James' World 2

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Nato secretary general Mark Rutte with Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on 21 January 2026. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

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When President Trump attacked Iran on Feb. 28, we called his decision reckless. He went to war without seeking congressional approval or the support of most allies. He offered thin and contradictory justifications to the American people. He failed to explain why this naïve attempt at regime change would end better than earlier attempts by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In the six weeks since, the recklessness of his war has become clearer yet. He has disdained careful military planning and acted on gut instinct and wishfulness. After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel predicted to Mr. Trump that the attacks would inspire a popular uprising in Iran, the director of the C.I.A. countered that the notion was “farcical,” The Times reported. Mr. Trump proceeded nonetheless. He was so confident that he assembled no plan to respond to an obvious countermove available to Iran: causing a spike in oil prices by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Nor did he develop a feasible strategy for securing the enriched uranium that Iran can use to rebuild its nuclear program.

Last week he careened from illegal and immoral threats about erasing Iranian civilization to a last-minute cease-fire that accomplishes few of his announced war aims. Iran continues to defy a central part of the deal and block most traffic from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump’s irresponsibility has left t

The United States on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat.

As we have emphasized, Iran’s regime deserves no sympathy. It has spent decades oppressing its people and sponsoring terrorism elsewhere. And the current war, combined with the June attacks by the United States and Israel and other Israeli operations since 2023, weakened Iran in important ways. Its navy, air force, and air defenses have been degraded, and its nuclear program has been set back. Its murderous network of regional allies — including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria’s fallen government — has been eroded.

Yet these successes cannot mask the ways in which the war has weakened the United States. We count four main setbacks for America’s national interests that are the direct result of Mr. Trump’s carelessness. These setbacks likewise weaken global democracy when authoritarians in China, Russia, and elsewhere were already feeling emboldened.

The most tangible blow to the United States and the world is the increased influence that Iran has secured over the global economy by weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz. About 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows through the strait, which is next to Iran’s southern shore.

Before the war, Iran’s leaders feared that blocking traffic would invite new economic sanctions and a military attack. Once the attack happened anyway, Iran closed the strait to nearly all traffic except its own ships. The policy is inexpensive because it mostly involves a threat, namely that a drone, missile, or small boat  blow up a tanker. Forcibly reopening the strait, by contrast, would require an enormous military operation potentially including ground troops and an extended occupation.

Mr. Trump’s lack of foresight about the Strait reveals glaring incompetence. The two-week cease-fire does not bring back the status quo because Iran is still limiting traffic and has threatened to impose tolls as part of a final peace deal. The war has shown Iran’s leaders that controlling the waterway is a real possibility. Eventually, other countries are likely to develop alternatives, including pipelines, but those solutions will take time. For now, Iran appears to have won diplomatic leverage that it could have only dreamed of six weeks ago. The only apparent way to change the situation would be for a global coalition to demand the strait’s reopening — the sort of coalition that Mr. Trump is distinctly unsuited to lead.

The second setback is to America’s military standing around the world. This war, together with recent U.S. assistance to Ukraine, Israel and other allies, has burned through a substantial portion of the stockpile of some weapons, such as Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors (which can shoot down other missiles). Experts believe the Pentagon used more than one-quarter of its Tomahawk missiles just in the war against Iran. Returning the stockpile to its previous size will take years, and the United States will have to make tough choices about where to maintain its military strength in the meantime. Already, the Pentagon has pulled missile defenses from South Korea.

The war has also revealed that the U.S. military is vulnerable to new ways of warfare. America used billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech munitions to destroy Iran’s traditional air and naval forces, while Tehran used cheap, disposable drones to halt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and hit targets in the region. The world saw how a country that spends one-hundredth of what the United States does on its military can seek to outlast it in a conflict. It is a reminder of the urgent need to reform America’s military.

The war’s third big cost is to America’s alliances. Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and most of Western Europe refused to support the United States in this war — unsurprisingly, given Mr. Trump’s treatment of them. When he demanded their help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, most allies declined. These countries will remain allies in important ways, but they have made clear that they no longer consider the United States a reliable friend. They are working to build stronger relationships with one another so that they can better resist Washington in the future. “Perhaps the greatest long-term damage to the United States from the Iran war will be in its relationships with allies around the world,” Daniel Byman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote on Wednesday.

The situation in the Middle East is more nuanced. Iran’s decision to attack its Arab neighbors during the war may draw those countries closer to the United States. But that prospect is uncertain. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries have been damaged economically by the war and feel abandoned by Mr. Trump’s cease-fire. The past six weeks have given them reason to question his judgment and his understanding of their interests.

The fourth setback is to America’s moral authority. For all the flaws of this country, it remains a beacon to many around the world. When pollsters ask people where they would move if they could, the United States is consistently the runaway No. 1 answer. America’s appeal stems not only from its prosperity but also from

ts freedom and democratic values. Mr. Trump has undercut those values for his entire political career and perhaps never more than in the past week, when he made odious threats to erase Iranian civilization. His Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, made a series of bloodthirsty remarks, including a threat to offer “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Those would be war crimes. Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have embraced a brutal approach to armed conflict that the United States led the world in rejecting after World War II. By doing so, they have undermined the foundations of America’s global leadership, which claims to place human dignity at the center of an argument for a freer and more open world.

Our editorial board has long opposed Mr. Trump’s approach to politics and governing. Yet we take no pleasure in his failures over the past six weeks. For one thing, there have been deaths, injuries, and destruction, in Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere. At least 13 U.S. service members have died in the war.

It is also a mistake for any Americans, including Mr. Trump’s critics, to root for this country to fail. We all have a stake in the nation that he leads. So does the rest of the free world. There are no other democracies with the economic and military strength to counter China and Russia. When America is weaker and poorer, as this war has made us, authoritarianism benefits.

The best hope now may sound naïve, but it remains true. Mr. Trump should at long last recognize the ineptitude of his impulsive, go-it-alone approach. He should involve Congress and seek help from America’s allies to minimize the damage from his war.

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Jason Hendardy for The New York Times

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After a record-breaking trip around the moon and back, the Artemis II mission is on its way home to Earth, and preparations are in full swing for its final descent. NASA is targeting splashdown—the moment that the capsule holding the crew will hit the Pacific Ocean—for Friday at 8:07 P.M. EDT. But the hours and minutes leading up to that moment are all critical.

The four Artemis II astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen—will begin their day at 11:35 A.M. Shortly after that, at approximately 1:50 P.M., they will be working to configure the capsule’s cramped cabin for reentry, stowing away baggage and making sure that everything they need for their journey through the Earth’s atmosphere is ready to go.

Next, NASA has scheduled a final trajectory-course-correction burn for 2:53 P.M. if needed to keep the mission’s Orion capsule, named Integrity by the crew, on track for its final target—Earth.

The astronauts will also review their reentry checklist to make sure that they are each properly in their space suit, which will help protect them on the potentially bumpy ride down, and clear on their responsibilities during the fall.

NASA will livestream the entire process, with the space agency’s own broadcast coverage beginning at around 6:30 P.M.—a little more than an hour before the capsule is due to reenter Earth’s atmosphere.

Moments before it does, the capsule will ditch its bulky service module at about 42 minutes before splashdown. Then, at approximately 7:37 P.M., the Orion capsule will perform a quick burn to maneuver into the right position and attitude for reentry and splashdown. Subsequently, at around 7:53 P.M., Orion will reenter Earth’s upper atmosphere some 400,000 feet above the surface, kicking off a 13-minute descent. At this time, the capsule will be traveling at about 24,000 miles an hour.

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Sixteen weeks into my second pregnancy, I had a miscarriage alone at home on an otherwise unremarkable autumn afternoon. I had officially entered the supposed “safe zone” of the second trimester, the point in pregnancy where risks of fetal complications and loss drop dramatically. By the time I saw bright red blood, I was certain I was “out of the woods.” I had finally begun to wrap my mind around the idea of having another child. My husband and I were excited to introduce a newborn into the confident rhythm we had established with our 3 1/2-year-old son. It was the beginning of one of the most devastating and profound experiences of my life. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in reproductive and maternal mental health, I was well aware that up to 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I knew the heart-wrenching reality of that experience as well as I could without having yet lived through it myself. Throughout my own pregnancy, I’d listened to heartbreaking stories of pregnancy loss, including chemical pregnancies, ectopic pregnancies, twin loss, infant loss, stillbirths, and terminations for medical reasons. I’d sat with countless women as they processed their grief, how their histories and experiences compounded those feelings, and how the unfortunate silence, stigma, and shame that so often follows pregnancy and infant loss heightened their pain. Now, however, my theoretical knowledge of the experience became corporeal.

Despite the fact that up to 25% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage (the actual number being likely much higher due to chemical pregnancies and underreporting), research shows that a majority of women feel a sense of shame, self-blame, and guilt in the aftermath of pregnancy loss. Cultural ideas about women’s bodies and patriarchal messages have wormed their way into women’s own perceptions of themselves, firmly planting the idea that if we haven’t “successfully” carried a healthy baby to term, our bodies must be somehow defective or inadequate, or we must have done something “wrong” to cause the loss. However, most miscarriages are the result of fetal chromosomal abnormalities, not the result of anything a woman did or didn’t do. Despite this, a national survey found that people believed miscarriage could be caused by going through a stressful event (76% of responders), lifting a heavy object (64%), previously having an intrauterine device (IUD) (28%), or taking birth control pills (22%). The misconceptions surrounding miscarriage get even wilder: The survey found 21% of people believed it could be caused by getting into an argument, 7% thought it could be caused by moderate exercise, and 4% thought it could be caused by having sex.

In my practice, I’ve found that the impulse to blame ourselves is often about perceptions of control. If I did something wrong and this is my fault, that means maybe I can do things differently the next time around and therefore change the outcome. There is shame in those thoughts, but perversely, there is also a sense of agency. That grasp for control is closely related to the cultural stigma attached to pregnancy loss that prevents women from talking about it openly and breeds isolation and misinformation. But when women know the facts about miscarriage and why it happens, they are less likely to blame themselves.

While I fully believe in the importance of talking about stigmatized issues like pregnancy loss, sexual trauma, anxiety and depression, and aging, I know from experience that doing so is hard.

 

We live in a culture that tells women that so many of the challenges they face are somehow our fault and that whatever we’re feeling about those challenges should be kept quiet. That cultural message often keeps us from talking about the most important and real experiences in our lives, overwhelmed by the fear that if we do speak our truths, we will be met with stunned stares or awkward lapses in conversations. But in the absence of real, nuanced, and sometimes messy conversations about the truth of our experiences, we feel ashamed and often end up turning our pain inward, convinced we should be able to swallow it and push through.

Even as someone who fully believes in the importance of talking about stigmatized issues like pregnancy loss, sexual trauma, anxiety and depression, and aging, I know from experience that doing so is hard. There’s no single source of the pressure to stay silent about these taboo subjects; it’s in the water, so to speak. Women go through so many potentially momentous transitions over the course of their lives, inhabiting many roles and navigating continually changing bodies while fielding messages from a culture hell-bent on telling them how to look, how to feel, how to act, how to be at every available opportunity. In so many moments in a woman’s life, there’s an insidious whisper: This is too messy. Don’t talk about it.

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By Julian E. Barnes

Julian E. Barnes reports on national security and has been tracking the Iranian effort to mine the Strait of Hormuz.

April 10, 2026

Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.

The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.

Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.

Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.

Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.

As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.

In a social media post on Tuesday discussing a pause in the American-Israeli war with Iran, President Trump said a two-week cease-fire was contingent on the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING” of the Strait of Hormuz.

On Wednesday, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, said that the strait would be open to traffic “with due consideration of technical limitations.” American officials have said Mr. Araghchi’s comment about technical limitations was a reference to Iran’s inability to quickly find or remove the mines.

Mr. Araghchi is now in Islamabad for meetings on Saturday with Mr. Vance. Given Mr. Trump’s demands to open the strait, the issue of how quickly safe passage through the waterway can be increased is likely to be a point of discussion.

The U.S. military sought to destroy Iran’s navy, sinking ships and targeting naval bases. But Iran has hundreds of small boats that it can use to harass ships or lay mines. Destroying all of those small boats has proved impossible.

Even before Iran began laying mines, threats from its leaders quickly disrupted global shipping and sent oil prices up sharply. On March 2, a senior official with the Revolutionary Guards announced that the strait was closed and claimed Iran would set ships “ablaze” if they entered the waterway, according to state media.

In the days after that threat, Iran began mining the strait, even as the United States intensified strikes on Iranian naval assets. At the time, American officials said Iran was not planting mines quickly or efficiently.

Because it was difficult to track the small boats deploying the mines, the United States is uncertain precisely how many Iran has placed in the strait or where they are located.

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Cargo ships near the Strait of Hormuz, as seen last month from northern Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. 

Credit…Reuters.

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