substitutes military superiority, targeted killings and the prospect of constant war for international relations, negotiations and lasting treaties. Khamenei’s assassination was a spectacular display of their combined military and espionage strength. But Israel’s spy agencies have a decades-long track record of taking out high-profile enemies, from generations of Hamas commanders in Gaza to the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in assassinations that did not destroy the groups these men headed. By contrast, peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, which brought lasting stability with countries once considered bitter enemies, are rarely celebrated by Israel’s current political leaders, said Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group. Those pacts’ crucial role in Israeli life was underlined in this war when the two countries offered the only route home for Israelis trapped outside the country when airspace was closed to civilian flights. There are plenty of regional examples from recent decades that could provide pause for thought over what can follow the death or departure of much-hated dictators, from civil war in Libya after the death of Muammar Gaddafi to the violent collapse of Iraq and the rise of Islamic State after the US-led invasion of 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein. The Iranian-born Israeli journalist and activist Orly Noy dismissed claims from Trump and Netanyahu that the attacks aimed to support Iranians fighting for change in their country. “It takes a considerable amount of naivety to believe that what matters to them is the wellbeing of the Iranian citizens, or support for their struggle to free themselves from this oppressive regime.” But there is little mainstream questioning of whether Israel’s use of military power is the best way to guarantee lasting security, Zonszein said. “It’s perplexing why Israelis aren’t having that conversation enough. I think over the last 20 years, Israelis have just been less and less interested in these deeper questions.” The public embrace of militarism is driven in part by Israel’s rapid economic growth and the expansion of its hi-tech military sector over recent decades, said Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa and director general of the country’s foreign ministry. “I often say it is impossible for Israel to live on the sword for ever, but there are very few Jews in Israel who think like me,” he said. “Forty or 50 years ago we were a very weak and small country in the Middle East. Israelis see ourselves now as at least a regional superpower. “People say: we are not 80 years old yet, and look how powerful this country is. Look how our economy survived these two and a half years of war. And look at our skyline, and look at the sales of arms all over the world.” Netanyahu has presided over that economic expansion and the military technology boom for much of the last three decades, and so is credited in part for both by many voters, Liel said. This latest war offers him a chance to bolster his legacy and his political standing before elections that must be held before October. Fierce domestic debate about responsibility for the 7 October 2023 attacks, which occurred on Netanyahu’s watch, was instantly set aside. Killing Khamenei, a leader who called for Israel’s destruction and sponsored a network of hostile groups across the region, makes it easier for the prime minister to campaign as a hardline security candidate. “For Netanyahu, there are two possible benefits that might be derived: a blow to Iran, and the possibility that this might tip the scales and usher him to victory in the elections,” Nadav Eyal wrote in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “Netanyahu probably does not draw any distinction between the strategic aspect and the political aspect, and that is putting things gently.” Trump’s request for Israel’s president to issue a pre-emptive pardon for Netanyahu in a long-running corruption trial may gather force if the war plays out in a way that the US and Israel can claim as victory. Some analysts sounded a note of caution that the war would bring election dividends for Netanyahu. “Despite all assumptions [Netanyahu] got no poll boost from the June war,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst. “It could be different this time but it is really important to watch surveys carefully because many commentators wrongly reported his coming triumph after June – and the polls just weren’t there.” Even if Netanyahu loses power this year, Israel’s wars of aggression inside occupied Palestine and against regional enemies are likely to continue, Zonszein said. “Until Israelis feel it in their pockets, or until there’s even more mass killings [of Israelis] or until the international community stops them, then it’s just going to keep going unfortunately.”

Foreign Office starts planning evacution of thousands of Britons in Middle East

The Foreign Office is drawing up plans to evacuate tens of thousands of British citizens if war in the Middle East escalates, with many travellers currently stranded in Dubai. The government does not know how many British nationals are resident, on holiday or otherwise travelling across the Gulf, but it said 94,000 have so far registered their presence in affected areas of the region. More than 50,000 of those are believed to be in the United Arab Emirates, and most of those are holidaymakers or other travellers, rather than residents, with Dubai a major tourist and business destination. Its airspace is currently closed, leaving tourists without a plan for getting home. The UK government’s advice is for people to follow local instructions, especially where it is to shelter in their current location. But the situation is uncertain and Whitehall sources said the government is looking at all options including evacuations via different routes if the airspace remains closed and tensions escalate. One possibility could be evacuation by road to neighbouring countries where the airspace remains open, such as Saudi Arabia. The Ministry of Defence is working with the Foreign Office on options as part of an unprecedented consular operation involving registering people across multiple countries to identify who may need support. The Foreign Office’s advice is against all travel to Iran, Israel and Palestine. It also advises against all but essential travel to the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, and there are further instructions to avoid travel to some parts of Pakistan. British nationals in Saudi Arabia are advised to stay at home, while those in Jordan, Oman, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq should take precautions given the heightened regional tensions. The foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, is expected to make her first remarks on the unfolding crisis on Monday after spending the weekend working on the response. She has been engaged in a major diplomatic push, speaking to her regional counterparts, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and other G7 foreign ministers. Keir Starmer issued a joint statement with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Sunday evening. It said the three countries were ready to take steps to defend their interests in the region after Iran’s “indiscriminate and disproportionate” missile attacks. “We will take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region, potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source,” they said. “We have agreed to work together with the US and allies in the region on this matter.” No 10 has refused to say whether the UK supports the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, but John Healey, the defence secretary, said on Sunday morning that few will mourn Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who died in the bombing. Healey described the Iranian regime as “evil” and said it had menaced the west by sponsoring at least 20 terrorist plots to attack the UK, as well as involvement in proxy wars. Pressed on the legality of the strikes, he said it was “for the US to set out and explain” whether its action was legal. He also refused to be drawn on the UK having the declined use of its military bases for the attacks. While distancing the UK from the strikes, Healey said the government’s role was now to act defensively. He said there was a “very real and rising threat from a regime that is lashing out across the region”, and that 300 UK troops had been within “a few hundred yards” of an Iranian strike on a base in Bahrain. Two missiles have also been fired in the direction of Cyprus, where thousands of UK personnel are stationed, although these are not believed to have been deliberately targeted at the British bases there. Speaking on Sky News, Healey said UK military planes were active in the Middle East in order to protect British citizens and interests across the region. Healey said Iran should get rid of its weapons and return to negotiation. Asked for his reaction to the killing of Khamenei, he said: “I think few people will mourn the ayatollah’s death, not least the families and friends of the thousands of protesters murdered on the streets of Iranian cities. “Iran and the regime he’s led for so long, it’s a source of evil – murdering its own citizens and sponsoring and exporting terror.” Healey said Iran was hitting out in an “indiscriminate” way, attacking hotels in Dubai and Bahrain, as well as an airport in Kuwait. The US and Israeli action has divided opinion in the UK. Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said the attack was in breach of international law and she was glad the UK was not involved. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, condemned the assassination of the ayatollah and told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that there was no justification for the bombing. In contrast, Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said it was “astonishing” that Starmer did not “step up” and offer more support to the US and Israeli operation. Reform UK’s Nigel Farage took a similar position, posting on X: “The prime minister needs to change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran!”

Iran’s military options limited as it tries to hit back at US-Israeli attack

In the grim calculus of war, Iran now has to hope it gets lucky. The first hours of the joint US-Israeli assault were catastrophic for the regime: the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, killed alongside, it is believed, the minister of defence, the head of the armed forces and the head of the powerful Revolutionary Guards. Iran knew its security apparatus had been compromised during the 12-day war of June 2025 when Israel killed a string of senior military commanders. During January’s street protests, Khamenei was moved away to a secure location for his own safety, yet on Saturday he felt safe enough to hold a security meeting in his compound in Tehran. The CIA had picked up on the meeting in advance and passed its intelligence to Israel. A handful of Israeli fighter jets flew for about two hours and struck the compound with around 30 long-range missiles. Though Khamenei had planned for his own death, naming a list of potential successors, and that of many of the country’s military and political leaders, requiring them to nominate people who could take over as many as four levels down, the reality can only be that Iran’s military response will be less coherent and coordinated after such a destabilising and demoralising loss of command and control. Waves of US and Israeli attacks are coming at a high pace. Initial reporting suggested the US carried out 900 strikes in the first 12 hours of the operation, while Israel claimed to have bombed 1,200 times in the first 24 hours. “The US and Israel are prioritising breaking Iran’s offensive capabilities and leadership,” said Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank. “The question is whether the Iranian regime can survive that and inflict enough pain regionally that brings that campaign to a halt.” Iran’s military options are limited. Its strategy has been to rely on Shahed drones and high-speed ballistic missiles to defend itself through retaliation, targeting Israel, US bases and the Middle Eastern countries where they are located. On Sunday, Oman, which had mediated in the failed nuclear talks with the US, became the sixth Arab country to be attacked when two drones targeted the Duqm naval base. The volume of retaliatory strikes has so far been substantial but in most cases they have been not very effective and they are likely to become less so. Three people were reported killed in the United Arab Emirates after Iran launched 165 missiles and 541 drones at the country, according to the UAE’s defence ministry. Of the drones, 35 got through defences and caused material damage, while the missiles did not. Tehran’s calculus appears to be that at some point a missile or drone will get through and cause enough damage to prompt a US or Israeli rethink, or that it has enough missiles and drones to exhaust US, Israeli and other air defences in the region. It is an attempt to learn from Ukraine, where complex salvoes of decoys, drones and missiles lead to a small number getting through. Nine people were killed and about 50 wounded when a missile hit a bomb shelter in the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, a serious incident but not enough to prompt any kind of rethink in a country used to deaths in conflict. In reality, the psychological impact of the strike on the Fairmont hotel in Dubai on Saturday may be more significant because of its effect on tourism in a country not used to being in the frontline. Jonathan Hackett, the author of a book on Iran’s covert warfare strategy, said Tehran had “between 1,500 to 3,000 ballistic missiles with various ranges and levels of readiness” but that they were being depleted rapidly. Israel counted that Iran fired 170 in the first day of the war. Before the latest fighting broke out, Iran was making a few dozen a month in sites located deep underground, but Israel and the US are targeting launch sites and manufacturing locations in the current bombing campaign. It is hard to see how it ballistic missile supply can last more than several days at volume, forcing Iran to switch to smaller and less effective Shahed and other drones. An obvious prize for Iran would be to hit a US warship, again emulating Ukraine’s extraordinary success against the Russian navy in the Black Sea, but it is likely to prove difficult to achieve. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday afternoon that they had targeted the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with four ballistic missiles, prompting a rapid social media rebuttal from the US military. “The missiles launched didn’t even come close,” Central Command said. Iran could once have counted on regional proxies, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, to strike at Israel, but most have been decimated in previous fighting, picked off by Israel one by one after Hamas’s attack in October 2023. The most capable left are Yemen’s Houthis, who have promised to resume attacks in the Red Sea, part of a wider effort to disrupt merchant shipping in the region. Iran’s best near-term hope is that it can prevent oil tankers from entering and leaving the Gulf through the strait of Hormuz, through a mixture of threats by radio and drone attacks. At least three tankers have already been damaged, including the MKD Vyom, on which one crew member was killed after it was struck by a suspected projectile off the coast of Oman. The goal is to try to impose economic costs on the US. A key moment will be how the oil price responds on Monday.

How Israeli sleight and US might led to the assassination of Ali Khamenei

The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was the culmination of decades of painstaking intelligence gathering by Israeli secret services, with crucial technological resources and manpower provided over the last six months by the CIA and other US intelligence services, that culminated in a single concentrated burst of lethal violence to decapitate the Iranian regime, according to experts, veteran spies and officials in Israel and the US. Khamenei was killed along with seven “members of the top Iranian security leadership who had gathered at several locations in Tehran” and around a dozen members of his family and close entourage in near-simultaneous strikes within 60 seconds, military officials in Israel said. Forty other senior Iranian leaders also died in the attack. The killing of Khamenei, 86, opened the air offensive launched this weekend by Israel and the US in an effort to overthrow the radical clerical regime in Tehran, plunging the Middle East into renewed chaos and violence. Some experts and intelligence veterans, however, described a possible strategic error that could alienate potential supporters or open the way for more radical opponents in the future. “The problem is that Israel is in love with assassinations … and we never learn that it is not the solution. We have killed all the leaders of Hamas. They are still there. It’s the same with Hezbollah. The leaders are always replaced,” said Yossi Melman, a respected Israeli analyst and author specialising in intelligence. Israel has a long history of conducting assassinations overseas, but has never before killed a head of state. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence service, said the strike was “a tactical surprise, an operational surprise” because the general expectation was that Israel would attack in darkness, replicating the surprise strike which opened the 12-day war in June. The timing of the assassination was determined by information the CIA gleaned about a meeting of top Iranian officials at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran scheduled for Saturday morning. Most critically, the CIA was able to tell Israeli counterparts that Khamenei would be at the site and the timing of the meeting, according to the New York Times. Israeli spies had also been tracking Khamenei for many years, building a minutely detailed file on his daily routine and those of his family members, associates, allies and those charged with keeping him safe. “It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle. You are putting all these scraps of information together. Where you don’t have [reliable data] you look further into those. It will be everything: how do they get food, what happens to their trash … We all get up and go to bed, we all eat and drink,” said a former CIA veteran with decades of experience in tracking high-profile terrorist targets. “We are in a world where information and data is so multi-layered that there is no one who doesn’t leave some kind of trail. Everything you do leaves a print.” Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA targeting officer who worked on Iran and an analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said the US would have been able to bring significant technological assets into play, though it was Israel that had built up the networks of agents on the ground capable of supplying human intelligence and carrying out covert operations within Iran. Gerecht said reports in the Israeli media that a photograph of Khamenei’s remains were shown to Donald Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were plausible. “The technological capacity of the US is extremely impressive and the tech does matter a lot, but I don’t think that the [CIA] had a lot to bring to the table in terms of [human intelligence] or covert action networks,” he said. “If you combine the technological capacity with the networks on the ground that would certainly amplify its effectiveness.” The Mossad, an abbreviation of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations in Hebrew, has been focussed on Iran for decades, and has built up deep networks of informants, agents and logistics there. This has allowed a series of operations including the assassination with a remote-controlled automatic machine gun of a top Iranian nuclear scientist travelling at speed in a car on a remote road, the infection with malware of computers running key parts of Iran’s nuclear programme and the theft of an archive of nuclear documents. The political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in 2024 with a bomb placed in his favourite room in a government guesthouse in Tehran. During the 12-day war in June, Israeli agents managed to identify the homes of Iranian nuclear scientists, intelligence officials and military commanders - information which allowed dozens to be killed in a first wave of surprise attacks. Melman said the Mossad had made a key change of strategy almost 20 years ago, deciding to recruit local agents within Iran who were given state-of-the-art equipment and high levels of training. David Barnea, who has led the Mossad since 2021, built a special department for a “foreign legion” of agents who have been deployed across the Middle East on sensitive missions. Such agents were easier to recruit in Iran, where many people were opposed to the ruling regime, than elsewhere, Melman said. Israel was poised to assassinate Khamenei last year, but Trump was reluctant to risk regional escalation and the reaction of allies concerned by the killing of a head of state. Such reservations appear to have disappeared in the months since the brief conflict last year, which ended shortly after US bombers attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. Israeli military officials said there had since been “really very enhanced cooperation” between Israel and the US on Iran. The flow of information from the Mossad’s networks on the ground in Iran would have been merged last week with intelligence gathered through communications intercepted by the US . “I wouldn’t be surprised if they locked on to a variety of means to track [Khamenei],” said Gerecht. “The Iranians are pretty sloppy. They love their phones. So maybe the supreme leader had a stack of burner phones but it’s about people he was calling regularly,.” Finally, information would have been fed through to the US and Israeli militaries to allow precise targeting information to be compiled and the orders to be given for that brief but deadly and destructive minute. “Sixty seconds. That’s all it took for this operation, but it is the product of years in the making,” said said Oded Ailam, a former head of the Mossad’s counterterrorism division and a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. “The modern battlefield is no longer defined only by tanks and aircraft. It is defined by data, access, trust, and timing. One minute can change a region.” The CIA veteran said they believed the assassination was a mistake: “I think it was the wrong thing to do. Not from an ethical perspective - I have been fine with killing people, a lot of them in fact - but from a long-term strategic perspective. “I know that when you take out someone’s leader you don’t solve the problem. You just create a new one.”

US allies and foes left scrambling as Trump catches them off-guard on Iran

A joint US-Israeli operation that appeared to use nuclear negotiations as cover. Gulf leaders courting Donald Trump as he decided to launch a major Middle Eastern intervention. Europe boxed out and a G7 defence minister caught so off-guard that he was grounded in Dubai as the bombs fell. And from Moscow, a strongly worded condemnation of the missile strikes against a fellow member of the anti-US “axis of upheaval” – and little else. The war unleashed by the US and Israel on Saturday has exposed the new rules of geopolitics in Trump’s second presidency, with strained alliances, unfettered militaries and a Washington that has regained its appetite for regime change. Despite an administration that claimed it would pull back from the Middle East and Europe in order to focus instead on the growing threat from China, the White House has toppled one leader in Latin America and has launched another war – that could easily become a regional conflict – with no clear plan for a transfer of power in Iran. The US’s closest European allies have been effectively pushed out of the decision-making – unable to influence Trump or even understand his future designs for Iran, allied leaders have walked a tightrope between condemning and condoning the attacks. Keir Starmer, who had said that the US would not be permitted to use a base at Diego Garcia for the strikes, has been criticised both by the left and right in the UK for his lukewarm support for Trump’s intervention. Emmanuel Macron claimed France was “neither informed nor involved” in the strikes. The EU’s first emergency security meeting will be held on Monday – more than 48 hours after the bombing began. Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, was on holiday with his family in Dubai when the US and Israel struck Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior political and military officials in an unprecedented attack. He had taken a day off to join his family there when the missiles struck. He claimed he had not taken by surprise, but that “the attack on Dubai … wasn’t considered among the hypotheses of Iranian response, in the timings and ways in which it occurred and materialised … because in the last crisis, more violent than this one, the emirates were excluded from the reaction and Dubai’s airport remained open.” The US had previously said it was engaged in negotiations with Tehran, but the strikes appear to have been a foregone conclusion. Senior US officials claimed they were prompted by the threat of Iran firing its ballistic missiles first. An Israeli defence spokesperson said the military campaign had taken advantage of an “operational opportunity” – people briefed on the operation said Khamenei had been at one of several meetings that were all targeted – but had been months in the planning. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had lobbied for months for the strikes, and as he called Trump on Saturday shortly after the bombs began falling, he had a hardcover title on his desk helpfully turned toward the camera: Allies at War. The Gulf countries had publicly warned against a strike, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had told the US that they would not allow their airspace to be used for the attacks. But the Washington Post reported that Riyadh had been playing a double game: publicly opposing military action while privately Mohammed bin Salman called Trump several times in the last month to advocate for the strikes. “The US has developed new allies now – if they are allies at all – which is the Gulf,” said Fiona Hill, a former member of Trump’s national security council and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a US thinktank. “The US was saying it’s no longer really interested in the Middle East – and that’s what the national security strategy was making clear as well. [But] it’s actually rooting itself in the Middle East even more.” Iranian missiles or drones have hit airports, luxury hotels and other civilian targets across the Gulf, with strikes reported in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The attacks have sparked outrage among Gulf governments, which are convening a meeting of foreign ministers on Sunday to discuss the crisis. Saudi Arabia has said it reserves the right to defend itself, raising the spectre of the conflict engulfing the region. “We are responsible and accountable for [the attacks], and so if we’ve done all we can in our defence and minimise the risk of damage from that, then I think we’re positioned for much stronger relationship and much stronger stability,” said Robert Harward, a retired vice-admiral who was at one point Trump’s choice for national security adviser, from Abu Dhabi. “It’s a gamble, but I think it’s a calculated gamble with the numbers in our favour.” After Khamenei was apparently killed in the opening salvoes of the war, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, hoping to find support in restraining the US-Israeli attack. In response, Lavrov issued a strongly worded statement condemning the attacks and calling for a “peaceful solution based in international law, mutual respect and balance of interests”. But Moscow could do little else to influence the Trump administration. Khamenei’s death is the latest setback for Russian allies across the world. Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was allied with Moscow before the US captured him, and Bashar al-Assad, a Russian client, was forced to flee Syria after his military collapsed last year. Trump has also signalled that the US may seek to carry out a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, another Russian ally. The war in Ukraine has taxed Russia’s resources, but the Kremlin has also found that the Trump administration’s rejection of the old rules of geopolitics have not necessarily played into its favour. “A Trump administration and the United States that is, in terms of military power, so much more powerful than Russia, and can do much more to go rogue and just act as it pleases is not good for Russia,” said Hanna Notte, a foreign policy analyst and the author of the upcoming We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West. “In the Middle East, Trump had rebuffed Putin’s offers to mediate and said ‘you settle your own war because you’re engaged elsewhere’,” she said. “And that has been kind of the theme of this administration vis a vis Russia. The hope that Russia might have had a year ago that it could work together with the United States in the Middle East hasn’t really panned out.”