When US President Donald Trump launched what the Pentagon named Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, he promised a swift and decisive victory. Just ten days into the conflict, he declared the United States had “already won the war in many ways.” Two months later, the fighting has been paused under a fragile conditional…

New York / Washington | May 1, 2026 Wall Street has a long tradition of reducing geopolitical crises to memorable acronyms — and 2026 has delivered its most darkly comedic one yet. Forget TACO Tuesday. The traders who spent 2025 cheerfully buying every tariff dip on the belief that Trump would blink are now staring…

New Delhi / Tokyo / Singapore | April 30, 2026 When the United States and Israel launched their air campaign against Iran on February 28, 2026 — and Iranian forces swiftly barricaded the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation — the world did not just witness the beginning of a devastating regional war. It witnessed the…

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 — the world’s most critical oil transit chokepoint — has turned strategic petroleum reserves from a dry policy topic into a live national security question. As global oil prices surge to historic highs and the International Energy Agency coordinates the largest emergency reserve release in history,…

Global energy markets remain on edge as geopolitical fault lines deepen April 29, 2026 — The price of crude oil pulled back modestly on Wednesday after touching a three-week high, as markets attempted to absorb the twin shocks of the United Arab Emirates’ surprise exit from OPEC and the continued Strait of Hormuz disruption that…

Long before the first US or Israeli missile struck Iranian soil, Iran’s economy was already in freefall. Decades of international sanctions, chronic mismanagement, rampant corruption, and a collapsing currency had hollowed out the financial lives of ordinary Iranians. Today, with the Iran-US war grinding into its third month, those fragile foundations have crumbled entirely —…

As a pope and a president find themselves on a collision course, the Vatican’s moral voice grows louder, and more American than ever. In a moment that blends the spiritual and the geopolitical, Pope Leo XIV the first American-born pope in the history of the Catholic Church, has delivered one of his most striking warnings…

Britain’s inflation nightmare returned with a number that economists had dreaded and households had already felt at the pump: 3.3%. The UK inflation rate accelerated sharply in March, driven almost entirely by the most dramatic monthly fuel price surge the country has seen in more than three years — and the war in Iran wrote…

He arrived in one of Africa’s wealthiest nations by natural resources and one of its most unequal by lived reality — and he did not let the contradiction go unspoken. Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass before an estimated 100,000 people in Kilamba, on the outskirts of Luanda, on Sunday, April 19 — day seven of…

India imports 85% of its crude oil. A significant share of it moves through the Strait of Hormuz. When Iran closed that strait on February 28 — triggering the worst global energy supply shock in recorded history — India needed an alternative fast. It found one in an unlikely place: a deep-water port carved into…