“US Israel Iran War”

The U.S. and its allies have intensified the battle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, sending low-flying attack jets over the sea lanes to blast Iranian naval vessels and Apache helicopters to shoot down Iran’s deadly drones, American military officials said.

The stepped-up operation is part of a multistage Pentagon plan to reduce the danger from Iranian armed boats, mines and cruise missiles, which have halted ship traffic through the waterway since early March. If the danger can be reduced, the U.S. could send U.S. warships through the strait and eventually escort vessels in and out of the Persian Gulf.

U.S. forces are destroying Iranian naval targets that threaten international shipping in and near the Strait of Hormuz. pic.twitter.com/qR6FJyI5ZS

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 19, 2026

US President Donald Trump has issued a typically strongly worded statement in the wake of attacks on a major gas field shared by Iran and Qatar on Wednesday.

Israel hit Iran’s South Pars – part of the world’s largest natural gas field – and Tehran retaliated by striking an energy complex in Qatar. The attacks led to a spike in energy prices, and fuelled Trump’s wrath.

On his Truth Social media platform, Trump threatened Iran again and said he didn’t know about Israel’s plans for the attack.

Netanyahu dismisses suggestion US and Israel are out of sync

Prime Minister Netanyahu was seeking to pour cold water on any suggestion that Israel had influence over Donald Trump’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

In the US, there has been considerable domestic debate over the reasons why the US entered this war, and the role Israel played.

Anti-Trump voices on the left, and some anti-war voices on the right, are already calling the Iran War a “quagmire”— after less than three weeks of fighting. Whether you opposed or supported the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran when it was launched on Feb. 28, 2026, to contend that it has descended into a quagmire after 18 days of mostly overwhelming U.S. and Israeli military success betrays advanced stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Ironically, some of these same voices — intellectuals like William Kristol and Robert Kagan — served as cheerleaders for the Iraq War, an actual quagmire that they supported year after year despite its seemingly endless nature. 

IRANIAN NAVAL INFRASTRUCTURE STRUCK IN THE CASPIAN SEA.

Targets included:
• Iranian Navy vessels, including missile ships, support vessels boats, & guard ships.
• A port command center from which Iranian Navy forces controlled naval operations
• Central infrastructure used… pic.twitter.com/8sNiWJzf9k

— Israeli Air Force (@IAFsite) March 19, 2026

Canada is ready to “contribute to appropriate efforts” to resume safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a significant artery in international shipping undergoing a “de facto closure” amid the war in Iran.

That’s according to a joint statement released Thursday, co-signed by Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. The countries demanded that Iran halt its “threats, laying of mines, drone and missile attacks and other attempts to block the strait to commercial shipping.”

US President Donald Trump has threatened to blow up a major gas field in Iran if it attacks the US’s Gulf Arab ally Qatar again.

Trump’s threat came after a day in which Israel hit Iran’s South Pars – part of the world’s largest natural gas field. Tehran retaliated by striking an energy complex in Qatar, causing “extensive damage” and leading to a spike in energy prices.

While Israel has not officially confirmed its attack on the gas field, the US president said the US “knew nothing” about its ally, which had “violently lashed out” at Iran “out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East”.

U.S. forces are destroying Iranian naval targets that threaten international shipping in and near the Strait of Hormuz. pic.twitter.com/qR6FJyI5ZS

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 19, 2026

Tehran’s infamous “doomsday clock” was designed to count down to the annihilation of Israel in the year 2040. Instead, it appears finally to have ceased operating at the 2026 mark, along with many leaders of Iran’s extremist Islamic regime.

The irony of Iran’s rout by its two most-hated enemies — the “Great Satan” United States and the “Little Satan” Israel — must be seismic in Iran’s major centers, where much of the civilian population openly celebrates, not the end of Israel as intended by Shia clerics, but, instead, the hoped-for final days of an apparently much-hated regime.

As is the norm when political events in uncivilized places become violent, stock and related commodity prices become volatile and usually overreact. This has certainly occurred with oil prices responding to developments in the Iran war. The U.S. administration has already waived the Jones Act to facilitate the delivery of foreign oil in foreign ships to U.S. ports and announced increased supply from the Naval oil reserve.

The United States is now an energy self-sufficient country, so concerns within the United States itself about the oil price are unfounded. The current spike in California is entirely the responsibility of successive state governments conducting an unholy war on the oil industry that has caused a drastic reduction of California’s oil refining capacity. However, even California will not long be troubled by this burden.

President Trump said Wednesday the U.S. might finish off the Iranian regime and let countries that rely on the Strait of Hormuz as an oil-shipping channel deal with its security.

Mr. Trump mused about the possibility while he urged other nations to help clear Iran’s blockade of the waterway, which carries 20% of the world’s oil supply.

“I wonder what would happen if we ‘finished off’ what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called ‘Straight?’ That would get some of our non-responsive ‘Allies’ in gear, and fast!!!” he posted on Truth Social.

That’ll get their attention.

Four years and 24 days. Nineteen days. There’s a huge difference between those two numbers. The first numbers — 1,485 days altogether — is the length of time since Russian troops crossed the Ukraine border on Feb. 22, 2022, and headed for Kyiv. The second number — just 19 days — is the number of days since U.S. and Israeli forces on Feb. 28 began bombing strategic targets in Iran.

The two attacks have this in common: their initial responses were far different from what many experts, in the United States and beyond, expected and predicted.

U.S. drops 5,000-pound bunker busters on underground Iranian missile sites along the Hormuz coastline

CENTCOM confirms GBU-72 Advanced Penetrator bombs were used to destroy hardened Iranian anti-ship cruise missile sites threatening commercial shipping in the Strait.

Five… pic.twitter.com/b5Z5hMp4Ar

— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) March 18, 2026

An Israeli official confirmed Wednesday morning that the Israeli Air Force carried out an attempted targeted assassination against Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmaeil Khatib on Tuesday night.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed Khatib’s death, saying that Khatib had been “in charge of the Iranian regime’s mechanisms for murder and internal repression, and of advancing external threats.”

“Israel’s policy is clear and unambiguous: No one in Iran is immune, and they are all targets.”

The spectacular American military operation that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power earlier this year has inevitably inspired comparisons among strategists searching for solutions to the Iran crisis.

When Maduro was captured during a dramatic U.S. raid on January 3, 2026, it was widely seen as a striking demonstration of American resolve under President Donald J. Trump. Maduro’s removal loosened the Venezuelan dictatorship’s grip on power and triggered a rapid political recalibration in Caracas. Washington quickly secured commitments on oil production, financial transparency, and the partial restructuring of Venezuela’s state energy giant PDVSA. Oil production, which had collapsed from roughly 3.2 million barrels per day in 1998 to around 800,000 by late 2025 after decades of corruption and mismanagement, began a gradual recovery as U.S. energy companies moved to revive extraction in the Orinoco Belt, home to some of the world’s largest heavy-crude reserves.

European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels on Monday, trying to decide on a course of action going forward to maintain their well-earned reputations for cowardice without angering the Orange Man in Washington.

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump just ENDED UK PM Keir Starmer's whole career in the Oval Office

*Turns around*: "I'm DISAPPOINTED. You see that man right there? Know who that is? The late, great WINSTON CHURCHILL."

"Unfortunately, Keir Starmer is NOT Winston Churchill." 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/NZYqiWRMiz

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 17, 2026