UK - Trump’s real Iran strategy is hiding in plain sight. It’s a disaster for Xi Jinping. We sometimes take a smug attitude in Britain towards the United States. We have a tendency to view the country as full of unsubtle cowboys, and US president Donald Trump as the worst of them all. Rarely has it been so misplaced. Most obviously, the US has been going from strength to strength, while we decline due to self-inflicted wounds. But Trump and his US administration are also being smarter than some give them credit for. They are thinking strategically about the challenges of this century and acting to defend the democratic world’s pre-eminence. For Israel, the war against Iran is about destroying the ability of the ayatollahs to threaten its existence. For the US, it is also a conflict to halt and reverse the creeping power of China, whose proxy is Iran. The stakes are vast. The outcome of this conflict, as yet unclear, will influence whether Beijing invades Taiwan. A US victory in the Middle East now may deter that invasion, and possibly even prevent a catastrophic war between the superpowers. Ultimately, the Iran war is part of the struggle of this century: which nation emerges as the world’s pre-eminent power, the US or China, and whose world-view predominates, that of the English-speaking world of democracy or Chinese Communism.

UK - After the vicious cost of living crisis that followed the pandemic, followed by the war in Ukraine, most of us are keenly aware of how vulnerable Britain is to global external shocks. Even now, nearly five years after lockdowns were mercifully lifted for good and four years since Putin’s tanks crashed over Ukraine’s borders, the impact of both those crises continues to be felt in people’s pockets. Nevertheless, I’m willing to bet that few of us expected the effects of events in Iran to be felt so soon after American and Israeli missiles and bombs began raining down on the Persian state. Yet here we are on day six of Operation Epic Fury (let’s call it a war because that’s what it is, even if Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, prefers to pretend it’s not) and already the economic and financial shockwaves are rippling through every household in Britain on multiple fronts. Put plainly, our living standards are once again under serious threat and our political masters must take much of the blame for their miserable failure to fortify the UK economy. It is negligence on an extreme scale.

TURKEY - Erdogan desperate to stay neutral as Iran war approaches Turkey’s borders. The Turkish president has urged diplomacy as fears of a refugee wave grow, but a missile targeting his country has changed the dynamic. In rural northern Syria, residents gathered in a field to inspect what is thought to be the remnants of a huge missile that was shot out of the sky by NATO air defences as it hurtled towards Turkey. The huge metal tube was found on Wednesday after Turkey’s defence ministry said a ballistic missile fired from Iran had been downed in the eastern Mediterranean. That it had travelled across Iraqi and Syrian airspace, with debris falling in Turkey’s southern Hatay province and in Qamishli in Kurdish-led Syria, highlights how delicate and interconnected regional stability is amid the ongoing US-Israeli assault on Iran. This time, however, Turkish territory had been affected. Anonymous US officials told media that the missile had been aimed at the country’s Incirlik airbase, which hosts a US Air Force contingent. It was intercepted by a US navy ship, according to reports.

IRAN - By targeting every GCC member with missiles and drones, Tehran has achieved the unthinkable: placing Israel and Qatar on the same team. This strategic blunder may finally cement a regional axis. Who would have thought? In September, Israel attacked in Qatar, targeting terrorist leaders the Gulf state was housing. But here we are. After five days of war with Iran, the Iranians have succeeded in putting Israel and Qatar on the same team – to say nothing of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia – all countries targeted over the past five days by Iranian missiles and drones. By some estimates, Iran has fired more missiles and drones at Gulf states combined than at Israel.

USA - Experts have warned of the potential activation of Iranian sleeper cells across the West amid the ongoing US-Israel military action. Concerns were particularly raised after two Iran-related violent incidents took place this week - one in Austin, Texas, and one in Toronto. “The Iranian regime has repeatedly demonstrated in the past that it carries out its terror beyond its own borders,” Marc Henrichmann told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Then on Tuesday, terrorism and Middle East expert Matthew Levitt warned German outlet TAZ that the Iranian regime may respond with attacks and assassinations in Europe. “Iranian operations abroad are definitely part of the regime’s toolkit for responding to attacks, including war,” Levitt - who used to work for the FBI - said.

IRAN - How Tehran can keep launching attacks indefinitely but Western missile supplies are weeks from running out. Iran's retaliatory campaign has exposed a growing imbalance between the production of drones and the exorbitant cost to shoot them down. A single Iranian drone can cost as little as $35,000 to produce, while intercepting it can cost anywhere from $500,000 to $4 million. By spreading strikes across more than five theatres at once and sustaining over 2,500 drones per day, Tehran is forcing its adversaries to divide their defences. Iran's advantage lies in scale, according to data gathered from open source intelligence and defence analysts. Rather than a few thousand long range drones, its total Shahed fleet is estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000 across all variants.

MIDDLE EAST - The Gulf states are now making the Israeli argument, not because they have suddenly become Zionists, but because Iranian missiles have a way of concentrating the mind. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and accidentally unified the Arab world against him. It took him six months and a catastrophic defeat to grasp what he had done. Iran appears to be making the same mistake, at greater speed, with less excuse. It has been watching that history for 35 years. There is a particular kind of clarity that only incoming missiles provide. You can debate the causes of a war indefinitely. You can calibrate your sympathy, manage your public statements, and balance your relationships. You can, in other words, be a modern Gulf state operating in the age of strategic ambiguity. Then the drones start landing near your oil terminals, and the ambiguity evaporates. That is not a guarantee of anything. The Middle East has swallowed more promising moments than this one. But it is a beginning, the kind that starts not with a speech or a handshake, but with the sober realization, shared across capitals, that the threat is real, and the choice is stark.

IRAN - The man expected to become Iran’s next supreme leader is unlikely to view the US as anything but an implacable enemy. Donald Trump claims the remnants of the Iranian regime are looking for an olive branch. The expected election of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader suggests otherwise. Khamenei, the second son of the late Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an air strike on Saturday, is a shadowy, hardline conservative figure with deep links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Having reportedly supplied the intelligence to take out one ayatollah Khamenei, the US is unlikely to look favourably on another one rising in his place. And from the potentially new supreme leader’s perspective, the recent bombing campaigns have killed his father, mother, wife and son, while shattering its navy, missile depots and nuclear programme. Given his background, he could hardly have seen the US as anything but an implacable enemy. But the events of recent days will have given a personal edge to that hatred.

USA - US submarine sinks Iranian Navy warship off Sri Lanka with 148 suspected drowned as Iran launches missiles at Turkey as war spreads across globe. 'Yesterday, in the Indian Ocean, an American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo - a quiet death. The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War Two,' he said. The warship was returning from a military exercise in India's eastern port of Viskhapatnam at the time of the attack. This sinking comes as war has broken out in the Mideast, after Israel and the United States launched strikes against Iran. It comes days after the US military said it had struck Iran’s largest naval warship following the launch of Trump’s ‘Operation Epic Fury.’ Meanwhile an Iranian missile heading towards Turkey has been destroyed by NATO as violence from the US-Israel war with Iran spreads beyond the Middle East.

USA - Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen to an all-time low as the vast majority of Americans turn on the President over his war in Iran. A new Daily Mail/JL Partners poll found the President's approval now stands at 44 percent, down four points since Friday and marking the lowest rating recorded in Daily Mail tracking to date. The sharp decline comes as Americans grow increasingly uneasy about his spiraling conflict tearing apart the Middle East after six American troops were killed.