Free Republic

At least 300 non-Iranian ships have applied for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz with Tehran’s new authority seeking to create a permanent toll system along the vital passageway. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) said the majority of the ships applying were oil tankers, with at least 77% of the applicants looking to exit the Persian Gulf to reach Asia, particularly China and India, two of the Middle East’s largest fuel buyers. The PGSA’s remarks came as the IRGC announced that its naval forces have escorted 24 vessels through the Strait of Hormuz over the past 24 hours....

Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Tuesday that the Iran war is “over now,” while laying out what he described as the Trump administration’s non-negotiable conditions for any broader agreement currently under discussion with Tehran — including the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the surrender of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile, and severe long-term restrictions on the regime’s nuclear program before any sanctions relief would be considered. Speaking in his first public congressional testimony since the launch of Operation Epic Fury in February, Rubio argued the Trump administration’s military and economic pressure campaign has significantly weakened the Islamic...

President Trump lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel's escalation in Lebanon in an expletive-laden call on Monday, two U.S. officials and a third source briefed on the call told Axios. Why it matters: Earlier on Monday, Iran threatened to abandon the negotiations with the U.S. over Israel's actions in Lebanon. On the call, Trump called Netanyahu "crazy" and accused him of ingratitude, according to two of the sources. He also put the brakes on Israel's plan to strike Beirut. Behind the scenes: One U.S. official said Trump told Netanyahu that following through on his threats to...

Vladimir Putin has suffered a fresh wave of war humiliation amid warnings that his unaffordable conflict with Ukraine is pushing his economy to the brink of collapse. Russia's Finance Ministry and its central bank has projected the government's budget deficit widening to a dangerous level if the Kremlin continues at the current rate of defence expenditure, according to Bloomberg. The stark warning came as Putin suffered further setbacks on the frontline, where the tide of the war is increasingly turning in Ukraine's favour. And authorities in Crimea are urging citizens not to panic amid ongoing petrol shortages with pictures showing...

Iran has damaged 20 US military sites since the start of the war, satellite images and videos analysed by BBC Verify show, suggesting the attacks are more extensive than publicly acknowledged. Iran has targeted key facilities across eight countries in the Middle East since the end of February, causing millions of dollars of damage to state-of the-art air defence systems, refuelling aircraft and radars. Tehran has targeted both US bases and shared military facilities in retaliation to the US-Israeli strikes across Iran and Lebanon over the past three months. The Pentagon says it has hit more than 13,000 targets in...

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has submitted an official letter of resignation to the Office of the Supreme Leader, a source familiar with the matter told Iran International. In the letter sent on Sunday, Pezeshkian stressed that the president and the government have effectively been excluded from major and vital decision-making processes in the country, and that the vacuum created by this situation has enabled hardline factions within the IRGC to take control of affairs, the source said. Pezeshkian added that under such circumstances he is unable to run the government and carry out his legal responsibilities, and for that reason...

As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American military engagement abroad. Politicians as ideologically diverse as Thomas Massie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now openly criticize interventionist foreign policy, while public fatigue with the post-9/11 wars has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum. Yet even as Americans tire of foreign interventions, cuts to the...

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, citing police, said on social media that [the truck driver] Dong, a native of China, does not speak English. NTSB board member Tom Chapman revealed few new details but said the bus was moving at a high rate of speed. “It seems fairly clear that if there was any braking there wasn’t much, because of the speed and severity of the collision,” Chapman said. [The Tragic Result] A family of four from Massachusetts who were killed when a bus crashed into multiple vehicles in Virginia were traveling to a wedding with a carload of homemade desserts...

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...

It was the kind of sweeping, last-minute demand that would have torpedoed most diplomatic talks: President Donald Trump insisting this week that in exchange for him ending the war with Iran, several Arab and Muslim countries should sign on to his Abraham Accords to normalize their diplomatic relations with Israel. But there’s been almost no response from any of the countries that Trump mentioned by name — more than half of whom already have diplomatic relations with Israel — and no statement of support from an Israeli government that would reap enormous benefits from such a deal. Analysts said Trump’s...

@mtgreenee We just said goodbye to our good friends Thomas and Carolyn Massie. The civil war in the Republican Party is successfully gutting the true America Firsters, like myself, Thomas and others. But I don’t think most Americans realize the extent of what’s happening, how bad it is, and what it’s going to produce. After taking the hard principled stand against war with Iran in June 2025 and releasing the Epstein files, the neocon controlled Republican establishment now backed by the President set out to destroy us. Thomas and I took two different routes but ended up in the same...

(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...

Race called!

President Donald Trump will convene a rare Cabinet meeting at Camp David Wednesday as negotiations with Iran enter a critical phase. All Cabinet members are expected to attend the meeting, first reported by the New York Post and confirmed by Fox News, including outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The gathering comes as the administration weighs next steps in high-stakes negotiations aimed at securing a broader agreement with Tehran amid a fraying ceasefire. Trump in recent days has suggested the sides are nearing a potential breakthrough, while Iranian officials have publicly pushed back on claims that a deal is...

Mehek Cooke@MehekCookeTrump just turned the Abraham Accords into an accountability trap for the Gulf states and Iran walked right into it.Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey have never held Iran accountable is due to exposure. They share a neighborhood. They can't sanction, shame, or confront Iran while having zero security architecture binding them to the West or to each other.The Abraham Accords change that math entirely. Once Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey are signatories, they aren't just recognizing Israel they are locking themselves into a collective security posture.A breach of the Iran deal becomes their problem...

The best hope for ending a poorly planned war, which started with scant consultation with Congress or the American people, may be an unsatisfactory peace that leaves critical issues to be resolved later and deepens Washington strife. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said a deal to halt the conflict he chose against Iran is imminent and very close. Each time, his predictions turned out to be wishful thinking or a misreading of Iran’s true intentions. So it’s no surprise his latest claims that a framework agreement with Tehran is near have been met with skepticism and confusion — nor that...

The regime in Iran is lying to you and your negotiators (period, stop!). Do not believe a word they say. I know you want to get out of this mess. All Americans want this unnecessary war to end. Keep in mind, as you have been told many times, Iran is still the leading state sponsor of terrorism (all anyone needs to say is Hezbollah, Hamas & Houthis, never mind IRGC-QF). None of these organizations are going away with this deal. How about getting them to first publicly apologize for killing American Soldiers and U.S. Marines many times over (especially on...

On Sunday, President Donald Trump said the deal that they are working on will involve "no dust, no dollars" and will not be like the failed Iran deal of Barack Obama, that it will be a good deal, or there will be no deal. He clapped back at criticism from people he said didn't know the Now, Trump has dropped a big update to the deal — that ultimately, it could turn out to be a more far-reaching peace deal. He said negotiations were proceeding "nicely" with Iran. Trump announced on Truth Social that he had held a conference call...

Volodymyr Zelensky has demanded that Ukraine be granted full membership of the European Union. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, had called for the country to be given a special half-in, half-out relationship, which would mean it could participate in European summits and ministerial meetings – but not cast a vote. Mr Zelensky criticised the “associate membership” concept, branding it an “unfair” move that would leave Ukraine “voiceless”. The Ukrainian president urged the EU to commit to his country’s full entry in a letter addressed to Antonio Costa, the president of the European Council, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of...

This is a war, which means that it isn't over until it's over. The stakes are high, the incentives to deceive are astronomical, and most information leaks are strategic. But there is plenty of reason to suspect that this might be the real deal. After all, Trump has been making all sorts of threats that turned out to be empty since the beginning of the "cease-fire," and has shown no real inclination to restart the war. 🚨 BREAKING: President Trump CONFIRMS a peace deal between the US and Iran has been “largely negotiated,” and could be finalized imminentlyAn announcement could...