The war’s transformation into a US-Iran war is the result neither of an imposition nor of a deliberate choice. As Washington shifted from military instruments to economic pressure, Israel’s influence over the course of the war diminished with it.

A Ukrainian strike in the Caspian Sea on July 25 hit an Iranian vessel and killed a crew member. Tehran threatened retaliation in the first days, then moved within four days from a military response to a demand for compensation. That retreat did not follow from any resolution of the dispute. The matter closed because both capitals chose to preserve the ambiguity surrounding it. Yet ambiguity worked as an escalation brake only under a particular set of conditions, and those co

What the ANA was in fact carrying is not yet known. The strategic message of the strike is clearer: for the Ukraine war, the geographical distance between Iran and Russia no longer provides strategic security on its own.

In mid-July, the United States resumed strikes on Iranian territory, sustaining them night after night. Iran has answered with missile and drone attacks on the Gulf states hosting American forces. Commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively ground to a halt, and war-risk insurance premiums have climbed to as much as 10% of a vessel's value. All of this has unfolded barely a month after a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed in Islamabad on June 17.

The targets struck on Iran’s coast point most clearly to a coercive operation aimed at seizing control over Hormuz. The same set of targets also makes a strike on hardened nuclear facilities militarily feasible.

The struggle around the Islamabad Accord is also a struggle over who will shape post-Khamenei Iran. The opponents’ objective is less to bring the accord down today than to set the terms of the sixty-day negotiating process.

The fate of the Islamic Republic will be determined not by military superiority alone but by the outcome of this longer and more uncertain struggle. It is precisely there that Israel has now turned all of its attention.

The first exchange of missile fire since the 8 April ceasefire is less a reignition of the war than a message. For Tehran an agreement is a necessity, not a preference; for Washington, only an agreement can reopen Hormuz.

Iran is fighting two wars at once, and they are not separate conflicts but two faces of the same one. The first is the military war now playing out in the air and across the country’s industrial heartland. The second is already being set in motion by these same strikes, yet it will become fully visible and will truly be lived, only after the guns fall silent. It is the war of the aftermath, the economic collapse, the social strain and the political reckoning that the destruct

The fundamental parameters of contemporary Greek politics were shaped in the post-1974 period known as the Metapolitefsi (Μεταπολίτευση, Regime Change). The collapse of the seven-year military junta was followed in short order by the abolition of the monarchy, the legalisation of the Communist Party and the establishment of the two main pillars of the party system that still operates today. The ideological map of today's Greek parties, the basic patterns of voter behaviour an

Islamabad’s mediating role has more to do with a reflex of threat management than with foreign policy gain. Five interconnected threats, from the western border to the energy bill, are shaping Pakistan’s response to the war.

The rallying-round-the-flag reflex of the war’s first phase is real, but the scale of infrastructure destruction is preparing a structurally deeper version of the delayed-instability pattern that followed June 2025.