U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
This article has been updated as story develops.
Last night President Donald Trump acknowledged that his administration knew about the Israeli attacks on Iran. This morning on Truth Social he suggested that it was part of a plan to get Tehran to accept a nuclear deal and if they do not comply now, "it will only get worse."
"Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse! There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE."
Israel carried out air strikes against targets in Iran’s capital city, Tehran, in the early hours of Friday morning local time. As of 10 PM EST, reports were coming in that strikes had killed at least four top Iranian officials, along with commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Hossein Salami.
Two prominent nuclear scientists Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi were killed when Israel attacked their homes, according to Iran state television. Other civilians were killed in Tehran, according to the New York Times, but explosions were reported in other areas of the country, too, specifically locations housing Iran's nuclear facilities and military bases, including Natanz, Kermanshah, Isfahan, Arak and Tabriz.
The spokesman of Iran’s Armed Forces, Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, said on state television that Israel and the United States will “recieve a forceful slap” and Iran’s Armed Forces would be retaliating with counterstrikes. “A retaliation attack is definite, God willingly," he said.
In a statement released by the White House shortly after the first reports of the attacks surfaced, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. was not involved in the attacks.
“Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran,” according to the statement. “We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense. President Trump and the Administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
Later, Fox News reported an exclusive interview with Trump following the strikes. From Fox's Jennifer Griffin: "President Trump was aware of the strikes beforehand. There were no surprises, but the US was NOT involved militarily and hopes Iran will return to the negotiating table (with Iran)"
Trump reportedly told Fox's Brett Baier, "Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb and we are hoping to get back to the negotiating table. We will see."
Trump is watching for any retaliation, and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is on high alert, Griffin said late Thursday. "He noted that the U.S. is ready to defend itself and Israel if Iran retaliates."
But by Friday morning the outlines of a more coordinated plan were coming into view, as Trump suggested on social media that he not only knew about the strikes but they were being used to coerce the Iranians into his preferred bargaining position in talks that until yesterday appeared to be going in a generally positive direction.
His chief Iran negotiator, Steve Witkoff, was scheduled to meet with Iran’s foreign minister on Sunday for a sixth round of talks on a possible deal that would curb Tehran’s nuclear program. The sticking point, of course, is whether Iran would be allowed to maintain its own civilian enrichment program. The Israelis and their hardline supporters in the U.S. have been adamant that their entire nuclear program should be destroyed.
Nevertheless, Trump has been saying all week — and the media has been reporting it — that he's been telling Israel to stand down on any planned attacks.
“I told [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] this would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “Now, that could change at any moment. It could change with a phone call. But right now, I think they want to make a deal. And, if we can make a deal, (it would) save a lot of lives.”
The strikes also came only a day after the U.S. started evacuating its embassies in the Middle East and started allowing voluntary departures of military dependents from its bases and facilities there. At the time, no reason other than safety was given, though Trump ominously said Wednesday night that the Middle East "could be a dangerous place."
After his comments over the last several hours the question of whether the U.S. would intervene if and when Iran retaliates appears to be moot.
After the bombs started dropping, the preeminent pro-Israel lobby group in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAIC), called for Washington to support Israel's fight on X: “America must stand with our ally as it takes action to protect its families from the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”
Others suggest this was all part of an elaborate plan to strike Iran from the very beginning. "President Trump’s deception campaign against Khamenei and the Islamic Republic will take its place as one of the most effective ever run by a political leader," declared Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank based in the U.S.
Meanwhile, leading Democrats began coming out hard against the strikes before night's end, but before Trump's most recent comments. "Israel’s alarming decision to launch airstrikes on Iran is a reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence," said Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) who added "military aggression of this scale is never the answer."
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the foreign relations committee, said the attacks were "clearly designed to scuttle the Trump Administration's negotiations with Iran."
"A war between Israel and Iran may be good for Netanyahu’s domestic politics, but it will likely be disastrous for both the security of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the region. As Secretary Rubio stated, the United States was not involved in today's strikes, and we have no obligation to follow Israel into a war we did not ask for and will make us less safe."
Meanwhile, Republican hawks were already envisioning the need for an American military response. After saying "game on" when the reports of the first strikes were coming in, Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.) said in a social media post that "People are wondering if Iran will attack American military personnel or interests throughout the region because of Israel’s attack on Iran’s leadership and nuclear facilities," he wrote.
"My answer is if they do, America should have an overwhelming response, destroying all of Iran’s oil refineries and oil infrastructure putting the ayatollah and his henchmen out of the oil business."
Referring to comments from Trump and other administration officials that Israel acted alone, Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute said, "Denying direct involvement in the attacks doesn’t change that Washington knew about them and this may be interpreted by Tehran was complicity which could put U.S. troops in the region at risk.”
A spat over the return of 6,000 Ukrainian bodies lays bare the unforgiving economic and political challenge that Ukraine faces in bringing home its fallen, and the political storm that President Zelensky will face when the war finally ends.
The second round of the Istanbul peace talks on June 2 led to an agreement for Russia and Ukraine to exchange 6,000 bodies. On Sunday, June 8, a convoy of Russian refrigerated lorries arrived at the agreed meeting point in Belarus, with over 1,000 bodies, but the Ukrainian side did not show up. It is not clear that June 8 was the agreed date for the body swap to start, and Ukraine claims that the exchange was due to take place three days later, on June 11. The exchange has now happened, with 1212 Ukrainian soldiers’ bodies exchanged for the bodies of 27 Russians.
A war of words has erupted about who’s to blame. Russia is trying to paint the Ukrainian side as trying to deceive its public on the true scale of battlefield losses, while Ukraine accuses its opponent of playing political games.
Families on both sides will want their deceased relatives back to lay them to rest. I personally recall the huge media backlash in Britain over the delay in repatriating bodies of the 131 Britons killed in Thailand by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, having been personally involved in the recovery effort.
Ukraine’s challenge is greater by many magnitudes; it will take years, not months, to identify every fallen Ukrainian service man and woman. The victim identification process for the 3,000 western tourists killed in Thailand in 2004 took well over a year. That involved a huge international team of police and forensic experts, collecting samples from the corpses. There was an equivalent network of professionally qualified police family liaison officers gathering ante-mortem data (fingerprints, hair strands, dental records, etc.) from the homes of those thought to be deceased and keeping worried relatives up to date with progress.
It’s clear from the Russian negotiator’s statement that not all of the 6,000 bodies due for exchange have identifying documents, such as dog tags, most likely related to the terrible nature of their injuries: after the 2002 Bali bombing, many of the 202 killed had missing body parts, massively complicating the identification process.
Even when the bodies are intact and have been stored well, a reliable visual identification will be impossible. It is very common for searching relatives to identify a corpse and claim it as their family member out of emotional desperation. I had a colleague at the British Embassy in Bangkok who was killed with his three children by the 2004 tsunami. He was survived by his wife who tragically misidentified one of the children at an open-air mortuary site.
I’ve seen no evidence that Ukraine has the institutional capacity or resources to mount a body identification operation at this scale for the bodies already in their possession. And the assistance of western police and forensic specialists will be impossible while war rages.
In October 2024, the Economist revealed that Ukraine’s Commissioner of Missing Persons had a list of over 48,000 who are still missing together with 2,552 bodies that had yet to be identified. Those numbers will be higher today, eight months down the track.
Some commentators have seized on the enormous cost in compensation to the families of the deceased. There have been widespread social media posts that Ukraine will have to pay around $2.1 billion in compensation to the families of the 6,000, but this figure is, in fact, too low. Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers agreed in September 2024 to increase the one-off payment to the families of the fallen to around $544,000. So the compensation figure for the 6,000 soldiers will run to $3.6 billion in an already overstretched Ukrainian state budget which is being subsidized by western nations. And this marks just the tip of the iceberg.
Western intelligence officials suggested in late 2024 that around 80,000 Ukrainian troops may have been killed. Assessments in alternative media tend to be higher. But if we use the number circulating in mainstream media and fast forward six months to today, let us speculate that 100,000 Ukrainian troops have died so far. If you take the 50,000 Ukrainians considered missing or unidentified and the 43,000 troops that Zelensky said had been killed in December, that number feels close to the mark. One hundred thousand dead represents a total cost in one-off compensation payments to families of $54.4 billion.
And the problem runs deeper than that. Intelligence officials from the same source also claimed up to 480,000 injuries to soldiers. Let’s say that figure is 550,000 today. Ukraine also pays between $180,000 and $290,000 for injury and disability. If only 20% of the reported injuries attracted the lowest tariff of one-off disability payment, that would add an extra $19.8 billion to the compensation bill. If it were 50%, $40.5 billion, and 80%, $79,2 billion.
So, even if the war were to end today, Ukraine could be staring down the barrel of a compensation bill, even on a conservative estimate, of over $130 billion. To put that into context, Ukraine is expected to generate $48.2 billion in tax revenue in 2025. Anyone who believes that Ukraine will not ask western donor nations for support in meeting this bill is fooling no one but themselves.
The vastly inflated cost of compensating victims and families of the fallen may reflect a wider effort to encourage more to take up military service. All this against a background of still severe recruitment shortages and desperate tactics used by recruitment officers, including dragging men off the streets.
In a bid to encourage men to fight, the most junior soldiers in the firing line are paid well over ten times the average salary in Ukraine. That includes a basic salary of almost $4,593 per month for troops on the front line, and all troops receive a payment of around $1,700 for every cumulative 30 days spent in combat. The latter sum also, terrifyingly, talks to the short life expectancy of those on the front line. Early in 2023, a former U.S. Marine claimed that the average life expectancy for recruits on the frontline was four hours. And, of course, extremely high rates of pay while war rages pose a major political challenge when the fighting stops and front-line soldiers take a near 89% reduction to non-combat pay of $494 per month.
Some commentators have argued that Ukraine might be incentivized to slow the identification of bodies to delay payments to relatives. That is an oversimplification that misses the true scale of the task that Ukraine faces.
The living nightmare for heartbroken relatives waiting to lay their loved ones to rest seems certain to continue for years to come. This may impose a devastating political cost on President Zelensky far greater than the towering and unaffordable economic cost of fighting a losing war.
For years now, the United States has justifiably wanted its allies to pick up a bigger share of the burden of their own defense.
But as America now asks its partners to boost military spending to 5% of GDP, the sheer scale of these demands — especially on allies in East Asia — could push yields higher on U.S. Treasury bonds at a time when they are already under pressure by skeptical global bond investors and ratings agencies.
Back in 2018, President Trump wrote a letter to key NATO allies warning that the failure of major European members to meet a pledge to spend 2% of GDP was “not sustainable.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 pushed spending somewhat closer to that mark, and a recent sharpening of transatlantic differences on a host of other issues has led to a pledge by Berlin to increase spending on defense and infrastructure by no less than one trillion euros over the next decade.
America’s Asian allies should look to countries in Europe as a new-found example, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth advised in his speech halfway around the world at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore at the end of last month. “NATO members are pledging to spend 5% of their GDP on defense, even Germany,” he claimed, even if the actual details fall somewhat short of the promise.
Meanwhile, there is rising concern about events in U.S. bond markets where 30-year yields are approaching 5% alongside a falling dollar, an unusual combination that has not been seen in decades and one more commonly associated with emerging markets in the Global South.
And last month, ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the U.S. from its highest AAA rating, the last of the three major ratings agencies to do so. Drawing attention to a troubling debt trajectory, the agency said it expects “persistent, large fiscal deficits will drive the government's debt and interest burden higher. The US' fiscal performance is likely to deteriorate relative to its own past and compared to other highly-rated sovereigns.”
Moody’s focus on interest payment ratios suggests a key dynamic at play here — the combination of a large stock of debt with high interest rates pushes up the U.S. government’s interest rate burden, which, in turn, causes the stock of debt to grow even faster. And in a world with large flows of cross-border financial investment, what happens in one country’s economy and markets can easily spill into others.
In other words, the interest rate on U.S. government debt depends not just on the supply and demand for such debt within America, but throughout the whole world. Foreign holders accounted for roughly 30% of all Treasury debt in public hands at the end of 2024, holding $8.5 trillion of $28.1 trillion outstanding, with roughly 55% of such holdings in foreign private hands. For close to three decades now, public and private foreign demand for U.S. Treasury debt has helped hold U.S. interest rates lower than they might otherwise have been.
All of this could change in a hurry, driven in good part by Washington’s desire to shift patterns of global defense expenditure. As suggested in Hegseth’s remarks, not only does the White House want the U.S. to spend more; it also wants a massive ramping up in defense spending by all its allies, including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and other key partners in Southeast Asia, among others.
According to the Treasury’s latest report on foreign holdings of U.S. securities, the three East Asian allies held roughly $1.5 trillion, $650 billion, and $200 billion of long-term debt securities, respectively (largely Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities issued by the Government-sponsored agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
Military spending increases around the world on the scale that the administration is pressing for could push up U.S. bond yields further, as allies borrow and spend more on their own defense, creating alternatives that can compete with Treasuries for global investors’ favor. Investors in U.S. allies might prefer opportunities closer to home and could also be subject to suasion by their governments to favor domestic bonds. Rising Treasury yields in turn could exacerbate concerns over the role of interest payments in the growth of U.S. government debt.
And, of course, bond yields are also a key driver of mortgage rates and thus of developments in the housing market — a key pillar of America’s political economy.
There could well be other factors in play that contribute to a reduced demand for U.S. assets. Sanctions and the impounding of Russian reserves helped lead to increased central bank demand for gold. And concerns about the unpredictability of U.S. trade policy have led even staunch allies like Japan’s finance minister to publicly muse about the leverage that country might hold through its ownership of U.S. bonds.
These impulses have not gone unnoticed in Washington, even as the administration’s own desires point in a few contradictory directions. It wants other countries to run smaller trade surpluses (implying less money to invest overseas) and take on more of the burden of their defense. At the same time, it wants the fiscal benefits of the low interest rates that derive from their subdued growth and their purchases of U.S. government debt, in addition to measures that increase American growth and revenues.
Attempts to square this circle have come down to suggestions such as allies buying very long-dated debt at below-market interest rates, increasing defense spending largely by buying more U.S. military equipment, or “paying” for the U.S. defense umbrella by just writing the U.S. government a check.
It is unclear how far such efforts will go given likely reservations in other countries about the extent to which they can depend on Washington, and the degree to which they see that broader economic and geopolitical interests are consistent with those of the United States.
Under such circumstances, rather than push for sharp increases in defense spending quickly, Washington could best meet its various goals by asking for a gradual increase in the share of the defense burden that is borne by its allies, even as it relies on diplomatic engagement to reduce the fiscal weight of that burden and supports and encourages their efforts to do the same.
Such a path would help reduce the risks to the United States and the world from a simultaneous rise in geopolitical and financial tensions.
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