Free Republic

One hundred days after they went to war together to thwart Iran’s rogue nuclear weapons program, radically degrade its ballistic missile industry, end its support for the Hezbollah and Hamas terror armies, and create the conditions for the fall of the regime, the US-Israel alliance against the Islamic Republic on Sunday reached its nadir. With its north battered relentlessly by Hezbollah in recent weeks, Israel resorted to a largely symbolic strike on the terror group’s Dahiyeh stronghold in Beirut, reportedly without telling the disapproving Trump administration ahead of time that it was doing so. And, as it had warned it...

President Trump denied Friday that he campaigned on avoiding “endless” wars, as he seeks to reach a deal to end hostilities with Iran. “I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war,” he told host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in an interview that aired Sunday. “We’ve been doing this for three months,” Trump added, referring to the Iran conflict that began on Feb. 28. “Much of it has been under… a pretty good form of ceasefire.” The president later said that he would “not have built the strongest military in...

Today, I want to speak plainly for myself as a veteran and a soldier who has seen firsthand the high cost of war. As someone who serves under President Trump's leadership, I have experienced the promise of peace... The old Washington way of thinking is something we hope is in the rear-view mirror and something that has held us back for too long. For decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building. It was a one-size-fits-all approach of toppling regimes, trying to impose our system of governance on others, intervening...

Benjamin Netanyahu is seething as Donald Trump edges closer to striking a peace deal with Iran, leaving the Israeli prime minister wishing Barack Obama were back in the White House, according to a new report. Netanyahu privately views the looming US-Iran pact as an unmitigated catastrophe and lays the blame squarely at Trump's feet, a senior political source revealed to Al-Monitor. 'This time, the prime minister’s hands are tied. He is completely paralyzed and knows that he will not be able to do anything, even if the agreement signed between the United States and Iran remains the disaster he now...

(In the first step towards shifting aid further into the shadows, the House's 2027 NDAA would all but fuse the two countries' armed forces together) At a time when the American public is expressing unprecedented levels of distrust in the Israeli government, Congress just proposed tying the U.S. to the Israeli military more than ever before. Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more...

Iran

The national retail average for a regular gallon of gas was $4.457 on Monday. That's a 1-cent increase from Sunday, according to the American Automobile Association, and 35 cents more than last Monday. At this time last year, a gallon of gas was $1.29 cheaper. The surging prices seemed to stabilize or even decrease for about two weeks, following a temporary ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran that has been indefinitely extended. However, the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route where roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes, has effectively remained closed or extremely limited to passage...

Continued failed diplomacy is only a deferral of catastrophe. Cognitive dissonance is in the air once again. Failed former Obama and Biden national security and foreign policy apparatchiks, Democrats in Congress, assorted globalists in Europe, pro-CCP influence peddlers, the European descendants of Neville Chamberlain, and the legion of legacy media talking heads have been doing their damnedest to undermine the long-delayed rescue operation of the Iranian people, who have been held hostage by a theocracy-driven autocracy since 1979. And that is exactly what Operation Epic Fury is: the rescue of the downtrodden and long-oppressed Iranian people from a tyrannical regime....

Megyn Kelly on "Piers Morgan Uncensored" discussed the damage sustained by the Trump political coalition, the global economy, and U.S. allies, after 40 days at war with Iran. “The question is now not, who has Trump lost. The question is who remains," she said about the MAGA coalition. "He’s underwater with men, including young men and young people. The young person coalition that Charlie Kirk delivered to the president is gone. They’ve abandoned Donald Trump." "These battles in the Middle East have been fought now for 20-plus years, and we continue to learn the same lesson over and over. It’s...

Iran has once again closed the Strait of Hormuz, blocking oil tankers from transiting the waterway, in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-tied outlet Fars News reported on Wednesday. Oil tankers attempting to transit the strait received threatening messages from the Iranian Navy, according to several shipping sources. "Any vessel trying to travel into the sea ... will be targeted and destroyed..." the message, which was received by several vessels, said. This is a developing story.

Former White House adviser and key figure in the MAGA movement, Steve Bannon, has called on the United States Department of Homeland Security to deport Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son, Yair, and send him to fight in Iran. “Netanyahu's kid down in Miami, turf him out tomorrow,” Bannon said. Similarly, on February 28th, a site was launched with the URL ‘DraftBarronTrump.com,’ a satirical site with fabricated quotes from the Trump family hailing Barron Trump’s bravery and how he should enlist to fight against Iran. A draft would require approval from both the president and Congress, and the US has not...

Fox News host Mark Levin argued for the White House to deploy "specialized" U.S. ground troops in Iran to secure Tehran's enriched uranium stockpiles, shortly after President Donald Trump urged members of the public to tune into his show late Saturday. The U.S. has sent thousands of elite soldiers and Marines to the Middle East in recent days, widely seen as a sign the White House could greenlight select ground operatio1s on Iranian soil and escalate the conflict with Tehran. Trump has not yet approved ground operations in Iran, according to U.S. media reports. "Why would we need troops on...

Everywhere you look in American politics, you’ll see two things. First are polls, predictions, and posturing around the concept that MAGA is finished, the Democrats are ascendant, and the midterm elections will be an absolute wipeout. And second are concrete examples showing that the Democrat Party is a collection of unmitigated angry, malignant clowns. I’m going to trust that I don’t have to take the reader through the endless litany of examples of the first contention. You’ve surely seen enough of that. Rather, I’ll focus on the second. And then take some time to relate it to the first. And...

Vice President JD Vance says the war with Iran will continue “for a little while longer” until the US and Israel can “neuter” the Islamic Republic. “The president’s going to keep at it for a little while longer to ensure that once we leave, we don’t have to do this again for a very, very long time,” Vance told podcaster Benny Johnson. “This country is threatening us in all these ways. They’re still trying to build a nuclear weapon. We need to neuter them for a very, very long time, and that’s the purpose. Vance said the goal of the...

One of the most persistent and dangerous lies circulating in today’s political discourse is the claim that any American confrontation with Iran-especially under President Donald Trump-is somehow a war “for Israel." It is a falsehood repeated so often that it has begun to calcify into conventional wisdom, echoed by media figures and political commentators who should know better, and some who simply don’t care whether it is true. Let’s say it plainly: this is not Israel’s war. It never was. It is America’s war-forced upon it by nearly half a century of Iranian aggression, bloodshed, hostage-taking, and ideological hatred directed...

*** The promise from President Donald Trump was clear: expose it, clean it up, and drain the swamp. Now more than a year into Trump’s second term, many voters are beginning to ask a simple question: Where are the results? ***Approval ratings for FBI Director Kash Patel are slipping. Only 40 percent of likely voters view Patel favorably. Even more striking, just 32 percent believe he is performing better than previous FBI directors, while 37 percent think he is doing worse.[Rasmussen Reports] *** During the campaign, Trump promised unprecedented transparency on a series of long-running controversies that many Americans believe...

Israel launched a major attack on an Iranian gas field this week, prompting retaliation by Iran against Gulf States, a threat to global energy supplies and a surge in fuel prices. President Trump first insisted the United States “knew nothing about” the strike, then later backtracked and said he warned Israel against attacking the complex. His attempt to distance his administration from the strike underscored the diverging aims of the United States and Israel as their war against Iran grinds on. As a superpower with global responsibilities, the United States cares deeply about global energy supplies and the safety of...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said that overthrowing Iran’s regime will require a “ground component” along with a revolution, as the U.S.-Israeli conflict with the Middle Eastern country nears the start of its fourth week. “It is often said that you can’t win –– you can’t do revolutions from the air, that is true,” Netanyahu said in a press conference in Jerusalem. “You can’t do it only from there, you can do a lot of things from the air and we’re doing –– but there has to be a ground component, as well. “There are many possibilities for...

Republican strategist Karl Rove on Wednesday argued President Trump will not lose any voters over the war against Iran. “Much of the criticism of Operation Epic Fury comes from the likes of the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, the Israel-obsessed podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and the conspiracist Candace Owens. Do voters who identify themselves as MAGA Republicans share their opinions? Do they feel betrayed by the president?” Rove wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “The answer is an unequivocal no, according to a survey from the Vandenberg Coalition, a nonpartisan group committed to the idea that...

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, President Donald Trump addressed ongoing discussions about Jeffrey Epstein, labeling them as a “hoax” perpetuated by his former supporters and the media. Trump criticized these supporters for being misled by what he described as the “Lunatic Left” and stated that he no longer desires their backing.Trump falsely compared the Epstein discussions to previous events he deemed as scams, including the Steele Dossier and the Russia investigation, asserting that these narratives are part of a pattern used by Democrats to distract from their failures.“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey...