U.S. and Nigerian forces have killed Abu Bilal al-Minuki, described as the second-in-command of the Islamic State group worldwide, according to an announcement Friday by U.S. President Donald Trump.
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Following over a month of escalating hostilities, Washington and Tehran agreed to a Pakistan-brokered, two-week ceasefire on April 8. This pause in the conflict presents a major opportunity to re-establish diplomatic channels between the two governments, enabling the possibility of ever reaching a bilateral agreement beneficial to both sides. However, the final outcome rests entirely on the actions of the involved actors.
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THE MIDDLE EAST, Apr. 7 – The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire, offering a pause and potential off-ramp in the fast-growing regional war that had threatened to further disrupt global energy markets. The agreement, announced by President Donald Trump, was brokered by Pakistani mediators and is tied to Iran’s commitment to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping.
The truce emerged only hours before Mr. Trump’s deadline for potential strikes against Iranian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges. Mr. Trump said the U.S. would suspend offensive operations for two weeks, describing the ceasefire terms as a workable basis for broader negotiations. Iranian officials, however, framed the deal more cautiously, signaling that Tehran views the pause as conditional and temporary rather than as a final solution. Reuters reported that Iran had demanded a full halt to U.S. strikes, guarantees against future attacks, compensation for war damages, and recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium as conditions for any lasting peace.
The Strait of Hormuz is central to the current deal. The waterway handles a significant share of the world’s maritime oil traffic, and its disruption had spiked the price of crude oil and intensified fears of a wider economic crisis. News of the ceasefire sent oil prices lower and lifted financial markets, reflecting investor hopes that the agreement could prevent any further crisis.
Still, the ceasefire’s feasibility is far from certain. The Associated Press and Reuters both reported that military activity and missile alerts continued in parts of the region and in Israel even after the announcement, underscoring the difficulty of translating high-level diplomatic understanding into an immediate halt on the ground. Israel, according to multiple reports, has also been folded into the arrangement, though fighting linked to Hezbollah and other regional fronts has not fully stopped.
For now, the agreement is offering a narrow off-ramp rather than a lasting peace. The two-week pause may create space for negotiations in Islamabad and further back-channel diplomacy, but the gap between Washington’s call for a temporary halt and the opening of the Strait, and Tehran’s demand for permanent guarantees, remains substantial. Whether this is the start of a broader settlement or just a brief interruption in the conflict will likely depend on what happens next in both the Strait of Hormuz and the negotiations in Islamabad.
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Iran’s revolutionary government didn’t just defy the West for four decades. It used the West’s own rulebook against it, and for a long time, it worked.
There is a version of the Iran story that gets told as a drama of rogue states versus the civilized order: Iran defying the world, the world pushing back, the cycle repeating. That version is comfortable because it implies the international community was doing its best against a difficult adversary. The less comfortable version, the one the evidence actually supports, is that Iran played the system brilliantly, exploiting every procedural tool the liberal international order offered, and bought itself roughly four decades of strategic time in the process.
The nuclear program that today sits weeks away from weapons-grade breakout was built largely in the gaps between negotiating rounds. The proxy empire that armed Hezbollah, funded Hamas, trained the Houthis, and reached deep into Iraq was expanded most aggressively during the periods of greatest diplomatic engagement. None of this happened by accident. It was a strategy, and it was executed by people who understood Western institutions from the inside out, because many of them had studied and worked in the West themselves.
The Islamic Republic’s founding generation wasn’t made up of clerics who stumbled into international diplomacy. Its first foreign policy apparatus was stocked, deliberately, with Iranians who had spent years inside American and European universities: people who understood how international law worked, how UN procedures could be used, and what Western governments needed to see in order to justify not acting.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, the man who would lead Iran’s nuclear negotiations for two decades and become the face of the 2015 nuclear deal, earned his bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State, then his master’s and PhD in International Law and Policy at the University of Denver in 1984 and 1988. He had lived in the United States for roughly 30 years. He had chaired the UN General Assembly’s Legal Committee and presided over the UN Disarmament Commission, the body that coordinates the global nonproliferation regime. He knew exactly how the machinery worked. More to the point, he knew where the gears jammed.
He wasn’t alone. Mostafa Chamran earned a PhD in plasma physics from UC Berkeley, then worked at Bell Laboratories and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before returning to become Iran’s first defense minister. Ebrahim Yazdi held a PhD in biochemistry from Baylor College of Medicine, served as a cancer researcher in Houston, then returned to become foreign minister. Sadegh Ghotbzadeh had studied at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and served as Khomeini’s English-language translator during his Paris exile. Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran’s first post-revolution president, studied economics and finance at the Sorbonne, where he later taught.
Khomeini used these figures strategically in the early years as a “democratic façade,” presenting moderate, Western-educated faces to international media while the theocratic structure consolidated behind them. Most were eventually purged, exiled, or executed once that function was no longer needed. But the institutional knowledge they represented didn’t disappear. It migrated into a second generation, and nowhere more consequentially than in Zarif, whose career from 1982 to 2021 was essentially a master class in exploiting the language and mechanisms of international law against the countries that created it.
Before getting into the nuclear program specifically, it’s worth understanding the legal infrastructure Iran built around itself, because that infrastructure was not defensive. It was offensive.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which functions as the United Nations’ supreme court for disputes between countries, became a recurring stage for Iranian grievance theater. Iran filed or participated in at least six major cases anchored primarily in the 1955 Treaty of Amity with the United States. The irony was thick: this was the same treaty Iran had declared void during the 1979 hostage crisis, but later resurrected as a legal vehicle the moment it became useful. The Oil Platforms case dragged through the court for eleven years (1992 to 2003). A 2018 case over JCPOA-related sanctions won Iran provisional measures ordering the U.S. to lift restrictions on humanitarian goods. A 2016 case over $1.8 billion in seized assets resulted in a 2023 ICJ ruling that the U.S. had violated four treaty obligations. None of these cases ultimately changed Iran’s behavior in any meaningful way. But they accomplished something more valuable: they kept Iran positioned as a victim of Western aggression in international forums, complicated the moral case for pressure, and consumed diplomatic bandwidth for years at a stretch.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the international agreement designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and signed by nearly every country on earth, provided a different kind of cover. Iran ratified it in 1970 as an original signatory and signed its safeguards agreement with the IAEA in 1974. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is essentially the UN’s nuclear watchdog, responsible for verifying through inspections and monitoring that countries are not secretly building weapons. For the next three decades, Tehran cited Article IV of the NPT, which guarantees the “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear energy, as legal justification for an enrichment program that had no plausible civilian rationale at the scale Iran was pursuing. NPT membership meant Iran could always frame Western attempts to restrict its enrichment as treaty violations, putting adversaries perpetually on the defensive in any legal or diplomatic forum.
The pattern was identical across every institution Iran engaged: join, invoke rights, generate procedural timelines that outlast political attention, use favorable rulings as legitimacy tools, ignore unfavorable ones. When the ICJ ordered Iran to release American hostages in 1980, Tehran simply didn’t comply. When the ICJ ruled in Iran’s favor decades later, Tehran publicized it globally.
The nuclear concealment operation ran for nearly two decades before anyone on the outside caught up. Iran hid a centrifuge enrichment program for 18 years and a laser enrichment program for 12 years, not from a determined inspection regime, but in plain sight of one that lacked the political will to push hard enough.
The secret wasn’t broken by inspectors. It was broken by Iranian dissidents. On August 14, 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran held a press conference in Washington publicly revealing secret uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and a heavy water production facility near Arak. When IAEA inspectors visited Natanz in February 2003, they found 160 centrifuges ready for operation with 1,000 more under construction, built eight meters underground beneath 7.6 meters of reinforced concrete, explicitly designed to survive aerial bombardment. Environmental samples came back positive for particles of both low-enriched and highly enriched uranium. Iran’s explanation, that contamination had come from its supplier, strained credulity even at the time.
The Fordow facility, buried 80 meters deep inside a mountain near Qom on a former IRGC missile base, was secretly constructed beginning around 2006. Iran disclosed it to the IAEA in September 2009, but only after learning that American, British, and French intelligence had already detected it. President Obama revealed it publicly four days later. By 2023, the IAEA detected uranium enriched to 83.7% at Fordow, just below the 90% weapons-grade threshold. Iran called it an “unintended fluctuation.”
At Parchin, a vast military complex spread across 40 square kilometers, the IAEA documented evidence of high-explosive experiments with an inert depleted uranium core, the kind of tests associated with designing a nuclear implosion weapon. When the agency requested access in 2012, satellite imagery showed buildings being demolished, earth displaced, and fresh asphalt laid over suspected test sites. Environmental sampling in 2015 found chemically man-made particles of natural uranium, contradicting Iran’s claim the building had been used for conventional chemical storage.
The IAEA formally found Iran in noncompliance with its safeguards agreement in September 2005 (GOV/2005/77). It would not issue a second noncompliance finding for another 20 years, until June 2025, during which interval Iran mastered enrichment at every level relevant to weapons production.
The most damning account of Iran’s negotiating strategy doesn’t come from Western intelligence assessments. It comes from Iran’s own chief nuclear negotiator, on Iranian state television.
Hassan Rouhani, who ran Iran’s nuclear negotiations from 2003 to 2005 before later becoming president, gave a remarkably candid interview before the 2013 presidential election. He called it “a lie” that everything had been suspended under his watch during the EU-3 talks. The EU-3 was the joint European negotiating group of Britain, France, and Germany, which engaged Iran in a two-year diplomatic process from 2003 to 2005. Rouhani went further, saying: “We halted the nuclear program? We were the ones to complete it!” He boasted that centrifuge numbers had reached 3,000 by the winter of 2004, during the supposed suspension period.
In an earlier 2005 speech, he was even more direct about the mechanics. While negotiations were ongoing in Tehran, Iranian engineers were simultaneously installing equipment at the Isfahan uranium conversion facility, the critical step that converts yellowcake uranium into the gas that feeds enrichment centrifuges. He described the negotiations as creating “a calm environment” that allowed the work to proceed uninterrupted.
The timeline confirms every word of it. Iran signed the Tehran Declaration in October 2003, agreeing to suspend enrichment and cooperate with inspectors, moves that prevented referral to the UN Security Council. The Paris Agreement in November 2004 formalized the suspension, but Iran characterized it as “voluntary” and “non-legally binding.” By August 2005, Iran unilaterally resumed uranium conversion at Isfahan. The negotiations had prevented Security Council referral for more than two years, during which Iran mastered the key technical steps it needed. When the IAEA finally referred Iran to the Security Council in February 2006, the technological fait accompli was already established. A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory analysis concluded bluntly that while Iran violated successive agreements, the talks created “an appearance of Iranian cooperation that lessened the U.S. case for military action.”
The 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was the culmination of years of Iranian diplomatic strategy, and it delivered real concessions in both directions. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was cut by 97%, from roughly 10,000 kilograms down to 300. The number of operating centrifuges was reduced from about 19,000 to 5,060. Breakout time was extended from an estimated two to three months to at least twelve. In exchange, Iran received access to frozen assets and the lifting of most international sanctions, along with daily IAEA inspector access to declared sites.
But the deal’s architecture contained features Iran was well positioned to exploit. Sunset clauses would lift centrifuge limits by 2026, enrichment caps by 2031, and all monitoring of uranium ore processing by 2041. The ballistic missile program, the delivery vehicle for any future warhead, was excluded from the agreement entirely. The dispute resolution mechanism for requesting access to suspicious sites allowed up to 24 days of delay before any inspection could be compelled. Iran’s leadership consistently declared military sites categorically off-limits. As of August 2017, the IAEA had not visited a single Iranian military site since Implementation Day.
Technical boundary-pushing during the JCPOA period was documented repeatedly. Iran exceeded its heavy water cap (a type of water used in certain reactor designs that can produce weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct) twice. Centrifuge numbers at times exceeded agreed limits. The Arak reactor core, supposedly neutralized by filling key pipelines with cement, was later admitted by Iran’s own atomic energy chief to be “easily reactivatable.” German intelligence reported Iran attempted more than 100 times in 2015 and 2016 to procure illicit nuclear and missile technology while the deal was in force.
The most consequential dimension of the JCPOA period wasn’t nuclear. It was financial.
Iran’s annual funding to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political organization that functions as Iran’s most capable and longest-standing regional proxy, rose from an estimated $100 to $200 million before the deal to roughly $700 million per year by 2018, per U.S. Treasury estimates. That represented approximately 70% of Hezbollah’s total annual budget. Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah didn’t hide it: he said publicly that Hezbollah’s budget, salaries, weapons, and rockets, came entirely from the Islamic Republic, and that as long as Iran had money, Hezbollah had money.
The Iranian oil export revenue numbers explain the mechanics directly. After JCPOA implementation, exports climbed to 2.5 to 2.8 million barrels per day, and oil earnings peaked at roughly $50.8 billion in 2018. Congressional testimony documented that military spending soared in direct proportion. The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) is Iran’s ideologically driven parallel military force, distinct from the regular army, that controls the proxy network and operates its own economic empire inside Iran. Its share of Iran’s defense spending grew from 27% in 2013 to 37.3% by 2023.
Beyond Hezbollah, the money flowed widely. Iranian funding to Hamas, the Gaza-based militant group that has governed the territory since 2007, reached an estimated $70 to $100 million annually. Afghan and Pakistani Shia militias were built from dozens of fighters into full military formations. Iran deployed over 100,000 Shia fighters to Syria to save the Assad regime, at an estimated cost of $6 to $15 billion per year. Houthi capabilities in Yemen expanded dramatically, with Iranian arms shipments documented through repeated naval interdictions. One IRGC deputy commander eventually acknowledged Iran had spent nearly $20 billion cumulatively on regional proxy activities. Every dollar of sanctions relief that flowed into Tehran moved downstream through the Quds Force, the IRGC’s external operations branch responsible for managing proxy relationships abroad, to its partners within months.
The Trump administration’s approach to Iran represented a structural break from every previous administration in one specific respect: it refused to engage the delay mechanism. Where previous governments, Republican and Democrat alike, had treated the nuclear file as separable from missiles and proxies, and accepted constrained enrichment as a realistic diplomatic achievement, the Trump team demanded comprehensive behavioral change across all fronts simultaneously and imposed maximum economic pressure without waiting for negotiations to conclude.
On May 8, 2018, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, citing sunset clauses, the exclusion of the missile program, insufficient inspection access, and the use of sanctions relief to fund terrorism. Sanctions were reimposed in two tranches in August and November 2018, and by April 2019, all remaining oil import waivers had been revoked. The administration ultimately imposed more than 1,500 sanctions designations on Iranian individuals and entities. In April 2019, the IRGC was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the first time any component of a foreign government received that designation, meaning any material support to the IRGC became a criminal matter under U.S. law, not merely a sanctions violation.
The economic impact was severe and measurable. Iranian oil exports collapsed from roughly 2.7 million barrels per day to as low as 400,000 to 500,000 by late 2019. Oil revenue fell from $50.8 billion in 2018 to $6 billion in 2020, an 88% decline. GDP contracted five to six percent annually in 2018 and 2019. The rial lost approximately 80% of its value on the parallel market. Iran cut its military budget by nearly 25% in 2019.
The downstream effects on proxy funding were visible and documented in real time. In March 2019, Nasrallah made an unprecedented public appeal for donations, acknowledging financial difficulties were “a result of this financial war.” Hezbollah fighters received only half their normal salaries. Roughly 1,000 offices were shuttered across Lebanon. Donation boxes appeared in Beirut neighborhoods, something previously unthinkable for an organization that had always projected financial strength. In Iraq, Quds Force commander Esmail Ghaani reportedly arrived at militia meetings carrying silver rings instead of cash, a widely noted distress signal that made the rounds among analysts covering the region.
The key structural distinction was that the maximum pressure campaign didn’t give Iran a diplomatic off-ramp that could be used to generate delay. Secretary of State Pompeo’s 12 demands, issued in a May 2018 speech, required Iran to permanently abandon enrichment, grant unqualified IAEA access to all sites including military ones, end all support to regional proxy groups, withdraw from Syria, and cease ballistic missile development. These demands were not a negotiating opening position. They were framed as prerequisites, and the administration was not offering another round of talks that could be used to buy time.
The January 3, 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport was the most consequential single U.S. action against Iran’s regional network in decades. Soleimani had commanded the IRGC-Quds Force for over twenty years and was widely considered the second most powerful figure in Iran after Supreme Leader Khamenei. He didn’t just manage the proxies. He built them. He personally maintained relationships with Nasrallah in Beirut, with militia commanders in Baghdad, with Houthi leadership in Sana’a, and with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. His operations in Iraq since 2003 were linked to the deaths of more than 600 American personnel. He coordinated the September 2019 drone and cruise missile strike on Saudi Aramco facilities that temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity.
His successor, Esmail Ghaani, inherited the title but not the relationships or the operational instincts that had made Soleimani irreplaceable. West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center assessed the killing as “a significant loss of capability and experience” while cautioning that the damage was not permanent. The proxy network had been embedded and institutionalized over decades, retaining operational autonomy independent of central direction. The multi-front Iranian proxy campaign that followed October 7, 2023, with Hezbollah attacking Israel’s north, Houthis blocking Red Sea shipping, and Iraqi militias targeting U.S. bases, demonstrated that the architecture survived its architect.
Iran’s four-decade strategy rested on a single insight that its Western-educated diplomats understood better than most: multilateral institutions move slowly, and the procedural requirements of international law create time that a determined actor can turn into strategic advantage. Rouhani didn’t just happen to stall during the EU-3 talks. The IAEA didn’t just happen to spend years seeking access to Parchin while Iran cleaned it up. These were predictable outcomes of a system Iran had studied carefully and knew how to navigate.
The record, taken whole, is unambiguous on its own terms. The chief nuclear negotiator boasted on state television that talks were used to complete nuclear infrastructure. Hezbollah’s budget tripled during the JCPOA’s sanctions relief period. The IAEA documented 18 years of concealed enrichment. Every major diplomatic engagement period coincided with proxy expansion. Measured purely by the question of time bought, the strategy delivered.
The Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign demonstrated that the strategy had a structural vulnerability: it depended entirely on Western willingness to keep engaging. When Washington withdrew from the JCPOA, designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization, and killed Soleimani, it bypassed the institutional delay mechanisms Iran had spent decades learning to exploit. The economic damage was real. The 88% oil revenue collapse, the Hezbollah austerity, and the Hamas budget cuts were all documented in real time. But the approach also carried its own cost: without the JCPOA’s monitoring architecture, Iran’s nuclear breakout time collapsed from over twelve months to approximately one week by 2023, and its enriched uranium stockpile grew to levels sufficient for more than a dozen weapons.
The deeper lesson may be that Iran didn’t so much “win” as expose a gap in the international order, one where procedural legitimacy and actual compliance are easy to conflate, and where a state actor willing to treat institutional membership as camouflage rather than commitment can exploit that gap indefinitely. Iran’s Western-educated diplomats understood that gap from experience. They spent four decades driving through it.
Last Saturday, Yemeni Houthi forces carried out a ballistic missile strike against Israel, triggering sirens over Beersheba and surrounding towns, entering the equation after declaring their firm support for the Islamic Republic.
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The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and carrying approximately one-fifth of global seaborne oil and significant LNG volumes has been effectively closed since early March 2026 amid the ongoing US-Israel military campaign against Iran (initiated 28 February 2026). Iran declared the waterway closed to vessels linked to the US, Israel and allies, with 21+ confirmed attacks on merchant ships and counting (causing at least 11 seafarer deaths/missing and multiple abandonments), threats of further strikes, and retaliatory hits on regional energy infrastructure.
This has driven tanker traffic to near-zero, down from ~153 daily transits pre-crisis, prompting Gulf producers to cut output as storage limits are met. This has spiked global oil prices beyond 2022 highs (briefly exceeding $100/bbl) and forced rerouting or suspension by major shippers. US responses include strikes on Iranian naval assets, destroying a large portion of its regional naval power, but reopening remains contingent on the current scenario. Iran although has stated that countries who complete transaction in Chinese Yuan can be given an allowance to pass
The Strait has faced repeated disruptions tied to Iran-Gulf tensions, establishing a pattern of asymmetric pressure via shipping harassment and infrastructure targeting without full closure until 2026:
These precedents demonstrate Iran’s proven capability for disruption but also historical restraint until the existential threat posed by the 2026 leadership decapitation strikes.
Trigger (28 February 2026): Coordinated US-Israel airstrikes (“Operation Epic Fury”/Roaring Lion) targeted Iranian military/nuclear sites and leadership compounds in Tehran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and multiple senior officials were killed (confirmed by Iranian state media and US/Israeli statements). Iran retaliated immediately with missiles/drones on US bases in UAE/Qatar/Bahrain, Israeli territory, and Gulf targets.
Iranian-made Strait Disruption (from 1 March):
IRGC declared the strait “closed” to adversary-linked shipping (2–4 March formal announcements), warning of attacks on any transiting vessel. Tactics: drones, sea drones/USVs, projectiles, fast boats, and mines. The US Navy struck Iranian minelayers and Kharg Island oil terminal.
Verified Ship Attacks (UKMTO/IRGC-corroborated; 21+ by 12 March, additional through 19 March; total ~24 documented incidents):
Casualties: 11+ seafarers killed/missing; 1+ port worker.
This comes amid the dangerous and costly escalation of strikes on the oil facilities
Verified Hits on Oil/Gas Facilities
Israel:
Gulf Nations:
Iranian Facilities (targeted by Israel/US):
US/Gulf Responses: Trump offered Navy escorts, political-risk insurance, and continued strikes on Iranian naval/minelaying assets. G7 discussed escorts; China pressed Iran privately while routing select vessels. Iraq declared force majeure; shipping firms (Maersk) suspended.
Conclusion:
Iran’s asymmetric playbook selective enforcement allowing approved passages while punishing Western-linked vessels, paired with retaliatory strikes against critical infrastructure exploits existential stakes to impose global leverage without inviting total naval defeat. US/Israeli Strikes on its naval fleet has degraded but not eliminated Tehran’s drone/USVs/shore-missile capacity, sustaining functional denial.
Strategically, this proves selective disruption outperforms absolute blockade: it has spiked oil prices, forced Gulf curtailments, triggered force majeures, and exposed bypass-route fragility delivering outsized economic coercion at sustainable risk. As of 21 March 2026, the chokepoint remains contested, underscoring hybrid warfare’s potency at energy arteries: Iran trades short-term pain for diplomatic leverage, while the US retains reopening tools but faces escalation. Absent swift ceasefire, the crisis cements the strait as a durable hybrid battlefield where verified pressure, not conquest, reshapes global energy security.
HAVANA — Cuba is facing one of its most serious internal crises in decades as a worsening energy shortage, economic decline, and rising public frustration combine to test the resilience of the island’s communist government.
Rolling blackouts, some lasting more than a dozen hours per day in parts of the country, have become routine as Cuba struggles with fuel shortages and aging power infrastructure. The outages have disrupted transportation, food distribution, and access to essential services, amplifying an already severe economic crisis.
In recent days, the situation has spilled into public unrest. Residents in the central Cuban city of Morón protested prolonged power outages and shortages, with demonstrators vandalizing a local Communist Party office, an unusually direct confrontation with government authority in a country where dissent is tightly controlled. Cuban authorities later confirmed arrests following the incident.
Separately, students at the University of Havana staged a rare protest over power and internet disruptions earlier this month, highlighting how frustrations are spreading beyond working-class neighborhoods to include younger and more politically active segments of society.
At the center of the crisis is Cuba’s worsening fuel shortage. The island relies heavily on imported oil to run its power plants and transportation systems, and those supplies have become increasingly constrained.
Officials in Havana say the shortage stems from tightening U.S. sanctions and disruptions to oil deliveries from Venezuela, which has historically supplied Cuba with heavily subsidized fuel. The lack of fuel has forced authorities to ration electricity and suspend some industrial activity.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged the severity of the situation in recent remarks, saying the government is exploring diplomatic avenues to ease pressure and stabilize fuel imports. Reuters reported that Cuba has held talks with the United States as the economic situation worsens.
The crisis also carries broader geopolitical implications.
Cuba has sought diplomatic and economic support from Russia and China as it attempts to navigate sanctions pressure and energy shortages. Chinese officials recently expressed support for Cuba amid what Beijing described as “external interference,” while Russia has similarly criticized U.S. pressure on the island.
Analysts say neither country appears likely to fully rescue Cuba’s struggling economy, but both have incentives to maintain political ties with Havana and limit U.S. influence in the Caribbean.
The island’s location, roughly 90 miles from Florida, gives it outsized strategic importance in regional geopolitics. During the Cold War, Cuba served as a major Soviet ally and intelligence outpost in the Western Hemisphere, most notably during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Today, the strategic concerns are different but still significant, including migration pressures, regional instability, and the potential expansion of foreign intelligence or economic influence in the region.
Despite the rising tensions, large-scale nationwide protests have not yet materialized. Cuba’s security apparatus remains highly capable of suppressing dissent, and past demonstrations have often been followed by arrests and surveillance.
Still, the frequency of recent protests and the increasingly confrontational tone of some demonstrations suggest growing strain inside the country.
Many observers note parallels with the July 2021 protests, the largest anti-government demonstrations on the island in decades, which were sparked by similar frustrations over shortages and blackouts.
For now, the Cuban government appears focused on managing the crisis through a combination of rationing, diplomatic outreach, and internal security measures. Whether that strategy can stabilize the country in the months ahead remains uncertain.
What happens next may depend largely on one critical factor: energy.
If fuel deliveries resume and electricity outages ease, tensions could stabilize. But if shortages worsen, or if the power grid suffers another major failure, then analysts warn the island could see broader unrest.
For a government already facing its most severe economic stress in decades, the margin for error is narrowing.
Iran’s Assembly of Experts has named Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the Islamic Republic’s third Supreme Leader. The announcement, broadcasted on state television early Monday local time, marks the first hereditary transfer of power since the 1979 revolution and comes as the country reels from the devastating US-Israeli military campaign, resulting in the death of his father.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a low profile cleric with deep ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now holds ultimate authority over Iran’s military, judiciary, media, and foreign policy at the most perilous moment in the nation’s 47-year history.
Timeline of Succession
Born on September 8, 1969, in Mashhad, Mojtaba is the second of Ali Khamenei’s six children. He briefly served in the Iran-Iraq War as a teenager, then pursued seminary studies in Qom from age 30 (unusually late for a cleric). He holds mid-ranking clerical credentials and has never held elected office or given a public speech. Despite his reclusive image, He wields significant backdoor influence. He is accused of orchestrating IRGC and Basij interference in the 2005 and 2009 presidential elections and of suppressing the Green Movement.
Reports indicate he lost mother and wife in addition to his father in the recent US-Israeli strikes.
The decision is historic and deeply controversial. The Islamic Republic has always rejected hereditary rule, emphasizing clerical merit over bloodlines. Mojtaba’s selection pushed by the IRGC represents the first father to son transfer of supreme power and cements hardliner dominance at a time when reformist voices have been sidelined. It seems like the appointment of Mojtaba is the establishment of a puppet as the figurehead to ensure their control and power in the regime. It also looks like the plot to ensure policy continuity for the regime, uncompromising opposition to the West, support for regional proxies and tight control over the nuclear program. However, it risks eroding legitimacy among a war affected population already facing economic collapse and civilian casualties from the protests.
Mojtaba Khamenei assumes power as a marked man in the middle of the Islamic Republic’s greatest existential crisis. Israel has explicitly threatened his life alongside Trump’s comments suggesting Washington will not accept him without concessions. His leadership remains untested; he has never managed public crises or addressed the nation. Mojtaba’s personal tragedy, his father, mother, his sister and wife may harden his stance against compromise. Yet the war’s devastation, severed oil revenues and international isolation pose enormous challenges. Whether he can unify a fractured elite, rally a grieving public and navigate potential further assassinations will define not only his fate but the survival of the Islamic Republic itself.
A senior cleric told state media,: “The nation must rally behind the new leader to preserve our dignity and independence.” In the streets of Tehran, however, the mood remains one of shock, defiance and uncertainty as explosions continue to echo across the region.
As of March 7, 2026, Iran’s fate is no longer a question of “next messy war or conclusion”—the messy war is actively unfolding. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated large-scale airstrikes (U.S. Operation Epic Fury; Israeli Operation Roaring Lion) against Iranian targets, including nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, air defenses, naval assets, government buildings in Tehran, and leadership compounds. This has already killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dozens of senior IRGC and government officials, and over 1,300 Iranians (military and civilian), with significant damage to critical infrastructure.
Iran has retaliated with hundreds of ballistic missiles and thousands of drones targeting Israel, U.S. bases in the Gulf, and civilian/economic sites in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and beyond (including Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and tanker traffic near Oman). The Strait of Hormuz has faced temporary closures and disruptions, spiking global oil prices and threatening 20% of world oil trade. The conflict now in its second week builds directly on the unresolved June 2025 “Twelve-Day War” and collapsed 2025–2026 nuclear negotiations. This is not abstract forecasting. It is a live geopolitical rupture driven by miscalculation, maximum-pressure doctrine, and opportunity after Iran’s regional proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis, Iraqi militias) were severely degraded since October 2023.
Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” strategy forward defense via proxies, missiles, and a advancing nuclear program provided deterrence but invited preemption. Post-2018 U.S. JCPOA withdrawal and “maximum pressure,” Iran enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade levels (enough theoretical material for multiple devices), rebuilt capabilities after 2025 Israeli/U.S. strikes, and faced reinstated UN sanctions in late 2025.
Domestic pressure compounded this: January 2026 protests (sparked by economic collapse—rial at historic lows, inflation >40%) were brutally suppressed, eroding legitimacy even among reformists. Failed indirect U.S.-Iran talks in Muscat/Geneva (February 2026) collapsed despite Iranian concessions on enrichment suspension; Trump and Netanyahu saw a window after intelligence indicated leadership vulnerability.
Geopolitically, U.S. (Trump administration) and Israeli objectives converged on degrading Iran’s missile/nuclear programs permanently and achieving de facto regime change without ground troops—echoing Venezuela 2025 dynamics. Iran miscalculated that its asymmetric toolkit and great-power patrons (Russia/China) would deter direct attack. They did not.
Three plausible medium-term paths (12–24 months) emerge from current trajectories:
Critical assessment
The war reflects U.S. assertion of dominance amid multipolar competition. Iran’s “resistance” model proved unsustainable once proxies eroded and the power vacuum exposed internal fragility. However, victory is illusory without “day-after” planning; a vacuum invites extremism or opportunistic footholds. Oil interdependence and proliferation risks mean no clean “conclusion” any resolution requires multilateral diplomacy that Trump has historically resisted.Human and strategic costs are getting increasingly immense. Long-term, Iran’s youth and resources could enable recovery under new governance but only if external powers avoid past errors.
Conclusion
Iran’s fate tilts toward a messy, violent conclusion regime transformation or indefinite stalemate that’s heading for yet another disaster in waiting. The 2026 war accelerates trends since 2023, with the executive power vacuum and continuous structural crises acting as decisive accelerants. The coming weeks will determine if this becomes a decisive pivot or another chapter in endless regional conflict. De-escalation windwos seems virtually closed.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is striking a harder tone. During drills cited by Tasnim News Agency, a Guard naval commander said the force could be ordered to close the Strait of Hormuz, a move that would jolt global energy markets.
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