Free Republic

America’s leverage in the Strait exposes Iran’s weakness—turning its greatest asset into a liability and reshaping the balance of power without a ground war. The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum. The Strait of HormuzPrior...

Pedro Sanchez, the current Prime Minister of Spain and Trump's most vocal critic in Europe, has a serious problem: he already leads a minority government held together by a coalition of left-wing parties, and in the coming elections looks headed toward a major defeat. He has been embroiled in questions about his wife's corruption, and was almost forced to resign when the allegations first arose. 🇪🇸 Spanish PM Sanchez’s wife charged with corruptionBegoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish far-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has been formally charged with multiple corruption-related offenses, including influence peddling, business corruption, embezzlement, and… pic.twitter.com/n04JCTaMZl— Visegrád...

TRANSCRIPT: CARVILLE: “I want to be clear on this. I do not want that man to die. I want to — I want to watch him suffer and I can’t watch a dead person suffer. So I want him to be fully cognizant come November so when people tell him.”

A promising new stage in our six-week Iran “excursion” began Sunday with President Trump’s announcement that the US Navy, together with allies, will immediately begin to blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” In wrestling terms, it’s a classic “swerve” move by the president, flipping the tables on his opponent. Iran thought it had the world over an (oil) barrel. Turns out it signed its own economic death warrant. The blockade is an inspired tactic pushed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former Green Beret-turned-UN Ambassador Mike Waltz as the logical next step...

The post-transphobia commonwealthWhat is the difference between an audacious and a mediocre dead-horse take? Frankly, I don’t know anymore. Some people may read what I have to say as the musings of a neoliberal bubble-inhabiting princess, and others may see them as a call from the Kremlin to stir workers of the world and unite against the master. Whatever you make of my positionality, I have an observation to share with my UC Berkeley compatriots in the Red Army: We may be deluding ourselves into thinking our particular tract of society is an egalitarian wet dream. Oftentimes, when I talk...

Americans have increasingly negative views of Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. * 60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% last year. * 59% have little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs – up from 52% last year. * In both political parties, majorities of adults under the age of 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively. The survey was conducted March 23-29 among 3,507 U.S. adults. It was fielded about a month into the U.S.- and Israeli-led...

Donald Trump's dramatic climbdown from his chilling threat to wipe out Iran's civilization has exposed the limits - and the rising risks - of the U.S. president's typically unpredictable negotiating style. His decision on Tuesday to back down and agree to a two-week ceasefire – which critics mockingly called another example ​of “TACO,” or “Trump always chickens out” – marked the biggest step so far toward de-escalating a 40-day-old war that has shaken the Middle East and disrupted global energy markets. But Trump’s claims of victory over Iran overlooked questions about ‌the effectiveness of mixing maximalist demands, erratic rhetoric and...

Democrats can rebrand candidates, but they cannot hide a long record of condescension toward the very working-class voters they now need to win back. After failing to win Congress and the presidency in 2024, the Democrats conducted an internal postmortem of what went wrong. While they predictably did not divulge the full results, everyone knew what they had found. Their obsessions with the low side of 30/70 issues had especially alienated Democrats from white middle- and working-class voters. Yet middle-class whites still comprise about 40–50 percent of the population and are perhaps overrepresented in voter turnout. Democrats realize that their...

Hyderabad, India — The city of Hyderabad has been called the Silicon Valley of India. "Google, Facebook, and all the other bigger companies are here," Rajesh Jaknalli, who has worked for a U.S. tech company in Hyderabad for about 10 years, told CBS News. "This place is actually called High Tech City, but because of the many companies that we have, the term 'Cyberabad' has come," Jaknalli explained. Jaknalli says he has worked here with one goal, to get an opportunity to one day move to the U.S. "Our dream was to perform, give you 100%, and then probably, we'll...

With Passover poised to begin Wednesday at sundown, a new poll shows a majority of American Jews oppose the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, even as 90% of them say they oppose the Iranian regime. The poll, commissioned by J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group, found that 60% of U.S. Jews oppose the war and 77% do not believe “President Trump has a clear plan and mission for the war.” Another poll of U.S. Jews, by the Jewish Electorate Institute, released Monday, showed similar results, with 55% of American Jews opposing military action against Iran. The two...

The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials. Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the...

The French president said that the objective is not to be the vassals of two hegemonic powersPARIS, April 3. /TASS/. During his visit to South Korea, French President Emmanuel Macron called for the formation of a "coalition of independence" to counter the unpredictability of the US and the alleged hegemony of China. "I think our objective is not to be the vassals of two hegemonic powers. None of these hegemonic powers, I would say. And we don’t want to depend on the dominance of, let’s say, China, nor do we want to be too much exposed to the unpredictability of...

Could the Iran war do what even Vladimir Putin couldn’t and blow up the North Atlantic Treaty alliance? That’s no longer an idle question as most of Europe refuses to help the U.S., and President Trump responds by threatening to leave NATO. This would be the dumbest alliance breakup in modern history. The immediate fault here lies with Europe. Spain and Italy are blocking U.S. military flights for Iran from their bases, and Mr. Trump says the Macron government has blocked flights over France. Add its reluctance to help clear the Strait of Hormuz, and Europe is playing into every...

Iran has achieved a singular statistic in its current front against Israel. After firing more than 400 missiles over nearly a month, Tehran apparently hasn’t hit a single Israeli military target. That leaves the Islamic Republic with a 100% civilian casualty ratio—a benchmark of the number of civilian casualties relative to combatant ones. Not long ago, civilian casualty ratios were at the heart of discussions of the Israel-Gaza war, with Israel’s critics claiming that “disproportionate” levels of civilian casualties were evidence of war crimes. In reality, Israel’s infliction of 30% to 40% military casualties on an adversary hiding behind civilians...

Should the US decide to send in military forces to secure Iran’s uranium stockpile, it would be a complex, risky and lengthy operation, fraught with radiation and chemical dangers, according to experts and former government officials. US President Donald Trump has offered shifting reasons for the war in Iran but has consistently said a primary objective is ensuring the country will "never have a nuclear weapon." Less clear is how far he is willing to go to seize Iran’s nuclear material. Given the risks of inserting as many as 1,000 specially trained forces into a war zone to remove the...

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X that all she heard from President Donald Trump's address to the nation on Wednesday night "was WAR WAR WAR." "I wanted so much for President Trump to put America First. That’s what I believed he would do. All I heard from his speech tonight was WAR WAR WAR," Greene wrote. "Nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans. Nothing to reduce our near $40 trillion in debt. Nothing to save Social Security, which goes bankrupt in just a few years. Nothing to lower the cost of insurance. Nothing to address jobs...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it's "not possible" for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to "take care" of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

NATO endures on American backing while many allies demand U.S. action abroad but withhold it when asked, exposing a widening gap between rhetoric and responsibility. NATO members are not legally required to join any member’s military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership. But they often do just that. Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security. They followed the precedent set by America’s 1999 intervention in...

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering firing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days but publicly praised her performance after the report surfaced, as congressional scrutiny over the Justice Department’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein case files intensifies, according to The New York Times. Trump has floated Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as a possible replacement but has not made a final decision, the Times reports. The deliberations over Bondi’s future intersect with mounting bipartisan pressure on the Justice Department to fully release materials related to the sex offender Epstein, placing the attorney general at the center of an...

Since its creation some 47 years ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran has demonstrated resourcefulness and dedication to its goals of regional hegemony and proliferation of Islamic radicalism. As a result, the extent of Iranian military recovery from the attacks in June 2025 should not have been surprising. Clearly, if the regime remains in control in Tehran, it will not relent and will continue to represent a danger to the West. Specifically, should the present conflict leave the regime with the resources to do so, it will seek to recover quickly and even expand its capabilities, including further developing its...