The Ghost of Gallipoli.
Banging pots.
“The first news summary of the morning —the most comprehensive I’ll receive all day— and the last thing I read before going on air.” — Hugh Hewitt, host of The Hugh Hewitt Show.
1. President Trump has upended US-China relations two weeks before a critical summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing by saying he might delay his first visit to the country in nine years as he grapples with the Iran war. In an interview with the FT, the US president suggested that he “may delay” the trip. Several people familiar with the situation said China had been expecting the trip to proceed as recently as Friday. (Source: ft.com)
2. Mr. Trump has warned that Nato faces a “very bad” future if US allies fail to assist in opening up the Strait of Hormuz, sending a blunt message to European nations to join his war effort in Iran. The US president told the FT in an interview on Sunday that he could also delay his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping later this month as he presses Beijing to help unblock the crucial waterway. “It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the Strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump said, arguing that Europe and China are heavily dependent on oil from the Gulf, unlike the US. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato,” he added. (Source: ft.com)
2. Mr. Trump has said preventing Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons is a central aim of the war he is waging. In the absence of regime change—or at least a deal to hand over its enriched uranium by Tehran’s leaders—that could mean seizing the country’s fissile material. Accomplishing that in the face of resistance from Iranian forces would be a complex military operation that could require the deployment of hundreds of troops at one or more sites for days, former U.S. military officers and experts said. The U.S. military has elite teams specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone. But locating and seizing the hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium that Iran possesses would require an intricate choreography and could be fraught with risk. If Trump decides to try to grab the uranium, retired Adm. James Stavridis, who served as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander and the former head of Southern Command, said it could require “potentially the largest special forces operation in history.” (Source: wsj.com)
4. Iran is considering allowing Chinese-linked ships through the Strait of Hormuz. An Iranian official said the Islamic Republic may grant safe passage to oil tankers if the cargo was traded in Chinese yuan. The official spoke to a CNN reporter, one of the few Western reporters allowed to travel to Tehran since the war broke out. Granting Chinese-linked ships safe passage would spare Iran’s strategic ally the economic pain of the war, while doubling down on the impact felt by the West. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)
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