A Regional War, With Options To Expand

Edited by Sam Thielman

BEFORE WE GET started with this edition, do we ever have a crossover deal for you!  My friend Jonathan Katz, an excellent reporter on U.S. imperialism, runs a newsletter you should be reading called The Racket. As it happens, he thinks his readers should be reading FOREVER WARS. So we've decided to make it easy for everyone. We're offering you an entire year of both our publications for the low, low price of $48. Call that the Lower 48. (I don't know.) If you don't already pay for FOREVER WARS, here's your offer—$2 less than the annual price with an entire other newsletter thrown in on top of that. You can't afford not to subscribe! [If you are already one of our treasured subscribers and not merely a future treasured subscriber, you can use this link to get a discount on a yearlong subscription to Jonathan’s newsletter.—Crazy Sam’s Discount Journalism, Crazy Sam, prop.]

ONCE AGAIN, DONALD TRUMP is learning that the Iranians are under no obligation to pause the war he started just because he needs a pause to reassure markets and slow the pace of U.S. interceptor firings. Yesterday, not long after Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced it had fired missiles at a U.S.-used airbase and a command center in Jordan. With Trump over the weekend holding off on continuing—and, indeed, escalating—what had been 12 days of airstrikes on Iran, al-Jazeera reported that the Iranian missile salvo seemed like a "pre-emptive attack, not a reactionary measure." Trump, angry and undoubtedly aware of his loss of control, vowed this morning to "beat the fucking shit out of them." 

The Jordan attack, and not only that one, shows that the battlefield is expanding inland—and adding combatants. It indicates Trump is trying to find military leverage to compel the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and, now, the Bab el-Mandeb, which Yemen's Ansarallah has closed to Saudi oil shipments. And, most frightening, it may not be done expanding. 

After Iran attacked the Jordan base, U.S. warplanes responded—but not against the Iranians. 

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) struck instead in eastern Iraq, against Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militias, apparently killing 20 militiamen and wounding 32 across seven Iraqi provinces. Those militias are sponsored by the Iranians, but many of them are integrated into the Iraqi military. Last week, the increasingly U.S.-aligned Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi visited Washington, where he was feted with $60 billion in U.S. oil-company contracts. When he visited the Pentagon, recall that FOREVER WARS wrote that "the presence of Iranian militias in al-Zaidi's country [would] be up for discussion." Chances are that this wave of retaliation had its origins in last week's meetings with the administration, as Trump told Fox News that the retaliation inside Iraq was coordinated with Baghdad. Iraq's president—not Prime Minister al-Zaidi—condemned the strikes and the "use of Iraqi territory as a launching point or battleground for attacks against neighboring countries." 

Crucially, it wasn't only the U.S. that bombed eastern Iraq. Joining CENTCOM were the Saudis, whose Abqaiq oil-processing facility—literally the world's largest—was burning on Monday. 

Attacking Abqaiq likely spooked the Saudis, who are being cagey about which facilities got hit, because it is very rare for Saudi warplanes to attack Iraq. (Just weeks ago, the Iraqi president who condemned this bombing said he wanted to deepen relations with his Saudi neighbors. And maybe al-Zaidi has canceled a visit to Saudi Arabia, but his condemnation of the bombing is notably muted.) Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't recall an instance when the Saudis have ever bombed Iraq—not during Saddam's time, the U.S. occupation nor the ISIS war; the Saudis tended to bomb ISIS in Syria. 

It's important to point out that no PMF have claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Saudis. Instead, they're saying they were struck on false pretenses, namely Saudi Arabia's "inability to respond to the painful Yemeni strikes." That's a reference to how Ansarallah (the Houthis) have hit Saudi tankers attempting to transit the Red Sea following the Saudis' latest bombardment of the critical port of Hodeida. Now the Iraq airstrikes represent the Saudis joining the war on two different fronts. Tomorrow, the Saudi defense minister will meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, when they'll surely discuss next steps.

Jordan and Iraq are not unknown battlefields for the Iran War, especially if we consider the war in the context of the post-October 7 U.S.-supported Israeli genocide, which set the region on fire. But it is conspicuous that Iranian retaliation was this time aimed there and was conducted by coalition partners, not the Iranians themselves. 

Throughout the five-month war, Iran has more typically targeted U.S. allies in the Gulf and shipping that doesn't follow Iranian routes through Hormuz. It's possible that these past 48 hours represent a blip in that larger pattern. Certainly the tankers that attempt the southern, Omani-coast route out of the strait will continue to be attacked. But it's also possible that Iran, which has to live with the Gulf states (and vice versa), might prefer giving Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the Emirates a breather—while simultaneously showing the U.S.-nuclear partner Saudis that the Iranian coalition has multiple ways of inflicting costs on Riyadh. Whatever the case, it's surely true that Iran wants to prompt the U.S. coalition to keep firing its missile interceptors, a critical asset that can't be replaced quickly or without inhibiting U.S. crisis response in Asia or eastern Europe.

And speaking of eastern Europe—be generous to me, geographically speaking, for the sake of this transition—by far the scariest escalation of the war occurred this weekend in the Caspian Sea. (Which, thank you, I know isn't in eastern Europe, but stay with me, transitions are difficult.) On Saturday, three days before President Volodomyr Zelensky met in Washington with Trump, Ukrainian drones fired on what the Iranians say was a civilian vessel and which the Ukrainians have implied were part of a shipment of Shahed-136 drones resupplying the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Unlike Jordan and Iraq, the Caspian has never been a theater of the Iran War, nor the broader post-October 7 conflict. 

Immediately fears rose that the failing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the failing U.S./Israeli war on Iran could become one giant war. Both Putin and Trump lack military leverage to achieve their goals, making escalation a simultaneously insane and enticing prospect. Quickly, the Ukrainians signaled they wanted no further confrontation and the Iranians sent the same signal back. But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also claimed that the Ukrainian attack was at "Israel's behest," indicating that either Iran isn't convinced the drone strike was a mistake or that Iran wants to give a brushback pitch to the Americans and Israelis before they get adventurous in the Caspian. 

That's a glimpse of just how apocalyptic this war can become. There is no mechanism at present to stop its growth. Between starting wars in both June 2025 and February 2026 under cover of nuclear negotiations, Trump has done all he possibly can to hollow out Iranian faith in diplomacy to secure an agreement ending the war. The Iranians aren't negotiating, despite what Trump has implied, and never agreed to a ceasefire outside of the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). They're instead relying on the infliction of sustained pain to restore their deterrent against the Americans and the Israelis. It's either a return to the MOU for Trump—a surrender document, to be clear—or the spiraling of the war, potentially into places it has yet to touch. 

CHINA TALK is entirely too sanguine about the world avoiding an oil shock emanating from the Iran War as opposed to being a looming, likely prospect for a war presently lacking a path to resolution. But today's edition also has an absolutely fascinating and new-to-me analysis of China's stabilizing role in forestalling such a crisis. "What we’ve seen in China is the largest swing of any country in history in its demonstrated capacity and need to consume oil — with virtually no repercussions for anything you use oil for," oil analyst Rory Johnston says. 

"This time," write Jordan Schneider and Phoebe Chow, "China cooperated and did the good thing, at least for the broad economic picture — but we cannot rely on that in the future, and that tool can be used against the West as easily as for it." This strikes me as yet another clear indication of the folly of seeking confrontation—no matter how much the China hawks want to dress that up as "competition," as if we don't know how World War I happened—with the rising power of the 21st century. 

I'VE BEEN EATING way too many ice cream sandwiches this summer. But nothing tastes as sweet as capitalist tears shed over the world-ending horror of their second homes being taxed. "A cabinet secretary, President Trump’s niece and an Oscar-nominated director have emerged as potential targets of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new tax on luxury second homes," begins a Wall Street Journal story. (Commerce Secretary and Epstein friend Howard Lutnick, Mary Trump and Darren Aronofsky.) The wealthy resent being singled out. Personally, I resent their manipulations of the local housing market and their recalcitrance at being taxed fairly. These people must be made to understand that taxing them represents a social compromise that they would be very, very wise to take. 

DID YOU SEE what was on this weekend's cover of the New York Times Book Review? That's right—it was a glowing review of The Midnight Special, the latest book by my brother from another mother, Colin Asher. Buy it right now.