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“I can’t do my job without News Items.” — Jim Cramer, CNBC.
1. The Pentagon needs $80 billion to cover costs from the Iran war as well as other non-war-related bills, Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg told lawmakers in phone calls this week, according to people familiar with the discussions. Lawmakers have been pressing the Trump administration to provide a comprehensive price tag for the war, which started Feb. 28. Among lawmakers’ concerns is that the military depleted valuable munitions that might be needed to confront threats elsewhere around the world. Pentagon leaders have said they could start running out of money for operations this summer unless Congress passes a new wartime spending bill, warning that the services will have to cut back on training exercises and other priorities because of the war in Iran and troop deployments along the U.S. southern border. (Source: wsj.com)
2. Deadly fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has derailed scheduled peace talks between the US and Iran after President Trump warned Israel against escalating the war with the Shia militia. Iran pulled out of the talks in Switzerland on Thursday, citing the ongoing Israeli operation in Lebanon as violating the agreement it signed with US this week to end the regional war on all fronts. In response, JD Vance, the US vice-president, postponed traveling to Switzerland as the Swiss foreign ministry said that it would not host the talks as scheduled. (Source: thetimes.com)
3. Institute for the Study of War:
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-affiliated media has made Iranian implementation of the US-Iran agreement, particularly provisions concerning the Strait of Hormuz, contingent on an end to Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran is likely connecting these two clauses to compel the United States to pressure Israel to cease operations in Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces has continued operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, despite Iranian insistence that Israel must halt its campaign in Lebanon as part of the MoU. Hezbollah seriously affects northern Israeli security, and its attacks have displaced Israeli citizens there. Israel is not a signatory to the MoU, even though the signatories added language that implied that Israel and Hezbollah were signatories. (Source: understandingwar.org)
4. The deal to end the conflict between the U.S. and Iran doesn’t address key reasons President Trump gave for going to war: the Islamic Republic’s missiles, drones and support for militias. That triple threat remains one of the biggest concerns for Tehran’s Gulf neighbors. The agreement, a memorandum of understanding that Trump signed Wednesday, places no limits on Tehran’s stockpile of the weapons that it used to menace international shipping, nor on the powerful regional network of armed militias that helped it attack Arab Gulf nations. “The MOU doesn’t address any of Iran’s core power-projection capabilities,” said Hasan Alhasan, a former foreign-policy analyst on the staff of the crown prince of Bahrain. (Sources: wsj.com, iiss.org)
5. Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran. It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them….“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview. David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column. (Sources: nytimes.com, timesofisrael.com)
