Iranian-Americans in the age of Trump, the Travel Ban, and the Threat of War
Most Iranian Americans want diplomacy with Iran: poll
March 11, 2026
Recent data released by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) suggests that a strong majority of Iranian Americans support diplomacy to resolve tensions between the U.S. and Iran — a finding at odds with the dominant conversation online suggesting that most Iranian Americans are in favor of the Iran war.
The data was collected through a survey of 505 Iranian Americans conducted by Zogby Analytics between Feb. 27 and March 5. Among the most notable results were that a clear majority of Iranian Americans — 61.6% — support diplomacy to move toward de-escalation and a negotiated path forward.
Screengrab via niacouncil.org
“If anything, a lot of people were surprised because they thought Iranian Americans overwhelmingly favored this war,” NIAC president Jamal Abdi said in a Wednesday press briefing. “In fact, it is divided in half. There was really no mandate for the war.”
As Abdi noted, the survey results show that Iranian Americans were nearly evenly divided on whether the U.S. should have initiated war with Iran, with 49.3% opposing the attacks and 48.9% supporting them.
Those who oppose the war are primarily concerned with harm inflicted on innocent civilians and the potential for further destabilization of the country, while those in support hope the war will make regime change more likely and reduce threats imposed by Iran’s nuclear program, according to the poll.
Screengrab via niacouncil.org
During the press briefing, Abdi also said that prominent Iranian Americans have attempted to “shape public perceptions about this war” by “proclaiming that war is the only path that anybody who disagrees is an Iran regime lobbyist.”
The reality is much more nuanced. This newly released data attempts to dispel some of the misinformation surrounding the opinions of the Iranian American community — a community that has faced trauma and division, Abdi said.
“This trauma has been preyed upon by outside interests who want war,” Abdi said during the press briefing. “We think it's really important to end this predatory relationship and expose to the public where our community actually stands, and encourage members of our community to stand up and be vocal and feel that they can be a full participant in U.S. democracy without fear of political violence or online cancellation or death threats and attacks.”
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REUTERS/Essam al-Sudani/File Photo
People walk near farmland by the Zubair oil field as gas flares rise in the distance, in Zubair Mishrif, Basra, Iraq, amid regional tensions following the recent disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, March 9, 2026.
Oil disruption from Iran war won’t end any time soon
March 11, 2026
The US-Israel-Iran war has led to extraordinary volatility in global energy markets this week, and there is little reason to think that it will abate any time soon.
Benchmark Brent crude, which traded below $60 per barrel early this year, jumped to $80 last Thursday. It then bounced to $120 in thin weekend markets and, as of this writing, has settled in around $92. In other words, the range of the recent oil price has been 50% of where it was a mere five days ago.
Needless to say, this is not normal behavior for what still remains the modern world’s most important industrial commodity. A similar (but slower) move from $70 to $120 per barrel was seen in late 2021 and early 2022 around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but, as the investment bank Goldman Sachs has noted, the physical disruption of oil supply due to the war in the Persian Gulf is 15 times as severe as that of the Ukraine crisis. One respected (and usually non-alarmist) oil commentator has suggested that the price could jump to over $200 per barrel if the situation in the Strait of Hormuz is not resolved.
This morning the International Energy Agency (which primarily includes the advanced industrial economies that are U.S. allies) announced that member countries would release 400 million barrels of oil from storage, starting with Japan. However, the impact of the announcement has been quite muted.A release that amounts to four days of global consumption and roughly 20 days of oil and products transiting through the Strait of Hormuz has had little impact on an oil market that is grappling not just with multiple uncertainties but also wildly inconsistent official messaging.
For one thing, there is a fundamental diplomatic uncertainty. It is unclear what U.S. and Israeli aims are in this war. At various moments, the White House has called for Iran’s “Unconditional Surrender,” and then modified this to reflect that the administration will determine what constitutes such an outcome, “whether they themselves [Iran] say it or not.”
Yet other officials have called for the equivalent of a Morgenthau Plan that leads to the comprehensive deindustrialization of Iran. And even if President Trump does decide that he has had enough and wishes to end the war, it is far from clear that Iran would agree to what might seem a “premature ceasefire” from its own point of view, where it was still left substantially weaker against future attacks and had not imposed enough costs to restore deterrence.
Against this backdrop, it is hard for the oil market to judge both U.S. and Israeli intentions and the potential scale of Iranian retaliation against all the oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf — a region that accounts for about 20% of all global production of crude petroleum and products.
The diplomatic uncertainty has been compounded by two basic questions that reflect the military uncertainties: what can Iran do to harm shipping? And can the U.S. Navy escort ships safely through the straits? As to the first, three vessels were reportedly struck yesterday in the Strait, indicating that Iran is ready and able to use force to stop ships.
The answer to the second question is more ambiguous. Yesterday, the U.S. appended a farcical element to the tragedies unfolding in the Gulf, as Energy Secretary Chris Wright first posted, then deleted, a tweet saying the Navy had successfully escorted a tanker through Hormuz. Greater clarity from the U.S. on this question does not appear to be forthcoming.
The broader point is that Iran’s offensive capabilities against civilian shipping have been described as cheap and plentiful, a reflection of the revolution in drone warfare. It is perhaps this capacity that has led the navy to tell the shipping industry that it is simply not possible to escort ships right now.
The scale of the war and the fact that the U.S. is a primary and declared belligerent in the conflict also undermines financial tools like the reinsurance coverage (insuring private insurers against loss) that has been proposed by the Development Finance Corporation. This makes for a different situation than the convoy/insurance combination provided by the U.S. to Gulf shipping during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Iran knows very well that the price of gasoline remains a key factor in U.S. domestic politics. This fact suggests that Hormuz and the global oil markets will remain a key point of pressure in this war. And solutions to the diplomatic, military, and financial uncertainties described above still seem very far away.
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Top Image Credit: March 3, 2026, Minab, Hormozgan, Iran: Iran holds a funeral ceremony for students and staff members of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school who were killed in a strike on the school in Minab, Hormozgan, southern Iran. On February 28, 2026, 'Operation Epic Fury,' a joint Israeli-U.S. military operation, targeted multiple locations across Iran, including a girls' school in Minab near an IRGC base. The school was hit by three missile attacks, resulting in at least 201 deaths and 747 injuries, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, though the toll remains unverified due to restricted media access in Iran. While Iran blamed the U.S. and Israel, the U.S. Central Command is investigating the incident, and Israel stated it was unaware of any operations in the area. The attacks intensified after the air strike that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei and several senior commanders. (Credit Image: © Ircs via ZUMA Press Wire) Reuters Connect
Why did mainstream media slow-walk coverage of school attack?
March 10, 2026
As the U.S. war with Iran rages, mainstream media’s slow response to a probable U.S. attack on an Iranian school suggests it is hesitant to report on the conflict’s growing human toll.
The attack occurred on February 28 in Minab, Iran, and killed at least 165 people — mostly school-aged children. Although the U.S. stresses it would not deliberately attack a school, subsequent investigation by American military investigators points the finger at Washington, as do remnants of a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile recovered from the site. (Only the U.S., the UK, and Australia have Tomahawk missiles.) CBS news reported that the strike on the school might have been an accident, perhaps sprung from outdated intelligence wrongly identifying it as still part of a nearby Iranian base.
Although the Trump administration says it is investigating the attack, President Trump has repeatedly asserted that an Iranian misfire, rather than a U.S. attack, was behind it.
That assertion is now sparking critical questions from reporters. As New York Times reporter Shawn McCreese pressed President Trump yesterday: “You just suggested Iran got a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school. But you're the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn't say that. Why are you the only person saying this?”
That forced Trump to admit he “didn’t know enough” about the school attack, but would accept the findings of an investigation on it. “Whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report,” Trump said yesterday.
But the skepticism has been slow to arrive, and the press has ultimately made some critical stumbles covering the school attack. On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Kristen Welker toed the U.S. line, asking Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi: “President Trump said Iran is responsible for [the school] strike. What is your response?” After Araghchi responded that the U.S. likely struck the school, Welker pressed him for evidence — failing to mention reporting suggesting the U.S. was behind the attack.
Moreover, the school attack did not at first receive substantive coverage in major outlets, despite its severity. As media analyst Adam Johnson observed on his Substack, the attack did not garner any front page coverage by New York Times, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal from February 28 through March 4.
“I am really shocked at the almost non-reporting…of the striking of a school in Iran in which 80–100 children may have been killed,” Ben de Pear, a former editor at Channel 4 News, wrote on social media. “I fear that we have become so inured to the killing of children in Gaza, that the destruction of the [girls’] school” has been “completely drowned out.”
“In the days that followed [the attack], you could watch the wall-to-wall coverage on U.S. cable news networks for hours, including the supposedly more progressive MS Now, and not see anything about the atrocity — even though there was plenty of visual evidence available,” observed James North, Mondoweiss’ Editor at Large.
As Gregory Shupak, who teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada, tells RS, many articles covering the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran do not even mention the school attack. Shupak used the media aggregator Factiva to assess how much the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have covered the incident. These outlets published 318 pieces that mentioned both Iran and the U.S. between from March 1 to March 9, but only 59 of those articles contained the word school, according to Shupak.
“That’s just 19%,” he said. “In other words, 81% of the material these outlets have run on the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression overlooks this horrific massacre, which suggest[s] that they don’t think the slaughter is terribly important or a crime that ought to have a major impact on how their audiences understand the war and its stakes.”
“This atrocity has received far too little attention in coverage of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran,” Shupak stressed.
Senators Brian Schatz (D - Hawaii), Patty Murray (D - Wash.), Jeanne Shaheen (D - N.H.), Jack Reed (D - R.I.), Mark Warner (D - Va.), and Chris Coons (D - Del.), released a statement demanding a probe into the school attack Sunday, signaling public anger over it is growing.
“The killing of school children is appalling and unacceptable under any circumstance. This incident is particularly concerning in light of Secretary Hegseth’s openly cavalier approach to the use of force, including his statement that U.S. strikes in Iran wouldn’t be bound by ‘stupid rules of engagement,’ in his words,” the lawmakers wrote.
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