Iranian protests sparked by economic woes quickly spread across country Yesterday at 9:00 p.m. Sydney Time By Yeganeh Torbati ISTANBUL — Anti-government demonstrations erupted in Iran this week, with initial protests by shop owners in Tehran over the plummeting value of the Iranian currency spreading by Wednesday to students, workers and other elements of society across the country. Iranians have struggled for years with raging inflation, anemic economic growth and international isolation, largely because of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions imposed by the United States and other countries over Iran’s nuclear program. Official figures show inflation reaching 50 percent this year and the overall economy shrinking slightly. But in recent days, the situation has grown acute, with the Iranian rial’s value falling sharply, repeatedly reaching record lows. Simmering discontent turned to open protest Sunday, when videos shared on social media showed shopkeepers in some of the comm...
Posts
How Much Abuse Can America’s Allies Take? Leaders gathering for a photo during a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, June 2025 - Christian Hartmann / Reuters Longtime Partners Will Soon Start to Drift Away December 8, 2025 Donald Trump’s rise was supposed to have upended the liberal international order. In his first term, Trump openly disparaged longtime European allies, pulled out of international treaties such as the Paris climate agreement, and decried how the United States was subsidizing its allies through military support and trade deficits. Yet as we argued in Foreign Affairs in 2022, Trump’s aggressive unilateralism did not break U.S. alliances. Shaken and often irritated by Washington’s bullying, the allies nevertheless did not drift away from the world’s preeminent superpower. The foreign relations doctrines, defense spending, and geopolitical alignments of core U.S. partners such as France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea did not shift in any meaningful ...
The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership As President Trump sought a peace deal and Vladimir V. Putin sought victory, factions in the White House and Pentagon bled the Ukrainian war effort. By Adam Entous Adam Entous conducted more than 300 interviews over more than a year with government, military and intelligence officials in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Turkey. Dec. 30, 2025 1.2k The train left the U.S. Army depot in the west of Germany and made for Poland and the Ukrainian border. These were the final 800 miles of a trans-Atlantic supply chain that had sustained Ukraine across more than three long years of war. The freight on this last day in June was 155-millimeter artillery shells, 18,000 of them packed into crates, their fuses separated out to prevent detonation in transit. Their ultimate destination was the eastern front, where Vladimir V. Putin’s generals were massing forces and ...