Beijing / Washington / Tehran — It is the question that every foreign ministry, every intelligence service, and every energy market analyst with a stake in the US Iran war’s outcome is now asking with increasing urgency: will Xi Jinping help Donald Trump end it? The question is deceptively simple. The answer is layered with…
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Beijing / Tehran / Washington — Beneath the surface of the US Iran war’s military strikes, diplomatic ultimatums, and cascading sanctions packages lies a financial reality that Washington has found extraordinarily difficult to confront directly: Iran is not broke. It is not collapsing. It is not being strangled into submission by the maximum pressure campaign…
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He was the candidate who promised to make America affordable again. Now, with gas at $4.50 a gallon, inflation at a three-year high, and 75% of Americans saying the Iran war has hurt their finances, Donald Trump has delivered the most politically explosive quote of his second term: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.…
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Washington — It began just after midnight. By 2 a.m., the posts had accumulated into something that veteran White House correspondents, opposition researchers, and even some Republican strategists were struggling to characterise with their usual clinical detachment. President Donald Trump, in what observers are calling one of his most sustained and factually untethered late-night social…
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The United States has now spent $29 billion fighting the Iran war — and every expert watching the numbers says that figure, staggering as it sounds, is a fraction of what the true bill will eventually be. Acting Defense Department Comptroller Jules Hurst III delivered the updated figure to the House Armed Services Committee on…
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Beijing / Washington / Tehran — In the weeks before President Donald Trump boards Air Force One for his high-stakes visit to Xi Jinping in Beijing, American intelligence officials and independent energy analysts have assembled a picture of Iranian oil financing that is as audacious in its scale as it is difficult to dismantle: a…
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Donald Trump built his political brand on strength, leverage, and the art of the deal. But as he lands in Beijing for his summit with Xi Jinping, a war he promised would be over in weeks has dragged into its eleventh week — and the man waiting for him at the negotiating table knows it.…
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Washington / Beijing / Geneva — There is a particular quality to the silence that precedes a meeting between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations — a held-breath quality that diplomats, markets, and governments across every continent recognise and respond to with the same mixture of hope and dread. As President Donald…
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Caracas / Washington / Georgetown — In a defiant rejection that carries echoes of the broader global confrontation between American power and the axis of nations aligned against it, Venezuela’s acting president has flatly refused President Donald Trump’s extraordinary request — framed in terms that blurred the line between diplomatic pressure and territorial annexation —…
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When historians write about the 2026 Iran war, they will note the missiles, the blockades, and the staggering human cost. But they will also note something unexpected: the conflict has been one of the most powerful accelerants of the clean energy transition in modern history — and the countries and companies that had quietly invested…