Ceuta faced a genuine emergency that deserved sober attention. Instead, the version of events peddled by Reform had no evidential basis. By Friday evening, the Spanish government said that more than 48,000 people had returned to Morocco, yet the first pictures had already done their work. Their political value lay in the shock of bare-chested men surging through a breached border: a complex Spanish-Moroccan episode was reduced to a fantasy preview of Dover.

My recent Henry Jackson Society report on the psychology of disinformation explains the mechanism. Fear and disgust weaken careful judgement, while shocking images lodge more firmly in memory than later corrections. Identity framing then supplies the plot: people like us are under threat from people like them. Social media rewards claims that produce immediate outrage.

Reform depends on that outrage. Britain plainly has an immigration problem, including years of careless legal migration policy. The scale, though, looks very different from the party’s preferred imagery. Oxford’s Migration Observatory recorded about 41,500 small-boat arrivals in 2025. ONS estimates show 294,000 study-related and 146,000 work-related non-EU long-term immigrants for the year. Visible but comparatively minor disorder in the Channel consumes attention, while the real problem, the much larger system created in Whitehall, receives less serious analysis.

A party ready for office would have to balance weak visa rules and the demands of universities and employers. Instead, Reform reaches for the dinghy. It turns a policy failure into a morality play starring an alien out-group and a treacherous elite. The voter is offered anger as proof of virtue. Anyone asking about relative scale risks being cast as one of those who allowed the betrayal.

The Greens work on another wound. Gaza has caused immense civilian suffering, and anger at the Israeli government is often justified. Green politics turns that horror into a domestic badge of belonging. Palestine becomes a test of moral purity; “the establishment” is deemed complicit; scepticism about slogans is treated as indifference to dead children. The party formally labels Israel’s conduct “apartheid” and “genocide”. Its electoral gains have openly drawn on voters furious with Labour over Gaza.

The imagery changes; the psychological design remains. Reform circulates a confected mass at the border. The Green ecosystem circulates the image of the bloodied child or the ruined street. Each selects the scene most likely to disrupt proportion and bind the viewer to a tribe. Each grievance has a factual core, but the manipulation begins when a single searing image is made to carry an entire commentary on complex issues.

This habit should be disqualifying from power. Government forces choices between competing priorities in circumstances that resist slogans. Immigration policy requires distinctions between lawful arrivals and illegal entry. Foreign policy requires judgement about allies and adversaries within the limits of British power. Ministers need proposals that withstand scrutiny from courts and budgets. Reform and the Greens flatten those distinctions because complexity cools the emotional manipulation that populists trade in.

Neither party has much incentive to resolve its chosen grievance. Reform needs the boats to keep approaching Kent. The Greens need Palestine as the standing indictment of everyone outside their moral community. Solving, or even merely qualifying, the issue would weaken the bond with the in-group.

Britain needs a serious reckoning with mass legal migration and an honest debate about Gaza. Reform and the Greens offer the politics of the nervous system instead. A party that first reaches for the most upsetting image, then bends the facts to the reaction, has already shown how it will behave when evidence resists its story. Both parties are utterly unfit to be anywhere near government.

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The breach was real and appalling. Spain estimates that roughly 50,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, while the local government puts the figure nearer 60,000. Fifty-seven people died. Spanish troops were deployed, and Pedro Sánchez called it a violation of Spain’s territorial sovereignty. Spain conspicuously failed to defend its border at the point of entry.

That should have sparked a serious debate about border security, Moroccan leverage and Spanish complacency. Instead, it triggered an orgy of online panic among people unwilling to spend thirty seconds looking at a map.

Ceuta is a Spanish city on the North African coast, surrounded by Morocco and the sea. The only regular routes onward are by ferry or air, and both are controlled. Ceuta is part of the Schengen Area, the European passport-free travel zone, but Spain retains a special regime requiring police identity and document checks. Entry into the enclave places someone on Spanish soil without granting free movement to mainland Spain, France or anywhere else in Europe.

The numbers demolish the hysteria more effectively than the geography. Spain’s Interior Ministry initially said that at least 25,000 people had returned to Morocco. By Friday evening, that estimate had risen to 48,300. Most went back voluntarily after discovering that Ceuta offered no food, shelter, work or a magical passage to the continent. The supposed invasion was reversing while Europe’s populists were still recording their reaction videos.

Spain has legal mechanisms for returning those who remain. A 1992 agreement allows it to request that Morocco readmit people who have been shown to have entered through Moroccan territory. Moroccan nationals can be identified and returned; other entrants can receive individual removal decisions. Asylum claims and unaccompanied children require separate procedures, neither of which creates a right to travel across Europe.

Much of the panic stems from a recent Supreme Court judgment concerning swimmers intercepted at sea. Spain cannot use the special summary rejection power designed for people climbing the fence; swimmers require the ordinary process, including a lawyer, an interpreter and access to asylum. The judgment prohibits instant pushbacks in those circumstances. Deportation after due process remains available, and the ferry gates remain under control.

We have seen this film before. In May 2021, around 8,000 to 10,000 people entered Ceuta after Morocco relaxed controls during a dispute over Spain’s medical treatment of Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front. The Polisario seeks independence for Western Sahara, which Morocco claims. Rabat was furious, Ceuta was flooded, and Spain sent in the Army. Most entrants were returned within days.

These episodes are best described as coercive migration engineering: Morocco manipulated population movement to punish Spain. The quarrel concerned Western Sahara and the balance of power between Madrid and Rabat.

The present crisis has the same shape. Sánchez visited Algeria, Morocco’s principal rival, on 20 July, ahead of a Spanish parliamentary committee advancing citizenship legislation for Sahrawis and their descendants. That timing proves nothing by itself, but it offers a more plausible context than a continent-wide operation intended to put 60,000 people on the streets of Calais.

A 2024 episode showed how decisive Moroccan enforcement can be. Social media calls drew around 3,000 people to Ceuta, but Rabat deployed heavily, halted the crossings, and arrested 152 alleged instigators. Digital mobilisation can assemble the crowd, but Moroccan policing largely determines whether it becomes a Spanish border crisis.

Ceuta gives Morocco an unusual pressure valve. Rabat controls the roads, towns and police deployments outside a small Spanish enclave. When relations deteriorate, Spain discovers how dependent its border is on the country that contests its sovereignty. Morocco can then restore control and help arrange returns.

That pattern is peculiar to Ceuta and, to a lesser extent, Melilla. It bears little resemblance to 2015, the Balkan route, Mediterranean journeys from Libya to Italy, or small boats across the English Channel. Most were Moroccans crossing directly into a tiny enclave with restricted onward travel. Tens of thousands returned across the same frontier within hours.

Spain’s own figures make the contrast even starker. Before this breach, irregular arrivals across Spain were down almost 25 per cent year on year, while entries into Ceuta had risen sharply. The national trend was falling as this one enclave spiked. That is evidence of a local rupture rather than a fresh continental tide.

Spain’s failure remains stark. A border overwhelmed by a rumour, with weak staffing and shifting Moroccan behaviour, is a serious national security vulnerability. Sánchez should explain why the frontier was so thinly defended and why Spain remains exposed to pressure from Rabat. Those charges require no imaginary march on Berlin.

The terminally online right chose the imaginary march anyway. Every clip must now prove civilisational collapse, while corrections are treated as betrayal. Politicians who knew Ceuta’s geography joined in. Meloni imposed targeted checks on arrivals from Spain, even though those she claimed to fear had no unchecked route from Ceuta and were already returning to Morocco in their tens of thousands.

Russian propagandists will amplify the spectacle because frightened, divided European societies serve Moscow. They need not fabricate the narrative. Western populists and engagement farmers distribute it for free, complete with recycled footage and maps apparently drawn from memory.

The border hawks have copied the activists they despise. They accuse the other side of refusing to discuss migration honestly, then bury the geography and return figures that undermine their own story. Morocco’s coercion, Spain’s negligence and 57 deaths are damning enough. They prefer the lie that Europe has already fallen.

Most of the crowd has now returned to Morocco. The hysteria is still travelling north.

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The whole sorry mess sickens me, and now the great indictment of Israel is coming apart, one revelation at a time. This fact is not being reported by a single damned one of the media outlets that have spent years screeching over the war in Gaza to the exclusion of almost all else. Famine, deliberate attacks on hospitals, the slaughter of journalists and children, and systematic obstruction of aid: each allegation was broadcast as settled fact and then used to prove genocidal intent. The same newsrooms and universities that thundered these charges have shown remarkably little interest in the evidence that now destroys each of these allegations.

It is incredible. There is no aspect of the genocide allegation that has not collapsed.

Start with the famine claim. In August 2025, the IPC used two ways of measuring malnutrition in children: weight compared with height, and the size of a child’s upper arm. Gaza had no local data showing how those two measures matched up, so the IPC used an estimate from elsewhere in the region. It assumed the weight-and-height measure would find about twice as many malnourished children as the arm measurement.

The first large Gaza survey to use both measures found the reverse. Of 1,335 children surveyed in 2026, 0.5% were identified as acutely malnourished by weight and height, while 1.3% were identified by upper-arm measurement. That survey cannot tell us exactly what conditions were like in 2025. The later survey cannot recreate conditions in 2025, but it exposes the rotten foundation beneath a verdict presented to the world as scientific certainty: a key assumption behind the famine declaration had never been tested in Gaza itself.

The food figures are equally awkward. Official COGAT-based data show that about 1.01 million tonnes of food entered Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 17 January 2025, against an estimated requirement of 825,000 tonnes. From the October 2025 ceasefire to 7 June 2026, 1.78 million tonnes entered, against a calculated need of roughly 643,000 tonnes.

Of course, food crossing a border does not guarantee it reaches every family. Roads were destroyed, distribution failed, aid was looted, and Israel’s two-and-a-half-month block on aid in spring 2025 was a grave error. However, those qualifications cannot rescue the claim of a continuous Israeli policy to starve Gaza. The quantities of food that entered Gaza are simply too large.

The hospital narrative has also disintegrated. American intelligence independently confirmed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used al-Shifa for command operations, weapons storage, and to hold hostages. Hamas accounts now describe armed men, including senior officers, sheltering inside the hospital during an Israeli siege. Hospitals remained protected, and Israel still had to obey the laws of war, but the moral fairy tale of innocent hospitals attacked by the brutal IDF is dead. There is now endless evidence in the public domain of Hamas using hospitals for military purposes.

The casualty statistics have fared no better. The claim that 70 per cent of the dead were women and children became a fixture of global coverage. OCHA’s July 2026 snapshot, based on Gaza Health Ministry figures for 71,444 identified fatalities, placed those categories at 45.2 per cent. Adult men make up over 50% of the fatalities, from a pre-war adult male percentage of approximately 25% of the population. Not all adult men can be counted as combatants, but a figure repeatedly cited as proof of indiscriminate slaughter is now shown to be false when applied to the overall toll. The “hundreds of thousands” of dead under the rubble have likewise not materialised. That number is completely implausible, given Gaza’s mechanism for reporting the missing and the financial compensation incentives to use it.

The supposed massacre of journalists is now unravelling in the same way. A Meir Amit Centre study of 266 people listed as journalists or media workers found that 157, around 60 per cent, were members of or clearly affiliated with terrorist organisations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has already removed eight names after establishing that they were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants, removed another twelve for other reasons, and, after this exposure came to light, opened a full review. Other OSINT suggests this figure of combatants is even higher.

This proves that “journalist” was often a dangerously incomplete label and that lurid claims of Israel slaughtering journalists were nothing more than propaganda. An artillery commander does not become a civilian by picking up a camera. Major outlets repeated the raw total for years, yet now they are barely reporting its collapse.

The same contamination appears across lists of healthcare workers and children. Militant obituaries have identified numerous medical workers as commanders and operatives, while faction records have revealed teenagers listed only as children despite their documented recruitment into armed groups. Recruited minors remain victims of the adults who used them, but age alone cannot establish civilian status or Israeli intent.

Hamas’s role in the aid disaster has finally forced its way into the UN’s own language. In July 2026, a senior UN official accused armed personnel affiliated with Gaza’s “de facto authorities” (ie, Hamas) of breaking into a food distribution point and a World Food Programme warehouse, assaulting drivers and participating in a wider pattern of intimidation, obstruction and smuggling attempts. Years of sneering at Hamas’s aid diversion as Israeli propaganda ended with the UN admitting it.

Academia performed no better. The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared Israel guilty, falsely claiming that the International Court of Justice had found genocide “plausible”. The court’s former president had already explained that it made no such finding. Only 28 per cent of the association’s members voted. Membership was open to literally anyone, yet headlines announced the judgment of the world’s genocide scholars. The same applies to the fraudulent squad of historians newly reinventing themselves as “genocide scholars”, assuming authority their qualifications do not grant, and grandly declaring Gaza a genocide. No mea culpa from these frauds. There are books to be sold.

The repercussions are no longer theoretical. Britain recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total in its history; the United States recorded 6,274, with physical assaults at a record. Two Israeli embassy employees were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Fifteen people were slaughtered at a Chanukah celebration in Sydney. And on, and on, and on.

No newspaper article pulled those triggers, and the hatred long predates Gaza, but the relentless depiction of the Jewish state as a child-killing, famine-making engine of genocide gave old hatred a new moral vocabulary. Jews everywhere were forced to answer for accusations that the evidence can no longer sustain. The genie of antisemitism is out of the bottle, and any corrections now will not put it back. The academics, NGOs, politicians and journalists who spread the genocide blood libel without waiting for evidence (or fabricating their own) now have blood on their hands.

Israel should already have been exonerated of the blanket charge that it sought to exterminate Gaza’s civilians. Individual strikes and alleged crimes still require investigation, but genocide cannot remain the default verdict after every single factual pillar supporting it has cracked.

The record now requires urgent correction, followed by inquiries within the universities and professional bodies that lent the libel their prestige. Some of those responsible should resign. They will not. The people who spread these blood libels remain in post, reviewing one another’s work and hoping nobody notices the ruins of their reputations.

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Trump treats diplomacy as a transaction: enough punishment lowers the price and yields a signature he can advertise as a victory. Tehran operates in the register of survival, coercive leverage and revolutionary prestige. For the regime, an agreement records who has bent whom. A settlement that leaves Iran weaker than before the war would admit that American bombing worked. Its rulers would rather absorb more strikes than sign it.

The June memorandum offered oil waivers, frozen assets, protection from new sanctions, and a reconstruction vehicle of at least $300 billion. Treasury issued General License X on 22 June, then revoked it on 7 July after Iranian attacks on shipping. Washington says Tehran breached first; Iran still dispatched $5 billion to $6 billion of oil during the brief opening. Banks, insurers and Iranian officials learned that an American concession can disappear overnight. Trump now threatens to confiscate frozen Iranian funds to compensate for damaged shipping. Offering the same paper again carries little credibility.

More bombing cannot restore American credibility or alter the regime’s conception of power. Thirteen nights of airstrikes damaged Iran without breaking its grip on Hormuz. Aircraft can demolish headquarters, missile depots and power infrastructure. They cannot compel a surviving revolutionary state to surrender the leverage on which its survival rests. Each attack reinforces Tehran’s conclusion that only coercive power and irreversible guarantees can protect it.

Iran also possesses the weapon Trump cannot easily bomb: time. Hormuz normally carries around 20 million barrels of oil each day. Global stockpiles absorbed the shock, although the cushion is shrinking. IEA members still held more than one billion barrels of emergency stocks on 21 July, so immediate exhaustion is unlikely. Physical exhaustion is unnecessary. Hoarding, insurance paralysis and panic in refined-product markets arrive earlier. The World Bank warns that prolonged escalation could cut global growth to 1.3 per cent and raise inflation to 4.5 per cent. Tehran is betting that Western economic tolerance will break first.

This economic desperation means that Trump has left himself two genuine exits, both appalling. The first would offer Iran a better deal than the June memorandum. Tehran will demand benefits that presidential whim cannot revoke: large sums upfront, funded reconstruction or compensation, durable sanctions relief, binding guarantees against another American or Israeli attack, and perhaps effective control of Hormuz or a recognised right to administer and charge for passage. Such terms would reward coercion and signal an American retreat. They may still offer the cheapest exit.

The second option is full regime change. That requires far more than another week of bombing. It means destroying the state’s coercive machinery, securing nuclear sites, clearing the strait, preventing civil war, and building a replacement government for a vast, armed and traumatised country. No credible operational plan has been presented, despite rumours of suicide missions to seize nuclear material or islands in the Strait of Hormuz. At the terminal edge of escalation sits an American nuclear weapon intended to shock Iran into capitulation. Its use would bring mass death, fallout, retaliation, and a collapse of the non-proliferation order, without guaranteeing an open strait or a governable Iran.

Trump may yet conclude that only a nuclear weapon can destroy the Iranian regime. The bitter irony is that his war has already taught Tehran the opposite lesson: only a nuclear weapon can save it. For Iran, the bomb has now become the regime’s essential future life insurance policy against Washington, far beyond the original conception of it being a weapon against Israel. I expect Iran to rush for nuclear power status in the aftermath of this disastrous American military adventure.

The apparent middle course consists of airstrikes, pauses, and claims that Tehran will eventually become reasonable. It offers no exit. Limited bombing leaves Iran in possession of its decisive leverage while American costs accumulate. Withdrawal allows Tehran to claim victory and entrench itself at Hormuz. Containment merely prolongs the crisis while oil markets and regional bases remain exposed.

Trump began this war without a political objective or a path to achieving one. He believed that military pain would yield a cheaper bargain. Instead, it destroyed the credibility of the bargain already offered and raised Iran’s price for the next one. Tehran can demand a richer peace while preparing for a larger war. Trump must choose between terms he cannot call a victory and escalation he cannot control. The trap is entirely of his own making. We return to Sun Tzu: tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

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The violence has also begun to exact a heavier toll on Americans. CENTCOM announced that two US service personnel were killed in an Iranian missile-and-drone attack on a base in Jordan. Another was listed as missing, with unidentified remains later recovered. Four personnel were medically evacuated before being discharged, while others treated for minor injuries returned to duty. A further American was killed during the controlled detonation of an unexploded Iranian drone in northern Iraq, and a second serviceman was wounded. The confirmed American death toll across the war has reached 17, with more than 430 wounded. Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, endured successive Iranian missile-and-drone attacks as sirens sounded across Manama and its air defences engaged several incoming waves. Iran cannot halt the bombing campaign or contest American control of the skies. It retains enough reach to kill Americans, terrorise Gulf capitals and widen the war after every supposedly decisive American blow.

The purpose of all this remains elusive. The war has been presented at various times as an operation to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, collapse the regime, support an uprising, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, protect commercial shipping, punish attacks on American forces and secure the global flow of oil. Donald Trump has now announced an even larger mission. “We were doing a little job, stopping them from having certain capability. Now we’re just ending it,” he told reporters, adding that America was eliminating any chance that Iran could ever possess a nuclear missile.

The confident language conceals the scale of the commitment. Permanently extinguishing Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon would require control over its enriched uranium, scientists, industrial base, underground facilities, missile programme and future government decisions. Air strikes can destroy equipment and delay reconstruction. Guaranteeing that Iran can never do so would demand intrusive inspections, capitulation, regime change, indefinite military enforcement or some combination of them. Trump has defined an immense strategic ambition without explaining the route towards it.

The phrase “finish the job” should now set off alarm bells.

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The latest American strikes can no longer be considered a single retaliatory raid. CENTCOM says its 12th July wave hit dozens of targets using fighter aircraft, naval vessels, one-way attack aerial…

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After a week in which Labour minister Hamas Falconer decided to stand up for the “rights” of Abu Safiya, a Hamas colonel in Israeli captivity; and at Chatham House, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper repeated the lie that insufficient aid was reaching Gaza (three times as much food as needed has entered the enclave); Starmer’s unelected northern usurper, Andy Burnham, now says Labour “didn’t get it right” on Gaza.

His video was a masterclass of platitudes. He deplores 7 October; of course he does. He deplores antisemitism, whilst echoing the antisemitic blood libels that have raged over Gaza for nearly three years. He insists there is “no contradiction” between zero tolerance for antisemitism and holding Netanyahu’s government to account, which, of course, would be true if he were not holding Israel to account based on Hamas propaganda. Then he promises a “fair and balanced approach” while floating more pressure on Israel, further sanctions and a possible ban on settlement goods.

What an insufferable farce.

It is neither fair nor balanced to mention Hamas merely as a ritual preamble before launching into an indictment of Israel. It is neither fair nor balanced to make no serious mention of Hamas’s endemic war crimes since 7 October, particularly when Hamas is so directly culpable for the suffering of Gazan civilians. Hamas committed a massacre and then allowed the West to disappear them from the battlefield. However, it still shaped and participated in that battlefield. It held the hostages. It embedded its military infrastructure in civilian spaces. It built a war in which Palestinian deaths would be converted into diplomatic pressure on Israel. The Gaza campaign cost the IDF over 500 killed in action and over 3,000 wounded. Gaza was a war between two combatant parties.

That is the central fact Burnham evades.

Hamas had planned for years to fight from underground. It built an extensive tunnel system for its fighters, weapons, command structures and survival. Yet not one Gazan civilian was admitted to that underground world for protection. Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, said the tunnels were built to protect Hamas fighters from aircraft and that civilians were the responsibility of the UN and Israel.

Sit with that for a moment. A government in Gaza built shelters for its combatants and left its civilians above ground whilst making sure the fighting unfolded amongst them, with predictable results. Then Western politicians watched the Hamas-generated horror unfold and treated Israel as if it had invented the moral and physical terrain on which Hamas chose to fight.

Burnham’s formulation is now the standard Labour posture. Condemn Hamas in one sentence, condemn antisemitism in another, then spend the rest of the argument rehearsing a narrative in which Israel is the sole actor with agency. Hamas, Palestinian political failure and Iranian sponsorship become background noise.

The obvious question is never answered, because those making these arguments do not want to address it: what should Israel actually have done?

I do not mean this hypothetically. What, operationally, do those condemning Israel believe Israel should have done instead to dismantle the Hamas infrastructure infesting Gaza? How should it have recovered hostages from tunnels and civilian buildings? How should it have prevented Hamas from reconstituting while leaving command nodes, weapons stores and tunnel networks intact? How do you fight an enemy that turns hospitals, schools, mosques, apartment blocks and refugee districts into pieces of its military architecture, then waits for Western outrage to finish the job?

Their unspoken, obvious answer is this: nothing. The logical conclusion of their criticism of Israel is that, after 7 October, the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, with hundreds of their citizens held hostage in Gaza’s tunnels, Israel should have done nothing. In their eyes, the Jewish state does not have the right to defend itself. They just do not have the balls to say it out loud.

This unspoken answer runs through the whole Labour approach. It is nothing but pressure on Israel as a substitute for serious strategy. What is missing is any thought about credible, viable interim steps that either side could conceivably take in the short term to radically improve people’s lives.

Where is the plan to disarm Hamas? Where is the plan to stop aid diversion? Where is the plan for a Palestinian Authority that can govern without corruption, terror patronage or clan capture? Where is the plan to support Israel’s future safety after a massacre in which families were burned, raped, abducted and butchered in their homes and at a music festival? Where is the plan for Palestinian education, policing, reconstruction and demilitarisation that does not hand Gaza back to the men who turned it into a fortress and a graveyard?

There is no plan. There is only this obscene, antisemitic criticism, because, ultimately, Britain has no say in any of this and it is easier to take cheap shots from the sideline to placate a riled-up voter base.

The same fantasy underpins the endless talk of Palestinian statehood. Palestinians are infantilised, indulged and patronised. They are spoken about as though they had no political institutions, factions, rulers, armed movements, internal coercion, or history of catastrophic leadership. A Palestinian state is invoked without even addressing the reasons it does not exist: Hamas’s rule in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority’s decay, the absence of democratic renewal, the refusal to abandon maximalist politics, and the security vacuum that any responsible Israeli government would have to confront.

Instead, Israelis are portrayed as villains acting against innocent victims. Palestinians are treated as symbols in someone else’s morality play, rather than adults trapped in a ruined political order partly of their own making.

Then there is Labour’s own record.

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Five days later, Washington was watching a different kind of fireworks. With tiresome predictability, Trump’s ceasefire with Iran has, at least partially, collapsed over continued Iranian attacks on shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz. US Central Command announced a new round of strikes on Iran, claiming to have struck more than eighty targets, including air defences, command-and-control nodes, coastal radar, anti-ship missile facilities, and IRGC boats near the Strait of Hormuz. The stated purpose was to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping following attacks on three vessels in the Strait. Last night, Iran returned fire with strikes on US military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. This morning, it is reported that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz came to a complete stop.

The two displays belong to different worlds, yet they share a political origin. One was ceremonial pyrotechnics for a national holiday. The other was organised violence by a superpower. Both translated state capacity into light, thunder, and awe, and produced a brief emotional satisfaction. Both left a haze behind.

The military strikes will have caused real damage. That should not be minimised. The United States remains exceptionally good at this form of warfare. When Washington decides to break stuff, stuff usually gets broken.

The problem is that breaking hardware is not the same as breaking the regime’s will and cohesion. Where is the political theory of victory here? There is no serious reason to believe the Islamic Republic will abandon its religious-revolutionary ambitions simply because America has destroyed another tranche of assets. The regime’s hostility to the United States and enmity towards Israel is non-negotiable. Its use of proxies, maritime pressure, missiles, drones, hostage-taking, ideological mobilisation, and martyrdom theatre is not an outer layer that can be peeled away from an otherwise normal state.

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The scale of those clocks now becomes apparent as more information emerges. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has updated a study that estimates missile expenditures and replacement timelines as of the day of the April ceasefire. It is the clearest visualisation yet of why Trump is so reluctant to return to war.

Let us break this down, missile-by-missile and examine the serious strategic repercussions of expending ammunition at this rate, and the dangers of taking so long to replenish stocks.

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The far harder question is what comes next; how does the Middle East find its way out of this disaster? Allow me to suggest ways forward.

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The deal as confession

Yesterday, Trump announced th…

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