We understand why Vance is concerned. If the reports from Iran’s official news agencies are correct, then he and the president have just capitulated to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Over the weekend, the Iranian state-run Mehrs News agency reported that over the 60-day negotiations period, Iran’s regime will receive $24 billion worth of unfrozen assets, $12 billion of which will reach their coffers before the talks even start.

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“The deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all,” he posted. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” The Secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed the naval blockade would end Sunday night, with the formal signing ceremony set for Friday in Switzerland—though the text of the memorandum has not been publicly released.

The agreement is not a full peace treaty, leaves 60 days to negotiate a fuller deal, and is the latest twist in a war that has reshaped the Middle East and roiled the global economy.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei alongside dozens of senior Iranian leaders and severely degrading Iran’s nuclear program. The war’s opening weeks were swift and overwhelming—what followed was anything but. Iranian retaliatory strikes have caused significant damage at U.S. military installations in the Middle East; 13 American service members were killed and hundreds more wounded; and the Pentagon has acknowledged the war has cost $29 billion, a figure other estimates put much higher. At home, the war has driven up prices. The new Iranian regime is even more hard-line than the one it replaced. A shaky ceasefire has been in effect for 10 weeks—and even on Sunday, an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs threatened to derail a deal entirely.

The agreement paves the way for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, with sanctions relief and billions in frozen assets on the table. What happens next is far from clear, but this struck us as an opportune moment to ask a range of contributors to weigh in on an urgent question: Was this war worth it? Their answers vary widely—and reflect the heated debate over the war that serves as the backdrop to the negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

Elliott Abrams: What Trump Could Still Throw Away

Whether the conflict with Iran has been worth it depends on the terms of the deal ending it, and Trump’s willingness to enforce them. Right now, both are very unclear.

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Don’t break out the ticker tape just yet. This is not a treaty, not a deal, and not a peace agreement. It’s a memorandum of understanding to negotiate the terms of a broader peace over the next 60 days. Put another way, it is yet another ceasefire. In this respect, the agreement does not achieve any of the aims that Trump laid out on February 28 when he launched the second Iran war with Israel.

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The honest answer is that it’s hard to tell—and that’s probably by design. Trump has repeatedly feinted toward peace before launching air strikes, and been loudest about escalation precisely when he was about to pull back. For a leader facing an adversary across a negotiating table, unpredictability is a genuine strategic asset. You don’t want your enemy to know where your lines are, when you’ll fold, or how far you’ll go. In that sense, the ambiguity is the point.

But there are signals worth reading. Vice President J.D. Vance and others around Trump are uncomfortable with the conflict—looking for ways to create distance from it, and in some cases, to assign blame for it to Israel. A New York Times story about alleged Israeli espionage on America, sourced to unnamed Pentagon officials, fits that pattern. A meaningful faction in Washington regards the war as a political liability and wants to find an exit.

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Yet Americans and soccer fans around the world might be wondering whether those games will be safe to attend. After all, it was only in February of this year that street shoot-outs and battles with drug gangs commanded the headlines.

Murder and mayhem ruled after the Mexican government took out drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”), leader of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The cartel’s response was swift and violent, most noticeably in tourist hot spot Puerto Vallarta, where parts of the coastal town were set on fire, roads were barricaded, and tourists had to shelter in place. The goal was to send a message to both the Mexican government and the United States, as it is rumored that the killing of Cervantes was aided by U.S. intelligence.

In spite of all that, the good news and the bad news is that Mexico probably will stay about as safe as it has been. So if you want to see the World Cup with especially enthusiastic crowds, this is a great chance to do so. (I can also vouch for the food in all three host cities.)

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But then I read the headline: Marjane Satrapi had died.

Four words. I read them, and then I read them again.

She had gained fame for her 2003 autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis—which, a few years later, was adapted into a film. She passed away Thursday at age 56. Her family said she died of sadness, more than a year after losing her husband, Mattias Ripa, the love of her life.

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Until recently, Trump’s strategy had been one consistent with his first term, where the United States organized a counter-Iran coalition among its traditional allies. Now he’s embraced an approach that strongly resembles the Obama-Biden way of dealing with the Middle East: restraining allies while seeking accommodation with Iran.

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It seemed possible. After he met with Xi Jinping, Trump informed reporters on board Air Force One that Xi was giving “very serious consideration” to Jin’s release.

Today, not only is Ezra Jin still in prison, but his lawyer, Guisheng Li, says he’s been cut off from Jin and that the pastor effectively has no contact with the outside world.

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Russia? Even for adventurous travelers, Russia is not at the top of many must-see lists in the summer of 2026. It is under heavy Western sanctions. Its major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, have been subject to semi-regular drone attacks in recent weeks. The State Department advises Americans not to travel there, and warns them that if they do go anyway, they will have their electronic devices hacked and may be kidnapped and held for ransom by the country’s all-powerful security services. So why visit?

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Qatar also owns nearly $15 billion of gas pipelines across Texas, part of the Empire State Building, and at least three condominiums in Trump World Tower near the United Nations headquarters. And it has invested as much as $800 million in businesses tied to top officials in the Donald Trump administrations, including former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and special envoy Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

The list of examples showing how Qatar has leveraged its tremendous wealth goes on and on—and has provoked worry and outrage for years about its influence over America’s most powerful people and institutions. A new report suggests the scale of the spending is even bigger than anyone realized.

According to an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Qatar, long a refuge for leaders of Hamas and a financier of Islamist terrorists, has poured over $400 billion into the United States since 2010. Those calculations build off of an investigation by The Free Press last year, which uncovered almost $100 billion in spending by Qatar over the past two decades. The Free Press analysis included six sectors where Qatar has spent money, while the FDD examined over a dozen.

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Against this backdrop, President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order asking some AI companies to allow the government to review powerful new models 30 days before releasing them to the public—a scaled-back version of an order originally scheduled for last month.

Today, historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson argues that for all its potential for good, the rapid and largely unregulated growth of AI doesn’t just threaten to render us obsolete; it has sparked the most dangerous arms race in history between the U.S. and China. And, like the nuclear arms race before it, he warns, the dangers it poses will not expire of their own volition. —The Editors

In 1957, Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. The book clearly identified the central problem of the nuclear age: that any strategy of brinkmanship based on the threat to use strategic nuclear weapons created such a high risk of Armageddon that it lacked credibility. Though flawed in the eyes of its many critics, it was a seminal work that established his reputation as a strategic thinker at a time of public uncertainty as the Cold War escalated.

Seven decades later, at another moment of uncertainty and escalation, we desperately need someone like Kissinger to write Artificial Intelligence and Global Security.

The unfolding history of artificial intelligence has now arrived at what may be its most dangerous moment. There are two barely controlled AI races, one between around five American companies—Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and xAI lead the field—and the other between the two geopolitical superpowers: the United States and China, with its own competing companies.

The leadership of the competitors in this race is, to say the least, of mixed quality. The chief executives of the most important companies include at least one with a record of duplicity, and at least two egomaniacs. Meanwhile, the president of the United States is a former real estate developer and reality TV star, roughly half of whose public utterances are mere bluffs, and the leader of the People’s Republic of China is a Marxist-Leninist who aspires to eclipse Mao Zedong as a dictator.

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Cast your mind back exactly six years. It is the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing what its commentariat breathlessly described as a “reckoning.” The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, thousands of miles away, sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets. As American cities burned, across the pond, statues were toppled. Multinational corporations issued groveling statements. Police officers—British police officers, in British cities, policing British people—took a knee before British protesters. So did Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition and now prime minister. So did every major soccer team in the country. People were fired, companies changed, a new code of acceptable behavior was drawn up. Life in Britain changed, if not quite as much as it did across the Atlantic.

The message that was repeated endlessly by politicians, journalists, and institutions of every stripe was unambiguous: Racism kills, and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.

Five years later, last December, an 18-year-old student named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times on a Southampton street after an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding, he told police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what had happened: He had been stabbed. Vickrum Digwa, who was standing nearby, and his brother told the officers something else: that Digwa had been the victim of a racist attack.

On the call to police, Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, said to the dispatcher, “We’ve just been attacked by . . .”, paused, then finished, “someone racially.”

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Piker, Uygur, and their defenders naturally rushed to blame Britain’s decision on Israel. Without a shred of evidence, anti-Zionist activist and sometime journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed the entry denial was “solely because they criticize and oppose the one country deemed sacred and off-limits.” Uygur said his criticism of Israel was likewise the culprit, while Piker said his ban was “at the behest of Israel.”

The suggestion that Israel is “sacred and off-limits” to criticism in the UK or anywhere else is, of course, laughable. For one thing, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood—the government minister responsible for the decision—has long been an outspoken critic of the Jewish state. And it’s not like Piker is some low-key supporter of Palestinian rights. He has claimed that Israel is far worse than Hamas, justified both the October 7 and September 11 attacks, and is now the subject of a U.S. inquiry into his recent trips to Cuba and China, where he used social media to evangelize on behalf of the totalitarian regimes.

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It’s easy to get lost following the complexities and twists of this drama, but the basic reason the negotiations and the leaks about the supposed progress of negotiations toward a happy resolution keep dragging on is simple: The two sides’ current demands are irreconcilable.

Iran, having seized control of the Strait of Hormuz at the beginning of the conflict, doesn’t want to give it back. The United States wants a return to the status quo in the key waterway. Iran also wishes to rebuild a nuclear program from its current rubble-ized conditions, though it appears willing to accept some form of time-limited restrictions in return for large amounts of money. This structure is, of course, the same as that of President Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy, and such a deal would be politically painful for President Donald Trump to sell to Senate Republicans. (It would also be subject to review by Congress.) The president also wants Iran’s highly enriched uranium brought out of the country or rendered safe under international supervision. The Iranians appear to be in no hurry to agree to this.

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What are we to make of it all? To bring clarity on where the war is—and what to expect next—we turn to historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. —The Editors

Like all our fellow citizens, Rieux . . . was torn between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks out, people say, “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. —Albert Camus, The Plague, part I, chapter 5

Since February 28, we have experienced the geopolitical equivalent of a roller-coaster ride on magic mushrooms. We hurtled from Operation Epic Fury to Operation Economic Fury to Project Freedom to no fury at all, and not much freedom of navigation either. We sped from the impending obliteration of Iranian civilization to “a Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE . . . largely negotiated, subject to finalization.” If you have not experienced the psychological equivalent of whiplash in the last 12 weeks, you have not been paying attention. How many nearly-peace nearly-deals have we nearly had? Four? Five?

On Sunday, there was once again media speculation that a deal to end the war was close to being done. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, quoting an unnamed “U.S. official,” Donald Trump’s nearly-but-not-quite-finalized, still-could-fall-apart draft memorandum of understanding (MOU) had seven key elements:

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Trump faces attacks from both directions at once. Republican allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham fear an ignominious retreat. “If a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict because it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism,” Graham warned on X over the weekend, “then Iran will be perceived as being a dominate [sic] force requiring a diplomatic solution.” Such an outcome, he added, “will be a nightmare for Israel.” Meanwhile, Democrats who opposed the war from the start depict the move toward diplomacy as an admission of futility. Senator Chris Van Hollen gloated that the emerging framework amounts to “a return to the prewar status quo.”

Adversaries claim that Trump’s diplomacy vindicates their depiction of the war as needless and reckless, while supporters demand an unconditional victory he cannot realistically deliver. Both sides misrepresent the strategic logic of the moment.

The Democratic critics refuse to acknowledge the war’s substantial achievements, foremost among them the severe degradation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and one of the leading independent experts on nuclear proliferation, assesses that Tehran went from near-certainty of the ability to build a nuclear weapon within months, to facing far longer timelines with substantially lower odds of success.

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Leaks in the press suggest that the U.S.-Iran agreement would compel Trump to give Iran an economic lifeline in exchange for opening the strait. Republicans have panned the early reported details of the deal. Senator Ted Cruz posted on X that the war would be a “disastrous mistake” if it ended with “an Iranian regime—still run by Islamists who chant ‘death to America’—now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz.”

Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said early reports of the agreement “seem straight out of the Wendy Sherman-Robert Malley-Ben Rhodes playbook,” referencing three senior Obama administration officials who helped craft the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. This prompted White House director of communications Stephen Cheung to implore Pompeo to “shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.”

But Trump is hearing it from all parts of his coalition. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on Sunday warned the president via X that the Iranian regime is lying, and that the $25 billion that the U.S. is reportedly offering in sanctions relief and unfrozen assets would be paying “tribute” to a terrorist regime. Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, posted Saturday on X: “The rumored 60-day ceasefire—with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith—would be a disaster.” Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham has warned throughout the weekend that ending the war now would give Iran a victory they did not earn on the battlefield.

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There has been no accountability for, and little public memory of, this heinous crime. In fact, in popular culture, the main representation of the incident has it factually and morally backward. In 2020, Netflix released Wasp Network, a dishonest film about a Cuban spy ring that helped enable the killing of the four men. The fictionalization turned Cuban intelligence agents into patriotic underdogs and treated the men they killed as an inconvenient subplot, which helped cement a misleading public memory of a murder, especially among viewers too young to remember the case.

This week, 30 years after the shoot-down, the U.S. government took an important step toward setting the record straight. The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment charging Raúl Castro and five co-defendants with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. This indictment has been interpreted by the press as a sort of presage to future military or diplomatic action by the Trump administration in Cuba, a pretext for whatever the next dramatic turn in Trumpian foreign policy may be. But the actual substance of the indictment should not be ignored.

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The Cuban revolution has become detached from its own history yet continues to grind on, mechanically, as a sort of theme park of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism. It’s the land of animatronic revolutionaries, where tourists, to their amazement, can experience the political repression, economic misery, and infrastructure collapse invariably produced by this system. The parades and slogans are still there, but the feeling has died.

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When Kabuga was finally arrested, authorities reportedly found passports and identity documents from multiple countries in his name, a testimony to the international complicity that allowed one of the world’s most wanted fugitives to disappear in plain sight for so many years. He had apparently lived, over the years, in Kenya and France, operating with relative freedom and allegedly enabled by his family, his network of Hutu extremists, and his vast personal wealth.

At The Hague, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), the body set up to handle unfinished cases from the genocide of the Tutsi and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, charged Kabuga with seven counts related to the genocide. Prosecutors alleged Kabuga, a prominent and wealthy Rwandan businessman, was a principal financier of the extremist militias that carried out the genocide. They accused him of using his position as a founder of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) to incite violence and mass participation in the genocide by broadcasting anti-Tutsi propaganda, describing the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” He was also accused of financing importation and distribution of machetes used during the killings.

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